New York Times, Thursday, January 7, 2016

What a cool triple-stack revealer in DOCTORS / WITHOUT / BORDERS! Three medium-length words chunked cleanly atop each other right in the middle of the puzzle is pretty darn cool. It would have been even cooler if Andrew could have gotten them exactly atop each other (instead of stairstepping them) but try filling around just the *DWB* pattern, much less the rest of the sets of letters. Awesome, memorable execution of the revealer.

I've seen several of the "letters outside the grid" in the past year, and two friends of mine both made DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS crosswords (independently!), so those factors muted the impact of today's puzzle for me. It also felt a little strange that the doctors are outside the borders, not crossing borders.

But I did really like the way Andrew made the grid look perfectly normal (without those outside letters). It's a simple matter to make a grid with NO, OZ, DRE, and WHO sitting outside the grid, but it's much more difficult to do it so that every interior word looks normal: DROVES looks like ROVES, ROPED looks like OPED, etc. Elegant touch.

I also appreciated Andrew's choice of long fill. It's impressive enough to get TOUCHED ON right through the stack of revealers, but it's a great feat to work in the colorful HOT DIGGETY and POP UP STORE. And then you cross ANDRE GIDE and HUSH MONEY through it all, without using a single gluey entry? That central region is just beautiful.

I'm not a fan of BESTIE, as it has too much of a pre-adolescent, cutesy feel to it. This is just personal opinion — I like TRUE DAT a lot, as I hear it all the time among adults, and I use it myself, but I can see some NYT readers scowling, saying "kids these days!"

You know who's saying that? THE OLDS! (I don't know that when applied to parents, but it is a term I sometimes hear for people who technology has left behind). A lot of subjectivity in what is "good fill."

An incredible middle region of the puzzle, and I might have given this the POW! if it had come out a few years earlier.