New York Times, Wednesday, March 2, 2022

I've been told all my life by friends, family, and co-workers that "My brain works differently." But noticing and admiring oddities in the English language is second nature to me. While I don't remember the series of idle thoughts that led me to realize OHIO and WASHINGTON could overlap to form IOWA, I do remember that I immediately went to an atlas to see if other items shared this property. Luckily, there were!

Though no other states fit the pattern, a surprising number of world capitals and countries do. In deciding on a theme set, I strived to pick combinations of locations that were well-known, and that spanned the globe. I also included the revealer BORDER DISPUTES in my original draft to supplement the numbering in the themed clues, but that was excessive. So, I dropped it and designed my first-ever 16-column-wide grid with just the three themers. It was a fun challenge to construct, and I'm happy with the mix of conversational and trivia-based entries in the rest of the puzzle.

Endless thanks to Mark McClain, Rich Proulx, Kyle Dolan, and the Crossword Discord community members for their generous feedback and thoughtful insights.

I spend a crazy amount of time looking for interesting letter pattern discoveries, so I rarely happen upon one whose category I've never even considered. There are three capitals overlapping in CAIRO ROME MEXICO, a three US state smash-up in OHIO IOWA WASHINGTON, and three countries jammed into PANAMA MALI LITHUANIA — triply cool. It's a neat touch that all the middle entries are four letters long and that each one of them splits in half for the overlap.

I wasn't sure what was going on at first since CAIROMEXICOCITY looks simply like CAIRO MEXICOCITY. Perhaps highlighting ROME would have heightened the a-ha: CAIROMEXICOCITY, preventing ROME from getting lost in the shuffle.

Excellent bonuses in the grid, too. With only three themers (the norm is four or five these days), I expect at least four long bonus entries. Note how wisely Dylan spaced these out: EL DORADO, MON CHERI, and MINT OREO, yum!

Dylan could have arranged his black squares to have only MINT OREO, and that would have been more than fine. But he didn't stop there — OKAY THEN sure makes for a fun addition. I appreciate the extra mile effort, especially because it's not at all a simple task, what with the adjacent long Downs both crossing two themers.

I love lexical oddities. If the presentation had been a little different, helping the discoveries stand out better, this would have been in POW! territory.