@Emma That was brutal; had to come here to look at the answer key after re-checking every clue.
@Emma Raise your hand if you were struggling with TReE LEAVES. Truly flummoxed.
@Emma Yep. Spent 15 minutes flyspecking before throwing in the towel.
@Emma Yup! TReE LEAVES x CEREL represent! Loved this puzzle.
CUREL crossing TRUELEAVES got me.
@Joe P same! I am doing this from Greenville, SC as well!
@Joe P That was the one letter that I had wrong when I finished filling the grid, but it didn't take very long in the flyspecking to fix it, since I'd been suspicious of the E that I'd put there all along.
@Joe P Same. Thank you for rescuing me with this comment!
Loved the Grace Paley reference. Not sure anyone has ever used the term "beer bar."
@Eric I enjoyed the puzzle quite a bit overall, but this one answer stuck in my craw also.
@Eric Places that sell Budweiser would probably not use the term BEER BAR, but craft breweries often do.
[Plant parts that develop as a seedling grows] The first leaves of a plant seedling are called cotyledons, and the true leaves come a little later, once the seedling has developed roots or some vitality, that's when the true leaves come in. What I love about the clue is that it can be used for both kinds of leaves. At least as far as xword info knows, cotyledons has never appeared here as clue or fill. I have been waiting a long time for cotyledons to appear in a puzzle here, so when I saw that clue, my heart started beating with joy. At last, cotyledons will have their day in the sun! But no. "True leaves." Don't they know cotyledons are the more deserving of that name? True leaves are mere pretenders to the throne! How much longer must I endure this curel torture?
@john ezra I went for cotyledons too at first. But rather than develop as the seedling grows, aren’t they actually consumed as the first source of energy for the developing seedling?
@john ezra Spelling Bee doesn’t like DICOT and MONOCOT, either.
@john ezra I enjoy saying "cotyledons" more than most other words.
@john ezra: and which are the cutest cotyledons? I’d argue for the brassicas.
Where my TREELEAVES/CEREL fam at?
@Stylus Happenstance Your fam's at pretty much all of the preceding comments.
@Stylus Happenstance It took a half hour to “finish” the puzzle, and another half hour to fix treeleaves/cerel
@Stylus Happenstance Hi, I'm here for the Tree Leaves / Cerel reunion
(In honor of 31-D, which made me groan out loud in the best possible way.) We both lie, looking at fill And we hope that it's right Although we both stare at the puzzle There are tough clues inside Was it something I said Or a challenging grid Did the words not come out right Though I tried hard to solve clues Though I tried But I guess that's why they say Each across has a down Just like every grid has its fun Just like every dad joke has a bad, bad pun Each across has a down (With great power ballad comes great responsibility.)
@Mike Didn't you mean response ability?
@Mike In a game of liar's poker, the person who is true leaves empty-handed.
I was bested by this puzz, fair and square. Like others, the TRUELEAVES/CUREL cross was ultimately my mistake, but I was uncertain enough about GRACE PALEY that I had to look it up. Turns out I had that part of the puzzle correct. I actually knew CUREL but didn't know it was Japanese. Even so I don't think I would have gotten it. On the bright side (that is the very first time I've ever written that), I did suss out HAIR METAL and ISM and a few others that took me a while. Still, I couldn't seal the deal. There is no joy in Mudville.
@Francis Me too, but I’m going to pretend otherwise….
Riffing on 47D [Material theorized as a possible cause of ancient Rome's decline, given its widespread use]... It's not out of the question that lead (Pb) is responsible for the current decline of the Western world. We know this happens with leaded paint, but I think it's much worse than that. Consider: tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive for the early decades of automobiles, right up until it was finally phased out in the 70s and 80s. Burning it doesn't destroy the lead--it spreads it into the environment. And it's still there. So, for most of baby boomers' lives the air was literally strewn with lead from car exhaust. Lead is a lifetime poison--once it's in the body, it doesn't leave. It accumulates. The Pb blood level may decrease a bit when one is not actively being poisoned, but Pb trapped in bones will continue to leach into the blood stream. What we are seeing in the world today might be, at least in part, due to widespread mental degradation due to the leaded gasolines. We could very easily be getting stupider, but at a slow rate we don't really notice it. Or, this could be totally wrong. The point I'm making is that we just don't know. Humans can and have found ways to poison themselves with their technology (arsenic in cosmetics, radium in watch-making, etc). And 1) we are, for a period, incapable of determining it's happening, and 2) we can't easily ameliorate the problem, because doing so hurts profits. Then again, I'm just a tree hugger.
@Francis The current decline of the western world has one more letter.
@Francis I saw this movie years ago, about the women who worked in the watch factory: "Radium Girls." <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6317180" target="_blank">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6317180</a>/
@Francis Just read today, there is also all the mercury that was used (burned) during the Gold Rush. Still in the environment.
@Francis I’ve read this also- lots of lead in the air and some in paint that we baby boomers inhaled. Plus lots of cigarette smoke from our elders and betters even if we didn’t smoke. A perfect storm.
@Francis The late, brilliant blogger Kevin Drum (fka Calpundit) was firmly convinced that the long secular decline in crime since the 1970s was attributable principally to our decision to cease poisoning our children with lead. (He was also an early predictor of how quickly AI would emerge and how disruptive it would be.)
@Francis -- "So, for most of baby boomers' lives the air was literally strewn with lead from car exhaust." I said that I thought I might go back to bed after wrestling with this puzzle. Now I KNOW I will!
Nah too many look-ups to really enjoy today's crossword. Yes, I realise it's a me problem that I don't necessarily know who wrote what, or the details of Passover dishes. I'm in the wrong part of the world so don't know where to look out from to see Ellis Island. I have a technical job that did not involve a liberal arts education. And, yes, it's a Saturday puzzle that's meant to be challenging. There's always tomorrow...
@Ged Nothing to do with where you’re from. This was just a terrible puzzle.
@Ged JERSEY CITY is the most generically named city in New Jersey. So if you get a few crosses, anyone with the knowledge that New York and New Jersey are neighbors might be able to infer the missing letters. Sure, much easier for New Yorkers, but plausibly gettable. (Of course, you’d also have to know where Ellis Island is, too.) Regarding the SEDER PLATE, it’s not a dish in the sense of a prepared entree; it is an actual piece of china. Experienced solvers would know from puzzles, if not real life, that the Seder is the ceremonial Passover meal. The SEDER PLATE is a plate placed in the center of the table with the various foods tasted at the ritual. The BITTER herbs that remind us of alavery in Egypt, the charoset, a wine, chopped apples and nuts mixture that represents the mortar those slaves used, a shank bone symbolizing the Passover aacrifice of old, and various other items. Hope this helps!
@Ged I know nothing about Passover dishes, had no clue about Jersey City, and also have a technical job. None of those gaps made this a hard puzzle. A huge recurring misunderstanding about crossword puzzles is that puzzles are meant to hinge upon *knowing* the trivia. But they’re not! The idea is to force most solvers (the majority who are presumed not to know the less-obvious trivia entries right off the bat) to fill in enough crosses to make good inferences. For instance, in today’s puzzle, I very much doubt any solver immediately got “Seder plate” without any crosses; but the average solver *is* expected to be able to recognize/infer that once a few crosses are in place. And while *some* solvers surely got “Jersey City” with minimal help from crosses, the answer basically fills itself in once you have the leading “JE” and enough of the bottom crossers to infer “CITY”.
I am once again amazed how many commenters have been demanding harder Saturday puzzles, and when we get one like today, how many nitpick at the constructor’s choices to justify the difficulty they experienced when solving it. I got tripped up in the same spot as most others, unhappy with the answer of TReELEAVES, which felt too simplistic for the clue, but unable to think of CUREL, even though I realized in hindsight that I do know that brand. I loved this puzzle because it both threw me some “gimmes” and because much of it challenged me. A great Saturday experience.
@RinF Harder because of misdirection is fine. Harder because of trivia and niche words is not fun to many. Surely you can appreciate the difference?
@RinF But who are the commenters that fall into both of those groups, i.e. have been calling for harder puzzles *and* are complaining about today’s? I haven’t seen any complaints from commenters who are known to bemoan the ease of the current era’s late-week puzzles. And incidentally, speaking as an unrepentant bemoaner: today’s puzzle was a typically easy 2026 Saturday offering (with some great clueing, btw), aside from one very tough square, which cost me 5+ minutes at the end, and gave me a chuckle when “true” finally occurred to me.
@Anonymous This is the closest I've ever come to falling into both groups. It was a rare time I felt frustrated longer than I felt challenged. But I think these experiences make for camaraderie, so for me it's all good. Besides, I much, much prefer a puzzle like today's than one that is over too quickly and easily to put up a fight. The constructors and editors are dedicated human beings, and if they are going to attempt to challenge us, there are going to be moments that frustrate us, perhaps more than they intend. I much prefer that to them playing it safe.
Maybe it was just me but this reminded me of Saturdays of yore. It reinforced several things I keep telling new solvers: take some breaks, jump around, don’t give up, and don’t hold one to every answer you think you are sure of. For example, BITTER and SEDERPLATE should have been slam dunks for me; but I was too bamboozled by dish as a type of food and LIE before ISM (lies are certainly meant to be believed); then I misread 45 across and had FILLEDAGAP. It wasn’t until I said it’s got to be BITTER, and dropped my assumptions, that I finally got that corner. I was never going to get HAIRMETAL and GRACEPALEY on my own, and tried to intuit the poison classification as ending with LIC, which gave me the very sensible idea that the queue clue ended with LINE. So sometimes you just gotta start over. Other things I held on to for far too long were HENS before EWES, CAST party before HOST, RECORDBOOK before RECIPE (which seemed like a lousy place to keep secrets), BOAT___ before BEER___, NIGHTSHIRT before DRESS, AQUA and TEAL before CYAN, so every corner was pulling teeth to me. But as I said you just need to be persistent and have faith that it will come to you. I did at least know CUREL, once I got a few letters, but could see how that spot could be a bit CRUEL. Was surprised by the LOIS gimme at first but then tickled by the dual clue. As an origamist I loved the crane clue. I just thought this was really well clued to flummox us which is what I want on a Saturday! Terrific!
SP, The recipes *are* the family secrets!
@SP ESP before ISM for me: I had the S, it's meant to be believed, and it also is pure crosswordese! That "I" was one of the last squares for me, because the voice in my head said "the herbs are something symbolic, but I'll never remember what", without realizing I knew all along they're BITTER. Holding onto assumptions – especially about my own knowledge gaps – is my forte!
This was a pretty wonderful puzzle - thank you!
So now we're supposed to know Japanese skin care brands as well?
@lioncitysolver That U was the last letter for me, but I shoulda known it earlier. CUREL is widely available in the US (and Europe, I think), but I didn't know it was Japanese. And I did know TRUE LEAVES, but forgot. They are the first leaves to emerge after the seed leaves.
@lioncitysolver This is why for me, look-ups are not a foul. I am just as happy at discovering the answer rather than have it stored somewhere in the cobwebs of my brain, taking up precious space.
@lioncitysolver I use it. Good product. I figure it’s no different than seeding Acer, Kia, Asahi, and Lego in the puzz. Maybe just me.
What really got me stuck here was GRACE PALEY crossing with both LACE and POPEYE -- A bit young for Popeye, and I've always heard it as "lay into someone", not lace. That was enough to get me doubting the whole southwest corner!
I found that extremely difficult.
Coming out from behind my rock (or palm frond?) to express this gardener’s delight over the appearance of TRUE LEAVES in this splendid Saturday puzzle. To a gardening nerd, planting seeds is such a satisfying process: from the emergence of the first anonymous sprout to the plant showing its true self. Imagine commonly used herbs, for example; when planted adjacent to one another, many look exactly the same at first but then the familiar feathery leaves of dill and scalloped edges of cilantro appear. And thinking of this now, with the first hard frost imminent, reminds me that all the fun will start again next spring. Well I did self-identify as a nerd …;-)
@Kate thankful for you and other gardeners/farmers in the comments for helping me fix my error in the puzzle and learn more about how plants grow!
@Kate Far from being a horticulturist, but the current homeowner of a historic garden and avid gardener, I felt a bit sheepish in not getting "true leaves" right away. Somehow just assumed it would be a harder Greek/Latin word in the nature of "cotyledon" (which I am familiar with). That was foolish of me to assume I didn't know the answer. Go with what you know!
I loved the Poison Classification clue. I did not love the 'true leaves' / 'curel' cross. I've never heard of Curel, and Cerel sounded fine. I've never heard of True Leaves, and Tree Leaves sounded fine. Needed to resort to trying out letters at various places until I got the jingle. No complaint, as both are fair, and the process was amusingly humbling. Hope it's a while before I need to do that again, though.
@CB Was with you until, “both are fair.”
@CB, That was my last letter as well. I had heard of Curel but had forgotten that I knew true leaves - so the inevitable tree leaves and cerel required fly-specking. (For me, I conflated Cera-Ve with Curel to justify my Cerel attempt)
The most unenjoyable Saturday puzzle in a long time.
Poison classification: HAIRMETAL. Clue of the year!!!
Nice to see SEDERPLATE and PLO contained within the same arena. Now, if only life could imitate crossword art.
This was a weird experience for me. The downs in the NE were Monday-level so that part of the puzzle felt like one huge gimme. The NW was very doable, too. But then there was the rest of the puzzle. I had almost nothing in the middle, SW and SE sections (LEAD and ETON were my only gimmes there). I started at the mostly empty grid for 20 minutes and I made some desperate guesses, but they all turned out to be wrong in the end. FISHsAucE crossed well with CITE, as did "wealthy" with "aqua". Without Google there was no way out of the mess I created. As is often the case, I simply didn't know the names and things that featured there. I've never heard of CASH APP, CUREL, Elizabeth Bishop and her "One ART", Discover, "The Duck Variations", JERSEY CITY, and GRACE PALEY - I ended up having to look up all that to finish. For SEDER PLATE I relied on crosses, only - I've learned of SEDER from these puzzles, but I expected a dish to have a less ... generic (?) name. Not knowing what that was, I didn't get BITTER without loads of crosses, either. As crosses revealed the entry, I found TRUE LEAVES very weird, too. It's not a term I've seen before and I can't recall its Polish equivalent.
Oh, I didn't know "LACE into", either. How does that make sense? I know of POPEYE, of course - I remember it mostly because I hated its style as a kid - but as clued today it was a huge mystery. I was never going to solve this puzzle on my own. Language skills are often enough to deal with late-week crosswords, but when a grid relies on cultural immersion, I'm destined to fail (which is fine, of course).
@Andrzej I had never heard of "The Duck Variations" or Grace Paley either, but I am now intrigued to know more about both of them (something I love about NYT crosswords). I can help you with Elizabeth Bishop's poem however - it's one of my favourites: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art" target="_blank">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art</a> I hope you enjoy it!
@Andrzej I had terrible with a lot of the same things today. It was a tough puzzle. I ended up looking up proper names eventually as I was well and truly stuck. Never in my life have I heard LACE into.
Today was almost CRUEL
@Petrol Truly, and let's leave it at that.
@Petrol Not almost. It was. Certainly more fun for the constructor than the solver. I expect Sundays to be difficult but this? SLOG
OMG! The column photo! I was at that Taylor Swift concert!
@Sam Lyons Hi stranger! I wanted to thank you for your recommendation of the John E. Woods translation of The Magic Mountain. When I finished it, I reread the introduction. That made me want to revisit parts of the novel and I think I read at least a third of it again. I was surprised by how well the language flowed and how funny it is in parts. Thanks again.
Now how do the grid whisperers explain why "Poison classification" didn't get a question mark but yesterday's "Rocky openings" did? I suspect they can't. I believe it's a matter of wifty week's-end whimsy. Fun half hour for me today. Thanks, August. Do good crosswords remind anyone else of fine food? So much time preparing and devoured before you know it.
@Matt Well, 31D is literal, but I sure didn't get it without some crosses. If the clue had been KISS classification, I would have been a Tuesday clue. So my take was that it was a very clever veiled capital, and those don't get ? in a Saturday puzzle. There's my whispered opinion.
I liked the "Poison" clue's answer the best. This puzzle was one I had to go away from for a while to re-think it. Upper left corner was the tough one today for me.
@Charlotte K Northwest bloc took me down repeatedly. Everything west of CRANES and north of THEUS required extensive reconstructive surgery. Sigh. Well done, August. 《Teeth gnashing》
Tricky, I didn't know MAMET and I had hONEYED for rich. I also ran into TReELEAVES/CeREL (tree leaves doesn't really make sense, but I was tired, and didn't know Curel).
@I In *our* defense, tree leaves makes a lot of sense, but TRUE LEAVES makes more sense. And I think a lot of people learned today that CUREL is Japanese.
Okay THAT was a glorious feast of reconsidered answers and head-smacking word play! Perfect accompaniment to a long transit ride, loved it - thank you!! (And yep, I was one of the CeREL peeps 😄)
Great puzzle, CUREL/TRUE LEAVES beat me. After about half an hour of flyspecking and running the alphabet multiple times on MAMET and GRACE PALEY. I threw in the towel and checked puzzle, and I don't feel like I would've ever gotten it. I guess Curel sounds kind of familiar, but true leaves will need a quick lookup. I had BeTTER/eSp/HAIRpETAL for quite a while, falling for the poison misdirect, imagining "hairpetal" goes with terms like LD50 in exterminator lingo.
This was both really hard and enjoyable at the same time. The Poison clue was my favorite. Took way longer than it should've to figure it out but I had a big smile when it clicked.
That was a toughie. If I hadn't been able to drop ALISON BRIE in to the northeast corner, I'd have really been stuck. As it was, I was trying to figure out what FISH WASTE was and why people were putting it in food (so not the WTO you're saying...).
Second time this week I've been emued. I actually did math for this post and I don't want it to go to waste, so here's the executive summary. This puzzle was a paradigm of freshness. More than three-quarters (.76) of the grid’s white squares belong to answers that have appeared either never- or once-before! Three quarters! And the answer set is clean! And the answers are interesting! My outing was filled with giddy gets, and the cluing had wordplay and deft misdirection that gave my brain the work it loves. I felt like I earned this one, and that’s the hallmark of a proper Saturday. You sure can craft a wicked and terrific themeless, August. Please, please keep at it. Thank you for this!
@Lewis That is an astonishing figure!! Thanks for doing the math – and for persevering. NYT should have you on its white list. If ever there was a candidate for always getting a pass (a post published, shall we say) for consistently meaningful, clean and joyous contributions, it is you!
Wowsers. What a great puzzle. I’m sure it’s not literally true, but it felt like every single clue had a double meaning… A really nice workout for the brain, and the answers seemed fresh as well. To me, this is what a Saturday puzzle is all about, really, really hard, but doable. The answers didn’t seem too specialized either, like about baseball or pop culture etc., where one group of solvers would be at a disadvantage. Thank you NYT.
Ok...am I alone here? LACE into....I thought it was lays into. Like you're really laying into them with the harsh comments! I say laid into meaning berating in the past tense too. Lace???? Really???
Amanda, Really! <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lace_into" target="_blank">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lace_into</a>
@Amanda I don't remember ever hearing it either.
@Amanda "lay into" per merriam-webster has been around since 1838 (at least), and wiktionary has a quote for "lace into" from 1963. Never heard of the latter, but I got it from the crosses, so whatever.
@Amanda “Lace into” is common enough in books. Don’t hear it much in everyday English.
@Amanda you are definitely not alone. I don't usually read the comments (because it can take a LONG time!), but I did today just to see if I was the only one!
it would be S'Wonderful if there were no answers referring to religion - the same words get used over and over. we all know the 'culprits' nothing against the religion just the use of these same terms ad nauseum. religious diets and eating habits lead to war and suffering. after all, that's what fuels the fire!! Happy Saturday y'all
@acjones It’s not religion that causes conflict. It’s the belief that your religion is the only one true religion that causes conflict.
@acjones Gold, oil, and territory also lead to war and suffering.
@acjones You may want to find out a bit more about Passover before accusing its food of having anything to do with inciting wars. Ignorance of Judaism or any other faith tradition (I’m not Jewish but have been to Seders) is not a valid reason for assigning such extreme views to it.
@acjones Shabbat Shalom to you too! Seriously I respect your opinion and won’t even call out antisemitism because I remember your rant on Mormons before too, so it’s pretty clear you’re not wild about many religions and probably religious ideology in general. Just remember that the puzzle is not promoting any ideology. Religions exist and have cultural and historic significance so it’s hard not to expect they should be in the fund of human knowledge and fair game. It’s like Biblical references, you don’t have to believe in the Bible to respect its place in a crossword. You may make a fair point about whether this particular reference was too obscure; it’s hard for me to know as a Jewish person. But I would disagree with eradicating any religious references. I don’t get upset about EID, or myriad Latin terms from Catholicism. Eldridge sorry if I bent my rule on moderation today, just felt this was important enough to add my opinion.
I come to the crosswords for the challenge. I got it today!
longing for a Saturday without any product ties or brands... just words and phrases with meaning. this had plenty of goodies mixed with answers unworthy of a Splendid Saturday.
HAIR METAL made me smile, and many of the clues were very satisfying to get. But TRUE LEAVES was a new one for me, so CUREL was never going to happen. As others have said, very cruel!
@Mads When a seed sprouts, it first develops a cotyledon (also called seed leaves) which is two leaves that will never look like the other leaves of the plant. Then it develops TRUELEAVES which all the other leaves will look like. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E8Uya1snYI" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E8Uya1snYI</a>
I thought I'd solved this with one cheat. I cheated on ALISON by typing in "actress BRIE" when I had NBRIE in my grid. It always seems less cheatsy to use what I've already figured out than to type in the info that the clue provides, like Trudy and Mad Men. But I still had to get past TEAL for the turquoise relative. Initially needing to choose between TEAL and AQUA, TEAL was "confirmed" by the A and I never questioned it. Who in the world would think of CYAN? Isn't that an entirely different shade of blue? So TEAL screwed up that section of the puzzle. Only when MONEYED finally came in -- you try to make a word meaning "rich" out of MOL???? -- did I finally get CYAN. Whew!!!! Finished!!!! But no such luck. Rex reveals that TREE LEAVES/CEREL is wrong. Which I never in a million years would have known if I hadn't glanced at his writeup. And therefore, after all that hard work, I ended up with a DNF anyway. One of the great blessings of solving on paper is that you don't always know if you have a DNF. I imagine I would have been happier today not knowing. What an incredible amount of work this was. I respect this puzzle like crazy, but I don't necessarily love it. It's not a very nice day out and maybe I'll go back to bed:)
@Nancy For a minute I thought I was getting a message...! I agree heartily about CYAN/turquoise! No quilter would ever make that mistake! What were they thinking there in the puzzle-lab?? Now if you were gardening, you would know that when you start your own (Let's say 'tomatoes') you wait for the seed to germinate, then you have the little shoot with its seed leaves, but you wait until you have at least 2 pairs of TRUE LEAVES (they look different) before you move the plant into a larger pot. Eventually you harden them off and plant them in the garden. Weed and water and await your reward!
An ECIG is not a modern pen, "of a sort", or of any kind. They don't look like pens, they often look more like a USB stick. A pen writes, an electronic cigarette is something you stick in your mouth. A pen has ink, an electronic cigarette has ingestible chemicals.
@Dave K.isn’t an ecig also called a vape pen?
@Dave K. They're often referred to as "vape pens".
@Dave K. Pen can also be a verb and an enclosure, and probably more.
So many toeholds that crumbled underfoot. hens, NIGHTgownS, onsTage/SoloacT, PAINTing, and probably a few others that they inspired. Broke through on the lower left, (having my guess of crossword-regular MAMET succeed was a big help), and slowly worked my way up to complete the grid to my satisfaction. Then flyspecking and alphabet running for that U in 26d. Not quite 50% over average, but no complaints.
So … I am an expert solver who virtually always solves even the hardest Saturdays with no lookups. I don’t often call foul but in this instance I have to do so on CUREL/TRUELEAVES. (I am actually not that worked up about this; I don’t pay attention to streaks, and I do this for fun — and this puzzle was still fun. But I think it’s also worth a mention …) CUREL is undeducible: if you don’t know the brand itself, CeREL is perfectly reasonable. TRUE LEAVES, while an actual term (i.e., not green paint), as I learned from Google, is still a fairly specialized one. To someone who has never heard the phrase, which I imagine is most people who are neither gardeners nor biologists, TReE LEAVES seems equally apt. This is a place where IMO the editors should have stepped in. Instead of the very general [Plant parts that develop as a seedling grows], a fairer clue might have been [Gardening term for plant parts that develop as a seedling grows], which would have indicated a specialized term. An even better clue would have been [Plant parts that develop after cotyledons]. Now, I had no idea before today what a “cotyledon” is (it is a seed leaf that precedes the true leaf). But the clue would have signaled that something was up, and I would have been more careful. With either clue I would have at least paused on TReE LEAVES — not sure I would have gotten it but might have led me to question CeREL or run the alphabet on that square. As it was I was completely mystified.
@Nat K That spot cost me 5 minutes once the grid was filled in. So no disagreement — it’s a brutal crossing if you’ve never heard of “true leaves” and don’t know Curel. But I disagree with your “foul” pronouncement, as IMO the clue for “true leaves” already *does* give you a strong hint that the answer might be a more specialized term than “tree leaves”. And even if that term is totally new to you (as it was to me), I’d argue that it is deducible enough. Also: it’s Saturday :)
Nat K, I'm neither a botanist nor a gardener, and I'm not up on skin care brands, but I do recognize "green paint" when I see it, so I knew it couldn't -- or at least shouldn't -- be TREe LEAVES, and CUREL sounded better than CeREL (and sounded like Purell, with which I trust we are all familiar).
@Nat K I didn't know CUREL at all, but I do know a goodly amount about starting one's seeds for the garden plot, and it's not all that unusual, esoteric, or specialized. Millions of people read the back of the seed packet and voilá! Plus the -s means more than one leaf; it's pairs, so you meant dicot, (shorthand for dicotyledon) --right?
Loved this one. So satisfying when completing the long entries. I didn’t love TRUELEAVES crossing with CUREL, but it was the only cross where I wasn’t sure of both. Figured it out after a few minutes. A nice, crunchy Saturday with only a few proper names. Kudos sir.
@Mark M I had the same problem with 26D as many did, but I knew CUREL. I had no idea it was a Japanese brand, though.
@Mark M I was also not fond of true leaves, mostly because I had tree leaves in there for a bit and was sure it had to be right. But the puzzle creator definitely made up for it with hair metal. I didn’t understand the answer, and admittedly between that and true leaves I was starting to feel critical of it. It wasn’t until I walked away and was doing some chores when it suddenly came clear and I laughed out loud (wife wondered if I was nuts). Great puzzle.
The course of true leaves never did run smooth. But the beautiful thing about a self-directed crossword streak is that even when it technically dies on a tricky crossing, death cannot stop “true leaves” - all it can do is delay it for a while. Nice puzzle.
Two days in a row with entries that recall books I have loved from an early age. Love that! And love that "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" made 53A a gimme for me. So helpful and gratifying after a mostly blank grid through most of the acrosses. I put in PLO right away, only to pull it out for the S in 'sauce', which we all now know was incorrect. Similarly, I had SEDER PLATE, but pulled out the second word before it eventually returned. When you have __MET and don't know the referenced work, it could just as easily be Sidney Lumet as David Mamet, amirite? CASH APP was a gimme, so I knew it wasn't a pub on the cross. Staring at BARS and thus HAIR___A_, the penny dropped. So satisfying!! Also loved a lot of the clues others have mentioned, with [Tie with string] leading the pack. (I had bale at first, from the B. Like baling cardboard, perhaps?) All the PORTS were another gimme, very fun. And yes, teal and aqua before CYAN. It's tough when "turquoise" covers such a wide range of hues! Turquoise also happens to be my birthstone. My (very secular) Jewish grandma kept all her cookery secrets very close to the vest, especially those chocolate treats like my birthday cake. The few she shared are tucked in my RECIPE BOOK! Thanks for all the happy memories, August. Great puzzle, keep 'em coming!
@G Sydney Lumet (with Y) was a film director, not a playwright.
O.M.G. I was one of the TReE leaves casualties. I did eventually get it but would never, ever, had I not been solving online with the forgiving "Amiss" scaffold. Part of the reason it took so long was because I, like others, spent forever in the SW doubting LACE. I ended up verifying spelling for names I was sure of because I was determined not to search on my first attempt spellings for proper nouns I did not know. That used to be one of my favorite "cheats" ("scaffolds"?) but these days I can almost always figure out names I don't know via crosses. So I verified GRACEPALEY and ALISONBRIE, and then started focusing on the CeREL crosses. Was there some other string tie besides BOLO? Anyway, I finished this in about my average time, but that was made up of Easy followed by 15 minutes of brute-force Impossible.
CEREL didn’t look quite right, but it still took me ages to twig to my error, and it sounds like I wasn’t alone. I had already faced a mighty struggle in the top left: I didn’t clock the phrase at 2D for a while, it’s way more common with YET, surely. 4D is not really a thing, PET seemed to make way more sense (when have you ever heard of a CAT-only shelter?). And I didn’t know animals other than doves use cotes. Some very clever cluing elsewhere but those issues ruined it for me and made it a slog.
@deeb "pet shelter" is rarer still; i've only heard "animal shelter".
For all those claiming that CAT SHELTERs do not exist. Oddly enough, this place showed up in a news segment on the local news last week, so it didn't seem at all odd to me that CAT SHELTER showed up in the grid. <a href="https://hartofme.org" target="_blank">https://hartofme.org</a>/