New York Times, Thursday, November 26, 2020

Experienced solvers are used to seeing rebus squares on Thursdays, where a group of letters share a single box in the grid. My idea for this puzzle was to invert that mechanism: in this grid, some letters occupy the real estate usually taken up by two letters. The grid design has been modified to help solvers catch on quickly; it's still one letter per box, even if some boxes aren't squares. Hopefully that kept the puzzle challenging but fun. I'm grateful to Mr. Shortz and the whole puzzle crew for taking my grid, which I'd bodged together by applying correction fluid to a printout with only squares, and making it work crisply in print and digital forms. And speaking of gratitude: happy Thanksgiving!

Neville! It's fun to be around incredibly sharp people, and Neville is right up there. We shared a cab to the ACPT one year; I enjoyed hearing about his math dissertation. Contrary to popular belief, mathematicians are some of the funniest people around. Who doesn't like derivative humor … about derivatives!

I should integrate more humor into my write-ups.

This is far from the first time we've seen this concept, the most recent about a year ago. I remembered a few from way back, too, one that cleverly used breaks and splits, and another that took "go big or go home" literally.

As with all mature theme types, though, there's room for a standout, and Neville executed this one well. I appreciated the consistency; that all the LONG themers were recognizable, two-word phrases starting with LONG.

I thought I had guessed the conceit right off the bat, so I appreciated that the dastardly first themer threw me for a loop. Having seen this theme type many times before, I was reasonably sure I should put only one letter in the elongated boxes, but [Oboe sound] had me wondering if this was something completely novel. Perhaps musical in some way? Nope, that's "oboe" as in O-BOE; two long O sounds. Great way to throw us veteran solvers off the trail.

I also appreciated how the presentation made my solve more challenging. I tended to print a normal-sized letter in the middle of the long boxes (similar to how it's shown in the grid here). That made it hard to catch those special letters as I was solving the down entries. I like a clever challenge on Thursdays, and trying to make the D and S of ENDORSES snake around in my head was a fun problem to tackle.

There were a few hiccups: DUMONT and NATANT didn't ring a bell. Shall we say they were on the tail of the bell curve? These were easy to forgive, though, since the solve was so much fun, and there were more than enough clever clues. I was sure [Gets behind] was a literal clue, not ENDORSES.

ADDED NOTE: reader Jesse Witt shared that the NYT app's displayed solution is cool. Fully agreed, they did a great job with that!