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Electronic music genre / SUN 7-13-25 / Phrase cooed en español / Two-stringed Chinese instrument / Soft palate appendages / Daughter on "Bob's Burgers" / Looked high and low in / Jersey boys? / Puccini opera set in Rome / Certain religious pacifist
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Constructor: Brandon Koppy
Relative difficulty: Easy 
THEME: Tunnel Vision — Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. The entries HOLES IN / THE WALL and BREAK THROUGH / TO THE OTHER SIDE serve as a kind of double revealer to indicate that 8 answers in the puzzle go across the central vertical line of black squares. Each half of these answers is clued normally, but the note (accessible by clicking the "i" icon in the app) has the 8 clues for the full across entries that cross the "wall." Additionally, the letters along the wall spell THE DOORS, which is the band that sings Break Through (To The Other Side).
Word of the Day: ELPHABA (45A: "Wicked" protagonist) —
Elphaba Thropp (/ˈɛlfəbə ˈθrɒp/ ⓘ) is the protagonist of Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the novel's musical theatre adaptation, and the musical's two-part film adaptation, Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025). She is a reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• • •
- 1D / 114D HOLES IN / THE WALL [Some neighborhood bars ... or what connects eight pairs of answers in this puzzle?]
- 68D / 18D BREAK THROUGH / TO THE OTHER SIDE [Classic 1967 song by a group whose name is a hint to solving the eight bonus clues (see note)]
- 5A / 11A DEMONS + T + RATE [Show how it's done]
- 31A / 32A BEET + H + OVEN ["Für Elise" composer]
- 56A / 57A GOB + E + TWEENS [They can help with conflict resolution]
- 69A / 70A DECO + D + ERRING [Spy device in old cereal boxes]
- 94A / 96A DISHON + O + RING [Bringing shame upon]
- 103A / 104A MENSCH + O + IRS [Bass-heavy musical groups, maybe]
- 133A / 134A AAVE + R + AGES [Valedictorians have them]
- 146A / 147A HONE + S + TWOMAN [New bride, quaintly]
Phew, alright, that was a lot of theme! Hello! It's Rafa covering for Rex today. Last time I was here I accidentally blogged the wrong puzzle and you all got two write-ups (I'm sorry / you're welcome) but today I triple-checked that this is indeed the puzzle I'm meant to be talking about. Let's get into it.
There's a lot going on with this theme, but the whole thing had one (IMO) fatal flaw that held the puzzle back. It's a real shame, because it's all very clever and cool and well-done from a gridding perspective, but it is what it is. The issue for me is that the main conceit of the theme (i.e. that 8 of the answers go through the central wall) was entirely irrelevant to the solve. I uncovered the two revealers and was excited to figure out how and why answers would cross the long line of black squares but ... that aha moment never came! I finished the puzzle, and the app immediately animated the squares along the center (spelling THE DOORS) and I never got a chance to even look at the clues in the note or figure out what was going on. Why was I denied this joy?!
 |
| TADPOLE |
Plus, it feels like a decently straightforward thing to fix with the cluing. For DEMONSTRATE, for example, I would have kept the clue for the RATE part the same, but, at 5A, instead of cluing DEMONS, why not clue the whole answer DEMONSTRATE? Then, you have to figure out what's going on to make the clue make sense. Maybe I'm too salty about it, but I felt totally robbed of the joy of figuring out the theme, and it felt like solving a high word-count themeless. (Which is fine, but it's the misleading advertising that gets me! If it's themeless then don't give me *two* revealers!)
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| MORAY EEL |
Anyways, maybe other people had different experiences figuring out what was going on here. Perhaps the experience of solving this one in print is better, since you don't get the animation spoiler. Let me know.
Putting this significant issue aside, as I mentioned already, this is a very well-executed puzzle! There's a lot of theme material, and the fill is quite smooth. We even get some nice bonuses in LOADS TIME, WESTEROS, NOW I GET IT, TO-DO LIST, UP ARROW, etc. I tend to live in a post-dupe crossword world (as in, I don't notice or care about dupes) but I did notice LET LIE and LIE ON (though I did not care!) -- is this something people care notice or care about?
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| COD |
Overall it felt on the easy side for a Sunday. Not a PR time for me, but decently close. The only area that posed resistance was the SW corner, where I wanted MOROSE for [Eeyore-esque] (instead of GLOOMY), and nothing else was coming easily. I think I was really speeding through it because I was so excited (in vain, alas!) to get to cracking the theme. Clearly the theme presentation was my biggest takeaway from the puzzle, as I keep coming back to it!
That's all from me today! Hope you all are having a lovely weekend, and wishing you the best for the week ahead.
- 22A OLAV [Name that becomes a shape if you switch the second and fourth letters] / 144A OVAL [Shape that becomes a name if you switch the second and fourth letters] — This was cute
- 105A IN PAWN [Traded for cash]— I had never heard the expression "in pawn" before. I wanted PAWNED at first, and then was some crosses resolved, I wanted IMPAWN (which I assumed was a verb, though now I realize it would only work if the clue said "trade" instead of "traded") (turns out it is, in fact, a verb per Merriam-Webster, though labeled archaic). I didn't know the RINSO cross (RIMSO seemed plausible enough), so that square gave me a lot of pause ... but we got there eventually.
- 128D DELCO [AC___ (G.M. subsidiary)] — The only DELCO I recognize is Delaware County, PA ... but that's probably too regional to be in a national crossword?
- 112D BLOSSOM [Stop being buds?] — Cute wordplay clue ("bud" as in the flower precursor, not as in pal).
- 47D BOCCI [Italian lawn game] — I have only ever seen this spelled "bocce" but *shrug*
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31 comments:
@Rafa completely captured my feelings about this one!
First, it was easy (knowing THE DOORS song was helpful).
Second, I was not happy that I never got a chance to discover the “bonus clues” answers. I breezed through the grid and the answers appeared. I was kinda looking forward to sussing them out. i might have been fun to do that or maybe not?
Third, me too for the most resistance in the SW. IMGUR and LIL MAMA were WOEs and I had IsIS before IRIS for a while.
Fourth, I agree that it was clever and well done with some fun clues but it was just disappointing. Mostly liked it.
I’ve been trying to like Sundays. Really, I have. I gave up on them for 5 years or so before returning to them about 6 months ago. Maybe not my best decision. I don’t have the patience to work these 21x21 grids, especially when, like this one, it is just a matter of “read clue, type in answer”. Making things worse is the fact that, though I may not be THE WORST typist in the universe, I certainly occupy a spot on the bottom tier. So there’s always a typo. Or 2. And tracking them down is so time consuming and boring that I just want to poke my eyes out but, because I’m doing this on a laptop, I don’t even have a pencil handy to implement that gory process. (OK, so maybe that’s positive thing.) This can happen with a 15x15 grid, too, but it just doesn’t seem so onerous. I can usually track the error(s) down. But tonight, even though I knew exactly what the trick was I couldn’t get the glorious (?) reveal without first hitting the check grid button and correcting my typos. Those opening doors are not so awesome when you have to “cheat”. I can try to rationalize this by saying that I know the problem is simply a typo (or in this case 2 typos) so it’s not really a cheat. But it is.
I know there will be a sizeable gallery out there asking, “Well, why didn’t you learn to type in high school like the rest of us?” Because Typing seemed so much more boring than Power Mechanics and Metalwork and my fave elective, Home Economics. (Yeah, cooking sounded like fun and I’m kinda motivated by fun.)
Anyway, I get psyched when I see Brandon Koppy’s byline on the puzzle so I was upset with the dull fill and the self inflicted disappointment re: the big reveal.
Got HOLESIN/THEWALL right away - my favorite hole-in-the-wall dive bar, Antonio's Nut House (the last one in Palo Alto, CA), sadly died a few years ago; then I moved to the other long downs. Quickly got BREAKTHROUGH/TO THE OTHER SIDE - that earworm will be with me for a while now - and knew it would have something to do with THE DOORS. The rest was pretty easy.
I read the notes, decided to ignore them and just solved it as a themeless. Two themelesses, actually, since the "wall" separated it into two puzzles. Without the extra clues, the puzzle was easy enough that this worked for me. But I wonder how this would have played for younger people. I was around when the Doors were on the charts, but are people nowadays more attuned to, say, Earl Sweatshirt?
I also had difficulty in the SW, mainly because IMGUR (115D) was a total WOE and I had LIL nas x before LIL MAMA for the 109D rapper.
At 103D I couldn't stop thinking about:
When you're starting to feel that an eel bit your heel
That's a moray
Thank you for creating a puzzle whose theme answer is well known to most of the older solvers like myself. I get frustrated by clues that ask me the title of a number one hit from some rapper I never heard of. Won’t know it, will have to look it up.
Felt like 2 Tuesday puzzles today. Easy enough to solve both but the connective tissue/theme was more a distraction (I know I should be on the lookout for that thing) than an enhancer.
I came here to confirm that there weren’t any theme clues or playful language hints for the hidden spanners. How strange!
Didn't like this. Essentially lots of micro-puzzles, some of which were super easy, some - for me - were not. Crossing ESOBESO with RINSO was a Natick for me. RINCO seemed as likely. Same with LOUDEST. Wanted LARGEST, ended up with LARDEST - SECA seemed as good as SECO, and ERHR as valid as ERHU (of which I've never heard). The SW was very hard - by then I was irritated enough to cheat.
I strongly believe that “How was the solve?” is a far more important question than “How impressive was the construction?” (And the solve was grand for me!)
But I don’t want to neglect that second question today, because Brandon’s crafting of this puzzle was superb:
• The skillful use of the entire grid. The East and West, from top to bottom, house the song title, and theme answer HOLES IN THE WALL. The center, from top to bottom, is occupied by the phantom THE DOORS, and the words connected by the letters of THE DOORS.
• The wordplay. Turning BEET and OVEN into BEETHOVEN, in effect, eight times. Plus the theme-related meanings in HOLES IN THE WALL, and BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE.
• The symmetry. Making this all work in the confines of a symmetrical grid. Also, in the black wall, the letters of THE DOORS are symmetrically spaced!
• The creativity. How did Brandon even come up with this multi-leveled theme? One involving melding pairs of words by adding a letter between them, not to mention a black wall, a band, and a song? Scintillating!
• The grunt-work. Coming up with those pairs of words, which included having them fit symmetry, so that, say, GOB / TWEENS, a three and a six, worked with MENSCH / IRS, a six and a three.
Impressive build? Very, and bravo Brandon!
BTW, Brandon must have thanked his lucky stars that HOLES IN / THE WALL and BREAK ON THROUGH / TO THE OTHER SIDE break evenly in half.
I agree with @Rafa, and solving online means that there was also nowhere to put the "extra" letter, so somehow I had to mentally figure out what and where the missing letters were and keep that in mind. I found the task tiresome and ultimately gave up (the Note was open for me right from the start on the NYT Games website, where I usually solve, so I knew there were some hidden answers and got a few of them before just giving up). That mad the puzzle "meh" for me, and I knew the Doors song and got it with very few crosses. And HOLES IN THE WALL, which was a good answer. But the solving experience was okay at best. This would have been better solved on paper--or as @Rafa said, with the "bonus" clues the actual clues for the first half of the answer.
For the print version solvers, the central vertical line was solid black. I never considered writing over it; it doesn’t appear as the digital “gray.” Frustrating.
Your comment about "bocci" is absolutely correct. The Italian lawn game is called bocce. A similar game was played in ancient Greece and called boccia. On-line sources tell me that boccia was primarily played by people with physical handicaps and began to be played in the Paralymics in 1984.
Luddite that I am, I use the print puzzle. The central vertical is printed solid black. Very frustrating.
The 1D clue led to THE WALL, which misled me to expect the band in question to be The Who. Kinda disappointed it wasn’t. Otherwise, solved as, in Rafa’s words, a “high word-count themeless,” which is not particularly fun on a Sunday.
The erhu is gorgeous. Here’s everything you need to know, in less than a minute:
https://youtu.be/X4pe2PqHU3Q?si=xHY8W_sX-Gr6BeIc
I felt like we stepped over the line from themed to a gimmick or outright stunt puzzle, which is usually not by forte. But I got all dressed up and came to the party, so I figured I may as well mingle.
Was introduced to a few interesting characters - most notably WEST EROS (what a name), ELPHABA (what an awful name), and IMGUR (omg, no comment on that one).
I wandered around for a bit - I even knew some of the propers on my own, like MACBETH, TOSCA and Bonnie RAITT (who I believe made an appearance recently, but that may have been in the LAT).
It seems like pretty much every day that you can find one of those “nobody ever says that, ever” words in the NYT puzzle - today I would nominate UVULAE, although I suspect that INPAWN may garner some interest as well.
So all and all, it wasn’t too bad - I met some new peeps, had a drink or two, and left early.
Same experience EXACTLY with IMGUR and LILnasx.... but I knew XL was probably wrong down there so I left it blank
Rafa - me too on being disappointed that after solving, I didn’t get to go back and look at the clues in the notes and solve them. Maybe another solution would be for the “wall” squares to turn gray or flash on-and-off or something so that you could then solve the eight extra clues. (The note would have to tell you what to do post-solve, and it wouldn’t work in print.)
Also agree with you that simple dupes don’t bother me - I almost never notice them.
Another part of the theme, I think: THE DOORS could represent actual doors in the wall where you can BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE. Imagine breaking down the doors, which you always see the cops do in the movies and which I would like to try once before I die.
I enjoyed the puzzle... and because a couple corners away from the middle had me stuck for a while, esp. the SW (@Conrad), I had time to go down the middle and find the answers that matched the bonus clues, and figured out/confirmed that it spelled "THEDOORS"--that actually helped me finish the song title, cuz I do remember Jim Morrison belting out "BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE." So I enjoyed the theme and figured it out as I went. I suspect this is the difference between those of us who just leisurely parade around the grid not worrying about the time vs those of you who really monitor the speed of the solve.... a plug for moseying! Thank you, Brandon, that was quite a feat of engineering and an awesome solve!!!! : ) Thanks.
I love the double meaning of THE DOORS phantom-ly going down the center wall -- the band, yes, but also, each of those letters is literally a door through which an answer goes through.
What an utter disaster. What idiot thought up the animation spoiler.
More evidence that the NYTimes cares more about showing off its cutesy animation technology than presenting a solid puzzle that creates a challenging and enjoyable solving experiences.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Apparently the NYTimes has forgotten this most basic truth.
I also have never seen it spelled bocci. I figured it’s another singular/plural error like panini/paninis instead of panino/panini. But never seen bocce pluralized in Italian. Kind of like playing a double header and saying you are playing soccers. Just doesn’t work in either language.
Rafa, once you choose to read the note after all the non-black squares were filled, you cede the right to complain that you didn't have time to read it pre-reveal. It's like when Rex solves Mondays downs only & then complains that the puzzle is too difficult for a Monday. Sorry, kids, but decisions have consequences.
Not all that familiar with The Doors's oeuvre (I was 7 in '67) so needed the crosses to suss out the lyrics. Enjoyed the bonus clues, too, though wanted to be able to enter the missing letters electronically in their black squares.
I always read the comments on a Sunday puzzle exactly for the frustrating, annoying reason you've mentioned - searching for TYPOS (especially in a Sunday-sized grid)! I've always been a fast typist - over 100 wpm - & got great jobs (first as a secretary in a previous life lol) but it can really bug the **** out of you when doing a puzzle - especially on Sunday! Thanks for sharing :(
A constructional masterpiece that unfortunately was not fun at all for this solver.
The thing about secret decoder ring puzzles is the view is never worth the climb.
"Bocce" is Italian and means the plural of 'ball'. It is also the name of a popular game. The singular of "bocce" is "boccia". "Bocci" is nothing.
Generally agree with the tedium of finding a typo on Sunday, but today it was a benefit. I had the grid all filled out, but with something wrong, so it didn’t autofill THE DOORS. I had a chance to find it myself to reveal the bonus answers. Btw, the typo was really a Natick, because I never watched GOT, and I thought OR DOCS made more sense than ER DOCS for leaving you in stitches, so I had wOsteros as the fictional land.
That the hints or notes were irrelevant left me feeling kind of meh. As above I did appreciate a NODAT The Doors Classic. As a side note, last week on vacation some one was blasting Touch Me at the pool and I was singing along and really getting into it. My 18 yo was both stunned and embarrassed.
Got the trick, but THEDOORS and their song were unknown to me (when I heard the excerpt, I was glad I didn't know it). Still managed to get everything except the SW corner. Another Sunday DNF for this octogenarian.
Mom: Ralphie, get down here to dinner right now.
Ralphie: Just a second, Ma. I'm DECODDERRING a secret message that Orphan Annie sent me ..... oh wait, she also sent me the decoded message, so I don't even get the fun of trying to decode it. Well, maybe someday she'll edit crosswords for the New York Times.
WTF. Give us two easy puzzles with the promise that there will be an interesting third puzzle at the end. And then give us the third puzzle already solved? This was a boffo construction by Brandon Koppy which was utterly ruined by an editorial decision. I generally have rolled my eyes at the "fire Will Shortz" crowd, but today I've become a full fledged member.
In retrospect see this as a well designed construction with some fun clues and answers. Unfortunately, I know nothing about The Doors! One great hole in my music knowledge, tho not the only one for sure. Some other clues/answers were also tough for me: ERHU, IMGUR, LIMAMA for example. On the other hand, I got a kick out of recognizing RINSO, TUSHIE, TOSCA, TWEENS, and the like.
WOW!
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