Will Treece author page

★ Sometimes all it takes is a single entry or clue for a themeless to sing to you. For Jim Horne, it was a clue whose cleverness I missed the first time around. "One" is its final number? I had already filled in most of A CHORUS LINE, so I didn't stop to think about it. I'm so glad Jim pointed out what a great misdirect this is! If you didn't notice the quotation marks, the clue would feel deviously mathematical.

For me, it was STAGFLATION. The MBA in me gets tickled by econ terms, especially one so colorful. (It describes when economic growth is stagnant, but inflation is high — a double whammy.) You'd think that economists are boring, but I have a lot of econ friends who are hilarious.

"Hilarious" in quotes might be a better description.

I had two hesitations before giving this one the POW!:

1. IOR is a particularly gloopy gluey bit, less in the camp of "minor crossword blip" and more "three random letters stuck together." Inelegant to say the least; glad Will Treece recognized this.
2. The other was more subjective — STAGFLATION is a downer already, then you add in ANEMIAS, UNFRIEND, BRUTALITIES, and TAKE REVENGE? Make love, Will, not war!

However, I greatly enjoyed the novelty of the grid design, neither a standard "triple-stacks in each of the four corners" nor a "wide-open middle," but something neatly in between. The smart black square placement allowed for smooth solving flow, while also making it constructor-friendly to fill. I like the trade-offs.

I had been vacillating, POW! or scow, and the conversation Jim and I had pushed it over the edge. It's not easy to cater to a hugely varied solving population.

My friends Megan and Dan are going to groan — they've been working on constructing a Sunday-size puzzle with this theme for years. And it features MATTHEW PERRY! That one was my favorite, since both MATTHEW PERRYs are uber-famous. Well, the "Friends" actor hasn't done much recently, but he punched his ticket with the Chandler Bing role.

ANNE HATHAWAY was interesting, as I didn't know anything about Shakespeare's wife. Fun to learn about the speculation regarding her helping Shakespeare write, or even fully writing for him.

STEVE MCQUEEN was the same way — I had no idea who the "12 Years a Slave" director was. Neat to learn that he was the first black director to win a Best Picture Academy Award.

GRAHAM GREENE … I'm sure there are a lot of "Dances with Wolves" and "The Thin Man" fans out there, but I'm neither. Made it tough to appreciate this one. It's fair game; just personal ignorance disrupting my ability to enjoy this one.

Will does a great job with his big NW corner — 5x5 regions are usually tough to fill cleanly and with sizzle. HIJABS is a colorful entry, with the J worked so smoothly into JOUST. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a major ‘60s group, so that doesn't bother me at all.

I like how Will shoots for the moon in incorporating so much long fill in the lower left and upper right. ON THIN ICE and AIR INTAKE are themeless-quality answers, and EUPHRATES sings too. This arrangement forces some compromises like ATA and ECKO (is that brand of clothing popular?), but when these minor offenders allow great material, I'm all for it.

I would have liked a cleaner puzzle overall though. That ENDO / AS NO / RTE over ATH / SSS section especially made the puzzle feel glue-heavy.

I won't give away the other famous names Megan and Dan came up with (in addition to the ones Will uncovered!) in case they decide to try for another venue, but it was neat to see how many they discovered. This is a rare case where I feel like this concept might have been even better as a Sunday-size puzzle.

★ A really nice debut puzzle. Most people would stick to four — or even three — theme answers in their first go-around. But Will goes big with six! Laudable.

And what an amusing theme. I laughed, picturing a junior editor starting out on the job, overzealously throwing around red ink. For all my grumbling about pop songs and hip bands, none of which I know, here's a case where I really welcomed them! It's doubtful that even the most clueless editor would correct THE BEATLES, but I can easily see the person smugly changing LINKIN PARK and deeming the LUDACRIS spelling as truly LUDICROUS.

Smart layout, intersecting two pairs of themers and using black squares to create a lot of space and separation between themers. Doesn't allow for a lot of jazzy fill, but that's okay for me, since the themers were mostly vivid.

A rough patch here and there, but that's to be expected in a six-themer, especially where there's a lot of overlap. And really, only the CWT / TO ERR / EDUC north area stuck out to me. No surprise that it came in one of the two areas with most themer overlap — where four white spaces sit between THE BEETLES and LUDICROUS. I might have tried moving the black square at the end of ITERATE up to the R of RODEO in order to reduce the overlap. Hard to say if that would have caused problems in the center of the puzzle, though.

My wife tells this joke she thinks is hilarious:

Q: What did the fish say when it swam into a wall?
A: Dam.

So DAMS, clued as [Challenges for salmon] made me smile.

And fun repurposing of "Grape Nuts" cereal, a WINO being a [Grape nut?] of sorts. I also enjoyed the homonym play on [Dehli order?] for SARI, a clothing item common in India.

ADDED NOTE: there was a last-minute change to the grid, and apparently the old version was printed by mistake in the NYT hardcopy. It affects only the western section of the puzzle (TOO BAD became TAIWAN, etc.). SARI for the confusion.