Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Lance Enfinger

Relative difficulty: medium-ish? corners were easier, center was harder

THEME: none

Word of the Day: FBI (CBS drama from Dick Wolf)—

FBI is an American crime drama television series created by Dick Wolf and Craig Turk that airs on CBS, where it premiered on September 25, 2018. ... The series features an ensemble cast including Missy Peregrym, Zeeko Zaki, Jeremy Sisto, Ebonée Noel, Sela Ward, Alana de la Garza, John Boyd and Katherine Renee Turner. ... The series centers on inner workings of the New York office criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This elite unit brings to bear all their talents, intellect, and technical expertise on major cases in order to keep New York and the country safe. [note: raise your hand if, like me, you dropped in CSI off of the I despite knowing damn well that it's not a Dick Wolf thing; force of habit, I guess?]

• • •

Hey hi hello, it me again, occasional indie constructor Christopher Adams, who you may recognize from places like the AVCX+, where I occasionally edit puzzles and even more rarely have them published (though I'm very proud of this very recent collaboration). Filling in today for a puzzle by Lance Enfinger, a constructor whose name I don't recognize, and it's a pretty straightforward puzzle.

I found the NW corner pretty easy to get started in, especially with such a gimme like ENYA (the clue, [Singer who owns Manderley Castle in Killiney], just oozes Irish charm). That led pretty quickly to MOMA despite the vague-ASS ([Word added as an intensifier], and it's a great linguistic usage) clue there ([N.Y.C. cultural landmark], and no, I will not apologize for the convoluted grammar of this sentence). After MOMA was UP TOP (["High-five!"], and who the heck hyphenates that???), which made the letter patterns of all the across answers easy to see, and I was (momentarily) off to the races. (A little side-eye to COSMO, not because it's a bad drink (though I'm not a fan), but because imo "Cape Codder" didn't do enough to signal the short name of the drink as the answer. But it's Saturday, so :shrug:, I guess.)

from the always wonderful xkcd

Anyway, skidded to a halt in the middle of the grid, and bounced around for a bit; found the SE corner about as easy as the NW, but even less help in getting into the middle of the grid—while I had LEAD BALLOON coming down from the top, I only had ___ CASINO coming up, with no idea of what that word could be. (And, to be honest, I don't think that clue is very helpful—my understanding of whales is that they are high rollers, and while they're often enticed by comps that might possibly potentially include a hotel, I don't think the hotel itself is the draw here.)

What did help was getting the SW corner—loved the pairing of HELL NO and FRESNO for the -NO endings (and, similarly, loved LOGES / LUGES, and even wished they were closer together in the grid). Probably my favorite clue in the grid was the one for FILET MIGNON ([Literally, "dainty slice"]), since it makes perfect sense in retrospect and is something that I'm very well acquainted with but never knew; just a wonderful light-bulb moment when I figured that out.

i couldn't not include a tom scott cooking video here

Coupled with ITCH (whose clue, [Scratch that], seemed to scream for an exclamation mark, but again, it's a Saturday) and SHOO, that was enough to get most of the triple stack. THREE-LEGGED RACE was the highlight for me; a fun entry with a cute repurposing of "tie". COUNT ONE'S LOSSES was, as almost all ONE'S phrases are, decidedly meh, and I STILL DON'T GET IT is a highlight in retrospect, though I definitely went through a few permutations of the last few words before figuring it out (I STILL...DOUBT THAT? DON'T BUY IT? DON'T SEE IT? etc.). Backing into the NE corner wasn't terribly hard, even though SLIDING DOOR could've really been any kind of door as far as I was concerned, given the clue—to me, opportunities (and the points where you make decisions about those opportunities) are just DOORS.

Overall, a fun way to spend a few minutes; I would've liked more fun stuff in the fill, but overall the vibe of this puzzle was "let's piece some things together from the clues and figure out these minipuzzles and maybe learn some things about ONO and FILET MIGNON and EELS and maybe other things that aren't food, like FRESNO" and you know what? That's fine, and I had enough of those "oh, that's a fun fact" or "oh, that's a clever clue" moments to enjoy the puzzle overall, even if there were a few things that didn't land for me.

Olio:

A few clues I really liked that I didn't mention above: FLINT ("lighter" in the clue talking about putting things on fire, not about weight), SWINGS ("tires" as in tire swings, and not getting tired), and the double usage of [Pot holder] for BLUNT and CHEF.
CRAIG (Bond between 2006 and 2021) — I am very well aware that Barry Bonds has an S in his last name, and has not played baseball in a long time, and this did not stop me from plunking in GIANT immediately.
COT (Trig function, in brief)— Yay for math content; the only way this could be better if it were the inverse tangent, rather than one over tangent (but I'm biased).
DORKS (Uncool sorts) — Can we just not with these cluing angles? Like NERDS, this is not necessarily a negative thing, so why do we have to clue it as such?
SINEAD (Irish form of Jane) — Once again, the New York Times finds a way to clue a woman's name as anything but an actual famous person with that name. They also do this with MEL(VIN), but in my experience it's far more common for female names.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jesse Goldberg

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Why? Well, Why Not?" — the actual theme is expressed by the answer WISE UP TO (115A: Become aware of ... or a hompohonic description of four letter shifts in this grid). The idea is that "Y"s move "up""two" rows, four different times. So, an answer that should have a "Y" loses a "Y" because that "Y" (in theory) has jumped up two rows to an answer that *isn't* supposed to have a "Y," but now does. So you get phrases made wacky by either by the addition or subtraction of a "Y," depending:

Theme answers:

BELLY BOTTOMS (24A: Places where some belts are tightened?)
COMBAT READ (29A: Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage," e.g.?)
CAMPY COUNSELOR (51A: Lawyer with absurdly exaggerated humor?)
SLUMBER PART (58A: Sleep phase?)
GRIMY REAPER (71A: Harvesting machine that needs cleaning?)
THREE TIMES A LAD (80A: Doctor's description of the birth of triplet sons?)
FAIRY FIGHT (96A: Battle between Tinker Bell and Princess Ozma?)
MADISON COUNT (108A: Census-taking of a Midwest capital?)

Word of the Day: CHARO (74D: One-named entertainer from Spain) —

María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza, professionally known by her stage name Charo, is a Spanish-American actress, singer, comedian, and flamenco guitarist.
Charo began playing guitar at the age of nine and trained under the famed Andrés Segovia.^[6]^[7] In 1966, she married 65-year-old bandleader Xavier Cugat and moved to the United States with him. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she became a ubiquitous presence on American television, frequently appearing as a guest star on series such as Laugh-In, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She is known for her uninhibited and exuberant manner, vague age, heavy Spanish accent and the catchphrase "cuchi-cuchi."
As a musician, Charo has performed and recorded in various styles for five decades. She released a series of disco recordings in the 1970s with Salsoul Records, most notably Dance a Little Bit Closer (1977). In 1995, her flamenco album Guitar Passion(1994) won the Female Pop Album of the Year award at the Billboard International Latin Music Conference and was named best female Latin pop album by Billboard. In an interview, she said, "Around the world I am known as a great musician. But in America I am known as the cuchi-cuchi girl. That’s okay, because cuchi-cuchi has taken me all the way to the bank." (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello. I am on vacation with friends. It is very low-key. Doing virtually nothing for a week. So I have some time to write. Next week, my vacation shifts to Los Angeles, where I will be with my extended family. Then, I will have no time, so you will be visited by many wonderful substitutes. But for now, please enjoy my lakeside write-ups. These will be somewhat shorter than usual, because, well, there's ... a lake ... and my friends ... but I promise they will be no less heartfelt ...

I do not like being away from my normal blogging set-up, which is to say, away from my printer. I like to print the puzzle out when I'm done and write comments on it. It's a pretty important part of the ritual. No printer here at the lake house, so I can't ... really *feel* or *see* the puzzle properly, or that's how it feels anyway. Bah. But the solving experience itself is largely the same, and today ... yeah, largely the same Sunday experience (wading thru wackiness), though of maybe a slightly higher conceptual caliber than usual. I was very weirded out by the revealer—that is, by its very existence, since, as far as I could tell, the title was the revealer. There was a "Why?" (added "Y") and a "Why not?" (subtracted "Y"), in alternating sequence, so ... you know, I had it. I was good. And then the revealer comes along and is like "Here's the punch line! Wait ... did you already tell them the joke?! Damn it, title! We talked about this!" The revealer is more elaborate and precise, changing the "Y" pun (from "why"s to "wise") and then adding the "two" pun. So the themers aren't just alternative between Y and Y-not; rather, the "Y"s are doing this very specific two-line leap "up." Cute. But again, the revealer felt redundant and belated, because of the title's having given everything away already. And the wackiness was your garden-variety add/subtract-a-letter wackiness. So, yeah, a pretty Sunday Sunday.

By far my favorite part of the puzzle was trying to figure out what the hell a THREE TIME(Y) SALAD was. A THREE BEAN SALAD is a very legitimate salad name, and I believe I might have tried to write THREE BEANY SALAD in there, just to make the origin phrase make *any* kind of sense. Never mind that BEANY makes no kind of sense for the actual clue. I was completely flummoxed. It wasn't until I had the whole answer from crosses that my brain finally parsed the base phrase correctly: it's the Commodores song, "Three Times A Lady"!! Never saw the "salad" hidden in there before! Speaking of hidden words, when did this whole "name hidden in this phrase"-type clue become such a big deal? ELI was hidden in a phrase just this week, and now we've got ALEC hiding in "global economy" (31D: Name hidden in "global economy"). I am extremely not a fan of this childish cluing. At least in cryptic crosswords, when they hide words and names like this, they don't just tell you outright that that's what's happening. You have to figure it out. But here, they're just like "Can you find the name in this phrase, Billy? What a good boy! So smart!" Come on. Why not just have the clue read [ALEC, just write in ALEC, it's ALEC]. At least that's not patronizing. Oh and another thing—who/what the hell is this ASTRO of which you speak? I asked everyone in the house just now, "Hey, if I asked you for a [Household robot from Amazon], what would you say?" Everyone: "... ALEXA?" And that was before I told them that yes, it had five letters, and yes, it began with "A." When I told them "no, ASTRO." They, like me, made a "what?" face. And then my friend had to tell ALEXA "shhh, it's OK ALEXA, I wasn't actually talking to you."ASTRO is the dog on "The Jetsons." That is the only non-baseball clue for ASTRO that I recognize.

Speed round:

1D: Proceeded down a lane, maybe (SWAM) — speaking of "speed," I wrote SPED here at first. No idea about any of the long Acrosses in this NW section at first, so I just threw in the first thing I could think of for all the short Downs, and despite a couple mistakes, the gambit paid off
41A: Medical gloves and N95 masks, for short (PPE) — never can quite remember this initialism or what it stands for. Personal protection ... equipment? Close. "Protective." I don't love it, not just because it reminds me of COVID. I never heard the term before COVID, and I can't see it remaining in public consciousness after COVID (unless deadly pandemics are just the new normal, which, maybe, but even then we mostly only talk about masks). Anyway, just because an abbr. is new doesn't mean that it's good. (Note: PPE has only appeared twice—both appearances were this month; I fear a PPE onslaught ... I hope not)
79A: Mythical weaver (ARACHNE) — ugh, wrote in ARIADNE—same number of letters, same first and last two letters, both of them involved with threads, of a sort (ARIADNE gave Theseus a thread so he could find his way back out of the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur with a sword, which ARIADNE also provided him. He rewarded her by abandoning her on an island. What a guy.
75D: Hand-held device used by Mr. Spock (TRICORDER) — I asked everyone in the house what a TRICORDER was and without hesitation they started shouting "Star Trek" info at me. Who are these people? (Hint: one of them is my wife). I have heard of TRICORDER but couldn't tell you what it does, or what is "TRI-" about it.
46D: Dancer Charisse of "Singin' in the Rain" (CYD) — SYD, SID, CID ... I think I tried them all, despite knowing exactly who CYD Charisse is. I forgot she was even in "Singin' in the Rain!"
36D: God associated with the moon (APOLLO)— mythologically untrue, but via the space program of that name ... yes, OK.

Note: my friend put on Brian ENO while I was finishing my write-up ... without any crossword intent! He just likes "Music for Airports" (as do I). Anyway, gotta go ENO. Bye bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Garrett Chalfin

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)

THEME: THE PRICE IS RIGHT (59A: Classic game show ... or a hint to 17-, 26- and 47-Across)— words meaning (roughly) "price" are all the way over on the "right" side of the grid (i.e. at the ends of long Across answers):

Theme answers:

WHOLE BEAN COFFEE (17A: Input for a barista's grinder)
"CARE TO ELABORATE?" (26A: "Can you say more about that?")
GUERILLA WARFARE (47A: Tactic employed by the Vietcong)

Word of the Day: Duke of SUSSEX (35A: Duke of ___, title for Prince Harry) —

Duke of Sussex is a substantive title, one of several royal dukedoms, that has been created twice in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It is a hereditary title of a specific rank of nobility in the British royal family. It takes its name from the historic county of Sussex in England.
The title was revived in 2018, when Queen Elizabeth II bestowed it on her grandson Prince Harry on 19 May 2018 upon his marriage to Meghan Markle. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one lost me right away. It's a very bad sign when a Monday puzzle can't even keep the fill clean enough for me to get out of the NW corner without me becoming distracted by its weakness, so much so that I'm inclined to stop and take a screenshot.

DYE LOT? DYE VAT? I dunno, I just know that the whole world of DYE-related things exist in my mind solely because of crosswords, why? DYE DYED DYES DYER DYERS, then DYE LOT, which I definitely learned from crosswords, and DYE VAT, which maybe I've also seen, but sigh. To be clear, I'm sighing not so much because of DYE VAT, but because it was the last straw, the answer that exhausted me before I was even 30 seconds into this thing. OAHU OTOE EEL ... it's a teeny corner and I felt like already I was just getting all the old repeaters flung at me before I'd even had time to get underway. And of course things didn't really improve. I mean, the longer answers are, of course, more interesting, but LIL ANI OSLO et al just never let up. Are we still doing LOLCAT (singular?) in the year of our lord 2022? OK. And as for the theme, well, the discovery of that was occasion for yet another deep sigh and another screenshot:

FEE ... RATE ... oh boy, grindingly mundane transactional bizness-y terms. This reminded me of all the crosswordese I have had to endure involving ads (including ADRATE and ADFEE as well as ADMAN ADSPACE etc.). The dullest things in life ... turned into a puzzle theme. OK. I mean, there's cute wordplay in the revealer (the "price" is indeed "right"), but it's really just ... at the end. If you'd actually *shifted* something right, that would seem like ... something. This is just a "like endings"-type puzzle masquerading as something slightly more elaborate. The answers themselves are mostly fine. I would enjoy seeing something like WHOLE BEAN COFFEE or "CARE TO ELABORATE" in a themeless puzzle, or under different thematic circumstances. I'm less sanguine about GUERILLA WARFARE, which is grisly on its face and is made somehow grislier by the clue's specificity about the Vietnam War. Surely there are other -FARE ending words out there that could fit the bill. The theme concept is stronger than the overall fill, but both are a bust for me today.

Some more things:

54A: Love, with "the" ("L" WORD) — this was one of the few answers that slowed me down. I could not conceive how anything "with 'the'" could possibly mean "love"—certainly not as a verb, and not as a noun either. I really think ... well, two things: 1, the clue needs some kind of qualifier, like "it's said," perhaps, because I have never called "love""the 'L' WORD"; and that leads me to 2, which is that the "L" WORD is "lesbian." Everybody knows this. They made a TV show about it and everything. Two TV shows!
49D: "The Shining" plot device that became significant when read backward (REDRUM)— "plot device?" I got this because of the "read backward" part but would never have got it without the "read backward" part because "plot device" just feels like a bizarre thing to call it. It's no more a plot device than the hotel or the labyrinth or Jack's typewriter or the axe or the elevator ... like, it's *in* the book, but ... "plot device" feels wrong. It's too specific. It's not a "technique." It's not a recognizable thing that other plots have used. It's just this freaky way that "Tony" indicates to Danny that some bad **** is going to go down. It looks cool and sounds scary when Danny says it (in "Tony"'s voice), but "device"? I dunno.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Apparently a high school student made this puzzle. That kid should be proud. And go make more puzzles.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jay Kaskel and Daniel Kantor

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: REPEAT AFTER ME (36A: Swearing-in words ... or a hint to 17-, 22-, 48- and 55-Across)— in each theme answer, a letter "repeats" after the letter string "ME" ... I think that's it

Theme answers:

FOR OLD TIMES' SAKE (17A: In remembrance of former days)
STEAMED DUMPLING (22A: Dim sum serving)
CONSUMER REPORTS (48A: Product-testing nonprofit since 1936)
"JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE" (55A: Late-night show starting in 2003)

Word of the Day: KRONA (4D: Swedish currency) —

noun
1.
the basic monetary unit of Sweden, equal to 100 öre.
2.
the basic monetary unit of Iceland, equal to 100 aurar. (google / Oxford Languages)

• • •

Hello again from Lake Michigan. The write-ups for these next three days (T, W, Th) really are going to be shorter than usual because timing ... is just ... hard when you're on vacation. Drinking and eating and socializing really horns in on your crossword time, it turns out. So I'm sitting here just after 10pm writing fairly frantically while my wife and friends are all sitting around planning tomorrow's adventures. I could get up at 4:30am like at home but LOL that is not happening on this particular vacation. There's a reason I normally have people cover for me on vacation, and cover for me they will once my vacation switches VENUEs (headed to Los Angeles on Friday). But for now, you get squibs. Is that the word? Squib? Maybe I mean "stub," I don't know. Definitely not "squab," which is some kind of small fowl, I think. Onward!

It's possible I'm missing something today, because I don't see what makes this particular concept special. A double letter following "ME," is that really it"? I thought maybe the repeated letters would spell some relevant ... something, but no. S + D + R + L, that doesn't spell anything I'm familiar with. I have no idea how high or low the difficulty bar is here. Seems like there must be a million phrases that feature "ME" and then repeated letters. Today, the repeated letters break across two words every time (that is, the first of the pair (e.g. the "R" in "CONSUMER") is the last letter in a word and the second of the pair (e.g. the "R" in "REPORTS") is the first letter of the next word. That's ... something. But it's not a particularly flashy or even noticeable thing. The concept just doesn't feel tight enough. Also, there should be no other "ME"s in a puzzle like this. If the theme is REPEAT AFTER ME, then that should hold for all "ME"s in the grid, which is why "ME"s should occur only in themers. But there are, of course, other "ME"s, like in MEATS. Eliminating all non-theme "ME"s from the grid is a way to make the whole theme seem more elegant. And it wouldn't have been hard to do. The grid is not tough to fill—in fact, the fill really could be saucier and more interesting overall, given how little pressure the theme puts on the grid. Mostly what we get is very familiar and predominantly dull stuff. It was really hard even to decide on a Word of the Day today, so uninspiring was the fill. Basically, where the fill was concerned, this puzzle OGLED OGRES. The point is, well, twofold: there should be no non-theme "ME"s and the fill in general should've been much more interesting.

There is nothing terrible about this puzzle. No big misses, nothing off-putting (except TASE, which, for me, is too strongly associated with police violence). The most jarring moment was trying to figure out 5D: Palindromic rental, getting D-D, and having no idea what that could be. I forgot that people still rent DVDs. Hell, *I* still rent DVDs, in that I still have (or recently re-got) the Netflix red-envelope snail-mail DVD/Blu-ray subscription dealie (and I love it). But cluing DVD as a rental still really threw me, since that is not how most people get their movies any more. OK, that's all, gotta go eat peaches. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Daniel Bodily

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium and then a final square that ... ??? I have no idea how people filled that one in, or what the app accepted, or really anything ...

THEME: [deeeeeep sigh] some question about Scrabble that is apparently on a multiple-choice test in some mythical world where people take multiple-choice tests about such things, what in the world...? — 16A: With 30- and 49-Across, test question to be answered by filling in the correct circle ("IN A SCRABBLE GAME / WHAT TILE IS WORTH / TWO POINTS?"); at the bottom of the grid are circled letters "A" through "E" (like multiple-choice exam answers) and every letter goes in like normal except "D" (one of two correct answers to the theme question); instead of "D" you are (apparently????) supposed to write in "SHADE" (even though you do not need "SHADE" *at all* to make sense of either the Down or the Across answer o my god this puzzle is so ill-conceived I don't even know ...

Word of the Day: EPODE (47D: Classical lyric poem) —

noun
1.
a form of lyric poem written in couplets, in which a long line is followed by a shorter one.
2.
the third section of an ancient Greek choral ode, or of one division of such an ode. (google/Oxford Languages)

• • •

Another very brief write-up today, as my Michigan vacation continues for another couple of days. It's going great, thanks for asking. Farmers markets and sand dunes and picnics and hikes and camp fires and cocktails and ice cream and everything you could hope for from Michigan. Even the horrible "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for TRUMP" flag hanging outside a house just down the road turns out to be very handy as a marker for figuring out just when our own driveway is coming up. Even the bad is magically good here in Michigan, is what I'm saying. What is not magically good is this puzzle, holy moly. Let's start with the fact that "D" is not the only tile that's worth two points in Scrabble. "G" also has that point value (if google isn't lying to me). So the very question is stupid from the get-go. The question implies (strongly) that there is just one such tile. There is not. This turns out to the be the least of the puzzle's problems, but it's still a pretty big problem. Then there's the perennial problem of having instructions and/or questions as your theme answers. Always a total vibe-killer. Not at all interesting to uncover. Especially uninteresting in this case, as the question is misleading in the first place (as we've established) and in the second, what the hell "test" would ever have such a question???? The very idea that you would take any test anywhere at any time that would have such a question is flat-out ridiculous. But the worst is that the "D""answer" is supposed to be ... not a "D" (which my software would not accept) but ... [SHADE]. LOL how in the world was I supposed to know that? True, PASTEL [SHADE] and [SHADE] TREE work for their respective clues, but (wait for it, drum roll, etc.) So Do PASTEL and TREE. All On Their Own! Actually, now that I think about it, [SHADE] TREE is at least something I've heard of, but PASTEL [Shade], yikes, no. I mean, the answer is PASTEL. [Shade] is not self-evidently missing. Hoo boy. So bad. That [Shade] / "D" is seriously the worst "rebus" square I've ever seen. And for the world's dumbest, most preposterous "test question." Even the perfect Michigan vibe in which I am currently living cannot make me warmly disposed to this monstrosity.

ODIC!? As a suffix? It's like the puzzle was trying to invent ways to be bad. And the spelling on WOOSH, ouch, my eyes (30D: Rushing sound). It's like when people write WOAH instead of the correct WHOA ... only worse. The word is WHOOSH. I use it a lot, primarily to describe the ideal Friday-solving experience (WHOOSH WHOOSH!). Merriam-Webster agrees with me and has many recent examples for you to peruse if you are so inclined. WOOSH just looks anemic and sad. Which I guess is fitting. Gotta get back to more pleasant diversions. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ella Dershowitz

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: POP-UP SHOP (60A: Temporary spot to do business ... or a hint to answering 17-, 35- and 41-Across) — the letters "SHOP" sort of ... pop up in three different longer answers (this basically means that from the "S" you go up one for your "H" then over one for your "O" and then back down to the row you started on for your "P" and the rest of the answer:

Theme answers:

BRITISH OPEN (17A: World's oldest golf tournament, familiarly)
"HERE'S HOPING" (35A: "Fingers crossed")
GRASSHOPPER (41A: After-dinner drink made with crème de menthe)

Word of the Day: Sam RAIMI (16A: Sam who directed 2022's "Doctor Strange" sequel) —

Samuel M. Raimi (/ˈreɪmi/ RAY-mee; born October 23, 1959) is an American filmmaker and actor. He is known for directing the Spider-Man trilogy (2002–2007) and the Evil Dead franchise (1981–present). He also directed the 1990 superhero film Darkman, the 1995 revisionist western The Quick and the Dead, the 1998 neo-noir crime-thriller A Simple Plan, the 2000 supernatural thriller film The Gift, the 2009 supernatural horror film Drag Me to Hell, and the 2013 Disney fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful. His films are known for their ostentatious and highly-dynamic visual style, inspired by comic books and slapstick comedy.
Raimi has also produced several successful television series, including Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-offXena: Warrior Princess. He founded the production company Renaissance Pictures in 1979 and Ghost House Pictures in 2002. His latest film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, was released on May 6, 2022; becoming his highest grossing film at the box office. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is the last of my very brief vacation write-ups. After today, a bevy of beautiful bloggers (including a few fresh faces) will take over for me for ten days or so while I'm in Los Angeles with my family. I'm back ... something like a week from Monday, I think. Michigan has been great. I will miss Michigan. Mostly I will miss my best friends, though. I could be anywhere on the planet with them and be perfectly happy.

with Shaun, my best friend of 31 years, at
Sleeping Bear Dunes in northern Michigan
(not pictured: our spouses)

This was a very easy Thursday puzzle. Much easier than yesterday's puzzle, for me, insofar as I was able to fully understand and complete it. This one has a much tighter, neater, cleaner, more elegant concept, though it wasn't obvious. Or, rather, the revealer wasn't obvious. I knew what was happening with the whole "SHOP" thing very early, but I was just guessing at the rationale until I hit the revealer, which the theme perfectly expresses. I had fun trying to guess what the revealer might be. Mainly my problem was that I didn't know if the gimmick involved "SHOP" or "HOP" (since the answer seemed to be, you know, hopping up one row and then back down again). Actually, at first I thought the theme related to premium cable TV channels, in that I thought BRITISH OPEN involved all the letters headed straight up from the "S" in "OHSNAP" (so ... BRITI and then SHO straight up and then the answer continuing on with PEN). So I thought SHO (or Showtime) had somehow popped up, and later on I'd be running into, I dunno, HBO or something.

Figured out what the hopping letters were *actually* doing with the next themer, but still couldn't decide if shopping or hopping was involved. Thought maybe that the formation of "SHOP" into a kind of box was going to lead to a revealer like "BOX STORE" but I guess those are usually called "big-box stores" (unless they actually sell boxes).

While I enjoyed wondering what the revealer was going to be, there was not any point at which I got genuinely stuck or challenged at all, which is kind of a disappointment on a Thursday. High-payoff trickery is what I want on this day of the week, and it was in short supply. The hardest answer for me was actually ESP (39A: Abbr. meaning "in particular"), which bugged me so much I actually threw it out to the house (i.e. my wife and friends) to see if they could get it so I wouldn't have to think about it any more (my non-solving friend Steve got it immediately). Why would you get cute with crosswordese like this? Why turn a repeater like ESP from innocuous to lamentable like this? You've got the fake "ability"ESP and the "Spain on an Olympic scoreboard"ESP, who exactly was clamoring for weird abbr. ESP? Beyond that, nothing very remarkable, bad or good, about the fill today. GROWTH SPURT is a winner. Everything else is just OK.

Anything need explaining? "Cuban" is a sandwich (hence HAM). PSI = "pounds per sq. in." (4D: Inflation spec), so it's the air kind of inflation, not the economic kind. UFOs are "dishes" because of their shape (14A: Dish seen around the world?). I don't know why a BOW is a [Finishing touch, so to speak]; I mean, I get the finishing touch part, but it seems literal to me. Put a bow on it. Nice final flourish. I guess it can be used metaphorically? Pretty sure it's the ribbon bow and not the bend from the waist kind of bow. Guess HYPOS are "hypotheticals." News to me. LIESL is really coming at us this week. Weird. Hoping you all have a wonderful stretch of puzzles coming your way during my absence. I won't be looking at crosswords, or puzzles in general, or anything involving a grid. Maps? Nope, too griddy, don't need 'em, won't use 'em. Gonna drive around L.A. by feel, and by shouting at other drivers and pedestrians for help with directions. It's gonna work great. See you later.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Erik Agard and Brooke Husic

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BALAYAGE (9D: Hair highlighting technique) —

Balayage (from the French, meaning 'scanning, sweeping') is a technique of free-form painting on clean, styled hair. The results are subtle, and thus more natural-looking than foiling or chunking.^[1] Balayage in its many variations is currently^[when?] trending in Hollywood.

• • •

Hello! Rafael Musa (Rafa) here, first-time Rexword blogger, and a byline you may recognize from USA Today (edited by one of today's constructors!), AVCX (co-edited by another of today's constructors!), and Universal. Excited to fill in today for a puzzle by two greats, both of whom I've had the privilege of working with!

First, a note on symmetry. Mirror symmetry is rare for themeless puzzles and allows for unusual geometries like the stack of 10s in the middle of the grid -- it's a fun shake-up for more seasoned solvers. Though it does come with a set of tradeoffs, as it's hard to avoid corners heavy with 4s and 5s that can feel less exciting to crack.

Onto the puzzle itself! I found this quite challenging for a Friday and had a solve time solidly in Saturday territory. This was mostly due to some devilish (in a good way!) cluing. Things like [Eats outside, perhaps] for STREET FOOD ("eats" being used a noun) and [Make a lead balloon?] for RACE AHEAD (think not lead the material, but having a lead -- pronounced "leed" -- in a race) really elevated the solve, but did slow me down a bit. The latter clue is particularly wonderful because both "lead" and "balloon" change meanings in the wordplay, and the surface sense is rock-solid -- absolutely stellar!

These crossword stilettos are iconic

The only real problem area for me was the left-middle. Tough clues (to me) on HARES, PEN, ACES, CHAPS (which was new to me in that context), as well as vague clue on PIES (there are so many holidays in so many different cultures and places! And so many foods are round!) had me floundering for a while but eventually I got there. I desperately wanted HEN for the swan, and "leporids" didn't mean anything to me. Perhaps this puzzle would have been better to run on a Saturday? Or with a more straightforward clue for one of those entries?

I did wish there was a tad more zing in the long fill, and that there were more longer slots. Here the mirror symmetry is hard to work with, as it can be harder to pack in more longer slots with its constraints. But still, stuff like BALAYAGE, HASHTAGS, STREETFOOD, WEIGHTEDBLANKET, STILETTOS, POWERYOGA, REDTAPEare all delightful. All the short fill is also great -- not a piece of crosswordese in sight.

I've also noticed a move toward including mini-themes and motifs in themeless puzzles at the NYT. Though there's of course no "correct" take on this, I'm personally not a huge fan of this shift! We have 5 days a week of themed puzzles already, don't mess with my sacred themeless weekend!! Me being a themeless purist aside, I didn't think the juice was quite worth the squeeze in the paired answers here. WEIGHTED BLANKET is outstanding, but I had never heard of HEAVY SECURITY as a standalone phrase, and it doesn't Google super well. But it's possible HEAVY SECURITY is more of a thing than I'm making it out to be!

All in all, a fun (and challenging!) Friday puzzle that stood out for its great fresh clues.

Bullets:

THEY SAY [Word is...] — At first I couldn't decide whether I liked this or it felt partially, but looking back at it I'm a big fan of its conversational vibe
GNATS [Cloud often seen in the summer] — Another fun clue -- nice way to elevate a familiar entry
ETTA [Blues guitarist Baker] — I loved seeing a new (to me) ETTA in this clue for another familiar entry
CRAIG [Name that anagrams to something you might smoke] — I feel like there's a lot of controversy about these name clues that don't reference a specific person. I personally love them! And in this tricky corner, I appreciated the easier angle.

I'll be back next week with another post!

[Follow Rafa on Twitter]

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Medium (mostly)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: EDSELS (41D: Group with the 1961 hit "Rama Lama Ding Dong," with "the") —

The Edsels were an American doo-wop group active during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name of the group was originally The Essos, after the oil company (!!!), but was changed to match the new Ford automobile, the Edsel. They recorded over 25 songs and had multiple performances on Dick Clark's American Bandstand.

Today the group is known almost exclusively for "Rama Lama Ding Dong," written by lead singer George "Wydell" Jones, Jr. The song was recorded in 1957 and released, under the erroneous title "Lama Rama Ding Dong," in 1958. It did not become popular until 1961, after a disc jockey in New York City began to play it as a segue from the Marcels' doo-wop version of "Blue Moon." (wikipedia)

• • •

Hi hi, everyone. Amy Nelson here, another first-time Rexword contributor, and I'm excited to be filling in today.

Solving this puzzle was an emphatically fine experience. An okay time was had by all. Throughout, the grid largely contained what felt to me like fresh fill, relatively speaking (if nothing else, LIESL got another day off, bless her heart). There was also minimal crosswordese to tangle with. But, at the same time, I wouldn't so much call this a particularly entertaining puzzle. And Byron Walden's previous NYT puzzles have, in my experience, been generally delightful solving events (if at times maddeningly challenging), so my expectations were perhaps unfairly high. That said, I'll go ahead and call in some of the hard PASSes I had to dole out in this one.

First off, DESK PERSON??? I just... I can't with it. Nor do I want to with it. DESK PERSON is the kind of fill that seems to have been designed specifically to torpedo an otherwise potentially lively puzzle. The cluing PRETTY straightforwardly signaled (in what for me didn't read in a very buzzy way) that the answer was going to be a job involving, well, something other than standing. (I initially just wrote "sitting" but I guess there are also jobs where you're, like, lying down... a lot? Like... a mechanic? Is there such a thing as a professional sleeper? That would be a great job. I would like to be that when I grow up please.) But really, DESK PERSON? I could honestly rant about this one answer for my entire post, but y'all get it. I don't want to become a one-note BORE straight out of the gate.

Other "nope" moments for me included THE NFL (get out of my crossword if you're already taking up this much real estate in my daily news pls & thx), JUICE BAR (just... blah), and BUBBA, or, more specifically, the arguably stale (and a lot less lighthearted in the #MeToo era) cluing for BUBBA [27A: Nickname for Bill Clinton]. Vanderpump Rules watchers, assemble! (IYKYK.)

It would also, I think, offend exactly no one if the NYT would just give SSN and OLE a rest already, even if only a temporary one. I know, I know, pigs sooner flying, etc. I can at least appreciate the unexpected cluing for OLE [44A: "Still the Same ___ Me" (George Jones album)] this time around. But E-TAIL can fully go ahead and get laid out on a pyre and be set on fire and pushed out to sea and maybe it'll eventually be like it was never even here.

High points, and there were a few, included JUMP FOR JOY [5A: Jubilate] (clue-into-answer alliteration? and with J's, no less? *chef's kiss*) and PÈRE [25A: ___ Noël], but the Christmas season is one of my favorite things in life, so maybe I'm biased. I also really liked the clever cluing for MEDIUMS [7D: Dead ringers?] and FALL ISSUE [37A: It's bound to run in the third quarter]. (Full disclosure: I 100% spent the bulk of today's solving time forgetting that baseball doesn't do "quarters" and consequently trying to come up with the name of whatever baseball position it would be that would, idk, be doing this running at this part of the baseball game?).

This particular Père Noël is decidedly *not* a high point.

Additionally, with IUD seemingly have been made to shoulder the entire [26A: Form of birth control] cluing brunt for *checks watch* ever, VASECTOMY shows up here as both flashier, more interesting fill as well as an example of topical fill that isn't a) so blandly on the nose, like THE NFL, or b) connotative of something especially, as Rex put it on Thursday in reference to TASE, violently off-putting.

Yet even with the occasional amusements interspersed throughout the grid, it felt like the puzzle as a whole was sort of weighed down by a larger proportion of insipid answers and/or cluing. In my opinion, the down answers suffered more from this than the across ones did, as when the lineup of two-word down answers in the NE corner (JUICE BAR OSCAR BID YES DEAR) spilled over into the SW corner (CHAT LINE LEFT ENDS) before essentially petering out into similarly unremarkable shorter fill (TROOPED BATTENS FULLER). I mean, regardless of whether or not it lands for you personally, at least BIDENOMICS has unfamiliarity/newness working for it.

On the other hand, ENDOWMENTS will likely never be the thing that successfully elevates a puzzle, and PUTS ON HOLD isn't bringing much to the [43A: Tables] either. Elsewhere, instances of more compelling fill (SHE BOP SONORA, for example) are, to some extent, diminished, whether it be by irksome parallel answers, like ULTRAS, or by crosses with a watering-down effect, like BORE ORAL PASS. These occurrences of, for lack of a better way of describing it, canceling-out exacerbate this puzzle's kind of global "meh" quality, resulting in the shining bits of fill being too often overshadowed.

To wrap up, I'd say that this week's Saturday issue was somewhat easier than others we've seen in recent weeks. However, there were some answers that I was only able to get because I knew enough of the crossing fill (GUSTAV, ROLLO, DEL SARTO, BOK). Unsurprisingly, all are names; indeed, all are names that, with the exception of DEL SARTO, could have been clued in more engaging ways. Why you'd forgo the chance to involve a Viking in your puzzle is, frankly, a question I don't care to know the answer to.

This is... one of the stranger music videos I've seen in a while? If you have ~5 minutes, I'd definitely recommend giving it a watch. And if you've got an hour to spare, you can watch it twelve times.

Variety acts:

29A: Make sound (REPAIR) — Not, in fact, as in: (transitive) "make" [an] "audible sound." Yeah... idk, -PEAL ended up as guess fill early on for some reason after I inexplicably ran with this incorrect interpretation of the clue, and it took ages to identify it as the root of that problem area.
36A: A whole bunch (RAFTS) — I was today years old when I first heard about this meaning of this word. Is that just by random chance? Or has every other person encountered this sense of "raft" before? (In my defense, until last year, I'd spent the better part of the past decade as a medieval lit grad student. And the OED clocks this meaning of "raft" as entering the language in the 1820s, i.e., basically at least four centuries too late for me to have been able to notice it. Yep. Sticking to that excuse.)
10D: Excited reaction at trivia night (OH OH) — I'm sorry, but two disembodied OHs do not an excited reaction make. This answer seems to be popping up frequently-ish lately, clued in various iterations, though perhaps most commonly in a classroom, "call on me" type context. Which, actually, at least makes sense, whereas I've never been to a trivia night that entailed having to be called on in order to answer.

Signed, Amy (writing from the hotel room I moved into after the first hotel room was already occupied by ants, a SITCH that did not seem to faze the front DESK PERSON like, at all, which of course isn't worrisome in the least)

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: TINA LABADIE

Relative difficulty: EASY-MEDIUM (I imagine this will vary widely today, based on your proper noun knowledge)

THEME: LETTERPLAY— Theme answers feature multiple letters or repeating patterns of letters that are cross-referenced as "hints" in other clues in the grid.

Theme answers:

AT AN ANGLE (25A: Not true?)

TRIPLE A (68A: Top credit rating ... or a hint to 25-Across)

UNIQUE USER (27A: Visitor to a website, in analytics lingo)

DOUBLE U (71A: 23rd in a series ... or a hint to 27-Across)

SAM ADAMS (42A: Beer named for a founding father)

TWO AM (52A: D.S.T. starting time ... or a hint to 42-Across)

HUSH HUSH (97A: Secretive)

FOUR H (90A: Club for farm kids ... or a hint to 97-Across)

VOODOO DOLL (115A: Spelling aid?)

FIVE-O (89A: Cops ... or a hint to 115-Across)

OIN OIN ONE (118A: Baseball announcer's call on a home run. As in "Going, Going, Gone," because...)

ZERO G (54A: Weightlessness ... or a hint to 118-Across).

Word of the Day: SMOLT (100D: Young Salmon) —

Smolt may refer to:
a juvenile salmon, having reached the stage of adulthood, that is ready to migrate to sea for the first time.
Smolt (Linux), a project aimed at hardware information collection

• • •

Hello once again! It's Eli Selzer, filling in for Rex as he vacations (checks Twitter) in my home town! Excited to be tackling a Sunday, though I was a little nervous because Friday and Saturday knocked me out this week. I enjoyed both puzzles and am a fan of all the constructors, and I'm not even sure they were actually HARD, but my times were well above average on both. Turns out I needn't have worried; this one played decidedly easier for me.

It looks like this is the NYT debut for Tina Labadie, so congratulations! I don't recognize the name from any other outlets, but it's always refreshing to see a non-male name on the byline (seriously, NYT, check out the amazing constructors for other puzzles and ask yourself why your gender disparity is still so stark). Ok, rant over, on to the puzzle!

So. The theme. It's perfectly fine conceptually, but I have a couple of issues. First, DOUBLE U looks ugly. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I've never seen the letter W written out that way. On top of that, the letter U appears THREE TIMES in UNIQUE USER. I suppose it means that the answer has two words that both start with the letter U, but it seriously bumps for me. And I'm not sure an analytics based clue is interesting enough to justify the stretch.

Second, the ZERO G / OIN OIN ONE pairing just doesn't fit the pattern. None of the other themers require you to remove letters or create a nonsense phrase to make them work. Maybe it was intended to be a bit of a "gotcha" on the last theme entry, but to me it feels less like a trick and more like cheating. If there had been other patterns that worked like this (or even if ALL of them were this style), I might have enjoyed it more. As it is, all I can see in 118A is "Oi Noi," making me think of Lily Sullivan's fake Australian accent on Comedy Bang Bang. (Seriously, say "Oh no" like this; it's fun!)

The other issue with the theme is that it's so dense the rest of the puzzle never really goes anywhere. I'm really struggling to find fill that stands out to me. There's a lot of history/geography TRIVIA (125A: "Jeopardy!" fodder) that wasn't really in my wheelhouse: IBADAN, SAUD, SIDRA. Nothing that slowed me down, just not things that came to mind readily. That plural ETNAS isn't doing the puzzle any favors, and I doubt many people are excited about LIMPID. I've definitely had lag on video calls, but I don't know that I've ever seen it referred to as TIME LAG. I can find the clued definition for STOW IT (though it's not one I've ever used), but Google strongly favors storage options for the phrase.

All right, I don't want this to be too much of a downer; let's find some positives!

Bullets:

7D: The "you" of the song lyric "I'm begging of you, please don't take my man"(JOLENE) — Like I need an excuse to listen to Jolene.

3D: Jazz singer born Eunice Kathleen Waymon (NINA SIMONE) — See Jolene comment above.

80D: The art of music? (ALBUM COVER)— I like the clue, but the answer is so generic that all I can think of is this:

104D: Hit 1979 musical in which a character's mistress is one of the main roles (EVITA)— I'm not sure I'd call Peron's Mistress a MAIN character, but she's certainly featured. Anyway, I'm a musical theater guy, and I like Evita.

Speaking of TRIVIAand its clue, I recently auditioned for Jeopardy (again) and am back in the contestant pool for the fifth time. Maybe they'll actually call this time? Fingers crossed!

All right, it's 100 degrees outside and I need a(nother) cocktail. Thanks to Rex for letting me sub in, and thanks to all the other bloggers taking part. Fun as always, and I'll see you all next time!

Signed Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of Crossworld

[Follow Eli Selzer on Twitter]

Hello, everyone! It’s Clare filling in for Rex. Hope everyone had a great month of July and found ways to stay nice and cool. D.C. has been 90-plus degrees and humid basically every day, which is… fun…. I played in a charity kickball tournament yesterday and felt like I was going to die of heat stroke (that’s only a slight exaggeration), and on top of that, I’m super sore today! Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom around here because the Premier League was back this weekend! And because my cousins and I had a “Lord of the Rings” movie marathon yesterday (extended-cut versions), which took about 14 hours and went until the wee hours of the morning.

Anywho, on to the puzzle!

Constructor: Kathy Lowden

Relative difficulty:Easy

THEME:MAKEUP (50D: Reconcile after a quarrel … … or a hint to the starts of 17-, 25-, 52- and 61-Across) — The first word of each theme answer is an item of makeup.

Theme answers:

BLUSH WINES (17A: Pale pink vineyard offerings)
SHADOW BOX (25A Practice punches with an imaginary opponent)
POWDER KEG (52A: Barrel of explosive stuff, or a situation that's ready to blow)
LINER NOTES (61A: Writings on an album sleeve or jewel case insert)

Word of the Day:SALK (40D: Vaccine pioneer Jonas)) —

Jonas Edward Salk (October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine. In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself toward developing a vaccine against polio. (Wiki)

• • •

This was one of the easier Mondays I’ve done in a while. The MAKEUP theme was nice, and I felt I had a slight leg up as someone who does indeed wear MAKEUP. Now, the theme doesn’t entirely work because, well, I’ve only ever referred to it (or heard it referred to) as “eye shadow,” not just SHADOW, or LINER— it would be “lip liner” or “eyeliner” or something like that. I also thought the revealer was in a slightly weird place at 50D. Usually, if the theme is just a single word, it’ll be the last across or maybe the last down; but the second-to-last down?

In all, I felt the puzzle was pleasant. The fill was a bit uninspired, but it also wasn’t bad. The solve went so quickly that I felt like I didn’t even have time to process some of the clues/answers, and it’s only when I went back that I developed both an appreciation for some answers and a meh feeling for others. On that note, I didn’t like ART I (26D) or IF I (62D). A SEC (21A) is also pretty ugly. 38D: "The way I see it," to texters could’ve been IMHO or just “imo.” There were both ODE (63D: Poem of praise) and ODD (44A: Quirky) in the puzzle. A lot of it felt crosswordese-y (crossword-easy?). There was also a strong religious current, with PRIEST (6D: One officiating at communion or hearing confession), DEACON (27D: Subordinate of a 6-Down), VESPER (34D: Evening prayer), and LOT (61D: Biblical fellow with a salty wife?) all in the puzzle.

From a tweet, I was clued into the fact that LAPP (37D: Reindeer herder of Scandinavia) is considered a slur by some people. A Wikipedia entry says, “The Sámi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by the Sámi, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e.g. Northern Sámi Sápmi. Their traditional languages are the Sámi languages, which are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family.” I couldn’t find a ton of information about this issue, but because the people seem to not want to be referred to in this way, I wish this hadn’t been in the puzzle.

I liked SNOW SUIT (39D), POWDER KEG (52A), and AMNESIAC (42A), in particular, which just felt off the beaten path for a crossword. For 9D: Atlanta-based TV channel, I originally put TNT, which is also based in Atlanta, but when I got to 13D: Explosive stuff, in brief and knew the answer for that one was TNT, I realized I must’ve made an error at 9D. I do know TNT and TBS are related, because NBA analysts move between the sets. (And, yes, Ernie Johnson is the MVP of both.)

Got nothing much else to say about the puzzle! I’ll be back again tomorrow, and I hope everyone has a great Monday.

Misc.:

The only thing I could think of when I saw POWDER KEG was the line in Hamilton in the song “Right Hand Man”: “We are a powder keg about to explode.” So that song will be stuck in my head for a while now.
I liked seeing STIR (30A) quite close to VESPER (34D). They’re seemingly unrelated, but in “Casino Royale” Ian Fleming invented the Vesper martini, named after the main female character in the novel. So it felt fitting to have this drink right next to the Bond clue/answer about martinis at 30A, even if the placement wasn’t intentional.
48A: Metrical foot in poetry as IAMB takes me back to 12th grade English class where I had to learn about poetry and rhyme schemes and write my own poems — and ugh. I did not enjoy that segment of class.
I wish I could’ve eaten the NAAN (16A) from our Indian food order last night, but I’m newly gluten-free because it seems I have a gluten allergy that’s been affecting my breathing😞😞😞 Oh, well.

Signed, Clare Carroll, someone who knows Liverpool is going to finish at the top of the table this season

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hello again, it’s Clare — yes, again! — for this Tuesday puzzle. Long time, no talk! I already gave my update yesterday, and there hasn’t been much in the way of sports in the past 24-ish hours, so let’s just dive right in, shall we?

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty:Challenging (for a Tuesday)

THEME:DAVID and GOLIATH — The puzzle grid is a slingshot and a stone representing the battle between DAVID and GOLIATH.

Theme answers:

GOLIATH (17A: One known for living large and getting stoned?)
VALLEY OF ELAH (20D: Biblical site for the battle depicted in this puzzle)
BOOK OF SAMUEL (22D: Hebrew Bible text with the story depicted in this puzzle)
DAVID (56A: Classic underdog)

Word of the Day:JORGE (25D: Argentine writer ___ Luis Borges) —

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories connected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and influenced the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature. His late poems converse with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. (Wiki)

• • •

This puzzle was architecturally very impressive but felt like a slog for me, as I didn’t know some of the crucial acrosses/downs and apparently need to brush up on my biblical knowledge. I definitely could have seen this puzzle appearing later in the week. Or maybe this one was just firmly off my wavelength.

I thought the theme itself was alright, though two puzzles in a row that are heavy on religious themes feels overdone; the grid created some nice symmetry and feels inventive. When I first saw the grid, I expected some sort of football theme, with what looks very much to me like a goal post there in the middle of the puzzle. (In fact, there are two football-related clues, at 44A: Issue for a punter or field goal kicker and 58A: Big Ten addition announced in 2022). But, alas, the puzzle grid is depicting a slingshot with a very cute little stone after 19A and before 21A.

I was a bit confused while I was solving about what the theme actually was. I got down to 56A as DAVID and thought, “This is really a lot of biblical stuff. But that’s pretty clever to have both DAVID and GOLIATH in the puzzle.” I certainly know the story of DAVID and GOLIATH, but I did not remember where it took place (even though I’ve actually been there and thrown a stone myself) or in what book of the bible the story was told. Also, I found it a little weird that neither 2D: Twin in Genesis (ESAU) nor 43D: Makeup of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem (ESSAYS) related to the theme of David and Goliath, even though both also are tied to the Bible.

I found the NE corner, in particular, to be challenging. I didn’t know the tennis player Tony TRABERT (21A: Tony ___, tennis champ of the 1950s), unfortunately, which was kind of the way into this section. I also didn’t remember CRATCHIT (7D: Scrooge's clerk), and I had to rack my brain for SHANTY TOWNS (14D: Hoovervilles during the Great Depression, e.g.) from a section back in APUSH in high school. Add in that I put “Elle” instead of DIOR for 10D: Big name in French fashion and that two clues play off each other (9A: Premium subscriptions often remove them and 9D: Tool that's a homophone of 9-Across), and it was a recipe for disaster for me in that section.

On another note… what in the world is 13D: Flatters in order to boost self-esteem?! EGO MASSAGES just looks gross, first of all, and I also don’t think it’s a verb used in that way?? Like, sure, I’ve heard of massaging someone’s ego. But EGO MASSAGES? No, thank you. Seriously, imagine going around like, “Oh, I’m just going to go EGO MASSAGE someone today.” (?!) The puzzle clearly needed the “s” at the end of “ego massage” to make the puzzle work, but EGO MASSAGES can’t possibly be a verb. Wow, that was a long rant; apparently it really bothered me.

Another thing that really bothered me is Y’KNOW (35A: "Catch my drift?"), which is unbearably ugly. I seriously stared at that answer and that “y” next to the “k” and was convinced I had something wrong. That was the last answer I put in, and I expected to see an error message and instead got the little signal saying I’d completed the puzzle. I’ve seen — and used — both “you know” and “ya know.” But Y'KNOW? Uh uh.

There was a weird amount of slang in this puzzle with GOT YA (39A: April Fools' exclamation), Y’KNOW (35A), ISH (28A: Sorta), LOTSA (31D: Many, informally), and LETS (64A: "Sure … why not!"), and some of it felt too forced. “Gotcha” feels much more natural to me than GOT YA. It’s called a gotcha. And, LOTSA could easily have been “loads” or “lotta.”

Now for the good: 44D: Wrong thing to say when you're actually lying? as LAYING is quite a clever clue/answer. The clue for GOLIATH (17A: One known for living large and getting stoned?) is an instant favorite clue. I also liked 41A: EN VOGUE (Fashionable, in France) a lot. And 18A: Monkey business? as ZOO amused me.

Also, this is apparently Bruce Haight’s 60th puzzle, which is quite an accomplishment!

And that’s all I’ve got! (Sorry for all the ranting. I might still be a tad tired from my epic “Lord of the Rings” marathon.)

Misc.:

With 44A as LAYING, I couldn’t help but think my dad would really appreciate this one. In a song (“All I Wanna Do” by Sugarland) that I used to sing out loud all the time, there’s a line, “Let’s just lay here and be lazy,” and every single time he would loudly say “lie” over the singing. It happened so frequently that I now can’t sing along with the song without saying “lie” myself.
When I saw 12A: __ Today, I seriously couldn’t think of anything except for the BTS song “Not Today.” And now I have this amazing song stuck in my head, so I’ll link it here so you all can have that as an earworm, too.

When I saw 23A: Espresso diluted with hot water as AMERICANO, I remembered the time while working my first job as a server and someone ordered an AMERICANO. I was bewildered (not being a coffee drinker at all) but nodded like I knew what the person was referring to and immediately asked someone else on staff. Never forgot what it was after that.
I put JORGE Luis Borges (25D) as the word of the day, and he seems like he was a fascinating guy. My dad actually met him in college, when Borges dropped in to speak about “Don Quixote,” his favorite book, at a seminar my dad was taking.
With 30D: Ramp taken by a skier, I couldn’t help but think the most apt answer would be a magic carpet (which took you from the bottom of the little hill to the top of it when you’re skiing at three years old). Apparently, though, this clue related to ski jumping and the technical term INRUN. (I was a ski racer, not a ski jumper, so this was a new term for me.)
I’d say yay for ONELS (13A: 1st-yr. law students), though this plural form is a tad strange to see. Still, I got this one nice and quickly!

Hope everyone has a great August!

Signed, Clare Carroll, who will now leave you alone for a few weeks

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Karen Lurie

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:34)

THEME: WELL, ACTUALLY — Nitpicker's lead-in... or, an answer to:

Theme answers:

Drink from a spring-- MINERAL WATER (as in, "Actually, I'd like well water!")
Steakhouse option-- MEDIUM RARE (as in, "Actually, I'd like it cooked well!")
Queasy, perhaps-- FEELING ILL (as in, "Actually, I'm feeling well!")

• • •

Word of the Day: EUDORA (Welty with a Pulitzer) —

Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer, who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South.

Heyyyy friendos, it's your pal Malaika subbing in for the ephemeral Rex. Sometimes y'all call me "adorable" and sometimes y'all call me "thoughtless," so we'll see what you think today! (Honestly, I think those are kinda the same thing.) I just played an incredibly good game of volleyball and I'm high off endorphins and adrenaline and serotonin and etc. I want to sprint laps around my block like a small child who was allowed to have both cake and ice cream at their birthday party but instead I will write this blog post!!!! ONWARDS!

I breezed through this puzzle (I average about ~15mins on a Wednesday, and this one I solved on my phone on the train!), and had all three of the theme answers before I reached the revealer, and zero guesses as to what it could be. It took a second for it to click-- It's not that "nitpicker" is the wrong term (it's not!), it's just not the term I most associate with "Well, actually..."

You know how people will usually discuss the plusses and minuses of something? Or the highs and lows? I've been toying with listing the "zings" and "dings." Let me know in the comments if you're in.

Zings: We get three different meanings of the word WELL. The revealer is fun and modern, and ties things together with a good "Oh!!" moment. That's only two things but the last zing is just... I really liked this theme!! Which counts for like ten more zings because really that's all that matters when you solve your little crossword on your little train ride home from your little volleyball game.

Dings: My main ding is the grid layout. I am picky pick picky about grid shapes, and I am not a fan of groups of three three-letter words in the corners-- this puzzle has that in all four corners, and two of them were closed off. And, while there was some nice mid-length stuff like WINGMAN and TWIRLED and GAYDAR (with that clue!!! [Sense of orientation?]), there were no (non-theme answers) that were longer than seven letters.

I totally get that building a grid around a revealer that's twelve letters is tough, but I wonder if just removing that block after LSU could have worked. Or either of these shapes? (I'm not putting in any effort to fill this, so maybe they're impossible.)

Bullets:

[Tall, slender hound] for SALUKI — This is a new term for me. The dog resembles a greyhound with fluffier ears.
Production company that's its founder's name spelled backwards]for OPRAH — I like that this went a more modern angle than the Marx Brothers :)
I have not heard of OXY (Big name in acne medication) or DMX (First musician to have his first five albums debut at #1) and I feel like in a corner this small and closed off they were just added to get the letter X in there?

xoxo Malaika

P.S. I'll close with an unrelated tip from when I started constructing crosswords: I thought the hardest part of making a puzzle was arranging the black squares, so I would take themes from old NYT puzzles, lay them out in a grid, and then compare my layout to the original! It was kind of like Puzzle Push-ups. A good exercise, if you will.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Medium, with an oversized grid (31:23)

THEME: TRANSLATED — Two word phrases, where the first word's translation is the second word

Theme answers:

[Faultless, biblically]-- WITHOUT SIN ("Sin" means "without" in Spanish)
[Substitute on TV]-- GUEST HOST ("Host" means "guest" in Czech)
[What's fatefully "cast" in a quote attributed to Julius Caesar]-- THE DIE ("Die" means "the" in German)
[Bakery container]-- BREAD PAN ("Pan" means "bread" in Spanish)
[Outspoken agitator]-- FIRE BRAND ("Brand" means "fire" in Dutch)

Word of the Day: CABIN (The Ingalls' family's little house on the prairie, e.g.) —

Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the most influential advocates of the American libertarian movement.

• • •

Hey beautiful commenters, I'm back for Malaika MWednesday Part 2. (Known to fans as "Thursday.") People seemed to like my "zings" and "dings" yesterday and I liked them too!! So I'll keep that jargon. If you'd like to read this while listening to what I listened to as I wrote it, here is Renee Rapp singing with the voice of an absolute angel.

Renee, I would die for you

My first ding is ARTOO. Upon filling this in, I audibly screeched. I know it was audible because my younger sister was hanging out with me and she said "Is everything okay?" I hate this fill. I hate this fill so much that I feel the need to put in capital letters that I HATE THIS FILL. It is worse than APSE and OLIO which are at least words. It might even be worse than NFLERS. Are you there, Will Shortz? It's me, Malaika. Please stop using this entry.

Zing time: This theme!! Wow!!!!! I once played around with a theme where one word of an all-English phrase could be translated to a different (e.g. PAINSTAKING --> Stabbing someone with a baguette) but I quickly gave up. This is soooo much more impressive than that, because there's no randomness. Is this a well-known phenomenon, like Kangaroo Words? Does a list of these exist that everyone except me has heard of? Or did the constructor have to just.... think of them? I don't even know where I'd start.

Did y'all mind that there were several across answers (ENLISTEE, MATHLETE, WET NOSES, ADORABLE) that seemed long enough to be theme material? That didn't bother me at all because of how the NYT site will highlight the theme answers. (In fact, it was a zing.) But I know some people solve on paper or with other programs, and it can be hard to keep track of them.

My last ding was the sheer amount of things I don't know. But that's not a ding on whether the puzzle was good, that's just about whether the puzzle was a fun solve for me personally. Things like LAIC [[*steels self for the four commenters that will say "If you are going to solve crosswords, young lady, then you had better get used to the word LAIC!!!!"*]] and REDD and THEO and ODOWD and even BUGBEAR were totally new to me. Plus a tonnnn of words that I learned from puzzles, like ATARI and SOLI and MOT and ADES and ALITO. (And the aforementioned ARTOO.) It would have felt like a slog had I not been having so much fun with the theme.

Bullets:

[High ball?] for ORB — Does "orb" mean space? Isn't orb just any sphere?
[The Congressional Black Caucus, for one] for BLOC — I am not a podcast person, but I did really enjoy this podcast that was about (among many things) how the politician Mia Love initially joined the CBC to "infiltrate" it, but ultimately found friends and allies there.
A TAWA is a cast iron skillet used to cook flatbreads like roti or paratha. I'd never heard this word-- even though my family is Indian, we call this a comal, which is the Spanish word for a similar type of pan.
I would have loved for a block to be added at square 69 so we could get a BOXCAR Children clue. I must have read fifty of these books when I was younger.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

P.S. Here is more free constructing rambling from me: When I lay out a grid, I try really, really hard to never have a patch of white that's 5x5 because it's surprisingly difficult to fill elegantly. Ryan McCarty makes grids with wide-open centers that he calls "chasms"-- I don't know that he has any type of quantitative criteria for what counts, but for me, when the center 5x5 section of a grid is all white, that's A Chasm™. It was so wild to see those sections in the corners of today's puzzle-- that means you have to fill that chunky space twice! (Those corners were the last two sections that I solved.)

P.P.S. [[ DON'T read this if you are going to be mean!! ]] This puzzle named seventeen males and three women. That's 15% women, which is on par with the percentage of NYT Thursday puzzles that have been published by women. These are numbers, please do not be mean to me for typing out some numbers.

Males: MATT Damon, MATT Bomer, Frankenstein, Threepio, ARTOO D2, Julius Caesar, BERT, Chris REDD,OTTO, H.P. Lovecraft, ALITO, Romeo, THEO Huxtable, Chris ODOWD, OPIE, Bernie Sanders, ROBIN

Women: Frida Kahlo, Juliet, Elizabeth Warren

Constructor: Trent Evans

Relative difficulty: This felt impossibly hard, but looking at my time (20:27) it was only medium hard

THEME: Themeless

Word of the Day: PHASER (Fictional weapon of the 23rd century) —

Phasers are common and versatile phased array pulsed energy projectile weapons, first seen in the original Star Trek series and later in almost all subsequent films and television spin-offs. Phasers range in size from small arms to starship-mounted weaponry. Though they seem to discharge in a continuous "beam", close observation reveals that phasers actually discharge a stream of pulsed energy projectiles into the target.

• • •

Hey pals! This is your last day of Malaika, or as I like to call it, Malaika MWednesday: Part 3. After this you will be free of my "horrible" and "inane" reviews. (For one month. Then I will be back rambling about "systemic sexism" and "I don't know pop culture references from the 60s" and other Gen Z bullshit.) Today's random musical theater YouTube video is Eva. Sigh. I always end up at Eva.

A Friday! I always prefer a Friday to err on the side of "too easy" and this one did not. (Actually, I always prefer for all puzzles to err on the side of "too easy.") One of my things is that if I'm not enjoying a puzzle, I'll simply stop solving it. (Same with books or movies that I'm not enjoying.) If I were not reviewing this puzzle I would have stopped after five minutes, but I'm glad I stuck it out. I didn't love the overall cluing vibe (which seemed to be "hard and vague") but looking over the fill now that I'm done, there's sooo much good stuff in here.

Both of the stacks are truly flawless, at least going across. Six stunning answers. (The downs... hmm. ADIA.... PIU.... LEONI.... Hmmm......) I wish they had been clued in a way that was a little more.... Idk, Friday! Lively and light and sparkly and fun! Reducing SPACE CAMP-- such an evocative phrase-- to geography-based trivia is just not my idea of a Friday clue. I would have preferred something as cliche and easy and technically inaccurate as [Summer destination that's out of this world].

TINCAN is another example of that-- it's a fun phrase that I'm sure conjures up an image in your mind. Lovely consonance as well. And instead we get.... Military trivia. Not my wheelhouse! I would have clued this as [Communication device for Calvin and Hobbes*, occasionally].

Other high parts were LIVE TWEET (*chef's kiss*) and I WONT ASK, which I literally said tonight at dinner, and FAKE TAN and BESTIES (... which I also said at dinner tonight). Low parts for me were MARSALIS (a name I'm unfamiliar with) and AMSCRAYS and ECT. Can someone explain NAVE for [Basilica section] please?

Oh, I guess I should say "ACED IT and YOU NAILED IT have IT crossing at the I" so there we go. I said it. It's done.

Bullets:

Have you ever had falafel made from FAVA beans? I've only had the chickpea variety.
The clue for MORNING RITUAL slowed me down a lot because I shower and solve the crossword at night! I love to be clean when I get into bed, and my curls do better drying overnight.
The first answer I put in was [Position in an array, to a computer scientist]. A gimme! I guess my nit is that I would have said "programmer" instead of "computer scientist."
I love mathematical PARADOXes. My favorite changes, but right now it's Russell's-- a classic.
KNEX was another gimme for me... Did y'all put "Lego" first? (I had the X from above which made it easy.) I had tons of these as a kid.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

*I read enough C&H when I was younger that through early college I had every strip memorized. (This skill is now, alas, rusty.) A friend didn't believe me and I told him to pick a random strip, describe the first panel to me, and I would complete the rest. He picked this one, and indeed, I nailed (heh) it, and he literally was speechless.

Also, this comic is 10x funnier now that WAP actually means something.

Constructor: John Westwig

Relative difficulty: Easy (13:10, more of a typical Friday time for me)

THEME: THEME— none

Word of the Day: ZAXBY'S (Southern fast-food chain with "Zalads" and "Zappetizers") —

Zaxby's is an American chain of fast casual restaurants offering chicken wings, chicken fingers, sandwiches, and salads. The chain operates primarily in the Southern United States and has more than 900 locations. Most Zaxby's restaurants are owned by franchisees, but 123 locations are owned by Zaxby company.^[1]

• • •

Hello hello, it's Rafa here again filling in for Rex on another themeless puzzle -- a Saturday this time! As a constructor, solver, and generally somewhat-active member of the Online Crossword Community™, I sometimes struggle with talking publicly about puzzles. All my puzzle takes are (obviously) informed by my own very specific biases and opinions and experiences which may or may not reflect other people's tastes. So I was SECRETLY hoping that I would either absolutely love or absolutely hate this puzzle, which would make the write-up easier, but instead it was a journey with valleys and peaks and ... plains? Ok, this metaphor didn't work. Let's get into it.

First, some zings. (Yes, I'm adopting Malaika's "zings" and "dings" verbiage, in an act of cross-guest-blogger solidarity.) I'm always a fan of conversational entries in my themeless puzzles, so things like GIMME A SEC, I'M AFRAID SO, OH GEEZ, and even HMM, I SEE (somewhat arbitrary? Maybe! But I still liked it!) were highlights. I also enjoyed WIIMOTE and DECAF TEA, but probably my favorite entry was APTONYM. I dropped it in without any crosses, which made me feel cool and smart (95% of the reason I solve crosswords) -- it's always fun to insta-get a lesser-known term in a puzzle.

I believe this is a "Zalad"

The short stuff was mostly super solid (maybe EXT is a ding). The middle was a bit proper-heavy -- JIM, JOON, DIAZ, IOLANI, SOMA, PAIGE, EREBUS but all mostly (we'll get into my trouble spot soon) crossed fairly, I thought. My controversial crossword take of the day is that I quite enjoy the name wordplay clues that don't reference a specific person! (e.g. the clue [Good name for a librarian?] for PAIGE.) Many point out that they prefer referencing actual people, especially for predominantly-female names since women are already underrepresented in puzzles. I understand/respect (and even agree with?) this, but I still like these clues!

I may or may not have accidentally flung this across the room many times back in the day

The only real trouble for me was that I had AVERAGE joe (a slightly more in-the-language expression, I daresay?) instead of AVERAGE GUY and that caused a *lot* of trouble because OH jEEZ (it's my preferred spelling, I daresay?) works just as well as OH GEEZ and I was hopeless on the volcano and the Yiddish. So spent a solid few minutes thinking of every possible meaning of "pit" (there are many! -- this very fact was even made into a crossword theme earlier this year) until I was able to get myself out of that mess.

Iolani Palace looks pretty

In general the clues were fun and tricky, with lots of wordplay. Maybe even too much wordplay? Some of it felt a bit tortured ([Where spring might be just around the corner?] for SPA and [What runs about a meter?] for TAXICAB, e.g.) but there were also some bangers ([Leaves totally drained of energy?] for DECAF TEA and [Buff, and then some] for MEGAFAN). The clue for ANTI-UNION, [Like those who refuse to be organized], felt a bit off to me, too. I feel like it's usually the bosses who retaliate against the workers for organizing, not the workers themselves who are against it! .... did capitalism write this clue?

Last ding-ish comment is that some of the long and mid-length stuff felt like they could have been a little more fun! Things like SECRETLY and MEATHEADS (this is a bit of a downer for a long slot, maybe?), I LOVE LA (maybe people who were alive in 1983 enjoyed this, but I was -12 years old in 1983), AGAINST, ARIDITY, ACTED ON, etc. All fine entries, but I would have loved a tad more zing!

Bullets:

AP GERMAN [H.S. class with ein Lehrer] — This is very specific to me, but I'm not a fan of AP___ type entries. A popular wordlist that many constructors use to make puzzles lists these entries with the highest possible score, so I feel like they're overrepresented in puzzles.
EL CHEAPO [Stingy sort] — I have never heard or seen this expression outside of crosswords -- I wonder if it's a regional or generational thing, or if I've just been living under a rock.
PATTY [Ground round] — I was gonna say I was a bit iffy on a PATTY being a "round" but Google lists "a circular piece of a particular substance" as a definition for "round" so ... what do I know?
PBS ["Antiques Roadshow" airer] — I truly don't think I've ever been able to plop one of these 3-letter networks in immediately
SOMA ["Brave New World" drug] — SoMa is also a neighborhood in San Francisco, where I live.

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rafa on Twitter]

Constructor: Jeff Chen and Jim Horne

Relative difficulty: medium-ish? idk, I solved on paper and kept making notes on things that annoyed me, which took lots of time and mental effort

grid lovingly taken from xwordinfo because i solved this puzzle on paper and can't be arsed to type the grid into the new york times website

THEME: In the Money — theme entries contain world capitals, which are hinted at by parentheticals in the clues, except an extra letter has been inserted, and these spell out (in order) KA-CHING for some reason.

Theme answers:

CASH REGISTER [Sight at a checkout counter] (also this is in no way explicitly identified as theme, which, lmao)
MARK O'MEARA [Golfer who won the 1998 Masters (Italy)] (golf content, yay)
DO A SLOW BURN [Seethe (Norway)]
QUIT COLD TURKEY [Give up all at once (Turkey)] (this is about the point where I wanted to give up on this puzzle)
CHAIR OF THE FED [Major player in U.S. economic policy (Egypt)]
TIMBER INDUSTRY [Boarding group? (Switzerland)]
MAKING A LIST [Activity for Santa (Rwanda)] (probably my favorite hidden capital here)
DOG HANDLER [One who walks to work? (Qatar)] (this one gets a pass because I lived here for a year)
CAPITAL GAINS [What this puzzle's circled letters are with respect to the surrounding shaded squares?]

Word of the Day: ANNA ["Inventing ___" (2022 Netflix hit)] —

Inventing Anna is an American drama miniseries created and produced by Shonda Rhimes, inspired by the story of Anna Sorokin and the article in New York titled "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" by Jessica Pressler. The series was released on Netflix on February 11, 2022. Julia Garner starred as Anna Sorokin, the title character. The series received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances (particularly Garner) but criticized the inconsistent tone.

Under the assumed name Anna Delvey, Russian-born Anna Sorokin is able to con members of New York City's upper crust into believing she is a German heiress with access to a substantial fortune. She uses this persona to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, goods and services while working towards her goal of opening an exclusive art-themed club.

• • •

Once again, it me, indie crossword person Christopher Adams, here to fill in for Rex, and on a Sunday no less. Despite filling in many times before, I always worry a bit⁠—what if the puzzle is absolutely hot garbage, which means I have to spend all this time solving a puzzle I don't like and even more time finding things to say about it, instead of doing what I usually do with puzzles that don't spark joy, which is just throw them away half solved and never look at them again. (Seriously, there's so many good puzzles out there, and so little time to solve them; the daily crossword links newsletter is a good place to start.)

Anyway, all of the above holds even more true on Sunday, when there's twice as much to slog through, and which usually don't spark joy. Oftentimes, they feel stretched out to fill the extra space, and might have worked better as a 15x15 puzzle instead. And, unfortunately, that's how this one felt to me.

It very much reminded me of the type of puzzle that Evan Birnholz is fond of doing at the Washington Post, minus all the excellent touches that make the Post (imo) the premier Sunday puzzle. Theme entries contain other words (plus an extra letter), and those extra letters spell something out. When done well, that extra layer elevates the puzzle, but when not, it falls flat.

DRUM SOLO (Special collection of musical hits?) — i cannot recommend x japan enough; also, yoshiki's been doing this for like four decades now and still kicks ass, and does not look like he's aged one day at all despite *gestures vaguely* everything that's happened in his career.

Case in point here: the title, "In The Money", hints that the shaded letters are probably currencies, and the circled letters are in the money. I tried LIRA and EURO first at 26A before actually reading the clue, which probably would've helped since I am a certified golf guy™ and found that clue easy and enjoyable (most of you will not, and that's OK; the continued inclusion of golf content in NYT crosswords is probably one of the three things Will Shortz and I actually agree on). Anyway, the title doesn't work, and tbh the reveal (CAPITAL GAINS) would've worked better as a title. No need to put it in the grid; have some faith that the solvers will figure out the theme from the answers / clues (especially since the countries are given in the clues), and let them get the a-ha from figuring out the pun on CAPITAL (meaning both capital cities and also money stuff here) rather than railroading and hand-holding them through it.

Also: KA-CHING? Is that the best you can come up with for a final touch? The potential is there for a capital pun, but the answer is rather meh. (Compare to, say, the 1/3/2021 NYT by Paolo Pasco, where a bunch of dances are interrupted by letters that spell out MAY I CUT IN?, which actually makes sense and nails the landing.) If you're gonna go for this pun, maybe have the added letters spell out an actual type of monetary capital. Hell, CASH by itself would've been better imo (also, love the way that CASH REGISTER is just wedged into the puzzle without any indication at all that it's part of the theme).

Which brings me to a third point: if you're not gonna make it worth being a 21x21, then it should be a 15x15. Only two of the theme answers (OK, three if you count MARK O'MEARA, which I recognize most people won't) really stood out as assets to me: QUIT COLD TURKEY and MAKING A LIST. TIMBER INDUSTRY was like, yeah, sure, guess that's a real thing, and stuff like DO A SLOW BURN actively made me frown. (Side note: if you're gonna do a thing where you add extra letters to things, don't make that extra letter a stand-alone word, as happens with DO A SLOW BURN.) Probably should've gone down to four(ish) answers, really made all of them sing, and put it in a 15x15. (Of course, you lose the title when going down in size, but I'd be OK with putting CAPITAL GAINS back in the grid if it meant better theme entries and a better final punchline.)

more japanese music recommendations: fishmans

Olio:

EOS — Would rather see this as the camera or the lip balm, but we just got both Friday, so we get Greek myth instead.
DEE — [World's end?] as in the last letter of the word "world", as opposed to, idk, someone famous with this name.
DANA (Queen Latifah's given first name) crossing LAURENTS (Sondheim and Bernstein's collaborator on "West Side Story") — Natick alert here; that vowel could just as well be an E, an I, or an O; A is the most likely option (or at least looks the most right), and is the right letter, but still, more care should be taken on that cross.
LIN (Playwright ___-Manuel Miranda) — I am not a fan of a FITB that splits apart a name into two pieces, even if it's at the hyphen. I am also not a fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but that's another gripe for another time.
TRIDENT (It's good for three points) — my favorite clue here, by far.
NATE (Statistician Silver) — :vomit emoji:
STU (Nickname that's three consecutive letters of the alphabet) — NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO a thousand times NO. I've said it before, I'll say it again: clue names as actual people with those names. (Especially women; this example happens to be a man's name, but by and large it's mostly women who get underrepresented by (not-so-)cute wordplay angles for names.)

EEYORE (Sad ass) — the name derives from the sound of a donkey (hee-haw, but make it British).
FRIED EGG (Burger topping that jacks up the cholesterol) — Don't judge me, Will Shortz; it's delicious and I'm gonna keep ordering it. (More preferable here, perhaps: a golf clue about how a ball buried in a bunker looks like...well, you know.)
MESCAL (Liquor from Mexico) — hated the S here, both because it's crossing STU (see above) but also because it's generally known as MEZCAL and there's no indication that this is a variant spelling.
LONGER (Like em dashes vis-à-vis en dashes) — a clue after my own heart; I'm very very fond of em dashes (and parentheses—look, all these tangential thoughts need to fit into one sentence, and I'm gonna find a way to do it) and will utilize them wherever possible—here, for example.
SINTER (Fuse by heading below the melting point) — sure, if you say so; at least all the crossings were fair (MIA Hamm's well-enough known, or should be, to be fair, but if you wanna complain about that crossing, I won't argue with you even if I don't agree with you).
NRA — this entry alone would've ruined the puzzle for me if I didn't already dislike it; instead, it's the disgusting cherry on top. Anyway: domestic terrorist organizations do not belong in crosswords, full stop.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Simon Marotte

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (for a Monday ... those big corners were weird / slowish)

THEME: STRIKE ONE (37A: Ump's call after a first pitch ... or a hint to the ends of 17-, 25-, 53- and 63-Across) — each of the endings is a thing you can strike, i.e. you can STRIKE ONE of the following:

Theme answers:

a balance (NEW BALANCE) (17A: Footwear giant headquartered in Boston, Mass.)
a deal (DONE DEAL) (25A: Fait accompli)
a pose (YOGA POSE) (53A: Downward dog, for one)
a chord (MINOR CHORD) (63A: Group of notes that often sounds sad)

Word of the Day: SELA Ward (40A: Actress Ward) —

Sela Ann Ward (born July 11, 1956) is an American actress, author, and producer. Her breakthrough TV role was as Teddy Reed in the NBC drama series Sisters (1991–96), for which she received her first Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1994. She received her second Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for the leading role of Lily Manning in the ABC drama series Once and Again (1999–2002). Ward later had the recurring role of Stacy Warner in the Fox medical drama House, also starred as Jo Danville in the CBSpolice procedural CSI: NY (2010–2013)^[3] and starred as Dana Mosier in the CBS police procedural series FBI (2018–2019).
She also played supporting roles in films, including The Man Who Loved Women (1983), Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985), Nothing in Common (1986), Hello Again (1987), The Fugitive (1993), My Fellow Americans (1996), The Badge(2002), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Guardian (2006), The Stepfather(2009), Gone Girl (2014), and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello, I'm back, no thanks to the good people at Delta, or to my car, which gave out at 70mph on the I-86 today, about ninety miles west of my final destination, i.e. home. We got in to Detroit after midnight, drove a couple hours to a tollbooth rest area plaza dealie, slept in the car for three hours, then drove back through Ohio and Pennsylvania to New York, where the car died, after which we spent hours waiting for a tow truck that was supposed to take half an hour the *first* time we called (we called at least four times), and even then since it's Sunday and we were ninety miles from home there was nothing much to be done so the car is back in Bath, NY waiting to be seen by Some Garage, which will tell us that it's a small thing or a big thing, and it will cost a little money or a lot of money. Anyway, thank god for friends, who came and rescued us and took us home. Now I'm all jet-lagged and obsessed with the fact that my house doesn't smell right. It doesn't smell bad, it just doesn't smell like I've been living in it. Not sure what the missing ingredient is yet. Coffee, probably. And scented candles. So yeah I've had about three hours sleep in the last 36 hours but at least I'm well fed (thawed some soup—magic). And now there's this puzzle, and it's fine, I guess, but it's built weird, I think. Giant corners and a super-choppy, hole-ridden center. Big corners might hold delights, the delights that longer answers often bring, but today they don't, not really. They're pretty shruggy. As for the theme, I didn't like the revealer at first because the ONE part felt awkward, but now I think maybe I like it fine. What might you do with each of the ending words? You might STRIKE ONE. None of the themers is that interesting on its own, but the theme holds up fine. Fine enough for Monday. I am only now learning that there is such a thing as MICROSLEEP (heard of "micronap," but not "-sleep"). I don't think it's clued well, though, since the clue implies that it's something that's intentional and possibly refreshing, whereas it's a no and no on both counts."People who experience microsleeps often remain unaware of them, instead believing themselves to have been awake the whole time, or to have temporarily lost focus" (wikipedia). I liked remembering SLIP 'N' SLIDE—do they still make them? I thought maybe they had been outlawed, like Jarts (lawn darts), since they were the cause of many a backyard injury, for sure.

had a great two-week vacation, first in Northern Michigan and then in Los Angeles. I'll discuss it over the coming week. Or I won't. We'll see. I gotta prepare for the start of the Fall semester (a week from tomorrow), and as I say, I gotta deal with my car, and on top of it all I have jury duty starting Tuesday. The highlights of L.A. were the New Beverly Cinema (I saw "Cinderella" (1950) and "Moonraker" (1979)), the Getty (esp. the Cy Twombly exhibit), and the Huntington Library/Museum in Pasadena (finally got to see the most important Chaucer MS on the planet, as well as other beautiful things.

at The Huntington

Not much to say about the fill in today's puzzle except that MANCAVE and "she-shed" are some vomity gender-binary nonsense. "She-shed" is actually physically painful to see and say, I can't believe women let themselves be talked into that bit of tin-eared marketing terminology. You don't even get a place in the actual house? Just ... a shed? Shed? That's the word for the dank cobwebby place you put dirty tools or whatever. And "she-shed" sounds like a hair and/or skin problem. Nah, you got the short end of the stick there, for sure. What else? I had LEGO ___ and no idea what followed, possibly because nothing made out of Legos qualifies as ART. Also, AH is not a sound of "contented pleasure." That's AAH, or possibly AHH. "AH" is a kind of unimpressed "I see," or else what you say at the dentist's office (28A: Sounds of contented pleasure = AHS). I had PUG for POM and SAYS YES instead of SAYS I DO, and I really truly believe it's spelled 'eeny' not EENIE. OK, glad to be back, etc. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sue Fracker

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: ELBOW ROOM (64A: Adequate space to move around ... as found in this puzzle's circled letters) — circled squares are arranged in elbow shapes (90-degree angles) throughout the grid

The ROOMS:

BOILER
GUEST
DRESSING
PANIC
ROMPER

Word of the Day: GAZA (6D: Historic mideast city where Samson died) —

Gaza (/ˈɡɑːzə/; Arabic: غَزَّة Ġazzah, IPA: [ɣaz.zah]), also referred to as Gaza City, is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of 590,481 (in 2017), making it the largest city in the State of Palestine. Inhabited since at least the 15th century BCE, Gaza has been dominated by several different peoples and empires throughout its history. (wikipedia)

• • •

Liked this one. The revealer was a proper revealer, in that I had no idea what was going on until I hit it, and when I hit it I thought "ah.... yes, good, okay." So the revealer ... revealed. And the basic joke is cute and consistent: five different types of room (specifically, words that can precede "room") bend like an elbow joint. One of them is not a real room ("Romper Room" is exclusively a TV show, right?) and one of them is not a room that 99.9% of people have or have ever been in (I imagine) (I know "Panic Room" as a paranoid rich person's house feature, and mostly only as a fictional thing, a la the David Fincher movie of the same name). The other three are very familiar, ordinary types of rooms. Anyway, no matter how common or uncommon or fictional the room types are, the premise holds up. It's a nice Monday/Tuesday-type theme. The fill is pretty dreary overall, relying very heavily on repeaters, e.g. STN ANTE INCAS ARTY PSST SSTS EDYS INGE AORTA OBI AMOR ULNA ... Speaking of ULNA, a constructor friend of mine told me that a popular online crossword puzzle he writes for is so strict about its fill being clean and familiar to ordinary, non-diehard solvers that they won't accept certain very familiar repeaters, and the example he gave me was ULNA. Me: "But that's ... just a regular bone ... in the human body." He just looked at me and shrugged. "Yep." Seems a bit strict, but I really do like the idea of someone policing the gunk and pushing the fill back toward common and familiar terrain, which will always have more and more varied cluing possibilities. There's not much in the way of noteworthy fill today outside the longer Acrosses. Just the two long Downs, as far as 7+-letter fill goes, and they're acceptable, but only acceptable. My favorite answer was STIR CRAZY. My favorite shorter answer was probably JIGSAW, the pleasures of which I refamiliarized myself with on my recent Northern Michigan trip.

Puzzle by "Puzzles of Color"

The puzzle played very easy, except the SW corner, which was comparatively quite slow, largely because I completely forgot the vacuum brand ("ORSON? ORLON? ORKIN? DYSON? Is the "O" wrong?"). Then I looked at the Acrosses down there for help but yikes, 63A: Ten pins in two bowls (SPARE) was inscrutable to me. I didn't know the attempt to knock over pins was called a "bowl.""It took me two bowls to topple all the pins" sounds super weird and stilted to me. But I guess that was the point of the clue—to make it look like the "bowl" in question was a basin and not an act of ball-rolling. Then I had SASH for 56D: Window part (PANE). So it got messy down there. So it got messy down there. But that was the only trouble spot. Other mistakes ... looks like I tried GIZA before GAZA. I should've known that one, since the Milton play about Samson is called "Eyeless in GAZA," not GIZA (sorry, that’s actually a *phrase* from the Milton play—play itself is called “Samson Agonistes”; Huxley wrote a novel called “Eyeless in GAZA”). Ah well. My literature Ph.D. fails me again. Had AMIGO before AMIGA and did the typical kealoa* two-step at 60D: Win easily after getting the initial "R" ("ROUT or ROMP!?") Aside from the overcommonness of the fill my only complaint is that "ON" is used not once not twice but thrice (RUN ON, UP ON, LED ON). Seems like at least one too many "ON"s. "On" too many.

One last thing:

16A: Backing, or the name of Athena's shield (AEGIS) — this is my starting Wordle word this week (I'm working my way through the dictionary) (yes, really). It's not a bad one. This was yesterday:

Thank you for reading my "online musings" (44D). Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: [SIC] (69A: [not my typo]) — Clues for famously misspelled names have "[69-Across]" after them, and 69-Across is [SIC], the notation for when you are indicating that "yes, I know the word appears misspelled, but that's how it appears in the original, don't blame me":

Theme answers:

FROOT LOOPS (17A: Breakfast cereal with a toucan mascot [69-Across])
BOSTON RED SOX (23A: Team that broke the "Curse of the Bambino" in 2004 [69-Across])
AMERICAN PHAROAH (39A: Triple Crown winner of 2015 [69-Across])
MORTAL KOMBAT (48A: Video game franchise featuring Sub-Zero and Sonya Blade [69-Across])
DEF LEPPARD (61A: "Pour Some Sugar on Me" rockers [69-Across])

Word of the Day: Ray LIOTTA (6D: Ray of "GoodFellas") —

Raymond Allen Liotta (Italian: [liˈɔtta]; December 18, 1954 – May 26, 2022) was an American actor and film producer. He was known for his roles as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) and Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). He was a Primetime Emmy Award winning actor and received nominations for a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Liotta first gained attention for his role as Ray Sinclair in the Jonathan Demme film Something Wild (1986), for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture nomination. He continued to star in films such as Unlawful Entry (1992), No Escape (1994), Cop Land (1997) Hannibal(2001), Blow (2001), Narc (2002), John Q (2002), Identity (2003), Killing Them Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Kill the Messenger (2014), Marriage Story (2019), and the Sopranos prequel theatrical film The Many Saints of Newark (2021).
He was also known for his television work in ER for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2004. He starred as Frank Sinatra in the television film The Rat Pack (1998) and Lorca and Tom Mitchell in Texas Rising (2015) for which he earned Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. He starred in the drama series Shades of Blue (2016–2018) with Jennifer Lopez and had a prominent voice acting role as Tommy Vercetti in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002). (wikipedia)

• • •

So this one was weird primarily because no one would write [SIC] after any of these names except maybe AMERICAN PHAROAH, whose fame was very short-lived and whose name really might seem like a typo to an ordinary reader (an ordinary reader who knows how to spell "pharaoh"). Actually, it kinda feels like the only reason people remember AMERICAN PHAROAH at all (outside the ever-decreasing ranks of horse-racing fandom) is precisely because of that misspelling. Whereas with BOSTON RED SOX ... that name is so long-established that I, a fan of baseball for coming up on half a century, never really thing of the name as a misspelling of "socks." That is, it doesn't even register as a misspelling, the way that DEF LEPPARD and FROOT LOOPS at least do—I know how to spell the band and the cereal, but those names at least register as wacky intentional misspellings, whereas SOX does not. The idea that you'd write SIC after the horse, I can buy, but after BOSTON RED SOX? Preposterous. I doubt anyone out there is going to think "don't you mean Deaf Leopard?" either. Anyway, these are famously "mis"-spelled names, so that's an interesting theme premise ... I just don't know if the SIC thing is really the best way to go about bringing it all together. I'm sure the use of SIC as a revealer here is supposed to be jokey / facetious, so the fact that you wouldn't *actually* use it for these names is (maybe) supposed to be beside the point. Still, the fact that I might in fact use it for some (horse) but never for others (baseball team) makes the theme set feel weirdly uneven, and the revealer feel like a punch line that doesn't quite land.

["One lump or two!"]

Speaking of misspellings, I was happy to see WHOA spelled correctly, but then I realized that the encroaching WOAH spelling (shudder) is not for this particular meaning of WHOA (3D: "Easy there!"), but for the exclamation you might make if you are surprised or left speechless by something. Today's WHOA is horse WHOA, not omg/wow WHOA. I think the move from WHOA to WOAH for the "omg/wow" exclamation is generational, but I don't know. Surely someone has written on this (... googling ...) yeah, looks like exceedingly-online folks are more apt to use WOAH (a misspelling that started as a message board phenomenon in the '80s, per this article). To me, WOAH is always gonna look like a chemical formula, and my brain is always gonna pronounce it like NOAH, e.g. "Noah's Ark contained a pair of every animal on earth, whereas WOAH's Ark contained only AMERICAN PHAROAH and hasn't been seen or heard from since 2015."

Some more notes:

13D: Big name in shapewear (SPANX) — there's a SPANX store in the relatively small Delta terminal at LAX. Crummy restaurants, a couple of those candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores, and ... a SPANX store. It seemed odd. But I guess shapewear emergencies might arise anywhere.
41D: Supermodel Wek (ALEK)— correct on the first guess! This is the first time I've landed ALEK's name with no problem! I am supermodelly challenged, but I'm working on it! I took this picture in one of those aforementioned candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores at the Delta terminal, just so that I could remember a name I feel sure is coming to a grid near me very soon:

[YUMI NU]

7D: "Not true what you say about me!" ("I DO SO!") — wrote in "I DON'T!" and did Not want to remove it.
14A: "Nasty!" ("UGH!")— wrote in "ICK!" which says "nasty!" to me far more than "UGH!" does. "UGH!" indicates a kind of resigned / exasperated revulsion, whereas "ICK!" feels more truly grossed out. (This may only apply in writing about crosswords, I don't know.)
59D: Like many of Horace's works (ODIC) — I didn't go on about the weak short fill today because sometimes I just get weary of saying the same thing day after day, but I wanted to say something about ODIC because it is an entirely self-inflicted wound. ODIC is pretty pure crosswordese. Not gonna find a lot of defenders for that never-seen-outside-crosswords, use-only-in-case-of-emergency fill. But today, the constructor has made it so that there aren't really any other options there. When you lock yourself into -D-C with your themers ... well, maybe consider a different solution. Swap FROOT LOOPS and DEF LEPPARD, move SIC ... something. -D-C leaves you with nowhere to go but ODIC. Why build crosswordese into your grid like this if you don't have to?

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Adam Wagner

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Easy for a rebus...)

THEME: INBOX ZERO (35D: Ambitious email goal, and a hint to four squares in this puzzle)— a rebus puzzle where some word meaning "zero" can be found "in" its own "box" four times:

Theme answers:

HEAVEN ON EARTH / RENO, NEVADA (18A: Paradise / 10D: Home of more than 16,000 slot machines)
BIKINI LINES / VANILLA (3D: Targets of some waxing / 22A: Bland)
LAUGH TEST / NAUGHTIER (40A: Proverbial assessment of whether or not an idea can be taken seriously / 32D: More likely to get coal, perhaps)
JACUZZI PARTY / MARZIPAN (64A: Hot tub shindig / 49D: Almond confection)

Word of the Day:"poisoned pawn" (68A: Captures a "poisoned pawn" in chess, e.g.) —

The Poisoned Pawn Variation is any of several series of opening moves in chess in which a pawn is said to be "poisoned" because its capture can result in a positional loss of time or a loss of material. [...] The variation was used in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Genius". (wikipedia)

• • •

For a puzzle that started with ALBS (the crosswordesiest of priestly garments) and passed through vomit (EMETIC), this one ended up being surprisingly fresh and delightful to solve. Rebuses are minefields by design—you gotta figure out where the hidden dangers are and defuse them or detonate them safely or whatever they do to mines to keep them from harming people. But sometimes the adventure can feel ... not worth it. Boring, maybe, like you have to dutifully hunt down these boxes that all say the same thing. And sometimes the rebus squares end up making the fill feel tortured, with slightly off phrases or junky fill popping up everywhere you go. But today the rebus squares were surprises, even after I got the revealer, and much of the time they came rising to the surface inside of truly original answers, so that there was pleasure not just in finding the rebus square, but in PARSE-ing the answers that crossed it. LAUGH TEST, JACUZZI PARTY, BIKINI LINES, HEAVEN ON EARTH, one after the other, the rebus squares and the answers that contained them were surprising and enjoyable. This puzzle feels very thoughtful, very polished, and the revealer is both a lively, contemporary phrase and a genuine "aha" surprise. After ALBS, I don't think I winced once while solving this thing. And there was no time at which I was not enjoying myself. Honestly, this is kind of a model rebus puzzle. MARZIPAN JACUZZI PARTY may be my favorite crossing of the year. It's just fun to say. MARZIPAN JACUZZI PARTY! I want to go to one.

If you know ALBS (and boy do I) then this puzzle was likely very easy to open up. ALBS STEELS BAIT ABCTV CUKE all in a row, which made the BIKINI part of BIKINI LINES easy to see. And since the word I wanted to be VANILLA ended up looking like VANLA, I knew pretty quickly a. that there was a problem, and b. what the problem was—rebus alert! (pause to lament this puzzle's VANILLA slander—a good VANILLA ice cream is anything but "bland"; VANILLA malts are my favorite drinks after coffee and Manhattans).

So I put NIL in its box and off I went, not yet knowing why NIL was in a box, but confident that I'd find out. Every subsequent rebus square involved me tiptoeing up to the square, testing the ground, and then eventually finding the target. HEAVEN... [tap tap tap ... check surrounding areas ...] ah, there it is, the NONE square! And so on. The AUGHT square was probably the hardest, just because I couldn't think of what kind of TEST was in play (I knew there was a TEST, just not which kind, at first). But NAUGHTIER fixed that (proverbially, naughty kids get coal instead of toys at Christmas, in case that clue wasn't clear). I got the revealer about halfway through:

Knowing the premise made getting that AUGHT square much easier than it would've been otherwise. That the puzzle remained interesting even after the revealer did its revealing is a real testament to its overall strength. This one has a strong premise, but more importantly, executes the premise in a way that makes the whole solve interesting and entertaining. The second half of the solve was at least as entertaining as the first half. That ... is something. And then to play me out with the world's most wonderfully depressing song!? Mwah, perfect. Thank you.

Six things:

33D: Prefix meaning "10" that's associated with 12 (DEC) — I didn't fully understand the "12" part as I was solving ... my brain was yelling something about "doDECahedron" at me, but I wasn't really listening. After I was finished, I realized that DEC. could be short for "December," i.e. the 12th month.
56D: Small, oily fish (SPRAT)— weird that the guy who could eat no fat would be named after an "oily fish" but OK.
59D: Stately estate (MANSE) — I had MANOR. I still want MANOR. I associate MANSEs with priests ... why is that? Perhaps because "A manse (/ˈmæns/) is a clergy house inhabited by, or formerly inhabited by, a minister, usually used in the context of Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and other Christian traditions." (wikipedia). There's a MANSE, Nevada, I just found out. It's in the far southern part of the state, relatively close to Las Vegas and about 400 miles from RENO, NEVADA.
15A: Google's streaming device (CHROMECAST) — weirdly never heard of this. Tried CHROMEBOOK in this space at first.
2D: Half of the only mother/daughter duo to be nominated for acting Oscars for the same film (LAURA DERN)— she and her mom, Diane Ladd, were both nominated for 1991's (fabulous) "Rambling Rose"

65D: Back (AGO)— not AFT!? But it's always AFT! Curses!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Literally, "dainty slice" / SAT 7-29-2022 / Hawaiian word for a mackerel / Pennsylvania city where Crayola is headquartered / The N.F.L. mascot Roary, for one / Future-altering decision point, metaphorically / They're bigger and lighter than skeletons

One-named entertainer from Spain / SUN 7-31-22 / Killer of the Night King on Game of Thrones / Author journalist Welteroth / Condiment at a pho shop / Flagship vehicle line for Mercedes-Benz / Smallest country in the E.U. by area / Serving with a meze platter / Hand-held device used by Mr. Spock

Feline meme since around 2006 / MON 8-1-22 / Input for a barista's grinder / Textile factory container

Product-testing nonprofit since 1936 / TUE 8-2-22 / Late-night show starting in 2003 / Moon-landing acronym / Vaccine shot in British lingo

Leafy shelter from the sun / WED 8-3-22 / Carpenter's bladed tool / Healthful practices collectively / Swahili word meaning freedom / Striped aquarium denizen

Go all in in poker lingo / THU 8-4-22 / After-dinner drink made with creme de menthe / Letter-shaped piece of piping / Tobiko or ikura at Japanese restaurant / What if propositions informally / He independently discovered the same comet as Hale / Inflation spec

Item in a husk / FRI 8-5-22 / Some cowboy wear / One might offer a sweet message / Sleep aid said to reduce anxiety / Ending with play or plate / Frequently flooded area

Some arcade habitués / SAT 8-6-2022 / For whom the gymnast Nadia Comaneci won gold in 1976 / 1984 #3 hit with the lyric "Ain't no law against it yet" / Sheltie shelterer, in brief / Worker who processes wool

Young Salmon / SUN 8-7-22 / The whole package, colloquially / Like the Xbox One X vis-à-vis the Xbox One / Nigerian city of 3.5+ million / Jazz singer born Eunice Kathleen Waymon / Crystal-clear

Pale pink vineyard offerings / MON 8-8-22 / Boater or bowler / Wipe out big-time / Rap's Lil __ X

Stands the test of time / TUES 8-9-22 / Monkey business? / Win every game of a series / What "C" faucets are in Italy, confusing

Baby aardvark / WED 8-10-2022 / Welty with a Pulitzer / Grammy-winning Aimee

Baked Scottish snack / THU 8-11-2022 / Like some church matters / 6 + 6

Trumpeter Wynton / FRI 8-12-2022 / Outer: Prefix / No cock-a-doodle-do-ers

Buff, and then some / SAT 8-13-2022 / Pieces of some pies / How couples elope / Leave a small tip / Cameron of Hollywood

Calculus expert? / SUN 8-14-2022 / Land with an accent over its first letter / "The Chi" channel, familiarly / Food that's a national emblem of Wales / Site acquired by Match.com in 2011 / Retired jersey number for the 76ers' Moses Malone

Counterpart of she-shed / MON 8-15-22 / Footwear giant headquartered in Boston Mass / Fast-food pork sandwich / Kind of technology in some modern military aircraft / Global center of Shia Islam / Toy that attaches to a garden hose / Ump's call after a first pitch / Minor hurt in kidspeak

Ten pins in two bowls / TUE 8-16-22 / Classic Camaro model / Element in some food product advertising / Embarrassing sound when bending over / Old-fashioned alternative to Venmo or Zelle / Collection of online musings

Video game franchise featuring Sub-Zero and Sonya Blade / WED 8-17-22 / Hairy cryptids / Aurora's Greek counterpart / Star Wars cantina patrons for short / Buffalo soldier dreadlock Bob Marley / Largish jazz combos