Re: N.Y. Times may leave dining halls (Jan. 27): Many days are marked with a flurry of text messages between several Morse College seniors before lunch. Not about where, or when — Stiles is our staging ground and we trickle in around 12:30 — but about where we can find The New York Times. I’m not writing to complain about the poor distribution of the newspaper, but to emphasize the social aspects of a certain element of the publication: the crossword.

For the last three years, my friends and I have gathered to make a stab at the Times crossword puzzle. We’re not the anagram type, nor puzzle geeks— though we did swoon when Will Shortz came to a Master’s Tea last year and read Rex Parker’s blog for a laugh — but we do the puzzle everyday (except Fridays, when we tend to throw up our hands).

This activity has been one of the most important during my time at Yale, even providing continuity when we found ourselves in Swing Space this year. I remember remarking remorsefully to my mother that I would have to buy an online subscription when I graduated. Maybe I will have to soon anyway, and if we pool our funds it will not be a huge sacrifice for us to pay for it, but without the paper itself, my friends and I will be losing the key element of our group activity.

I’m not here to argue about the Yale bubble, or the death of print journalism or even how crossword puzzles have been linked to mental acuity. This is a visceral and probably foolish plea, wrought of the nostalgia and lack of pragmatism of a second-semester senior: Don’t take our puzzle away.

Sarah Dewey

Jan. 28

The writer is a senior in Morse College.