English translation of the Dutch “klompen” / FRI 8-15-25 / Younger Simpson sister / Miso soup base / X, as in Mexico / Glazier’s replacement / Figure on the $10,000 bill / Like the culture depicted in Safiya Sinclair’s best-selling memoir “How to Say Babylon” / Fragrant flower whose name means “gift from “God” / Ticket exchange site since 2000

Pretty hard 1-Across right out of the gate, unless you are an adherent of something called Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager’s book club on the Today show), which seems to have helped make the memoir in question (How to Say Babylon) into a legit bestseller (1A: Like the culture depicted in Safiya Sinclair’s best-selling memoir “How to Say Babylon”). The only way I got to RASTA was by getting the -STA part—at that point, what else could it be. I knew of the connection between “Babylon” and RASTA culture from several mentions of the term in Reggae and Reggae-adjacent songs. It’s also the title of a great movie about the Jamaican music scene in London in the late ’70s. In Rastafarianism, “Babylon” represents “the forces of oppression and exploitation that Africans faced under colonialism and its legacies“

That NW corner was the hardest part, but as you know, this is often true—the hardest part is the place you start, and then once you get momentum, things get easier. I figured out that the [Younger Simpson sister] couldn’t be any of the animated Simpson sisters, and so had to be the younger of the singing Simpsons sisters. Jessica, I remembered (I once flew on a flight she was on, out of Cincinnati or Kentucky somewhere, I forget—a random fact of my life), but her younger sister, even with the “A,” took me a while to remember, and even then I spelled it ASHLEY, leaving me wondering how an EPEY involved “touching” (23A: Touching event?) (frankly, I wanted ORGY there at first). REKEYED before RETYPED. No idea what the context for [Rock alternative] could be until the answer (PAPER) was practically all the way filled in (context: rock-PAPER-scissors). So, struggle struggle … but then the long answers came flying out of that section with no effort at all, and I was off.

The rest of the puzzle proved pretty easy, the hardest answer being the guy on the $10,000 bill. If you’d given me [Salmon P. ___] as part of the clue, I *might* have been able to churn up CHASE, but as it was, nope. In fact, once I got CHASE, I just figured it was the guy who founded CHASE Manhattan bank (now just CHASE). Was that a guy? … holy &^$% it’s the same guy! I mean, no, he didn’t found CHASE National Bank (he’d been dead four years by that point), but the bank was named after him. I feel like I learned Salmon P. CHASE’s name from a fish-themed puzzle of some sort, years back. He was def in a “guys on the money” puzzle back in ’09. And here he is in some kind of fish-pun theme in 1974 (which five-year-old me might have enjoyed if someone had explained it to him)

[Check out the fill in this one! some real head-scratchers! The pre-software days of constructing were Wild]

Good grid, no cringe, a little light on the good stuff, but that good stuff was in fact good, so I can’t complain. This one had a nice flow—no places to really get stuck stuck, except maybe those cul-de-sacs in the NW and SE, which were certainly the hardest for me—I blanked on DASHI (43A: Miso soup base) and needed way too many crosses to see JASMINE in the SE (35D: Fragrant flower whose name means “gift from “God”).

Notes and explanations:

• 7D: “u r freaking hilarious” (LMFAO) — “Laughing my fabulous/fearsome/feathery ass off.” Seems weird that you would abbr. “u” and “r” like that but then write out “freaking hilarious” completely. Not a plausible text. I tried to make OMFG happen here (thanks to that (sexy) “MF”), but as you can probably guess, it wouldn’t fit. 

• 21A: X, as in Mexico (BESO) — the “as” part here is not great (i.e. totally unnecessary). I guess it’s trying to misdirect you and make you think the “X” has something to do with the letter in “Mexico,” as opposed to what “X” actually is here (a symbol for a “kiss,” which is Mexico (i.e. in Spanish) is BESO)
• 40A: Glazier’s replacement (PANE) — a glazier cuts and fits the glass for windows
• 13D: Order in the court? (CASE DISMISSED) — kind of a lifeless “?” clue, since nothing about it is specific to the answer; that is, any “order” might’ve worked (“ALL RISE,” “OVERRULED”). Nothing dismissy about the clue.
• 21D: My word! (BOND) — as I’ve said before, the lack of quotation marks around this clue, coupled with the “!,” means that the answer will not be an equivalent of the clue phrase itself (the apparent exclamation “My Word!”) but something that “my word” literally is …which is “my BOND” (in a common expression)
• 25D: First name in late-night (SETH) — as in Meyers. I go to bed too early for late-night shows, and I gave up “political comedy” shows completely in 2016, but I will admit to watching snippets of his monologues on Insta sometimes (I watched one once and then My Algorithm, being a rather simplistic robot, decided I need to see them at the top of my feed every day) (there are worse thing to be at the top of your feed, I suppose, so thanks, Algy (that’s what I call him))
• 45D: Place to brood (COOP) — “brood” here refers to hens managing their chicks, not you fretting about the CO-OP board won’t let you keep chickens in your apartment.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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