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Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who chooses to go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard.

Does today's grid look weird to you? Editors can and do, flip rows and columns on submitted crosswords. Which grid looks better?

The one on the right probably looks more normal. We're used to seeing long answers going Across. Sometimes they go Down for thematic reasons. Today's themeless seems to have long answers on the left and right edges purely for aesthetics. It looks a little like DNA strands, right? (Both those previous links go to Elizabeth C. Gorski puzzles.)

This is the NYT debut for Juliet Corless, but you can tell this is not the work of a crossword novice. Several of her other puzzles are at The Daily Princetonian.

I'm always happy to see Phillipa SOO in a puzzle, although that will be tough if you're not a Hamilnerd. HOREB was the mountain where Moses got the tablets with the Ten Commandments written by the hand of God. Too bad he broke them. The tablets, I mean. Maybe the commandments, too, I'm not sure. NCAA v Alston was a fight about the National Collegiate Athletic Association profiting from the namesakes and likenesses of college athletes. That's an antitrust violation, according to The Supremes.

Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are bit roles from a 1939 MGM movie musical. I wonder what films made today will be seen as iconic 83 years from now.

Congratulations, Ms. Corless. It's an Amazeballs crossword.

– puzzle by Juliet Corless

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who is making a game-saving CATCH in the World Series.

There used to be only two questions about ear piercing: how much will it hurt, and should I ask mom for permission or forgiveness? Now, you need to decide between industrial, helix, forward helix, rook, DAITH, inner conch, outer conch, tragus, anti-tragus, upper lobe, and standard lobe. (See chart here.) Oh, go for all of the above.

Saturday clues can be amusing even when they're not hard. "Phrase that's often contracted … or suffix for something contracted" is clever and memorable. Sometimes they pull memories from deep in your past. At one time, you knew pocketful of POSY, but if you don't have kids, you haven't heard that in a while.

As always, your personal experience can help or hinder your solve. I live in Seattle, so I'm unlikely to be fooled by "Washington can only mean DC," and I have much familiarity with SEA-TAC. If you live on the east coast, that might be trickier.

We use METONYMs so often that it's easy to forget they're figures of speech. No, the White House didn't literally make a statement, but hearing that it did doesn't sound weird at all.

Crossword clues don't have to always be true. Sometimes true is close enough. Only a tiny wee itsy fraction of IOS APPs are products of Apple Inc, but a few are, and, especially on a Saturday, that's fair game.

NENEH Cherry explained that Buffalo stance is "an attitude you have to have in order to get by. It's not about fashion but about survival in inner cities and elsewhere."

– puzzle by John Westwig

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who is playing a small role in a superhero movie.

One way to make a Saturday crossword challenging is to include words you might not be familiar with. Recent Saturdays have asked us to know the technical term PETABYTE, the modern novelist/poet OCEAN VUONG, and the recent slang word ZHUZH.

That's not the strategy today, where mostly common answer words could easily be clued at a Tuesday or Wednesday level. The difficulty is all in the clues, particularly those that play on initial assumptions.

• "Some budget graphics" isn't about inexpensive line charts. They're graphics about budgets.
• "Supergirl, eg." isn't looking for details about that specific superhero, only that she's an ALIEN.
• "It resurfaces after 20 minutes" doesn't refer to some denizen of the deep who emerges for oxygen after a long dive, it's about the machine that resurfaces the ice after a 20-minute period in hockey.

Wait, what? ZAMBONI is a common answer word?

This explains why it's difficult to judge the difficulty of any crossword or write about it. It's natural to assume your common knowledge is, if not universal, at least common. If you grew up in Canada or if you love hockey, ZAMBONI is a delightfully clever answer to a misleading clue. Otherwise, it's just a string of letters in a disappointing puzzle.

Zamboni or not, today's (mostly) common words means that your experience depends more on your ability to think creatively. If you like this sort of thing as much as I do, don't ignore the Puns and Anagrams and even the Cryptic crosswords that appear every few weeks.

– puzzle by Billy Bratton

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who is dealing with a flurry of transcription errors.

We sometimes see complicated words in clues that we have to parse into likely component parts to divine their meanings. For example, "Suffering from nyctophobia" means AFRAID OF THE DARK.

Today's puzzle flips that around — we get the complicated word in the answer — and then there's the new twist that your usual parsing strategy might lead you astray.

ARCTOPHILE is obviously a lover of ARCTO. Arcto means "north" or "arctic", but arktós is also a Greek word for "bear."

The theme answers might feel made up, but they're all in your dictionary. I know some TYPOMANIAcs. The publishing business is tough to break into. PANTOPHOBIA is no longer in vogue. Medical professionals prefer generalized anxiety disorder or panic disorder. MANDUCATES is perhaps more obvious, but the clue is funny. METROLOGY isn't even a debut answer. You probably remember it from that 1943 crossword.

The OK GO answer is more than reason enough to watch this amazing video. No tricks, no wires, no green screen:

– puzzle by John Hawksley

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who is busy playing TWISTER.

Look at this lovely progression. A new color is added at each step:

🔴🟡 are the circles in the MASTERCARD LOGO
🔴🟡🟢 in a TRAFFIC LIGHT
🔴🟡🟢🔵 on a TWISTER MAT
🔴🟡🟢🔵⚫ in the OLYMPIC RINGS

Finding this set amazes me, and presenting them in increasing order impresses me. I love it.

Which brings me to one of the great debates among the crossword cognizanti. I've been chastised for my view that a delightful theme can overcome other weaknesses in the grid, particularly flaws that result from thematic constraints. This Joe Krozel puzzle is one of my favorites, but since it suffers from "bad fill," not everyone agrees that it's brilliant.

Today's grid fails the typical analysis. There are 44 black squares — way too many! There are 24 3-letter words — not only a sin in itself, but ERA, ONE, ARE, ETA, and ERR are way too common. Each has appeared over 1,000 times! Clearly, this puzzle is crap.

But I look at that colored circle progression and think, I would have never thought such a theme was possible. Wow.

NYT can't do color in daily crosswords yet. Would you have enjoyed the puzzle more if the clues were just those colored circles instead of the color names? You can decide for yourself. Our goal is always usually to match the NYT print version as closely as possible, but today we changed the clues below the grid. Don't tell Will Shortz!

For the record, the official italicized theme clues in print are:

• Red and yellow circles
• Red, yellow and green circles
• Red, yellow, green and blue circles
• Red, yellow, green, blue and black circles

– puzzle by Erica Hsiung Wojcik and Matthew Stock