Chinese competitor of Amazon / SUN 1-18-26 / Bit of regal headwear / Breathable fabric used in mosquito nets / "Big" comic protagonist / Japanese craft that literally translates to "tray planting" / Images that can rip off human creators, perhaps / Affectionate term for una madre / Padmé Amidala's home planet in "Star Wars" / Like the Gospel of Mark, sequentially

Constructor: Rena Cohen

Relative difficulty: Easy

[80D: Padmé Amidala's home planet in "Star Wars" (NABOO)]

THEME: "Use Your Words" — sound of "you" is added to familiar phrases, creating wacky phrases, which are clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style). The theme is described by the revealer: SOUNDS LIKE A YOU PROBLEM (67A: "Don't look at me for help" ... or a phonetic hint to this puzzle's theme) (i.e. the "sound" of "you" is the "problem" in each theme answer):

Theme answers:

• AFTER MATTHEW (23A: Like the Gospel of Mark, sequentially?) (from "aftermath")
• REVIEW THE ENGINE (33A: Prepare for a mechanic's certification exam?) (from "rev the engine")
• THE SETTLERS OF YUCATAN (58A: Original people to move into Cancún's peninsula?) (from the game "The Settlers of Catan")
• UNITES IN SHINING ARMOR (79A: Gets married while wearing protective gear?) (from "knights in shining armor")
• TWO-AND-A-HALF MENU (103A: List of restaurant offerings for kids not yet three years old?) (from the TV show "Two-and-a-Half Men")
• VENUE DIAGRAM (118A: Wedding planner's aid?) (from "Venn diagram")

Word of the Day: TEMU (52D: Chinese competitor of Amazon) —

Temu is an online marketplace operated by e-commerce company PDD Holdings, which is owned by Colin Huang. It offers heavily discounted consumer goods, mostly shipped to consumers directly from China. By April 2025, the platform had expanded its operations to more than 90 markets.

In March 2024, Temu launched its Local Seller Program in the United States. As of July 2025, the program was operational in the UK, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Australia, among other countries. The program is designed to help local sellers reach more local consumers, bring more locally relevant products to local shoppers, and improve the user experience.

Temu's business model has allowed it to become popular among consumers, but has also drawn concerns over data privacy, forced labor, intellectual property, and the low quality of its marketplace products. The company has been embroiled in legal disputes with Shein, a direct competitor. The rise of Temu is one of Amazon's biggest challenges in years.

On October 17, 2022, Temu emerged as the most-downloaded U.S. shopping app. According to Sensor Tower, it was the most downloaded mobile app in any category in the U.S. between November 1 and December 14, 2022. According to Similarweb, as of September of 2024, it became the second most-visited online shopping site in the world. As of December of the same year, the number of monthly active users of Temu's global smartphone app surpassed that of Amazon. In the year of 2024, it was the most downloaded iPhone app in over 20 countries.

• • •

Lackluster. Just not enough oomph to carry a Sunday-sized puzzle. I appreciate the way that the revealer signals the addition not just of "you" but of the *sound* of "you" (SOUNDS LIKE A YOU PROBLEM), and I appreciate that the "you" sounds are spelled differently in every case. That is a nice touch. But in the end, it's just an add-a-"you" (sound) puzzle. That's all that happens. And the results aren't particularly spectacular. There's just no real humor in any of them. AFTER MATTHEW is very literal. REVIEW THE ENGINE is simply dull. Since Settlers of Catan is about settlers to begin with, somehow THE SETTLERS OF YUCATÁN doesn't add much. The remaining three just kinda sit there. You've got a lot of different spellings of the "you" sound, but you don't get a lot of humor or wackiness out of the set. There's a stray "you" sound in MALAMUTE (114A: Relative of a husky)—and, I suppose, in U.S.A. as well (120D: Today preceder)—but those are small enough that they're not really distractions. The idea that any of these "you" sounds were actually a "problem" is somewhat laughable. The basic gimmick was very easy to figure out, and none of the themers had anything difficult or mysterious or tricky about them (beyond the "yoo" addition). I got three (3!) of the themers without ever even looking at the clues. Just no-looked the SETTLERS, the SHINING ARMOR, and the TWO-AND-A-HALF MENU answers. Work the easy crosses, and the big stuff simply floats into view. The humor is a little pale and the difficulty level was way too low. There's nothing terrible about the grid, or the theme concept, for that matter. The theme execution and the overall cluing simply aren't as entertaining as they ought to be.

When I say that the theme was not hard to figure out, this is what I mean—this is how long it took me to figure out the basics:

Why did I think UNADEM was a thing!?!?! (1A: Bit of regal headwear). I guess my brain was doing some kind of numerical inference ...  if "DI-" is two, then "UNA-" is ... one? But if I was inferring from DIADEM, why not just guess DIADEM? Plus, isn't "UNI-" the prefix for "one," not "UNA-"??? I really have no idea what I was thinking here. Turns out the "DI" in DIADEM has nothing to do with "two"; the prefix is actually "DIA-" which means "through" or "across" (Gr.), with "-DEM" meaning "tie" or "bind"). Why in the world did my brain pick the fake word UNADEM over the real word DIADEM (a word I've known since I was a kid)??? Mysterious. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I knew I had learned a different kind of -DEM word, something that (like a DIADEM) goes on the head; I just couldn't think of what it was and threw down UNADEM. The word that my brain was probably searching for was ANADEM, which is a word, one that has been in the NYTXW—45 times (the same number as DIADEM!). Like DIADEM, an ANADEM is something worn on the head—but whereas a DIADEM is a jeweled crown and a symbol of royalty, an ANADEM is more of a a wreath (like the garland for a poet laureate). I realize that none of you made this mistake and that I'm talking to myself, but ... I'm fine with that. Some day ANADEM will show up in the grid again and you'll be like:

The NE corner is really speaking to me today. That's because I was once a young, balding man in ANN ARBOR (22A: College town nicknamed "A²"), and I went to a lot of concerts there, which means a lot of SET LISTS. I guess GOES BALD is supposed to be a bummer (and it probably is if you've actually got alopecia), but I still like that corner for giving me fond memories of grad school. No other parts of this grid spoke to me so strongly, though there are some nice moments. The SW corner, for instance: if I saw a MALAMUTE on the street, I would definitely later say "I LOVED IT!" The fill seems pretty smooth overall—the only place that had me grimacing was the far west, where CHAO next to TEMU crossing MAMI took some elbow grease to sort out. I had CHAO (51D: Former transportation Secretary Elaine) as CHOO and CHOI at various points; I flat-out forgot TEMU existed; and ... I have heard "MAMI" but not seen it much at all (63A: Affectionate term for una madre), so I really needed (but was not getting) the "A" from CHAO and the "M" from TEMU. Not the prettiest little nook or cranny, that one. That NANOS EELS IDINA is also less than great. But in both the TEMU and the IDINA sections, the short Downs are under a lot of strain, as they have to connect one themer to another (themers are fixed in place, so fill options are constrained). Very forgivable stuff.

Bullets:

• 66A: "Big" comic protagonist (NATE) — no idea. I know a Nate the Great. But whatever "comic" "Big NATE" is in, it's been flying under my radar. Is it an age thing? Let's find out ... oh yeah, I definitely missed all this. 

Big Nate (stylized as big NATE in the comic collections and BiG NATE in the books) is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Lincoln Peirce, syndicated since January 6, 1991. The strip follows sixth-grader Nate Wright, alongside his family, friends, and foes.

The strip's success led to a media franchise, consisting of two series of children's books by Lincoln Peirce – the eponymous novel series and the Little Big Nate board books – a video game hosted on Poptropica since 2009, and an animated television series, which premiered on Paramount+ in 2022.

I've read many a comics page and never come across this strip—but if it's been running for well over three decades and it spawned an animated television show, then yeah, that's pretty big. Just ... not in my neck of the woods. 

• 87A: Japanese craft that literally translates to "tray planting" (BONSAI) — I solved this puzzle just after coming back from Ithaca, where I saw the movie No Other Choice. It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, and it has some serious, unexpected BONSAI content. Let's just say ... the skills you learn with BONSAI are apparently, in certain gruesome circumstances, transferable! (it's not really that gruesome, despite the murders—it's actually hilarious. I shout-laughed a lot. It also just looks beautiful (shot in a very autumnal South Korea). Based on the novel The Ax by Donald Westlake (🐐), it's very much worth seeing).

• 84D: Images that can rip off human creators, perhaps (A.I. ART) — not in real life, not in my puzzle, not even with a critical clue, nope. Pass. Hard pass. (another great thing about the movie No Other Choice (see above)—it understands exactly how dehumanizing A.I. is)
• 73D: Greek god whose name becomes a flower if you move the first letter to the end (EROS) — I don't like these clues, especially if the new word has no clear relationship to the original word. But today, we don't just get one of these clues, we get two: 113D: Midwest city whose name becomes a Southwest city if you move the first letter to the end (AMES). At least the latter clue keeps it city-centered. That's something, I suppose.
• 97A: Honkers without horns (GEESE) — just in case this someday becomes relevant, I'm going to tell you (if you don't already know) that GEESE was also one of the biggest new bands of the last year. Not brand new—Getting Killed (2025) is their fourth album. But they're newly very famous. New to me, that's for sure. Led by frontman Cameron Winter, they're on nearly every Best Of list of 2025. I had only just learned who they were when the AVCX (American Values Club Crossword) posted the following on their Blue Sky account:

Me: "I ... I actually get that! I'm not yet completely out of touch! Hurray!" My friend Allegra, who is a crossword constructor herself, replied to this post:

[Jeff Tweedy is the frontman for Wilco, but you knew that]

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. the Boswords 2026 Winter Wondersolve is starting up very soon. Boswords is a long-running and well-loved crossword tournament. The Winter Wondersolve is entirely online and is open to both individuals and pairs. When I say you don't have to be a speed-solver to have a good time, please believe me. Check it out. You might have fun. Here are the deets:

Registration is open for the Boswords 2026 Winter Wondersolve, an online crossword tournament which will be held on Sunday, February 1 from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern. Solvers can compete individually or in pairs and will complete four puzzles (three themed and one themeless) edited by Brad Wilber. To register, to see the constructors, and to watch a short video describing the event, go to www.boswords.org.  

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Gentlemen, jocularly / SAT 1-17-26 / Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals / Korean barbecue rib dish / Setups for some elaborate group pictures / Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale" / Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova / Artificially unsophisticated / "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GALBI (43D: Korean barbecue rib dish) —

Galbi (Korean: 갈비; pronounced [kal.bi]), kalbi, galbi-gui (갈비구이), or grilled ribs is a type of gui (grilled dish) in traditional Korean cuisine. "Galbi" is the Korean word for "rib", and the dish is usually made with beef short ribs. When pork spare ribs or another meat is used instead, the dish is named accordingly. Galbi is served raw, then cooked on tabletop grills usually by the diners themselves. The dish may be marinated in a sweet and savory sauce usually containing soy sauce, garlic, and sugar. Both non-marinated and marinated galbi are often featured in Korean barbecue. In Japan, this and many other dishes in Korean barbecue influenced yakiniku, a fusion cuisine that often makes use of galbi (glossed as karubi). (wikipedia)

• • •

Seems like this comes down to whether figuring out the longest possible Roman numeral is your idea of a good time or not (8D: Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals). For me: not. Not awful, just ... tedious. Actually, in the end, not that hard. I just kept writing the Roman numerals in descending order, as many as I could write of each without the number looking wrong ("DD" = "M," so ... wrong; "LL" = "C," so ... wrong). And there it was: 3,888. That is ... something. A number. That is what that is. A very arbitrary number. Feels like a showy kind of stunt, but it left me cold, as did the somewhat juvenile fill. FARTSY and F-BOMB and PIT STAINS are the kind of thing that seem designed to get a laugh out of a twelve-year-old. I could've gone my whole life without seeing FARTSY in the grid, honestly. You'll be fascinated / thrilled / bored to know that this is not the first FART in the NYTXW—that great moment in crossword fill history came back in 2023 ([Brain ___]). But this is the first FARTSY. You can just imagine me tapping the Not All Debuts Are Good™ sign here. This is all to say that I could feel the puzzle trying to be flashy, "young," etc., and it felt like it was trying a little too hard. But most of the grid is actually pretty solid. Ordinary. Fine. The three "X"s from the Roman numeral and the four "K"s from KNICK-KNACK make for some lively fill in the crosses. None of the marquee fill really wowed me, but MEGAPIXELS has some juice (41A: Units for. high-resolution camera). FAUX-NAIF is also kind of cool (39A: Artificially unsophisticated). I thought "NAIF" was the noun and "NAIVE" was the adjective, so FAUX-NAIF (as an adjective) seemed odd to me, but it's right. Even though "naive" is much more common as an adjective than "naif," when you add "FAUX" to the front, only NAIF survives. No such thing as "faux-naive." I guess the "FAUX" Frenchifies it, and since "naif" (unlike "naive") is a French word ... voilà! 

[38A: "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)]

Not loving the triple "IN" in the puzzle today (MIX-INS, ASK IN, LAID IN). LAID IN is particularly awkward, in that those exact words aren't really likely to leave your mouth in that particular formation. There's definitely such a thing as a LAY-IN, and you can LAY (the ball) IN, but you'd probably never say "she LAID IN the basketball." "Laid it in" is the phrase I'm hearing in my head. The answer here is grammatically correct, but awkward-sounding. Also awkward: DELINT. I am quite sure it is a verb. It just looks silly. The only real trouble I had today involved (shockingly!) names. ANTONIO was certainly the best guess for how that name was going to turn out, but I thought maybe ANTONIN or maybe some other Brazilian spelling as yet unknown to me (6D: ___ Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova). As for the [Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale"] (RITA), no idea. I read that novel when I was in college (on my own, not for school), and liked it, and saw the (somewhat maligned) movie adaptation starring Natasha Richardson, and liked that, but once it came around again as a TV show, I was like "meh, I get the idea, I think I don't need to see this." And I haven't seen a single episode. So the names of anyone in that novel / movie / TV series are all unknown to and/or long forgotten by me. I'd also never heard of GALBI. Haven't lived near a good Korean place since I left Ann Arbor, and back then, all I ever ordered was bibimbap. I looked at GALBI (the last answer I got—I needed every cross), and thought, "isn't that some bygone Roman emperor?" And no, it's not, but yes, almost. I was close. GALBA has been in the NYTXW 20 times, usually clued as [Nero's successor]. It's somewhat less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era. 

Speaking of "less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era," I did another 1986 crossword today (printed out from the "Times Machine," which shows you old editions of the paper, and which I was using to look at movies that were in theaters this week forty years ago). It was a Thursday puzzle and I managed to solve it all perfectly. It had a theme, but it was very rudimentary (answers containing a standalone letter, e.g. C-RATIONS, DOCTOR K, MISTER T, etc.). The letters didn't even spell anything. Felt like a themeless. But doable. Why am I talking about it? Because it contained one answer that looked so nuts that I was sure it was wrong. That answer: ETAH (18A: Peary's winter base). I knew (or mostly knew) that Admiral Peary was an arctic explorer, but ... ETAH? Really wanted to change it to UTAH, but first of all, weird place for a "winter base" if you're exploring the Arctic, and second of all, the "U" would've given me EDUNS in the cross (5D: British noble family), and while I'm willing to buy almost any name, I was fairly sure EDENS had to be right. Which left me with ETAH. Unavoidably ETAH. So I looked it up and—sure enough:

There's also an ETAH in Uttar Pradesh. Just FYI. ETAH is a great example of Shortz's obscurity-eliminating effect on the puzzle. ETAH is emblematic of the kind of obscure geographical trivia that used to run rampant in crosswords, short answers you were expected to know if you wanted to solve crosswords. ETAH was going gangbusters for decades. 108 appearances before Shortz. Margaret Farrar, Will Weng, Eugene T. Maleska, they all loved ETAH. Then Shortz took over, and the ETAH pipeline went dry overnight. There were three appearances in 1993 (just before Shortz took over), and then ... none for over a decade. And after that single appearance (2004), there haven't been any more. None. Zip zero zilch. The only other thing in the 1986 grid that I really didn't know was SHEE, which is apparently a [Gaelic fairy].

We now return to our regularly scheduled puzzle: 

Bullets:

• 10A: What "margarita" means in Spanish (DAISY) — maybe it's because I'm solving at night instead of in the morning (when I usually solve), but my brain couldn't make sense of this clue. That is, I thought the wording meant that the answer would be "in Spanish." So my brain was like "well, there's a 'margarita' pizza, so it must be Italian, and now the puzzle wants to know what it means in Spanish ... weird." Well, first, the pizza is actually "Margherita," and second, "margarita" is already Spanish, and the clue just wants to know what it means in English. Needless to say, I got DAISY mostly from crosses.
• 16A: What Anora and Vanya do in 2024's "Anora" (ELOPE) — new ELOPE clue! Those are hard to come by. Surprised we haven't seen ANORA in the grid yet. Best Picture winner, short answer, all common letters. It's tailor-made. Ticks all the boxes. Valid in every way, and almost certainly useful from a constructing standpoint. I assume we'll see it by the end of this year. 
• 46A: Setups for some elaborate group pictures (RISERS) — I had to get this cross down to _ITA / -ISERS before I finally saw RISERS (as we've established, I didn't know the Handmaid's Tale woman). And yes, people arranged on stairs, I can see how such a photo might get "elaborate." Coincidentally, RISER (singular) was in the 1986 puzzle I just solved (above). 

• 4D: Grandson of Eve (ENOS) — here's the thing about crosswordese—it can bail you out when you're stuck, or help you get started, as it did for me today. First full answer in the grid for me today. I am no bible expert, but I am an expert on biblical names likely to appear in the crossword. ENOS is up near the top (when it not getting a chimp clue, or an early-'80s TV clue)

• 28D: Worker who's the subject of the song "Sixteen Tons" (COAL MINER) — if you look real carefully at the town square in Back to the Future (the square as it appeared in the '50s, that is), you can see a record store with a "Just Arrived" sign out front. The records that have "just arrived": "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and ... "16 Tons"! Bizarre that I noticed this at all when I watched the movie last year, let alone remembered it today. It's completely irrelevant to the plot. Just a background detail. 

• 36D: Good marks? (SAPS) — "mark" here is a potential victim of a scam. A target. A patsy.
• 42D: Gentlemen, jocularly (GERMS) — from the (Vaudevillean??? Milton Berlean??) expression, "Good evening, ladies and GERMS." You can find some dudes being weird about the phrase on a "Men's Rights" subreddit here. 
• 45D: Dough at a taquería (PESOS) — didn't love this, as there are countless taquerías in the United States and they all take U.S. dollars. The "dough" at a taquería is going to depend entirely on where that taquería is. If the taqueria is in Mexico, then sure, PESOS. Unless PESOS is an actual dough, like MASA. It's not, is it? We're talking about money, right? Yes, I'm sure that's right. If it's not, I'll hear about it.

That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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