Cuttings: May 2021

In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly –  article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there. Everyone who has worked with him in journalism and politics describes a pattern of selfishness and unreliability. He craves affection and demands loyalty, but lacks the qualities that would cultivate proper friendship. The public bonhomie hides a private streak of brooding paranoia. Being incapable of faithfulness, he presumes others are just as ready to betray him, which they duly do, provoked by his duplicity. Johnson is driven by a restless sense of his own entitlement to be at the apex of power and a conviction, supported by evidence gathered on his journey to the top, that rules are a trap to catch weaker men and honour is a plastic trophy that losers award themselves in consolation for unfulfilled ambition.”

The obscure maths theorem that governs the reliability of Covid testing – article by Tom Chivers in The Guardian. “Maths quiz. If you get a positive result on a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what’s the chance that you’ve actually got Covid? Surely it’s 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don’t have enough information to make the judgment.... Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). ... it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example. Imagine you undergo a test for a rare disease. The test is amazingly accurate: if you have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time; if you don’t have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time.... But the disease in question is very rare; just one person in every 10,000 has it. This is known as your ‘prior probability’: the background rate in the population. So now imagine you test 1 million people. There are 100 people who have the disease: your test correctly identifies 99 of them. And there are 999,900 people who don’t: your test correctly identifies 989,901 of them. But that means that your test, despite giving the right answer in 99% of cases, has told 9,999 people that they have the disease, when in fact they don’t. So if you get a positive result, in this case, your chance of actually having the disease is 99 in 10,098, or just under 1%. ... Without knowing the prior probability, you don’t know how likely it is that a result is false or true. If the disease was not so rare – if, say, 1% of people had it – your results would be totally different. Then you’d have 9,900 false positives, but also 9,990 true positives. So if you had a positive result, it would be more than 50% likely to be true.” See also ‘Covid, false positives and conditional probabilities...’ by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.

The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea –  article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. “A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: ‘The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.’ Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the ‘new religion of whiteness’ – a religion founded on the dogma that ‘of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan’ – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.”

The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health –  article by Laura Barton in The Guardian. “Our Bodies, Ourselves [was] a book about women’s health and sexuality that would prove revolutionary. It sold more than 4m copies globally and became available in 33 languages, and is considered one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Across its nine editions, it addressed sexual health, sexual orientation, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, postnatal depression, abortion (still illegal in much of the US in the book’s early editions), violence and abuse, gender identity, birth control and desire.... In the spring of [1969] as the women’s movement gained momentum, a Female Liberation conference had been held at ... Emmanuel College [Massachusetts]. There were taekwondo demonstrations, talks called Women and the Church, How Women Oppress Themselves and, on the Sunday morning, a workshop called Women and Their Bodies, held by Nancy Miriam Hawley. At the end of the workshop, the attenders were reluctant to leave, and the discussions spilled on outside. Over the months that followed, they formed a group that would be named the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to discuss their bodies, their lives, sexuality and relationships. The next year, they published a book named after the original workshop title. In 1971, they changed the book’s title to Our Bodies, Ourselves, to reflect women taking ownership of their own bodies. “

Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers –  article by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. “Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin,… is one of 10 electronic music pioneers featured in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s debut documentary, released this weekend. … Rovner’s big coup … is getting Laurie Anderson to narrate: the avant-garde composer signed up, delighted to hear that Oliveros and French composer Éliane Radigue would be properly getting their dues… . ‘It’s very interesting,’ Anderson says today, ‘that a lot of that early work in electronics was done by women. Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened, which is telling. They wanted to think about how sound could recalibrate our body and mind.’ “

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley review: how the modern world was made – article by Miles Taylor in The Guardian. “Few documents are venerated as much as the American constitution…. Yet, as Linda Colley’s brilliant new book shows, viewing constitutions as national tablets of stone tells us more about their contemporary charisma than the complex histories from which they were wrought. In this compelling study of constitutions produced around the world between the mid-18th century and the outbreak of the first world war, she upends the familiar version of history at every turn. Out goes the myth that constitutions were the product of democratic aspirations or revolution – rather they arose from the ashes of war or the threat of invasion. Nations may have been girded by constitutional documents, but these were borderless texts, available for adaptation across time and space. Above all, constitutions were ‘protean and volatile pieces of technology’ that travelled far and wide, assisted by the expansion of print media and the speeding-up of long-distance travel and communication…. Countries needed constitutions not to free the people, but to defend them from aggression from without, and disunion from within.“

‘It was exhilarating’: how the Guardian went digital ... and global – article by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian. “A trip to the US in 1993 to ‘see the internet’ left me in no doubt: the days of the daily printed newspaper were numbered. Once people learned about this thing they were calling the ‘world wide web’, there would be no going back. It might take 10 years, it might take 50, but it was clear that the future was digital. If that much seemed obvious, everything else was a mist of incomprehension and wild futurology. … The questions began in earnest, dozens of them, some concurrent, other consecutive. Was this a new medium, or simply a novel way of distribution?… If it was a new medium, did that require a different team with different skills to produce it?… How much should we invest in this new medium?… How could you protect your commercial revenues?… How could you run print and digital editorial operations in tandem?… What new skills did we need to enlist?… How could the Guardian adapt to being global?… Which came first: the paper or digital?… It took the Guardian nearly 140 years to be confident enough as a national paper to drop the word ‘Manchester’ from its title. It didn’t find a permanent home in London until 1976. Within 25 years of that move, it began to attract an enormous international readership – and it is now viewed on more than a billion browsers a year. The paper’s journey from local to national to global was bewilderingly sudden. Revolutions are fascinating things for historians to study. Living through one is unnervingly interesting. Decisions fly at you furiously fast. There is never enough time to think, and never enough data to help you make the right choice. If you get even half of the decisions right, you’re probably doing quite well. And you may not even know what ‘right’ was until many years later.”

Typo negative: the best and worst of Grauniad mistakes over 200 years – article by Elisabeth Ribbans in The Guardian. “‘If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.’ So wrote Ian Mayes, the Guardian’s first readers’ editor, in his debut column in that role in 1997. His appointment marked the start of a daily corrections and clarifications column, a first for a UK newspaper, which has mined a rich seam of typos and other slips for which ‘the Grauniad’ is fondly known. Thus we can recall how an April 1998 obituary declared the show that turned Joan Heal into a star was Grab Me a Gondolier (it should have read Grab Me a Gondola), while four months later the finance pages reported a £250,000 advance for Vikram Seth’s new novel, ‘A Suitable Buy’. We had a rather agile George Formby standing on a lamp-post, rather than leaning on one, in August 2002, which was around the same time we referred to a Miles Davis album as Sketches of Pain (when Spain was meant)….Sometimes the red pen must take itself to task. In 2007 it blushed: ‘We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26.’”

‘From a standing fart’: readers on their favourite Grauniad mistakes – letter to The Guardian. “ I enjoyed the litany of errors admitted to by the Guardian, but it brought to mind my own personal discomfort from a slip between copy and print. Many years ago, as a young would-be actor, I played Sally Bowles in a community theatre production of the musical, Cabaret. Imagine my dismay on reading the local newspaper critic’s eagerly awaited review, which opined that I had ‘failed totally to convince as Sally’. Later in the day, a knock at my front door revealed said critic, clutching his hand-typed review and apologising profusely. He had in fact not been quite as damning as first appeared, actually writing, ‘failed to totally convince’. Still not great, but it gave me something to work with. Getting ready in the dressing room that evening, the (very good) actor playing the MC popped his head round the door and, in vicious character, announced: ‘Anuzzer total failure tonight zen, Sally!’”

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew: in praise of a Victorian New Woman – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Whenever someone mentions Charlotte Mew, they feel obliged to add context. The fact that Thomas Hardy said she was the ‘greatest poetess’ he knew, or that Siegfried Sassoon maintained she was ‘the only poet who can give me a lump in my throat’…. Walter de la Mare, trying hard to define the source of Mew’s power, ventured ‘she just knows humanity’. The reason why any account of Mew, including this fine biography by Julia Copus, feels obliged to begin by bigging her up is precisely because she has so often been done down. Even during her lifetime Mew’s name was familiar only to those who lived and breathed contemporary literature… For these readers Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (1912) was nothing short of a punch to the gut and a slap on the ear, and all in a good way. The poem is a dramatic monologue in which an unschooled farmer laments the refusal of his child bride to respond to his physical and emotional expectations. Mew gives us both the farmer’s bumbling cruelty and the girl’s blind terror as she slips away ‘shy as a leveret’ across the fertile fields. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ feels as old as the hills yet startlingly new, with its balladry, mixed-up metre and long, wayward lines.”

The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war –article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “During the [second world] war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. … Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under heavy attack from German U-boats. Following [a decision by the Attlee government], the police and immigration inspectorate in Liverpool, working with the shipping companies, began the process of forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats and sending them back to China. With the war over and work scarce, many of the men would have been more than ready to go home. But for others, the story was very different. In the preceding war years, hundreds of Chinese seamen had met and married English women, had children and settled in Liverpool. These men were deported, too. The Chinese seamen’s families were never told what was happening, never given a chance to object and never given a chance to say goodbye. Most of the Chinese seamen’s British wives would go to their graves never knowing the truth, always believing their husbands had abandoned them.”