November 4, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Forty “Autumnal” Hink Pinks: The Answers By Dylan Hicks This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Ryan Grabowski, who got thirty-seven out of forty hink pinks. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Ryan! Below, the solutions. (Answers in bold managed to stump everyone.) See you next month. Read More
October 31, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Forty “Autumnal” Hink Pinks By Dylan Hicks Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Friday, November 4, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This month, the puzzle makes one of its intermittent returns to the semipopular rhyming game hink pink. As was previously explained in nearly identical language, hink pink is a word game in which synonyms, circumlocution, and micronarratives provide clues for rhyming phrases. In the standard explanatory example, an “overweight feline” is a “fat cat.” Hink Pinks on that babyish level aspire to lend vocabulary building an air of fun, but more sophisticated puzzles are sometimes mulled over on road trips, in trenches, and in other settings where boredom and tension might be mellowed, to paraphrase Dryden, by the dull sweets of rhyme. Read More
September 30, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Netanyahu’s Ready for More Puzzling?: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner is Mark Clemens. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Mark! Below, the solutions. Read More
September 26, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Netanyahu’s Ready for More Puzzling? By Dylan Hicks Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, September 29, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! Early last year, the novelist, editor, and wordplay master Ed Park energized and distracted his Facebook circle with the post “Hall and Joyce Carol Oates,” which as of this writing has prodded 5,853 comments. The responses imagined other incongruous supergroups and amalgams—Umberto Eco and the Bunnymen, Howlin’ Virginia Woolf—and ventured into kindred puns and portmanteaus such as the answers to this month’s puzzle. Aside from recycling or reformulating a few of my own contributions, I haven’t knowingly plagiarized from Park’s thread, but neither have I reviewed more than a fraction of its comments, so quite likely there’s some overlap. (Great minds and so on.) Though there are several musical-literary pairings here, I’ve rarely mingled writers with musical acts on Park’s precise model. Most frequently, the title of a movie, book, album, song, TV show, or poem has been joined with a celebrated figure from any field, but you might run into a tagline or some other familiar phrase instead of a title, or the answer might blend two titles. Homophones are welcome. The clues try to provide some context, often anachronistic or absurd, for the pun. A few examples: Popeye Doyle chases Irish suspense novelist. Kiss Me Kate, staged as will and representation, kicks off with a twist. The answers would be (1) The Tana French Connection (though I’m sure French is as law-abiding as her books are addictive); and (2) Another Op’nin’, Another Schopenhauer (which would present singers with phrasing hurdles). As must be clear, answers lean heavily on given names and surnames that are also everyday English words (Moscow on the Hudson Yang) and names that include meaningful syllables (as in our groaner headline, or The Danny McBride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even). Okay, that should be enough explanation; I’ll let you John Kerry on. Read More
September 1, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles What’s the Takeaway?: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner is Mike Emmons, who solved nineteen out of twenty riddles. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Mike! Below, the solutions. Read More
August 29, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles What’s the Takeaway? By Dylan Hicks Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Thursday, September 1, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This month’s puzzle is composed of twenty three-part questions whose one-word answers get shorter by subtraction. A riddle by Roget provides a model for our answers, though not our questions: What is that which is under you?Take one letter from it and it is over you?Take two letters from it and it is round you? The answers are chair, hair, and air. Our answers rarely rhyme, but the form is pretty much in line with Roget’s. Letters are taken away—from any part of the word, not just the beginning—but never jumbled; left-to-right order is diminished but maintained. Croton could become croon but not Orton. As those examples illustrate, we’ve imposed no Scrabbly prohibitions on proper nouns. Abbreviations are welcome, too. Note also that letters, as they travel from word to word, might take on diacritical marks, be capitalized, or otherwise undergo modest transformation. Très, for example, might follow trees. In most cases, the answer words shrink by ones (bread leads to bead before heading to bed) but in some cases they decrease by twos (bonobo to Bono to no) threes, or fours. Tailgate wags discovered this classic of quadrimedial reduction (above). Read More