Woman's name invented by Jonathan Swift / THUR 11-6-25 / "A braggart, a ___, a villain ...": "Romeo and Juliet" / Maker of the i4 and i5

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Hard (Around 20 minutes, although I was solving on paper)

THEME: TONGUE TWISTER clued as [Certain stumbling block ... or a hint to three pairs of symmetrically positioned answers in this puzzle]— Languages anagram to other words, which are clued in relation to the language. The language ("tongue") is "twisted," i.e. scrambled up.

• My nitpick is I didn't like the word "stumbling block." I suppose it works in the context of "Wow, that was accidentally very difficult for me to read aloud, what a tongue twister!" but I know it more as a cute game. I really wanted something with "language barrier," which of course did not fit.

Theme answers:

• FLEMISH is clued as [Language in which "zichzelf" is 49-Across]
• The corresponding answer is HIMSELF, which is an anagram of FLEMISH
• LATVIAN is clued as [Language in which "drosmigs" is 57-Across]
• The corresponding answer is VALIANT, which is an anagram of LATVIAN
• CROATIAN is clued as [Language in which "kabanica" is 10-Down]
• The corresponding answer is RAINCOAT which is an anagram of CROATIAN

Word of the Day: LOGOS (Prancing horse and golden bull, in the auto industry) —

The logo of the luxury carmaker Ferrari is the Prancing Horse (Italian: Cavallino Rampante, lit. 'little prancing horse'), a prancing black horse on a yellow background. The design was created by Francesco Baracca, an Italian flying ace during World War I, as a symbol to be displayed on his aeroplane; the Baracca family later permitted Enzo Ferrari to use the design.

The world of bullfighting is a key part of Lamborghini's identity. In 1962, Ferruccio Lamborghini visited the Seville ranch of Don Eduardo Miura, a renowned breeder of Spanish fighting bulls. Lamborghini was so impressed by the majestic Miura animals that he decided to adopt a raging bull as the emblem for the automaker he would open shortly.

• • •

Good morning, friends! We have a One Day Late Malaika MWednesday today, or as you may call it, a Malaika MThursday.

I found this puzzle very hard. Actually, I was a huge hater throughout 90% of the solving process. Then, I understood the theme and become less of a hater. (Many such cases.) I've solved a couple puzzles with language-y themes and it is tough because so much of the information is missing. In this case, three of the long answers were clued functionally as [Language] and another three of the long answered were clued as [Please translate this non-English term]. That makes it super hard to break into the puzzle. I kept checking my entries by looking at a crossing answer, seeing that the crossing answer was a theme clue and going "UGHHHHH!" 

Of course-- that's the puzzle!! That's the point of a puzzle... you "puzzle out" what's going on. I often chastise new solvers who think of a crossword as a series of 78 trivia questions that they can either directly fill in, or must skip and give up on. And yet here I am, complaining for sort of the same reason. This was not a high school language test where the puzzle is seeing if I know how to translate the Croatian word "kabanica." This is a game with wordplay where I have to figure out the anagram trick by doing a lot of cross-referencing with entries that have easier clues. And boy oh boy when I figured it out, I audibly breathed a sigh of relief. I find it very exhausting to write scathing reviews of puzzles on here (though I have done it before!!) and I am glad that this was challenging in a way that fell into place and became satisfying. Sort of the perfect Thursday theme.

Speaking of RAINCOAT, do you guys know where I can buy a beautiful yellow raincoat so that I look like Coraline

I wish the grid had a little more flow, or connectivity, to it. In this case, I clocked the theme, filled out all the theme answers, and then still had that top-right corner nearly blank. It felt like solving a mini puzzle that was independent from the rest of the experience. All three sections along the top felt quite segmented from the rest of the puzzle. But I understand that grids with mirror symmetry are a little constrained to lay out. 

I'm curious what other language anagrams didn't make the cut for this puzzle! It seems like something that could have worked great as a Sunday-sized puzzle.

Bullets:

• [The 1987 film "Spaceballs," e.g.] for FARCE — Oof, I did not like this clue. I had "spoof" for soooo long.
• [Like many mustaches in film] for FALSE — Is this true? I figured actors just.... grew mustaches. Would have made more sense for plays, not films. Although it says "many" not "most" so that could mean anything.
• [Museum's entrance and exit?] for EMS — This is referring to how the letter M begins and ends the word "museum." I hate clues like this, but alas, I myself sometimes write them.
  

xoxo Malaika

Now that I'm done reviewing the puzzle, I'm going to talk a little bit about the clue [Woman's name invented by Jonathan Swift] for VANESSA. You can skip this part if you like.

I have heard ~two people comment that the NYT puzzle will rarely clue an entry that is a woman's name by simply mentioning a real, famous woman. (Alternatives would include using a noun (like "dawn" as a noun rather than a person), using wordplay ("Name that anagrams to xyz"), or describing the woman via her relationship to a man.) This is not a trend that has stood out to me while broadly solving (which is not to say it does or doesn't exist, just that I haven't noticed!), but I did notice it with this clue, and it's feedback that I think about when I write my own puzzles.

I typically write easy clues. For proper nouns (like Vanessa), I usually to pick the most famous person that I know with that name, and then reference their most famous work. (Lots of subjectivity here, of course! And a big flaw here is that it can lead to repetitive clues.) If I want to make the clue even easier, I'll mention other people in the work as well. For Vanessa, my immediate thought would be:

• Easy clue: [Actress Hudgens of High School Musical]
• Even easier clue: [Actress Hudgens who starred alongside Zac Efron in High School Musical]

After hearing the feedback I mentioned above, I wondered if I should make an effort to clue women's names independently of the men that they have worked with. Ultimately, it is not something that I decided to prioritize, but it is something that I like to have in my brain while I am writing clues. I like to think about people's feedback while I am working, even if I don't take that feedback as a hard-and-fast rule. I think it makes me a more detail-oriented constructor.

What clue would you have written for VANESSA? What feedback would you like for me to keep in my brain while I am constructing?

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Elvis Costello hit featured in "Notting Hill" / THU 7-17-25 / Search engine giant based in China / Pioneering puzzle-laden game / Characters in "There Will Be Blood" / Region known for its silk and tea / Words often appearing after a number and a hyphen

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: MATRYOSHKA DOLLS (7D: Compact wooden figures ... and a hint to 5-, 11-, 22- and 25-Down) — clues for the theme answers resemble MATRYOSHKA DOLLS (also known as "nesting dolls"); theme answers are familiar phrases that you assemble using three nested clues/answers:

Theme answers:

• CULINARY ARTS (5D: (Stops (false (not any) witness) filming)) [NARY inside LIAR inside CUTS]
• DOMAIN NAMES (11D: (Bucks' (lady's (roadside stopover) title) mates)) [INN inside MAAM inside DOES]
• TIME MACHINES (22D: (Baseball (German (physicist Ernst) possessive) rarities)) [MACH inside MEIN inside TIES]
• PEER REVIEWS (25D: (Church (Buffalo's (minister, informally) waters) seats)) [REV inside ERIE inside PEWS]

Word of the Day: "SHE" (38A: Elvis Costello hit featured in "Notting Hill") —

"She" is a song written by Charles Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer and released as a single sung by Aznavour in 1974. The song was written in English as a theme tune for the British TV series Seven Faces of Woman.

Aznavour also recorded it in French, German, Italian and Spanish, under the titles "Tous les visages de l'amour" (English: All the Faces of Love), "Sie" (English: She) "Lei" (English: She) and "Es" (English: [She] is), respectively. He also recorded the song in a more uptempo French version with different lyrics, simply titled "Elle" (English: She).

The song peaked at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart and stayed there for four weeks; it was certified silver for shipments exceeding 300,000 units. It also reached number 1 in the Irish Charts, spending one week at the top. It was less popular outside the UK (where Seven Faces of Woman did not air); in France, the song narrowly missed the top 40, and in the United States, it failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and charted on the lower end of the easy listening charts.

Elvis Costello recorded a cover version of the song in 1999. This version, produced by Trevor Jones, was featured over the opening and final sequences of the film Notting Hill and charted throughout Europe. (wikipedia) (my emph.)

[peaked at 19 in the UK ... all those "dashes" are countries (incl. the US) where it didn't chart at all]

• • •

The hardest part of this puzzle was spelling MATRYOSHKA. In my head, the word sounds like "matruschka" (ma-TROO-shka), so the middle of the grid was something of an adventure, but otherwise, this theme presented almost no problems. It was clear right away, with the first themer I encountered (5D), what was going on. I had the "C-L" part, could see that the outer answer was going to be CUTS, put the "TS" at the end, and then used a couple more crosses to put the whole thing together. After that, I never looked at a "nesting" clue beyond the outer layer. That is, I'd get the front end from crosses, I'd read the clue, I'd put the back end in from there, and then, with whatever crosses I had in place, I'd just eyeball it and write in a word. I like to get a bunch of crosses in place before I ever look at a longer clue, generally, and today, that worked well. The beginning and end of the answer, plus whatever I had in the middle from crosses, just gave me the answer easily. The concept here is clever, but for me, the fun was over fast, and the revealer was exceedingly anticlimactic. I could see they were nesting—that was obvious from the clues themselves. MATRYOSHKA DOLLS is the appropriate metaphor, but as a solver, it felt redundant. It "revealed" nothing. Gave me a "hint" to nothing. It was explaining something to me that I could already see clearly. So the puzzle didn't have the zing it might. And like I said, I didn't even need the "inner" clues of the themers.  Execution seems well done (no idea how hard it is to find answers that break into nestable parts like this). The perfect symmetry on the nested answers is impressive, and it extends to the cluing (theme clues are all composed of two-word clues, where one word is in the front half of the clue and the other in the back half). So it's architecturally interesting, but a bit of a dud to solve. Anti-climactic, for sure.

But back to the middle of the grid—the spelling of MATRYOSHKA. I need to take issue with one of the crosses, specifically, with "SHE," specifically with "SHE" as clued (38A: Elvis Costello hit featured in "Notting Hill"). If you have never heard of this "hit," you are forgiven. I forgot it existed, and I have seen Elvis Costello in concert ... [counts on fingers ... runs out of fingers on one hand ...] seven? Yeah, seven times, I think. 1. St Paul; 2. Ommegang Brewery (near Cooperstown, NY); 3. Turning Stone Casino (the worst; central NY); 4. Bethel Woods (NY); 5. Ithaca; 6. Syracuse; 7. Ann Arbor ... yep, seven. I own countless EC records. So when I say I could not hum "SHE" for you right now if you paid me, perhaps you'll have some idea of how much "SHE" is not a "hit." OK, I'm listening to it right now, and it's definitely familiar, so he has probably played it at least once in concert, but ... "hit???" Elvis Costello has had precisely two (2) top-forty "hits" in this country in his entire (nearly 50-year) career: "Everyday I Write the Book" (#36, 1983) and "Veronica" (#19, 1989). He has a bunch of songs that feel like hits ("Alison" "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" etc.), but never actually were, by measurable standards (he made a big point about this on stage during the Syracuse concert). I think "SHE" has a lot of plays on Spotify, maybe? 1.5 million "views" on YouTube for the video (below). I guess that's something. But no, it is not a "hit" and never was. Maybe the least "hit" of any song that has ever been described as a "hit" by the NYTXW. I know of precisely one song called "SHE," and that's the beautiful Gram Parsons song, which I first heard in a cover by Chrissie Hynde (featuring Emmylou Harris). But the Elvis Costello "SHE"? No idea. Just a head-shakingly strange clue. 

I have never heard of BAIDU, but I'm guessing a lot of Chinese people have? (14A: Search engine giant based in China). Not my idea of a great answer (more ****ing tech names to memorize), but I guess if you're desperate, why not use it? On the other hand ... look how easy it is to do that corner up in more familiar (and utterly techless) fashion:

If you think the BAIDU version is better, that's fine, but we have Very different tastes. Aside from BAIDU, and "SHE" (as clued), there wasn't much that caused trouble today. I knew Jamie TARTT, but I imagine most non-"Lasso" watchers would have no idea what that character's name is, so if that eastern area of the puzzle was a challenge, I understand (36D: Jamie ___, "Ted Lasso" character). Looks like the crosses are pretty fair on TARTT, though, and nothing else in the puzzle (beyond what I've already mentioned) seems terribly taxing.

Bullets:

• 23A: Subject of evaluation by a college panel, informally (APP) — I had "AP-" and still managed to get this answer wrong at first (I thought it was APS, as in "AP tests")
• 30A: Characters in "There Will Be Blood" (OILMEN) — the OIL part was easy, but I wrote in ... OILERS (that's more of a hockey team)
• 65A: Pioneering puzzle-laden game (MYST) — a game I never played, but one I know well because it is four letters long and has unusual "Y" placement and so shows up in crossword grids from time to time.
• 23D: Region known for its silk and tea (ASSAM) — it's ASSAM Week here at the NYTXW! (see yesterday's puzzle). Crosswordese from way back. Sometimes you gotta refresh people's memory of the oldies. How else are newer solvers gonna learn? ASSAM was huge in the '70s (with a peak of nine (9) appearances in 1973). After falling out of favor in the late aughts / early '10s (only four (4) appearances total between '05 and '10), ASSAM appears to be making something of a comeback (five (5) appearances just last year).
• 35D: Words often appearing after a number and a hyphen (IN-ONE) — the hardest clue for me to wrap my head around today. Words ... following a number ... what? But I guess people say "two-in-one" or "three-in-one" to describe ... things that have multiple purposes? The phrase ALL-IN-ONE is way (way) more familiar to me.
• 46D: Withdraw one's testimony (RECANT) — I love this word. Why??? It's so ordinary. But it was the last thing I wrote in in the SW and I had this feeling of "oh, that's nice. That makes the corner nice." I don't always understand my emotional responses to words, and I certainly don't understand this one, but I'm smitten with RECANT today, who can say why? Shall I withdraw this testimony? Shall I RECANT? I shan't. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Maybe. Thou art probably pretty sweaty, if you live in the NE like I do. 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Unlikely fliers, in a saying / SUN 6-1-25 / Hawaiian song of farewell / Regional divisions in Russia / Fundamental building block of DNA / Nonspeaking character in "Frozen" / Two-version marketing experiments / Vice follower / Substance adapted to lab use by Fanny Hesse in 1881 / Aid-de-camp?

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Making Arrangements" — clues and answers are technically reversed—that is, the clues are actually answer to cryptic-style anagram clues, which are what you enter in the grid:

Theme answers:

• GENETICALLY ENGINEERED (23A: LEGAL NICETY — an anagram of "genetically," i.e., the letters of "genetically" ... "engineered" (to be in a different order))
• CHANGE OF HEART (39A: EARTH — an anagram of "heart," i.e., a "change of" the letters in "heart")
• MIXED BLESSING (55A: GLIBNESS — an anagram of "blessing," i.e., the letters in "blessing," ... mixed (up))
• TWISTED SISTER (83A: RESIST — an anagram of "sister," i.e. the letters in "sister" ... twisted)
• SWITCHED GEARS (99A: RAGES — an anagram of "gears," i.e., the letters of "gears" ... switched (around))
• TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER (117A: ROYAL PERMIT — an anagram of "temporarily," i.e., "temporarily" ... out of order)

Word of the Day: ADENINE (95D: Fundamental building block of DNA) —

Adenine (/ˈædɪniːn/, /ˈædɪnɪn/) (symbol A or Ade) is a purine nucleotide base that is found in DNA, RNA, and ATP. Usually a white crystalline substance. The shape of adenine is complementary and pairs to either thymine in DNA or uracil in RNA. In cells adenine, as an independent molecule, is rare. It is almost always covalently bound to become a part of a larger biomolecule.

Adenine has a central role in cellular respiration. It is part of adenosine triphosphate which provides the energy that drives and supports most activities in living cells, such as protein synthesis, chemical synthesis, muscle contraction, and nerve impulse propagation. In respiration it also participates as part of the cofactors nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, flavin adenine dinucleotide, and Coenzyme A. (wikipedia)

• • •

Remedial cryptic stuff. I do cryptic crosswords every day. Lately, I much prefer them to standard US-style crossword puzzles, possibly because I have to solve standard US-style crossword puzzles every dang day and my puzzling brain just needs to operate on a different level sometimes. Anyway, anagrams are the cheapest / easiest form of cryptic clue type, so much so that some outlets actually set limits on how many clues in any given puzzle can have anagrams as their cryptic element. Every time I read a cryptic clue, I'm looking out for anagram indicators, and let me tell you, if I've learned anything from solving cryptics, it's that anything can be an anagram indicator. OK maybe not anything, but ... for example, "Barbecue" was an anagram indicator in a cryptic puzzle I solved earlier this evening (shout out to Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto over there at Out of Left Field cryptics, love your work!). The clue started [Barbecue pit ...] and part of solving it involved anagramming "pit"—me: "'Barbecue' is an anagram indicator!?!?!" Yes. Because the first rule of cryptics is: (almost) Anything can be an anagram indicator. My point is, I'm anagramming all day every day, so this puzzle was like a sad half-baked easy cryptic-adjacent exercise for me. The theme was so easy that I actually no-looked not one but two of the themers. Once I had a bunch of crosses, it was just a matter of looking at the letter pattern and trying to find a familiar phrase where one of the words seemed to have an anagram indicator in it (i.e. "mixed," "twisted," etc.). Easy to get the entire phrase from there. So I never saw [GLIBNESS] and I never saw [RESIST]—didn't need to. The themer set is nice, in that the answers in the grid are all solid standalone phrases. TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER is the SPLASHYest of them all, and properly situated in the "big finale" position. But most of this was just a ho-hum shrug to me. You can write these kinds of clues all day long, honestly. [SABER] = DANCING BEARS. [SHORES] = DANCING HORSES. [VILER] = CHOPPED LIVER. [LICENSE] = AWKWARD SILENCE. [FOREST] = BANANAS FOSTER. Like that. On and on. 

As for the non-thematic elements of this puzzle ... fine. No real complaints. I had an error, though, and I want everyone out there who made the same mistake to fess up, please, so I don't feel like such an idiot. I had no idea what ADENINE was, so I really Really needed those crosses to come through for me, and ... mostly, they did. Except ... I hesitated at TSA v. NSA (109A: Surveillance org.). In the end, NSA just seemed like the better guess, if only because the "N" seemed to work better in ADENINE. Only ... I didn't have it as ADENINE. I had it as ADININE. Why? Because I heard the Hawaiian song in my head, and that last word sounds like "OI," so that's what I wrote: "ALOHA OI" (104A: Hawaiian song of farewell). Aaaargh, I should've known better. I've seen "ALOHA OE" in puzzles before. But no. I went with the sound in my head. Oy! So, yeah, total fail there. Bummer. I actually think it's an objectively bad cross, one that any sane constructor would try like hell to avoid, but I'm still mad at myself for botching "ALOHA OE."

The only other part of this puzzle that gave me any kind of pushback was the NNE, mainly because of TENT PEG (11D: Aid-de-camp?) and ASIDE FROM (13D: Excluding), both of which I had trouble parsing. Oh, and I wrote in IVAN instead of SVEN, that wasn't good (10D: Nonspeaking character in "Frozen"). Still haven't seen Frozen and am not likely to. I know there's an ELSA and an OLAF. I forgot about SVEN. The cluing in that section also gets pretty vague. [Place] is a very hard clue for STEAD if you don't have any letters in place. See also [Bakery treat] for DANISH. There are so many bakery treats! Even if you limit yourself to six-letter bakery treats. CRONUT! MUFFIN! COOKIE! So I was slow through there. Tough stuff. Nothing lethal, just mildly thorny. Rest of the puzzle: a cinch.

Bullet points:

• 1A: Warm shade of brown (PECAN) — Look, I know that anything can be a color (go look at paint swatches some time), but PECAN? I've never seen PECAN used that way. Again, I do not doubt that that word has been attributed to some shade of brown at some time. I'm just saying it's a mildly ridiculous way to clue PECAN, foisted on us by somebody's idea of clever clue juxtaposition—the clue for IVORY (right beneath PECAN) has the same clue phrasing (19A: Warm shade of white). Works waaaaaay better for IVORY than for PECAN. Not sure why we need identiclues here. There's no real wit or cleverness, and one of the clues feels forced.
• 29A: Example of industry in Proverbs 6:6-9 (ANT) — I got this easily enough, but really thought the story of the ant as a hard worker came from Aesop ("The Ant and the Grasshopper"). Ah, looks like Proverbs might've influenced the moralizing that usually attended retellings of the Aesop story.

The story has been used to teach the virtues of hard work and the perils of improvidence. Some versions state a moral at the end along the lines of "An idle soul shall suffer hunger", "Work today to eat tomorrow", and "July is follow'd by December". In La Fontaine's Fables no final judgment is made, although it has been argued that the author is there making sly fun of his own notoriously improvident ways. But the point of view in most retellings of the fable is supportive of the ant, a point of view influenced by the commendation in the biblical Book of Proverbs, which mentions the ant twice. The first proverb admonishes, "Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest" (6.6–8). Later, in a parallel saying of Agur, the insects figure among the 'four things that are little upon the earth but they are exceeding wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer.' (30.24–25)

• 31A: Polish language (EDIT) — So not "from Poland"; put "Polish" at the beginning of a clue, where the first word is always capitalized, and bam: ambiguity! 
• 88A: European capital through which the Akerselva flows (OSLO) — big weekend for Norway in the crossword. Yesterday we learned about how much coastline Norway has (depending on how you measure, a potentially ridiculous amount) and today ... well, I learned a river. How have I never heard of a river that flows through a major European city!? Realizing now that my knowledge of geography is exceedingly warped by crosswords. On my mental map of Europe, the EBRO and the ODER and the NEVA are massive (though I can't precisely place Any of them), whereas less grid-friendly rivers may as well not exist. And I doubt there are many rivers less grid-friendly than AKERSELVA.
• 1D: Unlikely fliers, in a saying (PIGS) — needed many crosses to get this one. The "saying" is "When pigs fly!" An expression meaning "that'll never happen." Do people still say this? I feel like "lipstick on a pig" has overtaken "When pigs fly!" on the Top Ten list of pig sayings. Not sure what the other sayings are. "Pig in a poke"? "In a pig's eye!" (what the hell did that ever mean?) (the same thing as "when pigs fly!," I know, but why its eye!?). 

• 32D: Fantasy role-playing game, for short (D AND D) — so, D&D (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons), with the "&" written out. It's an ampersandwich! (other examples include BANDB, RANDR, etc.)
• 48D: Regional divisions in Russia (OBLASTS) — pretty sure I learned this word from crosswords, back in the day. I just realized that I associate / conflate this word with "exclave," for reasons I do not understand at all. They are not the same.
• 53D: Members of a priestly caste of ancient Persia (MAGI) — I did not know the meaning of MAGI was as formal as all that. I just thought they were ... three wise guys. Wise men, I mean. ("Wise guys" makes them sound like mobsters.)
• 63D: Two-version marketing experiments (AB TESTS) — ugh. Grim. I do not speak marketing-speak. This answer can go walk into the ocean. Please.
• 118D: Desirable formation for ducks (ROW) — "in a metaphor," sure. In real life ... how do you know? Did you ask the ducks? Did a duck write this clue? (did it!?). Seems like ducks might not always want to be in a row. Maybe there are more optimal formations, depending on context. 

Happy June, everyone. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a group of solvers are asking the NYTXW to knock off the references to the Harry Potter books, given their author's virulent and hateful attitudes toward trans people, as well as her active funding of anti-trans orgs. You can see and/or sign the petition here.

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