New York Times, Thursday, December 12, 2019

The impetus for this puzzle was a bizarre desire to make something interesting out of the terrible crosswordese abbreviation AT NOS. My original submission used that phrase as the revealer, thereby giving a raison d'être for abbreviating the chemical elements. To enhance the theme, I created a sparse, super-symmetric grid-art layout evocative of the Rutherford-Bohr model of an atom.

Unusually, this theme relies on two-letter entries. They break the fundamental crossword convention that all words should be at least three letters long. For reference, only six other NYT grids in the Shortz era have contained two-letter words.

Unfortunately, since the original grid only had 25 black blocks, the fill was relatively weak. Generally speaking, the more white space you have, the harder it is to find clean fill. Furthermore, by using such a spartan grid configuration, I was at the mercy of the crossword gods as to which elements got featured. Luckily, despite these flaws, Will Shortz and crew were still interested in the idea. They offered that if I could create a cleaner grid featuring more familiar elements, they'd take a look.

The current arrangement uses 12 cheater squares. They make filling easier and provide flexibility to manipulate which elements get featured. By changing how many black squares there are and where they are deployed, the two-letter slots can correspond to different clue numbers. For example, if the cheater square in the upper-left corner were removed, the first element would be Beryllium (BE) instead of Lithium (LI).

Using these cheater squares, however, muddles the grid art and eliminates the supersymmetry. Ultimately, however, a clean, interesting solve rightfully takes priority. I hope this puzzle provides that.

Quiz! How many of these chemical symbols can Jeff translate? The clock starts … NOW!

Li: lithium

Ne: Nebraska? Neon, ha ha, just joking.

Ca: Ca … lifornium. No wait, calcium!

Ti: titanium

Sn: tin (you narrowly avoided a pedantic lecture about the root word "stannum" and my so-crazy-they're-genius theories on Stannis Baratheon)

Xe: xenon, this is far too easy!

Nd: … wait … hmm … North Darkotium? Nerdvedium? Bah!

Sm: ... Hulk SMASH(IUM)!

This former science wonk, who hit an easy 5 on his AP chem test and received a couple of chemistry scholarships, scored only 6 out of 8. (Neodymium and samarium.) That bodes poorly for even the advanced Thursday solver. God have mercy on John Q. Solver.

Fun treat to get so many long pieces of fill. RAN SMACK DAB INTO, GOING OUT ON A LIMB, BEGGED FOR MORE are all excellent. It's rare ever to get a themed grid where we get so many grid-spanning bonuses. It wasn't necessary — ATOMIC NUMBERS could have gone in the middle row — but I appreciated having more to enjoy inside my puzzle.

Creative idea, and I appreciate bizarre, mold-breaking grids. From a construction point of view, though, the idea is a little too easy to execute on, since once you go past the teens (in terms of atomic numbers), nearly every chemical symbol contains two letters.

I would have enjoyed it more (I BEGGED FOR MORE, yes I did) if Alex had shown us a Rutherford-Bohr model! (Said no one but this science dork.) At the very least, I would have liked a rectangular grid, approximating the periodic table.