Anonymous

@Chad did you really just come to the comments section of the publisher of the world’s most popular crossword puzzle to tell said publisher how crosswords work? Interesting move!

@Gianni I will never understand how quick some people in this forum are to label a constructor as having tried to show off their own intelligence. This is such a lazy, trashy insult to lob at people who have spent hours of their free time trying to make puzzles that crossword enthusiasts will find challenging and interesting. Jfyi it’s obvious to most readers that such comments are simply coming from a place of defensiveness, from solvers who are salty because a puzzle made *them* feel less smart than they were hoping…but it still drives me a little crazy how people make ad hominem attacks on constructors as though they were responding to a Reddit sh*tpost.

@Lauren aside from the themed entries, the clueing in this puzzle is absolutely Monday/Tuesday level. It seems like you went out of your way to proclaim your ignorance of Toni Morrison and her works — congrats, I guess. But you could have completely ignored all the theme clues and still easily solved this puzzle…

@Vernon Once you get past beginner-friendly puzzles, the idea is absolutely not that the average solver should be able to deduce the correct answer to each entry, taken in isolation — rather, the “cross” aspect becomes increasingly important as puzzle difficulty increases. In addition to deliberately ambiguous clueing (where crosses are not just helpful hints, but necessary for disambiguation), non-beginner puzzles also tend to include some trivia and vocabulary that can be fairly obscure…sometimes to an outright comical degree (check out some archived Saturdays from the 90s). And although surely a handful of sociopaths knew the meaning of APOLOGUE prior to solving today’s puzzle, I think it’s fair to assume the constructor/editor expected most solvers to *learn* that as part of the solving process.

@Chris “Why do all of these NYT puzzle authors have to prove how clever they are instead of creating interesting puzzles?” People truly occupy different realities in this comments section! It’s so strange to me how a strong contingent of commenters seem to view the NYT crossword universe through a perspective in which constructors are constantly trying to “prove how clever they are”, and many of the regular commenters are always bragging and/or trying to project snobbery when they talk about puzzles. Has it really not occurred to you that the reason the NYT continues to publish puzzles with the sort of gimmickry seen in today’s, and relatively challenging clueing like in yesterday’s (albeit quite infrequently of late), is that crossword puzzle enthusiasts (to include constructors and the editor) *truly enjoy* those kinds of puzzles?

@Sylvie “I found it jarring to see a casual phrase like that slapped onto something we grow up with knowing is sacred and extremely meaningful.” Sorry, but nothing is “sacred” as far as I’m concerned. You may disagree, but it’s unreasonable for you to expect the puzzles here to reflect your own sense of the sacredness of this or that cultural artifact. This clue and answer are fine.

@Heidi None of the “too easy!” commentary is directed at you, or any other solvers who are finding the current puzzles plenty challenging. But to be perfectly honest, if you are in that boat, you probably *shouldn’t* be able to solve the average Friday/Saturday puzzles without assistance. And that’s totally fine! As I see it, the day-of-week difficulty scheme is largely intended to strike a compromise that accommodates solvers with a wide range of abilities. The upshot being: for more experienced solvers, the first couple days of the week are usually cakewalks, and for less experienced solvers, the puzzles later in the week are often unapproachable. In other words, beginners and advanced solvers can “belong here” simultaneously (“here” being the puzzles themselves, the Wordplay comments section being a whole other beast). Recently, the editors seem to have prioritized making late-week puzzles approachable for less experienced solvers…with the result that more advanced solvers can often go weeks at a time without getting a puzzle that presents them with a real challenge. And that’s what the complaints are about.

@liz Jeez Louise, talk about going out of your way to find things to be “offended” about. This clue would have worked equally well with either team as an answer; and *if* Reign and Sounders had the same number of letters, a constructor could even deliberately exploit that ambiguity (all the more so if they also happened to have any letters in common).

@Dc Occasionally, commenters will complain about people who come here to brag about how fast they finished a puzzle. I pretty much always assume such commenters are wrongly projecting this “bragging” onto more advanced solvers (than themselves), who aren’t so much bragging as talking to each other without wording their comments to account for the potential insecurities of the beginners in the forum (of which, incidentally, there are waaay more than self-identification would likely indicate). Anyhoo, all that to say: having read your comment, I guess some people do actually come here to straight-up brag about their solve times 🤣

@Double Double Ambiguous clueing is an intentional feature in crossword puzzles. Do better with your comments.

@Jeff Assuredly, people like Barry feel much more strongly about the late-week puzzles being too easy than you do about their comments on that topic. Btw your *responses* to the “puzzles are too damn easy” comments fall into a category I particularly dislike. My least favorite genre would be the gaslighters (who argue that the maybe the puzzles haven’t actually gotten that much easier); but very close behind is the “things change, get over it” variant. Things do indeed change, but often for the worse; and arguing that other people should accept a given change just because “such is life” is really another way of saying “I don’t personally have a problem with this change, so you shouldn’t either”.

@Brian sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Thursdays ;)

@R This has just gotta be parody…right? Well, just to be safe: Barry Ancona bat signal activated!

@Ant I didn’t know a single one of the references you mentioned, and that’s a huge part of why this puzzle took me over an hour to complete…which is the whole freaking point of Saturday puzzles! This isn’t mean to be a digitized, solo pub trivia — the idea is that a given solver might know some of the trivia right off the bat, be familiar enough with another subset of the trivia entries to fill them in with a bit of help from crosses, and get the rest from crosses alone. The same principle applies to entries involving obscure vocabulary (of which there wasn’t any in today’s puzzle, at least off the top of my head).

@Laura Stratton Sincerely: thank you so much for this comment 🫶 I really wish more solvers would be quick to interpret rough solving as experiences reflective of their own skill level, rather than labeling the puzzle “a slog”, complaining about there being “too much trivia”, insulting the constructor (“trying to show off how smart they are”), etc.

@Grumpy “Definitely not for the international audience that the NYT pretends they welcome” Two things: 1) Where/how does the NYT advertise its crossword puzzles as being designed in a manner that’s meant to be “welcoming” to an international audience? 2) I can’t help but notice that you haven’t provided French versions of any of your comments. Definitely not for the international audience you’re pretending to express indignation on behalf of.

@Chris Chamberlain First off, these puzzles are not authored/edited a few days before publication — i.e. it’s entirely fair to assume that this grid was completed prior to the last week’s events. But even if this puzzle had been created yesterday, how could including “antifa” as an answer in the NYT’s daily crossword puzzle be “inflammatory”? Who/what could possibly be inflamed by that? Please give the manufactures outrage a rest.

@Heidi “But when there’s clue after clue that makes no sense, even when I reveal the answer…” I remember feeling *exactly* this way a few years back…but fwiw, I didn’t feel a shred of that for even a single entry in today’s puzzle (and for that matter, I don’t get that feeling anymore for even the most brutal stumpers in the archives). In other words: it gets better, I promise :)

@Billy Dude, there are no hard and fast rules about when a question mark must be used. And as Matt said, they are less likely to be used in late-week puzzles. But more generally (and somewhat amusingly), your own claim about the entry being “factually incorrect” is just plain wrong. How is a horse race *not* a “track event”? It’s an event that takes place on a track, so calling it a “track event” is eminently defensible. QED. Your claim rests on one specific definition/usage of the phrase “track event”, but clearly that’s not what the clue is actually invoking — it’s just what the constructor wanted you to *think* it was invoking.

@Michael yep, as you said (albeit in different words), this wasn’t a beginner-friendly puzzle. Which is exactly what many of us are looking for on Saturdays! As for “political bias”…coming from someone who absolutely does not “identify with” either the red or blue tribe of American politics, I’ve gotta say: if this puzzle struck you as excessively politicized, you are *very* easily triggered.

@Wark I couldn’t possibly agree with you more. Welcome to the forum!

@MmmmHmm “But humiliating ordinary humans who have the temerity to attempt a Saturday crossword can't be good for expanding NYT readership.” Believe me, the NYT has heard the complaints from you and your ilk, and have accordingly adjusted puzzle difficulty sharply downward during the last few years. Don’t believe me? Spend some time in the archives and try a handful of Fridays and Saturdays from > 10 years ago.

Update: I just read another comment where someone explained that the theme answers are actually NOT meant to be parsed as double entendres, but rather, greetings given *to* cards (i.e. “greeting cards” is a verb phrase, in which “cards” is in the accusative case). Ok, now I see that: a) These are very bad puns indeed b) …and I like them just fine

@Eric Ressner But if you enter the “out-letters” in rebuses, then they aren’t *out* of the grid, right? Also, the crosses don’t work if you use rebuses for the theme answers.

@S I am presently taking the time to hate on this puzzle, as well. Why? Because I had never heard of a Bruno Mars album called “24k Magic”, and while the “two” and “four” aspects of that answer can be inferred from the crosses, IMO there isn’t anywhere near a strong enough signal that the answer would contain non-alphabetic input (a very rare break from convention)…unless you happen to be familiar with the discography of “Bruno Mars”, that is.

@Mr Dave “What makes you think they are unskilled?” When someone comes here to post a very strong negative reaction to a puzzle that was generally easy, but required catching onto a gentle/obvious gimmick…that’s a *very* strong signal that the commenter is suffering from a personal skills gap. To put it differently: do you ever find yourself fuming about a puzzle after an easy/smooth solve? Unless you’re an exceptionally passionate crossword constructor, of course not — you just say “Meh” and move right along. The frustration, and desire to lash out at a puzzle and/or constructor, is a huge tell…

@Andrzej I don’t think most of the commenters you have in mind (or so I assume) are quite so insistent on everybody *enjoying* every puzzle. Rather, what seems to reliably elicit reactions from many such commenters (myself included at times) is how people are so quick to label a puzzle as *bad*, simply because they didn’t personally enjoy it. See, for example, the commenter who described today’s offering (and/or constructor) as “a witless hack”. All of that being said…rod-shaped!?

@Weinie I’ll never understand complaints about the presence of some amount of deliberately obscure trivia and/or vocab in a puzzle, especially later in the week. TBH I actually have no idea how obscure that particular entry is for the wider group, but I’ve personally never heard of Courtney Barnett or Kurt Vile, so it was totally opaque to me. As were SAMARA Weaving, LAALAA, and ELIZA. But why stop there? Plenty of people have probably never heard of the Philly Phanatic, and I’m sure a non-trivial cohort of solvers won’t immediately associate FINCH with To Kill a Mockingbird. I had also never heard the expression “so extra”. But you’re going to call this an awful puzzle because you haven’t heard of a music group in one of the clues and because LATS aren’t the primary muscle exercised in rows?

@Thomas Another art is combining (you might even say “crossing”) deliberately abstract clues in such a way that most solvers will be required to incrementally eliminate ambiguity as they go along, by solving entries as pairs/groups (after seeding the grid with their gimmes and/or strongest initial guesses). We’ve had two Saturdays like that in a row, and I’ve personally loved them both.

@Jonathan “I think it takes some practice.” Prescription: a hefty dose of thine own medicine! That, or you can just keep posting lazy, unclever, vague comments about puzzles that are too challenging for you (and yes, in spite of your defense mechanism of attempting to flip the script and blame the puzzle, that is exactly what is going on here).

@Lee Kellogg It’s fascinating to see how many people continue to interpret complaints about the puzzles being too easy as “bragging”. From the perspective of someone who completely agrees with such complaints, it couldn’t be more clear that this is a total misread (and probably a matter of projection and/or frustration, coming from people who found a puzzle sufficiently challenging to suit their own skill level and taste). For one thing, who do you see as the target audience for such boasts? And for another, have you noticed that such complaints tend to align very neatly with puzzles that are especially easy, e.g. as reflected in xwstats solve times? Please understand: the complainers genuinely *want* to be challenged by these puzzles, especially Thursday-Saturday. But such challenges have become increasingly rare over the last couple years — and it hasn’t been a remotely subtle transition, if you’re someone who knows what you’re looking at.

@Lauren Nah, the people bashing this puzzle need to realize two things: 1) There is a serious learning curve to solving crosswords. The length of time required to make good progress along that curve will vary quite a bit across individuals, but unless you’ve got exceptional natural ability, you’ll have to be willing to suffer through some puzzles that *seem* like they’re just full of bad/obscure clueing…until suddenly, one day, you realize you’re enjoying them, and the clues are (mostly) just fine. 2) Puzzle difficulty is highly personalized, and some days will feel like a total slog for you…even as half the commenters are happily announcing their new PBs for the day. And vice versa!

@CMH I haven’t read the book, but considering it is about Jennifer Doudna and the development of CRISPR, I can’t see how DNA could possibly *not* be a valid answer for this clue…?