Mandrake the Magician's sidekick / FRI 12-10-21 / 2019 rap hit whose title follows the lyric "How much money you got?" / Suffix with acetyl / Period at the beginning of the Stone Age / 1968 Peace Nobelist Cassin / Company that helped launch TMZ / Ensemble purchase that includes sheets and pillowcases / Largest sorority by enrollment (380,000+ members)

Constructor: Joe DiPietro

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CHIRASHI (48A: Japanese dish of raw fish and vegetables over rice) —

Chirashizushi (ちらし寿司, "scattered sushi", also referred to as barazushi) serves the rice in a bowl and tops it with a variety of raw fish and vegetable garnishes. [...] It is eaten annually on Hinamatsuri in March and Kodomonohi in May.

• Edomae chirashizushi (Edo-style scattered sushi) is served with uncooked ingredients in an artful arrangement.
• Gomokuzushi (Kansai-style sushi) consists of cooked or uncooked ingredients mixed in the body of rice.
• Sake-zushi (Kyushu-style sushi) uses rice wine over vinegar in preparing the rice, and is topped with shrimp, sea bream, octopus, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots and shredded omelette. (wikipedia)

This just wasn't for me. Full of things I either didn't know, didn't care about, or actively don't like. Tone was set by 1-Across, as it often is. I just have no idea what a BED-IN-A-BAG is (1A: Ensemble purchase that includes sheets and pillowcases). I got the "BED" part easy enough, but after that, I just shrugged as I watched letter after letter go in, and even after I saw that it had to be BED-IN-A-BAG, I hesitated to write it in, so dumb a concept did it seem. SOAP-ON-A-ROPE, I know. BED-IN-A-BAG, no. Is it a brand? I don't care enough to look it up. I did care enough to look up CHIRASHI, which sounds delicious (as most food does to me, frankly), but it didn't even have its own wikipedia page. It was buried in the "Sushi" page and even there wasn't referred to as CHIRASHI, but as "Chirashizushi." Not sure how I got to be 52 years old, having eaten in all kinds of restaurants all over the world, following food writers on social media for years, etc., and not heard of CHIRASHI, but here we are! Not the puzzle's fault, happy to learn the term, but like BED-IN-A-BAG, this just wasn't from anywhere in my universe. I also actively dislike gambling (SHOOT CRAPS), have (mostly) negative feelings about (most) fraternities and sororities (CHI OMEGA) and college football (BYU) (29D: One side of a coll. football "Holy War" rivalry) and TMZ (see 45A: Company that helped launch TMZ =>AOL), and wouldn't LEAN RIGHT if you paid me. You'd think ANTIFA would make up for LEAN RIGHT, politically, but the only time I ever hear the term "ANTIFA" is in the mouth of some paranoid right-wing dickhead, so ... no, that's didn't help. I had one moment of "ah, nice," and that was when I got RUNNER'S HIGH (24D: Rush while racing?). I would never use the term, since the parallel to a drug high is inapt (or just unappealing to me). but I have felt great while running, and I do like the phrase as a puzzle answer. But overwhelmingly, I felt outside of whatever the intended demographic was for this puzzle.