Richard

Really not a fan of that NW corner. I think that is the most challenging, not in a good way, corner, I have seen in the last 5 years. The layout (no way in) didn't help. MUNSHI is just bad fill. ELSTON - know it or unguessable. HAREMS was brutally clued. And for goodness sake, if you're going to use SCHMEARS, at least throw us a bone and imply the Yiddish origin in the hint. I know I know, nobody likes a whiner. But there's gotta be some room here for criticism when it's called for. That was awful.

This fell flat for me. I do get the meta element but we see repeat clues in normal circumstances so often that this didn't have much effect. Perhaps if the second answers had been able to stand alone as viable words/ phrases without the "feeling" and with the "feeling" as well, now that would have been something. I do appreciate constructors put their heart and soul into these and I can't create puzzle for the life of me, so I try to be slow to criticize. But as a Sunday NYT theme this seems a bit thin.

Really enjoyed this, but frankly I thought my (wrong) first-pass guesses were way more funny. "He's taken!" --> SORRYGIRLS One with sound judgment? --> PIANOTUNER

I did not know it was "Madama".... one of those things you must see a million times but your brain tells you it's Madame.

Worst Friday time for me in about 5 years. Just not on the same wavelength - I struggled mightily.

To each his own, but this was an UNenjoyable struggle for me. I know, it sucks grumbling about somebody's work of art. But lots of deliberately vague cluing to arrive not at novel words but crosswordese - looking at you, MERER ASHEN NOTV SEDER KOS OPIE OSHA - isn't my cup of tea. Also, I'd just say "can't stand the heat" is not the best clue for WILTS. It implies the answer would be WILT. I can see it's workable either way, but DOESN'T stand the heat would arguably be better for an answer ending with S. Or just clue it differently.

Seemed harder than an average rebussy Thursday for me. The tiny SW corner in particular, without knowing EMIL Jannings, was a bunch of guesswork. Happy to see Steven Wright get a shoutout, however. "If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you."

High marks for this one. A couple of odd/ unusual long ones but achievable with crosses. Thank you Jack!

I had SANK for SUNK. LARCH seemed reasonable in place of LURCH. Sunk sunk me.

I am finding that as a long-time solver, probably close to 2 decades on-and-off, my times are extremely consistent. I'm sure there are others like me out there with a massive, massive data set. Interestingly too, my average times and PB times for each weekday show a startling consistency - both are almost linear from Monday to Saturday. So I am not blowing my own horn when I say Joel's calibration seems a bit off. Friday PB yesterday by over a minute. New PB for Saturday today. A third PB for a Wed a few weeks ago. I am indeed enjoying the new Fagliano regime and I am finding some of the clues and themes are fresh, which is great. But my take is that the difficulty level needs an end-of-week tweak. I am definitely not getting smarter - so says my wife.

Interesting. Thought this might be one of those ones that was more fun for the constructor than the puzzler, but this is pretty remarkable to look over at the end. I can only imagine the limitations this places on your word list when building...

Fabulous puzzle. Difficult in parts but slowly gives way...

Seemed to be Tuesdayish.

Toughie. How legitimate is my solving streak, really, when I have a bunch of personal Naticks and just run the alphabet/ educated guesses on INEZ, YASQUEEN and GALOPS? Back in the old days, there was no way of telling if you had it right...

Funny, comments are all over the place for this. For me the NW was diabolical, the rest not so bad.

Yowza. 4x slower than my average for Thursday... neat theme however. Surely the if/and/but thing has been done before but this was pretty cute.

Loved this one, right on my wave length. Also love that ORESTEIA - which I had never heard of and taught me something new - was crossed with reasonable stuff. Ditto MYRNA. Weird proper names are fine when they don't cross.

Oh, very cute. Hemingway famously eschewed "ten dollar words", or words that might "send the reader to the dictionary." So I'm not sure I really would have like the NYT crossword. Mind you, he apparently socialized with JAI ALAI players before any of us knew that was a thing, so there's that...

I always have so much to say, and then I navigate away from the puzzle to the Wordplay column and the comments, and I forget everything because the puzzle is gone. This is the hardest Saturday I can remember solving, or rather, having the stubborness to solve to keep a streak alive.

One the one hand this construction is genius - theme answers are even symmetrical, for goodness' sake. And yet isn't this totally random? Is this not, "think of a phrase and force a crossword around it"? Netflix and Chill - next week, featuring popular streaming shows crossing synonyms for "cold".

I am so dumb. Blitzed through 90% of this then couldn't figure out the SW. FOODPREP works for the 1st line, COURTSIDE works for the 4th line (based on the clue). So I could not for the life of me figure out the bottom two "passages" based on two words alone. Didn't even occur to me that there were two "passages" per line.

Neat puzzle, but this is not a Tuesday.

"Pregap"?