Note: No WSJ puzzle due to the holiday.
Katie Byl and Jeff Chen’s New York Times crossword— Sophia’s write-up
Theme: WORK LIKE A DOG – each theme answer ends with an action a working dog could do
New York Times, Monday Jan 20, By Katie Byl and Jeff Chen
- 20a [Path of advancement for a lawyer] – PARTNER TRACK
- 27a [Position for Steph Curry or Caitlin Clark] – POINT GUARD
- 36a [Go along with prevailing wisdom] – FOLLOW THE HERD
- 49a [Manual for consistency in writing] – STYLE GUIDE
- 56a [Do one’s job to the point of exhaustion … or a hint to the ends of 20-, 27-, 36- and 49-Across] – WORK LIKE A DOG
My family and I watch the national dog show every year on Thanksgiving, and this puzzle made me think fondly about the dogs there in the working group. There’s a great variety of dog actions here, and I’m glad the constructors chose to include four theme answers plus a revealer to get more in there! As a basketball fan, POINT GUARD was my favorite answer and required no crosses for me. FIDO also feels theme adjacent in the middle.
The only problem with having this particular set of theme answers is that the necessary placement of the 12-letter WORK LIKE A DOG leads to the puzzle feeling very segmented – for example, look at how LLAMAS is the only down entry into the bottom left corner – which can make the puzzle tougher at times because solvers can’t use as much of their progress in one area of the puzzle to get into another. But again, a potential necessary trade-off to work with the highest quality theme set.
Another issue segmented puzzles can sometimes have is a lack of longer answers that aren’t thematic, but that certainly isn’t the case here! We have the lovely NO-GO AREAS, FRACTALS, CHIGNONS, and BRITICISM (I had trouble spelling the last two). I also liked G FORCE and the aforementioned LLAMAS. Trouble spots for me included the very first entry of the puzzle – I had “spam” for [Unwanted piece of mail] instead of BILL, and I could only remember Barbie relatives Skipper, Kelly, and Midge, not STACIE.
Congrats to Katie on a great NYT debut!
NYT: Another Monday with Will Shortz back, another Monday where I have the worst Monday time I’ve had in a while. This was the worst of all; I would probably have to go back a couple of years to find as slow a time as I had today for a Monday. None of the theme answers were obvious to me, and I was flailing a bit all over the place. I have never heard of BRITICISM before (unusual for me on Monday not to have heard of an answer at all), and at first I had ANGLICISM and then tried BRITISHISM but it didn’t fit. I would say STACIE as clued, CHIGNONS, and several other answers aren’t typical Monday fare, either. As Sophia pointed out, the parts of the puzzle were not that closely linked in the grid, so I had to tackle each part separately.
Katie, it was a great puzzle, and congratulations on the debut! As always, any comments about day-of-the-week placement are about the editorial decision to have this puzzle go on Monday rather than anything that the constructor has done. The puzzle itself was just fine; I think it should have been on Tuesday or Wednesday, though.