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This puzzle represents my record for theme efficiency. I thought of the idea and then scoured the databases for double-alcohol phrases. There aren't many. It's a challenge just to find candidate alcohols with short, common letter combinations (SLIVOVITZ, for example, isn't going to work), and even after you do, there aren't many phrases in which they are doubly embedded. HARUM SCARUM and HEAR YE, HEAR YE are the only ones of their type I could find. But those are great seed entries, so when I discovered MAKE MINE A DOUBLE was (amazingly) 15 letters, it would have been constructor malpractice not to make this puzzle.

So, I jimmied up LOGGING INTO, which isn't very exciting, but it works, leaving me in need of one 12-letter theme entry to round out the set. IMPORT EXPORT was my first try, but the NYT editing team didn't like it, because nobody orders a double port. Fair enough. But ALE was the only other possible option, and I had already tried to find a 12-letter double-ALE phrase and gotten nowhere. After lamenting the fact that ALEX HALEY wasn't named ALEX HALEYSON, I went on the "Alex" page of Wikipedia and almost immediately hit on ALEX VAN HALEN — 12 letters. Whoomp! (There it is.)

Next time I'm frustrated by the Crossword Gods foiling my beautiful theme idea (nobody take my SPICE GIRLS theme, I just need a match with ROSEMARY CLOONEY), I'll think of this puzzle.

– puzzle by Damon Gulczynski

I just had my graduation ceremony for my Master of Arts in Teaching program yesterday, so what better way to celebrate than having my third crossword in the New York Times! FINGERS CROSSED that things go well in my first year as a Chemistry teacher. This one goes out to everyone who helped me make it this far.

Jeff Chen of xwordinfo.com likes to mention Crucivera, the God of Crosswords, who sometimes deigns to smile on a puzzle and grant it perfect symmetry of theme answers. Not this puzzle. For this puzzle, Crucivera beat me up and took my lunch money. Crossing themes are difficult to grid because of all the letters locked into place, and this one was no exception.

It took me a few iterations to get it right — thanks to Will and the team for their patience. While there are a couple of compromises in the fill (especially the SW corner), here's hoping that the bonuses and the theme are enough to make up for it. Here's hoping you enjoy the solve!

– puzzle by Evan Mahnken

Happy 4th of July to everyone. Perhaps you'll find a few sparklers in my Jimmy the 14th puzzle? (Jeff: it's Jim Hilger's 14th NYT puzzle — happy Bastille Day coming up in 10 days!)

This crossword's theme required a little bit of elbow grease for me to come up with a symmetric set of answers. I originally included a theme revealer, which I think was FORWARDED LETTER. It was suggested that we go without the 15-long central revealer, on the second try.

The second submitted puzzle version dropped the revealer, but had wordier theme clues, using a "...with a little recycling?" ending, instead of the "...concisely?" one chosen by the editors. Since this ended up being a Thursday puzzle, I can appreciate the use of a slightly more cryptic and "concise" wording for the theme clues. I suspect it may require a little bit more elbow grease, to solve.

My favorite surviving original clue: "No longer either hot or cool?", for PASSE.

Hopeveryonenjoys!

– puzzle by Jim Hilger

The seed for the puzzle was "PHARMA BRO," as it was an entry that the NYT team liked in a prior unrelated and rejected themeless. So I thought I was pretty safe going with that ...yes, you guessed it, it still didn't make the cut! Though deemed "fresh," it had to be taken out due to its "ephemeral feel" that wouldn't last the test of time or the syndication lag, all of which I ultimately agreed with. So, the "most hated man in America" (for a while at least, until _____ took his place — insert your fav public enemy #1 here) was out, and his employee PHARMA REP was in. In the process, AUDIO TOUR / SLEEP ON IT morphed into the slightly more conventional AUDIOTAPE / SLEEPOVER now in that SE corner.

Only a few of my clues made it through (like 22A and 32D), so I still have a lot to learn. For example for 11D, "Not the hang-gliding type?" turned into "One who hates heights," and "Drug pusher?" for PHARMA REP was replaced by "One making a living by pushing drugs, informally," which is more accurate I suppose.

My favorite bit of the puzzle is probably the DAYTRADER / FAT FINGER pair, mostly because of my current day job in markets risk management. Yes, the latter does happen more than you think!

Hope my first themeless is acceptable to everyone.

Constructor Log : Submitted March 2018 and accepted in June after the aforementioned revision.

– puzzle by Freddie Cheng

This is my first puzzle to get accepted for publication, which I'm very excited about! I've always been interested in puzzle construction, mostly for the challenge of creating a fun, vibrant grid. I'm a big fan of games like Bananagrams and Boggle, and generally find the problem of stacking words neatly into a symmetrical grid very appealing. I think it appeals to the math-y side of my brain.

This puzzle has been in the works for a while. I've been going back to it sporadically for the past year or two, and just finally hunkered down and finished it. I came up with the idea after going to the World Chess Championship in NYC back in 2016. I was on a big chess kick—playing online and doing chess tactics every day—and thought ‘hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could somehow put a chess tactic inside a crossword puzzle?'

After that, it took some fiddling to figure out how best to do it. I knew it had to be a checkmate, so I spent some time looking through some "mate-in-one" puzzles to find a suitable one. I eventually found one I thought could work, saw that the solution KNIGHT TO B EIGHT lined up length-wise with CHECKMATE-IN-ONE, and decided to try it out. With some adding and removing of pieces (while being careful to keep the checkmate intact) I was able to fit it into the grid and fill in the rest from there.

– puzzle by Jack Reuter

I remember considering a puzzle about redundant phrases a couple years ago and being disappointed when it turned out the theme had been done before. However, that puzzle was on a Saturday almost twenty years ago, so I decided to give it a shot with (mostly) different phrases. This theme would certainly not be considered for a Saturday today, and it almost seems appropriate that a puzzle about redundant, repetitive, superfluous phrases is not entirely fresh!

I enjoy learning something about the history of phrases like this, so I looked them up on Google Ngram Viewer. PAST HISTORY seems to be the oldest of the group, coming in around the mid-1800's, and TAXI CAB became popular around 1920. BUNNY RABBIT took off in 1940 near the 7/27/40 debut of Bugs Bunny, and CASH MONEY came into common usage around 1945. RAT FINK took off in 1965 after Ed "Big Daddy" Roth created a "hot rod" character with that name as an anti-hero vs. Mickey Mouse.

Hope solvers enjoy the puzzle!

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

I'm surprised to see this puzzle published so close to my Tuesday crossword from April 9, 2019. Both puzzles rely on the same linguistic oddity (semordnilaps), though the rest of their gimmicks are very different. Even so, spacing the two puzzles further apart might have allowed the previous theme to fade a bit more from solvers' collective memory. On the other hand, there's only one overlapping semordnilap pair: the NAME TAG/GATEMAN combination. Fortuitously, that's also the last one a solver would encounter if solving top-to-bottom.

Today's grid was made six months before the April puzzle. It's interesting to me that solvers are encountering them in an order opposite their creation. Though perhaps that fits perfectly with the semordnilaps theme. ;-)

For this puzzle, I focused on long (6+ letters) semordnilap pairs that exhibit changes in spacing. I think it's much more exciting to find TO ORDER hidden in RED ROOT than REPAID hidden in DIAPER. Of course, there aren't a lot of long semordnilaps to choose from, so my options were pretty limited. Some of the other pairs that didn't make the cut include STRESSED/DESSERTS, DELIVER/REVILED, NO TIPS/SPIT ON, NO PETS/STEP ON, and WONTON/NOT NOW.

One ding for the puzzle is that the theme answers (CUSTOMIZED, STUDENTS, etc.) are somewhat prosaic. That's due to (1) terse clues (similar to a classical definition theme); (2) limited options on the semordnilap front; and (3) symmetry and length requirements. Hopefully the fun of the puzzle isn't in the theme words themselves — it's in deciphering the clues and figuring out the backwards answers.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

The inspiration for this puzzle was this Peter Wentz themeless from 2013. I solved that at a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina while I was on the road, photographing post offices across the Southeast. (Seriously—I have a blog, an Instagram of post offices, the whole shebang.) Peter's grids are always great, but this one really fascinated me: how the Z occupied such a position of prominence in two awesome entries; the clean stagger-stack of 13s; and that VW-/AAA-/NBA- stack in the southeast. I started jotting down any 13-letter phrases I encountered, and tried for years in vain to create a satisfying grid with similar topography. Nearly five years later, and with the benefit of some... let's call it "competence," this puzzle was complete.

My aim was to deliver three fun 13-letter entries that were not only Shortz-era debuts, but which also formed some silly little narrative if you take a step back. (See also: 36-/33-Down. That corner was actually remanded to me, and this iteration of fill is much nicer; thank you, Will.)

This grid is somewhat segmented, and that helped me create the rest of the puzzle. I tried to maximize the count of fresh entries, and my inner nerd led me to pack the corners full of sci-tech goodness.

I don't know how many other constructors have this tendency to constantly revisit or second-guess their completed work (for you classical music buffs, I'm more of a Mahler than a Shostakovich), but it still slightly gnaws at me that there are a bunch of plural entries crossing the central stack. Feels a bit inelegant. Alas!

– puzzle by Evan Kalish

I'm excited to be making my NYT debut! I am 17 years old, and since the age of 12, it has been a dream of mine to get a crossword published in the NYT. Aside from constructing crosswords, I also perform stand-up comedy and write music. They're all my favourite ways to appreciate words, pretty much.

I wrote this puzzle back in January. The seed for this theme was LAN[D ROVE]R, but the entry that made this puzzle possible was PENNY D[READ]FULS. I'm glad it got accepted!

My favourite clues from Will and Joel are [Something most people lie about?] and [Apple's first location?].

My favourite clue that I wrote is [Headrest for a couch napper, say].

Big thanks to Peter Broda for his amazing word list, as well as to Erik Agard for his feedback on my theme answers. Also, I'd like to give a shout-out to the online crosswording community for being a group of such talented and nice people.

I would also like to use this opportunity to plug my crossword blog lucky streak xwords where I post mainly themeless puzzles. My personal favourite so far is themeless seven so if you want a feel for what my puzzles are like I recommend you start there. Thank you!

– puzzle by Ada Nicolle

This puzzle was sparked by a love of rare letters (I'm an avid Scrabble player who studies the J, Q, X, and Z words for fun) and the discovery that AQUAMARINE seemed to fit rather nicely on top of FUZZY NAVEL. I began to create a potential grid skeleton around the double stack with ZEBRA on top, when I excitedly realized that I might actually be able to make it into a triple stack by using ZEBRA FINCH instead! This stack still remains one of my all-time favorites from my themeless constructions — I think getting four Z's and a Q into that 4x4 block is pretty cool, all four of the long answers up there seem pretty nice to me (especially ZEBRA FINCH, which is my favorite entry in the puzzle), and I'm especially pleased with how cleanly that corner turned out.

Once I came up with a rough grid skeleton, ALL THAT JAZZ seemed like it might work well at 27-Down to smoothly work in a few more rare letters, and it turns out it did. Construction often feels like it's all about compromise, so it's always nice when things just seem to fall into place — here, even allowing for a fortuitous pangram! With that in mind, though I admit that there was a not-so-small part of me that wanted to find a way to fit in ten more Z's (I might have a problem), I decided to prioritize filling the rest of the grid cleanly while trying to incorporate some more nice long entries. I think the puzzle turned out pretty well — it seems to me like one that can be enjoyed by a wide range of solvers, as there isn't much in the way of esoterica, current pop culture or niche references here, just some interesting entries, Scrabbly letters and some unique — and perhaps even mildly entertaining — clues.

Speaking of which, some of my favorite clues of mine in this puzzle are those for 42-Across, 50-Across, 27-Down, 43-Down, and 44-Down. Some might be interested to know that I originally clued CHALK LINE as the carpentry tool; to be honest, the new clue feels somewhat arbitrary to me. However, I was pleased to see that all three of my clues for the stacked entries in the upper-right survived, as I thought they were particularly… color-ful. On that (admittedly groan-worthy) note, happy solving!

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson

This is the first grid I've made with fewer than 60 entries. Never say never, but I suspect it will be the last. It's not easy to get the word count that low and keep everything flowing and interconnected the way I like.

There are a few clues here I really like, especially [Performance bonus] for ENCORE, which I had in mind when I built the grid. I really like having "question mark" clues that are so on point that you can omit the question mark. But my favorite clue is one of the innocuous ones: [Salves] for RELIEVES. It is there as a hat-tip to one of my constructing heroes, Sherry O. Blackard. In 2006, she had a 58-word puzzle in the Times where SALVES was an entry clued as [Relieves]. The grids aren't twins — hers had no three-letter words and was connected through the middle. But as a mere mortal, I'm happy to have one that is even just reminiscent of hers.

– puzzle by Byron Walden

One of these days I will have a puzzle in the NYT that doesn't use left/right symmetry, but today is not that day. As with both previous puzzles, the symmetry was pretty much dictated by the lengths of the theme entries. In addition, since all of the theme entries are of even length, the grid ended up being wider than usual to accommodate this. Neither of these changes bother me (in fact, I often use unusual sizes / symmetry for puzzles on my own site), but together, they did pose some challenges.

In particular, this means that every across entry straddling the middle columns has to be at least four letters long. Coupled with the fact that every theme entry has to be centered as well, it was a bit of a challenge to find a grid layout that allowed me to keep things clean and fresh while not being too constrictive. It's no wonder, then, that most of the long fill is out on the edges of the puzzle, where there are fewer constraints. But I was pleased to be able to work in some long downs through three theme entries apiece.

The longer across entries were also a nice bonus; KARAOKE BAR, in particular, is a favorite. Even though it's the same length as one of the theme entries, it was too good to leave out. My original submission had shading in the theme entries, both to avoid this confusion of what was and was not theme as well as making it easier to figure out which letters are involved in the theme; that said, the title and the clue for 105-Across spell things out pretty well, I think.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this one—a few more black squares than I'd like, but most of them are forced by the symmetry and the lengths of the theme answers, and the ones that aren't forced either helped immensely in filling around the overlapping theme answers or in working in some interesting answers. And, of course, keeping fill clean and crossings fair—to me, that's the golden rule, and if it takes a few extra black squares to do that, then I'll do that any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Back in 2017, George Barany and I had a puzzle in the Minnesota Crossword Tournament whose reveal was MINNESOTA WILD and whose theme answers were EXPANSION TEAM, NOMINATES, EXILE ON MAIN ST, and ANTIMESON. That puzzle was 17 rows by 13 columns. At that tournament, we were talking with Jeffrey Wechsler (who also had a puzzle in the tournament that year), who told us that he also had a puzzle with nine letter anagrams coming out in the near future; it was eventually published in the LA Times in 2018 with the reveal CHOCOLATE SWIRLS. That puzzle is 15 by 15, and Jeffrey noted that he managed to find all of his theme answers by hand (whereas both the MINNESOTA WILD and MIXED METAPHORS puzzles used computer assistance for the majority of it, although in both cases some potential theme answers were found by hand).

As far as I am aware, these are the only previous puzzles with anagrams of nine or more letters, although I'd be delighted to learn of any others. And I'd be remiss not to point out this absolute gem from Erik Agard, which has an OUT OF ORDER elevator (so, eight letters) in every theme answer (and, appropriately, has them all running up/down).

– puzzle by Christopher Adams