Wednesday

Patrick Jordan's NYS, "High-Caliber Profession," has a great-looking grid and some nice fill that hasn't been used this year (according to the Cruciverb database), such as SYNONYM and SIROCCO. I loved the clue for EDIT: "Mad workers do this"—a nice switch from the usual Time and Money clues. I wonder if that was Patrick or Peter Gordon's clue...

Randall Hartman's NYT moves "at ease" from the fill to the clues, where it serves as the opposite of TENHUT; meanwhile, Jack McInturff goes sensational, inspirational, and celebrational in the LAT. Updated: And in Hartman's CrosSynergy puzzle, his theme is the opposite of his NYT one—in the CS, he extracts AGE, while in the NYT, he adds a couple C's.

NYS 3:52
NYT 3:49
CS 3:42
LAT 3:04