Brandon Koppy author page

MOTHER SUPERIOR and PATERNITY TESTS — cheeky mini-theme! Such brilliant clues make these marquee entries truly superior, too. As much as I love innocently devilish wordplay that doesn't require question marks, on a Friday, sometimes I'm looking for easy-peasy fun. [Big sister?] and [… make someone pop?] both gave me a laugh.

I love PLAY MONEY to kick off a themeless, as it's such a playful entry. I wasn't as enamored by the clue, though. Great attempt to repurpose the delicious Junior Mint, but the link between "junior" and "play" passes Do Not Pass Go.

My kids love the HOME ALONE movies, and it drives Jill crazy. Not only does that franchise (seriously, SIX of them?!) encourage our kids to build booby traps, but that first movie is so ancient. The clue does a great job of freshening up the entry. I miss Roger Ebert and his acerbic, on-point commentary.

I've gotten pushback from several editors now on IBO. It's such a constructor-friendly sequence, alternating vowel consonant vowel, but IGBO is the preferred spelling.

IF I WERE YOU, I might have connected with the lower right stack more. As a kid, I used to like the Beach Boys, but PET SOUNDS sounds dated now. And I know I was supposed to love the critically acclaimed "Watchmen." My brother raved about it, but ALAN MOORE's content and drawings failed to draw me in.

Good thing there was so much else that did attract me. WET NOODLES is evocative, as is ON TIPPY-TOE crossing STINKER. How did Brandon know about the fits my kids threw at the swimming pool the other day?

MADE FOR TV MOVIE is such a fantastic marquee entry. Not only is it a colorful and fun phrase, but it also lends itself to so many great cluing angles. [Film ineligible to get an Oscar] made me wonder what sorts of shenanigans the Academy was up to.

CAESAR DRESSING also worked well. Although CAESAR has been used many times before, including references to the DRESSING, this is the first time we've seen the full entry in an NYT grid. The clue misdirect helps too, [Ranch alternative] possibly pointing to a dude ranch.

NURSING BRA is an excellent entry, and the wordplay around the [Milk duds?] clue is fiendishly clever. So why did that make me uncomfortable? It's possible that I've become oversensitive to certain issues over the years, and that I wouldn't have given things a second thought if the same clue had been presented by a female constructor.

I FEEL SILLY about this in some ways, but that is where I'm at these days. Maybe it's IRRELEVANT. As am I.

The cluing helped the puzzle shine. [Link warning] is quite the sand trap, nudging people to put in FORE instead of NSFW (not safe for work, as in a forwarded link). TIRE SWING literally going out on a limb made me laugh. Repurposing "hunter gatherer" to define a GAME WARDEN was so brilliant that it feels like there's a full crossword theme in there. This dork loved the nerdy {T, H, I, S} mathematical set, too.

I didn't quite FLOAT ON AIR today but I came close to it. Solid gridwork for a 68-worder, with some HIE INT NCO STR to nit-pick.

Old school throwback to the BEASTIE BOYS! After 40 years (!), these songs still hold up.

Okay, maybe not. I sabotaged my credibility yet again.

Nice riff on BEASTIE BOYS, featuring four "boys" with animal first names. WOLF BLITZER is such an awesome name, played upon many times not only for his first name but his last as well. BEAR GRYLLS is even better, so apt for a survival specialist. Don't get up in his grill, bears!

It's a shame about TIGER WOODS — hard to imagine now that most pundits gave him strong odds to take the "most Majors wins" title from Jack Nicklaus.

Mid-week grids often benefit from extra juice in the fill. Brandon could have raised his word count by breaking up some long slots, but the bonuses in BOGEYED (crossing TIGER WOODS, talk about throwing shade!), GO VIRAL, WIENERS, SENATOR, HATED IT hardly made me hate it.

Some tough prices to accept, though, with ATA EXT LBS PIS RET UKE YEE dabbing on the glue. It's not a set of trade-offs I would have made, but I can see the benefits of all those fill extras to help entertain solvers who weren't into the theme.

In the current years-long stretch of male-dominated crosswords, it felt strange to feature a revealer and theme set so heavily weighted that way. Still, the BEASTIE BOYS throwback let me relive some fun memories from my (embarrassing) youth.

At the surface level, this might look like an impossible construction challenge. How the heck could you possibly integrate those special TMI/TMI boxes?

Brandon's technique is effective, and there are a couple of other hacks, too. That only gets you to the starting gate, though. Think about the limited selection that the TMI string forces. There aren't many solid phrases to choose from, and most are long. The shortest ones I could find were HOT MIC and T MINUS. Trying to stack pairs of long themers — with limited flexibility to swap others in and out — will usually cause INKSPOTS all over your grid.

Excellent results, particularly in the opening corner. BREASTMILK / HOTMICS, with silky crossings everywhere, is a reason to say TA-DA!

The other two stacks also worked well, although I could see solvers saying I'M SORE to the AVILA / EVEL crossing. Additionally, it's not great to use the now-defunct PAC TEN, but one could make a case that it's historically significant.

I didn't get a sharp aha moment from the revealer — OVERSHARING doesn't indicate extra-long TMIs to me — but it was nice to get GASBAG as a wink-wink bonus in the upper right.

I haven't been so delighted by a debut phrase in years. Not only is STARING CONTEST a marquee-worthy phrase, but that clue! Game that ends in tears? Pretty much any game my kids play against each other. Chutes and Ladders is more like Shoots and Madders. "Tears up the board" is more like it.

Good sportsmanship has some ASTERISKS so far. (Ahem, ASTROS cheaters.)

EMU FARMS made for another amazing entry / clue pair. It's a fresh entry — an NYT crossword debut — plus it uses such clever repurposing of large "nest eggs."

As good as those are, both pale compared to the wordplay involved with [Culture subject]. Some solvers might be turned off by the ick factor of a TISSUE SAMPLE collection, but there's nothing icky about wordplay, both so clever and so gettable.

Today's quantity of wordplayful cluing isn't Weintraubian, but a trio this sharp still makes for a FIESTA.

Fun old-school mini theme, with YOUNG MC busting a DANCE TUNE along with EMINEM. Probably a good thing that CANNIBALS wasn't clued as [Fine Young ___], as that might be too much music to one's ears.

Super-solid Friday offering; the short fill clean enough to pass even the high bar for Friday themelesses. If your weak link is DSL, that shows such care in construction. No lag for me today!

Like many Americans, soccer hasn't captured my attention as much as other sports, but I've recently been fascinated by Welcome to Wrexham. Now, I want to sit in the Kop and cheer on Paul Mullin and Ollie Palmer — in a Deadpool costume, of course. It's fun to see my ex-pat friends catch WORLD CUP fever, rooting on their home country teams.

At first, the OLE x5 repetition felt like a cheap way to create a 15-letter grid spanner, but then I realized there's a real chant that uses exactly five OLEs. Neat!

The excessive Os in the next themer also got my OO (eyes) rolling. YouTube to the rescue again! There's something so endearing about announcers' enthusiastic elongations that I'm OOOOOOOOOOOOO-K with it.

VUVUZELA — banned in many venues for over a decade, thankfully — is a tough word to spell correctly, and expecting newer solvers to figure out the ZELLE crossing is a Zinedine Zidane head-butt. (SMAZE crossing LLANO is more like a cheap slide tackle.)

There's nothing like some personality injected into an early-week clue. FLAW is a common entry, and I'm crying GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL with this perfect shot: [Having a thermal exhaust port lead straight to the reactor of your Death Star, e.g.].

The SW and NE corners are so wide-open — even more "go big or go home" than pulling your goalie. There can be some incredible bonuses, like RUN WILD and THIS WON'T DO, with EYE CONTACT and GOOD ONE. However, OATERS STYES and Kevin NEALON make me so thankful that Michael Che and Colin Jost have freshened up "Weekend Update."

Although there were some offsides penalties and yellow cards, I enjoyed the celebratory feel of today's puzzle, foreshadowing all the excitement ahead in the upcoming weeks.

Some interesting finds! I've spent a ton of time with these space-changing concepts, and I still stared in amazement at HARP ON -> HARP O ON = HARPOON. (Space additions or shifts attract my attention more strongly than things like TOOK COVER to TOOK OVER, where one word stays constant.)

We've ghosted in the eight letters below for you: SPACE OUT. It didn't give me an a-ha, but it's an apt phrase for the concept.

Brandon brings up a great point about debut short entries. Because 3- and 4-letter entries are so heavily relied on, I always hesitate before utilizing something that's never been used before. Will Shortz once asked me to redo an entire Sunday puzzle based on OBO (or best offer), for example. In today's cases, WTF (what the "FRAK") is great. FRAK might be tough for heathen non-Battlestar fans. (Release the Cylons!)

I'm amazed that WAP made it through the editing gauntlet, given what it stands for. If you're faint of heart, don't google "Cardi B" and "WAP."

CORDATE is also a debut. In general, I leave entries at the "it's fine" score of 50 if someone can make a case that it is fine. PHLEGMY also caused me much consternation — I'd take CORDATE over it any time, given how loudly my son snorts up his snot when he gets a cold.

Impressive construction, given that not only are there eight(!) pairs(!) of themers to grid around. What's more, they don't all line up symmetrically. Yikes! Amazing that Brandon was able to fill it, period.

The "meta-answer" didn't strike me strongly, since it was like someone explaining a joke after telling it, but I enjoyed a lot of the finds. HARD ASS's HARD PASS is a fun pairing.

This recipe worked a lot better than my attempt at making MARINARA. Not only is the "chopping" better represented by separating the letters, but there's a fun change of pace with the LIME aptly squeezed into a rebus square. Yum, PICO DE GALLO!

It is a shame that Brandon wasn't able to include cilantro. Using the search pattern *C*I*L*A*N*T*R*O* (the stars represent "search for anything here"), the only option that was even remotely close was SOCIAL ANTHRO(POLOGY). Some people have a hatred of cilantro, anyway.

It is a tough layout, with all five themers grid-spanners or nearly so. Additionally, Brandon had to make the LIME rebus work with its Down answer. EBOAT definitely gets the stink-eye, but there's also enough DERM PORC PSA SSE that I'd have given thought to rework. I love SUPEREGOS and SPORTS BRA as bonus fill, but breaking up the latter would clean things up to where EBOAT might be more forgivable on the whole.

I felt so obtuse trying to figure out what [More than right … or seldom correct?] meant. Brilliant clue! (An OBTUSE angle is greater than a right angle's 90 degrees.)

Creativity is often finding unusual ways to combine disparate-seeming ideas, and this is a great example of that. Excellent decision to circle LIME, too, which helped me feel like the pattern being broken was fun, not jarring.

★ I love being surprised by a theme. It didn't take long to uncover PSYCHOANALYSIS, which is a "field of dreams." I didn't have to work at all to make that connection, though, which made it feel like a ho-hum concept. Take movie titles, find appropriate things they describe. Okay, that works.

I was so pleasantly thrown off-kilter by THE RED CARPET. "Star Trek" describes this … how? Then it dawned on me, that it perfectly encapsulates a star's trek into the Oscars. I've done so many of these types of "reinterpretation" puzzles that it's rare for an example like this to shine so brightly.

My solving experience kept ratcheting up, too. I read [Top Gun] and figured it would hint at a weapon high up. Maybe a SNIPER RIFLE — morbid, I know. I was so thankful to uncover something completely different, a T SHIRT CANNON firing tees, or shirt tops. Another innovative leap.

[Scent of a Woman] leading to CHANEL NO. FIVE was more literal than I wanted, but near it was the highlight. I could not figure out how BINGE WATCHER linked to [A Man for All Seasons]. Ironic for someone who's binged every season of roughly 50 shows in the past year.

Oh! Two short bonus answers that I nearly missed. [Guys and Dolls] works okay for GI JOES, but [Wayne's World] — as in Bruce Wayne — is such a creative link to GOTHAM City. A shame that the full GOTHAM CITY wasn't the grid entry since that would be harder to miss.

I do wonder if some solvers' dreaded "weird alert" will be triggered. I've gotten tons of feedback that it only takes a small handful of oddballs to sour people's experience, and ORONYM / ARIOSE, FLUMES / ALLELE, IRAIL, etc. have the potential to do so, as words not heard in everyday conversation. If you're in this camp, I'll plead to you to focus on the fantastic theme and look past any weird-factor grumpiness.

It's no secret that Sunday NYT puzzles sometimes underwhelm me. This is a splendid example of how a standard theme type can be played upon to perfection, built around some creative connections I might never have imagined myself.

Some great finds, four solidly in-the-language phrases comprised of two movie titles. With this type of paired-title theme, the phrases tend to be clunky or dull, since it's hard enough to come up with anything that works, period, much less anything colorful. I was especially impressed by MONSTER MASH, which uses the Charlize Theron star vehicle MONSTER, with the old M*A*S*H. Neat to have to mentally subtract those asterisks.

Solid revealer, too, FILM SPLICER connecting the themers. After the second themer, I confidently jumped to 52-Across and plunked in DOUBLE FEATURE. I was in La La Land …

Superb gridwork. Brandon did such a great job eking every last ounce of potential out of his mid-length slots. Not an ANOMALY to have BARNARD, AP TESTS, THUNDER, BASMATI rice, BIFOCAL, EMINENT, along with BEIGNET (yum!) and ON MY OWN. Nothing flashy, but all enhancing my solving experience.

Plus some FLOTUS ADWARS! I might watch the news again if it featured a Jill vs. Melania throwdown.

I'd often make a different trade-off in the south since MTA / SUR / PSS is a tough triplet to accept. However, FLOTUS is such a fun entry that I can see the merit. Add in GO WILD and RUN LOW, and that definitely tips the scales.

As Brandon mentioned, this isn't a novel idea. But it is a great example of how you can elevate your puzzle from the pack with an extra layer. In this case, excellent in-the-language themer discoveries made all the difference.

R2D2 = RYAN REYNOLDS? I'm embarrassed to admit the number of times I counted the Rs and Ds in his name, wondering where I misspelled it so I could get the extra D. RYAD REYNOLDS? RYAN REDNOLDS?

(It was twenty-eight.)

Even worse: before I figured out that DON DELILLO was the D* D* = D2, I Googled to see if he was the guy who played R2D2.

I admit these things so you can feel better about yourselves.

COCO CHANEL … I figured I must have been spelling her name wrong all these years. It's Co Co Chanel? Co Co NO! That's a strange C3, then.

(Jim Horne wasn't bothered by this — he sees the theme more simply as a name that contains three Cs. He could well be right.)

Finally, PATTON OSWALT. I bet he's PO'ed that it took me ten minutes to figure out that he's a P.O. and not a P 0 (zero). I wouldn't blame him.

Given the name-heaviness of the theme, I appreciated the non-propers in MATING DANCE, CHOP SAWS, and TALLY HO. SWEET solving RIDE, indeed! ESTROGEN and AD COPY work well, too. Oh, and RECLAIMED wood. What a wealth of riches!

There are more constraints than one might imagine because working around numbers can be tricky. Smooth work up in the northeast, 2 AM a meaningful marker in daylight savings time. I wasn't as hot on WW3, since I always see it as WWIII, but the fill around it is smooth. Solid gridsmanship all around.

Novel take on the "initialisms" genre. I appreciated the consistency, using all people, but the C3 didn't work. Even if it meant having less consistency, I'd have preferred entries like CHILI CON CARNE and PEARL OYSTER, since they more strictly fit the initialisms rules.

Ever notice that the CYCLE of LIFE and LIFE CYCLE mean the same thing? Meta!

I enjoyed this one much more than I thought I was going to. Kicking off a puzzle with a cross-reference — followed shortly by another one — is usually a surefire way to make me cranky. I can't drop into the solving flow; you're forcing me to jump around in ways I don't want to? Bah!

I ended up admiring the concept, though, a LIFE CYCLE starting with LIFE and ending with LIFE. It's rare to see a repeated entry in a crossword, so I appreciated that Brandon came up with a great way to justify it.

I did wonder about CYCLE being in the middle of the puzzle. And if CYCLE of LIFE (yet another cross-reference) should have created an infinite CYCLE, instead of having the chain end in the center of the puzzle. Since when does a circle have an end?

Then, my mind wandered, wondering what other implementations might have worked. Will Shortz typically doesn't like "corner blacks" in perimeter puzzles (like in the SW and NE corners) … ooh! How about LIFE and CYCLE intersecting at the E, in the lower right corner!

Kind of strange to start/end the sequence in the lower right, though, since that would mean solvers would generally start working the puzzle in the upper left, at what would be the middle of the chain.

All that wondering is usually a sign that the puzzle is doing something well. Spurring me on to think and brainstorm is an uncommon occurrence. And in the end, I concluded that I liked Brandon's approach more than anything that I could come up with. Even rarer!

Great gridwork, too. Perimeter puzzles are notoriously difficult, especially when it comes to knitting everything together in the middle. To weave in so much great material like EMAIL BLAST, BOSTON ACCENT, AMBIENT NOISE, while requiring only some ANOS, NEHI, plural CARLAS — that's a cause to yell WAHOO, indeed.

This puzzle grew on me, a thing of beauty whose elegance unfolded with careful study. It's one I'll remember.

Tough concept to explain. Maybe a mathematical explanation will help:

Take valid phrases of the form A + B.

Find valid phrases of the form A + C and B + D.

A success is defined as C + D, also forming an in-the-language phrase.

It's a nice variant of the overdone "both words can follow X" theme type. It's also hard enough to explain (read: mind-twisting) that there's likely room for more instances of this concept. Some great finds, like DOG / STAR -> DOG PADDLE + STAR BOARD -> PADDLE BOARD.

I liked the consistency of this puzzle, but the lack of tightness bugged me. It felt like there could be dozens, or maybe hundreds of solutions. To confirm my impression, I looked at DOG / STAR. Took only about a minute to find DOG POUND + STAR SIGN -> POUND SIGN.

It's still a good theme, not exactly like anything I can remember. It would have been better, though, if all the themers somehow related. Now that would have been POW!-worthy.

I sometimes get feedback that I dream too big when I critique puzzles, wishing for things that aren't possible. True enough, so that's something I've been trying to avoid. Today though, I think it would have been relatively easy to tighten up the theme, especially with the help of a little coding to fully explore the solution space. (Brandon has a point about single/multi-words, but I doubt most solvers would notice and/or care.)

That issue aside, the puzzle still worked well for me. Solid themers, six of them making the theme feel meaty. Decently clean fill (EDS EEN ESO LAN NUS I see you). Best of all, a ton of interesting mid-length fill in AMIRITE, ATE CROW, BEELINE, IRON MAN, PALADIN, SENATOR — that's the way to elevate a solving experience. I did notice how many three-letter words there were, making for a somewhat choppy solve, but all the snazzy seven-letter fill was worth it.

Debut! A constructor friend of mine, Jeb Bennett, came to me with this idea a while back. I wasn't fond of it because his themers didn't change meaning that drastically when the words were flipped, but there were one or two that were neat. In that vein, I liked Brandon's TRADE FAIR (FAIR TRADE), since FAIR drastically switches meanings.

I also liked OVERPASS (PASSOVER). The individual words don't change their sense, but what a difference does the order make. I've been to a Passover Seder, but never one on an OVERPASS. It is true that Passover got its name from the spirit of the Lord passing over marked homes, but the juxtaposition of Passover on an OVERPASS amused me anyway.

HOUSECAT to ... people call a brothel a "cathouse"? I like the meaning change of "cat," but talk about icky!

Strong revealer in FLIP FLOPS. I think most mid-week solvers would have figured it out on their own, but probably better to be safe than sorry, risking confusion or even irritation.

A little too ambitious of a grid, I think. It is true that with mid-week puzzles, you can get away with more esoteric or oddball stuff than for early-week puzzles because entries like ANTIFA or OGEE aren't going to stump (some) solvers. Even the KISLEV / DURST won't baffle (okay, maybe). But when you also have to also resort to a load of crossword glue: EFF, ESTO, IATE, OTT, SRA, STA … and SIEG?

Part of the issue is the theme density. Crossing pairs of themers in each corner makes for an incredibly hard job of filling. I would have been fine with fewer themers, but if you decide to go big, I think it would have been better to stick to the max of 78 words.

I'd rather have broken up AGREES TO and APPLE PAY to clean things up. While I do like APPLE PAY, AGREES TO isn't more than neutral. And some older solvers might even consider APPLE PAY to be a liability (it's an electronic payment system on iPhones).

I liked that Brandon came up with some strong FLIP-FLOPS, but it would have been nice to get another round of grid rework.