New York Times, Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The origins of this puzzle's theme came from seeing the clue "Woman's name that sounds like two letters of the alphabet" for ELSIE. This got me thinking about all the possible names that could be clued this way. Left on the cutting room floor: LC THE COW, LN DEGENERES, LE GOULDING, and OB WAN KENOBI.

As for grid construction, with six theme answers I knew I had to alternate their placement on either side of the grid. This allows for the least overlap between theme answers (e.g. 36- and 46-Across only overlap at the last letter), which in turn gives me less constraints as I try to find clean and entertaining fill. I started with searching for a central 7-letter word that would overlap nicely between 36- and 46-Across and leave me with entertaining down answers at 22- and 24-Down. I was happy with LUDACRIS, given that many people my age will appreciate seeing a popular rapper in the NYT puzzle. After that, it was a matter of trying to fill each of the other eight corners cleanly. I try to take advantage of longer answers (like 10- and 45-Down) to put in new, fresh fill, as it's awfully hard to do that with four or five letter answers.

Last week Joel finished his third year as my summer intern, while he goes to Pomona College. His constructions are always superclean, and he manages to include some great vocabulary besides. In this puzzle I especially like IT'S OK, TWOFACE, PARASAIL, LUDACRIS, and NEW MOON. That's impressive fill for a puzzle with this much theme material. It takes careful placement of theme answers and black squares — and some serious crossword chops, too — to pull it off.

Entertaining offering from Joel, putting a spin on the "two letters spoken aloud" type theme. It provided a nice aha moment after I finally stopped trying to shove ARTE JOHNSON into place and thought about it.

Six theme answers in the horizontal direction is a major challenge, and Joel executes it well. It's possible to put six themers into rows 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13, but that often makes black square positioning very difficult. Joel's solution of overlapping themers at rows 3/4 and 12/13 works well, with only the ??NF?? crossing restricting flexibility. As a result, the fill in the north and south is smooth.

Sparkly fill is a mark of a great constructor, and as Will mentions, Joel excels in this area. As for the shorter, supporting fill, OKEMO isn't something I knew, or found terribly interesting after looking up, but what other options are there for a O???O pattern? Partials (ODE TO), prefixes (OSTEO), or even more esoteric places (ORONO) are worse. OUTDO perhaps, but alternating pattern of vowels and consonants typically makes for better flexibility in fill.

For a puzzle that's this thematically dense, there will almost always be one or two fill patterns that cause difficulty. Joel does very well to make them nearly invisible. A great puzzle is often defined not by what the solver sees, but what he/she doesn't see.