Alexander Liebeskind author page
4 puzzles by Alexander Liebeskind
with Constructor comments
Alexander Liebeskind is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where he studied Computer Engineering, Applied Math, and Political Science. He is currently a software engineer at a startup and an ORISE Research Fellow at the FDA.
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A while back the words "oh, I see" came up in a conversation with a friend, which made me think about phrases that could be texted as a series of letters akin to O-I-C. Despite my lack of familiarity with the idea of grammagrams — words or phrases that can be phonetically expressed as a sequence of letters — I was quickly enamored with the concept. "Sea anemone"(C-N-M-N-E) was a fast favorite.
Eventually, after walking through the alphabet a few times, I landed on the caring grammagram "are you okay" (R-U-O-K) and set off to find phrases with the bigrams RU and OK in the correct order. As a longtime UCLA basketball fan, I would have loved to fit RUSSELL WESTBROOK in. I hope the final puzzle makes for a fun solve!
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The idea for today's puzzle was a happy accident: back when I came up with the theme, I was sitting on a plane without internet, turning over phrases in my head. Once I became fascinated with 37-Across, it was a matter of implementation. I tried phrases starting with GNU and KNEW, and then worked my way to NEWTONIAN PHYSICS and the like, before arriving at the final product.
Given that I graduated from college in the last few weeks, the publication timing feels especially apt.
Thanks for solving!
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Delighted to make my debut for the NYT! I'm a college student studying Computer Engineering at Columbia University, though I'm originally from Los Angeles.
The idea for this one came from JAMES BOND, which left me trying to clue the potential film adaptation: LeBron forms friendships on a new basketball team? Though it didn't make the final set, I enjoyed the process of playing with movie titles and cluing while constructing. In the end, I did my best to include films that made for lively theme entries and appealed to solvers.
A huge thank you to Jeff Chen, who waded through a sea of crossword ideas as I was getting started. For any puzzlemakers from underrepresented groups, the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory is a great resource for mentorship and collaboration.
I'll be donating all of the proceeds from today's puzzle to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Happy solving!