New York Times, Friday, November 24, 2017

BRUCE: I first submitted this puzzle in January of 2014. Anna Shechtman wrote back : "Will is intrigued by your AT THE DROP OF A HAT mini-themed 15x, whose strange symmetry effectively makes the black squares look like "dropping" hats. Assuming this was your intention, though, Will is not certain that MEXICAN HAT DANCE makes much sense as your second theme entry".

This was a bit embarrassing, and I switched to HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT for the next couple submissions, which failed for lack of sparkling fill. I decided to bring in a hired gun, and David rode in with his big white hat and saved the day. He didn't just blindly start working on better fill though — he first suggested we switch to FLIPPING ONES LID as the second theme entry and he then talked me into adding two blocks. This made the visual slightly less dramatic than my fish puzzle of 8/8/14 but moving from 66 words to 70 made it WAY easier to come up with good fill.

David is a master grid technician, and I believe he has the most precisely scored word list on the planet, so he is an amazing person to work with. He also has interned with Will and Joel for much of the past two summers. David has a great sense of humor too, so he is just fun to work with all around.

You might think that with my age being 64 and David's age being 20 this would be close to a record for biggest gap, but he did one with Bernice Gordon when she was 100 and he was 17! David turns 21 on the day this puzzle is published, and I think he has quite a future ahead of him in the crossbiz — HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVID!

DAVID: Always a pleasure to work with Bruce/Mr. Grid Art. I fell in love with the hat concept at first sight, though boy, was that grid difficult to work with given the constraints of the hats and the two 15s! The final product took many back-and-forths, so even if my word list is more fine-tuned than Bruce's (which is a big if), there's no way this would've turned out as well without his input every step of the way. Keep your eye out for more from us in the coming months :).

Mini-theme, FLIPPING ONE'S LID paired with AT THE DROP OF A HAT. Actually, more than just a mini-theme, what with the "hat" of black squares … flipping? Not exactly sure what kind of flip that is, but I can sort of buy it. Valiant attempt to create a sense of kinetic motion with those three "hats."

Not exactly sure why the sets of black squares relate to AT THE DROP OF A HAT though. The hat is flipping … while it's dropping?

Sure, let's go with that.

It's not my favorite mini-theme, as the two phrases don't seem that related, and the visuals don't help pull it all together for me. I much prefer mini-themes where there's some clever connection between the two main seed entries that you might even have to work at to figure out. Or to realize that it's an Easter egg!

All the black squares also left me feeling a bit cheated. I like filling in a lot of white squares in a themeless, by gum!

And those hats nibbled away so much at the grid, leaving a ton of short answers. 21 3-letter entries? No wonder my solve felt a bit choppy, never really letting me drop into the flow of things.

But a couple of nice feature entries besides the mini-theme, MAIN SQUEEZE and TAJ MAHAL = beautiful. Not a lot of long entries, but Bruce and David did well with their 7-letter entries, notoriously difficult to make sing. CHEERIO, GANACHE (yum!), INKSACS, OTTOMAN, RIDDLER, SASHIMI, yes! These helped a ton in terms of the quality of my solve.

(NONPROS or ENPLANE, not so much. Curious if anyone actually uses these terms.)

Let's speak no further of ALD, ALS, GTE, MTA, TNG.

Overall, this one didn't cohere as smartly as I wanted, and the maxi-theme forced too many compromises. But I like it when constructors try something new with mini-themes.