New York Times, Friday, September 19, 2014

I'm excited to have my first freestyle puzzle published, especially since over the last year, I've found them to be my favorite type of puzzle to construct. That realization, however, has been a double-edged sword, as the more I make freestyles — and the more I solve whistle-clean puzzles constructed by so many of my peers, publishing in the Times or independently — the higher I raise my own personal bar. Now, at least in a themeless, if a corner needs a TRA or an ARA to work, I need to rebuild that corner. This puzzle aimed to maximize the flashy stuff, so of course I love FRESH START, SOCIAL LIFE, WINE COOLER, LENA DUNHAM, and, in particular, HUMBLEBRAG, for which I know Will needed some convincing. But if I were making this again, I probably wouldn't stack TELE over ELEA, and you'd not be likely to encounter ENOL or SWF.

Regardless, it's great to have a published freestyle to my name, and I'm grateful to Will for publishing a puzzle of mine now for the second time on the day of a tournament — September 19 is the Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which, six years ago, was the first crossword tournament I ever went to. (Back then, I won the junior division title… although by default, as there were no other contestants under 25. I'm happy to say there's a lot more competition now!)

Another one from the young guns today. Finn, a recent graduate of Columbia, features a nice 1-Across with HUMBLEBRAG. Sometimes I worry when I see a definitional clue at 1-Across, as that usually means it's going to something you either know or you don't. But this is a strong one. Not only is it something that's worked its way into the sphere of people as unhip as me, but it's something that can be inferred. Excellent choice to seed the puzzle.

What a beautiful SE corner. It's always tough to come up with three strong stacked answers without having to resort to a couple of glue bits, and Finn's triplet is really well done. SOCIAL LIFE / WINE COOLER / FRESH START almost tells the story of the nerd who became cool once he started drinking. Hmm. Aside from the moral ambiguity, it does evoke a lot of strong pictures. And the fill is so clean, even SWF perfectly fine by me.

Where this puzzle really excels is where that triple turns upward. It's tough to turn a corner like that with just neutral, clean stuff, so to pull off ET VOILA and SEXPERT is pretty darn impressive. Even PROOFER gets an insider's nod to Finn's work in journalism.

It would have been nice to get a little more long stuff. This puzzle doesn't have quite as many 8+ letter entries as a usual themeless (often you see 14-16 slots for 8+ letter entries), which can be fine if the 7's are fully utilized. There are nice entries such as IRONSIDE weaved into the grid, but PALETTES and ORLANDO and CLEARER and UNEARTH won't usually earn checks from Will (I wouldn't think).

AT A SLANT, however, does get a thumbs-up from me today, given its beautiful link to EQUAL, just three slots away. I find it elegant when you can cleverly link close entries, in this case [Level] and [Not level] with slightly different meanings. Clue echoes and cross-references can work so well if they're this close within a grid.

I appreciate Finn's attention to detail, assembling his grid with very little glue. When your only little bits are TRA and ENOL and TELE, that's a success. Quality work from one of the young PHENOMs.