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IN COLLABORATION WITH
ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY
The awakening A liberal Washingtonian wanted to help West Virginians — and got an education in humility and harmony PAGE 12
Politics Making deals for ‘dreamers’ 4 Nation Warehouse clubs lose favor 8 Media Identify the trends 23
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THE FIX
GOP’s Mueller crisis arrives A MBER P HILLIPS
Republicans in Congress may not have been privy to any of the internal White House conversations at the time about the firing of Muelhe firing of special counsel Robert S. ler, which could be one reason they backed off Mueller III has long been a red line for passing protections for the special counsel. most Republicans in Congress who are “I don’t hear much pressure to pass anytrying to work with their president. thing,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConBut it’s a red line they'd rather not act on — nell (R-Ky.) told MSNBC in November. “There’s and now, with news that President Trump been no indication that the president or the actually made moves to do it, they may be White House are not cooperating with the forced to. special counsel.” There are two bills in Congress, both of “I’ve never been convinced they’re conwhich have some Republican support, that stitutional,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy would protect Mueller from being fired by (R-La.), told The Post of one proposal reTrump. But neither bill has been seriously quiring a three-judge panel to review any considered by leadership. firing from the executive branch. Up until this point, Republicans had There is no bill to protect Mueller in the given Trump the benefit of the doubt that House of Representatives, where some vohe wouldn’t launch a constitutional crisis. cal Republican lawmakers have said MuelFrom their perspective, why take action ler should step down because of what they and cause a confrontation with the presiallege are various levels of bias. dent (and jeopardize their agenda) if they Democrats involved in Congress’s Rusdon’t absolutely have to? sia investigation were so worried by ReNow they may now have to. publicans’ shrugs about protecting MuelTrump moved to fire Mueller in June, ler that in December Sen. Mark R. Warner shortly after the special counsel took over SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III. CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate the investigation of Russia meddling in the Intelligence Committee, gave a speech 2016 election, the New York Times, then warning a “constitutional crisis” would happen The Washington Post, reported Thursday protect Mueller if Trump tried to fire people in if Trump fired Mueller while Congress was night. Trump seemed pretty dead set on it, and the Justice Department in a way that would gone. only backed off after the White House's top eventually lead to getting rid of Mueller. The debate in Congress probably won’t imlawyer, Donald McGahn, threatened to resign. Even some of Trump’s biggest Republican mediately shift to how to protect Mueller. InReports that Trump wanted to get rid of the critics in the Senate didn’t believe he’d go that stead, it will probably zero in on whether it’s special counsel don’t entirely come out of the far. “I can’t imagine any administration taking Congress’s job to do it in the first place. blue — he’s frequently complained this investia move like that,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) “I believe now that this revelation has been gation is a “hoax” and suggested it’s politically told reporters in October. made public, that there will be increasing motivated. There has also been evidence that But this revelation is more concrete than pressure to protect Mueller,” moderate Rep. Trump was toying with the idea of first firing news over the summer. Trump didn’t just think Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) told my Post colleagues. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He even hinted about firing Mueller, he moved to do it. AccordBut either way, the confrontation with the in a July interview with the New York Times ing to The Post’s Rosalind Helderman and Josh president that Republicans were trying to that he’d fire Mueller if the independent invesDawsey, discussions were had and meetings avoid has just landed on their doorstep. n tigation started looking into his finances. were held by his aides to try to get him to back Firing Sessions is one of the clearest paths off. © The Washington Post
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for the president to get rid of the special counsel, who technically answers to the Justice Department. And that got some Republicans’ attention. “There will be holy hell to pay,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) warned Trump via reporters in July of what would happen if the president fired Sessions. A few weeks later, two pairs of bipartisan senators unveiled legislation to
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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 16
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TRENDS BOOKS OPINION MEDIA
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ON THE COVER Entrepreneur Joe Kapp, left, is working with poultry farmer Josh Frye in Wardensville, W.Va. Photograph by RICKY CARIOTI, The Washington Post.
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POLITICS
Dealing with the ‘dreamers’ BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND S EAN S ULLIVAN
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he immigration proposal President Trump plans to send to Congress this week will include a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants, more than twice the number of “dreamers” who were enrolled in a deferred action program Trump terminated last fall. That figure represents a significant concession to Democrats but is likely to produce sharp blowback among conservative Republicans. But the proposal also has provisions that are likely to engender fierce objections among liberal Democrats. One of those provisions is a $25 billion “trust fund” for a border wall and additional security upgrades on both the southwest and northern U.S. borders. And the president will also propose significant curbs to legal immigration channels, restricting the ability of U.S. citizens to petition for visas only for spouses and minor children and ending categories for parents and siblings. The White House cast the proposal as one piece of an immigration framework that would significantly tighten the nation’s border control laws. The compromise, which will formally be sent to the Senate on Monday, was intended to break an immigration impasse as Congress deliberates over the future of 690,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) whose temporary work permits will begin to expire March 5. Trump’s move will allow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to bring an immigration bill to the floor the week of Feb. 6, just days before a Feb. 8 deadline for a must-pass spending bill to keep the government open. Many Democrats and some Republicans said they will not support a longterm spending bill without an immigration deal. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an immigration moderate who has worked with Democrats on past proposals, hailed the
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Trump offers path to citizenship with caveats both parties won’t like White House plan in a tweet: “President Obama tried and couldn’t fix immigration. President Bush tried and couldn’t do it. I believe President Trump can. Today’s DACA recipients can be tomorrow’s #TRUMPDreamers.” But Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (DIll.) slammed the border wall funding as a “ransom for Dreamers” in a tweet and said the plan “doesn’t pass the laugh test.” The details of the White House plan came out Thursday, one day after Trump told reporters that he would be open to an immigration deal that includes a path to citizenship that would take up to 12 years for DACA recipients, immigrants known as dreamers who have lived in the country illegally since they were children. Trump and senior aides indicat-
ed Wednesday that the citizenship path would be limited to the 690,000 dreamers in the program when the president terminated it. Officials said Thursday that the citizenship path would be open to anyone who had been eligible for DACA, even the hundreds of thousands of dreamers who never applied. The Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 1.3 million dreamers were eligible for DACA last year with another 600,000 who could potentially become eligible if they met certain requirements. White House officials acknowledged that the House would likely consider a separate immigration proposal that could take a more conservative approach, potentially setting up a cross-chamber conference for a final deal that would come to Trump’s desk.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) praised President Trump’s immigration proposal, which includes a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants, $25 billion for a border wall and security upgrades, and curbs to legal immigration channels.
“We’re grateful for the president showing leadership on this issue and believe his ideas will help us ultimately reach a balanced solution,” said Doug Andres, spokesman for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). But getting to that point remains fraught and the White House proposal is likely to be treated in the Senate as a starting point in the debate, not the bottom line. Conservative news sites hammered Trump for his support of a path to citizenship, with Breitbart News calling the president “Amnesty Don” in a headline Thursday. Democrats will be under pressure from immigration groups to reject the proposal. “This is going to be dead on arrival. We are going to oppose it fiercely,” said Frank Sharry, execu-
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LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS
tive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights organization. “We are going to expect every Democrat to oppose it. And the idea that they are going to exploit the desperation of Democrats and dreamers to take a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty is a non-starter.” White House aides said the plan was the result of months of talks between the administration and lawmakers and cast it as an effort to provide Congress greater clarity over what Trump would support in an immigration deal. Some lawmakers have complained that the president has vacillated between signaling he was supportive of a deal only to pull back after speaking with aides or immigration hard-liners. McConnell has said he would be willing to move forward with a vote on an immigration bill that had support from Trump. In a statement Thursday, McConnell said the new framework helped fulfill that goal and urged lawmakers to “look to this framework for
guidance as they work towards an agreement.” While Trump was in Davos, Switzerland, for an economic forum late last week, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly remained in Washington to keep in close contact with Congress. However, Kelly did not visit Capitol Hill on Thursday, aides said. White House aides dismissed the notion that Trump’s proposal was too hard line for Democrats and some moderate Republicans. One official pointed to the failed attempts by Congress to pass sweeping immigration bills under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and said Trump’s proposal aims to appeal to more conservative members by beefing up border security and limiting family immigration, which the president has derisively referred to as “chain migration.” The White House plan notably does not allow parents of dreamers to remain in the country, an issue that is likely to inflame tensions.
A proposal from Graham and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), which Trump rejected this month, would have allowed parents of dreamers to seek renewable permits allowing them to stay in the United States but not seek legal permanent residency. Another potential sticking point centers on Trump’s proposal to end a diversity visa lottery that has awarded about 50,000 green cards annually to foreigners from countries with low immigration rates to the United States, including many African nations. Under Trump’s plan, those visas would go toward speeding up a backlog of up to 4 million family members of U.S. citizens who have already applied for green cards. Trump would allow those family members’ applications to be processed even as he terminates some family categories. The Durbin-Graham proposal would have reallocated the diversity lottery visas to some of the hundreds of thousands of immi-
DACA recipients and supporters rally in support of the program outside Disneyland in California this month.
grants already in the United States who have “temporary protected status” allowing them to remain because it is deemed too dangerous to return to their home countries. Trump has declared an end to TPS status for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and other countries, angering Democrats. “We have a right as Americans to decide who comes to America,” said one senior administration official. This official emphasized that the U.S. economy has transitioned to high-skilled jobs and added: “We need different immigrants today than we needed when my . . . family came here. Most countries in the world have developed an approach to immigration that says we want people that we need.” When asked if Trump would support a “DACA only bill” if the Senate fails to pass the White House proposal, one aide replied: “This is DACA” and held up a one-page summary including border wall money and legal immigration cuts. n ©The Washington Post
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At last, an embrace by global elites BY H EATHER L ONG AND T ORY N EWMYER
Davos, Switzerland
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resident Trump may have finally gained entry into the exclusive global club of the corporate elites he has long scorned — and which has scorned him. All it took was a $1.5 trillion tax cut and a much more hands-off approach toward regulating companies for business leaders to embrace him. It is a big change in attitude from a year ago, when many in the business elite viewed Trump’s inauguration and nationalistic brand of politics with high anxiety. Business leaders and their companies slammed the new administration’s ban on travel from six majority-Muslim countries — filling their social media accounts with criticism — and seven months later disbanded advisory councils to the president to protest his racially charged remarks about a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Trump’s arrival at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday — the epicenter of global financial elites — showed how much the cold relationship had thawed. While there was some wariness about Trump’s presidential style and apprehension about his stance on immigration and trade, many executives applauded an economic agenda built around corporate tax cuts and deregulation that they said was helping to bring investment and jobs to the United States. There were still some holdouts, who expressed concern that the tax cut would increase the deficit and worsen inequality. But a number of executives said Trump’s first year has gone better than they expected — even those who have been among his loudest critics. “I like a lot more stuff than I don’t like,” Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein said on CNBC on Wednesday. Trump seemed to appreciate the welcome as he began his two days in Davos. Asked by a journal-
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Trump’s economic policies win over critics, many of whom praise him at Davos economic forum ist whether he thought he would be received well, he responded, “I already am.” Back in the United States, half a dozen Republican senators this past week warned against taking further harsh measures on trade, after Trump imposed tariffs on washing machines and solar panels, and called on the administration to tread carefully as it renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement. But corporate Twitter accounts were more likely to boast of how they were using their savings from the tax cut than they were to criticize the president’s policies, helping to reshape the narrative around Trump. Wall Street titans such as Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon were highly critical of the president over the summer for pulling out of the Paris climate accord and his remarks after Charlottesville. But at the annual gathering of corporate and political elite in Davos, Dimon portrayed Trump
as a leader who has unconventional methods but gets things done, especially for businesses, and predicted his policies would drive an economic boom. “I think it’s possible you’re going to hit 4 percent sometime this year,” Dimon said in an interview with CNBC. “I promise you, we are going to be sitting here in a year and you all will be worrying about inflation and wages going up too high.” Blankfein, who started tweeting in June, made a habit of trolling Trump on Twitter. He made his first tweet a rebuke of Trump for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, calling the move a “setback for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world.” In September, Blankfein took on Trump’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. “I wouldn’t deport a kid who was brought here and only knows
President Trump arrives at the Congress Center during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
America,” Blankfein tweeted at the time. At Davos, Blankfein praised Trump’s leadership. “I’ve really liked what he’s done for the economy, and I think he’s gone out of his way to be very, very supportive of the system,” Blankfein said. Wall Street is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cuts. Its profitability has gone up and it benefits from the U.S. stock market hitting record highs, with many chief executives receiving the bulk of their compensation in stock options. Not everyone at Davos was convinced that tax cuts and deregulation will be good for the economy in the long run. BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink, a supporter of Hillary Clinton who was rumored to be on the shortlist to become her treasury secretary, was one of the few in Davos who seemed willing to cast doubt about the Trump administration’s approach. Fink visibly grimaced when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said 70 percent of the corporate tax cut would benefit worker pay. Fink said investors were the big winners. “Those who own equity have done fantastically well. It’s been brilliant for me,” Fink told a panel. “It has not been as impactful for so many people.” He went on to say that the tax cuts and stock market rise are “creating a greater disparity of income” in the United States. Still, the positive reaction at Davos has surpassed the expectations of Trump allies. Republican House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the reaction from the business community to the tax cuts had been even better than anticipated, and that everyone he met at Davos was very positive about Trump and the GOP agenda. “Their impression of America is we’re back doing bold things again,” McCarthy said. “You might not like his unconventional ways, but it is an effective way,” he said. n ©The Washington Post
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NATION
Warehouse clubs shop for customers BY
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arehouse clubs such as Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s Wholesale Club have for decades been an American staple: a place where families can stock up on bulk items, try free samples and spend the better part of a weekend morning meandering through aisles filled with 26-packs of canned salmon and king-size mattresses. But as more of Americans’ buying shifts online, some retail analysts say warehouse clubs may largely be left behind. “The core club customer is older: It’s generally someone with a family and a house,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at the research firm Forrester. “Costco has been one of the least digitally forward companies out there. This segment has had its head in the sand when it comes to competing with Amazon.” There are signs that the sector is falling behind: Warehouse clubs and supercenters cut an average of 2,500 jobs each month in 2017, reversing a longtime trend of steady growth, according to a Post analysis of Labor Department data. Between 2009 and 2016, warehouse stores had added an average of 3,000 workers each month. The sector received more bad news this month, when Walmart announced it would close 63 Sam’s Club stores, affecting an estimated 10,000 workers. In a tweet, the company said the closures would help “better align” its physical locations with its strategy. (Ten locations will reopen as e-commerce fulfillment centers.) “Today’s adults are not spending a lot of time shopping like my parents’ generation did,” said Kim Whitler, a marketing professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, they’re all timestarved and want to order groceries while they’re riding a bus to work.” Chieh Huang founded Boxed in 2013 with a simple idea: Deliver bulk goods to shoppers who don’t live near a wholesale club or have a car to get to one.
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Millennials want to shop online, and it could kill off supercenters if they don’t ‘better align’ What he quickly found, though, was a different sort of demand. “We actually found a bigger problem to solve, which is that folks didn’t have the time or patience to go,” even if they lived near a Costco or Sam’s Club, Huang said recently at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in New York. In other words, it wasn’t physical proximity or access to warehouse stores that were keeping customers away but rather a lack of willingness to shop for toilet paper and dish soap in person. Huang’s company, which began as a mobile app and quickly added an online site, has grown rapidly to fill a niche among young shoppers. Today, the company has more than $100 million in annual sales, up from $8 million in 2014. More than 60 percent of Boxed shoppers are ages 25 to 44, he said. At traditional wholesale clubs, the demographic skews the other way, with baby boomers and seniors
making up the majority of members. Stacy Schulz drives to the local Sam’s Club in Little Rock once or twice a month. It used to be a family affair, she said, with her four children scanning the toy aisle or reading books on couch displays while she and her husband shopped. Schulz, who’s from Houston, says she’s a longtime Costco devotee. But she’s had to switch alliances to Sam’s Club because although Costco has more than 510 U.S. stores, it has none in Arkansas, a state fiercely loyal to Walmart, which has its headquarters there. But now that her children, ages 11 to 17, have phones, they’re no longer interested in regular trips to the wholesale store. Instead, they do their shopping online, using their smartphones. “It’s like, I’m basically a walking commercial for Costco, but I look at my kids, and they just want to do everything on Amazon,” said
A customer browses clothing on display at a Costco store in Naperville, Ill. At traditional wholesale clubs, baby boomers and seniors make up the majority of members.
Schulz, 50. “And it’s the same when I go to Sam’s Club: I look around, and it’s all people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.” That’s not to say, experts said, that Costco, Sam’s Club and others haven’t made efforts in recent years to appeal to younger, timestrapped shoppers. Sam’s Club offers in-store pickup for online orders and the option to pay for items using an app instead of standing in line. Costco, meanwhile, has added more organic produce and meat and has an expansive wine selection. It is also rolling out grocery delivery services that will bring fresh produce, as well as packaged goods and other items, straight to customers’ doorsteps. “I think we’re encouraged when we see the level of millennials, if you will, that are signing up, when we see the average age of our membership coming down,” Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, told investors in late 2016. “Now, it was just a couple of years ago when the average U.S. Costco adult member was four-plus years older than the population as a whole. Now, it’s a little under two. And that’s without a lot of planning, but it’s part of what we do.” But, at the same time, competition is stiff. Warehouse clubs tend to target middle- and high-income households, which means there is significant overlap between membership at Sam’s Club and Costco (where annual fees are $55 and $65, respectively) and Amazon Prime, which charges $99 per year and stocks a growing supply of essentials in bulk. Nearly two-thirds of American households have Prime, according to data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. As a result, analysts say, more families may be inclined to rethink paying for additional memberships at wholesale clubs. “There’s a lot of overlap, and people are shopping on Amazon for other reasons as well,” said Mulpuru of Forrester. “Retail is a zero-sum game: As consumers shop more at one company, they’ll shop less at another.” n ©The Washington Post
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No longer the right combination BY
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t is a full five months into the school year, and Isabel Echavarria, a junior at BethesdaChevy Chase High School in Maryland, hasn’t used her locker once. She’s not even sure she has one. Sean Radley, a sophomore at Tesoro High in Southern California, thinks there may be one book in his locker, but he rarely visits it. Nekko Jones and Dwayne Burrell, freshmen at Cardozo Education Campus in Washington, were assigned lockers at the beginning of the year, but neither knows where his is. Once the gravitational center of the high school day, lockers long ago lost their allure, and their usefulness seems a relic of an epoch of education that has slipped away. Movies and television shows about high schools may still feature lockers, but in the real world, lockers have all but been abandoned. The trend has expanded so rapidly and widely that schools are now removing individual student lockers from their hallways, and builders and designers for many new high schools don’t even include them in their plans. “It’s a pretty big change that has taken place over the last few years,” said Sean Connor, a principal with Pfluger Architects, a large Texas firm that focuses on school construction. “It used to be the standard to provide individual lockers for every student. Now, the standard is no lockers or, at most, just a few.” So, why the change? Anyone with a high-schooler in their orbit knows that students now want everything they own with them all of the time. Books, phones, water bottles, headphones, laptops, tablets, snacks, coats, extra shoes. Where students used to swap out textbooks between classes, they now navigate the halls bent over by jam-packed backpacks. This carryall approach probably ensures a steady stream of patients for chiropractors, and it bewilders parents who don’t understand why their kids can’t just use an assigned locker to store their stuff. For most students, the issue is
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Once social hubs at schools, lockers now see little use and are being removed nationwide time and convenience. “My school is really big,” Echavarria said. “It has four floors and a basement, and stopping in one specific location between each class would be ridiculous. And it’s harder to keep track of your stuff if it’s in another location.” Lockers are also being left in the dust because schools offer more classes that use online textbooks, or they keep textbooks in the classroom to be shared by students. And the very nature of school is changing. “The high school experience has evolved where learning is anytime, anyplace,” said Ann Bonitatibus, principal at Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, where most of the school’s individual lockers were removed during a renovation last year. “The more that our campuses are like that, the more inclined our students are to have their materials with them at all times and all places.” As part of its renovation, Thomas Jefferson installed shared cub-
bies in convenient locations throughout the school where students can temporarily store their gear. For a generation raised on bike-sharing and Uber, the fluid ownership model makes sense. The changes, Bonitatibus said, “have been student-led more than anything.” Today’s students may be unaware of the role of the locker in high school lore, but for earlier generations, the news of its impending disappearance is cause for nostalgia. Not anymore. Claire Libert, a junior at York Community High in Elmhurst, Ill., still uses her locker but has no sentimental attachment to it. “It’s not like we meet there and share secrets like in the movies,” Libert said. At Rock Ridge High in Ashburn, Va., and home to 2,100 students, Principal John Duellman estimates that 90 percent of sophomores, juniors and seniors don’t use their lockers. Freshmen are a
Students walk past unused lockers at Cardozo Education Campus on Jan. 11 in Washington, D.C. Educators say the storage spaces get little use.
little more likely to hang on to their middle school habit of using their lockers to store their belongings. The shift, Duellman said, is part of the structural change in the way high schools operate, a byproduct “of the changing face of public education in America.” He says new high schools should look hard at whether lockers are needed and see what savings can be made in space and money by doing without them or with fewer of them. Manufacturers have felt the change. At DeBourgh Manufacturing, producer of “All American Lockers,” school lockers account for 56 percent of its school sales. That’s down 10 percentage points from just eight years ago for the family-owned Colorado company that is one of a half-dozen major locker manufacturers in the country. “We have seen this come around before over the last two decades, the discussion of lockers going away, but this time around it has more teeth,” said Jorgen Salo, DeBourgh’s president. “This time, we think that hallway lockers, the way they are used, how many are going to be bought, the long term is going to be less lockers and different kinds of lockers in the hallway.” Even as students abandon their lockers for an ever more mobile lifestyle, there are regrets. “We’re losing some of the classic culture high school experience,” said Lee Schwartz, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase. Schwartz did find a higher calling for lockers during her sophomore year. At the beginning of the school year, she decided to turn hers into a time capsule. Schwartz and her friends wrote letters to their future selves and deposited them in the locker to be read when they next opened it at the end of the year. “It was really fun to go back and pull them out,” she said. “It was nice to look back, and it was a good way to turn something not very useful into something pretty beneficial.” n © The Washington Post
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COVER STORY
TOWN AND COUNTRY A liberal entrepreneur from Washington, D.C., wanted to help West Virginians start their own businesses. First, he had to work on himself. BY JENNIFER MILLER
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n a sunny day last October, Joe Kapp ducked out of the fresh afternoon air and into the ammonia stench of an industrial chicken house. He followed Josh Frye, the owner, into the crush of 30,000 scuttling, chirping and crapping chicks, just 10 days old and still downy. Frye has three such houses here in Wardensville, W.Va., each the length of 11/2 football fields, and he walks them three times a day, nearly 300 days a year. He adjusts the temperature and ventilation, checks the water feeders and gauges the flock’s health. “I’m in awe of this,” Kapp said as birds scooted out of his path. “You get a run of emotions from visitors,” said Frye, 52. “From awesome to disgusting.”
After the first time he visited Frye’s farm, Kapp had come home with his boots smeared in chicken poop. “Joey, what have you been doing?” asked Carlos Gutierrez, Kapp’s partner of 25 years. And Kapp answered, “Honey, you don’t even want to know.” When Kapp, 47, an entrepreneur, and Gutierrez, 46, an entertainment lawyer, decamped to a West Virginia cabin in 2012, industrial chicken houses were not on the agenda. They’d come to take professional sabbaticals. But Kapp, who has a restless energy and an insatiable drive to make things happen, had barely settled into his Adirondack chair when he befriended the forward-thinking president at the local community college. From there, it wasn’t long before he was helping the college to launch an innovative project, the Institute for Rural Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (IREED), aimed at diversifying the regional economy of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. Over the past two years, Josh Frye had become one of IREED’s most promis-
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PHOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST
ing clients as he tried to develop his chicken farm into something much more ambitious: an innovative business with wide-reaching economic and environmental potential for the state. And yet, determined as Kapp was to help West Virginians like Frye, he was initially blind to the challenges of such a project — not just the systemic obstacles that have kept West Virginia from adapting to a rapidly evolving economy, but the personal roadblocks he would encounter as an affluent, liberal urbanite living in a rural culture he didn’t understand. He would eventually find himself the object of a vicious online campaign, targeted with homophobia and maligned as an arrogant carpetbagger. But easy as it might be, especially in the Trump era, to write off this response as pure bigotry and partisan ignorance, Kapp took another perspective. “I had to take some time to muck around in chicken s---,” he says. “I learned humility. If we can drop our sense of ‘we know best,’ that
animus that I have been the target of doesn’t need to be there.” Kapp has become an unlikely advocate for rural communities and their largely conservative, working-class populations. He believes this demographic has far more potential than they are given credit for. They deserve economic self-determination, he says, not empty promises to revive dying industries. He is certain that by harnessing local knowledge, like agriculture, they can start businesses and put their own people back to work. At the same time, Kapp knows that urban partners are vital to helping these communities access resources and take entrepreneurial risks. This creates a problem: At a moment when our country is increasingly divided, persuading West Virginians to trust the liberal, urban elites who have long maligned them isn’t easy. No less simple, Kapp has discovered, is getting these elites — himself included — to recognize their own shortcomings.
Above, entrepreneur Joe Kapp, left, visits poultry farmer Josh Frye. Opposite page, the main street of Wardensville, W.Va.
IREED is based at Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College, a modest, two-story building overlooking the new Corridor H highway. Only part of Corridor H is open now, but when finished, the 148-mile thoroughfare between Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley region and central West Virginia will serve as a badly needed conduit for workers, goods and visitors. Many people in the Potomac Highlands, the six-county region that Eastern serves, commute. Wardensville residents might drive between 30 and 70 miles to work each way because there aren’t jobs closer to home. Those who do work locally gravitate toward poultry processing, furniture manufacturing and agriculture, but the numbers aren’t good. In 2015, the unemployment rate in Hardy County, where Eastern is based, was 7.5 percent, compared with 6.7 percent statewide and 5.3 percent nationally. The per capita income in Hardy was just under $28,000 a year, comcontinues on next page
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pared with about $37,000 for the state and $48,000 nationwide. The Appalachian Regional Commission may not categorize Hardy County as economically “distressed” like the southwestern part of the state, but it falls somewhere between “transitional” and “atrisk.” It’s not surprising that so many young people are opting to leave the state. Lindsey Teets, Eastern’s small-business development coach, lamented this fact one afternoon in July. “Ninety percent of the kids I talk to at local high schools say they can’t make any money here,” he said. “To me, that’s heartbreaking.” Teets grew up in West Virginia and, in addition to his job at the college, runs a 200-head sheep farm with his father. On this day, he and Kapp were driving out to visit a small brewery whose revenue Teets had helped double over the past year. “Quite frankly,” Teets continued, “there’s almost nothing you can’t do from anywhere now.” “Assuming you have broadband,” Kapp scoffed. Halfway to the brewery, he knew, they’d lose service. “Before the 1930s, Appalachia didn’t have electrification,” Teets said. “And today we don’t have Internet. It’s the same problem.” Kapp shook his head. “You’ve got kids doing their homework in McDonald’s parking lots. People in most of the country just have no idea.” Growing up, Kapp certainly didn’t. He was raised in a middle-class North Miami Beach community, attended high school with the likes of author Brad Meltzer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and received his master’s in government administration at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduate school, he taught himself to code and bounced between companies, including a large tax-audit firm and a corporation that did sales force automation. By 26, he was working with major clients such as Johnson & Johnson and ExxonMobil. But Kapp wasn’t happy. He didn’t just need a more fulfilling job — he needed a mission. He quit his job and fled to the Tibetan Plateau, near the Himalayas. On his journey he kept thinking about Gutierrez, his longtime partner and the primary stabilizing force in his life. Inspiration struck: He decided he would help other gay couples achieve a similar stability. In 2006, he co-founded a D.C.-based financial and estate planning practice focused on LGBTQ couples and, a few years later, helped build the Capital Area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce out of a previously existing nonprofit. Before arriving in West Virginia, Kapp had only one experience at a community college: a summer biology class he and Gutierrez took for extra college credit. So when Kapp volunteered to teach an entrepreneurship course at Eastern in 2012, it was mainly out of boredom. He hardly considered it a real job; the college could barely pay. At Eastern, Kapp was impressed by his
students’ enthusiasm and was surprised to learn that some of them, along with a number of staff members, had side hustles to make ends meet. “People in big cities call the ‘gig economy’ the new thing,” Kapp says. “But it’s been in rural communities forever. ‘I’m a ditch digger, but I’ve got a vegetable garden market going.’ ” What they lacked, however, were the kinds of small-business development resources typically found in cities. Kapp believed Eastern, with its small size and lack of red tape, could be a hub for just that. Chuck Terrell, Eastern’s mustachioed, tattooed president, was amenable; getting students to enroll had been a struggle, and he’d been looking for ways to engage the broader community. West Virginia’s community college system is just over a decade old and has some of the lowest enrollment rates in the country — only about 10 percent of high school graduates, compared with 50 percent of graduates nationwide. But the kind of economic development that Kapp had in mind wasn’t part of community college culture. “That’s more of a four-year college role,” says Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the West Virginia Council for Community and Technical College Education. According to her and Terrell, community colleges largely put people to work by developing short-term train-
Top, Amo Oliverio of Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College examines polluted wetlands in Kempton, Md. A material called biochar, which Josh Frye produces from chicken litter, could help treat the area. Above, Donald Hitchcock, left, and Paul Yandura own the Lost River Trading Post in Wardensville.
ing programs to meet the needs of specific employers. Some community colleges have partnered with major corporations looking to hire many hundreds of workers. But that’s not possible in low-density areas like the Potomac Highlands. “Everyone’s talking about Amazon, but that’s not the right way to talk about economic development” in a rural community, says Nathan Ohle, executive director of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership, which focuses on communities of several thousand people. “That’s putting all your eggs in one basket. You need to create an ecosystem that allows for small-scale manufacturing and innovators. Quite frankly, what works in urban and suburban places won’t work in rural ones.” In 2013, Kapp pitched Terrell on the idea of establishing an institute for rural entrepreneurship. No community college in the state had anything of the kind. Kapp helped Eastern secure a $15,000 grant from the Coleman Foundation to set up IREED. Then, at an event for the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), Eastern was offered the chance to apply for $100,000, on the condition that it raise matching funds. Eventually, Kapp helped raise over $767,000 from a handful of private and public funders to support IREED initiatives. These included an entrepreneur-in-residence position for Kapp, which he assumed in 2014, and a Wardensvillebased business incubator called the New Biz Launchpad, which opened in 2015. Kapp had a new mission in West Virginia, but to him, it was simply an extension of his previous work helping LGBTQ couples and businesses find financial security. Though a secular Jew, he’d taken to heart a saying from Rabbi Maimonides: “The highest degree of charity, above which there is no other, is he who strengthens the hand of [the poor] . . . till he is able to be independent.” To Kapp, that meant helping marginalized people become self-reliant. And as a gay man, Joe Kapp knew from marginalized communities. Surely he could help the people of West Virginia. Kapp did not come out of the closet until college, and when his parents learned he was
gay, their primary reaction was fear. “It’s about 1989, and things were actually really, really difficult,” he recalls. “You still don’t have ubiquitous Internet access. You’re still in the throngs of the AIDS crisis, still having issues with homophobia, police raids of clubs. . . . If I’d come out much earlier, my life could have been a lot shorter.” He was saved, in part, because of Gutierrez. Almost from the start, the two were exclusive. They couldn’t have been more different: Kapp was a white, middle-class Jew, excitable, with a high tolerance for risk, while Gutierrez, a formerly undocumented immigrant from Colombia, was studious and cautious. But the couple found security and happiness facing a hostile world together. After he launched his LGBTQ estate planning firm, Kapp says, some people responded with
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COVER STORY disgust. At industry conferences, people would hear about his clients and walk away. But the culture was shifting and, before long, financial planners were asking his advice about reaching an LGBTQ audience. By 2012, Kapp was managing more than $45 million in assets and had doubled the D.C. Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce to over 450 members. That same year, the couple achieved a long-held goal: saving enough money to no longer need full-time jobs. Gutierrez resigned as in-house counsel for Discovery Communications, a position he’d held for 13 years, and Kapp had sold his share of the estate planning practice. With no immediate plans, they moved to the cabin they owned in Lost River, W.Va., a popular weekend retreat for D.C. gay professionals. From the start, small, albeit significant, signs revealed Kapp’s ignorance about the region. Agriculture is central to the Potomac Highlands economy, but Kapp never considered that farmers might be IREED’s target audience. Initially, he called the New Biz Launchpad an “incubator,” not realizing that most locals associated this word with chickens. On one occasion, he admitted to colleagues at Eastern that he didn’t know the difference between hay and straw. After they finished laughing at him, Tina Metzer, the Launchpad’s executive director, just shook her head. And then Kapp made the fateful decision to open IREED’s New Biz Launchpad in Wardensville — a small town populated by families whose lineage reaches back generations. (Josh Frye can trace his ancestors back to the 18th century, and he lives in the house where his own father was raised.) Kapp didn’t choose the location by chance. Two years before the Launchpad opened, Donald Hitchcock and Paul Yandura, domestic partners whom Kapp knew socially from Lost River, had spotted a business opportunity in Wardensville: Why not make the place — located along the road from Northern Virginia to Lost River and other points in the Potomac Highlands — a charming stop-off for weekenders and tourists? There were a few restaurants, but most of the storefronts were shuttered. So the couple purchased a handful of properties on Main Street, including a home, and opened a real estate agency and the Lost River Trading Post, an espresso-wine-craft-beer bar and crafts store. They persuaded a handful of friends and acquaintances from the District and Virginia to invest as well. Local and D.C.-based media noticed, and Yandura and Hitchcock became eager spokesmen for the town’s revitalization. Kapp hoped to capitalize on this momentum, using Wardensville’s success as a way to pitch both IREED funders and Launchpad clients. He also bought two buildings on Main Street, where he opened the New Biz Launchpad, a student-run store and a gallery space. “Wardensville became this petri dish of all these new creative ideas, and you had creative people like Paul and Donald and Joe, and that creates synergy,” Terrell says. “When you bring together that diversity, does it create conflict?
PHOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sure it does. But that’s part of a community evolving.” But Kapp didn’t fully grasp how much resentment Hitchcock and Yandura were causing, nor did he realize, at least initially, how different his mission was. Yandura was hoping to play up Wardensville’s “old school, authentic feel” and thereby create “something new and different and higher-end” for weekenders and tourists. They could brand it “the smallest town in America with a Main Street,” he says. But for this to work, Yandura said, they needed to persuade urbanites to visit a community “in the middle of nowhere that nobody wants to come to.” Which meant overhauling a town government that the couple considered to be dysfunctional and nepotistic. “There needed to be adults at the table,” Yandura says. Locals found this attitude condescending and worried their town would become an Epcot-like attraction for city folk. “West Virginia has historically been played upon” for outsiders’ commercial gain, says Lindsey Teets. “We’re really leery as a people of someone coming in and saying, ‘I’ve got your fix.’ You get someone to move in here that’s relatively rich, and they can buy whatever they want. They can use their money to bully [people] out.” Hitchcock and Yandura — whose tense dealings with locals became the subject of a 2017 story in Washingtonian magazine — say they were honoring the town’s roots by refurbishing buildings instead of demolishing them and by filling their shops with old-timey music and decor. They point to the Lost River Trading Post, which sells only American-made and local crafts, and the Main Street Initiative, a nonprofit umbrella group they founded for Wardensville businesses. They would also go on to open a nonprofit garden market and bakery, staffed primarily by local teens. Still, many locals believed the couple was obscuring a unique identity that reached back generations. Textbook gentrification. To make matters worse, the couple’s development efforts were supported by the newly elected mayor, a woman who quickly lost support among some
From left, Gary Dalton, Colin Perry, Dennis Torboli and Bob Arbaugh at the Kac-Ka-Pon Restaurant in Wardensville, where roots run deep.
KLMNO WEEKLY
residents for the reforms she was enacting. Kapp was easily lumped in with Hitchcock and Yandura. Some of this was stereotyping. And yet he, too, was giving press interviews, talking about how much the town had improved. He’d also befriended the new mayor, using his financial planning and auditing skills to tackle the town’s messy finances. When the mayor offered him an unpaid position as head of the Wardensville Development Authority, Kapp accepted. The woman he replaced was a local business owner and sixth-generation resident. In early June 2015, about six weeks after the Launchpad opened, Kapp learned that someone in town had started an anonymous Facebook page called Good News Wardensville. “We live in a growing, changing community,” the first post read. “And ALL change is good, right? Let’s find out together.” Kapp was overseas at the time and paid it little attention. But he returned home to dozens of posts. “Good news, Wardensville!” the anonymous administrator wrote on June 20. “It’s WEST VIRGINIA DAY! And we need to celebrate our state’s rich history, where for decades outsiders have come here to grab our land & resources, line their pockets & tell us what to do, all for our own good.” Kapp grew concerned. Later he would come to see that his mission — which was really Eastern’s mission — was not the same as Hitchcock and Yandura’s. “It’s one thing to have a bunch of people come from the outside and start businesses,” he says. “It’s another thing to help bring communities together and create capacity and really hear about the issues.” Tina Metzer, who grew up nearby, is even more blunt: “We don’t bulldoze our way in.” But when Kapp first arrived in Wardensville, he wasn’t working with native West Virginians like Metzer or Teets. He was fumbling in a foreign environment, unable to understand why the Launchpad had so few clients and why everyone was so hostile. Kapp followed Good News Wardensville obsessively, trying to make sense of it all. “I felt obligated,” he says. “I never wanted to do anything that would damage the reputation of the college.” Good News Wardensville ridiculed Kapp for running a “pop-up” shop at the art gallery, a popular urban concept that Kapp thought would help business owners test out their ideas. He was likened to Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Haney, the con man from “Green Acres.” But there was worse. In reference to Kapp, Hitchcock and Yandura, a local man posted a photograph of a human-sized inflatable penis with a smiley face and arms. The caption read, “ ‘New Friends’ Mascot.” Someone referenced Sodom and Gomorrah. And Kapp was frequently called the “Wiz of Biz” and “Whizzy Bizzy,” homophobic, “Wizard of Oz”-inspired slurs. One post about him featured an 1872 caricature of a carpetbagger. It may not have been the poster’s intention, but the image had stereotypical anti-Semitic features. continues on next page
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Good News Wardensville racked up 756 likes, roughly 500 more people than actually lived in town. Not everyone who followed the page supported it; plenty of residents called out the anonymous administrator and his or her supporters as mean-spirited bigots. Yet critics of Good News Wardensville could be mean-spirited, too. “You are all no better than ISIS,” one commenter wrote. “Just pure hate and spite,” wrote another. “Join the 21st century, people.” Gutierrez watched this unfold with dismay. “It’s hard to get beat up when you’re trying to do good,” he said. “It made me question a lot of what he was doing there and why.” Kapp insists that he never asked himself the same questions. He’d made a commitment to help the college, and he was going to follow through. “I’m a hopeful and eternal optimist,” he says. “I think every entrepreneur is, because you wake up every day regardless of how bad it was the previous day and think, Today’s going to be so much better.” And so, he says that when an elderly man tried to trip him at Town Council meetings — something that happened a couple of times — he’d simply step out of the way. And when someone threatened to burn down the Launchpad, he bought more fire insurance. He never posted on Good News Wardensville and, unlike Yandura and Hitchcock, he never got into shouting matches at Town Council meetings. Instead, he started his own Facebook page. He called it the Wiz of Biz — an attempt to claim, and thus defang, the slur — and uploaded a goofy photo of himself in an emerald green top hat. “The people attacking me want nothing more than to keep people in poverty and to maintain the status quo,” he posted in September 2015. “They are all to [sic] happy to use fear, lies and insults to keep things the same. The result are no new jobs in WV.” Kapp and Gutierrez have both concluded that the enmity in town wasn’t fundamentally about sexual orientation. “There were people who were openly homophobic, but I think the creation of the [Facebook] group was about outsiders, and the outsiders happened to be gay,” Gutierrez says. “Some people who have power in the community were scrambling to hold on to it.” But this wasn’t just about petty small-town politics, Kapp realized. It was about a deeper cultural fissure. As the presidential election approached, Kapp told his friends, “Trump’s going farther than any of you think.” “They’d laugh at me,” he says. “And I said, ‘I don’t think you understand how frustrated people are.’ And I had to stop talking to my friends, because they’d just start yelling at me.” The anonymous administrator stopped posting on Good News Wardensville in May 2016, purportedly because someone threatened to expose that person’s identity. Since then, Kapp has taken a hard look at himself. He now says he never should have advised the mayor or joined the development authority, no matter how noble his intentions. He should
have reached out to community organizations, such as churches, from the get-go. And he should have asked what the locals wanted and needed from the community college instead of showing up to announce what they could get. Kapp wishes he’d connected with Teets and Metzer sooner. Metzer, especially, “helped me understand what my own failures and faults were. If we’re going to be successful, you have to have a greater cultural competency with the communities that we’re working with.” Kapp can be reckless for the sake of his cultural education. In October, while visiting
a defunct coal mine with Josh Frye, he ventured to the edge of a river swooshing with toxic runoff. Between 1 million and 6 million gallons of this polluted water flowed into the Potomac every day. “If they didn’t use lime dust to treat it, the Potomac would be dead,” said Amo Oliverio, coordinator for Eastern’s biological and environmental technology program, who was showing the men around. As it turned out, Frye had a potential solution to the runoff problem — one that was less expensive and more permanent than lime dust. About a decade ago, he discovered that the special machine he’d been using to heat his chicken houses could be reconfigured to create poultry biochar: a black, sandlike substance made from chicken litter, whose chemical properties both improved deficient soil and trapped heavy metals. Biochar can be created from a variety of materials and is used in industries like agriculture and landscaping. But after reading a U.S. Department of Agriculture white paper on poultry biochar, Frye realized that it could help clean up mines, which often leached heavy metals into the surrounding environment. He buckled down, became a self-taught expert in the molecular composition of soil, and spent years talking to government agencies, universities and companies, trying to find partners and clients for a poultry biochar business. The project consumed his life and ran down his bank account. Frye’s current distributor, a fertilizer and soil amendment company called Southern Organics & Supply, says that to its knowledge, Frye is the first person to turn poultry biochar into a business. But Frye’s formal relationship with Southern Organics is recent. For many years, few people took him seriously. In 2012, the machine Frye used to make poultry biochar fell into disrepair. With no money to fix it, he was ready to give up. As a last resort, he called the Launchpad. He’d heard plenty about Kapp, of course, but he decided to withhold judgment. He had nothing left to lose. Kapp, meanwhile, says his “mind was blown” when he heard what Frye was up to. “I realized how many Joshes there are in other states, struggling for access to capital and resources.” Kapp, Metzer and Frye began meeting weekly at the Launchpad. Kapp helped Frye develop his business and reach both investors and clients, including state and federal institutions. Frye gave him a new way to think about
“If we’re going to be successful, you have to have a greater cultural competency with the communities that we’re working with.” Joe Kapp
economic diversification in the Potomac Highlands. IREED’s main goal should be to help the agricultural community think of itself as entrepreneurial — “one of the biggest challenges for individual farmers,” Kapp discovered. And so IREED created a centralized online marketplace, now in beta, where farmers can connect with buyers; it runs conferences where farmers scout and present new technologies; and it hosts monthly workshops with the West Virginia Department of Agriculture on topics from public relations to aquaponics to agrotourism. As it turns out, a lot of area farms want to open their doors to weekenders and tourists — the same people that Hitchcock and Yandura hoped to lure to Wardensville. But the approach matters. “The big piece is that it all has to be locally led,” says Ohle of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership. “Give the community a playbook and allow them to drive that.” Kapp may not be a West Virginian, but he is now shouldering a lot of their indignation. At one economic development conference, an audience member questioned Kapp’s decision to work with community colleges, calling them “the lowest common denominator.” At another, Kapp was talking about the challenges of rural entrepreneurship, and someone countered that it was easy to drum up “a few million dollars” in business investment. The problem, Kapp says, is that elites have not invited the rural working class into their conversations. And that needs to happen, both to achieve economic equality and close the cultural gap. There’s another shift happening these days, too. Since the election, Kapp says, a growing number of funders, foundations and corporations have come to him about reaching rural communities. Kapp is developing a program that will allow community colleges to offer low- or no-interest microloans, around $5,000, to aspiring entrepreneurs. These individuals would then take entrepreneurship and business-development courses at the lending college. “A bank might say, ‘This guy’s too risky,’ ” Kapp explains. “But a community college can say, ‘I know this guy. We work with him. I am vetting and validating his ability to be able to pay back the loan.’ ” Last fall, Kapp, NACCE and the National Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education won a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to introduce entrepreneurship education in eight community colleges across coal-mining-affected areas of Appalachia. The grant also provides curriculum resources for 28,000 K-through-12 students. The hope is that some of these students — perhaps many — will feel newly empowered to look beyond the fading economy that sustained their grandparents and parents. But, Kapp warns, they must feel supported — and respected — along the way. If not, the fissures between rural and urban, and working class and elite, will only keep growing. n ©The Washington Post
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BOOKS
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Absorbing thriller of fateful meeting
How to make sure time is on your side
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
F
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REVIEWED BY
P ATRICK A NDERSON
or students of World War II, certain places possess enduring resonance: among them are Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, Stalingrad, Monte Cassino, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima. Another milestone, although its importance is political rather than military, is Munich, the German city where British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler in September 1938 in a desperate attempt to preserve peace in Europe. Their meeting is the focal point of “Munich,” by Robert Harris, the author of numerous outstanding novels of political history, from ancient Rome to modern London. His new novel offers a painful look at an honorable man, longing for peace, but confronting an adversary who had only conquest in mind and only contempt for Chamberlain’s good intentions. The two leaders met to discuss Hitler’s demands that the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia be handed over to Germany. Chamberlain, fearful of Hitler’s wrath, accepted the takeover but sought to gain the dictator’s assurance that peace, not more demands, would follow. Chamberlain would be accused of appeasement, but Harris sees a man haunted by hundreds of thousands of English deaths in World War I, barely 20 years earlier, and desperate to buy time. Before Munich, he quizzes England’s military leaders about their readiness. The army chief reports, “We only have about a third of the number of guns we believe are needed to defend London.” The air force commander confesses, “On paper we have twenty-six modern squadrons available for home defense but only six have modern aircraft.” Although his story is based on fact, Harris uses two fictional characters to achieve his novelistic ends. They are young men, one British and one German, who became friends as students at Oxford and now serve as aides to the real-life senior diplomats. Hugh Legat is in
the British delegation because he speaks fluent German. Paul von Hartmann is part of Hitler’s entourage although he secretly belongs to a group of military and diplomatic officials in Berlin who hope to overthrow the German leader. During the Munich conference, von Hartmann furtively gives his English friend information about Hitler’s plans that may strengthen Chamberlain’s hand. He knows he is risking his life. The British view the German leader with dismay. Chamberlain says of his first meetings with the dictator that he felt like a Victorian explorer who had encountered “some savage warlord.” Legat, observing Hitler, is struck by his “strangely opaque blue eyes” and adds that he “smelled strongly of sweat.” Near the end of the conference, Chamberlain persuades Hitler to sign a statement that calls their Munich agreement “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.” To Hitler, these words are meaningless, but Chamberlain proclaims them to be proof that peace has been achieved. Back in England, he is hailed as a peacemaker and continues as prime minister for nearly two more years, but Hitler’s continued aggression finally forces his resignation. He is, of course, replaced by Winston Churchill, whose inspired leadership, along with the brilliance of the Royal Air Force, thwarted Hitler’s dreamed-of invasion of England. In time, American and Soviet might would crush the Third Reich. Some critics still call Chamberlain an appeaser, but Harris underscores the importance of the time he bought when he quotes Hitler saying bitterly in February 1945, when Germany’s defeat was near, “We ought to have gone to war in 1938.” Harris has again brought history to life with exceptional skill. n Anderson reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.
E MUNICH By Robert Harris Knopf. 320 pp. $27.95
WHEN The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing By Daniel H. Pink Riverhead. 258 pp. $28
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REVIEWED BY
M ATTHEW H UTSON
ach year, more and more people work on their own time. As a freelancer, I find that the greatest hardship isn’t getting enough gigs but managing my schedule. Some challenges are familiar to company employees, but others are more acute for those unswayed by the rhythms of the office — what time to get up, how many breaks to take, when to start a new project. Given the motivational mind games inherent in freelancing, a manual for structuring my day might be handy. In “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” Daniel H. Pink doesn’t reveal every secret about perfect timing, but he does give a cheat sheet on when to work, sleep and play, useful for both freelancers and those beholden to bosses. His life advice covers arenas from work to marriage to sports, and time spans from milliseconds to decades, in a volume that Pink, a business author and former politics and policy wonk, calls not a how-to book but “a whento book.” Some tidbits: Exercise in the morning to keep a routine or boost your mood; exercise later to perform better and enjoy it more. Before marrying, date for at least a year and finish your education. The best time to switch jobs for a salary bump is after three years (once you’ve garnered some skills) but before five years (so you’re not too tied to your company). The first 40 percent of the book focuses on daily patterns. We read about circadian rhythms, seeing graphs depicting two peaks in the average person’s mood, one around noon and one around 9 p.m. Performance on tasks requiring analytic reasoning tends to slump in the afternoon (hence afternoon coffee breaks). Creative insight, however, tends to peak during these diurnal doldrums. Night owls have different biological rhythms, so “what ultimately matters,” Pink writes, “is that type, task, and time align.”
Alignment can be a matter of life and death; medical errors increase in the afternoon. But taking breaks can help. When surgical teams pause to regroup before a procedure, patients benefit. Students score higher on tests after recess. Judges become less harsh after a snack. Even better are naps — 20 minutes or less, preferably with a shot of coffee just beforehand. Pink has become a convert to the “nappuccino.” Next Pink presents chapters on beginnings, middles and endings. Research indicates the importance, for example, of temporal landmarks: the beginning of a new week or semester or year. People see them as chances to start fresh and are more likely to, say, visit the gym on these dates. We’re also motivated by endings; people sprint before deadlines are up and are more likely to run a marathon — or attempt suicide — at ages that end in 9. We strive, sometimes unsuccessfully, for meaning near conclusions. Finally, before a brief encapsulating chapter, the book discusses interpersonal synchrony, necessary for productivity, well-being and even survival. Pink writes that we need an external pacesetter (a clock, choirmaster or coxswain), a communal bond (established through codes, clothes or contact) and a higher mission. The most general advice comes at the end, when Pink recommends that we not live in the present, “as so many spiritual gurus have advised,” but integrate the past, present and future; various studies suggest that nostalgia increases life’s meaning and that we make better plans when we identify with our future selves. The big-picture musings are a nice prompt for the interested reader at the finale of an otherwise practical book. n Hutson is a freelance science writer in New York and the author of “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.” This was written for The Washington Post.
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OPINIONS
BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Lessons from Catch-22 shutdown E.J. DIONNE JR writes about politics for The Washington Post in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog.
The lesson of the government shutdown is that it is really rotten to be the side with almost no power. If power corrupts, powerlessness leads to paralyzing recriminations. Among Democrats, neither progressives nor moderates have fully come to terms with the box their party is in. If they continue to put their internal quarrels above finding a better joint strategy, the victors will be President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). The Democrats’ feuding factions could start by laying off the self-righteous preening about how they are, respectively, so principled and so practical. The truth is that the aspirational left can’t win without the pragmatic center, and the center can’t win without the left. Instead, they should be highlighting what the shutdown made clear. In mobilizing raw nativism, Trump and the Republican leadership underscored the extent to which they are hogtied by their party’s right-wing extremists. As a result, the GOP is incapable of temperate governance and compromise. The barrier to sensible legislation in Washington is not a left that lacks any institutional authority, but the hard-line right in the White House and in the House of Representatives.
The Democrats lost the shutdown before it started, when Ryan pushed through a shortterm spending bill that narrowed the issues at stake by including a six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The renewal of CHIP could have been taken as an important Democratic victory. But Trump had already changed the context of the debate with his disgracefully cruel decision in September to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the United States when they were children. Democrats were moved to force the “dreamers” issue not just by the demands of liberals but also by the requirements of sheer decency. There was additional
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fury at Trump for blowing up a painstakingly negotiated DACA agreement. Most Democrats felt they had to reject a budget deal without a dreamers fix, even if shutdowns are hardly an ideal strategy for the party that respects the work government does. Republicans moved immediately and shamelessly to endanger Democratic senators from Trump states who are on the ballot this fall. Forgetting every kind word they had said about the dreamers, the GOP’s leaders converted these sympathetic Americans into “illegal immigrants” and said the shutdown was all about them. Trump’s campaign committee ran a reprehensible ad that claimed Democrats were complicit in murders committed by immigrants. Red-state Democrats scrambled for a quick exit ramp, and the bipartisan group of moderates organized the retreat. Progressives, including disheartened Latino groups, were understandably angry. But they would be hard-pressed to make the case that if the Democrats had held out longer they would have prevailed. The very structure of the Senate is unfair. It overrepresents older, overwhelmingly white and rural states. If Democrats are ever to
gain the majority in the Senate, they have to win and hold many of these states. Thus the Catch-22 Shutdown, morally necessary and politically unwinnable. So what now? The moderates and the progressives should stop bickering and push recalcitrant House and Senate Republicans into taking a stand on a humane solution for the dreamers. Activists should direct their energy the same way. Math is a stubborn thing. There can be little hope of progress unless the GOP’s nonnativists break with their leaders. In the meantime, left and center must link progressive immigration policy to progressive economic initiatives — ones that also speak to red-state voters who have been sold out by Trump. They were stumbling in this direction during the shutdown when they spoke up for adequate funding for community health centers and for combating the opioid crisis. Republicans’ victory will be short-lived if Democrats (and Republicans willing to work with them) shift the ground of the discussion from tactics to larger purposes. This is a long fight and the endpoint is Nov. 6. Only voters can change the balance of power. n
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How well can you spot news trends? Answers
To see how well you know news stories and trends, let’s play a game. We’re going to show you a chart without any labels. Then we’re going to ask you to choose among a few options for what the chart represents. See if you can guess them all! n ©The Washington Post 60
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The correct answers and a description of each graphic are listed at right.
Trend 4 a. Home runs vs. strikeouts per year in MLB b. New business openings vs. closings, quarterly c. Sales of McDonald’s Quarter Pounder vs. Filet-O-Fish, quarterly d. Homes listed for sale vs. homes purchased, quarterly
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Trend 1: d. President Trump’s disapproval (red) vs. approval rating (blue). Trump has low approval ratings for a first-term president, especially considering the health of the economy. Trend 2: c. Total home runs per MLB season. Despite an emphasis on pitch counts and swapping out pitchers to face the batter, more than 6,000 balls went out of the park last season. Trend 3: d. Original scripted series released on streaming networks. A large part of the increase has come as distributors of streaming content — such as Netflix or Hulu — have gotten into production. The number of original scripted series on streaming outlets rose from four in 2010 to 117 in 2017, according to FX Networks. Trend 4: b. New business openings (blue) vs. closings (red), quarterly. The key to this one is the large spike that coincides with the Great Recession. One indicator of the health of the economy is the number of new businesses created each year. Until recently, that indicator was at pre-recession levels.
The Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide Fall 2017 & Winter 2018 Edition lley Wenatchee Va
Visitor Guide
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Fall 2017 and Winter 2018
New This Year! The Wenatchee World has just published our new 100-page Fall/Winter Visitors Guide, filled with activities, events, places to visit and hundreds of things to do over the fall and winter months.
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