Sunday, June 22, 2025

LAT tk (Gareth) [3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
NYT 19:48 (Eric) [3.09 avg; 16 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Darby) [1.50 avg; 1 rating] rate it
Universal (Sunday) 11:25 (Jim) [3.00 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Norah) [3.33 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
WaPo 6:43 (Matt G) [2.75 avg; 6 ratings] rate it

Ruth Bloomfield Margolin and Hannah Margolin’s New York Times Crossword “Bringing a Plus One” — Eric’s review

Congratulations to Hannah Margolin for her New York Times puzzle debut!

Ruth Bloomfield Margolin and Hannah Margolin’s New York Times Crossword “Bringing a Plus One” — 6/22/25

It’s June, supposedly the traditional month for weddings, so we get phrases commonly associated with nuptials that have an extra letter in them:

• 23A [Make a partner’s beard presentable for all the photos?] SHAVE THE DATE Save the date.
• 25A [Poet hired to write the couple’s vows in flowery verse?] CASH BARD Cash bar.
• 34A [Cause of many headaches while planning the big day?] WEDDING DURESS Wedding dress.
• 52A [Tool for a couple who intend to return everything and keep the money?] GRIFT REGISTRY Gift registry. I like this one, despite the wordy clue.
• 68A [Fancy headpiece ornament?] FEATHER OF THE BRIDE Father of the bride.
• 86A [olorful sequined jacket that the groom chose to wear?] SOMETHING BOLD Something old.
• 101A [One ensuring that each family can invite the same number of guests?] PARITY PLANNER Party planner.
• 115A [Animal’s escort down the aisle?] BEAST MAN Best man.
• 117A [Parent who foolishly wore stiletto heels to a garden event?] MOTHER-IN-LAWN. Mother-in-law. I giggled at the image this created.

I was moderately amused by this theme, even though I’m not a huge wedding person. As a gay man, I’ve always felt like an outsider at a wedding. On the other hand, my husband and I had a lovely wedding and will celebrate our 11th anniversary in August. That’s not something we ever expected to do (we’ve been together much longer than that). By the time we could finally get married, both my parents were long dead; my husband’s father had been dead for over 10 years. But my mother-in-law and her brother did a wonderful job representing the previous generation.

Because the theme answers are not themselves common phrases, the solver has to come up with the base phrase and then figure out where the extra letter goes. That may have contributed to a slowish solving time for me. I particularly got bogged down around WEDDING DURESS and PARITY PLANNER.

I liked that all the base phrases were familiar. It would have made it easier to solve (and probably impossible to construct) for the extra letters to have all been in the same place.

Other stuff:

• 15A [Family elder in El Salvador] ABUELA Grandmother.
• 37A [1980s tennis champ Ivan] LENDL I sometimes wonder about dates in clues like this. Is there another “tennis champ” named Ivan? On the other hand, it might signal to the solver that “This is someone before your time; don’t waste too much time trying to answer it.”
• 61A [Airport alternative to EWR] LGA That’s Newark and La Guardia, if you’ve never had the pleasure of flying to or through New York.
• 65A [Pope who excommunicated Martin Luther] LEO X I can’t see that in the grid without wanting to parse it as LE OX, which reminds me of the Darius Milhaud ballet Le bœuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof), a piece of music I find extremely annoying.
• 3D [One of music’s Allman Brothers] DUANE I’m glad I’d already gotten 1A HADRON and didn’t need to decide between Gregg and Duane.
• 8D [Lady Anne, at the beginning of “Richard III”] WIDOW If you’ve never seen the 1995 version of Richard III, I highly recommend it. It’s a modernized setting (1930s-ish, with fascist trappings) with an oily Ian McKellen in the lead role, Annette Benning as Queen Elizabeth, Kristin Scott Thomas as Lady Anne, and a whole bunch of other wonderful actors.
• 11D [Famous “Dr.” who never practiced medicine] DRE/74A [Famous “Dr.” who never practiced medicine] SEUSS I put WHO in the first one.
• 41D [Queue before Q] LGBT I’ve seen this clue before, and I still automatically think of the letters in the alphabet.
• 69D [The “H” in HOMES] HURON I never learned that mnemonic as a kid. There are five Great Lakes; are they that hard to remember?
• 87D [Awkwafina’s given name] NORA I know this mostly from crosswords.

Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post Crossword “What Keeps Me Up at Night” — Matt’s review

Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post Crossword “What Keeps Me Up at Night” solution, 6/22/2025

Something a little different this week. We’ve got two different theme mechanisms, each with their own revealer, fit into a single puzzle. Let’s dig in:

• 23a [*Drain the slime created by the “99 Luftballons” band?” SAP NENA OOZE (the letters of SNOOZE are circled)
• 25a [*Do a farmin’ job then do an usher’s job?] REAP N SEAT
• 41a [*Type of tide caused by a dad who plays a board game involving settlers?] CATAN PA NEAP
• 56a [*Order to actor Mineo and an MLB official to stay close?] SAL UMP BE NEAR
• 68a [Nighttime activity that’s been interrupted in the starred answers] SLEEP
• 70a [Condition that I was recently diagnosed with, and a word whose letters interrupt the circled words] APNEA
• 81a [**”Basketball Hall of Famer Drexler and Bonnie’s partner in crime inspire awe?] CLYDES DAZZLE
• 94a [**One whose footsteps match the rhythm of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis] JAZZY WALKER
• 113a [**Tasseled hats worn while withdrawing money from a banking device] ATM FEZZES
• 117a [What I hope I’ll be able to do better with my CPAP machine, and what three phrases in this puzzle do to create the double-starred answers] CATCH SOME ZS

As wacky-clues-to-produce-wacky-entries goes, this one is pretty up there – I had special difficulty parsing both the clues and entries for the first theme – but I liked the payoff. I didn’t catch the consistency of APNEA interrupting the SLEEP words until the central revealer, while the ZZ additions in the second theme set came a bit easier. 

It’s an audacious puzzle, both in the autobiographical elements and the duple theme. It’s not up as I draft this, but I believe Evan will have more about the former in his own weekly writeup (should be available here). 

It takes a lot to make a duple themer payoff for the solver, in my opinion. Something that this apartis the two mechanisms really work together and within the grid. There’s a before-and-after effect to half a puzzle of APNEA interrupting SLEEP and half a puzzle of “caught” ZZs in themers that mirrors Evan’s own before-and-after of a sleep study and CPAP machine leading to better hygiene. It might be easier to have a handful of APNEA themers and a handful of ZZ themers in any order, but the puzzle is better for this arrangement.

One other particular highlight: [Phrase of empathy for another’s experience] I SEE YOU  

Jared Goudsmit’s Universal Sunday crossword, “Don’t Take it the Wrong Way …”—Jim’s review

Theme answers are familiar phrases but the clues are semordnilaps (semi-jocularly) or anadromes (as Wikipedia calls them), that is, words that are different words spelled backwards. The revealer is THINKING BACK (115a, [Recalling past events … or making sense of the starred clues]).

Universal Sunday crossword solution · “Don’t Take it the Wrong Way …” · Jared Goudsmit · 6.22.25

• 21a. [*Live?] BAD TO THE BONE.
• 37a. [*Gums?] SELF-SATISFIED.
• 54a. [*Trams?] SHARP AS A TACK.
• 64a. [*Peels?] CATCH SOME ZS.
• 78a. [*Slap?] BOSOM BUDDIES.
• 92a. [*Desserts?] UNDER PRESSURE.

It was fairly evident what was going on by the second entry, especially given the title. So the rest of the theme answers fell pretty easily. The revealer isn’t quite what I expected though. We’ve come to be trained in the crossword world to see a phrase THINKING BACK to mean “synonyms of the word ‘thinking’ spelled backwards”. But that’s not the case here. I suppose we just have to think what the clues mean backwards to find the actual clues for the entries. The entries themselves are a fun, sparkly set.

Aside from the theme there’s a lot of other fun fill here: ONE THING AT A TIME, SKATEBOARD TRICK, OCARINA, MAGENTA, MONSIEUR, PANICKY, SHUT-EYE, “I HATE IT,” OVEN MITTS, STUDIED UP, BOB ROSS, ROTGUT, and even STIPPLED. There seemed to be an abundance of proper names however, which slowed the solve down a bit.

Clues of note:

• 1a. [Instrument aka a potato flute]. OCARINA. I’ve never heard “potato flute,” but it’s apt.
• 95d. [Pasta sometimes mistaken for fusilli]. ROTINI. Really? Nobody’s ever heard of “Rotini Jerry“.
• 97d. [Mammal such as Nijntje]. RABBIT. I thought Nijntje was a type of rabbit after I got this via the crossings, but no, it’s the Dutch name of a character otherwise known as Miffy. I knew neither name.

3.5 stars.