LAT tk (Stella) rate it
Newsday tk (Kyle) rate it
NYT 6:05 (Amy) 
[3.50 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
Universal tk (Adam S) rate it
USA Today tk (ZEB) rate it
WSJ tk (Kyle) rate it
Daniel Bodily’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 6/6/26 – no. 0606
Easier for me than the Friday puzzle was. Go figure!
This 60-worder has wide-open corners with roughly 6×8 white spaces. A grid like that will generally contain some clunky fill to get everything to hold together.
Fave fill: SCHMEARS, UHAUL VAN, stepmom MOMALA Kamala Harris, PRESTIGE, KING-SIZE, PIE FIGHT, WAYFARER.
Entries that feel a little off to me include BURN SAGE, ATE CAKE, NETTER, DEARIE ME, SNEES, GETS TAN, TSETSE. AMENDMENT I is another way to refer to the First Amendment, but does anyone call it “amendment one” rather than “the First Amendment”?
New to me: 4D. [Hindu clerk], MUNSHI. Curious to know if this is everyday vocab in India. Wonder how many constructors have this in their word list!
Three more things:
- 2D. [Mexican fried pastry often covered in cinnamon sugar], CHURRO. Technically, churros originated in Spain and Portugal and they got colonized to places the Spaniards and Portuguese invaded.
- 28D. [School memento], CLASS PIN. I don’t remember that from high school and college in the 1980s. eBay has a bunch of vintage class pins. When’s the last time you saw a school touting class pins?
- 29D. [Doc’s license plate in “Back to the Future”], OUTATIME. Eww. First, if you’re going to use that phrase, it’s “outta.” Second, the movie trilogy takes place in California, which has long had an 7-character limit for plates. They’re considering going up to 8 now, but the movie people should’ve devised a plausible vanity plate for Doc.
A feat to fill a grid that looks like this, but the fill compromises that a challenging grid generally entails make the result less fun for me as a solver. 3.5 stars from me.
NW of the NYT stopped me dead. Got the rest of the puzzle but just stared at that section forever. Couldn’t see SUBPAR or ROSINED, didn’t know BURN SAGE (I was expecting a word in another language) or ELSTON. Eventually looked up synonyms of “deficient” and put in SUBPAR, but still stuck. Looked up ELSTON, then got ROSINED. And I still couldn’t see BURN SAGE (MUNSHI was just 6 random letters as far as I was concerned). I was thinking BURSSAGE or some such random word I’d never know. Tried random letters until the puzzle told me I was done.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
Exactly the same here. Flew through the SW, got the SE and NE with only a little difficulty, and then the NW was a mess. I had to look up the Stravinsky quote to get it all to fall into place.
I still liked it but I guess that’s the downside of grids like this. It’s like solving four separate smaller grids.