New York Times, Wednesday, June 5, 2019

I had been wanting to do a puzzle about SEVEN WONDERS for quite a while. I just couldn't figure out how to squeeze "Mausoleum at Halicarnassus" and "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" into a puzzle. It wasn't until I finally accepted that I couldn't fit the wonders into a grid, that this idea was born.

All credit for the cluing goes to the NYT staff. Some of my original clues were a bit trickier (e.g. [Flag holder in Congress] for LAPEL, [England's Rose, to Elton John] for LADYDI), and some of my thematic clues were harder to unravel without the reveal (e.g. [Amazon heroine] and [Where to find a magic mushroom] for (WONDER)WOMAN and (WONDER)LAND, respectively).

The calculation appears to be that the difficulty of the theme + day of the week + low word count = easier cluing = a more enjoyable solve! I particularly liked [Subdivision of a subdivision].

That feeling of déjà vu …

I liked today's execution better than the FOURTEEN / POINTS one. Enough theme density to feel solid, but not enough to cause migraine-inducing constraints. Some great choices, too — STEVIE (WONDER) with a quote about vision, (WONDER) WOMAN one of my favorite superheroes, (WONDER) PARENT (my wife) …

Where were the others again?

I highlighted them below. Not sure why the theme clues weren't starred this go-around. I worry that I'm going to get a lot of "THIS @#$! CLUE IS WRONG WRONG WRONG YOU @#$#@! MORON" emails.

(WONDER)ful.

Speaking of wrong, I'd have liked for all the clues to feel jarringly incorrect. That was the case for WOMAN, since there was no movie titled as such, but I breezed through BREAD, BRA, and DRUG. The clues felt a tiny bit off, but not enough to make me pause.

Good spacing of the seven themers + revealer. Note how spread out they are. It'd have been great to place one set in the NW / SE corners, but I have a feeling that SEVEN WONDERS in the SE might not make that possible.

Even with good spacing, it's still a tough job to fill the grid. It ended up not smooth enough for my taste, what with AGIN (oof!), AMO, IT AN, KOR, OISE, DROITS, ABLARE. Part of the issue is that the seven WONDERS do still interact somewhat — note how ONE HIT, BRA, and STEVIE start forcing things like AGIN, ITAN, and ABLARE. A better usage of black squares, further separating these three themers, would have helped.

The hugeness of the NW / SE corners is something to be avoided in grid design. Even though those corners are hardly constrained, see: DROITS, OISE. OVERFILLing ought to be a PSA subject — break up your big spaces, constructors!

A fine idea, and just about perfect theme density for this theme type. But I'd have much preferred a 74- or 76-word grid, allowing for a more elegant final product.

Until Jeff highlighted the theme answers, I didn't realize they were distributed symmetrically in the grid. Nice touch.

In 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day. Oh, right, he later won this other thing — the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Like many people, I read that book and then wondered what else this wonderfully restrained and understated British novelist had written, so I turned to Never Let Me Go. The clue at 19 Across calls it "dystopian" and it's certainly that. It's also about as far from Remains stylistically and thematically as you can get.

Both books are well worth reading and both were adapted for film. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson were among eight Oscar nominees for Remains. Never Let Me Go was a much less successful film. Stick to the book on that one.