New York Times, Saturday, October 23, 2021

I'm a THEMELESS JUNKIE (15). This isn't news to the real ones who've solved my stuff for years. According to XWord Info, more than 60% of my standard, non-variety crossword publications have appeared on a Friday or Saturday.

This puzzle today feels different, though. I'd always been so interested in the "How low can you go?" word count quests or asking myself, "How wide open can I possibly make this corner while still retaining good fill?" This pattern of so many shorter interlocking 7s, a classic grid skeleton, never appealed much to me as a constructor. Give me a challenge! Force me to use my imagination to pull off a technical marvel! My solvers deserve a formidable-looking Saturday, which would then be extra satisfying to solve!

Whew, was this grid a challenge, all right. A challenge to make every last 6-, 7-, 8- and 9-letter answer fresh, peculiar and/or fun to clue. A challenge to pack so much juice into each corner without relying on overfamiliar, pedestrian answers like ESTATES or TSETSES, or short gluey bits to hold the longer pizazz together. I'm not saying every last one of these is so sparkly (looking at you, GATEMAN and CARTAGE … and, believe me, it hurts to use DERE!), but hopefully nothing here makes you deep sigh and say, "I'm so damn tired of seeing this in puzzles."

To aspiring constructors taking notes: My strategy mostly revolved around using answers in the middle of the stacks that, well, you'd be surprised to find in the middle while solving. Answers like A LA MODE and ENTENTE traditionally appear in slots like 15-Across, to hold together zippier 7s on either side. So I hunched that if I, for instance, stacked the Scrabble-icious™ GROUCHY under POP QUIZ, it'd lead to fresher results with rarer letter combos. Or, if I needed to use something vowel-heavy, I'd resort to a new, cool-to-learn word like ÉCORCHÉ.

Finally, I've brought this up before, but it was delightful to bake in common words like ETHICS, TAXING, ENERGY, PIGTAIL, PRICES, DATING / PETUNIA / INEXACT, etc. They allowed me to kick back and have a blast with tricky, evocative and/or wordplay-inspired cluing. I know many constructors are interested in highlighting flashy names and elements of modern pop culture — myself included — but this I highly recommend as well!

Sam is a recent college grad and thus roughly three orders of magnitude hipper than me. I often have trouble with his themelesses, mystified at some show or artist that plays to his tastes/generation much more than mine, or words that I only vaguely recognize, or Learned-League-level geography. Such a pleasant surprise to feel on Sam's wavelength for a great majority of today's puzzle!

Great start at 1-Across, POP QUIZ featuring the rare Q and Z, and such a great wordplay clue for it. "Questions of surprise" isn't as in-the-language as I'd like, and the telltale question mark puts you on alert, but it's still a fun misdirection toward things like "but why?" or "oh really?"

Well done in juicing out of the long slots. EMOTICON is a bit dated but still fun, MAILCHIMP is a funny brand name, TV ANTENNA as "rabbit ears" was a nice throwback for us older generations.

And the PIECAKEN always makes me laugh. Where else but in America would you see at least one pie stuffed into a cake? Calling the PIECAKEN a "hybrid," though, doesn't do American gluttony justice. It's not simply kind of a pie, kind of a cake. It's a full freakin' pie jammed into a ginormous cake. U-S-A! U-S-A!

I'm always apprehensive about solving themelesses heavy on 7s because it's so hard to squeeze every last drop out of those mid-length slots. It's even more challenging when you have two stacks of 7s intersecting each other in all four corners. I imagine that few people will be tweeting #CARTAGE or #TAURINE.

However, Sam did a nice job working in OIL GLUT under EMIRATI, PG FILMS, PORK RIB, ALL STAR, UV LIGHT. That's a lot of solid to fantastic entries.

I did come to a screeching halt in the lower right, though. CARTAGE ... okay. Next to … ÉCORCHÉ? I asked some French-speaking American friends if they knew this, and I got a bunch of blank stares. (My native French friends said, "oui, bien sur!") It's a tough call. Part of me likes that Sam unabashedly features envelope-pushing words. However, along with PET FEES, which sounded odd to this former pet owner's ear, it was a tough way to finish out.

Super thankful for all the fair crosses! Also grateful that there was more for me in this one than in previous Sam themelesses.