Constellation whose name is Latin for "lizard" / THU 9-18-25 / Something you might change on a bed / Equine hybrid / Victorious military underdog in the Bible / Quality to which a unique six-character code is assigned, in graphic design / One might say "Big savings all week!" / Customizable, all-in-one internet digest / Holdings of winnings / Muscle car whose name evoked a U.S. road trip / Sister of Helios in Greek myth / Game played on an 8x8 board

Constructor: Adam Wagner

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: this "in" that — italicized clues all end with qualifiers ("in a sense," "in a way," etc.) where the "in" must be taken literally—that is, there are two clues (one before the "in" and one after) and the answer to the first clue is located inside the answer to the second clue, which then forms an unclued word or phrase:

Theme answers:

• TOO MUCH (17A: Meditation chant, in a sense) (the meditation chant "OM" appears "in" a sense, namely,  the sense of TOUCH)
• ROULETTE (25A: Tennis do-over, in a way) (the tennis do-over "LET" appears "in" a way, (like a path, or road), i.e. a ROUTE)
• RARE EVENT (34A: Superman portrayer Christopher, in so many words) (Christopher REEVE appears "in" so many words, i.e. a lot of possibly shouted words, i.e. a RANT)
• ACCIDENT (49A: Passport or driver's license, in a manner of speaking) (your ID appears "in" a manner of speaking, i.e. an ACCENT)
• PELICAN (58A: Action star Jet, in a nutshell) (Action star Jet LI has a nut—PECAN—for a shell)

Word of the Day: HINNY (28A: Equine hybrid) —

 

A hinny is a domestic equine hybrid, the offspring of a male horse (a stallion) and a female donkey (a jenny). It is the reciprocal cross to the more common mule, which is the product of a male donkey (a jack) and a female horse (a mare). The hinny is distinct from the mule both in physiology and temperament as a consequence of genomic imprinting and is also less common.

Many supposed examples of the jumart, a supposed hybrid between a horse and a cow in European folklore, were found to be hinnies. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, that was unexpected. Haven't struggled with a theme like that in what feels like months. I almost forgot what it was like. I've complained a lot about the way the difficulty level has slowly been decreased over time, to the point where nearly every puzzle plays "easy" compared to how it would've played even a decade ago. "Why do you rate every puzzle 'Easy' or 'Easy-Medium'!?!?" Because I refuse to adjust to the new standards. In fact, this puzzle might not even be "Challenging" by the old standards. Maybe it's just as hard as a regular Thursday should be. But certainly by comparison to puzzles I've been doing of late, this one punched me in the teeth. Repeatedly. The first issue was the shape of the grid—those corners, with 7s running into 7s, are So Hard to get a grip on (compared to the corners of most themed puzzles). And when you come out of the corners, you hardly have anything to work with. Normally, you finish a corner and you've got momentum that can take you into the next section, but here, you've got this:

DIAPER (20A: Something you might change on a bed) and SLURS (24D: Curved lines on sheet music) give me virtually nothing to grab hold of. They're just these tiny little arms reaching out into the void. The SE corner (when I finally got there) actually fell very easily, but every other corner was a struggle. The cluing was difficult in general and it was hard for me to parse multiple answers today, multi-word stuff like "I VOTE NO" and CRANE GAME (?) and PRIZE POTS (!?!?!) and especially STORE AD, dear lord, that one almost broke me (2D: One might say "Big savings all week!"). I'm looking at -READ at the end and thinking "what word could that possibly be?" Words, plural, it turns out. So there was a general difficulty to the puzzle: tough clues, hard-to-parse answers, slippery grid. And then there was the theme.

I did not understand the theme at all until I was like 60% in. I had four themers in place and no idea why they worked. I could see what seemed like relevant words inside those answers ( the "LET" in ROULETTE, for instance, or the "OM" in TOO MUCH, etc.), but I did not stop to figure out how it all worked. Worse, I kept reading the first themer, TOO MUCH, as "To OM much," which I figured was what you did while meditating (i.e. "om" a lot), and so I thought there was some kind of weird mashing up of words, not one word literally inside another word. It was only when wrestling with RARE EVENT that I finally saw what was going on. That answer starts with "R" and I tried to put REEVE there, at the front of the answer, but obviously that wouldn't work. But then REEVE was there, of course, inside the answer ... but inside what? What were those letters on the outside of REEVE doing? "RA ... NT ... where is the 'RANT' coming from? [looks back at clue, stares at 'in so many words'] ... oh my god, 'so many words,' 'RANT,' REEVE inside RANT, gah!" Kind of an 'aha' moment, kind of an exasperated 'finally, you idiot!' moment.  Knowing the theme definitely helped me with the last themer (ACCIDENT), which I was grateful for, because LACERTA, what the actual @*&$#? That corner would've been brutal if I'd had to wrestle with ACCIDENT too. 

The most harrowing moment of the solve was the HINNY / HUE crossing. That HUE clue was meaningless to me (28D: Quality to which a unique six-character code is assigned, in graphic design). Less than meaningless. Gibberish. I am not a graphic designer, so you could've kept adding words to that clue and they likely would have continued to add nothing to my comprehension. I guessed the "H" in HUE because color (i.e. HUE) seemed like something a graphic designer might care about. As for HINNY, pfffft, yeah, I've seen the word before (28A: Equine hybrid). Probably only in crosswords. See also LIGER, another "hybrid" I've never seen anywhere but the grid. So the "H" wasn't a total guess—I felt pretty confident about it, but since that cross appears right on top of a themer I was struggling with, the whole section was a bit yikes. But I think in the end I actually liked this puzzle. The theme is certainly brilliant, conceptually. The fill wasn't always pleasant, and the cluing was definitely harder than usual, but I was grateful to have a puzzle that really put up a fight, just like the good old days.

Bullet points:

• 1A: Customizable, all-in-one internet digest (RSS FEED) — another brutal parsing. No idea. I was expecting something more specific. I wrote in E-READER at one point. Just floundering.
• 4D: Like some nouns: Abbr. (FEM.) — not in English!!! The fact that I couldn't get this instantly really hurt.
• 5D: Gets away from (ELUDES) — sigh, look, 5-Down, now is really not the time or place for the whole EVADES / AVOIDS / ELUDES conundrum! Like, I'm already dealing with significant new problems, I don't need this old one.
• 8A: Shoots for the stars (GOES BIG) — so not ASPIRES then, great, great ... 
• 21D: Holdings of winnings (PRIZE POTS) — this phrase is magnificently ugly. I can't imagine seeing it or saying it. I understand what it means now that it's in front of me, but getting it in front of me was work.
• 22A: ___ Ulrich, Metallica drummer (LARS) — one of the puzzle's few outright gimmes, though as I was filling it in, I sincerely thought "yeesh, that's a gimme for me, but that is Not going to be a gimme for a lot of others." If you are among those others, just know that I was thinking of you.

• 38D: Constellation whose name is Latin for "lizard" (LACERTA) — this is the kind of arcane *&$% that the puzzle used to throw at you on a regular basis, particularly late in the week. I slightly resent it ... but then I also kinda miss it. I miss getting walloped by stuff like OCHLOCRACY and ZYZZYVA etc. Nostalgic vibes.
• 8D: Victorious military underdog in the Bible (GIDEON) — oof. My biblical ignorance, exposed. I have heard of GIDEONs Bibles, but I did not know there was a GIDEON actually in the Bible. He was leader of the Israelites and led a victory over the much larger Midonite army (Judges 6-8).
• 15A: Game played on an 8x8 board (OTHELLO) — I suspected this, but then I also got the game confused with the Verdi opera, which is to say I thought it was spelled OTELLO, so I balked at writing it in here.
• 3D: Rosh Hashana horns (SHOFARS) — another blessed gimme. And a timely one (Rosh Hashana is next week).
• 56A: Muscle car whose name evoked a U.S. road trip (TRANS AM) — the car name is so familiar to me that I never stopped to think about what it might "mean" (or "evoke"). Seems so obvious, but the car itself really doesn't seem like something you'd take on a road trip. Seems more like something you'd show off in the parking lot of a burger joint.

[I'm aware that Melba Toast is not a TRANS AM ... I just like this scene]

Hope you had an easier time than I did. Unless you enjoy hard times, in which case, I hope you enjoyed the struggle. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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