Bread Spread (2024)

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WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Today’s crossword, by Jeffrey Martinovic, is a doozy, and it reminded me of a seemingly impenetrable puzzle featured in an episode of “The Simpsons”: Professor Provolone’s Picto-Puzzle, which Lisa finds on the back of her lunch kit. The normally sharp Lisa can’t solve the puzzle — and begins to doubt her own intelligence after Bart, Milhouse, Nelson and Martin solve it instantly.

I felt a lot like Lisa today, for a few reasons. First, I really was spiraling into despair as I hopelessly stared from this grid’s revealer to its theme entries and tried to make the connection: Had I lost my ability to solve crosswords altogether? When the trick finally clicked — as it tends to do after you stare angrily for long enough — it turned out to be similar to the solution of the Picto-Puzzle (which Lisa did eventually solve). I’ve included relevant scenes from the episode below, should you prefer to theorize about what Professor Provolone and Mr. Martinovic’s riddles have in common. Otherwise, read on to see what the theme is all about.

Today’s Theme

Toward the end of our numbered Across clues, we learn that a certain “Feature of this puzzle’s grid” also describes “the answers to the six starred clues” (62A). After solving HOITY-TOITY for “Highfalutin” (11D), I expected the theme might have something to do with rhyming reduplication (a process that leads to the creation of words such as hokeypokey, easy-peasy et al.). But other themed entries stymie that theory: At 4-Down, “Hold on, repeat that?” is WAIT, WHAT, and the “Calculus calculation” (46D) solves to a single word, MAXIMUM.

But look closely at the letters that make up those answers, and you’ll see that they all share LATERAL SYMMETRY (62A). This means that each letter featured in the themed entries can be split vertically in two halves mirroring each other. The grid, too, features strictly lateral — as opposed to rotational — symmetry, breaking with crossword convention.