Advertisement
Supported by
Wordplay, The CROSSWORD COLUMN
It’s not what you know; it’s Lewis Rothlein and Jeff Chen’s second Sunday collaboration.
Jump to: Tricky Clues | Today’s Theme
SUNDAY PUZZLE — Lewis Rothlein is a yoga instructor and jazz piano enthusiast in Asheville, N.C., and Jeff Chen is a writer and professional crossword constructor in Seattle. This is their third collaboration for The New York Times (and if you liked this one, try their other Sunday grid, which ran in 2020). Mr. Rothlein came up with today’s theme, and Mr. Chen wrote code and sifted the results from the database at xwordinfo.com, which has about 200,000 answer words from past Times crosswords.
I love the execution of the theme. Visually, it pulls off a nifty maneuver in the Down entries that tricked my eye whenever my focus drifted, and the theme examples are quite inspired.
You will notice six Down entries in this grid with a run of shaded letters — these are important. The theme encompasses more than just those six entries, however, as solvers will discover when they wend their way to the bottom of this puzzle — and confusingly run out of room. There’s no rebus, but there is some grid-busting afoot.
Some of you might have filled in one of those shaded letter runs early in your solve, which would have been a lucky break, in my opinion. I came to understand this theme really slowly and circuitously.
The first sign of any shenanigans I noticed was at 94D, “Like England in the late 16th century.” I had a hunch about what the entry could be (it involved a certain queen), but I could not pinpoint what was going on until I hit 92D, “2004 Don Cheadle film set in Africa.” This is another specific bit of trivia that I was certain of: The movie is “Hotel Rwanda.” But the entry at 92D is only six letters long, and the ones that fit are the first six: HOTEL R. “Dastardly expression,” at 121A, solves to SNEER, sharing that R in HOTEL R, so there’s no indication of a rebus — just a handful of extra letters, W-A-N-D-A, falling off the bottom of the puzzle.
This was enough information for me to figure out that 91D, “Person dealing with casting and lines,” was FLY FIS, with H-E-R-M-A-N as extra letters. I realized that this entry was in the same column as 18-Down, one of the entries with shaded squares, and that there were several crossing letters entered there, some of them in the shaded area. The clue at 18-Down, “Reeked,” had made little sense until this moment, when I mentally filled in the gaps of S H _ _ M A _ T A N K with the E, R and N from H-E-R-M-A-N to get SHERMAN TANK. For “Reeked?” Look at it this way: If you drop HERMAN from that entry, you’re left with STANK.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement
Name Dropping – The New York Times
Posted by