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BROOKE Will and I started working together more than a year and a half ago and have posted a bunch of indie collabs on his blog — it's both surreal and sentimental that this is our first newspaper puzzle together! We tried really hard to make all the surrounding fill fun (I think it's super cool that the center stack has no 3-letter words intersecting it) and I don't think that can be epitomized more than through Will's inclusion of WERERABBIT.

I could go on and on about Will's contributions to the construction community as a whole through his mentorship of new constructors; the "indie roundups" he posts; and his innovation in the small puzzle space at Vox, with asymmetry, and absolutely mind-boggling thematic feats of construction … somehow while still managing to be a speed-solving icon. On a personal note, though, Will might be the constructor who has influenced my individual construction journey the most and I truly can't describe in words what I owe to him in that regard. He is so supremely kindhearted and open-minded, and the combination of these things made collaborating when I was just starting out feel like a really safe and welcome space to try new things — I can't thank him enough for this.

WILL: I'm very excited for our official newspaper debut, though, as Brooke mentioned, we've posted plenty of indie collabs already. I'm grateful to Brooke for kicking things off with a pristine center stack, and we're both grateful to the editing team, who are responsible for many of the best clues.

I'm gratified by Brooke's comments, but I also want to add that most of what I do these days is inspired and influenced by people who have just started to construct in the last few years and who are already revolutionizing the world of crosswords. And Brooke herself is a prime example — she's come up with all sorts of gridding and cluing innovations that I'd never considered in my many years of constructing. I've learned a lot from our collaborations, and I look forward to many more!

– puzzle by Brooke Husic and Will Nediger

I'm grateful to several pioneering constructors in the 21×21 themeless space: Ada Nicolle, Brooke Husic, Erik Agard, Evan Birnholz, Paolo Pasco, Ricky Cruz, and Will Nediger, among others who've contributed Sunday themelesses to the Times. If you enjoyed this puzzle, I'd highly recommend checking out the masterpieces linked above. My thanks also to the Times editing team for running this puzzle with about 70% of my clues intact (including my favorites at 58A, 92A, and 17D).

For those curious about the construction process, here were some of my design principles for this puzzle:

• Optimize the quality of short answers. Rough patches of short fill are like plot holes or continuity errors in a movie. I can ignore minor blips, but more jarring errors pull me out of the immersive experience. Personally, I prefer movies with no glaring plot holes, regardless of how well the individual scenes are acted and shot.
• Keep the grid wide open. By necessity, themed Sunday puzzles have less wide-open white space and more short answers. I think a themeless Sunday ought to stand out with wide open areas.
• 1-Across should be a long answer with a tough clue. I like a puzzle that offers well-calibrated resistance from square one, as a harbinger of the overall difficulty level.
• The grid should be aesthetically pleasing. Here, I took inspiration from the long diagonal lines featured in the exemplary themeless Sundays by Patrick Berry and Robyn Weintraub.
• Black-square "staircase" shapes are a feature, not a bug. There are two reasons for this. One: English words tend to start and end with consonants, and the "steps" of a staircase push out answers row by row so that they can all start or end with consonants. Two: When placed at the edge of the grid, staircases visually accentuate the diagonal lines formed by central black squares.

– puzzle by Sid Sivakumar

JENNY: We are very excited to be back in the NYT for our second puzzle! Here are some lines that didn't make the cut:

• Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros/ I'll stare at something less ... PREPOCEROS
• If called by a panther/ … DONT ANTHER
• I don't mind eels/ ... EXCEPT AS MEALS
• Swans have cygnets/ Seals have puppies/ But guppies just have … LITTLE GUPPIES

VICTOR: The inspiration for this puzzle came from a book of Ogden Nash poems, which I borrowed years ago from my grandfather, Edgar, and is still sitting on our bookshelf. It was published in 1959, and a few pages are falling out, but it contains all of the poems from today's puzzle. Along those lines, I would like to dedicate this puzzle to my late grandmother Eva — as my first and fondest memories of crosswords are from tackling the Sunday NYT puzzle together on summer vacations. Hope this puzzle leaves a good memory for some of you!

– puzzle by Jennifer Lee and Victor Galson

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!

– puzzle by Max Chen Lauring and Benjamin Chen Lauring

It's a thrill to be back in the Times! Just a casual decade-plus hiatus for me that stretches back to my college days. I never stopped solving, but only during the last couple of years did I have the itch to try and construct puzzles again, so it's nice to know that after shaking off some rust, I can still make a publication-worthy grid.

The inspiration was 1A, which is a phrase I've always found funny. As a gay man myself, there's something about, for example, comparing the legions of gays descending on Fire Island summer shares each year to a quasi-religious pilgrimage that amuses me. That two corners of the grid ended up with GAY... and LESBOS was serendipitous.

The other entry I really wanted to make work was BEER KOOZIE, which had the potent combination of never having appeared in the puzzle before, but being super recognizable, all while including some Scrabble-y letters. In the end, I was super happy with the whole northeast corner, which between BEER KOOZIE, ICE MACHINE, IMBIBE, BIKINIS, and BELIZE, has some nice beach vacay vibes.

As someone who doesn't love Random One Half Of Proper Names in the puzzle, despite their inevitability, I probably would've preferred fewer of them here in an ideal world, but I felt like the rest was lively enough to compensate. I hope people enjoy!

– puzzle by Patrick John Duggan

I first encountered the phrase CLEAN PLATE CLUB in the YouTube cooking show Binging With Babish, finding it so evocative and fun that I couldn't help but add it to my own dinner-table lexicon. But I didn't think to put it in a crossword until I encountered it in, of all places, an episode of The Handmaid's Tale. So I figured, either Binging With Babish is big in Gilead, or the phrase is a thing. (spoiler: it's a thing.)

I have a soft spot for grids that feature 14-letter entries since they have so much sparkle potential but are so often overshadowed by their 15-letter brethren. So I was thrilled to build this grid around the seed CLEAN PLATE CLUB and one of my favorite shows ever, STRANGER THINGS! Also thrilled to debut the "correct" spelling of DURAG in the crossword, at least according to the New York Times. (obligatory shoutout to Thundercat and his Dragonball Durag!)

Incidentally, of the seven Times puzzles I've had published since starting college, this one is the first one published while I'm at school and not on break. Rest assured, Mom, I'll be partying responsibly!

– puzzle by Adam Aaronson

Thrilled to be making my NYT debut! I'm a Mandarin Chinese teacher who started solving crosswords in college but lost the habit after moving to China. Quarantine in the US brought it back, and like many others, I became a pandemic constructor baby.

This theme idea came to me after somehow coming across ROCK ME AMADEUS and TICKLE ME ELMO in quick succession. The "verb me name" pattern intrigued me, but I wasn't sure I'd find any matching pairs. HELPMERHONDA eventually came next, but FEED ME SEYMOUR didn't pop into my head for a few desperate weeks (though it might be my favorite).

Pairs of 12s and 13s were killer for a novice constructor with limited gridding experience. I tried seemingly endless layouts to no avail. I plucked down the black square under OCT on a lark, certain the open NW and SE corners that created would spell doom. To my surprise, the grid began to fill, but all that open space required trade-offs in ASEC, OCT, USN. More black squares may have helped, but I'd rather have some glue than stagnant flow.

Thanks to the editing team for their support, especially for fixing my messy themer clues and adding the lovely hints for 27-A and 40-D. Glad my clue for 4-D made it. Also, as a former track athlete, chuffed to debut 17-A. Nothing like running an ANCHOR LEG! Hopefully, I'll continue to improve and be in the NYT again soon. In the meantime, you can find me at misfitpuzzles.com.

– puzzle by Ian Rathkey

I'm thrilled to make my NYT debut! Thanks to the editorial teams at the NYT, Universal, and WSJ, as well as the constructing community, for their gracious and encouraging feedback. XWord Info has been an indispensable resource. My friend Mike connected me to constructor extraordinaire Ian Livengood, who showed me the ropes, and fellow constructor Michael Lieberman has been an invaluable sounding board for my half-baked ideas. Most of all, thanks to my wife for her patience and support, and to our two young girls for helping me rekindle my love for wordplay.

The theme came to me gradually. First, Sally Hoelscher's 2020 puzzle featuring First Lady memoirs inspired the idea of using authors as themers. Then, during Zoom trivia with friends, my team answered a question about authors who wrote only one novel. Finally, a few weeks later, I realized the revealer could apply to those authors.

This puzzle not only taught me about construction but also about what answers to include. My first idea was to use book titles as themers, but while the titles didn't work symmetrically, the authors did. At first, I wrestled with including MARGARET MITCHELL. Although I loved the theme and thought it would only work if I paired her 16-letter name symmetrically with the 16-letter revealer, I was ready to scrap the puzzle entirely due to the novel's racism. However, when it dawned on me that I could split the revealer symmetrically and include ANNA SEWELL instead, I knew the puzzle could still work.

– puzzle by Drew Schmenner

I started constructing crosswords around the same time I graduated from my 200-hour yoga teacher training program, so the two have always been linked to me. This was one of the first themes I attempted, but it quickly ended up on the cutting room floor as my unsophisticated word list rendered a cluttered and obscure puzzle. I kept returning to it, trying to incorporate different poses and grid art.

The first version I submitted to the Crossword Team had a quasi-yin yang design that was laughably cluttered. I'm so grateful fellow yogi Wyna Liu (& the entire puzzle team) saw something in this theme and gave me the chance to rework it.

This is my most "autobiographical" puzzle to date. Yoga has been important to me for a long time in my life, even before I started teaching. The English major in me is also thrilled to have Mark Twain and Jane Austen incorporated. And the Disney song is the icing on the cake.

I hope you're able to learn at least one thing from this puzzle; those are always my favorite to solve.

– puzzle by Anne Grae Martin

This puzzle started with another grid, with a third (!) central 3x15 stack. Here, I found the HATERS GONNA HATE stack, but with ugly downs like HANA and ITER. Luckily, I saw that the grid could be opened up to GHANA and LITER while creating the four longer down entries. I'm happy with the result!

The puzzle is a pangram, mostly an accident. It came down to JQA // AQUAS, SAX // XES at the very end, which I thought was the best fill, regardless of style points.

Quick hits:

• FUN SIZE is my favorite debut entry. The term comes from tiny chocolate bars, but I've heard it used cutely for any diminutive thing, including people.
• GTA is an interesting debut, in that GTE, GTI, and GTO have all been used before, despite being far less familiar to me.
• My wife Hanh and I ate CHILI VERDE for the first time in Santa Fe while road-tripping across the country this year.
• I wrote the clue for HOT TO. I had recently watched the reality show in question. This is also why I was happy to keep the long partial in the grid.
• The editors wrote the clue for AKA, my biggest surprise in the final proof. The list of AKA sisters is a real who's who that includes Kamala Harris, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison.
• Apropos of the MOTHERS DAY / DAD JOKE crossing in the puzzle, I'm doing some "long-distance calling" today.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

– puzzle by John Hawksley

They say good artists copy, and great artists steal. I guess in that sense I am both a good and great artist because this theme was pretty directly lifted from — er, inspired by — this brilliant puzzle from Rich Proulx. I love the idea of a hidden word theme where the nested words are related to the bigger entries they're inside of — they feel so much more special and rare, like cruciverbal truffles. Which I guess makes me the... pig?

(Quick tangent — I have since had the good fortune of getting to know Rich IRL at a couple of Bay Area constructor gatherings, and am pleased to report he is as amazing as the puzzles he makes. I knew we'd be friends when he asked me what my favorite chess opening was. [Swoon!]).

The inspiration for this theme came early in the pandemic when I found myself thinking a lot about "America's Dad" Tom Hanks. One night as I was falling asleep, my brain decided to point out that Hanks starred in both BIG and BRIDGE OF SPIES. I leaped out of bed and spent six hours looking for more examples.

(Quick second tangent — I am now the dad of a seven-month-old, and I find it hilarious that there was ever a time in my life where I would voluntarily give up sleep to research crossword themes).

A few more theme examples if you're hungry for more (click links for answers):

• Ben Affleck (1998, 2012)
• Will Smith (2019, 2001) OR (2020, 2001)
• Allison Janney (2007, 2015)
• Anthony Hopkins (1998, 2011)
• Mark Wahlberg (2006, 2012)
• Ben Kingsley (2016, 2011)

– puzzle by Adam Wagner

Happy Fhanksgiving!

The impetus for this puzzle was the revealer, T/F, which never actually made it into the grid. That idea came from Christopher Adams' awesome puzzle. Any puzzle with FACE/OFF is a winner in my book. And as I write this, I just realized I missed my opportunity to clue CAGE appropriately. Sorry, Nic.

As a passionate gamer and native New England nerd, a bit disappointed that I only managed to get one reference to gaming, SciFi/Fantasy, or the Patriots. 33.33(repeating of course)%. Not great. I'll do better. Tried to sneak in SNES, but Will said nuh-uh.

KOALA BEAR is fun, but if redoing this puzzle now, I'd try to spice up the SNEAKS OUT spot and have fewer 3-letter words. Not a biggie, but 65-Down was not my original fill. I don't like to use any dir. abbrevs. or Roman numerals, unless, of course, we're talking Episodes IV, V, VI.

– puzzle by Chase Dittrich

This puzzle began with a vague desire to embed a sort of mini-theme in a central "stair-stack" of long answers. Once I got the idea for an X / Y / Z stack, I had to see if I could make it happen — and sure enough, I found a workable stack remarkably quickly! This is a great example of why I so frequently start a themeless by trying to build a stack around unusual letter combinations: in addition to the distinctive effect it often has on the finished puzzle, it also helps to narrow down the seemingly infinite possibilities and gives me a concrete challenge to aim for while also keeping my options open enough for any potential creativity to shine through.

Similarly, when I found that working in two 15-letter answers led to the most promising grid skeleton, I thought it would be cool if they were related in some way, so I was pleased with the fortuitous pairing of UNDERCOVER AGENT and THE COAST IS CLEAR that you see here.

My favorites clues are the devious [Spot early on?] for PUP, the pair of [Collage application] and [Vice principle] for PASTE and SIN respectively, and what I thought was a particularly nice addition from the editorial team: [The book of numbers] for YELLOW PAGES.

I hope this puzzle provides a nice diversion over the long weekend. Happy solving!

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson

This puzzle started when I heard "CAN'T TURN THAT DOWN" as a punchline to a joke about a broken TV. As much as I would like to take credit for that, I believe the original comes from comedian Tim Vine. As a father of two kids (with a third on the way), I am a firm believer in the art of the "Dad Joke." I've recently fully metamorphosed into dad mode by picking up crossword construction and smoking meats as hobbies.

Starting from that inspiration, I pictured an imaginary garage sale that would give common sales taglines a punny new meaning. I hadn't seen ad slogans as an NYT theme despite how many of these phrases we all encounter daily. I was surprised to learn that every phrase in my set would be a debut. Once I had written what I thought were really funny clues (I laughed at my own jokes), I was ready to go.

The grid came together easily after I placed NO STRINGS ATTACHED in the middle, flanked vertically on either side by BUY NOW PAY LATER and DOORBUSTER DEAL. This gave me the room I needed to fit in the other entries horizontally.

A few possible theme entries that did not make the final cut include: FREE OF CHARGE (something about a broken flashlight?), NO PRESSURE (A broken barometer?), FACTORY SPECIAL, and IT'S DIRT CHEAP. I am sure others could have worked!

Hope you'll see more from me in the future.