Priyanka Sethy and Matthew Stock put us to the test.
SUNDAY PUZZLE — It’s back-to-school season, no matter how long ago we last went back to school; this grid is a reminder of that, but it’s a fun one. It’s a collaboration between Matthew Stock, who has made two Sunday grids and several daily puzzles for The Times, and Priyanka Sethy, who makes her constructing debut. Ms. Sethy is a bicoastal management consultant, and Mr. Stock works for a math education nonprofit in East St. Louis, Ill.; they met via the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory on Facebook and worked together (from Ms. Sethy’s theme idea) over video.
The process behind the making of this puzzle is pretty modern, as is a lot of the trivia in today’s fill. Star students may sense the multipart theme earlier than I did; it sneaked up on me, and I found the whole experience fresh and enjoyable.
Tricky Clues
These two constructors injected a lot of personality, although I can’t say if Mr. Stock is behind the hard mathy clue for ORIGIN, for example, or if Ms. Sethy is to thank for any of the references to prominent female activists, lawyers and entertainers. A lot of fun wordplay includes ETA (rhymes with beta, zeta and theta), the office pun, TACKS and the adorable clue for STANDUP.
82A: “Tarnation” popped into my head as the natural ending for this unfinished phrase clue, and I couldn’t get rid of it (great word that once appeared in a cryptic as an anagram for a popular movie director, apropos of nothing). Not that it fit, but the entry here took me several parsings to get: so nofa? Sono fa? Aw, SON OF A … ! So OBVI, once you break it up right.
123A: This is a debut entry that describes a vast region of the Southwest that includes most of Nevada, half of Utah and small parts of California, Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming: the GREAT BASIN.
4D: Welcome to the crossword, chicken KATSU! This Japanese dish has been around for over a century (and might have schnitzel as its inspiration), but it’s a debut entry today.
40D: Speaking of eating, there are two culinary terms that work well in this spot: I chose “gravy,” which is what I call unexpected extra money in a paycheck for some forgotten bit of easy work, but the right entry is ICING (which is certainly a bonus on most cakes).
107D: Women of note blaze a wide trail through this fill, which I love; OPAL Tometi, AMAL Clooney, JANE Fonda, TSAI Ing-wen, CECE Winans and ENID Blyton all make appearances, as well as the sports- and podcaster Katie NOLAN, who’s a clue debut.
Today’s Theme
This is a theme where the puzzle’s title, “Study Breaks,” really helps, as do the two kinds of indicators in the grid itself. There are seven circled letters, each in a theme entry; each of those letters is embedded in a series of three, four or five shaded squares. Beside those two features, the seven theme clues don’t distinguish themselves, so this is not a puzzle where your mind can anticipate other examples once you’ve solved one or two.
My first sure thing was the name trivia at 74-Across, the “openly lesbian anchor” who also happens to be a crossword constructor herself, RACHEL MADDOW. I noted the shaded/bubbled CHE(L)M only briefly, and used crosses from this big entry to make some headway on the east side of this grid, which made the bigger theme entry beneath it apparent. At 92-Across, “Ones fighting for change” are POLITICAL ACTIVISTS; the shaded/bubbled letters here are CAL(A)C.
Honestly, in retrospect I should have parsed out those shaded letters and noticed that they did not include the circled letter, but I missed the importance of that feature. Nothing clicked at all until I’d reached the (fittingly) final theme entry in the puzzle at 119-Across: “Bringing up the rear.” This solves to LAST IN LINE; the shaded/circle bit is LA(S)TIN, and the shaded letters make only a recognizable, unabbreviated term: LATIN. Oh! LATIN, CALC, CHEM. Back to school, indeed — and I can assure you that I’d fail any test in any of those subjects today, no matter how hard I crammed three decades ago.
The topmost theme clue, at 21-Across, is mathematical, and it hammered the above point home, because I needed a lot of crosses to solve “Function whose output is 45° when applied to 1.” Gee, Mr. Stock, I probably did know that once; it’s ARCTANGENT, which includes AR(C)T. There’s a class I could see taking again and surviving, especially if it involved pastels and not an exam on the lesser painters of the Renaissance.
Notice that each circled letter is in the midst of an academic subject, which makes for a very neat trick that might make you recall the puzzle’s title, “Study Breaks,” that I mentioned before. If you read those letters from top to bottom, they spell out what they actually do to the words spelled by the shaded letters: CUT CLASS.
Constructor Notes
Priyanka: I am so ridiculously excited for this puzzle! Big shout-out to Matthew for mentoring me through the process of discovering crossword construction as an incredibly fulfilling pandemic hobby, and to my roommate Sofia who got me into crossword solving in the first place! We spent many a morning on the 1 train, with me trying and failing to make conversation while she raced to best her Tuesday solve time. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I figured. As a fairly self-aware nerd, I found this theme very appropriate as a debut. Matthew and I started out with CORE CURRICULUM as a revealer but meandered our way to CUT CLASS, a journey which certainly mirrored my experiences from first year to fourth year in college.
Matthew: I’m beyond thrilled to be a part of Priyanka’s New York Times debut! We first collaborated on a puzzle for the Universal Crossword syndicate in early 2020, and I’m so happy to have worked together and been friends ever since. Priyanka brought so much joy and excitement to each step of the construction process for “Study Breaks,” and I think it absolutely shows in the liveliness of the theme answers and the freshness and inclusivity of the fill. I’m proud to share this puzzle with her and with you all, and hope you enjoyed solving it as much as I did co-constructing it!
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