Popular chocolate biscuit from Down Under / SUN 7-6-25 / Mario's dinosaur sidekick / Trickster of Greek myth / Closest world capital to Miami / Onetime wealthiest family in Europe / Typical patty melt specification / Breaking maneuver / Of extremely unreliable quality, in slang / "Midnight's Children" author, 1981 / Word with bullet or toilet / Philosopher who wrote "The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape"

Constructor: Zhou Zhang and Kevin Curry

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Escape Room" — the puzzle is modeled on an escape room (I guess—I wouldn't know, never been in one); a four-letter answer sits at the middle of the grid, inside what looks like a keyhole, completely cut off from the rest of the grid (69D: [Insert key here]), and in order to figure out what word goes there, you have to follow hints found in other answers (there are four such hint-answers: one for each letter of the keyhole answer); the "key" to "unlocking" that center lock (and thus finishing ("escaping"?) the puzzle) is EXIT ... and if you figure it out, you are (according to the puzzle) a BREAKOUT STAR! (42D: Person everyone's talking about ... or what you'll be after unlocking the lock and completing this puzzle?)

Theme answers:

• 39D: Final stop ... or a hint to finding the first key letter in this puzzle (END OF THE ROAD) [the "road" in the grid is RODEO DRIVE, the "end" of which is the letter "E"]
• 109A: Kids' ball game played on a court ... or a hint to finding the second key letter in this puzzle (FOURSQUARE) [in the "4" square in this grid (see 4-Down, XES) is the letter "X"]
• 93A: "The Little Mermaid" hit ... or a phonetic hint to finding the third key letter in this puzzle ("UNDER THE SEA") [there is only one "C" in the puzzle (in MEDICI), and directly "under" it is the letter "I"]
• 31A: Is completely oblivious ... or a hint to finding the fourth key letter in this puzzle (DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE) [the one answer in the puzzle that "doesn't have a clue" is 76A: - (TEE), which stands for the letter "T"]

Word of the Day: TIM TAM (38D: Popular chocolate biscuit from Down Under) —

Tim Tam is a brand of chocolate biscuit introduced by the Australian biscuit company Arnott's Biscuits Holdings in 1964. It consists of two malted biscuits separated by a light hard chocolate cream filling and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate. // The biscuit was created by Ian Norris. During 1958 he took a world trip looking for inspiration for new products. While traveling in Britain, he found the Penguin biscuit and decided to try to "make a better one". // Tim Tam went on the market on 10 September 1964. They were named by Ross Arnott, who attended the 1958 Kentucky Derby and decided that the name of the winning horse, Tim Tam, was perfect for a planned new line of biscuits. Pepperidge Farm, a sister company of Arnott's, began importing the Tim Tam to the United States in 2008. Tim Tams are still "Made in Australia" and packaging in the US bears the slogan "Australia's Favorite Cookie". (wikipedia)

• • •

Full disclosure ... well, two full disclosures. One, I hate escape rooms. Or, rather, I imagine I would, and I have zero interest in them. They sound like hell. I know they are very popular, and very popular with puzzler types, but ... not for me, no thanks, no. Thankfully, this really had no bearing on my enjoyment of this puzzle. Full disclosure two: I met one of these constructors (Zhou Zhang) at the ACPT back in April! And I have photos to prove it:

[That's Zhou on my right and Mallory on my left; they were competing in the Pairs division, just like me and my wife. I don't know what happened between photo 1 and photo 2 to make us all laugh—we were all high on post-tournament adrenaline and/or exhaustion]

Zhou told me that her debut puzzle would be coming out at some indeterminate time in the future, but, if you've ever had a puzzle accepted by the NYT, you know that that can mean weeks, months, even years (though I'm guessing they don't let it get to "years" any more). So I've had my eye out for her name and, well, here we are. I'm happy to report that I had a good time. Thank god solving the "Escape Room" was relatively easy. I normally don't like too much fussy post-solve business, but in this case, finding my way to each of the four letters in "EXIT" was actually kind of fun. The letters range in difficulty; "X" and "T" were pretty self-evident, whereas the other two involved searching the grid a bit for the answer. I identified RODEO DRIVE as the "road" in question (re: END OF THE ROAD) pretty quickly (I assume there are no other "roads" in the puzzle; I didn't check), and at that point I already knew what the missing vowels were going to be (you only need the "X" and "T" to see that the word is going to be "EXIT"), but I still needed to know *why* "I" was the right third letter. I looked for the names of actual seas that the "I" might be "under" ("BLACK?" "RED?" "CASPIAN?"). No luck. Then I tried to reason backward from "I" and went looking for "EYE" (!?). I didn't consider the letter "C" as the "sea" in question until a little later, because I figured there were probably a lot of "C"s in the grid ... but then I looked and looked and there was just the one "C," and under it, the letter "I." Puzzle, solved! Room, escaped!

As usual, starting this puzzle at all was the hardest part. I totally struck out in the NW at first pass. Couldn't make anything out of [Board game recommendation] or [Spot markers] or [Toddler's demand] (MAMA?), and thought 17A: Prevailing fashion (VOGUE) might be TREND, so I abandoned the area. Now that I look, RUSHDIE is in that section, and he was a gimme, so I don't know why I didn't see that clue the first time through the NW (3D: "Midnight's Children" author, 1981). Weird. Anyway, I had SESH and that was it. So I got started in this real roundabout way, from ODS and ROSIN to PSIS and then down the side of the "lock" and back up the west coast until I hit the NW corner again, and at *that* point, I saw RUSHDIE. My grid looked like this:

As soon as I got DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE, I knew (or figured) there'd be a (literally) clue-less answer in the puzzle that would help me figure that one out. But rather than look for it, I just kept solving. Besides the final gimmick ("unlocking" that central answer), there's nothing particularly tricky about the puzzle. It's got lots of entertainment value, and for a puzzle with a *lot* of 3-4-5s, it's pretty clean. I solved it like a themeless puzzle, with no real thought as to how the gimmick worked until the end. Since the "X" and "T" were obvious, I could easily infer "E" and "I" to make "EXIT," but I still needed to know how the "E" and "I" hints work—which ended up being the only real "work" on my end (after the initial flailing around to start things).

There were a few things I didn't know, or muffed at first. Let's start with ... "toilet TRAIN"??? (60A: Word with bullet or toilet). Oh my god, I just got it. Both my wife and I, last night, were like "what the hell is a toilet TRAIN?" We thought maybe it was a toilet ... on a train? Like maybe the "with toilet" part of the clue meant that TRAIN came not after but before "toilet." TRAIN toilet. You know, like this one:

[you can't tell, but Cary Grant is hiding in that toilet; this is a still from Hitchcock's famous movie, Toilets on a Train]

I see now that "toilet train" is like "potty train." "Train" as verb (rather than locomotive). It's been so long since I had a small child in the house, the phrase "toilet TRAIN" has apparently become alien to me. I also couldn't make sense of [Breaking maneuver] for a while, since I kept thinking it was "braking." Eventually, I realized "breaking" here referred to breakdancing. Easy crosses meant HANDSTAND eventually filled itself in. Didn't know PEPE, which I'm assuming means "pepper" (?) (19A: Italian seasoning). Yes, it means "pepper." My favorite mistake came at 13D: Kind of joke ... or a response to a really bad one (GAG). I wrote in "DAD." There are DAD jokes, of course, and then, if your dad actually makes one of his corny jokes, you might respond with an exasperated / irritated / eye-rolling "DAD!" As in "Daaaaad, why do you do that, please stop." Had no idea about the philosopher at 1A: Philosopher who wrote "The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape" (MARX). I appreciate (now) the way this clue subtly introduces you to the "escape" theme. Lastly, where my ignorance / failure is concerned, I don't think I've ever had a TIM TAM, but I know of them, so I got that answer easily after a cross or two.

More things:

• 22A: Its freedom is granted in the First Amendment (PRESS) — not sure what "freedoms" any of us are going to have left after all [waves hands toward wider world] this. I went through a mental list of 1st amendment freedoms and got speech, religion, and assembly ... and then blanked. Finally getting PRESS was a definite "d'oh!" moment.
• 119A: One taking the words right out of your mouth? (LIP READER) — what a great clue. Just a perfect repurposing of a familiar idiom.
• 34A: Put a PIN in it (ATM) — again, clever repurposing of a familiar idiom. No need for a "?" on this clue, since it ends up being quite literal (PIN = personal identification number, of course).
• 7D: Journey in which you might carry quite a load? (GUILT TRIP) — very tricky. I never thought of the "trip" in that phrase as a "journey," even metaphorically, so I needed a lot of help from crosses on this one.
• 82D: Of extremely unreliable quality, in slang (JANKY) — love this word. Colorful, with high-value Scrabble letters to boot. Crossing JANKY with WARTY, really ... vivid.

Overall, I liked this far more than I tend to like Sunday puzzles. I declare it non-JANKY. That's all, see you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. if you're headed out to any kind of pool- or lake- or seaside vacation this summer, or any vacation that involves a significant amount of down time, and you want to solve crosswords but do NOT want to be on your phone or iPad or whatever all the time, why not pick up a delightful crossword puzzle book (yes book! Made of paper!). I have one that I'm saving (mostly) for my Santa Barbara vacation later in the summer—it's Name That Movie—Crossword Puzzles for Movie Lovers by Jeff Sinnock and Desirée Penner. I had their Name That Tune crossword book on my Holiday gift list last year, and now they've moved from music to movies. These are relatively easy 17x17 puzzles, all of them movie-themed, with a related movie title you have to figure out by unscrambling circled letters in the grid. The puzzles are relaxing, not taxing, and will (maybe?) help you with certain pop cultural blind spots that I know many of you have (as I do myself). 51 puzzles, 13 bucks. Worth it. Happy summer solving!

P.P.S. if you have crossword-related stuff you want me to promote, just ask. I can't promise I'll say "yes," but I usually do, and it costs you nothing :)

P.P.P.S. if I told you I'd promote something and haven't done it yet, give me a nudge. I feel like I lost track of these things a little this past (busy) spring.

P.P.P.P.S. Holy cow, Zhou (today’s co-constructor) and Mallory (both pictured with me, above) have today’s Apple crossword as well! Real breakout day for Z.Z.

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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Record-keeping device made of strings and knots / SAT 7-5-25 / Glass production / Brendon of Panic! at the Disco / French musician/composer ___ Tiersen / Fortnite developer / Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" / Getting in one guess, as Wordle / Subject of the books "Jonathan Loves David" and "Take Back the Word" / Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" / Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike

Constructor: Tracy Bennett

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: QUIPU (46D: Record-keeping device made of strings and knots) —

Quipu (/ˈkiːpuː/ KEE-poo), also spelled khipu (Ayacucho Quechua: kipu, [ˈkipu]; Cusco Quechua: khipu, [kʰipu]), are record keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.

A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending on its use and the amount of information it stored, a given quipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.

Objects which can unambiguously be identified as quipus first appear in the archaeological record during 1st millennium CE, likely attributable to the Wari Empire. Quipus subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco of the 13th to 15th centuries, and later of the Inca Empire (1438–1533), flourishing across the Andes from c. 1100 to 1532. Inca administration used quipus extensively for a variety of uses: monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, keeping calendrical information, military organization, and potentially for recording simple and stereotyped historical "annales". (wikipedia)

• • •

[37A: Babe, for one]

Lots of stuff I flat-out didn't know in this one, though it was still very doable—didn't play any harder than an average Saturday. I had no idea there was such a thing as QUEER THEOLOGY (46A: Subject of the books "Jonathan Loves David" and "Take Back the Word"). QUEER THEORY, sure—I went to grad school in the Humanities, after all. But THEOLOGY, no, that got by me. I mean of course there's QUEER THEOLOGY, there's QUEER everything, and yet still, this particular phrase—unknown to me. Got the QUEER part and then... no idea. QUEER TEENAGER? Sadly, no. Never heard the "8" / asterisk key called the STAR KEY, though as with QUEER THEOLOGY, that was eventually inferable (34A: *, to a typist). Never heard of QUIPU ... though I have this weird feeling that I "learned" it from crosswords and then forgot it (solve for long enough and this will happen to you, over and over and over and...). Looks like this is the first NYTXW appearance of QUIPU in over fifty-four years (!), so I don't feel so bad now about not recognizing it. Never would've remembered URIE without help from crosses (56A: Brendon of Panic! at the Disco). Absolutely no idea who this YANN composer person is (5A: French musician/composer ___ Tiersen). If the YANN is not Martel, I do not know the YANN. Looks like he scored the popular French movie Amélie (2001). Huh. OK. Ultimately, all the crosses on YANN are fair, though that second "N," yeesh. Who calls it NEAT VODKA? (8D: It's a straight shot). You can order any liquor "neat" but somehow the phrase "NEAT [insert liquor]"—while understandable and defensible—just sounds off. I would say someone was drinking whiskey neat, not neat whiskey. Of course I don't understand drinking vodka any way at all—it's the least interesting (and least taste-having) of all your major liquors. We have a well-stocked liquor cabinet—no vodka. But that's neither here nor there. The big-picture point here is that I got held up a lot by stuff beyond my ken. But through the magic of fair crosses, I got through it easily enough (easier as I went along, easiest at the finish, in the SE, where I didn't really know EPIC GAMES but had -IC GAMES filled in before I ever even saw the clue, so what else was it gonna be?) (30D: Fortnite developer).

[this is not the band in question—it's a song on a CD compilation that came with some NZ music mag I bought years and years ago. The compilation is called Awesome Feeling II. Presumably there was an Awesome Feeling I, but I don't own it]

Struggled up front with LONE, which really should've been SOLE, shouldn't it? LONE tracks, but SOLE alliterates, which is what all good crossword answers are supposed to do. Just discovered that Sole Survivor was the name of a 1970 TV movie starring William Shatner, about a WWII bombing mission gone awry, if that's of any interest to you. It's also the name of a 1984 horror movie whose poster has a cool-ass '80s digital font:

LONE survivor is just not as poetic or evocative as SOLE, though I can imagine someone saying it on the 6 o'clock news, so OK. Sticking with the NW corner—when I [Careen wildly], I do not SLUE. I VEER. So there was that. I had the 3D imaging as a CAT SCAN at first (my retired radiologist father would be disappointed). I know what ONION ROLLs are but I confess I didn't know they were particularly Jewish (3D: Jewish bakery specialty). So... struggle struggle struggle ... then I built that NW corner from the bottom up, and then ... the easiest answer in the NW, which I almost wish I'd looked at first:

I don't think UNCANNY VALLEY is clued quite right (22A: Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike). The point isn't that it's "too lifelike"—it's that it's both too lifelike *and* not lifelike enough. That's the valley. The "eeriness" is when the robot crosses that threshold into "close but not there." Lots of A.I.-created animation falls in this category for me. See also, famously, the animation in Polar Express (2004). Anyway, you can't have the titular "valley" if you don't have both the concept of "too lifelike" *and* the concept of "not lifelike enough." See ... the valley is not a mythical place, it's a literal shape on a graph:

Though there was lots I didn't know, and some stuff I didn't love, in this grid, there were a few winners, for sure. I liked UNCANNY VALLEY as an answer (just not the clue). QUEER THEOLOGY looks great (my ignorance of the term notwithstanding). RINKY-DINK is hard not to like. GUTTER BALL—funny (in real life, and as clued) (50A: Alley oops) (i.e. a mistake ("oops!") made in a bowling alley). And I like CADET BLUE, which was an answer I found myself writing in off the first few letters without really knowing if it was real (27D: Uniform shade). That is, the phrase occurred to me, so I wrote it in, but I didn't know how I knew it or what shade of blue it was, exactly. Sometimes your brain just whispers the answer to you and you go with it. Of course sometimes your brain whispers VEER and CAT SCAN, so you've got to keep your eye on it.

[originally entitled "LOAN Provider" ... I mean, probably]

What else?:

• 29A: Michigan's ___ Marquette River (waterway named for a missionary) (PÈRE)— I guess the "missionary" part of the clue was supposed to suggest the religious PÈRE ("father"). No help to me. Tracy (today's constructor) is from Michigan, so this seems like one of at least two little personal flourishes in the puzzle. The other, perhaps more obvious flourish is the Wordle clue (41A: Getting in one guess, as Wordle). Tracy happens to be the editor of Wordle, in case you didn't know. I didn't love ACING as the answer there, but I guess in the golf sense, in the hole-in-one sense, it's true. In the sense of "ACING a test," though, no. ACING in that sense implies a demonstration of ability, whereas getting Wordle in 1 is just dumb luck.
• 55A: Glass production (OPERA) — as in Philip Glass. He has written 15 operas, including The Perfect American, a portrait of Walt Disney in his later years as a "power-hungry racist." Gotta check that one out.
• 60A: Somewhat audible disparagements (TSKS) — not getting the "somewhat" on this clue and the identical (if singular) clue on HISS. They are both definitely audible, or else they don't work. If a disparagement falls in the woods and nobody hears it ... did you even disparage, bro?
• 19D: Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" (CHASSÉ) — love the "slid into" part of this clue, since sliding is what's involved with a CHASSÉ.

That's it. Gonna go do Wordle now. Probably not in 1 (my starter word this week is BORIC—if I get it in 3, I'll feel like a hero). See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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