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Been a while since we've seen a vowel progression, and I liked this one. Neat that there are five words that 1.) start with an S sound, 2.) end with an N sound, and 3.) have a long vowel in between. Creative to use RIVER SEINE — I wonder if Mike tried to fine something fitting ___ SANE, but that must have driven him insane.

At first LORD GIVE ME A SIGN felt odd, as I usually think of it just as GIVE ME A SIGN. (Who else would people be asking for a sign from?) But some Googling shows that the preceding LORD is quite common.

I also wasn't a huge fan of CUT AND SEWN, as it felt like the one phrases which felt contrived in order to make the theme work.

But Google again proved me wrong. Shows what I know. GOOGLE GIVE ME A SIGN!

I appreciate Mike's extra mile efforts in giving us parallel downs, and great ones at that. SOVIET ERA, RICE A RONI, and EGREGIOUS? BRING IT ON, excellent stuff. This arrangement is very tough to get clean, and both upper left (UNI, ANA, ENE) and lower right (who ever types out ONE D? and SNO) show strain typcial for this layout. Still, I don't mind the minor glue, considering how much vivacity the long downs add.

One clarification for people confused with the RHYME clue: [Hot to trot, e.g.]. I like the idea here, repurposing the phrase "hot to trot," but it seems to me that "hot for trot" might have been more accurate. Destroys the wordplay, of course.

Finally, the puzzle had me at PLEA: [Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi," e.g.]. My daughter, a "Y is for Yoda" onesie she has.

– puzzle by Michael Torch

NORSE GODS hidden in colorful phrases. ODIN, THOR, LOKI, and … TYR? Apparently Kevin and Brad aren't afraid of getting on Baldur, Frigg, Freyja, and Sif's bad side. Seriously though, it's too bad BALDUR doesn't get his due, as he has a great story, the "invincible" one getting killed by his one downfall, mistletoe. Someone have a famous kid named ARCHIBALD URANUS or something.

Great construction. There was so much excellent fill that I had to stop and admire it a few times during the solve. Five themers with a central 11 is a tough arrangement, so it's really cool that Kevin and Brad worked in BOSSMAN and LAW FIRM adjacent to that central TRUTH OR DARE. Great bonus material! I also liked those big SW and NE corners, with the juicy HEEL TAP, TELL MAMA, and EN VOGUE. Even BARRON was fun for this financial type (although BARRONS would have been much better).

Interesting to work in two Olympic figures, Matt BIONDI and SHANI Davis. I think the former is perfectly legit, with 11 medals, including five golds in one Games. SHANI Davis … I usually avoid that S???I pattern because SHANI is one of the few entries that works. But I read up more on him, and the fact that he's the first black athlete to win a Winter gold in an individual event is groundbreaking. Okay, he's perfectly fine too.

Took me a while to figure out why PIANO was an apt instrument for Alicia Keys. Keys. Keys! D'oh! Good one.

Nice to know that an EEL's blood is poisonous. Eel's blood vs. mistletoe? I'll take my chances on the latter.

Really strong execution. If TYR had been at ODIN, THOR, or LOKI's level, this would have been a serious contender for the POW.

– puzzle by Kevin Christian and Bradley Wilber

★ As many of you already know, the great Merl Reagle passed away a few weeks ago; a huge loss for the crossword community. Only having gotten into crosswords a few years ago, I really appreciated seeing this gem by Merl from way back in 1991. It's astounding to see how good this puzzle is given its point in crossword history, well before computer-assisted design became easily accessible.

Merl always stressed the importance of crosswords being first and foremost fun for solvers. This puzzle is a great example of that. The theme is so grin-inducing, I would have given it the POW! all by itself. I love Greek mythology, so seeing MANACLES reimagined as "man-a-clees" (similar to Pericles) is so hilarious. Each one of the ten (!) themers (not including the revealer!) works well for me; each one evoking a similar-sounding name from ancient Greece. TELEPHONE bring Persephone to mind, ANTIBIAS does the same for Phidias, etc.

To pack so much great material into a puzzle done by hand is amazing. And although Merl was known for being fine with six-letter partials and "imaginative" pieces of fill like PREWRAP, EXILER, IDLERS, and OTTS, there's remarkably little of that in play. I would consider it a very good puzzle in today's standards, and an absolute home run in 1991 standards.

It's so strange to think that I'll never see Merl again. He was so supportive, contacting me after I got my first NYT Sunday crossword published, both with kudos and a couple of tips. And at my first ACPT, he chatted with this fanboy for a long time, happy to talk shop with many a kind word for my work.

Merl hasn't published a puzzle in the NYT for a long time, since all his work went into his weekly Sunday puzzle, so I'm really glad to have this opportunity to add him to the list of constructors earning a Puzzle of the Week nod.

– puzzle by Merl Reagle (1950-2015)

I normally don't care for records in crosswords, as they're too often something that constructors prize but solvers completely miss — except for the gluey globs of fill that these record-breakers often force. Sometimes I even wonder if it's a bad thing that we keep records of such things as average Scrabble score, as it might promote this type of "do it for the record's sake" type of behavior, which too often does disservice to the solver.

But today's is a record-breaking type that gave me huge enjoyment. David gets high on the leader board, giving us so many of the "Big Four," J Q X Z. All of these letters can be rough to integrate into a puzzle without causing compromises in smoothness, so it's amazing that David worked in three of each with only minor blights.

Not only that, but there are three of EVERY letter in the puzzle — a triple pangram!

Sure, I didn't love TESTEES (although it's technically a word). There are a few other entries that might raise an eyebrow, but I decided I liked them all:

QUIFF. Never heard of this before, but it's an easily recognizable hairstyle that was "in" back a few decades ago. Cool word!

QUIRE. Not in my knowledge base, but it's legit.

The SHARIF / QUIFF crossing. Okay, this one caused me fits, as I assumed SHARIF would be clued to the great Omar SHARIF, who recently passed. Serves me right for overthinking things, that maybe SHARIA and QUIFA might be better than SHARIF and QUIFF. Tough crossing, and I can see the argument for it being unfair, given the cluing.

There's not a lot of multi-word goodness, with just JUST A BIT, MASON JAR, LEGO SET, and MAE WEST standing out, but there's so much Scrabbliness that it won me over. Plus, SLACKER and BANDSAW are pretty nice one-word entries.

All in all, a memorable puzzle. I usually cringe a bit when I sniff a constructor trying to break a record, but this final product was smooth enough that I really enjoyed the stunt.

– puzzle by David C. Duncan Dekker

Byron puts on a show today, giving us a huge number of long entries — 26 slots that are 7+ letters long. So much potential for colorful material, and Byron converts many of those slots into good stuff.

Today's might be the very definition of a Saturday puzzle, the beast that is meant to be the toughest puzzle of the week. (I couldn't finish it without a few times of hitting "check errors," of which I had many.) Let's go through a few categories that make up the difficulty:

Tough proper nouns. It could easily be my 1.) West Coast upbringing and my 2.) fourth-grade knowledge of geography, but ONONDAGA was a mystery. OREL RUSSIA too. I happen to love RY COODER and "Buena Vista Social Club" but that'll be rough on many too.

Vague clues. IDAHOS usually gets some sort of [Many potatoes] kind of clue, but today, the solver is expected to figure out that 1.) "hash" means breakfast hash, and 2.) the clue is looking for a specific type of potato. Toughie! And for [Open ___], I tried open MIC, Open ERA, open BAR, open AIR, open NET, open SEA …

Deviously wacky wordplay. Typically [Script ending] gets a telltale question mark, a dead giveaway that the answer is a suffix (URE). No question mark today!

Deep trivia. I vaguely know Perry Mason — not that I'd recognize him in a lineup, but I know the name. So far so good! Now, the question mark in [Street boss?] tells me that something tricky is happening. But it took Googling to figure out that PERRY MASON apparently has a secretary named Della Street. That's going to be rough on many solvers my generation and younger.

I love what Byron brings to the crossworld, a style that introduces crazy new wide-open grid patterns and so much new vocabulary. A majority of his long stuff is Shortz-era debut material — an amazing 12 entries! Now, some of it is a bit odd to my ear, like CREEPIES and IDEAL MAN, but that's Byron's style; not afraid to push the boundaries.

– puzzle by Byron Walden

Patrick uses double-digit numbers from phrases and titles for a rebus. I particularly liked 54 40 OR FIGHT — for some reason, my high school friends and I took to yelling it around school. It has a nice rhythm to it.

Not easy to find pairs of theme entries famous enough to be crossworthy. 48 HRS is a big hit movie, and Patrick does so well to pair it with THE LOWER 48. What a nice phrase that we'll otherwise never see in crosswords.

I also liked how Patrick kept all his across theme answers symmetrical. Other constructors might have willy-nilly strewn themers around without any regard to pairing up the lengths — 54 40 OR FIGHT and THE LOWER 48, for example — but not Patrick.

Paired double-digit numbers couldn't have been easy to find. There must be so many like 76 TROMBONES which don't have a useable match. I thought Patrick chose well for eight out of his nine, CENTURY 21 / 21 GRAMS the one I guessed (wrongly) on.

I'm sure I've seen CENTURY 21 signs around, but I remembered it as CENTURY 50 for some reason. And not having seen 21 GRAMS, that was a random guess. Doesn't 50 GRAMS seem more metric? That's what I'm saying! Anyhoo, seems like 21 is ripe for something a little snazzier and memorable, perhaps 21 JUMP STREET or a 21 GUN SALUTE. I have a feeling it's a compromise he made to keep symmetry in his themers — always the trade-offs.

Surprising to see PB go to 142 words, past the usual max of 140. Rebus puzzles are tough to create, especially when you don't have much flexibility in themers, but I've gotten used to seeing Patrick pull off the impossible. Also a bit odd to see AGIN in a Berry 1-Down.

Overall a nice, entertaining solve, perhaps a little more straightforward than I've come to expect from a PB. I spent way too much time trying to figure out where the extra layer was hidden — did the numbers all relate in some way? Or if you connect them sequentially, they form a shape?

Alas, no.

– puzzle by Patrick Berry

Golf theme today, a DRIVE, PITCH, CHIP, and a PUTT to end up IN THE HOLE. Fun wordplay around the revealer, repurposing its metaphorical "behind the 8-ball" meaning to a literal one.

I wasn't familiar with CHIPBOARD, but it's legit, if not snazzy. And at first I was put off by the extra PUTT in PUTT PUTTS, but given my golfing skills, I should be happy it wasn't the more accurate PUTT PUTT PUTT PUTTS.

The 9/9/11/9/9 arrangement of themers forces a lot of seven-letter entries in this grid, and Paula fills them well with the colorful WARPATH, HUSTLES, TRAITOR, and even SEPHORA, a kooky-looking brand name. Without any fill longer than seven letters, I much appreciate her usage of these slots, working in some great entries.

Getting all those good TIDBITS came with a cost, though. Will typically doesn't like acronyms unless they're very well known, but he'll sometimes let them through if the crossings are fair. BHT is vaguely familiar to me, but I can see solvers putting in MHT, with MAA as a believable [Sheep's sound]. Tough one that might irk some solvers; not a good thing for a Monday puzzle.

Although there was a good amount of glue almost necessitated by all those seven-letter slots, I liked that Paula spread it around, not really having a concentration in any one area. I didn't get bogged down at any one particular section during my solve, which sometimes happens if there's a huge bolus of gluey bits somewhere. In total though, I did feel like there was too much for my taste, what with a couple of partials, a prefix, abbr., a CHA and a SHA and a RAH, etc. Uncharacteristic for Paula.

Some people think I hold Mondays to an excessively high standard of smoothness. One can even make the argument that partials are good for Mondays, since they tend to help solvers. I can see that perspective, but I feel like smoothness / elegance in fill is one of the factors that distinguishes "the good crosswords" from the computer-generated or worse.

Great, creative clue for SKY. Reminds me of those jigsaw puzzles that are only one color. Talk about SADO-masochistic!

– puzzle by Paula Gamache

PG-13 interpreted as "THIRTEEN instances of PG inside the grid." I've highlighted them below, as it took me forever to catch all of them. I particularly liked the stairstep of connected PGs in the upper right corner — cool little section. A similarly neat effect from the linked PGs in the upper left.

It may seem like not a big deal to incorporate a bigram into a puzzle 13 times, but the PG combination isn't a super common one. Take the center area, for example — you might wonder why Jacob didn't put a single instance in there. But with only short slots, how would you incorporate PG? Perhaps JPG or PGUP? Perhaps, but the J would be hard to work in, and PG UP isn't the greatest of entries. LPGA is out, since PGA has already been used. Not easy!

Given how hard that *PG* constraint is to work with, I did like quite a few of the "themers," like STOPGAP, TOP GEAR, CRAP GAMES and SWAMP GAS. Colorful choices.

A theme like this is so heavily constrained that it's tough to avoid gluey bits galore. I've come to appreciate more and more a good upper left corner, which sets the tone for my solving experience. Fun MAO clue [Leader with an -ISM], but getting two abbreviations in MASC and ANS was not ideal.

It's an unfortunate by-product of stacking SWAMPGAS and CAMPGROUND. Both are very nice answers in which to hide PG, but with the MPG further constraining it, that's a tough area to cleanly fill around. CMII (random Roman numeral) and MSGR and ISAO further make for feeling of a gluey pile-up.

Same issue in the lower right, with LIP GLOSS stacked under PG THIRTEEN forcing some compromises in the NSEC / LIC / REOIL corner.

So, an audacious theme idea, causing all sorts of filling problems. Very difficult to fill around so many instances of that PG bigram.

– puzzle by Jacob Stulberg

Mike is moving out to Seattle, AKA the new crossword Mecca! Come, join us. Resistance is futile.

Six famous(-ish) gathering places from TV shows. Having wasted (er, spent — sorry Mike!) hundreds of hours watching "Friends," I knew CENTRAL PERK right off the bat — fun, punny name. And as a die-hard "Star Trek" fan, TEN FORWARD came easily as well. MACLARENS, not so much. Thankfully, Mike did a nice job of making sure that most all the entries crossing themers were fair.

Some might argue that ZAPOTEC makes for a tough crossing, but first of all, how many possibilities does TEN F?RWARD have? (Okay fine, maybe TEN FARWARD is marginally plausible.) Second of all, boo on you if you haven't invested in all the greatness that was "Star Trek: the Next Generation."

I like the consistency, all places from TV shows. At first, this giant "Casablanca" fan was distressed to see RICKS omitted, but that would have introduced a "this one is not like the others." Ah, well.

AZKABAN, the "Harry Potter" prison! Fun for the fanboy in me to see that. Probably not so much fun for the non-fanboys to guess at if it was AZKABAN or ASKABAN, what with INEZ / INES being equally likely. I'm taking away five points from Crossffyndor for that.

Nice execution, considering the difficulty of incorporating six themers. Mike does well to stack CENTRAL PERK / MOES TAVERN and TEN FORWARD / THE PEACH PIT, allowing him to space out the rest of the themers. It does cause some difficulty in the top, with UNES and PERTER, as well as in the bottom, with our good crossword friend EERO and A POD, but those are relatively minor.

I also like Mike's big thinking, keeping the word count low (74) and giving us quite a bit of longer fill. SOME NERVE, SLAPDASH, and LAID AN EGG are so zippy. He did a good job of spacing these long entries out, too, which helps a constructor more smoothly fill a grid.

All in all, a fun idea. It would have been nice to get at least one more with a wordplay name like CENTRAL PERK rather than straightforward trivia — get on that, TV writers!

– puzzle by Michael Hawkins

Turning puzzle, various types of beans "falling," cued by SPILLED THE BEANS. We've seen many puzzles which bend themers, so these days I think it's important to have a really good reason and/or an apt revealer to justify it. I like this one, although the puzzle doesn't quite get at how I imagine things spilling willy-nilly all over the place. It's a pretty orderly set of spills.

I like how Tracy disguised the four falling BEANS. SNAP is a perfect example of it, where by itself it gets a football-related clue, and OHS / SNAP gets one with a completely different meaning. Makes for an entertaining bout of confusion when I realized the answer has to be OHS, but that didn't at all fit [Playful response to a good dig].

Turning puzzles usually cause difficulty in filling around the bends, and Tracy does pretty well here. The upper right and lower left corners are so separated from the rest of the grid that this gives her a lot of freedom to fill them cleanly. (I'm not a huge fan of ALAR, but I think it's a fine answer.)

No surprise that the roughest region is the bottom right, where the revealer bends right into a relatively big swath of white space. Tracy gets so close to a perfectly clean fill. Sigh, ITER, such a convenient entry with common letters and alternating consonant vowel … and such an old-school piece of crosswordese.

I was a little confused during my solve as I couldn't quite figure out where the themers were, so I highlighted them below. Notice the total lack of symmetry — I would have liked at least some level of symmetry, perhaps having the across parts of the themers placed in symmetrical spots. Some will argue that this asymmetry actually makes it more interesting, because it removes the predictability and thus produces a more challenging solve, but a crossword without any sense of symmetry in the themers personally strikes me as inelegant.

Nice idea, perhaps some potential left on the table giving all the crazy interpretations that might better reflect a chaotic SPILL.

– puzzle by Tracy Gray

★ THIS IS SPINAL TAP is one of the few movies on my Top Tier list, so I had a big smile with the "Smell the Glove" clue. (The album cover ended up being solid black, due to NSFW reasons. Ahem.) BTW, "Smell the Glove" came between "Shark Sandwich" (described by a critic as "Sh*t Sandwich") and "Break Like the Wind."

Did I mention how much I love that movie?

Neat layout, built upon two pairs of grid-spanning entries. Sometimes puzzles built around grid-spanners use ones that are pretty average; snazziness sacrificed in the name of getting the darn grid to work. Here, I think Pete does great, four for four. Bravo! And while I really like Pete's WATERMELON SEEDS clue, I love Will/Joel's "spitting distance" one. (Sorry, Pete!)

It's great that Pete doesn't just depend on his grid-spanners to provide snazz, leaving slots for eight more long entries — colorful stuff in CHE GUEVARA / CEDAR FALLS and STUNT PILOT. (STAY AT HOME doesn't sound as good to my ear since it's usually paired with MOM or DAD, making it feel like a partial.) Crossing pairs of long answers is a rough task, so it's no surprise to see some URE and ALEF (a variant of ALIF) and MSS / OCTO around those regions. These are mostly minor, although personally, any entry that requires the "variant" tag is to be avoided at all costs.

Check out the big swaths of white in the north and south — ambitious to leave grid sections so wide-open. These big sections make it hard to work in great entries though, and the assortment of potentially esoteric proper names in the bottom — WALPOLE, GARDINER, COLLINS, MARLO — isn't ideal. I like the north better, with a great clue for KFC's The COLONEL, and MEMOREX, which takes me back to fun TV ads from childhood.

Finally, some solvers will be confused by REL, so I'll explain that the "little" in [Little brother or sister?] cues you that an abbr. is in play — REL for relative. "For short" or "briefly" or "quick" all work similarly. A good crossword convention to know.

A lot of fun stuff today!

– puzzle by Peter A. Collins

Man, what a bizarre (and cool!) spelling of BLAXPLOITATION. I'm sure there will be many others who started with BLACK and then continued with SPLOITATI ... *$%! that doesn't fit! Cool morphing of the CKS into an X.

I fell into another trap with CHRISTIAN MINGLE, which I was sure was CHRISTIAN SINGLES. Given that this was another answer that didn't fit, it took me a while to convince myself that there wasn't a rebus going on. Sneaky, very sneaky.

Even after reading up on the two Christian dating sites, it's unclear to me what the difference is. Sure makes for a good crossword trap. (And a saucy pairing with BI-CURIOUS!)

Damon's layout doesn't allow for a lot of long (8+ letter) answers, but he does have some seven-letter slots to shore up the snazziness. FAUX FUR is a great one. I would have liked a couple more.

With so many four-letter entries — a whopping 26 of them — it's so important to avoid drawing attention to them. The fine ones like SCOT, CHEF, EDEN, even MOOG, do that job nicely. Not as much so when there are borderline ones, and multiple ones from the same category. Some French (AOUT, ALUI, IDEE), hard proper nouns (CERF, EVIE, along with Tony OLIVA), and some terms I only ever learned from crosswordese (MOIL, TREF, AGHA) ... those last three are all reasonably fine by themselves in my opinion, but when you have them together, it makes for a less than desirable effect.

Same goes for CBER and RAVER. Generally, I don't have an issue with either, but together it seems like a little too much iffiness.

Such a fun clue for SNARE: [It's got game, often]. It's too bad it couldn't fully be misdirectional to something colorful like "he got game," but sometimes you can only go so far without torturing the clue.

And saving the best for last, the clue [What you find crawlers on]. So many times we've been misdirected toward the internet, so that's where I automatically went, looking for a WEB BROWSER or something. ALL FOURS is such a snappy answer.

– puzzle by Damon Gulczynski

I really like the concept here, a common phrase used as an example of a second common phrase, literally expressed. GRAY FOX is not only a nice phrase in itself, but it's a literal description of AGE BEFORE BEAUTY — "gray" describing "age" and "fox" a synonym for "beauty."

BIG DEALS also works well, as GRAND OPENING SALES gives us "big" = "grand" (placed before) "deals" = "sales."

I can only imagine how difficult it was to come up with all these themers. WAY BEHIND THE TIMES works for NEWSPAPER ROUTE (although I struggled, wanting it to be ROUTE NEWSPAPER, since that would put ROUTE behind the TIMES, in a way), but the WAY feels tagged on just to make the theme work. And COMPLETE PLAN doesn't really feel like a solid phrase to me, nor does MORE UNITED.

Finally, GO FIGURE … "figure" = "form," but "go" = "function" felt like a bit of a stretch to me. Yes, "going" is a synonym for "functioning," but that didn't feel quite direct enough for my taste.

Considering Joe only had six theme answers, I like how he worked in some long fill to help add more pizzazz. IM AN IDIOT is something I say all the time = love it! ACTIVE ROSTER and TIGERS MILK also add spice.

And although most solvers won't even notice it, I applaud how smoothly Joe went down to 134 words. This has the effect of giving the solver more mid-length fill (6-7 letters), and since entries of that length are much more rare than the 3-5 letter shorties, this can result in a fun experience … if the fill is clean. Good thing that we go a lot of strong material like IN PLAY, OUTBOX, ROTUND, TAOIST, TUDORS without much dreck.

The clever cluing today was much appreciated, too. Loved [Star trek figures?] for MAGI, for example. [Pop group] was even better, so innocently misdirecting away from COLAS.

Neat theme idea, although I wish a few more of the examples had been as close to spot on as GRAY FOX for AGE BEFORE BEAUTY.

– puzzle by Joe DiPietro

★ It's always a pleasure when a puzzle surprises me, doubly so when it happens on a Monday. I couldn't even tell what was a themer and what wasn't until I hit CROWN at the very bottom, pulling it all together — the LOS ANGELES KINGS, BUDWEISER, ROLEX, and HALLMARK CARDS all having a CROWN in their logo. Really fun idea.

Neat layout, too. I like mirror symmetry, and CC's design reminds me of a Space Invader or the TiVo logo. Mirror symmetry can be really useful, like in this case where the themers don't pair up in lengths, but they all have an odd number of letters: 15, 9, 5, and 11. That's perfect for mirror symmetry.

One of CC's trademarks is to include some snazzy long fill, no matter how difficult the layout. I have a feeling CC keeps a running list of strong fill, incorporating it at every opportunity. US MARSHALS, an emphatic THAT IS A LIE, ANDROID ONE, and LEO TOLSTOY are all beautiful. And even with the difficult parallel down layout of those four answers, there's barely a gluey bit to be seen, just an ESE. It's such fine work.

Although it's minor, IDE up in the north section is easy to polish out. The bigger issue for me is the south, with REY, ERATO, and ADANO. They're all fair(ish), but that pile-up could be very frustrating for a novice solver. It's a tough section to fill — that M??C slot at 54-Down takes away a lot of flexibility.

One option that would have helped is to place CROWN one row higher, at 61-Across. M?C? gives much more flexibility with MICE, MACE, MICA, MACH, MUCH, etc. But having a revealer not at the very end is inelegant. The option I like better is to place CROWN vertically at 50-Down, intersecting HALLMARK CARDS. It would likely require another set of cheater squares (where the C and N of CROWN are now), but that doesn't bother me personally.

A neat Monday theme which kept me guessing until the end.

– puzzle by Zhouqin Burnikel

Debut! Iain takes the Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell hit "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and parses out the barriers. It takes some implied words to make it work — (ain't no) MOUNTAIN HIGH (enough), (ain't no) VALLEY LOW (enough), (ain't no) RIVER WIDE (enough), to keep me from GETTING TO YOU (babe) — but there's enough there that I started humming the catchy tune. Good pick me up.

Many debut constructors are simply happy to complete a filled grid, so I like what Iain does here, leaving a couple of 7 and 8-letter slots for additional pizzazz. At first I wasn't sure about TOWAWAYS, but Google says it's a legit term. I can imagine it being used in conversation, as well. RENEGE ON is a perfectly fine answer, although I don't know that I'd call it a huge asset to the puzzle. AVATAR and JETSET do sparkle things up a bit.

Check out the west section, where AVATAR also jazzes up the joint. ALL NEW is also pretty darn good. Those 6x3 sections can be tricky though, which is why constructors usually stick to 4x3 and 5x3 sections around the perimeter. Not ideal to highlight two partials — A BAR and L RON — by crossing them with each other.

Other than that though, just minor gluey bits like ENE, EST, OBI, etc. Not bad. FLOR is pretty deep into Spanish, but it is similar enough to "flora" that it's not unreasonable.

Neat clue for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). "The daily diary of the American dream" sounds like something only an MBA-type would dream up. I bet one of them (us) did a SWOT analysis and then a Five Forces study to evaluate the synergies and proactivity of the slogan.

I would have liked the lyrics either more fully integrated into the puzzle (with AINT NO / ENOUGH in there somehow), or something trickier done to imply the missing words. But overall, a nice idea for a puzzle.

– puzzle by Iain S. Padley

Fun theme, regular phrases interpreted in relation to a store that might be found in a mall — TARGET, SUBWAY, GAP, and APPLE are ubiquitous in malls and are ripe for wordplay. I've heard the SUBWAY FARE line before, but the others felt pretty fresh.

With just four themers, I'd expect some nice long fill from Joel and Finn, and they deliver. I didn't remember how close the name NORMA BATES was to Norman Bates. Fun to piece that one together.

They also give us two long acrosses, which are much less common than long downs. This can be tricky, as these long across slots can cause filling problems. Check out how much overlap there is between APPLE TURNOVER and BANNER ADS, for example. The good thing is that the BANNER ADS slot can be filled with just about anything, and Joel/Finn select a strong entry that facilitates easy crosses. I really like how they worked in UBER and T BONED in that section.

I wasn't much a fan of CAREERIST though. It does have dictionary support, but I can't remember ever hearing the term throughout my engineering or startup pharma careers. Or through business school. It does allow for CASH CAB to be worked in, but I'm undecided on how good an answer that is. I did catch some episodes while it was on, but I wonder if it will seem passe to some solvers even now.

I like how they pushed the word count to 74, allowing for more 6-letter words than usual. TOW CAR and TURRET are ones we don't see every day. I did feel like the fill strained slightly, at least more than what I'm used to seeing with Joel's work — it's unusual to see even a single ABAA or an EFTS in his puzzles.

This is a rare case where I thought the theme would have made for a better Sunday-size grid. I liked the idea, amusing in its store wordplay, but I got a sense for only a teenty-tiny mall. I would have enjoyed another three or four stores added into the mix, in order to set the scene more completely. Perhaps STAPLES, KAY (Jewelers), PAYLESS, SEES (Candies), etc.?

– puzzle by Joel Fagliano and Finn Vigeland

Great idea here, a single letter + a trio of another phonetically replacing a word. JESSE ONNN (Jesse Owens) was my favorite, and PUBLIC IVVV (public Ivies) was neat too.

They're actually all super fun, but those two stuck out for me, since they're ones that I didn't think of when I brainstormed this exact theme a few months ago. Luckily, it's already been accepted at another venue, but man oh man I started to sweat with that "dang, I got scooped!" feeling after uncovering SAAA OF ELIA ("Essays of Elia"). I thought I had gone through every one of the 26*26 combinations, so it's impressive that Tim caught two that I glossed right over.

Serves me right for trying to brainstorm crosswords while feeding my 10-month old.

Very impressive execution, especially given that there are six themers. Okay, two of them are relatively short — XIII TAX and THE EMM (excise tax and the Emmys) — but still, it's hard to work around so many themers. Tim does an outstanding job of working with parallel downs in his upper right and lower left corners. They're all great answers, LION TAMER and SOUR NOTES wonderful answers. And best yet, Tim gets those worked in with nary a gluey entry.

Well okay, AGE TEN is pretty arbitrary, so that does stick out for me as inelegant. I suppose there's a case to be made that it's a big milestone for kids to turn double digits. Hmm. Otherwise, a SNO here and an EXT there is inconsequential.

Something really cool about all those Vs in the lower right corner, too. Three extra Vs worked smoothly in was quite a bonus, making a total of six Vs elegantly packed into a tiny space.

Really strong work and a fun solve.

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

CORY Booker finally gets his due in the NYT crossword! Stanford undergrad, Rhodes scholar, Yale law, mayor of Newark, and now New Jersey senator. Not to mention his saving a woman from a fire back in 2012. Sure takes a lot to supplant the "Boy Meets World" CORY that's usually used!

Some nice entries today, DANCE CRAZE such a fun one. SPREAD EM is also catchy, although it reminds me a little too much of when I got harassed by a cop a few years ago. Sometimes I wonder if a white guy would have been asked to step out of his car and then shoved against the door, only to realize that he indeed wasn't drunk or even tipsy, as he protested. Anyhoo, hopefully SPREAD EM doesn't induce similar reactions for other solvers.

The top left triple-stack is pretty nice. I wasn't familiar with CABOT COVE, but apparently it's famous from "Murder, She Wrote." These proper nouns are tricky — I'm sure MSW fans will squee in delight over this one. Others will need every cross to piece it together. Divisive.

I wasn't as big a fan of the opposite stack, as it reminded me of Rich Norris' advice to me a few years back: single-word entries can be tough to make snazzy. ELECTIVES has some potential for a clever clue to make it sing. OBSOLESCE feels slightly off to me, as "goes obsolete" is much more common to my ear. MARTINETS is pretty good, but even as the best of the three entries in my opinion, it's not an entry that makes me want to incorporate it into one of my puzzles.

I much prefer entries like MAKE NICE, HOT MIC, and even DNA LAB. All are colorful, and it's fun for me as a solver to have to figure out where a space should go.

I appreciated the low number of gluey bits. With just a few (minor) entries like ADAR and RECTO, which will be perfectly fine to many, it made for a smooth if not pizzazz-filled solve.

– puzzle by Gareth Bain and Brad Wilber

What an initial impression this puzzle makes, with its gigantic, wide-open spaces. I usually cringe when I see designs like this, because they're often only made possible with the help of boring(ish) entries and made-up-sounding ones. RE- prefixes, -ER or -ERS suffixes, and pluralized names are often the guilty parties. I find the segmentation into miniature puzzles undesirable as well, because it chokes off puzzle flow.

I was pleasantly surprised when I finished the upper-left mini-puzzle, though. There are many more delightful entries than I would have ever guessed, featuring VIP PASSES, I NEED A NAP, and even SEA SNAKES. Better yet, not an ugly bit in sight! Well, RIRE is pretty deep French, and PENTA isn't perfect.

But PENTA did give me a much-needed entry into mini-puzzle number two: the upper right. Given how segmented each mini-puzzle is, I really appreciated the extra entry point of TETRA. This second mini wasn't as fun for me, as ALTERNATE and MARINATED are pretty neutral to my eye, and SCENARIST feels somewhat iffy. Speaking of iffy … UCLAN. Yikes! Growing up in California, having friends who went to UCLA, UCLAN … well, yikes.

I liked mini number three better, with TAKE MINE and AMAZON ANT standing out. MAN AT isn't good, but it's not terrible. And the late great Merl Reagle hated — HATED — IRANI because he thought it should be IRANIAN, but I don't mind it much. NANCE and ESTES aren't assets, but they're certainly legit names.

Lastly, I thought the mini-puzzle in the lower right was okay too. TRUE FALSE is nice, and BONES UP and ALABASTER are pretty good too. Are they worth TOYERS, not just a gluey -ER word but a pluralized one? Hmm ... likely, but that's a tough call.

Overall, a great mental workout, those huge open spaces providing an extremely tough challenge in each of four mini-puzzles; very few places to even get a toehold.

– puzzle by Kevin Adamick

It usually takes 20+ ideas to come up with a good one. To Jason's credit, he kept at it, never giving up as we bounced around concepts. Finally, his idea of famous people "wearing" their trademark hat amused both of us.

We wanted an even gender split, but we couldn't find many females with a trademark hat (Jackie Kennedy, couldn't you have worn a hat without an "X" in it?). Luckily Jason thought of CALAMITY JANE, so we kicked off the puzzle with her in the upper left. I usually try not to use REATA, but 1.) that corner was rough to fill, and 2.) it's amusing to have the STETSON atop her head and a REATA twirling above.

Speaking of grid-filling issues, yikes. We felt seven people would be minimum, otherwise solvers might find their experience thin. But it took 50ish skeletons, shifting people and hats around, before one finally looked feasible. (UNKEYED comes from my music background — apologies if it's not familiar to you.)

But in that grid, Will pointed out that LNG (liquid natural gas) would be rough for solvers. He was absolutely right. Even though we crossed those letters fairly, LNG was something I looked the other way for, because that single entry made the skeleton possible.

You'd think I'd learn after all this time.

So we rebooted. After dozens more iterations, I threw in the towel and suggested that we go up to 142 words. We were still able to incorporate a lot of long slots for snazzy fill, so thankfully Will gave the thumbs-up. Jason worked in a lot of good stuff like WHAT A GUY and TV DAD.

I'll fess up to OSA, an entry I really dislike. But it allowed for EMOJI, DATA SET, and LEFT JABS — three goodies for the price of an OSA. I still cringe at seeing it, but hopefully solvers will find the trade-off favorable.

Finally, we had to use much more glue than I like in a crossword, but with much more than average thematic material, plus the constraint of seven pairs of entries having to be right atop each other, having some was unavoidable.

Fun to work with Jason!

– puzzle by Jason Mueller and Jeff Chen

Too bad the NYT doesn't use titles for its crosswords. At CrosSynergy, I find choosing the perfect title — either punny or obliquely hinting at the theme — one of the most fun aspects of brainstorming. Today, Bruce might have chosen "S'wonderful"? Or "Snaky Sounds"? We get an astounding 12 themers with a huge amount of interlocking. I thought there were only 10 at first, so I highlighted them below to make them stand out.

There are a ton of S* S* phrases to choose from, which I'm sure made Bruce's task easier. Might have even been the reason he picked the S* S* pattern. Most of the themers he chose were pretty decent. Others that I thought might have snazzed up the grid a bit: SOLAR SYSTEM, SHINTO SHRINE, SOUTH SUDAN, SPACE SHUTTLE ... there are so many options. But still, it's no mean feat to shove 12 themers into a 15x15 grid.

What really impressed me was the care Bruce took in filling out the grid. With such high density, I would expect to see many more gluey bits than just ENOW and PCT. In Bruce's recent puzzles, especially his "stunt" ones, I haven't cared for the trade-offs of more glue enabling more "stunt," so it was a pleasure to see how clean this one was. I especially appreciate that out of a Monday puzzle.

I totally understand the need to use variety in cluing, but I would have liked a double-dose of classical in RAVEL and LISZT. To get a tangly [Get tangled up] clue for RAVEL made it feel to me like a perfectly good entry got gluified. But I loved the clue for LOLA. Hearing "I'm not the world's most physical guy, / But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine" makes it difficult not to want to rock out.

Not the most mind-blowing theme, but the ultra-high theme density executed pretty cleanly was nice to see.

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

★ Loved this idea; three people who elicit "aahs," playfully nicknamed the WIZARD OF AAHS. One-word themers can often come out dull, but OTOLARI, er OTOLAYR, dang it! OTOLARYNGOLOGIST is a neat word. MASSAGE THERAPIST is a colorful answer as well. What a perfect pairing of 16-letter answers, both people strongly associated with AAHS.

I want to stress how much I liked this idea before I launch into my next paragraphs. Just the fact that I spent so much time thinking about the following shows how much I wanted this already neat idea to be the perfect crossword.

PYROTECHNIST. I was so convinced it was PYROTECHNICIAN that I thought rebus squares were in play. Maybe that IAN had been rebified? I had to force myself to enter the -NIST ending, my hands refusing to obey even at the very end. I totally get why Victor and Tom did this — at 14 letters, PYROTECHNICIAN doesn't match lengths with WIZARD OF OZ (10), THE WIZARD OF OZ (13), WIZARD OF AAHS (12), or THE WIZARD OF AAHS (15) — but it felt like a big compromise. Google does show 50K hits for PYROTECHNIST, so it's legit.

Ish.

Additionally, pyrotechnicians do elicit AAHS, but it's more OOHS and AAHS, with an emphasis on the former. This takes PYROTECHNIST further away from the other two themers for me, as the others are so strongly all about AAHS. I might have actually preferred just three total themers: OTOLARYNGOLOGIST, MASSAGE THERAPIST, and WIZARD OF AAHS right in the middle.

I appreciated much of the fill. Getting the long and colorful ILLUMINATI and OPENS DOORS goes a long ways to add zest. Not a fan of the old-school ITERS though. Those west and east sections are tough, what with having to work with two grid-spanning themers. The starts of OTOL... and MASS... combine with OPENS DOORS to make it a tough little section to fill, but I would have liked some massaging there to strip out ITERS.

It's rare that I like an idea so much I obsess about it this much after solving. POW! for me despite the minor shortcomings. Put a big smile on my face.

– puzzle by Victor Barocas and Tom Pepper

Football terms interpreted in wacky ways, appropriate for the recent KICKOFF of the NFL season. FIRST DOWN as an appetizer and DEFENSIVE LINE as "I am not guilty" made me smile.

FAIR CATCH in the sense of "she's a catch" sort of worked for me too, although the tortured clue — [Beauty queen bride, quaintly?] — betrays that something isn't quite right. A catch is a great person, so how could a great person be just fair? ADDED NOTE: A frequent reader, Laslzo Denes, points out that "fair" here is in the archaic "beautiful" sense of the word, so this does make more sense.

RED ZONE was a little too similar to RED STATE for me, and KICKOFF as [Exile from?] … where's the wackiness in that? I think these types of themes work best when the wack factor is high.

I liked that the grid had some big swaths of white, the upper right and lower left in particular. That lower left is so clean, and even features a couple of nice entries like RENOIR and ADWARE. I wasn't hot on ESPECIAL in the upper right, wondering if the E was supposed to be left blank to make it SPECIAL? But ESPECIAL does seem to be a legitimate word.

What with the lowish word count (74), Michael does pretty well to keep the gluey bits to minor stuff like HRS and SRS. EFS I personally see as less minor, but some solvers seem to dig letters spelled out, i.e. ESSES, PEE, DEE. I don't understand that, but perhaps it's because as something seen much more in crosswords than in real life, it gives regular solvers a leg up?

EMOTER is also a controversial one. I don't care for it at all, but I can see how people in acting might think it's perfectly fine.

It would have been great to get some more snappy long fill like NO MATTER, but I do appreciate how relatively clean Michael kept the puzzle, especially with the unusual and pretty tough layout. 13-letter middle themers are so hard to cleanly build around.

– puzzle by Michael S. Maurer

Nicely consistent theme; a pair of letters repeated exactly four times (total of five instances) within a kooky sentence. I AM A MAMA MAMBA gave me a chuckle — it would make a great seed for a picture book! LEND A DAD A DADA was a neat exercise in parse-ology, forcing me to struggle to figure out where the spaces went. Entertaining.

I always appreciate getting some long pieces of fill in a crossword, and Pete hits my wavelength today with six long entries. SMOKE ALARMS, NEXT IN LINE, PHOTO ALBUMS, and RATTED ON are all strong entries in my book. And although SANTA MONICA is average-ish to me, the "Three's Company" clue brought me back to the days when Jack Tripper was my boyhood hero.

Sad, isn't it?

Note how well Pete spaces out his long downs. None of them are piled up against each other, and they're all separated by a good number of black squares. I personally use similar arrangements of six long downs all the time, as it makes for surprisingly easy filling. All this extra material for the price of only an EDE and a minor AGRI = good execution.

Great to get even more sparkle in ONE SEED, too. I dropped in TOP SEED, but ONE SEED is a term I hear all the time during the NCAA basketball tourney.

Will's mentioned that all he's looking for out of a Thursday crossword is for it to be harder than a Wednesday. One way to do this is to simply crank up the difficulty of the clues. Take [Tots] for example. It took me forever to figure out that it obliquely referred to "totals up," not "little kid." I personally find it much more satisfying to have the theme concept of the crossword difficult, not the clues, though. Once I cottoned to this particular trick, looking for letter-repetitions made it too easy for my taste to fill in the theme answers.

The clue for ABA gave me a middle-schooler's tee-hee — the last part of the [Org. with red, white and blue balls, once] clue made me think of something very different. Ahem.

– puzzle by Peter A. Collins

Awesome skeleton; three sparkly answers stacked in the middle with INTERNET ECONOMY running through them. (I loved seeing INTERNET ECONOMY — I always read the business section first.) QUOTE UNQUOTE is my favorite kind of entry — it baffled me, especially as I tried to figure out if it was one word or many, plus it's a great phrase and amenable to potentially sneaky clue.

The layout also allows for many more long entries. Ten additional slots for 8+ letter entries = such potential for assets!

Starting in the upper left: even though I tend to not like one-word answers and proper nouns that much, AMERICANA is snazzy, and PAVAROTTI both has huge fame and plays to the NYT's learned audience. I didn't care for IM A MAC as that commercial tagline is quite outdated by now, and ACS is a crossword convention that many an editor has let by. This annoyingly strict mechanical engineer sighs.

I dug the lower left. Although O SOLE MIO has been used a ton in crosswords now, it's still a classic work. The fact that PAVAROTTI has performed it many times helps its cause today. DONE DEAL is also a jazzy entry, and best yet, that corner is nice and clean. NEMEA might be tough for some, but this huge fan of Greek myths will be assigning stable-cleaning duty to any cynics. Plus, all the crossings are fair ... unless someone can justify hearing OYs on a ship.

(Okay, the Argo went through a lot. Oy!)

I don't mind a bit of ANODIC or AMINES, but both in one puzzle isn't ideal for me. Even with CEES and ACS, I still wasn't bothered … until I hit the lower right.

I'm vaguely familiar with PARSI, but PARSEE looks variant-ish, given that a few dictionaries list it as such. It might be perfectly fine since it's a word ported to English without a definite spelling. But man oh man, trying to figure out the BAER and GARRET crossings was rough.

I know Max BAER from crosswords now, but Arthur "Bugs" BAER and GARRET, a word rarely used during the Shortz era … yikes! Made for an unfortunately unsatisfying ending to an otherwise fun solve.

– puzzle by James Mulhern

Neat middle "slantstack," with APRES MOI LE DELUGE appropriately flooding through it. RADIO SILENCE is a great entry, one of my favorites today. I also liked PUT A RING ON IT since it sounded so familiar. I overthought it, feeling like it was weird to call a woman/man an IT, but then I remembered the IT usually refers to a finger. Whew!

BOBA TEA is something I used to have all the time, but I had to look it up since I call it "bubble tea." LATTE ART was another slick modern entry, but since I just drink coffee with half and half like an old guy, it wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse. Still, I really enjoyed those two answers which gave the puzzle some hipness. Dare I say, DOPENESS?

I can already see the kids shaking their heads, swearing off the term DOPENESS now.

Speaking of modern, KARENO. One of David's previous puzzles brought us KUTI. Considering we saw a crazily-spelled SKRILLEX recently, I guessed KARENO might be KL RENO — like KD LANG or something. Although I grew up in the Bay Area and not Sacto, I can't ever remember hearing anyone call it SAC. I wonder if Utahans similarly pooh-pooh the idea of calling Salt Lake City SLC?

David pushes the boundaries today, giving us so much great stuff like the aforementioned plus DRUM LOOP, MOON BASE, and THE MOB. That's a ton of strong material jam-packed in.

On the flip side, this sort of high-density packing often requires various types of glue. I don't mind some minor ORO, MES, DESE, but the old-school ESNE and especially ESNES is not somewhere I'd personally go. And when I looked up FERULE, I got this: [An instrument, such as a cane, stick, or flat piece of wood, used in punishing children.] Uh … yikes.

All in all, a huge amount of snappy material but requiring a couple of dabs of industrial-strength glue to hold it together.

– puzzle by David Woolf

The quote mark is the same as an editor's ditto mark, which means to "repeat what's seen above." So Tom interprets these symbols as quote marks in the across direction, and ditto marks in the down, indicating that the letter above should be repeated.

An example: "OPEN SESAME" sits at 29-Across, including the open and close quotes. The crossing answer at 4-Down looks bizarre as CHED"AR, but the ditto mark tells you to repeat the D above. Thus, the double-D completes CHEDDAR.

Whew!

Took me a long time to catch on, and even then, I didn't recall how a ditto mark worked. I bet this puzzle will play super-strongly to the editing crowd, less so to those of us whose last experience with ditto marks came in high school.

I really enjoyed some of the Tom-ness we've come to see in his body of work. Kicking it off with (I AM NOT) SPOCK and OH CRUD is great. HULK SMASH! and MY PRECIOUS in the themers also made me smile. And the crazy word SUBBOOKKEEPER with its quadruple set of double-letters right down the middle — I wasn't familiar with the word, and it looks a bit made-up, but what a cool find.

I read Tom's comments about low word-count experimentation with great interest. Going down to 132 words is an incredibly difficult task, and Tom is one of the few people I think are equipped to handle it. Such a low word count does make for a tough-to-solve, wide-open puzzle filled with a lot of mid-length (6 or 7 letters) entries. Some of them I loved: KARAOKE, AMSCRAY, I SWEAR, PTOLEMY, NO MERCY. Along with longer entries like FIG LEAVES and CUE STICKS, that's a lot of solving goodness.

But it comes with trade-offs. Some of the ones I didn't care for: REROSE, INCANT, TRYERS, IN A BAR, SOWER, CHEMIC, UNMEET, not to mention the fine but not super interesting GAIN ON, NEARER TO, RUSH AT entries made longer just by prepositions.

I personally prefer just a few great entries with fewer gluey bits, much more commonly seen in 140 word puzzles. But the variety from week to week is a good change of pace.

– puzzle by Tom McCoy