Secondary social media accounts, informally / MON 5-5-25 / Purple "superfood" / ___ de Lempicka, Art Deco painter / Unwelcome sound in a crowded subway car / China's most-grown crop / Furniture item that's usually next to a drill / Sports figure informally called a "ribbie" / Religious pillars / Pre-A.D., in dating / Had but didn't divulge, as information

Constructor: Eric Rolfing

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: "WE GO WAY BACK" (59A: "I've known them forever!" ... or what 17-, 28- and 45-Across can collectively claim?) — things that go (way) back:

Theme answers:

• TIME MACHINE (17A: The DeLorean in "Back to the Future," e.g.)
• DENTIST'S CHAIR (28A: Furniture item that's usually next to a drill)
• CREDIT HISTORY (45A: Information for a loan officer)

Word of the Day: TAMARA de Lempicka (49A: ___ de Lempicka, Art Deco painter) —

[Young Lady with Gloves, 1927]

Tamara Łempicka (pronounced [taˈmara wɛmˈpit͡ska] ^ⓘ; 16 June 1894 – 18 March 1980), known outside Poland as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.

Born in Warsaw, records have long asserted her birthname was Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska, though documents have uncovered her true name as Tamara Rosa Hurwitz. She briefly moved to Saint Petersburg where she married Tadeusz Łempicki, a prominent Polish lawyer, then travelled to Paris. She studied painting with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres. She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris between the wars. In 1928, she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, divorcing Tadeusz Łempicki that same year. After the death of Kuffner's wife in 1933, Łempicka married Kuffner in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as "The Baroness with a Brush".

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States and she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still lifes and, in the 1960s, some abstract paintings. Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco. She moved to Mexico in 1974, where she died in 1980. At her request, her ashes were scattered over the Popocatépetl volcano. (wikipedia)

• • •

Lots of crosswordese in here, but the theme is pretty cute—nice revealer, nice themer set, very Monday-appropriate. I thought ALTS / SLR / LAILA / OLE / OSHA / ORE / OHARE / ACAI and on and on and on was going to ANNOY me more than it actually did. One of the beautiful things about solving Downs-only is that the challenge of the whole enterprise kind of distracts you from the quality of the short fill. Plus, you don't even see half of it (well, half the clues, anyway). So there's quite a lot of short yuck today, but there are also six longer Downs (!) to supplement the theme, which as I said, is pretty good. Clever. So overall, the solving experience was somewhat above average for me. Thinking about how far CREDIT HISTORY "goes back"—actually, thinking about the concept of CREDIT HISTORY at all—is kind of grim (my credit is pretty good, it's just that the whole thing seems like a horrible surveillance scheme). Any kind of "history" goes "way back." That was probably my least favorite of the bunch. But TIME MACHINE and DENTIST'S CHAIR—solid. And radically different from one another (unlike TIME MACHINE and CREDIT HISTORY, which both involve going back in time). Probably best not to think too hard about this one. Three things all go back. The revealer phrase is fresh and colloquial. The grid is ... not great, but fine. Overall, it'll do. Here's a picture of me with the TIME MACHINE DeLorean from Back to the Future, which I weirdly found parked outside a cafe in Bandon, OR one summer during a family vacation, twelve years ago:

[why is my t-shirt so stained?] 

[oh ... maybe this is why my t-shirt is stained]

There is no necessary reason you should feel THIRST while walking in the desert, any more than you might feel thirst walking down a city street (unless you were woefully unprepared for walking in the desert, I guess). And ACS are not "must-haves" during heat waves—they are nice, though. Mostly I hate the feeling of artificially cold air, but there are always a handful of days during the summer months, where sleep is virtually impossible without turning on the window unit in our house. But back to the puzzle. "Ribbie" is a reasonable approximation of how you pronounce it, but since I've only ever heard it spoken, it looks ridiculous written out. "Ribbies" is just the sound of someone treating RBIs like a true acronym (i.e. saying it as if it were a word). When I search "ribbies" I get "Girls Hair Accessories." And I guess a sneeze ("ACHOO!") is an "unwelcome sound" in a crowded subway car, but jeez, people sneeze, relax. Lots of sounds I'd find much more "unwelcome" on the subway than "ACHOO!" I'll just let you imagine what those are. 

Not much trouble today with the Downs-only solve. Blanked for a bit on ALTS (1D: Secondary social media accounts, informally), even though I have one or two of them. Biggest error today was NITWIT for NIMROD (3D: Numbskull). I left the last letter of AORTA- blank because you never know how they're gonna do the plural with that one (today, it was the regular old "S" plural, which, let's be honest, is the only reasonable plural for AORTA). The NE and SW were the toughest sections from a Downs-only perspective, as they contain the long Downs, which often don't fall very readily. I didn't get ABRASION initially, and then, when looking at SAT-N, I knew it couldn't be SATIN (because it would've created a double-"I" situation in the Down), so I went with the next thing that occurred to me: SATAN. This meant that I spelled ABRASIAN thusly, which looked very wrong ... and yet I didn't change it. Later, when I finished the puzzle and didn't get the "Congratulations" message, I went over the grid and saw very quickly what went wrong. Changed ABRASIAN to ABRASION (and SATAN to SAT ON) and that was that. 

Bullets:

• 49A: ___ de Lempicka, Art Deco painter (TAMARA) — even with -MARA all filled in, I couldn't confidently infer TAMARA. Probably the best guess in that situation, but ASMARA is the capital of Eritrea, and I figured there might be other possible -MARAs I wasn't thinking of, so I had to wait for the Downs. As for this painter, I wouldn't have known her name straightaway if I'd been reading the Across clues, but her work is very familiar to me now that I look at it. 
• 7D: Govt. org. known for its constructive criticism? (OSHA) — Because the Occupational Safety and Health Association is a regulatory agency that sets safety standards for "construction" sites (I assume), as well as other workplaces. 
• 9D: Religious pillars (TENETS) — TENETS was the first thing I thought of, but I still hesitated here, thinking there might be some term for literal pillars that I was overlooking.

• 52D: Prison outbreak (RIOT) —  As I've said many times, the longer the answer is, the harder it is to get with no letters in place, on average. When you solve Downs-only, you really rely on the short stuff to come through for you. This is especially true in places like the SW corner of today's puzzle, where there are very few short answers for you to get a toehold with, and where you need every toehold you can get. This is to say I assumed that this answer was going to be a gimme, and that I was going to struggle more with the adjacent long Downs. But I couldn't make sense of this clue at first because I assumed it had to do with breaking out of prison—with escaping. I mean, the term "prison break" exists, so my brain assumed [Prison outbreak] was in that same meaning ballpark. This is how I came to write in BUST here (as in "BUST out of prison" (???)). And so, weirdly, it ended up being the long Downs that helped me figure out the short Down, and not vice versa. World upside-down.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]