NYT Sunday Crossword of May 25: Travel Bug

June 1, 2025

The New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of May 25, 2025 was by Dylan Schiff and titled Travel Bug.

The theme of the puzzle involved six circled cells scattered across the grid. There was a hint clue for the mechanism of these cells: 69-Across [Theoretical paths depicted by the circles squares]: WORMHOLES. So it was reasonable to conclude that to read an answer, when you reached a circled cell you would warp to another cell, but even with that knowledge I couldn’t figure out the trick until the very end.

I saw that just warping to a cell, and continuing by reading in the same direction you were going in, didn’t seem to work. I also saw that writing one letter in the cell wouldn’t produce the answer, and somehow concluded that no letters should be written in the cell. Instead I guessed you had to continue on some non-obvious path on the other side of a warp. I could see some paths through adjacent cells that worked to form an answer, but couldn’t find a consistent pattern.

Finally, almost at the end of my puzzle solve, I realized the solution was to write multiple letters in the circle, and the same letters at the corresponding circle at the other end. For example:

• 30-Across [Inventor’s pride]: BRAIN CHILD
• 110-Across [Not breaking, as an actor]: STAYING IN CHARACTER

Where you actually wrote the nonsensical BRAINCHARACTER in the 30-Across cells, and STAYINGINCHILD in the 110-Across ones, with INCH in both of the circled cells.

It worked the same way for Down clues with the wormhole:

• 3-Down [“Can I speak to your manager?”]: WHO’S IN CHARGE
• 67-Down [Many an evangelical]: BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

Another wormhole was:

• 28-Across [Exam in which using notes is allowed]: OPEN BOOK TEST
• 115-Across [Lightweight Apple laptop]: MACBOOK AIR
• 15-Down [Making hotel reservations in advance]: PREBOOKING
• 90-Down [Certain social media update]: FACEBOOK POST

This also had me stumped, since I didn’t really understand what making a reservation “in advance” could mean, considering any reservation is essentially in advance. And not knowing you could put letters in the circles, I imagined 90-Down would warp to form FACE POST, which I guessed was a new word for posting a photo of your face on social media. Similarly, I guessed MAC AIR was a mistaken or uncommon abbreviation for MacBook Air. Once I realized BOOK fit, everything made sense.

I remembered in school having “open-book” vs “open-note” exams, but I didn’t remember that an open-book test allows using notes, and am not sure that’s necessarily true.

Final pair:

• 43-Across [Harry Houdini and David Blaine, for two]: ESCAPE ARTISTS
• 97-Across [Brand known as “The San Francisco Treat”]: RICE A RONI
• 33-Down [“Ain’t that the truth!”]: I HEAR YA
• 85-Down [Floor covering in many a living room]: AREA RUG

I was pretty sure about RICEARONI, vaguely recalling TV commercials seen in my youth.

All three wormhole fills—INCH, BOOK, and EAR—fit the “worm” theme: inchworm, bookworm, and earworm.

Some tricky clues for me:

• [Top-notch]: A-ONE, for A1 which means “very good; excellent”. I thought this might be new slang, but apparently it was first used in 1801.
• [Snazzily dressed gent]: FOP. I hadn’t heard this word for “a man excessively concerned with his appearance, vain”.
• [Search around as a truffle-hunting pig]: ROOTLE, I’m not sure if I’ve heard this, a variant of “root” as in “root around”.
• [GPS suggestions: Abbr.]: RTE, short for “Route”. I’ve not seen this.

Final thoughts

The wormhole mechanism had me stumped for most of the solve, but in retrospect I don’t know why I didn’t think of putting multiple letters in the squares sooner. Cool mechanism.