SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2019
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IN COLLABORATION WITH
ABCDE National Weekly
Decisions that shaped the decade A fruit seller, a man in love, Ashley Judd and others made tough choices that affected 8 PAGE 12 millions. PAGE
Politics Impeached Trump still disrupts 4
Nation Alaska faces crisis 8
Travel Cruises go casual 16
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KLMNO Weekly
The Fix
The next phase of impeachment BY
A MBER P HILLIPS
P
resident Trump entered the history books in a new category Wednesday: He is the third president in U.S. history to have been impeached by the House. The two votes on impeachment bring to an end the House’s months-long inquiry into whether Trump improperly pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations that would benefit him politically. Here’s how we got to this moment and what you can expect in the Senate trial that comes next. What happened Wednesday? The House spent Wednesday debating the two impeachment articles on the House floor. The first article accused him of abusing his power by leveraging the federal government and taxpayer money for his personal and political gain, and the second accused him of obstructing the congressional inquiry into his actions on Ukraine. Both articles passed, meaning Trump is impeached. The article on abuse of power passed 230 to 197, and the one on obstruction passed 229 to 198. But he’s not removed from office. The Senate determines whether that will happen. What the Constitution says about what happens next A president who has been impeached by the House can still serve as president. It’s up to the Senate to hold a trial to decide whether to remove him from office. The two other presidents impeached by the House, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, were both acquitted by the Senate. The Constitution says only that the Senate
KLMNO Weekly
Matt McClain/The Washington Post
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi oversees a vote on the second article of impeachment, which accused President Trump of obstructing the inquiry into his actions on Ukraine.
has to hold a trial, with the senators sitting as jurors, House lawmakers serving as prosecutors known as managers, and the chief justice of the United States presiding over it. Senators must take a public vote, and two-thirds of those present must agree on whether to convict the president and thus remove him from office. How a Senate trial works The only modern guide is the Clinton impeachment trial, which allowed no new evidence and only taped witness testimony of key witnesses. A majority of senators need to agree on the rules for Trump’s impeachment trial. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will probably try to come to a compromise beforehand on what witnesses to call to avoid a big, dramatic battle during the trial. But
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. 11
they have vastly different views on how to do this. Schumer has said he wants people close to the president during the period scrutinized in the impeachment inquiry, such as Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, or former national security adviser John Bolton, to testify. The Washington Post has reported that McConnell wants no witnesses at all. Even though the Senate trial is in Republican hands, The Post’s Mike DeBonis reports that some House Democrats are trying to influence what happens. As many as three dozen want to hold back the impeachment articles from going to the Senate immediately, which could delay the Senate trial Trump so badly wants to clear his name — and perhaps put pressure on Republicans to consider inviting witnesses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she wanted to see what the Senate process would be before submitting the impeachment articles, saying she wants to ensure the trial will be “fair.” This suggests she believes a fair trial includes witnesses. Assuming they get the articles without delay, senators will come to an agreement on a start date for a trial, expected to be in January. Senators will start by taking an oath of impartiality and will work six days a week until they’ve voted on both articles of impeachment. If there are witnesses, senators can ask them questions in writing, which the presiding official, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., will read out loud. The president can choose his own lawyers, and they can cross-examine witnesses. The chief justice can overrule something that happens in the trial that he feels is out of line with the rules, but senators can overrule him. If Trump is convicted on even one count, the Constitution says he has to be removed from office. Senators could take yet another vote to prevent him from running for office again. n
Contents Politics The Nation The World Cover Story Travel Books Opinion Five Myths
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NOTE TO READERS National Weekly will not publish the week of Dec 29. It will resume Jan. 5, 2020. On the cover Illustration by JACOB THOMAS for The Washington Post
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KLMNO Weekly
Politics
Winners and losers from the debate BY
A ARON B LAKE
S
even of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates took part in the party’s smallest 2020 primary debate to date Thursday night at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Below, some winners and losers. Winners
Joe Biden: I’ve had him as a loser in just about every debate thus far. He’s been halting, he’s often looked confused and he hasn’t shown himself to be the kind of debater Democrats will want going toe-to-toe with President Trump. Thursday night was better. It wasn’t flawless, but he kept things on the rails, had flashes of good humor and was deft with tough moments he could see approaching, including about his age. He dealt particularly well with the toughest question he got, which was about a recent Washington Post report on how leaders, including those in the Obama administration, misled the country about the status of the war in Afghanistan. He said he argued against nation-building there and emphasized disagreements with the Pentagon about things such as the troop surge. And he has documents to back that up. He had previously struggled when asked to own particular elements of the Obama legacy, but he did not on Thursday. Perhaps most importantly for Biden, as the candidate who leads almost all of the national polls — and has in recent weeks reasserted that lead — the other candidates mostly gave him a pass. Even when the topic was conducting high-dollar fundraisers, most of the heat was trained on South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) seemed to want to press the issue on Biden, he was bypassed. Buttigieg under fire: The most pointed exchange of the evening — and one of the most pointed exchanges of any debate to date — came when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) went after Butt-
Chris Carlson/Associated Press
Biden found his footing and Buttigieg parried the attacks against him as Democrats mixed it up igieg. Hard. She pointed to a fundraiser he recently held in a wine cave. “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States, Mr. Mayor,” she said, referring to $900 bottles of wine and addressing him directly. But Buttigieg, as he almost always has been, was prepared. He noted that he was the least wealthy of anyone onstage, and then he hit back just as hard. He noted that Warren transferred millions raised for her Senate campaign to her presidential bid, which included money raised at big-dollar fundraisers. “This is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass,” he said. Buttigieg also parried a series of attempts by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to goad him, including on his views of press freedom and his comments about the Washington experience of his opponents. It may not have been fun for Buttigieg, but he passed the tests. He’s a force in this race.
A more realistic approach: The early debates were focused on Medicare-for-all, free college and other issues on which the party has moved to the left. But as the field has shrunk — and as Medicare-for-all has fallen out of favor with even Democratic voters — there has been more of an emphasis on realism. Candidates admitted that people might have to be moved from places that are hit hard by climate change. There was less promising of huge things. Warren didn’t play up Medicare-for-all, as she had previously. Sanders brought it up, and Biden made an impassioned case against its steep costs. Biden also seemed to temper his claim that, if he became president, Republicans would suddenly start working with Democrats.
Losers Sanders on race, again: If there was one issue that dogged Sanders in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, it was his inability to appeal to minority
Democratic presidential candidates from left, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), and businessman Tom Steyer participate in Thursday’s primary debate in Los Angeles.
voters. And for one striking moment on Thursday, that problem reared its ugly head again. The candidates were asked about the declining diversity in their debate field, and when the question was presented to Sanders, he opted instead to try to return to a previous topic, climate change. Debate moderator Amna Nawaz of “PBS NewsHour” cut in, though. “Senator, with all respect, this question is about race. Can you answer the question as it was asked?” The crowd roared. Sanders tried to rescue it by saying people of color would suffer from climate change, too, and then he offered some boilerplate about problems that plague minority communities. It was one moment, but it came just after the only minority candidate onstage, Andrew Yang, gave a detailed answer citing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and it briefly revived some old demons. Democratic harmony: For the first hour-plus, this looked less like a debate and more like a town hall, in which each candidate was able to use a bunch of talking points, unchallenged. Then things turned. It was Warren vs. Buttigieg, yes, but Klobuchar in particular was looking to mix it up with just about everyone. The candidates took exception to the moderators’ questions. Sanders waved his arm when Biden was talking — as he is wont to do — and Biden told him, “Put your hand down for a second, Bernie.” Biden even sought to one-up Warren on her selfie game. It was evident that we are about a month and a half from the actual votes. The billing: Part of Democrats’ challenge in 2020 is to compete with the news machine that is Donald Trump. And that was particularly the case Thursday night, the day after Trump was impeached. It was perhaps an unfortunate bit of timing, including because it was six days before Christmas, and that won’t be the case in the future. But this was a really substantive debate, and it will be a shame if people weren’t tuned in. n
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books
From brutal surgeries to pink ribbons N ONFICTION
l
REVIEWED BY
R UTH P ENNEBAKER
I RADICAL The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America by Kate Pickert Little Brown Spark. 336 pp. $28
n a crisis? Take notes, Nora Ephron advised, because “everything is copy.” Diagnosed in 2014 with an aggressive breast cancer, Kate Pickert, then 35, took excellent notes. After all, she was a healthcare journalist who had written about breast cancer in the past. And like any savvy journalist, she recognized a great story when she was thrust into it. Pickert’s book, “Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America,” intermittently tells the story of her diagnosis and treatment, her gutwrenching fears and uncertainties. But as the subtitle suggests, “Radical” is much more — a remarkably unflinching and clear-eyed examination of scientific and cultural progress and failure centered on a disease once only whispered about, now ballyhooed in marches and merchandise. How unflinching? Pickert sat in an operating room and observed a bilateral mastectomy a scant few years after she had the same surgery. Twenty-four years after my own surgery, I almost keeled over reading her vivid account. For example: “The smell of burning flesh was unmistakable as the knife hissed and small whiffs of smoke floated upward into the operating room’s air-conditioning system.” “Radical” tracks breast cancer treatment beginning with the first brutal mastectomies before anesthesia and the origins of chemotherapy drugs on World War I battlefields. Today, treatments are targeted and refined, “with effective smaller surgeries, less toxic treatments and reliable drugs that blunt side effects and pain,” Pickert writes. Her own cancer, which was treated by a new drug, would probably have been fatal had it been diagnosed a decade earlier. Those advances, in addition to promising genetic research and
Matt McClain FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Brinker established the Susan G. Komen foundation in honor of her sister, who died of breast cancer. The group has helped raise awareness of the disease and lobbied for research funding.
dropping mortality rates for breast cancer, are some of the good news. At the same time, more than 40,000 American women still die of breast cancer every year. Even a third of women whose cancer is detected early will face recurrence or metastasis — and metastatic disease remains incurable. Annually, more than $1 billion is spent on breast cancer research, but scientists have not pinpointed the cause of most breast cancers, learned how to prevent them or discovered how to reliably identify the most lethal tumors. Pickert’s chronicle of the cultural history of breast cancer and the juggernaut of pink ribbons, marches and branding is equally riveting. How did breast cancer, of all diseases, become such a cultural phenomenon that even pro football players sport pink in October? And what should we make of the Susan G. Komen foundation, the group that spearheaded breast cancer awareness, spawned pink-ribboned Races for the Cure around the globe, and
lobbied businesses and government for funding for breast cancer research? After these early breakthroughs, Komen’s phenomenally successful messaging about early detection and annual mammograms for all women over 40 turned out to vastly underestimate the complexity of breast cancer. When new research showed that most women in their 40s don’t benefit from annual mammograms — which are mostly effective for women over 50 — there was a backlash of outrage. An epidemiologist with a federal task force that suggested a change in mammography recommendations even received death threats. “Mammography had become something of a religion,” as Pickert dryly puts it. Komen was also criticized for its employee salaries, emphasis on survivorship instead of metastatic disease and spending that allotted only 23 percent for research. The foundation never quite recovered from temporarily entering the abortion debate by
cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings in 2012. Even after a quick reversal in response to a public outcry, the foundation’s fundraising and reputation have diminished. Although Pickert notes Komen’s early accomplishments, she reminds us that most of the women interviewed for her book, whether breast cancer survivors or not, still “know very little about breast cancer itself, that it comes in different varieties, that a significant share of women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer will eventually see their cancer recur, that treatment has gotten far better and easier to endure, that mammogram screening is deeply flawed. It’s as if public understanding of breast cancer was frozen in time in the 1990s.” Pickert has written and researched an invaluable book for the 300,000 American women who were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 and who face a bewildering maze of information and misinformation about screening, risk assessment and treatment options — even after billions of dollars spent on research and awareness. Readers who don’t come armed with Pickert’s expertise as a health journalist and her research skills will find this book to be a remarkable, up-to-the-minute resource — even if the information isn’t always comforting. “Breast cancer is a more formidable foe than the races, ribbons and culture around it would have us believe,” Pickert writes. Last year, I lost my only sister to breast cancer. I can only hope Pickert has a long and productive life that chronicles the end of this terrible disease. n Pennebaker, a former columnist for the Texas Observer and the Dallas Morning News, is an Austin author and public radio commentator.
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Technology
KLMNO Weekly
How gadgets can strain your training Some athletes get too dependent on data, causing burnout, injury and poor results
“I realized I was hurting my body and that the data was running my life.” Bri Cawsey
BY
A MANDA L OUDIN
W
hen Bri Cawsey began running in 2008, she quickly got hooked on the sport and wanted to get faster. So she did what many runners do and bought a GPS watch that would give her realtime feedback on her pace, mileage and other metrics. First, she enjoyed the data readout. Before long, she connected her watch to an app that helped her track calories, as well. Then she added a second watch, more sophisticated than the first, and began comparing the data from the two for better accuracy. By about 2012, Cawsey found she couldn’t do anything without a tracking watch on her wrist. The obsessiveness all the data spurred turned out to be bad for Cawsey’s running and for her life: her times stopped improving because she was pushing too hard and she had trouble getting pregnant as her training wreaked havoc on her period. “I realized I was hurting my body and that the data was running my life,” Cawsey, now 34, says. Hollie Sick also developed an overdependence on technology, the data on her GPS sports watch driving her to do more and faster. In 2011, the runner wound up with a stress fracture in her tibia that forced her to lay off all sports for two months. “I became fixated on my pace,” she says. “Instead of running my easy runs easy, I ran too fast on every run.” Today, she often leaves the watch at home. “I will only use my GPS for specific workouts or races,” says Sick, who is now 29. “I have no real idea of what I’m running on my easy days — I let my body decide instead of my watch.” The paradox is real: Runners (along with cyclists and other athletes eager to track their mileage and time) can get all the data they want these days and use it to get faster. Yet, for many, that feedback can lead to overtraining, poor results and unhealthy behaviors. The bottom line, many experts say, is that far too many athletes are overdependent on their devices.
Illustration by stephan Walter for The Washington Post
“We are increasingly becoming a visual and data-driven society — many of us tend to get validation and comfort from numbers surrounding a workout,” says Adrienne Langelier, a sports psychology consultant from the Dallas area. “Running watches are now easily available and have more functionality than ever, creating a new norm surrounding run efforts.” “Technology is great when used appropriately,” says Jennifer Harrison, a Chicago-based running and triathlon coach. “It gives us objective measure points and, as a coach, I can use that feedback to track and monitor my athletes’ progress. But it is too easy to become too dependent on it.” Harrison estimates that 95 percent of the athletes she works with rely on technology. The ones who don’t generally are older, more seasoned runners and triathletes. While experienced athletes who use technology can suffer its pitfalls, it tends to be the new-to-the-sport athletes who have the most trouble.
“There’s an entire generation of athletes for whom, if it’s not tracked, it didn’t happen,” Harrison says. “As a coach, it’s my job to manage the data behind the scenes, but also to teach athletes to tap into their effort levels.” When athletes rely too much on technology, they often lose the ability to understand what is best for their bodies, trusting the data readout over how they feel. Technology cannot measure such factors as stress, lack of sleep, fatigue, overtraining or oncoming illness, which are important considerations both for interpreting training results and for balancing training with staying healthy. “If it’s 90 degrees out, you aren’t going to be able to keep your normal pace on a run,” Harrison says. “Yet I have athletes who fall apart when they see their pace slowing in these circumstances.” A 2016 analysis, published in Frontiers in Physiology that focused on self-regulation in endurance sports, found that sticking to a specific pace or exertion level can lead to a dip in performance.
The study concluded that excessively relying on technology to dictate pace can lead to anxiety and negativity surrounding performance, which can hurt outcomes. A small 2015 study from the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that when cyclists in the study group were hyper-focused on hitting a certain measurement — such as the pace on a watch — their perceived exertion was high. Conversely, when letting go of specific metrics and focusing instead on factors such as form, breathing or even nothing at all, athletes tended to achieve better results, as much as 10 percent better. This is no surprise to Hollie Sick. Since reducing her reliance on a GPS watch, she has felt happier with her running and also healthier. “I’m actually running more miles and doing it injury free, because I am listening to my body instead of my watch,” she says. “I’ve got loops mapped out so I know their distances and I just go run them without technology and feedback.” Harrison subscribes to this approach and asks all her athletes to spend several workouts per week without a watch. “I definitely have data hoarders who will fight me on this,” she says. “But I will have heart-to-heart conversations about the downsides and then ask that they give me subjective feedback from their workouts, rather than the data points.” Most athletes will generally fall in line with this approach once they’ve tried it, she says. Cawsey admits that weaning herself off the feedback was difficult. “It took me a few tries to get it right,” she says. “But every time I returned to the data, I felt myself slipping back into old habits.” Today, as the mother of an 8week-old infant, Cawsey is looking forward to returning to running — without a data watch. “I’m excited to simply run for pleasure,” she says. “I feel like I lost a piece of myself because I was so focused on the data.” n
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World
In Liberia, a legacy of animal testing D ANIELLE P AQUETTE in Monkey Island, Liberia BY
A
ll was quiet when the motorboat puttered to a stop. Saltwater lapped at the narrow sandy shore. Then the man in a blue life jacket cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, Hoo hoo! Like a secret password, the call unlocked a hidden primate universe. Dozens of chimpanzees emerged from the brush, hairy arms extended. They waded up to the rusty vessel with the nonchalance of someone fetching the mail. “Time to eat,” said Joseph Thomas, their wiry guardian of 40 years, tossing bananas into the furry crowd. Chimps aren’t supposed to be stuck on their own island — especially one with no food — or mingle with much-weaker humans. But nothing about Liberia’s Monkey Island is normal. It’s a spectacle, an increasingly costly burden and the enduring legacy of American scientists who set out to cure hepatitis B in 1974. This colony of 66 chimpanzees, which never learned to survive in the wild, eats about 500 pounds of produce each day, plus a weekly batch of hard-boiled eggs for protein. They rely on money from a charity abroad and the devotion of men who have known them since they lived in steel cages. “That’s Mabel,” said Thomas, pointing to a 100-pound female. “Look! She likes to wash her food in the water.” As if on cue, Mabel dunked her banana in the mud-brown river. The New York researchers who once injected her with viruses quit the country during the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history, abandoning Mabel and other animals who can live half a century. Thomas hadn’t planned to devote his life to protecting chimps through epidemic and civil war. Risk hangs over interactions with the brawny animals, who might still carry disease. The caretaker trusts they won’t hurt him because they know him. At age 20, Thomas became a
Danielle Paquette/The Washington Post
U.S. lab chimps were left on an island to starve. Their medical technician became their protector. caretaker at the nonprofit organization’s chimp laboratory in remote Robertsville. He fed the animals, cleaned up after them and got to know their personalitiesj. He was promoted four years later to medical technician. The chimps were infected with hepatitis and river blindness, an eye sickness caused by a parasite, as researchers developed vaccines. He tended to the animals like they were his children. He hoped the experiments would ease suffering in West Africa and beyond. The New York Blood Center set up shop in Liberia because chimps were already climbing the trees of its dense forests. No one expected the lab to tumble into chaos. In the early 1990s, Charles Taylor — the rebel leader who would become Liberia’s 22nd president and later a convicted war criminal — unleashed his ragtag army across the country, killing thou-
sands and forcing untold others from their homes. The American researchers fled. Thomas stayed behind with the chimps. Taylor’s soldiers, he said, stole the lab’s cars. Conflict surged into the 2000s as militants fought for control of Liberia, and public pressure to end testing on chimps snowballed. The New York Blood Center halted tests in 2004, sparking a big question: What would they do with all the animals? Putting them back into the nation’s forests wasn’t an option. They could spread disease to others through body fluids, and they didn’t know how to pick fruit or hunt insects. “The only way to hold them was to put them on an island,” Thomas said. There are six islands in the Farmington and Little Bassa rivers. These makeshift sanctuaries on the Atlantic coast became collectively known as Monkey Island.
Chimps infected with hepatitis B in the 1970s catch food from caretakers on Liberia’s Monkey Island. The colony of 66 chimpanzees eats about 500 pounds of produce each day, plus a weekly batch of hard-boiled eggs for protein.
Thomas and the other caretakers collected funds from New York to deliver the chimps buckets of bananas and lettuce, among other goods, every two days. A veterinarian stayed on the group’s payroll to check on the animals. In 2009, the New York Blood Center said it was getting hard to pay for Monkey Island. The charity contacted Liberia’s then-president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, for help and received no reply, its spokeswoman told The Washington Post. (A spokesman for Sirleaf declined to comment.) By 2015, as the Ebola virus ravaged the country, the New York Blood Center notified the Liberian government that it could “no longer divert funds from its important lifesaving mission here at home,” a spokeswoman said in a recent statement. Thomas stuck to the feeding schedule until the last penny was gone. He went with the other caretakers from fruit stall to fruit stall, seeking donations — a daunting task in a time of epidemic. One particularly generous neighbor gave him 50 pieces of coconut. The men gathered enough food to keep the chimps alive if not full for a few weeks. During that period, Thomas remembers pulling up to islands and seeing frantic, desperate animals. They screamed and fought over scraps. It wasn’t enough. He told the story to whoever would listen, he said, and eventually found a sympathetic ear with connections to Humane Society International in Washington. The nonprofit group has since bankrolled the care, spending about $500,000 annually on Monkey Island. Meals now happen twice a day. The price grows, though, as the colony does. Despite the team of 10 caretakers’ best family-planning efforts, which include vasectomies for males and slipping birth control in sugary milk paste, the chimps have had a few babies. “Very cute accidents,” Humane Society chief executive Kitty Block said. n
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World
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Kashmiris toil through Web blackout B Y N IHA M ASIH, S HAMS I RFAN AND J OANNA S LATER in New Delhi
E
ach morning at 8:15 a.m., a train pulls out of the station in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Hundreds of passengers cram the cars for the 70-mile journey, packed so tightly they can barely move. Nearly all will return the same day. Kashmiris call the train the Internet Express. It shuttles people out of the Kashmir Valley — where India has shut down access to the Internet for more than four months — to the nearest town where they can get online. On a recent foggy morning, it was full of people hoping to renew driver’s licenses, apply for passports, fill out admissions forms and check email. They included 16-year-old Khushboo Yaqoob, who was rushing to register for a medical school exam. “If I had any other option, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. The shutdown entered its 134th day Monday and became the longest ever imposed in a democracy, according to Access Now, an international advocacy group that tracks Internet suspensions. Only authoritarian regimes such as China and Myanmar have cut off the Internet for longer. India imposed the shutdown on Aug. 5, when authorities revoked Kashmir’s autonomy and statehood, snapped all communications and detained the region’s mainstream politicians. Landlines and calls on some mobile phones were subsequently restored, but the Internet remains blocked — a move Indian authorities say is necessary to maintain security in the restive territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. The 7 million people in the Kashmir Valley were abruptly returned to a pre-Internet era. They are unable to operate online businesses or read this article. In early December, they began disappearing from WhatsApp because accounts are automatically deleted after 120 days of inactivity. Jour-
Farooq Khan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
India’s shutdown has forced citizens to wait hours in line or travel to the nearest town to get online nalists rely on a government-run center with just 10 computers to file their stories. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce estimates $1.4 billion in losses already. “The original idea that was asserted by the government for shutting down communications was to prohibit unrest, but that really cannot be the argument after four months,” said David Kaye, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression. He called the blockage “draconian” and “worse than collective punishment.” Raman Jit Singh Chima, AsiaPacific policy director at Access Now, said it was “unprecedented” for a democracy to block access to the Internet for such an extended time and for such a large population. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) introduced a resolution in Congress recently urging India to lift the ban. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has defended the shut-
down as a way to disrupt activity by militant groups that India accuses Pakistan of supporting. “How do I cut off communications between the terrorists and their masters on the one hand but keep the Internet open for other people?” he asked during an interview with Politico in September. In Srinagar, the local government set up centers with Internet access to help students seeking to register for exams and says 100,000 students have used them. But for most Kashmiris, the nearest place where broadband Internet is readily accessible is the town of Banihal in the Jammu region bordering the Kashmir Valley. They have been making the journey since train service resumed Nov. 11. It was Yaqoob’s second trip in as many days. The day before, the Internet wasn’t working even in Banihal. She had attempted to access the Internet at the district headquarters near her home —
Journalists in Srinagar protest the Internet shutdown in India’s Kashmiri Valley last month. The blackout began Aug. 5.
where four computers are available for a population of 1 million people — but the lines were too long. In Banihal, Yaqoob and her mother waited for three hours outside an Internet cafe before their turn came. The teenager was submitting a form for a competitive exam for which she had been studying for two years, and the deadline was fast approaching. When she finally submitted the form, she burst into tears of relief. “I was not sure I would ever be able to fill it out,” she said. “Because of the Internet ban, I could see my dreams shattering.” Shutting down the Internet has become a regular feature of law enforcement in India, which has the distinction of imposing the most blackouts in the world. Officials routinely block access to contain rumors they say could lead to violence or to quell protests. A few weeks ago, authorities switched off the Internet in Guwahati, a city in northeast India, after violent protests against a new citizenship law. Kashmir is the region most affected. According to the Software Freedom Law Center, it accounts for more than 60 percent of the blackouts in the country. The current shutdown has paralyzed online businesses. The Kashmir Box, the most prominent e-commerce venture in the region, ships local produce and handicrafts to 50 countries. Since August, it has been unable to take new orders or fulfill pending ones. Founder Muheet Mehraj, 29, estimated the company has lost $420,000. “I feel terrible,” he said. “There can’t be a future for the company if you don’t know there will be Internet.” In mid-November, the state government began to provide select businesses with Internet access on certain conditions: They cannot access social media or allow WiFi connections, and they must hand over all content to security agencies on demand. Mehraj’s application for Internet access has been pending for two weeks. n
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Illustrations by Jacob Thomas for The Washington Post
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SUNDAY, December, 22, 2019
COVER STORY
How stolen apples, a Twitter joke and a marriage proposal helped shape the decade BY
AVI SELK
B
arely a year into the 2010s, Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York decided, for reasons that we may never understand completely, to tweet a photo of his crotch. That split-second act initiated a chain of increasingly far-flung consequences, as many observers have chronicled: Weiner’s resignation; his repeated relapses; the tabloids’ years-long obsession with him and his wife, Huma Abedin, who happened to work for Hillary Clinton, who happened to be running for president in late 2016 while dogged by a dormant email scandal, which reactivated 11 days before Election Day when the FBI announced that its agents had discovered hundreds of thousands of Clinton’s emails while searching Weiner’s computer for evidence of sexts with an underage girl. That dramatic reminder of Clinton’s email woes arguably swung the election to her opponent, all of which raises the question of whether Donald Trump would be president today had Anthony Weiner not chosen nine years earlier to photograph his underwear. Even the most seemingly insignificant (or in Weiner’s case, ignominious) decisions can influence the course of history. As the 2010s come to an end, we revisit the people whose choices helped spark sweeping changes to our politics, law, culture and geopolitical order.
Dec. 17, 2010
A fruit seller tries to get his apples back Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, lived without electricity, savings or hope in a rural town in Tunisia, under the rule of a dictator who had held power nearly as long as Bouazizi had been alive. Every morning, he pushed a cart of fruit a mile to the market, where he tried to sell whatever the police did not steal from him. His frustration built day after day, until one day he was pushed too far. As an officer was loading her second basket of unpaid-for apples into her car, a Washington Post reporter who visited the town wrote, Bouazizi tried to block her. The officer pushed the vendor to the ground, confiscated a produce scale that was probably one of Bouazizi’s most valuable possessions and slapped him in the face in front of the entire market. “Bouazizi wept with shame,” The Post wrote. City hall turned him away when he tried to complain, so he “told his fellow vendors he would let the world know how unfairly they were being treated, how corrupt the system was.” Later that day, Bouazizi stood in front of the municipal building, doused himself with paint thinner and ignited. “There had been self-immolations in Tunisia before and others since. For whatever reason, his act seemed to be a tipping point that pushed a lot of people over the edge,” said Steven Heydemann, a political scientist at Smith College who studies the aftermath of Bouazizi’s actions, known today as the Arab Spring. “He really became this kind of iconic symbol to conditions that millions of young people were finding intolerable. They very spontaneously and without much organization just swept into the streets to express anger.” Protests spread from the town of Sidi Bouzid across the country and then through much of North Africa and the Middle East, fueled by social media and Arab newscasts. Tunisia’s ruler was ousted 10 days after Bouazizi died of his burns. The dictators of Egypt, Libya and Yemen soon were gone, too. For a while, it seemed that the Arab Spring would revolutionize the region, but Heydemann noted that most countries eventually fell back to autocracy — or civil war as regimes beat back the protests with violence. Only one country affected by the Arab Spring has managed to hold democratic elections: Tunisia, where a fruit seller started it.
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Cover Story
June 26, 2013
Jim and John decide to marry They waited two decades to do it, and then everything happened at once. Jim Obergefell was sitting in an armchair in their Cincinnati condo. John Arthur was on the bed, which he rarely left since Lou Gehrig’s disease began to destroy his body. The TV was on, and a news alert informed them that the Supreme Court had just struck down a law that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex married couples. “That was the first moment in our almost 21 years together when, wow, marriage now has the potential to mean something,” Obergefell recalled. “After I hugged and kissed him, I said let’s get married. Luckily, he said yes. It was totally spur of the moment.” The court’s decision did not affect their state’s ban on same-sex marriage, so Obergefell and Arthur — who by that point was too sick to walk — flew to Maryland on July 11 and got married without leaving the plane. After they returned home, a civil rights attorney heard about them at a party and asked to meet. “He came over on Tuesday, five days after the marriage,” Obergefell said. “He pulled out a blank Ohio death certificate and said: ‘Do you understand that when John dies, his official death certificate will be wrong? They’ll say he was single, and you won’t be his spouse.’” Obergefell had never been to court before, he said. He and Arthur had never considered themselves part of the equality movement. They had been, until that moment, content that the federal government validated their marriage, even though Ohio’s state constitution forbade it. “This piece of paper — knowing John would die officially as an unmarried man — it broke our hearts,” Obergefell said. “But it also made that [state] constitutional amendment real. It made it hurtful. More than that, it made us angry.” The lawyer asked them: “Would you guys like to do something about it?” On July 19, the couple sued their state in federal court. In October, Arthur died. A district judge ruled Ohio’s marriage ban unconstitutional in December. One year later, an appeals court overturned the couple’s victory, along with the victories of 15 other couples who had taken their states to court. The Supreme Court stepped in again, and this time Obergefell’s name was on the case. On June 26, 2015 — two years to the day after Obergefell and Arthur’s engagement — same-sex marriage was legalized across the country.
Aug. 9, 2014
Johnetta Elzie goes to a vigil A few months before a Ferguson, Mo., police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, Johnetta Elzie said, a friend of hers was killed by police in St. Louis. She hadn’t protested that; it was par for the course for a black community living under a police department they saw as trigger-happy. “In St. Louis, there are so many people who have so many stories like that,” she said. “I’ve been harassed over a speeding ticket, had a warrant issued, followed everywhere I go.”
Elzie didn’t know Brown. She learned of his death the same way many others did: through a viral photo of him lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the street. On an impulse, she decided to drive across town with a friend that evening to see the scene herself. They arrived after Brown’s body had been removed. About 15 people were still gathered there, and Elzie began tweeting about what she saw and heard. “I just remember there were these two little toddlers and their parents, and they’d been out there all day,” she recalled. “They had to be 2 or 3 years old. And the two little ones kept saying they saw Mike-Mike get killed.” “The fact that they kept repeating it — sometimes in life, I wonder what happened in the moment that made you become the person you are right now. For these kids, you could see the point where this is going to be a lifetime of trauma, for these two kids who saw a black man get killed.” After she and her friend drove back home that night, she thought about what she’d seen — and what she might see if she returned to the neighborhood. “We stayed up talking. I stayed up tweeting, trying to figure out what was the next thing for tomorrow, or were we even going to go.” She did go to the next vigil for Brown, and the next, and the next, documenting protests, riots and police retaliation in 140-character dispatches.
Elzie is loath to take any special credit for the movement now called Black Lives Matter, but nevertheless she is known across the country today as one of its most prominent founding activists.
Jan. 15, 2015
April Reign makes a joke “The Oscars were like my Super Bowl,” said April Reign. “There were special snacks involved. I’d rip off the TV so the kids know this is Mommy’s night.” Back in 2015, Reign was a Washington-area attorney, raising two kids with her husband and occupying her free time watching movies and writing tweets for the entertainment of her 8,000 followers. That all changed on the morning the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced. The kids had left for school, and Reign was standing half-dressed in her family room listening to the list of names: Julianne Moore, Steve Carrell, Bradley Cooper, Laura Dern, Edward Norton . . . “There were no people of color nominated at all,” Reign observed of the acting nominees. “And this is the year that gave us ‘Selma.’ ” She reached for her phone and tweeted:
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cover story “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair.” The joke had sprung to mind spontaneously, born from the countless strangers who would walk up to her and ruffle her curls, and the white children in her elementary school who would compare their summer tans to her natural skin. “It was a snarky one-off,” Reign said. “I got dressed and went to work.” The next time she checked Twitter, #OscarsSoWhite was the top hashtag in the world. “#OscarsSoWhite they are adding a best golf movie category.” “#OscarsSoWhite they got their own sitcom on NBC in the 90s.” “#OscarsSoWhite they accurately represent Hollywood and its racial make up.” (That last from Trevor Noah.) The hashtag remained viral well into 2016, until the academy was so thoroughly embarrassed that it redrew its membership to include more people of color. The last Oscars included one of the most diverse lists of nominees in history — and Reign was invited.
Fall 2017
Ashley Judd speaks out Ashley Judd had told her story about Harvey Weinstein — what had happened after the all-powerful film producer invited the actress to his hotel room about 20
years earlier — to many people before she began to speak off the record to the New York Times. Judd had told her parents, her agent and her therapist that he had made sexual advances at what she expected to be a business meeting. Weinstein’s sexual predation was something of an open secret in Hollywood. Now the Times reporters were asking her to become the first actress to put her name to an accusation. Judd took a day to think about it. “I just laced up those sneakers and went for a long run,” she said. Her regular route is a one-lane road through the hills, pastures and forests outside Nashville. “I just listened to the countryside and the wind, and the dialogue between my head and my heart,” she said. She imagined the worst-case scenario: retaliation from Weinstein and all the power structures around him. Best case: “I thought maybe there’d be some protests in front of Harvey’s house.” She made up her mind when she reached a farmhouse at the three-quarter-mile mark: “I’d already made the most important decision I’ll ever make: I decided to turn my life over to a loving God,” she said. “The important question is whether you believe the universe is a friendly place. Then it became very — to choose to be Jodi [Kantor] and
KLMNO Weekly
Megan [Twohey]’s named source became very simple and exceedingly forthright. The yes was absolutely automatic.” The article, which included other accusations and ran just before a New Yorker exposé on Weinstein, did inspire protests. By the end of the month, a viral campaign known as #MeToo was revolutionizing the standards of behavior for powerful men.
June 22, 2018
A restaurant owner asks Sarah Sanders to leave Stephanie Wilkinson was at home on a Friday evening when her chef called from the Red Hen, a 26seat restaurant she owns in Lexington, Va., and informed her that President Trump’s press secretary had just walked in. Wilkinson is a Trump critic in a conservative county and had until then kept politics off the menu. But this was the summer of 2018, when Trump was pushing harsh policies against immigrants and transgender people, and several administration officials had already been heckled in public. The staff of the Red Hen, some of whom were gay and concerned about his attitude toward the LGBTQ community, were asking for help. Wilkinson arrived at her restaurant — “a tiny little box of a room,” she said — to find Sanders, her husband and a few presumed relatives seated around a plate of cheese. Disconcerted waiters and cooks were in the kitchen, preparing the main course. Wilkinson huddled with her staff, about 10 feet from Sanders’s table, and asked them what they wanted to do. “It was the moment when every single bit of news was happening at the southern border,” Wilkinson recalled. “It felt like a moment of crisis, and I know if I’d said, ‘Suck it up, we’re going to serve her and in two hours it’ll be over,’ to all of us it would be a bit of an ignoring of our moral compass.’” “I said I’d like to ask her to leave. Very quickly, everyone said yes.” So Wilkinson took Sanders outside and did just that. She comped the appetizers and went home. When she woke in the morning, she discovered that one of her kitchen workers had written about Sanders’s eviction on Facebook. In the days that followed, the Red Hen was forced to close, as reporters, supporters and protesters swamped its regular clientele. In the following months, it became almost routine for Trump allies to be hounded in public, as when former Democratic governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland lit into Ken Cuccinelli II, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, at a bar on Capitol Hill last month. In hindsight — at the end of a decade when every aspect of public life seemed to become political — Wilkinson believes she wouldn’t have acted differently that evening. “This is a unique moment in history,” she said. “People want to have their values heard and upheld by businesses they want to do business with.” The Red Hen has long since reopened, and Wilkinson said business is up. n
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books
KLMNO Weekly
Love starts anew across the pond
Diplomacy with a hip-hop beat
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
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REVIEWED BY
E LLEN M ORTON
A
fter her much-lauded summer hit, “The Wedding Party,” best-selling romance novelist Jasmine Guillory is sending some of those same characters on a “Royal Holiday” to Great Britain. Just before she steps into a demanding promotion, social worker Vivian Forest seizes her chance to take a vacation with her daughter, “Wedding Party” protagonist Maddie. For Maddie it’s a working holiday, styling an English duchess for the Christmas festivities at her country cottage. Vivian comes along to enjoy the trappings of the winter season among the gentry.
Jasmine Guillory
On her first day at the grand estate, Vivian meets Malcolm Hudson, private secretary to the queen. Malcolm and Vivian are instantly smitten. They explore their connection as they tour the grounds, and Malcolm introduces Vivian to the equestrian arts and quintessentially British meals, such as shepherd’s pie and mushy peas. “Is that like baby food?” Vivian wonders. “I know you’re having your fun about our food,” Malcolm replies, “but you have a great deal of odd food where you come from, too.” That bit of light culture clash is nearly the extent of the conflict between Malcolm and Vivian. The confrontations they do have are dealt with quickly and without escalation. Theirs is not so much a thrilling romance as a picture of effective communication and mutual understanding.
Each helps the other with an important decision, providing a key emotional insight when it is most needed. Meanwhile, Malcolm courts Vivian with champagne toasts and kisses under the mistletoe. They pass each other notes by means of a footman, share inside jokes over scones and soon make plans to extend Vivian’s stay so she can spend a few days between Christmas and the new year in London with Malcolm. He arranges enchanting surprises for her and gives her the VIP treatment at some of the city’s most famous landmarks. Vivian is exhilarated by it all, “her eyes full of wonder.” Her openhearted joy in these new experiences invites the reader to appreciate the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of England with the delight of a newcomer. For an American reader, the foreign country feels magical during the holiday season, and through Vivian we get to revel in the charms without suffering the chilly weather. Malcolm and Vivian are people of color and heroes in their mid-50s, making them anomalies in the romance genre. “Royal Holiday” gives positive representation of a mature, respectful, sex-positive couple of a certain age, but without much specificity. Malcolm and Vivian are broadly drawn characters, without the quirks and idiosyncrasies that would make them singular. As a result, some of their interactions feel superficial, like an amiable portrait whose subjects we can never fully know. Even so, it takes courage to open up one’s life to love, so it’s impossible to resist empathizing with the characters as they embrace their vulnerabilities and give each other the ultimate holiday gift: a love that feels too good to be true and the vow to try to believe in it together. n Morton is a writer in Los Angeles.
F ROYAL HOLIDAY By Jasmine Guillory Berkley. 304 pp. $20
Build The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World By Mark Katz Oxford. 232 pp. $24.95
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REVIEWED BY
A DAM B RADLEY
or nearly two decades, the United States government has undertaken a form of hip-hop politics. Rather than seeking to lead or direct rap, however, it has supported, sometimes unwittingly, a platform for hip-hop artists to fashion crosscultural bonds with citizens of foreign nations. In “Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World,” Mark Katz, a musicologist at the University of North Carolina, details the underground history of these efforts. At the center of Katz’s book is what he terms “hip-hop diplomacy,” a person-to-person practice that “offers the possibility of transforming conflict through cross-cultural performance and collaboration.” The U.S. government’s efforts in hip-hop diplomacy began only recently, in 2013, when a new program called Next Level — spearheaded by Katz — was born. Of course, deploying American performers in the service of international diplomacy stretches back into the mid-20th century, when the Yale Glee Club and classical performers, and later jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, staged concerts across the globe. With Next Level, these efforts shifted from large-scale concerts to small-scale workshops and other participatory programs aimed at fostering connections between visiting American artists and citizens of host nations. Among Next Level artists, one is not likely to find many household names: no Cardi Bs or Kanye Wests or Post Malones. Most are grass-roots performers, reflecting a diversity that might surprise those who know hip-hop only by the Billboard charts. “As a whole,” Katz writes, “the Next Level ‘family’ (a term the artists use) have been more racially and ethnically diverse, more activist, queerer, more feminist, and less male-dominated than the gener-
al population of hip hop artists.” For these cultural ambassadors and the foreign artists with whom they interact, hip-hop is not simply a Trojan horse bearing American capitalist values but a vehicle for personal and communal expression. Of course, hip-hop diplomacy isn’t without challenges. Katz readily acknowledges that the work can sometimes prove messy. He cites a 2015 mission to San Salvador, at a time when the U.S. government was undermining El Salvador’s national security even as it was sponsoring a Next Level program intended to combat violence there. “Our work to promote peace through music and dance generated an exquisite, unresolvable dissonance,” Katz writes. But dissonance, as any musician knows, is also part of the sonic tool kit. Many of the artists Katz introduces consciously grapple with the ethical and ideological implications of traveling under the flag of a government that does not always share their convictions. “These artists are not naïve,” Katz observes. Instead, they understand that the duty of active citizens is to affirm their government’s highest principles while resisting its lowest practices. In the age of Trump, the kind of cultural diplomacy Next Level promotes has become a subversive act. “These programs,” Katz writes, “were often designed to engage and support groups — women, the disabled, refugees — whom the president openly mocked or whose concerns he dismissed.” In this regard, Next Level artists are performing not simply an artistic but a patriotic duty: projecting an alternative vision of the United States to the world. n Bradley is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of several books on popular music.
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Opinions
Lessons on finding joy in loss from Beethoven Arthur C. Brooks is a Washington Post columnist focusing on happiness, culture and public policy.
“For the last three years my hearing has grown steadily weaker . . . in the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and . . . from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” ¶ These are the words of Ludwig van Beethoven in 1801, when he was 30. His 249th birthday was this past week. ¶ Beethoven was, as we now know, going deaf. Already quite famous as a pianist and composer, he had for several years experienced buzzing and ringing in his ears; by 1800, his hearing was in full decline. The problem thereafter worsened by the year, and it became clear to him and those around him that there was no hope of remission. But what happened as a result changed the world of music, and it holds a lesson for us more than two centuries later. For a long time, Beethoven raged against his decline, insisting on performing, with worse and worse results. To be able to hear his own playing, he banged on pianos so forcefully that he often left them wrecked. “In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled,” wrote his friend and fellow composer Ludwig Spohr. “I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.” Beethoven confided in friends that without sound, his life would be meaningless. One close to him wrote of his laments: “It is a cry of revolt and of heart-rending pain — one cannot hear it but be shaken with pity. He is ready to end his life; only moral rectitude keeps him back.” He finally gave up performing as his deafness progressed but found ways to keep composing. His housekeepers noticed that he would try to feel the timbre of notes on the piano by putting a pencil in his mouth and touching it to the soundboard while he played. When his hearing was partial, he apparently avoided using notes with the frequencies
he could not hear. A 2011 analysis in the British Medical Journal shows that high notes (above 1568 Hz) made up 80 percent of his string quartets written in his 20s but dropped to less than 20 percent in his 40s. In the last decade of Beethoven’s life (he died at 56), his deafness was complete, so music could reside only in his imagination. That meant the end of his compositional career, right? Wrong, of course. During that period, Beethoven wrote the music that would define his unique style, change music permanently and give him a legacy as one of the greatest composers of all time. Entirely deaf, Beethoven wrote his best string quartets (with more high notes than in works from the previous decade), his magisterial “Missa Solemnis” and his greatest triumph of all, the Ninth Symphony. He insisted on conducting the latter piece’s premier (although legend has it there was a second conductor in the wings whom the orchestra was actually following). After the performance, unaware of the
Daniel Fishel for The Washington Post
thunderous ovation, Beethoven was physically turned by one of the musicians to see the jubilant audience members on their feet after hearing what has come to be regarded by many as the greatest orchestral piece ever written. It seems a mystery that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear his own — and others’ — music. But maybe it isn’t so surprising. As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions, and more by the musical structures forming inside his own head. His early work is pleasantly reminiscent of his early instructor, the hugely popular Josef Haydn. Beethoven’s later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music’s romantic period. “He opened up a new world in music,” said French romantic master Hector Berlioz. “Beethoven is not human.” Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears. Perhaps therein lies a lesson for each of us. I know, I know: You’re no Beethoven. But as you read the lines above, maybe you could relate to the great composer’s loss in some small way. Have you lost something that defined your identity? Maybe it involves your looks. Or your social prestige. Or your professional relevance.
How might this loss set you free? You might finally define yourself in new ways, free from the boundaries you set for yourself based on the expectations of others. It would be naive to think that Beethoven fully appreciated the artistic freedom his deafness granted him. I can imagine Beethoven went to his grave regretting his loss of hearing, because it cost him his beloved career as a fine pianist. He did not know the extent to which his radical new compositional style would define him as truly great for hundreds of years after his death. Maybe he had a clue, however. It is significant that his Ninth Symphony closes triumphantly with lines from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy”: “Joy! A spark of fire from heaven, / Daughter from Elysium, / Drunk with fire we dare to enter, / Holy One, inside your shrine. / Your magic power binds together, / What we by custom wrench apart, / All men will emerge as brothers, / Where you rest your gentle wings.” This holiday season, perhaps we can all learn a lesson from the life of the great Beethoven. Take time to listen to the Ninth and give deep thought to the changes in your own life. You might not revolutionize music, but maybe you will discover joy in the freedom that can come from losing something, but allowing yourself to grow. n
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Travel
The end of formal nights on cruises BY
H ANNAH S AMPSON
G
erry Eggert has taken a lot of cruises in his 78 years. But the Chilliwack, B.C., resident has noticed something recently: People aren’t dressing up like they used to. He took his concerns to Facebook and quizzed a group of fellow Holland America Line fans: “This should draw some controversy!” he began. “My wife and I … don’t particularly like the ‘relaxed’ dress code HAL now allows in their main dining rooms, especially on ‘gala’ formal evenings.” He asked how fellow cruisers in the group felt. The query struck a nerve and sparked more than a few squabbles, differences of opinion and downright insults. “Only undertakers wear suits in today’s business environment!” wrote one retiree who doesn’t care to dress up on vacation. “If you want to dress like a construction worker eat outside with the construction workers!” one woman wrote. “Dress like you are going somewhere nice, not McDonald’s or Burger King,” someone else suggested. But the conversation revealed a deeper truth: Formal nights, a holdover from a grand cruising tradition, are becoming less formal — when they exist at all. And while that might be welcome news for travelers who just want to relax on vacation, it’s a sad turn for many who love to dine with a dressed-up crowd. “There has been a bit of an evolution in the dress code overall,” says Colleen McDaniel, executive editor of the news and review site Cruise Critic. “It doesn’t mean that everybody loves that. And in fact, many people who visit our message boards who are very much in favor of a formal night — and a formal dress policy — really, really don’t like it when people show up who are not in formalwear.” Cruise lines typically have a night or two during a sailing where passengers are encouraged to dress up for dinner in certain
Cunard Cruise Lines
Dress codes for these formerly glamorous events have slackened, a change that some bemoan restaurants and get professional photos taken. The suggested attire varies, but typically, it includes at least a dress, pantsuit or skirt and blouse for women, and dress pants and a collared shirt for men. Many lines that still host some kind of dressier-than-usual night have eased requirements or made their dress code a mere recommendation. And as the number of dining options on ships has expanded, so have nonformal venues beyond the main dining rooms. Celebrity Cruises, which describes itself as a “modern luxury” option, changed formal night to “evening chic” in 2015, allowing designer jeans and making a sport coat or blazer option for men. Holland America Line introduced “gala nights” in 2015; while a jacket and tie there is preferred, it is not required. Carnival Cruise Line changed its formal night to “cruise elegant” several years ago, adopting “more of a resort-style dress guideline.” Norwegian
Cruise Line has a “dress up or not night.” And Royal Caribbean International recently started holding a “wear your best” night on cruises of five nights or fewer, with the message: “Say goodbye to Formal Night, and hello to Wear Your Best. Get glamorous. Be chic. It’s time to shine — your way.” For some travelers, the loosened rules signal a disappointing end to a beloved way of life — not just in cruising, but also in society in general. They point out that travelers don’t dress up as much to take a flight, or go out to dinner, or attend a wedding or religious service. Many of the companies that have relaxed their policies say they’re responding to preferences of modern passengers, who may prefer a more casual vibe on board, not wanting to load down their luggage with suits or evening gowns. More people are cruising, an estimated 30 million this year, and that growth is coming from travelers who are not necessarily looking for fancy ex-
Formal night on a Cunard Cruise in the 1940s. The cruise line has not budged on its dress code for “gala evenings,” where guests are encouraged to “be at your most glamorous when the clock strikes 6 p.m.”
periences, insiders say. Other lines, many of them newer, eschew the idea of a dedicated formal night altogether, opting for “country club casual” (Oceania), “elegant casual” (Viking Ocean) or merely “more than a bathing suit” (the new Virgin Voyages). At least one operator isn’t budging from tradition. Cunard, a line famous for its transatlantic crossings and old-school glamour, holds two or three “gala evenings” every seven days of a sailing where guests are encouraged to “be at your most glamorous when the clock strikes 6 p.m.” That means something like a flowing ball gown for women and a tux, suit or kilt with jacket for men. Bow ties, regular ties or cravats are all acceptable. But even Cunard has nonformal settings where dressed-down can go, including the buffet, casino and pub. The wildly varying terms and enforcement policies can lead to some trepidation on the part of new cruisers and head-scratching even for those who have been around the ocean a few times. “A lot of the cruise lines, their terminology has been so nebulous,” says Liam Cusack, managing editor of Cruise & Travel Report and administrator of the Facebook group Holland America Line Fans. “Resort chic — what exactly is that? Or ‘country club casual’ — people don’t know what that is.” The subject can be especially intimidating for those who haven’t cruised before. Emma Le Teace, 25, who runs the website Cruising Isn’t Just for Old People, said her most popular articles tend to revolve around dress codes. “I think a lot of people are really afraid of the dress code, and they really shouldn’t be,” she says. Le Teace said some of her fellow millennial cruisers actually enjoy the chance to dress up — as long as it’s not mandatory. “Some people wear their prom dress again; when are you going to get the chance to do that?” she says. “Some people really love it. I think it’s about choice.” n
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KLMNO Weekly
Five Myths
Protest movements BY
M ARIA J . S TEPHAN
AND
A DAM G ALLAGHER
This year saw protests across the globe, as citizens bridled under what they consider the tyranny of their governments. From Iraq to Zimbabwe, Hong Kong to Chile, demonstrators even in places with ample surveillance and retributive regimes have worked to make their voices heard. But alongside these movements, misconceptions about how they work persist — and plague our understanding of their goals, their methods and their outcomes. Myth No. 1 Social media has made popular movements more effective. But while Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made protesting easier and mobilization faster, social media has not necessarily helped activists build durable organizations or foster longterm planning. These structures were critical to helping the Polish Solidarity movement endure martial law in the early 1980s, and more recently, grassroots organizing helped the Sudanese popular movement survive violent crackdowns by government forces and paramilitary groups. Movements that lack such attributes are vulnerable. Myth No. 2 Nonviolent resistance is useless against certain foes. But when one of us coconducted a study in 2011 examining about 330 major violent and nonviolent campaigns targeting incumbent regimes and foreign military occupations, we found that nonviolent efforts were twice as likely to achieve their goals. The majority succeeded against authoritarian governments, when even peaceful protests could have fatal consequences. The ousters of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Yahya Jammeh in Gambia, Bashir in
Sudan and Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria are only a handful of cases in which mass nonviolent force stripped power from despots. Scholars debate whether violence harms or helps otherwise nonviolent movements. While some argue that limited violence by unarmed civilians (like rioting or rock throwing) could be useful, others maintain that adding such tactics tends to lower participation rates and increase the risk of violent escalation by the regime, resulting in sometimes disastrous consequences for a movement. Myth No. 3 Nonviolent movements require charismatic leaders. Protest movements are often synonymous with inspiring leaders such as King, Gandhi or Lech Walesa in Poland. But today’s movements increasingly rely on leaderless resistance — or, perhaps more accurately, a diffuse structure with many leaders organizing in smaller pockets. Hong Kong activists’ decentralized approach to protests is a direct result of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, whose high-profile leaders were imprisoned. Social Unity, a broad-based coalition of labor, human rights, student, environmental and women’s groups, has driven the protests in Chile. Four days after those demonstrations broke out,
Spencer Platt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Demonstrators in Santiago, Chile, are overcome by tear gas during a clash with police Tuesday. The protest movement there is driven by a broad coalition, not a single leader.
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera announced a package of economic measures aimed at placating the movement, though protests continue. It would be hard to identify any charismatic leader in the Sudanese and Algerian popular uprisings. Myth No. 4 Popular movements are all about street demonstrations. But street protests are just one of a host of nonviolent tactics that can achieve political results. Other, equally valuable types of resistance include boycotts or strikes. A sex strike in 2003 by Liberian women demanding an end to the country’s second civil war succeeded. In Turkey in the 1990s, 30 million citizens turned the lights on and off at night to focus national attention on corruption, part of a campaign that culminated in judicial investigations, trials and guilty verdicts for politicians and members of organized-crime groups. The Montgomery bus and South Africa boycotts paved the way for the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation and apartheid. And in Sudan, a nationwide
labor strike and stay-at-home campaign preceded the ouster of Bashir. Myth No. 5 Protesters are fighting for progressive goals. But social-justice activists are not the only ones who have discovered protest tactics. Nativists, chauvinists, supremacists and others with exclusionary agendas are just as able to use civil disobedience to advance their aims. The annual Independence March in Poland, for instance, has recently gained a vibrant right-wing presence, with the protesters espousing anti-Islamic and anti-European Union sentiments. Many opponents of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement protested the expansion of their own rights by using the same nonviolent tactics as suffragists did. And it is common practice for autocrats to support progovernment rallies and demonstrations. n Stephan is the director of the program on nonviolent action at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Gallagher is the managing editor for public affairs and communications at the institute.
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