BEQ 14:02 (Eric) 
[2.75 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
Fireball untimed (Jenni) 
[3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
LAT 4:28 (Gareth) [2.50 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
NYT 9:40 (ZDL) 
[3.35 avg; 17 ratings] rate it
Universal 6-something (Eric) [2.67 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
USA Today 9:53 (Emily) 
[2.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
WSJ tk (Jim Q) [2.70 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
Ryan Judge’s Universal Crossword “Dancing Queen” — Eric’s Review
Ryan Judge’s Universal Crossword Puzzle “Dancing Queen” — 1/15/26 (Click to Embiggen)
I perpetually forget to read crossword puzzle titles — probably because the puzzle I solve most consistently is the New York Times, which eschews titles six days a week. I doubt knowing the title here would have made my solve any speedier, and it would only have increase the time I will have to spend trying to forget a certain ABBA song exists.
I did’t forget to consider the circled letters, but since I was solving fairly smoothly anyway, I didn’t give them that much thought. The circle letters can be unscrambled to make the names of famous crown-wearing ladies from European history:
- 17A [Film franchise that parodiesthe horror genre (In this answer, unscramble letters 3-6)] SCARY MOVIE Mary I’m not sure who the constructor and editors had in mind here: Mary, Queen of Scots? Mary I of England, a/k/a Bloody Mary? Mary, Queen of Hungary? Mary, Queen of Arkansas? (IYKYK)
- 28A [“I’m gonna begin … now!” (…letters 3-11 into a name that starts with “C”)] START THE CLOCK Charlotte I banged myself up skiing Monday and didn’t sleep well last night in part because my leg throbbed. It took me longer than it should have to unscramble this one, partly because I initially missed the hint about the starting letter. Again, I can only guess which Charlotte the clue refers to, so I’m guessing Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the consort to George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. From the clue’s “starts with ‘C”’ language, I originally inferred this one had a bonus unscrambling. But the only anagrams I can find are at least two words and are very strange (though “RECTAL HOT” has a certain cachet, doesn’t it?) Also, what’s with using “starts” in a clue for an answer that contains START! C’mon guys, there are rules to this game!
- 48A [Grocery store section with greens (… letters 6-13 into a name that starts with “I”) VEGETABLE AISLE Isabella I belatedly realized that the hint about the starting letter is there to help the solver work out the unscrambled name. And maybe they have VEGETABLE AISLEs in tiny urban markets, but in the size grocery store I have almost always shopped in, there are multiple aisles in the produce section.
- 63A [Leave without paying] DINE AND DITCH Anne I’m done guessing which Queen Anne we’re talking about here.
The more I think about this theme, the less satisfactory it is for me. You have two scramblings that involve so many letters that you’re giving an additional hint. Honestly, who’s going to take the time to unscramble those letters to make names? But at least a few of the theme answers are moderately fun.
Other stuff:
- 34A [Drag Race” challenge filled with insults] ROAST Having never seen that show, I needed a few crosses to get this answer.
- 43A [Websites like Brickipedia] WIKIS I didn’t recognize that site name and missed the pun on Wikipedia.
- 2A [With the bow, in music] ARCO Contrast that with the plucking of “pizzicato,” which is fun to say, fun to watch, fun to hear.
- 7D [The apartment in “The Apartment,” e.g.] LOVE NEST Director Billy Wilder made a lot of very funny, sometimes cynical movies. This is one of those, with Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and a Fred MacMurray character that will make you forget the dad on My Three Sons.
- 18D [New York’s is “Excelsior”] MOTTO I had the first three letter and briefly wondered if the remaining two were –EL. (Did I say I was tired?)
–
Wendy L. Brandes and Barbara Lin’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Time: 9m40s
Difficulty: Breezy (<8m) | Easy-ish (8-9m30s) | Moderate (9m30s-11m) | Rough going (11+m)
Wendy L. Brandes and Barbara Lin’s New York Times crossword, 1/15/26, 0115
Today’s theme: CONFIRMATION BIAS (Tendency to reinforce one’s established beliefs … or a hint to answering this puzzle’s starred clues)
- SEEK AND (YE S)HAL FIND
- ALL D(AY E)VERY DAY
- FAMILY G(AME N)IGHT
Confirmatory phrases are biased (diagonal) within each theme entry. I thought bias was a typography term, but apparently the provenance is needlework. Or maybe they’re referring to the fact that the circled letters have a definite slant, i.e., they’re demonstrating a BIAS, in which case this puzzle has been brought to you by Click & Clack’s Director of Sycophantic Activities, Eileen Yurway!
Cracking: CENA (Actor John who has granted more than 650 wishes for the Make-A-Wish Foundation)
Slacking: IDNO about that
Sidetracking: more CENA
Adam Shapiro’s Fireball Crossword “Culture Club” – Jenni’s write-up
I was relieved to discover this puzzle did not require knowledge of 80s pop music. It did take some figuring out and this time it was completely worth it. I finished the puzzle correctly and then stared it for a while before my “aha!” moment – and a very satisfying one it was, too!
The theme answers are somewhat nonsensical.
Fireball, January 14, 2025, Adam Shapiro, “Culture Club,” solution grid
- 18a [Fresco painter’s querry?] is NEED A MURAL?
- 30a [Split the word after Puerto across two lines?] is HYPHENATE RICAN.
- 59a [“Post-mission questioning going great?”] is DEBRIEF ROCKING?
- 77a [Swamp statistician?] is FEN COUNTER.
Hmm. There’s a revealer in the middle: 46a [Question posed by a business bestseller…or by two pairs of answers in this grid] is WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? If we take EDAM out of 18a and pop it into 30a, we get NEURAL and HYPHENATE(E)D AMERICAN (I think there’s an extra E in there. I also know Peter doesn’t make mistakes. Someone help me). Take BRIE out of 59 and insert it into 77 and we have DEFROCKING and BRIEF ENCOUNTER. I liked this a lot and I will like it even more when I figure out what I was doing wrong. ETA: and I do! From commenter Z: the EDAM goes between the T and E in ATE, so HYPHENATed amERICAN
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: never heard of the Netflix dystopian film called UGLIES.
Larry Snyder’s USA Today Crossword, “Tailspin” — Emily’s write-up
Hang on!
USA Today, January 15, 2026, “Tailspin” by Larry Snyder
Theme: each themer includes a scrambled “tail”
Themers:
- 20a. [What a master criminal might craft for themselves], AIRTIGHTALIBI
- 35a. [“Quit loitering”], MOVEITALONG
- 54a. [Crushing it], WINNINGATLIFE
A variety of themers in this set with AIRTIGHTALIBI, MOVEITALONG, and WINNINGATLIFE. They are also all phrases which is another fun commonality. I needed a few crossings for each, since a few different ideas came to mind but once I had some markers then they were easy enough to complete. Anyone get them right away? I think it’s possible, seeing them filled in.
Favorite fill: GUAVA, SUNTEA, RAWBAR, and PEI
Stumpers: OVERDID (needed crossings), IMON (thought “line” and “I’m up” first), and CATBED (misdirected–focused on location instead of cat breed)
A tricker solve for me today, due to cluing as well as entires especially the phrases. I still enjoyed the solve and everything was fairly crossed, it just took me a bit more time. Love the grid design and the lengthy bonus fill. Lots of food entries and looks like we’re having mainly Italian today!
3.75 stars
~Emily
Michael Hobin’s LA Times Crossword – Gareth’s theme summary
In today’s extra-wide (to accommodate an 8-letter centrepiece) crossword, we have four two-part answers with parts with ZZ in them. The centrepiece is TWINSIES, which can be interpreted as TWIN ZEDS, if you pronounce it weirdly. So:
- [Humvee or motor home, typically], GASGUZZLER
- [Cookies-and-cream Dairy Queen treats], OREOBLIZZARDS
- [Exciting points in time], BUZZERBEATERS
- [Pi day celebration, perhaps], PIZZAPARTY
Gareth
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1853 “Stranger Things” — Eric’s Review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1853 — 1/15/26 (Click to Embiggen)
If the title led you to expect a theme riffing on the hit Netflix series that is in its final season, I hope you’re not too disappointed.
My week got off to a rocky start (literally) when I went skiing Monday with a friend. Not long after I got there, my ski hit a small bit of exposed rock and I slammed into the snow, which was not soft and fluffy but hard and icy. (This is another year of less-than-ideal skiing conditions in my part of the Rockies.) I noticed at lunch how swollen my left leg was and, though I’d been skiing for an hour or so since my fall, I decided to visit ski patrol. The EMT there sent me to the ER in town (I drove myself), and after some X-rays and an ultrasound, the ER doctor told me that the swelling was just a hematoma that will take a few weeks to heal. But I was in the ER for two or three hours, and didn’t much feel like blogging the Monday BEQ puzzle when I got home. My apologies to anyone who missed seeing that.
Anyway, because of my injury and regular insomnia, I’m a bit sleep-deprived and loopy today. That affected my experience solving this thing Brendan’s got for us, in which
”thing” is rearranged with circled letters showing us where:
- 18A [Guy’s weekend to a lake house, say] FISHING TRIP What’s the “guy” for? Surely some women fish.
- 24A [Perspicacious] INSIGHTFUL I don’t know why I have trouble remembering what that word means. Is it because it starts off a bit sweaty?
- 34A [Bad MF with supreme confidence and ego] KING SHIT That’s a new one for me.
- 42A [Stoner’s tokes] BONG HITS I lost a bit of time because I misread “tokes” as “jokes.” My second college roommate never left for class without at least a few bong hits. Did Arturo even once offer me one? No, he did not. But I’m not bitter about it.
- 51A [Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn] EARTH SIGNS It’s probably only because of crosswords that I know that the zodiac signs are grouped as earth, wind, water or fire signs. That knowledge does not alter my belief that they’re meaningless.
- 59A [Final zinger] PARTING SHOT
The thing about a theme that involves a word scrambled up and squashed into a longer word is that the scrambled letters don’t help all that much (though I did see fairly early on what the circled letters were doing, and I like that most of them are split between two words. One’s enjoyment of the theme depends highly on how interesting your theme answers are. These are mostly fine (FISHING TRIP and EARTH SIGNS don’t do much for me.)
Other stuff:
- 20A [Dial down the difficulty considerably] NERF I think this term comes from video gaming, a pastime that has never really appealed to me. I learned of it from crosswords.
- 23A [“Getting Killed” band] GEESE I don’t know the band, the album or the song. The song of that name doesn’t do much for me, but it isn’t awful. (I have terrible rhythm, and to me, it sounds like the players are not in time. Maybe I’m wrong and there are complex polyrhythms going on.)
- 44A [Folded and stuffed food] OMELET I kept thinking of tacos or burritos (which of course are rolled).
- 1D [“Live at the Acropolis” new ager] YANNI A gimme though I’m not sure I’ve ever heard his music.
- 9D [British actress Diana] RIGG I put Emma Peel’s portrayer in and took her out when the crosses didn’t seem to cooperate.
- 19D [Magazine publisher with a mansion, for short] Hugh HEFner, once publisher of Will Shortz’ employer, Games magazine.
- 31A [Competition with ski superpipe and snowmobile freestyle events] X GAMES The summer X Games were in Austin once when I couldn’t take time off work. I had to go blocks out of my way to get to my office. And no one offered me a bong hit.
- 36A [Some concert performers people see in a new light?] HOLOGRAMS Cute clue. The appeal of those kinds of shows is lost on me.
NYT: My hint for constructors — sometimes you might have an idea that seems clever in theory, but in practice is impossible to implement cleanly. The fact that certain letters had to be circled so that the solver can see what’s going on is a good sign that this one should have been set aside. It ends up being a feat of construction that is a drag for the solver. This solver, anyway.
I thought it was okay – though not especially challenging for a Thursday. The three themers are sufficiently in the language (for me anyway) that it was clear what was missing from each. By the time I got to SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND, SWEAT and SENSE were already in place, which ruled out rebuses in the circles.
The gimmick helped a little bit with the solve – I didn’t know IRENE at 38-A, and the theme got me the first “E.” Most of the cluing was pretty straightforward.
My mother did a lot of sewing, so the phrase “bias cut” – cutting fabric at 45* to the weave – was familiar. So that’s the way I interpreted BIAS in the revealer. But I kinda like ZDL’s alternative of taking BIAS as “slant.”
Agree with ZDL on ID NO. Not only is that an ugly abbreviation, I wouldn’t refer to that as an “ID” number – it’s my driver’s license number.
I love to complain about awkward themes but IMO this is not one of them. It was immediately clear what was happening with the circles.
Puzzle: Fireball; Rating: 4 stars
@Jenni – HYPEN ATE RICAN – the EDAM goes between the T and E in ATE, so HYPHENATed amERICAN
Oh, duh. Thank you.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 1.5 stars
ORONO/LYN crossing DARYL, UTA HAGEN crossing AKRON/CINNA, and then there is ASHTABULA, with a population lower than a certain Boston suburb we all know.
Also the rebus doesn’t work on the website.
The WSJ app doesn’t support rebuses. Never has. The Across Lite version here does thanks to the manual labor of Glenn, unsung commenter.
Is the Across Lite version on Fiend the same version I access through Black Ink? I seem to get a lot of the bells and whistles like the hat animation from yesterday’s NYT
I don’t know about Black Ink. I generate the version for Fiend, but it’s linked to by many other sites. It’s possibly the one Black Ink uses, but I don’t know for sure.
I think it may be. I couldn’t get the WSJ puzzle recently when others couldn’t here. When you said it was available, I could.
Either way, thank you for your efforts. A lot of people benefit from what you do
Thanks. And lots of people have contributed to the effort. In addition to Glenn, who is quick when a rebus appears, the converter software has had many contributors. Foremost is Alex Boisvert, the original author of the code. Joon Pahk maintained it for a while before I took it over.
Keeping it working is actually fun — sort of like solving a puzzle at times. The WSJ works with a third-party in the UK that supports their app. With so many moving parts, things are pretty “brittle.” But I enjoy the challenge.
I got ASHTABULA from Bob Dylan: lyrics to “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” on Blood on the Tracks, where it rhymes with Honolulu with a slurred A as the final sound.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 4.5 stars
WSJ was extremely easy for anyone who lives in reality and doesn’t spend the bulk of their time staring at a device.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 3.5 stars
Agreed. The plethora of names up top marred an otherwise-clever puzzle. Crossing names should be a mortal sin. That lowered my rating by at least a half star.
I knew Ashtabula because it’s the name of the possibly-obsolete one-piece bicycle crankarm assembly found on the cheapest department store bikes. An Ashtabula crank was god-awful heavy.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
I got the gist of the theme and the circled letters were helpful. A lot of the other fill was less than great, though. Everyone’s already mentioned IDNO, but also ONENIL and ONEILL right next to each other… and do they even sell BVDs anymore?
NYT: Time for a pet-peeve airing. 28a [*24/7/365] ALL DAY EVERY DAY.
I’ve no issue with the answer, but the commonly-quipped clue phrase irks me. “…7/365” are the same units. It should be 24/7/52! Or if not that, 24/365. The latter isn’t so mellifluous, but 24/7/52 is at least as easy to say as 24/7/365; it’s just a matter of habit.
Best argument, I believe, is for just 24/7. There are more than 52 weeks in a year, and some years have more than 365 days. But 24/7/365 is in the language, and I suspect the 365 is there basically for emphasis.
NYT: I thought this puzzle was wonderful, despite some of the small points mentioned in these comments. Most of the fill was pretty smooth, and the CONFIRMATION BIAS theme and the way it was handled were so clever.
Puzzle: Universal; Rating: 2.5 stars
Thank you Ryan – I also forgot to read the title, and instead of thinking any longer about it, I came to see if someone else did! As soon as you pointed out the title, all the answers unscrambled in my head.
I agree that this theme is a bit tortured – all the clues and answers work sort of differently? And scrambled answers with some missing letters sometimes doesn’t really invoke dancing for me.
Puzzle: Universal; Rating: 5 stars
DINE AND DITCH?
Uni … Loved the IYKYK reference in your review, Eric. Mary Queen of Arkansas is also near the top of my list of Queen Marys. It was recorded a little more than 52 years ago. Thoughts like this always take me aback. When “Greetings from Asbury Park” was released, comparable legendary musicians from 52 years before were the likes of Paul Whiteman, Eubie Blake, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.
Thanks.
Born to Run was my real introduction to Springsteen. It can be bombastic, but it’s one of the best-sequenced albums I know.
We were lucky enough to see him in a fairly small venue in San Antonio, on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. Great show.