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The dirty secret about your clothes Making them is toxic to people and the environment. Start-ups in India see a better way. PAGE 12

Politics Priebus’s difficult job 4

World China touts DNA tests 10 5 Myths The President’s Daily Brief 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POWER POST

Democrats’ ‘break it, own it’ plan BY

P AUL K ANE

D

emocrats have an emerging strategy to defend the Affordable Care Act from Republican assault, daring their opponents to defy the “Pottery Barn rule”: They’re about to break the health-care system, and that means they will own it.

For more than six years, Republicans have attacked unpopular parts of the law without having to propose alternatives. Those days are over.

Emerging from their final huddle with President Obama, congressional Democrats said their plan is essentially to leave it to the GOP to replace Obamacare. And they’re getting an unintended assist from Republicans, who to date have no full plan, only a vague timeline and very few details on how they intend to do it.

“They’re going to own it and all the problems in the health-care system,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference after a 90-minute meeting with the president in the Capitol basement on Wednesday. Republicans will discover quickly, Schumer said, that implementing their preferred market-based alternatives will be virtually impossible without a large source of revenue, which would probably require Democratic votes for approval.

“Now they’re responsible for the entire health-care system, and it will be on their backs,” he said. “And I believe, a year from now, they will regret that they came out so fast out of the box.”

It is a modified version of how Republicans treated Obama and congressional Democrats in 2009 as they began the early steps of crafting the ACA. After prolonged talks with three Senate Republicans, Democrats moved ahead late in the year to pass the legislation on partyline votes.

As a result, Democrats politically owned ev-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ery mishap, including the system’s oftencrashing website during the rollout and the decision by insurance companies to abandon some exchanges that ran Obamacare in the states.

Republicans have hammered away at Obamacare ever since and made the legislation very unpopular in conservative-leaning states, driving some Democrats out of office in those regions for supporting the law.

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, right, speaks about Obamacare last week.

Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are adamant that they will not go as far as Republicans did back then in opposing just about every early Obama initiative.

They still talk about Trump’s position on a large infrastructure bill as a starting point for a bipartisan initiative, and the president-elect and Schumer have similar views on trade and alleged currency manipulation by China.

Still, it is becoming obvious that Democratic leaders intend to give little early assistance to Trump or other Republicans as they try to undo much of the Obama legacy.

Republicans know the Pottery Barn rule well; Colin Powell invoked it when he was sec-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 13

retary of state to warn then-President George W. Bush that he would own a toppled Iraqi government precipitated by a U.S. invasion.

They are very aware of the trap Schumer is trying to set and are working to portray Democrats as cheering for failure.

“I understand his political argument. He’s praying and hoping for failure, which means he’s praying and hoping for more pain on the part of the American people,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 GOP leader, said Wednesday.

“I would hope they would get past that and would agree to work with us, because a longterm, sustainable replacement for Obamacare is going to need to be done on a bipartisan, consensus-building basis.”

This early Democratic strategy is the easy lift — do nothing. Democrats privately acknowledge, however, that the party needs to craft a broader agenda than they have relied on for the past four years, which resulted in terrible electoral defeats in 2014 and 2016.

That positive agenda is a work in progress, aides say, and will come in the weeks and months ahead.

Public opinion of the overall law is split between those who support it and those who don’t. But it includes several very popular provisions, particularly one allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans up to age 26, and another prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to consumers with preexisting health conditions.

With Republicans advancing a repeal, Democrats plan to blame them for trying to end those popular pieces of the ACA. Republicans have tried to assure the public that the popular provisions will eventually become part of a replacement law.

“The status quo will be maintained until there’s a replacement. So if people have what they have now, they’ll keep that until there’s a replacement,” Cornyn said. n

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Industry of All Nations, a Los Angeles-based fashion brand, sells men’s pants that are dipped in indigo 6 to 12 times to produce two hues of blue and then dried under the sun.

Photograph by ESHA CHHABRA

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Daunting task for new chief of staff BY

K AREN T UMULTY

R

eince Priebus says that one of his most important tasks as Donald Trump’s chief of staff will be to establish “some level of order within the White House.”

That, of course, has been the central mission of everyone who has held this post in the past, but it is certain to be a particularly daunting challenge with a president who regards chaos as a management tool.

Trump’s Twitter feed is a daily, sometimes hourly, testament to his impulsive nature, his disregard for norms and protocol, his bottomless appetite for random information and misinformation.

Adding to the potential for tension is the fact that Trump’s White House is being set up with rival centers of gravity.

The structure puts Priebus on the same level as Stephen K. Bannon, whom Trump named to be his senior counselor and chief strategist. Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News, a media voice of the alt-right, which is a fringe movement that embraces elements of white nationalism.

Though the post-election announcement of Trump’s White House team described Bannon and Priebus as “equal partners to transform the federal government,” it listed Bannon first.

Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere Jared Kushner is also expected to be close by in some kind of capacity that will give him a say in major decisions.

None of the three has ever worked in a White House.

All of this means that the 44year-old Priebus will be at the center of an experiment to determine whether Trump’s singular style of leadership — honed in his family business, displayed on reality television, and used with devastating effect in a presidential campaign that defied every expectation — will transform Washington as Trump promised or prove ineffective when applied to the more complex work of presiding over the massive federal government.

The role in Trump’s inner sanc-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Priebus must bring order to a White House that will feed off chaos tum is, by some measures, a surprising spot for Priebus. After the party’s 2012 defeat, the party chairman presided over an autopsy report that called for courting minorities by, among other things, embracing looser immigration laws.

Trump, who campaigned on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and endorsed mass deportations, effectively rejected the recommendation — and won anyway.

The power-sharing dynamic between Priebus and his new colleagues looks worrisome to those who have had Priebus’s title in prior administrations. Some predict flatly that it will not work.

“The president has to make it clear that Reince is first among equals,” said Ken Duberstein, who served as chief of staff under Ronald Reagan. “You’ve got to empower somebody on the staff.”

“The chief of staff, I think, has the responsibility to be all-knowing — to decide what the president should know, what he needs to

know, what he doesn’t need to know,” agreed Andrew Card, who ran George W. Bush’s White House staff for 51/2 years, the secondlongest tenure of any chief of staff in modern history.

Ambiguous lines of authority, Card added, are likely to be “a challenge.”

“In my opinion, there can only be one chief of staff,” Card said.

Priebus, however, brushes off the skepticism.

“Bannon, Jared and I work together extremely well,” he said in an interview. “We’ve got a good team of people around [Trump] where we respect each other and we present options for him that I think he looks at and says, ‘Well, if these folks are on the same page, then it’s probably a pretty good option to take.’ ” But Trump is also known for being swayed by the last person he has talked to, especially if the advice is accompanied by flattery. In his White House, an array of peo-

President-elect Donald Trump and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus walk out of the Mar-a-Lago club owned by Trump in Palm Beach, Fla., last month.

ple, some with strong personalities, are expected to have coveted walk-in privileges to bring their viewpoints directly to the Oval Office. Besides Bannon and Kushner, this will probably include counselor Kellyanne Conway, policy adviser Stephen Miller, national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and counterterrorism adviser Thomas Bossert.

Trump’s spokesmen did not respond to a request to interview the president-elect about his relationship with Priebus, or how Trump envisions Priebus’s role.

Historically, a White House chief of staff is often the first to be blamed when something goes wrong. It is a burnout job. Even successful ones rarely last more than a couple of years.

Priebus, with a buttoned-up Midwestern bearing, has demonstrated a mastery of internal politics. His tenacity has been tested by the fact that he has survived six turbulent years — a record — as

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2017

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POLITICS chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“Reince has this kind of ‘aw, shucks’ demeanor, but he’s pretty tough,” said former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie.

Wisconsin assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who was a college roommate of Priebus’s, described him as “a shrewd operator, in the best sense of the word.”

This side of Priebus was not always apparent over the past year. He often seemed like a hapless passenger, along for the wild ride that was Trump’s candidacy.

Priebus joked that it wasn’t all that bad — he had not yet taken to pouring Baileys Irish Cream on his cereal in the morning.

Priebus does not deny published accounts of one particularly low moment, which came in the wake of The Washington Post’s Oct. 8 revelation of a 2005 tape in which Trump was heard making lewd comments about women and boasting of groping them. The distraught party chairman reportedly urged the GOP nominee to drop out of the race or face losing it in a landslide.

“I’m not going to talk about private conversations,” Priebus said when asked if it was true.

“Sure, I mean I was nervous about it, like everybody was, and he apologized for it, and we started doing debate prep again the next day.

And he just killed it in the second debate. He did such a great job, and he addressed it, and he did so, I think, like a champion, and he moved forward.”

Building a relationship Going back to Priebus’s early days as party chairman in 2011, Trump Tower had been a regular stop on his fundraising rounds.

When Priebus made the pilgrimage to Manhattan in early 2015, he noticed something seemed different about Trump.

The celebrity real estate developer had flirted with a presidential run so many times before that no one gave the idea much credence anymore. But Trump’s questions about the primary process struck Priebus as unusually detailed and pointed: How did the Iowa caucuses work? How were delegates awarded? Did straw polls matter?

“I left, and I started wondering whether he was actually getting very serious about running,” Priebus recalled.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

It would soon become apparent that he was, and as the campaign unfolded, Priebus began talking to Trump far more frequently than the other contenders.

“Perhaps some of the reason we became close is that he wasn’t as rigid as a lot of the people running for president,” Priebus said. “They were very controlled. They’re trained to be at arm’s length, even if you’re friends with them. Set up a phone call at 4:30 tomorrow to talk for 15 minutes to somebody.

That’s just not the way that President-elect Trump runs.”

Early on, Priebus used some of those sessions to urge Trump to tamp down his incendiary and divisive rhetoric. That turned out to be futile.

“Yes, occasionally we had disagreements along the way,” Priebus said. “We ended up creating a relationship where our frontrunner felt comfortable with the chairman of the party, and the chairman of the party felt comfortable with a front-runner that was not the typical plasticized Washington politician.”

‘The ultimate diplomat’ The Trump-Priebus relationship has had its rough patches during the campaign, but in one important regard, it also turned out to be what Priebus called “a perfect marriage.”

As he had dug the Republican Party out of debt, Priebus had been working for years to construct the kind of political infrastructure Trump’s campaign had neither the resources nor the inclination to build for itself. Such unglamorous basics as ground operation and data collection were a badly needed asset in some of the close states Trump needed to put him over 270 electoral votes.

“The party had to be just about perfect to win. The Democrats can be good and still win, but we have to be about perfect in order to win,” Priebus said. “It just turns out that the president-elect’s message was ringing extremely true to the electorate and we had the data and the infrastructure to back it up.”

And from the time when it had become clear that the New York real estate mogul would be the 2016 standard-bearer for a party whose establishment he had trashed, Priebus had taken on the difficult task of tugging the warring GOP factions toward reconciliation and acceptance, if not enthusiasm.

One of the most important projects was bringing aboard key party leaders in Priebus’s home state of Wisconsin, which had gone for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the primary and where Trump had been at war with major political figures.

The most important target, allies

Priebus holds a gavel after he was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2011, as committee secretary Sharon Day applauds.

Priebus survived six turbulent years — a record — as RNC chairman.

“Reince has this kind of ‘aw, shucks’ demeanor, but he’s pretty tough.” former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie

KLMNO WEEKLY

said, was House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Priebus “was the ultimate diplomat,” said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose own 2016 presidential hopes had fallen early victim to Trump. “Paul’s support was critical to sending a message, not just to House members, but just overall Republican voters. Reince was just tenacious.”

Vos, like many prominent Wisconsin Republicans, had supported Walker, then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), then Cruz, only to see each of their hopes incinerated in the anti-establishment brushfire that Trump had ignited.

“As soon as Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, he was all over me,” Vos said of Priebus. “I said, ‘I’ll take whatever you got.’ ” Trump carried Wisconsin by less than a percentage point, becoming the first Republican to do so since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

As Trump and his team have turned to governing, people knowledgeable about the internal deliberations of the transition say, Priebus has more often than not gotten his way on key administration hires. Several of his top aides are being lined up for big jobs in the White House.

Trump’s naming of Priebus sent a reassuring signal to the Washington establishment, including Ryan, whose ability to work with Trump is going to be vital to Republicans getting anything done.

Priebus said his new job was not the result of outside lobbying, but “all a matter of Donald Trump’s opinion.”

Politics in his blood Priebus grew up in historically Democratic blue-collar Kenosha, Wis., the son of a German American electrician father and a Greek mother born in Africa. His first name is short for Reinhold.

He was campaign chairman for Ronald Reagan in his third-grade mock election, listened to speeches by rising GOP firebrand Newt Gingrich on cassettes in his car as a teenager, and took his future wife, Sally, to a party fundraiser on their first date.

Priebus had nurtured a dream of being elected to office himself some day but lost a close race for state Senate in 2004, forcing him to recalibrate his ambitions and rechannel his love of politics. continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

In 2007, he became Wisconsin party chairman at the beginning of a turbulent era in that state’s politics, requiring some of the rough-water navigation skills he would later need on the national level.

Though Priebus had establishment credentials as a lawyer with one of the state’s big firms, he also became a regular presence at tea party rallies and grass-roots gatherings.

Priebus, as a result, shared in the credit for the 2010 election of tea party favorites Walker and Sen. Ron Johnson. And for helping Walker weather a recall effort.

Those successes made him something of a star in GOP circles.

He became RNC chairman in 2011 at a desperate time for the party, which was $24 million in debt.

“When you don’t have the White House and you don’t have the Congress, dialing for money is just hard as hell, and he just kept doing it, and he didn’t have anybody helping him,” said lobbyist Richard Hohlt. “He loved the job.”

By the end of 2012, the RNC has $3.3 million in the bank and no debt.

As different as Priebus is from Trump, the two will be learning the fundamentals of their jobs together. At a recent lunch with former White House chiefs of staff, hosted by the current one, Denis McDonough, Priebus peppered his predecessors with questions, according to three sources with knowledge of what was said during the private session.

What is paramount, said former chief of staff Card, is that no one be allowed to make end runs around Priebus.

“Almost no debate in the Oval Office should come without a prior debate in the chief of staff’s office,” Card said. “It is going to be a challenge for Reince.”

Priebus disagreed.

“No, I don’t think it’s a particular challenge,” he said, promising “an orderly system in place in which the president is informed, and not exhausted with multiple sources of information in an unorganized fashion.”

There was that word again: order. Achieving it could determine Trump’s success. And the responsibility for making it happen will be riding on his chief of staff, who might want to keep a bottle of Baileys handy, just in case. n

With 103 vacancies, Trump can reshape federal courts

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OBERT B ARNES

D

onald Trump is set to inherit an uncommon number of vacancies in the federal courts in addition to the open Supreme Court seat, giving the president-elect a monumental opportunity to reshape the judiciary after taking office.

The estimated 103 judicial vacancies that President Obama is expected to hand over to Trump in the Jan. 20 transition of power is nearly double the 54 openings Obama found eight years ago after George W. Bush’s presidency.

Confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl after Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015. Obama White House officials blame Senate Republicans for what they characterize as an unprecedented level of obstruction in blocking the Democratic president’s court picks.

The result is a multitude of openings throughout the federal circuit and district courts that will allow the new Republican president to quickly make a wide array of lifetime appointments.

State gun-control laws, abortion restrictions, voter laws, antidiscrimination measures and immigrant issues are all matters that are increasingly heard by federal judges and will be influenced by the new composition of the courts.

Trump has vowed to choose ideologues in the mold of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon — a prospect that has activists on the right giddy.

“I’m optimistic he’ll come at this right out of the gate,” said Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative group that has opposed many of Obama’s court choices.

“Every president can expect to make a huge impact,” Severino added, noting that Trump “is unique in having campaigned really hard on this issue — the significance of the courts and of the

Supreme Court, in particular.”

The Supreme Court vacancy created by Scalia’s death in February was a motivating issue for many conservative voters, especially evangelical Christians, to turn out for Trump. Senate Republicans refused to hold even a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, for the Scalia seat.

Democrats accuse Senate Ma-

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland did not get a hearing.

jority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, of intentionally denying Obama’s nominees a fair hearing and running out the clock in the hope that a Republican would succeed him, as Trump has.

Twenty-five of Obama’s court nominees were pending on the Senate floor, after having been approved out of the committee with bipartisan support, but they did not get a vote before the Senate ended its two-year term before the holidays, according to White House spokesman Eric Schultz.

“Republican tactics have been shameful and will forever leave a stain on the United States Senate,” Schultz said. “Republican congressional dysfunction has now metastasized to the third branch of government, and that is not a legacy to be proud of.”

Trump spoke frequently about his intentions to put forward a more conservative Supreme Court nominee as a way to galvanize the right.

“The replacement of our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies,” Trump said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “Very important. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election.”

Although Trump spoke little on the campaign trail about the many vacancies on lower courts, remaking the federal judiciary overall has been a priority of his and of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, aides said.

Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, is a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

Trump transition officials declined to comment on the process of selecting nominees, but incoming White House Counsel Don McGahn is expected to play a key role.

Such groups as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working with the Trump team to suggest possible candidates.

The judiciary also is a top priority for McConnell, who stands ready to help the Trump White House identify candidates and grease the sometimes-laborious Senate confirmation process.

The Trump administration and the Senate will be under pressure to quickly install judges in courts around the country where cases are severely backlogged because of long-vacant seats.

There are 38 judicial emergencies, according to the nonpartisan Judicial Conference, including in Texas, where seven seats have sat empty for more than one year. The Obama administration and the state’s two conservative Republican senators could not come to an agreement on nominees for the many openings.

“There is a real impact on real people,” said W. Neil Eggleston, Obama’s White House counsel.

“There are people and companies who are not having their cases heard because there are no judges around.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Assange goes from pariah to paragon

BY DAVID WEIGEL AND JOBY WARRICK

P

resident-elect Donald Trump tweeted some praise last week for a man most Republicans wanted nothing to do with. He had seen Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, defend himself during an hour of friendly, prime-time questions on Fox News. And he was impressed.

“Julian Assange said a ‘14-year old could have hacked Podesta,’ ” Trump wrote on Tuesday. “Why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info.”

It wasn’t the first time Trump had praised WikiLeaks. During his campaign for president, Trump had gleefully highlighted emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. By October, just the mention of WikiLeaks could start a roar of applause at Trump’s rallies.

Since then, Trump has continued praising the radical transparency group, harshly criticized by President Obama and other officials for what they describe as damaging national security leaks. He has defended its founder, who has lived in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since August 2012 to avoid extradition on a rape allegation in Sweden. And Trump has been in sync with conservative media, once critical of WikiLeaks, which increasingly embrace Assange as a hero.

Republicans have been slow to climb on board. In interviews, members of the congressional intelligence committees either declined to comment on WikiLeaks or made it clear that they wanted the organization shut down.

“Julian Assange is no hero,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.)

“Someone who steals property is not bringing transparency — he’s taking information that’s not his to give.”

In a statement, Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), a former CIA officer, said that Assange was not a “credible source” for Trump or anyone else.

“The same people who condemned Secretary Clinton for making sensitive and classified infor-

CARL COURT/GETTY IMAGES

Some onetime GOP critics now revere WikiLeaks founder for publishing DNC, Clinton documents mation vulnerable by using an unsecure server should be equally outraged that Assange continues to carelessly leak sensitive documents,” Hurd said.

On CNN, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — a Trump critic who has asked for hearings into possible Russian meddling in the election — urged the incoming president to look more closely at Assange’s tactics and motivations and to take seriously U.S. intelligence estimates that contradict Assange’s descriptions of the hacks.

“It’s the Democrats today; it could be the Republican Party tomorrow,” he said. “None of us should be gleeful when a foreign entity hacks into our political system to interfere with our elections, and that’s what the Russians did.”

Increasingly, reactions like those don’t jibe with the way Assange is portrayed by the sort of conservative sources that generally give Republicans glowing treatment. Assange’s interview with Fox News was conducted by Sean Hannity, who had evolved from a critic to a

frequent booster. From Assange’s room in London, Hannity presented WikiLeaks in its favored terms — as a source of true, incorruptible journalism, bringing down the political elite.

Hannity, who told Assange last month that he had “done us a favor,” said Tuesday that he believes “every word” Assange says.

“You exposed a level of corruption that I for 30 years on the radio as a conservative knew existed, and I was shocked at the level of corruption, duplicity, dishonesty, manipulation,” Hannity told Assange.

“Knowing what WikiLeaks revealed about the Podesta emails on Clinton corruption, on pay to play, on Bernie Sanders being cheated, all of this is revealed. Not a lot of this was covered.”

With little pushback from Hannity and just as little demand for proof, Assange denied that Russian hackers had anything to do with its troves of hacked Democratic emails. With Hannity’s urging, Assange said he was surprised that “elites” had failed to elect Clinton;

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange looks out in February from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he continues to seek asylum.

he had said, before the election, that Trump would “not be allowed” to win.

“We are happy to have credit for exposing the corruption and behavior that was occurring in that Clinton team and the DNC fixing things against Bernie Sanders,” Assange said. “We are quite happy to accept that.”

At less-mainstream news outlets, where Trump’s run and victory were celebrated, the praise had been echoing for months. The Drudge Report has linked videos with speculation that Assange has been aided by government insiders; Alex Jones’s InfoWars, which once criticized Assange for slowwalking the stolen Clinton campaign documents, is rife with rumors that Assange has been silenced by the government, and full of mockery for the Republicans who criticize him.

This treatment of Assange is a stark departure from what was, until recently, a near-universal condemnation of the Australian by conservative pundits and politicians as well as the national security establishment. Assange has inspired both admiration and hatred — sometimes by the same individuals — since his anti-secrecy organization first made global headlines in 2010.

That was the year that WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen, heavily classified Pentagon documents that shed light on U.S. actions in the Iraq War. That same year, WikiLeaks published the first of more than 250,000 pilfered State Department cables containing sensitive and often candid assessments of foreign governments and politicians.

Obama administration officials said publicizing the confidential records damaged relationships with key allies and put diplomats and intelligence operatives at risk.

The releases that started in 2010 prompted calls in conservative media for Assange’s prosecution, or worse.

Trump, in one of his then-frequent calls to Fox, called WikiLeaks “disgraceful” and added that “there should be like death penalty or something” for its releases. n

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NATION

Indiana’s boom in school vouchers

BY E MMA B ROWN AND M ANDY M C L AREN

I

ndiana lawmakers originally promoted the state’s school voucher program as a way to make good on America’s promise of equal opportunity, offering children from poor and lower-middle-class families an escape from public schools that failed to meet their needs.

But five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.

The voucher program, one of the nation’s largest and fastestgrowing, serves more than 32,000 children and provides an early glimpse of what education policy could look like in Donald Trump’s presidency.

Trump has signaled that he intends to pour billions of federal dollars into efforts to expand vouchers and charter schools nationwide. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, played an important role in lobbying for the establishment of Indiana’s voucher program in 2011.

And Vice President-elect Mike Pence led the charge as the state’s governor to loosen eligibility requirements and greatly expand the program’s reach.

The idea of sending taxpayer funds to private and parochial schools is one of the most polarizing propositions in education. To proponents, the rapid expansion of Indiana’s program is a model for giving more families better educational options. But Indiana’s voucher program is seen by many public school advocates as a cautionary tale.

Most recipients are not leaving the state’s worst schools: Just 3 percent of new recipients of vouchers in 2015 qualified for them because they lived in the boundaries of F-rated public

JOSHUA LOTT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

State’s system offers hint of school policy under Trump, Pence and education secretary nominee schools. And while overall private school enrollment grew by 12,000 students over the past five years, the number of voucher recipients grew by 29,000, according to state data, meaning that taxpayer money is potentially helping thousands of families pay for a choice they were already making. Most recipients qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, according to state data, but a growing proportion — now 31 percent — do not.

“The political strategy that voucher supporters have used is to start off small and targeted — lowincome families and special-education students — then gradually expand it to more groups,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University professor of economics who favors choice but has been critical of DeVos’s freemarket approach. “That’s also something the Trump-DeVos team will likely try. The term ‘Trojan horse’ comes to mind.”

Indiana’s program offers vouchers to low-income families, giving

them an amount equal to 90 percent of the state funds that otherwise would have gone to their assigned public schools to educate their children. That figure ranges from $4,700 to $6,500 per child, depending on the school district.

Children from more-affluent families get half that amount in vouchers.

Indiana’s program has succeeded in reaching children who otherwise would not have the chance to attend private schools.

Stephanie Schaefer of Newburgh, Ind., is a stay-at-home mother of six children, four of whom have used vouchers. For her 13-year-old daughter, Eliana, the opportunity to attend a private school was transformative: After struggling with learning disabilities and falling behind at her highly regarded public school, Eliana was able to catch up, thanks to more-personalized attention at Evansville Christian School.

Schaefer said they never could have afforded private school with-

Ashley Radosevich collects assignments at Horizon Christian Academy in Fort Wayne, Ind. Horizon had three campuses at which 85 percent of students received vouchers in 20152016. It was allowed to accept new voucher students even though one of its campuses, now merged, had twice failed the state’s grading system.

out help from the voucher program.

“I don’t think public education works for every kid,” Schaefer said.

“Parents should have the right to be able to find out where their child can fit, where their child can get the best education.”

Indiana’s legislature first approved a limited voucher program in 2011, capping it at 7,500 students in the first year and restricting it to children who had attended public schools for at least a year.

Two years later, Pence entered the governor’s office with a pledge to extend vouchers to more children.

Within months, Indiana lawmakers eliminated the requirement that children attend public school before receiving vouchers and lifted the cap on the number of recipients. The income cutoff was raised, and more middle-class families became eligible.

When those changes took effect, an estimated 60 percent of all Indiana children were eligible for vouchers, and the number of recipients jumped from 9,000 to more than 19,000 in one year. The proportion of children who had never previously attended Indiana public schools also rose quickly: By 2016, more than half of voucher recipients — 52 percent — had never been in the state’s public school system.

Opponents argue that vouchers are not reaching the children most in need of better schools. They also assert that voucher programs violate the constitutional separation of church and state by funneling public dollars into religious schools. Indiana’s program survived a legal challenge in 2013, when a judge ruled that the primary beneficiaries of the vouchers were families, not religious institutions.

Robert Enlow, president and chief executive of EdChoice, an Indianapolis-based organization that advocates for vouchers nationwide, said he wondered why voucher opponents are not as skeptical of persistently terrible public schools as they are of private schools. “We have schools that have been dropout factories in this state forever,” he said. n

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9

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Another twist in climate change fight BY

C HRIS M OONEY

I

t may have been the most controversial climate change study in years.

In the summer of 2015, a team of federal scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a blockbuster paper in Science that appeared to wipe away one of global warming doubters’ favorite arguments. The skeptics had for years suggested that following the then-record warm year of 1998 and throughout the beginning of the 21st century, global warming had slowed down or “paused.” But the 2015 paper, led

by NOAA’s Thomas Karl, employed an update to the agency’s influential temperature data set, and in particular to its record of the planet’s ocean temperatures, to suggest that really, the recent period was perfectly consistent with the much longer warming trend.

This didn’t merely surprise some scientists (who had been busily studying why global warming had appeared to moderate its rate somewhat in the early 21st century). It actually led to a congressional subpoena from Rep. Lamar Smith, chair of the House Committee on Science, who charged that “NOAA’s decision to readjust historical temperature records has broad national implications” and requested more information on why NOAA had made the data set adjustment, including data and communications from the scientists involved.

That controversy is likely to be stirred anew in the wake of a new study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, that finds the NOAA scientists did the right thing in adjusting their data set. In particular, the new research suggests that the NOAA scientists correctly adjusted their record of ocean temperatures in light of known biases in some observing systems — and indeed, that keepers of other top global temperature data sets should do likewise.

“We pretty robustly showed that NOAA got it right,” said study

NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

NOAA challenged idea of global warming ‘pause.’

Now new research says the agency was right. author Zeke Hausfather, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley and a researcher with Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit consortium that has reanalyzed the Earth’s temperatures. “There was no cooking of the books, there’s no politically motivated twisting of the data.”

Hausfather completed the study with scientists based at York University in the U.K., George Mason University and NASA, as well as an independent researcher.

To understand the new study — which gets complicated fast, as it dances back and forth between different data sets — you first need to understand the biggest issue underlying the original NOAA analysis. This involved reconciling the data from two separate ways of measuring temperatures at or near the surface of the planet’s oceans (which are the largest component of determining its overall temperature).

One data source was global ships, which draw in ocean water in their engine rooms and take its temperature. Key parts of the past ocean temperature record

are based on these reports. The other data source is buoys, which float in the water, take measurements, and relay the results to satellites. In general, buoys have been relied upon more for measurements beginning in the 1990s, as they have become more widely deployed. They are, naturally, a more direct measurement, one less mediated by physical ships and fallible humans.

But the increasing use of buoys created an issue of reconciling the two data sources to piece together a seamless and continuous record — and NOAA was, essentially, siding with the buoys when it comes to accuracy. “The ship data are systematically warmer than the buoy data,” NOAA explained in the controversial study. (After all, ship engines are relatively warm places.) It also said that the buoy data are “more accurate and reliable.”

Failing to account for this difference, once the shift from ship data to buoy data occurred, had led NOAA’s temperature record to be too cold — and also appeared to dampen the overall rate of global warming. So to better patch to-

This image obtained Nov. 16, 2015, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the satellite sea surface temperature departure for October 2015.

Orange-red colors are above-normal temperatures and are indicative of El Niño.

gether a long-term temperature record necessarily reliant on both data sources, NOAA used a “bias correction” to take this into account, and more generally gave greater weight to the buoy data, in updating its data set.

This highly technical switch, in turn, had the effect of increasing the overall warming of the oceans in the new data set — and helping to wipe out claims that there’d been any recent slowdown in the rate of climate change.

So with all of that background in place, what Hausfather and his colleagues have done in the new study is create separate records of ocean temperatures from three different, stand-alone measuring systems — satellites, Argo floats, and buoys. They then compared these measurements to the original and revised NOAA records (and to some other international records), and found that the new NOAA data set aligns better with the stand-alone sources, especially for buoys and satellites. The old and uncorrected data set, in contrast, they say suffers from a “cold bias.”

But Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has published on the “hiatus” and attributed it to changes in the Pacific Ocean, said that notwithstanding this work, something really did happen, temporarily, to the planet’s climate in the 2000s that could be called “hiatus” and is worth understanding.

“The early-21st century ‘slowdown’ (or ‘hiatus’) was mostly a product of internally-generated naturally occurring climate variability,” said Meehl by email. “It was notable compared to the previous 20 years when there was accelerated warming, also with a big contribution from internally generated variability.”

Therefore, for Meehl, it’s not an either-or. “To say the slowdown never occurred is to ignore the important aspects of internal variability, and to say that global warming stopped in the early 2000s ignores the important longterm warming trend due to increasing” greenhouse gases. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

China races for genomics dominance Y LAN Q . M UI Boston BY

L

indsay Weekes knew something was wrong as soon as her son was born.

Her pregnancy had been easy. The baby was a strapping 6 pounds, 12 ounces, with thick, curly black hair like his father’s.

But from the first moment Quinlan drew air, Lindsay could see he was tense, his muscles rigid.

Within 24 hours, Quinlan was whisked away from the hospital to an intensive care unit at a nearby medical university. There he began a battery of tests in the hope of a diagnosis, the start of a tortuous journey that has thrust the family into the center of a global economic race to push the limits of medicine.

The search for an answer has taken Quinlan to the cutting edge of the emerging field: the use of genomics, the study of our DNA, to tailor health care. The United States has long been the industry’s undisputed leader, performing much of the research that first decoded human DNA about 15 years ago.

But China is emerging as America’s fiercest competitor, and it is investing billions of dollars in research and funding promising new companies at home and abroad — including a laboratory that handles some of the toughest cases at Boston Children’s Hospital, where Quinlan has become a favorite of the staff.

Finding an answer for Quinlan and children like him relies as much on Chinese expertise as it does on American ingenuity. One of the founders of the lab was born and trained in China before immigrating to the United States. Chinese company WuXi NextCODE is one of its chief investors, and researchers there use WuXi’s programs to analyze the reams of data inside our DNA. In comments by President-elect Donald Trump, America’s relationship with China has been defined by frustration over the loss of factory jobs in the nation’s industrial heartland to the assembly lines of the world’s second-largest

JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Country’s $9 billion effort to beat U.S. in DNA testing has profound implications for one family economy. But experts say it is the battle for dominance in innovation and science that is more likely to determine the economy of the future.

“I’m very frustrated at how aggressively China is investing in this space while the U.S. is not moving with the same kind of purpose,” said Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. “China has established themselves as a really competitive force.”

For the Weekes family, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“There’s some missing piece of the puzzle that we need to find right now,” Lindsay Weekes said.

The family hoped genetic testing would provide an answer. The cost of sequencing DNA has dropped dramatically since researchers unraveled human biological building blocks for the first time in 2001. Estimates of the price tag for that initial discovery range from several hundred mil-

lion to a few billion dollars. Decoding a genome now runs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, spawning a flurry of potential applications.

Experts say the technology could prove as transformational as the Internet. Pharmaceutical companies want genetic information to concoct powerful new drugs. Hospitals hope to analyze genes to personalize medical care.

And doctors believe genetic data could provide the keys to understanding rare and mysterious conditions like Quinlan’s — and maybe one day even develop a cure.

Improving innovation For China, the genomics revolution has been a chance to showcase its technical prowess as well as cultivate homegrown innovation. Over the past two decades, China has transformed itself into an economic superpower through massive industrialization. But the country is facing the limits of that

Lindsay Weekes sits with her son, Quinlan, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that was diagnosed by a Chinese company’s genetic analysis.

model amid slowing growth, toxic pollution and the shift of manufacturing work to less-developed nations. To succeed over the next generation, China hopes to emulate Western-style entrepreneurship to transform its economy.

“When they looked out on the horizon, they saw that those who defined the cutting edge of the global economy are innovation leaders,” said Denis Simon, executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in China. “For China to play a central role in world affairs, as well as to have a very competitive economy, it would have to step up its innovation game.”

What China cannot create, it appears more than willing to buy.

Chinese investors — both private and government-supported — are backing U.S. start-ups in the hope of capturing the entrepreneurial spirit. China has sunk more than $3.6 billion into the U.S. health and biotechnology sector over the past 16 years, according to an analysis by Rhodium Group, a consulting firm.

Scientist and entrepreneur Ge Li is a poster child for China’s new model. Trained at Columbia University, Li was working as a laboratory scientist in Philadelphia in 2000 when he realized he could replicate his job in his home country for a fraction of the cost. His company, WuXi AppTec, which includes WuXi NextCODE, is now estimated to be worth more than $3.3 billion. About 14,000 people carry out the company’s research and product development around the world.

In the United States, the company has helped finance an array of biotech start-ups, including the home DNA testing company 23andMe. It tests medical devices in St. Paul, Minn., and develops biologic drugs in Atlanta. In Philadelphia, it is one of the anchors of a technology hub, opening its third biomanufacturing facility there this fall.

“We’re a U.S. company in the U.S., but we’re a Chinese company in China,” said Hannes Smarason, chief operating officer at WuXi NextCODE.

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11

WORLD The Quinlan genome project Sequencing is only the first step in what doctors call the “diagnostic odyssey.” Making sense of the resulting mountain of data is its own challenge. Unspooling one human genome takes up about 150 gigabytes, the equivalent of about 32 DVDs. The gene responsible for Quinlan’s disorder could be hidden in any one of them.

Geneticist Tim Yu is one of the founders of Claritas, the sequencing lab that handled Quinlan’s case, and he hunted through the entire library of the boy’s DNA for clues. A few years ago, a project this complex would have required getting bulky hard drives of genomic databases through the mail. WuXi NextCODE’s big breakthrough was to speed up the process by introducing the medical equivalent of a search engine, able to scour roughly two dozen reference databases over the Internet to find similar mutations.

The creation of vast warehouses of genetic information has raised concerns about privacy, however. Critics have questioned drug companies’ access to the databases, and there have been several well-publicized cases of researchers connecting people to DNA samples that were submitted anonymously. Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the advocacy group Center for Genetics and Society, said that China provides few safeguards for those who face discrimination based on what may be uncovered within their DNA. “Technically it can’t be 100 percent assured that your data will remain anonymous,” she said.

Smarason called WuXi’s systems “ironclad,” arguing that the data is not identifiable and is encrypted to defend against hackers.

Consent is required from every person who is part of the database.

“Many patients with diseases for which there is no treatment and many with rare disorders want their data shared, to contribute to a better understanding of their condition and to develop better drugs,” Smarason said.

Indeed, the larger the database, the better Yu’s chances of finding the gene responsible for Quinlan’s disorder. Yu looked for genes associated with Quinlan’s unique symptoms: a small head, seizures, involuntary movements and rigid muscles. WuXi NextCODE’s system found 120 that could have

WEEKLY

Military dolphins find next mission

caused one of the symptoms.

Nearly half of those genes were strong matches on both of the systems the lab uses to sequence patients’ DNA. But WuXi’s program found that only six could have been passed down from parents who showed no sign of the disorder. One stood out to Yu, a clipped segment on chromosome 7, resulting in a mutation of the BRAT1 gene.

At the time, only a handful similar cases had been documented in medical literature.

In all of them, the babies died within months.

Racing and waiting Quinlan’s disorder now has a name: RMFSL, or rigidity and multifocal seizure syndrome, lethal neonate. But the description is no longer accurate: At 2 years old, he has already survived much longer than the diagnosis would have predicted.

“When we finally got the diagnosis, it was like a sigh of relief,” Weekes said. “We don’t know what the future is going to hold, but at least we know why.”

Gene mutations similar to Quinlan’s have recently been found in a handful of other children, suggesting a broader spectrum of symptoms and offering some hope for Quinlan’s progress.

One is 10 years old with only mild mental disabilities. Others are more severely compromised than he is.

Heather Olson, Yu and Quinlan’s neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, recently published a paper expanding the definition of the disorder.

There is no cure for Quinlan.

But this past spring, Chinese officials launched a $9 billion investment in precision medicine, a wide-ranging initiative to not only sequence genes, but also develop customized new drugs using that data. The funding dwarfs a similar effort announced by President Obama a year ago that has an uncertain future in Trump’s new administration.

“The U.S. system has more dexterity and agility than the Chinese system,” said Simon, of Duke Kunshan University. “But the learning curve in China is very powerful, and the Chinese are moving fast.

The question is not if. The question is when.”

Quinlan and his family are waiting for the answers. n

KLMNO

BY

C LEVE R . W OOTSON J R.

S

urprise raids on Mexican smuggling boats, international treaties, and outright fishing bans have done little to stop the steady decline of the vaquita, the world’s smallest and possibly cutest porpoise.

Now, in a last-ditch effort straight out of a Sea Worldthemed sci-fi movie, conservationists are turning to a new method of vaquita preservation: military dolphins.

C. FAESI/PROYECTO VAQUITA VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vaquita porpoises are often trapped in fishing nets and drown. The U.S. Navy wants to use trained dolphins to seek out the endangered vaquitas to try to save them.

Technically, they’re the Seal Team 6 of dolphins, specially trained by the U.S. Navy to detect undersea mines and such.

Navy officials hope they’ll be equally good at finding the last vestiges of the vaquita, which make their home in the warm waters between the Mexican mainland and the Baja California Peninsula and have been decimated by a cruel mixture of fishing nets and economics.

“Their specific task is to locate” vaquitas, Jim Fallin of U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific told the Associated Press. “They would signal that by surfacing and returning to the boat from which they were launched.”

If the plan is approved, it would be the first step in a risky relocation project that may be the vaquita’s only chance to survive the next decade.

Vaquita numbers have dwindled since a fishing boom around World War II for a species of sea bass called totoaba, according to The Washington Post’s Darryl Fears. In China, where the totoaba bladder is both a delicacy and a traditional medicine, a pair of bladders can fetch $8,500.

To catch totoaba, which are also endangered, fishermen drag mesh gill nets through the warm waters of the Pacific, snagging everything they come in contact with — including vaquita.

Trapped in the nets, the porpoises drown when they can’t swim to the surface for air.

“It became clear that vaquitas were dying in most, if not all, types of gill nets used in the northern Gulf,” wrote the Cetacean Specialist Group, which tracks the porpoises.

Mexico has long had laws to protect vaquita, and the government is pressuring fishermen to use nets that vaquita could swim out of if caught. But by the time all fishermen have the new nets, the vaquita may already be extinct.

In 2014, a survey found only 100 vaquita, half the number reported two years earlier.

Last year, a count found just 60, and scientists worried that the battle to save the vaquita was all but over, Fears wrote.

The Navy’s dolphins would help locate them. Then, an international team of experts would capture them and transport them to a special holding facility, safe from the trawling nets of fishing boats, according to the AP. But the plan has potential holes.

For one, vaquita have never been found to survive or thrive in captivity. They’re elusive and hard to find and haven’t been thoroughly studied.

And the “little cows” aren’t exactly the rabbits of the sea.

They reproduce slowly — a mature female has about one calf every other year.

If the few remaining females die in captivity, for example, the species would be doomed. n

COVER STORY

JAYANTA DEY/REUTERS

THE CHANGING FABRIC OF INDIA’S TEXTILE INDUSTRY

I

BY ESHA CHHABRA in Auroville, India

n the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo.

At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he’ll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.

He’s worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his skin to peel off. Even today, it is discolored. “It was pretty bad,” he says, in his fragmented English. “But I didn’t have a choice.”

Conventional textile manufacturing is tough on both the people who work in it and their land. Issues arise at almost every stage of the process — the ubiquitous genetically modified seeds that strain farmers’ budgets, the pesticides used in cotton fields, the harsh chemicals used in dyes, the toxic waste that pollutes rivers, and the chemically treated clothing that ends up in landfills. The problems are exacerbated in the low-price, quick-turnaround segment of the market known as “fast fashion,” which encourages cheap production and a throwaway mind-set.

A new crop of small businesses is investing in organic farming, natural dyes and a transparent supply chain that encourages shoppers to think about the effect of their purchases — and they’re selling their products online and in a small but growing number of U.S. stores, from small trendy boutiques to Target.

These include Colorado-based Pact, which makes underwear and loungewear from all-organic cotton; New Jersey-based Boll and Branch, which sells organic-cotton bedsheets, blankets and towels; and two companies based in Los Angeles — Jungmaven, a hemp and organic-cotton T-shirt company, and Industry of All Nations, whose A worker hangs clothes are made with dyed yarn to dry natural dyes and fibers at a textile mill from around the world. on the outskirts The geographical of Agartala, in heartland for most of northeastern these sustainable startIndia. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

ups is India, the second-largest manufacturer of textiles in the world, behind China. Textile manufacturing is a $108 billion-a-year business here, employing more than 35 million people — including Varathan and his fellow workers at Colours of Nature.

‘Clean’ clothing The air inside the dye house smells of fermented indigo, oddly similar to the scent of cow dung. Pungent, to say the least. Men squat over indigo vats, dipping in T-shirt after T-shirt — some of them multiple times, to produce a darker, more intense shade. They hand the colored garments to sari-clad women, who throw them onto a clothesline. The T-shirts transform from green to blue as the indigo encounters oxygen. Dozens in varying shades of blue are drying in rows stretched across a sunny field.

“Just think if this is the way all our clothes were made — dip and dry,” says Juan Gerscovich, as he watches. “There is no need for chemicals. We just need to look to the Earth for answers.”

Gerscovich and his brother Fernando, cofounders of Industry of All Nations, spend several months every year visiting the communities in India, Latin America and sometimes Africa where they source their products, always including a stop here at Colours of Nature in Auroville. The dyeing shop is a key contributor to what the company calls its “Clean Clothes Project” in south India — clothes produced in a way that promotes clean rivers, oceans, soil and air.

Juan, dressed in his company’s wares — indigo-dyed chinos and a breezy white organiccotton shirt — stands over a 250-gallon vat of indigo, set in a hole dug in the ground. There are about two dozen of these big holes; each can dye about 50 pounds of cotton.

He acknowledges that the clothes produced this way aren’t cheap — T-shirts from Industry of All Nations, sold online or at their retail store in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, start at $40. But like other organic manufacturers, he says the high cost of this clothing ideally will translate into consumers giving serious consideration to the impact of their purchases.

“Shopping is thought of as fickle, something mindless, but in fact it is one of the most important activities an individual can do,” he says. “Shopping is the equivalent of voting.”

The Gerscoviches, who created their company in 2010, found common ground and a business partner in Jesus Ciriza Larraona,who founded Colours of Nature here in 1993. Larraona, a Spaniard, lives right next door to his business, and he has become a passionate student of the art of natural dyeing.

“This is a practice that has been going on since the Egyptians,” he says. “But why had it disappeared?”

The answer isn’t hard to understand: Synthetic dyes are quicker and easier to use, and they produce more colors. Natural dyes — notably indigo, but also plants such as madder

Cakes of dried indigo are submerged into vats of water, which are housed underground.

Colours of Nature employees sit at these vats of indigo-rich water, dipping clothes in and out to produce the desired shades of blue.

ESHA CHHABRA

(which produces a red hue), acacia (brown) and myrobalan (yellow), plus resins such as shellac (purple) and minerals including iron (black or gray) — take more time and are labor-intensive.

But chemical dyes take a toll. They can include compounds dangerous to the health of workers, ranging from chlorine bleach to known carcinogens such as arylamines. And if they aren’t treated properly, they can pollute the water supply.

That’s what propelled Mohan Sundaram Eswaran to change his business model. He ran a company in Tirupur, India’s textile manufacturing hub, for 12 years, making clothes for U.S. and European brands; the fabrics were dyed

with conventional dyes, and the fabrics were not generally organic. Business was good, he says: “I was selling more than 6,000 pieces a month and had over 150 employees working for me.”

But he was dismayed by what the industry was doing to the Noyyal River, which runs through Tirupur — a green and foamy waterway whose water can no longer be used even for livestock or irrigation. “That river used to be clean; I could play on the banks of it. Now, I cannot even look at it — all for a few dollars we earned,” he says. “We cannot do that to a river that’s been running for a thousand years.”

So six years ago he founded a new company,

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COVER STORY

ESHA CHHABRA

AMIT DAVE/REUTERS

Knitwin Fashion, which stitches and assembles clothing for Industry of All Nations from organic cotton that is dyed in cooperation with Colours of Nature.

Though doubtful at first about the change, Eswaran says he has found that the smaller quantities with higher profit margins characteristic of the organic industry can be profitable. “Before it was about large quantities, and small margins. Now it’s the opposite,” he says.

Another businessman making changes is Anbalagan Manikam, chief executive of KMA Exports. Each year his company sells 500 tons of indigo, sourced from more than 100 farms in Tamil Nadu state. Some of them have begun

transitioning to organic farming practices.

Manikam says he could produce more natural indigo if enough textile and clothing manufacturers sought it out: “We need more demand for indigo. With more demand, we can build more units to process the plant into powder and cakes for dyeing, and move away from chemical dyes.”

Raw materials But dyeing is only one part of the manufacturing process. The clothing material itself, namely cotton, poses a separate threat to farmers. Only a decade ago, Indian farmers planted 80 percent of their crop using seeds saved from

Top, Vijayakumar Varathan stands in front of Industry of All Nations’ indigo T-shirts, which he helped dye. He has been working at Colours of Nature dye house for the past 15 years.

Bottom, a worker applies color to strings, which will be used to make kites, alongside a road in Ahmedabad, India.

KLMNO WEEKLY

cotton grown the year before. But the advent of genetically modified (GMO) seeds drove that tradition out of the market. Farmers were originally attracted to the GMO varieties because they produced bigger yields than natural seeds and were supposed to be weed-resistant.

But once they stopped replanting natural cotton seeds, those varieties disappeared from the local agriculture. Today, more than 90 percent of Indian cotton comes from GMO seeds, which has forced farmers into a cycle of debt, according to Vandana Shiva, an agricultural activist. GMO seeds are expensive, and because GMO plants don’t produce fertile seeds of their own, new seeds have to be bought each season. Furthermore, pesticides are used on the GMO cotton fields.

Since 2004, however, a cooperative that now numbers more than 35,000 organic-cotton and fair-trade Indian farmers is forgoing chemicals and building a new seed bank of non-GMO cotton seeds. The Chetna Co-op connects these farmers to buyers, trains them with better farming practices and educates them on how to manage their finances. Today it sells its textiles to 16 small to midsize brands, mostly in the United States and in Europe. Denver-based Pact apparel, for instance, makes its T-shirts, underwear and loungewear entirely of the co-op’s organic cotton. In May 2016, the label landed in 460 Target stores across the United States.

“We want to challenge . . . Hanes, Fruit of the Loom and Jockey,” chief executive Brendan Synnott said in a telephone interview from Colorado. “Because the first thing you do in the morning is put on underwear, and it sits on your skin all day long.”

Other U.S. and European brands such as Nudie Jeans, houseware start-up Boll and Branch and apparel company Loomstate buy from Chetna, too. Payments are sent to the farmers through a cooperative bank account, says Vipul Kulkarni, marketing head for Chetna. A crucial element is that these brands commit to buying a certain amount of organic cotton from the farmers at the beginning of the season.

“For farmers, their finances are already stretched to the limit by the time they harvest the crop,” Kulkarni said, “and they will be ready to sell their organic cotton even at lower conventional rates, as they are desperate for cash by then.”

Synnott predicts that movement toward natural, sustainable practices will spread faster in the fashion world than the parallel movement that has made organic produce a staple of Western groceries.

“The organic-food movement started around 1980,” he says. “It’s taken over 30 years.

But now we have technology, which means we can get the stories out quicker, and we can sell directly to customers. Fashion is next.”

And it doesn’t have to be a boutique industry, he says: Big-box retailers are ready.

“I put in one phone call to Target, and we were in,” he said. “When we make such massmarket moves, that’s when we’re going to make change happen in fashion.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

SCIENCE

A new theory for dinosaurs’ demise BY

S ARAH K APLAN

F

or dinosaurs, hatching eggs was a long-term commitment.

A nest pinned the parents down to the spot where the eggs were laid. As long as they were incubating their eggs, they couldn’t venture off in search of food or to flee predators. And their eggs incubated for a very long time.

That’s according to Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University and the lead author of a new study on dinosaur hatching times in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Close examination of embryos found fossilized inside their eggs suggests that dinosaurs took as many as six months to hatch — far longer than their closest modern descendants, today’s birds.

This long period of development may have been what doomed them, Erickson said. After an asteroid crashed into the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction, it would have been harder for slowpoke reproducers like dinosaurs to recover.

“I think it’s an important piece for understanding why dinosaurs went extinct,” he said.

To understand why, we have to rewind a bit, to about 10 million years before the asteroid strike.

It’s the end of the Cretaceous Period. In what is now Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, a clutch of 12 eggs the rough size and shape of potatoes has just been laid by a Proto­ ceratops andrewsi, a relative of the Triceratops. Around the same time, near Alberta, Canada, a duck-billed Hypacrosaurus ste­ bingeri laid a 10-pound egg the size of a volleyball.

While the dinosaurs did whatever it is dinosaurs do while nesting (scientists think some species sat on their nests like birds, while others probably buried their eggs like reptiles), the embryos inside slowly develop. Just before the halfway point of their incubation period, they start to grow teeth.

GREGORY ERICKSON/FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

Long incubation times would have hindered recovery after asteroid In humans and reptiles, teeth are formed from dentin, a liquid that gets laid down every day and then mineralizes, forming a hard layer. Over time, the layers build up like tree rings, one for each day the embryo developed.

“You can basically just count those up and figure out how long it took the dentition to form,” Erickson said. He wondered if dinosaur embryos might exhibit the same phenomenon. So he talked with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History (which houses the Protoceratops eggs) and the University of Calgary (which has the Hypacrosaurus egg) into letting him sample a small amount of tooth from each fossil.

As soon as he popped his slide under a microscope and saw the telltale dentin layers, “I knew we were in business,” Erickson said.

The number of layers let him

calculate a conservative estimate of the incubation times for the two species: about three months for the smaller Protoceratops hatchlings, six months for the larger Hypacrosaurus. Most birds’ eggs hatch in a fraction of that time (chickens take three weeks, canaries need just 13 days).

Even emperor penguin dads, who famously huddle around their eggs for extended periods to protect them from the harsh Antarctic winter, incubate their young for two months at most.

“It’s really surprising,” Erickson said. “I don’t think that people would have entertained the idea that they would have incubated over the better part of the year.”

Spending a long time caring for a clutch of eggs probably cramped dinosaur parents’ styles. It restricted their habitats to regions where the weather was right for

A new study suggests that dinosaur eggs took as many as six months to hatch.

That probably had consequences when the asteroid struck and wiped out most dinosaurs, along with 75 percent of all life on Earth.

incubating an egg, made migration more difficult, and exposed attending parents to predators, natural disasters and hunger — “all the rigors that go with trying to protect the nest for long periods of time,” Erickson said.

And that probably had consequences when the asteroid struck and wiped out most dinosaurs, along with 75 percent of all life on Earth. If a species was going to survive, it needed to be holding all the right cards when it came to physical and life history attributes. Successful creatures were small and adaptable animals that lived fast and died young. For the ancestors of birds, quick incubation times may have boosted their ability to repopulate and evolve to fill ecological niches left vacant after the disaster.

“Dinosaurs found themselves holding basically a dead man's hand,” Erickson said. n

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HEALTH

KLMNO WEEKLY

Flawed thinking over healthy food BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

F

orget the nutrition facts label, the ingredients list and the say-so of experts: A new study finds that shoppers think a food is healthy only when it costs them more.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, is the latest evidence that your brain may work against you when it comes to choosing healthy foods. Researchers say our subconscious association of cost with health — what they call the “healthy = expensive intuition” — can prompt shoppers to not only spend more money but also to make uninformed health decisions without realizing it.

“We often ask how consumers process information about what they should eat,” said Kelly Haws, a processor of marketing at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of the new paper. “The truth is, we give them a ton of information — and they don’t process it all.”

Haws and other researchers in the realm of behavioral economics have a name for this phenomenon: It’s called heuristics, and it basically describes any sort of mental shortcut that we use to simplify decisions. Instead of consciously evaluating all of the information we have about a product — its calorie count, its ingredients, its brand, its location in the store — our brains rely on simple assumptions, such as the belief that healthy foods always cost more.

These assumptions can be deeply flawed, particularly when they’re applied to an overbroad set of situations. And we do apply them broadly when it comes to food: A 2013 study published in the journal Appetite concluded that heuristics, not rational choice, are the basis for most of our food decisions.

Given that prevalence, Haws said, a heuristic like “healthy = expensive” can have profound implications for consumer choice and, by extension, public health — particularly since the “healthy = expensive” intuition appears to

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be so persuasive to the consumers who depend on it.

To test the power of the heuristic, Haws and her two co-authors — Rebecca Reczek at Ohio State and Kevin Sample at the University of Georgia — ran five experiments on several hundred college undergrads. In the first two experiments, participants were shown a “new” food product and asked to guess either its price or health value. In both iterations of the experiment, participants assigned higher prices to healthier products and better health grades to more expensive foods.

In the third, participants were asked to order the more healthy of two sandwiches; they consistently picked the more expensive one, even when the researchers switched the prices. In the fourth, subjects rated an unfamiliar vitamin, DHA, as more important to a healthy diet when it was advertised as part of an expensive trail mix, rather than an averagepriced one.

In the final trial, participants were asked to evaluate reviews of a new, super-healthy protein bar, which cost either 99 cents or $4.

They spent far more time reading

People tend to wrongly assume if it costs more it must be more nutritious

the reviews of the 99 cents bar — a sign, the researchers suggest, that most couldn’t believe a “healthy” item would cost so little.

“Our results suggest that consumers have this really overwhelming sense that healthy equals expensive,” Haws said.

“And that has a big impact on their food decisions.”

Specifically, health-conscious shoppers are potentially overspending, and on products that aren’t necessarily all that good for them. Budget-minded shoppers may ignore their grocery store’s plethora of cheap, healthy options. And all consumers are at risk of forming opinions about promotional health and nutrition claims — such as the importance of DHA — based on nothing but the price of the item.

That’s not all, Haws said. The “healthy = expensive” intuition is just one of “a universe of mental shortcuts” that we rely on to choose food, and many of those shortcuts also appear to be flawed. Previous research has described a “supersize bias,” for instance, in which consumers ignore calorie counts and other health information when pre-

sented with a meal that seems like a good value. The majority of Americans also embrace what’s called the “unhealthy = tasty intuition” — the belief that food must be unhealthy to taste good.

“Are they reading the labels, processing the information?

Probably not,” said Deborah Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the Rand Corp. and the author of “A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Influences Behind the Obesity Epidemic — and How We Can End It.” “The problem with shopping is that it requires lots of decisions, and consumers have limited processing capacity. Every person has a limit on how many good decisions they can make before they start taking mental shortcuts” — such as assuming that pricey food is healthy.

Unfortunately for healthminded consumers, rewiring these sorts of heuristics is difficult; they are, after all, a normal part of our psychology. That is why advocates such as Cohen have advocated for more oversight of in-store food marketing, which Cohen said exploits consumers’ mental exhaustion.

One common technique, when it comes to diet, involves creating (and sticking to) simple nutritional edicts: “eat a salad with every dinner,” for instance, or “never eat chocolate.”

Haws has a heuristic of her own: “Expensive does not equal healthy.” For consumers, she said, the easiest solution to the “healthy = expensive” intuition is to simply remind themselves that it isn’t true while they’re shopping or dining. Haws and Cohen both suggest arriving at the grocery store with a prepared shopping list, the better to defend yourself against your own mental shortcuts. Haws also cycles through a mental list of cheap and healthy foods while she’s moving through the grocery store.

“You’ve probably heard of mindless eating. This is the same idea,” Haws said. “All you need is awareness: Just stop, take a second, and think about it.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Cricket — a slumdog game changer?

F ICTION

A

SELECTION DAY

By Aravind Adiga Scribner.

304 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

mericans know more about Quidditch than they do about cricket, but there must be magic in both games. Although the British import struck out against baseball on these shores sometime in the 19th century, U.S. readers have shown themselves willing to tolerate wickets and stumps if the writing is good enough. And now Americans should venture onto the field for Aravind Adiga’s tragicomic novel “Selection Day.” Adiga is an Indo-Australian writer who won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for his debut novel, “The White Tiger.”

Although “Selection Day” explores a different species of ambition, Adiga’s wit and raw sympathy will carry uninitiated readers beyond their ignorance of cricket — ignorance that the novel’s “Glossary of Cricketing Terms” wryly anticipates.

There’s nothing boring here, though. Adiga’s paragraphs bounce along like a ball hit hard down a dirt street. One gets the general direction, but the vectors of his story can change at any moment as we chase after these characters. They’re all men and boys enamored of cricket, “the triumph of civilization over instinct” — or a fraud perpetrated against impoverished kids who have no options.

“Selection Day” opens in the slums of Mumbai where a talent scout has spotted Radha Kumar, the best young batsman he has seen in 50 years. What is more exciting: This promising player has a little brother, Manju, the “golden boy,” who is even more spectacular. Two such stars in one family is practically “against Nature,” the talent scout claims, but it does not surprise the boys’ father, Mr. Kumar, a seller of “unique chutneys” who could out-push the pushiest Little League dad in the world. Adiga generates a lot of cringing comedy with this unhinged father who prays to “the

ALLA DREYVITSER/THE WASHINGTON POST

thousand-year-old God of Cricket.” Living in a tiny brick shed, Mr. Kumar supervises every moment of his sons’ lives, examining their genitalia weekly and enforcing a regimen of training that includes walking like a duck and avoiding sugar, girls and shaving (“because the cut of the razor makes hormones run faster”).

What’s uncomfortable about this story begins like an itch, but for a time, the zaniness of Adiga’s novel camouflages its darker themes. Although tales of young people pursuing sports as a path out of poverty are hardly unknown, India’s unregulated capitalism greases this plan in a way that would not be possible in the United States: Mr. Kumar essentially sells off a percentage of his sons’ future earnings for about $225 a month. The only upside to this deal is that it provides the boys with some precious time away from their histrionic father.

For Adiga, cricket captures the confluence of India’s hatred and respect for England — and for itself. This is a nation, he suggests, whose identity remains contorted by colonial imposition. “Only ten countries play this game, and only five of them play it well,” says a frustrated cricket enthusiast. “If we had any self-respect, we’d finally grow up as a people and play football. No: Let’s not expose ourselves to real competition, much safer to be in a ‘world cup’ against St. Kitts and Bangladesh. Selfobsession without self-belief: the very definition of the Indian middle class.”

That bitter critique — delivered in dialogue that always feels like it is poking us in the chest — finds more poignant expression in Adiga’s portrayal of young Manju. His desires pull him in contradictory ways that threaten to derail his great expectations. The boy thinks he would like to become a scien-

tist, but pursuing that dream would distract from his training.

Even more confusing to him is his attraction to a fellow cricket player who urges Manju to ignore his father and live however he wants.

“It’s not that easy to leave cricket behind,” Manju says, referring obliquely to the heterosexual identity his culture celebrates, particularly for its sports stars.

Starting with “Three Years Before Selection Day,” these chapters are situated in relation to the allimportant moment when young players are picked (or rejected). By the end, though, “Selection Day” evolves into a bittersweet reflection on the limits of what we can select. Choice — that most enticing Western ideal — does not thrive everywhere equally. To Manju’s rich, gay friend, the decision to reject his father and express his sexuality is simply a matter of will, of personal honesty.

If Manju is not that courageous, he is at least more psychologically astute. “Repression may be a redhot distortion of the truth,” he thinks, “but what follows it, acceptance, when a man finally examines his heart and says, ‘This is what I must have been partly or in whole,’ is hardly liberation. Nothing much changes because you have stopped lying to yourself. A moment of relief, yes, the sense of shedding some terrible weight — but it passes. . . . He had much more scorn for a world that had never shown him a clear path to love or to security.”

That sounds morose, but Adiga’s voice is so exuberant, his plotting so jaunty, that the sadness of this story feels as though it is accumulating just outside our peripheral vision. Or maybe we just grow to like this boy too much to acknowledge what’s happening to him. Suspended between ambition and fear, Manju must learn sooner or later that refusing to choose can be just as momentous as any other choice. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

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19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Do-gooder thinks the worst of people

A generous but odd McMarriage

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

M

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REVIEWED BY

M ARY K AY Z URAVLEFF

y favorite thing about my children’s D.C. public elementary school was that you could not predict which child belonged to which parent. The combination of interracial, gay and international marriages with surrogate, adopted and blended families made for rich cross-pollination.

Every time Karen Kipple, the main character in Lucinda Rosenfeld’s novel “Class,” worries about keeping her daughter in a New York City public school, I want to shake her — and look in the mirror.

One minute, Karen is remarking on “the “newfangledness” of the black children’s names and fearing that “the only thing she’d accomplished by sending her child to a mixed-income school was to make Ruby feel venomous toward at-risk children.” But the next minute she’s “teary-eyed at the spectacle and promise of so many beautiful children of so many different hues and hair types walking down the hall together.” Maybe that’s the role of satire: The life you’re cringing at may very well be your own.

Karen and her husband, Matt, had to work for what they have, which may be one of the reasons Karen is so acutely self-conscious.

Her Ivy League classmates “knew about cocktails and catamarans, ski resorts and stepmothers,” and “it seemed increasingly clear to Karen that the random luck of birth accounted for most of what people called success in life.” The author shows great insight plumbing Karen’s constant need for approval.

This timely novel captures every character in the worst light, and the grudge matches among Brooklyn’s liberal parentocracy are nastier than any playground brawl. Successful by their own measures, Karen and Matt live in a converted macaroni factory, spitting distance from several pretentious coffeehouses. To her credit, Karen “recognized that her life was ripe for mockery.”

Matt and Karen are doing both

well and good: She raises money for a nonprofit called Hungry Kids, and he is developing a realty website for low-income city dwellers. It is from this perch that Karen sends out her sticky judgmental strands. She sees an overweight black girl in grade school and imagines her “tragic life. No doubt there would be a teen pregnancy, followed by a failure to graduate high school, a dead-end cashier job at a fast-food restaurant, more babies with unaccountable men, food stamps, diabetes type 2.” Karen is hypercritical of the school’s teachers, the curriculum, the kids and the other parents, either because they’re absent or overly involved. Or is she projecting? Her internal rants often end with that question, evidence that so much of her disdain is prompted by defensiveness.

Whenever Karen spins out her web of scorn, she catches herself in it — and this reader, too. Karen objects to fruit juice in gradeschool lunches; however, like most of us, she resorts to sugary bribes when necessary. And to her secret distress, Ruby is in the 25th percentile for height and the 80th for weight. So is it everyone else who’s undereducated, lazy and undisciplined — or is she projecting?

If Karen were more committed to neighborhood public schools, she might fight for needed funding and enrollment; if she were more fiercely protective of her daughter, she might rightly tackle issues related to safety or curriculum. Instead, she goes off the rails, as if her swings from derision to piety to rationalization have scrambled her moral compass.

Every time Karen offers her take on the multicultural experiment that is public education, I was reminded of the satirist Alexander Pope’s saying: “All looks yellow to the Jaundiced Eye.” Therein lies Rosenfeld’s talent as well as her lineage. n Zuravleff’s most recent novel is “Man Alive!”

M CLASS

By Lucinda Rosenfeld Little, Brown. 339 pp. $26

RAY & JOAN The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away

By Lisa Napoli Dutton. 353 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

J AMES H ILL

ake no mistake about it, Ray Kroc was no Willie Loman.

Unlike the troubled character in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” the hardcharging Kroc knew what he wanted and set out to get it by all the means he could muster. When he died in 1984, he commanded an empire that spanned the world, changed the eating habits (probably not for the better) of a generation of post-World War II Americans, and made him and many of his associates unbelievably rich — all thanks to a hamburger stand he came upon in Southern California.

Yet attention must also be paid to his third wife, Joan. Impoverished as a child, and not much better off in early adulthood, she dreamed of better years to come — and did they ever.

It was a long time before Kroc married her, but when the wedding finally came about, Joan Beverly Mansfield Smith Kroc joined the ranks of America’s super-rich.

And in doing so, she became St. Joan of the Arches.

Lisa Napoli’s entertaining biography of the Krocs is subtitled somewhat misleadingly: “The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.” Ray Kroc, at the urging of his publicists, was a bit of a philanthropist, as evidenced by his generosity to Dartmouth College, his corporation’s belief in community outreach and the Ronald McDonald Houses for families of children undergoing long hospitalizations. By no means did Joan Kroc clear out the family checkbook; nor did she die destitute in 2003. And she looked after her heirs.

What Napoli captures so well is a woman who, having gotten so much for the simple act of saying “I do,” decided that others were as equally entitled to her good fortune as she was — and acted accordingly.

Widowhood was Joan Kroc’s

liberation. In San Diego and around the world, she ran with her own rat pack, which included Helen Copley of the publishing fortune, former San Diego mayor Maureen O’Connor — an heir to the Jack in the Box hamburger millions — and the actress Mercedes McCambridge. Kroc started doling out money, much of it anonymously, and, when her time on Earth was nearly over, she wrote up a will that disbursed more than $2.7 billion, including more than $1 billion to the Salvation Army and $225 million to NPR. But mostly, she became a voice for the voiceless, as seen in her brave attempt to bring order and sanity out of the chaos of a madman’s rampage in 1984 at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif., that killed 21 and injured 19.

She took it upon herself to start a fund for the victims, donating $100,000, and she insisted that the widow and two young children of the gunman would be among the beneficiaries at a time when most people in San Ysidro were still enraged over the killings.

Napoli has given us a book that is a snapshot of 20th-century America, particularly in the postwar years. That her two main characters were both rags-toriches stories makes it all the more appealing. The author’s portrait of the eccentric Joan Kroc is particularly engaging. Piecing together her character was no easy task; she was press shy — perhaps a reason no one had attempted a biography until Napoli, a veteran reporter, appointed herself to do the job.

“She hated the idea that someone might write a book about her,” Napoli notes. “Her death wouldn’t mean the end of the edict for silence.”

That silence has been broken.

Maybe St. Joan will now approve. n Hill is a former senior editor for The Washington Post News Media Services.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Liberal churches wane as conservative ones thrive

BY DAVID HASKELL is a professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, further ensuring their decline.

Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S. bishop in the Episcopalian Church, published his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” It was presented as an antidote to the crisis of decline in mainline churches.

Spong, a theological liberal, said congregations would grow if they abandoned their literal interpretation of the Bible and transformed along with changing times.

Spong’s general thesis is popular with many mainline Protestants, including those in the United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian (U.S.A.) and Episcopal churches. Spong’s work has won favor with academics, too. Praising Spong’s work specifically, Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School said in a review of Spong’s book that it “should be required reading for everyone concerned with facing head-on the intellectual and spiritual challenges of latetwentieth-century religious life.”

Harvard Divinity professor and liberal theologian Harvey Cox said “Bishop Spong’s work is a significant accomplishment,” and indeed, Cox has long been at the task of shifting Christianity to meet the needs of the modern world. Thus, liberal theology has been taught for decades in mainline seminaries and

preached from many mainline pulpits. Its enduring appeal to embattled clergy members is that it gives intellectual respectability to religious ideas that, on the surface, might appear far-fetched to modern audiences.

But the liberal turn in mainline churches doesn’t appear to have solved their problem of decline.

Over the last five years, my colleagues and I conducted a study of 22 mainline congregations in the province of Ontario. We compared those in the sample that were growing mainline congregations to those that were declining. After statistically analyzing the survey responses of over 2,200 congregants and the clergy members who serve them, we came to a counterintuitive discovery: Conservative Protestant theology, with its more literal view of the Bible, is a significant predictor of church growth while liberal theology leads to decline. The results were published this month in the peerreviewed journal Review of Religious Research.

We also found that for all measures, growing church clergy members were most conservative theologically, followed by their congregants, who were themselves followed by the congregants of the declining churches and then the declining church clergy members. In other words, growing church clergy members are the most theologically conservative, while

N. REDMOND/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

declining church clergy members are the least. Their congregations meet more in the middle.

For example, we found 93 percent of clergy members and 83 percent of worshipers from growing churches agreed with the statement “Jesus rose from the dead with a real flesh-andblood body leaving behind an empty tomb.” This compared with 67 percent of worshipers and 56 percent of clergy members from declining churches. Furthermore, all growing church clergy members and 90 percent of their worshipers agreed that “God performs miracles in answer to prayers,” compared with 80 percent of worshipers and a mere 44 percent of clergy members from declining churches.

Outside our research, when growing churches have been identified by other studies — nationally and internationally — they have been almost exclusively conservative in doctrine. As we explain in our academic work, because of methodological limitations, these other studies did not link growth to theology.

But our work suggests this is a fruitful avenue of research to pursue.

What explains the growth gap between liberal and conservative congregations? In defense of liberal churches, one might venture that it is the strength of belief, not the specifics of belief, that is the real cause of growth. In this case, pastors embracing liberal theology are just as likely

as conservative pastors to experience church growth, provided they are firm and clear in their religious convictions. Yet different beliefs, though equally strong, produce different outcomes.

For example, because of their conservative outlook, the growing church clergy members in our study took Jesus’ command to “Go make disciples” literally.

Thus, they all held the conviction it’s “very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians,” and thus probably put effort into converting nonChristians. Conversely, because of their liberal leanings, half the clergy members at the declining churches held the opposite conviction, believing it is not desirable to convert nonChristians. Some of them felt, for instance, that peddling their religion outside of their immediate faith community is culturally insensitive.

It should be obvious which of these two convictions is more likely to generate church growth.

While our research helps explains the dwindling ranks of liberal mainline congregations, it isn’t likely to bring much “joy to the world” of mainliners, especially those on the theological left. But, if it’s any consolation, when it comes to growth in mainline churches, Spong and other liberals are right to claim that Christianity must change or die. They just get the direction of the change wrong. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

House ethics office needs changes ROBERT L. WALKER is an attorney with the D.C. firm Wiley Rein and is a former chief counsel and staff director of the Senate and House ethics committees.

As an attorney in the private sector, I am not a booster of the Office of Congressional Ethics — the bipartisan entity established within the House of Representatives in 2008 to conduct independent preliminary reviews of allegations of misconduct by House members and staffers and, when necessary, to refer such allegations to the Ethics Committee for further investigation and action. In representing many members, staff, private entities and individuals before the OCE, I have experienced firsthand how the OCE board has issued overly broad and intrusive requests for information, taken overly expansive positions on the scope and meaning of House standards of conduct, and (albeit by design of its organizational charter issued by the House) overlaid a duplicative series of investigative steps on what was already a drawn-out and byzantine ethics disciplinary process.

However, as an observer and student of government ethics rules and processes, and of their vital importance in maintaining an essential measure of public faith that our public servants are working for the public good, I applaud Tuesday’s decision by House Republicans to scrap a proposed rules change that would have eliminated the independence of the OCE by putting it under the direct supervision (effectively, the control) of the House Ethics Committee. Among other

restrictions to the OCE’s authority and power, the proposed rules amendment would have assured that the OCE immediately ceased its investigative activity on a matter when requested by the Ethics Committee and would have prohibited the OCE board from issuing any public or press statement about its activities, or from issuing any investigative findings or report, except as specifically authorized.

The proposed limitations on the OCE’s public voice seem to have been motivated largely by events surrounding parallel investigations by the OCE and the Ethics Committee into 2013 travel by several House members to a conference in Azerbaijan allegedly funded by that country’s state-owned oil company. First, when the Ethics Committee,

which had commenced an investigation into the Azerbaijan allegations, asked the OCE to cease its investigation into the same matter, the office did not do so promptly. Second, a couple of months after this request to cease, The Post and Politico reported extensively on what should have been a confidential OCE report on the Azerbaijan travel; many observers concluded that the OCE leaked its report to the press.

Third, after the committee closed its investigation of the relevant members without issuing the OCE’s findings (stating that such a release could prejudice potential referrals to the Justice Department), the OCE took the extraordinary step of releasing its full findings on each of the members involved.

Clearly, changes to the OCE’s organizational and procedural rules would make sense to prevent unauthorized leaks of confidential information and to lessen the possibility that the board and the Ethics Committee find themselves at cross purposes on future matters. Since it was established, the OCE has played a healthy gadfly role in keeping the Ethics Committee on track and on its toes, but that role should not descend to directly undermining the work of the committee or the House ethics investigative and

disciplinary processes generally.

On the other hand, having injected transparency into the ethics process with the creation of an independent OCE (whose findings and reports must be released publicly, except under rare circumstances), the House should not appear to be compromising this transparency by putting the OCE under the control of the Ethics Committee.

Although, on paper, the proposed rule would not have eliminated the requirement for public release of the OCE’s report of a completed investigation, the Ethics Committee would have had the ability to intervene, and potentially terminate, an OCE investigation before its completion.

Historically, changes to congressional ethics rules and processes have been made based on the work and findings of task forces and study committees operating largely on a bipartisan basis. But it is the public’s buy-in, into rules and procedures that are at once fair to those they cover but demonstrably designed to get at — and get out — the whole truth, that is the essential underpinning of a credible congressional ethics process.

The House as a whole will need to keep this in mind going forward. n

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22

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

Honoring the man who beat ALS MARC A. THIESSEN is a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush. He writes a weekly online column for The Post.

Recently, we have stopped to remember those who left us in 2016 whose lives profoundly changed the world around them — people such as John Glenn, Nancy Reagan, Muhammad Ali and Elie Wiesel.

Allow me to add a name to that distinguished list that you probably never heard before: Ted Harada. Because Ted did something that no one else in recorded medical history ever did: He beat ALS. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a cruel illness that causes the motor neurons inside your spinal cord to die. Over time, your muscles degenerate and you become a prisoner in your own body — progressively losing the ability to move, speak, swallow and, eventually, breathe. There is no cure. No one has ever gotten better after a diagnosis of ALS. No one, that is, except Ted. When Ted was diagnosed in 2010 by Jonathan Glass, a doctor at the Emory ALS Center, he was deteriorating quickly. He could walk only short distances with the help of a cane. Simple tasks, such as getting the mail or walking up the stairs to put his kids to bed, had become impossible for him.

But two years later, on Oct. 20, 2012, Ted completed Atlanta’s 21/2mile Walk to Defeat ALS with no difficulty. In fact, Ted completed the ALS walk four years in a row.

He ditched his cane and was able once again to play with his kids in the pool and walk up the stairs to tuck them in for bed.

What saved Ted was an experimental ALS treatment pioneered at the Emory ALS Center, in which doctors opened his spinal cord and injected neural stem cells into diseased areas, where the pools of motor neurons affected by ALS are found. The hope was that the implanted cells would fix or replace the damaged ones and that this would slow or stop the degeneration of the motor neurons.

Before surgery, Ted was told the treatment would not help him. He was part of a Phase I safety trial, whose sole purpose was to prove the procedure would not kill him. But to his doctors’ surprise, not only did the procedure not kill him, it also reversed his ALS symptoms.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY SHENEMAN

The results were so shocking, so unprecedented, that Glass went back to reconfirm that Ted even had ALS. He did. Ted recalled when Glass sat him down and said: “You’re the first ALS patient I ever told this to, but right now you are not dying from ALS; you are living with it.”

And live he did. He used the time he had been given to the fullest — not only to enjoy his wife and their children but also to fight for others facing terminal illnesses. Ted became a champion of the Right to Try movement — a campaign led by the Goldwater Institute to pass laws in state legislatures across the country to allow patients with terminal illnesses such as Ted to get access to investigational drugs and treatments that completed basic safety testing and are showing great promise in clinical trials but are still not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Millions of Americans are dying of terminal illnesses, while treatments for many of those illnesses exist and are being safely used in clinical trials. But most patients cannot get them because the FDA has not yet determined them to be effective and approved them for general use. And bureaucratic obstacles limit the number who can get access on a “compassionate use” basis. While

there is no guarantee such experimental treatments will work, most dying Americans are not looking for a guarantee — they just want a chance.

In 2014, Ted wrote an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution sharing his story and making the case for the Georgia General Assembly to pass legislation giving terminal patients like him the right to try to save their lives.

In May 2016, Georgia became the 28th state to enact Right to Try legislation.

But Ted’s victory came in the shadow of tragic news. A few months before the bill was signed, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. This time, there would be no miracle cure. He passed away on Oct. 17, 2016.

We will never know how long Ted’s ALS symptoms would have remained in remission, but we know this much for certain: Ted did not die of ALS. “I don’t know why I was picked or why I was chosen,” he once told me, “but if I’ve been given this gift, how selfish [would it be] to keep that gift to myself and not do something good with it?”

Ted Harada did something good with his gift. He made medical history and brought hope to others who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Rest in peace, my friend. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The President’s Daily Brief BY

D AVID P RIESS

We’ve learned that President­elect Donald Trump has declined many intelligence briefings, delegating the daily task instead to Vice Presi­ dent­elect Mike Pence. In some ways this is a departure from the ap­ proach of past presidents. But there’s also widespread misunder­ standing of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and the traditions sur­ rounding it. Here are five erroneous beliefs.

MYTH NO. 1 The PDB has traditionally been for the president only.

While through most of its history the document has been marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” the PDB has never gone to the president alone. The most restricted dissemination was in the early 1970s, when the book went only to President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who was dual-hatted as national security adviser and secretary of state. In other administrations, the circle of readers has also included the vice president, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with additional White House staffers. By 2013, President Obama’s PDB was making its way to more than 30 recipients, including the president’s top strategic communications aide and speechwriter, and deputy secretaries of national security departments.

MYTH NO. 2 Intelligence officers brief presidents in person every day.

The commander in chief has received the PDB every working morning for the past 50 years. Inperson briefings, though, haven’t been as frequent.

Presidents Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush (previously a CIA director) and George W. Bush wanted face-to-face briefings daily. But they stand out as the exceptions. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Nixon rarely saw their CIA directors or senior intelligence officers for anything, much less to brief the PDB.

Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan discussed the daily book with their national security advisers, not CIA officers.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama received in-person presentations, but irregularly.

Former defense secretary Bob Gates, who has had insight into the use of the PDB by almost every president since Johnson, told me that “one of the greatest values of the PDB is the interaction with the president, which allows the leadership of CIA and the community to have a better idea of what’s on the president’s mind, where he is coming from on issues, what’s on his agenda and what he needs to know.”

MYTH NO. 3 Presidents get most of their intelligence from the PDB. The intelligence assessments in the PDB are just one slice of a very large pie. Important information makes its way to the president throughout the day, especially during crises, from a variety of channels: meetings with top West Wing advisers, messages from the White House Situation Room, phone calls from national security officials and in-person intelligence briefings that extend beyond the material in the once-per-day PDB. During the Cuban missile crisis, for example, President John F. Kennedy was briefed on Cuba in frequent meetings at the White House. His daily intelligence document kept him up to speed on other world events but largely neglected Cuba itself during those 13 days.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

President Obama and members of his National Security Council receive a briefing in June 2010. Obama reads his copy of the President’s Daily Brief in digital form on a tablet.

MYTH NO. 4 Presidents have placed enormous weight on the PDB. As the ultimate product of the intelligence community’s collection and analytic efforts, the PDB tends to command respect.

But several presidents have also pointed out the PDB’s flaws and inconsistencies. Less than two months into his term, President Jimmy Carter told intelligence officials that he was “disappointed” with the analysis he received and wanted more “divergent views.”

The PDB also exasperated Clinton — “all the time,” he told me — because he wanted more than it could provide.

Of all the presidents in the past 50 years, Nixon placed the least emphasis on the book.

“The PDB was not a central document in our thinking,” Kissinger told me. “It was one input.” Nixon’s distrust of the CIA prompted him to undervalue most of the agency’s judgments, if he read them at all.

MYTH NO. 5 The PDB isn’t worth the president’s time.

The PDB contains timely and,

hopefully, accurate assessments of national security threats and foreign policy opportunities. Each article, drafted by CIA analysts — and, since post-9/11 reforms kicked in more fully in 2005, by their colleagues across the intelligence community — synthesizes classified and unclassified source material into an assessment that is usually no longer than a single page, focused on what the president needs to know rather than what he wants to hear.

The PDB’s insights into what other governments, groups and individuals around the globe are doing or considering doing — even if only marginally different from in the days or weeks before — help the commander in chief get ahead of crises before they develop or react to them more confidently if they do erupt. Even when the text seems repetitive, there’s value in such incremental updates. n Priess, a former analyst and daily intelligence briefer at the CIA, is the author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents from Kennedy to Obama.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2017

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