AV Club 8:30 (Amy) rate it
LAT tk (Gareth) rate it
NYT 5:46 (Amy) rate it
The New Yorker tk (Jim Q) rate it
Universal tk (pannonica) rate it
USA Today tk (Emily) rate it
WSJ tk (Eric) rate it
Jonathan Raksin’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 6/17/26 – no. 0617
RIFFLE SHUFFLES are the name of the game. If you pretend the letters of GOOFOFFS, CONSOLES, and STONEPIT are playing cards, and you do a riffle shuffle to intersperse them, the letters are redistributed so that the shaded letters that used to be the first four letters are now the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th letters, while the unshaded second half become the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th letters. The shuffled words are SET POINT, COOLNESS, and … still GOOFOFFS! fun violation of the usual proscription against repeated entries.
Fave fill: ENCANTO, SHORT CON (don’t we all prefer the drama of a long con, though?), Paul MESCAL (still need to see Hamnet).
Three more things:
- 1A. [Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say], MISCAST. The Reacher character is written as a tall, beefy guy. Tom Cruise is something like 5’8″.
- 8A. [App brought back by Microsoft in 2024], MSN. There was an MSN app? And it went away? And then it came back? All this happened without my being aware it existed.
- 22A. [Laterite, for example], ORE. Never heard of it, but minerals ending with -ite are generally ores when they’re found in crossword clues. There are plenty of -ite minerals (calcite and quartzite, to name two) that aren’t ores, though.
Four stars from me.
Enrique Henestroza Anguiano’s AV Club Classic crossword, “Riders on Parade”—Amy’s recap
AV Club Classic crossword solution, 6/17/26 – “Riders on Parade”
Took me a while to figure out the circled letters and how to enter the theme answers. The circled letters spell out P-R-I-D-E, and the longer answers beneath them detour up and back down.
- 16a. [Brew offering from Sapporo or Hitachino], JA, float up to P, bounce back down to the A, NESE BEER. Or JAPANESE BEER.
- 24a. [Like one-sided relationships with celebrities], PARASOCIAL. PA, up to R, back down to RASOCIAL.
- 29a. [Occasion for a ceremonial first pitch], OPENING DAY.
- 39a. [It holds zeroa, beitzah, maror, karpas, and haroset], SEDER PLATE.
- 46a. [“Coco” song with the lyric “For even if I’m far away, I hold you in my heart”], REMEMBER ME.
- 53a. [June parade vehicle, or what you have to get up on (and down from) five times in this puzzle], PRIDE FLOAT.
Fave fill: DON’T EVEN, GO DEEP.
Honest clue: 2d. [Org. once committed to clean air], EPA. These days, more committed to watering down regulations to please corporations.
Four stars from me.