Constructor: Rich Proulx
Relative difficulty: Medium (4:05) (though I'm seeing people say it's both very easy and very hard, so who knows?)
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THEME: SEVEN WONDERS (49A: Monuments of classical antiquity ... or what literally is missing from this puzzle) — seven answers need "WONDER" before or after them to make (full) sense:
Theme answers:
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Bizarre theme execution here. The NW is essentially a (half-way decent!) themeless puzzle: lots of white space, splashy marquee answer, Totally Devoid Of Theme. Then you go tripping through the rest of the grid, encountering theme material on the NE-to-SW axis, though probably not even knowing you're encountering some of it, as stuff like BRA and DRUG went in for me without my knowing they were theme material. The "WONDER"s sometimes come before the answer, sometimes after. Maybe you think there's a pattern, but beyond symmetry, there really isn't. Then the revealer comes, and the wording of the clue is weird: they are the "SEVEN WONDERS *Of The Ancient World*" in every formulation I've ever heard. Why not just say "Monuments of the ancient world" in your clue? (clue isn't bad, just odd, for this reason). And there you are. The "Seven" part, by the time you get it to it, is less big revelation and more "oh, is that how many there are? I wasn't really paying attention." There's an added problem if you decide to overthink the theme, which I saw expressed by Evan Birnholz (Washington Post xword writer/editor) on Twitter: if you know that the SEVEN WONDERS have largely disappeared, then you are apt to wonder (!) if there's some theme connection between the actual "wonders" being gone and the word "WONDER" being gone seven times in this grid ... the problem with that idea being that one of the original SEVEN WONDERS still exists (the Great Pyramid of Giza). So ... yeah. Frustrating to see an *almost* next-level theme idea not quite come into focus. Thankfully, I was not thinking as deeply as Evan.
Those giant corners are so weird for a mid-week themed puzzles. I'm not mad, as they are pretty well filled, but the puzzle definitely took a quality dip once I moved from that NW corner into the rest of the grid. Themes are just Hard to do perfectly, and if they're not done perfectly, they mostly just feel like a burden on the fill (resulting in ASYLA and DROITS and KOR AGIN UTE OISE and what not). Giant corners are pretty E-R-S-T heavy, but they came out OK.
DADAART feels painfully redundant (YEW TREES slightly less so). The second half of OVERFILL held me up pretty bad, for some reason. Seemed like those four letters could go anywhere (16A: Exceed the capacity of). I lucked out with PELEG, having seen it just this past weekend at the tournament (I've read "Moby-Dick" and would've gotten it eventually, but it was nice to have PELEG fresh on my mind). SLOW JAM is great. This puzzle feels like a good themeless that got infected by Dutch Theme Disease (that's a play on "Dutch elm disease," not a slur against the Dutch). The NRA remains a terrorist org. that profits from the blood of children (40A: Range org.) and you should keep them the hell out of your grids. Good day.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Medium (4:05) (though I'm seeing people say it's both very easy and very hard, so who knows?)
Theme answers:
- BREAD
- ONE-HIT
- DRUG
- BRA
- STEVIE
- WOMAN
- LAND (32D: Domain of the Queen of Hearts)
Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize (an award Ishiguro had previously won in 1989 for The Remains of the Day), for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1] It also received an ALA Alex Award in 2006. A film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek was released in 2010; a Japanese television drama aired in 2016. (wikipedia)
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Those giant corners are so weird for a mid-week themed puzzles. I'm not mad, as they are pretty well filled, but the puzzle definitely took a quality dip once I moved from that NW corner into the rest of the grid. Themes are just Hard to do perfectly, and if they're not done perfectly, they mostly just feel like a burden on the fill (resulting in ASYLA and DROITS and KOR AGIN UTE OISE and what not). Giant corners are pretty E-R-S-T heavy, but they came out OK.
DADAART feels painfully redundant (YEW TREES slightly less so). The second half of OVERFILL held me up pretty bad, for some reason. Seemed like those four letters could go anywhere (16A: Exceed the capacity of). I lucked out with PELEG, having seen it just this past weekend at the tournament (I've read "Moby-Dick" and would've gotten it eventually, but it was nice to have PELEG fresh on my mind). SLOW JAM is great. This puzzle feels like a good themeless that got infected by Dutch Theme Disease (that's a play on "Dutch elm disease," not a slur against the Dutch). The NRA remains a terrorist org. that profits from the blood of children (40A: Range org.) and you should keep them the hell out of your grids. Good day.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]