New York Times, Tuesday, February 26, 2019

I came up with this idea in late 2015, being inspired by two prior Tuesdays: May 1, 2007, and November 16, 2010. It struck me that they both had a "pinwheel" pattern of long answers that did not have anything to do with theme, just to help set up the actual themers, and that they fit the simple "word that comes before/after" theme type. JOINT then struck me as both a description of the 90-degree turn and something with a more definite list of potential themers, and so I set to work on it.

I considered JOINT RESOLUTION in the center, but I wasn't sure how familiar it would be, nor could I think of any meaningful reason for RESOLUTION other than that it would make the revealer 15 letters long. It hit me immediately after trying the revealer in its current form that it would allow for two more themers. As I went along filling and cluing it, I was afraid that not all the joints being hinge joints, like their arrangement seemed to indicate, would be cause for rejection. There is always some such kind of risk that you take whenever you submit a puzzle, though, so I kept going and was thrilled when Will accepted it last May 18.

Thank you, solvers, for taking the time to try this. A puzzle is never truly happy until it is solved by you :-)

P.S. I must give a big shout-out to Tim Croce, who is a very good friend of mine... and, as of February 16, a dad!

JOINTs represented in the grid, showing them as they're bent. REEFER, DOOBIE, FATTY, BLUNT … oops! That's something different.

Audacious to use eight JOINTs, plus the revealer. Working around a single bent themer is hard enough, but eight is asking for trouble. I knew I was in for a rough ride when 1-A was [Some foreign river].

Oh wait, was that 10-Down? SOMME foreign river indeed!

But I was pleasantly surprised that there wasn't a flood of crossword glue; more like a splattering. Alex was careful to not have a concentration in any one category — some foreign rivers, outdated names (MINOLTA ICHAT), initialisms (PTL RPI), foreign words (RAITA, KNUT). Something for everyone!

I would have liked something more elegant — perhaps fewer joints, but placed in anatomical order? An example: NECK to SHOULDER to HIP to KNEE to ANKLE. That would have felt more planned, instead of an etude in building up construction skills.

Don't get me wrong — it's a ridiculous feat of construction to work so many JOINTs into a single grid, without using an entire bottle of crossword glue. Heck, there's even RUN A TAB and OAK LEAVES; solid bonuses.

But overall, it felt more like it was done for construction's sake — is this feat possible? — rather than for solver pleasure.