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I'm a rising high school senior at Riverdale Country School in New York City. It's beyond an honor to have today's puzzle!

I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure I thought of this theme on a Sunday night while I was sitting on the red chair in my living room trying not to do my homework, although, admittedly, that's how I come up with most of my puzzles. I sent this grid in with a bit of trepidation — since I know a hidden word theme is a tough sell these days — I was so happily surprised when the team told me this one was going to be a yes.

I want to thank the editing team, especially Wyna Liu and Tracy Bennett, for giving me kind and thoughtful feedback on my puzzles. Most of all, thank you to Andrew Kingsley for being the best cruciverbal partner-in-crime (and English teacher!) in potentially the history of cruciverbal partners-in-crime. Collaborating with him has made me the crossword constructor I am today, and for that, I am eternally grateful. Andrew and I have some cool stuff in the works, so hopefully, you'll see us under the bright lights sometime soon.

Happy solving!

– puzzle by Garrett Chalfin

JAY: With this puzzle, I had the phrase "Repeat after me" bouncing around in my head for a while, and naturally thought letters that repeat after the letters "M,E" might make for a nice puzzle. But I just wasn't sure it was NYT-worthy, so I forgot about it.

When Dan and I got together, as we often do (we are not only co-constructors but good friends) to catch up and talk puzzles, I mentioned it to him. His eyes lit up, and he said, "This is a great idea. We should totally do it." Dan has never been shy about giving me his honest opinion about my puzzle ideas before, so the fact that he sparked to it got me excited about bringing this one to life.

Unless you're a constructor, it's easy to assume the harder a puzzle is to solve, the harder it is to build, but building an easy puzzle can be more challenging because the parameters are more limiting. The high theme letter count (73) also contributed to the challenge.

– puzzle by Jay Kaskel and Daniel Kantor

My solo debut! A multiple choice test, mid-summer? *Sheeesh*

I must confess that I look back on this puzzle with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the critic in me frowns on the blindly clued, seemingly random trivia question. On the other hand, I really do like how this puzzle pushes the envelope. Giving solvers a solid reason to break the norm and "shade" in a square was one clear aim of this puzzle (I'd have preferred for solvers actually to blacken the square, but the rebus is as close as you get on the digital platform I guess...). In any case, I hope this puzzle finds you well and gives you something new to chew on. Big thanks to the editing team for their input and suggestions.

Speaking of STARRY, have you checked out these images on the Webb? Incredible!

...and just in case you were wondering, the combined scrabble score of my commentary here is 1246... I'll show myself out now...

– puzzle by Daniel Bodily

This is my second puzzle for the Times. My first was a collaboration with my daughter, Tess Davison that appeared in January 2020. There have been many rejections in between that one and this one!

I began working on this puzzle in January 2021. I seem to remember a small controversy about a clue for the entry PAD that would be immediately obvious to most women and girls but completely puzzling to most men. Some commenters pointed out that since most puzzle constructors are men, many puzzles are very male-oriented. (I know I get hung up when a theme is sports-related.) So, as a female constructor, I decided to think of a theme that would be familiar to more women than men — and came up with makeup!

My original attempt has gone through a couple of revisions, and I'd like to give a shoutout to the Puzzles team — especially Tracy Bennett — for their help and encouragement.

– puzzle by Kathy Lowden

False friends are the reason this puzzle exists. They're pairs of words in different languages that seem related to one another but whose meanings are completely different. So, 'pan' in Spanish isn't related to 'pan' in English, and it doesn't have anything to do with cooking vessels. False friends, in short, looked like one English word but meant another.

In finding theme material for this puzzle, I went through lists of these words, which had been compiled as a caution for language learners, and whenever a false friend and its English meaning formed a valid phrase, I added it. False friends were also invaluable in avoiding the trap of 'redundant' translations, like 'chai tea' (since chai already means 'tea') and the dozens of place names meaning 'river river' or 'hill hill' (look up tautological place names for a very confusing read), plus false cognates, in which two words do have the same meaning, but through pure coincidence rather than sharing a common ancestor.

In all, I'm surprised that this extremely rigid theme had as many valid entries as it did, and especially that almost all had the English and non-English word occur in the same order.

– puzzle by David Tuffs

I'm pretty sure I finished building this puzzle at 2 a.m., covered in eraser marks and pencil lead. Imagine if you had 15 children and had to remember the exact moment each was born — recalling the inspiration behind this puzzle is kind of like that even though it was CHOSEN for publication — my first. How was I to know THIS would be THE ONE?!!

I remember intending to make it visually fitting for the theme. I remember brainstorming room types, and I still have the page of all my scribbles. I was intently focused on the symmetry. When it all came together, I felt the thrill of satisfaction, but truly had no idea this one would make the cut.

I'm not sure how others construct their puzzles, but I print out blank grids and pencil everything in, erasing words that don't work, rearranging black squares as needed, consulting my phone or laptop for word lists, etc. When the grid is done, I punch it into the software for clue writing and submission formatting.

I love the act and the challenge of hand building the grid. I love erasing and writing in new words over the eraser marks. I wait to firmly color in the black squares until the puzzle is completely finished. It's like the final touch. In the end, it feels like a piece of art.

I hope you enjoy solving my puzzle!

– puzzle by Sue Fracker

"Pharaoh" is one of those words that I'm never totally sure how to spell, like "camaraderie," "occasion," and "hors d'ouevres." Hors d'oeurvres? Whatever.

In assembling my theme answers, I initially set out to find misspellings that occurred organically, like 39-Across, or Dan Quayle's "potatoe" (ask your parents, and then kindly see yourself off of my lawn). That didn't yield much, though, and while the rest of the themers are of the stylistic variety, I think they make for a much livelier set.

In other news — excluding a single Sunday puzzle, this is my fourth consecutive Wednesday puzzle. Nothing else, just Wednesdays. This hasn't been my intention, but evidently, I'm a Wednesday kind of constructor. Wednesday is also objectively the hardest day of the week to spell. Coincidence? Yes.

Special thanks go out to a 64-year-old registered nurse in a tiny central Missouri town, without whom this puzzle wouldn't have been possible.

– puzzle by Michael Paleos

Cracking a theme idea usually gives me an endorphin rush, a sort of cruciverbal runner's high. (Punner's high?) (Sorry.) (Actually, not sorry. No shame in my game.)

With this idea, though, it was more a rush of tentative dread because I was certain someone must have beaten me to the punch. Heck, Jeff Chen himself had even tweeted about it six months earlier. And yet, despite checking every resource I could find, it seemed like the theme hadn't been done.

So I set out to make the grid... and quickly realized why.

I must've made over 25 versions of this puzzle (I only submitted three—don't worry, I don't waste the editorial team's time *that* much). An early rejection had NADA (GEENA DAVIS, ALL IN A DAY'S WORK) and SQUAT (SASQUATCH, LOUIS QUATORZE), which the eds thought were more analogous with "nothing" than "zero." I tried LOVE (ALL OVER, DONALD GLOVER) as a fifth rebus, but the fill buckled under the pressure. Even ZIP was almost a non-starter (you may have doubts about JACUZZI PARTY, but I promise it's one million billion times better than the only other phrase that hides *ZI P*).

Why spend so much time making a crossword? Because it's fun. And challenging. And, in my opinion, kinda beautiful. I'm lucky to have found a hobby that so perfectly suits what I'm about and a community of people with whom I really feel like I belong. Love you, crossworld. See you next time!

– puzzle by Adam Wagner

Hello out there! Glad to be back with my second NYT puzzle. I am currently away from my desk in Seattle and being as old school as one can be with out falling off the face of the earth, I am not close enough to my notes to remember exactly how this theme got started. Most likely, I noticed that REAL ESTATE AGENT is a lovely spanner and took it from there.

All thanks to Cruciverbia for three very common housing options also being spanners. From there, jokes about overzealous sales people are easy. PEEK A BOO VIEW was also in the running but besides not being a spanner, it is a feature of a property instead of being a property, so it lacks the tightness of the theme as published.

The other notable thing about this puzzle is that my original submission was soundly rejected in a good news/bad news kind of way. Good news, we like your theme. Bad news, dull short uninteresting fill means no. So I took out some black squares to open up 2-, 3- and 6-Down and reworked it to a happily accepted grid which I hope you enjoyed solving.

Which leads to the question on many a constructor's lips... why not have a stage of submission to get approval of themes before filling and clueing an entire grid (especially in the realm of the SUNDAY)?!?! Obviously "Yes, we like this theme" isn't a guarantee but "No, we don't like this theme" could save one a lot of time. Thoughts?

– puzzle by Colin Ernst

OLIVIA: It has been such a pleasure to work with Andrea on my first ever NYT collab! When I started in the biz, Andrea provided me with invaluable guidance, and I'm thrilled to share a byline with her today.

This is also my first Thursday puzzle! I was definitely out of my comfort zone (Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays), but I'm really happy with how it came out.

I love the playfulness of the theme entries — they're just so fun to say. I remember we struggled with the best way to clue them — initially, we thought of describing a road trip route via cities and using something like INTERSTATE [Type of travel used in this puzzle] as the revealer. But I think the revealer we landed on makes for a tighter theme since it specifically calls out how we got three states in each entry. And as someone who has lived almost all her life in the NYC tri-state area, this revealer feels cozy to me, like coming home. Hope you enjoyed!

ACME: I met the crazily brilliant Olivia Mitra Framke when she reached out on the Fb mentor/collaborator page.

From an offhand remark of my being intrigued to discover a shared four letters between MiNNESota and TeNNESsee, Olivia was inspired to create a long list of overlapping states!

(My fave is the fact that the two shortest named states OHIO and IOWA overlap into OHIOWA)

From there we wrestled with best way to clue as well as a dead-on reveal.

Here's a quote from one of our earliest back-and-forths that gives a peek into the process:

• Ideally they should look slightly Un crazy and maybe even fun to say!
• Like the FLORIDAHOHIO 12 is a bit trippy bec at first it just looks like you've stuck an H between Florida and Ohio.
• I can't tell if that's great or the opposite!

I look forward to more collaborations. We've bonded (Oliviandrea?) but have yet to meet IRL, as the kids say!

– puzzle by Olivia Mitra Framke and Andrea Carla Michaels

This one started one day when I randomly ran across someone else's grid design and noticed all the 4-letter slots were downs and all the 5-letter slots were acrosses. Of course, my little nerd brain kicked in immediately: "Wonder if a grid like that's been done before? Wonder if it can be?" I thought I might be on to something when the answers came back — surprisingly: "Not that I can find" and "Yup."

Theme development is my constructor kryptonite, but even I figured out pretty quickly that — while a nice technical feat in grid design — as a theme goes, I've had more substance in hospital broth. And that was the end of it. I put it away.

But then the fill. It started to call out to me. Unbidden. At all hours. I realized I had never actually tried to fill that beautiful grid. It's only seventy words. No theme required. Maybe if I just see how clean I can get it...

When all that positivity popped up, my mind started wandering to retirement spots on alluring tropical islands with rum, pirates, sheepdogs, and sappy 1960s television... I knew my soul was home. I hope you found a little comfort as well. Cheers!

Much gratitude to my mentor, Jeff Chen. I wouldn't be here without his support, patience, kindness, and sage advice.

– puzzle by Robert Logan