Constructor: David Steinberg
Relative difficulty: Challenging (9:51)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: OERSTED (33A: Magnetic intensity unit named after a Danish physicist) —
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It remains unfathomable to me that the editors of this puzzle continue to troll their audience with racial provocation. I don't know what else to call it. Fine, you didn't know BEANER was a slur—except you did, you were told, explicitly, before it went to print, and you didn't care—there was a dust-up, the whole incident went through the media wringer, you issued a nominal apology, everyone still loves their crossword, life goes on. But apparently it goes on in quite the same fashion. It's hard not to see today's 4D: Raiding grp. (I.C.E.) as anything but a middle finger to every single person who dared complain about BEANER. There is no branch of law enforcement more despised in this country than I.C.E., none more specifically associated with the brutalization of immigrants and refugees, the tearing apart of families. You know what I.C.E. is, you know what it means to people, you know the anger and sadness its very existence provokes in people. And more importantly—and this is where "unfathomable" comes in—you have about, give or take, plus or minus, roughly 7000 JILLION DIFFERENT WAYS YOU CAN CLUE "ICE". It's ... a common word. Or, it's a name part. Here: [Vanilla ___].
You have to be impossibly tone-deaf or literally malicious to choose—choose!—the acronym here. Constructors don't usually opt for the acronym or initialism when they've got an ordinary word on their hands. I can think of exceptions, like N.O.W. But N.O.W. never boarded your Greyhound and demanded to see your papers, as far as I know. And so we have this pretty decent, very challenging puzzle, full of many things worth discussing, but all those things are overshadowed by I.C.E. And to use the clue to *emphasize* the trauma of "raiding," my god. And maybe you think, "it's an agency, it exists, it's a neutral term, fair game!" You can think that. You can take it that way. But the obvious point here is thousands and thousands and thousands of solvers won't take it that way. They won't take it that way at all. The presence of I.C.E. in this puzzle will seriously diminish or completely eliminate whatever pleasure people were experiencing while solving (if they bother finishing solving at all):
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So, the other things in the puzzle—this was very hard, but in a mostly enjoyable way. I don't usually like puzzles that get their difficulty primarily from names, which this one sure did, but I did appreciate getting a real work-out on a Saturday, and some of the fill was entertaining ("OH, IT'S ON!"). Still, names, man. OERSTED was the one that really destroyed me, as somehow I have never heard of him (or forgot about him), and he's sitting right at the gateway between one quadrant and another. Brutal. Especially crossing MOSCATO, which, like SAMBUCA, is not exactly among your first tier of familiar alcoholic beverage names. ACMILAN, brutal (1A: Football franchise since 1899); NOXZEMA, probably rough for some (rough for me because Yet Again I spelled it NOCZEMA). APPLEID, ruthless (I had APP CODE) (37A: Requirement for some downloads). Got my first toehold, not surprisingly, in the least name-y part of the grid: the SW. I went PRIES PREPARE PENS APE and knew I finally had traction. But since three of those four gateway-Acrosses—the answers that seal off the quadrants, i.e. SAMBUCA OERSTED APPLEID TOWARDS—were opaque to me, I never got any kind of momentum or flow. Bottom half not too tough, but middle and top were a train wreck. Had SORT for HIRE (10D: Find a position for) and so had --S-UCK for 8A: Dummy ... you don't even wanna know some of the answers I was entertaining. Literally none of them were plausible or even printable here. Weirdly, the "R" from the wrong SORT was actually right, and helped me get PARABLE, which (eventually) really helped me get the rest of the top, so hurray for wrong answers sometimes. I hope you enjoyed the struggle, and I hope I never see I.C.E. in my puzzle, or anywhere, ever again, thank you.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Challenging (9:51)
Word of the Day: OERSTED (33A: Magnetic intensity unit named after a Danish physicist) —
Hans Christian Ørsted (/ˈɜːrstɛd/; Danish: [hans kʁæsdjan ˈɶɐ̯sdɛð]; often rendered Oersted in English; 14 August 1777 – 9 March 1851) was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was the first connection found between electricity and magnetism. Oersted's law and the oersted (Oe) are named after him.A leader of the Danish Golden Age, Ørsted was a close friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the brother of politician and jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted, who served as Prime Minister of Denmark from 1853 to 1854. (wikipedia)
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You have to be impossibly tone-deaf or literally malicious to choose—choose!—the acronym here. Constructors don't usually opt for the acronym or initialism when they've got an ordinary word on their hands. I can think of exceptions, like N.O.W. But N.O.W. never boarded your Greyhound and demanded to see your papers, as far as I know. And so we have this pretty decent, very challenging puzzle, full of many things worth discussing, but all those things are overshadowed by I.C.E. And to use the clue to *emphasize* the trauma of "raiding," my god. And maybe you think, "it's an agency, it exists, it's a neutral term, fair game!" You can think that. You can take it that way. But the obvious point here is thousands and thousands and thousands of solvers won't take it that way. They won't take it that way at all. The presence of I.C.E. in this puzzle will seriously diminish or completely eliminate whatever pleasure people were experiencing while solving (if they bother finishing solving at all):
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]