Jim right here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who’s busy enjoying TWISTER.

Look at this beautiful development. A brand new colour is added at every step:

🔴🟡 are the circles within the MASTERCARD LOGO

🔴🟡🟢 in a TRAFFIC LIGHT

🔴🟡🟢🔵 on a TWISTER MAT

🔴🟡🟢🔵⚫ within the OLYMPIC RINGS

Finding this set amazes me, and presenting them in rising order impresses me. I find it irresistible.

Which brings me to one of many nice debates among the many crossword cognizanti. I’ve been chastised for my view {that a} pleasant theme can overcome different weaknesses within the grid, notably flaws that consequence from thematic constraints. This Joe Krozel puzzle is certainly one of my favorites, however because it suffers from “dangerous fill,” not everybody agrees that it is good.

Today’s grid fails the everyday evaluation. There are 44 black squares — approach too many! There are 24 3-letter phrases — not solely a sin in itself, however ERA, ONE, ARE, ETA, and ERR are approach too frequent. Each has appeared over 1,000 instances! Clearly, this puzzle is crap.

But I have a look at that coloured circle development and suppose, I’d have by no means thought such a theme was doable. Wow.

NYT cannot do colour in each day crosswords but. Would you could have loved the puzzle extra if the clues had been simply these coloured circles as an alternative of the colour names? You can resolve for your self. Our aim is at all times normally to match the NYT print model as intently as doable, however as we speak we modified the clues under the grid. Don’t inform Will Shortz!

For the file, the official italicized theme clues in print are:

• Red and yellow circles
• Red, yellow and inexperienced circles
• Red, yellow, inexperienced and blue circles
• Red, yellow, inexperienced, blue and black circles