New York Times, Tuesday, November 12, 2019

GABI: I'm a senior at UChicago, majoring in Chemistry. I write and help edit crosswords for my student newspaper, The Maroon, which is where all of my puzzles have been published to date. I really appreciate this fantastic 22nd birthday (11/11) present from the NYT editing team! Very well scheduled.

JAKOB: I'm a software maker by day and a puzzle maker by night. When I'm not constructing crosswords, I write puzzles for Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an online puzzlehunt that runs each year around Pi Day. Check out some of our puzzles; one I co-wrote is even A Crossword!

Fun fact — we're first cousins. After Gabi started writing crosswords last year, Jakob was at our great uncle's birthday party with Gabi's parents and mentioned over dinner that he'd recently started as well. The rest is history! This was our very first collaboration, which we finished and submitted in May. The theme idea was initially Gabi's, but Jakob helped refine and flesh it out. We brainstormed theme fill together and worked on the grid over VIDEOCHAT. We split the clues by direction and then revised together.

Clues that didn't make the cut… "Alarming comment from the navigator" for UH OH, "What tourists may do at the National Mall?" for BUY AMERICAN; and "New frontier for Grandma, perhaps" for VIDEOCHAT.

Some thank yous: to the editing team for cleaning up our clues and to our test solvers for their useful feedback and copy-editing.

From Gabi: To the members of the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Dictionary Facebook group for the many resources shared, to my fellow Maroon crossword writers for listening to my freakouts about getting emails from Will Shortz and to my mom, who inspired me to start doing the NYT puzzle in the first place.

From Jakob: To my GPH teammates for endlessly test solving my crossword puzzles, and to Sam Trabucco for offering feedback on so many theme ideas.

If you haven't seen "Schitt's Creek," stop reading this post and go binge. David, the BI-CURIOUS owner of the town, is one of my favorite sitcom characters in recent memory. Stroke of genius to get Eugene Levy's son, Dan Levy, to play his son on the show.

BYE BYE BYE … sort of rings a bell. From 2000? Wow, nearly twenty years ago? It's a sadly appropriate title for those non-Justin Timberlake guys. Uh … Lance something or other? Wasn't there a Jason in there?

Fun concept, but the grid execution had problems. A Tuesday puzzle ought to be welcoming to newer solvers, and entries like ARTE, DII, EIN, XYLO, and a singular TONG are not.

Crossing PHILOMENA with DOSAS is problematic as well. One might argue that an educated NYT solver ought to at least recognize one of these, but it's not fair to expect people to know their exact spellings, especially since any of the five vowels could look fine in that square.

One glance at the gigantic SW and NE corners, and I was sure this was a low-word count grid; almost impossible to get smooth enough for an early-week experience. In the NE, I love OVEN MITTS and VIDEO CHAT as bonuses. Trying to work those around BUY AMERICAN — plus the other bonuses of RIPENESS and ENLISTEE — is way too ambitious.

There's a ton of sparkly fill — LOOT BAG, GO BANANAS, STAMP TAX, TURBAN — but the balance is tilted too far away from smoothness. For a simple theme like this, increasing the word count to 76 or 78 would have decreased the filling difficulty and thus a better solving experience for newbs.

Looking forward to seeing what Gabi and Jake can do next with a grid layout more appropriate for early-week puzzles.