Our new game

	By Tom Wright-Piersanti I’m an editor of The Morning. My fastest Saturday crossword time is 5:31.

My favorite assignments in grade school were the logic puzzles that teachers would hand out when the class had downtime. They offered a few pieces of information — Zoe’s house is blue; Mark lives next to a green house; Jason doesn’t live next to Mark or Zoe — and challenged us to deduce the full picture.

To my third-grade brain, it seemed like a magic trick. By putting a few X’s and O’s on a grid, and by thinking about it hard enough, I could reveal entire worlds. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

Today, I’m what you might call a “puzzle guy.” I play any puzzle video game I can get my hands on. I edit The Times’s weekly news quiz. And I’m a crossword obsessive. When my colleague Melissa Kirsch attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for this newsletter, I tagged along and competed, trying to keep pace with the world’s best. (I couldn’t.)

Word games make up most of my puzzle diet these days. But I was excited when The Times recently introduced a new game of deduction, Pips, that does away with letters in favor of numbers.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll show you how to play.

Tips for Pips

The goal of Pips is simple: Place the domino pieces you’re given into a bunch of open squares. Certain conditions tell you which pieces can go where.

If several adjoining squares are marked with a number, the pieces you place there must add up to that number. If the squares are marked with an equals sign, you’ll have to place pieces that all have the same number of dots, or pips.

Placing one piece correctly will often cause the next move to become obvious. The revelations cascade, meaning one sharp placement can unlock a puzzle that, at first glance, seemed impenetrable.

Still, for those who aren’t as adept with numbers as they are with letters, figuring out that correct move can be tricky. So I asked Ian Livengood, the editor of Pips, to share a few tips for new players.

Beginner tip: Find a toehold.

Almost all Easy (and some Medium) puzzles will have an obvious starting point, where only one domino makes logical sense. These “toeholds” will help you finish the rest of the puzzle.

In this example, there’s only one domino with five dots on it, so it must go in the pink “5” region. From there, the other dominoes fall into place.

Intermediate tip: Spot the distinctive numbers.

Be on the lookout for a region that asks for a number that can only be satisfied with a specific set of dominoes. For example, a two-space region marked with a “12” must have a 6 and a 6. A three-square region with a “17” must be 5, 6 and 6.

Advanced tip: Use doubles to your advantage.

Any domino that has the same number twice is very helpful because it informs where other dominoes can be placed. In this example, the double-zero domino must go in the middle of the teal “0” region. After that, the puzzle begins to fall into place.

More games

If you’re like me, you sometimes finish The Times’s daily suite of puzzles and crave more. Here are a few of my favorites from around the web to add to your roster.

Middle East

Trump Administration

More on Politics

Other Big Stories

Is the federal government’s purchase of a 10 percent stake in Intel a socialist move?

Yes. In practice, socialist governments have seized the means of production and directed the economy through central planning. “The government owning part of Intel is, on some level, socialism. It’s at least socialism-ish!” Robby Soave writes for The Hill.

No. The United States has a long history of getting involved in company ownership for the purpose of staying competitive with rival nations. “When America faced an international communist threat sponsored by Moscow, conservatives knew absolute devotion to free markets was self-defeating,” Daniel McCarthy writes for The Daily Signal.

Elizabeth Austin gave up the couch of her dreams for an inelegant one. It’s improved the living room all the same, she writes.

Here are columns by Ross Douthat on the Minneapolis church shooting and Maureen Dowd on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and vaccines.

Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience.

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Ambience: Restaurateurs are falling back in love with old-school, high-maintenance candles.

Routine: How a blind pianist spends a day performing and rock climbing.

Labor Day deals: Most sales you’ll see this weekend are overhyped. Wirecutter’s experts found discounts on some of their favorite recommendations that are actually worthwhile.

Vows: The fishwife becomes a musician’s wife.

Your pick: The most-clicked article in The Morning yesterday was a look at Taylor Swift’s engagement ring.

Trending: People online are searching for the first reviews of Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. See some of them on Rotten Tomatoes.

A captor: Tran Trong Duyet, who oversaw the detention of John McCain and other American captives during the Vietnam War, died at 92. Decades after the war, he endorsed McCain’s run for president.

“Linsanity”: Jeremy Lin has retired from professional basketball after 15 years. He played for eight N.B.A. teams and won one championship, but he is best known for a brief stretch on the Knicks where he electrified fans and the nation.

U.S. Open: Coco Gauff eased past Magdalena Fręch to set up a blockbuster meeting with Naomi Osaka tomorrow. Jannik Sinner rallied from a set down to beat Denis Shapovalov. Read more takeaways from Day 7 of the tournament.

N.F.L.: If you’re one of the many fantasy football players with no idea how to assemble a roster before Week 1, The Athletic has your back. Here’s how to prep for your fantasy draft in 15 minutes or less.

	By Elisabeth Egan

“The Broken King,” by Michael Thomas: In this memoir, which our reviewer described as “unbearably bleak yet entirely mesmerizing,” Thomas explains where he’s been since the publication of his much-lauded novel “Man Gone Down” in 2006. Fatherhood has a lot to do with his publishing hiatus, and Thomas writes movingly about that without the shellac of so much parenting content. But the root cause of Thomas’s silence was his own childhood, which reared its ugly head as he set out to become a father different from his own. “The Broken King” takes readers back there, to Boston in the ’70s and to the trauma and racism that shaped Thomas. Our reviewer writes: “With a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away.”

This week’s subject for The Interview is Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize-winning author whose new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” is both a reflection on her difficult relationship with her mother and an exploration of Roy’s evolution into political writing. That writing, which often focuses on marginalized people in her home country of India, has made her a target of the government. We spoke about the parallels between India under Narendra Modi and the United States under Trump.

You are currently under threat of arrest in India for comments you made about Kashmir in 2010. Can you tell me a little bit about the status of that legal case?

I really don’t want to talk about it, actually, because it just increases the risk of something being taken out of context and something blowing up. It’s dormant right now, so I just let it be.

Even the manner in which you’re responding, which is that you do not want to address this because of the fear of legal repercussions, what does that say?

Well, I think in America you’re beginning to head in that direction. Ours started a long time ago, and one has to learn how to navigate it. And the reason that I don’t talk about it is because I would much rather write what I want to write than have some controversy about something you say off the cuff. It’s like they’re always trying to trip people up and trying to prevent you from thinking clearly. This culture of fear is everywhere here.

You touched on this a little, and so I would love to hear your thoughts on how you view parallels between the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the MAGA movement here in the United States.

There are a lot of parallels. If you look at the attack on citizenship, the attack on universities, the attack on students, the attack on Rohingyas, the continuous uncertainty, the fact that you might be ambushed by anything at any time — it’s so similar that you wonder, is there a playbook or is it just osmotic authoritarian behavior? The ruling party is confused with the government and all of it is confused with one man. So you’re seeing that in the U.S., and I look at it in shock. You thought that there was a mechanism in place, there were checks and balances in place. But clearly there isn’t a way of handling someone who’s completely out of control.

Read the interview here, or watch a longer version of the interview on our YouTube channel.

Read this week’s magazine.

Watch a comedy special over the long weekend. Here are some of our critic’s favorites.

Visit these reader-recommended state parks.

Achieve restaurant-quality scallops at home.

Treat yourself to a cashmere sweater.

In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Mia Leimkuhler offers up salmon recipes that are quick and easy to make on any busy evening. She suggests throwing together a sticky miso salmon bowl, salmon with garlic butter and tomato pasta, and a grilled salmon salad with lime, chiles and herbs.

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was magazine.

Can you put eight historical events — including “The Travels of Marco Polo,” the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the first email addresses — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, Sports Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

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