1966 Swedish Literature Nobelist who wrote about the struggles of the Jewish people / TUE 3-8-22 / Mythical goat-men / 1988 American Nobelist in Physiology or Medicine / 1976 Peace Nobelist from Northern Ireland who co-founded Community of Peace People / Successful singer or producer of popular music / Bygone G.M. car / Oklahoma city named for a Camelot woman

Constructor: Mary Lou Guizzo

Relative difficulty: Challenging (***for a Tuesday***) (names names names)

THEME: Women Nobelists — a list of women who have won Nobel Prizes ... if there's anything trickier going on here, I don't see it. I think it's just a slate of women from all over the globe in honor of today, International Women's Day:

Theme answers:

• NELLY SACHS (17A: 1966 Swedish Literature Nobelist who wrote about the struggles of the Jewish people)
• GERTRUDE ELION (23A: 1988 American Nobelist in Physiology or Medicine who helped develop the first drug used to fight rejection in organ transplants)
• DONNA STRICKLAND (38A: 2018 Canadian Physics Nobelist who helped implement chirped pulse amplification)
• BETTY WILLIAMS (51A: 1976 Peace Nobelist from Northern Ireland who co-founded Community of Peace People)
• MARIE CURIE (60A: 1911 Polish/French Chemistry Nobelist who pioneered research in radioactivity)
  

Word of the Day: NELLY SACHS (17A) —

Nelly Sachs (German pronunciation: [ˈnɛliː zaks]; 10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a German-Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems "Zeichen im Sand" (1962), "Verzauberung" (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden(1971). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's Women's History Month, and International Women's Day specifically, so I guess this puzzle is a celebration of that, but "celebration" is not quite the right word. I wish the puzzle had any sense of actual celebration, which is to say I wish it had any of the thematic playfulness you expect a crossword puzzle to have. What we have here is a list. A pious, dutiful list, with facts attached to each clue. It's a short and not terribly exciting museum exhibit or lecture. A trivia test of the most straightforward kind, without any of the wordplay or, well, fun that you might expect from a themed puzzle. I'm sure that all of the theme answers in this puzzle are very much worth remembering, but why are you remembering them specifically in crossword puzzle form? What is particularly interesting, from a crossword standpoint, about this set of names? They all won Nobels ... and they all fit symmetrically in a grid? Is that it? This is a problem I have with a lot of hastily-put-together tribute puzzles, too—the ones that sometimes run just after someone famous has died, say, or ones that run on some historic anniversary. They tend to just be facts. "Here are some facts." OK, facts are cool, but a crossword puzzle should have some hum and life, as well as some kind of wordplay hook, some kind of pleasure that's being offered beyond whatever pleasure you get from simply knowing the answer in a trivia test. This seemed like an arbitrary list. Yes, there are a few restrictions to the list (they're all women, they're all Nobelists, they come from different countries and are thus "international") but there have been many, many other women Nobelists, so why this group? Again, if there's a revealer I'm overlooking or anything that gives the theme greater coherence (anything that's actually in the puzzle and therefore visible to solvers), then I apologize for my blindness. But what it feels like is five random women Nobelists. That's it. These are all crossworthy names, but the puzzle itself feels like it's lacking any specific crossword value.

[In honor of Alfred Nobel, here are some more Swedes concerned with winning]

I hope none of the names created Naticks for any of you. The crosses all seem fair to me, but I can see novices and younger people having trouble with, for instance, the precise spelling of MERCK and ENOKI—the "E" and the "I" in those words, respectively are not very inferable if you don't know the names. And if you don't, my guess is that you are also unlikely to know GERTRUDE ELION (I sure didn't). So, tough luck. But if you are a regular solver, there should've been no trouble there, or anywhere else that I can see. I assume most everyone knows what a BENTO box is by now, but even if you don't, BETTY seems like the best guess for a woman's name, so you should be OK. I confess that I failed this trivia test utterly. I knew MARIE CURIE, of course, but none of the others even rang a bell. The science Nobelist names I don't feel too bad about, but as a literature professor I'm at least slightly embarrassed not to have known NELLY SACHS. I don't teach Swedish literature, or 20th-century literature, it's true, but still, she seems rather important, and I'm glad to learn about her today, so the puzzle did provide me instruction, if not entertainment. There's not much interest in the grid outside the names, primarily because there are no answers longer than six letters, and only two of those (HITMAKER, EMISSARY). The only thing that made me screw up my face in resistance was AIR ARM (47D: Military aviation wing). I guess this is just a general name for what the Air Force is in this country—that is, the part of the military concerned with flight. OK. I can accept that. It's not thrilling, but it's valid. I wish more of this had been thrilling, or at least seemed like it was having a good time and wanted us to join in. Tributes don't have to be humorless exercises in fact dissemination. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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