New York Times, Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Hi everyone!

I'm a first year at UChicago, where a surprisingly high number of my friends do the crossword. Maybe it's a thing here. Still figuring it out.

I blame my mom for my crossword habit. She still knows more words than me, but not for long!

Anyway, I like puns. That's probably the only explanation for this puzzle. If I remember correctly, I came up with the theme while thinking about why the scarecrow won an award. (He was outstanding in his field!) Turns out there are a lot of synonyms for "outstanding" that can be pun-ified. Some other possible theme entries I had considered using include a striking LABOR UNION, an exceptional ASTERISK, and a noteworthy LEGAL PAD.

I'm glad Will and Joel kept my clues for 49-Across (not applicable to my parents, thankfully) and 11-Down (has Dwight Schrute ever been in a puzzle?). I really like their new clue for 58-Across.

Back to puns: David AXELROD recently founded the Institute of Politics here, and he has a podcast called "The Axe Files" (har har har).

I'm excited to be published and I hope you'll see me around some more in the future!

I used to worry when I saw a new name on a byline — sometimes that meant we'd get a pretty rough grid. Even if the theme was fantastic, I find it difficult to fully applaud a crossword if the surrounding fill is too rocky.

Thankfully, things seem to be changing, and Zach's debut is right along these lines. It's not an earth-shattering grid — a 76-worder without much long fill — but wow, was it smooth. Where it really shined was in the NE and SW areas, both larger than average chunks of white space. Sure, some people object to HST and OTOE in the upper right (they're seen much, much more in crosswords than in real life), but I don't mind them. To work in that X and J so smoothly — without much crossword glue at all — is really nice work.

Similar results in the SW. R AND D will rankle some, as it's never seen as anything but R&D in real life, but I don't mind it much. And love the shout-out to TARO cake, which is delicious when freshly made.

The theme is "exclamations of delight wackily interpreted," i.e. "It's breathtaking!" for ASTHMA ATTACK. I've seen the first three often enough in this usage that they didn't feel very interesting, but the fourth — "It's remarkable!" for DRY ERASE BOARD piqued my interest. It unfortunately feels like an outlier, since it does something very different by twisting "remarkable" into "re-markable," but to me it's far and away the most delightful. I wish Zach had built the entire theme around this idea, going "full punny" on us. Bring it on!

TYE and LOD are tough entries to fill in, but they were given fair crossings … so that I didn't need to re-mark them as I solved.

(rimshot)

Very nice grid execution. And for those of us "The Office" fans out there, how awesome was that clue for JOB TITLE? Dwight K. Schrute, Assistant to the Regional Manager. Not Assistant Regional Manager, mind you.