New York Times, Tuesday, March 17, 2015

This was my second submission to Will and my first acceptance, so it will always hold a special place in my heart.

The puzzle began as part of an actual midterm I made for a DeCal (a program at UC Berkeley that allows undergraduate/graduate students to lead a self-designed course) on how to solve and construct crosswords. After the inimitable David Steinberg encouraged me to send Will some of my work, I thought of using this puzzle.

Well aware of the theme's relative simplicity, I checked XWord Info to see if the same theme had been done previously in the NYT. Indeed, it had! But, wait ... I had added an extra theme wrinkle that Mr. Bessette had not implemented: having the TERMs in the exact center of each entry and not just somewhere in the middle. Awesome! That seemed to me enough of a variation to reprise the theme some five or so years later.

After I had spent more time perfecting the fill (due to the theme density, many of the downs cross two or more themers and were therefore heavily constrained), I sent this off to Will and received an acceptance email in early November of 2013. Sometime in 2014, after learning of Will's new assistant, I happened upon a lovely article detailing Ms. Shechtman's "puzzling origins" and experiences working with Will. In the third paragraph were two of the same theme entries in my puzzle — plus one I had overlooked — and the same added theme wrinkle! At least I now felt qualified enough to utter the tired cliché, "Great minds think alike."

Still, the coincidence got me thinking: Is an idea or product still original if it was fully developed without prior knowledge of a similar, preexisting idea/product? Or, because of this time factor, would the idea be labeled a variation, a reinterpretation, or, worse, a rip-off? Then, to what extent is originality and craft affected by this race to beat others to the punch? Would Albert Gleizes have been a cubist had he known Pablo Picasso would eventually become the major pioneer of the art movement?

Anyhow, this is my long-winded way of saying that IMO an original execution is just as important as an original theme. Though we might try, we can't all start art movements. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted, "All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients." Sometimes, originality is simply a fresh look at an old idea.

Cool layout today, built around longish themers containing TERM smack dab in their middles. MONSTER MOVIE has exactly four letters before TERM and four after, LATER MAN has two in front and two in back, etc. Nice touch.

A good amount of colorful fill in those big, open corners. A AS IN APPLE, CLOSE LOOK, BAILING OUT, METRO AREA are all snazzy entries, enhancing my solving experience. They're awfully tough to build around, necessitating the ILA, KAN, DEPT, etc. sort of gluey bits. Reasonable trade-off, though.

Note how David has placed his six (!) themers in an every-other-row layout, in rows 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. There is so much interaction between the themers that many, many constraints are created. The center is especially crunched, with LAIRD (sort of) interacting with FOUR themers. It works fairly cleanly, although it would have been nice to at least have the option to choose something different than LAIRD. I actually think that entry is pretty interesting, but I imagine it will draw grumbles from "Tuesday solvers."

Generally I advocate for as much space as possible in between themers, but in the special case of high theme density, I often try to squeeze pairs of themers together. Here, I might have tried shoving LATER MAN and MASTERMIND together in rows 3 and 4. Not sure if it would have given friendly letter pairs in the overlap, but it would have let David lay out the skeleton as if he were working with four (very long) themers rather than six.

Rich Norris (editor of the LA Times crossword) has mentioned to me that it takes a lot to overcome his bias against single-word themers. I can see where that comes in today, with UNDETERMINED being not nearly as exciting as MONSTER MOVIE in my eyes. MASTERMIND does have a lot of appeal, but it might have been nice to see more of the DUMB TERMINAL / HIPSTER MUSIC kind of entries.

Finally, great clue for ONE. Curious to figure out if RELATIONS is the longest common word that can be formed by one-point Scrabble tiles.