I loved today's NYT crossword — thought it was especially enjoyable... full of challenging, interesting words...

... but my favorite NYT crossword blogger, Rex Parker, hated it:

Before I was half done, I had exclaimed "what?" or else audibly groaned something like half a dozen times. This thing was stale the second I bit into it (i.e. at TIETACK), and though parts of it are decent, the overall taste was unpleasant, for sure. Fitting that it has ARCHAISM in it, because it felt old and ... old. In a bad way. In the way where ... like in the olden days, when you just had to know random biological trivia or you were ****ed. BRISTLECONE PINE? SHAGBARK? News to me and *real* news to me, respectively. Take your botanical fetish back to the Maleskan era, thank you kindly....

Wait! My favorite thing was bristlecone pine. The clue was: "Tree that's among the oldest known life forms on earth (4,800+ years)." How can that be a mere "fetish"? There's a kind of tree on earth that was alive in 2700 B.C. — the end of the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt, the time of the mythical Yellow Emperor in China and the construction of the Caral metropolis in Peru...

No trace of warfare has been found at Caral: no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies. Shady's findings suggest it was a gentle society, built on commerce and pleasure. In one of the temples, they uncovered 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bones and 37 cornetts of deer and llama bones. One find revealed the remains of a baby, wrapped and buried with a necklace made of stone beads....

I knew bristlecone pine because I had just read the January 20th New Yorker article "The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees/Bristlecone pines have survived various catastrophes over the millennia, and they may survive humanity" by Alex Ross. A great read!

About forty-five hundred years ago, not long after the completion of the Great Pyramid at Giza, a seed of Pinus longaeva, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, landed on a steep slope in what are now known as the White Mountains, in eastern California...

After four or five years, the seedling on the steep slope would have been just a few inches higher, sprouting needles in place of the embryonic shoots. The needles are a deep green, tough, resinous, and closely bunched, in groups of five. On a mature tree, they live for fifty years or more. Decades may have passed before the tree was human height, and decades more before it resembled a conventional pine. Bristlecone saplings grow straight up, with relatively sparse foliage, looking like undernourished Christmas trees. After a few hundred years—by which time the Old Kingdom of Egypt had fallen—it was probably forty or fifty feet in height....

As the millennia go by, bristlecones become contorted and wraithlike. The main stem, or leader, dies back. Entire branches, even the trunk itself, become fossils. At first glance, the tree may look dead. Such is the case of the forty-five-hundred-year-old tree that clings to life near the tourist path that now runs through the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above. All told, the tree is an unprepossessing specimen; most people march past it without giving it a second glance. When I sat by the tree for an hour last July, the only visitor who took any notice of it was a dog named Dougie, who briefly sniffed the trunk and then darted away....

Rex Parker has an aversion to oldness.  The "Maleskan era" refers to the time when Eugene Maleska was the NYT crossword editor, 1977-1993. Maleska was born in 1916, so he was still deciding what a NYT crossword should be when he was 77 years old. There's a fear that young people won't take up crossword solving, because they'll run into clues about things from an era that older solvers actually lived through, making it seem as though the puzzle is constructed for old people. As an older person myself, I can see I sometimes have an advantage, but I don't feel a special warmth when, say, a 60s TV show comes up in the clues. I am, though, embarrassed for the NYT when it strains to look up to date by referencing a rap artist (almost always Dr. Dre, because "DRE" is an easy to cross sequence of letters), computer stuff (ETAIL!), and slang (YOLO!).

It's one thing to fuss over the problem of oldness when you're asking for things that came up during the life of some but not all crossword solvers. But that problem crumbles to nothing when you're talking about truly old things... and all honor and glory to the bristlecone pine.