Ethan Cooper author page

I've had hundreds of BLTs in my life, but I've never thought about the order of ingredients. Does it matter? Seems like it should — it'd be weird if someone described our nation's flag as the good old white, blue, and red, yeah?

Only one way to find out! Now I have to figure out which deli will give me the least side-eye when I order six different BLTs, using the six different permutations.

Great theme phrases. I LOVED TO BITS every single one of them, LOWER BACK TATTOO a great find for LBT. It's not as colorful a term as the more well-known one, but sadly, T S (warning, hilarious but NSFW!) doesn't fit in a B L T permutation theme.

I also appreciated how careful Ethan was to avoid duplicating any one word. It'd be all too easy to use TO or TOO twice. That attention to detail made the theme set stand out even more.

Five themers aren't easy to work into a 15x15 grid, especially when they're fairly long. If this had been a meatier theme, one that could have run on a Wednesday, I'd have given it more passes. For a newb, though, seeing ALBEE VERDI ULTA KVELL EPOCHAL might elicit a sensation of THIS LOOKS BAD.

All of these words are fair game, entries that educated NYT solvers ought to be (at least vaguely) familiar with. As a whole, though, they might take away from a victorious finish. As a constructor, you want to deliver a shout of "I DID IT!" instead of an "uh … I think I might have kinda sorta maybe finished?"

Black squares divided the grid into two halves, upper and lower. I'd have asked Ethan to rework, creating openings somewhere along that black diagonal. It'd be one thing if you could only have good grid flow or clean fill, but I'm positive that with this theme set, you can have both.

I'd have loved some rationale behind permuting the B L T letters — there are dozens of words indicating anagramming, so I'm sure there's some food-anagramming revealer out there — but overall, the snazziness of the five themers made up for that omission.

Today's puzzle takes us back to school, with TEXTBOOK, ROOM and BOARD being types of COLLEGE EXPENSES. Of course, no BEER is drunk by undergrads under the age of 21. Ahem.

Nice job disguising the theme. TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE does relate directly to textbooks, but the others made the theme opaque until the revealer. I enjoy when I have to work a little to figure out what's going on. I did find it a bit odd that TEXTBOOK wasn't pluralized, but it's pretty difficult to find a snappy phrase involving TEXTBOOKS. Plus, I didn't crack much of any TEXTBOOK during undergrad, much less TEXTBOOKS, so perhaps it's fine.

Good thing neither my mom nor dad do crosswords, or read these comments.

Ethan does something unusual today, drawing upon short slots for snappy entries. Three and four-letter entries (fives to a lesser extent) are so prevalent that it's tough to do anything interesting with them. UM, NO is such a great colloquial entry. And MUSTI looks so bizarre in the grid, but MUST I? makes for a snazzy phrase. Well done.

I had an initial hitch when I started the puzzle, hitting the crossing ADEN and SNELL right off the bat, so I was worried about the quality of the fill. Turns out the rest of the puzzle was well executed. ADEN and SNELL aren't "bad" entries per se, but I would much prefer to avoid them as part of my solve, especially when they pop up right off the bat. It might be different if ADEN had more geographic or historical significance, or if I were a fisherman.

Finally, it was useful to read Will's comments about Ethan's strong cluing. Gives me more impetus to redouble my efforts to improve my clue-writing skills. Sometimes it's too easy to get lazy on clue-writing, assuming that Will's going to change them anyway.