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 has a fun topic, but get ready to do some serious unscrambling of lengthy answers. 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: Not too much.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Is it on sale?

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:

• VICE, VICES, SHEER, FOLD, FOLDER, FOLDERS, BALD, CHEAP, HEAP

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:

• SALE, BUDGET, BARGAIN, INEXPENSIVE, AFFORDABLE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is ONTHECHEAP. To find it, start with the O that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

Toughest Strands puzzles

Here are some of the Strands topics I’ve found to be the toughest.

#1: Dated slang. Maybe you didn’t even use this lingo when it was cool. Toughest word: PHAT.

#2: Thar she blows! I guess marine biologists might ace this one. Toughest word: BALEEN or RIGHT. 

#3: Off the hook. Again, it helps to know a lot about sea creatures. Sorry, Charlie. Toughest word: BIGEYE or SKIPJACK.

As the precursor to today’s iPhones and foldable phones, landlines were once a staple in every home. While they may seem like ancient technology, they still might have a role to play today in your home — especially during a major mobile network outage.

Outages can leave you stranded without one of your most critical lines of access to the world for hours if you’re reliant only on a cellphone. And if your smartphone can’t make phone calls, it’s not much good in an emergency.

You might reconsider the role of this home device, once standard issue but now nearly obsolete. Here’s what to think about when deciding whether to keep (or get) a landline.

Remember the landline?

Landlines are telephones that connect to specialized wiring in our homes. The iconic image is that of a rotary-dial phone — usually rented from the phone company — that either hung on the wall or sat on a counter or table, though push-button and later cordless landlines replaced many of those oldsters in the 1980s. Landline phones connect through a global communication network that was built over more than a century. But as cellphones became broadly available and affordable, many people chose to drop their landlines altogether. 

A 2022 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only about 29% of US adults lived in a house with a landline phone, down from more than 90% in 2004. The crossover happened over 10 years ago, in 2015, when smartphone sales entered a boom period that reshaped the tech industry and helped turn iPhone-maker Apple into one of the world’s most highly valued companies.

Ann Williams is one of the folks who hasn’t given up on their landlines yet. When asked why she keeps hers around, she describes moving to Huntsville, Alabama, after a tornado outbreak on April 27, 2011, when dozens of twisters killed at least 250 people and knocked out power for days. Although she moved there after the tornadoes, hearing about the event brought home to her the importance of always needing a phone connection.

«The weather here is so unpredictable,» she told me in an interview. But landlines have dedicated power and often work even in an outage. «We remember a day when it was absolutely necessary to have (the landline),» Williams said.

What makes landline phones more reliable

Landline phones operate on a separate infrastructure, built from copper phone lines that are inexpensive to build and rather reliable. They also don’t have the drawbacks of cellular networks, like dropped calls, poor and distorted quality or weak reception.

A key reason people keep landlines around is that they tend to work even during power outages, which is a big plus for folks whose work involves emergency services, business or health care.

Analog fax machines are also built around landline phone systems, which means most hospitals and doctors’ offices, as well as policy and law offices, need to keep a landline connection running.

The downsides of landlines

The US Federal Communications Commission has effectively ended the requirement that phone companies provide traditional analog landlines, and carriers are actively retiring them in favor of newer technologies. As a result, more homes and business offices are being built with Ethernet jacks rather than phone jacks.

Landline phone connections aren’t cheap, either. Standalone home phone plans from big carriers like AT&T can run about $25 to $70 per month, depending on the plan and features. CenturyLink’s home phone service starts around $30 per month, and other providers, such as Spectrum, often charge around $30 or more for basic voice service, with lower promotional rates sometimes available when bundled with internet or TV.

And not all landlines use copper phone lines. Increasingly, companies are piggybacking their phone systems on their internet connections, a service called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. AllConnect currently tracks only three service providers offering old-style landlines: CenturyLink, Comcast Xfinity and Cox. 

How to get a new landline service

If you’re ready to get set up with a landline, call your local phone company to learn about phone services. If you live in an apartment building, it’s important for you to find out where the phone junction box is. Typically, the landlord should know, and if not, the local phone company should be able to find it.

Here are some follow-up questions you want to ask, and what to look for in the answers:

• Are the landlines VoIP or are they POTS? Ideally, if you’re looking for security and reliability, POTS is what you want. VoIP can work, but understand that it likely relies on your internet modem and connection. 
• If VoIP, does the company have backup power systems to ensure the voice line remains operational during a power outage? Most companies sell backup batteries that you can buy directly from them. You can use an uninterrupted power supply, perhaps from CyberPower or APC. Do note that these are different from portable power supplies. Portable power supplies do allow you to stay electronically powered on the go, but those aren’t meant to continuously monitor for power outages and then kick in as needed.
• Typically, local calls are free, but dialing out of your area code costs. What’s the rate structure? Companies like AT&T charge extra fees tor nationwide and international long-distance calls. Long-distance calls in particular are usually charged per minute, and companies don’t always publish that information on their websites. Make sure you know what it’ll cost, and if it’s too much, consider using a chat app like Signal, WhatsApp, Google Meet or Apple FaceTime for your long-distance calls instead.

What should you do with a landline phone?

If you have a landline but leave it languishing, just sucking money out of your bank account each month, you aren’t alone. But there are some ways to make it more useful.

Google Voice is a popular option that gives you a new phone number acting as a central hub. When someone calls, Google Voice rings all the phones you’ve connected, whether it’s a home landline, a cellphone, a work phone or anything else.

There are other such services too, including Zoom and RingCentral, if you don’t like working with Google. 

A landline phone can also connect with home security systems and medical alert sensors to help ensure that if you’re in an emergency, help will be there as soon as possible.

What to do if you can’t get a landline connected

If you’re ineligible for a landline or don’t like the service being offered, you do have more options from satellite providers. Companies such as HughesNet and SpaceX can support VoIP over their internet connections.

Phone makers like Apple are also slowly building satellite messaging into their devices. The iPhone has a feature called Emergency SOS, which can connect with a satellite to send location data to your friends or an emergency text to authorities.

Just hearing the phrase «AI health coach» listed among the Whoop band’s features was enough to make me tune out. After testing many of these supposed coaches, taking their advice became somewhat meaningless. But Whoop’s take on this tired perk may have turned the tide for me.

I’ve spent two months testing the latest Whoop MG band, a screenless fitness tracker built for athletes and long-term performance, and I’m shocked at how much I’ve learned. 

The chatbot doesn’t regurgitate generic wellness tips or wait for you to come to it with questions. Think of it as that little cartoon angel that pops up on your shoulder at exactly the right moment, except instead of moral guidance, it’s flagging that your heart rate data suggests you should probably skip the HIIT class tomorrow. 

It wasn’t just surfacing metrics. It was helping me understand what to do with them.

AI health coaches are the hot buzzword of the season among wellness enthusiasts. Over the last year, I’ve tested different versions from Google, Apple, Oura, Garmin, and Meta. On paper, most AI health coaches promise to contextualize the years’ worth of biometric data from your wearable device and turn it into personalized guidance. 

In reality, most require you to go looking for it: Open the right tab and ask the right questions about your data, if you remember the feature exists in the first place. 

Even when you do use AI health coaches as intended, they still offer mostly generic wellness advice (with the added worry about potentially handing off your data to train future models). At that point, it doesn’t feel much different from going straight to ChatGPT or Claude, just with your biometrics layered on top. 

If you’re already using a Whoop band, you’ve likely made that call about the risk to your information. The company says it uses anonymized, aggregated data to improve its platform and doesn’t sell your data to advertisers. The subscription, which ranges from $199 to $359 per year, is what you’re really paying for, and the AI coach is included. Though handing over your health data isn’t a small decision. 
As I explored in my piece on AI health coaches, my biggest concern going in was data privacy. We’ve become so desensitized to clicking «agree» on data disclosures that most of us aren’t even sure what we’re signing away anymore. The language is often intentionally vague, and much of this data falls outside HIPAA protections, meaning it can legally be repurposed in ways you never intended. If you’re concerned about privacy, read the fine print before you commit. From there, opt out of having your data used to train future models when possible, or skip the AI features entirely. In my case, the benefit still outweighs the risk (and testing them is part of my job), but I approach with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Like most apps, it has a dedicated coach button at the bottom of the nav bar that you can summon on demand. But this one finds me.

Two days before my period (which I’d genuinely forgotten was coming), the Whoop coach flagged that workouts might feel harder due to hormonal changes and suggested scaling back. Call it suggestive reasoning or newfound body awareness, but workouts truly did feel harder that week. 

During my regular 3-mile loop, my metrics showed signs of strain. My heart rate was higher than usual, my recovery was lower, and my running index came back «very good» instead of the «elite» level I’d hit on previous days. The next day, it didn’t just suggest a generic «rest day.» Instead, the coach pulled workouts already in my rotation and tailored them to my recovery, down to the number of minutes and heart rate zone targets. 

The Whoop band flagged that my all-out efforts hit differently, too. After crushing a PR (personal record), the AI coach surfaced a warning not to push into the peak heart rate zone more than once a week. 

As a casual athlete with chronic imposter syndrome, I’m usually beating myself up for not pushing myself to work out hard five days a week. Instead of praising me for being a martyr, it was saying the opposite. I was skeptical enough to verify it outside the app, and sure enough, sustained effort at peak heart rate can increase injury risk if you’re not baking in recovery time. 

This insight has forced me to rethink my all-or-nothing approach to training, where every workout had to be max effort to count. It also led me to put more trust in the AI coach. 

That trust got tested when I logged a hike carrying my 40-pound toddler, and my strain score didn’t reflect the effort. The band has no altimeter and no way to account for extra weight. When I flagged it, the coach couldn’t retroactively fix the score, but it explained that my elevated heart rate had already partially signaled the added effort. Not a perfect answer, but more than I’d have gotten staring at a number with no context.

The same logic applies to sleep. The Whoop coach adjusts your recommended bedtime dynamically based on strain, sleep debt and recent patterns. As bedtime approaches, the coach surfaces a reminder on my lock screen about my optimal bedtime window: «If you want to stay in the green recovery zone tomorrow, aim for 11:40 p.m.» 

And while it might not be enough to will me off the couch and into bed, the AI coach has stopped me from blowing too far past midnight. It feels less like a nagging parent and more like, «I’m trusting you to make the right choices for your body.»

That’s ultimately what sets the Whoop band’s AI coach apart. It’s the closest thing to an actual coach I’ve tested because it meets you where you are. It shows up at the right moment, connects the dots and gives you something actionable without asking anything extra from you. 

While most AI health tools still feel like dashboards with a slapped-on chatbot, this one is the first to feels like it’s truly coaching. Now it just needs to give me the same type of coaching at the gym or at the track while I’m doing the actual workout. Then I’d be all in.