Course Correction: NYT Sunday Crossword of April 6

April 6, 2025

Here are my notes from solving the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of April 6, 2025.

This puzzle by Kareem Ayas was titled Course Correction. Right from the start, the puzzle had a distinctive twist: there were six shaded discs in the grid, each covering a 3x3 area with three open squares flanked on each side by darkened squares. Four of these shaded areas were for three Down squares, and the remaining two had three Across squares.

69-Across offered a clue for these special squares: [Intense cycling sessions… or what you must do to complete the answers to this puzzle’s starred clues]. I was looking for something involving circuit training, but finally found SPIN CLASSES.

This hint unlocked the key to the discs. In the top left, I had WHYD for [*“Oh, what’s the point?”], with the D hitting an edge of a disc, and it was clear something was missing. Inside the disc was BIO downwards, from BIOPIC for [Genre of the 2024 film “Bob Marley: One Love”]. Then it was clear— if you spin the disc clockwise, the BIO becomes OIB horizontally, melding with the WHYD on its left to form WHYDOIB. On the right, was [Alternative] which solves to OTHER. Althogether it solves to WHY DO I BOTHER. In ASCII art:

        ■B■
    WHYD■I■OTHER
        ■O■

Clever! The other wrinkle was that not all discs spin in the same direction—some spin counterclockwise to form the answer. This caught me when I saw [*Part of the funnies page] should solve to COMIC STRIP with three parts: COM in the first section, ICS in the disc to be spun, and TRIP at the last section solving for [Set off, as an alarm]. Made sense—except it results in ICSONS for [Descendants], a word that doesn’t exist. When I realized you could spin the other way, ICS becomes SCI for SCIONS, which makes a lot more sense!

I got the closest I’ve gotten to solving the NYT Sunday puzzle without outside help. I’m learning common crossword answers: asea appeared here as it did in a previous puzzle, Etsy—an American e-commerce site for handmade goods and crafts—seems a favorite of constructors, and I’m pretty sure I’ve used ADMAN before for an advertising executive. But I did have to look some things up. Here are my notes for future reference.

Entertainment

• Percy Jackson & the Olympians is a fantasy novel series by American author Rick Riordan.

Music

• An erhu is a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument. It’s called 二に胡こ in Japanese, using the same characters as the Chinese.

Nature

• [A/C capacity] was BTU. I have not heard of British Thermal Unit before, the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It’s an alternative unit to the joule.
• A tern is a type of sea bird.

Places

• Estes Park, Colorado is the town at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Sports

• The “puck” in curling is called the stone, or rock.

Tricky clues

• [Hears, in a way] was TRIES, using hears and tries in the legal sense of hearing a case in court, or subjecting someone to trial.
• [Ringing endorsements?] solved to I DOS as in the I do said at a wedding; I guess because weddings also involve bells ringing. I originally had IPOS for this due to an incorrect cross, which I thought made sense because a company with an IPO rings the bell to open the stock market.
• [Superlative finish] was EST, as in the suffix -est, e.g., biggest, fastest.
• [Roast rostrum]—I had no idea what it meant, since I didn’t know that a rostrum is a platform or podium for speaking. The answer was DAIS, as a dais is a raised platform or stage. Roast is probably used in the sense of comedy roast and not particularly necessary for the clue.
• [Chinese fruits with leathery rinds] was LITCHIS which I didn’t get because usually the fruit is spelled lychee. Litchi is the scientific name for the genus.

Words

• A cuspid is a canine tooth.
• The word grandiloquent means “pompous or bombastic language”, so I don’t think the answer EPIC quite fits for [Grandiloquent], assuming that was correct.
• Nile green is a pale yellow green.
• The answer to [Cloying sentimentality] was TREACLE, which usually means “molasses”, but it can also mean “something (like a tone of voice) heavily sweet and cloying”.

Finally, as someone who worked on web browsers for ten years, I’m a little embarrassed that I could not solve [___ Explorer, classic web browser] for a while, since the obvious Internet Explorer did not fit in the three letter fill. The answer was MSN Explorer which I’d never used but vaguely remembered the existence of.

Final thoughts

This was a fun one—and I’m encouraged that I only needed to look up a few unfamiliar things. The spinning disc mechanism was novel and useful for triangulation, as each disc involved three different clues.