Puzzle #255: Horseshoe Falls

Got a Sunday-sized themed puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) for you all this time around. Instead of the usual PuzzleMe, I'm trying out the new Crossword Nexus embed (fullscreen solve link here):

Indie puzzle highlights

November 10: Puzzle #6 (Ryan Mathiason, Boswords Fall Themeless League)

November 24: Meeting of the Minds (Brooke Husic and Orta Therox, Puzzmo)

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Puzzle #6 (Ryan Mathiason)

There's a certain style of themeless puzzle that I particularly associate with Universal, but that's popular at many venues nowadays, where the focus is above all on the liveliness, as defined very specifically, of the long theme entries. A lively theme entry, in this style of puzzle, is usually a colloquial spoken phrase or an evocative two-word phrase from everyday life, made up of common words. I cite Universal specifically because they stick to specifically to this formula, to the extent that when I came across VEUVE CLICQUOT as a marquee entry in a Universal themeless a few months ago, I was genuinely shocked.

I've made a good number of themelesses in this mold myself, but I have to admit that I often feel tired of it as a solver. Sometimes it feels cookie-cutter, like the constructor is using the submission guidelines as a checklist instead of a springboard. (This is, after all, the rational thing to do to maximize your chances of getting published.) The short fill will be clean, but it won't necessary be interesting.

Just looking at the grid for this Boswords puzzle, it looks like a perfect example of the style - we've got a pinwheel configuration of pairs of 10s, each intersecting another 10 or 9, so that there are a ton of longish spots but they're spread out enough to make it relatively easy to keep their average quality high. And we've got classic lively entries like A DEAL'S A DEAL, DO ME A SOLID, CAN OPENER, PLOT TWIST, MOBILE HOME, MAPLE BACON, etc. Nonetheless, I find this puzzle simply much more engaging than a typical example of the style. Partly that's because many of these entries are paired with pitch-perfect wordplay clues, so that they're not just there to fill some sort of liveliness quota: [Friend request, perhaps?] for DO ME A SOLID, [Target of a bench press?] for PIANO PEDAL, [Turn in a library book?] for PLOT TWIST, [Function past your typical bedtime, say] for AFTERPARTY, and so on. And the excellent clues aren't limited to those prototypically lively long entries; we've also got stuff like [One way to confirm you're exactly right?] for PROTRACTOR, [Plays around?] for GOES ON TOUR, and [Fell out of love?] for SWOONED, and colorful trivia angles like [Jim's P.I. "office" on "The Rockford Files"] for MOBILE HOME and [Garden decoration originally intended to capture roving evil spirits] for BOTTLE TREE.

Meeting of the Minds (Brooke Husic and Orta Therox)

Crossword editors these days think a lot about "constructor voice," and how crosswords can be edited to exacting standards while still letting that voice shine through. I love to learn about who a constructor is and how they navigate the world via their voice. On the other hand, the crotchetier I get, the more I'm unimpressed when the extent of a constructor's voice is basically "Here are the extremely popular entertainers that I'm a fan of." So it's a breath of fresh air when a crossword gets a constructor's voice across in an eye-opening, formally compelling way - and even more so when two constructors do that in the same puzzle.

In this aptly titled puzzle, Brooke and Orta each highlights aspects of their cognitive experience of the world: Brooke's SYNESTHESIA and Orta's APHANTASIA. On the left side of the grid, POV cues generally refer to Brooke's experiences: [What I can remember very long numbers with (because of how they weight)] for EASE, [Greek vowels that feel shy] for ETAS, [Makes sounds (and colors) with a piano] for PLAYS, etc. And on the right side, they refer to Orta's experience: ["But ___ they do that?" (where "that" might be "picture an apple"] for HOW'D, [What I've wondered when I don't really attach emotions to memories like others do] for IS IT ME, etc. Those two halves are tied together by the horizontal grid spanner MUST BE NICE, [Phrase you might say about how the other half lives], which intersects both SYNESTHESIA and APHANTASIA.

What I really appreciate about this is how every element of the design feels purposeful - it's not just "Here's a bunch of stuff about us in clues scattered throughout the puzzle." This is what I meant when I said "formally compelling" earlier. The two-sided structure explicitly highlights what's implicit in the concept of constructor voice, which is that a crossword is a dialectic between a constructor and a solver and the constructor's voice generally shouldn't feel alienating to the solver - e.g. by using "you" in a clue when you really mean "I." And the clue for MUST BE NICE recognizes that the constructor-solver relationship is ideally symmetrical (in the sense that human relationships in general ought to be symmetrical) despite the seeming asymmetry in the fact that the constructor is a producer and the solver a consumer. And hey, the grid pattern is asymmetrical, but the formal structure makes it feel symmetrical (at least to me - but then again, I'm not a synesthete).

Puzzle #254: Freestyle 21

Another very cornery themeless for you (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - enjoy! Thanks to Ada for the test-solve.

Indie puzzle highlights

October 20: Pitch Perfect (Ben Zimmer, Defector)

October 21: Untitled (Ben Zimmer, Slate)

October 25: Puzzmo Mini Crossword #25 (Brooke Husic, Puzzmo)

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Pitch Perfect (Ben Zimmer)

Themes where letters have to be added or removed at the edges of the grid are not uncommon, but it's rare for such a theme to involve every entry on the sides of the grid. That's exactly what Ben's theme, with the revealer STRIKE OUT THE SIDE, does; for every Across entry that touches the left or right side of the grid, you have to ignore the letter on the edge for the clue to make sense. So for example, 1-Across is SNAP, but the clue is [Go out for a short bit?], for NAP.

Having the entries make sense both with or without the deleted letter is de rigueur at this point, but it's easy enough to satisfy this constraint by using choppy, sectioned-off grids with lots of short entries. This puzzle doesn't take the easy way out - there are four impressively long theme entries, all crossing the revealer (!): FINE LINE(N), (G)ASTRONOMY, PATTERSON(G), and (B)RAINWASH.

Untitled (Ben Zimmer)

Ben Zimmer has been on a roll lately! I particularly enjoy what he's been doing with his Slate midis, which is unlike what anybody else is doing in any of the main midi venues: elaborately intersecting mini-themes, often based on pop cultural current events. This is his most elaborate one yet, a tribute to DIANE KEATON, whose name is stacked with INTERIORS and ANNIE HALL in the center, intersecting RENATA ADLER (who inspired Diane Keaton's role in Interiors) and JAMES TAYLOR (singer of "You've Got a Friend," which Diane Keaton called the song of her life). I don't know that I've ever even seen such a tightly themed and tightly gridded intersection of this many entries in a 15x15, let alone in an 11x11, where it fits extremely snugly. Normally I don't care much about themes that don't involve any wordplay, but the intricate gridwork here provides more than enough wordy excitement for me.

Puzzmo Mini Crossword #25 (Brooke Husic)

Over at Puzzmo, Brooke has just wrapped up a 30-day series of minis designed to teach solvers the basics of crosswords. The use of minis, as opposed to midis, is a great way to introduce concepts in bite-sized packages that are friendly for begining solvers, and Brooke does an incredible job of fitting those concepts into those packages in the most efficient way possible. In each puzzle, the lesson feels like it's encapsulated perfectly by the 5x5ish grid that serves as its vehicle.

Case in point: the lesson on rebuses from puzzle #25. In a 6x5 grid, there are two rebus squares (the ADs in BAD EGG/RADAR and ROADIE/GLADE) plus a revealer (BALLAD, to be reparsed as BALLAD). In the solved grid, the entries that are part of the lesson are highlighted in red, and here there are a mere four letters that aren't highlighted!

I've often expressed that it's very difficult to get excited about a mini - it might be seeded around a great clue, but as a whole solving experience, it's rarely aesthetically satisfying; minis are generally popular because of the online incentives towards catering to short attention spans. In this series, Brooke has really made the case for the mini as an interesting format in itself.

Puzzle #253: Megaphone

Time for another themed one (pdf, puz, pdf solution)! Dig in.

Indie puzzle highlights

September 11: Fully Freehand Fhemeless #4 (Frisco17, Good Clues for People Who Love Bad Clues)

September 18: AVCX Cryptic 9/18/25 (Liam Hughes, AVCX)

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Fully Freehand Fhemeless #4 (Frisco17)

Lately, Frisco's been doing some wild things with freehand, asymmetrical themelesses, a type of puzzle dear to my heart. They're often built around wide-open center stacks, and this one is no exception, but I laughed out loud when I saw exactly what Frisco did with this stack: four ___ THE ___ advertising phrases (ENJOY THE GO, DO THE DEW, OUTPIZZA THE HUT, TASTE THE RAINBOW) right on top of each other. What I love is that these sorts of stacks tend to force the constructor to get creative with the crossings and surrounding fill - I don't know if Willy Wonka's YOU GET NOTHING or Ducky from The Land Before Time's YEP YEP YEP or Margaret's ARE YOU THERE GOD? were on Frisco's wordlist before, but they feel like the type of phrases that were needed to will the grid into submission and that, nevertheless, are perfectly legit entries and indeed assets. I'm not an iPhone user or a video game knower, but I imagine the same is true of BLUE BUBBLE and Clash Royale's HE HE HE HAW. Delightful zaniness all around, so much so that I can forgive a random vowelless entry (VLN for VIOLIN) and the variant spelling BEDUIN.

AVCX Cryptic 9/18/25 (Liam Hughes)

This cryptic is apparently Liam's first published puzzle anywhere, and it's certainly an auspicious start. As a cryptic setter, I tend to be obsessed with making the surfaces hang together, and based on this puzzle, Liam seems to have a similar obsession. The indicators are always perfectly chosen to fit the surface:

- "bounced" in [Personality drinking Red Bull bounced pecs, etc.] for FLEXORS
- "tossing and turning" in [Tossing and turning, may seek sleep aid] for EYE MASK
- "blocking any estrogen" in [A way to conceive: induce eggs, blocking any estrogen] for IN VITRO

There are also just a whole bunch of clues that highlight wordplay finds that tickle my brain:

- [Annoying nightcore remix] for HECTORING was literally on my list of clues to use at some point
- [Out of creamer, I can only get black coffee] for AMERICANO is a beautiful find, and it's crossing the beautifully surfaced [Filter out coffee's dregs at the bottom of each drink] for PERCOLATE
- [Italian dish made with ingredients of gelati, in different amounts] for TAGLIATELLE makes use of an extremely fortuitous letter-bank pairing of TAGLIATELLE/GELATI
- [Guest feature: T-Pain -- shit slaps, I danced] for THIS IS SPINAL TAP has a definition that, by itself, would be a top-tier themeless clue, and it's paired with a lovely anagram to boot

Puzzle #252: The World's Most Cornery Crossword

I actually have no idea what the world's most cornery crossword is. But this themeless (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is definitely cornerier than the average puzzle. Thanks to Ada for test-solving!

Constructed by Will Nediger with the crossword puzzle builder from Amuse Labs

Puzzle #251: It's Kind of Like Raspberry Ripple

New themed puzzle for you this week (pdf, puz, pdf solution)! Asymmetrical, as my puzzles are wont to be these days.

Made by Will Nediger using the online crossword builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights: Lollapuzzoola edition

This year's Lollapuzzoola featured a thoroughly excellent set of puzzles, so this special edition of indie puzzle highlights will cover three of them: Shady Characters by Brooke Husic, Express Finals by Malaika Handa, and Literary Creatures by Brian Cimmet. (There are no real spoilers in the writeup of Literary Creatures, though, so feel free to read even if you're still working on that one.)

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Shady Characters (Brooke Husic)

Writing the hard themed puzzle for a tournament (akin to the ACPT's Puzzle 5) is a particularly demanding assignment: you've gotta come up with a gimmick devious enough to slow down the top solvers, while also fair enough to give the rest of the solvers a fighting chance at finishing it in the time limit. And it's particular hard to come up with a truly original gimmick, one that hasn't been used a dozen times before. Brooke is particularly good at this latter challenge - her puzzle for the online edition of Lolla has become legendary, but her April Fools' puzzles for Puzzmo are great examples too.

The revealer of this puzzle is CALL BULL, clued as [Challenge as untrue ... and what you should, appropriately, do when you see red]. As hinted at very cleverly by the title, clues with the string "red" contain a lie, typically meaning the opposite of what they actually should mean. 1-Across, for example, is clued as [Hatred], but the answer is FONDNESS. There have been lots of puzzles in which clues need to be changed in order to be interpreted properly, but these usually involve letters being added to or deleted from the clues; I don't know that I've ever seen a puzzle that asks you to change the clues semantically like this.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that "red" is a very common string that doesn't stand out at all, so it's easy to miss, and the fact that Brooke ensured that each clue had a plausible answer, on the literal reading, with the same length as the actual answer. (So [Predominant U.S. language] clued SWAHILI, which is the same length as ENGLISH, and [Hundredth of a dollar] clued DIME, which is the same length as CENT.)

The other thing I like to see in a puzzle like this is crunchy cluing outside of the theme, so that the solve is still challenging even once you've cracked the gimmick. Here, Brooke's characteristic tricky cluing shines through in clues like [Curbed appeal?] for PLS, [Mole or slug] for UNIT, [Matter of record?] for VINYL, and [Head of cabbage?] for CFO.

Express Finals (Malaika Handa)

Writing the finals for a tournament is a similar challenge to writing the hard themed puzzle, especially for a tournament like Lolla that has more than one difficulty division, in which case the grid has to be flexible enough for the puzzle to be easy or very hard, depending on the clues. The harder version of this puzzle has a wildly impressive density of tricky wordplay clues, and an equally impressive hit rate with them. A lot of them announce themselves with question marks - [Hardly working class?] for EASY A, [Core memory component] for BYTE, [Took an enthusiastic approach?] for RAN UP, [Board present at a corporate event?] for CHARCUTERIE, [Professional script writers, for short?] for DOCS, etc. - but many others sneak up on you. [Target of much paper coverage] for ROCK, [Way of getting something off one's chest] for TOP SURGERY, and [It can indicate something's X factor] for DECA- are particularly great examples.

But I also appreciate that other approaches to trickiness are well represented, too. [It's used in cooking and skin care] for COCONUT OIL is a nice example of a clue that makes you search through your mental Rolodex for products that fit the bill. And the pairing of [Possessive that becomes another possessive if you add a letter] for OUR and, nearby, [Pronoun that becomes another pronoun if you add a letter] makes the choice of that particular cluing strategy feel more intentional and thoughtful than some such clues, which often feel like they add difficulty purely via vagueness. (Those are, I suppose, also "mental Rolodex" clues, but they often have a search space that's too large to be useful, which is definitely not the case with possessives and pronouns.)

Literary Creatures (Brian Cimmet)

I failed to successfully past the first step of Brian's three-step meta suite, but even that first step was enough to seriously wow me. This is a variety suite that's firing on all cylinders, from the sheer amount of variety in puzzle types (including Masyu and Sudoku-style logic puzzles and a whole bunch of different kinds of word puzzles), to the delightful narrative premise (you're a parent whose kid has presented you with a series of puzzles to figure out what book you need to read for their bedtime routine), to the way that the answers tie together thematically with the narrative and the flavortext of the story plays a key role in cracking the meta answers. The sheer scope of this is daunting and it'd take paragraphs to go through the individual puzzles that I enjoyed, so I'll leave it that, but this is highly recommended - if you bought the Lolla puzzles just for the crosswords, you should check this out too.

Puzzle #250: Freestyle 20

It feels like it's been a while since I've had a themeless here, so here's one (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - Sunday-sized and asymmetrical, in case that's your thing. Thanks to Frisco and Noah for test-solving!

Made by Will Nediger using the free crossword puzzle maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

July 25: themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard, crosstina aquafina)

July 29: the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein, Dissonant Grids)

July 31: Extra Toppings (bob weisz, Puzzmo)

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themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard)

This puzzle marks the return of the greatest byline yet discovered (their last blog collaboration won an Orca for puzzle of the year, and with good reason). Obviously, if you take two great constructors and combine them, you're probably going to get a great puzzle, but this particular byline is a very specific pairing of sensibilities that works like gangbusters. I associate Kelsey with wonderfully wordy-yet-precise, often autobiographically inspired, references in the clues - things like [make a last-minute, winning ebay bid on a vintage 90s nike charles barkley 1993 mvp single-stitch t-shirt, for example] for SNIPE or [fandom creation that might have a "felonious gru/minions", "bisexual mary magdalene", or "reichenbach falls coffeeshop au" tag] for FIC. And I associate Erik with wonderfully terse, creative wordplay clues - things like [prince fandom?] for SATAN WORSHIP or [defeat on points?] for OUTARGUE. (I have no idea who wrote those specific clues, of course - especially since I find that, when I collaborate, I tend to accommodate my style to that of the person I'm collabing with.)

The 1-Across clue is a perfect illustration of how beautifully those two sensibilities are married in this puzzle. [STOP! ..... hammer type] for BALL-PEEN both has the zaniness that I associate with Kelsey's byline and the ear for wordplay that associate with Erik's. I also like that there are clues with disguised capital letters that would only work in the all-lowercase house style of Crosstina Aquafina: [someone who's unmatched on bumble?] for OAF and [where u at?] for CAMPUS. And I like that ALLITERATIVE (clued as [like big bags bussin' out the bentley bentayga]) is stacked on two entries that are (quasi-)rhyming, the exact counterpart of alliteration (DIVINE NINE and TEXT NECK). I guess this writeup has just devolved into listing various things I like about this puzzle, so I'll also mention the colorfulness of the long fill: TWO CHEEKS OF THE SAME ASS, YOU HAD ONE JOB, A WORLD Of HURT, UNFUCKWITHABLE, I PLEAD THE FIFTH. Anyway, all this is to say that this might be the puzzle of the year so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kelsey and Erik repeat at the Orcas next year.

the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein)

Last month, Dissonant Grids featured the "symphony series," in which Owen Bergstein posted a puzzle a day for 31 days. The series is framed as a sort of cruciverbal symphony, though that analogy didn't really ring true for me. A symphony, at least on the classical model, has a tightly-linked large-scale structure connecting its movements, whereas I had no idea what to expect from day to day in Owen's series. A more revealing comparison for me would be to something like Luciano Berio's Sequenza, a series of 14 compositions for solo instruments or voice, incorporating a wide range of extended techniques and oddities (perhaps most notoriously the moment in Sequenza V in which the soloist turns to the audience and asks "Why?"). Owen's series is similarly an exercise in experimentation, encompassing many different approaches to grid design and cluing, many of which wouldn't fly in mainstream venues.

For me, the most productive of the experiments was in movement twenty-seven, in which the cluing is extremely difficult in a deliberately unfair way, and in which the solver is forbidden from using the check or reveal functions in the applet. With vague clues like [Name that's an anagram of another] and [There are about 90 million worldwide], there's practically no way to solve this puzzle without assistance, but Owen has provided optional hints to accompany each clue. Forcing the solver to eschew check and reveal, and decide exactly which hints they want to make use of, makes the solver into an active participant in the construction (or maybe more appropriately the editing) of the puzzle, choosing which clues need to be made easier to provide footholds. You could simply use all the hints, making it into a standard easy puzzle, or you could try to strategically use as few hints as possible, or you could do anything in between. To make another analogy to the avant-garde music of the mid-20th century, I'm reminded of George Brecht's Event Scores, which push the notion of the musical score by providing brief, open-ended instructions that ordinary people can carry out in everyday life. I think there's great potential in this kind of reimagining of the relationship between the constructor and the solver, and I'm excited to see what else can be done with it.

Extra Toppings (bob weisz)

When I make themed crosswords, I have a tendency to try to overcomplicate things, to put a hat on a hat, as they say. So I love to see a puzzle that puts a hat on a hat but does so for a good reason, and mildly ribs itself for doing so. Unusually, this puzzle has two unconnected sections, each shaped like a different kind of a hat, and each with its own revealer. The top section's revealer at 10-Across is PUT A LID ON IT, clued as ["I've heard enough!" ... and what the constructor did to the bottom part of this grid], while the bottom section's revealer is PUT A HAT ON A HAT, clued as [Oversell a joke... and 10-Across twice... and do what this entire grid does... oh god, even this clue is doing it...]. It's a delightfully weird and meta theme and I'm not sure I have anything else to say about it; it kind of speaks for itself!

Indie puzzle highlights

July 17: Stay in the Loop (halle, Puzzmo)

July 17: Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle, Dissonant Grids)

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Stay in the Loop (halle)

I write a lot of midis for Crossword Club that are meant to be very easy, but it gets boring using the same basic grid patterns over and over again, so sometimes I attempt more ambitious patterns. The ones that are hardest to fill cleanly, invariably, are the ones with patterns like this puzzle here, where there are black squares in the corners and the center, but nowhere else. In these patterns, no individual section is at all siloed off from the next, so every filling decision you makes drastically limits the rest of the grid. If a fill doesn't quite work, you often end up having to start over from scratch. So it's extremely impressive that Halle found eight interlocking 9s that are all high-quality (SPOON REST, WOULD I LIE, SIDELINES, TEENAGERS, TIDEWATER, SPINELESS, SWAP MEETS, PORE STRIP) and that there's nothing in the short fill that so much as made me wince.

It's also just an enjoyable solve, thanks to evocative cluing: [Canvas for Charlotte the Spider's messages], [Stressed coaches often pace along them], [When an episode's cliffhanger happens], [What many "Vampire Diaries" characters appear to be, even though they are actually over 100 years old], [The Cheesecake Factory's famously lengthy reading material, which I logged on Goodreads before it was removed as "NOT A BOOK"]. I'm not even giving the answers for these, because they're both easy and specific enough that you can probably guess most of them even without any letters, but they nonetheless feel fresh.

Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle)

Owen Bergstein's "Symphony Series," an ongoing avant-garde puzzle-a-day series over on Dissonant Grids, has included a couple of intermezzos by other constructors, including this one by Ada Nicolle. Given its provenance, I should be using a musical analogy to talk about this puzzle, but because I know nothing about music theory and a few things about poetry, I won't be doing that.

I like to compare crossword grids to poems because they're often working under similar sorts of linguistic constraints. But a crossword grid is much more like a sestina than, say, a sonnet, because it's the nature of the form that the constraints on what words you can use in concert with each other are rather severe, since every letter generally needs to be checked. I can think of a few sestinas that don't feel like they're straining under the weight of their form, but not many. And similarly, I can think of a few crossword grids that feel like pretty much every entry is chosen at will and not forced by the constraints of the interlock, but not many.

An underdiscussed constraint is the fact that the grids have defined endpoints, almost always the edges of a rectangle. I've made many grids, particularly ones that I've built out from stacked entries in the center, that would have worked beautifully except that the lengths of the long vertical crossers don't play nicely, so that one of them is a bit too close to the edge of the grid, necessitating a two-letter word or an unchecked letter. In "Puzzle Pieces," Ada decides to simply dispense with this pesky constraint, and the results are marvelous. Looking at any section of this collage of grids, I can immediately tell who made it - from up-to-the-minute stuff like UWU SPEECH over TOXIC YURI, to meta stuff like STAGGER STACK and SAN JOSE STRUT and NOM DE PUZ (not to mention HOW META), to stuff specific to Ada's life like ICELANDER. Every section is just bursting with colorful entries, and the fact that Ada didn't have to actually finish the grids off makes it like the "Oops! All Berries" of themelesses. Even just the titular section, piling up Z's with KAZOOS/PUZZLE PIECES/OUTPIZZA THE HUT crossing EX-YAKUZA/SNAZZY/PIAZZA, is worth the price of admission.

Puzzle #249: Words in Progress (Crossmess Parzel #5)

When I picked up Stan Gebler Davies' biography of Joyce, I knew I was in for a bad time from the first paragraph of the preface, which calls Finnegans Wake the "apotheosis of the crossword puzzle" and means it derogatorily. Later, he elaborates on that by calling the novel "a gigantic multilingual crossword puzzle, the theme Resurrection (either by whiskey or divine agency) and the language built on puns." Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing!

Finnegans Wake is indeed a dense amalgam of puns and coinages that's nearly impossible to understand (the phrase that provides the title of this puzzle series, for example, is a combnation of "Christmas parcel" and "crossword puzzle"), but a crossword puzzle seems like a singularly inapt analogy to me. A crossword puzzle is too orderly, too decipherable, to be a symbol for Finnegans Wake. Most crossword puzzles are, anyway. This here puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) isn't really solvable. At least, if it's solvable, it's only solvable in the sense that Finnegans Wake is readable. Maybe you'll be able to solve it, but certainly not in one or two sittings. Maybe you'll come up with a solution that isn't the same as mine, but that works just as well. Maybe (probably) you'll just hit "reveal grid" and read through the solution PDF for an explanation of the answers.

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free cross word generator

Puzzle #248: Episode Guide (Crossmess Parzel #4)

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa had a lot in common with Joyce; they were both visionaries who espoused what might be called a "critical nationalism" with respect to their home countries, and they even both participated in puzzle contests (Pessoa did so under the name A. A. Cross). But Pessoa was no fan of Joyce, complaining that Joyce's writing "is preoccupied with method, with how it is made." He added that the sensuality of Ulysses is "oneiric delirium - the kind treated by psychiatrists - presented as an end in itself."

It's true that Ulysses is a forbiddingly methodical novel, one that uses a dizzying range of styles and techniques. It's the polystylistic nature of Ulysses that makes it hard to compare to a crossword, though many have approached it as a puzzle. In a crossword, thematic unity is key: a single, consistently executed theme is generally treated as the hallmark of a good puzzle. That's a metric that I've brazenly ignored in this Ulysses-inspired crossword (pdf, puz, pdf solution). It's a 25x25 grid with 18 sections, each corresponding to one of the 18 episodes of the novel, and each one having a conceit inspired by that episode. Don't worry, familiarity with Ulysses isn't required to solve the puzzle (though it will surely help in some sections). If you're curious what the heck is going on in a particular section, I've included a handy section-by-section guide below the puzzle.

Thanks to Frisco, Richard, and Matthew for test-solving this beast!

Built by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free crossword puzzle creator

 

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Episode 1, "Telemachus"

The symbol of the cross is the first image in Ulysses, which begins "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed." But the symbol of the broken mirror is also a motif in Episode 1 (representing, according to Stephen Dedalus, the warped state of Irish art). So the puzzle opens with the image of a broken mirror crossing a razor.

Episode 2, "Nestor"

This episode depicts Stephen as a teacher at a boys' school, drilling his students with rote questions about ancient history, so the entries in the second section of the puzzle are clued in the same way.

Episode 3, "Proteus"

Episode 3 is named for Proteus, the mythological shapeshifter, and the third section of the puzzle is made up only of the letters in PROTEUS.

Episode 4, "Calypso"

Episode 4 is the first major introduction of the theme of bodily appetites, and the entries in this section are all related to food and drink.

Episode 5, "Lotus-Eaters"

This episode is inspired by the episode of The Odyssey in which Odysseus's crew eat lotus flowers and become intoxicated, losing all desire to continue their journey home. The episode also portrays the wandering and digressive thoughts of Leopold Bloom. The entries in this section are all related to the motif of intoxication, and are all interrupted before they can finish.

Episode 6, "Hades"

Episode 6 includes the first of several mentions in the novel of the phrase "retrospective arrangement," which critics often use to refer to the way in which passages in the novel serves as echoes of previous episodes. In this section, each entry is clued with a cross-reference to an entry in a previous section.

Episode 7, "Aeolus"

This episode is interspersed with newspaper headlines, so the clues in this section are written in the style of headlines.

Episode 8, "Lestrygonians"

Like Episode 4, "Lestrygonians" is filled with references to food, and Joyce's schema for Ulysses lists "peristaltic prose" as the technique used in this episode, with the contractions of the digestive system serving as a model for Bloom's post-lunch walk through Dublin. In this section, the letter bank from Episode 4 above is reused, as if the foods are traveling through the digestive system.

Episode 9, "Scylla & Charybdis"

In this episode, Stephen delivers a lecture on Hamlet, and the episode is dense with Shakespeare references, so each clue in this section is a reference to Shakespeare.

Episode 10, "Wandering Rocks"

This episode consists of 18 short vignettes using the technique of interpolation, in which passages from one vignette reappear in the middle of another vignette. A letter is interpolated into each entry in this section. (MAC becoming MASC is also a nod to the "man in the macintosh," mentioned in the writeup to the second puzzle in the series.)

Episode 11, "Sirens"

The prose in Episode 11 attempts to imitate the qualities of music, so this section of the puzzle is filled with musical references (and repeats the C, R, and N sounds in a hopefully quasi-musical way).

Episode 12, "Cyclops"

Episode 12 is a story narrated by an unnamed Dubliner, unusually using first-person "I" narration. Since the episode is named after the Cyclops, every entry in this section includes the letter "I" exactly once.

Episode 13, "Nausicaa"

In this episode, Bloom masturbates to the sight of Gerty MacDowell, a woman he sees on the beach. Before Bloom's climax, Gerty is characterized with an over-the-top cavalcade of references to beauty and fashion, but that sense of beauty fades afterwards as Gerty walks away and is revealed to walk with a limp. The Across entries above and below CLIMAX in this section are thematic nods to those descriptions.

Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun"

This section recapitulates the stylistic history of English prose, shifting between styles every few paragraphs. The Across clues in this section imitate five of the styles from the episode, ranging from early Latinate prose to Gothic horror.

Episode 15, "Circe"

This episode is written as a surrealistic stage play set during Bloom and Dedalus's visit to Dublin's red-light district. The clues in this section are written as if they were part of that play.

Episode 16, "Eumaeus"

This episode is deliberately written in a stilted, overwritten style, with some critics arguing that it imitates the way that Bloom himself would have written it. The clues in this section are written deliberately poorly.

Episode 17, "Ithaca"

This episode is written as a catechism (a theological question-and-answer session, essentially), so the clues are written as questions. The answer to the final question in the episode is a large dot printed on the page, referenced by the PERIOD rebus square.

Episode 18, "Penelope"

The final episode is a stream-of-consciousness representation of the thoughts of Bloom's wife Molly, so the clues and entries are in a continuous stream that doesn't break at the boundaries between entries. The partial clue at 123-Across, [yes], is a nod to the fact that "yes" is both the first and last word of the episode.

Puzzle #247: Four Last Things (Crossmess Parzel #3)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's outline of his own early life through the avatar of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. It begins with his childhood (announced by the opening words, "Once upon a time") and tracks his oscillations between periods of hedonism and deep religiosity. Perhaps the centerpiece of Portrait is the scene where Stephen listens to Father Arnall's sermon on the Four Last Things - death, judgment, hell, and heaven. This sermon is the impetus for Stephen to abandon sensual pursuits and return to the Catholic Church, but that return is short-lived; the confines of the church (and of Irish culture writ large) can't accommodate his artistic ambitions. When he sees a girl bathing along Dollymount Strand, he (in one of Joyce's characteristic epiphanies) experiences an intense urge to describe her beauty in prose. He becomes further alienated from both the church and from his homeland, realizing in the end that his aesthetic ambitions are incompatible with a life in Ireland.

But he still retains a deep love for his homeland, and hopes to help craft a new Irish identity through his writing. He concludes the novel by writing: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Inspired by the Four Last Things, this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) charts the four major aspects of Dedalus/Joyce's life in Portrait: childhood development, Catholic faith, sensualism, and finally aestheticism - an aestheticism that, as we will see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, aims to radically break free from all sorts of strictures.

Made by Will Nediger with the online cross word maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

June 22: Untitled (Sarah Sinclair, The Atlantic)

June 25: Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher, AVCX)

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Untitled (Sarah Sinclair)

With people like Caleb Madison, Paolo Pasco, and Kelsey Dixon contributing, the Atlantic crossword has been reliably great. But they recently entered their open-submissions-for-themelesses era, and judging by this puzzle, it's going to be a fun era. I always marvel at the quality and quantity of original question-mark clues that tend to appear in Paolo's Thursday and Friday puzzles, and this puzzle achieves a similar feat on a 15x15 scale: [Forehead lines?] for FACE TATTOO, [Team covering the spread?] for CATERERS, [Smartest person in the room, perhaps] for FASHIONISTA, [Spotty coverage?] for PIMPLE PATCH, and [Images from a wanted poster?] for THIRST TRAPS are highlights.

The clues for short fill keep things interesting, too; [Word that distinguishes the title of an H. G. Wells novel from the title of a Ralph Ellison novel] is a fun way to clue THE and a great example of how duplicating the answer in the clue (twice, even!) can sometimes be perfectly fine. I particularly like the zaniness of the DURER clue, [Great Piece of Turf artist Albrecht whose last name is fittingly found in verdure rendered]. "Aptly hidden in" clues are often awkwardly strained, but "verdure rendered" is such a striking phrase that this one loops around to being delightful to me. Plus, Great Piece of Turf really is notable for being a masterpiece of verdure-rendering.

Spill the Beans (Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher)

It's not like this theme type (substrings of theme entries dropping vertically, in this case words for beans) hasn't been done many times before (it feels like the WSJ has this kind of theme every few weeks). But I'm stunned by the smartness of the execution here. Each spilled bean (LIMA in MUSLIM AMERICAN, COCOA in ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE, and SOY in JUST SO YOU KNOW) is split across words in a phrase that would be an asset in a themeless puzzle, which is a great start. But also, this kind of theme is very hard to fill cleanly around, because the theme words are intersecting and the "spilled" words can't be placed symmetrically even if the puzzle itself is symmetrical, which constrains the black square placement a lot. To keep the fill squeaky-clean in this kind of puzzle, grid patterns sometimes end up feeling cramped.

Here, we've got nice chunky stacks of 6s, 7s, and 8s, but placed in a way that allowed Olivia and Sally to come up with a clean, lively fill. The NE and SW corners are particularly canny, breaking up a stack of three 8s with a single black square so that the corners themselves are only 3x3, allowing for fun long stuff (TIRAMISU, ROOT BEER, RAINCOAT, OM NOM NOM) while retaining a lot of flexibility with the crossings. (And I'll note that I only now, while writing this up, noticed that the grid is slightly asymmetrical, with a black square on only one side of ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE in the center row. The grid still has the aesthetically pleasing features of a fully symmetrical grid, but allows the fabulous hidden COCOA find to take center stage.) Elsewhere, we've got the stacked 7s DANGLED and APPROVE and ANEMONE and REDEYES, again with the crossings all being unimpeachable. Just wonderful gridwork.

Puzzle #246: Epiphanies (Crossmess Parzel #2)

I don't know if James Joyce ever solved crosswords, though on at least one occasion he did enter a puzzle competition in an English magazine in hopes of earning some money. The competition, with a 250-pound prize, involved deciphering a set of 48 words in batches of six. Joyce, who was living in Trieste at the time, sent his complete entry to his brother Stanislaus in a registered envelope so he would have proof that he had completed it, with the plan to sue the magazine if they didn't award him the prize. The plan failed because of the slowness of the mail delivery from Trieste to Dublin, but I'm left to wonder about the alternate history in which Joyce became a word puzzle fiend.

He was, of course, a wordplay fiend, as is evident from his late novels. But in daily life, too, he displayed a penchant for the kind of wordplay that's the stock-in-trade of crossword constructors. An Irish writer friend of his, Frank O'Connor, recalled once visiting Joyce and remarking on a landscape that was displayed on his wall in an unusual-looking frame. He asked what it was, and Joyce replied "That's cork." O'Connor, who was a native of the Irish city of Cork, said "I know it's Cork, but what's the frame made of?" In reference to Joyce's visual pun, O'Connor later reflected that Joyce must have suffered from some sort of "assocation mania." The complex chains of wordplay associations in Finnegans Wake put me in mind of Freud's account of parapraxes - verbal slips that arise from an unconscious train of associations. Joyce apparently didn't think much of Freud, though in a characteristic bit of wordplay, he did note that his own name comes from joyeux and is thus the French equivalent of Freud (from Freude, meaning "joy"). Still, I think it's undeniable that there's a strong literary kinship between Joyce and Freud. (Lionel Trilling: "James Joyce, with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words as things and of words which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.")

That use of "words which point to more than one thing" is the bread and butter of the crossword constructor. In that sense, one of the most cruciverbal puzzles in Joyce's work is the "man in the macintosh," a mysterious figure who pops up at various points in Ulysses. At one point, a newspaper reporter misinterprets this description and assumes that he's a man named M'Intosh. In his novel The House of Ulysses, Julián Ríos takes this wordplay one step further and reinterprets him as the man with the Macintosh, typing away on his computer.

This sort of thing was mostly to come later in his career, though. His early books, like Dubliners, were much less linguistically playful. At this point, Joyce was working out his concept of the "epiphany." He used this term for some of his early, very short prose pieces, which were either prose poems or sketches of overheard conversations. But he also structured several of the stories in Dubliners around the sort of epiphany that he defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation," such as Gabriel Conroy's moment of self-understanding occasioned by his realization of the depth of his wife's feeling for her deceased lover in "The Dead." In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen feels a duty as an artist to record these fleeting realizations for posterity. There's an affinity here with the epiphanic moment of hearing a phrase and realizing exactly how it can work as a crossword revealer, and the parallel epiphany that, hopefully, the solver experiences.

The epiphany is a small, crystalline moment, and it seems appropriate here to make a Dubliners-esque collection of such epiphanies. So this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is a series of revealers for which I haven't found enough theme entries to make a full theme - in each case, there's just one theme entry for each revealer. I couldn't turn any of them into full-blown puzzles, but, like Stephen, I also don't want to let them evanesce.

Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword creator from Amuse Labs

Puzzle #245: A Series of Gig Lamps Symmetrically Arranged (Crossmess Parzel #1)

In the essay "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf famously wrote that "life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." She charges English novelists of the previous several decades, particularly H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, with failing to truly tackle the complexities of life, focusing instead on the ephemeral and material. Among her contemporaries who are valiantly attempting to represent the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of human experience (to borrow a phrase from William James), she cites James Joyce as the most notable. Joyce, she writes, is "concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain." (Mind you, she wrote those words before Ulysses was finished, and her later assessments were much less positive - when she finally read it, she called it "pretentious" and "underbred.")

The words "symmetrically arranged" naturally jumped out at me, since it's a standard rule of crosswords that the theme entries should, in general, be symmetrically arranged. A typical crossword theme, indeed, is little more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. The theme can be elevated by the craftsmanship of the grid, but in a way perhaps that's even more pernicious - to Woolf, Bennett is the worst example of empty materialism precisely because he's such an excellent craftsman that there are no cracks for life to worm itself inside.

I generally think of myself as an excellent cruciverbal craftsman. I've been at this a long time, and I know how to fill a grid cleanly and smoothly without the seams showing. So I certainly know how to make a decidedly un-Joycean crossword. Over the next few puzzles, I'll be working my cruciverbal way through Joyce's major works, with one puzzle inspired by each of his books of fiction. But first, here's a puzzle that's nothing more than a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged (pdf, puz, pdf solution).

Made by Will Nediger with the free crossword puzzle builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

May 30: Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Puzzles)

June 1: Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen, A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle)

June 5: Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx, Puzzmo)

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Themeless "Off the Wall" (Ben Tolkin)

"Off the Wall" is aptly chosen - there's such an eclectic mix of goofy stuff in this themeless grid. DEYASSIFIES (clued as [Makes plain?]), SHAQTIN' A FOOL, THIS IS SPARTA, RECESSION POP, GOSH DARN IT (and, indeed, GOOFIER). I love this kind of grid shape with criss-crossing long entries, where the marquee stuff isn't confined to stacks. They're very hard to fill, and this is an object lesson in why it can be worthwhile to have a couple of entries like AGCY and SHA and AFTS in the short fill if it enables such a delightful solving experience overall.

Community Oriented (vidhya aravind and carly they themsen)

In case you missed it, you should check out A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle, a pack of puzzles by trans and nonbinary constructors in support of transgender charities. This puzzle was my favorite of the bunch, with some striking grid art that somehow still caught me by surprise when I got to the revealer, T4T ([Dating initialism reflected in the shapes in this grid]). And indeed, three chunks of black squares cascading down the grid are shaped like a T, a 4, and another T. I love it when there's an unexpected numeral in a revealer! The rest of the grid is packed with trans-related clues and entries, from HYPERVISIBILITY and WACHOWSKI to IT'S A GIRL, clued as ["Surprise" for some trans adults hosting their own gender reveal parties]. Particularly elegant is the stack of 5s in the top right: LABEL, clued as [Identify, in a way some queer people avoid], ARIEL, clued as [Disney character who famously underwent a transition giving her a major vocal change], and BOOKS, clued as ["Nevada" by Imogen Binnie and "The Death of Vivek Oji" by Akwaeke Emezi, for two].

There's also just an assorted range of delights to be found throughout the puzzle, like the linguistically fascinating BAKA - ["Fool" in Japanese (literally "horse-deer," describing a guy who would confuse the two] - which I don't think I've seen in a puzzle before. Or the original clues for common entries, like [Part of the psyche grounded in reality, or a sense of smugness that isn't] for EGO.

Nothing suspicious going on here! (jqzx)

I've seen a lot of themelesses with 4x10 stacks lately - it's a form I particularly associate with Adrian Johnson, who's made some excellent ones. Having constructed a couple myself now, I really get the appeal: they look eye-popping in a grid, but they're surprisingly tractable to construct cleanly (helped, possibly, by the fact that the average quality of 4s tends to be higher than that of 3s). When you're making a symmetrical themeless grid, though, making one 4x10 stack means that you have to make another one on the other side of the grid, so sometimes you get one stellar stack and one that's not quite so good.

A key part of Puzzmo's editorial ethos, though, is that there are no strict requirements for grid dimensions or symmetry, which helps make sure that every grid is the right size and layout for its purpose, whether it's themed or themeless. So there's nothing stopping a Puzzmo constructor from making one beautiful 4x10 stack and extending the grid just as much as necessary to make the themeless work. That's just what jqzx has done here, with a stack of BASIC CABLE/ART THERAPY/SCREEN TIME/HEADMASTER, where all the crossings are unimpeachable - the least good, if I had to pick was NOSTRA, but I even enjoyed that one, clued as it is with reference to Carlos Fuentes's masterpiece, Terra Nostra. The best crossings are the pair of FALSE STARTS and TAKES THE BAIT, which in turn cross the mini stack of UNDERBAKED and TOMFOOLERY. Just fantastic gridwork. And it feels very atypical of Puzzmo to me, since so few of their puzzles are wide-open themelesses - but in a more important sense, it's very typical of Puzzmo in its efficient use of grid space and design.

Puzzle #244: The Uprights

Back again with a tricksy puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - happy solving!

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's cross word maker

Indie puzzle highlights

April 23: Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith, Real Puzzling Stuff)

May 5: Untitled (Christina Iverson, Boswords)

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Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith)

Puzzles with theme gimmicks that affect every single clue are rare, and for good reason. Much of the time, the gimmick doesn't add much to the solving experience, so it makes the clue syntax more awkward with no good payoff. (I'm thinking, for example, about those puzzles where the theme is related to the letter S somehow and then every clue also starts with a S. It's like, okay, but to what end?) On the other hand, there are the gimmicks that are integral to the solving experience, like Mike Shenk's puzzle 5 from last year's ACPT, in which the letter C had to be removed from clues for them to make sense. These gimmicks are generally so specific that it'd be nigh impossible (and probably undesirable, anyway) for them to apply to every clue.

"Hooked on Phonics" hits the sweet spot, though. In this puzzle, every clue must be spoken out loud to make sense. The four longest Across entries are thematic: PLAY IT BY EAR clued as [Deftly negotiate a new peace], TALK IT OUT clued as [Approach for descent], READ ALOUD clued as [Utter pros], and LISTEN CLOSE clued as [Frays commanding attention]. These are all excellent, with [Utter pros] in particular reading very naturally. But then Ryan applies the same gimmick to every single clue. My favorite was [Target of attacks in the lead-up to the American Revolution], where "attacks" is really "a tax" and the answer is TEA. But there are numerous delightful finds in every section - [Literary figure known for wailing madly] for AHAB, [Growths beneath tulips] for GOATEES, [It's key when speaking French] for WHO, the list goes on. What makes it work is the fact that every clue is its own unique mini-puzzle, so the gimmick doesn't wear thin over the course of the solve.

 Untitled (Christina Iverson)

Few things are more consistent than the Boswords themeless leagues, where the puzzles are reliably excellent. But there's usually a puzzle or two each season that stands out above the rest for me. This season, it was Christina's finals puzzle. In the post-solve interview, Christina mentioned that she aimed to go light on the trivia to make a puzzle that worked nicely at all three difficulty levels. I was a bit surprised by that comment, since GEODESY, LIAR'S DICE, RONCO, PHOBOS, PAD SEE EW, and TOTORO, among others, are know-it-or-you-don't. Not that I was bothered by this - those entries span a wide range of different topics, and they're distributed throughout the grid in a way that makes the puzzle still accessible for those who are stumped by a few of them. But it's true that the puzzle is also chock full of broadly familiar entries that can be clued in myriads of ways, perfect for a Boswords puzzle: BASEBALL, ASTRONAUT, CHOP SHOP, STOVETOPS, EMERALD, SYRINGE, CHARADE, etc. I only solved the Stormy clues, but there were some doozies - [Some budget cuts] for CHUCK ROASTS was the highlight for me (and the seed, evidently), but I also loved [Ride in the 1970s-'80s, e.g.] for ASTRONAUT, [Singer of "Respect," at times] for SPELLER, and [Level in a stadium?] for A GAME (an entry that's particularly hard to clue trickily).

Puzzle #243: They Stagger the Entries (with Ada Nicolle)

Ada and I were bonding over Severance on a co-working call and we came up with this theme (pdf, puz, pdf solution), which we had to immediately turn into a puzzle. Don't worry, there are no Severance spoilers herein, and it should be enjoyable even if you've never seen a minute of the show. (Source: our test-solver Frisco, who loved it and who has never seen Severance.)

Ada, in addition to being my amazing co-editor at Crossword Club, is an editor for A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle, a puzzle pack supporting transgender charities that comes out in June. Please check it out!

Made by Ada Nicolle and Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's online cross word builder

Puzzle #242: 3 Through 5, Too

Some theme content in this one (pdf, puz, pdf solution), but I think it'll play more like a themeless (hopefully in a fun way). Happy solving!

 

Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

December 31: "In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller, lost for xwords)

March 20: Pet Theory (Ben Wilson, zerofiftyone)

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"In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller)

It's true, December 31 was a long time ago. But I'd been sleeping on August Miller's blog until a couple of recent AVCX puzzles and a profile in Daily Crossword Links inspired me to work through the recent backlog. Not only am I very late to covering this one, Quiara Vasquez's new Substack has already covered it, and that Substack promises to do basically the same thing as my highlight roundups, except much more comprehensively and with much better writing.

Still, I liked this puzzle a lot and therefore I'm going to talk about it! One thing I like about it is that, like many of August's puzzles, this one features triple stacks of 15s, which are way less popular than they used to be because they tend to involve significant sacrifices in fill quality (or at least they did in their heyday). August's triple stacks are consistently good, both in terms of the 15s themselves and in the short fill crossing them. But in this puzzle, I particularly want to highlight two entries: DORITOS ROULETTE and EMO KYLO REN. These are both phrases that will be totally unknown to a lot of solvers, and it's worth taking a look at how August chose to clue them. EMO KYLO REN is at least partly self-explanatory: it's a version of Kylo Ren who's emo. But with no context, that's still going to be pretty baffling to solvers who aren't already familiar. Cannily, August clues it as [Who tweeted "i get all my winter clothes from Hoth Topic"], which not only shouts out a great pun, but concisely tells the baffled solver that EMO KYLO REN is a parody Twitter account, without having to explicitly spell it out. Contrast that with the clue for STONED APE THEORY in another of August's puzzles that I recently solved: [Disputed hypothesis that ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms helped to catalyze the deevlopment of art and language among early humans]. That's a great entry that I've being hoping to use as a 15 for a while, but it's also totally opaque to someone who's not already familiar. So opaque that a glancing clue like the EMO KYLO REN clue wouldn't land; you've really gotta go straightforward with this one.

DORITOS ROULETTE, finally, is less transparent than EMO KYLO REN in a vacuum. But it's certainly one of the very few obvious potential meanings for the phrase, so the clue doesn't actually have to be so explicit at all. [Gamble with chips?] is a perfect piece of wordplay, but it's also perfect as a disambiguator of the meaning of DORITOS ROULETTE: it confirms that, yes, it probably means Russian roulette with dangerously spicy Doritos instead of bullets. (I mean, I guess it could also be a game of actual roulette with Doritos instead of balls, but... how would that even work?)

Pet Theory (Ben Wilson)

A lot of crosswords I've highlighted on here over the years have been Schrodinger puzzles, in which certain squares have multiple correct entries that work with the crossing entries. After all, Schrodingers are a staple of the hard crossword niche, and it's always impressive when they're pulled off well, without clues that feel too stretchy. So it's funny that my favorite recent Schrodinger puzzle isn't actually a Schrodinger puzzle (or should I say, both is and isn't a Schrodinger puzzle). Instead, it's got a mini-theme with SCHRODINGER'S CAT as an entry; the other entry is BOX-AND-WHISKER PLOT.

When I finished solving, I thought "Cute! Two science-y theme answers that are related to cats" and moved on with my life. But later in the shower I realized that, of course, the connection is much tighter: the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment involves a cat in a box, so Schrodinger's scheme could literally be described as a box-and-whisker plot. That's a beautiful reinterpretation of the phrase, remarkably affecting the meanings of both "box" and "whisker" (and even, metaphorically, "plot"). Cap it off with a perfect title and you've got the platonic ideal of a mini-theme.