New York Times, Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The idea for this puzzle came while solving Andrew Ries's "Stagger Sessions," a 20-crossword EP. In one puzzle, ELBA is clued like so:

[Idris who's a counterargument to John Donne's "no man is an island" bit]

I immediately noticed that NO MAN IS AN ISLAND is 15 letters, and thought if I could come up with some other men whose names were islands, I might have a theme. All I found were CUBA GOODING JR., BRET EASTON ELLIS, DOCK ELLIS (an All-Star pitcher who supposedly threw a no-hitter while on LSD), and the fashion designer PERRY ELLIS. The ELLIS names didn't work with the other theme lengths of 9, 13, and 15, so I thought this theme wouldn't work. But then I realized I could make it a left-right symmetric puzzle, and the grid worked nicely with just 72 words.

I contacted Andrew Ries to make sure he was okay with me adapting his clue into an entire puzzle. He said that he had had the same idea seven years ago, and had CECIL RHODES and JOHN IRELAND on his list, but not CUBA GOODING JR. He said JOHN IRELAND had the problem of repeating LAND with NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, and back then IDRIS ELBA was not nearly as famous as he is now, so he scrapped the idea and ended up incorporating it into the ELBA clue. He gave me the go-ahead for my theme, and here we are.

Great idea, NO MAN IS AN ISLAND refuted by CUBA GOODING JR, IDRIS ELBA, and … BRET EASTON ELLIS. I was only vaguely familiar with that last one, but most best-selling authors ought to be crossworthy, yeah?

He also felt out of place because no one refers to ELLIS Island as just Ellis (do they?), whereas CUBA and ELBA are islands on their own. Sometimes it's tough to find enough examples to flesh out a crossword theme, and you have to accept some not-quite-ideal themers.

As Peter said, mirror symmetry is sometimes a lifesaver. The constraints are weird — it works, as long as all your themers are odd in length, or you have one pair matched by length + two that are odd-numbered in length. But that matched pair can't be too long!

It's a very specific set of constraints, but when it works, it works.

You can also do some neat things, like split up PERRY / ELLIS, as it's 5 / 5. I might have preferred that, myself.

I haven't been crazy about Peter's recent low-word-count grids recently, as they introduce too many compromises for an early-week puzzle. Today's grid felt much stronger, the openness allowing for such goodies as BRAZILIANS and GRIZABELLA. Along with TEABAGS / SANGRIA + PLUG-INS, this was a lot of great material to keep solvers going.

A couple of entries did make me pause:

• GDANSK might be tough for newer solvers, but the crossing answers felt fair. And that GD- start is interesting.
• CRUDITY made me hitch — isn't it usually "crudeness"? CRUDITE, as in the French appetizer, might have been more up my alley, but it's probably more foreign (yes, pun intended) to less-experienced solvers.
• HD TV SET also felt slightly off. The SET felt like a tag-on.

But overall, a nice grid. Going down to 72 words can make a good change of pace, as long as the result is smooth, which today's was.