The Washington Post National Weekly - February 5, 2017

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017

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‘And we accomplished zero’ In these towns, laws targeting undocumented immigrants didn’t go as planned. PAGE 12

Politics Bannon sets agenda 4

World Bad place for selfies 11

5 Myths White House Press Corps 23

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

The Jackson comparison M ARY J ORDAN Nashville BY

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resident Trump, in his first days in office, has been drawing comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the pugilistic populist president who campaigned against elites and was known as temperamental and rash. Trump ordered a portrait of Jackson, with his distinctive shock of white hair, to be hung in the Oval Office, and his adviser Stephen K. Bannon called Trump’s inaugural address “very Jacksonian.”

The Hermitage, Jackson’s Nashville estate and museum, is seeing an uptick in interest in the seventh president because of Trump, the 45th.

“My email is exploding,” said Howard J. Kittell, president and chief executive of the Andrew Jackson Foundation that runs the Hermitage, as he walked around the grand 1,000-acre grounds over the weekend.

Both outsiders, Trump and Jackson share a number of qualities, but one of particular note: rabid fans and rabid foes. “A challenging figure” is how Kittell describes Jackson.

Jackson’s tenure spawned the term “kitchen cabinet” as his opponents railed against his unofficial advisers with powerful influence.

Now Trump’s inner circle — Bannon chief among them — is causing alarm even among members of the Republican Party.

Kittell noted that Jackson holds the distinction of having had more official portraits painted of him during his lifetime than any other president. Trump has a penchant for portraits of himself, including large ones that hang in his grand Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

Jackson, who led the nation from 1829 to 1837, was self-made, the first “common man” to be elected to the presidency; he was referred

KLMNO WEEKLY

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

President Trump speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 under a portrait of Andrew Jackson, to whom he has compared himself.

to as the “people’s president.” At the same time, he was famous for his showy display of the opulent marble and mahogany furnishings in his home.

Jackson’s mansion includes, according to a tour guide in 19th century dress, the drawing

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room “where Jackson ushered guests in to brag about himself.”

Intensely interested in what the media wrote about him, Jackson subscribed to 16 newspapers. Aging binders of old newspapers are stacked beside his desk and a big “X” is marked over one article that caught Jackson’s fury, an old-time precursor to Trump’s tweet blasts about articles and publications he hates.

Despite the similarities, author Jon Meacham, a Nashville resident who has written a biography of Jackson and is on the board of directors of the Hermitage, notes key distinctions: Jackson was a war hero and had political experience serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Jackson, Kittell said, was also an unapologetic slave owner.

Trump is a businessman and reality TV star.

He never held public office or served in the military and avoided Vietnam with student deferments and by citing a medical problems with bone spurs in his feet.

John Donnelly, a visitor from Ohio to the Hermitage, was reading an exhibit on the “Trail of Tears,” a deadly journey of Native Americans forced off land east of the Mississippi that Jackson triggered with the signing of the Indian Removal Act. “I guess undocumented Mexicans feel like that now,” Donnelly said.

The famous Jackson quote displayed at the entrance of the Hermitage: “I was born for a storm and a calm doesn’t suit me.”

Calm doesn’t suit Trump either, said Ann Packard, a Nashville resident visiting the Hermitage and upset over Trump’s executive order to ban people from certain Muslimmajority countries. She wondered what in years to come Trump’s presidential museum will feature: “I hope it’s not all about the storms he caused.” n

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

4 8 10 12 15 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Hazleton, Pa., seen in October, is one of several U.S. cities that tried passing laws to deter undocumented immigrants from living there. Photograph by JESSICA KOURKOUNIS for The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Bannon’s past rhetoric becomes Trump’s agenda JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Previous statements by president’s chief strategist shine light on White House priorities

BY F RANCES S TEAD S ELLERS AND D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

I

n November 2015, Stephen K. Bannon — then the executive chairman of Breitbart News — was hosting a satellite radio show. His guest was Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who opposed President Obama’s plan to resettle some Syrian refugees in the United States.

“We need to put a stop on refugees until we can vet,” Zinke said.

Bannon cut him off.

“Why even let ’em in?” he asked.

Bannon said that vetting refugees from Muslim-majority coun-

tries would cost money and time.

“Can’t that money be used in the United States?” he said. “Should we just take a pause and a hiatus for a number of years on any influx from that area of the world?”

In the years before Bannon grabbed the world’s attention as President Trump’s chief White House strategist, he was developing and articulating a fiery populist vision for remaking the United States and its role in the world.

Bannon’s past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart and other conservative platforms, serve as a road map for the controversial agenda that has roiled Washing-

ton and shaken the global order during Trump’s first days in office.

Now, at the center of power in the White House, Bannon is moving quickly to turn his ideas into policy, helping direct the biggest decisions of Trump’s administration. The withdrawal from a major trade pact. A ban on all visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries. And — in an echo of that conversation with Zinke, who is now Trump’s nominee for interior secretary — there was a temporary ban on all new refugees.

The result has been intense fury from Democrats, discomfort among many Republicans, and a

Stephen K. Bannon is moving quickly to turn his ideas into policy, helping direct the biggest decisions of President Trump’s administration.

growing sense of unease in the world that Trump intends to undermine an America-centered world that has lasted 70 years.

This sense of turmoil, welcomed by many Trump supporters as proof that the president is fulfilling his vow to jolt Washington, reflects the sort of transformation that Bannon has long called for.

That worldview, which Bannon laid out in interviews and speeches over the past several years, hinges largely on Bannon’s belief in American “sovereignty.” Bannon said that countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration,

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017

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POLITICS legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements.

At the same time, Bannon was concerned that the United States and the “Judeo-Christian West” were in a war against an expansionist Islamic ideology — but that they were losing the war by not recognizing what it was. Bannon said this fight was so important, it was worth overlooking differences with countries like Russia.

It is not yet clear how far Bannon will be able to go to enact his agenda. But his worldview calls for bigger changes than those already made. In the past, Bannon had wondered aloud whether the country was ready to follow his lead. Now, he will find out.

“Is that grit still there, that tenacity, that we’ve seen on the battlefields . . . fighting for something greater than themselves?” Bannon said in a radio interview in May, before joining the Trump campaign.

That, said Bannon, is “one of the biggest open questions in this country.”

Bannon, 62, is a former Navy officer and Goldman Sachs banker who made a fortune after he acquired a share of the royalties from a fledgling TV show called “Seinfeld.” In the past 15 years, he shifted into entertainment and conservative media, making films about Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin and then taking a lead role at Breitbart News.

At Breitbart, Bannon provided a platform for the alt-right, a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.

Bannon also forged a rapport with Trump, interviewing the businessman-candidate on his show and then, in August, joining the campaign as chief executive.

Now Bannon has become one of the most powerful men in America. And he’s not afraid to say so.

In interviews with reporters since Trump’s election, Bannon has eschewed the traditional it’sall-about-the-boss humility of presidential staffers.

“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in November, embracing comparisons to those figures. In the interview, Bannon compared himself to a powerful aide to England’s Henry VIII who helped engineer a worldshaking move of his era, the split of the Church of England from the Catholic Church.

“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.

To explore Bannon’s worldview, The Post reviewed hours of radio interviews that Bannon conducted while hosting a Breitbart radio show, as well as speeches and interviews he has given since 2014.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.

In his public statements, Bannon espoused a basic idea that Trump would later seize as the centerpiece of his campaign.

While others saw the world rebounding from the financial crisis of 2008, Bannon just saw it becoming more divided by class.

The elites that had caused the crisis — or, at least, failed to stop it — were now rising higher. Everyone else was being left behind.

“The middle class, the working men and women in the world . . . are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos,” Bannon said in a 2014 speech to a conference at the Vatican in a recording obtained by BuzzFeed.

Davos is a Swiss ski resort that hosts an annual conclave of wealthy and powerful people.

Bannon blamed both major political parties for this system and set out to force his ideas on an unwilling Republican leadership.

What he wanted, he said again and again, was “sovereignty.” Both in the United States and in its allies in Western Europe.

On one of the first Breitbart Radio shows, in November 2015, Bannon praised the movement in Britain to exit the European Union. He said that the British had joined the E.U. merely as a trading federation but that it had grown into a force that had stripped Britons of sovereignty “in every aspect important to their own life.”

In the case of the United States, Bannon was skeptical of multinational trade pacts, saying that they ceded control. In an interview in November 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agreed with Bannon.

“We shouldn’t be tying ourselves down like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians with so many strings a guy can’t move,” Sessions said.

One solution put forward by Bannon: the United States should pursue bilateral trade agreements — one country at a time.

On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration.

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.

The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”

“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” Bannon asked repeatedly.

“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.

In another show, Bannon had complained to Trump that so many Silicon Valley chief executives were South Asian or Asian.

This was a rare time when Trump — normally receptive to Bannon’s ideas on-air — pushed back. “I still

Bannon walks to the Oval Office with Kellyanne Conway, who serves as counselor to the president.

KLMNO WEEKLY

want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”

So far, Trump has made no changes to the high-skilled visa program. Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the Trump administration may reexamine the program.

Even as Bannon was calling for a general retreat from multinational alliances, however, he was warning of the need for a new alliance — involving only a subset of the world’s countries.

The “Judeo-Christian West” was at war, he said, but didn’t seem to understand it yet.

“There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,” Bannon said at the Vatican in 2014, when the Islamic State was growing. “Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is — and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it — will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.”

Bannon has given few details about the mechanics of the war he thinks the West should fight. But he has been clear that it is urgent enough to take priority over other rivalries and worries.

In his talk at the Vatican, Bannon was asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bannon’s answer was two-sided.

“I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand,” he said. But, Bannon said, there were bigger concerns than Russia.

“However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put [Russia] on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first.”

If Bannon succeeds, his own comparison, to Thomas Cromwell, might be apt — to a point.

“The analogy — if it’s going to work — is that Bannon has his own agenda, which he will try to use Trump for, and will try to exploit the power that Trump has given him, without his master always noticing,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of history at England’s Oxford University.

But Cromwell was later executed, after Henry VIII turned against him. For a man like that, MacCulloch said, power is always tenuous: “It’s very much dependent on the favor of the king.” n

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POLITICS

A status quo pick for Supreme Court B Y R OBERT B ARNES

P

resident Trump has chosen his first nominee, but it remains Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s Supreme Court. The question is how much longer he wants it.

Kennedy, 80 and celebrating his 29th year on the court, will remain the pivotal member of the court no matter how the warfare between Republicans and Democrats plays out. On almost every big social issue, neither the court’s liberal, Democratic-appointed justices nor Kennedy’s fellow Republican-appointed conservative colleagues can prevail without him.

That is why an undercurrent of Trump’s first choice for the court was whether it would soothe Kennedy, making him feel secure enough to retire and let this president choose the person who would succeed him.

“Justice Kennedy tries not to play politics with these things,” said one of Kennedy’s former clerks, who watches the court carefully. Like others, he spoke on the condition of anonymity about his old boss. “But obviously he will feel more comfortable if the person who is picked is someone he likes and respects, just as the opposite would give him pause.”

Who better, then, to put Kennedy at ease than one of his former clerks? Kennedy trekked to Denver to swear in his protege Neil Gorsuch on the appeals court 10 years ago. If Gorsuch is confirmed to the Supreme Court, it would be the first time that a justice has served with a former clerk.

Gorsuch on Tuesday evening praised the “incredibly welcoming and gracious” Kennedy, along with his other judicial mentors, the late justice Byron White and Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “These judges brought me up in the law,” he said. “Truly I would not be here without them.”

Trump campaigned for office expertly on the Supreme Court, which is especially important to conservatives and evangelicals.

He went so far as to say that even if

KAREN BLEIER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Even if Neil Gorsuch is confirmed, cases will still swing with Justice Anthony Kennedy — for now voters did not like him, they had no choice but to support him because of the potential to shape the court for a generation.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer is 78. They are two of the court’s four liberals and are not likely to leave the court voluntarily while Trump is in charge.

Some say Kennedy would be reluctant to leave, too, if it meant a more conservative court that would reverse some of his landmark decisions, especially on gay rights. But others who know him suggest he is ready to go.

“I would put it at 50-50 that he leaves at the end of the term,” said another former clerk. Kennedy recently hired clerks for the term that begins in October, but that is seen more as insurance than intent.

The gentlemanly Kennedy could not be more different from the combative Trump, and so some involved in filling the current Supreme Court opening kept the justice in mind during the process.

Pleasing Kennedy is wise but not dispositive, as lawyers at the court like to say.

“I suppose he’s more focused on the Trump administration as a whole,” said another former clerk.

“I think that will be more important to him than whether he likes this particular pick or not.”

All agree that it will not be Trump’s first Supreme Court pick who will seal the court’s ideological direction for a generation. It will be, if it happens, his second.

Gorsuch, like almost anyone on Trump’s list of 21 candidates to take Antonin Scalia’s spot, is likely to replicate the late justice’s voting pattern (if not his style). That would restore the court’s longheld position as a generally conservative body capable of the occasional liberal surprise.

Those surprises are almost always supplied by Kennedy, nominated to the court by fellow Californian Ronald Reagan. Overall, Kennedy most often votes with the court’s conservatives: He is fur-

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has been a critical swing vote on many Supreme Court cases, and that will not change should Neil Gorsuch be confirmed to replace the late Antonin Scalia. But if Kennedy is comfortable with the Gorsuch choice, some believe it will make the 80-year-old justice more comfortable with retiring.

ther to the right on law-and-order issues than Scalia was, he is comfortable with the court’s protective view of business, and he shared the losing view that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

But when the court moves left, it is because Kennedy joins its liberals — Ginsburg, Breyer, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. So Gorsuch’s appointment would return the court to the status quo that existed before Scalia died. After that, the court’s next appointment could mean a definitive shift.

The Supreme Court without Breyer, Ginsburg or Kennedy would be a different place, indeed.

They have been part of the scant majority that forbade the death penalty for minors and the intellectually disabled, and established a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. When environmentalists win, which is becoming increasingly rare, it is because this group has banded together.

Just last term, Kennedy and the liberals struck down a Texas law that they said used protecting women as a pretext for making abortion unavailable, and they continued a limited endorsement of affirmative action.

Many if not all of those holdings would be at risk in a court with five consistent conservatives, the oldest being 68-year-old Justice Clarence Thomas.

Kennedy’s role was especially important this past term. Before writing his opinion in the University of Texas affirmative-action case, Kennedy had never approved of a race-conscious program, although he had not been as willing as his colleagues to outlaw the use of race in such instances.

And prior to striking down the Texas abortion law, he had disapproved of only one statute on the issue — requiring a woman to inform her husband of her decision to have the procedure — among dozens the court had reviewed.

As had happened so many times before, Kennedy had the biggest impact on the most important cases. How long that continues is bigger than the current opening. n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

March may be first step for activism

BY S COTT C LEMENT, S ANDHYA S OMASHEKHAR AND M ICHAEL A LISON C HANDLER

D

ays into Donald Trump’s presidency, a large number of liberals say they plan to step up their political activity, with Democratic women particularly motivated to take action, according to a new Washington Post poll.

The results suggest that the Women’s March and its sister marches immediately after Trump’s inauguration, which brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators into the nation’s streets to protest his agenda, could reflect something more than a momentary burst in activism.

The poll found that 40 percent of Democratic women say they will become more involved in political causes this year, compared with 25 percent of Americans more broadly and 27 percent of Democratic men. Nearly half of liberal Democrats also say they will become more politically active, as do 43 percent of Democrats younger than 50. Interest in boosting activism is far lower — 21 percent — among independents and Republicans alike.

“I have called my senators. I called my congressman. I am sending emails. . . . I just donated $100 to the ACLU,” said Iris Dubois, 49, a lawyer and human relations manager in Atlanta, referring to the American Civil Liberties Union. She did not join her local women’s march but has nevertheless become more politically engaged — particularly in opposing Trump’s Cabinet picks.

For some, the activism has been more subtle. Brenda Tucker, 63, a school bus driver from Yorktown, Va., said she didn’t march and hasn’t written any letters. But she is speaking up more at church, where many of her fellow congregants back the president.

“I call them out on their Christianity,” Tucker said, noting her dislike of Trump. “Everybody should be doing something, like marching, on everything he does. . . .

Obviously, the majority of people did not want him.”

AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In poll, 40 percent of Democratic women vow to become more involved in political causes The breadth of activist leanings from the left follows a deeply divisive election in which Trump defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee of a major party to vie for the presidency. His treatment of women became an issue for his campaign, particularly after the release of a videotaped conversation in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals.

Overall, female voters preferred Clinton by a 13 percentage-point margin, according to exit polls, with more than 7 in 10 of her female supporters saying a Trump presidency made them feel “scared.”

The new survey results echo what took place after President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

Conservative voters, stunned and outraged by the election results, immediately began organizing to remake the Republican Party platform and block Obama’s agenda under a loosely affiliated movement called the tea party.

The movement was effective,

leading two years later to a sweep of state and congressional seats by conservative Republicans. But it remains to be seen whether the surge in liberal activism can coalesce into a similarly powerful force.

In the Post poll, majorities say they have heard a lot about the women’s marches and that they support the demonstrations — representing wider awareness and support than the tea party movement held at the height of its power in 2010.

Organizers of the women’s marches are certainly trying to parlay the protests into something more sustained. Immediately after the Jan. 21 gatherings, they launched an effort dubbed “10 actions for the first 100 days,” which included postcard-writing campaigns to members of Congress.

Other liberal activists have launched major phone campaigns to protest Trump’s agenda to lawmakers as well as to Trump’s resorts and other businesses. A National Education Association cam-

Hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and other marches across the nation.

Some are hoping that the turnout will translate into a force similar to the tea party, which coalesced after Barack Obama became president.

paign yielded more than 1 million emails to senators from people opposing Trump’s education secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos. On Tuesday, march organizers Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory gathered with other activists near the Capitol to call for senators to reject Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (RAla.).

“The women’s march on Washington aims to send a message to all levels of government and the current administration that we can stand together in solidarity and expect elected leaders to protect the rights of women, their families and their communities,” organizers said in a statement.

But some women expressed skepticism that the marches could translate into political change.

“I like what the women are protesting for, but I am not sure that protesting will really do anything,” said Angelica Rodriguez, 22, a college student and in-home health aide in San Antonio. “I don’t think anyone in office is going to take the women’s marches seriously or take their concerns seriously when it comes to passing the laws.”

Rodriguez said she supported Clinton but did not vote. Now, she expects to feel the pain: She is worried she will lose access to free birth control, which she gets through the Affordable Care Act. Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to repeal the law.

Some voters see Trump’s actions speaking louder than his words and do not fear the effect on women.

Magdalene Rose, 66, a retiree from Phoenix who voted for Clinton, noted that Trump has daughters and appointed a woman, pollster Kellyanne Conway, as his White House counselor. While she has misgivings about the rest of his agenda, “that’s one of the few things I’m not worried about,” she said.

The survey was conducted Jan. 25-29 among a random sample of 1,018 adults nationwide reached on cellular and landline phones and carries a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

In Seattle, a safe place for drug use BY

K ATIE Z EZIMA

O

fficials in Seattle have approved the nation’s first “safe- injection” sites for users of heroin and other illegal drugs, calling the move a drastic but necessary response to an epidemic of addiction that is claiming tens of thousands of lives each year.

The sites — which offer addicts clean needles, medical supervision and quick access to drugs that reverse the effects of an overdose — have long been popular in Europe. Now, with the U.S. death toll rising, the idea is gaining traction in a number of American cities, including Boston, New York and Ithaca, N.Y. While opponents say the sites promote illegal drug use, supporters say they can keep people alive and steer them toward treatment.

They compare supervised injection facilities to the needle exchanges that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a way to stanch the spread of HIV and hepatitis C among intravenous drug users.

“These sites save lives and that is our goal in Seattle/King County,” Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in a statement late last month when the sites were approved.

The sites are not legal under federal law, according to Kelly Dineen, a professor of health law at Saint Louis University School of Law. A provision of the Controlled Substances Act makes it illegal to operate facilities where drugs are used, she said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a record 33,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2015. Opioids now kill more people each year than car accidents. In 2015, the number of heroin deaths nationwide surpassed the number of deaths from gun homicides.

In addition to heroin, the deaths are caused by powerful prescription painkillers and fentanyl, a synthetic opiate so potent a tiny amount can kill people within minutes — leaving little time for help to arrive.

“If you want to really bend this curve of death, [safe injection sites

CAROL GUZY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Proponents say sites will prevent overdoses and promote treatment; opponents see acceptance are] going to have to be part of the strategy,” said Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which treats many victims of overdose.

In Seattle, the King County Board of Health voted unanimously last month to endorse two sites, one to be located in the city and the other to be in the surrounding county.

Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine (D) gave them final approval Jan. 27. In 2015, 132 people died of heroin overdoses in the county.

“We see this as a public health emergency,” said Jeff Duchin, the health officer for Seattle and King County. “Clearly the status quo isn’t working anywhere, and clearly we need to look at new tools.”

Duchin said officials hope to open the Seattle site within a year.

Both sites will be aimed primarily at homeless drug users, he said, with a goal of providing them basic health services and ultimately drug treatment.

“The real goal is not to open a day spa where people can come in and have a good time and use drugs, but to engage them in treat-

ment,” Duchin said. “They inject in a place where there’s a health-care worker who can save their lives if they overdose.”

Duchin said all drug users will be supervised at all times. If a person exhibits signs of an overdose, he said, a health-care worker will administer Naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids.

Over the next three years, officials plan to study the sites and collect data on how many people they attract, whether overdose deaths are being prevented and whether users of the sites enter drug treatment.

Possession of heroin is illegal under federal law, but, Duchin said, “We’re not really seeing this as a legal problem right now. If there are legal issues that come up, we’ll have to address them.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the idea is running into opposition outside the city, with some suburban mayors making clear they are not eager to host one of the sites.

“The people in my district, Democrat or Republican, would come unglued if we put a safe injection

Supporters of Seattle’s safe injection facilities compare them to needle exchanges, such as the one seen above in Washington, D.C., in 2007, which were set up to limit the spread of HIV and hepatitis C.

site in Federal Way,” said state Sen. Mark Miloscia (R), who represents Federal Way, in the southern reaches of King County near Tacoma.

“Saving lives is about getting people off heroin and not tolerating it.”

Worldwide, at least 90 facilities have been created to permit people to inject illegal drugs under medical supervision. The first opened in Berne, Switzerland, in 1986. France opened its first facility in October. A supervised injection site in Vancouver, B.C., is the only such site in North America.

After that facility opened in 2003, researchers found that overdose deaths in the surrounding community dropped 35 percent in just two years. Still, British Columbia recorded 914 overdose deaths last year, up 80 percent from 2015.

Closer to home, in Ithaca, N.Y., home to Cornell University, Mayor Svante Myrick (D) has been pushing to bring a site to his city.

Myrick’s father suffered from drug addiction. He won a recommendation from a city task force last year.

That effort has since stalled amid rising opposition from the city’s police chief and state lawmakers. Cornell law professor William Jacobson has argued that the sites amount to a “governmentrun heroin shooting gallery,” though he recently acknowledged that the sites might help to prevent overdoses.

“The heroin scourge is real,” Jacobson said in an email. “I’m just not sure normalizing the use helps the problem.”

In Massachusetts, state Sen. William Brownsberger (D) recently introduced legislation to permit safe-injection sites throughout the state. Currently, Boston Health Care for the Homeless offers medical monitoring to people who have injected illegal drugs, but they are not permitted to use drugs on-site.

The program, which started in April, has 10 chairs where addicts can sit while a nurse monitors vital signs and administers Naloxone in case of an overdose. Gaeta said 400 people have used the facility 2,679 times. About 10 percent of them have gone directly from the room into treatment, a number she called “miraculous.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

A border wall also impedes migrant animals BY

D ARRYL F EARS

T

he “big, beautiful wall” that President Trump has vowed to build along the Mexican border won’t block just humans. Dozens of animal species that migrate freely across the international line in search of water, food and mates would be walled off.

A list of animals that dwell near the 1,300-mile expanse that the proposed wall would cover is long. In May, Outside magazine, using information compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, pointed out more than 100 species between California and Texas that are listed as threatened and endangered under the Endangered Species Act or are candidates for a spot on the list.

At a time when the Trump administration has restricted communications from the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies, federal agencies may be reluctant to weigh in on any topic in a way that appears critical of the president’s ambitions.

But outside the government, scientists who have studied how 670 miles of walls and fences erected as part of the Secure Fence Act under former president George W. Bush in 2006 tell stories of animals stopping in their tracks, staring at barriers they couldn’t cross.

“At the border wall, people have found large mammals confounded and not knowing what to do,” said Jesse Lasky, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State University. Deer, mountain lions, jaguar and ocelots are among the animals whose daily movement were disrupted, he said.

Trump’s proposed wall, estimated to cost between $15 billion and $25 billion, would cover parts of the border that the Bush project, which was essentially abandoned because of its cost in 2009, does not.

Research on the impact of the current barrier fence is limited because the 2006 act gave the Homeland Security secretary sweeping power to build quickly, without the need for environmen-

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Dozens of species, some endangered, would be blocked from freely roaming across U.S.-Mexico line in search of water, food and mates tal impact studies or other analysis that would show how the land would be disturbed and how flora and fauna could potentially be harmed.

While at the University of Texas, Lasky led a study on the impact of barriers published in the journal Diversity and Distributions in 2011. The study’s main conclusion was that the “new barriers would increase the number of species at risk.”

A big concern, Lasky said in an interview recently, was that over time the populations of threatened and endangered species would decline. A wall cutting off isolated populations from those on the other side of the wall would exacerbate the problem because they couldn’t mate, at least not in a sustainable way.

“There are concerns about small populations mating with each other and inbreeding, and getting genetic disorders from

Scientists say the existing wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the fence at Playas de Tijuana in Baja California, are already disrupting the daily movements of animals. Ocelots, such as the one seen left at the National Zoo in Nicaragua, are among the many endangered animals that live near the border and would be affected.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

inbreeding,” Lasky said. Their problems wouldn’t end there.

“We didn’t talk about it much in the paper, but with climate change, if an animal or any organism is going to stay in the temper-

atures it prefers, it has to move to track those conditions. That’s going to be important for the persistence of a lot of species.”

A 2008 study mentioned the decline of carnivores, such as the grizzly bear and gray wolf, at the U.S.-Mexico border and renewed interest in protecting Neotropical cat species there. “In the U.S.A., there are no known breeding populations of jaguars and only two . . . populations of ocelots,” according to the study by scientists at Pace University in New York and the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in Mexico.

The cats “are threatened by land development and land conversion, predator control by cattle growers, an increase in disease exposure, construction of highways, international bridges and immigration-control infrastructure,” meaning border walls.

More walls would greatly magnify the threat, the researchers said. n

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Japan’s caregivers are gray-haired, too A NNA F IFIELD Yokohama, Japan BY

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t’s lunch hour at the Cross Heart nursing home, and a 72-year-old, slightly stooped man is spooning soup and filling tea cups.

But Kunio Odaira isn’t one of the residents. He’s one of the staff, part of an increasingly gray workforce in an increasingly gray country.

“I enjoy talking to the people here. It’s fun, but it’s also hard work,” Odaira said during a break from his caregiving duties on a recent day.

Japan is considered a “superaging” society. More than a quarter of the population is over 65, a figure set to rise to 40 percent by 2050.

The average life expectancy is 85, and that means many Japanese remain relatively healthy for a good two decades after retirement age.

At the same time, the birthrate has plummeted to well below the level needed to keep the population stable. Now home to 128 million people, Japan is expected to number less than 100 million by 2050, according to government projections.

That means authorities need to think about ways to keep seniors healthy and active for longer but also about how to augment the workforce to cope with labor shortages.

Enter the septuagenarian caregiver.

At Cross Heart, more than half of the 119 caregivers are over 60, and 15 of them are over 70.

“When we advertise for people to work here, we get lots of responses from older people, not younger people,” said nursing home director Kaori Yokoo in the lobby where residents were doing leg curls and chest presses on weight machines.

The foundation that runs this nursing home and others in Kanagawa Prefecture has raised the official retirement age to 70 but allows employees to keep working until 80 if they want to and can.

Municipalities around the country are also actively recruiting people over 60 to do lighter duties at nursing homes.

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Nursing homes employ staff into their 70s amid nation’s ‘super-aging’ population, labor shortage It’s one way of dealing with the problem. Meanwhile, researchers are working on robots that can lift the elderly out of beds and wheelchairs, and inward-looking Japan is slowly coming around to the idea that it may need to allow in more foreign workers.

Although older workers have constraints — some can’t do the heavier tasks — they also offer advantages over younger workers who want time off for their children, said Yokoo, who is 41.

“Plus, because they’re close in age to the residents, they can relate to each other more,” she said.

“We younger people think this must be nice for them. Older staff can understand things like physical pains more because they are living through the same things.”

Some of the older workers here are doing it because they need the money. For others, the money is a nice benefit, but the main motivation is the activity and sense of community.

Kiyoko Tsuboi, a 95-year-old

who comes into the rest home during the day, said she likes having Odaira around.

“He’s very attentive to our needs and knows things like how hot we like our tea. My son is not as kind as Odaira-san,” Tsuboi said as Odaira cleared away the lunch dishes. “He’s quite active despite his age, and even though he’s a man, he has an eye for detail.”

The dynamic works well for Odaira, too, who started here 17 years ago after retiring from his job in the sales department of an auto parts maker. He works eight hours a day, four days a week.

His father died when he was small, his mother when he was 22.

“It’s not like I’m replacing my mother, but I thought I could help someone else’s parents,” he said.

He also does it to stay young, Odaira said with a twinkle in his eye. “I think it’s good for me physically and mentally, so as long as I can keep working, I will.”

He’s not the oldest worker here, though. That title is shared by two

Kunio Odaira, 72, is one of 119 caregivers at the Cross Heart nursing home in Yokohama, Japan. Over half of the staff members are older than 60.

78-year-olds, a man who works in the office and Noriko Fukuju, who helps with pickups and drop-offs and does activities with “the old people.”

“It’s fun. I enjoy it,” she said.

Hiroko Akiyama, at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Gerontology, said a Japanese 65-year-old is in much better physical and mental shape than a 65-year-old a few decades ago. “They are full of energy, and healthy and longliving,” she said.

Akiyama’s research has found that working helps keep seniors that way. “They operate on a regular schedule. They wake up, get ready, go to work and talk to people and stay connected,” she said.

“We had a depressed old woman who changed completely after she started working.”

Still, Japan can’t rely solely on seniors or, potentially, robots to staff its nursing homes, where the need will only grow as the population ages, analysts say.

Japan has agreements with Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines under which applicants who complete job training and pass a Japanese language test can work at a Japanese nursing home.

But if they want to stay beyond three years, they must pass a national caregiver’s exam so difficult that 40 percent of Japanese applicants fail. Many Japanese also express concern about cultural differences.

Next year, the Japanese government will loosen the regulations slightly and set up a technical intern program, but there will still be time limits and difficult tests to pass.

Perhaps 2,000 people will come to Japan through the intern program, said Yasuhiro Yuki, an expert on elderly care at Shukutoku University. “But we hear we will need 300,000 more caregivers in the next 10 years,” he said. “So I still don’t think we will have enough.”

That means aging caregivers will increasingly become the norm.

“I can do this at least for two more years,” said Fukuju, the 78year-old, before she dashed out the door to renew her driver’s license. n

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Selfie scourge at Holocaust memorial A NTHONY F AIOLA Berlin BY

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uilt as a solemn place of reflection, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is an undulating sea of stone blocks lined up like so many coffins on a sprawling patch of central Berlin.

But in the look-at-me-age of Instagram and Facebook, it has also become something else.

The perfect backdrop for a selfie.

At a place honoring the memory of the Nazis’ victims, young laughing visitors hop from block to block, searching for the best angles. Some pose sensually atop the slabs for eye-candy shots on dating websites. One man had his picture taken between the stones while juggling.

Then someone said “Stop!”

That someone was best-selling author Shahak Shapira — a 28year-old Israeli transplant to Berlin who launched a project that became an instant example of the power of the Internet to generate shame. He published images of some of the worst offenders and then blended them into horrific backdrops of the Holocaust.

The effort went viral across Europe and beyond, becoming a stinging example of how record numbers of global tourists — particularly the young — have stripped revered sites of their gravitas.

“Look, this is not a place for fun selfies, and people need to know this,” he said. “No, it’s not ‘okay.’ ” An up-and-coming comedian — and the descendant of a Holocaust survivor — Shapira said he has watched for years as visitors treated the memorial with disrespect. He put his project together, he said, after a neo-Nazi website ran a piece delighting in the selfie craze and what it called Berlin’s “hoax monument.”

He is all about irreverence — he hit the talk show circuit here by riffing on his life as a Jew in Germany. He arrived from Israel at age 14, brought by his mother and her German boyfriend. They settled, he said, in a small town in the former communist east,

FABRIZIO BENSCH/REUTERS

Israeli transplant uses a website to shame those who treat Berlin’s monument with disrespect where he depicts existence for a young Jewish boy as a challenge.

During a school soccer match, he said, other kids teased him, warning he’d be sent to a concentration camp if he didn’t score a goal. He satirized his fate in a best-selling book roughly translated from German as “Tell It Like It Is: How I Became the Most German Jew in the World.”

But there should, he said, be limits to irreverence.

“The Holocaust is one of them,” he said.

His work shaming the memorial’s selfie-takers has divided observers. He became an overnight social-media sensation, with some saying he should be awarded a prize. But others ripped Shapira for using the images of Holocaust victims.

“If he wasn’t a Jew, one would have condemned him for this,” author Mirna Funk wrote in Zeit Online. “For using concentration camp inmates and murdered Jews — people, who might not want to be part of this campaign, because they don’t want to be

turned into victims of the Germans for forever and all times.”

But like his work or not, Shapira’s project has touched a nerve in a country where controversy, discomfort and the memory of the Holocaust often go together. The memorial has thundered back into the news here after Björn Höcke — a politician for the nationalist Alternative for Germany party — delivered a controversial speech last month describing it as “a monument of shame.” He topped that off by calling Germany’s commemoration culture of World War II-era crimes “stupid.”

The comments sparked outrage, but Höcke’s superiors stopped short of ejecting him from the party, suggesting a level of tolerance with such notions that have begun to worry some in the rebuilt Jewish community here.

Controversy has surrounded Berlin’s Holocaust memorial since its planning stages. In a speech at its 2005 inauguration, Paul Spiegel, then-president of

Visitors to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2013 jump on snowcovered stone blocks, which resemble coffins.

Germany’s Central Council of Jews, criticized it for being too abstract and failing to address the issue of guilt. Shortly after, the first reports emerged of people joyously jumping from stele to stele, prompting the publication Der Spiegel to ponder, “Is this what commemoration looks like?”

But the selfie obsession in recent years, critics say, appears to have pushed the problem to another level. During a visit to the memorial recently, tourists had written their names and messages including “I heart Berlin” into the snow on some of the lower slabs. Between the blocks, Louis, a 27-year-old Colombian tourist, had just finished taking a photo of himself with a selfie stick.

When asked if he felt some people might find that inappropriate, he quickly replied, “I totally agree. This is a place that people should respect — I apologize,” before running off to his tour group.

Yet it is perhaps the abstract nature of the memorial that has led so many visitors to treat it as just another art space. The memorial itself has set no guidelines on selfies — although its security staff is supposed to ask visitors to refrain from climbing atop the slabs.

Jewish leaders say they are not certain that a selfie ban would be helpful and that it may rob the memorial of sense of openness.

“It would be impossible to create rules and to enforce them,” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office. “Not everyone’s behavior is what some may wish, but this memorial truly helped to anchor Holocaust memory.”

Shapira titled his Internet project Yolocaust — a play on the “you only live once” mentality of selfietakers.

The project went viral, and the 12 photos he posted have since been taken down. Most of the subjects, he said, have also offered apologies.

“Sometimes you just need to give people a little push, and they get it,” he said. n

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Foiled in the fight against illegal immigration

Fed-up towns tried to block undocumented residents but couldn’t overcome obstacles C HICO H ARLAN Hazelton, Pa.

BY

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tarting a decade ago, a group of small U.S. cities began passing laws to block undocumented immigrants from living within their borders.

They were a collection of mostly white exurbs and faded manufacturing towns whose populations suddenly were transforming. More Latinos were arriving in search of jobs, and the towns’ leaders complained of

burdened schools and higher crime.

Here in this northeastern Pennsylvania city, then-Mayor Lou Barletta said he would do what he could to restore “law and order” and take back his city. It was time, Barletta said, for a “war on the illegals.”

And while that sentiment is shared among some advisers to President Trump, the experiences of these towns show how measures targeting undocumented immigrants can leave lasting and bitter racial divisions while doing little to address the underlying forces

that often determine where newcomers settle.

The laws in most cases aimed to make it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants and threatened fines for employers who hired them. But among the six most high-profile towns that tried to pass such laws, all have been foiled by court rulings, settlements or challenges with enforcement. Several have been ordered to pay the legal fees for the civil rights groups that brought suits. And in five of the six towns, the Latino population — legal or illegal — has continued to grow, attract-

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campaign about issues including a border wall with Mexico. Barletta is now a U.S. House member and was part of Trump’s transition team.

Trump recently rolled out the first phase of what are expected to be sweeping immigration policy changes, signing orders for the construction of a border wall and the targeting of “sanctuary cities” that resist the deportation of undocumented immigrants. His administration also ordered a 90-day ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries and a ban on all refugees for 120 days and from Syria indefinitely. Trump has more latitude to carry out immigration policy changes than states or cities do, but his policies could face legal challenges — or bring about unintended economic consequences.

“These ideas are more easy to sell as political talking points than as real policy options,” said Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law. “Just because you say you want to do something doesn’t mean you’ll be able to.”

JESSICA KOURKOUNIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

ed by a continued rise in low-paying jobs.

“It wound up costing our city $9 million in attorney’s fees,” said Bob Phelps, the mayor of Farmers Branch, Tex., a Dallas suburb that saw its ordinance defeated in court after a sevenyear legal battle. “And we accomplished zero.”

The local efforts were championed by two men who are now Trump advisers and reportedly were considered for Cabinet positions.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who counseled most of the cities in their legal challenges, consulted with Trump during his

Difficulties with enforcement The towns that took action — Hazleton; Farmers Branch; Valley Park, Mo.; Riverside, N.J.; Escondido, Calif.; and Fremont, Neb. — did so largely out of frustration, fed up with swift demographic changes and what they saw as the rising costs of caring for undocumented residents. The newcomers were drawn by cheaper housing costs and new industries that attracted low-wage labor.

“The presence of illegal aliens places a fiscal burden on the city,” Fremont’s ordinance read.

At the same time, the federal government’s inability to seal the border was helping to drive an argument that towns and states had the legal right to do a job that Washington could not manage. Kobach, a longtime activist who worked at the time for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, sought to use those towns as a testing ground for his aggressive stance. Most of the laws were passed in a flurry between 2006 and 2007.

Although immigration enforcement had long been the purview of the federal government, finding those who had crossed the border illegally or overstayed visas was not doable without the help of local law enforcement, said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations at NumbersUSA, which favors a reduction in immigration.

“You should help states and localities do what they want to do voluntarily in order to help the enforcement of immigration law,” Jenks said.

But localities have not gotten the chance. In Hazleton and Farmers Branch, federal judges ruled the ordinances discriminatory and unconstitutional. In Escondido, the town quickly backed away after a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Valley Park, the town’s mayor decided to no longer enforce what his predecessor had put in place. In Riverside, as legal bills piled up, the city council rescinded the ordinance, fearing damage to businesses.

Dozens of other towns considering “Illegal

Immigration Relief Act” laws backed off.

The municipality that has come the closest to successfully implementing such a law is Fremont, a meatpacking town west of Omaha where a six-year court fight, financed through a tax increase, won the city the right to ban undocumented immigrants from rental housing. But just as the city’s officials put the law in place in 2014, they realized it would not be effective: Fremont’s rental applications, with their wording approved by the courts, did not require the information, such as a Social Security number, that could help determine whether a person was in the United States legally.

Courts also have weakened several states’ illegal-immigrant laws, most notably in Arizona. Michael Hethmon, who is senior counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute and helped Kobach handle the Hazleton case, said that the local efforts have faced more setbacks than victories but that the towns’ money has been “well spent” in taking a stance. The towns had no data on the number of undocumented residents before or after the ordinances, making it difficult to measure how well the laws worked in driving away that part of the population.

“If you compare our advocacy struggle to other issues — civil rights issues or LGBT — you have to remember that those folks lost a lot more [at the beginning] before they ultimately prevailed,” Hethmon said.

The battles over the local ordinances, residents of those towns say, helped create fault lines that remain visible. Escondido in 2014 rejected a permit for a shelter that would have housed unaccompanied minors who had come across the southwest U.S. border; a new ACLU lawsuit alleges that the rejection was driven by anti-immigrant sentiment. In Fremont, the town has been split by a proposed new Costco poultry processing plant — one that would add hundreds of jobs but probably would accelerate the arrival of immigrants.

“The makeup of our town has really changed, and again with this chicken plant, continues on next page

The population of Hazleton, Pa., left, is now 50 percent Latino. After moving to Hazleton in 2005, Eric Garcia, below, opened EG Photo Studio on Wyoming Street, which has been revitalized by Latino-owned businesses.

AMANDA MUSTARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

from previous page

there’s going to be a majority of low-income jobs that will not bring us taxpayers and homeowners,” said Dawn Wiegert, 55, who has lived in Fremont for 25 years. “People that will be a burden on all of our other resources — I don’t know how else to say it without sounding racist.”

In Hazleton, the first place to propose an illegal-immigrant law, some of the tensions have worsened with the proliferation of social media, said Joleen Reis, 24, a Hazleton day-care worker who is one of the few who straddle the white and Latino communities. Her father came to Pennsylvania from Peru as a migrant worker and met her mother, who is white.

Reis pulled up a local-news page on Facebook. The latest item mentioned a police report — two men in dark clothing stealing from vehicles.

“So are you ready for America without illegals?” one commenter said. “Because I am!”

“Filthy animals!” another said. “Send them back somewhere now!”

Reis sighed.

“I try not to read this stuff, typically,” Reis said. “But they assume everyone is illegal. And it’s always ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ ” Blamed for town’s woes Tucked under the crisscross of highways near the Pocono Mountains, Hazleton had endured the slow-motion decay common in blue-collar manufacturing and mining towns, only this time there was a twist: A newer set of state tax breaks helped lure a blitz of distribution centers, as well as a Cargill slaughterhouse, to the outskirts of town. The Latino population, at 4 percent in 2000, had soared to 38 percent by 2006, with many Dominicans moving from the Bronx and Brooklyn in search of jobs and cheaper housing. Barletta said he was concerned about higher crime rates, and when a 29-year-old was killed, allegedly by undocumented immigrants, he decided to act.

He searched on his computer about gettough laws on immigration, finding an ordinance, debated but never passed, written by the city council in San Bernardino, Calif. Barletta copied the text almost verbatim. Hazleton’s ordinance would make it illegal for businesses to hire undocumented immigrants and called for fines for landlords who rented to them.

Several months later, Hazleton had a new law and CNN trucks outside its city hall.

Barletta emphasized that he opposed only those in the United States illegally and was driven to act by several obvious problems: The population was booming, but the tax base wasn’t — a sign, he said, of undocumented immigrants not contributing to the system.

Schools were spending more money to educate Spanish-speaking students. Hazleton’s woefully understaffed police force was struggling to deal with an uptick in violent crime.

“I saw how it affected the lives of people, our emergency rooms, our schools,” Barletta said in an interview. “A mayor had to take the stand.

Listen, it wasn’t fun — trust me. When my dog

Cities that passed laws to keep illegal immigrants from living there

Hazleton, Pa. Fremont, Neb.

Riverside, N.J.

Valley Park, Mo. Escondido, Calif.

Farmers Branch, Tex.

THE WASHINGTON POST

barked in the middle of the night, I had a shotgun under my bed.”

The law easily won the city council’s approval, but its enforcement was held up by an injunction and a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups, including the ACLU. In court, some of Barletta’s arguments for the law ran into trouble: He didn’t know how many undocumented immigrants lived in Hazleton or how many had committed crimes. The town hadn’t studied it.

A federal judge eventually ruled that the law was illegal because it usurped the federal government’s power and would affect not just undocumented immigrants but “those who look or act as if they are foreign.” Other courts upheld that ruling over eight years. Kobach, paid $250,000 by Hazleton, did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

In 2015, a federal judge ordered Hazleton to pay $1.4 million to the lawyers who had fought the town. The city, with a budget of $9 million, took out a bank loan and cut a check to the ACLU, said Joseph Yannuzzi, the mayor who succeeded Barletta.

“With that money,” Yannuzzi said, “we could have hired 12 police officers.”

‘No choice about the changes’ Latinos now constitute 50 percent of Hazleton’s population. They’ve opened up carnicerias and beauty salons and boutiques along once-decrepit Wyoming Street. They tend to be younger and much likelier to work than Hazleton’s white residents, according to census data, and now make up much of the labor force at the airport-size distribution centers of American

In most cases, the laws passed by the cities aimed to make it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants and threatened fines for employers who hired them. But among the six most high-profile towns, seen above, that tried to pass such laws, all have been foiled by court rulings, settlements or challenges with enforcement.

Eagle and Amazon.com (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post).

Hazleton native Joe Maddon, the manager of the Chicago Cubs, several years ago opened up a community center aimed at building closer relationships between whites and Hispanics.

“To be honest, residents who were here before don’t have no choice about the changes,” said Eric Garcia, 37, a Dominican who moved to Hazleton from New York in 2005 and owns a photo studio.

But many longtime residents, unnerved by the influx of foreigners, have left the city limits for what they call the “valley” suburbs. With an immigration message similar to Barletta’s, Trump won nearly 60 percent of the votes in Hazleton’s Luzerne County.

Jamie Longazel, a Hazleton native and University of Dayton sociologist who in 2016 published a book about his home town, “Undocumented Fears,” said that Barletta, with his ordinance, introduced a “villain” that people barely talked about beforehand. Longazel found in his research that only 0.7 percent of crimes in Hazleton between 2001 and 2006 had been committed by undocumented immigrants.

“I don’t want to made it sound like Hazleton is only full of backwards racists,” said Longazel, who conducted focus groups and interviews with longtime white residents. “I want to emphasize this point that a lot of the scapegoating we see is top-down. Politicians are speaking this language and then we tend to echo it, rather than there being malicious intent from the bottom.” n

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ENTERTAINMENT

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Long ‘hidden’ but now heralded BY

V ICTORIA S T. M ARTIN

F

ame has finally found Katherine Johnson — and it took only a half-century, six manned moon landings, a best-selling book and an Oscar-nominated movie.

For more than 30 years, Johnson worked as a NASA mathematician at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., where she played an unseen but pivotal role in the country’s space missions. That she was an African American woman in an almost all-male and white workforce made her career even more remarkable.

Now, three decades after retiring from the agency, Johnson is portrayed by actress Taraji P. Henson in “Hidden Figures,” a film based on a book of the same name.

The movie tells how a group of black women — world-class mathematicians all — helped provide NASA with data crucial to the success of the agency’s early spaceflights. “Hidden Figures” is nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.

Suddenly Johnson, who will turn 99 in August, finds herself inundated with interview requests, award banquet invitations and people who just want to stop by and shake her hand.

“I’m glad that I’m young enough still to be living and that they are, so they can look and see, ‘That’s who that is,’ ” she said. “And they are as excited as I am.”

For many people, especially African Americans, her tale of overcoming racism and sexism is inspirational.

But Johnson is still struggling to figure out what all the fuss is about.

“There’s nothing to it — I was just doing my job,” she said during an interview in her living room in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.

“They needed information and I had it, and it didn’t matter that I found it. At the time, it was just a question and an answer.”

Henson spent hours with Johnson before the filming got underway, according to her publicist, Pamela Sharp, who said the actress described the experience as “meeting a true hero.”

Johnson speaks these days with a slight rasp in her voice but carries the same confidence that prompted NASA engineers to turn to her for help in planning the Mercury and Apollo space missions by, among other things, calculating the distance between Earth and the moon.

Her daughters, Joylette Goble Hylick and Katherine Goble Moore, said she’s seen “Hidden Figures” three times. And while Johnson doesn’t remember seeing every single shot or scene in the film, her memories of her work are sharp.

Clad in a pink turtleneck and a snow white shawl, with her silver hair styled gently atop her head, Johnson recalled how John Glenn, the astronaut and longtime senator who died in December, insisted on her calculations for Friendship 7, the first mission to orbit Earth.

“Get that girl,” she remembered Glenn saying.

How, she was asked, did she know Glenn was referring to her?

Johnson shrugged and said, “He knew I had done [the calculations] before for him, and they trusted my work,” she said. “He asked me to do it, and I did it.”

At the end of the day, “color didn’t matter” at NASA, she said. You were only as good as your last answer.

“They never asked me to go back over [my calculations] because when I did it, I had done my best, and it was right,” she said.

Johnson said she was one of the first women to attend an editorial meeting at the agency. Usually only the men wrote papers, and they would all gather in a room to discuss the findings.

She said she “wanted to know what they talk about.” So she asked. And when someone noted that women didn’t attend those meetings, she followed up with: “Is there a law that says I can’t go?”

And her boss said, “ ‘Let her go,’ ” Johnson said. “No big thing. I hadn’t given it any thought. And the first time I went into one, a fellow asked a question and he said: ‘Katherine is here, ask her.

She did it.’ ” Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., when Woodrow Wilson occupied the White

REX FEATURES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS; BELOW, HOPPER STONE/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

After book and movie, she is acclaimed for work at NASA House and rotary dial telephones were still new. Some of Johnson’s earliest memories involved counting games — counting stair steps, dishes, anything. She was so eager to learn to read that she followed her older brother, Horace Coleman, to elementary school before she was old enough to attend.

She started second grade at the age of 4. When she was 10, her family moved to Institute, W.Va. — 120 miles away — so she could attend high school because there wasn’t one for black children in White Sulphur Springs. Johnson graduated from what is now West Virginia State University at 18.

After college, she began to work as a teacher. She married James Goble two years later. (He died in 1956; she married her current hus-

Katherine Johnson, top, is seen at the White House ceremony at which she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

She is portrayed by Taraji P. Henson, inset, in the movie “Hidden Figures.”

band, James Johnson, three years after that.)

In the early 1950s, she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA, was looking for mathematicians to work at Langley Research Center. By 1953, Johnson was working there as “a computer” — the title that the agency gave to those who worked on calculations.

By the time she retired in 1986, Johnson had worked on Glenn’s flight, the moon landings and the 1970 rescue of Apollo 13. She also helped write one of the first textbooks on space.

The Johnsons’ home is filled with pictures: snapshots of their six grandchildren, as well as an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Johnson, in which she posed with her hands on her hips and her lips painted her favorite shade of pink.

Johnson was modest and matter-of-fact about her achievements until the subject turned to the Presidential Medal of Freedom she was awarded in 2015 by President Barack Obama.

“That was a thrill,” she said of receiving the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Hylick, Johnson’s eldest daughter, has seen the movie nine times.

Each time, she says, she “learns a little bit more, and appreciates it a little bit more.”

“It’s wonderful — despite her humility, everyone is finding out what she did,” said her daughter, who had just learned that the local library where Johnson grew up will be named in her honor.

Growing up in Hampton, Margot Lee Shetterly heard stories about Johnson and the other black women at NASA from her father, who also worked there. Shetterly decided to write “Hidden Figures” six years ago. The book was released in September, and Shetterly was a consultant on the film.

Johnson, she said, “has given us a way to shine a light on a lot of women who have not been talked about. None of these women really got the recognition they deserved and . . . now an entire group of women are being recognized for the work that they did.” n

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INNOVATION

‘There’s a dignity to this place’

M AURA J UDKIS Philadelphia BY

W

hen the check hits the table after a threecourse meal at the homey EAT Café, it looks a little unusual. The receipt slip reads: “The total above is only a SUGGESTED price. Please write here the amount you wish to pay.”

The meal is valued at $15, plus $1.20 in tax. Some pay it. Some pay more. And many pay a few dollars, or nothing at all.

“We’ve had some graduate students come that are so grateful to have real food, and maybe they leave a couple of dollars,” said Mariana Chilton, a professor of public health at Drexel University and founder of the restaurant. “Even those who are not paying are not looking at it as a free meal. There’s a dignity to this place.”

EAT, which stands for Everyone at the Table, opened in October as one of about 50 experimental restaurants across the country that are transforming the way people think about food assistance and charity. They feed the needy and the non-needy side by side, giving low-income people the chance to eat a nutritious sit-down meal somewhere other than a soup kitchen.

“I couldn’t stand the idea that you have these gorgeous restaurants with nice food, and there are these families who are struggling who could never tap into that,” said Chilton. “I wanted to make a place where families could come experience some joy.”

No two pay-what-you-can cafes are alike. They might be run by Christian missionaries or secular volunteers; they might ask diners to help if they can’t pay. But each one has an owner with a deep sense of duty and a high threshold for pain. It’s hard enough to run a normal restaurant; one study pegs the first-year failure rate at 60 percent. Try running a restaurant where your guests don’t even have to foot the bill.

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCKPHOTO

‘I felt my heart expand’ For Denise Cerreta, the idea came as a spiritual awakening.

Fourteen years ago, she had just converted her Salt Lake City acupuncture clinic into a small cafe, which was a financial failure. One day, “with my spiritual senses, I heard, ‘Go to donation, let people price their own food,’ ” she said.

“The next person that walked through the door, I said, ‘No more pricing; price your own.’ I was a little bit shellshocked. And at the moment I did that, I felt my heart expand.”

Her One World Cafe served curries and lasagnas and salads, and it earned mostly glowing publicity, except from Rush Limbaugh, who called it “an embarrassment to American business.” There were bumps along the way — bounced paychecks, a staff walkout — that Cerreta attributed to her own inexperience. But for a few years, the cafe turned a small profit.

Other charitable folks around the country began asking Cerreta how to start their own cafes. She started the One World Everybody Eats foundation, offering business plans and mentoring to community restaurant owners, eventually closing her cafe to help others start their own.

“We’ve always embraced that there’s no one way or right way to do this,” Cerreta said. “We try to meet people where they’re at and help them increase food security in their community.”

The psychic rewards can be enormous. Cafe owners tell of the hundreds of thousands of meals they’ve served, the people who cry after eating their first square meal in years.

But getting to that point means toiling through years of bureaucracy, fundraising and doubt.

First, you have to find the right location: If the neighborhood is too poor, a cafe won’t get enough paying customers, and if it’s too rich, it will be inaccessible to the people it’s trying to help. And then there are the neighbors.

“Our neighbor businesses were concerned that we would be attracting shopping carts stacked up 10 deep,” said Bob Pearson, a One World board member who operated the Common Table in Bend, Ore., for about two years. The res-

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taurants tend to attract the food-insecure — working poor who have trouble making ends meet — but nearly every operator deals with residents who think it will be a soup kitchen. And sometimes, they’re hostile. When Libbie Combee opened Mosaics Cafe in Bartow, Fla., after a $200,000 renovation, she faced resistance from residents who were “determined to shut us down,” Combee said. “It got nasty.”

Some jurisdictions aren’t sure how to regulate them. Because Combee started her cafe through her religious ministry, she said the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s division of hotels and restaurants told her she was exempt, even though she asked to be regulated like a normal restaurant. When neighbors got word that she was operating an unregulated restaurant, the bad PR forced its closure.

She provided $24,000 worth of meals in the 10 months she was open. Now, she is $46,000 in debt.

Volunteers, or not?

For a cafe to be sustainable, Cerreta says, 80 percent of customers need to pay the suggested price to offset the 20 percent who pay little or nothing — though some cafes make it work with other ratios, and the many cafes that are run as nonprofits supplement with grants. The tricky thing is to compel those who have the money to pay, and to pay extra, without scaring away those who truly need a free meal. Cerreta used to leave the price up to the customer.

“When it was so anonymous, I think it was maybe tempting for people that would take five friends to lunch,” she said. Her cashiers began to tell people the suggested value of their meal.

That worked, but poverty researchers discourage that approach. Requiring low-income people to state, face-to-face, that they cannot pay the suggested amount could potentially shame them out of using the cafe at all.

“For some participants, it’s still going to feel like a charitable feeding experience, particularly if there’s something that makes them feel like they are different

PHOTOS BY DIXIE D. VEREEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Pay-what-you-can restaurant owners hope to serve more than just a good meal. from the average diner,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Chilton’s is the first community cafe to be founded by a poverty research center. That’s why, at EAT, the check is simply placed on the table in a traditional black plastic sleeve. There is no volunteering for meal credits.

“The last thing anyone should do is require anyone who’s super poor to volunteer. Give them a job!” Chilton said. “I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to be worthy to come into our place.”

It also perpetuates a stereotype that people who aren’t working are just sitting around all day. “Being poor is a full-time job in itself,” Waxman said.

But the One World board members say the volunteer-for-food model keeps the cafes functioning. Other say it provides job training and a chance for low-income people to work alongside middleclass volunteers.

“I think it gives them a sense of dignity and belonging, where they too have participated in their meal in some way,” said Dorothea Bongiovi, who founded two JBJ Soul Kitchen cafes in New Jersey with her husband, Jon Bon Jovi. Diners can volunteer for one hour in exchange for a free meal for up to four family members. Staff members, some of whom are trained in social work, connect volunteers with other services.

“The food is a vehicle to get

them into the Soul Kitchen to get them resources that they might not be aware of,” she said. Instead of calling it pay-what-you-can, Bongiovi prefers “pay it forward.”

‘You have to love on people’ Aside from profit, loss and the number of meals served, there is little data on these cafes. One study found that when consumers were asked to name the price they would pay for a product, they were less likely to buy it, because they felt bad they could not pay the “appropriate” price. But a broad, multi-restaurant study that examines a community restaurant’s impact on the poor has not yet been undertaken.

“There’s potential for something like this to have a bigger impact than can be mentioned in the profit margin,” said Julia Weinert, assistant director of poverty solutions at the University of Michigan.

Pearson says that for every 100 inquiries the organization receives, only about a dozen cafes actually open, and one-third of all community cafes have closed. Depending on location, he estimates it takes $30,000 to $100,000 to get a cafe off the ground, and then another $50,000 a year to operate it.

Kevin and Mary Bode are aware of the bumpy road ahead as they prepare to open the Knead Cafe in New Kensington, Pa., outside Pittsburgh, this month. They bought and renovated a building

Above left, executive chef Donnell JonesCraven works at the EAT Café in Philadelphia.

Above right, cafe founder Mariana Chilton talks with customer Mathilda Jones in the dining room. The pay-whatyou-can cafe opened in October.

KLMNO WEEKLY

near “some of the poorest blocks in all of Pennsylvania,” said Kevin Bode. Their challenge? Finding a chef with top skills who is also “on board with our mission to help raise somebody up,” Mary Bode said. “The person that we get has to have a servant’s heart.”

As hard as the job is for owners, it’s also tough on chefs. When many of your ingredients come as donations — ground turkey one week, couscous the next — every week’s menu is a “Chopped” challenge. The chef has to be part teacher, part social worker, too.

“You have to love on people, and you don’t have to do it from a distance,” said EAT’s chef, Donnell Jones-Craven.

Some cafes are seeking out high-profile restaurateurs as mentors. EAT Café has partnered with Vetri Community Partnership, a foundation run by famed Philadelphia chef Marc Vetri and restaurateur Jeff Benjamin, author of “Front of the House,” who trained the EAT staff.

Aside from the Vetri involvement, two experimental pay-whatyou-can locations of Panera Bread, and the occasional celebrity guest chef at JBJ Soul Kitchen, the concept has not had much crossover with the corporate and prestige restaurant world. That’s partly because, as the concept scales up, it loses its personal connection — a key factor to its success in small communities.

At the EAT Café on a recent Friday night, the vibrant green dining room was filling up with guests.

When she first learned about the pay-what-you-can concept, “I had never heard of such a thing,” said 87-year-old Calla Cousar, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who joined an advisory panel that Chilton set up to solicit community input. Now, Cousar comes once a week.

As a mentor to local teens, she’s going to start bringing groups of them here for dinner, “so they can eat something other than fast food,” she said. She motioned to the tables, the silverware, the glasses of nicely garnished basil lemonade. “I want to expose them to this.” n

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BOOKS

Regular folks can do research, too N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D EBORAH B LUM

A

CITIZEN SCIENCE How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery

By Caren Cooper Overlook.

294 pp. $28.95

s the daughter of an entomologist, I came to citizen science early. By the time I was in elementary school, I could identify the tiny black ants (Argentine) marching in determined lines down the sidewalk. By the time I was in high school, I was “volunteering” to help study the mating chemistry of bees. “Don’t worry,” my father shouted as I stood in a buzzing cloud of male drones, clutching a balloon bearing an array of come-hither pheromones. “They don’t sting.”

I shut my eyes anyway, but he was right. They didn’t. Male drone bees are designed for reproduction rather than hive defense. And I wasn’t particularly worried — standing in a buzz of bees was just part of my normal life. Or so I sometimes resentfully thought. It was only later that I realized how much the everyday science of my childhood had shaped the way I would see and value the intricate and unexpectedly beautiful weave of life around me.

That kind of illumination is cited in many of the arguments offered today by those promoting citizen participation in scientific research. The movement’s leaders are looking beyond the education of the individual; they also emphasize the way direct participation makes science more accessible to Americans who, many worry, are becoming alienated from the research process.

Further, there are areas of research that require a near-army of data-gatherers. Tracking shifts in bird migration, say, in response to climate change cannot be done without dedicated volunteers.

All of these issues have helped foster an increasingly well- managed array of citizen science projects. Consider, for instance, the rise of websites such as ISeeChange.org, an online “journal” in which everyone adds to a portrait of climate change by detailing change in their own communities — or even back yards.

Or programs such as SciStarter,

ROB O’NEAL/FLORIDA KEYS NEWS BUREAU VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some distant planets and comets were first seen by citizen astronomers. It’s just one example of citizen contributions to science.

which are designed to help people find an intriguing research project or even design one.

And consider the corresponding increase of books on the subject over the past several years. These include Sharman Russell’s lovely “Diary of a Citizen Scientist” and Chandra Clarke’s “Be the Change: Saving the World With Citizen Science,” both from 2014; last spring’s “The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science” by Darlene Cavalier and Eric B. Kennedy; and last fall’s elegant quasi-memoir “Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction” by Mary Ellen Hannibal.

The most recent of these books, Caren Cooper’s “Citizen Science: How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery,” is an engaging overview of the movement written with the energy and the enthusiasm of a crusader for the cause. Cooper, the assistant director of the biodiversity research laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to expand and update the SciStarter program and is a believer in the idea that science should become less insular. “Scientific

practice is an authoritarian system with which to produce trustworthy knowledge,” she writes, “but it doesn’t have to be authoritarian.”

After all, intelligent amateurs have been improving science for centuries. As an early example, Cooper cites the contributions of 17th-century Amsterdam cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, still famed for his dazzling improvements to microscopes of the time. In fact, van Leeuwenhoek not only developed powerful new standards of magnification; he did such detailed studies of microbes (which he called animalcules) that England’s Royal Society recognized him as a researcher of merit.

About a century later, in the 1770s, the American patriot and revolutionary Thomas Jefferson picked up the philosophical torch, organizing a network of volunteers to track climate patterns in his new country. Jefferson, Cooper notes, went on to experiment with the designs of rain gauges and barometers; he “abhorred gaps in his data.” And in past decades, citizen scientists have worked with professional researchers on projects ranging from studying monarch habitat and California wetlands to monitoring East Coast

sea turtles, counting ladybugs and searching the skies for the shimmer of distant stars.

Citizen astronomers, she points out, have on occasion done such pioneering work that it blurs the lines between the concept of amateur and professional; we should remember, Cooper notes, that some distant planets and comets were first sighted by dedicated citizens with good telescopes. “Amateurs are unique among citizen scientists in that they carry out independent research just like professionals do.” Mutual respect is a central point in the book; underneath Cooper’s easy conversational tone is a firm request for more respect and less self-protective arrogance from her fellow scientists.

Citizen contributions should be recognized and respected by the research community, she argues, and not only in astronomy. She cites numerous examples in environmental research, from Inuit work on ice depth in a time of climate change to the online iWitness Pollution Map, which let residents of Louisiana upload information on the impacts of the 2010 BP oil spill, and which continues tracking incidents today.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Cooper sees genuinely revolutionary potential in connecting professional researchers with their citizen counterparts. She also sees the connection as essential to our preservation: “Observing and sharing our observations will become what it means to be a responsible human being residing on planet earth.”

I don’t know that I’d go that far in assessing our future. But she is an excellent advocate for today.

When I finished the book, I decided to check out citizen scientist projects in my area. I’m looking, of course, for one without bees. n Blum is the author of five books, most recently “The Poisoner’s Handbook,” and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.

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War novel inspired

by J.R.R. Tolkien

A long walk helps illuminate Britain

F ICTION

NONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

he phrase “no man’s land” conjures up the zone between opposing trenches on the Western Front of World War I. “No Man’s Land” is also the title of Simon Tolkien’s barnburner of a novel, which, according to its dust jacket, was “inspired by the real-life experiences of his grandfather” in the same war. That would be J.R.R. Tolkien, future Oxford don and author of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

During the war, land was considered “no man’s” in the sense that neither side controlled it; both coveted it, however, and French or British soldiers who ventured into it were likely to be picked off by German snipers (and vice versa). Of all the no man’s lands, perhaps none have been made so much of as the ones along the Somme River, in northeastern France. More than a million men on both sides were wounded or killed there during an epically brutal stalemate that dragged on from early July to mid-November of 1916. The pithy British historian A.J.P. Taylor summed up the fighting this way: “Idealism perished on the Somme.”

Simon Tolkien’s protagonist, Adam Raine, has come a long way to mourn idealism. After his mother’s untimely death in London, Adam was whisked off to a coal-mining town in the north, where his father, an impoverished laborer, had kin. After living for a time with equally poor cousins, he profited from one of those custodial upheavals beloved of Victorian fiction: being taken into the household of a rich man — in this case the local coal magnate, Sir John Scarsdale — not as a servant, as one might expect, but as a kind of third son. Of the two sons by birth, the elder, Seaton, is a paragon who befriended Adam immediately. Then there is the younger, Brice, a spiteful coward who loathes Adam, not least because the parson’s beautiful daughter much prefers him to

Brice’s odious self.

If this sounds soap-operatic, that’s because it is. But in Tolkien’s hands the not-so-fresh scenario becomes engaging, especially when he inserts pungent period details. We visit a “penny sit-up,” a joint where for a penny a homeless man can sleep sitting up in a chair (don’t even think about lying down). And we squirm as young Englishmen are lured into a theater in which a beautiful chanteuse entertains them, flirts with them, and then comes down from the stage to shame the holdouts among them into signing up for the army.

The Great War, in other words, is underway, and Adam, now a student at Oxford, joins up, too.

Over the next hundred pages or so, Tolkien vividly portrays trench warfare, Somme-style, in all its dehumanizing misery. Here, in one of the milder passages, we see how petty rules and poor equipment make the grunts’ lives worse than they need be: “The bread was hard and stale and toasting had become difficult since the adjutant had come down hard on bayonets being used as toasting forks; the tea tasted of the petrol that seeped into the water as it was carried up to the front line each night in old fuel cans; and the flies were getting worse as the weather improved so that the soldiers had to constantly wave their hands over their food as they were cooking or eating it to keep them off.”

Tolkien has a bad habit, however, of not trusting his readers. He often tells us things we’re well aware of.

Nonetheless, “No Man’s Land” holds the reader’s interest, mainly because Simon Tolkien is a careful plotter who keeps his story moving along. In his hands, it becomes a haunting fictionalization of a pivotal episode in a hellish war. n Drabelle is a former contributing editor to The Washington Post’s Book World section.

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NO MAN’S LAND

By Simon Tolkien Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. 578 pp. $27.95

THE MARCHES The Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland

By Rory Stewart Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

354 pp. $27

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REVIEWED BY

H UGH T HOMSON

illiam Wordsworth was ever on the move, composing as he walked.

That he chose to ramble — over his lifetime walking a staggering 175,000 miles — contributed not only to his happiness but to ours. “We are indebted for so much of what is most excellent in his writings” because of his penchant for walking, the essayist Thomas de Quincey once remarked.

In Wordsworth’s day, walking was the act of a radical; it was to ally yourself, as the young poet wanted to do, with the peasant and the peddler. It helped him feel connected to the world and to people, to make an atlas of his feelings and spiritual progression.

Rory Stewart follows in that mold. For his first book, the acclaimed “The Places in Between,” Stewart walked across Afghanistan just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, an adventure that was both brave and revelatory. And this was just the beginning of a far longer walk that saw him cross Pakistan. Next, Stewart, a former soldier and diplomat, went to Iraq, where he was appointed a provincial governor after the 2003 invasion. It was an experience he wrote about memorably in “The Prince of the Marshes,” a sobering account of the fog of ignorance that pervaded the administration of that country.

Now he has come home, so to speak, to Wordsworth country. In “The Marches,” Stewart has written an account of a walk across and around England, beginning with a traverse along Hadrian’s Wall, built when a Roman emperor wanted to keep out migrants. The wall took 20,000 men more than a decade to build and required more stone and labor than the pyramids.

However, and with obvious resonance for the wall that may one day divide Mexico from the United States, he is quick to point out that Hadrian built his more as political symbol than practical barricade. Indeed, archaeologists concur that it was far from effective, was “porous”

and, after a while, may have been most useful as a way of employing otherwise idle troops in wall maintenance.

For much of the walk along Hadrian’s Wall, Stewart is accompanied by his 89-year-old father, an ex-serviceman who injects a bluff candor into the proceedings and is one of the book’s strengths.

With great affection and frankness, Stewart charts their relationship; the book could almost have been subtitled “A Walk Around My Father.” At one point, discussing the wall, the younger Stewart realizes that his father sees it not as a way of keeping the barbarians out — as most commentators do — but as a way, rather like the Berlin Wall, of keeping the Romans in. He had, after all, been a Cold War intelligence officer.

Stewart shows self-deprecating humor throughout, and his prose is always cool and lucid. But there is a lot of it. Just as I suspect that no reader has ever wished that Wordsworth had written more, so here too even the most loyal followers may limp in a little footsore by the end of the day.

The problem with “The Marches” is that, having crossed England coast to coast along Hadrian’s Wall — more than enough for most travel writers — Stewart then embarks on a series of further walks for some 1,000 miles. The accompanying map looks like a spider’s web. Much of what he later encounters is fascinating but not particularly germane.

Still, like Wordsworth, Stewart brings a humane empathy to his encounters with people and landscape. A walk, he believes, is a kind of miracle that can help him learn, like nothing else, about a nation or himself. He is precisely the sort of companion one would want to travel such a route with: informed, engaged and with a great deal of compassion. n Thomson is the author of “The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration of England.”

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OPINIONS

The odd relationship of Belichick and Brady SALLY JENKINS is an American sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She was previously a senior writer for Sports Illustrated.

Given that Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have led the New England Patriots to seven Super Bowls over 17 years, you might expect to find some emotional complexity at the heart of their partnership, if not a bond. But by all accounts the relationship between the quarterback and coach is straightforwardly transactional.

Belichick treats Brady the same way he does every other player: with that distant, flat, emotionless voice straight from the catacombs.

“They have never even gone out to lunch or dinner,” Brady’s father, Tom Sr., said. “That’s not what they do.”

Can it really be true that two men who have shared so much pure winning are so impersonal?

Or are they hiding something?

Surely, behind the scenes, the relationship warms to a nice rapport; there must be an affinity, the gunslinger affection of Butch and Sundance. Or at least the dueling banter of James Bond and his black-ops quartermaster, Q. Instead, the repartee between Brady and Belichick is largely composed of highly technical, heavily operational talk. Except when Belichick is blistering Brady for something in practice, which he does periodically for the benefit of the team. The success of their collaboration rests on two simple understandings, neither of which is particularly deep.

First, they share a workaholic absorption in the tedium of football strategy, a love for cataloging tendencies and almost mechanistic work habits.

Last February, Brady had a digital clock installed in his workout room at home that ticks down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the 2017 Super Bowl, so that he would know “he had exactly 11,325 minutes and 14 seconds to go,” Tom Sr. said.

Second, they share an instinct

that self-deprecation is the heart of real leadership. One of the marvels of their collaboration is that they have been able to fight the corrosions of stardom so consistently and build a culture that, for all of its disparate personalities, is essentially egoless and sublimating. As Brady remarked on his weekly radio show this week, the Patriots are “brainwashed.”

“We have a sign on our wall that says ‘Doing the right thing for the team when it may not be the right thing for you,’ ” Brady said. “And that’s just putting everything aside and ignoring the noise and all the positive things that people may say about you, all the negative things people may say about you and just believing in yourself and not making excuses. . . . I think our coach does a great job of never buying into that B.S. He never makes it about one player; he never makes it about one play. He never makes it about one call or one situation. . . . And he never lets his foot off the gas pedal, so really, when you come to our team, it’s just, you’re brainwashed. It’s just the way it goes.”

But if Belichick is a brainwasher, Brady has been the lead hypnotist. According to close observers, the Patriots’ ethos begins with Brady’s fundamental acquiescence to Belichick’s authority, even when it hurts.

“Players learn from players, and when you walk into that place and watch how Brady conducts his business, you know that’s how you do it there,” says Damon Huard, who served as a

BOB LEVEY/GETTY IMAGES

Bill Belichick and Tom Brady of the New England Patriots stand onstage during Super Bowl LI Opening Night in Houston on Monday.

backup quarterback for the Patriots from 2001 to 2003.

Brady willingly lets Belichick use him as the example, in everything from renegotiating cap-friendly contracts to absorbing Belichick’s scathing sarcasm for mistakes. One team insider notes that no matter how brilliant Belichick’s gameplanning and personnel decisions, “If Brady had a different personality and didn’t buy in and wasn’t this type of leader, it would be difficult.”

According to someone who knows both men, the tone was set during Brady’s rookie season, when he sat impatiently in meetings that would halt while former starter Drew Bledsoe left the room for a bathroom break.

Brady determined then not to be a quarterback who could make a room revolve around him, even unintentionally.

Former players cite example after example in which Brady has served as Belichick’s company man, without resentment. Gary Myers documented in one of his books, “Brady vs Manning, The Untold Story of the Rivalry That Transformed the NFL,” how Belichick would intentionally resist praising Brady for individual records, finally relenting only when he surpassed 50,000 yards.

The message is that Belichick demands from all players equally, and Brady has been

secure enough to accept it.

Brady has told his father that he aims to be “the perfect soldier.”

That doesn’t mean he always has understood his orders, or that there haven’t been clashes. If there is a fundamental difference between the two men, it’s in temperament: Brady is fierce, Belichick famously detached.

Brady has struggled to understand some of Belichick’s cooler roster decisions, how he could discard players who seemed essential or with whom Brady was close, such as Lawyer Milloy, Deion Branch and Logan Mankins.

The relationship works, observers say, because they have a mutual regard for the other as the absolute best in the NFL, and a tacit agreement to stay out of each other’s back yards and disagree without blowing up the organization.

It’s an odd dynamic: an impersonal relationship that has nevertheless steadily defined them personally over the years, until each has become sharply defined as among the greatest ever. A shared determination to build a faceless, egoless organization has made each of them, in his own way, the unmistakable frozen-in-time face of the franchise: Belichick, hooded and inscrutable on the sideline, Brady so poised under center that he seems almost pensive.

“Bookends,” Tom Sr. said.

“Complementary bookends.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

We need a war on secondhand sugar MICHAEL I. GORAN AND EMILY VENTURA Goran is a professor of preventive medicine and pediatrics at the University of Southern California and co-director of the school’s Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute. Ventura is a writer, nutrition educator and public health advocate.

If you saw a pregnant woman smoking, you would undoubtedly be concerned about the health of her child. But if you saw a pregnant woman drinking a soda, would you bat an eye? The comparison may seem extreme, but the parallels between tobacco and sugar run deeper than you might imagine.

There is no debate that secondhand smoke is harmful. Now scientists are discovering similar risks of “secondhand sugars” in infants and children, specifically that our high-sugar environment can harm children’s development and their long-term health.

We are finding that sugar exposure can begin to affect a child even before birth. The sugars that a mother consumes while pregnant or nursing can be passed to her baby, disrupt healthy growth and development, and pose risk for obesity.

Involuntary exposure to sugar can also continue beyond pregnancy and lactation. Infant formula and baby foods often contain added sugar, and many children are exposed to sugary beverages from infancy. One study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , which followed the diets of 1,189 infants over six years, showed that those who were given sugary beverages just three times per week at 10 to 12 months of age had twice the risk of becoming obese.

Children are too young to make

informed eating choices and are exposed to aggressive marketing campaigns for sweet foods. Once school-age, many children — especially those from low-income families — rely on public school meal programs, which are often high in sugar. A child can easily grow up in an environment loaded with sugar, creating a foundation for obesity and the associated risk of disease.

Does this all seem alarmist?

Isn’t sugar just the most recent nutritional villain? In reality, the situation with sugar and kids has gotten out of control, and we are starting to understand the repercussions. Certain types of sugar — especially fructose and artificial sweeteners, which have dramatically increased in our diet within the last generation — are particularly damaging during

critical periods of growth and development in children.

Fructose is commonly thought of as healthy because it is found in fruit. But consumption of beverages made with high fructose corn syrup and fruit juice concentrates deliver a much higher level of fructose than in a piece of whole fruit. In an animal study conducted by our collaborators at the University of Southern California, we found that higher levels of fructose consumption caused cognitive impairments and inflammation in the brain — but only when sugars were consumed during the animals’ adolescent growth periods.

Another study currently undergoing peer review from USC, in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, found that fructose was detectable in breast milk and was the only sugar in breast milk associated with obesity in infants. This is important to consider because, from an evolutionary perspective, fructose is not naturally present in breast milk and infants are not designed to handle it.

Similarly, while we have limited information about how artificial sweeteners affect childhood development, we do know that they present another source of potentially dangerous

secondhand sugars. A recent study from Canada including more than 3,000 women showed that consuming diet soda during pregnancy doubled their infants’ chances of becoming overweight.

Only after acknowledging that sugars have secondhand effects in infants and children can we take action to protect these vulnerable bystanders. The realization that secondhand smoke increased cancer risk in nonsmokers led to public-health programs that have greatly benefited our nation’s health by changing cultural norms and reducing smoking behaviors. We need a similar level of attention given to the prevention of secondhand sugars.

It’s clear that obesity starts with non-volitional exposure to sugar in the womb and during critical periods of development.

New policies and educational programs for pregnant women, new mothers and children can be designed to specifically prevent sugar exposure, not only in the home but also at school and in other public settings. We also need the food and beverage industry to step up and develop safer and healthier products that avoid harm to children. Only through responsible business practices can we prevent obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases in the next generation. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017

22

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Trump could reverse Iraq progress JOHN ALLEN AND MICHAEL O’HANLON are senior fellows at the Brookings Institution.

Allen, a retired Marine Corps general, led the international coalition to counter the Islamic State from 2014 to 2015.

Though he campaigned with the urgent goal of defeating the Islamic State and reasserting American greatness, President Trump has embarked on a policy that could in fact lead to the loss of U.S. influence in Iraq and the worsening of the Sunni-Shiite divide there. Whatever happens in the short term in the fight to liberate Mosul and other parts of the country from the Islamic State, this policy could lay the groundwork for the emergence of another similar Salafist group there. If that happens, Trump will have taken us backward, not forward, in the fight against terrorism and seriously eroded our role in a key Arab state that so many Americans gave so much to free and then to help stabilize.

The immediate cause of our concern is the recent executive order that prevented the movement of most Iraqis to the United States — including some who served and sacrificed alongside U.S. forces in the war there — along with citizens of six other nations in the region.

But in fact the problem is broader and deeper.

First, there were the frequent whiffs of Islamophobia from the Trump campaign and national security adviser Michael Flynn’s harsh critiques of Islam. Both Trump and Flynn are using more moderate rhetoric now — and the more moderate words may in fact reflect their true attitudes.

Certainly, in working with Flynn over the years, neither of us saw Islamophobia in his thinking when he was in uniform. Indeed,

his measured analysis of the Salafist threat made important contributions to the defeat of alQaeda in Iraq and in our operations against the Taliban.

But the harsher words from the campaign, and Flynn’s book, are widely known. They help to create a highly combustible atmosphere in which new decisions such as the recent executive order will be interpreted. This bell cannot be unrung without determined outreach by the White House to Muslims in the United States and around the world.

Second was Trump resurfacing his position that the United States should seize Iraqi oil because it underwrote the Islamic State’s war-making capabilities. He is apparently tone-deaf to the global reaction to this kind of “to the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY HALL

victor goes the spoils” talk, much less the Iraqi reaction.

Moreover, on the specifics of the argument, Trump is incorrect.

Iraqi oil fields contributed almost nothing to the Islamic State’s revenue stream, as the vast majority of oil-related funds have come from Syrian fields, and in particular sales of oil back to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, pillage (this is the legal term for it) of Iraqi oil is simply illegal under international law. The other week, Iraqis were furious over this repeated call by Trump, with some even girding themselves to fight to defend their sovereign natural resource.

If Trump decided to seize the oil, one thing such a mission would probably manage to do, beyond utterly inflaming the region, is unite Iraqis in a common cause heretofore elusive: We’d be fighting Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all at once.

U.S. officials report that Trump’s travel ban and his call for seizing the oil fields have severely undercut the credibility of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and could cause his government to fall. There is no telling what could come after Abadi, but with the critical Mosul battle reaching the final furlong, Iraqi Shiite leaders may decide they can clear all that remains of the Islamic

State from Iraq without U.S. help, leaning instead on Iran and Russia — as they’ve seen occur in Syria. This may not work. Even if it does, it is exactly what many of the Shiite Iraqi nationalists have wanted all along. A tactical success against the Islamic State could, as noted, immediately begin to sow the ground for the return of a future extremist, Salafist force given the likely resentment among Sunnis that would ensue.

It does not end there. Iran also says it will retaliate against the United States for the travel ban. At a practical level, this could easily play out in Iran simply unleashing the extremist Shiite militias to attack Americans in Iraq.

At the very moment that Trump has sought to up the game against the Islamic State, his words and actions treat Iraq and Iraqis as though they’re irrelevant to the defeat of this organization.

For all the ups and downs in Iraq over the past 14 years, we do have a friendly government of national unity (more or less) in Iraq right now, and it is controlling most of its own territory against various extremist forces while gradually restoring stability to the nation.

All of that is now at new acute risk not from the Islamic State, Syria or Moscow, but from Washington. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The White House Press Corps BY

G EORGE E . C ONDON J R.

White House reporters are promising to hold the new president, like his predecessors, to account. But relations are tense, fueled partly by the administration’s desire to weaken a group it has called an “oppo­ sition party” and partly by misunderstandings about the beat. Here are five of those misunderstandings.

MYTH NO. 1 The daily briefing is a waste of time.

It is true that the briefings can be boring. Ida Tarbell wrote about those early briefings in 1898, noting that they were conducted by presidential secretary John Addison Porter around a table at 10 p.m. “They gather around Secretary Porter for a kind of family talk, he discussing with them whatever of the events of the day he thinks wise to discuss.”

Then and now, no reporter would ever base any story solely on what was said in the briefing.

But it is still vital to a democracy that a representative of the president present himself every day. Everyone benefits when the government has to face that daily ordeal. It was at a White House briefing that Press Secretary Ron Ziegler on April 17, 1973, was forced to backtrack on months of Watergate evasions and declare his previous statements “inoperative.” It was at White House briefings that press secretaries for George W. Bush had to try to explain why no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And it was at White House briefings that Jay Carney was forced to explain the problems with the healthcare.gov website.

MYTH NO. 2 White House reporters needlessly cling to tradition.

Today’s reporters have worked with administrations of both parties to find better ways — collaborating on travel schedules, cost-cutting measures and which charter flights reporters use.

Contrary to what presidential aides have suggested, the correspondents’ association has not blocked access to any accredited reporters and has not kept them out of the briefing room. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus seems to think the 49 assigned seats in the room are set in stone and doled out to longestablished media outlets. In fact, 20 of the 49 seats are held either by news organizations that didn’t exist when the seats were first assigned in 1981 or by organizations new to covering the White House. Those include Yahoo News, SiriusXM, Salem Radio Network, the Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Bloomberg News, Fox News, BuzzFeed and Politico.

MYTH NO. 3 It’s the most glamorous beat in Washington.

Reporters still fight for the White House assignment, with its extensive foreign travel, frequent stories on Page One and all the airtime a TV correspondent could crave.

But there’s often nothing splendid about the work.

Correspondents endure unexplained odors and recurring rodent infestations. My desk in the White House basement has suffered through frequent flooding. Then there are the hours spent at White House stakeouts in the rain, snow and heat, never certain if a visiting lawmaker will deign to come out.

Or the nights spent in vans on pool duty (a tedious job in which reporters take turns recording the comings and goings for the

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

White House press secretary Sean Spicer takes questions at a news briefing in January. Daily briefings, though often routine, have value.

rest of the press corps that couldn’t be on site).

MYTH NO. 4 Reporters are always with the president, so he has no privacy.

Reporters are not asking to be at a restaurant table with the president’s family members. They are asking to know where a president is if he leaves the White House grounds. No one knows when a crisis will develop; no one knows when a motorcade will be in an accident; no one knows when a president will take ill; no one knows when an aide will whisper to the leader of the free world, as one did on Sept. 11, 2001, that “America is under attack.” A pool is there to provide information to the public so there’s no confusion when a terrorist strikes or a president collapses.

MYTH NO. 5 It doesn’t matter where the press quarters are.

Last month, Esquire reported that the new administration was looking for ways to evict the press from its West Wing offices.

Various administration officials said they would actually be doing

the press a favor, freeing them of their cramped quarters and noting that they still would be on the 18-acre White House campus.

This sounds reassuring only if you don’t understand the importance of proximity to the White House press offices and the restrictions already slapped on correspondents. While they reported throughout the White House campus before the Reagan administration, today they can reach only the press offices. And tight space is never a lasting concern. These are the early days of a new presidency, but soon the novelty will wear off — it always does — and the financial realities of covering the White House will set in for news organizations.

Where today you see reporters crammed in for the daily briefing, tomorrow you will see empty seats. And those who remain will write better, more accurate, more comprehensive stories in part because of the access they retain. n Condon Jr., the White House correspondent for National Journal, has covered the White House since 1982 and is a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2017