Niki B

Thomas Byrne, your story had me in tears. Thank you for such a personal tale! And I'm delighted that both your wife and daughter are thriving. When I was in grad school, I worked at a restaurant called Oscars. It was a much needed break from writing code and reading papers. One of my regular customers (apparently with quite the sweet tooth) told me her story, which I will paraphrase. Years before, she had experienced a terrible fall which led to a significant head injury, leaving her in a coma for several days. When she came out of the coma, the first thing she asked of her husband was to go to Oscars. When he asked why, she said the persistent thought that roused her from the coma was a strong desire for our banana cream pie. Of course, her husband brought her to Oscars as soon as she was well enough and they told the story for the first time. She was convinced that the existence (and deliciousness!) of our banana cream pie saved her life. It was a story that was repeated in our little restaurant many times over the years, and they were beaming with joy when they told it to me. Thank you for reminding me both of this story and of the power of small things to change lives. 🥹🥹🥹🥹❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Rena, if you frequent these comments, congrats on your fifth NYT puzzle as a college sophomore!! (I'm kind of IN AWE!) It was great fun and included some cute and clever clues and answers. Wash U is a wonderful school, pretzels are a worthy theme, and I hope you have a great second year of college! OK, BYE!

@hardroch you wanted me to let you know about my Town election race ... I lost but it was super close (3600 votes to 3296). I'm actually quite delighted with the support I received given that my opponent is well known in town and a long time incumbent. Not quite CLEANINGONESCLOCK!! My campaign was very modest in term of my outreach and given the closeness of the race I will definitely run next year. Super super interesting to run for local office. I suggest all you smart contributors to this board consider it in your own cities and towns. Good news is that several candidates I supported won, and it's enough to potentially make a huge difference in some aspects of my town (Milton MA). As for the puzzle, it was fun and quick and I love a dad joke or three so right up my alley. I completed it very late last night as I watched the election results roll in. Cheers to all!

The crossing clues were gentle enough that I didn't worry too much about with the (quite clever) theme until the end. Rather, I used a modified "Wheel of Fortune" solving style where I don't look at the clue but rather, let my brain complete the missing letters. It's rather fun and so cool that our brains do this for us. MY favorite answer was the sweet and lovely movie, BABE, with the wonderful James Cromwell as Farmer Hoggett. To me, the scene where he sings to Babe is one of the most beautiful scenes in Hollywood and makes me cry every time I watch it: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1XEjStkp2LY" target="_blank">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1XEjStkp2LY</a> That'll do pig, that'll do. Happy May Day!

Whew it's been a challenging week so far (but I'm loving it). I thought I might not finish this one, but after staring at the squares and trying to make words out of the nine letters for far too long, I let my mind relax and managed the solve. Very clever and holy cow that must have been hard to construct!! My daughter has Celiac so when I see wheat anywhere I feel oddly nervous for her 😬 ... as a plus, I know the names of many non-wheat grains but wheat grains like SEITAN are not in my vocab. She's doing awesome with it and I'm so grateful for knowledgeable servers and thoughtful restaurant owners for making eating out so much easier for her and others than for those diagnosed even 10 years earlier. Speaking of which, she's heading to college tomorrow as a first year at UVA (go Hoos!) and while I'm so so excited for her, I'm also feeling many other emotions. Best to all of you who may have kids, nieces, grandkids, etc., especially to first-timers. We got this! (And so do they!) ❤️😭❤️

Today was not easy for me (at all). FIEF (although so obvious and straightforward in hindsight), SEISMS, and the whole SE corner took me longer than I care to admit. I broke in with SLEEPMASK but every other letter felt like an eternity. Happy music felt like MAKING MAGIC today! I'm usually fast with Musa's puzzles but not today. In other fun news, I am running for local political office in my lovely Town of Millton (Board of Assessors) and I'm off to go hold my sign in the rain. Election is April 29. Local government in northeastern towns is fascinating. For a fun rabbit hole, google the concept of Town Meeting. Such a wild form of democracy that was completely foreign to me when I moved from Cleveland 20+ years ago. We take our local elections extremely seriously here, as I think it should be. Cheers!

Super fun puzzle this morning by a great constructor. Can't wait to see more from Sue. Multi-hyphenates is such a lovely word that's not used enough in everyday conversations. Maybe this puzzle will change that among at least a select crew of NYT crossword aficionados 😉. It occurs to me that as we go through life we become multi-hyphenates as a kind of beautiful rite of passage. Some are by necessity: we learn to tie our shoes, drive a car, cook... And some are because of life circumstances: we learn to soothe a crying baby, read a bedtime story (often reading upside down), comfort a hurting friend... And others are by choice: learning to sew or knit, mastering a golf swing, playing an instrument... There are so many talents that we take for granted in ourselves and others. This puzzle made me slow down for a minute and appreciate that fact. What a nice start to a Monday!

I just saw the news that Giorgio Armani has passed away at 91. Fitting tribute for him to be in today's puzzle. <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/giorgio-armani-the-italian-designer-who-changed-the-shape-of-fashion-has-died?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us" target="_blank">https://www.vogue.com/article/giorgio-armani-the-italian-designer-who-changed-the-shape-of-fashion-has-died?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us</a>

Wowza MAN! I loved this puzzle so so so much, and history is not my strong suit. I genuinely thought that I might not finish, but once I caught the theme it helped immensely. So so so fun and so many clever and innovative clues. Congrats to the constructor for a doozy of a Thursday!!

Lots of people in these comments like to think about whether puzzles are objectively easier or harder than they used to be. It's obviously a somewhat (very?) endogenous issue since we get better at puzzles the more we do them. But I have a different question. What is the optimal age for a crossword puzzler? I ask because some of my favorite posters have revealed themselves to be 70, 75, 80, even 90! Is there a sweet spot at which current knowledge/trivia is still accessible but you're senior enough to remember old stuff (maybe trivia, maybe things you learned in various levels of school?) What about if you have kids? (I know having teens makes me more aware of current trivia, etc.) I'm 56 for the record, and feel kind of close to the sweet spot! (I'm slow as can be, to be sure, but I can *usually* solve unaided). Thoughts?

As so often happens when I solve puzzles, one of the clues or answers connects to something recent in my life. Today, it was my super funny cab driver who hailed from Somalia! He regaled me with hilarious stories of his early dating life before he met his current wife, with whom he has six children. Thanks, Ishmael, for the entertaining cab ride to ORD this morning. ❤️

It's been a good week for me in crosswords! Loved the long entries, funny and guessable. In a rare occurrence I had no typos and no wrong answers the first time through even though several were guesses: Seurat, schuss (although it felt kinda right), oas was pure luck, I knew opera cake from doing crosswords... and yeah, it all worked. Loved prose poet, goes beast mode, thought "wha" was funny, and of course the combo of hot pants and sashay made me smile. Busy weekend ahead with an all-day church festival and me as the treasurer sprinting around with pockets full of cash that I collect from various stations. Hoping for sunshine! And hope that none of my fellow singles out there get ghosted this weekend!! 👻😆🤞🏼

Long(ish)ime reader of Wordplay, first time commenter. Have been finding both the puzzles and this column to be a great delight. Thought this Tuesday was a lot of fun and enjoyed the double negative theming. Happy 2024 to all of you and looking forward to 364 more puzzles this year!

Yesterday nearly killed me and today was speedy. Puzzles are weird!! I thought the designer clue would be ACCENT WALL and I had a whole snarky comment "the early 2000's called and they want their dated design idea back" planned, but then it was a more timeless LAMP so my snark is now foiled. HIDDEN STAIRCASE brought back memories of a friend with an old farmhouse that had a SECRET PASSAGE (sans staircase) that my little brother and I were just crazy about that we couldn't wait to visit! Also loved LUMBERED IN, RELAY, SPEED TRAPS, and RANLIKEMAD, such wonderful visual answers that make me currently feel like a CARBO LOADING couch potato. Shout out to three-letter named talents MIA, MAI, and CHU. Happy weekend to all ... I will be working in my yard and garden and can't wait to freshen things up for the Spring!

It's been a bonkers sort of week for me, but I have enjoyed all the puzzles so far. Some super great clues and although it took me a while, Thursday ended up being a lot of fun. It's interesting to hit a point where I'm confident I can do *most* puzzles without lookups despite being quite terrible at Greek mythology and sports names (I'm pretty good at sports lingo though). The confidence makes doing the puzzles more fun in some sense... I don't generally panic that I can't figure something out. I think this confidence also makes me a much better puzzler because I can relax my brain and let the words come. I keep thinking that must be how people who are masters of their trades might feel (I'm not even close to claiming mastery of puzzles!!! but you know what I mean). I'm thinking about musicians or skilled masons or carpenters. As a professor for 23 years I'll admit that I never feel that level of confidence in publishing and I only sometimes feel it in teaching. And I don't have imposter syndrome! I really just don't think I'm at this level of confidence in these areas. Have any of you reached that level of confidence in any of your careers, callings, or daily tasks, mundane or otherwise? Does it make those things boring or awesome? Happy Friday!

Loved this one, found it clever and witty and laughed out loud at the clue for 49D. I learned a lot and many of my fill was due to crossings, which is a sign to me of a great Saturday. Maybe I’m slightly in the gutter but SIREN, SEXT, GOTTHESHAFT, ITS HOT, and TANTRIC in the same puzzle seemed a little 🌶️ and a lot of fun. Great start to my Saturday!

Now that I'm in the zone, my days are not complete without solving the puzzle and visiting Wordplay (and sending the pic of the completed puzzle to one of my favorite humans, my almost 15 year old son). Mostly, I'm fascinated by the different parts of my brain that I activate when I solve! I can be insanely slow, but I always try to keep pondering...and then some days I zip right through. This one was slightly challenging for me for a Tuesday, but I loved it and figuring out the theme was essential to my solve. It's extra FUN for me when that happens for some reason. There's something sort of rhythmic about today's puzzle: maybe it's DANCE and HOUNDDOG but I'm feeling the opposite of NOHOPE as I head off to (Zoom) UNI to teach an online MBA class tonight. Cheers from Boston!

Was so super excited to see TANGENT LINES! Esoteric finance stuff ahead: I teach a class in Fixed Income and one of the concepts is estimating how much a bond's price changes for a given change in interest rates. The actual relation is non-linear (convex) and so we approximate the change with a tangent line. The slope of the TANGENT LINE is called duration, and it's a super important concept for bond investors because it gives them a very intuitive sense of price volatility of their bond for a 1 percent (100 basis point) change in yields. Longer term bonds generally have higher duration (in case you're wondering) and this is why investors prefer short term bonds in times of financial uncertainty (like I don't know, right now.) I'm always jumping up and down and drawing pictures on the board when I teach this. Can't wait to show this puzzle to my Fall students. If both TANGENT LINES and DURATION showed up in the same puzzle, my life would be complete 🤣🤣.

Still gotta read all the (525!!) comments but I LOVED this one and just finished it... today was a fun day of outdoor gardening and satisfying weed pulling. Got the theme quick and thank goodness because I found some of the fill quite hard!!! Oasts was last to fall and I'm still not sure what it means but I suspect the 525 other commenters will guide me. Great debut puzzle!!! More gardening tomorrow to prepare for the grad party I'm throwing my high school senior on Sunday! (No rain no rain no rain) ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

WHOA (WOAH). I absolutely did not pick up on the A SYMMETRY until the graphic at the end. Really quite incredible and super fun construction! Loved so many of the clever clues and gentle back to school vibe with IVIES, TUFTS, ONE L, and COG SCI. TOAD HALL gave me some happy nostalgia ... and led me to read more about Kenneth Grahame, who had quite a hard childhood and difficult life with some crazy events like nearly being killed by a shooter at his day job at a bank (!!) Although he'd written three prior books, The Wind in the Willlows (which was initially panned by some critics!) in 1908 was clearly his best-known work and apparently grew from several bedtime stories he made up for his son. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Grahame" target="_blank">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Grahame</a> Happy back to school to all!

Was super fun and cute!!! I wish that most solvers that end up breaking streaks because of rebus formatting would come here first and not after they've broken their streaks. I always feel sad for them. My general rebus advice is to put it all the letters in a row when it makes a word or there's no obvious need for a divider; or to put a slash when there are two different words for across and down (as I did today and it worked), or in worst case, put the first letter only (which seems to work like 95%+ of the time.) ... but never put a space in the rebus square!!! I'd also note that I would bet the NYT will restore a streak that was lost due solely to uncertainty as to how to format the rebus entry. Now I want candy and donuts and pumpkin flavored everything. Welcome Fall!!!

Fun!! Cute!! Interesting that two puzzles this week required dropping letters completely... I can feel my brain working hard to think outside the puzzle letter boxes (or inside?) and will be on the lookout for this in the future. Appreciate that the words with missing letters are still words! Fill was pretty easy, a little bit of a break after yesterday's toughie.

I have been doing the NYT puzzles most days since 2023. It took me about a year to consistently solve without lookups, and that was such a fun year!! It felt amazing to develop the skill. Until fairly recently, I found Friday and Saturday puzzles to be quite challenging and every once in a while, I couldn't finish one. Yesterday felt like that! I did finish, but it was slow and very satisfying. Today I solved in 1/4 of yesterday's time, and it was still fun, but also much less difficult than yesterday; hence, less satisfying. It makes me a little sad to see this happening. I very much want puzzles to be accessible to new solvers, but IMO, having the average difficulty factor be so much lower than even a few years ago takes away the true joy of learning to get good at puzzles! I'd love to see Fridays and Saturdays return to their prior difficulty levels. I think having 7 days of puzzles allows for this!!! ...and I've read enough comments from constructors on these pages to know that they would like to keep creating hard puzzles and publishing them in the NYT. Just my $0.02. ❤️🥳

Wow, I've been on a solving tear lately (and feeling a little smug about it tbh 😂😂), so this one really humbled me! I struggled with enough answers that I finally resorted to looking up a few. I can usually eventually solve puzzles after putting them down and coming back, and I am stubborn about solving on my own, but I'm pretty confident that would not have happened today! Had DEEP and DUALCAM for 1a and d respectively for far too long, and I'm not sure i could have worked my way out of that hole on my own, even with endless time. Super smart and great puzzle!!

I felt clever when I solved it but somehow backwards words in a crossword don't feel that fun to me although I love just about every other Thursday trick! Still, I appreciate the hard work in construction and any puzzle with NARNIA in it makes me happy. Recently I have been re-listening to a podcast on C.S. Lewis's book "The Great Divorce" (which is not about divorce!), a book with so many layers and such depth that it's worth a read (or re-read). Lewis gets to the heart of the beauty and sheer difficulty of being human like no other writer. And (IMO) although he's a Christian apologist, his themes and insights are pretty universal and he writes with humor, compassion, and love. Maybe you'll enjoy it: ❤️<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5P4tYS815akoMPRNQ3TsU2" target="_blank">https://open.spotify.com/show/5P4tYS815akoMPRNQ3TsU2</a>

As a cat owner, a cat condo sounds much more fashionable than the actual secondhand shag-rug-covered cat tree that my cats Maurice and Ginger kind of enjoy. But @johnezra mentioned a RAT CONDO below and it brought to mind a slightly more squeamish story. I used to own a second home near the ocean and I was visiting there one week with a good friend. I went to walk on the beach and came back to find her in the fetal position in the corner. She pointed to a closet and I opened it to find THE BIGGEST DEAD RAT I HAVE EVER SEEN. As a traditional non-rodent loving woman, I shrieked like a schoolgirl and jumped up and down ... and soon realized that someone had to deal with this. I didn't think to call my property management company (it was my first year of ownership and I haven't started renting yet)... so I grabbed a pair of work gloves and grabbed him(her?) by the tail. Holding him/her as far as my arm would stretch (my friend still cowering in the corner), I walked slowly toward the deck, opened the slider, tiptoed to edge, and threw the rat (overhand) as far as humanly possible. Thank God he cleared the pool, fence, and trees and landed somewhere in the dunes. For the rest of the time I owned that house we all referred to the incident as RATGATE...and I never again opened that closet without a racing heart and sweaty palms. Fortunately, it was an isolated incident and I was not actually running a RAT CONDO. Happy Sunday!

Loved this one! As a former accountant and current finance professor I found my (nerd) worlds colliding when I confidently filled in DEFERRED for 4D, changed it to DEFERRAL when I realized something was amiss, and finally ended with the correct PREPARER to close out the puzzle. 🌎🤓🌍

I keep hearing these phrases in the voices of either The Dude"l from Big Lebowski or Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and I can't stop giggling. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtdrKIdDgE" target="_blank">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtdrKIdDgE</a> ❤️🤣❤️🤣❤️

Awesome debut Jasin! Was tea-lighted to see my favorite (non alcoholic) beverage in today's puzzle. Hope to see more from you soon!

Whew, this Wednesday almost got me! Extremely challenging (for me) but ultimately a great workout. "HIM OR" me before "HUMOR" me, "RTTEN" before "USTEN", "CASE" before "COST" ... and got DDS fully from crosses. Chewy and clever, and thank goodness for the "X" theme or I'd have never gotten Xterra. Happy post tax day and hope it's sunny where you are! Boston's been glorious the last two days. ☀️