miniMeissner

@George Nixon I can't say for sure if it's typical for Mondays, but using Roman numerals for play and musical act numbers is rather common both in general, and in crosswords. I know I've seen it often enough in NYT puzzles that my immediate instinct was to fill in ACT_ and check the crossing down to figure out if it was ACTI or ACTV (although in hindsight, perhaps I should've guessed dreaming a dream was likely to be an early occurrence?)

@Brett I'm with you on this one. The theme was delightful to me, and I needed no help before I had every theme answer. It was the rest of the fill that became frustrating, I needed lookups in the same spots you critique and also had AVer for too long.

@Weak The "fallacy" clue isn't describing the term "slippery slope", it's referring to the "slippery slope fallacy", which is a logical fallacy whereby one argues that a starting condition will necessarily lead to a result, which will then necessarily lead to a further downstream result, etc., i.e. A leads to B, B leads to C, and C leads to D, therefore A leads to D. This line of argument can be fine, but it is a fallacy when each step is not actually a guaranteed, likely, or even plausible outcome.

@George On the one hand, I did get thrown for a loop when I (embarrassingly) misspelled "partical" and had no idea what a "lye socket" was. But on the other hand, a substantial amount of clever wordplay deals in homophones, so I think the aural element of some of the theme clues hardly defies convention or expectation. Maybe I'm biased as a spoken-word poet, but I found the execution here to be delightful.

@Seward Parker I concur! Well, partly; this one was significantly harder to me than most Sundays (50% longer than my average 😅), but it was a very enjoyable solve for most of the way, and the theme clues were especially delightful!

@D Crossword constructors, and the NYT, are not obligated to refrain from even mentioning or alluding to JKR or Harry Potter. The inclusion of an entry in reference to Harry Potter is not not the same thing as endorsement of its author's politics, and more importantly, does not materially contribute to her transphobic efforts. She does not materially benefit from it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the entry, and it causes no harm to anyone.

@97Bravo That's funny to me, because YETI was the only one I could get without any crossing letters, and then I spent a few minutes using it to put the rest of the box together. Congrats on the tenacious solve!

@Asher B. But it would defeat the challenge of the theme and the purpose of the revealer to use "With 22 Across..." etc. "WRAP/PARTY" doesn't reveal anything about the theme at all if the clues explicitly tell us already. I've never seen the dash clue used in a puzzle that didn't give ample information to work out the theme.

@Confused Kiwi That one caught me out because I was a huge fan of Roosterteeth's RWBY for some time. You'd think of the gallons of the stuff I ate as a kid, I would've looked at the name on the container once or twice!

@Jeff P. It might be very dependent on one's age and how they engage with the internet, but ASMR is well and commonly known to many, many people. Just because it's not something you've been long familiar with doesn't make it obscure.

@Mean Old Lady The clueing for the center square is all expressively different meanings for each word/phrase. An EXIT is a "way to go" out of a building, a TAXI is a car that provides a service, a STEM is one of several constituent sections of a flute, and so on.

@Chris Pommer Why should they? "Panini" is an entirely valid singular that does not need to be corrected—in English. Loanwords are rarely borrowed with all associated rules from the donor language, which leads many borrowed nouns to have different singular and/or plural forms than in the donor language. "Panini" is hardly unique in this regard. And since the clue is in English, it follows that the common English singular form is a correct answer.

@Nancy While the others go down the rabbit hole on the ATHEISM clue, I'd like to share that ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and refers to the tingling sensations from the scalp to the neck and down the spine that are triggered by various stimuli, such as soft touch and oddly satisfying sounds. Common cultural use of the term most often refers specifically to audio stimulus that triggers the response, as opposed to the response itself (e.g. "ASMR videos" of soft speaking or crinkling paper). Perhaps familiarity with it is strongly correlated with age (I'm on the younger side of 28), but I actually found that cloud and answer to be one of the quickest and most plainly obvious of this puzzle. To each their own strengths!

@Pat-a-pon "Bus" refers to clearing tables of dishes at a restaurant, specifically. "Busboy" or "busser" is a common name for that job role in food service. And I'm pretty sure BASSI isn't plural, it's "Bass I" meaning "Bass 1". This one annoys me, because when splitting a bass part in choral music arrangement, the 1st Bass (or Bass 1) part takes the higher line, while the 2nd Bass (or Bass 2) part takes the lower line. So "How low can they go?" really should've been used to clue BASSII rather than BASSI.