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Leftover theme answers:

BEE BALM

JAY JOHNSTON

KAY KYSER

PEA PODS

TEE TOTAL

YOU UNDERSTAND?

and the double: [Question to a potential presidential candidate]

ARE YOU RUNNING?

The complete list of legal-but-impossible-to-play Scrabble words is as follows:

• CLASSLESSNESSES
• KNICKKNACK
• KNICKKNACKS
• PIZZAZZ
• PIZZAZZES
• PIZZAZZY
• POSSESSEDNESSES
• RAZZAMATAZZ
• RAZZAMATAZZES
• RAZZMATAZZ
• RAZZMATAZZES
• SENSELESSNESSES
• STRESSLESSNESS

Words requiring both blanks include these:

• RIFFRAFF
• WHIPPERSNAPPER
• MAMMOGRAM
• CONCUPISCENCE
• CHOCKABLOCK
• CRACKERJACK (requires both C's, the J, the K, and both blanks)
• ZIGZAGGING (requires the Z, all three G's, and both blanks)

My favorite, though, has to be CHINCHERINCHEES (white-flowered South African lilies), which requires both C's, both H's, and both blanks. Since it's 15-letters long, there are only 30 places it can go on the board (spanning any row or column), but it can be played only if at least eight of the letters from it are already on the board in the right places.

I wanted to avoid phrases where the circled letters had two possible placements, so GOOD GOD, ROOT ROT, and MANAGEMENT AGENT were out, as well as APPASSIONATA SONATA, which also had the problem of being too many letters. Good ones that I didn't use included LARD LAD [Donut shop on "The Simpsons"], TOTO TOO [Question that Dorothy asks Glinda (and Glinda's answer)], SHADOW SHOW, MIRACLE MILE, ENDURANCE RACE, ESTIMATED TIME, FLOWERING FERN, and WRESTLING RING, and the too-long ones ASTONISHING THING, PRESIDENTIAL SEAL, ADMINISTRATIVE STATE, and INFINITESIMALLY SMALL.

There were some nice ones with three-letter second words, but ones longer than seven total letters seemed less interesting: ABSTRACT ART, BARGAIN BIN, BOTANY BAY, CARPENTER ANT, DEADBEAT DAD, TERMINALLY ILL, and TEXAS TEA.

Pret a Manger is my go-to lunch place when it's raining. It's on my block on 45th Street, and I can get there in about 20 steps, so I barely get wet. (I like the tuna and cucumber sandwich.) A few months ago as I left work, I saw the store sign across the street, and pronounced it to myself as "Manger" as in "Away in a Manger." I realized that ?ANGER can have three very different pronunciations, depending on what the first letter is. Before I was halfway to Penn Station, I had the theme, and I even figured I could put EYE coming down from the E of MANGER and cross the other E of EYE with RHYMES. In my head, while I was walking, that was in the lower right corner, but it didn't work out that way.

Another thing that didn't work out was using Margaret Sanger. A 14-letter answer can't go in the middle. I considered using Bernhard Langer (a German golfer who twice won the Masters) as a fourth theme answer, but I wasn't exactly sure if that didn't rhyme with "hanger," and given that his biggest win was 26 years ago, he's hardly a household name.

When submitting puzzles, I always include possible titles for when they are collected in books. My title for this one was "Looks Can Be Deceiving."

The idea for this puzzle came while solving Andrew Ries's "Stagger Sessions," a 20-crossword EP. In one puzzle, ELBA is clued like so:

[Idris who's a counterargument to John Donne's "no man is an island" bit]

I immediately noticed that NO MAN IS AN ISLAND is 15 letters, and thought if I could come up with some other men whose names were islands, I might have a theme. All I found were CUBA GOODING JR., BRET EASTON ELLIS, DOCK ELLIS (an All-Star pitcher who supposedly threw a no-hitter while on LSD), and the fashion designer PERRY ELLIS. The ELLIS names didn't work with the other theme lengths of 9, 13, and 15, so I thought this theme wouldn't work. But then I realized I could make it a left-right symmetric puzzle, and the grid worked nicely with just 72 words.

I contacted Andrew Ries to make sure he was okay with me adapting his clue into an entire puzzle. He said that he had had the same idea seven years ago, and had CECIL RHODES and JOHN IRELAND on his list, but not CUBA GOODING JR. He said JOHN IRELAND had the problem of repeating LAND with NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, and back then IDRIS ELBA was not nearly as famous as he is now, so he scrapped the idea and ended up incorporating it into the ELBA clue. He gave me the go-ahead for my theme, and here we are.

The idea for this puzzle came while testing a hangman book for Puzzlewright. The answer to one puzzle was LAST BUT NOT LEAST, and when I noticed that each of the four words ended with a T, I thought I could maybe make a theme out of that. I tried to find other letters that ended all the words in a four-word phrase but got nowhere fast. So then I went back to T and tried to come up with three-word phrases with the same trait. Having three three-word phrases followed by LAST BUT NOT LEAST, which describes itself, felt quite apt.

Having no other T's anywhere in the grid was, I felt, important. Will Shortz wasn't particular about that, but asked if I could make every clue end in a T. Having made a puzzle where every clue was a double dactyl, I figured (correctly) that making one where all the clues ended in a T would be no sweat. Using no other T's in the grid was a much tougher constraint. But for the clues ending in T, I had the additional self-imposed rule that all of the T-ending words had to be different. With that rule, it was no easy feat.

I had KEGEL (Exercise-developing gynecologist) at 32-Across, making 21-Down ASOK (Intern in "Dilbert") and 33-Down LAT (Muscle next to a delt). I prefer the ASOK/KEGEL crossing to the partial at 21-Down, but "chacun à son goût," right?

Here's a little puzzle to think about. When a puzzle gets collected into a book, a title often gets added, so I like to suggest a title when I submit it. Can you guess the title I have in mind for this puzzle from this hint? Take the last name of a U.S. president. Add a space so that the last four letters are separate from the first. Still don't have it at this point? He's a president who likes to tweet.

I was listening to a podcast on which the name CLARICE STARLING was mentioned. My ears pricked up. That's a name that ends in a bird, and it's 15 letters. I wondered how many other celebrities had bird last names. Before I got too far, I thought I should check to see if the theme had been done before. It had, many times.

In CrosSynergy on 1/1/01, Frank Longo had TONY HAWK, TOM KITE, PAMELA SUE MARTIN, CHRISTOPHER WREN, JOHN JAY, and RITA DOVE.

In the Los Angeles Times on 10/23/02, Denise M. Neuendorf had SHERYL CROW, TOM KITE, JONATHAN SWIFT, JOHN JAY, and PETER FINCH.

In the New York Times on 3/15/05, Gail Grabowski had HART CRANE, SHERYL CROW, EDDY RAVEN, JOHN JAY, and PETER FINCH.

In the New York Times on 8/23/06, Kevan Choset had CLARICE STARLING, PETER FINCH, SHERYL CROW, CHRISTOPHER WREN, and the explainer entry LARRY BIRD.

And in the New York Times on 5/10/16, David Kwong had EARL WEAVER, JOHN JAY, TONY HAWK, HART CRANE, TOM SWIFT, PETER FINCH, and the explainer entry BIRDMAN.

I needed something to make it different. I thought that maybe I could limit myself to fictional characters. In addition to the ones I used, I had Ichabod Crane, Frasier Crane, Atticus Finch and Jem Finch, Hudson Hawk, Bella Swan, Christopher Robin, and the "cuckoo" Pigeon sisters from "The Odd Couple": Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon. I noticed a lot of these were movie characters and then noticed that many were nominated for Oscars. So I went through all lists of Oscar-nominated roles to see if that would work, and I had success. I got lucky with how they were able to cross each other.

Credit for this puzzle's theme goes to my dog. Every day I go for a 35-minute walk with Lulu, a labradoodle who will be 10 in February. Since she isn't much of a conversationalist, I use that time to listen to podcasts. About a year ago, Stephen J. Dubner, the host of the podcast "Freakonomics Radio," started a new podcast called "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," described as "journalism wrapped in a game-show package." Each episode has some guests, including a real-time fact-checker.

Back in September, I was walking Lulu and listening to "TMSIDK." The fact-checker was A.J. Jacobs. I knew him from his podcast "Twice Removed" and his books, all of which I've read (except for the most recent one, called "It's All Relative," which claims that everyone is a distant cousin of everyone). When I heard what he said about being 1-Down in a crossword (listen at tmsidk.com/, Episode 27, about 2:50 into the episode), I had to stop my walk and replay it. It was a perfect quote for a crossword. I knew it was way too long for a daily puzzle (and it had to be a Monday or Tuesday or else it was no good), but I didn't know if it would be possible to get a portion of it to break up into symmetrical chunks. I wouldn't be able to check until I got home, still a 10-minute walk away. Lulu and I ran the last part of the walk. When I got home, I listened to the quote several times. The money part was the ending, so I started counting backward from the end. When I got to a word break at 16 letters, I thought "Damn! One letter too many!" But I kept counting backward, and after 16 more letters there was another break ... and then after 16 more, another break ... and those three formed a complete thought! It was perfect for a 16x15 grid! The odds of it working out exactly right were so slim, yet it did.

For the grid, the tricky part was keeping it at a Tuesday level with an eight-letter answer at 1-Across. I had to make sure that the words crossing the A.J. initials were drop-dead easy since if you aren't familiar with the name, those letters are essentially unchecked. (Such a blind crossing is known as a "Natick," after the crossing of N.C. WYETH with NATICK in this puzzle.)

I hope my "cousin" A.J. enjoys the puzzle!

I can't recall what the phrase was that gave me this theme. It might have been KANGAROO COURT. Whatever it was, I saw it and thought it was interesting because it was alliterative but the two words started with different letters. I wondered if there were others like that. I thought of ones like KNITTING NEEDLE and SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, but those seemed cheap since the K and P are silent. I wanted ones where the opening consonants didn't have any repeats. The only ones I could think of that worked were G/J, PH/F, C/S, and K/C. The Z/X possibility led nowhere. Too bad this ZEBRA XYLOPHONE isn't better known.

The puzzle needed a revealer, but ALLITERATION (or ALLITERATIVE) is 12 letters, a bad length. If it's at the bottom, it has to go in Row 12, which squeezes everything too much toward the middle. That's when I thought of putting ALLITERATIVE down the middle of a 15x16, and having the other theme answers crossing it.