Emily Carroll author page

I don't think I've ever said, or will ever say, the phrase "What's poppin?" out loud. Feels a little too. "How do you do, fellow kids?". But, still, a fun concept to build a theme around, and hopefully, it provides a bit of Monday entertainment on par with a pimple-popping video.

I never like having to resort to big "Utah" black squares in a puzzle, but the lengths of the theme entries just wouldn't cooperate with another arrangement. Hopefully, TINDER MATCH is a fun enough marquee entry to justify them.

For Downs-only solvers, I hope you enjoy the 39- to 44-Down succession of a HOT TODDY and SNYDERS pretzels followed by a CAPFUL of Pepto-Bismol. Sounds like a good way to celebrate the long weekend to me.

I hope this theme appeals to fans of baseball and/or musical theater, or to those who just like any excuse to smush a bunch of letters into a single rebus square.

I wish I could have fit in another play or two (e.g., AID And abet), but my attempts for more theme density caused a lot of unpleasant gluey fill, so I opted to prioritize that instead.

My first encounter with a GHOSTWRITER was the PBS show of the same name, whose plot literally interprets the word. Imagine my dismay to learn later in life that real ghostwriters are much less fun and hardly ever communicate with '90s Brooklyn kids via refrigerator magnets to help them solve mysteries.

But, if there's ever a day to pretend and let your imagination run wild, it's today. Happy Halloween!

As someone with weak ankles and a strong respect for gravity, skiing's not really my thing. So, the closest I'm getting to the BUNNY SLOPE is making this puzzle.

Prioritizing including longer diagonals like ENERGIZER and EASTER rather than sticking to just 3- and 4-letter types of bunnies definitely led to fill that is less than smooth in parts, but hopefully it's still a fun time whether you‘ve ever ridden a T-bar or just written it as a crossword answer.

My wife, Bridget, frequently asks me to work her name into a puzzle. My rationale for not doing it is that at 7 letters long that's a lot of grid real estate to give to a proper noun that can't really be clued in fun ways; so it would inevitably get dinged by the editing team, especially in the extra-selective world of themeless puzzles.

And then I go and make this puzzle that includes "Ernesto" and it's published on her birthday.

Happy birthday, Ernesto Bridget!

EMILY: Very excited to finally get a Saturday puzzle and hit for the crossword cycle! Big thanks to Erik for being an incredibly generous partner for my first collaborative effort. His superhuman cluing abilities and a constant push for inclusivity in the cross-world are a true inspiration. And also, thanks to the editors for teaching me a new mnemonic device, RIP Pluto.

ERIK: Emily is brilliant. I'm grateful for the opportunity to work with her and really happy with how it turned out. Kudos to her for the clever 23-Down clue and to the Times team for 27-Across.

I'm sure we've all been using a lot more FOWLLANGUAGE while dealing with this pandemic GOBBLEDYGOOK. So I hope this puzzle provides some much-needed distraction!

And on a personal note, as a New York City healthcare worker, I just want to say thank you for the outpouring of support and love over the past weeks. It's meant the world to my colleagues and me.

Stay safe, everyone.

I wanted to find a way to get BOYZIIMEN into a puzzle because I think the "YZII" is such a fun, bizarre string of letters. Initially, I was going to attempt to do so in a themeless puzzle, but as I was trying to work it into the bottom of a stack the idea of something being "on the eyes" came to me so I went in this direction instead. Will Shortz had the suggestion to make EASY ON THE EYES one of the answers when I originally had it as the title, which I think is a great tweak that makes the puzzle much less obvious and hopefully more fun for solvers!

If I were to go back and do this again, I'd probably get rid of one of the theme answers to let things breathe a little more. As it stands now, I think there are some pretty rough spots in terms of the fill.

I'm not a very good millennial, so I wasn't aware of the term "situationship" until I heard it in a Toyota commercial that was playing ad nauseam last winter. But after learning it, I thought it would make a nice marquee entry to build a puzzle around.

This is my first successful foray into themeless puzzles which I find much harder to construct in part because I don't have a custom word list to help with auto-filling (which is purely out of laziness/being bad at computers and not fully understanding the functionalities of Crossword Compiler, not some ascetic stance on crossword construction).

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out except there are more short 3- and 4-word answers than I'd like, and the process of making this exponentially increased the amount of respect I have for constructors who seem to effortlessly crank out these wide-open, elegant Friday and Saturday puzzles.

My idea for this puzzle started as a 15x15 with all clothing-themed homophone swaps — Bowtie Tae Bo, Loafer Furlough, and T-shirt Surety and the revealer Refashioned. But, since Surety has three syllables (as much as I tried to convince myself I could pronounce it in two), I was sent back to the drawing board and encouraged to try to expand it into a 21x21. Glad it worked out in the end and very excited to be making my Sunday debut!

The idea for this puzzle came to me this past summer after seeing banana split on the menu while taking my wife on her first ever trip to, our country's greatest culinary national treasure, Dairy Queen. How anyone could have survived 30 years on this earth without trying a Blizzard is beyond me. Luckily those dark ages are now behind us.

My original submission had BANANA SPLIT, ORANGE PEELS, GRAPE LEAVES, and LEMON DROP all as long answers; however, this ran into some consistency issues in terms of plurality and tense, so the editing team had the solution of separating BANANA/SPLITS and LEMON/DROPS in order to address this problem but still maintain symmetry. Never would have occurred to me to try that, so many thanks for the advice and patience as this went through a few rounds of revisions.

Classically, I think of going Dutch as going 50/50 on a bill. In an ideal world the long theme answers would be phrases that split famous Bills' last names evenly. Unfortunately, finding enough Bills with even-numbered last names that split nicely into interesting phrases proved surprisingly difficult.

Wikipedia defines going Dutch as "each person participating in a group activity pays for themselves"—so with that definition in mind, I think this theme still holds up, as long as you imagine that you just ordered salad while your date got two pre-meal cocktails and the lobster but oh-so-conveniently hasn't responded to your Venmo request yet.