Political cartoonist Edward / SAT 5-20-17 / Gullible rodent in Scott Adams comic / Celebratory move popularized by Cam / Real-life ice age beast seen on "Game of Thrones" / Muckracker who pushed for model tenements / Metric for gauging female representation in works of fiction / Ski town near Mount Mansfield

Constructor: Paolo Pasco and David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Medium (tilting easy)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Edward SOREL (26D: Political cartoonist Edward) —

Edward Sorel (born Edward Schwartz, 26 March 1929, The Bronx) is an illustrator, caricaturist, cartoonist, graphic designer and author whose work is known for its storytelling, its left-liberal social commentary, its criticism of reactionary right-wing politics and organized religion. Formerly a regular contributor to The Nation, New York Magazine and The Atlantic, his work is today seen more frequently in Vanity Fair. He has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of America's foremost political satirists".^[2][3][4] As a lifelong New Yorker, a large portion of his work interprets the life, culture and political events of New York City. There is also a large body of work which is nostalgic for the stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood when Sorel was a youth. Sorel is noted for his wavy pen-and-ink style, which he describes as "spontaneous direct drawing" (wikipedia)

AHI / CAD / CAPRA / NO FAIR— that is how I started this puzzle, or tried to. That's a .500 batting average, not bad, but not enough to get me real traction. For the second day in a row, I had to abandon my NW starting point and start elsewhere. And for the second day in a row things got much easier from there, and for the third (!) day in a row I like the puzzle.  This one is a little on-the-nose for teenage boys, with your requisite "GOT" clue and your requisite chess and computer and science clues and your requisite social media clues and that little bit of juvenile leering in the COOP clue (48A: Place to pick up chicks). Very on-brand, for better and worse. Mostly better. I feel like the NYT has no idea how to find a happy medium with its cultural frame of reference,so mostly it shuffles around with a solidly mid-'60s vibe, but then every once in a while a young former employee / loyalist is called in to "Do Something!" and we get a much more aggressively presentist and youth-oriented puzzle. Now I'm gonna take option B every day of the week, but man there has to be a middle way.


I started with VJS because I am old (12A: Onetime MTV figures). That turned out to be.a prime piece of three-letter real estate, and along with that corner's other gimme (AZIZ), VJS really got me going, both back into the NW (which ended up being a piece of cake when I came at it from east (?)) and into the SE, where I had my proudest moment of the day—remembering (sort of) BAHIA (50A: Brazil's fourth-largest state by population). That is *not* a promising clue—reminiscent of the bad old days when crosswords relied more heavily on obscurish geographical trivia—but while the "fourth-largest state" doesn't suggest crossworthiness, that letter combination (short, vowel-loaded, vowel-ending, with that odd central "H"), ensures that it will show up in puzzles more than most other countries'"fourth-largest states." Didn't know RATBERT (now and forever, from ASOK to RATBERT, always unfunny "Dilbert" can &^$% off) (46D: Gullible rodent in a Scott Adams comic), so that complicated things in the SE, but both BECHDEL TEST and ALICE WALKER were gimmes (!)—that's a lot of gimme. Gimme gimme. I teach Bechdel's "Fun Home" every year, and the BECHDEL TEST was just name-checked on "Riverdale" (of all places), so if you haven't heard of Bechdel or her eponymous test, now you have, and here it is:


Now maybe the long Acrosses in the SE weren't gimmes for you, in which case ... that corner is Awfully proper-noun-reliant (always dangerous). I mean, look:

Seems like that could be a danger zone for some. My danger zone was the SW, where (ugh, another) "Game of Thrones" clue and a chess clue kept me blocked out of the corner:

The new (to-me) SULU clue also made it hard to get traction in there (51A: The Philippines' ___ Archipelago). So I just sank to the bottom and got POD (66A: Edamame discard) and guessed ODE, and then boom, DUST MOP. From there I guessed TRAPS (I actually already had USED), and then it came together, though DIRE took every single cross ((DI-EWOLF had me first thinking: "DIMEWOLF!?") (39A: Real-life ice age beast seen on "Game of Thrones"). All in all, this was zippy and entertaining. Pasco has done consistently great work, which is crazy, as he is still just a junior in high school, I think—he's roughly my daughter's age. My daughter, btw, just got destroyed yesterday (when doing one of Patrick Blindauer's "Piece of Cake" puzzles) by a Nick NOLT- / Janet R-NO crossing. I wanted to shout at her "Why can't you be more like Paulo!? You're not my daughter!" But I bought her "Hamilton" tickets instead (this anecdote has been based on true events and may not have transpired precisely as written).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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