New York Times, Saturday, October 22, 2022

YACOB: Collaborating with Brooke on this Saturday puzzle was a blast! I am so thankful for how open and warm the crossword community is because it's allowed me to make amazing friends and collaborators like Brooke!

As for this puzzle, we started it last August, and Brooke laid out the grid and started with the beautiful stack in the SE. I then worked to fill the NW stack and connect the two; from there, it was pretty smooth sailing! As an Ethiopian-American, I couldn't pass up the chance to put in ADDIS ABABA at 1-Across once I saw the option pop up. I'm very proud of the fill on this puzzle because filling high-quality themeless puzzles can often feel like an impossible task, but I am super pleased with our end result.

Brooke is a magician with her clues, and it was a wonderful learning experience to clue this puzzle with her and learn from her cluing skills. My favorites of the clues she wrote that made it to the final puzzle are 15A, 50A, and 1D.

I had such a blast constructing this puzzle with Brooke, so hopefully, you'll see more Brooke-Yacob collaborations in the future!

BROOKE: +100 to everything Yacob said above! I'm so glad to have gotten to know and become friends with Yacob, whose puzzles I had long admired from afar, through the process of creating something together. He's just as amazing a person as you'd imagine from his thoughtful and deliberate constructions!

The most memorable part of the filling process was our constant refining of the fill after Yacob connected the NW and SE stacks. I massively appreciate his unwillingness to settle for anything iffy and also am also beyond happy with the result — I think this was part of why it was so fun to clue! I love the interplay of the statements in the 40A and 9D clues and the icons highlighted therein.

Even with the Rafaelian masterpiece yesterday, today's puzzle had serious POW! buzz. Although there are only 12 long slots (themelesses average roughly 14) there's so much juice squeezed out of each — a super-fresh entry in NEARLYWEDS, too! I hadn't heard the term, but that kind of inferable coinage gives me a smile.

I often find Brooke's cluing a factor of 2.718 too challenging for me. Today, after girding my Saturday loins (I'm still recovering from hernia repair surgery, bear with me), I was ready to tackle the brain-busting wordplay.

And was there some busting! I hit a dead stop along the entire left side of the puzzle. [One of several in a trend, perhaps] ... even though I suspected it had nothing to do with fashion trends, coming up with DATA POINTS was a struggle.

Same goes with [Reach]. That has so many different meanings, and not one that I could recall was the noun form getting at "full extent." That's okay, though — some Saturday defeats are inevitable.

I thought I was on my way to another plotzing with [World capital whose name means "new flower"], but my brain ran the GAMUT of crosswords it's clung onto, and it recalled the Patrick Berry usage from a decade ago. Fist pump, UH, YEAH!

There were a HOST of great clues that delivered similar fist-pumping moments. I thought Brooke would defeat me once again when I couldn't figure out what Santa's HOH OHO in Canada might be. What a brilliant way to deliver joy for an otherwise neutral entry in POSTAL CODE.

Brooke and Yacob did such a great job of setting me up for a hard-fought win.