New York Times, Friday, August 5, 2022

ERIK: My friend Brooke is also one of my favorite constructors, and I'm honored to be involved in one of her brilliant creations. Happy so many of our tricky clues made the cut — hers at 33-Down is my favorite. Hope you like it!

BROOKE: I'm indebted to Erik for reaching out to me in early 2020 to encourage me to create crossword puzzles. I'm so grateful now to have created this puzzle with a friend! Thanks to the editors for preserving our voices — my favorite of Erik's clues is 29-Down.

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who is getting his weekly balayage treatment.

This puzzle is too hard for a Friday and needs to run on a Saturday instead. It's incredible how often Shortz screws that up!

Wait a sec, let's think about this...

There are two ways a crossword becomes difficult. The first is trickery or wordplay that sends you off in the wrong direction. "Eats" in "Eats outside" is a noun. "Making a lead balloon" requires you to pronounce it as LEED balloon. "Office binder" isn't a paper holder. "Church address" isn't a sermon, it's how you might address the person behind the pulpit. Cryptic crosswords are nothing but these kinds of twists, and they're fun. The more crosswords you do, the more you teach your brain to flex, the less likely you'll be fooled by clues like "Alaska has the highest one."

The second way to increase difficulty is more controversial: obscurities. Knowing that leporids are rabbits or HARES, and that a female swan is a PEN, feel like basic facts. But maybe you don't have kids, so there's no way to know Frozen's realm, or you hate basketball, so you don't know NBA analysts, or you never do fast-paced posing or have your hair hand painted. Maybe you've never even heard of A Black Lady Sketch Show. Maybe you read Emma so long ago there's no way you can dredge up the vicar's name. (More on "dredging up" in a future post.)

These are all obscurities if you don't know them, and when two obscurities cross, it feels like a failure. Let's say it feels like the puzzle is a failure, not you, of course.

The problem is that obscurities are in the brain of the be-solver. Different life experiences vastly affect what defines common knowledge or facts worth knowing. What is obscure to you will delight others and (I like to think) encourage them to join the fold.

Erik Agard and Brooke Husic are brilliant constructors, they both want to make more diverse crosswords themselves, and they both want to push the NYT and other venues toward more diversity by crashing through the long-standing canon of acceptable knowledge. That's a challenge tougher than a weekend themeless because the status quo has so much inertia. There's even a perceived financial risk for the Times if they delight a smaller new audience but annoy their larger traditional solvers.

This tension happens with all art forms. We shouldn't be surprised that crosswords are no different.