Kind of spider commonly found near train tracks / SUN 5-29-22 / Subject of the seven-letter mnemonic PALE GAS / Slacks say in slang / He played Ferris Bueller's droning economics teacher / Rivendell resident in Lord of the Rings / Offroad Fury 2000s video game / Eponymous physicist Mach / Govt aid for a mom and pop store / Earful in an elevator / Cousin of a bittern / Symbols of rebirth in ancient Egypt

Constructor: Daniel Bodily and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

"He looks like a leprechaun"—my wife

THEME: "A Monumental Celebration" — a puzzle commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial

The black-square designs:

• LINCOLN MEMORIAL (27A: Landmark dedicated on 5/30/1922)
• STOVEPIPE HAT (63D: Accessory in which this puzzle's subject stashed important documents)
• BEARD (76A: Feature first recommended to this puzzle's subject by an 11-year-old girl)

Other theme answers:

• A NEW BIRTH / OF FREEDOM (21A: With 23-Across, what this puzzle's subject promised in his most famous address) (you can say "Gettysburg Address" here—we can all see that the puzzle is about Lincoln)
• SAVIOR OF THE UNION (35D: One epithet for this puzzle's subject)
• GREAT EMANCIPATOR (38D: Another epithet for this puzzle's subject)
• HONEST ABE (85A: Nickname for this puzzle's subject)
• RAILSPLITTER (59D: Campaign nickname that reflected the rustic upbringing of this puzzle's subject)
• PRE / SID / ENT (unclued as a complete word; clued only in 3-letter parts)

Word of the Day: Jon M. CHU (99A: "Crazy Rich Asians" director Jon M. ___) —

Jonathan Murray Chu (born November 2, 1979) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is best known as the director of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993.

The films that he has directed often include musical elements, including the dance films Step Up 2: The Streets (2008) and Step Up 3D (2010), musicals Jem and the Holograms(2015) and In the Heights (2021), and the live concert films Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011) and Justin Bieber's Believe (2013). Chu is an alumnus of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. (wikipedia)

• • •

I wish I had something nice to say about this puzzle, but I cannot tell a lie ... aw, dang, wrong president ... but seriously, I cannot tell a lie—this was over the second I looked at it. It's 100% about the black squares. "Look at me!" OK, I looked at you. Anything else? Oh ... arbitrary trivia, symmetrically placed? Greaaaaat. [Dutifully and listlessly fills grid]. 

Are the STOVEPIPE HAT and BEARD and LINCOLN MEMORIAL designs cute? I guess. But this thing still has to be a crossword puzzle. It has to have crossword ... wordiness. Something. Anything besides random trivia. And, I mean, you didn't even go very deep into the trivia. You actually put STOVEPIPE HAT and LINCOLN MEMORIAL and BEARD in the grid!? But ... they're already in the grid. We Can See Them. Such a weird waste of space. Such bizarre redundancy. And the clue on BEARD is ... shrug. I don't even know what to do with that. It needs some kind of context to be at all interesting. And why do the theme clues keep calling Lincoln "this puzzle's subject" when "this puzzle's subject" is manifestly the Memorial, not the man himself (as the clue on LINCOLN MEMORIAL clearly indicates, it's the Memorial's birthday, not his). The only really interesting aspect of this theme is the way the Memorial design is handled, with three "unchecked" Down answers (answers which are actually "checked," in a way, but the fact that together they spell "PRESIDENT"). That is literally the totality of solving interest in this puzzle. The rest is just fill-in-the-blanks.

Weird to just throw MASSEY in there asymmetrically (33A: Raymond ___, Best Actor nominee for portraying this puzzle's subject (1940)). I can think of at least two other actors who portrayed Lincoln more iconically, and their last names actually have the same number of letters (FONDA, LEWIS), so, you know, go for the actor thing or don't go for the actor thing, but randomly throwing MASSEY in as a kind of afterthought was weird. The clue on EGOTISM was so confusing because I just had no idea what it was pointing to. Who is "me?" Is it you? Me? I wrote in EGOTRIP, which seemed great. Then EGOTIST (is "me" the EGOTIST himself, I wondered). Then finally EGOTISM. Wearisome. I just don't think "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" is ... a SCAT? One unit of SCAT? It's the title of a song. It is not improvised, it is not filling in for lyrics, it is integral to the rhyme and rhythm of the song. Yes, the "words" are meaningless, so it has that in common with scatting, I guess, but oof, it's a reach. Also, still don't get how SCAT is functioning here. I know it only as a verb. But the clue is not a verb. If it were [Sing "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah," say], maybe SCAT might work. The clue and answer just feel wrong here on multiple levels. 

And then there's the stuff that I just found personally unpleasant. There's a 20+-year-old PlayStation 2 game clue for the absolutely ordinary and crosswordesey ATV (I went with GTA, i.e. Grand Theft Auto). There's Nixon speechwriter BEN STEIN who once called Obama "the most racist president there has ever been in America" (and that's not even in the top ten of dumbest shit that guy has said). There's the ultra-boring and hard-to-parse SBALOAN. I'm not seeing where the pleasure is in any of this. I swore off the entire wearisome MCU a few years back, just before "Avengers: Endgame" came out, but even if I'd seen it, I couldn't have told you who directed it, the same way I can't tell you who directed any of the roughly six hundred and forty-three MCU movies. SKINNYDIP! I liked that (5D: Barely get wet?). And BOOMMIC (that was hard, but worth it) (77A: Extendable recording device). But beyond the superficial showiness of the black-square designs, there's really not a lot here.  

MAIL CALL!

I got a bunch of mail in response to last week's Letter to the Editor (i.e. to me) from Gene Weingarten, on the question of what limits there should be, if any, on potentially off-putting or even outright repugnant fill (e.g. body parts, bodily functions, awful people, gruesome tragedies, racial slurs, etc.). Gene's basic take was that anything you might find mentioned in the paper itself is fair game for the crossword, and that my often vocal objections to things / people I found distasteful were a form of prudery. I ... well, didn't agree. You can read the exchange here. The letters I got were thoughtful (and occasionally very funny). Here are some highlights:

Gary Greenberg seconds Gene's sentiments. He writes that while he understands and appreciates the criteria by which I judge the things I like, my dislikes...

... seem much more personal and petty, and if they are rooted in any larger discourse, it is the one he mentions: Victorianism. I don't think you are a Victorian or really any kind of prude, but of course I don't know. More to the point, to the extent that prudishness is born of disgust about the visceral, this is how it reads, and one wonders where that revulsion is rooted. It's easy to see why clit works and phlegm doesn't--one bothers you, and the other one doesn't. The same is true of your objections to mentions of the NRA or Elon Musk. It is as if you are horrified to be confronted with people or ideas that disgust you, offended to see them as you solve a crossword. 

Which in itself is fine, free country and all that, but, and I mean this question seriously, if you're going to be a critic, don't you have to be more than some random fulminator? If so, then maybe you should figure out what role disgust plays in your aesthetic, and why it is a reliable criterion.  Why do you give it free reign? Why should it be a lodestar of crossword critique? And why should we take your disgust seriously?

Pedar Benson Bate (Director of Operations, NYC Trivia League) offers an interesting look at the issue from the perspective of trivia contests:

The act of including — AND choosing to exclude — certain topics in our trivia content is *always* an act of politics and can be construed or misconstrued as an act of endorsement. (This reminds me of the baffling decision Martin Scorcese made to cast the real Jordan Belfort as a cameo role in The Wolf of Wall Street, and then say that it wasn’t meant to be an approval of the repulsive actions we just saw fictionalized the previous three hours of the movie.) 

Living in this liberal city, we do try to make our questions as even keel as possible, but also with the understanding that there is no such thing as an “objective” trivia night. We know that even TRYING to be objective, our Politics will skew slightly left. Are you going to see a question about Kamala being the first Black woman vice president? Hell yeah! …But don’t ever expect to see questions about [redacted former president], the NRA, or other nasties. 

Whether or not we view ourselves as influencers, we must always at least keep in the back of our mind what kind of energy we are putting out into the world, and I think that your balking at [redacted former president], MUSK, or the RNA is the exact kind of positive energy that the world needs.

Some writers felt more strongly than even I do about keeping certain kinds of ugliness out of the puzzle. Connie Hestand writes:

Yes, those things are the reality of today’s world. It’s all out there and I’m forced to acknowledge it whether I want to or not. And if I should have the audacity to say - “Come on people, we can do better. Let’s clean things up a little bit.” - I’m labeled as a fusty, harrumphing old prude who has no interest in staying in step with modernity. If only I’d just stop with the swooning and go along and never say a word to object.  Well I do object! 
My point is that those who labor to entertain the masses of cruciverbalists are under no obligation to include the “muck, mayhem, malodor, crudeness, crassness and cruelty” we are already suffocated by in order to keep the puzzle socially current. There are plenty of other ways to keep the crossword modern and vibrant without ever dipping into those sewers of humanity. 

Tobias Baskin sees an important distinction between the "ick" related to, say, racial slurs or horrible human beings, and the "ick" related to body parts and functions:

Clearly newspapers do write stories about Elon Musk and we are going to get Musked in puzzles.  I agree with you, I cringe every time I see him or his ilk in a puzzle and good for you for complaining about it. Still, the other day, a puzzle hit me with Kcup, not in reference to some enormous bra but to the one-shot coffee thing; well those are an ecological catastrophe and I hate seeing them in a puzzle.  I think we are going to be gritting our teeth over these kinds of answers for a while. 

    But I am curious about body parts. A few of them are 'curse' words. But most are not. I get how piss and pus and barf are immediately disgusting. But I get no gag reaction from phlegm. Nor any from blood, rheum, lymph, or say, synovial fluid. I don't see those kinds of words in a puzzle often (ever?) but are they banned (like 'piss') or just obscure? Newspapers would run them in a story (I think). Blood is not obscure but it doesn't seem common in puzzles. What about solid body parts? Kidney? Liver? Intestines? Carcinoma? Appendix? Those don't cause me any ick trouble either and again they don't seem too common.

    I don't want to go all moralistic but the same kind of impulse telling us that we should not insult people with slurs, even obliquely in a puzzle, also might tell us that we should get more comfortable with our bodies and their parts. 

Ben Kirby's eminently sensible letter made me laugh out loud:

If my name were ever to appear in the NYTXW, I would be overjoyed. I would say something like “I made it!” and I would call my friends and family to share the good news. My mom would cut out the puzzle and frame it. It would be a feather in my cap, to say the least. But! Let’s say you had to figure out my obscure name via crosses. And let’s say that the crosses were HITLER and DIARRHEA. I would no longer feel good and would want my mom to burn the puzzle. My place of honor would have been tarnished by things worthy only of scorn and disgust.

I don’t want to see ROBERT E. LEE in a puzzle any more than I want to see him on a pedestal in a public square. Removing a statue of him is not erasing him from history- Wikipedia still exists. It is removing him from a place of honor so that that space can be used to honor those whom we collectively agree ought to be emulated. You can put LEE and HITLER and COCKANDBALLS in the NYTXW all you want, as they are indeed part of the lexicon. But to the extent that the NYTXW is a pedestal, you are cheapening that space and handicapping your own ability to honor someone who is truly worthy of it. 

But the letter that was perhaps closest to my own heart was this humdinger from Sally Sullivan, who knows what she likes and what she doesn't like and isn't shy about saying so:

Dear Mr. Parker,

In response to Mr. Weingartetn's letter to you and your response, I offer the following thoughts on those words I wish to see in crosswords.  And those words I do not wish to see.  I am a 78 year old married woman (not quite the 20's dowager), retired social worker and lawyer.  I solve crosswords, and other puzzles, purely for pleasure.  Each morning I tackle some of the NYT puzzles (Spelling Bee, Wordle, and Letter Boxed) with great anticipation and alacrity, if not with constant success.  I then move on to the NYT crossword and the WSJ (which I consider by far the most fun).  I don't do themeless.  I don't enjoy them.  There is no point in doing something that is no fun when one does not have to.

And there lies my point.  I divide those words (and others) that you and Mr. Weingarten discuss into two categories. There are those that give me pleasure because they remind me of pleasurable experiences.  And there are those that are not merely tasteless but downright offensive, because they evoke all that is hateful and evil in our world.  I want crosswords to entertain, to gladden, to give me pleasure.  I am happy to see "penis," "vagina," "clitoris," "orgasm," all of which have given me great pleasure over the years.  I am sure there are others in a similar vein.  I also have no objection to "fuck" and "shit," not only because both acts are enormously pleasurable, but also because nothing satisfies like screaming "You fucking piece of shit" to someone (hopefully without a lethal weapon) who offends.  

 "Hitler," the president who shall not be named, Elon Musk, and others evoke evil, malevolence, misery, disaster, arrogance, and corruption.  And so on.  I don't want to be assaulted by these feelings when I puzzle. I get enough in the news.  Therefore I stand, at least partially, with you Mr. Parker.  I am not a prude.  I simply like pleasure, where and when I can get it.  

I realize much of this is up to each individual's sensitivities, and many words fall somewhere in the middle.  For example, I have wiped kids' snotty noses enough times not to be bothered by "phlegmy" while drinking my coffee.  Others may differ. 

With best wishes and hopes for pleasurable puzzliing,

Sally Sullivan

You heard Sally. Get your pleasure where you can get it, folks. I'll see you tomorrow. And if you have any crossword thoughts you'd like to see in the Letter(s) to the Editor next Sunday, drop me a line: rexparker at icloud dot com.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. my wife just noticed that "ace" is in the clue for SKY (55A: Place for an ace), even though ACED is already in the grid, and very nearby (43D: Nailed). I think she's correct that this is an editing flaw, albeit a minor one.

P.P.S. Holy cow, that MALT / MELT trap is unfair (33D: Diner order). No idea how I knew that EVA Green was an EVA and not an AVA (41A: Actress Green of "Casino Royale"). Just lucky. MALT is so much better than MELT as an answer to 33D: Diner order that I can totally see how many of you (like my wife, it turns out) would've fallen into the MALT trap. Absolutely awful editing there—the clue on MELT should've been crystal clear, since it's crossing a not-that-famous proper noun at a highly ambiguous vowel.

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