New York Times, Saturday, April 27, 2019

It's very exciting to have another puzzle published in the New York Times! This was the first themeless puzzle I had accepted for any venue; by fun coincidence, I also constructed today [4/27]'s themeless LA Times puzzle. Double puzzle day!

Two years ago or so, I tried making a few themeless puzzles when I couldn't come up with any good themes. After a couple encouraging "near miss" rejections, I decided to take a more serious and systematic approach to making a themeless puzzle. I made this puzzle fourteen months ago; I've made several themeless puzzles since then (a few of which are in the queue for future Fridays and Saturdays) and I've learned a lot in the process.

A couple of entries in this grid would not pass muster with me today. ROLF in particular, but RARED and NEMEA are entries I'd prefer to avoid as well. I'm also not sure I'd include ALL IS TRUE now, for fear it's too niche. I originally clued it as [Alternate title for Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" (honestly!)] to give a bit of a parenthetical hint to the solver.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of my clues were kept. I'm particular happy that the clues for GO TO PRESS and OVER SLEEP made it through. Two that aren't mine are [Dawn of the Space Age?] and [Major thing in the heavens?] - I guess I need to work on my astronomy cluing.

Many moons ago, I submitted a puzzle to Will with GAIMAN in it. He said he wasn't sure if NEIL GAIMAN was well-known enough.

NEIL GAIMAN?! Winner of the Newbery for "The Graveyard Book," writer of "The Sandman" series, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards?

I was kvetching to a friend about it, and he said, "Neil who?"

Huh.

Maybe Will knows what he's doing.

As much as I admire NEIL GAIMAN's work — "The Graveyard Book" is fantastic — I like feature entries that are more widely accessible, like EARTHRISE and TULIPMANIA. The iconic photograph inspired generations to think beyond their limits.

And TULIPMANIA — those crazy Dutch! It may be urabn myth, but I love the story of the guy who accidentally ate a tulip bulb worth a fortune, thinking that it was an onion.

Now, you might say, are EARTHRISE and TULIPMANIA things most everyone knows? And you might even have a good point. These are subjective calls — there will undoubtedly be people out there who think the moon landing was faked, perhaps even by the Dutch, who spread TULIPMANIA rumors to disguise their secret agenda of taking over the moon.

(That's the plot of NEIL GAIMAN's latest book.)

But there's one big point of difference: EARTHRISE and TULIPMANIA are made up of words that most everyone knows. If you hadn't heard of GAIMAN before, it'd be a tortuous struggle.

This is all a long way of saying that I liked a lot of Joe's feature entries, but I wondered how many would feel foreign to many solvers. See: LEAF PEEPER and ALL IS TRUE. I was able to fill those in in because they're composed of words I knew. But neither did much for me.

JOHN CLEESE wrote "A Fish Called Wanda"? I'm already a "Monty Python" and "Fawlty Towers" fanboy, but this fact impresses me even more.

I appreciated Joe's gridwork, nary a dab of crossword glue to be seen. If there had been a few fewer feature entries that felt divisive — either you know it or you don't — it could have garnered POW! attention.