New York Times, Thursday, July 20, 2023

I hope solving this puzzle was less difficult than trying to fall asleep on a train (or in a car or on a plane, for that matter). Thanks to Sid Sivakumar and Matthew Stock and their puzzle from early 2021 for inspiring today's theme. I briefly considered using the revealer SLEEPING BAG and transforming BAG to ZZZ, but once I realized there were enough theme answers to use SLEEPING CAR, I put the pedal to the metal and got to work.

There were some speed bumps along the way. The editing team accepted the puzzle with the caveat of revising the fill. I had to accept some trade-offs because I was using the second-most number of Zs in a weekday puzzle in the Shortz Era — the record is 18! — so I couldn't avoid some crossword-ese like LST. My initial grid had all the theme answers placed horizontally, but to minimize the questionable fill, I had to change my approach and position two of the theme answers vertically. Fortunately, that worked, and I was able to finally put the puzzle to bed.

Quite a sleepy concept — in a good way! Drew takes the "hidden word" genre and guns the engine, playing on SLEEPING CAR to replace hidden car makes with Zs. The themers:

• UP(FORD)EBATE
• I(BMW)ATSON
• S(KIA)REA
• ICL(AUDI)US

The "hidden words" genre is so overdone that Will Shortz typically insists on the hidden word spanning across two words of a phrase. Mission accomplished for three of them — BMW in IBM WATSON is such a cool standout. AUDI doesn't measure up, but it is much more disguised than it would be in AUDIENCE, and something like TALAUD ISLANDS would be way too hard to figure out.

(I'd suggest ROE V WADE, but perhaps not in today's charged political climate. It is fun that LIGHTNING MCQUEEN is meta!)

The gimmick was so hard to uncover that I nearly got stumped, especially since I couldn't predict how many Zs there would be. A few much-appreciated gimmes, like Chloe ZHAO, told me where at least one Z was, but it still turned out to be a game of Battleship where my opponent kept announcing, "hit! Or maybe miss! Bwa ha ha!" That rough [___ Sunday] clue, plus ONZE and GAZANS, took more solving time than the rest of the puzzle combined.

Gridding around Zs is such a challenging task. Gridding around 14 is masochistic. Well done in the upper left, setting the tone for the rest of the puzzle with a clean result. I might have asked Drew to go up to 80 words to clean up some LST ORO RTE SGT, but that is a reasonable result, given the constraints.

I still hitch on SLEEPING vs. SLEEPER CAR, but I loved the creativity. Brainstorming ways of making it less like to blow solvers' gaskets would have been fun.