THIS AND THAT

Sid Sivakumar is an M.D./Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis, training in biomedical engineering and neuroscience. He works on medical devices that aid in stroke rehabilitation. In his spare time, he constructs and edits crosswords, including The Juggernaut Crossword, aimed at the South Asian diaspora.

This themeless puzzle is Sid's 10th for The Times. To make it, he started at 92-Across ("which has great letters"), stacked two long answers on top of that, and worked his way up.

I'm grateful to several pioneering constructors in the 21×21 themeless space: Ada Nicolle, Brooke Husic, Erik Agard, Evan Birnholz, Paolo Pasco, Ricky Cruz, and Will Nediger, among others who've contributed Sunday themelesses to the Times. If you enjoyed this puzzle, I'd highly recommend checking out the masterpieces linked above. My thanks also to the Times editing team for running this puzzle with about 70% of my clues intact (including my favorites at 58A, 92A, and 17D).

For those curious about the construction process, here were some of my design principles for this puzzle:

• Optimize the quality of short answers. Rough patches of short fill are like plot holes or continuity errors in a movie. I can ignore minor blips, but more jarring errors pull me out of the immersive experience. Personally, I prefer movies with no glaring plot holes, regardless of how well the individual scenes are acted and shot.
• Keep the grid wide open. By necessity, themed Sunday puzzles have less wide-open white space and more short answers. I think a themeless Sunday ought to stand out with wide open areas.
• 1-Across should be a long answer with a tough clue. I like a puzzle that offers well-calibrated resistance from square one, as a harbinger of the overall difficulty level.
• The grid should be aesthetically pleasing. Here, I took inspiration from the long diagonal lines featured in the exemplary themeless Sundays by Patrick Berry and Robyn Weintraub.
• Black-square "staircase" shapes are a feature, not a bug. There are two reasons for this. One: English words tend to start and end with consonants, and the "steps" of a staircase push out answers row by row so that they can all start or end with consonants. Two: When placed at the edge of the grid, staircases visually accentuate the diagonal lines formed by central black squares.

Themeless Sunday, with a fresh Sid-southeastern feel to it — how often do you see the words "bhikkhunis " and "bhindi masala" in a crossword? Some great entries, too, like CANDY COUNTERS, HOLODECKS, ELIMINATION DIET / KEYNOTE ADDRESSES. Themelesses are usually limited to 15-letter entries, so the 16+ length is ripe for fresh additions. I dislike THE LITTLE MERMAID because it's made my daughter want to lose four waist sizes (and grow a tail) so she can attract a prince — but it is nice not to get the shortened title.

Speaking of PRINTS, what a fantastic clue! They get left in the (literal) dust. Many of the Sunday themelesses have relied on sloggy 6-letter answers, so clues like this immensely elevate the solve.

Similarly, "Employees who work a lot" made me think of my first job when I was regularly working 80-hour weeks for The Man. Great shift to a smile when I realized it meant a (parking) lot.

I would have liked a greater quantity of clever cluing, though. Jim Horne and I chatted about the Sunday themeless series — he's more pro while I'm more con — and he reminded me of the delights within Patrick Berry's inaugural Sunday themeless. In particular, FOREST GREEN was a meh entry, but innocently misdirecting with "Shade in the woods" made it shine. As much as I like the novelty of VAPE SHOPS, it's hard to clue something like this cleverly, given that not everyone will recognize what vape shops are.

We also chatted about the word SCRIED, which I love because it reminds me of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" and the "Bartimaeus" trilogy. So many solvers have complained to me about SCRY over the years, but it gave Jim and me a reason to chat about some of our favorite recent reads.

I haven't changed my mind about the past three years of occasional themeless Sundays, too many of them feeling like giving up on attracting fresh themes. If they are here to stay, I'd at least like to see further innovation. There's so much possibility in using 21-letter grid-spanners, triple-stacks, intersecting 16+ letter answers, grid art, long stair sticks, etc.