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"Howards End" daughter / WED 6-10-26 / Landon who ran against F.D.R. in 1936 / Cousin of a flugelhorn / Notes of appreciation, in online parlance / Motivator, of a sort / ___ House, residence for visiting dignitaries in Washington / Only player on three victorious teams in this puzzle
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Constructor: David J. Kahn and Ethan Quigley
Relative difficulty: Medium
THEME: WORLD CUP WINNERS (7D: Global "club" with only eight members, each of which appears in circled letters with its country code) — just like it says: the country codes for the only eight countries ever to win the World Cup can be found in the eights sets of three circled squares inside today's grid:
Theme answers:
- BRAWL (4A: Big dust-up [1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002]) 🇧🇷
- AFFRAY (18A: Big dust-up [1998, 2018]) 🇫🇷
- WAR GOD (24A: Mars, notably [1978, 1986, 2022]) 🇦🇷
- TAURUS (36A: Cinco de Mayo birth, e.g. [1930, 1950]) 🇺🇾
- GERWIG (43A: "Lady Bird" director Greta [1954, 1974, 1990, 2014]) 🇩🇪
- NARITA (50A: Japan Airlines hub [1934, 1938, 1982, 2006]) 🇮🇹
- AVENGE (61A: Get back for [1966]) 🏴
- ESPYS (69A: Awards for Shohei Ohtani and Caitlin Clark [2010]) 🇪🇸
- (bonus answer) PELE (56D: Only player on three victorious teams in this puzzle)
Alfred Mossman Landon (September 9, 1887 – October 12, 1987) was an American oilman and politician who served as the 26th governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937. A member of the Republican Party, he was the party's nominee in the 1936 presidential election, and was defeated in a landslide by incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The margin of victory in the electoral college was the largest of Roosevelt's four elections to the office of president, as Landon won just 8 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 523. Landon died on October 12, 1987, becoming the only presidential candidate from either of the major parties to live to the age of 100 until Jimmy Carter in 2024, and is to date the only Republican candidate to do so. [...] The 1936 Republican National Convention selected Landon as the Republican Party's presidential nominee. He proved to be an ineffective campaigner and carried just two states in the election, neither of which was Kansas despite him being the sitting governor of that state. After the election, he left office as governor and never sought public office again. Later in life, he supported the Marshall Plan and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs. He gave the first in a series of lectures, now known as the Landon Lecture Series, at Kansas State University. Landon lived to the age of 100 and died in Topeka, Kansas, in 1987. His daughter, Nancy Kassebaum, represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997. (wikipedia)
• • •
The puzzle was easy except for the north, which was also less pleasant than the rest of the grid largely because they decided to get cute with the cluing and double it up ([Big dust-up] for two clues, both in the same tiny section, both themers). The real problem is AFFRAY, a word no one uses ("fray," sure, but "AFFRAY" sounds almost Victorian). I probably wouldn't have gotten AFFRAY with any kind of clue, but somehow I resented struggling to get an answer and having to endure a doubled-up clue. There was something suffocating about it. It's trying to be cute, but it muddies things too much, esp. since you're doing your little cutesy clue-doubling thing with theme answers. You wanna play little duplicate-clue games, use the regular fill, not the themers. This tiny section included not only two themers with duplicate clues (one of which is not an everyday word), it also had two annoyingly ambiguous clues for three-letter answers. I wrote in UMP for REF (5D: One making calls, informally) and DEA for ATF (6D: Antismuggling grp.). So that whole section felt airless and fussy and ultimately not that rewarding. Who wants trouble from three-letter answers? I should add that I wrote in BLAIR at first for 4D: ___ House, residence for visiting dignitaries in Washington, but then pulled it when it ended up clashing with UMP and DEA. Which is to say that clearly I'd heard of BLAIR House, but did not trust that I had it right. Also, LUSTS is something (much) stronger than 22A: Longs (for), and TYS aren't "notes" (15D: Notes of appreciation, in online parlance). You might write "TY" in a "note" (or text) (short for "thank you"), but TYS are not themselves "notes of appreciation." They are, at best, expressions of appreciation. At worst, they're a terrible plural abbr. that you'd never use irl and should never use in your grid.
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[2010!]
[1998!]
[1999! Not a World Cup song, but certainly a better song than the other two ... and hey, any song can be a World Cup song if you want it to be! Just put it on while you watch and bam, instant anthem!]
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Bullets:
- 34D: Motivator, of a sort (NUDGER) — what are we doing here? Come on.
- 31A: Little dust-up (SPAT) — still with the "dust-ups"?! Why?!
- 54D: "Howards End" daughter (EVIE) — this is where the puzzle gets whatever difficulty it has: in proper nouns of obscure origins. Kinda dicey to cross a two fictional women at a vowel (EVIE / MIRIAM), but I supposed that "I" was eventually inevitable (I thought maybe Mrs. Maisel was a MARIAM, but I've yet to meet or hear of an EVAE, so "I" it was!
- 50A: Japan airlines hub [1934, 1938, 1982, 2006] (NARITA) — weird to have ITALY hidden in a clue that is explicitly JAPANESE. I think it's better when the country-containing answers have nothing to do with specific countries. These are the minute aesthetic considerations I think about when I look over puzzles. This particular issue may not, in fact, be worth fretting over, but it's something that would irk me a little if this were my puzzle. But what do I know? I'm just a dog (70A: Stereotypical dog's name).
That's all. See you next time. And Happy Almost World Cup!
P.S. yesterday I learned that Ricky Martin and Shakira have both recorded official World Cup songs, but Marc Anthony has not. (Thanks, WFMU! Specifically, Tuesday Music Trivia on "Wake N Bake" with Clay Pigeon!).
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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16 comments:
The Times doubling down this week on WPOTY nominees with Sunday and today. I’ll take Nordic Combined over soccer any day. As REX highlights - the reveal here is as flat as can be.
JAZZ On The Autobahn
Overall fill goes from the oddity of things like AFFRAY and GEES to the trivial MIRIAM.
She Never Spoke Spanish To Me
Highly unenjoyable Wednesday morning solve.
Bee GEES
Timely, sure.
But sad.
Had a conversation with a colleague yesterday who told me he's going to boycott the whole thing. Even on TV. And he's a huge soccer fun.
Let's just hope that the bard's adage will prove itself true.
All's well that ends with Rex
Solved as a themeless. Once a few crosses made WORLDCUPWINNERS visible, that was my toehold into the top central portion. I agree with Rex about all the “dust-up” misdirection, more of a distraction than a welcome bit of added complexity. All in all, this took far over my average time to fill in all the three- and four-letter stuff. As a sportball nonenthusiast, I appreciated some of the clever clueing, but that’s about it.
I had a real hard time with the east - the double stacked Naticks of SKAT and ASTA crossing SERTAS, especially when NOWISE also made no sense.
Oh, I absolutely adored this one.
A World Cup theme. A World Cup theme. In June 2026. During the actual World Cup. The sort of idea that sounds so obvious in retrospect that you assume someone must have done it already, and then when it unfolds in front of you, you realize how elegantly the whole thing has been engineered. The circled entries are FIFA country codes—BRA, ARG, GER, ENG, ESP, ITA, FRA, URU—embedded in ordinary answers and clued with the championship years of the corresponding nations. That's a terrific Wednesday gimmick: accessible if you're a soccer fan, completely solvable if you're not, and satisfying from either direction.
My favorite part is that the theme manages to be both incredibly timely and incredibly restrained. Modern themed puzzles sometimes arrive carrying a megaphone and a PowerPoint presentation. This one just quietly lets BRAWL contain BRA, AFFRAY contain FRA, WARGOD contain ARG, TAURUS contain URU, GERWIG contain GER, and so on. The elegance is in the concealment. You're solving along, noticing odd clue references to years like 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002, and then suddenly the whole thing snaps into focus. A classic Wednesday "ohhhhhhh" moment.
And then there was the clue that nearly made me spit out my coffee: "Mars, notably [1978, 1986, 2022]" for WAR GOD. That's the kind of clue where you can practically hear the constructor giggling. Likewise "Cinco de Mayo birth, e.g. [1930, 1950]" for TAURUS. The puzzle keeps taking perfectly ordinary answers and forcing them to moonlight as World Cup trivia. It's absurd. It's delightful. It shouldn't work as well as it does.
The fill is also unusually lively for a theme this dense. GERWIG, PETRI, NOWISE, SKAT, ALMS, WIPE D, IDEA—nothing spectacular individually, but the grid has that smooth, professional feeling where you never hit a patch and think "well, somebody had to pay for the theme somehow." Even REX shows up at 70-Across, which I naturally choose to interpret as a tribute. No evidence supports this interpretation. I reject all competing theories.
Overall: exactly what I want from a Wednesday. Timely without being disposable. Clever without being convoluted. Funny without trying too hard. A puzzle that knows a giant international soccer tournament is happening and, instead of screaming WORLD CUP! WORLD CUP! WORLD CUP! from the rooftops, slips eight little country codes into the grid and trusts the solver to put the pieces together. That's confidence. That's craftsmanship. That's a very good Wednesday.
Easy, even though I know virtually nothing about World Cup soccer.
* * _ _ _
Overwrites:
Hand up for dea before ATF as the 6D antismugglers.
My 12D quick veer was a ZiG before it was a ZAG.
TkS before TYS for the notes of appreciation at 15D.
Got my muscles confused. lat before PEC at 58D.
WOEs:
AFFRAY at 18A.
EVIE, the daughter in Howard's End at 54D.
A little harder than Medium. I don't know soccer, as we call it in my home country -- I didn't even know that "the 2026 World Cup officially starts tomorrow". I had to get to PELE before I understood that soccer was the topic of conversation and that the three circled letters in each case were country abbreviations (which of course the revealer at 7D says plain as day; I guess I hadn't tackled that one yet). The years put in parentheses in the theme clues helped not a whit; they could have been made up randomly and I wouldn't have detected the difference.
For me the theme was boring, and I was itching to get it done because I want to get on with the day, so really any appreciation comes post-solve. There are some cute touches, like the FOOT in FOOT WARMERS and KICK in KICKSTARTER, and of course they don't have an ump calling balls and strikes; they have a REF for that. So some clues were subtly there, but in the heat of battle you don't always pick up on such hints.
But then there were the annoying aspects, like LUSTS (poorly clued), and the cross of AFFRAY and TYS -- I literally had to run the alphabet to get the last letter Y (at which point, I was all like "oh yeah, I guess that's a word"). Waffled between NARITA and NAkITA, and bungled Greta's last name. "NUDGER", yeah, okay. Don't know my card games either, but I thought there was a card game called "Spit", and then later I misspelled SKAT with a "c". Actually, both recall the Greek stem skat- which means "shit", which sounds like it could be a card game as well. I'll have to look up the origin of SKAT once I submit this post, which is gonna be right... (have a good day, folks!) now.
Solved it with only one look-up (to confirm the REINA/NARITA cross), but the music never sounded. This has occurred a few times in the past. Suggestions?
Great puzzle, took me a while to figure it out, but once we got that it was World Cup Winners that made it a little easier to come up with some of those more obscure answers. 12:03 for me so I think that's medium on a Wednesday. The clue on 70A was a very poor editing choice, almost a cheap shot.... you put OFL in the marquee corner spot and then.... clue it that way???? IMEANCMON!! Enjoyed learning that URUguay won the 1st FIFA World Cup, at home I might add, 4-2 over Argentina. There were only 13 teams in that 1st tournament, only 4 from Europe. Thanks, David and Ethan !!!
I thought hUnGER was a much better motivator (34D) than NUDGER.
I don't think of NARITA as crosswordese. Twelve appearances this century - about once every two years.
crouCh at 31D and heapON at 32D, both 'confirmed' by CORNET led to some brief trouble, but basically a very easy Wednesday.
Enjoyed the bonus PELE entry. I got to see him play with the Cosmos in the seventies. We lived in Maryland at the time but my father drove us up for a game.
Same problem as Rex with AFFRAY, and same reaction to the small number of WORLDCUPWINNERS. May some choppy construction but also a lot of fun wordplay involving references to soccer. As a young American decades ago I had little feel for the global importance of soccer, or FOOTball as the rest of the world knows it. At a corporate training site in Europe I was watching a CUP match with a group of Europeans when an instructor came by to tell us the class had resumed. Aside from a few humorous rude remarks, no one moved. The class was re-scheduled.
I thought it missed the mark - mostly I suspect due to the amount of strain that the theme put on the grid (see AFFRAY, for example, which appears to have been included out of desperation). There is also collateral damage to the fill, so you end up with stuff like GERWIG crossing REINA. It might be a fair trade off if you’re the type of sleuth who enjoys deciphering the theme answers, and/or is a soccer fan, and/or knows the country codes, etc. I prefer puzzles that are not as theme-forward - so this one wasn’t for me.
Two nits re individual entries. I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase NOWISE before, hopefully that’s just a “me” thing and in fact it has more currency IRL. Also, is it really necessary to clue a zodiac sign with reference to a holiday in a foreign country ?
I found it harder than medium. Crossing NARITA and REINA at a vowel was a Natick for me.
Hey All !
If those crazy Golden Knights don't start shooting for the net, there will be no ESPYS for them! (And no Stanley CUP) They were passing, and passing, and passing, and passing. Shoot the damn puck!
*Ahem* Sorry about that.
Got stuck in Center with the trifecta of names, GERWIG/REINA/NARITA. Also had GoTWET and WIrED, and the silly ole brain was not letting me see pattern recognition with having WORLD_Ur_I_NERS. WORLD OUR DINNERS? No nevermind that I had completely forgotten about the PELE clue. Yes, I know the WORLD CUP is starting, but what can you do?
42 Blockers today, again the extra 4 are Cheater Squares. But they help tremendously in getting the Theme to work out, so, OK.
Liked puz overall, didn't know only 8 Countries have all the World Cups. 22 Cups do far, let's have #23 be someone else! (Go USA!)
REX gets another point. That's 2 for the year!
@pablo, I think we might have to start giving you points for OTTER appearances, as apparently no one knows how to put PABLO or even PAUL in a puz!
Hope y'all have a great Wednesday!
Three F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Three random points:
• We’ve seen Greta GERWIG alluded to in Times puzzles before, but always through the answer GRETA, never through her surname. Lovely to see her finally get her well-deserved due.
• David J. Kahn has shown in his 191 Times puzzles that he loves making tricky clues that require steps to get to the answer. He, along with his grandson Ethan carried on the tradition today, with clues such as [Used one], [Deliver up], and [Suit in a certain suite].
• Since we have CORNET and a backward TAPS in the Middle West, here is a short info bite regarding horns and “Taps”. The bugle, which has no keys that the fingers press down, is the traditional horn for “Taps”. The cornet, which has keys, is sometimes preferred because it has a warmer, more solemn sound. And the trumpet, also with keys, is the most popular because far more musicians have it. You’re welcome.
A timely, fun, and satisfying solve for me. Thank you, David and Ethan!
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