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.
