New York Times, Thursday, September 2, 2021

Hi all! I'm a fourth-year linguistics major at UC Santa Cruz, my hobbies are photography, Garageband, and trying my best at piano, and I've been making crosswords for about a year and a half now.

This puzzle is my Times debut, and I'm really excited to contribute to this community. I made this puzzle last August, around the time I decided to use wordplay as a motive for learning to code again. I still can't make a website or a video game, but I can find all the words in a list that don't have the letter E in them in under a minute, so I would say I achieved my goal there.

I really enjoy constructing themes like this one because it's a really good excuse to spend a few hours at a time looking through lists of words with special properties. And while few of them translate into anything worthy of a theme, sometimes things work out.

While the concept of removing letters can be a bit basic for a Thursday, I hope that the vivid fill and the fact that solvers have to figure out the end letters from the crossings should make up for it. I'll also be interested to see how well solvers know TABLE MAT, which my British-born parents knew well, but which the dictionaries felt a bit more skittish about.

Some great finds, ZEN GARDEN becoming EN GARDE, PROSECUTE to ROSE CUT, STABLEMATE to TABLE MAT, WEATHERED to EAT HERE. These types of letter-removal discoveries pique me most when there's a space insertion or deletion or shifting, so they all delighted me.

Apt revealer in ENDLESSLY, too, ZEN GARDEN without its ends becoming EN GARDE.

The circles confused me at first, though. Why are Z and N important, I wondered. A-ha! If you turn Z 90 degrees, it becomes an N!

Wait. P and E? Is that a reference to Proctor and … Emble? Peeking and entering?

S and E … are both compass points? Ironically, that's when I realized that my wanderings were directionless.

It would have been fantastic if all the circled letters were the same. Or somehow related. Or spelled out a relevant phrase. An extra layer would have blown my mind. It's not necessary though, since the finds were all fresh and interesting.

Fantastic debut gridwork. Some editors balk at so many black squares (on the sides of the puzzle), but I'm all for whatever facilitates colorful and clean fill — at least, up to a point. I'm fine with the aesthetics of these pyramid blocks, but I wouldn't want them to grow any bigger.

David used his black squares so carefully throughout the hardest section to fill, the middle. Dotting them throughout created a lot of separation between the themers. That didn't leave many to use for the corners, but that's okay. Regions like these big corners are tractable when you only have to work with one theme answer running through them.

Such great additions to my solving experiences in DREAM ON, DON KING, ENGAGE, DIET PILL — and that was only the first quadrant! JEAN-LUC Picard, PRENUPS, the ROYAL WE … I could tell how much time and care David put into his filling process.

Maybe Harold STASSEN is a bit esoteric these days, but I'm sure older generations will shake their fists at me for saying that.

Once I got over my disappointment that the circled letters didn't do anything except indicate removal, my admiration soared. Enjoyable finds and an equally enjoyable grid. Great debut.