Selma march leader who served 17 terms in Congress / WED 1-24-24 / Court failure / Its shores have the lowest land-based elevation on earth / Its HQ is sometimes called "Crypto City" / Some water bearers / Fish with "snowflake" and "sawtooth" varieties / "The Clan of the Cave Bear" heroine / Sports org. in which five members have bird names

Constructor: John-Clark Levin

Relative difficulty: Easy (one of the easiest Wednesdays I've ever solved)

THEME: LONGJOHNS (35A: Winter underwear ... or what appear four times in this puzzle) — Different 5-letter "Johns" have their last names made twice as "long" by having each letter appear twice:

Theme answers:

• GGLLEENNNN (17A: First American to orbit the earth)
• LLEEWWIISS (25A: Selma march leader who served 17 terms in Congress)
• AADDAAMMSS (51A: Only U.S. president elected under the Federalist Party)
• EELLWWAAYY (62A: Broncos QB who won back-to-back Super Bowls)

Word of the Day: "AD ASTRA" (39D: 2019 Brad Pitt sci-fi movie whose title means "to the stars") —

Ad Astra is a 2019 American psychological science fiction film produced, co-written, and directed by James Gray. Starring Brad Pitt(who also produced), Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, and Donald Sutherland, it follows an astronaut who ventures into space in search of his lost father, whose obsessive quest to discover intelligent alien life at all costs threatens the Solar System and all life on Earth. The project was announced in early 2016, with Gray saying he wanted to feature "the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie". Pitt signed on to star in April 2017 and the rest of the cast joined later that year. Filming began around Los Angeles that August, lasting through October.

Ad Astra premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States on September 20, 2019, by 20th Century Fox. It received positive reviews from critics, with praise for Pitt's performance. At the 92nd Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Sound Mixing. The film grossed $135 million worldwide against an $80–100 million budget. (wikipedia)

• • •

That was a Monday. That was so easy it was almost non-existent. The theme is about as slight and pushoverable as any I've ever seen. Famous five-letter Johns? And all you gotta do is type each letter twice? And every John is 100% legitimately famous? OK, but in that case, we aren't gonna be at this long. Will there be anything else about the grid that's interesting? Any sparkly longer fill or ... anything? No? Just ... your regular old stuff? The Sparkle will top out at AIRBALL? Why are doing this again, exactly? To make solvers feel powerful? To take up space until the Thursday rolls around? It's hard to see what the point is here. The puzzle was so fill-in-the-blank, point-and-shoot, child's-placemat simple that I can tell you precisely, with crystal clarity, where I so much as hesitated in filling it in. First instinct for 1A: Some water bearers (MAINS) was EWERS, LOL, Extreme Crossword Brain at work right there. But then I got NIL (4D: Goose egg), switched EWERS to MAINS, and the next thing I know, the whole NW is filled in, with the first themer having this weird "GGLL" start. Must be an err- ... nope, it's John GLENN ... guess I just double every letter? Yup. And zoom, I'm off. Don't know *why* GLENN is GGLLEENNNN yet, but I'm off.

[PPRRIINNEE]

I somehow can't get the CHIP part of CHIP IN (10D: Contribute), but everything surrounding it is so easy that those squares get filled in pretty quickly anyway. I think of DJS as spinning vinyl,  not CDS (32D: CD players?), so again I needed nearby fill to help, and again it helped almost instantly. I did not get either PROM (56A: Event with a royal court) or AIRBALL (44D: Court failure) at first glance, and I misspelled SAMOYED (as SAMOYAD, I think) (46D: Siberian sled dog), so I guess we can say that the SE was the "hardest" section, but "GLORY BE!" led to "I'LL BE" (horrid "BE" / "BE" crossing there, boo!), which fixed SAMOYED's spelling, and then BRO AIRBALL PROM and zoom, off again. None of the Johns were hard. The last two I got solely by looking at the first two or three words of the clues ("Only U.S. president," "Broncos QB"). I know my crosswordese, so neither LAILA (not LEILA, not LAYLA) ALI nor AYLA last-name-unknown (65A: "The Clan of the Cave Bear" heroine) could slow me down. Finished in the far far SW with the Brad Pitt movie I didn't know but since it was also clued as the Latin phrase I *did* know, whoomp, there it was, the end. If I still got high on speed, I might've had good feelings about this one. As it is, it felt remedial, and I feel cheated.

[PPRRIINNEE]

If your clue begins "Italian" poet and it's five letters (esp. if I have some letters in place), I don't need the rest of the clue. If your clue begins "Norse god" and it's four letters (esp. if I have *any* letters in place), I don't need the rest of your clue. The clues needed to be putting up obstacles and roadblocks today, and they absolutely were not, not ever. If you'd shown me 18D: Fish with "snowflake" and "sawtooth" varieties *and* I'd had no idea how many letters it was *and* I'd had no letters in place, I would've been stumped. But in three letters, with any letters in place, it's EEL. I mean, it's crosswords, of course it's EEL. They retired GAR a long time ago, I think, so unless it's Old-Timers' Day at the Crossword Ballpark, the three-letter fish is always EEL. I had one write-over, and that's when I read a clue poorly (too quickly) and wrote in OVEN instead of NAAN (15A: Tandoori chicken accompaniment). See "Tandoori," see four letters ending in "N," write OVEN, pure instinct. NAAN is the more crosswordy word (and the only answer that actually makes sense here), but a TANDOOR is literally an OVEN, so that's why my brain did what it did. 

[PPRRIINNEE]

Puzzle had an overall old-ish feel, from "GLORY BE!" and "MY EYE!" to "M*A*S*H" and "Kate & ALLIE" to all the Johns to the old "trick" use of "fast" in the EAT clue (62D: Make a fast stop?). I hope lots of people broke their Wednesday records today, because I'm not sure what else this puzzle is good for. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Focus of some modern ethical debates / FRI 10-13-23 / Rock subgenre named for its aggressive vocals / Runner with vestigial wings / Commercial follower of Mc- or Nes- / Where the Tokugawa shogunate was established / Hit 2011 film based on a 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett / Foe of Ferocious Flea in Hanna-Barbera cartoons / World capital where it's illegal to display the Soviet hammer and sickle

Constructor: John-Clark Levin

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CHATGPT (34A: Focus of some modern ethical debates) —

ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, which enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.

ChatGPT is built upon either GPT-3.5 or GPT-4—members of OpenAI's proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, based on the transformer architecture developed by Google—and is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but due to its popularity, OpenAI now operates the service on a freemium model. It allows users on its free tier to access the GPT-3.5-based version. In contrast, the more advanced GPT-4 based version and priority access to newer features are provided to paid subscribers under the commercial name "ChatGPT Plus".

By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to OpenAI's valuation growing to $29 billion. Within months, Google, Baidu, and Meta accelerated the development of their competing products: Bard, Ernie Bot, and LLaMA. Microsoft launched its Bing Chat based on OpenAI's GPT-4. It raised concern among some observers over the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace or atrophy human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

• • •

One look at the grid and I got kinda depressed. Super boxy, with chunky corners accessible only by one-letter-wide entryways, and only a half dozen or so longish answers. Basically screams No Fun. Weird black-square configurations—or, rather, highly unweird black-square configurations, in that the black squares appear exclusively in three-square blocks, so that the grid looks like a Tetris game that only has one type of piece to throw at you. And then the opening clue (once I finally figured it out) ended up being so sad and useless and off-the-mark that ... well, it fit my feelings about the grid: No Fun. MATCHES are getting lit at a party??? (1A: Ones getting lit at a party, maybe). What are you talking about? Candles get lit at parties. Joints get lit at parties. Tiki torches get lit at parties. MATCHES are a means for lighting things. Who goes to a party and thinks, "Things are getting a little dull, let's light MATCHES!"? Pyromaniacs? Save your cutesy, half-naughty "getting lit"* pun for something that *stays burning* and more importantly, don't use "party" if, after solving, I still have no idea what kind of "party" you have in mind. It's really the "party" part here that's irking me. The connection between MATCHES and "party" is beyond tenuous. Yes, I can imagine MATCHES at a party, but I gotta develop a whole plotline in order to make it make sense. Come on. 

This grid doesn't have nearly enough marquee answers, and most of what it has is pretty VANILLA—VANILLA being actually one of the more exciting answers in this grid. Sincerely, I think "HERE I GO!" was the only answer that seemed vibrant and made me think "good one." Further, the grid is loaded with unpleasantness. White-savior narratives like THE HELP (I'd rather read American Psycho), or toilets (PORT-A-POTTIES), or CHATGPT, which is kinda like a reverse toilet, in that it gives you shit rather than disposes of it. If you work in education, you know how terrible CHATGPT has been for, well, everything. Plagiarism is not the problem (or only part of it). That bot spews out paragraph-shaped paragraphs, essay-shaped essays, poem-shaped poems, things that have the external appearance of writing, but that are clearly not writing, in that there is no plausible human voice there—no curiosity, no imagination, no rough edges, just a kind of bland uncanny-valley voice cobbled together from the millions of actual human voices from which it's stealing. Truly like the alien that is trying to learn to be human. We have been trained to accept this voice as normal by every ATM or customer service phone robot we've interacted with going back decades. CHATGPT returns results that are often shockingly devoid of content, but they look the part, they sound like they're saying something, and students aren't yet good enough writers to know how to shape anything CHATGPT gives them into useful form, into their own voice, so the results (where student papers are concerned) are usually vapidity, but worse than normal human vapidity. Machine-made vapidity. And if you're using it for "research," it's worse. I would say "go see for yourself," but the Catch-22 here, of course, is that every interaction you have with it merely trains it to be more fraudulent. People think it's "fun" to make the chatbot write recipes in the style of Dr. Seuss or whatever, but every inch of generative A.I. is killing human communication, and thus human community. The Luddites look smarter and more prescient every day.

Had no idea about the NW at first so had to start in the NE with SARA Gilbert (10D: Emmy-nominated Gilbert) and SCREAMO (18A: Rock subgenre named for its aggressive vocals) as my first foothold in the grid (I got TEN and ELLIS in the NW, but they were no help). I kinda like SCREAMO sitting atop VOICE TEACHER. Are there SCREAMO VOICE TEACHERs? Seems pretty niche, but also pretty cool. I think a polka dot-painted house would be pretty rad, so the EYESORE clue doesn't track for me at all (41A: House painted with polka dots, you might say). Also not tracking: HELOS (5D: Choppers). HE-LOL, what? You mean 'copters, maybe? This is a Shortz-era debut, probably because no one says it. It got used once in 1970, and otherwise has never appeared in any grid since Margaret Farrar was putting them together. No singular HELO in the Shortz era either (five in the pre-Shortz). I can only hear HELOS in this very cinematically-specific voice (Walter Brennan at his most Walter Brennany):

I think I'm done now. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*to "get lit" is to get wasted / drunk / intoxicated in one form or another, which definitely happens at parties. Whether there are MATCHES at these parties, who can say?

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Locale in Belmar NJ that lent its name to a noted rock-'n'-roll band / FRI 8-11-23 / Names of three czars of Bulgaria / Music genre for Lorde and Lana Del Rey / Hyperbole from someone who's dreaming big / Turner once big in the music industry

Constructor: John-Clark Levin

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: OAKS Park (5A: London's ___ Park, near Epsom Downs) —

Oaks Park is a public park in Carshalton in the London Borough of Sutton. It is bounded on the south by Croydon Lane (A2022), and on the east by Woodmansterne Road; smaller roads lie to west and north. [...] The estate lent its name to the Oaks horserace which was inaugurated by the Earl in 1779 and is run annually during the Derby meeting at Epsom Downs Racecourse, about 4 miles to the west. The original Oaks Race ran from Barrow Hedges, north of The Oaks and through Oaks Park before heading west to approximately the site of the current Epsom Downs Racecourse. Part of the off-road route still exists. (wikipedia)

• • •

Two good answers ("THE SKY'S THE LIMIT!" / "YOU WON'T REGRET IT!") with a lot of Yawn in between. Not enough marquee punch to really get off the ground. And it opens so badly—with a faux-chummy corporate slogan for a company whose dystopian "smart devices" essentially have much of the world voluntarily treating a powerful surveillance company like a friendly household assistant—that the puzzle would've needed a whole lot of oomph to recover. Whereas it only has, like, two oomphs. Nothing really wrong with this puzzle (besides the repulsive 1-Across). It's just not that interesting. It tries to do a little pasta dance there in the NE, but for me all that does is detract from from the only really interesting Down in the whole puzzle. Loved seeing POMODORO, but OLIVEOIL is the equivalent of EPEE where eight-letter answers are concerned, so I don't know that the corner is really elevated by pretending that you meant for those two answers to be thematically complementary. I mean, it's a cute coincidence, but that's all it is. And as for OREOCONE, I have no idea what that even is. All I know is that once again, as with 1-Across, the puzzle is back to trying to get its "relevance" and "currency" from corporations—in this case, by just mining every damn product in the OREO line. You're welcome, Nabisco. Is the cone made of Oreo? Is there an entire frozen dessert product called the OREOCONE? The more you look at it, the more it looks like a steroid ... something you'd put on a LESION. Have I not seen a pharmaceutical ad for an eczema treatment called OREOCONE? Seems plausible. If you think OREOCONE is a silly name for a prescription drug, brother, you haven't been anywhere near the pharmaceutical ad universe. Here's part of a subreddit entitled "Worst Drug Brand Name" (which I lifted from this article on weird prescription drug names in Philadelphia magazine):

 — Migranal. You’d think it was a rectal suppository for migraines.
          — For when your migraines are a pain in the ass.
— Bloxiverz. It’s like they let a 13-year-old create the name.
— Acyclovir. I once pronounced it “assy-clover” … will never live that one down in the pharmacy.
— Phosex. Pfizer really missed out on that one when branding Viagra.
— All these brand names people are saying here sound like Pokémon.

After working out the Google ad answer (after determining it wasn't a Siri ad answer or an Alexa ad answer),  the puzzle got very easy, and I just kinda followed the path of gravity, down, down, down, like water following the path of least resistance:

[Wish something could've caused this grid to sizzle]

I had no idea about OAKS Park, up front, and no idea about BORIS at all, but only the former caused any trouble (coming early, when I had nothing in the grid to help me out). Falling down the grid as I did, I had the BO- before I saw the clue at 50A: Name of three czars of Bulgaria (BORIS), and thought "Hmm, what are five-letter BO-names?" and, well, it turns out there aren't that many. Figured BOBBY was probably not likely, and went with the only other five-letter BO-name I could think of. This is crossword solving! Whenever anyone mistakenly thinks you have to be "smart" to solve these things, just remember that most of the time all you're doing is trying to come up with a five-letter BO-name (or the equivalent). It's a skill that can be developed, but it ain't rocket science.

I have heard the music of Lana Del Rey and Lorde a lot but have never heard anyone refer to it as ALT-POP (9A: Music genre for Lorde and Lana Del Rey). ALT-names, like OREO-names, all feel to me as if they're being artificially sustained by crosswords. You're much (much much) more likely to hear the music of the aforementioned artists referred to as "INDIE POP." I've never heard the 2 Chainz song in question but I do eagerly await the day the puzzle has the courage to put CHAINZ in the grid. Or go full 2 CHAINZ and use numerals in your grid somehow. This has almost certainly been done in an alt- I mean indie crossword, somewhere. But at the NYTXW ...

Today we learn that HOES have "handles" (fascinating!) (24A: Handled things outside?) and that CD PLAYERs are "Turner"s, of a sort (36D: Turner once big in the music industry). The latter clue is using the time-honored trick of using the capitalization of the first letter in a clue to create the false appearance of a proper noun, in this case a non-Ike, non-Tina "Turner." KATHLEEN fits, but ... like BOBBY, seemed unlikely. Plus, I had the "C" to start with, so the CD part was pretty obvious. So hurray for two answers in this puzzle! And ho-hum to the rest. Hopefully tomorrow will bring more sizzle, and more punch.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Google owns Blogger, I think, so I should probably apologize to my corporate overlords for disrespecting the brand. OK, GOOGLE, you win, I'm sorry.

P.P.S. This is an OREOCONE (I think):

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Famed deco designer / SUN 3-5-23 / Competitive setting in Fortnite / Landmark at the entrance to Narnia / Bankman-Fried fallen crypto mogul

Constructor: John-Clark Levin

Relative difficulty: Easyish

THEME: "As Heard Around the Dinner Table" — theme answers contain circled letters that are MEAT SUBSTITUTES (102A: Vegetarian options ... or what the shaded letters in this puzzle are, phonetically); that is, they are letter strings that sound just like meats (in their respective answers) despite not being spelled as such:

Theme answers:

• GO TO A RESTAURANT (22A: Dine out) (goat)
• DUCT TAPE (35A: Aid in some makeshift repairs) (duck)
• PORE CLEANSER (38A: Blackhead remover) (pork)
• BEFORE PICTURE (62A: Part of many a weight-loss ad) (beef)
• BAKE IN THE SUN (85A: Lie out on a scorching day) (bacon)
• LAMP POST (89A: Landmark at the entrance to Narnia) (lamb)

Word of the Day: CSU (10D: Fort Collins sch.) —

Colorado State University (Colorado State or CSU) is a public land-grant research university in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is the flagship university of the Colorado State University System. Colorado State University is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". It was founded in 1870 as Colorado Agricultural College and in 1935 was renamed the Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. In 1957, the Colorado General Assembly approved its current name, Colorado State University. [...] The Colorado State Rams compete in the NCAA Division I Mountain West conference. Swimmer and six-time Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken is one of CSU's most notable athletes. The school renamed West Drive, which stretches along the west side of the Administration Building at the south end of CSU's Oval, Amy Van Dyken Way. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really wish I had better news here, but this was pretty brutal. Not brutal as in hard–it was mostly a breeze—but brutal as in painful to solve, for a number of reasons. The basic theme concept ... I don't think it really works. They aren't MEAT SUBSTITUTES in any meaningful sense of the term. The "shaded letters" aren't substituting for anything. If you'd spelled it PORKLEANSER, then sure, "meat" is serving as a "substitute" for the actual letters, but as is, what you've got are answers that are spelled absolutely correctly. The fact that the circled letters are kinda pronounced like various meats doesn't make those letters "substitutes" for anything. So on a literal level, the theme doesn't seem to work that well. Also, just circling the "LAM" in an answer doesn't seem like ... anything. How many billions of words could you have used there? So your themers are either arbitrary and totally non-special answers, like LAMP POST, or, on the other end of the spectrum, they are tortured answers, like GO TO A RESTAURANT. I mean ... wow. Wow. I ... I mean, I invented the goofy phrase EAT A SANDWICH to describe a certain variety of ridiculous "[verb] A [noun]" phrases you sometimes see in crosswords, but I never ever imagined I'd seen an answer that was actually *goofier* than EAT A SANDWICH. I'm gonna have to rename the concept now. No, I'm not going to, but GO TO A RESTAURANT is hall-of-fame ridiculous. And then to have the gall, the gumption, the nerve to also put GETSANA in the same grid?! Amazing. Amazingly gruesome, but amazing nonetheless. Add to all this the puzzle's bizarre, perverse commitment to gratuitously inserting some of the very worst human beings into the grid (BRET Stephens!?!? SAM Bankman-Fried!?!? Whyyyyyyyy? What are you doing? Who is that for?), and you've got ... well, I don't know what, but nothing I would care to re-experience, that's for sure.

GO TO A RESTAURANT omg sorry I'm still laughing / dying inside over this answer. LOL, HOW DARE YOU indeed. I think I blacked out after that, somehow completing the puzzle without retaining much memory of any of it. The long Downs on the sides are kind of interesting. That's a nice little feature. Or ... it's the nicest feature of the puzzle, that's for sure. PANCAKE (as clued) and SLAMMER have some good energy. But the grid as a whole is rather bland, and the structure of the grid, woof, it's so horribly segmented. So many black squares, and those NE and SW corners are *ridiculously* cut off from the areas just beneath them. If you are in the NE corner, you cannot move down the grid without going All The Way Over, past the puzzle median, to AIRDROP at 41D: Apple wireless file transfer. Obviously the same holds true in reverse for the SE corner (gotta go allllll the way over to DECADES to move up). It feels really clunkily put together. I'm sorry I don't have more to say, or at least more to say that's positive. I just think this one missed the mark on every level—at the level of concept, execution, and overall fill. As for difficulty, there wasn't much. I think the hardest part for me was the DOUR DYED LOAF EUROS part. Lots of clues there I didn't understand. Had IDLE for LOAF (43D: Do nothing) and SOUR for DOUR (51A: Ill-humored) and had no idea what to make of the clue on EUROS (44D: Paris bar tender?) ("tender" here is "money"—so, the money you'd use at a Paris bar = EUROS). So that was a tough patch, but that's the only one, I think. I truly hope you found more to admire than I did. 

Anything need explaining? A COT is [Where you might go down in the ranks?] because "go down" = "sleep" and "ranks" = "other soldiers." That's all for me on this one. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Cigar milder than maduro / WED 4-15-20 / Old Spice alternative / Distinctively colored freshwater fish / Gives deep massage therapy / Canadian interjections / 1896 Olympics locale

Constructor: John-Clark Levin and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Challenging (5:46, which is around my average Friday time) (def played like a Thursday for me) (though it is oversized, at 15x16, so that will account at least a teeny bit of slowness) (maybe it's Medium-Challenging, I don't know)

THEME: HEAD TO TOE (34A: Complete ... as literally suggested by the four symmetrical pairs of answers to the starred clues) — for each symmetrical pair, you take the first letter of the word on the western side of the grid and move it to the bottom of the word to get the word that appears on the eastern side of the grid; thus, you move the top letter (HEAD) to the bottom position (TOE) to get the second answer in the pair:

Theme answers:

• GRIFFIN (2D: *Mythical beast that's half lion and half eagle) —> RIFFING (12D: *Making up variations on a theme)
• EMANATE (21D: *Send off, as rays) —> MANATEE (22D: *Sea cow)
• HOLDS OUT (39D: *Waits for a better offer, say) —> OLD SOUTH (44D: *Antebellum Dixie) (... mmm, who doesn't love the OLD SOUTH!?) :(
• ATHENS (50D: *1896 Olympics locale) —> THE NSA (52D: *Hush-hush org.)

Word of the Day: EFREM Zimbalist (21A: Violinist Zimbalist) —

Efrem Zimbalist Sr. (April 21, 1889 – February 22, 1985) was a concert violinist, composer, teacher, conductor and director of the Curtis Institute of Music. [...] Zimbalist married the famous American soprano Alma Gluck and they toured together for a time. Alma Gluck died in 1938. In 1943, having been a widower for five years, he married the Curtis Institute of Music's founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, daughter of publisher Cyrus Curtis, and 14 years his senior.

He died in 1985, at the age of 95. His and Alma's son, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and their granddaughter, Stephanie Zimbalist, both became popular actors. (wikipedia)

• • •

Felt misplaced on a Wednesday. The oversizedness probably contributed to the overall feeling of slowness, but I was stuck far more than usual on a Wednesday, which would've been fine, except too often my experience on getting released from stuckness was not "oh" or "aha" but "really?" and "sure, I guess, whatever." Most of this shruggish feeling came from a very small plot of land at the top of the grid. No idea on GO SEEK for the longest time (a horrid stand-alone answer); thought maybe ACRID for ACERB (7D: Bitter); forgot if it was EFREM or EFRON (the latter is Zac, sigh) (21A: Violinist Zimbalist); baffled by question-like phrasing on "AM I BEAT" (25A: "Whew! What a tiring day!"); never heard of a RED FIN (6D: Distinctively colored freshwater fish); impossible to see that the clue on AMIE wanted a French answer (25D: One who might become a fiancée); couldn't see EMANATE (wanted EMIT ... something something); and had TAPE instead of TIVO for a bit (26D: Record for later, in a way). Just a slog and a grind, that whole part. Grindslog! The rest of the puzzle seemed somewhat more in keeping with standard Wednesday difficulty levels, though ... I misspelled GRIFFON thusly (ugh), and thus could Not see LINEMAN (28A: Tackle, for one). I wasn't sure about the last two letters of ROSTAND's name (considered ROSTARD). I've probably seen END PIN before but it's not a term that comes readily to mind, and I needed many letters to get it. By the time it was all done, I was well over a minute over my usual Wednesday time and I still had no idea what the theme was all about. Took me forever (so, maybe a minute?) after I finished to "get" the theme, and there just wasn't enough wow there. It's a variation on anagrams. OK. The OLD SOUTH is such a vibe-wrecker of an answer ("antebellum" is just a pretty way of saying "slave-holding" as far as I'm concerned) that there was really no coming back from it. The one-letter wordplay just wasn't enough to make the experience feel good or pleasant.


OTTER is an anagram of TORTE. This has nothing to do with the puzzle theme, but I just noticed it, so I thought I'd point it out. I'm pretty sure (i.e. certain) that the [Top of an espresso] is the CREMA, not FROTH, which ... I guess you could use that word to describe the top of a cappuccino, though I'd go with "foam." FROTH is something you do at the mouth if you're angry and maybe want to AVENGE something. So the coffee clue missed. The grape leaves clue, though, that's nice. Tasty. I like DOLMA. I had some today (35D: Stuffed grape leaves). There's a great Greek restaurant that sells food at the local farmer's market here in Binghamton. You don't need to know this, but I'm just trying to think of nice things right now, to pass the time.


For all y'all who hate how much I talk about the lack of gender equality among NYTXW constructors, good news, I'm gonna talk about it again right now. Since Women's Week (the little 7-day early-March concession to the fact that women make puzzles too), the NYTXW has regressed to the mean, hard. Solo constructions by men: 26. Solo constructions by woman: 4. That's F-O-U-R. Since March 8. Four. We've had four solo man constructors since [checks calendar] this past Friday! But no solo women since March 25—we're halfway through April. Inequality this severe, at this late date, after years of open criticism from many quarters, is due solely to the culture created by the guy at the top. Liz Gorski was right. Please read her again (or for the first time, if you somehow missed her blog post on this topic last week). It's time for new leadership. The current leader seems to be tacking from negligence to outright hostility. The numbers don't lie. They are Abysmal. Even the most stalwart of status quo defenders have gotta admit, it's just embarrassing.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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