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ACROSS
1 Curry specialty: pintos, cooked and spicy (5,4)
6 Flip about knight (one getting out of bed) (5)
9 Progressive, say, confused 6A with UN (7)
10 Risk for addict involves falsifyin’ a poker hand (2,1,4)
11 Tart is cute, sporting professional attire (5,4)
12 Small swelling to go down (5)
13 France’s leader, in retirement, ate cheese (4)
14 Drunk with fur turned the wrong way round is protecting grand consortium of home builders? (6,4)
17 Stewed, um, escarole for appetizer, entree, and dessert? (6,4)
19 Pierce’s saliva (4)
21 Test odd characters in Tarrytown (3,2)
22 Hits a boy on the head with picnic food (4,5)
25 Christmas travelers, with archenemy almost sent back (4,3)
26 Zeus’s lover appears in play and museum exhibit (7)
27 Heads of lettuce usually spark the strangest longings (5)
28 Seek to embrace Scott Hamilton’s debut, which is like this Nation puzzle for us (9)
DOWN
1 Dress up very quietly to gain an edge (5)
2 Examine bug on either side of park (7)
3 Here and there, garbled a word that should precede eight symmetrically placed Across entries (5)
4 Too much hair in kinky Irish smut (9)
5 At last, waiter comes in to promote fish (5)
6 Coffee preparer swallows first of drip in car (8)
7 Cook breaking Crazy Luis’s spurs (7)
8 Colorful extended-play disc’s the thing to put more money in the bank (9)
13 Absorbent cloth mostly seemed to contain top-quality rope (4,5)
15 Where you can drink outdoors, youth takes a street uphill (3,6)
16 In retrospect, I must include article on “second waves” (8)
18 Novel applications, with sly, funny content (7)
20 In container for peas, kale salad moved rhythmically (7)
22 Franklin chapter to exclude team member (5)
23 Track return of Republican? I didn’t mean to do that (5)
24 Dine in the midst of Lawrence’s demise (5)
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 3495
ACROSS 1 CAND(ICEBERG)EN (canned anag.) 9 P + ET AL 10 ANCHOR + ITE (anag.) 11 T(HO)ROUGH 12 ST + RODE 14 “scale” phonetic reversal 16 L AND S + LID + E 17 BAMBOO + [puz]ZLE 19 [l]EARNS 22 BOX + SET 23 IN-[t/F]-ERNAL 26 IN + DOC + HI + N.A. 27 G + LI(T)Z 28 letter bank
DOWN 1 CA(PITA)L 2 NE(TWO)R[d] + K 3 hidden 4 EVAN + [b/G]-ELIZE 5 [sk]ETCH[es] 6 anag. 7 N(AI)ROB + I (rev.) 8 RE + D(E)YE 13 UNDE(RN + E)ATH 15 SHOW + [re/ER]-CAP 17 BOB + BIN 18 MIX + E-DUP-[e] 20 RAN(WIL[l])D 21 SELT (anag.) + ZER[o] 24 leag[u]e anag. 25 rev.
Joshua Kosman and Henri PicciottoJoshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto are The Nation’s puzzlers. To read more about Kosman, click here. To read more about Picciotto, click here. Kosman and Picciotto explain what they’re up to in “Solving The Nation’s Cryptic Crosswords” (also available as a PDF). Check out The Nation’s Current Issue page each week for the latest puzzle.