The Dish

Josh Keating takes in the effects of the March 2011 meltdown:

About 100,000 people are still living in temporary housing, and Japan has so far built only 3.5 percent of the new houses promised to people in heavily affected prefectures. CBS reports that in Koriyama, a town about 40 miles from the nuclear plant, many parents are still afraid to let their children play outside. There’s also an ongoing debate about whether higher-than-normal rates of thyroid cancer in children are connected to nuclear radiation or simply more rigorous testing.

Then there’s the psychological impact. A Brigham Young University study released last week found that a year after disaster, more than half of the citizens of Hirono, a heavily affected town near the plant, showed “clinically concerning” symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Two-thirds showed symptoms of depression.

Ken Silverstein explains why Japan seems ready to jump back on the nuclear horse while, 35 years after Three Mile Island, the US still won’t:

One factor that’s helped Japan is a new nuclear watchdog. Created in September 2012, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has eliminated the cozy relationships that allowed utility employees to become nuclear regulators and it has stood up to political pressure to turn a blind eye to operational shortcuts. The agency has shown its willingness to exert its influence: It routinely gives updates on the disabled Fukushima nuclear facility, cautioning that it has been leaking contaminated, or radiated, water into the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which had operated the Fukushima facility, is now fully cooperating.

Then there are the economic costs.  In May 2012, Japan turned off the last of its 54 nuclear reactors. Altogether, Japan has increased its reliance on imported liquefied natural gas to meet much of its electricity needs at a cost of more than $65 billion, says Deloitte Touch Tohmatsu. And the price of importing fossil fuels is getting even more expensive because of a weak yen.

Dish coverage of Fukushima and related topics here.

(Photo: A woman touches a memorial engraved with the names of the victims at Okawa Elementary School on the three year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, Japan on March 11, 2014. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami claimed more than 18,000 lives and triggered the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. By Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images)

In his Monday column, Brooks lamented what he sees as a turn away from American leadership, and leadership in general, in world affairs:

Political leaders are not at the forefront of history; real power is in the swarm. The ensuing doctrine is certainly not Reaganism — the belief that America should use its power to defeat tyranny and promote democracy. It’s not Kantian, or a belief that the world should be governed by international law. It’s not even realism — the belief that diplomats should play elaborate chess games to balance power and advance national interest. It’s a radical belief that the nature of power — where it comes from and how it can be used — has fundamentally shifted, and the people in the big offices just don’t get it.

It’s frankly naïve to believe that the world’s problems can be conquered through conflict-free cooperation and that the menaces to civilization, whether in the form of Putin or Iran, can be simply not faced. It’s the utopian belief that politics and conflict are optional.

Jesse Walker pounces:

Now, there are several strong arguments to be made against those of us who’d rather see Putin and the mullahs brought down by mass movements of Russians and Iranians rather than by sword-rattling Americans, but You guys think this can be done without conflict is not one of them.

The last big wave of these movements was the Arab Spring, and while people have plenty of complaints about how that went down, I don’t think anyone believes it was conflict-free. Except apparently Brooks, who writes as though conflicts are only conflicts if one side is being directed from the Oval Office.

Chotiner piles on:

Essentially, people today have discarded previous doctrines and theories of global affairs, and now believe in what Brooks calls “naïve” and “conflict free” resolution. You might expect, given the picture Brooks has drawn of foolish utopians running wild, that such lunacy and immaturity would have led to a much more dangerous world. Yet surely Brooks knows that by almost any calculation the world is much, much more peaceful than it was during the 20th century, and certainly during his beloved Cold War.

And Larison delivers the knockout:

If most Americans are more aware of the limits of power generally and U.S. power in particular, I’d say that is a very sensible reaction to more than a decade of overreach and absurd ideological projects, and a very healthy backlash to the delusions of Bush’s Second Inaugural. The U.S. has suffered from an absurd overconfidence in the efficacy of hard power for more than a decade (and really ever since the Gulf War), and Americans have been recoiling from the costs and failures associated with that.

I imagine that many Americans are fatigued by being told constantly how vitally important U.S. “leadership” in the world is, and how imperative it is that the U.S. “act” in response to this or that crisis. That fatigue is bound to be encouraged when Americans justifiably have little confidence in political and media classes that have presided over a series of major debacles since the start of the century. That makes it much easier to dismiss alarmism from politicians and pundits, including overblown claims about “menaces to civilization,” but that is not the same as ignoring real threats.

Adam Minter points out that the pollution in the South China Sea is complicating the search for the missing plane:

On Saturday, hours after the first news of the plane’s disappearance, the Vietnamese navy reported finding 6 mile (9.7 kilometers) and 9 mile oil slicks (reports about the size vary), raising hopes. On Monday, lab tests revealed that they were diesel fuel characteristic of the ships that ply, and pollute, the South China Sea. In the days since, fishermen and rescue workers have found life rafts, life jackets, a jet’s door and plastic oil barrels each initially suspected as originating from Flight 370, vetted in the news media, and then — perhaps literally — tossed overboard as trash.

As a reader noted in an update to our earlier post, a satellite imagery company is attempting to crowdsource the search:

The Colorado-based company Digital Globe sells high-resolution satellite imagery and aerial photography. Last year, the company acquired the crowdsourcing application known as Tomnod (“big eye” in Mongolian), boosting the application’s capabilities with stunningly detailed images from its six sophisticated satellites. Anyone can create an account and begin searching through the tiles of imagery. After a brief tutorial, you’re unleashed upon images of the open ocean, where you can tag objects as airplane wreckage, a life raft, or an oil slick. …

You have to worry if this will help or hinder efforts: Will all these amateur eyes just be creating more work for the rescue teams? After several people called a Malaysian paper to say they had “found” bits of the airplane in on Google Maps, Google had to issue a statement reminding users that their satellite imagery is a few months old.

While much has been made of the plane’s two passengers with fake passports, Josephine Wolff explains that most countries don’t check for them:

How two Iranian passengers managed to board a plane using stolen European passports is far from the biggest mystery surrounding the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370—in fact, it turns out to be one of the least surprising pieces of the otherwise perplexing and tragic story. Last year, airplane passengers boarded planes more than 1 billion times without their passports being checked against Interpol’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database, which would have flagged the MH 370 passengers’ documents as stolen, had it been consulted.

It remains unclear whether the two passengers using the stolen passports were in any way connected to the plane’s disappearance, and the ongoing investigation suggests that neither of them had ties to terrorist groups, but that has not stopped Interpol from seizing the opportunity to stress the importance and underutilization of the SLTD database.

Yesterday, showrunner Rob shared his thoughts on fans becoming investors in movie projects like Veronica Mars. In today’s video, he explains how difficult it is to even get a show on the air, let alone one worth being proud of:

In a followup, he notes how the hardest part of running a TV show is the sheer number of decisions, large and small, that need to be made on any given day:

Continue reading Ask Rob Thomas Anything: The Miracle Of Good TV

A first look at Ezra’s new venture:

I was going to try to write things that readers can understand, but I see those Vox wunderkinds beat me to the patent office.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) March 9, 2014

Dan McLaughlin feels that Ezra may have made a mistake:

In Congressional debates and televised attack ads, it is a great asset to be able to cite The Washington Post; it is far less valuable to tell the voters in a district in Iowa or Colorado what Ezra Klein of Vox dot com thinks. And make no mistake: liberal though it is, the Post is a venerable Washington institution with deep ties to both sides of the aisle, and the institutional gravitas that comes of being a city’s leading daily newspaper for decades … For years, friends and I referred to Klein, only half-jokingly, as the future editor of the Washington Post; he has tossed that away in exchange for increased autonomy and perhaps an increased ability to turn a profit, but what he has lost will be very hard to replace.

I think that’s hooey – and more a function of the writer’s conservative longing for establishment cred than any insight into current media. I’m sorry, but the Washington Post name is as big a burden these days as it is an advantage. We’re in a moment when a new version of its previous authority could be created – and I think Ezra is smart to be focused on that, rather than trying to save another legacy media institution from growing irrelevance. Meanwhile, the NYT’s replacement for 538 is making progress:

“The Upshot.” That’s the name the New York Times is giving to its new data-driven venture, focused on politics, policy and economic analysis and designed to fill the void left by Nate Silver, the one-man traffic machine whose statistical approach to political reporting was a massive success.

David Leonhardt, the Times’ former Washington bureau chief, who is in charge of The Upshot, told Quartz that the new venture will have a dedicated staff of 15, including three full-time graphic journalists, and is on track for a launch this spring. “The idea behind the name is, we are trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way,” Leonhardt says. “Obviously, we will be using data a lot to do that, not because data is some secret code, but because it’s a particularly effective way, when used in moderate doses, of explaining reality to people.”

The original 538 is relaunching next week:

We’re planning to relaunch FiveThirtyEight on March 17, a week from Monday. As with all plans, this one could go awry. We’re still completing final testing on the new website, and tweaking the final elements of the site’s design. But we estimate the probability of a March 17 launch at 90.617854%.

Heh – as we used to say in the olden days of the blogosphere. And good luck, Nate.

Earlier Dish on new media experiments here, here, and here. Dean Starkman took stock of things recently:

[H]ere’s what I see as the new [Future of News] consensus, or perhaps better, the Present of News (PON) consensus, since this looks like not so much as where we’re going as where we are:

Consensus #1: Free online news is a poor fit for legacy news organizations. Basically, the paywall side, the old guard, won this one. The New York Times digital subscription breakthrough in 2011 was initially dismissed as a unique case (just as the digital subscription success of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times was similarly dismissed a few years earlier. But that argument has eroded as digital subscription meters have gone up successfully around the world. That variants of the model have been adopted by digitally native sites like Andrew Sullivan’s, Politico, and even Capital New York further illustrates that paywalls have turned some kind of corner.

[Updated with reader-submitted questions that you can vote on below]

From her bio:

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, historian and commentator. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. Her new book is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, out from Yale University Press. Her The Happiness Myth brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life.  Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”

The Dish featured the arguments of Stay here and Hecht’s ideas about atheism here and here, part of a thread asking, “Where are all the female atheists?” Let us know what you think we should ask Jennifer via the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):

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[SURVEY NOW CLOSED]

Popova loved Stay, insisting that the book is “more than a must-read — it’s a cultural necessity”:

Hecht argues that, historically, our ideologies around suicide have set us up for “an unwinnable battle”: First, the moralistic doctrines of the major Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam condemned suicide as a sin that “God” forbids, one more offensive than even murder because you were stealing directly from divinity with no time left for repentance — a strategy based on negative reinforcement, which modern psychology has demonstrated time and again is largely ineffective. Then came The Enlightenment, whose secular philosophy championed individual agency and, in rebelling against the blind religiosity of the past, framed suicide as some sort of moral freedom — a toxic proposition Hecht decries as a cultural wrong turn. Reflecting on such attitudes — take, for instance, Patti Smith’s beautiful yet heartbreaking tribute to Virginia Woolf’s suicide — Hecht makes the case, instead, for two of history’s relatively unknown but potent arguments against suicide: That we owe it to society and to our personal communities to stay alive, and that we owe it to our future selves …