Saturday, January 31, 2026 |

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Nick Maritz’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap

NY Times crossword solution, 1/31/26 – no. 0131

Well! I wasn’t expecting this puzzle to feel more like a Friday, easier than yesterday’s puzzle was for me. 12a PEDIATRICIANS was a gimme, and then I worked the crossings and everything unfurled from there.

Fave fill: MARTIAL ARTS, PEDIATRICIANS, and VANILLA ICE CREAM stack; SANTA MONICA PIER and its ROLLER COASTER (who knew?) on a NEANDERTHAL (if you have HBO Max, check out the animated show Primal, featuring a neanderthal man and a female dinosaur who team up after losing their families); BASS LINE, CHIGNON, SPANIEL.

Three more things:

• 11D. [Herman ___, Dutch ophthalmologist known for his visual acuity testing], SNELLEN. The Snellen eye chart is named for him. Didn’t know he was Dutch and named Herman.
• 5D. [Bolognese, Parmesan, etc.], ITALIANS. You hungry now?
• 15D. [“Science is ___ that works”: Kurt Vonnegut], MAGIC. Good quote. I recently reread Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time since my teen years. Excellent read. What’s your favorite Vonnegut book?

Four stars from me.

Stan Newman’s Saturday Stumper Newsday crossword—Matt’s recap

Stan Newman’s Saturday Stumper Newsday crossword solution, 1/31/2026

Matt subbing in here for the Stumper, something different from my typical Sunday Washington Post puzzle. 

Stumpers usually fall for me depending on how quickly I commit to hunches. Even if they end up wrong, they help me see letter combinations that don’t work, and if they’re right, they’re in the grid earlier. 

This one played pretty easy as Stumpers go, and indeed it’s listed under Stan’s “Less Rough” moniker. I didn’t make many guesses and made fast progress in a few corners before I got a good enough foothold in the middle. Let’s dig in:

• 1a [Physician born in 2227] MCCOY. This was “who else could it be?” for me. Star Trek’s “Bones” was played by DeForest Kelly in the Original Series and by Karl Urban in the 2009s film
• 14a [Mecca near the Crockett Hotel] ALAMO. (Davy) “Crockett” perhaps an inroad here, but between the length and the letter combos with MCCOY, I plopped ALAMO in without much thought
• 19a [Letter ctr.] GPO. I’ve never paid much attention to the various *PO abbreviations. The crossings were reasonable enough.
• 22a [Never Tell Me the Odds podcaster] ESPN. This is – surprisingly! – a Star Wars-centered podcast (in reference to the Han Solo quote) rather than sports gambling.
• 24a [German Vollkornbrote, e.g.] RYES. Recognizing “brote” as German for “breads” helped a lot here. I won’t pretend to know “vollkorn” as “whole grain,” though it’s clear now.
• 29a [Bond and Powers] SPECIAL AGENTS. Pretty over the plate for a Stumper, no? Still, I could only drop the second word in until I got a few crossings, since there’s probably a few types of AGENTS that these two would fall under.
• 32a [Lower one’s voice?] BASSO PROFUNDO. As in “the voice of a lower one”. I myself am a tenor who sometimes pretends to be an alto. 
• 33a [Amazon MGM subsidiary] UNITED ARTISTS. Another one where the second word was clear but the full entry waited for crossings.
• 47a [Brownstone turned art museum] REHAB. I don’t know this.
• 50a [Brigadier at Second Bull Run] MEADE. Only so many five-letter names in the US Civil War
• 52a [Less than straight] SLY. I was a little thrown by “less than” here, but I can’t really quibble
• 53a [Street of fame is one] SKIER. This is in reference to Picabo Street, who retired 24 years ago. So.
• 10d [Nicely named former Archbishop of Manila, Jaime __] SIN. I cannot come up with a usage of “nice” that makes sense here, other than a desire to obfuscate by not using “ironically” or “inaptly”
• 21d [Adjective for the earliest talkies] PRECODE. In reference to the self-censoring “Hays Code” that limited movie content beginning in the ‘30s
• 25d [Family Fun Month] AUGUST. Another one that felt straightforward for a Stumper. There’s only one six-letter month.
• 32d [Five-sharp scale non-sharp] B NATURAL. I don’t really know my key signatures beyond four sharps or flats, but I had B in place, and I know that (in major scales) B# only appears in the seven-sharped key of C#, so it came together.
• 33d [Aftermaths] UPSHOTS. Your tolerance for dupes may vary, but I certainly noticed UPSHOTS and UPSTART very near each other.
• 39d [World capital at 12,000 feet] LA PAZ. Every time this clue or something like it comes around, I put in LHASA, which sits at 11,995 ft in Nepal . But it’s almost always LA PAZ, which sits at 11,980 ft in Bolivia. Alas.
• 41d [Snipe, e.g.] WADER. It’s a bird.

Cheers!