New York Times, Monday, April 29, 2019

PAST: Three years ago today, my first NYT crossword was published. Back then, I only made themelesses, but lately, as you can see here, I've been experimenting with days of the week I've seldom tried. Look out for a Thursday (and maybe even a Sunday) from me soon!

PRESENT: I successfully presented my master's thesis in education at the University of Pennsylvania this past weekend. Because I'm concerned about how students think about their and others' identities, my thesis focused on how 9th-grade boys learn to think about aspects of identity such as gender, class, and race through literature.

FUTURE: I recently accepted a teaching position at the Riverdale School in the Bronx, so I'll officially be a New Yorker next year. But fret not, for I will still be hosting and running Boswords this summer with John Lieb. If you're in the Boston area on July 28th and want to compete in a crossword tournament, Boswords is for you. Registration and other information can be found at boswords.org. Hope to see you there!

Ah, the eternal question—

No, not the DINOSAUR or the egg! You're a long way from Jurassic Park, my friend. This is the crossworld, where the most primal of queries is: once you've come up with a seed of an idea — might I say, an egg? — how do you build a crossword theme around it?

GET CRACKING is a great phrase, ripe with potential. I'd have considered making cute oval shapes out of circled squares, with OSTRICH, GOOSE, etc. popping their heads out the top. But that'd be tricky — and what would you put inside the circled squares? Repeating E G G or S H E L L isn't interesting.

Okay. How about representing EGGs being cracked, as for an omelet? According to today's puzzle ... you flatten them … and then poke up the middle? Sure!

No wonder my cooking is so terrible.

Then there's the old standby of breaking the animals across two entries, i.e., LOST and RICHARD. Overdone, but I'm Chinese. I like thousand-year-old eggs.

*rimshot*

What Andrew ended up with is a curious balance of trying to do something fresh, and trying to use interesting finds. There'd be no way to incorporate the cool DINOSAUR if you simply broke it into two pieces. So there's something to be said about popping up the S so that it could be included.

The visual doesn't work for me, but I appreciate the attempt to do break — dare I say, crack? — new ground.

Also appreciated was Andrew's gridwork, mostly Monday newb-friendly (albeit GAEA, which is usually GAIA, and RODINO are tough). That's not always easy to do with a "broken words" theme, since the black square separating the pieces takes away grid flexibility.

Check out that extra black square Andrew used, just before ANDY. Makes a huge difference in ease of filling that big NW corner. I wish more constructors would use "cheater squares" in this way. Some editors are strict about black square limits, but I don't care at all that this one has more than average (42, as opposed to usually a max of 36-38). Smoothness is a much higher priority.

Overall, I liked how Andrew scratched at the surface of doing something new. Including DINOSAUR was a nice touch (although Daenerys Targaryen has lodged a formal complaint about dragon-ism). The visual didn't all come together for me, feeling not quite GET CRACKING-ish, but I applaud the attempt to push the eggshell. Er, envelope.