It's most beautiful when broken / SAT 7-12-2025 / Philadelphia university known for its professional co-op program / Title character of a Jake Gyllenhaal cult classic

Constructor: Robert Logan

Relative difficulty: easy AF (easily a low 3:xx on a new laptop with none of my usual settings applied, which meant the puzzle interface put up a fight; wish I could say the same about the puzzle itself)

Word of the Day: PRISM (Device featured in Newton's "Opticks") —

Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light is a collection of three books by Isaac Newton that was published in English in 1704 (a scholarly Latin translation appeared in 1706). The treatise analyzes the fundamental nature of light by means of the refraction of light with prisms and lenses, the diffraction of light by closely spaced sheets of glass, and the behaviour of color mixtures with spectral lights or pigment powders. Opticks was Newton's second major work on physical science and it is considered one of the three major works on optics during the Scientific Revolution (alongside Johannes Kepler's Astronomiae Pars Optica and Christiaan Huygens' Treatise on Light). [wikipedia]

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Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams here, going beyond the concept of "haha it's funny that he keeps copypasting the intro", well past the realm of BAD JOKES, and into this blog post. Did not immediately recognize the constructor's name, but I see they've had a good number of puzzles before, all themeless.

This is certainly a straightforward grid for such a puzzle, and not terribly intimidating as a constructor: the little tunnels of five letter entries give you just enough wiggle room to more or less put the two sides of the grid (and the stacks of eight letter entries they intersect) together independently, with minimal impact on the other half. So I would expect some good stuff in the downs (and a high floor elsewhere), and that mostly hit for me; I just wish things weren't so straightforwardly clued. Which, nothing wrong with easy clues, but things can still be fun and easy without being rote, and this felt more like the latter throughout, with some (much-welcomed, and much-enjoyed) exceptions.

if you want BEEFS [Interpersonal "issues"], here's a (very incomplete) playlist of beefs from secret base

Started with a gimme of BATTED at 1A ([Like baseballs and some eyelashes]) and immediately switched to the downs, and bang bang bang BAD JOKES / A DROP IN THE OCEAN / THE NEXT BIG THING went in like [1, 2, and 3, in that order]. In all honesty I started typing "bucket" before "ocean" because I miscounted briefly, but it was a very quick fix so I'm not counting that as interrupting the solve flow. Nothing terribly misleading here, and having the first letters is always a help. THE NEXT BIG THING is one of those rare entries, imo, that's better with the THE included.

Anyway, cleared out the rest of that corner (shoutout to DREXEL and one of my best friends who went there, go Dragons) and also the lower left, which was even more an exercise in letter patterns, especially after easily dropping in BRAHMA on my way down there. (Side note, that might have been the hardest clue I'd hit to that point, solely because Vishnu is also six letters, which says something about how easy this puzzle is.) Arguable didn't need [European brewer...] given the HEI... start, but with all of that it's a gimme. Ditto for MANI-PEDI; only kinda for ANGLAISE ([Crème ___ (custard sauce)]) in that I've never heard of that sauce, but given the ANG... start, I have seen that word in other contexts, and it was nice to learn something while also dropping in letters.

[Flugelhorn player on the 1978 instrumental hit "Feels So Good"]; RIP to the recently-deceased Chuck Mangione, whose name is supervocalic (i.e. contains all five vowels exactly once)

From there, had the choice to go to the right side via either side of the diagonal; chose the upper path because that'd give me starting letters for the upper right stack, which would give me starting letters for the downs, etc. I cannot stress enough how much starting letters are a huge part of my solving philosophy. Briefly confused by ST BARTS ([Vacation isle for many a Francophile, familiarly]) because I only know that as the London hospital; this is actually Saint Barthélemy, which is a French island located in the Caribbean near Saint Martin.

if I had a nickel for every fun thing I've learned about something French from an entry in this puzzle, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice

The rest was slightly slower than before; I didn't get AT ANCHOR, but the MANGIONE gimme basically functioned as a first letter; there was the brief dilemma of "is this MOMENT or SECOND" for 13D, but that was easily cleared up by HOMEMADE COOKIES giving me EMO and CMON; had to briefly jump over to the SE to work up from that corner (again, first letters >>>> end letters), and shoutout to HEPA which imo is a fun abbreviation (and, side note, has been clued [Big acronym in purifying filters] in every Shortz-edited puzzle; props to Joel for changing up the wording even while keeping the same general clue angle); finished on SWIMS, whose clue probably needs a few caveats (like, certainly not in cursive; even otherwise, it depends on how curvy / angular your letters are and whether or not you worry about the dot on a lowercase i, and also I'll note that the W and M on the NYT app are not rotationally symmetric, etc.).

Olio:

• TWEENIE [Preadolescent, informally] — The one answer in this puzzle that made me grimace; TWEEN I've heard of, and TWEENER I've heard of (in the context of "a tennis shot hit between the legs"), but the infantilizing -IE suffix, to me, screams "out of touch older people who don't know how to use slang trying to refer to a younger generation"
• DOLE [Founder of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901] — As with so much of this puzzle, easy, but also fun in that you have to make a little leap from clue to "what are some fruit brands I've heard of" to answer, rather than just filling in the answer directly from the clue.
• TAMERS [Certain circus performers] — Are there actually still tamers at circi circopodes circuses? Not that I've ever been to one, but my understanding is that animal acts are pretty much a no-go nowadays.
• TATER TOT — As a card-carrying Midwesterner, I will heartily accept any hotdish recipes, especially if they will make me the star of my next potluck. I will also take any hotdishes and eat too much of it and tell you how much I love your cooking.
• HOMEMADE COOKIES — As a card-carrying carb lover, I will heartily accept any and all homemade cookies, with the except of oatmeal raisin cookies because they are the devil's handiwork. (It's not that they're bad cookies; it's that I have shit eyesight and they look like chocolate chip cookies from a distance and I love me a nice warm chocolate chip cookie, and I start thinking about how much I'm gonna enjoy it and then I get close and all my hopes and dreams are dashed and that's why I don't like them.)
• AMIRITE ["Agreed?"] — It's a valid entry, but it does feel a little dated, amirite?

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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