Jake Halperin author page

I hope solvers find this theme as delightful as I did when I was first lucky enough to stumble upon it. I'm also happy with the grid, for which I owe a debt of gratitude to the editorial team for their insistence.

We did have an interesting difference of opinions on the BEGATHON slot. They would have preferred an entry like TOGETHER, which could lend itself to various clever cluing angles, whereas BEGATHON kind of only works with a clue that spells it out. I opted for the fresh, snazzy fill, maybe because I still have a way to go before I reach the master cluing ability that the NYT editors are so famous for.

Before rolling this puzzle out to the general public, I tried it out on a couple of friends serving as my ANDES RODENTS.

This puzzle was accepted about a year ago, and was probably constructed about a year prior to that. I had to redo the grid on account of a large amount of undesirable short fill. It was a bit of a struggle before I landed on something satisfactory. The themer lengths are convenient enough, but I guess their somewhat scrabbly letters made for less flexibility than one might expect.

It's kind of surprising (at least to layperson like me) how many different words there are for where you park a boat. Worked out well for this puzzle, though.

The idea for this theme came to me around the time the Netflix series "13 Reasons Why" came out. To symmetrically match that answer, my original revealer was LUCKYBREAKS, clued as [Strokes of good fortune ... and a sarcastic hint to three of this puzzle's across answers]. But the sarcastic angle didn't land well, and I actually felt that replacing 13 REASONS WHY with FRIDAY THE 13TH gave the theme some added tightness, being all CINEMAtic (though ultimately not all clued as such).

I have a feeling Mitch Hedberg would have appreciated this one.

I came up with this theme idea quite a while back. One of the things I liked about it was that the answer ALI ET ALII seemed to take otherwise trite crossword glue and have some fun with it. I remember being a little concerned that the wordplay in each of the examples wasn't rigorously consistent, but luckily it struck a chord with the NYT editorial team.

I was asked to remove a couple of problem entries in my original grid, but as it turned out, that meant redoing it entirely. Grids with 9-letter slots in the middle row can be notoriously troublesome to work with.

A special shoutout to Linux geeks today comes in the form of CURL and AWK.

There have been puzzles where the idea for the theme came to me first, and I later went looking for a revealer, but the opposite order is probably more common for me, and if memory serves, today's theme is an example of the latter. The theme is rather constrained — in that there isn't an abundance of short irregular verbs like these, nor a great many phrases that contain each pair — which is basically a good thing.

My original submission had BIOMUSICAL (clued as [Hamilton, e.g.]) in the ON YOUR MARK slot, and I was a bit disappointed when I was asked to replace it (THEN), but I have to admit I'm happy with the revision (NOW).

This puzzle was accepted just over a year ago. It was the first time the NYT accepted a puzzle of mine as is, without asking for a revision. However, since I read a while ago that the constructor Joe DiPietro despises partials and the letter S in the lower right corner I avoid those things when I can, so it gives me a bit of discomfort to look at this grid, which has both. I've heard from both coders and composers/arrangers that looking at their earlier work has often triggered mild disgust. I suppose this can be seen as an encouraging sign of progress.

My original clue for TO PUT IT MILDLY invoked a shampooist.

My original theme set had two CON*PRO* phrases and two PRO*CON*, which for some reason felt like the "natural" or "balanced" choice to me, and PROS AND CONS was broken up into three slots along the middle row. However, the editors pointed out that PROXY CONFLICT was of questionable idiomaticity, and as one might guess, that grid had poorer fill and very little to nothing in the way of long bonus entries. (We're talking 67 theme squares compared to 53). They suggested the current lineup, adding CONCLUSIVE PROOF, as well as the revealer placement.

I'm glad I was able to work in a few fun long downs, and it's nice to debut SANSA not long after the GOT finale. I can sort of see how her name has the potential to eventually become serious crosswordese, with those friendly letters.

FLIGHT RISK was the seed for this here theme of travel,
From which the other entries did finally unravel.
Among the better candidates that never saw the light of day
Are MARINE LIFE, LIFE COACHING, and LIFE FINDS A WAY.
Finding phrases with names of board games is anything but easy;
How many can you think of that use the word Parcheesi?

Thanks to Will and Joel for looking at a couple of revisions. Special thanks to Tom Yuval for the feedback and support.