The Washington Post National Weekly - February 11, 2018

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2018

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THE SKY’S THE LIMIT Korean American snowboarder Chloe Kim is in position to soar at the 2018 Winter Games.

Politics From spy to flash point 4

World A reckoning with slavery 10

Retropolis When the Wall fell 23

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THE FIX

The case for a military parade BY

C ALLUM B ORCHERS

D

ays before he emceed Washington’s last military parade in 1991, “Today” show star Willard Scott sat for an interview on CNN and delivered a message to critics of the event and its $12 million price tag.

“Everybody has a right to their own opinion,” Scott said. But, he added, “the majority of people,” himself included, “desperately want to show some kind of appreciation and respect. And patriotism is really nothing more than pride, and pride is respect, and I don’t see anything at all wrong with it.”

This past week, The Post reported that President Trump has directed the Pentagon to plan a similar showcase of military might. And the president is surely hoping for the same kind of flag-waving media coverage that went along with President George H.W. Bush’s tribute to Operation Desert Storm 27 years ago.

“In the heady atmosphere of triumph, the media’s much-vaunted detachment has gone out the window,” Jeff Greenfield, then a correspondent for ABC’s “Nightline,” observed in a telecast on the night before the parade.

“From the corporate sponsors, from the press, from the president of the United States comes the same message,” Greenfield added: “These huge celebrations are to welcome home the men and women who helped produce the most sweeping, decisive U.S. military victory in nearly half a century.”

If Trump’s vision becomes reality, expect him to borrow from this old script. Trump recently said it was “un-American” and maybe even “treasonous” (the latter comment being a joke, supposedly) for Democrats not to stand and applaud certain lines in his State of the Union address. Imagine what he will say about anyone who does not cheer a heavily armed celebration of U.S. troops.

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DOUG MILLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

RON EDMONDS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Troops march over the Memorial Bridge in Washington during the National Victory Day Parade on June 8, 1991. At left, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and President Bush watch in the reviewing stand after Schwarzkopf led his troops.

For Trump, media consultant to himself, the beauty of a military parade is that even reporting that attempts to be purely descriptive will project the strong image he desires.

Consider the scenes depicted in major newspapers in 1991.

“Stealth fighter planes zoomed overhead, tanks and Patriot missiles rolled by and more than 8,000 battle-clad troops marched past a beaming President Bush in a display of the American military might that crushed Iraq in 43 days,” read a Los Angeles Times article.

The Washington Post reported that “a Harrier jet and a formation of helicopters blew

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 18

gravel, and a few minds, as they landed on the grass between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.”

Such reports didn’t necessarily present Bush’s parade as a good idea. “Indentations in the streets” are a public works headache, and The Post article went on to quote a helicopter pilot who said, “I think we blew away some joggers and sandblasted a few cars.”

Nevertheless, the spectacles portrayed in the press were undeniably impressive — and will be again in 2018, if Trump goes through with his parade plan. n

© The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY NUTRITION BOOKS OPINION RETROPOLIS

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ON THE COVER Chloe Kim competes in the final round of the ladies’ snowboard halfpipe during the Toyota U.S. Grand Prix on Jan. 20 in Mammoth, Calif. Photograph

by SEAN M. HAFFEY, Getty Images

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POLITICS

Was former spy a hero or hired gun?

BY T OM H AMBURGER AND R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN

I

n the fall of 2016, a little more than a month before Donald Trump was elected president, Christopher Steele had the undivided attention of the FBI. For months, the British former spy had been working to alert the Americans to what he believed were disturbing ties Trump had to Russia. He had grown so worried about what he had learned from his Russia network about the Kremlin’s plans that he told colleagues it was like “sitting on a nuclear weapon.”

He was now being summoned to Rome, where he spent hours in a discreet location telling four American officials — some of whom had flown in from the United States — about his findings.

The Russians had damaging information about Trump’s personal behavior and finances that could be used to pressure the GOP nominee. What’s more, the Kremlin was now carrying out an operation with the Trump campaign’s help to tilt the U.S. election — a plot Steele had been told was ordered by President Vladimir Putin.

The FBI investigators treated Steele as a peer, a Russia expert so well-trusted that he had assisted the Justice Department on past cases and provided briefing material for British prime ministers and at least one U.S. president.

During intense questioning that day in Rome, they alluded to some of their own findings of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign and raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day, according to people familiar with the discussion.

But Steele was not one of them.

He had left the famed Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, seven years earlier and was now working on behalf of Fusion GPS, a private Washington research firm whose work at the time was funded by Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party.

The meeting in Rome captured the unusual and complicated role of Steele, who wrote memos that

How the Steele dossier was compiled Christopher Steele is a British former intelligence officer who was hired by the Washington research firm Fusion GPS in June 2016 to investigate Donald Trump's ties to Russia. The 17 reports he filed — collectively known as the dossier — alleged that the Russians had compromising material on Trump and that they sought to tilt the election in his favor. Trump has denied the allegations in the dossier. However, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Russians engaged in an elaborate operation to swing the election to Trump.

LATE 2015 SPRING 2016 Conservative Contract switches to publication hires law firm paid by DNC, Clinton campaign Fusion GPS

JUNE 2016 Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele

JULY AND OCT. 2016 Steele briefs FBI agents

NOV. 2016 Trump wins election

JAN. 10, 2017 BuzzFeed publishes dossier of Steele reports

Steele compiles reports on Trump and Russia Detail below JULY 19 Alleges Trump adviser Carter Page met with Russian officials.

JUNE 20, 2016 First report after Steele is hired by Fusion.

Alleges Russians have compromising material on Trump.

JULY 5 Steele meets with FBI agent in London.

AUG. 10 Argues the Kremlin was pleased with the internal divisions they were sowing in U.S. electorate.

JULY 30 Describes Russian unease over U.S. election operation.

JULY 26 Describes large Russian hacking operation.

Sources: Post reporting and news reports

came to be known as “the dossier” and who has become the central point of contention in the political brawl raging around the Russia inquiry by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Those who believe Steele consider him a hero, a latter-day Paul Revere who, at personal risk, tried to provide an early warning about the Kremlin’s unprecedented meddling in a U.S. campaign.

Those who distrust him say he is merely a hired gun leading a political attack on Trump.

Steele struggled to navigate dual obligations — to his private clients, who were paying him to help Clinton win, and to a sense of public duty born of his previous life.

Sir Andrew Wood, a British former diplomat and friend of Steele, said he urged him in the fall of

AUG. 10 Describes effort to turn Bernie Sanders voters to Trump.

Each icon is a report filed by Steele to Fusion GPS

OCT. 31 Mother Jones reports on former spy who provided memos to FBI. NOV. 8 OCT. 12 Trump wins Says Putin was the election. angry about how the operation was progressing.

SEPT. 14 OCT. 3 Alleges Trump Steele briefs paid bribes FBI agents and engaged in Rome. in compromising personal behavior.

OCT. 19 Claims Trump lawyer Michael Cohen helped connect Trump’s team and Moscow, which Cohen has denied.

DEC. 13 Steele files his final report.

ROSALIND S. HELDERMAN, TOM HAMBURGER, KEVIN UHRMACHER AND JOHN MUYSKENS/THE WASHINGTON POST

2016 to alert the authorities. “The right sort of people” needed to be told, Wood said he told Steele. “My opinion was, ‘You don’t have a choice. At least, you don’t have an honorable choice.’ ” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, offered a competing argument: “You can be an FBI informant. You can be a political operative. But you can’t be both, particularly at the same time.”

Among Steele’s actions now under scrutiny is his decision to forward to the FBI — along with his own research — a separate report detailing uncorroborated allegations about Trump’s behavior that had been written by a longtime Clinton friend.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment. Steele, who is facing

Steele struggled to navigate political, public duties

libel lawsuits by people named in the dossier of research he compiled, declined to comment.

This portrait of Steele’s work is drawn from interviews with his friends and associates, former intelligence colleagues, court documents, congressional testimony and people familiar with the ongoing Russia investigations.

More than a year after the dossier’s completion, it remains unclear whether authorities have corroborated Steele’s specific allegations about Trump’s connections to Russia — including titillating claims that the Russians have compromising information about the president. Trump has denied Steele’s charges. However, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Russians engaged in an elaborate operation to swing the election to Trump.

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POLITICS Steele, 53, has said little publicly since he was identified more than a year ago as the author of the dossier. Friends and former colleagues said he has been dismayed by the attacks on him, particularly a criminal referral about his actions that two U.S. senators made to the Justice Department, accusing him of lying about his contacts with news organizations. The move was viewed by some British lawmakers and longtime intelligence officials as an affront to the special bond between the United States and Britain.

Recently, House Republicans released a memo alleging that the Justice Department overly relied on Steele’s research in an application to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page and did not adequately disclose Steele’s partisan ties to the court.

Democratic lawmakers rejected those claims, saying the GOP document inflates the role Steele’s information played in the warrant. And intelligence officials have said the court was told that some of the research in the warrant application was paid for by a political entity.

The president has seized on Steele’s role as evidence that Mueller’s entire investigation is tainted.

“This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” he tweeted last Saturday. “But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on.”

Those who know Steele say he grew increasingly alarmed about the prospect of the election of a U.S. president who he believed could be unduly swayed by Moscow. As his anxiety drove him to reach out to the FBI, he also met with journalists from several news organizations, including The Washington Post.

‘He’s the spy’ Steele had all the right credentials for the job.

He was steeped in Russia early on after being recruited to Britain’s elite spy service from the University of Cambridge. He spent two decades working for the MI6 spy agency, including a stint in his mid-20s in Moscow, where he served undercover in the British Embassy.

When he returned to work for the agency in London, he provided briefing materials on Russia for senior government officials and led the British inquiry into the mysterious 2006 death in London

VICTORIA JONES/PA WIRE

Christopher Steele has become a key point of contention in the political brawl surrounding the special counsel’s Russia inquiry.

of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB official and Putin critic.

In 2009, after more than two decades in public service, Steele turned to the private sector and founded a London-based consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, drawing on the reputation and network he developed doing intelligence work.

In one of his first cases as a private consultant, Steele worked closely with the FBI in its investigation of corruption at FIFA, the powerful worldwide soccer governing body. Steele, who at the time was working for the English Football Association, shared his research with top officials at the Justice Department. U.S. officials eventually charged 14 top soccer executives and their associates with wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering.

In June 2016, Steele was contacted by Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and co-founder of Fusion GPS. Simpson had an intriguing offer: Would Steele’s firm help research Trump’s ties to Russia?

Simpson’s firm had been looking into Trump’s history as a businessman, including his work in Russia, for months — first for the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that is funded in part by GOP hedge fund executive Paul Singer. After that arrangement ended in the spring, the law firm Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS to continue the work on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Most of Simpson’s research was based on scouring public records, court filings and media reports from around the world.

Steele brought far more: He was able to tap a network of human sources cultivated over decades of Russia work. He moved quickly, reaching out to Russian contacts and others he referred to as “collectors” who had other sources — some of whom had no idea their comments would be passed along to Steele.

His sources included “a close associate of Trump,” as well as “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure” and a “former top-level Russian intelligence officer,” both of whom Steele indicated had revealed their information to a “trusted compatriot,” he later reported to Fusion GPS. Just weeks after taking the case, Steele told friends that the initial intelligence he had gathered was “hair-raising.”

Trump allegedly had been compromised by video evidence of encounters with prostitutes, Steele’s reports said. And he had been wooed by Russian financial inducements, including opportunities to develop Trump buildings in the former Soviet Union and lucrative real estate deals with Russian buyers of his properties.

Steele wrote up his initial findings in late June in the first of 17 memos that later would be known as the dossier.

In short order, Steele made another fateful decision: that he needed to confide in U.S. law enforcement officials. He contacted a Rome-based FBI official with whom he had worked on the FIFA case and asked him to visit him in London in July, according to people familiar with the matter.

Steele told Simpson of his plan to meet with the FBI, describing it as an obligation rooted in his past

work for the British government. “ ‘I’m a former intelligence officer, and we’re your closest ally,’ ” Steele told Simpson, according to testimony Simpson later gave to the House Intelligence Committee. “ ‘You know, I have obligations, professional obligations. If there’s a national security emergency or possible national security issue, I should report it.’ ” Simpson said he did not question Steele’s judgment: “He’s the spy,” Simpson said. “I’m the exjournalist.” Simpson declined to comment to The Post.

On July 5, 2016, the Rome-based FBI agent met with Steele in Orbis’s London offices.

Dossier goes public During a later meeting with four FBI officials in Rome, Steele gleaned that the bureau had independently developed information that appeared to match some of his reports.

Weeks after the Rome meeting, the Justice Department incorporated some of Steele’s research into its secret application for a warrant to surveil Page.

Republican congressional investigators are now exploring whether Steele’s research was shaped by information gathered

by Clinton allies or if the Russians may have given him incorrect information, according to people with knowledge of their inquiries.

On Oct. 31, Mother Jones published a story by David Corn headlined, “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

The story did not name Steele, but it was based on information he shared, Corn later reported.

Then Trump won.

Steele’s role would soon emerge publicly. BuzzFeed published the dossier, and the Wall Street Journal identified him as the author.

Steele went into hiding, leaving his London home with his family for six weeks.

He reemerged in March, speaking briefly outside his office to thank supporters. “I won’t be making any further statements or comments at this time,” Steele said.

He has not been heard from publicly since. But in September, according to people familiar with his activities, Steele spent two days behind closed doors, talking to Mueller’s investigators. n ©The Washington Post

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STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA WIRE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6 and Steele’s former boss, called Steele a “go-to person on Russia.”

SERGEI KARPUKHIN/REUTERS

Sir Andrew Wood, a British former ambassador to Moscow, urged Steele in the fall of 2016 to tell authorities about his findings.

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NATION

At the Wall, a dilemma over remains BY

M ICHAEL E . R UANE

W

hen Vietnam veteran Gordon J. Castro died six years ago, his older brother, Leon, had him cremated and placed his remains in a specially inscribed, stainless-steel box.

He glued on Gordon’s Purple Heart medal, his silver and blue Combat Infantryman Badge and a 1st Cavalry Division insignia.

Then he got into his Ford pickup, put the box on the passenger seat and drove from Corpus Christi, Tex., to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington to fulfill his brother’s wish that he be laid to rest at the Wall.

Gordon Castro’s remains are among scores that have been left at the Wall over the years, in gestures of devotion, but in a practice the National Park Service is now trying to stop.

With an aging population of Vietnam veterans, the 50th anniversary of the worst year of fighting and Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s powerful Vietnam War documentary, the Park Service said, there has been an increase in remains being left.

“It’s been happening for years and years,” said Janet Folkerts, a Park Service curator. “But it’s becoming more and more of an issue. . . . It’s something that we have to definitely deal with.”

This past fall, signs were erected at the Wall telling visitors that human remains “and associated objects” should not be left or scattered there, or anywhere on the Mall.

Leaving mementos at the Wall has been a tradition since the polished stone memorial bearing the names of the 58,000 Vietnam War dead was dedicated in 1982.

Hundreds of thousands of letters, photographs, jungle boots, stuffed animals, sculptures, dog tags, college rings, a motorcycle, cigars, a piece of a helicopter rotor blade and human remains have been left.

The artifacts are gathered and stored in the Park Service’s large Museum Resource Center in Maryland. The human cremains

MICHAEL RUANE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Park Service struggles to discourage people from placing Vietnam vets’ ashes at D.C. memorial are kept in a locked metal cabinet with the windows papered over.

About 70 cremains — some in containers, some scattered — have been left at the Wall over the years, said Folkerts, a curator at the resource center. The first were left in 1990, she said. The most recent appeared several weeks ago. Thirty-one have been left in the past five years, including five in 2017.

Dick Lundskow’s family and friends left two small manila packets there this past Memorial Day. He wasn’t a veteran but was devoted to veterans’ causes, his daughter Angela Childers said, and would have wanted part of him left there.

Some cremains are in wooden, glass or metal urns. Some are in small pill-style boxes. Some are in plastic bags or Tupperware containers, according to a Park Service list.

Many of the containers are not marked with a name, said Laura

Anderson, curator for the Mall and Memorial Parks.

“We don’t have a way of knowing if it’s even a Vietnam vet,” she said. “Some of them could be other family members. They could be veterans from other wars. . . . We don’t know.”

Spokesman Mike Litterst said the remains can’t be added to the Park Service’s official collections.

“We’re not permitted,” he said.

“And right now, we don’t have an answer for what to do with these remains. But we do know that they won’t become part of the collections.”

Anderson, in an interview at the resource center last month, said: “We’ve been talking for a long time now about what to do about it . . . trying to come up with a policy for how we want to handle this.

“Because we’re not really equipped,” she said. “I imagine it’s a big decision — what do you do with your loved one — especially

This box contains the ashes of Gordon J. Castro. His brother, Leon, drove from Texas to place it at the Wall after Gordon told him he had “left the better part of himself” in Vietnam.

if somebody is asking to be left here. You want to honor those wishes. But we’re not allowed to accept them.”

Most parks do allow the scattering of remains under certain circumstances and with a permit.

But rules vary from park to park, according to regulations provided by Litterst.

Shenandoah National Park allows scattering but does not allow urns.

At Pearl Harbor, cremains of survivors of the World War II attack on the USS Arizona can be placed in urns aboard the sunken wreck. And the ashes of Pearl Harbor attack survivors can be spread in the harbor.

“A lot of Vietnam veterans feel very connected to the memorial,” Folkerts said. “It speaks to them in a way that many other places in the country don’t. So they would like to become part of it.”

Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the Wall, said in a email: “Many veterans and their families want ashes spread at THE WALL and will do as they please.

The vets want to be reunited with those who they remember as ‘forever young’ who laid down their lives in Vietnam, and to ease their pain that time cannot heal.”

Leon Castro, 70, said that in the final months of his brother’s life, Gordon abruptly announced he wanted his cremains left at the Wall.

Both men had served in Vietnam but had rarely talked about their experiences, he said in a telephone interview from Corpus Christi. The men and their sister, Linda, had been raised there by a single mother who worked as a secretary.

Leon, a retired carpenter, had gone to Vietnam first, serving in 1966 and 1967.

Gordon entered the Army and served in the infantry with the 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1970 and ’71. He was once wounded by shrapnel in a mortar attack, Leon said.

He lived in Victoria, Tex., and worked at a nearby Alcoa plant.

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NATION His sister said he was a gentle person who played the violin and did fine woodworking. He had been married and divorced twice and had no children.

But the brothers were very close.

“We didn’t have a father and grew up fairly poor,” Leon said.

Later, “we’d go ride motorcycles all over.”

When Gordon got sick, he asked to be cremated, Leon said.

And “one day, out of the blue, said he wanted me to take his . . . remains and leave them on the Wall.”

“I didn’t quite understand it,” he said. “Trying to figure out why he wanted that, I asked him, and he just said he felt he left the better part of himself ” in Vietnam. “He kind of felt he died there, sort of.”

His sister said he had made an emotional visit to the Wall several years ago and took rubbings of the names of friends.

Gordon died April 20, 2012, age 61.

Leon had the box specially fabricated and engraved. He drove the 1,600 miles from Corpus Christi to Washington in his red pickup. It was a two-day drive. He said he didn’t feel alone: “My brother was with me.”

He said he stayed in a hotel in Virginia and took a cab to the Wall.

“It was hard to leave him there,” he said, his voice breaking.

“I preferred to keep him close, but that’s what he wanted.”

Leon put the box down near the center of the Wall and walked away. Feeling a pang, he went back and picked it up, but then put it down again and left.

“I look at this as a homecoming,” he wrote in a note he put with the box.

Leon Castro said he had called someone in the Park Service, he believes at the resource center, before he made the trip from Texas. He said he was told that it was okay to leave the remains.

Litterst, the Park Service spokesman, said that person was mistaken or misinformed.

Asked about the agency’s new effort to halt the practice, Leon Castro said in an email: “It is understandable. Caring for the cremains of those Vets left at the Wall is an eternal responsibility.” © The Washington Post

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Cities, states work to clear marijuana convictions BY

K ATIE Z EZIMA

W

hen California voters passed a measure in 2016 that legalized cannabis and allowed people to have their marijuana convictions wiped away or reduced, San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan ordered her staff to immediately start scouring the city’s criminal records to find people who qualified.

NOAH BERGER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sheriff’s deputy in Calaveras County, Calif., arrests a man on suspicion of cultivating marijuana last year. Laws in states that have decriminalized marijuana sometimes collide with federal law.

As marijuana becomes legal in more states, some are allowing people to ask to have their old marijuana convictions expunged or reduced. It is, proponents say, a way to atone for a war on drugs that disproportionately affected low-income and minority communities and to ensure that the criminal records people carry are not out of sync with current laws.

It also attempts to get to the root of a complex legal question: What happens when people have a conviction on their record for an act that is no longer illegal?

“If you’ve made a legislative determination that this is no longer criminal, why would you want to continue to have people feeling the ramifications of something that people going forward will no longer have to suffer?” said Jenny Roberts, an American University law professor.

At least nine states, including Colorado, Maryland and Oregon, have made it easier to have some marijuana charges sealed or thrown out completely. Recre-

ational marijuana use is legal in some, but not all, of those states.

Colorado last year approved a bill that allows people convicted of misdemeanor marijuana possession before Dec. 10, 2012, to petition to have their convictions sealed.

In Oregon, lawmakers stated that judges must take the current law — which says that possessing and selling marijuana is legal — into account when they consider whether to change a person’s criminal record. In Maryland, people convicted of marijuana possession can petition a court for expungement.

In most places, people must specifically request to have their records expunged, a process that can be costly and time-consuming. Though the laws largely aimed to help low-income people, there is concern that the petitioning process makes it more difficult, and therefore less likely, that they will move to have their records changed.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón recently announced that his office will clear all marijuana misdemeanor convictions dating to 1975 and review all felony convictions to see if they are eligible for a reduction.

“California voters have clearly sent a message,” he said. “The war on drugs has been a failure, and more specifically, the war on marijuana has been a failure.”

Gascón said he is concerned about how U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is handling federal marijuana policy. Sessions last month rescinded Obama-era guidance that eased the federal enforcement of marijuana.

“It’s really a question of states’ rights,” Gascón said. “I’m very disturbed and concerned about the national trend.”

A spokesman for Sessions declined to comment.

Gascón estimates that about 3,000 people will be eligible to have their convictions vacated and about 5,000 will be eligible to have their cases reviewed for possible reduction.

Prosecutors can decide not to support a reduction if a person has a major felony, such as murder, on their record. Old convictions will be reclassified under the law as it reads now. For example, if someone had been convicted of possessing an ounce or less of marijuana, that conviction would be tossed out because that is now legal under California law.

California Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) introduced a bill that would require automatic expungement of records.

In San Diego County, Stephan ordered attorneys to look at cases shortly after voters passed the ballot initiative in November 2016, when the expungement provisions took effect. Prosecutors first looked at people in prison, then at those who were recently convicted, recommending their cases to public defenders.

They worked “backward, with the idea that persons that received their convictions more recently might be directly impacted in terms of their ability to look for jobs or have informal probation, housing benefits, military, other things,” she said.

About 680 people have had their convictions lessened, 55 of whom are behind bars, Stephan said. She believes there are about 5,000 people who are eligible to have their convictions changed.

“Our hope is that they will take advantage of it and use it to reintegrate and enter society without the burden of having a felony conviction,” she said.

Most of the sentencing laws are tied to the legalization of marijuana, something that Kevin Sabet, the founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalization, said shouldn’t be the case.

“People deserve a second chance, and we shouldn’t penalize people for past convictions, but it shouldn’t take having to legalize — and commercialize — marijuana for that to happen,” he said. “This is a false choice between legalization and criminalization.” n © The Washington Post

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COVER STORY PYEONGCHANG 2018

Fresh face of the Games

BY RICK MAESE

C

hloe Kim’s appeal is easy to understand. With a snowboard strapped to her feet, she can twirl and flip and generally send eyeballs rattling in sockets better than any teenage girl who has ever set foot on snow. A four-time X Games champion, she already might be an Olympic medalist if rules didn’t bar her from competing at the Sochi Games four years ago as a 13-year-old.

But talent is only part of the equation. Kim comes equipped with a bubbly personality —

candid, eager and relatable — and a Korean heritage that makes her marketable at home and abroad. NBC long ago tabbed her as one of the faces of the PyeongChang Games, featuring her in a promotion that aired during the Super Bowl. Nike plans to feature her in a campaign on the ground in South Korea this month, and among her myriad sponsors is a South Korean-based cosmetics company. Oh, and she speaks English, French and Korean.

“You’d be hard-pressed to create a more promising brand spokeswoman in a lab,” Sports Business Journal declared this month.

members gathering around the PyeongChang halfpipe. Despite her close ties to the host nation, Kim feels little internal struggle over cultural identity.

“I’m so used to America, used to the traffic in L.A., and I don’t really feel it click with the Korean culture,” she explained recently. “But obviously I have a Korean face, and I feel like that’s just — you know, I can’t walk around people like I’m like straight-up American. It’s like, I’m Korean American. My parents are from Korea.

“I don’t know. It’s weird. I just grew up in the States, so I feel like I identify more with the American culture.”

Identity is always a curious thing at the Olympics, especially as nations increasingly recruit athletes from around the globe, sometimes with only tenuous ties to their country.

That Jamaican bobsled team competing in PyeongChang? One member is from New Jersey. The Nigerian sled will feature women from Texas, Illinois and Minnesota. The South Koreans will field nearly 20 athletes from other countries, and about three dozen U.S.-born athletes will be representing other nations at these Olympics.

There’s little confusion for Kim, the chatty SoCal teen with blond highlights, active social media presence and unlimited athletic potential whom the world is about to meet.

“I always get the question, like, ‘Where are you from?’ L.A. ‘No, where are you really from?’

I was born in Long Beach. ‘No, no, like, where are you really, really from?’ ” she said. “. . . I always get that question. It’s never, like, my first answer would be, ‘I’m from Korea,’ or like, ‘I’m Korean.’ It’s always like, ‘I’m American.’ ”

SEAN M. HAFFEY/GETTY IMAGES

How unique and marketable is she? Consider this: Kim obtained her California driving permit in November 2015. Barely five months passed before she signed a major sponsorship deal with Toyota, just days after her 16th birthday.

Kim, now 17, could emerge from these Olympics as a transcendent athlete — in the vein of a young Shaun White or Michael Phelps even — but she enters them already comfortable with who she is. Her Korean-born parents immigrated here more than 20 years ago, and she’ll have no shortage of extended family

Family commitment Kim’s parents met in Switzerland when both were working for travel agencies. Jong Jin Kim and his wife, Boran, found their way to Southern California, where he studied engineering and the couple raised their three daughters.

Chloe’s the youngest and was all of 4 years old when she snowboarded for the first time.

Jong took her to Mountain High resort in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles.

“He wanted my mom to go with him,” she explained. “So he took me as bait.”

Kim showed promise on a snowboard early, entering her first competition at 6 and winning junior nationals a year later. Even when she moved to Switzerland for two years at age 8, she made regular treks to the Alps. She’d wake up at 4 a.m., take two trains to reach a halfpipe in France and continue her training.

“It was kind of crazy now that I think about it,” she said with a laugh.

When she returned to the States, she joined a developmental program at Mammoth Mountain, and her potential started to come into focus. By then, the Olympics were a distant goal for the family, and Kim’s father quit his engineering job to help make it a reality.

“Obviously, when I was 8, I had no idea what he was doing,” Kim said. “It was like, ‘Why is Dad home more?’ You know? But now that I think about it, you know, I feel like it was a really bold move, and I can’t believe my mom was okay with it.”

The Kims started home-schooling and doing online courses with their daughter in middle school, and every weekend Jong would

Chloe Kim finished second in the ladies’ snowboard halfpipe event during the Toyota U.S. Grand Prix on Jan. 20 in Mammoth, Calif.

She is a four-time X Games champion.

“Chloe is one of the most talented young snowboarders I’d ever seen.”

Kelly Clark, who is heading to her fifth Winter Olympics

ANNA STONEHOUSE/ ASPEN TIMES/ ASSOCIATED PRESS

drive 51/2 hours from their home in La Palma to Mammoth so Kim could learn from the best.

Their lives suddenly seemed to revolve around a dream, which Kim said startled some of their relatives back in Korea.

“I think at first it was a little hard for them to support it,” she said, “because, you know, I feel like a Korean’s ideal thing is their kid being like a lawyer, a doctor.”

Anyone who saw her on the snow, though, understood. Kim was soon entering bigger competitions, steadily posting higher scores and drawing more attention along the way, from other competitors and potential sponsors.

“Chloe is one of the most talented young snowboarders I’d ever seen,” said Kelly Clark, who’s heading to her fifth Winter Olympics. “I remember talking to Burton [a snowboard manufacturer] about her when I first saw her in Mammoth. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve never suggested that you pick up any athlete — except for this girl. This girl is someone you should sponsor and you should get behind. She has the potential to go very far.’ ” The Sochi Games were not an option because the Olympics bar anyone younger than 15 from competing, but 2014 still marked the year Kim announced herself as one of the world’s best in the halfpipe, winning silver at the X Games at just 13.

It meant she had four years to prepare for her first Winter Games, and the Olympic world had four years to prepare for her.

Star power Since she was small, Kim has visited her family in Korea almost every year. She enjoys going out with cousins there, sampling local cuisine and taking a break from her sport.

“It’s cool. I feel like I have another life,” she said.

Even back in California, she never feels too far removed from Korean culture.

“Since I travel with my parents, my mom is always cooking Korean food,” she says. “So it’s, like, I always want American food. It’s like, I need In-N-Out. We need to go to Chipotle. KFC, where are you at?”

Her most recent visit to Korea came in February 2017, when the U.S. State Department tapped her as a special envoy for a goodwill tour. It was her first taste of how she might be received at these PyeongChang Games.

“It was actually really crazy; I had like a paparazzi moment there,” she said, “which was, like, kind of cool. I felt like Kim Kardashian. . . . I look up, and there’s like 25 cameras around.”

Snowboarding is still a growing sport in South Korea. Since 1992, the country has won 53 medals across eight Winter Olympics. All but two have come in speedskating or shorttrack speedskating. The host nation might only compete for a handful of medals at these Olympics, but Kim gives Koreans someone else to root for.

“I think people know that she’s from the USA, but her background is Korean. We can distinguish that she’s American,” said Im Bomi, a sports reporter for Dong-A Ilbo, one of the country’s largest daily newspapers. “But we respect that she’s a talented snowboarder continues on next page

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KLMNO WEEKLY

PYEONGCHANG 2018

Trying to diversify Team USA Committee’s goal is a team that ‘looks like America’ BY

R ICK M AESE

T

TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

from previous page

who speaks Korean and who shares common things with us.”

In South Korea, headlines regularly refer to her as the “genius snowboarder” and highlight her Korean roots, noting her fondness for eating spicy rice cakes — a common afterschool snack — and her predilection for K-pop groups such as Girls’ Generation, Shinee and Super Junior.

“She’s just like a South Korean teenager,” the Hankook Ilbo newspaper reported.

She’s also become a role model for kids in the country. The U.S. Embassy in Seoul produced a video called “Just Like Chloe Kim,” featuring young Korean girls who want to snowboard like the Korean American teenager. Her goodwill trip last year included visiting the mountains, touring the U.S. Embassy, meeting local reporters and chatting with Korean college students.

“I’m, like, finishing up high school. I don’t know how you can learn anything from me because I’m still like a teenager,” she recalled.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”

She was plenty familiar with the people, the culture and the sprawling city of Seoul but was still taken aback by the attention, each stop reinforcing to her what she is and what she isn’t.

“I was in Korea for media,” she said, by way of

example, “and they do my face so pale. I had so much makeup on my neck to make it look like I’m pale. But, like, my hands are this color, and I’m not pale. . . . It’s definitely really different, and it’s kind of shocking to get used to, I guess.”

Back in the United States, she’s more wellknown, her face already ever-present on NBC promos in the weeks leading into the Olympics and her fan base bigger than any single demographic. “I got mail from a prison once,” she said with a laugh.

Kim is still among the youngest competitors at most competition stops, and she’ll wrap up her final year of high school this spring. She’s applying to colleges and knows the next phase of her life — with or without an Olympic medal — will be different.

For now, she travels with both parents and has a publicist and a high-profile agent. She’s backed by many big-name Olympic brands — Visa, Samsung and Oakley among them — but seems unaffected by the expectations that might be accompanying her to PyeongChang.

When she’s entering the pipe, she’s not thinking about any of that, of course. She rides up the 22-foot-high wall, climbing and climbing, before launching into the air. Kim spins and she flips and, for what can feel like several seconds, she looks like even gravity can’t pull her back down to earth. n © The Washington Post

Chloe Kim snowboards en route to a firstplace finish at a 2016 competition in Park City, Utah. The 17year-old is expected to feature prominently in this month’s Olympics.

he U.S. Olympic Committee says it’s taking its most diverse team ever to a Winter Games, an impressive and deserved boast that requires a caveat of

sorts.

Yes, USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African Americans and Asian Americans — and even the first two openly gay men — than recent winter squads. But they also realize this year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathered in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white.

“We’re not quite where we want to be,” said Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion. “. . . I think full-on inclusion has always been a priority of Team USA. I think everybody’s always felt it should represent every American.”

Team USA numbers 243 athletes, which is the largest team any nation has sent to a Winter Olympics. Of that group, 10 are African American — 4 percent — and another 10 are Asian American. The rest, by and large, are white. The Winter Games contingent is typically much smaller than its summer counterpart, but the demographic differences are striking. The United States took more than 550 athletes to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Of that group, more than 125 were African American — about 23 percent.

This year’s winter squad includes the first black long-track speedskater — Erin Jackson, who transitioned to the sport from inline skating — as well as the first black hockey player, Jordan Greenway, and first black short-track speedskater, 18-year-old Maame Biney, who moved from Ghana to the Washington area when she was 5 years old.

“It means a lot. I’m just really, really honored to have that title because then that means I get to inspire young African American athletes,” Biney said, “or any other race . . . to try this sport or try any other sport they think they can’t do.”

Asian Americans have seven spots on the figure skating team, two in speedskating and another in snowboarding, and five of the American bobsledders competing in PyeongChang are African American.

The lack of diversity on the winter teams is certainly not a new issue, and it’s not unique to the United States. But the USOC has identified it

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PYEONGCHANG 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

resources.

“I think it’s great that I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten,” he says. “It kind of feels like an inspiration, trying to get more African Americans like me trying to play hockey, not falling into stereotypes of playing football, basketball. . . . Obviously, there’s not a ton of African Americans playing hockey. It’s worked out great for me. I’ve had a great experience with it. I hope kids see that it’s good to play hockey, too.”

TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST

as an area for targeted growth. Thompson was hired to his post in 2012, shortly after the job was created, because the USOC saw room for improvement at every level: from athletes and coaches to the officials who run the national governing bodies for each sport and executives who work for the USOC. “Since that point, we’ve just been trying to find ways to make sure our team looks like America,” he said.

Keeping score The Ted Stevens Act requires each sport’s governing body and the USOC to send a report to both Congress and the president every four years that, among other things, details participation of minorities, women and people with disabilities. In a step toward even more transparency, the USOC now requires each sport’s governing body to submit a diversity scorecard each year. While the reports include bench marks and goals, the results offer statistical snapshots of each sport and, especially for the winter offerings, underscore the areas that are lacking.

“We wanted to see what that diversity looks like, how we could measure it, track it,” Thompson said. “That has had an incredible impact. I think it means we’re being transparent with our fans, so people can see, Number 1, it’s a priority, and, Number 2, we’re being honest about it. In some areas, we got some work to do.”

Sports such as figure skating, speedskating and bobsledding consistently boast a stronger

mix of athletes, according to a review of the annual scorecards, but other sports struggle from year to year. For example, of the 188 athletes counted by the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association in 2014 — the year of the Sochi Games — just 2 percent were minorities. USA Hockey reported 131 national team players in its system in 2016 and reported no minorities. USA Luge had 87 national team athletes in 2015, and for a second straight year had zero percent minorities.

“I don’t think there were any surprises,” Thompson said. “I think most people knew we had some challenges.”

Most of the winter sports face two major hurdles in diversifying their respective ranks: geography and economics.

Most winter sports can be practiced only in specific areas. For example, there are only two tracks in the United States for aspiring bobsledders, luge or skeleton racers, one in Utah and another in Lake Placid, N.Y. That could eliminate a large swath of potential competitors.

Other sports, such as curling, might be popular in certain regions; some take place on snow or on the mountains; and others, such as speedskating, have rinks or coaching only in certain parts of the country.

Greenway, the 20-year-old forward for the men’s hockey team, grew up in Canton, N.Y., just 10 miles from Canadian border. He laced up his first pair of skates at a young age and had no shortage of rinks nearby. But he knows many other African Americans don’t have the same

Olympic hockey pioneer Jordan Greenway: “I hope kids see that it’s good to play hockey, too.”

“We need to nuance our delivery to reach different communities.”

Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion

Costs and benefits Many winter sports also come with a heavy cost. Competitors can’t simply roll a ball onto a field or lace up a pair of running shoes. There’s winter gear, lift tickets, ice time, specialized equipment, coaching, travel.

“I think all of our winter sports realize that’s one of our challenges,” Thompson says. “. . . We always come from this assumption that minorities are poor. That simply isn’t true. So we need to nuance our delivery to reach different communities.”

A handful of grass-roots programs across the country try to make winter sports more accessible — perhaps with free ice time to P.E. classes during the school day, transportation to ski lifts or ice rinks, donated equipment and free instruction.

Speedskater Shani Davis will be competing in his fifth Olympics, and in 2006, he became the first black athlete to win a gold medal in an individual sport at a Winter Games. But even before that, he was integral to the launch of DC-ICE, a nonprofit that has helped introduce the sport to thousands of inner-city youth in the District of Columbia. He still serves as honorary chairman and travels to Washington regularly for events.

Bobsledding has become the most diverse American winter team by carefully selecting its elite competitors. USA Bobsledding actively recruits from other sports, which means its ranks are filled with athletes who have excelled in sports such as track and field or football.

Aja Evans grew up in Chicago. She was a sprinter who dreamed of competing in the Summer Olympics. But she was recruited to bobsledding, won a bronze at the 2014 Games and is hoping for gold this month in her second Olympics. She had to suffer through a lot of jokes in recent years about “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 Disney movie on the Jamaican bobsled team — “literally, I’ve heard them all” — but is now an ambassador for her sport.

“It’s just a lack of knowledge,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know. Everyone has different body shapes. It’s a lot of diversity. I think that’s the direction the sport is headed.”

While the USOC is happy to celebrate the makeup of its PyeongChang-bound Olympic team, it knows even bigger strides can be made over the next four years.

“We still have some work to do,” the USOC’s Thompson said. “I think it’s raising the visibility of the importance of diversity and inclusion. I hope we’re seeing some of that. We’re not quite there yet.” n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TECHNOLOGY

Creating zones free of smartphones BY

T ARA B AHRAMPOUR

G

raham Dugoni was at a music festival in San Francisco in 2012 when he witnessed something that disturbed him. A man was dancing, uninhibited, perhaps drunk, losing himself in the moment. Some strangers thought it was funny, so they filmed it and uploaded it to YouTube.

It’s the kind of thing that happens a thousand times a day. But it bothered Dugoni. Traditionally, as he saw it, people at such festivals would come together to commune, to share a collective feeling that those not present would never be able to participate in.

But now, everyone had a smartphone. You had to act cool. And that old group intimacy? It was gone.

“That was a keystone moment for me,” said Dugoni, 31, and it raised a key question. “What degree of privacy can we expect in a public sphere?”

The topic is complicated, but the answer he came up with was simple: ditch the phones.

He founded a company, Yondr, whose small, gray pouches swallow phones and lock them away from the fingers and eyes of their addicted owners. Since it started in 2014, hundreds of thousands of the neoprene pouches have been used across North America, Europe and Australia.

People entering a school, courtroom, concert, medical facility, wedding or other event are asked to slip their phones into the pouches when they enter. Once locked, the phones stay with their owners until they are ready to leave the premises, and then the devices are released from their tiny prisons at an “unlocking base.” The pouches can be rented for a single event or on extended leases. They are now used in more than 600 U.S. schools.

The effects are immediate: At first, people seem agitated and unsure of what to do with their hands. But then they adjust.

“In line at the concession stand, you’ll overhear people talk-

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Don’t want people using phones during school or at a show? With this invention, it’s in the bag. ing about the artist and the show, and then about the fact that they’re having this conversation because they don’t have phones,” Dugoni said. “You’ll see people fully engaged with each other talking, and the feel of it is radically different.”

At San Lorenzo High School in California, which this school year began requiring students to Yondr (yes, it’s a verb) their phones from the beginning of first period until the end of the last, the difference has been stark. Grades have gone up, and discipline problems have plummeted, said principal Allison Silvestri. Referrals for defiance and disrespect are down 82 percent, she said, adding that before Yondr, most of them stemmed from arguments between students and teachers over phone use in class.

There’s also another effect: “The campus is really loud now,” Silvestri said. “Students are

interacting, talking to each other, reading, kicking a ball, socializing — because they’re not standing in a circle texting each other.”

A college soccer player and jazz pianist with a keen interest in philosophy, Dugoni worked briefly in finance in Atlanta, which led him to investigate the nature of anxiety. Studying Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and the German American philosopher Albert Borgmann taught him that stress about technology is not a new thing.

“The role of technology in society is something that people have been circling around for a long time,” he said. “It’s a source of unarticulated angst in our society, a deep-seated thing that no one knows how to address. So phones are a hyperbolic representation of a deep theme.”

Dugoni compares the advent of the smartphone with the development of the phonetic alphabet or

Yondr representative Benji Spanier, left, and CEO Graham Dugoni are set up for a performance by comedian Dave Chappelle in 2016 in San Antonio.

Chappelle uses Yondr pouches to keep people from using their cellphones inside the venue.

the newspaper in its momentousness.

“I don’t think people realize how radically different it is to be a human being with a phone in your pocket,” he said. “If it becomes something that’s going to hollow out the meaning in your life, that’s something we’re going to have to address. . . . All we’re saying is, step into a phone-free zone; see what that’s like for a while.”

At this point, more than threequarters of adults in the United States possess a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center.

It has become “a path of least resistance,” Dugoni said, even as it erodes age-old group dynamics.

“If you send a text to somebody who’s not in the room, what you’re doing is extending your energy and bringing someone else into the fold. If everybody is doing that, the energy gets extended to the point where the perspective is changed and you can’t really bring it back.”

Locking away phones has been the rule at Dave Chappelle shows for years, and people are increasingly being asked to Yondr at parties and other informal events, said Carla Sims, Chappelle’s publicist.

In the absence of phones, performers “know they’re not going to be bombarded with requests for photos, and they’re not going to have a lot of cellphones in their face while they’re trying to do improv,” she said, adding that audience members also like not having everyone in front of them holding phones up.

Even as smartphone saturation has increased, the cultural tide has been shifting, with studies linking happiness to less screen time, and former tech executives speaking out about technology’s addictive qualities.

People’s response to Yondr has also become more positive, Dugoni said, adding, “The only people who weren’t positive about it were the people in Silicon Valley, which was how I knew it was a good idea.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A new sleuth to enthrall readers

Two very different views of our future

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

W

REVIEWED BY

R ICHARD L IPEZ

hen reviewing a book

by Walter Mosley, it’s hard not to simply quote all the great lines. There are so many of them.

You want to share the pleasures of Mosley’s jazz-inflected dialogue and the moody, descriptive passages reminiscent of Raymond Chandler at his best.

“Down the River Unto the Sea” is no exception. The book introduces cop-turned-P.I. Joe King Oliver. Oliver is just beginning to emerge from a decade-long funk after suffering at the hands of police gone bad. Locked up in Rikers Island after a phony rape charge, Oliver spent three months in solitary confinement and was so brutalized he nearly lost his mind. Now he avoids Brooklyn subway stations near his office on Montague Street because they feel like jail. Before Rikers, Oliver loved traditional jazz. Afterward, he gravitates to Thelonious Monk — dark, clamorous, discordant.

When the book opens, Oliver is out of jail and seeking help on two cases from a career criminal named Melquarth Frost. Frost, Mosley writes, “wasn’t the kind of guy who told you anything unless it was either absolutely necessary or a lie.”

The retired bank robber and now clockmaker “knew quite a bit about evolution. He told [Oliver] that his greatest wish, when he was a child, was to change into something different; like wolves had become dogs or dinosaurs birds.”

Mosley’s densely populated novel is full of characters like Frost, many of them African American, who have struggled to rise above unlucky beginnings. Some, like Oliver himself, have more or less succeeded; others, like Leonard “Manny” Compton, have not. The black activist/journalist is on death row for the murder of two on-duty cops in what was a setup to keep him from uncovering a police-run drugs-and-prostitution racket. Oliver’s efforts to save Manny require the kind of ruthless cunning he

learned earlier from the rottenest of rotten cops.

Oliver’s second case is his own.

The woman who wrongly accused him of sexual assault has had a religious conversion and wants to atone, so Oliver thinks he sees a way to redeem himself with the NYPD and maybe even return to the force. Not surprisingly, the two fraught situations intersect, and eventually Oliver is able to achieve some crude justice.

Along the way, there’s a good bit of ugliness — Frost tortures a torturer to extract information — and close-up views of some of the seamier precincts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island. For a while, Oliver is on the run from both cops and hoodlums and goes around with a shaved head and a fake mustache, and it’s pretty funny.

Oliver is a lovely character, smart and decent like Mosley’s popular Easy Rawlins but also mentally fragile. He is haunted by a lifetime of encounters with savagery, some racist, some more ecumenical. His emotional moorings are in his relationship with his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise, (Oliver’s bitter now-ex-wife refused to bail him out of Rikers) and with a circle of pals that includes Effy Stoller, a former prostitute Oliver protected after she killed her violent pimp.

Mosley, who is biracial and identifies as both black and Jewish, has a keen eye for his characters’ skin tones, and the evident pleasure he takes in the human race’s multiplicity of hues is infectious.

At 66, Mosley is, remarkably, as prolific as ever, sometimes producing more than a book a year. “Down the River Unto the Sea” — his 53rd book — is as gorgeous a novel as anything he’s ever written. And with Joe King Oliver, I’m betting, and hoping, he’s given us a character we haven’t see the last of. n Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson. This was written for The Washington Post.

W

DOWN THE RIVER UNTO THE SEA

By Walter Mosley Mulholland. 322 pp. $27.

THE WIZARD AND THE PROPHET Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World

By Charles C. Mann Knopf.

616 pp. $28.95

l

REVIEWED BY

F RED P EARCE

illiam Vogt was a prophet of doom. Seventy years ago, the ornithologist from Upstate New York first laid out the narrative of modern apocalyptic environmentalism with a brutal clarity that made him for a while a household name. The planet had a fixed “carrying capacity,” he wrote in his best-selling 1948 book, “Road to Survival.” We were exceeding that capacity. Our soils were failing; food production was faltering. We were on a “march to destruction” in which “threequarters of the human race will be wiped out.” He called for coercive population control and equally tough curbs on capitalism.

His contemporary Norman Borlaug of Iowa was, by contrast, a can-do guy, a wizard at plant breeding. As Vogt preached environmental hellfire, Borlaug initiated what became known as the Green Revolution, developing high-yielding varieties of crops that have fed a world whose population has more than doubled since. For Borlaug, such scientific advances made nonsense of any notion of a fixed carrying capacity for the planet. But we had to innovate or die.

In “The Wizard and the Prophet,” Charles C. Mann tells their stories and dissects their competing narratives of our future. Mann is a compelling and forensic analyst of big tipping points in human affairs. Most famously, he wrote “1491” and its successor “1493,” charting the original sin of Europeans arriving in America but also the folly of regarding what came before as some kind of Garden of Eden.

Here Mann looks forward, unpacking the polar opposites of extreme pessimism and optimism about the future that permeate modern society, through the lives of two of their earliest and most compelling advocates.

We learn much along the way about the postwar world in which the two men lived. How Borlaug’s

painstaking work — breeding, crossbreeding and crossbreeding again for the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico — was driven in part by an American fear that developing-world poverty would be an incubator for communism.

And how Vogt’s pessimism reverberated as a rebuke to the globalization of the American Dream.

Mann recognizes from the start that “the clash between the Vogtians and the Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values.”

Today, most of the big environmental debates are about climate change. But for much of the 20th century, the great existential question was whether we could feed a fast-rising global population. Today we discuss too much carbon in the atmosphere; back then it was too little nitrogen in the soil.

Today the argument continues.

Vogt’s ideas about the planet’s carrying capacity have been rebranded — first as “limits to growth” and more recently as “planetary boundaries.” The source of optimism has moved from the New Deal to neoliberal economics. But the name-calling hasn’t changed much.

Mann is commendably evenhanded in his treatment of the genius and frailties of both Vogt and Borlaug.

Mann concedes that Vogt was not directly responsible for India’s 1970s forced-sterilization program or China’s one-child policy, “but his intellectual guilt is heavy.”

Mann also finds Borlaug blind to the failings of his Green Revolution: its pollution, its insatiable water demands and the perverse effects of increased food production in deeply unequal societies.

Even so, Mann can only agree with Borlaug that the Green Revolution’s critics have no convincing explanation for how they would have fed the world without it. n Pearce is an environmental journalist based in Britain. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Robot vs. robot trading has hijacked the market STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a Washington Post business and economics writer.

It has been comical to watch the parade of guests on the business news channels this past week try to explain to viewers, and to one another, why our hyper­efficient financial markets — the ones that are supposed to be so brilliant at pricing the value of everything — have been bouncing around like a squash ball on an overheated court.

Pay no attention to the volatility, these financial wizards assure us. It’s just a little technical correction, a bit of froth being taken off the top of a market that had gotten a little ahead of itself. The fundamentals of our otherwise sound economy will soon reassert themselves.

Why is it that when the market is climbing by improbable leaps and bounds month after month we are supposed to take that as a genuine reflection of the fundamentals, but when the market is in a free fall, we are supposed to write that off as momentary fits of irrationality?

The truth is that the market is just as irrational and divorced from fundamentals on the way up as it is on the way down. It is in the nature of markets more so today than ever, as a result of the computerized high-frequency trading strategies of the Wall Street wise guys. What we’ve watched this past week is herd behavior on steroids.

It’s important to remember that a small fraction of the trades on stock markets these days — maybe 10 percent — are made by real-life humans deciding to buy or sell shares in one company or another. An additional 40 percent or so reflect decisions to invest in the entire stock market, or an entire industry, or an entire class of companies — index funds, exchange-traded funds or other kinds of passive investments.

That leaves half the trading that is done automatically by computers, according to complex algorithms that focus on changes in market prices or indexes

caused by the trading done by other computers. In this kind of robot vs. robot trading with its circular logic, fundamentals are irrelevant, the volumes are enormous and the holding periods are often a matter of minutes, or even seconds. More often than not, a “trade” is likely to be a combination of trades — buying this stock, shorting that ETF while selling a call option on some derivative instrument. And almost all of it is done with borrowed money.

One theory about Monday’s 1,000-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average had something to do with a trade that shorted an ETF tied to a volatility index, which forced the sponsor of the ETF, Credit Suisse, to buy some huge number of futures contracts to balance out its exposure.

The instrument goes by the name of VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term Exchange-Traded Note. In all honesty, I can’t explain what any of that means, but it apparently created a vicious cycle in which selling begat more selling and wound up wiping out nearly $3 billion in valuation for investors. Credit Suisse announced it would soon stop trading in the instrument, which in hindsight seems like the only

RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Traders, from left, Patrick Casey, Michael Smyth and Richard Newman work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

sporting thing to do.

“In my wildest imagination, I don’t know why these products exist,” Devesh Shah, the financial whiz who invented the VIX, told Bloomberg News this past week.

“Who do they benefit? No one except if someone wants to gamble.”

Aside from the gambling aspect, the rationale put forward for these ridiculously complex instruments and trading strategies is that they reduce price volatility and increase market liquidity, which is true except when it is not, which is precisely at those moments of market panic. Instead of hedging risk, which is often the reason people buy these instruments, they wind up increasing risks for those who own them and the market in general.

This is particularly true in a market such as this one, where the amount of trading done with borrowed money is higher than it has ever been, as a result of the low-interest-rate policies of the major central banks that allow hedge funds to borrow $4 or $5 for every one of their own they put at risk. When prices start to fall rapidly, the funds are forced to sell their positions to pay back the banks and brokerage houses, driving down the price even further. Selling begets yet more selling. Investors rushing to cover short positions, or to sell underwater options before they

expire, run into a similar dynamic.

And, of course, what happens with one asset class can affect what happens in all the others. A bubble in bitcoin, for example, can stir what John Maynard Keynes called the market’s “animal spirits,” encouraging investors to take risks and bid up the price of stocks or real estate or fine art. And it works in reverse when fear replaces greed.

There’s no rational reason the collapse in bitcoin prices, from $19,500 to $7,500, has any rational connection to stock prices, but as Keynes understood, investors and markets are not rational.

In truth, there is no reason a financial system has to be this complex and so volatile. There is no reason it has to divert so much of the country’s talent and capital, and to siphon off so much for traders and bankers and hedge fund managers. With a bit of intelligent regulation, we could have a financial system that is simpler, less risky, less expensive and less susceptible to manipulation.

There is a cost to the kind of financial “innovation” that produces instruments such as the VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term ExchangeTraded Note.

And my guess is that those costs now greatly exceed the benefits. n

14 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2018

21 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2018

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A blue wave or just a big ripple?

KAREN TUMULTY is a Washington Post columnist covering national politics.

Democrats are feeling cheery at the prospect that this fall will bring an end to the power outage they suffered in 2016 and the nearirrelevance they have endured since.

Conditions look particularly good for taking back the House. Off-year elections in a president’s first term nearly always cost his party some seats, and President Trump’s historically low approval ratings are an especially heavy weight for Republicans. The fact that so many GOP incumbents are in a rush to retire is no mere coincidence.

Democrats also have enthusiasm on their side, something that hasn’t been the case in a nonpresidential year since 2006. In the latest Post-ABC News poll, more than half of Democratic-leaning voters said it has become “more important to vote” this year; only a third of Republicans felt that way.

So what could go wrong for Democrats in 2018?

Plenty, actually.

Already, Democratic strategists are getting a little jumpy about the party’s shrinking advantage in the polls, especially the closely watched generic-ballot test, where voters are asked which party they would prefer to represent them in Congress.

The spread is running at 6.5 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average — just half where it was at the beginning

of the year. It shows an electorate still inclined to vote Democratic but probably not by enough to flip the House.

What should be more worrisome to Democrats — ironically enough — are some of the very forces that are working in their favor.

They are on track to have a record number of candidates running, led by a surge of women and veterans. According to the latest compilation by the Campaign Finance Institute, nearly 60 percent of Republicanheld districts have a Democratic challenger who has raised at least $50,000; two years ago, fewer than 20 percent had reached that threshold by this point in the cycle.

All of that is a good thing for any party. Except when it leads to large, messy primaries.

In suburban Virginia, for instance, Democrats worked hard to recruit state Sen. Jennifer T. Wexton (Loudoun) to take on Rep. Barbara Comstock, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country.

But now, there are eight other candidates in the primary, and Wexton is falling short in fundraising to Alison Friedman, who is backed by a host of liberal celebrities, among them Barbra Streisand.

In crowded primaries, Republicans will be rooting from the sidelines for the liberal base to pull all of the candidates leftward — forcing them to declare allegiance to single-payer health care, impeaching Trump, free college tuition. Those are October attack ads in waiting in many of the scattered pockets where Democrats need to win.

Which is why national numbers matter so little. For an electoral wave to rise high enough to wash a majority-making two dozen House seats into the Democratic column, the party will have to take territory that Hillary Clinton could not.

Meanwhile, economic confidence — notwithstanding the recent market plunge — has reached a level not seen in 17 years. That suggests, among other things, that the tax cuts that

looked so unpopular when they were passed in December may be an asset to Republicans by this fall.

Democrats also have to contend with two givens in Republicans’ favor — gerrymandered districts and outside spending by conservative groups.

As district lines are now drawn, a disproportionate amount of Democratic energy is corralled into a relatively small number of congressional seats. Foes of gerrymandering have won a recent string of court victories, but most of those rulings will have no effect on 2018.

On the money front, Democrats were already expecting to be outspent by at least $100 million. Then the Koch brothers informed their donors late last month that they were going to put as much as $400 million into the midterms, their largest commitment ever. In House races, a million dollars here and there can make the difference.

Finally, perhaps the single biggest miscalculation that Democrats could make right now is to expect Trump to do all their work for them.

One thing to remember about waves. Most of them break before they reach the shore. n

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2018 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

RETROPOLIS

As Berlin Wall fell, another remained BY

M ARC F ISHER

T

he Berlin Wall, which has now been down for longer than it was up — passing 10,316 days on Monday — was a brilliant expression of the power of oppression.

It was vast, 96 miles long. It was frightening, laced with mines, dotted with soldiers trained to shoot without asking questions. It was also far more effective than any solely physical barrier because it produced what East Germans called “the wall in the head,” the omnipresent belief that there was no escape, no hope.

So it struck Germans on both sides as nothing short of miraculous when the massive construction of concrete, bricks, barbed wire and electrified fence collapsed in what seemed like an instant.

I was The Washington Post’s Berlin bureau chief in 1989 when the barrier that had divided communist East Germany from capitalist West Germany since 1961 finally fell. The history books say the wall opened on one strange night in November of that year, but that’s not quite right. It was really a process that took several months, a process that consisted of the physical deconstruction of the wall, countless changes in people’s daily routines, and a mental shift — which was perhaps the biggest hurdle of all.

Early one December morning, I was the first motorist queued to pass through Checkpoint Charlie from East to West. While reporting a story in East Berlin, I had overstayed my visa (reporters were required to get out of the communist East by midnight or face arrest). Lacking the papers I would have needed to book a hotel room legally, I’d kept on reporting through the night, and now, as dawn approached, I could once again cross the border back into the West.

As the 6 a.m. reopening of the city’s internal border approached, the East German guard who stood between me and a return to the West painstakingly set up his desk and went through his morning ritual of opening the gates. Finally, the Vopo — the Volkspolizei, or people’s police, guards who never smiled and always managed to unnerve — flipped on the fluorescent bulb that hung over his traffic lane.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ ” he said, breaking into a big smile.

I sat there in stunned silence. The fearsome Vopo had cracked a joke.

He laughed at his own wit. He looked to me for a reaction.

The internal calculations that become second nature in a police state took me a few sec-

RICHARD A. LIPSKI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Dismantling the mental barrier that truly impeded German reunification was a much more difficult process onds to run. Was this a trick? Do I laugh and get accused of disrespecting the people’s police? Do I stare straight ahead and risk incurring the wrath of the all-powerful Volkspolizei? Eventually, with a slight, nervous grin, I looked him in the eye, something I’d once been warned against doing by a much sterner East German officer who’d caught me driving on a highway that was off-limits to westerners.

The border guard repeated his joke. This time, I allowed myself to smile along with him.

He didn’t even bother to check inside my trunk. Breaking a zillion rules, he just waved me through. The wall, the one he’d spent his working life defending, the one outside his booth and the one inside our heads, was gone.

In those weeks of startling change, every day brought new experiences. A few border crossings later, I was returning to the West after spending a day in an East German school where teachers were suddenly on their own, trying to figure out whether they still had to teach the once strictly required classes on communist ideology. I had tucked away deep

West Berliners rejoice from atop the Berlin Wall as East Berliners surge toward the opening at Potsdamer Platz on Nov. 12, 1989.

in my luggage a piece of contraband, an East German high school history textbook, 800 pages detailing every action of each Communist Party Congress in the country’s 40-year history. No party materials could cross the border — every time I’d tried before, the guards had confiscated everything.

This time, the guard found my book and chuckled as he flipped through it. “You can keep that,” he said. “No one needs those anymore.”

In those first weeks after the wall was semiofficially opened, the East German regime tried to maintain its separation and independence from the West, but the people knew what their government would take seven months to figure out: The game was up. In the final days before all border controls between the two Germanys were lifted, a few Vopo guards still insisted on checking travel documents. When one threatened to turn back a foreign visitor, the tourist loudly told a friend, “Don’t worry, he’s history in 10 days.”

The guard heard and replied softly, “Don’t make fun.”

On one of my last journeys through the controlled border, an East German guard went through the motions of stamping passports, but he could no longer muster the stern visages and menacing stares of the past. Instead, he chatted with us about his impending unemployment.

“It’s all for fun now, but in a few days, no more job,” he said. “Unemployed. I’m good at stamping things.”

A police state, it turned out, was a matter of attitude as much as it was of concrete and sniper’s nests. Germans on both sides of the divide would spend the months and decades that followed learning that the physical wall was far easier to dismantle than the barrier in their heads.

Superficially, the city changed almost instantly. Six months after the first easterners crossed freely, a new visitor appeared towering over the guard booths at Checkpoint Charlie: The Marlboro Man’s 15-foot-high image dominated the plaza where the Vopo had scared me into staying up all night.

But deep inside, the wall persisted. Years later, I met a former border guard at a bar in the East. He’d never found another job. He wanted me to know that he’d never shot anyone at the border. He would have — that was what he’d been trained to do — but he’d never had the occasion. He said he still thought about it every day. n

©The Washington Post