New York Times, Friday, September 4, 2020

Very, very excited to seed this puzzle with the first female congresswoman in US history. JEANNETTE RANKIN is fascinating to read about — she was elected for two separate terms, in 1916 and 1940. As a devout pacifist, she was the only person to vote against the US entry into WWII (knowing the vote would pass anyways). And, for a small part of her life, she lived in my hometown of Spokane. I've spent time off and on for the past year trying to track down any information about her time here, unfortunately to no avail beyond where she worked. If you do happen to know anything, please let me know!

Shout-out to the editing team for cleaning up a few clues, particularly 33-D. Construction-wise, I began by getting the middle to work with CREAM SODA and NOT SO FAST, then the top right/bottom left, and finally the other corners. Always content to break up a triple stack into a double if it makes the fill cleaner — which is what had to be done in the NW/SE.

JEANNETTE RANKIN crossing ROSA PARKS! I didn't know who the former was, but I did enjoy reading up on her — the clue sure enticed me to do so. Two amazing women.

It's not often that so many feature slots are taken up by full names, but IVAN PAVLOV is a fantastic one. He's someone most Friday solvers should have heard of — ring a bell, indeed. Delightful clue!

I'm glad there weren't that many more names in the puzzle. When I added Paul BLART to our word list years ago, I had much internal debate about what score to assign it. Ultimately I decided to leave it at our nominal "probably fine" level, but it was an astoundingly terrible movie. And I'm a Kevin James fan.

Such impeccable technical work, big kudos to Brian for not employing a single dab of crossword glue. Meticulous work in every region. There's no secret to a clean 70-word themeless, it's "just" a matter of hard work, iterating until you get it right. A tiny minority of constructors go to this length, though, most others getting fed up along the way. No "good enough" for Brian!

ELS as letters typed with the right ring finger? That confused me because I thought at first that it meant the letters E, L, and S. Will Shortz must have some incredibly flexible fingers!

Thankfully, some beautiful wordplay clues to offset my confusion/ineptitude. My favorite was for CAT BURGLAR, literally a high-level criminal. Reminded me of the Anne Hathaway Catwoman, prowling up on ledges.

Themelesses featuring names can be divisive. If you're a pagan heathen boor who hadn't heard of JEANNETTE RANKIN, you might not even bother going back to look her up, tossing the puzzle aside, dismissing it as a ho-hum affair. If you know her, though, it might be a standout puzzle for you. No doubt, she had some incredible achievements, in a time when the deck was stacked heavily against her.