A Message to Our Loyal Fans

FRIDAY PUZZLE High on my list of Things I Would Rather Not Have To Do is give people bad news, but in all likelihood, you’ve already solved the puzzle and gotten the sad message.

And since Peter Gordon created the first puzzle that Will Shortz edited here, it’s only fitting that he create if not the last one, then the penultimate one. There’s some wonderful symmetry there.

Resist the urge to panic. There will be times when you’ll miss those black and white squares and the satisfaction of filling in an entire grid. But you’ll adapt.

Don’t feel like you have to stop solving. There are plenty of perfectly good crosswords out there. They’re not the New York Times Crossword, but like I said, you’ll adjust.

Every dog has his day, and we’ve certainly had ours. Mr. Shortz has done a stellar job as editor but, in the end, it just wasn’t enough. The media industry has taken some huge hits, and now we’re taking ours. I take comfort in knowing that he will be happy to run his Westchester Table Tennis Center full-time and in peace. Maybe “The Simpsons” will do another crossword episode.

Having to dismantle this operation will be no easy task. There are emus to re-home, tears to wipe off the test solvers’ faces, shoulders to provide to the Times constructors who have nowhere else to go. And what of Joel Fagliano? Where will he go? It breaks my heart.

And, of course, you know what else this means. This means that I’m out of work. Anyone need a really hilarious columnist?

Regretfully, we bid you all adieu*. Let’s see what Mr. Gordon has to say about this turn of events:

Constructor’s Notes

Having gone 13 years without writing a New York Times crossword, I was quite surprised when Will Shortz contacted me and asked me to write one. After he revealed the reason, I was shocked. Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, but I think the newspaper executives who made this decision are being shortsighted and that the paper will lose many subscribers. Puzzle editors love symmetry, and Will said that since I wrote the first crossword under his editorship, he thought having me write the last one as well would make for a nice balance. You can imagine my eagerness at accepting the challenge.

After just a few minutes, I came up with the idea of breaking the news to the readers in the puzzle itself. Playing around with the phrasing for several hours, though, led to nothing that worked with symmetric lengths other than DUE TO BUDGET CUTS, THE NEW YORK TIMES, CROSSWORD PUZZLE, with no final line. Realizing that maybe I could write the penultimate puzzle, instead of the last one, was the key. If Will had something really special to run the final day, then my puzzle would work perfectly for the second-to-last day. Luckily, Will said he had just gotten a really special puzzle, so I played around some more and came up with WILL END TOMORROW.

Figuring that this puzzle would be scrutinized closely, I wanted to keep the word count as low as a themeless, with no more than 72 words. Once I placed the four 15s in the grid I looked for problem areas. Only the ZZ of PUZZLE looked problematic, but that area ended up working just fine. Looking back at it now, months after I wrote it, my least favorite answers are EEN, RRS, and USS. Since it’s a 72-worder with 60 theme squares, I can live with a few three-letter clunkers.

During the months between when I wrote this and when it was published, I was sworn to secrecy. According to some insiders who have seen tomorrow’s puzzle and given some hints about it in some private puzzle-based chatrooms, it has a quintuple stack of 15s, is a double pangram, has 52 words with just 17 black squares, and all the answers are common with no partials, foreign words, or Roman numerals. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if you can trust everything you read on the Internet.

* Please note the date of publication for this puzzle. You didn’t really think we would do that to you, did you? Read the first letter in each of my paragraphs, and the first letter in each of Mr. Gordon’s sentences to decipher the real meta message.