Crossworld Monthly Roundup, January 2023

Well, let's chat January. I count two dozen brilliant puzzles that came out this month. And I'm not even counting the NYT grid I did with Dan Ziring, nor this super-slick midi I did for Crossword Club with a 9x4 stack that would make Patrick Berry jealous.

My Favorite Themed Puzzle of January 2023: Shh, Be Quiet! (Claire Kaneshiro, The Daily Princetonian)
Honorable mentions: Looking Forward to the Next Dune Movie? (Elise Corbin, Cruciverbology); Do Stuff (Will Nediger, Bewilderingly)

My Favorite Themeless Puzzle of January 2023: January Stumper (Ada Nicolle, luckystreakxwords)
Honorable mentions: Look Both Ways (Themeless #16) (Adam Aaronson, Aaronson.org); Wednesday, Jan. 18 (Erik Agard, The New Yorker)

My Favorite Mini/Midi Puzzle of January 2023: Lousy Food, Lousy Service (Kavin Pawittranon, Lil AVC X)
Honorable mention: does this look like an apple product to you? (midi) (Steph Brown, A Little Puzzling)

My Favorite Clue of January 2023: [Members-only jacket?] (6) (Brooke Husic, "themeless xxx" - how apt)
Honorable mentions: [Wanted poster?] (10) (Anna Shechtman, "The Crossword, Monday, January 2"); [Want to go?] (9) (Dave Murchie, "Themeless 115"), [Doc consulted for help] (3) (Dave again, "The Right Tool"); [Eco-centric college class, informally?] (10) (Adam Aaronson, NYT 1/7/23); [Experience under one's belt?] (9) (Ryan McCarty, "Secret Snowflake"); [Like blue moons, black sheep, or red steak] (4) (Matt Jones, "Pay Cut")

Longer write-ups on the two dozen standout grids from indies and beyond below the cut (as well as answers for the favorite clues)...

 

Jan. 1: Happy New Year (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Crosswords)
OK, fine, I'm a sucker for grid art, but this "23"-shaped grid from Ben Tolkin certainly kicked off the New Year with a puzzle emphasizing why he is one of the Cool New Young Constructors. ANIME PROFILE PIC and MAKE FETCH HAPPEN are brilliant 15s (as is ALTERNATE ENDING, although it's not quite so contemporary - actually, Mean Girls was two decades ago, so is that still fresh? Oh god. I'm turning into dust); there's also such clues as [Reddit venue for James Corden to duck questions, e.g.] for AMA. Really, though, the appeal of this grid is its delicious nerdiness in ways idiosyncratic to the constructor himself rather than a genericized Gen Zedder, enabled by AmuseLabs' relaxed clue length requirements. I ordinarily would be irritated by a clue asking me for the name of an 11th century Danish king, but the way that this puzzle non-apologizes at length for including CNUT in a grid convinced me to look the guy up, and hey, Ben's right, he *is* an interesting and unjustly obscure historical figure. The relaxed standards of the indie scene work to this puzzle's benefit. Very charming.

Jan. 2: Bugs Out (Rebecca Goldstein, Universal)
Rebecca Goldstein is, for my money, one of the best themed puzzle makers in the business, and this puzzle illustrates why. Circled letters at the starts and ends of the longest entries lets us know that ROCKFORD PEACHES, TON OF BRICKS, FLIPS HOUSES, and BEER AND SKITTLES all begin and end with the letters of various bugs (so ROACHES, TICKS, FLIES, and BEETLES). What makes this theme so elegant is that even though the bugs themselves are in the plural, none of these have been arbitrarily pluralized to make the theme work as with an entry like, e.g., (W)(A)FFLE CRI(S)(P)(S). Plus, ROCKFORD PEACHES and BEER AND SKITTLES are just awesome finds even independent of the theme. OH HECK YES! and NO BIG DEAL as bonus entries are just icing on the cake here.

Wednesday, Jan. 4 (Hoang-Kim Vu & Jessica Zetzman, LA Times)
This puzzle's theme is a tried-and-true one - there are four things (a NEWBORN BABY, a SPRAINED ANKLE, a CHRISTMAS GIFT, and a BEAN BURRITO) that all are typically wrapped. What makes this puzzle interesting, on a formal level, is how it handles its revealer. Rather than place WRAP IT UP in the center and extend this grid to 16x15, this puzzle splits up its revealer and has WRAP / IT UP running parallel in the downs in the southeast corner of the grid. It's a clear way to get this grid to work, one that I think constructors ought to take note of.
Also of note is the wide range of languages on display in this puzzle - not merely crossword staples AGUA and EAU, clued in reference to one another, but ABUELO in the northeast and GUK - Korean for "soup," familiar from words like tteokguk - not too far below it. Also, AMA shows up in puzzles fairly often, but what about OTB? Lots of atypical fill here of the type that you rarely see outside of USA Today.

Jan. 7: Universal Freestyle 54 (Evan Mulvihill, Universal)
Universal's themeless puzzles (they're trying to make "freestyle" happen, which is working about as well as with "fetch") have a rep for being very, very clean at the expense of being fairly unambitious in terms of grid shapes, including often exceeding the standard 72-word cap for themelesses. Hence, this puzzle's humble but ambitious grid shape really stands out. You've got a brilliant stagger stack of 11-letter entries in PASTAFARIAN, MORTAL ENEMY, and BATTER-FRIED, which is cool already... but then you realize that every down entry crossing that stack is, at minimum, 6 letters long, ranging from shortish common words like TARRED and PREFER to fun phrases like I'M DRUNK and MANI-PEDI and HOW ON EARTH? to the spanner NATIONAL FORESTS (clued cheekily as [They contain branches of the government] - the NATIONAL plops in easily but FORESTS requires a bit more thinking, which is a cute design choice in terms of flow, since the solver is going to stop right at the bottom part of the stagger stack the puzzle is built around).
Oh, and also, MORTAL ENEMY is clued in reference to Batman and the Joker, and there's a deep-cut Aquaman reference in the inclusion of MERA here, but IRON MAN is clued as the athletic endurance thing. Nice to see Universal take a side in the Marvel vs DC fanboy war. ;)

Jan. 7: Mother Country (Andrew J. Ries, Vox)
A shockingly slick set from Ries, and quite possibly a complete one: each theme entry contains the letters MA followed by the name of a country (e.g. EX MACHINA and THOMAS PAINE). In my attempts to figure out other possible themers (he's finished out the set with CAMACHILE, MANNY MACHADO, and MAIN DIAGONAL) I could only come up with one, if I cheated and used an abbrevation (and MAUS: A SURVIVOR'S TALE doesn't even fit in a 15x15 grid). Pretty nice!

Jan. 9: Do Stuff (Will Nediger, Bewilderingly)
I'm never surprised when Will Nediger puts out a good, architecturally ambitious puzzle, and this is no exception. Many constructors would be happy to just keep a pun like [Style-over substance?] as a GEL clue in their back pocket, but here Will is building a whole damn puzzle around it, and one where the theme entries are in the form of stacked 12-letter entries. And this is ignoring the sheer number of funny, brilliant clues on display here, even for the short fill (e.g., [Unlikely spelling ___ word] for BEE and [Ball next to a temple] for EYE) as well as such novel entries as MONONOKE and F THAT. A+ work, as always.

Jan. 9: Lousy Food, Lousy Service (Kavin Pawittranon, Lil AVC X)
I met Kavin at Lollapuzzoola last year and am thrilled to see him getting bylines across various outlets. This grid is small but packed with all sorts of neat entries, including what must be the first Chan is Missing quote in the history of crosswords!

Jan. 9: What Are You, Ten? (Dan Schwartz, xwordswbabka)
What's better than a standard-size crossword from Dan Schwartz? A Sunday-size crossword from Dan Schwartz! The theme here, referencing the pop culture ephemera of the early '10s, is quite funny - I love references to the likes of Miley Cyrus at the VMAs, and an SNL skit from 2013 where Justin Timberlake plays a tofu cube who does the Harlem Shake. No, I didn't make that last thing up, although I think Dan probably could have. Oh, and he also introduced me to the TINAMOU, definitely among the cutest birds to ever exist. As usual for one of Dan's grids, the clues here are uniformly adorable.

Jan. 10: January Stumper (Ada Nicolle, luckystreakxwords)
Ada made a beautiful puzzle for Max Kurtzman for Crosscord's Secret Snowflake gift exchange and posted it on her website afterwards - despite its name, the puzzle takes its cues not from Stanley Newman but from Tim Croce. The influence is most obvious with the signature Croce 12/15/12 stack of marquee entries (in this case WHAT IS MY LIFE, SOMETHINGBURGER, and AT AN EARLY AGE), but I think a similar Croce drip can be found in wackadoodle entries like EX-GOV (clued as [One likely voted out of a mansion, briefly] - too much reality TV rotted my brain on this one and stopped me from seeing the misdirection until towards the very end of the puzzle). It's brutally difficult, but the aha moments on this one are uniformly excellent.

Jan. 15: does this look like an apple product to you? (midi) (Steph Brown, A Little Puzzling)
Steph Brown's new blog has been posting non-stop brilliant puzzles this month. This one two great spanners (BRAIN DUMP and I NEED A HUG) into a 9x9 midi, but the real joy is the cluing, which is twisty AND modern-fresh-indie-funny. Clues like [spread-thin filling] lean towards the former plaudit and clues like [like french toast that might give you salmonella] the latter; the alternation between the two gives this puzzle much of its charm, IMO. Plus, who can resist a grid with the clue [⊂(・﹏・⊂)], am I right??

Jan. 16: We're Everywhere (Will Nediger, Bewilderingly)
Ah shit, here we go again. I have no idea how Will was able to do this one... here you have a puzzle with eight themers. Four of them run vertically through the top of the grid. Two of them are at the bottom of the grid, stacked on top of each other. And another two run horizontally through ALL FOUR of those vertical themers. It's a pretty bonkers theme, all things considered.

Jan. 16: Themeless Monday #706 (Brendan Emmett Quigley, BEQ)
A typically solid BEQ effort, this one's short on long-long fill - the longest entries here are all nine letters - but it more than makes up for it with the big stacks here, full of modern references (The Banshees of INISHERAN, E-CIG JUICE, the new Interview with a Vampire series' cutie Armand a.k.a. ASSAD Zaman...) and with some fun cluing all throughout. Typically great BEQ, IMO.

Jan. 17: Look Both Ways (Themeless #16) (Adam Aaronson, Aaronson.org)
Oh man, this one is totally up my alley - its central strack is a trio of Pokemon names - but it's also full of incredible fill all around, including INSTACART, STORY MODE, STEELY DAN, and SCORIGAMI, as well as clues that are didactic but still funny, like a reference to LORDE's awesome Hot Ones segment (where she is completely unfazed by snowballing Scovilles).

Tuesday, Jan. 17 (Patrick Berry, The New Yorker)
Berry grids are always maximally clean, but this one has great clue after great clue. [Breakthrough advertising mascot?] for KOOL-AID MAN is probably the standout, but there's also more terse misdirection like [Art on one's sleeve] for ALBUM COVER, and even a run-of-the-mill entry like ROADS is given an A+ bangit treatment with [Take them out of here!] ... plus, I think this puzzle marks the debut of a four-letter entry in a mainstream publication, which is rare: a quick Google would suggest that FYRE (clued as the Netflix doc about the worst music festival ever) has never appeared before outside of the indie scene. (I could be wrong here, in which case please correct me, commentariat.)

Wednesday, Jan. 18 (Erik Agard, The New Yorker)
This one's a bit of a shocker from Erik, who I don't think of as the Scrabblefucking type... but I guess when your seed entry in WNBA star JONQUEL JONES, you're obligated to stuff the grid with entries like FALL EQUINOX, JINX IT, EXIT EXAM, and HALF-OFF. (The puzzle falls short of a pangram thanks to a missing K - I would've swapped out the crossing TIM/MISSES for TIK/KISSES, probably, but I am but a weak-willed mortal in the thrall of Ooxterplenon, so good on Erik for resisting temptation, arguably.) Special attention goes to the indirect memeing in the AGENT clue [Word after free or real estate], as well as the clue [Band with an umlaut in its name], which vexed me for quite a while in its eleven-letter answer slot. MOTLEY CRUE is one letter too short, BLUE OYSTER CULT is far too long, and I was skeptical this was going to be the puzzle debut of MOXY FRUVOUS, pangram-friendly as they are. Stupid me - the answer was just MOBIUS STRIP! You win this time, Agard!

Jan. 18: Defectors (Brandon Koppy, See 17-Across)
Mainstream mainstay Brandon Koppy's coming on hot with his cool new blog: this puzzle has perhaps the most elegant rationale for a theme I've seen all month. Grids where phrases like BETA VERSION are misparsed as BET AVERSION are fairly common (see Rich Katz' NYT debut from Sunday, Jan. 28), but I don't think I've seen a theme of this ilk where the shifted letters spell something out. In this case, they spell out A-G-E-N-T, giving us the revealer DOUBLE AGENT. Very neat. You also get lovely fill like KIM NG and WIIMOTE, plus I love the clue [Place for an egg drop?] spicing up the slightly academic OVIDUCT.

Tuesday, Jan. 24 (Erik Agard, The New Yorker)
Yet again Erik knocks it out of the park, with four brilliant long horizontal entries (including the clue-of-the-year contender [Topping topping, maybe?] for BETTER THAN SEX) effortlessly intersecting a vertical 15, AT THE LAST SECOND, clued unassumingly as just [Lately?]. There's also lots of interesting short fill that... well, look, I'll admit that I probably wouldn't be so thrilled to see [Ao ___] and [Maneki-___] in a puzzle if DAI and NEKO appeared every other grid in the same way ETE does (or even in the same way so many constructors have decided that parsing ONE as "on E" is an evergreen cluing angle rather than a fun thing to do once or twice across all of puzzledom), but as of 2023 they don't show up in every second puzzle, so for now I say encantada.

Jan. 24: Puzzle '85 (Matthew Luter, LuterCross)
A while ago I was trying to get the term "themelesque" to enter common parlance, for a puzzle that's essentially a themeless in terms of word-count and shape, but nonetheless was seeded with entries that are somehow connected. This grid's a prime example of that - the "seed entries" here are all references to music from 1985 (PAISLEY PARK, VOICES CARRY, and the central entry TEARS FOR FEARS). But really, these are some really neat stacks. I also dig seeing Max YASGUR's name in a grid - I have wanted to have a puzzle with MAX YASGUR and YASSS GURL! in it for a while, but I suspect that Crossword Club would not allow that.

Wednesday, Jan. 25 (Patrick Berry, The New Yorker)
I don't know how Patrick Berry does it - this grid is silky smooth in terms of fill, despite having an audacious quintet of 10-letter answers running horizontally through its center, intersected by CHANCED UPON and SHERMAN TANK. It's a brilliant construction that still finds time to stick in a couple Scrabbly letters, including Juicy J - and no, that's not what I'm calling the tenth letter of the alphabet, I mean that JUICY J of '10s pop fame appears in this grid (crossing JUDY at the puzzle's southwest edge, no less - no SASSES for Patrick Berry!), as does a Z or two in the wide open corner of the northwest. Now, the caveat here is that no individual entry is particularly exciting, and that I guess one or two of the propers here are a bit staid (e.g. who cares about PITNEY Bowes?) but with a grid this clean and wide-open you don't mind that.

Friday, Jan. 27 (Rebecca Goldstein, The New Yorker)
Folks who know me know that I looove me some mirror symmetry in grids, and this beautiful puzzle from Rebecca Goldstein has not only beautiful mirror symmetry, but a jaw-dropping number of incredible pieces of fill. HASTA MANANA and CATNIP MOUSE appear flanking the vertical themers, plus elsewhere in the grid we have BIG GULP, YUKFEST, KRAKEN, TAHDIG, and IT'S A MESS. And this is just the 6+ letter entries... and I haven't even discussed the theme content here! Let's leave that as a surprise, and just say that this puzzle rocks.

Jan. 28: Cross-Border Connections (Parker Higgins & Brooke Husic, The Modern Crossword)
I haven't quite figured out The Modern Crossword's deal, or how it meaningfully differs from the regular Universal puzzle other than the pay per puzzle being tripled. The "lightbulb" feature of their applet is... mostly just silly, IMO; we get a couple alternate clues in spots, and a couple "constructor's notes" after you solve the puzzle that mostly just... let us know that Brooke likes Louise Gluck, and that Parker likes... moths. OK.
That being said, this puzzle is great! I'm usually skeptical of puzzles that have their theme content laid out along the edges of the grid, because it ends up locking in most of the puzzle's corners in two directions and thus constraining the fill. But this puzzle has a wildly tight constraint AND a wildly tight theme - all the entries around the edge form a chain of two word phrases. So you have COUNTER / TOP / END as the first three acrosses, which are clued via cross references as "countertop," "top end," and then "end dates." Yes, there are twelve of these, and yes, it is a closed loop. The revealer, cleverly, is CHAINLINK/FENCE crossing at the N in the center of the grid. It's an architecturally ambitious grid that doesn't suffer for it fill-wise at all. It even gets in a charmingly shady clue for OREO: [Cookie brand not clued as a cookie brand in the New York Times crossword until 1994].

Jan. 28: Universal Freestyle 57 (Tom Pepper & C.C. Burnikel, Universal)
Another typically clean Universal outing from a pair whose joint byline has graced many good puzzles in the past month or two; this one's got a 72-word grid but it feels like fewer owing to several larger corners, full of exciting long answers stacked on top of each other, including ZAMBONI / I MEAN IT / GET BENT in the northeast. I think this puzzle debuts both CHOLULA *and* HAWKMAN, on top of one another, no less. Pretty neat.

Saturday, Jan. 28 (mini) (Juliana Pache, Black Crossword)
I'm going to admit I had some cynicism about this site when I first heard of it - there's a reason I didn't name this blog "Latinxfemmewords" (and it's not because I'm such a handsome butch) - but any doubts I had melted away when I started doing the puzzles on it and found that the minis were actually quite good. This one has a couple of the obvious reference points you'd expect from a self-proclaimed capital-B Black crossword, most obviously KENTE at 10-Across, but there's one clue that really stood out here, and it was the first one: ["Don't make me catch a ___"]. Having gotten the first letter off 1-Down ([Nick, has 12 children] is, obviously, CANNON), I thought of the obvious (to me, anyway) "catch a c___" phrase and plugged in COLD. Bzzzt! It's actually CASE - as in "catch a case," a fairly common expression that I've never heard, let alone used, which nonetheless is well-attested in AAVE.
I think in recent years a lot of constructors have tried very, very hard to diversify the reference points in their puzzles, particularly with respect to race and ethnicity, and as admirable and frankly necessary as that can be, the results are a little vexing. Not to get all Rumsfeldian, but a clue like the CASE one here is an unknown unknown, something that no white constructor (even one of the really woke ones who puts #BLM in their Twitter bio and IJEOMA OLUO at 9,000 on their wordlist) would ever even realize their puzzle was missing.
Anyway, the actual reason this puzzle is here is because Juliana finally clued BRICK the CORRECT way, as [New York slang for "very cold"]. About damn time!!

Jan. 29: Looking Forward to the Next Dune Movie? (Elise Corbin, Cruciverbology)
Wow, this is a kind of mind-bending concept for a puzzle - somewhat aptly for a Dunc-themed grid, I suppose. (Oh, I just now got the joke with the title - no, not the joke that Dunc has been misspelled, which I think is just an error on Elise's part.) The real surprise, I think, is that this grid concept isn't an ACPT Puzzle 5 or something in that vein - it's a unique gimmick of the sort I don't think I've seen before, that's nonetheless so simple that I can't believe no one's come up with it before. (Probably someone has and I'm just not aware of it, and five minutes after this post goes up Paolo will correct me.)

Jan. 31: One Way or Another (Morton J. Mendelson, Universal)
This isn't on its face the most exciting puzzle, but I like seeing grids like this because they run counter to the standard advice for themed puzzles. This is a uniclue puzzle where the words that share a clue number are antonyms of one another, so 1-Across is [Have no food], which is FAST on the across and FEAST on the down. All things considered I'd call this a pretty impressive grid, even though the longest entries are SOPPED UP and EDIT WARS. It's proof you can make a great puzzle with a simple-but-cool theme without any really long entries or revealers or "splashy" stuff.

Jan. 31: Shh, Be Quiet! (Claire Kaneshiro, The Daily Princetonian)
One thing I've been doing more often than not these days is checking out the puzzles that run in college newspapers, which increasingly are being made by teams of ambitious young puzzlemakers (see, for instance, Henry Josephson and Pravan Chakravarthy's excellent work in the Chicago Maroon, which I highlighted last month). The Daily Princetonian is probably the toniest college puzzle, boasting a staff with three Times-published constructors (Owen Travis, Simon Marotte, and Juliet Corless) and several other mainstream published constructors (e.g. Joah Macosko); they recently started publishing mini puzzles often enough that they can be considered a daily outlet.
Anyway, Claire Kaneshiro is not a name you have seen in the mainstream yet, but I suspect this will not be the last time she comes up in one of these writeups. The theme here is light but delightful - as the title implies, we're shifting initial SH sounds to become QU sounds, resulting in ABANDON QUIP, QUEER VOLUME (clued in reference to Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), and most charmingly, QUIT YOUR PANTS. It's the cluing angles here that I find most charming, though. ["In one era and out the other" phenomena?], for instance, is a hilarious and non-typo-ridden clue for TIME WARPS, the sort of wordplay you almost dismiss as a mistake and then realize, oh, bahaha, that's phenomenal. But even something simple like putting URS in a puzzle clued as ["My <3 is ___ (Valentine's txt)] - how sweet! Ditto [One making a ewe turn?] for RAM. Just a delightful puzzle, all things considered. You heard it here first, babe - the name on everybody's lips in 2023 is going to be CLAIRE KANESHIRO (15).

Answer key for clues:

[Members-only jacket?] CONDOM
[Wanted poster?] INFLUENCER
[Want to go?] TRAVEL BUG
[Doc consulted for help] FAQ
[Eco-centric college class, informally?] ITALIAN LIT
[Experience under one's belt?] THIRD BASE
[Like blue moons, black sheep, or red steak] RARE