Jonathan M. Kaye author page

JON: I was stumped trying to find a good revealer answer for this J-HOOK theme. I briefly considered JAY HOOK, the pitcher who gave the New York Mets their first franchise win in 1962, but decided that would be too obscure.

Then I remembered a clever Monday NYT puzzle by William I. Johnston from 9/9/2002: the theme involved the letter L, and all of the black squares were arranged in L shapes. What if I did a similar thing for the letter J, and used the "grid art" as the revealer?

To make that concept work with my theme answers, I had to expand the grid to 16x15. But I found the resulting grid very difficult to fill, so Will and Joel suggested the possibility of my bringing in Jeff Chen as a co-constructor. As it happens, I had been looking for an opportunity to collaborate with Jeff, and I jumped at the chance. Jeff was very receptive and a pleasure to work with, and we had a fun back-and-forth deciding on the remaining fill and then brainstorming on the clues.

In case anyone is wondering, the fact that we both have "J" names is just a happy coincidence.

Enjoy!

JEFF: I had been admiring the clever ideas in Jon's previous puzzles, so it was a pleasure to hear from him, asking if I could help with a puzzle grid after several back and forths with Will. Even better, I really liked his idea of Js representing hooks — another of Jon's neat concepts that stick to "one letter per square." It's so hard to innovate while adhering to that convention, but Jon's done it so many times.

Really fun to work with a member of the J club! (I work with Jim Horne and am married to Jill Denny.)

I'm pleased with how all aspects of this puzzle came together. My original concept was to simply divide the "B" into DD, but single-letter splits have been done before in the NYT crossword, and I wondered if there might be two letters that could be split together. I was fortunate to find that a divided "BY" would work nicely, including as part of a spot-on revealer, which in turn could be neatly clued as ÷.

The 12 theme entries (the four "BY" words and the eight that cross them at the divided "B" or "Y") use 75 squares, which could have led to a very tight grid — but with some effort I managed to keep it relatively open, with only 33 blocks.

At first I wanted the "BY" words to be more challenging, but Will and Joel asked me to change the toughest one in my submission: PRESBYOPIC. They felt a fairly obscure theme answer would throw many solvers, as there was already a difficult gimmick. I can see their point (even without my presbyopic reading glasses!) and I agree that the final puzzle is better without it.

I came up with the ATARI clue with Will in mind, as he's known to be an avid player of table tennis. I had to double-check to be sure that my memory was correct: Pong's graphics were so primitive that the ball actually was square.

Enjoy!

What a thrill to have today's New York Times crossword run under my byline, and to have my debut on a Thursday!

Will and Joel reacted to my submission with a "wow" on May 4, accepted my final grid on May 9, and apparently bumped the finished puzzle up in the queue. I'm grateful to them for their willingness to work with a novice constructor, their suggestion that I revise the grid with cleaner fill, and their expert edits to the clues. I hope solvers enjoy this puzzle and its unusual theme.

In developing the "TOP OFF" effect, I found only seven letters that could be "hidden" in a way that looked natural to me: D, I, J, L, O, U, V. I used these to make a list of about 20 words that might be good candidates, and settled on DUD, IDOL, OVOID, and VIVID after finding that each had a simple definition that could span the grid. (In retrospect, I realize that I overlooked some nice J words in making my list, and could have used the clue J0B8 B8J8 (or B8J8 by itself) with the answer MARTIAL ARTS SITE.)

In cognitive psychology, there's a concept called "functional fixedness" that may explain the difficulty in "seeing" the four words hidden in plain sight: we have a mental bias for associating a tool only with its most common function. We tend to see letters and numbers only as representations of sounds and amounts. Their shapes are arbitrary and used only for recognition, and not as possible hiding places for other information.

A bit about me: I live in the AU Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with my wife, son, and dog. For the last 11 years I've been privileged to serve as a Senior Counsel (in house attorney) for the American Red Cross.