New York Times, Friday, April 1, 2016

Having gone 13 years without writing a New York Times crossword, I was quite surprised when Will Shortz contacted me and asked me to write one. After he revealed the reason, I was shocked. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, but I think the newspaper executives who made this decision are being shortsighted and that the paper will lose many subscribers. Puzzle editors love symmetry, and Will said that since I wrote the first crossword under his editorship, he thought having me write the last one as well would make for a nice balance. You can imagine my eagerness at accepting the challenge.

After just a few minutes, I came up with the idea of breaking the news to the readers in the puzzle itself. Playing around with the phrasing for several hours, though, led to nothing that worked with symmetric lengths other than DUETOBUDGETCUTS, THENEWYORKTIMES, CROSSWORDPUZZLE, with no final line. Realizing that maybe I could write the penultimate puzzle, instead of the last one, was the key. If Will had something really special to run the final day, then my puzzle would work perfectly for the second-to-last day. Luckily, Will said he had just gotten a really special puzzle, so I played around some more and came up with WILLENDTOMORROW.

Figuring that this puzzle would be scrutinized closely, I wanted to keep the word count as low as a themeless, with no more than 72 words. Once I placed the four 15s in the grid I looked for problem areas. Only the ZZ of PUZZLE looked problematic, but that area ended up working just fine. Looking back at it now, months after I wrote it, my least favorite answers are EEN, RRS, and USS. Since it's a 72-worder with 60 theme squares, I can live with a few three-letter clunkers.

During the months between when I wrote this and when it was published, I was sworn to secrecy. According to some insiders who have seen tomorrow's puzzle and given some hints about it in some private puzzle-based chatrooms, it has a quintuple stack of 15s, is a double pangram, has 52 words with just 17 black squares, and all the answers are common with no partials, foreign words, or Roman numerals. You'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if you can trust everything you read on the Internet.

P.S. If you're interested, I have a subscription superhard crossword called Fireball Crosswords and a Kickstarter campaign going on right now for a not-so-hard news-based crossword.

An excellent construction from Peter, one of the best in the business. How fitting that he was chosen to tackle the penultimate NYT puzzle. I'm still in shock at the announcement buried within the grid. I suppose all good things must come to an end at some point.

Peter's puzzles tend to be a tad heavy on proper nouns for my taste, especially ones that some might consider esoteric. But this one is all good — Issa RAE was unfamiliar to me, but the crossings are all fair, and including "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl" in the clue made me want to check that out.

Peter tackles a tough 72-word grid even though he has four 15-letter themers. That theme density is tough enough in a 78-word grid! He uses his black squares very wisely, breaking up the grid such that no one subsection requires him to fill a gigantic white space. There's not one area that shines brilliantly for me, but spreading out the goodies — BROCADE, CLOISONNE, RIOT ACT, OCEANARIA — left me with a great impression.

Along with virtually no gluey bits — maybe just a USS, and that is pretty much fine — it's very well executed. A fitting penultimate puzzle. Tomorrow's is utterly jaw-dropping — Peter forgot to mention that it has one final extraordinary layer: it only uses four letters in the entire grid: R, U, S, and E.

(Before you email me with angry protests, check out the first letters of each sentence in Peter's commentary.)