David J. Kahn author page

I'm not sure where the idea for this puzzle came from … maybe changing TONI to RIGATONI. But the fact that CAPITAL could be crossed with GAINS in the middle of the grid suggested there would be enough room working around the sides of the puzzle for all of the themed answers I wanted to include.

After I submitted the puzzle, I was asked to change the answer SERIO to SASSE at 22-Across, easy enough to do. But I wanted to write a clue referring to the fact that all the letters in his FULL name could be spelled using only the letters in NEBRASKA, his home state. Since BEN wasn't yet an answer in the grid, I redid the lower left corner and, in doing so, changed 54-Across from YIN to BEN.

Sometimes it's worth extra work to add a really cool clue.

The idea for this puzzle came from reading about Small Business Saturday, a promotional day to support small businesses. Although I wrote the puzzle before the pandemic, the state of the economy today makes the idea of supporting small businesses even more important.

My objective here was to have symmetrical rebus boxes and to have the four Across answers containing the rebuses interlock with SMALL BUSINESSES. And, I think the low (70) word count makes for a more challenging Thursday.

In 2018 I wrote a Friday puzzle with a Beethoven minitheme. However, with the 250th anniversary of his birth coming up in December, I thought a more thematic one would be nice. Beethoven was so prolific that there was almost too much material to choose from so I limited the theme to more familiar stuff: three symphonies that are known by other names, plus the Fifth. A shout-out to my son-in-law Richard for his familiarity with the opening notes to the Fifth, which got me started.

This note fittingly comes to you from San Diego, where I'm visiting my daughter Lesley. And where I thought of the idea for this puzzle the last time I was out here.

No great insights to share about the puzzle itself, but wow, what great weather!

Even though there were 32 acts at Woodstock, many of them were bands, so it took me a while to get four well-known performers I could use for this theme. I would have loved to have Jimi HENDRIX in there (he was the closing act at the concert), but the crossword gods were telling me it wouldn't work.

I've been an admirer of I.M. Pei's work ever since he designed the original Newhouse School building at Syracuse University, my alma mater. And when in Paris two years ago, my granddaughter and I got a kick out of seeing the Louvre Pyramid up close. Even so, I'm not sure I would have written this puzzle unless it included the nice theme crossings.

I wrote this puzzle a while ago after hearing that the Broadway show had been running for 20 years. This is an especially good time to run the puzzle since this month marks the 25th anniversary of the original animated movie. There's also a photorealistic computer animated remake due out in July, which I'm looking forward to.

I wrote the puzzle when I saw that the long answers could be interlocked, freeing up the center of the grid for the four circles.

I don't want to say I'm a big Queen fan but the ringtone on my cell phone is "Radio Ga Ga." When I saw the Queen biopic recently, I thought the time was ripe for remembering their iconic Live Aid performance but not with a straightforward puzzle. The gimmick here was to split BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY into parts of other answers. First I looked at splitting RHAPSODY into the answers PERHAPS and ODYSSEY separated by a black square. However, splitting up BOHEMIAN didn't work as easily so I decided that a symmetrical split at the top and bottom of the grid would be more elegant.

The story goes that Elton John followed Queen at Live Aid and only half-jokingly, chewed them out for stealing the show. You can see the full 20-minute set anytime on YouTube.

Often I find that when I'm vacationing somewhere, an idea for a puzzle will come to mind. My wife and I were in Paris last summer when the theme for this puzzle popped up. The goal was to find as many French things as would fit (6 here) without creating a lot of crosswordese and place them in a way that would tie into the theme.

(If solvers want to say the puzzle is "well-executed," that's okay, I won't groan.)

After I thought of this theme, I started looking at all pro sports teams where an "I" appears exactly once in both the first and second name. I wound up using only baseball teams because the other sports gave me very few teams to choose from. And baseball teams might be more familiar to solvers, anyway. There were six major league teams that could possibly work, but I ran out of grid space, not to mention patience, which is why PITTSBURGH PIRATES didn't make the cut.

My wife and I were vacationing in New Orleans last November and they were making plans to celebrate the 300th anniversary in May. Since the Big Easy often evokes colorful images, it seemed like a good theme for a puzzle. Then as dumb luck would have it, I found out that San Antonio was also celebrating its 300th anniversary in May and also has 10 letters … and I could also cross two other themed answers with the cities. The tricky part was fitting the May 1718 date in the middle of the grid.

An extra twist (and one I hadn't thought of when I wrote the puzzle) is how cool it is for this puzzle to be running today. Because if you look at May 1718 a little differently, you get today's date (which is also coincidentally the 20th anniversary of a Sunday NYT crossword I wrote with my daughter Hillary, "Green Eggs and Hamlet.")

I've written two books of baseball-themed puzzles and love the idea of cluing baseball jargon in a nonbaseball way. This puzzle actually relates five answers to a situation you might hear described by a baseball announcer, with the appropriate payoff at the end. The puzzle needed to be a little wider to accommodate the longest answers and I tried to make the answers sound unforced. Looking forward to the 2018 season!

When I first wrote this puzzle, I had BRIGHTMAN (as in Sarah) crossing BEETHOVEN; the idea was to pair a classical composer with a "cross-over" artist. Will, tho, liked EARPHONES, which could also be paired with Beethoven better, so I reworked some of the original grid. I think gimmicks like this in a Friday or Saturday are fun and add something to an otherwise-themeless puzzle.

I guess I can say with a smile that this is just an OK puzzle. This worked only because I was able to find four 4-letter synonyms for OK that could be clued otherwise, which is why "so-so", at first an obvious synonym, wasn't included.

I also wanted to include a gunfighter on each side. Fun fact: Kirk Douglas, who played Doc Holliday in the 1957 movie, celebrated his centennial last year.

A big thanks to Kevin James for this one. If he hadn't come up with BLART as the last name of the mall cop in his 2009 comedy, who knows if BLUNT to SHARP is even possible. The other piece of luck is that this particular ladder isn't too long for a 15x15 and that the middle rung is BLADE. This allowed me to logically add RAZOR and KNIFE to the grid.

I'm a Broadway buff and see a lot of musicals. Last year, I wrote a puzzle about "Hamilton" for Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator, as well as the cast. (Still waiting to see the show. Extra tickets, anyone?)

Anyway, I started this puzzle with a Hamilton answer in the middle and went looking for other one-word Best Musical winners whose titles would start other answers and whose names would still be familiar even to non-theatergoers. There were 12 such musicals and I was able to get six in the grid, including 5 that interlocked. Pure luck that I was able to use the same clue for CAINE and WIEST.

I'm a big baseball fan and have written two baseball-themed books of puzzles. So when the Cubs made the World Series for the first time since 1945, I wrote this puzzle on 68-Across (and, yes, on a 8-Down, too). But when the Indians tied Game 7 in the eighth inning, I thought my puzzle was toast, at least for another year. But the crossword gods were with me and Will/Joel edited the puzzle the very next day!

In constructing the puzzle, I liked the answers WORLD SERIES RING and IVYCOVERED WALLS and went from there. I also had a fun quote by ERNIE BANKS in the clue for him, which never made it to print ("It's a beautiful day for a ball game. Let's play two!")

I'm more into writing themed puzzles but occasionally I'll write a Saturday with a minitheme or special gimmick, just to surprise solvers. This is one of them. The fun part for me with a Saturday puzzle is to see how hard or tricky you can make the clues; hopefully, solvers will have a good workout.

This theme works because the eight letters in PHONETIC are all different and the eight code words spelling out PHONETIC can be placed symmetrically in the grid.

I also had fun writing some of the clues, especially the T.S. Eliot quip.

This type of rebus puzzle has been done more frequently in the last few years but the goal here was to make the Across themed clues and answers funny. The original working title of the puzzle was actually "Aqueous Humor".

I was trying to get as many HEADS in the Down answers as possible and, at the same time, keep answers consistent with a Tuesday puzzle. When I found one answer (TWO BAGGER) that had two HEADS, I thought it would be nicer if another answer also had two; finding one that worked took some time but I like the result.

There's not a whole lot of theme in this puzzle but I wrote it because I liked the payoff at 62-Across. I also tried to use long Down answers that haven't been used too often before.

I had just seen "Something Rotten!", a very funny Broadway musical, and I was looking to do something to commemorate the upcoming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

The theme came to me when I realized that FRIEND OF MERCUTIO (where FRIEND later became COMRADE) included the name ROMEO. Coming up with other answers and getting this puzzle accepted was a struggle. My original submission had a few themed answers Will and Joel felt were either contrived (OPHELIA'S COMPLEX SUITOR, anyone?) or hid characters with only four letters in 21-letter answers (e.g., VILLAIN UNDOING OTHELLO). They liked the concept, though, so I focused on shortening the answers and adding some 5, 6 and 7-letter characters. I stuck to Shakespeare's more popular plays and Will/Joel offered a lot of feedback along the way. Finally, deleting SHAKESPEARE as an answer, which I did at the very end, makes for more of an "aha" moment.

My "connection" to presidents goes back to the time in the late 90's when Bill Clinton, who's a big crosswords fan, talked about one of my Sunday NYT puzzles at a White House conference on technology and the Internet. Since then, I've written several president-themed puzzles, including one to commemorate the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library in 2004. And my latest book of (40) puzzles, "White House Crosswords", came out a few months ago.

Word ladder-themed puzzles have been done before but this puzzle is a little different by adding a third president between the top and bottom ones. I was about to stop there but OVAL OFFICE and POCKET VETO interlocked nicely with POLK and FORD respectively. I then needed two other parallel Down answers, which took a lot longer to come up with. But sometimes you just get lucky.