New York Times, Monday, June 27, 2022

Since I live in a Bay Area beach town, I wish I could say that witnessing a majestic Pacific sunset compelled me to construct this puzzle. It's often foggy here, though, and as dusk nears, I'm usually occupied with my two young girls.

The real inspiration for this puzzle was Lynn Lempel's excellent 2019 puzzle. I looked for a way to add a new wrinkle to this theme concept. After finding the revealer, I was glad to find a symmetrical pairing (SUNNI ISLAM) that hid SUN with a different pronunciation, plus the other three theme answers that hid SUN across word breaks.

I'm not the only constructor who has recently found inspiration from the sun. I solved Max Lauring's offering in late April more quickly than a typical Thursday because his grid shared one identical theme answer and one similar one with mine.

As for the fill, I could have upped the word count from 76 to 78, but I hope the bits of glue like ACS and the partial ONE I were worth the tradeoffs for the long across answers like THEME SONGS and MUSIC SCENE.

Rise and shine, sleepyheads! The SUN is coming up, and … wait, what?

SETTING SUN? Is it bedtime already?

Before my kids could tell time, bedtime would happen as early as 3 p.m. on days they drove me crazy. Am I proud of blackening their windows to fool them?

No comment.

One of Will Shortz's top priorities is accuracy — he takes great pride in having as low an error rate as possible. The SUN does set in the west, so this execution is technically accurate. Confusing, though, since the usual Western left-to-right reading order makes today's SUN appear to rise.

Drew wisely chose a 7-letter central entry, GPS UNIT, which makes the gridwork much easier than a 9+ letter entry. There's still an element of difficulty that most puzzles don't have. Note that SETTING SUN and MONKEY'S UNCLE are both flush to the bottom of the grid (to enhance the SUN visual) instead of alternating bottom-top. This makes for more themer overlap than usual. Smart use of cheater squares to smooth the filling process.

I also enjoyed THEME SONGS and MUSIC SCENE. Will cares less than other editors about muddying up vertical themes with long horizontal entries. This isn't an issue today since the shaded squares clarify what's theme and what's not.

I like these "shifting trigram" puzzles; an old one still stands out in my memory banks. Today's was too confusing for my Western-biased thinking, but I liked how Drew arranged things so the SETTING SUN revealer didn't rise too soon in the solve, as too often happens with vertically-oriented themes.