SBS

@Steven M. Aristide was President of Haiti four separate times in the 1990s and 2000s and was repeatedly overthrown in coups that were major news in the U.S., especially because of the refugee waves that followed. He was the dominant figure in Haitian politics for fifteen years. Everything's a Natick for someone I guess but this really seems like fair game (plus "Aristida" and "Aristidd" seem like rather unlikely French last names, right?).

@john ezra yoda is green!

@Kyle The tattoo is not an arm though, it’s a tattoo

@john ezra musk was not a technocrat; many of the people he fired were. The job he was doing at DOGE didn’t involve any expert analysis of the needs of each agency, it involved blindly firing people with no idea of what they even did. And he was not hired for his technical expertise, but for his money and role getting Trump elected. (Thiel is similar but luckily has not been given as powerful a role yet.)

@K. H. Yes that’s the point of the clue—reread it

@Linda Jo I have medicine cabinets in several bathrooms, all installed in the 2020s!

@Cheryl If anything the Internet makes sharing interesting headlines easier. It's not like most Americans subscribed to the Chicago Daily Tribune, Variety, or the New York Post when those famous headlines ran....they had to be shared by other sources....

@Dave K. So he broke a different color barrier than the one you are thinking of?

@SBS Some qualitative thoughts: First, what exactly has gotten easier? That might be important to how you feel about this shift. I prefer when crosswords are rendered harder by tricky, misdirect-filled clues, rather than excessive arcane trivia--although a reasonable dose of arcana (especially with fairly accessible crosses) is one reason the crossword is a learning experience. The 2016 puzzles felt harder in both of these senses, but *especially* in terms of arcane facts, often many crammed together in a single part of the grid. This was true for basically all of the hardest puzzles of 2016--the numerous Saturdays and handful of Fridays that took me upwards of 45 minutes. Those longer puzzles really did feel like slogs....they reminded me of the rare brutal puzzles occasionally still published today, which this Comment section is consistently very harsh on (notwithstanding the Great Easening critique). So I think the Times knows what it's doing here. It's hard to fault it for not wanting to deeply frustrate most of its readers. Now that said, the "slog" perception might have been amplified by my mulish determination to pursue this test..44 of these are a lot to do in a month or so. Most were fun, and I'm glad the Archive is there. Personally, I'd be happy with a Friday distribution more like most of 2016's (not the high-end Friday outliers), and I'd be happy if the Saturdays were halfway between today's and 2016's.

@john ezra I was worried about that, and that's one reason I didn't go back further than 2016. But the truth is, I rarely came to a clue where I thought "I would have known this ten years ago, but I can't remember." As a middle-aged person, I am probably more in tune with slightly dated references!

@Juanita See note above: I worried about that, but it did not turn out to be my experience at all. The 2016 puzzles did have more arcane trivia, but it wasn't of the sort that was well-known at the time, either. And I think I knew pop culture better ten years ago!

@J-J Cote ha, your comment appeared while mine was pending. I guess it was not just me!

@Joe i think the reference is to a Supreme pizza, with all the toppings!

@Dave S a bad beat isn’t really just losing with a good hand. It’s losing when you outplayed your opponent in the sense made decisions that were in expectation right, while your opponent made decisions that were in expectation wrong, yet got lucky in the end, often by getting the only card that could help them on the river (the last card dealt). The beat is rendered “bad” by a sense of injustice.

@Helen Wright. Similarly, in the U.S., we would not use "cloakroom" for a place that one doesn't actually store, like, cloaks. (Or coats, more often.) I appreciate the nice euphemism, though! In any case, though, I understand the clue to be written from a US perspective, as in, "what we call a bathroom, Brits call a ___," which seems accurate.

@Ray I have done years' worth of Sundays through Thursdays before doing both of these, but I don't see why that would prepare me better for the 2026s than the 2016s. It's not like the fill was radically different across the eras and the 2016s would have been much easier if only I had access to some of that year's early-week puzzles to teach me some sort of word set. The hard trivia clues were truly hard, of the sort that don't repeat and the misdirect clues are hard because they are misdirects.

@Marshall Walthew Google suggests that "buff egret" or "buff-backed heron" are alternative names for the cattle egret (even though it too is partly white), so I guess that's in bounds. I also guessed Shrek first!

@Joe P I thought this too, but apparently XWStats only reports the median for its own user base, which tends toward highly experienced/competitive solvers.

@Andrzej Mail very much still arrives, mostly junk mailers that clog my mailbox just as spam clogs my email inbox, encouraged for some reason by discounted postage for bulk mail. It's "malt" that's a throwback, to about the 1950s: I'm 50 and have never tasted one or even seen one sold to my recollection. But they are still familiar cultural background knowledge.

@Andrzej It is even more impressive that you're doing the old puzzles than the new ones! But for me, the cluing IS harder in the old ones, but the trivia is also much more obscure in the older puzzles, and there's much more of it. (And not because it's from 2016--datedness in that sense is not the issue. The harder stuff is often from, like, 1700, or Ancient Egypt.) This is not true in EVERY old puzzle, but it is consistently the pattern in the ones in the right tail of the difficulty distribution. Anyway, these puzzles are WAY harder--this is not a subtle effect, and there can be more than one reason!

@John Interesting. It's my impression that the shift is longer ago than that, or at least, sometime between 2016 and 2023. My times have gotten a lot faster in the three years that I've done the puzzle, but I think that's overwhelmingly because like most beginners, I wasn't very good at first; when I go back and do ones that I skipped from 2023, I find them no harder than today's and I've gotten some of my best times. (That's one reason that I was skeptical of the Great Easening before I did this test.) That said, that's just based on trying a few random ones; I did not try to carry out a comprehensive test similar to this one for 2023.

@SP Does it come from a pickaxe? I always assumed the etymology was more similar to the football term--that it was because you were "picking off" the defender, i.e., intercepting his movement along his intended path.

@Steve L Possibly nobody has ever asked "Is Coke OK" because (unless Pepsi is specifically listed on the menu) nobody ever specifically orders a Pepsi!

@Andrzej FWIW I am a lifelong American who has never heard AMSCRAY! Frau was well clued though…the equivalent of Fraulein that you are thinking of is Miss, not Ms.

@APNerd if they didn't, the theme would be even more pointless because it would be completely impossible to figure out how the dots are supposed to be connected

@abelsey Hmm...a triple repeat. Might that be an alternate meaning of...THREEPEAT? (Or should we be on the alert for those words in tomorrow's puzzle, too?)

@Zézito this is exactly how I understood it in high school (although spitting the liquid out your mouth might also qualify)...and I went to high school in Alexandria, VA. a localism?

@NanuNanu When LYFT didn't work my next thought was that it was another "UBER"-like prefix ("MEGA"?). Taxi literally did not even cross my mind until three crossings were in! Felt rather silly though.

@Julie Wait--as a former Michigan resident, I was going to give a different definition of Michigan left, although also specific to (just a few) boulevards. It' s where a left turn is prohibited, so you go STRAIGHT, then you do a U-turn at a designated spot a bit past the intersection, then you turn right at the original intersection. I have never seen the version you are describing, though perhaps both exist. (And I think yours has to involve a U-turn after the right, right? Otherwise, right plus left equals continuing the same direction in which you began!)

@lucky13 original poster

@Matt The revealer clue itself explains the connection to the infinite scroll concept: obviously no site can truly have infinite new content, so in order to allow an infinite scroll, when it reaches the last of its content it loops back to the content that was at the top.

@Steve L That is a useful source, with the advantage of a much larger N, but I didn't want to rely on it because there's no real way to say whether the pool of solvers at xwstats has changed over time (which could be in either direction skill-wise), or perhaps it's mostly the same solvers but they've gotten more skilled. (I've noticed that the average times there, at least those posted relatively early, are quite fast!) I see my method of testing it as complementary: much smaller, but more controlled for skill (and at a skill level that might be more typical of most solvers!).

@SP Snausages made me think of my beloved childhood dog, who would go nuts for them. It made me happy. I haven't actually seen them for decades, despite having had subsequent dogs.