[PDF] [AcrossLite] [Solution] ☠️ ☠️ ☠️

Yesterday, at an old friend‘s bachelor party in Minneapolis, I left my phone (and all my IDs and cards) in a cab, and couldn’t recover any of it. It’s just a happy coincidence that the puzzle I’d decided to post today dovetails so neatly with the nightmarish project of trying to sort out the dependencies of how to replace all that stuff a few states from home. (White privilege, by the way, is clearing TSA in ~20 minutes with naught but a shrug and a smile.)

This is a 69-word puzzle, which is even lower than the maximum word count for NYT themeless crosswords. In a nutshell, that means that it’s a wide-open grid with relatively few black boxes. Oftentimes, low word-count puzzles can be more challenging to find that all-important toe hold that gets a solver started. But I intended this puzzle to be somewhat breezy. I’ll be curious to know if it solves that way in the end.