New York Times, Saturday, August 10, 2019

ANNA: I'm so excited for this puzzle to exist — this is my first NYT print puzzle, and working with Erik is a great experience. I've had puzzles previously in the LA Times, American Values Club, minis for the NYT app, the Indie 500 and Crosswords LA tournaments, and I'm also now the puzzle creator for Kinfolk magazine. I've been solving puzzles (or trying to) since I was something like ten years old, so this is a kind of huge deal for me.

Erik and I have created puzzles before, which is always wonderful. For this one, Erik provided some 15-letter entries to start a puzzle with. I picked the big central across one, put in 6-Down, and the whole northwest chunk just kinda miraculously fell into place. I'm not the best at making these wide-open themelesses, but I love solving them, so pulling this off felt real good. The smaller northeast/southwest portions were weirdly much harder to get into place. Our original cluing probably skewed a bit more Millennial/Gen Z, but it's nice to see that a lot of our clues stayed in place, or at least carried the same essence.

The mysterious clue for DEAR SANTA would have earned this puzzle the POW! alone. That huge SE corner, so hard to break into, made it even more baffling, given that I had precious few crossing letters to help me out. What a wow-moment when I realized that "anti-coal" was misdirecting away from children's desire to stay on the "nice" list and get toys instead.

I'll be holding this one up as the paragon, the perfect themeless entry/clue pair. Great entry + sizzlingly clever clue = Jeff has to go find the socks that Anna and Erik knocked off.

But wait, there's more! Big NW / SE corners like these are notorious for not being fillable with color and creaminess. LIES AHEAD doesn't do much, yes, but STEADICAM over POWER MOVE is delightful. IM HERE TO HELP running through both is fantastic. And if EWELL is your weak link, that's a huge win. (He was a biggish star in his day, so crossworthy.)

AND a central grid-spanner running through the triple-stacks in the SW / NE? What did I expect? I tell you what, not something as great as WHAT DO YOU EXPECT!

This is such a difficult construction. Any 68-worder is hard. Throw in:

1. two gigantic corners,
2. long answers running through said big corners, and
3. a grid-spanner,

and there's no way a puzzle should be this silky and sparkly. HALTER TOP, MOUSE POINTER, PARASITIC, OWNERSHIP, it's all so good. Some might even say ITS LIT.

(Some who are hipper than me. See: TURNT is a thing?)

Some might ask why I put OWNERSHIP on that list of sizzlers. It's just a ho-hum word, right? Yes, but give it a riddly clue like [It can pass when you pass] and heck yeah, it's an asset.

A couple of blips in IDONT OPPS RES TAI don't even matter when your overall product is this entertaining and smooth. It's such a pleasure when I know immediately, without a doubt, that a puzzle is POW!-worthy.