Farhad Manjoo: All I needed to survive lockdown was sourdough

For a few innocent weeks about 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of the quarantine era of 2020, my Instagram feed and perhaps yours, too, was suddenly overrun with images of impossibly lovely loaves of homemade bread. It was one of the first social-media show-off fads of the pandemic; with everyone stuck at home, cut off from gym mirrors and airplane wings at sunset, bread-making virtuosity emerged in certain circles as the hottest new way to show everyone online how much better you were than everyo