Cuttings: January 2021

In praise of the humble products all around us – blog post by Tim Hartford, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In a famous 1958 essay, ‘I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E Read’, Read’s pencil-narrator ... explains that it has an impressive pedigree: its graphite is from Ceylon, mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphuric acid and animal fats. Its cedar wood grew naturally but harvesting the timber required saws, axes, motors, rope and a railway car. The pencil – if you let it – will talk your ears off on the subject of its six coats of lacquer, or the origin of the brass in its ferrule, or the eraser on its tip. (Shockingly, the pencil even reveals how the graphite gets into the middle of the wood.) ... A modern variation on the pencil’s family tree comes courtesy of Thomas Thwaites, an artist and designer whose ‘Toaster Project’ was an attempt to design and build an ordinary toaster, beginning with assembling his own raw materials – quarrying mica, refining plastic, smelting steel. ‘You could easily spend your life making a toaster,’ he told me when I interviewed him about the project more than a decade ago. And indeed he took various short-cuts. Nevertheless, his finished toaster cost about £1,000 and required several months of work. It looked like a cake iced by a three-year-old, and when plugged into the mains it immediately caught fire.”

John Rawls: can liberalism's great philosopher come to the west's rescue again? – article by Julian Coman in The Guardian. “The vision of fairness in A Theory of Justice aspired to what Rawls called ‘the perspective of eternity’... Imagine, he suggested, if a society gathered to debate the principles of justice in a kind of town hall meeting, but no one knew anything about themselves. ‘No one knows his place in society,’ wrote Rawls, ‘his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.’ Passing judgment from behind this ‘veil of ignorance’, he believed, people would adopt two main principles. First, there should be extensive and equal basic liberties. Second, resulting social and economic inequalities should be managed to ‘the greatest benefit of the disadvantaged’ ... Following its triumphant publication however, the times began to change at dizzying speed. De-industrialisation bestowed a bitter legacy of distrust, division and disillusionment in the west, symbolised in Britain by the scars left by miners’ strike of 1984. Marketisation and the rise of the new right inaugurated an era in which growing inequality was not only sanctioned but celebrated.... The neo-liberal dismantling of the welfare state sidelined the ethos of Rawlsian egalitarianism. ... Following the financial crash, further culture wars ignited, dividing liberal cities from socially conservative hinterlands amid a resurgent nationalism. A new focus on systemic racism led to the formation of movements such as Black Lives Matter. There is now a palpable crisis of faith in the possibility of the kind of consensus that Rawls hoped to philosophically ground. What was it that A Theory of Justice didn’t foresee, or value enough, or understand?”

The director who dared to suggest Jewish men don't need rescuing by blond women – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “The director Joan Micklin Silver, who died [recently], made distinctly Jewish movies, as opposed to the kind of Jewish-lite movies that were – and are still – Hollywood’s more usual style.... . She took on what has stealthily become a staple cliche of American romcoms, exploded it and inverted it: the theme of Jewish assimilation.... Romcoms are based on the idea that love will save the protagonist. In fairytales, this means a wealthy prince rescuing a poor girl; in modern romcoms, it often means a dark-haired young man getting lifted out of his Semitic misery by a perky blond woman. [Woody] Allen more than any other film-maker established this template, particularly in his films with his then partner, Mia Farrow.... Thanks in no small part to Allen, you see this trope in every romcom starring actors such as Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler opposite the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, Drew Barrymore. In all these movies, the men are attractive because they have what are now seen as innately male Jewish qualities (anxiety, sarcasm, self-obsession), but simultaneously need to be rescued from them. Only someone who is their exact opposite can do that because while male Jewish qualities are depicted as desirable, the qualities associated with Jewish women (nagging, spoilt, nasal voices, dark hair) are very much not, as these movies often emphasise.... But in Crossing Delancey, [Silver] made that rarest of things: an American movie that actually celebrates Jewishness, as opposed to mocking it, exploiting it or apologising for it.”

Katharine Whitehorn obituary – by Janet Watts in The Guardian. “In the column she contributed to the Observer from 1963 until 1996, Katharine Whitehorn, who has died aged 92, did much to revolutionise the journalism that women wrote and read. She made her readers laugh, told them to stop trying to be perfect and brought their private concerns to public attention in ways that liberated lives – men’s as well as women’s.... She was a survivor, and she survived in style. A defining image of her adorned the cover of Whitehorn’s Social Survival (1968): the author in sparkling party mode, showing how to hold a bag, gloves, plate, cigarette, drink and fork in one hand, while leaving the other free ‘for shaking’.... Her best-loved book was her first, Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961...). Clever hostesses – including herself – went on serving her dirt-cheap, delicious recipes to their guests into the next millennium.... The book sold well for 40 years and the original edition was republished in 2008; it immortalised the lifestyle it outlived, in which even people as glamorous as the young Whitehorn ‘entertained’ in one room.”

Thank you, Katharine Whitehorn, for giving all the female reprobates a voice – article by Barbara Ellen in The Guardian. “Whitehorn’s writing aimed to reflect the times she was living in and it was defiantly human, female liberal, sane, amused, authentic and often revolutionary in its candid audacity. In her classic book, Cooking in a Bedsitter, she talked about grim landladies, shared bathrooms and cooking kippers. In one of her most famous articles, ‘Sluts’, she dryly appealed to her chosen tribe of female reprobates: ‘Those who have ever changed their stockings in a taxi, brushed their hair with someone’s nailbrush or safety-pinned a hem.’ In this way, Whitehorn was an instinctive and valuable feminist voice. One way to do womankind a favour is to take the sting out of our omnipresent anxieties and imagined inadequacies. She had a gift (and it is a gift) for evoking the pathos and humour of chaotic female life and for making women especially (though by no means exclusively) relate and laugh. Whitehorn made women of her generation feel ‘seen’, and she continues to do so decades later. ... She created a need for female-fuelled journalism. She cemented the market that clamoured for it. She created a safe space for all stripes of women writers to write and… breathe. On behalf of all the ‘sluts’ who followed, RIP, Ms Whitehorn, and thanks.”

How FarmVille and Facebook helped to cultivate a new audience for gaming – article by John Naughton in The Observer. “FarmVille was an agriculture-simulation game.... It was launched on Facebook in 2009 and for two years was the most popular game on the site.... You started with a virtual farm and a fixed amount of the virtual currency, Farm Coins, which you could add to by harvesting crops or visiting your neighbours. Your virtual farming career involved ploughing land, planting seeds and harvesting. If you were not diligent your crops would wither and die after a given time, depending on how long it took to grow each one.... The intriguing thing is that at one time more than 34 million sentient beings were doing this stuff every day. ... In its heyday, it was despised by the gaming industry, focused as it was on expensive, specialised gaming consoles and DVD franchises. [Marcus] Pincus [the original chief executive of the company which created Farmville] saw [it] as a relaxing activity that would appeal to a general audience, especially adults and women who would never have spent serious money on a PlayStation or an Xbox 360 and yet might enjoy playing a game. Now that most gaming seems to be moving online, you could say that he saw the future before the industry did.”