Hey y'all - Erik here, subbing for Rex today. I'll be shaking up the order of proceedings a bit, because I'm a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules. You can find the review a few paragraphs down, but let's start things off with a plug:
The puzzles are constructed by Tracy Bennett, Laura Braunstein, C.C. Burnikel, Amanda Chung, Debbie Ellerin, Gail Grabowski, Tracy Gray, Mary Lou Guizzo, Angela Olson Halsted, Pam Amick Klawitter, Sarah Keller, Lynn Lempel, Donna S. Levin, Ruth Bloomfield Margolin, Andrea Carla Michaels, Robin Stears, and Robyn Weintraub, and edited by Patti Varol and Amy Reynaldo. These are "Avengers: Infinity War"-meets-Kevin-Durant's-Golden-State-Warriors levels of wall-to-wall star-studdedness.
It's also a lot of women! In fact, there are more woman-constructed crosswords in this collection than there have been published by the New York Times so far this year†. Those who fail to see the urgency in closing the gender gaps in crossword constructing and editing often posit that 'you can't tell the difference between a crossword written by a woman and one written by a man' (ergo, whether women are equally represented has little bearing on the end product, so why should we care). The puzzles in Women of Letters disprove that thesis in a big way, through the dizzying array of less-traveled roads explored by themes, grids, and clues alike. From the juiciest marquee answers in the themelesses to the simplest choice of referencing a legendary actress by her accolades and not just [Bond girl], the collection never ceases to be a breath of fresh, inimitable air. (As the young people say: "Your fave could never.")
Get the puzzles.
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Constructor: Joel Fagliano
Relative difficulty: Challenging
Onto bigger things:
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Constructor: Peter Wentz
Relative difficulty: Measium
THEME: Mis-Unabbreviated— familiar phrases that start with abbreviations have those abbreviations unabbreviated to different unabbreviations than what they were previously abbreviated from:
Theme answers:
- WATER CLOSET FIELDS (22A: Meadows filled with loos?)
- PHYSICAL THERAPY BOATS (38A: Where sailors recover from their injuries?)
- ADVANCED PLACEMENT NEWS (55A: Goings-on in accelerated classes?)
- POLITICALLY CORRECT LAB (80A: Dog that doesn't offend people?)
- PUBLIC SCHOOL I LOVE YOU (100A: Cry of devotion from a non-academy student?)
- ANTE MERIDIEM RADIO (117A: Morning zoo programming?)
The idea of not eating oysters during months without an 'R' comes from the fact that the summer months are the prime breeding time for "red tides," or large blooms of algae that grow along the coast and have the tendency to spread toxins that can be absorbed by shellfish, including oysters. This is especially an issue for places with warm water temperatures, and eating locally raised seafood raises your risk of ingesting the toxins. (mentalfloss.com)
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I solved this one acrosses-only, which is a shame in retrospect because I missed the two best clues in the puzzle, 60D: Caesar dressing? (TUNIC) and 81D: Inclined to stress? (ITALIC). Very solid work. Oh, and I learned some stuff - JAWS had three sequels, and OSIRIS had green skin. SICK!I only got majorly held up in a couple places during my solve - didn't know JANE PAULEY (I mentioned I'm uncultured, right?), and plunking down HDTVS instead of HDDVD off the HD?V?, with the toughish clues for ENDS (46A: Quashes) and DADDYO (61A: "My man"), made that section difficult for me to close.
(Also, I put MERIDIAN for MERIDIEM despite having taken two years of Latin, but let's not dwell on that.)
The theme wasn't hitting on much for me - nothing particularly uproarious (though WATER CLOSET FIELDS is a pretty funny image), the word "zoo" in reference to morning RADIO in 117A confused the heck out of me, and I've always found PC LAB to be a bit on the "green paint"-y side as a crossword answer. Oh, and I guess LAB is the only theme answer where the meaning of the last word changes, so that's inconsistent, technically. All in all, though, it was a perfectly functional theme, one that's simple and elegant in its execution and makes good use of all that extra Sunday space.
Plus, a nice smooth grid from Wentz the themeless ace! Lots of fun stuff like SIT WELL, DADDY-O, EMOJI, SKYCAM, ALL-NBA TEAM, MIA HAMM, and WHAMMY, with only SEM., R-LESS, and perhaps EL ORO (I can be talked out of that one, but it seems like it's only here because of its convenient letter pattern - never seen GUAYAS in a puzzle) as unsightly glue words. This balance of dazzlers to clunkers is very hard to pull off in a 140-word Sunday grid, so color me impressed.
Many thanks to Wentz and the NYT team for all the solving fun today!
Signed, Erik Agard, CrossWorld First Team All-Defense
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
†In case you were curious how the numbers stack up, here's how many puzzles constructed by women have been published by various outlets so far this year. Mixed-gender collaborations were counted as 1. Women's names that are anagrams of "really Mike Shenk" were counted as 0. If anyone has data on the venues I'm missing, give me a shout.
Crosswords with Friends: 33/119 = 27.7%
Los Angeles Times: 31/119 = 26.1%
American Values Club: 3/18 = 16.7%
New York Times: 17/119 = 14.3%
Chronicle of Higher Education: 2/16 = 12.5%
Wall Street Journal: 9/99 = 9.1%
Fireball: 0/19 = 0%