LAT 3:12 (Stella) 
[3.25 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
Newsday 10:53 (Amy) 
[4.13 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
NYT 8:04 (Amy) 
[2.67 avg; 21 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) 
[2.83 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) 
[2.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
WSJ 13:02 (Eric) [2.67 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Crave Matters” — Eric’s Review
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal Crossword “Crave Matters” — 10/11/25
A basic, old-school theme this week that’s telegraphed by the puzzle’s title: Take familiar phrases that include a word beginning with GR, change the G to a C, and see what wackiness results:
- 23A [Stream that’s been flowing from time immemorial?] ANCIENT CREEK
- 28A [Laryngitis symptoms for a rooster?] CROWING PAINS
- 45A [Wrinkle on one’s arm?] ELBOW CREASE “Elbow grease” was my father’s preferred remedy for any pot or pan that had food cooked onto it. Letting it soak was not permitted.
- 53A [Hard mass in a tree’s crevice?] CRANNY KNOT
- 86A [Excited to dine at the seafood restaurant?] UP FOR CRABS I’ve got a nit to pick with this one, but I’ll scratch it off.
- 95A [Boorish kangaroo?] CRASS HOPPER
- 108A [Throat treatment from a pediatrician?] CROUP THERAPY
- 118A [Hole in a chunk of Swiss?] CHEESE CRATER I’m not sure whether there’s any significance to the choice of cheese in the clue; Swiss cheese is of course full of holes naturally.
There’s some inconsistency as to whether the GR to CR word is the first or second word in the answer, and there’s the one three-word outlier. But none of that slowed me down, and I don’t expect it will slow many solvers.
The theme answers are all fine. “Elbow crease,” “Up for crabs” and “croup therapy” amused me more than the others.
Other stuff:
- 7A [Hen’s offspring] BROOD Not CHICK.
- 21A [Morpheus frees him from the Matrix] NEO The Matrix? Three letters? It’s Neo.
- 22A [Comet alternative] AJAX/53D [Comet, e.g.] CLEANSER I’m not usually one to notice duplication in clues and answers, but this feels like a bit much.
- 91A [Cinnamon treat] CHURRO Yum. They’re on the menu at our favorite Mexican restaurant, but we never have room for dessert.
- 113A [1942 Abbott and Costello film] RIO RITA I feel like I’ve suddenly started seeing that answer a lot in the last few weeks.
- 8D [Karel apek play] R.U.R. A gimme even without the Č in the playwright’s surname. I think the Wall Street Journal‘s new puzzle interface can’t handle some diacritics.
- 13D [Means of control] REIN That looks odd without the S.
- 83D [Disinfectant since 1889] LYSOL What with the Ajax and the Comet, this has to be the most germ-free puzzle I’ve done in a while.
- 107D [“Pinocchio” author Collodi] CARLO I’m sure I’ve seen this before, but I needed some crosses for this one.
Sam Ezersky’s New York Times crossword–Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 10/11/25 – no. 1011
This 16×15 puzzle happens to have a lot of terms I wasn’t familiar with:
- 17A. [Symbol for electric flux, in physics], PHI. I know Greek letters but not flux in physics.
- 24A. [Ambitious tactic in bridge], SLAM BID. Joon knows bridge, I don’t.
- 27A. [Deck deception], FALSE CUT. For magicians or card cheats?
- 31A. [“___ Deo gloria” (Latin doctrine)], SOLI. Nothing like an untranslated Latin phrase with a vague context.
- 35A. [Car touted for its dual efficiency], DIESEL HYBRID. They have those?
- 26D. [Like typical frat boys, informally], BROEY. Not sure I’ve encountered that before.
- 27D. [Johann ___, philosopher who influenced Hegel], FICHTE. Never heard of him. Haven’t seen the surname, either.
- 35D. [String or integer, in computer science], DATA TYPE. That’s a thing? A semantic unit? Not green paint? My techie husband says yes, it’s a thing.
- 44D. [Lt. ___ Slothrop, main character in Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”], TYRONE. I suspect most of us haven’t actually read that?
Oof. On a brighter note, fave fill: IPHONE CAMERA (nice clue, [It snaps with a tap]), HEADBUTT, LAMAR JACKSON, BLOW YOUR MIND, MANI-PEDI, Count CHOCULA, CABS IT.
Unfave fill: Basically a partial, NO TRACE. Plural APRILS. DIET TIP. S AND M instead of the ampersand it wants. And for crying out loud, LP RECORD? This child of the 1970s says no, absolutely not. Between all the things I didn’t know and this handful of ugh, I didn’t enjoy the puzzle.
I hope you all liked the puzzle better than I did and found things that resonated with you. 2.75 stars from me.
Rafael Musa’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 10/11/25 by Rafael Musa
I liked if not loved this puzzle. Things I enjoyed:
- 20A the clue [[Jazz hands]] for TA-DA.
- 26A [Cake or Bread] is a fun way to clue BAND.
- 46A [One may thicken over time] is PLOT. I had CLOT in here at first, which is a nice bit of possible deception, whether it was planned or not.
- 52A [Break in?] is STAYCATION. Best clue in the puzzle.
- 12D I liked the entry CLIP-ON TIE.
- 27D [Carpenters’ union?] is ANT COLONY. Hilarious!
- 30D [Substance in herbal medicine] is ADAPTOGEN. I like it when STEM words make it into puzzles.
Things I didn’t:
- The central stack of 15s, HATERS GONNA HATE (fine, but I’ve seen it before), I DON’T WANT ANY LIP, and PARTIAL ECLIPSES, which is evocative but I’ve developed a dislike of plural entries in puzzles when it’s unlikely you’d discuss the thing in the plural in everyday life. (I think COTTON SWABS at 6D, by contrast, is a very good entry.)
- 15D [Occasion to celebrate achievements] is AWARD GALA, which feels a bit green-paint.
Matthew Sewell’s Newsday crossword, “Saturday Stumper”–Amy’s recap
Newsday crossword solution, 10/11/25 – “Saturday Stumper” – Sewell
It’s Amy subbing for pannonica this morning, with a fairly manageable (by Stumper standards) puzzle.
I started in the NW corner and also finished up there. Had to fill in GOLDEN HANDCUFFS (great entry) before I could piece together 1d SNUGS and its crossing prefix UNI. TO NOW in that same corner is an ugly entry, so it didn’t come easy.
Fave fill: new-to-me HAPPY FACE CRATER on Mars, SHOOTS THE BREEZE (the clue, [Emulates rappers], uses the old-fashioned rapping = conversing sense), PHILOSOPHY (great clue, [Cicero’s “true mother of the arts”]), GEODESIC, magazine COVER STORY, and contemporary GETS THE ICK (when a potential love interest does something that puts you off them, you’re getting the ick; they say it’s hard for a pairing to recover from that).
Clues and such:
- 8a. [Discontinued docker], IPOD. Can’t remember what it would dock on.
- 13a. [Cross hairs], SHAVE. Not buying “cross” here, for swiping across hairs with a razor.
- 14a. [Plot adversary, or plotting adversary], MOLE. Foe digging up the garden plot, or a spy.
- 21a. [Hamlet “injurious” oath], ‘SWOUNDS. Short for God’s wounds, later shortened to zounds.
- 22a. [Time of Eugene O’Neill], EON. This week’s quasi-cryptic clue.
- 39a. [Accounting records], DAY BOOKS. Not a term I’m familiar with.
- 52a. [Unnecessarily reserved], TOO COY. Feels green-painty.
- 7d. [Of 3-D surface math], GEODESIC. I know the word from geodesic domes rather than math.
- 10d. [He helps Anna find Elsa], OLAF the Frozen snowman. I tried SVEN the lumberjacky character first, thinking that an F was unlikely near the end of the crossing that turned out to be GOLDEN HANDCUFFS.
- 13d. [Starts moving], SENDS. When you’ve ordered something and you’re eager for it to arrive, you want the seller to send it posthaste. (Why isn’t “posthaste” a shipping speed option?)
- 19a. [About to hit], DUE UP. As in being on deck to bat next, I guess.
- 25d. [Harmonia’s antithetical parent], ARES. I guessed ERIS first. What’s the opposite of harmony? Is it war or discord, or both?
- 27d. [Revolutionary Olympic movement], AXEL. Spinning in the air, in figure skating.
- 30d. [__ de devocion (sanctuary)], CASA. House of devotion, sure.
- 41d. [You’d expect it to be shady], ARBOR. Literally shaded by trees.
- 47d. [“Excuse me?”], HUNH. I prefer the “huh” spelling.
- 50d. [Crescent extremity], HORN. That is one of many definitions of horn. Either pointy end of a crescent.
I was glad to get through this one without resorting to checking for wrong letters. 3.75 stars from me.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2.5 stars
NYT Oof is right!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
NYT: I really enjoyed this puzzle. Challenging but fair with a good flow to the grid so even when I had no clue at the answer (Tyrone, Fichte, Arya…) there were multiple ways to suss them out.
LAMAR JACKSON crossing ARYA and TUVALU was a problem for me, since I didn’t know the player or the country, and have become more aware of Game of Thrones through crosswords… I had ANYA there, and had to guess at the first A.
I got thrown off early when I put U-TRAP instead of P-TRAP, which then gave me URINE instead of PRINT for the forensics find, and messed up two crosses below… it was a lot of work fixing until getting it all straightened out. Toughest Saturday I’ve had in a while…
For diesel hybrids, I think there are buses that are diesel hybrids?
I liked the NYT! Basically agree with all the bad fill comments, but they were all easily gettable from crosses (for me), so it just made the puzzle hard but doable. That’s really all I’m interested in on a Saturday morning. 4 stars!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
This connected with me. I didn’t know many of the answers but was able to get to them with crossings and some partial guesses, which always gives me that “feeling smart” vibe engendered by a good puzzle. I guess the deep cuts would have sped things up a lot but it was still solvable. So it all felt fair.
Pretty good NYT. The longer entries were generally OK to good, the fill was doable and sometimes edifying.
Gravity’s Rainbow is arguable Pynchon’s most famous novel, for what it’s worth (either that or The Crying of Lot 49) — but I haven’t read it, and for a long time I had T BOONE instead of TYRONE (I thought it was a T BOONE Pickens homage of some kind.)
My nomination for worst fill in the NYT is BROEY. Really? I wasn’t aware that DIESELHYBRIDs exist, but they’re out there. I completely agree that LPRECORD is not a phrase anyone says — the cool kids these days speak of ‘vinyl,’ or so I have heard.
In my experience, SLAMBID is not something bridge players say. You might bid a slam, or try for a slam, but I’ve never heard of anyone making a slam bid.
The sets of three long answers, top and bottom, were good, but the rest was a dog’s breakfast, as my Dad used to say.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 3 stars
WSJ. Pretty easygoing, but the NE and SE corners were problematic for me. I’ve very rarely heard (15A) DODO for “NINNY” and (113A) film RIORITA I’d never heard of. The themer (53A) I couldn’t get also, again being unfamiliar with a GRANNY KNOT, which I just now had to Google.
WSJ.
Karel apek play (RUR).
As Eric mentions, the “Č” is missing. Recently I spent a good hour “debugging” my .puz convertor when a similar problem came up. Across Lite is ancient and doesn’t support Unicode, the standard that allows almost limitless character-set expression on computers. I have some rather ugly and convoluted code that is supposed to convert any characters not expressible in the ASCII set that Across Lite supports. Č should be changed to C, not dropped, and it seemed not to be working.
An hour later I realized that the Č was missing in the WSJ file I was starting with. This is a fairly recent bug in their app.
I printed the (PDF?) puzzle and the “Č” was present.
Yep, the pdf is produced by the WSJ team in the US. They send the puzzle to a partner in the UK who manage the online app, which is where problems sometimes crop up.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
Bridge. Pynchon. Fichte. Some yuck, but generally getable with crossings. Fine Saturday. I like ‘BROEY’ because it’s absolutely in the language unlike uhhhhhh ‘LP Record’ lol. Pretty par solving time for me, with a little delay due to needing crossings instead of just popping in a confident answer.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2.5 stars
I like the long stacks both at the top and bottom (esp. FROM EAR TO EAR and BLOW YOUR MIND), but to achieve this… there’s way too much trivial stuff (PETER IV, FRICHTE, TUVALU), weird partials (AN ACT, AN EYE) and other forced/awkward entries (LP RECORD, FALSE CUT, DATA TYPE) for me to recommend this one.
Stumper: This was a STUMPER! It took my husband and I going back and forth several times, and I looked up several things. However, we finished it! I’m not understsnding 13A and 46A, groaned at 22A and 24A, etc., etc. I’ll be interested to read the posting when it comes, as well as the comments of others here later.
Cross hairs for SHAVE is just stumpery. The razor indeed crosses hairs.
“Rap” meant “gab” before there was hip-hop, as in “rap session.”
Thanks for the help! I was obviously thinking of rappers as the performers. :)
That’s just what Stan wanted.
And for us to think “crosshairs” for cross hairs.
Yep! That’s why it’s the Stumper! :)
I didn’t find it too tricky. The last section to fall was the middle where I had CURIE (a gimme!) for a long time before realizing it had to be MARIE. I got SHAVE from crosses without understanding the clue, which is a stretch even by Stumper standards.
I’m glad someone found it easier than us! I, too, had Curie, then finally figured out that it had to be Marie. Out last section was the lower right.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
I was pretty happy when I saw Sam’s byline – you always get a challenge, but it’s a fair and rewarding challenge. The trivia was all gettable from crosses and deduction.
But yeah, even as someone who loves collecting them, LPRECORD was pretty bad.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2.5 stars
My experience was similar to Amy’s, except that I knew a couple things she did not, and vice versa. I found the top half easy and the bottom a slog, but finished well under my Saturday average anyway. Can’t say I enjoyed it, though.
I guess those who love a bunch of trivia in their puzzle will like this one, but I didn’t. You either knew the trivia or didn’t, figured it out or didn’t, with nothing clever or witty encountered along the way.
And you don’t “meet face to face” in a HEAD BUTT unless your face is on top of your head.
Diesel-hybrids were big in Europe about a decade ago, but most manufacturers have discontinued them. I believe Mercedes is the only remaining make with a diesel-hybrid line.
Stumper: Amy, I still have iPods (love them!) and I also have small Sony clock radios that I can plug them into and play the music on them. I assume that counts as “docking.”
NYT: Took a long time, and it wasn’t much fun. In addition to the junk Amy identified, I don’t care to see AWW and AAH in the same puzzle (in fact, I don’t especially care to see just one of these types of interjections in a puzzle).
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2 stars
NYT: I feel like some Saturday themelesses are hard because the cluing is tricky, and some are hard because either the clues or the answers are obscure. This puzzle was too much on the obscure side. The main character in Gravity’s Rainbow feels like a clue Eugene T Maleska would have had.
I agree with the “no, just no” sentiment about LPRECORD. Really, no.
I’m not bothered by LP RECORD as much as most folk. Yeah, we called them LPs. But that was short for “long-playing record.” That phrase doesn’t hurt my ears at all so the entry seems plausible.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2.5 stars
NYT: As an audiophile and vinyl maven, I have absolutely no quibbles with “LP Record”. It stands for Long Playing Record, to distinguish it from the 78 RPM oldies that preceded it, and folks commonly shorten it to LP – again, perfectly reasonable. I didn’t bat a proverbial eye at the clue and answer.
Agree on some of the other obscure answers. Having had Great Books of the Western World crammed down my throat in high school, long, long ago, I thought I at least had heard of most of those boring old philosophers and authors, but Fichte was a new one.
Except for a few that I kept for sentimental reasons, I got rid of my LPs many years ago. But they were a big part of my youth. We called them records, we called them LPs, we called them albums (we didn’t call them vinyl). But calling them LP records — nope, I just can’t imagine it. It sounds totally unnatural to me.
Puzzle: USA Today; Rating: 2 stars
The demise of crosswords is accelerating because of bad editorship that allows crummy puzzles to run, and because the editors don’t clean up the clues. Allowing too much internet initialism and abbreviations is alienating solvers over the age of 50 who don’t care for this kind of clueing/answers.
For example: 54D: “Fandom’s Aziracrow and Obikin, for two” and the answer is “Ships”, which is short for relationships. Aziracrow is a SHIP between the Good Omens characters Aziraphale and Crowley. Obikin is a SHIP between the Star Wars characters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker.
Who wants/needs this sort of nonsense in a crossword? Definitely not me.