New York Times, Friday, August 28, 2020

When I started constructing crosswords at the end of 2019, I certainly didn't expect my New York Times debut to be a themeless puzzle! For one thing, I only started solving themelesses a few years ago. And anyone who knows me knows that my memory for trivia and names is terrible. However, I fell in love with constructing themeless puzzles once I realized that the whole game is to cram the grid with maximum fun. And I love fun.

I chose to build this grid around the central PYRAMID SCHEME while listening to "The Dream," a podcast about multi-level marketing organizations. Some of my favorite clues were rearranged in the final edit — WANNABE's clue originally contained the lyrics "zig-a-zig-ah," and I still refer to this puzzle in my mind by GOLD TEETH's original clue, "Grill bits" — but I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Thanks to the editors for toughening it up.

Some very heartfelt shoutouts to Erik Agard for helping unblock me when I was just getting started, to Andrea Carla Michaels and all the other cruciverbalists who have been such enthusiastic cheerleaders, to my wife Tory for patiently solving all my drafts, and to my amazing family for fostering my love of questions, puzzles, and games for the past 31 years.

Debut! I'm always impressed by people making their crossword splashdown in the most competitive arena of them all, themelesses. Will recently noted that the acceptance rate for themelesses is about 5% — that's less than the acceptance rate for most colleges! Well done, Kate.

Fantastic central entry. PYRAMID SCHEME is great in its own right, the phrase laden with history and intrigue. The misdirect made it even better, "… likely to collapse" making me think about so many business plans I've reviewed that are so badly flawed. If I had 1% of every business that said: "if we can just get 1% of the target market" ... I'd have nothing.

Interesting decision to run so many vertical feature entries through the central PYRAMID SCHEME. That's a tough task, taking away so much flexibility. Check out the upper left corner, where POLISH UP / SOB STORY has to work through SHOEPRINT, which has to cross TRUE CRIME and TA-NEHISI. It's no surprise that you'd need some LIS, BIP, ISO, TTOPS to hold it all together.

A shame that Will Shortz didn't go with Kate's clue for GOLD TEETH. "Grill bits" playing on "drill bits" made this engineer chuckle.

I did enjoy some of the mid-length fill, like GEL PEN, PET RAT, BASE TEN, but themelesses usually shine in their long entries. With just 11 long slots and ESTROGEN, POLISH UP not doing much, I wanted more juice out of the solve. If you haven't read TA-NEHISI Coates, he'll sadly be a name you don't recognize that's taking up a valuable long slot. Though, if that is the case, do yourself a favor and read Between the World and Me. I hope it becomes assigned reading — it's much more relevant than some of "the classics" these days.

(I did appreciate that Kate kept the name count low so that solvers wouldn't feel barraged by unfamiliar entries.)

Still, a fun debut.