The whole look of the grid has changed, and with it the Degree of Difficulty, IMHO.
No longer are there a lot of answers running the full width of the grid, and the net effect is that of a Thursday puzzle. I feel a little sorry for the top notch solvers - which I am not. The dumbing down must be disappointing to them.
I am the book columnist for a daily newspaper. Every Tuesday evening I take my books in for the current week, drop them off on the feature editor’s desk and get more books for the next week. Our paper carries the NYT crossword.
This Tuesday, she had a letter on her desk from a reader begging her to make the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday crosswords easier because they were busting his or her chops. This person had noticed that these puzzles were getting harder.
The only days I ever do are Friday and Saturday because no other days are worth my time. Yes, Friday is getting a little easier.
I don’t know about the weekday crosswords, but for some time now my local paper has been carrying the Sunday (only) New Yourk Times crossword. And it seems to me that, over the past few years, the Sunday crossword has gotten easier, and I’ve been able to breeze through them a lot quicker. But I don’t know whether it’s the crossword that’s changed, or whether it’s just that I’ve gotten better with experience.
I don’t solve the NYT (or any other xw) regularly, but suggest it might be the latter. What makes puzzles hard is the amount of lateral thinking the constructor and/or editor can build in. As you continue to solve, your brain gets more flexible and it’s harder to trick you with this stuff – esp. since there are a finite number of legitimat techinques of doing it. (“Legitimate” meaning there are a bunch of conventions of cluing that must be followed.) Also, I think you tune into a particular editor’s quirks after solving his or her work for a while.
I agree.
Plus, I think Thudlow Boink is very smart. After all, no dummy could have chosen such an amusing name. I mean it. I laugh almost every time I see it.
The timing of this question is interesting to me, as I thought yesterday’s puzzle was so easy that I suspected it had been constructed to run on some other day of the week. However - recently the NYT has run some extraordinarily difficult Friday puzzles, ones that felt like Saturdays, so I don’t notice an overall trend of dumbing-down. But for those who don’t think crosswords are easier than they used to be, try solving some reprinted NYT puzzles from the 1970s; and I hope you’re up on your Latin, your French, and your Linnaean nomenclature.
The Sunday Puzzle usually has a theme . If you don’t get on the right wave length ,you can struggle for a long time.
That’s my general thought as well*. For me, it’s hit or miss. Most of the time I can get through the Friday/Saturday puzzle in one sitting, but every so often it seems to be tougher and it takes a couple of revisits. Eh, could be just not enough coffee.
I’ve heard/seen a number of interviews with Will Shortz, and he is buried with letters asking him to make the puzzles harder, balanced with an equal number of letters asking for him to make them easier. I think that he also mentioned that the Sunday puzzle is about the same difficulty as the Thursday puzzle.
*Although I will occasionally do the Thursday puzzle to see what the theme might be. I’m no constructor, but it seems to me to be more of a challenge to do a themed puzzle in the smaller constraints of the daily grid.
You are correct.
Wow, you people amaze me. I think I’ve solved a total of 2 Friday NYT puzzles in my life. My hit rate through the week is something like 100% (Monday), 95% (Tuesday), 70% (Wednesday), 20% (Thursday), 1% (Friday), 0% (Saturday).