Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Christopher Youngs

Relative difficulty: Normal Easy

THEME: NATIONALS (65A: D.C. baseball players ... or what the ends of 17-, 21-, 39- and 55-Across sound like) — last words of themers sound like the name of people of various nationalities:

Theme answers:

EXIT POLLS (Poles) (17A: Data sources for Election Day coverage)
NECK TIES (Thais) (21A: Accessories that may feature Windsor knots)
OVERSIZED CHECKS (Czechs) (39A: Large props held by contest winners in publicity photos)
TAILFINS (Finns) (55A: Late-1950s car stylings designed to look aerodynamic)

Word of the Day: METTLE (4D: Test one's ___ (be a challenge)) —

1a: vigor and strength of spirit or temperament (see TEMPERAMENT sense 1a)a girl of … mettle who lost a baby brother to leukemia— Bill Zehme
b: staying quality : STAMINAequipment that proved its mettleproved his mettle in battle
2: quality of temperament or dispositiongentlemen of brave mettle— William Shakespeare
on one's mettle
: aroused to do one's best (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Some days, I just ... don't have much of anything to say about a puzzle. I nearly fell asleep in the middle of this one. Do you know how unlikely that is? It's Monday—there's only a 3-or-4-minute window for falling asleep. But this thing just couldn't get up off the ground, somehow, and so I felt very tuned out. The puzzle had a couple of remarkable moments, at the very middle, and the very end (when I went back to see what the hell NATIONALS meant), but in between, it was like watching paint dry. Beige paint. Eggshell. You might say it was ... Ecru-ciating (how is ECRU not in this puzzle?—it really feels like the kind of puzzle where ECRU is lurking, somewhere...). I think the theme works just fine, actually. Of course I didn't notice the theme at all as I was solving, but realizing what the theme was, and that it was pretty consistent and tight, did elicit a little curious / mildly impressed "huh" from me, I'll admit that. I just wish there'd been anything between start and finish to kind of liven things up a bit. There's nothing horrible here. There's just a lot of stale, if perfectly legitimate, short stuff. Well, I said "nothing horrible," but that's not entirely true. There's ISMS. I'm never going to understand any constructor being content to have a non-word like ISMS in their grid when there's absolutely no need for it (as, today, there is not). Do you have any crosswordese like this that drives you nuts, where you're like "no, come on, anything, Anything, but that."ISMS is so made-up that I would happily accept ESAI and ECRU and EPEE in the same small section if it meant not having to see ISMS. I redid the ISMS corner just so I wouldn't have to look at ISMS any more. It came out blah, but blah is 1000x better than what's currently in the grid because what's currently in the grid is ISMS.

And before you knock IRMA, first of all, IRMA Thomas was a great soul singer, and secondly, there's a new TV series on HBO called "Irma Vep," based on a mid-'90s French movie of the same name (starring Maggie Cheung, really worth seeing). "Irma Vep" anagrams to "Vampire." But it's not a vampire movie. Not in the traditional sense. Anyway, the movie version is on The Criterion Channel. Where was I? Ah yes, my No-ISMS policy, which is firm. Definitely a "break only in case of emergency" word.

So, aside from the realization that the theme works just fine, even if it's not terribly exciting, the puzzle's other slight high point came midway, with OVERSIZED CHECKS, easily the most original and interesting answer in the grid. But to my ears the phrase is missing something, specifically the word "NOVELTY" between OVERSIZED and CHECKS. The phrase OVERSIZED CHECKS just doesn't get across the uncashability of said checks. I like the visual image that the clue conveys, but the phrase itself feels, well, passable but not on-the-nose.

I had trouble (not capital-T trouble, but trouble nonetheless) coming up with POOL (18D: Game with 15 numbered balls) and METTLE. I kept wanting POOL to be KENO, despite the fact that there are (I think) way more than 15 balls involved in KENO. Something about the way the clue was asking me to imagine POOL just didn't click. As for METTLE, the clue phrase wasn't terribly familiar to me, and the parenthetical part only made things worse (4D: Test one's ___ (be a challenge)). I think if I'd been constructing this I'd've done Anything I could've to turn METTLE into KETTLE. Oh, hey, look: change ATOM (1A: Tiny unit of matter) to AMOK, and bingo, there you go. Done and done. And you get a bonus "K" in the bargain. Sigh. Anyway, METTLE is not bad. I'm not knocking METTLE as a word. But I am saying KETTLE is better. Esp. for a Monday. That's quite enough about this puzzle. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Very Easy except for one completely ridiculous outlier of an answer ... so, still Easy

THEME: SPLIT SECOND (58A: Instant ... hinted at four times in this puzzle's circled squares) — things that are "second" in a series are "split" across two consecutive Across answers:

Theme answers:

"NOW WE'RE EVEN" / USE (second planet from sun)
AHEAD / AMSTERDAM (second U.S. president)
STATUES / DAYTONA (second day of the work week) (also, today)
SNOWGLOBE / TARRY (second letter of Greek alphabet)

Word of the Day: ALETTE (9D: Small building wing) —

1Roman & neoclassic archit : the pilasterlike abutment of an arch that is seen on either side of the large engaged column and that carries the entablature
2: a wing of a building (wikipedia)

• • •

This is one of those themes that has no real theme answers. No thematic content. Only an architectural feature that you're supposed to ooh and/or aah at when it's all over. And I will say that today's architectural feature is very clever. So I had one moment of "that's clever" at the very end. And, well, as Tuesdays go, that's maybe enough. Tuesdays can certainly let you down. And between its somewhat-livelier-than-usual fill and its interesting theme execution, I guess I come out on this puzzle's side in the end. But I never really fully enjoy these themeless themed puzzles. I think of them as compromised themelesses—"themeless" because none of the individual answers in the grid have anything to do, meaningwise, with the theme, and "compromised" because the theme concept requires fixed seed answers and thus places limitations on what answers can go where, limitations that true themelesses don't have. I'm now realizing that one of the reasons this Tuesday grid is livelier than most is probably because the constructor had a LOT of different options for dividing up these "second" things. I mean, Tuesday was probably always going to force you into something to do with STATUES or, I don't know, VIRTUES, but with the rest of the theme-involved answers, there would've been a lot of leeway, so the grid ends up more colorful than a normal themed Tuesday might otherwise be. And that's good. I liked that. I liked BOWLER HAT and despite finding poker about as interesting as golf (i.e. not), I did like POKER ROOM as answer. IDEA MAN is pretty snazzy, if gender-exclusive, and "NOW WE'RE EVEN" is gonna be a winning answer wherever it shows up. I can even tolerate the "EAT A SANDWICH"-esque BLEW A KISS, since unlike other "___ A ___" phrases I've seen in crosswords, BLEW A KISS feels very coherent and stand-alone-worthy. So I do think this puzzle is better made, in general, than your average Tuesday. I really do. And yet I missed having genuine theme content. Also, there was one answer, one terrible, out-of-place, "what the hell?" answer that I encountered early on and that kinda ruined everything. It was so bad, so out of place, that I spent the rest of the solve semi-resenting it. That answer ... well, it hardly needs a drumroll introduction since you probably know very well for yourself what it is. Still, allow me to pause for suspense.

[LOL this game show looks terrible]

OK, the answer is ALETTE, which is sixteen kinds of gruesome, and particularly gruesome on a Tuesday. No one says ALETTE since we have a term for ALETTE now and it's "wing." If you say a building has a "wing" people are like "awesome, I know what that is." If you say it has an ALETTE, you are going to get, at best, confused stares. "An ... ALETTE? Oooh, is that like a bidet!? Fancy!"ALETTE is so bad, constructor have had the good sense to lay off it for over 10 years. ALETTE is so bad, this is what I had to say about ALETTE the last time it appeared (Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011) (that puzzle also contained the word OCOTILLO, for context):

I think the only reason ALETTE follows directly on the heels of OCOTILLO is to make OCOTILLO look reasonable by comparison. "Yeah, we know you're already mad about OCOTILLO, so we're just gonna give you ALETTE now and hope you get over it quickly." ALETTE ... man, that is up there among the stupidest things I've ever seen in the grid. I'd like to buy a vowel, please. Two, actually: O and U. Then I can make "ALOUETTE" and sing a nice French song to distract myself from the #&!@iness that is ALETTE.

If you're gonna give me ALETTE, then at least give it to me on a Sunday, where I expect some difficulty and where the word can lose some of its bitterness by being more highly diluted by the higher word-count. On a Tuesday, this word is absurd, bordering on inexcusable. And it's not even holding good stuff together. Yes, it crosses two themers, and anything crossing multiple themers is in a tough position, but That's the kind of answer you're supposed to work out Early—you can't really settle your themers in place until the Downs holding them together are sorted. BLEW A KISS and ODOR EATER go through three themers, and I guarantee you they were the first things into the grid (along with the themers). So ALETTE ... were there really no better answers in the universe that could go there? It's not like the answer helps us get good fill up there. FBILAB isn't particularly good. OLDELI definitely isn't good. Why you make the decision to bring ALETTE to your otherwise Monday-level easy puzzle, I'll never know. Can you not see / hear / feel how bad an outlier it is? Anyway, ALETTE absolutely ruined the mood. The puzzle is above average in terms of its basic concept and fill quality, but ALETTE stinks so bad that I did not enjoy my visit. In short, GALETTE, yum, ALETTE, barf.

I could've done without AGASP, which exists only in crosswords and the minds of people who make them (23D: Audibly astonished). OLD ELI also reeks of old crosswordese (and the fawning fondness for all things Yale that has plagued the puzzle lo these many years) (15A: Yale, to alums). Though the puzzle was very easy, I very nearly left a mistake in the grid when I assumed that 42A: "Ripped" meant STOLE (not SWOLE). Because "Ripped" does mean STOLE, in some contexts. Or it's at least adjacent (as in the phrase "ripped off"). But I had a feeling that the "cookie" in 43D: Place to get a cookie, maybe was gonna be web browser-related, and TEBSITE seemed highly implausible. (Somewhere in the shadowy realm of theoretical words, a lonely TEBSITE is crying "ALETTE!?! How'd he get in!? Why, he's no more real than I am!!!" [sobs enviously]).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: FIND CLOSURE (61A: Accept and let go of something ... or a hint to the starts of the answers to the starred clues) — first words of themers are all clothing fasteners of one kind or another (so they provide closure ... of fabric):

Theme answers:

ZIPPER MERGE (17A: *Drivers' process when two lanes of traffic become one)
SNAPDRAGON (26A: *Garden plant that opens and shuts its "mouth")
BUTTON MUSHROOMS (38A: *White pizza toppings)
PINSTRIPES (49A: *Design on some baseball uniforms)

Word of the Day: ZIPPER MERGE (17A) —

When a lane is closed in a construction zone, a zipper merge occurs when motorists use both lanes of traffic until reaching the defined merge area, and then alternate in "zipper" fashion into the open lane.
Zipper merge vs. early merge
When most drivers see the first “lane closed ahead” sign in a work zone, they slow too quickly and move to the lane that will continue through the construction area. This driving behavior can lead to unexpected and dangerous lane switching, serious crashes and road rage.
Zipper merging, however, benefits individual drivers as well as the public at large. Research shows that these dangers decrease when motorists use both lanes until reaching the defined merge area and then alternate in "zipper" fashion into the open lane. (Minnesota DOT)

• • •

This is a fine "first words"-type puzzles. The revealer is cute, and the theme answers themselves are colorful and interesting, which means the journey to the revealer is not a programmatic and boring one. I like ZIPPERMERGE best of all, both because it's got, well, zip, and because I love ZIPPERMERGEs and wish they were a much, much more common thing in the U.S. (for reasons neatly described in the Word of the Day definition, above). The amount of erratic, aggressive, unpredictable behavior I've seen in and around "early merge" situations is astonishing. Unnecessarily stressful. Free-for-alls will inevitably result in cascading bad behavior, because, as we've established, people are frequently awful and driving only makes it worse and driving in close quarters with no clear guidance ... that's just asking for trouble. Nobody, literally nobody, is a *better* version of themselves when behind the wheel of a car, and people hate lane closures anyway, so everyone headed toward a merge is already inclined toward irritability. It's nice to have the whole situation just be orderly, so people can relax and not freak out about whether it's "fair" or not. ZIPPERMERGE tells you precisely where to start the merge. Here, no earlier. Once you are "here," then the rules are very clear. Merge like a zipper. Simple. Man have I come to hate driving over the years. Growing up in California, the idea that I would hate driving would've been unthinkable. The freedom! The romance! But now, ugh. Anyway, patience is always an option, when driving or ... really any time. The other theme answers are also nice, though they degrade slightly as you descend the grid, with PINSTRIPES being (to this non-YANKEEs fan) the least interesting of the bunch. My brain is so oriented away from the YANKEEs that I couldn't make sense of 69A: Major-leaguer who wears 49-Across at home even with -KEE in place. I didn't yet have PINSTRIPES and ... well, I figured they wanted an actual player, a particular guy, not a type of guy. This made me wonder if maybe TRUCK was wrong and the Major-leaguer was PEEWEE (Reese?). But this is all my own particular baseball pathology and has not much of anything to do with the puzzle, which, as I say, is just fine.

The fill does get a little yucky in places, especially toward the center, from AGORA through ÊTES TUN EONS through SSR SSE all the way over to the rock-bottom answer of the day, ASSAD. Dude is a war criminal on an epic scale. There's not enough "F*** That Guy" in the world to express my feelings about That Guy. ASSAD finds his way into puzzles because he is a short answer with common letters in an uncommon pattern. This means he's not only a terrible human being, he's also crosswordese of a sort, so now you have two reasons to get rid of him, which, today, is very easy. Again, without trying at all:

[please clue SPIT as a skewer or a piece of land, thank you]

There are more and undoubtedly better options than this, but you get the idea. You could just change ASSAD to ASSES, SPAT ADO to STET OSO, and that takes care of it too. You have lots of non-war-criminal options, is what I'm saying. A little effort in this section and you can probably end up improving it well beyond the de-ASSADification.

I think this puzzle thinks I'm fat. It keeps whispering things like "PUDGY" and "OBESE" at me. Take it easy, puzzle. I try to think about the Bidens (and all national political figures) as little as possible, and I especially don't think about their kids, so this ASHLEY person was news to me (48D: Daughter of Joe and Jill Biden). Everything else was familiar, though I weirdly had trouble early on with SEARCH, CREW and HERESY. I had SEAR-- and couldn't think of any English words that would fit there, LOL. Sigh. Ugh. Then I wanted 5D: Gaffer, best boy and others to be an -S-ending plural, and I wasn't sure what kind of "charge" the clue was going for at 6D: Inquisition charge (HERESY). Here, it's "charge" as in "allegation," not "charge" as in responsibility, i.e. "we are charged with torturing heretics." After that early snafu, the puzzle felt very easy. Took me a little bit to get from "white pizza" to BUTTON MUSHROOMS, since I did not know they were a necessary component. This is possibly because they are not a necessary component. They aren't even mentioned in the first full paragraph of wikipedia's "white pizza" page. They're an option. Not loving this clue. But I like the answer and pizza is tasty so any clue that takes my brain to the land of pizza and isn't verifiably false, I can't really be mad at. Especially if the puzzle also takes my brain to the land of AFFOGATOS, omg so tasty! (10D: Espresso-over-ice cream desserts). Lastly, I wanted GAIN CLOSURE before FIND CLOSURE. It just felt ... righter. But it's not. I mean, it is in my ears, but not in the world writ large. I think GET CLOSURE is pretty common too. They all work. That's all. Have a nice day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: OXYGENATION (34A: Photosynthetic process "inflating" 16-, 24-, 46- and 56-Across)— just add oxygen (O
2) (i.e. two "O"s) to the clued answer to get the answer in the grid ... which is just ... an unclued answer:

Theme answers:

CANOODLES (candles + O
2) (16A: Mood setters for a romantic dinner)
BOO RADLEY (Bradley + O
2) (24A: Actor Cooper)
TATTOOERS (tatters + O
2) (46A: Torn and ragged clothing)
PATOOTIES (patties + O
2) (56A: Quarter-pound things at McDonald's)

Word of the Day: BOO RADLEY (see 24A) —

In the classic American novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley(whose first name is actually Arthur) doesn’t leave his house or talk to anyone, which leads the children in the novel’s setting (Maycomb, Alabama) to wildly speculate about what he looks and acts like. According to main character Scout Finch’s brother, Jem, Boo Radley is more than six-feet tall with yellow teeth, a scar across his entire face, and blood-stained hands from eating raw cats.
In the reality of the story, Boo Radley is a kind but mentally underdeveloped recluse who stays inside after an accident in his childhood. He secretly leaves the Finch siblings little gifts in a tree outside as a friendly, social gesture and becomes a hero who saves them from an attack at the end of the book. Scout walks Boo Radley home after his heroics and begins to see the world from his perspective, learning her father’s lesson that you can never understand someone before “trying on his skin.”
Harper Lee apparently based the character of Boo Radley on a real family who lived in a boarded-up house down the street from her during her childhood. (dictionary.com)

• • •

I had somewhat high hopes for this one after I got CANOODLES. I thought it was really impressive the way the clue managed to get the base word (candles) and the oxygenated word (CANOODLES) to relate to one another (via the idea of a romantic dinner). Canoodling by candlelight! Nice. But the next themer I got was TATTOOERS, and the connection there between the base word and the oxygenated word was a lot less obvious. "I guess tattoo artists ... sometimes wear ripped ... shirts? Or jeans? ... maybe?" And then later: "Did Bradley Cooper .... play BOO RADLEY ... in a movie I don't know about? Or on Broadway?"). But then the dream of a connection between base word and oxygenated fell apart completely at PATOOTIES (unless, of course, you think that McDonald's hamburgers taste like ass, in which case, bull's eye!) (so weird that "patootie"can mean both "sweetheart" and "buttocks" ... English, what a language!). The most remarkable thing about this puzzle is that it's the second Thursday in a row where "patooties" have been involved (last week was the whole "-tooties" = two "T"s thing). I wouldn't want to guess at what the odds of such a hebdomadal coincidence are, but I'd say fairly slim. (Sorry, I just learned the word "hebdomadal" this week, while looking up "hebetude," so I'm trying it out on you all, thank you for your patience).

The puzzle had a slightly older feel today, in terms of its (pop) culture center of gravity (this is not a bad thing, just a thing). Putting "My Friend FLICKA" directly over BOO RADLEY definitely shoots you back to the mid-20th century for sure (though yes, Mockingbird is allegedly "timeless," blah blah blah). I think of Captain Marvel as very mid-century as well, though of course s/he's still around, appearing in a movie as recently as ... I dunno, recently (2019, actually). It's more than a little confusing to me, still, that Captain Marvel is the name of a character in both the Marvel *and* the DC Comics universe. In the DC universe he's maybe better known as "Shazam!," which is the name of the recent movie about him, which, like Marvel's movie Captain Marvel, also came out in 2019, dear lord, make the superhero movie conveyor belt stop, the culture is choking on these things. Make superheroes unpopular (i.e. genuinely nerdy) again! Speaking of (still more) superheroes, I briefly made Aquaman the king of the ATLANTIC (15D: Where Aquaman reigns as king). I don't know if that's better or worse than being the king of ATLANTIS. Probably more boring. And polluted. Less glamorous. You'd have to deal with the royalty from all the other oceans, which is probably a drag. So much sea ego, so many border disputes.

No real tricky spots today, just a few typical Thursday stumbles here and there. I made Captain Marvel an ALIEN at first (22A: Captain Marvel, for one). Completely blanked on AMY TAN (37A: Author of "The Bonesetter's Daughter," 2001). I was thinking of ... gah, what's her name ... the other "Bone" novel ... Keri Hulme ... Bone People, is that something? ... yes! NZ / Maori author Keri Hulme won the Booker for her 1984 novel The Bone People. Add that to your late-week KERI cluing options, constructors (it's OK, KERI Russell, you can still have M-Th).

Needed most of the crosses to get COGS (53D: Peons, metaphorically) (I think of "Peons" as already a metaphor, these days). I spelled HERESAY thusly, yikes (40D: Grist for the rumor mill). When your HEARSAY is also contrary to orthodox religious teachings: HERESAY! Two texting initialisms (BRB, IMO) is one texting initialism too many, IMO. One per puzzle, please. There are LIMITS! I really liked the clue on ATTIRE (41D: It may get worn out). Coulda stopped that clue at "worn" but the "out" really takes the misdirection to a new and more vivid level (you're not wearing it out through constant use, your wearing it ... out, like on a date, perhaps to a fancy dinner complete with candles and canoodling, who knows!?). Hope your Thursday, like every day, is happy and full of oxygen. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sophia Maymudes and Margaret Seikel

Relative difficulty: Challenging (possibly, I dunno; felt way harder than most Fridays, to me, but all puzzles have been so easy lately that maybe this was just Medium)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ARTURO Schomberg (30A: Historian Schomberg of the Harlem Renaissance) —

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (January 24, 1874 – June 10, 1938), was a historian writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem. (wikipedia)

• • •

I am in no condition to write clearly or fairly about this puzzle, as my morning has been a complete disaster. The cat has complicated new meds which just arrived yesterday, and there are glass bottles, and cheap syringes that I can't read or wield easily, and viscous liquids, and just a whole lot of fussiness involved. "Shoot the liquid into your cat's cheek," like LOL am I supposed to grow a third hand? Anyway, it was weirdly traumatic all around. So traumatic that I just abandoned all cat-feeding plans and went straight into my office to solve and write. There, I discovered ... non-operative internet! The indicator lights all looked good, but ... nothing. So I rebooted the modem and that worked ... for a while! Long enough for me to download and solve the puzzle. But then it faded out again. Then the modem rebooted itself (!?). And now I seem to be typing in some spirit world between connectivity and disconnectivity. I keep hitting "Update" so that I can be sure this post is getting through, if only incrementally. If you are somehow reading this early in the morning and it seems, uh, unfinished, it probably is! Anyway, I couldn't have been in a worse mood / headspace when I solved this puzzle, so I don't have a lot of good vibes to spread. I don't know if it was genuinely harder than usual because of names and concepts I didn't know, or if I was just so distracted by all the morning frustration that I couldn't think straight. Anyway, the grid looks fine, but the cluing was out of my wheelhouse, a lot, and there wasn't much that gave me genuine joy. Maybe LOVER'S QUARREL, which is nice and also looks kind of like LOVER SQUIRREL, which is an amusing visual. SORORITY SQUAT is original and will be very entertaining to someone, but my general feelings about campus Greek like are ... not ... too positive ... so that answer doesn't hold the charm for me that it might for others. But again, my particularly terrible morning is probably coloring a lot of my solving experience today.

I don't care about royal weddings At All, so TIARA clue meant nothing to me (17A: Meghan Markle's "something borrowed"). I had KANGAROO but absolutely no idea what was supposed to follow—it was so weird that I started doubting KANGAROO. That clue is so weird. Other marsupials have marsupia (marsupiums?) but surely those are not called KANGAROO POUCHes. Surely koalas and opossums don't have KANGAROO POUCHes. You would call a *kangaroo*'s marsupium a KANGAROO POUCH, but that's not a term for the marsupium generally. Very confusing. Also confusing: getting -OOD- at 15A: Place to slurp ramen and writing in FOOD COURT (it fit!). Probably the worst hole I fell into.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: SAM SMITH (26D: Pop singer who came out as nonbinary in 2019) —

Samuel Frederick Smith (born 19 May 1992) is an English singer and songwriter. After rising to prominence in October 2012 by featuring on Disclosure's breakthrough single "Latch", which peaked at number eleven on the UK Singles Chart, they were subsequently featured on Naughty Boy's "La La La", which became a number one single in May 2013. In December 2013, Smith was nominated for the 2014 Brit Critics' Choice Award and the BBC's Sound of 2014 poll, winning both. // Smith's debut studio album, In the Lonely Hour, was released in May 2014 on Capitol Records UK. [...] The album won four awards, at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. [...] As of April 2022, Smith has sold over 33 million albums and 227 million singles worldwide. Smith's achievements include four Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, three Billboard Music Awards, and an American Music Award, as well as a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. Smith is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle really wants you to know how young it is. I can't decide if all the slang is what a 20-something sounds like, or what a 50-something imagines a 20-something sounds like, or what a 50-something who wants desperately to sound like a 20-something sounds like. Anyway, there's a lot of slang that is not mine but that is Very Familiar to me. Oh, wait: "QUITE SO," that's all mine. I will cop to that. That's the kind of thing I'd say "ironically" but then you'd also have to put the quotation marks in quotation marks because, PSST, [whispers] not so ironic. But "it's a BOP,""I'M SO OVER IT,""KILLED IT!""THAT!," all of these answers demonstrate a real awareness of how people are using the language "these days," whatever their age, and yeah, that's cool. I think you're kind of pushing your luck on the "look at all the youthfulness!" front when you insist on putting both the MUPPETS *and* the CARE BEARS in your puzzle (I might have shouted "REAL MATURE!" at this puzzle when I hit CARE BEARS ... "ironically" shouted!), but you wanna wallow in your childhood, go off. There are worse things a puzzle could do. I'll take nostalgia for one's lost childhood over stuff like SPACE FORCE, that's for sure (5A: Branch of the U.S. military launched in 2019). This puzzle has wide range and nice bounce, but not a ton of bite. Easier for me than yesterday's puzzle. The top half felt like it was hardly there at all—when you just *hand* me OXY right up front, well, I can do a lot with that (4D: Competitor of Stridex). The second half was somewhat harder, but only because I (not being 20-something) totally blanked on SAM SMITH's name. I was like "ooh, I know this one, that's ... gah, they're mega-famous, British ... delicate, kinda soulful voice ... you get them confused with ED SHEERAN for some reason (sorry to both) ... SAM ... SAM ... ADAMS? No, that's a beer, damn it!" I was so mad at my brain that I wouldn't do the normal human solver thing and just Move On. The SAM SMITH troubles pretty much cascaded into the whole SE (amazing the damage that losing momentum can do), but that just meant that that corner felt like a proper Saturday. The rest, I blew through like it wasn't there.

As I say, OXY had some real slingshot power. I wrote in OTOH for 1A: Texter's preamble, for some reason (IMHO), but OXY fixed that *and* got me COAX, and with the front ends of those long Downs in place, I was in business. For someone who is my age (think Stranger Things kids if we followed them allllll the way to 2022), and for someone who saw all those exceedingly boring Peter Jackson movies, and for someone who actually played D&D for a time as a kid, I remember surprisingly little about "LOTR," so ARAGORN came to me out of the cultural ether rather than any particular part of my knowledge storehouse. Or that's how it felt, anyway. Even if it had given me trouble, everything around it is so easy that it wouldn't have stalled me for long. Entire NE was done in Monday/Tuesday time (not getting PEDANTIC by *me*, that's for sure). But as I say, things stalled a little on the descent to the bottom half of the puzzle. That was mostly SAM SMITH's fault, but also partially Alek WEK's fault. I am doomed to forget her name every time she comes up, no matter how many times she comes up. Not having the "K," I couldn't see SKATER (the phrasing on that clue is preposterous, since it makes it sound like the same person is doing both sports ... also made it sound like the clue wanted a specific athlete, not a kind of athlete ... also, why is "in different sports" on there at all?—Winter and Summer Olympics don't share any sports, so that's a redundant qualification). But I rebooted in the far SW with STY (48A: Where snorting isn't rude), which gave me SCRIM THEME YEAST, bang bang bang, and then I whooshed back into the middle of the grid from there, finishing in the SW, where there was still trouble waiting even after I'd sorted SAM SMITH. I had JUMP / JAM before BAIL / BOP, so that gummed things up (61A: Abandon ship / 61D: Catchy song, in modern slang). And then, more dangerous because less completely wrong, I had SPAT instead of SPAR at 38A: Squabble. This made parsing ROSARIES impossible until the bitter end. "TOSA ... what? Aargh, great, some religious term I know nothing about ..." But no, just ROSARIES hiding behind a completely understandable error.

Bullets:

57A: Classic Vans sneaker model (ERA)— LOL I've been wearing Vans off and on for my whole life and I had no idea about this model or that Vans had model names at all.
37D: Place where shells are put away (TAQUERIA)— ah, right, the other reason I had trouble getting into the SW. The attempted misdirection here with "shells" didn't work on me at all, and yet ... I couldn't get past TACO ... TACO STAND, TACO BAR, TACO TRUCK ... nothing about the clue suggested I'd be getting the Spanish term, so I just stalled and ended up having to work the answer from the back end later on.
55A: What comes before a bet (ALEPH) — now this misdirection *did* work. This is a very well disguised Hebrew letter clue. Not sure I love the cheap trickery of adding the indefinite article "a" to the clue, but I respect the attempt to at least *try* to make this puzzle a little tougher.
60D: 2020 thriller in which Jessica Chastain plays the title role ("AVA") — I vaguely remember seeing this come across my Netflix menu a couple years back. I wonder if pandemic-era movies ... if anyone's going to remember they happened.
63A: Brand name on Cakesters snack cakes (OREO) — I had HOHO in here at some point. I'm kind of sad now that the "Is OREO in today's #NYTXW?" Twitter account is gonna have to reset its "Days since last #NYTXW OREO" count to zero. The streak was up to 33!

2022-06-24: No.
Days since last #NYTXW OREO: 33*

*New 2022 OREO-less streak
— Is OREO in today’s #NYTXW? (@NYTXW_Oreo) June 24, 2022

See you tomorrow!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Matthew Stock and Finn Vigeland

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Bonus Features"— add a letter to famous titles to get wacky movie titles (clued "?"-style); the added letters, read from top to bottom, spell out "OUTTAKES" ... which are "Bonus Features" one might find on a Blu-ray or DVD ... also, I guess if you "take" the added letters "out" then, by definition, you get the actual movie title:

Theme answers:

"THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBOS" (19A: What you'll hear after-hours at a sports car sales lot?)
"BEVERLY HILLS COUP" (28A: Rodeo Drive uprising?)
"PANTS LABYRINTH" (36A: Twisted jeans legs?)
"THIGH FIDELITY" (61A: Staunch dedication to one's upper leg exercise routine?)
"JURASSIC PARKA" (69A: Winter wear for a stegosaurus?)
"BRIDGE OF SPIKES" (94A: Tire-puncturing way across a river?)
"THIS IS SPINAL TAPE" (1102A: Introduction to a chiropractor's makeshift toolkit?)
"THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT" (116A: Campaign to convince British P.M. Tony to change parties?)

Word of the Day: YUNA (30D: One-named singer with the 2016 hit "Crush") —

Yunalis binti Mat Zara'ai (Jawi: يوناليس بنت مد ظراعي; born 14 November 1986), known professionally as Yuna, is a Malaysian singer. Her initial exposure came through the viral success of her music uploaded to Myspace, which received over one million plays. This online success alerted an indie-pop label/management company to her music, and in early 2011 she signed with the Fader Label. She is best known for her collaboration with Usher on her breakout single "Crush", which peaked at number 3 on the US Billboard Adult R&B chart. [...] The 2012 single "Live Your Life", produced by Pharrell Williams, was a preamble to her self-titled full-length debut, which arrived that April. That summer, Yuna appeared at Lollapalooza. In 2013, Yuna returned with the album Nocturnal, featuring the single "Falling". In February 2016, Yuna previewed her third album with the release of "Places to Go", a single produced by hip-hop artist DJ Premier. The full album, Chapters, was released three months later. // In December 2016, Chapters broke into the Top 10 of the Billboard Best R&B Albums of 2016: Critic's Pick; Chapters ranked at number 7. Yuna received an award for the Most Successful Malaysian Singer from the Malaysian Book Of Records. Chapters was also nominated in the Top 20 Best R&B Albums of 2016 by Rolling Stone magazine. Yuna performed as a special guest at the 2016 Soul Train Music Awards. // In May 2017, Yuna became the first singer from Asia to be nominated for a BET Award; Yuna received a nomination for the BET Centric Award for "Crush", her duet single with Usher. (wikipedia)

• • •

Exceedingly easy without enough genuine hilarity to make up for the lack of challenge. I kinda smiled at PANTS LABYRINTH and THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT, but otherwise the wackiness was pretty tepid, and there weren't enough non-thematic points of interest to make the puzzle feel like a truly satisfying Sunday. I was also slightly hung up on the fact that the added letters spelled OUTTAKES but I was being asked to put them *in* to the grid, which made them more ... inputs ... but whatever, once you stop and look back, you can make a case that OUTTAKES is just fine as a bonus (meta) answer. It was clear almost instantly what the gimmick was, and after two or three themers, and since the premise was so simple (just ... add a letter), I knew the letters would spell something, and that something was completely obvious after just a couple letters, so ... it felt like it was all over but the shouting after just a few minutes. "The shouting" being "dutifully filling in the rest of the ginormous Sunday grid." Lots of black squares, super choppy, not a lot of longer interesting non-theme fill in this thing ... and what I'm seeing, on going over the grid now, isn't a lot to get excited by. GOLFTAN is probably the most original answer in here (95D: Shade that one might find on the links?), but that's balanced by the dull / odd STEERER, and then the rest of the long stuff is very unsizzly. Stuff like SO MUCH SO and EASE INTO. There really aren't many answers over 6 letters long in this puzzle at all. As for difficulty ... nope, none really. Didn't know YUNA, but, you know, crosses did their thing (30D: One-named singer with the 2016 hit "Crush"). Not sure where else you could possibly get bogged down in this thing. If you don't pay attention to famous movie titles, I can see this being semi-baffling, but if you're even passingly interested in movies, then this was a cinch. The least familiar movie to me was "Bridge of Spies," which came and went and missed me. I wanted "Bridge of Sighs," probably because the movie title is a deliberate pun on said bridge. But even that one I kinda knew, and the "K" I could figure out because the OUTTAKES gimmick was transparent. I do love movies and did not mind being reminded of some of these, but as far as the puzzleness of it all goes, I would've loved something a bit more fearsome and a lot less ho-hum than this.

My path through the grid was a bit odd. I normally chew up the NW and then move on, but I also normally solve short stuff and then use it to get the longer stuff. So today I basically shied away from those long Downs in the NW and followed the short stuff east. The first two themers fell in virtually no time, and the added "O" and "U" basically told me where we were headed:

No idea about U OF A (is that Alabama? ... LOL, no, it's Arkansas—nope, never in a million years would've guessed that U OF A stood for that particular "A" state; I know for a fact that UOFA has been clued specifically in reference to University of Arizona before, so, yeah, confusing) (26A: Fayetteville school, informally). I see "Fayette-" and think Louisiana ("Lafayette") and then, well, that's it. I'm out of "Fayette-" based place names. But again, as with YUNA, this answer added no real resistance to the solve. I had no idea SIMP had some special "modern" meaning. This clue sounds like a pretty regular, normal-ass meaning of SIMP (54D: One offering intense but unrequited affection, in modern usage). EAT ME and IT'S ME have me seeing double ME. Thankfully, SEE ME is not also in the grid (it's not, is it? ... no). Speaking of ME ... a word about backwards "ME," i.e. "'EM," i.e. "HIT 'EM" (23A: Cry from a boxing coach) ... What kind of preposterous answer is this. You're a "boxing coach" and your advice is "HIT 'EM"? It's boxing! That's what you do. What kind of coaching is that? And 'EM? How many people is your guy fighting? I have no idea how this five-letter inanity found its way into wordlists, but unless the clue is a partial and the clue is ["___ where it hurts!"] or (for a baseball angle) ["___ where they ain't"], maybe ditch HIT 'EM entirely. Or at least don't insult boxing coaches like this.

It's time once again for the

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

I got a few letters this week, but today I'm going with the following one because it echoes something I've been saying for a while now—something that's also relevant to today's extremely easy crossword:

Hello sir!

I'm fairly new to your column, so maybe you've explored this, but the NYT games subscription offers access going back to 93. I've worked my way back to 2006 (skipping M-W and Sunday).

I get that some material would have been easier solving 16 years ago when events were current; discounting that, the puzzles seem to have a much higher degree of potential difficulty.

For example, I can fill 9/10 Saturdays now in 20 minutes or so, and the one I don't complete I get very close. But a puzzle from, say, 5/20/06, seems more difficult than any Saturday for the past year. There are easier ones from that time, too, but when they're tough, hoo boy.

What do you make of this? Philosophical shift at some point? The Dumbing Down? Maybe I could have solved them all then but I've been intellectually downgraded since. [...]

Thanks,

Mat

ARGALI

It's true that evaluating the difficulty of past puzzles can be difficult because so much depends on context. That is, puzzles that are made in, say, 1997, are made to be *solved* in 1997. They have (if you're lucky) a 1997 viewpoint and assume a 1997 solver, someone who is breathing in 1997 air and culture etc. A 1997 constructor is going to assume things are common knowledge (about current events, about the 20th century in general) that a 2022 solver might have either no knowledge of or (in my case) no memory of. You know things, and then time passes and some of those things fall out of your head to make room for other things. So going back in time can make the puzzles feel more difficult than they were. Possibly. But as someone who has been solving for over three decades and solving, uh, let's say, "professionally" for fully half that time, I can definitely feel the NYTXW's slow but inexorable move away from truly difficult puzzles. Have I just gotten better as a solver? Eh, probably not. I was probably at my fastest a full decade ago. But even if I am a more experienced solver, and maybe I know more ... things, now, my sense is that the NYTXW used to have no problem throwing absolute backbreakers at you every once in a while, and now, that almost never happens. It's been a Long time since I felt like I had to work because the puzzle was genuinely hard (as opposed to just out of my wheelhouse a little). I can still remember (with a trauma-induced wince) the 2007 puzzle that taught me the word OCHLOCRACY. I think there was some as-yet-unknown-to-me antelope in that puzzle too (haha, no, it was a "mountain sheep," LOL: ARGALI, wtf!?). Couldn't finish it. Brutal. I literally rated it "Infernal." Man, I miss Bob Klahn. Anyway, I don't necessarily want more of that, but I would like more difficulty than I've been getting. But ... there's probably just more $$$ in keeping a burgeoning app-based solving population happy, and you can't maintain that massive subscriber base if you're absolutely baffling them half the time. Not everyone enjoys being shredded by the puzzle. Most people probably just want something they can do easily in 15. In and out. Nuggets! The Mini! Wordle! So no, Mat, I don't think you're wrong in your general assessment that hard puzzles used to be harder than they are today. They were also for a somewhat smaller group of people back then, and I'm not sure that was exactly ideal. So ... I dunno, things change, you adapt. You want hard, there are places you can get it. Speaking of which (segue!) ...

Please do yourself a favor and, if you're not already a subscriber to the American Values Club Crossword (AVCX), go and pick up Francis Heaney's latest barnburner of a puzzle—a rainbow-colored variety cryptic in honor of Pride Month, entitled "LGBTQIA+". Then set aside a few hours and maybe get together with some friends and pray to your gods for help because hoo boy, it is an extremely complicated, multi-layered, legitimately arduous adventure. But the reward! The thrill of having fought your way to the end of such a challenging quest! I just don't experience puzzling satisfaction of that kind that very often any more. If you've never solved cryptics, then find someone who does and give the puzzle to them. Maybe they'll teach you. They will definitely thank you. And with that, thank you. And good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. almost forgot, shout-out to YPSI! (That's YPSIlanti, MI, for those of you who didn't happen to attend UOFM or (if you went to school in YPSI proper) EMU!) (27A: City that neighbors Ann Arbor, for short)

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Drew Schmenner

Relative difficulty: Slightly harder than the usual Monday (still Easy, relax)

THEME: SETTING SUN (31D: What glows in the west at the day's end ... or a hint to this puzzle's sequence of shaded [i.e. circled] squares)— letter string "SUN" appears in long Downs, near the top of the grid in the EAST and then descending with each subsequent themer, if you read the themers backward (i.e. right to left, or EAST to west).

Theme answers:

SUNNI ISLAM (11D: Predominant religion of Indonesia and Pakistan)
MISS UNIVERSE (9D: Pageant whose hosts have included Bob Barker, Dick Clark and Steve Harvey)
GPS UNIT (26D: Dashboard-mounted navigator)
MONKEY'S UNCLE (21D: Animal "relative" an astonished person may claim to be)
SETTING SUN

Word of the Day: "Perry MASON" (9A: "Perry ___" (classic legal drama)) —

Perry Mason is an American legal drama series originally broadcast on CBS television from September 21, 1957, to May 22, 1966. The title character, portrayed by Raymond Burr, is a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Many episodes are based on stories written by Gardner.
Perry Mason was Hollywood's first weekly one-hour series filmed for television, and remains one of the longest-running and most successful legal-themed television series. During its first season, it received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Dramatic Series, and it became one of the five most popular shows on television. Burr received two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and Barbara Hale received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Seriesfor her portrayal of Mason's confidential secretary Della Street. Perry Mason and Burr were honored as Favorite Series and Favorite Male Performer in the first two TV GuideAward readers' polls. In 1960, the series received the first Silver Gavel Award presented for television drama by the American Bar Association. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was very much not for me, despite a couple of really lovely longer answers (SUNNI ISLAM, MONKEY'S UNCLE). I mentally checked out very quickly, after having a boatload of tired crosswordesey short stuff thrown at me right off the bat. I finished the NW (OLDE DDAY ALPO make it stop!) and by the time I hit SOFT G over NEAP I was like "oh I guess it's like this, then." Tired. I felt tired. Fast. Now, things definitely got better, or at least more interesting, from there, but the theme type is ancient (I swear I've seen this exact theme before), and despite the whole "accuracy" of the EAST to west movement of the SETTING SUN, the whole thing felt bassackwards. Yeah, the direction is OK, but somehow the visual here doesn't convey a *feeling* of accuracy. It doesn't exactly nail the look of a sunset, which means that what it does, mostly, is seem like a puzzle that's been built backwards. And while a few of the themers are sweet, most of the fill is not. And CTRLC made me want to shut everything down. You've got mainly tired fill, and the one bit of "new" short fill ends up being "new" in this wholly unlikeable way. Just a bleecccch of consonants. I don't use PCs, so the "shortcut" didn't register with me at all. CTRL-ALT-DELETE, that is a coherent thing. CTRL + random letter = arbitrary and weird. Plus, doesn't the "C" stand for "copy" ... which is in the clue ... I thought you weren't supposed to do that. Anyway, I fear people will think keyboard shortcuts are Great ideas for "new" short fill, and I'd really like to post- and preemptively register my disagreement with this premise. Also, MISS UNIVERSE, that really killed the vibe. "Which dated objectifying sexist bullshit pageant that no longer has any cultural relevance are we dealing with today!?" How are these shows still real? I would've thought their association with a certain sexual assailant / former president would've put them all safely in the Past Tense, but here we are. A real vibe-killer. I tried "MISS AMERICA" in there but it didn't fit. I do like that the puzzle is *trying* to do something original, though. It's more ambitious than most Mondays, and I'll take that over your typical 3/4-baked chuckle/groanfest.

Dull. https://t.co/55VeFPC9tm
— TediousSunsets (@TediousSunsets) June 21, 2022

"ONEI" was awkward (33A: "That's ___ hadn't heard!"), as was the clue on OUTS (69A: On the ___ (unfriendly)). I guess "we're on the OUTS" = "we're unfriendly (toward one another)"!?!?! but it's not a great substitution. I think of the phrase being longer, i.e. "I'm on the outs with her" or something like that. As usual, I was unsure of ILSA v. ELSA. I was somehow able to teach myself AXLE v. AXEL long ago, but haven't been able to do the same with ILSA v. ELSA, probably because lots of different people (and movie animals) have those names. ELSA is the movie lion and ILSA is the movie love interest, but ILSA just sounds* more lion-y to my ears, so the distinction never takes. I wanted to RUB the lotion ON, not IN (27A: Apply, as lotion). And then the entryway to the SE corner (ELVIS) ended up being unclued, or, rather, ended up being the second part of a cross-reference (so essentially unclued: 52D: See 64-Across) (64A: "___ Las Vegas" (1964 film starring 52-Down) (VIVA)). All these little things, plus CTRLC, made the puzzle move somewhat slower than it usually does. What else? Oh, if MISS UNIVERSE didn't bum you out, then maybe not being able to pay your bills on time will (5D: Charge for an overdue payment = LATE FEE). Somehow it's worse when it's clued in relation to not paying your bills on time than it would be if it were just, like, library fines (which my local library actually did away with during the pandemic and, I assume, in perpetuity, god bless them).

See you tomorrow.

P.S. please enjoy this crossword kitty photo from reader Jamie. I know I did.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hi, it’s Clare for the last Tuesday of June (how is it almost July already?!). Last time, I did my write-up while in Prague at 7 a.m.; this time, I’m doing it at a much more normal time and from a much more boring place, back in D.C. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t take this opportunity to say: The Warriors are NBA champs! I’ll say that again: The Warriors are NBA champs!! Their run was just phenomenal, and they’re the best. The Night Night celebration is iconic. And the Dubs core managed to win again despite being dismissed by the media for the past two years. Now, with basketball and hockey over, I’ll rely on tennis to keep me entertained (go, Carlito and Serena!), maybe with some baseball, too, depending on how my Giants do. Anywho, on to the puzzle…

Constructor:Scott Graham

Relative difficulty:Fairly easy

THEME: TEE TIME—There seem to be parts to the theme: 1) Six of the answers are two-word phrases where each word starts with “T”; 2) There are T’s constructed from black squares in the puzzle; and 3) Each clue starts with the letter “T.”

Theme answers:

TOP THIS (13A: "Try and do better!")
TEA TREE (15A: Traditional medicine uses its oil)
TEASER TRAILER (29A: Tantalizing film preview)
TREASURE TROVE (35A: Thieves' stash, maybe)
TAKE TEN (56A: Table the rehearsal for a bit, say)
TEE TIME (57A: Tiger's slot on the schedule, e.g.)

Word of the Day:SHEMP (39A: Three Stooges member, for a time) —

Samuel Horwitz (March 11, 1895 – November 22, 1955), known professionally as Shemp Howard, was an American comedian and actor. He was called "Shemp" because "Sam" came out that way in his mother's thick Litvak accent. He is best known as the third Stooge in the Three Stooges, a role he played when the act began in the early 1920s (1923–1932), while it was still associated with Ted Healy and known as "Ted Healy and his Stooges"; and again from 1946 until his death in 1955. During the fourteen years between his times with the Stooges, he had a successful solo career as a film comedian, including series of shorts by himself and with partners, and reluctantly returned to the Stooges as a favor to his brothers Moe and Curly. (Wiki)

• • •

What a Tuesday puzzle! T is indeed for Tuesday. In what I think is his debut, Scott Graham gave solvers a meticulously constructed puzzle that was themed on many different levels relating to “T.” There are six words placed symmetrically in the puzzle that are two-word phrases where each word starts with “T.” All of the black squares in the puzzle are in the shape of a “T.” And, finally, all the clues start with the letter “T” (that one took me a while to realize). I originally didn’t notice the theme, but, looking back, I started to appreciate the puzzle more and more. And it’s obviously very fitting to appear in the Times on a Tuesday.

The theme answers themselves were alright. I find it clever (if intentional) how there’s TEA TREE and TEE TIME and then the center of the puzzle is HOT COFFEE (34A: Tipplers drink this in the belief it helps sober them up). I also did like TREASURE TROVE and TEASER TRAILER because they’re just fun, long phrases. The others seem a bit basic, but I guess you can’t be too picky when working within the limit of all those T’s.

The placement of some answers in the puzzle was clever, too. There’s 20D: Tailoring related (SARTORIAL), and then right next to it there’s 15A: This is what a tailor seeks to provide, which is also tailoring related (THE PERFECT FIT). There’s ALFA (50A: Turin-based automaker ___ Romeo) and FERRARI (52A: Testarossa or Portofino) near each other, which are both related to Italian cars. The answer TOP THIS (13A: "Try and do better!") is on top of ACE HIGH (16A: Two pair beats it in poker).

SUSSED (56A) is a great word. YES AND (12: Two-word tenet of improv comedy) is one of my favorite answers in a crossword in recent memory. 57A: Tiger's slot on the schedule, e.g. (TEE TIME) is an amazing clue.

There wasn’t a ton of crosswordese, and the many seven-letter downs were mostly different from the norm.

I know I’m sort of waxing poetic about the puzzle, but I did find some oddities. While it’s objectively very clever and impressive that the constructor managed to start all the clues with a “T,” that led to some weirdly phrased clues, which really confused me (until I realized why they were like that). Case in point: For ACE HIGH (16A), the clue is: Two pair beats it in poker. It’s oddly specific about two pair, as so many hands in poker will beat an ACE HIGH. 43A: To what effect as HOW seems just kind of lazy. I also didn’t love 53D: Tomato shade with RED because it’s pretty boring (and tomatoes come in different shades, anyway; “Typical tomato shade” would’ve worked better). The clue for SWEDEN (59A: Third-largest country in the European Union, after France and Spain) also felt like useless trivia. (Though maybe someone finds the country’s relative size super fascinating.)

I really, really hated the clue/answer VOTER ID (37D: Thing checked at a polling station). First off, it’s not required to vote in California (and about 15 other states). These laws are also incredibly controversial — a number of them have been overturned because they were clearly implemented to suppress voters in predominantly minority communities. I hated seeing this phrase tossed in so casually in the puzzle.

Having SHOWER CURTAIN as a sort of marquee answer at 14D: Tub accessory was a bit disappointing. It’s just so random to give that much space to. Also, not all tubs have shower curtains around them. If I ever achieve my dream of owning a clawfoot tub, there’s no way I’m hiding it behind a piece of flimsy PVC. THE PERFECT FIT (15A) is a good phrase, but I just don’t like seeing THE in the puzzle, especially when it’s just there to take up space. (Now, if you want to mock Ohio State University for getting a trademark on “the,” I’m here for that.) There was a slightly strange number of violent words in the puzzle. You’ve got SHAFTS (39D), TROUNCE (10D), HARM (8D), SMOTE (46D), and ARES (48D) (the God of War). They’re also all downs. How odd.

Anyway, there were some odd bits to the puzzle, but most of them seem to have been in service of what was a very impressively constructed theme.

Misc.:

Today, I learned that there was a Three Stooges member not named Larry, Curly, or Moe! In fact, there seem to have been six Stooges, and they performed for a bit as the Six Stooges. The things you learn while solving crosswords! I had the h, m, and p of SHEMP and for some reason decided that the right answer was “chimp.” That answer is plausible, right?
I had a BIER (27D: Tall one or cold one, in German) or two while in Berlin — where the lagers are far superior to the offerings here in the States. While there, to be different, I also went to an Irish pub and had a margarita. (The ones in California are better.)
I filled in TEASER TRAILER (29A) immediately. As in the TEASER TRAILER for "Thor: Love and Thunder," which I shall be seeing in the theater on opening night in a bit more than a week. Color me excited!
AFT (33D: Toward the stern) being ship-related made me think of the show I just started (and, yes, also finished) called “Our Flag Means Death.” It’s a delightful and quirky comedy about a wealthy aristocrat who gets bored of his life and decides to become a pirate. His moniker is then the “Gentleman Pirate.” Highly recommend.

And that's all! Have a great July.

Signed, Clare Carroll, ta-ta til the (next) Tuesday

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Constructor: Jared Goudsmit

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (the "challenging" part is most for the extra effort it takes to locate / fill in all the rebus squares)

THEME: AB CRUNCHES (61A: Core exercises .. or a hint to eight squares in this puzzle) — letter sequence "AB" gets "crunched" into one square, eight times (four theme answers, two "AB" squares apiece):

Theme answers:

GRABBED A BITE (17A: Ate and ran, say)
INHABITABLE (21A: Fit to live in)
ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (37A: Legendary Himalayan humanoid)
ABRACADABRA (52A: The magic word?)

Word of the Day: NYALA (39D: Spiral-horned antelope) —

sexual dimorphism!
The lowland nyala or simply nyala (Tragelaphus angasii), is a spiral-horned antelopenative to southern Africa (not to be confused with the endangered Mountain nyala living in the Bale region of Ethiopia). It is a species of the family Bovidae and genus Nyala, also considered to be in the genus Tragelaphus. It was first described in 1849 by George French Angas. The body length is 135–195 cm (53–77 in), and it weighs 55–140 kg (121–309 lb). The coat is maroon or rufous brown in females and juveniles, but grows a dark brown or slate grey, often tinged with blue, in adult males. Females and young males have ten or more white stripes on their sides. Only males have horns, 60–83 cm (24–33 in) long and yellow-tipped. It exhibits the highest sexual dimorphism among the spiral-horned antelopes. [...] The nyala's range includes Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Eswatini, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It has been introduced to Botswana and Namibia, and reintroduced to Eswatini, where it had been extinct since the 1950s. Its population is stable and it has been listed as of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The principal threats to the species are poaching and habitat loss resulting from human settlement. (wikipedia) (emph. mine)

• • •

first Premier of China
1949-1976

Big gap here between quality of theme idea (great!) and quality of overall puzzle (less great). As with the Monday puzzle, I felt my confidence flag very quickly after I ran into a lot of short fill that felt very yesteryear, most notably the name partial ENLAI, which used to appear all the time in grids, back when people didn't have software to help them and also didn't have to try as hard for clean grids because competition wasn't nearly as fierce as it is today. You used to see CHOU (or ZHOU) a lot more too. Anyway, either one of that guy's name parts are potential red flags, warnings of "rough fill ahead." Neither name part is inherently bad, and if your overall puzzle were killer, you wouldn't blink at a stray CHOU or ENLAI. But in this grid, with so much other overfamiliar short stuff (e.g. EDAM AVAST NENE NOTA ATON ALOE SYSCO ERIN HUTT (another name part), ENLAI felt not like a necessary compromise, but like a bad omen of what the overall fill quality was going to be like. And what do you call stuff that *used* to be crosswordese but that you almost never see anymore? Asking for a friend. That friend's name is NYALA. I (eventually) remembered NYALA from my various expeditions into the wilds of ... crosswords of yore. The only reason I know most antelopes is from crosswords. I remember ORIBI very, very well from one of my first write-ups. But though the actual NYALA is not endangered, crossword NYALAs have all but gone extinct. So it's crosswordese ... but resurrected crosswordese. Ghost crosswordese. So is it even crosswordese anymore? If crosswordese has been pretty well buried in the past, maybe it's not stale any more. Maybe it's "retro." Can ASTA come back and play now? Anyway, my point ... wow, what was my point? Oh, EN-LAI had me fearing the worst. I didn't get the worst, but I didn't get much of anything good, either. *Except* the revealer, which, as I say, really truly works and is cute. So it's an extremely one-note puzzle, despite having 8 x "AB" = sixteen (musical) notes. If the rebus squares are, in fact, musically playable, and especially if what they play is the theme from "Jaws," which opened 47 years ago this past week, well then, this puzzle is genius. Otherwise, this puzzle is thematically clever but a bit tiresome to work through.

The rebus came swiftly. I wanted ARABS, ARABS wouldn't fit, but the surrounding fill meant that ARABS absolutely had to fit ... therefore "AB" rebus. Didn't get the 2-per-answer dealie with the rebus squares immediately because I had no idea what that first themer was going for, based on its clue. I had GRABBED and figured that since the familiar phrase is "grab and go" and the clue was "eat and run," the answer would be, what, GRABBED AND WENT (!?!). But no, not verb and verb but verbed A BITE. Puzzle is really pushing its luck with the "___ A ___" levels in this part of the grid. GRABBED A BITE x/w IN A BIT and *also* x/w TIE A BOW. None of these reaches EAT A SANDWICH levels of absurdity, but en masse, they're still a lot to take. I find things like INBETA and ADSPACE really dreary, maybe because once an answer gets 6 letters or longer I really expect it to brighten up the place a little. Something about the technicality and ho-hum adequacy of these answers is dispiriting, moreso when the grid is kind of anemic to begin with. I wish the "AB" answers themselves had had more sparkle, but just finding 2x"AB" answers that you can arrange symmetrically at all was probably a challenge. Maybe I'd be more happy about ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN as an answer if a. it had its initial "THE" (it's really awkward to pretend that he's just ... ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN), or b. I didn't see YETI in the grid all the damn time, thus making ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN feel (ironically) like a common sight. I did like "WHAT'S NEW!?" It has this quaint quality, having largely been surpassed in recent years by the more colloquial and somehow less genuinely curious-sounding "WHAT'S UP?""WHAT'S NEW?" sounds like you really want to hear how a person's been. "WHAT'S UP?" is more formulaic, more of a "hey!" Like "How ya doin?" You ask that, you don't really wanna know. You're just being polite. But "WHAT'S NEW?" actually seems to invite a response. Also, "WHAT'S UP?" can have kind of a "why are you bothering me right now?" that "WHAT'S NEW?" is simply never going to have. "WHAT'S NEW?" is the cry of someone who cares about you and wants to hear how you've been. Whereas "AVAST, NENE!" is the cry of someone who's been at sea way, way too long.

No mistakes today except NIQAB for HIJAB (11D: Muslim headscarf) (NIQAB is a veil, which some women wear as an extension / interpretation of HIJAB). I also got "cor anglais" confused with a French horn and so tried HORN at first for 63A: Relative to a cor anglais (OBOE). I know, you must be thinking, "What a RUBE." But if I'm being *really* honest, my first thought was that "cor anglais" was some type of pastry. And now I'm hungry. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Samuel A. Donaldson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (more one or the other depending on how long it takes you to figure out the gimmick)

THEME:"COVER YOUR EYES!" (40A: Warning before a gory movie scene ... or a phonetic hint to answering four rows in this puzzle)—four 15-letter theme answers are impossible to see at first because their "I"s have been "covered" by black squares. That is: four Across answers that start on the far left-hand side of the grid (17A, 24A, 53A, and 62A) appear to be mere 3- or 4- letter answers but are actually 15-letter grid-spanning answers that continue onto subsequent squares in their respective rows. The rows that they are in look like they contain three Across answers, but the row is all one answer once you put "I"s in the black squares on those rows. Each of the three regular-seeming "answers" in the affected rows appears to be clued separately, but those clues are just clue parts—you need to read all three Across clues in that row in succession in order to get the clue for the full, "I"-containing, grid-spanning answer (the "covered""I"s have no effect on Down answers). And so:

Theme answers:

VENDING MACHINES (17A: Mechanical + 18A: Snack + 19A: Dispensers)
MARIE ANTOINETTE (24A: French + 27A: Cake + 30A: Advocate?)
DETROIT RED WINGS (53A: Atlantic + 55A: Division + 57A: Skaters)
ALL-IN-ONE PRINTER (62A: Home + 63A: Office + 66A: Convenience)

Word of the Day: NAVARRE (32D: Pamplona's province) —

Navarre (English: /nəˈvɑːr/; Spanish: Navarra [naˈβara]; Basque: Nafarroa [nafaro.a]), officially the Chartered Community of Navarre (Spanish: Comunidad Foral de Navarra [komuniˈðað foˈɾal de naˈβara]; Basque: Nafarroako Foru Komunitatea [nafaro.ako foɾu komunitate.a]), is a foral autonomous community and province in northern Spain, bordering the Basque Autonomous Community, La Rioja, and Aragon in Spain and Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France. The capital city is Pamplona (Basque: Iruña). The present-day province makes up the majority of the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Navarre, a long-standing Pyrenean kingdom that occupied lands on both sides of the western Pyrenees, with its northernmost part, Lower Navarre, located in the southwest corner of France.
Navarre is in the transition zone between Green Spain and semi-arid interior areas, and thus its landscapes vary widely across the region. Being in a transition zone also produces a highly variable climate, with summers that are a mix of cooler spells and heat waves, and winters that are mild for the latitude. Navarre is one of the historic Basque districts: its Basque features are conspicuous in the north, but virtually absent on the southern fringes. The best-known event in Navarre is the annual festival of San Fermín held in Pamplona in July. (wikipedia)

• • •

OK, a proper Thursday then, let's do this! Floundering was the name of the game for the first part of this solve, that's for sure. Just that first little bit, the tiny NW corner, left me a little queasy, as I didn't understand how [Mechanical] could mean VEND. Was DEV wrong? (1D: Part of R & D: Abbr.). Was TEN wrong? (3D: Face value?). The latter seemed quite possible, as it had a "?" clue and who the hell knows what's going on with "?" clues half the time! I left VEND in place and floated down into the middle of the puzzle where things were still eerily off. I noticed there were no clear *theme* answers in this thing, no longer answers except for that middle Across. I'm not even sure I really noticed the middle Across answer, I just noticed that there was a creepy lack of apparent themers, so it was like, I don't know, being in a ghost town where zombies or some faster creatures were going to jump out and maul me any second. After solving a bunch of answers but also getting weirdly mildly stuck all over, I just went looking for a revealer to see if I could get a grip on what was going on. Scanned the clues and found 40-Across, with its soothing post-elliptical indication that yes, some weird stuff was afoot. So I just went after the [Warning before a gory movie] answer. The problem was, whose "warning?" I figured it would be some kind of pre-movie advisory from the movie itself, but apparently it's a warning from a friend of yours who has already seen the gory movie and has dragged you to the gory movie even though you are apparently squeamish about gory movies (you two have a weird dynamic). Or it's a parent's warning to a child, which raises the question "why is your child watching this movie at all, have you not heard of 'The Little Mermaid'?" The more I think about this admonition, the less I understand it. I didn't come to a movie to Not watch, presumably. But the warning appears to have lots of currency in horror-related contexts, and I figured it out without too much trouble, so it's fine. But even after getting it, I didn't *get it*—that is, I didn't know how it applied to the grid. I looked at VEND and thought ... "are there "I"s under there ... somewhere?" It was right ... here that the penny finally dropped:

I must have seen all the Across clues lined up in a row in the clues list—Mechanical / Snack / Dispensers are stacked one atop the other in the Across clue list. I never read the clue lists in order like that—I'm always toggling between Across and Down, working on whatever seems likeliest to give me my next answer success. Or, because I knew the "I" thing affected "rows," not just individual entries, maybe I just pulled back and looked at the row as a whole and saw VENDING MACHINES there. At any rate, I saw it. The most impressive thing about this theme, to me, is the way the theme answer clues are parceled out over three apparently separate clues. Totally devilish. You absolutely have to get that revealer answer; until then, you're going to be stuck solving partial clues as if they were full clues and getting gibberish as your answers. I don't know what to make of the "I"s not "working" in the Downs. I think I'm OK with it. They're ghost "I"s. I enjoyed working for and (finally) getting this theme, and I think the cluing trick is really ingenious. I am always happy when Thursday decides to be Thursday! I hope there aren't too many howls of "unfair!" today, but then again ... I don't mind the sound of howling. It's soothing sometimes.

There was so much theme business to take care of that the rest of the grid didn't make much of an impression on me. It must've held up just fine. I see a lot of short repeaters, but they're not particularly ugly or bygone, and they're mostly just doing their job of holding the elaborate theme framework in place. DEBARK hurts my ears a little. I would say DISEMBARK, wouldn't you? Isn't that a word? DEBARK sounds like you're saying "depart" or "the bark" ("which bark?""dat bark over dere!"). I had a hilarious hard time with the clue ["Blown" seal] because I thought for sure there was a movie called "Blown" starring some trained seal, like an ocean-Lassie or something, and I'll be damned if I know the names of any famous seals. I enjoyed seeing ENO and then finding out he was just the OPENER for ELO. Wait, no: looks like AC/DC was the real opener back at 4D: "Thunderstruck" band. Would not have minded having ONO show up for a song or two. There are worse directions for crosswordese to go. I know PETARD only from Shakespeare, but I do know that it is explosive, so that was easy enough. Christian GREY is the "50 Shades" guy. Way way outside my area of interest, but big (uh, famous) enough to have made an impression in my brain somewhere. ELON *University* is welcome in my grid any time. Anything else? Are the "?" clues clear? "Face" cards count as "ten" in Blackjack (and maybe other games) (3D: Face value?). PARK is the [Top gear?] because it's presumably at the (literal) top of the gear selector in your (automatic transmission) vehicle. The "relief" in 24D: Guide showing relief, maybe just refers to a relief map (you know, a map with 3D representation of elevation). I'm overexplaining. I'll stop. Good, challenging puzzle! See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (though I made some awful dumb mistakes)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ATTA (1A: It's kneaded to make naan and roti) —

Atta/Ata (Urdu: آٹا; Hindi: आटा, Bengali: আটা, romanized: Āṭā) or chakki atta is a wholemeal wheat flour, originating from the Indian subcontinent, used to make flatbreads such as chapati, roti, naan, paratha and puri. It is the most widespread flour in the Indian subcontinent. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was slowish for me. At first, it was the puzzle's fault. Later on, it was most definitely (mostly) my fault. Let's start with the puzzle's own, built-in difficulty, and for me, it came right away, first clue: 1A: It's kneaded to make naan and roti (ATTA). Four letters, Indian food, mental rolodex [whirrrrrrrr] well, two of those four-letter words are in the damn clue, so they're out. DAAL can be four letters, but it's usually three and anyway involves lentils ... what about DOSA?! But no, that's a finished food, not a dough or FLOUR. And that was that. Stumped. No hope for 1-Across. And I could not get a grip on anything in the NW without it. No idea which 3-letter tribe I was dealing with at 22A: Tribe known for ranching and oil and gas operations (UTE). Never use the term REFI or see it much out of crosswords, so I couldn't come up with anything much there besides ... I don't know, RENT? (26A: Take advantage of low A.P.R., perhaps). It was bad. Oh, worst of all, I had SAW IN instead of LED IN (16A: Brought through the door). Not sure how I can tell the difference without crosses. Nobel Prize winner, also a mystery for a bit (4D: Nobel Peace Prize winner from Ghana => ANNAN). And then there's TODIEFOR, which was always going to be hell to parse, but with everything else up there not working, it was nearly impossible (I wanted GOD-something (2D: Absolutely divine). I think I managed to claw my way toward clarity with the IN from the incorrect SAW IN, and then TWIG FLOWN ANNAN. In the end, ORIGAMI helped a lot, but FLOUR, yeesh, that clue—super hard (14D: Grocery bagful). Anyway, looks like if you knew ATTA right away, that corner was probably easy, but if not, uh, not. I'm not thrilled that the mystery answer ended up just being old-school crosswordese in new clothing, but if A(T)TA is indeed "the most widespread FLOUR in the Indian subcontinent" (as the wikipedia definition, above, claims), then I, and any of you who also didn't know that answer today, would be well advised to learn this definition of ATTA immediately. Hard to question the validity of a term with that kind of clout.

My problems rolled on even after I got out of that section. I wanted GRAN for 28A: Many a nanny (GOAT), which had to be an intentional trap. That mistake made APRICOTS really hard to see, and this is where the puzzle started to annoy me. APRICOTS are just ... a fruit. You can find them in the produce section. Why are they being clued as a brand? [Sun-Maid snack]!? I'm sure they ... make them? Process them? Are these driedAPRICOTS? Let APRICOTS just be APRICOTS. Sun-Maid, shmun-maid. Once I got into the NE, the puzzle finally got fun for a bit. ATE FOR TWO / POLAR BEAR / ROLL AGAIN is a nice stack, as is its counterpart in the SW—just lovely. But in the SW, I had a hell of a time because one little mistake of mine ended up snowballing and creating enormous havoc. Weird that in the beginning it was a four-letter word that did me in (ATTA), and the later on, the same thing happened. Only with ATTA, that was just pure ignorance, whereas with the next four-letter mistake, I just didn't read the clue right. See, at 42A: One of the six reaction buttons for a text on an iPhone, my brain just saw [blah blah blah blah iPhone], and the letter pattern -A-A. And so my brain went "DATA!" and I wrote that in and wow you would not think a tiny word like that could cause so much damage, but parsing "OH HELL NO!"?? Completely impossible ("OH TELL ... ME? ... TELL IT?") (34D: "Not on your life!"). And the [Religious exodus], HAHA, no. I had DE-I--. Incomprehensible. And then I went and spoiled it more by doing something stupid like completely misreading the clue at 50A: Give a little (SAG), which my brain (really off his game today) read as [Give a title], and so in went DUB (!?!?!). This meant that at 46D: Quit, slangily (BAG IT) I had BUG-- and I actually wrote in "BUGGA" (figuring ... I don't know ... it was some kind of Brit-inflected version of "bugger off" which somehow also meant "quit," I guess). So, HAHA, face-plant number two was self-inflicted. Clumsiness upon clumsiness. I did like those NE and SW corners, as I say, and RIDE SHOTGUN is sweet too. Those parts made bearable an otherwise painful gruesome solving experience.

[wikipedia: "Hijrah or Hijra (Arabic: الهجرة) was the journey of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina. The year in which the Hijrah took place is also identified as the epoch of the Lunar Hijri and Solar Hijri calendars; its date equates to 16 July, 622 in the Julian calendar. The Arabic word hijra means "departure" or "migration", among other definitions. It has been also transliterated as Hegira in medieval Latin, a term still in occasional use in English." (my emph.)]

Bullets:

25D: Nowheresville (PODUNK) — I think of the clue as a noun and the answer as an adjective, although I guess the clue *can* be an adjective or the answer a noun if you slang hard enough.
54D: Org. whose history is profiled in the 2015 best seller "To Make Men Free" (GOP)— the book sounds great, actually, but at this fascist moment in time, turns out there are No circumstances, no clues that are going to make me happy to see GOP in the puzzle, or anywhere. It's a white supremacist death cult now. No values but "liberal tears." If you still have an "R" after your name, you should be ashamed. You don't have to have a "D," that's for damn sure, but ... yeesh. Get out.
39D: "By all means," in old parlance ("PRAY DO") — Wow they weren't kidding about "old parlance." I like that PRAY crosses PSALM (39A: Song featuring up to 176 verses). I also think that PRAY-DOH would be a good name for a religious-themed Play-Doh. You could use it to sculpt cathedrals and Bible scenes and stuff. Surely someone has already beaten me to this idea. Ah, look. Urban dictionary, comin' through:

40D: Sedan : U.S. :: ___ : U.K. (SALOON)— absolutely floored by this. Not sure how I got to be this old without ever learning this bit of Britishness. I guess when I've been in the U.K., I've hardly ever been in a car, let alone thought about purchasing one, so it hasn't come up, but still. Boot, lorry, lift, flat ... you absorb a lot of these over time. But I did not absorb SALOON. We drink in our SALOONs. I hope that Brits don't in theirs.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Evan Kalish

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Prix de Lausanne (57A: Competitor in the Prix de Lausanne (BALLERINA)) —

The Prix de Lausanne is an international dance competition held annually in Lausanne, Switzerland. The competition is for young dancers seeking to pursue a professional career in classical ballet, and many former prize winners of the competition are now leading stars with major ballet companies around the world. The competition is managed by a non-profit foundation organised by the Fondation en faveur de l'Art chorégraphique and is maintained by various sponsors, patrons and donors. [...] Entry is reserved for young student-dancers, aged 15 through 18, who have not yet been in professional employment and open to candidates of all nationalities. // Currently, participants are required to submit a 15–20 min digital file recording showing them performing a combination of barre and centre-work exercises in a studio environment and pay a non-refundable registration fee of CHF 120. Those candidates selected to participate in the competition pay a second fee of CHF 120. // Around 80 candidates from 30 or so countries compete each year, in the hope of being selected for the final, reserved for the best 20 among them. The final of the competition is broadcast live on television. (wikipedia)

• • •

Once again (I think this is a couple weeks in a row now) the Saturday is easier than the Friday for me. I mean, if you're just going to hand me 1-Across, and a long 1-Across at that, then I'll take it, but all those free first letters (for the Downs) are probably going to turn even an otherwise Saturday corner into a Tuesday or Wednesday corner.

Sure enough, following the Munch painting, CHANT EDIT ARE got me moving, and then I could see that 15A: Sugar cubes, e.g. ended in -HEDRA, and NUT and REBUS, and with KANGAROOS off the table (probably intended as a trap answer at 17A: Certain Australian boomers (male) and flyers (female)), WALLABIES made the next most natural guess there, and so before I knew it, whoosh, that corner was done. And at that point I had the front ends of both long exit answers all cued up and reading to rocket into the center of the grid. Sadly, one of those potential rocket answers was GREAT RECESSION, an answer I don't understand wanting to build a puzzle around ever, let alone when the country is on the cusp of ... another GREAT RECESSION. It's not a "bad" answer, per se, but you make choices with your marquee answers, and I do not understand why, tonally, you'd want this one right at the heart of your puzzle. I had GREAT and wanted it to be ... something more specific, actually. More bygone. Instead it feels like when people called WWI the "Great War" or the "War to End All Wars." There's this assumption that that was *it*. That *that* was the "great" one. I feel like any minute now, God or Fate or whatever is gonna be like, "hold my beer." I tend to remember that time as "the subprime mortgage crisis," but I guess the global repercussions ballooned out from there. There's no joy in reflecting on any of this, so why is it one of your handful of marquee answers? Dunno.

I like TRIX RABBIT, but again, as with THE SCREAM, you just hand that one over like it's Monday (29D: Commercial mascot with floppy ears). And then NETFLIX SPECIAL becomes obvious and you're well set up to get into the remaining corners and finish them off. There was a brief period in there where I had SERB and KURD (LOL) before TURK (29A: Bosporus resident), and (thus) couldn't quite get a grip on ALKENE (22D: Certain hydrocarbon), but that was more or a Wednesday struggle than a Saturday struggle. And it was the only struggle this puzzle really offered. I mean, ASTRIDE LACONIC SHEATH, bam bam bam, off their first one or two letters. The SE corner never stood a chance. And if it weren't for the "???" quality of NOSE ART, or my apparent preference for the MANKINI over the TANKINI (12D: Bathing suit portmanteau), the other corners would've been just as easy. As it was, still pretty easy.

As usual, the names were the things I didn't know, but there weren't that many of them. SAL (4D: Comedian Vulcano of "Impractical Jokers") and ALI (11D: Tony-winning actress Stroker) were unknowns, but the crosses were just plowed right through them, so I didn't have to spend any time piecing them together. And I knew Rachel DRATCH (49A: "S.N.L." alum Rachel) and DELLA Reese (49D: "And That Reminds Me" singer Reese), so no trouble there. I saw Rachel DRATCH in the market at Grand Central one time, with a child that I assume was hers. That is my Rachel DRATCH story. Oh, and one of my colleagues was at Dartmouth at the same time as her. I think I got that right. So two Rachel DRATCH stories, neither of which qualifies as a story. This is me at my raconteuriest. I'm here every night.

A few more things:

53A: Taken charge (FEE) — a FEE is a "charge" that is "taken" (from you)
6D: Image problem? (REBUS) — I'm so used to thinking of REBUS in crossword terms (multiple letters, sometimes representing an image, in one square) that this kind of REBUS (the picture puzzle kind) always surprises me. A very "children's placemat" kind of puzzle. Here, see if you can figure out this one:

34D: Tick or tock (SEC) — Hmmm, I guess this is, literally, true. That is what the ticking (or tocking) of the clock represents: the passing of one second. I feel like I was *just* watching a documentary of some kind ... or a video online ... about how "tock" is not actually a different sound from "tick," but we talk about it as if it were ... I can't remember why this fact warranted attention. The end.

TOCK!

See you tomorrow,

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Tom McCoy

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Expansion Pack" — theme answers don't appear to fit the clue; they're all two-word answers, where you have to read the first letter of the first word as *its own word*, and then take the second word normally (e.g. BOTTOM LINE = "B" LINE = BEELINE for 23A: Direct path) (there were "Puzzle Notes" that offered standard clues for the actual answers that appeared in the grid ...

... but those were an annoying distraction so I ignored them):

Theme answers:

BOTTOM LINE = "B" LINE = "beeline" for 23A: Direct path
OLDER BROTHER = "O" BROTHER = "Oh, brother!" for 29A: "Sheesh!"
PUTTING GREEN = "P" GREEN = "pea green" for 41A: Color of the Owl and Pussy-cat's boat
IN CONTACT = "I" CONTACT = "eye contact" for 63A: Something avoided during awkward situations
CHARLEY HORSE = "C" HORSE = "seahorse" for 84A: Fish with a prehensile tail
GIVING THANKS = "G" THANKS = "Gee, thanks" for 97A: "Oh, that's so nice of you to say!"
THIRD PARTY = "T" PARTY = "tea party" for 105A: Mad Hatter's social event

Word of the Day: CLANGOR (84D: Cacophony) —

: a resounding clang or medley of clangsthe clangor of hammers (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

There's gotta be a better way to execute this concept. I kind of enjoyed figuring out what the hell was going on with the theme, but being confronted with the horrible "Puzzle Notes" ahead of time really mucked everything up. Just put a lot of wordy and dull and unnecessary blather between me and the puzzle experience. It's not That unusual for tricky puzzles to contain what are essentially unclued answers, so I don't know what the Notes were necessary. The first part of the "Notes" is actually fine—the part that says, essentially, "yo, a bunch of these answers aren't gonna match their clues, you gotta figure out why." That seems like plenty of help for any solver who might wonder what the hell they've stumbled into here. But the part where "standard clues" are offered up, in no particular order (???) as if they were somehow a feature and not a bug ... I don't get. The unclued answers remain a bug. You can embrace the bug-ness and just let them be, or you can try to eliminate the bug but end up smushing the bug and making an awful mess, which is essentially what happens here. Without the "Puzzle Notes" ... I think I like this concept fine. I definitely enjoyed not having any idea what was going on for a little bit. I like tricky themes that don't reveal themselves so easily, and this one definitely delivered on that count. Didn't put the trick together until right ... here:

Before that, I was under the impression that the first word of the themers was simply ballast, and its existence would be explained at some later point in the solve. That is, I assumed the literal answer to 23A: Direct path was LINE, that the color of the Owl / Pussy-cat boat was GREEN. Both answers seemed to work fine, so the whole first-letter concept didn't register. Then, as you can see (in the incomplete grid I just posted above), I had no idea how to spell GALL-VANTS, and while the only phrase that made sense at 63A was IN CONTACT, I wasn't about to commit to that answer until I had a grasp of what the hell was going on. Then I got to OLDER BROTHER, and saw the "Oh, brother!" connection immediately. Then I looked back on those earlier three themers and they all suddenly and clearly came into focus: beeline, pea green, and eye contact. True aha moment there. That was definitely where the puzzle peaked. The rest was easier and less exciting because the mystery was gone, but conceptually I think this one holds up pretty well. The unclued answers were always going to be a problem, and I just didn't like the clumsy attempt at handling them. Otherwise, thematically, thumbs up.

I also enjoyed the long Downs, particularly the fact that 3/4 of them were bouncy colloquial phrases. "LET'S GET ON WITH IT!""WHAT'S YOUR SECRET?" and especially "ON THAT NOTE ..." were all winners. There were a few times when the fill felt a little anemic or downright ugly. That ATARUN (?) / TERCE corner (SW) is very unpretty (except for PRINCE, who is very pretty), and the "WAH!""AH, ME" AMIGO cluster in the mideast was no looker either. "AH, ME" is always awful, and ... well, AMIGO is fine as an answer, but man do I hate that clue (46D: Broseph). Do people really talk that way? It's like a caricature of a caricature of how a "bro" talks. AMIGO is such a decent, all-purpose word, so why go and muck it up with fauxbrospeak, why? Sigh, ah me, etc. But beyond those two little sections, the weak spots appear only sporadically. My ALECTO (the one in every translation of the Aeneid I've ever read) has two "L"s, so that was weird (88A: One of the Furies of Greek myth). But I guess Virgil's spelling is anomalous. Or just a Latin variation. Dunno. No idea re: "A TO Z Mysteries" or ALDEN. I assumed the Boxcar Children were strictly a recent phenomenon, but it looks like they date back to the 1920s. Ah, I see the book series died out in the mid-70s but then got rebooted in the '90s. I missed both incarnations. The "A TO Z Mysteries" started in '97, way way past my time (they somehow missed my born-in-2000 daughter as well—weird).

Mistakes? Sure, some. I had UNAPT at 5A: Not suited (for) (UNFIT) and that was oddly consequential for a while, since that answer contained the first letters of two Downs I didn't know (7D: The yolk's on them and 8D: ___ Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's role in "Jurassic Park"). How is the yolk "on" FRIED EGGS any more than it's "on" any eggs? I get the pun, but it's UNAPT for the FRIED part of FRIED EGGS. I had BLAST before BEAST at 14A: Wild thing. I like that mistake. LOATHE before SCATHE at 94A: Excoriate. I like that mistake less. And CLANGOR, yeeeeesh. I wanted to write in CLAMOUR (British spelling?) and now the more I look at CLANGOR the less wordlike it looks (84D: Cacophony). It's like ... it wants to be CLAMOR, but also wants to be from BANGOR. It also sounds like an obscure "Star Trek" race, maybe one that got mentioned once, in a single episode of "TNG" in 1992, and then was never spoken of again. "Klingon" + "Borg" = CLANGOR!

Taking a week off from Letters to the Editor this week. More next week. Any crossword or blog-related questions can be sent to me at rexparker at icloud dot com. Have a lovely rest of your 4th o' July weekend.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. RITZ crackers come in "sleeves" (something like OREOs) (33D: Brand that comes in short sleeves) and I guess STARs"heat" ... outer "space"? (113A: Space heater?). Oh and the [Big Bird?] is LARRY Bird because he was a big basketball star and also just big (6'9").

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe even mildly tougher than Medium, for a Monday)

THEME: STATUE OF LIBERTY (57A: New York City landmark suggested by the ends of 17-, 22-, 34- and 50-Across)— last words of themers are parts of said statue; I guess this is a 4th of July-themed puzzle (?):

Theme answers:

PASSING THE TORCH (17A: Handing responsibility to someone else)
TRIPLE CROWN (22A: Major accomplishment in baseball or horse racing)
ASPIRIN TABLET (34A: One way to deal with a pain in the neck)
TOWN AND GOWN (50A: Two interacting communities in the home of a college)

Word of the Day: ARC LIGHT (11D: Intense illumination, as in old movie projectors) —

An arc lamp or arc light is a lamp that produces light by an electric arc (also called a voltaic arc).
The carbon arc light, which consists of an arc between carbon electrodes in air, invented by Humphry Davy in the first decade of the 1800s, was the first practical electric light. It was widely used starting in the 1870s for street and large building lighting until it was superseded by the incandescent light in the early 20th century. It continued in use in more specialized applications where a high intensity point light source was needed, such as searchlights and movie projectors until after World War II. The carbon arc lamp is now obsolete for most of these purposes, but it is still used as a source of high intensity ultraviolet light.
The term is now used for gas discharge lamps, which produce light by an arc between metal electrodes through a gas in a glass bulb. The common fluorescent lamp is a low-pressure mercury arc lamp. The xenon arc lamp, which produces a high intensity white light, is now used in many of the applications which formerly used the carbon arc, such as movie projectors and searchlights. (wikipedia)

• • •

Cringed my way through most of this. The fill just creaked and groaned. Started with old initialism at 1A (YSL) and then ARLO SOPS YESIDO EDER COSI SNL TERA ATON and by now I'm halfway down the grid. And what the hell was up with that clue on LILI (23D: Woman's name that looks like Roman numerals 51 + 51). No, 51 + 51 = 102, and unless there is a woman somewhere named CII, then that clue is garbage. I eventually got it—and it helped me change "YES YES" to "YES, I DO"—but if you want consecutive "LI"s and you're super in-love with your little Roman numeral joke, there's gotta be a better way to go about it than this misleading equation-style clue. HIC IMHO ATTAR ATAB ETTU AGEE HIC CEO NOFEE NSYNC LORRIE ALOEGEL, two different "___ AT" phrases, ETC. It's as if very, very little care went into filling and polishing this grid. When you look at the grid construction, you can see that it's really horrendously choppy, with lots of black squares cutting through the middle, creating a surfeit of 3- and 4-letter answers. The result was just painful to wade through. And it's not like the theme itself is any great shakes. Four things associated with a statue. OK. Kind of tepid for (what I imagine is supposed to be) a holiday-themed puzzle. I guarantee you that most every other major daily will produce a Monday puzzle *at least* this strong today. I don't know how the most famous and prestigious puzzle in the country, the one whose editor loves to tout how many submissions he gets, can't manage better than this. Complacency, that's what this is.

[

I had YIP AT before YAP AT (1D: Threaten, as a little dog might)—or, rather, I left the vowel blank and used the cross to make sure. Speaking of getting yapped at, we were walking in the state forest today and got run at by two dogs who came out bounding up the trail, off-leash. Luckily they were much more bark than bite (they were no-bite, in fact), but it's still freaky to have unattended dogs, especially biggish dogs, run at you, barking. Weirdly, the owners never actually showed. The dogs ran away ... and then we saw them again later, at which point we all exchanged sort of friendly nods ("hey, whassup, nice to see you again") and they went off and left us alone. Maybe their owners live adjacent to the state land. I hope so. Ok now I'm worried about them. Anyway, the woods were beautiful today. Lots and lots of birdsong, and yet when I whipped out my Merlin app to record and identify the song, turns out there was only one kind of bird singing, a bird I've never actually seen (to my knowledge): the red-eyed vireo.

Just wall-to-wall 24/7 non-stop red-eyed vireo. It's a dang forest, how is there only one type of bird making noise? If I sit on my steps in the morning I can ID half a dozen birds within a minute, but I had that app on for a full two minutes in the woods today and the Only bird singing was the vireo. I'm writing about dogs and birds so as not to have to write about this puzzle anymore. Would not mind seeing more VIREOs in puzzles. I hope you have a nice rest of your 4th. Don't shoot off fireworks because they scare both indoor and outdoor wildlife. Leave the explosions to the professionals. Take care.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Malgorzata Nowakowska and Eileen Williams

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)

THEME: Taylor SWIFT (49D: Taylor ___, some of whose hit songs are featured in the answers to the starred clues)— that's it ... it's just song names:

Theme answers:

FEARLESS (20A: *Like daredevils, seemingly)
BABE (25A: *Little one in arms)
RED (30A: *Visibly embarrassed)
BLANK SPACE (34A: *Void)
SHAKE IT OFF (41A: *Get over a minor injury, say)
DEAR JOHN (54A: *Start of a classic breakup letter)

Word of the Day: SUDAN (40A: Formerly the largest country in Africa, but since 2011 the third-largest) —

Sudan (English: /suːˈdɑːn/ or /suːˈdæn/; Arabic: السودان, romanized: as-Sūdān), officially the Republic of the Sudan (Arabic: جمهورية السودان, romanized: Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Egypt to the north, Eritrea to the northeast, Ethiopia to the southeast, Libya to the northwest, South Sudan to the south and the Red Sea. It has a population of 45.70 million people as of 2022 and occupies 1,886,068 square kilometres (728,215 square miles), making it Africa's third-largest country by area, and the third-largest by area in the Arab League. It was the largest country by area in Africa and the Arab League until the secession of South Sudan in 2011, since which both titles have been held by Algeria. Its capital is Khartoum and its most populated city is Omdurman (part of the metropolitan area of Khartoum). (wikipedia)

• • •

I am in no way averse to the idea of a Taylor SWIFT-themed puzzle, but this ain't it. There is nothing here, puzzle-wise. Just a list of songs. If you love Taylor SWIFT and are thrilled to see all her songs here, just imagine this theme being done with an artist you don't like. Or just ... any artist. I mean, if the themers were just Beatles songs and the revealer were merely THE BEATLES, people would be booing, not at the Beatles (well, mostly not at the Beatles), but at the weakness of the puzzle from a conceptual standpoint. There's no wordplay, no cleverness, no nothing but a list of songs. I mean, it's harmless—you can sort of enjoy it as a very easy themeless puzzle, which I imagine is how a lot of people enjoyed it—but I don't get how this passes muster as a NYTXW crossword puzzle. The *topic* is fine, but there is nothing *puzzle-worthy* in the theme execution. If there were—if the revealer (SWIFT) really snapped, or offered us anything besides merely literal explanation—it would be very easy to overlook, say, the odd placement of the revealer, or the non-symmetrical ("bonus"?) themers (since "PER" and "SOWN" are not Taylor SWIFT songs (that I know of...), "RED" and "BABE" are kind of left hanging out to dry. There's nothing puzzly about this theme. It's a list. The lack of real puzzleworthiness to this theme makes the whole thing seem like a publicity stunt—there's no doubt that social media is already *humming* with the buzz of adoring fans (as well as the grumping of non-fans and "kids these days" oldsters). Again, from my perspective, Taylor SWIFT's talent (considerable, IMHO) is beside the point. If you're going to pay homage to an artist you like, you gotta do better than just list some hits.

I guessed the theme right here...

... but when I looked downgrid I didn't see any space where TAYLORSWIFT would fit, so I was very much hoping that something much cooler than just her name would be serving as the revealer. Maybe there was going to be a final SWIFT song that would end up tying everything together. She does, famously*, have a lyric about crossword puzzles, after all. It's even in one of today's featured songs. Surprisingly, that song is *not* "BLANK SPACE"—it's "RED": "Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword / And realizing there's no right answer." If you track the word "crossword" across Twitter, as I do, then you have seen this lyric A Lot. Would've been cool to try to turn that lyric to a SWIFT-themed crossword. Would still be cool.

The basic quality of the grid seems fine, even slightly better than your average Tuesday fare. STORYBOOK and "I OWE YOU" are lovely (they sound like plausible Taylor SWIFT song titles, actually). I had trouble parsing PUT-UP JOBS, but I have no objection to it. "YOINK!" may be my favorite answer in the whole thing, though I think of it more as a sound effect *accompanying* the snatching of something than the snatch itself. Weirdly struggled right out of the gate with this one, as I tried to make FINS work for 1A: Swimmer's set (LAPS), and couldn't remember what the hell was on the Tropicana logo ("... banana...?") (1D: Symbol over the "i" in the Tropicana logo (LEAF)). But that was very minor as struggles go, and once I got traction, the puzzle became regular Tuesday-easy. Didn't know ROCHE, but that's about all I didn't know today (27D: La ___-Posay (skin-care brand)). I have just one major, and predictable, objection to the grid today, and that's the NW corner, specifically the clue on RONA (19A: Covid-19, slangily). I have never ever understood giving a cutesy nickname to something that killed millions and millions of people, that continues to kill them, in fact, though everyone's pretending it's not happening any more. In fact I don't know anyone who has ever used this term. I just know that it exists, and I knew very early on that constructors were going to be tempted to clue RONA this way. Thankfully, they haven't. Well, mostly they haven't.

Weirdly also just did a puzzle w/ 'RONA in it and *same* https://t.co/Xs2Gq1ZmLA
— Rex Parker 🐈🐾☕️🐾🐈 (@rexparker) July 24, 2021

Yes, the virus is newsworthy, it exists, but mass shooters also exist and I doubt anyone's clamoring to see their names in a puzzle. Cluing 'RONA this way is depressing and disrespectful and (most importantly) completely unnecessary. There is nothing forcing you to go the "sassy slang" route here. And it's not like that corner is even good. You shouldn't reclue RONA, you should junk it entirely. Here's a better corner, RONA- (and ERAT-) free. I made it in three minutes:

I don't know what constructors and (especially) editors are thinking, but above all, I wish they were thinking, "hey, can I spend a few more minutes making this corner better?" Some day...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: HARD!! (37:30!!!!!!!)

Word of the Day: Sonia BRAGA —

She is known in the English-speaking world for her Golden Globe Award–nominated performances in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Moon over Parador (1988). She also received a BAFTA Award nomination in 1981 for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (first released in 1976). For the 1994 television film The Burning Season, she was nominated for an Emmy Award and a third Golden Globe Award. Her other television and film credits include The Cosby Show (1986), Sex and the City (2001), American Family (2002), Alias (2005), Aquarius (2016), Bacurau (2019), and Fatima (2020). In 2020, The New York Times ranked her #24 in its list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.

• • •

Hi it's Malaika, here for a Malaika MWednesday. How has your evening been? During my evening I purchased cocktails and the profits went towards funding women's healthcare. After my third cocktail I bought this shirt and after my fourth cocktail, I solved this puzzle and wrote this post. So like, that's where we're at. (Solving music was Confessions Part II from here like truly a dozen times in a row.) (Do y'all like ((heh)) how much I'm using the word "like"? It's because a commenter from last time made fun of me for it. So I figured I'd, like, lean in.)

THEME: Rabbits and.... hats? — There are types of rabbits (BRER, ROGER, and PETER) crossing types of hats (BEANIE, DERBY, and BOATER). I got the rabbit part, but the hat part was totally lost on me! I had to look it up to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

THIS PUZZLE WAS SO HARD!!! Wednesdays usually take me about 11mins and I "Check Puzzle" zero or one times. This one was well past half an hour and I "Check Puzzle"d nine times, and even then finished with four boxes where I had zero idea what letters went in. (This is wild to me. I mean, I'm not a fantastic solver, but I'm pretty solid!! I have solved many NYT themeless puzzles in around ten minutes without checking-- yes, even after four cocktails!)

There are lots of things that make a puzzle hard! I like to try to pinpoint them because I have found that a bad puzzle is often hard, but a hard puzzle is not necessarily bad. That makes sense, right? Like, a puzzle can be hard because the constructor is sloppy with fill, or messes up their clue grammar... or a puzzle can be hard simply because their clues are asking knowledge of me (that is; me, the solver) that I do not have. This puzzle felt like the latter, and I am very excited to read the experiences of the commenters.

Mountains of things I did not know. I do not know Sonia BRAGA, or the term KEN meaning "knowledge," or "fuddy-duddy" as a phrase, or Santa ROSA, California, or what "portage" means. Or the shampoo brand PRELL (I experimented with a rebus and "L'oreal" for a bit) or that a YEW is an evergreen or what on earth the Jaguar clue was talking about. (Please explain?? CARAD??? What?) CPA is a word that I have learned from crossword puzzles and literally never seen out-and-about* and ETAS was ambiguous with ETDS. [Kind of vote] for PROXY and [Person with talent] (with no question mark!) for [AGENT] are vague and mis-direct-y in a way that I expect for a Saturday, not a Wednesday. THE UN was incredibly hard to parse, as was ATTRACTIVE since for a while I had [A??? ACTIVE] and was expecting a two-word phrase. (Jeff looooooves to talk about how long answers should be more than one word.)

The last thing that made this hard for me was the revealer, due to both the clue and the software. The clue was worded in a non-obvious way. [Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, e.g. ...which happens three times in this puzzle] was the clue for MAGIC TRICK, and made me think that I should be searching for that specific term to come into play. Instead, I was searching for "rabbits" and "hats" which were communicated plainly via the clue itself. Is this a little odd? It seemed off for me (weirdly, it felt "too easy" which is hilarious given how much I struggled with this puzzle), in terms of how revealers usually work. Meanwhile, the software did not highlight any of the rabbits or any of the hats. This led me to believe there was a rebus situation which I had totally missed, especially with entries like BRAGA and CARAD that were foreign to me.

Bullets:

[Small-arms runner of years past?] for T-REX — I begrudgingly admit that this clue is absolutely ingenious. (I am begrudging because it did not click until well after I had entered the letters-- I had ARES for a long time.)
[Pot seeds?] for ANTES — Same as above-- very good, very hard.
[Term of address in colonial India] for SAHIB — I am (half) Indian but don't know as much as I should. I knew this entry from the novel "A Little Princess," where a white American girl is referred to with this title by an Indian immigrant.
Here's a superrrrr petty bullet for you! I submit puzzles to the Times, and one of my rejections said that it was a no because they don't like corners that are only "connected" to the rest of the puzzle by a single square. So now whenever I see a puzzle that has this (here it's the 50A/48D crossing) I am like "HMMM!!!"

xoxo Malaika

*I contrast this with words I have learned from crosswords, and then have seen out-and-about, like ATOLL or RCA or ARIA (outside of the Pretty Little Liars-verse).

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Philip Wolfe

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Brace yourself! — phrases with DOUBLE, TWICE, and TWO in them (respectively), are represented in the grid by a doubling of an adjacent word in the answer. Thus:

Theme answers:

"YOU ONLY LIVE LIVE" (for "You Only Live Twice")
BLIND BLIND STUDY (for "double-blind study")
GOODY SHOES SHOES (for "goody two-shoes")

Word of the Day: PISCO (34D: Peruvian cocktail => PISCO SOUR) —

Pisco is a colorless or yellowish-to-amber colored brandy produced in winemaking regions of Chile and Peru. Made by distilling fermented grape juice into a high-proof spirit, it was developed by 16th-century Spanish settlers as an alternative to orujo, a pomace brandy that was being imported from Spain. It had the advantages of being produced from abundant domestically grown fruit and reducing the volume of alcoholic beverages transported to remote locations.

• • •

Compared to a few recent Thursdays, this one felt pretty listless. It was easy, tended toward crosswordese in the fill, and had a clever but fairly basic theme that didn't quite reach to Thursday levels of trickery and toughness. ABRA at 1-Across is a very, very bad sign. I think we had the full ABRACADABRA the other day, and I remember thinking to myself, "ah, the full incantation, that's nice; usually we're just subjected to that awful and completely alleged incantation *part*, ABRA" ... and here we are. Right from the top. ABRACADABRA is one word. Full stop. End of story. Why, in the 21st century, are we continuing to allow ABRA to stand on its own. Also, why (why) would you lead with it, or ever use it at all unless you were phenomenally desperate. And maybe if you're that desperate, you should redo the corner. Looking at that corner and seeing BROT (!??!!?), I'd say, yeah, you need to redo that corner, really and truly. And it's not like the rest of the grid disabused me of my sense that ABRA was an omen of fill to come. INURE STET ERATO TALI ASP NEER ELS ERIE, all the hits. The short fill is so weak (bland, really) that it was actually surprising to me when the long Downs turned out to be as strong as they were. PISCO SOUR is a bold, bold move, especially considering the NYTXW has never even had PISCO on its own in the grid before. I don't think I've had a PISCO SOUR, but I do enjoy cocktails and read about them sometimes, so I had the advantage of having heard of it. Lovely answer, imho. FRIVOLOUS and DOOFUSES are also a-OK in my book. But too much of this grid is laden with repeaters

As for the theme, here's the main problem: way too easy and more "huh, OK" than "wow." It's nice that the themers all came out to grid-spanning length—gives the puzzle a certain structural elegance—but once you get one of them, you can get the others immediately. The puzzle gives up everything at once. It took me a long time to finally make sense of the first themer, but I spent that "long time" easily filling in the whole top of the grid, so the first themer didn't play tough so much as mysterious. Anyway, I didn't get that second LIVE, and thus the theme gimmick, until right here:

But after that, I was able to go instantly to this:

Game over. Basically. Easy as pie. Too easy for a Thursday theme. The only bite in this grid came from the PISCO SOUR. Add this to the list of the many ways in which cocktails have made me happy.

I made some errors! They were inconsequential! But I will rehearse them here! I know Dante's Inferno way way too well to even think of ABYSS as an answer for 1D: Hell, to Dante, LOL. I mean ... true enough, I guess, but I really wanted the Italian word for "hell" there ... which, it turns out, funnily enough, is "Inferno." I had the AB- and still no idea. Did I mention I teach Inferno every year, sometimes twice a year? Sorry, SOMETIMES SOMETIMES A YEAR. It's true. Moving on. Had the usual E/I hassle at 15A: Accustom (INURE). Wrote in CONS for OFFS (10A: Does a hit on), which is a weird choice, in retrospect. I never really know what era or planet the NYTXW's "slanginess" is going to be from, or whether it's going to be accurate or awkward and tin-eared, so the clue just sounded like some kind of slang for running a scam. But OFFS is better, yes. Had DRESSY before DREAMY (40D: Very handsome, as a beau) and UPSHOT before UPTAKE (60A: Comprehension). I do believe that's it for screw-ups and struggles. I hope you enjoy the remainder of your Thursday, or whatever future day you happen to be reading this on. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kyle Dolan

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BITON (50D: Dog that's a cross of two French-named breeds) —

The Biton is a hybrid designer dog created in the United States. Bred as a family companion from crossing a Bichon Frise with a Coton de Tulear, the Biton retains the small size and adorable fluffy or long and curly coat of its parents. (wagwalking.com)

• • •

Found this one pretty dull and dreary. It's built like a Saturday puzzle, with four thick, distinct, relatively isolated corners that you have to work your way through methodically, and that you can very very easily get stuck in if anything goes wrong. In short—not great flow. Further, when. you decided to basically make it a four-corner puzzle, you don't get interesting answers so much as acceptable answers. You're not gonna object to most of the longer fill, but you aren't going to be surprised or delighted by it much either. I don't understand what answers in this puzzle were supposed to be seed entries, i.e. the fill you really think is new and fresh and fun and interesting. You get a bunch of 9s, but since they're stacked, the best you can hope for is "clean," not "eye-popping." It's very tough to make stacked longer answers come out clean, so unless you seed one of those corners with a real winner and build on top of it, what you're most likely to get, best case scenario, is mostly what you get here—the corners hold up, and that's it. You get a "Q" here and and "X" there, but also a bunch of just-OK stuff like ART EDITOR and REDTIDES and IRON RULE and OUTRACED. Nothing wrong with those, just ... nothing memorable, either. PAPER WASP, which is freed from the limitations that come with long-answer stacking, is easily the most interesting thing in the grid, but even that is interesting only in the sense of being unusual (I didn't know such a thing existed) (32D: Insect with a delicate nest). It's a curiosity, not a surprising turn of phrase or a familiar expression or a famous name you've never seen in a grid or some as-yet ungridded modern phenomenon. PAPER WASP got a "huh, cool name" out of me ... which is good, but it's the most that any of the answers in this puzzle got out of me—at least in terms of positive mental commentary. This felt like a solid, workmanlike, 20th-century Saturday puzzle. Very competent, not a ton of fun.

I really don't get deciding that your most "original" bit of fill is going to be short fill, and today I am particularly looking at QUBIT (7D: Portmanteau unit of computing information). No idea what that is. Seems like a little smug nod to techy folks. I'm guessing it's pronounced like "cubit," and that it's a "portmanteau" of, uh, Q*BERT and OBIT. Oh, dang, it's actually "quantum" + "bit"—way less interesting. Anyway, let's just say that this answer has made its one appearance for this decade. See you in the '30s, QUBIT! Another thing I don't get is trying to disguise your weak fill (BITON) under the name of a "designer dog" (the very phrase makes me queasy) (50D: Dog that's a cross of two French-named breeds). It would be one thing if the two breeds involved in the name (portmanteau! again!) were well known, but I was sitting there going, "OK, it's a bichon frise and ... and ... huh ... I got nothing ... oh, crap, is DRUB right? Is it DRUM / MITON!?!? A Maltese and a ... python? What in the hell?" If you were familiar with the dog breed Coton de Tulear (the -TON part of this dog-engineering experiment), then congratulations. I just had to trust DRUB (49A: Defeat soundly) and pray that BITON was ... something. Not a great position to put the solver in. (And hey, if I'm the only solver that's out of the BITON fandom loop, then I take it all back and apologize for my ignorance)

Other bits:

AREA MAP (40A: Part of a typical business search result on Google) — ugh. This answer pretty much embodies how scintillating I found this grid (not at all). I had SITEMAP and one point. So dreary to have the answer you need to get into one of the corners be this bland / vague. Thank god for GODSPEED down there (that answer looks positively electric compared to most of the rest of the grid)
TOGAED (28D: Like ancient Roman senators) — one of those forced-adjectival answers that you just have to accept. I mean, am I currently SHIRTED (well, am I?) (I am). But I'm happy to allow a few of these Crossword Specials in the service of a wonderful grid. Just wish this grid had been more wonderful.
EVA / DUARTE (38A: With 45-Down, pre-marriage name of a 1940s-'50s first lady)— first, congrats on using "pre-marriage" instead of the gendered, creepily virginity-focused "maiden"; second, wow, learning a lot about Bess Truman* today.
MIR (34A: "Es tut ___ leid" ("I'm sorry," in German))— unless it refers to a space station, your MIR clue is gonna be lost on me.
MAGIC ACT (34D: Tricky thing to pull off?)— had the "G," but that was less help than you'd imagine. I first tried EGG-something (thinking that it was "tricky" in the "trick-or-treat" sense, and maybe kids were egging someone's house), and then I tried GAG-something (thinking of, I don't know, a joke, I guess, although those aren't technically "tricky," are they?)
DOTE / TOTE— I just notice that these answers are symmetrical and they rhyme and for some reason I think this is cute. Get yourself a DOTE TOTE! Filled with all the books and candies and other items your beloved enjoys! This is the note I choose to end on. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*jk I know it's Eva Peron please no mail

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kevin G. Der

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging to Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Zeljko IVANEK (40D: Zeljko ___, 2008 Emmy winner for "Damages") —

Željko Ivanek (/ˈʒɛlkoʊ ɪˈvɑːnɪk/; Slovene: [ˈʒɛːlkɔ iˈʋaːnək]; born August 15, 1957) is an American actor of Slovenian-Croatian origin, known for his role as Ray Fiske on Damages, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award. Ivanek is also known for his role of Ed Danvers on Homicide: Life on the Street and Homicide: The Movie, Governor James Devlin on Oz, Andre Drazen on 24, Blake Sterling on the short-lived series The Event, and Emile "The Hunter" Danko in Heroes. From 2014 until 2019, he starred as Russell Jackson in the drama Madam Secretary. He also had a recurring role as FBISpecial Agent Jim Racine in the series Banshee.
For his active stage career, he has been awarded a Drama Desk Award and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, they don't make 'em like this any more. Or they do, I guess, just rarely. This was a proper Saturday, a harder, better version of yesterday's 4-corner type of challenge. Lots of white space, lots of vague or tricky cluing, lots of technical terms and trivia, lots of opportunity to fall on your face. Repeatedly. But because every corner had *two* ways in, not just one, it had much better flow than these types of highly segmented grids often have, and what's really impressive is how clean this relatively low word-count grid ended up being. And not just clean, but often fresh. Yes, the "freshness" frequently comes via names of recentish fame, but it's also there in the cluing (on LAGOS, for instance (15A: Hub for Nollywood movies)). "Freshness" doesn't only have to mean "recentness," it can mean thoughtfulness and originality and cleverness as well. Because if the puzzle were entirely and aggressively up-to-the-minute it would feel narrow and faddish, whereas this one tempered its recent pop culture trivia with wide-ranging subject matter. You can feel some predilections, such as the way the grid leans into movies and television, and especially music (CLARINET, RUBATOS, ARIETTAS). This gives the puzzle personality. It was definitely a rough solve for me in places, but ultimately I felt like the puzzle prioritized solver enjoyment just as much as Saturday gruelingness. As Saturday puzzles go, it is something close to model.

Looking at the blank grid, one might imagine that the most troublesome spots were going to be the giant lakes of white space in the NE and SW, but those were actually the easier parts of the puzzle for me. Harder for me were the other, narrower corners, and harder still was the connective tissue. I foundered on both sides of that center diagonal line of black squares, where the 3- and 4-letter answers form little staircases of a sort, from the lower to upper half of the puzzle. This made zooming from one corner to the next, for me, impossible. And yet I didn't feel trapped. That is ... it was like being lost in a hallway rather than cornered in a room. I never ended up anywhere where I felt there was no escape. I just got stuck, but I knew help was eventually going to come from some other part of the puzzle to rescue me. So coming out of the NW, for instance, I got "TOOTSIE" easy (30A: 1982 film with the tagline "Behind every great man, there is a woman!"), but had only vague memories of "Catcher in the Rye" (last read age 13), so ALLIE was a bust (weirdly, I remember Holden's sister was PHOEBE, but ALLIE, gone ... probably, in part, because he's dead before the novel starts) (22D: Holden's brother in "The Catcher in the Rye"). Then I thought all those presidents used to be ELIS (not ELKS) (as you can see, above, ELKS was my very last answer) (28A: Group that counts Harding, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy as former members). LAOS was a guess, but not an informed one (25A: Home of the Plain of Jars, a UNESCO World Heritage site). I wanted INTERACTED but I also knew it could be INTERFACED or INTER-godknowswhat, and I've never seen a CLAM CAKE in my life (clam bake, crab cake) (6D: Specialty of Rhode Island cuisine), so I had to slide down to the SW in order to maintain momentum, and there, despite having no clue as to any part of IVANEK, I blew through the corner (LOL I have watched several shows featuring IVANEK, including "Damages," so I know his face well, but he's just "that guy in that thing" as far as my brain is concerned).

Coming out of the SW, I was excited to see the "Atlanta" clue (one of my very favorite shows, one of the greatest TV shows of this century), and was super-excited to see the name I have been waiting to see in crosswords. "It's ZAZIE ...! ZAZIE ...!" And here my brain froze (45A: Actress with an Emmy nomination for FX's "Atlanta"). I blame ZADIE SMITH. I even tried SMITH here. Which weirdly got me SINEW (wrong), which even more weirdly got me INTRO and EVADE (both right!). But I'm getting ahead of myself. Blanked on the BEETZ, but luckily Cameron DIAZ gave me the "Z" that made me remember the odd bit of municipal slang HIZZONER (35D: Informal title in city government), and I got going again ... only to get bogged down once more trying to get out of that corner and up to the NE (my last corner). BONEASH!!? Woof, that one broke me (32A: Material in some china). Made me question ARIETTAS ("is it ORIETTAS? ... or are you thinking of OPERETTAS and ORATORIOS? ... damn it!") (33D: Mozart's "Voi, che sapete" and others) And then again *all* of the short-answer clues that made up the connective tissue leading out of the SE were killing me. Kinda wanted BADE but wasn't sure. DONEE clue was too vague. No idea re: GONG (another music clue!) (37A: Subject of a smash hit?), wanted both ECU and SOU before D'OR (29A: Louis ___ (predecessor of the franc)), had FOUL before LONG. Eventually had to dip into the (empty) NE corner itself and (luckily) get EATING and REAGAN, which helped me get LUNGS (ugh) (26A: Pair of pants?) (because they are a pair ... that pants?), and I managed to work my way back through the short stuff from there. Torched the NE corner and ended up finishing up back at my first real trouble spot, which I'm calling ELKS Junction. The end. A magical, mystical journey, full of peril and wonder. But I survived the ordeal of BONEASH Pit, maneuvered past the gruesome ship WRECKS (14D: Settings for some scuba dives), powered-up with a magic CLAM CAKE (!), and completed my quest at last. Good times.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Small building wing / TUE 6-21-22 / Muscle worked by kettlebell swing informally / Ninja turtle hangout / Self-description for many an expert hobbyist / German bacteriologist who lent his name to a kind of dish

Espresso-over-ice cream desserts / WED 6-22-22 / Darkest part of a shadow / Old-fashioned shoe cover / Garden plant that opens and shuts its "mouth" / Drivers' process when two lanes of traffic become one / Italian city in a Kiss Me Kate song

Zipper merge vs. early merge

Early chewing gum ingredient / THU 6-23-22 / South Asian informally / Ancient dweller of Central Asia and Eastern Europe / Street food favorites topped with tzatziki / Supplier of iron carrots in old cartoons / Sprites but not Pepsis / Adam's apple locale

Signature scent introduced in 1968 / FRI 6-24-22 / Kind of architectural movement with the philosophy of living with less

One-named singer with the 2016 hit "Crush" / SUN 6-26-22 / City that neighbors Ann Arbor for short / Cry from a boxing coach / Partition between nostrils / South Asian crepes / Tribe whose flag features a circle of tepees on a red background

Sound at the start of gentle and giant / MON 6-27-22 / Animal relative an astonished person may claim to be / PC shortcut for copy / Pageant whose hosts have included Bob Barker, Dick Clark and Steve Harvey

Tantalizing film preview / TUES 6-28-22 / Thames-side art gallery / Thieves' stash, maybe / Telenovela, e.g. / Thematically presented

Spiral-horned antelope / WED 6-29-22 / Relative of a cor anglais / NYC venue for the Ramones and the Cramps / Cardamom-infused tea / Legendary Himalayan humanoid / Amber quaff / Troop troupe for short / Cartoonist Goldberg who drew contraptions like the Self-Operating Napkin

Warning before a gory movie scene / Fictional Christian of books and films / Some cryobank deposits / American home or a royal palace / Obsolescent music holder / P.M. preceded and succeeded by Churchill / Vampiric in appearance / Playmate of Fido and Rover

Religious exodus / FRI 7-1-22 / By all means in old parlance / It's kneaded to make naan and roti / Song featuring up to 176 verses / Classic sketch comedy show from the '60s and '70s / Modern-day Brava! / Bygone Supreme Court inits / Quit slangily

Color of the Owl and the Pussy-cat's boat / SUN 7-3-22 / Last name of the Boxcar Children in children's literature / Rathskeller decoration / Demeter's mother in myth / Anthropologist's adjective / Cocktail made with ginger beer / Brand that comes in short sleeves

Woody bartender on Cheers / MON 7-4-22 / Intense illumination, as in old movie projectors / Woman's name that looks like Roman numerals for 51 + 51 / French fashion monogram

Symbol over "i" in the Tropicana logo / TUE 7-5-22 / Swimmer's set / La Posay skin-care brand / Well-orchestrated ruses / Household gas that may require mitigation / Start of a classic breakup letter / Mischievous creature of folklore / COVID-19 slangily

Jaguar spot, for example / WED 7-6-22 / Worker with books, for short / Big hot dog?

Peruvian cocktail / THU 7-7-22 / Opening in a magic act / Pro who calls the shot / Very handsome as a beau / Many a Cook Islander / River on which Greek deities swore their oaths / Northern terminus of I-79

Material in some china / SAT 7-9-22 / Louis predecessor of the franc / Hub for Nollywood movies / Indoor rowing machine in brief / Max couture label / Zeljko 2008 Emmy winner for Damages