The Washington Post National Weekly - July 7, 2019

SUNDAY, JULY 7, 2019

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

How did NASA put men on the moon 50 years ago? One harrowing step at a time. PAGE 12

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POLITICS

Biden leads in poll after debate D AN B ALZ AND S COTT C LEMENT

Warren and Harris — are chosen by at least 20 percent as the first or second choice of Democrats and Democratic-leaning indepenormer vice president Joe Biden leads dents. his Democratic rivals in the campaign No other candidate tops 10 percent when to win the party’s presidential nominacombining first and second choices. Buttigieg tion, continuing to attract broad supcomes closest, with a combined 9 percent. port despite coming under sharp attack from Thirteen candidates register at 2 percent or Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and others in the lower in the combined first and second choices.

June debate in Miami, according to a WashingThe event in Miami was the first time ton Post-ABC News survey.

Americans could see nearly the entire DemoDemocrats judge Harris as the standout cratic field onstage together, albeit in an apperformer among the 20 candidates who depearance split over two nights. Harbated over two nights, but she ranks ris’s attack on Biden over his past behind Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders position on school busing and his (Vt.) in preferences for a nominee to comments about working in the Senchallenge President Trump in the ate with segregationist senators pro2020 general election. vided the most electric moment of Biden is the leader among Demoeither night and gave the campaign of crats in two separate measures, the the senator from California a jolt of first when those surveyed were asked energy in the aftermath. to volunteer the name of a candidate The Post-ABC poll underscores they would support at this point as what has been the case from the time well as in a more traditional question Biden entered the race in April: While that identifies the list of those running he is the leader in the Democratic and asks respondents to select from MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS field, he is by no means a commandamong them. The former vice presiing front-runner. dent’s position is buoyed by percep- Former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala D. Harris Health care stands out as a key issue tions that he is the most electable debate racial issues as Sen. Bernie Sanders listens during the for Democrats, with 29 percent saying Democrat in a general election and by second night of the Democratic debate June 27. it is one of the most important factors his support among African American in their 2020 general election vote. But climate of the immigration issue in both debates. and older Democrats. change (25 percent), immigration (24 percent) When second-choice preferences are added to When Democrats and Democratic-leaning and gun violence (23 percent) also rank high. first-choice selections, Biden remains atop the independents are asked to identify their preThis Washington Post-ABC News poll was field, with 50 percent of Democrats saying he is ferred candidate, without being prompted with conducted by telephone from June 28 through either their first or second choice. Sanders stands a list of names, 21 percent cite Biden, a gain of July 1 among a random national sample of at 40 percent in the combined ranking, followed eight points since late April. Sanders runs sec1,008 adults, with 65 percent reached on cellby Warren at 25 percent and Harris at 24 percent. ond at 13 percent, up four points since April. phones and 35 percent on landlines. The marThe Post-ABC survey shows a clear stratificaHarris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) are gin of sampling error among the sample of 460 tion of the large Democratic field, based on a tied at 7 percent, both up three points.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning indepencombination of first and second choices. In that Among the others, only South Bend, Ind., dents is plus or minus 5.5 percentage points. n grouping, four candidates — Biden, Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, named by 3 percent, gets

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above 1 percent in this ranking. Meanwhile, 41 percent of Democrats did not volunteer a preferred candidate, down from 54 percent in April.

When the names of 22 Democrats running for the nomination are presented, Biden is slightly favored at 29 percent to Sanders’s 23 percent.

Harris and Warren are again tied, at 11 percent.

Buttigieg runs fifth, with 4 percent, and is tied with former housing secretary Julián Castro, who staked out a position calling for decriminalization of the border that framed the discussion

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2019 The Washington Post / Year 5, No. 39

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SPORTS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Fifty images taken during the Apollo 11 mission show the astronauts’ journey from Earth’s orbit to the moon and back.

Photos by NASA

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OPINIONS

Trump’s Korea gamble: Now what?

DAVID IGNATIUS is a columnist for The Washington Post and has also written eight spy novels.

I

n dealing with North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong Un, President Trump should remember that he is a snake handler, not a snake charmer. (The same advice applies to Kim, but we’ll leave that to pundits in Pyongyang.) ¶ The baseline: Kim is a modernizing autocrat who believes his survival will be enhanced by the economic development he wants, in addition to the nuclear weapons he has. If he has decided to resume negotiations, it’s to remove sanctions, put his economy in overdrive and, maybe, keep some of his nuclear arsenal.

It’s not because he has a “great relationship” with Trump, as the president’s comments have suggested, but because he’s a rational, if cocky, dictator.

This caution doesn’t diminish the importance of what Trump achieved this past Sunday in stage-managing his reality-diplomacy show at the Korean demilitarized zone. This was a high-risk photo opportunity, but when Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea, he reopened a path to denuclearization and normalization of relations.

Trump’s many bad qualities shouldn’t blind us to this good achievement. He successfully played a hunch that Kim wanted to resume talks. The fact that this achievement comes wrapped in Trump’s gaudy, dictator-friendly bunting doesn’t diminish its value. The question is whether this is a real turn toward peace and stability in Asia, as opposed to a survival gambit for Kim and a reelection campaign stunt for Trump.

“The idea of a Trump meeting with Kim in the DMZ has been kicking around for some time,” noted Robert Carlin, a longtime CIA analyst on North Korea, in an email message Sunday. Carlin

had feared that it was “a diving catch, a Hail Mary pass, betting the farm,” but Trump made the gamble work.

What were the precursors of this reopening? First, Kim apparently concluded he had erred at the Hanoi summit in February in expecting that he could get sanctions relief without making any real concessions on denuclearization. He began walking back this mistake in May, “signaling the window was again open for engaging the U.S.,” said Carlin, a careful reader of the North Korean press.

A clear public sign that Kim wanted to play ball again came in a June 4 Foreign Ministry statement reaffirming North Korea’s “will to cherish and implement in good faith” the denuclearization pledge Kim made at the Singapore summit in June 2018. The statement urged that “both sides give up their unilateral demands and find a constructive solution.”

A shadow play commenced: Kim sent Trump what the president called a “beautiful

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un talk before a meeting in the Korean demilitarized zone on June 30. Trump later became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea.

letter” last month, and Trump responded in kind. Stephen Biegun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea, said June 19 at the Atlantic Council that the “door is wide open” for renewed negotiations and that the only big obstacle was the lack of an “agreed definition of what denuclearization is.”

The State Department quietly announced June 24 that Biegun was traveling to Seoul. And then, on Saturday, came Trump’s seemingly off-the-wall tweet: “If Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” A day later, they were shaking hands and Trump was walking across the border.

Here’s what to watch carefully in the weeks ahead.

Since this diplomatic dance began, the question has been what specific, verifiable steps North Korea will take toward the declared goal of denuclearization. Kim tried to sidestep that in Hanoi by offering to dismantle one big nuclear facility at Yongbyon, which Trump rightly rejected because the United States knows there are other facilities

outside the boundary of this compound. Are those other facilities now on the table? Is the United States willing to consider a transitional “freeze” of Pyongyang’s activities? We’ll see.

Trump, wisely, seems to have accepted that denuclearization won’t be an immediate disarmament but a gradual, monitored process. He said Sunday that “speed is not the object. We want to see if we can do a really comprehensive, good deal.” That’s the right goal.

The personal factor in diplomacy is ephemeral but real. China may have been ready for an opening to America in 1972, but it took President Richard M. Nixon to go to Beijing. Egypt may have been primed for peace with Israel in 1978, but it took President Jimmy Carter to negotiate the Camp David Accords with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.

Kim and Trump make an unattractive pair, in many respects. But if for their own reasons they’re ready to begin a serious denuclearization discussion, so much the better. n

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POLITICS

Democrats face growing pressure on racial issues

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A heated Harris-Biden exchange resounds, but party wants to avoid losing centrists

BY M ATT V ISER AND A NNIE L INSKEY

A

n impassioned argument over racism in America has boiled to the surface in an increasingly muddled Democratic presidential primary contest, triggered by an electrifying debate encounter that has reverberated across the campaign for days.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who since his April 25 entry into the presidential contest has held a consistent lead in polls, is experiencing the most unsteady period of his campaign so far in the aftermath of his heated ex-

change with Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) over his past views on school desegregation, with demands from some civil rights leaders for him to further clarify his 1970s-era opposition to mandatory busing.

The moment has taken on particular salience because it showcased Biden, 76, who has premised his candidacy in part on his ability to win back working-class white voters, under attack from one of the country’s most prominent black political figures in Harris, who addressed the issues in deeply personal terms.

Harris and a second black presidential candidate, Sen. Cory

Booker (D-N.J.), have spent the past few weeks casting Biden as an anachronism who should apologize for his busing position and his willingness to work with segregationist senators.

The rising tensions have the potential to reshape the race, with Biden at risk of losing support from crucial African American voters and Harris appearing to gain momentum. But the emerging dynamics are also sparking concern among some in the party who fear that renewing painful debates over school busing risks turning off centrist voters whom Democrats hope to win next year in their shared goal of defeating

Former vice president Joe Biden, who has held a steady lead in the polls, is experiencing shakiness after an exchange on race with Sen. Kamala D. Harris during a primary debate.

President Trump.

“There is a narrow pathway if we continue on this path of being the quote-unquote Whole Foods party,” said J.D. Scholten, the Democrat who nearly defeated Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in a rural district. “. . . We have to compete in places that I call Dollar General districts.”

Others, however, say that the debate is precisely what is necessary as the party looks to nominate its next standard-bearer.

“It’s not really about busing. It’s about what their commitment to racial justice looks like,” said Aimee Allison, the founder and president of She the People, a

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POLITICS group intent on bolstering women of color in politics. “We should have a conversation that puts racial justice in the middle of a conversation in the Democratic primary.”

The episode that kicked off days of Democratic angst was the most memorable exchange from four hours of debating over two nights, as Harris not only confronted Biden’s long-held opposition to school busing but also personalized it by saying that she herself benefited from a busing system in California.

Biden said she was misinterpreting his position, but he struggled to respond in a debate that even supporters concede went worse than expected. The next day, in an appearance in Chicago, he spoke more forcefully when reading a speech via a teleprompter in which he defended his long record on voting rights and said the civil rights struggle was what drove him to run for office nearly five decades ago.

But Biden’s speech also highlighted the complicated nature of his argument, as he sought to hold the same position he held in the 1970s and yet square it with today’s politics on race. He has been an opponent of federally mandated busing — calling it an “asinine concept,” a “liberal train wreck” and discussing a constitutional amendment to ban it. But recently, he has drawn the distinction that he never opposed having school districts start a busing system on their own.

His campaign stressed this week that he also supports policies to address segregation, including rezoning school districts, combating discriminatory housing policies and eliminating obstacles to new public housing.

“He also believes that in 2019, there should be first-rate, quality schools in every neighborhood in America — and by tripling Title 1 funding, his education plan includes the resources to make that happen,” campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo said.

But some prominent activists believe he needs to do more.

“I don’t rule out that he can redeem himself,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who in April hosted many in the Democratic field before the National Action Network.

“But he’s going to have to do some clarifying.”

Sharpton said he had issues

STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), above at San Francisco’s Pride Parade last Sunday, and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), below, have spent the past week casting Biden as an anachronism who should apologize for his busing position and his willingness to work with segregationist senators.

with Biden’s position against busing as well as with his response to Harris that he was supportive of local districts implementing such programs — but not supportive of the federal government intervening in busing.

“His reflexive answer was more problematic than the initial answer,” Sharpton said. “To say you agreed with the locals making the decision and not the federal government is the problem. . . . What you are now advocating is states’ rights, which is what we fought the last 50 years. Hell, that’s what the Civil War was about.”

It has been a striking turn that a little over two years after the first black president left office, his party is now consumed by a major dispute over decades-old policies aimed at desegregation — and the opposition to those policies by that man’s vice president. Civil rights leaders who have worked with and admired Biden have been surprised, both by his debate performance and his struggles to move past it.

“Someone like Biden who actually has gone through a son’s death and has gone through pain, the fact that he was pretty flatfooted was a surprise to people,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “The fact that he didn’t hear her pain was a surprise to people, and it was a surprise to me.”

“I do think he knows and he can deal with the issue of pain,” Weingarten said. “But I think, like so many others, why, why not just say: ‘I’m sorry.’ ” The debate exchange has also animated Biden’s supporters, who are angry that Harris has used what they view as an unfair attack to rise in the polls.

“This was strategically planned,” said Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Firefighters, which has endorsed Biden. “This wasn’t an organic reaction. Like, ‘I’m offended and I’m organically emotionally reacting to this.’ This was a contrived, rehearsed, premeditated ambush. And I’m sorry that’s the case. I know the senator well and I have — I shouldn’t say had — I have respect for her. But I don’t think this will be looked upon as her finest moment.”

“Anybody who knows Joe Biden and his career knows his long and profound support of civil rights in every way you can measure it,” he added.

Harris’s debate thrust put Democratic candidates in a position they have not experienced for decades — having to contemplate a position on busing. Harris on Sunday said that she still supports busing and sees a modern-day use for it.

“The schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated, today than when I was in

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elementary school,” she told reporters in San Francisco this past Sunday. “And we need to put every effort, including busing, into play to desegregate the schools. . . .

There’s no such thing as separate but equal, and so busing is one of the ways by which we create desegregation and we make it more equal.”

Harris’s campaign on Monday said that she supported federal resources for busing and cited legislation from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio). That legislation would authorize $120 million for a variety of purposes, including one to expand school busing services.

Some in the party worry about a debate over busing policies — court-ordered school busing was highly unpopular among white voters in the 1970s, and black voters were divided on the practice. In today’s context, some worry that a return to advocating it might not play well among suburban voters who powered Democratic House wins in 2018. Others want to focus more broadly on racial justice — an area that Biden, the author of a tough-on-crime bill from 1994, could also struggle with.

Already, however, the debate is playing out in unpredictable ways. Gloria Major, a 66-year-old black voter from Columbia, S.C., grew up being bused to a white school in Florida.

“Racism is very real to me, but the realest thing is this country is going to hell in a handbasket,” she said. “Why are you debating something that happened 40 years ago?

That came out of the clear blue sky?”

Before the debate, she said, Harris was among a quartet of candidates who intrigued her. After the debate, Harris was off the list for creating “a distraction.”

“Why would I hold him accountable for something that happened in 1975?” she said. “Let’s go pull out all the skeletons out of everybody’s closet if that’s the case.”

“I feel like you’re being distracted from the issues that matter, and I think she’s trying to boost herself in the race,” she said. “There’s other things: Why not find the issues that are right now out of hand? We’re being sold to Russia and China. What about unarmed black men being shot by police?

What about body cameras?” n

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NATION

States strain to rein in data brokers BY

D OUGLAS M AC M ILLAN

U

ntil recently, Randy Koloski had never heard of Amerilist, a small business 25 miles north of Manhattan.

But for $150, Amerilist makes available a list of information on 5,000 people that includes Koloski’s name, home address, age, religion, education level and income.

Koloski, a school bus driver in Hartford, Vt., says he never agreed to turn over that data to Amerilist.

“They shouldn’t have access to that,” he said upon learning of the database.

Lawmakers in Koloski’s home state are at the forefront of a national movement aiming to shine a light on companies such as Amerilist — data brokers that buy and sell the personal information of millions of Americans with whom they have no direct relationship. A state law passed last year required all businesses that trade data on Vermont’s residents to register publicly and share some basic information about how they operate.

The goal was to give residents one public database where they can find clear information about all companies that sell their data and steps they can take to delete it.

Instead, the Vermont effort showed how difficult regulating these companies can be. Dozens of firms registered, but few offered clear answers about what they do with data.

Some data firms didn’t bother to register.

Amerilist filed its registration on June 19 — the day the company was contacted by The Washington Post, and more than four months after the state’s deadline. Ravi Backerdan, the company’s CEO, said he recalled hearing about the Vermont law, but signing up for registry “may have fallen under the radar.”

Backerdan says Amerilist only resells data it obtains from other data companies, including Experian and Acxiom. Amerilist doesn’t sell data on users who have registered their names on a “do not mail” database, he said.

ZOË VAN DIJK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Vermont’s new registry highlights the difficulties of regulating firms selling personal information The experiment in Vermont is being closely watched at a time when regulators across the country are trying to address growing concerns over online privacy. A California law set to take effect at the beginning of next year will allow the state’s residents to opt out of having their data sold.

Maine passed a law this month barring Internet service providers from selling broadband customers’ information. State legislatures in New York, Maryland and Massachusetts are all considering measures to give residents more control over data.

So far, Vermont is the only state to single out data brokers. All of the proposed measures, though, threaten to crack down on the most potent weapon in these companies’ arsenals. Third-party data, or information held by someone who didn’t obtain it directly from

the user, can be mined from public records, such as DMVs, property records and voter rolls, as well as private databases filled with people’s magazine subscriptions and shopping records.

Data industry executives who have lobbied against the state laws say third-party data is vital to the businesses they serve. Among those customers are banks, which use data to detect financial fraud, and law enforcement agencies, which dig through databases to find criminals. Advertisers hone pitches to potential customers based on third-party data about their behaviors and interests.

But privacy advocates warn that the spread of data increases the risk of it being misused. A list of people who have Alzheimer’s disease could be purchased by bad actors who want to take advantage of mentally ill people. Two data

brokers who advertise an Alzheimer’s patient list — Experian and Amerilist — say they vet the buyers of that data to make sure they are legitimate businesses.

Free websites that give anyone easy access to people’s current home addresses can be valuable tools for stalkers and abusers who are trying to locate their victims.

“Victims of domestic violence are trying to take control over their privacy,” said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “But the data broker companies are doing a significant amount of work to compile information about a person.”

It’s one thing for a user to willingly turn over their data to receive targeted advertisements, experts say. But the widespread sale of data, often taken without the explicit consent of users, gives data brokers broad latitude to do whatever they want with it, said Bob Gellman, an independent privacy consultant.

“A lot of what is going on here is hidden. No one knows,” Gellman said. “The notion they are only using the information to send you a coupon isn’t that bad. But they are building profiles of people.”

The privacy campaign in Vermont and other states could pave the way for more far-reaching data protections in the United States.

The Federal Trade Commission drew attention to the problems of an opaque data industry in a 2014 report, in which the agency called on Congress to pass legislation that would establish a nationwide registry of data brokers. A bill proposed the following year by four Senate Democrats, called the “Data Broker Accountability and Transparency Act,” never gained traction.

But renewed calls for U.S. privacy protections have followed Equifax’s massive data breach in 2017 and Facebook’s recent string of privacy scandals. Congress has been criticized for falling behind Europe’s regulators, who last year adopted sweeping online privacy rules.

Earlier this month, a group of

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NATION 40 state attorneys general recommended the creation of a clearinghouse for all data brokers in the country. In public comments to the FTC, the state officials said a registry could help prevent the “loss of privacy that occurs when consumers are subject to increasingly extensive monitoring without increased public awareness or oversight.”

Recently, even industry groups have come around to supporting federal legislation.

“Clearly there was a market failure,” Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We tried to do it ourselves.

We tried to do it through self regulation. There’s a problem with that: We cannot enforce compliance.”

Data assembly line Vermont’s new registry offers a peek inside the data broker economy. The more than 100 companies in the registry range in size from a one-man junk mail business operated out of a northern Vermont residence to Oracle, the 140,000person software giant that sells some of the world’s most sophisticated data marketing services.

Many of the businesses work together in a kind of digital data assembly line.

Edvisors operates a collection of websites for college-bound students, including PrivateStudentLoans.com, HowToGetIn.com and GradLoans.com. Students who visit these sites are asked to enter their personal information on surveys for the chance to win scholarships of up to $10,000. The company’s privacy policy says it may sell data “to third parties whose products and services we think may be of interest to you.”

ALC, a data reseller, takes data from Edvisors and repackages it for marketers, according to an advertisement on ALC’s website.

ALC advertised a “College Bound Student MasterFile,” which includes the names and home addresses of up to 3 million students for a rate of $95 per 1,000 names.

ALC told marketers it used data from two additional companies to “overlay” the student data with more details about them: Experian and Ethnic Technologies.

Experian, one of the largest collectors of third-party data, compiles thousands of data points on each consumer and uses them to predict which products and ser-

vices they will buy. When Experian can’t find a source of verified data, it uses statistical models to guess personal attributes, including political preferences, financial health and which types of products someone is likely to buy, according to a marketing brochure on the company’s website.

Ethnic Technologies, a Hackensack, N.J.-based start-up, says it uses an algorithm to automatically determine someone’s ethnicity based on first, middle and last names and the neighborhood where they live. For example, the company’s website says it would guess that Pablo Garcia is a Spanish speaker while Pablo Ferrera speaks Portuguese.

By matching the Edvisors names with Experian’s database, ALC said it could determine the household income level of each student. By pulling in data from Ethnic Technologies, it says it could add their ethnicity and religion.

Sherry Booles, ALC’s chief marketing officer, said the company has changed some of its practices around what types of data it sells since ALC was acquired by private equity firm CIP last year and a new management team took over. For example, she said ALC has recently ended relationships with partners who sell data on people under the age of 18.

In a statement, a spokesman for Experian said the company is “committed to transparent data practices” and gives consumers the ability to opt out of data collection.

Zachary Wilhoit, Ethnic Technologies’ CEO, says the company did not register with Vermont because it does not retain information on anyone. Its computer software predicts ethnicity and religion as soon as a customer enters a list of names, and Ethnic Technologies does not hold onto any of those records.

Edvisors, a subsidiary of the College Loan Corporation, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Vermont Assistant Attorney General Ryan Kriger said the state may go after companies that don’t comply with the registry, including issuing fines of up to $10,000 a year for companies failing to register. State officials may not penalize some companies for late submission, he said, because the registry is still so new. n

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Medicare may end acupuncture ban BY

L ENNY B ERNSTEIN

S

eeking ways to address chronic pain without narcotics, Medicare is exploring whether to pay for acupuncture, a move that would thrust the government program into the long-standing controversy over whether the therapy is any better than placebo.

Coverage would be for chronic low-back pain only, a malady that afflicts millions. Low-back pain ranks as the third-greatest cause of poor health or mortality in the United States, behind heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In its request for comments on acupuncture, the Department of Health and Human Services said that “in response to the U.S. opioid crisis, HHS is focused on preventing opioid use disorder and providing more evidencebased non-pharmacologic treatment options for chronic pain.”

The agency said it hopes “to determine if acupuncture for [chronic low-back pain] is reasonable and necessary under the Medicare program.” A proposal is due by July 15, with a final decision by Oct. 13.

Chronic pain — generally defined as pain that lasts 12 weeks or more — is a complex disorder with numerous causes. But there is widespread agreement that health-care providers have overused powerful opioid painkillers to address it, with little research to support that approach.

Currently, Medicare covers injections, braces, implanted neurostimulators and chiropractic care as well as drugs for chronic low-back pain.

Acupuncture continues to gain legitimacy as a treatment for pain relief in the United States. A 2014 review reported that more than 10 million acupuncture treatments are administered each year. Some insurance companies cover the practice, respected medical institutions offer it, and

schools of acupuncture produce new practitioners. The Department of Veterans Affairs has trained 2,400 providers to offer “battlefield acupuncture,” five tiny needles inserted at points in each ear, for pain relief.

Medicare coverage “is long overdue,” said Tony Y. Chon, director of integrative medicine and health at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “The opioid epidemic is going to be the momentum that’s really needed to push not just acupuncture but other kinds of non-pharmacological interventions to the forefront.”

Some proponents also note that acupuncture is one of the safest interventions available for pain — though accidents have been reported. Even if it does not always work, they argue, there is little harm in trying it when other options are not effective.

Taken overall, however, research shows that acupuncture is little more effective than placebo in many cases. When the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reviewed research on a wide range of therapies for chronic pain in 2018, it found the “strength of evidence” that acupuncture works for chronic low-back pain is “low.”

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says “research suggests that acupuncture can help manage certain pain conditions, but evidence about its value for other health issues is uncertain.”

For low-back pain, the institute cites a study that found it “more helpful than either no acupuncture or simulated acupuncture.”

But another found “strong evidence that there is no difference between the effects of actual and simulated acupuncture,” according to its website.

Critics go further, noting that hundreds of years of anatomical studies have not found evidence of the points in the body linked to the “energy channels” that acupuncture claims to be stimulating to provide pain relief. n

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COVER STORY

SUNDAY, July, 7, 2019

NASA had vision, genius and dash, but a strategy of incremental achievement

How the space race was won

BY JOEL

ACHENBACH

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

— Remarks prepared for President Richard M. Nixon, in a memo from White House speechwriter William Safire, July 18, 1969, under the heading “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER.”

Spoiler alert: They lived! ¶ They walked on the moon, gathered rocks, planted a flag, rocketed home to Earth and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. After three weeks in quarantine (to prevent a purely hypothetical moon-germ contagion), the three Apollo 11 astronauts got their ticker-tape parade and eternal glory. ¶ Why it worked — and why the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon after having been humiliated, repeatedly, during the early years of the Space Race — remains a compelling story of managerial vision, technological genius and astronautical dash. But it was never as breezy as NASA made it look. The first landing on the moon could easily have been the first crashing. ¶ NASA’s strategy during the 1960s was built around incremental achievements, with each mission wringing out some of the risk. Still, potential disaster lurked everywhere. Just two years before Apollo 11, three astronauts died in a freakish fire during a capsule test at Cape Canaveral, Fla. ¶ To put astronauts on the surface of the moon and bring them home safely, NASA had to do many things right, in succession, with margins of error ranging from small to nonexistent.

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made it possible to put astronauts on the moon’s surface in July 1969

PHOTOS FROM NASA

“I consider a trip to the moon and back to be a long and very fragile daisy chain of events,” Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 crew, told The Washington Post recently.

“There were 23 critical things that had to occur perfectly,” recalls engineer JoAnn Morgan, the instrumentation controller in Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center.

One of those things was the landing on the moon, which obviously couldn’t be practiced under realistic conditions. No one knew the nature of the moon’s surface. Hard? Soft? Powdery?

Gooey? The mission planners feared that the lunar module could become instantly mired, or just sink out of sight.

Equally nerve-racking was the planned departure from the moon. The top half of the lunar lander, the ascent module, relied on a single engine to blast the astronauts back to lunar orbit. It had to work. If it didn’t, Nixon would have to pull out that memo.

NASA has an institutional instinct to project supernatural competence; it downplays, or hides beneath jargon, the uh-oh moments in human spaceflight. If on July 20, 1969, a giant man-eating moon lizard had emerged from a lava tube and chased Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back into the lunar lander, NASA would have described this as an off-nominal event requiring a contingency procedure.

The ultimate challenge There’s a full-scale lunar lander on display at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in D.C. It is officially known as LM-2 —

Lunar Module 2. Originally called a Lunar Excursion Module, the spidery spacecraft was generally called “the Lem” and nicknamed “the bug.”

The display vehicle at the museum never went to space, but it was used in ground tests, including drop tests to see how it could handle a hard landing. The exterior has been modified to make it look like the Apollo 11 lander — the Eagle.

It doesn’t look like a flying machine. Or maybe it looks like one that has been taken apart and then, after a few cocktails, put back together incorrectly. It has no curves and minimal symmetry.

Directly overhead, suspended by wires from the ceiling, is the Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh’s primitive plane, not much more than a metal box with propellers. But at least it’s immediately recognizable as a plane. The lunar module is bewildering. Where, exactly, do the astronauts sit? (Nowhere: There are no seats. They stand.)

“This is the first true spaceship,” says Paul Fjeld, an artist who is an expert on space exploration and worked on the restoration of LM-2.

Fjeld explains that it didn’t have to fly in an atmosphere and thus didn’t have to be aerodynamic. Or even look good.

The designers at Grumman Aircraft had to figure out the most basic concepts, like how to get astronauts out of the crew cabin and down to the moon’s surface, roughly 10 feet below, notes Charles Fishman in his book “One Giant Leap.” The designers initially decided that the astronauts, who would be in bulky moon suits, should go to the surface by climbing down hand over

A panoramic photo assembled by Dave Byrne from images taken by Buzz Aldrin on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.

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“Roger, Tranquility.

We copy you on the ground.

You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

Charlie Duke, who served in Houston as the CapCom, the person in direct communication with the Apollo crew

Apollo 11 astronauts, from top, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong seen during the Apollo 11 mission.

COVER STORY hand on a knotted rope. They’d return the same way, lugging moon rocks and getting an amazing workout.

Wisely, the designers decided to go with a ladder.

Though everything about the moonshot was fraught with uncertainty, it benefited from a clearly defined goal. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked NASA to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth before the decade was out. The next year, in September 1962, Kennedy gave his famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech at Rice University in Houston. He said the United States chooses to do these things in space “not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . . ” He noted that the moon is 240,000 miles away and that the mission would require “a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall,” and that this rocket would be “made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented.”

He would not live to see this happen. But his assassination made the moon program untouchable, something that simply had to be achieved, not only for geopolitical reasons but also to honor the martyred president. The United States poured $20 billion and 400,000 workers into the moonshot.

Contrary to popular belief, NASA did not invent Teflon, Velcro or Tang. But it did invent flying to the moon. Navigating to and around the moon was a computing challenge — one that required the most advanced computers at MIT as well as human computers such as Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician celebrated in the book and movie “Hidden Figures.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had its own moon program but struggled to build a giant rocket that could launch without blowing up.

The Russians had internal disputes among their engineers. A huge setback came when the chief rocket designer, Sergei Korolev, died during surgery in 1966.

The United States, meanwhile, had Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi who led the program that devised the V-2 rockets that terrorized Britain during the war. Von Braun and other German scientists and engineers had been brought to the United States after the war. Von Braun envisioned human spaceflight that included space stations, space shuttles and interplanetary arks carrying humans to Mars. The moon landing, for von Braun, was just one milestone in a much more ambitious invasion of space.

“In a simplistic way, we had von Braun, and he built a rocket capable of a lunar landing mission. The Soviet Union could not build an equally capable rocket,” said John Logsdon, author of multiple books on the Space Race.

The Soviets did build a moon rocket, the N1.

It had 30 engines. Four times the Soviets tried to launch it, and every time something went wrong.

The second failure was particularly spectacular. It happened on July 3, 1969 — just 13 days before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11. The N1 rose above the launch tower, fell back to the

pad and blew up in one of the biggest nonmilitary explosions in history.

1202 alarm!

In December 1968 came the first giant leap, when the three Apollo 8 astronauts flew all the way to the moon, orbited it and flew home, a journey that most human beings appropriately found amazing.

Apollo 9 was a shakedown cruise in Earth orbit, with the command module and the lunar lander practicing the orbital rendezvous that would be necessary for the moon mission.

Apollo 10 was like a combination of the two previous missions: a flight to the moon and separation of the lunar module and the command module. The Lem descended to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface before igniting the ascent engine to blast back to lunar orbit.

So that left one more giant leap.

Not long before his death in 2012, Neil

Armstrong said in one of his rare interviews that he had wished, back in July 1969, that they’d had another month to get ready for the moon-landing mission. He calculated only a 50 percent chance of a successful landing. He figured that there was a 90 percent chance the crew would make it back to Earth alive.

On July 16, 1969, the Saturn V rocket with three Apollo 11 astronauts riding on top blasted off from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.

“I could feel the shock wave vibrate through my bones,” says engineer Morgan, who was at a console in Launch Control.

The trip to the moon took three days. Most of that time, the astronauts couldn’t see the Earth or the moon. The spacecraft rolled like a chicken on a spit so that the sun would not heat only one side of the vehicle. Finally the spacecraft pivoted, and the moon came into view. It filled the window. It was not a flat, silver disk, Collins recalled, but a three-dimensional object, bulging, and a rough-looking place.

“It was just a totally different moon than I had grown up with,” Collins said. “It was awesome. It was certainly not inviting.”

On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin slipped into the Eagle and began their descent to the lunar surface.

They hadn’t gone far before the lander’s computer flashed an alarm.

“Program alarm. It’s a twelve-oh-two,” Armstrong told Mission Control.

In Houston, astronaut Charlie Duke served as the CapCom, the person in direct communication with the Apollo crew. Duke had no idea what a 1202 alarm meant.

After 16 seconds of silence, Armstrong spoke again, this time with the kind of urgency you’d expect from someone who doesn’t know if he’s going to land on the moon or be forced to abort the mission: “Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

In Mission Control, engineer Steve Bales had a direct line to a 24-year-old colleague named Jack Garman who sat in a backroom.

Garman kept the computer codes (such as “1202”) on a cheat sheet on his console.

“It’s executive overflow. If it does not occur again, we’re fine,” Garman told Bales.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was a triumph of engineering — compact, hard-wired to do lots of things at once — but it was overloaded with radar data. As a result, it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, which was dump lower-priority programs. But it was continuing to guide the Eagle toward the surface.

Bales relayed that message: We’re still go for landing.

The Eagle, however, had overshot the intended landing area by several miles. The computer was guiding it toward a crater with steep sides and flanked by car-size boulders.

Armstrong took manual control, slowed the descent, and began flying the Eagle like a helicopter, almost parallel to the surface.

He had trained tirelessly on the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, an ungainly contraption designed to simulate how the Eagle would fly in the moon’s gentle gravity. Arm-

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KLMNO WEEKLY

strong was an extraordinary pilot. He’d gotten a student pilot’s license on his 16th birthday before he knew how to drive a car, according to James Donovan’s book “Shoot For the Moon.”

Not only could he fly anything, he could crash anything and emerge unscathed. Armstrong had flown combat missions in Korea, and once had to eject from his plane just before it crashed into the sea. He’d piloted the experimental, rocket-powered X-15 aircraft, at one point bouncing off the atmosphere accidentally (as dramatized in the opening scene of the movie “First Man”). During the Gemini 8 mission in 1966, a malfunctioning thruster put the spacecraft into a terrifying spin, but Armstrong, on the verge of passing out, managed to get it under control before making an emergency splashdown in the Pacific. And in 1968, he’d lost control of the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle and had to eject just seconds before it crashed.

As Armstrong searched for a level spot to land, fuel became an issue. The Eagle was supposed to be on the surface already and the fuel supply had been carefully calculated. If they ran out of fuel, they’d have to abort the landing by firing the ascent engine. The only other option was falling the rest of the way to the surface in what they could only hope would be a kind of soft crashing.

“Sixty seconds,” Charlie Duke said.

Aldrin called out the rate of descent and the lateral motion.

Armstrong searched for a flat spot.

“Kicking up some dust,” Aldrin said.

“Thirty seconds,” Duke said.

For nine seconds, no one said anything.

Armstrong’s heart rate hit 156.

“Contact light,” Aldrin said. A rod extending from the bottom of one of the Eagle’s legs had just touched the surface. Armstrong killed the engine.

“Houston, uh . . . ” He paused.

“Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

‘One small step’ That’s the famous moon landing. It’s in all the books. It’s in the “First Man” movie. You can hear the radio transmissions with an easy search online. But even with all this documentation, and even after half a century, it’s a strangely thrilling, terrifying moment in human history.

Armstrong and Aldrin were supposed to get some sleep but instead decided to get on with the moonwalk, which turned out to be in prime time for the U.S. television audience.

Armstrong stepped onto the “porch” and pulled a handle that deployed a television camera. His backward journey on the ladder was as incremental as the entire Apollo program. When he hit the footpad he jumped back up to the bottom rung of the ladder, just to make sure he could do it. Then he stepped onto the moon proper.

“That’s one small step for man . . . ”

He paused. Armstrong would later claim that he said “a man,” and not just “man.” He said the missing article must have gotten dropped from the radio transmission. “ . . . one giant leap for mankind.”

No one perceived it as a flubbed line.

Everyone got the point.

Aldrin followed just 20 minutes later, and as he looked around, he offered a perfect description: “Magnificent desolation.”

The race won Why did it all work so splendidly? The stars aligned.

In his new book “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race,” historian Douglas Brinkley writes, “[It] takes a rare combination of leadership, luck, timing, and public will to pull off something as sensational as Kennedy’s Apollo moonshot.”

Spaceflight is now in a profound transition, no longer the exclusive enterprise of huge government bureaucracies. The commercial space industry is booming. The economies of advanced nations depend on satellites. Military officials fear that their satellites are vulnerable, and they say we must prepare for a new era of space warfighting. President Trump wants to create a Space Force as a sixth branch of the military.

Meanwhile, the moon is prominent again.

China recently landed a probe on its far side.

India has a lander and rover planned for the near future. In March, the Trump administration ordered NASA to land astronauts at the moon’s south pole no later than 2024.

Reality check: Going to the moon isn’t as easy as plugging an address into Google Maps.

But with enough pluck and gumption, plus money and genius, it can be done.

That was the point of Apollo 11. n

A footprint in the lunar soil left by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969.

Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, was followed about 20 minutes later by crewmate Buzz Aldrin.

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SPORTS

A little girl with epic dreams R ICK M AESE in Long Beach, Calif.

down many opportunities.

The Browns spend at least half the year living in Miyazaki, a city in the southern part of Japan known for its surfing conditions but lacking in skate culture.

“I feel like I’m the only girl skating sometimes,” she says.

BY

H

er hair pokes out of the back of her sky blue helmet and flaps like a cape as she flies around in circles. Poised confidently on her skateboard — knees slightly bent, infectious smile engaged — she gains speed and fearlessly attacks the bowl. Sky Brown is not here to take it easy, and she doesn’t have time to wait behind the older, bigger skateboarders.

She’s 10 years old, about the size of two skateboards stacked end to end and has a big mission on tap.

“I want to go to the Olympics,” she says. “I want to be the youngest one out there and show the girls it doesn’t matter how big you are or how small you are. You can do anything.”

Sky is a member of Great Britain’s national team, hoping to be among the world’s best athletes who gather in Tokyo next summer when skateboarding makes its Olympic debut at the 2020 Games. No one who has seen her on a skateboard would dare rule her out. Her outsize talent and charisma have made her one of the most popular and intriguing skateboarders — even if she’s just now wrapping up fifth grade.

She has several sponsors, a giant social media following and several viral videos to her credit.

She’s a prodigy of sorts on a skateboard but also has made waves in surfing. Last year she even won “Dancing with the Stars: Juniors,” and she says there’s a purpose behind everything she does.

“If they watch me skate or do this trick, they’ll think maybe they can do it, too,” she says.

“That’s why I want to do the Olympics — to inspire those kids who think they can’t do it.”

Sky caused a stir when Great Britain put her on its national skateboarding team this spring, but she has since shown that she’s no novelty act. She took first in the U.K. national skateboarding championships in April. At the Dew Tour stop in Long Beach, the

A young Olympic dream

ALLISON ZAUCHA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sky Brown is just 10, but with skateboarding now an Olympic sport, she has 2020 in mind first Olympic qualifier in the United States, Sky was the youngest skater in the field. She posted the highest score in the qualifying round of the park event and was third after the quarterfinals, though she failed to advance to the finals.

Sky commands attention whenever she’s on her board. She doesn’t generate the power of her competitors, who are often more than twice her age, but she can be every bit as aggressive, smiling almost the entire time.

“To be able to create the speed and get the height she’s getting with the weight she’s got — she’s like a feather — you almost think it’s impossible,” says Lucy Adams, the chair of Skateboard England and Skateboard GB. From the beginning

Sky and her tightknit family — parents Stu and Mieko Brown and brother Ocean — split their time between Southern California and Japan, where Sky was born and first learned to skate.

“I started skateboarding when I was 3 or 4,” she explains, “but I’ve been playing with it since I was zero, kind of.

“It was always my favorite toy,” she continues. “I’d just always want to play with it.”

She would watch her dad and friends skate and then study YouTube videos. She wasn’t content to be simply balancing or slowly rolling. She hit the backyard ramp with her dad and was a natural, performing kick turns on the ramp and kick flips with her board.

Stu Brown uploaded some footage of 5-year-old Sky onto Facebook. The clip bounced around and soon amassed a few million views. Sponsors and event organizers started noticing. Invitations and opportunities started piling up.

She did her first local contest at 7 and the next year became the youngest girl to compete in the Vans U.S. Open Pro Series. The family is selective about what to take on and says it has had to turn

“Skateboarding is like my happy place,” says Sky Brown, who hopes to compete in the Olympics in 2020 and “inspire those kids who think they can’t do it.”

Sky met Adams, a British pro, in 2016 at a competition in the United Kingdom. The two struck up a friendship and stayed in touch. A few months later, skateboarding was formally added to the program for the 2020 Tokyo Games, and Adams later would take a position with the Great Britain national skateboarding team.

“I was like, ‘Skateboarding’s in the Olympics?’ ” Sky recalls. “Everyone was like, ‘You don’t know what the Olympics are?’ ” As Sky learned more, she became increasingly excited. The Olympics offer a big platform, and she thought girls all around the globe might see her and want to pick up a skateboard. But she will be just 12 years old during the Tokyo Games, which her parents felt was too young. Maybe in 2024, they told her, when she will be 16.

“But I was like, ‘Please, please, please!’ ” she recalls.

Adams and Sky swapped social media messages and chatted on WhatsApp. Sky couldn’t shake the Olympic dream, and Adams started entertaining the possibility, too, excited by the impact Sky could have. Because Sky’s father was born in England, the young skater could compete for Japan or Great Britain in international competition.

“I knew that Sky would be inspirational, and she’d help us raise the participation of skateboarding in this country, especially among females,” Adams says.

The governing body for most every other Olympic sport has age restrictions that prevent athletes as young as Sky from taking part in Olympic competition. Skateboarding does not.

“The idea is if a skater can earn enough points and do well enough in competition to qualify

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LIFESTYLE to participate in the Olympic Games, you shouldn’t eliminate their chance to participate based on how old they are,” said Josh Friedberg, the chief executive of USA Skateboarding.

Even though Sky was named to Great Britain’s national team, she’s not guaranteed a spot in the Olympics. She has to accumulate points at competitions over the next year and show that she’s among the most competitive park skaters, regardless of age.

Even if she makes it to Tokyo, winning a medal would be a stretch, but the history books would take notice. It’s not often someone as young as Sky reaches the Olympics. Inge Sorensen won a bronze medal in swimming for Denmark as a 12-year-old at the 1936 Olympics. Italy’s gymnastics team in 1928 had competitors who were 11 and 12. The youngest Olympian ever was Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who was all of 10 years old for the 1896 Games.

‘Like a playground for me’

Sky had been skating at a school in Oceanside, Calif., where she was trying a kick flip off some stairs. A bad landing sent her tumbling on her arm.

“It hurt really bad,” she says, “but I kept skating after.”

The pain didn’t subside, and doctors explained that she had fractured a bone, and Sky was outfitted for a pink cast that goes the length of her right arm. The injury has kept her from surfing, which meant more time to spend on her skateboard. Another tumble resulted in her cracking the cast, which is now reinforced with some tape.

Despite the injury, she insisted on competing in this month’s Dew Tour event. “It would’ve hurt her so much more to miss out,” her father says.

Sky skates well beyond her age, but there are competitors who are able to go higher and faster and execute tricks that Sky’s not ready for. It doesn’t stop her from trying, and in the coming years, she will be able to create more speed, more power and more air when she launches skyward.

During a recent competition, Sky was limited by the broken arm but still skated with a smile.

“Skateboarding is like my happy place,” she says. “It’s like a playground for me.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Alcohol brands take action as sobriety becomes popular BY

L AURA R EILEY

I

t’s everywhere you look these days: #SoberCurious, #SoberIsSexy, #SoberLife and #SoberSaturday. There are sober nightclubs, sober earlymorning dance parties, Instagram influencers who anchor their online identities with an eschewal of alcohol. The number of alcohol drinkers in the world has decreased by nearly 5 percent since 2000, according to the World Health Organization. The Beverage Information Group reports beer sales have slumped for five years in a row.

Alcohol brands are paying attention: Diageo (the world’s second largest distiller and parent of Guinness, Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker) recently funded a nonalcoholic spirits company called Seedlip. In cities like New York and Los Angeles it is routine for restaurants to have separate nonalcoholic drink lists, online searches with the word “mocktail” are up significantly, and online magazines like the Temper have debuted to defiantly tout the benefits of a sober lifestyle.

This is not a fad buoyed by addiction and recovery stories.

The millennial- and Gen Z-driven trend is seen as part of a burgeoning wellness movement, a desire to have social gatherings less focused on alcohol (and the next mornings less fuzzed by aftereffects), as well a shift toward abstemiousness more generally.

But it’s not cheap. Consumers will still spend $10 to $12 a pop for a mocktail, a refreshing quaff they might suck down in two minutes. Bars and restaurants may spend more because of the food waste associated with shortlived fresh juices, “shrubs” and tinctures with fancy extracts and infusions. And there are ongoing ripples among distilleries and breweries as the industry figures out whether this is a blip or a movement with staying power.

Mixologist Dean Hurst recently designed the bar program for

JEFF GRITCHEN/DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA /GETTY IMAGES

Infinity Fizz, a non-alcoholic “mocktail,” is an option for those who want to drink but stay sober at Disney California Adventure Park.

Lucky Cricket, the controversial Chinese restaurant created by Andrew Zimmern in St. Louis Park, Minn.

“I did four nonalcoholic drinks for Lucky Cricket. They did well, but the profit wasn’t as high because by the time you get impactful flavor combinations without the strong flavors of alcohol, it ends up being really expensive. When we costed it out, it was $10 or $12 per cocktail.

And that’s not even factoring in the waste of throwing away rancid fruit or juice,” he said.

Sharelle Klaus, founder of DRY, was among the early adopters, launching the company in 2005 after abstinence during four pregnancies left her feeling excluded at restaurants and on special occasions.

She first introduced her line of nonalcoholic beverages with “culinary-inspired flavors” in restaurants in Seattle. Sommeliers were initially snobby, relegating DRY to the category of soda, but chefs were receptive. The drinks are now sold nationally in major grocery chains in 10 flavors and retail for $4.99 to $5.99 for a 750 ml bottle, a 12-ounce glass bottle four-pack for $5.99 to $6.99 and four-packs of slim cans for about the same price.

She says half of American drinkers say they’d like to drink

less alcohol, and that goes up to two-thirds for millennial drinkers.

“Mental health is becoming a much bigger discussion point; it’s about keeping that edge and that clarity,” Klaus says. She argues nonalcoholic social drinking can help combat the distancing effects of cellphones and social media.

Nonalcoholic beer, which chugged along with modest performers for years, has seen a resurgence, from craft brewers to Heineken, which in January launched a nonalcoholic malt beverage called 0.0.

It’s far more costly to produce a nonalcoholic beer by removing alcohol from a beer, or by keeping a nonalcoholic beer from turning into an alcoholic beer, said Philip Brandes, the founder and head brewer at Bravus Brewing Co. in Costa Mesa, Calif., said to brew the first nonalcoholic craft beer.

Distill Ventures, an investment company focused on entrepreneurs creating drink brands, launched a nonalcoholic drinks program in 2017, saying they believed “Non-Alc had the potential to be the most exciting category within drinks.”

Today, of the more than 15 founder-led drink brands in their portfolio, a quarter are nonalcoholic. n

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BOOKS

Defending classical liberalism N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK J . D ENEEN

A

THE CONSERVATIVE SENSIBILITY

By George Will.

Hachette.

600 pp. $35

In his new book, columnist George Will calls for a return to “thoughtful reverence for the nation’s founding,” its classical liberal philosophy and its small-government ideals.

n old saying goes that people become more conservative as they age.

George Will’s new book, “The Conservative Sensibility,” shows that the opposite can be true. This book is not so much a brief for conservatism as it is a learned and lengthy defense of liberalism. His is a rousing defense of a distinctly American form of “conservatism,” one that embraces a political, social and economic system that encourages novelty, dynamism and constant, unpredictable change. Thus, American conservatism — or classical liberalism — Will acknowledges, does not, and does not wish to, conserve very much.

Government is the nemesis in Will’s new book. The rise and growth of government thwart humans’ natural sociability, produce unintended consequences that pervert the beneficial logic of market forces, and undermine the health of civil society. Will looks to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers — especially the natural-rights philosophy of individual liberty embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the principles of limited government animating the Constitution — as the lodestars of his vision of a rebirth of American conservatism.

Will credits one Princetonian, James Madison, as the visionary who crafted the classical liberal political frame of individual liberty, economic dynamism and a constitutional mechanism that presumed human self-interest without counting on public virtue. He blames a second Princetonian, Woodrow Wilson, for contriving a second form of liberalism, grounded in a belief not in individual liberty but in the ability of government to fashion an equitable economy, make human beings more social in orientation and remake the world into a global liberal democracy. The growth of a sclerotic administrative state has been a consequence, leading to a

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

decrease in individual economic liberty, manifold perversions of the markets by government intervention and bipartisan Wilsonian overconfidence in America’s ability to remake the world through liberal imperialism. A strength of libertarian analysis is the recognition of the perverse consequences and often opposite results of “dogooder-ism,” and these constitute some of the strongest parts of Will’s book, including a welcome critique of the overweening confidence leading to the war in Iraq.

Will calls above all for a renewed “thoughtful reverence for the nation’s founding.” He appears to envision a night watchman state approximately the same size and undertaking the same level of activities as that before the Civil War, while endorsing an economic and social sphere that produces the constant innovation, upheav-

al, social transformation and economic inequality of today’s world.

In these calls, Will is arguing against not only Wilson but a third Princeton man: namely, a younger George Will. The author of the 1983 book “Statecraft as Soulcraft” held that government needs to play a positive role in supporting the social institutions that a dynamic society consistently undermines, and he argued that liberal American society draws down a “dwindling legacy of cultural capital” that cannot “regenerate spontaneously.” In contrast to the younger Will, today’s Will refuses to consider that classical philosophy finally proves unbearable in practice to actual human beings, and that it was abandoned early in the republic not because of the corruptions of Germanic philosophy but because of a social and economic order that had become

too costly for too many people.

More peculiarly still, Will does not mention the great anxieties within conservatism today arising not only from economic dislocation but the threat posed to traditional beliefs and practices by economic institutions, particularly corporations. Nowhere to be found in the 538 pages of text is a discussion of conservative commitments to the unborn, the threats posed by the advance of the sexual liberation movement, and commitments to religious liberty. It is as if the book was written in 1944, the same year as Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” animated by a fear that the greatest threat to humanity lies in the advance of collectivist ideology. Today’s rankand-file conservatives, however, perceive the greatest threat to conservative social forms, practices and beliefs to be coming not from collectivism but hyper-individualism; not from too little liberty in the economic realm but a religious devotion to consumerism that supplants religion of self-discipline.

Will wrote a conservative book during the ascendancy of libertarianism in the 1980s, and today, a more libertarian book in an age when conservatives see more clearly how economic and social libertarianism combine to undermine conservatism. His current book has one vice that is frequently attributed to conservatives: It is backward-looking, proposing a solution relevant to a bygone era.

By contrast, his conservatism in 1983 was prophetic, anticipating the forces that are today on full display. It is the very dynamism of America that Will now celebrates that has made his new book antiquated upon arrival, an insight he might have recognized had he harked back to his younger, more conservative self. n Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, and author of “Why Liberalism Failed.”

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A beach read . . . or maybe more?

F ICTION

I

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REVIEWED BY

chapter has a different narrator: Becca, Rachel and Zahid, as well as Becca’s estranged husband, Jonathan, and Khloe, a black lesbian business school graduate who works for him.

Each chapter moves the central story forward but is also a digression. We hear about Khloe’s romantic life, Zahid’s job hunt and the saga of one especially dysfunctional family in town. Some of these sidesteps feel a little labored — Khloe’s story line is the least interesting — but the brisk pacing and economical style are seductive and keep the reader’s attention.

What will happen at this house in Connecticut, and the attendant themes of family, sex and marriage, are conveyed in a distant, affectless way. This isn’t minimalism, not really; the narrative has the sound and feel of anecdote, or maybe more appropriately, fairy tale. Not in the sense that there’s anything magical happening but insofar as there’s a moral to the stories. I think the author means to delight us with a love triangle, then redirect our attention to the various subplots and digressions that allow her to ruminate on identity, art, violence and our current politics.

“The girls had wanted a woman president,” Becca tells us of her students. “I educated the pinkcheeked boys who said they were happy about Trump. I had to set them straight, as carefully as possible, to avoid confrontations with parents.” The author is direct but mindful not to let moments like this overwhelm. She’s asking big questions but at the same time giving us the kind of book we’re told we want during the summer. While not profound, necessarily, this is a more serious book than it might seem at first glance. It’s like she’s served us a cupcake that turns out to be nutritious. n Alam is the author of “Rich and Pretty” and “That Kind of Mother.”

WEEKLY

A necessary guide to gender inclusivity

R UMAAN A LAM

t’s gospel in the publishing business that readers want light, enjoyable fare this time of year, and “Very Nice,” Marcy Dermansky’s fourth novel, fits the bill. With a story of sex and intrigue set amid rich people in a beautiful house with a picturesque swimming pool, it is, indeed, a good book to pack for your vacation. But maybe it’s more than that.

Set in roughly the present moment, the story focuses on Rachel, an undergraduate, who goes home to Connecticut for summer vacation. Her father has left her mother, Becca, a schoolteacher who has also just suffered the loss of her faithful dog, which might be the greater tragedy. Rachel has recently had a dalliance with her creative writing professor, Zahid, and by a strange turn of events he, too, ends up at the Connecticut home, where he falls under the spell not of his student but her mother.

It’s to the author’s credit that this mother-daughter love triangle is considerably less icky than it sounds. Zahid is in crisis, struggling to write his new book, and finds himself drawn to Becca — and her wealth. “This was the kind of woman I needed in my life,” he tells us. “A beautiful woman with a big, beautiful house . . .

A woman who had been let down by another man. She would not have unrealistic expectations.”

Yes, she’s rich, but this woman of a certain age is also an object of sexual desire. “Becca seemed to understand me. She was eighteen years older than I was, and this felt right to me. Our bodies felt right. She had a terrific body.”

The plot is nominally about whether Zahid and Becca will become lovers and how this will affect Rachel. But “Very Nice” contains many story lines and a whole cast of characters, almost like a stage farce: People race in and out of doors, nearly colliding and never quite realizing the part they play in the larger story. Each

KLMNO

N ONFICTION

I VERY NICE

By Marcy Dermansky Knopf. 304 pp. $25.95

GENDER: YOUR GUIDE A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say, and What to Do in the New Gender Culture

By Lee Airton Adams Media. 240 pp.

Paperback, $15.99

l

REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN P ETROW

t would be easy to fool yourself into thinking that attitudes toward transgender people have evolved significantly. True, celebrities including Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono came out as trans years ago. It’s been five years since Time magazine illustrated a cover story, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” with a striking photo of transgender “Orange is the New Black” actress Laverne Cox on its cover. We’re all good here, right?

Alas, no. As transgender visibility improved, the inevitable blowback ensued. North Carolina passed, then partially repealed HB2, the discriminatory “bathroom bill” that would have forced trans people to use the restroom that matched their birth certificates, regardless of their gender identity. The Human Rights Campaign puts the number of murdered trans people in 2018 as at least 26, with trans women of color at the greatest risk. We’re not all good here.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to discuss “Gender: Your Guide: A Gender-Friendly Primer On What to Know, What to Say, and What to Do in the New Gender Culture,” by Lee Airton, an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

Airton (who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they” as a preferred pronoun) writes about gender, language and identity with a warm and inclusive tone, especially of cisgender folks — those, like most of us, whose gender identity matches the one they were assigned at birth. Before tackling the question of how and when to use what are called “gender-neutral pronouns,” Airton provides a clear and concise background about “how to implement genderfriendly language and practices in your family and friendships, at work and with people you meet every day.”

Throughout, Airton encourages an attitude of “gender-friendli-

ness.” When, for example, you are making a speech or greeting a large number of people, say, “Hello, everyone,” which is more inclusive than “Hello, ladies and gentlemen.” If you are writing a letter (or business email), forgo “Dear Sir or Madam” and try using a person’s full name. When it comes to “husband” or “wife,” Airton suggests gender-neutral options, such as partner or spouse, even if you’re cisgender, in an opposite-sex relationship. The adoption of such language establishes new language norms, which can be a proxy for our progressing attitudes.

Airton explains why it’s important not to “misgender” someone, which is to refer to one gender as another, for instance a man as a woman or vice versa: “For many trans people, everyday communication and interaction are situations where our well-being and mental health are actively, gradually either beefed up or run down — often by people around us who may have no idea how their words or actions affect our capacity to participate in the world.”

Airton also provides a helpful section on the use of the highly controversial pronoun “they.”

Language purists insist “they” can only be used as a plural, but, really, the singular “they” is already common in our daily lives when someone’s gender is unknown. Like “you,” which is both singular and plural in English, so, too, is “they,” Airton explains. This means we need to listen for context when spoken. In my experience, those people who are most opposed to using “they” as a singular pronoun are using grammar impurity as a hedge for trans non-inclusion or antipathy toward trans folk.

We may not be all good quite yet, but we are all learning. Airton’s book just might bring you or a friend some much-needed peace of mind — and some new vocabulary to go with it. n Petrow is the author of “Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners.”

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