INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERINGS

Howard Barkin is a software quality-assurance specialist — and an ace crossword solver — from Hillsborough, N.J. He won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2016 and is a perennial top-10 finisher.

Victor Barocas, who also competes, is a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota. The men became acquainted through the tournament when their last names appeared alphabetically adjacent in the results. The idea for this puzzle was Howard's. They worked back and forth by email to make it.

VICTOR: I powered up the Wayback Machine to share some of the failed themers that Howard and I discussed. EE CUMMINGS (EEC) and DH LAWRENCE (DHL) both had nice initialisms, but we dismissed them so all of the entries would go by name-initial-name, not initial-initial-name.

I am of the perfect age to remember RICHARD DEAN ANDERSON as MacGyver and reading RDA's on labels, but, alas, a 19-letter name doesn't leave enough room to put the initials next to it, even if one can make a defibrillator out of two candlesticks and some microphone wire. Same problem for PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

MARK PAUL GOSSELAAR's 17 letters would have fit nicely with a block and a triplet next door, but we didn't have a good name to put opposite him, so no go, and we decided to skip all name-name-name types, which also ruled out JUNE CARTER CASH (not clear that everyone would know Jewish Community Centers well enough anyway, so also goodbye to JOHN C CALHOUN). DAVID O SELZNICK and JAMES A GARFIELD almost made it onto the list, and HARRY S TRUMAN might have been there had HUNTER S THOMPSON not beaten him to the HST punch.

So, after all that, we ended up with the set in the puzzle. I very much enjoyed working with Howard, and I hope that people enjoyed solving it as much as we enjoyed making it.

HOWARD: In short, I originally told Victor of a theme idea that I had based on initials that sadly never came to fruition (not even close, actually). Victor resurrected the idea and ran with it, coming up with a nice list of candidates. He developed a lot of solid fill and did some of the general heavy lifting on this puzzle. Co-constructing is fairly new for me, so this was a great experience -

I highly recommend it, Jeff ;).

Initialisms, well-known(ish) trigrams mirroring famous people's initials. Some interesting finds — with as much ARTHUR C CLARKE as I've read, I've never thought about his monogram matching the Atlantic Coast Conference.

I appreciated how Howard and Victor kept perfectly consistent, always choosing people who are known by their First, Middle Initial, and Last names. Jim and I did have a conversation about STEPHEN A DOUGLAS, which both of us hitched on, knowing him more without the middle initial. Some Googling shows that the A is fine, though.

This is a case where less might have been more. Putting ACC next to ARTHUR C CLARKE = smashing the theme over my head with a hammer. It also emphasized the initialism-nature of the puzzle, which is a bad thing, given that initialisms are generally overdone and boring. It would have been much more playful to integrate the trigrams into the clues, i.e. [Sci-fi author who's a member of the ACC?]

This would have allowed for more bonuses in the fill, as well as super smooth overall product. I did like what Howard and Victor achieved — some great bonuses in AP PHYSICS, A ROSE IS A ROSE, ITS GREEK TO ME, REACTION TIME, SILENT SPRING, along with an average amount of crossword glue.

But just think what these two solid constructors could have done without the constraint of the six trigrams fixed into place. Having maybe four more great bonuses and maybe six less of BSA GRO GRP OBES RUHR STKS could have done so much towards delivering an even snazzier and smoother solving experience.

In general, I advise newer constructors to avoid initialism themes, because editors seem to be slowing down their acceptance of these, given their overexposure. However, even the most done-to-death theme types still might be feasible, if not exciting, if they contain a clever twist, some wordplay, something to help raise them out of the muck.