New York Times, Monday, October 11, 2021

I'm jazzed to return to the pages of the Times after *nine* years away. A lot can change in nine years. Back in 2012, I was a high school senior who wrote puzzles in between homework assignments and college applications. Today, I'm a 26-year-old software developer who writes puzzles while waiting for code to build ...

Like me, crosswords have also grown up in the past decade. More kinds of people make and enjoy crosswords than ever before, there has been an explosion of indie crossword content, and the subject matter of the puzzles themselves has gotten better at keeping in lockstep with today's culture. It's an honor to make my contribution to this new and improved era of crosswords.

Today's puzzle's journey began when I was brainstorming straightforward Monday themes to flex my constructing muscles. My mind wandered to one of the puzzle's seed phrases and I wrote down as many as I could that followed the pattern. I'm never satisfied with a theme if it's too broad — my rule is that if I can think of 50% more candidate theme entries than I need, I probably need to narrow it a bit or add an extra hook.

To my surprise, there were not a ton of ___ IT OR ___ IT phrases. From there, it came down to eliminating duplicate words and finding matching pairs. I especially appreciated that while the phrase structure is pretty rigid, I was able to write clues that don't feel formulaic and show each theme entry in its own light.

Surprised to discover that there are so few X IT OR Y IT phrases out there. I could only think of "eat it or wear it," from "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing," involving a snubbed bowl of cereal dumped over Fudge's head. Ha ha, I would never actually do that!

But a guy can dream.

It's a shame that MAKE IT OR BREAK IT isn't as sparkly as the others, with "make or break" sounding more convincing. Ah well, the quartet is still solid, and it's a minor miracle that Ben could find enough phrases with this exact pattern.

A couple of bonuses, this guy doing a lot of pull-ups and push-ups these quarantine days to combat DADBOD. (My daily hour-long erg workout is a USE IT and LOSE IT proposition.) HAIR TIE, CHALETS, REDBOX, Muriel BOWSER, ARTBOOK — nothing flashy, but above-average use of mid-length slots.

I'd go far, far out of my way to avoid BAAL, especially given the potential traps crossing BOWSER and EARLE. Tough vocab for me as a seasoned solver. For newbs, things like ESE and LALA are so much easier to fill in.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Ben years back at the ACPT. He was just a teen back then, and it's neat to see him continue his construction career.