New York Times, Tuesday, March 19, 2019

I first had the idea for this theme in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was surprised by how well the theme answers worked, but I couldn't put the grid together. By June of the next year, my program and my word list had improved to the point that I thought it was worth giving the theme another go. I don't usually come back to theme ideas, but FILM NOIR was so lucky that I felt I had to try. Since it has eight letters, I had to make the puzzle 16 columns wide. Perhaps I could have split FILM NOIR up into, for example, ELM and NOT, letting me use a standard size grid, but I felt that would be less interesting. However, the extra space also allowed me to have two theme answers in row three.

After fiddling around for a bit, I finally found a version I was satisfied with. However, I realized that PR STUNT had an extra consecutive letter in it, the "U". I considered changing the pair to something like SIGHING and BURSTIN, but I felt that they would have been less exciting than the existing theme answers.

I'm happy to be back in the New York Times, and I hope you enjoy this puzzle.

Was it EASY AS ABC to discover the theme? I was going to boldly highlight the appropriate squares, but it might be more fun if you took another look. Think about the numbers in the clues, ranging from 1 to 26 …

Excellent finds, the alphabet fully represented in strings of letters — inside symmetrical themers! That's neat. I especially liked that Daniel was able to work smoothly around the tougher letters, DJ KHALED and BACKUPQB so innocently hiding JK and PQ.

I did hesitate at the HATHA / KHALED crossing — ripe for mistakes, as HATHI / KHILED or HATHE / KHELED could seem just as right. Also, having two rappers might trigger the solvers who constantly write to me saying DON'T PUT SO MANY DAMN RAPPERS IN YOUR &#$@# PUZZLES!

I'm a fan of MOS DEF, partially because of his music, but more so because he's gotten me out of many a crossword jam.

A tiny part of me enjoys irritating those rapper-complainy solvers, too.

With so much theme material — nine of them to work around! — Daniel did an admirable job of building his grid. Even at 83 words (the max for a 16x15 grid should be roughly 81), I noticed the strain here and there, a SEISMO up in the NE, random AT TWO in the SE, a bit of ODA, ALTI, ON AT daubed on elsewhere. It's not too shabby, given the theme constraint. Don't forget that Daniel necessarily had to make a pangram; rarely an easy construction task.

I appreciated his bonuses, too. OCTAHEDRA and other Platonic solids are always interesting. SAYS WHO? Sez ARISTOTLE!

This one reminds me of a similar concept done in a Sunday grid. I finally put up a note on that one, since at three separate instances, I couldn't figure out what was going on, and then promptly forgot. I like that Daniel found a way to similarly play on the alphabet, but squeezed his into a weekday grid, allowing for a theme-dense feeling.