Textile city NNE of Paris / MON 2-16-26 / Dull-witted sort / One giving support during childbirth / One of the Leeward Island in the Caribbean / Longtime comic strip set in a medieval kingdom / Possible cybercrime, informally / New wave band with the hit "Whip It" / Chicago's ___ Planetarium / Mike who voiced Shrek in "Shrek" / Computer operating system developed by Bell Labs

Constructor: Ian Livengood

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***solved Downs-only***)

THEME: Four kinds of ID — the letters "ID" appear in four different theme answers, with a different meaning each time:

Theme answers:

• THE WIZARD OF ID (19A: Longtime comic strip set in a medieval kingdom)
• BOISE, ID (36A: Capital of the Gem State, in a mailing address)
• I.D. THEFT (38A: Possible cybercrime, informally)
• "I'D GO EITHER WAY" (54A: "Makes no difference to me")

Word of the Day: ANTIGUA (42D: One of the Leeward Island in the Caribbean) —

Antigua is an island in the Lesser Antilles. It is one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region and the most populous island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua and Barbuda became an independent state within the Commonwealth of Nations on 1 November 1981.

The island's perimeter is roughly 87 km (54 mi) and its area 281 km² (108 sq mi). Its population was 83,191 (at the 2011 Census). The economy is mainly reliant on tourism, with the agricultural sector serving the domestic market.

More than 22,000 people live in the main city, St. John's. The city is situated in the north-west and has a deep harbour which is able to accommodate large cruise ships. Most of the population lives in the island's Central Plain. Other leading population settlements are All Saints (3,412) and Liberta (2,239), according to the 2001 census. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow I did not understand the rationale at all once I'd finished. Four IDs ... what am I missing? With no revealer to help me, I finally settled on the idea that these are just four different kinds of "ID"—a single word, a state abbrev., an abbrev. for "identity," and the contraction "I'D." It's that last one that clanks the hardest for me, as "I'D GO EITHER WAY" feels real off. I can definitely hear someone saying "I COULD GO EITHER WAY," but "I'D" (as in "I would"?), that doesn't ring as true to me. ["I could go either way on that"] was the clue for YOUR CALL a couple years back, and ["Makes no difference to me"] feels like an identical sentiment. I'm coming down with a cold, though, so my idiomatic sensors might not be working right. Let's see, what else is going on here? Maybe we're also supposed to admire the symmetry of the "ID"s? I don't know. But anyway, that's it, I think: four types of "ID." I know it's probably too much to ask, but it seems like the puzzle would be much nicer, or more elegant, if there were no other "ID"s in the grid at all. No RAID, no AVOID, no IDEA, no OVID. Other than that, I don't have much to say about this. Seems thin. And like it needs a hook—something to tie it all together. All in all, it was a little MEH for me.

The Downs-only solve was pretty brutal. I had mistake after mistake, and then got to the end and stared down two longer Downs that I couldn't get at all. Started out with WHIPS instead of CLOTS (1D: Thickens, as cream) and then tried both ALOT and ATON before I ever got near SLEW (4D: Whole bunch). No one has called another person a DODO BIRD since god knows when. Feels like something children used to say, in times of yore (i.e. my childhood). That answer required many crosses. I thought I had inferred the first themer, but (not knowing what the theme was), I wrote in THE WIZARD OF OZ. That made AVOID and especially MAD DASHES hard to see for a bit. If you ABHOR something, you might give it 0 stars, but the act of giving 0 stars is not itself abhorring (31D: Give 0 stars in a review, say). First you ABHOR, and *then* you give the bad rating, as a result of that abhorrence. Did not love the cluing there. The rest of the puzzle was pretty doable, until the end, when first IN-CROWDS (a very odd plural) (37D: Glitterati) and finally ANTIGUA left me almost completely stumped. I kept singing the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" in my head, hoping I'd alight on the correct island, but only got as far as Key Largo and Montego—no ANTIGUA to be found. There are a lot of Leeward Islands; I certainly couldn't remember them all. I was really relying on inferred crosses to help me out, but they were in short supply. The only letter I had for certain was the "I"! NEAR could've been NE'ER, SCAN could've been SCAB, SCAM, SCAR, and on and on—all the missing letters had multiple possibilities. My main problem was only thinking of SPY and SPF for SP-. When I finally ran the alphabet, I (immediately) hit SPA, and that terminal "A" was the thing that finally got me going toward ANTIGUA. Spent as much time trying to put that one together as I did on most of the rest of the puzzle. 

Bullets:

• 13A: Textile city NNE of Paris (LILLE) — seems kind of tough for a Monday. I know it well, and know its association with textiles, but had to read Alain de LILLE in grad school, so I have an advantage there.

[this is at least the second time I've featured this exact image on the blog when LILLE has been in the puzzle, so specific is my association of that place name with this exact book, a sodomy-obsessed 12th-century treatise on human sexual behavior that must've sat on my bookshelf for years and years in the '90s]

• 20D: D.C.'s National ___ (ZOO) — no idea. None. Zero. Wanted MALL but it wouldn't fit. I guess D.C. has ... a ZOO. Cool. I did not know that. I'm not a big ZOO fan. Animal fan, yes. ZOOs, not really.
• 32D: One giving support during childbirth (DOULA) — this was a gimme, but it also seems like a word of relatively recent fame. DOULA was not a thing I'd ever heard of until this century. But now it feels like a common term, definitely Monday-level vocabulary (and definitely built for crosswords—five letters, 60% vowels, terminal "A" ... it's got a lot going for it, from a constructor's POV). There's even a death DOULA (someone who assists the terminally ill in the dying process) on the current season of The Pitt. DOULA did not debut in the NYTXW until 2012 (courtesy of constructor Paula Gamache). It then promptly disappeared again for almost nine years. This is its sixth appearance in the 2020s. Perhaps not surprisingly, five of the seven NYTXW puzzles to feature DOULA have been constructed or co-constructed by women. That gender discrepancy is striking considering that even today (with representation considerably improved from the low of about a decade ago), women's names appear on the byline less than 1/3 of the time (108 puzzles in 2025) (15 out of 47 puzzles so far in 2026).
• 27D: Top-tier (BEST) — wanted A-ONE. I blame ... decades of crossword puzzles. Crossword history is littered with A-ONEs. Just SLEWs of A-ONEs, everywhere you look. 659 total NYTXW appearances, 208 in the Modern Era. That's against 255/88 for BEST. So my instincts were wrong, but sound. I played the higher percentage guess. These things don't always work out.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. if you contributed to my January blog fundraiser by check (i.e. through the mail), please know that anything I received through last week has been processed. If you sent a check and it hasn't cleared, please let me know. Thank you.

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