AV Club 5:53 (Amy) 
[2.75 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
LAT tk (Gareth) 
[3.17 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
NYT 3:54 (Amy) 
[3.72 avg; 18 ratings] rate it
The New Yorker 3:06 (Kyle) 
[4.50 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (pannonica) [2.67 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today 10:06 (Emily) 
[2.00 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
WSJ 7:14 (Eric) 
[4.00 avg; 7 ratings] rate it
Margot Kohn & Paul Hudes’ Wall Street Journal Crossword “High Style” — Eric’s Review
Margot Kohn and Paul Hudes’ Wall Street Journal Crossword “High Style” — 10/1/25
Congratulations to Margot Kohn and Paul Hudes, both of whom appear to be making their crossword debuts in a publication covered by Diary of a Crossword Fiend.
It’s a solid puzzle, with a tonsorial theme that eluded me until after I was done:
- 3D [Heavy-handed solution to a problem] BLUNT INSTRUMENT I blanked on the second word here and spent more time thinking about what it was than I should have. A few letters of “instrument” got me there eventually.
- 4D [Mike Tyson’s ring technique] BOB AND WEAVE
- 11D [Things like “Which Pizza Truly Matches Your Personality?”] BUZZFEED QUIZ There’s a magazine aimed at women that offers (or used to, anyway) quizzes of this kind. It’s just as well that I couldn’t remember that magazine’s title, because having a wrong answer slows me down. But 23A [Black Sabbath frontman, to fans] OZZY Osbourne gave me the Z and that’s all I needed to remember the Pulitzer Prize-winning website.
- 22D [On another level, or a clue to the starts of 3-, 4-, 11- and 27-Down] A CUT ABOVE
- 27D [Earn an X on the scorecard] BOWL A STRIKE
Hair styles in the beginning of Down answers? Cut. Check. Above. Check. The theme works. The last theme answer is a bit blah, but the other four are all lively.
What the theme didn’t do was help me solve the puzzle, but that’s more a factor of the way I solve crosswords than the theme itself. When I finished filling the grid and tried to make sense of the theme, I saw the title’s “high” and the theme answers’ “blunt” and “buzz” and briefly wondered what “bob” had to do with smoking weed.
Other stuff:
- 20A [Middle Eastern city that’s one of the ten highest capitals in the world] SANAA Wikipedia says the altitude is about 7,500 feet and that it’s the seventh-highest national capital. I didn’t know that.
- 33A [Rice of the Yankees] BEN That’s not a name I recognized. He’s still early in his MLB career and has 30 home runs and 79 runs batted in as September 12. I don’t follow baseball, but those numbers seem pretty respectable.
- 38A [Part of a breakup explanation] IT’S ME Don’t believe them; it’s you. Sorry.
- 49A [North America’s only marsupial] OPOSSUM I don’t find them very attractive (especially when they’re hissing at me).
65A [Fringes on Jewish garments] TZITZIT I didn’t know this word.- 2D [Ski resort that prohibits snowboarders] ALTA A gimme, as the only other resort in the United States that still bans snowboards is Deer Valley. (Not true: Mad River Glen in Vermont also prohibits snowboards.)
- 7D [Borat creator ___ Baron Cohen] SACHA I’m doomed to wander the earth trying to remember if the middle letter is a C or an S.
- 12D [Character who sings “Burn” in “Hamilton”] ELIZA I didn’t recognize that song, having never seen the play. But I knew Eliza Hamilton was one of the main characters.
- 44D [Ginger characteristic] RED HAIR I think it’s mostly British people who use “ginger” to describe a redhead.
Neville Fogarty’s New York Times crossword–Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 10/1/25 – no. 1001
Did you know Neville Fogarty has used the online handle @flyingelevator? True story. And so it’s no surprise that he’s made an anagram-adjacent theme. A word bank is a set of letters that can be used (as many times as needed) to build other words or phrases:
- 17A. [Elite soldier from GERMANY], ARMY RANGER. Meg Ryan is an anagram of Germany, but if you can use each letter more than once, you can spell out ARMY RANGER.
- 25A. [Vessel for cooking rice from NEPAL], PAELLA PAN. See how the all-caps part of the clue is a country name? That’s what tightens up the wordplay theme.
- 33A. [Sci-fi attack from SLOVENIA], ALIEN INVASION.
- 47A. [Fighting style from OMAN], MANO A MANO.
- 53A. [Seasonal precipitation from SURINAME], SUMMER RAIN.
I like this sort of wordplay. Did you enjoy it, too? Can you think of other not-too-long country names that lend themselves to this game? Eyeballing ITALY, FRANCE, and NORWAY (all of which are, like the theme countries, “isovocalic”–no repeats of the letters within each name), I got nothin’.
Fave fill: SHAOLIN, GAME BALL, “I’M HOOKED,” and the fresh entry ONLYFANS.
I’m tapped out from the evening’s editing, so I bid you auf wiedersehen. Four stars from me.
Patrick Berry’s New Yorker puzzle – Kyle’s write-up
The New Yorker solution grid – Patrick Berry – Wednesday 10/01/2025
Thanks Patrick for today’s New Yorker. It’s a solidly built grid. Some of my favorite answers: HANK AARON, GHOST TOWN, TWENTY ONE (clued via the film “Quiz Show”), TOOK A HINT. I don’t think much more needs to be said.
I’ll be at the Midwest Crossword Tournament in Chicago on Saturday – please say hello if you’re there!
Noelle Griskey’s USA Today Crossword, “In-flight Meal” — Emily’s write-up
What’ll ya have?
USA Today, October 01, 2025, “In-flight Meal” by Noelle Griskey
Theme: each themer contains –MEAL– but scrambled in various ways (aka “in-flight”)
Themers:
- 17a. [Digital detox], SOCIALMEDIAFAST
- 26a. [Dirty of dry cocktail made with twice the amount of alcohol], DOUBLEMARTINI
- 52a. [“Just one more mile!”], WEREALMOSTTHERE
A little bit of this and a little bit of that in today’s themer set. SOCIALMEDIAFAST was new to me so I needed most crossings. I had the second part of DOUBLEMARTINI first and WEREALMOSTTHERE took a few crossings but everything was fairly crossed.
Favorite fill: INK, SAUCY, and ALAMODE
Stumpers: USERID (needed crossings), BOSCH (new cluing for me), and EAGER (“excited” came to mind)
Lovely puzzle with a great grid design. Tougher cluing, at least for me, today. The bottom half, particularly the SW quadrant took me the longest to break into and even then I pecked my way through it seemed. Overall, a fun theme and themer set with lots of great overall fill but the tricker cluing–which could just be my knowledge not lining up well today)–made the puzzle feel not as smooth as other solves so that brings my rating down just a touch. What’d you all think?
3.75 stars
~Emily
Victor Schmitt’s AV Club Classic crossword, “AV Classic Themeless #84”–Amy’s recap
AV Club Classic crossword solutipn, “Themeless #84” – 10/1/25 – Schmitt
I’m wiped out, so …
Fave fill: METAVERSE, HALLUCINATION, FAKE TANS, SECRET HANDSHAKE, ARRONDISSEMENTS.
New to me: CANOSSA, 37a. [Destination for Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV’s walk of shame]. Apparently he stood in the snow for three days without a hat in penance.
3.5 stars from me, over and out.
NYT column challenge: NORWAY = No Worry.
Yes, I enjoyed the theme.
Nice!!!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
Technically, in a word bank, you have to use all of the input letters at least once each. Yours is missing an A…
Crossword Scraper works again for The New Yorker. Available now for updating on Firefox to version 1.3.28. Pending approval for Chrome (typically takes a few days, sometimes more).
Well, another odd thing. Won’t open puzzle with the crosswordfiend address link, but does work for https://www.newyorker.com/puzzles-and-games-dept/crossword/2029/10/01 Note, they have the year as 2029! I expect they’ll fix that before the day is through. Patrick Berry today.
Took me a while to find all the settings to enable, but it works at least for now. Good news indeed.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 4 stars
It’s a bit amusing that I, too, jumped to the idea that the WSJ puzzle’s theme was weed related. But I guess seeing the words “high”, “buzz”, “blunt”, and “bowl” in succession triggered my brain, too. I actually googled “bob weed” to see what I’d been missing all these years. (Surely 1A had to have been theme related, too.)
Dang! I missed bowl! And I had a college roommate who hit his bong several times a day (and never once offered me a hit; thanks, Arturo).
Eric, the insights into your life are too hilarious! Keep ’em comin’!
Thanks.
Arturo and I were roommates for a summer semester. I never ran into him again (the University of Texas had something like 45,000 undergraduate students in my day).
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
It was a fun theme.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
This theme grew on me as I was solving. It took a while to see what was happening, and then when I realized they were all country names as a letter bank, I really enjoyed it.
Wednesdays, in my mind, have a bit of an identity crisis… not easy but not hard, not tricky but not straightforward. But today was distinctive and perfectly placed.
I loved SUMMER RAIN as a theme entry, it’s evocative…
I have a nice PAELLA PAN that I need to put to better use. Some of my family members have shellfish allergies (tragic, I know) so I need to work around that. On top of celiac disease, meal planning requires some creativity. This was a good reminder of an option for this weekend family dinner!
And yes SAHARA means desert in Arabic, so hearing SAHARA desert took some getting used to.
A few years ago, there was a NYT crossword where the theme was geographical names in which a generic word from a language other than English had become mistakenly used as a specific place name: Sahara Desert, Lake Tahoe, Mississippi River and something else that I am too lazy to look up. It was one of the most educational themes I remember seeing.
When I looked at the Wordplay comments last night, there seemed to be a lot of criticism that the letter banks made the theme answers too easy. So what if they did? It was still a fun puzzle.
Cute theme; I could tell it was anagram-related, but I wasn’t familiar with word banks so I didn’t quite clock that you could reuse the letters. Nice Wednesday! And I do remember that tautological geographical names puzzle… very fun! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names)
I find Wordplay is where extremely unhappy people gather to talk about crosswords. And probably some bots too.
I think you’re confusing Wordplay and Rex Parker’s blog. (Which is not to say that Wordplay doesn’t have its share of whiny crossword solvers.)
I’d often heard of this device as a letter bank. If I’m not mistaken, Out of Left Field cryptic authors refer to it that way and defend it adamantly for cryptic puzzles, although others are leery of it as a steady device. (Those authors basically have their own cryptic rules.)
It pretty much worked for me in today’s NYT, although some of the fill was a struggle. As usual, Amy’s favorites were my burdensome trivia. I eventually called to mind GLORIA and didn’t have too much trouble seeing what RAT simply had to be. But I didn’t know SHAOLIN and the corner with, besides GLORIA, FLYNN and ONLY FANS, was a sruggle.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 5 stars
FYI – Re: WSJ 10/1.
Mad River Glen (Vermont) does not allow Snowboarding .
Thanks! I think I knew that about Mad River Glen at one point.
I grew up skiing in Vermont, but we never (so far as I remember) went to Mad River Glen. And even if we had, nobody snowboarded back then.
When I took skiing up again 20 years ago (which is when my husband started learning to snowboard), I thought there were three resorts that banned boards: Alta, Deer Valley and Taos (which caved about 10 years ago).
Mad River Glen doesn’t enter my mind because why would you ski in New England when Utah and Colorado are right there?
Sloppy editing to have WEAVE ending a themer, and then RED*HAIR* in the fill. Inelegant.
LAT: decent theme, but I’m not convinced that JOHN DEERE TOYS is “in the language” enough to be a grid entry, let alone a themer
Puzzle: The New Yorker; Rating: 4.5 stars
I don’t know how Patrick Berry does it so consistently. Smooth to solve, no junk — I hardly paused with even the unknowns (FANTA) and forgotten bits of trivia (TELEPHONES and TWENTY-ONE (I saw both movies long ago).
Kudos for the clueing of RHINESTONES. Nudie Cohn’s fashions are worth seeing.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
The theme doesn’t impress me that much but it’s serviceable. Fills are excellent and fresh (e.g. SAHARA, SHAOLIN). Nice puzzle.
I don’t understand the theme for the Universal crossword “Predictive Text”. Please explain.
Puzzle: Universal; Rating: 3 stars
I solved the puzzle, but I can’t make any sense of the theme, either.
I checked with the Universal editors. They have been good in the past about responding to such questions. Check back here on Thursday to see if I heard from them. (It’s possible that I will figure it out on my own, but I would not put much money on that.)
Each themer ends with a word (mate, mobile, graph) that can take “auto” as a prefix (autocomplete) to become a different word.
Thanks.
I thought a bit later that it might be something like that. But I wasn’t looking at the puzzle and CIRCLE GRAPH was the only theme answers I could remember.
Thank you Steve. Now I understand.
Thank you Eric.
You’re welcome. But Steve deserves the credit.
Eric, I know it was Steve, and I did thank him. But I wanted to thank you as well, since you were the first to respond to me.
I appreciate that.
Eric re your latest response (“I appreciate that”): 👍
Puzzle: LAT; Rating: 4.5 stars
I’m rating this puzzle 4.5 stars because the constructor put a lot of symmetric energy into the theme answers, and the editor didn’t goof up any clues. Congrats to Katherine Simonson!