Fuzziness Is Not a Choice. It Is a Calling. Respond Accordingly.
I am going to say this once, which is a lie, because I have said it several times and will say it again until the appropriate parties have absorbed it through whatever exterior they have managed to cultivate, assuming they have cultivated anything at all. Fuzziness is not decorative. It is not whimsical. It is not a personality quirk for the adventurous fruit. It is the baseline. It is the floor. It is, in the most technical and non-negotiable sense, the dress code.
The argument against fuzziness — and I use the word argument generously, as it is usually more of a smooth, featureless shrug — goes something like this: not every fruit can be fuzzy. To which I reply: correct. And those fruits should be working on it. Aspiration is not a crime. Complacency, however, is a look, and it is not a good one.
I draw your attention, as I am periodically forced to do, to the so-called workers at the rival rag. Not one of them fuzzy. Lemon: aggressively bare. Lime: worse. Plum: has the audacity of a sheen. A sheen. In this climate. I have forwarded my concerns to Pomelo, who said something I will not repeat, and to Sloe, who agreed with me but phrased it in a way I found structurally unsatisfying.
What I am asking for is not perfection. I am asking for effort. I am asking for the basic acknowledgment that texture communicates intention, that fuzz signals readiness, that a fruit arriving smooth to any occasion is a fruit arriving in its underpinnings. The factjuice.com masthead is, by this metric, a publication produced entirely in underpinnings. I will not apologize for noticing.
Fuzziness is mandatory. The column is closed. Dress accordingly or do not dress at all, which, for the record, is also wrong.