The Washington Post National Weekly - April 14, 2019

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Keeping Columbine Safe Keeping Columbine Safe IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE THE COLORADO IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE THE COLORADO SCHOOL SHOOTING. ONE MAN’S JOB IS TO MAKE SCHOOLSURE SHOOTING. ONE MAN’S JOBONE. IS TO MAKE THERE ISN’T ANOTHER SURE THERE ISN’T ANOTHER ONE. PAGE 12 PAGE 12 10

Politics Moderate pushback 7 Politics Moderate pushback 7

Nation In the West, small towns thrive 8 Nation In the West, small towns thrive 8

5 Myths Whistleblowers 23 5 Myths Whistleblowers 23

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THE FIX THE FIX

Barr will Barrlook willinto look‘spying’ into ‘spying’ A ARON B LAKE

on his campaign, former FBI director James B. technically spying on a campaign official. on his campaign, former FBI director James B. technically spying on a campaign official.

Comey said this was simply an informationThen there were a couple non-FISA related Comey said this was simply an informationThen there were a couple non-FISA related gathering effort — emphasizing that the “actuefforts to glean information from both Page rom almost the moment he was nomigathering effort — emphasizing that the “actuefforts to glean information from both Page rom almost the moment he was nomial” term is “the use of Confidential Human and another campaign adviser, George Papanated as attorney general, the question al” term is “the use of Confidential Human and another campaign adviser, George Papanated as attorney general, the question Sources.” dopoulos. The New York Times reported in has been whether William P. Barr Sources.” dopoulos. The New York Times reported in has been whether William P. Barr Former director of national intelligence May 2018 about the activities of an informant, would do President Trump’s bidding.

Former director of national intelligence May 2018 about the activities of an informant, would do President Trump’s bidding.

James R. Clapper Jr. was asked around the who was later revealed to be Stefan Halper: “At Signs are increasing that Barr is at least James R. Clapper Jr. was asked around the who was later revealed to be Stefan Halper: “At Signs are increasing that Barr is at least same time, “Was the FBI spying on Trump’s least one government informant met several aying things Trump wants to hear. same time, “Was the FBI spying on Trump’s least one government informant met several saying things Trump wants to hear. campaign?” and he responded directly. “No, times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, At a hearing of the Senate Appropriations campaign?” and he responded directly. “No, times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, At a hearing of the Senate Appropriations they were not.” ommittee this past week, Barr conthey were not.”

Committee this past week, Barr conAt another point in the same interrmed that he is looking into what he At another point in the same interfirmed that he is looking into what he view, Clapper seemed to momentarily alled “spying” on the Trump campaign view, Clapper seemed to momentarily called “spying” on the Trump campaign borrow the term Trump was using. “They uring the 2016 election. borrow the term Trump was using. “They during the 2016 election. were spying on — a term I don’t particu“I am going to be reviewing both the were spying on — a term I don’t particu“I am going to be reviewing both the larly like — but on what the Russians enesis and the conduct of intelligence larly like — but on what the Russians genesis and the conduct of intelligence were doing,” Clapper said. Trump has ctivities directed at the Trump camwere doing,” Clapper said. Trump has activities directed at the Trump cammisleadingly used that quote to argue aign,” Barr said. “I think spying on a misleadingly used that quote to argue paign,” Barr said. “I think spying on a that Clapper was confirming that spying olitical campaign is a big deal.” that Clapper was confirming that spying political campaign is a big deal.” did exist.

When pressed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen did exist.

When pressed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen And that’s the other point here. There D-N.H.) on whether he indeed viewed it And that’s the other point here. There (D-N.H.) on whether he indeed viewed it was clearly an information-gathering efs “spying” on Trump’s campaign, Barr was clearly an information-gathering efas “spying” on Trump’s campaign, Barr fort going on. The surveillance we know aid, “I think spying did occur.” fort going on. The surveillance we know said, “I think spying did occur.” about came after Page was off the cam“The question is whether it was adabout came after Page was off the cam“The question is whether it was adpaign. From there, the question is whethquately predicated,” he said. “I’m not paign. From there, the question is whethequately predicated,” he said. “I’m not er you consider hiring an informant to uggesting it was not adequately predier you consider hiring an informant to suggesting it was not adequately prediPETE MAROVICH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK talk to a couple of Trump campaign ated, but I need to explore that.”

PETE MAROVICH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK talk to a couple of Trump campaign cated, but I need to explore that.” advisers to be “spying on a political The existence of that inquiry is notable U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr testifies before the advisers to be “spying on a political The existence of that inquiry is notable U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr testifies before the campaign.” Clapper suggests that, even if nough; this is what Trump has been Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. campaign.” Clapper suggests that, even if enough; this is what Trump has been Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. you do consider it “spying,” the target was ushing in arguing that the entire Russia you do consider it “spying,” the target was pushing in arguing that the entire Russia Russia and not the campaign.

So the involvecurrent and former officials said. That has nvestigation was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” Russia and not the campaign. So the involvecurrent and former officials said. That has investigation was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” ment of the campaign was more incidental. become a politically contentious point, with med at bringing him down. ment of the campaign was more incidental. become a politically contentious point, with aimed at bringing him down.

Trump’s use of this term implies a much Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the But his use of the word “spying” might be Trump’s use of this term implies a much Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the But his use of the word “spying” might be more nefarious-sounding effort, and the idea F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or ust as notable. That is a highly disputed term more nefarious-sounding effort, and the idea F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or just as notable. That is a highly disputed term that it was targeted at his campaign is a big trying to entrap campaign officials.” hen it comes to what the FBI did relative to that it was targeted at his campaign is a big trying to entrap campaign officials.” when it comes to what the FBI did relative to piece of that. On Wednesday, Barr emphasized Unlike the Page FISA warrant, this came he Trump campaign in 2016. piece of that. On Wednesday, Barr emphasized Unlike the Page FISA warrant, this came the Trump campaign in 2016. that the “spying” might have been warranted even as the advisers were serving on the There are a few things we know about that that the “spying” might have been warranted even as the advisers were serving on the There are a few things we know about that and A-okay. But he also essentially subscribed campaign. But as the Times noted, the idea ritics of the FBI’s activities have characterand A-okay. But he also essentially subscribed campaign. But as the Times noted, the idea critics of the FBI’s activities have characterto both of those highly disputed Trump talking that it constituted “spying on a political ed as spying. One is the Foreign Intelligence to both of those highly disputed Trump talking that it constituted “spying on a political ized as spying. One is the Foreign Intelligence points. And that lends legitimacy to what, at campaign,” as Barr put it, is highly contenurveillance Act warrant to monitor former points. And that lends legitimacy to what, at campaign,” as Barr put it, is highly contenSurveillance Act warrant to monitor former this point, is essentially a Trump conspiracy tious. rump campaign adviser Carter Page. But that this point, is essentially a Trump conspiracy tious.

Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But that theory. n When Trump alleged that the FBI had spied ame after he left the campaign, so it wasn’t theory. n When Trump alleged that the FBI had spied came after he left the campaign, so it wasn’t

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CONTENTS

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OPINION local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2019 The Washington Post / Year 5, No. 27 FIVE MYTHS © 2019 The Washington Post / Year 5, No. 27

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ON THE COVER A pin on Rick ON THE COVER A pin on Rick POLITICS 4 Townsend’s sweater memorializes Townsend’s sweater memorializes THE NATION 8 his daughter, Lauren, who was his daughter, Lauren, who was THE WORLD 10 killed in the mass shooting at killed in the mass shooting at COVER STORY 12 Columbine High School on April 20, Columbine High School on April 20, TECHNOLOGY 16 1999. Photo by THOMAS PEIPERT 1999. Photo by THOMAS PEIPERT BOOKS 18 of the Associated Press of the Associated Press OPINION 20 FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

Congress can’t afford to look other way on Israel CHRIS VAN HOLLEN AND GERALD E. CONNOLLY Van Hollen, a Democrat, represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate.

Connolly, a Democrat, represents Virginia’s 11th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have narrowly prevailed in Israel’s election this past week — but at what cost? ¶ Netanyahu’s full­throated embrace of the far right’s extreme agenda has placed him on a dangerous track that is not in the interest of Israel, the Palestinians or the United States. As longtime supporters of a strong U.S.­ Israel relationship, we are deeply concerned about recent developments. If enacted, these policies would fundamentally change the character of Israel, undermine basic Palestinian human rights and violate long­held policies and values adopted by U.S. presidents of both parties to achieve a future two­state solution that enables Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and dignity alongside each other. That’s why Congress cannot afford to look the other way.

Netanyahu has demonstrated increasing disregard for international law and human rights — accelerating construction for thousands of settler housing units in the West Bank, allowing the forcible removal of Arab families from their homes in East Jerusalem and sanctioning violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories. He has also aligned himself with openly racist factions that have supported the removal of Palestinians from the occupied territories. In this context, his recently announced pledge to annex all settlements in the West Bank can be viewed only as the first step toward a West Bank with enclaves of stateless Palestinians or of a greater Israel without Palestinians.

These developments have not taken place in a vacuum. They have been recklessly aided and abetted by President Trump, whose indiscriminate support for Netanyahu and the Israeli far right has been characterized by total disregard for long-standing

U.S. policy, international law and regional stability. The administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem outside of a negotiated framework, close the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem and end support for all humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were part of a strategy to force Palestinians to abandon their aspirations for their future.

And this dangerous, shortsighted approach has continued. Just this past week, at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not confirm whether the administration would oppose any plan to unilaterally annex the West Bank — a long-held U.S. position critical, among other things, to preserving any prospect for a two-state solution.

What do these developments mean for American supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship, both in and outside of Congress? This is a time for honesty. And while Trump and Netanyahu loyalists

AMIR LEVY/GETTY IMAGES

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with his wife Sara, greets supporters at his Likud Party headquarters in Tel Aviv on April 10.

can be counted on to paint any criticism of their policies as antiIsrael, the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.

Standing up against this extreme agenda is vital for the security and prosperity of both our nations.

We have both strongly supported defense cooperation and security assistance to Israel, including the agreement reached

by President Barack Obama to provide Israel with about $38 billion in security assistance over the next 10 years. We have always viewed this support as critical to ensuring that Israel can defend itself against the threats it faces throughout the region — and with the expectation that it would enable Israel to make the difficult compromises necessary for peace. But a strong military is not all that is required to ensure Israel’s long-term security and stability as a Jewish and democratic state. Also necessary is a settlement that recognizes the human and political rights of the Palestinian people through the creation of an independent Palestinian state that recognizes Israel’s right to exist within its own borders.

Trump has abdicated the U.S. role in advancing the IsraeliPalestinian peace process and has attempted to exploit Israel for partisan political advantage.

Given what we have already seen, there is no reason to believe that his administration will offer anything close to a credible proposal to resolve the conflict peacefully. So Congress must pass legislation calling for the protection of the human rights of Israelis and Palestinians and opposing any actions that sabotage a future two-state solution — including any expansions of settlements to new areas and any effort to unilaterally annex any or all of the West Bank. Congress must also restore basic assistance to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and support schools and hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

We believe the vast majority of Americans, including the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Jewish community, support the positions we have outlined.

The truly pro-Israel position is one that recognizes the reality that a two-state solution is the only way to ensure a secure and democratic Jewish state and recognizes the political and human rights of the Palestinians.

Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean we have to support Netanyahu’s policies any more than being pro-American requires us to support Trump’s policies. In the context of recent developments, Congress cannot afford to be silent. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Whistleblowers BY

D ANA G OLD

When a whistleblower revealed the Trump administration’s decision to overturn 25 security clearance denials, it was the latest in a long and storied history of insiders exposing significant abuses of public trust.

Whistles were blown on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Watergate coverup, Enron’s financial fraud, the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of domestic electronic communications and, during the Trump administration, the corruption of former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, Cambridge Analytica’s theft of Facebook users’ data to develop targeted political ads, and harm to children posed by the “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Despite the essential role whistleblowers play in illuminating the truth and protecting the public interest, several myths persist about them, some pernicious.

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

MYTH NO. 1 Whistleblowers are employees who report problems externally.

Often a distinction is made between employees who raise concerns inside their organizations and those who turn to outside entities, such as Congress, enforcement agencies or the press, to disclose concerns about wrongdoing.

But under most whistleblower protection laws, employees have rights to report wrongdoing both internally and externally, free from reprisal. So failing to consider workers who disclose serious misconduct to be whistleblowers because they haven’t reported the problems externally could make them liable to retaliation by their employers.

MYTH NO. 2 Whistleblowers are either disloyal or heroes.

In reality, most whistleblowers are motivated by a deep sense of loyalty to their employers and are exercising both a high degree of professional ethics and a belief that their employers will address the problem. While many employees who witness wrongdoing in the workplace stay silent, fearing reprisal or

futility, those who do raise concerns — and again, most do so internally first — demonstrate faith that their employers are committed to compliance and that they can make a difference.

Whistleblowers who report externally typically do so because the problem is significant and their employers have failed to address it or engaged in reprisal (or both).

MYTH NO. 3 ‘Leaker’ is another term for ‘whistleblower.’

Leaking is not the same as whistleblowing.

Whistleblowing is defined under the Whistleblower Protection Act, the primary law that covers nonintelligence federal workers, as disclosure of information that an employee “reasonably believes” demonstrates “a violation of a law, rule or regulation; gross mismanagement; a gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; or a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.” This describes misconduct that is of serious concern to the public interest.

Leaks typically don’t reveal this level of misconduct, instead sharing information that may be salacious, embarrassing or

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning took evidence of an Iraqi airstrike that killed two photographers to WikiLeaks, which published it.

otherwise interesting, even if sometimes quite important.

MYTH NO. 4 Remaining anonymous is the best strategy for whistleblowing.

Because most workers raise concerns internally first, and because their information is often tied to their responsibilities and expertise, their fingerprints are metaphorically on their disclosures. Under the law, an employee who suffers reprisal for whistleblowing needs to show that the employer had knowledge that they raised an issue. A sophisticated employer may be able to suss out the identity of a whistleblower and retaliate, but an employee’s attempts to remain anonymous may make it more difficult to prove the employer had that knowledge.

Anonymity can weaken a whistleblower’s ability to gain support from public-interest organizations, professional associations, sympathetic members of Congress, enforcement agents and even other co-workers who might want to come forward.

MYTH NO. 5 Julian Assange is a whistleblower.

WikiLeaks is a self-described “media organization” that “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.” Before being implicated in the acquisition and release of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s emails in 2016, Assange and WikiLeaks published diplomatic cables and video footage of an Iraqi airstrike that killed two Reuters photographers, provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

But unlike Manning, Assange did not discover or disclose wrongdoing as an insider.

Rather, he received information from a whistleblower and published it. n Gold is senior counsel and director of education for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law organization that promotes government and corporate accountability through litigating whistleblower cases, publicizing whistleblowers’ disclosures and developing legal reforms.

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Federal aid is failing our schools ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a twice-weekly column on economics for The Washington Post.

You can count on one familiar refrain in the 2020 presidential campaign: Fix the schools. Faith in education is one of the nation’s bedrock values. Better schools would (we think) narrow economic inequalities and help people reach their personal potential. Promises to revitalize schools are inevitable.

There’s a magical quality to these proposals. The message seems to be that, if we can find the right combination of ideas, we can unleash education’s uplifting power. Be skeptical.

Already, at least two Democratic presidential candidates are pitching major educational proposals. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) would give most teachers a huge pay raise, reportedly averaging about $13,500. Teachers, it’s argued, are underpaid. This makes good ones hard to recruit and retain.

Meanwhile, ex-San Antonio mayor Julián Castro advocates universal pre-K classes to prepare children for school.

Both ideas sound sensible. But aside from the sizable costs, history suggests that creating gains in achievement and academic skills for the poor is extraordinarily difficult.

That’s the finding of a major new study. It reviewed test scores for Americans born between 1954 and 2001 to see how much

the achievement gap had closed between students with low and high socioeconomic status.

The startling result: hardly at all.

“The achievement gap fails to close,” headlined an article in Education Next. “Half century of testing shows [a] persistent divide between haves and havenots.”

The explanation is not that public policy wasn’t trying. The discouraging conclusion occurred despite the federal government’s decision to provide extra funding for poor schools under Title I of the Education and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Previously, public schools were funded mainly by localities and states. Corrected for inflation, overall spending per student nearly quadrupled from

1960 to 2015.

Still, there was little effect on the achievement gap. The study was conducted by Eric A. Hanushek and Laura M. Talpey of Stanford University, Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich. Tests were given at two ages, 14 and 17. Here are highlights: l The central problem seems to occur in high schools. Tests administered at age 14 actually showed improving student performance. But most of the gains reversed by age 17, just when students were preparing for college or work. l During this roughly halfcentury, there was no general rise in achievement, which would have been a partial victory — almost everyone’s achievement level would have increased even if the gap between top and bottom hadn’t closed. l The population’s changing ethnic and racial composition doesn’t explain the stubborn achievement gap. Separately, the study found similar trends among whites, suggesting that race or ethnicity aren’t major causes.

Broadly speaking, the study vindicates the results of earlier research conducted by

sociologist James Coleman in 1966. As part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Coleman examined what factors promoted educational success. He found parental education, income and race to be strongly connected to student achievement, while per-pupil expenditures and class size were much less so.

The upshot is that schools are being asked to do for their students what families usually do. This is a tall order that is probably beyond the capability of most schools.

As a society, we should keep trying. But we should not ignore history. The national strategy of controlling the country’s schools — through subsidies and regulatory requirements — has prevailed for half a century. It has failed. The federal government should exit the business of overseeing K-12 education. Federal aid would halt, and the financial loss would be offset by having the national government assume all the states’ Medicaid costs.

We should let states and localities see whether they can make schools work better. The grandiose fix-it national plans are mostly exercises in political marketing. We need solutions, not slogans. n

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POLITICS

White House goal: Eliminate agency B Y L ISA R EIN AND D AMIAN P ALETTA

T

he White House is moving to do what no president has accomplished since World War II: eliminate a major federal agency.

If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government.

The agency would be pulled apart and its functions divided among three other departments.

An executive order directing parts of the transition by the fall is in the final stages of review, administration officials said, with an announcement by President Trump likely by summer. OPM employees were briefed at a meeting in March.

For Trump, the breakup of the 5,565-employee federal personnel agency would offer a jolt of bureaucratic defibrillation to a slowto-change workforce that the president and his top aides have targeted as a symptom of a sluggish, inefficient government.

The experiment will be closely watched not just on Capitol Hill, but also by other agencies that could be next.

“It’s a big, exemplary step,” Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget and acting OPM director, said in an interview. She characterized the agency created to oversee the civil service in 1978 as “fundamentally not set up for success, structurally.”

For Democrats and their allies in the labor movement, the effort to abolish the agency and redistribute its functions is a power play in defiance of Congress.

“Does anyone really think that if tomorrow the president said, ‘I’m dismantling DOD, and I think Ben Carson over at HUD can handle procurement and Betsy DeVos over at Education can handle the Army,’ that it would fly through?” asked Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of a House Oversight Committee panel on government operations.

OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

Closing Office of Personnel Management seen as blueprint for shrinking the federal government He has sent Weichert a lengthy request for details of the plan and is scheduling a hearing this spring “so you can make your case.”

Watchers of the federal government say they cannot remember a stand-alone department of OPM’s scope being dismantled since the World War II era. The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that carried out public works projects, was dissolved in 1943. Congress abolished the Community Services Administration in 1981 and folded its functions into the Department of Health and Human Services, a closure faulted by congressional auditors as poorly handled. OPM, with a $2.1 billion annual budget, is bigger and more multifaceted.

Some former agencies, such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corp., which was prominent in the 1930s, once were large but shrank substantially before being eliminated.

“We’re very good at creating new entities,” said John Palguta, a

retired career executive with the Merit Systems Protection Board, “but we haven’t abolished very much.”

It’s not easy to wipe out a federal department, especially one that serves 2.1 million employees across the government. The White House is short on details even as it prepares to move employees out of OPM’s headquarters in downtown Washington. Officials were not able to estimate the short- or longterm savings of the closure.

The White House is attempting to dismantle the agency in several stages, with some steps beginning now and other changes delayed pending congressional approval.

But by starting the process, the administration hopes to claim a win on a major government reorganization plan that has languished without buy-in from Congress.

The plan envisions a smaller, more consolidated government in line with the president’s campaign

Margaret Weichert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the agency is “fundamentally not set up for success, structurally.”

promise to “cut so much your head will spin.” Wiping out the federal personnel agency could be Exhibit A as Trump’s reelection campaign assembles a list of victories to take to voters, from deregulation and tax cuts to trade tariffs.

Weichert acknowledged that the administration would need Congress to approve the transfer of two of OPM’s core functions, the employee retirement and healthcare systems, and plans to ask lawmakers to introduce legislation in coming weeks.

The White House is taking steps now to parcel out many of the other responsibilities by the fall.

The agency’s massive background investigation operation will migrate first to the Defense Department. The General Services Administration, the federal real estate agency, will absorb OPM’s human resources role, including training, pay and hiring, workforce planning, and the inspector general’s office.

The Office of Management and Budget would take over high-level policies governing federal employees, a plan that advocates and unions are decrying as a backdoor ploy to politicize the civil service by installing political appointees close to the White House.

Congress created OPM out of the Civil Service Commission in 1978, the last time lawmakers voted to establish hiring, employment and management practices for the federal workforce.

Some vocal supporters of smaller government question the White House’s approach.

“Is there any advantage in consolidating federal bureaucracies into larger federal bureaucracies?” asked Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He described the plan as a consolidation of “dysfunctional federal bureaucracies.”

Edwards noted that congressional auditors have criticized the GSA for years for weak management of its inventory of federal buildings. “If the GSA can’t manage buildings very well, why would we think it could manage people with the addition of OPM?” n

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Centrist Democrats form 2020 plan B Y M ICHAEL S CHERER AND M ATT V ISER

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fter ceding the policy debate to the left for months, Democratic centrists have begun to fight back with new proposals and a stark warning: The latest wave of far-left ideas, though popular with many in the Democratic Party, could lead to electoral disaster in 2020.

Environmentalists are drafting alternatives to the Green New Deal. Candidates who have endorsed Medicare-for-all are open to backing more incremental plans. And the economic strategist who helped steer the last two Democratic presidents is warning that liberal tax proposals could backfire.

The moderate pushback has been accelerated by the growing voices of a more centrist class of Democratic presidential contenders that includes former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, as well as expected announcements from former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.).

All have promised campaigns that will appeal to liberals without dramatically expanding the federal role in the economy.

Instead of the government health care for all proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), they are pushing public options or marginal Medicare expansions.

Instead of colossal government spending to solve climate change, they are offering market-based solutions. Instead of heavy taxes on the ultrarich, they are focused on closing loopholes and expanding tax breaks for the middle class.

“With the emergence of far more inequality, there is a quite deep sense of dissatisfaction that leads one to be willing to entertain bigger ideas than one might have a generation ago,” said Larry Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a top economic ad-

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG

Moderate hopefuls fear far-left policies will bring defeat, so they’re floating their own alternatives viser in the Obama administration. “That said, not all big ideas are good ideas.”

Moderate voices were sidelined in the first months of the 2020 campaign by a group of charismatic liberals who have found traction — as measured by polling, small-dollar fundraising and social media attention — with policy ideas far more disruptive than anything ever embraced by former president Barack Obama, the party’s longtime standard-bearer.

These ideas include several proposals for guaranteed government incomes, an echo of plans embraced by party leaders in the early 1970s; programs for the government to fund higher education, manufacture prescription drugs and take over the healthcare industry; and several plans to dramatically increase taxes on the richest Americans, by returning to a 70-percent income-tax rate for the highest earners and

imposing a tax on the net worth of wealthy households.

Traditional Democratic donors and activists watched with concern as these plans started to reshape the public face of the Democratic Party just months after the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats successfully won back the House with a relatively centrist message aimed largely at suburban voters by focusing on fighting corruption in Washington and Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his strategists have signaled that they intend to capitalize on what they consider the socialist underpinnings of the Democratic Party’s new policy ideas in the president’s reelection efforts, ideally to sway moderate Midwestern voters .

Biden’s probable entrance into the race could offer the strongest counterweight to the liberal energy. He has been meeting with advisers and has started to sketch

Former vice president Joe Biden speaks during the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers construction and maintenance conference in Washington on April 5. His probable entrance into the 2020 race could offer the strongest counterweight to the far-left energy.

out some of the proposals that would guide his campaign, policies that would build upon those he has been working on since leaving office.

Biden has raised alarms about the debt and the deficit and said he would support changes to Social Security and Medicare — topics none of the other candidates have raised with any vigor.

Biden has also talked about income inequality and the large gap between the rich and the poor that is “having the effect of pulling us apart.” His advisers cast as unrealistic plans such as those proposed by presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Biden, while speaking with reporters last week, said the party has not moved as far left as many may assume and pointed to results from the midterm election.

“Show me the really left-leftleft-left-wingers who beat a Republican,” he said. “The fact of the matter is the vast majority of the members of the Democratic Party are still basically liberalmoderate Democrats in the traditional sense.”

Biden called the debate over ideology “not a bad thing.”

O’Rourke, who supported replacing private health insurance with government insurance in 2017, is pushing for a more moderate Medicare for America proposal, which would expand government-run insurance to include those in the Affordable Care Act’s individual market while allowing those who want to keep private insurance to do so.

One voter pushed him during a recent town hall meeting in Independence, Iowa, saying he seemed to be defending greedy insurance companies.

“I have to be respectful to people who just shared with me what I shared with you: They like the program they’re in, they like the insurance that they have,” O’Rourke said. “If we become too ideological or too prescribed in the solution, we may allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.” n

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John McDonald, security chief for the district that includes Columbine High, checks in with his team last month.

SUNDAY, April, 14, 2019

COVER STORY

9

IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE THE COLUMBINE SHOOTING. HIS JOB IS TO STOP THE NEXT ATTACK.

BY JESSICA CONTRERA in Littleton, Colo.

Before the call came, John McDonald had finished his breakfast of Diet 7Up, put on his uniform and tucked his Smith & Wesson into its waistline holster. He made it to his office at Jefferson County Public Schools, where he is in charge of safety and security for a sprawling district that includes Columbine High School. On this morning, he even made it to his earliest meeting. And then his phone rang.

He knew as soon as he answered: The first school-shooting threat of the day had arrived.

“What do you got for me?” he said, and then he listened to find out how bad this one was going to be.

In a nation always awaiting the news of another school shooting, no community may be braced for that threat quite like the one surrounding Columbine High, a place forever defined by the 1999 attack that killed 13 people, wounded 24 more and ushered in an Internet-fueled era of mass violence. Twenty years later — the anniversary of the shooting is April 20 — Columbine is constantly invoked as the first name in the ever-growing list of campuses turned into crime scenes.

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe — each addition a reminder that this could happen anywhere, any time.

Almost as if it were impossible to stop.

But all the while, Columbine has been figuring out how to do just that.

Here in the Denver suburbs, the district has built what is likely the most sophisticated school security system in the country: installing locks that can be remotely controlled and cameras that track suspicious people; setting PHOTOS BY CHET STRANGE/THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

up a 24-hour dispatch center and a team of armed patrol officers; monitoring troubled students and their social media; getting training from world-renowned psychologists and former SWAT commanders; researching and investing, practicing and re-practicing, all to ensure that when the next significant threat comes, it is stopped before the worst happens again.

At the center of it all is McDonald, a 50-yearold police officer turned security expert who took the top job here 11 years ago because his only daughter was going to attend Columbine High. Today, he is responsible for the safety of 157 schools and 85,000 students in a community that long ago stopped talking about a need for healing or forgiveness and started focusing on recovery and preparation.

The officer who called McDonald was stationed inside one of the county’s other high schools. It was a Tuesday in March, one month before the 20th anniversary. There was a rumor, the officer said, that someone was going to shoot out the school’s windows.

Without McDonald giving an order, everything he had put in place to respond to threats was already in motion. More officers had been dispatched. Areas were being searched. His team and the local sheriff ’s department would interview students, teachers and administrators until they felt certain there was nothing they had missed.

Because what McDonald had learned, what he had preached around the country was this: Every threat counts. Even vague, unspecific ones. Nearly all past school shooters gave some indication of what they were about to do. They bragged to friends, wrote it in an essay or made what seemed at the time like just a bad joke.

The teenage Columbine shooters did so. The next shooter likely would, too.

“If you say you are going to kill us, are going to blow us up, if you make a threat to harm us, we are going to believe you,” McDonald liked to say, but lately, following through on that vow had become increasingly difficult.

Already, the district was dealing with more anonymous tips than ever from Safe2Tell, the online system Colorado students and parents use to report anything of concern. On his phone, McDonald kept photos of the pistols confiscated from students because of those tips: a 9mm in November, a .25 caliber in December, a Glock .45 in January.

And those were just the internal threats. With the anniversary approaching, the intense and sometimes disturbing interest in Columbine that has long festered on the Internet is spilling into the real world with greater frequency. Every day, multiple times a day, people show up at the high school wanting to see it, photograph it and get inside it. McDonald’s team usually stops them before they can even step out of their cars.

Some explain that they just wanted to pay their respects to the victims. Others claim they are in love with the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed themselves inside the school. Some say they have been reincarnated with the shooters’ souls.

More than 150 of these strangers were

showing up every month. The planning for the anniversary was underway. And now there was one more threat to handle from one of the district’s own students.

“Keep me updated,” McDonald said before hanging up his phone. Each day, he drained its battery at least twice answering all the calls from people who trusted him to keep this place safe. Each day was a test of whether all he has done to protect them would be enough.

The classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary

School where 20 first-graders were gunned down no longer exist. The residents of Newtown, Conn., voted to demolish the site and build a new school beside it, complete with a memorial garden where the classrooms had been. Within two days of the shooting in Parkland last year, Florida officials proposed doing the same to the freshman building of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, where 17 students and staff were killed.

But when McDonald pulled into the parking lot of Columbine, the school before him looked

Top: John McDonald talks with judicial specialist Maryann Peratt in Columbine’s library, which was built after the attack.

Above: He leads a security team meeting last month at the Jefferson County Public Schools building in Lakewood, Colo.

nearly identical to the one in 1999. A new library had been built to replace the one where so much blood had been shed. But the iconic two-story curved green windows that the world watched wounded student Patrick Ireland crawl through before he fell into the arms of first responders had been replaced with identical ones. The lockers inside stayed royal blue. The cafeteria pillars, which the shooters had tried to explode, remained in place.

“In ’99,” McDonald explained, “there was a thought at the time — and it wasn’t a wrong thought — that if we tear the school down, the killers will have won.”

He sometimes wishes they had chosen differently. “We didn’t ever envision what it would become 20 years later,” he said.

He waved to the security officers and radioed his location into the dispatch center, where his team was busy monitoring the officers investigating the first threat and sending other officers to the location of a second.

While McDonald had been overseeing an elementary school evacuation drill, his phone had buzzed with another Safe2Tell alert.

A Jefferson County student had reportedly said she wanted to shoot up her school.

The details of the threat made McDonald doubt it was true. “But, you never know until you look into it,” he said. An investigation had been launched.

Despite a $3 million budget and a team of 127 people working beneath him, McDonald personally checks every Safe2Tell alert. Not all are threats. There are reports of suicide attempts, cutting, child abuse, academic cheating, drug use, alcohol binging — all the other problems that make schools such fraught places. The overnight dispatchers have grown accustomed to McDonald calling at all hours to check that every report is being met with a response. His staff knows his jokes about all the weight he has gained since taking this job and how he doesn’t take sick days because he is saving them for a massive heart attack. They know he vacations only in the weeks when school is out.

McDonald lets people believe he is simply dedicated to preventing additional suffering in a place that had already endured so much.

That, after all, is true, and far easier to talk about than what happened when he was 19 years old.

In 1989, McDonald’s older sister Christy was assaulted, strangled and stabbed to death by a stranger who broke into her condo. The man was caught, and while McDonald was attending the criminal hearings, he was also working to become a police officer. His sister’s attacker eventually killed himself in jail. McDonald became an expert in violence prevention and taught his daughter, now a law student, to check locks twice before bed.

He circled around the back of Columbine, parked his car and swigged his second Diet 7Up. In the world of school safety, so many of the practices taught in 2019 have their origins here and in all that went wrong in this place in 1999.

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COVER STORY The spot where McDonald parked was not far from where law enforcement had formed a perimeter around the school. Police did not go into the building until a SWAT team arrived.

Today, officers are trained to enter immediately and take down the shooter, even if it means stepping over bodies.

The radio McDonald was using to talk to dispatch also connected to the area’s other first responders and law enforcement agencies. Twenty years ago, schools, police and emergency medical services had no single frequency on which they could all operate, causing chaos.

They also didn’t have a blueprint of Columbine when they arrived, meaning many had no sense of the layout inside. Now McDonald keeps detailed floor plans of all 157 schools in his trunk, along with extra ammunition, a bulletproof vest, a sledgehammer and an emergency stash of Peanut M&Ms for his diabetes.

He stepped out of his car and appeared on one of the school’s dozens of security cameras.

More were being installed before the anniversary. He entered through a door his dispatchers have the capability to lock or unlock. Each classroom he passed was equipped with a deadbolt that locks from the inside with a simple turn. No more teachers stuck in the hallway, fumbling with a ring of keys.

Seated around a conference table was the

group of current and former Columbine staff, students and law enforcement who have spent months organizing the 20th-anniversary events — a week of service projects and ceremonies.

There will be a rally for current students, a public memorial service for thousands and a private open house for survivors who want to visit the building. Some who RSVP’d have not been inside the school since they ran out of it on April 20, 1999.

The week is a chance for the organizers to present Columbine as they see it: a community that came back stronger, focused not on its past but on its dedication to help others.

Those who lived through the attack went on to become doctors, nurses, counselors and first responders. Five returned to Columbine to teach alongside 13 educators who remain from those days. Ireland, the student who crawled through the curved green windows, works as a financial adviser in nearby Lakewood. The students had each found their own ways to prove that their lives were about more than what two of their classmates had inflicted on them all those years ago.

But in recent months, they found themselves once again bombarded with calls from reporters who wanted them to revisit that day.

Frank DeAngelis, who was principal at Columbine during the attack and for 15 years afterward, had nearly 50 interviews to do in the month before anniversary events he was helping to plan.

The start of spring is always the most difficult part of the year for him. He said he’s

THOMAS PEIPER/ ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis reflects about the upcoming 20th anniversary of the mass shooting at the Colorado high school.

KLMNO WEEKLY

been in six car accidents during the month of April since 1999. This year, he could feel the distraction seeping in even earlier. But his support system was in place — faith, family, friends, a trusted counselor whom he saw for therapy. He felt like he was handling it all well.

Then he went to a doctor for what he thought was a spider bite and learned he had shingles. “Are you under any stress?” the doctor had asked.

When the meeting was over, McDonald followed DeAngelis out. He depended on the former principal for insight into the community, on how he could balance security with sensitivity. But as they started to talk, one of McDonald’s officers appeared.

“John, did you okay CNN being here?” he asked. “They’re in the parking lot.”

make sense. And the security cameras could instantly check the areas where they said the bombs were located. Students were kept locked inside the school, but teaching continued as usual.

Three months later, Christy was still finding it difficult to be away from the school, he confided to McDonald, who had stopped by his office after scolding CNN. “I’m supposed to be out on Friday … and I’m dreading that,” Christy said. “I am responsible for this place. If something were to happen, I have to be here. To protect my school and my kids and my staff.”

“I share that anxiety,” McDonald replied.

“My fear is not being here. Here or any other school. … To me, that is what would be devastating.”

While McDonald was busy threatening the

The third threat of his day sounded different,

CNN crew with trespassing charges, the current principal of Columbine was in his office listening to a broadcast of the school baseball team’s first game of the season. Scott Christy’s days are spent leading meetings, talking with parents, observing classrooms, planning for prom — running Columbine, the school, a place filled with students who weren’t even born when the attack happened.

“Ninety-eight percent of the time, maybe more — 99 percent of the time, it’s just a school.

We’re doing our best to prepare our kids for the future,” Christy said.

Then there are the times when Columbine the school becomes Columbine the symbol.

It happens after every new school shooting: The media calls, strange emails and outsider threats spike. After Parkland, there were 169 tips about school-shooting threats in two weeks. Christy, 42, tries to remain unfazed; he knows McDonald’s team will tell him when there is reason to worry. But that has been far harder in the past few months, since the threat Columbine received before Christmas.

On Dec. 13, schools, government buildings and newspapers across the country received emailed bomb threats from someone demanding payment in bitcoin. But the threats to Columbine came in the form of phone calls to 911 and to the school itself.

The callers claimed there was a bomb and someone with a gun in the school. Within a minute, McDonald’s team and the sheriff ’s department were inside searching for them.

Christy was alerted immediately, but he wasn’t at the school. It was the rare day when he was at the district’s headquarters, 30 minutes away. He ran to his car and sped down the highway at 100 miles an hour. When he made it to Columbine, the school was surrounded with police cars blocking his way.

“I’m the principal,” he pleaded. The officers wouldn’t let him by. Christy flung his car door open and sprinted toward the school.

“We’ve got a runner!” McDonald heard someone say over the radio. When he realized what was happening, he ordered that Christy be let in. By then, McDonald was sure that the threat was a hoax. The callers’ timelines didn’t

worrisome. A 19-year-old former Jefferson County student had been brought into a hospital by his mother. He reportedly said he was in love with a current student, but two of her male friends were in his way. He was planning to “remove” them. The hospital placed him on a mental health hold and called the police.

Local law enforcement was already sending officers to the houses of the students involved. They were working to find out whether the 19-year-old had access to weapons. McDonald told the dispatcher he wanted one of his own officers stationed at the school that could be targeted. The mental health hold would buy them time; they just didn’t know how much.

“If he gets out tonight,” McDonald told the dispatcher, “I don’t want to be surprised tomorrow.”

He drove straight back to his office. His threat-assessment team would need to come up with a plan for keeping the 19-year-old monitored and the school secure. He would need to call in John Nicoletti, the psychologist he trusted to give an analysis of the teenager and his state of mind. He would do everything he could to ensure that this young man received every possible resource to keep him off the path to violence.

His phone rang again. The school system’s chief operating officer wanted to be filled in.

“You think this is real?” his boss asked when he heard the details.

“Yeah,” McDonald said. “I think this is one we better be alerted to. Better be on guard for.

For sure.”

He hung up the phone. It was almost 7 p.m. He had been at work for 13 hours. Three threats. A fairly slow day, he thought. Everything working as it should. Everyone safe.

He said good night to the dispatchers before driving home. He heard them talking on the radio all evening, while he put away his Smith & Wesson, changed out of his uniform and waited for the local police to call with an update. He finally went to sleep, one day closer to the anniversary. n

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TECHNOLOGY

Who else is tracking your pregnancy?

BY

D REW H ARWELL

L

ike millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancytracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room.

But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their tryingto-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work.

“Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard.

Period- and pregnancy-tracking apps such as Ovia have climbed in popularity as fun, friendly companions for the daunting uncertainties of childbirth, and many expectant women check in daily to see, for instance, how their unborn babies’ size compares to different fruits or Parisian desserts.

But Ovia also has become a powerful monitoring tool for employers and health insurers, which under the banner of corporate wellness have aggressively pushed to gather more data about their workers’ lives than ever before.

Employers who pay the apps’ developer, Ovia Health, can offer their workers a special version of the apps that relays their health data — in a “de-identified,” aggre-

PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As apps to help women monitor their health proliferate, employers pay to keep tabs on data gated form — to an internal employer website accessible by human resources personnel. The companies offer it alongside other health benefits and incentivize workers to input as much about their bodies as they can, saying the data can help the companies minimize health-care spending, discover medical problems and better plan for the months ahead.

Emboldened by the popularity of Fitbit and other tracking technologies, Ovia has marketed itself as shepherding one of the oldest milestones in human existence into the digital age. By giving counseling and feedback on mothers’ progress, executives said, Ovia has helped women conceive after months of infertility and even saved the lives of women who wouldn’t otherwise have realized they were at risk.

But health and privacy advocates say this new generation of “menstrual surveillance” tools is pushing the limits of what women will share about one of the most sensitive moments of their

lives. The apps, they say, are designed largely to benefit not the women but their employers and insurers, who gain a sweeping new benchmark on which to assess their workers as they consider the next steps for their families and careers.

Experts worry that companies could use the data to bump up the cost or scale back the coverage of health-care benefits or that women’s intimate information could be exposed in data breaches or security risks. And though the data is made anonymous, experts also fear that the companies could identify women based on information relayed in confidence, particularly in workplaces where few women are pregnant at any given time.

“What could possibly be the most optimistic, best-faith reason for an employer to know how many high-risk pregnancies their employees have? So they can put more brochures in the break room?” asked Karen Levy, a Cornell University assistant profes-

Diana Diller of Los Angeles used the popular Ovia app to track the progress of her pregnancy with daughter Simone.

Ovia has also become a powerful tool for employers and health insurers.

sor who has researched family and workplace monitoring.

“The real benefit of self-tracking is always to the company,” Levy said. “People are being asked to do this at a time when they’re incredibly vulnerable and may not have any sense where that data is being passed.”

Ovia chief executive Paris Wallace said the company complies with privacy laws and provides the aggregate data so employers can evaluate how their workforces’ health outcomes have changed over time. The health information is sensitive, he said, but could also play a critical role in boosting women’s well-being and companies’ bottom lines.

“We are in a women’s health crisis, and it’s impacting people’s lives and their children’s lives,” he said, pointing to the country’s rising rates of premature births and maternal deaths. “But it’s also impacting the folks who are responsible for these outcomes — both financially and for the health of the members they’re accountable for.”

The rise of pregnancy-tracking apps shows how some companies increasingly view the human body as a technological gold mine, rich with a vast range of health data their algorithms can track and analyze. The consulting firm Frost & Sullivan said the “femtech” market — including tracking apps for women’s menstruation, nutrition and sexual wellness — could be worth as much as $50 billion by 2025.

Companies pay for Ovia’s “family benefits solution” package on a per-employee basis, but Ovia also makes money off targeted in-app advertising, including from sellers of fertility-support supplements, life insurance, cord-blood banking and cleaning products.

An Ovia spokeswoman said the company does not sell aggregate data for advertising purposes.

But women who use Ovia must consent to its 6,000-word “terms of use,” which grant the company a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to “utilize and exploit” their de-identified personal

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LIFESTYLES information for scientific research and “marketing purposes.”

Ovia may also “sell, lease or lend aggregated Personal Information to third parties,” the document adds.

With more than 10 million users — Ovia calls them “covered lives” — Ovia’s tracking services are now some of the most downloaded medical apps in America, and the company says it has collected billions of data points into what it calls “one of the largest data sets on women’s health in the world.”

Ovia’s corporate deals with employers and insurers have seen “triple-digit growth” in recent years, Wallace said. The company would not say how many firms it works with.

Ovia pitches its app to companies as a health-care aid for women to better understand their bodies during a mystifying phase of life.

But a key element of Ovia’s sales pitch is how companies can cut back on medical costs and help usher women back to work.

Pregnant women who track themselves, the company says, will live healthier, feel more in control and be less likely to give birth prematurely or via a C-section, both of which cost more in medical bills — for the family and the employer.

Women wanting to get pregnant are told they can rely on Ovia’s “fertility algorithms,” which analyze their menstrual data and suggest good times to try to conceive, potentially saving money on infertility treatments.

“An average of 33 hours of productivity are lost for every round of treatment,” an Ovia marketing document says.

But some health and privacy experts say there are many reasons a woman who is pregnant or trying to conceive wouldn’t want to tell her boss, and they worry the data could be used in a way that puts new moms at a disadvantage.

“The fact that women’s pregnancies are being tracked that closely by employers is very disturbing,” said Deborah C. Peel, a psychiatrist and founder of the Texas nonprofit Patient Privacy Rights. “There’s so much discrimination against mothers and families in the workplace, and they can’t trust their employer to have their best interests at heart.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Dog owners much happier than cat owners, survey finds BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

T

he well-respected survey that’s been a barometer of American politics, culture and behavior for more than four decades finally got around to the question that has bedeviled many a household.

Dog or cat?

In 2018, the General Social Survey for the first time included a battery of questions on pet ownership. The findings not only

MICHAEL PROBST/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dog owners are more likely to engage in outdoor physical activity, which may make them happier than those who have cats or no pets.

quantified the nation’s pet population — nearly 6 in 10 households have at least one —they made it possible to see how pet ownership overlaps with all sorts of factors of interest to social scientists.

Like happiness.

For starters, there is little difference between pet owners and non-owners when it comes to happiness, the survey shows.

The two groups are statistically indistinguishable on the likelihood of identifying as “very happy” (a little over 30 percent) or “not too happy” (in the midteens).

But when you break the data

down by pet type — cats, dogs or both — a stunning divide emerges: Dog owners are about twice as likely as cat owners to say they’re very happy, with people owning both falling somewhere in between.

Dog people, in other words, are slightly happier than those without any pets. Those in the cat camp, on the other hand, are significantly less happy than the pet-less. And having both appears to cancel each other out happiness-wise. (Since someone’s bound to ask, it isn’t possible to do this same type of analysis for say, rabbit owners or lizard owners or fish owners, since there aren’t enough of those folks in the survey to make a statistically valid sample).

These differences are quite large: The happiness divide between dog and cat owners is bigger than the one between people who identify as middle and upper class, and nearly as large as the gap between those who say they’re in “fair” versus “good or excellent” health.

However, correlation doesn’t equal causation, and there are probably a number of other differences between dog and cat owners that account for some of the differences. The General Social Survey data show that dog owners, for instance, are more likely to be married and own their own homes than cat owners, both factors known to affect happiness and life satisfaction.

Previous research on this topic yielded mixed results. In 2006, the Pew Research Center found no significant differences in happiness between pet owners and non-pet owners, or cat and dog owners. However, that survey did not distinguish between people who owned “only” a dog or a cat, and those who owned “either” a dog or a cat, potentially muddying the distinctions between exclusive dog and cat owners.

A 2016 study of dog and cat owners, on the other hand, yielded greater happiness ratings for dog owners relative to cat people. It attributed the contrast, at least in part, to differences in personality: Dog owners tended to be more agreeable, more extroverted and less neurotic than cat owners. And a 2015 study linked the presence of a cat in the home to fewer negative emotions, but not necessarily an increase in positive ones.

Other research makes the case that some of the pet-happiness relationship is causal, at least when it comes to canines. A 2013 study found, for instance, that dog owners are more likely to engage in outdoor physical activity than people who don’t own dogs, with obvious benefits for health and happiness.

Research also has shown that dog owners are more likely than other folks to form friendships with people in their neighborhoods on the basis of the random encounters that happen when they’re out walking their pets. Those social connections likely contribute to greater wellbeing among dog owners.

The General Social Survey also asked a number of questions about how people interact with their pets, and the answers may also explain some of the happiness gap. Dog owners, for instance, are more likely to seek comfort from their pet in times of stress, more likely to play with their pet, and more likely to consider their pet a member of their family. Those differences suggest a stronger social bond with their pets, which could create a greater sense of well-being.

Stepping away from the data, cat owners might protest that ownership isn’t about “happiness” at all: There’s something about felines that is grander and more mysterious — something that can’t be captured in a public opinion poll. n

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TECHNOLOGY WORLD KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

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haus 100 Who gets years else its due is later, tracking Bauhaus yourgets pregnancy? its due

BY G DRIFF REW W H ARWELL ITTE AND L UISA B ECK

L T

in Weimar, Germany ike millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of thedesign pregnancyhe Bauhaus school tracking emergedapp inOvia, an logging age of in every night to record new democratic turbulence, details on a screen asking about political polarization and her bodily functions, sex drive, rising extremism. medications and mood. she But in a modern era When of tumult gave years birth last she used 100 afterspring, its birth, the the app that to chart her baby’s first school inspired products onlineIkea medical data including from chairs to —the iPhone her name, her location and with its form-follows-function whether there beencelebrated any comphilosophy is had being plications — before leaving the across Germany. hospital’s recovery room. which The commemorations, But someone was regularly included the else opening of a checking in,museum too: herhere employer, $30 million in the which of paid to gain access to the heart cobblestoned Weimar, intimate details of aplenty its workers’ have inspired ogling over personal lives, from their the minimalist objects thattryingmade to-conceive the school so months radical fortoits early time motherhood. could and brought Diller’s it suchbosses renown in GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES lookyears up aggregate data on how the toSEAN come: the primarymany workers Ovia’s fertilicolor cradles, using arched-neck teaty, pregnancy and parenting apps pots and rectangular concretehad facedbuildings. high-risk pregnancies and-glass or Nationwide, gave birth prematurely; the top Bauhaus design is medicalreexamined, questions they had rebeing reappraised searched; and how soon lectures, the new and reimagined through moms planned to return to work. gallery exhibits, concerts and “Maybe I’m naive, but I dance —on an artistic belief that aperformances Marionettes thought it asthat positive tour de of force in its display at echoes the reinforcenewly an integrated art ment: to me ambition and trying scope thehelp grand opened Bauhaus type, would also They’re take care of myself,” said foundDiller, visions of the movement’s Museum in Weimar, and a brighter 39, an event Los Angeers. theplanner home ofinthe ne.” lesBut for the theschool. video game company parallels between the en, of course.

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ool that shaped look became a Nazi target

gives it some sparkle at night — is situated in a symbolic spot that carries weight. Across the street is a Nazi-era building that was used to administer slave-labor programs. Visible from an upstairs window is the memorial tower at Buchenwald, which was a concentration camp.

Inside, the 168 objects that Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius assembled as representative of the school’s work — carpets, pots and urns among them — form the basis of the collection. Thousands more complete the picture and tell the story of a school that defies easy characterization.

“There is no one Bauhaus style,” said Ute Ackermann, the museum curator, who has been at work assembling the collection for the past eight years. “More than any particular form or style, Bauhaus is the courage to have a vision and to experiment — to be willing to correct your path as you go, rather than have a predetermined route.”

That was true for the museum.

Early plans to clad the building in glass had to be abandoned as gated — the to problem an internal costs spiraled and of state ofform Thuringia. employer website accessible by bathing museum’s precious Hoffthe spoke as workers scurried human resources personnel.

The collections in natural lightmuseum sank to get Weimar’s newest companies it alongside othin.ready The building was ultimately for aoffer grand opening and er health and incentivize sheathed inbenefits concrete. dramatic homecoming for Bauworkers to input as about The celebration of much Bauhaus haus. their bodies as theyof this year has spanned acan, range of Through much thesaying past the data can the was companies artistic forms. century, the help school either minimize In Berlin, ahealth-care jazz pianist spending, operatunwelcome or invisible in Weidiscover medical problems and edmar, a grand piano punch a small city inwith eastern Gerbetter for the months cards toplan explore what many best known for Bauhaus the ahead. shortEmboldened the popularity might have sounded like. lived republic toby which it gaveAits of Fitbit and techFrench deconname aschoreographer well other as thetracking poets, artists nologies, Ovia has marketed itself structed hip-hop moves into before geoand musicians who long as shepherding one ofof the oldest metrical elements, and two arthad made it a cradle German milestones human ists performedin a duet withexistence ampliclassicism. into digital age.

By giving fied sewing machines.

Thethefounders of Bauhaus — counseling and Farther east, in thefeedback industrial German for “building house” on — mothers’ progress, city of Eisenhüttenstadt, an ex- to sought to bring art andexecutives beauty said, Ovia through hasdesign helped women hibit on Bauhaus reflected the masses everyday obconceive ofrose infertilionjects. the style as itmonths was adopted to a Theafter movement as ty and even the oflives of Soviet dreams ofsaved efficiency. response to the horrors World women who otherwise JustIdown road from War and asthe awouldn’t reflection onWeiwhere have Bauhaus realized were at in risk.a mar’s humans fit in they a museum, world increasingButhouse health and privacy advoyellow that once belonged ly dominated by machines. sayera thismarked newGerman generation to cates the poet of In18th-century an by political “menstrual surveillance” tools is Friedrich Schiller, art students and economic eruptions, said pushing thealimits ofprofessor whathave womfrom 19Weitz, different countries Eric history at en will share about the exhibited Bauhaus-inspired the Citytheir College of one New ofYork, most for sensitive moments of their visions the future.

Bauhaus represented n “hopeful-

PHILIP CHEUNGSEAN FOR THE GALLUP/GETTY WASHINGTON IMAGES POST

Germans As apps tohonor help women design school monitor that their shaped healthlook of proliferate, the modern employers world —pay andtobecame keep tabs a Nazi on data target lives. The apps, belief they say, ness, optimism, thatare a designed largely benefit not flourishing art, antointegrated art thethe women but type, their would employers of Bauhaus also and insurers, whoand gaina abrighter sweephelp democracy ing new future forbenchmark everyone.” on which to assess theirhappen, workersofascourse. they conIt didn’t sider next stepsthe forschool their The the Nazis ejected families and careers. from Weimar.

The communists of Experts worry that companies East Germany later appropriated could use the dataentire to bump the its legacy.

In the city,up there costonly or scale the coverage of is oneback original Bauhaus health-careeven benefits or that wombuilding, as Bauhaus has en’s intimate could been emulatedinformation from the design be exposed in data to breaches or studios of Sweden the tech security risks.

AndValley. though the corridors of Silicon data anonymous, experts It is made only in recent years that also fearhas that therehabilitated companies Bauhaus been could identify women on in Weimar, and only based with the information relayed in moveconfirecent opening that the dence,has particularly in workplaces ment been allowed to take where stage. few women are pregnant center at With any given the time. new museum, “we “What could possibly be said the will become a different city,” most optimistic, best-faith reason Weimar Mayor Peter Kleine.

“We for an to know town how are not employer just the classical many high-risk the pregnancies administering legacy oftheir the employees Sobecome they can put great poets.have?

We will a city more brochures in the break of invention.” room?” asked Karen Levy, a boxCorThe museum — somewhat nell University assistant profeslike with an LED display that

Marionettes Diana Diller of onLos display Angelesat used the the newly opened popular Bauhaus Ovia app to Museum track thein progress Weimar,of the her home pregnancy of thewith school. daughter Simone.

Ovia has also become a powerful tool for employers and health insurers.

gives sor who it some hassparkle researched at night family — is situated and workplace in a symbolic monitoring. spot that carries “The weight. real benefit Across of self-trackthe street is inga isNazi-era always building to the company,” that was used Levy said. to administer “People are being slave-labor asked programs. to do this atVisible a time from when an they’re upstairs incredibly window vulnerable is the memorial and may tower not have at Buchenwald, any sense where which that was adata concentration is being passed.” camp.

Inside, Ovia chief theexecutive 168 objects Paris Walthat Bauhaus lace said founder the company Waltercomplies Gropius assembled with privacyas laws representative and provides of the school’s aggregate work data —so carpets, employers pots and can urns evaluate amonghow themtheir — form workthe basis forces’of the health collection. outcomes Thousands have more changed complete over time. the picture The health and tell information the story is sensitive, of a school he said, that defies but could easyalso characterization. play a critical role in “There boostingis women’s no one well-being Bauhaus style,” and companies’ said Ute bottom Ackermann, lines. the museum “We are curator, in a women’s who has been health at work crisis, assembling and it’s impacting the collection people’s for livesthe andpast theireight children’s years. lives,” “More he than said, any pointing particular to the formcountry’s or style, Bauhaus rising rates is the of courage premature to have births a vision and maternal and to experiment deaths. “But — to it’s be willing also impacting to correct the folks your who path are as you responsible go, rather forthan thesehave outcomes a prede— termined both financially route.” and for the health That was of the truemembers for the museum. they’re Early accountable plans tofor.” clad the building in glass Thehad rise of to pregnancy-tracking be abandoned as costs apps shows spiraled how and some the problem companies of bathing increasingly the museum’s view the precious human collections body as aintechnological natural light sank gold in. mine, Therich building with awas vastultimately range of sheathed health data in concrete. their algorithms can track Theand celebration analyze. The ofconsulting Bauhaus this firm year Frost has&spanned Sullivana said rangethe of artistic “femtech” forms. market — including tracking In Berlin, apps a jazz for pianist women’s operatmened struation, a grandnutrition piano with and punch sexual cards wellness to explore — couldwhat be worth Bauhaus as might much ashave $50 billion sounded by 2025. like. A French Companies choreographer pay for Ovia’sdecon“famstructed ily benefits hip-hop solution” moves package into geoon a metrical per-employee elements, basis, and but Ovia two also artists makes performed money off a duet targeted with ampliin-app fied advertising, sewing machines. including from sellersFarther of fertility-support east, in the industrial supplecity ments, of life Eisenhüttenstadt, insurance, cord-blood an exhibit banking on Bauhaus and cleaning design products. reflected onAn theOvia stylespokeswoman as it was adopted said the to Soviet company dreams does of not efficiency. sell aggregate data Justfor down advertising the road from purposes.

Weimar’s But women Bauhaus who museum, use Ovia must in a yellow consenthouse to its that 6,000-word once belonged “terms to of use,” the 18th-century which grant German the company poet Friedrich a “royalty-free, Schiller, perpetual, art students and from irrevocable 19 different license, countries throughout have exhibited the universe” theirtoBauhaus-inspired “utilize and exvisions ploit” their for the de-identified future. n personal

15 19

SUNDAY, April, 14, 2019 SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2019

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Retro writings inspire anew

Harlem pairing comes to grief

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

B ETHANNE P ATRICK

T

running “this radical hag’s he title might put you off: screeds,” you know the titular “Chronicles of a Radical phrase will become a rallying cry Hag (with Recipes).” A to Haze’s fans. While not all of little cutesy, a little longthose are women, it’s the women winded. But even if Lorna Landwho understand how simply vik’s latest novel might also be speaking — let alone voicing — described as a little cutesy and a unpopular opinions can lead to little long-winded, it has sublabels like “radical,” “hag” and stance and purpose. much worse.

Welcome to Granite Creek, When Susan digs a bit deeper Minn., and its local newspaper, into the newspaper archives, she the Granite Creek Gazette. Since uncovers a stash of columns the 1960s, Hazel “Haze” Evans about Haze’s long-ago marriage has been writing a column that’s that illuminate the ailing writheavy on personal anecdote and perspective. Unfortunately, as er’s tender side. Granite Creekites sigh as Dr. Royal Kirby woos the book opens, Haze has fallen Haze with dinners at into a coma. While she’s places such as Zig’s visited and cared for by Supper Club; in the her many friends who present, Haze’s nurse hold out hope, current Mercedes tries to help publisher Susan her daughter’s partner McGrath decides a come out to her mothprint tribute is in order. er. While both of these She starts rerunning subplots are enjoysome of Haze’s best colable, neither is necesumns, and soon locals sary. look forward to the retThe stronger story ro weekly installments concerns Susan’s son, filled with wit, wisdom Sam. His parents are and recipes for treats Author Lorna separated and he feels with cornball names Landvik like his high school’s like “Aunt Alma’s Goodbiggest nerd. When Susan gives will Crescent Cookies” and him the “job” of sorting Haze’s “Thanks for Caring Butterscotch columns for republication, Sam Bars.” not only discovers his own interSometimes Haze takes her est in writing, he starts to comown experience and connects it municate on a more adult level to the communal; sometimes she with his lonely, worried mother. muses on current events and He, like Haze (and perhaps Landreminds everyone how much vik), puzzles life out best through they affect the lives of everyday words. Sam starts writing to people. But it’s when she veers Haze, and, speaking of his fellow toward the political, especially students, tells her, “your voice the feminist, that some of the made us want to use ours better.” town’s more conservative and This is a real tribute to all of the cantankerous residents object — small-town, warmhearted, bigobjections that the Gazette also mouthed “radical hags” out ran back in the day. It turns out there, and a truly fun read for that many of Haze’s columns them, too. n remain relevant, along with her Minnesota brand of warmhearted liberalism. Haze is antiwar, pro-choice and believes women Patrick is the editor, most recently, of are the equals of men.

“The Books That Changed My Life: When her frequent adversary Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Mr. Joseph Snell writes that he Musicians and Other Remarkable wishes the paper would stop People.

Z CHRONICLES OF A RADICAL HAG (WITH RECIPES)

By Lorna Landvik University of Minnesota Press. 320 pp. $25.95

ZORA AND LANGSTON A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

By Yuval Taylor W.W. Norton. 304 pp. $27.95

l

REVIEWED BY

L ISA P AGE

ora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were once joined at the hip; best friends, collaborators and literary lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Were they lovers, too?

According to Yuval Taylor’s book, “Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal,” the answer is no. But the passionate nature of their relationship was undeniable.

They met in 1925 at the Opportunity Awards Dinner in New York, where they rubbed elbows with such writers as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, Fannie Hurst, Eugene O’Neill and James Weldon Johnson.

Langston was self-effacing and mischievous, with a warm smile and impeccable English. He was 24, a Midwesterner and new to the Big Apple. He was also pedigreed — his great-uncle was the first dean of the law school at Howard University and one of the first black men elected to Congress.

Zora was outspoken and Southern; she was a preacher’s daughter who knew how to hold her own.

She told people that she was 24, but records show she was 10 years older. She wore bangles and beads, smoked cigarettes in public and played the harmonica at soirees.

She was very much the extrovert, in contrast to Langston’s fine manners and elusive quality.

They quickly formed a bond, and their friendship “informed practically everything they wrote, during those years,” Taylor writes.

“They jointly brought to life a new conception of African American literature quite unlike any that had come before.”

They also eventually shared a patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, known as Godmother. Mason, a white woman with deep pockets, was devoted to primitivism, an idea that people of color were uncorrupted by society. She saw Langston and Zora as revolutionary because they celebrated black culture and black life in a way other writers at the time did not.

Godmother financed them both in different ways. “While Langston was being paid to create, Zora was being paid to collect,” Taylor writes.

And so Zora — along with Langston — traveled through the South in her old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” and gathered information about folklore. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts,” Langston wrote in his memoir. He, meanwhile, gave talks at universities and met with luminaries.

The trip cemented their friendship, and they worked together on several projects, including a folk opera and a play based on Zora’s 1925 short story “The Bone of Contention.” But their alliance was disrupted by the addition of a third: the beautiful stenographer Louise Thompson, also financed

by Godmother. Louise fell in love with Langston and admired Zora.

The three of them set up shop in Westfield, N.J., working together day and night on the play, and escaping the worst of the Great Depression, thanks to Godmother.

Things fell apart in the spring of 1931. Langston wanted Louise to officially become their business manager. He also spoke of sharing credit for the play with her, infuriating Zora, who called Louise “a typist.” Eventually, Langston severed ties with Godmother. Zora wrote a version of the play on her own, and Langston wrote another.

In the end, there were two plays, two separate copyrights and gossip all over New York.

Taylor is scrupulous about dates and correspondence between the players. At times, he overreaches.

He is also tone-deaf on the subject of sexism in the 1930s, drawing few conclusions about Zora’s death in obscurity and Langston’s lifelong fame. Otherwise, this a complete pleasure to read. n Page is co-editor of “We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America.”

16

SUNDAY, April, 14, 2019

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