SUNDAY PUZZLE — Will Shortz, in his print introduction to this grid, writes: “Adam Wagner, of Oakland, Calif., is a creative lead at Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators. He’s the creator of the online games Shuffalo and Catalogues on The New Yorker’s website. Adam says it’s ‘crossword kismet’ that the six theme examples in this puzzle worked out perfectly in length, interlock and symmetry. Sometimes a crossword is just meant to be.”
Talk about a lot of moving parts! This puzzle was a doozy for me to make sense of, but once everything clicks into place, it’s a beautifully elegant system.
Today’s Theme
Solvers will notice six rectangular arrangements of gray boxes in this grid. They are all two squares tall and six squares wide, and each has a black outline with rounded corners and four arrows that indicate clockwise or counterclockwise movement. Each rectangle also has a thick vertical line separating two squares in its top or bottom row. There are also two extremely helpful revealer entries, at 49- and 85-Across, the first of which illuminates a high-end feature of these shapes that I didn’t recognize on my own.
The way the clues work in this theme set is confusing before you get a handle on the trick. There are six clues that stand out because they make no sense, on first glance, and they also run through six of the 12 rows that make up the gray rectangles. These appear at 19-, 28-, 66-, 73-, 112- and 124-Across — all of the gray rows with those thick lines, which turns out to be relevant — and all are jumbles of words and punctuation. 19A, for example, is [ … in global commerce)(Conflict … ].
The rectangles contain six more rows, above or below the ones already mentioned. Two of them are stand-alone entries with their own clues: 22A, [Potential benefit], which runs below 19A and forms the topmost rectangle, and 121A, [Certain factory machine], which is paired with 124A at the bottom of the grid. The remaining four are six-letter runs in longer entries; you’ll see those in 32-, 68-, 70- and 103-Across.
The shape at 19- and 22-Across is a good gateway to unraveling this confounding mechanism. This is where I cracked the code (i.e., used the brute force of letters from crossing entries to fill in every square). 1-Down, [Bewilder], is a hilariously apt clue for this spot in the puzzle: It solves to STUMP, which means that T is the first letter in 19A, and U is the first letter of 22A. With the additional help of 2- through 6-Down, which are reasonably easy to deduce for Sunday solvers, I had every letter in each entry. 19A is TETRAD, and 22A is UPSIDE, which goes with the clue [Potential benefit].