Puzzle Notes

Dear friends,

This week's puzzle is a medium-difficulty themeless (4.5/5 difficulty) by the wonderful Ben Zimmer. It's the 70th themeless from Classic. You can read more about Ben here.

The solution to last week's (hard) meta by Paolo Pasco is attached. Congratulations to everyone who submitted a correct response! From the right-answer pile, the lucky names of Tim Wright and Chandi Deitmer were selected at random. Both win their choice of prizes.

Lastly, some segment of social media devoted to crossword discussion has recently moved to BlueSky. We plan to have an AV Classic account there in the near future; for now you can follow Ben Tausig at burrata.bsky.social, among a number of other AV folks. See you next week!
Yrs,
Ben and the expanded AVCX crew
avxwords.com // @avcxword // @lilavcx // @avcxplus // @avcxtrivia // @avcxcryptic