New York Times, Monday, February 28, 2022

ZACH: I'm the creator and host of the Crossword Show, in which a panel of guests solves a crossword puzzle live onstage in front of an audience, and when the pandemic hit, I pivoted to making a series of videos I called "Solos."

After releasing this Solo (about Jared Leto holding a reproduction of his own head, which in turn inspired the notion of cephalophoric words), I received an email from dear friend and Crossword Show ally Andrea Carla Michaels, who said: "Have you made a crossword out of these and would you like to???" ACM was a joy to work with and learn from, and she deserves literally all of the construction credit; I'm very grateful to her for sharing the byline, suggesting this collab in the first place, and making sure 59D stayed in the grid.

Additional thanks to Will Nediger, who helped me figure out the initial cephalophoric words concept, and to my Crossword Show co-producers Dominic Del Bene and Jessica Mozes. We'll be announcing live dates soon, including several on the East Coast in summer 2022!

ANDREA: Three years ago I went to Zach's Crossword Show" (first of maybe four or five since) and was blown away. In one of his shows was this concept of Cephalophores (carrying one's own head). It inspired the idea for this puzzle, so I asked Zach if he'd like to join forces.

Zach's original concept and Will Nediger had come up with a list of 20 of these types of words. With his permission/blessing I culled a half dozen from the list and fashioned them into a puzzle. Joel asked for a rewrite (or three!) to get rid of some vocabulary unsuited for a Monday (sigh) e.g. REIKI and a weird variation of PNOM (my bad).

We lost our inside joke of LETO at 1A but slipped 59 D HEADS in as the final word. CEPHALOPHORE didn't make ANY of the cuts… but about ten versions later, et voilà, a crossword collaboration!

Repeated trigrams? They must spell something! Okay … OKE ANI THI WOR CHI? Not OKE!

First letters? OAH ... oh, crud.

Middles or finals? KNHOH nuh oh.

EIIRI, that's eerie.

At least I amuse myself.

There are thousands of entries that contain repeated trigrams separated by at least once space. Custom coding can turn them all up, or a simpler RegEx search can do the same thing. I did enjoy that WORDSWORTH was featured in a wordplayish theme. It's fun to say CHINCHILLA, too, such chi-chi sounds.

Given how many possibilities there are, it'd have been great to have some extra element like the repeated letters spelling something, a revealer giving justification for these particular trigrams, or at least a couple of fresher theme answers. Maybe some DOUBLE DRIBBLED fun, or GRUESOME TWOSOMES?

Still, a smooth Monday solving experience.

ADDED NOTE: The HEADline should have been "Jeff oblivious, misses obvious theme." Glad I read Zach and ACME's for context — I would never have figured that out on my own!

Here's the RegEx that finds words that repeat the first three letters later on.