Thinking Inside the Box by Adrienne Raphel

Author:Adrienne Raphel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

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At the turn of the twentieth century, mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor had an idea. Factory workers in America and Britain, he’d noticed, “soldiered,” dialing production to a crawl to protect their own interests; moving too fast, they argued, would get them to finish tasks too quickly and thus put everyone out of a job. Taylor disagreed. In Principles of Scientific Management, the grandfather of how-to guides, Taylor argued that efficiency, not underworking, was the key to success. Taylor boiled management into a formula: turn complex jobs into a series of simple ones, measure everything, and make workers’ earnings directly linked to performance. Taylor’s streamlining has left a long legacy, from students taught to perform on standardized tests to Japanese lifestyle guru Marie Kondo’s art of “tidying up.” Taylorism was an instant success, but it had its drawbacks in the workplace. Charlie Chaplin satirized the system in his 1936 film Modern Times: As a factory worker, Charlie-Cog had to screw nuts onto a machine, but the machine kept speeding up, faster and faster, until he was working at such a breakneck pace that he finally snapped.

At the ACPT, Taylorism still thrived among speed solvers. There were various tricks to speed solving. Speed solvers typically started in one corner and worked their way toward the middle. For easy puzzles, they often read only the down clues and filled in one direction to avoid having to switch vectors and lose crucial moments. Most speed solvers used a lowercase e, even when writing in all capitals, because the single-motion e was much easier to inscribe than its three-pronged counterpart. Speed solving relies on muscle memory, like putting a Rubik’s Cube together. Howard Barkin, the 2016 ACPT winner, could solve the Monday and Tuesday Times puzzles while carrying on a conversation, the way an expert knitter knits. A couple of minutes into the chat, he’d look down and the puzzle would have basically written itself. Dan Feyer, the ACPT champion from 2010 to 2015, and then again in 2017 and 2019, posted a YouTube video of himself solving a Newsday crossword puzzle in one minute and eight seconds: he begins with a long Across clue in each key quadrant, then flips and solves all the Downs rapid-fire. Some speed solvers psyched themselves into mental agility through athletic attire, like 2018 winner Erik Agard, who took the stage of that year’s championship in a bright red basketball jersey and sweats.

Among the regular solvers, competitors had to differentiate their personalities off the grid. Though the bulk of solvers fell somewhere in the incognito spectrum, in street clothes and displaying only mild superstitions, each year, more and more solvers used the tournament as an opportunity to make a fashion statement.

In the winter of 1924, a shopkeeper in Paris noticed two American women working through a crossword puzzle. Inspired by the striking graphic, he created checkerboard-patterned angora stockings. The crossword craze had not yet arrived in France, and although the novelty item “found good customers among American women,” according to the New York Times, French women declared it “hideous.

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