John

ENNEAD crossed with TNIA is a natick. Sorry, it just is. Nice puzzle, otherwise.

For a while, I thought the Taylor Swift hit must be OAR SONG -- presumably a sea shanty.

For Jethro Tull fans like me, it’s nice to see AQUALUNG and FLUTE SOLO in the same puzzle. I was stuck for a while with TUNE “for track selection.” I still don’t know what are BATARANGS – but it somehow worked (though I was doubting myself that “hierarchal” is a word – I thought it was always “hierarchical.”)

Loved this puzzle. My only hangup was with "CHILIAGON." I pictured a food truck serving Tex-Max fare: a "chiliwagon." Turns out it's a thousand-sided polygon. Because it is visually indistinguishable from a circle, philosophers like Descartes used it to argue that imagination and pure intellect are distinct.

Just hard enough, I thought. I was stuck for a while wondering what is SASTA -- some celebrity whose last name is Ribbons? Turns out 100% isn't SURE (as in a "sure thing" or a "sure bet"). No, it's PURE.

This is the first time I've given up early. Way too hard! (I've often commented here that certain puzzles are easier than expected -- not this time). Too many clues had MULTIPLE layers of obfuscation. Just one example: "London dunderhead." EITHER challenge us with s non-US slang term, OR trick us with a secondary use of a toponym (place name) -- but not both, please!

16 minutes for a Saturday puzzle! I know that's no big deal for many of you folks, but for me, that's astounding. (I attribute this to the puzzle's construction and clues, not to anything about me.)

I couldn't get PORNSTARS to quite fit for "ones always grinding at their jobs," though it worked well with my early attempts at the crosses.

Isn't this the fourth ATTA in a row? Will the streak continue? We'll find out tomorrow.

My only quibble is with DESE. My teen child taught it to me as DEEZ. For a while, I was stuck with BARE for "what flashers do." I never figured out how SYN could be a "zest for life: Abbr." until you folks noted that "zest" is a synonym for "life." Clever! For "lead follower," I assumed it would be the next element in the periodic table, which I dread (I have a PhD, and yet I managed to never take a chemistry class, ever, not even in high school.)

"Mind repeating that?" for MANTRA - brilliant!

Fun, but a tad easy for a Thursday. Or maybe I just lucked out in that, literally last night, I was reading all about the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia. I wanted to know more, having just finished Colin McEvedy's book "Cities of the Classical World." An hour of Wikipedia rabbit-hole armchair research revealed that grammatical gender in Indo-European languages originally was "animate" and "inanimate" (maintained only in the branch that included Lydian), but then, to make it easier to understand which nouns went with which adjectives in speech, "animate" divided into "masculine" and "feminine," and took a bunch of inanimate nouns along with it.... But I digress. :)

I was so happy to see IAN (as in Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull) for "famous flautist"...until I realized it was PAN. And, what is the largest tech hub in North America? I'm guessing the San Francisco Bay Area. (Interesting that Toronto is the third. That's cool.)

For "noted quintet," I had STONES for a while, until I realized it's SENSES.

I intended to complain that the singular isn't DOLMA, it's DOLMAS (the plural being DOLMADES)...but it turns out that's true only for the Greek word for this dish. In Turkish, Armenian, and probably several other languages, the singular indeed is DOLMA. Live and learn.

Now there, Deb, La Guardia is a LOT nicer than it used to be.

The clue for IN HEAT - "going after the big bucks, say" - made me laugh out loud.

(Elf) hats off to all of you who solved this. I'm pretty good at these things -- I've solved four of the last five Saturdays, and only had to look up one clue in just one of those -- but, after 25 minutes of trying, I knew I'd never come close to completing today's. Really, really hard. (As others have noted, this makes up for several recent too-easy-for-late-in-the-week puzzles).

Wow. A tour de force (and also fun). "Clarence Darrow" crossing with "danced around"? Amazing.

Super easy for a Thursday (for me). I really enjoyed the loop-de-loops -- surely not easy to construct! The only holdup for me (for a few minutes) was thinking "Resolve" was SETTLE...but it's METTLE.

Fun and quite fast, more like a high-quality Wednesday puzzle. I did stall on FLORES, because the common French word for "flowers" is FLEURS. FLORES is basically "floras" -- so this garden features plants from diverse biomes, say. Can a fluent French speaker verify this?

Good one! Just hard enough. Favorite clue: "Service agreement": AMEN

Loved it! Like the Times reviewer, I was impressed at how each word without its "missing" letter was still a (different) word. I agree with the puzzle maker that [Band whose name is a rhyme scheme their lyrics never featured] for ABBA would have been awesome.

I see TESSERACT climbing up the middle "staircase" and then down, balancing the Qs. Probably just a coincidence...or it it? Such a cool word -- a wrinkle in spacetime.

I was so sure "singing duo" was about burning or scorching (not musical vocalizing), since it had a question mark. This held me up for a while. Only just now did I realize that the "burning/scorching" word is spelled "singeing."

Not too hard, not too easy. I, too, found the "ABE" clue clever. The one stumper for me was "SMH." I'd never, ever heard of this until now ("shaking my head"). On the other hand, I got "PDH" ("public display of affection") quickly. Is that acronym still in vogue? Perhaps the Venn diagram of those who are familiar with these phrases shows almost complete mutual exclusivity.

"It may bring out the kid in you" was hilarious! I've never heard the phrase "set to" (for "quarrel"). Is it regional?

Excellent. Friday-level difficulty (for me), and full of great clues. I solved it before I saw the title -- and that's just the one I wanted to mention: "Acrobat's display" had me stuck for a while, until I realized with a groan -- PDF FILE. Hah! My only quibble is that I think of Brian Eno as composing ethereal, mellow, experimental "music for airports," but maybe I'm just not familiar with his rockier output.

"In need of an evening out" is a great clue!

I would have had a Saturday personal best, until I got to the SE quadrant. "Samesies," really? And isn't PCP an illegal drug -- what's that have to do with health insurance?

That was really hard (especially the northwest quadrant)...and then it wasn't! Great puzzle, great clues.

First time in months I had to give up -- just because of one square. I just couldn't figure out what CANBOUNOT meant...because obviously the other word was BALL ("a Southern collective"...you know, belle of the ball and all that.) Nope, that was Y'ALL.

I'm thinking of canceling my subscription, until the Times imposes a NO ETTA JAMES IN THE CROSSWORD PUZZLES rule. I'm kidding...barely.

Great puzzle. For a while I was stuck on SAW LOGS, because in my family it's always been just SAW WOOD. It's been mentioned that, for most New Yawkers, TOCK and TALK have different vowels. But for most US English speakers, especially under about 40 years old, they are the same -- a vowel merger that originated mainly in California, circa 1970 or earlier.

Never before heard of a pu pu platter, nor a "crane" as that mechanical hand that might randomly grab a coin or a toy at an arcade... ...but no matter, this was a wonderful puzzle. I'm the right age to have played Minesweeper, but I don't recall doing so...but the puzzle was well constructed, so I could figure it out anyway. I did play the board game Stratego back in the day. Similar idea - just substitute MINE with BOMB.

St. Denis is not a neighborhood in Paris. It's a suburb of Paris.

ORE is such a common entry, I'm impressed they came up with a new clue for it -- and a clever one, no less ("deposit that might gather interest.")