Wednesday, November 12, 2025 |

AV Club untimed (Amy) [2.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
LAT tk (Gareth) rate it
NYT 5:04 (Amy) [1.70 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
The New Yorker tk (Kyle) rate it
Universal tk (pannonica) rate it
USA Today tk (Emily) rate it
WSJ 7:11 (Eric) rate it

Hal Moore’s Wall Street Journal Crossword “Agape” — Eric’s Review

Hal Moore’s Wall Stree Journal Crossword — 11/12/25

I’m not a fan of themes that use the Down answers, but I can ignore that if that’s how a theme has to work. And this theme really needs to be in the Down answers:

• 3D [Shuriken, e.g.] NINJA WEAPON I think I’ve seen “shuriken” in a crossword before, but I didn’t remember it today. They’re also known as throwing stars.
• 7D [India’s first prime minister] JAWAHARLAL NEHRU I knew the name, I can picture the man, and I knew I would misspell it if I tried to do it from memory — so I filled in the first few letters and the NEHRU part.
• 9D [WNBA great and author of 2024’s “Dear Black Girls”] A’JA WILSON I don’t follow basketball and while Ms Wilson’s book (which appears to be a memoir) sounds interesting, I hadn’t heard of it before.
• 26D [Spectacular, or a feature of four long Down answers] JAW-DROPPING
• 33D [Dry Spanish export] RIOJA WINE

With the JAW-DROPPING revealer, I expect the JAWs to move progressively lower in the grid as you move from left to right. This has a down, up, down pattern, but that’s a minor quibble. J and W are not common letters in English, so there probably aren’t that many possible theme answers.

Some solvers might be unfamiliar with the proper names in the theme answers, so getting the revealer might help them figure out those names.

Other stuff:

• 18A [Dotty character?] LOWER CASE I Cute clue; the EI ending did not look promising.
• 23A [Night vision?] STARLIGHT Another cute clue that doesn’t really work for me.
• 25A [Singh in the World Golf Hall of Fame] VIJAY One of the few golfers I sort of know the name of, though I wanted to spell it like the MTV hosts back when MTV was about music videos.
• 31A [Piazza treat] GELATO That seemed pretty obvious.
• 43A [Tears of Joy and Flexed Biceps, e.g.] EMOJIS Though, technically speaking, the plural of “emoji” is “emoji.”
• 51A [In a difficult position] ON THE SPOT
• 12D [Go for a run, perhaps] SKI I’m impatiently waiting for the two ski areas nearest to where I live to open. It’s not looking promising.
• 31D [Fastball, in baseball lingo] GAS That’s not a term I’d heard before, but with the G from GELATO, I made a logical guess.
• 35D [Camp David Accords figure] Anwar SADAT, president of Egypt from 1970–1981. The peace deal with Israel probably led to Sadat’s assassination. Menachem BEGIN would also have fit here, but the S from 34A URSA ruled that out.

Priyanka Sethy & Ravij Sethy’s AV Club Crossword, “Concluding Movements”—Amy’s recap

AV Club Classic crossword solutiob, 11/12/25 – “Concluding Movements”

Once again, I didn’t remember to start the timer because I’m so used to having the timer automatically on. Felt pretty easy, though, despite the fact that the theme’s cultural references were entirely out of reach for me!

The revealer is 50a. [End with a flourish … or in another sense, what three answers in this puzzle do], FINISH IN STYLE. Take a phrase and add an -IST to turn it into a movement adherent, where the -IST words are known movements. The people in the clue account for the first half of each themer, I guess?

• 20a. [Provocateur and filmmaker Guy Debord, up for anything?], OPEN LETTERIST. He was a Marxist theorist? Both a Letterist and a Situationist? No idea what either of those things might be. So the “up for anything” in the clues signals that OPENness.
• 25a. [Antiquity-loving poet Alexander Pope, researching spiritual sects?], CULT CLASSICIST. Poet Pope was a Classicist? Sure. I didn’t affix a label when I read him in any college English lit classes. The clue gives him CULT interests.
• 43a. [Forward-looking sculptor Umberto Boccioni, scoring high on his SATs?], BRIGHT FUTURIST. Only a bit familiar with Boccioni, couldn’t have told you he was in Futurism.

And of course, open letter, cult classic, and bright future are all familiar phrases. I’m glad the overall fill and clues were easy, because the notable names in the clues sure weren’t pointing me towards the answers. Your scholarliness may vary.

Not much else is jumping out at me as in need of discussion, am busy feeling undereducated! 3.5 stars from me.

Brad Wiegmann & Nicole Wiegmann’s New York Times crossword–Amy’s recap

NY Times crossword solution, 11/12/25 – no. 1112

Wow, two family-duo bylines in a row for me tonight! Brad and Nicole bring us a cruciverbal riff on the classic OPTICAL ILLUSION, a drawing that could be a duck (with a really odd bill) or a rabbit (with its ears pointing straight back). There’s a rebus square for the duck or rabbit’s EYE in Seth M{EYE}RS / {EYE} MASK. The DUCK is at 38d and the RABBIT, 66a. The circled squares aren’t just there randomly to make the drawing; you connect the dots A through N to draw your rabbit. (It’s a rabbit. Duck bills don’t look like that!) Really a neat concept for a visual crossword gambit.

Fave fill: COBAIN, FIRE UP, SRIRACHA, DORITOS, ROADSTER, SCOFF. I could do without some of the fill (looking at you, AN I, MAA, and such), but the fill is generally smooth given the rigors of planting the A-through-N dots in their precise spots while retaining proper grid symmetry.

4.5 stars from me. I’d paid no mind to the circled letters while solving but found the DUCK and RABBIT and then when I finished solving online, boom, the grid art appeared! I know a lot of you cannot abide the idea of doing a crossword on the computer with anything other than Across Lite, but the NYT really does craft some neat displays for creative puzzle ideas if you solve on their website. It won’t bite, I promise. (I find it more rewarding to have the grid art drawn for me than to spend time playing connect-the-dots on a paper puzzle.)