Neck topper / SAT 8-29-26 / Half-spoken, half-sung passages of an opera / Nonhuman provider of medical advice / Green day star, for short / Skin-care brand known for its pore strips / Main characters for an early reader / Depicting the world bleakly and cynically / Green day star, for short / Humongous, slangily / Inverse of an exponential function

Constructor: Rafael Musa and Kate Chin Park

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ANA Huang (21A: Romance author Huang) —

Ana Huang is a Chinese-American author who primarily writes novels in the romance and new adult fiction genres. She is a #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. [...]  After 2019, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Huang began writing and self-publishing novels, and promoting them on TikTok. Her Twisted series went viral, and was republished by Bloom Books in 2022. [...] In 2023, her novel King of Greed reached #1 on the Paperback Trade Fiction section of The New York Times Best Seller list. King of Sloth was a #1 New York Times Best Seller, and reached #1 on the USA Today Booklist. Twisted Love stayed on the Paperback Trade Fiction section of The New York Times Best Seller list for 61 weeks. // In 2024, Huang, with 1,474,194 print copies sold, is the fourth highest selling BookTok author. (wikipedia)

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Kind of a tough one today, which is to say, just about the right difficulty level for a Saturday. So weird to have Rafa do an emergency fill-in for me yesterday and then open the puzzle and see his name on the byline this morning. While there is much that I loved about this puzzle, most of the good vibes immediately evaporated when I got "A.I. DOCTOR" (1D: Nonhuman provider of medical advice). I realize that my aversion to A.I. creep in the puzzle is largely personal and perhaps idiosyncratic, but I can't help it, I just find the proliferation of everything A.I. completely disheartening. Hate to see the puzzle heedlessly dive into All Things A.I. the way the rest of the world seems to be doing. I know that there are various professional applications for A.I. that are useful and non-dehumanizing, but most of it seems like a way to eliminate jobs, mislead people, and make a few people very rich. Even the idea of calling any A.I. a "doctor" is, or should be, abhorrent. It's not and never can be a "doctor." It's *trained* on work that millions of actual doctors have done, but it is not and cannot be a doctor. Also, various "A.I. DOCTORS" are being offered as substitutes for traditional medical service, in some cases specifically because the user might not have medical insurance, and so ... all this A.I. crap is just papery over structural failures in society. I hate it. Every time we anthropomorphize one of these things by treating it like it's human, giving in a human name (or job title), we're a. pretending it's something it isn't and b. conceding some piece of our humanity to corporate-owned proprietary machinery. This is why "A.I." will give dystopian vibes to me Every Time I see it in a puzzle. I would love if constructors had their own personal "no A.I." policy, but I can see that's not going to happen. I'm not mad (don't say I GOT MAD). Just sad and disappointed. And tired.

I was also a little put off by the name blitz up top (ANA CHENG EWING BAIN BIORE etc.) but the names dissipated in the lower half of the grid, so the overall experience of hacking through said names (the ones I didn't know) wasn't So bad. I knew some of the names (The PITT, August WILSON, Patrick EWING, BAIN Capital (another depresso-answer to go with the A.I. DOCTOR) (27A: ___ Capital, investment firm co-founded by Mitt Romney). But those pore strips, ugh. I had like six different letter combinations before I finally got to BIORE (14A: Skin-care brand known for its pore strips). BIERO? I think that was one of them. No way I am going to know a Chinese character's meaning, so CHENG could've been "any Chinese name." ANA Huang writes about as far away from where I read as possible (see "Word of the Day," above). I've read and enjoyed a romance novel or two in my time, but "New Adult Fiction" and "BookTok" are alien territory to me (perhaps brought down to earth on some kind of ALIEN SHIP, which is also kind of an alien term to me—isn't it just SPACE SHIP?). The fact that they have subdivided younger readers even further in order to create new markets. "New Adult"? "The genre originally faced criticism as a marketing scheme." Yeah, I bet it did. I guess "new adult fiction" is like YA fiction but the protagonist is 18-29?? So it's still written at an 8th-grade reading level but with a grown-up-ish character? Look, as I told my daughter when she was in her "dystopian scifi/fantasy teen trilogy" phase, if you're reading, you're reading, and I'm happy. But ... maybe some day think about leaving the algorithmically-created rut you've been channeled into by your corporate overlords? Some day? Just think about it. Meanwhile, for all I know ANA Huang is a fantastic writer and I'm missing out by being a grumpy old man. Very, very possible.

The marquee stuff was a little on the tepid side today. It's a lovely center stack, but it's not exactly crackling. More just ... pleasant. SOCIAL LADDER, TENNIS LESSON, PATIO HEATERS (whatever those are ...) they're solid, doing their job, but not exactly wowing anyone. Are PATIO HEATERS those things at restaurants that allow you to eat outside even when the weather is a bit crisp? Maybe rich people have them at their "parties" too. I weirdly liked ERSTWHILE more than almost anything in the grid. Its quaintness and oldenness look especially fetching hanging out right next to the much more modern "SO RANDOM" (36D: "Wow ... what are the chances?!"). But I do think that the longest answer in the grid is probably also the best. It's the one thing that feels unimpeachably marquee-worthy. It also gave me a delightful moment of coincidence, where the first thing I wrote in fit ... but was incorrect. I had BULLI and thought "what in the world starts 'BULLI-???" Then after muttering things like "bullying" and "bullion" to myself for a bit, I thought "Oh, BULL IN ... something ... what's that expression? Oh right! BULL IN THE HEATHER!"

This is what happens when you were a Gen X kid who listened to too much '90s alt rock. I mean, BULL IN THE HEATHER slid right in. When it fit (!) I was like "woo hoo! nailed it!" But then a few seconds later, I was like "wait, isn't the expression BULL IN A CHINA SHOP?" And then *that* fit. So I tested a cross and when NOIR worked at 41A: Depicting the world bleakly and cynically, I knew which BULL phrase was the right one. So thanks to Sonic Youth for nearly derailing my solving experience today, it was thrilling.

[15A: Large restaurant vessel shaped like another vessel]

Bullets:

• 1A: Main characters for an early reader (ABCS) — "characters" as in "letters"
• 16A: Conference handout (ID TAG) — no abbr. indicator in the clue made this extra hard for me
• 43A: "Sweet dreams are made of cheese / Who am I to dis a ___?" (parody lyrics) ("BRIE") — so incredibly dumb. I kind of love it.
• 47A: "It is not easy for a ___ to balance himself on a ladder": "Animal Farm" ("PIG") — first of all, true. Second of all, timely—the first American edition of Animal Farm was published 80 years ago this month (it was published a year earlier in England).

• 39D: Half-spoken, half-sung passages of an opera (ARIOSI) — a little old-school crosswordese for you. Vowel city! Terminal "I"! Useful! (though you don't see it around much any more—this is its first appearance in seven years).
• 48A: A word in closing (THUS) — I thought maybe "PLUS ..." Kinda like a "P.S."? Kinda?
• 14D: Humongous, slangily (BIG-ASS) — the NYTXW remains firmly in its ASS era. Expect ASS-suffixing to continue indefinitely. Conditions may worsen. Who knows?
• 2D: Neck topper (BOTTLE CAP) — I stared at this clue wondering what in the world it could mean. On top of a neck is a ... head. "Topper?" I get that bottles have "necks" and that bottle caps are "tops," but I can't quite imagine someone saying "top that neck, will ya?" and then someone else putting a bottle cap back on a bottle. But literally, the clue checks out.
• 13D: Green day star, for short (ST. PAT) — again, I don't think you'd actually call St. Patrick's Day "Green day" but literally, sure, people wear green, whatever. I just hope you didn't think the clue was asking for a member of the band Green Day—the lowercase "d" on "day" should've disabused you of that notion.

• 38D: Publisher of the front-page headline "This sport is stupid anyway" after a U.S. loss at the World Cup, in brief (N.Y. POST) — ... speaking of "American Idiot"—the New York Post! I miss the World Cup. Though I was reminded yesterday (in a New Yorker article about lethal European heatwaves) that Spain won and thought "oh ... right, I guess they did." Somehow the totality of the experience looms larger in my mind than the actual winner of the whole thing. 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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