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.

@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 🤣

@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.

@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).

@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…?

@JC from KC Me: It’s a contraction. You: A contraction? Me: What’d I say?

@Moira IMO that’s not an example of an entry that’s “forced”, so much as one that’s deliberately open-ended (i.e. the clue could map to any number of possible answers), the idea being to require solvers to use the crosses.

@Frank Obviously I can’t speak to your personal experience…but I can assure you that divvy/divvied is not an obscure term.

@Darren Nice touch with the “many people are saying” framing. In fact, I’d say the reception to this puzzle has been surprisingly positive considering the level of challenge it presents…consider me positively surprised!

@TQ I will never, as long as I live, understand the solvers who attribute characteristics such as smugness to puzzle constructors. What a weird, uncharitable take.

@Francis “I have long argued that doing puzzles from the past seems harder than current puzzles, because we're less immersed in the context of the puzzle creation. We have more possible memory interferences from what has happened since the puzzle was constructed.” Is that one factor? Absolutely! But the difference in difficulty, on average, between puzzles from 10+ years ago and today is simply *much* too stark for recency to account for too much of it. Simply put, the puzzles used to be a lot more, well, puzzling. Especially on the tougher Saturdays, there used to some brutally obscure trivia and vocabulary entries, the likes of which I doubt any constructor would even consider including nowadays. As I said in another thread, I don’t entirely miss those old Saturdays…but I do agree with Andrew that things have gone way too far in the other direction. I guess I can understand why pointing that out might seem like bragging, especially to someone for whom the current Fridays still feel like a good challenge. But please consider that this forum is frequented by people with a huge variety of solving skills/experience, and comments bemoaning the relative ease of today’s puzzles are directed mostly at other experienced solvers (as opposed to gloating in the direction of newer solvers).

@B “I finished without any help and I don't want to see another puzzle from this constructor again. It wasn't brilliant. It was just hard through obscurity.” The classic @B move: before criticizing a puzzle, clarify that said puzzle was NOT especially challenging for them, lest anyone should mistake their considered critique for a lesser solver’s misplaced/projected complaints about a puzzle that simply wasn’t on their personal wavelength (in combination with their solving skills being good, but not as good as they think).

@Andrzej since you went there…I did just get a new Saturday PB (and came in just 1.5 minutes over my Tuesday average). But no, I’m not going to complain or threaten canceling my subscription :) For one thing, there are hundreds of Saturdays in the archives that are new to me, which can provide a serious challenge anytime I want one. (And in many cases, by “serious challenge”, I mean that I’ll spend an hour or two getting half the grid filled in, eventually say f* it and click “check puzzle”, only to find that half my answers are wrong). But also, there have been so many days where a puzzle beat me over the head and took me well over my daily average…and then I’ve come here to find everyone congratulating each other on new PBs. The crossword gods giveth and taketh in equal measure 🤷‍♂️