New York Times, Thursday, November 4, 2021

I constructed this puzzle in early 2020. My original plan was to make it a Sunday, but I couldn't find enough pairs of long theme answers with significantly different parsings, so I decided to consolidate my best finds into a daily. My favorite example was EPIDERMAL/SPIDER-MAN so that one went into the grid first. I was also hoping to work in NOVELETTES/LOVE LETTER, but I couldn't find a great 10-letter match for it.

I'm not the kind of person who keeps close track of milestones, but I've been told that this is my 100th crossword (not counting variety puzzles) in The New York Times. My thanks go out to Will and his team for working with me for so many years, and to every one of you for solving my puzzles. I'm honored to be part of such a special community.

Eye-opening finds. I love these space-addition/deletion/shifting discoveries, GOLD INGOT and HOLDING ON sharing that long string of middle letters. Haters tend to say that these themes feel computer-generated, but this one requires a ton of human sifting. It's easy to write code to come up with pairs of entries differing only in their first/last letters. It's much, much harder to identify which of the thousands of finds are interesting.

There are tricks to cutting down possible pairs. You can eliminate terminal Ss, for instance, since things like CISTERN and SISTERS aren't impressive. You can require a space deletion or a space addition or a space shifting, but that will still allow a bunch of bland add-a-preposition phrases through. Then there's the issue of false negatives, i.e., the possibilities you miss by tightening the constraints too much.

There's a lot of artistry in organizing searches like this one. I had the good fortune to do a backyard hangout with David and Jim Horne last month, and I could happily chat for hours about an interesting problem like this.

Neat idea to incorporate the finds into rebus squares, too. Something was clearly odd about GA?AP, so breaking open GA(SC)AP made for a satisfying a-ha.

Great clues throughout, too. Kicking off the puzzle with [Where students might kick their feet up] — as in karate kicks in a DOJO — told me that I'd be in for some fun. It continued all the way to the end, where [Outdated charging device?] baffled me, even with the telltale question mark. Describing a LANCE as a "charging device" in a joust such a terrible pun that I groaned with delight.

It's so hard to come up with novel Thursday ideas, and this one scratched the itch I've been having for months now. Maybe it'll play hard for some solvers, since so much is going on, but the solve felt so worth the effort.