Constructor: Anne and Daniel Larsen
Relative difficulty: Easy (very, 4:46, first thing in the morning)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: EM SPACE (40D: Typographer's gap) —
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Totally acceptable if not terribly exciting offering today. A few nice, fresh phrases in a sea of tolerable if frequently overfamiliar stuff. There's something about certain phrases like NOT A HOPE and I DARE SAY and YOU BET I CAN that seem stiff and dated, and therefore seem as if they are arising from the graveyard of crosswords past (or a very extensive wordlist, which can amount to the same thing, since those are typically based on what's been in the puzzles before). Even IN A PANIC, which is a solid enough phrase, has an oddly crosswordy vibe to it—it's appeared eight times in the past decade, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for an eight-letter phrase, it's kind of a lot.. The grid shape here isn't helping. There aren't enough free-standing marquee answers; by "free-standing," I mean, "not tethered to another long answer of similar length" (see the pairs of long Downs in the NE and SW, which are noticeably less zingy than the best stuff, which in every case today (imho) is a longer answer that pops against the shorter fill surrounding it: DREAM ACT, BEYOND MEAT, NET NEUTRALITY. There was just something about this grid that felt closed in, like it couldn't quite breathe properly: too segmented, not built for the fill to really sing. But still, as I say, it holds up fine. I winced almost no times. You can send ATTA and ORANG back where they came from, but otherwise the grid is quite clean. And maybe I'm not giving enough credit to CHE GUEVARA / HOME PLANET as a colorful pair of answers, which I like more now than I did mid-solve. Anyway, good work. Just not as fresh and fun as the best Fridays.
Relative difficulty: Easy (very, 4:46, first thing in the morning)
Word of the Day: EM SPACE (40D: Typographer's gap) —
An em is a unit in the field of typography, equal to the currently specified point size. For example, one em in a 16-point typeface is 16 points. Therefore, this unit is the same for all typefaces at a given point size.
The em dash (—) and em space ( ) are each one em wide.
Typographic measurements using this unit are frequently expressed in decimal notation (e.g., 0.7 em) or as fractions of 100 or 1000 (e.g., 70/100 em or 700/1000 em). The name em was originally a reference to the width of the capital M in the typeface and size being used, which was often the same as the point size. (wikipedia) (emph. mine)
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TOE CAP ... I can't put my finger on it, or articulate it very well this morning, but this is another answer that feels squirmy to me—one of those "sure, whatever" phrases that I wouldn't use and haven't heard used. RICE BELT is interesting, but if I'd had to pick a belt to describe that area, I'd've gone with BIBLE. Honestly, needed crosses to get RICE. I've heard of em dashes but not EM SPACEs, though that wasn't hard to infer. Not thrilled about the dupe of "ACT" (DREAM ACT, ACTS ON), but at least today those answers are on opposite sides of the grids, i.e. the "ACT"s don't *intersect* the way those "OUT"s did earlier in the week, yeesh. I misread "South Asian" as "South African" so getting DESI was a real "D'oh!" moment (49D: Member of the South Asian diaspora). I had TOWED before TOTED (36A: Hauled), but that was the only mistake of the day, which may explain the sizzling fast time. Oh, no, sorry, one other mistake, of the utterly mundane and predictable variety: SODA before COLA (4D: Fountain option). Honestly, coming out of that NW corner, I was not terribly hopeful about where this puzzle was going, but it definitely wound up more enjoyable than not.