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September 2021

WaspReporter

STALKING IS A MISUNDERSTOOD DANGER

: d r a h f l o W Finn

y z a r c ‘I’m a ’ c i l o h a k r o w AM I THE A**HOLE? WaspReporter_20.1.indd 1

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Johan Graus Editor

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Free fall

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Black and gay

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Hello???

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10 Finn Wolfhard

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12 Allergies on the rise

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14 Accidental discoveries 16 r/AITA

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18 Keep your masks

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20 Next generation leaders 22 The power of words 24 Vampire panic

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26 Return of the dragon

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Scan the QR codes to access the audio files.

This past April, Sheila interviewed Katie, who lives in London but has recently spent quite some time in her native Cardiff.

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Contents

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Welcome to the first issue of WaspReporter Magazine Volume 20. We hope you’ve enjoyed your summer holidays and are ready for a brand-new school year!

Once again, we have done our best to select twelve articles that are not only interesting, thought-provoking, and fun to read but that will also help you improve your English skills. Take, for instance, our cover article featuring Finn Wolfhard, one of the young star actors making up the cast of Stranger Things. This multitalented 20-year-old not only appears in the Upside-Down world of the Netflix hit series (its fourth season is expected to air in 2022), but he’s also an aspiring screenwriter, director, and musician. You can read all about him on pages 10–11.

Next year marks WaspReporter’s 50th anniversary.

In all those years our commitment to bringing you topical and newsworthy articles that help you perfect your English has never waned. Yet this year something’s going to change. Traditionally, WaspReporter has included a paper Magazine and Student File (and that won’t change), but we have now added a state-of-theart digital platform (called eDition) that you can use to complete the Student File Assignments. The benefits are myriad: it allows for a more interactive experience, you can check your own answers, and the digital world is at your fingertips if you need extra help. Your teacher can tell you how to log in. Enjoy!

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Hello everyone,

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Lauren McLean was an experienced climber.

No one expected her to

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end up broken on a ledge

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l l a f Free Her feet hit the rock with the force of a hammer blow. Then she fell onto her side, facing the cliff on a ledge just wide enough to support her body. The rope at her waist snapped tight almost immediately, but she held on to a granite rock in case it went loose again. The fall had happened without warning, so fast she’d had no time to be frightened. Now she fought the panic rising in her chest.

Nine metres above her was the overhang from which she’d dropped. About 270 m below lay the floor of Death Canyon, a carpet of pines and brush, covered with house-sized boulders. Her ankles were already swelling, ballooning over the top of her climbing shoes.

Ants began to crawl up her legs; as she reached to brush them off, a dizzying pain shot up her back.

She wondered if her backbone was broken, too. The clouds grew darker. And then it began to rain.

A life of adventure

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25-year-old Lauren McLean grew up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

She had starred on her high school ski-racing team and she spent holidays hiking, fly-fishing, and horse riding at her family’s lodge in British Columbia. She took up rock climbing while studying at the University of Montana. After graduating, she spent a few months backpacking in Alaska, and then took a summer job leading youth expeditions for Wilderness Ventures, an outdoor-adventure company in the Pacific Northwest.

On an outing with her students to a climbing spot in the Oregon desert, McLean met respected mountaineer and extreme-sports journalist Michael Ybarra. Ybarra, 44, had discovered alpine climbing in his early 30s, while working as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He had thrown himself into the sport, travelling constantly

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in search of climbing challenges.

He was always ready to hit the rocks with another climbing enthusiast. McLean told Ybarra she’d be heading to the wild Teton mountains, in Wyoming. ‘Let’s get together there to do some climbing,’ he suggested.

A challenging climb

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In August, McLean and her friend Dana Ries, 21, travelled to Grand Teton National Park, where Ybarra joined them. McLean was far more experienced than Ries, a curlyhaired junior at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Both, however, were eager to learn from Ybarra, who’d climbed everywhere from the Himalayas to the Andes.

The trio spent three days climbing up difficult rock faces by day and staying at night in rustic cabins at the Grand Teton’s Climbers’ Ranch.

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we’re in trouble,’ Ries said, looking worriedly at McLean.

After Ybarra disappeared over the rocks, Ries tried to follow.

She made it part of the way, then lost her grip and dangled from her rope, about 270 m above the canyon floor. She and McLean yelled to Ybarra for help, but he couldn’t hear them because of the wind. Lightning crackled over a nearby peak. McLean pushed herself off the wall and hung next to Ries. ‘Why don’t you try climbing up my rope?’ she said to Ries. ‘When you get to the top, tell Michael to lower me a little so that I can reach the rock and start climbing again.’

Grabbing her friend’s lifeline, Ries managed to reach the rock a few metres above their heads. ‘See you soon,’ she called.

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The fall had happened so fast she’d had no time to be frightened

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Ybarra seemed surprised when Ries turned up alone, and he became concerned when she told him about McLean’s position. ‘We need to get her out of there before the wind changes,’ he said.

The women’s ropes ran through a gadget attached to the harness at Ybarra’s waist. Known as an autolocking belay device, its purpose is to slow or stop a climber’s fall. Ybarra had adjusted it to automatically stop the rope if either woman fell; now he hurried to reset the mechanism, intending to lower McLean carefully to the nearest ledge.

Exactly what went wrong is unclear, but in his rush, Ybarra somehow released the device completely. As metres of rope shot out, Ries yelled and Ybarra’s eyes went wide with horror. An instant later, he managed to apply the brake.

Shaking, he and Ries stepped to the edge of the rock. ‘Lauren,’ they shouted, ‘are you OK?’ Long seconds passed before the response came, in a shaky voice: ‘Not OK!’

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face of a rock formation known as Cathedral Buttress.

They started out at dawn, hiking through Death Canyon (so named because an explorer disappeared there in 1899) to reach the base of the cliff. At 8 a.m., they stepped into their harnesses, tied themselves to nylon ropes, and began the 550 m climb. It would take nine stages, called pitches, to reach the top, 2900 m above sea level.

The day was beautiful, and at first the going was smooth. But as the hours went by, the group’s mood shifted from cheerful to grim. The dark clouds that began gathering around 4 p.m. seemed to reflect the change in attitude.

The Teton mountains are well known for sudden late-afternoon thunderstorms. ‘We’d better hurry,’ Ybarra said. ‘Let’s get this done before it starts raining on us.’

There were two possible routes for the last pitch, which started from a narrow ledge. As usual, Ybarra opted for the harder one. As Ybarra climbed, the women could hear him struggling for the first time all day. ‘If this is tough for him, W R number 1 • volume 20

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Slowed by a storm

Ybarra’s first phone call went to Martin Vidak, the SAR coordinator.

At 4.55 p.m., Vidak sent a message to the Jenny Lake Rangers – the specially trained team responsible for Grand Teton’s Jenny Lake district, whose 18 members form one of the leading mountain SAR teams in the US. They gathered at the SAR base, a few kilometres from the accident site. And by 6.10, three of them had boarded the park’s helicopter to investigate the situation.

The crew brought back worrying news: thunderstorms were nearby, and it wasn’t clear whether the angle of the cliff allowed enough

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space – a minimum of 9 m – for the helicopter to pick up the victim.

Because of the late hour, she might have to spend the night there; the last rays of sunlight would be gone by 9 p.m., and safety regulations prevented the chopper from flying after dark. ‘We’ll just have to hope for the best,’ Vidak told his colleagues.

At 7.45 p.m., Dana Ries heard the helicopter. Looking up, she was startled to see a ranger floating toward her, hanging from a rope.

‘I’m Ryan Schuster,’ he said, as the aircraft set him down, along with a large gear bag.

Minutes later, the chopper returned bringing another ranger, park medic Rich Baerwald.

Then it came back with medical equipment, food, warm clothing, and sleeping bags.

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Baerwald carried a backpack full of supplies, climbed down the cliff, and reached McLean and Ybarra a little after 8.20 p.m. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked the injured woman. ‘I’d like to get off this mountain,’ she answered.

Baerwald checked her vital signs and splinted her left ankle, which was clearly broken; if there were other broken bones, they could be

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set later. A more urgent concern was shock: McLean seemed stable for the moment, but Baerwald knew she needed fluids and pain medication to remain that way. Ideally, the SAR team would get McLean off the rocks and to the hospital immediately.

But with the approaching storm, fading light, and narrow space for the helicopter, Baerwald wasn’t sure that was possible.

Baerwald radioed Schuster; both agreed that the helicopter could squeeze between the rocks if the wind stayed calm. The pilot suggested fixing an extra 30 m of rope to the 45 m length usually used for rescues, so that the helicopter could stay farther away from the dangerous cliff.

‘I’m going to put you in a screamer suit,’ Baerwald told McLean. ‘It’s a full-body harness that’ll support your back until we get you on the ground.’ Ybarra helped get her into the suit. With the chopper hovering above, Baerwald clipped McLean and himself onto the end of the extralong rope. Together, they rose from the rock. McLean really did feel like screaming – but with joy, not fear.

She was finally off the mountain.

And the sunset was the most beautiful one she had ever seen. <<

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Ybarra pulled out his mobile phone and dialled emergency; he was patched through to a searchand-rescue (SAR) coordinator for Grand Teton National Park. ‘We’ve got an injured climber,’ Ybarra told the ranger. ‘I’ll tell you more when I have the details.’ Then he re-tied his own rope and began climbing down the cliff.

As he lowered himself, the first cold raindrops hit his face, and he was half-soaked by the time he reached the overhang. He found McLean 9 m below it, lying on a shelf of rock no more than 30 cm wide.

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BBC

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Black and gay

What it’s like coming out as a black man when people see it as a ‘white thing’

By Phil Samba

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‘You’re disgusting.’ I still remember my mum saying that to me. I’d been in my bedroom, talking on the phone to men I’d met online, and some of those chats were pretty sexual. But I was 23 and still living at home, and I had no idea my mum had been listening through the door. I remember feeling so scared in that moment. I realised that I would have to finally tell her the truth – I was gay.

Despite knowing I was gay from the age of 14, it took me almost 10 years to come out. Keeping that part of me secret for so long made me feel so alone. I felt like I was different from everyone else.

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My family are originally from Sierra Leone, and I was born and raised in East London. I’m 28 now, and growing up, I didn’t know anyone who was gay, nor were there any black gay role models on TV or in

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the media. It was like we didn’t exist.

For some West African parents, someone coming out means that they’ve chosen to imitate white westerners, giving up on what they see as traditional African values. This may partly explain why, according to the Office for National Statistics, only 0.9 per cent of the UK’s black population describe themselves as openly gay, compared to 2 per cent of the total UK population.

My first crush was on someone in my year at the all-boys Catholic school I went to. I liked him straight away. He was tall, mixed-heritage, athletic, and the class joker. He was always happy to talk to me, but never in a romantic way. I don’t think he ever knew how I felt about him. I never told him, of course. I could barely admit it to myself.

So, until I was in my early twenties, I buried my feelings and

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tried my best to pretend to be straight. I went through a period as a teen of praying every night, begging God to make me straight so I would fit in. When my friends used to say things like ‘that’s so gay’ – meaning something was uncool – I’d join in so I wouldn’t stand out.

A double life

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But by the time I turned 21, I couldn’t suppress my sexuality any more. I knew pretty much nothing about the gay community, and was eager to learn. So, I created a Twitter profile using a fake name and used it to chat to guys online.

It felt like I was living a double life. It was upsetting, but also exciting. I started messaging a man and, before long, we were seeing each other. I would sneak out to meet him on the weekend, and for a brief while I felt totally happy.

Then I would come home and stay

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silent about where I’d been, trying to avoid my mum’s gaze.

After a few months things with that guy fizzled out, but something inside me was different.

My confidence had grown, and I started messaging a few different men. Before long, these messages became phone calls, and several of those phone calls got pretty explicit.

I decided that the time was right to tell my sister, who I’ve always been really close to. My sister has a couple of gay friends, so I thought she would be understanding – and I was right.

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I was planning to move out of home, as I thought it would be easier to come out to mum once we weren’t living under the same roof. I wanted her to have space to process the news and, to be honest, I wanted to avoid any uncomfortable situations if she didn’t take it well.

But then came mum overhearing the phone calls. By the time this happened I was well on my way to saving enough money to move out. I still have no idea how much she’d heard – but it was clearly enough. She told my nan she’d been listening, who then told me.

And then I knew it couldn’t wait any longer, I’d have to tell her the truth.

Her response devastated me.

She asked me to ‘change my lifestyle’ – whatever that means. I thought, being gay isn’t something I do, it’s who I am. Why couldn’t she just accept me for who I am?

Though my mum and I were never that close, part of me hoped my coming out might bring down some of the walls between us. But the opposite happened – there were more barriers between us than ever before.

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online was also gay and knew what I was going through. He mentioned there was a spare room in the student house he was about to move into – and I jumped at the chance to take it. I ended up living with four students, three of whom were also gay. For the first time, I felt like people really understood me.

But feeling accepted as a black man in the wider gay community was a different matter for me. Black, gay men are underrepresented in the mainstream, and the impact of that is huge. A recent survey found that 71 per cent of black men said they didn’t feel represented or visible in media and health campaigns aimed at LGBTQ+ people.

I’ve felt that, too. There are plenty of other gay, black men in my area – I know that because of how much a dating app I use lights up on any given night – but when I’m out with friends in a club it feels like we’re the only black, gay guys in there and we get a lot of unwelcome attention. It makes me feel really objectified, like a piece of meat.

I tried my best to pretend to be straight

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Helping others

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Today, the friends I met online have become like a family to me. I also campaign to raise awareness of sexual health among black, Asian, and minority ethnic gay men – who are more likely to be diagnosed

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with HIV in the UK than other groups.

For the campaign, I made posters of me and another black man – a model – posing as a couple in love, urging men like us to get tested and treated. The response was extremely positive. Even now, I still get messages on social media from young, black men telling me it helped persuade them go and get tested.

But there’s still so much narrowmindedness to break through.

People have told me I ‘don’t look gay’. But what does ‘gay’ look like?

When I ask them, they rarely have an answer for me – but I know what they mean. I’m not a stereotypically ‘camp’ white guy, so I can’t possibly be gay, right? That’s why I want to use my voice to challenge these wrong ideas.

As for my mum, we still don’t speak. She says she was shocked when I told her – but apparently, she says that, with time, she’s become OK with my sexuality. In any case, I’m comfortable with who I am now – and that’s the most important thing. <<

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We continued to live in the same house for several uncomfortable months. Mum acted like I had never told her I was gay. We barely spoke, except to make polite chit-chat. I knew I had to leave.

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Cosmopolitan

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It happens more than ever before and those who experience it still have to fight to be taken seriously. Catriona Harvey-Jenner investigates why stalking is one of the most misunderstood dangers out there…

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In England and Wales, more than one in five women (21.2%) say they have been stalked at some point in their adult lives. Recently, contact with Paladin (the National Stalking Advocacy Service) went up by 40%.

Physical harm aside, being stalked can take an unthinkable toll on a victim’s mental health, causing paranoia, stress, and anxiety. The stakes are high – so why does it seem that it’s a matter of luck whether or not a victim’s complaint will be taken seriously? And with technology making it easier than ever to invade in someone’s life, why are these tools developing quicker than the systems to stop this behaviour? I met those experiencing the crime to find out.

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It only took a few days for Hannah to notice the woman wherever she went. But there she was, in the same aisle at the supermarket, standing on the corner outside her son’s nursery, waiting around as she walked into town.

She tried to tell herself it was just a coincidence, but it became impossible. One night, after seeing the woman – dark, pointed eyes and hair creeping all the way down her back – she talked about it to her boyfriend. His face dropped.

The woman who had been following Hannah – the very same woman who, over the next four years, would go on to spy inside her house using binoculars, create 125 fake Instagram accounts, ruin her garden, send naked photographs, and post a dead rat through the door – was her partner’s ex-girlfriend.

Hannah eventually got a restraining order against her stalker, but one week later she began to show up again, and the police did little to help. ‘I don’t think the

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restraining order was worth the paper it was written on,’ she says. Hannah has gone through so many incidents, but because she’s spoken to a different police officer every time, nothing seems to get logged. ‘They never link things together. To them, the individual incidents don’t sound like a big deal, but to me, this is four years of being followed.’

Layla

Layla had left home wearing just the clothes on her back.

She was living in emergency housing several miles away, together with her two children. She’d been warned by social services to leave her partner of two years, Greg, immediately for their safety. He’d become violent when she told him. With no cooking space and little money (Greg had controlled all their finances), Layla scratched around to buy a takeaway. As the night went on, she slowly calmed down and dared to think about a future without Greg being around all the time.

The next morning, looking out of the window, Layla saw that her car was missing. Greg, she thought. But how does he know where we are? Days later, the sound of the letterbox made her jump. She went to see what it was, expecting to see a pizza delivery brochure on the floor, but was instead greeted with a pile of crumpled red material. It was her son’s football top. A top that had, up until that moment, stayed in the house with Greg.

During his 18-month stalking campaign, Greg used technology in more and more inventive ways, so Layla never knew what was coming next. He posed as her on a travel website and cancelled her holiday. He changed her Facebook password, locking her out. He took out bank cards in her name. And when she finally moved away

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various phone numbers, friends, and other personal details, and a catalogue of photographs. Yet, despite this evidence, they won’t charge him for stalking.

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for her safety, he found her again and showed up in the middle of the night, staring through her kitchen window.

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Jasmine

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‘Hey, when do we go back after half-term?’ When the Facebook message first popped up, Jasmine politely answered the question. It was 2008 and Adam, an ‘outcast’ from a few years above, had begun messaging her. The pair had no mutual friends, and Jasmine – who was only in her second year of high school – had never spoken to him. When friendly but negative answers didn’t stop him, Jasmine began feeling worried. Adam’s messages became more frequent over the years. He claimed that they were ‘meant to be together’, and became aggressive when she rejected him. By the time she reached college, Jasmine hoped she could leave Adam and his online obsession behind.

When I caught up with Jasmine – 12 years after that first message from Adam – she was shaken. Just days before, a man in an oversized face mask and pulleddown beanie hat came into the store she worked in.

At first it raised no alarm. But as the man took off his disguise and whispered, ‘Do you not recognise me, Jasmine?’ she panicked. She ran away through a side exit, but Adam followed and grabbed her from behind.

A police officer nearby made sure Jasmine got home safely, but the nightmare continued. A few nights later, she woke up as her phone buzzed, an unknown number flashing up. Deep, long breaths were all she could hear.

Jasmine first contacted the police in 2013, but it was only after Adam turned up at her work that they began to investigate. They found a password-protected document on his computer that listed her address,

High-tech abuse

According to stalking charity Suzy Lamplugh Trust, in 55% of cases reported to the National Stalking Helpline, there has been a close relationship between victim and perpetrator. ‘Women are at the greatest risk of harm when leaving a violent or controlling partner,’ says specialist solicitor Rachel Horman-Brown. ‘That’s when stalking can start because the perpetrator realises they’ve lost control.’ And one of the quickest ways to take back control? Technology. Stalkers can now come into their victims’ lives faster and more efficiently than ever before – as Greg knew. He had used his computer to hack into Layla’s emails on the night she left, and found the takeaway bill – complete with delivery address.

Between March and June 2020, anti-virus platform Avast showed an increase of 83% in the use of spying apps and stalkerware in the UK. Car trackers can be bought online for as little as £21.99. Even without this software, the way we live our lives now – constantly online, using social media – means stalkers can easily follow their victims. After blocking her stalker on Instagram hundreds of times, Hannah decided to stop using social media altogether. ‘The moment I set up an account, she finds it and sends me messages,’ she says.

What happened to Hannah – or Layla, or Jasmine – is not their fault. Far from it. But it’s troublingly easy to see how some victims end up regretting their own actions, instead of the entire blame resting rightly with those stalking them. <<

Hi Hello?

I’ll keep calling you till you pick up Why block me on FB? I can still see your private messages, you know You think you can ignore me???

Nice car, btw, is it new?

Stop pretending I don’t exist

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The teen star of Stranger Things has worked almost non-stop ever since his audition at 12. And for Finn Wolfhard, it’s not just the acting – he is also a screenwriter, a short-film director, and the frontman in a garage-rock band

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Alex Moshakis

Not long into our conversation, the Canadian actor Finn Wolfhard gets up from a couch and begins pacing the bright hallways of his parents’ Vancouver home. We are talking over Zoom, which he has downloaded onto his phone. And while he walks – while he carries me from one room to the next, describing the roles he’s played, the directors he admires – he holds his phone at chest-height, so all I can do is gaze up at him, at his straightline features and his long hair – a dark, thick tangle.

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Mike Wheeler

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Wolfhard describes himself as someone with ‘so much crazy energy’, even for a 20-year-old – so much that he often feels he must start doing something even when he is already doing something. He also describes himself as ‘a crazy workaholic’, which shows in his output. In the past two years alone,

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he has appeared in several major films as well as the third series of Stranger Things, the hit Netflix show that has made him a star.

In Stranger Things, Wolfhard plays the role of Mike Wheeler, the leader of a bunch of kid-nerds who investigate the paranormal goingson in their middle American town.

Meanwhile, they’re also going through normal teenage stuff, like figuring out how to act around members of the opposite sex.

Wolfhard is so convincingly awkward that it is easy to think he would be the same in real life, that the boundary between Wolfhard and Wheeler was somehow vague, but really the only thing they have in common seems to be that they are both decent kids.

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Disciplined and smart

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People always worry about what might happen to a child star like Wolfhard: that their heads get

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turned by bad stuff, that they make poor life choices and develop destructive habits, and that these things are sure to happen because they have been so directly in the spotlight while so young, and ‘who could handle that kind of pressure?’.

It seems Wolfhard can. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke.

He doesn’t do drugs. (Because he failed his test, he doesn’t even drive.) Friends describe Wolfhard as ‘smart and charming and down to earth’. I ask him how he does it. ‘If I were in the same boat in, let’s say 1990, I think it would be different,’ Wolfhard tells me. ‘But because there are so many rules to keep children safe now, you know?

Ask my co-stars. None of us have ever been in the position where, like, we’re at a party being served drinks… The environment I’ve grown up in has been very positive.’

When I ask him to tell me about his worst vice, he answers, ‘I say

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the word like a lot. And I eat like shit. I still eat like a four-year-old’ – burgers, sweets – ‘which is not a good thing when you’re constantly travelling and feeling crappy because of your diet.’

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When people ask Wolfhard if he expected Stranger Things to be such a success, he says no, he had not prepared for that, and he had not fully prepared for fame. At the time, Netflix was popular but not quite the beast it is now, and almost everyone on set was new to acting.

‘We just thought we were filming this secret thing that no one knew about,’ he says. Mostly the cast wondered whether or not the show would be renewed for a second series. Wouldn’t it be fun to come back, do it all again? ‘And then it just blew up. Overnight.’

The success of Stranger Things means Wolfhard is now recognised internationally, and he cannot escape its reach. During a recent trip to Tokyo, he spent four days moving freely through the city before his mega-fans found out.

The same thing happened in Barcelona – a short moment of freedom, and then, surprise, people everywhere.

Wolfhard doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the attention, but he does accept that it is a part of his work. ‘Sure, sometimes it can be off-putting, but I love my job too much to be, like, “I’m done getting recognised, I don’t want photos!”’

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Wolfhard attended a regular school whenever he was in Vancouver. He was grateful for school – that he could still attend, be a bit normal – but he didn’t enjoy it. ‘I always felt like everyone was going so much faster than I was,’ he says, ‘and I could never catch up to them.’ That he was away a lot didn’t make it any easier.

‘You know, when I was 12, on set, it opened my eyes. I knew exactly that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to be on set 100% of the time and just watch filmmaking happen. And it was hard for me to understand that I had to leave to go to school, to do the other work. I’m glad I did, but it was hard.’

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Plans for the future

When I ask if he felt as though he ever missed out on the regular teenage life, he shakes his head.

‘The normal teenage experience is you go to school and you go to parties once in a while… I’ve never

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really been into that stuff. What I like doing all the time is the stuff I like to do: movies and music.’

In his spare time, he watches films constantly, which is kind of work, because really, he is studying them. And when he is not watching movies he is listening to music. ‘I listen to it on the way to set. I listen to it at school, at home, when I write,’ he says. ‘It’s constantly in my head.’

Lately, Wolfhard has been working on several other scripts, as well as new music and watching many films. He cannot wait to return to work. And when work does resume, he will fling himself back into all of it – the acting, the music, the writing – and he will keep doing it for as long as he can. ‘At the end of the road, I want to look back and say I sat in a room with all of my friends and laughed really hard and we all made something together and we did it over and over and over again,’ he says. ‘That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ <<

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Wolfhard thinks his energy comes from his mother, who was an artist and is now ‘just a great stay-athome mum’. His work ethic comes from his father, who trained as a lawyer but for a while was also a screenwriter. When I ask how he remains so grounded, he points to his family. ‘I have good parents,’ he says now. ‘And I have a great friendship group.’ Whenever he is in danger of becoming ‘a person who talks about themselves all the time, someone will call me out on that,’ he says. ‘None of my friends are “Yes” people.’

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   audio

Magzter

According to the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, more than 150 million Europeans suffer from chronic allergic diseases – and they predict that by 2025, half of the entire EU population will be affected. Why are allergies on the increase, and how can we stop them?

Allergies

on the rise

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Let’s start at the beginning: what exactly is an allergy?

2 ‘It’s a reaction caused by your immune system, where it recognises something as foreign and responds to it with a high degree of reactivity,’ says Dr Adrian Morris, adult and paediatric allergy consultant. Allergens can come in many shapes and forms, from food and pollen to fur and dust. ‘Normally your body tolerates these things and nothing happens,’ Dr Morris continues, ‘but if your immune system thinks something dangerous is attacking it, it’ll react and try to fight it.’

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The rise in allergies has been swift in recent years.

1 allergies have actually existed for a long time; it’s thought that rashes, red eyes, and runny noses could date back as far as Ancient Greece. Scientific progress into allergies only really began to advance in the 19th century; the first known recording of hay fever was made in 1819 by Liverpudlian doctor John Bostock, and it was another 50 years until Dr Charles Blackley connected it to pollen. So it’s perhaps truer to say that allergies became far more diagnosable around the beginning of the 20th century, and the continual discovery of new allergens makes them more widespread than ever.

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What we know for certain is that allergies have always been a product of our environment. Back when hay fever was making its debut in British medical papers, major agricultural changes were happening. Dairy herds increased and Italian rye grass was introduced, which pollinated more heavily than any of the traditional grasses. These changes had a vital impact on the rise in allergies, the increase in pollen posing a threat to the immune systems of many.

In 2021, however, we’re seeing a different kind of change to our environment. We are, by now, all aware of the trouble climate change is causing for our planet, and it’s undoubtedly making our allergies worse. As temperatures rise, so does the pollen count. It’s thought that air pollution can also have an effect on those who suffer from asthma and hay fever. The increased amount of carbon dioxide in the air, released through our burning of fossil fuels, encourages grass to grow, thus creating more pollen.

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allergens. The ‘hygiene hypothesis’ dictates that those 105 who are overprotected from bacteria in childhood are more vulnerable to allergies. ‘We have such cleaner lifestyles now,’ explains Dr Morris. ‘We’re just not exposed to bugs and germs as much any more, so our 12 110 immune systems start to react to things that aren’t actually a problem or threat.’

Proof of this can be seen in those raised in farming communities, says Professor George du Toit, consultant paediatric allergist at The Portland Hospital. ‘Children born into environments with farm animals appear to have 115 fewer allergies than those who are born in cities, perhaps 13 due to exposure to healthy bacteria from unpasteurised milk,’ he explains.

But allergies in children can become an issue way 120 before they are even exposed to these environmental bacteria. In recent years, there has been a rise in the number of caesarean sections, which accounted for more than 21 per cent of births in 2015. One particular study of more than a million children conducted by researchers at Örebro University shows there could be a link between the development of food allergies in children born via C-section instead of a vaginal birth, due to the different bacterial flora they’re exposed to.

It’s important to remember that in our younger years, the stronger one’s immune system, the less likely it is to develop an allergy. For this, you must have exposure.

Allowing children to be around harmless bacteria will do just that.

With food allergies, both Dr Morris and Prof. du Toit recommend getting babies used to products that contain potential allergens, such as peanut butter, egg, and soya, early in life. ‘This has been shown to significantly decrease rates of allergy,’ says du Toit. ‘A broad diet is encouraged that’s rich in common food allergens.’

Desensitisation is also something that is gaining more popularity. ‘This means giving an individual minuscule traces of an allergen over a period of time,’ Dr Morris explains. ‘Starting with a tiny trace and building it up, until they can tolerate a higher level of that allergen.’

What’s so important about this method is that successful desensitisation can eliminate the constant fear that many of those who are allergic face every day: ‘We can improve their quality of life tremendously.’ <<

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No allergy has seen such a dramatic increase, though, as those caused by food. With peanuts in particular, a significant rise in the late 1990s was even labelled an epidemic. ‘Peanut allergies began as a phenomenon largely affecting children living in Western countries, the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK,’ Heather Fraser wrote in her book The Peanut Allergy Epidemic. ‘The alarm sounded for Americans when, between 1997 and 2002, the number of peanut allergic children doubled and then tripled, reaching an astonishing 1 million in 2008.’

The cause of this overwhelming rise? The truth is, no one’s really sure. As with most food allergies, it could be down to the age at which they’re first consumed, or again, our very strict hygiene routines. It is unlikely that better diagnosis is a factor. ‘Nut allergies are easy to diagnose,’ says Professor du Toit. ‘When someone is allergic, they experience obvious symptoms soon after exposure.’

Defeating allergies

An allergic reaction shows itself in many ways, varying from mild (itching of the mouth or developing a rash) to severe (anaphylaxis). ln the 20 years up to 2012, there was a whopping 615 per cent increase in hospital admissions for anaphylaxis, and 4,836 hospital admissions in 2017–2018 alone. The constant fear of this kind of reaction can have a huge impact on quality of life, and the reaction itself can, in some cases, be fatal.

Right now, there isn’t a cure for allergies, but it’s clear that if we are to gain any control over their increasing numbers, we need to make vital changes. Taking responsibility for our carbon footprint is essential, and crucially, food labelling needs to be better policed.

2 , there are ways we can help to prevent them.

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Accidental discoveries

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We all think that careful planning is needed to change

the course of events. But many innovations are made by accident. Here are some remarkable examples

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Percy Spencer was so fascinated by the sinking of the Titanic that he became a scientist. He joined the navy, trained as a radio electrician, and finally became an expert on radar during World War II. And he did it all without ever having graduated from high school.

After the war, Spencer worked for Raytheon Manufacturing. As he was walking near the company’s radar equipment one day, he felt a gooey mess in his shirt pocket.

Spencer often carried a chocolate bar to feed the squirrels at lunch.

He knew enough about radar to suspect that its heat-producing magnetron waves were to blame, but he wasn’t sure. So he placed a bag of popcorn kernels in front of the machine, and they popped. Spencer fine-tuned his discovery with Raytheon and he brought it on the market as the Radarange, now called the microwave oven.

Dr Seuss and Stephen King are rescued from the trash can of history

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Different though they may be, Stephen King and Dr Seuss have two things in common. They are both among the most successful authors in American history, and they both narrowly escaped a life of anonymity.

Theodor Geisel, the doctor’s real name, wrote his first children’s book, A story no one can beat, in the mid-1930s. Working as an advertising illustrator at the time, Geisel sent his manuscript to twenty-seven publishers. They all rejected it. After the last rejection, Geisel walked down Madison Avenue, determined to burn the manuscript. But he bumped into his old college roommate, Mike McClintock, who happened to edit children’s books at Vanguard Press.

McClintock asked to see the story; he suggested a few changes, and Vanguard published the book in 1937 with a new title: And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.. And the rest is history.

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Stephen King’s first published book was about a bullied teenage girl who discovers that she has fantastic mental powers, which she uses to get revenge on her bullies.

King disliked his story so much that he threw it away after writing only three pages. A few hours later, his wife found the pages crumpled and covered with cigarette ash in the wastepaper basket. She took them out and started reading, and she was hooked. ‘She wanted me to go on,’ King later wrote. ‘She wanted to know the rest of the story.’ And so he went on. Carrie sold over a million paperback copies in its first year.

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In the summer of 1928, Scottish physician Alexander Fleming was in such a rush to go on vacation that he accidentally left a stack of dirty Petri dishes in his laboratory sink. As if this wasn’t disgusting enough, the dishes were smeared with staphylococcus, a bacterium that causes boils, sore throats, and food poisoning. When Dr Fleming returned weeks later, he found something interesting in the mess in his sink: one of the Petri dishes was dotted with bacteria everywhere except for where some mould was growing. The area around it was clear, as if protected by something.

Upon closer inspection, Dr Fleming realised that the mould, a rare form of Penicillium notatum, had produced a ‘mould juice’ that killed several deadly bacteria. Dr Fleming published his remarkable discovery, and almost no one noticed.

In fact, years later, Howard Walter Florey, an Australian pathologist, found Fleming’s paper by accident while looking through old medical journals.

Together with biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, Dr Florey began to explore the therapeutic effects of the mould juice, and by 1941 they had collected enough penicillin to use on the first human subject, a 43-year-old police officer suffering from a terminal bacterial infection after scratching himself on rosebushes in his garden. The results were amazing: the patient’s fever dropped and his appetite returned, and the penicillin was welcomed as a wonder drug.

Unfortunately, when supplies ran out, the officer’s infection returned and he died.

Still, Dr Fleming shared the Nobel Prize with Dr Florey and Dr Chain for their work on the magic medicine. ‘I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic,’ Fleming remarked, ‘but I suppose that was exactly what I did.’

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Swiss engineer George de Mestral was a natural inventor. When he was 12, he designed and patented a toy airplane. As he got older, he considered nature the greatest inventor on the planet, so he kept his eyes out for natural phenomena that science could imitate. That’s where his faithful dog came in.

After a day hiking in the Swiss mountains, de Mestral noticed that his dog was covered with spiky burs, as were his own pants. He put the burs under the microscope and found tiny ‘hooks’ at the ends of their bristles that got stuck onto almost any kind of fur or clothing.

Since de Mestral was no fan of zippers (they tended to freeze in the Alpine winter) he spent the next ten years trying to duplicate the burs’ irresistible attraction to his dog. After countless attempts and belly rubs, de Mestral found the right material for his invention: nylon, which was strong enough for the hooks to hold but flexible enough to be separated with the right tug. De Mestral submitted his patent in 1952, and it was approved three years later. He named his invention Velcro, a combination of velvet and crochet, the French word for ‘hook’.

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Glenn Cowan was practising for the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, one afternoon when he realised he was the only American in the room.

He had missed the team bus back to the hotel!

Fearless, the 19-year-old Californian just hopped onto the shuttle with the Chinese national team. Most of the Chinese athletes watched the long-haired American with suspicion. The United States had broken diplomatic relations with China way back in 1949, and the team had been forbidden to speak to the Americans. But Zhuang Zedong, the team’s star player, stepped forward to shake Cowan’s hand. The two spoke through an interpreter, and Zhuang presented the American with a silk-screen picture of China’s Huangshan mountain range.

Cowan, a self-described hippie, returned the gesture the next day by giving Zhuang a T-shirt featuring a peace symbol and the words ‘Let It Be’.

After that spontaneous exchange of goodwill was broadcast around the world, Chinese leader Mao Zedong invited the entire US team to visit. A year later, President Richard Nixon made his own historic trip to Beijing. <<

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    The Guardian audio

AITA: the Reddit forum where the ethical dilemmas of sandwich eating – among other things – can be discussed freely

r/AITA

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First of all, you need to picture the sandwich.

This was a 6 ft-long party sub from a local deli, with loaves of bread braided together to make one super-sandwich – nearly twice the standard width, and loaded with fillings. It would have comfortably fed 20 to 25 people, and there were far fewer coming over to watch the fight.

But the host had not accounted for Alan. While the group was distracted by the TV, he ate more than half the sandwich by himself. ‘What I thought would be 1 has ballooned into a huge problem,’ Alan began his online post the following morning.

His host’s girlfriend had exploded at him, calling him a ‘pig’ for eating 3-4 ft of a 6 ft sandwich.

The next day Alan awoke to angry texts telling him that he had embarrassed himself. ‘I figured I could post here to see if what I did was really that bad,’ Alan wrote on the online forum Reddit. ‘Was I the asshole for eating that much of the sandwich?’

Age of uncertainty

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It is a question that most of us sometimes ask: am I the bad one in this situation? In an age of uncertainty, Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? (AITA) forum exists to 2 . It is where some 2.4 million people gather to review accounts of real-life wrongdoing, before delivering their verdict: YTA (‘You’re the asshole’) or NTA (‘Not the asshole’).

Of course, if you’re looking for help to live a better life, AITA is just one of many options. Advice columnists have mushroomed in popularity in the past 10 years – along with the range of problems they tackle. ‘In the old days, people would write about problems with a pesky neighbour or an intrusive mother-in-law,’ Heather Havrilesky, the author of New York magazine’s column Ask Polly, explained in 2014. ‘These days, I think people 3 asking questions that are branch out into the big picture of their lives.’

As the Internet has made space for us to express our deepest

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anxieties, however, it has also taught us to expect definitive answers. And this is where AITA, by delivering what it calls ‘catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher’, is so useful.

4 how much It is contemporary popular culture is concerned with the question of how to be good. In her documentary Miss Americana, Taylor Swift admitted that the need to be perceived as virtuous amounted to her ‘entire moral code’. It is the entire premise of the popular sitcom The Good Place, in which the moral accounting to get into heaven is muddled by the 5 . Simply by complexity of buying a tomato, explains one of its characters, ‘you are supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labour, contributing to global warming’.

Although the Internet has made us aware of this quagmire, it is also an often unforgiving environment in which to navigate it.

On social media, users compete for superiority over the big questions of the age – and the small ones, such

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as whether you wash your legs when you shower. It seems one misstep might prompt calls for ‘cancellation’.

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As William Davies, the author of Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, recently wrote, the Internet has created a ‘society of perpetual referendums’, reducing every issue to a yes-or-no poll 6 . This in which everyone ‘tyranny of binary opinion’, said Davies, is in part a response to navigating information overload online, with ‘clicking a button marked “like” or “dislike” … about as much critical activity as we are permitted’.

On Reddit, AITA reaches its verdict based on which response receives the most votes: YTA or NTA. Alan’s was delivered in more than 3,200 comments: YTA. The AITA forum also has ‘middle areas where “everybody sucks” or “nobody sucks” – which are 7 ,’ says Elizabeth, tragically one of a global group of about 30 moderators.

In a cultural moment when being the asshole might seem not only permissible but rewarded, AITA is exhilarating in its readiness to apportion blame. And the forum’s insane activity reflects the appetite for just that, averaging 30,000 posts a day, with some 800 scenarios for arbitration. The more outlandish problems draw popcorn-popping spectators from far and wide, and

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AITA gathers its ‘best of’ and ‘most controversial’ posts for easy perusal (though obvious ‘creative writing 8 ). exercises’ are AITA stands somewhat apart for the rigour of the discussion and even the altruism of its aim – described as to help people ‘see where they might have been in the wrong’. Many online spaces today ‘are dedicated to not just finding the person in the wrong, but piling on,’ says Steven, another moderator. ‘I do think we’re kind of unique in that we’re having these discussions about the morality 9 .’ of individuals, without Commenters are asked to bear in mind that ‘we are ALL “the asshole” at one point,’ while those who ask for a ruling are warned to accept the decision with grace.

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David Ryan Polgar, an advocate for ethical technology use, says AITA harks back to an earlier, less polarised version of the Internet – when it was primarily an information source that we navigated anonymously. Many people want the ability to seek advice not easily crowdsourced under their own name on Facebook or Twitter, free from any ‘ 10 risk,’ says Polgar. ‘Friends are not telling you the unvarnished truth – if you want radical honesty, you need strangers.’

Verdict by verdict, AITA is in effect crowdsourcing a moral code

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– perhaps in the absence of any other. In the past, societies have looked to religion or science for an ethical framework; in a modern world in which both are challenged, our sense of right and wrong has become untethered.

The great limitation to AITA’s ‘moral arbitration’ project, however, is obvious: it is opt-in.

If it occurs to you to ask ‘AITA?’ – let alone to seek another opinion – you’re 11 . Analysis has found that people who post are overwhelmingly cleared of wrongdoing, with 56% deemed NTA versus 22% certified assholes.

‘The people who come here obviously care about perhaps being in the wrong,’ says Elizabeth, ‘because otherwise they wouldn’t be here wondering if they were the asshole. We have to at least honour the fact that they are thinking about it.’

Of all the assholes declared

by AITA, she says Alan’s story had stayed with her for its relative wholesomeness. ‘There’s no 12 there – just a complete inability to understand that eating four out of six feet of a party sub is maybe not the best move.’

Steven remembers it differently.

After Alan was handed his verdict, the thread had to be shut down; Alan’s account was later suspended.

‘He was arguing up and down the comments the whole time. He just couldn’t accept that he was the asshole.’ <<

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Mashable

audio

Keep your

masks

The future of anti-surveillance fashion is bright (because the world is going to hell)

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Strangely patterned sweatshirts, reflective eyewear, wild face paint.

Over the past decade, computer science researchers, artists, fashion designers, and hobbyists have been creating clothing that makes it harder for surveillance systems to identify people. So far, these creations have been mostly experimental, or only worn in niche activist circles. However, thanks to the unique circumstances of 2020 and 2021, the idea of averting or subverting surveillance through fashion is having a moment.

‘Obviously we’ve been handed a very interesting coincidence of history, which is that face masks are more acceptable than they’ve ever been,’ said Kate Bertash, a cybersecurity professional who runs a website

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called AdversarialFashion.com.

‘They’re necessary for public health reasons and avoid facial recognition in protests.’ The coronavirus pandemic has made wearing face masks widespread and socially acceptable, while unprecedented participation in protests against police brutality has raised awareness about the surveillance state and shown how important it is for protesters to protect their identities.

Police have met protests with drone, helicopter, and aeroplane surveillance, feeding footage into a federal system that enables law enforcement to use the footage for future investigations. They’ve already used facial recognition to make arrests. In response, guides on how to protect your digital

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identity circulated widely. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advised protesters to wear nondescript clothing and leave smartphones at home or go into aeroplane mode to evade tracking.

At the same time, previously disparate camps in anti-surveillance fashion have started collaborating, with more amateurs and students joining the bandwagon. Some face masks now feature images that confuse surveillance systems – and that has the potential to go mainstream. ‘I’m excited to see what people put on masks,’ Bertash said. ‘Especially with face masks, I don’t think we even know yet what can be done to undermine facial recognition by obscuring a part of the face.’

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Cihang Xie, a fifth-year computer science PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, is trying to make computer vision systems that recognise images smarter.

He also inadvertently created anti-surveillance fashion tools for protesters. ‘Just do not use it for bad things,’ Xie said, when asked how he would feel about protesters using his research to protect their identities.

Along with several colleagues at both US and Chinese universities, Xie recently published a paper about creating a Universal Physical Camouflage (UPC) Attack, or basically a framework for creating patterns that cause object recognition systems to misclassify what they’re looking at. The paper shows how easy it is to fool these systems, and to ultimately make artificial intelligence (AI) smarter by identifying (and patching) their vulnerabilities. The researchers put their patterns on clothing, and showed that they could trick a computer into thinking a human was a potted plant or a bird.

Others have undertaken similar research: Tom Goldstein, a University of Maryland computer science professor, programmed an algorithm to design an ‘invisibility cloak’ to be printed on T-shirts and sweatshirts that made humans invisible (not just misclassified) to an image recognition system. But Xie’s research team also put their

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computer-fooling images on face masks. ‘Wearing a mask is already occlusion, and that’s already hard for facial recognition,’ Xie said.

‘With adversarial patterns, that definitely will make the problem much harder. I do not know any solution yet.’ Goldstein sees this as an exciting strategy. ‘Now that you have the ability to wear a mask, you can cover so much more of your body,’ Goldstein said. ‘The more of your body that you can cover with adversarial patterns, the more efficacious these attacks are.’

The extent to which mask wearing undermines facial recognition systems is not yet known. While some reports show that mask wearing is disrupting these systems, others show that there are technological workarounds, or that the people making facial recognition tech are adapting. However, Goldstein still sees mask wearing as the future of anti-surveillance fashion, both because of its power to become widely worn, and its effectiveness at undermining systems. ‘Adversarial things like cloaks and clothing, I think they will improve in their accuracy, but I don't think they’ll ever be as reliable as just covering your face,’ Goldstein said. ‘To me, the potential of masks in public spaces is what I see as the biggest opportunity for countersurveillance.’

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Nina Zhong, a Parsons School of Design senior studying fashion, is facing a problem: how to create anti-surveillance shoes that are comfortable enough to wear. ‘I haven’t totally finalised this yet, but I was looking to create heels which are asymmetrical,’ Zhong said. ‘I think the problem with this is that it might be kind of uncomfortable to walk in a different way, but it might be worth the difference.’

Zhong says she takes inspiration from Bertash and adversarial fashion designer Adam Harvey to prevent the collection of ‘soft biometrics’ like height, weight, and hair colour. Since some systems can identify a person by their gait,

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Zhong is trying to create shoes that would change the way a person walks. In the past, she has felt ‘alone’ in this work. But now that her friends and classmates are taking to the street and combining skill sets like protest tactics and fashion design, she feels things are changing. ‘I have friends who have experience doing this in actual real life, like in protests,’ Zhong said. ‘I myself am getting more feedback for those kinds of events.’

Bertash was excited to hear that a fashion student was inspired by her work. She felt it showed that the ability to fight back against surveillance was becoming more widespread and accessible. ‘The big moment that I see happening right now is that artists in particular are realising the mechanics of the way these things work,’ Bertash said.

‘Once they find an experimental environment, I think a lot of people can have the same ability to start playing with things in their closet.’

The trend has extended beyond the fashion world. Academics are reaching more people, and building on each other’s work, too.

‘People who were interested in surveillance used to be in different camps,’ Goldstein said. ‘AI, security and systems databases, people who work on human-computer interaction – these three academic communities never spoke to each other. But now, suddenly all of this is coming together.’

Researchers and designers are also making their work more accessible. Bertash’s website has a section that teaches others how to make their own adversarial designs for overloading surveillance systems.

Similarly, the designer of the camouflage face masks, Xie, has put his designs and research on GitHub for anyone to download. Although he didn’t intend for it to become a tool for protest, he’s not averse to the idea – and even sees its benefits.

‘If you want to protect yourself and you don’t want your government to know your information, you should know this technique,’ Xie said.

‘For anybody who wants to use it, our paper is there. You are free to download it.’ << WR number 1 • volume 20

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Time

Next generation l

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paths, crossing boundaries, and creating change.

Meet four inspirational individuals from different countries who want to make a difference by leading in inspirational ways

Advocating for racial and transgender tolerance 1

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Munroe Bergdorf, 33, is a black transgender activist and model from the UK. She comes across online as eminently self-assured – whether she’s calling out racism and transphobia on social media or writing articles about inclusion for black and brown gender-non-conforming people in the beauty industry. She catapulted onto a big stage in 2017, after she was hired as the first transgender model to star in a campaign for L’Oréal. But hope that the beauty industry was finally heeding calls to diversify evaporated when she was fired within a week, after the brand deemed a strongly worded condemnation of white supremacy she posted to social media inconsistent with its ‘values’. Following a public apology from L’Oréal, she joined the company’s UK Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board. It’s a reconciliation befitting her belief that people – and, yes, brands – should have the opportunity to change. ‘I have faith that everybody can grow,’ she says.

Bergdorf is using her platform – more than half a million Instagram followers, magazine articles, and TV appearances – to educate the world about racism, transphobia, and their intersection. She speaks forcefully about the United States, where the National Centre for Transgender Equality reports that more trans people may have been murdered in the first seven months of 2020 than in all of 2019. ‘I want to keep fighting for a world that values trans people like everybody else, not as something controversial. Activism is psychology. It’s about changing mindsets. That’s what I’m trying to do.’

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Mohamed Dhaouafi was training to be an engineer in Tunisia when a story about a fellow student’s 12-year-old cousin put him on a path toward prosthetics. The girl had been born without arms, but her parents couldn’t afford to buy her artificial replacements. Of some 30 million to 40 million amputees in developing countries around the world, Dhaouafi learned, only 5 per cent have access to prostheses. ‘For someone who’s lost a hand, it’s just miserable,’ he says. After he graduated from college, making prosthetic limbs that were both affordable and user-friendly ‘became my passion, my purpose’.

Cure Bionics, the start-up Dhaouafi established in November 2018, is now about to launch its 3D-printed, in-house engineered prostheses in Tunisia, with distribution in broader Africa and the Middle East to follow. Cure Bionics’ hands will cost around $2,500 – about one-fourth the market average. They have solar panels and use AI to adapt as a patient’s body grows or changes. The start-up is also developing virtual-reality games in parallel to help children master the use of their new prostheses. Dhaouafi says he wants Tunisians to be inspired by people with limb differences, rather than pity them. Prostheses should not be ‘an ugly metal thing they try to hide’, he says, but tools for ‘positive differentiation’.

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The world needs trailblazers who are forging new

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n leaders Fighting to save the coral reefs 55

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Amid a global pandemic, another disaster was unfolding earlier this year beneath the ocean waters off the coast of Australia. Thanks to climate change, surface water temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef hit record highs. The damage was clear: the reef had endured the most widespread bleaching event ever recorded, as corals expelled the symbiotic algae that serve as their food source and give them their colour.

With a quarter of all ocean fish depending on reefs during their life cycles, scientists say we urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to preserve the essential habitats. ‘Unfortunately, we aren’t acting quick enough on climate change, and that leaves a real problem for coral reefs,’ says Emma Camp, 33, a marine biogeochemist at the University of Technology Sydney. She’s investigating special corals that survive in mangrove forest lagoons where water is warmer and more acidic compared with that surrounding most reefs, and which may be resistant to the conditions devastating the Great Barrier Reef. Camp wants to learn if these creatures, named ‘super-corals’, can be transplanted to other reefs to aid restoration. She’s also investigating the biochemical properties that allow certain corals to survive in extreme environments. None of her efforts, she says, is a substitute for action to halt climate change. ‘My research is really about buying time.’

For Camp, it’s also essential to recruit a new generation of scientists to study the planet’s ecological systems. She talks about science with students around the world and speaks at local and international womenin-science events. ‘If we lose 50% of the intellectual input or potential innovation because we’re filtering out women from that career path, we’re really going to struggle to solve those problems,’ she says.

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As Covid-19 began to ravage North America, Canadian boxer Kim Clavel’s first main event fight, scheduled for March 21 in Montreal last year, was cancelled. Clavel had taken a leave from nursing to focus full-time on her fighting career. A huge opportunity had slipped away.

She felt destroyed. What next? She soon found out.

Canada desperately needed nurses to care for elderly patients fighting Covid-19. On March 21, instead of entering the ring, she began work in a Montreal nursing home.

An undefeated light flyweight champion, Clavel, 30, worked 16-hour shifts at times during the peak of the pandemic, treating as many as 30 patients at once in Montreal. Many of them were suffering and confused about why they couldn’t see their loved ones. She ended shifts in tears. ‘You have to hold their hands, you are with them in their last breaths,’ she says. ‘The only thing you can do is tell them everything will be all right.’ Over three months, Clavel worked in 11 different hospitals and nursing homes. ‘We have to take care of our elderly,’ Clavel says. In June, at the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards, better known as the ESPYs, she won the Pat Tillman Award for Service.

Clavel started boxing when she was 15. After her first lesson, she told the coach she wanted to be a champion.

‘He laughed,’ says Clavel. ‘He looked at me and said, “Little girl, calm down. You have to train first and we will see.”’ Eight months later, she won a Quebec title.

‘Boxing doesn’t have limits,’ she says. ‘It makes me feel alive.’

Clavel is once again focused on boxing full-time; she hopes to fight again by the end of the year and continue to raise the profile of women’s boxing. But she plans to put her scrubs back on at some point. She wants to earn an advanced degree, so she can write prescriptions and work even more closely with doctors. ‘To be a nurse you change lives, you change the world. Even if conditions are really hard, they never quit. Nurses are the army of health.’ << WR number 1 • volume 20

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    Ideas and Discoveries audio

Throughout history, the US president has often been the nation’s most respected person, and many of them have been powerful speakers as well. But is presidential rhetoric becoming less sophisticated – and is it lowering esteem for the chief executive in the process?

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In April 1789, after being elected in America’s very first presidential election, George Washington delivered his inaugural address to a joint session of Congress. Here is the opening sentence of that speech: ‘Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.’ Looking back on inaugural addresses of more recent times, it seems unlikely Washington’s speech would fly at an inauguration today. We have become accustomed to far simpler speeches and in some ways to far 3 simpler ideas.

The news website Vocativ.com has examined the topic more closely and analysed more than 600 presidential speeches of many varieties and eras. The conclusion:

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although the earliest speeches were often written at a level appropriate for a listener with a PhD, political speech has indeed grown more accessible over time. Abraham Lincoln had been self-educated but was widely acknowledged as a highly intelligent leader, yet his speeches – take the Gettysburg Address, for an example – were far easier for anyone to understand than Washington’s. While the entire world remembers the first president of the United States, his address – unlike Lincoln’s – has largely been forgotten.

A readability test

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Vocativ.com conducted analyses of the 600 speeches based on FleschKincaid, a ‘readability’ test the US Navy developed to ensure its military instruction manuals could be easily understood. The test is not intended to measure vocabulary

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or complexity of sentences. It evaluates two things: the number of syllables per word and the number of words per sentence. It assigns a score based on the grade levels of the US education system. The higher the score, the lower the grade level. So a score between 100 and 90 means that the text would be readily understood by the average 11-year-old – a fifth-grader.

A score of 30 or less indicates the text is quite difficult and would likely be readily understood only by someone with a university education.

So how do our politicians past and present stack up? Up until the 1850s, most presidents wrote in language that the Flesch-Kincaid test would score as college-level.

But starting around the time Word War II erupted, presidential addresses often haven’t risen above the level of a sixth-grade classroom.

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The power of words

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Interestingly, the Flesch-Kincaid test has rated both George W. Bush and Barack Obama about the same, placing them in the range of higher elementary school grades.

But remember: Flesch-Kincaid only counts syllables and words – it does not consider content or inspiration.

The Vocativ.com analysis found that presidential speeches are becoming less complex, in part because America is becoming more democratic (with a small ‘d’). Former President Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol insists that there has been no conscious attempt to dumb down the messages coming out of the Oval 7 Office. ‘In the early republic, presidents could assume they were speaking to audiences that were composed mostly of men like themselves – educated, civicminded landowners – the only Americans with the right to vote.

However over time, presidential messages have had to reach a 1 audience.’

Starting in the early 20th century, the tendency toward less complex political rhetoric was furthered by several important events. The 19th Amendment that was ratified in 1920 gave women the right to vote, greatly expanding the electoral base. In addition to

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Talking like a politician

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this constitutional change, there was a growing movement in the 1920s to make public education mandatory. And finally, when KDKA in Pittsburgh made the country’s 9 first commercial radio broadcast, it memorably chose November 2, 1920, which had been a presidential election day. By the 1930s more than half of American homes had a radio and thus access to nearinstant news and the voices of their politicians. The first US TV station (W3XK) began broadcasting in 1928, and by the 1950s television had also passed the 50% threshold.

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So what about other elected officials, such as senators and congressional representatives? We 190 know that most of them love to talk, and some are far better at it than others. But nearly all of them 10 seem to have mastered the arts of not making binding promises, of insulting their opponents without 195 sounding nasty, and of steering clear of anything that makes them 2 , sound like a politician. these manoeuvring abilities have not done them that much good in 200 recent years. According to Gallup’s congressional approval ratings, positive answers to the question ‘Do you approve of how Congress is handling its job?’ have hovered 205 somewhere between 13% and 28% over the past three years.

George Orwell had complained that political language was ‘designed to make lies sound 210 truthful and murder respectable, to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. But more than anything else, politicians hope that 11 215 their language will make people admire them. It’s a lot harder to get re-elected when you’re disliked. Thus they’ll soften their criticism of other politicians they 220 can’t stand, referring to them as ‘my good friend’. Instead of calling an idea they hate stupid, they are much more likely to say it’s counterproductive. And they avoid 225 calling one another liars, even when there’s lots of proof. Disingenuous is a popular alternative adjective.

We all hope that we’d see through

these efforts at being, well, disingenuous, but evidently we do not. If political speech weren’t effective, politicians would stop using it.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg remarked: ‘Each of us believes that we’re inured to manipulation – but that everyone else in the room is susceptible to it.’ Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As linguistic expert George Lakoff notes, ‘Language works by activating brain structures called “framecircuits” that we use to understand experience. Enough repetition can make them permanent, changing how we view the world. The modifier crooked convicted Hillary Clinton without a trial being held,’ he says.

The fourth estate

Though the principles involved are well known to marketers, advertisers, salespeople, and the scientists who study them, most journalists have yet to come to grips. But many politicians have: language shapes the way we think, and the most clever politicians take advantage of this by diverting attention from embarrassing news, shifting blame to other people, and repeating a message – whether true or untrue – over and over until it has entered the public consciousness. But journalists are not powerless in these situations.

They can report the truth instead of allowing themselves to be diverted, they can place blame squarely where it belongs, and they can refuse to report the buzzwords a politician repeatedly makes use of to establish an ‘alternative’ truth.

Political scientists employ the term fourth estate to refer to the press because of the power it holds – the ability to frame political issues. Back in the days of George Washington, as delegates arrived in Philadelphia to write (frame) the US Constitution, Britain’s House of Commons opened its debates to the press for the first time. British MP Edmund Burke had welcomed those journalists: ‘In the Reporters’ Gallery sits a fourth estate far more important than all the others.’ << WR number 1 • volume 20

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Smithsonian Magazine

audio

Vampire panic How superstition collided with public health concerns to create a modern monster

By Karina Wilson

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In 1721, London curate Thomas Lewis, concerned about the mephitic stink of decomposing flesh seeping from overstuffed tombs into his church, published a pamphlet in which he explained how he believed the noxious vapours desecrated the space, distracting his congregation from prayer. Lewis also claimed that the odours caused diseases like plague, smallpox, and dysentery.

A few years later, on the other side of Europe, in the village of Kisiljevo on the outskirts of the Hapsburg Empire, locals similarly blamed a corpse for spreading disease – but via a radically different method of transmission. In July 1725, they summoned Provisor Frombald, a health and safety official. His concern was identifying the cause of the cluster of cases and preventing a full-blown epidemic. The villagers believed Petar Blagojević, who had died ten weeks earlier, was up and out of his grave and bringing death to their homes.

The widow claimed her husband knocked on her door after the funeral, demanding his shoes before attempting to strangle her. Blagojević remained active over the next nine nights, attacking nine more villagers. After suffering a mysterious ‘twenty-four-hour illness’, they all died.

As Frombald detailed in his official report, the village elders had already made their diagnosis: Blagojević was vampyri, the Serbian word for ‘back from the dead’.

Frombald’s only job was to rubber-stamp this conclusion.

The villagers would take it from there. So, Frombald

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conducted a formal autopsy on the exhumed Blagojević.

He recorded the appearance (and smell) of the corpse as ‘completely fresh’. He also noted the appearance of ‘fresh blood’ around the mouth, supposedly sucked from the victims.

With such evidence before him, he couldn’t muster any objection to the villagers’ plan of action, repulsive though it seemed. As they drove a sharpened stake through Blagojević’s torso, Frombald witnessed ‘much blood, completely fresh’ gush from the ears and mouth – further proof of undead status, if any was needed.

His subsequent report made sensational newspapers, leading to the first printed usage of the local term vampyri, which would soon filter into other languages.

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Lewis’s complaint and Frombald’s investigation stemmed from the same public health issue: the proximity between the living and the dead. This had been a problem since

The widow claimed her husband knocked on her door after the funeral

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the beginnings of urbanisation in 11th-century Europe.

Homes and businesses tended to be built around places of worship and their attached burial grounds. The Church wasn’t keen to change this as inhumations were lucrative.

Priests earned significant fees from brokering postmortem real estate – the closer to the living the better.

Meanwhile, good Christians took comfort from knowing they would decay next to familiar people and places.

But, as the centuries piled up, populations bulged on both sides of the graveyard wall and competed for the same urban spaces.

When all the plots in a graveyard were full – as was happening more and more by the end of the 17th century – sextons added another layer, digging graves two, rather than the customary six, feet under. The bodies of the poor, or plague victims, were dumped, en masse, into pits. Most corpses were clad in only a shroud as coffins were considered a luxury.

All it took for the dead to rise was a heavy rainstorm, a pack of marauding dogs, or a sloppy drunk gravedigger (see: Hamlet). Some were withered down to the bone while others appeared ruddy and well fed, more lifelike than when they were gasping on their hollow-cheeked deathbeds. Medical science failed to explain such post-mortem anomalies but folk tradition had a name for the undecayed. The Slavic term was vampyr or upyr.

By any name, these monsters were believed to be the result of improperly observed burial rites or a suspicious death. Denied the proper ceremonies, unable to rest, they lurched from their graves, attacking relatives and friends who died in turn. The medieval cure was drastic: exhume, stake, decapitate, and burn, before scattering the ashes in running water. As the Age of Enlightenment took hold, this gruesome solution started to look like superstitious nonsense, especially to Catholic and Protestant bishops keen to move with the times – and away from witch hunts.

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Moving with the times

Nonetheless, the vampires persisted. When their reports of the returned dead fell on deaf ears at the bishop’s palace, tax-paying parishioners contacted their local government rep. In late 1731, Austro-Hungarian field surgeon Johannes Flückinger journeyed to the Serbian village of Medvegya to investigate another series of mysterious deaths. This time the suspected ‘Vampire Zero’ was an Albanian named Arnaud Paole. Forty days after his demise, four villagers declared the deceased Paole had returned ‘to torment them’ – and then those four promptly expired. The local elders disinterred Paole’s corpse and found it ‘complete and incorrupt’, while ‘completely fresh blood flowed from his eyes, ears and nose’. Satisfied by the evidence, the locals drove a stake through the torso, ‘whereupon he let out a noticeable groan and bled copiously’.

All was peaceful for around five years. Unfortunately, Paole had also sucked on calves during his vampiric rampage. As the contaminated cattle matured and were slaughtered, those who consumed the meat also became

infected and died, resulting in as many as 17 new vampires.

An expert in contagious diseases, Flückinger systematically ordered exhumations and conducted autopsies on all the suspects. Once again, he couldn’t find any evidence of known diseases. Folk-hypothesis trumped science as the most plausible diagnosis.

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Debate raged in scholarly, religious, and court circles regarding the nature of these so-called vampire epidemics. Did citizens need to fear blood-sucking ghouls attacking them in their beds? In which case, was it safe to live close to a graveyard? Should, as Lewis and his cohort had long been suggesting, the dead be securely interred in high-walled burial grounds outside city limits? The issue wasn’t laid to rest until 1746, when Vatican scholar Dom Augustin Calmet concluded in his Dissertations sur les apparitions that nobody outside scripture was rising from the grave. He classified vampires as creatures of imagination.

Calmet’s conclusion coincided with the birth of the cemetery reform movement. If the breakaway dead weren’t animated by supernatural forces, then sensible, practical measures would be enough to keep corpses confined to their tombs. While urban planners advocated for cemeteries outside city limits as early as 1708, Paris led the legislative way, restricting burials in churches and urban churchyards in 1765.

Lewis’s vision of sanitary burial grounds was finally realised in the garden cemeteries of the 19th century.

With the dearly departed now secured out of sight and out of mind, people’s once-real fear of marauding corpses faded into the past. Vampires, however, thanks to their new fictional status, thrived throughout the 1800s. They were reclaimed in Romantic literature as ephemeral, liminal figures, finding a natural home amid the elegant monuments of the new necropolises. They shed their former identity as barely sentient ghouls crawling from the fetid mud of urban graves and rose again as supernatural, superior seducers – the position they’ve staked in our hearts to this day. <<

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audio

Return of the dragon

China is rising in the eyes of the US and the West. But in its own historical perspective, this is a restoration

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No foreign policy issue will plague Biden more than China.

There’s already a debate raging among China watchers over what Washington’s next steps should be. Some favour a ‘reset’ to tamp down tensions and return to more constructive diplomacy. Others are fearful of that very reset and argue the US mustn’t stray from the hard line.

The choices made by the US administration will be critical. As the US has struggled to contain the coronavirus outbreak and restart its economy, China appears to be 1 strength. Its gross domestic 3 product expanded 4.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2020, an

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astounding rebound in a world still mostly mired in a pandemicinduced paralysis. (Official Chinese data have to be taken with several grains of salt, but economists generally agree the economy is rapidly on the mend.) In its own foreign policy, Beijing has barely flinched under US pressure and instead has become more assertive – enhancing its influence in global institutions such as the World Health Organisation, crushing 4 the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, turning up the heat on Taiwan, and brawling (literally) with India along their disputed border.

But before the US and its allies can move forward, they have to

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look back to figure out how the world got to this point with China in the first place. The West really got China ‘wrong’ by understanding the country’s arrival as a major power within the confines of its own – not China’s – historical experience.

Because of that, we in the US and the West talk and think about China the wrong way and craft policies mismatched to the deep historical trends shaping today’s China and its role in the world.

The key is to see the country as the Chinese see it and to place China within the context of its history, not ours in the West. With that, another China emerges that demands a different set of policies.

© DILOK KLAISATAPORN, YIUCHEUNG / SHUTTERSTOCK

By Michael Schuman

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Without this altered understanding of China, Washington policymakers will struggle to contend with Beijing 8 and its intensifying challenge to American global primacy.

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The problem starts in high school.

Mine, in Clifton, NJ, offered the option of US history or US history.

We learned about other parts of the world only when they drifted into the American narrative. China made an occasional cameo: John Hay’s Open Door Policy, or Chiang Kaishek’s World War II alliance against Japan. A lot of us were probably taught history in a similar manner – through the prism of our own story.

Prisms, though, distort. It just so happens Americans encountered China at one of the darkest points in its history. China in the 19th and early 20th centuries was politically decrepit, militarily inept, economically archaic, and, as Westerners saw it, socially backward. We were left with an image of the country that at best was an unmodern realm of quaint rice paddies and silk-robed 9 mandarins; at worst, a war-torn basket case drenched in destitution and decay. Sure, we all know something of China’s glittering past of bejewelled emperors, their grand palaces, and the engineering genius of the Great Wall. But that China is beyond our prism.

That skews the way we describe and discuss China today. We call it an ‘emerging market’, which it is within the boundaries of our own view. But twist the prism, and Chinese poverty is a fairly recent 2 aberration. The country had been one of the world’s largest economies over the past 2,000 years – and still was well into the 19th century. That’s why Westerners who visited China were awestruck by riches exceeding anything they’d witnessed in Europe. When the first Portuguese seafarers made their way to Guangzhou in the early 16th century, they gasped at silk flags as large as sails. ‘Such is the wealth of that country,’ reads one contemporary Portuguese account, ‘such is its vast supply of silk, that

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they squander gold leaf and silk on these flags where we use cheap 165 colours and coarse linen cloth.’

Rather than something startling, China’s growth into the world’s second-largest economy is a return to the norm. So is the critical role it plays in modern manufacturing and 10 170 trade. We grouse that China has ‘stolen’ our factories and fret over how much stuff at Target is ‘Made in China’. Historically, though, the country had been a major 175 manufacturing centre and premier exporter, capable of producing valuable goods on a mind-boggling scale. The Song dynasty (960–1279) experienced a near-industrial 180 revolution seven centuries before England’s. Silk and porcelain, both Chinese inventions, were among the world’s first truly global consumer products, the iPhones of 185 their age. Centuries before Vasco da Gama found his way to India in 1498, China was the beating heart of a global economic system, with trade links stretching from South 190 China, across South East Asia and 11 the Indian Ocean, to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. Thinking of modern China’s growing power as a restoration 195 forces a shift in how we contend with it. We in the West discuss how to fit China into the global political and economic order we created.

But China was never going to be 200 content being a mere cog in the Western machine. For much of its history, it sat at the centre of its own world order, based on a distinctly Chinese form of foreign relations and governed by Chinese diplomatic 205 ideals and practices, with roots dating back more than 2,000 years.

The Chinese rules of diplomacy and trade were based on the at least ceremonial stature of China as a superior civilisation, perched at the top of a hierarchy of societies.

Duality

The first step in dealing with a Chinese restoration is to accept that China wants to be and most likely will be a global superpower.

The notion that the US can ‘stop’ China is a non-starter. Washington can slow things up by withholding technology and disrupting trade.

But the Chinese believe that, based on their history, they have a right to be a superpower, and an approach meant to ‘keep China down’, as they see it, will generate conflict with few tangible results. Similarly, efforts to compel China to ‘play by the rules’, as in our rules, are almost equally hopeless. The Chinese perceive the Western world order as an imposition on an East Asia 3 they’d usually dominated, they’re far more likely to assert their own rules than follow ours.

I don’t believe in historical inevitabilities: just because China had great power status in the past doesn’t automatically mean it will rebound now. Contemporary China is still a middle-income country lacking key technologies and plagued by an artificially aging population; it has a long way to go to become a global superpower.

Yet from a policy standpoint, it’s wiser to recognise the historical trends propelling it forward and rejigger the world order to address Chinese aspirations (though not its autocracy). It won’t be easy. But neither is denying history. <<

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vibe WR

While we have made every effort to trace the copyright holders of

15 of the funniest puns ever

articles and illustrations contained in this issue, we would be grateful for any information that might assist us in identifying sources we have as yet been unable to find.

Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

#2

I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

#3

‘I have a split personality,’ said Tom, being frank.

#4

Last night, I dreamed I was swimming in an ocean of orange soda.

But it was just a Fanta sea.

#5

Will glass coffins be a success? Remains to be seen.

#6

What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo?

One is really heavy and the other is a little lighter.

#7

I can’t believe I got fired from the calendar factory.

All I did was take a day off.

#8

The man who survived pepper spray and mustard gas is now a seasoned veteran. #9

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool. #10

I tried to sue the airline for losing my luggage. I lost my case.

#11

All chemists know that alcohol is always a solution.

#12

A cross-eyed teacher couldn’t control his pupils.

#13

Is it ignorance or apathy that’s destroying the world today?

I don’t know and don’t really care. #14

There was a kidnapping at school yesterday.

Don’t worry, though – he woke up.

#15

How do you throw a space party?

You planet.

Editor Johan Graus Editorial assistant Aafke Moons Compiled by Marleen Cannegieter Erik Cats Christien van Gool Johan Graus Caspar van Haalen Aafke Moons Ine Sanders Frederike Westera Teaching enquiries © ROMAN SAMBORSKYI, COOKIE STUDIO, LULUS BUDI SANTOSO, TEGUH MUJIONO, DN BR, GOODSTUDIO, PLUTUSART / SHUTTERSTOCK

#1

Johan Graus, jgraus@xs4all.nl Photos on cover Emma McIntyre / Getty Images; r.classen, Mladen Mitrinovic, Victoruler / Shutterstock Editorial agency Marjan den Hertog, Deventer Graphic design Maura van Wermeskerken, Apeldoorn Subscriptions (also for Belgium) Mijntijdschrift.com Curieweg 16 8013 RA Zwolle (088) 22 666 93 waspreporter@mijntijdschrift.com Subscription terms and rates See Teacher File or bit.ly/wr-subscription © ThiemeMeulenhoff Amersfoort, Netherlands, 2021

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WaspReporter_20.1.indd 28

05-07-2021 08:59