New York Times, Wednesday, January 4, 2023

We're so excited to each make our debut and share this otherworldly puzzle! We developed the idea after Laura attended a very strange and intense moon ceremony in Central Park and excitedly shared all the heavenly details with Tom. That week, primed by the talk of space, the phrase CELESTIAL BODIES came into Tom's head and it felt like the perfect 15-letter fill to build our grid around.

The hardest part was the cascading ASTEROID — we had to try so many configurations to get a fillable grid. The pattern we ended up with is maybe not the most recognizable, but at least we were able to avoid fills like AAARGH.

Laura is the cohost of a crossword podcast Cross Talk (with Laura and Colin), a weekly show where we discuss the Thursday puzzle, our favorite constructors, and a lot of irrelevant nerd banter. Tom is a tech-y entrepreneur-y word lover who believes the world would be better if everyone rode bikes and did crosswords (just not simultaneously). Look out for some more Laura + Tom collabs in the future!

There's a reason Will Shortz listed Joanne Sullivan's LAND FORMS puzzle as one of his favorites in an old collection. Each shape looks exactly like you might imagine, and there's so much variety. Will might consider today's puzzle if he assembled a sequel to that 2011 book. The astronomer in me stared into the night sky of today's grid for hours.

I especially loved ASTEROID in its spotted pattern. Took me a minute to figure out why that was appropriate, but once I remembered their porosity, it made all the sense in the universe.

ASTEROID was doubly impressive, given how hard it can be to fill around fixed circles in diagonal patterns. Working with eight of them in a checkerboard is like trying to dodge a doomsday meteor strike. Smart to isolate this into a corner, where you can shift the entire thing to the left or downward without having it affect the rest of the grid. Such a smooth result, with an OREO THIN treat to boot.

COMET on the opposite side is also tough to grid around, but EPEES, ERAT, NEMEA isn't worthy of an ARG! shout. It's all worth the price of BIG DUMMY, for this big dummy, at least.

I would have loved a spiral GALAXY instead of a circular one. That's too much to ask out of six letters, but maybe two arms out of SPIRAL and GALAXY? Alternatively, an ellipse could have been more evocative.

Puzzles that strike me with their visual awe come around roughly as frequently as Halley's COMET. Stellar debut!