Some good crosswords from January
Birds! Doritos! Etc.!
Hello, and welcome to the inaugural installment of Quite Vexing! We’ll be kicking off the newsletter by talking about some of my favorite crosswords of the recent past, whether they come from a massive news corporation or a Blogspot page with 43 views. Although this post is coming to you in March, these grids are all from January 2025, because… that’s when I started writing this post, which, as you’ll soon see, got way out of hand. (So out of hand that you can’t read this whole post in your e-mail client! Yikes!)
If you just want to sample the best of the best, I’d say to check out
my favorite themed crossword from January, which was by “Waiting in the Wings” by Jasper Davidoff for the Audubon Society website
my favorite themeless crossword from January, which was “In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally” by August Miller on his blog, lost for xwords
Oh, and my favorite clue from this half of January was courtesy of Evan Birnholz, in the Washington Post Sunday puzzle from the 12th: [Benders that people often go on in church?] (five letters)
But by my count there were at least a dozen puzzles worth checking out in January! We’ll start with the themed ones, then wind our way down to the themelesses. Note that my analyses will contain spoilers! I’ve linked to the puzzles whenever a static URL is available, so you can solve them before reading my hot takes.
The Best Themed Grid of January
👑 Jan. 6: Waiting in the Wings by Jasper Davidoff (Audubon)
I would not have pegged the Audubon Society as the venue for the cutest crossword of 2025, but… look at it!
Adorable, right? But this puzzle wasn’t my favorite of the year just for its cuteness. (Although, good golly is it cute! Credit where it’s due to illustrator Emily Renaud.) See, the typical crossword is a menagerie of birds; pretty much every day you’ll run into some combination of the TIT, JAY, TEAL, WREN, and/or ORIOLE, and possibly a SMEW or two. (Don’t get me started on the ERNE.) This should be a delight — who but the blackest-hearted among us doesn’t love birdsong!? — and yet most of the time, when an EGRET makes its way into a crossword, it’s clued as something like…
[Big bird]
[Wading bird]
[Marsh bird]
[Shore bird]
…you get the picture. I’ve never seen a clue that does this beautiful creature justice, or even makes an attempt to tell it apart from a HERON. Until now, anyway! This grid’s got a HERON and an EGRET in it — the former clued as a [Green, Gray, or Little Blue wader], and the latter with a clue cheerfully informing you that [The Audubon logo is a Great one!] The level of specificity here is hardly a surprise given the venue, but what I really love about this puzzle is that it’s not just a crossword written by (or even by and for) birders, but a crossword/birdwatching hybrid, in which you need to identify the species either by sight or context to solve the puzzle. In some ways this is just the natural evolution of constructor Jasper Davidoff’s earlier work (as seen on his site Pocket Squares), which often included imagery in their grids, but he went above and beyond on this one.
And I didn’t even mention my favorite favorite favorite little detail on this puzzle, which is that the clue for ROD specifies that it’s a [Human’s fishing tool] (emphasis mine). Just delightful all around.
(And, as a bonus, in addition to the puzzle Audubon commissioned a mini-essay by beloved crossword constructor Matthew Stock, drawing a further connection between puzzlemaking and birding. Very sweet!)
Other Great Themed Grids
The New Yorker, Wednesday, Jan. 1 by Adam Aaronson
The theme here is super simple, but the attention to detail in the grid here is incredible, with many of the clues repeated or almost repeated. XENON and NEON, for instance, cross in the northwest, clued as [Noble gas that can produce a bluish glow] and [Noble gas that can produce a reddish-orange glow], respectively. Or how FANGS and ELSA, which appear one after the other in the grid, are clued as [Halloween accessory for a “Dracula” fan] and [Halloween accessory for a “Frozen” fan]. (Plus SOS and CTRL, which have similar clues referencing SZA's discography.) And Adam's not skimping on funny cluing angles for the non-paired clues either:
[Podcaster and speechwriter Favreau, or producer and screenwriter Favreau]
[Proud gay ___ Loompa (“S.N.L.” character played by Bowen Yang)]
[Automaker whose Hummer E.V. was called a “ghastly behemoth” in a review by The Verge]
[Like large anglerfish that are parasitized by their smaller mates]
The answers to these clues are hidden behind this footnote.1
The only thing I dislike about this puzzle is that it reminds me that the New Yorker could be lapping every other outlets when it comes to themed puzzles if they weren't so devoted to cost-cutting. (More on this in a second.)
Jan. 2: Focus! by Billy Ouska (Wall Street Journal)
Homophones! We know and love ‘em, except when we’re trying to remember the difference between a “homophone” and a “homonym,” which is that… um…
Anyone who’s listened to a Prince song can tell you that “eye” and “I” are homophones, but it’s still odd to note that the word “eye” has no “i” in it! This quirk of English is cleverly exploited here, as the revealer ALL EYES ON ME indicates that all seven I’s within the puzzle grid are on top of rebus squares containing the letters “ME.” Billy Ouska is not the first constructor to make a grid which hinges on this “I = eye” joke2, but I liked how subtle his handling of the theme is here.
The New Yorker, Friday, Jan. 3 by Kate Chin Park
I won’t be shouting out too many mini puzzles in this feature, and I certainly won’t be shouting out too many mini puzzles from the New Yorker. Not because these puzzles are bad, mind you, but because they exist in lieu of the excellent full-sized puzzles that the New Yorker used to run on Thursday and Friday. Boo!, I say — not just because I miss those quality grids, but because a luxury brand should not be doing shrinkflation.
But I will make an exception for this grid, and not just because it’s by the supremely talented KCP.3 See, this is a themed 5-by-5 puzzle: all the clues in this little grid are strings of emoji. I’ve seen this gimmick before, but it’s usually just that: a gimmick. The problem with pure pictorial clues is that, absent any obvious ways to indicate conjunctions, the resulting puzzle often ends up playing less like a puzzle and more like a See ‘n Say. (Oh, look, ROSE is just clued as [🌹]. Very “the cow goes moo.”)
I think this is the first puzzle of this ilk I’ve solved that didn’t feel this way, in large part due to Kate’s prudence in picking entries that feel like playing a game of charades. I’m particularly impressed that she got a delightful clue for MARIO in this puzzle in the form of [🎮👨🏻🔧🚽] — it’s difficult to clue people’s names using just basic emoji! I also adore the twinned clues of [🌅☝️] and [🌅👇] for RISE and SET, as well as… wait, I’ve already described 30% of the puzzle. Go do it yourself, you clod!
Jan. 5: If I Wrote the Dictionary… by Evan Birnholz (Washington Post)
Evan Birnholz notes that January 5, 2025 would’ve been the 75th birthday of his predecessor at WaPo4, the dearly departed Merl Reagle. It’s hard to understate just how beloved Merl Reagle was, both by solvers and his peers. To my surprise, no one has uploaded a clip of his appearance on The Simpsons to YouTube, but there is a clip on YouTube from the documentary Wordplay in which Merl is seen constructing a grid by hand. (I’m told that this scene inspired at least one crossword constructor to start making their own puzzles on graph paper.)
As a birthday tribute, Evan’s is a spin on one of Merl’s go-to themes — “If I Wrote the Dictionary,” in which various words were given punny new pseudo-definitions. For instance: a noun describing “a small landfill” ? Why, that would be a DUMPLING! Put enough dad jokes like that in a grid and you’ve got a stew going, baby.
Now, Evan loves to do a good dad joke theme (particularly when his recurring “Captain Obvious” character gets involved), but his puzzles often have a very specific twist to their themes, and this one was no exception. Once you laugh your way through the nine definitions (an adjective describing “Pluto since 2006?” Duh - EXPLANATORY!), you’ll discover that the nine words Evan has redefined spell out … REDEFINED! A truly lovely puzzle, both on its own merits, and as a synthesis of two great puzzlers’ sensibilities.
Jan. 6: The Hyperallergic Art Puzzle by Natan Last
Natan is a regular contributor to the New Yorker’s crossword feature, where he and fellow MFA-haver Anna Shechtman regularly compete to see who can be the most artsy-fartsy hoity-toity constructor on that roster.5 Anyway, Natan’s monthly puzzle for Hyperallergic is a perfect marriage between constructor and venue, and I love googling all the cool artists he namedrops in these grids. (I’ll break up the wall of text here with a piece by Indigenous Australian artist Reko RENNIE.)
Also notable: far as I can tell, this is the first crossword puzzle to namedrop Luigi MANGIONE! If you asked me “who will be the first constructor to put Luigi Mangione’s name in a grid?” I would 100% have guessed ardent leftie Natan Last.
LA Times, Thursday, Jan. 9 by Amanda Cook
When I first saw this grid, I thought the LA Times had made a mistake. “There’s no way that the 1-Across entry in a themed puzzle is nine letters,” I said, scratching my head. “Patti must have had a brainfart and ran Saturday’s puzzle a little early.” But no, to my delight, this was the real deal! 1-Across here really was COMMODITY, and this was in fact thematically relevant.
You see, at the middle of the grid we have the entry HOT CORNER, and this grid has four of them — that is to say, the words crossing at the corners of the grid (COMMODITY and CAKES; SHOTS and STREAK; GOSSIP and PANTS; CHOCOLATE and PLATE) can all be preceded by the word “hot.”
I cannot stress enough just how difficult it is to get a grid like this to work — every single entry in those wide open corners has to intersect with a theme entry, which really limits your capacity for good fill, and yet Amanda has populated those sections with terrific entries like KILLER ABS and FREEGAN. If this had run as a Saturday themeless I would have been enthused by its cleanness; the fact that this is a themed grid is just mind-blowing.
Jan. 11: Chew on This! by Jeff Stillman (Spyscape)
Jan. 18: All Aboard! by Bryant White (Spyscape)
I have never been to Spyscape, the Manhattan museum dedicated to tricking impressionable youth into thinking that the CIA is “cool” and “good,” but week after week I return to their extremely cool, extremely good puzzles page to have my mind blown. Spyscape’s gimmick is that every puzzle they publish has something to do with espionage or spy fiction, and somehow five years into their lifespan they’ve yet to exhaust this thematic well. I found these two consecutive puzzles from Jeff and Bryant to be a representative pair for the outlet, in terms of how they run the gamut from “ordinary” to “bizarro.”
Then again, when I say “ordinary,” how many “ordinary” puzzles are inspired by the EXPLODING GUM from Mission: Impossible? Jeff is not the first person to make a theme like this one, in which the string G-U-M breaks apart across long entries, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a good execution on this sort of idea: not only are ORAL ARGUMENT, BACKGROUND MUSIC, and GONZO JOURNALISM all interesting phrases, but the paths traced by the “exploding” letters form perfect straight lines. Meanwhile — speaking of GONZO! — Bryant’s tribute to the tricked-out train from Wild Wild West6 features four gadgets hidden behind seemingly benign furnishings, like a set of PISTOLS literally directly underneath a POOL TABLE. (It is here where I note that the furnishings in question are positioned in the grid in the places you’d expect them to be while standing in a room — so the HANGING LAMP would be on the ceiling, and is thus on the top of the grid, while the FIREPLACE is on the side of the car and thus the left edge of the grid.)
Oh, P.S.: is the 1999 Wild Wild West… good actually? I just know the film from the Will Smith rap-about-the-movie-I-was-just-in song. But it is wild — wild-wicky-wild-wild, even — just how good the blocking in this not-especially-beloved movie is relative to… any movie in theaters right now, honestly.
Jan. 12: The Inferno Variations by Owen Bergstein (Dissonant Grids)
Owen’s new-ish blog, Dissonant Grids, is dedicated to “expanding” the crossword form and the moods you can express within it, including the symptoms of depression. I’m aware this does not sound like riveting entertainment, and that in fact this sounds like one of those works of anti-entertainment that gets kudos for innovations in immiseration. Thankfully, this is not crossword Nanette! Owen’s been killing it with these puzzles, which are tonally avant-garde but still enjoyable as puzzles rather than as thought experiments.
The “Inferno” referenced here isn’t Alighieri’s, but the Atlantic’s — last year their print issues started running a feature on the back page called “Caleb’s Inferno,” which consists of a tall, narrow grid which is easy at the top and difficult at the bottom. It’s a cool format that’s inspired a couple copycats among the indie kids, and this pair of grids from Owen is an odd variant on that premise. They’re both shaped like Xs, and have difficulty graduated based on where you are in the grid. The first puzzle is easy at the edges but grows into a vague jumble at the center, culminating in a reference to a [Big terrifying thing out there] — y’know, THE WORLD — and the second puzzle flips the conceit, with an easy center and difficult corners. As you might expect from a teen constructor, both grids are steeped in zoomerisms like ANCOM and ON AUX, which I found both delightful and vexing. The second grid gets the slight edge for me because I love the sub-theme here in which Owen namedrops pop divas to increasingly obscure ends — [Lady Gaga, e.g.] is an ARIES, [Robyn, e.g.] is a SWEDE, and [Celine Dion, e.g.] is an XER — but they’re both unique solving experiences.
Jan. 16: Check the Forecast by Noah Sodickson (Chicago Maroon)
You know the University of Chicago as the school that gave us the Latke-Hamentaschen Debate and the murder of Salvador Allende — but did you know that in the past couple years it’s become an incubator for crossword talent? This puzzle plays its theme a little loose (DARK AND STORMY, being clued here as the cocktail and a possible descriptor for a day where there AIN'T NO SUNSHINE, is so clever that the other two theme entries can't possibly compare), but the cluing voice is excellent and elevates a lot of ho-hum short entries. [Its CEO might be called the Lord of the Rings] for WWE, for instance, or cluing SNL as a [Show where a Chase broke out?]. About the only objectionable thing about this puzzle is its description of the CARS films as "beloved," which... well, OK, Zoomer.
Jan. 16: “i suggest you do a little homework” by Alisya Reza (Crosswords by Alisya)
Finally, what everyone was craving: a Pete Hegseth tribute grid. No, seriously now: inspired by a viral exchange between Tammy Duckworth and Pete Hegseth, in which the former schooled the latter on his ignorance of SEATO, Alisya’s given us a mini puzzle in which each of the ten countries in SEATO gets namedropped among the ten clues. As Alisya notes, “now you, too, can say that you know more about Asia than the incoming defense secretary.”
Jan. 29: Stretching Exercises by Matthew Stock (Universal)
Sometimes puzzles excite you with high-concept themes and intricate wordplay. But sometimes, puzzles excite you by making you write out GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! with twelve Os. This is the latter kind of puzzle. The delight here should speak for itself, but I do want to note that this sort of grid is much harder to pull off than you’d expect based on stuff like that XKCD from last year — long strings of vowels can be hard to build a grid around! Matthew makes it look easy.
Jan. 30: Star Signs by Ben Wilson (zerofiftyone)
We got a couple cute puzzles ringing in the Year of the Snake — I’m partial towards a Puzzmo grid from Brooke Husic that was shaped like a snake and had the entry SSSSSSSSSSSS in the middle of it — but the best of them was probably this one from Ben Wilson, which fits six animals of the CHINESE ZODIAC in the grid, and the other six in the clues. (He also fits a couple funny clues about the Western zodiac in here too — getting ASTERISKS in the puzzle clued as [Star signs?] is a bit of flex.)
But I also like the way this puzzle casually bridges so many cultures — and I don’t just mean ethnic ones, like cluing AGING as [Waiting phase when making cheese or kimchi]. (Although that is cool.) In particular I love all the video game culture that’s present in the grid — references to Metal Gear, Octodad, and the fighting game concept of YOMI7 — without being all in-your-face about it.
Jan. 30: Homestyle Food by Dylan Schiff (USA Today)
There are many laudable aspects of the USA Today crossword; layered themes, I’m sorry to say, are not usually one of them. (January’s offerings from USA Today included a puzzle titled “Add In” where three long entries contained the string A-D-D and … titled “See In” where three long entries contained the string S-E-E.)
Which made the tightness of Dylan’s theme set here a pleasant surprise: in this grid we have PIZZA HUT, SHAKE SHACK, and WAFFLE HOUSE, three food chains whose names also describe housing situations. Adding to the “wait, what outlet is this again?” vibes are tricky/fun words like ERSATZ, NPR TOTE, and SOFTISH, as well as not one but two references to political figures (former Indian PM and crossword chestnut INDIRA Gandhi, and current Navajo activist and new-to-puzzles name ALLIE Redhorse Young) — all of which are a bit odd for the easy-breezy USA Today. But not in a bad way, mind you.
Jan. 31: They’re the Same Picture by Shannon Rapp & Will Eisenberg (Norah’s Puzzles)
Movie buffs love to talk about “twin films,” which by coincidence or by design have strangely similar premises. Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, Sky High and Zoom, Finding Nemo and Taken… wait, what?
That last one is courtesy of this very funny grid from Shannon and Will, which uses identical clues to describe pairs of films that no one would ordinarily put in the same sentence. GALAXY QUEST and THREE AMIGOS! was the one that stood out to me as a great find (they’re even the same number of letters!), but the real joy of a set like this is the way it invites you to come up with more entries that could have been included in the grid. Like, ooh, ooh, I got a good one: Don’t you just love that one movie? That beloved sequel to a hit 1989 film, in which an eccentric inventor is framed for evildoing by a villainous penguin? Yeah, that one! Ha ha. I could do this all day. You probably could too (and yes, you clod, this is an invitation to do just that in the comment section).
And on top of that, this puzzle includes the most delightfully raunchy clue of the month: [Kicked out of the fucking party?] for SEXILED.
The best themeless grid of January
👑 Dec. 31: “In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally” by August Miller (lost for xwords)
Yeah, yeah, this one’s from last year, technically. But I solved in on January 1st, so I’m counting it as a 2025 puzzle, and what a puzzle it is! The most impressive aspect of the grid is immediately visible when you open it up:
Yes, holy crap, it’s the vaunted double-triple puzzle, in which the first and last three rows of the grid are all 15 letters long. Having done one of these myself for Slate back in December I am intimately aware of how hard it is to pull a grid shape like this off — at least, not without resorting to weaksauce entries (especially for the final across entry) like PEER ASSESSMENTS and A LOT ON ONE’S PLATE. But you wouldn’t know that from solving August’s grid, which he starts off on a high note (with ALPHABET MAGNETS cleverly clued as [Attractive characters?]) which he holds like a cruciverbal Pavarotti all throughout the grid, his voice only wavering ever-so-slightly in the bottom row, where he sticks SYSTEMS ENGINEER. But then again, is SYSTEMS ENGINEER really so bad? At least that’s a real thing people say in real life (albeit only very boring people — sorry to my tech world readers). If this was 1998, the final across entry in a grid like this would be some crap like PEER ASSESSMENTS, and PEER ASSESSMENTS wouldn’t even be beneath DORITOS ROULETTE! (Which has the unbelieveably good clue [Gamble with chips?], incidentally.)
August notes that this grid contains a throwback to 2015, but I’m not sure whether he’s referring to the Kentucky Derby winner AMERICAN PHAROAH (sic!) or the delightful Twitter account EMO KYLO REN — in any case I am glad to see both their names. There’s a sort of donut hole when it comes to pop culture in crosswords, where contemporary references (OLIVIA RODRIGO or WHITE LOTUS or what have you) are cool, and pre-Y2K stuff is considered sufficiently canonical to be on editors’ radar, but everything between that is seen as “dated” and thus dicey. (I once received a note that DIGG was a “throwback.”) I do think that’s changing, now that so many mainstream puzzles are edited by ‘90s kids8.
Other themelesses worth checking out
The New York Times: Friday, Jan. 3 by Colin Adams
The New York Times: Friday, Jan. 31 by Adrian Johnson
I’m not going to go super-in-depth on the NYT puzzle, since you can find punditry about whether it’s good… pretty much everywhere else on the internet.9 Actually, it’s kind of miraculous when I hear someone mention that crosswords exist that aren’t on the Times games app! But yes, these two themelesses were both quite good, if you’ve fallen off the wagon and are looking for some quality puzzles to do. Colin’s grid I dug for how the puzzle managed to be tricky while still having very basic vocabulary; the paired marquee entries of WHO GOES THERE? and SUCKS TO BE YOU form a nice call and response, almost like a knock-knock joke, and it was fun to have [Ice skating move] appear in a puzzle and be LUTZ for once instead of AXEL. Adrian, on the other hand, has become the master of grids with four long entries stacked in each corner, often with clues like [Air play?] for RADIO DRAMA and [He’s taken!] for MARRIED MAN which are shorter than their respective entries without resorting to vagueness, not to mention I love the way this grid has BARNYARD cross WHINNY.
LA Times: Saturday, Jan. 11 by Kareem Ayas
Jan. 11: Universal Freestyle 156 by Kareem Ayas (Universal)
Jan. 11: Barely Hurts at All! (Freestyle) by Kareem Ayas (USA Today)
Despite what some rando on Reddit or the writers’ room on Rubicon will tell you, there isn’t some top-down conspiracy demanding that, e.g., every crossword released on Thursday the 31st will have the word LYCHEE in it. Nor is it ever intentional when one constructor has multiple puzzles out across multiple outlets on the same day. (Except that one time.) Which makes it all the more astonishing that Kareem Ayas got three different themeless puzzles published in three different papers on the same day — and just a few days after writing the inaugural New York Times Sunday puzzle of 2025, I might add.
This pleasant coincidence is nice not just because it shines a spotlight on a talented constructor but because it doubles as a case study in themeless “house style” at three different outlets. Universal wants a critical mass of long entries that are interesting in-and-of-themselves while not being too “exotic,” so Kareem delivers neat 3-by-10 stacks in each corner loaded with entries like BRAIN CORAL, ATLAS STONE, BEER O'CLOCK, VERUCA SALT, GLITTER PEN, and NEAT FREAKS, intersected down the middle by a grid-spanning READY WHEN YOU ARE, all clued for maximal breeziness. The LA Times, on the other hand, is much more amenable to spicy letter combinations and stone-faced misdirection on Saturday, so Kareem lets loose with entries like CATCH A FEW Z’S(!?) and WASABIOLI(!!??) before stiffening his upper lip and cluing both ZIPLOC BAG and BYTES as just [Storage unit(s)]. And when it comes to “freestyle” puzzles, USA Today is… adequate. (I did enjoy the paired 15-letter entries of BELLY BUTTON RING and IT’S JUST A SCRATCH, though — something very funny about that duo!)
The New Yorker: Monday, Jan. 13 by Erik Agard
It’s sort of funny — there was a period not too long ago where Erik Agard was the most feted constructor in all of crosswords, receiving glowing profiles in the likes of TIME for making puzzles — gasp! — diverse!! (Crosswords Not Just By Old White Guys Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story.) And, y’know, his tenure at USA Today was very important on the representation front, both in terms of who appeared in the puzzle and in terms of who made it — I’m not sure I’d be a full-time puzzlemaker without his backing early on in my career — but none of these articles really get at the core of why Erik’s work is so, so good.
Because, sure, his cultural reference points skew younger and capital-B Browner than average, in ways that appeal to me in particular — this grid has a triple header of Quiara Special Interests in references to Undone heroine ALMA Winograd-Diaz, Puberty 2 singer-songwriter MITSKI, and everyone’s favorite Latin character actress, JUDY fuckin’ REYES!! — but these are just minor aspects of this really neat grid. Consider the four long entries that are stacked on top of JUDY REYES’ name, and the various ways in which they’re clued:
TV STUDIOS is clued as [Showrooms?] — a classic bit of terse wordplay
THREATENING is clued as [Minatory] — a draconic bit of Latin-derived vocabulary10
GUITAR LESSONS is clued as [They can be thirty or sixty minutes (take your pick)] — splitting up a common phrase-form into two mini-clues for the same entry, one straightforward-but-vague (many things are an hour long) and the other one devious in its wordplay (no, the other kind of pick)
INTERRUPTED is clued as [Shouted out during an acceptance speech, for instance] — a similar trick to the previous clue, with “shouted out” being literal here rather than figurative, but note also how this clue works by exploiting the disembodied nature of crossword clues, in which we can leave out the number and position of “speakers” in this scenario
Note how that run of entries taps into pretty much every way you can make a crossword clue hard while never repeating a trick; also note that most constructors wouldn’t even try to come up with a clever clue for something like INTERRUPTED, which is a very “vanilla” word. Anyway, pretty much everything about this puzzle is great; e.g., I love Erik cluing LIGHTER as a [Blunt instrument?], and it’s very funny to use the technically-accurate-but-very-woo-woo-sounding description [Crystals believed to have healing properties] to describe the rather pedestrian EPSOM SALTS.
Jan. 20: Themeless Monday #809 by Brendan Emmett Quigley (BEQ)
Sunday, January 26, 2025 by Ada Nicolle (Crossword Club)
I’m putting these grids together because they’re both by prolific constructors and they both have impressive stacks of 15-letter entries at their centers. If you went back in time and showed these puzzles to a crossword fan circa 1998, they would go “wow!” And then they would ask you, “who’s Shaboozey?”
Hard to say which is the better of the two. Ada’s is definitely the easier one, with only one really tricky clue (for a 15-letter entry, natch) in [Steps out of the way?] — meanwhile Brendan is out here casually giving even three-letter entries twisted clues like [Words that may have a point?].11
Jan. 31: Leaving no crumbs by Jasper Davidoff
I started this post with one of Jasper’s grids, so why not end with one of them as well? There’s a good mix of shout-outs to pop culture both “classic” (AC/DC and ABBA both get shout-outs) and “modern” (Shark Tank and Hot Ones), and I like the way this grid is divided into a quartet of bouba-esque mini-sections engulfing a vermiform center. (Ordinarily this shape would feel “segmented” — a negative buzzword in crossword analysis — but maybe I’m giving this a pass, subliminally, on account of two of said sections being connected by the apt entry CROSS-STREET.) And of course, the clues are clever in the best tradition of cruciverbal drollery. (E.g., [Sows (but not reaps)] for SWINE.)
But what I really like about this grid, as abstract as this may sound, is its strained relationship with the Internet. Like, one of the long entries in this puzzle has the clue [Deprioritizes, in a modern way] which, given Jasper’s youth, made me worry the answer would be ANTIRIZZLES or something similarly adolescent. But no, it’s MARKS AS READ — which is one of those phrases you see almost daily, but never really think about. Even better is the center of the grid, where [Game of collecting computer chips?] clues COOKIE CLICKER12 — a game which is a decade old, and operates as a spoof of the number-go-up mindset that has since polluted nearly every facet of the Internet. Which is especially funny, because the entry above it is STEERS CLEAR OF, and the grid is all but inviting you to read it as STEERS CLEAR OF COOKIE CLICKER. Hilarious, IMO.
Some great clues I ran into
My favorite clue, as previously mentioned, was from Evan Birnholz: [Benders that people often go on in church?] (5) — the answer being, of course, KNEES. For reasons that I will talk about in a future installment of this newsletter, I’ve been thinking about all the cluing angles for the word “knee” and all its conjugations. Often you have clues riffing on scenarios in which people would kneel, like in Kaepernickesque protest or during a marriage proposal — e.g., [Base for a proposal?] from Joe Marquez’s New York Times grid on the 29th — but I love the way that Evan’s clue takes a pun many constructors would use by itself — haha, “benders” — and instead turns it into an eight-word tragicomedy.
But, across some 300-odd puzzles, there were way more than just one good clue. I’ve included the entries that go along with these clues as a footnote at the end of each category, if you want to play along at home.
Great wordplay:
[Christmas creep?] (7) (Peter Gordon, McKinsey 1/1)
[Hightailed it to a track?] (7) (Mollie Cowger, New Yorker 1/2)
[Ford torus] (4) (Tim Croce, Club 72 1/6)
[Virtue signal?] (4) (Laura Dershewitz, NYT 1/8)
[Absolut unit?] (5) (Andy Kravis, NYer 1/10)
[Where the walls have ears?] (8) (Kareem Ayas, LAT 1/11)
[What takes the L in a famous board game?] (6) (Aidan Deshong, Universal 1/12)
[Observation deck?] (5) (Jess Rucks, LAT 1/18)
[Legendary bargain hunter?] (5) (Natan Last, NYer 1/20)
[Practice set?] (14) (Liz Gorski, NYer 1/27)
[Fulfill a blanket order for] (6) (Brooke Husic, in her devious monthly blog puzzle from 1/27)
[Accessory for fall collections?] (4) (Rebecca Goldstein, LAT 1/29)13
Funny/novel trivia:
[What Steve Ballmer said was not "going to get any significant market share" (2007)] (6) (Stan Newman, Newsday 1/4)
[Jimmy Carter was the first president regularly seen in these] (5) (Scott McMahon, NYT 1/18) 14
Interesting angles on stock crossword answers:
[Desired orientation of major league stadiums, per MLB Rule 1.04. (Most ballparks do not comply.)] (3) (Jeff Linder on his blog on 1/8)
[Fuel for a Sequoia but not a Leaf] (3) (Rafa Musa, Universal 1/12)
[Brews that, if offered to me, I tack on an "s" at the end] (4) (Jeff and his blog again, 1/16)
[Word aptly found in "generation"] (3) (Margi Stevenson, USAT 1/16)
[Fish used as currency in medieval England] (3) (Parker Higgins, LAT 1/22)
[Olympic country code below Serbia's alphabetically] (3) (Kate Chin Park, Newsday 1/25)
[Part of NE (and technically also NO)] (4) (Brooke Husic’s 1/27 themeless again — this one’s devious)15
And just some purely delightful ones:
[First-aid procedure that can be done to the beat of Charli XCX's "360"] (3) (Mark Valdez, Puzzmo 1/1)
[I can't even with these!] (4) (CC Burnikel, Puzzmo 1/4)
[Elliott who was once depicted with Grover on the cover of TV Week] (5) (Paolo Pasco, Atlantic mini 1/13)
[Confection that can duel another one of itself in a microwave with a toothpick] (4) (Brooke again!? She can’t keep getting away with this!)
[Merchandise with logos for "Baienglaca" or "Guddi," e.g.] (9) (Sophia Maymudes, NYT 1/29)16
And finally, from the twisted mind of Malaika Handa in the January 3rd Vulture puzzle: [Surgery that's a pain in the ass to get?] (3)17
Shameless self-plug
I wrote at least 40 puzzles for Slate in January, between the daily mini and their regular weekday mid-sized offering, including the extremely ordinary puzzle that ran on the extremely normal date of January 20th, 2025:
But if you’re going to do one of my Slate midis from January, make it the grid from the 9th, which has all the things you could want in a crossword — good food, hip hop trivia, potshots at cowardice in corporate media, and what is shaping up to be the crosswords’ best boner joke of 2025.
Outside of my job, I also had a puzzle run in Universal this January — Universal Freestyle 155, their first themeless grid of the year. (This was the aforementioned puzzle with DIGG in it.) I tracked down a print copy of my puzzle in New York’s Daily News, which I’m irritated to report still doesn’t run bylines with its crossword puzzles! Thankfully, I planned for this contingency and got as close as I could get to sneaking my surname into one of the clues.
That was a lot!
Like I said — humongous post! In the introductory post for this newsletter I mentioned just how many grids are released every day, and it turns out that summarizing a thousand grids or so is brutally difficult! You read newsletters that do “link roundups” and think to yourself, “this is lazy girl content; it must be so easy to just aggregate other people’s content and then do little capsule summaries under them.” And then you try to do it yourself and realize… that shit’s hard!
I’ll try to have a post during the week proper talking about some March grids; next weekend I’ll be at the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, and there’ll surely be a recap post about that. Beyond that… it’s an open question what I’ll be posting in April! The cool thing about this newsletter is that “games and puzzles” is a pretty broad beat; yes, I’ll be reviewing some crossword-related media (still gotta see Ludwig!), but I’ve also been drafting posts about a killer robot mermaid, JD Vance, and Juul pods. All on-theme, honest to god. I also promised Megalopolis apologia, but now that Madame Web beat it out at the Razzies I’m tempted to defend that instead. Why not both?
In any case — the main reason I’ve made the leap to Substack rather than just posting these on my old blog is that I’ve found the comments here to be atypically intelligent for social media, and as such I welcome your feedback, ideas, compliments, and/or invective. (And your stabs at the twin films game. I didn’t forget about that one!)
xoxo, QV
They’re JON, OOMPA, GMC, and FEMALE. Could I even call myself a Substacker if I didn’t fawn over a demented “biological” definition of FEMALE?
This monocular New York Times grid by Joseph Gangi from last year, for instance.
I greatly dug these two midi grids of hers for the site Crossword Club, although that pair of puzzles doesn’t even begin to show how great Kate is. (See: pretty much any puzzle on her blog.) The one nice thing about these minis is that the New Yorker has some very talented constructors who work on their editorial team, and it’s nice to have regular puzzles by Andy Kravis and Mollie Cowger, albeit bite-sized ones.
Nota bene: the Washington Post only runs original puzzles on Sunday, and otherwise just syndicates the LA Times grid.
Not an insult, to be clear — despite crosswords’ rep as a “classy” pastime, grids have swung so far away from highbrow references in the past decade that it’s sort of refreshing when New Yorker puzzles go all Whit Stillman. It’s especially funny, in my opinion, that Anna and Natan independently made grids with AIME CESAIRE’s full name in them, which ran only a few months apart from each other.
OK, given Bryant’s age (and his status as crossworld’s most devoted Get Smart fan), this is probably a tribute to the proto-steampunk television series The Wild, Wild West rather than the peak-steampunk Smith/Kline film based on it. Same difference.
Although, of course, this idea isn’t unique to fighting games at all. Arguably, crossword constructors and solvers are in combat with each other too. I think whenever I see a clue like [French bread] in a puzzle and correctly put down EUROS, I will now chuckle and think “yomi!” to myself.
I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s already more than one daily newspaper whose puzzle is regularly edited by someone born after 9/11. Jared, if you’re reading this, get the hell off my lawn. >:’(
By “it” here I am referring to the NYT crossword, not the NYT itself, although (as anyone vaguely plugged in to the Substack ethos will tell you) there is obviously plenty of criticism of the NYT itself to be found on the internet, and in fact there is a small but significant intersection between criticism of the NYT itself and criticism of its games-and-puzzles empire.
It’s from the same root word as “menace,” if that helps. (Big “if,” I know.)
These are, respectively, SPIRAL STAIRCASE and ASL.
Wow, that’s some alliteration.
KRAMPUS, TWERK, TIRE, HALO, FIFTH, CORN MAZE(!), KNIGHT, TAROT, FAUST, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW(!!), TUCK IN, and RAKE
IPHONE and JEANS
ENE (as in the compass heading), GAS, IPAS, ERA, EEL, SRI (as in Sri Lanka; Serbia’s —nay, Srbija’s — is SRB), and ESTE (as seen in the Spanish compass headings noreste and noroeste)
CPR, ODDS, GOULD, PEEP, and KNOCKOFFS
What could it be but BBL?
I am overjoyed there is now a crosswords Substack.
Subscribed! I've been looking for a crossword roundup like this for some time. Thanks! Also, I appreciate the kind words about my WSJ puzzle. I was worried that people wouldn't catch that truly all of the i's were on "me" :-)