Hip-hop duo Sremmurd / FRI 1-20-23 / Penny candy morsel since 1907 / Apologetic comment from a dinner guest / Best-selling Israeli author of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" / Play a mean guitar slangily

Constructor: Robert S. Greenfield

Relative difficulty: Medium (Easy except for a single, grid-spanning answer)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: YUVAL NOAH HARARI (54A: Best-selling Israeli author of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind") —

Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 1976) is an Israeli historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[1] He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.

Harari writes about the cognitive revolution occurring roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapienssupplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the agricultural revolution and accelerated by the scientific revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. His books also examine the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so".

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari surveys human history from the evolutionary emergence of Homo Sapiens to 21st Century political and technological revolutions. The book is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was playing like a relatively bright and vibrant and entertaining (and easy) Friday puzzle ... until I hit that name at the bottom. At that point, everything ground to a crawl as I had to put together the lower third of the puzzle almost entirely through Downs, as YUVALNOAHHARARI was, until the end, just a series of letters that I could not parse or make sense of at all. Because it is such a (huge) outlier in this puzzle, in terms of recognizability and familiarity, and because it is just ... huge (15 letters), the name sucked all the air out of the room. I don't remember the rest of the puzzle well at all. I know I was having fun, but the puzzle basically became *all* about putting YUVALNOAHHARARI together. Let me say, loudly, since there are people who seem never to hear this part: The Fact That I Didn't Know The Name Is Not The Issue. I encounter things I don't know every day, even on Mondays and Tuesdays. Not the point. The point here is, first, the outlier thing I mentioned above—it was jarring to go from Friday zoom-zoom mode into Super-Saturday siege mode. Second, this seems like the kind of name you put in your puzzle as a first name ... or a last name ... [Yuval Noah ___] or [___ Noah Harari], something like that; then I work through the crosses and I learn something, ta da! But ... did you know YUVAL (a reasonably common Israeli name—I know one!) has never been in a NYTXW? Never. Not once. And HARARI ... I thought that was the arrow poison (found abundantly in Crosswords Of Yore), but that's CURARE, LOL. And HARARE is the capital of Zimbabwe. But HARARI ... well, you gotta go back to 1944 to find that in a NYTXW, and, well, the clue is truly something: 

[[Native of Harrar, Abyssinia], LOL thanks, 1944!]

Once again, proper nouns of limited fame draw a hard line in the sand—you either know it and crow about it or you don't and struggle (and probably keep your ignorance to yourself). This is true, in little ways, in every crossword, but today, oof, it completely changes the solving experience. For me, it took it from breezy Friday to sloggy Saturday. Do you know how many "best-selling" authors there are out there? I don't even know what the term means, exactly. Prince Harry and Michelle Obama sit atop the NYT Nonfiction Bestseller list right now, but do you know who's third? (And whose name is also a grid-spanning 15 letters long!)? It's a name I've seen every time I've walked into a bookstore for the past few months and I Still Would Have Found It Very Hard because it's not (yet?) universally famous. It's JENNETTE MCCURDY (15!), author of the provocatively-titled "I'm Glad My Mom Died." I don't even know what my exact point is anymore, except that names are dangerous ingredients and you should treat them as such—recognize their power to *completely* alter the solving experience in a way that a solver cannot work around, because you're dealing in know-it / don't-know-it trivia, and not vocabulary or wordplay etc. And when the name / name parts also aren't easily inferrable with the help of a few crosses, well that makes things all the harder. If the clues had been toughened up all over, and this had been run on a Saturday, I'd've found the Name I Didn't Know far, far less jarring. And bring on JENNETTE MCCURDY, just ... if you want to use all her splashy grid-spanning power, and not just her first or last name, maybe wait for Saturday?

["I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED," also 15!]

I wish I could say that YUVAL NOAH HARARI was the only name problem in the puzzle, but there's weirdly an even bigger name problem in the puzzle, even though it is technically, size-wise, very small. And that is the RAE / HAGEN cross (6D: Hip-hop duo ___ Sremmurd / 15A: Tom ___, consigliere in "The Godfather"). I got through it, but only because I knew RAE Sremmurd ("ear drummers" backwards). I've seen "The Godfather" many times, and I remember "Tom," but his last name ... if you'd told me it was HOGAN, I'd've believed you. My point is that crossing non-universally famous proper nouns at an uninferrable vowel is the precise definition of a Natick! Now maybe absolutely nobody trips on that cross and I have completely misread the danger. But ... if I were the constructor / editor, that cross is a red flag with a red siren. It's not the easiest section to make smooth (barring a complete tear-down), but here's one example of a layout where you can probably control the proper noun difficulty a little better (HEGEL's an important philosopher who has been in the puzzle a bunch of times, and even if he is a bit on the hard side, you can make all the crosses here (particularly the vowel crosses) much easier if you want):

But let me return to the early part of the solve, which was genuinely delightful. Look at this explosive whooshing of fireworks, right out of the NW corner!

 

I love HATE TO EAT AND RUN because, like me much of the time, the puzzle's just like "first-person pronouns? We don't need no first-person pronouns!" Loved it! COIN A PHRASE is a bit odd-looking without a "TO..." in front of it ... dangerously close to "EAT A SANDWICH"* territory without the idiomatic "TO..." in front of it ... but I'll allow it. 

["PARTICLE Man"]

My biggest non-name struggle today came ... well, it actually was adjacent to The Name, but not directly involved. I had  -OOML-  in place when I encountered 50A: What helps you see the big picture? and so (naturally?) I wrote in ROOM LAMP! If you have a "big picture" on your wall, surely the ROOM LAMP will help you see it, I reasoned, brilliantly. Then I sincerely thought it was ZOOM LAMP (which I thought was maybe the name for those circular lamps people use to directly and softly light their faces when they're on Zoom so they look ... I don't know, more presentable somehow?). I'm talking about these things:

But no, it's just a regular camera's ZOOM LENS. Now that's the kind of struggle I like–falling all over myself with wrong answers until the right one shows up and says "what is wrong with you?" Humiliation as fun. I am into it. Piecing together names I don't know—less fun. Inevitable, but less fun. The one good thing about today's puzzle is a. I am not likely to (completely) forget YUVAL NOAH HARARI or any of his name parts, and b. I am now better equipped to signal for air rescue when I (probably?) get stuck on a deserted island some day. No S.O.S.! Only V! or X! (30D: Letters that shouldn't be written big for air rescue (a single V or X is best)). This is news I can use. Thank you, crossword. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*My go-to example of an arbitrary "[Verb] A [Noun]" phrase

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