Jakob Weisblat author page

I'm excited to be making my solo NYT debut after a puzzle last year with my cousin Gabi Friedman.

This puzzle idea started as a Sunday puzzle where all the numbers 11, 22, 33, etc. appeared in the grid — I forget what the revealer was going to be — but I ended up with far more 99s than anything else, and so it turned into this. I think I had the idea for that puzzle after listening to the bows music, 99 Luftballons, over and over again each rehearsal for a play, Berlin, that I was doing lighting design for.

I initially imagined this as a Tuesday puzzle, but my clues are always harder than I think they are, so Wednesday is a good fit. I constructed this puzzle over two years ago, but it's been sitting in the queue for a while so that it could be published on a 9/9 with the appropriate difficulty.

I haven't been making many crosswords lately, as my team is writing the MIT Mystery Hunt this year, but hopefully, I'll get back on it once we've run our hunt in January.

GABI: I'm a senior at UChicago, majoring in Chemistry. I write and help edit crosswords for my student newspaper, The Maroon, which is where all of my puzzles have been published to date. I really appreciate this fantastic 22nd birthday (11/11) present from the NYT editing team! Very well scheduled.

JAKOB: I'm a software maker by day and a puzzle maker by night. When I'm not constructing crosswords, I write puzzles for Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an online puzzlehunt that runs each year around Pi Day. Check out some of our puzzles; one I co-wrote is even A Crossword!

Fun fact — we're first cousins. After Gabi started writing crosswords last year, Jakob was at our great uncle's birthday party with Gabi's parents and mentioned over dinner that he'd recently started as well. The rest is history! This was our very first collaboration, which we finished and submitted in May. The theme idea was initially Gabi's, but Jakob helped refine and flesh it out. We brainstormed theme fill together and worked on the grid over VIDEOCHAT. We split the clues by direction and then revised together.

Clues that didn't make the cut… "Alarming comment from the navigator" for UH OH, "What tourists may do at the National Mall?" for BUY AMERICAN; and "New frontier for Grandma, perhaps" for VIDEOCHAT.

Some thank yous: to the editing team for cleaning up our clues and to our test solvers for their useful feedback and copy-editing.

From Gabi: To the members of the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Dictionary Facebook group for the many resources shared, to my fellow Maroon crossword writers for listening to my freakouts about getting emails from Will Shortz and to my mom, who inspired me to start doing the NYT puzzle in the first place.

From Jakob: To my GPH teammates for endlessly test solving my crossword puzzles, and to Sam Trabucco for offering feedback on so many theme ideas.