Possible spoiler if you're a big fan of the NYT crossword puzzle.

My paper gets the Sunday NYT crossword 2 weeks after the NYT publishes the puzzle. I'm a big fan of crossword puzzles, and this week I was pleasantly surprised to see a conjunction of two hobbies - cartography and crossword.

The center of this puzzle featured a compass rose , and the words filled in around the rose had N, E, W, and S at the appropriate positions. Then, at 8 symmetrical places around the middle (boxed on my version below), rather than put in one letter, you have to put in N, E, W, and S inside a single box. The N and S are used for the down answers, whereas the W and E are used in the across answers.

A cartographic crossword.

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