Finn Vigeland author page

Happy Sunday! We're so excited to be sharing our first co-byline in the NYT Magazine. The initial idea for this theme came to Matthew almost three years ago, and we enjoyed taking our time getting the puzzle into its final form.

A good chunk of the work came during a long Zoom session last summer, where we decided at the last minute to stretch the first and last theme entries to 21 letters each. This upped our idea to a whopping 128 theme squares — every down entry in the puzzle except for two (45-Down and 79-Down) crosses at least one themer! — but we think these entries were worth the extra constraint. We found that opening up those northwest and southeast corners and allowing for longer down entries actually made the fill process easier.

We hope you enjoy the puzzle and find the hidden meta answer! If this inspires you to watch a movie this week, Matthew recommends Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and Finn recommends, in the spirit of Pride, And Then We Danced (2019).

Great to have my 20th crossword in the Times only two weeks after my last one! Arguably, this puzzle's revealer applies in three different senses (its surface meaning, the switch of the directional word in the film title, and the poor film direction described in the clues). Revealers typically only have a double meaning, so that's a fun little bonus I like about this puzzle.

I'm getting really into crosswords whose clues support and elevate the punniness or trickery of the theme entries. (For instance, this old JASA puzzle I developed with our class and my co-teacher Natan Last — the rhyming couplet clue idea was all Natan's, so I'm not patting myself on the back!)

Shoutout to regular New York Times crossword solver Rian Johnson, who most certainly did not misdirect "Knives Out," one of my favorite movies of the last decade! Trying to figure out a way to get that title in the grid was the seed for this theme.

When I sit down to brainstorm a Sunday theme, I often try to think of a title that I can pun on and spin into a full-sized theme concept, which is how this puzzle came to be. Even though Sundays can be a beast to construct and, occasionally, a chore to solve, I love playing with a larger canvas. And it's certainly a lot easier to do this row-stretching effect in the big grid — and not have the fill be constrained.

I hope newer solvers enjoyed the a-ha moment. Even if you clocked what was going on here early, I hope it still took some guessing to determine what "order" was being made "tall." I'm proud of a lot of stuff in this puzzle: including one of my favorite artists (17-Across), introducing 111-Across to crossworld (great clue from the Times editing team here), and most especially, packing in that 109-/110-Down combo.

I'd be down to meet in a cat café and collab on a puzzle with Sia, J Lo, and AOC if any of them are listening!

The seed for this puzzle (and its original title) was "Sunrise, Sunset"—with the eastern theme entires featuring a rising S-U-N, and the western ones featuring a setting S-U-N. It was important to me that none of these entires—whether the across ones or the down answers containing SUN—use that letter string to mean the word "sun." This was a bit harder than expected! You may notice that I broke a fairly rigid crossword rule in that the theme entries are not symmetrically placed, but it would have been near impossible to do so, given that they each span several rows. I did try to put them in approximately symmetrical locations, for consistency's sake.

Because the themers take up a lot of real estate in both across and down directions, filling this grid was a beast. This is the third draft I submitted, and while I wish there were a bit more room for the grid to breathe, I think it's free of dreck (REE being the only real gross entry, IMO). Phrases like SUNK COST, PROM DATES, REAL TALK, NERF WAR, and MIC DROP are fun bonus fill. I tried for way too long to get YASQUEEN at 11D (it really almost worked for a long time) but finally let it go when it came at the expense of too much bad fill).

I'm quite happy that my original clue on I SEE IT made it through; it feels much more in-the-language than previous methods of cluing that entry (variations of [Response to "Look over there!"]). In general, I like to make my puzzles contemporary and conversational, which I think I've accomplished here.

Lastly, I'm honored to have a puzzle run on the Sunday of ACPT for the second time! It's a pretty cool thing to see 600+ of the most avid crossword solvers in the world digging into your puzzle. See you in Stamford!

Go big or go home, right? For my first published triple-stack, I added an extra column to accommodate my long-time idol (and Twitter follower!) at 29-Across. I think he's worth it. Lin, I think your way with words would translate well to puzzle construction—let me know if you're interested!

I'm a bit sad to see the neutered clues on ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE—originally [Literary trope that's getting revived?]—and MLB DRAFT—[Occasion to cover one's bases, familiarly?]. I write a lot of themelesses for fun but often leave them sitting in my drafts folder without cluing them, so I guess I'm still getting used to Will's style on late-week puzzles. I avoid partial phrases in my puzzles unless there's really no other option, so I was disappointed that 11-Across's clue change caused it to be reparsed from the Latin AMO to the two-word A MO. Other than these quibbles, I'm quite pleased with the final version of this puzzle, which underwent several drafts over the last few years. Redoing themelesses until you finally get that golden fill is such a satisfying exercise, so I'm glad I persisted on this one.

Lastly, I'm over the moon that this puzzle is coincidentally being published the same day as the Boston launch event for Down and Across, the debut novel of one of my best friends, Arvin Ahmadi. Arvin began writing the book when we were college roommates, and I'm honored to have served as a bit of a puzzle consultant on it (and reader of several drafts). It's a great coming-of-age story with complex, diverse characters that will assuredly appeal to puzzle fans of all ages.

FINN AND NATAN: We're having a lot of fun at the JASA class by making types of puzzles as yet untried by the group, and someone in the class was hungry for a themeless with chunky, stacking corners. We were tickled by the SHE LOVES ME / HE'S A KEEPER combination, and spent a lot of time tinkering with the lower left, which is our favorite section. Our last puzzle in May debuted ARREST HIM; we're pleased to bring the entry back to the Times a second time.

It's tough to write a themeless in the first place, let alone as a group, since you want to make sure you've really exhausted every possibility to ensure the cleanest possible grid. The class was very patient as we all tested and retested new fill in the corners. If we recall correctly, the bottom right had a few other types of RACEs and LINEs at some point in time.

At this point, the JASA folks who make these puzzles are pros at all the aspects of construction, but the group clearly has a knack for clever cluing. [Sea as in Cannes] for MER and [Celebration after a run?] for CAST PARTY are among our favorites the class came up with. Will, Joel, and team did a lovely job neatening our clues, which tend to be overlong (Natan's fault) and overflowing, happily, with puns and alliteration (the class's!). A lesson in the original clue for PANIC BAR: [Don't push it!]

Hope you enjoy!

Finn kicked off the generation of this theme by finding the phrase BASELINE VASELINE, which we all thought was evocative of some umpish impishness. Natan always likes adding layers of a theme to the clues, and the two of us and the class sat together in front of a long list of eye rhymes, composing absurd couplets. We're particularly fond of the silly clues for KOSHER NOSHER and MASSAGE PASSAGE, both group efforts. We were pleased to have enough options to be able to cross themers in the SW and NE corners.

Hopefully the fill's enjoyable, too; we were happy to get some nice longer answers in there, and since we like modern language, Natan (having been charged with reworking a corner with some iffy answers) is glad to see SWOLE has kept its place on the team.

One bright memory of this puzzle is the Sunday we spent working on it in Stamford, the weekend of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Most of the JASA students attend the tournament, so we huddled around a laptop in the lobby, tinkering with the grid. It looks a lot different than it did then; hopefully any of the tournamentgoers who flitted by to guess the theme or offer a new entry have long forgotten, and so this is a brand new puzzle for them.

FINN: After Natan was abroad for a semester, I had the good fortune of taking over the reins at J.A.S.A. (the Jewish Association Serving the Aging). When Natan returned, we decided to co-teach the class, and we have a blast every Sunday with our amazing students. It really doesn't feel like teaching but more a seamless collaboration between eight people. There are a lot of laughs as we try out boundary-pushing entries or draft clues we know Will would never accept. I'm pretty sure this concept originated when we were stuck on brainstorming themes, and I just drew a circle on the chalkboard, hoping it would lead somewhere. For no particular reason, I drew more circles, and a theme was born.

NATAN: Co-teaching the JASA class with Finn is pretty lovely, and instructive besides. I'd never spelled nor smelled PATCHOULI, but love its letters. I did a quick run-through of modern dating as we discussed "ARE You The One?", a matchmaking reality show my friends and I love for honestly no good reason. As a class, we agree that bonus theme material is always great to shoehorn in provided it doesn't look too forced, and I think all the extra slots we found made the final cut. The class is a lot cleverer than I am; our first drafts at cluing often read like cryptics (mine read like TV Guide), so I'm glad to see a lot the double clues and references shine through, even on a Wednesday. Hope you like it!

This is my first add-a-letter-and-create-a-wacky-phrase puzzle in the Times, and my 10th Times puzzle overall. Considering my penchant for puns, I'm surprised it took this long! DRWHOSYOURDADDY is definitely my favorite themer. (DRWHOSONFIRST was another contender for the Dr. Who entry, but this one fit better... and made me laugh more.)

Sundays can be a slog to solve sometimes, but they are certainly a lot of fun to construct given the larger canvas to play with. I really enjoyed fitting in entries like SUPERBOWLMVP (so many consonants!), SETHROGEN, SANFRANCISCO, FRATBROS, HUGITOUT, and OHBOOHOO, as well as introducing shorter stuff like JDATE and JLAW (and who doesn't love those J's?).

Pleased that Will and Joel kept probably 90% of my clues. I've always preferred gridwork to cluing, so it's a nice affirmation to see that I'm getting more on track with variety, difficulty and length of clues.

The seed for this puzzle came when I was filling a different puzzle and two -GATE words ended up crossing in a corner. I thought that inelegant and decided to take out NAVIGATE. But I jokingly thought to myself, "I wonder if I could clue that as ["Avatar" scandal?]." And thus a theme was born. As the former managing editor of my college newspaper, I like to imagine two copy editors squabbling over whether or not to strike out a word. I can totally picture us Speccies dubbing that "The Great Dele-gate of 2016" or something.

I had targeted this puzzle for a Wednesday, so Will and Joel toned down the difficulty of the clues ever so slightly. Some clues left on the cutting room floor include ["The price we pay for love," per Queen Elizabeth II] for GRIEF and [Animal form of Harry Potter's Patronus] for STAG. My original adjacent clues for AWAKE and TIRED were, I think, too cute by half: [Pre-coffee, technically] and [Pre-coffee, alas]. But really, I'm just pleased they kept my original clue for MUSICAL: ["Hamilton," e.g.].

JOEL: I take the train from New York City out to Will's house in Pleasantville each day, so I'm very familiar with the "Watch the Gap" warning on every platform. This theme sprung from the realization that the "The Gap" doubled as a store. For a while, though, I couldn't get a full symmetrical set, so this sat around in my half-baked ideas notebook. When I pitched it to Finn, he came back with some great feedback about my existing examples and some new ones we might try. SUBWAY FARE was one of his, and I particularly like how both words change meaning in that one. Really elegant. Anyway, Finn was a great collaborator — hopefully this is the first of many from us!

FINN: It was a ton of fun to collaborate with Joel on this puzzle. Once we placed the theme answers and decided on a grid design that looked like it would work, it was surprisingly easy to split the grid in two. We only had to pre-determine two squares (the B at the end of CASHCAB and the E at the start of ENGRAVE) in order to be able to fill each half without the other one being there, since every other connecting entry between the two sides was a themer. I filled the left half and Joel took the right, and then I clued the acrosses and he clued the downs. Editing each other's work was a great exercise in understanding the other's style. To constructors looking to change things up: I highly recommend collaborating with a friend!

The Sound of Music is, as it is for so many people, one of my most treasured movies. It never fails to put me in a good mood. It was such a staple of my childhood that I know the script—lyrics AND dialogue—by heart. So, for the many hours singing along to 31-Across that this movie gave me, I am thrilled to give back to it in the most minuscule of ways by recognizing, in the Times crossword, the 50th anniversary of one of the highest-grossing and most beloved films of all time.

Discovering that The Sound of Music was a grid-spanning 15 letters long was one of my earliest revelations as a constructor. Indeed, this puzzle started as a daily-sized 15x15 in 2009. To get to the final product you see today, it took five years of on-and-off construction, a few changes in grid dimension, and ditching several high-concept meta themes (for a while, the children's names were all hidden in the grid in the column number corresponding to their ages ... yeah, I got really deep into this).

Ultimately, I kept it as a straightforward anniversary puzzle with the twist of the do-re-mi rebus. That concept has been done before and done well, but I'm glad that Will agreed it merited an encore performance this time. I hope this puzzle makes you think of some of your favorite things!

Unsurprisingly, the "Frozen" song was the seed here. I was brainstorming contemporary entries that might span a 21x grid, and my disappointment at finding it was three letters too long turned to opportunity when I decided just to make the extra MAN the theme. (This thought process happened on a canoe trip, so my original title was "Man Overboard.") Although five themers is a bit below average for a Times Sunday puzzle, the corresponding down answers containing "MAN" added a lot of constraints, especially as I tried to use the string M-A-N in contexts not meaning "man."

The SE corner was a bear to fill, and when Will accepted the puzzle he graciously gave me the chance to re-fill and re-clue it — twice! (Once on my own, a second time with an assist from Frank Longo, who found ALE GLASS as the silver bullet that allowed a clean escape from that corner.) I was surprised Will nixed my original NEYMAR at 105D, but he OK'd TALISA Stark, who's not even in the books, so go figure!

I'm pleased to be able to clue JACOBS as my idol Jane for the first time in the Times, and to debut BRUNCH for the first time since the Farrar era. Enjoy!

I'm excited to have my first freestyle puzzle published, especially since over the last year, I've found them to be my favorite type of puzzle to construct. That realization, however, has been a double-edged sword, as the more I make freestyles — and the more I solve whistle-clean puzzles constructed by so many of my peers, publishing in the Times or independently — the higher I raise my own personal bar. Now, at least in a themeless, if a corner needs a TRA or an ARA to work, I need to rebuild that corner. This puzzle aimed to maximize the flashy stuff, so of course I love FRESH START, SOCIAL LIFE, WINE COOLER, LENA DUNHAM, and, in particular, HUMBLEBRAG, for which I know Will needed some convincing. But if I were making this again, I probably wouldn't stack TELE over ELEA, and you'd not be likely to encounter ENOL or SWF.

Regardless, it's great to have a published freestyle to my name, and I'm grateful to Will for publishing a puzzle of mine now for the second time on the day of a tournament — September 19 is the Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which, six years ago, was the first crossword tournament I ever went to. (Back then, I won the junior division title… although by default, as there were no other contestants under 25. I'm happy to say there's a lot more competition now!)

This one was a long time in the making, largely because each theme answer actually consisted of two interlocking grid entries. Fourteen across theme answers is one thing to deal with, but having half across and half down was another. And while the across answers are symmetrically placed, the WATER/H2O square is not, which led to tough corners like the NE, where you have ELEVENTH HOUR and MOUTHHOLE separated by just one entry. Discovering that the "Snow White" song was spelled "HEIGH HO" was a real boon — that answer kept moving around to wherever I needed it the most.

This puzzle was published on the last day of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and Will and co. were kind enough to have hard copies of it lying around, since so many solvers, quarantined in the ballroom at the Brooklyn Marriott, were without their laptops or a copy of the dead-tree paper. It was sort of always a fantasy I had when I started constructing crosswords that I'd be on the subway on a day I had a puzzle in the Times, I'd see someone solving it, and, unable to control my excitement, I'd lean over to provide a hint (trying not to sound like a complete tool, of course). Well, that dream more than came true as I witnessed dozens of people solving it during tournament down time. Many came over to pay their compliments in person. A real boost to my ego!

I dreamed this foul-weather puzzle up on a beautiful sunny day. The goal was to think of 21-letter phrases that hadn't before appeared in the Times, and the revealer at 66-Across came to mind pretty quickly. While it was always the idea to have the theme answers go down (and with circles representing raindrops), for some reason, it never crossed my mind to make that revealer go vertically down as well — I was always beholden to the idea that the theme answers should intersect 66-Across.

So, contrary to what Rex Parker wrote in his review, it actually proved very difficult to find theme entries containing cats and dogs, of equal length, and which intersected the central answer at the right moment. As it often is, the weakest of the theme answers (CABLE SITCOMS ... it's not really a real phrase, though I think my clue redeems it) was the first one I came up with, and my favorite themer (BREAKING THE RULES) was the last one in place. Rejected entries include TRAIN ROBBERY (tabby), PROOF OF DELIVERY (poodle), and OBTUSE TRIANGLE (beagle). At one point in time, I also had ANIMAL CRACKER going down the center of the puzzle, clued as something like [Kid's snack ... or what you are when you solve this puzzle?] before I realized that was just a liiiittle too over the top.

Will accepted this puzzle in July 2010 — my first acceptance! — under the condition I get rid of four entries he didn't care for. I eagerly sent off a new version of the grid the next day, and then ... crickets. I knew to expect less-than-speedy responses from Will, but I was hoping an update to a conditional acceptance would merit a quick turnaround time.

Fast forward to October 1, still no response, and the night of the Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which Will hosts in his hometown of Pleasantville, NY. I went up to him to say hi, and he immediately went, "Finn! I still owe you a response, don't I?" At the tournament after-party, which he holds at his house, he took me up to his office, where I saw my puzzle sitting at the top of his pile. He accepted it the next day and it ran in print a mere 18 days later!

As Jim notes below, I was a student at Horace Mann School (58-Across) in Riverdale, NY, when I constructed this puzzle, so that was the seed entry here. And HI MOM was sort of an accidental bonus theme entry.