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Matt: The idea for this puzzle came from my wife, Alisa. But I take all the blame for my initial set of theme answers, some of which did not amuse as much as I'd hoped. I know for 'countrymen' I had BONO AND THE EDGE, wryly clued as composers of the masterpiece "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark"... c'mon, that's crossword gold, don't you think, Jeff?

Jeff: (searching for the "crickets" emoji)

Matt: Ok then. Will and Joel suggested that I check whether Jeff would be willing to help out with a revision, and he generously agreed to pitch in.

Jeff: If "pitch in" means "make funny comments," and "funny" means "annoying," then my wife agrees wholeheartedly. I enjoyed going along on this quest, although we somehow still haven't gotten to White Castle yet.

Matt: With Jeff on board, together we got this on its feet. I suspect some solvers will hesitate over 23-Across, but I think it's important for the puzzle to embrace new vocabulary. I appreciate Will and Joel's help sharpening this to its final form, and hopefully, Jeff and I will be back with more down the road.

Jeff: Along with the WHITE CASTLE BURGERS I WAS PROMISED. Jeff is getting upset!

– puzzle by Matthew Sewell and Jeff Chen

I submitted this puzzle on September 3rd, 2016 and it was accepted on October 20th (a pretty quick turnaround in my experience). It's my second accepted puzzle at the Times, but the first one was pegged for a day that has a significantly larger backlog (per the most recent inventory I've seen).

My constructing program of choice is Crossword Compiler v9. I use grep/sed/awk (via Cygwin) for word list manipulation and searching. In addition to the word lists I acquired with Crossword Compiler, I also use Matt Ginsberg's list (www.otsys.com/clue) and the one curated by Jeff Chen (the latter also includes the excellent XWI word list). Thanks guys!

As you might guess from the nature of the gimmick, constructing this puzzle required extra front-end work. After laying out the themers and making a tentative grid skeleton, I created a mirror image of the grid with the themers entered backwards to facilitate construction of the portions that use reversed words. As I worked back-and-forth between the two versions of the puzzle, I used temporary black squares to create smaller regions for filling. I also had to do some manual trial-and-error since many of the vertical entries intersect both types of across answers. Likewise, differences in typical vowel and consonant layouts in each direction (forward and backward) posed an additional challenge.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have created a word list that excluded palindromes and words that make other words when reversed. Since I didn't, I had to manually avoid such words when filling the reversed areas (having reversed words that spelled something else in the forward direction felt inelegant). On the other hand, leaving those extra words in gave more options for the rest of the fill, which didn't need to be constrained in that manner.

For further thoughts on this crossword, please check out my constructor notes on the Wordplay blog.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

I wrote this as an, uh, coping mechanism after certain late 2016 events. It's so important for kids to have role models they can see themselves in, and celebrating women who reach the top of fields historically dominated by men is a huge part of that. Shoutout to all my friends who will be those women for tomorrow's girls interested in STEM.

The crucial concept of BREAKing THE GLASS CEILING was very much in the news around the election, and hearing and thinking about it got me to thinking about how to literalize it in a crossword grid (this phenomenon happens to everyone, right?). A bit of brainstorming got me to the idea you see today, though I was pretty sure it'd be impossible to execute. There aren't that many ???GLASSes out there, and surely it'd be tough to find a set which could be broken in the manner I needed. I got lucky and it just barely worked out — I didn't leave too many good glasses on the (proverbial) table!

Lack of glass flexibility also led to a lack of flexibility in choosing women to include. I was bummed that I could only think of one GLASS which could be broken by a C, because CURIE and CLINTON were both at the top of my list. I went with CURIE mostly for field diversity, since a lot of others that were fitting in ended up being in politics. I was also sad that I couldn't think of any that could be broken by W, because I wanted to use either Edith WHARTON or Oprah WINFREY. Ditto Aretha FRANKLIN for F; the only "option" I found for F was WA(F)TER GLASS, and neither WAFTER nor WATER GLASS itself is strong at all.

This lack of flexibility, unfortunately, left me with a set of all white women, which I wanted to avoid, if possible — a puzzle celebrating diversity of extraordinary achievement feels incomplete that way. But overall, I was just happy to get a workable set of well-known glasses and women (and, in particular, women well-known as the breakers of their glass ceilings).

Wrangling the grid also wasn't trivial. It was easy to arrange the three glasses at the top of the grid since those ceilings naturally exist. Including all the black squares necessary to construct the remaining three ceilings constrained the grid a lot, and in particular led to the choked-off, relatively open sections that the theme entries are mostly contained in. And those sections themselves were pretty constrained, as happens with crossing theme entries, leading to some trade-offs in the fill — most notably in the CURIE / WIN(C)E GLASS region. I hope never to see the entry I SEE A again (though shoutout to my mom, who claims to have played "Bohemian Rhapsody" a lot when she was pregnant with me — explains a lot).

As for the rest of the puzzle, I think the fill is pretty solid in other regions, with (hopefully) enough interesting non-thematic stuff to keep solvers entertained. Writing ? clues is my favorite part of constructing, so I'm glad Will didn't quite excise all of them (luckily for everyone else, he did excise most of them). I think I'll add "first person to put the word SEXILE in the NYT crossword" to my dating app profiles — appreciating that feels like it'd have a really high correlation with getting along with me. Read into that what you will.

– puzzle by Sam Trabucco

This puzzle was a huge learning experience for me. I worked on dozens of iterations of the theme answers, originally wanting to include two more cameras as long, crossing downs, but I couldn't ever get it to work right. At one point I desperately had HITABEATNIKONCE ("Utterance by a 1960s bully recounting when he punched Jack Kerouac?") spanning the middle. I gave up for months, and then one day wondered "What if... Sputnik was actually called Sputnik One? Wouldn't that be convenient?" and from there decided to scale back the ambition a bit and just get the thing finished.

I learned a lot about the publishing and revision process and got some great assistance from Joel and Will, who helped clean up a couple of corners that weren't that great in my original submission. I also learned that my word list has a lot of tedious re-ranking in store for it.

This is my first published puzzle, and I am very grateful for all of the help I've received during the entire process. I would especially like to thank Peter Gordon and Patrick Blindauer for their immeasurably helpful tutoring sessions.

– puzzle by Andy Hinz

Somewhere along the line, PRAIRIE OYS got into me head as a funny phrase that might work in a puzzle, but I had two concerns: first, would it be funny to editors and solvers (funny to me isn't funny to everyone)? And what was the glue — the revealer — that would justify omitting TER at the ends of familiar phrases? Soon enough, LETTER DROP (read as three words) became the obvious solution. (BTW, I had prairie oysters for lunch once, back in the early 1970s in Montana at an A&W that sold them as "Blazing Bull Nuggets." Wow! Tasty and spicy!) GIMME SHEL also struck me as funny, though the base phrase — the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" — is anything but.

I was committed to making a six-theme puzzle, knowing full well that the theme answers (if going across) would all be separated by a single row, and there would be extra pressure on the non-theme fill — with 25- and 27-Down cutting through three theme entries. So I moved things around until everything seemed to work pretty well. And a tip o' the hat to OSAKA for just existing — and anchoring the most challenging section of the grid.

Off-topic note: some of you know that, like several other constructors, my entire career has been as a full-time writer (television, plays, novels). If you're curious, please visit my website and have a look. Thanks!

– puzzle by Ned White

This puzzle owes its existence to my best mate, an Englishman from Nottingham. I get a big kick out of unnecessarily translating/annotating what he says in front of other people. ("Oh, guys, 'knackered' means 'super tired.' Isn't that weird? He's from England.")

I wrote this puzzle, along with the first 20 or so that I sent out for consideration my puzzle editors, by hand. It was during the editorial process that I learned that constructors tend to use software to help with fill. The exchange went something like:

Me: They want edits. I can't look at this puzzle anymore.

Puzzle mentor: Will's right - you need to iron out the fill.

Me: *gurgle*

Puzzle mentor: What word list are you using? Are you running CrossFire?

Me: Uh... yeah. Crossed fire. *googles CrossFire*

Puzzle mentor: Ross? Ross?

Me: *gurgle*

After a semi-concussive facepalm, I chose to look back on my countless pencil-and-paper hours as a rite of passage. And I especially dig that BREXIT found a home in the fill. It is my great privilege to be able to honor my best mate — an immigrant and a good man — in these fraught days.

– puzzle by Ross Trudeau

When I first made this puzzle (many months ago), I tried to get MENA out of the grid. Then I heard about a movie called "Mena" starring Tom Cruise and coming out in January 2017. So I left it in there and figured I'd ask Will and Joel to run the puzzle after the movie came out, and I'd be the hippest, most current MENA-cluer in all the land. But now it turns out that the movie isn't coming out until September. And also it won't even be called "Mena." It will instead be called "American Made." Score another one for "Actress Suvari." There's a lesson here somewhere about....something.

The original grid I submitted, unfortunately, had a dupe (EAR/DOGEAR), which I didn't notice until I saw that Will and Joel edited the final grid. The dupe's removal caused CAIRO to become the obscure-ish BOITO and ARI to become the prefix-y OVI. Talking to constructors and solvers, I've noticed that dupes and near dupes are an area where there's a good deal of aesthetic disagreement. I'm personally not so bothered by something like EAR/DOGEAR, where the two entries could be clued totally differently. But I know that sort of dupe can be fingers-on-a-chalkboard-level annoying to some solvers.

Looking back at the grid, I didn't intend for the long answers to all feel like they came from the same cultural universe, but they sort of do: one could imagine a DATA SCIENTIST playing MINECRAFT while watching TREVOR NOAH before going to see a JESSE EISENBERG movie. I prefer the opposite: that the long answers in themeless puzzles come from diverse walks of life. But I wound up liking this particular grid the best and how these answers all fit together. Hope you enjoyed the solve!

– puzzle by Kyle Mahowald

The idea for this puzzle languished for years. I could never decide if it was good, or uninspired. Then, if I looked at it for the umpteenth time, I couldn't decide which ideas were the best to use. I might like one choice for a symmetrical pair, but be lukewarm about the other one.

Finally, this fall, I emailed a friend here who I know does Sunday NYT puzzles, and asked her what she thought. She started bugging me to do this. And here you have the result.

I was amazed how fast it went from submission to publication. I mailed this in early December and it was accepted in mid-January.

Probably the genesis of this puzzle was somehow reading "Colorado" as "color ado." That would make PUEBLO COLORADO into something like [Big fuss over how to paint the Indian village]. I still like that, but was afraid it wouldn't pass muster since "Colorado" actually comes from the Spanish word for "color", and thus the meanings wouldn't change.

I would have preferred more answers that divided the words in unusual ways, like MARSHALL PLAN, which I liked [Spec for an interplanetary campus building?] or MADEIRA WINE, which in the end seemed kind of blah [Aged a glassful for Mr. Glass?]. A few others that got left out were RAMBLING ROSE [The price went up on some flashy NFL jewelry?], TAKE A PLACEBO ["Park yourself somewhere," to a onetime White House pet?] (I wasn't sure whether that qualified as an "in the language" phrase), and GOLF CADDIES [Headline for the obit of a country club scoundrel?]. If the current grid hadn't worked out well enough, I would have gone back and tried other options.

As for clues, mine remained intact for the most part. I think that Will's changes, overall, tended to make things a bit easier; for example, the clues for MALE and ORANGES—both sort of gimmes--were his. And I would never have come up with that clue for MOTH—totally not in my wheelhouse. All the theme clues were basically the ones I wrote except for UNFUNDED MANDATES. I think I'm reading Will's revised clue a bit differently than he intends, because it seems somewhat off to me. (Mine had been "Watching TV on Saturday nights with a cash-strapped beau?")

Oh, and one last thing for all of you who wonder about clue-grid duplications. Looking at the preview copy, I happened to notice that Will changed the ELMO clue to read "Kids' TV character …" when KIDDIE LIT was fairly nearby in the grid. His response:

"I think bloggers accord way too much importance to this sort of thing, which average solvers don't give a hoot about. My rule is: No answer word in its entirety can be part of a clue, and no clue in its entirety can be part of an answer. But in most cases, partial to partial duplication, as in this puzzle, doesn't matter."

Anyway, I hope you had fun with this. That's the whole point.

– puzzle by Lynn Lempel

BRENT: In the ten years I've been submitting to the NYT, the rejections always included constructive criticism. Comments like "the theme isn't robust enough" gave way to "we accepted a very similar puzzle weeks ago!" I felt like Thomas Edison experimenting with the light bulb. Acceptance did arrive in 2014, but this puzzle is seeing the light of day only now.

Let me back up a bit. In a used bookstore in 2006, I discovered Crossworld, Marc Romano's book about the Stamford puzzle tournament. It hooked me, as I'd been a word nerd my whole life—a linguistics major, archivist, paleographer, Spanish instructor, and memory coach. In 2006, I was living in Boston. The tourney was coming up, and I began counting the days. There, I made friends with stellar constructors and wound up giving Brendan Emmett Quigley a ride back to Beantown. His energy was infectious.

My initial efforts were pretty cringeworthy, but essential. I enjoyed some early successes, with my first puzzle appearing in 2008 in the New York Sun and in 2011 in a Penguin Anthology of literary-themed crosswords. Huge shoutouts to Peter Gordon and Ben Tausig, respectively, for their support.

The NYT remained the Holy Grail. I submitted solo and with Michael Blake, whom I'd met through Monday NYT puzzle queen Andrea Carla Michaels. We submitted this puzzle in February 2014 and got the "crossword — yes!" email from Will in April.

As I was solving an NYT puzzle in August by David Steinberg and Bernice Gordon, the answers looked eerily familiar. It was the same theme as ours! We wrote to Will, who apologized for the duplication and promised to run ours in a couple of years "so it fades from solvers' memories." He is a man of his word, and here we are today.

MICHAEL: We can hardly begrudge that Will accepted the Bernice/David collaboration with a similar theme and ran it immediately, as that carried a delightful new cruciverbal record: the biggest age difference between co-constructors. We're happy that our puzzle, accepted slightly earlier, still got published 3 years later.

– puzzle by Brent Sverdloff and Michael Blake

I've been into crosswords for a few years. Before that, I was into word squares. At some point, my father wrote a simple crossword making program that let you enter words. I decided to add some more features.

For my 12th birthday, I asked for a better word list (the original one was just the Unix word list). I got what I asked for. Meanwhile, the program kept improving until the only hard part (if you were okay with doing some trial and error) became making sure that there was a minimal amount of crosswordese and obscure words, which my older sister and father helped with. (They also wrote most of the clues.)

I tried to submit a puzzle a week for a while. This was the eighth puzzle I submitted. Originally, I came up with the idea to have words with R's and L's turning into W's. When I told my father what I was doing, he told me that that was essentially how Elmer Fudd talked.

I got a list of common words with r and l in them and spent many evenings working before I had my theme answers. I originally had only QUACKOFDAWN, WHISKEYMOVE, WOWEDMOUTHS, SWATMACHINE, and ELMERFUDD in the middle. However, a center 9 puts a huge constraint on the grid and, although I tried very hard, the fill was simply terrible.

At some point, it occurred to me that adding a symmetrical theme partner to Elmer Fudd might make the construction easier! My best 9-letter word was TWEEHOUSE. Unfortunately, my original self-constraint was to have all the theme answers change their spelling beyond a simple letter substitution. Still, I hoped the theme answers were humorous enough to make people overlook this flaw. I didn't like that the middle section was a cut-off 3x3 section, but I couldn't find a different way to do it.

As for the fill, Will and Joel were unhappy with it in a few places. They made some much-needed improvements until it became the puzzle that is here today.

I'm thrilled to be making my debut in the New York Times!

– puzzle by Daniel Larsen

JESSE: Patrick Blindauer and I initially created this puzzle thinking that it would be released around Thanksgiving. As a nod to my family, vegetarians who celebrate ThanksLiving (yes, a vegan Thanksgiving), I thought we could create a puzzle for vegan dinner options. How did that morph into a food snowman? I don't remember.

I've never made a puzzle before, but I love solving them. Working with Patrick, who is a puzzlemaster, was thrilling; it was simultaneously an exercise in boundless, abstract creativity (a food snowman?) and rigid boundaries (we need exactly two 13-letter and two 10-letter foods that are also parts of the body!). It's a discipline that requires multiple parts of the mind: 1/2 Jackson Pollock, 1/2 Alan Turing.

It was also a good opportunity to express my love of African geography (SENEGAL), my family's heritage (POLE) and mention my playwright friend Will (ENO). And it was primarily exciting to use clues that have never appeared before (e.g. Christian with some intelligent designs? for DIOR; What revolting people do for RIOT).

PATRICK: I had a blast working on this with Jesse; big thanks to Will for putting us in touch.

We brainstormed at least a dozen ideas before settling on this, a wacky concept that we originally pitched for a Monday. I was in the middle of my Kickstarter campaign for "Piece of Cake Crosswords," and Jesse was eagerly anticipating the birth of his child. I had recently become a father myself so we chatted about that, as well as our mutual love of theatre. He was eager to learn about all aspects of construction and was an excellent collaborator. It was fascinating to watch his agile mind at work.

Congrats on your debut, Jesse, and happy birthday to the New York Times crossword!

– puzzle by Jesse Eisenberg and Patrick Blindauer

This puzzle dates back to April 2015, just a few months before my high school graduation . . . and probably a few months before Daniel Larsen's elementary school graduation! Getting old sucks ;).

Anyway, I don't remember much about the construction process for this one. I think I started in the upper left with RACK OF LAMB/ELAINE CHAO/BUTTER DISH. BOHO CHIC was a nice bonus, and the crossings looked pretty decent, so I moved on to either the lower left or the lower right (can't remember which). I didn't have very many 10-letter seed entries at the time, so I was thrilled to discover HIDDEN MIKE and CHAIN EMAIL in Matt Ginsberg's crowdsourced word list!

The upper right came last, because I remember not being thrilled with PISH or POOLE but ultimately settling on the current fill. Grids with four long triple-stacks are always such a pain to work with.

Looking back on this puzzle, I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out! I especially like the bottom stack with CHAIN EMAIL/TEXT ALERTS/STEELY GAZE. As usual, Will and Joel added some nice touches to the clues, especially for MASH and CUBIC.

I hope you enjoy the puzzle! Time to get back to retirement planning now. . .

– puzzle by David Steinberg

Eye surgery patients are always telling me that "Uh-Oh...." is a phrase they don't want to hear during their operation, but it occurred to me one day that it might make a great vowel-change-theme/ title for a Sunday puzzle. This proved to be pretty challenging because to do it right I had to change every "uh" sound in each phrase. Common words like "a" and "the" and "one" and "up" suddenly became dealbreakers.

Once I scrounged up suitable theme entries the puzzle went smoothly — I submitted it about November 1st, it was accepted December 15, and published about two months later since the Sunday queue is apparently rather short.

Will and Joel said their favorite entries were STONED SILENCE and HOT DOG BONE. I also like JANKY and "OH, WAIT!". Jeff must like those also since he gave them high scores on his XWord Info Word List.

(psst, Jeff ... how long do I have to keep promoting the word list?)

(Jeff: *passing Bruce a wad of unmarked bills*)

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

ED: This is the fifth puzzle I and Paula Gamache have collaborated on successfully — and the second puzzle created for a special day of the year: this one, Presidents Day — and April Fools' Day. If you want to construct a puzzle with a "holiday" theme, better make sure it's never been done before.

Our concept was "presidential trivia" where we'd start each theme clue with "the only president that…" Paula checked years of Presidents Day puzzles. We had a shot.

Next task: gathering pairs of presidents according to numbers of letters in their last name. And then how many could be jammed symmetrically into a 15X puzzle grid. We were able to squeeze eight presidential names — or four pairs — into that one puzzle with the fill holding it all together.

The theme clues had to be biographical nuggets, unique and interesting, so that the solver didn't know them right away. Not like "the only president with a 9' x 4' bathtub in the White House." TAFT. (Too easy.) Or "the only president to lose his wife and his mother on the same day." T. ROOSEVELT (Too grim.) Each, we felt, should be an interesting little fact, that the solver might say, "Gee, I didn't know that."

Also, just because you have a viable theme for your puzzle, don't take the fill for granted. The fill answers have to be a good complement to the rest of the puzzle and not be boring or trite.

Our puzzle didn't get accepted the first submission. We ended up submitting more presidential clues (back to the history books) and a whole new fill before it was accepted.

Unless you're dead, never say die.

– puzzle by Ed Stein and Paula Gamache

Don't get what's going on? Check out 10, 20, 30, 40 in the grid.

Still don't get it? Look at the entries at 10-Down, 20-Across, 30-Down, and 40-Across.

(Don't you hate-love it when someone (HOOD)WINKS you with (TRICK)QUESTIONS?)

I wish I could have rounded these out with two final answers more tricksy than (PUSH)PIN and (PET)ROCK — that was the Holy Grail. Ah well.

This idea came to me back in 2014, when Will asked me to write tricky Puzzle #5 for the ACPT … with only three weeks to go. In a state of sheer panic, I brainstormed day and night for one of those weeks, and this particular concept was only half-baked by then. For the life of me, I couldn't get it to work quite right. Thankfully, Will chose a different idea.

I forgot about it for a year, but it popped back in my head when I heard the phrase TEN FOUR. Wouldn't it be cool to have phrases involving TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT, TEN — and combine TEN and FOUR!

It nearly killed me to put the grid together, what with having to place themers at 2-D, 4-D, 6-D, 8-D, and 10-D — in such a way to never have a 2-A, 4-A, 6-A, 8-A, or 10-A, which would have confused the issue — and I was pretty happy with it, especially since the entire south of the puzzle was wide-open; ripe for great themeless fill. I had a lot of fun adding in colorful material in that first draft.

It's always a mixed blessing to hear that Will likes a concept but wants a revision. In this case, he liked the general idea ... but didn't like that TEN and FOUR were combined as themers … and didn't like that there was no theme in the south of the puzzle.

Shows you what I know!

– puzzle by Jeff Chen

Don't know if you can tell, but this puzzle had to be scaled back slightly from its original, larger ambitions. After some futzing around, LASTSTRAW was slotted for 1A but due to various formal and aesthetic constraints, like my non-acceptance of multiple STILTONS where TILTSAT is, and 31D/32D crossing three very long entries in a relatively open region, there was no way I could get the other corner to work without breaking it up. But I liked the top half too much to completely put the puzzle away for good.

Clues that stayed that have personal resonance: 3D (love that description) and 19A (I studied Xhosa for a semester and Zulu for a year and a half; can't really speak either to save my life).

As for 1D, it's the final Q that makes this entry new to a Times puzzle, and semantically, it's the most interesting letter, what with its dual meaning of "queer"/"questioning." Although the Q now seems to be standardized, its widespread adoption is still relatively recent, and has its remaining detractors, despite reclamation in inclusive circles of the word "queer." The National LGBTQ Task Force was renamed in 2014, I learned, and GLAAD only updated its media handbook to recommend its usage in October 2016. Some advocates, out of a desire to be more specific, have adopted my favorite version of the acronym: QUILTBAG.

A chance, anyhow, to meditate on a wider significance of single letters beyond the boxes of a crossword puzzle.

– puzzle by Andrew Zhou

SWIPE LEFT was the launching point for this puzzle. I heard it in an anti-smoking TV ad featuring the ditty "Left Swipe Dat" at the end of 2015 and wondered if it might make a fresh seed for a themeless. After asking around it became apparent that almost everyone but me recognized the phrase — mainly because I don't own a cell phone (much to the head-shaking disbelief of my family and friends).

Decided to stack SWIPE LEFT atop two other 9's by placing three vertical blocks, then placed three horizontal blocks midway down the left side and blocked diagonally up and to the right from there. Added a diagonal string to help divide the two halves. But then had to leave gaps below/above the three vertical blocks to avoid 2-letter spans. Upped the ante by sliding a pair of the blocks over to open the flow into the upper left and lower right (see picture).

The final fill felt smooth and even — not a lot of flash, but solid. Liked TOM RIPLEY, CRAISINS (yum — surprised it hadn't appeared before), CAPE COD BAY crossing BBQ RIBS (double yum!) and AIRSOFT, and even BIOBURDEN (it resonates with me as a dentist with the VA). Enjoyed the shiny clues Will and Joel came up with for CAMPS and SAHL.

And I'm glad Will kept my "cheese and rice!" clue for NERTS. The phrase brings to my mind a picture of Inspector Cramer (hmm...15 letters — add that to your list, Jeff) sitting across from Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in Nero's office, while chomping on his cigar and growling that minced oath in frustration!

– puzzle by Mark Diehl