Some Light Reading

Jeremy Newton, of Austin, Tex., is a software engineer who makes mobile games. He's been constructing crosswords for The Times since 2007, specializing in unusual themes often with visual elements. The idea for this one occurred to him last fall while he was stopped at a traffic light. It took him several months, off and on, to work out all the elements.

This is Jeremy's 15th Sunday crossword and 22nd Times puzzle overall.

To me, those three stacked circles on a traffic light seemed like a perfect visual to appear in a crossword. A satisfying concept clicked: Answers in one direction could include RED or GREEN, while their crossings could include STOP or GO.

My first strategy was dropping traffic lights into a sea of white squares. With unlit signal lights representing blank answer squares, skipped over by the horizontal crossers. Ultimately, this design felt too unintuitive for a solver to understand. A stronger strategy became using a traffic light as a triple stack of blocker squares. Having the unlit squares of the traffic signal behave as traditional blockers, while its RED or GREEN square joins an answer crossing through the light.

In my submission to the Times, I clued the word on the right side of an illuminated signal square as a separate answer with a misdirecting clue. [Money makers] for MINTS in WINTER (GREEN) MINTS, for example. The idea being this would help hide which light is colorized, allowing the solver "light" the signal. However, I appreciate how the Times team pivoted to a simpler approach of starting the grid with the signals lit. This helps establish the color rebus from the jump, giving the solver some early momentum while still leaving the fun GO/STOP twist to discover. Here's hoping this setup offers a satisfying solve!

The choice to include a yellow light was made about halfway through construction. I knew from the start that this puzzle theme felt incomplete without it, but what YELLOW represents isn't as clear-cut as RED or GREEN. So I proceeded without it. Until it occurred to me that having yellow represent both GO and STOP could be a fun twist. Producing a sort of Schrödinger answer, giving the solver a choice of either "braking" or "flooring it."

Favorite debut answer in this puzzle? DEADASS, of course! Fingers crossed, this puzzle leaves you deadass happy.

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who's stuck at a red light.

The first national color television broadcast in the United States was the 1954 Rose Parade, but crosswords are mostly still monochrome. For 25 years, NYT relied on Across Lite's .puz format to distribute puzzles to their most enthusiastic solvers, a format that didn't support color, most foreign characters, or other modern gimmicks. That format is now history, but color is still rare. Even at the Times, some of their distribution channels are black and white only.

Today's gimmick couldn't work without color. Blocks of three black squares have colored circles representing traffic lights. What's more, they're rebus elements. And, the rebus has to be interpreted differently Across and Down. That's a wild combination we've never encountered before.

This will be confusing for newer solvers, so I'll spell it out:

• Ignore the gray circles. Only the color ones matter.
• The Across answers use the color names. So, 103-Across is CATCH [RED] HANDED and 109-Across is THE JOLLY [GREEN] GIANT.
• The Down answers use the color meanings. So, 35-Down is HEART [STOP] PING, and 37-Down is DON'T [GO] THERE.
• The yellow light at 43-Down is ambiguous. The answer is either I'LL GO NOW or I'LL STOP NOW depending on how aggressively you drive.

Note that the orientation of the lights is correct — red on top and green on the bottom. Why is this important? So RED/GREEN color-blind drivers know which pedal to press as they tootle around.

Electric cars don't have MPG (39-Across), but they do have MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent), so you can compare efficiencies.

Back in 1999 when USENET (18-Down) was still a thing, the Times invited Usenet users from around the world to contribute to this Cryptic Crossword.