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June 7, 2026 
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In his constructor notes for today’s puzzle, Simeon Seigel wrote: “On more than one occasion, I’ve had a puzzle all set to submit to The Times, only to have an eerily similar puzzle show up in print just as I was about to hit send. I was still licking my wounds from having been scooped yet again by this Adam Wagner fellow when Adam contacted me out of the blue.” Adam, Simeon’s co-constructor today, wrote: “I had a lot of fun working with Sim to figure out clever ways of manipulating our data set to get the good examples to rise to the top.”
Puzzles You May Have Missed
Crossplay Tip
Keep sweep-friendly tiles: the letters in the word CANISTER, along with D and H are the ones most likely to enable you to play a sweep and pick up 40 bonus points. While high-point tiles such as X and Z are powerful for scoring, they’re part of relatively few of the seven- and eight-letter words you’ll need to find for a sweep.
Connections Quandary
Here’s the hardest category from Thursday, June 4. What connects these four things? See the answer in the P.S.
Strands
Last week’s hardest Strands puzzle was SHALL WE GATHER FOR LUNCH? from Monday, June 1 — 84.41 percent of solvers were able to complete it.
Last week’s easiest Strands puzzle was E-I-E-I-O, from Friday, May 29 — 95.38 percent of solvers were able to complete it.
Strands puzzles last week — from May 29 to June 4 — were much easier than those from the week before.
Wordle Weekly Recap
Hardest word: CHILI, from Monday, June 1.
Average guesses: 4.85, with 6.63 percent of players solving in three or fewer.
Easiest word: SMILE, from Saturday, May 30.
Average guesses: 3.89, with 35.07 percent of players solving in three or fewer.
The Wordle answers last week — from May 29 to June 4 — were roughly equal in difficulty compared with those from the week before.
Spelling Bee Hive
Overall, the Spelling Bee hives last week — from May 29 to June 4 — were a little harder than those from the week before. Of our subscribers who played last week, 34.87 percent hit Genius at least once.
Last week’s hardest puzzle: Tuesday, June 2 had the hardest pangram, with only 24.47 percent of users finding it.
Tuesday’s pangram: WINDMILLED
Letter set: L D M E I N W
Relax With Us
What’s it like to relax in New York City? The answer can be summarized by a scene in the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinny.” Joe Pesci’s Vinny Gambini, a newly licensed injury lawyer from New York, is sent down to Alabama to defend a cousin wrongly accused of murder. Gambini gets no sleep at first, put off by the eerie quiet of his small-town surroundings. But when he ends up in state prison for contempt of court, we see him dozing comfortably in his cell while a cacophony of sirens and rioting unfolds behind him.
This is the devil’s bargain for New Yorkers: We sign away our right to silence in exchange for the countless joys of living here, and condition ourselves to treat traffic, construction, music and loud conversation as a kind of room tone, mere ambience for our cinéma vérité. Friends and I have grown accustomed to pausing mid-conversation on subway platforms just long enough for a train to screech in and out of the station: “As I was saying …”
Decibels beget more decibels, of course, and every person shouting at a bar to be heard gives cause to another to shout louder. But that’s coexistence for you, and it feels good to know that you’re part of the noise.
How are we doing?
We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to crosswordeditors@nytimes.com.
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P.S. The answer to the Connections Quandary is that they are all words that come after “ghost.”
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