The Washington Post National Weekly - May 26, 2019

. IN .COLLABORATION SUNDAY, SUNDAY, MAYMAY 26, 2019 26, 2019 IN COLLABORATION WITH WITH

ABCDE ABCDE NATIONAL NATIONALWEEKLY WEEKLY

The The comeback comeback coast coast With With private private companies companies racing racing intointo space, space, thethe once-sacrosanct once-sacrosanct stretch stretch of Florida of Florida is experiencing is experiencing a surprising a surprising revival. revival.

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Politics Politics A majority-female A majority-female legislature legislature 4 4

World World U.S. U.S. migrants migrants in Mexico in Mexico 10 10

5 Myths 5 Myths Prisons Prisons 23 23

MAY 26, 2019 2 SUNDAY, MAY 26, 2019

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KLMNOKLMNO WEEKLY WEEKLY

THE FIX THE FIX

Building a casea against Trump Building case against Trump

Pelosi says Trump is Pelosi “becoming self-im-is “becoming self-imsays Trump peachable”: The morning of the contempt vote, of the contempt vote, peachable”: The morning Pelosi sat at a Washington Post event and said Post event and said espite Speaker Nancy espite Pelosi’sSpeaker efforts, Nancy Pelosi’s efforts, Pelosi sat at a Washington Trump is “becoming self-impeachable.”

It wasn’t House Democrats are House seriously conTrump is “becoming self-impeachable.” It wasn’t Democrats are seriously conimmediately clear whatimmediately she meant — clear that he wasshe meant — that he was sidering impeachment proceedings what sidering impeachment proceedings making his own case making that he his should im-that he should be imagainst President Trump. ownbe case against President Trump. peached, or that he was damaging his election The case has been building over the past peached, or that he was damaging his election The case has been building over the past chances by blockading Congress.

But it did seem month. Here are the key flash points that have chances by blockading Congress. But it did seem month.

Here are the key flash points that have like a turning point in Pelosi’s language. brought an increasingbrought numberan of increasing Democratsnumber of Democrats like a turning point in Pelosi’s language.

Justin Amash is open to impeachment (and one Republican) on board: Justin Amash is open to impeachment (and one Republican) on board: proceedings: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), The Mueller reportThe is released: There proceedings: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Mueller report is released: There tweeted that he had read the Mueller report were some Democratswere who some thought that the who thought that the tweeted that he had read the Mueller report Democrats and thought Trump “engaged in impeachable obstruction-y actionsobstruction-y outlined by actions special outlined by special and thought Trump “engaged in impeachable ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES conduct.”

ThisIMAGES one Republican going to counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIRobert in his S. report ALEX WONG/GETTY conduct.”wasn’t This one Republican wasn’t going to counsel Mueller III in his report change Pelosi’s calculations to Pelosi’s avoid impeachreleased April 18 were released enough to impeach theenough An empty chair sits House chair Judiciary change calculations to avoid impeachApril 18 were to impeach the in the An empty sits in the House Judiciary ment, but suddenly, Democrats’ president. But the majority stuckBut with Pelosi, after Donald ment, butimpeachment suddenly, Democrats’ impeachment president. the majorityCommittee stuck withhearing Pelosi, room Committee hearing room after Donald efforts were technically bipartisan. who privately urged her caucus to take it slow.

McGahn ignored a subpoena to testify. efforts were technically bipartisan. who privately urged her caucus to take it slow.

McGahn ignored a subpoena to testify.

Donald McGahn ignores a subpoena Elizabeth Warren takes the stage: She takes the stage: She Donald McGahn to ignores a subpoena to Elizabeth Warren talk to Congress: On Tuesday, the White the subpoenas,” he said.

“These aren’t, like, was one of the first 2020 hopefuls to come out talk to Congress: On Tuesday, the White the subpoenas,” he said. “These aren’t, like, was one of the first 2020 hopefuls to come out House’saretop lawyer, a key witness in thea key witness in the impartial The Democrats are trying in favor of impeachment and gave a forceful and House’s top lawyer, impartial people.

Theto Democrats trying to in favor of impeachment gave apeople. forceful Mueller report to Trump’s attempts to fire the attempts to fire the win 2020.”

He sued his accounting firm and explanation at a CNN town hall that became a Mueller report to Trump’s win 2020.” He sued his accounting firm and explanation at a CNN town hall that became a special counsel then lie about it, refused Congress to prevent access to his financial bumper-sticker argument for pro-impeachspecial counsel then to lie about it, refused to Congress to prevent access to his financial bumper-sticker argument for pro-impeachtestify.

The said House information.

His treasury secretaryHis said he ers: “There is no ‘political inconvenience’ testify.Committee The Houseissued Judiciary Committee issued information. treasury secretary heJudiciary ers: “There is no ‘political inconvenience’ a subpoena to force to talk, but won’t release Trump’s won’t tax returns, antax returns, exception to the Unitedexception States Constitution.” a subpoena to McGahn, force him to talk, but McGahn, releasedespite Trump’s despite an him to the United States Constitution.” under pressure His from Trump, not show IRS interpretation the law otherwise. of Histhe law The Mueller letter comes out: Onletter April comes under did pressure fromup.

Trump, did not show up. interpretation otherwise.

The Mueller out: On April of IRS To many Democrats on the fence about on the fence about former top aides refused to comply with 30, a letter leaked 30, that a showed Mueller To many Democrats former top aides refused to comply with letter leaked that showed Mueller impeachment, this was the last straw. subpoenas to testify. Ifsubpoenas Trump wastostonewallunhappy with how Attorney General William impeachment, thisThe was the last straw. The testify. If Trump was stonewallunhappy with how Attorney General William night before, Nadler and top Democrats had ing traditional investigations, what other opP. Barr characterizedP.the special counsel’s night before, Nadler and top Democrats had ing traditional investigations, what other opBarr characterized the special counsel’s Pelosi to consider impeachment pro- impeachment protions did Congress considerhaveurged report. Mueller urgedreport.

Barr toMueller releaseurged more Barr urged Pelosi to consider tions but did to Congress but to consider to release more have ceedings, even if it doesn’t lead even to articles of impeachment,This some Democrats wondered. and warned of “misunderstandings.”

This ceedings, if it doesn’t lead to articles of impeachment, some Democrats wondered. and warned of “misunderstandings.” impeachment against the president. against the president.

Attorney General Barr doesn’t show Barr followed reports that Mueller’s team thought impeachment Attorney General doesn’t show followed reports that Mueller’s team thought accusesATrump of a coverup and up,easy so Congress him contempt: A him Pelosi Barr’s summary had been toosummary easy on Trump, Pelosi accuses Trump of a coverup and up, so in Congress holds in contempt: Barr’s had been too on Trump,holds says that “could an impeachable of- an impeachable ofsitting Cabinet secretary refused to come to refused and it gives the perception among that “could be sitting Cabinet secretary to come to besays and it gives thesome perception among some fense”: Shereport. made the fense”: remarksShe at amade gathering testify the Mueller report.

Democrats that thereDemocrats is a coverup the is Congress the remarks at a gathering Congress to testify about the Mueller that inthere a coverupto in the about of progressives just hours after Barr said his problem was but White House. of progressives on Wednesday, just hours after Barrwith saidthe hisformat, problem was with the format, on butWednesday, White House. tamping down impeachment her it addedPelosi to the that Trump blocks investigations: Pelosiinvestigations: and tamping calls downfrom impeachment calls from her it added to the the White perception that the White Trump blocks andperception party in its a private It awas the most was blocking from its constiDemocratic leaders ofDemocratic key committees party in private meeting. It was the most House was blocking Congress from consti- meeting. leadershad of keyHouse committees had Congress to impeachmentopen thattoPelosi has ever that Pelosi has ever tutionally mandated of oversight. settled on a plan to invetigate aspects of impeachment tutionally mandated role ofopen oversight. settled onall a plan to invetigate all aspects of role publicly been.

Whenpublicly asked on Thursday May 8,report, the Democratic-led JudiciTrump’s life, including the Mueller report, the On been.

When asked on Thursday On MayHouse 8, the Democratic-led House JudiciTrump’s life, including Mueller whether wanted, on some level,wanted, to be on some level, to be ary Committee voted toary hold Barr in contempt without starting impeachment proceedings. whether Trump Committee voted to hold Barr in Trump contempt without starting impeachment proceedings. impeached, she said, “Of course.” of Congress for not showing up.

Trump had other ideas.

“We’re fighting all n impeached, she said, “Of course.” n of Congress for not showing up.

Trump had other ideas. “We’re fighting all

BY

A MBER P HILLIPS BY A MBER P HILLIPS

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CONTENTS

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WEEKLY WEEKLY

CONTENTS 4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A 4rocket carrying a ON THE COVER A rocket carrying a POLITICS satellite blasts off from satellite blasts off from Titusville, THE NATION 8 Titusville, Fla., in March. The10new push forMarch. The new push for Fla., in THE WORLD manned missions12 to space is manned missions to space is COVER STORY creating an economic creating an economic resurgence ENTERTAINMENT 16 resurgence in the area. Photo18

by JONATHAN in the area. Photo by JONATHAN BOOKS NEWTON of The Washington Post of The Washington Post NEWTON OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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FIVE MYTHS

Prisons BY

J OHN P FAFF

Criminal justice policy has secured a prominent place in the Democratic presidential primary race, with several candidates offering plans to reform the way Americans punish. Reinventing how we handle crime is one of the most important civil rights challenges of our time, yet much of the debate is built on misconceptions that push reform in inadequate and even counterproductive directions.

MYTH NO. 1 U.S. prisons are full of nonviolent drug offenders.

At a minimum, 55 percent of those in state prison have been convicted of a violent crime — and more than half of these people, or nearly 30 percent of the total prison population, have been found guilty of murder, manslaughter, rape or sexual assault, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Slightly less than 15 percent are incarcerated for drug crimes, even though most Americans believe the figure to be about 50 percent. (Drugs play a bigger role in the federal prison system, but that holds only about 10 percent of all prisoners; most incarcerated people are in state prison.)

The share of those in state prison for committing violence is even greater than 55 percent, however. Prisoners are classified by the most serious offense for which they are convicted, not arrested or charged. So if someone is arrested for a violent crime but ends up pleading guilty to a drug charge, his crime is classified as a nonviolent drug offense.

MYTH NO. 2 Private prisons drive mass incarceration.

There are two central flaws in this claim. First, only about 8 percent of all state and federal prisoners are held in private facilities. Most of those in private prisons are held in just five states,

and there is no real evidence that prison populations have grown faster in those states than elsewhere.

Second, of the roughly $50 billion we spend on prisons, about two-thirds, or $30 billion, is spent on wages and benefits for public-sector employees. In comparison, private prison firms collectively earn a few billion in revenue and (more important for their incentives to lobby) about $300 million in profits — just 1 percent of the public-sector wage bill. So public-sector correctional officer unions have a reason to lobby against reforms that would reduce inmate populations.

MYTH NO. 3 Long sentences are causing our prison population to age.

The reality is more complicated. Among prisoners who are over 65, fully half have served fewer than 10 years, which means they were admitted in their mid- to late 50s. Much of the aging of the prison population plausibly comes not from long sentences but from our inability to address late-age violence properly. Age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia can lead to violent behavior, and far too often we rely on police and jails, not public health services, to manage it. One study also suggests that extensive drug use when younger has led to higher levels of crime among a cohort of older Americans.

ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A guard stands watch over death row at San Quentin State Prison.

MYTH NO. 4 A recidivist is a career criminal.

“Once a criminal, always a criminal?” was the headline on a CBS News article about recidivism rates.

Perhaps the single most important statistic for evaluating new criminal justice policies is their effect on recidivism. So it would be great if recidivism statistics actually measured reoffending. They don’t. Formal recidivism numbers measure something like “the number of people rearrested” or “the number of people readmitted to prison.” Such data both understates and overstates actual reoffending, glossing over a critical debate about what recidivism even means.

First, the undercounting: We can’t measure reoffending that no one detects. No one voluntarily reports crimes they committed that the police did not observe or that victims did not report.

The overcounting issue is less immediately obvious but arguably far more important. If someone shifts from committing one robbery per day to one per month, he could eventually be reconvicted and classified as a

recidivist. That the amount of harm he caused fell by about 95 percent is immaterial. Ours is a binary metric; any one failure counts as recidivism.

MYTH NO. 5 Not sending someone to prison saves about $35,000 a year.

It’s easy to see where the number comes from: We spend about $50 billion to lock up 1.4 million people per year in state prisons. That’s about $35,000 per person in prison per year. Yet that is not what we save when we release a single inmate from prison.

Recall that about two-thirds of prison spending is wages: If we don’t cut payroll in proportion to inmate population, then the savings per prisoner will be much less. Other fixed costs, like water and heating bills, likewise do not decline steadily with the number of prisoners. The real savings of reducing the prison population by one person is often about $4,000 to $16,000, not $35,000. n Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham University, is the author of “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.”

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OPINIONS

More men need to speak out on abortion rights MONICA HESSE is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section and author of “American Fire.”

My job takes me to some deeply personal spaces, and so I have spent a lot of time in abortion clinics. I’ve written articles about women driving hundreds of miles to end pregnancies. For a story about abortion doulas — volunteers who hold hands and offer support through the procedure — I spent two months of Saturdays in a Virginia clinic that performed nine or 10 each day. With patients’ permission, I stood in the corner of an exam room holding a notebook. And when patients didn’t want a journalist present for one of the most intimate moments of their lives, I’d excuse myself to the waiting area. Where I’d sometimes talk to the men.

It wasn’t all husbands or boyfriends in the waiting room; sometimes it was mothers or roommates. But the patients receiving abortions weren’t allowed to drive themselves home, so they always came to the clinic with someone, and the someone was often the person responsible for the pregnancy that was now being ended.

It was an odd wait for these men. They fiddled with their phones or flipped awkwardly through the fashion magazines piled on end tables. One asked me if he would have time to run to GameStop before his girlfriend came out of anesthesia. I wanted to throttle him until he explained: He wanted to buy the new Tomb Raider for her, so she could play while she convalesced.

In those moments, these men reminded me of the little boys you see waiting for their mothers outside department store dressing rooms or towed into the ladies’ locker room at the Y and instructed to keep their eyes closed. These men knew they had to be there but weren’t sure what their jobs were. So mostly they just waited while their partners disappeared

into exam rooms for the complicated business of being a woman.

On Tuesday, progressive groups including Planned Parenthood and MoveOn organized rallies across the country to protest a spate of antiabortion legislation recently passed in Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and Ohio. At the one in D.C., representatives and senators took turns from the podium, promising to fight for reproductive choice. Many were women — Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Mazie Hirono (DHawaii); Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.) and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).

But men were there, too — from the podium and in the crowd. “Your stake in this fight is as big as anyone’s,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told them.

Said Rep. Seth Moulton (DMass.): “It’s not my job to come to Washington and take away the rights of my wife.”

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) shared that he used to be antiabortion but that he changed his position when he took office and began to hear from female constituents. “I met

ANNA MONEYMAKER/BLOOMBERG

“Your stake in this fight is as big as anyone’s,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told men during a rally for abortion rights Tuesday.

women for the first time in my life who’d had an abortion,” he said.

His conversion seemed appreciated by the audience, even if it was based on a dubious presumption: Since a quarter of all women in the United States have ended a pregnancy, Ryan had likely met many women who’d had abortions. He just didn’t know it.

I’ve been thinking about men who support abortion rights and how they should talk about it. It can’t always be only women who have to bare their souls in public. It can’t be only women painstakingly sharing their stories in the hopes that legislators will listen.

But it’s an incredibly delicate balance for even the most wellintentioned men to strike.

There’s a fine line between encouraging women to take the lead, and in making women feel like they’re stranded out in front alone with nobody behind them.

There’s a fine line between recognizing that if you don’t have a uterus you won’t be as affected — nobody is talking about imprisoning men whose partners have abortions — and deciding that if you don’t have a uterus, you don’t need to care.

A male reader emailed me the other day: “We need more women to speak out against outdated policies,” he wrote. He didn’t want to get in the way by

speaking out against those policies himself, he said.

But there was an element of his deference that sounded like a retrograde husband trying to shirk domestic duty: Surely, if he tried to help load the dishwasher, he would only do it wrong and muck it up.

But they had both dirtied the dishes. The messy business was a joint endeavor.

Which is what I ended up writing back to him: “We need more men to speak out, too.”

Men who support access to abortion are going to say wrong things and do wrong things, and they might feel awkward about it, and they might be gently castigated and encouraged to do better. And the whole conversation might be incredibly uncomfortable.

They should still try. Men who support abortion rights should still try.

I’ve been thinking about the men in the waiting room of the abortion clinic because they’d shown up in the waiting room of that abortion clinic. Because they were there, in that womanly space, doing the best they could at the time. Because they probably had a hundred places they would have rather been. But their wives and girlfriends were on the other side of the door, and they knew there were a hundred places she would have rather been, too. n

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OPINIONS

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Putting The treatment grad advice of terrorism into practice suspects JENA JASON MCGREGOR REZAIAN is a Washington writer for Global Post reporter Opinionswho for The focuses on leadership Washingtonissues Post. in Hethe headlines served as The – corporate Post’s management correspondentand in Tehran governance, from 2012 toworkplace 2016. He trends spent 544 and days the unjustly personalities imprisoned bywho Iranian run Washington authorities until andhis business. release in January 2016.

For Johncommencement Walker Lindh, aspeakers, U.S. citizen a message who moved of “changing to Afghanistan the world” and almost joined the seems Taliban, mandatory was released to include. from prison Thursday after serving 17 years At Colorado of a 20-year College sentence. a few weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey told graduates that As“you expected, have to hisact return as if ittowere society possible is controversial. to radically change the world.

Some And reports you have indicate to dothat it all hethe hastime.” not changed In her famous his radically 2011 Barnard anti-U. College S. views.graduation They quotespeech, him making Facebook statements chief operating in support officer of the Sheryl Sandberg Islamic State, asked evidence students: that “What he remains in the world a terrorist needs threat. to change, For some and what people, part this doreinforces you plan on theplaying view that in changing he’s a traitor it?”who should remain in prison for the rest of his life based on the original charges brought student loan debt — has the against him.

And in his 2014 potential for profoundly commencement address, Adm. different we have struggled outcomes.to find legal William The strong McRaven feelings memorably behind norms Not only to deal didwith Smith people show the told thesegraduates positionsat are the entirely University power accused ofof taking plotting action andfor of understandable.

Texas at AustinBut that let’s “toput change Morehouse’s committing violent students, crimes offering the them world, asidemake for a moment. your bed,” and an against example the United of whatStates. they, too, then Instead, reminded let’s consider graduates justof how the could At first, do for 9/11 others unified if they us from also multiplier crucial theeffect: notion“If of every law and one of built coastsuccessful to coast and careers all points uponinthe you order changed is to thethe health livesof ofour just 10 foundation between. But ofthat theirfeeling degrees, of but people democracy — and and each its institutions. one of those he oneness also called was momentary. for graduates Our and folks As changed odious asthe Lindh’s lives of professed another alumni debatesto over follow howin we his should footsteps, 10 allegiances people —were, just 10 he—still then received in five doing respond their to the ownattacks part toon literally U.S. soil generations due process.— He125 had years the — the pay soonitrevealed forward deep for another differences. class opportunity of 2014 to will hire have counsel changed and graduating Initially and class. understandably, the tooklives partofin800 judicial million proceedings, people.” the“On desire behalf wasoffor the retribution. eight ultimately There is receiving nothing wrong a pleawith generations One Octoberof2001 my family poll showed who 88 any bargain. of these calls for good deeds, have percent been of in Americans this country, approving we’re and Atthese a time speakers when the have nation made is going of a military to put aresponse little fuelfocused in youron their divided own onimpact so many onfronts, the world. bus,” Afghanistan, Smith said where to the Osama graduates. bin But upholding listening thetorule such ofadvice law must and “This Ladeniswas thethought challenge to to have you, been actually be something putting that it into we should actionall — alumni. in hiding.

This is my class — 2019. as be graduates able to agree of Morehouse upon. Yet since And About my family the same is making time, an a grant College the beginning watched of billionaire our apparently to international eliminate their poll student showed loans.” that Robert endlessF. war Smith on terrorism, do when he justice said people Afterinthe most cheers other and countries applause his hasfamily been anything would eliminate but blind, their as

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

and preferred chantsa subsided, legal rather hethan went on: “Now, military I know solution: my class extradition will make sure and trials they pay of those this forward. suspected And of I want implementing, my class toplanning look at these and [alumni], aiding in the these attacks. beautiful Morehouse In both cases brothers, respondents and let’s make wanted sure to see every justice. class Americans, has the same whoseopportunity compatriotsgoing had died forward in — thebecause attacks,we predictably are enough preferred to take care the visceral of our own version community.” over the Estimates proceduralofone. the value of the gift have The varied, capture with of Lindh, some reports who putting immediately in thebecame $10 million known range as while the American others have Taliban, said changed as much as the$40 equation. million.We were no longer simply Graduation discussing speeches how toare punish intended, nameless people of course, on the to provide other inspiration side of the world. that launches How would fresh we minds deal with intofellow the world. citizens Some whoof the joined bestforces speeches withhave thosereminded eager to graduates do us harm? of the power of failure, encouraged U.S. citizenship them not ensures to waste a time much“living broader someone set of protections else’s life,” or than thoughtfully many foreign-born described how to pay terrorism attention suspects to what received matters after and the attacks. think about The U.S. the people government around took suspected us. members of the Taliban, But even al-Qaeda memorable and other admonitions terrorist groups to “stay into custody, hungry, stay foolish,” held them orfor anecdotal long periods, stories of how denied speakers them due managed process, their then own triedlives and convicted and careers, them don’t in carry the opaque samemilitary weight trials. as witnessing actions The inhumane such as Smith’s. treatment His gift of has these the suspects, potential and to the provide, denialinof real theirtime, basicwith rights real at the U.S. consequences, detention center anin example Guantanamo to graduates Bay, are some of the of the multiplier most serious effect McRaven long-termdescribed. miscarriages of justice

in Without our country’s student history loanand debt, these contributed graduates to the can corroding choose different perception career of moral paths authority with lesswe concern once enjoyed. about the accompanying salary, Evengoing worse, into many careers other or working countriesinhave fields mimicked that do more U.S. good policy,for using the world. often With less debt, unsubstantiated they may beterrorismbetter and positioned national security-related to launch newcharges businesses — Iran and that Turkey create come more jobs.

And immediately they canto invest mindmore — toof justify their wages the imprisonment into long-term of political investments opponents and or use others theperceived money that to bewould at odds have withgone the state. to pay off loans Lindh to help did get family a trial members, in U.S. both court.ofHe which had legal could have profound representation effectsand in changing the the trajectories opportunityof totheir defend families’ himself. or their His 20-year communities’ sentence lives. was reduced There by were three signs years thatfor the good speech behavior. was already having that effect.

At the Morehouse time of his graduate capture, he Dwytt was a troubled Lewis told and CBS misguided News that Smith’s 20-year-old gift would who made wipeaaway terrible $150,000 decision to injoin debt, a conflict saying, “I’m abroad so motivated that eventually to goput change him the at odds world.” with hisThe home 21-year-old, country. Whether who said he comes is repentant, from Compton, he has paid Calif., a and heavy used price to for be homeless, that crime.said the power His plea of someone bargainsaying continues his to loan generate burden considerable was being taken care controversy of in hisamong “last 30those seconds whoof being wanted antoundergrad see him punished student” was inspiring more harshly. him But to help if there others. is a single “I think silver once lining youtohave this that chapter mind-set in one of our of ‘Icountry’s want to be longest impactful and most bitter and I stories, want toit’s change that the his release world,’ “ishe a victory said, “I for promise the rule you of law. that Justice energy was just served. transpires.” n n

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POLITICS

Where women call the shots

PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

B Y E MILY W AX- T HIBODEAUX in Carson City, Nev.

S

he didn’t plan to say it.

Yvanna Cancela, a newly elected Democrat in the Nevada Senate, didn’t want to “sound crass.” But when a Republican colleague defended a century-old law requiring doctors to ask women seeking abortions whether they’re married, Cancela couldn’t help firing back.

“A man is not asked his marital status before he gets a vasectomy,” she countered — and the packed hearing room fell silent.

Since Nevada seated the nation’s first majority-female state legislature in January, the male old guard has been shaken up by

the perspectives of female lawmakers. Bills prioritizing women’s health and safety have soared to the top of the agenda. Mounting reports of sexual harassment have led one male lawmaker to resign. And policy debates long dominated by men, including prison reform and gun safety, are yielding to female voices.

Cancela, 32, is part of the wave of women elected by both parties in November, many of them younger than 40. Today, women hold the majority with 23 seats in the Assembly and 10 in the Senate, or a combined 52 percent.

And in Alabama, which just enacted an almost complete ban on abortion, women make up just 15 percent of lawmakers.

No other legislature has achieved that milestone in U.S. history. Only Colorado comes close, with women constituting 47 percent of its legislators. In Congress, just one in four lawmakers is a woman.

And the female majority is having a huge effect: More than 17 pending bills deal with sexual assault, sex trafficking and sexual misconduct, with some measures aimed at making it easier to prosecute offenders. Bills to ban child marriage and examine the causes of maternal mortality are also on the docket.

“I can say with 100 percent certainty that we wouldn’t have had these conversations” a few years ago, said Assembly Majority

The first majority-female legislature is meeting in Nevada. Carson City may never be the same.

Of 63 lawmakers in Nevada, 11 are black, nine are Hispanic, one is Native American and one is Asian American Pacific Islander. Women hold 23 seats in the Assembly and 10 in the Senate. For the names of the female lawmakers, who are pictured here, see Page 5.

Leader Teresa Benitez-Thompson (D). “None of these bills would have seen the light of day.”

Nevada didn’t reach this landmark by accident. A loosely coordinated campaign of political action groups and women’s rights organizations recruited and trained women such as Cancela, who became political director of the 57,000-member Culinary Workers Union before she turned 30. One of those organizations, Emerge Nevada, said it trained twice as many female candidates ahead of the 2018 midterm election as it had in the preceding 12 years.

Meanwhile, the election of President Trump in 2016 mobilized Democratic women nation-

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POLITICS wide, including in Nevada, where women already held 40 percent of statehouse seats.

Along with the gender shift has come a steady increase in racial diversity: Of 63 lawmakers in Nevada, 11 are African American, nine are Hispanic, one is Native American and one, Rochelle Thuy Nguyen (D), 41, is the legislature’s first Democratic female Asian American Pacific Islander.

The result may seem surprising in a state more often defined by the hypersexuality and neon-lit debauchery of the Las Vegas Strip. Until 2017, the legislature included an assemblyman who had briefly appeared as an extra in a film about women being kidnapped and forced to live naked in kennels, according to PolitiFact.

But that lawmaker, Stephen Silberkraus (R), 38, was defeated by a woman, Lesley Cohen (D), 48, who highlighted the film during her campaign. (Silberkraus told reporters that he had been unaware of the film’s sexual nature.)

As a member of the Assembly, Cohen is leading a study on conditions for female sex workers in Nevada’s rural brothels, the nation’s only legal bordellos.

“Outsiders ask why and how Nevada — of all places — became first,” Cohen said. “But I say, why not Nevada? Why not everywhere?”

A culture change Carson City is a tiny frontier town, cradled among the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. For decades in the statehouse, charges of sexual harassment often were shrugged off or belittled, and bills sponsored by women were sometimes mocked.

In 2015, Sen. Patricia Ann Spearman (D), now 64, said legislative leaders refused to schedule a hearing on her bill to promote pay equity for women. “The boys club was like, ‘Why do we need that?’ ” she said. “It was a very misogynistic session.”

As recently as 2017, when the legislature approved a public referendum to repeal the “pink tax” on necessities such as tampons and diapers, one assemblyman argued against it, saying it would create a slippery slope.

“Can I add my jockstrap purchases to your list? You might argue it’s not a necessity, but I might beg to differ,” Jim March-

KLMNO WEEKLY

Who’s who Row 1 State Sen. Melanie Scheible, state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro, Assemblywoman Susie Martinez, state Sen. Heidi Seevers Gansert, Assemblywoman Lesley Cohen, state Sen. Marilyn Dondero, Assemblywoman Brittney Miller, state Sen. Yyanna Cancela and Assemblywoman Michelle Gorelow.

Nevada is first state with female-majority legislature 20% women Women make up 24% of Congress

30%

40%

MN PA

HI

US

NJ

DE WI

GA

VT

SC

UT KS

ID

AZ

AL

AR OH

MT NM

MI

IA NH

AK

WY

50%

KY IN

VA

WV LA

OK TX MO NE FL NY RI MD OR

MS TN

ND SD NC MA CA CT

Source: National Conference of State Legislatures

ant (R), now 63, said at the time.

Last November, voters agreed to repeal the tax — and replaced Marchant with a woman, Shea Backus (D).

Even now, female lawmakers in both parties say they receive anonymous phone calls from men commenting on their looks or threatening sexual violence. GOP women “share a lot of common ground and lived experiences with Democratic women,” said Assemblywoman Jill Tolles (R), 45.

Still, Nevada also has long history of female leadership. The first woman was elected to the legislature in 1918, before the U.S. Constitution guaranteed women the right to vote. And although the state has never elected a fe-

IL ME WA

CO

NV

KATE RABINOWITZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

male governor, it has had at least four female lieutenant governors, the first appointed in 1962.

These days, a giant banner strung across Main Street advertises a hotline for victims of sexual harassment and assault. Set up two years ago, after state Sen. Mark Manendo (D), now 52, resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment, witness tampering and other misconduct, the hotline has been buzzing during the current legislative session.

Some female lawmakers say the old guard is literally dying. In November, voters in rural Nevada elected Republican Dennis Hof — a 72-year-old reality TV star and owner of several legal brothels, including the Love Ranch and the Moonlite Bunny Ranch — to the

state Assembly. At the time, Hof had been dead for three weeks.

While many female lawmakers say they have found strong male allies this session, a few older men seem to be finding life in the minority difficult.

Democratic Assemblywoman Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod, 45, who keeps a “No Bulls--t Allowed” sign on her desk, said one assemblyman frequently asks, “Have you been a good girl today?”

“It’s so inappropriate on so many levels, and it’s that old guard trying to hang on,” she said.

“Calling this out is the way you change the world.”

The assemblyman, co-Deputy Minority Leader John Ellison (R), 66, said he has “great respect” for Bilbray-Axelrod. After being contacted by The Washington Post, Ellison sent her a handwritten card asking her to “please accept my apology if I ever said anything offensive to you.”

Bilbray-Axelrod said the moment shows that “there is hope for everyone.”

Historically, state legislatures have been “stubborn, slow-tochange institutions, which were heavily male-dominated,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Although it’s notable that “one state has crossed into the 50-percent mark to represent women,” she said, “it’s probably a lot more significant that we have 49 legislatures left to go.” n

Row 2 State Sen. Dallas Harris, Assemblywoman Jill Tolles, Assemblywoman Heidi Swank, Assemblywoman Ellen Spiegel, Assemblywoman Teresa Benitez-Thompson, Assemblywoman Dina Neal, Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui, Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno and Assemblywoman Selena Torres.

Row 3 State Sen. Julia Ratti, Assemblywoman Melissa Hardy, Assemblywoman Bea Duran, Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, Assemblywoman Sarah Peters, Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton, state Sen. Joyce Woodhouse, Assemblywoman Rochelle Nguyen and Assemblywoman Lisa Krasner.

Row 4 Assemblywoman Shea Backus, Assemblywoman Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod, Assemblywoman Connie Munk, state Sen. Marcia Washington, state Sen. Pat Spearman and Assemblywoman Robin Titus

From left front, Nevada Assembly members Alexis Hansen, Sarah Peters, Selena Torres and Melissa Hardy, along with Brittney Miller and Lisa Krasner in the second row, listen as a student testifies at a hearing.

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WORLD

A surge toward the southern border B Y M ARY B ETH S HERIDAN in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

S

panish friars brought the faith to this colonial city in Mexico’s central highlands.

The silver barons of the 18th century built its mansions.

Now comes the pickleball invasion.

It started with just a few American retirees. These days, two dozen players fill the courts at the municipal sports center most mornings, swinging paddles at plastic balls. There are so many clubs in Mexico dedicated to the U.S. sport that a tournament was held here last year.

“It was a madhouse,” said Victor Guzmán, a 67-year-old entrepreneur from Charlotte who helped pull the event together.

President Trump regularly assails the flow of migrants crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Less noticed has been the surge of people heading in the opposite direction.

Mexico’s statistics institute estimated this month that the U.S.-born population in this country has reached 799,000 — a roughly fourfold increase since 1990. And that is probably an undercount. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City estimates the real number at 1.5 million or more.

They’re a mixed group. They’re digital natives who can work just as easily from Puerto Vallarta as Palo Alto. They’re U.S.-born kids — nearly 600,000 of them — who’ve returned with their Mexican-born parents. And they’re retirees like Guzmán, who settled in this city five years ago and is now basically the pickleball king of San Miguel.

If the thousands of Mexicans moving home are taken into account, the flow of migrants from the United States to Mexico is probably larger than the flow of Mexicans to the United States.

The American immigrants are pouring money into local economies, renovating historic homes and changing the dynamics of Mexican classrooms.

“It’s beginning to become a

LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

More U.S. citizens are moving to Mexico, and even those there illegally find a welcome very important cultural phenomenon,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign minister, said in an interview. “Like the Mexican community in the United States.”

And yet, he said, Mexican authorities know little about the size or needs of their largest immigrant group. He has been tasked

by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador with changing that.

While the United States is deeply divided over immigration, American immigrants here have largely been welcomed. In San Miguel — where about 10 percent of the city’s 100,000 residents are U.S. citizens — Mayor Luis Alberto Villareal delivers his annual State of the Municipality address in English and Spanish.

Thanksgiving is celebrated a few weeks after Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Restaurants have adopted “American timing” — serving dinner at the ungodly hour of 6 p.m. — the mayor reports.

“Despite the fact that Donald

Trump insults my country every day, here we receive the entire international community, beginning with Americans, with open arms and hearts,” Villareal said.

Mexican authorities say that many of the Americans are probably undocumented — typically, they’ve overstayed their sixmonth visas. But the government has shown little concern.

“We have never pressured them to have their documents in order,” Ebrard said.

Typically, violators pay a small fine.

Villereal shrugged.

“We like people who come to work and help the economy of the city — like Mexicans do in the United States.”

San Miguel de Allende is about 170 miles northwest of Mexico City on a mile-high plateau where the sunshine coaxes bougainvillea to erupt in blazing colors and spill over walls. U.S. veterans began moving here after World War

Victor Guzmán plays pickleball in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Guzmán, a U.S. citizen, and his wife moved to San Miguel from Charlotte several years ago.

II to study at the local art institute on the GI Bill. Over the past 30 years, expatriates flooded in, enchanted by the city’s hilly cobblestone streets, soaring Gothic church, and houses painted in sunset colors: dusky rose, peach, yellow, orange.

The scenery isn’t the only draw.

Given the dollar’s strength against the Mexican peso, even an American getting by on Social Security and a modest pension can rent a high-ceilinged apartment, hire a maid and eat out most nights.

“You can live here on $2,000 or $3,000 a month — and live well,” Guzmán said.

Technology has shrunk the distance between the countries. In the 1980s, expat author Tony Cohan would contact his daughter in New York by trekking to the “larga distancia” office, where an operator would put a call through, as he recounted in his popular memoir “On Mexican Time.”

These days, Bill Slusser, 66, from Los Angeles, does part-time marketing work for American clients without leaving his home here: “The Internet allows that to happen.”

So many Americans live here that it’s not necessary to speak Spanish. There’s a dazzling array of activities for English speakers: the Rotary Club, the quilters’ circle, dancing clubs, Alcoholics Anonymous. Expats run dozens of charitable groups, mentoring Mexican students, helping provide clean drinking water, serving meals to poor abuelitas.

“Because it’s a relatively small town, it’s very easy to meet people and do whatever you want to do,” Slusser said one recent Friday at a tiny cafe. It was karaoke night.

“Por favor, tortilla chips!” a New York lawyer yelled.

The U.S. population in Mexico is still much smaller than the Mexican immigrant population north of the border, which is estimated at around 11 million.

But quietly, Americans are putting their imprint on Mexican towns. n

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The U.S.-China technology war BY

D AVID J . L YNCH

I

t may have begun as a trade war, but the U.S. conflict with China is increasingly becoming a technology war.

President Trump’s decision to confront Beijing over policies that he says discriminate against foreign firms and distort global markets has become a battle for control of advanced communications and computing technologies.

That evolution is taking the trans-Pacific conflict into sensitive realms of national security and human rights, making a quick settlement an evermore distant outcome. It’s also putting at risk a wide array of U.S.-China technology cooperation, including easy access to visas for researchers and venture capital funds for U.S. start-ups — and threatening to boomerang on U.S. companies that China might retaliate against.

The administration’s decision to blacklist one of China’s most prominent companies, Huawei Technologies, and the likelihood that U.S. officials will take similar action against additional Chinese targets means the administration’s offensive against China is likely to intensify before Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Japan at the end of June.

“The trade war really is more about technology than about trade,” said Paul Triolo, who heads Eurasia Group’s global technology policy practice. “Our sense is that the gloves are off.”

Indeed, the escalating U.S. actions are starting to inflict genuine pain on China.

On Wednesday, two British telecom companies, Vodafone and a unit of BT Group, said they would halt the use of Huawei smartphones on their newest networks. And Arm Holdings, a major designer of mobile phone computer chips, said it was “complying with all of the latest restrictions set forth by the U.S. government.”

As the financial casualties

ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

The two largest economies are fighting over who will control the sensitive world of communications mount, Xi shows no signs of blinking. On Wednesday, during a visit to southern China, he urged people to prepare for difficulties that he likened to a “new Long March.”

The reference was to the Communists’ 1934 fighting retreat that traversed more than 5,000 miles and became an inspirational touchstone for later generations, filling a role akin to that of Valley Forge or Gettysburg in the U.S. In coming weeks, the administration is expected to sanction Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. as part of a crackdown on Chinese companies and possibly government officials involved in repressive government policies in Xinjiang province in western China, Triolo said.

Other Chinese companies involved in supplying cameras and computers for the “Big Brother” surveillance system that China uses to control the Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, known as

Uighurs, also may be hit with a range of U.S. punishments, according to Triolo and other industry executives tracking the administration debate.

Among the potential targets are Zhejiang Dahua Technology of Hangzhou, the world’s secondlargest video surveillance company, with revenue of $3.4 billion last year.

An estimated 3 million Uighurs are detained in government camps, Randall Shriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Asia, said earlier this month.

Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the U.S., has denied reports of concentration camps and insisted that Xinjiang residents voluntarily attend vocational training centers. Xi is certain to bristle over any U.S. penalties tied to what Chinese officials traditionally describe as their internal affairs.

The administration is moving on other fronts to limit commercial ties between the two countries.

A Hikvision surveillance camera in Beijing. Eurasia Group’s Paul Triolo said the Trump administration is expected to impose sanctions on makers of Chinese surveillance equipment in the coming weeks.

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to bar China Mobile from providing telecom services in the United States. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the commission was “looking at” licenses previously granted to two other Chinese carriers, China Unicom and China Telecom.

A Treasury Department-led panel now scrutinizes more closely proposed Chinese investments in U.S. technology companies and the Commerce Department is drafting new regulations to limit exports to China of 14 categories of advanced technologies, including quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Recently, the United States and China were on the brink of what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin billed as a “historic” trade deal. Eleventh-hour efforts

by Chinese negotiators to water down core provisions prompted Trump instead to more than double tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods and begin the process of taxing all products from China.

Trump also has unleashed his national security team, which has been eyeing tough measures against China for more than a year. On May 15, the president signed an executive order giving the commerce secretary power to bar U.S. companies from buying foreign telecommunications equipment that might open U.S. networks to “potentially catastrophic effects.”

Huawei was not named in the presidential order, but analysts said the measure was clearly aimed at the Chinese telecommunications giant, which had $105 billion in sales last year.

“The meltdown of the trade talks gave license to the national security hawks to really run with the ball. It seems like this is just the beginning,” said David Hanke, a partner at Arent Fox and a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer. “China has been waging a tech war against us, but until now the U.S. Government was barely pushing back.” n

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COVER STORY

Launching the new Space Coast

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The birthplace of America’s Space Age fell into decay once the shuttle retired. Now it’s bouncing back, fueled by private industry.

BY CHRISTIAN DAVENPORT in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The crowds were packed along that same stretch of beach, cameras ready.

Their eyes trained on the site that sent men to the moon 50 years ago but had now been reborn as the perch for another powerful rocket ready to fly. ¶ The scene here last month was at once familiar and nostalgic, the past revived. But it was also altogether different. The rocket on the pad, the Falcon Heavy, was developed not by NASA but by a private company, SpaceX. ¶ Many in the crowd weren’t born when Walter Cronkite narrated the lunar landing for millions and this stretch of coastline held a sacrosanct spot in the national consciousness.

Instead, in the years since the Apollo era, the Cape had become a symbol of the abandoned dreams and diminished ambitions that ultimately led to the retirement of the space shuttle eight years ago and the end of human spaceflight from U.S. soil. ¶ Now, though, the Space Coast is coming back. A host of companies have laid claim to the old government launchpads. Buildings left

SUNDAY, May, 26, 2019

11

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

vacant have been torn down or rebuilt. And the Cape is once again on the verge of sending humans back to space for the first time since 2011, the crescendo of a new, reinvigorated space age that many hope will restore the flag-waving pride of a bygone era. ¶ As new life is being breathed back into this venerable coastline, the resurrection is coming in fits and starts, and in an entirely new form that is far more unstable and unpredictable than the one infused by government cash in the 1960s. Today, the new space age is built on the fortunes of private enterprise, subject to the whims of the economy. And like the next chapter of America’s grand adventure in space, the future of the Space Coast is far from guaranteed. ¶ Having seen the devastation that can come when a town reliant on a single industry buckles, local leaders have gone to great lengths to try to diversify their economy. They’ve put in special taxing districts and offered incentives to woo all sorts of businesses to create a better sense of stability.

Left: Apollo 8’s liftoff in 1968 captures a crowd’s attention on the beaches overlooking what was then Cape Kennedy, Fla. Right: More than 50 years later, families gather in Titusville, Fla., to watch the launch of a United Launch Alliance rocket carrying a satellite.

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COVER STORY

But this is a place where kids go to Astronaut High School, where the area code, 321, is designed to mimic the launch countdown, and reminders of the Space Age are everywhere, including monuments to astronauts and streets named Apollo Road and Tranquility Boulevard.

This is where the Space Age was born, with heroes named John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. This is where the crowds crammed the beaches before launch, counting down in unison. This is where rockets captured the world’s imagination.

And then they didn’t.

The question now is: Can they again?

Big rockets, big dreams At the dawn of the Space Age, this swampy stretch of coastline quickly became a thriving boomtown. Fueled by the Cold War to beat the Soviet Union to the moon, the population soared with engineers and rocket scientists.

Astronauts with the “right stuff ” trained by running on the beach during the day and partied at night on the Cocoa Beach strip full of jazz clubs and restaurants.

It was “a glamorous honky-tonk town with young girls twisting in bars, gamblers playing poker upstairs, lots of noise,” as Gay Talese wrote in the New York Times in 1965.

“It was total excitement,” said Roy Tharpe, 78, who grew up in the area and started working for NASA in 1963. “It seemed like we were launching rockets every three or four days — and they would explode all the time.”

If the Cape had a cathedral, it was Launch Complex 39A. Built for the Apollo missions, its spire stood more than 500 feet tall and launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon in July 1969 on a Saturn V rocket so powerful it felt like an earthquake.

After Apollo, 39A was reborn as the host for space shuttle launches. But when the shuttle program was shuttered after a 30-year run, the venerable launch site started rusting away in the salt air, joining the many other abandoned pads that dot the Cape like the ruins of a once-great civilization.

At the peak of the recession, the unemployment rate in Brevard County, where the Space Coast is largely based, spiked to 12 percent.

The real estate market plunged. The median price for single-family homes fell from nearly $250,000 in 2007 to less than $100,000 by 2011.

“What we didn’t anticipate was that [the shuttle retirement] would coincide with the recession — the deepest, longest recession,” said Lynda Weatherman, the president and CEO of the Space Coast Economic Development Commission. “I saw the numbers, and it was bad. And Florida was a bad place, and Brevard was particularly bad, especially for the housing markets. So we got clobbered.”

By 2013, maintenance on pad 39A was costing NASA $100,000 a month and even a spokesman admitted at the time that the

PHOTOS BY JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

launchpad had “not been kept up.” Since the facility is on the National Register of Historic Places, it could not be torn down. NASA was desperate to find someone to use it — even a start-up company that improbably was leading the commercialization of space.

SpaceX, the California venture founded by Elon Musk, was looking for a new launchpad and won the rights to take over the site. The company had secured contracts from NASA to carry cargo to the International Space Station

Top: People arrive to tour the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Titusville.

Above: The double blow of the shuttle program’s end and the recession left the city filled with empty buildings.

and was winning back the commercial launch contracts that had gone overseas. With a growing manifest, and perhaps a quixotic faith in the future, SpaceX was looking to expand.

Others soon followed.

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, had made a last-minute bid to lay claim to 39A, touching off a feud with Musk’s SpaceX. But without a rocket capable of flying from the site, Blue Origin was rebuffed. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Instead, it set its sights on another fading relic, launchpad 36, just down the road. Home to 145 launches, including the Mariner missions, which sent probes deep into the solar system, it, too, was wasting away. In 2015, Blue Origin reached a deal to take it over for the new rocket it was developing, called New Glenn.

“The pad had stood silent for more than 10 years — too long,” Bezos said at the time. “We can’t wait to fix that.”

Blue Origin has also built a massive rocket manufacturing facility nearby with plans to expand. Across the street, OneWeb, a satellite company that wants to create a worldwide Internet system delivered from space, also has a new plant.

Boeing has taken over an old space shuttle processing facility where it is building a

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Launchpads leased to private companies

3 MILES

os

FLORIDA

it

Daytona Beach

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A second act The future of the Space Coast is also being written by the smaller start-ups beginning to emerge in an industry once dominated by big government programs and military industrial complex contractors.

A Los Angeles-based company called Relativity, founded by former employees from Blue Origin and SpaceX, is working on a rocket that’s built entirely by 3-D printing. The goal is to be able to launch small satellites quickly and affordably. Recently, the company signed an agreement to take over the Cape’s launchpad 16.

Next door, at launchpad 20, another startup, Firefly, intends to launch the rockets it plans to build at a nearby facility.

Taken as a whole, the activity is helping NASA fulfill its goals of turning the Kennedy Space Center from a government-dominated facility to one with multiple tenants that showcases a new space economy.

“When you consider that in all of human history, only three nations have sent humans to space: the United States, Russia and China,” said Robert Cabana, the director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “Today, there are several U.S. companies building space vehicles to take humans to space.”

Outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center, developers are building residential communities up and down the coastline. The unemployment rate dropped to below 4 percent earlier this year. The tax base has bloomed with monthly taxable sales rebounding from a low of nearly $450 million in 2010 to over $850 million last year. And housing prices are back where they were before the recession.

The coast was known first and foremost “as a launch site,” said Weatherman, the head of the local economic development commission. “But we knew we could do more than that.”

The city of Titusville put out a video recently highlighting all the development going on across the town: an 18,000-squarefoot day-care center, a 170-unit subdivision, a new Hyatt and a new Marriott.

The Miracle City Mall, torn down after the recession, has been rebuilt as a new shopping center, with a new Harley Davidson dealership. Nearby, there’s a trendy new brewpub that serves oxtail mac and cheese and fancy cocktails like the “creamsicle fizz.”

“We got our very own Starbucks,” said Jim Hale, who works as a volunteer with the Air Force Space and Missile Museum here. “That

Areas with private manufacturing

qu

spacecraft designed to fly NASA astronauts to space from another nearby launchpad.

And NASA is developing a massive rocket, the Space Launch System, that it hopes will help get astronauts to the moon within five years. NASA is scrambling to get its first launch, with the Orion crew capsule, built

by Lockheed Martin, off the ground next year.

KENNEDY SPAC E C ENTER

Miami

39A: SpaceX

Titusville Indian River

SpaceX Visitors Center

Blue Origin

OneWeb

Banana River

Merritt Island

The Sand Bar in Cocoa Beach is a popular spot for locals and tourists along the Space Coast in Florida.

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

Blue Origin

Cape Canaveral

Cocoa

Rockledge

Firefly Relativity

Lockheed Martin

Port St. John

Source: ESA Sentinel

ULA

Boeing

Atlantic Ocean Cocoa Beach LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST

KLMNO WEEKLY

was big. . . . Now everything is new again.”

In the end, the double blow of the loss of the shuttle program and the recession was devastating, leaving streets filled with empty buildings. But it was not as bad as it could have been. “We were preparing for a Category 5 hurricane,” said Robin Fisher, a former county commissioner. “We got a Category 3.”

By the time the shuttle program was ending, a new commercial space industry was starting to take form. It was unclear what its future was or how successful it would be. But there was an enthusiasm surrounding it, and local officials embraced it.

“That was the second act for space in our county,” Weatherman said.

Still, space is a risky business. While many new entrants are trying to make their mark on the Cape, not all of them will survive. And for all of the success stories here, there have been missteps. SpaceX has had two rockets explode, one destroying a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Then, just recently, one of its spacecraft blew up during an engine test, sending a huge plume of smoke over the Cape.

NASA has turned over a few facilities to private companies that showed promise but ultimately faltered.

“Not everything worked,” Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center, said.

Some “lost contracts they thought they were going to get, and the bottom line was they were unsuccessful.”

There is a lot of excitement and enthusiasm for the commercial space industry. The investment money is pouring in. New companies seem to pop up every day. But some may be reminded of the old maxim: The quickest way to become a millionaire in space is to start out as a billionaire.

A new arrival They had packed the beaches once again. This time for the launch of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in the world currently in operation.

At liftoff, it christened pad 39A on a warm Thursday evening in April, thundering away on a towering pillow of smoke.

On the beaches, the crowds came not just for the launch, but a bit of rocket artistry unimaginable a generation ago.

Instead of ditching its rocket boosters into the ocean after flight, SpaceX flies them back so they can be reused — a bit of aerial acrobatics the company says helps lower the cost of spaceflight.

On this day, both side boosters flew back to one of the newest structures on the Cape: a pair of landing pads. The crowds craned their necks skyward to watch the boosters touching down in unison, twin sonic booms announcing their arrival.

Hale, the Air Force museum volunteer, watched from a nearby park with his wife, awestruck, as this new chapter evoked a memory of the old — and a question: “Where is Walter Cronkite when you need him?” n

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ENTERTAINMENT

Our investment in fictional characters BY

T RAVIS M . A NDREWS

T

o say some fans were displeased with the ending of HBO’s fantasy series “Game of Thrones” would be an understatement.

More than 1.4 million people have signed a petition on Change.org asking HBO to “remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers.” The creator of the page, Dylan D., wrote that “fans invested a wealth of passion and time into this series. I’ve been watching religiously since Season 2, myself. I’ve read all the books and eagerly await the next two. I love this story, and I, like most of you, was crushed to see how the last season (and Season 7, let’s be real) has been handled.”

Social media, meanwhile, has been aflame with criticism of the show’s finale. Take Stephen Martinez, a 34-year-old fan who lives in D.C. and works in government.

He took to Facebook with his grievances. “If anyone hasn’t watched ‘Game of Thrones’ at this point,” he wrote, “there’s literally no reason to start watching it now. None. No payoffs, no resolutions, horrible story lines for characters that aren’t Dany, nonsensical events and endings with no real purpose. Like seriously, if you didn’t watch this show in real time as the world wide phenomenon it was, you won’t enjoy it.”

Disappointment is one thing, but many fans’ reactions were brimming with far stronger emotions, ranging from sadness to anger.

There’s no question that endings matter. The way stories wrap up is so important that Ernest Hemingway penned more than 40 endings to “A Farewell to Arms,” said novelist Fiona Maazel, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University. (The exact number is debated.)

MFA students are often taught that an ending should be surprising but inevitable. And the reason an ending is “at least halfway inevitable is because the ending was in the story line and just had

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; HBO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

‘Game of Thrones’ is just a TV show. So why do people feel personally affected by the finale? to be teased out,” Maazel told The Post.

“I think a lot of people would argue that for ‘Game of Thrones,’ it wasn’t inevitable at all. There was very little packed into the prior eight years that might have prepared for you the outcome [that actually occurred],” Maazel said.

The predictability of some aspects of this season didn’t help, she added.

“The queen goes mad. The man kills his love for duty. I mean, for God’s sake, it’s just trope after trope being rehashed by a show that prided itself by exploding expectations,” Maazel said. “The ending certainly wasn’t inevitable. And it was, on the one hand, unexpected because . . . the characters hadn’t developed in a way to sufficiently warrant that ending. But yet it was completely predictable because they mobilized all these

tropes that they had shunned from the beginning.”

By those standards, the finale did not provide a good ending.

But why do fans care so much?

Over time, “you develop relationships with the characters, and they’re deep. It’s as if they’re your friends, your enemies, your neighbors or even your loved ones,” said Amanda D’AnnucciKean, who has studied the psychology of storytelling and gave a TEDx talk on the intersection of the two. “There’s a connection deeper than empathy. It’s personal. And once that story ends, your relationship ends. All your friendships are over, and all your lovers are gone. It just ends, and it’s devastating.”

In other words, emotions are already running high when a show is ending. And when it ends poorly, those emotions can be anger and betrayal.

This can particularly be the

Many viewers of the fantasy show have viciously criticized its last season. More than 1.4 million have signed a petition for a remake.

case when characters don’t act the way they have been presented, such as, say, Grey Worm letting Jon Snow live or Daenerys breaking bad in a split-second, rather than slowly descending into madness.

“When these characters are not true to themselves in a way you’ve experienced, you know it,” D’Annucci-Kean said. “You lose that connectedness. You lose that trust. The person you’ve connected with has either been lying to you this entire time and is now showing you their true colors or vice versa.”

“Writers need to give justice to their characters and have respect for the character development that they’ve made,” she added. “And when they don’t, it puts a bad taste in people’s mouths who trust them as well as the characters that they’ve developed.”

That doesn’t mean characters have to act morally or ethically, but they need to be authentic, and their actions have to be supported by the text and by their character development. If they aren’t, the viewer is pulled out of the story.

And that’s just about individual characters. If a story as a whole isn’t true to itself — if the ending isn’t supported by the text, which is what many are saying about “Game of Thrones” — then those negative emotions can be compounded exponentially.

"It’s like a relationship,” D’Annucci-Kean said. “Let’s say you’re dating someone. You even get married. Then you found out they cheat on you. Your relationship ends. What does that make you think about the entire time you were with them? That it was false.”

Maazel feels similarly, pointing out that part of it is a viewer wanting a return on investment.

“The kind of endings people really want is to learn something, to grow, to feel like their investment over the past eight years or 500 pages or two hours has borne fruit, [created] a revelation, the kind that might dawn on you six months later,” she said. n

15 SUNDAY, MAY 26, 2019

SUNDAY, May, 26, 2019 18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Can domestic abuse be prevented?

N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E . J . G RAFF

R NO VISIBLE BRUISES What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

By Rachel Louise Snyder Bloomsbury. 307 pp. $28

achel Louise Snyder got so deeply immersed in researching domestic abuse that she had a breakdown and sobbed uncontrollably for 10 days. Diagnosed with vicarious trauma, she took a year off from the project. But, she told me, she had to come back to it. “I wasn’t done,” she said.

The result is her compulsively readable new book, “No Visible Bruises.” In a writing style that’s as gripping as good fiction, as intimate as memoir and deeply informed, she takes us into the lives of the abused, the abusers and the survivors. The women’s stories are so common, they rarely even hit the front page or our social media feeds. The stories are devastating, but Snyder keeps us reading by pointing us toward possible solutions.

In “No Visible Bruises,” Snyder shows how an individual act of private terror ripples outward, devastating not just the immediate victim but families, friends and children. Family violence sends women and children into hospitals, homelessness and intergenerational cycles of trauma.

According to Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox, roughly half of all mass shootings in this country are “extreme incidents of domestic violence.”

“No Visible Bruises” starts by taking us deeply into the family life of Rocky Mosure, Michelle Monson Mosure and their two small children. Although we know how it ends, Snyder carries us through as if it were a detective novel, looking for answers to the question that bedevils us so often: Why didn’t Michelle take the kids and leave? The answer is that she feared her husband would kill her. Before he does, however, Snyder shows how slowly but relentlessly Rocky stifled Michelle’s life and corroded her will.

Public health researcher and Rutgers professor Evan Stark

CASARSA/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

calls this “coercive control,” a steadily escalating pattern of emotional abuse that involves taking over every decision in a woman’s life, controlling the money, isolating her from family and friends, monitoring her conversations and movements, and eroding her confidence.

This emotional abuse imposed through an alternating cycle of devotion and rage turns women into hostages in their own homes.

We see Michelle taking painstakingly small steps toward freedom, earning her high school diploma and getting financial aid so she can go to college for a nursing degree in hopes of eventually supporting her children.

But when Michelle confronted Rocky — she took out a restrain-

ing order and had him arrested for breaking into her mother’s house to take the kids — the legal system failed her. Rocky made bail and put an end to them all.

The book reveals where different individuals and agencies failed. But Snyder’s aim isn’t just to narrate the misery of what she calls “intimate terrorism” but also to outline how more women can be spared. She probes a central question: Why do men abuse and kill? Criminology professor Neil Websdale argues that for some men who’ve been steeped in the idea that manhood involves control and strength, loving a woman offers the only conduit to a world of feeling that they have otherwise shut off. If he believes that she is his inner

world and without her he will die, he is dependent on her.

In her search for solutions, Snyder embedded with abusers, allowing us to see the world through their eyes. Her research suggests crucial questions: Can men recover from an addiction to brutality and domination that’s so deeply socialized into them that it appears natural?

Snyder spends time with the pseudonymous Jimmy Espinoza, a former pimp and abuser who is trying to refrain from violence in part by training men in a batterer-intervention program at the San Bruno, Calif., prison. The program’s graduates have 80 percent less recidivism than their peers in another wing of the prison who weren’t given the chance to participate. The program teaches men to examine how their gendered expectations warp their behavior and how to accept responsibility for their violence, and introduces them to victims of similar violence. They discuss how their childhoods of violence and sexual abuse filled them with rage.

In the sessions, Jimmy tells stories of his deepest shame, saying that he found vulnerable women and “stole their souls.” He unburdens himself to wrest insight out of his students. Through a research-structured curriculum, these men help one another examine their toxic masculinity that led to choices that escalated into violent crimes.

When I asked Snyder whether she believes that men like these really can change, she answered: “I have hope. I don’t need for all of them to make it. I just need for a couple of them to make it. If 2,000 women a year are going to die, and we can keep 300 of those women alive, isn’t it worth it?” n Graff is managing editor of the Monkey Cage at The Washington Post and longtime journalist covering gender and sexuality.

16

SUNDAY, May, 26, 2019

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