FLIP 'PHONES

Emily Carroll is a 2016 medical-school graduate now finishing her residency in New York City. She finds crossword constructing "a nice stress reliever in the little free time I have outside the hospital." This puzzle was initially intended for a weekday (15 x 15 squares), but when she couldn't make the theme work satisfactorily, she came up with more examples and expanded it into a 21 x 21.

This is Emily's seventh crossword for The Times and her first Sunday.

My idea for this puzzle started as a 15x15 with all clothing-themed homophone swaps — Bowtie Tae Bo, Loafer Furlough, and T-shirt Surety and the revealer Refashioned. But, since Surety has three syllables (as much as I tried to convince myself I could pronounce it in two), I was sent back to the drawing board and encouraged to try to expand it into a 21x21. Glad it worked out in the end and very excited to be making my Sunday debut!

This one felt familiar.

Will rejected mine last year, saying that it didn't quite work for him. I never like getting a rejection, but I can understand, given how competitive it is for weekday puzzle slots. Will receives more submissions than ever, about 125 per week. For seven slots, that makes for a dauntingly low acceptance rate.

However, Sundays have always been the pain point for Will. In the past, he's had assistants comb through the slush pile, first and foremost flagging all Sunday grids. At last reported count, he only had 10 in the queue (most other days of the week it was more like 30-50). I sound like a skipping CD, beating the drum of getting him to try new ways of encouraging more Sunday submissions, especially clever theme ideas that can carry a solver through the big grid without losing interest.

The NYT Sunday crossword competes with other crosswords. Evan Birnholz's Washington Post Sunday crosswords have overall had better themes and much stronger grid execution than the NYT's over the past year. Worse, the NYT Sunday crossword also competes with social media. Netflix. Amazon Prime. As with every business, the NYT Sunday crossword must evolve and improve to compete with people's attention.

Yes, the NYT crossword subscription business has never been better. But complacency is the most common problem for any successful business.

I enjoyed Emily's theme set. I spent dozens of hours brainstorming mine, and LOAFER FURLOUGH never occurred to me. Brilliant find. It's so tricky working with a theme that doesn't allow for any computer-based data-mining assistance. Discovering something like KNEE HIGH HEINIE can feel like a gift of fortune (although I ended up dismissing it way back when, worrying that a saggy butt reference could offend people).

Nice gridwork. OH DEAR ME is a solid bonus, as is SEASLUG, BEGUILE, TRUE DAT, YEAH MAN.

It's not perfect craftsmanship in terms of short fill, but the crossword glue is mostly minor. ESS, HIES, HORS, ICI, LAH, OVI, TSE, UNI are thankfully all ignorable. On the whole, the grid is about average in terms of NYT Sunday quality. Might have benefitted from going to 142 words, allowing some smoothing and a bit more injected into the long slots.

Yet again, today's puzzle ended up feeling like a weekday grid stretched into a Sunday. Emily's initial instinct to do it as a 15x15 was spot-on. As much as I liked many of the finds, concentrating the five best into a 15x15 would have packed more punch.

I applaud Will's effort here, trying to expand his pool of Sunday submissions. Inflating weekday puzzles isn't a great way, though. If I were Will, I'd think about bringing on people like Evan as regular Sunday contributors.