Jonathan M. Kaye author page

Building a puzzle where all the wordplay fun occurs, not in the grid but in the theme clues, can be quite a gamble — appropriate that Jonathan riffed on Kenny Rogers' The Gambler! My karaoke skills are close to my pop music knowledge IQ, so I didn't figure out what was going on at first. I had a nice click afterward, though, when the dealin' was done.

The reason that most editors only sparingly take clue-based themes? Expectations. Solvers have been accustomed to connecting the dots between four or five long entries for so many decades that to do that through their clues can feel disappointing. Thankfully, I eventually recognized that this puzzle riffed on "The Gambler" and got a smile from it. It could be mystifying if you've never heard the song, though.

Jonathan did a nice job in selecting gridworthy theme phrases. I'd gladly feature WRESTLING MATCH and ELECTION SEASON in another crossword; LOWBALL OFFER to a lower degree.

ORIGAMI CLASS felt arbitrary — I love origami, but I haven't seen many classes offered — so I'd have folded on that one.

With four theme answers, you should be able to work in a ton of long bonuses, and Jonathan didn't disappoint with BLOWHARD/BOURDAIN, OFF-COLOR/WEAKNESS. I had a lot of trouble finishing the lower-left corner, though, and A FEW ZS made me remember feedback I've gotten over the years, that sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. A corner that's a bit choked off might have benefitted from easier material; entries that might RILE UP some solvers less.

I like more tricksiness to my Thursday solves, but I can see how Kenny Rogers fans would love this one.

Jonathan does so many interesting twists with letter shapes. I loved his first one, playing on letters with their TOP OFF. Then Js for HOOKs, and Qs representing car boots = playful exploration of capital letters.

And talk about twists — today, we get a DOUBLE HELIX = Xs, and Hs linked together to form the twisty shape. I didn't totally buy the image. Why two Hs and then one X? Felt like alternating H X H X H X might have painted a more DNA-looking picture. Or even just Xs, but working with 15 Xs would be insane.

Fleshing out the theme was CHROMOSOME, an apt themer for the DNA concept.

HUMAN BEINGS … sort of. But since all living creatures have DNA, why choose HUMAN BEINGS as a themer? Species-ism, I say!

BIOCHEMICAL wasn't as specific, either. DNA is just one of millions of BIOCHEMICAL topics.

I would have loved something related to ROSALIND FRANKLIN, WATSON, CRICK, NUCLEIC ACIDS, BASE PAIRS, etc. DNA is structured so elegantly, and there are so many stories wrapped up in it. Would have been nice to get themers that were more dead-nuts on.

Pretty good gridwork, considering how many Xs Jonathan had to work around. (Maybe that's the reason he upped the ratio of Hs/Xs to 2/1!) I don't love when an early-week puzzle gets up to five+ gluey bits (EL AL, BSA, DREI, IDEE, STS, etc.). But none of them are awful. So in the service of working around all those Xs, it's at an okay, if not desirable, level.

DNA has been mined for many a crossword over the years — it's a fascinating subject filled with all sorts of lore. I mostly enjoyed this new take on it.

What a bear of a construction — all those Js + the constraint of every black square chunk having to be J-shaped = BLAAARGH! Thankfully, the engineer in me loved how well the construction process lent itself to a methodical approach:

• The J blocks on the top and bottom could be shifted side to side into one of two acceptable positions, for a total of four combinations. But one combination resulted a two-letter word, so I eliminated it. OPTIONS: 3.
• Two J blocks in the center could be flipped 180 degrees. OPTIONS: 2.
• The first and last themers could be swapped. OPTIONS: 2.
• The middle themers could be swapped. OPTIONS: 2.

From there, it was a matter of systematically testing each of 3x2x2x2 =24 possibilities. There was something so satisfying about keeping a master list of 24 possibilities, putting checks or Xs by each one as I drilled down to find potential problems with each.

(Man, I'm weird.)

I actually got very far — a full grid — down one path, and I thought it could be fine. But after letting it breathe, I took another look and felt like it just wasn't NYT-worthy — too many ugly bits, and not enough colorful fill.

It took some convincing to really try the layout that you see in the finished puzzle, because I was sure that isolating the first and last Js in the NW / SE corners would be the way to go. (Shows what I know!) With this final layout, I happened to get lucky by figuring out a good option rather quickly in the NE, filling acceptably around that J.

The SW … I constructed something I liked, but I did wonder if Will was going to like it as much. It contained HAPTIC, I FROZE, and AB TONER, all entries I dug. Will, though, wondered if any were common enough to be acceptable, and all three in that one region felt like too much. Even though I did a lot of HAPTICs in engineering and my dad has a (dusty) AB TONER and I love I FROZE as a stage fright line, I could see where he was coming from.

Redoing that little corner was rough. I churned out four options, each with some trade-offs, before Jon had the clever idea of paring the grid back even further than I had considered. I wasn't a fan of AS A SET — seemed like a partial to me — but I agreed that it was better than using something like OENONE, the woman Paris left for Helen.

Another neat letter-based idea from Jon, this one using DIVIDED BY to represent BY split across the middle — the capital B forms a pair of capital Ds stacked atop each other, and the capital Y forms a capital V sitting on a capital I. I had seen both tricks individually, but to combine them into one — with such a perfect revealer! — was really cool. WITT (wish I had thought of that).

I also loved the fact that the BY in DIVIDED BY was split like the others. Very neat to have the special split happening right within the theme revealer. Nicely consistent.

I got a little confused during my solve, though. The fact that there were other Bs and Ys floating around the grid made me wonder why I shouldn't be splitting up those letters too. It was even more confusing when there was an extra B right in a theme entry: the first B in BOOBY TRAPS. But, I decided that it was totally fair, since there is a clear logic of "only divide the letters B and Y when they're combined into the BY bigram."

It would have been so awesome to not have that confusion. I've constructed enough puzzles with letter restrictions to realize how much the fill can suffer, especially when you choose not to use common letters, but Bs and Ys are a different story. It's a tough call — although BOOBY TRAPS has that confusion-generating first B, it's such a great answer.

Glad that Jon, Will, and Joel decided to eliminate PRESBYOPIC — even having worked in ophthalmic pharma development, that one only barely registered! I would have liked another example where BY weren't just the word BY, though, something like RUBY RED SLIPPERS or TRIPOLI, LIBYA. Alternately, having all BYs be separate words would have given nice consistency.

Excellent gridwork; just a few minor bits in IRED (odd form of IRE), RES, and GSA (General Services Administration). The theme constraint makes filling around those BY regions challenging, so the overall smoothness is even more appreciated than usual. And nice bonuses of CALIPHS, STONE AGE, MAESTRO, EAT DIRT, too. To do all that with so many entries affected by the theme is a fantastic result.

Another really clever idea from Jon. I felt like there was a little potential left on the table, but I still greatly enjoyed the solve — and perhaps even more so, the post-solve analysis. That's a great sign.

This puzzle got the BOOT! Neat to see the Os in various cars become Qs, that little diagonal line looking like an actual boot — if you write the Q in uppercase, that is. I imagine the people scribbling a lowercase "q" didn't have much of an idea of what was going on.

Very cool visual. I especially liked the NAVIGATQR, as the Q was in the back tire spot, where you usually see boots. In contrast, it felt odd to see the wheel and boot in the middle of EXPLQRER and CHERQKEE. Still, I appreciated Jonathan's effort of choosing four well-known car models from four well-known car makers, and tightening his choices by only using models with exactly one O.

Fun to get PRIVATE EYES, TRIFECTA, and DRONE BEE, too; all nice bonuses. I wasn't as much a fan of PRACTICABLE. It is a real word, but that 11-letter space is such prime real estate. It's a bit like a prized piece of land going into a bidding war … and the winner turns it into a parking lot.

As with his debut puzzle, there were a few rough spots in the fill. It's perfectly passable to have a bit of minor N DAK, TOITY (can only be clued one way), DIAS, since most grids — especially ones with so many hard-to-work-with Qs — will require some compromises. It's less elegant to have ASLANT and ASWIRL crossing each other, which makes them stand out even more. (They are real words, but especially ASWIRL has an old-timey feel that personally makes me wince.)

All in all, I would have preferred more car-like visuals, as with a previous Gorski puzzle. I did like the fact that each themer getting the boot was an actual car, but I would have loved the puzzle if each themer had exactly two Os, one at the second slot and one at the penultimate, with the latter getting the boot.

★ Debut, and what a brilliant idea! The mysterious clues kept me in the dark for the longest time, even after I had uncovered TOP / OFF. And it continued even after I pieced together DEFECTIVE BULLET — how could "B0B" possibly describe that? What a fantastic a-ha moment, realizing that you have to lop off the top of "B0B," getting DUD as a result. Here are the others, with a helpful graphic from Jonathan:

• TB8L gives IDOL
• 8V8TB forms OVOID
• My favorite, VMB making VIVID. Cutting off the top of M results in an I V I — so cool!

I'm typically not a fan of "definitional" puzzles, where the grid answers sound like they're taken from Merriam Webster. But it worked so well today, since I really needed those definitions in order to finally get my moment of clarity. SUPERSTAR would have been a fine, in-the-language answer for IDOL (and EGG SHAPED for OVOID), but I kind of like how SHAPED LIKE AN EGG feels like it's prodding me to keep on thinking. I needed that nudge!

There's a bit of APER AMOR ATALE crossword glue in the grid, but it's pretty minor stuff, especially considering all four themers are very long. It's not easy to pull off a perfectly clean grid using four grid-spanners, but Jonathan did well. Check out the west and east sections, which are usually the hardest (since you have to work with the beginnings or ends of two long themers) — the east is the roughest spot with TARDE (tough foreign word), ATALE (partial), RETAG (sort of arbitrary RE- word), but the west is so nice. Not a dab of crossword glue in there.

I might have liked a little more bonus fill, but that's a minor complaint when the theme idea is this good. SILLY ME is awfully nice, anyway, and I do like me some Harry Potter referenced in SEEKERS.

All in all, a fantastic debut. So, so, so enjoyable; a very memorable theme.