Today’s ThemeMost of us will notice nine across entries with bubbled letters surrounding a gray square (Across Lite solvers, check your Notepad). A shared gray square? Almost by happenstance, I went with that entry at 114A: SAILS ALONG (something this solver certainly did not), noticing that the bubbled letters spelled out SALSA (surrounding a single “I”). And then 117A made sense as VOLLEYBALL NET; BALLET, + “N.” This is where I arrived at the dance theme — SALSA, HORA, BALLET. Notice the title of the puzzle today, which gave me an inkling that those stray letters in the gray boxes were definitely going to matter: “Busting Moves,” meaning that something important is breaking up (“busting”) each bubbled dance move in its theme entry.

Source: New York Times January 02, 2021 22:52 UTC