March 7, 2023 - "State Line" - Pravan Chakravarthy, edited by Steve Mossberg

Difficulty ● ● ● ○ ○

Puzzle Notes

Dear friends:

We're excited to bring you a Lil AVC X debut tonight from Pravan Chakravarthy. This clever 11x11 is going to challenge you to look at things a little bit differently, but it's an absolute state-of-the-art construction. Here's Pravan:

Hey cruciverbalists -- super excited to be on the Lil AVC X roster for this year. I'm a college student at UChicago, where I'm studying linguistics and physics. I co-edit the puzzles for the Chicago Maroon, our newspaper here on campus, and when I'm not obsessing over crosswords, you can find me running, making music, or deeply lost in Wikipedia rabbit holes.

This puzzle was first attempted as a full 15x15 with just the central part of the grid art, and longer related answers strewn about the grid, and second as a midi featuring translations of the central part into different languages. It was only after both of those attempts failed that I stumbled upon this grid and serendipitously symmetric quote, and from there the rest of the puzzle was quite a joy to construct. Hope you enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to contributing more puzzles for you all! (And apologies if you can't quite see the grid art -- it was the best I could do with squares. Hopefully one day someone'll make a puzzle out of circles instead -- wouldn't that be cool?)
Headed to your inbox next Monday: another fresh Lil AVC X debut from Nijah Morris.

Thanks for your support!

Your friends at Lil AVC X

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