Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor:Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty:Easy (for a Friday)

THEME: None

Word of the Day:LENA Horne (48D: Entertainer and civil rights activist Horne)—

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned over 70 years appearing in film, television, and theater. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of 16 and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.
Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963 and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Horne died of congestive heart failure on May 9, 2010, at the age of 92.

• • •

Hi all, Rachel Fabi in for Rex tonight, as he is currently attending a John Prine concert in my city and bought me a beer in exchange for substitute blogging. Turns out that was a pretty great deal, because I absolutely flew through this puzzle, and should have an entire blog post written in the time it probably takes John Prine to tune his guitar.

Solving this was a dream-- there wasn't a single section were I stumbled for more than a couple of seconds. The NW went down first, with OGRE and OASIS both cleanly opening into GROUP PHOTO, with an excellent misdirect on the clue (14A: Big shot?), and READY OR NOT, with a more obvious clue (17A: Words in hide-and-seek -- not sure there are really any other words in hide-and-seek?). From the NW, the rest of the West fell into place, followed by the NE and SE. The last section I filled in was the middle; I had MANI in for PEDI, but once I got DON'T BE MAD for 36A: "It wasn't my fault," the middle clicked too.

I loved this grid all the way through. None of the fill felt crosswordy, and the longer entries were interesting, even if none of them were particularly AVANT GARDE. My only gripe is that the clues on these longer entries were a little too straightforward. For example, I think there were probably more exciting ways to clue 22D: Wed for TIED THE KNOT, or 10D: Often-repeated bit of modern folklore for URBAN LEGEND (notable exception: 51A: Something relatively complicated? for FAMILY TREE). Perhaps the lower level of difficulty on the clues is what makes this a Friday puzzle rather than a Saturday, but I still tend to expect a little more of a challenge this late in the week.

Overall, this is a refreshingly clean and crisp Friday puzzle that made me feel like an Olympic-level speed solver, which is honestly a pretty great way to go into the weekend.

PS. I feel morally obligated to disclose that Rex also bought co-organizer of Lollapuzzoola Brian Cimmet a beer, in exchange for which Brian told us the theme for this year's tournament. As an ethicist, having this kind of inside information makes me really uncomfortable, so I am sharing the theme with all of you. The theme for this year's Lollapuzzoola is: Cupcakes. You're welcome.

Bullets:

38D: John Updike novel subtitled "A Romance" - MARRY ME — I'm not familiar with the Updike novel, but this was pretty inferable, and it gives me an excuse to share this absolutely adorable music video from <autotune>Jason Derulo</autotune>:

32A: Turn a blind eye - SEE NO EVIL — I can't read this phrase without immediately replacing it with the monkey-covering-its-eyes emoji. Can Blogger support emojis? Let's find out: 🙈

Signed, Rachel Fabi, Queen-for-a-Day of CrossWorld
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Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (6:19)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AGENAS (43D: Old boosted rocket stages) —

noun Rocketry.
a U.S. upper stage, with a restartable liquid-propellant engine, used with variousbooster stages to launch satellites into orbit around the earth and send probes to the moon and planets: also used as a docking target in the Gemini program. (dictionary.com)

• • •

This puzzle, with its perfectly reasonable, occasionally entertaining grid, was totally ruined by poor editing. Well, it's partially ruined by the constructor, who never ever ever should've included the obscure crosswordese AGENAS in the grid—a grid otherwise so mercifully free of this kind of junk. In fact, ironically, the puzzle suffers precisely because this answer is suuuuuch an outlier, quality-wise. The obvious fix here (and why did no one see it) is to make it ARENAS and then change SORTA to TORTA (and please, please don't tell me TORTA is obscure, because, I guarantee you, using whatever metric of obscurity you want, it is not more obscure than AGENAS!). So you could've had TORTA / TAR / ARENAS. Bing bang boom, done. But no. It's AGENAS. Ugh. OK, so even then, it's not sooooo bad. All you have to do is give SAG a reasonable clue. That's a common word, shouldn't be too hard. What? What's that you say? You think it's very very cute to duplicate successive Across clues (even though many / most solvers don't solve by reading clues in order)? And you would like to do that little cutesy gimmicky thing here? Here? Where you're already dealing with the AGENAS Situation (as it has come to be known)? You love Reagan soooooo much that you want to do a little two-clue tribute to him? Here? Here? Honestly, the bad judgment is mind-boggling. Bad enough to think a very fine word like HIRES should be clued as HI hyphen RES (ugh x 1000) (26D: Crystal clear, as an image), now you want to clue SAG as an acronym? (Screen Actors Guild). This is negligence. To misjudge the situation this badly, to overestimate the power of your own cleverness so profoundly, after failing to see the TORTA Solution (as it has come to be known) in the first place. Exceedingly, painfully, predictably, the first Twitter comments on this puzzle (negative *and* positive reviews) go Right To This Part of The Grid and flag it as a problem. Everyone can see it. Why can't the editor? Lesson for constructors: give your editor as little room to f*** up as possible by not putting gunk like AGENAS in any puzzle you make ever, thank you.

I really hope you know your opera terms, because I can easily see someone's deciding that 40A: Handles with care? (PET NAMES) is PEN NAMES. I knew RECITATIVE (24D: Operatic song-speech), so no problems for me, but it's not exactly ARIA-level familiar to the general population, so it's possible people got tripped. Anytime you try to pull out that "?" clue, it better land beautifully. I don't think [Handles with care?] does, particularly. I honestly first thought that it had to do with actual pets ... for whom, of course, you care. But no, you give someone you *care* about a pet name (perhaps). Not sure why "Come on!" is in the "ASK ANYONE!" clue (25D: "Come on! It's common knowledge!"). Really confused me. I was it was going to be an exhortation to ASK the speaker another, harder question because the first one was a gimme (?). And I really didn't understand the clue 28D: Clickable message at the start of an online TV show (SKIP INTRO). It's not really a "message." It's an option. I'm not being given new information. I'm being given the option of moving ahead. Subtle, important difference. Clue on KICK is dumb because all kinds of proofs of alcohol have KICKs. 100-proof is arbitrary. 80-proof has plenty of KICK (which is about as specific a term as "spiciness"). So, to wrap, grid good, editing less so.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS someone on Twitter just confessed to thinking SOMETIMES Y (16A: Addendum to a common pentad) was one word, pronounced like "old-timey," and now I want it to be a word. "My love for crosswords is SOMETIMESY ... it comes, it goes ..."

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Constructor: David Liben-Nowell and Victor Barocas

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (9:49) (super duper easy "theme," weirdly hard clues in many other places)

THEME:"Take Two"— nine different times, the same Across answer succeeds itself—in the second appearance, the word "SECOND" must be mentally supplied before the word in order for the answer to make sense:

Second answers:

HAND (19A: Previously owned)
PLACE (26A: Silver)
STRING (32A: B-team)
PERSON (55A: What you will always be (but he or she isn't)?)
RATE (64A: Low-quality)
BANANA (79A: Supporting role)
NATURE (101A: Deeply ingrained habit)
CLASS (110A: Not having full rights, as a citizen)
BASE (116A: It's halfway around a diamond)

Word of the Day: CISCO (66A: Major name in network hardware) —

noun
a freshwater whitefish of northern countries. Most species are migratory and are important food fishes.

• • •

I need you to see this for what it is: a puzzle where four-to-six letter words of no great interest are duplicated within the grid. That Is It. Look how few longer / interesting answer there are! The puzzle absolutely squanders the one thing Sundays have going for them: size, and then the upshot of the theme is just repeating a word in the grid. Yes, there's a reason (the whole "second ___" thing), but at its core, this is a grid that just has two identical successive short answers nine times. And once you figure out the theme, which I stumbled into relatively early, then the rest of the themers become absurdly easy to get—look for stuff on the mid/right side of the grid (mostly) and then once you hit one of the "second" answers, just move to the previous Across answer and write it in again. I never saw the clues on half the "first" answers because why would I? Didn't need to. The fill was definitely second-RATE for the most part (ATEM ELAL STEN TISNT etc). The whole design of the grid didn't really allow for much in the way of interesting fill. Feels like the NYT is in emergency mode with Sundays. I hear their in-the-pipeline stack is very, very shallow. If this is the caliber of theme being accepted—something I'd expect to find in a lesser daily—then the situation must be pretty bad. But the app is making money hand over fist so who cares!?

["The THONGS Song" by CISCO]

Weirdly, I don't think I've ever had such a hard time starting a Sunday puzzle. I couldn't get anything to work at all in the NW. 1-Across is just such a godawful clue (1A: Word in Facebook and Disney Channel's original names), and then HASIT? (???) and the clue onUSDA (23A: Org. concerned with grades) and then two different themers before I had any idea what the theme was, and the rough clue on INCISORS (6D: Things that most people have eight of) and the stupidly clued TDS (7D: Bear necessities?) (you don't "need"TDS to win a football game). I had ORCS and WARN and that's about it (not sure why I didn't have DAVIES, which is a gimme—sometimes when I'm flailing around I don't actually see Every clue in a section). Cream is one of a category of BEIGES???? Blecccch. So bad. BEIGES, plural. Why doesn't anyone at this establishment care about fill? -ENCE next to SSE? It's not like the theme is so demanding. Fill on a theme like this should be Creamy. Beige, even.

[74A: Introduce oneself]

I had MEADE before BRAGG (10D: Confederate general with a fort named after him) (MEADE does have a fort named after him, but he was Union, my bad). Speaking of confederate generals ... you really parking COLIN Kaepernick next to a Confederate general? Is that intentional? Ironic? Performance art? You know he got blackballed from the NFL for protesting systemic racism, right—you know, that thing ... legacy of the Civil War? Anyway, it's an uncomfortable juxtaposition. Maybe there's a MORAL there somePLACE?

Had ETON before STEN (90A: Product from the Royal Small Arms Factory). I had "T" and "N" and I thought "well, it's British, probably, so ..." No one calls a $1 bill a George and no one calls a $5 bill an ABE seriously what is the editor doing (11D). Had MMM for YUM (60A: Indication of good taste?). Misspelled LARSSON (with an "E") but I forgive myself for that. See you all tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: EASY for many , but Medium-Challenging (3:26) for me (it's got a themeless word count (72)??? so yeah, just somewhat slower than usual for me to get through)

THEME: Afflictions — every theme clue starts ["Affliction" suffered by ...] and then the answers are figurative afflictions describing some collective passion:

Theme answers:

BEATLEMANIA (17A: "Affliction" suffered by Fab Four devotees)
MARCH MADNESS (27A: "Affliction" suffered by bracketologists)
FASHION CRAZE (43A: "Affliction" suffered by clothes lovers)
SPRING FEVER (56A: "Affliction" suffered by the winter-weary)

Word of the Day: ILENE Woods (42A: Woods who voiced Cinderella) —

Jacqueline Ruth "Ilene" Woods (May 5, 1929 – July 1, 2010) was an American actress and singer. Woods was the original voice of the title character of the Walt Disney animated feature Cinderella, for which she was named a Disney Legend in 2003. (wikipedia)

• • •

If your theme is this blah, then yeah, sure, go to town with a wide-open themeless-type grid on a Monday. Makes the solve a little slower, but not so much slower it's irksome (but I just saw someone post his personal best Monday time, so What Do I Know?). This ILENE person is pretty far afield for a Monday, but everything else felt pretty gettable. You probably had to hack at some of the longer Downs to get them to fall, but *that* kind of extra work, I don't mind. I mind slogging through crap, and while there's definitely some ugly parts to this grid, overall, I guess I'll take a simple *but coherent* theme and a grid with a lot of zingy fill over some ambitious but wonky theme that compromises the grid and makes us all suffer. I had a weird solve, where I traipsed right on down the west side of the grid and into the south without once ever getting a theme answer. I didn't even really see that there was a consistency to the theme clues until I was about halfway done. I don't recommend ignoring the themers this long. But that's just how it worked out today. My solves tend to wander where they wander, based on what seems like the most high-percentage answer to look at next, so while I generally start in the upper left and move downward, my route can go any which way depending on what gets thrown at me. It's possible I shouldn't just wander off like that, but as long as I'm having solving success, I'm loath to stop. I wish BIEBERFEVER had replaced SPRINGFEVER. It's dated, yes, but in a way I would really enjoy in 2019. But SPRINGFEVER, though plain, is fine.

NOISE LAWS (34D: Peace-and-quiet ordinances) and SANTA LETTERS (23D: Mail addressed to the North Pole) both qualify as real things, and yet I balked at both—crinkled my nose at the former and outright disbelieved the phrasing of the latter. "Letters to Santa" feels like the actual phrase, and in fact when I google ["SANTA LETTERS"], the first page of hits gets me several sites that are actually about letters written *by* "Santa." In fact the first seven (7) hits all think SANTA LETTERS come *from* the North Pole. But I see SANTA LETTERS used elsewhere to refer to letters written *to* the North Pole, so OK. Not lovin' it, but OK. As a shaved-headed person, I was not offended by BALDIE, though my sincere reaction was"oh go f*** yourself." Is that "offended"? I dunno. So many guys have shaved heads now, the idea of insulting someone with "chrome dome" or "BALDIE" seems puerile and very mid-20th-century. But whatever, if you're proud that you've debuted this stupid non-word that is also a pejorative, good for you, buddy (two constructors have used BALDY before, which is the actual spelling, but seriously, pat yourself on the back for your word debut!). Playground retorts are the worst kind of fill, and when you shove one (ARE SO) in a corner with stilted crosswordese like ASDOI, you're really not doing your job well. ITISSO, also stilted. ISOUT, just bad. But again, mostly this one was a cut-above the usual NYT Monday, just entertainment-wise. My favorite answer was EDITWAR (9D: Tussle between wiki page. modifiers). OK, bye, have a nice day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I'm told DARTs aren't actually aimed at bull's-eyes, necessarily, but this is someone else's fight to pick (25D: Missile aimed at a bull's-eye).

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Hello, and happy Tuesday! Hope everyone is having a great start to the week. My week started off significantly better than it would have if the U.S. women's national soccer team had been upset by Spain yesterday. Phew! What a game. I'm pretty sure my heart is still pounding 10 hours later. (Also, how great is Megan Rapinoe? I picked a pretty good jersey to buy myself!) The World Cup is bringing me back to my youth soccer days, and I love it. But, this go-around, I get to watch from my air-conditioned apartment, which, in this hot and humid D.C. summer, I'm quite thankful for.

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty:Medium

THEME: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — The title of this painting by Georges Seurat is spelled out across the puzzle, emulating pointillism.

Theme answers:

POINTILLISM (24A: Technique employed in the painting hidden in this puzzle)
GEORGES SEURAT (56A: Artist who created the painting hidden in this puzzle)

Word of the Day: NASL (17A: Org. for the New York Cosmos)

The North American Soccer League (NASL) is a professional men's soccer league headquartered in New York City. The league has been on hiatus since completing the 2017 season. The modern NASL was founded in 2009, and began play in 2011 with eight teams, following a 2010 season that saw NASL and USL teams play in a combined temporary Division II league. (Wikipedia)

• • •

I'm not really sure what to make of this puzzle. It's clever to use the dots in conjunction with pointillism, but I don't think it totally worked. I thought it was a well-intentioned big idea that was new. And, I do like new. But, the dots made things confusing, and I couldn't get it out of my head that the dots made the puzzle look like it had chicken pox. I also couldn't bring myself to care that the title of the painting was hidden in the puzzle. It didn't help with the solve, and it seemed like an afterthought to me.

I figured out the pointillism piece of the puzzle pretty easily, but it did take me a good minute of staring at my computer before I realized that POINTILLISM is spelled with two "l's" and not just the one. (Even typing this right now, I keep trying to spell it incorrectly. Thank goodness for spell check!)

(Side note: Did anyone else have problems with the New York Times app when they were solving? I wanted to do the puzzle on my phone at first, but the app wasn't letting me type anything. Weird.)

Overall, I didn't think the puzzle was that hard. The fill was somewhat basic, and, even with some longer downs than usual, it wasn't too tough to solve. I thought there were a few weird clues/answers that made it significantly harder, though. I have two bones to pick in particular. The first is the cross of 37D and 43A. I definitely feel like 43A: Impart could have been "send" instead of LEND, and I had no idea what the 37D Chess rating system was — apparently ELO. So, I paused there for a while. Also, I don't think the 53D clue: What the French pronounce "Louis" with that the English do not and its answer — LONG E— make sense at all. I know what the clue was trying to do, but it makes no sense because English people still pronounce "Louis" with a LONG E, just like the French do. I mean, Louis Armstrong. Louis Tomlinson (sue me, I like One Direction). Heck, even one of Kate Middleton and Prince William's kids is named Louis, and it's pronounced with a LONG E. So, that didn't work for me.

I also found NFL STAR for 49A pretty bland. I thought the pun in 27A: What's far from fair as ANI fell a bit flat, and it took me way too long to realize what 54A: First small bit of progress was getting at — ATOB. And, I did have some trouble in the bottom middle section with NUI, TED, and SUET all giving me some pause.

There were points (so to speak) of the puzzle that I did like. There seemed to be a lot of foreign words/elements in the puzzle, which brought a different flavor to the table. Like, NYET, BINDI, DEJA, FORTE, NUI, CHERIE, STE, JENGA, EINE, and NOOR. The interesting words made things a bit punchier.

Misc.:

I can't see TORT (60D) in a puzzle and not acknowledge it — so, thanks, law school! Torts was definitely my favorite class in my first year.
I only sort of remember the NASL (17A), and that's mostly because the legend himself, Pele, played for them. Man alive, what I wouldn't give to have had the chance to watch him play.
My sister convinced me to read the ANNE of Green Gables series when I was younger, and those books are truly delightful. If you've never read them, do yourself a favor and start reading them ASAP.
I like seeing Willem DAFOE (63A) pop up in a puzzle because I think he's awesome. And also because I'd really love to somehow live in a Wes Anderson movie like "Grand Budapest Hotel." So many colors!
I've never had plum pudding, but based on the definition of SUET (58A), I'm not sure that I'm missing all that much...

Have a great week!

Signed, Clare Carroll, happy soccer fan

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Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (4:44)

THEME: THEYDOSTUFF — all-caps clues are ordinary words that are meant to be understood as verb phrases (pronoun + verb) and answers are professions those phrases might fit:

Theme answers:

17A: HEBREWS, i.e. he brews ... BEERMAKER
24A: WEAVER, i.e. we aver ... TRUE BELIEVERS
52A: SHERIFFS, i.e. she riffs ... JAZZ GUITARIST
63A: IRATE, i.e. I rate ... APPRAISER

Word of the Day: MARS RED (46D: Shade akin to rust) —

1: any of various red to orange, brown, or violet artist's pigments made by calcining Mars yellow

2or mars red
a: COLCOTHAR sense 2
b: TOTEM sense 3

LOL ... so:

COLCOTHAR
: a reddish brown iron oxide left as a residue when ferrous sulfate is highly heated and used formerly in polishing glass and as a pigment
: a moderate reddish brown that is yellower and deeper than roan, yellower, stronger, and slightly darker than mahogany, and yellower, less strong, and slightly darker than oxblood — called also angel red, Coromandel, English red, Mars red, Prussian red, Tuscany

Also LOL ... there literally is no "sense 3" of TOTEM at the m-w.com website

• • •

I really like the restraint on this one. No clunky revealer stressing the grid means the fill, while not exactly scintillating, is clean, and we're allowed (or forced, depending on your POV) to figure the gimmick out on our own. This is the opposite of yesterday's monstrosity, where a clumsy "note" explained a phenomenon that didn't need explaining (and was dumb to begin with). This is carefully crafted work, mindful of the solver experience in a way that I appreciate. It took me a While to figure out what the hell was up with this theme. I might've been way down on the last themer before putting it all together. Yeah, that feels right, then I worked my way back up the grid figuring out the themers in reverse order. Having only four themers means there's a lot of non-theme space in the middle of the puzzle. You could make a lot of headway in the puzzle without knowing what was going on themewise. NW was by far my roughest spot. Screwed up everything possible in that section, so much so that when I returned late in the solve to clean it up, I was briefly but genuinely worried that I was going to get badly stuck. This is because I just could not make sense of the simple clue at 1D: Short cut (BOB). Had the BO- and still no idea. I was thinking "short cut" as in "a shorter path" and also "short cut" as in "snip," like a cut with scissors. Not thinking of haircut. "Short" seems relative and not such a great way to clue BOB. I have a shaved head, though, so my idea of "short" may be skewed. Also couldn't figure out the [Empathetic comment] at 3D. Wanted "THERE, THERE," but it wouldn't fit. And then clue on APP made no sense to me (5A: Store offering that can be free) (I wanted something like TOTE) and PAK, my god, no way. My brain tried to envision "east of Iran" and it was just a hazy blur. Where have you gone, Se-ri PAK!?

Noooo idea MARS RED was any kind of color, so ___RED was killing me. Totally blanked on Gore VIDAL (49D: Author of "Burr" and "Lincoln"), which is horribly embarrassing for this English Ph.D. "Ooh, that guy ... so venomous ... wrote crime fiction under the name Edgar Box WHY CAN I REMEMBER THAT BUT NOT HIS FAMOUS ACTUAL NAME!?"

Totally Travolta'd IDINA Menzel (47D: ___ Menzel, Tony-winning actress for "Wicked"). Well, not totally. IRINA is at least ballpark. Best mistake though was having ___ZGUITARIST and making the first word WHIZ. I am very excellent at solving, in case you didn't know. Sigh.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Hoang-Kim Vu

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:26)

THEME: CHECK ALL / THE BOXES (9D: With 39-Down, fulfill requirements ... or how to fill four of this puzzle's squares?) — a rebus puzzle with four √'d boxes:

Theme answers:

2D: MIC √ / 20A: √S AND BALANCES
30A: BLANK √ /33D: √ MATE
55A: √POINT CHARLIE / 55D: √ OUT
63A: COAT √ / 64D: √ER

Word of the Day:√POINT CHARLIE (55A) —

Checkpoint Charlie (or "Checkpoint C") was the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War (1947–1991).
East German leader Walter Ulbricht agitated and maneuvered to get the Soviet Union's permission to construct the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop Eastern Bloc emigration and defection westward through the Soviet border system, preventing escape across the city sector border from communist East Berlin into West Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.
After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany, the building at Checkpoint Charlie became a tourist attraction. It is now located in the Allied Museum in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. (wikipedia) (emph mine) (don't lift your clues from wikipedia) ([Cold War crossing] see that was easy)

• • •

While you all were watching the 1st Democratic debate, I was doing this puzzle. Let's start with the objection people are most likely to have to this puzzle, which is that the solver does not, in fact, CHECK ALL / THE BOXES. Obviously you don't check *all* the boxes—what the hell kind of grid would that even be?—but it is a pretty grand claim to put as your revealer when the number of checks your grid actually provides is far more modest. I don't find objections to the revealer that compelling, though, as the revealer clue is pretty specific ("how to fill *four* of this puzzle's squares" (*emphasis mine* obvs)). So CHECK ALL (four of) THE BOXES (in question). It's a common colloquial phrase, which is why it's being used as a revealer, and I like this repurposing of the phrase just fine. Certainly CHECK *ALL* / THE BOXES is superficially misleading, but it's technical inaccuracy is not bugging me nearly as much as the idea that *any* diet can be NO CARB. That is garbage. Carbohydrates are in virtually everything, so stop. Stop. Even the Keto-est diet has carbs. Ugh. I demand that you delete NO CARB from your word lists. It is guilty of deep fraudulence and needs to be punished, thank you. But back to the theme—it's simple and spare, but it works OK. Really didn't like that last √ in the SE, just tucked in there like an afterthought, with the highly unimpressive √ER as one of the answers. But the longer ones are nice phrases in and of themselves. Grid is very tame, with most non-theme stuff being short and familiar. But kudos for opting for simple and clean over complicated and blecch. Also, kudos for FULL OF IT.

As usual, NW was my roughest section, despite the fact that I got the theme *immediately*. AMPS to MIC √. Seriously, took me 3 seconds. Now, I wasn't sure that the √ went there, and even when I knew it did, I didn't know why, or what the revealer would be (I wanted something along the lines of THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL), but yeah, I've never spied a rebus faster than I did today. But still had trouble in the NW, as I said, because I thought a "sidebar" was legal and wanted AGS (?!) at 1D: Contents of some sidebars (ADS). Also had babies eating puréed PEAR (3D), and honestly no idea what capital was on the Mississippi that followed the pattern S-P---, despite the fact that my daughter practically lives there (she's in Minneapolis at UMN) (well, she's currently in NZ, but that's a whole other story). Had DEBUG before DEFOG, and man that hurt (21D: Clear, in a way). When I locked down that "G," I thought I was good. Other problem area was the SW—zero idea about the "√" at that point (√POINT CHARLIE had a very non-specific clue and took me a while to uncover). Without √, couldn't get 55D, and then 56D: Summon ... well, yeah, no, I don't think of PAGE as a verb much anymore, though of course the concept still exists (in hotel lobbies? airports?). Weird how two little corners can really slow things down. But since I got the theme quickly and the grid was generally easy, the slowness occasioned by those corners was not devastating.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Bruce Haight and David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (more Medium) (6:33)

THEME: ugh don't make me say it — black squares are supposed to be birds or bats or some implausible &^$%

Theme answers:

SPREAD ONE'S WINGS (17A: Become independent ... ... as suggested visually by some of this grid's black squares)
BATS IN THE BELFRY (57A: Mental eccentricity ... as suggested visually by some of this grid's black squares)

Word of the Day: ELROND (30A: Lord of Rivendell in "The Lord of the Rings") —

Elrond Half-elven is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He is introduced in The Hobbit, and plays a supporting role in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. [...] In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, Elrond is portrayed by Hugo Weaving.

• • •

It's a 'no' from me. Hard no. Those aren't birds or bats. They're just black squares. Astonishing that you'd hang a half-assed theme on such an unremarkable feature of the grid. Especially astonishing that you would allow one of only two themers to contain "ONE'S," which is like a parody of forced 15-letter answers, echoing ALOTONONESPLATE (which is the paradigmatic bad 15). Themed Fridays are ruined Fridays, and this one was especially ruined because its premised is weak and thin *and* there's nothing remotely interesting in the rest of the grid to make up for the weak thinness. Buncha biggish corners with lots of crossing 7s that yield little in the way of interesting. ISINFOR is horrid. ATATROT is horrid. Almost everything else is dull or obscure or both. ELROND is hilariously inconsequential—it's a debut today For A Reason ('cause it's bad and no one cares) (also I just find Tolkien ponderous and dull and the movies way way way way moreso). Had no idea there was a MARIETTA that was not in Georgia. But my ignorances aside, this simply isn't good in anyway. The "whimsy" on display in the "theme" is underwhelming, and none of the fill sizzles. LILLE? Blecch. I do like the words LISSOME and ANODYNE. That is the extent of positive things I have to say about this one. Oh, and the clue on NAMETAG is not bad (39D: Face-saving aid at a reunion).

Is "The Vampire Diaries" still a thing? Do people know actor names from that show?? NINA was entirely crosses. NINA notwithstanding, LEW Wallace and OPIE are conspire to give this puzzle a pretty olde-timey feel, as does the clue on LEFT JAB (1A: The "one" in "the old one-two," maybe). I'm looking around the grid that any answer that anyone could plausibly claim to like. CARLOAN!? EMANATE? ESSENCE? It's not that any of these (or their neighbors) is so bad, it's just that ... you want to build your late-week grid around good fill, not adequate filler. This puzzle has opted to build itself around a two-answer "theme" and three "M"s flying across the grid. Literally nothing about this grid's black squares "suggests" BELFRY, so they couldn't even get the clues right. Continues to bum me out that loyalist white guys get published at such a high rate while women I know have their puzzles routinely rejected because they just didn't "tickle" him (by "they" I mean the puzzles, of course ... man, I hope that was clear). Oh, props to the clue on SENECA, though (47D: ___ Falls Convention (early women's rights gathering))—the one moment during the solve where I was like "oh, cool."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Easy (5:12 without even hitting the gas) (first thing in the morning)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: OURBOROS (11D: Ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail) —

The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or serpent eating its own tail, variously signifying infinity and the cycle of birth and death. // Ouroboros derives from a Greek word meaning “tail-devourer.” While the word is not attested in English until the 1940s, the concept of the ouroboros is very ancient, used across many cultures as a symbol of cosmic harmony, eternity, and the cycle of birth and death.
The earliest known ouroboros symbol comes in a 14th-century BCE Egyptian religious text found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The symbol appears in a passage about the origin of the sun god Ra through a union with the death god Osiris, meant to illustrate creation through destruction. Ancient Egyptians also used the ouroboros to symbolize the flooding of the Nile, which occurred in seasonal cycles and was of great importance to ancient Egyptian agriculture and society. Other ancient cultures also incorporated the ouroboros symbol. Norse legend tells of the great serpent, Jörmungandr, who encircles the earth and bites its own tail. Hindu cosmology features an ouroboros as helping to prop up the Earth.
The ouroboros was specifically adopted by Gnostic philosophers in the 2nd century BCE. For them, it symbolized the dual nature of existence, marked by life and death, male and female, light and dark, mortality and divinity, or Earth and heaven. Alchemists notably used the ouroboros, too, to represent the element Mercury, believed to permeate and unite all matter. A drawing of the ouroboros can be found in one of the earliest alchemical texts, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, from the 3rd century CE. (dictionary.com)

• • •

First, big round of applause for the CLEO / OUROBOROS juxtaposition ("A drawing of the ouroboros can be found in one of the earliest alchemical texts, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, from the 3rd century CE."). Surely unintended, but still a nice little easter egg. This puzzle was far too easy overall, with many of the clues coming in at Monday level. See, for instance, ESAI (25D: Morales of "NYPD Blue") and ATTA and DYAN and EXS and ERIN and SELA and MARIA and MAA (tho I did consider BAA there at first) and ARIE (OK, I had ARYA, but it's crosswordese and a total gimme if my crosswordese memory bank had had the light turned on this morning). Gimmes are everywhere. OUROBOROS, long gimme (with an overly literal clue). SUGAR MAMA (great!), gimme. KAZAAM, gimme. ADOSE, AREN'T, UMAMI. The construction of the grid itself is very nice, but this one had no resistance at all *unless* you ran into a proper noun you're unfamiliar with. Or didn't know the French word for "strawberry"—that might've hurt (48A: Crème de ___ (strawberry liqueur)). The only way I got hurt today was by hurting myself (badly) when I blithely threw down HEBREW ALPHABET (!?!?) at 15D: What ends with Adar (HEBREW CALENDAR),"Adar" being another bit of crosswordese that I couldn't place this morning. That one error—the dumb accident of "alphabet" and "calendar" being the same length—probably cost me a full minute. It's the only thing that cost me any time longer than a few seconds today. Didn't like a bunch of the shorter stuff today, but the solid and entertaining longer stuff more than made up for those stray infelicities.

Today's constructor is film critic for "Vanity Fair," so I was def on the hunt for movie stuff (AFI, ALICIA, CLEO, "KAZAAM," CAAN, AT-AT, DYAN). Just now realizing that I have never heard of RENI (5D: Italian artist Guido). But then I (obviously) never saw it, so gettable were the long crosses. Aside from the whole HEBREW ALPHABET incident, my only missteps were small: SNOMOBILE (!) before SKIMOBILE (12D: Winter transport), SCARSBORO (!?) before SCARSDALE (65A: Geographical eponym of a 1970s-'80s fad diet), and then a bunch of letters I couldn't figure out somewhere in the middle of ZAPAT....A (33D: Mexican revolutionary). I was thinking of the (ELIA Kazan) movie! "Viva ZAPATA!"—the ZAPATISTAs were Emiliano Zapata's followers. I always love seeing GALOP in puzzles because I consider it one of the regrettable things I've ever put in a grid myself, and so every time I see it I feel slightly less bad. Mine was even in the same NW section of the grid. I think it might even have been 3D??? (checking ...). No it was 1-Across, and it was a *plural*. LOL. I'm all by myself in the Shortz era with that one. Anyway, if you didn't know GALOP(S), now you know.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. forgot about ARTEL (51D: Soviet workers' group), which was hardcore crosswordese in the pre-Shortz era (Maleska, Weng, and Farrar all leaned on it heavily), but (to Shortz's credit) it's all but vanished in the Shortz era. It's actually funny to see how fast he turned off the ARTEL spigot—it appears a bunch of times in the mid-'90s, in grids that were likely grandfathered in from the Maleska era, and then poof, gone. Well, not gone. But now it disappears for years at a time (this latest disappearing act lasted three years).

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Constructor: Emily Carroll

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:17, my second-fastest Sunday time)

THEME:"Flip 'phones"— theme answers are imaginary phrases made up of two two-syllable terms. Second term is just the first term with the syllables reversed (i.e. "flipped") (and respelled):

Theme answers:

KNEE-HIGH HEINIE (23A: Low end?)
TEA TREE TREATY (48A: Agreement for exporting essential oils?)
BOW-TIE TAE BO (63A: Exercise program done in formal attire?)
BEEFY PHOEBE (77A: Sturdily built friend on "Friends"?)
TOUCHY CHEETAH (93A: Spotted animal with a lot of sore spots?)
LOAFER FURLOUGH (118A: Cause of a work stoppage at a shoe factory?)

Word of the Day: SACCADE (76D: Rapid movement of the eye from one point to another) —

A saccade (/səˈkɑːd/ sə-KAHD, French for jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. In contrast, in smooth pursuit movements, the eyes move smoothly instead of in jumps. The phenomenon can be associated with a shift in frequency of an emitted signal or a movement of a body part or device. Controlled cortically by the frontal eye fields (FEF), or subcortically by the superior colliculus, saccades serve as a mechanism for fixation, rapid eye movement, and the fast phase of optokinetic nystagmus. The word appears to have been coined in the 1880s by French ophthalmologist Émile Javal, who used a mirror on one side of a page to observe eye movement in silent reading, and found that it involves a succession of discontinuous individual movements. (wikipedia)

• • •

I rarely find myself thinking "this theme could've been denser," but, well, this theme could've been denser. Six answers feels awfully thin for a Sunday of this particular theme type (where surely there were more apt answers out there to be found). That said, I need to be careful what I wish for, because I actually found the grid delightfully smooth, and extra themers could very well have gummed that up, so ... I'll just take the meager portions here and be grateful, I guess. KNEE-HIGH HEINIE makes absolutely no sense on any level (even a joke level), so though I like the sing-songiness of the answer, that's an issue. I can imagine a TOUCHY CHEETAH, I cannot even imagine a KNEE-HIGH HEINIE. Is it someone else's heinie? That only comes up to your knees? So ... like a child's ... heinie. This is an odd way to think about ... children. Or short people? Dolls? I really don't know. But the other absurd answers are absurd in a pleasantly wacky way. I really like that all the reversals in these themers involve respellings, so you're not just switching syllables, but changing their form in every case.

The puzzle was astonishingly easy, though. I don't know if that's such a bad thing on Sundays, which tend to feel like chores to me. But one thing the overall easiness did was make SACCADE stand out. Hard. Perhaps that was a familiar term to you, but for me it may as well have been random letters. The only reason I didn't break my Sunday record was that answer (I mean, probably). I actually had it as SACCADO for a bit (playing off of "staccato"?), which then made NO HELP harder to get than it should've been (112A: Utterly useless). Rest of the grid felt completely free of obscurities. Even if you don't know who YVES Tanguy is (I did) (78D: Surrealist Tanguy) or who NICOLE Diver is (I didn't) (21A: Wife in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night"), you at least know that YVES and NICOLE are names. I don't know what a SACCADE is. Well, I guess I do, now. But you see what I mean.

Let's see ... really annoyed at myself for thinking the Mariners still had an "M" on their caps (19D: Symbol on a Mariners cap). Weird to think of the simple letter "S" (ESS) as a "symbol" but yeah I guess it is. I was thinking of the letter "M" but mainly I was thinking trident (which is what the "M" used to be shaped like):

BAD AREA rubbed me slightly the wrong way, since it sounds like like something gentrifiers call a place before they gentrify it (33A: Part of town that may be dangerous). Baffled by ONEISH when all I had was ONEI-- (52A: Around an hour after noon). "GAG ME" really needs some kind of qualifier like "in the '80s" or "according to Moon Unit Zappa" or something because I don't think anyone's said it in earnest, in a non-ironic, non-deliberately retro kind of way since 1984. Still like the phrase, though. If you google ["GAG ME"] your first hits will all be for "GAG ME with a spoon," which is valspeak (or Valley Girl-speak), a sociolect that reached peak popularity / influence sometime between Frank Zappa & Moon Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl" (1982) and the movie "Valley Girl" (1983), both of which are iconic and excellent.

As for wrong turns, I somehow considered OPED for 82A: Statement often starting "I ..." (OATH), and I was convinced that a good chunk of a sci-film's budget might go to ETS. I guess I was close-ish. They do make ETS with CGI (116D: Part of a sci-fi film's budget). That's it. Happy Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Medium (felt easy, but 3:04 is pretty Medium)

THEME: MAKE MINE A DOUBLE (39A: Bar request ... or hint to the letters in the circles) — answers contain alcohol names twice:

Theme answers:

HARUM SCARUM (double RUM) (17A: Devil-may-care)
HEAR YE, HEAR YE! (double RYE) (24A: Town crier's cry)
ALEX VAN HALEN (double ALE) (?) (51:A Rock drummer whose last name is the same as his band)
LOGGING INTO (double GIN) (62A: Accessing, as a password-restricted website)

Word of the Day: ALEX VAN HALEN (51A) —

Alexander Arthur van Halen (born May 8, 1953 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch American musician who is the drummer and co-founder of the hard rock band Van Halen. The band was formed in 1974 by Alex Van Halen; his younger brother, Eddie Van Halen; David Lee Roth; and Michael Anthony. Warner Brothers signed the band in 1977, and its debut album was released in 1978. Alex and Eddie Van Halen are the only members of Van Halen who have been in the band throughout its existence. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really felt like I was flying through this one, but my time was totally normal. What a bummer. I want to blame the drink I had just before solving—a particularly tasty concoction my wife invented called The West Side (think Manhattan but w/ maraschino liqueur instead of sweet vermouth)—but the drink was probably not the problem. The problem was probably the NW, where I started and where I (in true me fashion) just flailed around like an eel on land for what felt like minutes but was more likely just 15-20 seconds (i.e. enough to take me from a fast time to a normal time). No idea re: HDTVS; more than no idea re: HAHA (?) funny (1D: ___ funny (genuinely humorous)); without "V" no idea re: VOUCH (4D: Give personal assurance (for)); ADD for SUM (5D: Total). Really had to muscle my way out of there with TIRE ALEC AEIOU. Once free of that corner, I went on a tear, but apparently not enough of a tear to make up for the initial fumbling. As for the theme, I quite like it, actually, though ALE is a weird one here—you might conceivably order a double of all the other drinks, because they are liquor, but you don't really order ALE that way. It's like ... pint, half-pint. Still, the core concept works, and the grid is scrumptiously clean! I can definitely accept this Monday puzzle.

There were a few minor hiccups along the way. Confused my Seminoles with my Sooners and wrote in OSU at 9D: The Seminoles of the A.C.C. (FSU). Assumed 34D: Of the highest quality would be a superlative (i.e. something ending -EST) and so took Forever to turn up DELUXE, which was harder to turn up than it might've been because wait what there's an *ALEX* VAN HALEN now? Really could've used that "X." In fact, didn't get DELUXE until I got that "X." Do people still use DSL? I looked at 35A: Broadband letters and honestly the clue just didn't compute, and when I got the "D" it still didn't compute, and when I got D-L the non-computing continued, so I let ELSA bail me out and I moved on. I did manage to remember Paul HOGAN, though, so I'm pretty chuffed about that. OK, that's enough of that.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Medium (I was slow because of sleepiness and typo) (3:56)

THEME: Actors who share their initials with a signature role they played —

Theme answers:

MARK RUFFALO (17A: Actor with the same initals as Michael Rezendes, his role in "Spotlight")
LIZA MINNELLI (11D: Actress with the same initals as Linda Marolla, her role in "Arthur")
JAMES STEWART (25D: Actor with the same initials as Jefferson Smith, his role in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington")
JOHN BELUSHI (62A: Actor with the same initials as Jake Blues, his role in "The Blues Brothers")

Word of the Day:"ERIN go bragh!" (34D: "___ go bragh") —

Erin go Bragh /ˌɛrɪn ɡə ˈbrɑː/, sometimes Erin go Braugh, is the anglicisation of an Irish language phrase, Éirinn go Brách, and is used to express allegiance to Ireland. It is most often translated as "Ireland Forever." (wikipedia)

• • •

So a recurring pattern in my solving, of late (and possibly of forever) is sputtering in, or possibly even mangling, the NW corner (always my starting point), after which I come reeling out of said corner, right myself, and torch the rest of the grid. I just wish I could find a way to make my puzzle entry a little ... smoother. It's not that surprising, this pattern. I mean, *of course* I have the most trouble with the grid at the beginning—the point at which I have literally the least amount of information to go on. Still, there has to be a way to close the time between when I start and when I have my bearings, both themewise and just general gridwise. Actually, the gridwise part is the most important. I can often move very swiftly through a grid before I've any idea what is going on with the theme. But I also think I'm theme-negligent at times, possibly to my detriment. Stopping or slowing down to cogitate on the nature of the theme feels time-wasteful. I figure it'll shout at me or it won't, and if I really have to stop and think about it, well then I will.

Today, had only a slight idea of the theme, even after I finished. I never got past the initial (ha) stages of the theme—that is, I just looked took it as an "actor with these initials" theme, never fully grasping that the initials were from roles they'd played. That latter bit might've helped, but maybe not. Anyway, could not come up with a MARK R- actor at all, and never saw "Spotlight" (though I guess I do know MR was in that, now that I think of it). Without RUFFALO, the upper middle was weirdly hard for me. OFF too vague to get (6D: Not working), DEARTH unexpectedly SAT-ish (8D: Lack), and OLDIE very weirdly clued (6A: Any classic vinyl record)—what is this clue doing? "Classic" is going the "old" work for you, so why is "vinyl" in there? It's like you want "vinyl" to signify "old," but you've semi-redundantly got "classic" in there because of course there are still vinyl records being made, so you get an awful clue. Any "classic" anything is an OLDIE. Also, an OLDIE is a singular song, and I do not think of '45s as "vinyl records" (though they are). That clue just feels botched. I have a lot of "vinyl records," so maybe I'm taking it all too personally. Also, "Any" classic vinyl record???? Just ... pick one? OOF that clue is OFF.

When I managed to get out of the corner, things took off, and I ended up liking the puzzle reasonably well. The actors and roles are all famous enough; this could easily have resulted in at least one actor or (more likely) role that was, let's say, less than iconic. But these hold up. The fill is crosswordesey in perhaps a few too many places, and ASALARK is really icky, but I enjoyed BIKERBAR and OTHERWISE and even UNWRITTEN, though holy moly I Could Not process the clue, entirely because of "only." [Oral only] sounds ... it sounds ... it sounds like its context is something other than storytelling. Like a clue in a much bluer kind of puzzle. Just baffling to me. Also, we humans call him JIMMY STEWART (which would've fit, come on!). I no-looked both NORMALCY and JOHN BELUSHI. Had their last few letters and just threw the rest of the answer across. Very risky behavior, but it paid off today. Wrote in MINGLED instead of MINGLES at 48D: Is sociable at a party), which was a dumb and costly mistake. Ended up with DUE ME at 72A: "So I was wrong."Sounded vaguely sexual. Like [Oral only], kinda.

I'm out of here for the next ten days or so. Headed out to (Denver, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Moab!!). Seeing my mom and sister, and doing a little side road trip with my wife. Lots of different people are gonna be filling in for me, many of them first-timers, so who knows what the hell they'll do. Things could get nuts. Or they could stay very even-keeled. We'll see. Please tune in and support my gracious guest hosts. I'll see you again soon.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor:Evan Mahnken

Relative difficulty:Easy (5:47)

THEME: FINGERS CROSSED (54A: "Here's hoping" ... or a hint to 16-Across/10-Down and 37-Across/14-Down) — two sets of entries cross "fingers" -- the words MIDDLE and INDEX intersect, and LITTLE and RING intersect.

Theme answers:

LET FREEDOM RING (16A: Verse ender in "My Country, 'Tis of Thee")
MIDDLE MAN (37A: Go-between)
A LITTLE BIT (10D: Somewhat)
PRICE INDEX (14D: Bureau of Labor Statistics statistic)

Word of the Day:MATTHEW ARNOLD (22D: Matthew _____, English poet who wrote "Dover Beach")—

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools...Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello! Long time reader, first time blogger. My name is Zach and I'm honored to sub for the day while Rex is on vacation! Coincidentally I am also on vacation with my family at the moment, so I got to do this puzzle with my mom, which has been a long standing tradition between us ("I may not go to gay bars with you, but I sure love doing puzzles with you!" - my mom). I was prepared to self-deprecatingly compare my sluggish Wednesday time to Rex's typically brisk one, but either this puzzle was on the easy side or having two brains working through this really made a difference, because we managed 5:43 (!!!). Regardless of the reason, it felt pretty breezy overall.

This was one of those themed puzzles that you're nearly finished with by the time you get to the revealer, so it elicits more of an "I'm impressed they pulled that off" reaction, rather than provide an additional layer for you to crack open and solve. But I still enjoyed it nonetheless. I was going to include a snarky comment about thumbs being shafted in this puzzle, until I looked it up and learned THUMBS. ARE. NOT. TECHNICALLY. FINGERS?! Who knew.

One of the advantages of solving puzzles with someone of *ahem* a different generation, is your slightly offset Venn Diagram circles of culture knowledge can make a big difference on a crossword. My mom was quick on the draw on LEM and ROUEN, two entries I would likely have had to leave until the end and hope I could get with acrosses. There were a few names -- EVA and ARNOLD -- that we didn't know based on the clues but could infer once we had a few of the letters filled in. At the end I asked "are there any clues I got that you wouldn't have?" I needn't embarrass myself by telling you her answer...

I thought the fill was a nice mix of phrases (GOT AN A; IN A CORNER), trivia, and common words, though overall the cluing felt very straightforward to me. Would have loved to see some more playful and clever cluing for a Wednesday puzzle!

Some other thoughts:

I thought the clue 16A: Verse ender in "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" was a cute nod to the Fourth. Also if you're anything like me you instantly started humming, sat there for a second, then awkwardly yelled "LET FREEDOM RING!!!!"
AROD being clued by his more famous (in my universe) female partner?? Love to see it!
Since MY EXES didn't fit for 24A: Things to keep tabs on, FOLDERS was a good answer lol
11D: Cab alternative as a clue for PINOT is great wordplay, especially when that is a very common clue for UBER and LYFT.
I didn't even notice the clue for RED (19A: Color of most Solo cups) until I had completed it with downs, so I didn't get a chance to make use of all those beer pong games from college (oops sorry, Mom!)
I adore clues and answers like LID (15A: Part of the eye that a fish doesn't have)— I don't know the answer off the top of my head but it's fair game because it's totally guessable. Plus it's fun trivia!
PuttingWRIT and ESQS side by side was a nice touch.
61A: The "m" in the equation "F=ma"got me thinking about the recent Radiolab episode I listened to about intelligence and Albert Einstein. Give it a listen!
TOILE is one of those words that looks so intensely familiar that I'm sure I know what it is. But after looking it up I think perhaps I didn't know it and instead just lucked out by combining "tulle" and "doily" in my head. Thank you crossword gods.

Signed,

Your fun substitute teacher Zach D'Angelo

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P.S. My mom clarified that she would LOVE to go to gay bars with me she just hasn't had the opportunity! Hahaha noted.

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Constructor: Jim Hilger

Relative difficulty: Easyish (5:51 for me)

THEME: CONCISELY — Theme answers are three-word phrases where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of the next, but the repeated letter is only written once and shared by the two words.

Theme answers:

AIR (R)AID (D)RILL (17A: Civil defense measure, concisely?)
SHORT (T)ERM (M)EMORY (23A: Recollection of something that just happened, concisely?)
PAY (Y)OUR (R)ESPECTS (50A: Make a polite visit, concisely?)
BEST (T)IME (E)VER (59A: "That. Was. A. Blast!," concisely?)

Word of the Day: Al CAPP (38D: Cartoonist who created Fearless Fosdick) —

Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner. ... Li'l Abner also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. It first appeared in 1942, and proved so popular that it ran intermittently over the next 35 years. Gould was personally parodied in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the Fosdick sequences closely mimicks Tracy, including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick was the star of his own short-lived puppet show on NBC, featuring the Mary Chase marionettes. (Wikipedia)

• • •

Hi all, it's Matt Levine substituting for Rex today. Normally I write a daily financial column for Bloomberg Opinion, and I am honored and nervous to be spending my day off writing for Rex. I was particularly nervous when I signed up to do today's puzzle because I wasn't sure if I was in for more of a Thursday puzzle (harder, rebus-y) or more of a Fourth of July puzzle (easier, fireworks-related).

And the answer was kind of ... neither? The puzzle is Fourth-free, and the theme and overall difficulty didn't feel that Thursday-like. I barely even noticed the theme; I filled in "AIRAID__" from crosses, thought "huh that looks like AIR RAID but isn't," and then just sort of accepted it being AIR RAID and went from there.

It is one of those themes that you probably appreciate more as a constructor than as a solver. (I am not a constructor.) From a construction perspective, it is a challenge to find workable phrases in which each word after the first starts with the last letter of the previous word. My own unscientific efforts to come up with examples to throw into this review suggest that that's harder than it sounds, as does the randomness of this puzzle's theme answers. (Was the AIR RAID DRILL the BEST TIME EVER?) You'd have a tough time doing this theme with phrases that are linked by anything else, making the theme about meaning as well as structure. INDEPENDENCE EVE EXCITEMENT. GLIB BARBECUE EVENT. KNOCKOFF FIREWORKS SHOW. None of those fit a grid obviously.

But when you're solving, the theme just feels like "oh you leave out a couple of letters, okay." It's not that concise. I do appreciate a theme that ends on its own positive review. BESTIMEVER, you're supposed to say when you finish. The puzzle is easy enough that a lot of people probably will.

There is some perfectly pleasant longish fill, more SOLEMN and SERENE than anything that EXCITES too much, but SPECTRAL and HOROSCOPE and ONAWHIM and DUSTMOP and MARACAS are nice. The pop-culture references never get any more current than AGUILERA. I am not convinced PRICERS are a thing. The shorter fill is pretty crosswordy, ONTO and ITO and EYETO and SEATO. Do you enjoy reading E.A.P. of of E'EN? That's a good clue for PASSÉ (50D), "No longer either hot or cool?," the only ? clue in the puzzle; otherwise the cluing is pretty straight-ahead.

Bullets:

22D Whale constellation - CETUS — Latin for whale. "Any large sea animal, a sea-monster; particularly a species of whale, a shark, dog-fish, seal, dolphin, etc.," says Lewis & Short, and it is pleasant to think of a more enchanted and less precise world in which, when you saw a big animal, you'd be like "ooh look it's a monster." The constellation does not look much like a whale? Apparently it's supposed to look like a monster.
34D Old Roman course - ITER— Latin for way, journey or road. Beowulf uses "whale-road" as a kenning to describe the sea, but that is Anglo-Saxon, not Latin, never mind.
46D Southernmost active volcano on earth - EREBUS — It's in Antarctica. In what might possibly be overkill, after my 2-year-old daughter asked me a few times "why is it raining," I went out and bought an earth science textbook and read it straight through, so I learned a lot about volcanoes before getting to the part about rain. "Because warm saturated air rises, expands and cools until the water condenses," I tell her now, unhelpfully.
49D Silo filler, in brief - ICBM — I was briefly misdirected. I wanted CORN or something. I don't know why that would be "in brief," but in my defense the theme here is Very Slight Abbreviation. ICBM is a regular old abbreviation though, intercontinental ballistic missile, the other kind of silo.
54A Christina on Rolling Stone's list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" - AGUILERA— I like when the clue goes out of its way to say something nice about the person. "Singer Christina" would have been a perfectly adequate clue. I do the New Yorker's crossword and notice it editorializing in the clues a lot more than the Times does. "Trump administration official," the Times might say, but the New Yorker will say something like "Trump administration official, who is bad."
58A Fifth Avenue concern - SAKS — "Concern" is a good old-timey way to say "business," and a little bit of misdirection.
61D Wall St. news - IPO— As a financial writer, I sometimes get annoyed at Rex for getting annoyed at the puzzle for including financial jargon. An IPO is a real thing, an initial public offering, and IPOs are in the news all the time these days, much more so than ITOs or ITERs. It's not amazing fill or anything but it's fine, it's fine.

Signed, Matt Levine, hanging out in Crossworld for a day
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Constructor: Freddie Cheng

Relative difficulty: Medium (7:38)

THEME: Freestyle / Themeless (70 words)

Word of the Day: ASE'S ("__ Death," movement from "Peer Gynt") — Peer Gynt, Op. 23, is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play of the same name, written by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in 1875. It premiered along with the play on 24 February 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo).^[1]
Grieg later created two suites from his Peer Gynt music. Some of the music from these suites have received coverage in popular culture; see Grieg's music in popular culture. (Wikipedia)

"The Death of Ase" (Åses død), also transliterated "The Death of Aase" and "Aase's Death," is the final movement from Act III of Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. The highly-recognizable "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Act II) and "Morning Mood" (Act IV) also originate from this work.

• • •

Hello fellow puzzlers! My name is Jonathan, and it is my pleasure to be filling in for Rex today. I am a math Ph.D. student at Tulane University, and I also enjoy solving and constructing crosswords (though no NYT publication yet!). I chose to fill in on a Friday because it is usually my favorite day of the week for NYT crosswords -- the constructor has the opportunity to maximize liveliness and clever cluing.

Today I tried going through somewhat quickly, and got caught up by some easy mistakes: LIKE I CARE for AS IF I CARE (16A: "Doesn't concern me"), FIGHT for ARGUE (54A: Contend), and the one that tripped me up the most, TINGE for TINCT (50A: Touch of color). That last one made the SW the last part of the grid to fall for me.

(26A; Also my face when I have ?IEES for 41-Down)

Each of the grid's corners has a 3x9 stack, where the showcase entries are -- each stack has lively and lovely fill, with my favorite being the SE (PHARMA REP, AUDIOTAPE, SLEEPOVER) and no especially weak long entries. I usually see FAT FINGER in the plural (or the adjective, fat-fingered), but it was nice to fill it in off of the "F."FREECYCLES (9D: Gives away to a better home, in modern coinage) was new to me, but highly inferrable.

(44A: Little mischief-makers)

The shorter entries groan a bit under the load, a little more than I would expect them to. Some of the less-common crosswordese examples include ASE'S (the word of the day!), TALI (50D: Anklebones), AEROS (19A: Former Houston hockey team) (its friend AERIES makes an appearance, too!), and DELED (39A: Struck out) in the past tense, which hasn't been seen in the NYT since 2007. I could see a potential Natick in the crossing of ASE'S and ERTE (37A: Big name in Deco design) if you didn't recall the artist's name.

Bullets:

DAY TRADER— (32D: One who gives a lot of orders) This is a nice clue; at first I was thinking line cook.
FRAT — (9A: Rush home?) Clever misdirection; it even sounds like it's looking for a verb.
ARTY— (38A: Hipsteresque, in a way) "Hipsteresque" is such a hipsteresque word.
RETROCOOL — (10D: Back in again) Also new to me, but completely inferrable. Google results for "retrocool" mostly refer to Retrocool Energy Services, Inc., a cooling-related energy conversation company based in (...wait for it...) Natick, MA!

Overall, the stacks were solid, which is important, but the rest was a bit shakier than I would have liked. It averages out to a normal and pleasant Friday.

Thanks to all the loyal readers of Rex's blog for staying tuned today, and thanks to Rex for letting me fill in! It was a blast.

Signed, Jonathan O'Rourke, Visitor of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Medium (8:40, while very distracted trying to remember things to write about)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: PABLO CASALS (31A: Cellist with a Presidential Medal of Freedom) —

Pau Casals i Defilló^[1]^[2] (Catalan: [ˈpaw kəˈzalz i ðəfiˈʎo]; 29 December 1876 – 22 October 1973), usually known in English as Pablo Casals,^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] was a cellist, composer, and conductor from Catalonia. He is generally regarded as the pre-eminent cellist of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the greatest cellists of all time. He made many recordings throughout his career, of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, also as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings of the Bach Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy (though the ceremony was presided over by Lyndon B. Johnson).

• • •

Hello Rexakateers! I'm Eli Selzer, filling in for Rex Parker from Van Nuys, California. And you know I'm in LA area because we just had an earthquake, literally as I was typing this sentence (7.1, about 100 miles north of the city, and maybe the longest I've felt since I've moved here). But nothing shall deter the blog! You might remember me from last time I filled in on the blog a few years back (you don't). I work in post production at a (the?) major film and television studio (hint: think mice and theme parks), and I'm (still) an aspiring writer. Turns out parting ways with your manager when you don't have a backup isn't the solid career plan I thought it was. Anyway, on to the puzzle!

I was worried I wouldn't have much to write about, but when I saw Erik Agard's name, I knew I had lucked out. Erik is easily one of my favorite constructors, and I tend to do well on his puzzles.

This one played a bit tough for me, but I think I probably lost a minute or so in thinking of things to blog about, and I'm also thoroughly out of my crossword routine. I usually do the puzzle in the morning, and not until I've had some coffee. It literally only needs to be a sip of coffee. But in order to get the blog out to you fine people, I solved as soon as it was released. Instead of coffee, I went with a pint of the Rex Parker-inspired New England IPA I brewed: Natick Crossing.

Enough about me. I really enjoyed this puzzle, even in the parts where I struggled. The middle offset stack played incredibly hard for me, largely because I absolutely could not pull the name DARLENE LOVE (33A: Singer seen annually on David Letterman's Christmas show). I knew her, could see her face, could hear the song, but the name just wasn't coming to me. In case you need a refresher, have some Christmas in July:

I expect a lot of people to struggle with PABLO CASALS and DARLENE LOVE crossed by INA CLAIRE (23D: "Ninotchka" actress, 1939). That's a lot of proper names, and not exactly common ones, with a fairly bland and hard to infer DECLARATORY (32A: Like some legal judgements) sitting in the middle. Still, the crossing points seemed fair, and I was able to muscle my way through it. Pulling DONE AND DONE (34A: "Say no more - I'm on it") helped.

There's very little junk fill here, an even short, common stuff like PDA (10A: Activity that might elicit stares, for short), IDS (39A: Walletful), and TSK (53A: "C'mon, man," in a syllable) get lively clueing. It was all exactly the quality I expect from Erik Agard, which makes for a great start to the weekend.

Bullets:

DANE COOK (32D: Stand-up comedian with the 2005 double-platinum album "Retaliation" — A little embarrassed that this one got me unstuck from a rut, but I listen to a LOT of standup and podcasts, so this album isn't unheard of for me.
POOP EMOJI (46A: #2 image among smartphone users?) — I'm sure this one won't sit well with some people, and I'm a little surprised that old man Shortz let it through, but when Patrick Stewart gives voice to an animated pile of poop, I guess that carries some clout.
WOOKIEE (22A: Kashyyyk denizen, in sci-fi) — I'm a huge Star Wars fan, so I hate how many tries it always takes me to spell "wookiee." I could post a picture of my wife and I with Chewbacca at Disneyland, but instead, here's his son Lumpy from the Star Wars Holiday Special. You're welcome.

MONAE (13A: Singer/Actress Janelle) — Janelle Monae is awesome. That is all.
DUKAKIS (11D: 1980s presidential candidate) - I was 6 during this election, and it is the first one I remember. I wanted Dukakis to win because I had read somewhere he was a Boy Scout and I had just joined Cub Scouts. Now when I think of him, I think of Jon Lovitz playing him on one episode of The Critic.
MOTORBIKE (17A: Yamaha purchase) - The phrase "motorbike" always makes me think of "Eddie's Teddy" from Rocky Horror, but instead I'm using this bullet to talk about non-motorbikes. I'm an avid cyclist, and the Tour de France starts today! It kicks off in Belgium this year, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the very-scrabbly-named Eddie Merckx's first Tour victory. My wife and I have a tradition of setting up a French picnic and wine on the opening day of the tour and watching the whole stage. Watching an entire Grand Tour stage start to finish (at least 5 hours of skinny guys on bikes) is not something I generally recommend, but the wine makes everything better.

Alright, thanks for bearing with my rambling. Until next time!

Signed, Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of CrossWorld

[Follow Eli Selzer on Twitter]

Constructor: Jack Reuter

Relative difficulty: Medium (perhaps harder if you're not familiar with chess or chess notation)

THEME: CHESS — The middle of the grid represents a chessboard with "pieces" set up such that "white" can achieve checkmate on its next move.

INSTRUCTIONS: The center of this puzzle represents a 70-Down/55-Down, in which you can achieve a 122-Across by moving the 25-Across.

Theme answers:

KNIGHT TO B EIGHT (25A: See instructions)
BLACK (31A: Side represented by triangles)
CHESSBOARD (55D, 70D: See instructions)
WHITE (116A: Side represented by circles)
CHECKMATE IN ONE (122A: See instructions)

Word of the Day: COWBIRD (98A: Brown-headed nest appropriator) —

Cowbirds are birds belonging to the genus Molothrus in the family Icteridae. They are of New World origin. They are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other species.

• • •

Greetings, Crossworld, and Happy Independence Day Weekend! This is Don McBrien, who is very happy to return as your guest blogger, this time for an extra-large (22 x 22) Sunday puzzle. The unusual size of the grid is to accommodate the 8 x 8 "chessboard" section in the middle, which certainly jumps out at you upon first looking at the puzzle. I have to admit that upon seeing that jumble in the middle of the grid, I was not optimistic about enjoying this puzzle. It just seemed a little too un-crosswordy. Upon reading the instruction, I had a pretty good idea what would be going on, but I was still not looking forward to getting to all those circles and triangles.

I was tearing through the upper third of the grid, until I came to KNIGHT TO B...where I got hung up for a while. I was looking for KNIGHT TO BISHOP [number], but that would not fit. Once I got SEEN IT (great clue!), the rest of the top fell. I am a bit surprised at this theme answer. I suspect that many NYT Crossword solvers know how to play chess, or are at least familiar with the basics, but are casual players familiar with chess notation? For example, you have to know that N stands for Knight (since K is reserved for King). That strikes me as something that only more serious players might understand well enough to appreciate in a puzzle. And this answer is critical to the theme as it sets up the revealer CHECKMATE IN ONE. That is another awkward entry - I had guessed that "achieve a 122-Across" would mean CHECKMATE, so I was a bit flummoxed when I had five spaces left over.

I found the middle of the grid difficult just because with the shaded squares, black squares, circles, triangles, and bold lines, that whole section is too busy, making it harder to tell (on my computer screen at least) how long the entries were. Luckily I knew what was going on and was able to force my way through it, but forcing my way through a puzzle is not the most enjoyable way to experience it. And once that section is complete, all of the non-chess-piece letters and solid black squares clog things up so that it takes a bit of mental effort to follow the "game" and actually see the checkmate. The theme is ambitious, and I guess it "works," but as a solver and casual chess player (at best), the solving experience was not awesome.

I enjoyed some of the longer fill answers. FREE TO GO, TIKI BAR and AUNTIE EM particularly. But there is a good amount of glue here too. ECO, EXO, CTO, AKU, MEH and its cousin BAH. ENOTE and EZINE (perhaps 88A could be clued as "Rest areas on the information superhighway" and 88D as "Cry for IT assistance"). And ANASS...Spent a good minute trying to recall a Biblical character named Anass.

Finally, and I feel like I'm piling on a bit here, the puzzle had a number of unpleasant clues and answers. Specifically, SEPPUKU (grim), ABSCESS (gross) and WINOS (insensitive), however, it was 130A AMPUTEE that really turned me off. It's tricky to work this answer tastefully into a puzzle at all, but to clue it with respect to two specific individuals, using their positions as Senators as misdirection, was just off-putting to me. As though they are defined by their loss of limbs - an answer in a crossword puzzle does not define someone, but it does seem to say "this is what is notable about these two people."

So not my favorite NYT Sunday puzzle ever, but perhaps your experience was different. Please share in the comments section. Thanks again to Rex for letting me drive while he is on vacation. Enjoy the rest of your Independence Day weekend!

Signed, Don McBrien, Assistant to the Regional Manager of CrossWorld

[Check out my website forum devoted to "meta"-style crosswords at metaXword.com]

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Constructor: Ned White

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: P AND G— Theme answers start with P and contain G.

Theme answers:

POINT GUARD (18A: *Basketball position for Magic Johnson or Steph Curry)
PAY GRADE (20A: *Level on the military wage scale)
PAINT GUN (26A: *Alternative to a brush when coating the side of a house)
P AND G (36A: Consumer products giant, for short...or a hint to the answers to the eight starred clues)
POP GROUP (41A: *The Beach Boys or Backstreet Boys)
PEA GREEN (52A: *Shade akin to olive)
PARTY GIRLS (54A: *Sorority types who go out a lot)
PUB GAMES (4D: *Darts and snooker)
PAN GRAVY (37D: *Roast accompaniment prepared with drippings)

Word of the Day: GHETTO (42D: Run-down area) —

A ghetto (Italian pronunciation: [ˈɡetto]), often the ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, typically as a result of social, legal, or economic pressure.^[1] Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of the ghetto appear across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people. The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other peoples. However, early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling "ghetto" in meaning appear in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Old French, and Latin. Ghettos in many cities have also been nicknamed "the hood", which is colloquial slang for "neighborhood" after it is shortened to 'hood.^[2]

(Wikipedia)

• • •

Hey, it's a surprise Annabel Monday! Cool huh? Rex asked me to fill in this week, which is why he filled in for me last week. Happy to be here! I went camping this weekend. Also, my summer job is going great! I love working at the library. I've been doing some filing, analyzing some data...it's really cool.

Anyway, this week's puzzle! I had a surprisingly difficult time for a Monday. Too many proper nouns, I think; that always throws me off. By the way, what are GRAN and NANA doing right next to each other? Who says POP GROUPS rather than BOY BANDS? I mean, I don't know that I'd call the Beach Boys a BOY BAND but hey, they're a band, they're all boys. I do have to note that nobody has said IMING since long before Myspace died. And do people actually say PAN GRAVY? I always just say gravy. Anyway, you can probably tell I can have a bunch of little gripes about the puzzle (and not just because of the Eagles reference!) so I'll tell you my absolute favorite thing about it: between AABA and ENGELS it briefly gave me a chance to flex my English-major muscles. Oh, so briefly.

The theme was fun, even if I found the corporation aspect a little weird. It helped me confirm PEA GREEN and solve PAY GRADE, so that was nice. And you have to give Ned White props for sneaking Products Giant into P AND G's clue. I do have one question: What exactly are, uh...PARTY GIRLS? Like, just girls that go out to party? Would PARTY BOYS be a potential clue? I dunno. Just seems weird. But hey, it was a Perfectly Good theme for a Monday! Simple and Monday-y, just how I like 'em.

Bullets:

OREO (31A: ____ O'S [breakfast cereal])— When I had almost all the letters of OREO (forget which ones I had missing) I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what the answer could possibly be instead. Surely they hadn't made a cereal that was literally just Oreos? But yeah, this is a thing, and I hope I'm never in any store that has it or else I have no idea how I'm supposed to stick to any sort of diet that isn't composed entirely of Oreo products.
PROM (52D: School event with a king and a queen)— I was going to post an embarrassing prom picture, but I don't have any because I've always looked cute. So instead I'll share my new favorite musical:
PRIUS (39A: Toyota hybrid) — This is the kind of car I have!! Her name is Rey (after the Star Wars character) and she's turning fifteen next year and I love her so much.
PAINT GUN (26A: *Alternative to a brush when coating the side of a house) — Seems like a pretty weird way to paint a house but ooookay?

Also, yeah, I know you all know what ghetto means. I just thought it was a good word to pause on for a minute. Help your community, even those who live in run-down areas.

Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: (Somewhat) Commonly Used Redundant Phrases —

Theme answers:

PAST HISTORY (17A: Experience, redundantly)
RAT FINK (25A: Snitch, redundantly)
CASH MONEY (38A: Moolah, redundantly)
TAXI CAB (54A: Hack, redundantly)
BUNNY RABBIT (64A: Cottontail, redundantly)

Word of the Day: STEINEM (12D: Feminist Gloria) —

Gloria Marie Steinem (/ˈstaɪnəm/; born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

• • •

This puzzle sets out a modest premise, and fulfills that premise serviceably enough. The five above phrases are indeed redundant. Whether these phrases are tickling to the mind is for the solver to judge. Among these, my favorite clue must be "Cottontail", because 1) It is such a charming, cuddly word for BUNNY RABBIT, and 2) it reminds me of one of my favorite pre-BEBOP standards.

That being said, in our age of conspiracy I cannot help but think that a deeper meaning may be there for us to decipher. Consider this, dear reader: does the juxtaposition of the answers BUNNY RABBIT and FRAME call to mind any particular movies, perhaps one renowned for its combination of live-action and animation! That's right, I believe the puzzle may contain several veiled clues as homage to Robert Zemeckis' 1988 slapstick classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After all, it is the 30-year, 16-dayth anniversary of the films release. In the film, detective Eddie Valiant must overcome his PAST HISTORY of discriminating against toons in order to exonerate Roger Rabbit, a film star accused of murdering CASH MONEY millionaire Marvin Acme. While avoiding the RAT FINK weasel henchmen with the help of anthropomorphic TAXI CAB Benny, Roger and Eddie conquer the forces of evil in order to secure a more harmonious future for toons and humans alike. Furthermore, Popeye, created by E.C. SEGAR, was supposed to have a cameo in the film but was scrapped. Just how big is the conspiracy? Well, that depends upon how far down the BUNNY RABBIT hole you want to go.

Overall, Coincidence? I think likely.

The grid is solid, if dull. I was particularly fond of the SW, with its triple threat of BITES AT (41D: Goes for, as when bobbing for apples), ON A LINE (42D: Like laundry being dried outdoors), and TAX SCAM (43D: Subject of an IRS consumer warning). Other highlights include E SHARP: every music student's favorite enharmonic equivalent to F. If you are wondering why composers choose to spell the note this way, just ask any musicologist who would be more than happy to give you a lecture-long response. Or, just watch the following well-produced video:

Finally, I do appreciate how BEBOP (6A: Jazz style) has become somewhat of a ubiquitous answer. For a genre initially intended to render itself impenetrable to the swing-dancing masses, it sure is made up of some crossword-friendly letters.

Thank you for coming along my conspiracy theory journey with me today.

And remember, sometimes a SEGAR is just a SEGAR.

Signed, Alex Tripp, Village Idiot of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David J. Kahn

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME — I.M. PEI tribute puzzle

Word of the Day:I.M. PEI [Subject of this puzzle (1917-2019)] —

Ieoh Ming Pei (Chinese: 貝聿銘), FAIA, RIBA^[2] (English: /joʊ.mɪŋ.ˈpeɪ/ yoh-ming-PAY^[3]^[4] 26 April 1917 – 16 May 2019) was a Chinese-American architect.

• • •

Theme answers:

DALLAS (16A: ___ City Hall, 36-Across-designed building (1978))
ROCKANDROLLHALLOFFAME (24A: With 10-Down, 36-Across-designed museum (1995))
IMPEI (36A: Subject of this puzzle (1917-2019))
LOUVREPYRAMID (14D: 36-Across designed Paris landmark (1989))
STARCHITECT (44A: Portmanteau for 36-Across)
BANKOFCHINATOWER (59A: With 26-Down, 36-Across-designed Hong Kong skyscraper (1990))

Hello! It's Brian Herrick filling in again for the one, the only, Rex Parker. I was lucky enough to sub on pi day (there was no pi or pie), and I'm back again while Rex enjoys what appears to be a lovely vacation. Seriously--he tweeted about how happy you all make him just by reading the blog. His vacation clearly has an abundance of nice things and a lack of things Rex dislikes, aka Tuesday NYT puzzles. HEYO!

So: this puzzle. I would be remiss if I did not begin this review without mentioning (arguably) the greatest Twitter account of all time, @PeiCheck. For months, they tweeted this:

And every day, I would know that I.M. Pei was still alive. Then, a few months ago, this:

Simply crushing. RIP to I.M. PEI.

Back to the puzzle!

Tribute puzzles are tough to construct. They really are. Most are a jumbled mass of trivia held together with crossword glue. They're often done terribly, sometimes done exceptionally (looking at Liz Gorski's Guggenheim puzzle which may not exactly be a tribute puzzle, but it's architecture-related and executed perfectly, so I'm going to include it here anyway). I think this one is somewhere in the middle.

On the one hand, so many noteworthy buildings to draw from, a testament to his career. There's a lot to work with. However, several of the theme-answers are split up between acrosses and downs, which was necessary but awkward. The intersecting themers are nice, but I imagine they make an already constrained grid tougher to fill.

Speaking of the fill...I did not enjoy it. GILA is not something I'm every going to remember in any context aside from the monster. Technically it looks like a TREETOAD is real, but TREEFROG is more ubiquitous, right? Is KALE (27D: Moolah)? Apparently!

Particularly, the SE and NW corners were a rough solving experience, with a fair amount of glue. AFTS (56D: When soaps normally air, informally) are afternoons? Really? And right next to SKUA (54D: Arctic seabird), which is about as crosswordese-y as it gets. GILA IRAE abutting each other in the NW is tough and, again, extremely crosswordese-y. I don't know how possible it is to improve those words with cluing, but I don't think GILA (3D: River to the Colorado) is the way to do it.

Bullets:

RIFLE (24D: Rummage (through)) — I appreciate this being clued as verb, not the gun
STARCHITECT (44A: Portmanteau for 36-Across) — I learned this word a few weeks ago from an architect friend on our way to see the USWNT play their final sendoff series game as we walked through the Oculus NYC. (GO GO USA!)
UCLA (11D: Sch. near Hollywood) — In trivia a few weeks ago, my friend put UCLA (the wrong answer) instead of ACLU (the correct answer). This is never not funny.
IONIC (30D: Kind of column) — I don't remember everything from high school Latin, but I sure do remember the columns.

Brilliant man worthy of a brilliant puzzle that didn't quite check all the boxes for me.

Signed, Brian Herrick, 104th Runner Up, Local Track, Lollapuzzoola 2018

PS Are you going to Lollapuzzoola? I'm going to Lollapuzzoola! If we've met on the internet, I'd love to meet you in person. Plus, I will have another year of solving under my belt but also will be a few weeks into parenthood. Will I do better or worse than in 2018? Stay tuned! And if you want to meet on the internet, I'm here.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

John Updike novel subtitled "A Romance" / FRI 6-21-19 / Entertainer and civil rights activist Horne / reflex, infant's instinctual spreading of the arms

Old boosted rocket stages / SAT 6-22-19 / Media big Zuckerman / Either constituent of table salt / They might work on something for 60 seconds / Sci-fi autho Simmons with 1989 Hugo-winning novel Hyperion

noun Rocketry.

Model for bust at Musei Capitolini / SUN 6-23-19 / Quaint contradiction / Fruit that surprisingly is slightly radioactive / Provincial capital south of lake with same name / Item carried in academic procession / Objects spinning in orrery

Woods who voiced Cinderella / MON 6-24-19 / Tussle between wiki page modifiers / Spewing naughty language as child / Missile aimed at bulls-eye

Game cube / TUES 6-25-19 / Beyond the horizon / Tower-building game / Daredevil Knievel

Oldest golfer to win PGA Tour event / WED 6-26-19 / Shade akin to rust / Two tone beast that sleeps standing up

Decorative sewing case / THU 6-27-19 / Famous symbol of Cold War / Monopoly token replaced in 2013 by cat

Physician on TV's Celebrity Rehab / FRI 6-28-19 / Actress Doborev of Vampire Diaries / Ohio town that was first permanent settlement in state / Eyes slangily / Briskly to equestrians

Soviet workers group / SAT 6-29-19 / Geographical eponym of 1970s-'80s fad diet / Woman who spends money on younger lover in modern lingo / Icon of ambient music

Rapid movement of eye from one point to another / SUN 6-30-19 / Wife in F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night / Last Oldsmobile ever produced / Tropical scurrier / Sturdily built friend on Friends

Rock drummer whose last name is same as his band / MON 7-1-19 / Paul who played Crocodile Dundee / Falsett-voiced Muppet

Oral only / TUE 7-2-19 / Former fast jet in brief / Any class vinyl record / Graphic representation of history / Establishment that might have a lot of hogs in front

Here’s hoping / WED 7-3-19 / Matthew English poet who wrote Dover Beach / Color of most Solo cups

Silo filler, in brief / THU 7-4-19 / Figure skater Midori / Olympic champion Ohno / Squaresville

Cause of typos, humorously / FRI 7-5-19 / Deposits in some banks / Synthetic fiber, for short / Activity for which you need a fair amount of wiggle room

Kashyyyk denizen, in sci-fi / SAT 7-5-19 / #2 image among smartphone users? / "Ninotchka" actress, 1939 / Many a Univision viewer, in modern usage

Letters near an X-ray machine / SUN 7-7-2019 / Veto on movie night / Dating-app distance metric / No longer needed for questioning /

Marx's collaborator on "The Communist Manifesto" / MON 7-8-19 / Al who created Lil' Abner / "For Better or for Worse" mom / 1980s tennis champ Ivan

Folgers alternative / WED 7-9-19 / Automated producer of spam / "The Highwayman" poet / Spaced out mentally

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