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Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven was a registered six offender. And speaking as a Gen X woman, that's not what HOO-HA means. This one involved a lot of Googling, but cheers to all the sports / car / geography people out there. I can tell you had fun.
@Liana it's a day that you get to learn a new word then! <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tony" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tony</a>
The "Answer Key" link is for March 7 -- might want to fix that!
Digital dependency? Of course. I need my fingers to fill in crossword puzzles.
Pretty grid, but if Diana RIGG was in *two* episodes of a show five years ago then that's a pretty uncool clueing. I looked up a ton of answers here -- no shame -- learning things. I laughed out loud at HYENA and SIXTH SENSE though. And I haven't seen love yet for "cylindrical grain holders" being COBS. A really great misdirection.
@Barry Ancona I hadn't heard of either person. What's hard to fathom about that? I learned a lot of proper names today -- I was honestly just grateful that I knew SIA, cousin ITT, and ANSEL Adams.
Smooth, my first with no lookups. As a MINOR quibble for the editors, bodybuilders are *never* after TONE, which is just a level of activation of a muscle if it means anything at all; bodybuilders are explicitly seeking hypertrophy (or the lack thereof). If they weren't trying to change the shape of their body, they wouldn't be bodybuilding! TONE is, however, something classically sought after by aerobics class devotees who are "trying not to bulk up".
Oh wow. I got slowed down by a PuRITY / PARITY problem, but this is brilliant grid art. Love the way there are no Os anywhere else in the puzzle besides the die faces.
SERGE turns out to be a specific kind of twill weave, not really a material in itself. One of several reasons I failed for ages to get into the NW corner, along with having RATS where I needed NUTS, but the only one I can actually complain about.
I threw myself off for way too long by trying ONCE UPON A TIME for scene-setting words, but was delighted to be reminded of one of my favorite Salinger stories: "To ESME, with Love and Squalor." P.S. My other favorite MONGOOSE is from an obscure book by Alexander Key called Flight to the Lonesome Place. Anyone here read it?
I really thought that "Did as expected on the links", at 47D, was going to be CLICKED. So clever, so wrong.
AYO EDEBIRI for a 10-letter extender of the theme. I did object to the sports slugger Natick, but the crosses were gentle enough that I could avoid lookups. And it was weirdly nice to see ACTV for once, instead of the endless ACTI and ACTII entries.
@Andree he's actually a really sweet guy who's put in a tremendous amount of study to learn what the editors like and accept. That's why he gets published a lot -- well, that and his focus on 21x21 grids, which are *so* much harder to make than 15x15 that few people are willing to try. Thus, they have a higher acceptance rate. If you don't like what gets published, you can a) blame the editors or b) learn to construct crosswords yourself! It's very fun, if also very humbling.
@Laura there used to be a restaurant in the Pru called Top of the Hub. So I do think it's real, if perhaps a little dated.
Wow. I thought "portals" as soon as I saw the grid, but still ultimately lost a lot of time flyspecking -- my error turned out to be a typo (IINCH) inside one of the rebuses where it could barely be seen, which was painful but entirely on me. I hear people talking about POY -- puzzle of the year? How do we vote? This is my first year really in the game, thanks to retirement...
@Jane Wheelaghan, try reading it as "W or M holes". Wells and mouths are both holes. I also found myself frustrated, with two naticks and some eye-rolling at yet more Biblical trivia (ENOS). This is the price of having five theme entries though!
@Desert Dweller, imgur has over 300 million monthly users. If you haven't checked it out before, go give it a look-see! You might increase your internet savvy, be amused and also know the answer next time.
@Ms. Billie M. Spaight I've been seeing AMIRITE in slang for at least 20 years. It's not uncommon or niche. It was a fine entry. As for me, I should not have confidently entered SOITGOES for the statement of resignation; unfortunately it crosses CLOWNS (some circus performers) quite nicely. Lots of confusion in the NE as I untangled all of that.
@Menc, the vertical lines of circled letters all spell out social media venues when read from down to up.
[Monotheists believe in this] = ONE GOD
Aw, I appreciated the callout to Lars and the Real Girl. That movie is bizarre but shows so many acts of kindness that it ends up being heartwarming.
The last mistake to fall for me was INVEST / VTOS ... unfortunately there *is* something about VTO cars on the internet, so I figured INVEST could be related to a "Down" payment in some way I wasn't getting. But no. Time to saquirrel away GTO in the same corner of my brain I keep REO, for those auto fill moments.
Dang, very unfortunate for me that there is in fact a "noon SHOW". I thought it couldn't be LATE SHOW because LATE isn't really a time of day. Ultimately, got thoroughly stuck at DISc/DISk parallel to SLY_OOTS with the still-baffling attention magnet crossing both. Giving up on cleverness today as we are indeed in a HEATWAVE here in the east. Going to go SPLOOT.
Simeon -- it's being discussed on Crosscord as "very beefy", and I would have found it far less charming without the circles & lines. Just for the record.
A new Saturday PB for me -- I was right on the wavelength, and getting 1A and 16D out of the gate with absolute certainty was enough to change my usual solve pattern so I could build off those. More from Jesse, please!
@Sam what about the "baseballs or eyelashes" clue, or the clever 180 degree rotation for SWIMS?
Barry, I think Grant is right. Looking at xwordinfo I see AUDRELORDE as an entry for Monday August 4, and it was clued as: Poet with the essay collection "Sister Outsider".
This HUFFS and it PUFFS and oh sigh, it BUFFS,and I guess you could say I am some fan of it. Nice tight theme.
@polymath I spent a moment thinking "wow, PRATE is kind of rude but okay" before it hit me.
BREAD, of course, is another food that means money. I wish I hadn't been so slow to solve this one when I need to be packing for my own upcoming DOPAMINE RUSH at amusement park... better if I had SPED through. Alas!
EL_AY crossing AL_EST was a complete natick for me. If we can avoid them for proper names, can we please start avoiding them with sports trivia? Actually, one could argue that AL WEST *is* a proper name, as ELWAY very certainly is. So maybe it was a true natick that should have been avoided from the start.
@Flamingo it doesn't, strictly. Symmetry is a strong guideline that the NYT editorial team can break on rare occasions, and they do. If you have access to the archives, some recent asymmetrical puzzles ran on 8/26/2025 and 9/14/2025. Symmetry is widely considered beautiful though, in crosswords as in many other art forms.
@Anthony I'm the tail end of GenX and didn't see the internet until I was 17 and starting college. That could still be considered "youth", but I read the crossword clue as meaning childhood (possibly because I'd already found the cubs/kittens answer of YOUNG).
@JC from KC, knowyourmeme.com is really helpful here: <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bye-felicia" target="_blank">https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bye-felicia</a> Apparently it's from the 1995 comedy film Friday. I've heard it, and said it, without ever knowing the source!
@Matt, they don't run themeless puzzles on Wednesday and you know it. (I MEAN, COME ON.)
@redweather, ADUs have been discussed a lot in the US as part of the (potential) solution for various cities' housing crises. Having converted an old garage into one and gotten it officially habitable and rented out, ADU was easy for me.
@Ken S, I admit I don't know why DORM is a Northwestern abode... are you willing to enlighten me?
@KC I thought the same thing. LAICS is extremely archaic, LATENS is not synonymous with darkens in any way, OPDOC is NYT-specific, someone or other isn't really Greek, ETALII/NEIL was vile. Amusingly, I learned the "seal the deal" meaning of ICE from a Connections earlier this very week, so at least ICESIT wasn't too bad for me. But this puzzle took me an incredibly long time and the grit wasn't worth the theme. I am happy to see a new constructor debut though!
@Anthony if I hadn't looked those two up I would *never* have gotten the SW corner, which was the last to fall even though I had them. A tough day.
@Joe P, ooh, "Puns and Anagrams" puzzles? No time right now, but I'm feeling like someone weaned on cryptics (like me) might have a chance here. Thanks for the pointer!
@Tom, you put a watch on your wrist... so one could say, taking a little CREATIVE LICENSE with the verbing of nouns, that you WATCH it.
@Annie, quadriceps is named for having four heads, not for its shape (it isn't a quadrilateral). I also had TRAP before DELT, alas!
@MRR, back-constructions are part of the language too. My only gripe here is the not-so-age-old LASE/TASE ambiguity-- I need to just start leaving the first letter blank.
Horror lets people go through a really cathartic "tension and release" stress cycle without having to experience any real risk. As someone else already pointed out, it shares the world-expanding "what if" mechanic of science fiction with a setting, scenario, or nemesis that usually makes people more grateful for their own mundane lives in the process. And of course, the dirty little secret of horror books and movies -- most of them have happy endings.
@Dave Munger what kind of broken are you seeing on xwstats? It seems to be working okay for me (though it's not showing today's puzzle yet, as usual; it only scrapes daily).
Especially lovely and generous notes from the constructor on this one. My only real objection is to SKI CAP, a type of field cap used by several German-speaking or German-influenced armed forces since the late 19th century. I have never seen a runner wearing one, nor do runners (at least in the Northeast US) tend to wear the thick knitted beanies sometimes sold as ski CAPs.
@Andrew Kennelly, I "learned" GELID long ago from a science fiction novel, West of Eden, that was clearly using it to mean "gelatinous"... oops. Apparently it took 30 years and a crossword puzzle for me to learn better.
@Stephen W, constructors call an entry like that "green paint" because, like the phrase "green paint", its meaning is fully clear from the words it is made of, and doesn't have a further specific meaning of its own.
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