___ Türeci, physician/scientist who co-founded BioNTech / SAT 7-26-25 / Casual hangout / Denizens of the Great Victoria Desert / Poisonous plant rumored to have killed the emperor Augustus / Sites of mutations on chromosomes / Sautéing option with a high smoke point / Plays dice with God, so to speak / Possible topic for a couples therapist

Constructor: Adam Levav

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ÖZLEM Türeci (34D: ___ Türeci, physician/scientist who co-founded BioNTech) —

Özlem Türeci (Turkish pronunciation: [ˈœzlem ˈtyredʒi]; born 6 March 1967) is a German physician, scientist and entrepreneur. In 2008, she co-founded the biotechnology company BioNTech, which in 2020 developed the first messenger RNA-based vaccine approved for use against COVID-19. Türeci has served as BioNTech's chief medical officer since 2018. Since 2021, she has been Professor of Personalized Immunotherapy at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Türeci and her spouse, Uğur Şahin, have won a number of awards. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was more Friday than Saturday. More Wednesday, even. I should not be able to floor a Saturday with almost no resistance. I got STUMPed exactly once—predictably, at ÖZLEM—and then half-stumped at ASIAN TIGER (had the TIGER, wanted the ASIAN, but wouldn't commit to it because it sounded ... vaguely racist or stereotypical or Orientalist or something?) (it's not; see below). Didn't fully understand LOCI (27D: Sites of mutations on chromosomes), which are just "places" to me, but still, that is the answer I wanted, so I can't say the answer held me back. I'm looking around the grid now and honestly not seeing anything that wasn't easy to handle. They have really Really dumbed down Saturdays since I started doing these things, particularly in the last decade or so, maybe even more so in the past year or so. Maybe there's some fear that if a "game" is hard to play, takes up too much time, requires patience and practice, that people just won't "play" it and will stick to bite-size, easy-entry games like ... well, all the other games at NYT Games. I love those games (well, some of them), but I also love the original 15x15 crossword, the elder statesman, the original newspaper "game." So it makes me a little sad to see it defanged like this. 

This puzzle took me about five minutes to solve, without rushing. At first, I thought there might be a theme. Maybe you did too. I mean, when a puzzle opens like this, it's understandable if some part of your theme-alarm system gets tripped:

BEBE BABA! Oh boy, here we go (I thought). There's gonna be some B-B- ring around the edge of the grid (those answers are all 4, so it seemed possible), and then there'll be some "BEES" revealer like KILLER BEES or SWARM OF BEES or BEE'S KNEES or BEEHIVE or god knows what. TWO BEES OR NOT TWO BEES? So many tragic theme ideas flashed through my head. But then just like that, the "B-B-" pattern disappeared and I found myself solving a regular-old themeless grid. And every answer seemed to go in as soon as I read its clue. I misspelled AARGH at first (ARRGH?), so there was that ... honestly, there's really not much to talk about in terms of difficulty. So easy to navigate through this one. I went from MEDIA (in MEDIA DIET) to ASAMI, which put the "I" at the end of a long answer, which thus made that long answer Very easy to get (terminal-"I"s are rare, long terminal "I"s especially). So, suddenly ... whoosh whoosh:

Lots of high-value Scrabble letters, right across the middle. One of the "Z"s was of course useless to me (see ÖZLEM, above), but otherwise, "J" got me JARTS and "A" got me SEDAN and on and on. I think my flow got a little interrupted trying to get into the SW from the middle, so I just dove into the SW and found SETI, PREK, and ERIK just waiting to be found and built upon. I actually made a mistake on my very last entry, or was about to when I realized it wasn't going to work with the crosses—I wanted MINE instead of MILK (48D: Exploit over time). But that's it. A somewhat dull walk in the park. The grid itself seems very solid. No real complaints there. But the cluing is both too easy and too dull. It's not even trying to be tough or spicy or sassy or anything. Only two "?" clues in the whole thing, and only one of those (45D: Pop flies?) was at all misleading. I guess there are some faint misdirections or ambiguities here and there that keep it from being too too easy, but looking over the clues, I'm not seeing much effort to be clever or tricky (which Saturdays really need to be). My favorite part of the solve was actually looking at the answer to 26D for the first time, before I looked at the clue but after I'd filled most of it in, and wondering who the hell this non-Thurman UMA was. UMA C. TUALLY? What movie was she in? I've heard of Margaret Qualley, but UMA C. TUALLY ... she's new to me. Possibly because she's imaginary.

Bullet points:

• 17A: Poisonous plant rumored to have killed the emperor Augustus (BELLADONNA) — I teach the literature of Augustan Rome (specifically Virgil) all the time, so I think about Augustus, but I weirdly never think about how he died. I think about the fact that Virgil died before fully completing the Aeneid. I think about the fact that Augustus exiled Ovid (for "carmen et error" (a mysterious phrase meaning "a song and a mistake") to a little place on the Black Sea called Tomis (modern day Constanța, Romania)). But Augustus's death by (allegedly!) BELLADONNA, this is somehow news to me. BELLADONNA is mentioned nowhere on Augustus's wikipedia page, although there is mention of rumors that Augustus's wife Livia might've poisoned him.

• 22A: Dictionaries have many of these: Abbr. (PGS) — any book has "many" of these ("many" being a completely meaningless word without context). If you wanted WDS here, you're forgiven. PGS = "pages."
• 56A: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea or Taiwan, to an economist (ASIAN TIGER) — Since there are, in fact, tigers in Asia (and only in Asia), I thought that was a factor in the naming ("what symbolic animal of 'the Orient' can we call this phenomenon?"), but it turns out "tiger" is a standalone term: "A tiger economy is the economy of a country which undergoes rapid economic growth, usually accompanied by an increase in the standard of living" (wikipedia). So there aren't just ASIAN TIGERs, there are also Gulf Tigers, Baltic Tigers, and even Celtic Tigers, despite the fact that there haven't been actual tigers in Ireland for ... I'm no tigerologist, but I'm gonna say, ever. 
• 48A: Has only the best intentions (MEANS WELL) — a phrase I cannot hear without thinking of Anthony Perkins' best scene in Psycho (entertaining Marion in his parlor, surrounded by animals he has stuffed) ("People always mean well...":

• 51A: Feature of many a handbag (CLASP) — not STRAP! This is about as tricky as clues got today.
• 30D: Denizens of the Great Victoria Desert (EMUS) — had the "E" and I swear to god went through ELKS, EWOK and EELS before EMUS ever occurred to me. I don't think of Australia as having a desert, I think of the whole thing as just being a desert. So it took some effort to get my mind onto the right continent.
• 61A: Casual hangout (SESH) — is it me, or is this "word" becoming a real *&%&ing nuisance? I can't believe this is only the third SESH of the year (perhaps because they've all come in the past two months). But we're certainly on track for the SESHiest year ever, and if it seems like the "word" came out of nowhere, well, it kinda did. This is a visual representation of SESH in the Shortz Era

[The Great SESH Explosion of the 2020s ... I blame COVID, somehow]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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