New York Times, Saturday, September 21, 2019

joon and erik: we originally had "manmade" in the phrasing for the 8-down clue, and are grateful to the nyt team for the thoughtful edit there (as well as other improvements like 46-across). hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

joon and Erik, two of my favorite people in the crossworld! A reader accused me the other day of favoritism; that I gave better treatment to puzzles written by people I like.

Well, duh. You don't like it, get your own blog.

joon and I first met at an ACPT when people kept calling me joon or Kevin. The three of us bonded over that — there's a silver lining to racism!

And Erik. I've had the privilege of trading tons of thoughts with him about everything from construction techniques to clever cluing to diversity within our sphere. We even have a co-written Thursday puzzle that's been waiting for over a year to be published.

(Hint hint, nudge nudge, Will.)

IMPRESSIVE work in today's puzzle. (Note to constructors: putting not-so-subliminal messages into your grids works.) The 66-word grid features some juicy entries — TEA KETTLE, REPAIR SHOP, KUNTA KINTE, THE MASSES, CAMERA CREW, to name a few — which doesn't happen all the time for low-word-count grids.

It does have some drawbacks, notably the walls of black squares that cut the grid into five parts. Bring down those walls, sirs!

4x7 corners rarely come out both clean and colorful, but check out the SW. MALWARE, LEBRON over WNBA, the SOPRANOS, all JABBING at the supposed limitations of 4x7 corners!

ALAS (see, not-so-subliminal messages work), the NE doesn't compare, what with DISTRICT, EAT OVER, AGEMATE more neutral than positive. It's a clean corner, but hardly colorful. I'd like to see what joon and Erik could do if they moved the black square after OPAL one column to the right. That would not only make it easier to squeeze more juice out of the remaining three long downs in the NE, but would open up grid flow.

I often dislike being forced to learn things from my crossword, but AGENDER didn't feel teachy, since it's easily inferable from the A prefix modifying GENDER. There's so much I don't know about so much, so this is a welcome way of introducing me to the concept. (Read: don't mess with my victorious finish.)

Might have been a POW! contender, what with all the juicy clues — LEBRON more than a little forward, and the Sun a bloc member of the WNBA, just to start — if they'd only been a little less audacious, shifting to a 68-word grid.