New York Times, Thursday, February 16, 2023

Of the many joys of puzzling, one of my favorites is the process of opening a puzzle, seeing a funky symmetry-bucking grid, and immediately knowing there's a fun gimmick to suss out. Sean Yamada-Hunter's THAT'S A BIG IF puzzle, Liz Gorski's Guggenheim tribute, and countless Joe Krozel puzzles have scratched this itch for me, and I've always wanted to try my hand at something similar.

I'd been kicking around the phrase TAKE THE L as a theme for a while, but it never really went anywhere. Then it hit me — black squares forming L's could be a clear W!

This puzzle took more trial and error than any I've made before or since — even finding the appropriate shape for the L's took me a few days! A few early versions of the puzzle contained non-thematic L's, but I thought those might distract solvers and removed them. This is why the inelegant ONE SKI survives instead of MUESLI, which would've been oodles more fun.

E-BIKE, BOW WOW WOW, AVATAR, AVICII, and the clue for POT DEALERS — there's a lot of stuff in here I'm glad to bring to a Times crossword.

I think it's interesting, too, that Matthew Stock and I used such similar revealers to such wildly different ends!

I'm proud of this one and hope you agree the effort was worth it!

What the L?!

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

What a neat mixing of crossword genres! The Ls made of black squares pop out as grid art, five answers turn corners, and the grid art letters are inserted into those five answers. Some of the most creative concepts result from hybridizing genres, and this is a wonderful example.

In case you haven't picked out the five themers yet:

• NAI(L)EDIT
• FOODCO(L)ORING
• GRAMMARPO(L)ICE
• POTDEA(L)ERS
• NUC(L)EAR

Note how every one of the final chunks is a valid crossword answer. Neat way to further obfuscate the trick.

Gridding around turning puzzles is hard. Gridding around five sets of nesting, turning themers is not for the faint of heart. Kevin didn't quite get to NAILED IT, what with a few rocky TWOD (2-D) and AVIEW regions, but it's well done given the extreme constraints.

This is a rare case where I enjoyed the theme enough that I would have loved it expanded into a Sunday 21x21. That might have allowed symmetry along a diagonal axis, too — if the legs of each L were equal length. I loved Liz's bold Guggenheim swirl, but today's almost-but-not-quite symmetry left me with in an uncanny valley.

Even with that hitch though, I loved how Kevin successfully swirled together so many different established concepts to make something different. Whatever the kids say that means the opposite of TAKE THE L, that's what I say for Kevin today.