Amanda Winters makes her New York Times debut.
Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues
MONDAY PUZZLE — The origin of the phrase at the heart of Amanda Winters’s crossword theme rests in myth and is often attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (also called Thoth), the Egyptian-Greek god whose Emerald Tablet is considered the founding text of alchemy. And although the puzzle describes this phrase as a “philosophical principle,” the interpretation varies widely. The maxim has been used by astrologers to describe the influence of planets on our lives; by culture writers to excuse flakiness during the holidays; and by Madonna to credit guardian angels for her survival after a dangerous fall.
This puzzle is Ms. Winters’s debut in The New York Times, and it seems apt to describe her beginning as auspicious. Have a crack at the grid and see how its philosophy squares with you. And if you struggle with any clues, you can blame the absence of guardian angels or planetary interference. Mercury is in retrograde, after all.
Today’s Theme
By filling in the grid, we see a cluster of letters repeated throughout the shaded areas: A-S-S-O. We don’t have an immediate indication of how the letters are meant to be read — and for a while I was convinced that the constructor was trying to name-drop a certain British online clothing company. Ms. Winters’s revealer provides us with much-needed guidance.
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW — the “philosophical principle in which Earth mirrors heaven” — is split between 39- and 41-Across. And just like that, the pattern emerges: AS appears in the top row of each shaded square, SO below that row. Should we struggle with any clues that cross these squares, we now know at least part of the answers: “Where sailors go” (15A) must be AS_ _, and the “Noise that accompanies a shock wave” (18A) is SO_ _ _ _ _ _ _. (ASEA and SONIC BOOM are the answers there.)
The alignment of these pairs of letters is no cosmic coincidence. Christina Iverson, a puzzle editor at The Times, said that the stacking of theme entries was “hard to pull off,” requiring from both the constructor and the editors “a lot of time tinkering to get the best fill around it all.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
