Composer Luigi who pioneered noise music / SUN 6-12-22 / Chemical ingredient in flubber / Rock's CJ or Dee Dee / Former name for the NBA's Thunder informally / Goldman who crusaded for birth control access / Monocle-dropping exclamation

Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Didn't We Just Have This?" — words appear in the grid, and then get referred to in entries that refer to said words appearing ... again:

Theme answers:

• "... AND ANOTHER THING" (27A: Argument extender [ref. 18-Across]) (18A = THING)
• "THIS ISN'T MY / FIRST RODEO" (48A: With 87-Across, "I've been around the block a few times" [ref. 23-Across]) (23A = RODEO)
• "IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN" (70A: Classic Yogi Berra quote [ref. 33-Across]) (33A = DEJA VU)
• "BABY ONE MORE TIME" (111A: Debut album by Britney Spears [ref. 82-Across]) (82A = BABY)

Word of the Day: UNROLLED (91A: Consolidated for easier reading, as a Twitter thread) —

The beauty of Twitter is that every message is constrained to 280 characters and under, but sometimes you simply can’t get all your thoughts across in just a single tweet. Or perhaps you’re following a live news story and you need to follow the thread to read the news as it develops so there’s context for what happened earlier.

Whatever the reason, sometimes Twitter threads can get long, which can make them difficult to follow. Thankfully, there’s a bot that can help piece those tweets together into one piece of text without all the extra replies from anyone other than the person who originally started the thread. This is called “unrolling” a thread, and it’s created by a tool called @threadreaderapp, which lets you combine tweetstorms into one single post simply by using the keyword “unroll.” (theverge.com)

• • •

I can't say this isn't a cute joke but it ends up making the puzzle so easy that it ends up being not much of a puzzle, to be honest. Also, there are just four themers, and with thematic content that light, I'd expect a much brighter and more vibrant grid than what we end up getting. The only non-theme answers that really struck me as interesting were two proper nouns that briefly sent me into "holy crap, please don't let any of these crosses fail, please" mode (AYOTOMETI, RUSSOLO). I thank those names for giving me some genuine excitement, even if that excitement was basically Failure Terror. Nothing else in the grid was that thrilling, although, again, I'll grant you that the basic thematic premise is kind of funny. It's especially funny to run this puzzle directly after a puzzle that also duplicated a word (EAR), but with absolutely no self-awareness or humor. And yet this theme was all too thin and simple to satisfy on a Sunday-sized canvas. "IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN" is a perfect, grid-spanning 21 letters long, and it seems a wonderful phrase to build a puzzle around. I just wish there'd been more places for this concept to go, or that this particular execution of the concept hadn't made too much of this puzzle too obvious too quickly. Look how fast I got the theme:

And not just the first theme answer, but the whole dang theme concept:

Maybe if both THING and RODEO hadn't both been in a solver's most likely starting point (i.e. the NW), things would've been a tiny bit tougher, and maybe that would've made the solve a little more satisfying, I don't know. Also, maybe if the theme clues had found some (much) more elegant way of handling the cross-references than just plunking them down in aggressively straightforward, workmanlike, non-wordplay fashion, i.e. in brackets with instructions that are roughly the equivalent of "just go look at this other answer"—maybe that would've provided the elegance, the oomph, that this puzzle seemed to lack. Promising concept, fizzling execution, not much grid spice to offset the thematic thinness. That was how things looked from where I was solving. I do want to praise [Monocle-dropping exclamation], which is a hilariously specific and vivid clue for "I SAY!"

Buncha stuff I did not know today. For instance COCO Palm, which sounds like a stage name, not a tree name (5A: ___ palm (tropical tree)). If you'd told me the tree was a COCOA palm, well, I wouldn't have known that either, but it definitely would've felt more plausible. Also, been eating doughnuts (donuts?) and other pastry for half a century-ish and somehow never heard of a LONGJOHN (12D: Doughnut similar to an éclair). Put an "S" on the end of that LONGJOHN, and then it's something I'm plenty familiar with. But in the singular, doughnut form: new to me. I had RIALS before RIYAL (57A: Currency of Qatar) because RIAL is the name of the currency of lots and lots of places (hmm, apparently just three places (Iran, Yemen, Oman), but ... it feels like a lot, is what I'm saying). Qatar puts a "Y" in there for some reason. More international currency things for me to learn and then forget! Non-human primates don't have CHINs??? (25A: Body part that humans have that other primates don't). Also, not a thing I knew. I would've thought any creature with a jawbone technically had a CHIN, but apparently not. Thought flubber might've been made out of BORON (76A: Chemical ingredient in flubber = BORAX), and that the alleged 2018 legal drama might then have been called "On the Basis of SIN" (66D: "On the Basis of ___" (2018 legal drama) = SEX), so that was a fun little alternate-universe diversion. I don't have anything else marked on my puzzle, so I guess I'm done. 

Time once again for ...

Letters to the Editor

No new topics in my Letters to the Editor this week, but a few letters did harken back to the subject of the first letter I published a few weeks back by Gene Weingarten—the question of what fill, if any, should be off-limits in a crossword puzzle (read Gene's original letter here, and a few reader responses from the following week here). Several writers this week shared Gene's (mostly) anything-goes attitude toward crossword fill, and (implicitly or explicitly) dismissed "sensitivity" as a valid concern. Toby S. writes:

I think we’re of a similar age/era (I was b. in ‘68) and so I have a hard time believing that men of our era do not have the ‘…but words will never hurt me’ ethos burned into your (our) lizard brainstem. Yes, I get the idea that certain names and phrases have the power to turn on the horror movie projector inside one’s mind. But…as Gene gets at, it is just a crossword puzzle, reflecting the world as it is. Such clues / words do. not. imply. approval. They just don’t. So why do you let them ‘take up residence’ in your mind even for a moment? Has this always been your ‘human response’ or is it possible that over time your internal algorithm has noticed that the fussier you comment the more emails / comments you get?

And Julian Rosenblum basically agrees:

I don’t think being included as part of a crossword puzzle’s fill is inherently much of a pedestal. If it were, we’d probably have far more statues of ERNEs and WRENs. Filling a crossword puzzle is not easy. I doubt that someone writing a puzzle is thinking, you know what this thing really needs? Phlegm. That’s just not how those words come to be part of the puzzle. And it would be a shame to reject someone’s beautifully constructed puzzle because it required them to incorporate a word that some people find mildly distasteful.

There are absolutely certain words that should not appear in a crossword (racial slurs, for example), but I think the criteria for being, let’s call it, de-worded, should be very high.

I also posit that Elon Musk, self-proclaimed champion of free speech, would be elated to know that a bunch of pearl-clutching liberals are trying to remove his name from the New York Times crossword puzzle. Plays right into his hand.

Allison Hughes, however, has a much different take on the issue:

I think there’s value in thinking about why some people have a strong reaction to certain words, and some people have no reaction. Please excuse me, but I’m going to use Trump as an example, because that is a name that I personally have a reaction to.

When I say “reaction”, I mean hearing his name evokes a feeling in me. When I hear the word “Trump”, I think of that moment during his campaign when he bragged about repeatedly sexually assaulting women. I am a woman. 

There are multiple layers to my feelings. First are the feelings that I would have if any person on earth bragged of hurting women simply because they are women. Of hurting me just because they can. I feel helpless, despairing, sad, and pessimistic [...]

I don’t want to see the word Trump in the crossword because I don’t want to feel all of those feelings his name evokes. Presumably you have similar reasons or feelings as to why you don’t want to see his name in the crossword as well.

I’m sure there are people out there who feel happiness at the thought of women having fewer rights or being assaulted, and presumably those people want to see Trump’s name more often in the crossword. But what of these people who feel neutral about his name? Those who say that Trump is simply “one of 46 presidents of the United States”. This is a fact, they say, and facts are neutral.

What a blessing to see his name and not feel sad or anxious. What a blessing it is to not worry about your future equality. What a blessing it is to not think about being intentionally hurt because of an intrinsic part of your existence.

B.K.S. Fisher isn't troubled by unpleasant people or topics in the crossword, but would like us to consider the premium some solvers put on "currency" (or "recency" or "contemporariness" in crossword fill), particularly when that push for currency involves the denigration of the "old":

I have a broad tolerance for the words, people, organizations and events that land in my crossword puzzle.  I may grimace or shake my head at certain clues or certain answers, but it’s a reaction of the moment which colors no more than 15 seconds of my day.  These things exist (or existed) in the world in which I live, and I don’t expect the crossword to be walled off from them.  It’s a learning experience when something I know little or nothing about provokes a strong negative reaction from you or the people who comment on this site.  I look it up with as much interest as I would something positive or neutral.  That said, hate-speech has no place in this or any forum.  I want pleasure from my crossword puzzle just as much as the next person.  But I don’t find that references to the unpleasant detract from my enjoyment in any significant way.  Moreover, I find no reason to gripe when someone else takes offense at something I don’t.  We all have our sensibilities and I’m disinclined to call anyone a prude or a pearl-clutcher.

In my mind, this question of crossword suitability based on propriety dovetails with the question of suitability based on currency.  In both cases, the issue is what individuals and which aspects of the human endeavor are to be considered crossword-appropriate.  It seems the dudgeon can climb just as high for older references as for mucus, McConnell and Musk.  I think that history offers a rich trove of material for puzzles, and I don’t just mean our friends Tut and Homer.  A few months ago, one of the stars of the silent-movie era, Theda Bara, appeared in a puzzle.  When commenters complained about her being decades out of date, I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan (and did both).  Out of date!  Of course, she’s out of date!  She’s part of the very beginning of the history of Hollywood, a history which has taken us from the Kinetograph to digital cinema, and from the antics of the Keystone Kops to sophisticated explorations of the human heart and mind.  For Theda Bara’s particular legacy, I refer you to Rita Hayworth (Gilda), Kathleen Turner (Body Heat) and Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl).  I understand that solvers don’t want their puzzles laden with historical fact at the expense of current references.  I, too, want a balance.  But it’s too prescriptive to require each puzzle to strike parity with the age of its references.  And I regret the growing tendency to see history, within the solving community and without, as random occurrences with no contemporary relevance, rather than as “a chronological record of significant events” (Merriam-Webster) which informs every aspect of our lived reality.  

Thanks for the letters. Feel free to write me about anything crossword-related that you'd like to get off your chest (rexparker at icloud dot com). Be sure to mark any letters "OK TO PRINT." Please try to keep future letters to 300 words or less, just so I can accommodate several of them if I need to. Thanks so much,

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. ANI = AN "I" — that is, the letter "I" (78A: The last thing a Mississippi cheerleader wants); you'd think the Mississippi cheerleader would've grown used to all the "I"s, or that they'd dread the "S" just as much, but whatever, just go with it... (actually, I think "last thing" = literally the last letter in "Mississippi"; you know, "Gimme an 'M'! Gimme an 'I'! etc. all the way until Gimme an 'I', the last letter the cheerleader demands (i.e. 'wants'). I miss the [Black cuckoo] already).

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