Crossword Nation Week 382: NETWORKING

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Time: 13:56

Liz Gorski changed the name of this puzzle from "Network" in order to ditch the association to the Lumet film and instead went with the innocuous, for her, "Networking." However, for me, that word just makes me think of one of the sillier elements of my job, at which I'm pretty sure I'm simultaneously brilliant and atrocious. I suppose if the people networking want to talk about crosswords or ultimate (i.e. not about work), then I'm GRAND at networking! Maybe they'd like to hear a YARN about the New Mutants. Hopefully, they're just a NERD like me.

CHANNEL FINDERS gives an alternate title for the theme and, sure enough, if you look at the end of the longer across clues, you'll find PERSONAL HISTORY, SLY AS A FOX, SURFIN USA, and ONCE IN A LIFETIME. There's something charmingly quaint about these older channels that reminds me of my cable box from the 90s.

So, I got really stuck in the absolutely brutal west central portion of the grid. ATHOL Fugard, author of "Tsotsi," was particularly tough since it's not really an easily inferable name. I also didn't know RONDOS as musical term. Finally, the wild card was LEN Berman (for me, could have been Ken, Ben, Ren...) so I spent a lot of time messing with that square. Obviously, I didn't know YALES to be locks either. 

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