New York Times, Friday, September 11, 2020

ERIK: Grateful to Caitlin, one of the greats, for the opportunity to collaborate! She's responsible for most of this grid, including that bottom-left corner where I just could not find a good fill, and also many of the standout clues (e.g. 1-Across, 61-Across, 12-Down, 29-Down). I'm also thankful to the NYT team for adding a Rihanna reference at 11-Down — love to see it!

CAITLIN: You'd have to be a fool to pass up an opportunity to work with Erik, and I ain't no fool! It is always my great pleasure to work with and learn from him. Erik is such a master at writing clues, turning even the most usual fill like 50-Across into something fresh and clever. A lot of his other clues were softened up for this Friday offering, but rest assured they were likewise brilliant. I also loved the editing team's sneaky misdirection at 39-Down. I hope the fun we had in making this puzzle together translates into an enjoyable solve!

Jim Horne summed up today's wonderful solve perfectly: "They had me at PALM FRONDS." I was so stuck in this corner, unable to figure out if it was fans of Jesus, zealots, fans of Pilates? Nope, manual PALM FROND fans from the Biblical days; so brilliant!

A close second was something "sacrificed at the altar." That's sure laden with imagery of ancient sacrifices to the gods. Talk about Biblical! I laughed upon uncovering the wordplay here, some women "sacrificing" their MAIDEN NAME upon getting married.

Caitlin is a rising star, having recently joined the New Yorker's crack squad of themeless constructors, and Erik perhaps the best clue writer on the planet, so my expectations were already high. Yet, they still wowed me. We get a fun SLEEPYHEAD, the evocative SUCKED FACE, BLACK MAGIC with a wicked [Bad spells clue] that hid the plural. There was about an average number of long slots for a themeless, but they used every single one of them so well.

I wonder how newer themeless solvers feel about clues like [Get out of here!] for ESCAPE ROOM. I hitched when first encountering these directive clues years ago, but now I appreciate them more and more.

The one issue I had was the difficulty level of the lower-left corner, which felt ten times harder than the rest of the puzzle. It's a dirty trick to clue RAH as a crowd roar when every solver will auto-fill in OLE. (Have you ever heard a crowd roar RAH?). Along with barely knowing a thing about "Coco" and being unable to identify AC/DC as the singers of "Rock or Bust," even though I'm a fan of the group, my solve nearly ground to a halt.

Even with that corner, though, the entire solving experience was exactly what I want out of a Friday themeless: a load of great long entries, a ton of witty clues, and an elegantly constructed puzzle. Ticks all the boxes.