Thursday, May 22, 2025, David J. Kahn

This is a complex theme. MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING is the multi-answer revealer, and it explains, in a way, that the word "all" (EVERYTHING) in the theme answers is changed into the currency of the country in brackets in the clue. Let's look at the themers:

*Be brave and proud [Iran] - should be "stand tall," but replace all with rial and you get STANDTRIAL
*How some medications are taken [Jordan] - ORDINARY (dinar)
*Luminous meteor [South Africa] - FIREBRAND (rand)
*Ubiquitously [Korea] - WONOVER (won)
*Ones on your side [Costa Rica] - COLONIES (colón)

See what I mean? Complex. 

Luckily, the rest of the answers were, at least on the left side, for me, pretty straightforward. On the right side we had things like EZER (1990s Israeli president Weizman) and DEDE (Film editor ____ Allen). 

This one was all about the theme, in my opinion, and it was pretty impressive.

- Horace