New York Times, Friday, January 17, 2014

I am a perfectionist. My mind fixates on anything suboptimal. When constructing a puzzle, this habit can be helpful as hundreds of judgements are made — whether a partial is worth it, are there too many plurals in the grid, etc. And since a submission can be rejected for a single flaw — e.g. one entry is deemed too obscure — diligence is needed. The trap is that the mind can go too far in this direction, dwelling on the smallest imperfection while forgetting the merits. I once spent days agonizing over a themeless with a single entry I disliked — FDR — before I came to my senses.

The company I work at is researching methods for peer feedback. We learned the greatest factor in whether a team is thriving and successful is the ratio of positive to negative feedback. The best teams used 5x as many positive comments to negative — while average teams only used 2x. Sometimes the human brain works in unintuitive ways. Since then, I've tried to apply the 5x to rule to myself when constructing. It's helped me remain objective about imperfections while still remembering the merits. I've found myself happier and more motivated to construct. As is commonly said, perfection is impossible to achieve.

Onto the puzzle. I became interested in 4-stacks while observing Patrick Berry's puzzles (even his 5-stacks are smooth) and wondered if mere mortals could do it. Began at the top right corner with 6-A and 16-A as fresh entries. 18-A is a plural not ending in S, which adds some nice misdirection. 11-D was a serendipitous discovery for BLACKO??. And I liked some other lively entries in the grid. But I wish I could change KIEL. While not totally obscure — it hosted Olympics events as recently as 1972 — many people won't know it. I personally didn't. For a painful time I considered scrapping the entire corner because of it. Now I feel the grid as a whole is good enough to accept it. Hopefully, solvers will get the crossings and be satisfied by learning a word. Finally, I noticed that Will kept many of my favorite clues, but also changed some to make the puzzle easier. It's helpful to know my instinct is writing clues that are a bit too difficult. Overall, I'd like to improve several entries, but the result is okay and I hope the next is better, even though it will be imperfect.

ADDED NOTE: This puzzle was used in the 2014 MIT Mystery Hunt. See this blog post for more details.

Kevin Der makes a crackerjack themeless. Entries here I like include HOTEL BARS, ANIMAL FAT, AS I RECALL, GYM CLASSES, DIME STORES, BEETHOVEN, STORM DOOR, HONEYBEE, OPEN MIKE, NO BOTHER, BLACK OPS, OP ARTIST and EYES ON ME. That's a lot of nice stuff! Nothing really bad either.

A nice construction from one of the best in the business, Joon. Er, Jeff. Darn it, I mean Kevin!*.

One aspect I like best about Kevin's work is that he's always pushing the envelope, trying to figure out what he can do new that others haven't done before. Look at the NE and the SW today: beautiful chunky white sections, smoothly filled. Typically themeless constructors stay with triple-stacked areas, because moving to quad stacks exponentially increases the difficulty. It's definitely been done many times before, but check out how snazzy and clean he makes them. HOTEL BARS / ANIMAL FAT / AS I RECALL all crossed by BLACK OPS? Must have taken days, perhaps weeks to figure out that one subsection.

Usually going to 66 words in a themeless means you're going to have some compromises. But Kevin takes so much care in his work, leaving us with only ONE LS and KIEL as misdemeanors. And it was great to hear him say he struggled to see if he could eliminate KIEL somehow. But given the giant ell of white space up in that corner, it would be very difficult to do while still retaining BLACK OPS crossing all the long stacked answers. That NE corner has so many great answers though; they're easily worth the price of KIEL.

The one knock on today's puzzle might be that there isn't a marquee answer that jumped out at me with that hurts-so-good slap upside the head. I smiled when I finally pieced together DIME STORES — very cool clue — and I really liked the colloquial NO BOTHER, but I really appreciate getting at least one whiz-bang answer (usually themeless constructors place their best answer at 1-across).

Kevin took a stretch off of constructing for a while during his stint helping Obama get reelected among other pedestrian activities; very glad to see that he's in the kitchen again, mixing up more magic.

*I can joke about this, you can't. Ha.