The Washington Post National Weekly - May 5, 2019

SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2019

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

EIGHT THINGS TO TOSS

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Daily stockmarket updates Astrology ‘Double down’ Responding to email Bacon Exclamation points School portraits Perfume PAGE 10 12

Politics Trump downplays cyber threats 4 Nation Modern tech fuels hate 8 World Maduro ouster fails 10

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WEEKLY

THE FIX THE FIX

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CONTENTS

This publication was prepared This publication by editorswas at The prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing Washington and distribution Post for printing by our and distribution by our partner publications across partner the publications country. All articles across and the country. All articles and columns have previouslycolumns appeared have in The previously Post orappeared on in The POLITICS Post or on washingtonpost.com andwashingtonpost.com have been edited toand fit this have been editedTHE to fitNATION this format. For questions orformat. comments For questions regarding or content, comments regarding THE content, WORLD please email weekly@washpost.com. please email Ifweekly@washpost.com. you have a If youCOVER have a STORY question about printing question quality, wish about to printing subscribe, quality, or wish to subscribe, or ENTERTAINMENT would like to place a hold would on delivery, like to place please a hold contact on delivery, your please contact your BOOKS local newspaper’s circulation local newspaper’s department.circulation department.OPINION © 2019 The Washington Post © / Year 2019 5,The No. Washington 30 Post / Year 5, No. 30 FIVE MYTHS

WEEKLY WEEKLY

CONTENTS 4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

THE ON THE COVER It’s time of COVER It’s that time of POLITICS 4 thatON year again: year again: What should be on yourWhat should be on your THE NATION 8 list for spring cleaning? listWORLD for spring cleaning?

THE 10 ILLUSTRATION

BY PARTY OF ONE ILLUSTRATION PARTY OF ONE COVER STORY BY12 for The Washington ENTERTAINMENT 16 Postfor The Washington Post BOOKS 18 OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

Some friend William Barr turned out to be DANA MILBANK is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Eight­year­old Liam Daly became an Internet sensation when he penned a letter to his grandfather, William Barr, while sitting in the front row at Barr’s confirmation hearing in January. ¶ “Dear Grandpa,” he wrote. “You are doing great so far. But I know you still will.” ¶ Alas for Liam, and for all of us, it was not to be. Now, just weeks on the job as President Trump’s attorney general, Grandpa has disgraced himself. The speed with which Barr trashed a reputation built over decades is stunning, even by Trump administration standards.

Before, Barr was known as the attorney general to President George H.W. Bush and an éminence grise of the Washington legal community.

Now he is known for betraying a friend, lying to Congress and misrepresenting the Mueller report in a way that excused the president’s misbehavior and let Russia off the hook.

Three weeks ago, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) asked Barr about reports that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team complained that Barr’s four-page summary of their work didn’t “adequately or accurately” portray their findings. “Do you know what they’re referencing?”

Crist asked.

“No, I don’t,” Barr replied under oath, speculating that they “probably wanted more put out.”

Grandpa was fibbing.

Thanks to The Washington Post’s reporting, we now know that two weeks before Barr denied knowledge of the Mueller team’s displeasure, he received a letter from Mueller complaining that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions” and resulted in “public confusion.”

Barr, caught in flagrante delicto in his deception, told senators Wednesday that “the

question was relating to unidentified members” of Mueller’s team, not Mueller himself — a technical answer that might get him off for perjury but doesn’t avoid the conclusion that he deliberately misled Congress and the public.

Why didn’t Barr disclose the Mueller letter when Crist asked the question? Barr replied that Crist had posed “a very different question.”

Um, right.

Of equal concern, Barr rejected Mueller’s requests to release more of the report to clear up the confusion. “At that point, it was my baby,” Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “It was my decision how and when to make it public, not Bob Mueller’s.”

It was his baby, and he smothered it — thus allowing Barr’s misrepresentation of Mueller’s report (characterized

by Trump as “total exoneration”) to harden.

Barr’s mistreatment of Mueller is all the more appalling because, during his confirmation hearing, Barr boasted that the two men and their wives were “good friends” and would remain so.

Barr reportedly told a senator privately that he and Mueller were “best friends,” that their wives attended Bible study

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Attorney General William P. Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.

together and that Mueller attended the weddings of Barr’s children.

If so, Barr’s betrayal reminds us: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. In addition to his unilateral clearing of Trump on obstruction of justice (something Mueller did not do), Barr also echoed Trump’s claim that there was “no collusion” (a question Mueller did not address) and that there had been “spying” against Trump’s campaign.

Barr continued undermining Mueller on Wednesday, calling Mueller’s letter to him “a bit snitty” and saying Mueller should have ended the investigation if he didn’t think it in his purview to say whether Trump committed a crime. And Barr eagerly played Trump’s defense lawyer.

Mueller’s finding that Trump repeatedly leaned on White House counsel Don McGahn to get Mueller fired?

Barr devised the implausible explanation that Trump only wanted Mueller replaced by “another special counsel.”

And Trump instructing McGahn to say publicly that Trump didn’t order Mueller fired? “Not a crime,” Barr argued.

Barr also defended his assertion that Trump “fully

cooperated” with the investigation, even though he refused to be interviewed and tried to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself and shut down the inquiry.

“I don’t see any conflict between that and fully cooperating with the investigation,” Barr reasoned.

And what about Trump’s mobstyle tactics to thwart cooperation with Mueller?

“Discouraging flipping in that sense is not obstruction,” Barr declared.

Even Barr’s choice of pronouns — “we have not waived the executive privilege,” he said — showed he was Trump’s lawyer, not America’s attorney general.

Repeatedly, Barr said it didn’t matter that Trump had deceived the public. “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people,” he said. But now Barr, by misrepresenting his dealings with Mueller, has gotten himself into the business of lying to the American people.

Even an 8-year-old knows lying is wrong, whether it’s legal or not. Surely Grandpa Barr should have. The attorney general owed better to his “friend” Mueller, and to the rest of us. n

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OPINIONS

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

Social Security must be saved now CHARLES BLAHOUS holds the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and served as a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare from 2010 through 2015.

In April, Social Security’s trustees issued a dire warning. In their 2019 annual report, they announced that future costs for the program will be 20 percent higher than projected revenue. As soon as next year, Social Security’s yearly expenses are expected to exceed its income — forcing the program to begin drawing down its trust funds.

Those funds will be depleted in 2035, but we can’t wait that long for reform. Even if we were to cut off all new beneficiaries at that time — a measure so drastic that lawmakers would never allow it — the program’s financial shortfall would still be too enormous to avoid insolvency.

Other thorny problems, such as containing the costs of health care and education, lack clear and immediate policy solutions.

Social Security, by contrast, mostly requires leadership and political will. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) sometimes quipped, “Social Security is easy; it’s just difficult.”

In 1983, the United States’ political class was still up to the challenge. Leaders of both parties — President Ronald Reagan and Sen.Bob Dole (R-Kan.), House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) and Moynihan, among others — brokered legislation to stave off insolvency.

It was indeed difficult: They had to delay cost-of-living adjustments and tax benefits, raise the full eligibility age and

withstand opposition from powerful lobbyists. Yet they got it done, because both sides put all options on the table and compromised.

Today, the threats to Social Security are even greater. The program’s current imbalance is already much larger than the one corrected in 1983. With each year that this imbalance grows, the fixes necessary to solve it become more painful. Now more than ever, the challenge of Social Security demands bipartisan leadership.

Instead, the program is imperiled by intensifying partisan polarization — a problem that has been decades in the making. In the 1990s, multiple bipartisan reform plans were introduced in the Senate

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

and the House using every lever available to strengthen the program’s finances — eligibilityage changes, moderation of benefit growth and new taxes, among others. But they went nowhere. President Bill Clinton, and then President George W. Bush, agreed on the need for reform and made it part of their governing agendas. Yet both were stymied in their efforts.

The situation has only gotten worse. Throughout the past decade, those seeking the presidency have focused their rhetoric more on what they wouldn’t do to repair Social Security’s finances than on what they would. Congress isn’t doing much better. Instead of charting a realistic path forward, every congressional Social Security proposal introduced this year would do one of two things: add a new parental leave benefit, or significantly increase projected costs through a general benefit increase.

For more than 35 years, however, Congress has conspicuously declined to raise taxes enough to fund Social Security’s current benefit schedule. Unless and until there is some evidence that lawmakers are willing to raise Social Security taxes enough to close the current shortfall, for example by

immediately raising the payroll tax rate from 12.4 percent to 15.2 percent, or enacting an equivalent tax increase, any discussion of further benefit increases is irresponsible fantasy.

Given these obstacles, what should today’s leaders do? From a pure policy perspective, ideal solutions would focus primarily on cost containment. Social Security costs are rising faster than our economic capacity, workers’ living standards are growing more slowly than beneficiaries’, the program facilitates some undesirable transfers of income from poor to rich, and the younger generations who already face large netincome losses through Social Security are those who would bear the brunt of any new taxes.

Politically speaking, however, a reform package capable of winning both Republican and Democratic support would almost certainly have to contain a blend of changes — including moderating benefit growth, adjusting eligibility ages and increasing tax revenue.

The Social Security program and those who depend on it desperately need responsible bipartisan leadership. Let’s hope that our elected leaders, and at least one of those seeking high office in 2020, will provide it. n

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FIVE MYTHS

The debt BY

W ILLIAM G ALE

Despite a strong economy, the U.S. budget deficit recently rose by nearly 40 percent year over year, largely because of the tax cuts passed in 2017 and the spending deal approved in 2018. Federal debt — the accumulation of past deficits — reached its highest level ever relative to the economy, with the exception of a few years around World War II. And that’s before financial shortfalls for Social Security and Medicare occur and send debt to unprecedented levels.

Some conservatives warn of a coming debt crisis, while leading liberal economists argue that we can ignore deficits and debt at this time.

Several myths are muddling the discussion.

MYTH NO. 1 Debt is harmless if it’s issued in a nation’s own currency.

In a recent University of Chicago survey of prominent economists, not one agreed that a country that issues debt in its own currency does not have to worry about deficits. Future debt will stem largely from anemic revenue growth and increased expenditures on an aging population. The result will reduce future national saving — the sum of saving by the private and public sectors — and drag down future national income. This could happen through higher interest rates, which choke off investment and reduce production and income. Or it could happen through greater borrowing from abroad, which would allow us to maintain production but siphon off increasing resources to debt payments. Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and others indicate that these effects could be substantial.

MYTH NO. 2 Low interest rates mean debt doesn’t matter.

Low interest rates certainly make debt more palatable and make the crisis scenarios look silly, but they are not a panacea.

Under current law, the CBO projects that federal debt will rise from about 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)

now to more than 150 percent by 2048 and will continue to increase afterward. Net interest payments are projected to rise from about 1.8 percent of GDP to more than 6 percent, which would be larger than the entire Social Security program.

Financial markets imply that low rates will persist, but they have been wrong in the past. We can borrow and consume more if interest rates stay low forever, but if we accumulate a lot of debt and then rates rise, we will face major problems.

MYTH NO. 3 We should balance the budget and pay off the debt.

Balanced budgets may have symbolic value, but they are not necessary. Rules aimed at forcing balanced budgets make recessions deeper and longer by requiring spending cuts or tax increases during hard times, and they can be manipulated through accounting gimmicks. Almost every state has a balancedbudget rule, but many of them face future fiscal shortfalls focused on health-care and retirement spending, just as the federal government does.

An even more extreme goal is to pay off the entire debt. As Alexander Hamilton explained, debt can be a blessing: It can facilitate trade, finance national defense, fight recessions, fund

PAUL YEUNG/BLOOMBERG NEWS

In a recent survey of prominent economists, not one agreed that a country that issues debt in its own currency does not have to worry about deficits.

investments, and provide liquid and safe assets for investors. What we really need to do is put the debt on a stable and sustainable path.

MYTH NO. 4 We can grow our way out of the debt.

Faster economic growth could help lower debt, but the CBO estimates that raising productivity growth rates by onethird — an enormous boost — would slow the increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio over 30 years by only one-third.

And demographics are working against us: Baby boomers were entering the labor force and buying homes in the 1980s and 1990s, but they are retiring now, which will increase spending on Social Security and Medicare. Without policy changes, the budget won’t be able to avoid rising deficits and debt.

MYTH NO. 5 There’s an easy solution to the debt.

Any serious plan to lower the debt must involve significant tax increases and/or major spending cuts. Foreign aid, government

salaries and other programs that politicians typically target are tiny, and eliminating them would not make much difference.

Almost 70 percent of federal spending goes to Social Security, health care, defense and interest on the debt. Spending cuts will have to come from those areas.

We can’t unilaterally cut interest payments — that’s called defaulting. And the other programs are extremely popular.

A second seemingly painless approach is to inflate away the debt. This, of course, would lead to inflation. But most of our longterm obligations already are indexed to inflation, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments. Inflation will not cut those costs.

The ultimate in pain-free solutions is the notion that broad-based tax cuts raise revenue. But the record very clearly shows that broad tax cuts reduce revenue. n Gale is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, co-director of the UrbanBrookings Tax Policy Center and author of “Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future.”

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POLITICS

DeVos is a Trump Cabinet survivor

BY L AURA M ECKLER, A SHLEY P ARKER AND J OSH D AWSEY

I

n a presidential Cabinet that resembles a season of “Survivor” more than “The West Wing,” an unlikely contestant is still standing after more than two years.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos remains so disliked in certain circles that her very name is a punchline. She mostly lands in the news for the wrong reasons, such as being forced last month to defend budget cuts for the Special Olympics before angry lawmakers. President Trump has privately complained about her, insulting her intelligence on several occasions, according to a former senior administration official who worked closely with Trump and another senior official who is still at the White House.

Yet the president shows no signs of asking her to resign, reflecting in part his lack of interest in the issue of education and the department responsible for it. And DeVos has no interest in departing. Advisers say she is excited by the tasks ahead. After two years of mostly undoing the work of her predecessors, she has shifted to advancing her own agenda.

Topping her list is a proposal for a $5-billion-a-year tax credit that would reimburse taxpayers and corporations dollar for dollar for donations to scholarship programs. DeVos, 61, came to Washington after a lifetime of advocating for school vouchers and other programs that allow families to channel tax dollars away from traditional public schools. Passage of such a plan would represent a crowning achievement — though it is unlikely, given widespread Democratic opposition.

DeVos persuaded the Treasury Department to support the idea, even though the credit would complicate the tax code just two years after a bill passed to simplify it. She worked behind the scenes to negotiate details and unite most school choice proponents behind the plan. Now, she

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

After two years, the president shows no indication of wanting the education secretary to resign is traveling the country to promote the idea, with trips so far to three states and more planned.

At the White House, aides do not expect the measure to become law, and Trump hardly mentions it. But White House officials say DeVos gets credit for pushing the school choice agenda, which is popular with Trump’s core of conservative supporters.

This account of DeVos’s endurance in the Education Department’s top job is based on interviews with eight people with direct knowledge of the secretary’s relationship with the president and with an understanding of the inner workings of the White House and education agency. Many of those people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the relationships involved.

So far, officials occupying 15 Cabinet-level positions have been fired or resigned since Trump took office. Leaders at State, Jus-

tice, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and Health and Human Services have been fired, resigned under pressure or quit in protest.

DeVos has benefited from Trump’s lack of interest in education, officials say. And the president is actually loath to fire subordinates. In many cases, he’s let them dangle for months before cutting the rope or makes their lives so miserable they quit.

DeVos aides say she has a good relationship with Trump. One adviser said the president calls DeVos maybe once a month to talk. He dismissed reports of the president speaking negatively about DeVos, saying he makes derisive remarks about all sorts of people.

Also bolstering DeVos’s standing: She hasn’t had a single personal scandal. She’s a billionaire and travels by private plane, but she pays for it herself. She donates her salary to charity. Even detractors say that in person, DeVos is pleasant and easy to be around. And she has shown per-

President Trump appreciates that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, above, is a loyal soldier willing to defend even unpopular policies, officials said.

sonal grit, appearing in public in a wheelchair after she broke her pelvis in a cycling accident.

In contrast, White House officials describe Trump as more hot and cold regarding DeVos and said he rarely sees her. He has been frustrated with her public mistakes, beginning with her disastrous confirmation hearing, they said, and expects perfection from his lieutenants.

Trump appreciates that she’s tough, handles criticism and is a loyal soldier willing to defend even unpopular policies, officials said. For instance, in March, she spent three days defending the administration’s plan to eliminate nearly $18 million in federal funding for a Special Olympics program in schools. She had fought to maintain the spending and was overruled by the White House budget office but still argued for the cut before hostile lawmakers at two congressional hearings. Then, after the threeday mini-drama, Trump swooped in and announced he was overruling “my people” and favored the funding. It prompted a rare, albeit gentle, DeVos pushback.

DeVos kept quiet on other disagreements with the White House: She was against revoking documents meant to help schools work with transgender students.

She didn’t think that a school safety commission should consider the question of racial disparities in student discipline.

Aides describe her as a loyal soldier, an approach that has helped keep her position with Trump secure. But DeVos has done little to win over critics who opposed her from the start. Detractors say she lacks basic knowledge about education, caring only about school choice.

They charge that she wants to destroy, not bolster, public education. And they argue that someone who has never attended a public school has no business being education secretary.

“She is undeterred in her mission despite the forces against her,” department spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill said. “People see she is in it for the right reasons.” n

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Case backlog hurts immigration plan

BY N ICK M IROFF AND M ARIA S ACCHETTI

L

ooming over the Trump administration’s struggle to curb illegal immigration is a challenge that no amount of razor wire, troops or steel fencing can fix.

The U.S. immigration court system is facing a backlog of 850,000 cases, and it has fewer than 450 judges nationwide to handle them. New asylum applications and other claims are piling up, creating long delays that Central American families arriving in record numbers know will allow them to remain in the United States for years while they wait.

Trump’s critics blame his administration’s overzealous enforcement approach for making the problem worse by arresting more people who can’t be quickly deported. But the delays have become a migration magnet as powerful as the U.S. economy or the desire to reunite with relatives living in the United States, administration officials say.

Since Trump took office, the backlog has swelled by more than 200,000 cases. The president has grown so frustrated that he has been floating the idea of doing away with U.S. immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, not the judicial branch.

Trump on Monday ordered his administration to draft new regulations that call for courts to tighten the existing requirement to adjudicate asylum cases within 180 days. The measures seek to deter new asylum requests by imposing fees on applicants and limiting their ability to qualify for work permits while waiting for their claims to be heard. Trump hopes that faster scrutiny of asylum claims — and perhaps a higher bar for establishing “credible fear” of returning to their home countries — will turn more people away, especially those he thinks are gaming the system.

But to speed up the process and clear out cases, the government almost certainly will have to ramp

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The caseload in U.S. immigration court soars as Trump orders legislation to speed up adjudication up its immigration bureaucracy.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the country’s immigration courts, is hiring judges faster than ever before.

Attorney General William P. Barr told lawmakers last month that the administration has hired more immigration judges than in the previous seven years combined.

But the system is still falling behind because of the surge at the border. As of March, the average immigration case had been pending for 736 days, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) center, which compiles immigration court data.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors limits on immigration, said Trump’s measures “will keep the backlog from getting worse.”

Restricting work permits will reduce the incentive for immigrants to file fraudulent asylum claims, she said, but added that

the Trump administration must institute additional measures — such as detaining families, making the initial asylum screening stricter and fast-tracking their court cases — to have a broader effect. More than 103,000 migrants arrived in March, the highest one-month total in 12 years.

Issuing work permits allows asylum seekers to support themselves and avoid relying on taxpayer assistance, but the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute said in a report last year that soaring numbers of permits might also be a sign of abuse.

Work permits issued to asylum applicants rose from 55,000 in fiscal 2012 to 278,000 halfway through 2017, government data show.

For migrants living in the United States whose asylum claims are weak, the backlog can be a blessing, affording them more time to work legally before facing the possibility of deportation. By the same token, it can hurt claimants with strong cases who want

Carlos Aldana plays with his daughters Fernanda and Alejandra AldanaRamos as his partner, Elvia Ramos, watches at his sister’s house in Seattle. The Honduran family is staying there as they await a court decision on their asylum cases.

to start laying down roots but are stuck in limbo, unsure whether they ultimately will be allowed to stay.

“It’s been good for me, because it gives me more time,” said Carlos Aldana, 30, a Honduran father of two who arrived with a large migrant caravan last May and now lives outside Seattle while waiting for a response to his asylum request.

Aldana had an initial hearing, he said, but he’s not due back in court until September 2020.

“Little by little, we’re getting settled here,” he said.

Asylum seekers with strong cases are often looking for more than legal residency. Obtaining a green card and citizenship would clear the way for them to bring immediate relatives to the United States or allow them to travel abroad. Others are seeking legal status to qualify for certain jobs or benefits or to be able to vote.

Trump’s order tightening rules for asylum seekers marks a turnaround for a president who has attempted to solve the asylum problem by keeping migrants at bay with a border wall, a ban on asylum for border jumpers and other restrictions.

Doris Meissner, who reduced a large backlog as immigration commissioner from 1993 to 2000, said the White House is “begrudgingly” acknowledging that the solution is to allow immigrants to seek asylum, limit incentives to obtain work permits, and to adjudicate the most recent arrivals faster.

“They’ve been trying to deny people access to the system overall instead of just recognizing that there is this system, it is in our laws, do the work,” said Meissner.

She said the White House’s “punitive” approaches, such as charging a fee, and relying on the courts instead of asylum officers to handle cases, could also slow things down. Fees require bureaucratic rulemaking, and courts are more adversarial settings with more lawyers that could slow the process. A faster way, she said, would be to dispatch trained asylum officers to handle the cases. n

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WORLD

‘Full plan’ to oust Maduro crumbles B Y K AREN D E Y OUNG, J OSH D AWSEY AND P AUL S ONNE

F

or weeks, the Venezuelan opposition had been working on a comprehensive blueprint to finally force President Nicolás Maduro from office. Several of his top military and civilian aides were said to have been persuaded to switch sides, while others would be allowed to leave the country.

There was a strong suggestion that Maduro himself might peacefully fly to Havana.

“They produced a pretty full plan,” a U.S. official said of the opposition. Implementation was tentatively set for Wednesday, although no date had been finalized.

On Monday, however, the plan started to fall apart.

Maduro, it seemed, had gotten wind of it, and opposition leader Juan Guaidó responded by rushing ahead. At dawn Tuesday, after alerting the U.S. State Department, Guaidó released a video saying that significant Venezuela military units were with him and that the moment had come to rise up against Maduro.

But after a day of bloody protests, the government remained intact. The Trump administration publicly blamed Russia and Cuba — Maduro’s top backers — for keeping him in place and discouraging expected high-level defections.

On Wednesday, as the United States and Russia traded barbs, the White House held an emergency meeting of top national security aides to mull next steps.

“Significant progress on defense matters” was made, a senior administration official said.

Throughout the day, however, there were mixed messages about what role, if any, the U.S. military would play in Washington’s future efforts to resolve the Venezuelan crisis.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that a peaceful resolution was still desired but that “military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

White House has sent mixed messages about what role U.S. military might play in Venezuela the United States will do,” he told Fox Business Network.

Asked if the U.S. military would be used to protect Guaidó, White House national security adviser John Bolton told MSNBC that President Trump “has been clear and concise on this point: All options are open. We want a peaceful transfer of power. But we are not going to see Guaidó mistreated by this regime.”

Top Pentagon officials emphasized nonmilitary options and said they had not been given orders to pre-position troops or prepare for conflict. “We’re obviously watching the situation very closely in Venezuela. The president’s made it clear that all options are on the table,” Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in congressional testimony. “To date, most of our actions have been diplomatic and economic.”

Trump has shown little willingness to plunge into Venezuela,

according to current and former aides, although he has already imposed sanctions on Cuba and threatened more. Russia, the White House said in a statement late Wednesday, “must leave” Venezuela “and renounce their support of the Maduro regime.”

The president has occasionally mused to others that Bolton wants to get him into wars. Two advisers who have discussed Venezuela with him said Trump often brings up Florida politics, and his golf club in Doral, when talking about the subject. Both said Trump was unlikely to authorize any sort of long-term military action there. At the same time, however, aides said he has given Bolton wide purview over Venezuela.

Officials continued to voice confidence that a turning point in the more than three-month-old standoff had been reached with Guaidó’s declaration early Tuesday that “the end” had arrived.

An injured opposition protester is taken to medics during a street battle with police and national guardsmen in Caracas on May 1.

He called for troops to change sides and join massive street protests.

A day later, although the Venezuelan military and Maduro’s government remained largely intact, Bolton said that “any facile conclusion that things are going to return to ‘normal’ is completely wrong. . . . The situation’s not sustainable.”

Early Tuesday, Guaidó appeared at a military base in eastern Caracas, along with a small band of armed men in military uniforms, to announce that “Operation Liberty” had begun.

At about 6 a.m., Bolton called Trump and his own top aides to say the announcement had come.

At midmorning, however, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López appeared on TV and declared the uprising an attempted coup and denounced protesters gathered in the streets.

Reports of defections and government collapse, he said, were “fake news.”

The administration, seeking to undermine Maduro’s trust in those around him, decided to out Padrino; Maikel Morena, the chief justice of the Supreme Court; and presidential guard commander Ivan Rafael Hernandez Dala by name, saying they had agreed to sign documents supporting the constitution.

When Maduro failed to appear throughout the day, Pompeo eventually declared that the Venezuelan leader “had his plane ready” but had been dissuaded from leaving by Russia.

A senior administration official noted that “when times get tough” for Maduro, including a number of failed coup attempts in the past, “he has always had a plane ready.” But, the official said, “the information we had was that he was very seriously contemplating” a departure on Tuesday morning.

“Then the Russians said don’t leave,” said the official, who characterized Russia’s intervention as “advice,” perhaps based on a reading of how the day would unfold. n

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With parmesan, it’s Italy vs. the world The campaign over the country’s oftenmimicked cheese combines old food traditions and new nationalist sentiment

Ilaria Bertinelli at the Bertinelli factory in Noceto. The process of creating Italy’s beloved Parmigiano Reggiano is hushed, deliberate and has changed little over nine centuries.

B Y C HICO H ARLAN AND S TEFANO P ITRELLI in Rome

T

he investigators say they have a duty to defend Italy’s national interests, and so they spend their days in a discreetly marked government office, scanning the Internet for dubious activity, trying to thwart one threat after the next.

In other words, they are on the lookout for fake cheese.

“This looks like the fishiest thing ever,” one of the food investigators, Domenico Vona, said last month after some Internet sleuthing led him to an “Italian parmesan” made in Ukraine.

Vona studied the product details of the deep yellow vacuumpacked hunks.

“This is blatant,” he said as he filed a complaint to the online marketplace, Alibaba, where it was being sold. “This is definitely not Parmigiano.”

If Italy had its way, there would be no such thing as Ukrainian parmesan. Or American parmesan. In fact, there would be no generic parmesan whatsoever — only Parmigiano Reggiano, produced inside a small patch of Italian countryside, under exacting specifications, at one of 330 dairies whose cheese wheels are tested with percussion hammers and then branded with markings of authenticity if they pass muster.

In Brussels, Italian diplomats are pressing the European Union to protect Italian foods in trade deals being negotiated with other nations. In Rome, the government team of self-described food cops is signing agreements with online marketplaces to crack down on the Internet sale of faux Italian wines, sausages, cheeses, among others. And the country’s populist leaders — with their “Italians First” slogans — are bashing “Made in Italy” food knockoffs while extolling the greatness of Italian cuisine.

“I want a tricolor flag — big like this — on Italian products,” said Italy’s most powerful politician, far-right League party leader Mat-

EMANUELE AMIGHETTI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

teo Salvini, who regularly touts his all-Italian diet on social media.

Within the E.U., foods and wines linked historically to a particular region are categorized as “geographical origin” products.

And they are fiercely protected inside of the bloc. The sale of generic parmesan, for instance, is banned in Europe. When hashing out trade deals, Europe has tried to press other countries to apply a version of those protections.

But in the many places where European rules don’t apply, parmesan has become the perfect emblem for the debate over whether a nationally significant food can and should be appropriated, and even tweaked, by foreigners. Parmigiano Reggiano is trademarked in the United States and most other countries, and the term cannot be used for nonItalian cheese. With parmesan, though, producers have nothing

stopping them.

“While [our parmesan] is not exactly the same, it’s very similar,” said Jeff Schwager, the president of Sartori, Wisconsin-based company founded in 1939 by Italian immigrants. “We intentionally produce ours where the cheese is a little creamier.”

Much of the cheese-loving world says Italy is refusing to let food culture evolve. You might need healthy cows and good workers to make delicious parmesan, they say, but you don’t need Italian soil. Italians, though, say their defense of Parmigiano is rooted in a mix of good taste, economics and sense that they are upholding culinary commandments. The consortium that regulates domestic Parmigiano production estimates Italy is losing billions of euros because of “counterfeits.”

Some of the work of finding those “frauds” takes place in Rome, in a government building

decorated with idyllic paintings of hay and pastures. The Central Inspectorate for Fraud Repression and Quality Protection has been around for several decades, but Italy’s populist leaders recently boosted its budget.

“Food, for us, is a strategic asset,” the agency’s director, Stefano Vaccari, said.

Parmigiano Reggiano is produced in a flat northern strip of provinces that gave the cheese its name: One of the provinces is Parma. Another is Reggio. Beyond the approved zone for Parmigiano-making — an area that includes five provinces, bounded by two rivers — the cheese cannot be made. Within the zone, the cheese can be made only one way: by following rules — created by a consortium of producers — governing cow diet, milk temperature, fat content, even the dimensions of the finished cheese wheel.

A visitor to the region might quickly hear about how the Parmigiano process has changed little over nine centuries, or about customs documents showing the exporting of an ancestral Parmigiano cheese during Medieval times. Cheese makers are aghast at the suggestion that the formula for Parmigiano might possibly be altered for the better; in fact, if it changes, they say, the cheese is no longer Parmigiano.

When the leaders of the Parmigiano Reggiano consortium visited New York last year for a food convention, they used the downtime as they often do on foreign visits: to conduct a test of their own. They bought whatever parmesan they could find, and they returned to northern Italy with a suitcase full of samples. They retreated to a laboratory to study some of the harder-to-spot variables. But they also smelled the cheese, broke it apart, tasted it.

Consortium director Riccardo Deserti said the American parmesan lacked the complexity and couldn’t compare with the original. He had a suggestion about what to call it.

“A cheese,” he said. “Simply, a cheese.” n

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COVER STORY

This year, let’s get rid of these 8 things ILLUSTRATIONS BY PARTY OF ONE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

11

SUNDAY, May, 5, 2019

Daily stock-market updates B Y S UZE O RMAN

T

he news media stokes stock-watching mania as if we were a nation of day traders. The phenomenon appears in its most extreme forms on the financial TV channels, but it’s everywhere: Ticktock changes in market indexes are plastered into a corner of cable news screens or scroll by in nonstop chyrons. Even nonfinancial outlets — broadcast, cable, radio and digital — diligently include a stock-market roundup in their reports.

But barely half of Americans own stock, and those who do are typically investing for retirement, in which case it makes no sense to follow the daily gyrations of the market. The herd mentality tugs at us to buy when we hear

stocks are rising and to sell when stocks are falling. Yet studies show that when amateurs — and most pros, too — try to “time” the market, they do worse than if they’d simply added to an index fund at regular intervals.

(The lack of context makes the updates even worse. “Dow down 150 points” splashed in large type on a TV screen certainly sets off our fear receptors, but many news outlets omit, or play down, the percentage drop — which is often far less alarming.)

And if you’re going to insist on reporting what “the market” is doing this very minute, at least pick an index that actually represents the market as a whole. The Dow Jones

industrial average comprises just 30 stocks — which, by the way, are added and deleted at the whims of the Dow gods, who don’t follow transparent rules for inclusion and exclusion.

TV producers aren’t going to dispense with this style of financial “coverage” entirely, although they should. You want the best shot at reaching your retirement goals? Stick to your long-term strategy, and don’t give those daily market updates a moment’s thought.

Suze Orman is a two-time Emmy Award–winning television host, the author of nine New York Times bestsellers, and the host of the Women & Money podcast.

Bacon B Y A NH L UU

I

love a few strips of crispy, fatty bacon. The flavor is delicious. And it adds a wonderful smokiness to some dishes — like in collard greens or on pasta, in some salads, or maybe on top of broccoli-cheddar soup.

But there’s not much that’s worse than bacon where there shouldn’t be any.

And these days, there is a lot of bacon in a lot of places where there shouldn’t be any. It’s now common to see bacon soda, bacon chips, bacon hot sauce, bacon mints, bacon mayo, bacon vodka and bacon cotton candy. It’s time to get rid of all of that.

This type of gluttony is purely an American phenomenon. The savory, sweet smokiness of bacon does not go with everything. It often imparts a gag-inducing richness that leaves you

unable to take more than a few bites or sips. The first one is always: Oh wow! That does taste just like bacon. And the next: Okay, that’s all I can take of that. You end up wasting a whole lot of otherwise good food or drink because someone thought it would be cool to put bacon in it.

Attempting to replicate these recipes at home is especially revolting; the liquid smoke flavor that leaches out of a lot of store-bought bacon is unappetizing in the extreme. It overpowers my palate. It covers up the flavor of whatever you’re putting bacon in — and the porkiness of the bacon itself.

Consider me a bacon purist, I guess.

Anh Luu is the owner and executive chef at Tapalaya in Portland, Ore.

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COVER STORY

Exclamation points

Perfume

‘Double Down’

B Y B ENJAMIN D REYER

B Y L INDSEY K AUFMAN P ALAN

B Y D ON S CHLESINGER

ow well I recall, from the distant days of my relative youth, that the singing Pointer Sisters were, and I paraphrase, so excited and just couldn’t hide it. Well, it was the ’80s, and we were, some of us, rather hopped up.

Decades later, I find myself inclined to contain my enthusiasm.

As a longtime copy editor, I’d no more ask you to rid your writing of exclamation points than I’d ask you to shun adverbs (which I love), semicolons (which I worship) or the word “the.” But the overuse of exclamation points — they’re just so tempting when you feel the need to turn up the volume on a workaday thought — has lately mushroomed into the standing ovation of punctuation: an obligatory, performative demonstration of enthusiasm meant to reassure their users that they’ve had a good time or can provide one. That salad? Delicious!

That meeting? Productive! In texts and on social media, lest one be read as frostily sarcastic, every greeting must be a “Hi!” and every expression of gratitude a “Thanks!” And the result of all that thrilled intensity? If everything’s exciting, ultimately nothing is.

Most thoughts, at least as expressed in writing, would better conclude with the self-effacing chill of the simple period, so that when we do pull up a bang — as the ! is sometimes called — it might make an impression.

I once suggested that writers confine themselves, over the course of a full-length book, to, at most, a dozen exclamation points, to which one writer immediately rejoindered, “Over the course of an entire career, you mean.”

I can’t aspire to such writerly stoicism, but: (Exclamation) point taken.

hen I was growing up in Texas, my parents had a standing Saturday “date night.” Our mom would kiss my sister and me good night as we choked on her cloying cloud of Chanel No. 5, the aroma Velcroing itself to my nose for hours afterward.

The fragrance industry (including perfume, deodorant and other products) is worth roughly $75 billion globally; it introduces about 100 scents annually. This year’s newest nose-turners include additions by Tom Ford, Dior, Gucci and, from Carolina Hererra, “Good Girl,” in a stiletto-shaped bottle. Macy’s alone carries more than 1,000 perfumes. I smell this stuff on the commuter across the aisle, the woman next to me in spin class and even my friend who seems to reek of SweeTarts.

Much like cigarette smoke, this is an assault on everyone. You wouldn’t shove your blasting headphones in every passerby’s ears, so why should nonconsensual olfactory overload be any different?

What’s more, perfume is full of chemicals called phthalates, which one study linked to developmental disorders in children whose mothers were exposed during pregnancy. Fragrances can also be toxic, preying upon allergies, which means your smellacious colleague could be the cause of your sneezing, headaches or nausea. I’d advise you to look at the ingredients on your bottle’s label, but thanks to tradesecret laws, perfume-makers are protected from disclosing their formulas.

You don’t need to pour all your eau de toilettes down the toilet. But using just a dab vs. a half-bottle’s worth could be a start. Opting for natural-based oils, lotions or fragrances would be better. The rest of us would breathe a little easier.

H

Benjamin Dreyer is the managing editor and copy chief of Random House and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Dreyer’s English.”

W

P

Lindsey Kaufman Palan is a freelance creative

Don Schlesinger, a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame, is the author of “Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros’ Way.”

director in advertising and Brooklyn-based writer.

resident Trump “doubled down on his intention to invalidate the Affordable Care Act in the courts,” a Washington Post columnist noted in April. He “doubled down” on threats to close the U.S.-Mexico border to asylum seekers (Newsweek) around the same time, and White House aides “doubled down” on denying disaster funding to Puerto Rico (NBC News). Democrats do it, too: Beto O’Rourke “doubled down” (The Post) on comparing Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric to Nazi discourse.

Clearly, this phrase, from blackjack, is applied to someone compounding an already dubious remark, suggestion or activity. Caught in a dangerous situation, this person opts for risky aggression. But the term is not just overused, it’s wildly misused. In fact, these scenarios convey almost the opposite of its original meaning.

In blackjack, the maneuver consists of doubling the amount of one’s wager in exchange for accepting the limitation that only one more card may be drawn to the hand in question. It means a favorable situation for winning money has presented itself. While the strategy imparts greater risk, the implication is that the greater reward — a doubled payout — more than justifies the gamble.

Dictionaries now cite the new meaning alongside the old one. But if you are looking for a gambling cliche, why not consider “going all in” — the poker term for committing all of one’s chips to the pot. That tactic is used not only when one has an extremely strong hand but also when one is in a vulnerable position. That seems closer to what pundits mean by “doubling down.”

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Astrology

Responding to email

School portraits

B Y R ON R EAGAN

B Y T AYLOR L ORENZ

B Y M ARISA B ELLACK

n 1981, having scarcely begun his presidency, my father was shot in the street by a young man trying to impress a famous actress. My mother, inside out with worry and feeling helpless to prevent such a thing from happening again, fell prey to an astrologer, who promised to warn of any particularly inauspicious days for my father to leave the house. This arrangement had little influence on the presidential schedule but produced considerable embarrassment when it was revealed some time later.

My mother was foolish, of course, but given the stressful circumstances, I’m inclined to forgive. I’m less charitably inclined toward the charlatan who took advantage of her.

Anxious or not, it’s past time we abandoned astrology. Such pseudoscientific piffle is at best harmless folly. At worst, it belongs to a family of more pernicious intellectual lapses with serious consequences. Let’s consider astrology, innocuous as it may seem, a kind of gateway drug: It softens the mental ground for equally unsound but far more harmful ideas. If you believe in the stars, you can believe anything.

Astrology, which seems to be enjoying a renaissance among millennials and Gen Xers, is only one sad example from our flabby-minded post-truth era. A disturbing number of people are forgoing vaccinations for their kids or getting their “news” from assorted crackpots and hustlers on social media.

Reasoning is a hallmark of our species, but we’re forgetting how to do it. Magical thinking is a bad habit we need to break. We are not owed our own reality. Nature doesn’t care about politics. Jupiter doesn’t determine your character; you do. If you want to be influenced by the stars, buy a telescope.

ccording to a study by the Radicati Group, a market research firm, people across the globe sent and received 269 billion emails a day in 2017. By 2022, that number is projected to reach more than 333 billion. Plenty of it is junk, but a lot of it seems to demand a response, if only because the person who wrote you is an old friend — or because they keep writing to “check back in.”

As the message count rises, it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re being pulled under.

People have adopted various coping mechanisms to deal with the deluge: Some strictly schedule themselves, emailing only in the morning or between certain hours. Others valiantly struggle to maintain inbox zero, consistently deleting every item in their inbox. And a few just snooze everything non-urgent until the weekend.

Here’s my strategy: I stopped responding to email.

Responding to email simply begets more email. Most endless email threads can be resolved in a three-minute phone conversation or Slack exchange instead of stretching out like a slow-motion ping-pong rally. And plenty of other messages just don’t warrant a response, or even consideration, in the first place. (Sorry, PR folks: I’m still not interested in your client’s blockchain-powered smoothie maker.)

As I’ve shifted more of my personal communication to chat apps like Facebook Messenger and iMessage, and more of my work communication to Slack, I find email less and less necessary. If we really have something to chat about, let’s actually chat, unburdened by all the time-wasting “Dears” and “All bests.” This year we should toss the expectation that everyone should respond to every email message and embrace the concept of inbox infinity.

I

Ron Reagan is a writer and political commentator living in Seattle and Tuscany.

A

T

he appeal of school portraits was understandable in the late 1850s, when photographer George K. Warren was coaxing Ivy League seniors into his makeshift studio. The technology was new and thrilling: Glass-plate negatives allowed photographers, for the first time, to make multiple copies of a single image.

Senior portraits, bound into elegant albums, would have been treasured as possibly the only photographs a young man might have of himself and his friends, says Shannon Thomas Perich, curator of the National Museum of American History’s photography collection.

But now? I have more than 10,000 photos of my kids. At every school event, there’s a designated volunteer photographer, and parents are encouraged afterward to submit photos for the yearbook. That’s for elementary school. Teens and college kids don’t seem to have any problems taking photos of themselves and their friends. It’s hard to see the value in posed school portraits on top of all that.

Okay, so there’s something democratic in situating every student similarly, regardless of circumstance. But these photos aren’t cheap.

Prints of one pose and a set of digitals go for $145 at our school. Retouching is an additional $15 to $35 to remove “minor facial blemishes,” whiten teeth and even skin tone. The emphasis seems more on capitalism than on democracy.

And photographing everyone the same way drains personality. Many school portraits still look like the ones Warren took back in 1858: students posed stiffly in front of a blotchy backdrop. Perich appreciates that “there’s something very joyful in the optimism of the school portraits, the pride of being in school.”

But she adds: “I would rather have a snapshot than a portrait of someone.” n Marisa Bellack is The Washington Post’s Europe

Taylor Lorenz is a staff writer at the Atlantic.

editor.

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ENTERTAINMENT

What it’s like to lose to James Holzhauer BY

E MILY Y AHR

Lewis Black, game 6: Any other day, any other opponent, the results might have been different.

Alex Koral, game 1: I hoped he would start missing questions . . . and then in the Double Jeopardy round it was sort of like — you see the writing on the wall.

J

ust picture it: You’ve always dreamed of being on “Jeopardy!” You take the online test. You impress producers at the in-person audition.

You beat out thousands of other hopefuls. You travel to Los Angeles. You step onstage under the bright lights of the TV set. You see Alex Trebek. This is your moment to shine. . . . and then you have to play against James Holzhauer.

This has been the harsh reality for the contestants who have faced off against one of the most dominant players in “Jeopardy!” history — someone who may have cracked the code to the legendary game show, to the point where it might never be the same. Holzhauer, a professional gambler from Las Vegas, had racked up more than $1.6 million in 21 games as of Thursday night, and is averaging the highest amount per game in the show’s history.

Ratings have spiked as viewers tune in to see his aggressive gameplay: a strategy that involves picking the highest-dollar clues first, placing massive bets on the Daily Double and Final Jeopardy questions and, apparently, having a stunning command of nearly every trivia topic in existence.

As Holzhauer casually works his way through the categories, it’s impossible not to wonder about the other two contestants. We spoke with some of them and have learned that there are five stages of losing to Holzhauer.

1. You quickly realize something is up with this “James” guy.

“Jeopardy!” is generally taped weeks or months ahead of airtime, with producers staging five consecutive games in a day.

So new contestants typically have no idea who the defending champion is until they arrive on set.

Kevin Bohannon, game 8:

The producer said, “So James,

JEOPARDY PRODUCTIONS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The ‘Jeopardy!’ champ has been one of the most dominant players in the trivia show’s history tell them how much you won.” He said, “$415,000.” We all went, “WHAT?!” That was shocking.

Mike

Dindoffer,

game

7:

[When Holzhauer won $110,914 in his fourth game.] You could hear the audible gasp from the audience.

Satish Chandrasekhar, game 2: I knew he was a pretty strong

competitor, but I didn’t know he was at the level he is now.

Lorelle Anderson, game 10: I knew we had the returning champ and how much money he won, but didn’t know what he was like until I saw that first game. My expectations just adjusted dramatically.

Claudia Walters, game 14:

They said, “Here’s our returning champion, James, he’s won 12 games so far. . . . He has [$851,926].” I pulled out my calculator . . . and kept staring at it.

Hannah Pierson-Compeau, game 10: I kept thinking, “Come

on, somebody beat him, somebody beat this guy so I can play somebody else!”

2. You acknowledge this might not go well.

Arriving on the “Jeopardy!” set is surreal enough as it is. Holzhauer, though, has had the chance to make himself feel at home, so he’s free to pursue his tactic of pouncing on high-dollar clues.

Samantha Merwin, game 11:

For my game . . . it didn’t feel as dramatic as it looks. The Double Jeopardy round was when it was like, “This is crazy.”

Matthew Amster-Burton, game 3: One $2,000 clue was

about the lead singer of the Pixies. I’m a huge Pixies fan . . . I thought, “I’ve got this.” But then he beat me to the buzzer.

3. You accept that, yes, you are going to lose.

The game moves so quickly that some players remain oblivious to the dollar amounts being amassed. It’s not until a break in the action that they notice how much Holzhauer has racked up.

“Jeopardy!” contestant James Holzhauer eclipsed the $1 million mark in winnings on April 23.

4. You suddenly hear from every person you’ve ever known.

A common thing for contestants to hear: “If it wasn’t for that guy, you could have won!”

Walters: It’s been the strangest thing to become famous for when you lose.

Dindoffer: People thinks he comes off robotic. But truthfully, I think he’s trying to play the gambler strategy, not reveal too much and keep moving.

Kevin Donohue, game 14: My dad emailed me, “On an ordinary show, you would have been up there.”

Black: People would watch and I would get comments like, “Wait, do you have to go up against that guy?” “Uh — yeah.”

5. Even in defeat, you’re proud to be part of “Jeopardy!” history.

Competitors expressed admiration for Holzhauer. And hey, only 400 people make it on the show of the roughly 85,000 people who take the online “Jeopardy!” test. So just being there is a huge accomplishment.

Donohue: James is 100 percent amazing. It has been really fun to see him take all of the best pieces of “Jeopardy!” players and combine them into a master strategy.

Amster-Burton: I did not go to “Jeopardy!” expecting to win.

It’s an honor to play, and it was a great story to be beaten by the best of the best.

Black: I got to be on “Jeopardy!,” shake hands with Alex Trebek and be an extremely minor footnote in the history of the show. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. n

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BOOKS

Lonely years of investigating Cosby N ONFICTION

l

REVIEW BY

J ESSICA M . G OLDSTEIN

B CHASING COSBY The Downfall of America’s Dad

By Nicole Weisensee Egan Seal Press. 320 pp. $28

ill Cosby was raised in a North Philadelphia housing project, spent the prime of his life as one of the most admired and adored performers in Hollywood and currently resides in SCI Phoenix, a Pennsylvania state penitentiary, where he is serving three to 10 years for aggravated indecent assault.

I covered both of Cosby’s criminal trials (the first of which ended in a mistrial) for ThinkProgress, seeing up close a true rarity in American life: a man being brought to justice for an act of sexual violence. That Cosby was an exceptionally famous and wealthy man only made this more extraordinary.

After nearly five years on the Cosby beat, I thought I knew the story to its bones. But Nicole Weisensee Egan’s expertise is formidable, and her book, “Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad,” is worthwhile for anyone hoping to understand the Cosby case in full. She was an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News when Andrea Constand’s allegations broke in 2005, and she continued to cover Cosby at People and the Daily Beast. It seems there is no relevant document she hasn’t read, no critical character she neglected to interview. “Chasing Cosby” chronicles her experience following a case that, for years, most people preferred to ignore. In clear, vivid prose, she illuminates how a beloved star was exposed as a violent predator, and how Cosby’s conviction became the first of the #MeToo era.

Egan deftly balances a play-byplay of the criminal proceedings with a methodical explanation of her reporting, gamely sharing her personal relationship to both.

Specialists on everything from victim behavior to forensic toxicology contextualize Egan’s findings. She raises zoom-out questions that Cosby’s conviction

MATT SLOCUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bill Cosby arrives for his sentencing hearing at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Sept. 24, 2018.

alone doesn’t answer, about wealth, race, the criminal justice system and “the dangers of deifying celebrities.” And far from feeling self-indulgent or distracting, Egan’s willingness to share her human connection to her professional endeavor makes her writing resonate with a greater power.

Egan came to the case as a Cliff Huxtable fan. “The Cosby Show” debuted when she was a high school senior, the same year her older brother died, “and watching the show gave me an escape out of my own, fraught home and into the cozy normalcy of a family not traumatized by death.” But the more she dug into Constand’s allegation that Cosby — a man Constand considered a mentor, not to mention a major donor and member of the Board of Trustees at Temple University, her employer — had drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home in a Philadelphia suburb, the more “the validity of the charges came to light.”

Egan’s was a lonely reporting effort. Until October 2014, when Hannibal Buress’s stand-up set mentioning Cosby rape allegations went viral, Egan practically had the Cosby beat to herself.

Nobody wanted to believe Cosby could be a serial abuser, even though his predilection for drugging women was apparently an open secret in the entertainment industry. Constand’s, too, was an isolating journey: Of the 60-plus women who would eventually come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct, only Constand had a claim that was within her state’s statute of limitations, not only when she first reported it to the police but when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office approached her about reopening the case in 2015.

As Egan pursued the Cosby story, she found enemies in unexpected places. That she faced threats from Cosby’s camp is alarming if not surprising; that

other journalists undermined her work is a more disconcerting matter. She details her infuriating struggle to get journalism experts to see the accounts of Cosby’s accusers as “legitimate” enough to merit news coverage, and she is undermined by media professors and pundits who say stories about allegations only witnessed by the two involved parties (so, the vast majority of sex crimes) could never pass journalistic muster.

Some of the most damaging information involves Bruce Castor, the Montgomery County district attorney who declined to prosecute Cosby in 2005. Though Castor would later try to win back his D.A. seat with the campaign promise that he would get Cosby this time around (he lost to Kevin Steele), Egan’s reporting reveals a man who never took Constand’s allegations seriously and instead went out of his way to protect Cosby. In one telling passage, Egan digs up records showing Castor’s father, an attorney, had represented a millionaire philanthropist in the sale of his house to Cosby — the same house in which Cosby later drugged and sexually assaulted Constand.

In some ways, the pre-2017 world Egan describes already feels carbon-dated. Constand went to the police a year before Tarana Burke began the Me Too movement and 12 years before Burke’s rallying cry became a hashtag that galvanized an unprecedented and ongoing reckoning with sexual violence. In “Chasing Cosby,” Egan reminds readers how new, unusual and remarkable it is that the Me Too movement is happening at all. Her reporting is a reminder that we’re living through a historical anomaly that, without the courage and fortitude of Constand and her sister survivors, may not have come to pass. n Goldstein is the culture editor of ThinkProgress.

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