New York Times, Monday, March 29, 2021

For a good while I'd had the idea to do something with "to be or not to be," in the sense of "two B's or not two B's." I'd wanted to find two phrases where B's were inserted in a word and two where B's were removed. But removing B's and being left with anything remotely sensible proved unlikely, and the whole thing languished.

But … a strange thing happened. One night just after going to bed, Hamlet's words came into my head—who knows why— and suddenly, I thought of a different approach. "To be or not to be" didn't have to mean two B's vs. no B's. It could mean two B's vs. one B. A true epiphany!

Immediately I thought of HABIT/RABBIT, but there really aren't many pairs that could work. There was ROBIN and BOBBIN, but BOBBIN doesn't yield anything puzzle-worthy. Clearly, the spellings and pronunciations had to be the same. Not DOUBLE/BUBBLE or RUBLE/RUBBLE. I was extremely lucky that the two pairs in the puzzle worked out both with symmetry and with having the one-B answer coming before the two-B answer.

I didn't figure this as a Monday, so Will et al. eased up on a number of the clues. The one that caught my attention was at 53-A, "What the Supremes said to do …" as the clue for STOP. LOL, you can be sure that's not from me. Being hopelessly ignorant about most pop culture, a reference like that would never, ever cross my mind.

This was a fun puzzle for me finally to work out. As always, I hope it's fun to solve.

People ping me so often with various TO BE OR NOT TO BE ideas that it's hard for me to be impressed with any of them. That leaning made me shrug when I hit today's revealer. Rhyming words, one with a double B, one with a single B … not impressive, since there should be a big handful of these. Dozens. Hundreds, maybe!

May-B not.

The fact that HABIT / RABBIT and TREBLE / PEBBLE don't just rhyme, but their endings differ only by a single vs. double B, makes the set so tight. I couldn't think of a single other pair that would work like this.

My appreciation for this concept grew and grew. There's something so impressive about the theme tightness.

And there's Lynn's beautiful gridwork, perfect for newer solvers. It's not technically perfect, but entries like ESE are easily figure-out-able. Plus, they're fine prices to pay to allow for the fun long bonuses, THIN MINT, BELGIANS, ENTR'ACTE.

Not only a strong Monday grid, but a crossworthy addition to the TO BE OR NOT TO BE genre.