https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Parker
In 2008, he invented on his blog the crossword term "natick" (after Natick, Massachusetts) for an "unguessable" square crossed in both directions by proper nouns considered obscure.
I'm a fan of the NYT Mini, too. The art of that puzzle, I think, is in the clues, which are usually not straight synonyms or dictionary-type definitions. Some examples from recent puzzles:
Name tag heading: HELLO
Word shouted during a defibrillator scene in a hospital drama: CLEAR
Kind of orange with a "belly button": NAVEL
"I'm not a ____" (online affirmation next to a checkbox): ROBOT
What breweries might creatively repurpose as seats: KEGS
Another feature of the NYT Mini is that the creators seem to limit the number of pop-culture facts to at most one per puzzle. I’m bad at names of actors, cartoon characters, pop stars, etc., but I’m usually able to solve the puzzles even when they have clues and answers like
Ogre who asks "What are you doing in my swamp?!": SHREK
[1] A few minutes later: I did try. I gave Claude 3.5 Sonnet the above clues and answers as examples and asked it to produce clues for today’s NYT Mini answers. Here are the results:
https://gally.net/temp/20240904miniclues/index.html
Not as clever as the NYT’s clues, but not terrible, either.
> Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines consist mainly of solid regions of uninterrupted white squares, separated more sparsely by shaded squares. Every letter is "checked" (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, ... have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares (around 25%), leaving about half the letters in an answer unchecked.
Still do the NYT every day though.
I have been running a 5x5 game that is more wordle like (i.e. no clues, guess entire words) at https://squareword.org for the past ~2.5 years. Interestingly, when you exclude proper nouns, there is a relatively limited amount of possible 5x5 squares with common words - I am having to add some uncommon words to make it work. I guess with nouns included this is less likely to happen, should be a much larger space of possible words.
Solving a crosswords is a bit like solving an equation system, since the grid is equivalent to all row questions AND all column questions combined in a big mega-confunction, so it helps to see all at once.