First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Prospect covered the death of Princess Diana, ten years ago today, with a roundtable featuring Michael Ignatieff, Zoë Heller, Ian Buruma and others. Also at that time, Carlo Gébler reported the effect it had in Fermanagh and Charlotte Cory shared her memories of the princess. At the end of 1997, Geoffrey Wheatcroft looked back on a momentous year. A year after Diana’s death, theologian Philip Nobile caused a minor media storm by wondering whether Diana was in heaven or hell. Finally, in last month’s issue Andrew Marr and Joan Smith debated the significance of the Diana moment.

I find Wikipedia-bashing tedious and somewhat ungentlemanly. For columnists looking to fill space, it is simple sport to find an error—though usually a trivial one—in a Wikipedia entry on a topic about which you have some claim to knowledge. But surely the real Wikipedia story is that through the collective efforts of tens of thousands of volunteers, anyone (or almost anyone) with a connection to the internet has access to a free, vast encyclopedia that most of the time does a damn good job. Of course, Wikipedia’s shortcomings are well documented—any resource open to editing by whoever fancies it exposes itself to risk of vandalism, manipulation or incompetence—and so you’d be foolish to rely exclusively on it. But as a jumping-off point for further research, or for corroboration, it’s incredibly useful—and Prospect is happy for its crack team of fact-checkers to use it, in an intelligent way. For what it’s worth, on topics I know a bit about, Wikipedia seems to me to come off pretty well. And of course, a couple of years ago Nature compared 42 science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found that in terms of accuracy, the free online encyclopedia fared almost as well as its “dead-trees” counterpart (2007 edition currently retailing for £995).*

Yet despite all this, I always hesitate before turning to Wikipedia to educate myself. And it was only yesterday, when reading this article by Douglas Wolk in the New Republic on Wikipedia’s treatment of the Valerie Plame case, that I realised that this was not because of Wikipedia’s record on accuracy, but because of its turn of phrase. As Wolk argues, Wikipedia’s scrupulous adherence to the “neutral point of view” credo drains all life from its writing, and can often lead to sentences that, while factually flawless, are stylistic shockers. “Little things that are true and even relevant keep accruing on the page like barnacles,” says Wolk, and while in theory neutrality need not imply a steadfast refusal to declare some facts important and others not, in practice it usually does, leading to immensely lengthy entries that lack the attention to weight, rhythm and stylistic balance you’d get from a single-authored article. If you just want the facts, then Wikipedia will, usually, serve you well—but for clear, concise writing, Britannica still coasts it.

* One should add that the Encyclopedia Britannica contested Nature’s methodology.

I thought I’d cross post this from The Great Beyond, which is a blog we recently started at Nature to complement our own news coverage. The blog rounds up the science stories that, for one reason or another, we’re not covering this week,  but which are still worth your attention. Let me know whether First Drafts and its readers would welcome this as a weekly service

Friday August 31, 2007
Storms to get stronger / Lucy fossil controversy / Scientists sue over background checks

Thursday August 30, 2007
Global warming: belief but no understanding / ‘Drunk’ astronauts were sober, probably / Supersonic space rain / Plants can hear

Wednesday August 29, 2007
Spiderman suit in ten years / Greenhouse gases and ozone holes / Science blogger sued update

Tuesday August 28, 2007
Star Wars prop in space / Stem cells fix rat hearts / China legislates for failure / Fantasy journal league

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Spoonful of Medicine: Apoorva Mandavilli on (Bio)piracy in Brazil and elsewhere
The Sceptical Chymist: ‘Materials Girl’ on Physics, summer school, and math

Ones that got away
You think brain drain is a problem? Read ‘How T-Force abducted Germany’s best brains for Britain’ in The Guardian
‘Diabetes as Darwinism’ - Greg Critser in the LA Times says we’re all short-beaked finches
Extinction fears over ‘Irwin’s bum-breathing turtle’ from News.com.au
A giant space-junk gun in The Columbus Dispatch (via KSJ Tracker)

The September issue of Prospect, out today, marks the 60th anniversary of Indian independence by asking an uncomfortable question of India’s new middle class—why is it so uninterested in politics and social justice? In our cover story, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad argues that aspects of India’s history and culture have helped shape a middle class—easiest the biggest in the world—that is largely apathetic about politics and the 300m Indians living in extreme poverty.

One reason for the introversion of India’s middle class, argues Ram-Prasad, arises from the great achievement of India: democracy. Whereas fighting for political representation was an important part of western middle-class experience in the 19th century, in India, political rights existed before the creation of a big middle class, and are now taken for granted by those who see their prosperity as entirely of their own making. In fact, India’s middle class, says Ram-Prasad, behaves in a similar manner to the apathetic consuming classes of today’s west, “concentrating on expanding its choice of lifestyles while taking political parties to be as bad as each other and non-party politics as hopelessly idealistic.”

Click here to read the article, and let us know what you think in the comments boxes.

The election of Abdullah Gül as Turkey’s president is the latest chapter in the increasingly tense cold war between the country’s ruling AK party—often eccentrically described in the western press as “mildly Islamist”—and the army, guardians of Turkey’s secular, “Kemalist” constitution. The story is well rehearsed, but to recap briefly—earlier this year, the AK party put forward Gül, then foreign minister, as its candidate for president. The army, concerned by Gül’s Islamist past and particularly by the fact that his wife wears the hijab, let its displeasure be known and even hinted that it might intervene militarily, as it has done in the past, to preserve Turkey’s secular status.

After a constitutional court had annulled the first parliamentary vote on the presidency on a technicality, Turkey’s prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, called a general election for late July, which the AK party went on to win by a landslide. With its strengthened mandate, the AK party again nominated Gül for the presidency, and this time he won handsomely.

The AK vs army story has meant that in recent months the running sore, for Turkey, of its Kurdish minority has largely been ignored in the western press, but as Christopher de Bellaigue reports in the new issue of Prospect, the AK party’s national election success extended to the Kurdish areas, largely at the expense of Kurdish nationalists. AK’s success over the last few months demonstrates not only the threat the party poses to the Turkish secular establishment, but also to the Kurdish nationalists’ claim to be the sole representatives of Turkey’s Kurds.

At midday on 17 August, 1962, Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, two teenage citizens of the GDR, jumped into ‘the death strip’ - an area of no-man’s land leading up to the Berlin wall. As they reached the wall, they were fired upon 21 times. Helmut made it over to safety, but Peter was hit a number of times. Seriously wounded, he lay a few yards short of the wall shouting for help. Having seen what had happened, hundreds of citizens of West Berlin gathered, shouting demands at the guards to help Peter, though they did nothing. First aid kits were thrown over the wall but were of no use to Peter. After 50 minutes of calling for help, he fell silent. More than an hour after the attempted escape, GDR guards finally removed his dead body from the death strip.

This is the story to which artist S Mark Gubb turned his hand in the ICA’s re-enactment of “The Death of Peter Fechter,” the latest example of “site-specific theatre,” a phenomenon discussed by Chris Wilkinson in the new issue of Prospect. The audience were taken to an industrial site near Belmarsh prison, a location kept secret until the end. As we stepped off our coaches, we saw guards/actors in 1960s uniforms patrolling a makeshift wall.

The ICA’s re-enactment is very much in line with a fashion that has been growing in Germany since the post-wall years, one I call Mauerpark, after a Berlin park that occupies part of the old wall’s route. Mauerpark is a “theme-park” approach to the wall and the fission created by its 30-year history, one where terror turns curiosity. The souvenirs of Mauerpark are GDR insignia such as gold-framed portraits of party leader Erich Honecker, always with a particularly stern pair of shell-rimmed glasses. Mauerpark’s celebrities are those who tried to escape over the inner-German border, with defectors using hot air balloons or secretly dug tunnels with a whiff of Indiana Jones about them.

Yet the most famous escapees remain two young men who ran for it, perpetuated in grainy black-and-white pictures: one is Conrad Schumann, an East German soldier who in 1961 seized his chance while on duty at the Bernauer Strasse border. A camera caught him as he jumped over what was then still a barbed-wire fence, and the resulting photo (see left) turned him into a symbol of defiance. The other is young Peter Fechter, a limp body being lifted out of the death strip by border guards.

The ICA play, while well intentioned, turned the story of Fechter’s escape into a didactic play on civil courage (with a continuous undertone of ‘What would you have done?’). The over-the-top acting of the West Berlin civilians, who were planted in the crowd, and the focus on one tragic story without real historical context, meant that “The Death of Peter Fechter” felt exploitative, somehow anti-historical—and completely Mauerpark.

Yesterday in Karbala, the young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr let it be known that he would be “freezing” all activities of his Mahdi Army militia for six months. It remains to be seen whether the move will have any impact on the sectarian carnage in Iraq; some analysts simply believe that this is an attempt by al-Sadr to reassert his control over the group, which has become increasingly fractious and divided over recent months.

The Mahdi Army is merely the best known of the many militias and criminal gangs roaming Iraq, making violence an everyday reality for millions of Iraqis. The stories of the individuals and families caught up in such violence are usually lost in the horrific statistics that spew forth from the country almost every day. This is why we chose to publish this article by the Independent’s Kim Sengupta in the new issue of Prospect. Sengupta tells the story of the al-Hayalis, a middle-class family who were preparing to flee Iraq for Dubai when tragedy struck. Let us know your thoughts below.

What does it mean to talk about good and evil today? According to Nicholas Mosley—the novelist and son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists—it means writing off large swathes of contemporary literary culture as pointless and trying to repopulate the empty heavens beneath which most British literature now takes place.

In the new issue of Prospect, Edward Skidelsky writes about his recent meeting with Mosley, and describes the restlessness that has marked both the latter’s life and writing. A non-realist author, Mosley is acutely aware of the limitations of words, but fascinated by the insights they can propel readers towards: in his case, a morality that is at once highly religious and yet outside of the traditional polarities of good and evil.

If it sounds tortuous, that’s because it is—but it’s also a suggestive alternative to the idea that literature should no longer have any “meaning” beyond its style and fidelity to actuality. Read the piece and let us know what you think here.

A blatantly self-serving cross post from Heliophage, where I’m blogging rather poorly and sporadically to promote and facilitate any eventual discussion of Eating the Sun (synopsis|Amazon). If this is in fact too self serving I rely on the wisdom of Prospecters for deletion, warnings never to darken their doors again, etc

I’ll be participating in two events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival over the bank-holiday weekend.

On Sunday evening, 19:30, I will be discussing the future of nature (concept, not magazine) with Martyn Amos, author of Genesis Machines. This is not about Phil Collins’ posthetics, but instead about DNA computing and synthetic biology, on which subjects his “lucid and punchy prose conveys a genuine excitement of the frontier” (Guardian review by Steve Poole). Apparently in this discussion I will be examining the role that plants might play in the future, though I fancy I may stray a bit beyond that brief.

Then on Monday afternoon at 14:30 I will be talking about the secret life of plants with Nicholas Harberd, author of Seed to Seed, in which

he explains how he and his colleagues at the world-renowned John Innes Centre in Norfolk are helping to work out how plants control their growth and reproduction in the face of life’s vicissitudes. He tells it like it is: not as a logical, inexorable progression from ignorance to omniscience but as a sequence of leaps and lurches from becalmment to epiphany achieved by - who knows? In Harberd’s case by cycling through the wind and hail of the Norfolk countryside, watching plants grow in a local churchyard and hoping for inspiration. Coleridge would have understood the approach perfectly. Success so far has been excellent - but still, it’s all to do. (Guardian review by Colin Tudge, and yes it is a small world…)

I’m enjoying Seed to Seed and wonder whether it should have been one of the Indy’s nature-book picks, but I don’t know what I’d oust to make room for it. Anyway, I look forward to meeting Nick and hearing what he has to say immensely.

I’ve just been reading an engaging book about statistics—The Tiger That Isn’t, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot—and it’s got me thinking a little harder, as statistics always ought to, about familiar things I thought I already knew everything about.

For instance, how much do you think the mean national income was in the UK, after tax and benefits, for two childless people living as a couple in 2005/6? I’m willing to bet that many will be surprised by the answer, which is £23,000—equivalent to £11,500 each (most people I’ve tested thought it would be higher). Still, statistics are often surprising, and the wise reader learns to expect this. What’s much more interesting is just how limited this mean is as an index of national incomes.

Blastland and Dilnot use the analogy (made famous by the Dutch economist Jan Pen) of a procession of the world’s population, in which people are exactly as tall as they are wealthy. Within this procession, a person of average wealth will also be of average height; remembering that height is a measurement for which the mean is a useful index, as it roughly follows the “normal” distribution of a bell-curve. Global wealth is such, however, that it is not until 80% of humanity have walked diminutively past that you first see a person of average height. Then, in the last few minutes, giants stride into view, each one many miles high, dragging the mean inexorably towards them.

National earnings, similarly, are dragged up by huge wealth at the top, so that only about a third of the population earn the mean income or more. Far more telling is the median—the number that exactly 50% of the population lie above, and 50% lie below. In the UK, this figure is just £18,800 for childless couples, (i.e. £9,400 per person) almost 20 per cent below the mean. In other words, half of the UK’s childless couples have less than £1,567 a month coming into their bank accounts in total; less than £784 each.

In terms of income, the mode—the most frequent single result—is less useful even than the mean (it happens to be around £14,000). Sometimes, however, it too comes into its own. Take feet, in the sense of the things on the end of our legs. Because some people have one or no feet, the global mean is something like 1.998: not a very useful number. But, because there are only three possible answers to the question “how many feet do you have?” (even in the case of deformities, I think it’s safe to say you either have one foot, two, or none) the median result is also not very useful, because it’s one: the middle result of three. Here, finally, the mode comes into its own, and reminds us that most people have two feet: another triumph for statistics.

EDIT: I feel I ought to acknowledge, as highlighted in the comments below, my hastily incorrect interpretation of median in the last paragraph, which of course refers to the middle result from a given sample and has nothing to do with the “middle” out of three possible results. I should also add that this error is my own, and is no reflection of Blastland’s and Dilnot’s perfectly lucid book…