Technologies

Trump’s Tariffs Explained as US Inflation Picks Up Steam Once Again

The pause on many tariffs was supposed to end this week, but it didn’t. Despite that, reports still indicate that tariffs have caused a notable recent spike in inflation.

The One Big Beautiful Bill might’ve made it across the finish line, but tariffs still remain the dominant focus of President Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

After unleashing market chaos on April 2 («Liberation Day») when he unveiled a laundry list of heavy tariffs for countries around the world, they were paused for 90 days after the stock market dramatically tumbled. That 90-day pause was supposed to end this week, but the tariffs have been been extended again through Aug. 1. More recently, the administration hiked tariffs against Canada to 35% and threatened Brazil with a 50% rate, while the US Labor Department announced on Tuesday that consumer prices rose 2.7% in June, the highest spike since February.

Amid the uncertainties and upheavals, Trump has barreled forward with his plans, including doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and announcing a new plan to increase the rate for China to 55%. He also hyped up a trade deal on July 2 that leaves Vietnam’s import tax rate at a historically high 20%. The sweeping tariff initiative will likely affect your cost of living, which we know from our surveys is something you’re worried about.

That all came after Trump’s push hit its biggest roadblock yet, when the US Court of International Trade ruled late last month that Trump had overstepped his authority when he imposed tariffs. That ruling was stayed, but the fight is likely to head to the Supreme Court. All the while, major US companies like Apple and Walmart have butted heads with the administration over the tariffs and their bluntness about how tariffs will make affording things harder for consumers.

Amid all this noise, you might still be wondering: What exactly are tariffs, and what will they mean for me?

The short answer: Expect to pay more for at least some goods and services. For the long answer, keep reading, and for more, check out CNET’s price tracker for 11 popular and tariff-vulnerable products.

What are tariffs?

Put simply, a tariff is a tax on the cost of importing or exporting goods by a particular country. So, for example, a 60% tariff on Chinese imports would be a 60% tax on the price of importing, say, computer components from China.

Trump has been fixated on imports as the centerpiece of his economic plans, often claiming that the money collected from taxes on imported goods would help finance other parts of his agenda. The US imports $3 trillion worth of goods from other countries annually.

The president has also shown a fixation on trade deficits, claiming that the US having a trade deficit with any country means that country is ripping the US off. This is a flawed understanding of the matter, many economists have said, since deficits are often a simple case of resource realities: Wealthy nations like the US buy specific things from nations that have them, while those nations in turn may not be wealthy enough to buy much of anything from the US.

While Trump deployed tariffs in his first term, notably against China, he ramped up his plans more significantly for the 2024 campaign, promising 60% tariffs against China and a universal 20% tariff on all imports into the US.

«Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,» Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan last year. At one point, he called himself «Tariff Man» in a post on Truth Social.

Who pays the cost of tariffs?

Trump repeatedly claimed, before and immediately after returning to the White House, that the country of origin for an imported good pays the cost of the tariffs and that Americans would not see any price increases from them. However, as economists and fact-checkers stressed, this is not the case.

The companies importing the tariffed goods — American companies or organizations in this case — pay the higher costs. To compensate, companies can raise their prices or absorb the additional costs themselves.

So, who ends up paying the price for tariffs? In the end, usually you, the consumer. For instance, a universal tariff on goods from Canada would increase Canadian lumber prices, which would have the knock-on effect of making construction and home renovations more expensive for US consumers. While it is possible for a company to absorb the costs of tariffs without increasing prices, this is not at all likely, at least for now.

Speaking with CNET, Ryan Reith, vice president of International Data Corporation’s worldwide mobile device tracking programs, explained that price hikes from tariffs, especially on technology and hardware, are inevitable in the short term. He estimated that the full amount imposed on imports by Trump’s tariffs would be passed on to consumers, which he called the «cost pass-through.» Any potential efforts for companies to absorb the new costs themselves would come in the future, once they have a better understanding of the tariffs, if at all.

Which Trump tariffs have gone into effect?

Following Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements on April 2 and subsequent shifting by the president, the following tariffs are in effect:

A 50% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, doubled from 25% as of June 4.
A 30% tariff on all Chinese imports until the new deal touted by Trump takes effect, after which it will purportedly go up to 55%. China being a major focus of Trump’s trade agenda, it has faced a rate notably higher than other countries, peaking at 145% before trade talks commenced.
25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and 35% on those from Canada. This applies only to goods from each country that are not covered under the 2018 USMCA trade agreement brokered during Trump’s first term. The deal covers roughly half of all imports from Canada and about a third of those from Mexico, so the rest are subject to the new tariffs. Energy imports not covered by USMCA will be taxed at only 10%.
A 25% tariff on all foreign-made cars and auto parts.
A sweeping overall 10% tariff on all imported goods.

For certain countries that Trump said were more responsible for the US trade deficit, Trump imposed what he called «reciprocal» tariffs that exceed the 10% level: 20% for the 27 nations that make up the European Union, 26% for India, 24% for Japan and so on. These were meant to take effect on April 9 but were delayed by 90 days due to historic stock market volatility, and then delayed again to Aug. 1. These rates are subject to change until that new effective date, and some have already been altered: the rate against Japan was upped to 25%, the same as the rate against South Korea; Trump has also threatened a 50% rate against Brazil.

pic.twitter.com/v5WMU5wofc

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025

Trump’s claim that these reciprocal tariffs are based on high tariffs imposed against the US by the targeted countries has drawn intense pushback from experts and economists, who have argued that some of these numbers are false or potentially inflated. For example, the above chart says a 39% tariff from the EU, despite its average tariff for US goods being around 3%. Some of the tariffs are against places that are not countries but tiny territories of other nations. The Heard and McDonald Islands, for example, are uninhabited. We’ll dig into the confusion around these calculations below.

Notably, that minimum 10% tariff will not be on top of those steel, aluminum and auto tariffs. Canada and Mexico were also spared from the 10% minimum additional tariff imposed on all countries the US trades with.

On April 11, the administration said smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics, along with flat panel displays, memory chips and semiconductors, were exempt from reciprocal tariffs. But it wasn’t clear whether that would remain the case or whether such products might face different fees later.

How were the Trump reciprocal tariffs calculated?

The numbers released by the Trump administration for its barrage of «reciprocal» tariffs led to widespread confusion among experts. Trump’s own claim that these new rates were derived by halving the tariffs already imposed against the US by certain countries was widely disputed, with critics noting that some of the numbers listed for certain countries were much higher than the actual rates and some countries had tariff rates listed despite not specifically having tariffs against the US at all.

In a post to X that spread fast across social media, finance journalist James Surowiecki said that the new reciprocal rates appeared to have been reached by taking the trade deficit the US has with each country and dividing it by the amount the country exports to the US. This, he explained, consistently produced the reciprocal tariff percentages revealed by the White House across the board.

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.
So we… https://t.co/PBjF8xmcuv

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 2, 2025

«What extraordinary nonsense this is,» Surowiecki wrote about the finding.

The White House later attempted to debunk this idea, releasing what it claimed was the real formula, though it was quickly determined that this formula was arguably just a more complex version of the one Surowiecki deduced.

What will the Trump tariffs do to prices?

In short: Prices are almost certainly going up, if not now, then eventually. That is, if the products even make it to US shelves at all, as some tariffs will simply be too high for companies to bother dealing with.

While the effects of a lot of tariffs might not be felt straight away, some potential real-world examples have already emerged. Microsoft has increased prices across the board for its Xbox gaming brand, with its flagship Xbox Series X console jumping 20% from $500 to $600. Kent International, one of the main suppliers of bicycles to Walmart, announced that it would be stopping imports from China, which account for 90% of its stock.

Speaking about Trump’s tariff plans just before they were announced, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said that they would generate $6 trillion in revenue over the next decade. Given that tariffs are most often paid by consumers, CNN characterized this as potentially «the largest tax hike in US history.» Estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, cited by Axios, predict that Trump’s new tariffs will cause a 2.3% increase in inflation throughout 2025. This translates to about a $3,800 increase in expenses for the average American household.

Reith, the IDC analyst, told CNET that Chinese-based tech companies, like PC makers Acer, Asus and Lenovo, have «100% exposure» to these import taxes, with products like phones and computers the most likely to take a hit. He also said that the companies best positioned to weather the tariff impacts are those that have moved some of their operations out of China to places like India, Thailand and Vietnam, singling out the likes of Apple, Dell and HP. Samsung, based in South Korea, is also likely to avoid the full force of Trump’s tariffs.

In an effort to minimize its tariff vulnerability, Apple has begun to move the production of goods for the US market from China to India.

Will tariffs affect prices immediately?

In the short term — the first days or weeks after a tariff takes effect — maybe not. There are still a lot of products in the US imported pre-tariffs and on store shelves, meaning the businesses don’t need a price hike to recoup import taxes. Once new products need to be brought in from overseas, that’s when you’ll see prices start to climb because of tariffs or you’ll see them become unavailable.

That uncertainty has made consumers anxious. CNET’s survey revealed that about 38% of shoppers feel pressured to make certain purchases before tariffs make them more expensive. About 10% say they have already made certain purchases in hopes of getting them in before the price hikes, while 27% said they have delayed purchases for products that cost more than $500. Generally, this worry is the most acute concerning smartphones, laptops and home appliances.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and Trump critic, voiced concerns about when to buy certain things in a post on Bluesky just after Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements. In it, he suggested that consumers might want to stock up on certain items before tariff inflation hits.

«It’s not a bad idea to go to the local Walmart or big box retailer and buy lots of consumables now,» Cuban wrote. «From toothpaste to soap, anything you can find storage space for, buy before they have to replenish inventory. Even if it’s made in the USA, they will jack up the price and blame it on tariffs.»

CNET’s Money team recommends that before you make any purchase, especially a high-ticket item, be sure that the expenditure fits within your budget and your spending plans. Buying something you can’t afford now because it might be less affordable later can be burdensome, to say the least.

What is the goal of the White House tariff plan?

The typical goal behind tariffs is to discourage consumers and businesses from buying the tariffed, foreign-sourced goods and encourage them to buy domestically produced goods instead. When implemented in the right way, tariffs are generally seen as a useful way to protect domestic industries.

One of the stated intentions for Trump’s tariffs is along those lines: to restore American manufacturing and production. However, the White House also says it’s negotiating with numerous countries looking for tariff exemptions, and some officials have also floated the idea that the tariffs will help finance Trump’s tax cuts.

Those things are often contradictory: If manufacturing moves to the US or if a bunch of countries are exempt from tariffs, then tariffs aren’t actually being collected and can’t be used to finance anything. This and many other points have led a lot of economists to allege that Trump’s plans are misguided.

As for returning — or «reshoring» — manufacturing in the US, tariffs are a better tool for protecting industries that already exist because importers can fall back on them right away. Building up the factories and plants needed for this in the US could take years, leaving Americans to suffer under higher prices in the interim.

That problem is worsened by the fact that the materials needed to build those factories will also be tariffed, making the costs of «reshoring» production in the US too heavy for companies to stomach. These issues, and the general instability of American economic policies under Trump, are part of why experts warn that Trump’s tariffs could have the opposite effect: keeping manufacturing out of the US and leaving consumers stuck with inflated prices. Any factories that do get built in the US because of tariffs also have a high chance of being automated, canceling out a lot of job creation potential. To give you one real-world example of this: When warning customers of future price hikes, toy maker Mattel also noted that it had no plans to move manufacturing to the US.

Trump has reportedly been fixated on the notion that Apple’s iPhone — the most popular smartphone in the US market — can be manufactured entirely in the US. This has been broadly dismissed by experts, for a lot of the same reasons mentioned above, but also because an American-made iPhone could cost upward of $3,500. One report from 404 Media dubbed the idea «a pure fantasy.» The overall sophistication and breadth of China’s manufacturing sector have also been cited, with CEO Tim Cook stating in 2017 that the US lacks the number of tooling engineers to make its products.

For more, see how tariffs might raise the prices of Apple products and find some expert tips for saving money.

Technologies

We’re All Flailing With AI: I Tried Art That Pokes Back at the Chaos

A handful of moments at SXSW had me wondering: How much of AI is me playing a game and how much is it a game playing me?

Smack dab in the middle of this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, there was a huge dirt hole in the ground, blocks wide, where there used to be a convention center. The festival’s events continued around it in hotels, but the building’s absence was like a lurking symbol. Of chaos, of disruption. Of the world in 2026, dealing with AI and everything else.

I have no idea what the rest of 2026 will bring, but the vibe I felt at a vibe-filled show made me question how AI can work with our lives, our art and our existence. Instead of fighting it, the conference awkwardly embraced it and challenged it. I saw pockets of work all over the place and wondered about it. Conversations. And how to escape it.

Everyone’s trying to handle a world that’s suddenly way too overloaded with AI, generating documents, images, deepfakes and music, injecting assistant agents into our operating systems, even launching entire unleashed and interconnected agent systems all talking to each other on their own social networks. Job-threatening, constantly shifting, training on our data and aiming for our faces. Do we run from it, try to destroy it, or use art to question and challenge it?

SXSW gave me a lot of the latter, in different slices.

In my panel I was in at SXSW with Meow Wolf’s Vince Kadlubek and Niantic Spatial’s Dennis Hwang about their experiments overlaying tech into art in physical installations, Kadlubek discussed how AI’s infinite slop creative tool becomes uninteresting over time, while intentional art counteracts that. And that’s exactly how I felt moving through intentionally-made experiences that turned my thoughts about AI inside out, all in different ways.

AI seeping into our gaming chats, for better and worse

In a VR headset in a hotel ballroom, I chatted with cartoon fantasy characters in a whimsical game called Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking, made by game studio Arvore. I could make any request or beg as much as I wanted from my cage, where I was held prisoner for offending the King and kept dangling over a monster’s mouth for execution. Could I plead my case to them? The cartoonish VR characters responded, but via generative AI improvising off a script from a writing team, using Claude.

The chats were fun, ridiculous. I made myself an irresponsible magician and leaned into improv with the characters who approached me. None of them disappointed, which is a surprise for dialogue that’s somewhat AI-generated. Most interactions felt frazzled and absurd, but it worked for the style and the humor of it all. There was a bit of a delay for responses to kick in, though, standard-issue for a lot of AI conversations.

This was the best use of AI I saw. But what could it mean for future games, like RPGs? It’s an unsettling thought if you’re a writer…or, exciting. Indie games could end up finding ways to branch out responsive dialogue in ways that still feel custom-written and crafted. I don’t know.

On the less successful end was Love Bird, an interactive game show experience directed by Cameron Kostopoulos. I was wowed by the initial onboarding, where the «producers» called me on my phone to interview me. The producer was actually an AI chatbot with a surprisingly rapid response time. I convinced the AI to be a participant, and then was led into a room where I spoke via Xbox controller and headset microphone with a PC game on a monitor, where I was competing with others while carnivorous bird-people threatened to eat us. I’m not sure why, exactly. And I don’t know how it all ended, because my chats with the host and participants fell into broken loops that made us have to quit out early.

Love Bird was fast-paced and responsive, but also too chaotic and weird, even for someone like me who likes weird. It didn’t feel like it was really paying attention to me, and I didn’t feel like I had space to process. Maybe that’s by chaotic design, but after emerging, it just made me want to feel less AI-spammed and have games that didn’t flood me with as much conversation as this one did. I needed a quiet space. My favorite immersive experiences are often the quiet ones, not the chatty ones.

AI as a personal transformational lens

In one room, I stood at a podium and read a portion of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s acceptance speech from November as, before me, video clips of crowds cheering played on a large video monitor, seemingly reacting to me. A few minutes later, I heard my voice delivering more of Mamdani’s speech, AI-generated in my voice, to film clips of inspirational moments of support. I saw my own face layered into the background of some of these clips, too.

The Great Dictator, directed by Gabo Arora, is a museum-style participatory exploration of the power of rhetoric, provocatively named for the Charlie Chaplin satire about Adolf Hitler. The three speeches you can choose from — Mamdani’s, President Ronald Reagan’s on taking down the Berlin Wall, and Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet speech — are all picked to represent powerful moments in history, and the exhibit is about embodying history and feeling the power of speech and rhetoric in a personal way — and relating to it from a new, personal, and maybe more empathetic angle. The voice AI was generated by ElevenLabs, and the video clips at the end were hand edited, but with AI overlays of my face handled by Runway. What surprised me was how much I ended up being in historical documents. Is this a deepfake? Is it embodiment? Is it both?

Another art experience embedded me into the work: Spectacular, by Jonathan Yeo. Yeo is an artist from London whose portrait work includes King Charles III, President George W. Bush and designer Jony Ive of Apple renown and has played with tech in many of his installations. This gallery at SXSW, replicated from an exhibit that was in Paris before, used Snap Spectacles AR glasses to melt the real portraits with augmented effects and voice narration from Yeo. And, later on, the portraits began overlaying my own face, transformed in art styles that matched Yeo’s using generative AI trained on his work. At the end, I got a printout of my portrait, «signed» by Yeo himself.

I spoke with Yeo in Austin after experiencing his work. He admitted that AI is a provocation here, but that he wants to own the process that AI is trying to take from our own data everywhere. And he’s trying to apply AI and AR in ways that feel intentional and subtle as ways to help play with and bring the art to life, in museums and elsewhere. But again, like with The Great Dictator, I wondered: How much will «permanent» documents of art and history begin to melt over time with AI? What will be kept intact, and who will enforce the line?

AI as broken manipulator

Wearing a pair of Meta Oakley smart glasses, I stood in a room full of objects on shelves as a voice directed me to open a drawer, find a dollar bill there and put it in a shredder filled with bill fragments. I did it. The AI remarked with pleasant surprise at how compliant I was. From there, I «competed» tasks to prove my value as human labor, graded by an AI that saw my actions through the glasses camera and showed my stats on a TV screen, along with a deepfaked dancing version of myself.

Body Proxy, by Tender Claws, applies Meta’s glasses camera feed into its own art AI app on a phone to explore how AI could make us proxies for physical labor. It’s weird and satirical like some of their other VR work (the game Virtual Virtual Reality, among others), but also pushes at a much bigger question: How much is AI breaking us or manipulating us? How much are we willing to be manipulated?

Escape The Internet (Part One), an interactive game I played in a movie theater at the Alamo Drafthouse, turned similar ideas of manipulation into a social experiment. Created by Lucas Rizzotto, another VR/AR provocateur artist, it involved no headsets or glasses. Instead, everyone in the theater used their own phones to connect to a private server that «ran» the game and gave us little personal avatars, feeding us surveys to collect our personal tendencies and then having us play social voting games to see how we’d polarize on decisions like, for instance, who to kill: one person who shared our political views, or five who didn’t?

It’s all absurd and funny and guided by Rizzotto’s in-person guidance at the front of the theater, and along the way, I thought about how social platforms manipulate us with algorithms. Here, in this room together, we’re encouraged to find each other, recognize each other and love each other. The experience has branching paths and can be replayed, and could re-emerge in future conferences and events. But, again, I asked myself: How much of AI is a game that’s playing me, instead of me playing it?

Design for AI is still unfinished (or nonexistent)

In some of the panels I sat in on, and in conversations I had, I got a creeping sense that AI is moving too fast for artists or ethicists — or anyone else, really — to stop and properly process. One panel exploring The Future Design Language of Robots, with Olivia Vagelos of the Design for Feelings Studio, and Savannah Kunovsky, managing director of Ideo’s emerging technology division, tapped into the assumptions we make about robots. I teamed up with someone next to me to try to dream up ideas to break my assumptions and think freshly about what robots could be.

Kunovsky and Vagelos both agreed that designing for AI presents similar challenges right now, particularly because the tech is moving too fast for design to properly attend to it. But sadly, my attempt to record what they said as a quote was sabotaged by my AI-enabled Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which activated as the microphone when I tried recording a voice memo from the panel on my phone, muting the audio completely because of noise cancellation. Wearables are still broken, too.

Another panel, called Generative Ghosts: AI Afterlives and the Future of Memory, led in part by two Google DeepMind researchers, discussed many fascinating angles on how we can responsibly handle archiving our lives via AI as memories in the future, and who controls that ability. The panel had no specific answers but plenty of questions. And, as my own attempt at recording it was also erased by my activated smart glasses, it gave me an additional level of absurd friction which made me wonder: Will these archived memories eventually be lost, too, from big tech companies that sunset services or introduce noncompatible formats, memory-holing the memories?

AI is threatening, but often not successful in fulfilling its promises (or threats). Self-driving Waymo cars flooded Austin during SXSW, with my Uber app often pushing them on me instead of human drivers. I gave in and took a few for amusement, but they usually took longer to get where I was going. And, one unfortunate evening, my Waymo took a weird roundabout route that ended up dropping me off a half mile from my destination on the wrong side of the highway.

My favorite SXSW memory was making an old-fashioned collage out of magazine clippings with friends at an art gallery over wine, something that involved no tech at all. We worked our magic with intuition, scissors, old magazines and good conversation. Was it perfect? No. But it cost a lot less than generative AI. Which also makes me wonder if all these AI tools being offered to enhance or supplant creativity are necessary, or whether we’ll just rediscover that we had more tools than we realized all along.

Technologies

Samsung’s Galaxy A37, A57 New Pricing Tests the Limits of a Plastic Phone

While market conditions are raising the cost of these Galaxy A phones, Samsung’s hopes fast charging speeds, improved water resistance and camera features will provide value for price-conscious buyers.

Samsung’s announcement of the new $450 Galaxy A37 and $550 Galaxy A57 today brings good news and bad news for value-conscious customers looking for a cheaper phone.

Much like we’ve seen on the flagship-level Galaxy S26, both phones are priced higher than the A36 and A56 they are replacing — in this case by $50 — though storage options for both phones still start at 128GB. However, both phones did get a design improvement that features IP68 water resistance and will feature the newly updated Circle to Search, with enhancements like Find the Look for identifying outfits.

Starting with the $450 Galaxy A37, this phone has a 6.7-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1480 processor and has a 45-watt wired charging speed, which Samsung says will recharge its 5,000-mAh battery from 0% to 65% in 30 minutes.

The phone is made from plastic and comes in four colors: charcoal, gray-green, white and — my favorite — lavender. (Note: Samsung adds the word «Awesome» in front of all of these color names, but I’m going to save us from this.) The A37 also comes in a 256GB model that costs $540.

The A37’s cameras include a 50-megapixel wide, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 5-megapixel macro on the back, along with a 12-megapixel selfie camera on the front. The A37 gets a sampling of Galaxy AI features, including object eraser for editing photos, language translation and an upgraded Bixby assistant.

The $550 Galaxy A57 moves up from plastic to a metal body but only comes in navy. It also has a 6.7-inch display, but weighs in at 179 grams, which is markedly lighter than the A56’s 198g. During my hands-on time, it was noticeably light, especially for a phone with the larger display size.

The phone runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1680 processor. It also gets a few more AI photo editing tools like Best Face for fixing group photos where someone is blinking.

The cameras on the A57 include a 50-megapixel wide, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel macro on the back and, like the A37, includes a 12-megapixel selfie camera. A step-up 256GB model costs $610, but it’s worth noting that this price is really close to the $650 Galaxy S25 FE, which includes all of the Galaxy AI features along with a telephoto camera.

I’m bummed but not surprised to see the increased cost of the A37 and A57 versus last year’s models, which a Samsung representative said is attributable to current market conditions when I asked about the ongoing RAM shortage.

During my hands-on time, though, I did find both phones to look quite nice, with the lavender model likely providing plenty of competition to the $499 Google Pixel 10A’s colors. Both phones will go on sale on April 9.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 25 #752

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 25, No. 752.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, but it might make you hungry. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Intermission mission.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Movie candy.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

ROBE, BORE, WEEDS, WEED, RENT, RIND, CORN, SCAN, SPAN, SPANS, SAND, CANE, CANT, CROSS, COIN

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: