New York Times, Monday, September 30, 2013

I made this puzzle after watching a couple episodes of "The Americans." Really solid show, BTW. In the last episode, Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" is prominently featured on the soundtrack. That phrase is practically begging for some Thursday theme treatment.

I guess you could say this puzzle contains [puts on sunglasses] tOP Secret information. YYYYYEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! An inside job, perhaps.

Anyhoo, I had two goals for this puzzle: 1) avoid stray O-P-S letter strings and 2) split OP/S across two words in all theme answers. So ... mission accomplished?

Six theme entries plus an "explainer," at 58A, all wrapped in a simple, elegant construction, make for a handsome Monday puzzle. COHIBA at 43A was new to me, but the crossings are good, and everything else seems easy enough. BTW, the Monday through Thursday puzzles this week were used at the 17th annual Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament last Friday, held for charity in my hometown of Pleasantville, NY.

The fastest solver was Glen Ryan, Taftville, CT — perfect in 2 mins. 41 secs. Dan Feyer, a tournament judge (and reigning American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champ), finished this puzzle in 2:05. He beat constructor Ian Livengood, another judge, by about half a minute...on Ian's own puzzle!

Nice Monday puzzle to ease us into the week. This one will be Ian's 11th Monday puzzle in the Shortz era, putting him in rare air. Making a super-smooth but interesting Monday puzzle is one of the more difficult tasks in construction, and Ian yet again proves himself up to the task.

The consistency is much appreciated in his theme choices, all six (SIX! for goodness sake) themers split in the OP/S fashion, none with the O/PS break. Not that there are many phrases which exhibit the latter, but P.G. Wodehouse and his LEAVE IT TO PSMITH must feel left out today.

The layout is unusual, as it often must be with such staggering theme density. Given such stringent requirements, the rest of a puzzle's fill often suffers, but Ian laughs in the face of adversity, tossing in MEAT STEW, CAB STAND, TYPE SET, and MAD MEN. I paused a bit because the themers don't stand out quite as much as they could (I've highlighted them; notice how MEAT STEW and CAB STAND are longer than COP SHOW and look like they ought to be themers) but that's a reasonable trade-off given how much goodness is contained within the grid.

COHIBA...it's often nice to see a brand new word making its debut in the NYT, but this one gave me pause. Yes, it's well known (according to the Google at least), but it feels out of place to me for a Monday NYT. The crossings are all fair, so no problems there, but IMO it has the vibe of being awfully hard for a novice solver.

Will and I have slightly different philosophies on what a Monday puzzle should be. I might have kicked it back to Ian, asking him to lose COHIBA, AGUE, SANA (which I think is more commonly spelled SANA'A), and/or DSO so I could convince more non-crossword people that the NYT xw is doable and that they ought to give it a try (although I'm not sure it would be possible to get rid of those entries, given how theme-dense this puzzle is). But I'm sure there will be many solvers today who applaud Will's decision as one giving them a new word or two for their crossword vocabulary. It must be tough to make dozens of these decisions every day.

Time to kick back with a COHIBA. Ah, relaxing. Okay, I approve of COHIBA.

Final note: I race the great Dan Feyer on my own puzzles, and haven't beaten him yet (although now I can come within a factor of two). I've tried studying MY OWN ANSWER GRID just before solving...and he still beats me. It's like watching a magic trick.