Mark Phaedrus

Here comes another comment storm… the underlined clues don’t appear in the app.

I really got a kick out of this one. Good cluing, and I had to go through four spellings of psilo—psylo—the mushroom thing.

Nice. Very nice. Enjoyed the cluing, really solid use of the 15-letter entries. Looking back on it, I’d have predicted that the lower left would be lethal for me, because I had absolutely no idea who Ai Weiwei was… but I managed to get it purely from the crossing words, and was intrigued enough to look him up after finishing the puzzle, and that made the night even better. Quite a life story, and some very interesting art.

Wow. I liked the cluing, but for some reason this was a lot easier for me than most Friday puzzles. A hair over a four-minute solve, when my usual Friday average is ten minutes.