Celestial phenomena observed at perigees / WED 6-11-25 / Grammy-nominated poet Nikki ___ / Solomonic figures / Chang or Eng Bunker, notably / Sounds heard during a cuteness overload / One of four featured on the Yale Nature Walk / The World Map is the largest one to date, with 11,695 pieces

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: MISSISSIPPI River (18D: Natural dividing line on a U.S. map, as suggested by this puzzle's circled letters) — almost all the states that the MISSISSIPPI runs through can be found on either side of MISSISSIPPI in the grid (in the form of state codes, located inside the pairs of circled squares)

Theme answers:

• SIAMESE TWIN (17A: Chang or Eng Bunker, notably)
• MOTOR SKILLS (27A: Throwing a ball and grasping a pencil, e.g.)
• STAR WITNESS (45A: Provider of crucial testimony)
• PLAGIARISMS (59A: Copyright wrongs)

Word of the Day: Nikki GIOVANNI (32A: Grammy-nominated poet Nikki ___) —

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. (June 7, 1943 – December 9, 2024) was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator. One of the world's best-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.

Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution". During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. [...]

Giovanni received numerous awards and held 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She was also given the key to more than two dozen cities. Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. She had a South American bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.

• • •

Uh, you missed a state. Which is just one of several things that makes this theme not work well at all. Pairs of circled letters just don't seem that exciting to start with, and these pairs force some fairly awkward answers, like a singular SIAMESE TWIN and (much stranger) a plural PLAGIARISMS. "Be right back, gonna go do some PLAGIARISMS." That is not a word that wants to be in the plural at all. But the themers have to match in length, so SIAMESE TWIN comes in short and PLAGIARISMS comes in long, all so the theme can "work." So thematic constraints lead to geographic absurdities (the complete elimination of MN because it doesn't have another state to "pair" with it) as well as theme answer absurdities (one twin, two PLAGIARISMS). But then again, the theme isn't constrained enough, in that the states are So Far Apart from each other. Famously, notably, visibly (see map above), the MISSISSIPPI runs through (or alongside) all the states in question, but in the grid, only two of the ten states are actually found alongside the MISSISSIPPI. Most of them have somehow drifted away from the river, and some of them ... I mean, my god, Wisconsin 's up around where Maine should be, and Louisiana is over in southern California somewhere. Just ridiculous physical placement. Come on. Do the thing or don't do the thing. Get MN in there, get those states closer to the damn river, or scrap the whole enterprise.

And for the second day in a row, the fill in the puzzle was startlingly weak. After encountering STU and EKED in quick succession, before I'd even really gotten started, I stopped and let out a sigh, took a deep breath, and braced myself for what was (likely) to come, which is to say, an avalanche of subpar fill. And sure enough, it came. SES ... is there anything worse than SES? (7D: French possessive). Yes, sure, sometimes you're desperate and you need a French possessive, but that's an answer I'd just eliminate from my wordlist so I never had to see it again. Don't even let the software suggest it. And that's just the beginning today. IDS crossing IMS, ELIE alongside SSNS, ILE and ALVA and AER and ASPS and AWS IPAS EPSOM DEL TTOP TERRE ... and a few more repeaters I don't care to list right now. If you had maybe half this much gunk, OK, every puzzle makes compromises here and there. But this grid was primarily compromises. This is what happens when you build a grid with so many 3s 4s and 5s, and then don't take the time to really polish your grid. Again, the thematic constraints are probably partially to blame, but that just takes me back to my first point, which is why do this theme at all if you can't nail it? The mid-range fill could've livened things up a bit, but it's hard to get excited by stuff like LAB SITE and TRESTLE and SEEPED. I guess SUPERMOONS is gonna be exciting to some (I don't really know what those are and wrote in SUPERNOVAE) (3D: Celestial phenomena observed at perigees). I enjoyed seeing Nikki GIOVANNI (as clued). The clue for LEGO SET has me intrigued (30D: The World Map is the largest one to date, with 11,695 pieces). I actually think ON FIRE is pretty nice, as 6-letter answers go. But overall, the fill on this one was really disappointing. Objectively below average, overwhelmingly stale. 

It was easy, though, so I doubt many solvers are going to be terribly bothered by its shortcomings. I don't remember struggling anywhere with this one. Oh, except for the SUPERNOVAE error, which wasn't too hard to dig my way out of. That [I, for one] clue (49D) has been used a ton of times, for a variety of answers ranging from ROMAN NUMERAL to PRONOUN to HALOGEN (where the "I" stands for Iodine). The clue first appeared in 1999, where, like today, it was used for VOWEL. Anyway, I hesitated there a little and let crosses help me out. But otherwise, I'm struggling to see struggle points. 


Bullets:

• 41A: National park that's home to the Pretty Rocks Landslide (DENALI) — I did not know this. Apparently the landslide is ongoing and has (since 2021) made the sole road through DENALI National Park impassable. I was startled to find that the National Park Service still has language up on its website for Pretty Rock Landslide that acknowledges the role of climate change in accelerated erosion. There's even a big subheading on the site that reads: "Climate Change as Causal Agent." I'd've expected this administration to have scrubbed such language the way they scrubbed pictures of Black people, including war heroes, from Pentagon websites. Frankly, I'm semi-surprised they haven't literally taken the letters "DEI" out of DENALI ("NAL!") but looks like the president has already simply changed the name of the mountain back to Mount White Guy Who Never Set Foot in Alaska. At any rate, there's one change to DENALI that only this grid can achieve, which is to relocate it to the northern border of ARkansas.
• 62A: Sounds heard during a cuteness overload (AWS) — What is a "cuteness overload?" I assume it involves multiple people, because it's hard to imagine one person saying "AW" repeatedly, no matter how cute the child / kitten / puppy in question.
• 58A: One of four featured on the Yale Nature Walk (ELM) — no crossword would be complete without a Yale reference being shoehorned in somewhere.
• 2D: Sticking point for a gardener? (STAKE) — you stick a STAKE in the ground primarily for plant support, I think (my wife is the gardener, not me). I wanted STAVE here, but that's for barrel-making (cooping? coopering? yes, coopering) not gardening.

[ON FIRE]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Nonalcoholic mixed drink / MON 3-13-23 / Creatures that helped make Cinderella's dress / Country that's home to the Inca Trail

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium (as a Downs-only solve)

THEME: MOCKTAIL (62A: Nonalcoholic mixed drink ... or a hint to this synonyms found at the ends of 16-, 24-, 37- and 51-Across) — last words (or "tails") of theme answers are synonyms for "mock":

"Mock" "tail"  answers:

• PRIME RIB (16A: Quality beef cut)
• MOVE THE NEEDLE (24A: Have a noticeable impact, so to speak)
• WHIZ KID (37A: Young phenom)
• TAKEN FOR A RIDE (51A: Bamboozled)

Word of the Day: KEIRA Knightley (53D: Actress Knightley) —

Keira Christina Righton OBE (/ˈkɪərə ˈnaɪtli/;  née Knightley, born 26 March 1985) is an English actress. Known for her work in both independent films and blockbusters, particularly period dramas, she has received several accolades, including nominations for two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2018, she was appointed an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to drama and charity. [...] For her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in the period romance Pride & Prejudice (2005), Knightley was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She starred in a number of more period pieces, playing a complex love interest in Atonement (2007), tastemaker Georgiana Cavendish in The Duchess (2008), and the titular socialite in Anna Karenina (2012). She forayed into contemporary dramas, appearing as an aspiring musician in Begin Again (2013) and a medical student in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). Knightley returned to historical films playing Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game (2014), earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and starred as the eponymous writer in Colette (2018). (wikipedia)

• • •

Did you know TAGALONGS and THIN MINTS are both Girl Scout cookies and both 9 letters and both start with "T"! True story! (Briefly tragic story, for me, but only briefly). It was funny putting the revealer together—well, what turned out to be the revealer (I wasn't so sure if that's what it was when I was trying to piece it together). I solved Downs-only, and really wanted that word to be MOCKTAIL based on what I had in place: the "M" the "T" the "I" and "L" ... and probably the "K" but you never can tell with KEA/LOA—the eponymous kealoa*. So I wrote in MOCKTAIL but because I'd guessed IAMS at 57A (the clue for which I was not allowed to look at), I ended up with abutting "A"s in 33D: Longest keys on keyboards, which obviously had to be wrong, but instead of taking out the "A" in IAMS I took out most *all* of MOCKTAIL. Sigh. I kept thinking about a piano keyboard, and thought "well ... all the white keys are the same length so ... what do you call those?" And there's only *one* space bar on a computer keyboard, so the clue just wasn't registering correctly with me. Annnnnyway, once it was all sorted out and the puzzle was over, I looked at MOCKTAIL, then looked at the longer Across answers, saw the whole "mock" "tail" thing going on, and thought "huh, OK, yeah, that works." Those words *do* mean "mock" and they *do* come at the "tail" end of their respective answers, so you can't say that the theme isn't as advertised. It does the thing it says it does. Hard to be mad at a puzzle like that.

The grid feels very black square-heavy and (consequently) super-choppy through the NW and SE. There are double cheater squares (?!) (above the "B" in RIB and below the "M" in MOCK). "Cheater squares" are black squares that don't add to the word count—they just make the grid easier to fill. Those double cheaters make the grid look weird and kind of amateurish. This is what happens when you arrange your themers a certain way, namely this way, namely with the "B" in PRIMERIB and the "H" in MOVETHENEEDLE in the same column, such that they pretty much have to be part of the same answer. You kinda gotta put black squares over that "B" 'cause good luck finding anything that will fit a -B-H or a --B-H pattern. Honestly, simply making MOVETHENEEDLE and TAKENFORARIDE switch places wouldn't have helped much, since you'd've been in the same position, just with "F" instead of "H"—no -B-F or --B-F answers either (unless you want to go with DAB OF, which hopefully you do not). Nah, you gotta really rethink the grid structure *or* just do what they did here and go with the double cheaters. No one but me is gonna care, so why not? Make it easy on yourself. 

Not being able to get SPACEBARS was definitely the biggest hang-up I had on the Downs-only front, though I couldn't get SCENTED either (impossible to know what the first letter was since MUS- at 42A could've ended in so many things). But the most surprising hang-up in retrospect was NORI (26D: "Me neither"), which I had as NOPE, and then NOT I. This meant I kept doubting OZS, which seemed the only plausible answer for 31D: Parts of lbs., but I just couldn't square it with the crosses, since I kept getting either OEP or OET depending on which (wrong) answer I went with. Finally NORI occurred to me. Really would've appreciated a sushi clue there, for differentiation and clarity purposes. But whatever, I got there, eventually. Had TAKES FOR A RIDE before TAKEN etc. but had enough foresight to see that it might be a different verb tense. And that was that. The fill feels a little subpar today, but the theme works fine, and that's all I really ask of these early-week puzzles—a theme that works and fill somewhere north of garbage. Mission accomplished. Gotta run. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

**kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

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Jaguar spot, for example / WED 7-6-22 / Worker with books, for short / Big hot dog?

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: HARD!! (37:30!!!!!!!)

Word of the Day: Sonia BRAGA —

She is known in the English-speaking world for her Golden Globe Award–nominated performances in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Moon over Parador (1988). She also received a BAFTA Award nomination in 1981 for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (first released in 1976). For the 1994 television film The Burning Season, she was nominated for an Emmy Award and a third Golden Globe Award. Her other television and film credits include The Cosby Show (1986), Sex and the City (2001), American Family (2002), Alias (2005), Aquarius (2016), Bacurau (2019), and Fatima (2020). In 2020, The New York Times ranked her #24 in its list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.

• • •

Hi it's Malaika, here for a Malaika MWednesday. How has your evening been? During my evening I purchased cocktails and the profits went towards funding women's healthcare. After my third cocktail I bought this shirt and after my fourth cocktail, I solved this puzzle and wrote this post. So like, that's where we're at. (Solving music was Confessions Part II from here like truly a dozen times in a row.) (Do y'all like ((heh)) how much I'm using the word "like"? It's because a commenter from last time made fun of me for it. So I figured I'd, like, lean in.)

THEME: Rabbits and.... hats? — There are types of rabbits (BRER, ROGER, and PETER) crossing types of hats (BEANIE, DERBY, and BOATER). I got the rabbit part, but the hat part was totally lost on me! I had to look it up to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

THIS PUZZLE WAS SO HARD!!! Wednesdays usually take me about 11mins and I "Check Puzzle" zero or one times. This one was well past half an hour and I "Check Puzzle"d nine times, and even then finished with four boxes where I had zero idea what letters went in. (This is wild to me. I mean, I'm not a fantastic solver, but I'm pretty solid!! I have solved many NYT themeless puzzles in around ten minutes without checking-- yes, even after four cocktails!)

There are lots of things that make a puzzle hard! I like to try to pinpoint them because I have found that a bad puzzle is often hard, but a hard puzzle is not necessarily bad. That makes sense, right? Like, a puzzle can be hard because the constructor is sloppy with fill, or messes up their clue grammar... or a puzzle can be hard simply because their clues are asking knowledge of me (that is; me, the solver) that I do not have. This puzzle felt like the latter, and I am very excited to read the experiences of the commenters.

Mountains of things I did not know. I do not know Sonia BRAGA, or the term KEN meaning "knowledge," or "fuddy-duddy" as a phrase, or Santa ROSA, California, or what "portage" means. Or the shampoo brand PRELL (I experimented with a rebus and "L'oreal" for a bit) or that a YEW is an evergreen or what on earth the Jaguar clue was talking about. (Please explain?? CARAD??? What?) CPA is a word that I have learned from crossword puzzles and literally never seen out-and-about* and ETAS was ambiguous with ETDS. [Kind of vote] for PROXY and [Person with talent] (with no question mark!) for [AGENT] are vague and mis-direct-y in a way that I expect for a Saturday, not a Wednesday. THE UN was incredibly hard to parse, as was ATTRACTIVE since for a while I had [A??? ACTIVE] and was expecting a two-word phrase. (Jeff looooooves to talk about how long answers should be more than one word.)

The last thing that made this hard for me was the revealer, due to both the clue and the software. The clue was worded in a non-obvious way. [Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, e.g. ...which happens three times in this puzzle] was the clue for MAGIC TRICK, and made me think that I should be searching for that specific term to come into play. Instead, I was searching for "rabbits" and "hats" which were communicated plainly via the clue itself. Is this a little odd? It seemed off for me (weirdly, it felt "too easy" which is hilarious given how much I struggled with this puzzle), in terms of how revealers usually work. Meanwhile, the software did not highlight any of the rabbits or any of the hats. This led me to believe there was a rebus situation which I had totally missed, especially with entries like BRAGA and CARAD that were foreign to me.

Bullets:

• [Small-arms runner of years past?] for T-REX — I begrudgingly admit that this clue is absolutely ingenious. (I am begrudging because it did not click until well after I had entered the letters-- I had ARES for a long time.)
• [Pot seeds?] for ANTES — Same as above-- very good, very hard.
• [Term of address in colonial India] for SAHIB — I am (half) Indian but don't know as much as I should. I knew this entry from the novel "A Little Princess," where a white American girl is referred to with this title by an Indian immigrant.
• Here's a superrrrr petty bullet for you! I submit puzzles to the Times, and one of my rejections said that it was a no because they don't like corners that are only "connected" to the rest of the puzzle by a single square. So now whenever I see a puzzle that has this (here it's the 50A/48D crossing) I am like "HMMM!!!"

xoxo Malaika

*I contrast this with words I have learned from crosswords, and then have seen out-and-about, like ATOLL or RCA or ARIA (outside of the Pretty Little Liars-verse). 

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