A relative of passengers involved in a train crash talks on her mobile phone as she waits for news at the Cersia Building on July 25, 2013 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The crash occurred as the train approached the north-western Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela at 8.40pm on July 24. At least 77 people have died and a further 131 reported injured. The crash occured on the eve of the Santiago de Compostela Festivities. By David Ramos/Getty Images.
A reader writes:
I enjoyed your recent post about Nate Silver and am glad he’s moving to ESPN – one of my daily reads (in addition to the Times). I also like the idea of a Silver-led version of Grantland. But I thought I’d pass along the Big Lead’s recent piece on Grantland, which is very successful in some ways but is apparently dependent on its connections to ESPN not just for editing and support but also basic financial viability.
The article’s a bit critical of Simmons, probably in part due to professional jealousy, but I don’t think it’s entirely misplaced in its judgment (though I like Simmons for the most part). ESPN is an extraordinarily profitable media corporation that still struggles for journalistic respectability, largely because of the obvious potential conflicts of interest involved in reporting on athletes and athletics and broadcasting sports. Grantland seems possibly like a kind of write-off for them, and it’s basically safe. In some ways, 538 is a riskier and bolder move, but I think that the lessons regarding old vs. new media are more complex than a clear victory by bloggers over the old media.
A sizable excerpt from the Big Lead piece:
Grantland sought to “prove long-form has a place online.” Has it done so? Sort of.
It is hard to fashion a general principle from Grantland. The site was not a startup. ESPN affiliation offered it immediate credibility and promotion. ESPN coffers offered it cash to launch and to operate at a loss if need be. ESPN’s existing Internet infrastructure offered it multiple traffic fire hoses, including plum placement on ESPN.com and Bill Simmons’ twitter feed (now over 2 million followers). This project was more than a domain name and a dream. The floor was much higher.
The site’s birth conditions shaped its development. Grantland is utopian and expensive. The masthead has 10 people listed as some form of editor. Another 18 are listed as staff writers. There are additional, high-profile contributors. We presume there are more uncredited grunts doing technical support. Even presuming they are paid at standard rates, that is substantial overhead. Most Internet outfits are skeletal. Grantland is not just fleshed. It is bloated.
Grantland is not optimized to pay for itself with traffic. Writers are afforded time to produce thoughtful content, only thoughtful content. The site publishes a relatively small amount, only Monday through Friday. Grantland is an Internet place where weekends still exist.
How is the site’s traffic? According to Comscore, Grantland has hovered around or a bit above two million unique visitors for the past 12 months. Their number for May, after a recent uptick, was 2,474,000 unique visitors, up 26 percent from May 2012. For some perspective, that is 76 percent of the traffic generated by Deadspin over the same month. Is that traffic enough to make the site self-sufficient financially? The answer in January was “it depends on how you do the accounting” and ESPN “doesn’t discuss financials.” We suspect ESPN would argue important ad metrics are shifting from raw traffic to audience engagement. The company declined a request to provide data that would have buttressed that point.
Grantland, denied the WWL teat, probably would not survive, at least as constituted. But that does not prove long form content does not work on the Internet. Long-form, writerly content was seldom, if ever self-sustaining before the Internet. The New Yorker still prints because it is “The New Yorker.” The magazine was notably unprofitable when magazines were booming. Even before print, scholars relied on independent wealth or, more likely, someone else’s independent wealth to furnish expensive libraries and disseminate their work. The Internet has not changed the climate, so much as it has intensified and quantified it. …
Long-form content will work on the Internet, as it has throughout history, with someone or something else subsidizing it.
Read the rest of the piece here.
In response to the tragic train crash in Spain, Caitlin Dewey reviews data on train safety and concludes that trains “remain one of the safest ways to travel in Europe.” Waldman adds that “train travel and air travel are both substantially safer than road travel”:
The real killer, though, is motorcycles. A doctor once told me that medical professionals sometimes call them “donorcycles,” since they produce so many organ donors. I tried without success to find one source that gave comparable data on miles traveled per fatality for all different kinds of U.S. travel, but I did come across this report from the European Union from 2001/2002, which gives some pretty striking numbers. …
Even though these aren’t the latest numbers, you get the idea. What jumps out is that the individual means of transportation are the least safe, and the communal ones are the safest. Emotionally, though, we feel more safe when we feel that we, and not somebody else or an automated system, is in control.
Mark Obbie takes issue with Scheiber’s thesis:
From the cover lines and title (“Big Law in Free Fall,” “The Last Days of Big Law”) to an outlandishly flimsy nut graf (claiming just one in 10 top firms will survive the imminent apocalypse, or so says “one common hypothesis” that then never gets explained or examined), the story looks at one sore throat and proclaims it a cancer pandemic. Its prognosis on the death of the mid-sized full-service firm echoes a forecast made so many times it has lost all credibility. Then the piece takes yet another giant step into journalism hell by shooting readers through a time warp that conveniently skips the past 30 or so years of Big Law business history. Big Law has been declared dying for decades. Pieces touting the death of Big Law have been written for decades. Unfortunately, “Big Law Still Really, Really Dying,” while arguable (except where it’s still really, really profitable), doesn’t sell copy.
Meanwhile, Leah Plunkett focuses on the Americans who can’t afford legal help:
When people can’t get lawyers to help them with complex problems, they stand to lose (pdf) the things that are most precious to them, like custody of their children, the roof over their heads, or that quintessentially American opportunity to make a fresh start after crashing and burning.
Even if all Americans could afford to pay for lawyers, there may well not be any lawyers around. Outside of cities, lawyers can be scarce. As The New York Timesrecently reported, South Dakota has gone so far as to pass a law that will pay lawyers to work in that state’s rural communities. A worthy endeavor, but it’s difficult to imagine that the program will do much to get the over-supply of lawyers on Wall Street to migrate to Main Street: The annual stipend for South Dakota’s program is less than a month’s salary for a first-year Big Law associate in New York.1 And of course, as others have discussed, today’s young lawyers—who might otherwise be intrigued by doing Little Law on the Prairie—frequently face financial debt that is insurmountable on all but a Big Law salary.
The Crystal Ball’s 2014 Senate ratings:
Kyle Kondik previews the 2014, 2016, and 2018 Senate races:
The Democrats are overextended on the 2014 map, which probably means the Republicans should, at the very least, make a dent in the Democratic Senate majority next year. Two years later, the Republicans will be defending a map on which they are overextended, which could help the Democrats make up for some of their possible 2014 losses. And then the Democrats are overextended again in 2018.
All of which suggests that 60-vote Senate majorities are going to be elusive for either party, and future Senate majority leaders, be they Democrats or Republicans, are going to be continually tempted by some form of the “nuclear option” in limiting the filibuster. Given its rapidly increasing use, future Senate majorities — maybe even as soon as this one — might decide they have little choice but to reach for the button.
Enten thinks that, over the long run, the Senate favors Republicans:
Only about 26% of the country as a whole live in the top 10 metropolitan areas. For minorities, those percentages climb significantly: 37% of blacks, who voted for Obama by a 10:1 ratio, live in the top ten metropolitan areas. This includes Washington, DC, which doesn’t have any representation in Congress. Further, 45% of Latinos, who voted for Obama by greater than a 2.5:1 ratio, live in the top ten metropolitan areas.
That’s why it should be no surprise that 36 of the 50 states in the union have a higher percentage of non-Hispanic whites than the nation as a whole. That puts the Democratic party behind the eight ball in winning more states than Republicans. If racial polarization in terms of voting patterns continue to exist or get worse, then it will only go downhill for Democrats in winning more states.
This isn’t that big of a deal in winning presidential contests. The electoral college may be a lot of things, but it does take into account population in assigning electoral votes. Indeed, at this point, the Democrats seem to be enjoying an advantage in the electoral college. That is, they are in a better position to win the electoral college and lose the national vote than are Republicans.
On the Senate level, it is, however, a very big deal.
A reader shifts gears on the subject:
Here’s my example of race influencing being spectacularly stupid: the phenomenon of date/acquaintance rape. I’m a middle-aged white woman who grew up in a city torn by the racial tension of the late ’60s and affected by white flight (I joke that my parents were the only white people who moved INTO town, six months after the riots). By the time I got to junior high, my 8th grade graduating class was 425 kids, of whom about 20 were Hispanic and 5 of us were Anglo. The rest were black.
From the age of 7 to 10, I was bullied in a horrible, passive/aggressive and rejecting way by a white female classmate who was the definition of a frenemy. Around that age I also got jumped by a group of black girls from round the way, which frankly was a lot less emotionally damaging. Two of my best friends were African-American boys who at the age of 12 were already what Fox News likes to call “hulking.” As you can judge from the variety of “urban violence” and “urban friendship”, it came in all genders and colors. So I was never taught either by my own experience or certainly by my parents to fear any one group, but instead to keep aware of my surroundings and have a healthy skepticism about the purported “safety” of any place or any persons.
I ended up at a small rural college that was 98% white.
While I did drink, it was always with close friends of both genders whom I knew extremely well. I never got drunk at a frat party because it was filled with young men at the height of influence of hormones and peer pressure and general dickishness whom I did not know. The only thing I did know about them was that they were “nice boys from good families”, which is a lot of words to say white. This one attribute made many of my fellow co-eds feel totally safe to get completely bombed out of their minds in their presence, because those boys were not the males they had been taught to be careful of. They had been taught that a rapist is a big black guy in an alley. And sometimes, bad things happened because of this belief that corn-fed guys out of the Lands End catalog were not capable of sexual assault.
Before you think that the above is meant to indicate I am some paragon of post-racial centeredness, I am definitely not. The biases inherent in living in our society are difficult to escape, and I am no exception. Long after I graduated, I was the victim of an attempted date-rape by a man I had been seeing for a couple of weeks. He was white, and a doctor, and Jewish. Imagine all the racial/class level/educational/religious stereotypes of “this dude is totally safe and ultimately harmless” swimming around in that description. And I fell for every one of them.
Slick Willy aptly covers “Blurred Lines”:
Marc Herman finds some fault with the military:
Women currently make up between three and six percent of commercial airline pilots, according to Women in Aviation, a pilot’s organization. The U.S. has about 50,000 commercial fliers, of which about 450 are women.
The reasons appear in part to be structural. CNN looked at aviation’s lack of diversity in 2011, and noted that it costs about $100,000 to train for a commercial aviation rating. To avoid that cost many would-be pilots enlist in the military, where they can exchange a few years of service for tax-funded flight school. But then the old trap returns. The military is improving its gender and ethnic balance since its first studies in the 1990s, but slowly. Women were first allowed to receive Air Force basic flight training in 1976 and as navigators the following year, but could qualify for fighter jet training starting only 20 years ago, in 1993. The Air Force Personnel Center reports that, as of June 30 of this year, of the nearly 330,000 people in the Air Force, 725 were women assigned as pilots, and 265 were navigators. Even if every one of those people retired and went into commercial aviation, they would represent less than two percent of the country’s professional pilot corps.
Juan Cole Matthew Walton looks at the backdrop behind the recent uptick of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence:
Muslims in Myanmar have faced the everyday discrimination and challenges that non-Buddhists face in an overwhelmingly Buddhist majority country, but there have also been instances of more targeted oppression. Riots in 1930 were directed more generally at the immigrant Indian population (as a stand-in for the colonial power), but the 1938 riots (although also intended as anti-colonial actions) targeted Muslims more explicitly. After the establishment of military rule in 1962, Muslims were explicitly excluded from the Burmese military. Anti-Muslim riots occurred again in Mandalay in 1997 and Taungoo in 2001. While these latter incidents involved large numbers of monks, many have speculated that the incidents were organized by the military to deflect attention from other issues or to galvanize nationalist sentiment. …
The 969 movement is the public face of the current resurgent Buddhist nationalism.
The movement derives its name from the nine great qualities of the Buddha, the six great qualities of the dhamma (his teachings), and the nine great qualities of the sangha (monkhood), the “triple gems” of Buddhism. There is also a sense in which 969 is intended as a numerological counter to the Muslim 786 symbol. 786 is a numerological representation of “Bismillah Rahmane ne Rahim” (which, interestingly, is considered haram by some branches of Islam) and is pragmatically used by Muslims in Myanmar and elsewhere in South Asia as an identifying marker, particular in the case of halal restaurants. A groundless yet widespread rumor in Myanmar is that 786—adding up to 21—is a secret Muslim code that indicates a desire to take over either Myanmar or the world (depending on the scope of the teller’s ambitions) in the 21st century.
Recent Dish on religious violence in Burma here, here and here.
(Photo: Myanmar police force stand guard near Martyrs’ Mausoleum during a ceremony as Myanmar marks the 66th anniversary of Martyrs’ Day at the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Yangon on July 19, 2013. By Soe Than WIN/AFP/Getty Images)
Norm Ornstein, about as moderate a figure as AEI could tolerate, tells the truth about the unprecedented nihilism behind the GOP’s current campaign to nullify a presidency and sabotage a duly-enacted law. His comparison with Medicare D under Bush is brilliant. So are these two paragraphs:
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it
work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
The current GOP is a threat to this country’s economy, social order and cultural moderation. There is nothing even faintly conservative about their contempt for democratic institutions or their refusal to behave as anything but political vandals.
