NYT Guide for August 30, 2025: Suggestions, Tricks, and Resolutions

The New York Times' Connections puzzle on Saturday took solvers on an exciting journey through music, slang, and contemporary culture. The theme of the puzzle, Puzzle #743, was a clever blend of easy categories and one particularly evasive set that required greater cultural awareness.

One such set of words, titled "Not Be Good," referred to disappointment or failure in slang, with each word having multiple meanings. For example, BITE, BLOW, STINK, and SUCK were marked as failures, while EAT, ROCK, RULE, and SLAY were celebrated as successes. The words ROCK and RULE, sounding distinctly 1980s and 1990s, were contrasted with SLAY and EAT, which comprise more recent parlance.

But the most challenging group for solvers was the set of contemporary composers, who represented modern classical innovation. The set included John Cage, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, all influential figures associated with avant-garde and minimalist music movements. Solvers may have found words like ROCK or BITE easy, but encountered difficulty with names like REICH or ENO.

John Cage was an American avant-garde composer known for pioneering chance music, prepared piano, and redefining the concept of music itself. He studied with Schoenberg and collaborated with dancer Merce Cunningham in New York. Brian Eno is an English musician and composer credited with developing ambient music and influencing minimalism through experimental electronic soundscapes. Philip Glass is an American composer whose repetitive structures and meditative minimalism helped define the style in the 1960s and onward. Steve Reich (born 1936) is a key minimalist composer famous for rhythmic phase shifting and works like "Different Trains" blending minimalism, sampling, and historical themes, imparting groove and energy to the genre.

The puzzle's design showcases the capacity to span registers, from the quotidian slang of 'sucks' and 'slays' to the lofty titles of avant-garde composers. Furthermore, the design opposes contraries (failure to success, popular to avant-garde), highlighting how language works across culture and time.

The music genre category was the easiest to approach, but the puzzle avoided placing ROCK in this category. Instead, it included EMO, FUNK, METAL, and POP genres. The group of words EAT, ROCK, RULE, and SLAY forms a good generational connection in the puzzle.

Overall, the NYT Connections puzzle #743 was a thought-provoking and entertaining challenge for solvers, demonstrating the puzzle's ability to combine light wordplay with complex cultural references.