New York Times, Thursday, August 22, 2019

I've always found turning puzzles like this fun to solve (shout out to Tracy Gray who had a great Spill the Beans puzzle a couple years ago that sticks out in my mind), so I wanted to try my hand at constructing one. My goal was to find words/phrases that would work as stand-alone entries despite the "dive." It's more aesthetically pleasing when you can look at a puzzle after solving it, and everything is a real word and not just a mishmash of letters.

Luckily, though this isn't the most original theme for a Thursday, Will Shortz accepted it with the caveat that he'd shelve it for a bit until the theme type would feel a little less over-familiar to solvers. Glad that time is now, on my three-year debut-versary!

Also nice to see a change in the cluing made possible by the continued success of our outstanding USWNT with my original clue for 21-down being "2015 Women's World Cup winners".

A few years ago, Will Shortz put a moratorium on turning puzzles. There are many ways of executing on a turning puzzle — going up, going down, double turns, turns on rebus squares, etc. But ultimately, they all fit into the same classification. I'm glad he's careful to space them out these days.

I liked Emily's interpretation and execution, playing on the juicy phrase, DIVE BAR. It's elegant:

• As Emily pointed out, every grid entry looks normal. SNAILS, GEM, TRANS, ESC, all looks good. Some solvers like to see telltale signs that something is going on — think if PANH had been an across answer (for HANDLE bar.). Finding innocent-looking entries that disguise SNAILS PACE, GEMINI, etc. is much harder.
• The four turned pieces are easily recognized as types of BARs: SPACE bar, MINI bar, SPORTS bar, CROW bar.
• It's a varied set. No SPORTS bar and BIKER bar, or CROW bar and DRAW bar. (What, you don't know what a DRAW bar is? You non-mechanical-engineering infidel!)

Great fill, too. Emily wisely didn't give herself many constraints, just 39 thematic squares, so she had a lot of freedom to zestify the grid. It's not easy to work around turned answers, so LITERATI and OMEGA MAN were great bonuses in the NE.

(I wasn't so sure about ELI ELI, but the clue was descriptive enough that I figured it out.)

Along with ARABIAN SEA, ANTITHESIS, MUSHROOM, IS IT TRUE — and only minimal ATOB TES TUE minor glue — that's a big construction win. I'm sure a ton of iteration was involved.

It's tough for a turning puzzle to wow me these days, but this one's a solid puzzle.