Lovers of the NY Times Crossword know that it begins on Monday and grows more difficult as the week progresses -- until Sunday, when the puzzle is twice as big, yet whose level of difficulty is the same as Thursday's. Recently I've noticed more multiple word answers in the Thursday puzzle, making it closer to Friday and Saturday's puzzles, where two and three word answers are common.
Something else I've noticed is how poorly I fair on clues drawn from popular culture -- from the 1# song of 2006 to secondary characters from recent Netflix series. Answers to these clues are arrived at only through induction, based on what can and cannot happen linguistically between letters supplied by the answers that cross the space provided.
My interest in the puzzle began when I was fifteen, when popular culture was all I knew and my mother, who was addicted to the puzzle, would call out from the den, "Karen of 'Five Easy Pieces'!" or "Soul's Barry, five letters, middle letter 'I"!" and I would shout back "Black" and "White," respectively. Like my mother, I too was addicted to the puzzle until my mid-forties. We have the pandemic to thank for returning us to it.
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