The Washington Post National Weekly - March 25, 2018

SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2018

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY Taming the Mississippi A tour of infrastructure reveals questions about the past and future of America’s great river

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THE FIX

Some puzzling takes on Russia BY

A ARON B LAKE

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n Tuesday, 17 days after Russia allegedly poisoned a former spy on the soil of a close U.S. ally using a nerve agent, President Trump made the case for taking it easy on Russia.

“Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump tweeted in defense of his having congratulated Vladimir Putin on his apparently undemocratic reelection win. He also tweeted: “I called President Putin of Russia to con­ gratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The Fake News Me­ dia is crazed because they wanted me to exco­ riate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.......” “.....They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didn’t have the “smarts.” Obama and Clinton tried, but didn’t have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!” It’s a case Trump has made regularly while defending his soft posture toward Russia, but seldom has it been so apparent how overly simplistic it is.

Despite signing on to a strong statement alleging Russia was at least complicit in the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the White House over the past couple of days has defended Trump’s apparent willingness to gloss over that and any alleged shenanigans in Putin’s reelection, including sidelining Putin critics.

In doing so, it has essentially argued that its hands are tied and that this is all distracting from a broader goal of harmony. But both

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those arguments belie this truth: Trump has seemingly no desire to challenge Putin.

Tuesday’s White House news briefing featured a rather remarkable exchange. In it, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to questions about Trump congratulating Putin by saying the United States can’t tell other counties what to do.

YURI SENATOROV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Sergei Skripal, former Russian spy, shown in 2006, was poisoned earlier this month.

“We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate,” Sanders said. “What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country, and that’s not something that we can dictate to them, how they operate.”

While that statement is strictly true, it’s really not the point. The United States can’t dictate what other countries can do, sure, but it can sure apply pressure — whether through tough words, sanctions or other means. It has done that very thing, in fact, with Venezuela’s tainted elections as recently as . . . last week. As Alyssa Farah, the vice president’s press secretary, tweeted: “.@VP Pence has accepted an invitation to

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 24

address @OAS_Offical next week. He will re­ affirm our strong partnerships across the re­ gion alliances & call on all member nations to pressure the Maduro regime to end its lawless actions & address its humanitarian crisis. #Venezuela.”

Sanders was presenting a false choice between drawing a line in the sand and accepting Putin’s win as legitimate. In reality, there are many choices in between.

That same false dichotomy was evident in Trump’s tweets Wednesday — and has been a regular feature of his defenses of a desired alliance with Putin. Trump has often presented his softness on Putin as the price of doing business when it comes to making friends. While that might help matters, it ignores the fact that every alliance is predicated on trust and not being taken advantage of. It’s one thing to try to be nice; it’s another to let someone walk all over you.

Glossing over the Skripal poisoning — which Trump failed to broach with Putin Tuesday despite it being in his talking points — could pretty easily be construed as letting someone walk all over you.

The fact that Trump has now argued, just a few weeks later, that being tough on Russia is the wrong call is a pretty telling example of what he’s willing to put up with. Trump has signaled that pressing Putin on election interference and the Skripal poisoning is unimportant in the grand scheme of things — despite other parts of his administration regarding each as something of a red line.

If Trump truly thinks those things are not that big a deal and not worth raising a stink over, he might as well say it. But that’s the inescapable conclusion of everything he and the White House have done both this week and throughout his administration. n

©The Washington Post

ON THE COVER Barges float at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in Cairo, Ill., the start of a fearsome stretch. Photograph by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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Top 10 House races to watch in 2018 BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

R

epublican Rick Saccone conceded defeat in the tight race for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District on Wednesday, clearing the way for Democrat Conor Lamb to be sworn in next month and giving the Democrats a victory in a district President Trump won by 20 percentage points.

Democrats’ stunningly strong performance deep in Trump country can’t be ignored as we look to November’s midterm elections, where all 435 House seats are up for reelection. Voter enthusiasm, polling and high-profile GOP retirements indicate the House majority is up for grabs.

If Democrats win back the House for the first time in eight years, they’ll do it by winning in districts like these 10. Nine belong to Republicans, and they span the country. Here they are, ranked in order of least likely to flip parties to most : 10. California’s 39th District (open seat): GOP Rep. Edward R. Royce is retiring after 26 years. He had built a relationship with the district’s growing Asian and Latino population, and now that he’s gone, this Orange County-area district looks significantly more Democratic. After the district voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain, Hillary Clinton won by more than eight points in 2016.

California has a jungle primary system, in which the top two votegetters in June, regardless of which party they represent, advance to the general election. There’s a crowded field on the Democratic side, and the risk for Democrats is that they send someone too far to the left to the general election and lose this moderate seat.

9. Iowa’s 1st District (Republican incumbent): Rep. Rod Blum’s Northeastern Iowa district is perennially competitive because it encompasses one of Iowa’s most Democratic cities, Dubuque.

Blum, a conservative who doesn’t quite match the district’s politics, has been able to hang on in two elections that favored Republicans. But his job could be in jeop-

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

If Democrats want to win back House, they must flip seats and these districts are most vulnerable ardy in a Democratic wave. State Rep. Abby Finkenauer appears to be the lead Democrat to challenge Blum.

8. Minnesota’s 2nd District (Republican): Democrats are excited about a rematch between first-term GOP Rep. Jason Lewis and Democrat Angie Craig. Craig lost by two points in 2016 in this swing district spanning the south Twin Cities suburbs. But Democrats blame an independent candidate for eating into their win margin. This time around the race may hinge on what voters here, who went for Trump, think about the president now, given that Lewis has willingly cast himself in Trump’s shadow.

7. Arizona’s 2nd District (open): Democrats are hoping to flip this Tucson-area district now that GOP Rep. Martha McSally is running for Senate. Former Democratic congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, who represented another Arizona district and had a failed Senate bid in 2016, is running for the seat. But Republicans think she’ll pay the price for jumping congressional districts.

6. Virginia’s 10th District (Republican): Rep. Barbara Comstock has been one of Republicans’

most vulnerable incumbents since she won this district in the outer D.C. suburbs in 2014. She disavowed Trump in 2016 on her way to reelection. But Democrats think even smart campaigning won’t save Comstock in a region of the state that is rapidly turning blue. One of the more conservative counties in Comstock’s district, Loudoun County, helped put a Democrat in the governor’s mansion in 2017.

There are at least four viable Democrats running to challenge her.

5. Minnesota’s 8th District (open): Minnesota, in case you can’t tell, is a battleground. This rural district is perhaps Republicans’ top pickup opportunity in 2018, since Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan is retiring after three terms, shortly after Trump won his district by 15 points. Republicans think they have one of their best recruits of 2018 in St. Louis County Commissioner Pete Stauber, a former police officer from Duluth and member of a hockey dynasty.

4. Pennsylvania’s 6th District (Republican): Pennsylvania is another battleground this November, thanks in part to the state’s Supreme Court order for legislators to redraw all 18 congressional districts, which ended up

FROM LEFT: Reps.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) and Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.).

favoring Democrats. That means GOP Rep. Ryan Costello’s Republican-leaning district in the Philadelphia suburbs has now shifted among analysts to a toss-up. After watching Democrats dominate in the 18th District’s special election, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Costello may see the writing on the wall and not run. If that’s the case, this race will get even more competitive for Democrats without a GOP incumbent.

3. New Jersey’s 2nd District (open): While you could make a case for any one of the seven races above to be swapped out with another equally competitive one, the next three races aren’t nearly as contentious. Longtime GOP Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo’s decision to retire suddenly makes this Atlantic City-area seat competitive for Democrats. His exit almost immediately elevated the Democratic front-runner, moderate state Sen. Jeff Van Drew. Republicans openly acknowledge they don’t have a solid candidate to respond.

2. Florida’s 27th District (open): Another GOP retirement all but forces the party to give up a congressional seat. Longtime Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen announced she wouldn’t be running for reelection, and with her departure goes perhaps the only Republican who can win this majority-Hispanic Southern Florida district that went for Clinton by 20 points.

1. Pennsylvania’s 5th District (open): Our most likely seat to flip comes after the GOP congressman who had held it for eight years is retiring amid a sexual harassment scandal. But that’s not the main reason this southwest Philadelphia-area district is the most likely to go to Democrats in November. In the new lines drawn by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, perhaps no district got reshaped as drastically as GOP Rep. Patrick Meehan’s, previously numbered Pennsylvania’s 7th. While the old district narrowly went for Clinton by one point, Clinton would have won the new one by nearly 30 points. This is likely a Democratic giveaway now, and there’s not much Republicans can do about it. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Video, cell data led to Austin bomber

BY E VA R UTH M ORAVEC, D EVLIN B ARRETT, M ATT Z APOTOSKY, M ARK B ERMAN AND K RISTINE P HILLIPS

Austin

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he FBI agents and police investigators tasked with identifying who was responsible for planting a series of bombs here seemed at times to be chasing ghosts.

They ran down theories of drug-dealer retaliation gone awry and struggled to understand the significance of family connections between the victims.

All the while, the bomber escalated his attacks — first by using a tripwire and then by sending explosives through FedEx. But behind the scenes, investigators had used cell-tower data to tie Mark Anthony Conditt, a 23-year-old from the Austin suburbs, to the bombing sites and other relevant locations, the Texas governor said Wednesday. And when the suspected bomber used FedEx, law enforcement caught an ever bigger break: He had been captured on a store’s video surveillance system.

The furious manhunt for Conditt culminated early Wednesday after one of the police surveillance teams scouring the area spotted his red SUV in a hotel parking lot in Round Rock, about 18 miles north of the Texas capital.

Officers closed in, and Conditt detonated a bomb. The bloody confrontation brought an end to three weeks of terror in which investigators believe Conditt planted at least six bombs at homes or in the FedEx delivery system. The devices killed two people and wounded several others, and officials warned he could have left more bombs elsewhere that have yet to be found.

“This is the culmination of three very long weeks for our community,” said Austin interim police chief Brian Manley, adding, “We don’t know where this suspect has spent his last 24 hours, and therefore, we still need to remain vigilant to ensure

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Authorities warn more devices may be left behind; suspect died after detonating bomb that no other packages or devices have been left through the community.”

Officials said late Wednesday that Conditt’s motive seemed to be frustration with his life.

Conditt made a 25-minute video recording on his cellphone describing how he built seven explosive devices, Manley said.

He said the video, which was made between 9 and 11 p.m.

Tuesday, seemed to be created because Conditt “felt like we were getting very close to him.”

“He does not at all mention anything about terrorism, nor does he mention anything about hate, but instead it is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point,” he said, adding, “there was no reason given for why he selected” the victims.

On Wednesday, FBI officials searched Conditt’s home for clues about the attacks as they advised Austin residents to remain wary. They took two of his roommates into custody for

questioning — although they released one and said neither was under arrest. A neighbor of a home owned by the Conditt family said an officer with a megaphone had yelled that the FBI was there with a search warrant, and a young man came out of the house and was immediately handcuffed and led to an unmarked SUV. Conditt attended Austin Community College between 2010 and 2012 but did not graduate, according to the school. Mark Roessler, 57, a neighbor, described Conditt as “quiet, introverted, polite and clean-cut,” adding that he never had a lot of visitors, loud parties or other social events. He said he last saw Conditt about a week ago, when they both arrived home at the same time. “We didn’t make eye contact,” Roessler said. “In retrospect, he was certainly in the midst of all of this.”

Eddie Harp, who has been friends with the Conditt family for 15 years, read a statement to the media outside the Conditts’

Travis County SWAT officers walk near Mark Anthony Conditt’s home in Pflugerville, Tex., on Wednesday.

Authorities traced a purchase of a sign used with one of the bombs in Austin to a Home Depot in Pflugerville. Conditt recorded a video late Tuesday when he felt police were closing in on him.

home, saying: “I have a simple and heartfelt statement from the family. This will be their only statement. The family is grieved not only for their loss but also for the loss of those affected by these heinous actions. The family’s present focus is on dealing with their shock and loss and cooperating with the police investigation. If you are a praying person, please join us in praying for the families of all who have lost loved ones.”

Agents have found components that match materials used in the bombs inside Conditt’s house but not completed bombs, officials said.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been able to reconstruct all the bombs they say Conditt made.

“We know it’s the same person who manufactured all of these,” ATF Deputy Assistant Director Fred Milanowski said.

Conditt had been an enigma to law enforcement. After the first explosion killed 39-year-old Anthony House on March 2, police were reluctant to even call the episode a homicide and said they believed the incident was isolated.

“We can’t rule out that Mr. House didn’t construct this himself and accidentally detonate it, in which case it would be an accidental death,” Assistant Chief Joe Chacon said in the days after the incident.

Investigators at first explored a theory in which House was the unintended recipient of a bomb meant for a drug-dealing neighbor. Austin police had recently raided a home nearby and seized marijuana and hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to an attorney for the man who lived there.

The attorney, Mark McCrimmon, said investigators asked his client, whom he declined to identify, to come in for an interview on the day the bomb went off.

They seemed convinced that the bomb was meant for his client, and tried to play “good cop, bad cop,” McCrimmon said, asking him, “Who’s trying to kill you?”

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NATION and warning him that his roommate might be in danger.

“They used the C-word, ‘cartel,’ and we kept saying, it’s not a cartel, it’s not a cartel, it’s not a cartel,” McCrimmon said. “It’s just pot, and it’s the cost of doing business sometimes.”

When two more bombs went off 10 days later, investigators rapidly shifted gears. More than 350 law enforcement personnel — including FBI behavioral analysts and ATF forensic scientists — soon descended on Austin.

They explored family ties between House and the second victim, 17-year-old Draylen Mason, and whether the episodes might have been racially motivated. House’s stepfather and Mason’s grandfather were close friends and both prominent members of Austin’s African American community. They wondered whether that made them targets.

Investigators also explored whether the third bomb, which injured a 75-year-old Hispanic woman, might have been meant for someone else, interviewing a woman who lived on the block with the last name Mason, though she was no relation to Draylen.

“The federal government brought the full resources of federal law enforcement here to solve this and to stop the injuring and the killing that was occurring,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Christopher Combs said Wednesday.

The bombs, though, continued. A device activated with a tripwire injured two people in Austin, and investigators then discovered two packages that had been sent through FedEx. One of the packages exploded at a FedEx facility in Schertz, Tex., while the other was recovered from a different facility in Austin.

The company turned over that package and extensive information, including surveillance footage, to law enforcement, which would prove to be critical.

“That proved to be the case,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler (D) said early Wednesday.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said officials tied Conditt to the explosions first by his cellphone — which they detected was at the bombing sites. He said investigators then determined that Conditt’s red SUV had been at “vari-

ous locations that tied him, possibly, to those crimes.”

The FedEx surveillance footage, from a south Austin store, showed Conditt wearing a wig and gloves, and officers soon obtained a receipt for the disguise, Abbott said. He said they also determined that Conditt purchased signs, like the one used to anchor the tripwire that triggered an explosion, at a Home Depot in Pflugerville.

Manley, the interim Austin police chief, said investigators became “very interested” in Conditt “over the past couple of days.”

Federal prosecutors already had charged Conditt with one count of unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device by the time officers spotted him in his SUV. Police said officers surrounded the hotel to take him into custody, and he started to drive away. Officers decided to stop him, forcing his car onto the shoulder of a frontage road on Interstate 35, officials said.

As a SWAT officer banged on a window of the SUV, Conditt detonated a bomb inside his car, injuring the officer. At that point, another officer fired at the suspect, police said. They found Conditt dead inside the vehicle with severe injuries from the bomb, officials said.

Frank de la Fuente, who was staying at a Red Roof Inn on Highway 35, said he heard an explosion at about 3:30 a.m. followed by two gunshots.

Jeremy Lowe, who was also staying at the Red Roof Inn, said that “they shut down the highway and told everybody to not go anywhere.”

While investigators continued to explore whether someone might have worked with Conditt — or whether he left the potential for more destruction behind — some said his death brought some reassurance.

“I’m relieved for the people of this state and the city of Austin to know that the person who was the author of this horrific destruction and harmed lives no longer poses a danger,” Abbott said.

President Trump wrote on Twitter: “AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!”n ©The Washington Post

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After deadly crash, Uber grounds fleet

BY M ICHAEL L ARIS AND F AIZ S IDDIQUI

W

Mark Anthony Conditt detonated explosives inside his car as the police approached.

ith police in Tempe, Ariz., pointing to a pedestrian’s behavior as a factor in a deadly driverless Uber crash, investigators scoured evidence last week looking for broader safety insights for a burgeoning industry.

The crash last weekend prompted Uber to abruptly halt testing of its autonomous vehicles across North America. The moratorium on testing included Tempe, San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Tempe’s pedestrian fatality was the first known death involving a driverless vehicle, thrusting the community into a national debate about the proper level of state and federal oversight.

Scores of companies are vying for competitive advantage in the wide-open and potentially transformative world of autonomous vehicles, with technology developers touting the safety benefits of removing fallible human beings from the driver’s seat — and critics warning that many iterations of the enabling technologies are being implemented before they are ready.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which administers voluntary federal guidelines on the deployment of driverless cars, sent a “special crash investigation” team to Tempe as part of its “vigilant oversight and authority over the safety of all motor vehicles and equipment, including automated technologies.” The agency said it was in contact with Uber and Volvo, as well as local, state and federal authorities.

But critics continued to argue that the vehicles are being unleashed without adequate standards and oversight.

“These cars are being rushed onto the public highways way before they’re ready,” said Joan Claybrook, a consumer advocate and former head of NHTSA un-

der President Jimmy Carter.

“The public are the guinea pigs for these early vehicles.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent body that does painstaking and precise investigations into everything from bridge collapses to train wrecks and plane crashes, continued to gather information in Arizona through the week, including pulling from electronic data sources stored in the vehicle or sent to Uber.

The safety body said its investigation would examine the operating condition of the SUV, the backup driver’s interactions with it and “opportunities for the vehicle or driver to detect” the pedestrian.

Tech companies and automakers have billed driverless cars as a tool to reduce the nation’s toll of 40,000 road fatalities a year. The robo-cars — enabled by sophisticated sensors and algorithms — have a more complete view of their surroundings than human drivers, advocates argue. And they can avoid making all-toohuman mistakes, backers say.

“What would prevent those [fatalities] would be not speeding, not drinking, not texting, not being distracted,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina.

“The hope is that automated driving, when it is ready, will be able to address many of those causes without introducing significant new sources of crashes.”

Smith also said that pedestrians and bicyclists often get blamed in these cases “because the pedestrians are the dead ones, and they’re not there to defend themselves.”

“Really, any crash with that pedestrian should have been avoidable, unless the circumstances were really strange, meaning: Physics won. If the victim was visible and the path of the victim was reasonably predictable, then she should not have been hit,” Smith said. n © The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

A struggle to control the mighty Mississippi River

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his river runs the spine of America, touching 10 states and draining waters from 21 more, a vast waterway with a rich mythology, a sometimes powerful beauty and an always alarming propensity to flood.

Nearly 30 locks and dams hold back water in the river’s upper reaches. Every river bend to the south is lined by concrete to slow the water’s corrosive force. Levees corset thousands of miles of riverbanks, and 170 bridges run above.

All of this infrastructure is aimed at permitting barge traffic and protecting farms and cities.

Most of it is decrepit.

Now, with President Trump’s push for a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, there are hopes of billions to fix up the Mississippi. But there are clashes over which projects to pursue, and no agreement on how to pay for any of it.

A move to tame one portion of the river can create chaos for people somewhere else along

its 2,350-mile path, and in that precarious balance is the key to understanding the competing interests and enduring problems that vex the entire country.

“To understand America at this time,” says R.D. James, a Missouri farmer and new Army assistant secretary overseeing its Corps of Engineers, “you have to understand the river.”

At the same time, it’s clear that the river itself has changed.

“It doesn’t behave like it used to,” said John Carlin, a towboat pilot who has worked the Hannibal, Mo., riverfront for more than 40 years. “Seems like it doesn’t take much to get out of control.”

Now, the Mississippi is flooding again. Earlier this month, after a deluge of latewinter rain, the Corps opened a massive floodway just above New Orleans, an emergency relief valve that it has been forced to use with increasingly regularity — three times in just the past seven years.

BY TODD C. FRANKEL Along the Mississippi River

Sunset on the river at the Rock Island Centennial Bridge, left, which connects the Illinois city with Davenport, Iowa.

Infrastructure is a bureaucratic word, a way of describing human efforts to impose order on nature. More than almost anything the government does, the effects of the infrastructure it builds can be felt for generations. Earth is moved. Water redirected. Tunnels dug. Roads paved. It is man’s hubris on naked display.

Sometimes, the infrastructure turns out to be the enemy, and that fact makes the people working and living along the Mississippi wary of the promises coming from Washington.

Some river watchers perked up when Trump mentioned “waterways across our land” as part of his infrastructure target list during his recent State of the Union speech. That sounded like good news. But Trump’s plan mostly scales back the government’s long-running role in charting the Mississippi’s course, calling for more private investment and less federal oversight along the river.

That, many here say, will create a host of new problems.

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“It’s disappointing,” said Mike Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, a barge industry group, echoing the reaction of many people who use the river. “We’re running on an interstate of water. And we’re always being overlooked.”

The trouble with controlling the Mississippi today is that it has evolved into three different river systems.

The Upper Mississippi is a string of slack-water pools held behind dams, with water so placid that water skiing was invented there in 1922.

The middle portion is a mishmash of wing dikes and arched chevrons — man-made structures to “train” the river.

Here, it is artificially narrowed, only half as wide in St. Louis as it was in the early 1800s.

The truly fearsome Mississippi doesn’t start until the confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, Ill., where the water emerges like a monster on par with the Amazon or Congo

rivers. The Mississippi then runs to the Gulf of Mexico, hidden behind an extensive levee system built after the Great Flood of 1927, a disaster that displaced 1 percent of the country’s population as levees fell like toppled dominoes.

That flood’s legacy still guides how the river is controlled today.

The Army Corps of Engineers oversees most of the river’s infrastructure and runs it with a battle general’s intent. It’s the Corps that operates the locks and dams, that built the levee system in the Lower Mississippi; it maintains the tools used to control the water levels throughout and regulates levees farther north.

But a growing number of critics say the Corps’ flood-fighting efforts make flooding worse.

“It’s like fighting the moon,” said Robert Criss, a hydrogeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies the river running just a few miles from his office door. “It’s stupid

Photography by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON The Washington Post

In Little Falls, Minn. — “Where the Mississippi Pauses” — the river takes breaks more often in winter, when the flow is slowed by ice.

to fight.”

And it can look like a losing battle.

In the past seven years, the Mississippi River Valley has been hit with 100-, 200- and 500-year floods — ones that had a 1 percent or less chance of happening in each timespan — that caused damage of more than $50 billion. Disasters along the river “have become persistent and systemic,” noted a group representing 75 cities from 10 states in a report last year.

The White House response sketched out in Trump’s infrastructure plan is inadequate, said the group, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. It actually makes it harder to fund new flood protections by slashing the federal government’s project cost-sharing from the current range of 50 to 80 percent down to 20 percent, said Colin Wellenkamp, the group’s executive director. So for every $1 in federal funds, local and state governments would need to chip in $4. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

“That’s interesting,” Wellenkamp said dryly. “How are we going to be saddled with that?”

The group is also worried that the White House’s proposed budget cuts would kill off other federal programs that already pay for river infrastructure, such as a Transportation Department grant program that has spent $162 million in recent years to help pay for new bridges, ports and riverfront improvements.

Meanwhile, historic river crests are falling like home-run records during Major League Baseball’s steroids era. In Hannibal, Mo., where people have been recording river heights since Mark Twain’s time, four of the top 10 crests have come in the past decade.

In Brainerd, Minn., it’s five of the top 10.

In Natchez, Miss., it’s three of 10 — and this week, they’re bracing to record another.

“You can call it climate change, but whatever you call it, things are changing,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Wehr, who oversaw the Corps’ operations on the river until being promoted last year to be second-in-command at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington.

“We’ve got to modify how we manage the river,” said Norma Jean Mattei, a University of New Orleans civil engineer and member of the Mississippi River Commission, which oversees how the Corps runs the river.

But Criss considers the Corps and its use of river infrastructure to be one of the problems.

“The water has nowhere to go,” he said.

You don’t flood out your neighbors. It’s one of the unwritten rules of the river.

Just the accusation is enough to spark a fistfight. But people had long suspected that the levees across from Hannibal, Mo., were too tall, making the flooding worse for neighbors downstream.

So a crew from the Corps came out two years ago in ATVs, riding along 200 miles of riverbanks to measure levee heights. The Corps found that the walls were two to three feet taller than the agency allows in many spots, from Burlington, Iowa, down almost to St. Louis.

The Hannibal-area levees belong to Sny Island — an Illinois drainage district so carefully maintained that it has flooded only once in 110 years, a point of pride for vigilant farmers and volunteers there.

But today, the Sny’s levees frighten people such as Nancy Guyton, who leads a group accusing the district of breaking with long-held tradition.

“If they get away with this,” Guyton warned

recently, “they’re going to ruin the river.”

She and her husband own a small farm outside Annada, Mo. They have lived through several major river floods. But now the water seems high all the time.

Now, Guyton was sitting in Calvin’s Restaurant in tiny Eolia, Mo., with Mark Harvey, another member of the group Neighbors of the Mississippi, which represents residents of three counties downriver of the Sny. Harvey is not a farmer. He’s not going to lose any crops if the river floods.

But he is the superintendent of Pike County schools. He knows that flooded farmland is worthless. He sees the Sny’s levees as a threat to buying textbooks and paying teachers.

“You can’t just build a wall and say to heck with it,” Harvey said.

TOP: For now, an aging flood wall — covered in murals — protects Cape Girardeau, Mo., from the rushing river.

ABOVE: Nancy Guyton is concerned about levees that could spill floodwater onto her small farm in Annada, Mo.

In an office across the river, Mike Reed sounded offended.

Reed runs the Sny levee district from New Canton, Ill., a town tucked next to a limestone bluff that served as the riverbank eons ago.

Today, the river is six miles away — across some of the most fertile farmland in the world — and kept there by a levee wall.

Reed said Sny farmers and residents felt as if they’d been “smeared” by the Corps.

“Why are they going after us?” Reed said.

“Why are we made to look like a rogue levee district that raised its levees in the dark of night?”

The Corps says its position is simple. Some levees have soared past their federally authorized levels, with most of the height added after a major flood in 2008.

“Their levees have been altered without careful evaluation and no permission,” said Scott Whitney, flood risk manager for the Corps’ Rock Island District.

A couple of feet might not sound like much.

But every inch of levee height pushes floodwaters from one place to another. With levees blocking the river from its natural flood plain, the water has only one place to go: up.

The Corps can’t force a levee district to lower its levees. It can only stop paying for levee repairs. Each state regulates its levees — and the Mississippi touches 10 different states.

“The science is clear,” said Nicholas Pinter, associate director at the Center for Watershed Sciences of the University of California at Davis, who has extensively studied flood risks on the Mississippi. “When one levee district builds bigger levees, it increases the size and magnitude of flooding across the river, 10 miles up and down, too.”

Pinter said he was surprised that so many levee districts were building walls that are clearly too tall.

“The Sny is one of the players in what I would call levee wars,” Pinter said. “And to have it springing up there is puzzling and unnerving.

We thought the levee wars” featuring sabotage and gun-toting safety patrols “were a thing of the past.”

Reed said if the Sny district is forced to lower levees, it would lose its 100-year flood rating, meaning the Federal Emergency Management Agency would no longer consider the area to have protection from a once-in-a-century flood.

Insurance premiums would skyrocket, and the value of Sny farmland would plummet to half the current $12,000 an acre, “which would be devastating.”

Straightening the Mississippi The color of the upper river, north of St. Louis, is mostly blue and green.

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The Mississippi River meanders its way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico 2,300 miles away. A straightened view of the river allows us to easily see the connections that the ribbon of water creates between cities.

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COVER STORY Trump’s infrastructure plan proposes reducing the Corps’ role in monitoring levee heights.

The plan also proposes stripping the Corps of authority over some levees in the name of reducing costs and complexity. That’s good news for districts looking to raise their levees unfettered. It’s bad news for neighbors hoping the federal government continues to referee disputes along the river.

Guyton and other small groups dotting the riverbanks are alarmed. They say they wouldn’t be able to keep up if flood protection becomes a race to see who can build the biggest.

“This would be a disaster,” Guyton said.

Efforts to control the river start way up north, including at a lock and dam that once gave Minneapolis bragging rights as the river’s “Head of Navigation.” This is where the river that begins as a trickle in Upper Minnesota crashes like a white-water fist into a 50-foot limestone gorge, all under the lonely gaze of lockmaster Mike DeRusha.

He loves this view. It might be the most dramatic on the entire Mississippi. DeRusha stands at the wide windows of a brick control tower atop the lock and dam at Upper St. Anthony Falls. He used to have 12 workers with him here. They kept this Corps facility humming 24 hours a day for boats and barges to pass around the falls. Today, DeRusha is the last man left.

The official reason this lock closed three years ago was worries about invasive Asian carp swimming their way farther north and using the lock to get around the falls. But that wasn’t the real culprit. Instead, the extraordinary decision to mothball a major piece of infrastructure illustrates how much the Mississippi’s role in American life has changed.

“Minneapolis decided to give up on a dream its predecessors fought so hard for — to be the economic bookend to New Orleans,” river historian John Anfinson said. “But they have new dreams now.”

Minneapolis is powered today by health care and corporate headquarters for giants including Target. The shuttered brick mills next to the falls are now sought-after lofts and condos.

Planners look at the Corps’ control tower, built in 1967, and see an event space. Shutting down the lock, they say, would speed the river’s transformation from industrial waterway to recreational asset.

The lock at Upper St. Anthony Falls was the first one closed on the Mississippi — and it sent a shudder down the river.

Now, the Corps is studying whether to close

two more nearby locks — perhaps even pulling out the concrete and steel, returning the river to something approaching its wild state.

This is the barge industry’s worst fear, especially if this idea spreads.

“We’re not happy about it,” said Russell Eichman, a consultant for the barge trade group Upper Mississippi Waterway Association. “It might set a precedent.”

The 29 locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi were not built for flood control. They were built for barges. The river drops 420 feet in the 670 miles between the first and last lock, so barges need the staircase of locks and dams for navigation.

Barges move 300 million tons of goods a year on the Mississippi — a number that has remained mostly flat since 2000. Still, it’s the

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route for 60 percent of U.S. grain exports. And a single barge can transport the equivalent of 60 to 70 tractor trailers — a bragging point you’ll hear within five minutes of talking with the industry or the Corps.

The barge industry argues that ending shipping on the river would result in epic highway traffic jams.

What the river needs, barge boosters say, is to make the Mississippi’s locks bigger and better.

Most were built in the 1930s and expected to last 50 years. They can’t accommodate huge, modern barge flotillas. When a lock breaks, the river can be closed for days or weeks.

“This a huge issue for the U.S. to compete on the world market from a transportation standpoint,” said Rodney Weinzierl of the Illinois Corn Growers Association.

The barge industry thought it scored a major win in 2007 when Congress authorized the doubling in size of seven locks — five on the Mississippi, two on the Illinois River. The price tag was more than $2 billion. But Congress never funded it.

So they were excited by Trump’s talk of infrastructure spending — and alarmed by his proposal for paying for it. Trump and others have hinted that they might use private-public partnerships. Companies would invest in new projects and charge user fees. It’s commonly referred to as “P3.” Barge companies hate P3.

“If you were to go with P3 to build a lock and dam and start charging a toll, then you’re going to bankrupt operators,” Toohey of the Waterways Council said.

Barges pay nothing to go through locks now.

No one does. The locks are run in the public interest.

Up and down the monumental river, the public interest is a matter of much dispute.

There are constituencies promoting different projects that would cost billions — raising the height along 370 miles of levees and flood walls, or putting the first floodways on the Upper Mississippi or undertaking a total rethinking of how the river is managed.

The arguments continue, and the tools for holding back the water get older and weaker as the river rages on.

In Minneapolis, the veteran lockmaster DeRusha, who plans to retire this year, knows he probably won’t be here to see what becomes of his old workplace.

“I just hope the site remains and it’s an asset,” DeRusha said. “It’s a jewel.” n © The Washington Post

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The Mississippi is so forceful that it eats away at its banks. Unimpeded, it could shift hundreds of feet a year. Since the 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has shored up the river bed with concrete to prevent it from shifting.

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Sediment from the Missouri and Ohio rivers shifts the color of the water, turning it an earthy brown.

TOP: Lockmaster Mike DeRusha relishes his view of the Mississippi River atop the dam at Upper St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis.

ABOVE: The Archer Daniels Midland plant sits on the banks of the Mississippi

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KLMNO WEEKLY

SOCIAL MEDIA

The NBA has a phone obsession BY

C ANDACE B UCKNER

J

ason Terry knows he’s breaking the rules, but he can’t help it. In the Milwaukee Bucks’ locker room 75 minutes before a matchup with the visiting Washington Wizards, the veteran guard’s eyes are lowered, in deep inspection of his phone.

This season, the Bucks — not the team, but the players — implemented a rule: Stay off your phone before games. Players are only allowed to navigate music playlists. There is an exception for guys with certain pregame routines such as Terry’s video poker habit, which the 40-year-old has long used as a way to ease his mind before taking the court. But general phone use — and especially social media — is off limits.

“This is the time to get focused,” Terry explains.

But he isn’t watching the monitor showing Wizards game footage or playing video poker. He’s busted: The lull of the moment draws him to his email. The phone — as ubiquitous in an NBA workspace as X’s and O’s on the whiteboard — has the lockerroom veteran breaking the rules.

“I mean, it’s addictive,” Terry admits.

NBA players are a special breed, blessed with skill and athleticism, yet they are not unlike most of us: They, too, are obsessed with checking their phones, thumbing through Twitter and liking photos on Instagram.

The NBA social media boom began in 2009 in Milwaukee’s locker room when then-Bucks player Charlie Villanueva sent a tweet during halftime of a game against the Boston Celtics. The message was harmless, if superfluous: Villanueva shared with his followers that he needed to step up in the second half. His coach at the time, Scott Skiles, chastised Villanueva afterward for creating the perception that he was not focused. Before the start of the following season, the league introduced a rule banning cellphone usage during games.

Players now operate within

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One Wizard player calls it ‘social media disease.’

And the league’s young stars are not immune. these rules while otherwise tweeting and sharing with abandon. Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant was caught using a secret account to defend his honor against haters. After being traded to the New Orleans Pelicans, Nikola Mirotic seemingly trolled his former Chicago Bulls teammates by posting a shrug emoji moments after they gave up a late lead and lost to the Philadelphia 76ers. Those Sixers, by the way, feature the NBA’s king of Twitter.

All-star center Joel Embiid discovered his social media voice when he lost his entire rookie season to injury. He played a lot of video games but got bored and started tweeting — needling LeBron James for a reply and requesting dates with singer Rihanna.

“I just figured that social media would be a way for me to have fun, and that’s how I got into it — that summer that I got drafted,” says Embiid, who now boasts more

than 2 million Instagram followers, and another 1.27 million on Twitter. “From there, I guess it took off.”

Born with phone in hand For the NBA’s millennials, this is a way of life, because they have been wired to smartphones since childhood.

Before an early-season game in Washington, four of the six Phoenix Suns players in the visitors’ locker room were checking their social media feeds less than 70 minutes before tip-off, and the two abstaining were eventually pulled in by rookie Josh Jackson showing off an Instagram post.

Then again, that scene isn’t particularly surprising — the Suns have the NBA’s youngest roster by average age, causing interim head coach Jay Triano to joke, “No alcohol in there, please. It’s not allowed.”

Memphis Grizzlies rookie Dillon Brooks says he has tried to break his college habit of check-

Wielding a selfie stick, eventual top pick Karl-Anthony Towns poses with other prospects before the 2015 NBA draft in New York.

ing his phone, but once he got to the NBA and saw teammates glued to their devices, he followed suit.

“I try to stay out of it,” the 22-year-old says, “but, like, when you walk in after a game, every single person is on their phone, just looking at Instagram, looking at Twitter.”

Wizards forward Kelly Oubre Jr., also 22, has more than 530,000 followers between his Twitter and Instagram accounts.

He is equally as likely to retweet a Zen message from Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi as he is to mock a lifestyle Twitter account for not including him among the best dressed players in the NBA. He carries two phones and will often pick up one immediately after participating in the team’s morning shootaround. But he wishes he wasn’t so much like his peers.

“I hate it,” Oubre says. “It’s a generational thing, I would say for sure. It’s something that I really don’t like — the stereotype about my generation. I feel like we’re too dependent on the cellphones and the social media to hype our egos and make us feel good when, at the end of the day, that comes from yourself. It’s just a crutch, honestly. I call it the ‘SMD’ — the social media disease.”

Oubre may have a point, according to what Jim Taylor has observed in his clients. Taylor, who specializes in sports psychology and has worked with athletes from the NBA, NFL and MLB, believes social media can be distracting. Before several of his clients set off for PyeongChang to compete in the Winter Olympics, he recommended they shut off their phones.

“Just like almost every other person on the planet these days, they’re addicted. They’re probably more addicted to their phone and their social media,” Taylor says. “Because of egos, because of audiences . . . it’s psychologically more addictive because of the size of the audiences, the adulation that they receive. And also, realistically, they get hooked on the trolls, too.”

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ENVIRONMENT Getting the message across Some NBA coaches say there is no cure for the “SMD.” “You’re banging your head against the wall if you’re going to try to get them to put their phones down,” the Detroit Pistons’ Stan Van Gundy says.

Coach Luke Walton has not banned phones from the Los Angeles Lakers’ breakfast meetings or film-room sessions, but if a player’s device rings, he can expect to pay a small fine.

When 76ers Coach Brett Brown scrolls through Embiid’s social media feeds and notices something controversial — such as Embiid and Miami Heat center Hassan Whiteside engaging in Twitter trash talk after a preseason game — he will use it as a teachable moment.

“If you can find a way to not dismiss it and educate them on the pitfalls of social media, of which there are many, then, you know, you’re just not living with your head in the sand,” Brown says. “It’s the world we live in.”

Triano says it’s much like the way he texts his kids to get through to them.

“I know they’re going to get that before they hear me verbally,” he says. “It’s the way things are, and I think we as coaches need to adapt and know that it’s going to take different ways to reach these young kids now.”

It’s not just the kids. The oldest of Terry’s five daughters is in college, yet he’s a grown man who can’t put down his iPhone 5 before games. In 2014, Terry was 36 and a member of the Brooklyn Nets, a locker room filled with veterans, including Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Reggie Evans, when it hit him.

“That’s when I noticed guys were on their phones,” Terry recalls.

Back inside the Bucks’ space, Terry looks around and sees teammates watching the pregame scouting video. Occasionally, one looks down at his phone and thumbs up, though it’s only to find the next song.

Terry gets chastised by his kids for using a phone that’s a few generations out of date, and he’s heckled by young teammates who implore him to join Instagram and Snapchat. But Terry’s fine with having just Twitter and a few apps. Besides, he’s already trying to break the addiction. n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Tougher emissions policies could save millions of lives BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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here is an overlooked benefit to greatly lowering carbon emissions worldwide, a new study says. In addition to preserving Arctic sea ice, reducing sea-level rise and alleviating other effects of global warming, it would probably save more than 150 million human lives.

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Smoke and steam billow from a state-owned steel plant in Hebei, China. A study said the benefit of lowering carbon emissions worldwide would be felt mostly in Asian countries with dirty air.

According to the study, premature deaths would fall on nearly every continent if the world’s governments agree to cut emissions of carbon and other harmful gases enough to limit global temperature rise to less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is about a degree lower than the target set by the Paris climate agreement.

The benefit would be felt mostly in Asian countries with dirty air — 13 million lives would be saved in large cities in India alone. Greater Dhaka in Bangladesh would have 3.6 million fewer deaths, and Jakarta in Indonesia would record 1.6 fewer lives lost. The African cities of Lagos and Cairo combined would register more than 2 million fewer deaths.

In the United States, the Clean Air Act has improved air quality over the years. Still, more than 330,000 lives in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and

Washington would be spared, according to the study, published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Americans don’t really grasp how pollution impacts their lives,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “You say, ‘My uncle went to the hospital and died of a heart attack.’ You don’t say the heart attack was caused by air pollution, so we don’t know. It’s still a big killer here. It’s much bigger than from people who die from plane crashes or war or terrorism, but we don’t see the link so clearly.”

Shindell used an automaker’s problem with faulty ignition switches in 2014 to further illustrate his point. When the switches failed, more than 3 million recalls were involved and auto executives were summoned to Washington to testify before Congress. “But the combined tailpipes of automobiles kill dozens and dozens more people than faulty ignition switches,” the researcher said. “We should be far more worried about pollution than the things we actually worry about.”

There is little hope that the Paris climate accord can reach its goal of limiting global temperature rise to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, let alone the 2.7-degree threshold that calls for stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The higher threshold was a bargain struck by politicians and economists who helped negotiate the global agreement as the lowest-cost approach. As a statement that announced the study said, that strategy “permits emissions of carbon dioxide and associated air pollutants to remain higher in the short-term in hopes they can be offset by negative emissions in the far distant future.”

In other words, governments can loosely regulate emissions from power plants, cement factories and other industries in the hopes that technological advancements will reduce future carbon emissions beyond what is imagin-

able. Shindell said, “That’s a very risky strategy.” It’s akin to loading up on a credit card now in the belief that your future income will be much higher and you can pay later, he said.

Greg Faluvegi, a researcher at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University, and Karl Seltzer, a researcher at Duke, contributed to the study. It was funded by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The researchers ran computer simulations of future carbon dioxide emissions as well as other pollutants — such as ozone and particulate matter — that make it harder for millions of people around the world to breathe, to arrive at different scenarios for its potentially grave effects.

Then they “calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world — but focusing on results in major cities — using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths,” the statement said.

The models calculated about 7 million deaths per year if governments fail to work toward zero emissions by the end of the century, starting today.

“There’s got to be a significant amount of progress within the 2020s or it’s too late,” Shindell said.

Even for the researchers, it’s a piein-the-sky goal, given that South Asian nations such as India, where pollution is among the worst in the world, argue correctly that their per capita use is small compared with historical use in the Western Hemisphere and that they should be allowed time to develop just as other countries did.

While politicians, the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists fight, some people who matter in the debate are on the sidelines, Shindell said. “We should have doctors and public health professionals weigh into this. We don’t have the understanding of how people are impacted by this.” n © The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Women working to change our world N ONFICTION

T VISIONARY WOMEN How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World

By Andrea Barnet Ecco. 514 pp. $29.99

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REVIEWED BY

J OANNA S CUTTS

hey were single and married, mothers and not, educated and self-taught, financially comfortable and struggling. Their work spans the second half of the 20th century and continues into the present.

They did not know one another.

But in her lively new biography of Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, Andrea Barnet makes a compelling case that these women “changed our world.” Environmentalists in the broadest sense, their vision — and actions — on conservation, she shows, are nothing short of revolutionary.

“Visionary Women” links Barnet’s subjects chronologically, with an emphasis on the 1960s. It was then that the women became, collectively, “a kind of true north for the gathering counterculture.”

They were Davids aiming slingshots at the Goliath of postwar America, which was waging an all-out “war on nature” with wrecking balls and toxic pesticides, paving paradise to put up a vast suburban parking lot.

In “Silent Spring” (1962), Carson shocked the nation by laying bare the enormous environmental cost of technological progress. Jacobs, in turn, was fighting to keep another fragile and beautiful ecosystem — her New York City neighborhood — from being flattened by the highways whisking white families to the suburbs. Meanwhile, Goodall camped for months in the jungles of Tanzania to bring back reports of the intelligence and sociability of chimpanzees, which upended the scientific establishment’s assumption of human supremacy. Finally, Waters, more product than driver of the counterculture, built a restaurant and a worldwide reputation on the idea that the best meals were created in a respectful symbiosis between environment, farmer, chef and diner.

The ’60s saw the gathering of the second feminist wave, and Barnet writes that Betty Friedan

ASSOCIATED PRESS

might be considered a fifth “visionary” in her lineup but for the violence of her approach, her desire to blow up the system rather than safeguard what is valuable.

Yet Barnet is careful not to rely on essentialist assumptions about gender. When she describes Carson’s style of fostering connection rather than competing with her peers as “female,” the word is set off in scare quotes. Her subjects’ femaleness mattered most, unsurprisingly, to men: It was what they saw first and what some of them could not see past.

Over and over, Goodall fended off the sexual advances of her much older mentor. Carson was dismissed by her critics as a catloving spinster, and Jacobs as a “sentimental Hausfrau.” Jacobs embraced her maternal identity, deploying local children to knock on doors, gather signatures and draw the attention of the press.

Beyond their iconoclasm and remarkably supportive families — and of course, their gender — the main biographical trait these women share is that they all are white. When Barnet writes of the complacent world into which Carson’s “Silent Spring” would erupt, “People looked inward to home and family, diverted themselves with easy pleasures, [and] turned a blind eye to social and racial injustices,” she means white people — those who, like her subjects, were the intended

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

LEFT: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” outlined the environmental costs of progress.

ABOVE: Jane Goodall’s studies of chimps challenged notions of human supremacy. RIGHT: Alice Waters’s food popularized the idea of sustainable dining.

beneficiaries of the vast postwar technological and consumer boom.

Barnet, whose previous book was about the women of Greenwich Village and Harlem in the 1910s and ’20s, acknowledges that the cliche of the suburban American Dream was based on segregation and exclusion. She observes that Jacobs testified to a Senate subcommittee in 1962 about endemic racism at the Federal Housing Authority and that her ideas about the failures of housing projects influenced James Baldwin, yet we don’t hear voices from communities of color — the main targets of urban-renewal policies.

Barnet might have noted, in her discussion of the rise of agribusiness, that the patterns of racial exclusion that created the suburbs

ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

also affected rural areas, with black farmers routinely denied federal assistance to save their businesses. That less than 2 percent of the country’s farmers today are African American should affect how we understand the “farm to table” relationship and who benefits from efforts to improve the food supply. Likewise, if there has truly been a “paradigm shift” in the way Americans value the natural world since Carson’s book was published, it needs to extend to an understanding of the central role of race in environmental catastrophes like the Flint, Mich., water crisis.

Still, Barnet makes a powerful case for a shared perspective among her subjects, likening Carson’s understanding of the sea to Jacobs’s view of the city, as “a balance of live and ever-evolving forces, a fluid network of exchanges, as much a process as a place.”

All four women learned by immersing themselves in their environment and letting their eyes lead the way. Of the many lessons they have to teach us, this may be the most potent of all: Pay attention. n Scutts, a literary critic and cultural historian, is the author of “The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Flight-attendant thriller fit for takeoff

Clash of rule of law with popular will

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

“T

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

he Flight Attendant” opens with a doozy — dare I say a killer?

— of a hangover

scene.

Cassandra “Cassie” Bowden is a seasoned survivor when it comes to the aftereffects of binge drinking and random hookups. A gorgeous single woman in her late 30s, Cassie enjoys the off-duty perks of her job as a flight attendant. A fistful of Advil and a shower and she’s ready to step back into her slightly crumpled uniform. But one fateful morning in a hotel room in Dubai puts a dead stop to Cassie’s fancy-free lifestyle.

The scene teasingly unfolds over the first five pages of the novel: the harsh morning light, the parched sourness of Cassie’s mouth, the dizzy recollections of a passionate night spent with the hedge fund manager named Alex she met on the flight from New York. Cassie turns to look at the man in the bed beside her: “For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. . . . She saw his neck . . . how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey.”

The slow-motion getaway that plays out over the next five chapters is particularly excruciating, but anxiety-prone readers will have to remind themselves to breathe for pretty much the entirety of this novel.

For starters, a bloodstained Cassie has to figure out how to unobtrusively exit that room and walk back to the hotel where her flight crew will be assembling for the shuttle ride to the airport.

(Step One: Place a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the hotel room door and take a quick shower. Step Two: Exit hotel and toss remains

of the possible murder weapon — a broken Stolichnaya bottle — into trash cans along the way.) All through the multi-leg flight back to New York, Cassie is tormented by a question she can’t answer because of her drunken blackout: Did she cut Alex’s throat with that broken vodka bottle?

Filled with turbulence and sudden plunges in altitude, “The Flight Attendant” is a very rare thriller whose penultimate chapter made me think to myself, “I didn’t see that coming.” The novel is also enhanced by the author’s deftness in sketching out vivid characters and locales and by his obvious research into the realities of airline work.

Inevitably, Alex’s body is discovered and his one-night stand with Cassie becomes public. Cassie becomes the FBI’s prime suspect and is dubbed the “Cart Tart Killer” by the tabloids.

But Cassie has more to fear than nasty nicknames or even jail time. As her memory of that misbegotten night improves, Cassie remembers details about another woman — some kind of business associate of Alex’s — who visited the hotel room and knocked back vodka while remaining unnervingly sober.

Working a flight to Rome, Cassie is certain she spots that woman in an airport line. And, what’s with the shady Russian business connections Alex might have had?

“The Flight Attendant” is the ultimate airplane book, and not just because of its name: entertaining and filled with inside info on the less glamorous aspect of flight crews’ lives, it may even make you more politely attentive the next time you’re asked to listen to that in-flight lecture on emergency water landings. n Corrigan who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program Fresh Air. This was written for The Washington Post.

B THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT

By Chris Bohjalian Doubleday. 368 pp. $26.95

THE PEOPLE VS. DEMOCRACY Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

By Yascha Mounk Harvard.

393 pp. $29.95

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REVIEWED BY

T HOMAS C AROTHERS

ookshelves in the United States and Europe are starting to sag under the weight of new volumes analyzing democracy’s troubled state. Their foreboding titles sound a clear alarm, such as “How Democracies Die” and “The Road to Unfreedom.” Yascha Mounk’s, “The People vs. Democracy,” is an engaging, accessible addition to this stream. For Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard University and a frequent commentator on contemporary politics, the most pressing challenge comes from “the farright populists who have been gaining strength in every major democracy,” with President Trump “the most striking manifestation of democracy’s crisis.”

Mounk warns that two foundational assumptions of post-World War II global politics are now in question. It no longer appears certain that the established democracies of North America and Europe will always stay democratic. Additionally, rather than forming a seamless whole, liberalism and democracy — the essences of which in Mounk’s account are, respectively, the rule of law and the popular will — are starting to clash seriously with each other.

In Mounk’s account, three big developments are driving the contemporary instability of democracy. First and foremost, slow economic growth and rising inequality have replaced the sustained high growth and moderate inequality that helped root Western democracy in the second half of the 20th century. Second, the recent wave of immigration in most major democracies is prompting a “vast rebellion” against ethnic and cultural pluralism. Third, new communications technologies have removed traditional media filters, empowering previously marginalized illiberal voices and making citizens more aware of the unrepresentative features of their democratic institutions.

Yet in painting analytically with such broad strokes and bold

colors, Mounk sometimes sacrifices nuance. The vision he sets out of populism as a global epidemic overstates the case, for example. Populism is not on the rise in many regions, including subSaharan Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, and has recently been on the decline in Latin America. Additionally, the virus of populism in Europe does not appear to be spreading as quickly or dangerously he implies.

Mounk highlights the crumbling of what he calls “democracy’s founding myth”: liberal democracy’s claim to be democratic despite relying heavily on representative institutions that he says were founded in self-conscious opposition to the ideal of democracy. Here too, however, the rapid sweep of his account produces some analytic queasiness. His claims about the growing power of unelected institutions are telling with regard to Europe, especially given the sometimes overweening role of the European Union. But they are a bit strained vis-a-vis the United States.

Mounk moves forthrightly from diagnosis to extensive prescription, with a three-part call to action. More than a few recommendations will make the reader mumble “no doubt” but wonder how exactly they might come about. That politically likely solutions to the powerful drivers of democratic discontent are so elusive is less a shortcoming of the book than a reflection of the depth of the troubles at hand.

There is room for debate over many parts of the alarming picture that Mounk and other worried political experts are presenting, yet no room for debate that Western democracy is showing greater strain and facing greater threats than at any time in decades.n Carothers is the senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This was written for The Washington Post.

14 SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2018

21 SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2018

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A look at a long Saudi to-do list DAVID IGNATIUS is a Washington Post columnist.

As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continues his whirlwind promotional tour of America, it’s important to assess what he has already begun changing in Saudi policy and what’s still on his to-do list.

The modernization of Saudi cultural and religious life is evident to any visitor to the kingdom. When I was in Riyadh a few weeks ago, I saw many small signs of the expansion of women’s rights, such as: Women’s gyms are opening around the city, women’s sports teams are organizing, women are attending soccer matches and cultural events, and women are eagerly discussing what cars they’ll be buying when they’re allowed to drive in June.

“We are all human beings, and there is no difference,” the Saudi crown prince said in an interview last week with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Talk is easy, of course, but in a country where women have been treated as second-class citizens for so long, such royal proclamations matter.

Economic reforms, however, are mostly still in the planning stage. The privatization of Saudi Aramco has likely been delayed until next year, and it’s not yet clear how much of the oil company will be floated publicly, where the stock sale will take place or its valuation. The anticorruption putsch last November seems popular with the Saudi public, but it’s still not clear whether turning the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh into a billionaires’

prison has helped the rule of law in Saudi Arabia or hurt.

The biggest foreign challenge for MBS, as the crown prince is known, is the potentially ruinous war in Yemen. The Saudi leader jumped into this conflict three years ago, hoping to smite an Iranian-backed force centered on the Houthi sect in northwest Yemen. The Houthis managed to ally with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and a deluge of Saudi bombs and artillery devastated the impoverished country but hasn’t yet forced the Houthis to accept a settlement.

MBS insisted the tide is turning in Yemen during more than two hours of discussion at his palace on Feb. 26. He said the Houthis had blundered by killing Saleh this past December, two days after

Saleh switched sides and backed Riyadh.

Prospects for a Yemen settlement have improved, another senior Saudi official told me. A model is the deal that was nearly reached about 20 months ago in Kuwait. Now, as then, a key Saudi demand is that the Houthis give up heavy weapons before a transitional government is in place; the Saudis fear a repetition of Lebanon, where Hezbollah kept its weapons after the end of the civil war and became a state within the state.

One little-noticed area of change is Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Iraq, which has been stunted for a generation.

MBS has met Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and held several meetings with a senior Iraqi security leader.

Cabinet ministers have exchanged visits, too. The two countries have established a joint “coordination committee” to facilitate further discussion.

Saudi-Iraqi cultural and economic contacts have also expanded: A soccer game between the two nations in Basra, Iraq, in February was a raucous moment of sports diplomacy. An international oil and gas exposition in Basra, planned for December, will give another chance for the two countries to

mingle.

And then there’s the religious rift: The Saudi-Iraqi estrangement in recent years helped worsen the sectarian divide between Sunnis, who regard Mecca as their religious center, and Shiites, who look to Najaf in central Iraq as a shrine holier than even Qom in Iran.

MBS has tried to bridge this religious divide, partly as a way of undercutting Iranian influence, and Iraqis and Saudis both report progress.

Sheikh Mohammad al-Issa, a member of the Saudi religious leadership and head of the government-backed Muslim World League, said last month that he had hosted Muqtada alSadr, a fiery Iraqi cleric, for a lengthy discussion in Riyadh recently. “I don’t believe we have any issues with the Shia as a sect,” he told me. This tolerant stance may help offer an alternative for Arab Shiites who want to resist Iranian tutelage.

MBS is an autocratic young leader in a hurry. He wants to fight every battle at once. But he needs to be in the business of solving problems rather than picking new fights with Iran. And in his travels across the United States this month, he’d be wise to make some friends outside the Trump White House. n

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SUNDAY, MARCH MARCH 2018 SUNDAY, 25, 25, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Espionage BY

M ARK K RAMER

The poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in southern England, most likely by Rus­ sian intelligence agents, highlights the role of espionage in Russia’s relations with the West. Skripal had been a double agent for the Brit­ ish from the 1990s until he was arrested by Russian security forces in 2004. Britain got him back in a spy swap in 2010. Espionage often generates misconceptions — by virtue of its secrecy.

MYTH NO. 1 Espionage increases tensions between hostile states.

Espionage is ubiquitous, and all governments are aware that their opponents — and even their friends and allies — are spying on them. Only rarely do acts of espionage lead to significant tension between states. Even when a spy scandal leads a government to expel another’s diplomats and embassy staff, the furor usually subsides quickly, and staffing levels are restored.

Espionage has often helped to prevent or reduce tension. During the Cold War, Soviet and East German intelligence agencies recruited large numbers of spies at NATO headquarters and in the West German government. From them, Soviet leaders learned that U.S. and NATO military forces were not gearing up for an attack.

Technical means of intelligencegathering provided further reassurance. The United States and the Soviet Union deployed elaborate systems — including reconnaissance satellites, electronic interceptors and naval eavesdropping devices — to find out what the other was doing with its military, especially its nuclear arsenal. This gave leaders on both sides confidence that the other was not about to launch a surprise nuclear attack.

MYTH NO. 2 This assassination attempt will make Russia a pariah.

Previous Russian attacks in Britain have not had significant

consequences for the Kremlin.

After Alexander Litvinenko was killed in London in 2006 by two Russian operatives who poisoned his tea with polonium-210, the British government imposed sanctions, but almost no other government did. Shortly after Litvinenko died, Germany reaffirmed its lavish energy deals with Russian state-owned companies, hardly a way to express disapproval of brazen murder. The Russian government over the past two decades has been able to do much the same.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s hopes of lasting Western efforts to isolate Russia seem unlikely to be fulfilled.

MYTH NO. 3 Spies betray their country mostly for money.

Nearly all the U.S. officials who became spies for the Soviet Union during the Stalin era did so for ideological reasons. Many did not even get paid.

Disgruntlement and a desire for revenge spurred numerous others to become spies, such as CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, whose anger at being passed over for a foreign posting induced him to help the KGB and ultimately defect to the Soviet Union. Many others were blackmailed or coerced into spying, having been entrapped by sexual encounters of various sorts. In the post-Cold War era, money has been even less significant. One authoritative study found it was a factor in only 28 percent of the known

PHIL NOBLE/REUTERS

Dawn is reflected in the windows of the official London residence of Russia’s ambassador to Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats last week after the poisoning in a British town of a former Russian intelligence agent.

MYTH NO. 4 Concerns about Soviet spies in the 1940s were overblown.

U.S. decryptions of Soviet foreign intelligence cables from the 1940s (released in the mid’90s) and declassified materials from the former Soviet intelligence archives reveal that hundreds of U.S. citizens, including some high-ranking officials worked for Stalin’s intelligence agencies.

When the FBI began breaking up Soviet spy networks in the United States after World War II, the scale of Soviet espionage was not yet understood. Only many years later could U.S. officials truly see how large the spy rings had been. If President Harry Truman had known the full extent of the betrayals, the backlash in the United States would have been harsher.

intelligence agencies is to gather information about foreign countries, especially hostile ones. The intelligence services of the major powers also engage in covert operations, subversion, and the spreading of propaganda and disinformation, but the largest share by far of their personnel and resources goes toward the collection of secret information through human and technical espionage and the subsequent analysis of that information.

Declassified Soviet intelligence documents confirm that the chief task of the hundreds of Americans who were recruited by Stalin’s intelligence agencies was to obtain secret information and pass it on to Moscow.

Influencing policy was rarely, if ever, their main goal — indeed, it was discouraged if it would raise red flags and thereby endanger access to classified materials. n

MYTH NO. 5 Espionage mostly aims to sway the policies of hostile powers.

The dominant purpose of

Kramer is the director of Cold War studies at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. This was written for The Washington Post.

cases of Americans who spied for foreign countries from 1990 through 2015.