New York Times, Friday, May 22, 2015

I started working on this puzzle as an exercise in "How to construct a Triple Stack." I wanted to understand the magnitude of the trade-offs between interesting 15s and interesting everything-elses. I also wanted to maintain an open grid, because my own personal gripe with many Triple Stack puzzles is that there's only one way to attack them: whittle away at 3-, 4- and 5-letter fill until you have enough of the stack to intuit the long answers.

So I started with the top and bottom 15s as my seed entries, and then chose a grid shape that would feel open but still not impossible to fill. I think the top stack came out zippier than the bottom stack, but I was happy to avoid a preponderance of terminal esses that can sometimes distract from otherwise nice answers.

Other notes: I'm also happy to see "Afrobeat music pioneer Fela" make his debut. I tried to sneak him into an old, rejected puzzle submission a few years ago, on an easier day of the week. He seems worthy of a Fri/Sat puzzle, though, as long as the crosses are fair. I'm also very pleased with the cluing. Many of my favorites made the cut, and Will's additions are excellent.

I hope you enjoy!

Themeless puzzles featuring 15-letter entries sometimes suffer from a lack of pizzazz, because those long guys don't leave much room for other good fill. If most of your grid snazz comes from six grid-spanners, all six ought to be fantastic.

Luckily, David gives us six beautiful ones. SEALED WITH A KISS is a great way to lead it off. The clue for RUSSIAN ROULETTE doesn't seem quite accurate — it can go around the circle multiple times without anything happening, yeah? — but the entry itself is colorful. (Note: Jim pointed out that there is only one round ... the round in the chamber. D'oh!)

Added bonus to get MILE RUN, I ASSUME, SCEPTER. Way to work some extra assets right through the stacks.

So very tough to make a clean triple-stacks puzzle. David does quite well as triple-stacks go, but at this point in crossword evolution, the "as triple-stacks go" qualifier counts for very little. About five little gluey bits for most themeless puzzles is roughly where I as a solver start to sense inelegance.

IT CAME feels particularly inelegant to me, breaking the rule of no partials greater than five letters. I'd be fine with a six-letter partial if it allowed something never before seen to happen — not here though. I'd love to see if something like IT CLUB (kin to an AV club) could make things better. Shifting the black squares in the center might be effective, but that would cause all sorts of ripple effects.

(Note: David mentioned that his original clue was [Cry after finding a package], which seems better to me. A bit arbitrary, but at least I can see IT CAME as a non-partial now.)

Some nice clues:

• [F-, H- or I-, but not G-]. Cool to figure out that it related to chemistry: fluorine, hydrogen, and iodine can become ANIONs.
• [Get a lock on, e.g.] had me thinking about targeting, homing in on, etc. Great a-ha to realize it referred to leg locks, etc. in wrestling.
• [Web content] is something I'm always thinking about; trying to write about puzzle elements I think solvers will find interesting. SILK in a spider web = a good headslap moment.
• [Breaks down in class] made me think of poor students wailing over finals, but it's a misdirection. English teachers parse (break down) sentence structures.

Really appreciated how each of these clues didn't require a telltale question mark!