LAT 3:15 (Stella) 
[3.31 avg; 8 ratings] rate it
Newsday 15:52 (pannonica) 
[4.21 avg; 7 ratings] rate it
NYT 10:34 (Amy) 
[2.97 avg; 17 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) [3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) rate it
WSJ untimed (pannonica) [3.83 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
If you like to challenge yourself with cryptic crosswords, there’s a new quarterly print magazine from the unch. team of (mostly?) British setters. A small magazine, about ten cryptics, smaller than 6×9 inches. Visit their site for more info or to order yours. What I don’t know is how much the shipping is from the UK to the US (or anywhere else), or if magazines are subject to tariffs.
Samuel Smalley’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 10/18/25 – no. 1018
Oof! That upper right corner played like a Stumper and it was largely blank for the final few minutes of my solve. Eventually it all came together, anchored by the iffy [Crunchy snacks], OAT BARS. You talking about Nature Valley brand, that crumble all over the place? Or the other brands of oat-rish granola bars that are chewier? Anyway, I call ’em all granola bars, be they crunchy or chewy. And you?
Fave fill: FACE TAT, HAULED ASS, “WELL, SORTA,” HELP LINES, the ESSENCE Music Festival (the setting of the movie Girls Trip), TORNADOES, “YES, CHEF,” HAS GAME, GOALPOST, NEON TETRAS, FIRE BOATS.
MAD FOR and STAYS MAD? No, no, no. Rip out that section and start again. It doesn’t matter that different meanings of the word are evoked. It’s still the same word!
19D. [Attire for many a flamenco dancer], RED DRESS. Is this green paint or “yeah, a lot of flamenco dancers wear ruffled red dresses”?
New to me:
- 33D. [Bread purchase in the U.K.], PAN LOAF. As opposed to the more humble plain loaf, apparently. You’re forgiven for not knowing this term, Americans and other non-British/Scottish/Irish peoples.
- 30D. [Energy device that reflects sunlight], HELIOSTAT. I guessed that sunlight = helio-, which helped, but I don’t know what this “energy device” is for.
Overall, 3.25 stars from me. How’d it treat you?
Kyle Dolan’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 10/18/25 by Kyle Dolan
I was surprised to look up and see a time of 3:15: This puzzle felt quite a bit harder than that! It felt a little more academic in knowledge base than a typical themeless, and I appreciated that. Stuff to note:
- Between the tough clue of [Sign of aging] for PATINA at 1A and the new-to-me word TMESIS at 3D, it wasn’t super easy to get traction in the NW. I’m glad to have learned TMESIS: I knew there was a word for [Construction such as the term “un-freaking-believable”], but not what that word was.
- 16A [__ effect: phenomenon of attraction in fluid mechanics, familiarly] is CHEERIOS. Nerd alert! (Here for it!)
- 34A [Shooting stars?] is SAGITTARIUS. Cute!
- 36A [Prime minister between Theresa and Liz] is BORIS (Johnson). Remember when the UK had three prime ministers in the same year? France would like some advice.
- 46A [Former Japanese coin] is SEN. I had YEN in here for a long time, and fact-checked myself after I was done solving: I guess single-YEN coins are still in circulation, and therefore this clue is unambiguous but requires some pretty deep-cut knowledge.
- 51A [Some medical providers, for short] is PAS, in its “physician assistants” sense. I’m glad to see PAS getting some recognition in this small way. They do a lot!
Ryan Mathiason’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Training Programs” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 10/18/25 • Sat • “Training Programs” • Mathiason • solution • 20251018
Did you work out the theme before the revealer? Was pretty easy, right?
- 113aR [Have a satisfactory conclusion, and a feature of each starred answer] WORK OUT IN THE END.
- 23a. [*Is clueless about how to perform glute exercises?] DOESN’T KNOW SQUAT.
- 39a. [*Team-building exercise for the core?] GANGPLANK.
- 49a. [*Choosing to do a triceps exercise?] GOING FOR A DIP.
- 66a. [*Ability to do a deltoid exercise however you like?] FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
- 85a. [*Prepare a pectoral exercise for someone else?] WARM THE BENCH. So, bench and press are distinct exercises? Presumably one or the other is a bench press?
- 94a. [*”That’s one of the best quadriceps exercises I’ve ever seen”?] WHAT A JERK.
Annnd rest.
- 4d [Still on the shelf] UNSOLD, not UNUSED.
- 12d [U.S. state closest to Asia] ALASKA. 72a [U.S. state closest to Europe] MAINE.
- 35d [What you saw while sleeping?] LOGS. I see what you did there.
- 36d [Person who’s good at caving?] SOFTIE. Hmm.
- 40d [Gram equivalent] NANA. Fooled me, even though I’ve seen such a clue previously.
- 51d [Makes famous] RENOWNS. Was unaware of such usage.
- 63d [Modern collectible, briefly] NFT. Everyone at this point knows these are basically a scam, right?
- 66d [It has a big plus] FIRST AID KIT. Didn’t even see the clue during the solve. Pretty nice one, though.
- 67d [Where Benjamin Netanyahu earned a B.S. in architecture] MIT. Gratuitous mention of a war criminal.
- 79d [Part of a person that others can’t see] INNER SELF. 56a [Not learned] INNATE. 84a [Connections] INS.
- 1a [Site of the Rupa Rupa high jungle] PERU. A near-gimme for me, as I quickly computed (four-letter answer) + (altitude) + (jungle).
- 30a [Delta product] SILT. Fooled me here too. Was thinking of faucets and power tools.
- 53a [Reds fan?] WINO >side-eye<
- 99a [La Española, por ejemplo] ISLA. Also known as Hispaniola.
Ben Zimmer’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 10/18/25 • Saturday Stumper • Zimmer • solution • 20251018
As is typical of Stumper solves, it seemed as if I wouldn’t break through to a tipping point, yet slowly and surely it all started to resolve.
- 1a [Earliest leader of Thebes] THETA. The ‘earliest’ part threw me off.
- 15a [They’re “wet” with sauce and melted cheese] BURRITOS. Should have gotten this one much sooner than I did.
- 18a [Something positioned above a plate] MITT. Oof, I should’ve seen this one for what it was earlier too.
- 19a [Four before O] KAY. Had the puzzle been really tough, I would have taken a few moments to count backwards in the alphabet, but it never came to that.
- 26a [Nickname of a mound or music great] SATCH. Baseball pitcher Satchel Paige and jazz trumpeter/singer Louis ‘Satchelmouth’ (‘Satchmo’) Armstrong. Did not help that I parsed the clue as … (a mound) or (music great).
- 44a [“I can be viewed without special formatting”] .TXT
One of my first entries filled in, despite the weird first-person framing of the clue. - 45a [Off the __ (top-of-mind, not surprisingly] DOME. Not a phrase I’m familiar with.
- 48a [Pizzeria purchase] TOMATOES. Bizarrely, with a few letters in place my first instinct was POTATOES.
- 52d [It’s 70 miles south of Salem] EUGENE. Should have been an easy get, but my East Coast bias got in the way.
- 1d [Pitching impediments] TIN EARS. Oof (nice).
- 3d [Motorcycle Hall of Fame name] EVEL. My very first entry.
- 5d [What a spot check takes care of] AD FEE. Good though somewhat tortured clue.
- 6d [Legendary ridiculing racer] HARE. Another gimme.
- 8d [Kind of soup as a starter?] PRIMORDIAL. >groan<
- 9d [Swift production of the 18th century] SATIRE. Jonathan Swift. Was pretty confident that this was the answer, but I prudently waited for several crossings to confirm. 21d [Swift production of the 21st century] THE ERAS TOUR. I certainly knew who the subject was—Taylor Swift—but I needed several crossings before seeing the answer. Definite articles in crossword entries are kind of rare.
- 11d [Fit together nicely] NESTED, not NESTLE.
- 17d [One of the Uranian Shakespearean moons] Queen MAB.
- 23d [What many American flags depict] STATE SEALS. To their detriment, from a vexillological design standpoint.
- 25d [Given the go-ahead] CUED, not OKED.
- 31d [Multiply] TWO TIMES. >skeptical wince< Best I can do to explain this one is suggest that ‘multiply’ is an adjective rather than a verb.
- 34d [GPS ancestor] SEXTANT. Quite an early ancestor. I was stuck on the too-short SATNAV,
- 36d [Social media slang evoking old-timey car horns] AWOOGA. Have not heard of this in the modern context.
- 40d [Individuality] STYLE. Another early bit of fill, thanks to the -S of the plural answer at 39-across, which eventually turned out to be ALOES.
Got to run!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
This one was hard in a good way – the cluing was really well done. There wasn’t a bunch of obscure trivia, and there were a couple of relatively easy ones to help you start chipping away. I went over my Saturday average but I never felt like it was hopeless or a waste of time. I think when people say they want a hard Saturday to solve, they’re asking for something like this.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
Totally agree. I blew my Saturday average by a bit, but I didn’t mind the challenge.
Tough but ultimately doable NYT. NEMEA was the only entirely unfamiliar entry, otherwise difficulty was due to cluing and unexpected entries. Stared at a mostly empty NE corner for a while, HEDGE finally broke it open. Didn’t notice MAD reuse. Excellent puzzle.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
BWA(?)A x (?)EMEA and ROME/A x AREOLE/A in the same grid significantly affected my enjoyment of an otherwise really good puzzle.
Those are the two that got me as well. ROMA should have been clued in Italian it its entirety if they wanted the A.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
I agree about the ROMA v. ROME comment.
+1
Stumper: flew through the top left but then ground to a halt. But eventually pieced it together. I can’t wrap my head around how “Multiply” clues TWO TIMES. I can’t think of any sentence where the answer could replace the clue. If you multiply something, you don’t two-times it (and you could multiply by any number anyway). I’m looking at Merriam Webster — multiply like, in multiple ways? Or like, more than one ply, like toilet paper? I have no idea.
Puzzle: Newsday; Rating: 5 stars
I don’t get that either but I’m just relieved/ecstatic I was able to solve this puzzle without any cheating, for the first time in ages. It was a fun solve, too, with some great clues (like the two Swiftian clues). Thank you Ben Zimmer!
Puzzle: Newsday; Rating: 5 stars
I suspect that “Multiply” was a way to Stumperize a clue like “Cheats.” But it doesn’t quite work. Still a great puzzle.
My guess on “Multiply” is that it’s to be taken as an adverb, not a verb – “in multiple cases.” A stretch – but this is a Stumper.
Ah! Thanks.
NYT: Toughest in a long time. Despite being from England, I had to run the alphabet to get the N of PANLOAF, and then I had to Google to find out what it might be. Wikipedia says it’s mostly a Scottish term.
Stumper: Got about halfway then gave up. Since when does anyone buy TOMATOES at a pizzeria? And like others, I can’t make much sense of the TWOTIMES clue.
I took the pizzeria reference to mean that the pizzeria was buying the tomatoes. Wording could go either way on who is doing the buying.
You’re right, thanks
You’re welcome! :)
In my neck of the woods (SE Michigan) you can order fresh tomatoes on a pizza (they’re good!). This can’t be the only place.
Stumper: Pannonica is completely on target, as always. Agree with everything she said. I would just add I thought the cluing on 5D, “what a spot check takes care of” kind of nice for “ad fee.”
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
NYT – tought but fair! Broke open NE with TWEAKS and INAWE
NYT: Cluing OAT BARS as “crunchy snacks” is IMO a bad clue. There’s nothing inherently crunchy about an OAT BAR. The manufacturer can make them crunchy, but they can make any snack bar crunchy. To me, it’s like cluing NOTEBOOK as “red-covered thing to write in.”
I don’t love “Crank cases” for UFOLOGY for similar reasons. Why UFOLOGY as opposed to any other thing believed in by cranks?
Is EBRAKE a common term? I’ve never seen that before.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
I’ve never heard the term ebrake to refer to the emergency brake.
I also object a bit to the clue about the name that sounds like two letters… we have so many possibilities, including essie which almost fits… but without any crossings, there could be katie, casey, effie, ellie … the list goes on and on.
A crunchy Sat. difficulty with some nice cluing, on the positive side.
E BRAKE is new to me, too. And is the emergency brake actually something that gets pulled “in many car chase scenes?” I suspect I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t seem all that common to me.
Those quick u-turns are called “hand-brake turns.” You lock the rear wheels at speed and steer into a (hopefully) controlled 180-degree spin before releasing it.
Well, I see it discussed online, so I guess it must be “a thing.” I’m not a physicist, so it’s hard for me to understand how locking up the rear wheels assists in making a tight u-turn.
When I was a teenager, driving a rear-wheel drive car, I could make a tight u-turn on a two-lane gravel road (of which there were many where I grew up) by turning the wheel hard left and accelerating. The back end would slue around and I was headed back the way I came.
Regardless, I’m still not convinced this shows up in “many car chase scenes.”
It works because sliding friction (which is what happens when the wheels are locked and sliding on the road) is less than static friction (which is what the front wheels experience, as they are still gripping the road), so locking the back wheels causes the back to want to slide to the front. My intro Physics teacher used to say that the emergency brake is there for when you want to have an emergency, like your car to spin around.
My car is all-wheel drive, but it has a “drift mode” for such shenanigans. Tons of fun, so long as there’s nothing around to hit.
In reply to pannonica’s question from the WSJ review: there are other types of press exercises in addition to bench (e.g. overhead press)
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 1.5 stars
Bwana crossing nemea crossing heliostat sandwiched with adapt and adept? No thank you. Ruined an otherwise good Saturday puzzle for me
Yeah, I’m with you… this Saturday got a lot of praise, but when it’s got BWANA and NEMEA in it, I have trouble agreeing with assessments of “not a lot of trivia”. I managed about 2/3 of it, and then it just felt like an unfun slog. The two letter name didn’t help… I had ELLEN -> ELLIE, both of which first at first, but getting to ELSIE was also very hard. I like clever cluing, but most didn’t give a feeling of “Ah, that’s nice!” but rather “okay… I guess I see how that works.” First Saturday in a while that ended on a sour note; I guess it wasn’t for me. I’m glad many others enjoyed it, though!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 1.5 stars
I’m with you! Super un-fun.
welcome back, pannonica!
not surprisingly, evel is where i started
Yep! My husband starts us off and that and “simmer” is what he got. :)
NYT: I agree with Amy that this puzzle was getting into Stumper territory. The difficulty was in the obscurity of the clues and imprecision of the answers, rather than in wordplay. Unlike many of the commenters here, this is just not a style of puzzle I enjoy.
How many people will have ever learned, and remembered, that there were ancient Greek games in Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea as well as in Olympia?? That in Scotland and Northern Ireland they still make a distinction between a PAN LOAF and a plain loaf? That NEON TETRAS are native to the Amazon Basin? That some people think of a parking brake as an “emergency” brake (it isn’t) and then further shorten it to E-BRAKE?
Post Malone has FACE TATs; Maori people keeping sacred ancient tradition have moko. And when was the last time you heard a receiver called a RADIO SET, or attended a TAFFY PULL?
It took a while to get a foothold, but in the end I finished very close to my average time. Can’t say I enjoyed it, though; a lot of eye-rolling was involved. This constructor obviously has talent, and I see from the constructor’s notes that the editorial team rewrote a lot of the clues. I’d be very curious to see the original clue set.
Yeah… I have to agree with you. First Saturday in a long time that I just didn’t feel great about.
Small answers in each quadrant of the Stumper led to success: Swiss, evel, hare and draws. My most difficult entry was SITKA because the US in the clue had me looking for an abbreviation or nickname.
Thanks, Ben Zimmer!
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 4 stars
Seven funny themers about weightlifting!
38a
“Bassos”
Basso is bass singular
Bassi is bass plural
Bassos is neither
Would you be surprised that M-W prefers “bassos”?
Very.
We call them “loan words,” but English is pretty violent with its borrowings. Once a word is in our dictionary, we have our way with it.