Daniel Larsen author page

I've always wanted to try my hand at a triple stack. As I was fooling around with layouts, I noticed that you tend to get a pretty enclosed center when you place black squares around triple stacks in a natural way.

For this puzzle, I wanted to keep the middle as open as possible (which hopefully is more satisfying for the solver). As a trade-off (in terms of construction difficulty), I put in some cheater squares in the corners. It's nice because when you arrange them in threes like that, it's more aesthetically pleasing than if you use two blocks, and it's also considerably easier to fill.

When I began the actual construction, I found I could fill in either stack fairly easily. Connecting the two, however, was proving impossible. I was wondering if maybe I'd bitten off more than I could chew in terms of the open middle. So I bailed and added another cheater square. The result is the grid pattern is a bit chunky. The good news was that it was now quite easy to fill in, and I could be selective in choosing words.

Thanks as always to the editorial team for improving the clues.

Themeless puzzles are typically judged on how "fresh" the fill is, how much the entries excite the solver. I wrote this puzzle with the goal of trying to maximize the amount of fresh fill. That may sound like an obvious goal, but most themeless puzzles actually don't try to do that. Often, constructors start with a few "seeds", entries that they really love, and then go from there. Basically, it's a question of quality vs. quantity, and most constructors put the emphasis on the former. But for this puzzle, I wanted to go for the other extreme.

I knew of an excellent Times puzzle by David Steinberg that seemed like a good place to start, as he managed to pack in an amazing amount of fresh fill. I decided to try to see what I could do with the same grid pattern. It's one of the easiest patterns of black squares you can imagine, primarily because of the lack of long words. That's a mixed blessing because the long answers are usually where most of the sparkle in a themeless can be found. You really have to make the most of the short fill. Even then, some solvers might still be disappointed with the lack of marquee entries.

Before I began constructing, there were some changes that needed to be made to my word list and my construction program. First, I looked through entries in my word list that had been marked as fresh and noted the ones that I liked especially. Because of the grid pattern, I only had to worry about entries that were 7 letters or fewer, which made the task much more manageable. Then I told my program to try to maximize the number of those entries. Finally, due to the super-symmetry of the grid pattern, dupes were an even bigger problem than usual, so I wrote some code which mostly eliminated them.

After all the hours I put in to get to that stage, the actual construction was a breeze. One coincidence I found amusing was that I had two Apple products in the grid (iPad Pro and Mac) plus a company (Mott's) known for its apple products. You might notice that Mac is no longer in the puzzle, as the original crossing MCU/MAC was changed to MSU/MAS. I've watched a lot of Marvel movies, so MCU was actually on my list of fresh fill. It just goes to show that tastes differ.

There remains one aspect of crossword constructing that really can't be automated: cluing. It's an area I've always struggled with, and this puzzle was no exception. In fact, when it was accepted, the Times team requested that I reclue it. I think my second set of clues was an improvement, but as always the final version is considerably better than anything I could come up with, thanks to the editorial team.

I had been thinking about starting a crossword club for a while. Then the pandemic struck. When I heard about the Wave Learning Festival, a student-run initiative whose stated goal is to combat the educational inequalities that the pandemic has only exacerbated.

I applied to teach a course on crossword construction. Fortunately, they specialize in offbeat topics that might be offered at universities, but rarely show up in a school classroom.

My class consisted of about a dozen people. We met online three times a week for three weeks. I tried to make it as interactive as possible, with students constructing word squares in the first class. We ended the course by constructing a whole puzzle together. It was rejected. The New York Times had already accepted a puzzle with the same theme.

I enjoyed the experience, so I decided to sign up to teach the class again. The second time went more smoothly. We solved quite a few puzzles together. That gives you an appreciation for what goes into a good crossword. It was extended to ten classes, giving us time to cover all the fundamentals. We were thrilled when the editorial team accepted our puzzle.

Our theme started with a discussion of Mexican food. We were thinking about the ingredients of nachos and noticed that chips and dips rhymed. That got us thinking about rhyming phrases. We needed another wrinkle and thought that if the phrases themselves rhymed with each other, that would be pretty cool.

We needed to start with a word that had as many rhymes as possible. NIGHTLIGHT led us to try "-ite", which also has an unusually large number of 1-syllable rhymes. Even so, it was unclear whether there were enough such phrases to make a crossword.

There was a fairly intense debate about the final selection of our theme answers. Was it a problem that we had both "night" and "knight"? We could have gone for a different set of theme answers that would have instead included KITEFIGHT and LIGHTBITE. Ultimately, we liked the overall quality of this set enough that we were willing to overlook the whole night/knight situation.

This was a great experience for me, and I hope the class feels similarly!

ANNE: The two main seeds for this puzzle were BEYONDMEAT and NETNEUTRALITY. Both of them seemed vaguely topical, but hopefully not so much as to be outdated by the time the puzzle would be published. (We did not realize ahead of time how important WiFi and meat substitutes would be in 2020...)

DANIEL: It's always a little bit strange to have non-symmetrical seeds, since you don't get the equality of constraints on both sides that you get used to in writing themed puzzles. Funnily enough, though, we actually struggled more with the SE than with the NW. In fact, Will requested that we try to refill the SE. It was a bit of a challenge, since Anne was home when we initially constructed the puzzle, but she was in college by the time we had to redo that corner. I'm sure remote construction is another thing that has seen an unexpected rise recently.

ANNE: I remember Daniel calling me to re-clue the puzzle one night, and when I got off the phone with him, my roommate gave me this strange look and said, "What on earth were you talking about, and since when have you been into K-pop?"(This was for our original clue for IDOL, although that has since been changed.) Trying to clue a puzzle can lead to a pretty weird-sounding conversation, I guess.

DANIEL: It was a bit funny for me to see HOMEPLANET show up again in one of my themelesses. I guess the point is that I've scored it high, and it has common letters. Anyway, last time I clued it "Corellia, to Han Solo", which I thought might be too specialized. I was gratified to see that they kept the clue, but this time, I probably pushed my luck too far when I tried "Dathomir, to Darth Maul". Understandably, the editorial team rejected that clue (even Obi-Wan thought it was Iridonia), and moved the Star Wars to the clue for 45-down.

The grid design for this puzzle was inspired by Patrick Berry, since many of his puzzles feature similar staircases of black squares (for example, 4/7/2017). I wanted all of the central answers to be fresh phrases that had never been used before in the New York Times. This version of the center was the very last possibility I tried since I could only see the first word: the unexciting DID ONE'S PART. But DID ONE'S PART did its part, allowing the other answers to fit into place. Originally, the crossing ASIS/ANET was CSIS/CNET, but I decided I should accept the partial since otherwise, it might be a sticky crossing for some solvers.

I've been working on my cluing, but it's still an uphill climb. My two favorite ideas, (DC insiders?) for SUPERHEROES and (You might see it on Mulberry Street) for LITTLE ITALY, were both changed. I guess those clues were too much of a stretch.

Anyway, in these terrible times, I hope crosswords can remain a welcome break in solvers' lives.

I wrote this puzzle right after making a major upgrade to my construction software. It paid off; I thought this puzzle came out much better than my previous attempts at themeless crosswords. It was also my first themeless to be accepted.

The seed for this puzzle was, of course, SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT. I chose THERE IS NO ESCAPE as its symmetrical partner, partially because of how deliciously evil it sounds and also because it has a certain connection to Schrödinger's unfortunate victim (half of the time, at least). I was surprised at how easily most of the puzzle fell into place. My biggest problem was constructing the stacks of 10-letter words. I had to lower my threshold for bad fill there, which is why THA and HST are present.

I wrote this puzzle soon after Solo: A Star Wars Story came out, so I was happy that the editorial team kept my clue to 60-across. I'm also grateful for their improvements to the rest of my clues.

On a side note, I seem to specialize in Valentine's Day puzzles.

DANIEL: For years, I have been trying to figure out how to construct acceptable themeless puzzles. After all, good, original themes are hard to come by. My first attempts were awful, but as my program and word list improved, so did my puzzles. Eventually, I got better at finding the delicate balance between including fresh words and minimizing bad fill.

This was the 4th puzzle I wrote with Anne, and it was the break-through. Our seeds were FRAPPUCCINO (UNICORN FRAPPUCCINO didn't fit) and YELLOW VESTS. At the time we wrote it, YELLOW VESTS was highly topical, and Will kindly expedited the publication so that it would still be relevant. I was doing a project about the Yellow Vest movement in school, and when I came home, I found out that this puzzle had been accepted. Perfect timing!

ANNE: I've been peripherally involved with Daniel's crossword activities for a while, but this is the first time one of our joint puzzles has been accepted. We wrote this when I was home from college over winter break, and I was looking forward to a French class about revolutions, which is what made me think of YELLOW VESTS. Despite the stereotype of the over-caffeinated college student, FRAPPUCCINO was not from personal experience.

Our basic model for constructing was that Daniel operated his program while I suggested words and provided "constructive" criticism. I'm just glad it worked!

I first had the idea for this theme in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was surprised by how well the theme answers worked, but I couldn't put the grid together. By June of the next year, my program and my word list had improved to the point that I thought it was worth giving the theme another go. I don't usually come back to theme ideas, but FILM NOIR was so lucky that I felt I had to try. Since it has eight letters, I had to make the puzzle 16 columns wide. Perhaps I could have split FILM NOIR up into, for example, ELM and NOT, letting me use a standard size grid, but I felt that would be less interesting. However, the extra space also allowed me to have two theme answers in row three.

After fiddling around for a bit, I finally found a version I was satisfied with. However, I realized that PR STUNT had an extra consecutive letter in it, the "U". I considered changing the pair to something like SIGHING and BURSTIN, but I felt that they would have been less exciting than the existing theme answers.

I'm happy to be back in the New York Times, and I hope you enjoy this puzzle.

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!