Laura Taylor Kinnel author page

Did it bug you that this rebus was straightforward? Not me! Although I enjoy novel concepts that push boundaries, rebuses are already tough enough for many solvers. Given that the NYT's Sunday audience is broad and varied, leaving it as a standard rebus makes sense.

Although, having a SHOE smashing the ROACH would have been super satisfying …

PYTHAGORE(AN T)HEOREM is a textbook example of how to pull off a rebus: the word spans across all words of the entry, and it's an excellent phrase. Even the crossing answer exhibits some of this, with ANT crawling across LE(AN-T)O.

DESI(GNAT)ED DRIVER would usually get cited by Will Shortz since GNAT doesn't span the words — DRIVER doesn't do any thematic work. What are the alternatives, though? SI(GN A T)REATY is technically better, but it's not the most exciting of phrases.

Sometimes it's better to flout the guidelines so solvers might not STIFLE A YAWN.

Similar case for IN LIKE (FLY)NN. That's such a colorful phrase that the rules be damned.

JEF(F LY)NNE does object, though.

Does BEE bee-long? They're so critical in maintaining the balance of nature. My wife would have preferred drawing attention to a beheMOTH problem in her walk-in closet, and my kids would have said dynaMITE! if their latest fear had been included.

It's generally frowned upon to have Across fill longer than themers — WATERMELON and SEMIWEEKLY overshadow CEL(TIC K)NOT. Hard to resist the quaint PATOOTIE, though.

I appreciated that Laura more than balanced out her to-be-stamped-out AGIN GLO glue with so much lovely SPARE RIB LEGALESE DELI CASE and even DIATOMIC for us chem nerds.

So much of construction is all about trade-offs, and I like many of the ones Laura made today.

For a puzzle all about COOKIE CUTTERS, it's hardly cookie cutter! Neat meshing of rebus, space-skipping, and visuals to create something unlike anything I've seen before. I'm a huge proponent of utilizing the Sunday Magazine's glossy color printing for crossword innovation, and printing cute COOKIE CUTTER shapes as rebus hints is a step in the right direction.

Get it? A step in the right direction? Because after GINGER, you have to step right over TREE to get to SNAP, thus making a GINGER SNAP?

I know that joke wasn't a cut above, but—

What do you mean I'm on the naughty list?

Having to work with pairs of crossing themers is rarely straightforward. Laura's task was somewhat easier than usual since each entry in a crossing pair is independent of the other, but it's still not a walk in the park when you have so much theme material.

Although there is a liberal amount of short glue, I appreciate that Laura worked hard to keep the crossings fair. If you don't know the American Ballet Theatre (ABT), at least you can piece it in through crossings.

Neat to get DR FAUCI featured in the lower left for a feeling of nowness. Also great to uncover THE BEES KNEES, a delightful entry.

There was something unsatisfying about the pre-printed shapes giving away the rebus in the Downs, but figuring out the "cutting" of Across answers still made for a solid a-ha.

There's so much potential in the NYT Sunday Magazine print format. I'm looking forward to what creative ideas 2022 will showcase.

★ I love lofty attempts to do something new and cool in a Sunday crossword. Those five little boxes baffled me, the tricksy crossings remaining opaque until I hit the apt revealer, TICK ALL THE BOXES. A-ha! BOX in the Across direction, and TICK in the Down. Clever!

I appreciated the quality of the Down theme answers. I'm sadly familiar with PUTting LIPSTICK ON A PIG, as my daughter and book agent like to point out. TICKLE THE IVORIES, now THAT'S THE TICKET! And even though STICKY SITUATION and CARROT AND STICK use TICK in too similar a way, they're both fantastic entries.

The puzzle fell too quickly once I hit the revealer since once you figure out how one rebus box works, you can fill in the rest right away. That bothered me less than usual, though, since the rebus was complicated. What sense of relief to finally see the light!

I wonder if using an assortment of Across rebuses would have alleviated that issue? Aside from TICK, there's CHECK, X, MARK … SLASH? I'd have preferred the variety, but I can see how the notion of a rebus that works differently in Across vs. Down is hard enough for most solvers.

A bit too much dependence on usual crossword glue such as RIAS, ERGS, ORO, STLO, ALL, NNE, SENS, EPI, etc., but most of them are minor enough. Toss in the tougher HUS and LAE, though … I'd have asked for a round of revisions.

Thankfully, Laura worked in a couple of great bonuses. HERDED CATS is fantastic. NO RELATION, too, along with its mystifying clue on Elizabeth Warren vis-à-vis Earl Warren. SENIOR PROM as the "last dance" and SEAHORSE with a neat piece of trivia on males carrying the babies, and it's starting to feel like Laura had the HOT HAND.

The puzzle didn't 100% hit for me because of the repetitive nature of those five boxes, but I love Laura's audacious target and sizzling themers. I'd love to see more NYT Sunday puzzles aim this high.

The Jim and Jeff shelter-in-place conversations continue!

Jim: I didn't get the "pun" aspect of SPRING ROLL. Did you?

Jeff: ROLL sounds like ROLE. Role, as in a part to play!

Jim: That's not how puns work. They'd have included "homophonic" or "phonetic" in the clue.

Jeff: Puns. Have. No. Rules!

Jim: Maybe not in the vast lawlessness of the American Colonies. In Canada, every schoolboy is dutifully required to study and memorize "The Primer for Prim Punditry."

Jeff: Ha ha ha! Wait. You're kidding, right?

Jim: Rule #1 of Punditry: Thou Shalt Not Phoneticate. Rule #2: Honor Thy Groans. Truly, the punniness today comes in the form of "roll" used in the "roll call" sense.

Jeff: Whoa. Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

Brilliant theme concept, SPRING ROLL hinting at calling the roll of SPRING-related roles. One of the March women in Little Women, April something, someone named MAY from a show that was so terrible even this superhero fanboy averted his eyes, and JUNE CLEAVER, my secret boyhood crush.

Both Jim and I had a tough time with this solve, both of us having serious gaps in our knowledge of fictional characters. I was relieved to hear that Jim couldn't recall MARMEE MARCH. I'm not the only uncivilized boor — take that, Canadia!

And get this. Jim only barely recognized JUNE CLEAVER. Score one for the American educational system!

Point is, the theme concept was WITTy (Wish I Thought of That). It's fraught with danger, though, since name-heavy puzzles are alienating enough when you're using celebs. Going one level deeper into fictional characters ... some solvers will squee over them, and some will be haters because WTF CROSSWORD, I HAVE TO KNOW GREY'S ANATOMY CHARACTERS? Perilous territory.

A quick fix that could have helped a ton: replace MELINDA MAY with AUNT MAY from the Spider-man movies. Solvers are forced to come up with one less potentially arbitrary-seeming name, and even better, the gridwork becomes about four times easier. A central 7 is so easy to build around that it'd be easy to reduce the count of ABAT AGA AME MGR PEI plural EMMAS.

Better yet (but more invasive) would be to break up SPRING / ROLL, placing them in a corner, intersecting at the R. Maybe even change it to ROLE, for better comedic effect! (Quiet, you Canadians.)

Point is, I loved the theme concept, and would have jumped at a chance to take this one to the next level. If Laura could have found more accessible names and pulled off a smoother grid, it would have been an easy POW! choice.

How appropriate, Laura's picture featuring salt and pepper hair! Hopefully no one will react with salty language when I say that Laura is worth her salt today.

No wonder people take me with a (massive) grain of salt.

Aside from the three SALT phrases I attempted to weave together in the first paragraph, I couldn't find others. Surprising — I would have guessed there'd be at least a dozen. Sure, there are shorties like SALT LICK and OLD SALT, but you can't feature those in a Sunday puzzle. I admire the tightness of the theme.

(Considering I'm one of the 3.14 people in the universe who would pump a fist at the sight of UNIVERSAL TURING MACHINE, it's good that Laura left it out.)

I wondered for a while if it would have been better to use an assortment of chemicals and their substitutions, but what other common chemicals are there that can be represented (with no numbers)? For some solvers, even making the leap from salt to NaCl could be hard, anyway.

Great NACL phrases! With rebuses, the crossing entries often have to be short, and that leads them toward not standing out. I appreciate how colorful RAN A CLOSE SECOND and PUTS ON A CLINIC are.

My first impression of theme density was that the puzzle felt thin. Just five themers to flesh out a 21x21? Not meaty enough for my taste, but the two long NACL entries, plus a whole lot of color—DRIVE UP A WALL, who doesn't like a TAX CREDIT, NON EVENT, ERASMUS, PAD THAI, RED FLAG, TINY TIM—helps make up for it.

I would have loved one more long SALT phrase, but not at the expense of any more crossword glue. ATNO DEUT EUR etc. I sere—er, see—you.

Nice job spreading out the SALT crystals, too. Even though there are only five of them, they cover most of the grid. It's just the southeast corner that felt a bit left out.

Overall, a solid rebus concept with something a little different.

Imagine this nerd's eyes, boinging wide with delight upon uncovering MULTIPLICATIVE INVERSE. Ooh, yeah! Wait. Somehow that's linked to THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY? FOR REAL? We're already at MACH SIX and still accelerating! Please be a higher math equation or a new physics discovery, please please please!

Counting the number of Ts in the long phrases?

From two Ts to five Ts?

Anything more? No?

Don't tease me like that!

I did enjoy the shock of the empty grid's arresting visual. Check out all of those Ts, arranged in the shape of a capital pi. Mirror symmetry instead of standard rotational symmetry, and a big X-ish shape in the middle, too? Laura sure knows how to grab my attention. I don't know that it belongs in the Grid Art Hall of Fame, but it's memorable.

It's rare for a constructor to debut on a Sunday, since Sunday 140-word puzzles are maybe an order of magnitude harder to make than a weekday. Then, to go down to only 136 words, upping the difficulty by another factor of 2 or 3? Yikes!

Did you notice that there aren't any other Ts in the grid? That's an elegant touch — one which makes gridwork yet again harder. The inability to work with an ubiquitous letter hamstrings you.

I'd have asked for one more revision, given the excess of ATMAN FAIRE PULLA AMO ERNE and on and on. Going down to 136 words does allow for the inclusion of some great extra bonuses — ABSCISSA, AIRWAVES, GO BROKE, LIVES A LIVE, O HENRY, ON A JAG are delights, and the list keeps on going! — but the overall tradeoff left the grid with an unpolished feel. Breaking up ROGER FEDERER and DELIVERY ROOM would have been a shame but would allow for a better overall result.

I'd have loved something more with those Ts, some sort of Mad Hatteresque tea party. There have been several crosswords playing on black square shapes, including typography marks, a raft of Ls, "Utah" blocks, and a weekday implementation of Ts. I'm sure there's room for more. The best ones give the solver an amazing insight, whereas T-totaling isn't a big enough payoff for a Sunday puzzle.

Overall, though, I'm impressed with Laura's audacious vision for the puzzle. I hope solvers appreciate how incredibly difficult Laura's task was.