Brooke Husic author page

BROOKE: I'm so thrilled for Olivia and my collab debut! We barely knew each other when we started collaborating, but now we've been working together at Lil AVC X for about half a year. Olivia is such a thoughtful editor and mentor and has really amazing, creative ideas; it's a privilege to work with her! Her thoughtfulness and creativeness came through in this puzzle — the idea is all hers!

OLIVIA: I'm so grateful that Brooke contacted me about collaborating back in 2021! It was a pleasure to work with her then and an absolute dream to work with her now. This is the first Wednesday puzzle for both of us, and I'm really happy with how it turned out!

This theme started as an idea to create clues made up of anagrams ... the two entries I had at the start were [Notes set on stone] for ENGRAVINGS and [Least stale tales] for PAGE TURNERS. Luckily Brooke had the idea of switching up the execution by putting the anagrams in the grid. From there, we went back and forth with some fun options. Here are some others that were left on the cutting room floor:

• I WON'T OWN IT IN TWO [Refusal to buy something broken?]
• TEAM'S MATES STEAM [Friends of the squad hang out in the sauna?]
• TIMES EMITS ITEMS [The Gray Lady generates content?]
• KEATS TAKES STEAK [English poet orders the filet?]
• ELVIS VEILS EVILS [The King hides his sins?]

Brooke: I love when I look at the latest NYT byline and see Adam's name because more often than not I'm about to be faced with a theme that wouldn't occur to me in my wildest dreams. I will never forget this Sunday or of course this theme-in-the-clues Thursday. Neither of us remembered this, but it turns out I reached out to Adam to compliment his very first NYT puzzle! I'm overjoyed that one of the cool theme kids was down to collaborate with me.

And what a collaboration! We worked so hard on this puzzle! Every single component was a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-two-constructors situation. The theme is so different from Adam's original pitch (which we would, obviously, be nowhere without). We considered dozens of options for every corner of the grid, and we clued with exquisite care — clues which have largely been retained in print! The best clue in this puzzle is Adam's 22-Down and my second favorite is Adam's 50-Across. Perhaps related to the latter, I was sad to lose original Adam's DAD clue, which was [Most common job in America for men].

P.S. The third These Puzzles Fund Abortion pack dropped this week. Donate here to receive sixteen puzzles by these amazing constructors.

Adam: Geeking out that I get to share a byline with Brooke, who happens to be the constructor of my personal all-time favorite puzzle. And wow did working with her live up to the hype. Not only did she routinely turbocharge this puzzle with fill (ERHU! RAGEROOMS!) and clues ("Pre-sale alert?"! "The Wasteland"!), she's also just fun to work with. An absolutely ideal collab.

Besides the byline, my other favorite thing about this puzzle is how human the theme is. No code, no ChatGPT, just two friends texting each other messages like "what are words that have ... synonyms?"

P.S. As many of you know, I have a word game called Anigrams. I'm excited to announce that today I'm launching a Patreon for it! Come by for bonus challenges, new games, a playable backlog/archive (coming next week), or just to lend support. I'll also share a few NSFW theme examples for this puzzle that didn't make the cut. Hope you'll consider joining!

YACOB: Collaborating with Brooke on this Saturday puzzle was a blast! I am so thankful for how open and warm the crossword community is because it's allowed me to make amazing friends and collaborators like Brooke!

As for this puzzle, we started it last August, and Brooke laid out the grid and started with the beautiful stack in the SE. I then worked to fill the NW stack and connect the two; from there, it was pretty smooth sailing! As an Ethiopian-American, I couldn't pass up the chance to put in ADDIS ABABA at 1-Across once I saw the option pop up. I'm very proud of the fill on this puzzle because filling high-quality themeless puzzles can often feel like an impossible task, but I am super pleased with our end result.

Brooke is a magician with her clues, and it was a wonderful learning experience to clue this puzzle with her and learn from her cluing skills. My favorites of the clues she wrote that made it to the final puzzle are 15A, 50A, and 1D.

I had such a blast constructing this puzzle with Brooke, so hopefully, you'll see more Brooke-Yacob collaborations in the future!

BROOKE: +100 to everything Yacob said above! I'm so glad to have gotten to know and become friends with Yacob, whose puzzles I had long admired from afar, through the process of creating something together. He's just as amazing a person as you'd imagine from his thoughtful and deliberate constructions!

The most memorable part of the filling process was our constant refining of the fill after Yacob connected the NW and SE stacks. I massively appreciate his unwillingness to settle for anything iffy and also am also beyond happy with the result — I think this was part of why it was so fun to clue! I love the interplay of the statements in the 40A and 9D clues and the icons highlighted therein.

CLAIRE: I am forever indebted to Brooke for helping this puzzle get to publication. This puzzle went as mine sometimes do — I made the grid, wrote one clue (29-Down), and then set it aside until I was in the mood for more cluing. A few months later I found the puzzle and reached out to Brooke, asking if she wanted to write some clues and, (no surprise) she knocked it out of the park.

BROOKE: Claire is one of the constructors I am consistently most inspired by and it was very much my privilege to team up on this one! The only downside is depriving the solver of more bangers like 29-Down (obviously the best clue in the puzzle). Most of the clues are exactly or close to our originals (if this was a tougher Friday than usual, um, oops)... we cannot, however, take credit for the fun/interesting/?!? fact in 38-Down.

BOTH: We (along with the fabulous Rachel Fabi) have spent the past few months editing These Puzzles Fund Abortion Too, a puzzle pack that is currently raising money for seven different abortion funds. Please check out our website for more info or go straight to the NNAF Fund-a-Thon page.

BROOKE Will and I started working together more than a year and a half ago and have posted a bunch of indie collabs on his blog — it's both surreal and sentimental that this is our first newspaper puzzle together! We tried really hard to make all the surrounding fill fun (I think it's super cool that the center stack has no 3-letter words intersecting it) and I don't think that can be epitomized more than through Will's inclusion of WERERABBIT.

I could go on and on about Will's contributions to the construction community as a whole through his mentorship of new constructors; the "indie roundups" he posts; and his innovation in the small puzzle space at Vox, with asymmetry, and absolutely mind-boggling thematic feats of construction … somehow while still managing to be a speed-solving icon. On a personal note, though, Will might be the constructor who has influenced my individual construction journey the most and I truly can't describe in words what I owe to him in that regard. He is so supremely kindhearted and open-minded, and the combination of these things made collaborating when I was just starting out feel like a really safe and welcome space to try new things — I can't thank him enough for this.

WILL: I'm very excited for our official newspaper debut, though, as Brooke mentioned, we've posted plenty of indie collabs already. I'm grateful to Brooke for kicking things off with a pristine center stack, and we're both grateful to the editing team, who are responsible for many of the best clues.

I'm gratified by Brooke's comments, but I also want to add that most of what I do these days is inspired and influenced by people who have just started to construct in the last few years and who are already revolutionizing the world of crosswords. And Brooke herself is a prime example — she's come up with all sorts of gridding and cluing innovations that I'd never considered in my many years of constructing. I've learned a lot from our collaborations, and I look forward to many more!

In her Lollapuzzoola interview a week and a half ago, the peerless Robyn Weintraub said "I don't know that there's a single well-established constructor who doesn't look back on puzzle #1 and cringe — and you're supposed to; that means you've gotten better." While I'm far from well-established, I'm certainly feeling this right now about today's puzzle — one of my very first, written ~15 months ago — and apologize to any solvers who have come to associate my byline with cleaner fill than you see here.

The grid is (alas) all mine but note that only ~15 of the 76 clues are. For something constructed more recently, you can also check out my USA Today puzzle today with the great Adesina O. Koiki, which is at a similar difficulty level.

When I sent the above to Jim and Jeff, they replied and asked me what I'd change and why. A few answers that stand out in an ugly way to me are SEA TRIP (this does not feel like an in-the-language phrase), RESEEK (I have never heard anyone actually add the prefix "re-" to "seek"), and AMORS (I mistakenly thought this was a Spanish plural) — and that's certainly not the full list.

While I do think this was a fairly ambitious geometry — especially in the northwest and southeast corners — for an already tough-to-grid theme set full of X's and K's, from where I stand now I personally don't think that the highs in, e.g., the northwest corner outweigh the lows of ORIN (originally clued as Aquaman), GO BALD (originally clued as a voluntary style choice), and O ROMEO (this feels like a contrived bunch of convenient letters to me). Otoh, I don't actually mind ARA, which still has my submitted clue and is a shoutout to my dad.

ADA: I am so excited to be sharing a New York Times byline with THE Brooke Husic. She is one of my favourite themeless constructors in the game right now, she's co-hosting Lollapuzzoola 14, and she's a huge inspiration to me and to many other puzzlers. I'm so honoured for her to be my first NYT collab! The fifteen interlock was her idea, and being able to be a part of her construction process was super fun.

Also: If you liked this puzzle, I also run a themeless subscription service called luckystreak xwords+! I have an exclusive deal for NYT solvers (plus a free themeless!) so check it out! It means the world to me being able to consistently do something I love, and any support is much appreciated. Thank you!!

BROOKE: Ada consistently blows my mind with grid geometries and cluing angles, so when I asked her to collaborate it was 100% because I wanted to do something epic geometrically together (and also 100% because Ada is an awesome human — we made this puzzle over zoom on opposite sides of the Atlantic and it was extremely fun). All this is to say: if the last Ada Nicolle puzzle you solved was her NYT debut then you have been *missing* *out*. Luckily you can atone by checking out her blog and all-bangers-no-skips subscription service.

BROOKE: What a true honor to co-construct with Brian, one of my idols in themeless gridding, and to share the weekend with my day one crossword bestie Matthew. This was the first of many puzzles Brian and I have made together (here's another we blogged a few days ago) and I love its interconnectedness and all the great stuff we crammed into the fill and clues — I'm always into current music and literature refs, and love that we seeded this one with 28D (and that the neighboring 27D fell right into place), that we have the privilege of debuting 32D, and that we could highlight the work in 41A. Much appreciation to whichever geniuses on the editorial team wrote the clues for 6A and 53A!

BRIAN: Brooke is flat-out an awesome person to construct with — she is laser-focused on making every clue & every bit of fill as entertaining, fun, and inclusive as possible. Beyond what she highlighted, I really like the way the long central acrosses (from 24A to 39A) came together. They do everything — connect the big corner stacks, are lively phrases themselves, and even work well with all the central down 7s. We both are really proud of how the whole puzzle came together — this definitely won't be the last time you hear from us!

Hi solvers and onlookers, I'm so happy to see you and I hope you enjoyed this puzzle! It's a bit weird to contrast it with the puzzles I'm making now — I wrote this one last summer when I had been constructing for ~six months. From my current standpoint, I'm certainly putting more effort into exciting and fresh mid-length fill, and I hope to write more clues that editors keep. I love featuring my ANGELOU clue, and I'm hype I discovered the symmetric intersection of these two 14's.

I'm grateful to stand on the shoulders of giants with the diagonal symmetry here, and excited to bring it to the NYT after writing many diagonally symmetric puzzles for other venues, including last week's Boswords championship puzzle (available as part of the 2021 Spring Puzzle Packet, and you can watch the postgame interview with me & the three spectacular finalists on Twitch).

While this is only my third NYT puzzle, in the last year or so I've published about 50 puzzles in other venues and about 50 more on independent blogs. The latter includes my own blog — xwords by a ladee — where I post challenging themeless puzzles with both conventional and more boundary-pushing clue sets. Besides the Boswords championship, some personal recent highlights are my American Values Club themeless that ran two weeks ago and my latest USA Today puzzle, which ran on May 3 (permalinks / Sally's writeup).

Feel free to keep in touch with me on twitter @ my crossword-constructing alter ego @xandraladee … otherwise I'll see you next time I make an appearance over here!

For our second Times collaboration, we sought a themeless grid with a novel architecture. Sid had the idea of a marquee central stack with each subsequent Across entry flush against the left or right side of the grid in an alternating fashion. It turned out that this constraint required an even number of rows, so we pushed to a 16-tall grid with six central Acrosses. The center forced wide-open corners in the top left and bottom right. We're proud of it!

We've had the great fortune to construct for many venues both together and solo! Notably, we've been known to collaborate on Sid's puzzle blog. Some other recent highlights: Sid has written puzzles for three crossword tournaments this year, including the Championship Puzzle for the Boswords 2020 Fall Themeless League … and Brooke is excited to be joining the Boswords team for their Spring 2021 Themeless League — find both the Fall 2020 puzzle packet and Spring 2021 info at boswords.org! Today's puzzle rounds out an exciting week for Brooke, which included her 22nd puzzle in the USA Today and her first puzzle with the Inkubator (puzzles by trans women, cis women, and women-aligned constructors). She also has her own puzzle blog (note from Sid: Brooke's experimentations with grid symmetry have changed the indie crossword scene, and ripple effects are starting to be seen in mainstream puzzles, too).

A closing message from Brooke: It was a little less than a year ago that I decided a goal for 2020 would be to construct (let alone submit!) a single crossword puzzle. If you're interested in constructing but are on the fence, I encourage you to go for it! You can get involved with the community through the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory or the Crossword Discord Server.

We built this puzzle around MODEL MINORITY, a demographic myth we feel is important to highlight. We know, however, that this is a term that could elicit discomfort among some solvers, particularly those who look to puzzles to distract themselves from the world. As solvers ourselves, we notice our own tendency to conflate discomfort over an entry in a crossword puzzle with discomfort over the real-world phenomenon that the entry references.

By highlighting the MODEL MINORITY myth as a marquee entry in our puzzle, we hope both to introduce the concept to folks who aren't aware of it, and to make those who have experienced the social pressures associated with a perceived MODEL MINORITY — like Sid himself — feel seen. It's not the easiest topic to address in a crossword puzzle, especially given the practical limitations of crossword publishing (e.g., clue brevity). But it's prudent to shed light on racial bias at this critical time of societal reckoning—and crosswords are, undoubtedly, a reflection of our society.

This grid includes several other entries that we wanted to clue sensitively, and we're grateful to the editing team for their care and thoughtfulness. We're also glad that many of our original clues made it to print—some of our personal favorites are 58-Across, 3-Down, and 11-Down. Of course, the editing team came through with their own awesome takes; we especially love their angles for 22-Down and 52-Down.

In addition to our shared love of puzzles, the two of us share an alma mater and love for St. Louis: Sid is an MD/PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, where Brooke went to college. We're also both academics in the sciences: Brooke is a postdoc in mathematics in Berlin, Germany, and Sid's PhD is in biomedical engineering. Finally, while this may be the Husic–Sivakumar team's debut in the Times, we've collaborated extensively in other venues, including the extremely-worth-your-time Grids for Good charity crossword pack (available for just a $10 donation to the COVID/racial justice fund of your choice!), and Sid's indie puzzle site, Sid's Grids. We're also both excited to be contributing individual puzzles to this year's Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament, which will be held virtually one week from today!