The Washington Post National Weekly - September 22, 2019 by The Wenatchee World

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POLITICS

Vaping ban caught industry off guard BY L AURIE M C G INLEY, N EENA S ATIJA, J OSH D AWSEY AND Y ASMEEN A BUTALEB

uul Labs did everything in the power players’ handbook to cement its status in Washington. The Silicon Valley start-up worked to make friends in the nation’s capital. It hired senior White House officials wired into President Trump and the first family. It sent politically connected officials to the West Wing to extol its products. It spent big on lawmakers in both parties. But the e-cigarette giant, along with the rest of the vaping industry, was caught off guard when President Trump decided to take drastic action, banning almost all flavored vaping products. “We can’t have our youth be so affected,” he said in the Oval Office. The scope of this month’s announcement stunned most of the industry, even big companies like Juul that have carefully nurtured relationships with policymakers to gain influence. But lately, those companies have also been undercut by a stream of reports about teen e-cigarette use and a mysterious lung illness tied to vaping — with a seventh death, in California, announced Monday. Now some are going into crisis mode to try to protect against a ban that would probably put small operators out of business and result in million-dollar losses for the giants. Some companies have harnessed staffers and lobbyists with ties to the White House and Capitol Hill to gather information about the still-unfinished policy and figure out how they might navigate a path forward, according to current and former administration officials and others with knowledge of the efforts. Market-leading Juul has sent lobbyists to talk to Hill Republicans but has not yet decided whether to challenge the ban on mint and menthol e-cigarettes, its two biggest moneymakers. Ironically, the company accused of igniting the underage vaping epidemic a few years ago might benefit from the ban over the long term because the prohibi-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

E-cig players have gone into crisis mode, are mounting lobbying blitz tion will be even harder on smaller competitors, some experts say. Tobacco giant Altria owns about a 35 percent stake in Juul. Smaller players, such as the Vapor Technology Association, say many of its members could not survive such a ban and vow a fight. “We are going to make it clear that this is the wrong approach, that it will literally cut down an entire industry that has grown up, with 166,000 jobs, to challenge the tobacco industry, and they are mostly small businesses,” said Tony Abboud, executive director of the trade group. Vaping advocates and consumers, meanwhile, are bombarding the White House and Congress, complaining on Twitter and launching petitions to protest the ban, said Greg Conley, president of

the American Vaping Association. Some of them were heartened by a Trump tweet that suggested vaping might, in fact, be a good alternative to cigarettes, and the ban was simply to “make sure this alternative is SAFE for ALL!” and to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of children. ‘Public outrage’ Despite its strong deregulatory approach, the Trump administration started focusing intensely on e-cigarettes a little more than a year ago when then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb saw data showing a 78 percent jump in high schoolers using e-cigarettes — a product ostensibly designed to help adult smokers quit cigarettes. “E-cigs have become an almost ubiquitous — and dangerous —

President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump discuss the Food and Drug Administration‘s plan to ban the sale of flavored vaping products and e-cigarettes.

trend among teens,” he said then. Over the next few months, Gottlieb met with e-cigarette makers, demanding they take steps to reduce the use of their products by minors and threatening sales restrictions and tighter regulation. Around the time he announced his departure in March, he summoned the heads of Juul and Altria to a meeting where he accused them of reneging on commitments to quell teen use, according to people familiar with the discussions. He also said the companies were trying to undermine the FDA by going to the White House, where the companies found a more sympathetic ear, they said. Juul says it has supported policies to restrict youth vaping but declined to comment on that meeting. Altria spokesman David

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POLITICS Sutton said it has consistently supported administration efforts to reduce teen vaping. On the way out the door, Gottlieb also proposed sweeping sales restrictions — but not a ban. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar promised to continue the anti-youth-vaping agenda, suggesting officials might consider tougher action if youth vaping continued to increase. Then came a summer of devastating headlines about a mysterious vaping-related illness that had sickened 380 people in 36 states and resulted in seven deaths. Many of the victims used illicit marijuana products, according to health authorities and clinicians. But officials have not been able to unequivocally rule out nicotine products, giving vaping foes new ammunition to press their case. Melania Trump began expressing concerns, according to senior White House officials, and Ivanka Trump also got involved. Some White House aides and political advisers were also concerned the vaping issue could become a 2020 campaign problem. “Juul has created more public outrage in a shorter period of time than any other company I can think of,” said Matt Myers, president of Campaign for TobaccoFree Kids. “When you prey on middle-class white kids, Republican or Democrat, you will make a lot of people angry.” As the number of those illnesses rose, Azar got new data right after Labor Day showing that 27.5 percent of high schoolers in 2019 said they had used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days, up from 20.8 percent the year before — the second big jump in two years. The data also pointed to the surging popularity of mint and menthol e-cigarettes. Alarmed, Azar and other top administration officials, including White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, domestic policy chief Joe Grogan, acting FDA Commissioner Norman “Ned” Sharpless and adviser Ivanka Trump had two meetings on the issue without Trump, including one on Sept. 9. That day, Melania Trump tweeted she was “deeply concerned about the growing epidemic of e-cigarette use in our children.” Officials kept a close hold on the information, strenuously avoiding leaks that would spur lobbyists to jump into action. Trump was presented with a

EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS

number of options, ranging from doing nothing to removing almost all vaping flavors from the marketplace. The president had had been reading about people dying from a mystery lung disease, say White House officials. Faced with a perfect storm of worsening youth vaping numbers and fatal illnesses potentially related to vaping, he chose the toughest course. The policy, as laid out, would bar sales of almost all flavored e-cigarettes — mint and menthol, as well as sweet and fruity — in stores and online. Products would not be permitted back on the market until, and if, they received FDA approval. Only tobacco-flavored vapes would be exempt. Officials said the guidance would be published in several weeks and go into effect 30 days after that. Manufacturers could seek FDA approval to bring their products back to the marketplace, but it’s far from clear they would be successful. Those manufacturers had already faced a May 2020 deadline for such applications, which among other things would need to show whether the product would make it less likely adults would smoke regular cigarettes and not entice young people to start smoking. But under that earlier plan, companies could have kept their products on the market for some period of time while the agency weighed approval. Juul has said it supports “the

need for aggressive category-wide action on flavored products,” and will comply with the final FDA policy, when it takes effect. That doesn’t mean, Juul-watchers say, it won’t try to change the policy before it’s finalized. Last year, under mounting FDA pressure, Juul voluntarily stopped selling all flavors but mint, menthol and tobacco in retail outlets — and then watched as competitors and counterfeiters filled the void with their own sweet and fruity products. Since then, Juul says it has been eager for a government crackdown on those products to level the playing field, as well as to curb youth vaping. Survival of the biggest? If any company might be positioned to navigate or moderate the policy, it would be Juul. Its staff and consultants include a who’s who of Trump world, including Josh Raffel, former spokesman for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Johnny DeStefano, former counselor to the president; Rebeccah Propp, former director of media affairs for Vice President Pence, and Tevi Troy, who worked in the George W. Bush administration along with Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary. DeStefano, who is a Juul consultant, remains in touch with campaign and White House officials, although he is not allowed to lobby them for Juul under White House ethics rules. The other former

“Juul took a shotgun approach to try to lobby this issue. They were neither targeted nor effective in what they did.” Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner

Market-leading Juul has sent lobbyists to talk to Republicans on Capitol Hill but has not yet decided whether to challenge the ban on menthol and mint e-cigarettes, its two biggest moneymakers.

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Trump administration officials also are not allowed to contact their former White House colleagues on behalf of Juul. In 2017, the start-up had just two lobbyists. Now, it has at least 10 times that number, including former staffers for House speakers Paul D. Ryan and John Boehner, according to federal lobbying disclosures. The company has already spent nearly $2 million in the first two quarters of this year on lobbying, up from $1.64 million for all of last year. The political action committee for Altria Group, meanwhile, donated $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and was a major contributor to Pence’s “Great America” committee. It also hired Jeff Miller, who has close ties to Pence, to lobby on tobacco and e-cigarette issues. Miller has already reported bundling more than $1 million in contribution’s to the Trump 2020 campaign. Despite those broad investments, Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, said he doesn’t think Juul has been very effective. “Juul took a shotgun approach to try to lobby this issue,” he said. “They were neither targeted nor effective in what they did.” He said he thinks the company’s efforts hurt the whole industry. Other e-cigarette companies with ties to deep-pocketed tobacco companies include Vuse, which is owned by tobacco giant Reynolds American, and Swisher International, a cigar maker. Both are represented by Brian Ballard, a Florida lobbyist who represented Trump’s businesses there and worked on the 2016 campaign. Reynolds paid Ballard’s firm $1.1 million to lobby entities including Congress, White House, HHS and the vice president’s office since 2017. Swisher, which hired Ballard in April, has so far paid the firm $60,000, records show. Reynolds American’s PAC donated $15,000 to committees for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2016. While lobbyists are not required to report exactly how much they spend on specific issues, much of the money would probably have gone to work on vapingrelated issues — including Trump’s proposal in March for $100 million a year in user fees on the e-cigarette industry, and bills related to age restrictions. n

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A threat to Calif.’s pollution authority BY J ULIET E ILPERIN AND B RADY D ENNIS

resident Trump plans to revoke California’s power to limit carbon pollution from cars and light trucks, sparking a legal battle with the nation’s most populous state. In tweets, Trump declared on Wednesday that the decision to take away California’s longstanding authority to impose stricter air pollution rules would lower the sticker price for new vehicles. The president’s argument echoed in part the proposal made by administration officials last year, who argued that freezing mileage standards between 2020 and 2026 at roughly 37 miles per gallon would lower the sticker price of vehicles and spur Americans to replace older, lesssafe cars with newer, safer models. But the Trump administration’s own analysis also acknowledged that easing the Obama-era standards would increase U.S. fuel consumption by roughly a half-million barrels of oil per day, an increase of 2 to 3 percent, and would lead to an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. Public-health experts and environmental groups have insisted that the White House’s proposal ignores the health benefits from more efficient, less-polluting cars and would lead people to spend more money at the gas pump. They said the rollback would allow more carbon dioxide to spew from the nation’s vehicles, undermining any chance of curbing climate pollution in the transportation sector, which has emerged as the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Over thousands of pages, the administration’s proposal last year argues that the costs of meeting existing federal mileage requirements over the next few years would boost the sticker price of vehicles, prompting people to continue driving older cars and trucks rather than buying

PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG

Trump has declared plans to revoke state’s longstanding power to set own emissions standards newer, more efficient ones. That would in turn increase the risk of accidents, it claimed. EPA staffers questioned some of those estimates, though the EPA and the Transportation Department ultimately published the proposal jointly. Trump’s move sets up a potential clash over the state’s longstanding ability to set its own more stringent standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency, a power the courts have upheld for the past half-century. California is pressing ahead with a plan to raise the average mileage of the U.S. auto fleet to 50 miles per gallon by model year 2026, and 13 other states and the District have pledged to adopt those standards. At a news conference Wednes-

day, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other top officials said they would challenge the move in court. The federal government has never revoked an existing waiver for California, though it once declined to sign off on one in 2007. The state challenged that decision, and Obama officials granted it in 2009. Speaking to reporters, Newsom said the state needed to take steps to curb tailpipe pollution because the transportation sector now ranks as the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. “You can’t get serious about climate change unless you’re serious about vehicle emissions,” he said, adding that Trump was acting out of frustration that

Vehicle traffic in California — shown on the 101 Freeway — is a major factor in the emissions of greenhouse gases and in the creation of smog.

California had managed to defend its policies in court. “We are winning. He is losing.” California’s power to set its own standards dates back to 1967 legislation and has been reaffirmed every time Congress amended the law. Its governor,, pledged Tuesday to sue the federal government if it revoked the state’s existing waiver. It is unclear whether the auto industry will endorse Trump’s push to ease tailpipe emissions standards. Four companies — Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW of North America — reached an agreement with the California Air Resources Board in July to produce vehicles that would reach an average of nearly 50 miles per gallon by 2026. The Justice Department has launched an inquiry into whether the four carmakers violated antitrust law by entering into a voluntary agreement with California. “Automakers support yearover-year increases in fuel economy standards that align with marketplace realities, and we support one national program as the best path to preserve good auto jobs, keep new vehicles affordable for more Americans and avoid a marketplace with different standards,” said Dave Schwietert, interim president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a major trade group. “We will review this action today along with the yet to-be-released final CAFE/GHG rule to get the full picture of how this impacts automakers, our workers and our customers.” The Trump administration’s pressure campaign targeting automakers has begun to pay dividends. Not a single company has joined the framework forged in July, and on Wednesday California officials said those discussions stalled after the Justice Department started its inquiry. “Well, we’re in a different world now,” said Mary Nichols, who chairs the California Air Resources Board. n

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NATION

Wall could pose harm to historic areas BY J ULIET E ILPERIN AND N ICK M IROFF

ulldozers and excavators rushing to install President Trump’s border barrier could damage or destroy up to 22 archaeological sites within Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in coming months, according to an internal National Park Service report obtained by The Washington Post. The administration’s plan to convert an existing five-foot-high vehicle barrier into a 30-foot steel edifice could pose irreparable harm to unexcavated remnants of ancient Sonoran Desert peoples. Experts identified these risks as U.S. Customs and Border Protection seeks to fast-track the construction to meet Trump’s campaign pledge of completing 500 miles of barrier by next year’s election. Unlike concerns about the barrier project that have come from private landowners, churches, communities and advocacy groups, these new warnings about the potential destruction of historic sites come from within the government itself. The National Park Service’s 123-page report, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, emerges from a well-respected agency within the Interior Department as the Department of Homeland Security and the White House push ahead with their construction plans. While the government scrambles to analyze vulnerable sites as heavy equipment moves in, the administration also faces external challenges seeking to block the use of eminent domain to seize land, as well as lawsuits asking courts to halt work in and around wildlife refuges and other protected lands. New construction began last month within the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, an internationally recognized biosphere reserve southwest of Phoenix with nearly 330,000 acres of congressionally designated wilderness. The work is part of a 43-mile span of fencing that also

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Up to 22 Ariz. sites may be ruined by fast-moving border project, National Park Service report says traverses the adjacent Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. With the president demanding weekly updates on construction progress and tweeting out drone footage of new fencing through the desert, administration officials have said they are under extraordinary pressure to meet Trump’s construction goals. The Department of Homeland Security has taken advantage of a 2005 law to waive several federal requirements — including the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act — that could have slowed and possibly stopped the barrier’s advance in the stretch in Arizona. The Organ Pipe Cactus area has been one of the busiest this year for migrant border crossings, an influx that includes large groups of adults and children walking through the desert to surrender to U.S. agents, typically seeking humanitarian protections. Some archaeological features

along the border already have suffered damage as Border Patrol agents zoom through in pursuit of migrants and smugglers in allterrain vehicles, according to federal officials and two experts who have conducted research in the region. Environmental groups have fought unsuccessfully to halt construction in protected areas, arguing that more-imposing barriers could disrupt wildlife migration and threaten the survival of imperiled species. But there has been little mention of the potential damage to archaeological sites, where stone tools, ceramic shards and other pre-Columbian artifacts are extremely well-preserved in the arid environment. Desert-dwelling peoples have populated the area for at least 16,000 years, particularly around the oasis of Quitobaquito Springs in the national monument. The springs and surrounding desert wetlands are just 200 feet from the border, where crews

A fence runs along the U.S.-Mexico border at Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Replacing it with a 30-foot-tall steel barrier, as envisioned by President Trump, could damage as many as 22 archaeological sites there, a government assessment says.

plan to bring in heavy earth-moving equipment to install the giant steel barriers. Scientists have raised concerns that the springs could dry up if crews pump groundwater from the area for the barrier’s concrete base. CBP officials said the agency has looked at “most” of the archaeological sites identified in the Park Service report and found just five that are within the 60foot-wide strip of federal land on the U.S. side of the border where the government will erect the structure, an area known as the Roosevelt Reservation, which was set aside along the border in California, Arizona and New Mexico. Of those five, officials said, one had a “lithic scatter” — remnants of stone tools and other culturally relevant artifacts. Construction crews do not yet have a plan to begin work at that location, CBP officials said, noting that the agency has had discussions with the Park Service about collecting and analyzing fragments of historic significance from that site. The officials said they have not delayed or otherwise altered their construction plans to conduct more detailed surveys or excavations in the area. Officials said crews with earthmoving equipment have started installing barriers in a two-mile section east of the border crossing at Lukeville, Ariz., a particularly busy stretch for illegal crossings. CBP officials acknowledged that trucks and earth-moving equipment driving through the fragile desert risk harming sites outside the specific construction zones. The officials said they are following Park Service guidance as to where workers can drive. With CBP, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their construction contractors under pressure from the White House, federal land in the West has become the easiest place to quickly add fencing. There are few private landowners in the desert terrain outside Texas, and it is a far easier place to build than along the winding riverbanks of the Rio Grande. n

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A test case for Medicaid block grants BY

A MY G OLDSTEIN

ennessee has unveiled a plan to convert Medicaid into a block grant — an idea long supported by conservatives that would rupture the federal government’s halfcentury-old compact with states for safety-net insurance for the poor. Tennessee is setting up the nation’s first test case of how far the Trump administration is willing to go to allow a state the “flexibility” that has become a watchword of the administration’s healthcare policies. If TennCare, as that state calls its Medicaid program, wins federal approval for its plan, it could embolden other Republican-led states to follow suit. It also almost certainly would ignite litigation over the legality of such a profound change to the country’s largest public insurance program without approval by Congress. Medicaid, originated as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, is an entitlement program in which the government pays each state a certain percentage of the cost of care for anyone eligible for the health coverage. Under block grants, first broached during the Reagan administration, the government would instead pay a state a lump sum each year while freeing it from many of Medicaid’s rules, including who must be allowed into the program and what health care is covered. Proponents contend the model would save money and let states run the program more efficiently; opponents contend it would strand states and vulnerable residents during economic downturns or as expensive new therapies emerge. Medicaid block grants were part of unsuccessful Republican legislation two years ago that would have dismantled major parts of the Affordable Care Act, although block grants do not inherently conflict with the law. Internal GOP disagreements over the idea were a significant reason those bills failed.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Tennessee becomes the first state to answer Trump’s call to overhaul insurance funding Since then, President Trump has called for Medicaid block grants in his budgets, though Congress has ignored the idea. Seema Verma, administrator of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has urged states to move toward block grants, although guidance she has written for states has been under review for months at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Tennessee is the first state that is coming forward. Its draft proposal would affect more than 1 million of the 1.4 million state residents on TennCare, according to the state’s Medicaid director. The block grant would be used for medical services for children, pregnant women, parents and other core groups of people such as those who are blind and disabled. Some aspects of Medicaid would be excluded from the change, such as coverage of prescription drugs and payments to hospitals that treat a

large share of low-income patients. In an interview, Gov. Bill Lee (R) said Trump administration officials “need some examples to show the rest of the country how to do this, and we have an example. . . . We consider ourselves as leaders,” having run Medicaid in cost-efficient ways for years, he said. “It would be very important for the country to see an opportunity to lower the cost of Medicaid services without changing the quality or level of those services to the Medicaid population,” Lee said. “For Tennessee to be an example of how we can deliver that would be a very big deal.” The draft plan is not a pure version of a block grant. It would rely on fixed annual payments, adjusted yearly for inflation. The state would get extra money per person in years in which enrollment grew but would not get less money if enrollment shrank. If the state spent less in a given year than it would have under the

“It would be very important for the country to see an opportunity to lower the cost of Medicaid services without changing the quality or level of those services to the Medicaid population,” Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said about the changes to the state’s program.

traditional Medicaid system, Tennessee would split those savings with the government, according to the draft plan, in another departure from a classic block-grant approach. It is proposing not to cut back on eligibility rules or benefits. TennCare Director Gabe Roberts said in an interview that he and his staff have had several conversations with CMS officials, giving them “a sense of what to expect . . . from a conceptual level.” Roberts said that the federal officials have largely listened without providing feedback. A CMS spokesman, Johnathan Monroe, declined to discuss the agency’s recent interactions with TennCare, saying only, “CMS supports efforts to improve accountability for cost and outcomes in Medicaid, and we look forward to working with Tennessee once they submit their proposal to help them achieve these goals as effectively as possible within our statutory authority.” Under a law the Tennessee legislature adopted in May, the state must submit a final version of its plan to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by late November. Starting Tuesday, the draft is open to a month of public comment. Critics are trying to turn out in large numbers in opposition. National patient-advocacy organizations already have been protesting. A dozen groups wrote to the governor in late April that, for sick and vulnerable patients, changing to a block grant “jeopardizes their access to treatment and, in turn, their health.” More than two dozen groups wrote to CMS’s Verma in July, urging her to reject states that ask for block grants. Within Tennessee, opponents have been mobilizing. Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, a group representing vulnerable residents needing health care and other assistance, said the proposed changes to TennCare would be “devastating for our health infrastructure, for the Tennessee economy, and for our communities.” n

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A long-forgotten World War II diary A girl’s writings of life in Nazi Poland are seen as still relevant today

B Y R ICK N OACK in Berlin

Nazis uncovered Renia’s hideout, and she was executed. The fate of her grandparents is unknown, but Bellak said she believes they were killed and buried in a mass grave. She and her mother managed to escape to Austria with the help of a German officer who had fallen in love with the mother, a fluent German speaker. After the war ended, both immigrated to the United States, where they were later joined by Renia’s boyfriend. “I have something for you,” Bellak recalled Schwarzer saying at the time. “It was Renia’s diary, all seven hundred pages of it. My mom and I broke down in tears,” Bellak wrote, recalling the encounter in the early 1950s. Throughout their time together, she had not known that her sister was writing a diary. But despite the haunting details — or perhaps because of them — Renia’s diary lay virtually untouched in a vault in New York City for more than half a century.

s the Nazis strengthened their grip on Europe in 1939, Renia Spiegel, a 14year-old Jewish girl in Poland, turned to a new companion. “Today, my dear Diary, is the beginning of our deep friendship,” she wrote on Jan. 31 that year. For more than three years, Renia documented her life in more than 650 handwritten and densely filled pages. “You won’t betray me,” she wrote. But someone else did. On July 30, 1942, Renia, then 18, was summarily executed by the Nazis after they discovered her hideout in the city of Przemysl in southeastern Poland. More than half a century later, her translated diary — strikingly similar in some ways to that of Anne Frank but long kept locked in a vault — is finally set to be published in the United States. The scheduled release of “Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Diary” on Tuesday comes at a critical time, as nationalism and right-wing populism have drawn comparisons with the 1930s — including in the United States, where Renia’s sister Elizabeth Bellak fled with her mother after World War II. “I’m worried again,” said Bellak, 88, speaking from a hotel in Warsaw this past week, where she was due to attend the screening of an accompanying video documentary by Polish American filmmaker Tomasz Magierski. She expressed hope that her sister’s story would help “remind young and old” of the horrors of that time. Bellak still has not found the strength to SILWIA GROCHOWSKA read the full diary her sister wrote up to her final days. Center: Holocaust “It’s too emotional, too painful victim and diarist for me,” she said. Renia, as the Renia Spiegel in older sister, “was like a surrogate 1936. mother to me” and a “wonderful, Above: Elizabeth wonderful person.” Bellak, Renia’s Renia’s diary indicates how sister, in Warsaw’s much she cared for her sister, a Polin Museum.

BELLAK FAMILY ARCHIVE

child movie star in late-1930s Poland, despite occasional discontent over what she saw as her younger sibling’s ability “to steal the show.” Three years and about 650 pages The diary traces Renia’s path from a teenager worried about the looming threat of Nazism to a victim of the Nazis’ occupation of Poland and their declared mission to exterminate the Jewish people. Weeks before the invasion of Poland, Renia appeared to sense the growing danger. “Mama’s very worried about me. Oh! I’m so unhappy,” she wrote in March 1939. Her mother spent long stretches in the capital, Warsaw, in 1939 and following years, hoping to promote her younger daughter as a movie actress. Renia and her sister stayed behind in southeastern Poland, where Renia continued to docu-

ment her growing anxiety. But she also wrote about falling in love and trying to go about normal life. Later that year — still separated from her mother — Renia wrote of an intensified sense of urgency: “Przemysl was attacked. We had to flee. The three of us escaped: me, [Elizabeth] and Grandpa. … Granny stayed behind.” Weeks later: “Holy God, please give me an easy death.” Within the subsequent three years, in hundreds of detailed entries, Renia documented their family’s transfer into a ghetto, along with thousands of other Jews who were given only 24 hours to move. As the Nazis were preparing to transfer thousands of Jews to a death camp, Renia’s boyfriend, Zygmunt Schwarzer, arranged a desperate attempt to rescue the sisters — the two were separated from each other and from their grandparents. Soon after their goodbye, the

The diary’s long path to global recognition When her own children started asking about their family’s story, Bellak gradually began opening up. “What was in that book about the aunt?” she recalled her daughter asking repeatedly. “That’s how it started.” Magierski and Bellak’s daughter, Alexandra Bellak, played a crucial role in the release of the diary, initially in Polish and now in other languages. “My mother was reluctant to talk about it because it unearthed painful memories,” the daughter told The Washington Post. “So, I thought, well, there’s this elusive diary, sitting in the vault.” The more pages were translated, the more obvious the diary’s literary quality and historical relevance became to her. “Writing gave her freedom to express herself,” even as “evil and hate all around” mounted, Alexandra Bellak said of Renia. “It’s almost fortuitous that the diary is being published now … because the same signs are showing their ugly heads again,” she said. “It’s more relevant than ever.” n

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‘It was the donor. It had to be.’ B Y ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA in Bartlett, Ill.

Danielle Rizzo’s son is screaming. He is planted in the middle of the lobby of his elementary school, clinging to rainbow-colored blocks as she gently explains that she is here — off schedule, in the middle of the day — to take him to a doctor’s appointment. But the first-grader is not listening. “Happy Meal,” he repeats over and over again. “Happy Meal!” His little brother, who is also going to the appointment, is nearby, not moving. Rizzo is relieved that the two of them are not melting down at the same time, which happens all too often, and firmly guides them out the door. Rizzo’s children, ages 7 and 6, were at the center of one of the most ethically complex legal cases in the modern-day fertility industry. Three years ago, while researching treatment options for her sons, Rizzo says she made an extraordinary discovery: The boys are part of an autism cluster involving at least a dozen children scattered across the United States, Canada and Europe, all conceived with sperm from the same donor. Many of the children have secondary diagnoses of ADHD, dyslexia, mood disorders, epilepsy and other developmental and learning disabilities.

After Danielle Rizzo found out her sons were part of an autism cluster, she sued the sperm bank and its parent company

The phenomenon is believed to be unprecedented and has attracted the attention of some of the world’s foremost experts in the genetics of autism, who have been gathering blood and spit samples from the families. Autism, which affects an estimated 1 of 59 children in the United States, is a “spectrum disorder” characterized by difficulties navigating social situations and restricted or repetitive behavior. Some people who have it never speak and need daily care, while others, like actress Daryl Hannah and Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri, are highly successful in their fields. In recent years a growing movement has been challenging the notion that autism is a disorder at all. Rather, advocates argue, it’s a difference that should be celebrated as adding diversity to human communities. Rizzo hopes her children will cope better as they grow older, but for now, she knows they are suffering. When she first found out about their many half-siblings, she consulted a genetic counselor, who she says told her the odds of so many blood-related children with autism occurring spontaneously was akin to all the mothers “opening up a dictionary and pointing to the same letter of the same word on the same page at the same time.”

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COVER STORY

Danielle Rizzo with her boys, ages 6 and 7, in Streamwood, Ill. PHOTOS BY TAYLOR GLASCOCK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

“It was the donor,” Rizzo remembered thinking. “It had to be.” A quick online search for the donor’s profile showed that sperm from a man matching his description was still being sold by at least four companies. She called them all, asking for information about his medical history — and to inform them of the autism cluster — but she says the representatives she reached told her she didn’t have any “evidence” that his sperm was responsible for the autism cases. She turned to health-care regulators in New York and California, where the sperm banks were based. The response, Rizzo said, was that cases like hers are not part of their responsibility. (A spokeswoman for New York State said her department had no record of Rizzo’s complaint but urged her “to reach out.” A California spokesperson said the state would consider investigating her case as an “adverse event” related to a sperm bank.) The Food and Drug Administration told her its oversight of the sperm-donor industry is limited to screening for sexually transmitted diseases. So, after a year of fruitless phone calls and letters, she sued.

Motherhood Rizzo turned to a sperm bank when she was 27 years old and a business banker at a JPMorgan Chase branch. She and her partner, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, had been together for eight years. They met while Rizzo was attending community college on a softball scholarship. In June 2011, when Illinois began issuing civil union licenses to same-sex couples, they were the first in line at the Kane County courthouse. Rizzo says they were eager to start their family and decided that Rizzo, younger by two years, would carry the baby. For months, the couple scoured online profiles to find just the right sperm donor. Donor H898 from Idant Laboratories looked like a winner. He was blond and blue-eyed, 6-foot-1, 240 pounds, and appeared to be smart and accomplished. His profile said he had a master’s degree and was working as a medical photographer. And most important, Rizzo says, he had a clean bill of health, according to his profile — having scribbled “NA” and a strikethrough line on all but one of the more than 100 medical questions, including mental health ones, posed by sperm banks. (His paternal grandfather had had prostate cancer at age 85.) Over the next few months, Rizzo purchased several vials of sperm. The bill came to about $500. Rizzo’s first son, conceived via in vitro fertilization, was born in September 2011, and the first year of his life was bliss. “He was the happiest baby,” she recalled. “We knew we wanted one more kid.” Doctors transferred another embryo, and their second boy was born about 14 months after the first.

Danielle Rizzo’s sons cover their ears as a loud vehicle drives by. Noise sensitivity is a common challenge for people with autism spectrum disorders.

It was around that time that Rizzo says they started noticing unusual behaviors in their first son. He had stopped looking his mothers in the eye. He no longer responded to his name. He wouldn’t interact with other children. She was devastated when her second child, at around age 2, began to exhibit the same behaviors. Rizzo sought help from the state’s early-intervention services and a developmental pediatrician, and both boys were diagnosed with autism. She and her partner took turns running the boys to therapies. But the more months that passed, the more help the boys seemed to need. After three nannies quit, Rizzo left her job, and her relationship collapsed. Rizzo received primary custody, and with two preschoolers with severe needs, she says she was financially strapped. Her ex had been fulfilling her obligation to pay child support, but Rizzo says it wasn’t enough to cover the mortgage. The house went into foreclosure. Rizzo went on Medicaid, and in July 2018 she and the two boys moved into her parents’ basement.

The lawsuit Sperm donors tend to be taller, better looking and better educated than the general population. But they have the same chance of carrying a gene for an inherited condition as anyone else. And because of their unusual role in modern

reproduction, the effect of those mutations can be amplified. Popular donors can father 10, 20, 100 or even more progeny — each potentially carrying the same genetic risk factors. Rizzo has never had contact with the donor, who is now in his early 40s and from the New York area. But two other mothers who have met him said in interviews that he is clean-cut and polite. One described him as “hot.” Another said her first impression of the donor, who showed up wearing khakis and a nice shirt, was that he is “brave” and “generous.” The parents had happily connected on Facebook and Yahoo groups for “donor siblings” — and then were shocked to discover that many of their children seemed to have the same types of developmental challenges and diagnoses. Donor H898’s sperm was offered through multiple sources. According to the mothers, court documents and genetic testing through 23andMe and Ancestry.com, he sold anonymously to at least four sperm banks (which typically pay about $100 per visit), donated to a high-end agency that matches parents with donors they can meet face-to-face, and offered his sperm for a low fee or even free on sites such as KnownDonorRegistry.com or privately. Rizzo filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in July 2017. In her complaint, she alleged that his online profile was a lie and that he was not an “appropriate candidate for sperm donation.” She sued

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COVER STORY Idant and Daxor, Idant’s former parent company, under the state’s consumer fraud and deceptive practices act. She says in the complaint that research, based on public documents and calls to his relatives, showed that the donor had no college degrees, had been diagnosed with ADHD, and “went to a school for children with learning and emotional disabilities.” (Idant, and other sperm banks, generally do not verify their donors’ medical and educational backgrounds.) Moreover, her attorneys wrote in the filing, “Donor H898 is a prolific sperm donor who has fathered at least 12 children through sperm donation, and that each of those children has either been diagnosed with Autism, or suffers from signs and symptoms associated with Autism.” In court documents, other mothers corroborated the story. Guidelines from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which represents fertility clinics in the United States, call for mandatory genetic testing for only one disease: cystic fibrosis. But most clinics say they test for several hundred. There is no test for autism. Idant was one of the nation’s oldest sperm banks until it shut down around 2015. In 2009, it was sued by a woman whose child had Fragile X Syndrome, a developmental disorder that is among the conditions typically detected in genetic tests. The suit was dismissed because the plaintiffs could not define a “legally-cognizable injury.” In 2004, state inspectors found that Idant had ignored the requirement that sperm donors be tested for genetic and sexually transmitted diseases. It was temporarily closed by New York state regulators in 1995 for failing to pass along information about “high-risk social and sexual behavior. And in the 1990s, Idant settled a lawsuit from a white mother who said it gave her the wrong sperm, from a black donor. Officials from Daxor, Idant’s former parent company, said in a statement that Rizzo’s lawsuit was “meritless.” In court filings, Idant attorneys called the accusations by Rizzo “inflammatory, specious and dangerous,” and said her claims did not establish that the company “knew any of the alleged representations to be false.” Citing privacy concerns, the sperm banks declined to contact the donor regarding a request for an interview, and he did not respond to messages left on an online profile. Rochester Cryobank, which also sold sperm from the same donor, has gone out of business. Manhattan Cryobank, now part of California Cryobank, said that the donor had over a dozen successful births with zero reports of any children affected by autism. It confirmed that it had refunded the payment made by a woman who had purchased the donor’s sperm but had not yet used it; she heard about Rizzo’s lawsuit and asked for her money back. But the company said the donor’s sperm was not removed from its inventory because it did not have enough informa-

tion to further investigate the autism link. As of August, Repro Lab was still selling vials, priced at $450-$525, from the donor. A Repro Lab official said they received a report from an anonymous caller regarding an increased risk of autism, but the report was “unsubstantiated,” as the donor “did not report any history of autism in his family.” “We would deny participation to a donor in our program if he or any first-degree relative had a history of autism,” the company said.

The scientist Desperate for help, Rizzo Googled “world renowned geneticist” and “autism” and came up with the University of Toronto’s Stephen Scherer’s name on several research papers and a YouTube video. “I have two boys ages 3 & 4 that have been diagnosed and live with autism,” she emailed. “I have connected with other moms from the same sperm donor. We have found that 7 or 8 children have been diagnosed with autism. . . . This was a shock and devastation to say the least.” Scherer was so intrigued that he replied at 4:36 a.m. He had never heard of such a large cluster in one generation of a biological family. “It was the perfect kind of genetic experiment,” he said in a recent interview. For more than 20 years, Scherer’s lab, based at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, has been collecting, cataloguing and trying to find patterns in the DNA of families affected by autism. It has more than 20,000 samples. A similar project, called SPARK and funded by the Simons Foundation in New York, has amassed 85,000. Scientists know of more than 100 genes that appear to be associated with autism. Some are inherited, while others occur as new mutations. Most mutations associated with autism do not definitively cause the condition; they only increase someone’s risk. But, Scherer says, an intriguing subset of “high impact” genes — estimated to be involved in 5 to 20 percent of all

Rizzo hopes her lawsuit will lead to greater oversight of the sperm bank industry. “I did not sue because my children are autistic,” she says. “I was suing to right a wrong.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

autism cases — appears to directly result in autism. When researchers tested Rizzo’s older son’s blood, Rizzo says they found two gene mutations linked to autism — MBD1 and SHANK1. Her younger son has the MBD1 variant. Rizzo said all seven of the half-siblings whose parents had them tested have at least one of these mutations. Neither was inherited from Rizzo, according to the tests, she said. While the research is still preliminary and the donor could have numerous other biological children who are not on the autism spectrum, Scherer says, “our hypothesis is that it’s something in his DNA.”

The children Doctors diagnose autism based on behaviors — rigidity, repetitive habits, difficulty with seeing things from someone else’s perspective. Rizzo’s sons can speak, and the older is starting to read and write. Doctors have told her they are somewhere in the middle of the autism spectrum. Both are still in diapers, throw their hands over their ears when there is a loud sound, and have not made friends at school. The elder’s huge blue eyes light up when he’s spinning and flapping his arms. The younger gets very upset if someone stands close to him, and has trouble engaging in conversations about anything other than Super Mario Bros. The boys, who attend an intensive autism therapy program at school, have daily meltdowns. As for the other children Rizzo discovered, one half brother around their age who lives on the East Coast is mainstreamed in school and a gentle and happy child, his mother said in an interview. But he is several years behind in school. Another half brother is very high functioning, his mother says, but is in full-time special education because of difficulties with speech and dyslexia. Rizzo loves her children, and said she believes God gave them to her for a reason. She finds a lot of joy in simple moments such as taking them to water parks, sharing slushies and piling into one bed reading “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man.” But she wishes things could be easier for them, and she worries for their future. On March 14, she agreed to end the lawsuit by accepting an offer of $250,000 from the company. After the lawyers took their share, her ex — who takes care of the children one day a week and every other weekend — was awarded half of the rest. Rizzo said she desperately needed the money to pay for behavioral and socialskills therapies not covered by public assistance, to create a trust for the boys’ long-term care, and so that the family could get their own apartment. She hopes her case will push government regulators to impose greater oversight of the sperm bank industry. “I did not sue because my children are autistic. I was suing to right a wrong.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A Rubik’s Cube of government secrets N ONFICTION

REVIEWED BY

G REG M ILLER

I PERMANENT RECORD By Edward Snowden Metropolitan Books. 352 pp. $30

t has been more than six years since Edward Snowden landed at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow for what he expected to be a tense but temporary wait for a connecting flight on his way to asylum in Ecuador. Instead, he was stranded at the airport for 40 days in a futile search for safe passage beyond the reach of the U.S. government. When he finally left the terminal, it was as a pawn in a U.S.-Russia standoff, and he was confronting life as a permanent resident of Moscow. “Exile,” he writes in his new memoir, “is an endless layover.” The espionage abuses that Snowden exposed before he became a fugitive in 2013 — most notably the U.S. government’s mass collection of unsuspecting Americans’ phone records — look no less alarming in hindsight. But after the reckoning he provoked came a wave of technology-driven crises: Russia’s election interference in 2016, the racist manifestos that surfaced after mass shootings, the broader descent into dysfunctional public discourse. Snowden’s book, “Permanent Record,” is an exploration of his disenchantment with a digital universe that, early in his life, he saw as a source of liberation, even salvation. He traces his rapid path from a tech-obsessed teen to positions of tremendous access at powerful U.S. spy agencies, culminating in his decision to expose the sweeping and invasive surveillance networks that the CIA and National Security Agency had erected in the aftermath of 9/11. Snowden’s consuming concern for personal privacy that he says compelled his leak works against him as the author of a memoir. He revealed some of the U.S. government’s most closely guarded intelligence programs, but he withholds from readers any truly revealing material about his own life. As a result, “Permanent Record” is a book that mostly skims the surface of Snowden’s relative-

JULIET LINDERMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Edward Snowden’s disclosure of domestic spying by the government in 2013 was one of the most significant security breaches in U.S. history. “I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me,” he writes.

ly familiar life story. While Snowden is not completely forthcoming in his account of one of the most serious security breaches in U.S. history, he provides glimpses of his tradecraft. While working in 2012 at an NSA facility called the Tunnel, under a pineapple field in Hawaii, Snowden used his access as a systems administrator to begin assembling a library of documents on the agency’s most far-reaching surveillance programs. Night by night, he probed the corners of the agency’s network and copied the files to a micro SD card, the size of a fingernail, that he smuggled past security guards in the “priedoff square of a Rubik’s cube” that he carried everywhere. His ability to solve the Rubik’s puzzle in seconds dazzled colleagues. He gave cubes as gifts to those he was seeking to dupe and gave them tips on how to solve them. “The more that people got used to them, the less they’d ever want a closer look at mine,” he reasoned.

After assembling his collection of files, he began reaching out tentatively to journalists. Some of the most gripping passages in the book center on his forays around Oahu in a car loaded with a laptop and technical equipment. He would pilfer wireless signals from resorts and libraries to send encrypted messages to journalists. He told his employer — at that time he was working on contract to the NSA — that he needed to take an emergency medical leave. Then he disappeared, paying cash for an airline ticket to Hong Kong. The revelations triggered what President Barack Obama grudgingly called an overdue “national conversation” about the country’s surveillance powers. In time, U.S. spy agencies were forced to retreat from operations that had stretched if not exceeded constitutional limits. In the latter section of the book, he describes a gripping scene when Russian officials whisk him into a room where they pressure him to cooperate. “If you want to

search my bag, it’s right here,” he said. “But I promise you, there’s nothing in it that can help you.” Weeks later, Russian authorities finally issued him a temporary visa for a stay that has now dragged on for six years. One of this book’s greatest flaws is that it gives us almost no meaningful insight into that life of exile. Snowden describes how he was joined in Russia by his American girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and offers their marriage two years ago as a happy ending. But what is that existence really like? Does he have regrets? To what extent has he pursued a possible return to the United States? And most important, how has he adapted to life in a nation known for the sort of repressive surveillance that he feared was encroaching on his own country? n Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent for The Washington Post, is the author of “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Horror tale has familiar quandary

How lawlessness harms our oceans

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

REVIEWED BY

W ILLIAM S HEEHAN

wenty years ago, Stephen King’s highflying career nearly came to an end when he was struck by an out-of-control vehicle near his home in rural Maine. The decades since that near-fatal encounter have been a kind of bonus round, and King has taken full advantage. His output during this period includes more than 20 novels and several collections of short fiction, along with numerous screenplays and assorted nonfiction. Always prolific, King seems to have tapped into a bottomless reservoir of narrative. “The Institute,” is the latest to emerge, and it is classic King, with an extra measure of urgency and anger. Beneath its extravagant plot and typically propulsive prose, the book is animated by a central concern that could not be more relevant: the inhumane treatment of children. King’s ability to generate worldclass scares has never been the most important aspect of his work. More central to his enduring popularity is his ability to create textured, credible portraits of real people beset by appalling circumstances and struggling, often futilely, to survive. Lately, King has turned his empathetic vision outward, addressing the social and political crises pressing down on us all. “The Institute” begins in DuPray, S.C., far from the eventual center of the narrative. King quickly introduces us to the town and its denizens, chief among them Tim Jamieson, a roving former policeman who will play a vital role in the dramas to come. The action then shifts to Minneapolis and to the home of the novel’s protagonist, 12-year-old Luke Ellis. Luke is a bona fide, off-thecharts genius who possesses a minor talent for telekinesis. The story begins in earnest when a trio of thugs invade Luke’s home, kill his parents and carry him off to the destination of the novel’s title. The Institute is a clandestine organization located deep in the

Maine woods. It exists for one purpose only: to study, enhance and exploit the paranormal talents of its youthful prisoners. Through invasive techniques that amount to little more than torture, the Institute staff attempts to transform their charges into psychic weapons against political enemies. The ensuing narrative invites us to ponder the image of children separated from their parents and forced to live in brutal circumstances, all to serve the purposes of powerful men. The bulk of the action takes place in the Institute itself and concerns the concerted efforts of a group of traumatized kids to understand and utilize their own abilities, and to turn those abilities against their captors. The result is a scenario that plays to the author’s strengths. Few writers have King’s ability to create credible young people whose nascent qualities prefigure the adults they will (with luck) become. And even fewer have the imaginative resources that King brings to bear on his portrait of life at the Institute, a life filled with large and small cruelties, and with a chilling indifference to the effect those cruelties have on the most vulnerable among us. The Institute, King tells us, not only destroys its chosen victims. It also destroys the “moral compass” of those who work there too long. Once again, the real world peers out from behind the curtain of King’s fiction. Throughout his long career, King has been committed to the bedrock notion that stories matter, that they help us understand both ourselves and the world we inhabit. “The Institute,” filled as it is with anger, sorrow, empathy and, yes, hope, reiterates that commitment with undiminished power. It is a first-rate entertainment that has something important to say. We all need to listen. n Sheehan is the author of “At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub.”

T THE INSTITUTE By Stephen King Scribner. 576 pp. $30.00

THE OUTLAW OCEAN Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier By Ian Urbina Knopf. 544 pp. $30

REVIEWED BY

A LYSSA R OSENBERG

he remote is now very near: Mount Everest has traffic jams, and Instagram influencers are posing at Chernobyl. The Google Car maps where we live, photographing our homes usually when the lawn is unkempt. The world has never felt smaller or more known, for good and ill. Into that world comes Ian Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean” bearing an unsettling idea: There is still much we don’t know about our world, and the consequences of our ignorance are likely to arrive onshore not in a gentle swell but with crashing force. The result is a book that leaves behind the unnerving feeling that we’re becalmed and can move in no positive direction: “The Outlaw Ocean” brings the reader up close to an overwhelming truth, but the magnitude of the revelation is paralyzing. The book grew out of Urbina’s reporting about the sea for the New York Times, and as a result, it is constructed as a series of seafaring yarns. The installments vary wildly in tone, as you might expect in the nautical genre of storytelling. Max Hardberger, a raffish oceanic repo man, stars in Urbina’s heist story. Offshore abortionist Rebecca Gomperts helps women in an outlaw feminist fable. Captains Adam Meyerson and Wyanda Lublink are the book’s environmentalist Ahabs, chasing down not a whale but a Japanese ship that slaughters whales in exceptionally brutal fashion. And men like Lang Long, a Cambodian who was trafficked and sold into the Thai fishing industry, are modernday Billy Budds in a system that lacks even the rough justice of a drumhead court-martial. That Urbina has been able to pluck these people out of the vast blue expanse that surrounds them and locate them, both on the map and in our minds, at least for a moment, is an impressive feat of reporting. While all nonfiction books presumably exist to tell

readers something they didn’t already know, “The Outlaw Ocean” uses our lack of knowledge to bolster his argument: If we don’t know much about sea slavery or the battles between environmentalists and the fishing industry, it’s because it’s hard for us landlubbers to know what happens so far from shore. This isn’t the only sense in which Urbina has constructed his book as a kind of inexorable current. Though it certainly has its lighter segments, his stories keep converging on a grim point: that the vastness of the ocean has served the purposes of governments and businesses that prefer to operate in a realm without rules. There are exceptions, like the tiny island nation of Palau, which is trying to curb illegal fishing through quirks of maritime law that give it dominion over 230,000 square miles of ocean. But apparently, there are plenty of powerful people who stand to benefit from the lawless state of the ocean — and plenty more of us who so badly want to believe that we can have cheap, ethically harvested seafood that we’re willing to let them keep it that way. That may be difficult to do after reading “The Outlaw Ocean.” Urbina’s chronicles of man’s inhumanity to man, as well as to fish had me considering giving up seafood. As with plenty of what takes place on land, it’s dispiriting to think that we’ve chosen this state of affairs, and it may be too late to recover the trash that’s made its way to the deepest waters on Earth or to restore the fish and sea animal populations devastated by our insatiable appetites. But we decided to make the oceans outlaw territory; that, at least, is a decision we might be able to take back, even if only a league at a time. n Rosenberg writes about culture and politics for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Hong Kong’s protesters need a leader to succeed DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column in The Washington Post. Ignatius has also written eight spy novels.

HONG KONG — As tens of thousands of protesters marched down Hennessy Road toward government headquarters this past Sunday afternoon chanting pro democracy slogans and waving American flags, it was an exuberant celebration of this territory’s yearning for freedom. ¶ The protesters seemed heedless of the danger: Men and women, young and old, ninjaclad teenagers and moms with their kids, all joined in the 15th straight weekend of protest. A doctor at a hospital, a 56yearold schoolteacher and a 19yearold girl studying German, English and philosophy stopped to explain to me their chant: “Fight for freedom! Stand with Hong Kong!” When the marchers passed a pro-Beijing newspaper office, they booed. Approaching the police headquarters, they raised their middle fingers and shouted insults, calling the cops gangsters and dogs. In the hot afternoon sun, they distributed blue fans imprinted with a cartoon of a frantic fish and the words: “I thought water was a basic fish right . . . and I thought freedom was a basic human right.” Watching the Hong Kong protests is exhilarating in a world where democracy often seems in retreat and autocrats are on the rise. But I had a nagging fear, too. This idealistic, largely leaderless protest reminds me of the early days of the Arab Spring. That worries me. Without strong leadership, this movement could have a similar unhappy ending. Sunday afternoon ended with a spasm of violence that’s a foreboding of trouble ahead. The hardcore protesters lingered outside the government offices on Harcourt Road while the other marchers moved on. Watching from an overpass 100 yards away, I

could see the young would-be warriors crouching behind concrete barriers, cradling bricks and, it turned out, hidden petrol bombs — which they soon began hurling toward the riot police. As the petrol bombs torched trees and grass inside the government compound, the protesters cheered. The young radicals wanted a confrontation, and they eventually got one. Canisters of tear gas were fired from nearby buildings, and a water cannon advanced, followed by baton-wielding riot police. (My thanks to Robert Godden and Jennifer Wang of Rights Exposure, a monitoring group, who provided me with protective gear so I could watch the drama unfold.) It’s now more than 100 days since the pro-democracy protests began in early June. The South China Morning Post tallied the numbers: So far, there have been 2,414 rounds of tear gas fired and 1,453 people arrested. The economic impact is growing, too. Cathay Pacific, a Hong Kong airline, reported a 38 percent slump in inbound traffic in August compared with

KYLE LAM/BLOOMBERG

Riot police aim a tear-gas gun at demonstrators in Hong Kong this past Sunday. The pro-democracy protests first started in early June.

a year earlier; some hotels reported their occupancy rates falling to nearly half. The democratic movement has deep roots here. At nearly every rapid-transit stop and public gathering place, there’s what’s known as a “Lennon Wall,” with graffiti, placards and personal protest notes. The authorities take down the messages, and by the next day, people have posted a new array. A few weeks ago, demonstrators gathered at shopping malls and other public places to sing their new anthem, “Glory to Hong Kong,” which proclaims: “Freedom shall shine upon us.” Martin Lee, a human-rights activist who led democracy protests a generation ago and is now 81, tells me he sympathizes even with the militants who have used violent tactics. “For 35 years, I used peaceful means, and they ignored me,” he says. Where is this lovable but illdefined movement heading? During a week in Hong Kong, I put that question to militant protesters and pro-Beijing government officials, as well as to local business leaders and media pundits. In several dozen conversations, I heard the same basic answer that Lee gave:

“How will it end? I don’t know.” It’s now a precarious stalemate: The Hong Kong government is weak and waging what amounts to a weekly standoff; Beijing is frustrated but seemingly doesn’t want to intervene militarily; the protesters have broad popular support but no leaders who could forge a pragmatic victory. A prominent former Hong Kong official told me he wants to negotiate with the young protesters, but in this amorphous, Internet-based movement, he can’t find them. What’s profoundly moving is that the Hongkongers are openly defying mainland China, which in 1997 promised “one country, two systems” but is widely seen to have reneged. A former official explains why he became disenchanted: “I thought we were on the same railway line. Hong Kong was ahead of the mainland, but we were headed to the same destination (of freedom). I don’t believe that anymore.” This is a brave, noble movement. It needs leaders who can decide what success looks like, and seize it now, while they’re winning. The road darkens ahead. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Meritocracy BY

D ANIEL M ARKOVITS

Meritocracy seems like common sense. Who could possibly object to the idea that people should get ahead based on their own accomplishments, rather than their parents’ social class? This seems the natural way to give everyone a fair shot at success. But meritocracy is not the great leveler that we often hold it up to be. The system is rigged. Inequality is as bad as ever. And meritocracy is the culprit. MYTH NO. 1 College admissions are driven by corruption. But the system is mostly meritocratic. The lengths that families went to in the Varsity Blues scandal — one allegedly paid $6.5 million to get a child into Stanford — highlight just how unusual outright, illegal corruption remains. And while legacy preferences are immoral, legacy applicants also tend to have strong academic credentials. Elite colleges are full of extremely high-level academic achievers: Harvard’s median student scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT. This numbers would look very different if corruption and nepotism alone dominated elite admissions. MYTH NO. 2 A meritocracy ensures opportunities for all. But economic inequality turns meritocracy into a mechanism by which rich parents can pass their privilege down to their children. No area of household spending is more sensitive to rising incomes than on education, which means inequality warps outcomes. The richest school districts now spend more than twice as much per student per year as middleclass schools, and elite private schools spend up to six times as much. That helps yield higher scores on standardized tests and admissions to more elite universities. Academically, children of

elite parents now dramatically outperform middle-class children. Students whose parents make more than $200,000 per year now score about 250 points higher on the SAT than students whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000 and about 390 points higher than students whose parents make less than $20,000. MYTH NO. 3 Elite private education is paid for by the families who use it. Private education’s very name announces a separation from the public system and, by implication, from public funding. Rich families presumably pay their own way. But that’s not really true. Private schools and colleges earn endowment income taxfree, and alumni donations are tax-deductible. These advantages have conspired to allow elite private schools to become extravagantly wealthy, while subsidized by taxpayers. A super-elite private high school might have an endowment of more than $1 billion; the 10 biggest university endowments total more than $200 billion. All this means that the public is subsidizing the wealthiest students. MYTH NO. 4 Technological innovation makes inequality inevitable. The McKinsey Global

STEVEN SENNE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Actress Lori Loughlin arrives at federal court in Boston on April 3 to face charges in the Varsity Blues scandal. While such high-profile scams gain attention, most college admissions are based on merit.

Institute — the consulting firm’s research arm — forecasts that about a third of the U.S. workforce, overwhelmingly in mid-skilled jobs, will be displaced by automation by 2030. But that replacement isn’t inevitable; it would be a result of choices made by policymakers and elites. Technology depends on social and economic forces. The Industrial Revolution was stimulated when a wave of unskilled workers reached England’s cities, and the innovations of industrial production, which targeted this new labor source, helped make unskilled workers more productive and thus more valuable. Present-day innovation’s overwhelming bias in favor of skilled workers reflects the same mechanism, now pushing in the opposite direction — it reduces the need for unskilled labor. MYTH NO. 5 Meritocracy serves the winners well. But meritocracy is also a pitiless struggle to get and stay

ahead. The competition for admission to elite colleges has become so intense that almost any failure disqualifies an applicant. The strain exacts a toll, and students at rich high schools are now more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than students from poor backgrounds and are two or three times as likely as average students to suffer anxiety and depression. After graduation, meritocrats must work with crushing intensity to extract a return from their extravagant educations. Elite lawyers bill nearly twice as many hours per year today as they did in 1960; bankers’ hours — a term derived from the 10-to-3 business day once fixed by banks — have given way to the ironically named “banker nine-to-five,” which begins at 9 a.m. on one day and runs through 5 a.m. on the next. n Markovits, the Guido Calabresi professor of law at Yale Law School, is the author of “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.”

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This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination, and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. For use only by adults twenty-one and older. Keep out of the reach of children.