New York Times, Thursday, March 24, 2016

We first started talking about some kind of CIRCULAR REASONING puzzle at the 2015 Minnesota Crossword Tournament (where we'd met a few years prior, after both constructing puzzles, and hitting it off both interpersonally and cruciverbally). We started thinking about a Sunday-sized puzzle (a large circle of marked squares containing "CIRCULAR REASONING WORKS BECAUSE ..."), but we couldn't come up with enough good additional themers to go with the circled squares, so eventually we swapped to a 15x15 concept using a "circular rectangle" instead.

We went back and forth a bunch of times on the long entry, which had to be changed to have even length so it could fit as a rectangle — CIRCULAR REASONING {WORKS CORRECTLY, IS GOOD, IS USEFUL} BECAUSE ...? — before finally settling on Tom's idea of the MAKES NO SENSE version.

But the 15x15 version that we started with was, it turned out, a real bear to grid/fill to our satisfaction. It took a long while to figure out why, but eventually David realized how ambitious we were being: the two 14s imposed major constraints on the black squares in a 15x15 grid, plus the long 38-letter wrapped entry was causing some really tough letter combinations in both directions when it turned a corner — we had a ton of theme squares, and by necessity there also wasn't good separation between the theme entries. Switching to a 16x14 grid relaxed the black-square constraints from the 14-letter themers, and we were off and running.

Our original submission was a little nastier for the solver: we'd simply clued what's now 28-Around as 28-Across (and completely omitted the numbers in the squares now numbered 24, 32, and 50, which was the only hint that something strange was going on).

We hope that everyone enjoyed solving it!

There's an interesting idea here, CIRCULAR REASONING MAKES NO SENSE BECAUSE (repeat ad infinitum) placed into a loop. I like logical reasoning puzzles, so an element of this theme greatly amused me.

I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had solved on paper. Having a clue which is neither across nor down — one lone "around" clue — is a neat idea, but it didn't translate well into the electronic version.

A few inelegancies:

• Starting the quote off-center felt funny. It would have been great to get it started in the top middle, or the top left. I believe either of those could have been possible, unless I'm missing something.
• For a theme based around CIRCULAR REASONING, I wanted the big answer to go in an actual circle. That's tough to do, but a square could have been better than a rectangle.
• LOGICAL FALLACY is a nice addition to the puzzle. BEG THE QUESTION feels like a tenuous connection. (ADDED NOTE: Jim does bring up a good point below.)
• Like in Stepquotes, the places where the long answer turns is technically "unchecked," i.e. there's no way to solve it out if you can't figure out the quote. That made the west and east sections so tough that I nearly didn't finish. Made it awfully frustrating to have just a few blocks left to fill in and no crossings to help me do so.
• How cool would it have been to have the four corners of the quote spell something? Not sure what might be — FLAW perhaps?

There were a few nice bonuses in CS LEWIS, SKI SHOP, LIVE CHAT, and those definitely enhanced the puzzle. And it's definitely an interesting concept — Jim and I discussed how we might catalog an entry of infinite length into our database. Overall though, I would have liked the elegancy level to have been bumped up somehow.

Jeff feels that BEG THE QUESTION "feels like a tenuous connection" to this theme. The word pedant in me disagrees — that's the answer that made this puzzle sing. While the phrase has come to be (mis)used as a synonym for "raise the question" (this makes no sense to me!) it has traditionally meant "take for granted or assume the truth of the very thing being questioned" which is exactly circular reasoning.

If this feels wrong to you, take comfort in knowing that we word pedants always lose in the long run. "Irregardless" will become standard form, "I could care less" will somehow make sense, and the original (Aristotelean, apparently) meaning of "beg the question" will be lost forever.

Anyway, I love logic puzzles and I love crosswords so a crossword about logic works for me.