New York Times, Saturday, December 4, 2021

This puzzle owes its genesis to Brooke Husic and the puzzles on her blog, which:

1. you should solve (my favorites are this one and this one), and
2. inspired the diagonal symmetry seen in this grid.

Shout out to my parents, who unfailingly turned off my electric fan every night throughout my childhood.

CHEF'S KISS is right! Perfect Saturday puzzle. This further establishes Nam Jin as a preeminent themeless constructor. Hard to believe his debut was only about a year ago.

Did you notice the diagonal symmetry along the NW to SE axis? Not only is it different — this long-time solver appreciates different — but it's purposeful. Running triple-stacked long entries through each other often makes a themeless constructor's life doubly agonizing because even if you can achieve greatness in one corner, you have to do it again in the opposite.

Not so with diagonal symmetry! Check out how much easier the SE is to fill than the NW.

And what excellent results in the NW. The horizontal stack is the star, with three marquee entries. The vertical stack isn't nearly as strong, but with HOOKAH BAR, it's so much better than a typical triple-stack-intersecting-into-triple-stack result.

Something unusual and cool about two long entries with a terminal F. Both SANS SERIF and NOTE TO SELF didn't come easy because I couldn't convince myself that this might happen. So many long entries in themelesses end in common RSTLNE letters.

Such entertaining cluing, too — material that made me feel smart. Great mix of giveaway question marks ("overdrawn account?" = YARN) and brilliant misdirects that you don't necessarily need to understand to solve. I missed why ERS were transcript omissions until Jim Horne mentioned that it's not a college transcript but a spoken one.

I love it when a constructor sets me up for a smashing victory, like an en fuego game of pool where each shot leaves the cue ball with a perfect angle for the next shot, culminating in slamming the eight-ball home. It's rare that I'll want to see a themeless byline repeated more than once a month, but I'm adding Nam Jin's name to that list.