WEST-SOUTHWEST

Julian Lim, of Singapore, is an assistant professor at the School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. He leads the school's Awake Lab, which studies the effects of mindfulness practice on sleep, well-being, and cognition. He holds a B.S. from Duke and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Julian started solving British crosswords in high school, later getting hooked on American ones. He says he has solved every New York Times crossword since 2004.

With other commitments in life, I've had much less time to construct crosswords in the past few years, that is, until the pandemic restrictions in Singapore left me caged at home with nothing but time. Happily, creating puzzles is still as fun now as it was when I started 10 years ago, although keeping up with the vocabulary of young people is becoming increasingly challenging — sometimes, I feel like I need to get a couple of my undergrads to help me maintain my wordlist.

The theme of this puzzle is also admittedly a bit old-fashioned. I like the theme set I managed to come up with, though, so I hope people in the mood for an old-fashioned Sunday will have a good time. Or if not, just an old fashioned instead. Ganbei!

Straight over the plate Sunday, casting a wide net to catch as many solvers as possible. There's nothing about the theme that's tricky, nothing to trip up even a starting solver. It's easy to recognize that W words become SW words.

Well, easy … ish. SUMMER SWEAR had me confused for a hot minute, thinking that maybe it should be SWUMMERS SWEAR. Like what a backstroker would do when hit by cramps?

And FOR SWANT OF A BETTER SWORD? Swans can become knights?

Let's call it easy(ish) for non-ridiculous overthinkers. The "straight over the plate" pitch might actually be a W-SW curveball!

I appreciated so much of Julian's grid: IRIDESCE, TOY STORES, PARTHENON, CARL SAGAN, POWER DIVE? Yeah!

It's not easy to smooth out an entire 21x21 140-word grid, though. If it hadn't been for that pesky middle section ... I didn't know NORITE, fine. One word, whatever. Then ROWEL? And if you don't own any AIWA electronics, or if you haven't heard stories of ROCs in Arabian Night tales, you're in big ROC doo-doo.

Then there's KEBAB. No, KABOB is the alternate spelling. No again … KEBOB? I know it's a transliteration, so there might not be a "correct" spelling, but man, does KEBOB look wrong.

Simple letter swaps like W to SW seem too easy to be interesting, but I did get a laugh out of SPARKLING SWINE, which made me imagine pigs shining each other up with their muddy dung. You can almost get to a "polishing a turd" joke … not quite, but close enough to make me giggle.

I prefer more envelope-pushing Sunday crosswords, but a softball every once in a while isn't a terrible thing, offering up a theme that might be accessible to the entire gamut of Sunday solvers.