Onetime leader of the Sinaloa Cartel / THU 3-6-25 / Adriatic port city / Like one with renewed beliefs / Fire breather of myth / Neutrogena dandruff shampoo / Indian crepe served with chutney / Intensifying suffix, in modern slang / Gymnastics star of the 2012 and 2016 Olympics / Mouselike mammal

Constructor: Kiran Pandey

Relative difficulty: Easyish

THEME: "Come again?" — four answers that express repetition or doubleness, represented in the grid by words that are duplicates of the words that precede them:

Theme answers:

• BORN / BORN (i.e. "born again") (17A: Like one with renewed beliefs)
• NATURE / NATURE (i.e. "second nature") (30A: The great outdoors)
• CARBON / CARBON (i.e. "carbon copy") (48A: Exact replica)
• DOWN / DOWN (i.e. "double down") (63A: Strengthen one's commitment)

Word of the Day: EL CHAPO (26A: Onetime leader of the Sinaloa Cartel) —

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera (Spanish: [xoaˈkin aɾtʃiˈβaldo ɣusˈman loˈeɾa]; born 4 April 1957), commonly known as "El Chapo", is a Mexican former drug lord and a former leader within the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán is believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 34,000 people, and was considered to be the most powerful drug trafficker in the world until he was extradited to the United States and sentenced to life in prison. [...] Guzmán was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala and then was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking. He bribed multiple prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum-security prison in 2001. His status as a fugitive resulted in an $8.8 million combined reward from Mexico and the U.S. for information leading to his capture, and he was arrested in Mexico in 2014. He escaped prior to formal sentencing in 2015, through a tunnel dug by associates into his jail cell. Mexican authorities recaptured him following a shoot-out in January 2016, and extradited him to the U.S. a year later. In 2019, he was found guilty of a number of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated in ADX Florence, Colorado, United States.

• • •

Possibly the easiest Thursday of all time, but I made it way harder on myself by acting like I was walking through a minefield and looking suspiciously at every answer. And by making a couple of dumb mistakes (BORE for BORN (16A: Brought into being), EST for PST (31D: Winter hours in L.A.) (I know very well what time zone "L.A." is in, so some "EST" reflex must've just taken over). I also came down the left side of the grid, so the theme just ... didn't materialize until I was all the way over in the bottom right corner of the grid. Seriously, I did not "get" the theme, or even see a theme answer, until 63A: Strengthen one's commitment ((DOWN) DOWN). I was like "how is this DO-...? Oh. [Looks upgrid] Ohhhhhhhh." And then all the theme answers went zip-bang into place:

Any slowness today was a result of Thursday trepidation (I know there's a theme about to leap out bite me, I just don't know where it is) and the specific route I took through the grid. If I'd just gone over from the NW to the N and worked out BORN somehow, the theme would've (probably) dawned on me sooner, and maybe things would've been even faster. One of the weird things about this puzzle is how the overall cluing is just not up to Thursday levels of difficulty. With a very light theme that's not that hard to discern, this puzzle should probably have had somewhat tougher cluing. The other weird thing was just how light the theme was: BORN NATURE CARBON DOWN. That's the total extent of the theme: 20 squares. I know that their "doubles" are also part of it, but since those first iterations are clued straight, I dunno ... they don't play like theme, so I don't really count them. So all the real interest in this grid is in the long non-thematic Downs, which (by volume) absolutely overwhelm the theme—62 squares worth of long Down action! The theme is clever enough, but it ends up feeling almost incidental. And like I said, once you get the idea, all theme difficulty evaporates immediately. I enjoyed this one a reasonable amount, but I would've liked a little more Thursday thematic punch.

Aside from my two tiny mistakes (see above), the only challenge was remembering / spelling ALY RAISMAN's name. I got the ALY quick enough (that often appears as a standalone crossword answer), but the rest was ... well, everything between "R" and "MAN" was kind of a BLUR (13A: Make less distinct). I also couldn't imagine any [Mouselike mammal]s that fit the ---E- pattern, though E-WASTE took care of the problem pretty fast (by giving me the "W"). Though Nope is one of my favorite movies of recent years, and though I *own* Get Out on DVD, I have so far only ever watched Get Out on other people's screens on an airplane, so I just had to infer SUNKEN PLACE (not hard). Does that term exist outside of Get Out? The puzzle was so easy today that most of that answer just filled itself in from crosses. Nothing else in this puzzle rose about Tuesday level difficulty.

Notes:

• 9A: Neutrogena dandruff shampoo (T-GEL) — they also make a shampoo called T-SAL, which is what I wrote in at first. T-FAL ... is a cookware brand. Not recommended for haircare.
• 21A: Seller of Poäng and Ekenäset chairs (IKEA) — I'm gonna be a superstickler here and say that "Seller" is pretty much a dupe of SELL (53A: Betray, with "out"), and so that clue should probably have been rewritten.
• 67A: Have an inclination (TEND) — had the "E," wrote in LEAN (but kept TEND in mind, so no harm done).
• 50A: Fire breather of myth (CHIMERA) — ANORA won all the Oscars (deservedly so), so you should definitely expect to see ANORA in grids starting soon and then forever. That vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel pattern will not be denied. I mention ANORA here because it was actually the *second*-best movie I saw in theaters last year. The best best was Alice Rohrwacher's La CHIMERA (which I guess technically came out in 2023, just not in my corner of the world):

• 7D: Adriatic port city (BARI) — I would love to have a world map where the only place names on it are ones I learned from crosswords. DILI (East Timor), the ROSS SEA, ELY (the "cathedral town"), and ... this Adriatic port city (which the puzzle used to rely on a lot more than it does not):

[from xwordinfo]

• 35D: Comedian Vulcano (SAL) — no idea ... which I'm pretty sure I've said before. I'm having deja vu a little right now. Yeah, looks like this guy was a 2022 clue for SAL as well: [Comedian Sal of "Impractical Jokers"]. I'm only writing this all out on the off chance that it will make his name stick. Probably doomed to just get it from crosses every time it shows up. Today, that wasn't hard (though that "A" was the very last square I entered in the grid).
• 57D: Look-alike (TWIN) — and a little bonus theme answer to close things out ... see also REUSE (15A: Find more value from).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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