The Washington Post National Weekly

The Fix Jeb Bush falls flat on Iraq 3

Politics What to do with Bill Clinton? 4

Technology Getting a byte of dinner 17

5 Myths About breast cancer 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

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THE FIX

Jeb Bush’s very bad week BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

S

ometimes politicians do things so inexplicable that it makes you wonder, well, just what the heck are they thinking?

Witness Jeb Bush’s answers over the course of this past week when asked whether, knowing what we know now, he would have authorized the war in Iraq begun by his brother, former president George W. Bush.

On Monday, Jeb Bush seemed to mishear Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly — answering the Iraq question without understanding the all important “if you knew then what we know now” caveat.

Okay, fine.

Seemingly embarking on a bit of necessary cleanup duty Tuesday, Bush called into Sean Hannity’s radio show to clarify that, yes, he had misunderstood the question. Hannity offered Bush a second chance to get it right, asking him the same question the former Florida governor had misunderstood when Kelly asked it. “I don’t know what that decision would have been,” Bush responded. “That’s a hypothetical.”

Um, what?

Then came Wednesday and a town hall in Reno, Nev., where Bush was again asked the Iraq question. This time he went with: “So, going back in time and talking about hypotheticals — what would have happened, what could have happened, I think, does a disservice for” the men and women who served in the conflict.

Er . . .

And later on that same day in a press gaggle after the town hall, Bush offered this: “Of course, given the power of looking back and having that — of course anybody would have made different decisions.”

Bush, on Thursday afternoon, finally made

KLMNO WEEKLY

PAT SULLIVAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

it clear. “Knowing what we know now . . . I would not have gone into Iraq,” Bush said at a campaign stop in Tempe, Ariz.

But how can someone as able as Jeb Bush — he was a two-term governor of a giant state, after all — go through most of a week like this one with it not totally clear how he would have handled Iraq knowing then what we know now?

Color me baffled — especially because this isn’t exactly the sort of “gotcha” question that politicians usually blanch at and/or flub. Remember that: 1. Bush HAD to know this question was coming at some point during the campaign. It is literally the SINGLE MOST OBVIOUS ques-

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tion to ask him, given that his brother prosecuted the war in Iraq and that the main reason the war was begun — concerns about weapons of mass destruction — has been proven to be false. HOW — and I know I am using all caps a lot but I am amazed at all of this — do you not have a really well-rehearsed answer on what you would have done in Iraq knowing what we know now about WMD? Like, that is candidate 101 for any candidate — much less one who is George W. Bush’s younger brother.

2. There’s only one right answer to the question given how the American public views the war in Iraq. And that answer is “No, knowing what we know now, I would not have authorized the war.” It’s the answer Republicans hoping to be the “not Jeb” in the race immediately gave in the aftermath of his struggles to get it right, seeking to drive the contrast between themselves and the former Florida governor for undecided GOP voters. And while George W. Bush hasn’t totally abandoned his belief in the rightness of the war, he did acknowledge in his memoir that “there are things we got wrong in Iraq.” There is space for Jeb Bush to both get this right politically and do right by his brother.

What’s the lingering effect (if any) of Bush’s awful week on Iraq? Hard to say, specifically, but I do think it makes plain why running as a “Bush” is so hard for him — even in a GOP primary. It’s not just that people tend to say that they don’t want any more dynasties. It’s that Bush will have to find answers — good ones, preferably — for the controversial things his brother did in office. While every Republican in the race will have to deal with the specter of George W., no one has one-tenth of the challenge in doing so that Jeb does.

If this week is any indication, Bush still has lots of work to do on that front. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Aimed at helping consumers quantify lifestyle habits, a flood of wearable devices is a harbinger of technology’s destiny.

Illustration by SEBASTIEN THIBAULT, for The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

In Hillary’s run, what role fits Bill?

ABDELJALIL BOUNHARAPST/ASSOCIATED PRESS

For now, the other Clinton avoids politics — but not the limelight P HILIP R UCKER Marrakesh, Morocco BY

T

he scene that unfolded here this month as Bill Clinton convened world leaders for a philanthropic conference was hardly what his wife’s champion-for-everydayAmericans campaign would have ordered up.

Gathered in Marrakesh for a Clinton Global Initiative confab, foreign oligarchs and corporate titans mingled amid palm trees, dec-

orative pools and dazzling tiled courtyards with the former president and his traveling delegation of foundation donors — many of whom are also donors to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

When daughter Chelsea moderated a discussion on women’s empowerment, the only male panelist was Morocco’s richest person, Othman Benjelloun, whose BMCE Bank is a CGI sponsor. For the week’s biggest party, guests were chauffeured across

the city to an opulent 56-room palace that boasts a private collection of Arabian horses, overlooks the snow-capped Atlas Mountains and serves a fine-dining menu of “biolight” cuisine.

It was a long way from Hillary Clinton’s campaign-trail visits to Chipotle. The luxe week in Morocco highlighted the overarching question facing the Clintons and their coexisting circles of political advisers: What to do with Bill?

The question applies not only to the campaign but also to his

Former U.S president Bill Clinton, right, listens during a plenary session at the Clinton Global Initiative Middle East & Africa meeting May 6 in Morocco.

role as first gentleman if she gets elected.

In a presidential race that could include two dozen candidates, none has a spouse like Bill Clinton — a former president whose sprawling charitable ventures are rife with potential conflicts of interest; an admired public figure whose common touch propelled his rise but who now charges up to $500,000 to give a speech; a curious ideas man whose penchant for speaking his mind drives news cycles; and a

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POLITICS globe-trotting icon whose recognizable tuft of white hair draws onlookers everywhere, from his old Arkansas haunts to the bustling souks around Marrakesh’s central square.

Bill Clinton is a political animal who logged 168,000 miles on the campaign trail in 2014. Yet senior aides say he does not plan to do any campaign activities for his wife in 2015, including fundraisers for her campaign or allied super PACs. He has said privately that she should lead the campaign on her own, aides said.

“He’s completely focused right now on the foundation,” said Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “That does not mean that he does not realize his wife is running for president. But he is not directly engaged in the campaign.

As he has said before, if his advice is asked for, he’s happy to give it.”

But even if he’s off the campaign trail, Bill Clinton is never out of the limelight. He will remain prominent in the public eye with a busy schedule of appearances.

“Bill Clinton is like nuclear energy,” said David Axelrod, a strategist on President Obama’s campaigns. “If you use it properly, it can be enormously helpful and proactive. If you misuse it, it can be catastrophic.”

‘A supporting spouse’ Keeping the former president at a distance is one way the 2016 Clinton campaign is trying to prove it has learned from the mistakes of 2008. Although as her aides know well, it is impossible to truly isolate him from her campaign.

“He is a very smart political strategist and practitioner,” said Ann Lewis, a longtime Hillary Clinton adviser. “He has never thought that politics is beneath him. He believes that politics is the way that we govern ourselves.”

Bill Clinton has many assets. He is universally known and unusually popular; 73 percent of voters approved of his job performance as president in a Washington PostABC News poll in March, while his personal favorability rating stood at 65 percent in a CNN-ORC poll in March. He also is considered one of the Democratic Party’s most talented communicators; his 2012 convention speech was a standout moment in support of Obama’s reelection.

“Any conversation about Bill Clinton and his impact on the

BEN CURTIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Bill Clinton is like nuclear energy. If you use it properly, it can be enormously helpful and proactive. If you misuse it, it can be catastrophic.”

— David Axelrod

campaign has to start with the fact that Americans like him and they’ve liked him for a long time,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign who now works for Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton super PAC. But as Bill Clinton showed in 2008, he can be an undisciplined and rogue surrogate. Some of the ugliest episodes in his wife’s campaign were his making, including his stray remarks about Obama that angered black voters in South Carolina and his behind-thescenes meddling in the campaign’s strategy.

Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who feuded with Bill Clinton in 2008 over what he saw as racebaiting, said in a recent interview that the former president should be “a supporting spouse” this time around.

“He should refrain from doing anything or saying anything that would take the attention off of her candidacy,” said Clyburn, who has not endorsed anyone in the 2016 race. “It’s got to be about Hillary.

It’s got to be about her vision, and he’s got to be supportive of that.”

Axelrod, recalling the Clintons’ joint appearance in the fall at retiring Sen. Tom Harkin’s steak fry in

Iowa, said it would be foolish for them to campaign together regularly. “It’s hard to shine when you’re standing next to the sun,” he said recently. “He’s a luminescent character, and it is diminishing to have him out there at her side.”

Aides insisted that Bill Clinton is not calling up campaign aides, devouring polls or mapping out strategies. The campaign has no “Bill whisperer” tasked with managing him, although Flournoy is in regular contact with top aides at Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.

The former president also has long-standing relationships with campaign chairman John D. Podesta and other advisers.

The Clintons speak to each other often, sometimes multiple times a day, but usually about personal matters and rarely about the nity-gritty of her race, aides said. Some days, he doesn’t know where she’s campaigning. And on the Africa trip, he was more attuned to the British elections — glued to the BBC — than to her campaign.

Letting his wife decide Clinton, who declined a request to be interviewed for this report, is grappling with what the future

Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, drop in at a primary school in Nairobi. As his wife’s campaign got underway, the former president toured African projects backed by his family’s foundation.

KLMNO WEEKLY

might hold. He is continuing to raise money for the foundation, where his daughter has assumed a greater leadership role. Last year, the foundation raised a $250 million endowment to provide longterm stability in his absence.

His advisers understand that the foundation’s activities could complicate a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Bill Clinton says his role would be determined by his wife. “What does she want me to do?” he said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I have no idea.”

One option is that Hillary Clinton could draft him as a special envoy somewhere or give him a portfolio in her administration.

He is continually fascinated by science, aides said, and lately has been thinking about creating a fairer economy. He also has talked about bringing together corporate partners to rebuild Baltimore after last month’s riots.

A return of the Clintons to the White House would also usher in a blurring of traditional gender roles, not to mention titles: Bill Clinton’s aides still refer to him as “the president.”

The closest historical parallel is Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

During Franklin’s presidency, Eleanor earned personal income from paid speeches, newspaper columns and a weekly radio show, said Carl Anthony, a historian at the National First Ladies’ Library.

He said she gave most of her income to the March of Dimes Foundation, which her husband founded to combat polio.

“She made a lot of money on her own, but not without a congressional investigation and media attacks on her commercializing the presidency,” Anthony said.

Fred Wertheimer, president of the reform group Democracy 21, said the couple should completely withdraw from the charity if Hillary Clinton wins: “Change the name of the foundation, and make a clean break.”

Foundation supporters believe otherwise.

“It would probably be one of the greatest wastes of human talent in the history of the world” for Bill Clinton to withdraw, said Jay Jacobs, a major donor who traveled with him to Africa. “How do you say to these poor farmers, to mothers whose children can’t hear, ‘Sorry, no more because politics can’t abide by it?’ That would be morally wrong.” n

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POLITICS

A political breach gets personal BY

P AUL K ANE

T

he liberal grass-roots movement gave birth to two huge stars over the last decade, one who rode a wave of anti-war support into the White House and the other who became the ideological standardbearer in the fight against big banks and corporate greed.

Now, in a battle few saw coming three years ago, President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) are locked in an increasingly personal dispute over a mammoth global trade deal that the president is trying to finalize in his last years in the White House. The faceoff has become the defining battle in the Democratic Party, as Obama seeks “fast-track” trade authority, which would allow him a freer hand to cut trade deals.

The ultimate goal is approval of a deal with 12 Pacific-rim nations representing roughly 40 percent of the global economy.

Moreover, this dispute sets the stage for the campaign to succeed Obama, as the senator has opted not to run but instead is focusing on moving the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, farther to the left.

On two fronts, Warren appears to have won initial battles. The Senate on Tuesday ran into a filibuster of the Trade Promotion Authority measure that would grant Obama fast-track powers to pass global deals, as the overwhelming majority of Democrats blocked consideration of the legislation.

Also, Clinton has provided almost no cover for Obama on the trade issue even though she played a role in shaping the early stages of talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has long claimed the “pivot to Asia” as one of her most prominent accomplishments as Obama’s first secretary of state.

Against this backdrop, the bad blood between Obama and Warren has spilled out into the open.

What began with a slight jab at Warren’s opposition to trade legislation — “she’s wrong on this,” Obama told MSNBC three weeks ago — has escalated into a series of barbs and retorts carried out on

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Obama-Warren trade dispute sets the stage for Democrats’ campaign to succeed president cable TV and Internet interviews, radio shows and from the official podium at the White House.

Over the weekend Obama used a turn of phrase — “a politician like everybody else” — that was a deep cut against Warren, who constructed an image of being the principled voice in the wilderness trying to help the working class. Warren returned fire by accusing the president of duplicity because he “won’t actually let people read the agreement” before Tuesday’s procedural vote in the Senate.

Behind the scenes, according to Democratic aides and lobbyists, Warren is helping encourage Democrats to oppose the TPA bill.

It is an unusual time in a Senate where the majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), once proudly boasted that his top 2012 goal was see Obama defeated but now boasts about the handwritten letter the president sent him after McConnell voted for Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Obama-Warren relation-

ship has never been particularly close, but it also hasn’t ever been openly hostile until recent weeks.

Since the late 1990s, as a Harvard law professor with an expertise in bankruptcy, Warren has been an influential voice among liberals who have studied longterm wage earnings by the middle and lower class. Those days found her few allies in Washington.

Following the Wall Street crash of 2008, she served as the head of a congressional oversight panel on how the $700 billion bank program was implemented and then became a special adviser to Obama to help create one of the key pieces of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that rewrote regulations for financial institutions, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The initial indications were that Warren would get the formal nomination to run the CFPB, but that required Senate confirmation and Republicans made clear they would filibuster any nominee to run an agency that they did not support.

The bad blood between President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has spilled into the open during disputes over his request for “fasttrack” trade authority, which would allow him a freer hand to cut trade deals.

Eventually Obama gave up on Warren’s nomination, to the dismay of liberal activists.

Their political futures somewhat intertwined when Warren used a high-profile speech at Obama’s nominating convention to break away from Brown in what had been a neck-and-neck race until the early fall.

She raised more than $42 million for her Senate race, a staggering sum for a first-time candidate for office. She used the energy of small-dollar donors drawn to her message in a manner that Obama first used in his 2008 campaign to defeat Clinton in the primary and then win the general election.

Warren’s tenure in the Senate has been keenly focused on banking and Wall Street causes, making countless appearances in liberal settings or interviews with liberal media outlets to argue that wage stagnation has left the middle class falling behind.

Democrats largely latched onto this message for the 2014 midterm elections, and Warren became a star on the campaign trail for candidates, but it showed little dividend to anyone but the senator.

Democrats lost nine Senate seats and were relegated to their smallest number of House seats since before the Great Depression.

This year, Warren has been more willing to poke Democrats, including Obama and Clinton.

Clinton has responded by signaling that her 2016 campaign will embrace many of the Warrenadvocated ideas.

But Obama grew tired of Warren’s tactics on the trade bill.

The president is particularly irked by Warren’s representations that the Pacific trade deal is being held in secret, when members of Congress are allowed to review its current stages in a classified room in the Capitol basement.

Also, he resents her assertion that future trade deals would roll back portions of Dodd-Frank.

“On most issues, she and I deeply agree,” Obama told Yahoo News in Oregon.

“On this one, though, her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.” n

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POLITICS

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Wis. budget fight casts long shadow J ENNA J OHNSON Madison, Wis. BY

A

s Gov. Scott Walker travels the country ahead of a likely presidential campaign, he boasts about how he transformed this state’s finances — weakening unions, eliminating a shortfall and pushing through $2 billion in tax cuts.

But back home in the State Capitol, a new round of partisan fighting has erupted over the lingering impacts of Walker’s policies and the amount of time he is spending away from Wisconsin in preparation for his expected White House bid. The standoff could have repercussions in 2016 as Walker’s fiscal record comes under scrutiny.

The promised revenues from Walker’s previous budget moves have not fully materialized, leading Walker and GOP lawmakers to propose another round of reductions — including cuts in funding for schools, the university system, health-care programs and a slew of other programs. The Republican-controlled legislature says it won’t raise taxes, though it might increase fees for registering a car or visiting a state park.

“We all are going to have to scratch and claw and figure out how to get through this budget,” said Senate President Mary Lazich, a Republican who once carpooled with Walker. “When I listen to my constituency that elects me and puts me here, they see government as having plenty of money.”

Democrats are attempting to derail many of the cuts, and they accuse Walker of using the state’s budget to advance his own political interests as a likely presidential candidate. They note that Walker wants to retain a tax break on manufacturers and farms and to issue $220 million in bonds for a Milwaukee Bucks basketball arena, even as he’s pushing for cuts in education and health care.

They complain that Walker — who spent this past week on a tour of Israel sponsored by political allies — spends too much time traveling in anticipation of a bid.

“He’s running for president, and he has checked out of here and

CHRIS KEANE/REUTERS

Efforts to close his state’s shortfall follow Walker as he considers a run for the GOP nomination has used people here in this state to further his political ambition,” said state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, a Democrat from Middleton.

Laurel Patrick, a Walker spokeswoman, said the governor has continued to meet weekly with legislative leaders and is in regular contact with lawmakers, his staff and others, regardless of his location.

In the four years Walker has been governor, Wisconsin has become a petri dish for fiscal conservatives. Walker campaigned using his daily brown-bag lunch as a symbol of how he and his family live within their means and that the state should do the same.

But during hours of budgetrelated hearings recently, Wisconsin Democrats argued that Walker’s tax cuts for the wealthy, corporations and property owners have yet to help many middle- and working-class families or jumpstart the state’s stagnant economy.

Although Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is well below the national average, its rate of private-sector job growth is one of

the worst in the nation, and wages have remained stagnant while other states see substantial gains.

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that Wisconsin’s middle class — those earning between about $34,500 and $103,000 — has shrunk at a faster rate than in any other state.

“When does this trickle-down economics kick in?” asked state Sen. Robert W. Wirch, a Democrat from southeast Wisconsin, during a hearing on repealing a law that helps set a minimum wage for state construction jobs. “Maybe it’s time we try something else . . . .

Your philosophy, with all due respect, is not working.”

Republicans argue that the state’s economy is doing much better than Democrats say it is and that Wisconsin’s problems mirror a slow national recovery.

“When the economy does pick up across the country, I think we will really be able to kick it into gear and probably outpace a number of other states,” said Sen. Stephen L. Nass, a Republican from

A new round of partisan fighting has erupted in Wisconsin over the lingering impacts of Gov. Scott Walker’s policies and the amount of time he is spending away from Wisconsin in preparation for his expected White House bid.

southern Wisconsin.

Walker has proposed cutting $300 million over two years from the public university system, which some Republicans describe as too flush with cash and bloated with bureaucracy. He also calls for cuts to elderly prescription assistance, rural health centers, transportation and public schools — although lawmakers are hopeful they will find cash for the latter.

Meanwhile, Walker wants to allow an unlimited number of children to take their share of public school funding to a private school, an idea that lawmakers from both parties have been slow to embrace.

Walker has called for major reforms to welfare programs, including mandating drug-testing for those who receive benefits, and says his primary goal is to continue to lower property taxes.

The partisan acrimony was clear at one point recently when lawmakers on a newly formed welfare reform committee fought over Walker’s proposal to require recipients of state assistance to undergo drug testing. Democrats responded by introducing amendments to require the governor, legislators and chief executives whose companies receive tax breaks to undergo similar testing.

“If we want the people of Wisconsin to pee in a cup . . . we should pee first,” said Rep. Andy Jorgensen, a Democrat from southern Wisconsin.

Republicans quashed the effort by refusing to discuss the amendments, prompting Jorgensen to angrily accuse them of pursuing a “right-wing agenda.”

Rep. Mark Born (R), the committee chairman, said Republicans are reforming social welfare because it’s a top priority for their constituents — not because it bolsters the governor’s résumé.

“What the governor is doing in the state or anywhere else, I don’t think that impacts what we’re doing here,” Born said. “There are some things where the governor is talking about them and that’s great, because we are working together on this stuff, but I don’t really view any of his other activities as impacting this.” n

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NATION

Planting the seeds for shelter T ERRENCE M C C OY Baltimore BY

M

ark Council knows a thing or two about Baltimore. In his 55 years here, he’s lived numerous lives. He’s been a cook. He’s been a mechanic. And now he’s a homeless person, a position that’s afforded him his closest view yet of a problem that’s eating the city from the inside.

Council sees the vacant houses on his way to the homeless shelter.

The facades are inescapable, he says, blanketing entire blocks. He can’t help but feel frustrated.

“I look at all of these vacant houses, and I’m like, ‘I could be living in one of these houses,’ ” Council said. “I think, ‘We all, all the homeless, could be living in one of those houses.’ ” Council has had enough. So he’s joined Housing Our Neighbors, a group that trumpets an innovative solution used across the country that it says would ensure affordable housing for vulnerable residents. Vacant housing, the group says, presents a “unique opportunity” to turn Baltimore’s blight into a boon. Although the city has historically had difficulty rehabilitating poor neighborhoods and critics question the plan’s feasibility, the group says the urgency couldn’t be greater.

Last month, as Baltimore buckled under the weight of Freddie Gray’s controversial death, the national spotlight settled on the impoverished neighborhoods that produced him. Report after report mentioned the abandoned homes.

But the scourge of vacant housing extends far beyond the area where Gray lived. It is as stitched into the city’s social fabric as the Baltimore Ravens. The city says there are 16,000 vacant homes in the city, but it defines vacancy only as uninhabitable. Others have a looser definition, which leads to higher counts. Housing Our Neighbors recently canvassed a slice of East Baltimore and counted 395 vacant homes — 33 percent more than the city’s count. The U.S. Census Bureau has found 46,800 vacant homes — 16 percent

AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

High number of abandoned houses in Baltimore is giving homeless people ideas and hope of Baltimore’s housing stock.

“All of Baltimore’s social, economic and political issues are encapsulated by the vacant houses,” said Jeff Singer, professor of social work at the University of Maryland. “They’re vacant because of economic and political forces.”

Baltimore’s story is a familiar one, shared by Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland. It’s a tale of a city ensnared by global forces that deindustrialized its economic engine — the steel plants — and destroyed its manufacturing sector. After Baltimore’s plants closed, a slow decay took hold in neighborhoods with high unemployment rates, quickening when wealthier residents fled for the suburbs or other areas amid a citywide population exodus. In their wake, a drug trade flourished in certain neighborhoods, further weakening property values until real estate agents and investors abandoned chunks of the city, giving rise to vacancies.

In Baltimore and elsewhere, vacant buildings are associated with

numerous problems. One recent study showed that abandoned buildings are associated with higher rates of “assaultive violence.” Another found that residents who live

At top, Emily Painter, 7, plays in front of vacant rowhouses next to her home in West Baltimore.

near vacant building have a far greater chance of falling victim to fires. And in 2008, Baltimore discovered that the cost of providing police and fire services to a block increased by $1,472 annually for each vacant house.

While thousands of homes sit vacant, many low-income Baltimore residents have difficulty affording housing. In neighborhoods such as SandtownWinchester, where nearly a quarter of the buildings stand vacant, median income hovers around $24,000. For every 100 lowincome households, an Urban Institute report said last year, Baltimore has 29 affordable units.

Housing Our Neighbors, made up of homeless and housing advocates, says that if the traditional housing market has become unaccessible for extremely low-income residents, they need to create an alternative.

The organization first wants the city to invest in poor neighborhoods to rehabilitate vacant houses. Then comes something called a community land trust. Successful in other parts of the country, the land trust features a nonprofit organization that owns and manages land where affordable housing is built. It would ensure that rents and mortgages remain affordable and decide which homes to demolish and which to renovate.

Nearly 260 community land trusts have been created across the country, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which studied the issue. Communities including Boston and Durham, N.C., have had success serving lowincome residents in poor neighborhoods with it.

“We’ve seen the story of capital flight from Baltimore, and one of the indications of that has been our vacant housing,” said Rachel Kutler, who works with Housing Our Neighbors and urges livable wages for low-income residents in addition to affordable housing. “If the problem is that the marketplace isn’t working for people, we want to see an alternative to that, one with community control that’s an alternative to the regular housing market.”

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NATION But some experts don’t agree.

Barbara Samuels, managing attorney for the ACLU of Maryland’s Fair Housing Project, said she’s wary of plans that call for turning vacant homes into affordable ones.

It sounds nice, she said, but on a “superficial level.”

“In a neighborhood with a housing surplus, [rehabbing homes] can actually be counterproductive,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Ultimately, people need jobs, not just housing. So I think we have all learned that bricks and mortar is not the answer.”

What she’s perhaps referring to are the lessons learned in the Sandtown area of Baltimore, where Gray lived. Two decades ago, visionary developer James Rouse and city officials poured more than $130 million into that neighborhood, long trapped in poverty. One of the initiative’s major goals was to renovate or rehabilitate houses, and more than 1,000 were eventually built. But today, there are as many vacant houses as ever.

Stefanie DeLuca, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who studied the neighborhood, said that one of the mistakes was to focus too heavily on the effect of a problem rather than the problem itself.

“Solving vacant houses won’t fix the problems that created them in the first place,” DeLuca said. “A bedrock of the economy has shifted over time, and it wasn’t favorable to affordable housing.”

So does that mean people have to give up hope? Does that mean communities swarming with gutted buildings should just accept them? Does that mean the homeless should stop peering up at the vacant homes, wondering at what could be?

Of course not, said Council, who fell into homelessness after a cousin he lived with became hooked on drugs and lost his home. Council will continue looking at those vacant homes on his way to his shelter. They represent the best chance, he says, he has for someplace affordable to live.

“We need to change the system and wake up Baltimore,” he said.

“We need to let them know that we are human beings and that we need help. In the same way that animals also need shelter, we need affordable houses. We need that for all of us.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Economists’ find: Hot day + math test = lower scores BY

C HRIS M OONEY

W

e all know about some of the more obvious consequences of warmer weather — like heat waves.

But poorer math performance, at least in the short term when kids take tests on particularly hot days?

That’s a surprising finding from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economist Joshua Graff Zivin of the University of California at San Diego and two colleagues, which the authors call the “first economic analysis of the relationship between temperature/climate and human capital.”

Drawing on existing literature on how warmer temperatures can affect the brain, the researchers proceeded to examine children’s test scores from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a very long-running study that began with children born between 1957 and 1964, and since 1986 has also involved assessments of their kids.

The researchers were able to study 8,003 children who had been given recurring math and reading assessment tests — sometimes on more than four separate occasions over time — in their homes. The dataset allowed them to overlay test scores with the average temperature in the county where they lived on the day of testing. And hence their very surprising result — “we find that math performance declines linearly above 21C (70F), with the effect statistically significant beyond 26C (79F),” as the paper puts it. No effect was found for reading scores, however.

“If you move from roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit to roughly 87 and a half degrees Fahrenheit, a child’s mathematics score decreases by 1.6 percentile points,” said Graff Zivin. “We throw billions of dollars at moving test scores in the United States, and we do a reasonably lousy job of it . . . so when you see a test score change of this mag-

nitude, it’s pretty notable.”

To seek out a reason for this effect, the paper turns to neurological literature on the effects of temperature on the brain. The brain uses a great deal of energy and creates heat in doing so — which the body dispels less efficiently when it’s hot out. Thus, the researchers suggest, a variety of mental operations, such as the use of working memory, may be affected by warmer temperatures.

“Military research has shown that soldiers executing complex

ISTOCK

Warm weather is linked to poorer performance in the short term tasks in hot environments make more errors than soldiers in cooler conditions,” they noted. They also hypothesized that this would affect math scores more than reading scores.

One of Graff Zivin’s co-authors, Solomon Hsiang of the University of California at Berkeley, has also previously co-authored research suggesting that economic productivity declines on hot days.

In this study, the authors also examined whether there would be a cumulative, long-term effect on students’ scores from temperature. They thought the impact would compound, really leading kids’ scores to nosedive over time.

But in a long-term analysis of scores over time, they didn’t find that. Rather, they found that tem-

perature didn’t have a significant effect any longer.

“I’ve got to tell you, we puzzled over that for at least a year, to try to really wrap our heads around whether we’re doing it right and what might explain such a pattern of results,” said Graff Zivin.

The researchers ultimately concluded that, much like Florida building its beachside roads higher up in the face of rising seas, parents and children were probably engaging in a kind of “adaptation” to higher temperatures (even though they were not aware that’s what they were doing).

“You get a hot day on the day of your test, you take the test, you discover that you’re several percentiles lower,” said Graff Zivin.

“Then your parents say, ‘no more field hockey, you’re going to Mathnasium.’ ” In other words, a kind of “compensation” kicks in, and families — driven by parents — may strive ever harder to bring test scores up, and counteract the effects of temperature.

“Parent[s] are offsetting more than a 6 percentile point accumulated decrease in human capital due to warmer temperature exposures,” the authors wrote.

This is not, the authors noted, without its cost. It takes considerable parental effort to drive up math scores. “The fact that people are engaging in lots of compensatory behavior, because they’re sending their kids to math camp, that has social costs,” said Graff Zivin.

One possible objection to the study, however, involves air conditioning — most U.S. homes have it, and the question is whether this could somehow insulate kids from outdoor temperatures when they take the test. But Graff Zivin doesn’t think that can explain away the results.

“We don’t know what the kid is doing 2 hours before the test implementer arrives at the house, it’s quite possible the kids are outside,” he says. “It’s quite possible these kids are exposed to some heat even if they can then come in and cool off.” n

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With U.S. gone, Kandahar goes dark S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Kandahar, Afghanistan BY

I

nside a former U.S. military combat outpost, still ringed by curled barbed wire and blast walls, several massive generators are silent. Outside, factories that depend on the machines for electricity are either shuttered or on the brink of closing.

They are totems to one of the least-known American efforts to combat the Afghan insurgency: lighting up this strategic southern city, the cradle of the Taliban.

Now, nearly a year after U.S. troops left the Afghans in control of the base, the more than $300 million project to bolster the economy by supplying electrical power had literally broken down.

As the U.S. military’s presence and its aid dollars shrink, the cashstrapped Afghan government is unable to afford spare parts or fuel for the generators. Now, Kandahar, where Osama bin Laden ordered the 9/11 attacks, is growing darker, raising questions about the city’s stability and whether U.S. funds were properly spent.

A year ago, on good days, some enclaves received 12 to 16 hours of electricity a day. Today, some weeks go by with no power at all, local officials and residents said.

“We are struggling to survive,” said Rohullah Noori, the marketing manager of Herat Ice Cream, near the base. “Our company’s life depends on electricity.”

Around this city, scores of businesses have closed or downsized as a result of power shortages.

Unemployment is growing, as is resentment of the central government. Prices of basic necessities are rising, partly because of higher fuel costs to drive generators.

Life has become a struggle — so much so that some residents pine for the days of Taliban rule.

“During the Taliban, we had city power and security. That was the best time,” said Sultan Mohammad, who sat in near-darkness inside his shop, unable to keep his soft drinks cold. “This is the worst time we’ve ever faced, without electricity.”

“If the security in Kandahar

LORENZO TUGNOLI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In the cradle of the Taliban, America exerted its power by providing electricity. That switch is off. becomes bad, it will impact all of Afghanistan,” said Sayed Rasoul, regional director of the government power utility, known by its acronym DABS. “The Taliban was born here. All of Afghanistan’s revolutions started from here.”

The last time Kandahar had round-the-clock electricity was in the 1970s. Back then it was a backwater, despite being the focus of the ethnic Pashtun homeland of the nation’s kings and ruling tribes. Under Taliban rule, when the population was a lot smaller, residents received electricity most of the day, generated by the Kajaki Dam, built in the 1950s by American engineers in neighboring Helmand province.

After the Islamists’ ouster in 2001, Kandahar’s population boomed. American contracts caused the economy to grow.

By 2011, Helmand province was a nexus of the fighting, and electricity from the Kajaki Dam was frequently cut. That year, U.S military commanders and aid officials identified the provision of

electricity to Kandahar as a top objective, hoping it would generate confidence in government.

The U.S. military initially spent $143.5 million to build two diesel power-generating plants, then after 2011 an additional $139.6 million to provide fuel and maintain them. And USAID, the American government’s aid arm, provided $24.4 million to build smaller generators at one site and rehabilitate some more at another.

At its peak, the project brought power, mostly for businesses, to roughly half the city, but never round-the-clock. The rest of the population still heavily depended on the Kajaki Dam. Since June, the U.S. military has gradually reduced the fuel supply each month. The sites are now able to provide only one week of electricity per month, and none goes to city residents, utility officials said. In September, funding is scheduled to end, and U.S. military officials say there is no plan to renew the project.

On a recent day, the city had

Employees of a wedding hall in Kandahar stand in the darkness.

Electrical power in Afghanistan’s second-largest city is unreliable.

received no electricity from the dam for the previous two months because of clashes between Taliban and Afghan security forces.

“It was a waste of money to build these generator plants,” said Sayed Jan Khakrezwal, the head of the provincial council.

Kandahar is now a city of generators. They hum in factories, shops and government buildings.

In poorer enclaves, streets are dark, houses and shops lighted as they were in the 19th century.

Senior local government and national utility officials said in interviews that they urged American military and aid officials to provide a more sustainable source of energy months before the decision was taken to pursue the generator option.

“There were other permanent alternatives — wind, hydro or charcoal energy,” said Tooryalai Wesa, governor of Kandahar province. “With that kind of money spent, we could have had a very stable solar-powered system.”

Col. Allan L. Webster, joint engineering director for U.S. Forces Afghanistan, acknowledged that Afghan officials urged the consideration of more durable options.

But large-scale power projects take “significant time and resources to complete,” he said.

The U.S. government is now considering spending millions more on a proposal local officials made before 2011: a solar power plant. But the electricity from the plant will be nowhere near enough to meet the city’s needs.

There is still no permanent solution. Since the reductions in the U.S. fuel supply, the Afghan government has been unable to fill the gap. U.S. commanders and aid officials had expected DABS to increase prices for electricity, which is heavily subsidized, to pay for fuel and timely repairs.

But DABS officials said they fear price hikes would breed resentment and harm businesses more.

“It has to be a big jump in price,” said Mirwais Alami, DABS commercial director. “The people will find it hard to accept it.

“Honestly, we don’t know what to do with Kandahar,” he said. n

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S. Korean men deep into skin beauty A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

W

hen it comes to taking care of his skin, Lee Woo-jung just does the basics: toner, essence, moisturizer and “BB cream,” the tinted sun cream that covers up flaws without being too makeuppy.

This kind of beauty routine is standard among image-conscious South Korean men in their 20s — which is to say, most South Korean men in their 20s.

“People look at me differently when I take care of my skin,” said Lee, 27, a gym owner who was walking through the trendy Seoul district of Hongdae with his girlfriend recently. “It helps me when I’m working because I have a good image. When I approach other people, they are more open to me.”

Tall, with perfect hair and chiseled cheekbones, Lee turned heads as he indulged an impertinent reporter’s questions. His looks may have been exceptional, but his skin-care routine was not.

South Korea has become famous in recent years for skin-care products for women, which incorporate everything from regenerating snail mucus to animal placenta. Now young — and some not so young — men are also buying into the beauty obsession that has swept this land, boosting the nation’s already booming cheap cosmetics business.

“In South Korea, being young and active are considered very attractive qualities. Youth equals ability,” said Eric Min, deputy editor in chief at Luel, a glossy men’s magazine with a whole section devoted to grooming. Min, 41, has bright, flawless skin with not even the faintest wrinkle. “So you get plus points here if you look younger.”

The South Korean beauty-product industry boasts about $10 billion in sales annually through stores such as Nature Republic, Etude House, Missha and Tony Moly. Exports to China and Southeast Asia have been growing at a rapid pace, and many tourists here head straight for these shops.

South Korean beauty routines

WOOHAE CHO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The nation’s cosmetics industry is changing its own image to appeal to more than just women for women involve a confounding array of steps, involving multiple cleansers, potions and creams.

Does the essence go on after the serum but before the emulsion?

As the women’s market has become saturated, beauty companies have been stepping up their marketing to men.

It’s a huge prospect in South Korea — and increasingly in other parts of Asia, thanks to the phenomenal popularity of Korean dramas and music — where the masculine ideal of beauty might be described as “metrosexual” in the West.

More than 10 percent — or $1.5 billion — of domestic beautyproduct sales are now coming from products for men. The men’s market has been growing at about 9 percent each year for the past four years, said Kang Jae-joon, head of equity research in Korea at the investment manager Franklin Templeton.

The most popular products for

men include skin-care preparations — toners, essences and lotions — and pencil kits for filling in the eyebrows. BB cream is also popular — it can be passed off as sunblock — although the Iope brand makes a version of its famous cushion foundation compact for men.

While face products for men are not an entirely foreign concept in the United States — brands such as Lab Series and Clinique, both owned by Estee Lauder, offer lines for men — it’s nowhere near the scale seen here.

In South Korea, getting ahead is not just about having a good résumé but a good complexion to go with it.

“Korean society is very competitive, and for young men to improve their career chances and while looking for a girlfriend, looking good helps their competitiveness,” said Kang, 48, who says he uses mask packs to care for his skin after doing outdoor sports.

“People look at me differently when I take care of my skin.”

Lee Woo-jung, Seoul gym owner, above

Kang’s colleague Oh Se-bom, 32, has a much more complicated skin-care regimen involving antiaging products such as eye cream.

He said Korean cosmetics companies realized they had left half the domestic market untapped.

“For Korean companies, the men’s cosmetics market is like a blue ocean,” Oh said. “So they’re all strengthening their lines.”

Representatives of Innisfree, part of Amore Pacific, one of South Korea’s largest beauty companies, were scouting for new customers at a baseball game on a recent sunny Sunday.

As the Doosan Bears played the Kia Tigers, Innisfree was holding a promotional event in the stands.

Women in white Innisfree uniforms handed out samples of sea salt cleanser and a seven-day trialsize toner from the new Forest line for men.

“There are a lot of people in our target demographic here,” said Lim Chae-dok, a marketing executive at Innisfree who was overseeing the baseball promotion, referring to men in their 20s and 30s.

“The Forest brand isn’t wellknown yet, so while they’re enjoying the baseball game, they can also absorb our message.”

For men, cosmetic sampling is really important, Lim said. “A lot of men don’t choose their own products, they just take what their girlfriend gives them,” he said.

Innisfree would not provide details of its sales but said it offers 30 products for men. Since strengthening brand communication for the men’s line, it has seen 13 percent growth in new customers, the company said.

A 37-year-old office worker named Choe Yong-son was watching the game with his family.

“During my military service, my skin got really ruined, so I started using my mom’s products, her special moisturizers,” Choe said. He now uses his own toner and moisturizer, as well as sunblock “because my wife tells me to.”

But it’s really just the minimum, he said. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but after they get married, Korean men don’t really care that much about their skin. Only before.” n

Body of data Spearheaded by the flood of wearable devices, a movement to ‘quantify’ consumers’ lifestyles is evolving into big business with immense health and privacy ramifications

BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA | San Diego

F

rom the instant he wakes up each morning, through his workday and into the night, the essence of Larry Smarr is captured by a series of numbers: a resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute, a blood pressure of 130/70, a stress level of 2 percent, 191 pounds, 8,000 steps taken, 15 floors climbed, 8 hours of sleep. ¶ Smarr, an astrophysicist and computer scientist, could be the world’s most self­measured man. For nearly 15 years, the professor at the University of California at San Diego has been obsessed with what he describes as the most complicated subject he has ever experimented on: his own body. ¶ Smarr keeps track of more than 150 parameters. Some, such as his heartbeat, movement and whether he’s sitting, standing or lying down, he measures continuously in real time with a wireless gadget on his belt. Some, such as his weight, he logs daily. Others, such as his blood and the bacteria in his intestines, he tests only about once every month. ¶ Smarr compares the way he treats his body with how people monitor and maintain their cars: “We know exactly how much gas we have, the engine temperature, how fast we are going.

What I’m doing is creating a dashboard for my body.”¶ Once, Smarr was most renowned as the head of the research lab where Marc Andreessen developed the Web browser in the early 1990s. Now 66, Smarr is the unlikely hero of a global movement among ordinary people to “quantify” themselves using wearable fitness gadgets, medical equipment, headcams, traditional lab tests and homemade contraptions, all with the goal of finding ways to optimize their bodies and minds to live longer, healthier lives — and perhaps to discover some important truth about themselves and their purpose in life.

The explosion in extreme tracking is part of a digital revolution in health care led by the tech visionaries who created Apple, Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Using the chips, database and algorithms that powered the information revolution of the past few decades, these new billionaires now are attempting to rebuild, regenerate and reprogram the human body.

In the aggregate data being gathered by millions of personal tracking devices are patterns that may reveal what in the diet, exercise regimen and environment contributes to disease.

Could physical activity patterns be used to not only track individuals’ cardiac health but also to inform decisions about where to place a public park and improve walkability? Could trackers find cancer clusters or contaminated waterways? A pilot project in Louisville, for example, uses inhalers with special sensors to pinpoint asthma “hot spots” in the city.

“As we have more and more sophisticated wearables that can continuously measure things ranging from your physical activity to your stress levels to your emotional state, we can begin to cross-correlate and understand how each aspect of our life consciously and unconsciously impacts one another,” Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun and investor in mobile health start-ups, said in an interview.

The idea that data is a turnkey to self-

discovery is not new. More than 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin was tracking 13 personal virtues in a daily journal to develop his moral character. The ubiquity of cheap technology and an attendant plethora of apps now allow a growing number of Americans to track the minutiae of their lives as never before.

James Norris, in his 30s and an entrepreneur in Oakland, Calif., has spent the past 15 years tracking, mapping and analyzing his “firsts” — from his first kiss to the first time he saw fireworks at the Mall.

Laurie Frick, 59, an Austin artist, is turning her sleep and movement patterns into colorful visualizations made of laser-cut paper and wood.

And Nicholas Felton, 37, a Brooklyn data scientist, has been publishing an annual report about every Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and text message he sends. More than 30,300 people are following his life on Twitter.

Most extreme are “life loggers,” who wear cameras 24/7 , jot down every new idea and record their daily activities in exacting detail.

Their goal is to create a collection of information that is an extension of their own memories.

Even President Obama is wearing a new Fitbit Surge, which monitors heart rate, sleep and location, on his left wrist, as a March photograph revealed.

Tech firms are eagerly responding to the human penchant for self-perfectability by

Tech firms are responding to the human penchant for self-perfectability by inventing more devices that can collect even more data, which the tech titans see as the real gold mine.

inventing more devices that can collect even more data, which the tech titans foresee as the real gold mine.

At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in January, new gizmos on display included a baby bottle that measures nutritional intake, a band that measures how high you jump and “smart” clothing connected to smoke detectors. Google is working on a smart contact lens that can continuously measure a person’s glucose levels in his tears. The Apple Watch has a heart-rate sensor and quantifies when you move, exercise or stand. The company also has filed a patent to upgrade its earbuds to measure blood oxygen and temperature.

In the near future, companies hope to augment those trackers with new ones that will measure from the inside out — using chips that are ingestible or float in the bloodstream.

Some physicians, academics and ethicists criticize the utility of tracking as prime evidence of the narcissism of the technological age — and one that raises serious questions about the accuracy and privacy of the health data collected, who owns it and how it should be used. There are also worries about the implications of the proliferation of devices for broader surveillance by the government, such as what happened with cellphone providers and the National Security Agency. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

Critics point to the brouhaha in 2011, when some owners of Fitbit exercise sensors noticed that their sexual activity — including information about the duration of an episode and whether it was “passive, light effort” or “active and vigorous” — was being publicly shared by default.

They worry that wearables will be used as “black boxes” for a person’s body in legal matters. Three years ago, after a San Francisco cyclist struck and killed a 71-year-old pedestrian, prosecutors obtained his data from Strava, a GPS-enabled fitness tracker, to show he had been speeding and blew through several stop signs before the accident. More recently, a Calgary law firm is trying to use Fitbit data as evidence of injuries a client sustained in a car crash.

More sophisticated tools in development, such as a smartphone app that analyzes a bipolar person’s voice to predict a manic episode, and injectables and implants that test the blood, offer greater medical benefit but also pose greater risks.

Des Spence, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom, argues that unnecessary monitoring is creating incredible anxiety among today’s “unhealthily health-obsessed” trackers.

“Health and fitness have become the new social currency, spawning a ‘worried well’ generation,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the April issue of BMJ, the former British Medical Journal.

“Getting the data is much easier than making it useful,” said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science and public health at Cornell University.

Constantly measuring heart rate may be helpful for someone heavily involved in sports or someone at risk of a heart attack. “But it’s unclear how important and meaningful it is for the everyday person,” she said.

After all, Estrin and other experts argue, Homo sapiens has survived for about 130,000 years without such technology because the human body already has a number of alarm systems built into it. Any mother who has been woken in the wee hours by a crying child knows that a gentle press of the back of the wrist to a forehead is fast, free and eerily accurate in diagnosing a fever.

Social sharing Until about three years ago, it was nearly impossible for ordinary people to get a readout about the state of their bodies on a regular basis.

Now dozens of biosensing wearable technologies with names such as the Fitbit Surge, Misfit Shine and Jawbone UP have exploited the miniaturization of computer components and the ubiquity of cellphones to create an industry that is expected to reach $50 billion in sales by 2018, according to an estimate by Credit Suisse.

The research firm Gartner forecasts that 68.1 million wearable devices will be shipped

this year. A growing percentage are being purchased by employers including Bates College and IBM as perks for their workers. A survey by Nielsen last year indicated that 61 percent of those aware of wearable technology for tracking and monitoring medical conditions use fitness bands.

The technology is inherently social. Many users share their body metrics with friends, family and even co-workers as readily as they would pictures from their travels to distant countries or their late-night bar adventures.

“When I talk to my parents, they are paranoid about their health data being stolen, but it doesn’t bother me,” said Halle Tecco, the 31-year-old co-founder and managing director of Rock Health.

The digital health incubator in San Francisco is funding a number of next-generation wearables and monitors, such as a software program that assesses Alzheimer’s risk by analyzing eye movements with a cellphone camera and a band being tested as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder that analyzes skin responses.

This openness extends to the citizen-scientists’ willingness to share information for the greater good. Thirty-four percent of health trackers share their data or notes with someone else, according to a Pew Research Center study.

In March, when Apple announced its ResearchKit initiative to allow people to share their information with researchers working on projects in asthma, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer and Parkinson’s through various apps, more than 41,000 people volunteered within the first five days.

It’s unclear whether young adults’ open attitude toward sharing their data will remain when the next generation of more invasive biotrackers becomes commonplace.

Ginger.io, which was developed by data scientists from MIT, has created an app that can alert a provider if something is “off ” — signaling the possibility of depression or a manic episode — based on how much a patient moves around or how many people they talk to that day so that counseling or other intervention can be offered.

Silicon Valley-based Proteus Digital Health has developed a prototype of an ingestible chip the size of a grain of sand that can be embedded in a pill. When the pill is swallowed, the chip sends a signal that’s logged on to central servers that you — or a loved one or doctor — can access on your phone or desktop.

The life sciences unit of Google X, the search company’s secretive research lab, is working on building a nano-size particle that will travel in the bloodstream. The particles would circulate throughout the body and attach to particular types of cells, such as cancer cells, or to enzymes given off by plaque in the arteries before they are about to rupture or cause a heart attack or stroke. If the particles found questionable cells or enzymes, they would send a signal to a device worn outside the body that would transmit the

information to the patient or to a physician.

The innovation is outpacing the scientific and legal framework for testing and regulating such devices. The Food and Drug Administration in January indicated it would regulate devices that are invasive but take a lighter touch on wearables.

According to the agency’s draft guidelines, a wellness product crosses into the territory of

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COVER STORY scrutiny under federal food and drug safety laws.

They would still be subject to monitoring by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to recall products to protect the public against unreasonable risks from injuries or death from consumer products. In 2014, after thousands of users complained of skin irritations from Fitbit bands, the CPSC worked with the company on a recall that affected more than 1 million devices.

How the data that is generated from the devices is protected and shared is also murky.

Federal patient privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act don’t apply to most of the information the gadgets are tracking. Unless the data is being used by a physician to treat a patient, the companies that help track a person’s information aren’t bound by the same confidentiality, notification and security requirements as a doctor’s office or hospital. That means the data could theoretically be made available for sale to marketers, released under subpoena in legal cases with fewer constraints — and eventually worth billions to private companies that might not make the huge data sets free and open to publicly funded researchers.

EARNIE GRAFTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“The mythology in this country is you can do whatever you want to your body, and a doctor will give you a pill to fix it. That needs to change,” says Larry Smarr, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego. He tracks his biometric data, seen on charts behind him.

a medical device, which requires a rigorous FDA review that is expensive for manufacturers, when its intended use refers to a specific disease or condition, or it presents an inherent risk to a user’s safety. That would essentially leave hundreds, if not thousands, of “low-risk general wellness” products — a category that presumably applies to the current incarnation of Fitbits — free from extra

The data of a life Larry Smarr’s journey into the data of his life began when he moved to California in 2000.

“I had spent 28 years in the heartland of the obesity epidemic in Illinois. I had gained a lot of weight and wasn’t exercising. I got to La Jolla and looked around and said, ‘Oh, my God, if I don’t get with the program, they are going to send me back,’ ” he recalled.

Smarr came to California as a computer science professor to head a $400 million multidisciplinary research institute for the University of California that has been called the West Coast equivalent of MIT’s famous Media Lab. Composed of scientists, artists and technologists, Calit2 (or the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) aims to rapidly develop prototypes of technological innovations and test them in the real world.

Embracing the institute’s multidisciplinary philosophy, Smarr took a scientist’s approach to investigating himself. Although he had no previous experience in medicine, nutrition or biochemistry, he trained himself, he said, by reading more than 600 journal articles on monitoring and health.

He measured his way to lifestyle change: No coffee after 10 a.m., because he tested how long the effects lasted after his last drop; 40 minutes on the elliptical, because that was how long it took for him to reach his optimal heart rate; new vitamin supplements every few months, as dictated by his evaluation of his blood work.

“We are in a once-a-century period of discovery about the human organism,” Smarr said. Quoting science-fiction author William

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Gibson, he said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Smarr’s mantra is that these devices and tests will help people take personal responsibility for their own health. And an increasing body of behavioral medical research has found that patients who track their diet, physical activity and weight achieve better results than those who don’t, suggesting that wearable monitors provide feedback that reinforces personal accountability.

“The mythology in this country is you can do whatever you want to your body, and a doctor will give you a pill to fix it. That needs to change,” Smarr said.

Few people may be willing to go as far as Smarr.

In 2009, when blood tests showed he was secreting excessive amounts of something called C-reactive protein, a substance found in blood plasma that is a marker of inflammation, he took the results to his internist: “There’s something terrible going on.” The doctor asked how he felt. “Fine,” said Smarr, and so the doctor laughed and sent him home, he recalled.

“This is when I began to realize there is a disconnect between science and medicine,” said Smarr, who countered by writing down how he was feeling in a diary. “I realized I could data-mine this information,” he said, on a spreadsheet with a scale for the severity of issue. He was surprised at all the things he had dismissed as minor: blurriness and stinging in his eyes for a short while, arthritis, swelling in his belly. The record-keeping didn’t yield a diagnosis, so in 2011 he decided to try to identify the organisms in several months of stool samples. With more than 90 percent of the cells in the human body made up of other organisms, the idea of keeping one’s “microbiome” healthy was just taking off; Smarr was curious about how that applied to him.

“You are an ecology, and the health of those bugs determine how you are,” he said.

He looked at all his data and had a eureka moment: He had Crohn’s, an inflammatory bowel disease.

One weekday afternoon in his lab, Smarr studied his life on an 18-by-8-foot monitor that spans most of the room. On the board were 150 key variables about his body over a 10-year period, displayed in colored rectangles. Most were green, meaning they fall within the expected, healthy range. But some were yellow (one to 10 times outside the healthy range), and a handful were red (10 to 100 times outside the healthy range).

According to the custom-built “future patient” program built by coders at the research center Smarr oversees, the scientist’s body was still in attack mode for some reason.

It has been nearly three years since Smarr discovered the issue, and he’s tens of thousands of metrics down the road, but he has yet to find a way to treat it. “People overestimate what knowledge can do for you,” he said with a shrug. n

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TECHNOLOGY

The future or an eco-dream?

BY

D REW H ARWELL

T

he Toyota sedan cruising recently down a leafy suburban parkway was like any family car on the road, save for one key detail: Its power was coming not from gasoline but hydrogen, stored in tanks beneath the seats.

The first mass-market car to run off hydrogen, the $57,500 Mirai, has quickly become a powerful force in the battle for tomorrow’s roads. The four-seater can drive farther and refuel faster than any electric car a driver can buy.

But the world’s biggest car company, even before the Mirai’s first California sale in October, is placing a risky bet on hydrogen, now sold at only a dozen U.S. fueling stations. For many, it still evokes the Hindenburg and the hydrogen bomb.

The type of hydrogen fuel cells that run the Mirai have been repeatedly tried and abandoned by rival automakers, and electric-car pioneers have panned the technology as unrealistic and doomed to fail.

“If you’re going to pick an energy source mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick,” Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, Toyota’s chief rival in the electric-car market, said in January. “It doesn’t make sense, and that will become apparent in the next few years.”

Think of the Mirai as a small power plant on wheels. Instead of drawing energy from a battery, like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt, the all-electric Mirai makes its own, by gulping in air and mixing it with hydrogen in a stack of fuel cells. The reaction cleanly powers the motor and belches out no exhaust, save for a thin trickle of water.

Boosters of zero-emission vehicleshave praisedthe Mirai — whose name in Japanese means “future” — as a solution to some of electric cars’ thorniest problems. The sedan can drive 300 miles on a full tank and be refueled in about five minutes — instead of needing to be plugged in overnight — making it an easier fit for the typical commute.

Toyota bets on hydrogen, but there are only 12 places in the U.S. where you can fill ’er up Toyota has a track record for this sort of disruption, having built the first mass-produced hybrid, the Prius, from an experimental laughingstock into a clean and unexciting mainstream sedan. Although still a niche — hybrids make up only 3 percent of American car sales — the Prius became emblematic of a way normal drivers could help save the world without trying too hard.

“Toyota is so big that it can still be a science experiment for them,” said David Whiston, an equity strategist with investment researcher Morningstar. “If it doesn’t work out, they can go back to selling Priuses and all the other gas guzzlers no one ever talks about.”

Yet these are very different roads than the ones the Prius first rolled onto 18 years ago. When drivers first bought the hybrid, they already had ways to fuel it —

and no easier alternative if they wanted a greener drive.

Today, the Mirai faces competition not just from electric vehicles but also from traditional gas guzzlers, which because of tougher federal emissions standards drive more efficiently than ever. Traditional vehicles are also far cheaper: Though Toyota is pledging three years of free hydrogen and more than $5,000 in federal and state incentives could bring down the cost, the Mirai is about twice as pricey as the average mid-size sedan.

Musk, whose company makes the electric flagship Model S, has become one of fuel cells’ most vocal critics, calling them “extremely silly” “fool cells” that siphon money and attention from the efficient battery systems that run most electric cars, including his.

Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn has

PHOTOS BY JASON ALDAG THE WASHINGTON POST

A look at the outside and under the hood of the $57,500 hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai. The sedan’s name means “future” in Japanese.

slammed the idea that a country as vast as the United States could efficiently build a network of hydrogen stations nearly from scratch.

For Toyota, it could become a globe-spanning chicken-or-egg problem: That there are few hydrogen stations could lead to fewer drivers — and fewer of the customers those stations need to survive.

Toyota, the $236 billion Japanese juggernaut, is starting small, with plans to make available only 3,000 Mirais in the United States by 2017, a sum close to the number of Ford F-150 trucks sold in a day.

Most of those cars will cruise solely in California, home to 10 of the country’s 12 hydrogen refueling stations. Though other hydrogen fueling centers operate in Connecticut and South Carolina and more are in development, building or outfitting a station to supply the universe’s lightest element can cost $1 million or more.

Environmental advocates have questioned just how eco-friendly the Mirai can be. Hydrogen today is mostly produced from natural gas, a fossil fuel, and must be trucked to stations via tankers.

Energy experts say hydrogen, over time, will increasingly come from clean renewable sources such as wind and solar. The Mirai, Toyota executives argue, is only the first step of a energy evolution that one said was the carmaker’s vision for “the next 100 years.”

The carmaker has also attempted to swat back safety concerns.

Hydrogen is odorless and flammable but no more dangerous than gasoline and disperses quickly in case of leaks, company officials say.

But in the end, the trickiest obstacle for advanced fuel-cell cars might prove to be a simple one: price. At its cheapest, the Mirai can be leased for $499 a month, three times the cost of a new Corolla set to sip historically cheap gas.

To succeed, Toyota will need to get “some people on board and willing to spend $50,000 on a compact car,” said Whiston, the Morningstar equity strategist.

“Much like with Tesla, [buyers] will have to pay up for the privilege of saving the world.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

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FOOD

KLMNO WEEKLY

A chef who creates without a kitchen BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

B

ored with finding cures for cancer and beating “Jeopardy!” champions at their own game, the IBM computer system known as Watson has taken up a hobby: cooking.

For the past three years, the system’s keepers have fed it a steady diet of cookbooks and food theory. They’re trying to train a machine — which can’t even taste!

— to understand what makes a good recipe.

Recently, Watson got so pro that, along with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, it published a cookbook, an eccentric 231-page tome crowded with what its creators call “recipes for innovation.”

There’s a weird beef burrito accented with chocolate and edamame. A risotto studded with candied ginger, of all possible things. A pumpkin-ricotta cheesecake with savory mushroom meringues.

“Watson amplifies human creativity,” said Steve Abrams, an IBM engineer who worked on the Chef Watson team. “It’s a collaboration that allows Watson and the chef to discover more than either of them could independently.”

My personal adventures with Watson begin, as so many kitchen adventures do, with some overlooked, frost-bitten produce I needed to use. I’d planned to throw the frozen corn into a soup, but in the age of “cognitive cooking,” that’s for amateurs.

Home cooks, alas, don’t have access to quite the same version of Chef Watson that the Institute of Culinary Education did. But IBM, in partnership with Bon Appétit magazine, has released a slightly less robust Web app that basically uses the same technology.

You input your ingredients and preferences: a dessert with corn and sugar, I said.

And Watson generates pairing suggestions: pumpkin puree, medjool dates . . . horseradish.

From there, you can add and subtract ingredients, cuisines and dishes from Watson’s list until the

SERGIO MEMBRILLAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

system generates a satisfactory recipe template.

Watson is enormously complicated, so it’s hard to explain exactly what the site is doing when it makes its recommendations. But in the most basic terms, Watson ingests a huge amount of unstructured data — recipes, books, academic studies, tweets — and analyzes it for patterns the human eye wouldn’t detect. (If you’ve seen the recent blockbuster “Ex Machina,” you have a general, if sci-fi, model for this type of machine-learning.)

To create the Web app for home cooks, IBM researchers input nearly 10,000 recipes from Bon Appétit. To make the professional

version of Chef Watson, researchers went even further: 30,000plus recipes, scraped from the Internet; spreadsheets on the molecular makeup of different flavor and odor compounds in food; and academic research into the smells and tastes that people find most pleasurable, an obscure field known as “hedonic psychophysics.”

Much of that information is too technical, too literally microscopic, to register on most chefs’ radar.

(Did you know, for instance, that white wine and tomatoes share the chemical compound hexenal?) As Watson crawls the recipe log, it calculates which foods appear in

Infused with data, IBM’s Watson challenges notion of how a dish comes together

recipes together, and the statistical frequency of each match. It plots chemical affinities on a complex computational knowledge graph.

Corn, Watson decided, pairs pretty well with berries. Using the Watson app, I eventually ended up with a recipe for Corn Wedding Tarts, adapted from a more conventional version with rhubarb and phyllo pastry.

At the Institute of Culinary Education, chefs working with IBM probed Watson for similarly novel pairings. Asked for Spanish pastry ingredients, Watson suggested pepper, saffron, coconut milk, lemon extract and honey.

Later, chef James Briscione turned to Watson for inspiration for a Creole-spiced dumpling. The system spit out okra, tomatoes, lamb and shrimp, among other things.

“If you look at the list of ingredients, it’s just gumbo,” Briscione said. “But I would never have thought to condense gumbo and put it in a dumpling like that. . . .

It’s such a collaboration between you and the man in the machine.”

Briscione likens the Watson experience to solving a puzzle: You know the ingredients will work together, but not how or in what form. It’s like a more cerebral take on the popular Food Network show “Chopped” — which Briscione, incidentally, has won twice.

My Corn Wedding Tarts are . . . interesting. Not interesting in quite the same way as the chocolate-beef burrito from Watson’s cookbook, with its confoundingly cohesive garnishes of soybean and Edam cheese. Also not, thankfully, interesting in the same way as the mushroom-flavored whipped cream that topped an otherwise excellent cheesecake. (We fed that to our dog, who thought it was great.)

Instead, the corn tarts are just benignly peculiar: crooked rectangles of pie crust, topped with a sticky mound of corn and ginger in a strawberry-jam glaze. Strawberries and corn, it turns out, contain high concentrations of an organic compound called furaneol, which is why this combination, against all odds, approaches okay. n

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Bad boy on the mound N ON-FICTION

I PEDRO

By Pedro Martinez and Michael Silverman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

317 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

T HOMAS H ELEBA

t was September 2001, and the Boston Red Sox were in the final month of a miserable season. Ace pitcher Pedro Martinez had been shut down for the rest of the year with a rotator cuff injury, and major league games were on hold because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Red Sox were conducting a workout at Fenway Park after 21 hours of travel from Tampa to Baltimore to Boston, and thenmanager Joe Kerrigan insisted that Martinez dress in full uniform and supervise a bullpen session for two of his teammates. Martinez, who had put his uniform on over his street clothes, reminded his manager that he was done for the year and thought it would be best if he were home resting after the long day of travel. Kerrigan disagreed, the two exchanged words, and Martinez responded by taking off his uniform and throwing it down at his manager’s feet. “I never should have done that, out of respect for the Red Sox, but I wanted to disrespect Joe,” Martinez said. “I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t going to play for him. I pretty much said, ‘I quit.’ ” That revelation is just one of many Martinez discloses in “Pedro,” his memoir written with the Boston Herald’s Michael Silverman. When it comes to his hatred of Kerrigan, previously his pitching coach in Montreal and Boston, Martinez does not hold back. In fact, there is little the eight-time all-star holds back about any subject as he offers a revealing look at a colorful career that brought him from Manoguayabo in the Dominican Republic to the top of the baseball world. He goes into great detail about his childhood in the Dominican Republic, his admiration and love for his older brother Ramon, his adjustment to life in the United States, and his moves from the Dodgers to the Expos to the Red Sox to the Mets and, finally, the Phillies.

Among other highlights: l Almost being traded from the Expos to the Yankees for a young

AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES

Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez says that when he hit a batter, it was usually no accident.

reliever named Mariano Rivera in 1997. l Dancing naked in the clubhouse upon the arrivals of Red Sox managers Grady Little and Terry Francona. l A Viagra-spiked drink concocted by the ever-baffling Manny Ramirez during the 2004 American League Championship Series.

For the most part, Martinez presents himself as a fun-loving teammate who is dead serious about his craft. He’s not above holding grudges, however, saying he would never have pitched for the Dodgers again after they traded him to Montreal for Delino DeShields, and repeatedly mentioning the two sportswriters who left him off their MVP ballots in 1999. (The winner was Ivan Rodriguez.)

Martinez is upfront about hitting batters — 90 percent of the time it was on purpose, he says — but is sensitive about the “headhunter” label that was attached to him: According to him, he always

aimed below the neck. His detailed battles with Will Clark, Brady Anderson and Gary Sheffield are especially entertaining.

While Martinez is unapologetic about insisting on using the inner half of the plate, he does have one regret. “From the day I was old enough to listen, ‘respect’ was the word my parents and their generation preached constantly. Respect your elders. I could not raise an eyebrow, never mind my voice, at an elder. . . . I can only wish I had recalled those voices on October 11, 2003.” Martinez is referring to the day he threw down 72-year-old Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer during a bench-clearing melee in the ALCS. “I made the wrong decision, one that I am still paying for,” he says. “Some days I feel like there are more people who remember me as the angry young man who pushed down a defenseless old man than as a pitcher who won three Cy Young Awards and a world title and wound up with

some nice numbers. . . . I can’t defend what I did.”

Martinez also talks about pitching in the steroid era. He says he was first offered performanceenhancing drugs in 1992, and though he remains steadfast that he never juiced, he says he saw Expos teammates injecting one another in 1994 and ’95. “All around me, guys were pumping up, getting bigger and bigger,” he writes. When it was revealed that longtime teammate Ramirez was among those who had used, Martinez called it “maybe the biggest letdown.”

“Pedro” is an easy read, one that you don’t have to be an ardent seamhead to enjoy. Occasionally it gets a little stat-heavy, but the intimate details Martinez offers up from inside and outside the clubhouse make the book a winner. n Heleba is sports copy chief at The Washington Post and a lifelong Red Sox fan.

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Recapturing the magic of flight

Tale with a core of discovery, action

N ON-FICTION

F ICTION

W

l

REVIEWED BY

R EEVE L INDBERGH

ilbur Wright played the harmonica, Orville the violin. There were two older Wright brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, and a younger sister, Katharine, a graduate of Oberlin College and a high school Latin teacher. She and the younger two brothers, both lifelong bachelors, lived in Dayton, Ohio, with their father, clergyman Milton Wright. Their mother had died of tuberculosis in 1889.

The detailed glimpses of the Wright family revealed in the first pages of David McCullough’s superb new book, “The Wright Brothers,” give more personal information than most of us can claim to know about aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. Their 1903 manned flights off the Outer Banks of North Carolina at Kitty Hawk “were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.”

Few people at the time showed any interest in this extraordinary feat. No reporters were present when the flights took place Dec. 17, 1903, no representatives of scientific journals, no politicians eager to ally themselves with the enormous promise of aviation. Instead, there were three men from a nearby Life-Saving Station, one dairy farmer and a curious 18-year-old.

Dedicated to the dream of flight, the Wrights endured countless setbacks, disappointments and frustrations as they labored to perfect their flying machine. According to one witness, they were “the workingest boys” he ever knew. Generally inseparable, they were nonetheless quite different from one another. Wilbur was older, more serious and more studious; Orville shyer, gentler and more optimistic.

Raised under the benevolent influence of Bishop Wright, the Wright children were encouraged to read widely and learn extensively, not necessarily at school. Or-

ville claimed that “the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

When the bicycle craze seized the country in the 1890s, the brothers soon opened a workshop repairing and selling bicycles and sharpening ice skates in winter.

It was Wilbur, fascinated since childhood by the flight of birds, who began to follow the experiments of German engineer Otto Lilienthal, who built and flew a dozen or more gliders.

Though the triumph of Kitty Hawk went all but unrecognized in the United States at first, the Wright brothers took their flying machine, now with a more powerful engine, to a pasture known as Huffman Prairie and persevered.

They enjoyed ever-increasing success, “routinely making controlled flights of 25 miles or more.” Still, their proposal to sell the machine to the U.S. government was rejected twice.

Finally, in 1909, the Wrights were acknowledged in their own country, honored with lavish homecoming ceremonies, medals and a “Great Homecoming” celebration in Dayton.

The transformation of the Wright Bicycle Shop into the “Wright Company for the manufacture of airplanes,” and the following struggles with legal and business matters, reflect the Wright brothers’ central position in the ongoing development of aviation after Kitty Hawk. McCullough’s magical account of their early adventures — enhanced by volumes of family correspondence, written records, and his own deep understanding of the country and the era — shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly. n Lindbergh has written books for children and adults, including “Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures.”

L THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

By David McCullough Simon & Schuster.

320 pp. $30

THE DEAD LANDS

By Benjamin Percy Grand Central. 400 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED BY

K EITH D ONOHUE

ewis and Clark have attained a kind of mythic status in American history as our daring explorers of the frontier. That’s why it is so weird to have them sort of show up again in “The Dead Lands,” Benjamin Percy’s new post-apocalyptic novel.

The author of the werewolf thriller “Red Moon” and the gothic ecothriller “The Wilding,” Percy now joins a parade of contemporary writers slouching toward dystopia.

Around the time of our present age, somebody sneezed and blew up the world. As a deadly influenza pandemic began wiping out whole cities, the mad response of governments was to launch nuclear missiles to contain the disease. In St. Louis, the citizens erected walls around the downtown area, creating the Sanctuary, and believed themselves to be the only survivors.

One of the great joys of the novel is Percy’s world-building, creating a future that is recycling its past.

The story opens 150 years from that biological meltdown. There is no television, no Internet, even the newspapers are kaput. When gasoline ran out, people resorted to riding horses, and a kind of retro economy sprang up with blacksmiths and apothecaries and it was dominated by tight controls on the rapidly dwindling water supply. Ruled by a tyrannical mayor who tolerates no dissension, the Sanctuary is a fascist little kingdom of fear. Beyond the walls are the Dead Lands, inhabited only by creatures mutated by decades of fallout: hairless sand wolves, giant spiders and albino bats.

And then from the West, a rider arrives at the gates. Dark-eyed and mysterious, she is Gawea, and she brings news of a better world, where the rain falls and fresh crops grow, where civilization has been restored. A band of pilgrims, inspired by her story, decides to follow her back to the promised land.

They are led by Lewis Meriwether, whose name is one of the many tweaks to distinguish the fictional from the historical. He is curator of

the Sanctuary’s museum and inventor of extraordinary mechanical devices. His partner in this adventure is Wilhelmina Clark, and they are joined by a small group who also share the names of some of the members of the original Corps of Discovery. History geeks will recognize Reed, York, Jon Colter and the rest as they follow the trail more or less of the 1804 expedition, bound for Oregon.

The real Lewis and Clark dog the fictional ones in “The Dead Lands,” but if some allegory is at work, I can’t find it. Percy, who grew up in Oregon , seems merely to be riffing on a favorite story. But ultimately, the associations are a distraction, which is a shame, really, because otherwise the novel is finely crafted and relentlessly inventive.

Percy writes with a strong line, his rhythms incantatory and musical. The book crackles with action and adventure, and his descriptions of the wonders and disasters along the trail are as vivid as any accounts from the Corps of Discovery journals. Take, for example, this: “They surprise a huddle of javelinas, the big bristly pigs snorting and squealing, rushing toward them and hoofing up a big cloud of dust and swinging their tusks from side to side, and Clark drops two of them with arrows before the drove escapes.” A subplot set back in the Sanctuary where two children scheme to overthrow authority balances neatly against the episodes from the westward expedition.

“The Dead Lands” begins in darkness but ends in hope. Along the way, this band of survivors deals with brutality and violence, but also displays the fortitude and immensity of the human spirit.

When the true Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific, William Clark wrote, “Ocian in view! O! the joy.”

Like the journals, “The Dead Lands” will often take your breath away. n Donohue is a novelist, whose latest book is “The Boy Who Drew Monsters.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Dads are smarter these days, on and o≠ screen CHAD PREVOST has a Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State and serves as faculty of the Yale Writers’ Conference.

Just a few years ago, when I was less embroiled in the throes of dad­dom, I had no idea about the pervasive characterization of the dumb dad. But it is everywhere. You can find dumb dads in young­reader books like “The Berenstain Bears,” sitcoms from “Leave It to Beaver” to “All in the Family” to “Married … with Children” to “Everybody Loves Raymond” and an enduring legacy of commercials since the 1950s. As Homer Simpson — perhaps the most enduring of his ilk — quips, “Marriage is like a coffin, and each kid is another nail.”

For generations, those bumbling oafs set a subconscious example for the rest of us, giving us implicit permission to leave household duties to our wives because — obviously — we just weren’t that good at them, anyway. But now the disconnected father who exits stage left for the better part of the week and washes his hands at the door of competence or emotional engagement is starting to fade into pop-culture history. Ed O’Neill’s character in “Modern Family” may be the best example: Jay Pritchett has come a long way from the goon-dad stereotype of Al Bundy. Or look at what happened to Huggies when the diaper company tried to traffic in dumb-dad stereotypes for a 2012 commercial — dads and moms alike protested the ad’s conceit, which was that dads were so oblivious to their children that they’d leave diapers on well past the point that other brands would fail. Clorox tried something similar the following year, then meekly withdrew its ad, too.

By last year, Cheerios had learned the lesson: Its twominute “how to dad” ad showed a cool, calm father doing it all, with mom nowhere in sight, and it racked up 1.6 million YouTube views. And Nyquil put out an ad showing a dad begging for a sick day from his kid, not his boss,

with the tag line “dads don’t take sick days” — it was virtually identical to a similar ad targeting moms.

Why the change in attitude?

Advertisers and TV writers are just catching up to demographic trends. Married couples haven’t been in the majority for the past five years, a decline from 78 percent in the 1950s to 48 percent by 2010 (which means the old standard of a mom who ran the home and a dad who didn’t know what to do once he was back from the office no longer makes much sense). In most two-parent families, Pew research shows, both parents are working outside the home at least part-time. And in a growing number of them, dads are the ones taking care of the domestic end: Between 1995 and 2011, the number of stay-athome-dads in the U.S. nearly tripled from 64,000 to 176,000.

It was about time all this changed. A generation of women had been spending eight hours (at least) at the office, followed by a “second shift” of housework that amounts to an estimated extra month of work per year. When Mom finally did manage to collapse in front of the tube, the networks gave her a parade of hapless dimwits stumbling around ordinary household chores, seemingly incapable of lifting a spatula, running a

ERIC MCCANDLESS/ABC

RON BATZDORFF/FOX

RON CBS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

From top left, the bumbling dads on “All in the Family,” “The Simpsons” and “Married . . . With Children” were often the butt of the joke.

dishwasher or tying a bow.

But as I’ve learned in the five years I’ve been a part-time writer and full-time stay-at-home dad while my wife builds a technology company, that image is neither accurate nor particularly satisfying. No, the domestic hemisphere is not for the faint of heart. Not just because it’s hard. It is definitely another job, but it’s also often humble work, tending to others and scheduling your life around their schedules, while remaining engaged enough to be emotionally present for your kids.

There’s little external reward, and for many smart and driven people, even when you do it well, it’s not enough.

For me, the chance to quit my teaching job and try my hand at writing, while raising our kids, sounded like a dream. I can say now that both novel writing and domestic duties have proved to be far more challenging than anything I could have imagined — and yet I wouldn’t trade what I’m experiencing, and what we as a family have grown into.

There are, though, intangible benefits of discovering that domestic involvement is not merely “helping” your spouse.

Dads report higher levels of happiness, positive emotion and life meaning than men who aren’t

dads. And the countries that rank the highest in annual lists of the happiest countries are — no surprise in my household — also the countries near the top of the World Economic Forum’s ranking of those doing the best at closing the gender gap between men and women in a range of areas.

The dumb dad may be turning into an endangered species, but he’s not likely to go extinct any time soon. For one, dumb people will always be with us, and unfortunately, some of them will always be dads. For another, many men feel dislocated when they aren’t clear on how they’re contributing. Better to “sacrifice,” get out of the house and earn some dough. Which, despite the rise in stay-at-home dads, men still do far more of: Women make only 78 cents on the dollar that men make, and men dominate the ranks of CEOs and politicians.

Dads, this is just to say, whatever you think you believe about domestic politics, it’s time to sharpen more than your lawnmower blades or even the kitchen knives. This thing is called the 21st century, and we’re all in it. If we all accept responsibility for being present at work and home, we’ll find we’ve become a happier nation. One evolving domicile at a time. n

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

More movies need female directors MELISSA SILVERSTEIN is the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood and the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Athena Film Festival.

There are two moments each year when people pay attention to the film business on a global scale. The first is the Academy Awards. The second is Cannes, the world’s biggest and most prestigious film festival.

Each year, images of stars walking the red carpet ricochet around the globe for the 10-day event, which is underway now.

But the lights of Cannes also illuminate one of the biggest crises facing the film business: the lack of opportunities for female filmmakers. In the past decade, only 9 percent of the films in the main competition at the festival have been directed by women, according to data culled by Women and Hollywood, a project that advocates for gender parity in the entertainment industry. This year, that number is 10.5 percent.

Cannes does has a few bright spots for women this time around: For the first time, a female director, Agnès Varda, will be awarded an honorary Palme d’Or. And for the first time since 1987, a film directed by a woman, Emmanuelle Bercot, will open the festival. But Bercot’s film is not included in the competition, which this year features only two female-directed projects.

The lack of women behind the camera is not a new problem, or one limited to Cannes. The numbers have crept up a bit for women in TV but had virtually no effect on feature films. The opportunities for female directors

at the highest level of the film business continue to stagnate.

According to the Los Angeles Times, in 2014, women directed only 4.6 percent of studio films.

And new data from the Sundance Institute and Women in Film LA Female Filmmaker Initiative, analyzed by USC’s Annenberg Center, showed that the topgrossing films from 2002 to 2014 were overwhelmingly directed by men, by a ratio of 23 to 1.

The need for women behind the camera isn’t mere tokenism; the sex of the director makes a difference in who is shown on camera and how. According to one study, only 28 percent of speaking characters were female in films with exclusively male directors and writers. The presence of at least one female director and/or writer made that

figure jump to 37 percent. The numbers are even starker when it comes to the sex of protagonists.

Of movies with a female director or writer, 39 percent of the protagonists were female. When the director and writers were exclusively male, just 4 percent of protagonists were women.

And only 12 percent of the top 100 grossing films in 2014 had female protagonists. At the 2014 Oscars, not one of the nominated films for best picture featured a female main character. Successful movies that star women are still seen as anomalies, and any failure is taken as proof that women aren’t bankable. This point was illustrated in an e-mail discovered through the Sony hack, in which the head of Marvel wrote to the Sony CEO about the historic failure of female superhero films and why these types of movies are problematic.

That particular e-mail also illustrates an incredibly difficult problem for female-centric content — the perception that the male experience is the norm for storytelling and heroism, and the female perspective is seen as the “other.” This misperception reverberates in Hollywood, where men continue to dominate at all levels of the business.

And while Hollywood may be a boys club in most of its

leadership, it is not a boys club when it comes to the audience.

According to the MPAA, women buy half of all movie tickets. It’s hard to imagine that studio executives actively conspire to keep women out, but research from the Female Filmmakers Initiative shows that when executives, sales agents and agents think about directors, they think male.

But women are making inroads. Sam Taylor-Johnson broke the opening weekend record for a female-directed film for “50 Shades of Grey”: $85 million. And Patty Jenkins was just hired to helm “Wonder Woman,” which will make her the first woman to direct a live-action film with a budget of more than $100 million.

Films are the most democratic and universal way we communicate and share our stories. Representation is key. It all goes back to the famous quote from Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

When we don’t have women telling stories or having women represented as protagonists, we are telling girls (and boys) that women’s voices, visions and experiences don’t count. We know that’s not true in the real world, and it’s time for this to change in our movies. n

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Clinton’s cowardice on trade ROBERT KAGAN is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.

There are two things no serious candidate for the White House in 2016 can equivocate on: defense spending and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Foreign policy and strategy are going to be front-andcenter in the coming campaign. Few doubt that the world has become more dangerous, that the world order created by the United States, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, is fraying at the edges, and that America’s critical role as a leader in the international system is increasingly in doubt. One key element of restoring U.S. leadership is increasing defense spending, busting the sequester caps and bringing the defense budget at least to the level called for by President Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates.

But another key element is solidifying and advancing a freetrade regime that binds the United States closer to its European and Asian allies. In Asia, especially, this is more than just a trade issue, although the United States stands to benefit from a well-negotiated agreement. It is, above all, a strategic issue. The United States and China are locked in a competition across the spectrum of power and influence.

Militarily, the Chinese seek to deny American access to the region and hope thereby to divide the United States from its allies.

Economically, China would like to turn Asia into a region of

Chinese hegemony, where every key trade relationship is with Beijing. In such a world, the United States is a net loser — providing costly security to allies but not much else, while China reaps the economic rewards and grabs the hearts and minds, and pocketbooks, of regional players.

Experts on Asia, Democrat and Republican, consider the TPP trade agreement an essential element of U.S. strategy in Asia.

On no other issue is there more bipartisan consensus within the foreign policy community.

Which brings us to Hillary Rodham Clinton. As secretary of state, Clinton supported the TPP wholeheartedly, for reasons economic and strategic. This was not a matter of loyalty to Obama.

Clinton was known to make clear her differences with the president

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DARKOW FOR THE COLUMBIA DAILY TRIBUNE

on a number of issues.

Yet now, when the trade agreement hangs in the balance, when the all-important question of “trade promotion authority“ was voted on in the Senate, Clinton has been silent, or worse, has quietly indicated her concerns about the agreement.

Whether this is posturing to avoid offending her party’s left wing, only Clinton can know for sure. But it is an interesting departure from her statements as the nation’s top diplomat.

There are always candidates who believe they can run a careful race for president, trimming on issues that seem to require it during the primaries and general election, with the idea that, once elected, they can do what they know is the right thing. Unfortunately, American politics rarely work that way.

It is generally the case that if you don’t have the courage to run on a particular platform, you will not have any more courage to govern on it once you are in office. Presidents usually only do what they say they are going to do. Ronald Reagan promised to rebuild American defenses and cut taxes. That is what he did.

Obama promised to pull troops out of the Middle East, and that is what he did. If Clinton won’t run on a free-trade platform, she

won’t govern on one.

In a world very much in need of American leadership, but still leery of American power, there is no more effective form of U.S. global involvement than the strengthening of the global freetrade regime. In Asia, especially, where many believe the United States’ economic future lies, building strong trade ties is smart economics and smart strategy.

Our allies want it. China worries about it. It is a critical card to play in the complex game of global influence.

Those who oppose it are not thinking of foreign policy or America’s role in the world. They are thinking of nothing more than the most narrow and parochial of U.S. interests. Like the people who voted for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, they would defend a small segment of the U.S. economy at the cost of the global economy and America’s global influence. Is that where Clinton wants to be? Is that the kind of leadership she proposes to offer us? For a candidate who as yet faces no primary challenge, to cower in the face of possible criticism from the irresponsible wing of her party gives little assurance that she has what it takes to lead the nation in the very difficult years ahead. n

SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Breast cancer BY

P AIGE W INFIELD C UNNINGHAM

Everyone knows that hot pink stands for breast cancer. The second­ leading cause of cancer death among women has given rise to per­ haps the most effective anti­cancer campaign in U.S. history. But widespread public awareness hasn’t tamped down misperceptions.

Here are some myths you might still believe.

1

Breast cancer is mostly linked to family history.

Certain genetic mutations do dramatically increase the chances of getting breast cancer: Women with an abnormality in either the BRCA1 or the BRCA2 gene, for instance, have a 40 to 85 percent chance of developing it, compared with about a 12 percent chance among the general population. An estimated 1 in 400 to 800 people will inherit this mutation, which translates to 400,000 to 800,000 Americans.

But most breast cancer patients don’t have a family history of the disease. Only 5 to 10 percent of breast cancer cases are considered hereditary — and just 13 percent of patients have a mom or sister who also got it.

2

Birth-control pills increase the risk of developing the disease.

Many women believe that taking oral contraception increases breast cancer risk. But what’s less known is that not all birth-control pills increase the risk — just those with high levels of estrogen.

Last year, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that for women who had recently taken pills with highdose estrogen, the risk of breast cancer was 2.7 times greater. The risk was 1.6 times higher for recent users of pills containing moderate-dosage estrogen. But the researchers found no greater

risk associated with pills with low doses . The distinction matters; most women on the pill these days use moderate- or low-dose kinds. Of the study’s participants, fewer than 1 percent were taking a pill with high-dose estrogen, and overall, birth-control pills today contain about a fifth of the estrogen that oral contraceptives had when they debuted in the 1960s.

Furthermore, most women take the pill in their 20s and 30s, when they’re less likely to develop the disease anyway, and the slightly elevated risk decreases four years after a woman stops taking it. Simply growing older puts a woman at far greater risk of developing breast cancer than oral contraceptives do.

3

Larger breasts mean greater risk.

A slew of headlines suggesting a higher breast cancer risk among well-endowed women resulted from a 2012 study by genetics firm 23andMe. But the correlation is far from proven. For one thing, the study identified only genetic variants that have an effect on both breast cancer risk and breast size — and the researchers admitted that much more research would be needed to establish a concrete link.

Previous studies have presented conflicting results. Two studies found that larger breasts elevate the risk among thin women but not among heavy women. Another study found the opposite: that women with

PINK UMBRELLAS HANG ABOVE DOWNTOWN SOFIA, BULGARIA, IN 2012. STOYAN NENOV/REUTERS

smaller breasts may have a higher risk because of tissue density.

4

All women should do a monthly breast selfexam.

For years, the monthly breast exam was the holy grail of cancer screening. Doctors insisted — and often still do — that female patients practice them.

But the science shows that selfexams don’t improve survival rates. In studies of Russian and Chinese women conducted over a decade, the rate of breast cancer deaths was almost identical among women trained in selfexams and among those who weren’t. Doing a self-exam can also lead to more unnecessary screenings, false-positive test results and biopsies with benign results. And by the time many women find lumps, their cancer has already been growing for several years.

Self-exams aren’t necessarily bad, experts say, but it’s more important for women to be aware of their breasts in the same way they monitor their bodies in general, rather than conducting an exam in a particular way each

month.

5

Breast cancer research needs more money.

Breast cancer gets eight times as much funding as lung cancer, even though lung cancer kills more women yearly. In total, breast cancer gets more than double the federal research funding of any other cancer.

The huge investment is thanks to a highly effective publicawareness push that began way before any other anti-cancer efforts. Komen has spread its influence through a huge network of partnerships.

Another factor in breast cancer’s elevated funding is its relatively low mortality rate.

About 12 percent of women diagnosed with the disease die within five years — a rate much lower than for cancers of the lungs or pancreas, which kill a majority of patients five years out.

That means there are lots of survivors to rally the troops. n Winfield Cunningham is a health-care correspondent for the Washington Examiner.

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SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2015