Constructor: Emily Carroll
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: ALTE Oper (55D: ___ Oper (famed German concert hall)) —
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This is a lovely puzzle, but it's a Friday puzzle. Possibly on the tough side for a Friday, but the contrast with yesterday's puzzle (a Saturday-level bruiser) is stark, which raises the question, "Why?" Why not just put the puzzles on their appropriate days? Or at least edit them down / up to the appropriate level of difficulty for their day of the week? It really looks like someone noticed that there hadn't been a woman constructor on Saturday at all in 2021, and so this puzzle was moved to Saturday to make that "0" in the Saturday column disappear. This is not a big deal, but it is weirdly cynical. Or maybe it didn't happen this way at all, and *I'm* the cynical one. It's hard not to be cynical about the NYTXW's treatment of non-white-male constructor numbers, given the editor's history of not caring at all about such things. It's remarkable that, after considerable external pressure over a number of years, the NYTXW was able to bring its number of women constructors up *67%* in *one year*—30% of the puzzles published in 2020 had a woman as constructor or co-constructor, after that number had languished in the mid-to-high teens for a full decade. So, hurray, progress. But remember that the progress came from immense, sustained outside pressure, which resulted in important new hiring. Also, 30% is not 50%. Anyway, things are on the right track, at least. But if you're going to publish a woman on Saturday (as you should, roughly every other Saturday), then edit the puzzle to Saturday-level toughness. I'm not a huge fan of difficulty porn, but it's weird how historically the NYTXW has reserved "difficulty" for puzzles by men (women's numbers have always been much better on Monday than any other day, for instance). Here are the numbers on women constructors in the Shortz era, properly color-coded (red for "doing bad," green for "doing good"):
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Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy
Word of the Day: ALTE Oper (55D: ___ Oper (famed German concert hall)) —
The original opera house in Frankfurt is now the Alte Oper (Old Opera), a concert hall and former opera house in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was inaugurated in 1880 but destroyed by bombs in 1944. It was rebuilt, slowly, in the 1970s, opening again in 1981. Many important operas were performed for the first time in Frankfurt, including Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in 1937.
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| (taken with absolutely no permission from—but hopefully with the warm wishes of—Parker Higgins) |
The puzzle: Loved it. I even loved the inventive ways it tried to make its worst parts a little better: I'm never gonna love seeing crosswordese like ALTE, TES, or ATTA in the puzzle, but at least today there were original and interesting clues on all of those answers. The longer answers are the more important part, of course, and they were particularly shiny today. That NW corner is a gem—those long Acrosses aren't just great as individual answers, they form an entertainingly bizarre trio. Sometimes I like to think of the answers as people hanging out together in their corners, like their in a room at a party, and, well, I want to go to the party where the guest list includes a trash-talking Muhammad Ali, the EASTER BUNNY, and the cast of "A CHORUS LINE" (17A: Show that opens with "I Hope I Get It"). I also like the idea of an ITALIAN FLAG"flying" over a CONTENT FARM which is somehow an actual farm and located entirely UNDER THE SEA. Just acres of servers on the bottom of the ocean, with the red white and green just wafting in the current. Ariel works in management there, probably.
Here's the solving progress:
Started with TEASE—not a *huge* fan of that answer for that clue, as "Flirt" seems reasonably positive, but TEASE, ick, that has connotations of manipulativeness, negative connotations that I don't so much like. I hear "TEASE" in more of an angrily disappointed dude voice. Whereas "flirt" just doesn't convey the idea that the person is somehow dishonest about their intentions. Let's just say there are profane words for women in particular that have -TEASE as the suffix (or ... I guess it's more the profanity that's the prefix ... you get the idea). Anyway, that was my first (however reluctant) answer in the grid, and then SEEK and then EVOKE ERNESTO ASHEN STOKE and then bam, the EASTER BUNNY drops in and the party starts. Solving flow is steady from there until I get into a very mild pickle in the SE:
We've all been here, where you get the front (or back) end of a long answer, but it's a complete word and you canNot figure out what the word is that's supposed to go with it. And today, that happened with two adjacent answers. ITALIAN blank, CONTENT blank. In the first case, the only Italian airline I knew was AL ITALIA (crosswordese!) and ITALIAN AIR (?) wouldn't fit. And then with CONTENT, I just couldn't remember the term. I knew I knew it, but I was just blanking. So I thought I'd just go up and over the black square above NTH, but there I hit EAR blank! (48A: Sensation from a song that you're really, really into, slangily). And wrote in EAR WORM! So ... -GASM over FLAG over FARM proved quite a pesky little defensive line there in the SE. But ATLAS (50D: He's got a lot on his shoulders), broke everything open, showed me my EARGASM mistake, and led the way to FLAG and FARM and freedom! Finished up in the NW, where DREW *TO* was the biggest enemy I faced (still sounds wrong for its clue—hard to swap out DREW TO and [Attracted] in a way that makes sense; DREW IN works much better). I think my favorite moment of the puzzle was going from thinking "-MF!? No one's name starts -MF!" to a huge aha with E.M. FORSTER (29D: Novelist who received a Nobel nomination at least 20 times, but never won). Hope you found something to enjoy as well. See you tomorrow. Happy spring, everyone.
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