New York Times, Saturday, November 19, 2016

ML: I remember thinking about MADAME PRESIDENT as I worked on my first solo themeless that included MISTER PRESIDENT back in January 2014 (published in April 2015).

I consulted Jeff after two solo attempts in 2014 were rejected. Will and Joel liked all the 15s I had come up with but not the shorter fill holding it together. My first attempt with Jeff was also rejected, but the second accepted in February 2015. We kept the original 15s but Jeff reworked the entire grid structure. He kept the 15s locked but flipped the grid so that the SW corner became the NE. He also changed the position of the black squares.

I was pleased to add another female name, actress KERRY WASHINGTON, to the data base. The new entries to the database would also have included THE NEW YORK TIMES had Peter Gordon not beaten us with its debut earlier this year in a very clever puzzle. I liked Jeff's additions of NO GO AREAS and END IN A TIE. I was pleased to see my clue for NBA ALL STAR GAMES, "Where East meets West?" retained.

Thanks once again to Jeff for co-constructing and Will and Joel for accepting and editing this puzzle. I hope you enjoyed your solving experience.

JEFF: NBA ALL STAR GAMES are some of my favorite spectacles in all of sports. That entire weekend is filled with such athleticism, skill, and talent — it's mind-boggling. I particularly like the Slam Dunk contest. Just when I think everything new under the sun has been done, Spud Webb wins it (he's 5'9"). Then came the Jordan-Dominique battles. And last year, seeing Aaron Gordon leap over a mascot 1.) going up in the sitting position 2.) grabbing the ball with his left hand 3.) passing it underneath his horizontal legs and then 4.) slamming it home … I was so excited, I might have peed a little.

So when ML asked me to help her redo this grid after an initial rejection, how could I refuse? Now, who wants to watch the between the legs tomahawk jam I'm working on? (So what if it's on an 8-foot high rim.)

I also enjoyed helping get the incredibly talented KERRY WASHINGTON in the NYT crossword.

But things didn't go quite as planned with MADAME PRESIDENT.

Someday.

Hey, my daughter was born in the United States ...

I enjoy working on grids with ML. She sent me this one after a rejection — there had been too many unsavory short gluey words — and asked if I could help her redo it. I liked the skeleton of 15s, NO DAY AT THE BEACH feeling particularly relevant, so off we went.

I've commented before on how tough themelesses can be when you fix a large skeleton of interlocking answers into place, and this one was no different. We actually had to tear the entire thing down to the bare studs, move a whole bunch of black squares around, and try dozens of arrangements to find one that gave us even a modicum of flexibility. It was very important to me to get more sparkly answers into the grid than just those 15s, and that's tough to do — there's virtually no place in the grid that allows much freedom to breathe.

We settled upon a few long slots in the NW / SE corners, and although I do like RAN A RISK, ANOMALIES, NO-GO AREAS, and NOBLESSE pretty well, they didn't sizzle as much as I wanted. But working more colorful answers into all four slots would have meant using big globs of crossword glue, and there already was some present due to the skeleton's trickiness. Always the trade-offs.

A similar story for the other two corners, with END IN A TIE and TRANSLATE not as stellar as I would have liked, but they allowed for clean(-ish) corners. Also, they seemed like they could be ripe for really clever clues, which is a trick Patrick Berry often uses to spice up the less colorful long entries in his ultraclean grids. If we could have come up with a sizzling clue for TRANSLATE for example, I think it could have flipped the neutral entry into something memorable. My offering — [Turn chat into cat, say] — is an attempt to mislead away from the fact that "chat" is the French word for "cat." Looking back on it, I don't think it really works though. Drat.