New York Times, Friday, September 22, 2017

Going to keep this short, because I honestly don't remember much about this puzzle. I see from my files that it dates back to May 2015, a month before my high school graduation. That whole time period is a blur for me: My last AP tests, throwing my cap in the air, saying goodbye to old friends, feeling anxious about starting college, etc. Apparently I was making themelesses as well—not a huge surprise :).

Looking at the puzzle now, I'm pleased with how it turned out. I must've been trying to mix things up by doing triple stacks of 14s, and I like my choices of long entries (especially the wacky-looking MI CASA ES SU CASA at 1-Across). I also appreciate how relatively smooth and trivia-free the rest of the grid is. Might've gone for a little more zing were I building this puzzle today, but at the same time, the relative lack of crosswordese allows for a lot of nice cluing opportunities.

Speaking of which, big ups to Will, Joel, and Sam for improving so many of the clues! Didn't remember the originals, but looking back on them now, I feel their replacements are definitely better.

Hope you enjoy—maybe it's time for me to start solving my old puzzles!

Fourteen-letter entries are rare in themelesses, and for good reason — they're so annoying to work around. Each one forces a black square placement right off the bat, and that's no bueno for constructors needing maximum flexibility.

So it's neat to get six (!) 14-letter entries today … triple-stacked, nonetheless! Most of them feel so fresh, a reflection of how most themeless constructors avoid 14s like the plague. MI CASA ES SU CASA is awesome, as is ICING ON THE CAKE.

Visually, I don't care for most black squares in the corners of themelesses — Rich Norris over at the LAT has discouraged their use — but those chunks in the NE / SW felt like reasonable prices to pay to get those colorful stacks.

Clean stacks, too. Well, mostly. It's inevitable to get some minor crossword glue like CTR and ESA holding a triple-stack together. I was less enthused about INHERES … ["The door is open!" cries?]. It is in the dictionary, but it's such an odd word, not something I hear every day. Or year. Or decade.

And UDALL and SIGURD felt like fair game to me, but even this Norse myth buff had a tough time piecing together SIGURD. So although I appreciated the lack of ugly short fill, the mid-length stuff did feel somewhat offbeat.

Love the MACE clue, a literal "old ball and chain." Ha!

But there were some clues I had to look up to figure out:

• TIME INC is a [Life preserver?]? I think they bought … Life magazine? Hard to tell from the Wikipedia article.
• DOCTOR is one who's gotten the third degree? But don't most physicians get a bachelor's and then an MD? Ah, must be referring to Ph.D.s. But some go straight from bachelor's to Ph.D. programs. Huh.
• [Current director] attempted to misdirect from electrical current to "contemporary film director," perhaps? But it fell flat on this engineer, as that's an awkward way to describe a DIODE.

Overall, the cluing felt like it was trying a little too hard.

There wasn't as much great fill as I like in a themeless — tough to include much else when the triple-stacks take up so much real estate — but wow, were most of those 14s fantastic.