A clear, calm account of a long career, and of the 2016 reporting.
Timothy E. Parker is a Guinness World Records Puzzle Master. For three decades his puzzles have run in the biggest newspapers and media companies on earth, and he is a bestselling co-author with Dr. Tim LaHaye of "The Book of Revelation Made Clear."
His work continues today. He created Real World IQ, the first new standardized intelligence assessment since 1955, with scoring verified bias free by IBM Quantum computing, and he is the architect of a family of assessments and games for the Advanced Learning Academy.
In 2016, an article raised questions about similarities among puzzles published over Mr. Parker's career. The full facts were not reflected at the time. Here is the record, plainly stated.
No. He was never dismissed. He continued as the editor of the Universal Crossword for roughly two and a half more years, until December of 2018, and left as part of a company cost reduction, not because of the reporting. He remains affiliated with Andrews McMeel Universal today, where his Family Time crossword is still syndicated.
No duplicate puzzles were ever found. The review identified 91 similar themes, meaning the three or four longest answers in a 78-answer grid, across roughly 15,000 puzzles published over a long career. Theme overlap of that scale, built across thousands of puzzles over decades, is ordinary in the field.
Those were authorized reprints. USA Today ran Mr. Parker's puzzles, with his permission, for years in its weekend edition. Those licensed reprints account for the repeats that were later flagged.
Yes. Mr. Parker pursued the matter and prevailed, represented by the entertainment law firm Lavely & Singer.
The reporter later had the foreword to his own puzzle book written by a competing editor, a relationship worth noting given the small and competitive world of professional puzzle making.
The work speaks across thirty years and 180 million solvers. The record speaks for itself.
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