Necklace that can be made with kukui nuts / TUE 4-12-22 / Reddish-purple salad ingredient / Old-fashioned message carriers / Sch system with campuses in Buffalo and Binghamton

Constructor: Dan Schoenholz

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: jobs? — Job categories are taken literally, as if they referred to specific jobs. It's wacky.

Theme answers:

• METEOROLOGIST (19A: Temp job?)
• WEDDING PLANNER (27A: Union job?)
• YOGA INSTRUCTOR (44A: Flex job?)
• PSYCHOANALYST (51A: Dream job?)

Word of the Day: Alice MUNRO (15A: Literature Nobelist Alice) —

Alice Ann Munro (/mənˈroʊ/; née Laidlaw /ˈleɪdlɔː/; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."

Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov." Munro has received many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story", and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one never really came together for me. I didn't even really grok the concept until I was three themers deep, and by that point the concept had atrophied a bit, which is to say the best clue/answer pair is at the top, and then they get weaker as the puzzle goes on. Actually, the first two are fine. I guess the third is fine too, but I hadn't heard of a "flex job" until just now. I know what "flextime" is, but I had not heard a job referred to as a "flex" job, so when I saw "flex" here I interpreted it as a really impressive job that is likely to intimidate other people—*that* meaning of "flex." But no, a "flex job" is just any job that allows you to be more "flexible" with your time than a standard (and mythical) 9-to-5 job would. And OK, you have to be "flexible" to be a YOGA INSTRUCTOR, that seems reasonable. What doesn't seem as reasonable is the clue on PSYCHOANALYST (51A: Dream job?). I know that Freud wrote "Interpretation of Dreams" but this does not seem to me to be definitively what PSYCHOANALYSTs do. Is it? Still? I'm reading definitions of "psychoanalysis" and sure enough, talking about dreams seems to be part of it ... This seems primitive and strange to me, but I've never been in "analysis" or known anyone who was. Therapy, sure. Like, 80% of people I know. But proper "analysis," no. Feels like a '70s phenomenon. Dreams, you say? OK. I see now that this theme felt tepid to me primarily because I didn't know "flex job" was a thing, and I didn't fully understand what PSYCHOANALYSTs (apparently) ... do. Anyway, I half liked it. The top half.

The grid was loaded with repeaters (PSAT IAGO AGAR ... and that's just one interlocking section) and didn't have any oomph in the longer answers besides OLD MEDIA, which is, ironically, fresh. Harder to get excited about TOFOLLOW and ARALSEA. Actually, HIT IT BIG is also strong, so that's at least two solid long Downs giving the grid a little bit of life. I think I'm realizing as I write that the puzzle is fine, structurally, but just not that interesting *to me*. 

I do have one question, though, about the grid construction. And it's a question I wouldn't have thought to ask if I hadn't run into the truly horrid, I-can't-believe-we're-still-doing-this answer NOT PC (30D: Likely to offend, in brief). The question is: why, when the grid was being built, didn't WEDDING PLANNER and YOGA INSTRUCTOR swap positions? When you make a grid for a themed puzzle, the themers are the first thing that go in and you build the grid around them. So why would you put yourself in a N---C position as opposed to (if you swap the theme answer positions) a T---N position? So many more possible answers, good solid answers, that you can get out of T---N. Whereas N---C leaves you with NYSNC and NOTPC and not a hell of a lot else. The same goes for D---G vs. A---D. I think DEFOG is a fine answer, which is why it didn't jar me and make me wonder about core construction principles the way NOTPC did. But D---G can't do nearly as many things as A---D can do. It all comes back to ... flex! Swapping these two answers would give a constructor more flexibility. Now, I said it was a question because it is. I mean, there must've been a reason not to swap these answers. You'd get T---G for that center Down, which is definitely *less* flexible than the current P---S. Anyway, these are the kinds of choices you have to make early on. The point is, I wouldn't put NOT PC or UNPC in my grid for any reason; they both reek of a kind of cruel, bigoted, "sorry you were offended" attitude (stop blaming people for not enjoying your racism). And NOT PC is particularly clunky-sounding to boot. I hate UNPC too, but at least it sounds like a coherent standalone answer. So ... I'd've swapped WEDDING PLANNER and YOGA INSTRUCTOR or gone with NSYNC at 30-Down. Either way, I'm saying bye (bye bye) to NOT PC.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]