Reacts to a Magic Trick – The New York Times

THURSDAY PUZZLE The constructors Yacob Yonas and Chad Horner who is making his debut are a bad influence on all of us.

Thats all Im saying. Stay in school, kids.

5A. To let someone off the hook is to forgive them or to release them from trouble. In this puzzle, however, Let off the hook? is to UNPEG.

10A. You wanted the answer to be stripe, didnt you? Not enough squares, so we had to think about other parts of the zebra. For Zebra feature, the answer is MANE.

16A. This is a really nice bit of wordplay, because it reads so smoothly. Mean less? sounds like it is supposed to refer to something that doesnt mean as much as something else, but in this puzzle, the clue should be read as meaning someone who is not as or less mean. The answer is NICER.

31A. Youve seen this before, and youve committed it to memory, right? Even if you havent seen it, note that question mark. Band aid? is not going to be the adhesive strip you place over a wound (or an owie in crossword-speak). For one thing, its Thursday; thats too easy. Then theres the ? as well as the fact that the brand Band-Aid uses the hyphen and capitalizes the letter A in aid. So the clue needs to be read differently, as someone who aids a band. That would be the ROADIE.

65A. I cant SKIP SCHOOL without this scene from Ferris Buellers Day Off.

69A. You know how I knew that the clue Pack of smarties? wasnt about the candy? No capital S. The smarties in this puzzle are the members of Mensa.

72A. It always amuses me to see words related to oat in the puzzle, mostly because of the contortions constructors put it through to fill a section in a puzzle. Today, we have OATEN, an adjective, but what if we conjugated it completely?

OAT: NounOATEN: AdjectiveOATING: VerbOATED: Past tense verbOATER: Noun and cowboy flickTHE OATENING: Scary movie

You know those word within a word puzzle themes, where you have to find something hidden? And those themes where the answers to the clues make absolutely no sense until you figure out whats going on? Weve got a bit of both today.

Mr. Yonas and Mr. Horner are trying to get us to SKIP SCHOOL, which is a lot easier than it used to be since a) It happens to be summer break in the United States and 2) When school was in session, most of it was virtual because we are in the middle of a pandemic and all you had to do was turn off your laptop camera.

Anyway, the constructors offer us a set of four clues whose answers make no sense, at least on the surface. STAY ALERT is good advice, but it does not mean to Kick off (in any sense of the phrase). So there must be something else we need to do

Oh! I know! Lets SKIP SCHOOL, which refers to universities in the case of this puzzle. If you look closely, YALE University is hidden inside the phrase STAY ALERT. And if you skip that school, the answer becomes START (STAY ALERT minus YALE equals START).

Clever, right? Similarly, if you are amazed by a magic trick, you probably would not shriek GAS PRICES! at the magician, unless you wanted to scare the magician away. But if you take RICE University out of GAS PRICES, you wind up with GASPS, which makes much more sense.

Please help us welcome our special guest, Mina Kimes of ESPN. Thursdays stream will be an hour later this week to accommodate Ms. Kimess schedule, so dont forget to tune in at 2 p.m. Eastern on Twitter (@NYTimesWordplay) or YouTube (WordplayNYT) to watch her rock this puzzle with me and Sam Ezersky.

If you miss the livestream, the video will be posted here toward the end of the day.

We might have trouble keeping up with her:

Yacob Yonas: I love themes that play with word movement within the themes. I feel like they can lead to a strong Aha! moment, since, at first glance, the theme answers might make no sense. I hope you all enjoy it!

In case you were curious, here are some of the themes that didnt make the cut: HA[RPI]NGON, S[PACE]CREW, S[PITT]AKE, F[REED]IVE.

Chad Horner: Super excited to be making my New York Times Crossword debut. This acceptance came after a half dozen or so unsuccessful attempts, so for any aspiring constructors out there, definitely keep at it!

All credit goes to Yacob for this theme idea. As for the fill and clues, I tend to enjoy more trivia-based content, and some of my favorite clues of ours that made it through the editing process are 14A, 2D (loved those bands in high school!) and 58D (one of my all-time favorite shows).

Very cool to see this run as a Thursday; some of the clues have definitely been Thursday-ed up a bit, but hopefully nothing too tricky!

Almost finished solving but need a bit more help? Weve got you covered.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead, but subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.

Trying to get back to the puzzle page? Right here.

Your thoughts?

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Reacts to a Magic Trick - The New York Times

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero