Longreads

Nate Silver: 'It's numbers with their imperfections versus bullshit.' Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer Nate Silver is a new kind of political superstar. One who actually knows what he's…

(Photo: Catherine Ledner) In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of…

What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced…

In 1997 I arrived in Geneva to work for a year at the headquarters of a relief organization. Feeling overwhelmed by my job and lonely in a city of overworked expats passing through for two to three…

On February 23rd, a North Korean girl just shy of her seventeenth birthday walked across the frozen Tumen River into China, becoming at once a runaway and a refugee. Song-hee (as she asked to be…

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person,…

…

"Ayee-eeee..." Lars von Trier says, physically wincing, as it begins. (His ramblings are prompted by a question partly inquiring about the interest he had expressed to a Danish film magazine about the Nazi aesthetic and their achievements in the field of design.) "Yeah, okay. I remember that..." He asks me to stop it for a moment, then continues. "Terrible..." He sees the distressed look on Dunst's face, helpless to stop the flow of disastrous words from the mouth of someone inches away from her. "I kind of didn't look at her," he remembers. "But I had a feeling that she was kind of reacting. But then I thought 'Ah, these Americans, they're always so scared of everything, you know...' " Just watching Dunst's face, as it shifts between amusement, concern, bafflement, horror, compassion, and pain, without ever losing its dignity, tells you as much about what is happening as Trier's words do.

In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there were clear guidance from scientists and politicians, but here, too, contemporary Japan seems particularly vulnerable. The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to. "Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that," says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan's leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact.