Woollen Hulls

ON DECONSTRUCTION

by Alexander Freeling

Ferran Adrià could never be accused of being too straightforward. The celebrated Spanish chef made his name with dishes that were part science experiment, part conceptual art. Familiar dishes made utterly strange by a cocktail of tricksy humor and laboratory technique.

As Silviya Svejenova and colleagues put it, “Adrià’s artistry is in the contrasts (hot–cold, soft–crunchy, solid–liquid, sweet–savory), the concepts (e.g., foams), the techniques (e.g., spherification), and the creative methods (e.g., deconstruction).”

WEAK TIES AND STRONG TIES

by Alexander Freeling

It was a theory of social networking before social networks. In 1973, Mark Granovetter published an essay on “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Rejected four years earlier by one of the major sociology journals while Granovetter was still a grad student, it ultimately made his name.

Strong ties are connections to people close to you. Weak ties—no surprise—link to the opposite: friends of friends, people you see at the pub or the gym, perhaps some distant family. Granovetter’s idea was simple enough: weak ties matter more than we think.

RABBIT HOLES

by Alexander Freeling

The curse of the algorithm is also its genius: the goal is to make you watch one more video, but whether you click or not, it uses that fact to become even more persuasive next time. The forces of repetition win either way. It’s the inverse of channel hopping: rather than randomly skipping until something grabs you, it serves you a seemingly random but utterly calculated platter of options.

OTHER PEOPLE’S GEAR

by Alexander Freeling

Borrowed branding has a strange appeal. The most egregious example might be Franklin & Marshall: not the small liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but the Italian clothing brand of the same name, which for years produced athletic clothing with unlicensed Franklin & Marshall logos, before finally going straight and cutting a deal with the college. Their hoodies, sweatpants and tees sold well outside of the United States, and low-end fashion retailers in the UK are still trying to shift boxes of them. For the rest of the world, it was a believable heritage logo with a dash of New England money and collegiate athleticism. In the US—where business was decidedly less successful—it was just someone else’s gear.

RULES OF THE HAT

by Alexander Freeling

This year I broke a rule I didn’t know I’d made: no hats at home. It wasn’t intentional, I realized, but over the years hats, like shorts, had become things to wear only in warmer climes (which is to say: not Britain). There were a couple of practical reasons for the change. One was my aforementioned DIY haircutting woes; another was the travel restrictions which made longer-distance trips distinctly more complicated.

IMPORTED GOODS

by Alexander Freeling

There’s trouble afoot in British cheesemaking. Simon Spurrell, a purveyor of small-batch Cheshire and Stilton cheeses, has been voicing his frustration that any order from a European citizen now requires a post-Brexit health certificate costing roughly 50 times the price of a decent cheddar. Sales to individual customers have become impossible virtually overnight. On the other side of the refrigerator, British consumers are noticing a paucity of Époisses and Pont-l’Évêque. Those in the fishing industry report similar woes, including a reduction of four-fifths in exports and a crisis in particular for the shellfish business, whose offering is prized by French restaurants but shunned by the local crowd.

ON BEING COLORFUL

by Alexander Freeling

Only some colors are colorful. To be full of color implies intensity and saturation. This is why colorful also means to be bright, lively, and expressive. It can also be euphemistic: if my language is a bit coarse, you might call it colorful, though if it was really improper you could say that I was being blue.

DIY

by Alexander Freeling

Unless you’re a professional, practical work comes in two forms: the kind that needs doing and the kind it’s fun to attempt. How big each of these categories are, and what they contain, depends on your personality and preferences. I like to cook, so that’s a hobby; I have less appetite for decorating, so that’s work. I am faced with cutting my own hair at the moment, so that’s a disaster.

Economists sometimes define hobbies as inefficient work. In other words, if you could pay someone to do your gardening and thereby gain time or money, that’s an efficiency. And if, in spite of the efficiency, you’d rather do it yourself, that’s a hobby.

HEAVYWEIGHTS

by Alexander Freeling

Cold, like happy, is a relative term. Tell anyone from New York or Moscow that it was cold in Britain this year and you might get a pitying chuckle. But in a land without snow tyres or decent central heating, it was. At least, this is how I choose to explain my recent fascination with seriously heavy fabrics.

ON BRAND

by Alexander Freeling

The promise of modern branding has always been complicated. On the one hand, brands have existed for centuries as a kind of maker’s guarantee. Medieval English merchants would attach their names to bales of cloth, using their reputation to vouch for the consistency and honesty of the product. On the other hand, since the arrival of mass production, branding has been used to distinguish a manufacturer’s goods, elevate them, and insist on their exceptionality. These are mixed messages: Coke is always Coke, but having a Coke is always special. (Hence the unofficial tagline of its rival: “is Pepsi ok?”)

Nowhere is this tension clearer than in the Domino’s Pizza branded Rolex Air King.