Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle (2024)

THEME:"Misstated" — US state puns ... that is it:

Theme answers:

• "FLOOR IT, DUH!" (Florida) (22A: Getaway driver's plan obviously?)
• "MISS IS ZIPPY" (Mississippi) (28A: "She sure runs fast!"?)
• TEN ASEA (Tennessee) (34A: Captain and nine crew members?)
• "ORE AGAIN!?" (Oregon) (45A: Jaded miner's remark?)
• MINI SODA (Minnesota) (51A: co*ke-ette?)
• INDIE ANNA (Indiana) (60A: Actress Kendrick, when appearing in smaller films?)
• DELL-AWARE (Delaware) (70A: PC-sensitive, in a way?)
• "WHY OMING?" (Wyoming) (80A: "You realize this is a silent meditation, right?")
• EYED A HOE (Idaho) (86A: Considered buying that garden tool?)
• "HUH, WHY 'E'?" (Hawaii) (96A: "Wait ... can we not play this in F sharp instead?")
• "VERGE IN, YEAH" (Virginia) (102A: "Mm-hmm, get a little nearer"?)
• "WHISK ON, SON!" (Wisconsin) (113A: Parent's encouragement to a budding chef?)

Word of the Day: RISSOLE(14D: Meat-filled puff) —

Arissole(fromLatinrusseolus, meaningreddish, viaFrenchin which "rissoler" means "to redden") is a smallpattyenclosed inpastryor rolled inbreadcrumbs, usuallybakedordeep fried.The filling hassavoryingredients,most oftenmincedmeat,fishor cheese, and is served as anentrée,main course, orside dish.

In Australia and New Zealand, a rissole is patty of minced meat and other ingredients, without a pastry covering but often covered in a breadcrumb coating, similar toHamburg steakandSalisbury steak. (wikipedia)

• • •

["Dude..."]

Once again, if you enjoy groaner puns, have I got a puzzle for you. Not so much for me. But for you, maybe. If so, lucky you. For me: painful from start to finish. Never not painful. I admire some of the more, uh, ambitious puns, I guess, because at least they had the courage to flop hard, but mostly, yeesh, these were rough. And off. So often just way off. Huge variations in aptness. Stuff like DELL-AWARE and INDIE ANNA are dead-on, soundwise, whereas "FLOOR IT, DUH"!?!? ... I have no idea what that answer thinks it's doing, or how it thinks it's anywhere close to punny. There's a damn "T" in there, what the hell? The worst (by far) was VERGE IN, YEAH ... I mean, I can't even begin to imagine any context, even the most fanciful context, where anyone would utter those words. I don't even know what "VERGE IN" means. Who says that? "Get a little nearer" = VERGE IN????? What are editors for if not to say "uh, no"? The clue and the answer there are both nth-degree tortured. As if dad joke-level puns weren't hard enough to endure over the course of a Very Large 21x21 canvas. "MINI SODA?" No One Pronounces The State Name That Way. It seems as if the idea today was volume. Dazzle them with ... density? Twelve themers!? When the theme is unsavory, more is not better. Why not all the states? Since quality of pun seems not to matter at all, why not keep going? "CALIPH OR NIA?" [Choice between a Muslim ruler and actress Peeples?] Or WASH IN TUN [Use wine cask for bathing?] MISHA GUN [Firearm belonging to Baryshnikov?]. Go to town. I think I almost liked EYED A HOE and "ORE AGAIN!?" and "WHISK ON, SON!" But twelve of these, in a grid that doesn't really have anything else to offer as far as marquee fill ... I was enduring fare more than I was enjoying. (You Sundays-only solvers should know that the puzzle was on a Very good run this week, from Wednesday through yesterday—there really is a Sunday-specific quality problem) (Also, there are two WHYs in the state puns... why? That kind of duplication seems ... bad.)

The puzzle was mostly easy. The theme, despite having some bonkers entries, was very easy to work out, in general, so all the difficulty really came from the fill, which was fine but forgettable, with some occasionally ugly answers and forced cluing. It's weird how often I'm asked to know this ERDOS guy's name (7D: Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers). OK, only eight times in twenty years, but that seems like a lot. ERDOS makes me miss MS/DOS. Seems like you'd do everything you could to keep that name out of your puzzle. ERDOS makes EULER seem like a household name. A moratorium on five-letter "E" mathematicians, I beg you. Never heard of RISSOLE, so that was easily the scariest / diciest / iffiest part of the solve for me. TATAR / RISSOLE ... that cross wasn't exactly in doubt, since at least TATAR meant *something* to me, but in general, RISSOLE was a yikes for me. I did like the juxtaposition of RISSOLE and ZOLA. If there's not a ZOLA RISSOLE, there should be. The clue on GEESE is 49D: V-six or V-twelve?). I mean, yes, they fly in "V" shapes, vaguely, but 6? 12? Arbitrary numbers. I mean, why not V-eight? Bizarre. Also, GEESE crosses OASES, which (as clued) could easily (or so it seemed to me) have been OASIS (56A: Sandy springs)—that's what I wrote in at first, and that made GEESE very hard to see. I also had what felt like a close call at ABS / "BOOYA!" The spelling on the latter one felt odd, and ABS had a tricky / vague clue (67A: Core components) (I think I wanted CPU there at first). Do people really use the term "COHEIR?" (77A: One of several named in a will). You just refer to the heirs as "heirs", right? Normally? Like normal people do, when they say things? I don't know that I've ever heard of YAMA (105D: Hindu god of death). I had RAMA. Not a great feeling to discover YAMA via uncovering the absolute worst themer of the bunch ("VERGE IN, YEAH!"). I still can't fathom this answer. The tone, the context, nothing. "VERGE, ENYA!," while still nonsensical, would have been so much more pleasing.

There were some bizarre clues today. Like the one on WOOD. Such a nice, versatile, ordinary word, you could clue it any number of ways, but today you clue it as a synonym of ... "woods" (33A: Where fairy tale creatures often live)? I haven't heard the woods called a "WOOD" outside of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories (set in theHundred Acre WOOD). Fairy tale characters live in the woods. With the "S" on the end. The fairy tale-based Sondheim musical (starring INDIE ANNA Kendrick!) is called Into the Woods, for god's sake, not Into the WOOD. Appropriate that that answer crosses LAID EGGS. Boo to that answer. You have to really do some heavy imaginative lifting to make "AND?" work at 119A: Sassy retort. Specifically, you have to mentally add the "?" And the sass. You end up with a kind of substitute for "Your point being?" ("YOUR POINT BEING?" would be a top-tier crossword answer, by the way, if you're looking to pad your wordlist). Do people really "frown upon" BURPs (15A: Frowned-upon sound)? I guess in some contexts it's considered rude, still, but fewer and fewer things are, and seems to me people are as apt to laugh at or ignore as "frown upon" a BURP. As I learned the last time BURP appeared in the grid (yesterday? two days ago?), there's a whole kid-lit industry dedicated to how funny BURPs are.

The one-l lama,He's a priest.The two-l llama,He's a beast.And I will betA silk pajamaThere isn't anyThree-l lllama.

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THEME: none

Word of the Day: EID AL-ADHA(13A: Islam's feast of sacrifice) —

Eid al-Adha(Arabic:عيد الأضحى,romanized:ʿĪd al-ʾAḍḥā,EEDəlAD-hə;IPA:[ˈʕiːdalˈʔadˤħaː]), commonly translated as theFeast of Sacrificeand also known asYawm an-Nahr(Arabic:يوم النحر,romanized:Yawm al-Naḥr), is the second of the two mainIslamic holidaysalongsideEid al-Fitr. In theIslamic calendar, Eid al-Adha falls on the 10th day of the twelfth and final month ofDhu al-Hijja, and celebrations and observances are generally carried forward to the three following days, known as the Tashreeq days.

As with Eid al-Fitr, theEid prayeris performed on the morning of Eid al-Adha, after whichudhiyah, or the ritual sacrifice ofsheep, may be performed. In Islamic tradition, it honours the willingness ofAbrahamto sacrifice his son as an act of obedience toGod's command. Depending on the narrative, eitherIshmaelorIsaacare referred to with the honorific title "Sacrifice of God".Pilgrims performing theHajjtypically perform thetawafandsaeeof Hajj on Eid al-Adha, along with the ritualstoning of the devilon the Eid day and the following days.

Eid al-Adha is also sometimes called the "Greater Eid" (Arabic:العيد الكبير,romanized:al-ʿĪd al-Kabīr).In India it is also calledBakra-Id. (wikipedia)

• • •

Aaaaaand once again Saturday is the new Friday. This was Friday- (not Saturday-) easy, and had all the pop and whoosh and flow and fun that I want my Fridays to have. Well, it wasn't all fun. I finished up in the SE, where there was definitely some grumbling. My grumbling. LOL that I'm supposed to know the name of a skating (i.e. skateboarding) magazine (42A: Magazine with a "Skater of the Year" award), though I will say that THRASHER was inferrable, as I guess I've heard of skateboarding as "thrashing" before. This "Glossary of Skateboarding Terms and Slang" (from Surfer Today dot com) defines a "Thrasher" as "an avid or enthusiastic skater," so there you go. Ooh, also, looks like there's an iconic skateboarding movie of 1986 called Thrashin'. Iconic to skaters, that is. Maybe not "iconic." Well-known, perhaps. Divisive, it seems. (This conversation between Josh Brolin and Tony Hawk (both in the movie) is very funny):

Back to the elation. Nice to have a big fat gimme at 1-Across today (1A: Sound from a kid = MAA). Gave me all the first letters in a bank of 6-letter answers, hurray. ADORED and AIN'T SO to POD and MESS UP and bam, the whole far NW is set before I have a chance to think. But now I've got EID ... and, uh ... if the next bit is not MUBARAK!, I confess, I give up. I *should've* known EID AL-FITR (which would've fit ... r), since that's the EID I know—the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan. But I didn't even have that in my arsenal. AndEID AL-ADHA—totally new to me today. But if it's one of the two main Islamic holidays, I can't exactly complain it's obscure, now can I? I enjoyed learning that there's more than one EID, and I especially enjoyed that I was able to learn this without my grid absolutely blowing up—all crosses fair! And I'm grateful that EID AL-ADHA introduced a little struggle into my solve (which needed it). My main experience of the NW was not the struggle caused by EID AL-ADHA but the explosion of great answers that started here and then shot across the grid in all directions. STRESS EAT(19A: Down during difficult times?) and SNOW ANGEL(17A: Something that's made lying down) into THEATER DISTRICT (getting DISTRICT was my first big whoosh) (6D: Play area), and then onto the UNEVEN BARS and getting down with the BOSSA NOVA, with very little trouble. And the hits kept coming: "I WON'T BITE"! RUSSIAN SPY! (great clue) (36A: Red plant?). RIB TIPS! (29A: Chewy barbecue bits). And "JUST FYI," so good, so colloquially on-the-nose (33A: "In case it's of interest ..."). I had just the terminal "I" and thought "what the hell!?!?" So nice to go from "what the hell!?!?" to "Oh, wow, yes, that's it. Seemed impossible, but ... there it is!"

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THEME: none

Word of the Day: PFLAG(27D: National advocacy grp. for L.G.B.T.Q. issues) —

PFLAGis the United States' largest organization dedicated to supporting, educating, and advocating forlesbian,gay,bisexual,transgender, andqueer(LGBTQ+) people and those who love them. PFLAG National is the national organization, which provides support to the PFLAG network of local chapters.PFLAG has nearly 400 chapters across the United States, with more than 350,000 members and supporters.

PFLAG(pronounced/ˈpiːflæɡ/PEE-flag) is no longer an acronym, but the actual name of the organization. Prior to 2014, the acronym stood forParents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays(later broadened toParents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Until removal of the hyphen in 1993 the name was officially styled as P-FLAG.In 2014 the membership of the organization voted to officially change the name to PFLAG to reflect the decades of fully inclusive work it had been doing in the LGBTQ+ community. (wikipedia)

• • •

The bottom half didn't liven things up much more than the top half did, though there's something intriguing and provocative about the THREESOME / IBUPROFEN juxtaposition, and "WHAT A TREAT!" is, in fact, a bit of a treat. But it's really (really) hard to get excited about DIAERESES (38A: What Anne Brontë and Anaïs Nin have in common). That three-vowel run ("IAE") had me certain something was wrong, though nothing was wrong. I was lucky enough to know PFLAG. If you didn't, I can see that section getting really thorny indeed. I think I've been spelling "diaresis" ("dieresis"?) wrong my whole life. Well, to the extent that I've been spelling it at all, which is ... unlikely. You're not supposed to call that double-dot mark in "Brontë" or "Anaïs" an "umlaut" because on a technical level it is not an umlaut despite looking exactly like an umlaut. It's function is to signal a new, discrete syllable. Basically it tells you "Brontë" has two syllables not one (i.e. "BRON-tay," not "BRONT") and "Anaïs" has three and not two (i.e. "ah-nah-ees" (or "uh-NAY-iss"), not "An ACE"). It's a hard word to love, TBH. Speaking of TBH ("to be honest"), really hope everyone is up on there textspeak, because that "T" cross for TBH seems potentially rough (seems reasonable for people to imagine that there's an "MLB on CBS"). I don't know how you'd rationalize CBH as an answer to that clue (33A: "Frankly," in texting shorthand), but I often have no rationalization of the things I put in the grid. I mean, ELO, for instance. See above. Hey, is CBH the cannabis stuff ... nope, that's CBD (short for "cannabidiol," the active ingredient in cannabis). You can add cannabis to chess, poker, KENKEN, and other things I am clearly no expert on (and not particularly interested in).

Dupes aplenty today, NOT SO NICE and IT'S NOT FAR. NOS and NO-NONSENSE and NONA and NANO (I know those last two aren't proper "nos" but the alliteration is hard to stop once you start). Today I learned a new NONA. I put a NONA Hendryx song on the blog the other day when the puzzle *didn't* use her as a clue (it opted instead for the geometrical prefix NONA-, as in "nonagon"). NONA Gaye's discography seems pretty thin, but she did some pretty high-profile acting there for a while. She was in Ali as well as the Matrix sequels. She also collaborated with (and dated!) Prince. I mistakenly thought that NONA Hendryx was the daughter of Jimi Hendrix (she was born "Hendrix") but they're basically the same age. "Distant cousins," according to her. Anyway, connections to music royalty all around.

Puzzle notes:

• 42A: No small part (SPEAKING ROLE)— hey look, another "No" to add to the list of "NOS" and "NOTs" we've already got going. I wrote in STARRING ROLE here. I don't really understand the clue on this one—many SPEAKING ROLEs are in fact Very small parts.
• 4D: Top choices (T-SHIRTS)— big misdirect in the clue, but even so, I should've known the answer wouldn't start "TOP" (which I literally wrote in the grid for a bit, what the hell?!). I was thinking "hmmm, like TOP PICKS, something like that?" when I should've been thinking "That can't be right! 'Top' is in the clue, you idiot!"
• 7D: MGM co-founder Marcus (LOEW)— wrote this in as LOEB. As in "Leopold and." Or, you know, the LOEB Classical Library (red for Latin, green for Greek):

• 60A: Like the flavor of much mezcal (SMOKY)— mezcal is one of my favorite base spirits for co*cktails and I still managed to fumble this one a bit. Had the -MO-Y and like "... EMORY?" Tik TOK to the rescue with the "K" (TOK, among the uglier entries of the day)
• 37D: New York Post gossip section named for its location (PAGE SIX)— the things I don't care about just Keep Coming. I'm aware that the Post exists, but can't imagine reading it. And a "gossip section"? I'd sooner solve a KENKEN (which, believe me, is Saying Something)
• 46D: Greek goddess of peace (IRENE) — so many great IRENEs in the world, why would you go this route? I was like "Is it IRENE? IRENA? IRINA?" Ugh.

• 39D: Mythical creature likely inspired by Madagascar's elephant bird (ROC)— I know this exclusively from some version of "Sinbad the Sailor," I think. Hey, do you remember the sitcom "ROC"? Early '90s? Fox? Starring the great Charles Dutton? Is that streaming? I remember really liking it. Gonna see if I can't track that show down...

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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THEME: STUFFED CRUST pizza!(41A: Feature of a deluxe pie ... and of this puzzle?) — grid is shaped (roughly) like a pizza, and the boxes on the edge (or "crust") of it are all "stuffed" with two letters instead of the usual one. The black squares in the puzzle are supposed to represent PIZZA TOPPINGs(26A: Pepperoni, mushroom or green pepper ... or what each cluster of black squares represents in this puzzle)

The all-crust answers (clockwise from the top):

• CASTILLO (1A: Château : France :: ___ : Spain)
• ALPACA (5A: Llama relative with prized wool)
• KEEP TABS (21D: Closely monitor, with "on")
• STINKY (46D: Foul)
• REINDEER (66A: Vixen, e.g.)
• ONE-UPS (65A: Outdoes)
• MURALIST (36D: Artist whose work has a wide reach?)
• WHOOPI (18D: "Sister Act" star, familiarly)

Word of the Day: STUFFED CRUST pizza(41A) —

Stuffed crust pizzaispizzawithcheese(typicallymozzarella) or other ingredients added into the outer edge of the crust. The stuffed crust pizza was popularized byPizza Hut, which debuted this style of pizza in 1995. //Pizza Hut introduced stuffed crust pizza, created by Patty Scheibmeir, and launched it on March 25, 1995. It was marketed ina commercial with Donald Trump. //Pizza Hut was sued by the family of Anthony Mongiello for $1 billion, over claims that Pizza Hut's stuffed crust infringed on Mongiello's 1987 patent (US4661361A) on making stuffed pizza shells. Pizza Hut was found to have not infringed on the Patent in 1999, the court stating "...[the] plaintiff does not have a product patent, and its method patent is not infringed simply because some examples of defendant's completed product approximate plaintiff's product." //DiGiornobegan offering a cheese stuffed crust pizza in grocery stores in 2001. [...] Pizza Hut New Zealand has soldMarmitestuffed crust pizza,and Pizza Hut Japan introduced a pizza with a crust of pockets stuffed with, alternately,Camembert, shrimp, sausage, and mozzarella.Pizza Hut Japan offered a crust stuffed with shrimp and mayonnaise, and Pizza Hut Germany offered a "German King" with a sausage, bacon, and cheese-stuffed crust.Pizza Hut Japan and South Korea have sold pizza with shrimp and cheese-stuffed crust, and Pizza Hut Hong Kong made abalone sauce "Cheesy Lava"-stuffed crust pizza.Pizza Hut Australia made a pizza with a crust stuffed with miniature meat pies. (wikipedia) (dang, I've been to NZ five times and no one ever offered this to me! I feel cheated)

• • •

It is stupid how good this puzzle is. How good the puzzle has been two days in a row now. The concept is actually ... kind of simple. Stuff the crust (of the grid) with two letters instead of one. Change the shape of the grid from square to round (-ish). Make the black squares look (kinda) like PIZZA TOPPINGs. Conceptually, simple. Execution-wise, I'm guessing less simple. A lot less. So so so nice to have a puzzle that is obviously an architectural marvel but that doesn't feel overly fussy or complicated and that isn't either torturous or tedious to solve. This one was hard ... and then bam, the gimmick dropped and it was delightful. Maybe a touch too easy—once you know the outer edges are "stuffed," the puzzle drops to like a Tuesday/Wednesday difficulty level. But the grid is juicy and varied enough to remain interesting for the rest of the solve, and I will confess that I gasped (ever so slightly) when the grid went full COLOR at the end. I am on record as not caring for this kind of tech-assisted gimmickry, but I think I object to the gimmickry most when it seems to be the main point of interest, or when it seems to be trying to make up for mediocre puzzle quality. Today, I loved the puzzle so much that the post-solve pop of pizza—the visual transformation to color—felt like a nice little bonus. I mean, I wouldn't eat anything that looked like that, but I can see the pizzaness of it all maybe a little more clearly. Mainly I was just stunned that my software was capable of such a transformation. I stubbornly refuse to solve in-app (or on the site)—it's just not convenient for my purposes, and I don't like the idea of my solving data being harvested—so I use Black Ink, which has generally not had the color / animation / post-solve whistles and bells that the app has been leaning into. So when my grid burst into color in the end ... part of my gasp was genuine surprise that my software could even do something like that. But surface-level effects aside, this puzzle was a joy to solve as a puzzle. As long as a puzzle holds up as a puzzle, you can make it do whatever you want once I'm done solving. Make it self-destruct for all I care. The puzzle is the thing, and this one was a joy.

The difficulty today is getting started. If you're like me (maybe??) you probably wrote in CASA at1A: Château : France :: ___ : Spainand then quickly ground to a halt. Maybe you got mad that certain words you knew had to be right just wouldn't fit ("I know it's Steve CARELL ... or is it CARREL? Or CARRELL? Those don't fit either. Wait, is it CAREL? That ... looks wrong"). The secret to getting started on this one, for me, was Get Away From The Edge. "Step away from the crust, sir." God bless you, TORI Amos. Once I finally found an answer that I *knew* and that *fit*, I felt like I had some kind of chance. The puzzle bloomed out from TORI to IPO and ORSO. Then I looked at that long answer, which turned out to be the first themer. The answer seemed to be "PIZZA TOPPING" *and* I had some letters to confirm it, so I inched my way west via crosses, filling in PIZZA TOPPING backwards as I went. PINTA, ODISTS, APT ... And then, I was like "OK, so we're gonna run out of room here real quick. We're ... one letter short. So ... is it ... is it just a two letters / one square trick!!??! (puts in the "PI" and then checks 18D: "Sister Act" star, familiarly) Yes, that's it! OMG, it's a STUFFED CRUST pizza!!!!" I actually mentally shouted the revealer before I ever even got to the revealer itself. I just knew instantly that that's what was up. I had the pizza part and then the "PI" went in and whooooosh the whole theme came to me in a rush.

Of course I still had to finish, and it seemed like the stuffed squares could potentially get perilous at points. I definitely tiptoed my way to CASTILLO (totally unknown to me), and struggled to make something ending in "-US" from 12A: Parting words ("CALL US!"?) (I like my ADIEUX to end with a proper "X" thank you very much).

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THEME:"I'M WALKIN' HERE" (52A: Memorable ad-lib in "Midnight Cowboy" ... or what the starred clues would say about their answers)— clues are names of famous people, and answers are places where they famously walked:

These don't actually sound like contradictory accounts. Anyway, still weird to use "ad-lib" here and not just "line." Also weird (very weird) not to have a question mark at the end of the revealer clue, and for that same clue to use "would" instead of "might" ("... or what the starred clues would say about their answers"). You're being playful, fanciful, absurd in imagining these characters saying this line. To just say flatly that these characters "would" say the line is ... well it's preposterous on its face. You need some indication in the clue that you are being wacky. You need a "?" Or you at least need a "might" instead of a "would."

But back to the actual puzzle. Thematically, it's close to perfect. A 10. Simple and elegant, with three genuinely iconic walkers (no forced examples here), and a revealer that genuinely surprises and entertains. "How are these going to hang together, exactly?" I'm thinking as I descend the grid, and then bam, I get that iconic line—"I'M WALKIN' HERE!"—which would be a ton of fun to encounter under any circ*mstances, but is particularly fun here as the answer that makes it all make sense. Plus there's the added bonus of getting to imagine Jesus, Dorothy, and Neil actually saying this line. I just imagine Dorothy angrily shoving a Munchkin out of the way...

What was nice about this puzzle was that while I was making my way to the revealer, I didn't feel like I was just ho-humming along, waiting to get to the punchline. The trip, the journey, the walk itself was a great pleasure, with many highlights along the way. The theme answers themselves are solid to vibrant, but I particularly appreciated that the puzzle had other high-quality answers to offer, starting with "OK, YOU WIN" (my first indication that this wasn't just going to be a phoned-in grid), and then continuing on with the spooky juxtaposition of SHRIEK and CAULDRON (loved that modern clue on CAULDRON) (10D: Emotionally volatile situation, metaphorically). You also get the wild WENT WILD along with the quainter and more tame (but for me, no less enjoyable) SET SHOTS(39D: Old-fashioned basketball attempts) before BARHOPping your way to a SMOOSHING finale. There's a lot of ordinary, perhaps less-than-lovely short stuff along the way (AVI LIC ONME ISTO USB NSA) and some crosswordesey names (EIRE, LEONA, RIRI), but the longer, more colorful stuff makes me forget any of that. I also appreciate the low-key way that the puzzle populates the grid with women and (outside of the themers) only women. Plus BRA, and HERS. A subtle way of saying "see, it's really not that hard." When a puzzle effortlessly centers women like this, it reminds me of my years and years (and years) of solving puzzles where the default POV was male—male passing as neutral. Rebecca makes puzzles that feel like they're for everyone. It helps that those puzzles are also, typically, excellent.

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