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Gloomy, as an atmosphere / THU 11-27-25 / Essential biochemical process that releases energy in cells / "Anno Domini" period / Feature of a mountain or fingerprint / Lucky scientist, perhaps / Skin-care product thinner than a moisturizer / Football offense arrangement that resembles an inverted Y shape / Person who's off-base
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Constructor: Alexander Liebeskind
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- WISHBONE FORMATION / ON EDGE (17A: Football offense arrangement that resembles an inverted Y shape / 18D: Anxious)
- FAST WORKER / YEAR OF OUR LORD (29A: Good person to give a time-consuming project, maybe / 9D: "Anno Domini" period)
- EARTH REENTRY / SATURNINE (43A: Process for a descending spacecraft / 24D: Gloomy, as an atmosphere)
Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.In 2019, the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction. [...] Petry's desire to become a professional writer was raised first in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class and commented on it with the words: "I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to." The decision to become a pharmacist was her family's. After graduating in 1929 from Old Saybrook High School, she went to college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years, while also writing short stories. On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, and moved to New York. She worked as a journalist writing articles for newspapers including The Amsterdam News (between 1938 and 1941) and The People's Voice (1941–44), and published short stories in The Crisis, where her first story appeared in 1943, Phylon, and other outlets.
Between 1944 and 1946, Petry studied creative writing at Columbia University and worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. It was during this period that she experienced and understood what the majority of the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life. [...] Her daughter Liz explained to The Washington Post that "her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book (The Street), which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do."
The Street, Petry's first and most popular novel, was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales exceeding one million copies. (wikipedia)
• • •
My software wouldn't accept the grid I have posted above, even though it's technically correct (at least for the Downs). I just discovered I was supposed to enter the circled-square part as letters, not numbers. Ah well. While the relationship between Across and Down circles was easy to figure out, the revealer seemed at least a little off in terms of describing what I, the solver, did to solve the puzzle. The puzzle seems to believe that you have a circle (the Across number) and then you (mentally) square it in order to get the Down answer to work. But for me, the Across and Down have equal weight and one does not precede (in any temporal way) the other. So SQUARE THE CIRCLE doesn't make much sense if "the circle" is both, say, "TWO" and "FOUR." I figured out the Across/Down relationship at EARTH REENTRY / SATURNINE, but I wouldn't say I got "THREE" first and then I squared it—in fact, I'm pretty sure I figured out "NINE" first. So the "circle" was "NINE" as much as it was "THREE." Thus it made as much sense to say that the Across was the square root of the Down as to say that the Down was the square of the Across. I think the thing is ... like, the revealer clue implies that you have one thing and you need to do something to it in order to figure out the next thing, but it's equally hard to get the first thing as the second thing. The revealer simply doesn't match the solving experience. This may seem like a technicality, but technicalities matter.
What's more, the fill was subpar yet again. Plural Greek letters and plural Russian negatives and at least two partial exclamations (HEE, YABBA), and some more shrieking (GAH, YOW) and then a host of hoary repeaters (ENRON (still?), ESC, ADT, UTERO, ODEON, AOLER (ouch), etc.). Also unlovely are SED and REN, the latter of which has a clue designed to make someone like me (a medievalist) nuts (33D: ___ Faire (medieval-themed festival)). Hey, do you know what REN stands for? Do you know what it's short for? I think you do. And if you do, then maybe you too had a little twinge of "huh?" when you wrote in this answer. See, the "RENaissance" (so-called) is, explicitly, specifically, self-importantly, not "medieval." Not not not. The Middle Ages (whence the word "medieval"—from L. medium aevum, "middle age") are the allegedly benighted period that the Renaissance was supposedly leaving behind. Thus the Renaissance is, by definition, subsequent to the "medieval" period. To say that a REN(naissance) Faire is "medieval-themed" ... the nails-on-chalkboard effect was real and jarring. But then ... it looks like the people who put on and go to these "faires" don't give a **** about such niceties as terminological accuracy. "Many Renaissance fairs are set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Some are set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, or in other countries, such as France. Others are set outside the era of the Renaissance; these may include earlier medieval periods such as the Viking Age or later periods such as the Golden Age of Piracy" (wikipedia) (my emph.). I get that everyone collapses the olden days into one giant Time of Yore and that actual historical periodicity is entirely an invention of historians writing (generally) well after the times in question, and that shifts from one time to another are actually gradual and involve continuity as well as rupture blah blah blah. But where labels are concerned, "REN" is not not not not "medieval." Not. No. Stop.
This puzzle was difficult only in terms of getting the gimmick. Once you get it, it's smooth sailing (fairly typical for a Thursday). The gimmick today wasn't too hard to get, though the NW was a bit of a disaster to start, in that I had WHORL (???) for 1A: Feature of a mountain or fingerprint (RIDGE). Somehow WHORL seemed like ... maybe a snowcap formation, or maybe something happening in a mountain stream, I don't know. But five letters, fingerprint feature ... WHORL is what comes to mind. RAWER was thus hard to get (1D: More cold and wet). But eventually Idris ELBA came along to save the day (as he so often does) (5D: Actor Idris). WHORL became RIDGE and things began to fall into place. ON EDGE may have been the toughest of the theme answers to get because EDGY fit so neatly there (18D: Anxious). I wanted 27A: Low-lying area to be VALE, but couldn't make it work with the "Y" from EDGY in there. Finally I worked out the theme at EARTH REENTRY / SATURNINE, which helped me get ON EDGE, and that was that. Difficulty over.
Bullets:
- 20A: High key? (ESC) — because it's at the top of your keyboard (I assume)
- 37A: Skin-care product thinner than a moisturizer (SERUM) — if you wanna get me really truly out of my depth, give me "skin-care product" clues. I think I've heard the word "SERUM" used in skin-care ads I've been forced to sit through, but had no idea what, exactly, it was.
- 63A: Tosses out (CASTS) — Hmm. "Tosses" and CASTS seem equivalent. The "out" is weird to me here. Unnecessary-seeming. Confusing. I can imagine scenarios where you swap out "Tosses out" as CASTS, but I can imagine more where "Tosses" and CASTS are the same.
- 3D: Lucky scientist, perhaps (DISCOVERER) — this seems true enough, but presumably most scientists "discover" things through hard work, because they're actually looking for something, even if, yes, some discoveries are happy accidents. The word "lucky" feels slightly too flippant, somehow. I mean, if she "discovered" a four-leaf clover, sure, lucky. But if she "discovers" the cure for cancer ...
- 26D: "That's relatable" ("I FEEL YA") — showing my age here (56, as of yesterday), I wrote in "I HEAR YA." "Feel" in this sense has been around for decades, but is not part of my own personal vocabulary.
- 35D: Person who's off-base? (SHORTSTOP) — this was almost as jarring as the REN Faire clue for me, but for a different reason, namely: We Just Had This Clue For SHORTSTOP!!!! A merely nineteen days ago: [One who's off-base?]. Bizarre for any nine-letter word to repeat in that short a span of time, but particularly bizarre that the same "?" clue would be used in both instances. No, not bizarre. Negligent. It's a good clue but you Just Used It. If the clue were straightforward, probably no one would notice, but "?" clues are showy, ostentatious, look-at-me, so people are gonna notice. Like, the funkier your outfit, the more people are likely to notice when you wear it again. Maybe give it a few years. Nineteen days ... not long enough.
- 50D: #'s place (TWEET) — ugh, The Place Formerly Known as Twitter. What a hell hole. Anyway, "#" in this case is a hashtag, which you use to tag relevant subject matter in your posts (on Twitter, these were known as "TWEETs"). You know, like #CatsOfTwitter #ElonSucks #NoGoodBillionaires etc.
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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41 comments:
Medium, then Easy once I caught on to the gimmick. I liked it better than OFL did: * * * * _
My experience was similar to @Rex's but I was less upset about REN (33D). I got the rebus squares in [ON E]dge (18D) and WISHB[ONE] FORMATION (17A) and figured the three rebus squares would either all be ONEs or they'd be ONE, TWO and THREE. FAS[T WO]rker at 29A confirmed the latter, and I put [THREE] in 43A. That's where it became apparent that SATUR[three] made no sense. Come to think of it, 9D also didn't compute as YEAR O[two] LORD. I needed the revealer to figure out the bidirectional rebus squares.
Overwrites (non-theme-related):
lbS before OZS for the 6D deli units.
eDGy before [ON E]DGE at 18D. At that point, my working theory was that the rebus only applied to the across word and the down was just a single letter.
I gEt you before I FEEL YA at 26D.
WOEs:
ANN Petry at 13D.
I may have studied the 31D KREBS CYCLE in high school biology but it sure didn't stick.
FYI, to complete in the app, you have to write out the number being squared, so “one,” “two,” and “three.”
Figured out the trick, but tried to put ONEONE, TWOFOUR and THREENINE in as (double?) rebuses. Didn't work, obviously, so I just went with ONE, TWO, and THREE only in the squares, and the music sounded. My hat is off to the constructor for a remarkable grid.
Just curious...the plural of alumnus is alumni...ergo, is the plural of rebus rebi?
How do you enter the rebus?
For some reason I love the sound of wish bone formation. Not a football fan so don't know why it seemed familiar as well as sounding good. And I liked saturnine even though it got me all fouled up. I had the nine in place and could not see how eighty one worked with the across answer. Didn't mi so much that the reveal didn't exactly fit the trick, but I'd never heard the expression so it didn't ring bells for me. Love lemon tarts so loved that answer liked year of our lord and fast worker. Had NO Idea about krebs cycle. Had to Google to be sure it was right. Immediately forgot everything the paragraph about it said.
Click in the square and hit the ESC key. A little window will pop up that allows you to enter multiple letters. After doing so, hit return to complete the entry.
Puzzle was deemed successful for me when I did one/one, two/four, three/nine in the rebus squares...though edited them to just one, two, three after the success sound.
Medium for me at about 15 minutes. Liked it more than @REX did.... And @REX didn't even mention the ever-popular REX namedrop!!!! If I ever try my hand at constructing, I definitely want to have REX as one of my entries : )!!! I thought this was a clever theme.... kind of funny, of course, when you realize that the 1st themer doesn't change, since ONE squared is.... ONE. Also fun that the revealer actually DEPENDS ON the kind of chintzy little conceit of putting circles inside special squares to highlight them and make the puzzle a bit easier for us.... without that conceit the revealer doesn't happen. So that was cute too. I loved this puzzle and had a great time with it. Especially liked figuring out/reminding myself of the KREBSCYCLE and thinking of LEMONTARTS!!! Thanks, Alexander, for a nice Turkey day puzzle!!!! : )
For those wondering what this puzzle has to do with Thanksgiving, it’s obvious. SATURNINE means “glum” which is sandwiched by the same letters in “grim”, the ending to “Pilgrim”. Duh!
And wishes for a splendid Thanksgiving to all in the tribe here, for whom I'm extraordinarily grateful.
Agree with Rex''s comment re "casts".
Don't think of skin care products as being out of my depth, but in total sync re "serum"
I learned 35 across in first year Latin over 60 years ago. It came back to me instantly.
I've tried words, numbers, just the one, both, both separated by / but nothing will make the puzzle say it is complete! And yes, @ Rex, I thought cluing REN with "medieval" was way wrong. Otherwise easy puzzle, sigh.
Well, happy belated birthday @Rex and Happy Thanksgiving to all!
@Lewis
And here I thought it was WISHBONE... !
["I don't give a darn" in a famous skit] - there, a non-straightforward and "?"-less (so, pretty Thursdayish) clue for SHORTSTOP. I had the same reaction as 59D REX there.
KREBS CYCLE rang a faint bell from HS biology. It doesn't look like there are too many options for 31D with all the theme stuff in place. KEVIN BACON fits, but leaves O-V-- at 39A.
thrown off by the poor clue/answer to Anno Domini, which means, of course only "Year of the Lord". The 'our' is not present in the Latin. To get Year of Our Lord the clue would have to be 'Anno domini nostri'.
Ah, thank you. Finally got the rebus thingie to work.
@Smith -- Hah!
ONE was the first rebus I filled in, which led me to believe that the other rebuses would work for across and down – what a terrific misdirect!
I am one who has trouble saying RAWER once, let alone five times fast.
I liked the backward subtheme, with a backward SODA to go with “Coke-versus-Pepsi”, a backward GAH to go with OLD, and a backward ELBA to go with FAST WORKER. Serendipity at its finest.
Alexander’s notes gave me a highly worthwhile TIL – Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Award, the highest honor in mathematics, and the first Iranian to do so. I found the Wikipedia article on her to be very inspiring.
Here’s something you don’t see very often in a symmetrical grid – and it’s because of the theme – one answer each of length 12, 13, 15, and 17.
So, Alexander, you brought me many extras on top of a splendid solve, for which I’m most grateful. Thank you!
We're going to have that discussion again?!?! Since it's Thanksgiving and everyone is relaxed, we could make a drinking game out of it. Every time someone says "rebodes", do a shot.
More seriously and soberly: the Latin word rebus is already a plural form (in the ablative case), so the only thing to do is try not to give away the fact you don't know Latin, by trying to fake it with "rebi". (It's sort of like pretending to form the plural of "agenda" as "agendae", not realizing that "agenda" in Latin is already plural, with "agendum" as its singular.) In my opinion, the only sensible response is to treat "rebus" as English, and pluralize it as "rebuses". But that's no fun, is it?
I'm a big fan of "Ball of Fire" and oddly was introduced to it only after I saw "A Song is Born" the remake with Danny Kaye and a plethora or big band personalities.
Could also an oblique turkey reference in Wishbone????
Inspiring but also sad: Maryam Mirzakhani died not long after being awarded the Fields Medal. She was utterly brilliant, and no telling what else she would have gone on to do. She was the first woman to be so awarded (and only one of two so far).
Rebus actually is a plural, funnily enough. I knew this - it's one of the endings drilled into you in Latin, but not how it was used in this sense. I just looked it up thanks to your comment! Comes from the phrase "non verbis sed rebus" or "not by words but by things" as in the sense of those puzzles where pictures and letters combine ( with '+"s and '-'s to make a saying. How it was first applied to xwords isn't clear to me.
I would rate this as Easy. The theme was halfway cracked when I saw that SATURN had to be SATUR(NINE), and all the way cracked when I saw that the across elsewhere had to be "something WORKER" = FAS(TWO)RKER. Elsewhere the puzzle was quite straightforward. The thing that burned time was futzing about when I realized that my standard SHORTcut response to rebus puzzles wasn't working this time. I don't enjoy rebus puzzles when this happens.
AOLER is just awful. The worst of the DUDS the puzzle had on offer. C'mon, man.
The way SAC was clued was also pretty bad, IMO. GAH!
And, I'm also getting a little tired of I FEEL YA.
Well, it's OFF TO the store to pick up an ingredient I forgot TWO days ago. I'm in charge of the stuffing, which in our case I think I'd prefer to call the dressing, as we used to say in the South -- here it's really a side dish and nothing we're using to stuff a turkey with. In fact we're not even doing a turkey; instead it's a glazed ham. Anyway, gotta go. Wishing you a very enjoyable Thanksgiving, to all those who celebrate it!
Thank you!
Sorry OFL but the revealer is truly brilliant and refers to a classical problem in geometry which is unsolvable. You can't "square" a circle with only a compass and straight edge since pi is a transcendental number.
And that's why I only go to the rival Early Modern Faire in my area—it gives me a little more wiggle room in how I dress, what I eat, how I worship, and what I read!
Happy birthday (Rex, belated) and Happy Thanksgiving (everyone—even if you're Canadian).
kj (Bardfilm)
I was hoping for something light and airy to commence the holiday season, or perhaps a T’day related theme. It looks like we got one that’s been in the Thursday queue for a while and today was its turn.
I tend to get fatigued when the grids look like gibberish as they are being filled in, even when I know there is a gimmick underlying the whole situation, and frequently I find the payoff (in terms of an “aha!”) to not be commensurate with the effort and the mental gymnastics required to keep track of everything. I’m hoping that with more experience (and patience) that less effort will ultimately be required. It’s a slow process, but I’m getting there.
Have a great holiday everyone (and some good football games today if you are a fan). It seemed like a stretch of about 50 years where the Lions had like 10 losses by Thanksgiving each year so the early game was always a snoozer. Hopefully we’ll get something interesting and exciting today.
Hey All !
I'd be a good Billionaire. Give me the money, I'll prove it! 😁
Neat idea. I put in the entire words with a slash, and the NYT site accepted it as correct, as in TWO/FOUR, THREE/NINE. You can't really see the words, as that many letters in one square get microscopic. However, I noticed just now, the site changed it to just TWO and THREE when completed.
Does the Krusty Krab use KREBS CYCLE? 😁
SHORTSTOP clue a weird thing for Rex to go OFF about. But, we all have our bugbears, so I FEEL YA.
Hands up for who had teal first for AQUA. And lbS for OZS. Technically true, but you don't order 8 OZS at a deli, you order half a pound. Amirite?
Growing up in Northeast PA, Scranton area, we had the four channels, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, but instead of Channels like 2, 3, 4, etc. ours were 16, 22, 28, with PBS at 44. Since I sat closest to the TV, I was the channel changer. Going from 16 to 44 was a journey!
YABBA HUBba ZOO. That was the saying, right? Har.
Have a great Thursday, and a great Thanksgiving! Don't eat too much LEMON TARTS!
Three F's (Plus a hidden one in the Two/Four Rebus) We'll just call it Four
RooMonster
DarrinV
Thank you! It was driving me crazy
Off to a flying start with RIDGE which led to RAWER (common term around here) and the W instantly gave me WINGBACKFORMATION. Well, the FORMATION part was right at least. Saw the necessary FOUR in YEAROFOURLORD, wound up at the bottom where the revealer was easy enough to see, but didn't get the whole concept until THREE crossing SATURNINE. ONE squared equaling ONE was pretty fiendish.
No trouble entering the rebus answers with my pencil. TIL ANN as clued and KREBSCYCLE, a total WOE. Agree that AOLER should be banned permanently and now have a new found disgust for REN as referring to anything medieval, thanks to OFL, although my outrage will not be quite as severe. Also learned a new meaning for SERUM, not that I will ever use it in this sense.
Pretty ingenious, AL. A Lot to like here and thanks for all the fun.
Happy T-Day to one and all. One thing I am truly thankful for is our little community of word lovers that has a forum here. Special thanks to OFL for making this all possible.
Me too….around 55 yrs! Eek!
Thanks, was driving me crazy!
Wow, lots of technicalities to complain about hiss morning, and as Rex says, they count, but I felt this was overall an imaginative theme in a relatively easy puzzle. I never complain about easiness, because they are all tough for me, but on a relative scale for a Thursday this one went fast for me. Had a bit of trouble with the YEAROFOURLORD because as at least one blogger has already pointed out, the “OUR” is part of an informal description, not actually in the Latin. And loved how @Lewis morphed SATURNINE into Pilgrim! His word-play is amazing.
TBH, just figuring out how to enter the rebus was the trickiest part of this puzzle.
Must be more fun solving online. Nothing pops in the newspaper.
The puzzle was cute but too easy for a Thursday. No turkey theme?
The theme of the puzzle is “square the circle” and, as pointed out above, this is done using “pi” - while today is not March 14, today is unequivocally “Pie” day!
I went with the full lettered spelling…One, Two/Four, and Three/Nine…and it worked without issue
Wish I'd read this piece in its entirety before giving up on the puzzle, the letters-not-numerals requirement broke my streak.
Thanks! How does it work in Yiddish?
RENaissance scholar here. That clue grated hard, nails-on-chalkboard for me, and I thought, “Surely the consolation will be that Rex will rant about this publicly for me!” I am so satisfied to say that I was not disappointed. The clue felt kinda like when people ask me if my students have to read Shakespeare in Old English. [facepalm] So Rex, I FEEL YA on this one.
Oh hey, but on the topic of crossword annoyances for English profs, I was delighted two days ago that BRITLIT came up as an abbr. for a course, since that is an abbr. we actually use regularly, as opposed to LITCRIT that we never ever say.
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