High-quality cannabis in slang / SUN 8-15-21 / Racial justice movement since 2013 in brief / Nonwriting credentials for Conan Doyle and Chekhov informally / Avant-garde artists Congo and Pierre Brassau / Spirit in Arabian myth / Playwright Will who was a 2005 Pulitzer finalist

Constructor: Aimee Lucido and Ella Dershowitz

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: DOUBLE CROSS (69A: Betray ... or a hint to four answers in this puzzle)— familiar phrases containing numbers appear in the grid with that number halved ... but then the number actually crosses the letter string "TWO," so ... crosses "TWO" = x 2 = doubled. The "TWO" cross doubles the number back to what it's supposed to be, hence "DOUBLE CROSS":

Theme answers:

• ONE-FACED (27A: Duplicitous) (i.e. two-faced) (x/w ATWOOD)
• TWO-LETTER WORDS (i.e. four-letter words) (52A: #$%& and @%¢!) (x/w ATWORST)
• THREE FEET UNDER (i.e. six feet under) (85A: Pushing up daisies) (x/w "ITWORKS!")
• FOUR BALL (i.e. eight ball) (113A: What the beleaguered are behind) (x/w "JUSTWOW")

Word of the Day: Will ENO (14D: Playwright Will who was a 2005 Pulitzer finalist) —

Will Eno (born 1965) is an American playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. His play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2005. His play The Realistic Joneses appeared on Broadway in 2014, where it received a Drama Desk Special Award and was named Best Play on Broadway by USA Today, and best American play of 2014 by The Guardian. His play The Open House was presented Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in 2014 and won the Obie Award for Playwriting as well as other awards, and was on both TIME Magazine and Time Out New York 's Top Ten Plays of 2014. (wikipedia)

There's a cleverness to this concept, but ultimately it's a bit one-note, and the theme feels very thin. I get that the "TWO" crosses mean that there are really technically eight theme answers (besides the revealer), but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like four, and four is thin. Also, once you grok the concept, there's not much left to discover, and no real new cleverness left to discover. 2x1 is 2, 2x2 is 4, and so on. You could just go down to all the themers you didn't have yet and get them pretty easily. The issue isn't just "does it work?" but "is it fun? is it joyful? does it hold surprises?" There just wasn't enough oomph to this one for me. Some of this flatness could've been made up for in the fill, but the grid is not built in such a way that allows for a lot of longer, showier answers. POP A WHEELIE (118A: Be up for some biking?) and LOUDMOUTH (25A: Blabberer) definitely give the grid some life, but mostly what you have is a very choppy, black-squarey grid and (consequently) a preponderance of shorter answers; thus, not a lot of especially lively fill (though the overall quality is more than sufficiently smooth and solid). The best, most creative moments actually come in the various "TWO"-containing answers. Kinda tough to make that work out for times, crossing the appropriate number each time, and as you can see, difficulty often leads to cool innovation; "JUST ... WOW"(82D: "I. Can't. Even.") is the very best example of this, though "IT WORKS" (80D: "Success!") is also inventive. The theme concept is sturdy, but it doesn't lead to a ton of solving joy. I found myself wishing the whole experience were, I don't know, PERKIER, maybe?