Evan Kalish author page

I've previously expressed my philosophy of themeless crossword construction, and it holds true for this puzzle: pack as many interesting, novel entries into a grid as possible without sacrificing fill quality. I strive to construct the sorts of puzzles that I most enjoy solving, and I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Surprisingly, the final across entry is a debut to NYT crosswords and even stumped Jeff Chen's impeccable word list. My proposed clue was: "Setting for gifted children?" Sam's (Ezersky) clue is fantastic as well! I was thrilled that the editors kept my angles for 32-Down and 47-Across.

If you, like me, appreciate the U.S. Postal Service and are still seeking a unique and functional gift, consider the 2022 Postlandia Calendar of Post Offices and Places. I've visited 10,556 post offices across the country! Find out more at the Postlandia blog.

DAVID: This puzzle happened because the crossword community is full of great people encouraging newbies. Erik Agard's fantastic Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory introduced me to Nate Cardin, who helped me finish my first ever (rejected!) puzzle. Evan and I met at an Andy Kravis-led workshop in Brooklyn. It turns out we were both frustratedly gnawing at the exact same idea ("Monkey in the Middle") and decided to collaborate.

Getting our original idea actually to work in a grid was a struggle. Squeezing a 17-letter marquee answer in a 15x15 grid can make things complicated! We attempted a bunch of variations on the theme concept before hitting on the grid you see here, with its added visual element that we hope makes the puzzle accessible and interesting to new and experienced solvers alike. The theme ultimately covers *a lot* of real estate at 70 squares(?!), and the grid is a bit heavy on 3-letter entries and black squares, but we hope the fill is worth any tradeoffs. Props go to Evan for some of the fill's more modern and colloquial entries, but I'm claiming BANANA PEEL, which I *love* for this theme. Thanks for gibbon us a chance!

I post puzzles these days at GridProQuo.blogspot.com and @Hero_Complex — some nerdier themes, a couple of funkier concepts, and training to construct a Cryptic Crassword. (You read that correctly.) I've always been a big nerd, but at some point, did I become indie?

Am I cool now?!

EVAN: David was always cool! And thanks again to Andy for organizing the meeting that made this collaboration possible.

For a different take on this idea, try Ben Tausig's "Swingers," available for purchase at the American Values Club crossword website. (Or, skip to the puzzle review at Crossword Fiend.)

Even with a basic idea and set of theme entries in hand, this grid was a beast to develop. Fortunately, one late night I realized that we could incorporate the evocative 17-letter phrase — arc and all — utilizing mirror symmetry within the standard rotationally symmetric grid. That was the key to freeing up the grid enough to make things clean and sparkly. I fired off an excited email to David at 4:15 a.m. with the breakthrough.

EVAN: This puzzle started with the title. My first idea for a theme entry was "ALL ABOUT THAT BUS" — which would be quite the Meghan Trainor song — though for at least two years this idea sat on the shelf. Bringing in Caitlin, whose work I really respect, helped motivate the project forward. She was responsible for getting the grid laid out just right for optimal fill.

My favorite clues of ours that made the cut were the timely 1-Down (MAYA), 30-Down ("SAY HI!)", 59-Across (UFO), and 84-Down (DIMS; I'm a glutton for pun-ishment). Props to Will & Co. for 35-Down (OLYMPUS)!

CAITLIN: Credit where credit is due — the title/theme idea for this puzzle was all Evan's. And props to him for also making a google spreadsheet for brainstorming theme entries and clues (which is way more organized than I could ever hope to be). Brainstorming, gridding, and cluing was a truly collaborative effort involving many, many emails and several video chats. It was fun to make and I hope it is fun to solve!

Constructing early-week crosswords is fun. It can be tricky to find straightforward concepts that haven't been explored; this is one of a handful of progression puzzles I was pleased to be able to create. I hope you got a "rush" from solving it! (P.S. Did you notice the little bonuses in the first and last across entries?)

To any crossword constructors — especially newcomers — who have a puzzle to submit to the New York Times, but are out of stamps, are immunocompromised, or just not wanting to risk a non-essential trip to the post office, I'm happy to print and mail in your puzzles for you. I have a postal scale, I have envelopes, and I have lifetimes worth of stamps, so please feel free to get in contact with me. Contact me via Instagram (@thepostlandia) or Twitter (@evanpostlandia).

Definitely follow my Instagram if you want to see hundreds and hundreds of post offices from across America! I've been to 10,000 of them. That's not a typo. I also sometimes post photos of cats. The world can never have enough photos of cats.

This puzzle is dedicated to Andy Richter. Why? It's got nothing at all to do with the theme, that he super-kicked butt on "Celebrity Jeopardy!," or that I just saw "Elf" for the first time two weeks ago. It's funny how things work out sometimes...

Constructing crosswords can feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole: get one corner just the way you like it, and it constrains how well you're able to fill another part of the grid. Crossword construction is a complex web of interconnected trade-offs. And this grid was surprisingly difficult to fill.

In fact, in my first submission of this puzzle, I was careless enough not to notice that I'd included both "opener" and "open-toed." Oy. When Will & Co. remanded it with this observation, it wreaked havoc: Butterfly Effect incarnate. To replace one word, I had to gut everything. Fortunately, between the time I first constructed this puzzle and its revision, I'd added a new entry to my word list: 11-Down.

Right about the time I submitted this idea (a year and a half ago), my first NYT crossword appeared. One of the entries in that puzzle was PANINI. Andy Richter was overseas, and but took the time to tweet an (accurate) observation (see right).

Vowing revenge, I added TEAM COCO to my word list. You can't avoid it if you watch TBS at all; how had it never appeared in a puzzle? I knew THAT would get his attention, at which point my cruciverbal vengeance would be complete. It turns out that one entry rescued the upper-right corner, and so I credit Andy Richter for this puzzle's current form. BWAHAHA! Now we're even.

I was so thrilled that this puzzle was accepted. It was one of my very first puzzle ideas, and it finally came to fruition last year. I wanted the theme to remain a mystery until the end, so straightforward entries like OOPSIE-DAISY and AXL ROSE were off the table. My only regret was that I couldn't include REINCARNATION.

Constructing this was a bit trickier than it might seem. The puzzle's layout was largely forced by the 11-letter revealer (LATE BLOOMER) and grid-spanning entries. Unfortunately, this meant lots of short (three-letter) entries, which aren't generally exciting for the solver. That said, I was pleased to be able to include stacks of longer down entries in the NE/SW corners.

I want to draw your attention to 23-Down. You might find this an unusual choice of clues to highlight, but I want to discuss ALI. It's one of those generally uneventful three-letter entries referred to above, and there are just so many ways to clue the name — most revolving around fictional characters and pugilists. I'm glad that the hilarious Ali Wong gets her first Daily New York Times crossword shout-out here. I try to be mindful of broadening the cross-section of accomplished people featured in clues, and I look forward to seeing more references to newer names like Mahershala Ali, Ali Krieger, Ali Stroker, and Ali Velshi in future crosswords.

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

This puzzle is a par 4. I wanted it to have a narrative progression when all was said and done, so I hope you enjoyed the order of the entries!

Looking back, some of the fill is a little less clean than I might hope to include if I wrote the puzzle today, but such can be the nature of a six-theme entry beast. I hope some of the mid-to-longer answers appealed to you. Now, I am not a person who knows a lot about pop music at all, so the inclusion of two modern musical performers (CARDI B and AVICII) surprised even me at the time…

This puzzle was written in May 2018. When I discovered that AVICII worked in the lower-left, I felt that I had to include him; the performer had taken his own life the month before at the age of 28. Here's a link to "Wake Me Up," the song referenced in the clue; and "Heaven," a beautiful tribute video created by some of his long-time collaborators. I've always been a fan of classical music foremost, but I enjoy Avicii's work. If you had difficulty with his name (hopefully all the crossings were fair; apologies for UVEA or SNOCAT if they weren't), I hope it was worth the introduction.

The inspiration for this puzzle was this Peter Wentz themeless from 2013. I solved that at a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina while I was on the road, photographing post offices across the Southeast. (Seriously—I have a blog, an Instagram of post offices, the whole shebang.) Peter's grids are always great, but this one really fascinated me: how the Z occupied such a position of prominence in two awesome entries; the clean stagger-stack of 13s; and that VW-/AAA-/NBA- stack in the southeast. I started jotting down any 13-letter phrases I encountered, and tried for years in vain to create a satisfying grid with similar topography. Nearly five years later, and with the benefit of some... let's call it "competence," this puzzle was complete.

My aim was to deliver three fun 13-letter entries that were not only Shortz-era debuts, but which also formed some silly little narrative if you take a step back. (See also: 36-/33-Down. That corner was actually remanded to me, and this iteration of fill is much nicer; thank you, Will.)

This grid is somewhat segmented, and that helped me create the rest of the puzzle. I tried to maximize the count of fresh entries, and my inner nerd led me to pack the corners full of sci-tech goodness.

I don't know how many other constructors have this tendency to constantly revisit or second-guess their completed work (for you classical music buffs, I'm more of a Mahler than a Shostakovich), but it still slightly gnaws at me that there are a bunch of plural entries crossing the central stack. Feels a bit inelegant. Alas!

Glad to be back! The inspiration for this puzzle was a concept I very much enjoyed by Andrew Reynolds. I remember wondering how in the world he extracted those theme answers! A brute force approach would require testing 5,040 permutation strings of seven letters against a word list, so I figured a bit of skillful coding was involved. "Change the world" struck me as an interesting concept with lots of options to consider, and I hope this interpretation of the phrase does it reasonable justice.

I took a unique approach for finding potential theme answers, involving Excel, that didn't involve real coding expertise. I tested out every planet, sans Mars, and not all were suited for the job. (Jupiter yielded nothing, Uranus only "PURSUANT," and Neptune merely "ANTEPENULTIMATE"!) The most fun entry I didn't use: "MERCY RULE" for Mercury! Hopefully, this set of theme answers is satisfying.

Looking back, if I were to write the puzzle again, I might try to make the grid a bit less segmented (increase the "flow"), clean up a couple of bits of fill (i.e., TEHEE and LAIN), and add a couple of jazzier long answers. My favorite corner here is the SW. Hope you enjoyed!

Astute observers will note that this is very similar to my debut offering from July. I have other ideas, I swear! My future offerings differ in core concept and thematic density. That said, I've had this idea for some time… Everyone's got an inner nerd! I've got, like, six of them.

You know how they say starlight is a glimpse into the past? Sunlight takes eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the Sun to Earth, so sunlight we witness at 10:00 AM is a look at stellar reactions that occurred at 9:52. Telescopes help us witness the universe as it evolved millions — even billions — of years ago. Since I submitted this puzzle, I've been gaining experience and evolving as a constructor. It's been only a year, but it feels like a lifetime ago. You, dear solver, are looking at cruciverbal starlight.

Were I to write the puzzle today I would do things a bit differently. I would likely remove two of the entries: DESIGNER DRUG, which I first heard about as a promising potential cancer treatment (but which also has an unfortunate meaning); and SCREENER DVDS, which is a bit of an outlier in terms of familiarity. I'd look to replace those two entries with just one in the middle row, leaving more opportunity for "bonus fill" and cleaning up suboptimal entries like SSN, TOV, and PLO in the process.

It took me a minute to realize, but that lower-right corner isn't mine! My submission had:

- P P P
N E R D
P R O F
R U M S

I suspect it was the PPP/PDFS crossing that was deemed unfriendly for Monday solvers. I dig classical music, but if you don't then PPP could prove difficult. There is a myriad of fill possibilities for the corner... GDAY is fun, but I would not opt for NAS/ALIA myself. It's interesting to see what happens behind the crossword scenes!

Props to the NYT crew for the fresh clue for (Idris) ELBA!

In the crossword world, low-hanging thematic fruit can be hard to come by. This makes building ‘freestyle' puzzles an attractive proposition for many a budding constructor.

Development of this puzzle began with the lower-right corner. My goal was to stack three jazzy, new, and perhaps even quasi-related entries (see: Matt Ginsberg)—with minimal to no fill compromises. That corner, which I filled manually back in 2015, established the grid's block pattern. The puzzle's layout is comparatively straightforward from a constructor's perspective because it is relatively segmented. This means you can start building out from any corner, and you likely won't need to tear out your work later on.

I would revisit and complete the grid two years later. The awesome chain sweetgreen introduced me to the KALE CAESAR salad; once I discovered it on other menus, I figured it was worth a cruciverbal shot. I hope that entry was, at a minimum, inferable/worth a chuckle! I was thrilled to be able to incorporate BIG PHARMA, PERP WALK, PH TEST, and "BWAHAHA!!!" My one real fill regret is HAYS, though today I might replace LUSTS FOR as well.

I've always enjoyed wordplay, and I attempted to clue up this late-week puzzle with a hefty serving of linguistic gymnastics. In the end, most of my submitted clues didn't make the cut. Will & Co. came up with great clues for 1-A and 44-D; you can blame me for 39-D. For those gluttons for pun-ishment, here were a handful of my sneakier concoctions:

10-D: One might accompany a charge

26-D: Lightly push back?

41-A: Sore spots?

51-D: Veiled remarks?

As with many constructors, this marks the fulfillment of a long-time dream. I've always loved playing with words, and back in middle school I would eagerly await Will Shortz's next Sunday Puzzle challenge, tuning in to NPR at exactly 10:41 A.M. (But who's counting?) In college I was inspired by the work of Dustin Foley, who wrote a daily puzzle comic strip. Back then I was filling 15x15 grids printed from Microsoft Word, and the results weren't particularly encouraging. (To wit: Once I tried asking a crush out via crossword on Valentine's Day. It went unsolved.) Puzzling at Brown really took off soon after I graduated, and I vowed that one day I would join the ranks of Shortz-certified Brunonian cruciverbalists. [Insert training montage here.]

I'm a huge road trip enthusiast, and over time I've come to realize the importance of certain life skills… like navigating the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger. (Psst… think Will would allow "Animal Style" in a grid?) I first considered a SECRET MENU puzzle in 2014, lamenting that the only decent phrase I could find a secret "menu" in was PRIME NUMBER. Years later, "IT'S A SECRET" struck me as a good revealer, leading to this puzzle.

The veritable cornucopia of potential thematic material led to high ambitions and an inevitable Grid Reckoning. It eventually led me to attempt a theme answer stack à la Patrick Berry, though the challenge left this mere mortal with the unfortunate TELNET and cheater squares at 6- and 65-Across. Considering that every down answer intersects between one and three theme entries, I was pleased to keep the damage fairly contained. (I know, ID EST can be a bit of a party pooper… though initially he's great.) Hopefully MARKUP LANGUAGE—the ‘ML' of ‘HTML'—isn't too outré for a Monday puzzle. My favorite find was WHAT A GENTLEMAN, a comment I've heard in the wild! SHOPPER, à la GRASSHOPPER, was the coolest possibility I didn't incorporate.

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle! I'd like to thank Jeff Chen, who has a) put up with me for years as I've learned the ropes and peppered him with random crossword ideas; and b) made great resources available for budding constructors everywhere.