New York Times, Thursday, January 25, 2018

Unsurprisingly, there aren't too many words or phrases that (1) contain the name of an island; and (2) spell something else after removing those letters. Luckily there were enough to make a workable theme set.

Along the way, I also considered using words that can precede ISLAND such as LONG (e.g., BELONGING, ALONGSIDE, or PROLONGS) and/or islands that aren't commonly known as single words (such as the Isle of MAN). In the end, I decided to limit myself to single-word islands, which I find the most satisfying.

One somewhat unusual feature of this puzzle is that the islands are hidden within single words rather than spanning the ending/beginning of multiple words, which is the more common (and elegant) approach to hidden word themes. Hopefully the added bonus of creating new words with the remaining letters makes up for this shortcoming.

As more of my puzzles run in the NYT, it's been interesting to see the fluidity of Will's publication queue. For example, my first seven accepted Thursday puzzles have been published in a different order than the one they were accepted in. So far the progression has been 1, 4, 3, 5, 7 with the second and sixth puzzles still unpublished (today's grid was my seventh accepted Thursday). I'm only considering Thursday puzzles here because each day of the week has a different queue whose length varies depending on inventory levels.

From what I've read elsewhere Will likes to space out certain kinds of puzzles (e.g., rebuses) while also accelerating debuts and grids that particularly catch his fancy. I suspect puzzles are also more likely to get bumped around in the queue when a constructor has multiple pending grids of the same difficulty level versus a situation where a constructor only has one.

Love this theme! Alex interprets ISLAND HOPPING as "skip the island embedded in the phrase/word, resulting in a new word." S(CUBA) TANK to STANK was particularly nice, as was BAL(TIMOR)E to BALE. Beautiful finds.

CON(CRETE)S to CONS wasn't as awesome, as it was odd to get CONCRETES in the plural. VER(BALI)SE to VERSE too — if only we were in Britain! Or VERZE had been a real word. It really should be.

Great execution on the grid. Working with five themers, the middle one sort of cutting the grid in half, is rarely easy. Beautiful results in the big NE corner, EVIL TWIN particularly nice (I'm an identical twin, and clearly the evil one).

The SW corner did contain the awkward pluralised (not -ized, to keep with the Britishising today) KEVINS, but how great are IN DENIAL and SOUR NOTE? Well worth the price of KEVINS.

And two standout clues were the cherries on top:

• The common phrase, [Back to school], repurposed to describe the typical school email ending, EDU.
• [Things with entrances and exits] aren't buildings, but (play) SCRIPTS.

Speaking of that, SCRIPTS, TS ELIOT, OH SNAP, MONOCLE, TEFLON — fantastic use of the mid-length slots.

Fun, tricksy theme, excellent execution. I paused slightly before giving this the POW! due to the two themers that made me hitch, but overall, this is very close to my Thursday puzzle ideal.