SUNDAY PUZZLE — Will Shortz, in his print introduction to this grid, writes: “Adam Wagner, of Oakland, California, is a creative lead at Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators. He is the creator of the online games Shuffalo and Catalogs on The New Yorker’s website. Adam calls it a ‘crossword puzzle’ that the six topic examples in this puzzle worked perfectly in length, interconnectedness, and symmetry. Sometimes a crossword puzzle It’s just meant to be.” Talk about a lot of moving parts! It was difficult for me to make sense of this puzzle, but once everything falls into place, it’s a wonderfully elegant system. Today’s ThemeSolvers will notice six rectangular arrangements of gray boxes in this grid. They are all two squares high and six squares wide, and each has a black outline with rounded corners and four arrows indicating 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 useful insightful entries, at 49 and 85 wide, the first of which illuminates a high-level feature of these shapes that I didn’t recognize on my own. The way the clues work in this set of themes is confusing before you can get the hang of it. There are six clues that stand out because they don’t make sense, at first glance, and they also run through six of the 12 rows that form the gray rectangles. These appear at 19, 28, 66, 73, 112 and 124 widths (all gray rows with those thick lines, which turns out to be relevant) and are all jumbles of words and punctuation. 19A, for example, is [ … in global commerce)(Conflict … ].The rectangles contain six more rows, above or below those already mentioned. Two of them are independent entrances with their own tracks: 22A, [Potential benefit]which runs below 19A and forms the upper rectangle, and 121A, [Certain factory machine]which is paired with 124A at the bottom of the network. The remaining four are six-letter runs in longer entries; you will see them in 32, 68, 70 and 103 widths. The 19 and 22 wide shape is a good gateway to unraveling this confusing mechanism. This is where I cracked the code (i.e. I used brute force of the letters from the crossed entries to complete each square). 1-down, [Bewilder]is a hilariously appropriate clue for this point in the puzzle: it resolves to STUMP, meaning T is the first letter of 19A and U is the first letter of 22A. With the additional help of 2 through 6-Down, which are reasonably easy for Sunday solvers to deduce, I had all the letters in each entry. 19A is TETRAD and 22A is UPSIDE, which goes with the track [Potential benefit].Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you’re in Reader mode, exit and log in to your Times account or subscribe to all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Do you want all of The Times? Subscribe.
