New York Times, Wednesday, June 30, 2021

CHRIS: Long story short: I emailed Adam to congratulate him on his NYT debut and say I'd be down to collab with him sometime. And then we did.

ADAM: Short story long: I first had the idea for an "867-5309/Jenny"-themed crossword back before my NYT debut last January. That's right, this zoomer came up with the ‘80s song theme. Music is the thread that ties generations together or something. Anyway, fitting seven theme entries and a JENNY revealer into a 15x15 grid proved basically impossible, especially for then-noobish Adam.

So when Chris swooped in and proposed a collab, I knew he could help realize the idea. We shot some emails back and forth, played around with different theme entries and grid layouts, and crucially decided to expand the grid to 16x15. And somehow, through some combination of collaboration* and luck**, we managed to eke out a crossword.*** Irrefutable evidence that teamwork makes the dream work.

CHIRS: *e.g. Adam suggesting we put JENNY in the lower corner rather than in the center, Adam suggesting we go 16 wide, and/or Adam suggesting US TOO in order to open up the lower corner and remove six three-letter words.

**Adam being good at what he does.

***Our email records have a bunch of stuff about theme entries, placement, grid layout, etc., but there's a mysterious one week gap where the puzzle suddenly went from an idea to the completely-filled grid you see today. I blame Nixon's secretary.

"867-5309/Jenny" got air time when I was back in high school. I even I tried calling the number once. I waited until our land line was free, picked up our rotary dial phone, and plugged away at it. I had to restart a few times because the darn dial kept slipping halfway around, as it always did, so when I got the "your call must include an area code" automated message and my mom picked up the other line to scream at me to stop using the phone for nonsense, I figured I'd have better luck waiting for Jenny to call me.

That song debuted in 1981? Forty years ago? Yikes! I'm curious to see how many Gen Y and Millennial solvers (besides Adam!) will be baffled today.

Audacious to tackle seven(!) themers, along with JENNY, even with that extra column. Neat observation that none of the numbers repeat, which would have make this theme a no-go, due to the rule of no duplications within a grid. Some top-notch craftsmanship to put together something that knitted together so well. The NE corner is particularly challenging, with two stacked themers having to flow into the central FIVE GUYS. Brilliant to work in INNUENDO, such a great word filled with … well, innuendo.

I also appreciated Chris and Adam's care in making proper names unambiguous. If you didn't know Bud SELIG, Ted CHIANG, or the ENIAC, it'd be an uphill battle to argue that any of those letters was a trap. Perhaps if you're vegetarian, FIVE ?UYS might seem better as FIVE MUYS, a Spanish chain? And maybe you could argue that baby animals are MUTE, but I would say "huh?" or maybe HUNH (probably not) to you.

Some puzzles are geared toward the young and hip, so one could argue that there should be some for the rotary dial crowd. I'd prefer to have puzzles that aren't so divisive, with some people overjoyed and some people feeling shunned. Hard to please everyone, though.

4-Down [Sole survivor of the Pequod.] This is a great clue. Even if you only know the first line of Moby Dick, you know it's narrated by someone called ISHMAEL. He must have survived since he's telling the story, so if there's only one survivor, it must be him. Plus, "Spoiler alert" is funny.

17-Across [Like many old video game soundtracks] is EIGHT-BIT. I suppose that's true for the soundtracks, but the charm of old games now comes from the EIGHT-BIT graphics. Those big chunky pixels could only display 256 (2^8) different colors, so forget any ideas about subtle shading or realism.

2-Down: Exhalation: Stories is a stunningly great collection of short stories by Ted CHIANG.