It's the shortest month of the year, and thus I have an atypically short write-up. I didn't even bother changing the text on the photoshop for this post! (Don't tut-tut me, who do I look like, Kelsey??)
My Favorite Themeless Puzzle of February 2023: The Crossword, Monday, Feb. 20 (Paolo Pasco, New Yorker)
Honorable mention: Free Association 78 (Trent Evans, Grid Therapy)
My Favorite Themed Puzzle of February 2023: To Infinity and Beyond (Elise Corbin, Cruciverbology)
Honorable mention: The Interview (Aaron Ullman, Universal)
My Favorite Clue of February 2023: [What very few are able to pull a one-eighty on?] (4) (Erik Agard, New Yorker Tuesday 2/21/23)
[Source of cracks on a screen?] (6) (Tim Croce, "Freestyle 784")
[Approach to mating] (7) (Will Nediger, "Freestyle")
[Gives an appropriate response to "Would you like to watch the Gossip Girl reboot?"] (6) (Malaika Handa, "Head First")
[One picking up speed] (8) (Brandon Koppy, "Themeless: Extra Sauce")
["Boys do now cry 'Kiss my Parliament,' instead of 'Kiss my ___,'" so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to" (Samuel Pepys)] (4) (Will Nediger, "In Search of Lost Time")
[They say "boo" but not "yay"] (6) (Gary Cee, Universal, "Possessions")
[Stand-alone issue?] (9) (BEQ, "Themeless Monday #710")
[Something pointed out more than once to a fashion designer?] (Croce again, "Freestyle 788")
[Prez dispensers?] (4) (Alexandra Olson, "Novel Issue")
A full list of these puzzles - and entries for these clues - under the jump!
Feb. 2: Horse Feathers (Alex Boisvert & Ben Zimmer, Crossword Nexus)
Ben Zimmer doesn't make puzzles all that often, but when he does, you know you're in for something super interesting. Actually, this is a pretty straightforward theme - all the entries are synonyms for NONSENSE, like MALARKEY, CLAPTRAP, etc - or it would be, but it's impressive to see so many theme entries interlocking in a fun pattern like this. But the real joy of this puzzle is the gleefully on-brand references to linguistics throughout the grid. For instance, did you know that the opposite of an acrostic is a telestich? That's a phrase made of the final letters of words in a phrase or list. (The most famous such telestich being, of course, NSYNC.) Or that BLUR is used in Singaporean English to mean "confused" ? All sorts of brilliant clues like that - and this isn't even starting on options like [Network that missed the New Orleans New Year's countdown because Don Lemon was too busy dancing to "Back That Azz Up" ] for CNN.
Feb. 4: Excuse (Andrew J. Ries, Vox)
OK, you knew this puzzle was going to get a shout-out here - here you've got four entries that all contain the letter X followed by the letter Q, and they're all good ones - ORTHODOX QUAKERS, TAX QUESTION, SEX QUIZ, and my favorite of the bunch, NETFLIX QUEUES. There's also some cute and rarely seen short fill here, like XFL and SQUEE!, added to accommodate the X-otiQ theme content, plus a neat save here cluing the typically gluey ONA as the Rooney Mara character in "Women Talking" (which is deliberate, since it could have been CHAIR crossing ANA instead).
Feb. 5: Grudge Match (Brian Thomas, Puzzles that Need a Home)
I don't think there's any theme more despised than that of the word ladder - although the quip puzzle does come close, if you do not believe that Acrostics Are Just Quip Puzzles (and if you do not believe that then you are wrong, sorry). Anyway, leave it to Brian Thomas to prove just how funny even the hoariest of theme premises can be in the hands of a true maven. The themer TOTAL DICK is not merely a funny entry on its own but an on-theme one, given the revealer BONE TO PICK, for instance; and of course, the cluing here is uniformly excellent, mixing highbrow references to the likes of KANT and LOCKE (and of course, the excellent MONETS clue ["Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", "Water-Lilies", and "Water-Lilies", for example]) and the charmingly lowbrow (like [Like the fridge door after the kids get themselves food] for AJAR). Although I guess I could do without the clue [Character who wears white gloves and red sneakers (and that's it)] for SONIC - I mean, bad enough I think about Winnie the Pooh's nudity, y'know?
Ultimately I'd consider this puzzle the word ladder equivalent of what perennial QVXwordz favorite Go The F to Sleep is for replace-a-letter themes - proof that this seemingly stodgy puzzle varietal is actually really really fun once freed from the confines of mainstreaming and breakfast testing, and proof that the best puzzles come from the indie world not by accident but by design.
The Crossword, Tuesday, Feb. 7 (Natan Last, The New Yorker)
Sometimes the New Yorker's offerings can be a bit too self-consciously "highbrow" for their own good, and when they are it's usually on account of either Natan Last or Anna Shechtman, who are generally quite good constructors but also very, very dedicated to making sure you know they have MFAs. Shechtman's grid on the 6th skewed a bit too hoity-toity for my tastes (although I'm sure she'll redeem herself with her next grid), but this offering from Last was just a joy from start to finish, with a roughly Z-shaped grid and many many fun long entries, including stacked pairs of spanners at the top and bottom.
Feb. 8: Themeless #81 (Stella Zawistowski, Tough as Nails)
In advance of Stella's book of Tough as Nails grid being made available for the general public, it feels appropriate to remind everyone what a brilliant constructor of themelesses she is - this one in particular apparently was lying in limbo for a couple years before she clued it up, and yet it feels fresh to the max. This is in part due to Stella's skill at finding new and yet totally inferable pop culture hooks for words like IDOL (clued as a BTS tune) and SOJU (which is exciting enough on its own, but doubly so when clued as a Korean-American drag queen), but there's also plenty of funny misdirections coursing throughout the grid, including the superficially-on-brand-for-2023 [The A in AI], which I felt very clever for realizing was ALLEN (as in Allen Iverson). And of course, as you would expect from Inkubator's themeless editor, plenty of feminist-friendly cluing angles. My favorite clue here, incidentally, is for BOTS: [Entities that presumably can't tell fire hydrants and palm trees apart] made me actually laugh out loud.
Feb. 10: Love Letters (Jasper Davidoff, Pocket Squares)
I always happily await Jasper's puzzles, which are usually extremely charming and not too concerned with sticking to the crossword conventions most of us have internalized. This grid shape would have set off tons of alarm bells for me had I thought of making this grid myself, what with its unchecked squares and tiny little corners, but when solving the grid I had absolutely no problems with any of those things, probably because they were used to get lots of fun fill choices in the grid (such as FOXES and OTTERS running down the center column). The theme here is surprisingly simple (no rebus action here, despite your instinct as a solver) and of course, the cluing is filled with all sorts of entries that appeal to me as a wannabe-young-person. Look, ma, I know who [Michele of dubious literacy] is!
Feb. 11: Have a Ball (Patrick Blindauer, Vox)
OK, is this puzzle winning any Orcas? No. Is the puzzle particularly good? Well, DESKS/SCORPIONS/THERMOSTATS is a promising trio of acrosses to start the grid off with, to be sure. But otherwise no, this is just a typically solid Patrick Blindauer grid, up to his usual high standards but nothing beyond that. However, this is all ignoring the most important metric for a grid at a major publication, which is that this is LITERALLY A GRID SHAPED LIKE A BALL WITH ITS ONLY THEME CONTENT BEING THE WORDS "CHINESE SPY BALLOON" IN IT!! HOLY SHIT. Ha ha ha. I think if this puzzle appeared in the NYT we'd be in the middle of World War III. I love that this puzzle exists.
Feb. 12: The Atlantic 2/12/23 (Daniel Mauer, The Atlantic)
You know, The Atlantic is probably one of the... stranger outlets out there. That is not to say this puzzle is bad, although a few of the entries here are not what I would call "good" by any stretch (there's a part of the grid where CANTAB and H-BEAMS cross ABM and BSS, which, erm, yikes). But it is a sort of strange theme, in a way that is sort of appealing - in the sense that the world's first, and probably last, Carl ORFF-themed grid is also going to be the world's first, and probably also last, puzzle with varieties of tuna snaking diagonally through the grid. (Yes, the revealer is OH, FOUR TUNA.) I might just be kind of weird, which is why I liked this grid in spite of some awkward fill choices, but hey, you can't say this puzzle's not unique.
Feb. 14: Sheydah #21 (Ariel Haymarket, Haymarket's Squares)
This grid's a fun one from Ariel, starting with a very nice stack in the northwest enabled by FJORD at 1-Down, giving us some real King Shit (metaphorically and semi-literally) when JAMES CAAN clued in reference to Misery is placed atop King's memoir ON WRITING. But there are all sorts of lovely and conversational clues here, even for super common fill. I think [Covert conversation catalyst] is probably the most fun clue I've ever seen for PSST, for instance; I'm also a big fan of [*ntz ntz ntz* stuff] as a clue for EDM, among other things here. Just lots of fun.
Feb. 16: The Interview (Aaron Ullman, Universal)
Thematically, this puzzle is very straightforward - it feels like one of those Sunday NYTs with a pun theme, with entries like PUZZLE PIECE clued as ["I'm the perfect fit for this position"] - but the fill here is anything but! We get the first whiff of weirdness when the first theme entry, at 17-Across, is SPANX PANTS (!), and then we get all sorts of really exciting and atypical fill in both the theme content and the midlength fill crossing it, as with ROBOT VACUUM crossing KEEP IT PG, or even the combo of NAG NAG and HAR HAR. I checked to see if a mainstream outlet had included NORMIE yet, and all I got was a Byron Walden grid from 2007 in the Times where it was clued as George Wendt's character from Cheers. Even the clues here, like [WHAT WAS ON WHEN I WROTE THIS CLUE] for CAPS LOCK, infuse this puzzle with a level of personality that's somewhat atypical of Universal, which in the spirit of accessibility often aims for a sort of deliberate blandness in cluing voice (not an insult, just an observation).
Feb. 18: Good Lookers (Lisa Senzel, Spyscape)
You would expect by this point that Spyscape would have run itself into the ground, having made something like 200 puzzles with espionage-related themes at this point. But every time I think they must have exhausted every possible premise for a spycraft-themed puzzle, out comes a grid like this joint from Lisa Senzel. On its face the FIVE EYES Alliance - an intelligence-sharing program between five Anglophone nations - should be the driest fodder for a puzzle imaginable, and yet this puzzle uses it as the basis of a super tight set of national symbols - KIWI BIRD, UNION JACK, KANGAROO, APPLE PIE, and MAPLE LEAF - that, wouldn't you know it, contains exactly five instances of the letter I. Very clever, very weird, and a testament to the power of outlets that have a very narrow focus.
Feb. 19: The Atlantic 2/19/23 (Adam Vincent, The Atlantic)
I think sometimes that solving something like 2,500+ puzzles per year has warped my brain and made me start to appreciate grids for reasons completely lateral to the average solver's. But here we have a puzzle that I think is just objectively really great for reasons independent of how structurally ambitious it is. The theme here is simple but smart - the revealer here is TAKE A HIKE, and the themers are all things that you can't actually hike through (like a PAPER TRAIL or SPACE MOUNTAIN) despite their names. What makes this puzzle so interesting is that its 10/13/9/13/10 themeset requires theme entries to be flush against each other in rows 3 and 4, meaning there are eight(!) down entries that must double-cross each pair of flushed themers. And yet the grid does not suffer from this constraint at all! In fact, if anything the fill crossing these entries is the highlight of the puzzle: LIP SYNC and KLEPTO are the first two such down entries, for instance, and we also get stuff like ROW HOME and HALF DEAD as a result. And this completely overlooks the breezy cleverness of the clues here, such as [Where spectators sit, ironically] for STANDS. Just a really great puzzle all around.
The Crossword, Monday, Feb. 20 (Paolo Pasco, The New Yorker)
Paolo has been relegated to the easier difficulties of New Yorker themeless, or so it's seemed (I don't actually have the data to back this claim up on hand) ... which made this tricky grid from him a real joy. The grid shape here is super impressive, having FIVE stacked nine-letter entries staggered in the grid's center, all but two of them crossing entries of seven or more letters running vertically! And what entries they are - TOUCH-STARVED, METAVERSE, NERF GUNS, NED LUDD - and even a seemingly blah entry in this stack like STATE BIRD is given the incredible clue [One with a bill voted on by U.S. lawmakers?]. Plenty of fun clues all around here - did you know that Helen Keller was the one credited with introducing the AKITA to the United States? - and while the grid is obviously built around that massive yawning chasm in its center, the top left and bottom right also have their share of charming entries, such as FACETUNED and GYM SOCK. A brilliant puzzle from one of the best in the business.
Feb. 20: Karaoke (A Little Bit of Everything) (Dan Schwartz, xwords with babka)
I think the laugh when I figured out exactly what Dan was going for on this one was the biggest laugh I've had all year. Granted, I am squarely in the target demo to "crack" this "meta," but even if you don't Dan's got a thoughtful and funny cluing voice that makes this big, big puzzle worth solving anyway.
Feb. 22: Inner Clarity (Enrique Henestroza Anguiano, Universal)
One of the most popular types of crossword theme is something where every themer begins (or ends) with a certain category of thing. Just open, um, literally any LA Times Monday and you'll run into one of those. This set from Enrique does something similar, but in a much more impressive way - you're actually looking out for the MIDDLE word of each theme entry, because EIGHT HOUR DAY, NO LOOKING BACK, and HIGH WATER MARK all have a HEART OF GLASS. This is a very tricky set to come up with, since all the phrases need to be exactly three words, and most three-word phrases have a conjunction or something boring at their center - but this grid is great, and I like all three of the themers here. I guess he could have done the Bloodhound Gang song FIRE WATER BURN in lieu of HIGH WATER MARK, but I think a puzzle that reminded me of the Bloodhound Gang's existence would be my least favorite puzzle of the month instead of one of my favorite favorites. But I don't know - I can't resist a puzzle with the bonus entry CRANKY PANTS, so Enrique would still end up on my nice list anyway.
Feb. 23: Three the Hard Way (Brendan Emmett Quigley, Brendan Emmett Quigley)
I'm a sucker for grids full of Xs, as longtime QVXwordz enthusiasts will recall, so I have to shout out this BEQ grid that sticks twelve of them into a single puzzle - the theme entries (HERSHEY'S KISSES, OUTRAGE PORN, ZERO DARK THIRTY, and TALKING TURKEY) all had their last words replaced, per the theme, with a trio of Xs. As you can imagine, the fill suffers slightly as a result (XIS / XTC / XES is a distinctly underwhelming trio of 3-letter entries) but this gives Brendan an excuse to make this puzzle a bit risque in a way that I find very charming, including what must be the spiciest clue of the season in [She loves cocks] for HEN. Sexist? OK, maybe a tinge. Funny? Yes, very, imo.
Feb. 24: Free Association 78 (Trent Evans, Grid Therapy)
Trent's been publishing on Grid Therapy less often than he used to, in part because Trent generally eschews the obvious markers of "indie" crosswords and thus has no problems getting published in the NYT, Universal, etc. But I guess I got inured to just how consistently excellent his themelesses are, and going a month without doing one of them really brings out how charming his grids are. He's one of the foremost purveyors of "conversational" fill, as you can see when this puzzle's first two long entries are DON'T BE A HERO and I HAVE AN IDEA, which cross ANY ADVICE. This puzzle is slightly less "voicy" than Trent's normal fare - no not-so-veiled references to drama in the Evans household this time - but you still get touches of that Evansian snark with ["The so-called ___" (phrase often said with air quotes)] or [Sophomoric spoken addition after a fortune cookie reading] for IN BED; the charmingly "meta" [___ Therapy] for GRID is also appreciated. You also have to appreciate Trent's willingness to come up with new angles for common fill: [Detective played by Eddie] for AXEL, for instance, or [Song with one consonant] for ARIA, or perhaps the only good ASEA clue I've ever seen: [In the Red or the Black]. Great work, per usual.
Feb. 25: I'll Give You the First Letter (Will Nediger, Vox)
This puzzle is a quintessential Will Nediger grid - an extremely tight theme (BLUEPRINT clued as [Plan B], ON ONE'S FEET clued as [Standing O], etc) that, thanks to how spread out and how overt the theme material is (just four entries), allows him to make a grid with two vertical spanners (both of which, ABOUT THE AUTHORS and ASSERT DOMINANCE, are both quite good) and large corners. The fill is quite clean while still feeling unique - plus, I'm also a big fan of seeing Roy Lichtenstein's WHAAM! in grids, so that was delightful.
Feb. 26: To Infinity and Beyond (Elise Corbin, Cruciverbology)
This puzzle makes my brain hurt, and I don't know how the hell Elise got this "infinite" grid to work. She's a wizard, is the only explanation I can come up with.
Entries for the clues at the top of the entry:
LSAT
SITCOM
ENDGAME
SAYS NO
RADAR GUN
ARSE
GHOSTS
ONLY CHILD
CONE BRA
ATMS
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