Alina Abidi’s New York Times Crossword — Sophia’s review
Hi folks! Happy to be back covering after the end of the NYT tech guild strike.
New York Times, 11 15 2024, By Alina Abidi
I loved the vibes of Alina’s puzzle! So many of the long answers felt fun and conversational. A couple that stood out to me are RARING TO GO, YOU’RE NOT WRONG, DON’T TELL ME, EVER HEARD OF IT, I CAN SEE YOU. Actually, almost none of the long answers are proper nouns, which I think will make the puzzle more interesting and accessible to different groups of people. I normally don’t care much about duplicated words in puzzles, but RARING TO GO and I’VE GOTTA GO felt a little egregious to me, because it uses the same word in the same context/similar length answers.
Things that were tricky for me included TETE A TETES and SOUPÇONS (me, looking at the first 5/8ths of this answer: “…. soup cans??”). I didn’t know Henry LUCE or ERMA Franklin. I studied math in college but I wasn’t familiar with the word IDEMPOTENT. My tech background was helpful for knowing LINUX, EVICTS as clued, and Kara SWISHER.
Other thoughts – very elegant to have CARL crossing SAGAN. My two favorite clues in the puzzle were [Macy’s or Wendy’s, for instance?] for HERS, and [Library section that may have comic books and beanbags] for TEENS, just because of its specificity – I can confirm that I spent a *lot* of time on the teen section beanbags of my local library back in the day.
Happy Friday all!