New York Times, Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Glad to be back! The inspiration for this puzzle was a concept I very much enjoyed by Andrew Reynolds. I remember wondering how in the world he extracted those theme answers! A brute force approach would require testing 5,040 permutation strings of seven letters against a word list, so I figured a bit of skillful coding was involved. "Change the world" struck me as an interesting concept with lots of options to consider, and I hope this interpretation of the phrase does it reasonable justice.

I took a unique approach for finding potential theme answers, involving Excel, that didn't involve real coding expertise. I tested out every planet, sans Mars, and not all were suited for the job. (Jupiter yielded nothing, Uranus only "PURSUANT," and Neptune merely "ANTEPENULTIMATE"!) The most fun entry I didn't use: "MERCY RULE" for Mercury! Hopefully, this set of theme answers is satisfying.

Looking back, if I were to write the puzzle again, I might try to make the grid a bit less segmented (increase the "flow"), clean up a couple of bits of fill (i.e., TEHEE and LAIN), and add a couple of jazzier long answers. My favorite corner here is the SW. Hope you enjoyed!

Anagrams are often too difficult to figure out, which risks solvers not bothering to go back and untangling them. I like that Evan chose sequences on the easier side to decipher. VESUN starts with a telltale VE-, letting us know that it had to be VE-SUN. You know, the allied Victory in Europe on the SUN.

I admit, the presence of SUN confused me a bit.

Also confusing: the different planets are worlds? I get EARTH, but there's life on MYRECRU?

Er … MR. CEURY?

MERCURY, bah!

I'd have preferred using different worlds that have been inhabited. Like VULCAN. ENDOR. HOTH. I suppose we could allow MARS, given how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will soon be terraforming it into a battleground for their dominion robot armies. My money's on the Bezobots.

(Jim pointed out my existenceism bias; that "world" doesn't necessarily mean "containing life." In fact, this dictionary does include a direct definition making the theme valid. It is definition #12 out of 12, but still, it does work.)

Maybe that theme would be a bit too nerdy, but crossword people tend to be (gasp!) a bit nerdy.

In cryptic crosswords, CHANGES is a common indicator for anagramming. It works today, but something like PLANETARY MOTION would have been better. And it would have given a better reason for using planets!

Strong gridwork; I'm impressed at the level of quality Evan is producing these days. Hardly a drop of crossword glue to be seen, and even some goodies in WENT STAG, TD PASS, FANTASY, MALAISE, GYM RAT, WHO ME? No AW MAN from Jeff!

I even briefly considered some POW! love for this one, based on the solid gridwork. The theme didn't quite work for me, though.

P.S. (WARNING: NERD ALERT) There's an easier approach to searching for scrambled strings. Take MERCURY, for example. You can inspect all the 7-letter sequences in your wordlist, checking to see if they have exactly one of M, E, C, U, Y, and two Rs. About five minutes of code and five seconds of run time turned up ARMY RECRUIT(S) and MERCY RULE but nothing else. VENUS was more interesting, with ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, EVENS UP THE SCORE, LEAVES UNSAID, LIVENS UP, and my favorite, NATURE VS NURTURE.

Evan Kalish, in his notes above, dismisses ANTE-PENULTIMATE as uninteresting. It's a great word! Perhaps he's unfamiliar with Flanders & Swann, whose brilliant song Have Some Madeira M'dear includes this verse every word lover should cherish: