The Washington Post National Weekly - April 24, 2016

Politics Another scandal in the South 4

Education A long wait for college hopefuls 8

Science Why is a good cry helpful? 17

5 Myths About tax havens 23

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THE FIX

Right on the money BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

A

lexander Hamilton seemed destined to share his starring role on paper currency with an American woman, thanks to the immutable forces of bureaucracy. His bill was up next for a redesign right as President Obama decided to finally put a woman on one.

But something else Hamilton couldn’t have fathomed — a Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop musical of his life becoming a hit — probably played a role in keeping the $10 bill all to himself. Well, that and the fact that a viral campaign and women at the highest levels of political power wanted Hamilton to stay and someone else — specifically President Andrew Jackson — to go.

Last week, they got their wish. The Treasury Department announced Wednesday it would be putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

At first, backlash to Hamilton was kind of muted. It was tough to complain about finally getting a woman on a bill, but it also wasn’t really what advocates wanted. They had focused their efforts on the $20 bill that features controversial pro-slavery, pro-Native Americanremoval president Andrew Jackson. Slate initially pitched the idea of doing away with the seventh U.S. president’s face in 2014, writing: “Andrew Jackson engineered a genocide. He shouldn’t be on our currency.”

A group that calls itself W20, or Women on 20s, picked up the idea and ran with it. It coordinated an online campaign to replace Jackson. It went viral. More than 600,000 voters nominated Tubman, the nation’s most famous abolitionist and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, to replace the man you could argue is her polar opposite.

And if the Treasury was feeling pressure for

KLMNO WEEKLY

ASSOCIATED PRESS, REUTERS PHOTOS

Clockwise from left: Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson and Alexander Hamilton.

its decision not to boot Jackson, it was also getting an increasing amount of pressure for its decision to boot Hamilton. The ethnically and musically diverse Broadway hit “Hamilton” was becoming too popular to ignore.

A relatively overlooked Founding Father became the epitome of cool, and suddenly the fight to change the $20 over the $10 became as much about honoring a woman as it was about protecting the legacy of a man.

None other than the musical’s writer, LinManuel Miranda, gave the impression he personally lobbied Lew to keep his guy on. Lew’s a noted fan of “Hamilton.” He gushed in New York magazine about both the show and meeting Miranda, who also plays Hamilton, after the performance.

“When I met him, I said, ‘Well, I’ve made

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 28

my case,’ ” Miranda told the New York Times, concerning that backstage meeting.

Lew again met with Miranda the day before the cast played selections of the musical for the president last month.

This month, Hillary Clinton told a New York Daily News editorial board meeting she’d “keep Hamilton where he is.” He was a New Yorker, an immigrant and one of George Washington’s closest aides, she said, according to the paper.

Oh and also, she liked the musical.

And that’s the modern-day story of Hamilton vs. Jackson. At first, bureaucracy and timing seemed to conspire to kick Hamilton off the $10 bill. But then, 21st-century forces — social media, political pressure and some really great hip-hop songs — appeared to help keep him and give Jackson the boot instead. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Sean Parker has recruited scores of the nation’s top research scientists to join him in a wildly ambitious $250 million philanthropic effort to rid the world of cancer. Photograph by NICK OTTO for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

The heartache of Dixie N EELY T UCKER Montgomery, Ala. BY

I

n the mortuary of disaster that is Alabama politics, it is important to note that Gov. Dr. Robert J. Bentley is still in charge, for now.

The 74-year-old balding grandfather and star of sexy phone chats to the senior political adviser three decades his junior is accused of being at the center of a complex web of deceit, betrayal and mendacity that falls somewhere between the better parts of the Old Testament and the steamy Southern plays of Tennessee Williams.

Nor is it, by any means, over.

Reporters hound Bentley at his every appearance, asking about his $1,800 burner cellphones and the use of a state helicopter to pick up his forgotten wallet. “I’m the governor. And I had to have money. I had to buy something to eat,” Bentley said recently by way of explanation.

The state House could vote this week to set up an impeachment committee, and the lieutenant governor has been blunt: She’s ready to take over as soon as she’s needed.

The state’s former top cop, Spencer Collier, filed a wrongfuldismissal lawsuit on Tuesday.

Once a staunch ally of Bentley, he claims the governor sacked him because he refused an illegal order to not cooperate with a grand jury investigation involving the speaker of the House, who goes on trial next month on 23 felony counts of ethics violations.

As calls for the conservative Republican’s resignation mount, the various investigations underway are heading into “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” territory.

“Robert Bentley should not be sitting in the governor’s office,” says Allen Farley, the Republican House member who last year asked the state attorney general’s office to investigate Bentley’s use of state resources to carry out his alleged affair. The woman in question is Rebekah Caldwell Mason, 44, a married mother of three.

“He’s the state of Alabama’s spokesperson, our representative,” Farley said in an interview.

MATTHEW HINTON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

A once-popular governor joins the list of Alabama political scandals “And this is someone I want negotiating on behalf of the state? I don’t think so.”

When Bentley was first elected in 2010, he was a popular, softspoken dermatologist, a devout Baptist deacon, a father of four and grandfather of eight, and married for a half-century. He said he wouldn’t take his $120,000-a-year salary until the state reached full employment, and he hasn’t.

One year into his second term, he isdivorced,estrangedfromhisfamily, expelled from his church, ostracized by his party, pilloried by the public and at the center of an alleged sex and abuse-of-power scandal that may drive him from office.

“It’s like King David and Bathsheba in the Old Testament,” says

Johnny Mack Morrow, a Democrat from rural Franklin County, another former ally of the governor turned harsh critic. “Or maybe like Percy Sledge’s song, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ ” On a leaked phone recording that went viral, the septuagenarian governor tells Mason explicitly of his yearnings.

The governor has admitted to an “inappropriate relationship.”

Both have denied a physical affair.

Throughout it all, he continues to insist he did nothing illegal.

The Southern politician with an outsize personality and appetites to match is by turns a staple and cliche of the region. Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas, Huey P. Long and Edwin Edwards in Louisiana,

Alaabama Gov. Robert Bentley, seen at a 2013 ceremony in Mobile, could face impeachment proceedings in the wake of an alleged affair with a former political adviser.

Probes into his conduct and a potential suit also loom.

Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, Bill Clinton in Arkansas — the list is as long as one wishes to make it.

And the Roll Tide/War Eagle state that likes to advertise itself as the Heart of Dixie is, after all, accustomed to state-capital shenanigans. Big Jim “Bait a Trap with a Blonde” Folsom presided as governor here, as did George “Segregation Forever” Wallace.

More recently, backwoodspreacher-turned-governor Guy Hunt (R) was convicted of crimes in office in 1993. Gov. Don Siegelman (D), in office a decade later, was convicted of bribery and is still serving time.

In Montgomery, people aren’t surprised to have a governor mired in a sex scandal. They’re just

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POLITICS astonished that it’s Bentley.

Tall and thin, possessed of a mild manner and quiet disposition, he named his four sons after biblical apostles. He came to the state capital as a legislator in 2002, at 60, the oldest freshman Republican legislator elected in that cycle.

He struck up a friendship with Collier, at 32, the youngest freshman Republican elected that year.

Bentley made no waves. He did not go out on the town.

He certainly did not impress anyoneasaladies’man.SteveFlowers, the state’s veteran political commentator and author of “Of Goats and Governors: Six Decades of Colorful Alabama Political Stories,” compares Bentley to Goober and Gomer Pyle, small-town unsophisticates in the long-ago television series set in the South. Mark Childress, the novelist from Monroeville and author of “Crazy in Alabama,” independently suggested the milquetoast shop owner Sam Drucker in “Petticoat Junction.”

“He was a just good, moral person,” said Morrow, the Democratic representative, “decent, likable, very low key. He and his wife, Dianne, they were good people.”

Collier and Bentley held similar political views and became close friends over eight years together in the legislature, in a father-son sort of way, Collier said in a news conference after he was fired. They and their wives often had dinner after political conferences. When Collier’s father died after years of mental illness and dementia, he and Bentley prayed together.

When Bentley won an upset bid for governor in 2010, part of his appeal was the straight-arrow family man (notwithstanding him legally changing his name so that Dr. was right there on the ballot).

Well-off but not wealthy, he lived simply and tended to dress in khakis. He made his pledge to forgo his salary and released his tax returns even before he was elected as evidence of his transparency.

He was pro-gun, pro-business and pro-church, and anti-immigrant and anti-new-taxes, all popular positions in Alabama. But at the start of his second term, he switched directions on taxes and called for a $500 million increase, stunning his Republican colleagues. He has since been viewed as increasingly out of touch.

And in that second term, Mason, an accomplished broadcast journalist, moved up from his

DAVE MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

communications staff to become his senior political adviser.

No longer paid by the state, she was president of her own company, RCM Communications, and served on a consultant basis as the governor’s senior political adviser.

She was paid from campaign funds — $500,000 over four years — and the source of those donations was not known. This meant that no one was entirely sure who was indirectly paying her.

Collier, Morrow and other legislators noticed that the governor began to be hard to reach. He started dressing more sharply.

Mason began to be seen around the legislature as the gatekeeper to the governor, holding sway over his opinions. The recorded conversations reveal the intensity of their relationship.

“You know, I worry about sometimes I love you so much, I worry about loving you so much. I do. I do,” he can be heard saying.

“He just fell in love, bless his heart,” says Flowers, the columnist. “He was like a little schoolboy with a crush.”

This was not a secret, Collier says, to the governor’s staff, family or close observers. The governor’s wife filed for divorce shortly after

he was sworn in for a second term in January 2015.

Flowers says Mason and Bentley called him to Bentley’s office in December to chew him out for a column he’d written months earlier, when the governor’s divorce was finalized, about the rumors about their relationship.

“She took control of the meeting and started browbeating me. . . .

The governor was sitting there about to cry, saying he hadn’t seen his family at Christmas,” Flowers said. “She was going on for 15 minutes. . . . I felt really sorry for him. He was trying to talk at me, but she was too busy doing it.”

The whole messy affair blew up on March 22 when Bentley fired his longtime friend from his post as the highly respected executive director of the 1,400-member Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.

Collier, 44, then said he had seen and investigated text messages and audio “of a sexual nature” between Bentley and Mason. The governor, through a spokeswoman, denied the allegations.

A few hours before Collier’s statement, the governor’s ex-wife gave the sex-spiced recordings to Yellowhammer News, a conservative website that promptly made

them available to the world.

A week after that, Mason resigned. She is still married to Jon Mason, a former TV weatherman who continues to serve the governor in a cabinet-level position as his head of faith-based initiatives. She is no longer a member of the Tuscaloosa First Baptist Church: Like the governor, she was kicked out.

Before and after the uproar that has followed, the state auditor and four legislators, including several Republicans, filed separate requests asking the ethics and criminal justice agencies to investigate the governor’s conduct. A fifth legislator filed an impeachment motion earlier this month. Rumors swirl in Montgomery’s political circles of a federal investigation.

“We’re all very disappointed in the governor’s activities and actions,” Kay Ivey, the lieutenant governor, said in an interview with the student newspaper at Auburn University, her alma mater. “They speak for themselves. It saddens me that the highest office in the land is receiving such low marks right now.”

Meanwhile, the governor’s train wreck is hardly the only one on the political tracks in Alabama.

Eighteen months after he was indicted on allegations of using his office for personal gain and soliciting things of value, House Speaker Mike Hubbard, a powerful leader in the state Republican Party, is finally going on trial. Bentley is expected to be a witness.

Should impeachment proceedings come to pass, they would be overseen by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office in 2003 for defying federal orders to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state’s Judicial Building.

Voters reelected him in 2013.

“If I sent this story to my fiction editor,” says Childress, the novelist, “she would send it back and tell me to make it more realistic.”

Morrow, the veteran legislator, reflects on the plight of the central character in the story, his biblical fall from grace and his persistent defiance.

He does not think this is going to end well.

“Robert is just not strong enough a person for this,” he said.

“It’s only going to get worse. He’s trying to go out and do business as usual, and people are not going to let him. We’re a laughingstock.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

“We’re all very disappointed in the governor’s activities and actions. They speak for themselves. It saddens me that the highest office in the land is receiving such low marks right now.’

Kay Ivey, Alabama’s lieutenant governor

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has admitted to an “inappropriate relationship” with aide Rebekah Caldwell Mason, left, but says he did nothing illegal.

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POLITICS

Ryan’s quest to set the GOP agenda

BY K ELSEY S NELL AND M IKE D E B ONIS

H

ouse Speaker Paul D. Ryan plans to roll out a wide-ranging conservative agenda in the weeks before Republicans gather in Cleveland to select their presidential nominee.

Republicans say the speaker’s agenda project — the product of several task forces and dozens of meetings among rank-and-file House members — will provide specifics, and perhaps even draft legislation, on key issues of importance to conservatives, including health care, taxes and national security. Republicans have long promised an alternative to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which they constantly bash but for which they have not produced a concrete replacement.

If Ryan (R-Wis.) and his conference deliver as promised, their agenda would provide a tangible blueprint on which vulnerable Republicans could run in November — and serve as an alternative to the ideas promoted by presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. And some Republicans think that Trump, if he is the GOP standardbearer, will seriously hurt those running below him.

The new speaker hopes the agenda will make good on his promise to turn Republicans into a “proposition party” that stands for something rather than only against Obama’s initiatives.

“The party is easier to unite over ideas than personalities,” said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who has coordinated the agenda project with Ryan, in a recent interview. Introducing a platform “could solve a lot of things that ail us.”

Since winning the House majority in 2010, Republicans have promised concrete reforms and, at least in the case of health care, have yet to deliver. But their members seem to be clamoring for concrete ideas and proposals on which to base their campaigns, even if they clash with the eventual presidential nominee.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Goal is to create policy specifics for Republicans to run on and alternative to ideas of Trump, Cruz Rep. Dennis Ross (Fla.) — elected as part of the massive GOP wave in 2010 — said he would rather disagree with Trump than campaign on a list of empty promises.

“If our nominee doesn’t agree, that’s a chance we all take, but to do nothing is not the option,” he said. “Hell, we’ve had 60 times of repealing [Obamacare] and not one of replacing. It is kind of hard to go back home and say, ‘Hey, trust me again okay?’”

Ryan highlighted the agenda project in a speech he delivered Tuesday night at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.

“A lot of people don’t like conservatism as they know it,” he said, according to prepared remarks, commenting on the “upheaval” of the election year. “For too many people, Republicans seem to be caught in a time warp. They’re thinking, ‘We don’t control our borders. Wages are going nowhere. College and heath care

keep getting more expensive. ISIS continues to spread. And what are Republicans going to do about it?’

So we need to adapt our policies to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That’s exactly what House Republicans are trying to do now.”

The agenda project has proceeded quietly but steadily behind closed doors since the effort was formally unveiled at a Republican policy retreat in January. The chairmen of the House standing committees were each tasked with developing policy documents in six areas: health care, taxes, national security, regulatory reform, poverty and reasserting Congress’s constitutional authority.

Since then, each task force has opened the process to rank-andfile Republicans, who have been invited to contribute regardless of their committee assignments. By the time the final plans are unveiled, leadership aides said, Republicans will have gathered for at least 25 meetings.

Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) leaves after a news conference in which he criticized the Obama administration and the tax code of the Internal Revenue System this past week. Taxes are one of the areas his agenda project will address.

The result, in McCarthy’s telling, will be the most detailed set of policy plans released by House Republicans since retaking the majority more than five years ago. The health care plan, for instance, will put forth the first leadershipendorsed plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. Some plans will take the form of actual draft legislation; other parts will resemble “white papers” detailing specific policies.

The agenda project has served as a useful outlet for House Republicans who have grown frustrated with their failure to make good on the campaign promises that helped the GOP build a historic majority in recent years.

But while these proposals will give restive Republicans something to run on, they will also give Democrats something to run against — a lesson Ryan knows well after seeing his entitlementslashing budget proposals show up in years of Democratic attack ads.

Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said he doesn’t think GOP voters will be much impressed with the new agenda, given the Republicans’ failure to deliver on their previous promises — let alone in tackling basic tasks like passing a budget. And he also said a list of proposals won’t be enough to insulate vulnerable Republicans from the top of their ticket.

“It’s the House of Trump, the party of Trump, and all that comes with Trump, and we’re seeing all of that dysfunction mount on top of itself,” Luján said.

Top Republicans, including Ryan, have suggested that should Trump win the nomination, he could seize on the House agenda to fill the gaps in his spotty policy platform — though the opposite could also happen if voters link Trump’s ideas to congressional Republicans.

Trump supporter Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), said he was not overly concerned about Congress stepping on Trump’s toes as a nominee, saying that “as long as they’re on the same sheet of music in general, I think that’s all that matters.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Fighting big money on a small scale BY

M ATEA G OLD

F

or Pete Gonzalez, the turning point came last year after he’d watched too many episodes of “The Daily Show” skewering politicians for their dependence on rich donors.

“It’s clear that money is completely corrupting politics, and we need to step it up,” said Gonzalez, 31, who lives in Coral Gables, Fla. So this month, Gonzalez, an account manager at an insurance brokerage, dressed up as a $100 bill and led a rally in front of the Miami-Dade County Government Center, calling on the Dade County Commission to require local candidates to disclose more about their backers.

“I went from apathetic to community organizer,” Gonzalez said.

A backlash against monied interests in politics that has buoyed the White House bids of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) is reverberating far beyond the presidential race. The huge sums swamping campaigns have prompted voters to appeal to city halls and state capitols, hoping to curb the influence of wealthy donors in their communities.

Two weeks ago brought one of the largest public protests against big money, drawing thousands to Washington. But similar, if smaller, efforts have been playing out across the country on a regular basis.

In Chicago, Sharon Sanders, a retired special-education teacher, is working to build support for a small-donor matching program for city elections. In Cocoa, Fla., Melissa Martin, a former Marine Corps staff judge advocate, is urging her five-member city council to pass a resolution supporting anticorruption legislation. In Seattle, high school biology teacher Jonathan Tong helped collect thousands of signatures for a November state ballot initiative supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citi­ zens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which has made it easier for corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited money on politics.

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

The backlash against Citizens United’s effect on politics is manifesting at city halls, state capitols “I wanted to stand up for my students and my two high-schoolage daughters,” said Tong, who added that he devotes his free time to the issue. “I want them to have the democracy that they deserve.”

The focus of the community efforts varies. Some are pursuing resolutions condemning Citizens United, hoping to amass enough opposition in the states to be able to eventually secure a constitutional amendment. Others in states including Arizona and Arkansas are pushing for fuller disclosure of campaign contributions and stricter ethics rules for lobbyists.

The growing number of local efforts means that politicians at every level of government are contending with voters who believe that their voices are being drowned out by those with more resources.

“People are talking about it,” said Chris Narveson, town chairman of New Glarus, Wis. — population 1,400 — which will vote on an anti-Citizens United resolution in November. “There is even mon-

ey going into local races that used to be, you just show up and talk.

Now you see paid signs going up.”

David Bossie, president of Citi­ zens United, the conservative advocacy group that spurred the Supreme Court decision, said President Obama and other Democrats have used “demagoguery” to stir up opposition to the case. The anger is misplaced, he said.

Hedge-fund billionaires such as George Soros “and other incredibly wealthy leftists have been participating in the process for a long time, long before the Citizens United decision came along,” Bossie said. “That’s free speech.

My answer to speech I do not agree with is more speech.”

But activists trying to reduce the influence of wealthy donors said the ground-level efforts show that there is momentum to change the campaign finance landscape.

“We are seeing lots and lots of people at the local level not waiting for Washington to act, taking matters into their own hands,”

Protesters attend a rally near the White House last year as they call for an end to corporate money in politics. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision made it easier for corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited money on politics.

said David Donnelly, president of the advocacy group Every Voice.

“It seems like people have gotten to the point where they are fed up and they are not going to take it anymore.”

Much of the organizing is being done by offshoots of national groups such as Common Cause, Represent.Us and United to Amend, which have seized on increasing voter awareness about money in politics. But there are also independent endeavors, such as in California, where Republican businessman John Cox has spent $1 million trying to get a measure on the ballot in November that would require legislators to wear NASCAR-style logos of their biggest donors.

“Everyone understands the rich, the big businesses, the labor unions control politics,” Cox said.

“What I’m hoping to do is ignite a movement based upon ridiculing the absurdity of this system.”

Activists say there is evidence of a groundswell. In Wisconsin, a group of United to Amend supporters has spent the past several years taking its anti-Citizens Unit­ ed message from town to town, asking voters to support a resolution calling for the decision to be overturned.

In the 72 communities it has approached, each has passed the resolution by wide margins — including 11 this month. Eventually, the group hopes to build enough local support to place a statewide referendum on the ballot.

Much of the work is being driven by volunteers new to political activism, such as Ray Spellman, a former tractor dealer and civil engineer, who went door to door in his rural town, Darlington, Wis., gathering the 200 signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot. On April 5, it passed with 81 percent of the vote.

“It’s just energized our local community,” said Spellman, 65.

“No matter anyone’s political affiliation or level of activism, they get this at a gut level. Everybody understands money, and they understand that if you or I or a politician take money, you are obligated to the source of that money.” n

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NATION

Lingering in a college wait-list limbo BY

N ICK A NDERSON

S

tudents applying to top colleges crave to hear “yes!” when decisions roll out in March and brace themselves for “no.” But huge numbers get a vague answer that is neither admission nor denial — a tantalizing “maybe” — with an invitation to join a wait list.

Wait-list offers far outnumber seats in the entering classes at many of those schools, a Washington Post analysis found. The University of Michigan last year invited 14,960 students onto its wait list, by far the largest total from among dozens of schools that The Post reviewed and more than 25 percent of all applicants to the state flagship in Ann Arbor. Of the 4,512 who accepted a wait-list spot, just 90 — 1.99 percent — were admitted to a class of 6,071.

Wait lists prolong the tension of the grueling college search for tens of thousands of students a year, giving a glimmer of hope that often ends with no payoff beyond the satisfaction of learning that elite schools considered their bids beyond outright rejection.

For colleges, wait lists provide peace of mind during admission season, enabling enrollment chiefs to plug unexpected holes in a class — perhaps nursing students, or prospective engineers, or out-of-state residents interested in business. But for teenagers on the cusp of high school graduation, the massive lists exact an emotional toll after they already have spent many stressful months in pursuit of their college dreams.

“I definitely do still feel like I’m in a limbo state,” said Apollo Yong, 17, a senior in Arlington, Va. He is wait-listed at the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College, and is wondering what his final choices will be as the May 1 deadline looms for admitted students to choose a school: “There’s still, like, hope that I’ll get in.”

A strong International Baccalaureate student with an interest in biomedical engineering, Yong plays violin in the orchestra and picked up the mandolin for a part in the spring play “Dark of the

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

More and more students find the tension is not over when the application answer is ‘maybe’ The waiting game How students on the wait list fared at the University of Michigan, which had a 2015 class size of 6,071:

14,960 Offered a wait-list spot

4,512 Accepted a wait-list spot

90 Admitted from the wait list

To see more about this school and review data from nearly 100 others that The Washington Post analyzed, visit wapo.st/collegewaitlists.

Moon.” He has been admitted to the University of Virginia, Georgia Tech and the University of Texas at Dallas, and said he is “really happy” with those options.

Chicago and Dartmouth both praised Yong’s “impressive accom-

plishments.” But instead of admissiontheyofferedhimplacesontheir wait lists. “Initially I thought, ‘What did I do wrong?’ ” Yong said. It is difficult to say what the chances are that Yong will get into either. At the most elite schools, wait-listed students seem to face prospects ranging from slim to none.

Chicago reveals little about its wait lists. Data from Dartmouth show that it is hit or miss: Last year, Dartmouth admitted 129 from a wait list of 963, amounting to roughly 10 percent of the entering class. But Dartmouth did not admit any wait-listed applicants in 2014 — of 1,133 names, zero made it to the New Hampshire campus.

The Post reviewed wait-list results for 2014 and 2015 at nearly 100 selective schools, drawn from responses to the Common Data Set questionnaire. Some colleges will start to make admission offers from their wait list in late April.

Many, though, will wait until after the May 1 deadline for admitted students to make an enrollment

Apollo Yong, 17, an International Baccalaureate student, on a bed of college paraphernalia at home in Arlington, Va. A strong candidate, he still is among thousands on college wait lists — at the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College.

deposit. Then, when they know how their classes are shaping up, they might dip into their wait lists.

Or they might not.

Some famous schools, such as Harvard University, use wait lists but reveal nothing about them.

Yale University disclosed that it invited 1,324 applicants to its list in 2014, about the same size of its entering class, but declined to reveal how many were admitted early through that route.

Stanford, the nation’s most selective university, admitted a mere seven from its wait list in 2014 and none from a list of 927 in 2015.

Wait-listed students also were shut out last year at Lehigh and Tulane universities and at the University of Maryland, as well as Bryn Mawr, Dickinson and Macalester colleges. They had little success at Carnegie Mellon (four admits) and Duke (nine).

The dynamics of wait lists provide a stark illustration of the pecking order in higher education.

Consider students who have accepted admission to a school ranked in the top 25 by U.S. News and World Report but not in the top 10. If those students get an offer from a top-10 school via a wait list after May 1, they might well accept it and forfeit their enrollment deposits elsewhere. But that, in turn, leaves the first schools they accepted with a suddenly vacant seat. So those schools go to their lists, creating a cascading effect through the market.

Case Western Reserve, a private university in Cleveland ranked 37th nationally, keeps an eye every year on the flow of students to higher-ranked private schools such as Northwestern, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and Emory, as well as public universities such as Ohio State, Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech and the University of California at Berkeley. Those schools sometimes lure strong candidates away from Case Western.

“What happens there matters to us,” said Rick Bischoff, the school’s vice president for enrollment.

To ensure that the university hits its freshman enrollment target of 1,250, Case Western keeps

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NATION one of the deepest wait lists in the country and uses it aggressively.

The school invited more than 9,000 applicants to its wait list last year, and wound up with 5,119 names. Ultimately, it offered admission to 518 of those students.

Not all accepted, but the school met its enrollment goal.

Bischoff said that it is vital not to admit too many students through regular admission. In 2012, the university overshot its enrollment target by 30 percent, leaving the school to scramble to find beds for hundreds of unexpected arrivals and to schedule more courses. “That’s bad,” Bischoff said.

Now, Case Western doles out regular-admission offers conservatively and plans on filling about 10 percent of its class through the wait list. Bischoff said that he starts making offers from the list in late April.

“We love our wait-list kids,” Bischoff said, noting that their academic profile is as strong or stronger than the overall entering class.

“It’s not that these are sub-par students. These are terrific, terrific kids.”

When the school pulls from the wait list, he said, “we’re making some kids’ dreams come true.”

Sometimes, schools activate nearly their entire wait list. Penn State admitted 1,445 of its 1,473 wait-listed applicants in 2015 to its main campus, a year after it waitlisted no one. Ohio State let in everyone from its list in 2014 (239 students) and again in 2015 (304).

Meanwhile, wait-listed students everywhere are spending April, and perhaps part of May, in high suspense.

Sally Ancheva, 17, another Washington-Lee senior, was admitted to UC-Berkeley, UCLA and U-Va., as well as Stetson University in Florida, with a scholarship. She said she was wait-listed at Harvard, Stanford and Chicago.

She recalled getting the Stanford decision in late March: “A part of you always thinks it’s going to be a yes.” But she was realistic, ready for a no.

The “maybe” caught her offguard.

“I wasn’t prepared for that. I took it like a rejection. It was very tough,” she said. Now, she is reiterating her interest to her wait-list schools and trying to stay flexible.

“I’ve come to peace with the whole thing.” n

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Moms turn to crowdfunding to pay for maternity leave BY

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ieri Andrews is an expectant mother, but when the 24-year-old Texan gives birth in a few weeks, caring for a newborn baby will be the least of her concerns.

Andrews’s job, as CBS affiliate KHOU reported, doesn’t offer paid maternity leave, meaning she has to find a way to survive six weeks without income.

For a woman who lives paycheck to paycheck, the impending financial challenge has turned a joyous moment in her life into a terrifying one. “I’m pregnant — sorry,” she told the station, wiping tears from her eyes.

For Andrews, a potential solution exists. At a time when it’s become common to turn to crowdfunding to help pay for funerals, medical expenses or creative business ideas, some pregnant women are hoping alternative finance can offset the lack of support they receive from employers.

“We’re not trying to get anything out of it other than just making sure I have a place to live with my kids, you know,” Andrews, who is seeking $2,000 on GoFundMe, told KHOU. “Anything helps, anything helps,” she added.

San Francisco just became the first city in the nation to require employers to offer six weeks of fully paid leave for new parents.

And yet, only 12 percent of U.S. private-sector workers have access to paid family leave, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

“Two decades ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act broke new ground by establishing some rights to parental leave, but it is limited to 12 weeks of unpaid leave and available only to employees in medium and large firms,” Jane Waldfogel, a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work wrote last year in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. As a result, mothers in the United

States continue to take much shorter leaves than those in other countries, and fathers typically take a week or less.

At the same time, child costs continue to rise. A two parent household making more than $61,000 a year will spend about $16,000 on child-related expenses during their baby’s first year of life, according to a U.S. Depart-

work. Others are worried about getting enough time off that they can recover without being forced back to work with health problems.

Their stories are often brutal, candid and desperate.

They are people like a woman who identifies herself as “Megan,” a married mother of five with another on the way who works

KHOU

Kieri Andrews, an expectant mother, is hoping crowdfunding helps her finance maternity leave. Without it, she has no idea how she’ll survive.

ment of Agriculture estimate.

To raise money on sites like GoFundMe, GiveForward, YouCaring and Generosity, users can expect to pay a one-time fee. On some of these sites, users are not subject to goals or deadlines, allowing them to keep a large percentage of the donations.

On GoFundMe, the phrase “maternity leave” returns nearly 1,500 results. The “Today” show reported that GoFundMe has a total of 6,000 fundraising campaigns that mention the words “maternity leave” or “child care,” which have raised more than $9 million collectively.

Dozens more can be found on YouCaring as well.

It’s not uncommon to see women asking for modest donations, sometimes a few thousand dollars, sometimes far less. Requests often include money for diapers, formula, clothing, rent and other monthly bills. Sometimes, women are only seeking a donation that might allow them to take a few days off

overnights as a security officer.

“I’ve found myself in a position where I will now be unable to stay home with my newborn nor have time to heal after the whole intensive labor that we as women have to endure. This is both heartbreaking and stressful knowing I can’t come up with the money to stay home any other way then asking for help.”

And then there’s Nicole Ritchie, a 24-year-old woman from Roanoke, Va., expecting her first child, who works at a salon that doesn’t offer “benefits, insurance, or paid maternity leave,” according to Self magazine. After hearing about other expectant mothers who had success raising money online, Ritchie started raising money several months before her due date, the magazine reported.

She said her goal is $1,200 — enough to cover six weeks of bills — and so far she’s raised $500 from 16 people in nearly a month. n

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Kabul Libre! New routes to the West.

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ith roads to Europe increasingly blocked by strict border controls, Afghans hoping to flee war and economic peril are desperately searching for new escape routes by way of refugee camps in India, airports in Russia and even the beaches of Cuba.

The shifting travel plans — which are also seeing Afghans attempting to buy their way into Europe before leaving Kabul, through the purchase of visas — may signal the next phase in a migration crisis that is rattling world leaders and draining Afghanistan of its workforce.

After a year in which hundreds of thousands of Afghans poured into Europe by land, more migrants are now trying to skirt hostile border agents and dangerous boat trips by flying to their destinations. As a result, although human smuggling was a booming industry in Afghanistan last year, criminal rackets that trade in visas may be reaping a windfall this year.

“People now are not willing to take great risks,” said Tamin Omarzi, who works as a travel agent in Kabul’s largest mall.

“They want to just travel with a passport, and don’t come back.”

Last year, along with more than 1 million refugees from Syria and Iraq, about 250,000 Afghans journeyed to Europe in hopes of securing asylum there. Many traveled through Iran and Turkey before crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece.

Overwhelmed by the influx, European leaders have shown less sympathy for Afghans than for refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Much of Afghanistan, they note, remains under the control of a Western-backed government.

Last month, the European Union reached a deal with Turkey to send migrants back to refugee camps there, effectively severing the land route to Europe.

Since then, travel agents in Kabul report that requests for visas to Iran and Turkey are down by as much as 80 percent compared with last year at this time. A Unit-

Schengen area: Passports not required to cross common borders.

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to virtually all Afghans TUNISIA

ed Nations report released the other week also concluded that the flow of migrants from Afghanistan has slowed while “people reconsider destinations and subsequent optimal routes.”

“There is currently lower movement but no dropoff in the people wanting to go,” said Alexander Mundt, assistant representative for protection at the U.N. refugee agency. “They are just exploring their options, their means and the right moment to go.”

Plenty of Afghans are still on the move, however, in a mass migration that is raising new challenges for immigration agencies across the world.

Sulaiman Sayeedi, a travel agent in Kabul’s middle-class Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, said there has been a surge in demand for flights to India, Indonesia and Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Once they arrive, Afghan travelers often claim refugee status with the United Nations in hopes of being resettled. In India, for example, Afghan asylum applications have doubled in recent months, according to Mundt.

Other Afghans are flying to Moscow, believing that from there

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they can cross into Ukraine or even Belarus and then move onward to E.U. countries.

“Some people are coming in and just asking for tickets to anywhere they can get to,” Sayeedi said.

“They just want a better life, a more civilized, modern life.”

To achieve that in the United States or Canada, Afghans may make Cuba their gateway to the Western Hemisphere.

Over the past two months, travel agents in Kabul have been surprised by Afghans showing up at their offices with Cuban visas, which are suspected of having been issued in Iran or acquired on the black market.

“Ten or 15 people have come just since January asking for tickets for Cuba,” Sayeedi said. “And they are not staying there. The only option is to move forward, probably on to Mexico and then America or Canada.”

Other agents in Kabul also report a spike in interest in Cuba, and U.N. officials in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz say they recently encountered a family with Cuban visas. Havana has been a way station in the past for South Asians hoping to transit to Central America and from there to

the United States.

Besides Cuba, some Afghans are attempting to land in South America, either to seek residency there or make the trip north toward the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rahimihi, a travel agent in Kabul’s central Shar-e Naw district, recently booked flights for relatives who had obtained visas for Ecuador, as well as transit visas through Brazil.

“They first had to go to Pakistan to get the transit visa [from the Brazilian Embassy], and then left two weeks ago,” said Rahimihi, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “They want to go to Canada.”

But central and northern European countries remain Afghans’ preferred destinations, reflecting the widely held belief here that Germany, Norway and Sweden are the most welcoming toward refugees.

Mohammad Unus has been deported from both Italy and Turkey over the past two years while attempting to reach Germany. Now, for his third attempt, he’s working with a local travel agent.

“Since Ashraf Ghani became president, all the people want to escape from Afghanistan,” Unus said, reflecting widespread concern here that Ghani’s promised economic reforms haven’t materialized. “I’ve already spent $40,000 trying to get to Europe, and now I plan to sell my house to get there if I have to this time.”

Such desperation is fueling the shady enterprise of visa dealing on the streets of Kabul. According to travel agents, Afghans are now paying dealers $15,000 to $25,000 to obtain a “Schengen visa” — a reference to countries that are part of the Schengen Agreement, which was drawn up to allow unrestricted movement among 26 European nations.

Until stability returns to Afghanistan, travel agents expect to stay busy planning one-way trips.

“For survival, people will do anything,” said Roheen, who estimates that 30 percent of urban Afghan youths hope to leave the country. “If they encounter a problem, then they will just try another option.” n

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Quake survivors return to Everest A NNIE G OWEN Kathmandu, Nepal BY

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he third time Dutch climber Eric Arnold tried and failed to reach the summit of Mount Everest, he was nearly killed by a thundering wall of snow, rock and ice unleashed by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal last year. The avalanche that coursed through Everest Base Camp sent him sprawling, choking on snow but alive. Eighteen others were not so lucky.

Now Arnold, 36, is among 100 or so climbers returning to Nepal after surviving the worst disaster in Everest’s modern history, determined to tackle the sacred mountain once again. Dozens are making their way to base camp, with the first trips through the mountain’s treacherous Khumbu icefall expected to begin within days.

Arnold knows the odds of success. Four years ago, bad weather forced him to turn back mere yards from the summit. Two years ago, he tried again, but the climbing season was canceled after 16 Nepali guides were crushed to death by falling ice.

Then, last April 25, came the earthquake that left 8,000 dead across the country. The deadly avalanche it spawned on Everest might have prompted others to give up their quest to climb the mountain, but not Arnold.

“I didn’t decide immediately to go back. I waited until my emotions were more stable,” Arnold said. “But Mount Everest is my big childhood dream.”

Nepali and Western guide companies and climbers say that this season is likely to be one of the quietest in recent memory on Everest: According to Nepal’s tourism department, 279 climbers have official permits so far, the lowest number since 2011. While not unexpected, it’s still a blow to a struggling economy in a country where tourism is the biggest industry and Everest’s gleaming peak is the magnetic draw.

“I think a lot of people are taking a year off, waiting and seeing what happens,” said Adrian Ball-

ANNIE GOWEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

As Nepal still recovers from a temblor that killed 8,000 people, a subdued climbing season opens inger, an earthquake survivor and longtime guide. “I still see a huge amount of interest in Everest. The fact that there are risks in climbing Everest is part of its allure.”

These survivors are returning to a Himayalan land scarred not just by the April 25 temblor but by a devastating aftershock May 12.

Ruined houses dot the landscape, business is slow in the teahouses, and hundreds of thousands of residents are still displaced, waiting for government funds to rebuild. To make matters worse, a political furor over Nepal’s newly drafted constitution sparked a six-month border blockade by a tribal community in the country’s lowlands that resulted in gas and cooking-oil shortages.

“Last year was a very dark year,” said Ananda Prasad Pokharel, Nepal’s minister for culture, tourism and civil aviation. “Now we are waiting for a fresh start for the

country.”

After months of partisan bickering, Nepal established a National Reconstruction Authority in December. But the authority has disbursed little of the cash it has on hand after receiving $4 billion in pledges from various donors last year. Only a few hundred in the hard-hit Dolakha district have received any of the nearly $1,900 the government has promised victims to build earthquake-resistant homes.

“At this pace, it will take decades to complete reconstruction,” the country’s prime minister, Khadga Prasad Oli, griped at an event in Kathmandu on March 30, though he serves as head of the authority’s steering and advisory committees.

Pokharel blamed the delay on red tape and bureaucratic demands by foreign donors.

Tourism officials say they see signs of life returning to the busi-

Flower sellers work near fenced-off earthquake rubble in Kathmandu. Nepal and its tourism industry are still struggling after the April 25 earthquake and a powerful May 12 aftershock.

ness, which experienced a 32 percent drop in visitors last year.

Hotel occupancies, while still down, have risen to between 50 and 55 percent. Private donors are helping rebuild ancient heritage sites such as the Durbar Square in Patan, where carvers are painstakingly re-creating wooden cornices for the collapsed temples of Nepali kings.

Reviving Nepal’s mountaineering trade is crucial to stabilizing the economy, tourism officials say.

Nepal’s main climbing season brought in $26 million in 2012, according to Ang Tshering Sherpa, head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, with trips to Everest contributing nearly half that.

Yet the Everest tragedies in 2014 and 2015 played out against a backdrop of rising concern over conditions on the mountain. A growing number of climbers and new expedition businesses have left a trail of environmental devastation in their wake. Further, a recent report estimated that global warming could shrink Everest’s glaciers 70 percent by the end of the century.

At base camp, as many 1,500 climbers, cooks, medical assistants, guides and other staff gather each season. The rubble of broken tent posts and ripped backpacks left by the avalanche has long since been cleared, with shiny new tents erected in their place.

“There is a quiet apprehension around camp,” longtime Everest chronicler Alan Arnette wrote in his blog when he arrived April 10.

During conversations, eyes tend to linger on the hanging columns of glacial ice on nearby peaks, he said.

And climbers say everybody is wondering about conditions at the 29,029-foot summit, untouched now for more than a year.

Arnold, back for his fourth attempt, just hopes there are no more calamities.

“A lot of people say, ‘Maybe it’s not your turn, maybe it’s not your fate, maybe the mountain is telling you not to climb it,’ ” he said. “But I still have a passion for it. When I realized that, I decided I have to go back.” n

this Silicon Valley bad-boy genius wants to kick the *#$! out of cancer Sean Parker is bringing scientists together in a $250 million effort to use the body’s immune system to defeat the disease.

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BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA in Los Angeles

ean Parker is in a partying mood.

He has invited 700 of his closest friends to his $55 million home on this starlit evening to celebrate the launch of his latest project, which he describes as the most important thing he has done in his 36 years.

It’s bigger than Napster, which upended the music industry, he says. More life-changing than Facebook — which now has more than 1 billion users.

On the grounds of the billionaire’s mansion, which glows with several thousand white candles and is decorated with elaborate arrange-

ments of succulents, it is as if the world has been turned upside down. Tom Hanks, Keira Knightly, Katie Couric and Bradley Cooper are milling about. California Gov. Jerry Brown makes a cameo appearance. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry are here, too.

But the guests of honor, the people everyone is lining up to take selfies with, are cancer researchers sporting bow ties.

Tonight, Hanks says, is about “the science geeks and nerds and doctors, the people who live their lives under hideous fluorescent lighting.”

Parker has personally recruited many of the scores of researchers in the crowd at the black-

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

tie affair to join him in a wildly ambitious $250 million philanthropic effort to rid the world of the devastating disease. His plan involves bringing together a critical mass of scientists in the red-hot area of immunotherapy and pointing them in the direction of the most promising targets in the hope that, together, they can move research along faster than by working alone.

It is hard to overstate the promise of the field. If successful, it would allow doctors to tinker with the body’s immune system so that it could fight off cancer on its own — without the barbarity of surgery, without the toxicity of

chemotherapy and radiation.

“Immunotherapies, when they work, are often curative. There are survivors 10, 15 years out from early trials who are cancer-free,” Parker says. “The work has a level of importance that consumer Internet doesn’t really have.”

It’s also much harder. Life sciences, as some other tech philanthropists are discovering, are infinitely more complex than computer systems. After sinking more than $300 million into funding for research on aging, Larry Ellison recently abandoned the cause after what associates said was disappointment about the

lack of breakthroughs. The internal politics of the scientific world are also sometimes tricky for the former entrepreneurs to navigate. The Gates Foundation, which has made huge strides toward its goal of wiping malaria from the face of the Earth, has faced criticism for promoting “group think” for the way it has helped guide researchers to certain targets with its funding.

Parker said that despite his success in business — and that’s putting it mildly when you consider his net worth of $3 billion — there has been something “unsatisfying” about building continues on next page

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from previous page

the next big online product for teenagers. He wanted to do something more meaningful with his time and money.

The statement is Parker’s acknowledgment that none of us — no matter how wealthy, beautiful or talented — is invincible to the ravages of disease. It isn’t hyperbolic to say that many people — and certainly Parker — think that the scientists on his lawn may be among the best hopes the world has to one day find a cure.

A puzzle turns personal The Sean Parker the world knows was immortalized by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie “The Social Network” as a gifted playboy with questionable morals. A 2013 photo spread in Vanity Fair of his lavish Tolkien-themed wedding to singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas among Big Sur’s redwoods earned him the ire of environmentalists.

But in real life, during two separate interviews for this story, Parker comes across as humble, sensitive, deeper and more complicated than you might expect from the caricatures of Silicon Valley’s bad-boy genius. The notoriously flaky executive who reportedly always runs late is not only on time but early. He talks charmingly, a mile a minute, about everything from “neoepitope targets” and “monoclonal drug conjugate-based delivery” — to how he once managed to hit himself in the head with Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar. (It was at an after-party for the movie — which, for the record, Parker hates for getting him wrong. “I bumped in to him and I should have been cold but for whatever reason I said, ‘Can I hold your Oscar?’

As he’s handing it to me he kind of smacks me in the head and my initial reaction is, ‘Oh my God, did I hurt it?’ ”) You can see the influence of family on Parker — he now has a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son. He very seriously describes his model for scientific innovation as creating a “sandbox” for the researchers.

“Everyone in our network can play in it,” he said. “They are able to borrow things from each other’s labs and use discoveries without compromising or encumbering their intellectual property.”

Since leaving Facebook, Parker has had his hands in more than a dozen ventures in widely varying fields — all designed to improve on the world as he sees it. They include companies such as Spotify, Airtime, Plaxo and his latest project, Screening Room, which would let subscribers show first-run movies in their living rooms for $50 a pop. Then there’s Brigade, the social-media platform designed to give millennials a voice in politics. The Economic Innovation Group, a D.C.-based think tank, is focused on driving private investment and entrepreneurs to struggling parts of the country. And then there’s his $1 million donation to try to get marijuana legalized in California.

In the beginning, Parker’s interest in cancer was similar to his passion for other areas and had to do with solving an intellectual puzzle that eluded him.

The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy has partnered with 300 scientists at six institutions, 30 companies and a half-dozen advocacy groups.

Ever since he was a child growing up in and around Herndon, Va., Parker has suffered from life-threatening allergies to peanuts, tree nuts and shellfish. He jokes that his wife keeps count of emergency room visits (14 from when the couple met until the birth of their second child in 2014).

His condition led him to learn as much as he could about the body’s immune system and how it goes awry. About seven years ago, he stumbled onto some papers about how that could theoretically be applied to cancer. Since then, Parker — who famously went on to

give you whatever you need, we’ll put you on an island to do it.”

But that treatment didn’t work, either.

When Ziskin died at age 61 in June 2011, Parker was shaken.

“A lot of us who knew her thought she was invincible. She had the smarts, the money, the resources and the fight,” he recalled. “We thought for sure she’d beat it.”

Word of Parker’s growing interest, expertise and connections in cancer started to spread among California’s elite, and others sought his help. Jeffrey Huber, an executive with Google X

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sean Parker, background, spent his teens and early 20s as a co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook.

His net worth is in the billions.

He wanted to do something more meaningful, which led him to cancer research.

co-found Napster at age 19 and became Facebook’s first president at age 24, never having gone to college — has spent countless hours on PubMed, Wikipedia and other sites teaching himself the lingo of science and trying to figure out where the gaps are.

“Most people spend their time on the Internet watching cat videos,” he said. “And I pass the time late at night when my wife is wondering what the heck I’m doing — she probably thinks I’m watching porn — I’m actually reading medical journals.”

But as Parker got deeper into the world of cancer and connected with more people, it started to become personal.

He said it was Laura Ziskin, a Hollywood film producer and breast cancer activist, who inspired him to think big with his philanthropy in the space. When Ziskin’s cancer came back in an aggressive way several years after they met, and traditional treatments had failed her, it was Parker who reached out to physician Cassian Yee to try an experimental immunotherapy drug. According to an account in MIT Technology Review, Parker told him, “We’ll

(the company’s secretive, stretch-for-the stars experimental lab) reached out on behalf of his wife, Laura, who had been healthy, with no symptoms, when doctors diagnosed her with stage 4 colon cancer.

Huber said he was moved by how Parker dedicated himself to his wife’s case. “He took a very personal interest,” Huber said. “We moved heaven and Earth to help her, but it was a futile battle.”

After his wife’s death, Huber left Google to become chief executive of a cancer-focused company called Grail. One of the first things he did after starting his new job in February was to sign on to Parker’s new effort.

Many of the institute’s other partners — 300 scientists at six institutions, 30 companies and a half-dozen advocacy groups — are also connected to Parker in some personal way through cancer.

Parker is well aware of the painful inequality that exists in immunotherapy, with most patients finding experimental drugs impossible to obtain — and some of them prohibitively expensive. One main priority, he said, is to

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COVER STORY change that and make sure that any person who wants the treatments can try them. As of now, he says, only 200,000 of the 13.5 million Americans who have a history of cancer have ever tried the therapies.

Geeking out About two weeks before the big April 13 unveiling of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Parker was in San Francisco checking on some final preparations. As he bounded up the steps of the University of California medical sciences building dressed

He describes being at Parker’s home office with other scientists one day while they were trying to pick out a name for the institute. He said he was struck by how Parker’s thousands of books were organized by field: physics, art history, evolution and so forth.

“We were looking through the glossaries to try to find some interesting names,” Bluestone recalled. “A name like entropy would come up.

Sean’d be like, ‘Well, do you know what it means, a, b, c and d?’ Someone else would say, ‘What about this medieval art thing?’ And Sean would say, ‘Well, this person cut off someone

One of Parker’s main priorities, he said, is to change the prohibitive expense of immunotherapy and make sure that any person who wants the treatments can try them.

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

in a forest-green Henley shirt, dark jeans and beat-up suede boots, he was indistinguishable from the sea of doctors and researchers rushing back and forth on the street below.

Jeff Bluestone, the former university provost and immunologist who was tapped by Parker to head the institute, met him at the entrance and without so much as a hello exclaimed: “We got ’em!” Parker broke into a broad grin and threw him a high-five.

The men were talking about Stanford. The medical center’s attorneys had just approved a deal making it the sixth partner in the consortium — joining MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at San Francisco and UCLA. It was a major coup.

In the year that Parker and Bluestone plotted to set up the institute, they have grown close, and Bluestone alternately talks about Parker as a scientific peer and as a father might of a son he is particularly proud of. They finish each other’s sentences. Bluestone said that it is not unusual for him to get calls late at night from Parker with a question.

else’s head. You don’t want to name the institute after that.’ ” “He’s a scholar in ways most people are not scholars,” Bluestone said.

On the agenda for the day’s visit, in addition to touring the construction on the wing of the building that would become the command center for the institute, was a meeting with a patient — a 57-year-old fifth-grade public school teacher named Brian Landers, from the nearby town of Alameda.

The team was working on designing a clinical trial to try to figure out why some people respond well to immunotherapy while others do not — a question critical to bringing treatment to the masses. Landers, as he himself put it, is “the data.”

Landers was in bad shape — with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his colon, right lung and connective tissue in his body — when doctors treated him with immunotherapy drugs. Within half a year, the tumors all but disappeared, making him among the lucky “super responders” to the therapy.

As the three scientists in the room peppered

Jeff Bluestone is a former university provost and the immunologist whom Sean Parker picked to head his Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Brian with questions, Parker didn’t miss a beat and was geeking out with the rest of them.

“To me, there’s nothing more exciting than what’s happening in life sciences. We’re at an inflection point where the technology has advanced to a point where we have the ability to be transformational,” he said, putting his hand on his chin as he does when he’s thinking hard.

“Look at T cells,” he added, talking about the body’s disease-fighting armies. “Blood-cancer patients are getting T cells designed with some natural and some unnatural components mixed into one living cell that’s grown outside your body and put back in. Like that’s science fiction almost. It’s pretty crazy!”

As part of Parker’s mission, he says he wants to disrupt the way the world sees scientists. He said he has always wondered why celebrities are so, well, celebrated, while scientists toil in relative obscurity. He said he wants to make sure the scientists at his institute are in the best possible shape, mentally and physically, so they can do what they do best: think. Silicon Valley companies offer free lunches and Skittles to their employees. Why shouldn’t his scientists also enjoy some perks?

The fabulous party, during which numerous celebrities referred to their “rock-star scientist” guests and thanked them profusely for their dedication to their work, is just one example.

Parker has also treated the growing group of scientists affiliated with his institute to twiceyearly retreats that he says he wants to be enjoyable for them rather than a burden, like most academic conferences. The last gathering was this month in California, over two days in Napa, and featured hot-air balloon rides, spa treatments, wine tasting and golf in between scientific meetings. The one before that was in Hawaii, where the scientists snorkeled and ate grilled fish. It was Parker’s idea that family members not only be welcome but encouraged to attend the festivities. He brings along his own wife and kids to bond with those of the scientists.

The juxtaposition of the humble scientist’s life and Parker’s world isn’t lost on the researchers. Lewis Lanier, who runs the Parker Institute site at the University of California at San Francisco, said the feting is “certainly very different” from even a year ago when he was spending his time trying to eke out enough money for his research from one National Institutes of Health grant to another. Carl June, the renowned University of Pennsylvania professor who brought immunotherapy to the public’s attention after effectively curing a 6-year-old girl’s advanced leukemia, is also somewhat baffled by the collision of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and his work.

“I don’t do the whole social media thing,” June said. “I knew about what he did with Napster and Facebook, but not much more. He has a different background from the circles I travel in.”

June said he is still not used to all the attention but game to embrace any approach that will move the science along faster. And after all, he said, he has read that Parker throws a mean party. n

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BY

INNOVATION

L AVANYA R AMANATHAN

VICTORIA ADAMS FOGG/THE WASHINGTON POST

T

o taste a Cronut — an actual, legit Cronut — you must be willing to brave the sea of humanity that amasses each morning outside Dominique Ansel Bakery in Manhattan.

You can also go to a Dunkin’ Donuts in pretty much any city and order something that’s kind of like Ansel’s iconic pastry, cut from croissant dough and then deep fried. Or, in Sacramento, you could have a Doissant. In San Francisco, you can scarf down a Cruffin, which is not a doughnut at all, but hey, close enough.

Given how quickly food trends emerge and travel, it’s not surprising that there’s a Cronut, or Fauxnuts.

But the hottest food trend of the past five years may be copycatting.

And the examples go way beyond the Cronut.

Kimchi quesadillas and shortrib tacos were the brilliant pairings that launched Los Angeles’s Roy Choi and the Kogi food trucks — and then set off an echo-boom of Korean-taco knockoffs. New York’s Doughnut Plant claims to have cooked up square jelly doughnuts nearly a decade ago; but now you can have one at Washington, D.C.’s Astro Doughnuts. Do you drool over the overthe-top cakes with ganache drippings that Australian home baker Katherine Sabbath posts for her nearly 300,000 Instagram followers? Plenty of shops from New York to California can sell you an “homage.”

“Once upon a time, a chef produced something, and it slowly made its way around, by people eating there, by word-of-mouth, by traditional media,” said David Sax, author of “The Tastemakers,” which traces the evolution of food crazes. This is how it worked in the days of the Caesar salad and the baked Alaska.

But if cooking has always revolved around adapting and perfecting existing dishes, why does this feel different?

One word: speed. “It’s happening so quickly, it’s impossible to control,” Sax said.

Point a pastry-cream-covered finger at Instagram, which provides the blueprints for bakers in Ohio and Jakarta to start foodcoloring perfectly good bagels the unholy hues of a Grateful Dead

What’s cooking?

Nothing new.

T-shirt. And don’t forget the foodies, eager and willing to gobble up the edible equivalent of a fake Fendi bag.

But unlike the purses of Canal Street, food copycats may even affirm the value of the real deals and turn an unknown chef who spawns a trend into a household name.

If no one copies your pork bun or your rainbow bagel, “if nobody cared enough to even imitate it,” Sax said, that means “it doesn’t resonate with anyone.”

James Beard Award-winning chef Mike Solomonov and his business partner, Steven Cook, have opened several popular Philadelphia eateries: Israeli restaurant Zahav; a hummus place known as Dizengoff; and a Korean-chicken-and-doughnuts joint called Federal Donuts. And his fans, he said, email him when they spot what look like plagiarists.

Dizengoff serves a hummus bowl with beets and hazelnuts, and in Washington, D.C., hummus restaurant Little Sesame serves a hummus bowl with beets and hazelnuts. Phoenix’s Welcome Chicken + Doughnuts looks a lot like Federal Donuts.

“It’s sometimes a little bit weird,” Solomonov said. “You’re, like, ‘Wow, they’re doing Korean fried chicken and doughnuts?’

Wouldn’t they want to do something different?”

But he’s learned to shrug it off.

“We didn’t invent Korean fried chicken, and we didn’t invent cake doughnuts,” he said.

Sometimes, however, the plagiarist isn’t a naive young chef.

Burger King boldly hawks the Big King, which is exactly what it sounds like: an uncanny match, double patty for double patty, sesame-seed bun for sesame-seed bun,

Cronuts, hummus bowls, pork buns, special cakes.

Chefs borrow a lot. Is it homage or theft?

for McDonald’s Big Mac. In March, frozen-yogurt chain 16 Handles unveiled MMMilk & Cereal, a cornflakes-flavored treat that chief executive Solomon Choi proudly declared “you won’t see anywhere else.”

But we have: At Milk Bar dessert shops, where Christina Tosi’s Cereal Milk soft-serve has been one of the most iconic sugar rushes of the past decade.

“MMMilk & Cereal” was hastily renamed “Cereal Bowl,” but it remained on 16 Handles’ taps.

How is that possible?

Chefs can protect the names of their unique creations — think Boardwalk Fries, the Cronut or Coca-Cola — said Michael F. Snyder, a Philadelphia lawyer experienced in food industry intellectual property law. It’s far harder, he said, to prove that someone’s dish is a knockoff, mostly because it’s a high bar to prove that yours is original.

What about a recipe? Forget it.

In the eyes of the U.S. Copyright Office (and the courts), recipes are just lists of ingredients that can’t be copyrighted; neither can a chef copyright a work derived from something that already existed.

And what chef can argue that they’ve created not only a new dish but also the cooking techniques that went into it?

Designs, like the ridges in a Ruffles potato chip, can be copyrighted if they’re unique, Snyder said, but once a chef cooks a dish on a television show or publishes a cookbook, a business secret becomes fair game.

Even so, Ansel published a version of his Cronut recipe for home cooks. “I don’t think worrying about imitators is a healthy way to create,” he said by email. “Protecting yourself and your intellectual property is something I’ve had to learn to do.” Ansel trademarked the Cronut name, but not for the reasons you might expect. He was prompted, he said, by “trademark trolls, who sweep in and trademark something they didn’t create and later prevent the creators from using the name.”

Of their copycats, Sax said, “while it may seem like intellectual thievery and rip-offs, fundamentally, this is how the culture of food moves forward.”

“If a chef puts something on their menu that they weren’t the first to do, that’s not a crime.

That’s cuisine.” n

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

17

SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Studying the tracks of our tears BY

M EERI K IM

T

he shedding of emotional tears is unique to humans, but our evolutionary, psychological and biological reasons for “crying it out” remain a mystery.

Although crying in babies serves an obvious purpose, many scientists from different fields have put in their two cents about why adults do so. Charles Darwin considered tears to be a mere side effect of facial muscle contractions and a notable exception to the rule that useless processes would not be conserved through evolution.

Biochemist William Frey’s more modern theory to explain the healing effects of a good cry proposes that weeping expels toxins and stress hormones. Other researchers have disputed his theory, arguing that the amounts of those expelled substances would be too small to make any noticeable difference.

In scientific terms, crying can be defined as the secretion of liquid containing proteins, enzymes, lipids and other substances from the lacrimal apparatus, a group of small organs around the eye.

“There are other animals that grieve, but they don’t cry emotional tears,” said Jay Efran, an emeritus professor of psychology at Temple University. “They do tear when there’s an irritation in the eye or to keep the eyes moist, but not what we would consider emotional tears as a result of a psychological event.”

Efran had come across a twostage theory of laughter, which inspired him to think more closely about how crying might obey a similar pattern.

Take the famous joke in the introduction of “Annie Hall”: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill Mountains resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ ” “All jokes of that sort first raise your tension level — you’re listening intently because you’re going to have to figure out what the joke

VALERIY KACHAEV/ISTOCKPHOTO

is,” he said. “Then when you get to the punch line, your level of tension drops, you get it, and you laugh.”

Similarly, according to his twostage theory of tears, people experience a crying fit when something happens to first spark high anxiety or distress and this is followed by a moment of recalibration or release. For instance, a child who loses his mother at the grocery store begins frantically searching for her, getting more and more worried as he scans the aisles. Suddenly, he hears her call his name from behind, sees her comforting face and promptly bursts into tears.

Even tears of joy can be interpreted with a two-stage theory,

Efran said. A mother may cry at her daughter’s wedding because of the built-up pressure of planning and fretting about the ceremony.

Finally, the tension-breaking moment comes when her child utters “I do” — waterworks commence.

“She’s relieved that everything has gone well, and in a larger sense, her job as parent has reached another epic point by marrying off her daughter,” he said.

Both laughing and crying seem to be reactions dictated by a rapid change in our autonomic system, the part of our nervous system that controls involuntary actions such as heartbeat and pupil dilation. They emerge when the body shifts from a fight-or-flight state, which is stimulated by the sympa-

Science works to figure out why some people just need a good cry.

thetic nervous system, to the parasympathetic nervous system’s relax-and-restore mode.

Efran’s theory may explain why humans cry, but what would be the purpose of tears themselves? It seems odd to have excess liquid produced by glands in the eye when we experience sadness, relief or joy.

To hunt for clues, scientists analyzed the tears of mice, finding multiple compounds that serve as signaling chemicals for their peers. In 2005, researchers discovered a pheromone they named exocrine gland-secreting peptide 1, or ESP1. Found in the tears of male mice, it heightens the chance that females will mate with them.

Another pheromone, ESP22, present only in the tears of juvenile mice, protects them against unwanted mating by adults.

Building on this work, a 2011 experiment had 24 men sniff the tears of crying women — who had collected their specimens earlier while watching a sad movie — while rating the sexual attractiveness of various female faces. Even though the men never saw the criers and the tears were odorless, the faces appeared less attractive after smelling women’s tears than a control saline sample. The men’s levels of salivary testosterone dropped, and functional magnetic imaging showed less activity in areas of the brain associated with sexual arousal.

Although some media outlets interpreted this as “tears are a turn-off,” the findings more likely demonstrate a type of chemical signaling related to the need for comfort. As ESP22 protects prepubescent mice from the sexual advances of adults, a pheromone in human tears could serve to tell our partners that we need help and consolation at the moment rather than a romp in a bedroom.

“Certainly early in life, crying indicates that the organism is tense and overwhelmed — it’s a signal to the caretaker that they need some help,” Efran said. “So in evolutionary terms, it’s sort of efficient because it signals that help is needed and also indicates a system rehabilitation or recovery.” n

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A big cat’s dangerous journey N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

J OHN V AILLANT

M HEART OF A LION A Lone Cat’s Walk Across America

By William Stolzenburg Bloomsbury. 245 pp. $27

any years ago, when I was teaching at an elementary school, a student of mine brought a box full of worms to class. He planned to release them at the end of the day, but he forgot about them. I forgot about them too until I returned to the classroom the following morning. What I saw there has stuck with me for nearly 30 years: Somehow the lid had come off the box, and the worms had escaped. Some of them made it only a few feet across the floor, others reached the classroom wall, a few aimed for more distant corners, but they were no match for central heating and wall-to-wall carpet. Every one of them was dead.

Reading William Stolzenburg’s poignant and heroic tale of mountain lions and their epic migrations from an isolated habitat in South Dakota’s Black Hills, I was reminded of those worms. The Black Hills are a small mountain range on the western edge of the Great Plains that is home to a resurgent but embattled population of mountain lions. In 2009, a young tom, crowded out by dominant males, launched himself eastward on a meandering hejira that took him across the plains and through some of the most densely populated areas in the country on a six-state search for a mate. In “Heart of a Lion,” Stolzenburg, a veteran science and wildlife writer, traces this cat’s journey: He confirms its tracks in Wisconsin, camera-trap images in Illinois and DNA samples consistent with Black Hills lions. In so doing, Stolzenburg painstakingly places this intrepid tom in the larger context of mountain lion history and lore and illuminates, through the examples of other wayward males, the hazards of a self-directed rewilding program.

Also known as cougars, pumas and a host of other regional names, mountain lions have more in common with tigers and jaguars than with lions. Unlike their larger, savannah-dwelling namesakes,

RICK WILKING /REUTERS

A mountain lion makes its way through fresh snow in the foothills outside of Golden, Colo., in 2014.

American mountain lions are primarily forest dwellers. In addition to being able swimmers, they are well-suited to cold climates, but they can live virtually anywhere.

Not so long ago, they did — from coast to coast and from the Everglades to the Rockies. As the continent’s dominant carnivore, mountain lions divided their world into marked territories of three or four breeding females overseen by a single tom whose domain might cover hundreds of jealously guarded square miles. Today, only vestiges of these feline kingdoms remain. What Stolzenburg vividly conveys is how profoundly America has changed since lions last had the run of the place.

While indigenous populations found a way to coexist with lions and even revere them, European settlers adopted an “Apocalypse Now” approach, terminating these animals with extreme prejudice rivaled only by their purges of wolves and Indians. By 1910, the mountain lion had been all but extirpated from the lower 48 states. Once one of the largest,

most successful and widely distributed predators, the mountain lion had been reduced to a ghost of its former self, haunting only the most remote mountains of the West. Yet this former keystone species in North America’s natural order, elusive at the best of times, continues to twang our consciousness like a phantom limb.

And now it’s growing back.

From a low point in the 1960s, mountain lions have been reclaiming lost territory, most notably in the West, where their relative success is tied to the hunting and conservation regulations of individual states. The cat’s former strongholds in the Midwest and Eastern states have been far more difficult to recolonize, and this is where Stolzenburg focuses his attention, exploring the region’s natural and human history while also delving into anthropology and paleopsychology.

Like naive aliens, mountain lions prove themselves strangely inept in manmade landscapes. They walk in traffic and lounge on back porches, and even when they man-

age to dodge cars and commuter trains, they are sometimes shot by suburban police. Each one of these deaths raises a stark question: How do we accommodate a human-size carnivore that is, on the one hand, charismatic, mysterious and primordially frightening and, on the other, like us in its ambition, entitlement and sense of domain?

What becomes painfully clear as Stolzenburg homes in on current attitudes toward mountain lions is that these animals are a hot-button issue: While many citizens and conservation groups across the country welcome the cat’s return, it’s still open season in Texas, just as it was 100 years ago. In South Dakota, hunting season is also year-round and, this year, 60 lions can be killed in the Black Hills alone. For this New World cat, the world has indeed been made new, but the latest iteration is as unforgiving to them as a classroom is to earthworms. n Vaillant is the author of nonfiction works “The Golden Spruce” and “The Tiger” and a novel, “The Jaguar’s Children.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A wily woman scoops up art, men

Delving into the enigma of a legend

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

L.

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

S. Hilton’s “Maestra” will be one of this year’s most talked-about novels, simply because of its explicit sex scenes. It’s one of the raciest mainstream books published in recent memory. The good news is that the British, Oxford-educated author not only writes well about sex, she writes well about everything. You could cut the sex scenes and “Maestra” would still be a fascinating novel about a young woman on the make. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.

Hilton’s publisher compares her character Judith Rashleigh to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, and both characters do combine amorality with the ever-worsening crimes they commit throughout Europe. But Judith may well be the more interesting character and, although Highsmith was a pioneer in many regards, she could not in her era approach the graphic sex that enlivens Hilton’s novel.

We see that a difficult childhood shaped Judith’s underlying anger.

Her mother drank (“a perfectly reasonable response to her life,” her daughter says), and she remembers being bullied in school and evicted from their home. But she also discovered museums and a love of art, and worked her way through college. In her 20s, she wins a dreamed-of job in a major London auction house, only to find that her pay is low and her bosses care more about money than about art.

To make ends meet, Judith works evenings in a club where attractive young women persuade rich older men to spend heavily on overpriced champagne. One of her admirers — “one of the grossest men I had ever seen” — invites her on a vacation to the French Riviera. There, at the glorious Hotel du Cap, she is obliged to service this fool, an indignity that leads to his departure from this life. Judith then sets out for Italy with 9,000 euros in the “classic quilted shoulder bag in black with leather-andgilt handles” that her late, unla-

mented lover had bought her.

In sunny Portofino, a billionaire invites her for a cruise aboard his yacht but proves to be indifferent to sex. Unaccustomed to such treatment, Judith arranges a close encounter — presented in unflinching detail — with the yacht’s captain. This pattern continues as Judith moves about Europe — rich men, torrid sex and, increasingly, expensive art she obtains by means fair or foul.

At one point, our heroine reflects on “the purity of sheer carnal pleasure” and the way that sex with a stranger “made me feel so free, so untouchable.” She adds, “Most of it I’d liked, and some I hadn’t . . . but it was the only real power I’d ever had and I wanted to test its limits.”

Hilton is testing the limits, too, and although some readers will admire the realism she brings to Judith’s sex life, others will object to her frequent use of words not often encountered in polite conversation.

Hilton also can be quite naughty in other ways. As Judith enters a London party, she notices that “hundreds of pasty men in bad suits were crowded around the free bar with the excitement of Mormons let loose in Atlantic City.”

Murder is central to her story — perhaps a few more murders than were absolutely necessary — and soon she is fleeing both the law and Mafia toughs determined to recover a painting she hopes will launch her career as a big-time art dealer.

Will Judith’s dreams come true, or will her crimes catch up with her?

We won’t know right away. At least two more of her adventures remain, thanks to the million-dollar, three-book deal Hilton has signed.

(A movie is also in the works.) In other words, more mayhem, more art — and certainly more sex — lie ahead for insatiable Judith and for all those consenting adults who will delight in her endless ups and downs. n Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

F MAESTRA

By L.S. Hilton Putnam. 320 pp. $27

ORSON WELLES Volume 3: One-Man Band

By Simon Callow Viking. 466 pp. $40

l

REVIEWED BY

C HARLES M ATTHEWS

or would-be biographers, Orson Welles is the colossus on the horizon that grows larger — and more incomprehensible — the nearer you approach. Get too close and all you see is the pedestal. Biographers also have to contend with the fact that Welles was a gifted and artful liar.

Given the difficulty of seeing Welles steadily and seeing him whole, it is no surprise that the best biographies have approached him piecemeal. This year we have “OneMan Band,” the richly detailed and immensely readable third installment of Simon Callow’s projected four-volume biography. It covers the years from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, which were bracketed by two Shakespeare films: “Othello” in 1952 and “Chimes at Midnight” in 1965. In 1955 came Welles’s audacious staging of “Moby-Dick” in London, which received rave reviews and which Callow says Welles considered “the best thing he had ever done in any medium.” And in 1958, he made “Touch of Evil,” “every frame” of which, Callow asserts, “celebrates the art of film.”

But it was also the period when his reputation took its severest hits.

In 1952, the New York theater critic Walter Kerr called Welles “possibly the youngest living has-been.”

Welles was stung by the epithet, and it stuck. Much has been written ever since about the man who, after triumphs in New York theater and on radio, went to Hollywood to make the film masterpiece “Citizen Kane” but never again regained those heights. “Welles had committed an unforgivable crime in American eyes: he had failed, but refused to give up,” Callow says. “He was just irritatingly there, a constant reminder of the disappointment he had caused.”

Callow’s biography aims at correcting that image of Welles, emphasizing the significant artistic achievements of this period and the reasons why they were undervalued. The two major movies,

“Touch of Evil” and “Chimes at Midnight,” for example, were both seriously mishandled in distribution. The studio, Universal, took over “Touch of Evil” after a sneak preview audience panned it, trimmed it heavily and released it on the bottom half of a double bill.

And “Chimes at Midnight” was the victim of disputes by the several sources that financed it: The legal haggling over who had the distribution rights prevented widespread public exhibition and release on DVD until very recently.

Callow,anactorwithlongexperience both on stage and in movies, provocatively asserts that Welles was not by nature a filmmaker: “It was his tragedy that he lacked the gift of working conceptually, to conceive his work in his head. His inspiration came from what he saw in front of his eyes; his genius depended on being able to improvise and interact with the material.”

In the theater, the rehearsal process allowed for a certain amount of reworking the show on the fly and even in mid-run, but once a film has started shooting, a director can’t make radical changes of direction, and even the editing process has its limitations.

Callow’s acting experience also gives him an insight into something else that troubled Welles.

When he was directing a play or film in which he appeared, Welles typically had others read his lines during rehearsals. Callow asserts that “Welles was fundamentally insecure as an actor.”

What makes Callow’s biography so exciting is that he’s not willing to reduce Welles to a formula: misunderstood genius, for example, or self-destructive egotist. Callow simplifies things for us: “It is characteristic of many of Welles’s commentators that they select one or other of the many Welleses as quintessential, but the mystery of the man is that all the Welleses coexist; all are true.” n Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California.

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

5 ‘big ideas’ to help us fight Islamic extremism DAVID PETRAEUS is the chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a retired U.S. Army general who commanded coalition forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008 and Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011, and served as CIA director from 2011 to 2012.

The formulation of sound national policy requires finding the right overarching concepts. Getting the “big ideas” right is particularly important when major developments appear to have invalidated the concepts upon which previous policy and strategy were based — which now appears to be the case in the wake of the Arab Spring.

To illustrate this point, I have often noted that the surge that mattered most in Iraq was not the surge of forces. It was the surge of ideas, which guided the strategy that ultimately reduced violence in the country so substantially.

The biggest of the big ideas that guided the Iraq surge included recognition that: l The decisive terrain was the human terrain — and that securing the people had to be our foremost task. Without progress on that, nothing else would be possible. l We could secure the people only by living with them, locating our forces in their neighborhoods, rather than consolidating on big bases, as we had been doing the year before the surge. l We could not kill or capture our way out of the sizable insurgency that plagued Iraq; rather, though killing and capturing were necessary, we needed to reconcile with as many of the insurgent rank and file as was possible. l We could not clear areas of insurgents and then leave them after handing control off to Iraqi security forces; rather, we had to clear and hold, transitioning to Iraqis only when we achieved a situation that they could sustain.

Now, nine tough years later, five big ideas seem to be crystallizing as the lessons we should be taking from developments over the past decade.

First, it is increasingly apparent that ungoverned spaces in a region stretching from West Africa through the Middle East and into Central Asia will be

exploited by Islamic extremists who want to establish sanctuaries in which they can enforce their extremist version of Islam and from which they can conduct terrorist attacks.

Second, it is also apparent that the attacks and other activities of such extremists will not be confined to the areas or regions in which they are located. Rather, as in the case of Syria, the actions of the extremist groups are likely to spew instability, extremism, violence and refugees far beyond their immediate surroundings, posing increasingly difficult challenges for our partners in the region, our European allies and even our homeland.

Third, it is also increasingly clear that, in responding to these challenges, U.S. leadership is imperative. If the United States does not lead, it is unlikely that another country will. Moreover, at this point, no group of other countries can collectively approach U.S. capabilities. This does not mean that the United States needs to undertake enormous efforts to counter extremist groups in each case. To the contrary, the United States should do only what is absolutely necessary, and we should do so with as many partners as possible. Churchill was right when he observed, “There is only one thing worse than fighting

KHALID MOHAMMED/ASSOCIATED PRESS

People flee their homes during fighting between Iraqi forces and the Islamic State to regain control of Hit, west of Baghdad, on April 13.

with allies, and that is fighting without them.” And, if one of those partners wants to walk point — such as France in Mali — we should support it, while recognizing that we still may have to contribute substantially.

Partners from the Islamic world are of particular importance. Indeed, they have huge incentives to be involved, as the ongoing struggles are generally not clashes between civilizations. Rather, what we are seeing is more accurately a clash within a civilization, that of the Islamic world. And no leaders have more to lose should extremism gather momentum than those of predominantly Islamic states.

Fourth, it is becoming clear that the path the United States and coalition partners pursue has to be comprehensive and not just a narrow counterterrorism approach. It is increasingly apparent that more than precision strikes and special operations raids are needed. This does not mean that the United States has to provide the conventional ground forces, conduct the political reconciliation component or undertake the nation-building tasks necessary in such cases. In Iraq at present, for example, it is clear that the Iraqis not only should provide those components, but also that they have to do so for the results achieved — with considerable

help from the U.S.-led coalition — to be sustainable.

Fifth, and finally, it is clear that the U.S.-led effort will have to be sustained for what may be extended periods of time — and that reductions in our level of effort should be guided by conditions on the ground rather than fixed timetables. While aspirational timelines for reductions in our efforts may have some merit, it is clear from our experiences under both post-9/11 administrations that premature transitions and drawdowns can result in loss of the progress for which we sacrificed greatly — and may result in having to return to a country to avoid a setback to U.S. interests.

To be sure, there is nothing easy about what I describe.

Success in all such efforts will require sustained commitment, not just of our military forces, but also of the capabilities of other departments and agencies.

A comprehensive approach is neither easy nor cheap. But that is also true of the actions we have to take as inadequately governed spaces become ungoverned and in turn are exploited by transnational extremists.

The Long War is going to be an ultramarathon, and it is time we recognized that. But we and our partners have the ability to respond in a thoughtful, prudent manner, informed by the big ideas that I have described. Nothing less will prove adequate. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

States shouldn’t boycott states NATHAN CHRISTENSEN is an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.

Last month, President Obama returned from Cuba, where he took another step toward normalizing relations with the island nation. In his speech to the Cuban people, the president made the case that engagement is a more powerful agent of change than isolation, even where strong disagreements remain. With his visit, the president continued to chip away at the more-than-50-year U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

Two days later, Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, laid the foundation for a new embargo.

He announced that San Francisco’s city workers are banned indefinitely from traveling to North Carolina unless doing so is essential to public health and safety. The embargo is intended to protest North Carolina’s new law prohibiting the state’s local governments from enacting anti-discrimination rules that protect gay and transgender people and limiting transgender people to bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificate. Since then, more cities and states have announced similar travel bans. Others will probably follow.

At the moment that our country is opening lines of communication and travel abroad, we are closing them within our own borders.

The bans apply only to official city or state travel, and it’s unclear how often employees from these cities and states actually travel to North Carolina. But these policies are as much about message as effect. The problem is: It’s the wrong message.

It’s not that North Carolina’s law is acceptable. It isn’t. I was part of the legal team that brought an end to Oregon’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, and discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation is harmful and inconsistent with our country’s values. North Carolina’s decision to thwart its own cities’ efforts to prevent discrimination deserves condemnation.

And it’s not that those who oppose North Carolina’s law should sit on the sidelines; it’s important that people and organizations take action when

they see injustice, as we did in Oregon. The business, civic and political leaders who have spoken out against North Carolina’s law, including by warning that they may not pursue future investments in the state, have sent a powerful message.

But should city and state government travel bans be part of the response? States are on the front lines of social and political issues. What would happen to our ability as a country to work through important issues if whenever a city or state perceived injustice in another state, it banned official travel there?

What if Ohio banned travel to Arizona because it deemed Arizona’s policies toward immigrants inhumane? What if Texas barred state employees from traveling to Connecticut because it believed that Connecticut’s gun control laws were unjust? What if Minneapolis banned travel to Georgia to protest that state’s use of capital punishment?

The presidential campaign is evidence enough that we live in a polarized environment. Do we need more lines in the sand, and fewer people talking and meeting with each other?

Not only do the travel bans potentially send us down a slippery slope, but also they are blunt instruments that could halt

progress in other areas. Cities and states collaborate on many issues, from urban planning to public education. What would happen to this collaboration if their officials were not allowed to meet? Should city planners in Seattle be stopped from visiting a green building project in Charlotte? And what would happen to organizations that bring city and state officials together, such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors?

Even setting aside the restriction on travel, these bans undermine collaboration. They erect walls between public employees, with no exception for areas where their views and work are aligned.

For city and state governments wanting to take action, rather than ban travel, do the opposite.

Organize a trip to North Carolina.

Bring along a coalition of political, business and civic leaders who can present their views and experiences on inclusiveness for gay and transgender people to residents and public officials there, engaging them in a direct dialogue.

Perhaps by humanizing the issue and opening lines of communication, we could remove the fear and misunderstanding underlying North Carolina’s new law and plant seeds for more long-lasting change. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

22

OPINIONS

ALYSSA ROSENBERG blogs about pop culture for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

When the news came Thursday that Prince had died at 57 at his home in Minnesota, a chorus went up that it was the latest cruelty of 2016, a year that already feels merciless in those it’s claimed, four months along.

But if the deaths of Prince and Bowie and Chyna and Harper Lee taken together feel like a moment of catastrophic generational turnover, the loss of Prince and Bowie represent a more specific calamity. We’re in a moment in American politics consumed by gender panic, from Donald Trump’s menstrual anxieties to the rise of and backlash to a movement for transgender rights. And now we’ve lost two men who had an expansive, almost luxuriant vision of what it meant to be a man and lived out that vision through decades when it was much less safe to do so.

Both Prince and Bowie often seemed more than merely human. Bowie was an ageless vampire in “The Hunger,” a human manifestation of an alien being as Ziggy Stardust, the rock star from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Prince left language behind to adopt what became known as the “Love Symbol” as his moniker; his death prompted many people to remark that mortality seemed like the only garment that didn’t fit him, that he had transubstantiated or ascended rather than truly died.

But if conventional notions of gender were only one of the things that didn’t constrain Bowie and Prince, their transcendence

of this particular category is still a particularly significant part of their legacies. In the clothes they wore, the lean bodies they lived in, the way they positioned themselves in their music and art, their relationships to LGBT communities and in so many other ways, Prince and Bowie were living arguments that there is no one way, and no correct way, for a man to dress, to move, to decide what he values, to choose who he loves or where he stands in relation to that person.

And that transcendence and transgression weren’t just about what Prince and Bowie did in their own lives; it was in what they made other people want to do to them. Mick Jagger may have

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Prince, Bowie and how to be men

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had an affair with David Bowie, but everyone wanted to sleep with Prince, even when they didn’t want to want him.

The critic Hilton Als began his 2012 essay on Prince in Harper’s with a long recounting of a 2002 stand-up comedy special from Jamie Foxx that gets at the sexual panic Prince inspired. In the joke, Foxx talks about going backstage at a Prince show, looking in the artist’s eyes, and trying to manage his own reaction: first, denying that what he felt for Prince made him gay, then insisting that if they had sex that Foxx would be the active partner.

Fourteen years ago, when Foxx aired that routine, marriage equality wasn’t yet the law in a single state, much less the settled law of the land. Foxx’s special was just three years removed from the trial of Aaron McKinney for the killing of Matthew Shepard, where McKinney’s lawyers tried to use a “gay panic” defense. And Prince had been inspiring that sort of unease for decades.

There are wry notes of regret in Als’s essay, about the choices Prince made to become famous and when he became famous, about the sacrifice of “the girl Prince had been before he stopped being a girl: outrageous and demanding.” But even when Prince stepped onto larger, more

mainstream stages, his presence could still be radical.

It’s true that in recent years, the Super Bowl halftime show has often been a showcase for women in the midst of a clash between men. But if these performances act as an argument that men and women can each be powerful in their own spheres and on their own terms, Prince’s appearance on the Super Bowl stage in 2007 was an argument, at this particular worship service dedicated to traditional masculinity, for a vastly huger range of possible ways for a man to command the nation.

What other person could take that very particular stage in a head wrap and end his performance with his guitar posed as a symbol of male sexual virility — which, of course it was — silhouetted on a giant scale and make it all feel like an effortless, coherent whole, without a hint of overcompensation?

The age of 57 is awfully early for anyone to die, but it feels especially so for Prince; he never reminded us that he was growing older by trying to seem young.

Now he’s gone before we could possess him as fully as he always invited us to. But we’ll continue on into the weirder, more beautiful world he seemed to be living in decades before the rest of us arrived there. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

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FIVE MYTHS

Tax havens BY

N ICHOLAS S HAXSON

News broke this month of an unprecedented data leak, known as the Panama Papers, containing detailed, confidential information about more than 200,000 offshore companies involved with Mossack Fon­ seca, a Panamanian law firm. Still, myths persist about the supposed benefits of offshore tax havens, both for the countries that stash wealth there and for the havens themselves.

1

Tax havens protect vulnerable people against despotic governments, unjust laws and political turmoil.

One benefit of tax havens, to listen to economists such as Cato Institute senior fellow Daniel Mitchell, is that they help shield oppressed groups from greedy and corrupt regimes. The most famous version of this myth was first peddled in 1966 by the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today’s Credit Suisse), suggesting that Swiss bank secrecy was set up to protect Jewish money from the Nazis. In reality, Switzerland’s famous banking secrecy law of 1934 was triggered by a French tax-evasion scandal involving several wealthy elites, and Swiss secrecy wound up protecting a ton of Nazi loot. Tax havens shield the money of rich people, not vulnerable ones. Indeed, the Panama Papers revealed offshore accounts associated with several dictators and members of oppressive regimes from around the globe, and few linked to ordinary citizens. When tax havens assist kleptocratic elites in hiding their cash with impunity, they don’t guard against corruption and despotism — they help perpetuate them.

2

Tax havens are good for high-tax nations.

According to economics professor James Hines, tax havens serve as healthy competition for high-tax countries, nudging them toward less-restrictive financial policy. By providing alternatives to tightly

controlled financial sectors, Hines wrote in a 2010 paper, tax havens discourage regulations that act as “a drag on local economies.”

But “tax haven discipline” has terrible effects. Capital is much more mobile than workers are, so when countries try to compete with havens, they cut taxes on capital to lure it in — but they don’t cut taxes on workers. The result is steeper inequality.

Capital flight to havens also hurts investment and jobs. Further, it is well-established that high-tax countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland enjoy similar or better economic growth and human development outcomes than their lower-tax peers.

3

Besides Switzerland, most tax havens are small tropical islands.

Among the world’s biggest tax havens is the United States, which hosts vast sums of foreign wealth under conditions of strong secrecy. States including Delaware and Nevada allow shell companies whose owners are not identified, providing cover for foreign cash. And while most havens have signed on to a strong global transparency scheme for sharing banking information (called the Common Reporting Standard) that will take effect in 2017, the United States isn’t playing ball, meaning it will continue to serve as a haven for secretive foreign money.

Britain is perhaps even worse.

It runs a network of some of the world’s largest havens, from the

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Cayman Islands to Bermuda to Jersey. These places, the last remnants of the British Empire, are partly independent (and yes, some are quite sunny). But their legislation is approved in London, Queen Elizabeth II appoints their governors and her head graces their stamps and banknotes. A Financial Secrecy Index ranking the world’s biggest tax havens by secrecy and scale puts the United States in third place, after Switzerland and Hong Kong. If Britain were lumped in with its offshore network, though, it would rank first.

4

Being a tax haven makes a country rich.

Wealth flows to countries that are already rich and stable; that is why tax havens are rich countries. Particularly in small havens such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, the “trickle down” from offshore finance flows mostly to foreign expatriates. So headline figures for tax havens’ per capita wealth massively overstate the benefits to locals. Meanwhile, highsalaried finance jobs in havens undermine other economic sectors such as tourism, mostly by sucking skills and talent from

them. When crisis hits — when other countries crack down on tax-haven abuse, for instance — there is no Plan B. The British tax haven of Jersey is now in dire straits for just this reason.

5

Cutting corporate taxes helps nations compete with tax havens.

Reducing corporate taxes to attract wealth back from tax havens sounds plausible. But it doesn’t work that way.

As U.S. corporate tax rates have plunged over the past 40 years, corporations have shoveled everrising quantities of money offshore. In the early 1990s, corporations paid an effective tax rate of nearly 35 percent, and revenue losses to offshore tax havens were hardly a problem.

Now effective rates are below 20 percent, and revenue losses are running at an estimated $100 billion annually and rising.

The key reason is not high taxes but the proliferation of havens, loopholes and advisers.

The solution is not to cut taxes but to crack down. n Shaxson is the author of “Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2016

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