NYT Sunday Crossword of June 8: Meeting their Match

June 14, 2025

The New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle of June 8, 2025 was by John Kugelman and titled Meeting their Match.

This puzzle had magnet icons in eight dark cells of the grid, pointing either to the left or right. To solve the puzzle you’d have to figure out how these magnets worked.

I started to get an inkling that some answers couldn’t fit in the usual squares. For example:

• [What Jason Momoa has, notably] looked like ABS__, and while ABS OF __ looked plausible, nothing reasonable could follow in the remaining two squares.
• [Jason Statham or Sylvester Stallone] was shaping up to be ACTION_ but no single letter at the end could form a reasonable answer.

I finally cracked the theme with 54-Down [Colorful feature of a lawn]. The down squares were filled as GREENGR and then the answer bended to the right, using the letters from the crosses it passed over to form GREEN GRASS, ending at a magnet icon. The Across clue in that spot where the answer bended was a blank [-], confirming that it the across fill RASS wasn’t supposed to make sense.

The mechanism was that each magnet would bend the answer toward it of the outermost down clue crossing the magnet’s field.

Here were the theme answers:

• [What Jason Momoa has, notably]: ABS OF STEEL.
• [Jason Statham or Sylvester Stallone]: ACTION STARS.
• [Churchgoer]: CONGREGANT. I figured the answer would be about congregation, but couldn’t think of this form of the word.
• [Church]: HOUSE OF GOD. OK.
• [Ground cover plant with trailing vines and five-petaled flowers]: PERIWINKLE. New to me.
• [Japanese restaurant order]: NOODLE BOWL. As someone who lives in Japan, this was somewhat disappointing. I could see the answer ended with BOWL but it took many crosses to find NOODLE. But a noodle bowl is generic enough to be about many cuisines, and in Japan you won’t really find something at a restaurant called “noodle bowl” in Japanese. Ramen is just ramen and udon is udon, for example.
• [Chinese restaurant order]: EGG FOO YUNG. I wasn’t familar with this name in English. In Japan I think this is more commonly called かに玉 (kanitama, crab omelet).

There was also a meta clue about the theme, but I couldn’t crack it until the very end: [Powerful force of attraction on display in this puzzle?]. I saw the end was MAGNETISM but couldn’t solve the beginning. The answer turned out to be ANIMAL MAGNETISM, a term I hadn’t heard of, so even though I saw that animal could fit I didn’t think it was correct.

I learned from reading another review of the puzzle that the “bent” portion of the answers were three-letter animal names (e.g., ass in GREEN GRASS), but this eluded me because you have to skip the first letter of the four-squared Across clue they occupy to see it.

This puzzle was overall difficult, with many short answers I didn’t not recognize. Some notes:

• [Boxer’s diet, maybe]: ALPO. From a previous puzzle, I guessed this would be a dog food. But I had to look up my notes to remember this particular brand.
• [Belle boy?]: BEAU. Belle meaning “beautiful”, often for a girl though. A handsome boy is a “beau”.
• [Break, slangily]: BORK. Ironically I knew this but initially dismissed it because I thought it was esoteric programmer speak and didn’t think it was mainstream enough to appear here.
• [More expensive]: DEARER, as dear can mean expensive, as in “paid a dear price”.
• [A, in German * class]: EIN, an indefinite article in German.
• [Seventh of 24]: ETA. Referring to the the Greek alphabet.
• [Fancy diving flips]: GAINERS, a term in diving or gymnastics.
• [Bottleful for un bébé]: LAIT, French for milk.
• [Hightail it]: LAM. I knew “on the lam” but not as a verb.
• [Uncle ____]: (nickname for comedian Berle): MILTIE. I knew Milton Berle, but not this nickname, hence I originally just filled it as MILTON.
• [Gateway to the Amalfi Coast]: SALERNO, a coastal city in Italy.
• [Fat substitute]: OLESTRA, an additive that was much maligned and not often used today.
• [Brand used for Taco Tuesday]: ORTEGA, an American brand.
• [Cold and wet, as weather]: RAW. Haven’t heard weather described as this.
• [One-named pop star with releases on the Monkey Puzzle]: SIA. With enough crosses, I’d guessed MIA (e.g., My Love is Like Wo), unknowingly mispelling Mya.
• [La petite Thérèse, e.g.: Abbr.]: STE. Thérèse of Lisieux is a saint and in French, “Sainte” can be abbreviated Ste.
• [“Star Trek”: T.N.G. empath]: TROI, for Deanna Troi.

Final thoughts

The theme was reasonable but I could not enjoy it fully having missed the animal part until reading about it later. Many of the clues I couldn’t get, especially the foreign language ones. On to the next one.