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ALMOST THERE … WAIT FOR IT … NOT QUITE YET …

Today's theme forms a waiting list!

What do you mean that my pun, IT'S A NO GO?

Will Shortz wants Thursdays to be harder than Wednesdays, and constructors often stretch to lower word counts to amp up the difficulty. At 72 words, this one is on par with themelesses! It allows for such fantastic bonuses as BARED ALL, GO ON TOUR, and even mid-range touches like EMPEROR and NEODADA.

The excessive glue did IRRITATE my solve, though. Most dabs were minor, like ORO ENO NSW TRE, but they all added up. And when you have too many from one category, like non-everyday foreign words, CIEL and MINUTO stand out even more. I don't mind audacious 72-word efforts, but using some cheater squares might have achieved better color and clarity. For example, blackening out the H of HENS could have appropriately led to eliminating PREENER.

This b-ball nut loved [Accessory for running or dribbling]. It's especially apt given the childish behavior of certain Brooklyn Nets players recently …

Although the joke was one-note, I enjoyed the wildness of splitting ANTICI / PATION in two.

You could even say I was of two halves on the theme.

One day you'll INURE TO me.

– puzzle by Daniel Mauer

Three fantastic debut entries today, hitting at different levels of awesomeness:

RECENCY BIAS is such a strong entry in its own right. It's a common term in statistical analysis, and even if you don't know it, the two words put together make sense. Using a wordplay clue might go over people's heads, though, so resorting to a dictionary definition pulls down its fun.

Amazing clue for EDITORIAL WE. Although the term isn't as colorful as THE ROYAL WE, playing on First magazine makes for incredible wordplay. Repurposing "first person plural" is a maneuver fit for queens.

AFROPICKS does it all — great debut entry that employs an even better clue. Long in the tooth, indeed.

72 words is the max allowable for themelesses, so the competition is tooth-and-nail fierce. You have to excel in both color and clarity to attain even a glimmer of consideration. Scott did well in the former, not as much in the latter. In the future, with the themeless bar rising exponentially, EPS ERN ETD — along with the old-timey NEHI not having an eternal feel as much as an ETERNE one — will be more troublesome than ever.

The layout is (more or less) the standard triple-stacks-in-each-corner, so each one needs to sing. The bottom triplet of RECENCY BIAS / PHOTO CREDIT / MIND READER hits a high C — much catchier than the played-out MONSTER MASH. You can argue that the oldie is a classic, but given how many times it's been in crosswords, it's not a graveyard smash kickoff.

There's so much to love — I CAN'T WATCH evokes so many images — but there was too much inelegance in this 72-worder to garner any POW! consideration.

– puzzle by Scott Earl

★ Such JOLLITY today! I love playful themelesses, and Kate ventures into Weintraubian territory, with smile-worthy NO TAKEBACKS, COULD IT BE?, SWITCHEROO, OVER THE TOP. Of course it would GET THE NOD for my POW!

The sheer pleasure didn't end with the entries. My daughter took a historic stand on the way to preschool a few years back, refusing to budge while it snowed on her and my wife. Both of them got bent out of shape — just like the PIPE CLEANERS that somehow spawn endlessly from my daughter's craft boxes.

And [Sound investment] is so innocent. Unlike when my daughter washed the mp3 player I bought for her, after I told her many times about water and electronics not mixing.

Tough love is a sound investment, but it doesn't fix STEREOs.

Coming close to diagonally splitting the grid in half is not ideal. With only two entries connecting the left and right sides — HOLE PUNCH and COULD IT BE — there's a huge danger of wrecking the feng shui of the solving flow. It's no fun to be trapped in one half, unable to break into the other.

However, this layout granted Kate a huge construction advantage: being able to optimize the grid one half at a time. For example, if you land on a great fill for the left side, you can work the right side with HOLE ____ and COULD ___ allowing for alternate starting options: HOLE IN ONE, HOLE CARDS, COULD HAVE, etc.

It's not a perfect 72-worder, especially since it features only 12 long (8+ letter) entries, but the ones Kate incorporated were an A-TEAM of whimsical phrases.

– puzzle by Kate Hawkins

I've now watched every season of "The Great British Bake-off" and have binged every available "The Great Canadian Baking Show," "The Great Australian Bake Off," and "The Great Kiwi Bake Off." Is it any wonder I loved the punnery around how a cooking show contestant STIRS UP DRAMA?

It's a shame that this puzzle had to be edited before Musk blew up Twitter. My next-door neighbor (still employed there but not sure if that's a good thing) SHARES many ACCOUNTs with me.

Not all of the themers resonated. AIRS THEIR DIRTY LAUNDRY has been punned upon many times in crosswords and HAS ALL THE JUICY DETAILS didn't give me a smooth connection to a smoothie bar worker. Overall, a solid example of a tried-and-true "punny reinterpretations" theme.

It's difficult to land a debut in the NYT, and it's much harder to do it with a Sunday 21x21. Simply filling a 140-word grid is hard enough, and filling it well is an accomplishment to celebrate. I liked the decision to keep the themers to six (average is seven), which allowed Gustie to work in great bonuses like TRUST FUNDS, SHAKA SIGN, even TAX CODE. I haven't read AMERICANAH yet, but the plot summary in the clue piqued my interest.

Nice touch to cross SHAKA SIGN with DANGLE, both using "hang loose" in their clues.

Some fun wordplay, too, like your ELBOW as a "sneeze guard." (Not the case for my son, who's had back-to-school colds for two months now — my face is his sneeze guard.)

I love seeing the fruits of the Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship. This puzzle is a solid offering for casual solvers, with some fresh SPILL THE TEA type phrases.

– puzzle by Gustie Owens

DEPOSIT SLIP, SAN ANDREAS FAULT, HONEY BOO-BOO … easy day in "Name That Theme." No slip-ups for me!

Wait. MY BAD refers to four theme entries?

Swing and an OLE MISS.

Take a moment to admire the beautiful left-right (mirror) symmetry. This often allows for a happy face made of black squares, and I found myself smiling along. Great way to add a dash of solving pleasure.

Mirror sym isn't simply pretty, though — Tracy didn't have any flexibility in SAN ANDREAS FAULT 15 (few other fault lines are as well-known) and HONEY BOO-BOO 11, so regular symmetry would demand that __ SLIP and ___ MISS match lengths at 15 and 11. GIVE THE PINK SLIP 15 and JACKSON MISS 11 would work, but the former is a downer, and the latter's abbreviation makes it inelegant.

One way to make OLE MISS stand out is to place it in the center of the puzzle, ensuring that there isn't any Across fill that's 7 letters or longer. SHOT PAR and CABOOSE are outstanding bonuses, but they obfuscated OLE MISS.

Hardly a miss with the gridwork, which isn't always easy with left-right symmetry. The only entry that made me SALTY was LAIRD, which is potentially tough for newer solvers — at least, non-Scottish ones. Crossing it with YA-YAS is borderline unfair, as LOIRD and YO-YAS is a defensible guess.

Moving HONEY BOO-BOO down one row would help the south region since filling a constrained 4x5 chunk is much easier than a 5x5. Note that this would create four more three-letter words, though, and Tracy is already at 20 (editors tend to balk at 22ish). Always the trade-offs.

Entertaining Monday, and I appreciated that there was only one region of possible user ERROR.

– puzzle by Tracy Gray

Wyna and Ross are bold. After watching UMA THURMAN in "Imposters," I'd be giving Lenny Cohen all the respect she deserves.

Cool that there are so many crossworthy females exhibiting this vowel-consonant-vowel pattern. I couldn't think of any others besides UTA HAGEN and ALI MACGRAW. (Is OLA HUDSON famous enough?)

Impressive to pack seven(!) long names into the grid — and to do it so cleanly. Not a surprise given the track records of these two constructing stars, but it's still admirable. They could have even cleaned up the minor ACR stuff by breaking up BEATDOWNS at the T, but I like that the trade-off injects more pizzazz.

Although the construction feat is technically masterful, I wanted an extra layer to bring it all together. I'm thankful that Ross spoke up, because I completely missed the word ladder aspect!

Could they have made that more noticeable? Incorporating WORD LADDER would have been intrusive — and kind of random — so probably not.

What else could they have done with the "female name vowel-consonant-vowel pattern" concept? Limiting to A_A worked well for Matt Gaffney and his daughter, ADA.

Or perhaps there's some delightful revealer to bring everything together, expressed in the vowel-consonant-vowel pattern? I couldn't think of one right away, but it'd have been fun to brainstorm to figure out a better a-ha moment.

Wait ... AHA!

– puzzle by Ross Trudeau and Wyna Liu

What, this puzzle didn't run on Europe Day? It's amusing that the "Day of the united Europe" is disagreed upon (May 5^th vs. May 9^th). Agree to disagree, just like today's theme.

I had a tough time figuring out what was going on, so I asked my French friends down the street what CONCURRENCE meant. The answer came back quickly: rivalry, bien sur! We were all amused that the word nearly flipped in meaning from French to English.

GYMNASIUM was easier to suss out since there's a Wikipedia article about Danish GYMNASIUMS. No wonder the Danes are ahead of us academically, jumping through metaphorical school hoops while we take things literally.

SEMESTER was tougher to figure out. I found a couple of references, including one that made some sense — after I watched several "learn basic Swedish" videos. Tack, YouTube!

Digging got even deeper with MULTIPLEX. Bing proved useless, as usual, though Google maybe found something useful. Is Interglot a trusted source?

OLD TIMER was the hardest to research. Ultimately, I landed on what appears to be an authoritative explanation, although I still am not sure what TÜV NORD means.

After spending an hour researching and thinking about this theme, I still have difficulty describing it. It's not "letter sequences that mean different things in different languages," like CHAT = cat in French. It's … ported words? From different languages to English? Or English to different languages?

Le poulet oder ägg?

Whatever it is exactly, it made me stop and think, and I'm always appreciative of those opportunities.

– puzzle by Karen Steinberg

Ever wonder what a PIRATE would look like if Salvador Dali painted one? Look at the grid below.

As with most of Dali's works, I appreciate the visual dreamscape but rarely understand what's going on. Today, Grant interprets an eye patch as an "I patch," blacking out a single letter eye that goes through LONG JOHN S(I)LVER. That's clever!

The "hook hand" took me a while. Think FLUSH ... as in a poker hand. That's a big stretch, but what would have been better? HAND is the obvious choice, but you try to make a hook shape out of four letters. It's possible, but such a stubby weapon might strike more amusement than fear into the hearts of your victims.

PEG / LEG was the most satisfying. I struggled with what letters were "correct," but once I thought through SHAKE A LEG -> PEG replaces LEG, making it a PEG LEG, I clapped my flush hand down on the table.

This disparate triplet of visuals easily beats three of a kind.

Debut entries like MID JULY cause many difficulties in scoring for our Word List. What's next — LATE FEBRUARY? SECOND WEEK OF SUMMER? We've found that a KISS (keep things simple, stupid) system serves constructors best, but it's not always easy to categorize entries.

As much as I love sci-fi and superhero works — Samuel L. Jackson's NICK FURY is badass — I like Grant's swerve, eschewing eye-patchioed characters that even this dork wouldn't immediately recognize. (I'm ashamed to say that I've never seen Escape from New York, but not enough to suffer through Kurt Russell's "acting.")

Although the PIRATE elements required some effort to understand, what avant-garde art doesn't?

– puzzle by Grant Thackray

I GOTTA SAY that there were some excellent debuts: PRAYER MAT, APOLOGY ACCEPTED, DON'T GET UP, and even T-Swizzle TAY-TAY (fine, I admit that I can't shake off Shake It Off).

Although SUPERNOVA has been in the NYT crossword since 1966, there's been no more impressive clue than [Huge pop star?]. On a Friday, I appreciated that telltale question mark, tipping me off that if Tayla Swiff couldn't be involved, at least I'd get some stellar (sorry) wordplay.

POP UP SHOP is a fresher entry, though wow, what a Saturday clue. [Store for a short time] — without a question mark — pushes so strongly toward storage rental units. It's absolutely fair and Saturday-worthy clever, but I didn't get the same elation as I did with SUPERNOVA and its clue.

Brooke's latest New Yorker puzzle garnered some "hardest puzzle of the year" chatter, so I tried it. And failed. Miserably. Today's was thankfully much more in my realm of possibility, though there were a lot of toughies:

• LOOFA as a [Natural rubber]? If there had been a question mark, I'd buy "rubber" as a "thing that rubs."
• [Root] has eight major categories of definitions in Merriam-Webster—and that's only in nouns. It took ages get to the BOTTOM of the clue …
• [Stand for a shot] ... I gave up golf decades ago because this hack couldn't hack it, but calling an opening drive a "shot" (not a TEE shot) deserves a question mark.
• [It's right on a map] obfuscated things as much as today's politicians. I get that RED STATEs lean right. Again though, no question mark?
• Ōdī et amō.

Neat gridwork — did you notice the diagonal symmetry along the SW to NE axis? — and I might have loved this solving experience on a Saturday.

– puzzle by Brooke Husic and Hoang-Kim Vu

★ 1-Across sets the tone for a solving experience, and Sid aced it today. The question mark on [Eye exam you need to pass?] caused me to stop and think, and I got such a blissful a-ha moment when I pieced together IRIS SCAN. Even Gandalf would have let the Balrog pass for that.

The northwest corner shined even further with [Where making a hasty exit is encouraged]. The clue made this ESCAPE ROOM enthusiast reminisce to the last one Jill and I did, where we not only exited with plenty of time but showed the operator a hidden clue that he wasn't aware of. (He didn't appreciate it.)

In Seattle, LATTE ART is on par with traditional art, and [Mug shot subject?] is something even Ansel Adams would give a shot.

Needless to say, I FELL IN LOVE with such playful humor. No hang-ups at all for clues like [Evidence of one's hang-ups?].

I'm curious to see how many Gen Alphas are going to be like, WTF is a DIAL TONE?

I appreciated that some of the wordplay was devious — what I expect on a Saturday. [Passage in a cemetery] evokes so many catacomb images. EPITAPH gets the last word!

Technically excellent gridwork, too. Although the four huge pyramids of black squares make gridding much easier, any 64-worder is tough. I like that Sid traded off some less-interesting entries like FELDSPAR and REST AREA for squeaky cleanliness.

Neat to get a touch like [Bhikku's teacher], too. I had no idea what Bhikku meant, but LAMA is certainly a familiar word. Great way to inject some of Sid's personality and background without affecting my ability to solve the puzzle.

The one ding was that everything fell much more easily that I expect out of a Saturday challenge. I flew through, compared to yesterday's brain-buster. Switching the two would have made both better, as so much of life is about expectations.

– puzzle by Sid Sivakumar

Did it bug you that this rebus was straightforward? Not me! Although I enjoy novel concepts that push boundaries, rebuses are already tough enough for many solvers. Given that the NYT's Sunday audience is broad and varied, leaving it as a standard rebus makes sense.

Although, having a SHOE smashing the ROACH would have been super satisfying …

PYTHAGORE(AN T)HEOREM is a textbook example of how to pull off a rebus: the word spans across all words of the entry, and it's an excellent phrase. Even the crossing answer exhibits some of this, with ANT crawling across LE(AN-T)O.

DESI(GNAT)ED DRIVER would usually get cited by Will Shortz since GNAT doesn't span the words — DRIVER doesn't do any thematic work. What are the alternatives, though? SI(GN A T)REATY is technically better, but it's not the most exciting of phrases.

Sometimes it's better to flout the guidelines so solvers might not STIFLE A YAWN.

Similar case for IN LIKE (FLY)NN. That's such a colorful phrase that the rules be damned.

JEF(F LY)NNE does object, though.

Does BEE bee-long? They're so critical in maintaining the balance of nature. My wife would have preferred drawing attention to a beheMOTH problem in her walk-in closet, and my kids would have said dynaMITE! if their latest fear had been included.

It's generally frowned upon to have Across fill longer than themers — WATERMELON and SEMIWEEKLY overshadow CEL(TIC K)NOT. Hard to resist the quaint PATOOTIE, though.

I appreciated that Laura more than balanced out her to-be-stamped-out AGIN GLO glue with so much lovely SPARE RIB LEGALESE DELI CASE and even DIATOMIC for us chem nerds.

So much of construction is all about trade-offs, and I like many of the ones Laura made today.

– puzzle by Laura Taylor Kinnel

There's discussion of getting a dog in our household, which usually gets shut down when I say that whatever poop the kids don't pick up will magically GO FETCHed to their bedsides. Appropriate that MESS and KISMET made appearances in the grid.

Such a great clue to freshen up MESS! We don't have Spaghetti Sunday since our kids won't touch anything blighted by even a molecule of red sauce (insert dramatic snubbing-face here), but I can only imagine the cleanup.

Nice work in disguising the FETCHed items. BALL is difficult to deballify, but BALL OF FIRE is much more obfuscating than SOCCER BALL or the like. It's a great phrase, too. STICK TO IT is particularly well camouflaged since the noun STICK changes into a verb. I also appreciated that newsPAPER wasn't immediately apparent, hidden by a subtle PAPER TRAIL.

I loved that BEAGLES crossed GO FETCH. This wouldn't typically be possible with a standard all-horizontal-themers layout. It's such a great bonus; excellent reason to use the "windmill" pattern.

No symmetrical partner for BEAGLES, though? A quick perusal of dog breeds turned up SHIH TZU. That Z might have created some SNAFUS, however, and SNAFUS is a great bonus entry. Hardly a FAULT in the gridwork.

I told a friend that Will Shortz isn't taking many "hidden words" puzzles these days, but he is still interested in "how are these words related?" concepts. This is a simple example of that genre, but it's effective.

– puzzle by Anthony J. Caruso and Zhouqin Burnikel

Such floral language today! Speaking as a parent whose younger kid had a hair-trigger gag reflex during infancy, BABY'S BREATH smelling of Gerber products is a best-case scenario. I enjoyed reimagining GOLDENROD as the fishing equivalent of the Palme d'Or or the Golden Shoe. My most recent career was in ophthalmic drug discovery, so I would have also accepted [Photoreceptor with the Midas touch?].

LADY SLIPPER was clued a bit too straightforwardly for my taste, but I liked the save on WOLFSBANE, whose name is not surprisingly related to wolves. Playfully connecting it to the third pig's brick house was a solid construction.

Some great bonuses in the grid: EVIL GENIUS, PAST LIFE, and HOUSEPARTY all shine. Curious that SHER and CIRRI, two tough early-week entries, were in a relatively unconstrained region, though. It's possible that moving the three black squares to the right of EENY over one column could have helped. That would also have helped grid flow into the NW and SE corners.

Although I stopped going to Chinese school after a few weeks (okay, I was politely asked to leave), my ancestors can breathe relief that I dropped in PINYIN. Crossing it with LILI and the old-timey NEHI could cause newer solvers to fall from EDEN.

There's an amazing quantity of flowers in the world, and Julietta chose some of the best ones to play upon. I am curious what she could have done with DUTCHMANS BREECHES or BASTARD TOADFLAX, but a blossoming debut.

– puzzle by Julietta Gervase

Break it up! LUCKY BREAKS = lucky objects broken across grid entries. The fresh term SESH (slang for "session") is inside HORSESHOE — talk about a lucky break!

NUMB / ERSE / VENOM works, although ERSE is called out on many editors' spec sheets since dictionaries list this word as "dated." Scottish/Irish fiction fascinates me (Read The Scorpio Races!) so I'm fine with it, but it's not the best to highlight. A shame that symmetry didn't allow for NUMB / ERS / EVENED. I might have pushed to flaunt symmetry (the horror!) for this purpose.

NUMBER SEVEN ... them's the breaks for those of us from different cultures. Being Taiwanese-American, I go both ways with lucky numbers, but I draw the line at lucky bird poop.

I loved how wildly HORSESHOE broke across ABHOR / SESH / OEUF, so much so that I hardly minded OEUF, also called out on specs sheets everywhere. It'd be fun to brainstorm, trying for similarly wild splits like SHOO / TIN / GST / AR.

RAIN / BOW and SHAM / ROCK fill out the concept. It's a shame that they split mundanely along syllabic lines.

It felt jarring to break lucky things. Would UNLUCKY BREAKS create a stronger a-ha? VLADIMIR / RORSCHACH, MOCHA / INLET / TERSE, etc.

A couple of great cluing touches helped liven the solve. Even this baseball non-enthusiast enjoyed [Left base?] as THIRD. And it's so hard to enliven common entries like DOE and ATM, but [Mommie deer-est?] made me laugh, and [Where bills get passed] misdirects so well toward congress.

"Broken words" puzzles tend to suffer from start-and-stop syndrome — there are a ton of short words by necessity — but there was enough to keep me engaged, especially with the ingenious last themer split.

– puzzle by Matthew Stock

Will Shortz has often said that he simply wants Thursday puzzles to be harder than Wednesdays. For this amateur cook (read: I can open a jar of spaghetti sauce), a French recipe definitely is hard! I was sure that something kooky was going on in the NW corner, since WTF are NEW POTATOES? Surely that can't be a thing …

Oh, it is?

That's a LOW NOTE even for me.

Spelling VICHYSSOISE was even harder. Although I've only had it a few times — the HEAVY CREAM isn't great for us lactose intolerance deniers (my poor wife) — I should be able to piece it together.

VICHYSOISE …

VICHYSSOICE …

My French friends down the street are tsking at me, moaning "oo la la."

This theme was too straightforward for my Thursday tastes — the picture to the right looks suspiciously bland — but it certainly provided a challenge, given that I had no idea what goes into the dish. It also piqued my interested in trying to make VICHYSSOISE. It couldn't possibly be any harder than spelling the word!

It's so much fun to watch Julia Child take pleasure in cooking — great reminder to take pleasure in whatever you do.

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

BAD JUJU is an awesome way to open up a themeless!

I had some bad juju as I solved today, stumbling on a slew of tough clues and entries:

• The ZEBRA clue is brilliant — once I cracked the Saturday-level-plus wordplay. [Inspiration for some fashion lines?] refers to zebra print clothing. Not a surprise that I didn't know that, considering I now consider jeans as fancy wear.
• Cluing SNOOZES as a plural noun is Saturday-level difficult.
• SO RANDOM seems to be what the kids say these days. Taking it one step further is XD SO RANDOM. I think the XD is some sort of emoticon, but that does seem so random.
• I love me some Clash Royale, but if there's a way to create a GAMERTAG, I'm not aware of it. Given my ineptitude at the game, it's very possible that I've created a gamertag without knowing it.
• RED MASS sounds a lot less dramatic than the Red Wedding.
• KIDA is actually Kid A — interesting background, involving Thom Yorke's vision of the first cloned baby. My knowledge of pop music, especially older stuff, is on par with that of my fashion sense, but a platinum album is crossworthy.

Excellent saves for some older crosswordese kinds of entries. GMEN gets refreshed as a nickname for the NY Giants. NETZERO, the ISP, went out of style decades ago but not NET ZERO, the emissions goal. Curious if ELENORE and POMADES could have taken similarly fresh angles.

Some excellent debuts: BOLTCUTTERS, CHOKEPOINTS, VODKA CRAN. Perhaps a bad juju vibe given that GUNBORE and SUBMITS also debuted, but there was more than enough challenge to get me a brain-busting workout.

– puzzle by Kameron Austin Collins

Tom, Christina, YOU'RE ON FIRE! There were so many entertaining entries that they eased the pain of having fewer-than-average long entries (only 11, as opposed to roughly 14). WEENIE ROAST, AIR FRESHENER, plus a mini-theme of EMAIL HOAXES / FAN THEORIES / TRUE OR FALSE? Definitely true!

Amazing work in the smile-inducing cluing. THERMOMETER isn't an exciting entry, but [Cold shower?] is Saturday-level punniness. That's shower, as in "a thing that shows."

The clues elevated the mid-length material, too. WINE BAR is already great, and when you play on "ports" as a computer port vs. a dessert wine, it becomes a star. SELFIE as [Something you reach out and take] + AMOEBA as [One confined to a cell?] = chuckles all around.

Even some of the short usual suspects were uplifted by sharp cluing. I've heard a lot of "pitcher" misdirects away from SALE, but [Pitcher's aim?] made me think so strongly of baseball that I couldn't unthink it. And what a great piece of trivia about the YETI. Apparently, you can actually secure a YETI hunting license, YET I still wonder if that's as much a hoax as the YETI.

Notice that if you "flip" the grid (along the NW to SE diagonal), this layout is essentially a standard "stair-stack." The flip gave a fresher feel, moving away from the tried-and-true themeless stair-stack, and it also generated an eye-catching visual. Not sure what the S S in the middle of the grid refers to, but it left me sans souci.

My main complaint was that the puzzle flew by much too quickly. Switching yesterday's and today's puzzles would have made them both stronger, better matching expectations that the NYT Saturday puzzle ought to be the hardest one of the week.

– puzzle by Christina Iverson and Tom Pepper

★ Visually stunning layout, sort of like a cross between a windmill and a hedge maze. All of the black square diagonals produce a mesmerizing sense of movement and grid flow.

Ryan is perhaps the most skilled themeless constructor, when it comes to gigantic, jaw-dropping open spaces. Some of his grid middles are nothing short of miraculous — I tried filling this grid pattern and got something that wasn't even half as clean or colorful as his beautiful WINTER SCENE. Today's center isn't as impossible-feeling, but it's still so daunting that I doubt I'd even try my hand at it.

And look at the results! I've listened to DESPACITO a hundred times since I found out about it, and I'll probably go another hundred. BET AWARDS next to FEMINISTS, with self-descriptive PANTS ROLE and a WISECRACK going through them. CHRIS PAUL, the "Point God," helped me and my friend win our fantasy basketball league last year, so he's even more of a god to me than ever. There's so much SPICINESS in every bite.

I didn't know MEMESTOCK, and it made me feel almost as out of it as DANK MEMES did. At least this time it was more self-explanatory.

I worried that so many five-letter entries in the thinner passageways would lead to some ho-hum solving, but some Xs in TAXES TAXIS SIXES helped. Heck, even KLAUS GRITS GAIUS CRASS — there's a story in there, and I want to read it.

A couple of long slots were taken up by neutral entries like REST STOPS, PENETRATE, DELISTED. Great clue for DELISTED, though. I was so sure that [Removed from an exchange] had to do with an email or text exchange — neat exchange away from a stock exchange.

I'm slowly defrosting to the idea of Sunday themelesses. Part of me still feels that they're a cop-out; that the cash-flush NYT Games is going to sit back rather than spur constructors to come up with better 21x21 themes. If Sunday themelesses are a permanent part of the rotation, tapping specialized constructors who can deliver this kind of amazing grid is the way to do it.

– puzzle by Ryan McCarty

That's a wrap! Literally, TAPE, SCISSORS, BOX, PAPER wrapping up a GIFT. My wife grew up with carefully wrapped presents, so we had some discussions early on about my preferred style. Some might call "roll GIFT in old newspaper" lazy — I call it eco-conscious.

Now that Jill has come to terms with all the waste, our holiday prep would make for a much different crossword: BOX, HIDE, CODE, BAFFLE. Ah, the precious looks of confusion/frustration / anger on our kids' faces after nine hours of breaking ciphers to find their presents!

Hey, who put coal in my stocking?

Speaking of coal, CLAUS gets dinged by some editors because it's hard to clue with anything but [Santa ___]. Well done today, spotlighting Mrs. CLAUS. We all know who really makes things happen, and it's not jolly old saint SLACKER.

I appreciated the color in Jennifer's themer choices. Although they didn't disguise the concept much — SCISSORS KICK can't help but evoke a pair of SCISSORS — they're almost all phrases I'd gladly see in a themeless puzzle. Even BOX SEAT shines.

Some of the bonuses are even snazzier — hard to argue with SKYROCKET! One-word entries are often less interesting than multi-worders, but EXECRABLE is hardly execrable. You only have to speak the word to get a sense for its meaning.

I want more smoothness in my Monday solve. IT WAS twas a long partial, ENIAC is a toughie from days of yore, ORANG … throw in some AMOR ASSN OTT, and it's too high a price for all the nice bonuses. Perhaps hiding GIFT at 59-Down (crossing BOWSTRING) could have helped.

Fun idea to kick off the holiday week. Wrap it up, I'll take it!

– puzzle by Jennifer Nutt

Literalisms today, using phrases following the X BETWEEN THE YS pattern. I enjoyed that Pete made his Y words singular: CRACKFALLSCRACK is a fun way to turn FALLS BETWEEN THE CRACKS into a wacky wordy.

Crosswords have played upon literalisms for decades, so it's important to introduce at least a little something fresh. For instance, a quick search for NEEDLE phrases turned up one puzzle from long ago — and then another one using the same interpretation. Nice that Pete's execution felt a touch different.

I also enjoyed the variety in word lengths. I was lulled into a pattern with FALLS between the CRACKs and SLIPS between the SHEETs, but then got hit right between the eyes with EYE HITS RIGHT EYE.

Tuesdays are easier to construct than Mondays since solvers who venture out of the Monday wading pool at least know how to deal with a little water splashed in their face. Haven't heard of ELAL? Maybe you can figure it out from the "Sabbath" reference in the clue. If not, the crosses are mostly straightforward (is there anything more likely than L for OLAV?).

Even with four grid spanners, some long Down bonuses are almost always possible. SCHEMERS and PERISHED aren't wow-worthy, but GO KARTS, AIR HORN, and OH MY GOD, sure inject pizzazz. Excellent use of those mid-length slots.

It isn't easy to dip into the deep well of literalisms, so I appreciated that Pete's interpretation offered a bit of freshness. If nothing else, at least it won't cause a STATEWARSTATE.

– puzzle by Peter Koetters

I recently downloaded the Too Good To Go app. Pastries that are a bit stale, meat that mostly passes the sniff test, and fruit with unexpected flavors and/or textures don't sound appealing, but for roughly 75% off? Heck yeah, we Taiwanese do love a BIG DEAL!

Fine, I'll guess I'll settle for FIFTY PERCENT OFF.

MEGAMERGER … now we're talking BIG DEAL! My neighbor works for Twitter — at least still as of last night — so it's been fascinating to get the skinny of Musk's musky transaction.

I was baffled by ROYAL FLUSH at first. It is a BIG DEAL but in the same way as any incredibly lucky outcome. Neat a-ha when I realized that the word "deal" did double duty, playing on the deal of the poker cards. Clever!

Such an interesting assortment of bonus entries. This chem dork loved RHENIUM. FOIST ON is more interesting than other "add-a-preposition" phrases. My daughter is obsessed with LIP BALM in her quest to become a fashionista (she's still at the clown stage).

F WORDS in the plural felt odd initially, but it works. Great cross between FWORDS and SALTY, too — especially apt after dealing with two sick kids, one with both influenza and RSV. That'll get anyone HUFFISH. RECTO is a niche term, but I liked AGNI much more than usual. Referring to the Hindu god of fire is so much better than [Lambs: Lat.].

"What do these things have in common" puzzles work best when they play on vastly different meanings or interpretations. FIFTY PERCENT OFF and MEGAMERGER were too close, both touching on business transactions, but I loved the wordplay that ROYAL FLUSH dealt out.

– puzzle by Nancy Stark and Will Nediger

How many distinct entries can you make using the starting trigram of CAR? At least twelve, as it turns out! David provides them all in a ROUNDABOUT ROUTE. For example, 5-Down can produce CAR(PETS), CAR(ETS), and CAR(DING), depending on which exit you take.

The paths confused me — wouldn't you pick up all the letters as you go, like CAR(DING) should follow the path of CAR+P+E+DING as you drive around the black square?

Then I figured, this American DING-a-ling should stop CAR+P+ING, given that we're still stuck in the stone ages with ridiculous four-way stops.

Neat how David applied symmetry, two CARs appearing forward, and two backward as RAC. That further accentuated the ROUNDABOUT nature of the theme.

Cool that several entries had to appear in the grid as regular words. The PETS in CAR(PETS) shows up as STEP, while in the upper right corner, both TONS in CAR(TONS) and OMED in CAR(OMED) innocuously show up as SNOT and DEMO. Elegant touch to have nothing (except RAC) give away the game.

It's so difficult gridding around four-part themers, and when they're short, that means that your fill must be long — to stay under the 78-word minimum, something has to be long. Brilliant fill, so much SANTA HAT, ANGELINA's clever etymology clue, DERELICT, SUNK COSTS … David was not at all SITting ONE OUT. AMBROSIA to my ears.

Not picking up all the letters around the ROUNDABOUTs still bugs me. Still, there is something insidery about how CAR(DING) cuts the corner, just like some annoying drivers do around our lone neighborhood ROUNDABOUT. Don't get me started on the guy who drives straight over it in his SUV — CAR(OMED) is right!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

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!

– puzzle by Brandon Koppy

Neat change of pace to get an audacious construction featuring eight interlocking grid spanners around the perimeter. Reminds me of the awe I experienced when I first encountered some of Joe Krozel's record-setting puzzles. Funny to see the rhyming CULTURE VULTURES echoed by the rhyming YOU'RE ONLY LONELY.

Are ALABAMA SLAMMERS more popular at bars or at themeless crossword construction sessions? Not only does the entry have so many easy-to-work-with letters, but note that precious vowel-consonant alternation. "Checkerboarding" various regions — vowels on the black squares and consonants on the white, or vice versa — can make for an easier meshing of entries.

This type of grid is so rigidly constrained that it's nearly impossible to land on eight sizzling grid spanners, with few short, gluey bits. ELECTRICAL POWER and BEETHOVENS THIRD crackle with high notes! Whether you like the latter or YOU'RE ONLY LONELY more is a matter of taste, but I loved learning the bit of trivia, that BEETHOVEN'S THIRD was initially dedicated to Napoleon.

It's hard enough to get all your crossings through a stack clean. Doing that four times simultaneously? To escape with NMI PTL PCT ESS CST isn't bad. Well worth the price of colorful entries like BEFORE YOU KNOW IT and especially SO CLOSE YET SO FAR.

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson

★ Plays on "novel" have been done so many times in crosswords — both in titles and grid entries — that I was predisposed to ennui. HOME PAGES referring to "Little House on the Prairie" melted some ice, especially since reading The Long Winter to my kids was chillingly captivating. However, it still felt like the rest of the puzzle would be more of the same.

Good thing so many themers were so NOVEL! The sheer breath and range of terms to describe books captivated the writer in me. I probably could have come up with WRITING, VOLUME, STORY, BOOK, but there's such creativity in employing SENTENCES, PRINT, and TITLE. John is Roget in action, and then some.

I was surprised by how many puns I couldn't immediately get. Already knowing the gist of the concept, I worried that the puzzle would fall flatly into place. But "Crime and Punishment" as PRISON SENTENCES? "The Help" as a WORKING TITLE? Yes!

And the coup de grace: "If Beale Street Could Talk" works doubly as an ADDRESS BOOK — once because it refers to the Beale Street address, and once more when you think of a speech as an orator's address. That is some amazing double-talk.

If I hadn't read Will Shortz's note, I would have guessed that this 140-word grid was made by a veteran constructor. There's an average number of short, gloopy entries, but things like ASSN ESE PSAS are minor. Although this is John's debut, it's no surprise that he's worked several years at his craft.

Sometimes I put down a book within the first few pages, convinced that it's not for me. I'm so glad that I forced myself to press on today, because John imbued his work with as much subtext as The Hunt for Red October.

– puzzle by John Martz

My daughter: Hey dad, want to hear a joke?

Me: (caught in the headlights, frantically looking for an excuse)

My daughter: What did the digital clock say to his mom?

Me: My phone is vibrating, I need to—

My daughter: Look ma, no hands! Ha ha ha ha ha — what does digital mean?

Me: (MAKing A FACE) Would you look at the time?

FACE, GEARS, HANDS made for an easy "Name That Theme" Monday. Usually you want consistency in themers, keeping them all singular or plural, but it would have been strange to have a CLOCK with two FACEs or just a single HAND.

I appreciated all the bonuses Kurt worked in to keep my attention after I grasped the concept so early. Great layout, spreading out and alternating his long Downs. ROCK OPERA, MNEMONIC, and ANTITOXIN are stellar.

ELEVATES ironically doesn't elevate things as much.

MNEMONIC is a tough word to spell. Its clue was even tougher to figure out. "How I wish I could calculate pi"? You don't have to wish — all you do is use Leibniz's formula to close in on 3.141592 … D'oh! The lengths of the words in the clue give the digits of pi.

Now, if Kevan Choset could come up with something to help us duplicate his feat …

Trying to spell MNEMONIC slowed me down, but not as much as a MUD FLOW. It's a legit term, though on a Monday with URIS, ESSEX, GREER, ELY, my solve was murkier than expected. For such a simple theme, it's great to match with equally simple fill.

Although the CLOCKWORK parts weren't as well-disguised as I wanted, I still enjoyed getting in GEAR for the week.

– puzzle by Kurt Weller

I enjoyed being mystified all the way until hitting the revealer. I was bamboozled, trying to figure out how PARK and DATE and TALK and BILL were related. It all came together with DOUBLECROSS = two words literally crossing each other, and each word can complete the pattern "double ___." Double PARK / double DATE, double CHIN / double DIP, etc.

Double AGENT was especially fitting for the DOUBLE CROSS theme!

It's nearly inevitable to get some gluey short fill around crossing themers. Take the region around BEANSTALK / BILLY, for example — three-letter slots can be tricky to fill smoothly when they're so highly constrained. On one hand, I might have enjoyed a SYD Tha KYD cross-reference. However, it wouldn't have been fair to early-week solvers, so the easy clue, letting newbs see SYD in "Easy does it," was a smart call.

Lynn is such a professional that almost everything else was smooth. As much as I hate partials, I usually prefer them to tough names in early-week puzzles for the benefit of newer solvers. LEDA often is better clued as [___ double-life] on a Monday or Tuesday, but with DOUBLE CROSS already in the grid, that would have been inelegant.

There are a huge number of words that can follow "double" in a phrase, so it would have been fantastic to have some way to tighten things up; to sharpen to a-ha moment. Still, I did enjoy trying to puzzle out how the crossing words were related.

– puzzle by Lynn Lempel