NYT Crossword Answers for Sept. 20, 2024

Jump to: Tricky Clues

FRIDAY PUZZLE — Jackson Matz, the constructor of today’s puzzle, is a high school senior who is going through the college application process, a notoriously stressful time in a teenager’s life. I don’t know if we can persuade his first choice of school to admit him, but perhaps if we all cross our fingers and send him good wishes we can help him out.

While he’s waiting to hear back from colleges, Mr. Matz is making puzzles, which is a perfectly normal and relaxing thing to do when you’re under stress. (That’s a lot funnier if you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword.)

Today’s puzzle has intersecting 15s, a feature that I love. It’s fun to take an overall guess at a grid-spanning entry, write in the letters one by one and hope that, by the time you get to the end of it, you have the entire thing correct. When a crossword has many of these crossing spanners, the fun increases, as does the amount of 10D that I can conquer in the grid by simply solving a few entries.

Shorter answers can help fill in crossing entries, but for my money it’s those long answers that make solving themeless puzzles so much fun.

Your thoughts?

Tricky Clues

1A. The philosophy of THEISM was [influenced by Aristotle’s concept of the Unmoved Mover], a being that represents God. According to Britannica.com:

“Aristotle’s fundamental principle is that everything that is in motion is moved by something else, and he offers a number of (unconvincing) arguments to this effect. He then argues that there cannot be an infinite series of moved movers. If it is true that when A is in motion there must be some B that moves A, then if B is itself in motion there must be some C moving B, and so on. This series cannot go on forever, and so it must come to a halt in some X that is a cause of motion but does not move itself — an unmoved mover.”

7A. As soon as I saw the phrase “pig tales” (as opposed to the hairstyle called “pig tails”) in the clue [Four-year-old in pig tales?], I assumed the answer was Fern, the young girl who rescued Wilbur, the pig in “Charlotte’s Web.” Unfortunately, that name didn’t fit the five-letter slot. Once I had the first and the last letter of 7A filled in, I realized that the answer was PEPPA Pig.