New York Times, Thursday, March 17, 2016

Ever heard Tuvan throat singers? My dad was really into them growing up. Their music is absolutely otherworldly.

As for the theme: it was important to me to have every entry in the puzzle contain a clue, meaning each of the "turned" answers had to merge with other answers in the puzzle, rather than occupy their own unique location (with "-" as a clue for those spaces). My hope was that, in doing this, the solver might be misled enough on an initial pass through the puzzle that the revealer could offer an "aha" moment. I also wanted EVENT to "turn" on one of the three middle letters of EVENT (not the beginning E or the ending T), for consistency.

Finally, because the turned entries aren't symmetrically located, the grid layout was more constrained than it otherwise would be. In spite of this, I'm pretty happy with the longer, nonthematic across and down entries. Hope you enjoyed!

We haven't seen a "turning" puzzle in a few months now — much appreciation to Will for spreading them out. Today, David gives us a TURN OF EVE … or is that TURN OF EVENTS? Three other themers get turned somewhere within the EVENT letter sequence. I've highlighted them below.

I generally like themers to be the longest across entries in the grid, or otherwise stand out somehow. But today's gave a nice challenge of having to find those turning buggers. I was baffled when I read that there were supposed to be four — ACEV(ENTURA), PREVE(NTABLE), and TURNOFEVE(NTS) were obvious. Where was the final one? Took me forever to realize that the [Hearst monthly] is SEVEN(TEEN), not SEVEN.

That bugged me. For consistency's sake, I would have all four themers working exactly in the same way. They do all turn somewhere within their EVENT letter sequence, but SEVEN is the only one that looks so innocent in the grid. I would have preferred if every one of the themers was hidden so innocently, like in a previous turning puzzle I quite liked, but breaking SEVENTEEN into SEV(ENTEEN) or SEVENT(EEN) would also have appealed to me more.

Grids using short themers always come with an added difficulty level, requiring a lot of long entries. I really like NBA DRAFT, NEST EGGS, OPEN TABLE (as part of a themer!), even INUNDATE and DRAMATIZE. I wasn't sure about UNADVISED, as ILL-ADVISED was what came to mind, but the dictionary shows that UNADVISED is perfectly legit (as in a client UNADVISED by their lawyer). So overall, a nice job of working in colorful long material.

Short material was good too, just a small amount of things like … well, AMT. That's the way to keep a puzzle smooth. And linking WHO and HOW as questions that are anagrams of each other — right next to each other, too! That's a nice touch.