Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (the "Medium" part was figuring out the themers)

THEME: STOUT (64A: Kind of beer ... or a multi-word hint to 18-, 22-, 37-, 51- and 57-Across) — familiar phrases with the initial "S" and "T" taken "OUT" (wacky phrases, wacky clues):

Theme answers:

UMP SPEECH (18A: "Strike three!" or "Yer out!"?) (stump speech)
EEL TRAP (22A: Way to catch a conger?) (steel trap)
RANGE BEDFELLOWS (37A: The main characters of "Brokeback Mountain," e.g.?) (strange bedfellows)
ALE MATE (51A: Drinking buddy?) (stalemate)
ICKY NOTES (57A: Gross messages?) (Sticky Notes)

Word of the Day: Chinua Achebe (60D: Crop item grown in Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart") —

Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbeɪ/; born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at Government College Umuahia and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease(1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah(1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" featured a criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist"; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy. (wikipedia)

• • •

This theme type is old as the hills. See those hills outside your window? Or, whatever, that building or wall outside your window? Older. Anyone who's done puzzles for 10+ years has seen some (but apparently not all) the variants. The TROUT and the SPOUT and the CLOUT and possibly the GOUT BOUT LOUT I don't do every puzzle so I don't know. All I know is that I knew the revealer after I got my first themer. Blew past EEL TRAP without realizing it was a themer—an EEL TRAP is a real, honest-to-god thing, and thus not at all "wacky" like the rest of the themers (maybe you call it an EEL POT, but the crossword has historically been so OBSESSed with eels and eeliness that EEL TRAP feels like an old friend, or at least like someone you've seen before). Then I swung over and up into the NE, and once I pieced together UMP SPEECH, after taking a second to think about what the play on words was, I saw it: S, T ... OUT. And I immediately went to the bottom of the grid thinking, "Oh, no, please don't be that, it can't just be that." And while I didn't find STOUT at the very bottom (weird revealer placement, by the way), I did, sadly, find it nearby:

At this point I took a deep breath and sighed dramatically, for an audience composed solely of my cats, who didn't even look up. "He's sighing again," they probably thought. "Seen it." And then I went back to finishing up the puzzle.

A puzzle like this, being based on a well-worn wordplay premise, is only as good as the wacky themers it produces, and there are hits and misses. The good news is the marquee themer, RANGE BEDFELLOWS, is pretty dang good. I still haven't seen the movie, but my understanding is that it features two cowboys who sleep together. And Michelle Williams, of "Dawson's Creek" fame. Anyhoo, the wordplay is sound there, for sure. ICKY NOTES and ALE MATE come in 2nd and 3rd (really glad they didn't try to put an example of an icky note in the clue, god knows how that would've come out). UMP SPEECH is dull. And EEL TRAP is invisible. The fill is all short stuff, except PROVOLONE, which is great, and RECESSION, which is not (they're both fine as answers, I'm talking about lovability now).

Five more things:

6D: Bulk up, as muscles (SCULPT) — took me forever because these are different things. Ask a professional bodybuilder (my trainer is one—she is not "bulky," and SCULPTing is its own art)
8D: Toggle on a clock (AM/PM) — the worst. "Ooh, is it AM/PM or AM/FM, I can't wait to find out!" No one thinks this! So, yeah, I messed up this one and AVER / AVOW, and I had T-BILL not T-BOND (50D: Long-term U.S. security). I did guess the correct "E" spelling of CLEO's name, though (26D: Miss ___, famed TV psychic). That's something.
6A: Line crosser, of a sort (SCAB) — in this economy!? I'd probably leave union-busting out of the puzzle, if I ruled the world. Also, no more flippant or wacky clues for COMA (7D: Out-of-it state).
67A: Slyly spiteful (CATTY)— this answer is where the revealer should be, in the last Across position. STOUT was likely elevated one slot because longer terminal-U answers are a drag to work with (really restricts your fill options), and that's what you would've had on your hands if you'd have STOUT flush with the bottom of the grid.
46D: Big, bushy-tailed squirrel (MARMOT)— here's a picture of a MARMOT to brighten your day:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: plurals written as two singulars— familiar phrases that contain letter strings that spell out irregular plurals (i.e. not simple add-an-S plurals); those plurals are represented in the grid as two singular forms of the noun, side by side, in the circled squares. So COMEDIC EFFECT contains "DICE," but in the grid, instead of "DICE" we get one "DIE" and then another "DIE" ... and so on:

Theme answers:

Comedic effect => COME DIE DIE FFECT (17A: What a pratfall may be done for)
Twelve steps => TW ELF ELF TEPS (25A: Program followed in Alcoholics Anonymous)
Name names => NA MAN MAN AMES (46A: Sing under pressure)
Coffee table => CO FOOT FOOT ABLE (59A: Where magazines may be laid out)

Word of the Day: MAHARISHI (43A: Title that translates to "great sage") —

In Ancient India, Maharishi is a Sanskrit word, written as "महर्षि" in Devanagari (formed from the prefix mahā- meaning "great" and r̥ṣi meaning "seer"), indicating members of the highest order of ancient Indian sages, popularly known in India as "seers," i.e. those who engage in research to understand and experience (and therefore know) Nature and its governing laws. (wikipedia)

• • •

Normally not a big fan of gibberish in the grid, but the central idea here is so cute that I didn't mind. It's simple but ingenious—just represent a plural as two singulars. Of course that alone isn't too interesting, since representing "dogs" as DOG DOG or "roads" as ROAD ROAD wouldn't be that remarkable a transformation. But by making all the involved plurals irregular, i.e. plurals that don't follow the most common add-an-S structure, the devolution into two singulars is more dramatic somehow. In fact, ELVES is the only one with an "S" ending at all, and that one of course has the V-back-to-F change. The others are all truly irregular non-S plurals. The answers they appear in are all relatively straightforward and easy to get, or at least easy to get purchase on. Everything outside the involved theme squares today is extremely straightforward. Since it's Thursday, and I expect trickery, I just sort of sidled up to those circled squares without plunging in straight away. I surrounded them ... crossed them (to make sure the crosses were working properly; god knows what circled squares are going to do to an answer on a Thursday). Got the theme at "twelve steps" when I realized "elves" was embedded inside it, but there were six (not five) circled squares, and since I already had the first "EL-," I guessed I had a couple of ELFs on my hands (instead of the "elves"). COMEDIEDIEFFECT ended up being the hardest for me because my brain was thinking "DIE and DIE = DIES." But I got it sorted. The last two themers were totally transparent, but still enjoyable to uncover. The fill was solid enough. A pleasant surprise, overall.

Five things:

51D: Padmé Amidala's home planet in "Star Wars" (NABOO) — It pays to store grid-friendly "Star Wars" answers away somewhere in your brain, as they recur. There's this assumption that you'll just *know* the "Star Wars" universe (see also the Potterverse) (which is to say, see also 64A: ___ Scamander, protagonist of "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them") (NEWT). I resent the "Star Wars" part of the NABOO clue, since the only "Star Wars" I recognize came out in 1977 and there was no Padmé Amidala in it, that I can recall. This is "Phantom Menace" territory ... no time to fall into this rabbit hole today.
15D: ___ Shute, "A Town Like Alice" novelist (NEVIL) — a very popular novelist that, as far as I can tell, no one reads anymore. Shute was English and moved to Australia, which is where "A Town Like Alice" is set. If nothing else, today I learned the this song's title is (apparently) a literary allusion:

39D: Props, so to speak (CREDIT)— seems like a verb or plural noun, but it's slang for "proper respect," i.e. "due credit." It was "propers" in Aretha Franklin's "Respect," but in hip-hop slang it gets shortened to "props"
31A: Proper way to pass (ON THE LEFT) — assuming you don't live in the UK, Japan, NZ, etc. Not thrilled about this fairly arbitrary prepositional phrase, or about two ON phrases crossing (see 4D: Where we are (ON EARTH)). But as annoyances go, these are fairly minor.
29D: "That's nonsense" ("POOH")— POOH is a bear. Wanted POSH (from "pish-posh!"?), but that would've meant that the [May day celebrant] was the MSM, which seemed highly unlikely (common abbr. for "mainstream media," used primarily by paranoid nutters, please never ever put it in a grid, thank you)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I blocked out APPARATS, possibly because it was traumatic (20A: Communist party systems). I somehow know the term "apparatchik" without knowing that its most literal, basic meaning is "a member of a Communist apparat."

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Constructor: Grant Thackray

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TORTONI (61A: Italian dessert topped with crumbled macaroons) —

: ice cream made of heavy cream often with minced almonds and chopped maraschino cherries and often flavored with rum (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Started badly and ended badly and wasn't that great in between. Thinks it's much cuter than it is, tries to be slangy but just sounds dated, and tries to cover up mediocrity with some "XXX" dazzle camouflage. There wasn't one point at which I was enjoying myself. OH, TO have a good Friday puzzle again! I need light, bouncy, playful—full of crackle and originality, and spot-on with the cluing. This was nowhere near the mark. Lost me at 1-Across, to be honest (1A: Star Bucks, say?). Good example of someone being so enamored of their wordplay clue that they don't care whether it's a very *good* clue or not. I get it, Starbucks is a company, so "Star Bucks," very clever. But even knowing it was going to be basketball-related, that pile-up of initials was still hard to get because two Bucks can't be MVP at the same time. You would never "say" anything about "Star Bucks" who were NBAMVPS. Or, rather, since there have only ever been two (early-'70s Kareem and reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo), "Star Bucks" (meaning NBAMVPS) could only ever refer to them. That's it. It's those two. So, the casual "say" in the clue, ugh. It's so misleading. "Say" implies it might be any number of Bucks, as opposed to two and only two, the minimum number it takes to make a plural. NBAMVPS isn't a terrible delightful 1-Across to begin with, and then we get a clue that has a pretty tortured relationship to accuracy. All because someone thought "Star Bucks" was a good pun. And then to have that answer cross a word that can be a racial slur at 1-Down ... well, I was pretty much out at that point. Would've stopped, but I've got a job to do, so ...

And the ending, blargh. Imagine capping off your solve by having to change ONE EURO to THE (!?!?!) EURO (25D: It's usually around 9/10 pound). Your clue is dealing in numbers ("9/10") so I just assumed you would stay in the realm of numbers, but no ... a definite article instead. Unlikeable! I like ED ASNER as an actor, but he's exceedingly crossword-common, and that whole SE corner, for various reasons, just doesn't cut it. Including RSVPED after you've already subjected me to NBAMVPS just feels bludgeony. I have no idea which IVAN did anything, frankly, so I had to infer the Roman numeral "I" (40A: Russian prince nicknamed "Moneybag"). Had trouble with the cross (37D: Dreaded fate for a samurai) because I figured that "samurai" meant I was in for something samurai-specific, something Japanese, a particular concept ... but no, just plain old English DISHONOR. Kind of ironic that MANSPLAIN appears in a puzzle that includes no women in the grid and only* Gal Gadot in the clues (she's the ISRAELI). This is a puzzle that wants you to believe it's against dudes talking condescendingly to women, but the actual nuts and bolts of the puzzle belie the t-shirt feminism of MANSPLAIN. Less showing that you know the terminology of anti-sexism, more actually being anti-sexist, please and thanks. IT'S A BOY, indeed.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*do not @ me about the Lewis Carroll character, please

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Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium (just two toughish areas for me)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: SUN RA (46A: Jazzman who was a pioneer of Afrofuturism) —

Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led "The Arkestra," an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up.
Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism.Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity, saying "Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym."
His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ragtime and early New Orleans hot jazz, to swing music, bebop, free jazz and fusion. His compositions ranged from keyboard solos to works for big bands of over 30 musicians, along with electronic excursions, songs, chants, percussion pieces, and anthems. From the mid-1950s until his death, Ra led the musical collective The Arkestra (which featured artists such as Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson throughout its various iterations). Its performances often included dancers and musicians dressed in elaborate, futuristic costumes inspired by ancient Egyptian attire and the Space Age. (wikipedia)

• • •

This movie is amazing. God bless the Criterion Channel

Since I've (largely) stopped timing myself on puzzles I do first thing in the morning, I feel like I'm seeing the whole question of "Difficulty" a little more clearly. Which is to say, I think the clock can be deceptive. Don't ask me to elaborate on this theory, because I haven't thought about it too much. I just know that if I'm not in speed mode, I can feel the tough spots better, and see their ... I don't know, let's say "absolute toughness" a little better, as opposed to the kind of "toughness" that comes from the idiosyncratic mistakes one makes when speeding (fat fingers, poor reading comprehension, etc.). In that same time period (so ... the past three to six months), the late-week, "difficult" puzzles have seemed to get appreciably easier. I doubt they have actually moved much in terms of difficulty in that short a time period, so I think I'm just picking up on a broad recent phenomenon, which is that the "difficult" puzzles (Th-Sun, but esp F & Sat) have been made easier in recent years. Probably in the name of accessibility. I certainly haven't gotten *better* at puzzles. Not faster, anyway. I'm just noticing how easy it is for me to stroll through a Saturday these days, with none of the sweat and tooth-grinding that often characterized a Saturday solve for me even at my speed-solving peak (roughly ten years ago). I think that now that the NYTXW is doing such enormous business (like the cooking app, it's carrying the paper in terms of human attention, if not outright $$$), a conscious choice has been made to make the "difficult" puzzles more accessible, and I don't think this is necessarily bad. Casual solvers should have a shot at all the puzzles on offer, or should at least feel like they can get there one day. I do miss the genuine struggle, though, sometimes.

Today's puzzle only put up a fight in two places for me. It definitely has teeth enough to make the solve interesting, and it's a good-looking grid. But I didn't look at a clue I didn't know for the first 1/3 of the puzzle. I opened like this, bam bam:

And then proceeded, with no hesitation at all, all the way down the west side of the grid until I hit the (by far) obscurest clue in the puzzle. Weirdly, it was a clue for a mere three-letter word: TOP (45A: Sorting label for a Twitter search). Totally inscrutable to me for the longest time—and I do Twitter searches *often*. It wasn't until I got TOP (entirely from crosses) that I remembered, "oh, right, when your search results come in, there *are* a bunch of headers at the top, different ways you can sort results"; the only two I remember (now) are "Latest" (which shows the results in reverse chronological order) and "TOP" (which some algorithm has determined are the most "engaging" or whatever dumb names they use to monetize your attention and anesthetize that way that you feel). So ... TOP! You *really* gotta use Twitter to have a shot there, and even many Twitter users (hi there) are gonna squint at that one. That little clue packed a lot of wallop, esp. relative to most of the rest of the grid.

The more serious challenge came in the SE, where REPRIMANDS fit perfectly at 51A: Upbraids (REPROACHES), and where, facing S-UR--E at 36D: Popular ice drink (SLURPEE), I decided I would write in SOUR ALE (!?!?!). My 10-year-old self is looking at me right now like "dude, you went to 7-11 and drank cola SLURPEEs every damn chance you got. I'm drinking one right now!" Embarrassing. No one else is making that error, I'm fairly confident, so I can't ascribe it to the puzzle's "difficulty." But I definitely had to work around the REPRIMANDS trap. But even there, RED SKY was a gimme (41D: Morning omen for sailors) and CATE Blanchett was a gimme, so even though "GEE, YA THINK?" was slightly hard to parse (54A: "Thanks, Captain Obvious!"), I fought my way up and out of there with only a normal Saturday amount of struggle. The rest of the grid felt handed to me. If you don't know STEVE / KERR (4D: With 16-Across, championship-winning head coach of the Golden State Warriors), maybe it's harder, but with him (and he's a gimme for me), you've got toeholds in two parts of the grid. Really opens things up.

There were a few answers I couldn't get right away.

Thought the Hajj was maybe a HIKE (!?) (it's a RITE) (23A: Hajj, e.g.)
Had the "H" but no idea what to do with it at 25A: Overplay (HAM UP)
I had the -OR and wanted ARDOR at 42A: Vehemence but then thought "no, ARDOR's more love than [Vehemence]" ... and then TOP got involved and really messed things up, so even though I guessed ARDOR early, I took a while to commit to it.
I didn't hesitate too much at 'ZINE, or, rather, if I did, it was out of disbelief that anyone would think The Atlantic was a 'ZINE (28A: The Atlantic, but not the Pacific, for short). I'd give you MAG before I gave you 'ZINE, which has a very specific non-commercial / DIY meaning. The Atlantic is a mass-market slick. It's the antithesis of a 'ZINE.

I do feel bad for people who have never heard of Lincoln in the BARDO, because how in the world are you gonna know if you have that one right. Unless your knowledge of Buddhism runs pretty deep, you aren't likely to recognize BARDO as a word at all. And when you don't recognize a word at all, when it seems like you're staring at nonsense, then all of a sudden *all* the crosses start to look suspect. BARDO was a gimme for me (Lincoln in the BARDO won the Man Booker Prize in 2017), but if you struggled with that one, I see you, and I sympathize.

That's all. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Lisa Bunker

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

Is it ... art?

THEME:"Sealed With a Kiss"— eight rebus squares contain RED[some fourth letter], where the fourth letters spell out RUBY LIPS ... I can't tell if they are supposed to be a visual representation of lips or what, but ... I did a drawing anyway, just in case (above). Anyway, Red "R," Red "U," Red "B," etc.:

Theme answers:

SNA[RE DR]UM / REDRAFTS
C[REDU]LOUS / POWERED UP
CHARTE[RED B]US / SACRED BOOK
HUND[RED Y]ARD / SCAREDY CAT
JA[RED L]ETO / ASSUREDLY
EXTRA C[REDI]T / INGREDIENTS
F[RED P]ERRY / ORDERED PAIR
EA[RED S]EAL / MAÎTRE D'S

Word of the Day: "ONDINE" (51D: Debussy prelude inspired by a water sprite) —

Undines /ˈʌndiːn, ʌnˈdiːn/ (or ondines) are a category of elemental beings associated with water, first named in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus. Similar creatures are found in classical literature, particularly Ovid's Metamorphoses. Later writers developed the undine into a water nymph in its own right, and it continues to live in modern literature and art through such adaptations as Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and the Undine of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.
Undines are almost invariably depicted as being female, and are usually found in forest pools and waterfalls. The group contains many species, including nereides, limnads, naiades and mermaids. Although resembling humans in form, they lack a human soul, so to achieve mortality they must acquire one by marrying a human. Such a union is not without risk for the man, because if he is unfaithful, then he is fated to die. //
French composer Claude Debussy included a piece called "Ondine" in his collection of piano preludes written in 1913 (Preludes, Book 2, No. 8). (wikipedia)

• • •

I mostly enjoyed solving this one, and was really looking forward to spelling out the RED letters at the end to see what my Valentine's Day message was going to be. I wrote it out and it spelled RUBY LIPS. Title is "Sealed With a Kiss," so that tracks, but I'm incredibly distracted by the fact that those aren't lips. I mean, they don't make lip shapes. Unless half of your face has fallen or you're on your side or falling through the air or something. I can't make them into plausible lip shapes. So all I can think is that ... I'm not supposed to. That it's not part of the gag. But *how* can it not be part of the theme? There are two sets of four, just as there are two lips, and they are fairly begging to be connected with a red pen (as I have done above). So it's like I'm being asked to see lips, but then they aren't there, or they are these bizarre misshapen lips. What's weirder—it doesn't seem like it would've been that hard to arrange the squares in the grid so that they *do* make plausible lip shapes. An arc up top, an arc below, voìla! I am guessing that it was not, in fact, easy to do that in practice, as you'd end up with rebus squares very close to one another—too close to pull it off and keep the grid from being a wreck. So instead you've got these rebus squares way the hell and gone out there in the NW and SE corners, where they are easier to handle, fill-wise, but where they make the whole lip representation into a mess or a farce or ... something. It's a shame that this one didn't land. It's a great idea, with a great set-up, and the theme answers themselves (the ones containing the rebus squares) are quite solid and interesting. But I ended up with a pair of lips that looked nothing like lips. Or, rather, that looked *something* like lips, but not enough like lips to be plausible lips. An angry child's drawing of lips, maybe. Anyway, it's weird, and given the promising concept, disappointing.

Maybe go easier on the RE- answers (REDRAFTS, RESOD, REAIR) and the plural noun brand names (SERTAS, SNAPPLES). And I don't know what the weird "Q" thing in the NE is about, but it's not really worth it. I mean, it's hard not to love the "Thong Song," so OK, SISQO / ACQUIT you can have, but CASQUE (!?!?!) / QUA, why? The first was baffling to me (and I'm a medievalist) (16D: Medieval helmet), and then QUA ... pourquoi? This kind of Scrabble-f***king baffles me. I knew RSTLNE but not in the "right" order, so that was no fun. OX TEAM sounds really odd to my ears (93D: Field-plowing duo). Team of oxen ... it wants to be written out formally, for some reason. Clearer, more elegant. OX TEAM sounds like some kind of weird bovine rivals of the X-MEN. "ONDINE" is obscure as heck. The themers were all easy enough to get, except whoa FRED PERRY (!?!?!) (109A: British tennis champ who invented the sweatband). That is a name that rings a faint bell, but with a mathy cross (ORDERED PAIR), I was mildly panicked there for a second. But only a second. Or two. Probably.

Had FLUFFY before PLUSHY (25D: Like many stuffed animals) and floundered my way through BUSHTIT (12D: Small woodland songbird). Otherwise, no problems. If you see lips in this puzzle, then god bless you and your eyeballs. I hope it pleased you. I'm only displeased because I found the concept so pleasing, conceptually. Having this very off lip picture staring at me at the end just brought me down. But that's OK. I still liked this far better than most recent Sundays. At least it was trying.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. PBR stands for Pabst Blue Ribbon (54A), OLY is short for Olympia (80A)

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Constructor: Meconya Alford

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for second week in a row, the Monday puzzle is more like a Tuesday/Wednesday puzzle)

THEME: WHITE HOUSE DOGS (56A: What the starts of 21-, 26-, 40- and 50-Across)— first words of familiar phrases / names are all also the names of presidential pooches:

Theme answers:

BUDDY COP MOVIES (21A: "Rush Hour" and "21 Jump Street" [Clinton])
BARNEY FIFE (26A: TV deputy of Mayberry [Bush 43])
BO TREE (40A: The Buddha is often depicted meditating under it [Obama]
MAJOR SCALE (50A: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, e.g. [Biden]

Word of the Day: BO TREE (40A) —

The Bodhi Tree or Bodhi Fig Tree ("tree of awakening") -- also called the Bo Tree -- was a large and ancient sacred fig tree (Ficus religiosa) located in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. Siddhartha Gautama, the spiritual teacher who became known as the Buddha, is said to have attained enlightenment or Bodhi circa 500 BCE under it. In religious iconography, the Bodhi Tree is recognizable by its heart-shaped leaves, which are usually prominently displayed.
The proper term "Bodhi Tree" is also applied to existing sacred fig (Ficus religiosa) trees, also known as bodhi trees. The foremost example of an existing tree is the Mahabodhi Tree growing at the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, which is often cited as a direct descendant of the original tree. This tree, planted around 250 BCE, is a frequent destination for pilgrims, being the most important of the four main Buddhist pilgrimage sites.
Other holy bodhi trees with great significance in the history of Buddhism are the Anandabodhi Tree at Jetavana in Sravasti in North India and the Sri Maha Bodhi Tree in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Both are also believed to have been propagated from the original Bodhi Tree. (wikipedia)

• • •

I will start by saying I really like this theme, and I'm especially impressed that the dogs all appear in chronological order, going through Presidents 42, 43, 44 ... skipping the *$%^ing monster at 45, whom you wouldn't trust to take care of a chia pet let alone an actual sentient creature ... and ending at 46. I feel a little bad for CHAMP, who should've at least been given a walk-on role as part of the fill, come on, have a heart. So, hurray theme. I do think there are some issues with theme execution, and I emphatically assert that this is not a Monday puzzle. The execution issues and the day-of-the-week issues are semi-related. I'll start with the difficulty issue—like last week, this puzzle was off the charts in terms of my normal Monday times. It is oversized, but even allowing for that, high 3's is a full minute slower than normal, and a full minute, when you typically take just under 3 minutes to finish, is a *ton* of time. While the puzzle felt very Mondayish in places, there is one place in particular where it felt closer to Saturday, and that problem area has *everything* to do with theme execution (i.e. what themers you use and where you place them). So the problem, for me, was YUBA (!?!?!?!), which all on its own is a total mystery, but crossing BO TREE (literally no idea) and KAILUA (rings a bell, but ???), yeah, YUBA was a nightmare. It was made more nightmarish by its actually not-at-all-helpful clue, 27D: Rhyming title character who plays the tuba in Cuba, in a Rudy Vallee song. "Rhyming title character" ... what? Rhyming with what? I assumed this meant it rhymed with itself, i.e. internally, so, having YU, I wrote in YUYU. I see, now, that the clue has "helpfully" included "tuba" and "Cuba" in the clue, but those did not At All register as rhymes for the actual answer when I read the clue. I was so stuck through that area: three answers that I've never heard of, all crossing, on a Monday. Insanity.

The root of the problem is the theme answer placement. When you put BARNEY FIFE and BO TREE (again, ???) in their current locations, as a constructor you've put yourself in a position where you've got to deal with Y-B- as one of the Downs, and wow, good luck with that. If you're building a puzzle, you place your themers first, and I can guarantee you, Y-B- is (or should be) the Very First cross that you wrangle, because it's a mess. Virtually nothing follows the Y-B- letter pattern. Only word I can think of that fits there is YOBS? Is that a thing? Yes, YOB is British slang for a "loutish or uncultured person." But that's not really a Monday answer either. I don't really get why, faced with Y-B-, the constructor didn't move some things around to avoid that truly limiting scenario. I also don't know why the editor didn't suggest as much, given that you end up with such an un-Mondayish pile-up precisely at that point. If all the YUBA crosses were common, and the clue had been more clearly written, then OK, it's a bizarre anomaly in the grid, but no big deal. But as is, it's a [record needle scratch sound] on an otherwise really interesting puzzle. I'm not sure why this is 16 wide. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to build your puzzle around a more famous BO, like DEREK or JACKSON. You want people to glide easily through your Monday, and to be able to finish with a clear sense that all the answers are correct, so they can appreciate your theme. YUBA / BO TREE / KAILUA cruelly un-Mondays this puzzle. I mean, a *Rudy Vallee* song!?!? I honestly don't even know who that is. Name is familiar, but ... hard shrug. Again, I think editors should've seen all these problems and advised accordingly. Still, all in all, this is promising work. The theme really is a good one.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. looks like Rudy Vallee was born "Vallée," with the accent aigu on that first "e"; that's even how it is spelled on the record label in the video, above. Not sure where or how the accent got lost between the 1930s and today's clues ...

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Constructor: Johanna Fenimore

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)

THEME:"BEER ME!" (62A: "I'll have a cold one, please" ... or a hint to 17-, 26-, 43- and 57-Across)— words on the front or back ends (alternating) of longer answers are brands of BEER:

Theme answers:

NIP IN THE BUD (17A: Do something)
STELLA MCCARTNEY (26A: British fashion designer who's the daughter of Linda and Sir Paul)
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON (43A: Very rarely)
CORONA CIGAR (57A: Long, straight-sided smoke)

Word of the Day: XBOX ONE (41D: Popular video game console released in 2013) —

The Xbox One is a line of home video game consoles developed by Microsoft. Announced in May 2013, it is the successor to Xbox 360 and the third base console in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was first released in North America, parts of Europe, Australia, and South America in November 2013, and in Japan, China, and other European countries in September 2014. It is the first Xbox game console to be released in China, specifically in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone. Microsoft marketed the device as an "all-in-one entertainment system", hence the name 'Xbox One'. An eighth-generation console, it mainly competed against Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U and later the Switch. [...] The system was succeeded by the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, which launched on November 10, 2020. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really enjoyed this one, partly because I have such low expectations for Tuesday that anything halfway decent is likely to come across as pleasing, but mostly because the revealer is fresh and fun (even if, again, it's not in the *final* Across position—what is with this trend with revealers *hovering* one line up from the bottom in the SE? ... although ... I guess if you can get far better fill results by lifting the revealer off the bottom by one row, then it's enough for the revealer just to be in the SE section—still has a terminal feel, and quality of fill should be a paramount concern ... although DIEM and TREY and CEO aren't exactly eye-popping ... OK, stopping overthinking this now). NIP IN THE BUD is a tight idiomatic phrase that makes me not mind the presence of NIP so much (if it shows up on the first page of search results as an ethnic slur, it's worth thinking hard about whether you really want to use it). STELLA MCCARTNEY is a pretty inspired way to get a 15-letter STELLA (to balance out the 15-letter ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, which is about the only BLUE MOON phrase there is). I sadly thought she was STELLA MCCARTHY, which didn't stretch to the whole 15, and which is obviously wrong if you bother to Read The Whole Clue (my clue-reading impatience costs me once again). I don't really know what a CORONA CIGAR is, but I trust that it is a thing. "Cigar" feels redundant—I think I've heard of "corona," the way I've heard of "claro" and "panatela" (my entire cigar vocabulary, besides "stogie" comes from crosswords). It's a type of cigar, not a brand (according to Cigar Aficionado, which is not a phrase I ever imagined writing, "corona" is the "benchmark size against which all other sizes are measured," so there). The whole grid is very lively, the revealer pops ... yes, I'll take this.

I liked both "AW, C'MON" (11D: "Pretty, pretty please") and COME BY (65A: Acquire) even though that *almost* feels like a dupe (i.e. duplicate, i.e. "come" is (sorta) in both answers). I'm not sure there's any "please" implied in "AW, C'MON." Speaking of which, I *know* there's not any "please" implied in "BEER ME!" so I have no idea why they've appended "please" to "I'll have a cold one" in that clue. I know ARES very well but do not think of him as a "symbol," so that clue was bizarrely hard for me (51D: Symbol of militarism). I seriously wanted APES in there at one point. I forgot the XBOX ONE existed. I wanted XBOX NOW, which is probably a conflation of XBOX LIVE and some other product name. I shave my head so the BRUSHES clue was not intuitive for me (25D: Items often used in front of mirrors). Didn't know EMILIA (14A: "Game of Thrones" actress Clarke) or RORY (49A: ___ Storm and the Hurricanes (Ringo's band before the Beatles)), but didn't even see the clue for the former (got the whole NW corner from Downs), and the latter came easily with crosses. I think I thought OARMEN had an "S" in it ... so, "oarsmen." I'm never 100% sure about the final vowel in AUGUR (33A: Foretell), possibly because AUGER ("a tool with a helical bit for boring holes in wood") also exists. But outside the ARES next to XBOX ONE section, this one went pretty smoothly. Really hit the Tuesday spot. That does not often happen. So, ok then, good. Moving on ...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: David Harris and Evan Kalish

Relative difficulty: Easy (unless you've never heard of one or the other of the actresses up top, in which case probably much harder)

THEME: MONKEY [in the] MIDDLE (43A: With the circled letters and 46-Across, playground keep-away game) — circled squares containing "I N T H E" form a lob arc from one side of the grid (MONKEY) to the other (MIDDLE). Those circled squares represent the arc of a ball (presumably) that's being kept away from the titular "monkey in the middle," who is represented by the letters "APE" in DIAPERS (APES can be found in (sorta) the middle of four other themers). APES is also the revealer (65A: Animals found in 16-, 20-, 35-, 51- and 58-Across):

Theme answers:

RHEA PERLMAN (16A: Portrayer of Carla Tortelli on "Cheers")
AMANDA PEET (20A: "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" co-star)
DIAPERS (35A: Huggies, e.g.)
BANANA PEEL (51A: Cause of a comedic slip)
ON A PEDESTAL (58A: Where idols might be placed)

Word of the Day: AMANDA PEET (20A) —

Amanda Peet (born January 11, 1972) is an American actress. After studying at Columbia University, Peet began her acting career with small parts on television, and made her film debut in Animal Room (1995). Her featured role in the comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000) brought her wider recognition, and she has since appeared in a variety of films, including Something's Gotta Give (2003), Identity (2003), Syriana (2005), The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), 2012 (2009), and The Way, Way Back (2013). On television, Peet has starred in Jack & Jill (1999–2001), Togetherness(2015–2016), Brockmire (2016–2020), and the second season of Dirty John in 2020. (wikipedia)

• • •

Had to look up the game after I was done because I couldn't remember what it was. Didn't play it as a kid, as I recall, though "keep-away" is familiar enough. MONKEY in the MIDDLE sounds like a more formally organized version of "keep-away" which seems like a more spontaneous (and possibly cruel) "game" where the "monkey" is an unwilling participant. Couldn't figure out why DIAPERS were "in the middle" (is the monkey a baby??) but then saw APE there in the exact MIDDLE. Seeing the APE in DIAPERS (!) was a real aha moment. It was only afterward that I noticed both the APES"hiding" in the theme answers and (well after that) the revealer. Never saw the revealer. The puzzle was so easy, I just filled it in from crosses, not even noticing it. Feels very redundant and anti-climactic. I mean, yes, I did not see the other APES at first, it's true, but I did *find* them when I went looking, and that was at least mildly entertaining. And then the extra APES ... I mean, I get it, you feel like you *should* have more theme material in the puzzle, but none of those APES have a ball going over their heads and, most crucially, none of those APES are actually "in the (exact) middle" of their answers. They're in there, but off to one side or the other. So in order to fulfill some assumed obligation to cram the grid with theme material, we get imperfectly executed theme (no ball overhead, no "middle" placement). The APE in DIAPERS, great. All the rest of it, all the stuff not involving the nice visual gag "in the middle," is excessive window dressing. Too much. Mars the elegance of the concept.

As for difficulty, there wasn't much. RHEA PERLMAN is pretty famous from all those years on "Cheers" (and all those Emmys (4)). AMANDA PEET, while well known, at least to me, is a far less familiar name (or at least I think she will be, to most NYTXW solvers), and so it's possible she caused some difficulty. Unknown proper nouns often do. But no other spot in the grid should've caused much trouble. I had a few minor hesitations, that's all. Not sure what is going on with the clue for AMANDA PEET—I have never heard of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and it's not even mentioned in the first paragraph of her wikipedia bio. For me, her iconic role is as the owner of the minor-league Morristown Frackers in "Brockmire":

Five things:

14A: Greeting in an inbox (E-CARD) — had the "E-" and then ... so many places to go from there. I choice "-VITE" ... [incorrect buzzer!]
43D: Order from Tony Soprano, e.g. (MOB HIT) — kinda tired of the puzzle's obsession with mob violence. ICE as "murder," HITMAN, HITLIST, etc. I get it, it's a significant part of the tv / movie landscape blah blah blah, but I'm finding murder and violence in my grid more and more unpleasant these days. Same way I've lost patience for flippant, wacky clues about alcoholics (another NYTXW obsession). "The Sopranos" is a great show. "The Godfather" is a great movie. It's just that romanticizing the mob (and particularly mob violence) is, in general, one of my less favorite aspects of popular culture.
3D: Had drinks before going out, informally (PRE-GAMED) — I had PREG- and thought, "wow, that is a dark clue for PREGNANT, what the—!?"
45D: Sharp rejection ("NO NO NO!")— Is it "sharp," though? It's repeated, that's for sure. Had the first "No!" and then went looking for a four-letter word like "DEAL" or "DICE" or something. But it's just a bunch of "NO"s.
12D: "Never-ending" offerings at Olive Garden (PASTAS) — pretty sure it's "Never-Ending Pasta Bowls," hang on ... (checking) ... yep. There's even a "Never-Ending Pasta Pass" (for Olive Garden superfans, I guess). But nowhere is there PASTAS with an "S." If you're going to use advertising language, get the wording right.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. did enjoy the BEER clue, gotta say (49D: The missing letters in _UDW_IS__)

P.P.S. so sorry I posted this late (9:40am). I was done at 6am but for some reason walked away from my desk and never came back to hit "Post." This is probably the latest posting date for the blog in ~14 years. My apologies for failing you.

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Constructor: Zachary Spitz

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: TV SPOTS (38A: Many P.S.A.s ... or the four circled squares in this grid?)— This is a Schrödinger puzzle, where the entry could be one of two words (or both at the same time, until you type in a letter!). In this case, at four circled squares in the grid, you can use either a T or a V, hence, TV SPOTS.

Theme answers:

INTENTIONS / INVENTIONS (17A: Designs)
HOTELS / HOVELS (3D: Some accommodations)
REMOTE / REMOVE (34A: Separate from all the others, say)
RATE / RAVE (27D: Give five stars, say)
CARTER / CARVER (41A: Famous peanut grower)
TARNISH / VARNISH (42D: Certain outer coating)
ANTI-TAX / ANTI-VAX (56A: Like some libertarians)
LATISH / LAVISH (48D: Like an Oscars afterparty)

Word of the Day: ELISSA (Michigan congresswoman Slotkin) —

Elissa Blair Slotkin (born July 10, 1976) is an American politician and former CIA analyst serving as the U.S. Representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district since 2019.^[1] A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and Department of Defense official. Her district is based in part of south and southeast Michigan and includes some of Detroit's outer northern and western suburbs and most of the state capital, Lansing.

• • •

Hi everyone, Rachel Fabi in for Rex today, just in time to solve and write up this clever Schrödinger puzzle for you all! My feelings about this puzzle evolved throughout the solve and in the time I've spent thinking about the puzzle since finishing it, so I'll try to trace that emotional journey in this post (spoiler alert: it culminates with me thinking this puzzle is awesome).

Starting out, I was confused by this puzzle. As can sometimes be the case with Schrödinger grids, I straight-up didn't notice that there was anything going on with the circled squares until I got to the very last theme entry. I think it's entirely possible that some solvers will finish this puzzle without detecting the theme at all, even with the revealer! And when I finally did notice the theme, I felt pretty lukewarm about it. "Oh, it's one of *those* puzzles," I thought, crankily deciding to use the T for ANTI-TAX instead of having the delusional ANTI-VAXshow up on my screen. And then I looked at the crossing clue [48D: Like an Oscars afterparty]. And, almost against my will, I chuckled. Oscars parties ARE (presumably, though I have never been to one to confirm) LAVISH. And they're on after the Oscars so... they must be LATISH too. And then I became slightly cranky again, because I doubt that -ISH qualifier is necessary; a party after the Oscars is straight-up LATE! But the cleverness of the gimmick had begun to sink in. I revisited the first circled square I had confidently stuck REMOTE into and realized, aha! If you parse "Separate" as a verb in [34A: Separate from all the others, say], then REMOVE works here too!

And so, much against my will, I began to love this puzzle. I think TARNISH/VARNISH is probably the weakest pair, just because they are so closely related, and yet received such an underwhelming clue [42D: Certain outer coating]. But CARTER/CARVER! The sheer cleverness! President Jimmy CARTER, who sold his peanut farm to avoid the possibility of maybe someday appearing to be in violation of the emoluments clause, and George Washington CARVER, the scientist and inventor known for his work with peanuts, are both [41A: Famous peanut grower]s. If I had to bet, I'd say this was probably the starting point of the theme for the constructor, who may have noticed the similarities in their names and occupations and built this theme around it (I'm going to read constructor notes after I write this post, so I'll hopefully know whether I'm right soon enough). Another impressive thing about this theme is that the themers *aren't* symmetrical, which I think some people might count against this grid, but I actually think this adds an extra layer of complexity to placing the black squares. Anyways, this is a long paragraph to say that this theme grew on me immensely over the last hour or so.

Another positive aspect of this puzzle is the long fill, which is generally quite solid. EATS CROW and TREE GODSare especially fun, and I like CARTOONIST, SKI SUITS, and ON HIATUS quite a bit as well. On the downside, some of the short fill holding this clever theme together is pretty rough. I personally could live without UIE (which the NYT can't seem to decide how to spell), GTI, ITO, ALEE (which the NYT Spelling Bee still doesn't accept, last time I checked!), RCS, and, especially, the nonsense syllable KOO. Clearly these things were not dealbreakers for the editors or for me, as I still on balance love this puzzle, but I wish they could have been avoided.

A few more things:

Bullets:

Favorite clues:

[60A: One drawing lots?] for CARTOONIST— this is super clever and I love it.
[37D: Kodama, in Japanese mythology] for TREE GODS. I've never heard this before, but it's a beautiful word and now I know about kodama! Pictured to the right as depicted in "Princess Mononoke"

Least favorite clue:

[31D: Man's name that sounds like two letters of the alphabet] for ARTIE — can we stop with these? Just find a human named ARTIE! Or refill that section!

We got a double dose of SNL women with Tina FEY and perennial crossword favorite Cheri O'TERI
The crossing of SELES/ELISSA may be natick territory for some solvers (SELES was a big pull for me that I'm glad to have gotten! I don't tennis, although I understand a very important tennis match (game?) is tennising as I write this?)
Missed opportunity for a Macy Gray clue at [19A: I try]:

Overall, I enjoyed this puzzle significantly more after the solve than I did during the solve, which is really just an indication that the theme is extremely clever.

And now, if I may use this platform for a brief moment of self-promotion, I'd like to encourage you to sign up for the Boswords Spring Themeless League, to which I will be contributing a puzzle, if you have not yet done so already! The tournament consists of one themeless puzzle, at a choose-your-own difficulty level, every Monday night through March and April, with a pre-season event next Monday (although you can compete without ever attending the events live). I've competed in the past several online Boswords events, and I can say that the feeling of community and shared love of crossword puzzles at these events make them some of those rare, wonderful times of true connection and togetherness in this weird pandemic world. I hope to see you all there!

Signed, Rachel Fabi, Queen-for-a-Day of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Amanda Rafkin

Relative difficulty: Medium (skewing slightly harder depending on how rough the proper nouns were for you)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Dorothy LAMOUR (27D: Dorothy of old"Road" films) —

Dorothy Lamour (born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton; December 10, 1914 – September 22, 1996) was an American actress and singer. She is best remembered for having appeared in the Road to...movies, a series of successful comedies starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.
Lamour began her career in the 1930s as a big band singer. In 1936, she moved to Hollywood, where she signed with Paramount Pictures. Her appearance as Ulah in The Jungle Princess (1936) brought her fame and marked the beginning of her image as the "Sarong Queen".
In 1940, Lamour made her first Road series comedy film Road to Singapore. The Road series films were popular during the 1940s. The sixth film in the series, Road to Bali, was released in 1952. (wikipedia)

• • •

Had some trouble in the middle of this one, but otherwise, a pretty normal Friday. A little heavy on names, but maybe that's just the SE, where BADU BENES HEIDI and TOO $hort all cross each other just a little bit over from the RAND / O'NEIL cross. LAMOUR and LASSER are old(er) names that might have caused trouble as well (though LASSER is, or was, reasonably common at one point). All of the names are fine, individually. Perfectly suitable for crosswords. There were just a lot of them piled up, which can make solving dicey, as proper nouns are feast or famine for solvers. The NW was, bizarrely, the easiest part of the puzzle for me. Usually, getting started can involve a lot of sputtering, but I went to the little guy early (FAD), and that terminal "F" got me A BIT OF—and thus the first letters of All the Acrosses in that section. LACUNA is kind of a tough word, but it's one I know, so I made quick work of that NW section. It was only when I hit the center that I ran into problems—total stoppage, in fact. See if you can see where my problem is:

Well, ENO, obviously (30D: Singer/songwriter of 1980's "Kiss Kiss Kiss"). I actually had ONO in there at first, but -YLO- looked wrong at 29-Across so I pulled it. I also have NESTEA instead of NESTLÉ at 25D: Parent company of Gerber and Lean Cuisine. That's the real killer, because that's two wrong letters reaching into the empty part of the grid, giving me false footholds. Bad news. Even with the A-K- at the top of 28D: 13, for many (AWKWARD AGE), I couldn't see it (wanted something like "unlucky number"). The only thing that makes me mad at the *puzzle* and not myself is 27A: Modern lead-in to speak (LOL). I've been on the internet for, well, a while, and I don't know what "LOLspeak" is. LOLcats, yes. LOLspeak, no. Lulz, yes, LOLspeak ... can't even imagine. Hang on. Wow, ok, it seems that LOLspeak is the language of LOLcats. The ungrammatical language of cat memes. OK.

When I googled "LOLspeak," LOLcat came up. I love cats, but the whole LOLcat thing got very old very fast. It all feels very 15 years ago, i.e. a lot less "modern" than the clue believes. I really hope you knew LOLspeak, or knew Dorothy LAMOUR, because that crossing seems maybe tough otherwise. I briefly thought the actress was Dorothy MALONE (just watched "Written on the Wind"), and was very eager to find out what MOLspeak was. But then I fixed it.

I think MADE BANK is my favorite thing in this grid (13D: Raked in the dough). AWKWARD AGE is also nice, even if the clue did flummox me for a bit. And both CEREAL AISLE and its clue are very nice (53A: Way of Life?). Though I talk about her every time I teach the Aeneid, I never think of Helen as a DEMI-GODDESS, but of course she is, just as (technically) Aeneas is a demi-god (mother = Venus). Helen was the offspring of Leda (a mortal princess) and the Swan (aka noted shapeshifter-rapist Zeus). What else? Oh, lots of women in the grid—very noticeable, largely because the norm is the reverse. In fact, men are better represented in this grid than women are in the typical NYTXW grid. Nice to see the effort here to even things out a bit, though it shouldn't just be women constructors who are fixing this issue.

Lastly, if you don't get the clue on VOWELS (37A: Complete set in musical comedy?), it just means that a complete set of the VOWELS (a e i o u and even y) can be found in the phrase "musical comedy." Until tomorrow...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Ali Gascoigne

Relative difficulty: Medium (again, as with yesterday, the preponderance of proper nouns might make it much tougher)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Leo ROSTEN (26D: Humorist Leo who wrote "The Joys of Yiddish," 1968) —

Leo Calvin Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) was an American humorist in the fields of scriptwriting, storywriting, journalism, and Yiddish lexicography. He was also a political scientist interested especially in the relationship of politics and the media. [...] Rosten is best remembered for his stories about the night-school "prodigy" Hyman Kaplan, written under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. They were published in The New Yorker from 1935^[1] and collected in two volumes published in 1937 and 1959, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The Education was a "close second" for one U.S. National Book Award in 1938. The second collection was one of eighteen National Book Award for Fiction finalists in 1960. // He is also well known for his encyclopedic The Joys of Yiddish (1968), a guide to Yiddish and to Jewish culture including anecdotes and Jewish humor. It was followed by O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976), a reworking of the two 1930s collections, and Hooray for Yiddish! (1982), a humorous lexicon of the American language as influenced by Jewish culture. Another Rosten work is Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations.

• • •

This was, for the most part, a nicely varied and sufficiently tough Saturday. The grid's not built to give you too many long answers (these are usually the most colorful), but what it does give you is decent. I especially liked FREEGANS and "GET A ROOM!"Also, this is a puzzle constructed by a man that is properly inclusive of women, so, you know, here's me giving credit instead of yelling criticism. Don't say I never etc. I do want to ask constructors, once again, to consider not just the kinds of names they use, but how well known they are, whom they're well known to, and (this is crucial) how close they all are to each other. Diversity is, for me, a paramount concern, and this puzzle is good on that front: old new, men women, Black white, cool. There were two areas, though, where proximate names created potential difficulty—this is not necessarily a criticism, as Saturdays are *supposed* to be difficult, but ... it's a question of whether you want to be getting your difficulty primarily from tricky clues and wordplay or from names, many of which are culturally / generationally exclusionary by their very nature, leaving some solvers thrilled, or at least satisfied, and others just blinking and baffled. I think it's fine to have both kinds of difficulty, but ROSTEN (used-to-be famous) next to ANYA Taylor-Joy (very recently famous) creates a real knot, and SKEE-LO crossing AKON, while easy for me, seems like a possible nightmare for someone who is less familiar with stylized one-name '90s/'00s rapper/singers from the hip-hop/R&B world. Both names I've seen before, both grid-worthy, but crossing like that, dang. You can tell the puzzle kinda knows it's in dicey territory, as it really Really goes out of its way to help you with AKON (8D: Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an "R" in the middle). Since SKEE-LO is only really famous for one song ... that crossing feels potentially demographically fatal, especially with the already tough ALICANTE up there. Also, staying in that quadrant, people who don't know SKEE-LO or AKON are maybe also less likely to know CRAY? (short for "crazy," sometimes doubled to "CRAY-CRAY"). Just hypothesizing. Anyway, space your names out and make sure your difficulty is coming from a broad array of answer types and cluing strategies. Again, all the names in this puzzle are absolutely acceptable fare. Just watch where you put 'em / how you clue 'em.

I don't watch "Queen's Gambit" and don't plan to, but I did see last year's "Emma," and ANYA Taylor-Joy was great in that. Still, I remembered her as an ANNA. Alas. Turns out that "Y" is a *crucial* letter in parsing the central Across, "IT'S A YES FROM ME" (32A: "You have my vote!"). I had "IT'S AN ..." and wanted something like "IT'S AN EASY YES," but that didn't fit. How I remembered Leo ROSTEN, I have no idea. I looked at the clue, thought "How am I supposed to remember that?," and then found my fingers typing R-O-S-T-E-N almost independently of me. Weird how you can not know something and know it simultaneously. I am certain that "The Joys of Yiddish" was on my mom's bookshelves in my childhood, along with, I don't know, that blue Zelda Fitzgerald biography, maybe? I didn't read anything on those bookshelves, but they left a strong memory imprint. Still, I did not know that I knew who wrote "Joys of Yiddish" ... until I did. So, trouble with ANYA offset by the unexpected lack of trouble with ROSTEN, which meant what could've been a very hard section created only a minor hold-up. Another hold-up: ELLA before ETTA (47D: "___ Is Betta Than Evvah!" (1976 album)) (I see that you're trying to give me ETTA by including the rhyming 'word''Betta' but the double-v in 'Evvah' made me think double-letters, not rhymes, were the deal, so ... ELLA). I have maybe heard of ALICANTE, but certainly don't "know" it, so that answer needed almost every cross. Otherwise I didn't really struggle much. Parsing the longest answers (including SECRET SERVICE) provided most of today's difficulty. The puzzle was very much on my cultural wavelength.

Some more things:

1A: Requirement (MUST-DO)— yeesh, that was tough. And slightly awkward. MUST-SEE feels natural (possibly from NBC's '90s TV slogan, "Must-See TV"), whereas MUST-DO feels clunky. "Have you been to the Louvre? Oh, it's a MUST-DO" ... :( ... not saying it's not a thing, but saying it clanks.
39D: One doing some stitching (SEAMER) — really? Kinda weak. I'd've gone with [Four-___ (fastball type)], but also I'd've gone with something other than SEAMER.
41D: Kind of state (NANNY)— this is right-wing propaganda. Total garbage. There is no such state. NANNY state is what so-called "conservatives" call a functioning government. One with taxes and regulation. And heat and electricity and clean drinking water. You can't include NANNY state in your puzzle like it's an actual, real thing. It bespeaks a fraudulent world view, or at least an extremely politically tendentious world view, and should be clued as such. I mean ... "The term was popularised by the British and American tobacco industry." This clue is cordially invited to *&$% off.
43D: Buddy of "Barnaby Jones" (EBSEN) — there will never be a day when I don't hesitate when spelling EBSEN (or EPSOM, or EPSON). You'd think I could get a mnemonic going like "Buddy has a 'B' ... and the 'E' at the front has a 'buddy' toward the back." Solves the "B" and the "E" dilemma. But I guarantee I won't even remember writing this the next time EBSEN's in the grid.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (much harder if your knowledge of pop music is bad)

THEME:"Karaoke Bars"— Clues all follow the pattern [___ bars?] followed by a singer or group's name. Here "bars" refers to "bars" of music, i.e. songs. So the answers are songs that are punnily related to whatever the word is that precedes "bars" in the clue:

Theme answers:

"FLY ME TO THE MOON" (Space bars? [Frank Sinatra]) (a song about (outer) space)
"SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" (47A: Wet bars? [Gene Kelly]) (a song about getting wet)
"JAILHOUSE ROCK" (69A: Prison bars? [ Elvis Presley]) (a song about prison)
"MONEY, MONEY, MONEY" (92A: Cash bars? [Abba]) (a song about cash)
"DANCING ON MY OWN" (116A: Singles bars? [Robyn]) (a song for people with no partners)
"POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME" (3D: Candy bars? [Def Leppard]) (a song seemingly related to candy?)
"WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS" (33D: Gold bars? [Queen]) (a song about winning a "gold" medal)

Word of the Day: PIA (83D: Flag carrier to Karachi and Islamabad) —

Pakistan International Airlines (Urdu: پاکستان بین الاقوامی ہواپیمائی‎; abbreviated PIA, Urdu: پی‌آئی‌اے‎) is a Pakistani-International Airline and the national flag carrier of Pakistan under the administrative control of the Secretary to the Government of Pakistan for Aviation. Its central hub is Karachi's Jinnah International Airport, while Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore, and Islamabad International Airport serve as secondary hubs. (wikipedia)

• • •

Slightly more clever than most of the dad-joke themes we tend to get on Sundays, but only slightly. The bars joke is cute, but in execution the theme gets a little thin. The definition of "bar" just isn't that stretchy, so many of these bars (in the clues) are the same type (i.e. the type that serve liquor: wet, cash, singles). Further, the "?" conceit sometimes ends up quite literal, and other times involves a stretch. The Abba song *is* about cash, so [Cash bars?], dead on, "JAILHOUSE ROCK" is a song about prison, bingo ... but the Def Leppard song is not at all about candy. I don't really get why he wants sugar poured on him (in the name of love), but I'm pretty sure it's a metaphor. "WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS" also involves a bit of a stretch, since they aren't singing about the Olympics. So some clues are perfectly apt, others, less so. Feels uneven. Also, huge old white guy energy on these songs. I mean, great songs, mostly, but it's All White, and with the notable exception of Robyn and Abba ... dude city. Plus, Robyn is really the only one providing "bars" that are anywhere near modern (and that song is over a decade old). Robyn also provides (probably) the least well known song (if I imagine a kind of prototypical NYTXW solving audience). Hers will actually be the *best*-known song for some younger folks, but in general we are in solid classic rock / oldies territory here. I know all these songs very well, but I imagine some younger solvers will be less familiar with the 40+-year-old stuff (which is, uh, most of it). Demographic exclusion is the nature of the beast with a theme like this. Would be cool if these weren't all so demographically ... of yore, but at least these are mostly truly classic, as opposed to some Rudy Vallee song about Yuba playing a tuba or whatever the hell that was a few days ago. Anyway, I do like the creativity and ambition of the theme here, but as executed, this one just wasn't for me.

No real resistance in this one for me. Toughest part by far was ELMST crossing NOSEDIN. I assumed that the [Horror film locale, in brief] was going to be a generic horror film site, like, I don't know, summer camp or a sorority house or something. ELMST, yuck. Not your prettiest 5-letter answer there (It's actually "ELM ST.," as in "Nightmare on"). And NOSED IN ... ??? (123A: Was snoopy). I had SPIED ON here for what felt like a good amount of time. SPIED ON is nice, and apt, whereas NOSED IN, pffffft. It's funny that this puzzle thinks I already know not one but two Biden appointees. The whole thing with Biden's election is that I get to take a *break* from paying attention to political *$^% for, like, six months, minimum. I know his dogs and wife, and I know the Vice President, and honestly, I'm maxed out. OK, I do see JEN Psaki's name from time to time, so that's fine (69D: ___ Psaki, Biden press secretary) (also, look out for PSAKI (5), probably!). But it's gonna be a while before I'm up to speed on this currently 1-month-old group of Bidenites. Yeah, even this LLOYD guy, who, as defense secretary, seems *kinda* important (76A: ___ Austin, Biden defense secretary). But I'm exhausted. I voted for Biden so I could breathe again, and check out for a while. Make politics boring again!!!

THE DOW and THE TIDE (?) in THE same puzzle is THE worst. I had no idea how in the world FLUTES could be [High winds] until after I'd finished and went back to think about it (musical instrument winds, not the weather kind of winds). The PAMELA / RAMA cross definitely gave me trouble, even though I've heard of both (59A: ___ Adlon, Emmy winner for "King of the Hill" / 50D: Seventh avatar of Vishnu). Just couldn't recall the names or wasn't certain about them. Before I figured out the theme, I thought for sure that there was something thematic going on in the NE corner, with ETCETC over CHACHA. I thought, "Are all the corners gonna be like this? Six letter answers that are just three letters repeating? What's that about?" Turns out it's about nothing. Coincidence. No pattern. Just a strange one-off thing. Oh well. Until next week.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Normal Monday except for KYIV, what the hell was that!?

THEME: POOL (64A: Game suggested by the ends of 20-, 38- and 55-Across and 11- and 34-Down) — themers end in words related to billiards:

Theme answers:

GIMME A BREAK (20A: "Jeez, lighten up, will ya!")
ON CUE (38A: As expected)
OUT OF POCKET (55A: Like medical expenses you pay for yourself)
TOWEL RACK (11D: Bar from the bathroom?)
ON THE BALL (34D: Alert)

Word of the Day: Niobium (6D: Mythical woman after whom element 41 is named) —

Niobium, also known as columbium, is a chemical element with the symbol Nb (formerly Cb) and atomic number 41. Niobium is a light grey, crystalline, and ductile transition metal. Pure niobium has a Mohs hardness rating similar to that of pure titanium, and it has similar ductility to iron. Niobium oxidizes in the earth's atmosphere very slowly, hence its application in jewelry as a hypoallergenic alternative to nickel. Niobium is often found in the minerals pyrochlore and columbite, hence the former name "columbium". Its name comes from Greek mythology, specifically Niobe, who was the daughter of Tantalus, the namesake of tantalum. The name reflects the great similarity between the two elements in their physical and chemical properties, making them difficult to distinguish. (wikipedia)

• • •

Disappointing on all levels, this one. The theme is a remedial type that feels like it was probably done a hundred times in 90s and 00s puzzles. Last words are all related to [X] ... ok, well, the answers you use should be sizzling and the revealer should probably be colorful and the grid should definitely be whistle-clean ... and none of these things are true. BREAK isn't even like the others, in that it's an act, not a piece of equipment. ON CUE adds nothing and should probably have been ditched. All it does is make the fill in the center of the grid really awful. No one's gonna be begging for a fifth themer that's five letters long. There is no such desire among solvers. Make your themers hot and your grid immaculate and no one's gonna notice if you have four themers or three themers or five themers. ON CUE adds nothing, takes away a ton. That ON CUE section (i.e. the middle) is the worst part of the grid, fill-wise (except perhaps the SW, about which, more below). No good way to clue POCUS, so you get a laughably easy fill-in-the-blank. EAUS!??!!? Wow, really Really thought the plural of EAU was EAUX ('cause it is). EAUS is garbage, though only slightly more garbage-y than OHIOU, which looks ridiculous. It's a Monday puzzle with a simple theme, why is this grid not totally smooth? No excuse. Theme is boring, executed poorly, and the fill is subpar all over.

The clue on "OK, NOW" doesn't make sense to me (50D: "All righty then ..."). Doesn't strike my ear as correct at all, maybe because "All righty then..." has a stand-alone feel, either ironic or conclusive (something you'd say when wrapping things up) rather than introductory. Had the "OK" and still no idea what was supposed to follow. But that's a minor issue. The major issue is KYIV (53D: Ukraine's capital, to Ukrainians). I mean ... KYIV. It's Monday, and you wanna spell KIEV like that? And ... why? It's a regular old 4x5 corner in a Monday puzzle, how in the world can you not fill it in a way that spares us KYIV. I took a very quick, non-software-aided pass at that computer and found two alternatives fairly quickly. A little time and attention, and you'd think you could get out of there without resorting to KYIV. If things were better elsewhere, I could forgive this corner, but things are better nowhere. Monday grids just have to be more polished than this in 2021. They have to. Please.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: POTTY MOUTH (57A: One using crude language ... or one saying the last parts of the answers to the starred clues?) — last words in theme answers are (like "potty") euphemisms for "toilet":

Theme answers:

IRON THRONE (18A: *Seat for the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros)
DEADHEAD (24A: *Devotee of Jerry Garcia's band)
ELTON JOHN (36A: *"Can You Feel the Love Tonight" singer/composer)
WATERLOO (52A: *Decisive defeat)

Word of the Day: TIN ROOF (49A: "Hot" place for a cat in theater) —

This sundae features a scoop of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and a scoop of chocolate ice cream with creamy white marshmallow sauce, topped with Spanish peanuts. The Tin Roof Sundae was created in 1916, at the Potter Drug Co., in Potter, Nebraska, owned by pharmacist James Earl Thayer. His son, Harold Dean “Pinky” Thayer, worked in the soda fountain as a teenager and is credited for inventing the ice cream treat. According to Dr. J.E. Thayer of Sidney, there are two stories of how the sundae got its name. The first is that it was inspired by the tin ceiling in the business; the other is that the stable across the street had a tin roof and that he named it after that. The Tin Roof Sundae can still be enjoyed in Potter, Nebraska, where the Potter Drug Co., now called the Potter Sundry, is still in operation. (wikipedia)

that feeling when a cat ruins your favorite sundae

• • •

Very competent but very staid, very quarter-century-ago feeling, and very not for me. This feels like a puzzle from a bygone time, a time when ... people were ashamed to refer to the toilet and therefore invented a whole bunch of silly euphemisms. Actually, "head" is nautical and "loo" is British, but "john"'s period of peak popularity is before my time (on this earth) and I've only heard people use "throne"-as-toilet in the dumbest of unfunny jokey ways. And the revealer is baby-talk, or, rather, adult baby-talk used to refer to someone who is swearing (you know, like a grown-up, or a precocious kid). There's nothing charming about any of this. Toilet euphemisms, no, the very concept of "POTTY MOUTH," no. Truly, it's such an off-putting expression, combining baby-talking with an astonishingly filthy literal image. And the priggishness implied by the term ... I just can't find any of this fun. It's not offensive, it's just tiresome. Just use profanity, just say "toilet," just grow up and get on with your life. Further, toilets—not my favorite thing to have to meditate on at 5 in the a.m. Again, this theme is right over the plate, conceptually. Utterly conventional. A last-words-type puzzle just like they made in the last century. Unfortunately, the corny chuckle-"humor" comes from the last century as well. When I read the revealer clue, I really thought that [One using crude language...] was going to involve some kind of clever oil business pun (on "crude"). This made discovering the whole "potty" angle that much more disappointing. Worse than the theme subject (which you can like or not like, whatever) is the stale fill. The grid is just drenched in repeaters (of the ASAP EMIR HOC CSI ERE SSR ERIE UKE type). Just ... awash. FLOODed. This repeater onslaught probably has more to do with my failure to warm up to this puzzle than the theme (which is pretty much neutral at a purely technical level, in terms of concept and execution). When you don't have snazzy or eye-catching or even interesting longer answers, all the short stuff really starts to feel like a swarm of gnats. And today's longer answers were perfectly adequate, but that's about all they were. Thus, gnats. Better than BEES, I guess, but only just (32A: Honeybunch?).

[" ... TIN ROOF, rusted ..."]

If you had any trouble with this puzzle at all, it's likely because you aren't a "Game of Thrones" fan. Clue doesn't even bother mentioning that that's where the answer comes from. Annoying that the NYTXW just assumes "we" all know every aspect of this (pay-cable) show, but such is life. We're gonna get "GOT" clues for decades. It's like Harry Potter for grown-ups. Speaking of ... just after having this thought about the "GOT" / HP connection, I surprisingly, yet unsurprisingly, ran into the EMMA clue: 54D: Actress Watson of the "Harry Potter" films—totally gratuitous HP promotion. Mme. Bovary cries out for respect from her fictional grave. This puzzle has two non-word sounds, which is one too many for my tastes (UHS, HMM) (although I guess MEW is also a non-word sound, but it's adorable, so I'll give it a pass). I had UMS before UHS, the kind of "mistake" that really makes a puzzle "fun" (21D: Speech fillers). If there's a highlight today, it's CAL and GARY, my new favorite Canadian crossword-solving couple (47A: Canadian city whose name consists of two consecutive boys' names). I hope an actual Canadian couple named CAL and GARY were solving this puzzle together, got to that clue, and then just slowly turned to look at each other ... AGAPE. (if you *are* that couple, please call me)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hello, all! It’s Clare — coming to you this time for the last Wednesday in February rather than Tuesday. This month has mostly flown by for me. People told me that I’d be bored in my final year of law school, but how can I be bored when they’re keeping me so busy with work? I’ve got multiple actual clients and papers to write and exams to study for and jobs to apply for and just… it’s a lot! Anywho, on to the puzzle!

Constructor:Andrew J. Ries

Relative difficulty:Fairly easy

THEME: PARADOX(59A: Logical contradiction … or an aural hint to what are found in 20-, 25- and 45-Across)— Each theme answer has a “pair of docs” in the circled parts of the answer

Theme answers:

DEVILS DOZEN (20A: “Satanic” nickname for the number 13)
THE WHOLE TRUTH (25A: What a witness is sworn to tell)
DREADNOUGHT (45A: W.W I-era battleship)

Word of the Day:DREADNOUGHT (45A: W.W I-era battleship) —

The dreadnought was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. The first of the kind, the Royal Navy's HMS Dreadnought, had such an impact when launched in 1906 that similar battleships built after her were referred to as "dreadnoughts," and earlier battleships became known as pre-dreadnoughts. Her design had two revolutionary features: an "all-big-gun" armament scheme, with an unprecedented number of heavy-calibre guns, and steam turbine propulsion. (Wiki)

• • •

If this is the type/quality of puzzle I get on a Wednesday, maybe I’ll just switch my official day of the month! I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle. The theme (though I didn’t completely get it until after I solved the puzzle) was clever and fun.The whole puzzle felt clean and modern; the clues were creative. I’m not sure how else to say it — it was just a nice puzzle all around.

Each of the theme answers itself was good, and the added bit of having “doctors” within each answer was a really nice touch. My favorite has to be “Doctor” WHO, which is my favorite TV show of all time. (David Tennant, the 10th Doctor, is the absolute best; and the current Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, is likewise fantastic.) Dr. NO is one of my favorite Bond movies, so I enjoyed seeing this in the puzzle. Dr. OZ? Make that a NO; his pseudo-science strains credulity more often than what I see on the science fiction TV show “Doctor Who.” Still, that’s quite an impressive and diverse array of doctors.

Having WRAITH (5D: Spooky specter) and HELL (6D: Word spelled with “double hockey sticks”) cross DEVILS DOZEN (20A) was a great start to the puzzle (though I was sort of expecting a Halloween-esque spooky theme with that start). I also really liked the long downs — TWEET STORM (30D: Social media tirade), HOME DESIGN (26D: Subject for House Beautiful Magazine) and the full form of GEN XER (47D: Kid born in the ‘70s, say) are all nice and fresh.

In a puzzle that was so clean, only two things really stood out to me, neither of which is of much consequence, but I’ve got to put on my Rex hat and critique somewhere in here! First, DEL TACO (37A) isn’t really a competitor of Chipotle, is it? This might just be my take, as someone who is borderline obsessed with Chipotle, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard these two compared before. Second, I disliked having ECG (63A: Heartbeat recording: Abbr.) in the puzzle; there’s no way in this kind of situation to know that it’s not EKG. Google helpfully tells me that ECG is the English abbreviation, while EKG is the German abbreviation, but in the many, many hours of Grey’s Anatomy I’ve watched, I’ve only ever heard EKG, hence my confusion. Luckily, NARCO coming down was pretty easy, so I knew to switch it to ECG.

My favorite part of the puzzle was definitely the clues. The constructor managed to clue some very typical crossword words in unusual ways, which I really appreciated. Probably my favorite was seeing 61A: Number of seasons played by baseball’s Seattle Pilots as ONE (61D). That’s just such a random — and interesting — clue. (After one season, the Pilots moved to Milwaukee and became the Brewers in 1970.) Then, having UFO (54D) clued as What Venus is sometimes mistaken for, due to its brightness was different. Same goes for PJS (32D: Togs for sawing logs?), TEETH (43A: Effectiveness of a law, metaphorically), ODIN (56D: Husband of Frigg, in Norse mythology), and ETAL (38D: Abbr. after the third co-author, perhaps). PHONE (32A: What’s answered but never asks a question, in a riddle) was also clued in a fun way.

Misc.:

I can confirm we talk a lot in law school about whether something has TEETH (43D).
ZORRO (22D)— I loved watching these movies. I have such a distinct memory of watching the two ZORRO movies on the little portable DVD player I had when I was younger while riding in the car up to Tahoe to go skiing. And who wouldn't fall at least a little bit in love with in-his-prime Antonio Banderas? Or Catherine Zeta Jones, for that matter.
While I’ve never actually had GEL (12D) nails myself, I am a 20-something woman who has opened a copy of Vogue before, so I do know what they are! But I learned they may not have much traction among men of a certain age. (Right, Dad?)

I’m 99% convinced that this was a really great puzzle; the other 1% thinks that I’m just in an amazing mood because BTS just performed on “MTV Unplugged” and killed it beyond belief so everything feels right with the world. Because you need your regular dose of the best group on the entire planet, here is a song for your viewing pleasure:

And if, like me, you’re a big fan of the Coldplay song “Fix You,” here’s an extra-special treat that *gasp* is better than the original!

Signed, Clare Carroll, someone who briefly thought about becoming a doctor but who fainted in the ER on the first day of her internship. (My surgical mask was too tight!!)

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Dylan Schiff

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: DOUBLE DOWN (32D: Blackjack bet ... or a hint to applying the five circled regions in this puzzle) — wow, "applying" is a weird word here; you just "Double" the circled squares in the long "Down" answers to get your actual answers:

Theme answers:

HANGING INDENT (3D: Feature of some bibliographic citations)
COVER VERSION (36D: Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," for example)
HEART MURMUR (6D: Stethoscope detection)
BARBARA BUSH (41D: Former first and second lady)
STEAK TARTARE (10D: Dish often topped with raw egg yolk)

Word of the Day: Bill AYERS (22A: Bill ___, noted Vietnam War-era activist) —

William Charles Ayers (/ɛərz/; born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist. During the 1960s, Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground that opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his later work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.
In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow imperialism. The Weather Underground conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings (including police stations, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon) during the 1960s and 1970s in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Ayers is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.^[ During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. He is married to lawyer and Clinical Law Professor Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather Underground.

Also

William Oscar Ayers (September 27, 1919 – September 24, 1980) was an American Major League Baseball pitcher from Newnan, Georgia. He played for the New York Giants during the 1947 season. (wikipedia)

• • •

Interesting concept, but very unevenly developed, and with a high level of thematic density that causes the grid to groan terribly under the pressure. My first thought with the theme was "Why three letters?" and "Why *these* letters?" When the answer ended up being "no reason, totally arbitrary" to both, things got less interesting, and when the final (moving west to east) three themers all ended up having their three letters merely repeated inside of one word instead of strung across two (which is the much much the more interesting / elegant way to do things), well, that was pretty deflating. The revealer felt like kind of an afterthought at that point—not surprising or clever enough to rescue the ho-hum theme execution. At least HANGING INDENT was tough to work out, its three letters doubled across two words and masked by not being doubled in sound. COVER VERSION was likewise an interesting choice here—it's the same sound doubled, but each VER is in a separate word, so the doubleness doesn't announce itself so strongly, and you probably need to get crosses to work it out. Whereas ... MURMUR and BARBARA and TARTARE were all painfully simple to discover because the repeats are such distinctive and obvious parts of these single words/names (esp. MURMUR, the cheapest repeat of them all, and TARTARE, a close second). There's just nothing creative about those last three themers. You'd think a three-letter repeat could've yielded more interesting answers, where the repetition was more disguised and harder to suss out.

The fill was especially weak today. It was so bad early on that I stopped to take a photo:

Note: I took the photo *before* filling in OCTANT (more unloveliness). ATHOS is an age-old repeater, but if your fill around it is fresh and clean, an age-old repeater can be highly tolerable. And yet ... today ... we got from ATHOS straight into a truly ugly abbr. (ATTS) (I like this better clued as a QB stat, but I like it best when it's not in my grid at all), and then TROU, ugh, a "word" that baffles so many solvers (esp. younger solvers) every time it appears because no one says it except maybe in some olde-tymey jokey way; I have never heard it except in the phrase "drop trou" (i.e. "pull your pants down"), which I have heard only in movies??? Not sure. And yet I see it in crosswords All The Time (or ... far too regularly for my taste). So, ATHOS ATTS TROU. That's your opening gambit. And then TONTO!? LOL, nice save there, I guess, with the clue, but the thing about TONTO, however you clue it, is that people still see the Lone Ranger's sidekick, which evokes all the racial unpleasantness your new clue is trying to avoid. And then there's OCTANT! ATHOS ATTS TROU TONTO OCTANT. Quite a series. At that point, I truly wanted out. And things don't get much better: REWONandREUSE. The vintage crosswordese horror that is ONERS. Some relatively harmless classics like AGORA, ALERO, and the OGEES. Pretty crusty all over. Some obvious Scrabble-f***ing in the NE and SW corners, but those corners are so cut off that there's no way the Q and J and K can really compromise anything. They're actually handled fairly neatly.

The names might prove slightly troubling today, esp. since ALLIE (a toughie) and DALEY cross. DALEY is such a major name in politics that I assume he'll take care of any problems with ALLIE, but still, any letter can cause trouble when you're dealing with an uncommon name like ALLIE, which I couldn't remember at all (Holden, Phoebe ... that's it, that's all I got in the Catcher memory bank). I know AYERS only from all the Obama-era "controversy."AYERS has more commonly been clued as AYERS Rock (Australia), but that's a colonialist term no longer in use. It's officially ULURU now. Put that in your grid and smoke it (seriously, ULURU deserves grid time).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Chuck Deodene

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (???!) (no idea, solved it on ZOOM whilst chatting)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: GIO Ponti (19A: Italian architect Ponti) —

Superleggera chair
Giovanni "Gio" Ponti (18 November 1891 – 16 September 1979) was an Italian architect, industrial designer, furniture designer, artist, teacher, writer and publisher.
During his career, which spanned six decades, Ponti built more than a hundred buildings in Italy and in the rest of the world. He designed a considerable number of decorative art and design objects as well as furniture. Thanks to the magazine Domus, which he founded in 1928 and directed almost all his life, and thanks to his active participation in exhibitions such as the Milan Triennial, he was also an enthusiastic advocate of an Italian-style art of living and a major player in the renewal of Italian design after the Second World War. From 1936 to 1961, he taught at the Milan Polytechnic School and trained several generations of designers. Ponti also contributed to the creation in 1954 of one of the most important design awards: the Compasso d'Oro prize. Ponti died on 16 September 1979.
His most famous works are the Pirelli Tower, built from 1956 to 1960 in Milan in collaboration with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, the Villa Planchart in Caracas and the Superleggera chair, produced by Cassina in 1957. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello! It's time for my monthly Zoom-solve with my friend and fellow central New Yorker, crossword constructor Rachel Fabi. Normally we'd do it on the 23rd, but ... you know, circumstances, so here we are, solving a Friday puzzle on the 26th.

Our overall take was: very nice central stack, decent long Downs, rough everywhere else. Which seemed upside-down, as pulling off a clean 15 stack seems like it would be more challenging than simply filling a relatively small and highly sequestered corner, but, yeah, none of the corners was very good, and one (the NE) was just baffling. You can watch the video and see us solve it in real time, but if you're not so inclined, I can tell you there is a good chunk of time where I just keep changing IMPASTO (!?!?!) to IMPASSE over and over and over again. The IMPASTO / TAW (!?!?!?!?!) cross is extremely likely to cause some subset of solvers to just stare at the grid in befuddlement. I don't think IMPASTO or TAW is particularly good on its own, but I *know* they're awful when they team up to cross at that "T." It's been 60 years since anyone could tell you the different marble types—since anyone played marbles at all, honestly—so what in the hell is that clue even doing? IMPASSE / SAW / ERS ... why did the puzzle not go this direction? I'm all for the road less traveled, but sometimes you don't travel down a road because it's full of potholes or leads off a cliff. It's true that TO SEE is already in the grid, and maybe you don't want SAW and SEE in the same grid, but. you can clue SAW as a noun, a bunch of ways, so that ... really shouldn't be a problem. Honestly, on every level, IMPASTO / TAW is such a terrible choice. To make things worse, someone's gone and parked a GREEN CAR up in that corner as well. I've only just begun to accept ECOCAR, so there is no way I'm accepting GREEN CAR ... unless the car is actually painted GREEN or belongs to singer Al GREEN. The other corners are merely mediocre and mildly tiresome, but that NE corner has me just shaking my head.

But the middle part, as I say, is wonderful, with PUT A FACE TO A NAME occupying its rightful place of glory at center stage (38A: Meet somebody you've heard lots about). This puzzle played hard for me, with a bunch of names I just didn't know (GIO, SVEN??) and cluing I couldn't make sense of very readily. There are many more little details in the video. Enjoy! Or don't! See you tomorrow!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Yacob Yonas

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (again, the proper nouns—and there are a lot of them—are gonna cause experiences to vary wildly)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: MASER (55A: Atomic clock timekeeper) —

A maser (/ˈmeɪzər/, an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely low-noise microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep space spacecraft communication ground stations. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really liked this one. If there were half as many names, I'd probably have liked it more. I have no problems with any of the names, on an individual basis, but, as I've said many times, nothing includes/excludes solvers more sharply than a proper noun. Also, nothing gives less of an "aha" than the completion of a name you don't know. If I have to struggle to get RESENT (and I did, a little), then at least at the end of the struggle, I know what RESENT is. I don't have this same satisfaction upon completing ELY, ARON, or AMELIA, for instance. Names are parts of puzzles, and if they're just a small part, they're great. I just feel for solvers (of all kinds) when the proper nouns pile up. For instance, for me today, I just stared blankly at four different answers when I was done, three of which were names (the fourth was MASER, which I thought was maybe a watch brand, idk). Importantly, the names I blanked on were generations apart, all three of these names. There was a Verdi opera name (AMELIA) (2D: Renato's wife in Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera"), a Beatles song name (MR. KITE) (38A: Title character in a "Sgt. Pepper" song), and a "YouTube star" name (LANA) (61A: Actress/YouTube star ___ Condor). I worked them all out reasonably easily, and none of them actually diminished my enjoyment of the rest of the puzzle. But ... I'm just thinking about people for whom the proper noun experience will be more arduous.

It's funny, names: I do like seeing them, when I know them. It's like the puzzle is saying, "Hey, there, this one's for you. You belong." Which is important, at a fundamental level. And yet it's not the most *satisfying* level, for me, as a solver. Like, when I get handed something like LOVETT, I feel like I came by it cheap. I did not earn LOVETT or work LOVETT out. LOVETT's just there, tipping his hat at me, letting me past some figurative rope or gate to get further into the puzzle. It's a different level of pleasure. A candy level. I *do* like it. But it's somehow not as satisfying as the answer I have to work for, even if that "work" is just correctly making sense of the cluing. On the flip side, when I work out something like "MR. KITE," I'm left with ... not much of a feeling at all. I don't mean to pick on that answer, which is fine, and which I definitely *should* have known (I know so much of the Beatles catalogue so well, and yet have never listened to Sgt. Pepper (!?)). I'm just trying to think through the ways that names are different from other kinds of answers, at the satisfaction/dissatisfaction level. One last thing that should be said about today's names (HAILE TRACI AMELIA LOVETT HAMM LANA MRKITE ISIDORA SANGER DANIEL ELY ARON): this is a really beautifully diverse slate. I am into the cultural breadth on display here. It's true that names can be exclusionary, but if you offer a genuine variety, then at least they aren't exclusionary along one (racial / generational / gender) line. Anyway, I hope you navigated them successfully, because the puzzle really was bright and delightful overall.

"BALL IS LIFE!" is quite the opener! (1A: Hoopster's mantra). Hopefully its vibrancy will be pleasing even to people who have never heard it before. I needed crosses to get it, but when I did, I perked right up. Very different energy than the answer I opened with (TEA SERVICE). Quite a bracing experience to believe you're at a rather prim tea party only to have a bunch of ballplayers crash the party and start dribbling, dunking, and raining threes down upon you. And the fresh phrases kept coming: FACEPALM, MEET-CUTE, ASCII ART. The one thing I will say about the glut of names today is that they are from alllllll over the cultural / generational spectrum. There's something for everyone to love / trip on! The only time the names got truly dense was in the SW, where ELY and ARON (old) and LANA (new) crossed MET GALA. The lucky thing about this name pile-up is the names *do* come from different worlds. Old pros are gonna pick up ELY and (maybe?) ARON with little sweat, but trip on LANA, but then vice versa for younger solvers, perhaps. MET GALA seems like a generally known thing, only, if you are like me, and only half paying attention, you went and wrote in MET BALL and got yourself in a little trouble. BALL and GALA have that "AL" core in common, so the wrongness of BALL ("confirmed" by ACAI) was not immediately apparent. A word about LANA Condor. She is indeed a YouTube star, but she's also the main star in a very popular Netflix film series ("To All the Boys I've Loved Before"). She's been in a Marvel movie, she did voicework on "Bojack Horseman" ... what I'm saying is, if you're introducing a person to grid life (GRID IS LIFE!) then it would be cool for the clue to include something specific about that person's accomplishments, so that even if a solver hasn't heard of the person, they have some reason to care. "YouTube star," with no specifics, is not a reason to care.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I sorta like the colloquial quality of the clue at 47D: Like, now (AT ONCE), but that clue could just as easily have been, like, [Now]. The "Like" part adds only confusion. I thought I was supposed to come up with a modern word for "Like." Like, we used to say "Like," but "now" we say ... what? What do we say?! ... quite the misdirection hole.

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Constructor: Brad Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Crossword Buff" — puns related to nudism

Theme answers:

BARELY MANAGING (24A: Leadership style of the nudist club president?)
MANY MOONS AGO (41A: When the nudist club was founded?)
RAW RECRUITS (56A: New members of the nudist club?)
COMIC STRIPS (78A: What happens in the stand-up show at the nudist club?)
EXPOSURE TIME (92A: Hours spent by the pool at the nudist club?)
FULLY RECOVERED (108A: How people returned from a week at the nudist club?)
BOTTOMLESS PIT (4D: Where the nudist club orchestra plays its concerts?)
WINNING STREAK (59D: Victory in the annual nudist club 1K?)

Word of the Day: CETUS (78D: Whale constellation) —

Cetus (/ˈsiːtəs/) is a constellation. The Cetus was a sea monster in Greek mythology as both Perseus and Heracles needed to slay, sometimes in English called 'the whale'. Cetus is in the region of the sky that contains other water-related constellations: Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus. (wikipedia)

• • •

No time for this. The era when tehee'ing about nekkidness puns was something that might warrant a hearty chuckle has long passed, folks. This felt like a theme from times of yore. Not even a smile from me, on any of these. Why is the pit merely BOTTOMLESS if they're a "nudist club orchestra?" That's some pretty half-assed (!) nudism there. Some stuff, like FULLY RECOVERED, only connects to nudism in the most tenuous of ways. The theme is juvenile and corny, and even if I thought it was great conceptually, the clues / answers just don't land. The rest of it is just filler. A grid you might've seen decades ago. Fine, unremarkable. I remain completely baffled that the NYTXW not only doesn't turn out a *killer* Sunday puzzle every week, but can't even put a string of passable efforts together. OK, I'm just noticing that LAR (!?!?!) is an answer, so even my estimation of the fill has gone down now (9D: Choreographer Lubovitch). Wow. LAR. OK. This is the marquee puzzle, the Sunday, the Big Show! Howwwwwww do we end up with a pile of disappointment every week!?

Almost all the difficulty lay in trying to figure out what the hell the themers were trying to do, which meant over and over again, struggle was followed not by aha but by oof. Now I'm seeing MORIA? What is that? (43D: Balrog's home in "The Lord of the Rings"). Also, who / what is BALROG. I saw all those movies, and found them completely dull and forgettable. "LAR MORIA!" That's the devil's toast—roughly translated, it means "here's to your continued crossword suffering!"

Besides the themers, the only other trouble spot I encountered was the SW, generally. This is almost entirely due to the fact that I forgot CETUS, which ended up being in a weirdly crucial position, in terms of movement through the grid. CETUS and EAST gave me fits, and so my way into the SW felt a bit clogged up. I'd also never heard of RAIN-X (?) (69D: Big name in windshield wipers) or LISA Vanderpump (83D: Vanderpump of Bravo's "Vanderpump Rules"), and couldn't get to AUTO from 99D: Thermostat setting at all—needed every cross. Still, as trouble spots go, these are all pretty minor. The big issue today is that very little of any of this was interesting. I wish the news were better, but it is not. I'd really been feeling that the puzzle in general had been creeping up, quality-wise, this year. But Sunday ... bloody Sunday. I think I've liked one this year. The Paolo Pasco one from 1/3. I'm begging the good constructors, submit Sunday puzzles. Save us. Save me. Thank you. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. The Boswords 2021 Spring Themeless League starts *MONDAY* Mar. 1, 2021. Get a taste of virtual tournament fun and then when this whole pandemic baloney has subsided, you can maybe venture into the wonderful world of 3-dimensional crossword tournaments! Actual physical space! Actual human bodies! What a concept. In the meantime, this League is very popular and people seem to really enjoy it, so give it a go. Here's a blurb from head tournament guy, John Lieb:

Registration for the Boswords 2021 Spring Themeless League is still open! The 9-week event starts on Monday, March 1 and features themeless puzzles -- clued at three levels of difficulty -- from an all-star roster of constructors and edited by Brad Wilber. To register, to view the constructor line-up, and to learn more, go to www.boswords.org.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Michael Lieberman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: World's Fairs — Theme answers were exhibits at the World's Fair.

Theme answers:

SPACE NEEDLE (18A: Seattle, 1962)
EIFFEL TOWER (27A: Paris, 1889)
FERRIS WHEEL (45A: Chicago, 1893)
WORLD'S FAIRS (58A: Events for which the answers to the three italicized clues were built)

Word of the Day: EDSEL (33D: '50s Ford flop) —

Edsel is a brand of automobile that was marketed by the Ford Motor Company from the 1958 to the 1960 model years. Deriving its name from Edsel Ford, Edsels were developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. Established as an expansion of the Lincoln-Mercury Division to three brands (re-christened the Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln Division), Edsel shared a price range with Mercury; the division shared its bodies with both Mercury and Ford.
(Wikipedia)

• • •

Happy August Monday! I think we need one of those right now. It's been so snowy and rainy and cold here. Where's the sunshine?

Breezed right through this one, despite the ESPNU/UTE cross being nigh impossible for me as someone who doesn't like sports unless I'm the one playing 'em. East side had me saying wheeeeeeeee thanks to all the E's. I complained about AXE/AXLE in the crossword discord and was quickly reminded that the words don't actually share a root, which, fair. But they sound so similar! Also, yeah, I had POSTAL for PARCEL too despite sort of knowing in my heart that it wasn't gonna be right.

This was a really cute theme for a Monday! Learned a little World's Fair trivia. It's wild to me that the Space Needle was completed as recently as 1962. Does anyone remember reading about it in the paper, or maybe even going to see it in person soon after construction? Or ever? I've never been, myself.

Speaking of the World's Fair, did you know the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair boasted human zoos? Exhibits consisting of people? Yeah.

Bullets:

EIFFEL TOWER (27A: Paris, 1889) — Ah, the top of le tour d'Eiffel. That was where I first got to know my high school sweetheart. (We then proceeded to get separated from the rest of our school group and wander around a metro station for two hours trying to find them again before giving up and going back to the hotel. Never did see Notre Dame...)
SNAIL (50A: Word before shell or mail) — Do you want to watch a snail eat for four minutes with me?
AXE (61A: Jack Nicholson's weapon in "The Shining") — I can't think of this movie without thinking of my stepfather scaring the living bejeezus out of me by sticking his head through the staircase slats and yelling HEEEEEERE'S JOHNNY! at the top of his lungs while I was watching with a friend.
OSCAR (29D: ____ the Grouch) — This dude loves trash.

Signed, August Thompson, tired graduate student.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

[Follow August Thompson on Twitter]

Miss ___ famed TV psychic / WED 2-10-21 / World capital that's home to Temple of Literature built in 1070 / Crop item grown in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Title that translates to great sage / THU 2-11-21 / Padmé Amidala's home planet in Star Wars / Cowboys QB-turned-broadcaster

Noted speaker of more than 20 languages / FRI 2-12-21 / Beast vanquished by Oedipus / Company whose most famous product once claimed it does what Nintendon't

Sorting label for a Twitter search / SAT 2-13-21 / Jazzman who was a pioneer of Afrofuturism / Bly who traveled around the globe in 72 days / Sister channel of Flix for short / Literary member of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

British tennis champ who invented the sweatband / SUN 2-14-21 / Debussy prelude inspired by a water sprite / Small woodland songbird / Mango Madness and Go Bananas for two

Rhyming title character who plays the tuba in Cuba, in a Rudy Vallee song / MON 2-15-21 / Windsurfing locale NE of Honolulu

Long straight-sided smoke / TUE 2-16-21 / Popular video game console released in 2013

Relative of a cor anglais / WED 2-17-21 / Turnblad role for Divine in Hairspray / 2013 title role for Scarlett Johansson / Never-ending offerings at Olive Garden

Kodama, in Japanese mythology / THU 2-18-21 / "Giant Brain" unveiled in 1946 / Winner of nine Grand Slam titles / Michigan congresswoman Slotkin

Complete set in musical comedy / FRI 2-19-21 / Modern lead-in to speak / Short pioneer in West Coast hip-hop / Pal of Seinfeld and Costanza / Parent company of Gerber and Lean Cuisine

Anticonsumerists aiming to help the environment / SAT 2-20-21 / Humorist Leo who wrote Joys of Yiddish / Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an R in the middle / Cold War missile type / Word derived from Greek for age

Seventh avatar of Vishnu / SUN 2-21-21 / Horror film locale in short / Adlon Emmy winner for King of the Hill / Geographical name that comes from the Sioux for sleepy ones / Papal name last taken in 1939 / 2006 film with the tagline Keep it wheel / Mapo spicy sichuan dish

Mythical woman after whom element 41 is named / MON 2-22-21 / Key for Debussy's fille aux cheveux de lin

Seat for the ruler of the Seen Kingdoms of Westeros / TUE 2-23-21 / One using crude language

Family nickname / WED 2-23-21 / Indian musical pattern / Part of a nerve cell / Sticky wicket

Architect of original Sisyphean task / THU 2-25-21 / Collaborator on 1968's Two Virgins familiarly / Garment whose name comes from Malay for sheath / Surname of two former Chicago mayors / Vintage diner fixture in brief / Psyche's mate in Greek mythology

Robinhood competitor / FRI 2-26-21 / Fencing sport with bamboo swords / Flavoring of Cedilla liqueur / and Ole stock characters in Upper Midwest jokes / Equatorial plantation crop / Bring aboard sci-fi style / Follower of McCarthy

Hoopster's mantra / SAT 2-27-21 / Renato's wife in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera / Actress YouTube star Condor / Trope seen in rom-coms / Pioneer in 35 mm cameras / Material whose name is Scandinavian country in French / Ron who played Tarzan on old TV

Balrog's home in Lord of the Rings / SUN 2-28-21 / Big name in windshield wipers /Site of the Minotaur's labyrinth / Liquor with double-headed eagle logo

TV channel for college sports / MON 3-1-2021 / Laudable Lauder / "And you?" to Caesar / Sweetheart, in Salerno