New York Times, Thursday, March 18, 2021

Ever since solving David Steinberg's excellent FROOT LOOPS puzzle, I've thought about using some sort of loop-based trick. This puzzle finally gave me the chance to do it!

To brainstorm potential words for the loops, I went on XWord Info to look up all the ways that ADO has been clued in past crosswords. It's a common answer, so this gave me many options. Without that flexibility, I might not have been able to fill the grid, because this type of theme is very constraining. The interlocking geometry of the theme entries is simply incompatible with many words (including some of my favorites: BALLYHOO, BROUHAHA, HULLABALOO, and HURLY-BURLY — it seems that certain letters really evoke a commotion!).

Thanks, as always, to the editorial team for their work; I especially like the clue [Salk and Pepper, in brief], which they added. I also appreciate the new initiative of sending the puzzle PDF to constructors a couple weeks before publication so that we can let the editors know if there are any changes we would like to be made.

I helped a constructor rebuild a MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING puzzle a while back, but today's is the version I wish we had thought of. What a clever idea, to literally surround six NOTHING blocks with synonyms of MUCH ADO! Tom has some of the neatest crossword ideas of anyone in the crossworld, so it's such a pleasure to see him back in the saddle after a hiatus last year.

Note how consistent he was in his orientations, the synonyms always starting in the west and traveling clockwise: FRACAS, FUSS, HUBBUB, UPROAR, STIR, RUMPUS. I don't think it was necessary to place all the bubbled words symmetrically, but it added a touch of elegance.

That did necessitate some trade-offs, though. SSRS at the top of your grid isn't a great way to headline, and there was enough ABBR ISR OFA STS YRS — all things called out on editors' spec sheets — to bog me down. Will Shortz recently mentioned that he's shying away from puzzles that have themers making patterns in grids like this, because of the glue they force. It's so difficult to fill around fixed shapes.

I took a lot of organic chemistry, but I couldn't remember anyone ever calling it ORGO. Makes sense, though. ADDED NOTE: Reader Larry Byrd, a retired prof. of organic chemistry, says that he never used the term when teaching — it was always "O-chem" — but his former students now use ORGO exclusively in their text messages. Thanks!

I loved getting THE ROBOT, some yummy SCHMEAR, and even ANAGRAMS, with an homage to crosswords of the past. Helped to make up for some of the short glue I had to wade through.

Fantastic clue for NEST. That's a structure put together by a crane (bird), not a crane (machine).

Such a magnificent concept; the perfect way to execute on this idea. Neat way to stack MUCHADO/ABOUT/NOTHING, too. If there had been fewer shaky parts of the grid, it would have been a POW! for sure.

P.S. Solvers on the NYT app should enter NOTHING or just N into the blank squares. Thanks to reader Jeff Doyle-Horney for the tip!

A fascinating talk on words and crosswords by Tom McCoy: