New York Times, Monday, March 3, 2014

Andrea:

Started with an email from my friend and partner in many puzzles, Michael Blake, asking if I wanted in on the theme. EASTERNEASTER and PATTERNPATTER had come to him in his sleep and they weren't in the database.

I thought this was a neat and weird concept, x n x, which could be parsed two ways, and was more than just add an N. Will thought it was original too, which pleased us.

We called it LIVE n LEARN even though that wasn't the exact thing we were doing, but the feel we wanted to communicate. We discarded many ideas, they weren't as easy to come up and be clear and/or amusing as we thought, but then we got a nice set together.

I added DIVANDIVA and LEARNLEAR because I wanted them to make the most surface sense possible. Michael then came up with the wonderful FREETOWNFREETOW which went neatly across the middle. Can't imagine who came up with a pangram for the fill! :)

Fun theme today, all "wacky" phrases based on a (word(s) ending with N) + (same word(s) without the N) pattern. FREE TOWN FREE TOW was genius! And DIVAN DIVA elicited images of Katey Sagal as Peg Bundy from "Married with Children," saying "bon bon." Amusing, enjoyable Monday.

Nice construction today, with some really good long stuff. Chris CHRISTIE makes an appearance along with ESTROGEN, plus a nice STANZA and HINT AT, which always reminds me of the Monty Python "nudge nudge wink wink" sketch. A couple of standout clues as well, my favorite being the one for SLANG. It's hard to come up with inventive clues for a Monday since it's designed to be the easiest puzzle of the week, so clues like this add spice.

Ah, the pangram. Andrea and I have different philosophies on pangrams, and I think both have merit. I personally place a lot of value on smooth fill vs. Scrabbly letters, but I know several solvers who really like seeing pangrams. I hadn't been aware of that until a few months ago — it surprised me to hear it and caused me to change my thinking about "right" and "wrong" when it comes to constructions. I'm sure there will be many solvers who like seeing the X up in the NE corner. It didn't do a lot for me because of the awkward partial THE X, but that's okay. It's Andrea's decision, and like almost all constructor choices, it will please some and not please some. Can't win 'em all.

Finally, I hadn't picked up that an N was at the heart of each answer — nice, from a consistency standpoint. I did notice that LEARN LEAR was the only one where the first word was a verb, so that did stand out a bit.

Nice start to the week.