John Ewbank’s New York Times crossword, “In My Defense …” — Nate’s write-up
07.21.2024 Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle
– 22A: NO TRUE SCOTSMAN [All crossword fans love this puzzle; anyone who doesn’t love this puzzle can’t be a *real* crossword fan!]
– 30A: CIRCULAR REASONING [Why was this chosen as today’s puzzle? Because it’s great! What makes it great? I mean, it was chosen for publication!]
– 47A: CHERRY PICKING [I sent this crossword to 100 friends, and two of them really liked it!]
– 65A: POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC [What’s more, one of those friends won the lottery right after solving it — coincidence? I think not!]
– 85A: SLIPPERY SLOPE [If you criticize this puzzle, where will it end? Before long, you’ll be criticizing your mother’s cooking?]
– 101A: APPEAL TO AUTHORITY [Besides, The New York Times said it was good!]
– 114A: LOGICAL FALLACY [Part of a flawed argument, examples of which are seen throughout this puzzle]
This puzzle’s theme is simply a list of logical fallacies that fit into the grid symmetrically. That’s it. No wordplay, no clever puns, nothing we’d expect in a modern theme, except for perhaps some cheekily-written theme clues that might, in a meta way, protest a bit too much.
I unfortunately didn’t find the grid’s fill or cluing any more exciting than the theme (and, in some places, it felt particularly rough), which leaves me wondering how this puzzle made it through. IZZATSO? That being the actual entry baffled me. And, if you were stumped on NO TRUE SCOTSMAN, fear not – the constructor admits in his own constructor notes that it was new to him, too!
As has become the case quite often these days, I’m hopeful that many of you enjoyed this puzzle more than I did – if I’m the odd one out, I’d be all the happier. Let us know in the comments – and have a lovely weekend!
PS – On a happier note, if you’ll be at the Boswords Crossword Tournament on Sunday, please say hi. I’ll be there!
Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post crossword, “Made to Order” — Matt’s write-up
Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post crossword, “Made to Order” solution, 7/21/2024
A meta this week. The prompt is to correct a themer: “One of this puzzle’s theme answers is the wrong one. The answer to this week’s metapuzzle is the theme answer that should replace it, formed by combining two entries in the completed grid.“
Seven across answers jumped out during the solve, notable for their wackiness, but it wasn’t until I started to list them out that I realized the first six are an anagrams of the immediately preceding entries:
MYOPES / EMO PSY
SOB STORY / BOORS STY
VOLUMES / ELMO SUV
SOCIETAL / ACE I LOST
SUBTEXT / BEST TUX
SABOTEUR / ABE OR STU
JACOBY / AHI NOW
A closer look, and the second half of each theme pair is in alphabetical order, even AHI NOW despite not being an anagram of JACOBY. It wasn’t immediately clear to me which of that pair was the wrong entry that needed to be replaced, but I didn’t quickly see an anagram of AHI NOW. Picking through the three-letter entries in the grid, ABC is near the top, and JOY near the bottom – they’re even symmetrically placed.
An anagram of JACOBY that matches the pattern of the other theme pairs, ABC JOY is also an apt payoff for a puzzle hinging on alphabetical order. A satisfying progression of ‘aha’ moments for me. The first step in particular — identifying the themers — is pretty clear, so I hope others had a similarly good time with this one.
Notes:
- 7a [Boring power tools] DRILLS. A lifetime of crossword solving had me entering and soon erasing AUGERS here
- 60d [Pieces played by a single musician] SOLO SET. The first chunk of this was easy to drop in. Finding the right way to match the plural clue took some crossings. But it’s a fair entry, in my mind.
Gary Larson’s Universal Sunday crossword, “I’ve Got a Funny Feeling…”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases that end in a word that could also be an emotion or a hint at an emotion. Crossword wackiness ensues.
Universal Sunday crossword solution · “I’ve Got a Funny Feeling…” · Gary Larson · 7.21.24
- 23a. [*Despondency after a long pub crawl?] TWELVE-BAR BLUES. Good start. I like this one.
- 39a. [*Unscrupulous used-car dealer’s nefarious enthusiasm?] LEMON ZEST. Reprehensible (the car dealer, not the clue or entry).
- 43a. [*Sense of ease with one’s putter?] GREEN PEACE. Also good.
- 64a. [*Anxiety around attending a church gathering?] SOCIAL BUTTERFLIES.
- 87a. [*Vinyl collector’s euphoria in finding a rare album?] RECORD HIGH.
- 90a. [*Passion rediscovered during a midlife crisis?] FORTY LOVE. Forty is midlife? I guess I’m late for my crisis.
- 110a. [*Prime minister of England’s bouts of depression during WWII?] CHURCHILL DOWNS. Meh. I don’t like this one. You might call a bout of depression a “low point” or a “low,” but I doubt you’d call it a “down.”
These were mostly good except that last one didn’t sit well, as I noted. But good wordplay overall.
Fill highlights: LIP LINER, HOT YOGA, YVONNE (my niece’s name), MALAYSIA, SADISTIC, and KING’S MEN. That central staircase of six- and seven-letter down entries is impressive.
Clues of note:
- 9a. [Heist target, often]. SAFE. BANK seemed like the obvious entry, but it wasn’t too hard to correct this with the crossings.
- 46a. [Red October and others]. SUBS. Fictional submarine from the Tom Clancy book and film.
- 57a. [Exceptionally cruel to others]. SADISTIC. There’s an essential element to sadism (i.e. deriving pleasure from inflicting pain) that should be present in the clue.
- 97a. [Coffee entrepreneur Alfred]. According to the company’s history, Alfred PEET singlehandedly “taught the world to drink coffee.”
- 113a. [Bench sharer with Felix]. EARL. No idea what this is. Baseball?
- 38d. [“___ class is tough” (Teen Talk Barbie phrase)]. MATH. Huh. I mis-remember the phrase as “Math is hard”. Mattel later apologized for the phrase.
- 41d. [Take second, in a way]. STEAL. This one’s baseball for sure.
Good puzzle with clean fill. 3.75 stars.
I have a specific personal quirk— I really enjoy lists of logical fallacies. So, the Sunday NYT scratched a long-term itch. I didn’t even get bored in the middle of the puzzle, which is very unusual for me. I had a couple of issues with the puzzle, though— I did object to the ‘Y’ in YHEAR, and found the ‘Beetle juice’ clue to be just icky.
I’m with you. When I was doing this puzzle I knew it wasn’t technically very good, but I enjoy learning about logical fallacies so I got some enjoyment out of that.
I enjoyed it more than most, too, although it’s straightforward once you get the idea that the clues are examples of the fallacies to be entered as answers. I even smiled at a couple. I did wonder at first why I couldn’t enter just POST HOC PROPTER HOC, as some write it, but they’re in the minority, I know.
Still, nothing stellar and, a fair amount of crosswordese in the fill, as if a Brit setter was trying to reassure the editor that he plays by all the American rules. YHEAR is awful. And I do wish more examples weren’t given in the magazine’s biographical note, a further giveaway. But maybe the real defense is that so many past Sunday puzzles have been so forced. Really boring starts to look ok by comparison.
I see nothing objectionable about Y’HEAR.
IZZATSO?
Neither of those entries bothered me, though one never knows quite how to spell some of those phrases that are primarily spoken.
Maybe it’s just me (or maybe me and MattF), but Y’HEAR makes me want not to pronounce Y as a syllable, but to elide it, producing something like the single syllable “year.” Thus, I kept wondering why I couldn’t fit in, say, “ya hear?”
Well, if I had to write that phrase out, there’s a good chance I would write “ya hear.” But I don’t have a problem with it being rendered as Y’HEAR.
I guess YHEAR just seems meaningless to me. Yes, you can imagine it decorated with an apostrophe, asserting that it’s a shortened form of something else, but that doesn’t work for me. [Shrug].
For what it’s worth, I had a lot of trouble filling in that YH at the start of Y’HEAR, but I have seen the phrase written that way many times.
I had LAC for beetle juice but I realize that lac insects aren’t beetles… I really didn’t care for NBAERS… that felt like some of the roughest fill. The logical fallacies were easy to fill in, and led to a fast Sunday.
Why was Beetle Juice icky? It is just GAS for the Volkswagen.
NYT: Might be a personal record. Filled the first six rows, along with a few dangling “Down” answers, and knew this was not for me. A bit of a downer after a good Saturday puzzle. I liked the clue for BRUNO.
NYT: I more or less knew three of the logical fallacies and could make POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC work eventually (was 68D going to be AH ME or OH ME? Who cares?)
NBAERS is extremely awkward and the NB made it look like with 6A or 20A was wrong.
It took me way too long to get GOPRO. I see those things all the time when I go skiing, but they always have a bracket that attaches to a ski helmet.
But the clues for the theme answers were moderately amusing.
I started with OHMY, which I think fits the clue better, although it’s just as ugly as AHME and OHME.
I would clue OHMY as ‘having some resistance, electrically.’
NYT: I knew all the fallacies — including NOTRUESCOTSMAN, which always amuses me — but I didn’t care for the listicle nature of the puzzle itself. And some of the fill was iffy, as others have said.
WaPo: I got nowhere with the meta. I was looking for a theme entry that didn’t match its clue in some way, and failed to notice the anagrams. But as always with Evan’s metas, if I can’t see anything after a minute or two I let it go.
Universal Sunday: Felix and Earl are Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter and Warren
TY for explaining that clue! Editor Jeff Chen should have made it less archaic.
Frankfurter and Warren were on the court when I was a kid. I remember the right wingers wanting to impeach Earl Warren over things like the Miranda decision and Griswold v. Connecticut (state law prohibiting married couples from using contraception violated the constitutional right to privacy).
Old, maybe, but hardly “archaic.”
I saw a spoiler here before I solved that puzzle, so I don’t know that that I would have gotten that on my own.
Once again, thx for your input Eric. Both of those justices last served over five decades ago, which seems like ancient history to me, lol!
You’re welcome.
I may be old, but I’m not ancient. Yet.
And if I am allowed to go into “Martin Herbach” pedantic-mode, my original use of the term “archaic” was intended to mean “archival”, as in the annals of history. (Phew, I barely redeemed myself with blatant lying, didn’t I?)
NYT – not interesting. Didn’t know most of the logical fallacies, so I was just trying to work through the crossing answers
NYT: I enjoyed the theme of various types of logical fallacies.
(I did not find the examples, all manner of pretend-boasting by the constructor, to be particularly amusing, and I would have enjoyed the puzzle more if it had picked something different for the examples.)
Do you find 100D to be clued correctly? Seems like there should have been an abbreviation in the clue to suggest MT rather than MOUNT.
MT EVEREST has appeared 5 times, with no abbreviation signal for any of them. MT RAINIER was “Tallest peak in the Cascades” (5/2/2023). It’s pretty common to treat abbreviations that are used as commonly as their spelled-out words this way.
This was my favorite Sunday puzzle in years. Like MattF, I love lists of logical fallacies. I’ve been teaching literature and writing for over 30 years and have always taught my students to avoid using fallacious arguments in their writing. Unlike Nate, I found the non-themed entries to be clever and clear (except for IZ ZAT SO). As someone who spends her summers in London, I wonder if the fact that the constructor John Ewbank hails from Macclesfield had something to do with my appreciation of the puzzle.
I loved it too. I think it would make the basis of a great drinking game for the next presidential debate.
I fully loved the theme. That said, the fill deflated the soufflé – especially for a theme like this. (See Nate’s review…)
(@Martin: Let us all know when you have an app for the bingo cards, btw.)
WaPo: I figured the wacky answers had to be the “theme answers,l despite them not being the longest answers or being symmetrically placed. It took a minute to see that MYOPES anagrams to EMO PSY, but once I did, I knew I had the right idea.
I’m not a big baseball fan, but I’m a little surprised that I don’t recognize JACOBY Ellsbury’s name. From his Wikipedia entry, it sounds like he had a respectable career.
I didn’t notice that each theme answer has its letters in alphabetical order. Thanks for pointing that out, Matt. And thanks, Evan Birnholz, for a fun and solvable meta.
Ratings: There’s been a lot of discussion here about whether the rating system is somewhat accurate or not because there is not an established criteria.
So maybe if the “3-star” rating was removed, we might get a better striation in the results of what the solvers thought about a crossword…
Love the New York Times today. If fhese logical fallacies were taught to every middle school kid, we’d have a lot more nuanced thinkers in our midst.
Re Wapo, the theme indicated that ahinow was the only answer that fit an order, so I thought “ha I won” was a good anagram. From there I anagrammed the theme title, so, dreamt rodeo, dare motored, and my favorite, toreador med. Clearly, I did not get the meta. Does the theme refer to alphabetical order? That was not addressed. Thank you.
The title “Made to Order” refers to alphabetical order. All seven of the wacky theme answers have their letters in alphabetical order but AHI NOW is the only one that isn’t an anagram of the Across answer preceding it, so you have to find the alphabetized anagram of the preceding answer JACOBY.
That said, even though it doesn’t satisfy the instructions, it is very cool how AHI NOW can be anagrammed to “HA, I WON.” I never saw that.
Thanks for your answer. I am in awe of your crossword prowess. The other anagram was “Win a ho,”, not quite as appropriate, lol. I always enjoy your puzzles, even when the metas are beyond me.
UNI-SUN: The editing is too loose for me. For example, 113A – “Bench sharer with Felix”, answer is “Earl”. (Former U.S. Supreme Court Justices)
WaPo: Nice puzzle but the meta was a clunker for me. What the heck is “ABC Joy” all about? Does it have something to do with Joy Behar’s network ABC?
ABC JOY isn’t meant to be a real phrase on its own. It’s just the most appropriate answer I could find that 1) has its letters in alphabetical order, 2) hints at the process of alphabetizing things and the happiness of solving crosswords and metas, and 3) can be anagrammed into a real word (JACOBY).
LAT: fun Sunday, though I’m not a huge golf fan… I did enjoy the education / golf crossover angle. Most of the fill was pretty good; I got tripped up a bit with SIMU LIU, but the crossings were fair in the end. Would love to see regular reviews of the LAT Sunday if possible…
LAT “Course Work” had an amusing meta (golf terms) but the course was a trash heap, littered with unfamiliar names.