New York Times, Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Credit for this puzzle's theme goes to my dog. Every day I go for a 35-minute walk with Lulu, a labradoodle who will be 10 in February. Since she isn't much of a conversationalist, I use that time to listen to podcasts. About a year ago, Stephen J. Dubner, the host of the podcast "Freakonomics Radio," started a new podcast called "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," described as "journalism wrapped in a game-show package." Each episode has some guests, including a real-time fact-checker.

Back in September, I was walking Lulu and listening to "TMSIDK." The fact-checker was A.J. Jacobs. I knew him from his podcast "Twice Removed" and his books, all of which I've read (except for the most recent one, called "It's All Relative," which claims that everyone is a distant cousin of everyone). When I heard what he said about being 1-Down in a crossword (listen at tmsidk.com/, Episode 27, about 2:50 into the episode), I had to stop my walk and replay it. It was a perfect quote for a crossword. I knew it was way too long for a daily puzzle (and it had to be a Monday or Tuesday or else it was no good), but I didn't know if it would be possible to get a portion of it to break up into symmetrical chunks. I wouldn't be able to check until I got home, still a 10-minute walk away. Lulu and I ran the last part of the walk. When I got home, I listened to the quote several times. The money part was the ending, so I started counting backward from the end. When I got to a word break at 16 letters, I thought "Damn! One letter too many!" But I kept counting backward, and after 16 more letters there was another break ... and then after 16 more, another break ... and those three formed a complete thought! It was perfect for a 16x15 grid! The odds of it working out exactly right were so slim, yet it did.

For the grid, the tricky part was keeping it at a Tuesday level with an eight-letter answer at 1-Across. I had to make sure that the words crossing the A.J. initials were drop-dead easy since if you aren't familiar with the name, those letters are essentially unchecked. (Such a blind crossing is known as a "Natick," after the crossing of N.C. WYETH with NATICK in this puzzle.)

I hope my "cousin" A.J. enjoys the puzzle!

I was so curious to uncover the person quoted! I'm usually not that obsessed with getting 1-A, happy to leave it blank if I can't get it right away. But today, I was determined to get it. Curious moment when I filled in the last letter … AJ JACOBS sounded so (kind of) familiar.

I stopped solving at that point to go look him up — ah, he wrote "The Year of Living Biblically," which I enjoyed. A quest to live according to the Bible's rules, for a full year? Hilarious!

A fun quote about him being STILL A FIVE LETTER / WORD STARTING WITH / LOS AND ENDING WITH ER. (Were you also confused that JACOBS has six letters? No? Uh, me neither.) Witty quip.

Quote puzzles are tough to make shine, as the entire punch of the puzzle is packed into that one line. This one was okay for me, but it did feel odd that Peter depended on a notepad to make the full quote work. It felt choppy, having to start at the notepad and then jump to the rest of the puzzle. And as neat as it was to break into 16 / 16 /16, the breaks don't come at natural break points (odd to put a break between LETTER and WORD, for example).

I appreciate Peter's attempt to give us more in the bonus fill, leaving his four corners wide open. Some BAY AREA / CAPITAL W, DATABASE, SCOUT CAR helped elevate my solve.

So much of it was more neutral though, like ATOLLS, ERECTS, ASANAS, ODESSA, INSPECT, etc. And MENACER and ABSCESS aren't very pleasant. I would have preferred a more conservative, traditional grid layout, breaking up the top into three across words per row instead of two, and focusing harder on working in more long downs for bonuses.

Novel approach, appropriate to AJ JACOBS. The quote and execution thereof didn't quite work for me, but I liked seeing something different.