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Washington Post
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Solution to Evan Birnholz's April 27 crossword, ‘World-Building'
Last week I wrote about my adrenaline-fueled experience at Crossword Con on Friday, April 4. After discussing today's puzzle, I'll pick up the story at the 2025 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), after I'd finally gotten a good night's sleep following 44 straight hours awake. The instructions to this weekend's meta say we are looking for 'the missing 11-letter theme answer, formed by combining two entries in the completed grid.' The theme answers stick out pretty loudly as bizarre phrases that smash disparate words together: Whenever you solve a meta with theme answers as strange as these, the first thing to ask yourself is why these words in particular are combined the way they are. They're not puns based on regular phrases, so there must be a reason. With a little nod from the puzzle's title, you'll notice the pattern inside the theme answers. They each form the name of a planet in our solar system: The one planet missing from that set is EARTH, so hopefully it's clear how to finish the meta: We need to find two entries in the grid (totaling 11 letters) which, when combined, create the letters of EARTH in consecutive order. You'll find one of those pieces in a fairly common place to find a meta hint: the final Across entry, where APPEAR appears at 129A: [Become visible]. The other piece is not too far away at 79D: [Bronze medalist's place] which is THIRD. Combine them and you get the meta answer APPEAR THIRD, as Earth does in the order of the planets. You might guess that the theme answer that amused me the most was KAIJU PIT EROTICA. In fact I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the Great Red spot on Jupiter is used for. I'm not saying that every crossword has to have theme answer like KAIJU PIT EROTICA … I'm not not saying that, either. If you've never seen the 2006 documentary 'Wordplay,' here's some background to explain how the ACPT works. There are five divisions of solvers: A, B, C, D and E. The top three fastest and most accurate solvers solve competitively in the A division finals. The B division is made up of the top 20 percent of all solvers and the C division is made up of the top 40 percent of solvers. You get placed in these divisions based on your past performance in the ACPT, or directly into the C division if it's your first ACPT. If you're in the A division, you can't solve in the B or C division finals; if you're in the B division, you can't solve in the C division finals. It gives a small handful of solvers of different speeds a chance to participate competitively during the final puzzle of the tournament. Every ACPT competitor solves seven themed crosswords, six on Saturday and one on Sunday morning. There's an eighth puzzle (a themeless 15×15) that the finalists in the A, B and C divisions solve onstage on big whiteboards while everyone else solves it on the ground non-competitively. The C division finalists get moderately difficult clues, like those of a Wednesday New York Times crossword; the B division finalists get the same puzzle with maybe a Friday NYT-level difficulty; and the A division finalists get very tough clues, tougher than a Saturday NYT. I've been in the B division for about a decade, and I've been aspiring to solve in the B division final for a few years now. Your puzzle score is determined both by how fast and how accurate you are, but it's to the minute. If you finish a puzzle perfectly with 10:59 left on the clock, you get the same score you'd get if you finished that puzzle perfectly with 10:01 left. If the minute rolls over — if you finish with 9:59 left — it's considered finishing a minute slower than if you turned it in with 10:01 left. Having about 30 seconds left when you look up at the clock is good because it gives you plenty of time to check over your grid before raising your hand to signal that you're done. If the minute ticks over and you look up to see 58 seconds left, you end up cursing your bad luck in being just a tad too slow; at the top of the standings in each division, those few seconds can make the difference between making the finals and not making them. Of course, you also have to turn in perfect solutions with no mistakes or blank squares on all puzzles. For Puzzle 1, you're given 15 minutes to finish a relatively easy 15×15 crossword. In all my years going to the ACPT, I've never finished Puzzle 1 in under four minutes; finishing it in the 3-minute range would be a good target if I wanted a shot at the B division final. Sadly, I didn't hit it. I looked up at the clock and saw 10:46 left. So once again I would not finish Puzzle 1 in under four minutes and I would have to make up the time in some other puzzle. I told a few others that I would probably need the solve of my life on Puzzle 5 (the really difficult one) later in the afternoon. Puzzle 2 is a 17×17 crossword and you have 25 minutes to finish it. I had 19 minutes left when I turned it in, so my time was good, but I was convinced I'd made a mistake. I couldn't be 100 percent sure because if I've solved a tournament puzzle quickly without spending much time on any individual answer, I tend to forget a lot of what I just filled in. The problem was that I didn't fully understand the theme and I mostly ignored it while I was solving, but I had a vague memory of filling in a wrong Down answer and didn't check whatever the crossing answer was. So I figured my shot at the B final was over. If you make even one mistake, it sets you back far enough that it's virtually impossible to climb the rankings sufficiently to reach the final in your division … unless you are literally one of the four or five fastest solvers in the world (which I'm not), or you can outrace everyone in your division in all the remaining puzzles by maybe two minutes each (which I can't). Puzzle 3 (19×19, 30-minute time limit) was fairly tough in its cluing, but I'd heard others had the same experience and I got a bit of luck in that I looked up and saw 22:02 left on the clock. I just shot my hand in the air to save the minute. I've gotten burned on this a couple of times in the past, when I didn't have enough time left in the minute to check the puzzle over for blank squares, but by this point I felt I'd probably already screwed up with Puzzle 2, so what did it matter? I went to lunch, but I didn't want to look at the standings on my phone. I never check the standings until all six of the puzzles on Saturday are complete since I don't want to psych myself out before the afternoon slate of crosswords (especially Puzzle 5), but my friends Jesse Lansner and Adam Doctoroff told me separately that they had checked the standings and … apparently I was clean on Puzzle 2. No mistake. What a relief! That put my mind at ease, but I had to stay focused for puzzles 4, 5 and 6, perhaps mostly with Puzzle 6 — in the previous two ACPTs, I'd finished Puzzle 5 in a good time and then carelessly left a blank square in Puzzle 6, and I told myself over and over that this would not happen a third time in a row. I finished Puzzle 4 (15×15, 20-minute time limit) in a good time, with 15 minutes left. Then came the dreaded Puzzle 5 (17×17, 30-minute time limit, with a very difficult theme and tough clues). I have finished Puzzle 5 without a mistake every year since 2015, but it doesn't matter how many times I have solved it successfully; I still have the fear that I'll get completely stuck and won't be able to finish before time is up. Remember how I said earlier that to make up the time on Puzzle 1, I felt I needed the solve of my life on Puzzle 5? I got it. When I was finished filling it in, I looked up and saw maybe 22:20 left on the clock. This was my best-ever solve on Puzzle 5; I think my previous best was in 2023 when I had 19 minutes left, and I'd had a couple of years with 17 or 18 minutes left, but 22 minutes remaining? Unreal. I couldn't believe I pulled that off, and I had enough time to look it over for any iffy squares or blanks. I knew Puzzle 6 (19×19, 30-minute time limit) would be significantly easier, but I still had to remind myself to check the grid again and again to make sure there were no blank squares. I finished that one with maybe 23:40 left, so I had plenty of time to look the puzzle over. My friends Pete and Claire Rimkus have a trick they use — turning the completed grid upside-down since supposedly your eye catches blank squares much more easily this way. Since I had time to spare, I did it myself just to make absolutely sure it was totally filled. I was fairly confident there were no blanks; if I turned this puzzle in with no mistakes, I might be in a competitive spot for the B final. I went to dinner with my friends Matt Sandler, Heather McIntire, Jordan Goldberg, Zoe Jacoby and Zoe's dad. We had a nice time chatting about the day's puzzles, and I enjoyed eating Raclette cheese for the first time. I'd still been avoiding checking the standings and I'd heard they only had the scores of Puzzles 1 through 4 up. However, they had put my scan of Puzzle 5 online, and that was clean. All right! Five perfect puzzles and my best-ever finish on Puzzle 5 in the bag. At this point I decided I had to check my scan of Puzzle 2 and see what I did there; while solving I must have corrected whatever wrong letter I had without even knowing it (that has happened before). I looked down at my phone … … and then my heart broke into a thousand pieces. There wasn't just one wrong square in Puzzle 2. There were two wrong squares. The judges just missed them in their early-afternoon check of the puzzles. This wasn't a case where my letters looked ambiguous and a judge might have thought I put in the right letters; they were clearly wrong. So I had a mild moral crisis on my hands: I had a chance to make the B final if the scores didn't reflect the error, but it wouldn't be fair to the other B division competitors who handed in six perfect puzzles. I say it was mild not just because it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but because I didn't need much convincing on how to proceed. The plan was that after we got back to the hotel, I'd let the judges know about my two wrong squares. About 20 minutes later, the standings were updated again, and the error still hadn't shown up in my score. This is where the ACPT really twisted the knife — I was sitting in 18th place overall, and 2nd in the B division! You need to finish in the top 3 of division A, B, or C to solve one of the final puzzles onstage, and I had a somewhat comfortable three-minute lead on the two B division solvers who were sitting just behind me in 4th and 5th (David Cole and Sam Mattson). I somehow managed to finish Puzzle 5 faster than everyone else in the B division, which is something I'd have never imagined doing at any point in my solving life. When I saw my erroneous place in the standings, I basically jumped out of my seat and shouted 'ARE YOU KIDDING ME?' I've had moments at the ACPT where I've discovered I'd made a mistake in one of the first six puzzles, and that's always a bummer, but until now I'd never had a moment where I needed to tell the judges they missed a mistake I'd made and sacrifice my place in the standings. I'd certainly never had this much at stake at the ACPT in any year. I didn't even get the chance to have my moment of integrity with the officials. When you are sitting as high as 2nd place in the B division, the judges look over your puzzles again and again, as well as the puzzles of everyone else who has a real shot at making the finals, just to make sure they've gotten everything right. They eventually caught the two wrong squares on their own. I fell back down to 50th place in the standings while we were finishing dessert. As Matt put it to me, 'You had the agony without the heroism.' The next morning, we had Puzzle 7 (21×21, 45-minute time limit). Of course it didn't matter how well I did on this puzzle since there was no way to make up enough ground to make it back into a B-final position. Puzzle 7 was very bizarre for me in that I felt I was slow — not that the theme was difficult, but that the clues felt pitched tougher than I expected — and yet somehow, I still finished in good time with 35 minutes left. Once again I had the good fortune of looking up and seeing 35:02 on the clock, and once again I'd stopped caring if I'd even made a mistake, so I just threw my hand up to turn it in. I had a nagging feeling I'd left an entire corner blank, but that concern turned out to be unfounded — it was a clean puzzle, and I leaped back up to a final finish of 38th place overall, but nowhere near the top three spots of the B division. Even in my best prior performances at the ACPT, I wasn't fast enough to be a B division finalist. This year, I was fast enough to make it. If not for that one careless error in Puzzle 2, I would have been in the B final. As disappointing as that was, the silver lining I'm taking from this year's tournament is that I know I can make the B final one day. I just have to, you know, not screw it up. And honestly, I couldn't have been prouder of my friend David Cole after he became the third B finalist. He told me after Puzzle 7 that he was just as shocked on Saturday night that he was sitting in 3rd in the B division when he thought I was ahead of him, and he ended up finishing 2nd onstage in the B final. Dan Schwartz finished first in the B final, in a little more than four and a half minutes, which is astonishing; I have a hard time believing I'd have been anywhere near that if I'd made the final. (If you've solved the ACPT puzzles already, you can watch the B final here. The final for the A division is here if you want to see three crossword-solving titans — Paolo Pasco, Will Nediger and Dan Feyer — absolutely rip through the toughest clues in blazing speed.) So that's another ACPT gone by. Hopefully that error in Puzzle 2 won't end up haunting me for years to come, and who knows if I'll have that same kind of speed next year. I feel like I can't really count on having the 'solve of my life' on Puzzle 5 again, and there are so many B division solvers (or some as yet unknown rookie) who could crush the competition in 2026. Then again, if I did as well as I did despite spending 44 straight hours from Thursday into Friday awake, and if I felt like I went slowly on Puzzle 7 and still finished it in under 10 minutes, then maybe I have room to improve my speed-solving. Even if I never end up making the B final, I won't regret that I got to spend time with my whole crossword family. Maybe my son Elliot will compete at this tournament one day, too — he's still the winner of the Unbelievably Cute Little Guy division in my book and he didn't even have to solve a puzzle to do that — but we'll let him decide if he wants to take up crosswords as a hobby. Let's do this again next year, shall we?
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brain Trust
Last Friday afternoon, in the lobby of a Marriott in downtown Stamford, Conn., attendees of the 47th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the annual confab of word nerds hosted by The Times's puzzle editor, Will Shortz, joyously convened. Veteran puzzlers greeted old friends with the excitement of a homecoming. First-timers smiled nervously, eyeing others' name tags in hopes of catching a glimpse of a favorite crossword constructor. Some broke off into groups to chat or work on one of the many crosswords stacked on the welcome table. 'Electric!' I scrawled in my notebook, smiling eagerly at the scene despite my efforts to be a dispassionate observer. Before last weekend, I thought of myself as a crossword person, insofar as I do the Times puzzle regularly and with some speed. I had, since seeing the 2006 documentary 'Wordplay,' dreamed of attending the tournament, but only idly, sometimes musing to my one crossword friend about how it might be fun to spend an entire weekend doing puzzles. I had no idea what an amateur I was. At the tournament I encountered puzzlers who can finish a Saturday puzzle in three minutes. I met a fan who can, when presented with a constructor's name, recall with precision just how many crosswords that person has had published in The Times. I witnessed a die-hard dressed as a cruciverbalist Phantom of the Opera, replete with grid-printed cape and mask and a rose whose stem was a giant pencil. 'There are no casual puzzle people here,' I wrote in my notebook after the late-night wine-and-cheese reception where I sipped pinot grigio and listened to two constructors try to articulate the ecstasy they feel when, while painstakingly crafting a crossword, they realize the grid is actually going to come together, that they're going to be able to complete an elegant puzzle. On Saturday, I did six timed puzzles with the competitors, only one of which I didn't manage to complete in the 30 minutes allotted, and I felt some measure of pride that I wasn't totally out of my league. But like a majority of the nearly 1,000 people at the tournament who had no hope of making it to the final round (grand prize: $7,500) my times were beside the point. The point was the community, the shared love and language participants possessed. In the hotel elevator after the first puzzle session, strangers became immediate comrades in arms as they commiserated over the clues they didn't get: 'Wait, how is POT a three-letter word for 'Cash on hand'?' The puzzles they'd all just completed were enough of a connection to start a conversation, to linger and chat when they got to their floor, then make plans to get lunch together. This kind of fast intimacy is nearly impossible in the real world. If we take the time to even acknowledge a stranger in an elevator, we're apt to nod, smile politely, look down at our phones: I see you, I recognize your humanity, but I have no desire to take this liaison any further. At a conference of enthusiasts, this impulse to withdraw is inverted. You're there because you want to connect, because you've been doing puzzles alone in your kitchen for the past year and this is your one chance to geek out with others who share your niche interest. I spend most of my time avoiding eye contact with strangers; at a summit of the devoted, everyone is wide open, gazes get met eagerly. Here we are, all of us with this one passion in common, so we have common ground on which to establish a warm and satisfying chat, if not a lasting friendship. On my way home from the conference, I stopped in to see my old friend Peter, whom I've known since college. As much as I'd marveled at how easy it was to bond with strangers over crosswords at the tournament, it was a relief to be around someone who really knew me, to relax into the easy flow of our shared history. Meeting new people is exciting, but it's also exhausting. What would be ideal, I thought, was if Peter were into crosswords — then I could have the excitement of this shared interest within a rich, established relationship. That's unlikely to materialize though; he's shown no interest. But for many years, we've both convened regularly with a group of friends for 'Cookbook Club,' a roving potluck where everyone prepares a dish from the same cookbook. It's our own sort of conference, based on an existing shared interest in cooking and eating. For several years, I sampled a different grape varietal every month with a group of friends at 'Wine Club.' My friend Avi jokingly calls our weekly dinners out 'Restaurant Club.' Eating and drinking with friends is hardly an arcane interest akin to speed-solving puzzles. But putting some structure around our everyday enthusiasms elevates them, adds some of the pageantry of the fan conference to an ordinary gathering, rendering the goings-on of ordinary life a little more exciting. 📺 'The Last of Us' (Sunday): A show to make you think twice about that lunchtime portobello burger or pizza ai funghi, 'The Last of Us' is an unusually stylish and affecting adaptation of a popular video game, and it returns for a second season. Set in a future in which cordyceps mushrooms have turned people into near zombies, the show centers, initially, on Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a mysteriously immune teenager, and Joel (Pedro Pascal), the smuggler who delivers her to what he hopes will be safety. The first season ended with a violent shootout. This one, set several years later, begins more peaceably. (Therapy has returned to the land.) But post-apocalypse, things rarely stay calm for long. For more: Can you tell a clicker from a walker? Test your zombie knowledge with this quiz. Chocolate-Caramel Matzo Toffee Passover starts tonight. If you're looking for a last-minute gift to bring to a Seder, there's still time to whip up a batch of chocolate-caramel matzo toffee. To make it, bake matzo crackers beneath a buttery topping of brown-sugar toffee and then cover it in bittersweet chocolate. You can add any toppings you like (chopped nuts, dried fruit, candied ginger, even crushed potato chips), or leave it pleasingly minimalist with just a sprinkle of flaky sea salt. It will keep up to a week when stored airtight at room temperature, but it rarely lasts that long in our toffee-loving house. The Hunt: A couple scoured pastoral properties in Maine, Vermont and New York for a space where they could live and work. Which did they choose? Play our game. Budding industry: To revive the farm that had been in his family for seven generations, this antique collector chose to plant cannabis. What you get for $1.6 million: A 1875 Colonial Revival house in Kennebunkport, Maine; a converted church in Thunderbolt, Ga.; or a contemporary house in Phoenix. No phone, no guidebook: A writer visited Casablanca, Morocco, for the first time — without the internet. Here's how it went. All about looks: Restaurateurs are finding that ambience and branding matter more to some diners than the food. Micro-retirement: Some young people are spending their savings on an extended break earlier in their careers. Green your garden: Read about four ecologically crucial things you should do in your garden. Create an al fresco oasis The right patio dining set can instantly make your home feel bigger and transform your outdoor space. But this furniture is often expensive, and it can be hard to know where to start. Wirecutter's experts recommend considering a few factors. First, the layout: Putting down painter's tape will help you imagine the set's overall footprint. And choose materials you can realistically maintain. Wood, for example, generally requires the most upkeep, but it's also often the most repairable. To help, we spent more than 80 hours assembling and testing sets in all kinds of climates and spaces. Any of our five favorites would make a lovely setting for upcoming spring meals. — Daniela Gorny The Masters golf tournament: Turn up the volume this weekend and enjoy the sounds of Augusta National Golf Club: the thwack of a 7-iron, the polite applause of well-heeled patrons, the chirps of birds greeting springtime. We asked Kathi Borgmann, an expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, what types of birdsong viewers might hear this weekend. 'Keep your ears tuned in for the 'peter, peter, peter' of the tufted titmouse and the boisterous 'teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, tea' from the Carolina wren,' she said. 'You might even hear a 'birdie, birdie, birdie' from a northern cardinal, or an announcer getting excited about a good shot.' Today and tomorrow, starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on CBS Oh, about the golf … Justin Rose (-8) leads after two rounds, but Rory McIlroy is closing in. Follow Masters coverage at The Athletic. Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangrams were hollowing and howling. Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week's headlines. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@
