Constructor: Aaron M. Rosenberg
Relative difficulty: Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)
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THEME: searching for magazines in a digital world... — familiar phrases are clued as if they are responses (from an olde-tymey news merchant) to requests for specific dead-tree, non-digital magazines like one used to read in the olden days:
Theme answers:
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There's something kind of clever about the concept, but the execution felt awkward in many ways. So, let's leave aside that the very scenario that the puzzle wants you to imagine is preposterous. I mean, news / magazine shops are about as common as video rental stores, and anyway, even in the '90s, when they were thriving, it's hard to imagine anyone wandering in and making any of these requests. "Got any news magazines?" I mean ... yes? Wait, where are you? Are you in a convenience store in rural Pennsylvania? A 7-11 or a Sheetz or something? Maybe these requests and answers make sense in that context, because no one is just asking a news vendor for "news magazines" (?). But anyway, let's just say the scenario here is Totally Plausible. There are still many problems. If you're STRAPPED FOR something, you are not "out" of it. If you are SHORT A FEW of something, you are not "out" of it. These are not phrases that suggest utter depletion. You're low, that's what they mean. But the puzzle is trying to make us think they mean. The other three phrases all do what they're supposed to—indicate the complete non-existence of any copies of their respective magazines. But the first and last of the themers do not do that. The phrasing on SHORT A FEW PEOPLE is obviously terrible. PEOPLE as a plural of the magazine title?? "A few" makes it countable, and while the word "people" is obviously plural, as a mag title it's singular, and so ... No no no. The surface meaning works, but the magazine meaning 100% does not. My brain could somehow handle a sentence like "oh yeah, we've got some PEOPLE in the back" but not "we're SHORT A FEW PEOPLE." The "few" just makes it clunk. Imagine "short a few Time" and maybe you'll hear what I mean.
Relative difficulty: Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)
Theme answers:
- STRAPPED FOR TIME (17A: "Got any news magazines?""Sorry, we're ...")
- OUT OF SHAPE (23A: "Got any fitness magazines?""Sadly, we're ...")
- LACKING / VARIETY (36A: With 40-Across, "Got any showbiz magazines?""Regrettably, we're ...")
- MISSING OUT (53A: "Got any L.G.B.T.Q. magazines?""Unfortunately, we're ...")
- SHORT A FEW PEOPLE (60A: "Got any celebrity magazines?""Alas, we're ...")
Yeun Sang-yeop (Korean: 연상엽; born December 21, 1983), known professionally as Steven Yeun(/jʌn/), is an American actor. Yeun initially rose to prominence for playing Glenn Rhee in the television series The Walking Dead (2010–2016). He earned critical acclaim for starring in the thriller Burning (2018) and drama Minari (2020). The latter earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Asian American actor to do so. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021.Yeun has also appeared in the films Okja (2017), Sorry to Bother You (2018), The Humans (2021) and Nope (2022), and starred in the dark comedy series Beef (2023). He has also voiced main characters in television series such as Voltron: Legendary Defender (2016–2018), Tales of Arcadia (2016–2021), Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters (2017–2018), Final Space (2018–2021), Tuca & Bertie (2019–2022), and Invincible (2021–present). (wikipedia)
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LACKING / VARIETY is lacking snap. It's the limpest of the set. The best, by far, are OUT OF SHAPE and MISSING OUT, but this brings me to the theme's final and perhaps most distracting problem—the repetition of OUT. OUT Magazine is a core theme element, so (for elegance's sake) there should be no other OUTs in the grid, let alone in the themer set. So that was unfortunate. But not nearly as unfortunate as it gets later on, with the subsequent piling on of OUTs. As if repeating OUT once wasn't bad enough, you've also got OUTLAW and OUTWIT (the latter of which has its "OUT" crossing the "OUT" in MISSING OUT!?). A total OUT-storm. How many times can you dupe a word before the flaw becomes FATAL?
Something about the theme concept made it play slow for me, for a Tuesday. You've got wacky clues and imagined phrases and you have to find your way to magazine titles ... this is not a complaint, I like the concept, but if you wanna know why the relative difficulty rating is "Challenging" (for a Tuesday), now you know. There were other things too. The ERAS clue inexplicably baffled me (6A: Ballpark figures, for short). I wrote in ETAS and then had no idea how the Soviet symbol could be TED-something (7D: Soviet symbol). RED STAR forced the change to ERAS but I still did not get it. I was reading the word as ... a word. And "ballpark" as metaphorical. But even after imagining a baseball park, I had a moment of "what?" I was thinking of "figures" as people, like UMPS. But it's just the pitching stat, Earned Run Average, pluralized. That is the last way I'd clue ERAS (leaning into the abbr. instead of the ordinary word), which may be why I just didn't see something that, in retrospect, is fairly obvious. Further issues for me included misspelling YEUN as YUEN, writing in JUMP TO before LEAP TO (50D: Arrive at quickly, as conclusions), having no idea at all about "ALL OK" (?) (49A: Completely fine), and expecting the "outburst" at 38D: Outburst that may be entirely symbolic? to be something more than a single WORD (I had the "CUSS" part and then ... shrug). The grid overall is pretty solid and polished, with only ALL OK seeming strange as a standalone answer, and none of the short fill really bothering me at all. I guess the short fill was ... ALL OK. Maybe ALL OK is ALL OK too. The theme execution just didn't quite work for me today, and the OUTs, man, yeesh. It's like Hitchcock's The Birds* up in here, but with "Outs." Total mayhem. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld