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This puzzle is a nice example of the benefits of having thoughtful soundboards for theme ideas — my original concept focused on only soccer, and I toyed with two extra thematic layers: a RED card rebus replacing the square where the player was "ejected," as in HO[RED]SS ROMANTICS (with PELE getting the red card), and "sidelining" the ejected players, their entries only appearing along the puzzle's rim.

The current iteration is both more varied (lots of different sports and players, rather than one; including the reasons for ejection as a bonus) and compressed (trimming my kooky bells and whistles so the ejection gimmick stands out). It's the product of lots of back and forth with Joel, and crossword greats like Brendan Emmett Quigley, Andy Kravis, and more. All of which is to say that having people like that in my life makes the puzzles I construct better — and is a helpful reminder to make myself available for that kind of theme soundboarding, and more. Please check out the Crossword Collaboration group — its focus on getting more underrepresented groups published is written up here — and feel free to reach out!

I also thought the edits on this puzzle were helpful from Will + team, pithier but keeping the (to me interesting or under-referenced) information in my clues for EMILE, MALCOLM X, MALI, COGNATE, CAJUN, and (I can't believe this stayed!) MARIE. Hope y'all enjoy the puzzle!

NATAN: This puzzle was such a treat to make, even by the standards of the already lovely JASA process. The people, for one: we're joined by new faces, like Andy Kravis up at the lectern, who's so encyclopedic we barely need to research for clues anymore, and new constructors like Susan, Tom, Joe, and more, who're injecting even more humor and breadth into these collaborations.

For another thing, this was one of those puzzles where students became teachers — the JASA class came up with the revealer, brainstormed the best theme pairs, drew up the skeleton of the grid, and even bailed us out of a bad fill moment by dropping in OH MY LORD where we'd had OH MY WORD and were coming up empty or trivial.

We were also able to keep a wide-open construction with some nice long entries. Hope y'all like it!

ANDY: This was my first puzzle with the JASA class, and I'm looking forward to making many more with them.

This puzzle germinated during late nights spent dreaming under a mosquito net — I was in western Tanzania for work and it was recommended we stay in the compound at night, so I spent a lot of time with sci-fi e-books and blank grids and anti-malarial pills. Maybe also poetry — the Frost poem was definitely the seed, and earlier iterations of this puzzle focused equally on the "less traveled" and the "diverged" lines.

Initially I was looking for movies, songs, and literature pairs that had the word ROAD in them "diverging." (Here's a long boring explanation of that old, dream-fueled idea: imagine ROAD TO RIO across, then an additional OAD diagonally down from the R, then it picks up three rows down and finishes across with HOUSE, for the movie ROADHOUSE. The idea was to play on "less traveled" as less popular — ROADHOUSE as grossing less or having smaller audience numbers than ROAD TO RIO, or something). Anyway, that morphed into the idea you see now, with a nice steer from Joel on putting a black square after the "diverged" answer, since it should function as if it were its own entry.

Diagonal words always make filling tougher, and I'm happy with some of the pizzazz in the puzzle, but would've spent more time trying to avoid the glue, especially in the lower left. Hopefully the theme offers a fun aha moment, and hopefully you're as tickled by the descent of THE ROAD TO HELL as I am. Sad to see an Ed KOCH clue become Koch Industries, given the hellscape toward which companies like theirs have steered us.

Thanks to Will, Joel, Sam and all those who looked at early versions of this!

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.

I'm in love with the stacks of 13+14 marquee entries, and given the constraints they laid on the rest of the grid, I'm really happy with the pop and cleanliness of the rest of the answers. KEG STAND! WOOKIEES! OLD FLAME! (My college experience?!) Hopefully there are fun answers to discover in every quadrant.

I like writing clues that tie into one another in ways beyond traditional cross-referencing. I think this is pretty in print — I like the look of the streak of clues that reads "Rushed, Rush, Red ___, Red ___" — but it's interesting to note that many, many solvers do the crossword digitally now, where that kind of maneuver has less aesthetic cache. Something for me to unlearn, perhaps.

Generally, I thought this one wasn't edited as well as usual. You'll note that ironically, GLORIA STEINEM and WHITE PRIVILEGE are (precisely? nearly?) the only woman and person of color, respectively, in the puzzle. If memory serves, the original clues for at least MARC, STIR (either Tribe or Marley), HAJI, SAD, and SHRINE explicitly brought something, uh, deliberately un-Tom-Thumb-y to the cultural table. Even the clues for SHAD (kohada!) and PRUNE (tzimmes!) drew from milieus inferrable to Times solvers but more interesting, to me, than definitional clues, which this puzzle didn't lack. Strangely, the already-long clues for HOT TAKE and OTT were padded, to the point of clunkiness.

Shout out to my favorite poetry professor in college, Darren Angle, who had us read Matthea Harvey's "SAD Little Breathing Machine," a book of poems that's stayed with me for many years since. And shout out to Will and Joel for writing an amazing VIRTUAL REALITY clue!

This one was a lot of fun to make! I'd thought AINT I A WOMAN would make a nice entry ever since Finn Vigeland, the JASA Crossword Class, and I had a puzzle rejected because (among other probably reasonable reasons) it had (to the editors unfamiliar) BELL HOOKS in it. (!??@?@??!?!!?!?!?!#?@?@?!@?!@?@#? <- verbatim quote from me after hearing the news. Also verbatim: "But it's an inferably-spelled name! Bell! Hooks! LIKE THE THINGS ON WHICH YOU HANG YOUR BELLS.) Robbed of seeing her name in all caps in the solution, I mentioned her work in the clue for AINT I, hoping for another rare starts-off-lowercase crossword clue. No dice.

A lot of wordplay-driven clues in this one, and Will and Joel (and Frank?) did a lovely job smoothing my excesses when I leaned a little ungrammatical (I had "Play hard to get?" for IN-JOKE before they realized English syntax is a virtue before G-d). Most of the clues are mine, though I went, originally, heavier on the pop culture — besides bell, no more references to Pynchon (YEOMEN), Vonnegut (his SAN Lorenzo), or DAS Racist. My roomie tells me his dad would have hated those clues, so hopefully this was all worth it.

Very happy to get TRANSGENDER into a puzzle, and with a hopefully inoffensive clue — not always guaranteed these days. Crosswords are our own little sandbox of linguistic import; that word hadn't appeared in a puzzle before, though I hope to see it again and again.

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!

I had the idea to literalize the phrase "In one ear and out the other" a long time ago, and the rebus part was I think the most fun way to actualize this theme. There were wonky ways to make the theme more or less elegant, I thought, while keeping it solvable: the circles were Will and Joel's addition, since they thought the puzzle played too hard without it.

I liked having all the entires be actual phrases, making the theme even truer, though it was hard to not repeat "A" too many times, and a few discarded phrases ("WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?" I remember as one I was sad to see go) duped the common components of spoken language too much to stay; earlier versions had ear-shaped black square contortions (kind of) and fewer theme answers, since those crossing rebus squares, which I thought didn't need to conform to the theme, were getting tough to fill around.

On the fill, glad I was able to get I'M ON A BOAT, WAGE GAP, HANG TIGHT, WASN'T ME, and a few other more modern entries in the grid. Hopefully OBELI is worth its surrounding colloquialisms.

The world, I guess, maybe, is better off without my wordier clues for many entries. I love, love, love quote clues for literature / pop culture references; ADA and VLADIMIR both had enormous excerpts of their lines trotted out for reasons pretentious and unnecessary. But damn, they said good stuff. Also, one of my favorite things about cluing is finding relationships between adjacent or nearby clues: I had originally clued LINES as [Subjects in Euclid's geometry] and LOGS as [Subjects in Euler's calculus, briefly], or something, and I miss those little mini topical excursions in the clues.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it!

This was my first attempt at a triple stack; I think I'd gotten scared away by the idea that they require bad shorter fill, but after finding this trio I knew I had to pursue it. I really like when themelesses open up into quadrants with space for shorter double stacks, which I've found gives you a lot of leeway to insert something fresh. Got lucky with the SW, though I tried to re-fill that corner for a while before I talked myself into allowing ETCHEDIN, which still has a funny ring to me.

On the cluing side, I'm happy a lot my clues made the final cut — YOGA PANTS, HOP ON POP, HAMPSHIRE were the ones I was most happy to see transfer. Will and Joel did a great job hacking away at my tendency, these days anyway, to write overlong trivia-laden clues :) We've got another editorial attempt to, maybe the phrase is "freshen up" the clue for MEN — this one feels as though there's more potential for empowerment.

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle! And if you're a woman interested in learning how to construct themelesses, I'd like to throw my hat in to the ring of constructors happy to mentor.