New York Times, Wednesday, May 17, 2023

I'm so excited to have the Wednesday puzzle this week — my first solo showing in the New York Times! This one represents a pretty early effort for me, and I'm happy to report that I remain very pleased with how it turned out. I'm also very grateful to the top-notch editing crew at the Times, who helped me take this puzzle through a couple of revisions and made sure it hit all the marks.

One constraint I imposed on this grid is that the "split" pairs of answers spanned the whole width of the line they're on. That, plus the 13-letter revealer, meant I did not have a lot of wiggle room for arranging the blocks. But what is crossword construction, if not painstakingly weaving the most fun possible path through self-imposed obstacles?

An opinion I hold on themes like this that might be controversial: I love when one of the necessary letter combinations only appear in weird circumstances. Finding CKONE as an entry that begins with CK- was a major shot in the arm for this puzzle, at least for me. (Especially when paired, as in my original draft, with the very fun ANTIPASTO. Alas!) That tightened up the grid requirements even more, and I think you can spot the gluey bits that resulted. But all in all, can't be too mad with this one!

The "words that can precede X" genre is on its last legs, so you have to do something special to get one accepted. Today is a perfect example of exactly that, Parker employing not one but two additional levels to make his puzzle stand out.

The first, obvious one is that ___ SPLIT phrases are represented literally: SEVEN / TEN split, BAN / ANA split, STO / CK split, and LICK / ETY split. (Non-investors might not be familiar with stock splits, but they're ultra-common in finance.) Neat find in ETYMOLOGY to make that pesky ETY beginning work.

I would have guessed that there were a few dozen phrases following the form of ___ SPLIT — I was amazed that you can count them on one hand. Besides the quartet Parker used, what else is there? You could go deep into finance with a REVERSE split or into bowling with a BABY split or DODO split, but those are much weaker options. Such top-notch tightness — not being able to find a single other possible themer — lends so much elegance to the theme.

Puzzles featuring splits often come with filling difficulties, especially when so many of the themer ends/starts are constrained. Since you want to obfuscate SEVEN, only a few entries like MAKES EVEN or BREAKS EVEN work. ??BAN could only be CUBAN or URBAN, so all the inflexibility makes it unsurprising to get some EBRO crossing SER in that region. Incorporating the IONIAN SEA does help make up for it, though.

There have been a lot of splits puzzles and a whole lot of "words that can precede X" ones. Combining the two resulted in a solid effort today.