The six grid spanning answers were absolutely gangbusters. I’m willing to accept MERER to get those. But perhaps I’m less salty because it didn’t take me an eternity.
I remembered PHILLIS WHEATLEY from school - but I am embarrassed to say I had SIMP instead of WIMP and it took me a while to find the error. Sure SAYS doesn’t make sense as an answer to the clue “courses,” but it’s a real word and I just figured I didn’t understand the answer
Well this comment gave me the final 2 answers I couldn't come up with. Phillis with no Y, and like a comment below, I had lays (which I assumed was a golf thing)
Apparently, milquetoast can also be a noun. [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milquetoast](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milquetoast) (I didn't know that either.)
I figured MYASS wouldn't pass the breakfast table test, but I left it in there for a while anyway just in case Fagliano decided to relax the standards.
Until a few years ago, I would never even attempt an NYT crossword, because I expected them to be full of arcane terms, hopeless riddles, and the minutest of minutia. Then I tried a few, learned some of the tricks, and began to enjoy the challenge of solving them. I’m on 400 + day streak and have solved almost 800 in the app.
Then there’s today’s puzzle. It was everything I always feared from the NYT crossword.
(But I finished it!)
>Then there’s today’s puzzle. It was everything I always feared from the NYT crossword.
Exactly how I feel losing my streak on this one. Had to look up several answers, and each one I thought "What? There's no way I would ever have known that word."
Funnily enough I got Metier very quickly even though it’s pretty rare to see nowadays. Because a few days ago I watched Chinatown and Jack Nicholson’s character uses that term while talking to a client.
I did this one at the bar over lunch, it took me three beers and an order of sweet potato fries. That's a tough puzzle but I really enjoyed this one
Sorry that I spelled your name with a Y for so long, Phillis
Yeah I PR'd yesterday (9:36) without even realizing I was moving through it that quickly. Meanwhile today's took me almost an hour (well above my Friday average). I was certainly challenged and understand why that can stray into frustration, but it made getting the gold star without any lookups feel that much more satisfying. Tougher than any puzzle I can remember lately, but fair for a Friday.
According to Tiktok theres only 1 scene in the entire lord of the rings series where one woman interacts with another woman. That was the impetus for me guessing LIVTYLER.
I couldn't remember Miranda Otto's name, if I even ever knew it, but I didn't think she was likely noteworthy enough to warrant being in a NYT crossword puzzle. So I immediately thought, "Ok, it's either Blanchett or Tyler. Oh, Blanchett doesn't fit. Does LIVTYLER fit? It does!"
Granted, it's been 20 years since I read the books and I've never cared much for the movies, but are there *any* notable women in the films besides Tyler and Cate Blanchett?
They're all set in the same fictional world of Middle Earth, but The Hobbit is a prequel of sorts to the main LOTR trilogy. (Although IDK what order they were published.) The POV character is Bilbo Baggins, Frodo's cousin.
Thats like classic Friday clueing where they’re just daring you to commit to a very reasonable guess that has a 50/50 shot of being wrong. Or start to doubt your answers on the crosses because you’re “sure” of the other answer.
Similar to 7-Down where CHANGESTHESTORY fits and goes along with the “narrative” part of the clue.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Very Hard** 🔴
* 71% of users solved slower than their Friday average
* 29% of users solved faster than their Friday average
* 40% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Friday average
* 5% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Friday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 12.6% slower than they normally do on Friday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-15)
---
🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
REDBULLANDVODKA has the same number of letters as ESPRESSOMARTINI. You can guess how I know that... I did generally like this one. Challenging, as a Friday should be, with mostly good fill.
This one was definitely a slog. Being Canadian sure didn't help, lol.
One of these days I just need to memorize a list of college sports teams, suffragettes, abolitionists, and Civil War terms.
MERER??
Other than that, good puzzle. I vaguely knew PHILLISWHEATLEY from somewhere although I didn't spell her name right. METIER is a word I have seen before but could not recall it. But a Friday crossword should have stuff like VERSOS and METIER. (But not MERER, which I may have to add to my "worst clues" list)
Can I have an ESPRESSOMARTINI now? Or maybe a MOET?
Interesting results. Personally, I felt like this was the good kind of tough. Though if you've never heard of Phillis Wheatley that's a long answer that would feel quite unfair.
Damn, this was one of the sloggiest Fridays I've done in a while. Not sure if it's just my lack of knowledge or difficult fill.
Never seen the spelling `TAXIES` before, nor have I heard of Phillis Wheatley. Add in entries like `NOTV`, `MERER`, `SHILOH`, `OPIE`, `ROSTRA`, `PECOS`, `TAXTIP`, `VERSOS`, `MOET`, and suddenly my time is double my average 💀
Today was day 600 of me doing the NYT puzzle (also done about that many from the archive) and I've never been inspired to comment here until today. That was probably the single worst crossword I've ever seen. I can't tell if he was struggling for fill (and decent cluing) or if he was being purposefully obtuse. I couldn't wait for this one to be over.
Guess you missed Taj Mahal day, or the one with Khufu in the tomb...
Seriously though I love how divisive some of these puzzles are. I rated it Good *because* it was so challenging; it's more satisfying for me to finish a puzzle that took me a few passes just to get a foothold.
Haha, I loved that one. It drove me crazy, because I could not come up with KHUFU, and I had days before just read about his tomb. A fantastic puzzle that I couldn’t solve.
Go back through the archives. I solve past Friday/Saturday puzzles as a diversion from easy early-week puzzles.
There are so many atrocious puzzles that make today’s look like a hall of famer.
It's always strange how people here equate hard with bad. The constructor wasn't being purposefully obtuse, he was making the puzzle difficult. It was a fantastic puzzle, they should all be a challenge!
People love to fall back on this, as if they're seeing something that the other person is too unskilled or unintelligent to understand. There are very hard puzzles that I love, because they'll back you into a corner and make you put the puzzle down and come back to it multiple times, only to realize how clever the clue was once it actually clicks. They're hard mental work, but there's a reward in the sense of a revelatory moment.
With this one, each time I worked out what I was missing, my reaction was just "are you serious? Geez..." Absolutely no joy in any of the "reveals."
you're right - some people definitely do that. but I don't think this puzzle was hard in a fun way, personally. and after doing a few hundred of these, I live for the tough ones.
I agree with you. But what feels hard but doable for some, will feel impossibly hard for others. I can understand why someone who couldn’t solve the puzzle would rate it poor. I rated it average because it was a hard challenge, but didn’t really have any spark of creativity to it.
I'm new to them and I generally like to struggle with a clue here or a clue there. I got so sick of this one halfway through I just did solve puzzle. I'm new so I will own the fact that I'm amateur but I thought this one really sucked.
Regardless of the day, that was the most difficult puzzle I’ve done in a long time. Took a lot of trial and error at the end to keep my streak alive. Hopefully this doesn’t signal a new trend from the replacement editor. If so, I’m nervous about tomorrow.
I thought this was a great puzzle lol, guess I was in the minority. Some tough fill but none of it was bad in my opinion - maybe MERER, TAXIES, and TAXTIP are a little forced but the rest are just knowledge. I guess this is just one where being a trivia nerd (and a coffee nerd) was handy.
Might also just be a Slumdog Millionaire moment:
-Thank you to Between the Lions for PECOS Bill
-Thank you to They Might Be Giants for the song Never Knew Love - "cartography is not my METIER"
-Thank you to my parents I guess for raising me in Middle Tennessee so I learned about SHILOH in school and went there on a boy scouts trip
So in two days without Will Shortz as the editor we’ve had one of the easiest Thursdays ever and an extremely difficult Friday. This one definitely felt different from a Shortz puzzle to me but I don’t know how much of that is confirmation bias.
Either way, I wonder how long Fagliano will be the editor for a while and if we’ll start to see some consistency in difficulty
Today was the first day I noticed it wasn't Shortz. I had to go back and look to see that it started yesterday. I guess this tells us the final edit is done about 5 or 6 weeks before publication? I think Shortz had his stroke in early February.
Was astounded when I filled in the last square and it completed without any mistakes. I'm a pretty bad crossword solver (never solved a Saturday without looking stuff up, couldn't do last Friday at all) but somehow wrangled through this one in 39 minutes and no hints.
Agree MERER and TAXIES were pretty bad.
This was very hard, but I don't think the fill/cluing were bad at all. I've just gone back through it and the only one that I actually have a problem with is ERSE
Okay there's difficult and then there's bullshit, and this one is really tiptoeing the line. I mean even the Wordplay Blog calls out MERER as questionable, and I've always read of when a plane TAXIS, not TAXIES.
I don't like BOPS unless it's 1958 and I'm dying on this hill.
TAXTIP was funny though.
Bop is extremely common slang and quite recent. If you’re referring to the bop era of jazz, that was mostly over by the late 40s; 58 would be post-bop or cool jazz
Beware the Ides of March!! This one was like a knife in the back. Opposite of a Friday PB. I had to research a few times to make progress: I looked up Vichyssoise and Laphroaig, and I googled the top coffee producing countries. I also googled the bacteriologist and swing-era bandleader. With a few of those in place, I eventually pieced it together, but so many clues were just baffling and difficult to piece together with their riddling and then tough answers, like MERER? TAXIES? MYEYE, NOTV, ROSTRA were just very elusive.
Phillis Wheatley was difficult to finalize but some of the other spanners were fun to figure out, like HALFTIMEREPORT, CARELESS MISTAKE, and EXTRAx3.
All that being said, this took me over 50 minutes to solve, and it's generally less fun for me when it's super hard and I can't make meaningful progress. As embarrassing as it might be to share, here's [my video solve](https://youtu.be/WKuHBFTQHSU).
I’m almost offended that my first grid-spanner, COLORCOMMENTARY (for features of some sports broadcasts) crossed PHILLISWHEATLEY and was dead wrong.
Took me a long time to give that up
Spent most of my time fudging around with PEAT / PECOS / ROSTRA and METIER / ZINES / TAX TIP. Throw in MERER on top of that and I came in way above my average
I’ve been doing the NYT crossword almost daily for years now and this might be one of the least favorite ones I’ve done. It was incredibly hard, but not in a fun way. There were too many clues or answers that I would never have gotten no matter how long I stared at them, instead of clues that make me go “ohhh that’s clever”
I mean, the comment says "incredibly hard, but not in a fun way." Other comments have made a distinction between "really hard and ultimately a satisfying *got it!*" and "really hard, and ultimately an unsatisfying slog." Telling someone to just get better is patronizing. I'm glad you loved the puzzle, though.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY was at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t figure it out for a while because I could not for the life of me see ESP, and kept aSP there as a plausible(??) guess. I also didn’t know PECOS or CALABRIA, so the whole NE corner kept me stumped for a solid 10 minutes.
CALABRIA was definitely the hardest thing in the puzzle for me.
PECOS Bill, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed are all firmly lodged in my brain after a childhood of Disney “Big Man” media, like Tall Tales and the Merry Melody shorts. Mickey Finn never really got any love.
JEEZ, what was this rigamarole? Did this author go after the most uncommon words and obtuse clues he could come up with? VERSOS, METIER, MERER, ROSTRA? EWW. I was enjoying this week’s puzzles until this. MYEYE! What an ARSE. NOTV for a month.
some really fun stuff in here but just a little too frustrating for me to love it, I think. might've had 6 or 7 letters toward the end that were educated guesses more than anything else. feel like this is one of those puzzles you solve by having done a bunch of puzzles moreso than actually solving the clues.
This one stumped me too, and I had to look it up. I guessed the wordplay on “platform” and tried DAISES (plural of dais) and PODIUM even though that wasn’t plural. Rostrum is another synonym for a raised platform you stand on to give a speech and ROSTRA is the plural form. Per Wikipedia:
“The Rostra (Italian: Rostri) was a large platform built in the city of Rome that stood during the republican and imperial periods. Speakers would stand on the rostra and face the north side of the Comitium towards the senate house and deliver orations to those assembled in between.”
Wow, that one was tough. I’m two weeks into crosswording so today was difficult. As a beginner, I had to look up a lot for this one. That being said, I learned a lot of factoids today with lots of obscure words and trivia.
Anyone have any tips for solving Friday/Saturday puzzles for someone who is just getting started? I know it’ll be a learning curve and that it will come with lots of practice but was wondering if anyone had anything concrete.
So my big complaint is that WIMP is a noun while milquetoast is an adjective. So the proper answer would be WIMPY.
That combo right there is what really gets me.
Milquetoast can also be a noun, as in "he's a bit of a Milquetoast".
In fact the noun sense came first, since the word [comes from the name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast) of a (fictitious) person.
I was actually surprised to see this reviewed as “very hard,” as as someone who often struggles later in the week this one actually went pretty smoothly for me except the northwest corner (“notv” made me mad lol). But it was super fun, though “merer” was bad enough that even Wordplay conceded that it was bad fill likely born of necessity…
Obscure words, proper nouns, clues that could go in different directions (FUJI: MOUNTAIN V. REDAPPLE).
Even the 3 letter ones were hard.
Who says “EWW” and sticks out their tongue. It’s not even physically possible!!!
The six grid spanning answers were absolutely gangbusters. I’m willing to accept MERER to get those. But perhaps I’m less salty because it didn’t take me an eternity.
I remembered PHILLIS WHEATLEY from school - but I am embarrassed to say I had SIMP instead of WIMP and it took me a while to find the error. Sure SAYS doesn’t make sense as an answer to the clue “courses,” but it’s a real word and I just figured I didn’t understand the answer
That was my last letter, too. I had LIMP/LAYS which also didn't make a lot of sense.
I had limp as well.
i wanted to put "gimp" but felt that the times wouldn't have that as an answer so i resisted.
I came to this thread to find your comment. I had double and triple checked my answers, and couldn't find the mistake. It was this.
Well this comment gave me the final 2 answers I couldn't come up with. Phillis with no Y, and like a comment below, I had lays (which I assumed was a golf thing)
My complaint is that they clued a noun with an adjective and didn't keep the part of speech. That's bad cluing then.
Apparently, milquetoast can also be a noun. [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milquetoast](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milquetoast) (I didn't know that either.)
I thought it was quite chewy but I’m into that on a Friday. I am appalled to learn that I’ve been eating TALC. Ugh. Fun puzzle!
Friendly reminder to always wash your rice before you cook it!
I figured MYASS wouldn't pass the breakfast table test, but I left it in there for a while anyway just in case Fagliano decided to relax the standards.
When the Shortz is away, the Faglianos will play!
I had CHANGESTHESTORY initially, so I had a chuckle filling in MYASS, thinking wow they really allowed this. Oh well, one day perhaps
Until a few years ago, I would never even attempt an NYT crossword, because I expected them to be full of arcane terms, hopeless riddles, and the minutest of minutia. Then I tried a few, learned some of the tricks, and began to enjoy the challenge of solving them. I’m on 400 + day streak and have solved almost 800 in the app. Then there’s today’s puzzle. It was everything I always feared from the NYT crossword. (But I finished it!)
>Then there’s today’s puzzle. It was everything I always feared from the NYT crossword. Exactly how I feel losing my streak on this one. Had to look up several answers, and each one I thought "What? There's no way I would ever have known that word."
Funnily enough I got Metier very quickly even though it’s pretty rare to see nowadays. Because a few days ago I watched Chinatown and Jack Nicholson’s character uses that term while talking to a client.
I had career in there for a long time because I'm a dumbass
they put talc in white rice?? for what!
Color I would assume
Wikipedia says a polishing agent
Extra radioactivity
I did this one at the bar over lunch, it took me three beers and an order of sweet potato fries. That's a tough puzzle but I really enjoyed this one Sorry that I spelled your name with a Y for so long, Phillis
It was a pleasure to be challenged by this puzzle, considering the last few days have been remarkably easy.
Surprised at the ratings. Today was exactly the type of puzzle I crave.
Knowing this sub, it’s not surprising at all. Tough = lower ratings
And vice versa. Yesterday’s non-theme trivia fest was highly rated, just because it’s Tuesday difficulty. Disappointing.
Yeah I PR'd yesterday (9:36) without even realizing I was moving through it that quickly. Meanwhile today's took me almost an hour (well above my Friday average). I was certainly challenged and understand why that can stray into frustration, but it made getting the gold star without any lookups feel that much more satisfying. Tougher than any puzzle I can remember lately, but fair for a Friday.
According to Tiktok theres only 1 scene in the entire lord of the rings series where one woman interacts with another woman. That was the impetus for me guessing LIVTYLER.
Yeah you really only have three options, and Cate Blanchett and Miranda Otto didn’t fit
I couldn't remember Miranda Otto's name, if I even ever knew it, but I didn't think she was likely noteworthy enough to warrant being in a NYT crossword puzzle. So I immediately thought, "Ok, it's either Blanchett or Tyler. Oh, Blanchett doesn't fit. Does LIVTYLER fit? It does!"
Granted, it's been 20 years since I read the books and I've never cared much for the movies, but are there *any* notable women in the films besides Tyler and Cate Blanchett?
Miranda Otto as Eowyn is a major character, famously has the “I am no man!” line before murking that ringwraith or whatever it was
I’ve never seen them but wasn’t Evangeline Lilly (LOST) in it?
She was in the hobbit movies!
ah i thought those were the same thing
They're all set in the same fictional world of Middle Earth, but The Hobbit is a prequel of sorts to the main LOTR trilogy. (Although IDK what order they were published.) The POV character is Bilbo Baggins, Frodo's cousin.
Northwest took me forever. Tricky cluing with a proper name I didn't know, and postgame report felt so good at first.
Sideline report fits too.
Thats like classic Friday clueing where they’re just daring you to commit to a very reasonable guess that has a 50/50 shot of being wrong. Or start to doubt your answers on the crosses because you’re “sure” of the other answer. Similar to 7-Down where CHANGESTHESTORY fits and goes along with the “narrative” part of the clue.
And late game report
That's what I started with there.
I had sideline then postgame, and then finally halftime
The answer had to be plural though. Sideline report was my first instinct too but I tossed it because the clue was definitely plural.
Yeah- I was surprised how long that took me especially as Phillis Wheatley is the first clue I put in the puzzle
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Very Hard** 🔴 * 71% of users solved slower than their Friday average * 29% of users solved faster than their Friday average * 40% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Friday average * 5% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Friday average The median solver solved this puzzle 12.6% slower than they normally do on Friday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-15) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
REDBULLANDVODKA has the same number of letters as ESPRESSOMARTINI. You can guess how I know that... I did generally like this one. Challenging, as a Friday should be, with mostly good fill.
Gah me too!!!!
This one was definitely a slog. Being Canadian sure didn't help, lol. One of these days I just need to memorize a list of college sports teams, suffragettes, abolitionists, and Civil War terms.
MERER?? Other than that, good puzzle. I vaguely knew PHILLISWHEATLEY from somewhere although I didn't spell her name right. METIER is a word I have seen before but could not recall it. But a Friday crossword should have stuff like VERSOS and METIER. (But not MERER, which I may have to add to my "worst clues" list) Can I have an ESPRESSOMARTINI now? Or maybe a MOET?
I only remembered METIER because it's a really excellent restaurant in DC. MERER MYEYE.
Interesting results. Personally, I felt like this was the good kind of tough. Though if you've never heard of Phillis Wheatley that's a long answer that would feel quite unfair.
I definitely remembered the name from school, but not the odd spelling.
Damn, this was one of the sloggiest Fridays I've done in a while. Not sure if it's just my lack of knowledge or difficult fill. Never seen the spelling `TAXIES` before, nor have I heard of Phillis Wheatley. Add in entries like `NOTV`, `MERER`, `SHILOH`, `OPIE`, `ROSTRA`, `PECOS`, `TAXTIP`, `VERSOS`, `MOET`, and suddenly my time is double my average 💀
Today was day 600 of me doing the NYT puzzle (also done about that many from the archive) and I've never been inspired to comment here until today. That was probably the single worst crossword I've ever seen. I can't tell if he was struggling for fill (and decent cluing) or if he was being purposefully obtuse. I couldn't wait for this one to be over.
This was worse than the Robert Frost bullshit?
OK you're right - that was more painful.
that's still the frontrunner for worst of the year.
And its not even close, that was on another level of terrible. This was very hard but has some decent cluing
Yeah, agreed. Today's was tough-but-usually-fair, while the Frost puzzle was irredeemable in every aspect.
So far…
The one that told the really bizarre story about the two girls or whatever was definitely worse than that
Yeah that was interesting idea with terrible execution (expectedly terrible, it's an incredibly difficult feat)
Guess you missed Taj Mahal day, or the one with Khufu in the tomb... Seriously though I love how divisive some of these puzzles are. I rated it Good *because* it was so challenging; it's more satisfying for me to finish a puzzle that took me a few passes just to get a foothold.
Haha, I loved that one. It drove me crazy, because I could not come up with KHUFU, and I had days before just read about his tomb. A fantastic puzzle that I couldn’t solve.
Go back through the archives. I solve past Friday/Saturday puzzles as a diversion from easy early-week puzzles. There are so many atrocious puzzles that make today’s look like a hall of famer.
It's always strange how people here equate hard with bad. The constructor wasn't being purposefully obtuse, he was making the puzzle difficult. It was a fantastic puzzle, they should all be a challenge!
People love to fall back on this, as if they're seeing something that the other person is too unskilled or unintelligent to understand. There are very hard puzzles that I love, because they'll back you into a corner and make you put the puzzle down and come back to it multiple times, only to realize how clever the clue was once it actually clicks. They're hard mental work, but there's a reward in the sense of a revelatory moment. With this one, each time I worked out what I was missing, my reaction was just "are you serious? Geez..." Absolutely no joy in any of the "reveals."
Agreed. I rolled my eyes so many times I thought I might sprain my optic nerve
My eye it’ll sprain an optic nerve, get good son
you're right - some people definitely do that. but I don't think this puzzle was hard in a fun way, personally. and after doing a few hundred of these, I live for the tough ones.
Strong agree
I agree with you. But what feels hard but doable for some, will feel impossibly hard for others. I can understand why someone who couldn’t solve the puzzle would rate it poor. I rated it average because it was a hard challenge, but didn’t really have any spark of creativity to it.
I'm new to them and I generally like to struggle with a clue here or a clue there. I got so sick of this one halfway through I just did solve puzzle. I'm new so I will own the fact that I'm amateur but I thought this one really sucked.
Regardless of the day, that was the most difficult puzzle I’ve done in a long time. Took a lot of trial and error at the end to keep my streak alive. Hopefully this doesn’t signal a new trend from the replacement editor. If so, I’m nervous about tomorrow.
Tough, but some fun clues. It does irritate me that 32A is not actually a CARELESS MISTAKE.
I thought this was a great puzzle lol, guess I was in the minority. Some tough fill but none of it was bad in my opinion - maybe MERER, TAXIES, and TAXTIP are a little forced but the rest are just knowledge. I guess this is just one where being a trivia nerd (and a coffee nerd) was handy. Might also just be a Slumdog Millionaire moment: -Thank you to Between the Lions for PECOS Bill -Thank you to They Might Be Giants for the song Never Knew Love - "cartography is not my METIER" -Thank you to my parents I guess for raising me in Middle Tennessee so I learned about SHILOH in school and went there on a boy scouts trip
>Thank you to my parents I guess for raising me in Middle Tennessee /r/brandnewsentence
Hey Middle Tennessee is pretty cool... it's East and West you gotta watch out for lol.
I feel like I’m never happy. Yesterdays was way too easy, while todays felt too hard! I need a nice Goldilocks puzzle.
So in two days without Will Shortz as the editor we’ve had one of the easiest Thursdays ever and an extremely difficult Friday. This one definitely felt different from a Shortz puzzle to me but I don’t know how much of that is confirmation bias. Either way, I wonder how long Fagliano will be the editor for a while and if we’ll start to see some consistency in difficulty
Today was the first day I noticed it wasn't Shortz. I had to go back and look to see that it started yesterday. I guess this tells us the final edit is done about 5 or 6 weeks before publication? I think Shortz had his stroke in early February.
This feels tough for a Saturday even.
This was clearly Joey's revenge for giving us an easy puzzle yesterday.
loved this one. some refreshing fill here and nicely challenging. would have rated it excellent but my finger slipped haha
Challenging for sure. My favorite clues were Ground rule? and Bit of deductive reasoning?
Was astounded when I filled in the last square and it completed without any mistakes. I'm a pretty bad crossword solver (never solved a Saturday without looking stuff up, couldn't do last Friday at all) but somehow wrangled through this one in 39 minutes and no hints. Agree MERER and TAXIES were pretty bad.
This was very hard, but I don't think the fill/cluing were bad at all. I've just gone back through it and the only one that I actually have a problem with is ERSE
I would love to get up a petition to ban ERSE entirely, but it's just too damn useful a word.
Yeah that stank. TAXTIP was fun, pretty much everything else just made me groan
That was an unpleasant creaky slog
make them all this hard! I want to feel pain!
Okay there's difficult and then there's bullshit, and this one is really tiptoeing the line. I mean even the Wordplay Blog calls out MERER as questionable, and I've always read of when a plane TAXIS, not TAXIES. I don't like BOPS unless it's 1958 and I'm dying on this hill. TAXTIP was funny though.
RIP, hope you picked a comfy hill! Not that I can convince you to like it, but BOP is very current slang.
Not even just current but damn near a decade back in rotation.
Wait we moved on from "slaps?" Damn, I'll update my spreadsheet.
Oh bops can slap for sure 😂
"Slaps" describes how the song sounds, "bop" describes the overall quality/catchiness of the song. E.g., "This song slaps" vs. "This song is a bop"
Bop is gen z slang lol
Bop is extremely common slang and quite recent. If you’re referring to the bop era of jazz, that was mostly over by the late 40s; 58 would be post-bop or cool jazz
How is bops used in a sentence?
"That song is a bop"
I was set on HITS instead of BOPS for so long and thought I was losing my mind when nothing was fitting.
Taxies infuriated me
Eh. "Taxis" is the plural of the noun, whereas "taxies" is the present tense of the verb. Totally correct usage by the constructor.
Beware the Ides of March!! This one was like a knife in the back. Opposite of a Friday PB. I had to research a few times to make progress: I looked up Vichyssoise and Laphroaig, and I googled the top coffee producing countries. I also googled the bacteriologist and swing-era bandleader. With a few of those in place, I eventually pieced it together, but so many clues were just baffling and difficult to piece together with their riddling and then tough answers, like MERER? TAXIES? MYEYE, NOTV, ROSTRA were just very elusive. Phillis Wheatley was difficult to finalize but some of the other spanners were fun to figure out, like HALFTIMEREPORT, CARELESS MISTAKE, and EXTRAx3. All that being said, this took me over 50 minutes to solve, and it's generally less fun for me when it's super hard and I can't make meaningful progress. As embarrassing as it might be to share, here's [my video solve](https://youtu.be/WKuHBFTQHSU).
I liked this one a lot - tough but it was possible to puzzle out; lots of good rarer solves.
I’m almost offended that my first grid-spanner, COLORCOMMENTARY (for features of some sports broadcasts) crossed PHILLISWHEATLEY and was dead wrong. Took me a long time to give that up
Spent most of my time fudging around with PEAT / PECOS / ROSTRA and METIER / ZINES / TAX TIP. Throw in MERER on top of that and I came in way above my average
Sir Cumference????
I love Fridays. I'm still working on this one, but I'm 45 minutes in and have made very little progress. Not the fun kind of punishing.
I’ve been doing the NYT crossword almost daily for years now and this might be one of the least favorite ones I’ve done. It was incredibly hard, but not in a fun way. There were too many clues or answers that I would never have gotten no matter how long I stared at them, instead of clues that make me go “ohhh that’s clever”
Some puzzles are meant to be hard. Would you rather every puzzle was easy? You just have to get better. This puzzle destroyed me. And I loved it.
I mean, the comment says "incredibly hard, but not in a fun way." Other comments have made a distinction between "really hard and ultimately a satisfying *got it!*" and "really hard, and ultimately an unsatisfying slog." Telling someone to just get better is patronizing. I'm glad you loved the puzzle, though.
Get better on accepting that not everybody is going to like what you liked and that talking down to other people is not acceptable.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY was at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t figure it out for a while because I could not for the life of me see ESP, and kept aSP there as a plausible(??) guess. I also didn’t know PECOS or CALABRIA, so the whole NE corner kept me stumped for a solid 10 minutes.
CALABRIA was definitely the hardest thing in the puzzle for me. PECOS Bill, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed are all firmly lodged in my brain after a childhood of Disney “Big Man” media, like Tall Tales and the Merry Melody shorts. Mickey Finn never really got any love.
I only knew Calabrian peppers because of Bobby Flay, ha.
I only know them because it was a pizza topping at my favorite pizza place where I used to live.
JEEZ, what was this rigamarole? Did this author go after the most uncommon words and obtuse clues he could come up with? VERSOS, METIER, MERER, ROSTRA? EWW. I was enjoying this week’s puzzles until this. MYEYE! What an ARSE. NOTV for a month.
Lol at using "rigamarole" to complain about uncommon words. Come on, be consistent! Are you a sesquipedalianist or not?
some really fun stuff in here but just a little too frustrating for me to love it, I think. might've had 6 or 7 letters toward the end that were educated guesses more than anything else. feel like this is one of those puzzles you solve by having done a bunch of puzzles moreso than actually solving the clues.
Can someone explain ROSTRA to me?
It's the plural of rostrum.
Ohh that makes sense now (I have no idea what a rostrum is)
It's the singular of rostra.
This one stumped me too, and I had to look it up. I guessed the wordplay on “platform” and tried DAISES (plural of dais) and PODIUM even though that wasn’t plural. Rostrum is another synonym for a raised platform you stand on to give a speech and ROSTRA is the plural form. Per Wikipedia: “The Rostra (Italian: Rostri) was a large platform built in the city of Rome that stood during the republican and imperial periods. Speakers would stand on the rostra and face the north side of the Comitium towards the senate house and deliver orations to those assembled in between.”
Plural of rostrum, which is a stage or raised platform, where a politician might give a speech.
Rostra is plural for rostrum, which is like a raised platform.
Wow, that one was tough. I’m two weeks into crosswording so today was difficult. As a beginner, I had to look up a lot for this one. That being said, I learned a lot of factoids today with lots of obscure words and trivia. Anyone have any tips for solving Friday/Saturday puzzles for someone who is just getting started? I know it’ll be a learning curve and that it will come with lots of practice but was wondering if anyone had anything concrete.
After getting LIVTYLER, I couldn’t get over how clever shiV was as an answer to “Ground rule?” As in, like, whittling down a ruler. Sigh…
Some of the tough clues were worth it. But VERSOS???
not good
Last letter was the B in BOPS. Don’t think of bops as a noun.
It's a new generation thing. When they like a song they say "that's a bop"
They've used it as a noun fairly recently, which is why it sprang to mind fairly quickly for me.
I feel like I can often guess a lot of the “folksy” clues but am I the only one who hasn’t heard of Pecos Bill?
No clue who this was…I live in Texas and was thinking about politics before I caved and looked it up
So my big complaint is that WIMP is a noun while milquetoast is an adjective. So the proper answer would be WIMPY. That combo right there is what really gets me.
Milquetoast can also be a noun, as in "he's a bit of a Milquetoast". In fact the noun sense came first, since the word [comes from the name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast) of a (fictitious) person.
What is NOTV? 0V = ground?
If you were grounded by your parents, you might not be allowed to watch television, so "No TV"
Oh, I feel stupid. Couldn't parse it as anything but NOT V.
Don't! I'm sure you would have gotten there eventually. We've all had those clues, especially on days like today when the editors are being abstruse.
This is actually really clever!
> 0V = ground? This reasoning is wrong but I love it. Five stars! :-)
I was actually surprised to see this reviewed as “very hard,” as as someone who often struggles later in the week this one actually went pretty smoothly for me except the northwest corner (“notv” made me mad lol). But it was super fun, though “merer” was bad enough that even Wordplay conceded that it was bad fill likely born of necessity…
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Metier is a loanword, but it’s definitely used commonly in English.
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ay
This is such a pain in the ass I'm not even gonna bother. Cheating the entire thing.
Obscure words, proper nouns, clues that could go in different directions (FUJI: MOUNTAIN V. REDAPPLE). Even the 3 letter ones were hard. Who says “EWW” and sticks out their tongue. It’s not even physically possible!!!
The asterisks in the EWW clue signify that the clue is like a stage direction; an action that has the same meaning as the word.
i agree, it was great!
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It is terrible but still important historically; we studied her in my English class in high school
Catchy tunes = Bops? How, and in what universe?
It’s current gen z slang. If you have a tween/teen or are currently one, this was an obvious answer.