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Looking for a hint for today’s Connections puzzle? Below, we have clues to help you unlock whichever category has you stumped for the puzzle on July 13, 2025.

Connections first launched on the New York Times in June 2023. The premise is deceptively simple: Players have to find the thematic connection of four groups of four words … without making more than four mistakes.

Today’s Connections has categories about issues of the month, nectars of the gods and more.

Below are the hints, categories and answers for today’s Connections game, puzzle #763, on July 13.

A hint for each Connections category today, July 13

Yellow group hint: Playful cut downs

Green group hint: Payment details

Blue group hint: Offline media

Purple group hint: Jiggle juice

A word in each Connections category today, July 13

Yellow group word: Knock

Green group word: Expiration

Blue group word: Mag

Purple group word: Cab

Connections categories today, July 13

Yellow group category: Insult

Green group category: Credit card info

Blue group category: Slang for printed matter

Purple group category: Wine nicknames

Here are the answers to Connections today, July 13

What are the yellow words in today’s Connections?

Insult: Burn, knock, slight, zing

What are the green words in today’s Connections?

Credit card info: Expiration, name, number, ZIP

What are the blue words in today’s Connections?

Slang for printed matter: Glossy, mag, rag, zine

What are the purple words in today’s Connections?

Wine nicknames: Bubbly, cab, chard, zin

Somewhere out there, a Statler or a Waldorf is arguing that Scarlett Johansson is no Clark Gable. She’s not even a Myrna Loy. They don’t make them like that any more. Blah-blah.

We will get to the relevance of those particular veterans in a moment, but, whatever one’s feelings about Johansson, it cannot be denied that she has claimed one high-profile record all for herself. This week it emerged that she is now the highest-grossing lead actor of all time.

This is not to say she is the best-paid actor. (Last year that was Duane “the Rock” Johnson.) But movies starring Johansson have made more than movies starring anybody else. The co-lead of the current smash Jurassic World: Rebirth passes out Samuel L Jackson with her lifetime total of $14.9 billion, or about €12.7 billion. Robert Downey jnr, Zoë Saldaña and Chris Pratt complete the top five.

[ Jurassic World: Rebirth review – the plot is mid-level dumb but ‘good film’ belongs among its keywordsOpens in new window ]

Words can scarcely express what a flawed metric this is for establishing the biggest – not to mention the greatest – movie star of all time. Inflation strips the figures of some relevancy, but, when it comes to the all-time box-office charts, the unadjusted number one remains something worth fighting over. Avatar, the current champ, is, astonishingly, still number two when you tweak for inflation.

No, the real issue is to do with the withering potency of the movie star. Almost none of the films that got Johansson to the top was sold on her name. This is no slight on an eminently likable and charismatic actor. The same can be said of the four who complete that top five. Scar-Jo gets there thanks to her role as Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, now, as gun-toting team leader in that Jurassic World movie.

The stand-alone Black Widow film, released as we were coming out of Covid, is the lowest-grossing of her MCU flicks. Jackson and Downey jnr are also Marvel alumni. Saldaña registers for the MCU and the two Avatar films. Pratt scores for the MCU and the previous three Jurassic World films.

So registering on this list is all about getting yourself signed on for the biggest franchises of the day. It has been said before; it will be said again. The intellectual property (as we grandly label familiar source material) is now the real star of the movie. What the hell is the name of the guy in that new Superman flick? Dirk Cornswoggle? Doug Clangpiglet? Never mind. It’s Superman, baby.

At the risk of encouraging Statler and Waldorf, let us note that it was very much not this way in the old days. In 2000, TLA Releasing set out to tabulate the stars who had sold the most tickets at the box office through the decades. This is obviously a better model than highest grosser, as inflation has no bearing.

[ Scarlett Johansson: ‘I had a very formidable grandmother who I was incredibly close with’Opens in new window ]

The results bring us back to a whole different universe. If you wished to be cynical you could still see this as a chart of brands, but the brand – honed and primped by the studio system – is the actor, not what then was not called a franchise.

Gable, star of the annihilating Gone with the Wind, is at number one with 1.2 billion tickets sold. John Wayne is there at number two, with 1.1 billion. Everyone in that top 10 had an easily summarised type – avuncular Bing Crosby, homely Jimmy Stewart, suave Cary Grant and so on – and each knew not to swerve too far from that template.

The only one who points towards our current compromised future is Harrison Ford, at number nine. True, he had already clocked up a bunch of Star Wars and Indiana Jones flicks, but, even in those, he felt like a craggy visitor from the golden age.

The bad news for sentimental old fogeys is that no woman makes the top 10. It is, indeed, Myrna Loy who scrapes in first, at number 11, a few places ahead of Bette Davis and Judy Garland. All recognisable brands. Each the most saleable aspect of the films in which they starred.

For all that sighing towards a supposedly golden past, one would have trouble arguing that Johansson is an unworthy candidate for stellar elevation. If not her then who else? True, she can’t open a film like Bette Davis once did. But nobody can do that any more. Everything else about Johansson radiates vintage glamour.

When she graduated from juvenile roles to adult lead, with Lost in Translation, in 2003, it was immediately apparent that we had a movie star on our hands. The worry is that the job of movie star is now as redundant as that of lamplighter, crossing sweeper or court jester.

That Superman guy’s name will come to me in a minute.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

As an idea, an aesthetic, a palette, I adore the summer. I love its languidness and its juiciness and its vividness, its long days and its balmy nights, the way it brings us to the water and to foreign places, the nostalgia and hazy memories of childhood it evokes. I even like the notion of its fleetingness — there is a sort of urgency inherent in it, a sense of needing to “live in the now”. 

And yet in reality, it can be more complicated. Amid all the hedonism and the heat and the holidays, the summer can also bring a deep sense of melancholy and sadness and, for many of us, heightened anxiety. We worry that everyone else is having more fun than we are; we feel we should be outside socialising rather than indoors in front of the TV scrolling on our phones; we look at other people’s beach-ready bodies and feel bad about our own; we feel anxious that it’s all coming to an end too quickly. 

At a wedding in Greece last weekend with a group of Americans, I was surprised to discover the universality of that last worry. It turns out it’s not just pessimistic Brits who start to fret about summer ending as soon as — even before — it has begun. “I hate Independence Day, it feels like the summer is already over,” a woman said to me. One man said he always started to feel like that in May. 

Despite the summer solstice being, in astronomical terms, the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere and not the middle of it, the fact that the days start to slowly get shorter from that point leads to a sense that it is slipping away from us too quickly. We look forward to the summer all year, and then when it comes, we are often too worried about its ending — or too preoccupied with what’s coming next — to be able to properly enjoy it. When we are finally on that holiday we booked months ago, the first 24 hours might feel blissful, but then after that we often start to count down the number of days until it’s over. A metaphor for life itself, perhaps.

And then there are those among us who can’t bear the heat, or the very idea of summer, who are also counting down the days, but for different reasons. The people who hate the sun and the socialising and the skimpy clothing and long for the colder, cosier weather. A friend of mine consistently feels depressed in July and August, and then a sense of huge relief when September comes around, when all the pressure to appear as if one is having a great time is over. 

There is, after all, nothing quite so miserable as feeling unhappy when we are meant to be feeling good. In the winter, we have an excuse to feel blue, a comfort in itself: it’s dark and grey and “miserable” outside, so of course we’re sad. We get to moan about it with others, too. It’s much more emotionally uncomfortable and isolating to be feeling gloomy on a sunshiny day. And yet it is also far more common than we imagine.

Every January, my inbox fills up with press releases about “Blue Monday”, usually the third Monday of the month, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. I have always naively assumed this is the day when suicide rates and societal depression levels are at their highest. But it turns out that this is a day that was made up by — surprise — a travel company two decades ago. There is no evidence that this is a particularly sad day, and neither is there evidence of an increase in suicides at this time of year.

Quite the contrary, in fact: research has consistently suggested that suicide rates in countries with temperate climates — non-tropical ones that have distinct seasons — spike in late spring or early summer, and tend to be at their lowest in the winter. A 2019 meta-analysis of 19 studies in various countries found that a 1C increase in average temperature was associated with a 1.7 per cent increase in the incidence of suicide.

And in our warming climate, summer brings with it more than just social factors and expectations to make us feel anxious — the physiological impact that very hot weather has on our bodies mimics that produced by high levels of stress and anxiety: a raised heart rate, rapid breathing, high cortisol levels, dizziness and lightheadedness. No wonder heatwaves can trigger panic attacks, insomnia, and psychosomatic sickness.

You may know someone who has seasonal affective disorder, or SAD; you might even have it yourself. But we should not imagine that it is only the colder, darker days that can make us feel blue, and nor should we imagine that the summer is some kind of months-long bliss state. Summertime sadness is not just a Lana Del Rey song.

jemima.kelly@ft.com