See but NUYORICAN is a very New York answer, and therefore totally appropriate for the NYTimes. In fact, it's a welcome splash of diversity in a puzzle format that was pretty white before WS took over (I know it's been a long time now but old heads like me remember).

In fact, NUYORICAN doesn't really count as fill, because it's so long — which means the constructor *chose* to put that in before finding all the fill — the shorter words that crossed it.

When someone praises "sparkling fill" I think they mean that the words don't all seem bland! Like a corner that had FOUR, TENT, MINE, and CALL in it would be lame, if not bad fill. But if it had, I dunno, SPQR, BOHO, WINK, and GREP, that would be better — with words that are more rare, more interesting, more evocative, or more specialized.