Brie

Since PAW and COW were some of my first confident entries, I started automatically putting W’s in the circled squares, which meant I didn’t ever consider of any of the “D” answers— I just thought “what would start with a W here that answers the clue?” I had everything in besides the north-central section (Cy Young sounded like a book award to me, ha) and I started to doubt myself when I suspected BOWL for 16D. Why isn’t that W circled?? I still made it to the end without figuring out the theme, which was a bummer for my ego since I just *love* the smug satisfaction of cracking a Thursday. That being said, I’m thoroughly charmed by the clever W-OR-D play, bruised ego and all. 🙃 Thank you for a thoughtful puzzle!! And as always, appreciate the column & comments that help me learn new things, get unstuck, and think about things differently for future puzzles.

I LOVE THURSDAYS. This puzzle was a satisfying exercise of “chipping away” until the AHA moment. If anyone monitoring the comments is looking for UX feedback, the one thing I had trouble with was seeing the shaded squares while the clue was highlighted (I solve in the NYT Games app), so I had to click out of the clue to check where the shaded squares were so I could know where I needed to reverse the letters.