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I was pleased to work SHIRLEY CHISHOLM into this Saturday puzzle. Her name has been in an NYT puzzle only once before ( in1981). We could use more women like her in Congress. If you are not familiar with SHIRLEY CHISHOLM, please watch the video below and be inspired.

Working TAYLOR SCHILLING in was also a plus, along with SPORCLE, ANYONE LISTENING and IT'S NOT FAIR. I suspect different demographics will know TAYLOR SCHILLING as opposed to SHIRLEY CHISHOLM. Hopefully, you got the other one from the crossings, along with Manuel NEUER, the soccer "sweeper-keeper." Before this, NEUER appeared in the NYT puzzles clued as "More modern or newer, in Germany."

For those of you who have not been to the HIGH SIERRA country, you should add it to your bucket list — a beautiful spot!

I hope you enjoyed your solving experience. Thanks to Will and Joel for accepting and editing this puzzle.

– puzzle by Mary Lou Guizzo

The impetus for this one came from seeing the sign "Nikola Tesla Corner" on my way to work, on Fifth Av./40^th St. next to Bryant Park in Manhattan. The sign commemorates Tesla's labs nearby on 8W40th Street, as well as his time spent feeding pigeons in Bryant Park. As a former electrical engineer, I am pleased to introduce his full name into the puzzle.

Theme is pretty straightforward, featuring the full set of the non-esoteric TESLA anagrams, ending with LAST BUT NOT LEAST. Favorite non-theme entry is DON'T SPEAK, which was a massive hit for No Doubt. More personally, however, I liked it more because it's a phrase that stuck in my mind from the Woody Allen movie "Bullets over Broadway," where Dianne Wiest's character uses the phrase repeatedly on her opposites, with much comical effect. Not laugh-out funny, but I just found it very amusing and memorable for some reason. Not surprisingly, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for that role.

Constructor logs: this was submitted way back in November 2013, and accepted in April 2014.

– puzzle by Freddie Cheng

This puzzle is my first themeless in the New York Times. A humbling experience — the bar is very high. Without theme entries to "excuse" possible deficiencies in the grid, there is little tolerance for "glue" (or whatever your preferred euphemism is for poor entries).

I constructed this puzzle around four seed entries: DUMPSTERFIRE, VITRUVIANMAN, SETOFPIPES and GAMETHEORY — all interesting entries that hadn't been used before. I was pleased that the NW and SE corners had reasonable stacks. However, as with any puzzle, once I looked at it again a few months after submission, there were several entries I wish I could've avoided — ACAN, TAPPER and INIGO come to mind, not to mention COSTUMER.

I was also pleased to see that approx 2/3 of my clues survived directly or in a closely related fashion. One clue that did not survive amongst the seed entries was for 41-Across (VITRUVIANMAN). My original clue was "Da Vinci's canon of proportions" — which in hindsight, was far too obscure.

As always, my thanks to Will and Joel for their help.

Finally, as a "still learning" constructor, XWord Info has been invaluable, and a shout-out to Jeff Chen for his rapid responses and counsel to questions like "what do you think of ___ as an entry?" Thanks, Jeff.

– puzzle by Pawel Fludzinski

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!

– puzzle by Natan Last

I wanted to make a pop culture-themed puzzle that spanned many generations. Without an exact theme idea in mind, I started browsing lists of old actresses and actors hoping something would come to me. Because SID CAESAR and LEE J. COBB both have surnames that start with C, they were listed near each other, and I made the obvious salad connection. Next I came up with the revealer SALAD DAYS, and the idea that my puzzle would contain movie stars with salad names who reminded people of their salad days. It seemed clever enough.

It didn't work out quite like I wanted. (Does it ever?) There aren't a ton of well-known salad-named movie stars (nary a Waldorf or a House or a Tuna), and so I had to take what I could get: three actors who were at their peaks over fifty years ago and a guy who was better known for, um, "being intimate" with a dead moose on the side of the road on a silly TV show than he was for being in movies. (Unfortunately, I didn't think of Eva Green until well after the puzzle had been accepted.)

So if you were born in the ‘40s or the ‘80s, this puzzle might hearken you back to your SALAD DAYS. Otherwise it's a puzzle with a simple theme for all the people out there who really like vegetable-based word play.

– puzzle by Damon J. Gulczynski

I was surprised to learn that these are pretty much the longest words in the English language with their letters in alphabetical order (and no repeated letters). I left out BIOPSY, for obvious reasons, and GHOSTY seemed like it was missing an L.

I originally submitted this theme two years ago with ALPHABETIC ORDER as the 15 letter reveal across the middle. Will and Joel wrote back that they liked the theme but couldn't get over the fact that it should be ALPHABETICAL ORDER. I wrote to Joel asking if they would consider a 15x17 puzzle and he said sorry, no.

However, he must have spent some time thinking about this because he came up with the current layout of the revealer phrases and told me all I needed to do was work in the six theme entries. Thank you, Joel!

BIJOUX and CHINTZ are not friendly words to squeeze into a tight grid, so there is some glue but apparently NOT SO MUCH as to be a dealbreaker. Expanding the grid to 15x16 (necessitated by IS IN) helped some.

I wanted RUMI at 26-Down, a Persian poet that Googles incredibly well, but he did not survive the final edit — I can imagine that as an editor you have to think long and hard before you allow a short two-vowel word like that because once it gets in everyone's word list you will be seeing it often.

My favorite entry is BZZT-- when I was growing up in Wisconsin they used to have big electrical bug zappers in the city park to control the mosquitos in that area, so BZZT brings back childhood memories...

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

This puzzle was constructed in January 2015, and a revision was suggested in June 2015. After re-submission the revision was accepted for publication in October 2015.

The construction started with WHAT A JOKE, a sarcastic comment that often finds me stifling a chuckle when I hear it in person. The next placement was ZEBRA FISH, a term I hadn't heard since I was a boy. So it was with these two scrabbly entries that things got underway, with fingers crossed for a you-know-what.

I mentioned in the notes for my debut puzzle that I use a home-made grid filler program. One of the limitations of the tool is that it uses an unranked word list (of freeware origin) that still contains plenty of clunkers. This means that achieving a clean fill with lively entries is an exercise in patience. In the original construction of this grid I wasn't patient enough, because I allowed two iffy words into the fill. It was lucky for me that they were confined to the SW quadrant, or Will and Joel might not have suggested a revision.

The clue for ROSETTI (36D — Mozart contemporary Antonio ____) is intended to be tricky. I figured some solvers would put SALIERI.

I think Will and Joel's YOYO DIET — [Go in and out of middle management?] — is funny and clever.

– puzzle by Roland Huget

Dealing with movie/book/television spoilers is always a dicey subject. For this puzzle, I wanted to only fill the grid with twist endings that 99% of puzzle solvers will either already know, or won't care about getting spoiled. If you haven't seen "Citizen Kane" yet, you're probably resigned to not seeing it with fresh eyes. It would have been cruel to have clues like "[BLANK] dies in Game of Thrones," because I imagine the NYT offices would have been immediately stormed by upset fans. That's also why I was determined to split the clues up into two answers, so that simply reading the clue wouldn't spoil the fun. A bit hypocritical, I know.

This is my first crossword in the New York Times, and in fact my first crossword accepted anywhere (though certainly not my first crossword submitted anywhere)! I gave myself the bucket list item of having a crossword in the NYT, and I thought once I achieved that, I would stop, but I might be hooked. I'm a huge fan of wordplay and pun-based clues or answers, and since this puzzle is a bit sparse in that department, I'll be doubling down with puns on my next puzzle.

I'd like to thank Jeff and his fantastic website for making it possible for me to create quality puzzles. I want to thank my mom and my family for giving me a love of puzzles to begin with, and I want to thank the Academy for nominating me for this award. (The ironic thing is—I've only actually seen two of the six movies in this puzzle. And yet, like everyone else, I know the endings to all of them.)

– puzzle by Grant Thackray

ACME: Neil and I met almost 40 years ago in a galaxy far far away and have been friends for a long long time. We had already discussed doing a puzzle together when Will broached the idea of pairing a megastar (pun intended!) with a mere mortal.

Neil participated in every aspect, from theme generation to input on fill and cluing, despite his very tight schedule ... he really is in another stratosphere these days!

(The original theme seed was YOUCANTBESIRIUS (15!), followed by PLANETOFTHEAPUS, a bird-of-paradise constellation no one has ever heard of!)

Neil and I went through dozens of astropuns and Will and Joel were the final arbiters, even adding LITTLEDIPPER. They were strict about getting us to tighten our focus on stars, specifically. Smooth sailing, despite a little "discussion" as to whether HEAVENLYBODY clued as a "hottie" was sexist or not ... and my stubbornness of wanting DWARFPLANET ("Where Doc and Dopey hail from?") as a poke at Neil, who was responsible for demoting PLUTO, much to the horror of third graders everywhere.

Neil is an energetic, indefatigable, humorous, brilliant educator who wants to highlight Science in many forms ... whether hosting "Cosmos" or joining forces with his old college buddy to create a little Monday puzzle!

NEIL: I suppose a good puzzle clue is one where some people know the answer outright, while other people know they should know the answer but don't, leaving the rest to feel guilty for being clueless about the clue itself. Of course, politics, literature, entertainment, and pop culture, combined with nimble vocabulary, heavily feed these puzzles.

But as science rises in or culture, empowering us to become better shepherds of this world that we are borrowing from our descendants, we might expect to see science-inspired clues alongside the traditional ones. And maybe even occasional puzzle that's entirely science themed. In this spirit, I was delighted to work with one of the NYT's frequent contributors Andrea Carla Michaels, an old acquaintance from college, to bring some of the universe down to Earth — in this case, for a Monday Puzzle. As good a place as any to start.

– puzzle by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Andrea Carla Michaels

GEORGE: John started working on this puzzle in April 2015 but got sidetracked by the earthquake in Nepal later that month. In early summer, he sent me a prototype to ask for help. I was sure that all five tastes could be incorporated into 15-letter theme answers and made a new grid. We worked through eight or nine versions of that and sent the puzzle to a few people to test solve in late summer 2015. With their feedback we reworked the grid again and iterated fill changes through another half-dozen versions to what you see today. Submitted September 2015 and accepted in December of that year.

We were pleased to find a sweet spot for the revealer, TASTE, crossing two theme answers. It's nice to see that our clues for SCENE and OUTIE are in the final version, and we especially enjoyed Will and Joel's clue for PURE MATHEMATICS. Ours was {Goldbach's conjecture, e.g.}.

JOHN: In October of 2014 I made a puzzle and asked on a crossword discussion blog for testers. I got a gratifying number of very helpful comments, including a long email from George packed with suggestions and information and including a link to xwordinfo.com. (Jeff: my subscription is George's fault: when I saw my own puzzle in the "Analyze view" I was hooked.) George has been my mentor since then, and I owe the opportunity to appear in the Times today to him and his group of crossword friends.

– puzzle by George Barany and John D. Child

This puzzle has a relatively simple theme concept that I think turned out nicely (YMMV). Either the word TRICYCLE or PENTAGON occurred to me initially (I don't recall which) as a basis for repeating the latter part of the word as many times as its numerical prefix suggested — thus creating a "literal" variation of the word. Despite the standard 15-square width of a grid, it was immediately apparent that a "quad" prefix would force a 16-square width, with the latter part of the "quad" word comprising four letters. The word QUADRANT was chosen.

It's unusual to have only three theme entries, especially in the New York Times, where some puzzles seem to strive to fill the thematic level to near bursting. That can be dangerous! Such ventures are occasionally called out for substandard fill by the ever-vigilant squad of bloggers and commenters. But the "tri" prefix could provide a 15-letter entry, as could the "penta" entry. With one 16 and two 15's, that was that. "Hexa" couldn't work, and a six-letter ending for a "bi" word would yield a 16-letter entry, which wouldn't allow standard symmetry among the theme entries, following the logical progression of bi, tri, quad, and penta. So, three was the limit.

On the whole, I thought this concept might produce a reasonable "aha moment", and since it was accepted by Will, I suppose it did so.

– puzzle by Jeffrey Wechsler

This is my first published puzzle. I'm pretty excited about my debut, but I think my dad is more excited. I remember him and my mom working on the Sunday Times puzzle when I was young, but I never had much interest in crosswords myself. It wasn't until I was about thirty that I started solving these things (with some help from my sister). Five years later I started constructing amusing (or at least mildly inappropriate) puzzles for my friends, usually to celebrate New Year's. We also play crossword puzzle charades, where we take turns pantomiming the clues and then putting the answers into an empty solution grid.

This puzzle bears little resemblance to my original submission. In fact, with the exception of three short theme answers, there's nothing left of the original. Even the grid size is different. If you're interested, take a look at the original 15x16 puzzle.

I started with the idea of squeezing extra words into a grid where they didn't fit. The entire theme would consist of unclued answers that had to be thin enough (literally) to squeeze in. I thought of (skinny) JEANS, (narrow) BRIDGE, (narrow) MARGIN, (lean) BEEF, (thin) line, (thin) ICE, (thin) AIR and (slim) CHANCE. Once I settled on 5 symmetric theme answers I had to go 16 wide with JEANS in the middle.

But Will thought the grid would look best if entire columns were thin instead of just individual answers. So…basically a complete rewrite. I'm still not sure which I like better, but Will and Joel were very helpful with the overhaul. I hope you like how it turned out.

– puzzle by Sandy Ganzell

JOHN: Michael and I go way back to 1994, when I married his sister's best friend. Our families still spend a few holidays together. During those get-togethers, we shared a common interest in word games, good books, and beautiful hikes. We've pushed each other along in crossword construction. Even though we have moved about as far apart as two people can get in the continental US, we bump crossword ideas off of one another via text almost daily. We have managed to hike occasionally, too!

We decided to collaborate on themeless puzzles about a year ago. We are having better luck than we might have expected, but it helps that we have abandoned a lot of partial and complete grids. If we don't both agree that a grid is coming together cleanly, we trash it and move on.

It's impossible to remember which of us is responsible for which parts of this particular puzz—

MICHAEL: Let me stop you there. This collaboration started when you texted me to ask if a particular portmanteau word you were including in your grid was used widely enough to be crossword-worthy. I confirmed that it was: I had featured it in the puzzle I was constructing at the time. Rather than battle it out for the debut, we joined forces and collaborated from the grid you had started. The only entries from your initial grid that survived our edits were your central entry and 15- and 17-Across. Ironically enough we never managed to incorporate the portmanteau that had united us.

– puzzle by Michael Hawkins and John Guzzetta

SAM: My first of many collaborations with David! We talk a bunch outside of crossword meetups--we're on the same wavelength solving each other's puzzles--so it was only in due time that we'd take up themeless construction together.

It's so interesting to see different strategies constructors follow for filling an open grid; in my case, I usually stack/interlock 2-3 seed answers and build the black squares around them as I go. David, on the other hand, created a rough skeleton for the entire grid after slotting LIFE OF PABLO (our seed) at 1A. He designed the top half of the grid, including the aforementioned black square layout, and I pieced together the bottom beginning with NOBODY CARES as a fresh and constructor-friendly entry.

I fought for MAJORDOMO / BIZARRO / ?????JOB (now JACKED UP) to avoid the proper noun buildup near the southwest, but nothing would budge. Still overall pleased with how this turned out, especially with my clues for ROE V WADE and ABOUT ME staying intact, among others.

For those of you competing at the ACPT with me, I hope this puzzle serves as a nice morning warmup—good luck to all! Thanks to David for showing me some masterful techniques, and to Will and Joel, with whom I'm excited to work alongside after graduating from UVA in May!

DAVID: Always a pleasure to work with Sam! Collaborating is often a tricky process because constructors have such different styles, but with Sam, things work smoothly since we have the same tastes in fill, clues, etc. In fact, Sam was the one who suggested building a puzzle around LIFE OF PABLO in the first place, and I was quick to jump on the idea!

I'll be back in Pleasantville this summer working with Will and Joel for the few weeks before Sam takes over full-time. I'm so excited for him!!! Anyway, I hope you enjoy our puzzle, and I look forward to seeing many of you at the ACPT!

– puzzle by Sam Ezersky and David Steinberg

TRACY: It was so much fun to team up with Jeff again for our second collaborative NYT Sunday puzzle!

I contacted Jeff last November with an idea I had been working on which crossed two colors through a shared rebus box to equal a third "mixed result" color, but I was struggling with how to represent the mixed result color in the grid that would make sense to the solver. I didn't want a lot of cross reference type clues, and a three-way rebus (has that ever been done before?) or a diagonally-running mixed result theme entry would be too confusing, IMO.

Not surprisingly, Jeff was able to think outside the proverbial (rebus) box concept and notice that certain pairs of colors shared a common letter where they could cross and "mix" with each other. For consistency, we picked four pairs of colors that included red, and from there, we came up with a list of colorful theme entries based on the final colors we had chosen. Lastly, we substituted the actual colors in the theme entries with one or the other mixing colors.

Jeff did the heavy duty grid work and placement of the theme entries, and we both shared in filling and cluing. The result, we hope, is a fun and lively Sunday puzzle. Enjoy!

JEFF: Such fun to work with Tracy! We went back and forth maybe 20 times before settling on this implementation. In case you missed it, an example is that RED + BLUE (RED crossing BLUE) = PURPLE, so you should interpret both crossing answers as the mixed color. Not RED PEOPLE EATER or BLUE HEARTS, but PURPLE PEOPLE EATER and PURPLE HEARTS! I've colorized the grid below to clarify.

It was hard to find enough well-known color mixes, and it turned out that almost all of them used RED. Both of us were worried about duplicating words in the puzzle, so I pushed us to use RED as a hidden word, i.e. within HIGHER EDUCATION, to avoid the outright duplications.

Thankfully, Tracy pushed back, pointing out that one way or another, we'd have duplicated answers — both the across and the down mixed color would be the same, i.e. PURPLE duplicated in (PURPLE) PEOPLE EATER / (PURPLE) HEARTS. If we're gonna have some duplication, why not go all out?

It took me a while to get used to that idea, but I liked it more and more every time I thought about it. Sort of a quantum duality. Very glad for Tracy's input there!

– puzzle by Tracy Gray and Jeff Chen

For the past few years, I've been a member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP), which studies how grammar varies across dialects. The idea for this puzzle came when I was researching the for the YGDP; I'd been looking for a way to use the interpretation of STAKEOUT as S-TAKEOUT, and seeing the phrase ALLS I KNOW gave me an idea of how to do it.

When people think about dialectal variation, they usually think in terms of which words are available (e.g., whether you say soda or pop) and in terms of pronunciation (e.g. whether you pronounce caught and cot the same or differently). The YGDP studies a third type of dialectal variation, namely grammatical variation. An example of this is with the word anymore: In most dialects, anymore typically has to follow a negative word such as not ("Gas is not expensive anymore"), but in some dialects it can occur without a negative word ("Gas is really expensive anymore"). This usage is called positive , and it's pretty common where I'm from (the Pittsburgh area).

This puzzle touches on one of the core beliefs of most linguists--namely, that non-standard linguistic features such as "alls I know" should be embraced rather than disparaged. Language naturally varies across speakers and across time, and if you ignore its fluidity you miss much of its beauty. For a better explanation of this viewpoint, check out the op-ed "Our Language Prejudices Don't Make No Sense" by Raffaella Zanuttini.

A sincere thank you to all the members of the YGDP, both for inspiring this puzzle and for being such a big part of my undergraduate career!

– puzzle by Tom McCoy