Epitome of completeness / SAT 10-5-24 / Oldest city in France / "Reward" for altruism, maybe / Lover of Pyramus, in Ovid / Political activist who organized 1963's March on Washington / Mercedes ___, icon of Argentine folk music / Feature of Garamond or Perpetua / Penalty taker's lament / Beer whose name means "morning sun" / Erroneous justification for a 2003 invasion, for short

Constructor: Natan Last

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: BAYARD RUSTIN (5D: Political activist who organized 1963's March on Washington) —

Bayard Rustin (/ˈbaɪ.ərd/ BY-ərd; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American political activist, a prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin was the principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Rustin worked in 1941 with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement to press for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership; he taught King about non-violence. Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes. During the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights. [...] 

On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey, wanna see someone luck out? Watch:

Ha ha, look at those first two answers, 1-Across and 1-Down. Wrong and wrong ... And Yet! Somehow that "Y" in TYNE ended up in the right place, which was all I needed to get "YOU FOOL!," which I then confirmed with FBI LAB. When I took the above screenshot, I had no idea I had any wrong answers; I was just documenting my progress, as I often do on late-week puzzles. "Look at me, coming out of the gate on fire!" Little did I know I was literally on fire, i.e. my first two answers were a mini trash fire. Luckily I was able to put that fire out real quick—probably ten seconds after I took the screenshot. But I just wanted to show you how skill is great and all, but you can't beat dumb luck. Wrong answers ... lead to right answers ... and the puzzle opens right up. Amazing. Thank you, OOXTEPLERNON (He's the God of Short Bad Fill, but I assume his purview extends to all things crossword-related—when He's angry, you get lots of EER and EEN and EEK thrown at you, but sometimes he exhibits generosity and blesses even your FLUBS).

100% of the difficulty in today's puzzle came from proper nouns. Natan makes puzzles for the New Yorker, and this felt a lot like a "Moderately Challenging" New Yorker puzzle—i.e. a themeless that's somewhat heavy on proper nouns I've never heard of, ones for which I sometimes have to work every cross (to be clear, I do “Moderately Challenging” New Yorker puzzles in ~6 minutes—their difficulty ratings are, uh, idiosyncratic). Today, the "yipes" proper noun, for me, was BAYARD RUSTIN. When I read his bio, I think, "jeez, how do you not know him, you should really know him—he was a central figure in the civil rights movement." Then I see that he was gay and (therefore, in a more homophobic era) worked largely behind the scenes. Still, he's a huge deal, Presidential Medal of Freedom and all that, so ... can't complain about his presence here. Happy to learn (or possibly relearn) his name. But man, every single cross I needed! I don't know any BAYARDs or any RUSTINs. At all. Those are not names on my list of name possibilities. BAYARD has appeared six times in the NYTXW, but ... well, here's the complete list of clues for those BAYARDs:

[xwordinfo.com]

Gotta be honest, every single one of those clues is gibberish to me. "Legendary horse"? Who's "Rinaldo"?

Bayard (Modern French: [bajaʁ]; Dutch: Ros Beiaard or just Beiaard; Italian: Baiardo) is a magical bay horse in the legends derived from the medieval chansons de geste. These texts, especially that of The Four Sons of Aymon, attribute to him magical qualities and a supernatural origin. He is known for his strength and intelligence, and possesses the supernatural ability to adjust his size to his riders.

Looks like "Rinaldo" is one of the Four Sons of Aymon. LOL I went to grad school for medieval literature and didn't know any of this! (Don't blame UM, though, I was really a very lazy student). So that's a brief crossword history of BAYARD. What of RUSTIN? Any RUSTINs? Hey, wow ... looks like Bayard RUSTIN has appeared in the NYTXW before ... once, way back in February of 1984! Clue: [Bayard ___, Washington March organizer: 1963]. I can't believe the crossword discovered him and then mislaid him for forty years. Welcome back, buddy!

Other proper nouns of my not-knowing: well, LYME, you saw that. I was thinking of Newcastle-Upon-TYNE, which is another Newcastle-___-___ place in England (how many are there!?) (1A: Newcastle-under-___, Staffordshire, England). Then there was SOSA, which gave me a bit of a fright because I had SO-A and no idea what letter to put there. This is because I didn't know LYME and so had LY-E, which gave me -OBBO-S for 3D: Don, and I absolutely Could Not parse it. Brain kept trying to make -OBBO-S into one word. Thought maybe the Argentinian singer was SONA (25A: Mercedes ___, icon of Argentine folk music). Certainly never expected SOSA, since the only SOSA I know is the late-'90s, PED-enhanced baseball slugger. But eventually my brain kicked in with the "hey, maybe it's two words" wisdom and I got through (MOB BOSS). Later on, there was MONSTRO—no idea (32D: Name of the whale in "Pinocchio"). I didn't see the recent Guillermo del Toro remake of Pinocchio, and I never cared much for that whole story when I was growing up, so once you get past the whole "I wanna be a real boy" / nose-growth stuff, I'm kind of tapped out on Pinocchio lore. I guess that's mostly it for proper nouns, except for THISBE (12D: Lover of Pyramus, in Ovid), ROME (37A: W.H. Auden's "The Fall of ___"), BIALIK (36D: Post-Trebek "Jeopardy!" host), and MARSEILLE (32A: Oldest city in France), which I'd at least heard of, and The LAST BATTLE, which I actually knew (again, dumb luck—I happen to be married to world's foremost reader of The Chronicles of Narnia; those books pretty much define her childhood. Please don't tell her I initially confused two of the books today and wrote in The LAST PRINCE) (8D: Seventh and final "Chronicles of Narnia" book, with "The").

Outside the proper nouns, almost zero trouble today. If there was stuff I didn't know, I was able to flow right around it. And "flow" is a good word for what this puzzle had. Really enjoyed whooshing around the grid, particularly through that lovely, creamy center. There's nothing flashy in there, but it's all incredibly smooth and lively, especially given how dense the long answers are there. Had a little trouble dropping into the SE corner, only because at 21D: It's nothing new, I wanted SAME OLD SONG or SAME OLD SAME OLD, neither of which fit. But I thought "maybe STORY?" and yes, that was it. Finished up easily from there.



Notes:

• 16A: Beer whose name means "morning sun" (ASAHI) — ASAHI, the official beer of crosswords. When in doubt, guess ASAHI (esp. if it's five letters and you already have the "A")
• 18A: Feature of Garamond or Perpetua (SERIF) — Garamond and Perpetua are fonts.
• 44A: Double duty? (STUNTS) — my proudest moment of the day. Got this off the first "S"! The "duty" of a stunt double is ... yeah it's right there in the name: STUNTS. I think I wanted "STAND IN" at first, but it didn't fit.
• 7D: Erroneous justification for a 2003 invasion, for short (WMD) — it's great when a clue can be factually accurate while also being, at the same time, a great "fuck-you" to an entire lying, warmongering administration. [Chef's kiss] to this clue!
• 34D: Penalty taker's lament ("I MISSED") — "Penalty" here is a "penalty shot" (as in football, which is to say, "soccer").

• 35D: Chest bump? (PEC) — nice cross with DIP (33A: Bodyweight exercise). A wide-grip DIP can help build your PECs. 
• 41D: Cheek ('TUDE) — short for "attitude." "Cheek" here means "sass," "backtalk," etc.
• 48D: Whirl, so to speak (TRY) — As in, "Give it a whirl!" Like this clue a lot.
• 17A: Pitches low and inside? (SUBWAY ADS) — best clue of the day, a word-perfect misdirection. Looks like baseball ... isn't baseball. (Congrats to the New York Metropolitans for advancing to the NLDS ... maybe we'll get a Subway Series this year, but that is not my wish: go Tigers!)
• 33D: Epitome of completeness (DOTTED i) — unsurprisingly, CROSSEDT has never, not once, appeared in the NYTXW. Eight DOTTEDIs in the last decade, but no CROSSEDTs! I am officially waging a complaint on behalf of all of T-dom.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Speed reading, for short / FRI 10-4-24 / Liu regarded as China's first supermodel / Indian fried bread / High-end skin-care brand / Frequent Missy Elliott collaborator / Cannes "confirm"? / Acrobat displays / Demo for many parents of Alphas / Onetime home of the world's largest pineapple plantation

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Extremely easy (like a Tuesday or Wednesday)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: POORI (6D: Indian fried bread) —

Puri, also poori, is a type of deep-fried bread, made from unleavened whole-wheat flour, originated from the Indian subcontinent.

Puris are most commonly served as breakfast or snacks. It is also served at special or ceremonial functions as part of ceremonial rituals along with other vegetarian food offered in Hindu prayer as prasadam. When hosting guests it is common in some households to serve puri in place of roti, as a small gesture of formality. (wikipedia)

• • •

A zippy little puzzle, but maybe too zippy. I blew through it like it wasn't there, like walking through smoke, just ... no resistance, anywhere. Even when I didn't know something, or immediately recall it (as with POORI), I seemed to flow right over and around it via adjacent answers and crosses without any apparent speed-drop or extra effort. I think the first time I actually pulled up, once I got started, was way down in the SE corner, when I couldn't get BUFFET off the "BU" ... and honestly, in retrospect, that should've been obvious. Before that, I'd basically tumbled down the grid, from NW to SE, seemingly by sheer force of gravity as opposed to any real cogitation on my part. First guesses were going right in and proving correct every time. I mean, I even remembered every damn letter in LGBTQIA, in order, on my first try (29A: Initialism that precedes "+"). I guess it's really only those last two that are (somewhat) hard to come up with, since they're latecomers to the letter string, and anyway it seemed unlikely to be "AI" since all that does is evoke our dystopian robot-controlled future (which is to say, present), so "IA" it was! And this happened over and over—I'd throw down the first thing that came to me and damned if it wasn't right. HIDEY HOLE off the "IDE" (16A: Place to conceal oneself), TYPE 'A'S off the "Y" (14D: Go-getters, often), the GIRL part of DREAM GIRL (8D: Certain romantic ideal), the HERO part of ITALIAN HERO (are there other HEROs? and how is this different from an "Italian sub," which definitely sounds more familiar?) (11D: Long lunch?)—even stuff I didn't really know, like AESOP ("is it ... AESOP? it is!? ha ha, look at me, remembering beauty product stuff!") (34D: High-end skin-care brand). It all just went right in. Overall, the puzzle was very smooth and very easy, but it wasn't terribly exciting. The marquee answers are fine, but as with lots of Fridays lately, there wasn't a ton of sparkle. Nothing I was really thrilled or surprised to see. But still, it all holds up. A not unpleasant experience, for sure.

There's one square that seems potentially problematic—one where I can imagine solvers making a bad guess (because most of them will not have heard of one of the answers, for sure). That square is the "E" in the WEN / AU NATUREL crossing. I'm sure Liu WEN is a big deal in her profession (56D: Liu regarded as China's first supermodel), but in this grid, she's the least familiar name (at least to me), and proper nouns are always dangerous, especially at the vowels, so the "E" here is a potential "yikes" moment. Yes, you should probably know that it's AU NATUREL, not AU NATURAL (59A: In the buff) ... but I feel like people (mis)pronounce it "NATURAL" all the time (with the last syllable accented and sounding like a guy named "AL"). And yes, WAN is less probable as a name, especially considering that it's a perfectly ordinary English word and would likely get clued that way. But WAN is a name—a Chinese name at that—so if you don't know the supermodel here (and I know a lot of you, like me, didn't), then WAN wouldn't be a bad guess. I'm just saying that this is the one and only square in the puzzle that made me go "yeesh, I am not 100% here... oh well, fingers crossed." Ideally, there should be zero of those squares in a puzzle.* Then again, I'm on record as not giving a damn about "supermodels" and having no real knowledge of that world, so it's possible Liu WEN is like Cindy Crawford-famous and I'm alone, or nearly alone, in even hesitating at this square.

It's a debut for POORI, which is cool, but it's a little weird that we got POORI before PURI, if only because four-letter answers are generally more plentiful than 5s. Actually, PURI was in a puzzle once ... in 1976, as a [Hindu pilgrimage center]. Maybe it appears more often on Indian menus in America as POORI? Yes, based on this single randomly selected menu from an Indian restaurant in Milwaukee, it looks like POORI is the preferred menu spelling in this country. 

[Antique Indian Restaurant]

Explainers:

• 1D: Speed reading, for short (MPH) — maybe the hardest part of the puzzle, in that it was the second clue I looked at (after getting MWAH immediately), and ... well, I had no idea what was going on here. I didn't know "speed reading" had an initialism or acronym or whatever. Turns out, the clue isn't about speed reading (as in, reading quickly) at all; it's the "reading" of your "speed" on your speedometer (or the cop's radar gun, or any speed measuring device). And (car) speed is, in fact (in this country, anyway), measured in miles per hour (MPH). 
• 5A: Tablet that's impossible to swallow? (IPAD) — I like the "?" here. Like ... someone somewhere is definitely thinking "'Impossible,' eh? ... hold my beer..."
• 44A: Business name abbr. (LLC) — had the "C" and went with INC. This is what passes for "difficulty" today.
• 23D: What often carries a U.S.D.A. seal (ORGANIC BEEF) — really wish this clue had been more BEEF-specific. I mean, ORGANIC anything might carry this seal, right? Yes, pretty much. The USDA website has a subsection labeled "Honey, mushrooms, pet food," and uses "organic dill" (!) as an example at one point. Did anyone guess ORGANIC DILL here? PORK? FIGS? DUCK? My point is, if you're gonna have a BEEF answer, get a BEEF clue. 

• 43A: Once, for one (NUMERO) — "Once" is Spanish for the number (NUMERO) "eleven."
• 15D: So-called "explosion shot" from a sand trap (BLAST) — this one tried to confuse me with golf lingo but joke's on you, clue—I had the "-AST," took one look at "explosion," and had my answer. This clue could've just been [Explosion]. But I guess the golf demographic must be served.
• 57D: Apt letters missing from __ipper_ (SLY) — first, "Apt letters missing" feels all kinds of grammatically wrong. "Letters aptly missing," maybe? Second, there was at least a couple seconds where I was thinking "What is SLS?" But then I got saved by GEN Y. Speaking of ... 
• 62A: Demo for many parents of Alphas (GEN Y) — ugh no one calls it that. Only crosswords call Millennials "GEN Y." It goes Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and, I guess, Alphas (a default reset so we could start over at the beginning of the (Greek) alphabet??). But GENY? GENY? 

• 50A: Acrobat displays (PDFS) — Acrobat is software (from Adobe) that allows you to view and manipulate PDF files.
• 54D: Cannes "confirm"? (OUI) — clue of the day. If you "confirm" something in Cannes, you might simply say OUI. It's a pun on "Can confirm" (a common affirmative reply, esp. online). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*It's at least theoretically possible that solvers might botch the CIARA / SABRA crossing as well (36A: Frequent Missy Elliott collaborator / 20D: Big name in hummus). Two not-universally-famous propers crossing at a vowel—never not dicey.

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