Calculus expert? / SUN 8-14-2022 / Land with an accent over its first letter / "The Chi" channel, familiarly / Food that's a national emblem of Wales / Site acquired by Match.com in 2011 / Retired jersey number for the 76ers' Moses Malone

Constructor: Jeff Chen and Jim Horne

Relative difficulty: medium-ish? idk, I solved on paper and kept making notes on things that annoyed me, which took lots of time and mental effort

grid lovingly taken from xwordinfo because i solved this puzzle on paper and can't be arsed to type the grid into the new york times website

THEME: In the Money — theme entries contain world capitals, which are hinted at by parentheticals in the clues, except an extra letter has been inserted, and these spell out (in order) KA-CHING for some reason.

Theme answers:

• CASH REGISTER [Sight at a checkout counter] (also this is in no way explicitly identified as theme, which, lmao)
• MARK O'MEARA [Golfer who won the 1998 Masters (Italy)] (golf content, yay)
• DO A SLOW BURN [Seethe (Norway)]
• QUIT COLD TURKEY [Give up all at once (Turkey)] (this is about the point where I wanted to give up on this puzzle)
• CHAIR OF THE FED [Major player in U.S. economic policy (Egypt)]
• TIMBER INDUSTRY [Boarding group? (Switzerland)] 
• MAKING A LIST [Activity for Santa (Rwanda)] (probably my favorite hidden capital here)
• DOG HANDLER [One who walks to work? (Qatar)] (this one gets a pass because I lived here for a year)
• CAPITAL GAINS [What this puzzle's circled letters are with respect to the surrounding shaded squares?]

Word of the Day: ANNA ["Inventing ___" (2022 Netflix hit)] —

Inventing Anna is an American drama miniseries created and produced by Shonda Rhimes, inspired by the story of Anna Sorokin and the article in New York titled "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" by Jessica Pressler. The series was released on Netflix on February 11, 2022. Julia Garner starred as Anna Sorokin, the title character. The series received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances (particularly Garner) but criticized the inconsistent tone.

Under the assumed name Anna Delvey, Russian-born Anna Sorokin is able to con members of New York City's upper crust into believing she is a German heiress with access to a substantial fortune. She uses this persona to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, goods and services while working towards her goal of opening an exclusive art-themed club. 

• • •

Once again, it me, indie crossword person Christopher Adams, here to fill in for Rex, and on a Sunday no less. Despite filling in many times before, I always worry a bit⁠—what if the puzzle is absolutely hot garbage, which means I have to spend all this time solving a puzzle I don't like and even more time finding things to say about it, instead of doing what I usually do with puzzles that don't spark joy, which is just throw them away half solved and never look at them again. (Seriously, there's so many good puzzles out there, and so little time to solve them; the daily crossword links newsletter is a good place to start.)

Anyway, all of the above holds even more true on Sunday, when there's twice as much to slog through, and which usually don't spark joy. Oftentimes, they feel stretched out to fill the extra space, and might have worked better as a 15x15 puzzle instead. And, unfortunately, that's how this one felt to me.

It very much reminded me of the type of puzzle that Evan Birnholz is fond of doing at the Washington Post, minus all the excellent touches that make the Post (imo) the premier Sunday puzzle. Theme entries contain other words (plus an extra letter), and those extra letters spell something out. When done well, that extra layer elevates the puzzle, but when not, it falls flat.

DRUM SOLO (Special collection of musical hits?) — i cannot recommend x japan enough; also, yoshiki's been doing this for like four decades now and still kicks ass, and does not look like he's aged one day at all despite *gestures vaguely* everything that's happened in his career.

Case in point here: the title, "In The Money", hints that the shaded letters are probably currencies, and the circled letters are in the money. I tried LIRA and EURO first at 26A before actually reading the clue, which probably would've helped since I am a certified golf guy™ and found that clue easy and enjoyable (most of you will not, and that's OK; the continued inclusion of golf content in NYT crosswords is probably one of the three things Will Shortz and I actually agree on). Anyway, the title doesn't work, and tbh the reveal (CAPITAL GAINS) would've worked better as a title. No need to put it in the grid; have some faith that the solvers will figure out the theme from the answers / clues (especially since the countries are given in the clues), and let them get the a-ha from figuring out the pun on CAPITAL (meaning both capital cities and also money stuff here) rather than railroading and hand-holding them through it.

Also: KA-CHING? Is that the best you can come up with for a final touch? The potential is there for a capital pun, but the answer is rather meh. (Compare to, say, the 1/3/2021 NYT by Paolo Pasco, where a bunch of dances are interrupted by letters that spell out MAY I CUT IN?, which actually makes sense and nails the landing.) If you're gonna go for this pun, maybe have the added letters spell out an actual type of monetary capital. Hell, CASH by itself would've been better imo (also, love the way that CASH REGISTER is just wedged into the puzzle without any indication at all that it's part of the theme).

Which brings me to a third point: if you're not gonna make it worth being a 21x21, then it should be a 15x15. Only two of the theme answers (OK, three if you count MARK O'MEARA, which I recognize most people won't) really stood out as assets to me: QUIT COLD TURKEY and MAKING A LIST. TIMBER INDUSTRY was like, yeah, sure, guess that's a real thing, and stuff like DO A SLOW BURN actively made me frown. (Side note: if you're gonna do a thing where you add extra letters to things, don't make that extra letter a stand-alone word, as happens with DO A SLOW BURN.) Probably should've gone down to four(ish) answers, really made all of them sing, and put it in a 15x15. (Of course, you lose the title when going down in size, but I'd be OK with putting CAPITAL GAINS back in the grid if it meant better theme entries and a better final punchline.)

more japanese music recommendations: fishmans

Olio:

• EOS — Would rather see this as the camera or the lip balm, but we just got both Friday, so we get Greek myth instead.
• DEE — [World's end?] as in the last letter of the word "world", as opposed to, idk, someone famous with this name.
• DANA (Queen Latifah's given first name) crossing LAURENTS (Sondheim and Bernstein's collaborator on "West Side Story") — Natick alert here; that vowel could just as well be an E, an I, or an O; A is the most likely option (or at least looks the most right), and is the right letter, but still, more care should be taken on that cross.
• LIN (Playwright ___-Manuel Miranda) — I am not a fan of a FITB that splits apart a name into two pieces, even if it's at the hyphen. I am also not a fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but that's another gripe for another time.
• TRIDENT (It's good for three points) — my favorite clue here, by far.
• NATE (Statistician Silver) — :vomit emoji:
• STU (Nickname that's three consecutive letters of the alphabet) — NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO a thousand times NO. I've said it before, I'll say it again: clue names as actual people with those names. (Especially women; this example happens to be a man's name, but by and large it's mostly women who get underrepresented by (not-so-)cute wordplay angles for names.)

• EEYORE (Sad ass) — the name derives from the sound of a donkey (hee-haw, but make it British).
• FRIED EGG (Burger topping that jacks up the cholesterol) — Don't judge me, Will Shortz; it's delicious and I'm gonna keep ordering it. (More preferable here, perhaps: a golf clue about how a ball buried in a bunker looks like...well, you know.)
• MESCAL (Liquor from Mexico) — hated the S here, both because it's crossing STU (see above) but also because it's generally known as MEZCAL and there's no indication that this is a variant spelling.
• LONGER (Like em dashes vis-à-vis en dashes) — a clue after my own heart; I'm very very fond of em dashes (and parentheses—look, all these tangential thoughts need to fit into one sentence, and I'm gonna find a way to do it) and will utilize them wherever possible—here, for example.
• SINTER (Fuse by heading below the melting point) — sure, if you say so; at least all the crossings were fair (MIA Hamm's well-enough known, or should be, to be fair, but if you wanna complain about that crossing, I won't argue with you even if I don't agree with you).
• NRA — this entry alone would've ruined the puzzle for me if I didn't already dislike it; instead, it's the disgusting cherry on top. Anyway: domestic terrorist organizations do not belong in crosswords, full stop.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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