WSJ (Contest) Grid: 20 minutes; Meta: 5 more 
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Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Critical Position” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a word that might describe a critical situation.
Mike provided a thematic hint in the central entry: SECONDINCOMMAND, clued as Critical hierarchic position. The rest of the horizontal entries comprised the theme entries:
WSJ Contest – 01.25.2026
- PR(EDICT)ION: Early call
- MA(FIAT)IES: Mob connections
- B(ORDER)SON: Abuts
- LYN(DECRE)EK: Stream that flows into Lake Ontario near Toronto
Each themer contained a command:
- E[D]ICT
- F[I]AT
- O[R]DER
- D[E]CREE
The second letter in each command spells our contest solution DIRE. Solvers: please share your thoughts,
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4 stars
Clever and overall great fun. I even learned the meaning of factotum.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4 stars
Same here, knew the word but for some reason always thought it was a clerical position of some sort.
I believe 65A is OTTO and 58D is SETS.
Agree
Fixed, thanks!
Love Mike’s metas!! Fun one!!
Fun puzzle with a clever meta. Didn’t take me too long to Voir Dire.
I took the first letters and the “O” from second in command and came up with:
Efood.
I figured that would be a critical situation. When I looked it up, I came up with “Two popular options in the market today are StackFood and eFood” Efood sure sounded critical to me.
Puzzle: WSJ (Contest); Rating: 4.5 stars
I started out thinking that all the first letters (EFCOD) would be DEFCON if you moved the D to the front and found an N from somewhere. As in turns out, NOONE at 40D allows us to create DEFCON ONE, with an extra O. I kicked that idea aside because the instructions say “a word” and moved on. Interesting, though.
It only took me about ten more minutes to see that the center themer was actually a hint!