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BETH: Originally from New York, I am a librarian, writer, and artist living in Los Angeles. My puzzles have appeared in Universal Crossword, Crosswords Club, Los Angeles Times, and Spyscape. This is my New York Times debut.

My mom was an avid solver, loved wordplay, and created crossword puzzles for family and friends. After she passed away, I was inspired by her love of crossword puzzles and tried my hand at constructing. I had no idea how taken I would be, but it's become a passion.

This puzzle grew from a library-related theme I was exploring when I noticed that "sad" spanned across the words READERS ADVISORY. I ran the idea by Trent and asked him if he wanted to collaborate. He said yes and suggested the revealer, GUT FEELING. We decided on a 59-letter set which took a few grids to get the fill you see today. I hope that you enjoy our puzzle!

A special thank you to Trent, Imani Tolliver, the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory, my family and friends, and my mom whose life continues to inspire me.

Wishing you and your loved ones a happy and healthy new year!

TRENT: It was an absolute delight to work with Beth. Since meeting through the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory, we've had puzzles together in Universal and Spyscape. I'm so happy to see her published in the New York Times. I guarantee you will be seeing her name more in the future.

Since last I was in the New York Times, I've moved full-time into my private practice of psychology. You can check out my website and find out if you live in one of the 25 states where I practice via telehealth. I'd also like to invite you to visit my independent puzzle site, Grid Therapy. New puzzles are posted 2-4 times a month and they're free of charge. I hope to see you there!

– puzzle by Beth Rubin and Trent H. Evans

So excited to make my NYT debut! I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, and recently moved to Oakland, CA, where I work in healthcare analytics. Outside of crosswords, my passions include board games, basketball, and public staircases.

This idea was inspired by this cool 2015 puzzle by Jacob Stulberg. My main construction challenge was to squeeze in three sets of animals that have relatively recognizable group names. I considered an ESCAPE POD of SEALs for some versions, but ultimately CROW, LION, and ANT proved the easiest to work with. For the revealer, I also considered HERD MENTALITY and the pop band ANIMAL COLLECTIVE.

The PRIDE MONTH of LIONs is my favorite theme answer and I had fun bringing in some longer rebus entries like CROWD NOISE and DOMINANT HAND. Meanwhile, I wish I could've avoided PENAL COLONY, MICROWATT, and ANIM.

A big thank you to Sarah, Mike, and Avery for their great guidance on early versions of this puzzle.

Hope everyone's having a good Thursday!

PS: I also want to shout out this similar Fireball puzzle by Paolo Pasco, which I learned about in the lead-up to publication. It's disappointing to know I wasn't the first to this idea! It also seems highly fitting that the theme for both puzzles is GROUPTHINK (and an honor to be in any kind of group with a legend like Paolo).

– puzzle by Andrew Linzer

Great to be back in 2022 (and on my half birthday, too)! Developing this puzzle's theme was a surprisingly involved process. Finding a symmetrical set of five entries that rhyme with all ten digits is no walk in the park.

The first theme entry I thought of was KEVIN KLINE, which sorta locked itself in as the one with the 7. Then I made a Python program that mined the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for every word that rhymes with a single digit and searched my wordlist for every entry consisting of two of those words back-to-back. Now I had a massive list of ostensible theme entries, but I still had to manually weed out tons of false positives like DONOR [2, 4] and LIVESON [5, 1]. Eventually, I lucked into the theme set you see today!

Fun fact: the first rendition of this puzzle had no revealer like RHYMING. But after my aunt test solved it and didn't notice the significance of the numbers, I realized even a straightforward revealer would do the job. Get your puzzles test solved, kids!

Bonus clue for those playing along at home: Conflict that climaxed at the Little Bighorn [8, 2, 4].

– puzzle by Adam Aaronson

I'm very excited to make my New York Times debut — many thanks to everyone involved! I'm a comedy and game show writer, and in March 2020 I wrote for a show (remotely, as you might have guessed by the date) that uses a crossword format (although technically #notacrossword). That experience made me want to try writing a "real" crossword, so a pandemic project was born.

For this particular puzzle, I was playing around with changing the tenses of verbs in movie titles, as in "Raised Arizona," "Brought It On," etc. Then I added pronouns to make them sentences that also acted as summaries, as in "They Traded Places," "He Forgot Sarah Marshall," etc. The funny thing is, if you were about to watch "Finding Nemo" and someone walked in and said, "Spoiler alert: they found Nemo", you might be annoyed at first, but then you'd probably laugh because you'd realize that the title "Finding Nemo" is pretty much a spoiler anyway.

– puzzle by Karen Lurie

I live in Brooklyn, NY with my husband and our three kids and this puzzle was made possible by all of them. My oldest daughter is responsible for the beginning of my crossword interest; my husband and I started doing the puzzle 5+ years ago trying to stay awake feeding her as a newborn. My son inspired this particular puzzle by telling me to have "sweet ‘eams" one night (early versions included "Exclamation from a mid-century modern enthusiast"). And I learned how to construct puzzles in 2020 on maternity leave with my youngest, who was the chillest baby. Biggest thanks to my husband who provided encouragement, additional theme ideas, and test-solving along the way.

The crossword community has been such a wonderful and welcoming group of people. Thank you to the folks who have graciously volunteered their time to help me (and others) learn - especially Kate Hawkins, Ross Trudeau, and Christina Iverson.

It's cold here in New York so I'd like to remind everyone to SAY NO TO UGGS. Just kidding, they're your feet, keep ‘em cozy.

– puzzle by Kate Schutzengel

I was still early in my constructing apprenticeship when this one sprung to life. I wanted a grid with flow and a sense of movement, and stumbling on this pattern immediately caught my eye. Sometimes the right central answer in the right grid just makes everything flow, and I had an embarrassment of good fill to choose from, or at least that's how I'm remembering it.

I was likely tearing my hair out until the wee hours, but we have a way of blocking out those experiences. MENTAL GYMNASTICS was indeed what I was going through at the time, as well, so that was an entry I was determined to feature before I'd even begun.

I love this puzzle's debuts: the central answer, as well as LEGO HOUSE (also an Ed Sheeran song with a video featuring Happy Potter's Rupert Grint), HOT COMB, HIRED GOON and POUR OVER, and that my first NYT themeless made it to the coveted Saturday slot.

Thanks to the editing team for all their help with the cluing — the collective brainpower is always impressive.

– puzzle by Daniel Okulitch

NANCY: When I consider a theme idea, I always ask myself: Will it provide the solver with any "Aha moments"? How many? How big will they be? That's what I look for as a solver and I want to give that kind of pleasure to others. In a Thursday-style "trick" puzzle, you might be talking about one huge "Aha!" — when everything that has thoroughly baffled you up until now, at last, falls into place. There should be many " Aha moments " in a wordplay puzzle like this one, especially if it's an oversized Sunday grid, there should be many "Aha moments".

One rule of thumb for me: Getting one themer should in no way make getting the next one any easier. Each should provide its own separate challenge. I never want to give away too much. I'm rather mean that way :)

Whatever our theme is or has been in the past, brainstorming theme ideas with Will is always a delight. We both love wordplay, and by the time Will goes off to create a grid based on our theme choices, we're confident that between the two of us, we've come up with the strongest possible choices for that particular theme.

We hope you'll enjoy this puzzle.

WILL: I have nothing much to add that Nancy didn't cover in her notes, so I'll just add that Nancy is always a joy to work with — and her style is pretty different from the sorts of puzzles I usually make, so it makes for a nice change.

– puzzle by Nancy Stark and Will Nediger

When the pandemic hit and quarantine ensured togetherness, Ellen began looking for a distraction. Peering over Ray's shoulder while he was doing the crossword, the spark of a new passion began to glow. While our styles proved dramatically different — creative flair and equally creative orthography vs. read-the-clues-in-order and zero knowledge of pop culture — it became apparent we made a good team. Our friends at Boswords provided us with hours of fun practice, solving cooperatively, and inevitably the idea struck: couldn't we construct one of these?

We studied the six-part guide How to Make a Crossword Puzzle in the NYT. We brainstormed theme ideas and created a spreadsheet of half-baked concepts. Ray inundated Jeff Chen with theme suggestions, but his polite back-and-forth didn't result in any great theme concepts. Undaunted, we downloaded some construction software and simply began putting together puzzles. We had fun trying to be inventive with our clues but we will never compare to Brad Wilber, and we used friends to beta test our puzzles (thank you David Markus).

After six very nicely worded encouraging rejection emails from the NYT, they wrote to say they accepted this puzzle, saying that it made them smile. For that comment, we smile as well and hope you have the same reaction. Here's to teamwork and 27 years of marriage, a love of games, puns, and each other.

– puzzle by Ray Brunsberg and Ellen Brunsberg

When brainstorming this puzzle, I wanted to make a grid where the theme letters evoke a recognizable symbol or pattern. An eye chart seemed like a good choice since the design itself is the letters, although in a real eye chart the letters start big and get progressively smaller. If I were making this puzzle again, it would be fun to attempt a 21 x 21 grid, embiggening a single E in a 5 x 5 square at the top, then a 4 x 4 F and P, and so on down to single-square letters at the bottom.

Today's layout required left/right symmetry, given the spread of the circles. I'm not usually a fan of quip or quotation puzzles since you have to rely on the crossing answers to complete the puzzle, but in this case, I felt like there needed to be a "why" to explain the eye chart. I settled on the idea that you pass an eye test (and this puzzle) if you get the letters right. Despite the constraints of the circled letters and the three-part answer, I think I got a relatively clean fill, so hopefully, everyone felt like they had a fair chance at solving this puzzle's message.

The editors came up with the hilarious clue for 62-Down. I wish I had thought of it.

– puzzle by Michael Schlossberg

LEWIS: Not only is Jeff an overseer of this site and reviewer of every single NYT puzzle, but he also writes novels that get published and has two young kids — enough to keep anyone more than jammed for time. Yet somehow, he fit in exchanging 130 emails with me over the final two months of 2019 — a very rewarding back-and-forth — as we brainstormed, constructed, and polished this puzzle.

We started with a completely different theme based on repeating letter strings like today's puzzle but using a different gimmick. We spent weeks on it, then ran what we had by some people we trust and were met with a resounding "Meh!", bringing us to a back-to-square-one nadir. Then revelation hit: musical repeat signs! It gave us far better theme answers than the original theme, and we were on our way.

Additional theme answers we considered for today's puzzle are C[ARDBO]XES, PR[IMET]V, MATCHE[SWIT]H, and I[STHI]NGON.

– puzzle by Lewis Rothlein and Jeff Chen

My first published themeless! Hurray! I made this puzzle last January, right after I received news that a previous themeless I'd sent to the Times — which I'd felt pretty good about — had been rejected. That crossword had also featured a central staircase, so when I started work on this puzzle, I decided to keep the design. This time though, the competitive Scrabble player in me insisted that I squeeze more high-point letters into the central stack.

The staircase seemed like it wasn't going to work at first, largely due to some weird letter combinations on the right-hand side. I nearly abandoned it after testing several hundred black square permutations, but then I realized that there was a phrase that could work at 28A, and the grid was saved! Filling the rest wasn't too difficult, although I did have to rework the bottom part of the puzzle due to some gluey entries.

If I were to remake this puzzle today, I'd change the upper left. I don't love the dupe at 2D and 11D, and 19A seems too esoteric. And I'm sad that I couldn't include an X, which would've made this puzzle a pangram.

Thanks to my dad for test-solving, Wyna Liu for helping me clean up the grid, and the editing team for strengthening my clues! I love what they came up with for 34A and 5D, but I'm pleased that they kept my clues for 39A and 45A. I was proud of those.

– puzzle by Jem Burch