Wednesday, June 17 2026, Jonathan Raksin

 

Today's crossword features a really neat device, revealed by the central Across answer RIFFLESHUFFLES ("Casino maneuvers (*) carried out three times in this puzzle?").  In a properly done riffle shuffle, a deck of cards is cut into two equal piles, and then shuffled so that the cards from each pile are exactly interleaved, the cards from pile 1 now 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. from the top and those from pile 1 now 2nd, 4th, 6th and so on.  Somehow, Mr. Raksin has come up with three different eight-letter words/phrases, which can be split into halves and riffle-shuffled letter-wise and still be valid English :

• CONSOLES --> COOLNESS
• STONEPITS --> SETPOINT
  ...and my favourite for its absolute cheekiness:
• GOOFOFFS --> GOOFOFFS

If you're like me, this is the first NYT puzzle you've ever solved with an answer appearing twice in the grid.  It was even clued the same ("Slackers")!!  What chutzpah!  But of course it works here - and I fully approve.

Amazing!  I can only imagine how these pairs were discovered.  If it were me, I'd have used software somehow.

Incidentally, if you perfectly riffle-shuffle a deck of cards 8 times, you restore it to its original order! A neat and not necessarily intuitive outcome.

Despite a bit of an odd grid configuration, with the NE and SW corners almost completely isolated from the rest of the grid, it was a smooth, midweek-appropriate solve.  I was nearly done in right at the start by a couple of intersecting clues in the NW corner that I had no idea about : Paul MESCAL, who played Shakespeare in "Hamnet", and the Disney film ENCANTO.  I also thought Tom Cruise was ILL-CAST, not MISCAST, as Jack Reacher, and that the Complete Works of anything would be CANON, not TOMES.  But it all worked out with a lucky guess or two, and no damage done.

I liked the little Supernatural Corner at the bottom, with "Telepathy, e.g." (PSI) in close proximity with "'Ability' that's hard to believe, for short" (ESP).  Popcorn TOFU sounds terrible.  Well, regular popcorn ain't all that either.  I was not familiar with the term SHORTCON for a fast-paced scam. I love Osso BUCO.  Maybe I'll make it this weekend, in between bike rides...

And with that, on to the "turn"!

-philbo

(*) known in these parts as "manoeuvres"