Top Italian soccer league / TUE 10-5-21 / Really in textspeak / Stage name of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys / Signature Phil Collins his ranked among VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s / The me of Despicable Me

Constructor: Hoang-Kim Vu and Jessica Zetzman

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (*for a Tuesday*)

THEME: HEARTBROKEN (60A: Despondent ... as progressively  suggested by 17-, 24-, 38- and 48-Across) — letter string "HEART" is found in first theme answer, and in each successive theme answer, the  same letter string can be found "broken," with the "HEART" parts one square farther apart with each successive themer:

Theme answers:

• "THEARTOFWAR" (17A: Classic work with chapters titled "Attack by Stratagem" and "Maneuvering an Army")
• "INTHEAIRTONIGHT" (24A: Signature Phil Collins hit ranked among VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s")
• SWITCHESPARTIES (38A: Changes political affiliation)
• HEADFORTHEHILLS (48A: Flee to remote safety)

Word of the Day: SERIE A (5D: Top Italian soccer league) —

Serie A (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsɛːrje ˈa]), also called Serie A TIM for sponsorship reasons, is a professional league competition for football clubs located at the top of the Italian football league system and the winner is awarded the Scudetto and the Coppa Campioni d'Italia. It has been operating as a round-robin tournament for over ninety years since the 1929–30 season. It had been organized by the Direttorio Divisioni Superiori until 1943 and the Lega Calcio until 2010, when the Lega Serie A was created for the 2010–11 season. Serie A is regarded as one of the best football leagues in the world and it is often depicted as the most tactical and defensively sound national league. Serie A was the world's strongest national league in 2020 according to IFFHS, and is ranked third among European leagues according to UEFA's league coefficient, behind La Liga and the Premier League and ahead of the Bundesliga and Ligue 1, which is based on the performance of Italian clubs in the Champions League and the Europa League during the previous five years. Serie A led the UEFA ranking from 1986 to 1988 and from 1990 to 1999. (wikipedia)

• • •

Loads of problems with this theme, both in concept and in execution. Let's start with the fact that once "heart" is "broken" ... it's broken. It can't be more broken. Or, rather, moving "heart" parts farther apart does not break "heart" more. It's the same amount of broken: just broken. I don't get the concept of moving the "heart" parts one square farther apart each time. What is being illustrated? Once you break "heart," you're HEARTBROKEN ... the rest isn't very meaningful. Also, technically "heart" breaks across two words even in the first answer (where HEART is supposed to be intact). That is, if I write out "THE ART OF WAR" with normal spacing, as you can see ... "heart," broken (between the words "THE" and "ART"). So the concept gets muddled further there. The worst part, though, was that the puzzle is trying to sell you on this idea of a "progression" in the theme, with the two parts of "heart" getting one square farther apart each time, but (huge "but") ... they're not the same parts. That is, the "heart" first breaks between "A" and "R" (in "INTHEAIRTONIGHT"), so there's an "HEA" part and an "RT" part. But in the next themer, those aren't the two parts at all—the "break" happens between the "E" and the "A"! So there aren't two "heart" parts drifting farther apart each time; there are three separate and distinct breaks, and while yes, each break is one square bigger, the whole idea of "progression" is destroyed when the initial breaking place is not maintained through all the themers. It's really wobbly all around, this theme. 

Also, what is up with the Phil Collins clue? Who cares about VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s"—that info tells us absolutely nothing. "IN THE AIR TONIGHT" is noteworthy primarily for having one of the most famous beat drops in pop music history: two seconds of drum fill that have become legendary. Whole articles have been written about it. Maybe reference that in your clue; at any rate, reference something more specific and colorful than VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s," which is just a long-winded and not particularly revealing way of signifying "'80s hit." 

The fill is also oddly ROUGH. Lots of overcommon stuff, and then HOLO- and AIRES and L'OEIL, which are unappealing stand-alone fragments. I don't get the fill choices in some of the smaller, easier-to-fill places. Like the east, what is happening there? A tiny 3x4 section you could fill a million ways and we are subjected to both THU and USD? Both of those are OK if you really need them, but you don't here. Actually, let's leave the innocuous THU alone. But my god, how is USD / HERD better than USE / HERE?? USE is not exciting, but at least there's a million different ways to clue it, and it's a complete, non-abbr. word, whereas USD (short for "the US dollar") is strictly a "break in case of emergency" ill option. Or HERA / USA! There's another better option. Just doesn't seem like the grid was filled with care. And what the hell is SERIEA doing in a Tuesday puzzle? You gotta push back on your wordlist sometimes, yeesh. This is a Tuesday puzzle and SERIEA will be totally unknown to huge swaths of the solving population (including me). Also, it's mostly uninferable. When I had all the letters in place, I guessed that it was SERIE [space] A and not SERIEA (one word), but I wasn't entirely sure. That is the kind of answer that wants to pass itself off as cool and new, but it's actually just here to provide an AIOLI-like number of vowels, to make filling the grid easier. SERIEA has never been in a grid before, ever, and you're debuting it ... on a Tuesday? This makes no sense. Again, there are so many little considerations that seem to have gone unconsidered in this puzzle. SRSLY. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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