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NYT 4:35 (Amy) 
[3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
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Kareem Ayas’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 7/4/26 – no. 0704
What the what?? The Friday puzzle worked me over, and the Saturday puzzle played like an easier Friday.
First up: 39A. [Painter ___ Thomas, first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum], ALMA. I love her work! An image search for alma thomas art is delightful, a screen full of her paintings. I’ve seen her work at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (in D.C.) and solved a jigsaw puzzle of her Eclipse.
Fave fill: RAP BATTLE, BACKDRAFT, SOULMATE, CREAM SODA, CHILI PASTE, “LIFE IMITATES ART,” “GOD HELP ME,” SEX ED CLASS. Also appreciated TARANA Burke (a gimme), who devised the #MeToo movement. Could do without the awful VENDEE (it’s in Merriam-Webster, but have you encountered this word in the wild?) and “I DIG.”
New to me: 35D. [One attracted to all gender identities, for short], OMNI. Plausible but I hadn’t seen the term before. Also 20D. [“___ Sancte Spiritus” (medieval Latin hymn)], VENI. We get ACU clued as a puncture prefix; why not VENI? I am not up on my medieval hymns.
Here’s an interview with Kareem that you might like. He’s a playwright and an English teacher, and he’s Lebanese and Syrian. Paging Huda!
Four stars from me.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
Agree Amy, it’s like the Friday and Saturday NYT were switched this week.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
This was definitely easier than Friday. It wasn’t bad, but I’ve liked some of Kareem’s other grids more than this one. In particular the TARANA/SCHEMA cross was a genuine natick for me. I wasn’t familiar with that name, and 24A could very easily have been SCHEME. (I also wasn’t familiar with OCEANARIA but that’s just a knowledge gap.)