Dr. Bill Conerly connects the dots between the economy and business decisions. He has the unique combination of a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University and over 30 years’ experience helping companies adapt to changing economic conditions. He has worked in economics and corporate planning at two Fortune 500 corporations and at a major bank, where he was senior vice president. He has earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.   Companies have used Dr. Conerly’s expertise to help with decisions regarding capital expenditures, inventory levels, expansion into new markets, pricing, business models and financial structure. Dr. Conerly is an on-line contributor to Forbes.com and the author of The Flexible Stance: Thriving in a Boom/Bust Economy (2016) as well as Businomics (2007). He had been interviewed on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CNN and CNBC. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, and USA Today.

NEW YORK — Saturday’s edition of The New York Times’ Connections puzzle sent players hunting through categories built around synonyms for exhaustion, segments of something larger, and two closely related wordplay twists involving hidden units of length and secret pursuit, in a grid that puzzle columnists described as unusually tricky given how similarly two of its categories were structured.

Connections, published daily by the Times as part of its expanding suite of word games, presents 16 words or phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a common theme, and the puzzle is color-coded by difficulty, with yellow generally representing the most straightforward category and purple the most challenging. Players are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends.

Saturday’s puzzle, numbered 1161, organized its 16 entries into four categories: words meaning exhausted, words meaning a segment or portion, words ending in hidden units of length, and words ending in synonyms for following someone secretly.

The yellow group, typically the easiest of the four, centered on words describing a state of exhaustion. It included “beat,” “fried,” “spent” and “worn out,” four terms commonly used informally to describe feeling completely drained of energy. Puzzle commentary noted this category rewarded straightforward vocabulary recognition, requiring little lateral thinking compared with the puzzle’s later, more complex groups.

The green group asked players to identify words meaning a segment or discrete portion of something larger, linking “leg,” “phase,” “stage” and “stretch.” Each word can describe one part of a longer journey, process or sequence, a category commentators described as conceptually connected but not overly difficult to untangle once the shared theme became apparent.

The blue category introduced the puzzle’s central wordplay twist, grouping words that each conceal a unit of length at their end: “chamomile,” ending in “mile”; “grinch,” ending in “inch”; “hotfoot,” ending in “foot”; and “lanyard,” ending in “yard.” Several puzzle columnists noted they initially spotted this pattern and assumed it would rank as the day’s purple, most difficult category, only to find it placed instead at blue, one level down.

That assumption proved to be exactly the trap the puzzle’s editors had set. The purple group, the day’s most difficult, followed a nearly identical structural gimmick, but built around hidden synonyms for following someone secretly rather than units of length. It linked “beanstalk,” ending in “stalk”; “eyeshadow,” ending in “shadow”; “hightail,” ending in “tail”; and “soundtrack,” ending in “track,” each concealing a different verb meaning to covertly follow or pursue someone. One columnist covering the puzzle for TechRadar admitted to missing the purple group entirely on a first attempt, explaining that after already identifying one “ending in” category, they assumed the puzzle would not repeat a similar structural pattern a second time, a miscalculation that led directly into one of Connections’ classic misdirection traps.

Connections has become one of the most closely followed entries in the Times’ games lineup since its 2023 launch, following the runaway success of Wordle, which the Times acquired the previous year. The puzzle rewards lateral thinking over straightforward vocabulary knowledge, since individual words can often plausibly belong to more than one category, a design choice intended to create red herrings that complicate early guesses. Saturday’s back-to-back “ending in” categories represented an especially deliberate example of that misdirection strategy, testing whether players would recognize the second hidden pattern once they had already used their pattern-recognition instincts to solve the first.

Connections is written under the direction of the Times’ crossword editor, Wyna Liu, who oversees the game’s daily categories. Saturday’s puzzle arrived alongside the Times’ newer Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff produced in partnership with The Athletic that applies the same grouping format to sports-specific terminology, running each day alongside the standard puzzle rather than replacing it.

The Times does not disclose internal difficulty ratings for individual Connections puzzles, but outlets that publish daily hint columns generally rank each day’s difficulty based on reader feedback and common patterns of mistakes. Saturday’s puzzle was described by several of those columns as more challenging than average, with the near-identical structure of the blue and purple categories singled out as the primary source of difficulty, since the pattern required solvers to recognize not just one, but two separate instances of the same underlying wordplay device within a single grid.

Connections remains part of a broader daily routine for millions of puzzle enthusiasts who also complete Wordle, the Mini Crossword and Strands each morning, all of which reset at midnight in each player’s local time zone. The four games have become a fixture of the Times’ digital subscription strategy, with the company regularly citing engagement with its games portfolio as a driver of subscriber growth in its quarterly earnings reports.

Players who missed Saturday’s puzzle or want to revisit past solutions can access the Connections archive through the Times’ Games app for subscribers with All Access or Games-specific subscriptions. A new Connections puzzle, along with a new Connections: Sports Edition, Wordle and Mini Crossword, will be published at midnight Sunday.

On a quintessential Beverly Hills street in 1985, a restaurant that would help transform the pizza industry opened its doors.

After years of practicing law as federal prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, co-founders Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax chose to leave the courtroom behind to pursue their dream of becoming restaurateurs.

“We didn’t want to open just a restaurant. We decided to be bold. We said we want to open a national and international chain of restaurants,” Rosenfield told Fox News Digital.

With its Original BBQ Chicken Pizza and polished approach to casual dining, California Pizza Kitchen helped popularize California-style pizza among diners across the U.S. and eventually around the world. The chain became a household name while helping bring a distinctive, California-inspired approach to pizzas, pastas, salads and desserts.

FUDDRUCKERS BECAME THE ‘BLOCKBUSTER’ OF BURGERS, AND NOW IT’S NEARLY GONE

Rick Rosenfield (Left) and Larry Flax (Right) co-founded California Pizza Kitchen after years of practicing law. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images / Getty Images)

California Pizza Kitchen has more than 120 restaurants in 10 countries. But at one point, CPK existed only in a single storefront on South Beverly Drive.

Rosenfield recalled the restaurant’s early days in Beverly Hills as “hectic,” with actress Shirley MacLaine becoming its first customer on opening day.

“Even before we opened, we knew we had a blockbuster on our hand. We created barbecue chicken pizza. And in the early days of CPK, it was complete craziness. Everybody was coming for barbecue chicken pizza,” said Rosenfield. His book, “The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza,” was released July 21.

Rosenfield and Flax employed a real estate strategy that helped expand CPK’s reach, opening restaurants in and around shopping malls.

“CPK also had a hand in changing the way America eats because we were pioneers in going into upscale shopping centers around America at a time when… there was all fast food,” Rosenfield said. “We brought this polished, casual dining to the best malls in America.”

California Pizza Kitchen located at the Simi Valley Town Center April 12, 2010. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images / Getty Images)

After Rosenfield and Flax grew CPK to more than 200 locations worldwide, the pizza giant was acquired for $470 million by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital in 2011.

‘MCDONALD’S CHANGED THE COURSE OF MY LIFE’: CONGRESSMAN SELLS BUSINESS HE BUILT SINCE HIS TEEN YEARS

At the time of the acquisition, the  San Francisco-based firm described itself as “one of the most active acquirers of leading brands in the restaurant and retail sector.”

Nine years after Golden Gate Capital acquired the chain, CPK filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 30, 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic compounded its existing financial troubles.

Rosenfield, however, told Fox News Digital he believes CPK’s troubles began before the bankruptcy filing, arguing that Golden Gate Capital damaged the culture he and Flax had spent decades building.

“As founder, it’s hard to sit back because I had no role in it whatsoever. So, we’re armchair quarterbacks looking from the outside,” he said.

A California Pizza Kitchen location in Los Angeles on June 28, 2005. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Los Angeles Magazine / Getty Images)

“I believe that they damaged the culture from day one. They wanted to remake it in an image different than we had remade it in. And in the meantime, it wasn’t successful,” the co-founder continued. “And it continued to decline on that basis, unfortunately. As I said, while we sat and watched it, and then it was ultimately driven into bankruptcy.”

Golden Gate Capital declined Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

California Pizza Kitchen emerged from bankruptcy in November 2020, and Rosenfield, who said he still dines at CPK every several weeks, is optimistic about the chain’s future under new ownership that he believes is “committed” to restoring the brand’s success.

The acquisition of California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) by New York-based Consortium Brand Partners was announced in December 2025 for a deal valued just under $300 million. Rosenfield said he is “thrilled” with the direction the restaurant is headed in under the new ownership.

“I believe they want to bring the brand, not only to its former glory, but to new glory,” said Rosenfield. “I have confidence in this team. And for the first time in all these years, my partner, Larry Flax, and I are very excited about where it could go.”

Rosenfield and Flax at the Redondo Beach/South Bay Galleria California Pizza Kitchen on Jan. 15, 2008. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Rosenfield reflected on the legacy he and Flax built from a small, leased space in Beverly Hills, telling Fox News Digital that the 41-year-old restaurant chain “accomplished” exactly what they envisioned from the beginning.

“I love that everybody has a CPK story. That’s what drove me to do the book,” the co-founder said. “It’s accomplished what we wanted. Grandparents, parents, kids all have a place that they can all go to and agree to go to.”

“While I said that I believe that they did damage to the culture in the years past, I think the food has been incredibly consistent. And I’ve always been extremely, I’m extremely proud of the brand,” Rosenfield said.