David Steinberg author page

DAVID: My dad, Paul, thought of this Reducing Fractions crossword idea years ago. In Dad's proposed implementation, the theme answers were three-square rebus arrangements such as FOUR LINE EIGHT. Dad wasn't a constructor yet, but he loved the twistiness of this idea, so he urged me to use it. I quickly realized that the three-square rebuses were impossible to construct around, so I moved on.

This idea stuck in Dad's head, though: Every so often, he'd ask, "When are you constructing the Reducing Fractions puzzle?" and I'd reply, "I told you: It's impossible!" Enter my mom, Karen. In 2021, she started constructing regularly, and Dad jumped at the opportunity to revive this idea. Mom tried hard but hit the same roadblocks. One day, I realized we could do a bidirectional, two-square rebus, but because the fractions had to be in order, the number of theme sets would be very limited.

Last year, Dad was diagnosed with atypical Parkinson's, and he's now in hospice. Crosswords are no longer in his life in the same way they once were, but when Mom and I told him Reducing Fractions was running in The Times, he was very happy. This one's for you, Dad!

Paul's original proposed title for this puzzle was "One Way or Another" (like the Blondie song). His first thought was that the theme entries would have to be on diagonals (with circled squares) because he didn't think it would be possible to have them read both forward and backward. But David thought it might be by using a program.

Karen sifted through many, many single-spaced pages of candidates and, after removing the junk, whittled them down to 10 pages; everyone then discussed the best candidates to arrive at the final theme set.

Having flexibility in the grid size, because The Times occasionally publishes nonstandard sizes, was key to making this puzzle work. The taller and narrower 19x23 size David chose worked well, and he thought it might fly because it "played" like a 21x21 and even had 140 words.

Karen filled the grid, David made some changes, and because they didn't agree on one section (which neither of them liked), they decided they would separately fill it and then reconvene. They ultimately ended up using some parts of each person's fill. The 1-Across entry, MD-PHD, was the most controversial—no one was thrilled with it, especially in that position, but it allowed for the best fill in the upper left. After Paul did a draft of the clues, everyone helped finalize them.

Constructing newcomers Karen and Paul realize they're fortunate to have a crossword editor as a son!

I constructed this puzzle at the end of 2020 with the goal of having it run on Valentine's Day in 2021, since February 14 was a Sunday last year. Will liked my puzzle but informed me that Lisa Bunker had beaten me to the punch with her ingenious Sealed With a Kiss crossword. Will graciously agreed to hold my puzzle for a year, and I'm excited that its time has now come.

Will asked me to try lowering the word count from 144, but I'm grateful he ultimately made an exception. Working with 18 symmetrical, interlocking theme answers was one of my biggest construction challenges to date. I wanted to be sure I kept each answer in the grid as natural-sounding as possible, even though this meant having a higher word count and fewer flashy bonuses.

As ambitious as I like to be with my themes, I never let myself forget about newer and more casual solvers: If one of my puzzles ends up feeling more like a construction stunt than an enjoyable solve, I haven't done my job quite right.

This puzzle's minitheme has a funny backstory. In the pre-COVID days, I used to create a monthly word puzzle out of sticky notes and post it in my cubicle for any interested co-workers. I even had a leaderboard sticky note with the names of everyone who had solved the puzzle. Erik Agard sat next to me, so as you can imagine, the leaderboard almost always had at least one name on it before you could say "sticky note"!

One month, I made a puzzle out of two columns of sticky notes where I changed the first letters of alliterative two-word phrases. For example, a sticky note in the first column read "halted," and a sticky note in the second column read "silk." Changing the first letters of those two words yielded "malted milk," and "m" became a letter that was part of the final answer (which, if memory serves, was "Mahomes," as in Kansas City's legendary quarterback). Another pair of sticky notes read "mighty"/"fight," and my intended answer was "eighty-eight."

One co-worker stopped by my cubicle and stared at the puzzle for several minutes, evidently perplexed. We got to talking about which answers she'd already figured out, and she mentioned "nighty night" for "mighty/fight." Nighty night! I hadn't even considered that, but it was clearly just as good an answer. I quickly patched up the puzzle by changing "fight" to "night" (so solvers would know that "night" wasn't part of the answer), though this amusing find ultimately intrigued me so much that I decided to make a whole puzzle out of it. Moral of the story: Always get your puzzles test-solved!

LUCI: I'm absolutely thrilled to make my constructing debut, and couldn't have asked for a better mentor in David! I've enjoyed solving the NYT crossword for about four years, but it was a while before I found the Wordplay column and, through learning about the constructors behind the puzzles, realized anyone is free to write and submit them. After completing David's 8/18/19 Sunday puzzle "Revolutionary", I learned that he had just graduated from Stanford, where I was about to begin my sophomore year. Reaching out for advice and being met with the opportunity to collaborate on a Sunday puzzle (which evolved into this one) was a dream come true, and I thoroughly enjoyed the getting to know the process of it all.

As David says, we originally planned on a Sunday-length puzzle and had a few more theme entries to show for it, but I'm happy with how the Tuesday version turned out. Some other fun entries in this theme include CLOTHES / CLOSE TO THE CHEST, BATHES / BEATS THE HEAT, GRAND TIME / GETTING MARRIED, and CARTED IN / INCARCERATED. Also, a favorite clue I came up with for that original Sunday puzzle: TEMP [F, C, or K meas.] :)

I'm taking a couple of quarters off from classes, which at Stanford are all online for upperclassmen until the spring, and that's left me with lots of time to think of ideas — hopefully, you'll hear from me again!

DAVID: It was a pleasure working with Luci! She was a freshman at Stanford the same year I was a senior, but our paths never crossed. When Luci reached out last year asking for constructing advice, I knew we had to make a puzzle together. Go Cardinal!

Fortunately, I'd been thinking about a theme that seemed perfect for collaboration. I've always been fascinated by letter banks, and I figured there had to be a subset of them that were apt, so I wrote a short program to generate possibilities. Surprisingly, there were more than 11,000 options; not so surprisingly, almost all the pairings were completely random. I knew uncovering the apt ones would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Luci and I were able to divide and conquer, which sped things up significantly — she combed through all the letter banks starting with A to M, and I took N to Z.

We originally built this puzzle as a Sunday, but alas, Will and his team liked some of our finds more than others. On the bright side, building both Sunday and daily versions of this puzzle gave Luci lots of constructing practice, and we're both thrilled with how the puzzle turned out. Having my 100th crossword run in The Times is exciting, but nothing can compare to the thrill of making a debut! We hope you enjoy our puzzle.

I'm always trying to think of new themes involving grid art. When I came up with the idea of gender pronouns — a topic I feel is especially important — separated by slashes made of black squares, I knew I was on to something exciting! The three slashes turned into one big slash, though I still wanted to arrange the pronouns so each pair was separated by a "mini-slash" of three black squares.

One of my biggest challenges was coming up with an answer ending in "they." I'd originally planned to use the poet Robert SOUTHEY, but his name seemed a bit tough to me. I was pleased to discover that BUT HEY could fit with an extra black square, as BUT HEY both feels easier and hides "they" in a more interesting way.

Once I had the theme answers in place, I added the reveal PERSONAL/PRONOUNS for some extra theme material, and I was on to the fill and then the clues. My favorite clue is [Tattoo subject who might disapprove of tattoos] for MOM.

All in all, I hope many solvers see themselves represented in this puzzle. Happy solving!

DAVID: It was a pleasure working with Evan on his first Sunday crossword! He initially proposed a 15x15 version of the theme with answers that scrambled Utah, Ohio, Maine, and Oregon. Curious to see whether it was possible to scramble states with longer names, I wrote a Java program to mine a large word list for options. When I discovered that the 12-letter West Virginia could be scrambled within PERSUASIVE WRITING, I knew we were on to something! Evan sifted through my program's output to find the other six theme answers, and he took the lead on designing and filling the grid. We considered several fills before settling on the one you see, which we felt had the fewest obscurities. Most of the clues are Evan's.

Will Shortz held our puzzle in his queue for a while to space it out from Alan Arbesfeld's somewhat similar Altered States puzzle from October 9 of last year. Speaking of somewhat similar crosswords, we also strove to differentiate our puzzle from Bruce Haight's May 16, 2017 offering as much as we could. Both puzzles use AFRICAN LION, though, since it's one of just a few possible answers that scramble the letters of "California" consecutively.

Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage any new/newish constructors who feel intimidated by Sunday-size crosswords to take the plunge. Evan was initially nervous about constructing his first 21x21, but he did so well on structuring and filling this larger grid that I would've guessed he'd been constructing Sundays for years if he hadn't told me otherwise!

EVAN: I was indeed quite nervous about making a Sunday-size puzzle. It's daunting: there's so much white space, and you want to get the fill silky-smooth. David wasn't willing to compromise on any sub-par fill, and the puzzle you see here is the result. I think we're both quite proud of it. The task of making a Sunday-size puzzle on my own doesn't seem so bad now. I hope to make some more when I have my summer off. Happy solving!

As is the case with a surprising number of my puzzle ideas, this one came to me during finals week. I had a 15-page term paper due two days later, which made the opportunity to "procrastistruct" a 21x21 more appealing than ever before!

My first challenge was coming up with a symmetric, lively theme set. I made a point of avoiding theme entries with extraneous ball strings, such as CLASSICAL BALLET for the LBAL slot. The theme set I almost used had WELL-BALANCED DIET paired with FALLBACK POSITION. Both of these entries seemed a little dry and perhaps more in-the-language as just balanced diet and fallback, respectively. After coming up with the four main theme entries, I threw in GOES FOR A SPIN and TURN TURN TURN to ensure that there would be enough theme material.

For 21x21s, I'm the kind of constructor who prefers 142- or 144-word grids with silky-smooth fill to 140-word grids with more pizzazz but also more trade-offs. In this grid, I attempted to balance the two philosophies by keeping the individual sections relatively closed off. As per usual with my grids nowadays, I made a point of avoiding trivia and spreading the cultural references I did use across generations.

I wrote a good chunk of the clues on the plane ride home from this year's ACPT. A couple of my favorites are [Producer of brown eggs] for CADBURY and [Garden item that sounds like the plural of another garden item] for HOSE. I also included two shoutouts to my new home, Kansas City: [Burnt barbecue bits] for ENDS and [Royals' org.] for MLB.

Hope you enjoy!

BRUCE: I submitted a BATS puzzle to Will back in about 2015. He liked the grid art, but I couldn't come up with two solid 15 letter theme entries. I threw about a dozen of them at him, including CHOKE UP ON THE BAT — that's how desperate I was. I eventually sent the idea to David, since he did an amazing job of coming up with a second theme entry for our HATS puzzle of 11/24/17. David suggested SPREAD ONE'S WINGS, and the project took off from there. It would have been nice to run it on Halloween, but the next Friday Halloween is 2025.

It's always a pleasure working with David - he recently graduated from Stanford (congrats David!) and part of their commencement ceremony is a "Wacky Walk" into the stadium in costume. Here is David making the CrossWorld proud!

DAVID: Always fun to co-construct with Bruce! Squeezing in enough zippy nonthematic fill for a Friday was a challenge, given the constraints of the grid art and theme entries, but fortunately, it didn't drive us batty. I'm especially fond of Bruce's LEFT JAB/I SURE DO stack in the northwest corner.

My post-graduation plan is to continue editing the Universal Crossword, which I'll be doing in-house at Andrews McMeel Universal as their Puzzles and Games Editor starting in September. "The kid" of crosswords is now officially grown up!

This themeless dates back to March 2016. I started in the upper left with the Scrabbly NOXZEMA/CINEMAX crossing, though my favorite corner is the lower right. Even though the short crossings aren't as smooth, I like the trio of animal entries (ROAD HOG, BEAR HUG, and CAT POSE). SCHMUCK is a bit edgy for my current taste, but I'll always have a soft spot for Yiddish and other words that relate to Jewish culture. I debuted HAMANTASCHEN in a Newsday Saturday Stumper a few years ago, and lately, I've been trying to work RUGELACH into a themeless grid.

In other news, I was recently named editor of the Universal Crossword and Universal Sunday Crossword! The former appears daily in the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous other domestic and international newspapers. If you're looking for a cooldown after solving my Saturday puzzle, you won't want to miss today's offering from the amazing Zhouqin Burnikel (available after midnight Central Time).

TRENTON: To be honest, I was surprised at how long it took David to get in touch with me after my debut puzzle came out online (about fifteen minutes). So, naturally, when David mentioned the idea of collaborating on a themeless, I was quick to jump on board. I started with everyone's favorite font, COMIC SANS, and once I had the stack of 9s built, I noticed the enticing possibility of fitting OONA CHAPLIN and PG THIRTEEN underneath! I made a potential grid skeleton and sent off what I had to David, and unsurprisingly, what he sent back was full of fun stuff — I especially like the lower-right, with lively fill like THANKS OBAMA and DETOX DIET.

After a little more back-and-forth and some polishing, our grid was complete. Next came the clues — which were an absolute blast to write together! (In all seriousness, we might have had a bit too much fun.) It was a nice bonus that most of them ended up making the cut. Some of my favorites of our clues are those for 14-Across, 60-Across, 61-Across, 3-Down, 33-Down, and 49-Down.

I was initially a bit nervous to co-construct with a seasoned pro, but I needn't have worried. Collaborating with David was a fantastic experience — I'd say it was all CHILL and no PILL. On that groan-worthy note, over to you, David!

DAVID: Always a pleasure to work with Trenton! When he sent me an upper left/center packed with five long seed entries plus ultra-smooth short fill, I knew finding a similarly smooth and lively lower right would be a challenge. Once I had THANKS OBAMA and DETOX DIET in place, though, I knew I was in business. As Trenton mentioned, the highlight of the process was the cluing. There was definitely as much laughter as there was clue-writing!

This is the last themeless I constructed before heading off to college in the fall of 2015. I spent a good part of that summer scoring all the 3-6 letter entries in my various word lists, and so I was excited to test out the fruits of my labor in a themeless grid. Having a scored word list made my life a lot easier—I was suddenly able to squeeze in more zing than ever before while still keeping the short fill smooth. All the cruddy entries I'd been rejecting manually for years no longer showed up as possibilities, because their scores were finally low enough that they didn't make the cut.

Nowadays, I've gotten so used to having a scored word list that I've forgotten what it's like to construct without one. The one thing I wish is that Jeff Chen's XWord Info word list had been around at the time since scoring your word list from scratch nowadays is like reinventing the wheel. Jeff deserves a huge shout-out for making a quality scored list available to everyone in the community!