New York Times, Thursday, August 25, 2022

OLIVIA: It has been such a pleasure to work with Andrea on my first ever NYT collab! When I started in the biz, Andrea provided me with invaluable guidance, and I'm thrilled to share a byline with her today.

This is also my first Thursday puzzle! I was definitely out of my comfort zone (Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays), but I'm really happy with how it came out.

I love the playfulness of the theme entries — they're just so fun to say. I remember we struggled with the best way to clue them — initially, we thought of describing a road trip route via cities and using something like INTERSTATE [Type of travel used in this puzzle] as the revealer. But I think the revealer we landed on makes for a tighter theme since it specifically calls out how we got three states in each entry. And as someone who has lived almost all her life in the NYC tri-state area, this revealer feels cozy to me, like coming home. Hope you enjoyed!

ACME: I met the crazily brilliant Olivia Mitra Framke when she reached out on the Fb mentor/collaborator page.

From an offhand remark of my being intrigued to discover a shared four letters between MiNNESota and TeNNESsee, Olivia was inspired to create a long list of overlapping states!

(My fave is the fact that the two shortest named states OHIO and IOWA overlap into OHIOWA)

From there we wrestled with best way to clue as well as a dead-on reveal.

Here's a quote from one of our earliest back-and-forths that gives a peek into the process:

• Ideally they should look slightly Un crazy and maybe even fun to say!
• Like the FLORIDAHOHIO 12 is a bit trippy bec at first it just looks like you've stuck an H between Florida and Ohio.
• I can't tell if that's great or the opposite!

I look forward to more collaborations. We've bonded (Oliviandrea?) but have yet to meet IRL, as the kids say!

If VERMONTANA is half as eye-popping as a VERMONSTER sundae, I'd gladly search for Green Mountain Treasure!

I treasured learning why VERMONT is called the Green Mountain State. Turns out that VERMONT comes from vert + mont, the French words for green + mountain. Hey, wait a minute! MONTANA derives from the Spanish word … for mountains! Neat extra layer to make the already cool MONT overlap even more memorable.

TRISTATE AREA aptly describes three states. I wondered, though, if it gets adequately at overlapping letters. Revealers like CROSSING STATE LINES or BORDER DISPUTES would have felt much more on point.

I love it when a puzzle kicks off with amusing wordplay. Deleting two minor letters from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to make NOAH a "rider of the lost ark" gave me such a smile.

But that paled in comparison to the ROOMBAS clue! I'm a sucker for cats riding ROOMBAS, so that was a delightful two hours of binge-watching YouTube videos.

Some of the themers weren't as impressive as others, especially when they involved only a single letter of overlap (IOWALABAMA and MONTANALASKA). I enjoyed a previous puzzle more since it presented the singular best in CATegory. (In the category of cat ROOMBAS, it's clearly Frodo's chariot.) Enough amusement elsewhere in the grid to keep up my interest, though.