‘Where to?’ (2024)

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MONDAY PUZZLE — Surprise! Sam Corbin is on vacation this week, so a few Games people will be sitting in for her. I haven’t been here on a Monday for quite a while, but I have to say that I like what she’s done with the place.

Jennifer Nutt returns with her 10th crossword in The New York Times. Ms. Nutt’s puzzle made me smile, because her theme recalled a childhood pastime that I loved when my parents took me to the beach in the summer.

But that’s not all that amused me. One pair of nontheme entries in particular, 10 and 11D, which I will discuss below, made me laugh out loud because of their proximity to each other and the way they were clued. And they’re not even cross-referenced. It’s hard to believe this was an accident.

Or was it? I asked Sam Ezersky, a puzzle editor, about these two entries, and while he did not edit this puzzle, he was metaphorically in the room where it happened. We talked about whether there had been any discussion among editors about cluing those two entries so that they almost seemed to tell a story.

“No discussion on this,” Mr. Ezersky said in a message, “and these weren’t the constructors’ originals — they were part of Joel fa*gliano and Will Shortz’s edits to make the clues more Monday-friendly.

“We do like finding certain cluing parallelisms when they aren’t too forced, though,” he continued. “Sometimes our readers even notice things we don’t!”