New York Times, Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The NYT has recently started sending proofs to constructors before they get finalized, and it's very great to have that say in what gets published. In this puzzle, LYDIA (who I originally clued as the "Beetlejuice" character) was edited to be the ancient province. I place personal importance on keeping as many women's names in puzzles as I can (as references usually skew male), so being able to ask for a change (and to a more prominent Lydia, at that) is such a great opportunity to have.

This is a very common early-week theme type, so I don't have much to comment on themewise. I think the AMPERSAND and ASTERISK finds are what make the theme worth it, as those lengthy strings are always fun to discover from a construction standpoint, and the goal is always that they entertain solvers as well. I'm also happy I got to give a shoutout to the oft-neglected tilde, one of the many diacritic marks that gets left out of foreign-language crossword answers.

While I'm happy with ROSARIES, SCOTUS, and SLEEP IN, I'm finding that longer bonuses are what make early-week puzzles shine, and I'd like to do more with those in the future.

Hope everyone enjoys the puzzle!

Many moons ago, a "broken words" puzzle broke my mind. Such a clever idea to split words … that can follow SPLIT! Although this theme type is fairly common these days, I still enjoy seeing sharp examples of it. Today's is exactly that.

What makes for an excellent "broken words" theme? First, there has to be a solid revealer, something along the lines of SPLIT ___, BROKEN ___, (something) DIVIDED, etc. Second, the words getting split ought to be long or complicated enough that they make solvers sit back and admire.

Ricky did exceptionally well with the second criterion. AMPERS/AND at nine letters and ASTE/RISK at eight is fantastic. HY/PHEN is shorter, but there's only one place to feasibly break the word.

TIL/DE isn't as exciting — until you consider how he could have split the word. There's no other option, since there's nothing that ends in TILD or starts with ILDE. Also, how many words end in TIL? All I could find besides UNTIL were LENTIL and PISTIL. There's something elegant about a problem that has so few possible solutions.

On that note, what other keyboard characters could Ricky have used? CARET is too easy, and most others require SIGN, like POUND SIGN or PERCENT SIGN. I was surprised at the theme's tightness, since my first impression was that there would be at least a half a dozen more to choose from.

BREAKS CHARACTER isn't an A+ revealer because 1.) grammatically, "breaks a character" or "breaks characters" would better fit the idea, and 2.) there's nothing to specify why keyboard characters, not movie characters, "characters" as in comedians, one's moral fiber, etc. Still, it works well enough.

I also appreciated Ricky's gentle nudges away from crossworld cultural norms, with AZUL and AMOR. Normally, I'd ding these, but I like how they reflect some of what makes Ricky Ricky, while still being accessible to a broad range of solvers (these answers are etymologically related to AZURE and AMOUR or AMORE, which might be more widely familiar).

I don't mind few bonuses in an early-week grid when a theme is meaty and the fill is smooth and accessible. Great work; a puzzle I'd happily give to newbs.