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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Haley mess bodes ill for summit A ARON B LAKE

and had given her the go-ahead to announce it; it’s difficult to read her comments any other way. That’s a hell of a way to do business, wo big foreign policy stories broke especially when dealing with something as within a few hours of each other this substantive and serious as sanctions against past week: an antagonistic foreign power. Haley has now U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on been undermined — with her words perhaps Tuesday night effectively said that the White not carrying as much weight on the world House bungled its announcement of new Russtage as before — and the White House sia sanctions. And we found out Presilooks as though it didn’t have its ducks dent Trump’s planned meeting with in a row.

Kim Jong Un is very real — so real that These are the people who are preparCIA Director Mike Pompeo already ing historic talks with the leader of an made a secret trip to meet with Kim. even more antagonistic foreign power, The juxtaposition of those two stories and this is a president whose ability to is . . . not great. And it reinforces the ponegotiate in his meeting with Kim tential downside of high-stakes negotiacould determine the fate of both a deal tions involving a president who often and people’s lives. If the White House appears to struggle to execute a coherdoesn’t have a game plan to execute or ent and deliberate strategy.

Trump can’t or won’t execute it, that Trump’s posture toward North Korea could pose major problems. The chief and his decision to meet with the North rule of these summits is “no surprises,” Korean leader have largely been met and Trump doesn’t seem to do “no surwith applause by the American people prises.” and cautious optimism by experts and This new episode follows, of course, politicians. Even though North Korea HECTOR RETAMAL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES upon Trump’s failure last month to has sought such talks for years, there is abide by talking points on his phone a sense that crippling sanctions — sanc- U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley speaks call with Russian President Vladimir tions won by the Trump administration at U.N. Headquarters in New York on Thursday.

Putin — including a “DO NOT CONin the often-obstinate U.N. Security GRATULATE” warning about Putin’s reelecsanctions would be coming Monday. But rathCouncil — may have pushed North Korea tion win and an unheeded plea to bring up er than correct her, the White House anonytoward legitimate denuclearization talks. the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britmously suggested Monday that she had erred But the potential downside of a face-to-face ain. So, since the Kim meeting was greenlit, or been confused. Then chief White House meeting involving the president of the United we now have two episodes in two months of economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday States — especially one as unpredictable and Trump proving he can’t stick to a foreign poldecided to say those things on the record. unversed in diplomacy as Trump — is also icy script or even general guidelines.

That drew a curt and powerful response very real. There are highly sensitive talks inIt may be time to start assuming the same from Haley. “With all due respect, I don’t get volving a nuclear-armed foreign dictator who thing can and probably will happen with Kim. confused,” she said in a statement. has made being able to strike at the U.S. Exactly what that means practically speakHaley is essentially saying that Trump homeland his goal (with the goal posts rapidly ing? Who knows. n changed his mind after the White House deapproaching). And Trump has often rattled cided to deploy new sanctions against Russia his saber right back, threatening to “totally © The Washington Post BY

T

KLMNO WEEKLY

destroy” North Korea. Combine that with Trump’s apparent lack of message discipline and disregard for preparation, and who knows what could come out of this unprecedented summit? There’s a decidedly nonzero chance that it will be bad.

Which brings us to Haley’s comments. The U.N. ambassador said last Sunday that new

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 28

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER There’s a movement to see midlife changes not as a crisis but as a transition that we can better manage to make people happier. Illustration by MATT CHASE for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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POLITICS

Trump’s ‘shadow’ chief of sta≠

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

Fox News’s Sean Hannity has taken on the role of confidant and adviser to the president

BY R OBERT C OSTA, S ARAH E LLISON AND J OSH D AWSEY

T

he phone calls between President Trump and Sean Hannity come early in the morning or late at night, after the Fox News host goes off the air. They discuss ideas for Hannity’s show, Trump’s frustration with the ongoing special

counsel probe and even, at times, what the president should tweet, according to people familiar with the conversations. When he’s off the phone, Trump is known to cite Hannity when he talks with White House advisers.

The revelation this past week that the two men share an attorney is just the latest sign of how Hannity is intertwined with Trump’s world — an increasingly

powerful confidant who offers the media-driven president a sympathetic ear and shared grievances.

The conservative commentator is so close to Trump that some White House aides have dubbed him the unofficial chief of staff.

This portrait of the interactions between the president and the talk-show host is based on interviews with more than a dozen friends, advisers and associ-

White House spokesman Sean Spicer, right, gives Fox News personality Sean Hannity a tour of the press briefing room at the White House in early 2017.

ates of the two men, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

For a president who feels, intensely, that he is under siege, Hannity offers what he prizes: loyalty and a mass audience. And Trump, in turn, has directed his supporters to Hannity’s show — urging people on Twitter the other week to watch the commenta-

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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POLITICS tor attack special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who heads the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Their bond intensified during the 2016 campaign and has grown stronger during Trump’s time in office.

“The bottom line is, during the heat of the campaign when relationships are forged, he was always there, offering good advice, in person and on television,” former deputy Trump campaign manager David Bossie said of Hannity. “The president sees him as an incredibly smart and articulate spokesman for the agenda.”

Trump and Hannity usually speak several times a week, according to people familiar with their relationship. The Fox News host, whose show averages more than 3 million viewers daily, is one of the few people who gets patched immediately to Trump.

The two men review news stories and aspects of Hannity’s show, and occasionally debate specifics about whatever the president is considering typing out on Twitter.

There have also been times when Trump has assessed the merits of various White House aides with Hannity.

The frequency of Hannity’s contact with Trump means that “he basically has a desk in the place,” one presidential adviser said.

Hannity and White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Several West Wing aides and friends of the president pointed to their running conversations — whether they take place over the phone or on the golf course in Florida, as they did in late March — as crucial to understanding this moment in the Trump presidency, when the president is eager to return to the combative and television-infused style of his business career and more isolated than ever from the traditional Republicans who have struggled to guide him.

“There is a small group of people who Trump speaks with who truly don’t have to be obsequious,” a veteran Trump ally said. “Sean is one of them,” the ally added, and said that Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, veteran investor Carl Icahn and first lady Melania Trump “may be the only others on that list.”

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“The president sees him as an incredibly smart and articulate spokesman for the agenda.”

David Bossie, former deputy Trump campaign manager, speaking about Sean Hannity

Hannity’s counsel hews to a core theme — distance yourself from Washington elites and trust the instincts that he argues won Trump the White House — the advisers said, and Hannity has emphasized that keeping conservatives happy on immigration and health-care issues is critical.

Another regular topic: venting about the Russia probe and senior Justice Department figures such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation, the advisers said.

On air, Hannity has accused Rosenstein of launching a “war” on Trump and called Mueller part of a “deep state crime” family.

“Sometimes, Hannity gets him fired up,” the adviser said. “But Hannity also reminds him of what his base thinks.”

Hannity’s journey into Trump’s political sanctum took a decade to develop. The two became friendly before Trump became president, when Hannity would occasionally venture to Trump Tower to interview him, according to a Hannity producer who traveled with him.

“He rated very high,” this per-

son said of Trump’s appearances on the show.

Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was also a guest on Hannity’s program.

During one of Cohen’s appearances in 2012, Hannity noted that he was wearing a Trump tie.

“Loving it,” Cohen responded.

On Monday, an attorney for Cohen, who is under criminal investigation, revealed in federal court that the longtime Trump attorney had also done legal work for Hannity.

Hannity told viewers that night that the advice he sought from Cohen — which he did not disclose in recent weeks as he criticized raids of the lawyer’s office and residences — was “minor” and focused on real estate.

Fox News said Tuesday in a statement that while the network “was unaware of Sean Hannity’s informal relationship with Michael Cohen and was surprised by the announcement in court yesterday, we have reviewed the matter and spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support.”

Advisers, at times, refer to Hannity as the “shadow” chief of staff,

Sean Hannity arrives on stage to speak with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2016.

KLMNO WEEKLY

rivaling White House chief of staff John F. Kelly in terms of influence. Whenever Trump is irritated by his staff, he turns to outside allies, and Hannity is usually atop the call list.

Hannity’s relationship with attorney Jay Sekulow played a part in Sekulow signing on to Trump’s legal team on the Russia investigation, they said, adding that Hannity’s work with lawyers Victoria Toensing and her husband, Joseph diGenova, also contributed to the pair being considered to come aboard, although they did not ultimately do so.

Hannity long urged Bill Shine — who was Fox News’s co-president and had been Hannity’s first producer at Fox News but resigned last year — to join the Trump administration and has spoken highly of Shine to White House advisers. Shine, however, has declined to engage in serious talks about a job, an official said.

Hannity’s relationships with Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have served as the “glue” of his relationship with the president, one White House official said.

The two men appreciate Hannity bringing them on his program and recognize how those appearances have been important for their own profiles, the official said, noting that Hannity was a constant presence with the family at debates during the presidential campaign and widely liked by Trump family members.

And Hannity’s programs, whether on radio or television, have become a trusted gathering place for Trump allies during the campaign and after, providing a chronicle of sorts of the views of the president’s camp and the issues that have animated them as they have adjusted to power and faced challenges.

Cohen appeared on Hannity’s TV show three days before Trump’s inauguration last year.

Hannity pressed him on one issue: Given that Cohen was Trump’s personal attorney, “Can I assume that in that role, not being a government role, that you’d have attorney-client privilege with President Trump?”

“Yes, of course,” Cohen replied.

“That relationship, hopefully, will last, you know, for — not four years, but eight years. I think he’s a wonderful man.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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POLITICS

Democrats’ advantage is shrinking Polling shows that a blue sweep in the midterm elections is no guarantee

BY D AN B ALZ AND S COTT C LEMENT

D

emocrats hold an advantage ahead of the midterm elections, but a Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that edge has narrowed since January, a signal to party leaders and strategists that they could be premature in anticipating a huge wave of victories in November.

The poll finds that the gap between support for Democratic vs. Republican House candidates has dropped by more than half since the beginning of the year. At the same time, there has been a slight increase in President Trump’s approval rating, although it remains low. Measures of partisan enthusiasm paint a more mixed picture of the electorate in comparison with signs of Democratic intensity displayed in many recent special elections.

One potentially new factor in the mix of midterm issues is gun policy, which has emerged as a major voter consideration two months after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. More than 4 in 10 registered voters say it is extremely important that candidates share their views on gun issues. Fewer voters say it is critical that candidates share their views on Trump or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), leaders who are most likely to be targets in partisan messaging this fall.

With the Republicans’ House majority at risk, 47 percent of registered voters say they prefer the Democratic candidate in their district, while 43 percent favor the Republican. That four-point margin compares with a 12-point advantage Democrats held in January. Among a broader group of voting-age adults, the Democrats’ margin is 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent.

Republicans owe part of their improved standing to Trump’s thawing job ratings. The PostABC poll finds that 40 percent approve of the president, up slightly from 36 percent in Janu-

POLL

Washington Post-ABC News Poll

Democrats’ midterm advantage narrows among registered voters, remains wide among all adults Q: If the election for the U.S. House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate in your congressional district?

Percentage point size of Democratic advantage in generic midterm ballot

13% 12% 9

11% 10%

12%

10% All adults

6

4% Registered voters

3 0

Nov. 2017

Jan. 2018

April 2018

Source: Washington Post-ABC News poll April 8-11, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults with an error margin of +/- 3.5 percentage points and 865 registered voters with an error margin of +/- 4 points.

ary to his highest level of support since last April. Still, Trump continues to face majority disapproval at 56 percent, higher than any other president at this stage since the dawn of modern polling, an indication that he remains a significant liability for Republicans on ballots in November.

The survey shows the GOP making a more pronounced shift among white voters, who now prefer Republicans by a 14-point margin over Democrats, up from five points in January. Republicans lead by 60 percent to 31 percent among white voters without college degrees, slightly larger than an 18-point GOP advantage three months ago.

The situation in the districts where control of the House is likely to be decided is slightly more favorable for Democrats.

The Cook Political Report, which produces nonpartisan analysis, lists 56 of the 435 congressional districts as competitive — 51 of them in Republican hands to just five held by Democrats.

In competitive districts excluding Pennsylvania, where new boundaries were drawn this year, Democrats have an edge of

50 percent to 43 percent when voters are asked which party’s candidates they would favor if the election in their district were held today. Democrats need a net gain of 23 seats to capture the majority in the House.

Special elections and gubernatorial races over the past year have shown that Democrats are benefiting from a surge in voter enthusiasm, including a narrow victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District in March, which Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2016.

The Post-ABC poll finds parity in stated voting intentions.

Among registered voters, 68 percent of both Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning registered voters say they are certain they will vote. This contrasts with Post-ABC polling ahead of the 2010 and 2014 midterm cycles, when Republicans averaged a double-digit advantage in intentions to vote. Democrats suffered major losses in both years.

Other public polls have found a narrowing in Democrats’ midterm advantage, although it has been less sharp than in the PostABC poll.

An average of public polls compiled by The Post finds Democrats’ lead on this metric stood at eight points in January and 11 points in February but six points in polls over the past 30 days, similar to the Post-ABC poll’s four-point margin. Analysts expect Democrats to need a six- to eight-point lead in “generic-ballot polls” to win a majority of congressional districts.

The new survey points to opportunities and challenges for both parties in coming months.

Some core constituencies of each party expressed tepid interest in turning out to vote in an off-year election, when many eligible voters typically stay home.

Although 58 percent of all adults say they are sure they will vote this year, that falls to fewer than 4 in 10 among adults younger than 30. Young voters have heavily favored Democrats in recent elections. Certainty to vote dips to 54 percent among African Americans and 39 percent among Hispanics. Those compare with 64 percent among whites, a majority of whom favor Republicans.

At the same time, white voters with college degrees, a competitive voting bloc, are 14 points more likely to say they are certain to vote than whites with some college or less, a group that has increasingly favored Republicans and voted for Trump at record levels.

Sixty-one percent of men and 56 percent of women say they are certain to vote, with 55 percent of female registered voters saying they favor a Democratic candidate and 50 percent of men backing a Republican. Democrats are counting on strong turnout among women to help their candidates in November.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted April 8-11 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults reached on cellphones and landline telephones. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is four points among the sample of 865 registered voters. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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POLITICS

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Deficit binge paves way for next one U.S. is projected to spend almost as much on interest for debt as it will on Pentagon by 2022

BY D AMIAN P ALETTA AND E RICA W ERNER

B

y 2022, the U.S. government is projected to spend almost as much money on interest payments for its massive debt as it will on the Pentagon, more than $600 billion every year.

The spiraling expense underscores a frightening reality in Washington: President Trump and Congress have not only massively expanded the U.S. government’s debt, they have broken free of multiple guardrails intended to keep budgets balanced, freeing future lawmakers to further expand the yawning gap between what the government takes in and what it spends.

The latest increase has come at a time when Republicans control the White House and Congress, cementing a GOP indifference to balancing the budget despite making deficit reduction their rhetorical North Star during the Obama administration.

“There’s no serious effort on either the Republican or Democratic side to address it, and the president’s not for it,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said. “So if the president’s not for it, it’s not going to happen.”

Now, this borrowing binge appears impossible to reverse, despite a growing global prosperity that has prompted leaders of other major economies to shrink deficits that expanded during the recession a decade ago.

In February, Congress passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that shredded caps erected in 2010. It also waived the debt limit for the 15th time in the past 10 years.

In December, Republicans overrode unanimous Democratic opposition to pass a tax cut projected to add more than $1 trillion in deficit spending, as the GOP used a shell budget resolution and waived the federal law meant to prevent cuts like this from ever taking place.

During the debate, they torpedoed a provision that would have triggered an automatic tax increase if rosy economic growth

How the federal deficit could grow in the next decade The size of the federal deficit — the gap between what the government spends and what it takes in — is expected to eclipse $1T every year from 2020 to 2028. $7T $1.5T deficit

$6T

$4T

$2.7T $.3T $2.4T 0

Spending

$4.0T $.7T

Deficit

$3.3T

$5.5T

Revenue Actual Projected

2006

2028

2017

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget

projections did not materialize.

The author of that failed provision, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), has grasped for any way to limit the tax law’s impact on the debt.

Even when his idea was rejected, he voted for the tax law anyway.

Four months later, eyeing his retirement at the end of this year, Corker signaled he might have made a mistake. He said a complete antipathy has taken hold of Washington, particularly when it comes to changing costly programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

“I just leave here despondent over that particular issue because there’s just no forcing mechanism, there’s no punishment to Congress for not doing its job,” he said.

To be sure, Democrats and Republicans have both done more to expand the deficit than contract it, as they have found it easier to spend money than to cut it. The parties focus on short-term goals and winning elections, punting difficult decisions about the debt, military budgets or social welfare programs.

Rising interest rates could expedite this reckoning, lawmakers from both parties believe, but it is not expected to be a focus for either party heading into the November midterm elections that are shaping up to be a referendum on Trump’s governance.

The other week, the House of Representatives failed to advance a halfhearted amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have

THE WASHINGTON POST

required Congress to balance its budget.

“Everybody on this floor knows this is all pretend,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on the House floor during the vote.

That same week, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), once considered by the GOP to be the pied piper of fiscal responsibility despite having championed the deficit-busting tax law, said he was retiring.

Trump, meanwhile, has paid little heed to any warnings about fiscal recklessness. He has embraced higher deficits through tax cuts, but his senior advisers have blamed the swollen spending on Congress’s inability to plan ahead.

Members of Congress have blamed the White House’s unwillingness to take the lead, and House Republicans have blamed the Senate for failing to vote on their bills.

While all sides blame each other, the federal government ran deficits in excess of $200 billion in both February and March, the only time this has happened in consecutive months in American history.

The consequences are immense.

This year, the government is projected to spend $316 billion on interest payments for its debt. In 2022, those costs will rise to $643 billion, far surpassing the government’s Medicaid budget.

In times of economic strength, such as now, deficits tend to con-

tract, with emergency spending measures rolling off the federal balance sheet and coffers flush with tax receipts.

The White House and Congress have taken a much different approach in the past 16 months, committing to more than $1 trillion in future spending and slashing tax rates across the board. They are betting big that economic growth alone will solve future problems, though they lack any backup plan if this promise eludes them.

If there is an economic downturn, the debt will spike even faster, because the United States will be forced to borrow even more money to pay for things such as expanded unemployment benefits, food stamps and other safety net programs.

Republicans often complain that the only way to corral the budget is by restricting future spending in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but Democrats see this as an attempt to hollow out programs that are designed to help the elderly and the poor. This mistrust has led both parties to effectively abandon any pretense to make changes, something Trump solidified during the campaign when he declared cuts to the programs off limits.

The government will spend $1.7 trillion on Medicare and Social Security this year, accounting for 41 percent of all federal spending.

“In the longer term, both parties, Republicans and Democrats, are going to have to find a way together to save those programs for the long term,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said. “It’s got to be thoughtful and deliberate, and we’re going to have to do it together.”

Based on some measures, the government now has $21 trillion in debt.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the Trump administration will spend $981 billion more than it brings in through revenue next year, and that gap — called the deficit — will eclipse $1 trillion in perpetuity by 2020. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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NATION

Patron or trespasser: Who decides?

BY T RACY J AN AND R ACHEL S IEGEL

P

ublic outrage over the arrest of two African American men at a downtown Starbucks sparked a corporate crisis that led the company to take the unprecedented step of announcing it would close more than 8,000 stores for an afternoon in May to train baristas on how to recognize their racial biases.

The scene of two black men in handcuffs being led out of the Philadelphia coffee shop by police the other week delivered an uncomfortable reminder of the country’s racial disparities.

The incident illustrates a pervasive bias that can affect even the most mundane activities in U.S. public spaces — in this case, meeting someone for a coffee. The two men were waiting for a business associate when the manager called the police.

Nowhere else in Philadelphia are African Americans more disproportionately stopped by police than in the Center City neighborhood surrounding the Starbucks, two blocks from ritzy Rittenhouse Square, where rents in luxury apartments run as high as $10,000 a month.

While African Americans make up 3 percent of the area’s residents, they account for 67 percent of pedestrian police stops, according to a 2017 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has monitored racial disparity in Philadelphia policing for eight years. Most of those stopped were never charged.

Similar racial disparities in citations and arrests for commercial trespassing occur across the country, according to lawyers and civic leaders.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., African Americans make up 21 percent of the population but accounted for 59 percent of commercial trespassing arrests at businesses such as gas stations and bars, according to the ACLU, which filed a federal lawsuit against the city in 2013.

“It raises all kinds of questions.

How long can you be on a proper-

MICHAEL BRYANT/PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER /ASSOCIATED PRESS

There are stark racial disparities in commercial trespassing arrests and citations, experts say ty? Can you not browse at these stores now? Who gets to determine whether you’re acting as a patron or as a trespasser?” said Jason D. Williamson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, referring to the disproportionate targeting of African Americans. “It goes to the judgments that are made not only by the police but by store owners who ratchet up the level of suspicion depending on what you look like.”

For many African Americans, particularly young black men, the pervasive scrutiny means never letting down their guards while shopping, dining or gathering with friends, Williamson said.

This vigilance may translate into always asking for a receipt and shopping bag, even as municipalities impose small charges for plastic bags. Or dressing in a collared shirt simply to run weekend errands. Or being mindful not to linger for too long in a store.

“It’s the day-to-day opportunity

costs of being black in America,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Kevin Harden Jr., a 32-year-old lawyer who works near Rittenhouse Square, said he often is ignored by wait staff when he trades in his three-piece suits for jeans and Timberland boots on weekends.

“The employees frequently don’t have the ability to delineate between a homeless person and a black professional when I have on jeans,” Harden said. “They lack cultural competency. It’s like an invisibility when I’m seeking service, but they see me when they dislike me.”

In the Starbucks case, one of the men had asked to use the restroom before they purchased anything. A Starbucks employee told the men that the company policy was to refuse the use of bathrooms to non-customers and asked the men to leave, according to an account by Philadelphia Po-

Local Black Lives Matter activist Asa Khalif, left, protests inside a Starbucks on April 15 after a manager called police and two black men were arrested on days earlier in Philadelphia.

lice Commissioner Richard Ross.

The manager called the police when the men did not leave. Police handcuffed the men and led them out of the store, a scene captured by bystanders’ cellphones. They were released early the next morning with no charges filed.

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, along with their lawyer, talked about what happened on “Good Morning America” on Thursday. Robinson said that when he saw police arrive, he thought, “They can’t be here for us.”

“I understand that rules are rules, but what’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong,” Robinson said later. “That’s in any situation, whether there’s race involved or anything.”

Starbucks chief executive Kevin Johnson apologized to the men in person this past week for what he called the “reprehensible” circumstances that led to their arrest. The company also removed the manager who called police.

Ross, who is black, originally defended his police department’s handling of the case, describing the officers’ response as “professional.” On Thursday, he apologized to the two men and said that he “failed miserably” in the messaging around the arrests. He said the police department did not have a policy for dealing with similar situations, but does now.

Craig M. Straw, Philadelphia’s first deputy city solicitor, said the city and police department have been working with the ACLU to cut in half the number of pedestrian stops without reasonable suspicion since 2016.

Officers who have consistently high numbers of inappropriate stops are disciplined, from verbal counseling to suspension.

Straw acknowledged that despite the reduced number of stops, the racial disparities remain. He said experts who have examined the data disagree on whether race played a predominant role in the stops.

Jeannine Deni, store manager at a Barnes & Noble in Center City, said people are welcome to read in the bookstore or sit in its second-

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

9

NATION floor cafe for as long as they would like without making a purchase.

Restrooms are also open to the public.

She said the store rarely involves the police, doing so only when visitors are harming themselves or others.

At a McDonald’s near Rittenhouse Square, a sign alerts customers to the store’s 20-minute time limit for consuming food.

“PLEASE — NO LOITERING,” the sign said in bold, capital black letters.

Latasha Adams, a manager at the restaurant, defended the restaurant’s policies on loitering and trespassing. Almost once a day, Adams says, employees have to escort an unruly visitor or patron out of the store.

Adams said the time limit is necessary even for paying customers who keep to themselves, to prevent them from “taking advantage of the situation.”

“The customer doesn’t like it when people trespass,” Adams said. “It kind of hurts our business because who wants to eat here when you have a trespasser just chilling in here, just taking up spaces that are supposed to be for the customers?”

But Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said some business owners use law enforcement to “frighten away people they don’t want there.”

“Businesses call police all the time to keep people who they don’t like the looks of from congregating in front of their store,” Roper said. “It’s homeless people, not only African Americans.”

The ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a 2010 lawsuit against the Philadelphia Police Department for racial profiling, although Roper said the force had improved its practices in recent years and no longer stops people solely for “loitering.”

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said that until U.S. society addresses the issue of implicit bias, the disproportionate wrongful arrests of African Americans will continue.

“It’s an ever-present threat to one’s freedom,” Johnson said.

“Our ability to express ourselves freely is drastically hampered by the fact that someone could interpret malicious motives just because we exist or appear a certain way.” n © The Washington Post

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Warmer waters lure bull sharks to the Outer Banks BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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here’s a baby boom in the warming waters of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, in the rivers and bays that branch out from the Pamlico Sound. They are tiny. They are cute. They are bull sharks.

Drawn by a temperature rise in coastal waters, a result of climate change, bull sharks that prefer warmth and water with lower salinity levels have taken to mating in the sound near North Carolina’s popular beach haven, and juvenile sharks are showing up where they have rarely been seen before, a new study says.

Humans shouldn’t be alarmed, a researcher said. The nurseries are established in remote areas such as Long Shoal River and Rose Bay, far from the beach action in Kitty Hawk and Cape Hatteras. Besides, the babies don’t bite.

Researcher Charles Bangley said adult bull sharks, so named because of their stocky, barrelchested build, swim along the Atlantic coast and have been spotted in the sound by fishermen for decades. But juveniles were uncommon, even in gill net surveys undertaken by scientists between 2001 and 2011.

But in 2011, there was “a slightly higher number of bull sharks . . . and a spike the year after,” said Bangley, a marine scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland who was the study’s lead author. The number kept rising up to 2016, establishing a pattern. “We kind of have a before and after in our data set.” The study was published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study was an offshoot of a larger survey of 12 shark species, including the four-foot smooth dogfish, the spiny dogfish and Atlantic sharpnose shark — all relatively small. The sandbar shark is the largest of that study, published recently in the journal PLOS One.

ROGER SIMMS/DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A surfer wades into the Atlantic Ocean in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., as a shark lurks in the surf in 2001. Most bull shark nurseries are in Florida.

A bull shark nursery in the Outer Banks raises eyebrows because Florida is the Atlantic’s haven for bull shark nurseries.

The barrier islands near Cape Canaveral are where most are born. There are also several nurseries between the Florida Keys and the Everglades and Tampa Bay. South Carolina has a massive shark nursery, but it does not have bull sharks.

Bull sharks like water temperatures at 68 degrees or a little warmer. Juvenile bull sharks hang around the area where they’re born for about four years.

It’s safer there in the tepid, less salty water that isn’t tolerated by other shark species that might eat them. Then they swim off to join adults that glide up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Those early days in the nearfreshwater nursery is why adult bull sharks maintain an affinity for bays and rivers. They have been spotted as far north as Long Island and deep into the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay. “Bull shark migration patterns are poorly understood,” Bangley said, noting it was a subject for a future study.

“Juvenile bull shark presence in the sound was strongly related to early summer temperatures and late summer salinities, which have increased in the estuary over the 13 survey years,” the study said. “Further evidence for increasing water temperatures in Pamlico Sound was found in a 45-year data set for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries estuarine trawl survey.”

The results suggest higher water temperature “allowed bull sharks to expand their nursery habitat. This shift will have unknown, but potentially strong, impacts on both the local ecosystem and interactions with humans,” the study said.

Human and shark encounters overwhelmingly result more often in the death of the shark.

Shark attacks of all kinds in North Carolina have been exceedingly rare. In 2015, Bangley said, there were eight bites in summer, none of them fatal, mostly in the sound, not in the Atlantic, where beachgoers frolic.

“As as far as I know, no bites on a swimmer inside the sound,” Bangley said. n ©The Washington Post

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Search and destroy — together J OSHUA P ARTLOW Mexico City BY

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n the past few opiate-soaked years, U.S. officials say, nearly all the heroin coursing through American cities has come from one place: Mexico.

U.S. authorities have expressed alarm at what they call an explosion of opium poppy in their southern neighbor. Echoing a federal drug agency assessment, President Trump has declared that “an astonishing 90 percent of the heroin in America comes from south of the border” and cited that as one reason to build a giant border wall.

Yet Mexican and U.S. officials have struggled in recent years to answer some basic questions about Mexico’s illegal poppy crop: How much is actually being grown? How much of it is the Mexican government destroying?

And how much is being turned into heroin?

Now the Trump administration is intensifying its efforts to help Mexico get a more detailed picture of its poppy problem. It has begun to supply Mexican authorities with drones and geolocation technology and is funding studies to pinpoint how much poppy is being planted and how much heroin is produced from it.

The new initiatives emerged from several high-level meetings between Mexican and U.S. officials last year, as well as a trip in July by then-Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, who flew to see poppy fields in Guerrero state with Mexican military leaders, according to Mexican and U.S. officials.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric about Mexico on illegal immigration, trade and the wall could jeopardize that kind of security cooperation. On April 9, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s office said he had instructed cabinet secretaries to review their bilateral programs with the United States, following a tense week in which Trump criticized Mexico about a caravan of migrants heading toward the U.S. border.

But on certain issues, such as

PEDRO PARDO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. gives Mexico high-tech tools and pays for research to get a handle on opium production poppy, the two sides have already quietly made progress. With Trump as president, “we thought that there would have been a chilling of relations,” said Juan Carlos Silva, chief of the anti-drug division of Mexico’s federal police. “On the contrary, we have grown closer.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration said in a report last year that Mexico supplies 93 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States, up from half of it in 2012 — even though it lags far behind Afghanistan and Burma as an opium poppy producer, according to U.N. figures.

The DEA also reported that production more than tripled in Mexico between 2013 and 2016, to 79,000 acres, in part because of “reduced poppy eradication.”

But there is no consensus on those estimates, particularly the production numbers.

Mexican military officials deny that poppy production has tripled and say they have increased eradi-

cation efforts, deploying more than 20,000 soldiers on ground or aerial missions.

The troops destroyed about 71,000 acres last year and are on pace this year to surpass that, the officials said.

A decade ago, Mexico eradicated 27,000 acres, according to the United Nations.

There are several reasons for the disparate assessments.

Poppy, which is often cultivated in remote mountain areas, is harder to identify from aerial imagery than coca, the base ingredient of cocaine. In Colombia, once a major source of U.S. heroin, it is often grown in forests under cloud cover. In Mexico, where it is mainly grown in the western states of Guerrero, Sinaloa and Durango, it can also be interspersed with other crops, such as peach trees, making it difficult to detect.

And since poppy has such a short growing cycle — from seed to harvest in just four months — intermittent photography might

RASHIDE FRIAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Top, a community policing group in Mexico’s Guerrero state patrols the hills of Carrizalillo.

Above, In Sinaloa state, poppies are targeted for confiscation during an operation last month.

miss certain fields, experts say.

“There are still a lot of question marks around the figures,” said Martin Jelsma, director of the drug program at the Transnational Institute, a research organization based in Amsterdam, and the co-author of a forthcoming study on Mexican and Colombian poppy production.

For the past year, U.S. officials have focused on trying to help Mexican authorities establish an accurate picture of how much poppy is being grown and a system for verifying the amount Mexican security forces have destroyed.

Until 2016, Mexico did not provide verifiable statistics on the size of its poppy crop. That year, working with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, it produced its first such report, relying on aerial and satellite imagery that found that about 61,000 acres of poppy was being grown.

This summer, Mexico and the U.N. agency are expected to publish updated information and the first estimates of “yield,” or how much poppy paste and heroin result from the crop. The U.S. government has helped fund that study, known as MEXK-54.

In addition, U.S. authorities have given the Mexican military several drones to help identify fields, according to a senior Mexican military official. They have also provided handheld equipment that uses GPS coordinates to locate poppy fields that have been destroyed, then sends the data via satellite to the Mexican attorney general’s office, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The Mexican army has the primary responsibility for eradication.

Some, however, are skeptical that Mexican authorities will do much to curb opium poppy production.

“No matter how much money we pump into that, they’re still going to do what they want to do,” a second U.S. official said. “They might take all that equipment we throw at them and use it for something else.” n © The Washington Post

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The Castro era comes to an end A NTHONY F AIOLA Havana BY

T

hrough the Space Age, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Internet era, Cubans held one constant: A Castro ruled the nation.

That has now changed.

Raúl Castro, 86, stepped aside as Cuba’s president this past week, ending the epochal run of two brothers who sent shock waves through 20th-century politics. Nearly two decades into this century, and less than two years after Fidel Castro’s death, his brother’s exit from Cuba’s top job leaves this insular island at a crossroads, weighing how fast, if at all, to embrace change.

“This is an important moment for Cuba, but the truth is, nobody knows what to expect,” said Camilo Condis, general manager of Artecorte, a community project in Havana. “I mean, other than Fidel and Raúl, who is there? You didn’t really know anyone else.”

The National Assembly replaced Castro with Miguel DíazCanel. Born after the revolution, Díaz-Canel, 57, grew up in the shadow of the olive-drab-wearing guerrilleros who remain a powerful if aging force in Cuba’s decision-making apparatus. He is viewed as a consensus builder unlikely to push for quick or radical reform.

Castro has laid the groundwork for his exit for years, and the passing of the torch is highly symbolic. When Raúl took the reins from Fidel in 2008, a Castro was still in charge. This time, the succession amounts to a tricky effort to build a new generation of leaders without the Castro name, a move considered essential to cementing the central role of Cuba’s communist system.

“This is about institutionalizing the regime,” said Jorge Domínguez, a Cuba expert and professor of government at Harvard University. “It’s about Raúl Castro saying, ‘I am president, but I have a term, and then someone else is going to lead . . . . If you are someone who really wants the regime to endure, it’s what Raúl

ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI/REUTERS

In Cuba, nearly six decades of rule by Fidel and Raúl ends as the younger brother steps aside needs to do.”

The transition is happening at a time when a decade-long opening under Castro has already begun to alter the fabric of Cuban life. Access to the Internet is still subpar, but hotspots are more widely available than ever before.

There are now more than 5 million cellphones in this nation of 11.5 million people. More than 550,000 Cubans work in the private sector. After years in which Cubans were forced to obtain permission to leave the country, Cubans these days can travel freely. It is now possible to buy and sell real estate.

Yet in a country where streets are still swimming in 1950s Chevys and Fords, Cuban life can feel stuck in time, and plagued with problems that never really went away. Locals talk of periodic shortages — eggs, potatoes, toilet paper. In a potential sign of discontent, turnout in recent municipal elections stood at 82.5 percent — the lowest in four decades, and a stunningly low number in a

country where citizens face high pressure to vote.

Perhaps not surprisingly in a one-party state, few here are openly clamoring for radical political change. And in an important sense, this past week’s transition will not mean the end of Castro leadership, since Raúl will remain the head of the powerful Communist Party.

But some are testing the boundaries of official tolerance through independent-minded blogs and social media. More and more Cubans are calling for a path to economic prosperity.

That desire for advancement is presenting Cuba’s ruling elite with a growing challenge: how and whether to more closely follow in the footsteps of communist societies like China and Vietnam, which have managed to ringfence their one-party systems while vastly expanding the private sector. Cuba’s economic opening has been far slower, and has unfolded in fits and starts.

“We may find that the only way

A boy raises the Cuban flag during a daily ceremony at a school in Santo Domingo, Cuba, this month. The National Assembly named Miguel Díaz-Canel president on Thursday. Raúl Castro remains head of the Communist Party.

to preserve the achievements of the revolution is to change the country in substantial ways,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat based in Havana.

Cuba’s National Assembly will pick Castro’s successor, with DíazCanel seen by insiders as by far the most likely successor. An engineer often seen toting a tablet computer, he has been serving as Cuba’s first vice president.

Though he lacks the Castro name, Díaz-Canel is without doubt blessed by Raúl Castro. He has been a constant presence at the side of his reform-minded mentor. But he has also curried favor with the hard-liners, who have largely succeeded in stalling a more drastic opening here.

Some Cubans hope that, given his relatively young age, DíazCanel may be willing to take economic reforms further than the Castros ever did. Yet he is also viewed as a party ideologue who was skeptical of the thaw with the United States under President Barack Obama and whose position on freedom of expression appears to have hardened in recent years.

More Cuban islanders — including some who still at least partly embrace the revolution — have been traveling to cities like Miami, bringing a diversity of political opinion to U.S. Cuban culture. Young Cuban Americans, meanwhile, continue to discover their roots through visits to the island, sparking a growing dialogue across the Straits of Florida.

Andrew Hevia, a 33-year-old half-Cuban Miamian and coproducer of the Academy Awardwinning film “Moonlight,” for instance, is heading to Havana this month for the first time.

“My grandmother, who passed a number of years ago, would have been the one who had the most problems with me going,” he said.

But, he added, “the conversation in Miami has changed about going to Cuba . . . maybe it’s that there’s less resistance in my parents’ generation, or that [my generation is] taking the initiative, forcing things to come along.” n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

A MIDDLE AGE RENAISSANCE

“I

BY JONATHAN RAUCH

think what we’re seeing,” Marc Freedman told me when I interviewed him one summer day, “right in front of our nose, is the emergence of a new period of life.” ¶ Freedman is in his late 50s and lives and works in San Francisco. As the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called Encore.org, he sees his job as developing and demonstrating ways to bring soci­ ety’s outdated model of aging into closer harmony with the modern reality.

In his 2011 book “The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife,” he suggests that we talk about a midlife chasm instead of a midlife crisis: a gap between the substantial support people need in middle age and the meager support society gives them. “The intervening space is not just wide,” Freedman writes, “it’s confusing and chaotic, a mismatched mess of mixed signals, outdated norms, anachronistic institutions, and multiple misperceptions.” ¶ Over the past decade or so, evidence has emerged from economics, psychology and neuroscience showing that humans tend to go through a kind of emotional reboot around midlife. It’s often experienced as a period of malaise and dissatisfaction, but normally it is not — contrary to stereotype — a crisis. Rather, it is a transition. During this period, our values, our priorities, even our brains tend to shift away from competition and social striving and toward connecting and giving to others.¶ Aging, it now appears, has a U­shaped effect on life satisfaction. The excitement and high expectations of our 20s and 30s are followed by a long period of readjustment in middle age — which is a grind to experience but equips us for a surprising rebirth of positivity and wisdom in late adulthood. continues on next page

MATT CHASE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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from previous page

Of course, all lives are different, and this phenomenon will vary from person to person.

But the transitional pattern appears to be quite fundamental: It is found in massive data sets covering populations and countries all over the world — and an analogous pattern has been observed in chimps and orangutans.

If you wanted to design a society that exacerbated midlife misery and squandered the potential of later adulthood, you might deliver education in a single lump during the first two decades of life, load work into the middle decades, and then herd healthy, happy and highly skilled older adults into idleness. In other words, you would do more or less what we have been doing for the past century or so.

It’s a model that made some sense when most people needed only a high school degree, held only one kind of job for life, and died around age 65. But it offers nothing by way of guidance and support for the kind of midlife relaunch that today’s Americans increasingly demand, and that today’s America increasingly needs.

Fortunately, better alternatives are emerging — not from Washington, D.C., but from educators, corporations and civic entrepreneurs who are inventing and testing the ideas and institutions that are already ushering our current model for midlife into obsolescence.

bottom-up rather than top-down, as organic social change very often is. In a study published in 2017 in the Gerontologist, Phyllis Moen, Erik Kojola and Kate Schaefers conducted in-depth interviews with 23 innovative organizations in the greater Minneapolis region, including private-sector companies, government agencies and nonprofits. The organizations, they write, are “upending existing age-graded workplace norms and experimenting with new policies”: providing flexible working hours; developing phased exits for employees who want to scale back gradually rather than retire all at once; hiring and rehiring older workers and retirees; providing training and development to older as well as younger workers.

Communities and civic groups and social entrepreneurs are also inventing templates.

Freedman likes to tell the story of a group of rabbis who are creating a bar mitzvah ceremony for people in their 60s. Encore.org is

Nothing is harder than jumping out of the deep grooves we have carved for ourselves by our 40s. How can I reinvent my life while meeting responsibilities and making ends meet?

On the printed page, the idea of a fresh start in

midlife sounds pretty glorious; in real life, nothing is harder than jumping out of the deep grooves we have carved for ourselves by our 40s. What do I really want? Who wants me?

How can I reinvent my life while meeting responsibilities and making ends meet? What are the options, and how can I sort through them all?

Those questions and many more clobber anyone who contemplates a midlife relaunch.

Relaunchers need guardrails to change course safely. They need institutions and programs and examples that provide support and structure. They need employers who will accommodate and hire mature workers who may want to work part time, undertake not-so-big jobs, and apply old skills to new ventures. They need universities and financial aid geared to retooling in midlife; pensions and 401(k) plans flexible enough to cope with the “retired but working”; career counseling and job fairs and internships and gap years for graybeards in search of new missions and opportunities.

They also need society’s permission to experiment and grow and err.

Freedman is among a burgeoning group of social thinkers and entrepreneurs seeking to address these challenges. He and others imagine innovations like Individual Purpose Accounts, which would help people save up for gap years and adult education, or reforms allowing people to use a year’s worth of Social Security benefits early, so they could go back to school or do an internship.

“There’s an adaptation that’s going on in a lot of sectors,” Freedman told me. The adaptation is fragmented and improvisational and

itself an example of civic improvisation. Another sprang up spontaneously in 2000: Charlotte Frank and Christine Millen, friends and New Yorkers and veterans of the women’s movement, found themselves leaving jobs but unready to retire. “As they talked to each other,” Susan Collins recounted to me, “they realized they couldn’t be the only two women in New York facing this giant stretch of time and saying, ‘Who the heck wants to retire?’ ” Collins, who was in her early 60s when we met, is the executive director of the Transition Network, a national community of professional women in their 50s. What began as mutually supportive conversations among Frank and Millen and their own networks has grown into a nonprofit with 2,200 members and 13 chapters nationwide. That is small, as nonprofits go; but it is large enough to have proved its concept. For $100 a year, women in midlife and beyond can connect with those who are in a reinvention stage or have passed through one.

“You meet other people in the same type of situation and you realize you’re not alone,” Collins said.

Though the organization provides workshops and seminars and networking opportunities, the heart of its model is what it calls “transition peer groups.” Those are monthly gatherings of eight to 12 women who explore preselected topics of their choice, such as how to deal with adult children, how to cope with stiffening bodies, what brings contentment, and how to forgive. The gathering is not group therapy or counseling. “It’s not here to resolve your psychological challenges,” Collins said.

Rather, it is a conversation among peers about who they are and where they might be going and how to get there. The meetings are like book groups, except what’s being read and discussed is the members’ lives, and the mission is to plot the next chapter.

The Transition Network is interesting, and promising, partly because it is entirely a grassroots project. With the exception of director Collins and a couple of staff people, everyone is a volunteer. Its communitarian model of mutual self-help is right out of the playbook of Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century Frenchman who famously documented Americans’ genius for forming voluntary groups and associations. But broader, more systematic adoption will require the involvement of sizable institutions that can move the social and cultural needle in a bigger way.

No major organization has yet stepped up on a large scale, but we have an early-stage prototype to look at. AARP is one of the strongest lobbying organizations in the United States. In Washington, it is renowned for its clout on issues of interest to seniors. But in the early 2010s, searching for ventures that could introduce the organization to people in their 40s and 50s, AARP kept encountering the phenomenon of midlife and post-midlife transitions.

And so, in 2012, it launched a program called Life Reimagined. The idea was to provide online information and services geared toward midlife: e-books, quizzes, meditation guides, life-planning exercises and workbooks, and streaming courses about subjects like brain health, relationships and finding purpose.

Also, the site experimented with an online platform allowing users to shop for and schedule life coaching, at prices steeply discounted below prevailing market rates.

Life Reimagined, which has since been folded into a related AARP effort, took inspiration from a book of the same name by life coach Richard J. Leider and journalist Alan M. Webber (who was recently elected mayor of Santa Fe, N.M.). Leider and Webber stress that big transitions aren’t DIY projects and that, as Webber told me, isolation kills. “It’s pretty lonesome inside your own head,” Webber said, when I spoke with him about the project.

“Everybody’s life is an experiment of one, but nobody should have to go it alone.”

In 2010, when Philip Pizzo, a pediatrician by

training, was planning his own transition from being dean of Stanford University’s medical school, he began pondering ways in which higher education could help mature people rethink their lives. “I’ve talked to hundreds of people, probably thousands, across the world,” he said. “It’s amazing to see how many individuals are frustrated and disappointed by the time they hit their late 40s and 50s. That seems to be much more normative than I would have predicted. Then the question becomes, what do people do? How do they realign themselves, and how can they do that?” He began to imagine university programs where midlifers could learn from and support one another,

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COVER STORY “and where they can utilize higher education to do what they did in the early phase of their life: re-explore, rethink, reconnect with people, and plan that next phase of their life.”

In January 2015, Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute was born, under Pizzo’s leadership. From applicants with several decades of life experience and a desire to recalibrate, the program chose about two dozen participants (called fellows). For a year, they would attend university courses, hear prominent guest speakers, and share their hopes and plans and know-how.

“They’re all in transition and often they don’t have anybody to talk to about it,” Pizzo told me.

As the institute’s name implies (and as its mid-five-figure tuition affirms), the Distinguished Careers Institute was not for everyone.

Pizzo compared it to the first Tesla Roadster, a $100,000 electric car that used the purchasing power of early adopters to put electricity on the road and (Tesla hoped) seed a market for more affordable, utilitarian electric vehicles. “We started out with lots of bells and whistles to demonstrate proof of principle,” Pizzo said. “I have no expectation or desire that the kind of program we’ve put together becomes the model.

My hope is that there will be lots of seeds sown that will accomplish similar ends in a much more democratized way.” Pizzo talks frequently with community colleges and universities about ways to build their own versions. Some, such as Portland Community College in Oregon and Pace University in New York, already offer programs for encore careerists.

Workplaces, too, can build programs and norms for tackling midlife challenges. Consider what has happened at Leo Burnett, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. Like a lot of companies nowadays, it offers coaching, especially for top executives. Once viewed as a form of remediation, coaching has come to be seen in the business world as a way to bring out the best in employees with high potential.

When I asked her about the agency’s commitment to coaching, Renetta McCann, the company’s chief U.S. talent officer, likened midlife in the advertising business to the compactor scene from the 1977 “Star Wars” movie: “The floors are moving, the walls are moving, the ceiling is moving,” she told me. “What we’ve come to understand is that the people in the middle of the organization are the ones under the most pressure. At some time in that age zone, you wind up in the crunch. Getting the work out the door falls on you, and you’ve got to negotiate all these relationships. And God forbid you should have a life of your own: a spouse, partner, kids, whatever. Heaven help you.”

Coaching, she said, was available for employees of all ages at Leo Burnett. A large share of those who used it, though, were in their late 30s and their 40s. “Where in society are people given people to ask these questions to?” McCann said. “At 35 and 45, that’s when your values are probably most under pressure. You’re still trying to fit in. You’re still trying to be the kid your parents wanted. You’re dealing with your spouse or partner. There’s this incredible pressure to have The Answer. A lot of times, when

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consulting, because the coach’s job is not to pass down advice or expertise. Instead, life coaches often refer to themselves as “allies.” They are trained to listen closely, to notice things, and to surface core questions about who we are and what we want and how to get there.

What struck me as unusual and pioneering about Leo Burnett’s approach was that coaching there was normal. Coaches were fellow workers embedded within the company. They knew the players in the agency and the stresses of the job.

Executives used and recommended the program as a matter of course. Within the company, coaching was part of everyday life. The company had thus inverted the usual assumption that values questions and midlife transitions belong in the closet, especially at work.

“We’ve tried to take the stigma out of it,” said Peter Diamond, whose coaching work within Leo Burnett subsequently blossomed into an independent coaching career. “In three years, coaching went from something where I was very cautious to make sure that people weren’t coming in and out at the same time, to being part of the fabric of the agency.”

“At 35 and 45, that’s when your values are probably most under pressure.

You’re still trying to fit in. You’re still trying to be the kid your parents wanted. You’re dealing with your spouse or partner.” you are pressed to have The Answer, people either stop asking questions or they don’t ask high-quality questions.”

McCann knew whereof she spoke, having traveled the happiness curve herself. Earlier in her career, she was global CEO of one of the company’s business units. At 52, she burned out, retired, went back to school, got a master’s, then returned to the agency in a new role, now working with people. Along the way, she found answers to some of her questions. “One of the things I did was take a hard look at my own values,” she says. “I found I had two different value sets, one set of values attached to my heart and one to my mind. One is about grace; the other is about curiosity.”

Coaching is not the same as mentoring or

Society, not science, determines what is normal in the lives we lead, and that, right now, is the problem. The standard social templates for adult development and life satisfaction turn the U-shaped happiness curve upside down, describing something more like a hillshaped arc. In their book, Leider and Webber describe the conventional view this way: “Each of us starts off fresh and new, ready to learn and grow and discover our individual potential. We arc upward as we go through our early years, and we continue to grow until about the time we hit middle age. At that point we’ve reached the apex of our lives, the top of the parabola. After that, as we pass middle age, we begin the process of decline that takes us into retirement, then old age, and eventually, death.”

Within that outdated but still prevalent paradigm, the happiness curve is not normal.

It is more like the opposite of normal. Sure, midlife crisis is a familiar phenomenon. But, as the very word “crisis” implies, it is extreme and extraordinary and bad. We avoid it if we can, and if we cannot avoid it, we hide it.

By telling a social story about normalcy that is at odds with reality, we manufacture dismay and shame about a perfectly normal transition. By expecting people to exhibit maximum mastery in midlife, we leave them to their own devices if they feel adrift and vulnerable. By leaving them to their own devices, we increase their isolation and therefore their unhappiness.

This trap may never go away entirely, but already it is possible to see how the essential pieces of a new support infrastructure could work together to ease us through our transitions. Improvisations like Leo Burnett’s and Stanford’s and AARP’s and the Transition Network’s are emerging because people need them — and aren’t waiting around. n © The Washington Post

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TRANSPORTATION

Southwest pilot had ‘nerves of steel’

DAVID MAIALETTI/PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Her time as one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots served her well after engine blew BY

S AMANTHA S CHMIDT

T

he pilot’s voice was calm yet focused as her plane descended, telling air traffic control she had “149 souls” on board and was carrying 21,000 pounds — or about five hours’ worth — of fuel.

“Southwest 1380, we’re single engine,” said Capt. Tammie Jo Shults, a former fighter pilot with the U.S. Navy. “We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit.” She asked for medical personnel to meet her aircraft on the runway.

“We’ve got injured passengers.”

“Injured passengers, okay, and is your airplane physically on fire?” asked a male voice on the other end, according to audio of the interaction.

“No, it’s not on fire, but part of it’s missing,” Shults said, pausing for a moment. “They said there’s a hole, and uh, someone went out.”

The engine on Shults’s plane had, in fact, exploded Tuesday, spraying shrapnel into the aircraft, causing a window to be blown out and leaving one woman dead and seven other people injured.

In the midst of the chaos, Shults

LINDA MALONEY

deftly guided the plane onto the runway at Philadelphia International Airport, touching down at 190 mph, saving the lives of 148 people aboard and averting a far worse catastrophe.

“She has nerves of steel,” passenger Alfred Tumlinson said Wednesday.

“She was talking to us very

calmly,” he said. “ ‘We’re descending, we’re not going down, we’re descending, just stay calm, brace yourselves,’ ” he recalled Shults saying.

Another passenger, Diana McBride Self, thanked Shults on Facebook for her “guidance and bravery in a traumatic situation.”

She added that Shults “came back

Tammie Jo Shults, a former fighter pilot with the Navy and seen above in a photo from the early 1990s, made a successful emergency landing, top, in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

to speak to each of us personally.”

“This is a true American Hero,” McBride wrote. Others on social media agreed and compared Shults with Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who guided his US Airways plane to safety in New York’s Hudson River in 2009.

In statement issued via Twitter on Wednesday night, Southwest Airlines acknowledged Flight 1380 was piloted by Shults, along with first officer Darren Ellisor.

Shults declined to comment.

The passenger killed was identified as Jennifer Riordan, of New Mexico, by her employer Wells Fargo. Riordan was an Albuquerque-based community relations leader “who was loved and respected,” Wells Fargo said in a statement.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said that investigators are aware of reports from passengers that Riordan was nearly sucked out of the plane, but that “we have not corroborated that ourselves.”

“Knowing Tammie Jo, I know her heart is broken for the death of that passenger,” said her motherin-law, Virginia Shults.

It was also no surprise to her that Tammie Jo Shults was the

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

17

MUSIC CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK pilot credited with the skillful landing. Shults’s mother-in-law and friends described her as a pioneer in the aviation field, a woman who broke barriers to pursue her goals.

She was among the first female fighter pilots for the U.S. Navy, according to her alma mater, MidAmerica Nazarene University, from which she graduated in 1983.

A Navy spokeswoman said Shults was “among the first cohort of women pilots to transition to tactical aircraft.” After commissioning in the Navy in 1985 and finishing flight training in Pensacola, Fla., her duties took her to Point Mugu, Calif., where she was an instructor pilot on planes including the F/A-18 Hornet.

She was a decorated pilot who rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and twice received the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, along with a National Defense Service Medal and an expert pistol Marksmanship Medal, according to a biography provided by the Navy Office of Information.

Shults’s persistence in becoming a pilot goes back to her upbringing on a New Mexico ranch, near Holloman Air Force Base, Shults says in the book “Military Fly Moms,” by Linda Maloney.

“Some people grow up around aviation. I grew up under it,” she said. Watching the daily air show, she knew she “just had to fly.”

She recalled attending a lecture on aviation during her senior year of high school, in 1979. A retired colonel started the class by asking Shults, the only girl in attendance, “if I was lost.”

“I mustered up the courage to assure him I was not and that I was interested in flying,” she wrote. “He allowed me to stay but assured me there were no professional women pilots.”

When she met a woman in college who had received her Air Force wings, she wrote, “I set to work trying to break into the club.”

But Shults, whose maiden name is Bonnell, wrote that the Air Force “wasn’t interested” in talking to her. The Navy let her apply for aviation officer candidate school, “but there did not seem to be a demand for women pilots.”

“Finally,” she wrote, a year after taking the Navy aviation

exam, she found a recruiter who would process her application. After aviation officer candidate school in Pensacola, she was assigned to a training squadron at Naval Air Station Chase Field in Beeville, Tex., as an instructor pilot teaching student aviators how to fly the Navy T-2 trainer. She later left to fly the A-7 Corsair in Lemoore, Calif.

By then, she met her “knight in shining airplane,” a fellow pilot who would become her husband, Dean Shults. (He also now flies for Southwest Airlines.)

Because of the combat exclusion law, Tammie Jo Shults was prohibited from flying in a combat squadron. While her husband was able to join a squadron, her choices were limited, involving providing electronic warfare training to Navy ships and aircraft.

She later became one of the first women to fly what was then the Navy’s newest fighter, the F/A-18 Hornet but, again, in a support role.

She served in the Navy for 10 years. She left in 1993 and now lives in the San Antonio area with her husband. She has two children: a teenage son and a daughter in her early 20s.

Shults’s approach to parenting, described in the “Military Fly Moms” book, reflected a similar sentiment.

“We endeavor to teach our children to be leaders, not lemmings,” she said. “This is especially important when it comes to making the right choice while the crowd is pulling in the other direction.”

Gary Shults, her brother-inlaw, described her to the AP as a “formidable woman, as sharp as a tack.”

“My brother says she’s the best pilot he knows,” Gary Shults said.

“She’s a very caring, giving person who takes care of lots of people.”

Shults’s mother-in-law also described her as a devout Christian, with a faith she thinks may have contributed to her calm state amid the emergency landing.

“I know God was with her, and I know she was talking to God,” Virginia Shults said.

Whatever was going through her mind as she completed her landing, Tammie Jo Shults even made time to tell the control tower: “Thank you. . . . Thanks, guys, for the help.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘DAMN.’ — that’s a fine Pulitzer pick BY

C HRIS R ICHARDS

D

amn for real. Kendrick Lamar just won the Pulitzer Prize for music. What does it mean? So many

things.

First, it confirms that these strange days have been blindingly golden for black pop culture.

“Black Panther” just made history at the box office, Beyoncé just made history at Coachella, and on Monday, one of the leading candidates for Voice of His

AMY HARRIS/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kendrick Lamar, seen performing last year, just won the Pulitzer Prize for music for his album “DAMN.”

Generation made history by winning a medal that has only ever hung across the hearts of classical and jazz musicians. Hopefully, the newish African American Museum still has some empty space on the walls.

Here’s what else it means: That rap music is the most significant pop idiom of our time. It’s the sound of 21st century American life — a black art form with a black-and-white-and-everyoneelse audience. The music is an implicit conversation about the conjoined legacies of slavery, segregation, police brutality and other hideous injustices that our society doesn’t care to solve. In that sense, rap music is the sound of a broken nation struggling to understand itself.

And Lamar understands that.

Whenever he darts off into a virtuoso verse, he isn’t trying to diz-

zy our ears as much as vocalize his own hyper-awareness to the state of the nation in real time.

On “DAMN.,” his astonishing 2017 album, he surveys a smoking landscape and lets the disappointment bounce off his tongue: “It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets, Wall Street, corporate offices, banks, employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts.” In a profoundly disorienting American moment, here was a rap album that sounded clear-eyed and sure-footed. On Monday afternoon, it earned a 30-year-old from Compton his first Pulitzer.

Let’s not forget that “DAMN.” didn’t win album of the year at the 60th annual Grammy Awards in February — a depressing kind of shock, until you remember that the Recording Academy has only ever bestowed its most -coveted trophy to a rap album once.

The loss marked Lamar’s third consecutive snub for album of the year, and it was enough to make you wonder why an industry that profits so handsomely from black art so adamantly refuses to celebrate it.

Some awards mean more than others, though, and while prestige often tends to calcify our ideas about what constitutes greatness, the Pulitzer committee has stepped up to recognize the worthiness of Lamar’s work. In doing so, our shared definition of “great music” instantly becomes more flexible.

Maybe Lamar knew that all along. He’s always courted prestige, and in 2015, when his galvanic “To Pimp a Butterfly” was nominated for album of the year at the 2016 Grammys, he had no qualms asking to be recognized by the powers that be.

“Ultimately, for the hip-hop community, I would love for us to win them all,” Lamar told the New York Times about the nine prizes he had been nominated for that year. “Because we deserve that.”

Truth is, he deserved better.

Monday was a fine start. n

© The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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BOOKS

The legacy of a rebellious Kennedy N ONFICTION

E EUNICE The Kennedy Who Changed the World

By Eileen McNamara Simon & Schuster.

383 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

E VAN T HOMAS

unice Shriver was the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children. She did not fit in with the “golden trio” — Joe Jr., Jack and Kick — who sat at the grown-ups’ table, nor with her younger siblings, who sat at the kids’ table.

Gawky, toothy, sickly and painfully thin, she was teased, in the sometimes harsh Kennedy way, as “Puny Eunie.” At the same time, she was willful and determined.

She wanted to learn from her more glamorous brothers and sisters. In leather-bound notebooks, she wrote down the way they might enter a room to attract attention or make small talk to charm. To her dominating father, she wrote: “Dear Daddy, I know you are very busy. I also know you are advising everyone else in [the] house on their careers, so why not me?”

Angular and fierce, carelessly dressed in pants and moth-eaten sweaters, she could appear manly.

“If that girl had been born with balls, she would have been a hell of a politician,” her father reputedly said of her.

Eunice was the most ardently religious of the Kennedy children — an “old soul,” said her sister Kick — and also the most caring. It was Eunice who looked after Rosemary, the pretty but “slow” Kennedy sister, taking her sailing and to dances. Increasingly given to tantrums as she became a teenager, Rosemary dangerously wandered off at night into the streets. In 1941, her father dispatched Rosemary to have a prefrontal lobotomy, which was botched, leaving her braindamaged. In the secretive Kennedy family, Rosemary became a disappeared person, vanished from the newsy letters the clan exchanged.

Eunice later said she had no idea where her sister was “for a decade after the surgery.”

Could that really be true? In her discerning, often moving biography, Eileen McNamara writes that “Joe Kennedy’s authority over his children was such that Eunice

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Above from left, Eunice Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Bishop James Cassidy, Rose Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, John F. Fitzgerald (Rose’s father) and Ted Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 1946.

might have known better than to ask.” Eunice worshiped her father, ignoring, or pretending to ignore, his indiscretions. At the same time, consciously or unconsciously, she rebelled. While the men in the family philandered, Eunice spurned the wooing of her faithful suitor Sargent Shriver for seven years and came close to taking vows of chastity. In 1953, it took a charismatic young priest — Theodore Hesburgh, later president of Notre Dame — to persuade her not to become a nun. (“I told her she did have a vocation, but that her vocation was to be Sargent Shriver’s wife and the mother of his children and to continue to do the work she was doing. I think I resolved it to everyone’s satisfaction,” recalled Hesburgh.)

When patriarch Joe suffered a debilitating stroke in 1961, Eunice pushed the family to bring Rosemary back into the light, to humanize her condition, in an article written under Eunice’s byline for the Saturday Evening Post (which still did not disclose the lobotomy). And when Joe died at age 81,

Eunice brought Rosemary out of exile, taking her swimming and sailing again at Hyannis Port.

By then, Eunice had become the nation’s leading crusader for the rights of the mentally disabled.

She devoted the family’s foundation to the cause and tirelessly, relentlessly lobbied and agitated for government funding, publicity and programs.

Eunice’s legacy includes the Special Olympics, which had its origins in the back yard of her Maryland estate as Camp Shriver (“Where Everybody Is Somebody”) and, with a significant boost from the city of Chicago, became an international event involving millions of special-needs athletes.

It may be an exaggeration to claim, as the author’s publisher does, that Eunice “left behind the Kennedy family’s most profound and lasting legacy” (we might not be here at all if JFK had misplayed the Cuban missile crisis). But McNamara has written a fair-minded, well-reported book. The Shriver children wisely trusted her and

opened up Eunice’s papers, allowing McNamara to deliver a sensitive, nuanced portrait.

For all her human sympathy, Eunice was anything but cuddly. If her five children wanted to be comforted, they crawled into bed with their father (who slept in a separate room from his wife).

“They definitely had their gender roles mixed up,” said their daughter, journalist Maria Shriver. The country-club-raised Eunice could be a little clueless, once suggesting that juvenile delinquents should take up golf and tennis. She was notoriously hard to work for, by one count going through 21 assistants in four years. She was not exactly timely about paying her bills. Carelessly popping pills for her chronic ailments, “she was a working addict, people would say today,” according to her son Bobby.

At the same time, she was the family member who could be counted on to stand by Kennedy children when they got into trouble, as they sometimes did. And as a confessing Catholic, she practiced what she preached. She would invite delinquent girls from the House of the Good Shepherd in Chicago to live in her family apartment. Her husband, Sargent, recalled: “I’d go to the door, and there would be a woman with a suitcase and a plaintive look on her face. ‘Uh-oh,’ I’d think. ‘Another one of Eunice’s girls.’ ” Describing life in the Shriver home, McNamara writes: “It was only in retrospect that her own children saw Camp Shriver as something unusual. In the moment, a field full of scores of boisterous children — some in wheelchairs playing catch, others in protective helmets banging their heads against trees — was just life with Mummy.” But what a life. n Thomas is the author of “Robert Kennedy: His Life” and a forthcoming biography of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A thriller right off the assembly line

When MLK really became a preacher

F ICTION l

N ONFICTION

I

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

n 2006, Sara Shepard published the best-selling novel “Pretty Little Liars,” the first in what would become one of the most successful young-adult suspense series ever. Eventually stretching out to 16 novels, the “Pretty Little Liars” juggernaut begot “Pretty Little Liars” the television series, which ran for seven seasons beginning in 2010.

All this is to say that Shepard is one of those sublimely successful authors whose books sell themselves. Her swarm of fans who have come of age with “Pretty Little Liars” — and Shepard’s many other YA novels — will not be dissuaded from reading her new book, “The Elizas,” a thriller aimed at an adult audience, no matter what scorn I heap upon it.

But, though the effort be futile, heap I must.

Like “Pretty Little Liars,” “The Elizas” is grounded on a big contrivance: In this case, a soon-tobe-published debut novelist named Eliza Fontaine realizes that the murder attempts and various other torments she has inflicted on her fictional heroine are starting to happen to her. Is Eliza herself responsible for this real-life mayhem? (After all, she has a complicated medical history that includes a childhood brain tumor and consequent memory loss. Now a 20-something adult, she is prone to suicidal thoughts and behaviors, binge drinking, and blackouts.)

Or perhaps Eliza’s canny publicist is wreaking this havoc. It’s true that Eliza’s near-drowning in a Palm Springs pool has been a boon for pre-publication orders of her novel! Or maybe that odd guy named Desmond is to blame.

He rescued Eliza from the bottom of the pool and now seems to be stalking her. Or maybe the culprit is her resentful stepsister Gabby. Or what about Eliza’s glamorous Aunt Eleanor, who disappeared years ago? Could it be possible that Aunt Eleanor might reappear and provide answers

about the attacks, strange text messages and other tribulations now dogging Eliza? You betcha!

Interspersed within this story line are chapters from Eliza’s forthcoming novel, called “The Dots.” The plot of “The Dots,” which is every bit as mechanical as the main suspense narrative, focuses on a girl named Dot — who, like Eliza, had a brain tumor as a child — and her dazzling Aunt Dorothy, who seems to have a lot in common with Aunt Eleanor. “The Dots” opens on young Dot’s hospital stays. Long before Dot or her doctors wise up to what’s going on, we readers deduce that every time Aunt Dorothy appears at the hospital bearing some soothing tonic, young Dot gets sicker. It takes a very, very long time for the obvious diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy to be suggested.

Because of her memory problems, Eliza has no clue about whether the misadventures that she has conjured for Dot in her novel are fictional or true; nor does Eliza know for certain if she jumped into that Palm Springs pool or if someone pushed her; if the latter possibility turns out to be the case, Eliza may be forgetting essential details about her assailant’s identity that could now save her life.

Whatever. Shepard’s story line is simultaneously so ornate and empty that it dissolves soon after reading. Eccentric but flat characters populate the novel’s pages, and false alarms pop up with humdrum predictability.

This is silly stuff, the kind of assembly line writing that gives thrillers a bad name. I’ve tried but failed to think of a single positive thing to say about “The Elizas,” but no matter. Word is the novel has already been optioned for a film adaptation. 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.

I THE ELIZAS

By Sara Shepard Atria. 339 pp. $26

THE SEMINARIAN Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age

By Patrick Parr Chicago Review Press.

286 pp. $26.99

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARK W HITAKER

n the summer of 1947, at the age of 18, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to join the family business and become a preacher. After spending three years at Morehouse College socializing more than he studied and flirting with becoming a lawyer, he delivered the news to his father, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Overjoyed, “Daddy” King had his son ordained and installed him as assistant pastor. At that point, young Martin could have stayed in Atlanta and settled into the comfortable life of a minister destined to inherit his father’s pulpit.

Instead, he broke more news to his parents during his senior year: He planned to go to a seminary to pursue a bachelor of divinity degree. And not just any seminary: one up North, with a liberal, allwhite faculty that prided itself on demythologizing the biblical figures of Moses and Jesus and introducing students to critical thinkers from Saint Augustine to Kant.

King’s three years at the Crozer Theological Seminary, south of Philadelphia, marked an important turning point in his life and are well worth the exclusive focus they get in this compact, readable and well-researched book. A teacher and freelance journalist with a long-time interest in King, Patrick Parr has mined the papers at the King Center in Atlanta and at Stanford University, as well as archived interviews conducted by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, the authors of the best-known books about King, which devote relatively few pages to the Crozer story. Parr tracked down several classmates of King’s, who shared personal memories and took him on a tour of what’s left of the campus, which was closed in 1970. Tantalizingly, he also interviewed a white woman with whom King became briefly involved while at Crozer: Betty Moitz, then the 20-year-old daughter of the seminary cook.

Parr’s most interesting revela-

tions trace King’s growth as a preacher and public speaker. Before he arrived at Crozer, his models in that area were his forceful but unpolished father, a smoother rival from another Atlanta church and the distinguished president of Morehouse, Benjamin Mays. At Crozer, King studied preaching every semester with Professor Robert Keighton, a lover of English literature who introduced him to classic sermon forms, as well as to orating for the radio. But King also received feedback from the Rev. J. Pius Barbour, an African American pastor at a nearby church who invited black seminary students to his house for home-cooked meals and toughlove critiques, urging them not to lose touch with the call-and-response tradition of their churches while absorbing “the White Man’s intellectualism.” By the end of his first year at Crozer, King was giving guest sermons at nearby churches and was acknowledged as the finest preacher among his peers.

As King’s friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel later identified, King’s vision of himself as a “drum major for justice” also had much in common with the Old Testament prophets, whom he studied in depth at Crozer.

Here, Parr offers little analysis, but he does leave readers with a memorable image. As classmates passed King’s room in “Old Main,” the imposing central building on the Crozer campus, they often heard him rehearsing the delivery of the verse from the Book of Amos that he would invoke again and again over the next two decades, up to the impassioned “Mountaintop” speech he gave the night before his death.

“Let justice run down like water,” King recited, “and righteousness like a mighty stream!” n Whitaker is the author of “Smoketown: The Unknown Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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OPINIONS

Barbara Bush taught me about grace and integrity MARY KATE CARY is a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and is the executive producer of the documentary “41ON41,” which stars Barbara Bush. She is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

This was written for The Washington Post.

The first time I met Barbara Bush, I was wearing her bathing suit. I was terrified. She was gracious.

It was June 1993, and George H.W. Bush had invited several speechwriters to Kennebunkport, Maine, to work on a few post­presidential addresses. As noon approached, the president announced that we’d “go for a dip” in the icy Maine surf. Next thing I knew, he was handing me a bathing suit — a skirted one­piece — that belonged to his wife and announcing I had no excuse.

As we headed to the pool — the presidential plan had us stopping there to “get used to the water” — I spied the former first lady with several of her Texas friends.

“Ladies!” called out the president. “You know my speechwriters, don’t you?” Not wanting her to think I had rifled through her closet and helped myself, I said, “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bush. I hope you don’t mind that your husband loaned me your bathing suit.”

I gulped, waiting for a legendary Barbara Bush takedown.

There was none. She simply laughed and said, “I’m so glad we had a suit for you — have fun!”

And that was one of the first of many lessons I was to learn from Mrs. Bush: If you want to enjoy life, you’ve got to be able to roll with it. She always made room for all the long-lost friends, the unexpected dinner guests, the staffers needing bathing suits.

There was one lost soul she took in years ago, a near-deaf orphaned young man named Don Rhodes who volunteered for her husband’s 1964 Senate campaign. The Bushes kept him on their personal payroll until his death in his 70s; they were as generous to Don as they were quiet about it. Not many people knew about Don, to the point that if folks told me they were “very good friends” of the Bushes, I’d reply, “Oh, then you must know Don Rhodes?” If the

answer was no, that told me all I needed to know.

Some funeral observers will notice that the first lady will be buried next to her daughter Robin. What many won’t know is that Don’s ashes are scattered over the family gravesite, so that he could be with them as well.

The Bushes — not Don — requested that.

The way Mrs. Bush took in so many showed me two additional lessons: not only what it means to be big-hearted, but also how to be quiet about it. She was unfailingly generous, but she tolerated no horn-tooting.

A few years ago, Mrs. Bush told me she had “none of the responsibilities and all of the joys of being the wife of George Bush.” The truth is she had tremendous responsibilities. She raised six children in 29 homes in 17 different cities. Each of her surviving children was successful — but more important, she made sure they became decent, caring,

ROBERT F. BUKATY/AP

Former first lady Barbara Bush, seen in 2013, died Tuesday at age 92.

The writer says she was unfailingly generous but also quiet about it.

gracious people. All of them have that same twinkle in their eyes that she had, the same quick wit and easy laugh. All of them have been unceasingly kind to me, as she was.

When she lost one of her children to leukemia — Robin, at age 3 — she began a lifelong commitment to raising money for cancer research, so that fewer parents would have to go through what she did. When another of her children — Neil, in early high school — was diagnosed with dyslexia, she wanted to make sure others would never struggle with literacy. Very few are aware that she and her husband have raised countless millions of dollars for both cancer research and literacy. The Bushes were quiet about that, too.

The last time I saw Mrs. Bush, it was a spectacularly beautiful day in East Texas, at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University. Historian Jon Meacham and I were sitting with the 41s, as they are called, on their patio enjoying the afternoon.

At one point, the name of one of her high school classmates

came up, and a grinning George Bush told us that the young man had once taken Barbara out for a date. “You know, he was very interested in the Silver Fox,” he teased. She smiled and declared she had never so much as kissed the guy, and then told us for the umpteenth time that she had married the first boy she ever kissed. “Believe me,” she said, eyeing her husband of 73 years, “he was no George Bush.”

She once told me that the last thing she and George did every night was to debate who loved the other more, before falling asleep holding hands. In addition to her husband, she was loved by millions of Americans who admired her quiet leadership, her unfailing grace and her everyday integrity.

What a life she led. What a family she built. What a legacy she leaves. America already misses you terribly, Mrs. Bush. n Mary Kate Cary is a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and is the executive producer of the documentary “41ON41,” which stars Barbara Bush. She is currently a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Internet sales taxes need court to act DANIEL HEMEL is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He signed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in South Dakota v. Wayfair.

This was written for The Washington Post.

When the Supreme Court last considered whether states could apply their sales taxes to out-of-state retailers, “Amazon” still referred to a rain forest. The justices could not — and did not — foresee that a quartercentury later, more than half the country would shop online, and that states would lose billions of dollars in sales-tax revenue each year because of e-commerce.

The justices then also probably did not anticipate another trend: the descent of Congress into gridlock. This phenomenon has several causes: hyperpartisanship, weak congressional leadership and the pernicious influence of money in politics. The result: Pressing problems that might have been addressed in an earlier era are now going unresolved.

The specter of legislative gridlock loomed large last week at the Supreme Court, when Marty Jackley, the attorney general of South Dakota, asked the justices to overrule two precedents from the pre-Internet, pre-gridlock age: National Bellas Hess, Inc. v.

Department of Revenue of Illinois, (1967) and Quill Corp. v. North Dakota (1992). Together, the cases establish that states cannot impose sales-tax obligations on out-of-state retailers unless Congress explicitly authorizes it.

The Supreme Court’s opinions in Bellas Hess and Quill reflect a bygone era in which “mail-order houses” conducted business by catalogue and post. They also reflected a set of assumptions about legislative action that appear almost as outdated.

The Government Accountability Office estimates that states and localities lost between $8 billion and $13 billion last year because of their failure to collect sales taxes from out-ofstate retailers. To put that in perspective, the GAO’s low-end estimate suggests that if states could collect sales tax on remote transactions, they could afford to hire more than 130,000 additional public-school teachers.

Some members of Congress have sought to strike a sensible compromise that allows states to meet their revenue needs without imposing significant compliance burdens on small businesses. In

May 2013, the Senate voted 69 to 27 to pass the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would have authorized states to collect sales taxes from out-of-state retailers that conduct more than $1 million in remote sales nationwide each year. The bill also required states to simplify sales-tax compliance as a precondition for their expanded sales-tax authority. But Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, refused to bring the bill to a vote.

At last week’s oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan asked Jackley whether Congress’s inaction was intentional. But it is difficult to describe congressional inaction as a conscious choice when a bipartisan supermajority in the Senate supports reform, and when rank-and-file members of the House have not had a say.

Dozens of representatives from both parties have co-sponsored legislation along the lines of the Marketplace Fairness Act. But these bills are referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where the chairman lets them die.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked Jackley whether noncollection of sales taxes is a “diminishing” problem now that Amazon collects sales taxes in all 45 states that enforce them. But Amazon does not require third-

party sellers, which account for approximately half of all transactions on the site, to collect sales taxes. Neither does eBay, which ranks number two behind Amazon in e-commerce sales.

(The Post is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.)

The strongest argument against judicial intervention is “stare decisis,” Latin for “to stand by things decided.” But stare decisis plays a curious role here.

In other cases involving the dormant commerce clause, the court has said that stare decisis does not prevent it from overturning outdated precedents that impinge on the taxing power of states. Thus, the court is caught between two doctrines: a set of precedents that address state sales-tax collection and a set of “meta-precedents” that tell it how much weight to accord to prior decisions in the dormant commerce clause domain.

The justices can’t rely on Congress or Amazon to solve the problem. And they can’t put the blame on their predecessors, because precedent doesn’t stop them from intervening. Passing the buck here will cause states and localities to lose billions of dollars more in sales tax revenue.

And the justices have no one to pass the buck to but themselves. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

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OPINIONS

BY KEVIN SIERS FOR THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

In Syria, a mission never tried MICHAEL GERSON is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post.

“Mission Accomplished” may be the most famous presidential words never actually uttered by a president. I know because, as head of presidential speechwriting at the time, I didn’t write them. They were found on a banner but never in a single draft of President George W. Bush’s 2003 remarks aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

But now that this phrase has been tweeted and defended by President Trump, it is worth examining what he has accomplished by his missile strikes in Syria.

High explosives do not constitute a Syria policy, which has been lacking across two administrations. So it might be more useful to ask a narrower question: What principle is the United States trying to enforce?

Trump seems committed to the norm that chemical weapons attacks against civilians should bring kinetic consequences. That is superior to President Barack Obama’s version, in which chemical attacks brought only unenforced threats.

Trump’s position, however, has its own share of inconsistencies.

It prioritizes the lives of children killed by a nerve agent above the lives of children killed by a barrel bomb. Targeting civilians — through bombing, forced starvation, torture and the repeated use of chemical weapons — has been an essential element

of Syrian President Bashar alAssad’s strategy in his country’s civil war. His aim has not merely been to reclaim territory from the rebels; it has been to terrify the Syrian people into submission or flight. And, with the help of Russia and Iran, he has largely succeeded.

There is a further inconsistency. The images of children after a chemical weapons attack seem to move the president. The images of 5 million refugee children — many out of school, many traumatized by violence and loss — seem to lack that power. So far this year, the United States has accepted 11 — yes, 11 — Syrian refugees. The Trump administration, apparently, will avenge the deaths of Syrian children, but not welcome them.

Despite all this, it can be

argued that the norm prohibiting the use of chemical weapons is a special one. In a world where wars often involve criminal barbarity, it is useful to place at least one act beyond the pale.

But this should not be mistaken for the deterrence of future chemical attacks. Hitting a few sites with perhaps 100 missiles may reduce Assad’s capability to make more sophisticated chemical weapons.

But the chemical attack on Douma was fairly primitive. The coalition strike probably did not deprive Assad of the ability to repeat this kind of tactic. And Assad still has a powerful incentive to do so, since news reports indicate that it was the chemical attack that finally broke the spirit of resisters in Douma.

Trump’s standard — that a dictator can indiscriminately kill his people as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons — is nearly lost in the overarching lesson of the Syrian conflict. Assad has established his own international norm: If you make war on your own people — if you kill enough of them, brutalize enough of them and displace enough of them — the world will let you stay in power.

Here is the norm that America might have defended: Mass atrocities against civilians as a

method of warfare won’t be allowed to succeed. This would involve not only punishing the use of chemical weapons as a tactic but also making sure that the use of chemical weapons and other violence directed at civilians fails as a strategy.

The last two administrations have placed their main emphasis on two goals — defeating the Islamic State and opposing the use of chemical weapons — for a reason. Obama and Trump have wanted to define the U.S. mission in ways that are discrete, limited and achievable. Both men can claim credit in the campaign against the Islamic State — not a trivial matter.

In the real world, however, battles are not won by limiting your objectives. The outcome in Syria that would have best served U.S. values and interests? A wellarmed coalition of moderate rebels forcing the regime to the negotiating table, resulting in a coalition government that includes some regime elements but not Assad. Now, this is a distant, perhaps impossible, dream. But it is the only result that would have reestablished the norm that murdering innocents as part of a military strategy won’t be allowed to prevail. This mission was never even attempted. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Veterans Affairs BY

P HILLIP L ONGMAN

Americans have been hearing for years that the health­care system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs is in crisis. In truth, misconcep­ tions mar the debate about how veterans’ health care actually works.

MYTH NO. 1 The claims process is slow because of VA bureaucrats.

The latest department data shows that as of the end of last year, more than 75,000 veterans were waiting for VA to decide whether they qualified for health care and other benefits based on a service-related disability.

Yet while VA has streamlined its claims process — the backlog is down from more than 600,000 five years ago — the fundamental reason for these delays isn’t bureaucratic inefficiency. The process certainly could be more administratively efficient, but it is ultimately Congress that makes it so difficult for many veterans to get VA care. Because of laws that strictly limit eligibility, veterans must show that they are either poor or suffer from some specific degree of disability related to their military service to qualify for many health-care services as well as pension benefits. The requirement to litigate different health conditions — such as, say, whether a veteran’s hearing loss is a result of artillery fire or exposure to rock-and-roll — is the ultimate reason the VA claims process is prolonged and often humiliating to vets.

MYTH NO. 2 Wait times to see a doctor at VA are an exceptional problem.

The coverage of this scandal has been deeply misleading. The key question that often goes unanswered is: compared with what? A 2015 study by the Rand Corp. concluded that, in general, “wait times at the VA for new patient primary and specialty care are shorter than wait times reported in focused studies of the private sector.” In a 2013 survey by

the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that supports independent research on healthcare issues, 1 in 4 Americans reported that they had to wait six or more days for an appointment with their primary-care physician, even when they were “sick or needed care.” Most major VA medical centers, by contrast, now offer same-day urgent primary-care and mental-healthcare appointments. Current enrollees seeking nonurgent primary care can typically get an appointment in three to seven days.

MYTH NO. 3 VA delivers mediocre care or worse.

Compared with the rest of the U.S. health-care system, VA’s performance is pretty impressive.

As a Rand review of the literature concluded, study after study has found that the “quality of care delivered by VA is generally equal to or better than care delivered in the private sector.” This has been true since VA underwent a structural transformation in the mid-1990s. Since then, healthcare researchers, as well as mainline veterans’ service organizations, have consistently hailed its pioneering use of electronic medical records, adherence to evidence-based medicine, patient safety measures, and high levels of care coordination and scientific research.

The bipartisan Commission on Care, of which I was a member, found the quality of VA’s behavioral health programs “largely unrivalled.” In many areas, VA offers specialized polytrauma and rehabilitative care for veterans that cannot be obtained at any price elsewhere.

NATI HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Studies have found that at Veterans Affairs hospitals, military veterans receive care comparable to that in the private sector.

Part of the reason you hear so many negative stories about VA health care is that it receives far more scrutiny than the rest of the health-care system, including from two standing committees in Congress, an inspector general, veterans service organizations and a highly engaged press.

MYTH NO. 4 VA should offer patients maximum choice in doctors.

Choice comes at the cost of other important values, such as providing coordinated, highquality, cost-effective care. The Commission on Care found that giving VA enrollees the ability to choose any private doctor for any treatment (which recently passed legislation does not do) would be fantastically expensive to taxpayers unless it involved all sorts of bureaucratic cost controls. Sending veterans to other providers could also threaten the viability of VA hospitals and clinics, many of which already face rapid shrinking in their patient populations, owing to the passing of the World War II generation. If VA hospitals wind up closing, that would leave veterans with less, not more, choice in doctors.

MYTH NO. 5 Allowing veterans to see private doctors means ‘privatizing’ VA. “I work very closely with the major veterans organizations,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on “Face the Nation” recently. “. . . And what they say is they want to strengthen the VA, not dismember it, not privatize it.”

Yet not all calls for VA to make better use of private providers amount to “privatization,” as some liberals and public employee unions claim. VA has a long history of partnering with private medical schools and purchasing care in the community. Especially in rural areas, VA often lacks the facilities and personnel to offer vets timely, convenient, high-quality care. In such circumstances, joining with local private providers to create integrated networks of care makes clinical and fiscal sense. n Longman served on the Commission on Care, established by Congress to study the future of VA, and is the author of a book on VA, “Best Care Anywhere.” He is policy director at the Open Markets Institute and a senior editor at the Washington Monthly. This was written for The Washington Post.

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SUNDAY, APRIL 22, 2018

Photographs from 2017 Wen-Con

Our Second Annual Wen-Con Pop Culture Convention Was A Huge Success.

Thank you to all our talented performers, amazing vendors, delightful cosplayers, supportive sponsors, and of course, to all of you who purchased a ticket and attended.

WE’LL BE BACK AGAIN NEXT YEAR ~ WATCH FOR OUR ANNOUNCEMENT ON 2019 DATE(S)!