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Come on, people. You're highly educated people doing a mentally challenging hobby. Multiplication of single digit numbers is not "math", it's basic (numerical) literacy. It would be like people studying mathematics complaining that they are expected to know how to read.
I'm so happy today. My streak is now 365 days. When I started with the minis and then Mondays in 2020, I couldn't imagine I would one day solve a Saturday puzzle without any help, let alone solve 52 of them in a row (and all the days in between 😊). Very grateful to the whole crossword community, especially to the constructors!
That was fun! Slightly harder than your usual Monday. My solving time was severely impacted by staring at "FAELWENA" for a minute or so and feeling that it just can't be right, April Fools or not. Also appreciated row 2, it reads like a Grindr profile...
Had almost nothing after the first pass, and then it slowly came together. Finished in 44:44, which is not something to brag about, but it does look neat! For a long time, I didn't notice the first accent on bébé, and was looking for a Spanish word. Which inspired to following Ode to Crosswords, hope you enjoy :) Tricky clues and lots of punning, from constructors all too cunning Keep the scary world at bay with your puzzle of the day Yes, you'll have to know some sports (and the really boring sorts) US states and Asian mountains, music bands and Trevi fountains. Learn some Spanish, learn some French know that reek's the same as stench Memorize some German stuff, as for Russian, nyet's enough Know your Shakespeare, know your Plath, some biology and math Have an atlas at the ready, golden stars are pretty heady Run the alphabet when stuck, or write in ink and show your pluck Google things and don't feel bad it's your game, as someone said
Hats off to the constructor for an impressive crossword, and hats off to me for my 500-day streak!
Woo-hoo, a 300-day-streak! Just two more months and change before the big, once unimaginable milestone. Loved today's puzzle too. Fridays might be my favorite now that the novelty of Thursday/Sunday tricks has worn off. I think I disagree with Steve L that NIKKI/FAKIE is a Natick, just because FAKIE is (even to somebody like me, who has never seen or heard of it, and who is more likely to learn to fly than to ever do it) so much more likely to be the right answer than FAcIE. If nothing else, FAcIE would probably be clued via "prima facie". In a true Natick, at teast for me, several letters are equally likely if you don't know at least one of the two answers.
Nice! Like it often happens, I found the Saturday puzzle to be easier than Friday. 38A is not clued well. Given a subgroup H of a group G, you can decompose G into (left/right) cosets, and one of these cosets is indeed the subgroup H itself, but the others are not subgroups.
I have a 300+ day streak at the moment, but if I go to the archive, it happens quite often I'm left with a few empty squares in a Monday puzzle - where minor celebrities cross obscure TV shows and words not used in an actual conversation since the 1870's. Some commentators here would say that this shows that the puzzles have become easier, but I would actually say that it's that they've gotten better. Constructors (a shout-out to all of them! I can't tell you how much joy you bring to my life!) now use computer software, they have great word lists, and there is so much competition that a puzzle with TEAMCOCO, SEAMUS, SMEW and OSHEA in one section, and UHURA and NORAD in another, has no chance of being published. Or rather, that's what I thought until today. How on earth was this puzzle accepted? And how could it run on a Monday? The cluing was at least Wednesday-level in some parts. And the theme was meh at best. My least favorite puzzle since 2020, when I started solving. This one brought zero joy.
This was the hardest Wednesday I can remember. Typically the comments about difficulty on this forum reflect my own experience, and I must say that I'm surprised that some people found this one to be Tuesday-level. I had never heard of ORALE, and had probably heard of KOLA but had no idea what the third letter was; and for some reason I had never heard of the word PRATE. Is it common? And, of course, had never seen either ZERO MOSTEL or EREBUS. Luckily there are not many endings of PRA?? that give an English-sounding word, and an alphabet run finally gave me the ORALE/KOLA. But for a while I thought that my 255-day streak would end because of a Wednesday!
An important day for the world! Or, you know, just me. I finally got to a 200-day streak. I needed an alphabet run for the SAGUARO/NYRO crossing, but that doesn't count as cheating in my version of the game. The next big goal: a 365-day streak. Interestingly, I've been to all the states mentioned today (my ratings of them would be quite different though).
@Beth in Greenbelt Actually it would be impossible to construct a crossword with alternating vowels and consonants in every word without also doing what you noticed (i.e. the empty squares "maintaining the pattern"). You can use what's called "a parity argument" for this, but just to illustrate: let's say you have something like this: 1x2 345 Here 1 is the last letter of one word, x is a black square, 2 is the first letter of the next word, 345 are the three letters under 1x2. If 1 is a vowel, then 3 must be a consonant, so 4 must be a vowel, so 5 must be a consonant, so 2 must be a vowel. (To be precise, you can't avoid this unless the crossword is broken off into several disconnected parts by the black squares, but that is against crossword construction "rules".)
Over the years, my feelings about stacks of grid spanners have evolved from "they're intimidating" to "they're intimidating but they are almost always well-known phrases and once you have a few letters you might be able to guess what they are and then they are actually of great help for the difficult short words that cross them". I felt like a very bad Slav because I got both RUS and BIALY on crossings and had never heard of either of them - but then I read that even Andrzej didn't know the latter and I feel better. As a Southern Slav, I feel very excluded by the "Lech, Czech and Rus" legend. What brother am I a descendant of?
Really disliked this one. I got the themers somehow (brand names, but also puns, so acceptable in my book), but the top central part was just awful. Brand next to brand next to brand (OSTER, REOS, TOTAL - even that could not be clued differently??). And the completely mysterious DDS, which made me doubt HOWD (and my life choices, as somebody who also teaches calculus for a living). I ended up doing a double alphabet run: all vowels for _STER, and all letters for HIR_, and this worked only because Flying Cloud and Royale kind of sound like something that could be cars, so R seemed the most reasonable guess for _EOS. My streak is fortunately intact, but my Wednesday average probably went up by several minutes.
Don't forget their sister Onya, who was a famous runner. Her name is still invoked at the start of every race.
Wow, my Sunday personal best of 16:25! An improvement of more than three minutes. I enjoyed the puns and the rest of the puzzle.
Sunday PB! Under 16 minutes! Very happy about it :)
Like lots of other solvers, I didn't find the puzzle that enjoyable, and would have given up long ago if I didn't care about my streak (and I do, I care; in fact, I care way too much). Somehow managed, but it took more than an hour. I read somewhere that every section of a crossword should have some easy clues to give the solvers a foothold. Sam is not willing to do that: no freebies, no gimmes, just hard, tricky, punny, misdirecting clues everywhere. So yes, lots of aha moments, but also very frustrating.
Wow. I think that was the hardest puzzle I ever successfully solved. A little bit too much trivia for my taste, but an excellent puzzle nevertheless. The streak is intact! 500 beckons!
I'm quite baffled by NINTHS being clued as [.1111, .2222, .3333, etc.]. 1/9 is in fact 0.1111..., with ones repeating ad infinitum, similar for 2/9, 3/9 etc. Without the dots, and without the word "approximately" or something of that sort, this is just plain wrong.
For some reason my braggy post about completing my 365-day streak was not published. I think that the emus are jealous. But yes, this happened today, and I'm super happy.
A toughie! For quite a while I thought my streak was over - and I was just 12 days shy of my 186-day streak. But several breaks later, I finally figured out URANIUMORE (such a weird sequence of consonants and vowels! I was sure my crossings were wrong) and my streak was safe. Hoping for a 200 this time! November 13 is D day (CC day?). Did anyone else want to divide the (odd) Roman numeral LV by two? Would have preferred fewer proper names, but a great puzzle overall.
@Dave Munger The main reason I do crossword puzzles is words and wordplay and language, not trivia. I don't like it when proper names cross other proper names, or if there's a section where there are so many names that it becomes impossible to solve if you don't know them. If it's an English word I don't know, I'll try to memorize it. But there are aspects of the U.S. culture that really don't interest me (like your sports), so if it's a football or baseball player, I'll try to get it from the crosses and forget it immediately. And yes, I know it's an American crossword for a primarily U.S. audience and I'm not complaining, just explaining my likes and dislikes :) Trivia-heaviness is the reason I never do crosswords in my own language.
@Amanda S The UK is still part of Europe, just not part of the European Union (the EU). It's true that "Europe" is sometimes used as a synonym for the EU.
I'm Slovenian and I can confirm that we do plenty of alien invasions from here.
@Juli Sudoku is not really a number puzzle, since you never use any number properties or operations. You could replace the numbers with letters A through I or nine different types of fruit or nine country flags and it would work just as well. A number puzzle is, for example, Kakuro.
@Dave S I did the same. My reasoning was that one would never enter a rebus that was already explicitly stated in the clue. The revealer also demanded U's, not rebuses.
Today I broke my streak record! 187 and counting, I really want to get to 200 this time... Crosswords gods, please be merciful in the next two weeks. Today's puzzle was tough enough, I needed almost half an hour and for a while I thought that NE would be the end of me.
After two days of suffering (finished solving both Wednesday and Thursday the next morning - thanks, time difference, for letting me sleep on it without missing out on a gold star!), this felt like a breath of fresh air. A perfect Friday! Just the right amount of struggling.
Coming from a small country that has inexplicably won 7 of the last 14 GRAND TOURS, I just loved today's theme! And today's stage was absolutely amazing, so great timing. LEACHMAN crossing SLADE and SAT SHIVA was a complete Natick for me, but I guessed "h" from the crossings and "l" was one of my first tries before I got my dunce's tune (see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL4N08TKXrM" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL4N08TKXrM</a>).
@Lauren I think something like "sometimes" or "maybe" should have been added. While the formula volume = base area times height works for a box or a cylinder, it's not correct, for example, for a pyramid or cone (where the volume is one third times base area times height). And "area of what" is not a bad question, base area would be a better response.
I was addicted to Minesweeper as a teenager (as my PB of 59 seconds on the expert level attests), and this wonderful puzzle (which took a bit longer) brought back a lot of great memories. Thanks, Aidan!
I enjoyed the last two puzzles, and I liked their themes, but I found the revealers somewhat lacking. Tuesday does not mean (or sound like) "two days". "Sharing is caring" is not the same as "change sh to c". Perhaps I would like it better if the revealer clues were different, but as it is, I don't find either one too convincing.
I'm surprised by the complaints about the NW, for me, it was the SE that almost ended my streak. Never heard of SRIRACHA, never heard of YOINKED, never heard of THICKE. The streak is safe for now, but my Friday average got a significant boost.
A nice puzzle and an interesting revealer. I would have preferred the Polgar sisters to the Kardashians though. Judit is commentating the world chess championships at the moment, doing a stellar job as usual. What a legend!
Look at that, Deb chose a Slovenian skier for the first photo of the column! Not a gentleman though - it's Ilka Å tuhec, a two-time downhill world champion.
If I add up my solving times for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week, I get my Wednesday.
@Puzzlemucker No, not my first language, but I did live in the US for a few years.
@Michael Even now, with FOUR hints (title, note, x symbols, revealer), people in the comments are complaining about "the math". Without the note, people would be also complaining about how they were trying to fit in rebuses (two, four etc.). Also, as some people noted below, without the instructions, 10 1 2 4 would be as mathematically valid as 5 2 4 2.
@Andrzej I actually copy every comment I write before I click submit. If it's not posted for some reason (usually if it's too short) I paste, add another sentence and resubmit. I agree that your posts are super interesting, so don't give up!
Loved it. I was totally on the constructors' wavelength. My Friday PB!
@Eric Hougland I think what they mean is that usually the revealer explains each of the theme entries, and today it explains all four of them put together.
@Grumpy You have to put the other 6 answers into pairs, and then each pair is a (well known?) *spangram*. There's also an article on CNET that explains it.
@dutchiris You can also send an email to <a href="mailto:nytgames@nytimes.com">nytgames@nytimes.com</a> and ask them to restore your streak.
@Andrzej Ultramarine is a color, so "leader" as in "it comes in front of". Emus come in all colors, including ultramarine.
@Gregg Poor Thursday constructors, somebody will also be upset with them.
@Dave There were square roots on August 14, and roots are a harder mathematical concept than multiplication.
@Nora I don't think the editors would think that repeating "l'/le/la" breaks any rules. If the entry has "the" in it, I'm sure they are OK with the clue having it as well. This is just the French version.
@Eric Hougland "Hole-istic hint" perhaps?
@JayTee When it comes TikTok stars, I am as lost as people will be in 2124 when they solve puzzles from 2024. Crosses to the rescue!
@PC If I'm counting correctly, you didn't think Thursday's puzzle was excellent - check out a "reply" puzzle (I didn't know that was a thing!) at <a href="https://downforacross.com/beta/game/4848014-ceft" target="_blank">https://downforacross.com/beta/game/4848014-ceft</a>, it's hilarious.