I'm excited to be back in the Wall Street Journal. It's a paper that's sold everywhere (good for me because I still buy a physical copy when I have a crossword running) and its puzzles aren't behind a paywall. As I've mentioned before, the WSJ's editorial process is much different from the NYT's in that you don't get a proof to review before publication. I'd prefer to see their changes before it's published, but I also understand that we live in a world of finite resources. It would be taxing to deliver proofs in advance, engage in back-and-forth with finicky authors, etc. Besides, the editors know what they're doing. (Also, I've only had two puzzles run with them, and it's possible that my experience isn't representative.)
Some things I like about this crossword:
- Theme density: 60 squares dedicated to theme entries (40 is generally the minimum and 50 is pretty standard)
- 36 black squares (relatively low for a themed puzzle) and no cheater squares, though honestly I don't know how much that really matters. It's one of those things that constructors notice way more than solvers, I'm sure.
- The cluing of the themed answers: I originally just wanted to clue each themer simply as "Conform" but I think that would've made the puzzle drier and I'm glad I put more thought into it.
- My clues for 30-Down and 45D, which I really hope survive the editorial process (edit: 30D survived but 45D [Upon un-retiring (for the first time), he wore the number of this clue] did not).
Things that gave me trouble:
- Laying out the grid. I always struggle with this, to be honest, but it's even tougher for me with four 15s, because there are even more possibilities than normal. (If I had, say, two 12s and two 11s, then at least I'd be somewhat restricted in that the 12s and 11s would have to be symmetrically opposite each other. Here, any of the 15s could go anywhere.)
- Filling the bottom-left corner. (ALIS crossing TSK at 64A/60D was the best I could do.)
- The top-right corner seems okay but pretty blah. So many common letters (Rs, Es, etc.), not a lot of Scrabble points (something I'm only noticing now as I look back at this puzzle for the first time in months)
These clues (among others) did not survive:
- 43D: [An infant tends to be an early one; a teen, not so much]
- 27A: [How Al felt after falling just shy of the presidency in 2000?]
The grid virtually survived in whole but the central-east section was originally SWAMI at 44A and SLUM and PESO at 40D and 41D. I think their edit is an improvement, especially given how dominant IGA has been recently.
Minutia:
I don't pretend to be an expert, but let me quickly point out my clue for 53A as a teaching point. RIO appears in crosswords all the time, probably due to its vowel-to-consonant ratio. With a word that shows up all the time, it's easy to give it a straightforward clue - [Largest city in Brazil], for instance - and move on. There's nothing wrong with that, especially with an early-week puzzle. You've got to give solvers some footholds, after all. But too many straightforward clues can make for a boring solve.
So, what's a different way to clue RIO? Well, just to give one example, there was a pretty famous soccer player named RIO Ferdinand from a decade ago. But cluing a word as a proper noun often makes it a "you either know it or you don't" situation, which can frustrate solvers if it occurs too frequently. Here, even if you had the I and O, if you had never heard of the guy, you wouldn't know his name: GIO? MIO? There's nothing wrong with proper names, of course, and in fact they're welcome for some variety. But my puzzles normally have enough proper names that can only be clued as such, so I'm not going to go out of my way to create another one.
(At this point, I have to clarify that yes, I realize RIO the city is a proper noun. I suppose I should be using a different term. But RIO the city is a well known proper noun that has entered the general knowledge in a way that almost no person, no matter how famous, will. Also, I'm operating on the assumption that everyone knows RIO the city, which isn't fair, but I do think that of all the ways to clue it, referencing the city would be the easiest for the general population.)
You can also go with a cute clue like [City that's the center of industriousness?]* as appeared in the Washington Post in 2019. I love clues like this but you have to use them sparingly, especially in an early-week puzzle, since they're normally more challenging.
A nice way to add some flair to the clue for RIO without necessarily making it tricky is to reference something noteworthy about the city. [2016 Olympics host city], for instance. Even if you never pay attention to the Olympics, you know that it's gotta be a large city. So, when you have the I and O, you can drop in the R with confidence.
Taking it a step further, I clued RIO as a reference to the Las Vegas casino. I could've described it as [Host casino of the World Series of Poker] but that would be more challenging because that doesn't give you any indication of what the name of the casino could be. Using the example above, if you had the I and O, you'd still be stuck since a bunch of letters could plausibly fit. At the end of the solve, you'd learn something knew ("huh, didn't realize there was a Vegas casino called 'Rio'") but it might be aggravating if that's where you get stuck.
Instead, by cluing it as [Las Vegas casino with an Ipanema Tower], you get the best of both worlds: you get to teach the solver something new while also making this gettable, because even if the solver has never been to Las Vegas, he can use his knowledge of Ipanema to deduce that the answer is Rio.
Again, I don't think any of these clues are necessarily bad, or even better/worse than the others. Sometimes, the situation calls for a straightforward, no-nonsense clue. Sometimes, you've got more latitude and you can work in a piece of trivia. Other times, you can afford to just flat-out make the clue tougher by referencing the soccer player (or the casino without any tieback to the city). It's just good to have options.
Thanks as always for reading and hope this was helpful for some of y'all out there.
*IndustRIOusness, get it?
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