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Jem Burch makes his second appearance in the New York Times Crossword.
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By Deb Amlen
FRIDAY PUZZLE — Let’s welcome back Jem Burch, who made his debut in the New York Times Crossword in April, when he was a senior in high school. Now, he is a first-year student at Yale, studying linguistics and (probably) Slavic languages. It’s nice to see that he has continued making puzzles.
I’m not the kind of person who puts pangram puzzles on a pedestal, because it often seems as if the constructor is overcompensating for uninspired fill by forcing high-scoring Scrabble letters into the grid. Or maybe the fill is uninspiring because those letters were forced into the grid. In any case, constructors shouldn’t make those puzzles just because they can. The buzz of noticing the pangram wears off a lot faster than the buzz of a grid packed with sizzling entries.
In Mr. Burch’s case, even though his puzzle is not a pangram — the letter X is missing — he has managed to include some of those Scrabbly, uncommon letters and keep the party going. I was particularly enamored of his central stack — PAJAMA PARTY, BASE JUMPER and ZERO GRAVITY — because it made me visualize a group of athletes jumping out of a plane in their pajamas. All three entries are debuts, too, which I think is worth putting on a pedestal.
10A. I knew about the terra-cotta army that was built inside a tomb to accompany the first Chinese emperor to his eternal rest, but I could not remember the emperor’s name or that of his dynasty. It was the QIN dynasty, named for the emperor Qin Shihuang.
19A. ATEN, the Egyptian sun deity, is not an answer that would leap to the forefront of your average solver’s consciousness, but it has appeared in the New York Times Crossword puzzle 285 times before this puzzle.
26A. Because I was hungry when I wrote this, I thought about chicken eggs for the clue “Egg container?,” and my answer was “cup,” as in a cup that would hold a soft-boiled egg. I couldn’t think of a word for the container eggs come in at the supermarket, and I doubted that it would be three letters anyway. It turns out that the container we are supposed to be thinking of is the SAC.
34A. “Space force?” is not what you think it is, because the F in “force” is lowercase, and because there is that question mark at the end. The clue refers to a force that may be experienced in space, and the answer is ZERO GRAVITY.
5D. Clever one: “Spread makeup: Abbr.” is not about smearing foundation or blush on your face, but the makeup of a spread in sports. The answer is PTS, or “points.”
12D. “Chopped liver, so to speak” is from the question “So what am I, chopped liver?” A person who asks this question is being made to feel like a NOBODY.
In this 1998 column, William Safire channeled his Yiddishkeit to explore the derivation of the phrase. In it, the lexicologist Sol Steinmetz speculated: “Chopped liver is merely an appetizer or side dish, not as important as chicken soup or gefilte fish. Hence it was often used among Jewish comedians in the Borscht Belt as a humorous metaphor for something or someone insignificant.”
My first published themeless puzzle! Hurray!
I made this puzzle last January, right after I received news that a previous themeless one I’d submitted to The Times — which I’d felt pretty good about — had been rejected. That crossword had also featured a central staircase, so when I started work on this puzzle, I decided to stick with the basic design. This time, though, the competitive Scrabble player in me insisted that I squeeze more high-point letters into the central stack.
The staircase seemed as if it weren’t going to work at first, largely because of the weird letter combinations it forced on the right-hand side. I nearly abandoned it after testing several hundred permutations of black squares, but then I realized that there was a phrase that could work at 28A, and the grid was saved! Filling the rest wasn’t too difficult, although I did have to rework the bottom part of the puzzle to avoid some gluey entries.
If I were to remake this puzzle today, I’d probably change the upper left. I don’t love the duplication at 2D and 11D, and 19A seems too esoteric. (Although I did enjoy learning about this deity’s role in the Amarna Period in an art history class.) And I’m sad that I wasn’t able to squeeze in an X, which would have made this puzzle a pangram.
Thanks to my dad for happily test-solving so many of my crosswords, Wyna Liu for helping me clean up the bottom part of this puzzle and the editing team for strengthening my clues. I love what the team came up with for 34A and 5D, but I’m pleased that the editors kept my clues for 39A and 45A. I was rather proud of those.
The New York Times Crossword has an open submission system, and you can submit your puzzles online.

For tips on how to get started, read our series, “How to Make a Crossword Puzzle.”
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Warning: There be spoilers ahead, but subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.
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