Jesse Goldberg’s Thursday grid looks broken at first glance: many Down entries don’t match their clues. That’s intentional. The revealer at 52-Across — clued as “What each Down answer needs from its clue in order to make sense” — is FIRST TWO LETTERS. The key is right there: each Down answer becomes a valid word or phrase only after you prepend the first two letters of its clue.

Theme mechanic: add the first two letters of the clue to the Down entry

The Downs are entered into the grid without those two letters, which is why they read as nonsense. To interpret them, take the opening two letters from the Down clue and tack them onto the front of the grid entry. Once you do, everything resolves cleanly and the crossings make sense.

Down clue Two-letter prefix Grid entry Completed answer
Studs (4-Down) ST ALLIONS STALLIONS
The Chicago Bulls had a pair of them in the 1990s (40-Down) TH REEPEATS THREEPEATS

Tip: If a Down entry looks like a plausible word missing its opening consonant blend or digraph, check whether those two leading letters are sitting at the very start of the clue. If they are, you’ve found the fix.

Why the Across themers nudge you to the trick

Goldberg places a set of long Across entries that act like stage directions for the meta:

  • SKIM OFF THE TOP
  • SHRUG IT OFF
  • STRAIGHTEN UP

Together with the revealer FIRST TWO LETTERS, they hint at the operation. You “skim” the opening letters off the top of the clue, “shrug off” the momentary dissonance in the Downs, and “straighten up” each entry by placing those letters at the front. It’s an elegant bit of cluing symmetry once you see it.

How to solve it efficiently

  • Work the Across clues early. The cluing is intentionally straightforward to compensate for the Down gimmick, so Across entries provide a stable scaffold.
  • When a Down entry won’t fit its clue, extract the first two letters of that clue and prepend them to the grid entry. Confirm with multiple crossings.
  • Use long Across themers to anchor quadrants. Once anchored, you can validate several Downs quickly with the two-letter add-on.

Examples of straightforward cluing that help

The grid sprinkles in clean, gettable entries to keep you moving while the theme clicks into place:

  • 24-Across: SETI, clued as the subject “studied with the help of telescopes.”
  • 60-Across: OBAMA, clued as the only US president not born in the continental United States.

Both answers confirm letter patterns that stabilize crossings for nearby themed Downs.

Constructor’s note, summarized

The seed for this theme came from a wordplay challenge at the 2025 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, where attendees were asked to write clues beginning with the same two letters as the answer. That constraint translated cleanly into a crossword gimmick: steal those letters from the clues and attach them to the answers. To build the grid, Goldberg sifted a large database of published clues to find thousands that matched the pattern for Down entries, and then filled the Acrosses from a standard word list. The result is a Thursday that initially resists — and then resolves suddenly once you apply the rule consistently.

Play today’s puzzle

If you want to try the theme in context, you can solve the September 25, 2025 daily puzzle via the New York Times Crossword app or on the web at the puzzle’s daily page: nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2025/09/25.

Once you know to lift the first two letters from the clue and set them atop each Down, the grid snaps into place — a tidy Thursday reveal that rewards a little lateral thinking.