Jeffrey Martinovic and William Yuan’s Universal crossword, “Absent Tees”—Jim’s review Crazy timing here! Yesterday’s NYT had essentially the same theme. As in that puzzle, theme answers are familiar (though unclued) words and phrases that satisfy the clues only when the Ts are mentally ...
I get a lot of questions from crossword constructors about various NYT crossword records, and boy, do we have data! Today's puzzle ties the record for fewest words in a Sunday 21x21. It's also one of the most "open," (how many white squares don't touch any black squares). I'm...
It's been eight years since my last New York Times crossword puzzle, and I'm so excited to be back! I've wanted to make a new NYT crossword ever since I decided to leave my software engineering job to focus on my writing career (check out "Emmy in the Key of Code" coming out ...
This was much better than a recent music puzzle, but I'd have loved even more selections that better catered to the diverse audience that the NYT crossword serves. During my solve, I bogged down in the tons of 3-5 letter entries, making things feel choppy. Perhaps it was the grid ...
MIKE: I hope that my 2nd NYT puzzle (another collaboration with old pal KH) doesn't give people whiplash, i.e. this here straight-forward-themed Tuesday after last month's themeless Saturday! As even editors said on acceptance, while this theme is more straight-forward than what they mig...
That turned out to take a LOT of digging because most state names (like Illinois and Hawaii for example) don't have easy letters to anagram with — none of these five phrases had ever appeared before in the NYT, and three of them were not even in any of my word lists. They all ...