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. Currently, he develops digital products and policy for refugees and asylum seekers at USCIS, the federal immigration benefits agency. Recently, he was a Director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, an advocacy non-profit that models itself as a union for asylum seekers. In 2016, he 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, 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 Atlantic, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Money on the Left, Hyperallergic, Narrative, and elsewhere.

You can reach him at natan.last@columbia.edu.

He is represented by Kate Garrick at Salky Literary Management.