LAT 2:26 (Stella) 
[3.71 avg; 7 ratings] rate it
Newsday untimed (Amy) 
[3.10 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
NYT untimed (Amy) [3.44 avg; 16 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) [3.67 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) 
[4.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
WSJ 18:01 (Jim Q) rate it
Adam Levav’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 7/26/25 – no. 0726
I was nodding off before puzzle time, so this’ll be brief.
Fave fill: AVOCADO OIL (I think we have a bottle?), MEDIA DIET, MEANS WELL, ASIAN TIGER, TEMPTS FATE, “UM, ACTUALLY,” SEX LIFE.
Completely fine with me but I can hear the shrieking: BEBE Rexha right at 1-Across. It was a gimme and got me off to a quick start. She’s an Albanian American pop singer. News you can you use: The British pop star Rita Ora is the child of Kosovo Albanians. John Belushi and Mother Teresa were also of Albanian descent.
Needed every crossing: 34D. [___ Türeci, physician/scientist who co-founded BioNTech], OZLEM. She’s German and of Turkish parentage. If you got an mRNA COVID vaccine, you can thank BioNTech.
Over and out, I’m beat. 3.75 stars from me.
Malaika Handa’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 7/26/25 by Malaika Handa
I suppose after the highly-out-of-the-ordinary difficulty level of last week’s LAT Saturday, we were due up for an easy one, which this puzzle was. It’s a bit of a bummer that I didn’t even get the chance to be fooled by a couple of maybe-tricky clues, like [Wedding traditions that involve rings] for HORAS, simply because I got to the crossings first and the crossings were easy.
- 22A [Zip around a soccer field?] is NIL, which is cute: “Zip” here is used in its “slang for zero” sense.
- 30A [1960s hit covered by Salt-N-Pepa] is TWIST AND SHOUT. Huh, TIL and I’ll have to go listen to the cover when I finish writing this post. I love Salt-N-Pepa but hadn’t heard this one!
- 44A [Dessert brand with the early slogan “Delicate. Delightful. Dainty.”] is JELL-O. Who knew? I wouldn’t have, if blogging this puzzle weren’t on my list of to-dos: Again, the crossings were too easy.
- 1D [Cellular protein in microfilaments] is ACTIN, one of the few sources of friction in solving the puzzle and a nice change from the usual cluing of this entry as the two-word phrase ACT IN (usually with some not-especially-natural-sounding clue like [Be in the cast of])
- 6D [Lilian Jackson Braun genre] is COZY MYSTERY, a term that was new to me but easily inferable (perhaps a little too easily for a Saturday solve).
- 12D [Social media users who celebrate an annual “cake day”] is REDDITORS. I’m a heavy Reddit user and never bothered to find out what “cake day” refers to until today: Your birthday is the day you were born, and your cake day is the day you created an account on Reddit.
- 34D [Change places?] is TIP JARS. This clue didn’t really fool me into thinking that “change” meant anything but “coins,” but it’s cute nonetheless.
Daniel Bodily’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Double Trouble” — Jim Q’s write-up
THEME:
Two-syllable word or phrase + made-up rhyming phrase = uninhibited wackiness
WSJ • 7/26/25 • Sat • “Double Trouble” • Daniel Bodily • solution • 20250726
THEME ANSWERS:
- 24A: [Campaign-ending blunder in a public Q&A meeting?] TOWNHALL DOWNFALL
- 32A: [Tailgater’s headgear made of mongoose fur?] MEERKAT BEERHAT
- 57A: [Big prize awarded to the top studio area for outdoor scenes?] BACKLOT JACKPOT
- 83A: [*NSYNC playing the “Babes” in a 1903 operetta?] TOYLAND BOY BAND
- 105A: [Ousting of a Mafia don?] MOB BOSS JOB LOSS
- 116A: [Fenway’s Green Monster, for one?] BALLPARK HALLMARK
- 3D: [Ultra-conservatives brawling in a pub?] FAR RIGHT BAR FIGHT
- 40D: [Baking container made of pyrite?] FAKE GOLD CAKE MOLD
This is the kind of Sunday puzzle I like best: lighthearted, structurally consistent, and full of silly little delights. Once I understood the theme — wacky rhyming wordplay built off familiar phrases — I could start using one half of a themer to infer the other, which really helped in some thornier fill spots.
The entries are solid across the board, but FAR RIGHT BAR FIGHT is my definite favorite. Timely. We all know what they’re fighting about (Popcorn emoji.) Also, shoutout to BALLPARK HALLMARK and TOYLAND BOY BAND, which I got without any crosses — which was satisfying.
I’m pretty sure a real MOB BOSS JOB LOSS ends with a life loss, not a pink slip. But hey, imagining Don Corleone browsing ZipRecruiter is worth the suspension of disbelief. (“Horse grooming? Hard pass.”)
NEW TO ME / TIP-OF-TONGUE:
- SHOGI – [Japanese chess].
Shogi
- STRIDER – [Aragorn’s alias in Lord of the Rings]. Like Star Wars, I’ve never read or seen LOTR, but crosswords have taught me a lot. Glad to know this.
- TONKATSU – [Breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet]. Surprisingly inferable!
- GUANACO – [Alpaca cousin]. I’m sure I’ve seen this before. But I needed every cross.
- JALEN Hurts – I’ve accepted I’ll never master the sports-name canon.
- NEWSDAY – [Ray’s employer on Everybody Loves Raymond]. Never really watched, but this was a fun tidbit.
MUSINGS & MISFIRES:
- 29A: [Companion of Westley and Fezzik in The Princess Bride] – INIGO. Blank stare
for way too long on this one. The iconic six-fingered man, of course. Prepare to die. - 54A: [Labor party supporter?] – NURSE. Interesting. I mean, I guess a group of people encouraging a soon-to-be mother to “PUSH!” could be a party of sorts! (that’s what I’m picturing anyway). I wouldn’t know what to bring to that party. Which birthday is it? It’s not 1. And it can’t be 0…
- 49A: [“Heavens!”] – MY STARS! I had MY LANDS. I guess I stayed more grounded.
- 74A: [2019 jukebox musical with “Better Be Good to Me”] – TINA. I skipped this one. I try to see everything on Broadway (expensive habit), but I’m not a jukebox musical fan.
72D: [Title song from a 1980 Olivia Newton-John film] – XANADU. Hands up for GREASE! - 26D: [Hart stoppers, perhaps] – DOES. Picturing a group of stags slamming the brakes and lowering sunglasses at some fine foraging.
44D: [Texter’s “Beats me”] – IDK. Alternate clue: [Middle school test response when the student’s checked out].
MY TRAINWRECK SPOT:
2D: [Intentional walk, in sports slang] – I had FREE BASE, not FREE PASS. Which… might be better? That misstep, paired with my lack of faith in OPI (I always forget the middle letter), SHOGI, and STRIDER, left me confidently writing in ET RIDER and OBI, which now looks absurd in hindsight. But in the moment, it earned a “looks good enough” from me.
Took a solid 3 minutes of scanning for typos before I finally sorted that mess out.
This felt tougher than your average Sunday — at least for me — though my time says otherwise (slightly under par on a 21x). A lively, creative grid with lots of charm. A little weird, a little nerdy, Thumbs up.
4 stars.
Winston Emmons’s Newsday crossword, “Saturday Stumper”–Amy’s recap
Newsday crossword solution, 7/26/25 “Saturday Stumper”
As you can see from the markers in some squares in the NW and SE corners, I used the “check” function and cleared out 12 wrong squares. It didn’t help that COGITO (17a. [Descartes start]) and I THINK share that letter I in the fourth slot.
I did google one thing: 59a. [Sister of Helios]. He’s a sun god, so SELENE the moon goddess is his sister. Getting that into the grid helped unlock that corner.
Fave fill: APPLE PIE, ONE-ARMED BANDITS. I do prefer themeless puzzles with lots of juicy fill. This ain’t that.
There are a few entries that felt clunky to me, not great fill: HELLO AND GOODBYE, BARTERER, SWAT AT, BEAT US? Plural abbreviations aren’t good fill: YDS SSTS YRS IBMS. Abbreviations, shortenings, fragments: AGI LAV INE all hideously smushed together, AS TO, HIPAA ([Medical privacy law since ’96]), SSW. Foreign vocab: COGITO, ETES, OMNES. These aren’t fun!
Three more things:
- 33a. [American benchmark], APPLE PIE. As in “as American as ___.” Benchmark feels weird outside of that comparison.
- 31a. [Cloning candidates of the past], IBMS. I filled in EWES first, but the HIPAA crossing made me reconsider.
- 5d. [Language related to Comanche], AZTEC. Part of the reason that corner was so hard for me. I was trying to think of 5-letter indigenous languages within the current US, had those blinders on. Wikipedia says “The Comanche language is a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Originally, it was a Shoshoni dialect, but diverged and became a separate language.”
3.25 stars from me.
NYT: Interesting Saturday. I prefer stacks of long-spanners in the Fridays and Saturdays, and I was a little disappointed to not see any, but 10 10-letter answers wasn’t too bad. My first run through, When reading the clues, I was worried I might have to look up BEBE / BABA, OZLEM, and EMUS but the crossings worked for everything except 1A. Ended up with a faster than average time, even faster than yesterday.
The EMUS reminded me of the two years there was an emu loose in east central Illinois: https://www.wcia.com/news/elusive-emu-caught-after-2-years-on-the-run/
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
Very good puzzle.
That BEBE/BABA start was cool, although I had no idea about BEBE. Now I know.
Also, great to see OZLEM in the puzzle- I knew her last name but not first and liked learning it.
I got stuck here and there, but other areas flowed very easily and I too finished faster than my Friday time.
And UM… ACTUALLY cracked me up. I had a Chinese postdoc in the lab who was usually very quiet, but once in a while he’d say “Um.. actually” and then launch into a detailed weedy exposition that left you cross-eyed. We all learned to quickly change the subject as soon as we heard it.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
OZLEM was my last entry–I had OZLOW there for the longest time.
Very appropriate to enter BIKE GLOVES as I’m watching the penultimate stage of the TdF!
NYT: I also found this to be a fun, satisfying Saturday puzzle.
Thought the Türeci name would have started with an ‘N’ because of BioNTech, but not so.
Also I don’t think of SEDANs as Street racers, more of a suburban dad car to me.
Very good though!
NYT: Nice puzzle. BEBE was a gimme for me as well, although probably not for most. Another famous pop singer of Albanian descent is Dua Lipa.
You didn’t read my write-up, did you? :-)
But but… you mentioned Rita Ora, not Dua Lipa.
D’oh! There two British-Albanian pop singers with 7-letter names that lend themselves to crosswords! They occupy the same spot in my brain because I don’t know either’s music.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
It hit that sweet-and-sour spot just right.
Took me a while to get started on the NYT, but I finished in a better than usual time. MEDIADIET is not a phrase I’ve heard, or at least not remembered, but it makes sense.
I was thrilled to see NTH clued correctly for once!
I could have sworn MEDIADIET had been used in the last year or so, but apparently it’s a debut.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
NYT: This one seemed far too easy to me. I had to make a couple of wild guesses early but then blew through the puzzle. That said, I did enjoy it quite a bit and probably got lucky with some of the subject matter.
NYT was a nice relatively easy puzzle. Some edifying entries, some unusual names… but no stoppers.
Puzzle: Newsday; Rating: 2.5 stars
In the Stumper: “‘Flat-out fun’ hardware” = SPAD. (Simple Plastic Airplane Design — model airplane design.)
Seriously?
If you search for “flat-out fun,” all you get are crossword sites. Not a mark of a plausible clue, esp. when SLED seems so likely an answer.
“Flat-out fun” was an Apple marketing tagline for the IPAD.
I had the same issue — OBVS/SPAD, with a big wtf on the latter. But this is the Stumper so I just assumed it was some weird obscurity.
Yikes: I’ve only heard OBVS — I never thought of OBVI and IPAD.
OBVI is one of those bits of crosswordese that constructors try to convince people everyone says all the time but nobody actually uses, lol. I’m only familiar with it because Crossfire keeps bringing it up
I hear this phrase all the time.
Yes, I’ve seen it used by the young on posting sites.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
This puzzle was, for me, not worthy of a Saturday challenge. I prefer to take my time with tough puzzles, and I don’t keep track of my solving times. Yet I sped through this without much trouble at all. 😢
I mildly object to 22A: “Dictionaries have many of these”—“PGS.”
The correct abbreviations for “page” and “pages” are “p.” and “pp.”
True story: A former teaching colleague of mine told me that her friend, who taught at a Catholic elementary school, submitted her lesson plans to the principal, a nun. They were returned to her with her with all of her errant abbreviations—“pgs.—corrected to “pp.”
Newsday: No errors, but I spent way too long in the SE. This kind of segmentation is just not fun, and the fact that the only letter you get is the really common S doesn’t help at all. It’s frustrating to finish almost the whole puzzle in ~20 minutes and then be stuck with essentially a separate mini-puzzle for another ~20 minutes.
That corner was especially hard since I was looking for a synonym of “expensive” for [Very steep] and I was thinking of the “school” (actually “schoolboy”) definition for [Eleve]; I had ECOLE and then ETUDE (both good guesses IMO) for a very long time, and SE- was not doing anything for me.
My Colorado tribe was OTOE and my COGS were greased, so ECOLE/COGS/OTOE/some ETRE or other was looking really good there for a while.
I finally cracked the corner open when I pulled everything and figured [Wedding band, sometimes] was gonna be one of the “duo/trio/quartet+” words and SEXTET was the first thing that fit. That gave AXLE and then the rest of the corner.
The NW was comparatively much easier since AZTEC was the only language I could think of ending with C, and then COGITO was obvious. Goes to show the huge difference the one letter makes (but grids still shouldn’t be this segmented!)
My [___ mic (clip-on amplifier)] was a LAP mic (thought it might be short for lapel) but I’ve definitely heard of lavalier/LAV before, so no foul there.
Footholds in the main puzzle: OBVI, HIPAA, SSTS, HAD, EON, HASBRO (knew this), IHOP (“name a four-letter restaurant franchise”) all went in with zero or minimal crosses. Not really happy with the “say” in [Stumpers, say] for POSERS; “stumper” and “poser” are already synonyms, so even though I wanted POSERS immediately with the P I hesitated in putting it in. I guess the “Stumper” here refers specifically to the Saturday Stumper?
OMNES looks hella wrong. I need remind myself to set my Crossfire min score to 20 one of these days so I can recognize these five-letter bits of glue, lol. You just don’t see these in the Times etc. anymore so I have to familiarize myself with them some other way.
SE aside I had a lot of fun. Always happy to finish with no errors.
Your logic and mine agreed — I, too, had LAP instead of LAV (I’m going to have to look up “lavalier” — never heard of it), but I luckily did get AXLE, so knew OTOES could not be right (AO together… no). My tough area was the NE because, while I had EAT for the first part of 18A , the only crossing letter I was sure of after that was the L from ALGICIDES — and I tried AGE, instead of AGI (can’t imagine what that’s an abbreviation of — going to have to find a form and look).
Other than the NE, it wasn’t too bad for me and my husband — he helps — he got the entire NW corner this time all by hisself!
I looked up AGI — it’s Adjusted Gross Income for anyone else curious.
I forgot to add that I do agree with Amy — too many abbreviations, etc. and particularly obscure ones (LAV and AGI, for instance).
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
A very, very easy Saturday puzzle for me, as it was for 80% (at this writing) of the solvers who use XWSTATS.com. A near-PR for me, in fact.
Although I didn’t know BEBE or OZLEM, I didn’t need to, as both were easy to get from crosses. Ms. Türeci’s name, in particular, is well worth remembering for her groundbreaking research in the therapeutic use of mRNA (as Amy mentioned above).
Other than that, nothing really stood out for me as interesting or noteworthy fill. I would be perfectly OK with never seeing AARGH, ASAMI or SESH in a puzzle again. I never mind being reminded of ERIK Satie, however, even though his first name has unfortunately become crosswordese.
Bottom line: a pleasant-enough puzzle that could have run on a Wednesday and still been on the easy side for its calendar slot.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 1 star
CAVEAT: This rating is not for the puzzle but for Will Shortz.
It’s a smooth puzzle but way too easy for a Saturday. Normally I don’t do Sats (way out of my league) and imagine when I tried one and finished it in Wednesday time.
OZLEM is obscure but every cross is fair and easy. BEBE and BABA isn’t familiar for me but that’s the last empty square for me.
But this is not Saturday at all. Longest entry is ten letters!? No 3-ply stacks of long entries!? What the f—
I think that Shortz must retire.
I loved the Stumper even tho I had a big error. ELMS instead of IBMS. Elm trees were cloned to stop the blight. Still I should have seen ROBIN.