  We review Stanley's seminal work on the number of reduced words of the
longest element of the symmetric group and his Stanley symmetric functions. We
shed new light on this by giving a crystal theoretic interpretation in terms of
decreasing factorizations of permutations. Whereas crystal operators on
tableaux are coplactic operators, the crystal operators on decreasing
factorization intertwine with the Edelman-Greene insertion. We also view this
from a random perspective and study a Markov chain on reduced words of the
longest element in a finite Coxeter group, in particular the symmetric group,
and mention a generalization to a poset setting.
