New York Times, Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Clocking in at 42 letters, I believe "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is one of the longest non-quote word strings to ever appear in a daily NYT crossword puzzle. Evenly spreading it out over the entire grid to simulate pointillism while maintaining the best fill possible required several non-standard constraints and techniques.

First, I spaced out the "letter dots" so that no two dots were orthogonally adjacent. I initially tried to avoid diagonal adjacency too, but that proved too constraining on the surrounding fill. Spacing out the dots in this way gives the grid a more uniform and aesthetically pleasing pattern.

Second, I intersected parts of the painting's name with POINTILLISM and GEORGES SEURAT, which I also had to keep away from the top, the bottom, and each other. The result: 14 dots before either word, 2 dots in POINTILLISM, 15 dots between the two, 3 dots in GEORGES SEURAT, and 8 dots afterward.

Third, I placed letter dots in positions where the fill would be least constrained. For example, the J in JATTE is placed in the lower-left corner where it is relatively isolated from other letter dots and starts a 5-letter horizontal word. In English, J is much more common at the start of words than in other positions. Based on XWord Info's word list, there are 317 valid strings with a J as the first letter of a 5-letter word, versus 27, 84, 48, and 9 valid strings when the J is in the other positions. Since the title unfolds top-to-bottom in a fixed order, I had much more control over horizontal placement than vertical placement. For example, after the J, I had to work in 4 more letters, which limits how high or low it can be positioned.

Stop me if you've heard me say this before: crosswords are a deeply personal experience. Your level of joy is hugely influenced by the intersection of things in the puzzle and things you love. That Venn Diagram overlap is enormous for me today, so it's impossible to be objective.

1. I got to feel smug. As soon as I saw all those dots, I guessed we were heading toward a Seurat theme.
2. I happen to love the Art Institute of Chicago, home of the iconic painting you discover by connecting the dots.
3. I happen to love Sondheim, and Sunday in the Park with George is one of his masterpieces. That musical is centered on that painter and that painting. (If you prefer, you can think of the artwork as a key element in a different kind of iconic scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)

Crossword commentators sometimes ding puzzles because they either don't know or don't care about the theme. Today I get to express the opposite viewpoint when my endorphins are gushing.

Any guesses as to how many times people will email me, asking what's the point of this one?

I admire so much about Jim. Take his gusto; his love for the arts. It's a joy to read how happy this puzzle made him. Makes me wish I felt that way about more things.

I was preparing to go into great detail about how the solving experience was not enjoyable, given that the random dots didn't form a picture, as is the payoff of POINTILLISM. Jim's comments made me hesitate. After some deliberation, I'll say that the puzzle is nothing if not memorable.

Art appreciation is subjective. Sometimes you either love a work or you hate it. Some might even say that the best pieces are the ones that get noticed; that generate this love/hate duality.