Saturday, January 31, 2026

LAT 2:54 (Stella) [3.42 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
Newsday 5:35 (Matthew) [3.92 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
NYT 5:06 (Amy) [3.92 avg; 13 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Matthew) [2.67 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Matthew) [1.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
WSJ 16:12 (Jim Q) rate it

Nick Maritz’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap

NY Times crossword solution, 1/31/26 – no. 0131

Well! I wasn’t expecting this puzzle to feel more like a Friday, easier than yesterday’s puzzle was for me. 12a PEDIATRICIANS was a gimme, and then I worked the crossings and everything unfurled from there.

Fave fill: MARTIAL ARTS, PEDIATRICIANS, and VANILLA ICE CREAM stack; SANTA MONICA PIER and its ROLLER COASTER (who knew?) on a NEANDERTHAL (if you have HBO Max, check out the animated show Primal, featuring a neanderthal man and a female dinosaur who team up after losing their families); BASS LINE, CHIGNON, SPANIEL.

Three more things:

• 11D. [Herman ___, Dutch ophthalmologist known for his visual acuity testing], SNELLEN. The Snellen eye chart is named for him. Didn’t know he was Dutch and named Herman.
• 5D. [Bolognese, Parmesan, etc.], ITALIANS. You hungry now?
• 15D. [“Science is ___ that works”: Kurt Vonnegut], MAGIC. Good quote. I recently reread Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time since my teen years. Excellent read. What’s your favorite Vonnegut book?

Four stars from me.

Stan Newman’s Saturday Stumper Newsday crossword—Matt’s recap

Stan Newman’s Saturday Stumper Newsday crossword solution, 1/31/2026

Matt subbing in here for the Stumper, something different from my typical Sunday Washington Post puzzle. 

Stumpers usually fall for me depending on how quickly I commit to hunches. Even if they end up wrong, they help me see letter combinations that don’t work, and if they’re right, they’re in the grid earlier. 

This one played pretty easy as Stumpers go, and indeed it’s listed under Stan’s “Less Rough” moniker. I didn’t make many guesses and made fast progress in a few corners before I got a good enough foothold in the middle. Let’s dig in:

• 1a [Physician born in 2227] MCCOY. This was “who else could it be?” for me. Star Trek’s “Bones” was played by DeForest Kelly in the Original Series and by Karl Urban in the 2009s film
• 14a [Mecca near the Crockett Hotel] ALAMO. (Davy) “Crockett” perhaps an inroad here, but between the length and the letter combos with MCCOY, I plopped ALAMO in without much thought
• 19a [Letter ctr.] GPO. I’ve never paid much attention to the various *PO abbreviations. The crossings were reasonable enough.
• 22a [Never Tell Me the Odds podcaster] ESPN. This is – surprisingly! – a Star Wars-centered podcast (in reference to the Han Solo quote) rather than sports gambling.
• 24a [German Vollkornbrote, e.g.] RYES. Recognizing “brote” as German for “breads” helped a lot here. I won’t pretend to know “vollkorn” as “whole grain,” though it’s clear now.
• 29a [Bond and Powers] SPECIAL AGENTS. Pretty over the plate for a Stumper, no? Still, I could only drop the second word in until I got a few crossings, since there’s probably a few types of AGENTS that these two would fall under.
• 32a [Lower one’s voice?] BASSO PROFUNDO. As in “the voice of a lower one”. I myself am a tenor who sometimes pretends to be an alto. 
• 33a [Amazon MGM subsidiary] UNITED ARTISTS. Another one where the second word was clear but the full entry waited for crossings.
• 47a [Brownstone turned art museum] REHAB. I don’t know this.
• 50a [Brigadier at Second Bull Run] MEADE. Only so many five-letter names in the US Civil War
• 52a [Less than straight] SLY. I was a little thrown by “less than” here, but I can’t really quibble
• 53a [Street of fame is one] SKIER. This is in reference to Picabo Street, who retired 24 years ago. So.
• 10d [Nicely named former Archbishop of Manila, Jaime __] SIN. I cannot come up with a usage of “nice” that makes sense here, other than a desire to obfuscate by not using “ironically” or “inaptly”
• 21d [Adjective for the earliest talkies] PRECODE. In reference to the self-censoring “Hays Code” that limited movie content beginning in the ‘30s
• 25d [Family Fun Month] AUGUST. Another one that felt straightforward for a Stumper. There’s only one six-letter month.
• 32d [Five-sharp scale non-sharp] B NATURAL. I don’t really know my key signatures beyond four sharps or flats, but I had B in place, and I know that (in major scales) B# only appears in the seven-sharped key of C#, so it came together.
• 33d [Aftermaths] UPSHOTS. Your tolerance for dupes may vary, but I certainly noticed UPSHOTS and UPSTART very near each other.
• 39d [World capital at 12,000 feet] LA PAZ. Every time this clue or something like it comes around, I put in LHASA, which sits at 11,995 ft in Nepal . But it’s almost always LA PAZ, which sits at 11,980 ft in Bolivia. Alas.

EDIT: Lhasa is in Tibet! Which is why the answer is usually La Paz. Maybe today is the day I stop making that mistake!

• 41d [Snipe, e.g.] WADER. It’s a bird.

Cheers!

Mark Axel’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up

Los Angeles Times 1/31/26 by Mark Axel

I liked, if not loved, this puzzle. I enjoyed entries like JAVERT, JOB-HOP, AMAZON ECHO, LACE-FRONT, AYAHUASCA, SIDE-EYE, and especially SCALLION PANCAKE 😋. (You know how they say not to go grocery shopping when you’re hungry? Maybe I also should not solve while hungry, because now all I can think about is SCALLION PANCAKEs.) I was less into YOU’RE GONNA WANNA, which is essentially making a partial phrase into a marquee entry, ARE WE DONE (I feel like I’ve seen that one enough times now), and ROKU REMOTE, which felt like a mix of green paint and spon-con. (Yes, I realize I just listed AMAZON ECHO in my “likes” entries, but that seems like a branded item I’ve actually said out loud at least once, whereas ROKU REMOTE feels more contrived.) Also, JANE JETSON felt a bit dated to put in the key position of 1A. (Please correct me if The Jetsons is making a comeback.)

But I guess what turns this into a like-not-love, on reflection, is the clues. Unless I’m counting incorrectly, there’s only one question-mark clue (13D doesn’t count, as the QM isn’t there to indicate a pun). This is not to say that there was no wordplay in the puzzle — for example, 17A [Budget rentals] for MOVING VANS, in which deceptive capitalization hides that the brand Budget, and not a synonym for “low-priced,” is meant. I just could’ve used a little more wordplay of the kind that makes you chuckle.

Derek Ruttan’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Palette-able” — Jim Q’s write-up

THEME: Foods that begin with colors (placed in rainbow order)

Derek Ruttan’s Wall Street Journal Crossword “Palette-able” — 1/31/26 (Click to Embiggen)

THEME ANSWERS:

• RED ONION CHUTNEY
• ORANGE SLICE
• YELLOW BELL PEPPER
• GREEN OLIVE
• BLUE CHEESE
• INDIGO ROSE TOMATO
• VIOLET SALAD
• (revealer) TASTE THE RAINBOW

I don’t normally solve the Saturday WSJ, but I must admit, I had fun with this one. Sure a couple of frustrating moments- particularly with some names that I grappled with- but overall, enough bite to keep it interesting and enough smoothness to keep it solveable.

Indigo Rose Tomatos

Color/Food themes are nothing new, but I like the “rainbow connection” that I didn’t fully appreciate until uncovering the revealer, which was a very nice touch. That said,

Violet Salad

I’ve never heard of a VIOLET SALAD [Wildflower side dish] or the cumbersomely clued INDIGO ROSE TOMATO [Garden fruit whose unique color comes from the antioxidant anthocyanin]. I don’t have a jar of RED ONION CHUTNEY in my fridge either. But hey… maybe it’s a thing that’s all the rage with foodies. Who am I to say? I draw the line at [Briny bit on a pizza] for GREEN OLIVE though. Seems like there are SO many ways to clue that… makes me wonder why pizza? The only olives I’ve ever seen on pizzas are the (gross) black ones.

Anyway, none of that really detracts from the quality of the puzzle. In fact, the odder of the theme entries were the most interesting to uncover.

HANGUPS / NEW TO ME / MUSINGS:

• [Do ___ on (harm)] A JOB. That’s a weird partial. I needed like every cross. I’ve noticed that WSJ allows for more partials than most other publications I solve, but I don’t like them, and if a grid can’t do without them, I prefer ones that are solidly in (my) language.
• [Craters of the Moon National Monument site] IDAHO. Cool!
• [Garnish for an Old-Fashioned or Negroni] ORANGE SLICE. I think the whole slice of ORANGE is falling out of favor in the old fashioned these days. Now a big slab of the peal with its zest is more common from what I can tell (I do indeed enjoy my old fashioneds).
• [Smart reaction?] OUCH. As in “OUCH! That smarts!”
• [They may block for the QB] TES. Tight ends, I’m assuming. Looks weird to me, but I know next to nothing about football.  That made GATE LEG and BOLUSES quite difficult for me since those were new words/terms for me.
• [Milk, facetiously] MOO JUICE. I’ve heard this before. I can’t tell if I love it or hate it. Something about the phrase gives me the ick, but in a cutesy way.
• [Second-hand item?] WATCH. Indeed, a watch is an item with a second-hand.
• [Rangers work on it] ICE. Don’t quite get this… Are we talking about, like, forest rangers? Or the SUV?
• [Nodded] DOZED OFF. I initially thought that this wasn’t a clean substitution… but then I thought of The Raven: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping…” In that context, it is a clean substitution.
• [Ink spots?] PEN NIBS. Don’t know how I feel about this one. I don’t think of PEN NIBS often.
• [Wee] ITTY. I had ITSY, which led me to fill in FIRST for FIRTH and SOTO for SOHO. I like my accidental fill better, I think (FIRTH was a word somewhere in the attic of my brain).
• [Baked British fish dish] EEL PIE. No thank you.
• [“___ but a scratch” (Black Knight’s line in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”)] TIS.
  

  Current view. Beginnings of our Spamalot set. It will look amazing once it’s complete and those ugly red curtains are removed!

  I’m currently typing this while supervising my cast painting our set for Spamalot right now.

•  [The Beach Boys’ last hit] KOKOMO. Bummer that their last was that long ago!
• [“Sweat” playwright Nottage] LYNN. Loved seeing her name in the puzzle, and clued with one of the best plays I’ve seen in recent memory. If you are like me, and you have difficulty understanding the mindset of MAGA, this may offer a glimpse. Really an incredible play, written by a phenomenal playwright.