4/13/25 - Both Sides Now ⛖

🏁 Solve –> Both Sides Now by John Kugelman

15A | Antidepressant type, in brief

SSRI

The class of pharmaceuticals known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) treat depression (and other mental health conditions) by preventing serotonin – a hormone that carries messages between nerve cells in the brain – from being absorbed back into the cells after carrying out its duties.

As a result, more serotonin remains present in the synapses of the brain at any given time, which has been found to have a positive impact on regulating mood.

The U.S. Federal Drug Administration currently lists seven approved SSRIs, including fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and escitalopram (Lexapro).

60A | "The ___ Show" (12x platinum 2002 album)

EMINEM

In 1976, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) introduced its "Platinum" certification to denote an album that had achieved sales of one million units in the U.S. [At the same time, the pre-existing "Gold" award was redefined to reflect record sales of 500,000, and in 1999 the "Diamond" designation was added to honor albums with 10 million copies sold.]

While these numbers originally only consisted of physical copies, in the digital age the definition has been expanded to account for "album equivalent sales," meaning that 10 downloads or 1,500 streams of tracks from a single album now count the same as a vinyl or CD purchase.

To date, Elvis Presley has earned the most total Platinum records (67), while Garth Brooks holds the title for Diamond albums (9).

62A | 1982 Benjamin Hoff best seller on Eastern philosophy, with "The"

TAO OF POOH

Benjamin Hoff was living in Portland, Oregon and working as a tree pruner in a Japanese garden when he wrote The Tao of Pooh – a slim volume that sought to introduce Westerners to Taoism (a Chinese philosophy for living in harmony with the universe) by guiding them through its tenets with help from the characters of A.A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" series of children's books.

[Milne's estate received profits from each sale – 33.3% for hardcover and 40% for paperback – before his creations entered the public domain in 2002.]

Released by Dutton Books (Winnie the Pooh's U.S. publisher), The Tao of Pooh spent 49 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and spawned a sequel, 1992's The Te of Piglet.

66A | Monopoly token retired in 2013

IRON

In 1935, Monopoly began including six tiny metal pieces – a battleship, boot, cannon, iron, top hat and thimble – for players to use to mark their movement around the game board. (Previously, instructions indicated that buttons, pennies, and other small items from around the house should be employed.)

Over the ensuing decades various tokens have come and gone – and even come back again. [See: the thimble and sack of money, both of which are now back in rotation after hiatuses.]

That's all to say, there's still a chance the iron could one day return from retirement, a status it currently has in common with other bygone options such as the purse, rocking horse, airplane, wheelbarrow, and T-Rex.

👉 BONUS BIT: The design for the battleship token was modeled after the USS Indiana (BB-1) and has also made appearances in two other games: "Conflict" and "Diplomacy."

92A | Gallup's bailiwick

POLLS

On October 20, 1935, a new syndicated column appeared in 3o newspapers across the United States. Titled "America Speaks," the weekly feature was a forum for George Gallup to showcase the results of his public opinion polls, which were conducted by his company – the American Institute of Public Opinion.

In an effort to increase his circulation, Gallup made a splashy bet the following year: if he failed to predict the winner of the 1936 presidential election with a greater degree of accuracy than The Literary Digest (which had correctly identified the outcome of the past five races), he would issues refunds to every newspaper that paid to publish his product.

After collecting millions of votes, The Literary Digest declared victory would go to Kansas Governor Alf Landon by a wide margin of 57% to 43%. Gallup, on the other hand, used modern statistical sampling techniques to generate a much smaller (~3,000), but more representative group of respondents, ultimately declaring that incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt would come out on top 54-46%.

The result? A win for Gallup – and FDR, who coasted to his second term in office by securing 61% of the popular vote.

120A | Bill Gates gave six of them between 2009 and 2015

TED TALKS

Standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, the inaugural TED Conference took place in Monterey, California in 1984 and featured demos of the fledgling compact disc and e-book formats, as well as 3D graphics courtesy of LucasFilm.

On June 27, 2006, the first "TED Talks" were released for free online. One of the videos – "Do schools kill creativity" by education expert Sir Ken Robinson – remains the most viewed entry in the series.

As of 2025, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has given 10 talks, with his most recent coming in 2022 and his most popular (9th on the all-time list) a prescient address titled "The next outbreak? We're not ready" presented in 2015.

13D | Metal producer based in Pittsburgh

ALCOA

Despite being the most abundant metal found in Earth's crust, aluminum was once quite difficult to refine and even into the 1800s the element was considered more valuable than gold. That all changed in 1888 when Charles Martin Hall and two investors established the Aluminum Company of America (or simply, Alcoa) to capitalize on a new process Hall had invented for refining aluminum inexpensively on an industrial scale.

Whereas the world's output of refined aluminum had previously only amounted to a few ounces a month, Alcoa could pump out nearly 50 pounds a day – a number that increased to 90,000 pounds by the early 1900s, which resulted in aluminum becoming the utterly commonplace material we're familiar with seeing all around us today.

👉 BONUS BIT: Weighing 6.25 pounds (2.85 kg), the pyramid-shaped capstone at the apex of the Washington Monument is crafted entirely of aluminum, making it the largest piece of the then-precious metal to have ever been cast at the time of its installation in 1884.

The bill? $225, or approximately $7,000 in today's dollars. If only they had waited a few more years!

22D | "General" of takeout

TSO

The creation of "General Tso's Chicken" is attributed to Peng Chang-kuei, a chef born in China's Hunan province who crafted the recipe in the 1950s while living in Taiwan (where he had been forced to re-locate after Mao Zedong's Communist Party came to power).

It wasn't until the 1970s, however, when other chefs inspired by Peng began serving the dish in New York City that things really took off – especially after sugar was added to its flavor profile to accommodate American tastes.

Ironically, although it has been called “the most famous Hunanese dish in the world," when Peng opened a restaurant in his hometown, General Tso's Chicken proved quite unpopular and the establishment was short-lived.

⚠️ FYI: Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) was a 19th century Chinese military officer who gained notoriety for his role in suppressing various rebellions and almost certainly never ate anything resembling the dish that now bears his name.

32D | Prefix with bel

DECI

The "bel scale" – named for Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone – was created in order to measure how much signal loss occurred when transmitting sound across telephone wires.

As conceived, a 1 bel difference between two sounds indicates that one is 10x louder than the other; however, in practice, a smaller, more granular unit was needed and thus was born the "decibel" (one-tenth of a bel).

For most people, one decibel represents the smallest detectable difference in volume between two sounds. To put the unit in context, here are the decibel (dB) ratings associated with several common sounds/events:

• 20 dB - mosquito buzzing
• 60 dB - normal conversation
• 80-90 dB - blender, hair dryer, lawnmower [point at which hearing loss can potentially begin to occur]
• 110-130 dB - ambulance siren, rock concert
• 145 dB - fireworks

57D | Poet with four Pulitzers

FROST

Since 1917, the Pulitzer Prize committee has bestowed its awards annually in two fields: Journalism and Letters, Drama & Music, the latter of which is presently divided into the categories of Drama, Fiction, History, Biography, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Music, and Memoir or Autobiography.

"The Road Not Taken" poet Robert Frost sits atop the all-time leaderboard with four Pulitzers to his name (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943; all in poetry) – a distinction he shares with dramatist Eugene O'Neill, playwright/biographer Robert E. Sherwood, and journalists David Barstow, Jo Becker, and Carol Guzy.