Check the Ratings (with Dominic Jeong)

I'm excited to share this collaboration with Dominic Jeong! Dominic is a senior math major at Duke who happens to be one of my major advisees, and he reached out to me about crossword construction after reading about my NYT debut in the Duke research blog. It was a real pleasure to work with him on constructing this tasty puzzle, and I'm excited to see more great puzzles from him in the future!

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Theme explanation (Spoiler alert!)

The answers to the starred clues are names of Michelin-starred restaurants. The number of stars in the clue correspond to the number of stars the restaurant received.

Hello, World! - SOLUTION

Hello, World!

After an entertaining and slightly ridiculous 15 minutes of fame back in the fall, this is my first new (meta)puzzle in a while! This one is hosted over at Muggle Meta Mondays, a weekly metapuzzle that's run by the XWord Muggles Forum. Many thanks to Peter Abide and Al Sisti for running the puzzle and for their really helpful feedback. I think it's roughly a Gaffney week 3, but as my undergrads can tell you, I'm not always so good at judging how hard things will be. Feel free to email me if you have the answer or if you want a hint. I'll post solutions on Sunday, May 1. 

And if you enjoy doing metas, I highly recommend the MMM! 

The meta answer is a language.

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