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I'm so thrilled to be making my solo NYT debut (despite this being my fourth byline this year)! I love when my themes have multiple layers to them, so in addition to having the weather-related words at the beginning of this puzzle's theme entries, I also tried to make them appear in the order they would actually happen during a storm.

I'm not sure how noticeable that will actually be during the solve, but it was fun for me to have an additional constraint in choosing a theme set and laying out the grid. Regretfully, this meant I couldn't find a way to include any phrases that started with "rain," which I think is the most obvious omission, but I'm still happy with the way the theme worked out.

Since I originally submitted this puzzle, I've done a lot of work to edit my wordlist and make sure that the fill in my grid is inclusive and respectful to everyone. Unfortunately, that meant that this puzzle does contain some language (namely 12- and 28-down) which I would no longer feel comfortable including if I had written this puzzle today. I think these words make light of serious issues and that including them worsens the solving experience.

I will continue to work to make my puzzles as inclusive and respectful as possible in the future, and I'm very grateful to the constructors on Crossword Twitter and the Crosscord Discord channel who have spoken out about the importance of using inclusive language in puzzles.

– puzzle by Kyra Wilson

I know this mash-up/double feature gimmick has been done before (for both movies and musicals), but I've only ever seen it result in zany themers. I was curious if I could find examples that were valid in-the-language phrases, and, luckily enough, there were just enough for a solid theme set. The one entry I loved that didn't make the cut was ZODIAC SIGNS, but without a title the revealer took precedence for that final slot.

– puzzle by Brandon Koppy

My original idea involved answers like TALL DARK AND HAND, clued as [With part of 64-Across, conventionally attractive.] 64-Across would then be the sizzling revealer ALL, and you'd realize you have to use part of that, aka SOME, to complete the theme entries (i.e. TALL DARK AND HAND[SOME]).

I quickly realized that the concept needed [Part of 64-Across] work so I sent it to my island of misfit themes and went on with my life.

Fast forward a few months. I was solving this puzzle by John-Clark Levin and Jeff Chen, and landed on the entry GRIFFIN, shaded in grey. "Damn!" I thought. "They've cracked the ALL/SOME idea using mythological creatures! I bet EAGLE and LION will be missing elsewhere in the grid, and you'll have to break GRIFFIN apart to fill the gaps! Brilliant!"

Of course, that was not the theme of that puzzle, not even close. But the nice thing about whiffing on a theme guess is that you may end up with an original idea you can use yourself! (Also — the actual theme of that puzzle is incredible. I highly recommend solving it if you haven't already).

This grid was a bear (or, half-bear half-human) to make, particularly in the central column where the themers intersect. I'm glad I was able to keep the animal theme going by honoring the GOAT Alex TREBEK, and my beloved HARIBO Goldbears. Big thanks to the editorial team for the many wonderful clues (though I will brag and say my favorite clue in the puzzle is my own, at 55-Across).

One last thing I'd like to share, and apologies for running long. My incredible partner Anna works as a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant trying to, in her words, "make corporate America less sexist and racist, among other things." One of the many great aspects of being married to her is that she always calls me out on my blind spots, and helps me learn from them. This puzzle had a few of those blind spots I'd like to address.

Firstly, is MANHOLE COVERS still a preferred term? I know some places call them 'maintenance covers' to use less unnecessarily gendered language. And for that matter, are all centaurs even men, anyway? Or is 'MAN' in that sense used like 'mankind'? But wait, is 'mankind' even a preferred term anymore? These issues may be small nits in the grand scheme, but even small issues are important to talk about. It's an ocean of drops, after all.

– puzzle by Adam Wagner

CHRISTINA: This puzzle came very far from my initial idea! I wanted to make a domino themed puzzle for my domino-obsessed son, with pieces that toppled over in the grid. I asked Jeff to work on the idea with me because he is so good at tricky concepts like this. We threw around all sorts of ideas. Sometimes an idea would seem great in writing, but when we'd try implementing it on a grid, it would be total chaos. We tried other moving parts ideas, like magnets and puzzle pieces, and eventually settled on this.

Initially we had the puzzle in the middle with puzzle related phrases around it, but once we settled on the idea of silly phrases describing putting a puzzle together, it made more sense to put them from top to bottom. I like the idea of someone yelling, "Come on man, get it together!" at someone solving a jigsaw puzzle.

One entry that didn't end up working due to mirror symmetry was "SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED" which is a shame!

Our original grid didn't have the puzzle piece outlines shown in the bottom, but it's probably a good addition from the editors. We thought it was funny to imagine people getting out tiny scissors and trying to put the puzzle pieces together.

JEFF: Christina is being kind to me — some of my early concepts were worse than "total chaos." Think John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind." The pieces ... didn't all fit.

– puzzle by Christina Iverson and Jeff Chen

This puzzle originally employed a much trickier gimmick. Rather than putting both halves of each pseudo-antonym pair in the grid, it clued one pseudo-antonym from each pair (identified with an asterisked clue) while putting its complement into the grid. One advantage of that presentation was that it accommodated twice as many pairings. The editors liked the basic idea of pseudo-antonyms but suggested putting both halves in the puzzle instead.

Embracing that restriction helped me tighten the theme. I pivoted to only including pseudo-antonyms with a positional aspect. And I was able to put everything in the correct place: OVER & HIGH on top, LEFT & RIGHT correctly ordered in the middle, and LOW & UNDER on the bottom. It's a subtle touch.

When I saw the pre-publication proof two weeks ago, I was surprised by a couple of things. First, that the puzzle would run on a Monday. During construction, the editing team requested clues at a Wednesday-ish level. Second, and more surprising, was the change to the last three theme clues. They were originally straight clues (per the editing team's recommendation). I would think converting them to cross-references ups the difficulty, which is counterintuitive for a Wednesday-ish puzzle running on a Monday.

Finally, based on last week's announcement, I believe this will be the last NYT crossword offered as a .puz file. Hopefully, this is an enjoyable final solve in that format!

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

A little bit about me: I am a third-year law student based in Washington, D.C. I started solving crosswords regularly when I was studying for the LSAT and began constructing in 2019 before starting law school. Constructing and solving have been great outlets for me during the more stressful moments of school.

This theme came together quickly once I set my mind to it. I liked that there was a weirdly high number of phrases that fit this theme, but not an excessive number. Fitting them into the longer answers came easily as well, and from that point it was just a matter of getting the fill as clean as I could manage.

One last note, The Little Red Hen has always held a special place in my heart, and it feels apropos that my debut pays homage to it. I had a seizure when I was very little, and the first thing my mom read to me after it was The Little Red Hen to make sure I could follow along. I've always associated that story with gratitude for health and family, and this is especially true after this year. I hope if you're reading this you can take time to appreciate something in your life you're grateful for right now.

Thank you to my parents, friends, and boyfriend for being so supportive of all my hobbies over the years. I hope everyone has as much fun solving this puzzle as I had constructing it!

– puzzle by Anne Grae Martin

AIMEE: Ella and I first wanted to make this a Thursday puzzle, and we tried really hard to get this to fit in a 15x. But the themers were so constrained, and it's so hard to do a puzzle where themers cross each other, that we ended up needing to go big with a Sunday-sized puzzle to make it work. Which ended up being good because this is my first Sunday-sized NYT puzzle!

ELLA: Aimee and I both really loved Andrew Kingsley's 2020 RED CROSS puzzle and were intrigued by the idea of doing a similar type of transformation. We landed on this revealer because we thought the phrase itself was super fun and liked the theme answers it allowed for (I was especially excited to include 85-Across, which is one of my favorite shows of all time).

Initially, we also wanted to include an answer where the "real" answer and the gridded answer both had zero because we both thought that was a fun, weird edge case, but alas, there didn't end up being enough space in the grid.

– puzzle by Aimee Lucido and Ella Dershowitz

I'm chuffed to bits to have my first puzzle published in the Times. I constructed this one in a rare fit of lucidity in the early days of the pandemic, part of a string of diversionary hobbies that would grow to include backgammon, chess, bread baking, Rubik's cubes, abstract painting, pottery throwing, thoroughbred handicapping, and screenwriting. This puzzle is the sole public fruit of these labors.

I'm a journalist, and having a puzzle out brings the same sort of excitement as having a piece out — along with an extra tinge of sadistic thrill. To my mind, crosswords are a potent democratizing force. If you solve enough puzzles, there are few things or concepts in the world, in all its weird and diverse majesty, to which you will not be exposed, and these things and concepts are all presented on level terms. Constructors are torchbearers of this ethos and I'm honored to join them.

As for the specifics of this puzzle, the theme idea came from the same place as every idea I've ever had, which is to say some mysterious and unknowable recess — perhaps, in this case, a deep-seated association between the puzzle and breakfast. The net result, I hope, is a pleasurable solve and an aesthetically pleasing finished grid that, if you squint, looks like something you might eat in the morning.

– puzzle by Oliver Roeder

I find constructing themeless puzzles easier to get started and harder to finish. For this one my seed entries were HOT TOPICS, which I got from watching an episode of "The View," and ARE WE ALONE, which I got after finishing Andy Weir's latest sci-fi novel The Hail Mary Project. Both were uncommon crossword fill and lent themselves to some nice clues.

All the rest of the puzzle was trying to fill a grid with lots of long entries, e.g., twelve 9-letter entries and a couple of answers with 10 letters. I especially get satisfaction when these longer answers are not often seen in crosswords. WAR EPIC and NICE CATCH are two I got pleasure filling in.

Finishing a themeless often involves making final choices that involve picking between compromises. The lower left section of the puzzle posed a "lesser of two evils" decision. RIFER is a meh entry IMO. I could have substituted NIFTY, a much better one. But that would have given me TREADER instead of E READER and YAPPERS instead of RAPPERS. Now I could clue TREADER as "One who keeps his head above water" and YAPPERS as "Talkative types", but I didn't like those "ER" entries next to each other as much as EREADER and RAPPERS, each of which lent themselves to better clues.

It is hard to know when you are done constructing a themeless, especially one with a low word count. I worked a long time trying to get rid of ELLER (a dated entry), but it would have come at too much of a cost relative to the longer words around it. So, I let it stand.

I've constructed many Friday and Saturday Times crossword and I still get a kick out of seeing a construction I've done filled with lots of chunky white spaces filled with a variety of seldom-seen entries. They often take more time than any themed puzzle to build. And then, when the sharp NY Times solvers finish it in a half hour or less, I sometimes feel like the chef who worked all day preparing a meal and having his dinner guests gobble it down. My pleasure is in the challenges of constructing more than arriving at the final product.

Have a safe rest of the summer to all my friends in the puzzle world.

– puzzle by Randolph Ross

Hello everyone — I am excited to be making my NYT debut!

My general approach for themeless puzzles is to try to jam as many fun and colorful entries in as I can while minimizing proper nouns … and if that means a higher word count or adding cheater squares or harmless bits of crosswordese then so be it. So, while there are certainly a few bits crosswordese and initialisms, given those parameters, this was pretty successful!

With three intertwined grid-spanning entries you would think those were the seed entries, but the seed was the crossing of ELEVATOR PITCH and TURDUCKEN — which were my two favorite entries from a previous puzzle that I ended up scrapping. The sides were initially closed off, but after a bunch of unsuccessful iterations, I opened them up and was pleased to find RENEWABLE ENERGY and THAT HITS THE SPOT fitting in great. I filled in the rest from the top-down, with THE WAR ON DRUGS being a late addition for how prominent it is.

A big thank you to the editors for greatly improving the puzzle, and an even bigger thank you to my initial editor (my mom) who took the first pass at this and all my other submitted puzzles and pointed out all my bad puns that made no sense. I have four other accepted puzzles (1 Weds, 2 Fri, 1 Sat) pending publish, so you should be seeing more of me soon.

Hope you enjoy!

– puzzle by Joseph Greenbaum

This was a fun one to make! I hope that you as a solver weren't TEARING OFF the page in a FIT OF ANGER. As puzzle-making ENTERTAINERS, we're just trying to EARN INTEREST, so I hope instead that the EXCITATION of this puzzle helped INTOXICATE you!

Now that it's published, can I SLEEP EASY? YES PLEASE!

Prompted by Jeff's curiosity on the mode of discovery: I found the anagrams by writing a script which combed through the XWord Info word list (thank you!) to identify anagram pairs. It creates a dictionary with keys as the string of letters in the word but in alphabetical order, checking for duplicate keys — which are anagrams. I did it in R but it could be easily done in Python for example.

Then I looked at that lengthy list to manually identify interesting combos. Didn't know what I'd find at first — I ended up making two puzzles, the Sunday size you've seen which was obviously accepted, and a weekday one with "antigrams" (opposite-meaning anagrams) which was absolutely fairly not accepted. I also found a lot which were interesting but didn't say "put me in a puzzle!"

– puzzle by Stephen McCarthy

JESSIE: I'm a political science PhD concluding a dissertation on organized crime and vote buying in Latin America, and for some time most of my crossword output centered on themes related to my research. (We'll see if my imminent arrival on the job market impacts how much I care to mix work and puzzles.) Today's theme is considerably more lighthearted in tone, which tone belies what a colossal pain in the butt it was to build out.

The neatness of how I CAN SHOW / YOU / THE WORLD resolves into a three-part, symmetrical revealer answer is what attracted me to this concept. But with a revealer occupying the central 3 rows and abutting both left and right edges, options for laying out four separate themers in a conventional way become limited. The pinwheel arrangement you see here, with PLANETARIUM and GOOGLE EARTH both intersecting the revealer, represented an elegant solution that allowed me enough flexibility to sneak a couple of fun bonus answers in SCAREDY CAT and POPE MOBILE (original clue: "Mass produced vehicle?").

ROSS: When this puzzle goes live on Monday night, Jessie and I will be sharing a romantic beachside dinner and asking one another a very important and special question... one that, incidentally, might help me correct an embarrassing oversight I made a couple of days ago over on my personal crossword site, Rossword Puzzles.

– puzzle by Jessie Bullock and Ross Trudeau

The genesis of this puzzle came from an early 2019 brainstorming session on the word "state," during which I noticed how many synonyms there are for the verb "say." After playing around with different approaches, I honed in on finding two-word phrases that I could clue punnily (also using two words) as types of speeches. Among these phrases were STREET ADDRESS and PIZZA DELIVERY, both of which were included in an early version of this puzzle, clued as [Block quote?] and [Cheesy dish?] respectively.

Although this earlier version was accepted by the Chronicle of Higher Education (my first professional acceptance!), it didn't have a chance to run before their crossword was discontinued. When I later submitted it to the Times, the team suggested restricting the theme answers to more persuasive speech types and cluing them as examples of what those speeches might say.

The final piece to fall was coming up with 27-Across—an entry that felt at first like a stretch but now is actually my favorite of the bunch. Something about the image of a salesperson hawking a niche single-use culinary item just feels right to me.

For those of you keeping track at home, this puzzle was accepted in its final form in mid-June 2020.

– puzzle by Adam Vincent

Hope you enjoyed the twist and used the missing letters to find the hidden cross country. The first two crossings were probably the hardest to get as you are trying to figure out the Thursday theme. Especially if you entered LASTNAME (First in China, second in US) with confidence. Once the grid was partially filled and the central CROSSCOUNTRY revealed, did the crossword staples (PANAM, BEIN, IGER) provide the confidence to skip a square? At least that was my attempt — that the puzzle put up some initial resistance and then crumble for an easy solve!

As usual, great work by the NYT team on the clues that were changed - they know how to clean up some of my wild clues and create a balanced offering. One of my misdirection clues that did not make it: Probe that ended September 15, 2017 for CASSINI; and that hard TONG-as-a-verb clue? Not mine!

The first version, started early in the pandemic, was a simple letter-drop from countries and you can see a better version by Deeksha Gaur, a brilliant puzzle! In a strange coincidence, an early draft of mine had identical theme answers (but, without the great revealer: NATION BUILDING)! Uncanny how two constructors can independently dream up similar themes.

But I dropped this format and looked for two countries that could cross each other with the same missing letter. Why? Because I did not have the wonderful NATIONBUILDING as the revealer, and CROSSCOUNTRY/UNITEDNATIONS/MISSINGLINK were the potential revealers stuck in my head!

The second manifestation, a Sunday 21x titled "CROSS COUNTRY", with UNITEDNATIONS crossing MISSINGLINK in the center (perfectly at the N!), had six intersecting countries sprinkled around the large grid. (LEANON-OLIVIA, MAN-CAMERON, HANA-REECE were some of the other finds). However, the missing letters did not spell a country or a revealer. With some crisp feedback from two test-solvers (one with initials BEQ, and the other named Patrick with a ™ symbol), I dropped the puzzle down to 15x. Both stalwarts insisted that the missing letters had to spell another country to add an extra layer of fun, so I had no choice but to find BEIN-IGER (the weakest of the crossing countries). Thanks guys!

List of other countries on my list: HUNGRY (really wanted to use this, and I am sure a better grid-expert would have figured out how to use this with PANAM/TONG/CHIN/MALT in the 15x version, instead of the TONG-PANAM pairing), INLAND, ENYA, NEAL, PAIN/SPAN/SPIN. Did I miss any others?

– puzzle by Ashish Vengsarkar