The Washington Post National Weekly - January 7, 2018

SUNDAY, JANUARY 7, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

One giant step Can space tourism improve life on Earth ? PAGE 12

Politics Trump and Bannon’s split 4

Nation Exodus from Puerto Rico 8

Science Break bad habits 23

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THE FIX

Congress’s 2018 issues, ranked BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

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ongress left town for the holidays with no long-term solutions to any outstanding political and policy quagmires. That means lawmakers have a lot to figure out in not a lot of time. Congress doesn’t do well under pressure, so it’s very possible a lot of this will fall by the wayside. Here are the issues Congress will most likely deal with, ranked.

1. Fund the government by Jan. 19: Congress could not agree on how to fund the government in 2018, so they kicked the can down the road. Now they have about two weeks to either stall again or come to a bipartisan agreement.

The hang­ups: Republicans need Democrats and/or conservative House lawmakers to pass a spending bill, which means any one of these factions of Congress could decide to leverage their votes for a policy issue that is a non-starter for the other side.

Republicans are loath to step on their tax bill success by shutting down the government.

2. Get a deal ending automatic spending cuts: Complicating budget negotiations are strict caps on how much Congress can spend each year on domestic and defense spending, a requirement from 2011.

Both Senate Republicans and Democrats say ending these automatic spending cuts is their priority. They must find a way to raise these caps if they want to come to a long-term spending deal.

The hang­ups: Republicans are focused on raising the caps for military spending to give President Trump his requested increase of about $100 billion. Democrats are demanding a dollar-for-dollar raise on domestic spending, too. That could turn off some fiscally inclined

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Republicans, putting the whole spending bill in jeopardy.

3. Fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program and disaster relief: Both sides generally agree they need to refund CHIP, a program 9 million children rely on that Congress let expire in September.

Another must-do is issuing tens of billions of dollars to communities ravaged by historically strong hurricanes and wildfires. Republicans and Democrats generally agree helping communities rebuild is a core function of the federal government.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The hang­ups: On disaster relief, it may just be too expensive for a majority of Congress to stomach. Before the holiday, the House approved $81 billion in disaster relief, but Democrats said that was not enough, given places like the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico still do not have power.

4. Protect “dreamers”: Four months after Trump ended the program that protects young undocumented immigrants, and then tossed it to Congress to deal with, lawmakers still haven’t figured out what to do.

There is a bipartisan group in the Senate trying to put a deal together. Powerful GOP senators such as John Cornyn (Texas), Charles

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 13

E. Grassley (Iowa), John McCain (Ariz.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) support dreamer protections.

The hang­ups: It seems that for every Republican who wants dreamers protected, there is another Republican who sees it as amnesty.

Then there’s Trump. He has given some seriously mixed signals on whether he wants to protect dreamers. Now, he is demanding money for his border wall in exchange for extending protections — a non-starter for most congressional Democrats and Republicans.

5. Propping up subsidies for Obamacare: This is top priority for one Republican in particular, Sen. Susan Collins (Maine). She got an agreement from Senate GOP leaders that she would vote for the tax bill if they voted on a bipartisan bill to continue payments that help lower-income people with health-care costs.

The hang­ups: A vote in the Senate doesn’t mean a bill will become a law. House Republicans don’t seem too interested in voting on something that could save the Affordable Care Act, especially when a number of them are still peeved that the law even exists.

6. Renewing FISA: Should the government be able to spy on a foreigner without a warrant? And, in the process, collect any communication that foreigner has with Americans? A program that lets the government do that, known as FISA, expires Jan. 19. A House aide predicted to The Washington Post that the issue will get a vote in the next few weeks, which means Congress could have a potentially contentious debate on its hands.

The hang­ups: The debate over warrantless surveillance isn’t new, and it doesn’t fall along party lines. Those who think the program opens the door for abuse of government power include libertarian-minded Republicans as well as liberal Democrats. n

©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DATA CRUNCH BOOKS OPINION SCIENCE

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ON THE COVER A writer had a “gateway space tourism experience” aboard G-Force One, a commercial flight that creates a zero-gravity environment. Photo illustration by ISABEL ESPANOL for The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

A partnership pivots to bitter enmity

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump insists Bannon was a minor figure, but others say he made Trump president BY

M ICHAEL K RANISH

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resident Trump’s dismissive description Wednesday of Stephen K. Bannon as “a staffer” who had “very little to do with our historic victory” marked his latest effort to cast his onetime confidant as a bit player who never had any real influence on the president’s politics or policies.

It was the kind of story-shaping

statement that, not so long ago, Trump and Bannon might have written together.

In reality, Bannon has been a guiding figure for Trump for years as the New York developer began seriously to consider running for president, according to associates of both men.

Sam Nunberg, who said he arranged numerous telephone calls between Bannon and Trump dating to 2013, said it did not take

long for the two to become ideological soul mates. At a time when Trump was widely dismissed as a credible candidate, Nunberg said, Bannon took him seriously and publicized him on the Breitbart News website, which Bannon oversaw.

From those earliest days, Bannon encouraged Trump to run for the White House, and then, in the race’s final months, he effectively took over a campaign that ap-

Stephen K. Bannon, then-White House chief strategist, listens to President Trump during a meeting on cybersecurity in the White House last year.

peared to have almost no chance of succeeding.

“The only candidate who could have won this past election on the message of populism and conservative nationalism is Donald J. Trump,” said Nunberg, who worked for Trump as a political and public affairs adviser before he was fired in 2015. “However, at the time Steve took a formal role, the campaign was in dire straits, and I don’t believe the president

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POLITICS would have been able to pull off that upset at the end without Steve Bannon.”

It is possible, if not likely, that Trump and Bannon will reunite again soon — the president has a long history of making up with associates against whom he has lashed out. But for now, at least, Trump and Bannon are on the outs, following revelations in a new book by Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” in which Bannon is quoted as saying that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016 was “treasonous.”

Bannon declined to comment Wednesday.

John Thornton — a former coworker of Bannon’s at Goldman Sachs whom Bannon has described as a “mentor” — saw Bannon work closely with Trump during the transition and the early months of the administration. He said in an interview Wednesday that he was impressed at how smoothly they got along and by how the president listened closely to Bannon’s advice.

“It was a very healthy, highly engaged, intimate relationship that you would expect to see between the person who had just won the presidency and the person who had run the campaign,” Thornton said. “There’s no question he was clearly a central figure helping the president achieve his goals.”

Bannon and Trump were introduced in 2010 by David Bossie, who rose as a hero on the right when as a congressional staffer in the 1990s he helped to investigate Bill Clinton and went on to become president of Citizens United, a conservative group whose work includes a movie pillorying Hillary Clinton. Bossie did not respond to a request for comment.

Outwardly, Bannon and Trump did not seem to have much in common — one making his fame and fortune in front of the cameras, the other building a power base behind them. The two men bonded over their rare ability to be members of the coastal elite while representing themselves as champions of the downtrodden working class — as well as over a shared anger at the GOP establishment.

That bond gelled shortly after Mitt Romney lost the presidential

CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

“Bannon sees himself as the head of a movement, and he sees Trump as the beneficiary of that movement at this point in time.”

John Thornton, a former co-worker of Bannon’s at Goldman Sachs race in 2012. Trump began tweeting that Republicans had been robbed. During that same year, Bannon became executive chairman of Breitbart News and reshaped the website into one promoting more-nationalistic views, later declaring that it was “the platform for the alt-right.”

It was after the 2012 election, as Trump went through his quadrennial exercise of pondering a bid for the presidency, that he began talking to Bannon on the phone more regularly. By 2015, their conversations became public, as Trump took turns as a guest on a radio broadcast called the Breitbart News Daily. Bannon has said that he was “mocked and ridiculed” for talking about a Trump candidacy on the show but that he realized that Trump had an uncanny ability to attract support.

During the radio interviews, Bannon sometimes seemed to be tutoring Trump about how to frame issues. For instance, in one interview, Trump said he wanted to build a border wall but allow some immigrants who graduated

from U.S. universities to stay in the country.

“I still want people to come in.

But I want them to go through the process,” Trump said.

Bannon responded, “You got to remember, we’re Breitbart. We’re the know-nothing vulgarians. So we’ve always got to be to the right of you on this.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Trump said.

As Trump’s presidential campaign unfolded, Bannon regularly advised Trump and his son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, while also pushing the candidacy on the Breitbart website. Then, as the campaign seemed headed for defeat, Trump in August 2016 hired Bannon as the campaign’s chief executive. Just as he had on his radio show, Bannon pushed Trump to go further to the right and to hammer Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton mercilessly.

The strategy worked, and Trump rewarded Bannon by making him the White House chief strategist, a powerful role that put him in conflict with Kushner, who was named Trump’s senior adviser. Bannon had worked well with

President Trump talks to Jared Kushner, center, and Stephen K. Bannon during a swearing in ceremony for senior staff at the White House in 2017.

Bannon had worked well with Kushner during the campaign but often was at odds with him in the White House.

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Kushner during the campaign but often was at odds with him in the White House, as Bannon pushed policies such as pulling out of a global-warming treaty, which Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, reportedly had supported.

Thornton said that while the relationship between Trump and Bannon may baffle some, there is a “larger picture” that makes sense to Bannon.

“Bannon sees himself as the head of a movement, and he sees Trump as the beneficiary of that movement at this point in time,” Thornton said. “Bannon sees himself as helping Trump stay true to that movement. If Trump or his administration deviates from the movement, Bannon will go on the offense. If Trump stays true, Bannon is all in.”

The relationship seemed to have fallen apart in August, shortly after Bannon was quoted in an interview with the American Prospect saying “there’s no military solution” to North Korea’s nuclear capability, “they got us.”

Trump fired him, although Bannon said he resigned. In any case, Bannon later told the Weekly Standard: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency.

But that presidency is over. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

Bannon then returned to running Breitbart News and, in effect, began laying the groundwork for the next phase of his war against the Republican establishment, of which he now viewed Trump as a captive. Still, the two remained in touch and had talked on the telephone at least five times since Bannon’s departure, according to the White House.

Bannon persuaded Trump to endorse Roy Moore, the failed U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama who was accused of inappropriate sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early 30s.

Then came the news Wednesday of Wolff’s book, and the president, having played a crucial role in making Bannon one of the best-known political figures of the day, said that his former chief strategist had “lost his mind” and that he was done with him. n © The Washington Post

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NATION

A long way from Puerto Rico C HICO H ARLAN Huron, S.D. BY

T

he airport terminal doors slid open and out came 22 people from Puerto Rico, walking into the whipping South Dakota wind, not quite ready for what was ahead.

One still wore shorts. Another zipped up a hoodie. The group climbed into three waiting vans.

“You guys good?” asked a driver who would be taking them to their new home. “Does anybody speak English?”

“No,” one person said, and the driver let the van go silent before turning up some country music.

Through the windows, there were miles of emptiness, and Gretchen Velez, 21, looked at the others and was quiet. She’d started the day on an island that was desperately short on electricity and clean water and jobs because of Hurricane Maria. Now, 10 hours later, she was in a place she knew almost nothing about, other than what a job recruiter had told her, that he had a position for her at a turkey processing plant in a town some 3,000 miles away.

Velez had never left Puerto Rico, but after years of economic crisis and then a natural disaster, almost everybody she knew was wondering whether they had any choice but to go. By some counts, nearly 2,000 Puerto Ricans were leaving every day, and in that exodus, some mainland U.S. companies were starting to see an opportunity of their own — a new answer in their ever-evolving struggle to find workers who would perform lower-rung American jobs.

When Velez and the others arrived in Huron after a two-hour ride, on the horizon were the lights of a turkey plant called Dakota Provisions. The Puerto Ricans unloaded their luggage, and a Spanish-speaking humanresources employee from the turkey plant passed out keys and showed them to their rooms.

After the storm Ten weeks earlier, Velez had been a college student with a

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

A South Dakota turkey plant saw opportunity in the exodus from the storm-ravaged island part-time job and no plans to leave Puerto Rico. But then the hurricane hit, bringing with it 30 inches of rain and 120 mph winds, and when it was over she had knee-high water in her house and no idea what to do. She had lost her job; the building where she’d worked was flooded. Her college classes were canceled.

The train she used to commute wasn’t running. As the weeks passed, Velez saw only deeper evidence of a place falling apart.

To catch phone service, Velez walked toward a cell tower until she had enough of a connection to see the goodbye notes friends were posting on Facebook as they left the island. And then, one day, a different kind of message popped up, posted by her cousin, about an opportunity in South Dakota at a turkey plant where he worked. “Take advantage!” he wrote.

The turkey plant had opened 12 years earlier and since then had grown into one of the largest

employers in South Dakota, with more than a thousand workers. It had also transformed the character of Huron: The starting-level jobs — breast-pullers, carcassloaders, bird-hangers — rarely attracted anyone from the local workforce, so instead the plant filled with people from all over the world. Soon, a town that had been 97 percent white had four Asian grocery stores and a school district where half the students were learning English as a second language, and at the center of it was a plant in constant need of workers.

For a year, the company had tried recruiting in Puerto Rico, where the economy over a decade had already contracted 10 percent. But then came the hurricane, and in the turkey plant’s HR office, one of the recruiting managers, Oscar Luque, saw news footage of what looked to him like a “Third World country.” He asked Puerto Ricans already at the plant to spread the word that

Employees work in a refrigerated environment processing turkeys at Dakota Provisions in Huron, S.D.

he was coming. He flew to the island with 48 drug-test kits, somehow found a vacant hotel room in San Juan, and waited to see who would show up.

Over the next week, with workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency still directing traffic, 80 people came from across the island to meet with him. Luque told them about the work — that it was repetitive, physical, “not always pretty.” He told them about the wages — $10.00 per hour, jumping soon after to $12 or $13. He said the company would fly them to South Dakota and slowly deduct the flight costs out of their paychecks.

He described the jobs available.

“A good opportunity,” Luque called it, and he offered the job to welders and bartenders and security guards, and then to Velez, who said she would come, and then sold her iPod and a video game console to gather spending cash for the trip.

The morning after she arrived in South Dakota, she opened the motel room curtains and looked outside. Just beyond the parking lot was a baseball field, a restaurant called the Plains and a 28foot-tall statue of a pheasant, the region’s favorite hunting target.

She put on three layers, walked outside and video-chatted with her boyfriend back in Puerto Rico, holding up her phone to show him the view.

“Is that a duck?” he asked when Velez walked up to the bird.

“I don’t think so,” she said, and when they talked again the next day she told him that Huron was very cold and quiet, that it was flat, that it had nice houses and also a Salvation Army, where she’d picked up a red winter coat, one that she planned to wear during her shifts inside the plant.

As her first day of work approached, she had so many questions about how life inside the plant would feel. How would the turkeys look? Would she see blood? Could she handle the cold?

During two days of orientation — mostly instructions on safety and health — she didn’t once see the work area. It was only on the eve

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NATION of her first shift, while she was being fitted for rubber boots, that a veteran Puerto Rican employee walked out of the work area and into the break room.

“First two weeks, you’ll hurt,” he said. “But you’re coming from Puerto Rico. Put your heart into it. This is your life.”

First day on the plant floor The next morning, there was a fresh layer of snow on the ground.

At the plant, 19,900 turkeys arrived in trucks and 22 workers clocked in for the first time.

Velez had been assigned to the deboning room, one of about 185 workers standing shoulder to shoulder. She buttoned a white smock over her red jacket, pulled on her rubber boots and walked through two swinging doors, entering a narrow, frigid hallway that led to her work area. In the hallway, she stopped by a booth that provided her the rest of her equipment, and she pulled it on layer by layer — a vinyl apron, a hairnet, protection for her ears and eyes, a pair of cotton gloves, and over that a pair of rubber gloves, and on her right hand a mesh steel glove for protection against cuts.

A supervisor led her down the hallway and into a room with high ceilings, bright lights, silver metal surfaces and a temperature set at 36 to 38 degrees.

This was her first time inside the plant. To her right, she saw plucked and headless turkeys arriving into the room on a chute, where workers picked them up and hooked them by their feet to a conveyor belt.

Everywhere she looked, she saw people from somewhere else.

Only a handful seemed to be local. The people hanging the birds were from Burma. Some of the people trimming the breasts were from Puerto Rico. Deeper in the factory, cutting skin, removing organs, there were people from Cuba and Guatemala and Vietnam. More than a dozen were from Chuuk, an island chain in Micronesia.

A supervisor, from Haiti, led Velez to her station, on what was called the wing line. A worker, from Puerto Rico, pulled Velez aside and showed her the motion she would make hundreds of times for the rest of the day: picking up a turkey wing from a trough in front of her. She was on

the line with five other workers, and no matter how fast they cut, they couldn’t keep up. Every few minutes, somebody came by with a shovel and dumped more wings into the trough.

On her first attempt, Velez fumbled with the knife and missed half the meat. Her second attempt was better, and same with her third. But on her fourth, she dragged the knife into the bone and got stuck. Her fifth, she fought to yank away the skin. The wings were massive and slippery, she thought; she couldn’t figure out how best to hold them.

Then, the cold set in. Somehow, she would later say, it seemed to build and build, sinking into her feet and hands, and impossible to shake away. The meat was cold.

The knife was cold. Even the ground felt cold.

She returned to the line. The wings kept coming. She trimmed a wing in 25 seconds, then 22 seconds, then 29. The muscles in her hands kept tightening,.

With 15 minutes to go, she found a last wind. She shook her hands and picked up the wings as quickly as she could — 13 seconds, 15 seconds — until another worker looked at the clock and said the day was almost over. Velez cut the meat from one more wing and dropped it onto the belt.

Other workers guided her out of the deboning room, into a cleanup area where she washed bits of turkey flesh and skin from her boots, her rubber gloves, her apron. She said she was exhausted. She said the muscles in her lower legs hurt from standing.

She said the muscles in her hand hurt from cutting. She tried to make a fist and couldn’t. “I’m just so tired,” she said.

She walked slowly toward the turkey plant’s exit and, while waiting for the other workers to filter out, sat in a chair and dropped her head on a table. Her first day as a worker in South Dakota was over. The next morning, her alarm would ring at 5 a.m.

“I need to get some sleep,” she said, but for now, all she wanted to do was get a ride back to the motel. She wanted to get back to Puerto Rico eventually, but here, for her, was opportunity — the chance to stand under a hot shower for as long as it took to take away the chill of the day. n ©The Washington Post

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Homeless youth numbers on rise BY

Study: 1 in 10 last year lacked beds.

Rising housing costs, family volatility cited.

M ORIAH B ALINGIT

H

emmed in by low wages, pricey rental markets and family instability, more young people are crashing on couches of friends or acquaintances, sleeping in cars or turning to the streets, a new study has found.

Researchers with Chapin Hall, a youth policy center at the University of Chicago, surveyed in 2016 and 2017 more than 26,000 young people and their families across the country to gauge how many of them had been homeless during some period of the previous year.

Their results were alarming: One in 10 people ages 18 to 25 had experienced homelessness. For adolescents, the number was 1 in 30. They concluded that nearly 3.5 million young adults and 660,000 adolescents had been homeless within the previous year.

Matthew Morton, a Chapin Hall research fellow, said he aims to dispel the notion that homelessness afflicts mostly older men. His survey identified college students and graduates and employed young people who struggled to find a permanent place to stay.

Researchers also found it was no less prevalent in rural areas than in urban ones.

“Our findings probably challenge the images of homelessness.

Homelessness is young,” Morton said. “It’s more common than people expect and it’s largely hidden.”

That was true in the District, where officials counted more homeless children and parents than homeless single men last year. The number of homeless families soared by more than 30 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to a federal estimate released last spring.

The researchers relied on a broad definition of homelessness and counted as homeless young people who had run away from home — even for a night — as well as those who were forced to sleep on couches or stay with friends temporarily. Children who run

away are more likely to face homelessness as adults, Morton said.

The study marked the first time researchers had used a nationally representative survey to capture the picture of youth homelessness.

Previously, researchers relied on “point in time” counts, which tallied only people who were homeless on a particular day. Morton said those counts probably underestimated the prevalence of youth homelessness, because young people are more likely to move in and out of it than older people.

The findings “are staggering.

They are alarming, but they’re not necessarily surprising,” Morton said. “Many young people are getting hammered in this economy . . . and far too many youth have experienced trauma and lack stable family situations. You have a major affordable housing crisis.”

Neither Kera Pingree, 21, nor Dee Baillet, 27, fit the stereotype of homelessness. Pingree is pursuing a degree at Southern Maine Community College while working at the University of Southern Maine, and Baillet is a college graduate.

When Baillet came out as gay to his mother at 17, she told him he could no longer live at home. So he went to his bedroom and packed a duffel bag, unsure of where he would go. But it didn’t stop him from graduating from high school and ending up in college, where he finished early and took a teaching job in Indianapolis. But his housing situation fell through. Broke and unsure of where to go, he first considered staying in a shelter, but it felt unsafe. So he slept in his car.

Pingree, 21, had a daughter at 15 and was separated from the girl three years later, when family conflict forced a move. Pingree bounced from a friend’s house to a partner’s house. Pingree remained separated from the little girl for four months until space at a family shelter opened up.

“Optimally there would have been a program to allow me to live on my own with my daughter,” Pingree said. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

S. Korea welcomes talks with North S IMON D ENYER Beijing BY

S

outh Korea has leaped at an offer of talks from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of next month’s Winter Olympics, betting that tensions between the two countries can be eased after more than a year of insults, military drills, missile launches and nuclear tests.

U.S. officials said they doubt Kim’s sincerity but declared that Washington will not stand in the way, nor will it allow the North to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States.

“Rocket man now wants to talk to South Korea for first time,” President Trump tweeted last week, referring to Kim. “Perhaps that is good news, perhaps not — we will see!”

A top South Korean official suggested that the two sides meet as early as this week. The offer of talks could lead to a temporary relaxation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. But experts warned that North Korea was most likely borrowing from a wellworn playbook, hoping to win relief from sanctions and buy time to improve its nuclear program without offering any real concessions.

In a New Year’s Day speech, Kim said he wanted to ease tensions with the South and was willing to send a delegation to the PyeongChang Olympics, and suggested that the two sides meet to discuss the idea. At the same time, he cautioned the Trump administration that a “nuclear button” was on his desk and his missiles could strike any part of the United States. Trump responded with a threat of his own Tuesday evening.

“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works,” he tweeted.

Cho Myoung-gyon, Seoul’s unification minister, responded in a televised news conference Tuesday with an offer to meet as soon as Jan. 9 at the shared border village of Panmunjom to discuss cooperation over the Olympics and how to

KIM JU-HYOUNG/YONHAP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Seoul official suggests meeting in coming week, but Washington is skeptical of Pyongyang’s offer improve overall ties, news agencies reported. Talks, if they took place, would be the first in more than two years.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in favors dialogue to reduce tensions with Pyongyang and sees the Olympics, which will begin Feb. 9, as a “groundbreaking chance” to improve ties and achieve peace.

Some analysts cautioned that Kim may be trying to split South Korea from the United States, its ally. Trump and Moon have not been on the best of terms, and Trump has attacked Kim, personally and repeatedly. Yet Trump did not appear to be disconcerted by Kim’s move. He said on Twitter that sanctions and other pressure “are beginning to have a big impact on North Korea.”

Though Moon welcomed Kim’s address, he stressed that Seoul would have to coordinate the next steps with its allies, according to the Yonhap news agency.

State Department spokeswom-

an Heather Nauert told reporters Tuesday that “Kim Jong Un may be trying to drive a wedge of some sort between the two nations, between our nation and the Republic of Korea. I can assure you that that will not happen.” She said it is up to South Korea if it wants to open talks with the North. But, she added, “we are very skeptical of Kim Jong Un’s sincerity in sitting down and having talks.”

Kim said Monday that he wanted to improve the “frozen” relations between the two Koreas and would “open our doors to anyone” from the South who sincerely sought national concord.

“We earnestly wish the Olympic Games a success,” he said, according to the North’s official KCNA news agency. “. . . We are willing to dispatch our delegation and adopt other necessary measures; with regard to this matter, the authorities of the North and the South may meet together soon.”

Talks could offer an opportunity to dial down tensions on the Ko-

South Korean President Moon Jaein speaks during a cabinet meeting last week in Seoul. South Korea on Tuesday offered high-level talks with North Korea to find ways to cooperate on next month’s Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.

rean Peninsula, after a year when war emerged as a real risk. China’s Foreign Ministry welcomed what it called “positive steps” by both sides and said it hoped they would “take advantage of this opportunity and make concrete efforts in improving bilateral ties, and realize denuclearization of the peninsula,” according to spokesman Geng Shuang.

But a sticking point has been a planned joint military exercise with the United States, which North Korea sees as preparation for war. Moon has asked Washington for a postponement until after the Olympics, but no agreement has been reached.

Daniel Russel, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia under President Barack Obama and is now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Kim’s aim is to “divide and conquer.” “Kim wants to unwind sanctions and clearly sees President Moon’s angst over the Olympics as the weak link in the allied chain,” he said.

Russel said the North Korean leader’s behavior fit into a familiar pattern, with the threat of the “nuclear button” on Kim’s desk combined with the “enticement” of talks.

“Pyongyang’s pattern is to raise tensions to a fever pitch, dangle a conciliatory offer, collect any and all concessions, then rinse and repeat,” he said. “The key to disrupting this pattern and compelling North Korea into credible negotiations over its nuclear program — which is the goal of the sanctions — is maintaining unity between the U.S. and South Korea, as well as Japan, China and Russia.”

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said the United States should boycott the Olympics if North Korea attends.

“Allowing Kim Jong Un’s North Korea to participate in #WinterOlympics would give legitimacy to the most illegitimate regime on the planet,” he tweeted. “I’m confident South Korea will reject this absurd overture and fully believe that if North Korea goes to the Winter Olympics, we do not.” n ©The Washington Post

8 COVER

STORY

SUNDAY, JANUARY 7, 2018

I’ll fly away

Space tourism can take us to see new places, but will it also change how we see ourselves?

BY

L EIGH A NN H ENION

M

y body is suspended midair,

and it’s all I can do to breathe steadily. Everything around me is whitewashed. The padded ceiling and floor have blurred. I’m not consciously twitching a muscle, yet I’m moving. And I’m laughing — uncontrollably — because my mind cannot accept the absurdity of what my body knows to be true: I’m flying.

I am onboard a Boeing 727 owned by the Zero Gravity Corp. It’s the only commercial plane that has been approved by the Federal Aviation

Administration to take passengers on a journey that re-creates the weightlessness of space.

Without leaving the atmosphere, the aircraft — known as G-Force One — flies upward, then lunges toward the earth in a parabolic pattern, creating a zero-gravity environment in its cabin.

Aboard G-Force One, I’ve lost all sense of up and down, left and right, space and time. Even my spirit feels lighter. As I float in a sea of feet and elbows, a 300-pound man slowly sails past, curled in the fetal position. The look on his face mirrors mine: absolute bewilderment.

A flight coach is standing over me, poised with a bottle of water. Orbs float out. My fellow passengers’ mouths pucker, vying for bait. One woman attempting to catch water in her mouth

misses, and a mercury-like glob slides across her face. When I reach out to touch a mass of water quivering before me, my finger slices through its center. Where there was one orb, there are now two. They drift away from each other, away from me. It’s a gift of physics, but it feels like magic.

I have a tendency to seek out remarkable

experiences — eclipses, tornadoes, vast animal migrations. I’ve never been particularly interested in space, but I’ve long been intrigued by travel’s ability to stretch the boundaries of perception. So when I met a former Zero G participant who referred to her flight as “the most awe-inspiring” journey of her uber-adventurous life, I started researching how to book passage.

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Parabolic flight was developed in the 1950s as a way to explore the nature of zero gravity, and NASA has long used it for research and training. It’s the only way to achieve true weightlessness without leaving Earth’s atmosphere (aside from drop towers, which aren’t safe for human experiments).

Zero G, based out of Arlington, Va., was founded in 1993, but it wasn’t cleared for commercial flights until 2004. G-Force One maneuvers at degrees so acute that existing regulations would have required passengers to wear parachutes. For years, the FAA seemed perplexed to the point of inaction by the idea of a commercial zero-gravity flight. According to Zero G representatives, FAA officials sometimes wondered aloud: Who in the world would want to do this?

Today, what was once accessible only to scientists and astronauts is an experience open to anyone. Tickets are expensive — $4,950 — yet more than 15,000 people, ages 9 to 93, have flown on G-Force One over the years. The plane regularly airport-hops, to give different regions better access. It’s reminiscent of how, in the 1920s — when airplanes were still oddities — pilots known as “barnstormers” would take their vehicles around the country to give thrill rides. “There’s a misconception that you’ve got to be in great shape or be somehow special to be able to do this,” says Tim Bailey, Zero G’s flight director. “But that’s not true. This is a gateway space tourism experience.”

Indeed, Zero G provides a glimpse into a perhaps-not-too-distant future when space travel will be a more standard part of human existence. Only 560 people have journeyed to space, but the rise of commercial space tourism

will, someday soon, radically increase that number. Elon Musk — whom the BBC has called “both bonkers and brilliant” — sincerely aims to build a colony on Mars, and his company, SpaceX, is planning to take two tourists on a trip around the moon in 2018. Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, envisions millions of people going about their daily business in space and has founded a company, Blue Origin, to make it happen. Richard Branson’s commercial spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, has declared that it has a goal of “democratizing access to space.”

A ride on Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft will cost $250,000. And yet, despite the sticker shock, roughly 700 people, from 50 countries, have signed up — even though the company doesn’t have a hard launch date. Already Virgin Galactic has enlisted more people than have traveled to space in all of human history.

Surely space tourism, once experienced on a mass scale, will affect humanity — and not just because it will open up new vacation opportunities, but because it could reshape us socially, culturally, emotionally. My Zero G experience gave me a window into how this might unfold: how space travel could prove consequential in ways that are difficult to imagine from this point in history. There’s even a chance it might improve life on Earth.

A few hours before we took to the sky this past June, 20-odd fellow passengers and I gathered in a conference room at the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott, where I learned about their motivations for pursuing zero gravity. Josh Brown-Kramer, 37, who’d traveled from Nebraska, had nightly dreams of

Opposite page, Passengers float aboard the G-Force One plane, which flies upward, then lunges toward the earth to create a zero-gravity environment.

Below, the Boeing 727 is owned by Zero Gravity Corp., based in Arlington, Va.

taking wing as a child — and they continued into adulthood. When he heard about parabolic flight a decade ago, he immediately wanted to do it. His wife and fellow passenger, Carolyn BrownKramer, 34, wasn’t convinced it would be worth the effort until she saw videos of physicist Stephen Hawking, paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), floating without his wheelchair in G-Force One. “I just couldn’t get over the look on his face, to see that he felt an ebullience,” she told me. “It was amazing to watch him overcome limitations like that.”

Carolyn, a psychologist, started to think of their quest for Zero G tickets as a personal tracing of humans’ ever-reaching impulse to explore beyond what’s believed possible.

“There’s a term for that constant striving for greatness and growth,” she said. “It’s called the self-determination theory. It’s the desire to have control over one’s own life, to make decisions about your future. If you don’t, you live unfulfilled. Plenty of people have day-today goals, but a lot don’t have long-term goals.”

Bonnie Birckenstaedt, 34, had come from Colorado. An engineer with Lockheed Martin, Birckenstaedt had applied to, and been rejected from, NASA’s astronaut program three times. “Three times,” she emphasized. “What can you do?” She’d decided that, if she couldn’t realize her goal of becoming an astronaut, then she’d cobble together experiences that would get her as close as possible. She’d earned her pilot’s license, studied astronomy and read stacks of science fiction books. Standing in front of me at the hotel, she opened her arms and solemnly declared, “I just love the expanse.” continues on next page

PHOTOS BY STEVE BOXALL/ZERO GRAVITY CORP

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COVER STORY

from previous page

So does self-proclaimed “space geek” Louis Lebbos, 36, who’d arrived from Portugal.

Minutes after we met, he was showing me childhood photos of himself wearing a NASA T-shirt. Lebbos chose to pursue a career in digital entrepreneurship rather than employment with a space agency. But he and Birckenstaedt — dreamers of the same dream, from two sides of the world — had both finally found their way to zero gravity. “We’re almost astronauts!” Lebbos told me.

Like the rest of us, he had already put on a navy-blue flight suit. He caught the edge of his name tag to inspect it more closely. The letters were upside down. This NASA tradition is a wink to the reality that, in space, there’s no up or down.

Only those who’ve earned their weightless wings wear their name tags with earthly orientation.

When G-Force One pilots gathered at the front of the room, they informed us that they’d be taking us out of the Washington area and into approved airspace over the Atlantic — a necessity since parabolic-maneuvering planes have a tendency to “scare people” on the ground and can create 911-call overloads. We’d generally be at the same altitude as commercial planes, but there would be points in the parabolic pattern when we’d be plummeting toward the earth at 26,000 feet per minute.

In case this wasn’t enough to make us rethink what we were doing, the lights were dimmed for an FAA-required video that explained the dangers of not being able to reach the plane’s oxygen boxes. There were also warnings against harming fellow passengers.

None of that, though, eclipsed our collective fear of the breakfast buffet, given that G-Force One is sometimes called the “Vomit Comet.”

On our bus ride out to G-Force One, Mark Stayton, 58, from Pennsylvania, put a hand over his mouth in mock horror and said: “I wasn’t nervous when I booked my ticket. But this morning I woke up and thought: Oh my God, what have I done? I’m a child of the ’60s, and I’ve been waiting for this all my life. But I’m an old guy now.

In my state, and with the state of the space program, I’m not going to have the chance to go into space. But I have this.”

We entered G-Force One through a staircase at its tail. There were a few rows of belted seats at the back, where we strapped in for a 30-minute flight over the ocean to reach our approved airspace. Before us stretched a windowless, seatless cabin coated in gymnastic padding. A flight attendant came on the intercom to announce that we were traveling with normal gravity, and I realized something had been nagging at me: Since I’d never existed outside of gravity’s grasp, there was no way for me to understand the force of what I’d been up against.

A Zero G flight is, through subtraction rather than addition, a proper introduction to a phenomenon I’d taken for granted as some inextricable part of my being.

As we waited, I studied the ceiling, a patchwork of foam pieces cut to fit around fluorescent light fixtures. Soon our flight coach

STEVE BOXALL/ZERO GRAVITY CORP

invited us to pad across the floor in uniform socks the color of egg yolks. There, she instructed us to lie flat on our backs. I immediately focused on a fixed point to prevent motion sickness. I’d read that deep breathing might prevent nausea, so I also started inhaling and exhaling like a woman in labor.

To acclimate fliers, G-Force One starts with gentle parabolas that offer Martian gravity, at one-third body weight on Earth, and lunar gravity, at one-sixth. When the initial parabola started, I had trouble lifting my head with gravity pulling on my body harder than it ever had before. My heart, my lungs, everything felt like it was being sucked to the floor on an amusement-park ride.

Then my arms were rising, as if pulled by unseen strings. Away went my legs. My torso.

My entire body. I was free of something I’d never fully recognized. A coach suggested doing a push-up on Mars. I ended up flipping myself like a pancake.

Within seconds, I was stuck to the mat again.

My coach walked by and asked how I was doing, but I couldn’t speak. I gave two thumbs up and braced for our second destination: the moon.

There, my body launched at the power of my pinkie and hovered until a call of “feet down” signaled that we should orient our bodies to the mat for landings.

Then, at last: zero gravity. At 1.8 G, every molecule of my body felt like it was tightening; at zero G, every molecule of my body unfurls into a state of relaxation I’ve never reached before. Weightlessness is sometimes defined as an absence of G-force contact stress, the measurement of pressure applied by gravity.

G-Force One passengers begin by lying flat on their backs. Then the plane starts flying in gentle parabolas to acclimate fliers.

And that’s exactly how it feels: stress-less. I’m free-falling through unknown territory.

I quickly lose track of how many parabolas we’ve taken. Each one lasts 20 to 30 seconds, but the concept of time is foreign when you’re levitating. To be weightless is to be suspended in a visceral sense of eternity. There is no end or beginning. There is only the strange relief of shedding a lifetime of expectation. The group doesn’t repress its elation. There are giggles, shrieks and yelps of delight. We’re no longer bound to the earth. We belong to the expanse.

Decades ago, little was known about how

zero-gravity environs would affect the human body. Would people be able to breathe? Could they swallow?

I’m weak with hunger, but I can’t handle the idea of food yet. I wave off an in-flight snack and draw my arms to my chest. G-Force One is kept cold to stave off queasiness. Its florescent-lit cabin looks a little like the innards of a refrigerator. Bailey figures that, as the number of commercial spaceflights rise, so will a whole service industry. “I’m a flight attendant on my way to being an astronaut,” he says. “Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, they’re all going to need people like me. My colleagues and I are pioneering new career paths.”

I notice that, on his flight suit, he has a picture of Earth, whereas the rest of us are wearing the American flag. He received it from a member of the Space Generation Advisory Council, a nongovernmental organization that advises groups including the United Nations. It was formed by young people who wanted a say in the future of the

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COVER STORY international space sector. When they designed a flag, they chose the planet as their symbol. “They say that’s the flag we should all be wearing when we go into space,” Bailey says. “We’re not going as a nationality. We’re going as humans.”

Bailey has heard astronauts say that the first day they’re in space, they look for their country.

Then, they’ll say, “Oh, we’re over this or that continent.” Then, they just look at Earth. He puts his right hand against the patch, like he might put a hand over his heart during a pledge. “I’m from here. I’m from Earth. That’s the profound cultural change I think space tourism is going to push, thinking about humanity in a larger context.”

There’s a term for what Bailey’s describing: the overview effect. Coined by author Frank White in 1987, the phrase seeks to explain why astronauts who’ve seen Earth from a distance often have life-altering cognitive shifts.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell has explained that this happens because, when viewing the planet from space, “you develop an instant global consciousness . . . an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it.”

The overview effect is a mostly visual phenomenon; and in a zero-gravity plane, you don’t, of course, get to see Earth at a distance. Yet there is something about the weightlessness of G-Force One that inspires its own kind of awe.

And awe itself can lead to what David Yaden, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, describes as selftranscendence — the experience of shedding one’s sense of self to feel part of something larger.

Yaden, who studies awe, flow, mindfulness and other varieties of experience, suspects that if he and his neuroscientist colleagues attached monitors to G-Force One passengers, they’d find decreased activation in passengers’ brain regions that regulate both spatial awareness and sense of self during flight.

In short, feeling at one with the universe isn’t a hippie notion; it’s also a scientific reality. “It’s important not to be overly enthusiastic about the effect it might have,” Yaden says about awe and space tourism, “but here’s what I hope: As more people travel into space, the increased awe will have a ripple effect, to where people value experiences over material things and increase generosity to those in need. Secondly, the planet is a salient symbol of everything that means anything to us, and space travel could help us recognize that we need to protect it.”

Yaden does suspect that, over time, space travel’s ability to awaken us to awe might fade.

Given the way we’ve adapted to car rides — which once required special goggles for a spin around the block and evoked nowunimaginable wonder — it’s likely that the marvel of space travel will lessen as it becomes commonplace. But, in its first decades, space tourism will straddle the threshold of novel yet relatively attainable. Which means we may be alive at just the right moment to revel in it. “It’s possible that we’re in the golden age of awe when it comes to space travel,” Yaden says. “But

I believe there’s still more awe to come.

After the group disperses, I decide to go to the

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. It’s only five miles away, and — as a companion facility to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum on the Mall — it seems a fitting pilgrimage. It’s only when I get to the front entrance that I realize I’m still wearing my flight suit. Despite the fact that I look ridiculous — like some sort of fangirl at an astronomy conference — I’m too tired to change.

When I reach the center’s space hangar, I stand nose-to-nose with the space shuttle Discovery and stare. If I’d come yesterday, I would have gotten lost in the intricacies of the shuttle’s exterior tiles. I would’ve focused on hardware. Now, part of me is actually bracing for unseen forces to send me into the rafters of this hangar.

On the seemingly insurmountable walk back to my car, I fiddle with the zippers of my flight suit, running their teeth through my fingers

WEEKLY

like rosary beads. When I pass the cutout image of a helmeted astronaut near the building’s entrance, I move out of foot traffic and close my eyes in an attempt to regain my bearings.

When I open them, there’s a little girl standing in front of me. She has a camera strap wrapped around her wrist, and I’m startled to realize that she didn’t stop to take a photo of the astronaut’s likeness; she stopped to take a picture of me. In the eyes of this little girl, my flight suit has transformed me into someone worth contemplating. And it might not be where she imagines I’ve come from that’s inspiring her vicarious sense of awe; it could be the possibility of where I’m headed next.

When I disembark G-Force One, a coach rips

my name tag from Velcro and replaces it rightside up. Earning my wings was exhilarating — and exhausting. I shuffle over to the van that will deliver us to the hotel for what Zero G calls a “regravitation celebration.”

The vehicle lurches forward. It veers right.

We’re no longer on the Vomit Comet, but people are still throwing up. According to Zero G’s promotional materials, roughly 5 percent of passengers get sick. Of the six people who sat in my row during our belted airspace time, the percentage was 50. And every one of the besieged said they’d do it all over again.

Carolyn Brown-Kramer got so sick that she had to be strapped down in the back of the plane for most of our flight. Amazingly, even she seems glad she went. Before we’ve pulled off the tarmac, her husband has already announced that he would like to start saving again, month-by-month, for another zerogravity trip.

Bonnie Birckenstaedt is also ready to go another round, though she’d like to spend her sophomore flight entirely in lunar gravity. The feel of walking on the moon was, to her, the best part of the experience. Zero gravity proved too unpredictable for controlled tricks. “Next time, I want to do more flips!” she says as we walk into the hotel lobby. “I didn’t feel sick. Not even a little bit!”

Thankfully, I didn’t either. Neither did Mark Stayton, whose wife had given him this Zero G flight as a 25th wedding anniversary present.

“Oh, I’m so not done!” he says. “I want to go again!” For Stayton, another flight will require years of saving and planning and, perhaps, 50th-anniversary negotiations. But he has more immediate plans now that his waking life is the stuff of dreams. “I’ve heard that people who’ve done this tend to dream about flying a lot afterward,” he says. “They get to go back in their sleep! I’m going to try for a lucid dream, one where I could practice moving around in zero G. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?”

KLMNO

“You develop an instant global consciousness . . . an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it.”

Edgar Mitchell, astronaut

Months after our flight, I call some of my fellow passengers to find out how they are processing their encounter with zero gravity. I’m also interested to hear what they think of Yaden’s research, which I share conversationally.

“I didn’t realize how overwhelming the experience would be,” Carolyn Brown-Kramer tells me. Sometimes, she finds herself closing her eyes, trying to channel the elation of that first parabola. Often it eludes her. But sometimes she’s able to conjure the marvel of space travel while sitting in her office chair. Her husband, Josh Brown-Kramer, is still planning a second zero-gravity flight, and he recently persuaded his father to join him.

All my fellow passengers had been exuberant about zero gravity post-flight, but Mark Stayton had seemed the most emotionally moved.

When I call him, he admits that he almost hadn’t boarded the plane that day because he was afraid of how his body might respond. For 10 years, he’s dealt with a neurological condition that causes his feet to miss messages from his brain. “I’m reminded of gravity on a regular basis,” he says. “I’m not a small guy.

When I go down, I go down hard. But zero G took all of that away.”

In flight, the disorientation he has struggled with for a decade was magnified in a joyous way: “I wasn’t thinking about my feet, and they didn’t bother me. All my earthbound notions were gone.” It was poignant because of his medical history, but he sees greater implications. “Once you know things don’t necessarily have to be the way they are, that they can be better,” he says, “there’s a little piece of hope you carry.”

Stayton considers himself an introvert, but something strange has happened since he returned home: He’s regularly seized by the urge to encourage everyone he knows with disposable income to invest in a Zero G ticket, because he wants to share the powerful perspective it brings. “In weightlessness, you transcend,” he tells me. “Everything inconsequential falls away. That, in the end, helps you find your core. Right now, we need to get back to the core of who we are, as humans, so that we can learn to work together for the betterment of our species. If enough people can find a way to directly experience the awe of space, it’ll absolutely change the world.” n © The Washinton Post

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BOOKS

The worst book written about Darwin N ONFICTION

I CHARLES DARWIN Victorian Mythmaker

By A.N. Wilson Harper.

438 pp. $32.50

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REVIEWED BY

J ERRY C OYNE

’ve been an evolutionary biologist for nearly half a century and have read hundreds of books about Charles Darwin and his science. If we exclude books written by creationists — a group that A.N. Wilson doesn’t identify with — “Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker” is by far the worst. Appalling in its sloppy arguments and unrelenting and unwarranted negativity, its most infuriating flaw is its abysmal failure to get the most basic facts right. It’s a grossly inaccurate and partisan attack on both Darwin and evolution.

Given that many of Wilson’s earlier biographies have been admired for their style and insight, and not criticized for pervasive errors, this new project is baffling. Where Darwin’s other biographers have seen a sensitive and kindly man, a scrupulous scientist who willingly credited his predecessors, Wilson finds a greedy “self-mythologizer” desperate to become famous, even if it required ignoring or plagiarizing his forerunners and fellow naturalists. Because the documentary record is so rich — Darwin was a meticulous notetaker and letter-keeper — and because Darwin and his ideas occupy such a prominent place in the history of science, a vast amount of scholarly energy has been devoted to understanding his life and influences. How is it, then, that Wilson can come up with a completely new take on his subject?

There are two possibilities: All preceding Darwin scholarship is wrong, or, alternatively, the mistakes lie with Wilson. Parsimony alone would suggest that Wilson is the anomaly here. That Wilson is the confused outlier among Darwin biographers is easily confirmed by even a cursory inspection of the book, which is replete with factual errors.

Wilson says repeatedly that Darwin didn’t persuade his con-

OLI SCARFF/GETTY IMAGES

A.N. Wilson criticizes Charles Darwin by using creationist tropes — for instance, that Nazi genocide was inspired by Darwinism.

temporaries of evolution’s truth, but in fact by Darwin’s death in 1882, virtually all scientists — and most educated people — accepted evolution (he was, after all, buried in Westminster Abbey). The rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 did not undercut evolution, as Wilson argues, but supported it, even correcting Darwin’s mistaken ideas about how inheritance worked.

In the most embarrassing error, Wilson claims that the first 50 pages of an important Darwin notebook have been lost forever, asserting that Darwin destroyed them to hide his intellectual cribbing from his contemporary Edward Blyth. In reality, Darwin simply placed those pages in a folder for later use, and they can easily be found online.

Why the sustained animus against Darwin? I think Wilson’s issue is not really Darwin but his ideas. “Darwin was wrong,” is how he opens the book, referring to the theory of evolution. Wilson plainly dislikes evolutionary biology, but, lacking scientific credentials, is not in a position to provide a thorough scientific critique of the field. Instead, he

seems to have written a biography — a task he is at least in principle qualified for, having written 20 books on history — as a platform to launch an assault on evolution.

Wilson has taken a somewhat tortuous (and public) spiritual path: Raised a Christian, he became an atheist and then returned to Christianity. Now writing as a believer, he seems reluctant to see humankind’s genesis and fate removed from divine hands. My evidence for this: Wilson’s reliance on discredited creationist cliches; his claims that human traits such as language, consciousness, altruism and even bipedality simply could not have evolved; and his avowal that his return to religion derived from writing about Wagner and Nazi Germany and seeing “how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neoDarwinian ravings” in contrast to the views of anti-Nazi Christians.

A familiar creationist claim lies at the core of Wilson’s problem with evolution: that Darwin promoted “social Darwinism,” the view that evolution tells us that “might makes right” in our own species, and that a struggle among races and classes picks

out superior groups with the right to control others. In fact, Darwin was never a social Darwinist and certainly can’t be held responsible for others’ misuse (and abuse) of his ideas.

Wilson takes this to its logical extreme by proclaiming that Darwin’s views led to the Holocaust.

He states that the Nazis’ race and eugenics laws were “all based on bogus Victorian science, much of which had started life in the gentle setting of Darwin’s study at Down House.” But as science historian Robert Richards showed decisively in his essay “Was Hitler a Darwinian?” (not cited by Wilson), Adolf Hitler and the Nazis explicitly rejected Darwinism and its materialistic underpinnings, basing their genocidal policies on anti-Semitism and ideas of racial superiority that existed long before Darwin.

In fact, Darwin spurned the notion of interfering with the lives and reproduction of others, saying that “we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.”

Wilson’s use of the familiar and discredited tropes of creationism forces us to conclude that, even if he isn’t a creationist, he surely walks and quacks like one.

In the end, Wilson’s book is harmful, because its ignorance and denial of scientific evidence, coming from an established author, will promote the mistaken view that evolutionary biology is seriously flawed. And by flouting the research on Darwin carried out by serious historians of science, it betrays those historians and history itself. n Coyne is professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “Speciation” (with H. Allen Orr), “Why Evolution Is True” and “Faith vs.

Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A bombmaker has L.A. living in fear

Finding perfect silence anywhere

F ICTION l

N ONFICTION

R

REVIEWED BY

R ICHARD L IPEZ

eaders of Thomas Perry’s new thriller, “The Bomb Maker,” will practically have earned PhDs in sophisticated explosive-making techniques before finishing this tale of a mad bomber on the rampage in Los Angeles. It’s fascinating, sinister stuff — and Perry’s depraved mastermind is all too creepily believable.

Perry adeptly plays on our awareness of public-place terrorist bombings, creating an atmosphere of anxiety and dread. Despite several holes in the plot, you’ll keep flipping the pages, ever fearful of what bloody horror will strike unlucky Los Angeles next.

One of the cruelest aspects of this bomber’s strategy is that he designs bombs that look as if they can be defused by the police experts but have secret elements that kill and maim the unwary.

Retired bomb squad head Dick Stahl seems to be the only man who can match wits with the bomber (whose name we never learn), and he is recruited from his private security business to make it possible for the L.A. citizenry to ride the subway again, and buy gas, and hold kids’ baseball games in Griffith Park.

Admirably, the bomb squad has female members, and it’s not long before the divorced Stahl and Sgt. Diane Hines are working up a sweat indoors as well as out.

The relationship violates police department regulations — Stahl is Hines’s supervisor — and he gets kicked off the case by the cranky mayor of L.A., whose dislike of Stahl is never really explained. Stahl is returned to work only after clumsier people are vaporized.

It’s too bad that ace EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) expert Stahl talks like Sgt. Joe Friday much of the time and is about as interesting. Nor does it help that Perry’s big finish feels like one of those action-flick trailers that make you wish you’d

brought earplugs to the theater.

Nor do we learn a lot about what makes the bomber tick psychologically. His early life was in Illinois, where his parents “had been eager for him to grow up and move out of the house. He had always been sullen and solitary, and they didn’t like him much.”

One of a number of implausible elements in Perry’s plot has the bomber cruising the dark web in search of international terrorist groups that will fund him. He finds one easily, though it seems odd that U.S. intelligence agencies would not have picked up on this.

The terrorists — all nameless, ideology-less, denatured bad chaps — at one point order the bomber to procure an arsenal of guns for a big massacre they are planning in L.A. They need 15 AK-47s, a bunch of pistols, and plenty of ammo. The bomber drives from gun show to gun show around the Southwest and gathers the weaponry in no time at all. He never doubts he can accomplish this without revealing his identity to anybody. Readers won’t doubt it, either. Piece of cake.

Despite its shortcomings, “The Bomb Maker” does one thing very well. Plainly well-researched, it makes graphically real the dangers faced by American urban bomb squads in an era when they could be called into service any day. Luckily, the real bomb squads have so far mostly had to deal with klutzes, not the kind of brilliantly skilled practitioner Perry introduces to us in his work of fiction. But it’s good to be reminded that these men and women — many of them formerly in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan — are well prepared, should they be needed. n Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.

This was written for The Washington Post.

H THE BOMB MAKER

By Thomas Perry Mysterious Press. 384 pp. $26

SILENCE In the Age of Noise

By Erling Kagge Translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook Pantheon.

144 pp. $19.95

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REVIEWED BY

S COTT R USSELL S ANDERS

ow many millions of words have been spoken or written in praise of silence? In this slim volume, Norwegian adventurer and philosopher Erling Kagge adds his voice to the chorus. On the opening page he tells of trying to convince his three teenage daughters that “the world’s secrets are hidden inside silence.” The daughters greeted this fatherly advice with skepticism, counting on their smartphones to reveal any secrets worth knowing.

Soon after that exchange, Kagge found a more receptive audience among a group of students in a Scottish pub. “What is silence?” they wanted to know, and “Why is it more important now than ever?” Brooding on the questions, he came up with 33 responses, which are laid out in these pages in as many numbered sections.

The final section is a blank page, a gesture reminiscent of the Zen master who, when asked how to achieve enlightenment, gazed at the questioner with lips firmly sealed.

The filled pages that precede the empty one offer a miscellany of memories, reflections, aphorisms and quotations bearing on Kagge’s theme — the search for silence amid the clatter and clutter of our frenetic world. We hear about a soccer star who blocks out the roar of the crowd when he takes a shot on goal, about a performance artist who stares at visitors for hours without speaking, about people in psychological experiments who choose to suffer an electric shock rather than sit alone in a room with no entertainment except their thoughts.

Although Kagge has spent much of his career indoors, he is best known for his outdoor adventures. He was the first person to reach the “three poles” on foot: the North Pole, the South Pole and the peak of Mount Everest. He has crossed Manhattan through sewer tunnels, crossed oceans in sailing ships and trekked for months

at a stretch in remote lands. He has written about these exploits in previous books.

In “Silence,” he sketches his “extreme journeys to the ends of the earth” to illustrate the restorative impact of withdrawing from the human cacophony into the wilds.

Not all of his journeys have been so arduous. He tells of flying from Norway to Sri Lanka “in order to relax, eat healthily and practice yoga in lush surroundings.”

Recognizing that few of us can indulge in serenity tourism, and fewer still can spend months walking or sailing to the ends of the Earth, Kagge reassures us that “the silence I have in mind may be found wherever you are, if you pay attention, inside your mind, and is without cost.”

Like a fair number of passages throughout the book, this one sounds trite and plodding in English translation, however it may sound in Norwegian. Consider the opening of Section One: “A lot of things in daily life boil down to wonder. It is one of the purest forms of joy that I can imagine. I enjoy the feeling.”

It’s hard to imagine that such bland claims would have satisfied the curiosity of those Scottish students or motivated Kagge’s teenage daughters. As for those of us who long for refuge from the clamor of messages and machines, we might find more inspiration in recent works that draw on traditional wisdom, such as “Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise” by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, or Patrick Shen’s meditative documentary “In Pursuit of Silence.”

The yearning for relief from human chatter may be as old as our capacity for speech. There will always be more to say about the benefits of saying — and hearing — less. n Sanders is the author, most recently, of “Dancing in Dreamtime” and “Stone Country: Then & Now.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

This president will not be silent on Iran MIKE PENCE is vice president of the United States. This was written for The Washington Post.

Eight­and­a­half years ago, Americans watched the people of Iran rise up to claim their birthright of freedom. In the “Green Revolution,” millions of courageous young men and women filled the streets of Tehran and Tabriz, Qazvin and Karaj, and what seemed like every city and village in between. They denounced a fraudulent election, and as the days went on, they began to demand that the unelected ayatollahs end their decades of repression and release their iron­fisted grip on Iran and her people.

Those brave protesters looked to the leader of the free world for support. But as I saw firsthand as a member of Congress, the president of the United States stayed silent.

In the wake of the demonstrations and the regime’s brutal attempts to suppress them, President Barack Obama repeatedly failed to express America’s solidarity with the Iranian protesters. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I recognized the lack of action for what it was: an abdication of American leadership.

The United States has long stood with those who yearn for freedom and a brighter future, and yet the president declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship, issuing only a delayed response condemning the regime’s violence. At the same time, the United States was failing to confront the leading state sponsor of terrorism — a mistake that endangered the safety and security of the American people and our allies.

The last administration’s refusal to act ultimately emboldened Iran’s tyrannical rulers to crack down on the dissent. The Green Revolution was ruthlessly put down, and the deadly silence on the streets of Iran matched the deafening silence from the White House. To this day, many Iranians blame the United States for abandoning them in their hour of need.

Today, the Iranian people are once again rising up to demand freedom and opportunity, and under President Trump, the United States is standing with them. This time, we will not be silent.

Months before the protests started in Iran, the president predicted that the days of the Iranian regime were numbered.

Speaking at the United Nations in September, he said, “The good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most.” Much like another president who made similar predictions about the Soviet Union, the president was mocked.

These words now ring truer than ever. Where his predecessor stayed silent in 2009, Trump has swiftly offered the Iranian people America’s unwavering support.

He has also committed to provide assistance in the days ahead.

More broadly, the president

GREGORIO BORGIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A demonstrator yells near the flag of the former Imperial State of Iran outside the Iranian Embassy in Rome during anti-government protests.

declined to certify the previous administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which flooded the regime’s coffers with tens of billions of dollars in cash — money that it could use to repress its own people and support terrorism across the wider world.

We have already issued new sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the president is weighing additional actions to punish the regime for its belligerent behavior and assault on its own citizens.

The United States has spoken clearly and unequivocally.

Unfortunately, many of our European partners, as well as the United Nations, have thus far failed to forcefully speak out on the growing crisis in Iran. It’s time for them to stand up. The suppression of the Green Revolution in 2009 shows the disastrous price of silence. The

president and I call on leaders of freedom-loving nations across the world to condemn Iran’s unelected dictators and defend the Iranian people’s unalienable right to chart their own future and determine their own destiny.

The president has said that “oppressive regimes cannot endure forever,” and our administration will continue to support the protesters in their calls for freedom and demand that Iran’s leaders cease their dangerous and destabilizing actions at home and abroad.

We stand with the proud people of Iran because it is right, and because the regime in Tehran threatens the peace and security of the world. That is the essence of American leadership, and as the people of Iran now know, the United States is leading on the world stage for freedom once again. n

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TOM TOLES

It’s okay to turn away from screens VIVEK WADHWA is a Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley, a former entrepreneur and a syndicated columnist.

This was written for The Washington Post.

Facebook’s recent acknowledgment that social media may be making its users feel bad in some cases is a significant milestone. So far, the technology industry hardly has talked about the downsides of their products. Now a realization seems to be setting in that perhaps something has gone wrong along the way.

Research that Facebook cited in a blog post documented that when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information they feel worse. For example, reading Facebook posts for even 10 minutes can put people in a bad mood, and clicking or liking too many links and posts can have a negative effect on mental health.

Social media may well be making many of us unhappy, jealous and anti-social.

While Facebook said that as a result of the assessments, it would make some changes to its platform, it also highlighted some of the benefits of using the social network. It pointed to research it helped conduct that concludes that “sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions” can make people feel better. Facebook said it is working with sociologists and scientists to find ways to enhance

“well-being through meaningful interactions.”

“In sum, our research and other academic literature suggests that it’s about how you use social media that matters when it comes to your wellbeing,” Facebook said. It posits that if we engage or interact with others more on its platform, we will be happier.

But that approach doesn’t seem to be an effective solution for those who can’t pull themselves away from such platforms. The Pew Research Center estimates that 24 percent of teens go online “almost constantly,” for example. It is becoming a matter of addiction.

In July 2016, former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris published an essay that detailed the many ways in which technology affects people’s minds and makes them addicted. He drew a direct line of descent to phones and computer screens

from the numerous techniques that slot-machine designers use to entice gamblers to sit for hours losing money.

These techniques are similar to the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner, who in the 1930s put rats in boxes and taught them to push levers to receive a food pellet.

They would push the levers only when hungry, though. To get the rats to press the lever repeatedly, even when they did not need food, he gave them a pellet only some of the time, a concept now known as intermittent variable rewards.

The casinos took variable rewards to a new level, designing multiple forms of rewards into slot machines. Those machines now bring in the majority of casino profits. Players not only receive payouts at seemingly random intervals but also partial payouts that impart the feeling of a win even if the player in fact loses money overall on a turn.

These techniques entice humans to keep playing, because our brains are hard-wired to become addicted to variable rewards. And it is intermittent variable rewards that have us checking our smartphones for emails, new followers on Twitter or more likes on photographs on Facebook.

The “bottomless bowl” of information we are served also

leaves us always seeking more.

Cornell University researcher Brian Wansink led a 2005 study that found that people who ate soup from bowls that had a tube in the bottom, which constantly refilled themselves, consumed 73 percent more than those who ate out of normal bowls. And they felt no more satiated. This is the effect Netflix has when it autoplays the next episode of a show after a cliffhanger and you continue watching, thinking, “I can make up the sleep over the weekend.” And it is the effect that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have in tacking on their scrolling pages and updating news feeds, causing each article to roll into the next.

This doesn’t seem to be a fair fight. The tech industry is constantly mining our data, using artificial intelligence to learn our habits and building tools to have us returning for more. We can turn off our applications, but some of us are subconsciously addicted to them.

So we need to be aware of what we are up against. Technology, when used correctly, can be wonderful. But perhaps the best solution is just to use technology in moderation. Maybe we should just turn away from our screens sometimes and meet our friends and family in person. n

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