New York Times, Friday, June 28, 2019

BRUCE: I submitted a BATS puzzle to Will back in about 2015. He liked the grid art, but I couldn't come up with two solid 15 letter theme entries. I threw about a dozen of them at him, including CHOKE UP ON THE BAT — that's how desperate I was. I eventually sent the idea to David, since he did an amazing job of coming up with a second theme entry for our HATS puzzle of 11/24/17. David suggested SPREAD ONE'S WINGS, and the project took off from there. It would have been nice to run it on Halloween, but the next Friday Halloween is 2025.

It's always a pleasure working with David - he recently graduated from Stanford (congrats David!) and part of their commencement ceremony is a "Wacky Walk" into the stadium in costume. Here is David making the CrossWorld proud!

DAVID: Always fun to co-construct with Bruce! Squeezing in enough zippy nonthematic fill for a Friday was a challenge, given the constraints of the grid art and theme entries, but fortunately, it didn't drive us batty. I'm especially fond of Bruce's LEFT JAB/I SURE DO stack in the northwest corner.

My post-graduation plan is to continue editing the Universal Crossword, which I'll be doing in-house at Andrews McMeel Universal as their Puzzles and Games Editor starting in September. "The kid" of crosswords is now officially grown up!

We add to Bruce's tally of grid art — specifically his grid art involving rare, diagonal symmetry. Scan through his full listing; see if you can pick out the birds, the goldfish, and the butterflies. Make sure to check out his first, my favorite of the bunch.

I appreciate how Bruce and David tried to make the most of the mini-theme, linking in their 15-letter marquees. BATS IN THE BELFRY works, although I did wonder if that can be an offensive term to people with mental health issues. For that reason, I liked SPREAD ONE'S WINGS better, but it would have been better to have a more bats-specific themer.

Hmm. Some ideas:

• How about ECHOLOCATION, a phenomenon people closely associate with bats? (Of course, the grid would need an overhaul to accommodate a shorter marquee themer.)
• Make it Halloween-themed, with VAMPIRE BAT and BRAM STOKER.
• "Things with bats" could be a fun way to obliquely flesh out the theme. BASEBALL GAME and TRANSYLVANIA?

Brainstorming for a more clever mini-theme aside, I enjoyed so much of Bruce and David's grid. It's tough to squeeze juice out of seven-letter slots, too often needing things like CAMERAS and AT A TROT to hold a grid together. LEFT JAB is a great start. ALLOW ME, CAR LOAN, WENT PRO, MR GREEN, all high-quality assets.

Editors tend to favor multi-word entries since they're more colorful on the whole, but check out the beauty of LISSOME / ESPANOL / FURRIER. Not words you see every day, and so satisfying. ANODYNE is in the same mold.

My only nit was the DR DREW / ELROND crossing. I'm a big fan of both, but it's a tough ask, requiring all educated solvers to know one or the other. So many other letters could look reasonable: DR CREW, ELRONG, DR TREW, ELRONF.

Overall, a highly enjoyable solve. If the headline themers had elated me — they felt worthy of a bronze medal performance instead of a gold — it'd have been an easy POW! pick.

Is this grid asymmetric? We've had this exact controversy before in a previous Bruce Haight puzzle. The squares that make the bats have diagonal symmetry. The rest of the squares have standard rotational symmetry. Mushing them together makes, what? Something new, I guess.