The Washington Post National Weekly. November 3, 2019

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2019

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

The trouble with chocolate 8 A decade after Mars and other makers vowed to stop deforestation, the problem persists. PAGE PAGE 12

Politics A longer impeachment effort 6

Nation Mental sick days for students 8

5 Myths Testosterone 23

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POLLING

Majority credit Trump for raid

BY S COTT C LEMENT AND E MILY G USKIN

views that are also very similar to a January Post-ABC poll in which 51 percent said Trump’s policies had damaged the country’s reputation. majority of Americans say President As with after the bin Laden killing, AmeriTrump deserves credit for the death of cans have limited expectations that Baghdadi’s Islamic State leader Abu Bakr aldeath will make the United States safer from Baghdadi, although this past weekterrorism. Just over one-quarter say this, 26 end’s successful raid has failed to improve percent, while 16 percent say the United States ratings for Trump’s strength as a leader, a will be “more at risk” and 54 percent Washington Post-ABC News poll say there has not been much finds. change. A Fox News poll immediThe public also offers mixed reately after bin Laden’s killing found actions to Trump’s withdrawal of 22 percent saying the United States American troops from the border was safer from terrorism, while a 47 between Syria and Turkey, with percent plurality said there had not over 4 in 10 saying the move will been much change. weaken U.S. efforts against the Republicans are most optimistic Islamic State while others predict about the effect of Baghdadi’s little negative impact. death, with 45 percent saying it will The Post-ABC poll conducted make the United States safer, comthis past Sunday through Wednespared with 22 percent of political day finds a 54 percent majority of independents and 15 percent of Americans saying Trump should Democrats. get a great deal or “some” credit for The successful raid targeting Baghdadi’s death after ordering a Baghdadi came only weeks after nighttime military raid of a comTrump announced the withdrawal pound in northwest Syria on Oct. from northeastern Syria of about 26. Trump said Baghdadi fled into a JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST 1,000 U.S. troops who were workdead-end tunnel where he detonating to combat the Islamic State in ed a suicide vest that killed him. No President Trump announces the death of Islamic State leader Abu partnership with Syrian Kurdish U.S. troops died or were injured in Bakr al-Baghdadi. A Post-ABC poll finds a 54 percent majority saying forces. Aided by U.S. and coalition the raid.

Trump should get a great deal or “some” credit for the death. air power and assistance, local Trump garners substantial credKurdish fighters had driven the terrorist Post-ABC poll finds 44 percent saying Trump it across oft-polarized partisan lines for his group out of areas under its control. “is a strong leader,” little different from the 48 role in Baghdadi’s death. Nearly 4 in 10 The Post-ABC poll finds 44 percent of adults percent who said that at the start of the year.

Democrats and just over half of independents saying the U.S. withdrawal will “weaken” A separate question finds roughly twice as say he should get at least some credit, with ongoing U.S. efforts against the militants, many Americans saying the Trump administhose numbers rising to more than 7 in 10 though slightly more say it will either “make tration’s policies have made the United States among fellow Republicans. But Trump reno difference” (37 percent) or “strengthen” less respected, rather than more respected, ceives fewer plaudits than President Barack (12 percent) anti-Islamic State efforts. n around the world, 54 percent vs. 28 percent — Obama after Obama ordered a 2011 U.S. strike

A

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that killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Then, 76 percent said Obama should get “a great deal” or “some” credit, according to a Post-Pew Research Center poll.

While Obama received a short-term boost in popularity after bin Laden’s killing, the successful raid against Baghdadi does not appear to have helped Trump’s image as a leader. The

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 6, No. 4

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Deforestation has toppled tall trees and damaged lands near the city of Bangolo, Ivory Coast. Photo by SALWAN GEORGES of The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Act of defiance fires up Trump’s base G RIFF W ITTE in Fort Myers, Fla. BY

W

hen it came to impeachment, the congressman wanted “to get all the facts on the table.” He thought the ambassadors testifying in closed session were “professional diplomats” and that an apparent admission from the White House lectern of a quid pro quo with Ukraine should be taken at face value.

At another time, under a different president, Republican Rep. Francis Rooney’s words might have seemed innocuous, banal to the point of irrelevance.

But this is 2019, the president is Trump and in the country clubs and gated communities of Rooney’s ruby-red district along southwest Florida’s shimmering Gulf Coast, the comments provoked a collective howl.

Republican Facebook pages lit up with indignation that Rooney had failed to denounce the impeachment inquiry as “a witch hunt.” Party activists traded outraged texts. Some took their case directly to the congressman, protesting what they saw as an act of supreme disloyalty to a leader they say they have come to revere more than any in their lifetimes.

“I told him, ‘You’ve betrayed your country, your president and your constituents,’ ” said Doris Cortese, 80, the vice chair of the Lee County Republican Executive Committee, recounting a conversation with Rooney.

“My exact words to him were: ‘Get out.’ ” Within hours, the longtime Republican insider had, announcing on Fox News his decision not to run again after two terms.

The dramatic late-October sequence traced a now familiar arc of Trump’s presidency. Republicans who dare to step out of line get pummeled for their trouble.

Rather than inspire imitators, they become object lessons — a warning to others of the dangers of disobedience. The dynamic helps explain why every GOP House member — Rooney included — voted Thursday against opening

PHOTOS BY ZACK WITTMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The president’s supporters aren’t breaking over impeachment an impeachment inquiry, even as Democrats voted nearly unanimously in favor.

Rooney’s toe-dip into the whirlpool of subversion had, for a brief while, appeared like it could be different, at least when viewed from Washington.

Polls show that support for impeachment among Democratic and independent voters is rising as the facts documenting a presidential abuse of power pile up.

Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have grown increasingly agitated with the White House on a range of issues, from Middle East

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

policy to Trump’s choice of venues for the Group of 7 summit.

But seen from here in southwest Florida — the heart of Trump country in a state he will need to win next year to hold the White

House — the president’s base is not cracking. It’s growing stronger. By outing himself as a less-than-reliable ally, Republican activists say, Rooney did the party a service as it attempts to weed out all who might waver.

“If he’s not going to vote with the president,” Cortese said, “we can get someone who will.”

Rooney said in an interview that he decided to retire because he accomplished what he wanted to in Washington and that his announcement was unrelated to his comments on impeachment, which had come just a day earlier.

Doris Cortese, vice chair of the Lee County Republican Executive Committee, was one of many Republicans outraged with Rep. Francis Rooney (Fla.), left, after he refused to rule out a vote for impeachment.

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POLITICS He also said he believed he could have run and won again.

But he acknowledged that the outcry about his remarks had been loud and that many Republican primary voters in his affluent southwest Florida district would not tolerate any daylight between their congressman and the president.

“If there’s going to be a vote, I want to know all the facts,” Rooney said. “There are a lot of people down there who don’t like that.”

Trump’s famous boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Rooney said, certainly applied in some quarters of a district the president had carried by 22 points.

“Nobody would ever say that about George W. Bush or Bush 41 or Obama or Clinton or even the sainted Ronald Reagan,” said Rooney, 65, a wealthy businessman whose family-owned construction firm built presidential libraries for the Bushes. “This is a unique phenomenon that we’re facing here.”

And is that sort of devotion good for the country?

“I think it’s better when people think,” he said.

National polls bear out the idea that Republicans are sticking with the president. A Washington Post average of surveys since mid-October finds that more than 8 in 10 Democrats and nearly half of all independents favor impeachment. Both figures have jumped substantially in the past month, as the picture of Trump’s Ukraine dealings becomes more complete.

But the Republican figure remains low, with just about 1 in 10 GOP voters backing the process.

Trump voters on Florida’s Gulf Coast said they were unbothered by testimony from administration officials indicating that the president had used the powers of his office to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political rival. But they were incensed by the way they said that Democrats were pursuing Trump’s possible removal from office, including by hearing testimony in closed session.

“It’s not correct, it’s not constitutional, it’s unprecedented and it’s probably illegal,” said Marty Wisher, a 54-year-old artist and avid Republican volunteer.

Sitting at Lee County GOP headquarters — in a strip mall wedged among golf and tennis clubs —

Wisher sported a necklace with the word “Trump” emblazoned in sparkly sequins, along with a bracelet to match.

She wakes in the morning to the thrill of her gold-cased phone buzzing as the president tweets.

There is almost nothing that she wouldn’t do for him — including helping him make good on his signature promise with her own hands.

“If he asks for volunteers, well, I guess I’m going to go learn how to build a wall,” she said.

It wasn’t always obvious that Trump could inspire such devotion here. A haven for retirees and families seeking a quieter and sunnier lifestyle than the one on offer in cities up north, the coastal region that includes Fort Myers, Na-

Top: A cardboard cutout of President Trump at the Lee County Republican Headquarters office.

Above: Marty Wisher, an artist and a member of the Republican Women of Cape Coral Club, wears her Trumpthemed jewelry.

ples, Sanibel Island and Cape Coral has long been defined by an appetite for low taxes and fiscal conservatism.

During the Obama years, the tea party took off here, with the ballooning federal deficit becoming a rallying cry against the Democratic president.

In the 2016 primary, voters here seemed to initially favor favorite sons Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

Jonathan Martin, chair of the Lee County GOP, backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Trump seemed to be an afterthought — at least at first.

“We were hesitant,” Martin said.

“He was a New York City Democrat until recently. There was a lot of uncertainty.”

No more. The deficit might still be galloping ever higher, but Trump’s backers hardly seem to mind.

The president’s attacks on the media, undocumented immigrants and U.S. allies that he accuses of not paying their share all play well here. His appointment of conservative judges earns him plaudits from church pulpits. And the local economy, which already had been strengthening under President Barack Obama following a sharp downturn when the housing bubble burst, has never been better.

“I consider him to be our David against Goliath,” said Nancy Price, a 73-year-old retiree who spends much of her free time volunteering for Republican campaigns.

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That’s why Republicans — whether they’re Trump fans — say the Ukraine investigation is unlikely to make much of an impact here, no matter where the facts ultimately lead.

“It won’t move the dial,” said Chauncey Goss, the son of a former Republican congressman. He has run for the seat twice and also chairs a state board.

To say otherwise “is wishful thinking,” he said.

When Rooney spoke up, many here were perplexed by why he would take such a risk.

“My first thought was, ‘Why is he going against the president without all the facts? Does he know something we don’t?’ ” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner.

Rooney did have access to information others do not — at least not yet. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he sat in on hours of testimony from former ambassadors and White House officials. Trump has denounced them as nefarious emissaries of the “Deep State.” Rooney, who had been a Capitol Hill staffer during Watergate, said their testimony was troubling and credible.

Though Rooney insisted he had not yet seen evidence of behavior that merited impeachment, he wanted to have all the facts before making a call on “the most important vote I’ll cast.”

That was heresy to many Republican activists. Rooney already had upset them by breaking with the president on funding for Trump’s border wall. They had campaigned for both men, but there was no question who they would support if they had to choose.

“Rooney turned on us. Trump is staying with us,” Wisher said.

“That’s the difference.”

Wisher said she would not make the same mistake again and has plans to personally question would-be successors about how closely they will hew to Trump’s agenda.

Analysts predict the contest to replace Rooney next year ultimately will come down to who can show the greatest fealty to the president.

“They’ll all be trying to outdo each other,” said Peter Bergerson, a political scientist at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It will be the Ivory soap test. You’ve got to be 99.99 percent pure. At least.” n

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POLITICS

A disruptive impeachment process

BY M ICHAEL S CHERER AND M IKE D E B ONIS

H

ouse Democrats increasingly expect their impeachment effort against President Trump to stretch well past Thanksgiving, possibly forcing a Senate trial into January or later — a timeline that could disrupt the final weeks of campaigning before the party starts to choose its nominee.

House leaders had initially hoped to hold a floor vote before the Nov. 28 holiday so the Senate could hold trial before Christmas.

But the surprising number of witnesses agreeing to testify behind closed doors in the Capitol over the past few weeks has extended the timeline and sparked a debate over whether prolonged impeachment proceedings are politically prudent.

Some Democratic strategists have raised concerns that an extended process that bridges the holiday season risks losing the nation’s attention or lending credence to Republican claims that Democrats have been distracted from the bread-and-butter issues such as health care and job creation that they focused on in the 2018 election.

“The bandwidth and the attention span for it will be hard pressed once the holiday season is engaged,” said Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “I think this is not something people want on their dinner table.”

A January trial would also disrupt the final weeks of campaigning before the Iowa caucuses for candidates who are senators in Washington, while others including former vice president Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg continue to rally voters on hay bales. The caucuses are Feb. 3.

A divided House approved a resolution Thursday formally authorizing and articulating guidelines for the next phase of its impeachment inquiry, a move that signaled Democrats are on course to bring charges against

ERIN SCOTT/REUTERS

Democrats fear a drawn-out effort risks losing the nation’s attention and distracting from primaries Trump by the end of the year.

The 232-to-196 vote, which hewed closely to party lines, was expected to fuel the partisan fighting that has accompanied every stage of the impeachment probe and much of the Trump presidency. Nearly all Democrats backed the resolution, and House Republicans, who spent weeks clamoring for such a vote, opposed it.

Under the constitutional process, the House would vote to impeach with a simple majority vote.

The Senate would then hold a trial, with conviction requiring a vote of two-thirds of the senators present.

Other strategists have said that Trump and the Republican Party have reacted so poorly to the impeachment investigation that a drawn-out process could be beneficial to Trump’s rivals.

“He has been exhibiting all the behaviors that polling shows makes the voters who decide elections very nervous about him,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior White House adviser to President Barack Obama and now co-hosts

the “Pod Save America” podcast.

“Short circuiting the investigation to meet an arbitrary deadline is the greater political risk than having it bleed into 2020.”

On Capitol Hill, interviews with more than a dozen House Democrats revealed their hope to conduct a full and complete investigation, with some expressing concern about the process extending into January.

“The end of the year is the deadline still, and I certainly think it ought to happen before Iowa,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

“When you run against an incumbent, you have to make the case of why to fire them. The House has done that. But you also have to make the case of how you’re going to improve people’s lives.”

Others are focused more on the need to follow the facts.

“I think they should take as long as they need,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

“They shouldn’t take any extra time. But I don’t think there’s any magic to Thanksgiving or Christmas. This

Republican Reps.

Steve Scalise (La.), left, and Jim Jordan (Ohio) talk with reporters during a break on Tuesday in testimony being given by Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a witness in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct.

is a weighty matter, and if it takes several months, so be it.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has sided with the latter group, even as the team she has assembled to conduct the inquiry has been moving quickly, repeatedly seeking to avoid judicial involvement that might cause months of delay in an effort to produce more documents and testimony.

Republicans have repeatedly tried to use time as a weapon to get the upper hand in proceedings.

Trump and his staff have refused requests for documents and demanded that current and former officials decline House requests for documents.

In October, House Republicans tried to disrupt the investigative work, with members storming and delaying a closed-door witness interview.

So far, the Democratic National Committee and the top presidential campaigns have not weighed in on the timing debate, both because they do not want to politicize the process and because it is difficult to game out just what an extended process would mean.

Several senators running for president, including Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), a former state prosecutor, are likely to try to use a trial of Trump as a showcase for their candidacy. But the trial could also remove them from the campaign trail in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire just weeks before the vote.

Some in the Senate have weighed in on a separate debate over expanding the scope of the investigation, another decision that could extend the reach of the process.

“I think it’s important to get it done, get the information you need and move on,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the former chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“They just got to stay focused on Ukraine, get the information, and then hopefully come to some sort of [decision on] whether they’re going to send it over here.”

He said time was a factor, though not a decisive one.

“I just think it’s important that

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POLITICS they do their job in a very timely manner — whether it’s done by the end of the year or not, I can’t say,” Tester said.

Another group, including Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (DMich.), have echoed Pelosi in pushing back against an artificial timeline.

“I’ve heard we need to be done before Thanksgiving, that it needs to be done before Christmas, that it needs to be done before the first primary — it needs to be done when it’s done,” said House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (DMass.). “This has to be a dignified process and a process the American people respect.”

Hanging over the entire discussion is an awareness of the political nature of impeachment.

Though the proceedings have so far been held mostly behind closed doors, leaders of both parties are closely tracking public opinion polls, which have shown a clear growth in support for both an impeachment investigation and Trump’s removal since September.

A Washington Post-Schar School poll in early October found 58 percent of Americans supported opening the inquiry, while 49 percent supported recommending Trump’s removal from office. A CNN poll taken between Oct. 17 and 20 similarly found that 50 percent supported removing him from office.

The strong support for impeachment could put pressure on vulnerable Republican members of the Senate, including Sen. Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Sen. Martha McSally (Ariz.), who have recently signed on to a bill that condemns the House impeachment process.

Some Democratic strategists are hopeful a more extended impeachment proceeding will make it easier for their Democratic rivals to make the case that the GOP incumbents are more focused on defending Trump than on working for their state.

But other Democrats worry the same arguments could be made against their own presidential candidates, who have built campaigns around providing more support for middle-class families and new health insurance options. n

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After resignation, Hill vows to help ‘revenge porn’ victims BY

M ICHELLE Y E H EE L EE

A

fter announcing her resignation from Congress amid an ethics probe, Rep. Katie Hill says she wants to become an advocate for victims of unwanted distribution of explicit images, a practice better known as “revenge porn.”

Nude photos of Hill, who is accused of having a relationship with an aide in her office in violation of congressional ethics rules, were published on a conservative website and a British website. The articles also alleged that she previously had a relationship with a campaign staffer.

In a message to supporters, Hill apologized for her “imperfections” and promised to “fight to ensure that no one else has to live through what I just experienced” in connection with the release of the intimate photos.

“Some people call this electronic assault, digital exploitation. Others call it revenge porn.

As a victim of it, I call it one of the worst things we can do to our sisters and our daughters,” Hill said Monday in the video.

She continued: “I will not allow my experience to scare off other young women or girls from running for office. For the sake of all of us we cannot let that happen.”

In her resignation announcement this past Sunday, Hill said she was considering legal options over the photos and that “as long as I am in Congress, we’ll live fearful of what might come next and how much it will hurt.”

An ethics committee investigation could have lasted several months, pushing beyond the Dec. 6 filing deadline to run in the California primary on March 3.

Hill’s resignation, less than a year after flipping her seat from Republican hands in the 2018 midterms, will shake up the House race in her northeastern Los Angeles district.

On Monday, California State Assemblywoman Christy Smith

ZACH GIBSON/GETTY IMAGES

Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) resigned after nude photos of her were published on a conservative website and a British website.

announced she would run for the seat and released an array of endorsements from California Democratic leaders. Secretary of State Alex Padilla is also considering a run, according to a person familiar with internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

Despite the fact that the seat was previously held by a Republican, the district leans Democratic. Democrats expressed confidence they would win the open seat next year in a district that Hillary Clinton won by six percentage points in 2016.

That confidence is largely rooted in shifting demographics in the district, with more diverse and independent voters, said Darry Sragow, longtime Democratic strategist in California who runs the nonpartisan California Target Book.

“A Republican who wants that seat back is clearly going to have to distance himself or herself from the president, assuming that the president is on the ticket in November 2020,” Sragow said.

The controversy surrounding Hill comes at a politically sensitive time for the Democratic leadership, which is trying to remain focused on the impeachment inquiry, Sragow said.

The allegation raised against Hill would have been a major test of new ethics restrictions put in place after the #MeToo movement, prohibiting relationships between members of Congress and their staff.

The restrictions were put into place “with the understanding that there is a huge power dynamic between lawmakers and their staffers, and that can cause all sorts of ethical and moral problems,” said Jessica Levinson, ethics expert at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Additionally, she said, “you really want to be conducting the people’s business as opposed to personal business.”

The case involving Hill is a high-profile example of the threat of online abuse against individuals by weaponizing private images, said Mary Anne Franks, president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that focuses on fighting online abuse and discrimination.

Hill’s decision to consider pursuing legal action points to the challenges in seeking protection against the unwanted release of intimate photos. There is a patchwork of laws in 46 states that have different requirements as to what constitutes “revenge porn,” Franks said. n

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NATION

Students push for mental sick days BY

W ILLIAM W AN

I

n the face of rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among young people, some states and school systems have started allowing students to take mental-health days off from school.

Last year, Utah changed its definition of valid excuses for absences to include mental health issues. This summer, Oregon enacted a law — driven by a group of high school student activists — that allows students to take days off for mental health.

Students in other states, including Colorado, Florida and Washington, are attempting to get similar laws passed.

“High school can be a lonely, difficult place to begin with,” said Hailey Hardcastle, 19, who spent months lobbying for the Oregon law as a high school senior. “But there’s so much more pressure these days — getting into college, the social pressure, even just the state of the world and what you’re exposed to with climate change, and everything going on with politics. A lot of times it can feel like the world is about to end.”

Hardcastle and others encountered skepticism and resistance from lawmakers who worried that students would use mental health days as an excuse to skip school or that such a law would coddle young people.

But mental health problems among youths have been on a steady, alarming rise in recent years. A study this year showed a steeper hike in reports of mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts among teens and young adults than in people of other ages.

Suicidal thoughts among teens ages 18 or 19 increased 46 percent from 2008 to 2017, and suicide attempts among people ages 22 or 23 have doubled. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the rate of suicide increased by 56 percent from 2007 to 2017 among people ages 10 to 24. Suicide, in recent years, has become the secondmost-common cause of death

KRISTEN DOWNEY

Utah and Oregon have passed laws allowing such absences, which supporters say could save lives among teens and young adults. It has overtake homicides and is outpaced only by accidents.

Experts cannot easily explain the mental illness epidemic among youths. Some have attributed it to lack of community, the rise of social media, bullying or less sleep.

“I don’t think there’s one single answer,” said Jennifer Rothman, a senior manager at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “But we know there’s a real need to do something about it. And these mental sick days are a way to at least end the silence and talk about the problem.”

In Oregon, the idea for mental sick days came up at a summer camp of student leaders from high schools throughout the state, said Hardcastle and others who attended. Many students talked about suicides by friends and friends of friends. Some talked openly about their own struggles with mental illness.

The student leaders created a new group — Students for a

Healthy Oregon — and enlisted the help of psychologists and lobbyists to volunteer as advisers.

“We helped them figure out which legislators they needed to get on board and things like how to organize a letter-writing campaign,” said Robin Henderson, a psychologist and chief executive for behavioral health for the Providence Medical Group in Oregon.

“It was surprising the amount of pushback they got.”

Before the law, Oregon students could have up to five days of excused absences in a threemonth period for physical illness, doctor or dentist appointments or a family emergency. Outside those circumstances, they often would not be allowed to make up tests or homework they missed.

Some lawmakers grilled the students on their proposal. At a legislative hearing in April, state Sen. Mark Hass (D) said, “One of the things we’re dealing with up here is chronic absenteeism . . . that affects graduation rates.”

State Sen. Dallas Heard (R) said

Students prepare to testify before the Oregon legislature in February in support of mental-health days. After a year of lobbying, their bill was signed into law and enacted.

he believes students need to toughen up: “If we simply just start saying . . . that there really is no consequence for ramping up this idea that we should not have to come to work or practice or to school because we’re having a bad day . . . I’m concerned that’s going to continue to start eroding our society to the point where we have much, much bigger issues.”

Trying to answer the lawmakers’ concerns, high school senior Derek Evans responded, “The bottom line of this is there will be students that will abuse the system but there will be students that this will save.”

Evans talked about his struggles with anxiety and depression, and how recently — after being a longtime 4.0 student — he had to take four days off for mental health and was sternly warned by administrators that he would fail if he did not return to school immediately.

“The system appears not to support our students but to force them into classes when they are far from healthy,” Evans said.

Allowing students to take mental sick days could help parents and counselors take notice and spark conversations, other students said at the hearings.

“One the biggest problems that persists with mental health is the stigma around it,” Amit Paley, CEO and executive director of the LGBTQ youth suicide prevention group the Trevor Project, said in an interview. “If a young person can feel comfortable saying ‘I need help,’ that can be life-changing for a young person. It’s really different than having to lie about what’s going on just to take a sick day.”

This summer, after a year of lobbying, letter writing and testifying at their state capitol, the students in Oregon got their bill signed into law and enacted.

Since then, they have been advising student leaders in other states who are interested in getting similar laws passed.

In Colorado, students are working with officials to try to introduce a bill when the state legislature reconvenes in January. n

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COVER STORY

Mars Inc. wants to be a green company.

A decade after chocolate makers vowed to stop rampant deforestation, the problem has only gotten worse

BY STEVEN MUFSON in Elizabethtown, Pa.

Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s, Milky Way and other stalwarts of the nation’s Halloween candy bag, vowed in 2009 to switch entirely to sustainable cocoa to combat deforestation, a major contributor to climate change.

But Mars and other global chocolate makers are far from meeting that ambitious goal. Over the past decade, deforestation has accelerated in West Africa, the

source of two-thirds of the world’s cocoa.

By one estimate, the loss of tropical rainforests last year sped up more in Ghana and Ivory Coast than anywhere else in the world.

“Anytime someone bites on a chocolate bar in the United States, a tree is being cut down,” said Eric Agnero, an environmental activist in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast. “If we

9

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The issue is where its chocolate comes from.

PHOTOS BY SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

continue like that, in two, three, four years there will be no more forests.�

Worldwide, the pace of deforestation is alarming. In 2017, 40 football fields of tropical forests were lost every minute, according to Global Forest Watch, a nonprofit organization with online data and tools for gathering and monitoring forests.

Recent wildfires have focused atten-

tion on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, but West Africa is another major trouble spot. Ivory Coast has lost 80 percent of its forests over the past 50 years. And in Ghana, trees have been chopped down across an area the size of New Jersey, according to an estimate by the minister of lands and natural resources.

Although illegal mining accounts for some of the destruction, much of it is the

Cocoa farmers have chopped down vast swaths of old forests to make way for more cocoa plants near the city of Bangolo, Ivory Coast.

work of hundreds of thousands of poor cocoa farmers seeking to expand their plots by felling mature trees, often in national parks and protected forests.

Left to rot, those trees no longer capture and store carbon dioxide but instead release it into the atmosphere. According to the Woods Hole Research Center, tropical deforestation is currently responsible for about 10 percent of global

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

greenhouse gas emissions.

The failure to make progress against deforestation has tarnished the image and credibility of the chocolate industry at a time when it is already under fire for its practices in West Africa. The Washington Post reported in June about the use of child labor in West African cocoa fields, which has persisted despite promises decades ago to stop it.

Last year, Mars postponed its target date for switching entirely to sustainably produced cocoa from 2020 to 2025.

“Zero deforestation cocoa only exists where all the forest has already disappeared,” wrote Francois Ruf, an economist with CIRAD, a French agricultural research and international cooperation organization.

Traders, certification firms and the Ivorian and Ghanaian governments are struggling alongside chocolate companies to find a strategy that works. Mars, for example, has paid tens of millions of dollars extra for certified cocoa, and millions more to certification firms such as Rainforest Alliance.

Now, however, it’s skeptical that such firms can deliver, given the difficulty of monitoring the thousands of cocoa farmers scratching out harvests on small plots.

“The myth over the last 10 years was that certification would solve the problem of deforestation,” says Barry Parkin, chief procurement and sustainability officer at Mars. “In most cases, it was a little bit helpful. But it is not solving the core issues or assuring that your cocoa is deforestation-free.”

For cocoa farmer Coulibaly Abou, deforestation is not a climate catastrophe. It’s a living.

Since 2006, he has carved out a parcel for himself, knocking down tall trees and clearing brush to plant short cocoa trees. When the pods containing cocoa beans are ripe, he picks them, cuts them open, discards the white pulp, and spreads the wet beans on the ground to ferment and dry. It takes more than 400 beans to make a pound of chocolate, according to Sucden, a commodities trading firm.

“Everything here was once forest,” Abou, 35, said earlier this year as he walked along a shady path that connects his cocoa farm with the tiny hamlet of Gloplou in western Ivory Coast. He pointed to some of the once-towering trees that had been cut down, their wide trunks left to rot.

The additional farmland has enabled Abou to support his wife and six children, although just barely. They live in a two-room hut, one of about 20 in the village. After a bumper cocoa crop last year, the state-owned monopoly slashed prices by 36 percent. This year, the stingy prices have combined with a poor crop to leave Abou with just $600 in earnings.

BIG CHOCOLATE Nearly 5,000 miles and a world away, in a factory in the heart of Pennsylvania dairy country, Mars transforms the beans grown by Ivory Coast farmers such as Abou. The beans are roasted, milled and blended. Bitter nibs burst into a panoply of flavors. The factory is infused

Top: Workers gather cocoa beans outside a cooperative facility in the village of Gloplou in Ivory Coast.

Above: Cocoa farmer Coulibaly Abou, 35, struggles to earn enough for his family. He lives with his wife and six children, including his 1-year-old son, Sidiki, in Gloplou.

with the aroma of chocolate.

Mars prides itself on its sensitivity to climate change. In 2009, it was the first global chocolate company to pledge to use only sustainable cocoa. Five years later, it became the first U.S. company to join RE100, a group of companies vowing to get all of their electricity from renewable sources.

Founded a century ago around a kitchen table, Mars, based in McLean, Va., is still family owned and operates 150 factories in more than 80 countries. It purchases enough solar and wind power to meet the needs of its operations in Belgium, Brazil, Lithuania, the United Kingdom and the United States, and, since 2007, has cut its emissions by 25 percent.

Parkin said managing for climate change makes good business sense. “The emergence of more efficient solar and wind means we can source renewable energy at a lower cost than fossil fuels. This is not fanciful anymore,” he said.

“Every deal we’ve done, we’ve saved money.”

Mars — which also makes Wrigley’s gum, Uncle Ben’s rice and Pedigree pet food — looks beyond its own operations when calculating its carbon footprint. Unlike two-thirds of the 50 largest food and beverage companies in the United States and Canada, Mars looks at its entire supply chain, including the land-use decisions of West African farmers.

By that method, Mars says it emits 25 million tons of carbon a year. The vast majority — three-quarters of emissions — comes from agriculture, with 8 million tons coming from deforestation alone.

That task of doing something about it has fallen mainly on Parkin. In many companies, the sustainability chief is a public relations executive. But Parkin is head of both procurement and sustainability, merging two tasks that are often at odds.

At Mars, executives worry about the destructive effects of global warming on the agricultural commodities they need to buy. In addition to battling deforestation, the company has called for “a serious price on carbon,” Parkin said.

Mars has joined a campaign to lobby Congress to establish an “ambitious” carbon pricing system that would tax emitters.

Under a tax of $50 per ton, Parkin said, Mars would owe more than $1 billion a year. Congress has shown little interest in the idea.

CORRUPTION IS ‘PERVASIVE’ The giant chocolate companies are not solely to blame for not stopping deforestation. Environmentalists accuse governments, too.

Ivory Coast has created national parks and set aside other forests, but has not protected them.

About 40 percent of the country’s cocoa crop

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COVER STORY Tree cover

Tree cover loss since 2010

KLMNO WEEKLY

Cocoa production zones

G UI N E A IVORY COAST

SI ERR A L EO N E

GHANA NIGERIA TOGO

Yamoussoukro

LIBERIA

BENIN

Kumasi

Monrovia

Lagos

Lome Europe

Accra

Asia

Abidjan

Detail

Gulf of Guinea

Africa A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

Sources: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA; OECD, CIRAD, and Esri

comes from those areas, said Etelle Higonnet of Mighty Earth, a U.S.-based environmental group that issued a report called “Chocolate’s Dark Secret.” The Marahoué National Park alone has 30,000 illegal inhabitants, according to one estimate, including small farmers and refugees from the poor, drought-ridden and strife-torn countries of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

And as unrest rocked Ivory Coast in the early 2000s, stopping deforestation slipped down the government’s list of priorities.

Earlier this year, Vivid Economics, a consulting firm working with the Ivorian Ministry of Planning and Development, warned that “total loss of rural forest remains likely within a decade” in the country’s southwest region. At current rates, the report added, the entire forest in Biolequin, a major reservoir of virgin forest, could “disappear in less than a decade.”

Corruption is “pervasive,” according to the financial auditing firm KPMG, which told investors that Ivory Coast ranks 108th out of 176 countries.

Small farmers occupy the lowest rung of the cocoa beans’ journey. They sell to middlemen, known as “pisteurs,” who transport and sell bags of cocoa beans to cooperatives. The cooperatives then sell to large international trading houses such as Olam, Cargill and Barry Callebaut, which then sell to chocolate companies such as Mars.

In Ghana, the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) is the intermediary between farmers and foreign buyers. Last year, Cocobod squeezed the nation’s farmers by lowering prices below international market rates. Agnero, the activist, said that is pushing farmers deeper into the forests to enlarge their crops.

Ghana defends its record. It cites a tree-

planting campaign by young Ghanaians as well as an alphabet soup of other strategies. In July, the country signed a deal with the World Bank, freeing up $50 million to combat deforestation.

In Ivory Coast, Alain-Richard Donwahi, the minister of water and forests, said in an email that a new forest code adopted in July by the National Assembly would create a “legal framework” to protect forests. However, he said, the $1 billion cost remains a “major challenge” and help from the private sector will be “essential.”

The code calls for clearing all people out of the least-damaged forests; there, Donwahi said, “no human presence is tolerated.” In forests with some degradation, people will be removed over three years. And where damage is greatest, farmers will be resettled.

But ousting farmers from forest land has been a struggle. After Ivory Coast tried to drive farmers out of protected areas in 2016, Human Rights Watch said evictees had “suffered extortion and physical abuse by forest conservation authorities,” who demanded “gifts” — sometimes in cash and other times in livestock.

‘NOTHING HAS CHANGED’ In 2011, Mars’s Dove Chocolate gained the Rainforest Alliance’s seal of approval, which assures consumers that the cocoa came from farms that did not use child labor, harm wildlife or chop down trees. Dove’s Silky Smooth Dark Chocolate began sporting the alliance’s green frog seal in January 2012.

Then the Rainforest Alliance revealed that its certification system had failed; it could not vouch for every cocoa shipment. In Ivory Coast, it suspended or fired four auditing firms responsible for 90 percent of certifica-

100 MILES

THE WASHINGTON POST

“Supply chains, the engines of global growth, are broken.”

Barry Parkin, chief procurement and sustainability officer at Mars

tions awarded last year.

“We have discovered that noncertified cocoa has potentially been entering certified supply chains,” the group said on its website. It did not specify when the lapse took place.

Rainforest Alliance chief executive Han de Groot said the company can trace certified cocoa beans back from ships to farms. But industry experts said that would require a census, surveys and satellite maps that aren’t available. De Groot conceded that unreliable GPS coordinates for farms and forests have been a problem.

One major chocolate company, Barry Callebaut, says that it has built its own database with information on 185,000 farmers, their families, their trees and the outlines of their land. It says it has 300 people monitoring practices on the farms, and that it has developed a method of planting trees that would use drones to shoot seeds into the ground at a rate of 100,000 a day.

Next year, chocolate companies in Ivory Coast plan to use GPS coordinates to map about 1 million of the country’s 1.6 million farms, said Richard Scobey, a longtime World Bank official who now heads the World Cocoa Foundation.

That would help companies and international groups detect new encroachment on forests.

Ruf, the French agricultural expert, has decried the “declarations and zero deforestation slogans,” writing that “nothing has changed.”

Mars is cautious, too.

“Supply chains, the engines of global growth, are broken,” Parkin said in September 2018 at the international climate conference in Poland.

“We can no longer treat these as commodities of unknown origin and unknown climate impact.

You’ve got to radically change how you source these materials.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A love letter to Marine ‘grunts’ N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH D . S AMET

‘C CALL SIGN CHAOS Learning to Lead

By Jim Mattis and Bing West Random House.

300 pp. $28

all Sign Chaos” is a love story. Whatever else it may be — memoir, leadership handbook, chronicle of two decades of wars gone wrong abroad against the backdrop of a mercenary culture at home riven by “cynicism” and “tribalism” — the book, written by former defense secretary Jim Mattis and fellow Marine veteran Bing West, always returns to the object of Mattis’s deepest, most sustained affection: the Marine, specifically the infantryman or “grunt,” who risks his life, for his country, yes, but mostly, Mattis maintains, for his brothers-in-arms. “It’s well known among Marines that our greatest honor is fighting alongside our fellow sailors and Marines,” he writes.

Mattis regards himself as their “sentinel.” As almost every page makes clear, infantry troops are ever in his mind’s eye, even after he ascends to the highest echelons, because they are the ones most vulnerable to policy’s potentially lethal impact. Mattis refers to these men as “my lads” or “my young wolves.” Their manhood repeatedly contrasts with what he regards as the enemy’s cowardly lack of it. Women are peripheral to his vision of combat and to the book. An assertion toward the end that the military is “not a petri dish for social experiments” echoes what he has said about integrating women into combat units.

Mattis’s explicit motive for writing was to “attempt to pass to young leaders” the lessons of “over four decades of naval service.”

Mattis’s core principles would delight many young officers I know: Learn the culture, define the problem, encourage audacity and initiative, underwrite mistakes, protect mavericks, communicate intent clearly.

Readers looking for leadership lessons will find them in abundance, organized into three sections — direct, executive and strategic — and mapped onto Mattis’s

ROB CURTIS/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, center left, and Gul Agha Sherzai, center right, the governor of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, in 2001, welcome back nine Afghan fighters who were wounded by friendly fire.

career progression. Lessons are delivered in the aphoristic style popular in military and business cultures. Mattis encapsulates the “leadership fundamentals” he learned as a lieutenant in “three Cs”: competence, caring, conviction. He emphasizes “touchstones”: “Attitudes are caught, not taught” and “trust is the coin of the realm.”

This brevity suits well the swift narrative and reflects a military love of inspirational maxims. Yet their formulaic nature seems at odds with the deep thoughtfulness of which this man of action is clearly capable. With messianic zeal, Mattis champions reading as both “honor” and ethical duty. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

To meet each new challenge,

Mattis turns to his library: Xenophon, Napoleon, Sherman, Grant, T.E. Lawrence and Viscount Slim are among his favorites; he has pored over the campaigns of Alexander the Great; Marcus Aurelius has long been his lodestar. Reading has given Mattis not only a sense of historical continuity but also the agility to change his approach when circumstances demand.

Decades of serious reading and combat leadership have shaped what might well be Mattis’s most fiercely held belief: “You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.” War is inevitable, chaos endemic to it, but history doesn’t determine “its own unchangeable course,” and men have the power to shape it: “You are going to write history, my fine young sailors and Marines,” he writes to the 1st Marine Division on the eve of its 2004 deployment to Iraq, “so write it

well.”

Through it all, those sailors and Marines remain a point of clarity amid geopolitical turmoil and Mattis’s disappointment at being unable to dissuade the civilian policymakers he swore to obey from ill-advised “strategic gambles.”

Mattis wonders whether the military’s “hardwired . . . can-do spirit” diminished the ability of highranking commanders to provide frank assessments of strategic feasibility.

On the Pentagon desk where he signed orders to deploy troops, Mattis placed a card articulating his burden: “Will this commitment contribute sufficiently to the well being of the American people to justify putting our troops in a position to die?” He “would like to think that . . . the answer . . . is ‘yes.’ ” n Samet is the editor of “The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Jacob Marley, ghost unchained

Serving God while spying for the U.S.

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

N

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

owadays, it’s true, we’ve corralled our spooks and specters within the confines of Halloween, but for centuries the long, dark nights of winter inspired tales of supernatural visitors. Even today, they haunt us in what remains the season’s most popular holiday tale: “A Christmas Carol,” written by Charles Dickens in 1843.

“Marley was dead,” Dickens begins. “There is no doubt that Marley was dead.” When Scrooge endures that visitation from his old partner in chains, the man has been underground for seven years.

But now — to borrow the words of another great Victorian writer — the rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Marley lives.

Jon Clinch has revived the life behind the famous ghost in a prequel that fleshes out the early relationship between the two old misers in “A Christmas Carol.”

In “Marley,” Clinch begins when Jacob and Ebenezer are students at Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys. With an amusing imitation of Dickens’s style, Clinch writes that the academy has “all the qualities of a prison but the warmth, all the qualities of a graveyard but the fresh air.” Alone and naive, young Ebenezer falls under the protection of a savvier boy named Jacob who quickly takes advantage of him, and with that, the foundation of the partnership between Scrooge & Marley is set.

Although Clinch relies on the details provided in “A Christmas Carol,” he never seems cramped by them. Whereas Dickens describes Scrooge as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner,” that still leaves room to imagine what he was like when he was getting started in 1800. Clinch doesn’t merely introduce a younger “covetous old sinner”. His Scrooge is hard-working, even chilly, but he’s also sincere and honorable. What’s more, as we know from “A Christmas Carol,” he’s in love with a young woman.

How this ambitious business-

man eventually ends up pleading with a spirit for the salvation of his soul is just one of the questions this novel sets out to answer.

Clinch is more interested in Scrooge’s partner, Jacob, who “possesses a grace that his partner lacks.” He’s a veritable chameleon.

And unbeknown to Scrooge, Marley is a master forger who has built a vast enterprise of front companies, shell businesses and phony proprietors.

But Dickens never specifies the exact nature of Scrooge’s business.

Almost two centuries later, that omission allows Clinch just the space he needs to imagine something lucrative, repellent and historically believable buried deep beneath all the fraud and accounting shenanigans: slavery. That clever bit of speculation provides the moral complications the novel needs to plumb the dimensions of both men. Scrooge is determined to separate their business from the unspeakable trade, while Marley hopes to continue draining profit from African captives — even if he has to hide those transactions from his partner’s eagle-eye.

If “Marley” has any flaws, it’s that this Battle of the Bookkeepers is not sufficiently dramatic to carry along the whole story. To its own detriment, the narrative concentrates too much on genteel domestic scenes and refined romantic conversations.

The result is a costume drama that pleasantly mimics Dickens’s tone and presents a plausible backstory to his most familiar creation but fails to generate enough of its own energy. “Marley” remains a derivative side story. We’re never chilled by anything close to the terror that Scrooge feels before his own gravestone.

We never feel anything like the elation of his early-morning reformation. And we never brush away embarrassed tears at anything like Tiny Tim’s sappy blessing. n Charles writes about books for The Washington Post.

L MARLEY

By Jon Clinch Atria. 285 pp. $27

DOUBLE CROSSED The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War

By Matthew Avery Sutton Basic Books. 401 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID A . H OLLINGER

aying the political groundwork for Gen. George Patton’s North African landing of 1942, a top intelligence agent promised local communists that the United States would help them overthrow the government of Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco. The Americans would even drive the Spanish out of Morocco and thereby facilitate Arab independence. William Eddy, a member of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first foreign intelligence agency, knew these were lies. Later in life, the devout Episcopalian’s conscience troubled him, and he wondered if he could “ever again become a wholly honorable man.”

Eddy is one of four deeply religious American Protestants who are the subjects of Matthew Avery Sutton’s arresting and informative book, “Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War.” All served in the OSS, the World War II predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Sutton adds to our understanding of the clandestine services by revealing the littleknown role of missionaries in these operations.

Eddy was a son of missionaries who served in Lebanon, and the Congregationalist Stephen Penrose, another of Sutton’s subjects, taught in a missionary college there. A third was John Birch, an active Baptist missionary in China, who is best known for the John Birch Society, created by right-wing Americans in 1958 long after his death in 1945.

Sutton’s fourth figure is Stewart Herman, a Lutheran minister who was based in Berlin.

Many OSS agents had missionary backgrounds. Their foreignlanguage fluency and intimate knowledge of distant lands made them ideal recruits. But most had either drifted away from the faith or did not connect it to their government work. But these four men were certain that spying for

the government and advancing Protestant Christianity were mutually reinforcing projects.

The four case studies allow Sutton to explore the diverse ways his subjects integrated the two projects. On the far right was Birch, whose priority was always to make China a Christian nation.

As Sutton writes, “He saw himself first and foremost as a foot soldier in the army of the Lord.”

The other three were ecumenical and comfortable with the mainstream Republican and Democratic leaders of the time.

Herman worked with anti-Nazi churchmen in Germany but showed a lack of sympathy for non-Christians.

Penrose’s sense of world politics and of the Christian faith was more pluralistic than Herman’s.

When working in the field, however, Penrose’s sympathy for Arab nationalists made him reluctant to have the OSS cooperate with Jewish groups in Palestine.

Eddy, the most important of Sutton’s characters, was at the liberal end of the spectrum. Far from expecting Christianity to overtake other religions, he celebrated Islam. He hoped for a future when Christianity and Islam would achieve a harmonious alliance against the common evils of the human heart.

Sutton skillfully juxtaposes his four stories, revealing the actions of each figure throughout the war and its aftermath. We see Birch dodging bullets in China while Eddy was translating for President Franklin Roosevelt and the Saudi king at a meeting aboard a warship in the Red Sea. “Double Crossed” is a great read and a fresh, archive-intensive contribution to our understanding of American intelligence during World War II. n Hollinger is a historian at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Don’t be fooled by the NCAA’s empty rhetoric SALLY JENKINS is a Washington Post sports columnist.

The NCAA’s latest move is all wind and stall. It’s nothing more than an attempt to slow the landslide, one that will bury the current leaders to the point of extinction. Look closely at the NCAA’s supposed grand concession to allow college athletes the rights over their own names and likenesses, and note that it contains zero specifics, an almost infinite number of potential restrictions, and doesn’t actually say anything about money. It’s the organization’s classic signature, that blowhardy nothingness. ¶ The exact wording of the NCAA board of governors’ announcement is the giveaway. Each NCAA division is directed to “consider updates to relevant bylaws and policies for the 21st century” that would eventually allow athletes to “benefit” from their own names and images, so long as they do so “in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.” What on earth do all those soft words mean? Here’s what they don’t mean: anything imminent. Or concrete. Or real. What they do mean is that the NCAA is in a panic over a raft of legislation that would make their current piratical rules illegal.

As matters stand, the NCAA denies athletes their natural economic rights, and hijacks their names, images and likenesses for financial gain. Ohio State’s Chase Young is a star who may not sign his own autograph for money or endorse a Columbus car dealership. Rather, the money generated by his talent, celebrity and image will continue to go to pay the $600,000 salary for some mid-level associate athletic director and other cronies.

What member of a university marching band is told that they must not profit from the trumpet so long as they’re at the university? What member of a school orchestra is told they better not play their violin for money, or they’ll lose the right to perform? What young actress or actor is told they can’t appear in a play or a film for pay, at peril of being labeled “dirty” and a

“cheat?” The NCAA has fundamentally violated the rights of scores of athletes by forcing them into a separate and unequal class of citizens. So, the NCAA’s announcement that it has “started the process” to “enhance” athletes’ ability to own what never should have been taken from them in the first place is not cause for congratulation.

Look closely at the NCAA’s verbiage and you will find buried in it some key phrases that show just how desperate its leaders are to delay, and to hang on to its ravening economic system.

“Compensation” for anything related to “athletics performance” will still be “impermissible” — for everyone except seven-figure athletic directors, of course.

Athletes will be able to benefit only from “collegiate” rather than “professional” opportunities — whatever that means. Question:

ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The NCAA has announced it would consider rules changes that would allow college athletes “the opportunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model,” though questions remain.

Does a lemonade stand count as collegiate or professional?

In other words, the NCAA still will forbid athletes from actually making any money — unless it’s such a small and paltry amount of loose change that it’s not worth bothering over.

“The board’s action today creates a path to enhance opportunities for studentathletes while ensuring they compete against students and not professionals,” NCAA President Mark Emmert droned.

Create a path? The path was already there, created by legislators because the NCAA was so recalcitrant on this issue.

California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act in September over the NCAA’s baying protest, and Florida is right on its heels.

California’s law, set to take effect in 2023, would prohibit schools from punishing athletes for exercising their basic commercial rights. A dozen other states are considering similar laws. Then there is the federal measure proposed by Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) that would strip the NCAA of its tax-exempt status if it continues to restrict the use of an athlete’s name, image and likeness. Walker is trying to get the bill to a vote so it can take effect next year.

The only reason the board of governors took this vote was because their position is utterly unsustainable. It’s simply a bid to appease lawmakers, and try to regain the reins of the rulechange process before they are legislated out of existence in their current form.

It would be purely a mistake to allow this manipulation to work.

Lawmakers should keep the pressure on the NCAA, because unrelenting legal force is the only thing that revenue-bloated body has ever responded to.

Let up now, and the NCAA will spend years upon years holding “working groups,” which will issue “recommendations,” which will result in “proposals,” which will then be referred to subcommittees. And the only thing that will come from any of it is more buzzwordy blather about “models.” Meantime, the rake-off will continue, and the kids who sweat to generate all the money will watch vainly as they are robbed of their natural rights over their own names, as well as the true value of their scholarship.

The NCAA has had years to make rules that genuinely benefit their “student-athletes.” They have refused, except at the point of a legal threat. What we need now are laws. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Testosterone BY

R EBECCA M . J ORDAN- Y OUNG

AND

K ATRINA K ARKAZIS

Testosterone has a fascinating double life: A molecule with a precise chemical structure, it also has an outsize cultural presence, winning praise and blame for a wide range of characteristics typically associated with masculinity. Many of the claims go well beyond or even directly against the scientific evidence about what scientists call “T.” MYTH NO. 1 Testosterone is the male sex hormone.

T isn’t just a male hormone: It’s also the most abundant biologically active steroid hormone in women’s bodies — crucial for female development and well-being. It helps support ovulation, for instance.

And T isn’t just a sex hormone, either. In men and women, receptors for the hormone are found in almost all tissues, and it contributes to lean body mass, bone health, cognitive function and mood, among other attributes.

Both testosterone and the supposed female sex hormone estrogen were identified in the context of scientists’ search for the chemical essences of maleness and femaleness, an origin story that helps explain the tenacity of the “sex hormone” label. Another explanation may be the confusion of quantity with importance. Yes, men generally have much higher levels of T than women. But greater quantity doesn’t equate to greater function (elephants have bigger brains than humans, but brains aren’t more important to elephants than to us).

MYTH NO. 2 Testosterone drives aggression and sexual violence.

A 2012 study in the International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism asserted that there’s “evidence that testosterone levels are

higher in individuals with aggressive behavior.”

Yet “gold standard” studies — placebo-controlled trials in which neither the research subjects nor the investigators know which people are getting T — have shown that even extremely high doses of the hormone don’t increase hostility, anger or aggression in men. And when it comes to endogenous T, the kind produced by people’s own bodies, the classic studies linking T to aggression and violence are badly flawed because of imprecise measures and poor statistical practice — as we found when we reexamined them.

MYTH NO. 3 Testosterone supercharges your love life.

Ads for testosterone boosters promise “vigor & vitality,” increased “stamina” and “improved confidence in the bedroom,” while tabloid publications make tantalizingly specific pronouncements such as: “The higher the testosterone level, the greater the amount of sexual activity.”

Unfortunately for would-be Lotharios, “studies of men’s testosterone and sexual behavior suggest either weak or null relationships,” as one review of the scholarly literature put it in 2017. A certain (relatively low) level of testosterone is necessary for optimal sexual functioning, but above that threshold, more T doesn’t make much difference, for men or women.

ISTOCK

The chemical formula for testosterone, widely known as the male hormone that controls sex drive, anger and athleticism. But its function is much more nuanced than that — in both men and women.

MYTH NO. 4 It caused the 2008 market crash and boom-bust cycles.

After the 2008 financial crisis, some commentators pinpointed one possible cause: Traders, overwhelmingly young men, take irrational risks because of high T. But the studies attempting to link T to financial recklessness are weak. An often-cited 2008 study by two Cambridge University neuroscientists set out to show that financial gains might raise T levels, causing riskier bets, which in turn would raise T — a dangerous spiral.

They measured the T of 17 traders in the mornings, and again in the afternoons, for eight days and tracked their financial performance. The scientists managed to show that people who had relatively high T in the morning tended to have higher earnings that day. But they either didn’t look for, or didn’t find, an association between a day’s high earnings and testosterone levels in the afternoon — which is what their risk-spiral hypothesis would require. Again, the paper’s modest findings were probably due to chance, given how many analyses were conducted.

MYTH NO. 5 The more testosterone, the better the athlete.

But T’s effect on athleticism isn’t straightforward, in either men or women. At the most basic level, no study has ever concluded that you can predict the outcome of speed or strength events by knowing competitors’ T levels. And while T does affect parameters related to athleticism, including muscle size and oxygen uptake, the relationships don’t translate into better sports performance in a clear-cut way. Consider a study of 52 teenage Olympic weightlifters — an elite group, male and female. Among the boys, there was no relationship between T levels and strength, and among girls, the athletes with lower T lifted more weight. n Jordan-Young is a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Karkazis is a cultural anthropologist and a senior visiting fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. They are co-authors of “Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography.”

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