New York Times, Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Ta-da! Totally thrilled to toss this "T" theme to the Times! 'Twas tricky to tackle the teeming T's that this Tuesday theme took. Truthfully, the talented Times team tailored top-notch transformations to the tiresome text. Thanks to them, the terms trending towards terrible trash turned to twinkling treasure. This tongue-twisting type thus terminates the traditional theme talk. Therefore, time to tell the thesaurus, "Take that! Torpedoed! Toast!"

Phew! That's a lot of Ts. Tons, you might say. This puzzle was inspired by William I. Johnston's wonderful L-themed puzzle from 2002.

Thanks to my friends Adrienne, Elly, and Nikki for their feedback on my many drafts. I hope everyone had as much fun solving this puzzle as I had creating it!

TEE TIME today! Great first impression; the grid art jumping out at me. The unusual pattern of black squares Ts is mesmerizing. Escher-esque.

Jim Horne and I both missed various aspects of this puzzle, so note the three tiers of T-themage:

1. All black squares are grouped into T shapes.
2. Some long entries are two-worders, where both words begin with T.
3. Every clue begins with a T.

The black Ts in the center reminded me of the famous Four Ts puzzle, a classic that helped hook me on mechanical puzzles. I enjoyed reminiscing about the first time I figured it out; such a rush.

Some excellent theme answers, TEASER TRAILER and TREASURE TROVE both colorful. I would have liked a few more marquee ones, though, as TEA TREE and TAKE TEN escaped my first look. Long entries like HOT COFFEE naturally jump out more.

(Mirror symmetry would have allowed for more long T* T* theme answers, plus you could have more of the Ts appear without rotation.)

I appreciated that Scott went out of his way to focus on grid smoothness. Grid art puzzles can be tricky to fill, especially with so many long non-theme slots. Impressive to escape with only ATRA and ENTR as minor dings.

Plenty of puzzles use initialism themes, others riff on letters shaped out of black squares, yet others employ the "every clue begins with ___" trick. I don't remember seeing one that combined all of these elements. I don't know that today's successfully TAG TEAMED these concepts together, but it's useful to titrate things in TEST TUBES once in a while.

Hey, constructors, are you looking for phrases where each word starts with T? A regular T*T* search will clutter up results with words like TATTOO that don't fit this theme because tattoo is a word, not a phrase.

But wait, our new OneLook Search button knows about phrases. We can help! Operators are standing by! Free shipping!

Click on these examples:

• *T *T finds multi-word phrases (there's that space in the middle) where at least two words start with T. Promising! But too many of those "found" words are THE, which is boring.
• *T *T-H means ignore the letter H, so no THEs to be found. Some good stuff is eliminated, but most of the results are better. Except, now we notice the word TO crops up too much.
• *T *T-HO means ignore both H and O, so no more TO either.

None of these are perfect solutions. We still get some phrases with more than two words, we're missing phrases with non-THE Hs, etc. But, with zero programming, you've found several good options.

To get a better solution, you might try writing a Python script. We have some examples. You can make that as sophisticated as you want, but this solution also has a problem. You can only find answers your word list knows about. OneLook searches the Internet.

You don't have to understand any of this to be a good or even a great constructor. But sometimes, finding out more about how these tools work can make your job easier. Much easier.