New York Times, Saturday, September 24, 2016

I was pleased to work MALALA YOUSAFZAI's name into this puzzle. She is such an inspiring young person giving hope to many through her human rights advocacy and example. As she has noted "One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world."

If you had trouble spelling YOUSAFZAI, you're in good company. I wrote the Nobel Peace Prize committee to alert them. Their response was "Thank you for spotting the spelling typo. It has been changed on two pages but not in the press releases from the Norwegian Nobel Committee (NNC). NNC does not want us to change in their official material."

I noticed my initial puzzle submission had a dupe in it after I mailed it off and worked to eliminate it. In a grid with so few black blocks it wasn't a simple fix, but the resulting puzzle was much improved and more to Will and Joel's liking. My thanks to them for accepting and editing this puzzle. I'm thrilled to have my first Saturday NYT puzzle published.

Thanks to David Steinberg whose October 10, 2014 blog post on The Preshortzian Puzzle Project piqued my interest. I decided to try my hand at filling such a grid.

I hope you've enjoyed your solving experience.

I really like it when a puzzle forces me to rethink my criteria. For themelesses, I often begin by counting the liabilities: the inelegant bits required to hold a puzzle's long answers together (ONT, for example). If that's more than about four, it feels inelegant, like seeing duct tape or rusty nails holding a piece of fine art together.

For my second criterion, I start by tallying up the assets: vivid, colorful entries (GOSH DARN, e.g.). I add a few points if there's an impressive feature (grid-spanning entries, huge white spaces, etc.), and then subtract the number of liabilities. I've found that if that final result is more than about 10, I love the puzzle. Less than 10 and I don't feel sated, more like eating low-sodium bread than a big fat everything pizza.

Today's puzzle doesn't have that many long entries — just eight of 8+ letters — and some of them I'd consider neutral. PINED FOR feels fine but not something I'd tweet about, and the SOLOMONS would have been better if it had gotten an interesting piece of trivia. There are a few nice seven-letter entries like STARMAP and CODE RED, but even then, the quantity of what I'd call assets isn't very high.

There is something pretty cool about having four grid-spanners intersecting each other — and it makes the construction way harder — so I'd add maybe two points for that.

Given those intersecting long entries, it's not a surprise to see gluey bits like ESAS, LTS, RRS, OLD AS, RETIN, CALS (usually just "cal"), LEM, etc. They are all minor, but there sure are a lot.

So my calculations should predict that my stomach would still be grumbling after low-sodium bread. But I couldn't stop looking at MALALA YOUSAFZAI / PIZZA MARGHERITA / ALL KIDDING ASIDE / LAID IT ON THE LINE. They're all great answers, and I've been wondering when we'd see MALALA's crossword-friendly name. (The bestseller I AM MALALA, too!) To get her full name, with its mind-bending -FZAI ending is such a treat. There's so much to like in that one answer alone.

I'm still trying to figure out why I enjoyed this puzzle so much. Love it when the unexpected happens.