NYT Crossword Answers for Dec. 10, 2024

Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues

TUESDAY PUZZLE — If your goal is to get better at solving crosswords, you might want to start by practicing a form of exercise named at 33D of today’s grid: HATHA YOGA. It’ll help you keep calm when you first open a Thursday or Sunday grid.

On a more sincere note, though, I make the suggestion because hatha and other forms of yoga tend to involve inversions like shoulder stands, headstands and handstands. The benefits of these poses are manifold: Inversions can not only regulate mood and heart rate, but also give one a fresh vantage from which to see the world. What things look like upside down can be drastically different from how they appear right-side up.

Today’s crossword, constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf, is a perfect occasion for a few yogic inversions. Practicing one while solving may even help you spot the puzzle’s theme. Let’s flip the page together, shall we?

Today’s Theme

When themed answers are nested inside other entries, constructors will often shade or circle the relevant squares. Here, a title for [Some movie set workers] (14D) doubles as a way to describe what we do by filling in the shaded squares. After solving the clues in which the squares appear, we have, from left to right: AYOG, TMILK, ORIM and EELK. Perfectly (in)coherent.

The movie-set workers are MAKEUP ARTISTS — and if we read this title as three separate words, we get MAKE UP ARTISTS. At first, I thought this meant that we were inventing (i.e. making up) names for artists — doesn’t T Milk sound like a rap sibling of T-Pain? — but I doubted that this passed muster for a puzzle theme. Then I saw what was actually going on.