New York Times, Monday, February 15, 2016

My "connection" to presidents goes back to the time in the late 90's when Bill Clinton, who's a big crosswords fan, talked about one of my Sunday NYT puzzles at a White House conference on technology and the Internet. Since then, I've written several president-themed puzzles, including one to commemorate the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library in 2004. And my latest book of (40) puzzles, "White House Crosswords", came out a few months ago.

Word ladder-themed puzzles have been done before but this puzzle is a little different by adding a third president between the top and bottom ones. I was about to stop there but OVAL OFFICE and POCKET VETO interlocked nicely with POLK and FORD respectively. I then needed two other parallel Down answers, which took a lot longer to come up with. But sometimes you just get lucky.

Word ladder to commemorate Presidents' Day, POLK to TAFT to FORD. I was hoping there would be a natural progression, i.e. President #11 to #22 to #33 or something, but it goes from #11 to #27 to ... #38? Ah well, that would have been asking for a lot.

A word ladder with 11 steps creates all sorts of constraints on a grid. You might think: all those little short words, what's the big deal? But check out how many down entries cross two rungs of the ladder — every single one of the middle(-ish) ones. That's a ton of inflexibility foisted upon one grid. I'm impressed that David got that swath configured with only a smattering of AERO and ATILT. That's nice work!

I can totally see the allure of the beautiful OVAL OFFICE / LEGISLATOR set of parallel downs. I usually don't like when a grid has some random fill which feels theme-ish, as that makes it feel watered down and unintentional, but there's so much presidential material packed in today that I enjoyed the effect . And that corner is so nice — I don't mind ECO at all, since it has many ways it can be clued (including author Umberto), and Gen XER works too.

The opposite corner perfectly demonstrates the difficulty that symmetry imposes on a constructor. That SE is already tough to fill, and when you try to shove in POCKET VETO, you're bound to need some glue to hold the section together. PQR is so, so ugly, a random run of letters. ITER is one of those old-school Maleskan bits, and crossing ALIF makes it hard to justify, especially for a Monday. Oof, that's not good at all.

Ideally, I would have liked more elegance in the grid, TAFT smack dab in the middle of the grid at the very least. And it would have been stunning to get some sort of natural order — can you imagine how cool it would have been if President #11 had been at 11-Across, President #22 at 22-Across, etc.? But still, it was fun to get so much Presidential feel.