Beverage featured in "A Christmas Story" / FRI 11-7-25 / Illustrator of the Tammany Tiger / Bygone office assistant / In an awesome way, slangily / Victuals, informally / Domesticated insect entirely dependent on humans for reproduction / Novelist Fannie who wrote "Imitation of Life" (1933) / The Brady household including Alice, e.g. / Muscleman of 1980s TV

Constructor: Kelly Morenus

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Fannie HURST (1D: Novelist Fannie who wrote "Imitation of Life" (1933)) —

Fannie Hurst (October 18, 1889 – February 23, 1968) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.

Although her novels, including Lummox (1923), Back Street (1931), and Imitation of Life (1933), lost popularity over time and were mostly out of print as of the 2000s, they were bestsellers when first published and were translated into many languages. She also published over 300 short stories during her lifetime.

Hurst is known for the film adaptations of her works, including Imitation of Life (1934), Four Daughters (1938), Imitation of Life (1959), Humoresque (1946), and Young at Heart (1954, a musical remake of Four Daughters). (wikipedia)

• • •

This didn't start out so great. It had the kind of fill up top that makes me sag and stop and take a screenshot to document the vibe

STENO TEAT ATSEA NSA ADES ... plus a no-longer-famous author of yore (HURST) and neo-crosswordese ELOTE (I still like ELOTE, both as a food and as an answer, but it really is starting to proliferate like an answer that's going to wear out its welcome, eventually—first NYTXW appearance in 2023, one more appearance in 2024, and now four appearances in 2025 (with ~eight weeks still left in the year). I'd include NAST in this crosswordy onslaught as well (20A: Illustrator of the Tammany Tiger) (I actually learned who NAST was from crosswords, way way way back in the early days of this blog—Jan. 23, 2007: Puzzle: [Tweed twitter Thomas]. Me: "!?!?!?!?!"). It was hard to appreciate the longer stuff in the NW with so much tired short stuff to hack through. But then I, and the puzzle, put the PEDAL TO THE METAL, and whoosh, off I went. 

[ENNEAD, i.e. a set of 9]

Did the fill improve? Yeah, a bit, but it still had a leaden, draggy feel here and there. It's probably strongest in the NE and into the center: FLIP OUT ON and LET IT RIDE are a great pair, and there's no compromises with the crosses up there. Things get a little uglier at ENNEAD and T'NIA Miller, a name I'm hearing of for the first time right now (and a debut answer). She seems to be a successful British actress who is in a lot of things I've never watched, mostly things I didn't know existed. If you say "Fall of the House of Usher" to me, I think Poe, and if you say "no, the movie," I think "Oh, Vincent Price! Cool!" But no. There was a TV show? Oh, a Netflix show. Shrug. Not a subscriber any more. And even when I was, I couldn't keep up with all the damned shows. Today's Fall of the House of Usher was actually a miniseries. I think I'll just stick with King Vincent, thanks.

The clue on PEDAL TO THE MEDAL felt bad, in the sense that it's not a complete command in that form, the way the clue suggests (8D: "Step on it!"). You need "Put the" at the front for it to be a plausible command. I guess I can imagine shouting the phrase without the "Put the" at the beginning, but it feels pretty contrived. The clue on LIKE A BOSS also felt slightly off to me (34D: In an awesome way, slangily). Something about "awesome" is too vague and not competence-specific enough. If you do something LIKE A BOSS, you do it with confidence, skill, and authority, which I suppose falls under the umbrella "awesomely" if you squint hard enough, but the clue just isn't on-the-nose enough. Anyway, "in an awesome way" is already slang. [With skill and panache, slangily] makes more sense.

I had some trouble with MAILER (I was thinking of much bigger, more industrial "shipping containers") (31A: Shipping container), and I think I had LUNA MOTH before SILK MOTH (just because I had four blank letters before MOTH and LUNA, you know, fit) (39A: Domesticated insect entirely dependent on humans for reproduction). Otherwise, no real errors, except a brief dalliance with GERM (30D: Very start, as of an idea = SEED). The SE corner went down like a Monday, as more of my crosswordesey friends (NERO, ORSINO, NSC, HAVA, ASNER) showed up and made things very easy.

Bullets:

• 57A: Modern identification method (RETINA SCAN) — and here I've been wasting valuable nanoseconds saying "RETINAL SCAN." Possibly because that's the actual term. But in common usage, the "L" gets dropped, it's fine. Slowed me down only as long as it took me to delete the "L."
• 15A: Synthetic upholstery material (ULTRASUEDE) — in Japan it is sold under the brand name ECSAINE, which is the kind of answer I see in my crossword nightmares. The very first paragraph of the wikipedia entry for ULTRASUEDE states that "It is used to make footbags (also known as hacky sacks) and juggling balls." Which is bizarrely specific. Did a hacky-sacker write this entry?
• 51A: Victuals, informally (GRUB) — I wanted EATS. See also CHOW.

• 52D: World capital on both banks of the Daugava River (RIGA) — had the "R" and "A" and completely instinctively wrote in ROMA. The crossword probability part of my brain simply overrode the "look at the actual words that are in the clue" part. Actually, it turns out, ROMA is only slightly more common than RIGA, in terms of all-time NYTXW appearances (309 to 298). This is the fifth RIGA of 2025, making this the most RIGAful year since 2003. Oh, maybe I should add that RIGA, in case you didn't know, is the capital of Latvia.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Woman's name invented by Jonathan Swift / THUR 11-6-25 / "A braggart, a ___, a villain ...": "Romeo and Juliet" / Maker of the i4 and i5

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Hard (Around 20 minutes, although I was solving on paper)

THEME: TONGUE TWISTER clued as [Certain stumbling block ... or a hint to three pairs of symmetrically positioned answers in this puzzle]— Languages anagram to other words, which are clued in relation to the language. The language ("tongue") is "twisted," i.e. scrambled up.

• My nitpick is I didn't like the word "stumbling block." I suppose it works in the context of "Wow, that was accidentally very difficult for me to read aloud, what a tongue twister!" but I know it more as a cute game. I really wanted something with "language barrier," which of course did not fit.

Theme answers:

• FLEMISH is clued as [Language in which "zichzelf" is 49-Across]
• The corresponding answer is HIMSELF, which is an anagram of FLEMISH
• LATVIAN is clued as [Language in which "drosmigs" is 57-Across]
• The corresponding answer is VALIANT, which is an anagram of LATVIAN
• CROATIAN is clued as [Language in which "kabanica" is 10-Down]
• The corresponding answer is RAINCOAT which is an anagram of CROATIAN

Word of the Day: LOGOS (Prancing horse and golden bull, in the auto industry) —

The logo of the luxury carmaker Ferrari is the Prancing Horse (Italian: Cavallino Rampante, lit. 'little prancing horse'), a prancing black horse on a yellow background. The design was created by Francesco Baracca, an Italian flying ace during World War I, as a symbol to be displayed on his aeroplane; the Baracca family later permitted Enzo Ferrari to use the design.

The world of bullfighting is a key part of Lamborghini's identity. In 1962, Ferruccio Lamborghini visited the Seville ranch of Don Eduardo Miura, a renowned breeder of Spanish fighting bulls. Lamborghini was so impressed by the majestic Miura animals that he decided to adopt a raging bull as the emblem for the automaker he would open shortly.

• • •

Good morning, friends! We have a One Day Late Malaika MWednesday today, or as you may call it, a Malaika MThursday.

I found this puzzle very hard. Actually, I was a huge hater throughout 90% of the solving process. Then, I understood the theme and become less of a hater. (Many such cases.) I've solved a couple puzzles with language-y themes and it is tough because so much of the information is missing. In this case, three of the long answers were clued functionally as [Language] and another three of the long answered were clued as [Please translate this non-English term]. That makes it super hard to break into the puzzle. I kept checking my entries by looking at a crossing answer, seeing that the crossing answer was a theme clue and going "UGHHHHH!" 

Of course-- that's the puzzle!! That's the point of a puzzle... you "puzzle out" what's going on. I often chastise new solvers who think of a crossword as a series of 78 trivia questions that they can either directly fill in, or must skip and give up on. And yet here I am, complaining for sort of the same reason. This was not a high school language test where the puzzle is seeing if I know how to translate the Croatian word "kabanica." This is a game with wordplay where I have to figure out the anagram trick by doing a lot of cross-referencing with entries that have easier clues. And boy oh boy when I figured it out, I audibly breathed a sigh of relief. I find it very exhausting to write scathing reviews of puzzles on here (though I have done it before!!) and I am glad that this was challenging in a way that fell into place and became satisfying. Sort of the perfect Thursday theme.

Speaking of RAINCOAT, do you guys know where I can buy a beautiful yellow raincoat so that I look like Coraline

I wish the grid had a little more flow, or connectivity, to it. In this case, I clocked the theme, filled out all the theme answers, and then still had that top-right corner nearly blank. It felt like solving a mini puzzle that was independent from the rest of the experience. All three sections along the top felt quite segmented from the rest of the puzzle. But I understand that grids with mirror symmetry are a little constrained to lay out. 

I'm curious what other language anagrams didn't make the cut for this puzzle! It seems like something that could have worked great as a Sunday-sized puzzle.

Bullets:

• [The 1987 film "Spaceballs," e.g.] for FARCE — Oof, I did not like this clue. I had "spoof" for soooo long.
• [Like many mustaches in film] for FALSE — Is this true? I figured actors just.... grew mustaches. Would have made more sense for plays, not films. Although it says "many" not "most" so that could mean anything.
• [Museum's entrance and exit?] for EMS — This is referring to how the letter M begins and ends the word "museum." I hate clues like this, but alas, I myself sometimes write them.
  

xoxo Malaika

Now that I'm done reviewing the puzzle, I'm going to talk a little bit about the clue [Woman's name invented by Jonathan Swift] for VANESSA. You can skip this part if you like.

I have heard ~two people comment that the NYT puzzle will rarely clue an entry that is a woman's name by simply mentioning a real, famous woman. (Alternatives would include using a noun (like "dawn" as a noun rather than a person), using wordplay ("Name that anagrams to xyz"), or describing the woman via her relationship to a man.) This is not a trend that has stood out to me while broadly solving (which is not to say it does or doesn't exist, just that I haven't noticed!), but I did notice it with this clue, and it's feedback that I think about when I write my own puzzles.

I typically write easy clues. For proper nouns (like Vanessa), I usually to pick the most famous person that I know with that name, and then reference their most famous work. (Lots of subjectivity here, of course! And a big flaw here is that it can lead to repetitive clues.) If I want to make the clue even easier, I'll mention other people in the work as well. For Vanessa, my immediate thought would be:

• Easy clue: [Actress Hudgens of High School Musical]
• Even easier clue: [Actress Hudgens who starred alongside Zac Efron in High School Musical]

After hearing the feedback I mentioned above, I wondered if I should make an effort to clue women's names independently of the men that they have worked with. Ultimately, it is not something that I decided to prioritize, but it is something that I like to have in my brain while I am writing clues. I like to think about people's feedback while I am working, even if I don't take that feedback as a hard-and-fast rule. I think it makes me a more detail-oriented constructor.

What clue would you have written for VANESSA? What feedback would you like for me to keep in my brain while I am constructing?

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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