LAT 2:23 (Stella) 
[3.13 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
Newsday 15:47 (pannonica) 
[3.83 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
NYT 5:46 (Amy) [3.97 avg; 15 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) [3.17 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) 
[1.83 avg; 3 ratings] 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, 12/27/25 – no. 1227
Not so hard for a Saturday puzzle, eh?
Fave fill: RANDO, SHOEHORNS, ROOM TEMP, ELITE EIGHT, DOTTED THE I, CRINKLE CUT fries, “YOU HEARD ME RIGHT,” PLUNGE POOL, and DEATH METAL. (Note: Death metal is not my favorite genre.)
Three clues, what the heck:
- 36A. [Zip], JACK DIDDLY SQUAT. Now, this sounds all kinds of wrong to me. There’s jack squat and there’s diddly squat, but I don’t know about this double-up. Your vote?
- 15A. [Ring on a coaster?], LOOP-DE-LOOP. A ring on a roller-coaster’s track, not a wet mark on a drink coaster.
- 45A. [Fantasy author Bardugo], LEIGH. I don’t know her work at all, but some of her books/series have been adapted for TV. My era of reading fantasy fiction was mainly in my teens.
Paul Coulter’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Double Reverse” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 12/27/25 • Sat • “Double Reverse” • Coulter • solution • 20251227
Left-right mirror symmetry, with both across theme answers and a couple of downs.
- 99aR [Decisive moments (or what the first and third letters of each circled segment are] TURNING POINTS. The entries ping-pong through the circled sections before continuing on. Three letters do the work of seven.
- 1a. [After an interruption, question to the person you’ve been talking to] WHEREWE (where were we).
- 13a. [Crispy, starch-filled Mexican fare] POTACOS (potato tacos).
- 29a. [Threats in movies like “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”] EXTINCTIONLEVENTS (extinction-level events).
- 53a. [Security devices that may be silent] BURGLARMS (burglar alarms).
- 67a. [Psychotherapy technique developed by Eric Berne] TRANSACTIONALYSIS (transactional analysis).
- 76d. [Storm warning, sometimes] RADVISORY (radar advisory).
- 81d. [Library material set aside for students in a specific class] COURSERVE (course reserve). Is that a common term?
For me, this theme falls into the category of stunts that are more geekishly appealing to constructors than solvers. It’s a neat phenomenon to observe and compile, but kind of a slog to wade through when it’s put into a crossword. 16d [“__ you clever?”] AREN’T.
- 5d [Flip inside out] EVERT. Not quite what’s happening with the themers, but close enough for me to feel compelled to talk about it.
- 10d [Blasting stuff] NITRO. 69d [Chemist who became a philanthropist] ALFRED NOBEL.
- 11d [It makes sounds] OCEAN. In two ways.
- 33d [Unit of pressure] TORR. Not a common word, even in crosswords. Named for Evangelista Torricelli.
- 39d [Island north of Australia] TIMOR. With the MO in place, I started to enter SAMOA, knowing full well it’s significantly farther west of Australia.
- 64d [Derisive] SNEERY. ?? 23a [Devoid of help] AIDLESS. ????
- 82d [Insect trachea, e.g.] AIR VESSEL. Bit obscure. I might have tried a different approach, such as [Dirigible, e.g.], although that could just as easily draw complaints.
- 95d [Tank top?] TURRET. Yup.
- 22d [Like some soap] ON A ROPE. 54d [Sainted pope called “the Great”] LEO I. Pope-Soap-On-A-Rope.
- 26a [Judge, at times] TRIER. Would also have accepted [Film director Lars von __ ], he of The Five Obstructions.
- 45a [Symbol of purity] LILY. Also, regular and seasonal reminder: lilies are toxic to cats.
- 50a [Miguel’s great-grandmother in a 2017 Pixar film] COCO.
- 63a [Players until 2022] IPODS. 8d [Tahoe runner] MAC. Can we put a one-Apple-product-per-puzzle cap on crosswords?
- 72a [Cactus bump that bears spines] AREOLE. Forced myself to dredge up this term from memory before working crossings, which would have been far easier.
- 88a [French silk] SOIE. 98a [Amt. on a Form 1040’s Linie 11] AGI. More plaster over the grid’s ruptures.
- 115a [Galley of yore] BIREME.
- 116a [Mount St. Helens, in 1980] ERUPTER, not ERUPTOR as I first tried. The O was the final letter I needed to change to complete the grid correctly.
- 121a [Corsair, Pacer and Ranger, e.g.] EDSELS. All are also model names of other cars: Lincoln Corsair, AMC Pacer, Ford (truck) Ranger.
Rafael Musa’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 12/27/25 • Saturday Stumper • Musa • solution • 20251227
My relative quick solve time would have been even faster had I not had some outsize trouble in the lower right corner.
In tackling this puzzle, I was unusually bold and put in quite a number of entries without verifying crossings; about a third of them turned out to be incorrect:
- 21a [Digital display] TEN, not ASL.
- 37a [Something to hold the mayo] BLT, not JAR, not POT.
- 41a [Bar busters of yore] FEDS, not DRYS.
- 45d [Kindly] GENTLE, not GENIAL. This was the major impediment for that southeast corner.
On the other hand, these were my coups:
- 20a [Live the wrong way] EVIL (cryptic-style reversal).
- 43a [Nation due north of the Horn] YEMEN.
- 51a [Hands or feet] UNIT.
- 6d [Watershed monitor] EPA.
- 10d [Rebus puzzle pronoun] EWE.
- 23d [Sea predators] ORCAS.
- 25d [Dickinson’s “Ended, __ it begun”] ERE.
- 40d [Unchangeable] SET.
- 56d [Cry companion] HUE.
Had this been a more unforgiving Stumper, that ratio might’ve been more critical.
- 14a [Yellow pages, historically] LEGAL PAD. I believe that the telephone book would be capitalized as Yellow Pages, so there was an inkling of the misdirection here.
- 16a [Canadian contemporary of Alice Munro] ATWOOD. Was expecting a full name.
- 17a [Merger precursor] MARRIAGE LICENSE. Not strictly about business.
- 22a [Internal uplift] EGO BOOSTERS. Tried BOOSTING first.
- 29a [Pour out?] RAIN. I think ‘out’ here means outside. The clue would have been less guileful had it just been [Pour].
- 34a [What might say GRANDMA WAS HERE] ONESIE. Meh.
- 36a [Trust buster] RAT. Allied with the [Bar busters of yore] clue. Speaking of yore: 34d [ __ days] OLDEN.
- 42a [About a 30 min. walk from Boston Common] MIT. Had no idea about this, but for once a cross-reference was genuinely helpful. Without yet knowing the answer to 44d [42-Across major] ECON, I was able to pop in the correct one for 42-across.
- 46a [Data extraction with algorithms] DATA SCIENCE. The second word eluded me for far too long.
- 50a [Source of American arabica] KONA. This is coffee, and it’s grown in Hawaii.
- 54a [Evidence of a loving relationship] MATCHING TATTOOS. Okay, sure.
- 60a [Crescent shape] SEMILUNE. Bit tough.
- 61a [The first Eisenhower jackets] SERGES. Yah, didn’t know this at all, despite knowing what serge material is.
- 1d [Acreage-stewardship org.] BLM, The Bureau of Land Management. As with the current, perverted EPA, that’s one of the agency’s ostensible missions.
- 4d [Comparatively mindful] WARIER. Put in the -ER early to get some letters in-grid.
- 7d [Indignation monetizer] RAGE BAIT. Everyone should be familiar with this term by now.
- 11d [“I need more time!”] DON’T RUSH ME.
- 12d [Flag] LOSE SPIRIT. Desperately tried to make LOSE STEAM fit.
- 18d [“Sea” predator] LION, as in sea lion. I get that the quotes in the clue hint to the animal’s name, and that it’s consciously mimicking the subsequent ORCAS clue (23d), but I don’t really care for this one.
- 24d [Fair housing] TENTS. I suspected this might be the answer from the very beginning, with no crossings, but unlike with so many other entries in this puzzle, I kept my powder dry on this one.
- 27d [Wedding wheel-out] TIERED CAKE. Meh.
- 28d [Product of cosmic ray collisions] ANTIMATTER. Needed but a few crossings for this one.
- 33d [Word from Latin for “sandy place”] ARENA. Makes sense, with a little thought.
- 48d [Emulate emergency generators] CUT IN. Sure, emergency generators do CUT IN, but … ’emulate’?
- 52d [Short letters?] IOUS. Normally this would clue IOU, so I was hesitant to make the leap to IOUS.
- 53d [Author inspired by Zora] TONI. Neale Hurston, Morrison.
- 57d [Chambre d’__ (guest bedroom)] AMI.
August Miller’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 12/27/25 by August Miller
You know what I’m going to say about this one, right? Too easy! Not in an absolute sense, because I think this puzzle would be just fine in Universal where one expects breezy solves on Saturdays. But I thought the sparklers in this grid, like AIRBENDER, SCREENCAP, and especially that middle stack of SPLIT DECISIONS, CARE TO ELABORATE?, and TWO-PART EPISODE, deserved cluing that makes you work for it a little harder.
BTW, SPLIT DECISIONS, clued here as [Some boxing losses], will always to me be this puzzle format.
Saturday Universal:
https://herbach.dnsalias.com/wsj/uc251227.puz
Thank you, Martin!
NYT was slow work but doable. My father, who was a radiologist, took a course at OAKRIDGE in the fifties. The last letter I filled in was the first letter of JACKDIDDLYSQUAT— but I did get it, so I guess it’s a real phrase.
REDHEAD / RANDO was it for me. I, too, dropped OAKRIDGE in immediately thanks to my work :-) Pretty fun Saturday!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
NYT – clunky but not that hard. Should have swapped Fri and Sat this week
Funny how WALDO worked just as well as RANDO up there in the northeast!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 5 stars
I confidently put Waldo there and took some time to get off it. I really liked the puzzle. Great Saturday
I had the exact same issue!
NYT: enjoyable, solvable Saturday for me.
I do agree that JACKDIDDLYSQUAT is too much. But maybe they go say it somewhere other than Philly!?!?
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
NYT – Is ALOP a word? I was fine with everything but ALOP. I want to make an ALOP creature, akin to the ALOT.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
ALOP next to TITI is not pretty. I’ve said JACKDIDDLYSQUAT many times before (mostly to my kids) and I’m not from Philly.
NYT: Pretty easy Saturday. I don’t very often solve in 2X Amy’s time, but that’s where I was at today.
Didn’t care for JACK DIDDLY SQUAT. Maybe it’s regional. I’ve heard/used DIDDLY SQUAT and just plain JACK (a polite version of JACK shit) in this context, but never this whole phrase.
Some cute clues – ASTERISKS, DELI, KITE, ADAM and NO AM (avoiding Chomsky) made me smile.
Do wine corks TAPER? I’ve seen tapered corks in bottles of vinegar or oil, and in a chemistry lab – but all of the wine bottle corks I’ve seen are either straight or mushroom style, for sparkling wines.
We have had a few sets of tapered ones but the ones we have are no longer available for purchase. We would like a few more. We use them for soda also. I don’t know how common such corks are.
I’m with the detractors on JACKDIDDLYSQUAT. Totally new to me. I also didn’t care for DOTTEDTHEI — just one?
Gary R makes a good point about wine corks — they are almost always cylindrical.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
For any Ohio State University alumni, the singular form of this expression is second nature.
And I think a lot of wine corks taper very slightly, as I often cannot pound them back into the bottle both ways.
I’ve found that if I invert the cork it goes back in the bottle. But that is based on a very small sample size
iswydt
Anyway, the part of the cork that’s inside the bottle, touching the wine, expands.
Some years ago I thought I wanted to make vinegar. I abandoned the idea when I couldn’t find a key ingredient – leftover wine
Puzzle: Newsday; Rating: 3.5 stars
Thanks to Pannonica for her usual thorough write up. SE was tough – made tougher by INNS at 52D.
Seems like a lot of us had issues with the southeast! I had “matching outfits” first for 54A, which stymied me for a wgile!
Puzzle: Newsday; Rating: 4.5 stars
Fun LAT, though I didn’t find it as breezy as Stella did (though to be fair, if I ever beat one of Stella’s times I’m pretty sure that would violate physics at some level!) Last week’s stellar LAT left something to be desired this week. ECORESORT, TAKESAPIC, and the oft-sighted CARETOELABORATE have far less flair than crunchier entries, and i think that threw me off the wavelength when we’re also getting STORMI (Kylie’s daughter) clued along decidedly less modern crosswordese.
NYT… easy peasy. I’m on track for a record week. My average times in the NYT this week are hovering just below 4:00, so at least there’s that. The puzzle today I liked much more than the LAT.
But Rafael Musa, who delivered in spades in last Saturdays LAT also gave us a TOP NOTCH stumper this week. It was tricky without being obtuse. The clues all jived–I had a similar experience to pannonica here: I was bold and it paid off. The sign of a great puzzle. Stumper gets my review this week!
The NW of the Stumper was really the only hold-up today. I thought I was so smart when PAD showed up in 14A and I plopped “steno” in front of it. Only after I crossed that out did MARRIAGE fill in and allow me to finish the puzzle. If I had put in OGRE right away, I might have saved myself some frustration.
BLM, all I could think of was Black Lives Matter, so the Pannonica write was helpful in explaining it was the Bureau of Land Management.
Yes, I tried “steno” first, too, but did have “marriage license” before then, so wuickly realuzed that one of them wasn’t correct — did take me a while to figure out which one, though!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
I was all ready to skip this one like Katie’s last impossible Saturday until I read up and was convinced it was not so impossible. And it wasn’t. The baffling foreign phrases and the parade of proper names and the impenetrable clues were… well not totally gone, but much reduced. It was challenging without being mean, and I liked it a lot.
Side note, I usually put two much stronger words after JACK in that phrase, and it would have fit the grid. You can figure it out.
I had the same feeling as pannonica about the WSJ: too clever for it’s own good. I never did get to the point of relying on themers, which mostly didn’t get a smile, just worked at filling it all in.
For me it didn’t help that I had trouble getting into the swing of the reversals without ticking them off each time. That can happen when I bury circles around circled letters in ink, maybe a bit more so when exactly one set of circled letters isn’t contained within the answer; it starts the answer. I wasn’t looking for that.
But it also didn’t happen that I started the puzzle by confidently filling in the top right themer as “tostada,” which seemed to match the clue and the required number of letters. It pointed me to a different reversal scheme that looked perfectly valid.
Stumper: Had stuff to do yesterday, so just got to it today. Pannonica is on target, as always. Southwest corner was the worst — I had “matching outfits” first snd “semilune” didn’t leap into my mind.
Re Stumper
Just realized that 49D “Heartland city adopted by Vietnamese” is another cryptic-style clue!
Oh I missed that too!
Good catch! My first thought was sister cities. :)
Puzzle: USA Today; Rating: 1 star
Very boring puzzle that shouldn’t have been published.