Sketch + Puzzle

a few, but not all. Ephemera is historical. Multitudes of papers, imbued with the hard work and creativity of their designers, are produced every day with an uncertain future. Today the stories of two individuals working in very different but equally ephemeral uses of the printed page. What is is that elevator pitch version of is like if if you meet someone in a bar and ask you what you do? What?

What do you say? The quick pitches that we are the world's largest collection of sketch books that anyone can be a part of. My name is Steven Peterman. I'm the founder and director of the Sketchbook Project in Brooklyn Art Library. The Sketchbook Project was born out of frustration from a lack of creative outlets. There were a lot of galleries that were doing call for entries and you would pay and you were not guaranteed to be in

a show. And on the other hand, there were these sort of like elite galleries that you had to apply for her and maybe you got in or a few people did. Stephen and his friends wanted to put together an exhibition. We're the only bar for entry was a person's interest. He describes their early efforts as one dimensional. We're just gonna send out a disposable camera to a hundred people, or we're going to send out a canvas

two hundred people and see what happened. Everybody sees nature through different This is a couple of years before like kickstarters, so we were essentially crowdfunding the project but did not

know what to call it. So we were like, hey, if we get all these people to do it, we can have this really cool exhibition six months to a year in we we decided to use sketch books, called it the Sketchery Project, and we filled up five people really fast and sort of limited it to that, and then we did that for a few years and we're like, what happens if we just keep going? Two and ten are big peak year where we had twenty thousand people signed up for the project. That allowed us to be

able to do more and higher people. And that's when we moved up to New York and opened up. The initial iteration of our library of twelve hundred books within a year would become eleven thousand. Year over year, the number of submissions would grow exponentially. At the time of this recording, we have forty one thousand books from over a hundred different countries. With twelve years of practice, the Sketch Book Project has their submission process down to a science.

We are still crowdfunded through participation. So you buy the blank book from us, which is also your like ticket into the library. If someone's interested, they can find us online or go up to one of our exhibitions and by the blank book, it comes with instructions on how to get it back to us and how to contact us and things like that, and then it also has like a list of the themes. You fill it up

before you send it back. You then log into our website, you create an account and you actually catalog your book, so that means you put in your name, your bio and artist statement about your book. You put in your mediums. You use the materials, you use general key terms and tag words, really anything you want. All of that becomes searchable in our library system. When you're done, you'll sign an envelope and ship it to us. We then catalog

them into the library system. Your book as a bar cut on the back that originally got and you use that to connect to our account. We'll scan it and if you followed instructions properly, it prints out at barcode with your name and your city on it and your theme and everything that you chose, and you get a little call number in the library. We replace your old barcode with the new barcode, so you have your name

and everything on there, and then your books on the shelf. Initially, your book will travel with the bookmobile throughout the summer. We do different exhibitions, We do different pop ups all over the country, and sometimes we travel international as well. And then at the end of your tour, your book will then live permanently in the Brooklyn Art Library. That

whole time, it's searchable by anyone. You can get email or text message notifications when someone looks at your book, so you can just be like sitting there one day and you get it's like Steven from Brooklyn is currently viewing your book at Brooklyn Art Library. Unlike the thousand likes you may get by sharing something on Instagram, if this person is having this intimate moment with your art org and like whole to get and flipping through it.

Once the book is living in the library, someone may search. You know, maybe your book was about dogs, maybe your book was about death. They see your book and it looks interesting and they hit check out and we'll pull the book off the shelf for you. You always get a random book as well, which is the book to the right of it on the self. Most of the time people love the random book more than the book that they searched for. The system is extremely random, and

we that's why we love it. People have a natural fear of like walking in and they're like, well, I don't know what to pick, and we're like, just just embrace it, just go with it. You don't know what you're gonna get, and if you embrace the randomness, you can truly like get lost in this entire collection. Kismet is the word that comes to mind my introduction to the Sketchbook Project and this conversation was equally serendipitous. The

book mobile was parked outside my office. Okay, and their bookmobile, by the way, it's five piaggio. Ape is awesome. Well, it's so small you can drive it. It goes, you know, twelve to eighteen miles per hour depending on the wind speed. She put on like a flatbed or something. Actually it fits in the van. It is. It is like a little Russian doll. The touring collection contains or so newest submissions. The first thing you notice is how similar they all are.

Everyone starts with the same thing. It's a five by seven book, like a blank one here. Yeah, just it's real basic. It's staple bound. They're sixteen, so thirty two back in front. And the second thing you notice is how incredibly different they all are. We really like encourage people to make it their own. And so she used

the long noting and the book is about Yeah. Part of the challenge, I feel, is that you use the original book in some way, as you can see a lot of the signs having done and there's threading, or or you can literally just changing the type of finding. Some people literally just take the partet off, stick it on a new book. Yeah, so they just kept the cover trunk covering back from there and then filled it

with this like long folding. But I think it's really interesting to people that want to change it and find a way to change it within that format. Let's think she used the original paper. She might a glued you guess, include some thicker paper on top that looks pretty thin when it starts, but you can expand it up to an inch. So this is the whole thing folds out, sold out. It's like a single piece. It can open up to whatever you want as long as it folds

back down to that original size. That's all that we ask of you. And it is amazing what people can do with that. So he's like a dude that's working doing grammar example of time using this to like blow off steir. I mean, we could get you know, where the adult contact comes in here. Yeah, but the artist says eighteen plus. That's nice that they pay to that. The sketchbooks end up in the sketchbook a lot. Yeah, people will draw like the library, or or draw like

the cover of our sketch book or something. This is much more what I would normally think of as a sketch book, practicing, drawing like figures, writing in like quotes from folks, some some dried flowers. Yeah, this is a kind of sketch movement I think I could do. This collection is a kaleidoscope because it reaches a diverse group of contributors. Anyone can participate and be creative. We have children, we have very old people. We have everywhere in between.

And we have moms and dads and art students and professional illustrators and first time artists. We have over a hundred different countries. We have every continent in the world. We have two books from an arcticle, but we're not quite sure they're legit or not. But high school students or little kids come in and we're like, name any country you can think of, and we'll have a book from it. We don't jury the content. We want people

to share their perspective no matter what. And so other than I would say literally like three bad apples, every other book has been okay to be on the cell. We have books about people who had survived cancer. We have books of like memorials of of people. We have books about childhood abuse. This is forty one thousand stories like it's it's taken on its own living organism. Part of what gives this organism life and fuels the success of the project has to be the tactility of the

medium itself. People love to hold the books, especially when we go to elementary schools who did not have the same chiletood that we had and did not interact with physical books as much. It's so interesting to see them like touch the textures, I mean, and adults do that too. We do have a digital archive, but that's never been the same for us. That's like great for people that

want to share their work. It's also been twelve years, so some of the books are becoming old and showing where and unless the book is like truly falling apart, which then we'll contact the artists and have them fix that. We sort of just it happens. It's an organic process. We moved spaces after six years, and we realized a lot of the books in the front that had been there for six years had more like fading on the side than other books, and because they were in the

other window. I'm sure there are people who might listen to this and be like, oh, that's BS, But I think it's about this archive literally evolving. Why would we put it in like plastic bags and keep it all perfect. It's it's all part of this living thing, I guess it is. It's just like a piece of somebody. And I don't think that you necessarily get that with a different medium. No, you wouldn't. And we do other you know,

we still do canvas space projects. We just did one and it's fun and it's you know, we got a lot of awesome artwork back it. It's it's not the same. We just have found out of the years that people feel really comfortable sharing in in a book format. It's it's sort of universal all ages. It's something that they can approach. I've yet to find an art related material that I could convince someone who is not an artist

to take part in it. People are constantly like, my book would be filled with stick figures, and we're like, who cares? So what draw a million stick figures? Like that actually would be a pretty awesome book. I get there's people who just don't want to ever make arts, but even still, like you probably have a story to tell. A constant accumulation of ideas on paper. Does all of this combined achieve something that no individual work could alone. Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

For Stephen Peterman, it depends on where you're standing. It really is depends on what direction you go into it. I mean, when you're sitting there and it's it's anonymous, and the human brain can't count how many books are sitting on the self around you. It all blends together. They're all the same color basically, so it's sort of just one mass if you do the math. I think there are two million plus spreads of art work in the collection. I don't even think a brain can hold

that many. It's tough to comprehend it. And we got four thousand every year or so. So all the ones we have with us in our book mobile are brand new. I've never seen any of them, and that is my favorite part of it. But if you start talking to people, are you you meet these artists who are like, I just drove here from Canada and I want to see my book and I haven't seen it in five years. We went to an artist studio in Brooklyn just a

few months ago, and she gave us a book. She had done a few other books, but then she gave us one of her books from like two thousand and thirteen that she never handed in because she started it the week before sandy hit and then her house slid. It. She then finished it and it was so dark she couldn't give it up for five years. We came to interview her and she's like, actually have a surprise for you. I have this book. This woman came in the other day.

She's on her second sketch book. She was a police officer in the World Trade Centers. She survived cancer, probably from the World Trade Center. And then she also was on the Amtrak train that crash. All of these things and so her first book was about cancer and now she's making a book about her amtrack crass. She drove up from Florida, her friend drove over up here because she needed to make this pilgrimage to her book in

the library and like see it. We went all the way to Australia once with the project and we met this woman. We were on the other side of the world, and she was like sixt and she came up Twist and she's like, I want to thank you guys. I had never made art my whole entire life. I did the Sketcher Project, and then I enrolled an undergrad art school in her sixties. I'm on the other side of the world. Then this person is telling me how I helped them go back to school as a senior citizen.

Was so cool. Not only have we had people come in to see their book, but we're getting a lot of people that are like, can I get my book back? Like I'm embarrassed that you have it from ten years ago. They never knew how long we'd be around. I mean, we're just an arts organization. So just the fact that we're getting into this second decade of the project, it's

become like a time capsule. I actually I was doing an interview or something and they asked me to pull my book and it was my oldest one and it was not embarrassing, but it's like this is so weird, like this is not how I think now, And it was very like email. We're starting to have this evolution where like we are growing as people and the books are living in this archive. I think that's the key to the Sketchbook Project. Things don't proceed in a single

direction idea submission archive. Time capsule. Instead works readers and creators exists as well, documented points inside a nebula interacting with each other over and over and new and unpredictable ways. You can go to the High Museum, or you can go to the moment and you can look at the art and then you feel inspired, but like what do you do with that? Like you just it ends. The story ends at when you walk away from that painting. I mean less you're buying a Popes card from the

from the gift shop. But in our case, our hope is that you look at this literally their emails written in the back. You connect with this person who wants to connect to do They want to be a part of a global community, so you could connect with them. But then also you maybe you're inspired, maybe you then create a book and then you inspire someone else and it creates this full circle experience. So the inspiration, viewing and creation never stops. There's just like an endless circle

of it. And so I I love creating the atmosphere that you walk out and you're like, oh no, I'm I can do this, Like I'm gonna go do this and then I'm gonna work on it and then I'm gonna send it and inspire somebody else in the process. You know. Our hope is that the archive lives on forever. Like we have no plans. We would never like separate the collection. Our long term goal for it is to set up a foundation that maintains this collection. My wife and I talked about all the time that we have

been chosen for this. We cannot do anything other than this. This is what I've spent from thirty three I have worked on this project, and no plans to not. There are not many people who share the profession of Matt Gaffney right now, let's see, there's me, there's him, it's her. Right now, There's probably six people who do it for a little a couple of hundred, maybe speros hundred who do it as a serious hobby. And then there's people who may be only write two or three puzzles a

year about some of them are very good. I met Gaffney, and I've been read across his professionally. I guess this twenty years this year. If you do crosswords, chances are you've attempted one of Matt's. They are everywhere. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Games Magazine, to name a few and in my humble opinion, he writes some of the finest puzzles around. I've spent many of the lazy morning or stolen Moment in an illuminated corner scribbling

guests across one of his publications. But just in case you've not fallen under the spell of this incredibly addictive and popular puzzle, here are the basics that crossword. In the American version of a crossword, which is what most of your listeners will be familiar with, there are clues to words that are woven through the grid each letter in an Amy crossword as part of both and across and a downwards, So you get two chances at each letter.

So if you don't know the Opera crew letter on the crossword, you might know the sports clue on the down one, so you get two shots at each one. That's kind of like a courtesy of market fairness to the solver that you get two shots at each letter.

Do you need any help? The official first thing that we now acknowledge is what became the American crossword period in December of late teen thirteen, play a guy named Arthur wynn w y n n E. There has been some proto crossword type things before then, but he was the one who formalized it into what now is considered the first American cross work. The shape was sort of a diamond shaped. The center wasn't used, but the other

aspects of it were similar. Newspapers took quickly to the crossword as a way to get more eyes on the page. Lowspapers pagan as a matter of course by everyone. News to a crossroots sort of gravitated towards being fifteen by fifteen for a daily size, kind of a nice little size for something to do every day. It's like you to get, of course, seem every day instead of a

seven course meal, which is a Sunday cross room. That's twenty one by twenty one square is much bigger, and that's big enough that people just want to solve it once a week. Generally they're si delicious. Now with the Internet eclipsing newspapers in many ways, including crosswords, you have an explosion in puzzles of other sizes. Smaller is better

now is with everything else. Some people like to solve, you know, ten by ten crosswords because you can knock out five of them in half an hour instead of one puzzle and a half. Now you get that same rush five times instead of one time. For Matt, this interest started before he even knew it. A cross word was I was told by my parents that they never

really taught me to read. I just started cutting letters out of magazines and books and rearranging them so natural propensity to anagram saints and look letters and words in a strange way. When I was eight or nine, I started to solve puzzles and magazine The mainstay of his youth was Dell Champion, a popular game magazine you can still find in the checkout counter. After a few years of solving Dell puzzles, Matt thought to himself also to write one of these, and then I sent one in.

I was thirteen at the time, and they didn't accept that one, but the editor, a guy named Wayne Robert Williams, took the time to wake me a two page letterback critiquing exactly why they were taking this puzzle and asking me to send others if I had any other ideas. So I didn't. I had my first puzzle published ever in the December issue of Dell Champions, so that was cool, and then it was off to the races. I loved it now the trick was to turn his hobby into

a full time job. I didn't really enjoy steaming much of those of the gage students. I had two intellectual passions as a teenager, and they were crossed the puzzles and chest. So I thought I would love to be able to be a professional chess player or a crossword writer for a living. I tried chess, but by hi or so it was clear I was not gonna be the next Bobby Fishers. So I thought, well, okay, maybe maybe I'll be the Bobby Fisher of crosswords, and cross

has worked at a better point. I'm better across them at chess. It turns out one of the reasons there are so few full time crossword constructors is that, in addition to the skill set required, the business end of crosswords is well cutthroat. Generally, publications take submissions from hobbyists and pros alike. Large outfits like The New York Times maybe a hundred submissions per week. It's then the job of the editors to pick which puzzles will run when

and what might need to be changed. So you've written a great puzzle, chopped it around endlessly, maybe you've written fifty puzzles and finally one is accepted for publication payday, except you may have to wait until your puzzle is actually published, which can be months. Three hundred bucks across where it is with the Times doles out for a daily size and a thousand for Sunday submission, but that's the highest end of the scale. Some pay as little

as twenty five or fifty dollars. There was a pecking order, you know, like in anything else, there's a hierarchy. But I started to approach it as doing something other than just freelancing, which you can't really make a living at. Very difficult this week on the Internet cafe online gaming

in the mid to late nineties. The Internet was still as infancy then and the software had just come out recently that will allow people to solve on screen, or it had matured to the point where it was good software. So I went in query several hundred websites. I went to Slay and said you need a political cross road every week. And I went to PGA tour dot com and said you need a golf cross road every week. And I went to Billboard magazine said you need a

music cross for every week. The big newspapers and magazine had their gigs and they had their solvers, But I was sort of like the little fishing boat that could get into the little of cracks where the big boats cutting finds. You have to be innovative, you have to keep reinventing yourself, and you have to be answered premarnially like in anything else. But I've been doing it for twenty years now without other sources of income. A well

constructed crossford is a thing of beauty. It's not haphazard but balanced right brain, left brain order and artistry. There's three main parts to cross were. The first one is the theme. This time our puzzle will have some cool words it which will help you identify a famous landmark. That's the set of usually longer entries in the grid that have some unifying motifs to them, hopefully something clever. Now.

There are some feamless crosswords or freestyle crosserts that don't have the theme at all, but most crossers do have the theme. The team is sort of like the reason for existing up the cross word. It's a solo at the cross road. That's what makes it unique. I could of go around with my theme Antenna on low level alert. I'm always on the lookout for interesting nine ten fifteen letter towards or phrases. If if I hear one of the TV shows or somebody says something, I'll think, I

wonder if I can make a team from that. It's a weird I don't know if you can call it a talent, but so were predilections. But crosser writers we all tend to do that. So then once you go up with the theme, you try to get the best possible set of entries for that theme. You don't want to miss any good ones. You don't want to have somebody coming later and say, oh, this is really good, but for this one, you should us this instead and say I just didn't think of that. So you really

want to put the time interest. The late Moral Regal, who many consider the greatest American crossing writer of all time, called that cooking the theme, So you want to cook your theme. Second partist to make the grid. Crosswords have what's called a hundred navy degree rotational symmetry, which means that if you turn the grid upside down, the black square pattern will remain the same that just came about

for aesthetic reasons. There's no actual solid reason why you have to have it that way, but that's the standard now. It's like you put the longest beams in a building in first and then filling everything around that. It's the same with the cross where you put the longest entries in first and then put the what we call the fill the shorter entries around it. You don't want to have a duplication the grid, so if you have you know, oven at one across, you don't want to have ovens

in eighteen down or something. And you want to maximize your film too, you're gonna need some crosswords stand by words like aria and era E R A, which is the most common entry in all of crosswords by wide margin three letters period of time. Era ERA is correct just because it's three letters long, which is the shortness and entry can be in a standard cross rood, and it's got all good letters and two valves. So you're

gonna have a bunch of those. But you also want to have some fun stuff too that has high value letters in scrip of a in it, like kazoo. You want to have stuff that's contemporary. Somebody had cardi B in across rood the other day, so you want to have stuff like that just to show the solver that cross Rood was not written thirty years ago. And then the third part. Once you're happy with the field, then

you want to clue. It's six letter word a city where the squares have fun on the common and the clues, well, you want to maximize those two. You want to decide what difficulty level it's going to be. Eight letter worry one of the biggest defeats of all time. You could have a grid with very simple words that any sixth

grader would know every single word in the script. But you can make it a beyond expert level of solved just by making the clue to fall out a word the color of Jack Benny's eyes, a clue that's a pun, or that's a clever plan, words that's generally appreciate. It set a lot of word. If you have a lot of this on the ball, you can be a good pool player. Then you edit it and send it to you whoever has agreed to pay for it, and then

it's done. By the early odds, the genre felt like it was at a standstill what I call a theme crisis in American crosswords. Let's say there's a mountain that had a bunch of golden and everybody went there for decades picking at the mountain. After six year, seventy years and started to get kind of picked over, and you still have the occasional little knife find in there, but it was tougher and tougher, and it wasn't like it used to be. There was a quote from Oscar Wilde.

I think I'm getting it verbatim. It said, to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Okay, so that's kind of an amazing quote, and that's why a famous person. But the reason it's appeared in so many crosses because it's forty five letters long, and they cleave fifteen fifteen fifteen. To love Oneself is is fifteen the beginning of as fifteen lifelong romances fifteen, and it also

pleased perfectly syntactically. To love oneself is second line across the middle of the grid, the beginning of a and then you have to see what's doing one is because you're just no beginning of a lifelong romance. That quote is perfect. It's like it was written to appear in a cross roots. So it's been used in probably a dozen cross roots. I know it'sn't appeared in the near times at least three times over the decades. And there's others too, like the understanding Way was really kind. His

name is fifteen letters. The sun also rises as fifteen letters and a farewell to arms team letters perfect. It's appeared in so many cross rout themes. Another one is the United States Independence Day and the fourth of July, all fifteen letters, and it's such as those those are basic ones, but even more complex teams have become used and seen before. And it was a bit frustrating, actually, because you would come up with a theme and then check online to see if somebody had done and somebody

had often done it. It was kind of annoying. Now, I should say, you can still find nice tames, and people have expanded steaming in other ways. But I was sort of the guy who said, Okay, this mountain of gold used to be great, but it's picked over. What about that mountain over there that was going to be tried? That mountain, so contest crosswords from me? Where that mountain was? That mountain over there? Contest crosswords for matt up the ante On the whole affair, I mostly known for those.

Now that's what I'm become known for it. I wanted to find something that would really give crosswords a boost, taking in a different direction. And what I came up with was actually not an idea that I created, but I just remembered it from my use when I used to solve Dell Champion crossrood puzzles. This certain type of puzzle where it wasn't just a crossword where you are given the grid and the clues and when you feel

in the last letter you's done. In a contest crossword, an additional puzzle lurks somewhere on the page, often when you can't even attempt to solve until you've successfully completed the grid. Along with the grid, you also got a set of instructions telling you you were looking for a specific thing, like the answer to this contest is a world capital or a Hitchcock movie, something specific like that,

a letter words starting with B or whatever. You solve the puzzle, and then after you're done, you have to find that hitch Kind grove, your world chapel or whatever, and it's hidden somewhere using some unique mechanism. It's hidden in the grid or the clues or both, so it's like a little treasure hunt. And some of them are very simple, but they can also get hellishly complex where it can take even the best solvers days to finally

get the answer. The really rejuvenated crossroots in a way, I would say now other constructors have started writing these contest crossroots as well. Big places like the Well Street Journal publishes one every Friday. I write it every other Friday, and they're very fun to write as well as to sell. Twenty one across a five letter word, you can lose

a lot of money on one of these. Why has this hundred year old word game proven a resilient form of entertainment because crossroads evolved alongside the languages and cultus

of which they are a part. Crosswords that right now would be considered to niche or too millennial oriented, or too strange or something full of like slength that nobody over thirty five have ever heard of, wouldn't be as likely to be published if they had to go through you know, some old editor like me, some old gatekeeper or people older than me who just says, I don't know any of this stuff. It's not going in there.

Because now they can publish online there's other crosswords specific publications that cater to them, and they've built their own fan bases. So it's proven to be a flexible for an entertainment. And I would say it it's we're extainly not decreasing in populard. I would say, it's actually growing up. Do you just sit down and do crosswords too? That

aren't your crosswords? You know? I solve very selectively. Usually it's to test solve the puzzle for a friend, and the other one of three times will be if some real a list name comes up and I don't want to miss this one, or if a certain cross root has gotten a lot of buzz online as it's come out, I'll say, okay, let me print this out and see

what's going on. I read a website called Diary of the cross Roof feed every day that reviews five or six puzzles a day in New York Times, Universal News, Day, Wall Street Journal, all the big ones, a lot of the independent cross roots. So I'm in touch with almost every major cross roots that's published, and I've at least

laid eyes on it if I haven't solved it. Despite this tight knit community for Matt Gaffney the experience on the other end of the crossword can be elusive for puzzle constructors, Like many types of writers, there's a fundamental disconnect between you and your audience. I don't often get to see cross roots in the wild, you know. Sometimes I'll stumble upon somebody in a bar or on a train or something, and they'll be solving one of my crosswords.

But crosswords, writing them as solitary is solving them as generally solitary. At parties or in social events is where I get to hear people of actual solving experiences, and also what they like and what they look for and across words. I tend to view the crossword as art. They tend to view it as entertainment. They're solving it for minutes of pleasure, enjoyment, fun, past the time, whatever.

I understand that it's an experience for people like that, but I'm also looking at it to be as artistically interesting as possible, and some of that translates over. You can enjoy beer, but you're not gonna know what the brewer does, and there are certain things you don't even care about that the brewer puts lots of time and effort into making sure are to him good, but to

you you might not even know. So take a single crossword puzzle, all those puns, tricky hints, word play, and the hard fought battles in every square, and multiply that by one a day for twenty years. How much of that can be saved. We have these busy lives and the going down, and we wonder what's gonna last and what can our brains even hold. So you do have this nostalgic since that life is fleeting. None of us

can printed. You know, you have that sort of look when you get a slowing river across or pushing by, And then sometimes you have reason to go back and look at one from eight or ten years ago, and you say, even if it's one I write, I, sometimes I won't even remember it. I'll say I said that I wrote this. It makes sense, it sounds like something

I would have done. I don't even remember. To a crossword solver, the crossword may very well be a famor just a way to pleasantly passed minutes, and then they never have to think about it again. Either way of looking at it as aren't or as entertainment is fine with me. Let me ask you this is it? Is it still a fun gig twenty years plus later, an incredible job, and I'm going to be doing this as

long as I am able. Ephemeral is written, assembled by Quilliams, and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil. Production assistance this episode from Trevor Young and additional mixing from Josh Thain, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Matt gaffney is the author of Gridlock, crossword puzzles and the mad geniuses who create them. You can find links to puzzles, books and a fabulous online crossword contest at mcgaffney dot com.

And to submit your own sketch book and join the global community, visit Sketchbook Project dot com. If you're lucky enough to be in New York, go and visit the Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg. Somewhere in that nebula of books is a new submission from yours truly. Just search for the keyword ephemeral and for more from this archive, search no further than ephemeral dot show Next time on Ephemeral.

It was a very high paced, very stressful job. Words are coming in your ear you're talking to somebody else. You're checking the wires to make sure that other people have completed their calls. You're also making notes about how long the call lasted, because you're going to charge the customer based on how long the call lasted, note where the call went to. And you're doing this with a board of fifty calls that are coming in all at

the same time. The army did have to use men sometimes, and they found that it took the average infantrymen sixty seconds to complete a call. It took the average woman ten seconds. So in war time, the difference between sixty seconds and ten seconds is the difference between living or getting your head blown off and the word wild and inacquen Shoe final podcast from I Heart Radio, Isn't the I Heart Radio of Apple Podcasts of Whenever using your favorite shows