Term for censored dissident in 1984 / FRI 1-1-21 / Title heroine of a James Joyce short story / Fast fashion retailer / Backdrop for the Compromise of 1850 / Park Corner London tube station / Appropriately named ghost in Nintendo games / Honorifics that can be repeated to indicate higher status

Constructor: Milo Beckman

Relative difficulty: Medium (6-something, but that's with repeated wrestling with the software over the number-boxes ... plus it's très oversized (16x16)

THEME: 2021— numbers 2, 0, 2, and 1 go in the boxes at the center of the grid, resulting in the following number-containing answers:

Theme answers:

• CATCH-22 (19D: Inescapable bind)
• FOREVER 21 (39A: Fast-fashion retailer)
• 20 PERCENT (37A: A fifth)
• 01 ALUMS (38D: First graduates of the new millennium, informally)

Word of the Day: fast fashion (39A: Fast-fashion retailer: FOREVER 21) —

: an approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers (merriam-webster.com)

You'll forgive me if this write-up is short. I figure if I'm up this late, I may as well celebrate properly at 12:00 a.m., but that's in less than an hour, and once I figure in drink-pouring time, well, the writing window is tight. Today's constructor sent me his original clues so that I could see how much they'd been changed by the editor. It's an 80-word puzzle and Milo counts just 25 of his own clues among the published clues. That seems like a pretty heavy editorial hand, but every constructor has a tale or twelve about such heavy-handedness. I once had something close to a quarter of the entire *grid* changed between acceptance and publication—and on a Sunday-sized puzzle. Humbling / humiliating. I couldn't see how the changes were anything but a lateral move, but then I didn't have decades of editorial experience and wasn't in charge so who cares. Point is, our puzzles are our babies and none of us are that thrilled when they come back to us looking all ... different. But editors standardize difficulty and also give the puzzle a distinctive voice and their work is crucial to any smooth-running puzzle. When editors are good, they improve your work, and it's a gift. I'm not going to do a side-by-side clue comparison today (if Milo has any specific comment, I'll post it later), but most of the final clues seem to have been simplified, shortened, or made more accessible in some way. This means, sadly, that a lot of the life (that is, a lot of younger-skewing cultural specificity) has been wrung out of them. Still, most of the clue edits I'm looking at seem reasonable, if not necessarily inspired. The most interesting change to me is the lone grid change: RZA got changed to MBA (23A: Résumé asset). I can hear 90% of solverdom exclaiming "thank god," but I think RZA is a cool answer (originally clued as [Wu Tang founder/beatmaker]). Dude is legit famous. He raps, produces, acts, scores movies (parts 1 and 2 of Tarantino's Kill Bill, for example). Main problem, though, is that he's not a household name to most NYTXW solvers, so every cross on RZA has to be extremely gettable, and I'm not sure the "R" in RPG (i.e. role-playing games) is. So we end up getting MBA ... more ultra-common snoozy bizspeak. But it's viable. And on a short answer, that's good enough. And anyway, the main interest of the puzzle lies elsewhere.