Anticonsumerists aiming to help the environment / SAT 2-20-21 / Humorist Leo who wrote Joys of Yiddish / Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an R in the middle / Cold War missile type / Word derived from Greek for age

Constructor: Ali Gascoigne

Relative difficulty: Medium (again, as with yesterday, the preponderance of proper nouns might make it much tougher)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Leo ROSTEN (26D: Humorist Leo who wrote "The Joys of Yiddish," 1968) —

Leo Calvin Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) was an American humorist in the fields of scriptwriting, storywriting, journalism, and Yiddish lexicography. He was also a political scientist interested especially in the relationship of politics and the media. [...] Rosten is best remembered for his stories about the night-school "prodigy" Hyman Kaplan, written under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. They were published in The New Yorker from 1935^[1] and collected in two volumes published in 1937 and 1959, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The Education was a "close second" for one U.S. National Book Award in 1938. The second collection was one of eighteen National Book Award for Fiction finalists in 1960.  // He is also well known for his encyclopedic The Joys of Yiddish (1968), a guide to Yiddish and to Jewish culture including anecdotes and Jewish humor. It was followed by O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976), a reworking of the two 1930s collections, and  Hooray for Yiddish! (1982), a humorous lexicon of the American language as influenced by Jewish culture. Another Rosten work is Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations.

This was, for the most part, a nicely varied and sufficiently tough Saturday. The grid's not built to give you too many long answers (these are usually the most colorful), but what it does give you is decent. I especially liked FREEGANS and "GET A ROOM!"Also, this is a puzzle constructed by a man that is properly inclusive of women, so, you know, here's me giving credit instead of yelling criticism. Don't say I never etc. I do want to ask constructors, once again, to consider not just the kinds of names they use, but how well known they are, whom they're well known to, and (this is crucial) how close they all are to each other. Diversity is, for me, a paramount concern, and this puzzle is good on that front: old new, men women, Black white, cool. There were two areas, though, where proximate names created potential difficulty—this is not necessarily a criticism, as Saturdays are *supposed* to be difficult, but ... it's a question of whether you want to be getting your difficulty primarily from tricky clues and wordplay or from names, many of which are culturally / generationally exclusionary by their very nature, leaving some solvers thrilled, or at least satisfied, and others just blinking and baffled. I think it's fine to have both kinds of difficulty, but ROSTEN (used-to-be famous) next to ANYA Taylor-Joy (very recently famous) creates a real knot, and SKEE-LO crossing AKON, while easy for me, seems like a possible nightmare for someone who is less familiar with stylized one-name '90s/'00s rapper/singers from the hip-hop/R&B world. Both names I've seen before, both grid-worthy, but crossing like that, dang. You can tell the puzzle kinda knows it's in dicey territory, as it really Really goes out of its way to help you with AKON (8D: Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an "R" in the middle). Since SKEE-LO is only really famous for one song ... that crossing feels potentially demographically fatal, especially with the already tough ALICANTE up there. Also, staying in that quadrant, people who don't know SKEE-LO or AKON are maybe also less likely to know CRAY? (short for "crazy," sometimes doubled to "CRAY-CRAY"). Just hypothesizing. Anyway, space your names out and make sure your difficulty is coming from a broad array of answer types and cluing strategies. Again, all the names in this puzzle are absolutely acceptable fare. Just watch where you put 'em / how you clue 'em.