1987 biopic set in China / THU 3-2-23 / Palindromic staple in Indian cuisine / Bon indie band with a platinum debut album of 2008 / Long-running animated TV role that hasn't had a speaking appearance since 2017

Constructor: Malaika Handa

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: STEM CELLS (60A: Subject of some medical research ... or a description of this puzzle's theme?) — a rebus puzzle in which the letter string "STEM" appears in three different squares (or "CELLS"):

Theme answers:

• SOLAR SYSTEMS / TASTEMAKERS (17A: Sites of many revolutions / 7D: Influencer, as with fashion)
• GHOST EMOJI / LOSE ONE'S TEMPER (38A: Image in some "Happy Halloween!" texts / 10D: Boil over)
• IT'S TEMPTING / THE LAST EMPEROR (45A: "Ooh ... I so want to!" / 24D: 1987 biopic set in China)

Word of the Day: UPTALK (11D: Speech that ends sentences with rising tones) —

: speech in which each clause, sentence, etc., ends like a question with a rising inflection (merriam-webster.com)

Starting in America with the Valley Girls of the 1980s …, uptalk became common among young women across the country by the 1990s.—Douglas Quenqua,  New York Times,  27 Feb. 2012 (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

LOL she did not tell me she had today's puzzle. And I think this is her NYTXW debut. Her name isn't in my database. She writes crosswords for So Many outlets, but somehow she's never had one in the Times? Weird. Anyway, congrats to Mali, who blogs for me every first Wednesday of the month (including yesterday). My first thought on getting the rebus here (which happened early, and easily), was "not another STEM rebus!" I had this strong feeling that I'd Just Seen a STEM rebus, either in the NYTXW or somewhere else, where SCI and TECH and ENG (!?) and MATH were each rebused into their own little cells. So I thought this was just going to be a lesser (or at least less complex) version of that. But that just made the revealer all-the-more surprising—was expecting one kind of STEM, got something Completely Different. It's a nifty find—noticing that the phrase STEM CELLS is a perfect rebus revealer phrase. What are crossword boxes but a bunch of CELLS, in the spreadsheet sense? So just stick STEM in a few of them, and voila! There's nothing especially tricky going on here—it's rather vanilla as rebus puzzles go—but I am a big fan of vanilla. You don't need a ton of whistles and bells and sprinkles and Oreo chunks in your ice cream to make it good. A perfectly executed revealer goes a long way, and STEM CELLS is a real stick-the-landing revealer. 

It also helps that the STEM-containing answers are so colorful. Literally, THE LAST EMPEROR is a very colorful movie, and GHOST EMOJI, omg, that answer alone was worth the price of admission for me. A great answer that is *also* a themer. Is this what "Necessity is the mother of Invention" means? I am not generally a fan of answers with ONE'S in them, as I've seen ONE(S) too many ONE'S-containing grid-spanning answers in my long solving career (most notably, A LOT ON ONE'S PLATE), and ONE'S often feels awkward, or like YOUR should be there instead, but LOSE ONE'S TEMPER gets a pass because it's a themer. Rebus rules! Also, it just doesn't sound that weird. Anyway, the inventiveness of GHOST EMOJI makes any small infelicities, imagined or actual, a lot harder to care about.

[These were all in my first five years of blogging ...
three times in 2011 alone! ... you can see how I lost my mind]

The fill is also pretty solid on this one. It's pretty texty (BRB, the clue on ETA (50A: "about when will u b here?")), and has a youngish vibe overall. Perfect for UPTALKing TAYLOR fans. But then there's also this (ironically?) quaint / old-fashioned thing going on with MA'AM and "HI HO!" Also, as youngish-feeling puzzles go, this one seems very wide-ranging and inclusive. There's not a ton of names or terms that only an extremely online under-30 person is going to know. There's not a ton of names, period. It's a very accessible puzzle overall, no matter your skill level / age. I think it will play on the easy side, as rebus puzzles go, and is not apt to be generationally divisive in any meaningful way.

Not many trouble spots today. No idea who EMMA Raducanu is, but who cares, the crosses were a cinch. I wrote "TEMPTING!" in at 45A: "Ooh ... I so want to!" and I wonder if anyone else did that. It seemed like a perfectly good answer, and that can be so dangerous. Luckily, I'd already discovered the rebus gimmick, so I found my error quickly enough, but if I *hadn't*, oof, TEMPTING would've seemed pretty solid given how many of those crosses work. I wrote TBA in for the ETA clue, which is extremely weird ... I think my brain thought it meant "time of arrival?" or something like that. Again, not a big deal, crosses took care of it. The answer that actually held me up the most was PLUCK, because I got the "U" and then the "K" and assumed that the answer for 9A: Gumption was SPUNK! "You got a lot of SPUNK, kid ... a lot of MOXIE!" PLUCK and SPUNK was not a kealoa* I ever saw coming. And yet, again, the surrounding fill was so easy that I only got delayed, not properly stuck. I like RIDERS over BUSLANE. I like the ambiguous clue on ASIDE (42A: Line at a theater, maybe). I know lots of solvers aren't big rebus fans, but I hope you never GAVE UP and found some way to enjoy this ultimately straightforward and conceptually clever Thursday puzzle. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]