Natan Last is a researcher, policy advisor, writer, and crossword constructor in New York City.
He is the author of Across the Universe, a non-fiction book about crossword puzzles for Pantheon, out November 2025 and available for pre-order now. He regularly contributes crosswords to The New Yorker and The New York Times.
He is trained as a social scientist, focused on migration, political economy, technology, and law. Recently, he developed digital products and humanitarian policy for refugees and asylum seekers at USCIS, the federal immigration benefits agency; served as a Director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, an advocacy non-profit that models itself as a union for asylum seekers; and was a founding member of the International Rescue Committee’s research and innovation lab.
He has a master’s degree from Columbia’s School for International Affairs, where he studied climate migration, international human rights law, macroeconomic theory, and world literature. He has lectured on refugee policy, immigration politics, data ethics, literature, crosswords, and other subjects at Princeton, the Harvard Kennedy School, SxSW, The New Yorker Festival, and the U.N.’s annual refugee consultation in Geneva.
His writing spans essays, academic research, policy papers, poetry, and criticism. Recent work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Money on the Left, Hyperallergic, Narrative, and elsewhere.
You can reach him at natanlast1@gmail.com.
He is represented by Kate Garrick at Salky Literary Management.
Praise for Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, out now from Pantheon.
“Warning: This book is highly contagious.” —Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me
“A gridful of insight and pleasure.”—Stefan Fatsis, bestselling author of Word Freak and Unabridged
“Last . . . brings an economy of language and keen eye for nuance to Across the Universe. He also infuses the work with a puzzler’s love of patterns and puns. . . . A rich and magnificent artifact of crossword culture.”—BookPage
“I’ve often said that my secret weapon on Jeopardy! was my lifelong crossword puzzle habit. Natan Last’s exuberant, revealing journey through the vast grid of crossword history has helped me understand just why it is that I get so much pleasure, and so much benefit, from the seemingly trivial task of writing letters in squares. This book is a 15-letter quad-stack feat of cultural criticism!”—Amy Schneider, author of In the Form of a Question