Max Lauring author page

I'm excited for my NYTXW Thursday debut! First, I'd like to give a big shout out to Loren Muse Smith and Tracy Gray's 2017 puzzle, which I drew inspiration from heavily (standing on the shoulders of giants).

I enjoy puzzles that take advantage of the online solving experience (like this past Sunday's Easter Egg Hunt puzzle on the NYT's xword app that transformed EGG rebuses into images of colorful eggs). So when I thought of this theme, I imagined how cool it'd be for certain black squares to literally eclipse the SUN and then disappear to reveal the SUN rebuses (I'm not an astronomy buff, so I had to constantly look at this image to remember how a solar eclipse actually worked).

I created a list of probably 50+ theme answers, of which many didn't make the cut, including: SAMSUNG GALAXY, EASTER SUNDAY, E PLURIBUS UNUM, MENS UNDERWEAR, LETS UNPACK THAT, and COMES UNDER FIRE. The grid constraints were pretty difficult. I spent days trying to create a grid where the SUN rebuses were scattered randomly — I even created 16x15 and 16x16 versions too — but ultimately found that a 15x15 grid with symmetrical rebus squares yielded much cleaner results.

Even though this is your typical weekday rebus puzzle, I hope solvers still have a pleasant "aha" moment. Thanks to Will Shortz and the editing team for their thorough (and I mean thorough) suggestions that helped improve this puzzle.

We're incredibly excited to be back in the NYT after a short four-year hiatus! We don't remember exactly how we thought of the theme — probably through spitballing and bantering as usual — though the "Charlie Kelly Pepe Silvia" meme comes pretty close to portraying our brainstorming process.

Ben is currently an undergraduate at Yale and Max is an MD/PhD student in NYC. We didn't tell anyone in our family about this puzzle, so it'll be a fun surprise to see their reaction today. This puzzle also serves as a nice juxtaposition to our debut puzzle, as we felt more methodical and confident in our constructing process this time around (and we have lots of room for improvement). We are also happy to be debuting the entry at 13-Down.

As always, thank you to Will Shortz and the puzzle editing team for their advice and insight. Hopefully you'll see our next puzzle a lot sooner than four years from now!

We're excited to be debuting our puzzle in the New York Times! We thought of the idea for this puzzle on a car ride one day over the summer, and when we got home, we came up with as many relevant theme answers as possible. After amassing twenty or so candidates, one-by-one we sifted through all the possible combinations that would yield an adaptable, aesthetically-attractive grid while trying to incorporate as many theme clues as we could. Soon after, we manually filled out the grid, and eight weeks later we heard back from Will Shortz and his team. The editing process with Will Shortz was extremely insightful, and he had a lot of good advice for our first puzzle. We look forward to publishing more creative puzzles soon!

Max Lauring is a senior at Yale University majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. He does research in a lab at the Yale School of Medicine, plays cello in Low Strung (the world's largest all cello rock group), and founded the Yale Turnip, a satirical online publication. Max started doing crosswords in high school for fun but always admired the constructing process of a puzzle.

Benjamin Lauring is a seventeen-year-old senior at Tenafly High School. He has been playing classical guitar for ten years and studies guitar at the Manhattan School of Music as part of its Pre-College Program. Ben started doing crosswords in high school as well, given that his dad and brother were frequent solvers of the NYT daily puzzle. He was never interested in constructing until his junior year English teacher, Gary Whitehead, talked about how he constructed puzzles. When Max came home from college this past summer, we both thought it would be a cool idea to make our own puzzle. It was an incredibly fun process and they hope to submit our second puzzle by the end of the year!