Cuttings: October 2021

Covid by Numbers: how to make sense of the statistics –  review by Oliver Johnson in The Guardian. “Every internet user can access accurate and timely information on Covid cases, deaths, hospitalisations and vaccines, broken down by age, gender and location. However, while this wealth of information can be immensely valuable, it can also cause problems. Taken out of context and spun in a misleading way, raw coronavirus numbers can be a source of disinformation, which through social media can spread as efficiently as the virus itself. A simple fact, such as the median age of coronavirus victims (83) actually exceeding UK life expectancy at birth (81) can lead to governments and the public not taking Covid as seriously as they should. (Having lived to 83, one would ordinarily expect to live longer still – what matters is life expectancy conditional on having reached this age.)… The right way to think involves not raw data but its analysis via the academic discipline of statistics.… There can be few better people to do this than David Spiegelhalter, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and Anthony Masters, the Society’s ‘statistical ambassador’. Readers of their Observer column will not be surprised that in this book they give a clear and extremely readable guided tour of the pandemic, mostly from a UK viewpoint.”

Minding our language: How editors can frame questions without judgement – blog post by Louise Harnby. "Are the words I placed in bold [in an extract from Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me] ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t. Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have."

HarperCollins removes story from David Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “David Walliams’ story about a Chinese boy called Brian Wong, which was criticised by campaigners for its ‘casual racism’, is set to be removed from future editions of his short story collection The World’s Worst Children. Walliams’ bestselling anthology, which was published in 2016, was criticised earlier this year by the podcaster Georgie Ma over the Brian Wong story, which tells of a boy who was ‘never, ever wrong’, and who was a ‘total and utter swot’. ‘There are so many racist jokes on ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] community with the surname Wong and associating it with wrong,’ Ma said on Instagram. ‘If David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this.’ Ma, who said the story was ‘normalising casual racism from an early age’, particularly criticised Tony Ross’s illustration of the character. ‘You can see it’s just got the stereotypical small eyes, and the glasses, and it’s just complete casual racism,’ she said.”

Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists And The New Right – article by Chris Horner in 3 Quarks Daily, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog.  “In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades,… [we find] a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’…. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’… Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc…. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed? A first step would be for liberals and radicals to listen to each other, and to reflect on what they both stand for and oppose.…”

The big idea: does practice make perfect? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it.… ‘Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that may be labelled “practice”.’ And this is the key idea of Ericsson’s own research: it’s not so much how much you practice, as what kind of practice you do. Simply repeating a task until it has become automatic and then doing it a lot – like, say, driving a car – does not count as real practice. (Indeed, people tend to become worse at driving over time.) That’s ‘naive practice’… By contrast, improving at a complex skill such as a sport or a musical instrument requires ‘purposeful practice’, venturing repeatedly out of one’s comfort zone in a state of watchful self-criticism. For world-class performance, you additionally need a well-structured field of competitive endeavour (such as tennis or violin-playing) plus a teacher who can design the right kind of training activities. All that adds up to the ideal of what Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’, a method that has been widely adopted by sports psychologists.”

Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.“

Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world – article by Howard W. French in The Guardian, extracted from his book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us learned in school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away in the heart of ‘darkest’ west Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home…. European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia… Bartolomeu Dias, another Portuguese explorer who knew Elmina well, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that…. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades between the Portuguese arrival at Elmina in 1471 and their landing in India in 1498. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”

Can Anyone Reshape the State? – blog post by Nicolas Colin from January 2020, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Transforming a large organization is difficult and prone to failure … but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here’s what we know about what works. … All large organizations that have overcome the innovator’s dilemma have taken the same path: not trying to reshape themselves, but creating something new and different on the side. There still aren’t many examples, however… Most of the time, that something new is barely connected to the parent organization. In fact, most of the output of corporate research is used by outside organizations rather than by whomever commissioned the research. Xerox developed the mouse, but it was Apple that innovated with it. … There are some cases in which large organizations have reinvented themselves without making a detour to the outside, but these are so few as to make it difficult to draw conclusions…. All of the above is why I think Dominic Cummings is bound to fail [in his then topical efforts to reshape the state]. Like many people with a Prometheus complex, he wants the best of both worlds. He wants the proximity to power and the intoxicating impression of being at the top, orchestrating it all. At the same time he wants to build new things. But it doesn’t work that way. If Cummings had the radical ambition of a Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t become a special advisor to Xerox’s CEO (in this metaphor, that’s Boris Johnson). Rather he would put as much distance as possible between himself and the top of the organization.”

A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent, and saved him –article by Patrick Stewart in The Guardian. “I never sat my 11-plus. … Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. … I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too. The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. … A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship.… It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: ‘What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!’”

‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building, … is a six-storey hymn to one of the main reasons for going to university: meeting other people. It is a place of wide sociable staircases, broad public terraces, and open-plan study areas that look across to dance studios and performance spaces. In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards. Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place, where even the public is free to roam from top to bottom. ‘It is a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas,’ said Lord Norman Foster, speaking on behalf of the Stirling prize jury. ‘In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning can delightfully coexist. That is no mean feat.’”

Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “‘Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.’ So said the director Bong Joon-ho, as he accepted his best picture Oscar for Parasite in 2020… The success of Netflix’s Korean series Squid Game… has proved him more than right. It has become Netflix’s biggest hit yet,… But it has also sparked an intense debate about what gets lost in that one-inch block of text – and raised questions over whether Netflix is investing enough in creating accurate versions of foreign-language scripts…. ‘If you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show,’ concludes Youngmi Mayer, the New York-based co-host of the podcast Feeling Asian. She released a TikTok video unpicking the flaws in Squid Game’s subtitles… One of the lead female characters … is represented as more subservient and less intelligent than in Korean. The ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ first game (Red Light, Green Light) is not properly translated, either, and the concept of ‘gganbu’ (a link between two equals – which becomes a major plot point) is glossed over. … ‘Netflix is notorious for its weak translations of Korean dramas,’ wrote Sharon Kwon in Slate. Alongside many others online, Kwon highlighted the translation of ‘sir’ instead of ‘boss’ – as used by the Pakistani character Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) to defer to others – arguing that by not using the latter, it lessens the impact of the anti-capitalist message of the series. Vice’s Eileen Cho wrote: ‘How will people learn about our culture if the streamer is mistranslating the language?’”

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes up for the flaws of Mulan – article by Jingan Young in The Guardian. “This time last year I was disheartened by the troubling [Disney] live-action Mulan … so I had few expectations of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings… It was therefore a satisfying prove-me-wrong moment to watch the film…. I left with hope and elation, not disappointment. Shang-Chi is a film so very unlike Mulan, which featured a bland ‘superheroine’ who simply reacted to a series of fantastical, though unconnected, events around her. In stark contrast Shang-Chi is a heartfelt reimagining of the story by two Asian-American film-makers… Cretton and Callaham have created a modern bildungsroman, eradicating the ‘yellow peril’ origins of its superhero; Marvel’s initial comic series was developed as a spin-off from Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr Fu Manchu novels. Instead they offer up a story of revenge, redemption, grief and familial trauma – and several of the most spectacular fight sequences ever shown in cinema, the first being a balletic seduction scene which I have no doubt will be replicated many times.”

Out now: four new novels expanding the Hey-Diddle-Diddle universe – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Fiddle: can an idealistic kitten make it in the merciless world of professional violin playing? Little Dog: an inspiring journey from runt of the litter to a world of wonder, fun and laughter. Moon: how an ordinary cow overcame prejudice and ridicule to realise her incredible dream. Dish and spoon: they’ve run away together, but can their love bridge the gulf between crockery and cutlery?”

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: inequality is not the price of civilisation – review by David Priestland in The Guardian. “Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow [argue against the] common assumption [that] as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and ‘civilised’, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress…. It is this tale … which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ … simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.”

Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? – article by Anna Leach and Miles Probyn in The Guardian. “Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two…. A diagram of story elements is not going to deradicalise someone who believes vaccines are implanting microchips in people’s arms. … But [this project] does raise one tantalising possibility that perhaps this mapping – what one of the authors, Pavan Holur, calls ‘an AI mirror held up to online conversations’ – lets people see the totality of the belief system they are tying themselves into. While someone might think vaccines are unsafe, they do not necessarily think 5G causes coronavirus. ‘If people are looking at it and thinking “Wait a minute, I don’t trust at least this part of the narrative”,’ Tangherlini says, ‘you might be able to fracture those low-probability links between domains. And if you can fracture or question them, you get the potential for community level change.’”