First Eurodance hit in the U.S. / SUN 11-30-25 / Gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, for one / Noodling in a jazz tune / Anti-mob law acronym / John who painted “Backyards, Greenwich Village" / Mantou or bao, in Chinese cuisine / Noodling in a jazz tune / Diamonds can sometimes be found in them / 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" / Former Portuguese colony on the Malabar Coast / Historical Dutch settler / Ancient drinker of the fermented beverage chicha / 1999 Ron Howard film about a reality show

Constructor: Natan Last

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Hog Wild" — the grid illustrates the biblical idiom PEARLS BEFORE / SWINE (16D: With 87-Down, idiom about wasting one's efforts ... as seen in four columns in this puzzle?); words that can follow "pearl" in familiar phrases / names appear inside little pearl-shaped figures (i.e. circles), and each string of "pearls" is directly above ("before") a famous pig (or "swine"):

Theme answers ("pearls" are in BLUE, "swine" are in PINK):

• "PUMP UP THE JAM" / PORKY (12D: First Eurodance hit in the U.S. (1989) / 83D: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" speaker)
• GLASS ONION / HAMM (28D: 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" / 91D: Pink character in the "Toy Story" movies)
• PASS THE BUCK / WILBUR (6D: Skirt responsibility / 77D: Literary runt of the litter)
• SAFE HARBOR / BABE (31D: Refuge / 94D: Farmer Hoggett's entrant in a sheepherding contest)

Word of the Day: Paramore (84A: Grammy-winning Paramore hit of 2014 = "AIN'T IT FUN") —

Paramore is an American rock band formed in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2004. Since 2017, the band's lineup includes lead vocalist Hayley Williams, lead guitarist Taylor York, and drummer Zac Farro. Williams and Farro are founding members of the group, while York, a high school friend of the original lineup, joined in 2007. [...] The band's second album, Riot! (2007) became a mainstream success thanks to the success of the singles "Misery Business", "Crushcrushcrush", and "That's What You Get". The album was certified Platinum in the US and the band received a Best New Artist nomination at the 2008 Grammy Awards. Their 2009 follow-up, Brand New Eyes, reached number two on the Billboard 200 and became the band's second-highest-charting album to date. It produced the top-forty single "The Only Exception" and went platinum in Ireland and the UK. // Following the departure of Zac and Josh Farro in 2010, the band released their self-titled fourth album in 2013. Paramore gave the band their first number one album on the US Billboard 200 and was also the number one album in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. It included the singles "Still Into You" and "Ain't It Fun", with the latter winning the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song for Williams and York as songwriters, making it Paramore's first Grammy win.

• • •

First things first. Today's constructor, Natan Last, has a brand new book out about—you guessed it—the mating habits of the white-breasted cormorant. JK, it's about the history of the crossword puzzle! It's called Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. I've read it and I love it and you should buy it. But don't just take my word for it ... actually, you should just take my word for it, but if somehow that's not enough, read a review. Like this one in the L.A. Times. It really is a wonderful tour through this world, our world, CrossWorld. Lots of familiar names, lots of charming anecdotes. Nice timing on this puzzle, Natan. Promotional synergy! Sell those books! (if I sound cynical, I'm not—it really is a good book that deserves to be read). Now on to the puzzle!

***

Well this is certainly the most conceptually interesting Sunday puzzle I've seen in a while. The only criticism I have of the theme is that these "pearls" are more "above" than they are "before" swine. Decidedly above. If you had to describe the spatial relationship here, it's over/under, not before/after. But if you call the lawyers in, I think they could get a judge to rule that "above" is a type of "before," especially since it's reasonably conventional to think of a puzzle "starting" at the top and "ending" at the bottom. You're likely to the get the "pearl" answers "before" you get the "swine" answer, so ... OK. Judges say "OK." Beyond that, the theme is beautifully executed, particularly the "pearl" part, with the conventional circled squares magically transformed into images of pearls by virtue of the theme, and with each pearl-strand spelling out a word that can follow the word / name "Pearl": the band Pearl Jam, the cocktail garnish pearl onion, the author Pearl (S.) Buck, and the poorly-reviewed 2001 blockbuster Pearl Harbor ("a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours" — Roger Ebert). The fictional "swine" are all famous, except maybe HAMM, whose name I didn't know. Not sure he's reached the iconic status of pigs like WILBUR, BABE, and PORKY. Poor Piglet, left on the bench. But symmetry is a harsh mistress, and today she called for a four-letter pig (to match BABE). And so in goes HAMM. Toy Story is famous enough for theme answer purposes, and even if I didn't know HAMM, at least I could infer his name, so ... fair. Nice job. And kudos for working "THAT'LL DO" into the grid. I got a big post-solve rush of happiness when I realized that the puzzle was winking at me there.

The puzzle stands out physically as well, as it has an absolutely bonkers grid layout. Is it supposed to resemble a pig's face? Again, I think if you call the lawyers in, they could argue at least semi-convincingly that I'm supposed to see a pig's face. That highly unusual middle section, with its colonnade of 11s drilling 7 rows down into a black void from which there is no escape, has something vaguely snouty about it. And the upside-down black "L"s at the top are kind of ear-y. I could be convinced, is all I'm saying. 

I didn't always love the fill. AN APPLE A DAY is creative, but a bit sad on its own. Partial adages, are we doing that now? Also, AN APPLE A DAY keeps the doctor away, which seems like a far more MODEST claim than "cure-all." Apples are good for you, they are part of a healthy diet, but they don't, as yet, make you immortal. How have I been a baseball fan for nigh on a half century and never heard the term LOUD OUTS (4D: Baseballs that are hard-hit but then caught, in lingo)? It's possible (probable?) that I have heard it and just didn't process what I was hearing, or that I have not heard it nearly enough for it to register as a familiar baseball phrase. I could've inferred the meaning from the phrase itself, but I needed a bunch of crosses to get it in there today. 

There are two long song titles that are likely to throw older solvers (or, in the case of "PUMP UP THE JAM," possibly younger solvers as well)—one of them threw me. I am very much in the demo for "PUMP UP THE JAM" and very much not in the demo for Paramore, a band whose name I hear way more often than I ever hear their music. If a band blew up between the year I finished my dissertation (1999) and the first Obama administration, there is a good chance I missed the boat entirely. Job / marriage / daughter / dogs / crossword blog / etc. had me far far less focused on pop culture than I had been in my teens and 20s. The '00s is also my biggest blind spot movie-wise. Paramore becomes popular at the tail end of this pop culture blackout period for me, but despite paying reasonably close attention to contemporary music in the intervening years, I still know only their name, not a one of their songs. But they are absolutely massive for a certain section of Millennials in particular, so they're certainly crossworthy. Still, it's weird that one of their song titles made it into the grid before they did. PARAMORE seems like it would be pretty useful as 8-letter answers go—so many common letters. And yet, to date, nothing. Except "AIN'T IT FUN." It did win a Grammy. But it's decidedly less famous than most songs you're apt to see in a puzzle.

If there are rough patches in the grid here and there, I think most of them are probably side effects of a structurally demanding grid. EDTV LORI "PUMP UP THE JAM" BACON (!) HANS is quite a name wad to choke down, esp. since it's conceivable that a solver wouldn't know any of the first three of those names. No one calls stadiums STADIA, so cluing it as if it were part of ordinary baseball usage feels ridiculous (20D: Diamonds can sometimes be found in them). Staying over there for a second (with our crossword friends ARAL and SIA), what is a John SLOAN!? (26D: John who painted 'Backyards, Greenwich Village"). Besides an answer designed to make me feel like an uncultured BOER (I mean "boor" ... possibly "bore")? Aha, the Ashcan school, yes [nods sagely] I've heard of that (I have heard of it, but like many things I've heard of—say, Paramore—know almost nothing about it). Here's the painting in question:

Kitty! John SLOAN is now my favorite p— holy crap is that Ronald McDonald's evil niece in the window? This painting is just full of surprises. Oh wait, there's a second kitty! And clown girl is eying him hungrily. Run kitties, run!

Bullets:

• 81A: Lethargy (SOPOR) — pfffffffft OK I associate SOPOR (when I'm forced to think about it at all, which is only when I'm solving crosswords) with "sleep." If something's "SOPORific," it is sleep-inducing. Every definition of SOPOR I'm seeing has the word "sleep" in it. "Lethargy," on the other hand, I associate with SOPOR's cousin, TORPOR, which literally means "lethargy." 

• 21A: Actress Zosia ___ of "Girls" (MAMET) — briefly but strongly wanted this answer to be RONAN. But that's not Zosia. That Saoirse. Zosia is a different actress entirely. Daughter of the playwright MAMET.
• 52A: College voter? (ELECTOR) — as in "the Electoral College."
• 74A: Mantou or bao, in Chinese cuisine (BUN) — "bao" is very familiar to me. "Mantou," that's new. Steamed BUN, no filling, popular in northern China.

• 100A: Noodling in a jazz tune (VAMPING) — not sure why "noodling" seems far too informal a substitute for VAMPING, but it does. Yes—here we go. From good ol' M-W herself (yeah, the dictionary's a "she," no, I will not be accepting questions): ": to improvise on an instrument in an informal or desultory manner." It's the "in an informal or desultory manner" part that makes it inapt to my ear.
• 28D: 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" (GLASS ONION) — going to see the sequel to this sequel today, up in Ithaca. Very excited. I could wait two weeks for it to come out on Netflix, but screw that. Big screen, baby!

• 54D: Anti-mob law acronym (RICO) — LOL I always thought it was named for some guy named RICO. But no, the RICO of "RICO Act" stands for "Racketeer Influenced (?) and Corrupt Organizations." Is "Racketeer Influenced" a compound adjective? If so, shouldn't it be hyphenated? So awkward, no wonder they just say "RICO."
• 78D: L'___ du Nord" (Minnesota motto) (ÉTOILE) — started rereading Simenon's first Maigret mystery, Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr the Latvian) yesterday (en français), and the whole first part of the story involves tracking the movement of a trans-European train called ... L'ÉTOILE-du-Nord!

OK, that's all. Now go buy Natan's book, or order it as a holiday gift for the aspiring cruciverbalist in your life. It's very good, and not just 'cause I'm (very briefly) in it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P. S. this Tuesday, Dec. 2, Eli Selzer (who fills in for me here on the blog occasionally) will be on Jeopardy! Tune in to see how it goes!

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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