"For real!," in modern slang / TUE 1-6-26 / Penalty box, in hockey lingo / In short supply, as energy / The only person to have the opinion / One-named Cuban-born designer who fashioned Nancy Reagan's red outfits / Amniocentesis targets / Spicy Sweet Chili chip / Country in which men traditionally wear robes called dishdashas

Constructor: Paul Coulter

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)

THEME: "THERE'S NO TWO / WAYS ABOUT IT" (17A: With 59-Across, "This is beyond a doubt" ... or a punny hint to 24-, 38- and 49-Across) — in each theme answer, inside three pairs of circled squares, you can find "NO" situated both forward and backward ("TWO WAYS") on either side of ("ABOUT") "IT":

Theme answers:

• A MINORITY OF ONE (24A: The only person to have the opinion)
• SET IN OPPOSITION (38A: Contrast)
• NO-WIN SITUATION (49A: Thing bound to end in failure)

Word of the Day: ADOLFO (10D: One-named Cuban-born designer who fashioned Nancy Reagan's red outfits) —

Adolfo Faustino Sardiña (February 15, 1923 – November 27, 2021), professionally known as Adolfo, was a Cuban-born American fashion designer who started out as a milliner in the 1950s. While chief designer for the wholesale milliners Emme, he won the Coty Award and the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award. In 1963 he set up his own salon in New York, firstly as a milliner, and then focusing on clothing. He retired from fashion design in 1993. [...] With financial help from Bill Blass, Adolfo opened his first salon in New York in 1963, where he met many of the customers who would become his patrons when he gave up millinery to focus on clothing. He had met the Duchess of Windsor by 1965, through whom he met regular customers Betsy Bloomingdale, Babe Paley and Nancy Reagan. Adolfo would go on to become good friends with Reagan, and not only designed her dresses for both of her husband's inaugurations, but many dresses she wore during her time as the First Lady. After Mainbocher retired, one of his highest-profile clients, C. Z. Guest, came to Adolfo to make her clothes instead. Adolfo's clothes were designed to complement his hats, which the designer saw as an optional accessory rather than a wardrobe essential. [...] In 1993, at the age of 70, Adolfo decided to retire from fashion design and rely on the income from his licensing agreements with various manufacturers. Licensed Adolfo merchandise, including menswear, hats and accessories, luggage, sportswear, furs and perfume, was retailed widely at all consumer levels from Bloomingdale's through to J. C. Penney and the television shopping network QVC. In 1993, Adolfo's licensing agreements for perfume sales alone had a wholesale return of over 5 million dollars. By 2014, Adolfo was once again designing for his ready-to-wear clothing lines. (wikipedia)

• • •

***ATTENTION: READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS*** : It's early January, which means it's time once again for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. 2026 is a big year for me, as Rex Parker Solves the NYT Crossword will celebrate its 20th birthday in September. Two decades. The big 2-0. A score of years. One score and no years ago, I brought forth on this Internet a new blog, conceived in ... I think I'll stop there, but you get the idea. I've been at this a long time, and while it has been my privilege and joy, it has also been (and continues to be) a lot of work. Very early mornings, no days off—well, no days off for the blog. I do have two very able regular subs (Mali and Clare) who write for me once a month, as well as a handful of other folks who stand in for me when I go on vacation. But otherwise, it's just me, every dang day, up by 4am, solving and writing. I've never been this disciplined about anything in my life. Ask anyone. "Is he disciplined about anything else?" "No, he is not. Just this one thing. It's weird." And it's because I have a responsibility to an audience (that's you). Even after nearly 20 years, I'm still genuinely stunned and exceedingly grateful that so many of you have made the blog a part of your daily routine. Ideally, it adds a little value to the solving experience. Teaches you something you didn't know, or helps you look at crosswords in a new way, or makes you laugh (my highest goal, frankly). Or maybe the blog simply offers a feeling of commiseration—a familiar voice confirming that yes, that clue was terrible, or yes, that themer set should have been tighter, or wow, yes, that answer was indeed beautiful. Whether you find it informative or comforting or entertaining or infuriating—or all of the above—if you're reading me on a fairly regular basis, there's something valuable you're getting out of the blog. And I couldn't be happier about that.

["That's upside-down, sweetheart"]

Hopefully by now you can tell that for better or worse, what you get from me is my honest, unvarnished feelings about a puzzle. There's an explanatory element too, sure, but this blog is basically one person's solving diary. Idiosyncratic. Personal. Human. I'm not interested in trying to guess consensus opinion. I'll leave that to A.I. All I can do, all I want to do, is tell you exactly what it was like for me to solve the puzzle—what I thought, what I felt. Because while solving may seem like mere box-filling to outsiders, crossword enthusiasts know that the puzzle actually makes us feel things—joy, anguish, confusion (confusion's a feeling, right?). Our feelings might not always be rational, but dammit, they're ours, and they're worth having. And sharing. I love that crosswords engage the messy, human side of you, as well as the objective, solution-oriented side. If I just wanted to fill in boxes, without any of the messy human stuff, I'd solve sudoku (no shade, sudoku fans, they're just not for me!).

[conferring w/ my editor]

Over the years, I have received all kinds of advice about "monetizing" the blog, invitations to turn it into a subscription-type deal à la Substack or Patreon. And maybe I'd make more money that way, I don't know, but that sort of thing has never felt right for me. And honestly, does anyone really need yet another subscription to manage? As I've said in years past, I like being out here on this super old-school blogging platform, just giving it away for free and relying on conscientious addicts like yourselves to pay me what you think the blog's worth. It's just nicer that way. How much should you give? Whatever you think the blog is worth to you on a yearly basis. Whatever that amount is is fantastic. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are three options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar on the homepage, as well as at the bottom of every write-up):

Second, a mailing address (checks can be made out to "Michael Sharp" or "Rex Parker") (be sure to date them with the new year, 2026!):

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905

The third, increasingly popular option is Venmo; if that's your preferred way of moving money around, my handle is @MichaelDavidSharp (the last four digits of my phone are 4878, in case Venmo asks you, which I guess it does sometimes, when it's not trying to push crypto on you, what the hell?!)

All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All Venmo contributions will get a little heart emoji, at a minimum :) All snail mail contributions will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. I know snail mail is a hassle for most people, but I love it. I love seeing your (mostly) gorgeous handwriting and then sending you my (completely) awful handwriting. The human touch—it's nice. In recent years, my daughter has designed my annual postcards, but this year, grad school and NYC theater work are keeping her otherwise occupied, so I had to seek design help elsewhere. Enter Katie Kosma, who is not only a professional illustrator/designer, but (crucially!) a crossword enthusiast. She listened patiently to my long and disorganized list of ideas and in very short order was able to arrive at this year's design, inspired by film noir title cards. 

I'm very happy with how it turned out. The teeny boxes inside the letters, the copyright credit ("Natick Pictures, Inc."), and especially that pencil lamppost—mwah! I know most people solve online now, and many paper solvers prefer pen, but the pencil just feels iconic, and appropriate for the card's throwback vibe. That lamppost was entirely Katie's creation. She was a dream to work with. Can't say enough good things about her.

Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just indicate "NO CARD." 

Again, as ever, I'm so grateful for your readership. Please know that your support means a lot to me and my family. Now on to today's puzzle... 

• • •

This puzzle started bad and stayed bad—creatively bad, but still ... not good. Let's start with the NW corner, where before I really got started I already felt like giving up. Throwing in the towel. Packing it in. I had to stop after UHURA RARIN' UTERI and take a deep, "come-on-buddy-you-can-do-it" breath. 

That is some high-density junk. No professional should be throwing that much cruddy crosswordese at you, in such quantities, so early. Things did not get much better in adjacent sections, with the preposterous "I LOST" and then SIN BIN, a term I've only ever seen in crosswords (is it old-fashioned? I'm not a hockey fan but I have watched my share over the years and don't think I've heard it). GIT behind me, SIN BIN! There's a repulsive OTS NEWO IMS LDOPA stack in the NE ... the whole puzzle is just thick with crud. So even if the theme had been amazing, the overall experience was never gonna get above so-so because all this tired, unpolished fill was weighing it down. 

Sadly, I can't say the theme was amazing. Ambitious, yes. Conceptually clever ... in its way, for sure. But there are several wobbly aspects. First, having the revealer first makes things slightly awkward and anticlimactic. I had a lot of trouble parsing THERE'S NO TWO, but once that "W" from MAW dropped in, the whole answer became obvious, and I ended up getting all these free letters on the other side of the grid:

All that remained was to figure out what the hell the revealer meant, which was not obvious to me at first, perhaps because A MINORITY OF ONE was perhaps the hardest-to-parse Tuesday answer I've ever seen. It's chiefly the "A," I think. Articles aren't usually parts of answers. Then there's the relative uncommonness of the phrase, which maybe I've heard before? Not sure. To go from dreck fill to this weird long answer with mysteriously circled squares in it ... it was just not a game I was happy to be playing. Once I finally got that answer, I could see the NO and IT and ON, but the "TWO WAYS" in the revealer at first had me thinking that something would have to be read backwards—which is true, but I went ahead and read all the circled squares backward and got "NOTION." Which left me with 10 or seconds of "well ... I guess a 'NOTION' is an opinion, in a way, and so if one opinion (A MINORITY OF ONE) goes one way, and then another opinion (NOTION) goes the other way, then ... there *are* two ways about it? ... uh ... hmm ..." Eventually I let the "punny" quality of the revealer sink in, decided to take it *very* literally, and once I saw that NO IT ON were going to be visitors in the second themer as well, I finally saw what was going on. "NO" is facing two different ways, and both of those "NO"s are on either side of "IT." A visual pun. Great.

The second themer ended up being not much easier to parse than the first, largely because of the extremely terse and vague clue: 38A: Contrast. I came at it from the back end, and even having POSITION in place didn't help. So I've got a grid with relatively easy but extraordinarily ugly fill in it, and then I've got themer after torturous themer trying desperately to express the "punny" theme. The one themer that seemed to do so most naturally and fluidly was NO-WIN SITUATION. Unfortunately, that is the one themer that is disqualified because it contains "NO" as the word "NO" (whereas all the other "NO"s are hidden in their words). Worse, that "NO" actually crosses another "NO" (in NO CAP). If your theme is about hidden "NO"s, you have to do two things. One, actually *hide* all the damn "NO"s, and two, don't let any stray "NO"s appear in your grid. Because now you've got "NO" two ways about "IT" ... and also this other NO, don't pay attention to him, he doesn't count, not sure who invited him. I can see how this concept might've seemed like an interesting premise for a theme, but the execution of the theme made it all seem ... not worth it. I don't know if I'd be more kindly disposed to the theme if the fill hadn't been so terrible. It's possible. A clean grid goes a long way to helping me *appreciate* what you're doing with the theme. But even with a gleaming grid, I think the theme execution would've seemed ... ungainly. 

Almost all of the difficulty today lay in the themers. Even with the "help" from the revealer, those first two themers were a giant yikes. Otherwise, this was Tuesday-easy. But I'm not used to much of any resistance on a Tuesday, hence the "Medium-Challenging" rating (it was a little north of normal, difficulty-wise, for me). I assume NO CAP is no longer a mystery to any of you (49D: "For real!," in modern slang). Even if it's slang you somehow haven't heard from your kids or grandkids, you've definitely seen it in crossword grids now. Just two days ago, in fact. That means that NO CAP has appeared almost as many times this week (2) as it did all last year (3). Before that, it had appeared just once. I'm guessing NO CAP goes through the roof this year, as the newish five-letter phrase finally enters the wordlists of the constructing population and becomes more familiar to the solving population generally. Which means we'll be seeing NO CAP well after the phrase itself has stopped being used. See, for instance, PHAT, which has been chugging along steadily since 1998. As prevalent in recent years as it was then. Old slang never dies, it just haunts crosswords for eternity. It's rad!

Bullets:

• 1A: Lt. ___, communications officer on the original "Star Trek" (UHURA) — no Star Wars clues today (that's two whole days now!), but we do, sadly, get two Star *Treks*, which should count as one Star Wars (45A: Burton of "Star Trek: T.N.G." = LEVAR). Judges?  ... Sorry, judges say no violation, only a stern warning. Star Trek clues, like Star Wars clues, can also be tiresome and annoying and unimaginative, esp. if they come in bunches. LEVAR Burton has done other things! Vary your cluing! Get more creative with it! Anyway: Days Without a Star Wars or Star Trek Reference: 0.

• 3D: Amniocentesis targets (UTERI) — something about "targets" feels off to me. Like, I'm imagining a video game where our hero, Amniocentesis, has to shoot down giant flying UTERI. UTERI Flying Overhead! (UFO).  UTERI is already a silly plural to begin with, no need to call attention to it with weird clue phrasing.
• 32D: In short supply, as energy (AT A LOW EBB) — the puzzle's second four-word answer (after the six-word revealer). This one wasn't quite as hard to parse as the others.
• 23D: Spicy Sweet Chili chip (DORITO) — One is the loneliest DORITO that you'll ever do. Two can be as bad as one—they're the loneliest DORITOs since DORITO one. (a single DORITO always seems so sad) (not as said as VIEWAS, which really was not built to stand alone ... but pretty sad)

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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