New York Times, Wednesday, April 15, 2020

JOHN-CLARK: I'm delighted to be making my Times debut today alongside the fantastic Jeff Chen, with whom I've collaborated on several puzzles in other publications.

The idea for this one came out of brainstorming Jeff and I were doing around interesting letter movements—once we settled on HEAD TO TOE, the main challenge was finding pairs that were 1) long enough to be interesting, 2) widely familiar, 3) natural, and 4) pleasantly surprising. Jeff wrote some code to do an exhaustive search, but our choices were limited because most candidates didn't meet all those criteria. The first condition ruled out HEART/EARTH as too short. The second scotched GERVIN/ERVING, since many solvers won't know retired basketball stars. GELATIN is fun, but ELATING is an unusual form that feels a bit like crosswordese. And DEVOLVE/EVOLVED are too similar to each other. When we settled on the themers that made it into the puzzle, we liked that no pair shared any meaningful morphological elements (e.g. VOLV), hopefully increasing that sense of "aha!" on noticing each connection.

A few words of introduction to the NYT solvership ... I'm an Ojai, California native, and currently a Ph.D. student at Cambridge in the UK, studying how governments can do a better job anticipating the impacts of artificial intelligence. I also work as an author and journalist at the intersection of technology, politics, and security. Among more lighthearted pursuits, I've been known to perform stage magic and stand-up comedy, and will take even the flimsiest excuse to sing Tom Lehrer's The Elements. I'm quite new to solving (let along constructing) crosswords — although my dad has been a lifelong fan, and as a kid I enjoyed helping out when he'd announce "Ayyubid sultan, S---D-N" around the breakfast table. But credit to dear family friend and avid cruciverbalist Ivan Roth for giving me the inspiration to finally give it a real try. And big thanks to Will, Sam, Joel, and Andy for their improvements to our puzzle, and being a pleasure to work with!

It felt fitting to end this theme with THE NSA. They're everywhere — especially in (A)THENSA!

John-Clark and I brainstorm upon tons of ideas. For this one, the (H)OLDS OUT to OLD SOUT(H) pair stood out, but there weren't many other long ones. We tried combining pairs into longer phrases for kooky results, but EMANATE MANATEE! wouldn't exactly wow anyone.

Not only that, but would solvers even notice what was going on? Would they groan, thinking it's yet another anagrams puzzle? And would it even be possible to create a grid with enough pairs to be interesting?

After some consideration, I sadly moved it into my "not worthy of a full crossword" graveyard.

But John-Clark is persistent. He thought it would make for an engaging solve, and picked out a few pairs as an example set. I was doubtful that it was possible, given that it would need to feature HEAD TO TOE somewhere, and also integrate at least three pairs of themers. Seven themers in a mirror symmetry arrangement? Impossible!

Well, not impossible. Improbable. Improbable, in terms of making a high quality grid, that is.

Long story short, Will Shortz liked the idea, but not the cramped grid I laid out. High-quality, it was not.

Improbable, indeed. Back to the graveyard, evil undead!

But one night, as I wondered if expanding to a 16x15 grid would help, the zombie rose. Fast forward past several sleepness nights, and I sent John-Clark a new grid skeleton that passed my testing.

See? Making a crossword is yeas! Er, easy.