Freestyling – The New York Times
SUNDAY PUZZLE — Will Shortz, in his print introduction to this grid, writes: “Tracy Bennett is a digital puzzles editor for The Times. She manages Wordle and helps with the Crossword. In this themeless puzzle, she took a bold grid pattern with lots of white squares and in each corner positioned a marquee answer — ‘something new or that had an appealing sound or cluing potential.’ Then she built out from there.”
This is a super fun solve for themeless fans! There are so many wide swaths of vibrant, surprising entries, and all the stair steps of various length make for dazzling geometry. That massive diagonal run of 15 black squares had a zipper effect on my solve, separating the grid into halves. I had great luck on the left, or upper side, and staggered around the bottom of the puzzle for ages before reaching a satisfying finish.
Tricky Clues
14A. The unexpected answer to “That makes two of us!” is CLONING, which made me laugh and think of Dolly the sheep, the first mammalian clone, who was born in 1996. Seems so long ago! The foofaraw over artificial intelligence now reminds me of the fears of human cloning back then, which fortunately never came to pass.
48A. This is a wonderful clue and entry combination, my favorite in a while. “Super-sillyous?” is a fanciful homophone of “supercilious” with a much different (and ridiculous) meaning: WACKADOODLE.
57A. “Canal inspector” contains a reference to anatomy, rather than geography, and indicates an EAR DOCTOR.
92A./93A. This is a lovely pair of entries to end this puzzle — book ends, you could say! “Leafs,” at 92A, solves to the onomatopoeic RIFFLES, which makes me picture flipping through pages of thick paper, possibly trimmed with gold. Then the clue for 93A, “Set of books with maps, perhaps,” evoked an image of an old atlas or almanac; however, the answer is FANTASY SERIES. The maps in these books are part of the world creation process, a la J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
32D. This entry has been in the Times Crossword a handful of times, starting in 1954; for anyone without expertise in materials (especially French ones), it’s probably crosswordese. I don’t think I’ve seen it elsewhere, at least. The “Rough fabric with a loose weave” in question is RATINE.
34D. As much as people love to ruminate over the slang of the moment, we’ve really got nothing that compares to colorful lingo from a century ago. “Leave hurriedly, in quaint usage,” solves to TAKE A POWDER, which has a few possible origin stories. One involves an escape to the POWDER room and then from the predicament itself; in another, the POWDER is a headache remedy that one takes before excusing oneself to lie down. The POWDER in question could also be a “Mickey,” slang for a drug slipped into someone’s drink; “Mickey” is named after Mickey Finn, a Chicago bartender who would sedate his patrons and rob them in the 1890s.
44D. This is impossible trivia! Hats off to anyone who knew the answer for “Compulsory payments of old,” or MULCTS, which is from Latin, and has made a few appearances in past Times puzzles — in the 1950s, especially. A speck of the abstruse is fine in a weekend puzzle, isn’t it?
84D. I incorrectly chose an artiodactyl instead of the “Largest of the lagomorphs” here, and wrote in “hart” instead of HARE. This made 93A read “fantasy stries,” which looked like a typo rather than proof that my taxonomic knowledge was wanting.
Constructor Notes
I’ve never made a themeless puzzle this size before. I knew I wanted to pre-place a marquee answer in each quadrant, something that was either new or that had an appealing sound or cluing potential. 23-Across, 48-Across, 50-Across and 87-Across were the starting points. I admire Patrick Berry’s work immensely, and I intentionally started with a grid design that he used for his Sunday themeless of 11/4/2018. I ended up flipping a perimeter cheater square while filling.
My working title for this puzzle was “Step Right Up” because of the stair step pattern of blocks in the grid’s center, and because I saw myself as stepping right up to the challenge of tackling those wide open spaces. There are a couple of sticky points I hope solvers will forgive (the term at 44-Down is tough and archaic). My favorite clue that got kept in editing (and my favorite answer) can be found at 48-Across. I tend to be both playfully goofy and a bit verbose in my cluing, and thus there were some wise and disciplined edits to my originals (-:
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