New York Times, Saturday, May 9, 2015

The seed entries for this one were 1-, 17-, and 58-Across along with 12- and 31-Down. I wasn't sure if 31-Down would pass muster, but I gave it a shot, and Will was okay with it. I wanted to get 58-Across into a puzzle for a little while since my boys are big fans of the show, and they begged me to try to work it into a grid, so I was pleased when I was able to get it into this puzzle.

I really like the mini-theme in the upper right side of the puzzle as well; 11-Down crossing 29-Across was a happy accident, so when I moved to the center, I decided to take it a step further by getting 42-Across in there, too.

I had a lot of fun making this puzzle.

Some really strong entries featured today, MUFFIN TOP bringing me back to my days of obsessively watching "Seinfeld." And that upper-right corner is an absolute beauty, anchored by EVOLUTION running through both MUTATE and DARWIN, along with a BATARANG and a SPYGLASS tucked in. Not to mention, what a great clue for KING TUT — [Royal who toured the U.S. in the late 1970s] said nothing about the royal being alive!

A while back, I wrote a Saturday Stumper for Stan Newman, and he mentioned that one or two short entries were iffy in that they were "un-Stumperable." I didn't quite get what he meant, but today's puzzle made it click into place. In order to make a puzzle tough, it's important to have multiple ways of cluing an entry. Bits like AGHA, AMAH, and OGEE fall into that bucket. To regular solvers, [Eastern nurse] or [Asian au pair] is a dead giveaway for AMAH. And cluing it in some arcane manner would just be unfair. So I can understand how Stan would see it as critical to avoid these usual suspects in a puzzle meant to be extra-challenging.

On that note of difficulty, I would have loved something harder for ONE IN FOUR. Those numbers felt arbitrary to me, and the clue was so easy that it felt like cheating to fill in the answer. Perhaps something more crunchy, more satisfying to suss out, like [Chance of heterozygous parents imparting a recessive gene]? Or [Chance of rolling a 5 or 6 in craps]? The latter is too arbitrary, but figuring it out entertained me.

Finally, a note on DOCTOR WHO. Although I've dedicated way too many brain cells to Star Wars and Star Trek esoterica, I've never seen DOCTOR WHO. I still find it a perfectly fine entry though, as it's popular (albeit niche) in sci-fi. "Time lord" would be too much as an entry for me, but that term makes for a perfectly good clue. Nice to learn more vocab I can use in metaphors to baffle my wife (who once thought "Live long and prosper" was a quote from Benjamin Franklin).