The NYTimes Mini Crossword is a reliable joy

Two things that Trump and Obama have in common: they have both been President of the United States, and they both have five letters in their last names. This second fact means that they have both cropped up in the New York Times' Mini Crossword - a gem-like 5x5 treat that pops up online every morning and can be played for free.

I love crosswords, by which I mean that I love the idea of them. If I have a whole day at my disposal I can just about get a Rufus cryptic finished, albeit with a little cheating, and I love to read about the form's strangest variants. The Listener, for example, is a cryptic so astonishingly challenging that a past example required solvers to finish the grid, cut it up into Tetris pieces, and then fashion them into a wall. That's a weekend right there, but quite a good weekend.

If the Listener is at one end of the crosswords scale, the NYTimes Mini is at the other. The Mini, edited since its inception by Joel Fagliano, is a US joint for starters, so cryptic clues - a definition joined in a dainty muddle with a bit of wordplay - are out, although very occasionally a cryptic-like pun, with its familiar pincer movement feel, will turn up anyway. And black squares are often out too. It can be a bit daunting, coming from English crosswords, to see a grid in which almost every square is ready to receive a letter.

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