Harmful algal blooms / SUN 7-14-24 / Early invader of Britain / Traveling caller, perhaps / QVC alternative / Place with swinging doors, stereotypically

Constructor: Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "It Goes Both Ways" — palindromes ... that's it

Theme answers:

• CD CASE DIVIDES AC/DC (22A: Rock group clashes over album art?)
• PACER'S SELFLESS RECAP (36A: Humble postgame summary from an Indiana basketball player?)
• "KLAUS, ACT CASUAL, K?" (Slangy request to a German to play it cool?)
• NARC, IN A PANIC, RAN (74A: What happened when the bus went sideways?)
• SEUSS IGNITING ISSUES (99A: Headline regarding a children's author's controversy?)
• "IRISH SIDE DISH, SIRI" (118A: Voice-activated order for cabbage or soda bread?)

Word of the Day: FRED Hampton (10D: Activist Hampton of the Black Panthers) —

Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist. He came to prominence in his late teens and very early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots (which organized poor whites), and the Young Lords (which organized Hispanics), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. A Marxist–Leninist, Hampton considered fascism the greatest threat, saying "nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all."

In 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified Hampton as a radical threat. It tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers organization. In December 1969, Hampton was drugged, then shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, who received aid from the Chicago Police Department and the FBI leading up to the attack. Law enforcement sprayed more than 100 gunshots throughout the apartment; the occupants fired once. During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner's jury concluded that Hampton's and Clark's deaths were justifiable homicides.

A civil lawsuit was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark. It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $5.84 million in 2023); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton's death, at age 21, a deliberate murder or an assassination at the FBI's initiative. (wikipedia)

• • •

Greetings from the north shore of Lake Crossword. Write-ups will be brief this week, as I am on vacation with my best friends and want to enjoy it. I have very able substitutes, obviously (thanks, Eli, for filling in yesterday), but I'm gonna be away a lot this summer and didn't want to disappear from the blog for Too long, so we're gonna experiment with Micro Write-Ups (which will probably end up being just as long as my regular write-ups by the end of the week, as muscle memory just takes over). As I type, right now, 7:27pm Saturday night (the Sunday puzzle comes out 6pm Saturday, for whoever didn't already know that), apparently there is a Big News Story unfolding, one of those Big News Stories that makes me happy I'm distracted by blogging so I'm not tempted to be constantly refreshing my news feed trying to figure out What The Hell Is Happening. I wish we could just have a normal one, just a day without political chaos, that would be nice. Anyway ... no comment at this point, as I "know" very little and know even less. About this puzzle, however, I do know something, and that's that it wasn't very good. Or ... there wasn't much there. Palindromes. That's it. Nothing to make the puzzle cohere beyond ... palindromes. You could do this sort of thing all day, but why would you? Are some of them funny? Maybe the one about KLAUS is funny, because outlandish (just imagining the context in which anyone might say, "KLAUS, ACT CASUAL, K?" is pretty amusing), but the rest are kinda meh, and again, there's just not enough here to make the theme cohere as a theme. If you had a bunch of palindromes that had something, anything, in common—a feature, a topic, anything—then maybe you'd have something. But you don't, so you don't. Have something, that is. And "It Goes Both Ways" is about as uninspired a title as you could imagine for a palindrome theme. The puzzle isn't really trying, is what I'm saying. Disappointing.

I'm already spending more time writing this than I'd planned to. So let's step on the gas here. As I say, the puzzle theme was not elevated enough to be interesting, and, because it involved palindromes, it also made the puzzle super duper easy. As I moved down the grid, I just kept filling in themers by writing in the squares that I knew would be doubled, before I even looked at the theme clues. If I got "-ALK" at the end of an answer, then I write "KLA-" in a the beginning because that's how palindromes work. So there were just freebie letters, all over the place. And even without this assist, the grid was really easy. Buncha names I didn't know (CORA TOM IAN) but they were all easy to get from crosses. Zero trouble spots otherwise. Hardest stuff for me was figuring out what followed OREO at 85D: Nabisco treat with ice cream and cookies (OREO CONE), and figuring out A-LISTER (1A: J.Lo or J-Law), a term I really don't care for or use. The clue on INFORM was also hard, because vague (8A: Brief). I had OOH before OOF (84A: "That's gotta hurt!") and, more disruptively, INNARDS before INSIDES (96D: Guts). I like my answer better. By a long shot. But whatever, none of these problems were real problems, none of these "difficulties" were very difficult, just as none of this puzzle was terribly interesting. I like the term FINAL CUT (14D: Version shown at the movie theater), and "STAY CALM" has a respectable amount of colloquial energy, but otherwise, look at the grid—there's just not a lot on offer. No real sparkle. Let's go to the lightning round...

Lightning round:

• 44A: You might go for a spin in one (TUTU) — this clue was cute. I appreciate the misdirection effort here
• 92A: Early invader of Britain (DANE) — this could've been a lot of things, Britain being an invasion magnet for centuries and centuries. The most consequential of those invasions was the Norman one (1066), but the Danes left their imprint all over Britain in the late first millennium, particularly the west coast ("Danelaw"). [Update: my east/west dyslexia strikes again—it’s EAST coast—thx to the commenter who pointed this out]
• 82D: First name in soul (OTIS) — here you go, one of the most amazing and influential live performances of all time:

• 45A: Doohickey (ITEM) — again, the puzzle tries to do that clue-doubling thing but it only really works for *one* of the clues. [Doohickey] is just fine, perfect even, for THINGY, but for plain old ITEM, it is way, Way less apt.
• 106A: Player in a baseball stadium (ORGANIST) — took me way to long to figure out that the "player" wasn't playing baseball. Rookie mistake. Or "rookie slowness," I guess. I blame the massive fish & chips dinner I just ate. No, wait, I solved before I ate ... whatever, I blame something. The over air-conditioned basement of this Airbnb? Yes, that'll do.
• 126A: Traveling caller, perhaps (REF) — "Traveling" is a violation in basketball, and the official who "calls" the violation is a referee (or "REF"). This has been Remedial Sports Talk with Rex Parker. Join us next week when I explain what RGS are in American football or what TREY means in basketball parlance or what a TATER is in baseball slang or something like that. 
• 114D: Skinny pieces of clothing (TIES) — remember skinny ties?! If not, then you missed the early '80s. They were a fashion staple there, for a bit, insofar as men had fashion staples then. Hmm, according to "High Cotton Ties Dot Com" (yes, a real website), skinny TIES are still a thing, the way all things are still a thing in this eternally retro long-'90s internet-flattened era that we are all apparently doomed to live in forever and ever until the end of the world: "Skinny ties have been in and out of style for years, following the ebb and flow of fashion. They became a hit in the '50s and '60s, then resurged in the '80s with the synth-pop craze. Today, skinny ties remain cool, especially for younger and taller guys who dig that retro vibe." Dig that retro vibe, crossword hepcats. I'll see you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. still clearly have some work to do on this whole "micro write-up" concept.

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