Ailee Yoshida’s New York Times crossword— Sophia’s write-up
Theme: COFFEE BREAK – The grid contains the names of four coffee orders, “broken” between two answers.
New York Times, 12 16 2024, By Ailee Yoshida
- 17a [Sound of an unfortunate bird poop landing]/18a [Blab] – SPLAT/TELL
- 22a [Hi-___ image] / 23a [Department handling media inquiries] – RES/PRESS OFFICE
- 48a [Competition whose winner gets a tiara and sash] / 52[Gesture of approval] – MISS AMERICA/NOD
- 56a [Muppet with his own “world” on “Sesame Street”] / 57a [Blingy piece of neckwear] – ELMO/CHAIN
- 34a [Timeout at work … as represented visually by this puzzle’s circled letters] – COFFEE BREAK
Anyone else have “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter stuck in their head after solving this one? I think this theme and revealer is super effective. COFFEE BREAK is a fun phrase on its own, and perfectly explains what’s going on here. All of the answers included in the coffee phrases are solid, with PRESS OFFICE and MISS AMERICA as the standouts (although I did try to fill in “beauty pageant” at first).
The thing with hidden word puzzles is that the rest of the fill needs to be strong enough to withstand the fact that there aren’t necessarily long theme entries – the puzzle can very easily become full of short, boring fill. But that’s not what happened here! There’s a lot of fun fill, like CHIA SEED, ELEGANCE, ARTISTIC, AVOCADO, SO I HEAR. There are a few pieces of fill that are suboptimal (ILIUM, IF I), but overall everything works.
Random other thoughts: I enjoy how much cookie related content is in this puzzle – the BEAR-shaped Teddy Grahams, Double STUF Oreos, and cookies in a SLEEVE. The hardest part of the puzzle for me was the bottom middle, since I didn’t know Phil SIMMS. And some clue highights: [This stinks!] for ODOR, [Like lines / that rhyme / and keep / good time] for POETIC.
Happy Monday all!