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I'm thrilled to have a puzzle in the New York Times! Crosswords are in my blood - my grandparents were avid solvers, my dad submitted a puzzle to Eugene Maleska, and I caught the bug in 2013 and have been a daily solver ever since. This is actually the second crossword of mine to be accepted by the NYT but the first to appear in print, so you haven't seen the last of me.

This idea excited me because I enjoy themes where each theme clue feels like a small self-contained puzzle. There are not as many candidate phrases for this one as you might think. A handful of words sound like two letters (e.g., IVY, EXCEL, CAGEY), fewer of those words begin legitimate 2-word phrases (e.g., IVY LEAGUE), and fewer yet can be clued in this theme's format (is there an example of a league that starts with V?). Another entry I considered was SEEDY BAR but, while Cheers is a well-known "C" bar, I wasn't satisfied with the recognizability of any "D" bars.

I was pleased to see many of my clues survive the editing process, including a nod to my alma mater at 67-Down.

Many thanks to my wife Maheen for helping me workshop ideas, my dad for getting me into crosswords, and my mom and sister for being ridiculously supportive of every move I make. Thanks, Will, Sam, and the rest of the editing team, for doing a wonderful job sprucing up the puzzle. I adore crossword puzzles, and it means a lot to me to provide a (hopefully pleasant) diversion for New York Times solvers today.

– puzzle by Jack Murtagh

I love the chance to defy solver expectations in crosswords. Instead of going the usual rebus route by squeezing POUND or NUMBER into a rebus square, I found it more fun to create the # symbol from an intersecting pair of symbols. I'm hoping the puzzle creates a satisfying "aha moment" when the combo of double-I's and equal sign jumps out.

For the "=" part of the hashtag, there's a decent list of possible answers that include the word EQUAL. For the possible double-I entries, the list is considerably short. And because the grid's real estate between horizontal "=" entries is super tight, the best-fitting vertical themers are ones with a double-I near their centers. Which led to ruling out answers that begin or end with "II", like I INSIST or POMPEII.

Ultimately, puzzle construction was far less bumpy when nailing down four horizontal themers with "=" symbols symmetrically placed in the grid. Doing so made the tiny set of possible vertical themers easier to wrangle into the mix.

Happy to see my clue for 1-Across making the cut, "Product that's available on tap?". I'd like to think A ___ might dupe some solvers into plunking in ALE instead of APP. I also really appreciate the Times editors' revision of my clue for ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL. That was irritatingly difficult to clue. I submitted "Assuming no other issues come up…". But updating to the straightforward clue "Translation of the Latin phrase ‘ceteris paribus'" works perfectly.

Hope you enjoy the #ThursdayTrickery!

– puzzle by Jeremy Newton

The original accepted version of this puzzle actually had a totally different bottom right-hand corner. It had the phrase ELDERWAND as one of the long answers, which, at the time of acceptance, I thought, was a really great entry. It'd be a fun gimme for Harry Potter fans, but it could also be clued in such a way that makes it inferrable even for those who aren't. But, since JK Rowling has been in the news lately for reasons that make me want to NOT put her in a crossword puzzle, I was left with a dilemma: do Harry Potter entries lose their lustre because of something the author did? And if the answer is yes, does, does that mean we should revise a previously-accepted puzzle to accommodate a change in public sentiment?

I honestly don't know the answer to these questions, but what I did know was that that corner had lost its lustre for me. So I figured if I could come up with a new corner that I liked just as much, it would be worth changing. And if not, well, everyone understands that there's a delay between acceptance and publication of puzzle, right? Luckily, I found this new bottom-right corner that I like just as much, if not more, than the previous one. I hope you do too!

– puzzle by Aimee Lucido

EVAN: This puzzle started with the title. My first idea for a theme entry was "ALL ABOUT THAT BUS" — which would be quite the Meghan Trainor song — though for at least two years this idea sat on the shelf. Bringing in Caitlin, whose work I really respect, helped motivate the project forward. She was responsible for getting the grid laid out just right for optimal fill.

My favorite clues of ours that made the cut were the timely 1-Down (MAYA), 30-Down ("SAY HI!)", 59-Across (UFO), and 84-Down (DIMS; I'm a glutton for pun-ishment). Props to Will & Co. for 35-Down (OLYMPUS)!

CAITLIN: Credit where credit is due — the title/theme idea for this puzzle was all Evan's. And props to him for also making a google spreadsheet for brainstorming theme entries and clues (which is way more organized than I could ever hope to be). Brainstorming, gridding, and cluing was a truly collaborative effort involving many, many emails and several video chats. It was fun to make and I hope it is fun to solve!

– puzzle by Evan Kalish and Caitlin Reid

I wrote the first draft of this puzzle while eating lunch with my mom by the water in San Francisco. While explaining how one might come up with a crossword theme, I rattled off these theme answers by means of example — I was redesigning the appearance of 59A on our website at work that day — and was delighted to realize that the answer lengths were symmetrical. Given her incredible support for my puzzle-making — and how tasty the sandwiches were — I'd like to give my mom an advisory credit. Thanks, mom!

In my day job, I build digital news products for the Bay Area public media organization KQED. Looking back at this puzzle a year later, it makes me smile to notice how apt the clues and answers for 48A, 49A, 51A, 59A, and 39D are given my line of work.

Some of my other favorite answers: I'm delighted to have written some queer representation into 10D. And where I grew up, we called a 37A a roly-poly.

I wrote my first crossword for my wedding in 2018. This is the second crossword I constructed and my first NYTimes acceptance. I submitted it a year and a week ago today.

– puzzle by Kate Hawkins

This puzzle is a blast from my past — I wrote and submitted this puzzle back in Summer 2013! Why it's running so long after the fact is something hardcore fans of the puzzle might be able to suss out... How I came up with the theme is a bit of a blur now, as you might imagine, but I *think* the revealer came up in some trivia thing I was doing at the time, and then the center answer became the germ around which the rest of the theme quickly emerged.

Because the puzzle has been resting for so long, I asked Will and the gang for permission to refill and reclue it since my skills have improved since then. Still, it was hard to find a good new shape for the grid — this one still feels a little inelegant to me somehow, especially in the SE, but I like the lack of three-letter words despite the expanded grid size, and answers like 6-D, 66-A, and 35-Down feel gratifying to have gotten in here.

At 18-Across, I originally had GREEN FLAG, but upon revisiting the puzzle, I felt that GREEN DAY was too unlike the other themers to pass muster — I really like HOLYFIELD as a nice last-minute save for that spot! Incidentally, I had a very different clue for 1-Across that I'm not surprised to see didn't make it to press!

FWIW, I also didn't know that 32-A was an alternate spelling, or I'd have replaced it... oh well.

– puzzle by Alex Bajcz

SAWYER: I met my wife Natalya in 2012. We established a tradition of solving the Saturday NYT crossword. After deciding to propose, my most romantic option seemed to be publishing a crossword in the NYT containing the message.

I started constructing, first by hand, then with a phone app. Every MTA trip commuting to work, I'd be rearranging entries, with NATALYA#MARRYME the only fixed part of the layout. After months of work with little to show for it, my friend Meg introduced me to Ashton. I apprenticed under him and James Mulhern, and among many valuable lessons, they taught me about the timeline of publication. So by the time I had created a proposal puzzle that could be mistaken for an NYT themeless, I secretly replaced the week's puzzle with mine in Across Lite, and Natalya solved it in March 2017. My heart was pounding when she said, "Wow, my name is in the puzzle! We should take a picture!" After she filled in MARRY ME, I knelt next to the coffee table to finalize the delivery of the message.

She said yes! We went on to get married in 2018, with the proposal puzzle on display to be solved by our wedding guests, including Ashton. After that journey proved so successful, Ashton and I decided to try a collaboration. I seeded his corner with one of my very favorite phrases, NO WORRIES, and my corner got started with PRESS SEND, a phrase that Natalya often uses. I ended up finishing off the southwest, and I'm particularly proud of the rich Scrabbly short fill under the long diagonal. I find it poetic that Ashton and I now have a puzzle to share with the world after he helped me construct a puzzle that was designed to be solved by exactly one person.

– puzzle by Sawyer Tabony and Ashton Anderson

When we linked up last year via social media to start making puzzles together, it was love at first Zoom. Within a few weeks, Ross had flown across the country to visit Amanda in L.A., and we spent a blissful three days making grids: on the sofa, in coffee shops, in the lobby of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. Towards the end of the weekend, the idea for a TWO PEAS IN A POD grid lodged itself in Amanda's brain as a way to commemorate our improbable puzz-based friendship. Ross needed little convincing. As if the story needed any more saccharine details, we even have a photo of us collaboratively placing the puzzle envelope into a blue mailbox.

Will and co. accepted the grid as you see it, but decided in final edits that CREVE / VEE was preferable to CREPE / PEE, given the rebus PP's. We offered to rework a few squares to accommodate CRETE / TEE (there's a TEED that would have needed to change), but it was too late to make changes. All this to say, well, CREVE isn't in our personal word lists, with apologies to the ~18,000 residents of Creve Coeur, MO. We also would have preferred to have TORI clued as a woman, but the editors felt the puzzle was a bit name-heavy and preferred to clue the entry as a word rather than a proper noun. Though Amanda loves women and has a brain that crumbles at the thought or sight of numbers, she conceded.

For more Rafkin-Trudeau grids, visit either of our puzzle sites: Brain Candy and Rossword Puzzles.

– puzzle by Amanda Rafkin and Ross Trudeau

It is a tremendous honor to contribute to the New York Times crossword. I have done the puzzle regularly for a quarter-century — at the breakfast table in high school, in the back of the class in college, on my laptop in law school, and now every morning on the app. I had no idea puzzle submissions were open to the public until reading Wordplay.

I tried my hand at construction during the doldrums of lockdown and was instantly hooked. My first few efforts were rather bad in hindsight and rightly rejected. The idea for this one came from my paralegal Nicole, who suggested a Jeopardy theme (RIP, Mr. Trebek). Jeopardy ran right after Wheel of Fortune when I grew up, and the theme for this puzzle immediately popped into my head.

Three months later, I nearly fell out of my chair when Sam Ezersky delivered a tentative yes. The team asked if I could clean up some unsightly fill, and I went to work. Given that I was on the cusp of acceptance, I splurged on Jeff Chen's mind-blowing wordlist and entirely reworked the grid. That did it.

Sam said I could expect publication in around six months. My mother, who encouraged me to "graduate" from simpler puzzles to the crossword so long ago, is battling cancer. She still does the paper puzzle every day in ink. Sam and Will awesomely moved my puzzle up in the queue so that she will have the joy of seeing her son's name on the byline. My parents have no idea that I have been constructing, so I cannot wait for their reactions on Thursday.

As we appropriately enter the Thanksgiving season, I send my gratitude to Sam and Will, Jeff for his list and comments during my rework, my wife Andie for tolerating my crossword ramblings all year, and, of course, my mother. Thanks for getting me started on this hobby and for everything else, Mom. This one's for you.

– puzzle by Derek J. Angell

This one's not my usual constructing style. I fought the urge early on to make the grid as wide open as possible, and left in more crossword-y glue (T-MAN, TNN, ASP) so that every last long answer could be fun in its own right — even common words like LAUREATES and ELEMENTARY preserve the human feel of a puzzle, and offer tons of cluing possibilities. With this approach, I'm hoping there aren't any answers outside of 1A that cause solvers to say "Weird" or "Huh." Okay, maybe LINAC and URSAE crossing ENESCO wasn't so great ...

My favorite aspect of the final publication isn't the zip, though, but the smoothness of the NE / SW corners: FLOORS / RING UP / ENERGY and DOOBIE / NO LOSS / AND YET, all crossed by real-word 3s and 4s. The clue I miss most, that (understandably) didn't make the cut: SHORTSTOP, clued obliquely as ... [Second or third person?]. But I'll settle for any angle that includes a Baltimore Oriole.

Enjoy the puzzle, and give today's Scrabbly Spelling Bee a go!

– puzzle by Sam Ezersky

In an ideal world, all of the plus signs would be perfectly symmetric like those in the middle and upper-right. Unfortunately, ZERO, FOUR, FIVE, and NINE have an even number of letters, which means they can't be symmetrically distributed when crossing. Likewise, no usable odd-length numbers share a middle letter. Therefore, some slightly funky plus signs are the order of the day.

In fact, regardless of their shape, there aren't many equations that generate usable plus signs. There are two constraints at work:

First, the sum must be hidden in two theme answers that are unrelated to the number (ruling out things like THE SIXTH SENSE as a base phrase for THREE + THREE = SIX).

Second, because the shape of the crossed addends must (roughly) resemble a plus sign, they need to share an internal letter (i.e., zERo, oNe, tWo, tHREe, fOUr, fIVe, sIx, sEVEn, eIGHt, nINe, and tEn). We stop at TEN, because larger addends will create a sum that fails the first constraint. As you can see, a number like TWO can only be paired with another TWO since no other numbers have an internal W.

And from those valid equations, our choices are even more limited if we don't repeat sums. That means, for example, choosing only one of FIVE + FIVE = TEN, SEVEN + THREE = TEN, and NINE + ONE = TEN. Likewise, sticking to one ZERO addend as a final twist for the lower-right reduces the possible combinations even further.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

Most of the ideas for the crosswords I make come from a twisty interpretation of everyday things I see, read, or hear. The inspiration for today's was just like that — seeing "two IDs required" in a newspaper article. With the assistance of the very constructor-useful onelook.com, I selected the three most lively theme answers available. (Sorry, ETHIDIUM BROMIDE didn't make the cut.)

While Monday grids with all-easy answers are most easily accomplished with a closed-off grid of maximum answer count (78), I wanted something more intricate for Will, the Times, and you. So, wanting to have the IDS revealer as the last Down answer and opening up the grid as much as this-human-ly possible, I managed to complete today's 74-answer diagram. The 10 answers Down of 7+ letters were a little tricky to accomplish, necessitating the one answer that I'd rather not have used (40 Down NAES), but Will didn't mind it, and I hope you didn't either.

For any early-week crossword I do for the Times, the cluing is a tug-of-war challenge for me. For any puzzle for Will, I always check the database of Times clues, striving for as many "new" clues as possible. The extra challenge comes from avoiding trickery and ambiguity at the same time.

Will kept the essence of somewhat more than half of my clues; the changed ones were typically made easier with a better-known fact, such as HEIDI as the "Project Runway" host rather than Mrs. Ted Cruz.

And that's all I have to say about that.

– puzzle by Stanley Newman

JOHN: Jeff has spoken plainly of his boredom with homophones, but several months ago, when he offered to use his coding chops for collaboration, I reached out with an idea I had been working on unsuccessfully for a couple of years. I was trying to do a word ladder with homophones, with a set of two-word phrases linked, and with the last word linking back to the beginning. I got close a couple times, but never could make it work. BOW KNOT, NOT GREAT, GRATE ... nope. PLANE FARE, FAIR BALL, BAWL OUT ... nope. WOOD FINISH, FINNISH ... uh, nope. I have pages of these.

We spent a few days honing and improving a ready-made list of homophones, and then Jeff wrote a program to produce all the two-word phrases consisting of these homophones, and after some more shuffling and honing, we got ... nothing we could use.

It looks like my idea is doomed unless someone else out there would like to pick it up and run with it.

But, while scanning the various lists, we did happen to notice a rare phenomenon, when a two-word phrase could be flip-flopped and homophon-ized to produce another valid two-word phrase. As I recall, we spotted only these three pairs, and we got lucky with symmetry. Though it was not what we set out to accomplish, we felt like it was still a nifty set and submitted it.

– puzzle by John Guzzetta and Jeff Chen