NYT Crossword Answers for July 15, 2023

Jun 15, 2023

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Wordplay, The CROSSWORD COLUMN

Jeff Chen’s themeless grid is stacked with surprises.

By Caitlin Lovinger

SATURDAY PUZZLE — Jeff Chen is a prolific constructor who collaborates with seemingly everyone in the puzzleverse, including Jim Horne on the indispensable crossword statistics site xwordinfo.com. This is his first solo Saturday grid since 2017; its design is complex (with unusual left-right mirror symmetry), and there’s a ton of wild fill, as one would expect from a guru.

The finer points of construction are often lost on me, but I do think this grid is abnormally expressive. It looks like a street art installation by Invader: a low-resolution alien rolling its eyes a little. Its cluing spoke to me, too. As a rusty ex-student of French and horticulture (in different eras), I had enough entries at the tip of my tongue to get hooked into most of the puzzle, although the bottom of the grid was quite challenging.

22A. This clue was a debut and a dad joke that I recognized instantly, but for a maddeningly long time I could only think of the punchline only in singular form. “What might be said by successful bettors … or sesame seeds?” solves to WE’RE ON A ROLL.

31A/54A. Thank you to my previous self, who sat through hours of high school French, because clues like these are gimmes even decades later and also make me feel worldly (until someone asks me to pronounce them). “Meilleur ___ (French ‘bestie’)” is AMI, and “___-feuille (French pastry named for its layers)” is MILLE.

42A. This is another clue that brought back memories (Tipper Gore, anyone?). “Record label” might seem antiquated to younger solvers who are used to getting their music in digital form. This clue is a reference to the black-and-white EXPLICIT CONTENT stickers that adorned records, tapes and CDs starting in the 1980s.

49A. I’m thankful for crossing letters when I have to solve a clue like this in reverse: “Like Google searches, typically” is really vague, but it does describe CASE INSENSITIVE. (The potential pun clue that Mr. Chen discusses in his constructor notes is pretty great but would have been too sophisticated for me here.)

23D. This is a debut. It makes perfect sense in the rearview mirror but was a hard one to deduce. I chose other locations — undercover, behind the lines — but “Where spies work” solves to ON THE INSIDE.

27D. The two bottom corners of this grid are connected to the rest of the puzzle only by the two span entries at 42- and 49-Across. Even if you solved those, you would need to figure out some tricky fill to get more letters for the corner blocks. I thought of two tools that fit this clue’s definition of “Some bottle openers,” but church keys and corkscrews were both a letter too long. The entry is close: SCREWCAPS.

31D. The “Plant genus named after the Greek goddess of nature” is ARTEMISIA, an entry that hasn’t been in the crossword for over 20 years. This group of plants is used for medications and absinthe as well as ornamentation.

Even after a decade of constructing crosswords, I still learn from my mistakes. I learned quite a lot from making this themeless.

Given the ultrahigh competition in themeless puzzles, you must do something extraordinary to get noticed. That might be a unique grid pattern, wickedly sharp clues strewn throughout or a dense packing of star entries that Will Shortz can’t help but notice. Best to hit all three marks.

This one started well enough. Playing around with mirror symmetry and a pair of pyramid blocks for a couple of days finally resulted in something that looked both fun and not impossible to fill. The most constrained region was the bottom, with those long slots serving as inflexible backbones.

After a week of hacking, I landed on ON THE INSIDE / AMERICAN LIT / EXPLICIT CONTENT / CASE INSENSITIVE, and it felt right. CASE INSENSITIVE had great cluing potential, playing on “capital punishment,” and EXPLICIT CONTENT made me think about “sworn statements.” So I filled the rest of the grid, assuming the clues would gel.

Three weeks and many sworn statements later, I still couldn’t phrase my clues to my liking. The best I could do — after nearly a hundred rewrites — was this:EXPLICIT CONTENT [Warning issued before sworn statements?]CASE INSENSITIVE [State that forbids capital punishment?]

I figured Will and team would polish these up and call them good. Why didn’t I think from the start that joking around about capital punishment would likely never fly? Or spend more time trying to word something much better around “sworn statements” that would actually seem innocently clever instead of being a dead giveaway?

I #@!EXPLICIT CONTENT#$! swear, next time, I will.

The New York Times Crossword has an open submission system, and you can submit your puzzles online.

For tips on how to get started, read our series, “How to Make a Crossword Puzzle.”

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