New York Times, Tuesday, September 24, 2019

While working on this idea in April 2018, I tried to make the Greek letters break across a two-word phrase, and I tried to use as many four- and five-letter Greek letters (THETA, ALPHA, OMEGA, ZETA, IOTA) and as few three-letter Greek letters (RHO) as possible. But to make it work, I had to break the rule about not sectioning off the grid with a single pair of blocks, and I had to let in some bits of fill I wish I could have avoided (ESSO, YEO, ANSE, ARTE, ANIS, and SECY) some of which pile up in the middle bottom in an ugly way.

The interlock dictated much of the grid design, so a 72-word count was a necessity, not something I was shooting for! I hope I included enough good stuff in the long answers to make up for the short fill. I also wish I could have made them all look like perfect plus-signs, but I hope just the general notion of "Greek letters crossing" will work in solvers' minds.

Oh, one more thing: I hope solvers won't be thrown by the word PITA hiding in PIT AGAINST directly beneath GREEK CROSS. I worked for a long time to remove that, but in the end, couldn't eliminate it.

Three GREEK CROSSes = pairs of themers intersecting at their hidden Greek letters. The LAT published a bigger version of this concept just two weeks ago, unfortunately. I liked how that one crossed the same letter with itself, forming GREEK CROSSes with equal length arms.

But then I wondered, maybe John's done something brilliant by picking out Greek letters THAT SPELL OUT SOMETHING! That would more than enough make up for his unequal CROSS lengths.

ALPHA = A

RHO = R

IOTA = I

ZETA = Z

ARIZona? Maybe there are Greek artifacts in Tempe? This is actually happening!

OMEGA = O

THETA = T

Huh. Would you buy Judas IZcARIOT?

Humph.

The grid contains several rough spots, enough that I stopped keeping track after ANSE ALYN ARTE RIAL SECY. Five strikes and you're out for an early-week puzzle! (That number could easily be three or less, for some solvers.) Not nearly smooth enough to be accessible to newer solvers.

What happened? The biggest problem is the size of the real estate around each pair of crossing letters. Take FINAL PHASE and AIR HOLES, for example. It's usually wise to put a black square close to that intersection, probably at the first P of PPM. If you don't, you're effectively trying to build a themeless-esque grid — but with several constraints already locked into place.

There's no easy fix, unfortunately, since if you put a black square at the first P of PPM, you'd form a two-letter word. That means you'd need to move that black square to the left of LEMON ZEST. The shocks ripple through the puzzle, and require a full redo. Unfortunate, but that's what was necessary.

I did like that John managed to work in so much snazzy long fill. LEMON ZEST and REST EASY are welcome surprises in the middle of the puzzle. LEAD APRONS, RAMS HORN, and PIT AGAINST would have also added to the quality of my solving experience, except for the problems they caused in short fill.