NYT Sunday Crossword of Jun 1: Making Arrangements

June 8, 2025

The New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of June 1, 2025 was by Sam Brody and titled Making Arrangements.

The puzzle’s theme was revealed in six across clues written in all uppercase. The clues were cryptically terse.

I first started to understand the theme with 55-Across [GLIBNESS]. With enough crosses, I could make out the common phrase MIXED BLESSING. What did this have to do with glibness? Noting the title about “arrangements”, and staring at the clue and the answer, you can see that BLESSING is a permutation—arrangement—of GLIBNESS. And “mixed” means that the letters in “blessing” are literally mixed to form the clue.

Continuing on to 83-Across [RESIST], I could find another answer that fit the theme: TWISTED SISTER, an 80s glam metal band, with RESIST being twisted to form SISTER.

The others:

• 23-Across [LEGAL NICETY]: GENETICALLY ENGINEERED. This one gave me the most trouble because somehow I’d inserted an R to form GENERICALLY and nothing made sense, until I found the error.
• 39-Across [EARTH]: CHANGE OF HEART.
• 99-Across [RAGES]: SWITCHED GEARS. A bit tough because I tried SWITCH IN GEARS first.
• 117-Across [ROYAL PERMIT]: TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER. The most fun to uncover. I found OUT OF ORDER belonged at the end first, and realized the anagram could go at the beginning, not the end (the only other one was 23-Across which I solved last).

Some tricky or interesting clues for me:

• [Hawaiian song of farewell]: ALOHA ʻOE. A song written by Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom before the overthrow by U.S. forces.
• [Number after zwei]: DREI. Numbers in German: zwei is 2 and drei is 3.
• [__ sauce (condiment also called nitsume)]: EEL. Nitsume (煮詰め) is not commonly used in Japan to refer to a sauce; it just means “reduced by simmering” though apparently the reference to sauce does exist among culinary professionals like sushi chefs. However you won’t go to the supermarket and find something labelled nitsume. What the clue refers to is probably commonly called うなぎのタレ, “eel sauce”.
• [Piece of work]: ERG, a unit of work or energy. The equivalent SI unit is the joule. A clue that this was a unit came in the form of [Meas. roughly equivalent to 10 billion 12-Downs]: BTU.
• [First name in stunts]: EVEL. I always thought the stuntman’s stagename was Evil Knievel, but he softened it to Evel; I guess because naming yourself evil even as a daredevil was too controversial at the time.
• [Butter substitute]: OLEO, another word for margarine. I’ve never heard of this.
• [Nonspeaking character in “Frozen”]: SVEN. I’ve seen Frozen many years ago but had to look up the character names again to solve this. I’d guessed OLAF who I remembered was a character.
• [Aid-de-camp?]: TENT PEG. Funny. Aide de camp is a secretary to a senior military or government official; changing to aid for a pun for a useful item for camping.

Final thoughts

I had fun solving this one. The anagram clues were nice because they didn’t require factual knowledge yet were satisfying to solve. I thought I would be able to get to the end without looking anything up, but some things like the Frozen character, the butter substitute, and the Hawaiian song name had to be looked up. Overall it was a smart and approachable theme.