New York Times, Thursday, April 23, 2020

YACOB: In June 2018, Erik and I were brainstorming themes for a back-to-school themed puzzle for the Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament. In our list of funky ideas, we considered making a puzzle centered around the revealer PASSING NOTES where musical notes (e.g. DO/RE/MI) would move from one theme answer to the next. I wrote up some code to try to find entries that could work for each musical note.

ERIK: Little did we know that Paolo Pasco was already working on a similar puzzle for the tournament! It's always a bummer to be scooped on a theme idea, but it stings a little less when it's by one of the greats.

YACOB: After Lolla, we remembered that we found a lot of promising entries for RE, and we figured sometime down the line, we could find a way to make a cool theme centered around just moving RE. This is that puzzle! Hope you all enjoy :)

Phrases that morph into equally valid new phrases are my jam, so Yacob and Erik had me at BREAKING BAD to BAKING BREAD. What a beautiful discovery!

I have a feeling some solvers won't figure out what's going on, so here's a before and after:

• BREAKING BAD to BAKING BREAD
• IN THE RED to IN THREE-D (think: IN 3-D)
• CREATED to CATERED
• COMPADRE to COMPARED

None of the rest is as strong as BREAKING BAD to BAKING BREAD — it's so neat when there are multiple words involved. IN THREE-D did hit that mark, but spelling THREE out is a crossword-specific … "oddity" would be a generous description.

As I would expect from these two (Yacob giving us a smash hit on this last themeless), such a tasty grid! Constructors often fail when they try to go big — 72 words is in themeless territory — but there was no going home today. Even if you didn't enjoy the theme as much as I did, I'd give each of these entries a check (Will Shortz assigns checks and minuses in his grid-assessing process):

• TEA LEONI
• TAKE SIGN (baseball-specific lingo, but such a neat term)
• NO MERCY
• HUMVEE
• YE GODS (some see it as weird, but it's grown on me over the years)
• CLOSE ONE
• GET IT NOW?

Between TACTILE, ANIMATE, and IMPEDED, I'd toss in another checkmark, taking the total up to 8. That's astounding for a puzzle built around five theme entries.

I'd have loved another stunner like BREAKING BAD to BAKING BREAD, but the four (RE)LOCATIONS worked well enough. It made me want to go search for more. I didn't have time to write the code, but I spent five minutes figuring out how I would do it — I love it when someone gives my brain a challenge. Along with gridwork that greatly enhanced my solving experience, these guys earn another POW! apiece.