nyt connections hints september 3
September 3, 2024
Dispatches from the Puzzle Desk
By A. Corvo, Senior Correspondent-at-Large
PARIS—While half the planet was busy arguing whether the latest BRICS summit would finally topple the dollar (spoiler: it won’t, the greenback is like a cockroach with a Black Card), the rest of humanity did what it always does when existential dread peaks: opened The New York Times and prayed the Connections grid would deliver four neat yellow boxes of dopamine. Today’s hints dropped at 00:01 GMT, right when Tokyo salarymen were pretending to work and Californian insomniacs were doom-scrolling. The puzzle, dear reader, is never just a puzzle; it is a geopolitical mood ring.
Let us survey the battlefield. Hint #1—“A way to say ‘small’”—sent Brussels bureaucrats scrambling for thesaurus.com in seven languages, because God forbid the EU admit anything is actually small. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s press pool quietly noted that the Russian word for “tiny” doubles as a slur for Western sanctions. Coincidence, surely.
Hint #2—“Things you can scale”—had Silicon Valley venture capitalists salivating: fish, walls, Everest, a startup’s burn rate. In Lagos, fintech founders laughed so hard they spilled their ₦1,000 lattes; scaling here means getting the generator to run long enough to finish the round.
Hint #3—“Found in a bar”—united humanity in shared dishonesty. From Dublin to Dubai, we all pretended the answer would be “olive” and not “crippling debt.” The bars in question, by the way, are increasingly owned by private-equity firms that also own the hospital you’ll stagger into later. Circle of life.
Hint #4—“Signs of aging”—was the cruelest. Berlin DJs tried “vinyl crackle,” Seoul skincare influencers countered with “fine lines,” and my editor in New York muttered “subscription fatigue.” We are all, in some sense, expiring daily specials.
Consider the global supply chain of this nonsense: A Canadian coder wakes at 3 a.m. to queue the hints into the NYT’s CDN. A Singaporean data-analyst bot parses the resulting Twitter meltdown to sell targeted ads for anti-wrinkle cream. An Italian graduate student procrastinating on her dissertation about Renaissance cryptography decides that “cryptic” is definitely one of the purple-group words. The carbon footprint is measurable; the cultural footprint, incalculable.
Yet the puzzle persists as the last universally acceptable addiction. Opioids are gauche, crypto is passé, but four categories of lexical Sudoku? Chef’s kiss. UN peacekeepers in Goma trade hints over patchy WhatsApp. Refugee kids in Lesbos solve yesterday’s grid on a cracked Samsung, the screen spider-webbed like the Schengen dream. Somewhere in the International Space Station, astronauts circle the Earth every 90 minutes and still complain that the Wi-Fi lag ruins their streak. If that’s not a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, I don’t know what is.
And when you finally crack that smug green category—today it was “Parts of a Lock”—you feel, for eight fleeting seconds, like a competent adult. Never mind that 2°C of warming is now baked in, or that your pension will evaporate faster than a Wordle green square. You have arranged language into pleasing rectangles; surely civilization can be saved by Tuesday.
The grid resets at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, which is neither green nor particularly mean, merely indifferent. Until then, we are all citizens of the same anxious archipelago, tapping tiles instead of fixing the roof. The hints for September 3 will be forgotten by September 4, archived behind the paywall of history. But somewhere a coder is already writing tomorrow’s algorithmic cruelty, and somewhere else a human will greet it like sunrise.
That, comrades, is connection.
