Longreads

An extended conversation with the legendary linguist Graham Gordon Ramsay If one were to rank a list of civilization's greatest and most elusive intellectual challenges, the problem of "decoding"…

Limited lifeline: Zuhura Hussein, who does outreach in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, has the names of many TB sufferers and HIV-positive clients on her phone but no technology to track them. Credit:…

When building projects grew scarce in the United States a few years ago, the California architect Robert Steinberg opened an office in Shanghai. He says he didnt…

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.