NYT Crossword Answers for March 19, 2024

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TUESDAY PUZZLE — To explain what makes Lynn Lempel’s crossword theme so clever, I’d like to take a brief detour from the crossword and talk about Spelling Bee; I hope you’ll forgive the digression. The Bee, for those unfamiliar, features a honeycomb grid with seven letters and challenges solvers to find the pangram, a word that uses every available letter in the grid.

I can’t seem to solve compound pangrams. When faced with jumbled letters, my brain doesn’t want to conceive of two words as one. Airflow? Gumdrop? Windfall? All invisible to me. It’s only when someone else looks at the grid and identifies the term that I can see it plainly.

In her puzzle, Ms. Lempel put words together so slyly that the theme acted on my brain in much the same way that those compound pangrams do. I couldn’t have conceived of what she was up to without the revealer, but now that I’ve figured it out I’m wondering how I didn’t see it.

Today’s Theme

Unlike professional sports, crosswords have no built-in “Game break” (63A) — that is unless you happen to be solving Ms. Lempel’s latest puzzle, in which HALFTIME not only exists but also serves as “a hint to interpreting the first parts of 17-, 26-, 36-, and 52-Across.”

The clue at 17-Across is “Parent dressed up at a pride parade, perhaps?” and the answer, at first, seems to be MAIN DRAG. But taking the first part of this answer and halving it turns it to MA IN DRAG. The “Choice between a haircut and manicure?” is not DOORNAILS, but DO OR NAILS. And so on. See what I meant about putting words together in sly ways?