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Yes, another frustratingly ambiguous week despite the self-congratulatory guff in the editorial.

"Object" can come from either "protest" or "contest", take your pick, so the answer could be Y or N.

Can we have a new editor please? Nimrod should stick to setting.

I agree there is an ambiguity.

I went for protest on the basis that it is listed as a synonym for object in Chambers Crossword Dictionary whereas contest is not.

I suppose if you enter perhaps making a note on your entry may suffice?

dryden,

I would like to politely - not confrontationally - disagree with your last posting.

11A. I can't see how the extra word 'Admit' could be parsed in the answer.
13A. Remove the extra word 'burn' to make sense of the clue.
i.e the American spelling of 'smolder' there (in Salem). This spelling is given in Chambers,
21A. I agree that 'perhaps' did look a little bit like an extra word - but the clue would have read a bit clumsily without it.

Overall, I think there were one or two other clues that seemed to offer an extra word . . . but maybe that was part of the challenge?
Inkys are are always strewn with wild herrings and red geese.
Now, can anyone help with parsing of 7D please?

13A - the clue makes sense as is; burn is not an extra word.

7D: NS (Bridge team - technically NS is a 'pair' not a 'team' in bridge parlance) inside (Q)UEEN

Nelson and buzzb, in a similarly polite and non-confrontational tone, I stand by what I wrote. 11a is a perfectly legitimate clue as it stands, with 'Admit' taken as an imperative, instructing the solver to let TE into SAD, so there's no obvious candidate for an extra word there.
In 13a I did not have 'burn' in mind as the extra word, but 'start'. The definition of smoulder in both Chambers and OED is "to burn slowly;" 'start' doesn't appear anywhere in their definitions, so the definition strikes me as misleading, even inaccurate.
While I agree that 'perhaps' in 21a is probably surface decoration, my general point is that a setter should take care to avoid surface decoration of this kind in puzzles dependent on extra words in clues. If the word can be justified by the wordplay that's fine; some might see 'brought' in 15d as possibly superfluous, but it's easy to see it as part of the container indication, so I have no problem with that.