New York Times, Tuesday, July 12, 2022

In April of 2021, I was reading Matt Walker's fascinating Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams and wondered whether there might be a way to make a puzzle with a visual of the circadian rhythm sleep-wake cycle. I decided to try putting CIRCADIAN RHYTHM in circled letters in a wave pattern across the approximate center of the grid, with SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES above and TWENTY-FOUR HOURS below. I also put DAY in the center of the first row and NIGHT in the center of the last.

After some tinkering (which included a couple of suggestions from my son, David, about block placement), I submitted the puzzle in mid-April. In July, Wyna Liu wrote saying the team was interested in the puzzle but wanted a few revisions to the fill. She suggested switching the positions of SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES and TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. I submitted a revised grid, and the team made a few additional fixes to one corner. I then clued the revised puzzle, and on July 27, it was formally accepted.

Many thanks again to Wyna and the rest of the team (and, of course, to David for his block suggestions!).

Why do I love up and down stripes so much? They win me over almost every time.

Not surprising, given how Charlie Brown-y I am.

Neat that TWENTY FOUR HOURS and SLEEP WAKE CYCLES are both 15 letters long. It's fortuitous enough when two theme answers are equal in length, allowing thematic symmetry, but both of them being grid-spanners gives so much more flexibility than if they were 12-14 letters. Note that the singular SLEEP WAKE CYCLE would need to be placed in row 12, thus compressing the themers and creating yet more challenges.

Will Shortz isn't taking many themes requiring diagonal entries these days because of all the fill compromises they tend to require. Filling a subsection like the middle is easy if you only have one Across entry to work around, but when you pin letters into fixed locations like D I A N R, you strip away many possibilities. Smart to deploy so many black squares in the center to section off the most challenging part of the grid.

Using up so many black squares creates snags elsewhere, though. With the word count already pushed to the max of 78, you must work with big swaths of white space in the bottom corners. When the diagonal C I R takes away flexibility, that region becomes much harder to fill.

With all the technical constraints, it's a fine result to escape with minor dabs of FAA GYN LOA SLC.

What a beautiful clue for ONE DIME! I confidently plunked in ONE CENT, but that's the smallest denomination, not size. Along with so much great wordplay in "the 1%" as LOWFAT and horns on both impala animals and Impala cars, there was so much more wordplay fun than we usually get on a Tuesday.

Great DAY to NIGHT touch. I admired Karen's solo debut.