Anticonsumerists aiming to help the environment / SAT 2-20-21 / Humorist Leo who wrote Joys of Yiddish / Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an R in the middle / Cold War missile type / Word derived from Greek for age

Constructor: Ali Gascoigne

Relative difficulty: Medium (again, as with yesterday, the preponderance of proper nouns might make it much tougher)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Leo ROSTEN (26D: Humorist Leo who wrote "The Joys of Yiddish," 1968) —

Leo Calvin Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) was an American humorist in the fields of scriptwriting, storywriting, journalism, and Yiddish lexicography. He was also a political scientist interested especially in the relationship of politics and the media. [...] Rosten is best remembered for his stories about the night-school "prodigy" Hyman Kaplan, written under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. They were published in The New Yorker from 1935^[1] and collected in two volumes published in 1937 and 1959, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. The Education was a "close second" for one U.S. National Book Award in 1938. The second collection was one of eighteen National Book Award for Fiction finalists in 1960.  // He is also well known for his encyclopedic The Joys of Yiddish (1968), a guide to Yiddish and to Jewish culture including anecdotes and Jewish humor. It was followed by O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! (1976), a reworking of the two 1930s collections, and  Hooray for Yiddish! (1982), a humorous lexicon of the American language as influenced by Jewish culture. Another Rosten work is Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations.

• • •

This was, for the most part, a nicely varied and sufficiently tough Saturday. The grid's not built to give you too many long answers (these are usually the most colorful), but what it does give you is decent. I especially liked FREEGANS and "GET A ROOM!"Also, this is a puzzle constructed by a man that is properly inclusive of women, so, you know, here's me giving credit instead of yelling criticism. Don't say I never etc. I do want to ask constructors, once again, to consider not just the kinds of names they use, but how well known they are, whom they're well known to, and (this is crucial) how close they all are to each other. Diversity is, for me, a paramount concern, and this puzzle is good on that front: old new, men women, Black white, cool. There were two areas, though, where proximate names created potential difficulty—this is not necessarily a criticism, as Saturdays are *supposed* to be difficult, but ... it's a question of whether you want to be getting your difficulty primarily from tricky clues and wordplay or from names, many of which are culturally / generationally exclusionary by their very nature, leaving some solvers thrilled, or at least satisfied, and others just blinking and baffled. I think it's fine to have both kinds of difficulty, but ROSTEN (used-to-be famous) next to ANYA Taylor-Joy (very recently famous) creates a real knot, and SKEE-LO crossing AKON, while easy for me, seems like a possible nightmare for someone who is less familiar with stylized one-name '90s/'00s rapper/singers from the hip-hop/R&B world. Both names I've seen before, both grid-worthy, but crossing like that, dang. You can tell the puzzle kinda knows it's in dicey territory, as it really Really goes out of its way to help you with AKON (8D: Singer whose name becomes a city if you add an "R" in the middle). Since SKEE-LO is only really famous for one song ... that crossing feels potentially demographically fatal, especially with the already tough ALICANTE up there. Also, staying in that quadrant, people who don't know SKEE-LO or AKON are maybe also less likely to know CRAY? (short for "crazy," sometimes doubled to "CRAY-CRAY"). Just hypothesizing. Anyway, space your names out and make sure your difficulty is coming from a broad array of answer types and cluing strategies. Again, all the names in this puzzle are absolutely acceptable fare. Just watch where you put 'em / how you clue 'em.

I don't watch "Queen's Gambit" and don't plan to, but I did see last year's "Emma," and ANYA Taylor-Joy was great in that. Still, I remembered her as an ANNA. Alas. Turns out that "Y" is a *crucial* letter in parsing the central Across, "IT'S A YES FROM ME" (32A: "You have my vote!"). I had "IT'S AN ..." and wanted something like "IT'S AN EASY YES," but that didn't fit. How I remembered Leo ROSTEN, I have no idea. I looked at the clue, thought "How am I supposed to remember that?," and then found my fingers typing R-O-S-T-E-N almost independently of me. Weird how you can not know something and know it simultaneously. I am certain that "The Joys of Yiddish" was on my mom's bookshelves in my childhood, along with, I don't know, that blue Zelda Fitzgerald biography, maybe? I didn't read anything on those bookshelves, but they left a strong memory imprint. Still, I did not know that I knew who wrote "Joys of Yiddish" ... until I did. So, trouble with ANYA offset by the unexpected lack of trouble with ROSTEN, which meant what could've been a very hard section created only a minor hold-up. Another hold-up: ELLA before ETTA (47D: "___ Is Betta Than Evvah!" (1976 album)) (I see that you're trying to give me ETTA by including the rhyming 'word' 'Betta' but the double-v in 'Evvah' made me think double-letters, not rhymes, were the deal, so ... ELLA). I have maybe heard of ALICANTE, but certainly don't "know" it, so that answer needed almost every cross. Otherwise I didn't really struggle much. Parsing the longest answers (including SECRET SERVICE) provided most of today's difficulty. The puzzle was very much on my cultural wavelength. 

Some more things:

• 1A: Requirement (MUST-DO) — yeesh, that was tough. And slightly awkward. MUST-SEE feels natural (possibly from NBC's '90s TV slogan, "Must-See TV"), whereas MUST-DO feels clunky. "Have you been to the Louvre? Oh, it's a MUST-DO" ... :( ... not saying it's not a thing, but saying it clanks.
• 39D: One doing some stitching (SEAMER) — really? Kinda weak. I'd've gone with [Four-___ (fastball type)], but also I'd've gone with something other than SEAMER.
• 41D: Kind of state (NANNY) — this is right-wing propaganda. Total garbage. There is no such state. NANNY state is what so-called "conservatives" call a functioning government. One with taxes and regulation. And heat and electricity and clean drinking water. You can't include NANNY state in your puzzle like it's an actual, real thing. It bespeaks a fraudulent world view, or at least an extremely politically tendentious world view, and should be clued as such. I mean ... "The term was popularised by the British and American tobacco industry." This clue is cordially invited to *&$% off.
• 43D: Buddy of "Barnaby Jones" (EBSEN) — there will never be a day when I don't hesitate when spelling EBSEN (or EPSOM, or EPSON). You'd think I could get a mnemonic going like "Buddy has a 'B' ... and the 'E' at the front has a 'buddy' toward the back." Solves the "B" and the "E" dilemma. But I guarantee I won't even remember writing this the next time EBSEN's in the grid.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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