From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
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