Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day. Its no-frills design, once-daily refresh, and spoiler-free way to share results on social media has turned it into an overnight success.

But the game’s swift pop culture ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented. In fact, 100 years before Wordle entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept the nation.

I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s.

The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913 edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement. Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares, acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.

Building on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle. The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today—it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center. But the instructions are familiar: “fill the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”

The word-cross—which eventually became cross-word, likely due to a type-setting accident, and later dropped the hyphen to become, simply, the crossword—wasn’t supposed to be a regular feature in the weekly supplement. Wynne found the prep work tedious, and typographers resented setting up the puzzle shape for print. But players were hooked; when the word game didn’t appear one Sunday, they demanded to know where it had gone, helping ensure that game stayed on as a regular feature for FUN.

Readers weren’t just doing the crossword, they were also actively sending in construction submissions for consideration. Wynne bemoaned the boxes of submissions that started filling up his office. “The editor of FUN receives an average of twenty-five cross-words every day from readers,” he wrote in 1915, adding drolly that “the puzzle editor has kindly figured out that the present supply will last until the second week in December, 2100.”

By 1921, Wynne had had enough, handing over the reins to Margaret Petherbridge, an aspiring reporter who was languishing as secretary to the paper’s Sunday editor. At first, Petherbridge viewed the task much as Wynne had—a Siberia assignment—and like him, she rubber-stamped submissions for publication. Because of this, early crosswords regularly went to print untested and riddled with spelling errors, misnumbered definitions, and incorrect clues. But this changed after famed columnist—and noted crossword fan—Franklin Pierce Adams joined the World. Recognizing the game’s high-profile fan base, Petherbridge realized that she could make a name for herself if she really took ownership of the game. In turn, she and her colleagues, F. Gregory Hartswick and Prosper Buranelli, began setting the puzzles a full week ahead, proofing them for errors and establishing uniform standards, like only using dictionary words for game play.

The crossword was coming into its own, but it would take another year for it to truly go viral. Anecdotally, Richard Simon’s aunt, a fan of the game, is to thank for this: as the story goes, she inspired Simon and his partner Max Schuster to publish the world’s first crossword book as a launching pad for their new book publishing house. The $1.35 book —which came with an attached pencil (a cross-promotion with the Venus Pencil Company)—proved to be a smash success, laying the foundation for Simon & Schuster to become one of America’s biggest publishing houses.

The crossword started appearing everywhere. Families used them to announce engagements, including the pending union of Miss Katherine Langley and James G. Bentley of Pennsylvania. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad announced it would put dictionaries on trains to “come to the aid of traveling cross-word puzzle enthusiasts.” One speaker at the Amateur Athletic Union’s annual meeting took the time to bemoan how much the hobby had bled into practice time. “The fascination of the puzzles is keeping the athletes of the country away from their training,” he alleged. “They put on their running or bathing suits and then stay in the locker rooms asking each other for words that fill in the white spaces of the puzzles.”

“Crosswords were the Beatles of 1924,” Petherbridge, who would go on to become the New York Times’ inaugural crossword editor under her married name, Margaret Farrar, later remarked.

By 1925, even Queen Mary (along with “lesser members of the royal family”) had taken up the pastime. But with all the buzz—including an original Broadway musical Puzzles of 1925 and a pop song—came pushback.

A crossword fanatic ringing up a doctor in the middle of the night to find the answer to a clue. Reproduction of a drawing after D.L. Ghilchilp, 1925. CC BY 4.0

Just as Wordle has its share of detractors (a phenomenon only magnified by social media), a look back at newspaper reports from the 1920s shows that the crossword faced its own number of critics.

Some of these complaints against the crossword feel quaint. For instance, the president of the British Optical Association blamed the crossword for eye strain: “Qualified opticians,” he said, “could perform valuable service to the public in warning them against over indulgence in the pastime under wrong conditions.” Other accusations, however, that sought to dismiss the game’s worth, read more like contemporary Twitter screeds. Take one pastor who used his sermon to declare that “the working of cross-word puzzles is the mark of childish mentality.” He continued, “there is no use for persons to pretend that working one of the puzzles carries any intellectual value with it.”

A literary debate around puzzling also raged: Should the crossword be taken seriously? The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, for one, “answered in the negative” when it reported it had no crossword books on file, and no plans to acquire any. “[T]he city’s money should be spent for more serious purposes,” one icy statement read.

Combing through coverage of crossword puzzles in the 1920s, I’m struck by how convinced its detractors were that the game wouldn’t have long-term relevance. But of course, we know now that the crossword wasn’t going anywhere. Currently more than 50 million Americans do them, and the crossword appears in every major daily newspaper.

Those who want to write Wordle off as a fad today would, in turn, do well to heed the advice of the Chicago Department of Health of 1924, which prescribed the crossword for “general health and happiness.” The slim bulletin, titled “Crossworditis,” asserted that “part of our lives and much energy must be put into amusement, to satisfy the play instinct within us.”

Wordle and the veritable cottage industry of derivatives that have already sprung up in its wake—from Heardle, which uses audio clues to popular songs, to the NSFW Lewdle, to the Taylor Swift-themed Taylordle—may be more contemporary in tone and tech than the crossword of the 1920s, but they continue to fulfill that same need for a new generation of fans.

After all, as one reporter observed when the crossword was just taking off, puzzling itself—“despite its furious vogue at the moment”—was nothing new: “Through the ages it runs,” the article noted, “with each age setting for itself its own brand of riddle.”

The post Before Wordle, There Was Cross-Word Mania appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Charity singles are the songs specially recorded by musical artists to benefit charitable causes. Perhaps the best known are 1984’s Band Aid, which sang “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” about Ethiopian hunger, and 1985’s “We Are The World,” recorded on behalf of Africa. Critics have never warmed to the genre, but I surprised myself by growing attached to a number of them. Not only do they tend to have the hookiest of choruses, but there is also something particularly pleasurable about music that makes no effort whatsoever to be cool. In a cynical, highly marketed, autotuned, and media-managed music world, singers prepared to just turn up and belt out a chorus seem endearing. They have an appealing lack of glossiness, and even an artificial show of sincerity is more attractive than posed irony.

But there is one thing that is clear when you listen to charity singles. Most are bad. Very bad. Being bad was evidence that a single was thrown together to confront an emergency, with the participating artists typically lowering their usual standards. Bad was kind of the point; the rough production values demonstrated that no money was spent, much less wasted. In fact, the ones that were any good musically were usually unsuccessful.

There had been musical fundraisers before the 1980s. Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Leadbelly did a benefit show for California’s Dust Bowl refugees in 1940. Elvis did a 1961 benefit concert in Hawaii for the U.S.S. Arizona Pearl Harbor memorial and George Harrison did a 1971 concert for Bangladesh. But it was in the ‘80s that the charity single came into its own. Benefit songs sold philanthropy and Victorian values, raising funds for traditional causes such as Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, but in a style that appealed to youth-oriented broadcasting and made use of videos, which were then new.

Charity singles are never just about the money, though. They have an old-fashioned moral message and an idealistic take on the need for social change straight out of Dickens. These songs are statements—about who we think we are as a society, how we want to be seen, and which people in need we think we can “help.” “We Are the World”, we are reminded. “Do Something Now” for Christian Aid. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for the Bradford Football Disaster. The songs themselves created a utopian sense of community, however artificial, between donors and an imagined community of worthy recipients.

There was a recipe for building the perfect 80s charity single. Take an eclectic group of musicians who shouldn’t really get along. Include individual voices that have standout lines (good options are Boy George, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting). One participant must look as if they are taking their part too seriously, and one person must look as if they are not taking their part seriously enough. And there should be a video in which microphones, leads, lyric sheets, and producers are visible, as well as a collective chorus shot including people who did not necessarily perform on the record.

Your group of singers should include someone old, someone new, someone with genuine credibility, someone surprising, and a puppet. The puppets from the British satire Spitting Image appeared in the videos for charity singles, including Genesis’ 1986 song raising awareness of Middle East policy, “Land of Confusion.” (The puppets also made their own spoof charity single in 1990).

The Muppets have had a good run in charity singles too, from the ‘80s to the present day. More recently their theme tune was re-recorded to raise money for a New Zealand cancer charity, and Kermit the Frog performed a duet of “Rainbow Connection” with Ed Sheeran for Red Nose Day, a song that the Muppets and their fans have used to raise charity funds and awareness since the 1980s.

To go with the self-consciously eclectic stars, ‘80s charity single videos were produced in a deliberately slipshod way to emphasize the time and labour donated by musicians, producers, and technicians. The urgent nature of production was made clear in wilfully unprofessional-looking videos, thrown together in a hurry. Viewers got to see the nuts and bolts of the recording process, often with a motley skeleton crew portrayed mucking around together. In fact, the more uncomfortable the style pairings and the less likely the performers to work together normally, the clearer their own charitable donation was. The eclecticism of performers also made it easier to market a charity single broadly.

Whether it’s the performers singing together, the consumers buying the records, or the imagined recipients, everyone was part of the same community, headed up by the Muppets and Boy George. We weren’t just buying a single, we were buying a moral community. At a time when there was no such thing as society and greed was good, charity singles reminded us that there was another way, not perfect of course, but a statement of intent.

The problem with this recipe was that it became too familiar; once the format was instantly recognizable, charity singles lost their sense of spontaneity, their heart—and their charity.

Since that ‘80s heyday, and up to the most recent wave of recordings, the most significant charity single releases have been corporate events for corporate-style charities attached to telethons like Red Nose Day, Children in Need, or Band Aid reboots. These events are not the spontaneous thrown-together responses to crisis, but professionally organized and carefully planned and executed. Recent charity singles have been linked to reality TV show brands like The X Factor and BBC Music, rather than being built from particular pop tribes. The X Factor finalists used to produce a charity single and music video before the final winner of the show was anointed. Making it through the live rounds to perform on the video was a badge of honour in itself. For The X Factor contestants, the charity single was a bridge into a professional music career. There is no awareness to be raised. There is no community to be built. There is a television event to be marketed.

Recently, the charity single has made a comeback as artists step away from the corporate event model to create moments of intensely shared feeling. Once again, some charity singles seem to be about community and finding common ground amidst the shock waves of terrorism, mass violence, and climate change. Portishead, for example, has dedicated its haunting new ABBA cover “SOS” to the memory of Jo Cox, Labour MP, who was shot dead in the run up to the Brexit referendum. Adele and Christina Aguilera both used recent performances to express their reactions to the shooting in Orlando, Florida that killed 49 people at Pulse nightclub.

Indeed, Orlando may be a turning point for the charity single. The multiple charity singles for the Pulse shooting victims have not only been good, but also sung by the right people.

After Orlando, a vigil was held in London’s ‘gay village’ on Old Compton Street in Soho, which was the scene of a violent hate crime in 1999 when 39 people were injured by a politically motivated nail bombing. The London Gay Men’s Chorus performed at the Orlando vigil, singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the live performance captured a feeling of shared vulnerability and collective resilience. Their recording of a charity single marks the arrival of a transatlantic LGBTQ community. It will raise funds for both the Pulse Victims Fund and a British-based charity fighting hate crime.

The most striking example of what a charity single can do now is the recording of Bruce Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” by 60 Broadway stars to raise money for the LGBT Centre of Central Florida. “Broadway for Orlando” contains touches of the Band Aid template. It was recorded in one sitting and the recording studio is the focus of the video. We see shots of the mixing desk. And while some of the singing leaves a bit to be desired, this is not a re-enactment of the ‘80s cliché. Whoopie Goldberg and Sarah Jessica Parker might not compete vocally, but they understand the point of a good cameo. This record is an authentic outpouring by a community with deep-rooted connections to the recipients of funds raised.

This is the charity single at its best. The Orlando charity singers are singing for themselves, and singing resilience into their communities. United in a choir of voices, the Orlando singles find a way to give voice to victims of the unspeakable.

The post We Are the World. We Are the Charity Single. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Journalist David Sax, author of The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes But Fed Up With Fondue, opened his talk at the Grand Central Market downtown by asking the standing-room-only crowd to react viscerally to these words and phrases. While people cheered for “kale” and “bacon,” their response to “cupcake” was mixed—and they booed both “gluten-free” and “bacon-kale cupcakes.” The loudest cheers, however, were reserved for “food trucks.”

This response, said Sax, gets at the heart of food trends and why they matter to us. The people who booed “cupcakes” don’t dislike the taste of cupcakes; likewise, people who groan over our national bacon obsession don’t want bacon to disappear from diner menus.

But although we think our taste in food is individual, “our appetite moves together as a herd,” said Sax. From high-end restaurants to Albertsons, our dietary behavior is driven by food trends. “They are the edible zeitgeist,” he said—and they even move beyond the edible. The bacon craze has changed restaurant menus and spawned bacon T-shirts, a bacon coffin (which resembles but is not made of bacon), and a bacon-scented lubricant that’s sold tens of thousands of tubes.

To illustrate how a food fad comes about, Sax offered the Kogi BBQ taco truck as an example. In 2008, chef Roy Choi lost his job in the recession; he was unemployed and unsure of what to do next. The recession had also hurt the real estate business, and the catering trucks that had long fed construction workers were suddenly on the market. Choi and a partner bought a truck and opened a business making and selling Korean barbecue tacos. They announced their locations on Twitter and quickly went viral thanks to social media, as people shared information on the truck’s location and how long the line was, as well as photographs of the tacos. Despite operating without an advertising or marketing budget, the truck had people waiting on line for two hours.

In the past, said Sax, the Kogi truck’s popularity would have grown slowly by word of mouth. It would have taken years for the story of Roy Choi and his Kogi taco to be picked up by local and then national media. “The reason food trends are so pervasive,” said Sax, is because in the 21st century they “explode onto the scene.” Choi went from being a nobody to a household name in a matter of months.

Food trends start with an innovator, said Sax. That can be someone like Choi or an agriculture enthusiast who comes up with a new strain of kale. Then, the media (people like Anthony Bourdain or Jonathan Gold) pick up on it and share it with a larger audience. And, in turn, other “actors” take those trends and bring them to the masses. Sax asked Roy Choi how long it took for his food to be copied elsewhere; in four months, two other Korean taco trucks were driving around L.A. In eight months, Kogi’s pioneering Korean-Mexican blend was on the menu at California Pizza Kitchen.

Food fads matter, said Sax. They have culinary, economic, cultural, and political impacts. They introduce us to new culinary flavors—in the case of Kogi, the blend of Mexican and Korean flavors created a kind of “fusion 2.0” that melds the street foods of different cultures. Economically, food fads have tremendous impact, and not just in terms of money generated and taxes paid. A food truck costs as little as $30,000 to launch; a restaurant costs at least $100,000. The food truck trend has created an entirely new economic model for innovation. Culturally, food fads expand our horizons—as Choi did in building an interest not just in Korean-Mexican food but in traditional Korean food. And, politically, food trends can create large-scale change. In the wake of Kogi, food trucks banded together and stood up for their rights. Decades ago, the organic and local movement started with San Francisco chef Alice Waters but became a movement once people said they ate that way for the taste.

“Try to imagine a time without food trends,” said Sax. We wouldn’t be looking for new things to eat. We wouldn’t be looking for people to innovate. Restaurateurs would stick to doing what worked.

Food trends are the “start-ups” and “Silicon Valley” of the food industry, said Sax. They push us to eat something different. And, as a result, “we’re living at the best time to eat,” he said. And “that’s because of food trends.”

In the audience question-and-answer session, Sax was asked for his thoughts on the gluten-free trend.

He said that people pick up on buzzwords, from “gluten-free” to “Omega-3.” A study appears showing that “x” can possibly help with “y”—and therefore, we should start eating as much “x” as possible. However, Sax said he doesn’t think the gluten-free diet will last for large numbers of people, particularly with new scientific evidence that calls the existence of gluten intolerance into question.

Another audience member asked if food fads existed in antiquity.

Sax said that turducken might have roots in Roman times: Certain courts would “stuff one T-boned animal into another into another,” like matryoshka (Russian nesting) dolls. But other food fads with early origins have had real staying power. Coffee came to Europe from Ethiopia and took Vienna, and then Italy, by storm. Tea, too, was a fad at first. But the fads die off, and the real trends have an everlasting effect.

The post Why Angelenos Love Kogi BBQ, Kale, and Cupcakes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Momofuku’s David Chang, whose stratospheric success launched a thousand pork belly–stuffed buns, hip ramen restaurants, and kimchi-topped dishes, found his early realization that he was a trendsetter profoundly unsettling. Chang would walk into a new restaurant in Denver and find himself face to face with nearly half of his menu and the same minimalist plywood décor that he’d used at Momofuku Noodle Bar. “I try to take it with a grain of salt,” he said. “I try not to eat at those restaurants. I try to avoid them. It would be like watching the cover band of the band I wanted to see. It’s too meta-fucking-weird.” For a while Chang resented the trends he started and all that they had spawned, but as he has matured and his restaurant business expanded, Chang realized that his power as a trendsetting tastemaker was actually liberating. “It allows us to do other things,” said Chang, “to finance and pursue new flavors and more interesting projects. I fully embrace it, and I want to serve the best buns, the best ramens, the best fried chicken of all time.”

Chang also worried that the increasing importance of food trends for chefs and the restaurant business was skewing the priorities of young cooks, who are less interested in learning the fundamentals of the classical kitchen than they are with whipping out a bag of edible fireworks. He also has a deep problem with appropriation, which has increased in pace dramatically now that the minutia of every single menu is posted online almost instantly. When Chang first heard about Catalan modernist chef Ferran Adrià, who operated the surrealist restaurant El Bulli in northern Spain, he had no idea what was being described, how the dishes looked, let alone how they were made. Those who wanted to find out had to travel there, work in Adrià’s kitchen, and pick up the knowledge by hand. “But now with the Internet, cooks don’t have to travel and see how something is done.” They can just replicate it from photos and recipes posted online. “Food trends are a very dangerous thing,” Chang warned me. “They can spark innovation but also kill innovation.”

Chang acknowledged that food culture is an evolution, and even the foolish trends are what push our culture forward. No one creates their ideas in a vacuum. Even when it seems like someone is putting one more molten chocolate cake on their menu, if the chef is tweaking it in any way by, say, adding Mexican-style chilies and cinnamon to the chocolate or making it with something crazy like pig’s blood (something I tried once, and actually liked), it opens up another road for our taste buds to venture down. Trends are the process of a feedback loop, of competition between talents, and they are a balance between following the herd, pleasing customers, and letting creativity flow. Without them restaurants would serve the exact same dishes they did 40 years ago—we’d still be eating roast beef, mashed potatoes, and frozen vegetables night after night after night.

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In the perpetual game of hot-or-not, what’s on our plate seems to be a particular source of obsession. Will kale still be popular 10 years from now? Will we ever get sick of pizza? What kinds of crazy ingredients can we throw together and still call a taco? In advance of David Sax’s visit to Zócalo to discuss where food fads come from, we asked chefs, restaurateurs, historians, and food writers: What’s the difference between a food fad and a food revolution? And when does it affect the larger culture?

The post When Arugula Became a Thing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Given our obsessive, even fetishistic, interest in coffee, it seems axiomatic that we are drinking more coffee than ever before. But that’s not just wrong. It’s entirely wrong. Our grandparents drank twice as much coffee as we do.

American coffee consumption peaked just after World War II. In that era, soldiers chugged it from tin cups, factory workers used it to brace for long shifts, and office break rooms were chock-a-block with coffee pots. Gum-popping waitresses refilled countless coffee cups lining the counters of all-night diners. Jukeboxes blared the Ink Spots’ melodic harmonizing, “I love the java jive and it loves me,” and Frank Sinatra singing, “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.”

In 1946, American coffee consumption peaked at over 46 gallons per person annually. By 1995, it was less than half that amount.

So what happened to bring an end to coffee’s heyday? The short answer is that Coke took over.

Soft drinks displaced coffee in what the food industry calls “stomach share.” Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi were well-established brands back then, but not nearly as popular as they are today. When coffee’s popularity peaked, Americans drank just 11 gallons of soft drinks annually. But that changed in a hurry. Through the next few decades, soft drink consumption spiked as coffee consumption plummeted. The lines crossed around 1974, and the trends continued. By 2005, Americans drank 51 gallons of soft drinks and only 24 gallons of coffee. In less than 60 years we made this huge shift—from drinking five times as much coffee as soda to drinking half as much.

There are many reasons carbonated soft drinks gained the upper hand over time. Coca-Cola’s brilliant marketing during World War II—including the promise “to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company”—won a generation of loyal customers as the soldiers returned home. And the company promoted strong brand identity and uniformity. A Coke is always a Coke, and postwar consumers appreciated knowing exactly what they were in for, whether they bought “the real thing” from an Atlanta soda fountain, the Beverly Hills Hotel, or a dusty gas station on Route 66. Coffee—stronger here, weaker there—was less of a curated brand offering the same experience again and again (until recently). The genius of Howard Schultz wasn’t just to brew good coffee, but to brand Starbucks as if it was Coke.

Of course the reason we can talk interchangeably about soft drinks and coffee is because of what they have in common: caffeine. All of the five top-selling soft drinks, and eight of the top 10, are caffeinated. Although there is less caffeine in soft drinks than in coffee, even the mere 34 milligrams in a can of Coke is a psychoactive dose. And caffeine, even at low levels, just makes us feel good—energetic, alert, optimistic, even. The cola industry is so dependent on caffeine that it blends more than 10 million pounds of the bitter, white powder into beverages every year.

So Americans have not just been swapping a hot, slightly bitter beverage for a cold sweet one; we have been shifting the preferred sources of our favorite psychoactive drug (though coffee, with its higher caffeine levels, is still the top source of caffeine in the American diet). Some of us follow a sort of hybrid strategy, supplementing our morning coffee with afternoon soft drinks. Others drink soda in a pattern familiar to coffee drinkers—one can first thing in the morning, another a half hour later, one at mid-morning, and another in mid-afternoon. Adding insult to coffee’s injury, we now spend more than twice as much on soft drinks as we do on coffee, more than $75 billion annually. This despite the incessant jokes about $5 lattes.

But coffee is bouncing back: Consumption has climbed since its nadir in the 1990s, and we can credit this new era of tasty, widely accessible, and carefully branded java for that recent growth. Soft drink sales, meanwhile, have declined slightly in recent years, due to health concerns. And the trends continue to evolve. As soft drinks have lost some steam, other formulations of sugar and caffeine—bottled teas and energy drinks—have gained momentum.

It’s a funny thing to ponder, as we choose our daily brew from a McCafé or Starbucks or Stumptown. There’s no doubt we live in coffee’s golden age, with better coffee more available than ever before. There’s just less of it than first appears.

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