Joel Fagliano author page

This puzzle's publication is gratifying, because it seemed close to impossible to make. I had the idea for it back in 2015, but only got about a third of the way down before realizing how insane the constraints were going to be.

Over the years, when scrolling through my files for half-baked ideas, I'd inevitably take another stab at filling this, only to give up after a little progress. Five versions (and five years) later, I'd made it two-thirds of the way down the grid, before a final flurry of inspiration in quarantine gave me a miraculous fill for the bottom section that even included a revealer (TWO TO ONE).

I'm sure astute solvers will notice some indulgences with the two-word phrases down there (I'm looking at you, GOOD TONE and LAND USERS), but hopefully they'll permit me a few stretchy ones.

Overall, while I'm not normally one to make a stunt crossword like this, it's fun to push the boundaries of the art form every now and then. Next time, though, I'll probably just ask someone with computer chops to write a script and save myself the five years!

MELINDA: To understand how much of a thrill it is for me to co-author the New York Times crossword today, you should also know I'm a lifelong lover of puzzles. That's one of the things that first brought Bill and me together. When we were dating, I brought a more than 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower to his house. I thought we'd do what my family used to do and leave it on the table for the next few months, occasionally adding a few pieces here and there. It turns out I overestimated our ability to walk away from a challenge. Bill and I finished that puzzle in a single weekend.

Over the years, I've come to realize that our shared love of puzzles is more than just a hobby. You might even say it's part of our worldview. I think there's a lot of value in throwing yourself into problems that seem daunting and reminding yourself that with time and effort, they, too, become doable. Find that one edge piece, and the whole bottom corner begins to arrange itself. Get that 1-Across hint, and the name of that Eagles song comes rushing back. You simply begin applying what you know until you wear away at the edges of the things you don't. In other words, you just start. And the more puzzles you solve, the more confidence you have to tackle the next one.

This crossword is full of answers that mean something to me: a former president who is also one of my heroes, the mascot of my alma mater, and, most important, a reminder of the dividends we reap when we invest in women and girls.

I hope it does what puzzles do best and gets you to look at challenges—even tough ones—not with resignation but with determination."

JOEL: The genesis of this puzzle is a Melinda Gates tweet in which she stated that "anyone who knows me knows I love puzzles". Naturally, that piqued our interest in including her in our celebrity crossword series. I jumped at the chance to be the one who got to collaborate with her, as I'm a huge admirer of the selfless work she does for the world.

We started by brainstorming themes based off of her various initiatives, which included one on women's empowerment titled "The XX Factor." Well, that got my constructor wordplay brain whirring, and I was able to generate some other puns in a similar vein, and we had our theme. For constructing the grid, I gave Melinda three or four options for potential fills in each corner, allowing her to pick and choose the words she connected with most. BLUE ROAN was an example of an entry I didn't know much about that Melinda loved, as equestrian is a big deal in her family. Finally, Melinda wrote most of the clues — and came up with some real gems, I should add. "Hoppy mediums" for ALES was my favorite of hers.

One final shoutout to Melinda's indispensable aide Beth Giudicessi, who helped immensely with putting this together. Hope solvers enjoy the final product!

Excited to be back in the Magazine pages! Given how many tiny crosswords I make these days, setting my mind to a Sunday puzzle was refreshing.

Because this is a fairly established theme type — add-a-sound themes have been pretty much done to death — I knew I needed to make the puzzle stand out for solvers in some way. Themewise, that meant making every example as amusing as possible. Crossword jokes are never going to be high comedy, but they should still make the solver smile when they uncover each example. A lot of that comes in carefully planning the theme set before you start building the grid, making sure you have a good joke to go with each answer. It also means theme answers that are just plausible enough to be real, while still silly or incongruous enough to elicit a laugh — of course you'd never really call a fat Congressperson "Senator of Gravity," but it's funny to think about.

The other way I tried to make the puzzle stand out was with the fill. I used only six theme answers instead of trying to jam in seven or eight, which allowed me to increase the length of each answer and make the word count lower. Sunday puzzles at the max word count limit of 140 can often feel like a chore to finish, particularly if the fill is stale and familiar. For this one, I tried to make the puzzle free of the normal three and four letter crutch words and use longer, more fresh and interesting vocabulary. In the past, this might have meant using seeded entries of pop culture names or modern slang, but I'm increasingly focusing instead on filling with regular words (CLUMSY, BEER, TYPING, etc.) that can become fun entries when clued in an imaginative way. I think that makes for a more enjoyable experience for every type of solver.

Hope people enjoy it!

When Will asked me to make this puzzle for the 25,000 mark of the New York Times Crossword, I was honored and a little intimidated. I haven't made a themeless crossword in several years, and the bar has gotten so much higher for the smoothness and liveliness of the fill.

From a constructing perspective, anchoring in the two long Down entries put some extra constraints on filling this with as many lively, fresh phrases as possible. I started with that bottom right stack, and built up, finishing in the upper left corner. My focus was on limiting the amount of names and getting solid words and phrases that could receive fun clues. I think a lot of puzzles now look for the flashy modern answer, but to me, something like ELEPHANT or CONTINENTS can be just as good, just because of all of the fun cluing possibilities.

Anyway, here's to many more Times crosswords in the years to come — it's a dream come true to get to make and edit them for a living.

SAM: I ride the train to and from Will's house with Joel twice a week, and it's not uncommon for us to be building grids individually during the commute. Joel is, of course, an incredible constructor, so I can't help but glance over at what he's cooking up; besides, I'd never gotten a live look-in at another constructor's style.

One day, I saw Joel playing around with APOSTATES in a grid, to be parsed as A-P-O STATES. I thought for a few minutes and then threw D-I-A TRIBES and P-A-S SPORTS his way. Joel noted the interlock these three answers could have in a grid, and we were off to the races!

We shot for a low word count (70) right off the bat, not only to challenge ourselves, but because we felt there could be many fill bonuses with longer non-theme answers — LPGA TOUR, DAD ROCK and DON'T BE are my personal favorites.

I really liked working with Joel as he kept me honest in pushing myself to my limits. We must have gone through several fill iterations where I settled for an iffy answer (COP CAR was once LOW BET ... *yawn*), yet Joel seemed to know every time that something better was possible, whether the final fill was his or my own.

Consider this to be the first of many collabs from us. We hope you enjoyed it!

JOEL: Always a joy to have another constructor carry a half-baked idea like this over the finish line. As Sam said, hopefully this is the first of many train ride puzzles, it was a blast to work on.

There were two inspirations for this theme. A while back, I saw an ad in the Economist for a magazine subscription that read "Present tense? Future perfect." I thought "Huh, that's a pretty cool wordplay find," and then promptly forgot all about it. Recently, I got a Gchat from Brendan Emmett Quigley, who wanted to run a clue for the answer FAKE NEWS by me — "Indefinite article?". Again, I thought that was a really nice find. Later that day, some long-dormant synapse in my brain connected the two of those and I realized there might be good Sunday crossword theme there.

As for the fill, the one thing that gave me pause was the inclusion of ANN COULTER as an answer. In light of the recent controversies over Eric Trump and Betsy DeVos references in the Times crossword, I worried that some solvers would be upset by this clue/answer. On the one hand, I strongly disagree with just about everything she's ever written or said, and giving her book free press in the crossword brings me little joy. On the other hand, she's undeniably an interesting and fresh crossword answer — she's well-known by most Americans, and her full name has never appeared.

Overall, my general feeling is that the crosswords should reflect modern life, positive and negative. Prominent supporters of the new administration are just as puzzle-worthy as prominent critics. That being said, I'll try not go out of my way to include politically charged fill like this, knowing how it makes some people feel.

One thing I often tussle with when putting together a theme is the balance between consistency and playfulness. On the one hand, it's nice for the solver who has cottoned onto the theme to have some idea of what the following theme answers will look like. On the other hand, curveballs and surprising theme answers can add extra aha moments to the solve and more satisfaction.

With this theme, I originally had thrown some extraneous words on like SWEATER AND LOUD PANTS for a marathoner, TWO SOCKS AND A BELT for the boxer, and so on. My thinking was the ___ AND ___ format would get too repetitive. But in the end, it felt like it was going to be inconsistent for the solver to encounter some theme answers with extraneous words and others without. My compromise was to put a trio (TURTLENECK, BOA AND CROCS) across the middle, which does break the pattern but in a more constrained way. That was my way of adding an extra "aha".

I'm not sure solvers care about any of this that much, but these are the things constructors agonize over!

Hope everyone enjoys the puzzle.

BYRON: The idea for the puzzle was Joel's. I was psyched when he asked me to collaborate on it, because I like puzzles which play with crossword conventions, and I am a big fan of Joel's puzzles generally. For an easy puzzle, you want the structure of the theme to be evident right away. For a trickier puzzle, you want the revelation to come right at, or possibly just after the end. For this one, I envisioned the typical solver getting it somewhere in the middle, maybe just past halfway through. Too soon, and it becomes just a slightly odd themeless. Too late, and the joy of the joke gets washed away. Hopefully, we found the right mix.

JOEL: Had a ton of fun putting this together with Byron. One thing we debated in the theme stage was whether a clue like "*Search party?" for ED MCMAHON was fair game — after all, it completely eliminates the quote marks used in the show "Star Search," not to mention the space between "Star" and "Search". We agreed it might be a little cheap, but that hopefully it would add an extra "aha" layer for the solver.

We both favor wide-open grid patterns and constructing challenges, so our styles meshed pretty well when it came time to fill the grid. I've always felt that Byron is one of the best themeless constructors, so the task of working on a Sunday with him with big chunky corners like this was very cool. In the end, I think we kept the compromises to a relative minimum while working in some nice longer fill, but I'll be interested to read how solvers felt.

I came up with this idea around the time of my symmetry puzzle, which had a somewhat similar concept of every letter being used twice except for one.

I knew I wanted the extra letters to spell something, and at first I was aiming for "The Leftovers", the hit HBO show. But I couldn't find a good leftover V example, and I wasn't even sure some solvers would know that show.

For about two months, I tried to come up with these out of my head/through manual searching. I'd take a word that already had most of the letters used twice (COMMON, e.g.) and then search on phrases with that word (COMMON SENSE would've worked, leaving over the C, for example). I had about 15 or 16 of these, but they didn't spell anything apt and I was generating insane-looking pages in my notebook of scribbled out words. I realized I was never going to be able to get a good set on my own.

So I reached out to Jeff, who was able to write a script that generated a list of all the answers in his database that fit this pattern. From there, I was able to fill in the holes of the letters I still needed to spell out the meta answer. Huge shout-out to him for his help in putting this together, and his general role in helping constructors everywhere with their craft.