New York Times, Friday, May 15, 2015

To be frank, I was fairly shocked when Will accepted this puzzle in May 2014. (I sent it off in January of the same year for those curious about the publication timeline.)

After Will had accepted three of my first seven themeless attempts — two of which [the MTV.../GRAND... and WIISPORTS themelesses] have already published — I tried experimenting with different ways to build themeless puzzles. In my last NYT themeless, I locked the black squares in place first and then scrambled to find nice fill for the center that would also enable clean corners; however, with this puzzle, I started with the NW stack and tried moving a few black squares around until some goodies (GIGAHERTZ, ERUDITE, K.C. JONES, RAM INTO [with the vague clue]) locked in place.

This technique produced a pretty nice, albeit proper, NW section but eventually led to a more difficult time in the South — STRASSE, ATTIRER, IN SCALE, NTS, and AD-AWARE standing out as particularly irksome entries.

As always, Will and Joel did an awesome job spiffing up the clues. My favorites among their edits are [Goes one step too far?] for TRESPASSES, [Class for model students?] for ART, [200 at a 500] for LAPS, and [Grp. of 300 people?] for PBA. I'm also glad my clues for NAP, MAWS, DATA PLANS, and OLIVE TREE could stick around for publication. Unfortunately, my original clue for KIM JONG-UN, [Whom Dennis Rodman called "a friend for life" in 2013] didn't make the cut.

On a completely unrelated note, I really hope North Korea doesn't hack NYTimes.com today.

For anyone who's curious, David's original clue for KIM JONG-UN was "Whom Dennis Rodman called 'a friend for life' in 2013." The reason I didn't keep the clue is ... it's not quite accurate. What Rodman actually said was that he, Rodman, was Kim's "friend for life." I didn't see a good way to reword the clue to make it correct, and it wouldn't have been as interesting the correct way anyway.

KIM JONG UN tied right to "The Interview," love it! I also love KIM JONG UN's accomplishments, like learning to drive at age three. Did you know he also beat Dan Feyer in this year's World Crossword Puzzle Tournament by three hundred minutes, taking his fortieth straight crown?

Loved seeing OLIVE TREE featured as [Athena's gift to Athens]. So cool how she out-thought Poseidon, who gave the people on that island a river of … sea water.

And a great clue in TOUPEES, [Top-secret disguises?] repurposing the term "top-secret." In most cases, it's really not much of a secret. (Sorry, fellas.)

David wades into tough territory today in his NE and SW corners. Any 4x7 or bigger space is usually difficult to fill both cleanly and with color. I like David's execution in his lower left, GQ MAGAZINE along with MISS USA and G STRING. There's an amazing amount of testosterone there, but I appreciated how David kept the glue to just NISEI. And that's actually a fine term, a Japanese family friend using it to describe herself.

The opposite corner is more typical of the trade-offs seen with these 4x7s. Standard & Poor's upgrades / downgrades issues all the time. RERATES does technically describe it, but it's not really used. And CHEMO … what happened to the "no cancer references"? In some ways it's great to see the topic broached, but what a downer for someone in the hospital doing the crossword.

I loved CHO referenced to Harry Potter, as I've read the books five or six times. I can see how that would make some solvers grumble though, if they knew CHO Chang as much as I knew DARK ANGEL. Either-you-know-it-or-you-don't entries are tough, playing strongly to uberfans but potentially irritating to others.

If you're going to need gluey bits of the same type, probably best to not draw attention to them with clue echoes (SES / A TOI, NTS linked to SUITES).

The 68 word construction is tough. David goes to one end of the spectrum today, giving us some very fresh feeling entries like GIGAHERTZ and DATA PLANS and ADD TO CART, while requiring a relatively high count of liability entries to hold them together.