LAT 2:42 (Stella) 
[3.80 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
Newsday 13:20 (pannonica ) [4.17 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
NYT 8:01 (Amy) [3.83 avg; 15 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) 
[2.75 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) [2.50 avg; 1 rating] rate it
WSJ untimed (pannonica) 
[4.50 avg; 1 rating] rate it
Katie Hoody’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 7/12/25 – no. 0712
Just me, or was this one tougher than you expected it to be?
There were a few things that really didn’t come easy for me:
- 1D. [Smack], WHOP. It’s in the dictionary but I feel like I just don’t encounter this word.
- 17A. [It features high wind movements], OBOE SONATA. That’s a thing? Sure.
- 51A. [Smith who was the first woman to receive the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s Career Excellence Award], CLAIRE. Baseball writers are not my strong suit. There’s Roger Angell and … that’s it. Here’s Ms. Smith’s Wikipedia page. She’s also just the fourth African American writer to receive that honor.
- 44D. [Fixed-format summary of an article, as on Wikipedia], INFO BOX. Why, there’s one in the Claire Smith article! Photo, birthdate, occupation, education, honors. Didn’t know it had a name.
Fave fill: HOME BREWER, Quinta BRUNSON, ICONOCLAST, SIXTH SENSE (terrific clue, [Adjunct faculty?]), SPEED CHESS, TRAVELOGUE, RIGAMAROLE, ITALIAN SUB, GOLDEN GOAL, “GO EASY ON ME.”
Nice to see the SULU Sea in lieu of Mr. Sulu. My husband and son saw it when they were on Palawan, but didn’t go in the water (that beach was a muddy one).
Another sharp clue: 36A. [Terms of a trade], LINGO. Not the terms you’ve agreed on in making a trade, but rather the terminology of a profession.
I also liked 22A. [Spot for newborn care], NEST. Newborn birds! Chicago is besotted with its local Great Lakes piping plovers. This summer, a third generation of plovers hatched on the beach, and the littles are ridiculously cute. They grow up fast, though! They’re already fledging and their mama should be heading south soon.
Kyle Dolan’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 7/12/25 by Kyle Dolan
I’d say this was a solid outing, one I neither particularly liked nor disliked:
- 15A [Have a heart-to-heart exchange?] is a nice clue for FALL IN LOVE.
- 27A/29A I didn’t notice this while solving, but the adjacency of the clues [German car, informally] and [Hybrid since 1997] for BEEMER and PRIUS, respectively, is a fun probably-a-coincidence.
- 30A [Sense of achievement] is SELF-PRIDE, which felt a bit green paint to me. Googling it with quotes produces about 280K hits, which IMO places it in the “some people say this, but it’s not in the language (yet?)” category.
- 54A [Ad hoc groups of specialists] is TIGER TEAMS, a term that’s new to me (and the 119K hits it gets in quotation marks suggests that I’m not wrong for thinking it sounds more like my athletic classmates at Princeton than its actual meaning).
- 56A [Some ranch dressing] is a very nice clue for STETSON HAT.
- 8D [One way to break the ice?] is POLAR BEAR PLUNGE, which makes this puzzle feel like it would’ve been more appropriate on New Year’s Day, or at least some time in the winter.
- 12D [Amish rite of passage] is RUMSPRINGA, which is a word that’s really fun to say out loud.
- 28D [Edmonton CFL team] is the ELKS. I totally approve of this angle, since normally the plural of ELK is ELK; the -S plural has historically been clued with reference to the civic organization, but given said organization’s checkered past, I like seeing the CFL clue. (Besides, I’m all for getting a little more ex-US sports knowledge into all of our brains, and Saturday is the day to do that in a puzzle!)
- 51D [J-Hope’s K-pop band] is BTS. I like the way this clue reads!
Gary Larson and Amy Ensz’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Genuine Article” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 7/12/25 • Sat • “Genuine Article” • Larson, Ensz • solution • 20250712
My solve was slower than usual, but I put that down to sluggishness on my end rather than increased difficulty in the crossword per se.
The theme involves wordplay for things that are written for periodicals.
- 22a. [Report about felony traffic violations for Police Quarterly?] BIG TICKET ITEM.
- 49a. [Analysis of an NFL snapper for Sports Illustrated] CENTERPIECE.
- 79a. [Editorial about the bottling industry for Wine & Spirits?] FIFTH COLUMN. A fifth is an antiquated term referring to a fifth of a gallon. It’s nearly equivalent to a volume of 750ml, which is what has replaced it in the industry.
- 107a. [Review of beauty treatments for Glamour?] FACIAL FEATURE.
- 2d. [Write-up about Tenzing Norgay for Climbing?] HIGH PROFILE.
- 15d. [Pictorial of a building annex for Architectural Digest?] WINGSPREAD.
- 65d. [First-person fly-fishing article for Field & Stream?] BANK ACCOUNT.
- 68d. [Exposé on meth abuse for the New England Journal of Medicine?] UPPER STORY.
I’ll note that all of these theme answers are singular; no arbitrary plurals to fit lengths for symmetrical pairs. That’s some welcome construction rigor.
- 1a [Compared to] THAN.
- 24a [Tangle up] ENSNARL. Waited on the final letter, as it might have been an E.
- 30a [Watch what you’re saying?] LIP READ. The clue seems to confuse subject and object. A lip reader watches what someone else is saying.
- 36a [Think maybe you can] DARE TO.
- 39a [Stock rush] STAMPEDE. Despite the lack of a question mark, I wasn’t misled by the clue. Still not a fan of referring to living creatures as ‘stock’, but such is the world we’ve arranged.
- 56a [Like the Parthenon] PILLARED. Uh, ok.
- 60a [Irish Sea feeder] DEE. OCH, it’s a river. (25a [Gaelic “Gee!”])
- 89a [Treasure guardian] GNOME. Was unaware of this lore.
- 90a [1950 Nobel Prize winner Ralph] BUNCHE. Some creaky glue for the gird.
- 97a [Warning to a jaywalker] TOOT, not HONK.
- 102a [Chryslers of the 1980s] K CARS. More glue.
- 111a [Compelling sort] COERCER. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 114a [Torah holder] HOLY ARK. Got the ARK part quickly enough, but needed to work for the modifier.
- 8d [Longtime UK record label] is never not EMI.
- 10d [Real] IN ESSE. As opposed to in posse, which indicates potentiality.
- 14d [Years, in France] ANS. 74d [Years, in Italy] ANNI.
- 35d [Dr.’s order?] AMA. Cute.
38d [Bartholomew Cubbins had 500 of them] HATS. From the old children’s book. I misremembered and tried CATS. And before that, I guessed completely wrong with RBIS.- 55d [“The Bells of St. __”] MARY’S.
- 66d [Glider designer Lilienthal] OTTO.
- 70d [Grave marker?] ACCENT. Glad to have had the question mark on this one.
Matthew Sewell’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 7/12/25 • Saturday Stumper • Sewell • solution • 20250712
Am surprised at how easy this one turned out to be. I don’t have time to give it a proper write-up (spent too much time on the WSJ, oops) so I’ll just hit the highlights as best I can.
First area to gain a foothold: lower right, followed by right flank. Expanded and plowed through upper right and lower left, leaving the upper left as the final section.
Most of my hunches and guesses turned out to be correct (whew!).
Long acrosses: 33a [Any-dimensional geometric model] EUCLIDEAN SPACE (59a [Mathematical rhyme for “play mean”] SCALENE wtf). 39a [Adventure epic genre] SWORD-AND-SANDAL; pulling this out from the mostly-complete rear section really helped turbocharge my solve.
- 31d [Entree often prepared piccata] SCALLOPINI. I thought those were two distinct preparations, but the internet tells me that’s incorrect.
- 5a [GPS alternative, still] POLARIS, not ROAD MAP.
- 23a [What NBA jumpers use] ACL. Okay fine whatever.
- 24a [First 50-Down word?] SYNE; 50d [After all] LAST. Kind of a terrible cross-reference.
- 42a [Certain PR person] SRTA. PR here stands for Puerto Rico, not public relations.
- 45a [Thick locks] MANE. Another entry crucial to my rapid solve, along with the stacked 53a OSLO.
- 48a [DC broadcaster in Kurdish, Korean, etc.] VOA. Captured and subverted now.
- 57a [How meat gets brined] OSMOSIS.
- 60a [Shift consideration] HEMLINE; shift as a type of dress. 25d [D, as on dresses] DONNA—presumably DONNA Karan, of DKNY.
- 1d [Port north of Kuwait City] BASRA. Yet another key entry.
- 11d [It’s about time] AGING. Yup.
- 34d [Heartfelt sentiment] I CARE. Is it just me, or are people saying “(I) appreciate you” more in casual conversation lately?
- 40d [Poodle papers line items] DAMS. Pedigree stuff.
- 56d [One handling inspiring issues] ENT; tried good ol’ EMT first.
yes, tough, but fair, good saturday puzzle
some large holes after the first time thru, and a lot of jumping around got me there
the time was not as bad as it seemed
NYT: I really, really struggled with this one. Some of it was my own doing (I had IHADABLAST instead of WHATABLAST, and it was close enough that it caused major problems), but there were also a lot I had never heard of before (SULU as clued, CLAIRE as clued, GOLDENGOAL, WHOP, OBOE SONATA, ELLIES, INFOBOX).
It’s a good thing EARL Sweatshirt was back again so soon, or I might still be doing the puzzle!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2.5 stars
Possibly my worst Saturday time ever. This one wasn’t quite as laden with proper nouns as Ms. Hoody’s last grid, but it was still painful. I gave up on the gold star after half an hour when it stopped being fun, and even then I struggled to finish. (What the hell is an OBOE SONATA?)
P.S. Golden goals are pretty much dead in soccer and have been for years. Only college soccer still uses them, but they stopped for awhile as well.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
“What the hell is an oboe sonata?” Well, really it’s for oboe and piano. Not especially common in the repertoire. The one by Poulenc is quite charming.
I enjoyed the puzzle – it seemed terribly intimidating at first, but fell into place smoothly.
I think two things flustered me here:
– I had to fight really hard for the fill. It exhausted me to the point where I could no longer appreciate the great clues for SIXTHSENSE and some others. I’m used to Saturday entries that sound like they’re Not A Thing, but by the time I got OBOESONATA I was already like “just get me out of here.”
– The grid is really segmented. All the long entries are packed into the corners, and there are a lot of blank spots toward the middle. So you end up with four mini grids that don’t connect very much. If you struggle with one of them (let alone three like I did), you’re gonna have a bad time.
There are about a zillion baroque sonatas published for the nearly interchangeable flute or oboe plus harpsichord and continuo. Here’s one by Bach.
Two separate experiences for me. The top 2/3 or so of the puzzle fell pretty quickly, but then I struggled with the bottom 1/3 – particularly the SE corner. Nothing particularly unfair or unfamiliar – just a mental block, I guess.
I didn’t think the grid was particularly “segmented.” There are four entry points to each of those corners with the three long entries – to me, that makes things pretty well “connected.” I think maybe all those single black squares in the middle of the puzzle make it look more broken up than a lot of grids.
Yep, the NYT was tougher than usual. Took a while, but it finally fell.
Tough NYT. Didn’t get HYENA, but suspected that the ‘N’ was the bad actor. Agree that the grid was rather disconnected.
Conversely, I got HYENA (referring to the spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta) with no crossings. Definitely a tougher crossword than usual.
HYENA was an early toehold for me too. Once you learn that female hyenas have pseudo-penises to facilitate their control over both males and females, “sub-Saharan” and “matriarchal” are instant gimme.
I love tautonyms like Crocuta crocuta and Gorilla gorilla. My favorite is the fish Boops boops. I find it sad they are outlawed in botany.
My fave used to be Chaos chaos, but that’s now regarded as obsolete. Taxonomy must advance, I guess.
It isn’t quite advancement so much as disentangling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(genus)#Early_history_and_naming_controversy
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
NYT: Tough for me but it didn’t feel unfair, although most of the proper nouns were unknown to me. I only had to look one thing up: BRUNSON, which got me LULU, which got me ELLIES (I am not super experienced with crosswords but I still am surprised I haven’t seen either before).
But yeah I can never remember if it’s BRUNSON or BRANSON or BRONSON
In the NYT, I got RIGG and RIVAL immediately and moved quickly through the right hand side of the puzzle, but took much longer to finish the rest, esp the NW section.
I wouldn’t describe Saturn’s rings as discs, which to me implies a plane circular object, like an old LP, with at most a small hole in the center. I had SHAKE before EVADE until I decided the Theroux clue wanted TRAVELOGUE. I continue not to be fond of the NYT insisting on the non-standard spelling RIGAMAROLE.
I don’t know ELLIES. Is that short for something?
It’s named for the award’s symbol, the elephant.
Let’s not conflate the Australian Screen Editors Award with the National Magazine Awards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Magazine_Awards
I didn’t know the nickname, but I could picture the Alexander Calder stabile that’s reproduced for each trophy.
(Excuse me if I’m trampling on a joke.)
Wrong elephant. Here’s the right one. A little classier, but same idea.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
I don’t think of Saturn’s rings as discs, either, so I was surprised to read in Wikipedia that “it is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk…” (or at least that appears to be the current majority opinion).
I absolutely loved some of the devious clues today (esp. SIXTHSENSE and LINGO), and I just like the word ICONOCLAST and was glad to see it in the grid. :)
OTOH, I did not know ELLIES, BRUNSON, CLAIRE, the Simpsons quote, or what an INFOBOX is (but it makes perfect sense), and I’m still not sure I believe WHOP is a real word.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 5 stars
Couldn’t get INSUM to fall and finally gave up. No idea how HORN is a period ender, though. Tough puzzle that I should have gotten, but just didn’t for whatever reason. (Actually — just figured out the horn thing typing this. Tough clue!) Nice to be defeated honestly every once in a while!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
The horn that goes off at the end of a quarter in a basketball game?
pannonica found this stumper easier than i, but strangely my time was in the high normal range
one of my main slowdowns was not entering basra cold, and then it slipped my mind and hung me up in that corner which fell quickly once i remembered it
had i done so right off the bat, my time might have been slightly better than normal
when euclidean space fell i was home free
nice stumper, no surprise coming from mr sewell, thanks
It took my husband and I both to do it, but it otherwise wasn’t difficult. Usually, he’ll get a couple and I finish it, but it was definitely more of a team effort today. There was some stuff I’d never heard of (“Euclidean spaces,” for one), but we could got them from the crossings. My one quibble was 20A “Oscar ___” with an answer of “noms” — I more commonly have heard of “Oscar noDs,” as has Google — it asked me “Did I mean nominations.”
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
NYT: Loved this Saturday puzzle! It took a lot of perseverance and back and forth around the grid – just what I hope for in a Saturday – but I found the payoff very rewarding and enjoyable. Very clever cluing!
I’m glad that I wrote down my starting time on the Stumper because when finished, I would have sworn that hours had gone by but it was under 1 hour, so medium for me. Perhaps it’s because most of the puzzle was blank for so long but once I got the SE filled, everything else fell in quickly.
Although I had OSLO and MANE in place, I hesitated putting in DAMS because I thought that was horses only, not poodles.
My breakthrough in the SW was actually an error. I threw in LeST at 50D which broke it open. I had VOILA in place but 44A, I didn’t see the letterism of VEE for a long time. Yeah, I’m not liking the cross-reference of LAST and SYNE.
Luke or LEIA?
This was fun to conquer, nice job Matthew Sewell!
Pannonica, are you a Mats fan?
???
Wilander? The New York Metropolitans? Placemats?
Oh. You posted a Replacements song. Fans refer to the band affectionately as “The Placemats”, and, even more affectionately, as “The Mats”.
Aha, I was not aware of this.
Interesting there are so many who complain about the hardness of the NYT. I guess y’all forgot Saturdays were supposed to be the hardest one of the week. I personally was happy.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 4.5 stars
The more I do 21 x 21 puzzles, the more I realize how difficult it becomes. Evan Birnholz is a wizard at these on a weekly basis (TY Evan!).
But Gary Larson & Amy Ensz delivered a rock-solid puzzle today!
LAT: I meant to do this one earlier, but got distracted by the Sunday LAT puzzle with its Rebecca Goldstein byline.
I found Kyle Dolan’s puzzle flowed very smoothly, despite some unknowns like TIGER TEAMS and BANYAN TREE. Fun clueing, too.