New York Times, Saturday, June 3, 2023

I'd like to retroactively title this puzzle "Everything Everywhere All at Once", which was too big to fit in a 15x15 grid.

The "stairstep" progression of Nothing -> Anything -> Something -> Everything caught my attention as a fun way to seed a themeless, as it created a bunch of really workable substrings in the Downs. I worked through a couple iterations of this puzzle, trying a quad stack (fat chance!) and two double stacks, ultimately settling on a triple stack with the disappointing omission of a delicious everything bagel.

(Side note: Seattle! Get your bagel act together. How hard can it be?)

A BIT of RIMY fill here and there, but I'm happy with the grid given the constraints of the center spanners. Getting 8-Down to run through it all felt appropriate for what I hope was a fun stumper of a Saturday!

SOMETHING? ANYTHING? NOTHING. It's hard enough to create a solid grid-spanning triple-stack, and to do it with a mini-theme makes John's creation stand out. Three excellent phrases stacked together with a common thread tying them together? Love it!

Adhering to such a tight constraint almost guarantees you'll need some trade-offs to make it work. AERO and AIR is the biggest issue. AERO gets dinged on most editors' spec sheets (prefix), and duplicating with AIR is a double no-no.

However, many solvers don't care about this sort of thing, and adding airiness by including pairs of long Downs through the ends of the triple stack adds so much color. NEO NOIR FILM and ARMY TRAINEE are great entries.

The opposite side is less constrained since there are a reasonable number of phrases starting with SOMETHING, ANYTHING, and NOTHING. It's still challenging to make all the crossings smooth, though. H WORD is tenuous today when much stronger language is used, even in kids' shows. Crossing that with RIMY was hoary.

The center of the triple stack gives such an ugly letter sequence to work with: -NGP-. Don't forget that due to symmetry reasons, there have to be an equal number of letters on either side of it … but PUZZLING PROBLEM solved! (Table tennis zealot Will Shortz probably would have pushed for PING PONG PADDLES.) While PUZZLING PROBLEM feels slightly arbitrary — is TOUGH STUMPER or PERPLEXING CONUNDRUM crossworthy? — it's a reasonable solution to the -NGP- enigma.

I love when constructors push the envelope in themelesses, and this grid was largely successful.