Eric Hougland

<a href="https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/crossword-editor-will-shortz-says" target="_blank">https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/crossword-editor-will-shortz-says</a>

My husband’s uncle had several books of NYT crossword puzzles. When he died a few years ago, his widow gave them to me. Filling out this grid reminded me of finishing the puzzles Uncle Woody started — especially when I had to change an incorrect answer. Thanks for the fun, Mr. Milton, and congratulations on your solo NYT debut!

Congratulations on your NYT debuts, Messrs. Michnovicz and Michnovicz! Nicely done!

Gust for GALE probably added 10 minutes to my solving time. I finally caught on to the trick with GIVE OFF/EMIT, but I still struggled to finish the NW corner. This was the most challenging Sunday puzzle in weeks, not so much because of the clue drawings but because of the "See __ Down" clues.

If you’ve been wondering how Will Shortz is doing, he emceed the ACPT this weekend: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/hkysa7xy" target="_blank">https://tinyurl.com/hkysa7xy</a> I think there’s about 45 minutes of video before he shows up. He seems to be recovering well.

The many pronunciations of OUGH has long fascinated me, but it never occurred to me to try and build a crossword puzzle around it. Thanks, Ms Morris!

Congratulations on a fun and zippy NYT debut, Mr. Josephson! I especially liked the freshness of the four 15-letter answers in the top and bottom of the grid. Good luck with the remainder of your studies!

I hope those who think that the Saturday puzzle has been much too easy of late are happy with this one. Granted, I’m a bit tired from skiing all day, but this took me as long as some of the really tricky puzzles from 20 years ago. Part of my trouble was being overly-Saturdayish early on, when I had WAdi instead of WASH. (I blame Frank Herbert for introducing me to wadi decades before I ever hiked in a wash.) Once I got rid of WAdi, I had much less trouble finding the answers. And a big thanks to ANYA Taylor-Joy, TONI Braxton and ex-PFC Wintergreen for their help. Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with this one. Thanks for the challenge, Mr. Juhnke!

Crunchy? Not really. Fun? Absolutely. The clueing was just challenging enough to make me think, but not so hard that I got stuck anywhere.

I’m pleased to announce the winners and runners-up for the 2024 Puzzle of the Year Awards (a/k/a the Griddies): Best Early Week Puzzle: Winner June 10 (Kareem Ayas), Runner-Up May 13 (Jeremy Newton) Best Thursday Puzzle: Winner June 27 (Paolo Pasco and Sarah Sinclair); Runner-Up May 23 (Adam Wagner) Best Themeless Puzzle: Winner December 21 (Barbara Lin and Lewis Rothlein); Runner-Up August 2 (Kate Chin Park) Best Sunday Puzzle: Winner December 15 “Art Heist” (David Kwong); Runner-Up December 1 “Drive Around the Block” (John Lieb); Almost Runner-Up July 28 “The Big 5-0” (Paolo Pasco) Congratulations to all the winners and almost-winners (especially Wordplay’s own Lewis Rothlein)! Thanks to John Ezra and Cat Lady Margaret for their help in the balloting process. And thanks to everyone who voted. Instead of repeating the ballot’s descriptions of the winning puzzles, I’ll borrow the words of the wonderful Wordplay columnists (which, due to space limitations, will appear as replies to this comment).

Congratulations on your New York Times puzzle debut, Mr. Hayden! Nicely done!

Congratulations on your NYT debut, Dr. Breen! Nicely done. Thanks to you both.

Congratulations on your NYT debut, Mr. Judge! I found it more challenging than many recent late-week puzzles, but fun all the same. Thanks!

I don’t know how many people here solve the AVXC crossword puzzles, but yesterday’s puzzle had the clue “Puzzle columnist Amlen.” Congratulations, Deb! You’ve officially crossword famous!

Sam Corbin, you wrote “It wouldn’t be a week at the New York Times Crossword without a nautical clue that’s new to me.” Where were you on Saturday? 47A “Pole used for extending a sail” SPRIT

Congratulations on a fun NYT debut, Ms Rajamani! My favorite of the RIPPED ABS was “Viable investment scheme.” Hope we’ll see you back soon!

Congratulations on a fine NYT debut, Mr. Benson! Sorry to see that your puzzle’s charms are lost in the (totally justified) complaints about the layout of the web version of the puzzle. I hope we’ll see you back soon.

Congratulations on a solid NYT debut, Mr. Bykodorov! CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR is a phrase that has always amused me, and the theme answers you chose to incorporate the rearranged cigars are all interesting and well-known. I hope we’ll see you back soon!

For 40A, “Org. that specifically prohibits bowling pins and pool cues,” I originally had MMA (which of course is the sport, not its governing body). I think I like my answer better. I’ve seen a lot of clues for SSN in the last few years, but this one might be my favorite. When we bought our house back in 1995, I refused to sign the paperwork until they removed our social security numbers from documents that were going to be filed in the public records.

Like many others, I found this lacking the usual trickiness that can make Thursday so much fun. It's difficult for me to say whether it was too easy, as I've recently started solving puzzles on our iMac. My touch-typing skills have deteriorated in retirement (I typed a lot working for the legislature). And there are all these extra keys that the developers of the NYT Games app kindly omitted! Would I have been faster on my iPad? I don't know. Nevertheless, I appreciated the punny clues, particularly PERIOD DRAMA and RUN ON FUMES. Note that August Lee-Kovach made his NYT crossword debut just a little over three years ago, at age 14. I don't know what y'all were doing at 17 or 18, but I certainly wasn't having crossword puzzles published in national newspapers.

Some encouraging news about Will Shortz’s recovery: <a href="https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/crossword-editor-will-shortz-says" target="_blank">https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/crossword-editor-will-shortz-says</a>

John Ezra, Marshall Walthew and I are pleased to announce the winners and runners-up for the 2025 Griddies (f/k/a the Puzzle of the Year Awards): Best Early Week Puzzle: Winner August 27 (Zhou Zhang), Runner-Up April 1 (Sande Milton) Best Thursday Puzzle: Winner October 2 (Aidan Deshong); Runner-Up July 17 (Sam Brody) Best Friday or Saturday Puzzle: Winner July 19 (Erik Agard); Runner-Up October 24 (Kelvin Zhou) Best Sunday Puzzle: Winner July 6 “Escape Room” (Zhou Zhang and Kevin Curry); Runner-Up May 25 “Travel Bug” (Dylan Schiff) Congratulations to all the winners and almost-winners! Thanks to everyone who voted. And double thanks to everyone who had to re-enter their votes in the second round. Instead of repeating the ballot’s descriptions of the winning puzzles, John, Marshall and I have borrowed the words of the wonderful Wordplay columnists and puzzle constructors and editors (which, due to space limitations, will appear as replies to this comment).

I have an account at xwordstats.com that lets me see a bit more about how my solving time on any NYT crossword puzzle compares to other days. It also gives me the median solving time for other people who have such accounts. If you thought that today’s puzzle was hard for a Tuesday, you’re not alone. xwordstats.com rates it as “Very Hard” in comparison to other Tuesdays and says that 80% of their users solved more slowly than their Tuesday averages. If you’re at all interested in seeing that kind of data, consider signing up for an account. I’m not obsessed about my solving times, but it’s nice to see a little more context in which to evaluate any particular puzzle’s difficulty level.

How is it that MULTI-HYPHENATE has only one hyphen? Thanks for the fun puzzle, Ms Fracker! I’m impressed that you construct using paper and pencil. Not many people do that anymore.

Barry Ancona: I heard that you mentioned in the comments for Wednesday’s puzzle that longtime commenter Robert Michael Panoff had died some months ago. I remember reading his comments and am sorry to hear that news. I also remember a photo of you and Mr. Panoff at an eatery when he visited NYC. My condolences for the loss of your friend.

Congratulations on your NYT debut, Mr. Werfel! Nicely done!

A clever idea that I’m sure was difficult to construct: For each of the five colors, you need four five-letter words that are are part of common things like (BLACK) MAGIC or (RED) SCARE). Then, you need to put each one in the right part of the grid in such a way that you can fill the rest of the grid. This puzzle essentially has 23 theme answers, counting the revealer and the hints at 17A and 20A. All those fixed answers make it much more difficult to fill the grid well. So it’s too bad that the colors made it very difficult to solve in the app. I turned off overlays almost immediately, and that helped a lot. Still, I expect this would have worked much better in print. Great constructor note, though.

The more I have thought about this puzzle, the more I think it’s a perfect bridge for someone who is doing reasonably well with Monday and Tuesday puzzles but who struggles with Thursday trickery. You’re going along, filling in squares, and you hit something like 11D. The answer that fits the grid is obviously CLOSING TIME, but what does that have to do with “Not moving fast enough”? So you plug on, and eventually you see the revealer, which is simply beautiful and beautifully simple. Suddenly it all makes sense! Those of us who have been solving for years take these kinds of things for granted. I hope that many newer solvers were pleased when they got today’s trick. Thanks again, guys, for a wonderful puzzle and a lovely constructor note c

I spent as much time trying to figure out what the theme was as I did solving the grid — maybe more. I saw PUNCH as FRUIT DRINK, but didn’t see the other theme answers as HOLEs. I finally gave up try to understand the theme and read Wordplay. I don’t know how I would reword “collective hint” to make it more obvious to imperceptive people like me, but “collective hint” didn’t work for me.

Thanks for a fun Monday puzzle, Mr. Evans. And thanks for this reminder: “[G]etting better at crosswords is a long process of not knowing stuff, followed by then knowing said stuff.” I learn new things from crossword puzzles almost every day. And sometimes, I actually remember it.

I’m accustomed to seeing the occasional Erik Agard puzzle in The New Yorker, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen one here. This one was a gem. I especially enjoyed FREEDOM RIDES, CORETTA SCOTT King,TITILLATE, DON’T GET ANY IDEAS, MASCOT RACE and IMPOSSIBLE COLOR. The last three days have all had excellent puzzles. Thanks to the constructors and editors.

It’s a depressing anecdote, but I’ll share it anyway as an example of how the most innocuous-sounding entry can sometimes stir up an unpleasant memory in a solver. (The story is also about one of the most surreal moments of my life.) __________ In 1990, my 24-year old sister Andrea was hit by a car while crossing a street at night and was instantly killed. At Andrea’s memorial service a few days later, a woman who none of my family knew (probably one of Andrea’s coworkers) offered this remembrance of Andrea: “I want to share something about Andrea that many of you probably didn’t know: Andrea had a substance abuse problem.” Long pause, during which my siblings and I looked at each other with dumbfounded expressions. “She was addicted to the bread sticks at OLIVE GARDEN!” __________ I don’t think that OLIVE GARDEN should be off-limits for the crossword. But in the same way that the Jackson Browne song “Fountain of Sorrow” takes me back to that funeral home in St. Louis, any mention of Olive Garden reminds me of my sister. Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.

There were lots of nice clues in this one, but my favorite is 26D ALSO. It took me a few seconds after getting the answer to realize what the clue meant. Of the answers, my favorite is 37D MAY I TRY. I'm better about not stepping in until someone asks for help than I used to be, but it's still difficult for me to watch someone struggle with something that I'm pretty sure I can handle easily. But what I most enjoyed was learning about Adrian Johnson's crossword-solving friend Alexandra. I'm lucky enough to have made a similar friend through this comment section. Thanks, Mr. Johnson, for an entertaining puzzle.

Congratulations on your 50th NYT puzzle, Ms Weintraub! Thank you for the many amusing puzzles you’ve created over the years.

Wow! When I finished the puzzle, I imagined Adam Wagner poring over his wordlists to find entries that would work. I now have equal parts of disappointment that the theme entries were the product of a Python script and admiration that Mr. Wagner made the effort to learn enough Python to pull this off. I was surprised to come here and see people calling the puzzle easy. Part of what caused me to struggle was some wrong answers, like APP at 1A instead of PDF. It didn’t help that when you have a word slot selected, the shading is almost invisible. (I don’t much like grids with circles, but that might have worked better.) It took me 10 minutes or so to realize what was going on with the braiding, though some of that may have been due to the potent margaritas I had with my birthday dinner. And when I had the grid filled but got the “Not quite there” message, it took me a bit to notice that the Across answers all made sense. Once I did, it was easy to find my mistake. Thanks, Mr. Wagner, for a challenging but ultimately solvable Thursday!

Mr. Walden, I don’t think you have ever delivered a MEDIOCRE puzzle. This was one of those puzzles that was not as challenging as it first seemed. TORA BORA, OPEN MRI and CBER were about the only gimmes I had. For “Macintosh,” I tried “computer” and “red apple” before CROCI gave me RAINCOAT. For “Zero stars,” my first fill was “I hated it.” Wonderful clues. I especially liked ZOMBIE MOVIES, IRS, DOGIES and BIG UPSET. Thanks!

Congratulations on your NYT debut, Ms. Bowers! Thanks for a puzzle with a theme we haven’t seen before.

I found this easier than Friday’s, possibly because this time, DREAM DATE was 100% correct instead of a bit better than half right. Things that I didn’t know, like the “Narnia” title and MARSEILLE, were easy to get with a few crosses. It’s interesting to see that the debut entries include such familiar phrases as GOOD KARMA and TOUCH-TONE. Those, plus clever clues like the one for SUBWAY ADS, show that puzzles don’t have to be the SAME OLD STORY. Thanks, Mr. Last!

Vaer: sotto voce appreciates your concern. She sends her love wants you (and anyone else who’s concerned about her) to know that she’s OK. She just needs a little break from Wordplay and hopes to be back here soon. Thanks for asking after her.

Congratulations on your NYT debut, Mr. Adams! I wish you well in whatever comes after college, and I hope we’ll see you back here again someday.

Much more challenging than Friday’s puzzle. I was glad for the proper names that got me started (Uzo ADUBA, NORA, and especially Arundhati ROY, whose “The God of Small Things” is one of my favorite novels). I liked the clues for ART STORE and SYNAPSE. I’m less keen on answers like TESTEES and BESTREW; neither seems like something I have ever heard in casual conversation. I’m also not sure I buy “Illuminating example” as a clue for ANALOGY, which to me implies a comparison. “Epitome” seems closer to the clue.

It seemed more challenging than it turned out to be, which is always fun. Thanks, gents!