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This one started with IT'S A ZOO crossing NOTHING BURGER, two entries I heard on the same day I started this puzzle. The former was a response to the NYC subways on a particularly bad day and the latter was uttered on cable news at least five times that day, probably by defense lawyers for you know who.

I liked CONTORTIONIST because I had the clue (one who is bent out of shape) in mind for a while. I also really like the clue for CENTRIPETAL (a force of nature). It seems that many themeless puzzles these days don't favor long words instead of phrases or idioms; some think they're not as interesting. I think it's all about the clues — if they're clever, then the solver will enjoy the entry.

MIDSENTENCE occurred to me because I have the bad habit of interrupting others that way. My daughter has recently made a point of that to me. I was surprised to learn that this is the first time that word was in a Times crossword.

I'm pleased that this puzzle is mostly junk-free in a pretty diagram. After all the puzzles I've constructed over the years, I still get a kick out of a good-looking grid with a low word count. The aesthetics of an attractive array of black and white squares is not appreciated by all solvers, but it's a big part of why I like to solve and create themeless puzzles so much.

– puzzle by Randolph Ross

I'm thrilled to have my first puzzle published in the New York Times. One thing I have discovered while learning this craft is that the community of crossword constructors is welcoming and generous. I'd like to specifically thank Jeff Chen, Sam Ezersky, Sam Donaldson, Will Nediger, Sam Trabucco, Finn Vigeland, and Peter Broda. These talented constructors selflessly shared the benefit of their experience with a newbie, and I cannot overstate how grateful I am for that.

I'm a clinical psychologist practicing in Catonsville, MD, and I am fortunate to have found a calling that suits me and gives me the great privilege of helping others as they grow and overcome obstacles in their lives. I live in Catonsville with my wife Beth and four of our five children, all of whom were in middle school and at that AWKWARDAGE when this puzzle was constructed. My oldest is a college graduate and working in his first professional job in environmental science. In my free time, I play piano and trumpet in a local band, and Saturdays this fall I can be found cheering on my alma mater, the TCU Horned Frogs. Whether this will prove therapeutic remains to be seen as of this writing.

Crossword constructing has proven therapeutic for me, and I hope you enjoy the result of my first effort. With the benefit of more experience I look back on this puzzle and wish I had another crack at a few of the fill choices, but I'm happy with the theme, and I learned a lot from reviewing the changes Will and his team made to many of the clues.

I have more accepted puzzles in the queue, and I look forward to sharing them with you. I only began solving crosswords a couple of years ago, and I quickly discovered solving is a wonderful way to clear my mind of all the tasks and worries which might otherwise take me out of the present moment. I hope this puzzle gives you a few minutes of that same peace.

– puzzle by Trent H. Evans

I'm pleased to publish my first NYT Sunday — thanks to Sam and Will for their nice edit, especially their clues for 37- and 54-Across, and 59-Down.

This puzzle is special to me for two reasons. Firstly, by sheer coincidence, it appears on the final day of the U.S. Open tennis tournament. With respect and affection for the golf competition held in the UK each July, in New York, The Open only means one thing.

I started out going with my mom when Sampras and Agassi were in their pomp, although I idolized Patrick Rafter, the Australian who relentlessly attacked the net and said "sorry, mate" when he had to catch his serve toss. I have had some of the best sports moments of my life at the Open, including a memorable night match in 2000 when my mom and I saw my hero Rafter (by then a two-time Open champion) lose dramatically in the first round. Though it wasn't the result I wanted, the atmosphere was electric, and I was hooked.

In recent years, I have been making the annual pilgrimage to Flushing with my soon-to-be-wife Laura — my solving partner on Sundays and my everything partner every day. She has been encouraging me in my constructing since we first met, and I am always bouncing ideas off her. I thought "love-hate relationships" could make for an interesting Sunday concept and revealer, and first tried a "switch" idea (answers like love speech and hate handles), as well as conventionally hiding "love" and "hate" inside longer answers. But I was struggling with the execution until Laura suggested a rebus element which could operate differently in the across and down directions.

After a lot of trial and error, I found the "H-A-T-E" strings hiding in those two longer answers, and realized I could intersect them both with the centrally placed revealer (It seemed logical for the "L-O-V-E" strings all to operate horizontally because Across clues appear first in print). This led to a somewhat unusual grid with lots of options for long non-theme material, and I'm happy with the bonuses I was able to include. It's a real challenge to stay at or under the 140-word limit, so I hope the tradeoffs, including more short plurals than I'd prefer, were worth it, and that solvers enjoy my interpretation of mixed feelings.

– puzzle by Hal Moore

It's always nice to see one's work published in the New York Times, but I was especially gratified to see this one appear — it had been accepted on January 21, 2017! Well, as they say, good things come to those who wait. For those of you who found 2-Down to be difficult, please note that the event mentioned in the clue was less than a month in the past when the puzzle was accepted.

The puzzle theme is similar to one I published in the Chronicle of Higher Education several years ago entitled "Made in Japan". I noticed that several Japanese words commonly known to English speakers have literal translations that are rather surprising or intriguing. For example, "sayonara" means "if it must be so" and "karaoke" means "empty orchestra". More recently, I noticed the same thing sometimes occurs in the names of French food items, and the presence of the inimitable Julia Child on American television offered a revealer that would lead to such theme entries. In devising the grid, I was fortunate in the letter length of the selected entries; they allowed me to use a progression of terms that become, to a degree, relatively harder to spell or less familiar as one proceeds down the grid.

And a pun hangs in the air that I can't resist — the French terms are all theme entries, but not all entrées. Despite that comment, I hope you enjoy the puzzle.

– puzzle by Jeffrey Wechsler

I suspect Will and crew have a backlog of rebus puzzles in their Thursday inventory. This one took nearly as long to go from acceptance to publication (17 months) as my first 5 Thursday puzzles combined (3+1.5+3+5+5 = 17.5 months).

Since I created this puzzle so long ago, I see it now through a very different set of eyes. When I wrote it, I was really into creating pangrammatic grids (i.e., using all the letters of the alphabet at least once). While scrabbly letters can be great since they're generally rarer in crosswords, if I were making this puzzle today, I would prioritize smoother fill over including the last few letters of the alphabet. For example, QED, UTE, and ETRE seem like a high price to pay for the Q in the upper-left corner.

On the other hand, I still agree with my decision to deploy the Utah block (i.e., the Utah-shaped clump of 5 contiguous black squares) in the lower right. Once THIN OUT, INBOX, and OUTBOX were in place, if I hadn't deployed the Utah block (i.e., if I had put a black square where the S in SHELL is and removed the 3 black squares to the left), then there would have been only one entry into that corner (THIN OUT). To create good grid flow, you want at least two words to connect any isolated section with the rest of the grid.

Two other things I like about this puzzle: (1) the symmetry between CARPING ABOUT and RAINBOW TROUT; and (2) the image of a stacked INBOX/OUTBOX sitting on someone's desk. My original cluing for the INBOX/OUTBOX revealer was to treat them as a unit (thereby emphasizing the visual nature of the stacking), but hopefully, solvers will still get the picture (hah!) in the puzzle's current incarnation.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

This puzzle is one of the success stories of the editing process, so I owe extra thanks to Will for this one, for having both high standards and patience with constructors.

Back in 2015, I'd built a puzzle around the same pair of 15-letter seeds (which may speak a little to their pairing: I was starting to write this puzzle just as Obergefell v. Hodges was being decided — plus I'm a computer science faculty member, so I was particularly drawn to the second of the two long entries). I had managed to include a bunch of other longer entries that I liked a lot (SPARKPLUG, HARPER LEE, ITS SO EASY, ...), but, as the rejection note from Will and Joel said, there were too many ugly short entries that "start to add up after a while to make for unpleasant solving." That's always a tendency that I have to fight when I'm filling puzzles: I tend to overvalue what I consider to be awesome long entries and fail to pay enough attention to the costly short junk that they induce.

I got similar feedback from some other editors at other venues, and so, begrudgingly, I put the puzzle away in my (overstuffed) filing drawer of rejections.

But I kept finding myself compelled by this pair of 15s, and so I pulled it back out a couple of years later. In short, I moved a couple of black squares around, refilled again from scratch, reclued it all, and submitted a new version. A good portion of the NW corner (my favorite portion of the 2015 version) stayed intact from attempt #1 to attempt #2, and OVINES survived (but migrated in the grid); save those pieces and the 15s, everything else was brand new.

And here's the result. Hope you enjoy it — and, even if you don't, I hope you appreciate that the version you didn't see was a lot worse!

– puzzle by David Liben-Nowell

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!

– puzzle by Joel Fagliano

I was Magritte's "Son of Man" for a Hallowe'en party a couple of years ago. The decision, however, had a fatal flaw: it was my Hallowe'en party and I was playing bartender. Seeing, I learned later, is a useful sense to have when preparing drinks for public consumption.

"Seeing is not believing" could be a warning drawing from the subject of this puzzle. The construction came together rather quickly, because I always needed to think several steps ahead to ensure the viability of its completion.

I'll go into some depth about the construction, for those interested. Tribute puzzles put an inherent limitation on theme entries: you've got to keep them basic and trivial (i.e. like trivia). (That being said, I have to acknowledge here Elizabeth Gorski and Kevin Der for having contributed the finest puzzles of this sort, in my book.) I thought here the added quotation simultaneously refined and complicated the tribute, and once I decided to include it, given the beautiful way it can break into segments of 7, 15, and 7, it became clear that I needed to go with right-left symmetry. (In fact, the crossings work out very kindly if you stack the lines directly on top of one another, but immediately you'll see the impossibility of this option.)

For the pipe itself, I knew it needed to possess a convincing likeness once it was drawn, and I was intent on honoring the original proportions as much as possible. So I put an image of "Treachery" into a vector graphics software, overlaid a 21x21 grid on it, and set out to find the key vertices of the pipe, seeing where they landed in the grid. These spots would correspond to the squares with circles in them. I also did some of manual testing in one of those science notebooks I somehow still own, despite completing zero scientific activities on a daily basis. It was only then I realized just how much the luscious, round edges of this pipe contribute to its sensuality, hence my "rounded edges look best" direction.

Because the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is so iconic, and a fundamental visual component of the painting, as opposed to being a paratext, I knew it had to be included, in the original French. With the quotation on three lines, the title of the painting, and the other thematic material, there was no way this was going to make it in as a regular entry. Yet, at 17 letters, and hence 17 points in the outline, the phrase gives just enough resolution for the image (better than 14 for "THIS IS NOT A PIPE"). Once these proportions were determined, they were fixed, though the image could be moved vertically within the grid, and I could start the phrase at several points (I limited the possibilities to the left side: so the circles at 29-, 36-, or 62-across). Getting the title of work in the interstitial line without circles and finding out the"I" at 85-across could pull double duty was a crucial step toward getting that central section to work. I do wish MAGRITTE could have been in the very last slot, to echo the extreme corner position of the signature in the original image, but the crossings wouldn't allow it (it barely allowed the present corner to happen).

Thanks as always to Will and co. for helping get this out into the world. A couple of notes here: My original title for this puzzle was "WHAT YOU SEE IS...". The central bottom box was also revised from the submission (I had, under IS IT NOT: CEO, EXT, STE; not sure if EXT and STE are less desirable than OXY and DTS.) I had a lot more wordplay in the original clues, but maybe some were imprecise, or too oblique: SELFIE was "Single shot?" EMITTERS was "Ones with issues?" NOTE was "Staff pick?" The clues for LAB NOTES and TROUPE, however, made it through.

In the end, this puzzle is not only an homage to Magritte, but also an homage to the typology of puzzles: apart from being a tribute, it has circles you connect to make an image, a quotation, and even a bit of thematic wordplay with 120-across. It's also an homage to paper [solving].

Hopefully, the surrealism of the original painting gains a new dimension here: a representation of a representation. The (benign) joke, which was the reason "Treachery" was so enticing to invoke, is on detractors of this theme: if you finish the puzzle, play your bonus round of connect-the-dots, and declare "that's not a pipe!" or "that isn't anything like a pipe!," you'd, of course, be fully correct.

– puzzle by Andrew Zhou

Given the theme, I originally made this a pangram, but with answers that Will thought were too much for a Monday — ergo, a Z is nowhere to be found. It's funny — I'm usually told to redo a grid because it's not good enough; this time, I was told to dial it down because it was too good (I think?).

As far back as I can remember, I've always been a huge fan of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. I had both Nintendo games as a kid, and I would tune in to watch every night at 7 pm — a tradition I'm currently passing on to my son.

Once I realized how well the symmetry worked, I was honestly shocked that this theme had never appeared in an NY Times puzzle before. After all, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune go hand-in-hand, airing back-to-back for the past 30+ years, so it seemed like such an up-for-grabs theme for an author to jump on. As such, I don't consider it a gameshow theme — the gameshow aspect is more of a subtext. The theme, I think, is more about how well these two shows complement each other. I mean seriously, can you think of one without thinking of the other?

I was very happy with the outcome because not only do the theme answers fit symmetrically, but their order is not forced or random. The shows and corresponding hosts group in a smooth, top-to-bottom pattern of show, host(s), show, host(s).

And here's the interesting kicker — crosswords incorporate the same aspects these gameshows do, from the clues on Jeopardy! to the blank spaces and letters on Wheel of Fortune. Kind of makes the theme all the more fitting — and makes sense as to why I could never like these shows without liking crosswords, and vice versa.

Note: Turns out that in certain parts of the country, Wheel of Fortune airs before Jeopardy! I never knew (or even thought about) that before constructing this puzzle. Ah, ya learn something new every day.

– puzzle by Michael Black

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!

– puzzle by Melinda Gates and Joel Fagliano

The Revenge of the Grid

I believe the art of the crossword puzzle will wither and die if we don't keep breaking it open to make it new again. I get bored if all I do is create variations on proven concepts. So, whether you liked this puzzle or not, I did it to explore something new, to break a few rules, and to take advantage of a platform (the NYT) that celebrates the idea of taking risks.

In this puzzle, I was intrigued by the idea of exploring whether the grid itself could provide its own theme clues. I like to think that if puzzle grids had personalities and could talk, some grids (extroverted types) would say they wanted to be more center stage, to participate in the same things that the clues always do.

"Hey, why do you words always get to give the clues? Why can't we grids ever do that!? It's always empty square, black square, empty square, black square…"

I like to think that my grid is smiling at the idea that its theme fill points back to the grid. The theme fill is, in a way, subordinated to the grid. When the grid lives ABOVE the fill, it's a good day in grid-dom.

When pondering this puzzle, I wondered how far I could go with the design. Would I have to do it using already-accepted methods? Would Will Shortz be interested? How much would I be allowed to challenge standard grid design? My first draft even included CLUELESS in the fill, clued as "How one might feel trying to solve 17-, 33-, 42-, and 62-Across". In the end, Will advised that the CLUELESS entry was not necessary. The puzzle's grid would speak for itself. He got the point I was trying to make even more than I did.

– puzzle by Daniel Kantor