New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 2020

I'm so excited to make my debut in The New York Times! I started seriously constructing in August 2018 and racked up seventeen rejections before finally receiving the fabled "Crossword — yes!" email in March earlier this year.

56-Across was my seed entry for this puzzle. It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that my original clue referenced New York, nor that the editorial team changed it to Los Angeles. Brainstorming other themers turned out to be an exercise in realizing the limits of my perspective, which is a cool but also frustrating part of constructing. For example, a paper I grew up assuming was widely read turned out to be just a county newspaper (meaning ON THE RECORD wouldn't fly), and I learned that LOST IN THE POST, the title of a song I've listened to since middle school, isn't actually a British idiom. In the end, I could only make three entries work, which I was worried would be too sparse for a theme, but thankfully it wasn't a dealbreaker.

I'm grateful to the editorial team for helping polish this puzzle (and also all their thoughtful feedback on my 17 earlier submissions), but I'm glad a couple clues I wrote made the cut. Most notably, as someone who played a lot of Monopoly growing up, I couldn't pass up the intersecting references at 68-Across and 49-Down. I hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

Today's theme sounds like a joke my kids would tell: a Boston cabbie picks up a reporter and asks, "Where to?" The person replies, "Circle the block a few times! I need to go AROUND THE GLOBE!"

Then the cabbie bangs his head against the dining room table as his cackling kids demand that their father laugh because it's hilarious, so why aren't you laughing?

Seriously, though, the first themer was perfect. There's something neat about the dual description of reporters being found AROUND THE GLOBE (the HQ of the Globe) and also having to travel AROUND THE GLOBE.

The second didn't work as well. A Baltimore news reader's desk can be found UNDER THE SUN? Baltimoreans haul their desks out to the sidewalk so they can read their papers? Better would have been something funny, maybe referring to the basement of the Sun building.

The lack of parallel structure hurt the last themer. When you start with two out of three positional "… can be found" clues and the last entry is BEHIND THE TIMES, it's bizarre not to complete the pattern. Make them all the same or all different.

At only 39 theme squares, the theme felt thin, but I couldn't come up with a fourth possibility, either. Although three themers is unusually low these days, taking up less real estate can make room for bonuses in the fill. I appreciate that Adam wove in so much UNCLE SAM, AEGEAN SEA, TEA GARDEN, OIL BARON, with careful avoidance of glue, only minor ASI and CRO. That helped shore up the solving experience.

ZEBU, not so much. (Crossword insiders have a crude term that starts with "Scrabble" for forcing the rare letters JQXZ into a grid.) I enjoy AP CALC and the Z, but ZEBU might trigger that "I have to know trivia to do crosswords?" unease that we badly want to avoid.

A lot of potential with this theme. With some massaging of the clues, perhaps writing a little story about them — a reporter circling the building, searching the basement, then finding his source hiding in the back alley? — it could have been more memorable.