WSJ (Contest) Grid: untimed; Meta: 15 minutes 
[4.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “A Matter of Degree” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for a well-known magazine. It took me a while to find all of the theme entries (the first four were obvious based on their location and length): there were seven. LESE and ESSE unlocked it for me: each themer contained a secondary intercardinal direction (TIL that term):
WSJ Contest – 06.07.2026
- LESE: ___-majesté -> ESE
- CROSSWORD: You’re doing one now -> SSW
- DAWNWELLS: She played Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island” -> WNW
- SPANNER: Wrench, to Brits -> NNE
- ARCHENEMY: The Joker, to Batman -> ENE
- ANNWILSON: Lead singer on “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You” -> NNW
- ESSE: To be, to Tiberius -> SSE
That left one missing direction: WSW, which is contained our contest answer: NEWSWEEK. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Before seeing LESE and ESSE, I thought maybe it’d just be a magazine with a direction. My first thought was ESSENCE. But fortunately I waited for the other shoe to drop.
I spotted six secondary intercardinal directions but missed the one in SPANNER. I still thought that central answer was important and I decided you had to “span the grid” in order to solve the meta. As a result, I spent a lot of time plotting the directions from the center of the grid to see which squares they intersected at the outer edges. Obviously, no luck. If I had noticed the seventh, I might have realized I needed to look for the missing one. A very clever puzzle!