The Washington Post National Weekly - April 30, 2017

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

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With spring weather finally here to stay, we asked 9 writers to nominate something we should wash away.

Here are their picks: l ‘Unconscious bias,’ by Kara Swisher l Healthy substitutes, by Nina Teicholz l Cropped pants, by Tim Gunn l Countdown clocks, by Tom Cotton l No reservations, by Tom Sietsema l Self-care, by Amanda Erickson l Tweetstorms, by Jeff MacGregor l Wedding registries, by Caitlin Flanagan l College football, by Patrick Hruby PAGES 12-15

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Politics Trump’s turns 4 World A tattoo taboo 10 5 Myths The oceans 23

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THE FIX

The peril of Wall Street money BY

A ARON B LAKE

F

ormer president Barack Obama reemerged last week for his first formal public event since leaving office, but all people can talk about is a future event — specifically, one for which he will be paid his old annual salary for one speech.

News broke that Obama would be paid one of those exorbitant speaker’s fees that Hillary Clinton received: $400,000 for speaking at a Wall Street conference put on by the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Obama’s situation is not the same as Clinton’s, in that he cannot run for president again. So taking Wall Street’s money, at this point, won’t directly affect official U.S. policy that Obama will pursue in the future. Nor is there any rule prohibiting him from receiving the money. But that doesn’t mean the arrangement isn’t problematic — especially these days and especially for Obama and his party. Below are some reasons Obama may want to rethink his decision.

1. It continues to set a dubious precedent

There is no rule against Obama doing this.

None. But there is the precedent that it sets — or rather, continues to set.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.

If there’s one thing the Elizabeth Warren/ Bernie Sanders wing is still sore about in the Obama administration, it’s the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the

financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought. In 2014, she said, “They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes.” And last week, she and Sanders criticized Obama over the speaking fee.

Whether fair or not, it’s not difficult to look at Wall Street paying $400,000 to Obama as a reward for the lack of charges.

2. We have other rules against retroactively cashing in

It’s not as though the idea of holding office and then benefiting from it at a later date is a completely novel one. The Trump administration, the Obama administration and Congress have all instituted lobbying bans on their employees, limiting their ability to lobby government after leaving government — usually for years.

These bans aren’t written because those aides may one day rejoin government and be influenced by having been made wealthy by certain special interests; they’re written because it became so normal for former aides to cash in afterward and basically use their government jobs for a future payday on behalf of well-heeled special interests. The prospect of future wealth became a given.

3. Democrats are trying to be the anti-Wall Street party

This whole thing comes at a somewhat inauspicious time for the Democratic Party: just as Democrats’ true identity is in flux, as Sanders’s anti-Wall Street message seems to be ascendant, and as President Trump at times co-opted that message in the 2016 election.

That brand of populism clearly has very broad appeal, and now Democrats are being put in the position of deciding whether their former president should take $400,000 from

Wall Street for a speech. At the least, it risks suggesting the party’s anti-Wall Street posture is in some cases just that — posturing.

4. Obama discussed the corrupting influence of such arrangements in his book

There is actually a section in Obama’s 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that describes the subtle, corrupting influence of arrangements like this: “And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. . . .

The path of least resistance — of fundraisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes.”

Obama is talking about politicians who are in office, but he’s also talking about how special interests get their hooks in you without you really being conscious of it.

He’s talking about how taking specialinterest money is the easy way out. And that sure seems applicable. n

©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

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

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POLITICS

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s resolutions, then reversals His stance on NAFTA is just the latest abrupt policy shift in the president’s first 100 days

BY A SHLEY P ARKER, P HILIP R UCKER, D AMIAN P ALETTA AND K AREN D E Y OUNG

P

resident Trump was set to announce Saturday, on the 100th day of his presidency, that he was withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement — the sort of disruptive proclamation that would upend both global and domestic politics and signal to his base that he was keeping his campaign promise to terminate what he once called “a total disaster” and “one

of the worst deals ever.”

“I was all set to terminate,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview Thursday night. “I looked forward to terminating. I was going to do it.”

There was just one problem: Trump’s team — like on so many issues — was deeply divided.

As news of the president’s plan reached Ottawa and Mexico City in the middle of the week and rattled the markets and Congress, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and others huddled in meetings with Trump, urging him not to sign a

President Trump, seen last week, returned to more comfortable issues such as trade and taxes as his first 100 days came to a close.

document triggering a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA. Perdue even brought along a prop to the Oval Office: a map of the United States that illustrated the areas that would be hardest hit, particularly from agriculture and manufacturing losses, and highlighting that many of those states and counties were “Trump country” communities that had voted for the president in November.

“It shows that I do have a very big farmer base, which is good,” Trump recalled. “They like Trump, but I like them, and I’m going to help

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POLITICS them.”

By Wednesday night, Trump — who spent nearly two years as a candidate railing against the trade agreement — had backed down, saying that conversations with advisers and phone calls with the leaders of Canada and Mexico had persuaded him to reconsider.

Recalling his late Wednesday conversation with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump said, “He said to me, ‘I would really appreciate if we could negotiate instead of you terminating, because terminating sets a lot of things in motion that could be pretty devastating for a lot of people.’ ” Trump’s declaration to withdraw from NAFTA, followed by his abrupt turnabout, was the latest in a series of sudden policy shifts and outright reversals in the frenzied lead-up to his 100th day in office, reflecting a president desperate to notch tangible victories and to offer the impression of forward momentum. It was also another example of the inherent tension between the fiery populist, who ran on a promise to upend Washington, and the pragmatic businessman, who is eager to score wins and is easily influenced by a cadre of chief executive friends and top advisers, many with Wall Street pedigrees.

Trump announced that he was not labeling China a currency manipulator, after months of promising to do so on Day One of his presidency. And he declared NATO “no longer obsolete,” after months of saying it was.

He threatened to shut down the government over the border wall, only to retreat on funding for an actual brick-and-mortar structure. And he tasked his team with drafting a complex overhaul of the nation’s tax code only to suddenly announce, surprising even his own aides and advisers, that he expected a proposal to be rolled out within days.

In some ways, as Trump has hit the 100-day mark of his presidency, he is arguably beginning to find his footing, concentrating on core issues that have always animated him (trade) and others that captivate his business side (taxes). By refocusing on questions of trade and the economy, Trump has returned to more familiar and comfortable territory — the nationalistic populism that has defined him since the 1980s.

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“The president has put himself in a perfect position on NAFTA because folks know he’s inclined [to be] negative on NAFTA, yet he’s open to negotiating,” said Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. “It’s a good spot to be. The leverage is all with the president.”

Unlike his first failed attempt at passing a Republican replacement for President Barack Obama’s health-care law, Trump and his team are directing as much activity as possible from within the West Wing, relying on executive orders rather than the more unwieldy but durable process of legislation.

But the approach has worried and alienated many of his closest allies, on Capitol Hill, on K Street and abroad. And it has showcased a president who often seems more interested in short-term accomplishments — and positive cable news headlines — than longerterm policy goals guided by ideology, and who can be swayed by unfolding events or compelling arguments from whomever he talks to last.

“I think they’re just going to act whenever they can on executive action,” said Chris Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company, and a longtime friend of Trump’s. “The problem is it’s very temporary, but he wants to get things done, and trade has always been one of his big issues.”

Trump, Ruddy added, “is a busi-

ness guy. He thinks that America gets a bad part of these deals, and he wants to renegotiate them.”

‘All over the map’ With Saturday’s 100-day marker fast approaching, and eager for a win, the president turned his attention to taxes.

Trump had privately groused that he wished he had tackled taxes before trying to push through health care, a view magnified by some outside friends and confidants. Even something more modest than the full overhaul for which he hoped, such as cutting corporate tax rates, they said, would provide the president and his base with an energizing triumph.

But it was an April 19 op-ed in the New York Times, titled “Why Are Republicans Making Tax Reform So Hard?” and penned by Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, that helped propel Trump to act.

The op-ed, written by conservatives who have strong influence within the White House, said an overhaul of the tax code would give Trump a much-needed “legislative victory” and complained that the White House “seems to be all over the map on the subject.” It called on the administration to move quickly on a tax proposal, not to overthink it and to push forward “with some degree of urgency.”

Trump saw the op-ed right as he

From left, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others listen as Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during a bilateral meeting at Mar-aLago in Florida in April. Trump decided not to label China a currency manipulator after months of promising to do so on Day One of his presidency.

KLMNO WEEKLY

was becoming restless with the success of his economic agenda.

The White House rushed to engage the op-ed’s authors and reassure the economic conservatives who have privately complained about Trump’s nationalistic streak on trade and the lack of action of taxes.

When Kudlow and Moore gathered a group of conservatives Tuesday evening at Cafe Berlin, a white-tablecloth German restaurant on Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stopped by, even though he was not scheduled to attend.

“We texted him and said, ‘Come by if you’d like,’ ” Kudlow said.

“Well, he did, and he spoke for two or three minutes and took questions.”

On April 21, two days after the op-ed ran, Trump announced in an interview with the Associated Press that his advisers would be releasing a tax plan by the following Wednesday, or “shortly thereafter.”

Some aides working on the plan were stunned, caught unaware of the expedited timeline.

Still, they reasoned, maybe “shortly thereafter” meant they could unveil the plan a week or two later. But hours after the AP interview, during an appearance at the Treasury Department, Trump stood beside Mnuchin and told reporters that the tax plan would come out Wednesday.

The proposal unveiled that day offered some specifics — cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and collapsing seven tax brackets down into three — but was vague in other areas, including just how the government would pay for it. Critics seized on the one-page printout the White House distributed with details of the tax plan as the flimsy embodiment of its lack of depth.

“It was a restatement of bullet points that Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore drafted on the back of a cocktail napkin at the 21 Club,” quipped one longtime Washington Republican in contact with the White House.

But the tax proposal — unveiled with great fanfare in a midday briefing with reporters — achieved several of Trump’s key objectives, garnering him a day of largely positive headlines; laying at least a baseline marker for a top policy goal; and reassuring Americontinues on next page

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from previous page

cans, many of whom voted for the promise of a businessman commander in chief, that pocketbook relief would be arriving by next tax season.

“The president was being illadvised that he had to repeal Obamacare before passing taxes,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser.

Kudlow spent Wednesday at the White House, chatting with top officials after the rollout of a plan that many credited him with helping to spur.

“If we helped, I’m very pleased,” Kudlow said. “I think the president has set a terrific tax reform, economic growth marker.”

Still, he dismissed the suggestion that he was the impetus for Trump’s swift action on taxes.

The president, Kudlow said, “just wants to move. He’s been tied in knots on health care, and he had an impulse to get it together on taxes.”

‘My way or the highway’ Canada and Mexico were blindsided Wednesday as news of Trump’s planned NAFTA withdrawal spread north and south of the border.

Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, described the news as a “my-way-or-the-highway ambush” from the White House, especially coming amid what has been weeks of steady and amicable discussions among the three countries about revamping the trade agreement.

But Mexico — which was already on edge after Trump’s brief flirtation with attaching borderwall funding to a must-pass, short-term spending bill — quickly leapt to action. Two cabinet-level officials in Mexico reached out to their U.S. counterparts to deliver a blunt message: If Trump officially announced the U.S. intention to withdraw from NAFTA, Mexico would not return to the negotiating table.

Mexico would not, the officials warned, negotiate with “a gun to its head.”

The president, meanwhile, was hearing a similar message from some of his own senior advisers.

Ross, the commerce secretary, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, scrambled to persuade Trump to back down.

The United States can only trig-

ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“If we can’t come to a satisfactory conclusion,” says President Trump, “we’ll terminate NAFTA.” ger the six-month clock to withdraw from NAFTA once, they said.

They told the president that he had strong leverage to renegotiate the trade deal but that once he publicly signaled his intent to leave, the situation would become so politically fraught for Canada and Mexico that they would not be able to return to negotiations, even if they wanted to.

In the Oval Office interview, however, Trump repeatedly insisted that he was ready to pull out of NAFTA. At one point, he turned to Kushner, who was standing near his desk, and asked, “Was I ready to terminate NAFTA?” “Yeah,” Kushner said, before explaining the case he made to the president: “I said, ‘Look, there’s pluses and minuses to doing it,’ and either way he would have ended up in a good place.”

Perdue, the agriculture secretary, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also cautioned Trump against moving ahead, while two of the White House’s populists, trade adviser Peter Navarro and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, urged him to stay the course, announcing his intention to withdraw in a splashy primetime rally Saturday night in Harrisburg, Pa. The administration also re-

ceived pressure from hundreds of business executives from around the country, many of whom called the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asking what was going to happen, before calling the White House directly, urging Trump not to sign the order. Tom Donohue, the chamber’s chief executive, also relayed the message to senior White House officials.

The complaints pouring in from agriculture groups were even more apoplectic, warning White House officials that withdrawing from NAFTA could devastate the U.S. agriculture industry, allowing Mexico to reinstate high tariffs against U.S. exports.

The Mexican government, meanwhile, had “several” contacts with its Canadian counterparts throughout the day Wednesday to share reactions and map out a joint strategy, including separate phone calls between their countries’ leaders and Trump that evening.

“We had the same position,” said Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray on Thursday in an interview on Mexican television.

Trump publicly claimed Thursday that his phone calls with Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau persuaded him to give negotiations a chance.

Trump's threat to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement worried farmers, who warned White House officials that such an action could devastate the U.S. agriculture industry.

Trump decided to renegotiate the deal rather than withdraw from it.

But a senior administration official said Trump had already decided to hold off on signing the NAFTA termination letter before his phone calls with Mexico and Canada.

In the interview, Trump recounted his internal deliberations: “In one way, I like the termination. In the other way, I like them — a lot, both of them. We have a very good relationship. And it’s very hard when you have a relationship, it’s very much something that would not be a nice act.

It would not be exactly a friendly act.”

But, the president added, he reserves the right to change his mind. “I can always terminate,” Trump said. “They called me up, they said, ‘Could we try negotiating?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, yes.’ If we can’t come to a satisfactory conclusion, we’ll terminate NAFTA.” Promises unfulfilled A few doors from the Oval Office, Bannon works out of what he calls “the war room,” a West Wing hideaway adjoining the chief of staff’s suite, from which Karl Rove and David Axelrod once worked.

Upon moving in, Bannon cleared out most of the furniture, save for a standing desk and chairs, and plastered the walls with lists of Trump’s campaign promises — scores, even hundreds of them, with green check marks or giant red X’s over those that have been met.

A list of 10 major pieces of legislation that Trump promised in his “Contract with the American Voter” hangs from near the ceiling down to the floor. None is crossed out yet.

On Wednesday evening, around the time Trump was talking with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts, one whiteboard contained an ominous marking: “NAFTA” and “April 29.” It underscored Bannon’s hope that on Saturday night, Trump would sign the paperwork initiating the withdrawal from NAFTA. Indeed, that same whiteboard contained other trade-specific actions, many boasting already checked-off promises.

Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Check.

Action on the aluminum and steel industries? Check and check.

One of the few unfulfilled, so far, was NAFTA. n ©The Washington Post

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Will Trump’s tax plan pay for itself?

BY

M AX E HRENFREUND

A

t the center of President Trump’s plan to dramatically cut taxes on businesses and individuals is a promise to stimulate extraordinary economic growth, so much so, his advisers say, that the plan will pay for itself.

If he succeeds in keeping that promise, Trump will have accomplished something that his taxcutting Republican predecessors failed to do, according to economists and tax policy experts from both parties.

In describing the proposal Wednesday, Trump’s top economic advisers said the plan would unleash new investment and spending

by American companies and consumers, supercharging economic growth. That growth, in turn, would prevent the plan from leaving the federal government short trillions of dollars of tax revenue.

But in the experience of two other Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, tax cuts produced an uneven record on prompting economic growth. And in both instances, reductions in taxes failed to pay for themselves and instead left the nation to deal with increasing federal debt.

After his 1981 tax cut, Reagan was forced to raise taxes several times. And Bush’s tax cuts put the nation on vulnerable fiscal footing, depriving the government of revenue as the United States waged two wars and faced a financial crisis. Ultimately, Congress and President Barack Obama, after several standoffs over federal finances, increased taxes by billions of dollars and imposed strict limits on government spending.

Economists fear it will happen again. “This is definitely not in pays-for-itself territory,” Alan Cole, an economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, said of Trump’s plan.

At the White House on Wednesday, Trump’s advisers touted the cuts as the start of an economic renaissance, recommitting to promises that their proposed tax regimen would both grow the economy and cut the debt.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Treasury secretary predicts ‘trillions’ in additional revenue, but economists expect it to add to debt “This tax reform package is about growing the economy, creating jobs. It’s about the economy,” Gary Cohn, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, told reporters. “That’s how we’re looking at this plan.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the plan would curb the debt. “The economic plan under Trump will grow the economy and will create massive amounts of revenues, trillions of dollars in additional revenues,” Mnuchin said.

Trump’s tax guidelines diverge from an effort by congressional Republicans, led by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), to craft a plan that aims to cut rates while keeping the government’s total tax revenue level, as the reductions would be balanced out by new taxes elsewhere and the elimination of loopholes.

For Trump, the attraction of his strategy is that it allows his administration to avoid proposing massive spending cuts or offsetting tax increases to keep the debt in check.

And indeed, even the modest pro-

posals he is making to raise some offsetting funding — such as limiting tax deductions to offset state and local taxes — promise to be controversial as he attempts to enlist Congress in support of his plans.

But while Trump says his tax plan is part of a broader agenda that will validate his campaign promises of economic growth not seen for decades, economists remain skeptical.

After reviewing the tax policy outline that the Trump administration released Wednesday, several said they are hopeful that Republicans can craft a plan that would have modest benefits for the economy, but few expected Trump to be able to deliver the level of growth he has promised.

“The evidence shows clearly that no feasible tax reform in this country will raise economic growth to 3 percent on a sustained basis, given our current demographics,” said Doug Elmendorf, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

As Trump attempts to succeed

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, center, touted President Trump’s tax plan at a news briefing Wednesday.

“The economic plan under Trump will grow the economy and will create massive amounts of revenues,” Mnuchin said.

where Reagan stumbled, he will deal with multiple hurdles the former president didn’t, argued Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and former adviser in the Bush White House.

When Reagan reduced rates, he cut the maximum marginal rate on ordinary income for individual taxpayers from 70 percent to 50 percent.

That rate now is 39.6 percent, and cutting it further is unlikely to have the same on-the-ground impact on taxpayers’ decisions.

Further reductions in rates are “just not going to have as big an impact as some of those early, dramatic fixes did,” Holtz-Eakin said.

Reagan, Elmendorf said, benefited from women’s entry into the workforce, which accelerated economic growth. Now, as the babyboomer generation hits retirement, the labor force is shrinking, limiting the prospects for the economy.

Trump also comes into office facing far more debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. public debt is the equivalent of 77 percent of gross domestic product, a level that’s more than double the rate faced by Bush or Reagan. That worries fiscal conservatives.

“I don’t want to run some fiscal-policy experiment with the largest, most important economy on the planet. I mean, we’re not Belgium,” said James Pethokoukis, an economic commentator at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “I would urge caution.”

Economists debate how successful Bush and Reagan were in stimulating the economy, but nearly all agree that the cuts ultimately added to the debt, as they failed to pay for themselves.

Despite recent history, members of Trump’s camp say Trump will deliver on his promises.

“This isn’t going to be easy. Doing big things never is,” Cohn said Wednesday. “We will be attacked from the left and attacked from the right, but one this is certain: I would never, ever bet against this president. He will get this done for the American people.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

W.Va. Bible class begets court case J OE H EIM Princeton, W.Va. BY

G

ym is Trenton Tolliver’s favorite class. But the 7year-old is also a huge fan of the weekly Bible course at Princeton Primary, his public elementary school. He gets to play matching games about Bible stories and listen to classic tales.

Noah and the Ark is a favorite.

Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden, of course. And the story about how their son Cain killed his brother, Abel.

“That one was a little bit of a surprise,” Trenton said as he sat with his parents, Brett and Courtney Tolliver, one day this month watching his little sister’s soccer practice on a lush field in this small town in the mountains of southern West Virginia.

This spring, Bible classes such as Trenton’s are on the minds of many here in Mercer County. For decades, the county’s public schools have offered a weekly Bible class during the school day — 30 minutes at the elementary level and 45 minutes in middle school.

Bible classes on school time are a rarity in public education, but here they are a long-standing tradition. The program is not mandatory, but almost every child in the district attends. And there is widespread support for the classes: Parents and community members help raise nearly $500,000 a year to pay for the Bible in the Schools program.

Now Bible in the Schools is facing a stiff legal challenge. Two county residents with school-age children argue in a lawsuit that the program violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the West Virginia Constitution. Filed in January and amended last month by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the suit charges that the Bible class “advances and endorses one religion, improperly entangles public schools in religious affairs, and violates the personal consciences of nonreligious and non-Christian parents and students.”

Supporters are adamant that

WADE PAYNE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The popular class is offered in public elementary and middle schools, but is it constitutional? the weekly class is an elective meant to explore the history and literature of the Bible, not to promote religious belief.

“My experience with it has been very positive. I’ve never known of anyone who has been pressured or felt ostracized,” said the Rev. David W. Dockery, senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Princeton.

“Any time God’s word can be proclaimed is beneficial and is a good thing.”

Trenton’s parents also find it hard to see why there would be objections.

“I think it’s a great program mainly because it’s the only chance for some of these kids to even see the Bible,” said Brett Tolliver, 27. “More importantly, I don’t know who it harms. The kids aren’t forced to be there.”

Courtney Tolliver, 26, a teacher in the district, agrees.

“It’s not teaching religion, but it teaches character and respect and how important it is to tell the truth,” she said. “The kids love it and the ones who don’t partici-

pate aren’t made to feel left out.”

But the plaintiffs in the suit and their backers argue that the program’s popularity shouldn’t matter in the face of Supreme Court rulings such as McCollum v.

Board of Education in 1948 that have banned public schools from initiating or sponsoring religious activity. The suit alleges that the lessons in the Mercer schools are similar to what a child would hear in Sunday school and that they advocate the Ten Commandments and treat stories in the Bible as historical fact.

The suit quotes from one lesson: “If all of the Israelites had chosen to follow the Ten Commandments, think of how safe and happy they would have been.”

Another lesson asks students to imagine that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. It says: “So picture Adam being able to crawl up on the back of a dinosaur! He and Eve could have their own personal waterslide!

Wouldn’t that be so wild!”

The district declined a request

Brett and Courtney Tolliver sit with children EllaKate, 4, and Trenton, 7, in Princeton, W.Va. Trenton attends the weekly Bible class, which is offered during the school day and is not mandatory. Courtney Tolliver said, “It’s not teaching religion, but it teaches character and respect and how important it is to tell the truth.”

to observe one of the classes.

Elizabeth Deal, who describes herself as agnostic, is one of the plaintiffs in the case. Her daughter attended elementary school in nearby Bluefield, but Deal kept her out of the Bible class. Even though the class was optional, Deal said there weren’t any alternative lessons or activities for those who opted out. Her daughter was told to sit in the computer lab for that half-hour and read a book.

Bypassing the class left her vulnerable to bullying. Deal said other students told her daughter that she was going to hell. One day a student saw her daughter reading a “Harry Potter” novel and told her, according to the mother: “You don’t need to be reading this. You need to be reading the Bible.”

Eventually Deal moved her daughter to a public school a few miles away in Virginia where there is no Bible class. She pays an out-of-state fee of several hundred dollars, but she no longer worries about her child being taunted.

Deal said she joined the suit because she believes strongly in the separation of church and state. “When something is wrong,” she said, “you have to stand up against it.”

God is a big deal in Mercer County, home to about 125 churches that dominate the main streets of its biggest towns, Princeton (population 6,400) and Bluefield (10,400), and smaller burgs such as Athens (1,000), Bramwell (360) and Oakvale (120). A lot of the good jobs in the county have left — 22 percent of its 61,000 residents live below the poverty level — but the churches have stayed.

The Rev. Ray Hurt has been the lead pastor at the Church of God in Princeton for more than two decades. The church, one of the largest buildings in town, can hold up to 2,000 people for Sunday services and often does. For Hurt, Bible in the Schools, which has been in the public schools here in one form or another since 1939, is simply a way for students to further their knowledge.

“There is a great deal of not just poetry and prose in the Bible, but

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NATION from what I’ve read almost every piece of history that’s in the Bible has eventually been proven,” he said. “We see the Bible not just as a book of faith but as a pretty accurate account of history that informs us about a lot of things that happened.”

Hurt, whose son, the Rev. J.B. Hurt, is also a minister in the Church of God and a member of the county school board, says he would oppose the program if he thought it was being used to teach religion or if students were required to take the class. But he also embraces the idea that the Bible offers irrefutable lessons in morality and teaches the difference between right and wrong.

“If you read the Bible, you’re going to get a whole lot of good ideas that are going to stick with you and make you a better person,” he said. “You don’t have to push religion with it. It speaks for itself in terms of morals and ethics and those things.”

The idea that a weekly Bible class for 6,600 students in 16 public elementary schools and three middle schools is somehow simply an academic offering doesn’t sit well with Lynne White, 54, a former two-term school board member and mother of two sons who went through Mercer schools.

“As a person of faith myself, I don’t see any problem with having an after-school Bible program,” White said. “But to me this seems a pretty clear violation of the Constitution.”

White holds the school board and leadership responsible for spreading what she says is a false sense of what the Bible in the Schools program is and does.

In a commentary for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, White wrote that “the Bible in the Schools program in Mercer County is being sustained on a foundation of lies.”

She argued that the classes are character education based on biblical values, that they were not electives because West Virginia doesn’t offer electives in elementary or middle school and that even though the classes are funded by private donations, that doesn’t mean they should be taught during the instructional day. She also said it was untrue that children who didn’t take the class weren’t made to “feel different or ostracized.”

If it were simply a popularity contest, Bible in the Schools would be allowed to continue as is.

Even the president of the local mosque in Princeton says it should stay.

“It’s good to be God-fearing no matter how you approach it,” said Mohammad Iqbal, head of the Islamic Society of the Appalachian Region. “Whether it’s the Bible, whether it’s Koran, whether it’s Torah, whether it’s some other book. But it should be optional, not enforced. If the parents have no objection and the student has no objection, it is okay.”

But the program’s fate will not be resolved by popular vote or on Facebook posts. Instead, the question will be tried in the courtroom of Judge David A. Faber of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia in Bluefield. (Faber was nominated by President George H.W. Bush.)

Representing the Mercer school district is the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit law firm based in Texas that specializes in religious freedom cases. Hiram Sasser, a lawyer at the firm, said the district’s main objective is to allow the Bible course to remain as an elective while making sure it complies with the law.

“There are two things to look at,” Sasser said. “The first is whether you can have a Bible course at all. And the other is whether you can have the Bible course as it is presently constituted. It’s fair to say that we’re very confident on the first issue. And on the second issue . . . our client is very, very flexible in terms of making sure that the content is in compliance with the law.”

But the plaintiffs aren’t looking for flexibility. They want the Bible class out of the school day.

The program “is unconstitutional at its core and cannot be saved via modifications,” said Patrick Elliott, a lawyer with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

“There is no legally permissible way for Mercer County Schools to continue with any type of program like this.”

Trenton Tolliver is oblivious to the Bible battle that swirls around him. His first-grade school year ends next month. Hanging in the balance of the court case is what he will learn in the Bible course in second grade. Or if there will be a Bible course at all. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

A deadly turn for drugs and driving

RICK WILKING/REUTERS

A Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy checks if a driver has been driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol at a checkpoint in Golden, Colo.

BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

F

or the first time, statistics show that drivers killed in crashes are more likely to be on drugs than drunk.

Forty-three percent of drivers tested in fatal crashes in 2015 had used a legal or illegal drug, eclipsing the 37 percent who tested above the legal limit for alcohol, according to a report released this past week by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) and the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility.

Of drivers who tested positive for drugs, more than a third had used marijuana and more than 9 percent used amphetamines.

The report is narrowly focused on fatal crashes. It shows that among fatally injured drivers with known test results, 2015 was the first time that drug use was more prevalent than alcohol use.

Beyond that, however, it draws on other studies that create a complicated portrait of legal and illegal drug use nationwide. Every state bans driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

The opioid epidemic — heroin use and the abuse of prescription drugs — is well established. In 2015, more than 33,000 people fatally overdosed on opioids, almost equal to the 35,095 people killed that year in all traffic crashes.

Though the dates when each state passed a law vary, that period

coincided with more-permissive laws covering the use of pot.

Medical use is now allowed in 29 states and the District of Columbia; 17 states permit its use in some medical circumstances; use has been decriminalized in 21 states; recreational use is legal in eight states and the District.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised to reinvigorate the war on drugs, reversing an Obama administration policy that reduced prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Although the liberalization of marijuana laws and increase in drug-use fatalities might lead to an easy conclusion, the report cites European studies that found marijuana use slightly increased the risk of a crash, while opioids, amphetamines and mixing alcohol with drugs greatly increased the risk of a crash.

Counterbalancing that assessment of crash risk is this stark statistic: In Colorado, marijuanarelated traffic deaths increased by 48 percent after the state legalized recreational use of the drug.

Surveys of regular marijuana users in Colorado and Washington state, which also has legalized recreational use, found that almost none thought marijuana use impaired their driving, while they believed drinking alcohol did.

The challenge to police in attempting to enforce laws against drug-using drivers is compounded because many officers lack training to identify those under the influence of drugs, and delays in testing may allow the drug to metabolize so the results do not accurately measure the concentration in the driver’s system at the time of the incident.

“As states across the country continue to struggle with drugimpaired driving, it’s critical that we help them understand the current landscape and provide examples of best practices so they can craft the most effective countermeasures,” said Jonathan Adkins, executive director of GHSA. n

©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Tattoo artist takes on Japanese taboo A NNA F IFIELD Osaka, Japan BY

V

isitors to Japan who have tattoos bigger than a Band-Aid can forget about going to hot springs or swimming in a public pool.

They also can rule out some beaches and gyms, certain restaurants and karaoke rooms, and even some convenience stores.

This is because tattoos are strongly associated with organized crime here — specifically the yakuza, or Japanese mafia — and are therefore almost universally viewed with repugnance. Case in point: When Disney released the animated movie “Moana” here, the advertising featured only the young girl in the title, and not the heavily tattooed Maui, who was shown on posters elsewhere (although the company says it was simply a marketing decision).

Japan’s ingrained aversion to tattoos will be put to the test when Tokyo hosts the Summer Olympics in 2020, an event that will bring a huge influx of foreign visitors — including athletes with body art.

It will get an earlier test, though, with a legal battle in Osaka.

Taiki Masuda, a 29-year-old tattoo artist, went to court this past week to fight a $3,000 fine that was imposed on him two years ago when police raided his studio.

They relied on a 14-year-old regulation originally intended specifically to regulate cosmetic tattooing, such as creating permanent eyebrows, which stipulated that only licensed health-care providers could do such work.

The others caught up in the raid paid their fines. Masuda, who prided himself on the cleanliness of his studio, refused to give in.

“This is a violation of freedom of expression,” he said in an interview in an Osaka cafe, his heavily decorated skin completely covered with long clothes. “Tattooing is not a medical act, but they’re saying I should be a doctor if I want to do this. It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t accept it.”

The case is expected to take months to hear, and if Masuda

PHOTOS BY SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The future of body art in the country may hinge on legal battle over whether it’s a medical act loses, it will effectively make it impossible to get a tattoo in Japan.

“This is an unprecedented case,” said his attorney, Takeshi Mikami. “The prosecutors’ position that tattooing should be performed only by doctors is an overreach. This case goes against common sense.”

Because tattooing exists in a kind of legal gray area, Masuda and his allies have formed a group called Save Tattooing in Japan.

They want licensing and regulation for tattoo artists, as in many other countries.

But the authorities are standing firm.

“It’s a medical act to put pigment on a needle tip and insert ink into the skin,” said Yoshiyuki Kanno, of the health ministry. “It can cause damage, and there are risks like bleeding or infections if tattooing is done by someone without technical knowledge.”

This attitude has arisen in a country that has a long history of

tattooing.

In the 17th century, tattoos were used to punish criminals, especially those who had been involved in scams, said Brian Ashcraft, an American journalist in Osaka who wrote a book about Japanese tattooing.

Then, in the 1700s, Japanese men who worked with their bodies started to get elaborate tattoos.

Firefighters had big dragons and other images associated with water, to protect them against fire.

When Japan began opening up to the outside world in the 1800s, authorities cracked down on tattoos because they didn’t want foreigners to think they were backward, and outlawed them entirely in 1872. But the ban had to be scrapped at the end of World War II because so many of Japan’s American occupiers had tattoos.

Tattoos became permissible but carried a social stigma.

“There was such a boom in the 1970s in movies about yakuza, and all the yakuza characters had huge

Tattoo artist Taiki Masuda, right, with Kiyoshi Shimizu of Save Tattooing, are fighting a government directive on the art form. “They’re saying I should be a doctor if I want to do this,” Masuda said. “It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t accept it.”

tattoos. It made people associate tattoos with yakuza,” said Kiyoshi Shimizu, who runs the Save Tattooing group with Masuda. “Tattoos equal yakuza equal evil. That became the mind-set.”

The stigma attached to tattoos is also rooted in class structure and hierarchical values, Ashcraft said.

“One of the central ideals is that you must respect your parents,” he said. “You got your body from your parents, so if you put ink into your body, you’re disrespecting your parents.”

Ordinary tattoo artists were generally tolerated until two years ago, when the police in Osaka decided that the 2001 regulations designed for cosmetic tattooing gave them scope to take on the larger tattoo trade. They embarked on high-profile raids on tattoo artists, including Masuda.

In 2012, Osaka City Hall banned tattoos for its employees. Those who already had them were not allowed to show them to citizens and were not allowed to get any more, even if they are not visible.

“Even if you’re being careful, the tattoos might show and they might intimidate citizens, and we don’t want to take that risk,” said Hidetaka Yamaguchi of the city’s human resources department.

This disgust with tattoos is causing complications with Japan’s drive to attract more tourists, especially to big international events.

“Overseas, tattoos are considered a form of self-expression,” said Ichiro Matsui, the governor of Osaka prefecture, which Monday applied to host the 2025 World Expo. “We’d like more foreigners to come here and enjoy Japan, but there are different customs here.”

Already, Masuda’s case has changed one mind.

“I didn’t know anyone who had a tattoo before this case, but it completely changed the image I had of tattoo fans and tattoo artists,” said Mikami, Masuda’s defense lawyer. “Tattoos have existed in Japan for long, and I hope Japanese society can be more tolerant and accepting.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Macron’s showing looks good for E.U.

BY G RIFF M ICHAEL

Berlin

W ITTE AND B IRNBAUM

I

n this era of fiery populism and muscular anti-globalist forces, politicians across Europe are suddenly discovering an electoral surprise.

It might actually pay to embrace the European Union.

The top finisher in the first round of the French presidential election last Sunday was Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist who jets to Berlin to give speeches in English. The blue-and-yellow banner of the E.U. flutters off his campaign headquarters. He is strongly favored to beat his antiEurope rival, Marine Le Pen, in a May 7 runoff.

After years in which the E.U. was the favorite foil for ascendant politicians on the continent, the 28-nation club may be making a comeback despite Brexit and President Trump’s euroskepticism. The Netherlands’ staunchly pro-European Green Left party quadrupled its support in elections last month. Former European Parliament president Martin Schulz is surging in polls ahead of September elections in Germany.

And Macron has promised, if elected, to help lead “an ambitious Europe,” restoring France to a preeminent place in the E.U. after years in which the French role has been diminished by its domestic struggles with unemployment, terrorism and political dysfunction. He has pledged to push for reforms that would force stronger nations to protect weaker ones.

Last Sunday’s balloting showed French attitudes toward Europe split down the middle, with euroskeptic politicians winning nearly half the vote. In addition to Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left candidate, drew millions of votes. Opinion polls examining E.U. attitudes revealed conflicted feelings, with a majority of French respondents describing themselves as pro-E.U. but saying the institution needed deep reforms.

KAMIL ZIHNIOGLU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Support for centrist French candidate ahead of runoff might signal ebbing of the populist wave Given such division, European leaders nervously watched the first-round voting to see which way France might tilt. On Monday, many political figures were unusually public about their support for Macron.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, tweeted that Macron’s first-place finish showed that “France AND Europe can win together. The center is stronger than the populists think!”

The centrist German lawmaker Alexander Lambsdorff heaped on more praise. Macron is “a French John F. Kennedy,” he told Germany’s ZDF television.

In a rare display of cross-continental comity, Macron also was congratulated by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a combative leftist who has sparred with the German government ever since he was forced to accept a humiliating bailout in 2015.

Pro-E.U. politicians were not the only ones to focus on Macron’s attitudes toward Europe.

Nigel Farage, the British anti-E.U. politician who helped lead last year’s Brexit campaign, tweeted dismissively that Macron gave his victory speech Sunday night “with EU flag behind him.

Says it all.”

Leaders in Europe normally maintain a studious silence when the vote isn’t on their turf. That they didn’t in this case reflects the gravity for Europe of the final round of the French vote.

If Macron is elected — and opinion polls suggest he has a comfortable lead over Le Pen despite his first-round squeaker — continental leaders are cautiously optimistic that he can steer the beleaguered country back to its historically central role in European affairs. If Le Pen wins, modern Europe — defined by integration and growing cooperation across national boundaries — could fall apart after already being jolted by Britain’s decision to exit the E.U. Analysts believe that if Macron can put more of a Gallic stamp on

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron greets supporters at a Paris restaurant where he met with his staff after winning the election’s first round last week. Macron has promised, if he wins the May 7 runoff against National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, to help lead “an ambitious Europe,” restoring France to a preeminent place in the European Union.

the E.U. machinery in Brussels, he may have a chance to shift France’s complicated attitude toward the bloc back toward more positive ground, particularly if he can also jump-start his country’s stalled economy.

“The French liked Europe when it was a greater France, but they feel today that it’s no longer the case. It’s a greater Germany,” said Eddy Fougier, an expert on anti-globalization movements at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs.

For all their concerns about the E.U., voters may be becoming more wary of disruptive European politicians as they watch Trump churn up political turmoil in the United States and Britain solidify its E.U. divorce plans.

As the European powers-thatbe closed ranks around Macron, they took two major risks. One is that by backing the French centrist, they will fan the flames of anti-establishment ire that have propelled Le Pen’s rise.

“It could reinforce some of the discontent in France among those who will see this as the global elite denying them their right to vote,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The other potential pitfall is that European leaders could find it more difficult to work with Le Pen if she wins. For months before Americans voted last year, European leaders denounced Trump — only to have to make amends this year with solicitous visits to the new U.S. president at the White House.

Analysts suggested that, even if Macron wins, Europe’s centrists will need to keep their expectations in check for what he can achieve.

“It may be that Europe’s leaders have an over-interpretation of the role Macron can play,” said Claire Demesmay, who studies France for the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The antiEuropean mood in France will still be there — and it could increase.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

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12

9 THINGS WE SHOULD WIPE AWAY RIGHT AWAY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEVEN WILSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

13

‘Unconscious bias’

Healthy substitutes

Cropped pants

BY KARA SWISHER

BY NINA TEICHOLZ

BY TIM GUNN

You can’t throw a hammer in Silicon Valley these days and not hit a gender or race bias controversy. And believe me, I’d like to throw a lot of hammers, aimed squarely at the still-thick heads of most tech leaders on this most important of topics. The problem is everywhere: Uber. Oracle. Google. And venture capital firms, so many VC firms.

My biggest gripe is about their convoluted and costly efforts to address lagging hiring and pay for women and people of color. These self-described masters of quantification have all kinds of hurtfeelings excuses. “But the pipeline!” they cry, as if people were oil and talent was a dwindling resource that couldn’t be made again and again.

The worst excuse is what is widely called “unconscious bias” — bias that kicks in automatically, with our supposedly unthinking brains making often-inaccurate snap judgments.

While I am fully aware of the science behind the concept — which basically boils down to the fact that we are all beasts at heart — it’s pure laziness by some of the world’s smartest and most innovative people to pretend they are unconscious of something so glaringly clear. It both abrogates the responsibility of leaders and fobs it off on training and classes that never seem to solve the problem, no matter how much money is spent. Studies suggest these programs may actually backfire, conveying that stereotyping is normal and, therefore, okay.

Here’s a suggestion for tech execs: Pick up your head and look. If you see 10 white men on a board of 10, or an engineering staff that’s 80 percent white and male, with no faces unlike your own, you’re not building a meritocracy. Instead, it’s a mirror-tocracy, and what’s reflecting back at you is neither pretty nor unconscious.

Government nutrition guidelines and magazine advice columns have long promoted healthy substitutes for everyday foods. Whole industries have been built around alternative foods that are supposed to make us feel better and live longer.

But in many cases, the healthiest choice is to forgo the “healthy” substitutes.

Consider the egg-white omelet. We were told for decades to avoid yolks and limit our dietary cholesterol to help protect against heart disease.

Yet in 2015, the U.S. dietary guidelines dropped the daily cap on cholesterol. It turns out that studies since the 1950s had found that dietary cholesterol had little meaningful effect on blood cholesterol.

What a shame for all of those delicious omelets we never got to eat. And, more seriously, for all the vitamins we missed — egg yolks are far more nutrient-dense than the whites, with super-rich amounts of biotin, choline and lutein.

It’s the same story with low-fat foods: For decades we’ve snacked with abandon on low-fat cookies and pretzels, exactly as the American Heart Association advised. Yet health officials no longer recommend a limit on total fat — that was more non-fact-based advice, it turns out. A low-fat diet is now “associated with dislipidemia,” according to the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which means it’s linked to heart disease. Whoops! Hello, guacamole.

Agave syrup, too, can go. Agave is marketed as a natural sweetener because it comes from a plant.

But so does sugar — from sugar cane or sugar beets. And both sweeteners are a combination of glucose and fructose. Agave happens to have far more fructose, which is directly implicated in fatty liver disease.

And soy milk? It’s extracted from soybeans using pressure, heat and hexane, a solvent. The resulting rancid mixture must be steamed to eliminate bad odors, bleached to remove the gray color, and then enhanced with sweeteners, artificial colors and synthetic vitamins. No, thanks.

My view of what’s in your closet is accepting and democratic: I don’t care what you wear, provided that you accept responsibility for wearing it. But there are some items for which nobody should shoulder responsibility, including leggings-aspants (how? why?) and the dreaded droppedcrotch trouser (horrors). Still, my No. 1 offender is the cropped pant. It’s fashion’s Bronx cheer.

Because the only fit issue is in the waist (rather than the length, too), I see these monstrosities more and more. Universally unflattering, they are neither here nor there; they’re too long to be shorts and too short to be capris, with which they are often confused. They are loose and fall straight from the waist at the widest part of the hip, unlike capris, which are snug and slightly tapered. The male version is misleadingly referred to as “manpris.” Balderdash!

The key to getting fashion right is the harmony and balance of silhouette (your true shape), proportion (think of yourself as divided into thirds from shoulder to ankle) and fit (neither voluminous nor tight), in concert with color and pattern.

In terms of proportion, your thirds are the following: shoulder to waist, waist to knee, knee to ankle.

Your apparel should conform to those demarcations. Proper shorts will fall to just above the knee.

Proper pants will extend roughly to the ankle.

The cropped pant wreaks havoc with proportion. Because the hem falls between the knee and the ankle, usually at the widest part of the calf, the cropped pant succeeds in making you look shorter.

I don’t know anyone, female or male, who strives for that goal.

Worn thoughtfully and strategically, clothes create a positive optical illusion, suggesting that you are longer and leaner than you actually are.

Worn carelessly, clothes — particularly cropped pants — can do the opposite.

Kara Swisher is a technology journalist and executive editor of Recode.

Tim Gunn is a design educator, author and co-host of “Project Runway.”

Nina Teicholz is the author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.” continues on next page

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

14

COVER STORY

Countdown clocks

No reservations

Self-care

BY TOM COTTON

BY TOM SIETSEMA

BY AMANDA ERICKSON

Just 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes to go until The Washington Post publishes its 2018 Spring Cleaning issue. In the meantime, we ought to ditch the countdown clock.

These days, it seems like news channels are always counting down to something. But I can’t quite agree with the networks about what’s considered a clock-worthy “event.” New Year’s? Sure. A presidential address? Possibly. Rachel Maddow’s Trump tax return “exposé”? Hardly. In fact, cable news networks use the clock to plug so much of their own programming that they end up promoting themselves far more than actual news. Consider: Last year, CNN hyped one of its presidential debates with a clock that counted down to 8:30 p.m. But just as viewers tuned in, the network aired 30 more minutes of programmed punditry — and then started the debate for real at 9 p.m. Like so many other cable news clocks, it was a countdown to a letdown.

But there’s a more serious point here. A wellinformed public is essential to democratic selfgovernment. And the countdown clock reflects a frenzied, over-caffeinated news culture that ill serves a vigilant citizenry. It lowers important topics to the realm of entertainment and raises quotidian trivia to the status of “breaking news” — which is often neither breaking nor news. That makes it harder for us to think about what’s going on in the world in a deliberate fashion. It plays into the hands of politicians, who benefit from a distracted public. It defeats a main purpose of reporting the news — to inform and educate.

BREAKING: And we would be better off without it.

Fans of good cuisine are increasingly asked to stand in line for the opportunity to taste the handiwork of top chefs. On any given night, queues stretch from the doors of these fashionable food destinations because none of these tastemakers take reservations.

Restaurants that hew to this policy say it frees them from the tyranny of latecomers and noshows — bad guest behavior that eats into their profits. The practice also has a democratic ring to it, since theoretically anyone has a shot at a seat.

Rank and money don’t carry much clout in restaurants that don’t let you save spots.

The problem is that whole swaths of us are relegated to dreaming about clams and sausage in XO sauce rather than experiencing it firsthand. If you’re a person of a certain age — unable, say, to leave work early, or go out after dark, or stand for long — too bad. These restaurants are not for you.

Nor are they welcoming of suburb dwellers, who run the risk of coming into the city for dinner and not being fed, or parents of young children, who hesitate to shell out babysitter money for time spent outside a dining room.

No-reservations restaurants defend themselves by saying not all establishments are meant for everybody. True, a steakhouse is the wrong place for a vegetarian to reach nirvana. But as someone whose first priority is diners, I’d like to point out that “restaurant” is derived from the French word for “restore,” and restaurants that don’t let you plan in advance are anything but fortifying.

If you want empty affirmation at any price, peruse BuzzFeed’s list of “self-care tips so extra they just might work”: “Buy yourself a fancy . . . robe and sit around drinking tea out of [a] goblet like some decadent royal.” “Get yourself a whole cake.” “Book someone to deep clean your home, go out for a massage while it’s happening, and then come back and enjoy pretending that you’re a relaxed human who actually has their life together.”

In other words: Self-care is for people who can afford fancy robes, cleaning services, massages and goblets. A once-radical act has become a marketing opportunity.

In the 1960s, therapists and academics coined “self-care” in part to help trauma therapists, social workers and activists avoid burnout by talking through their feelings and connecting with others in similar circumstances. In the ’70s, self-care became more overtly political as a way for people on the margins to fortify themselves in an oppressive system. In a 1988 book, black poet Audre Lorde wrote that “caring for myself is not selfindulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

But as the term has made its way into the mainstream, it has lost its connection to radical politics. Folded into commercials and marketing guides, and used to sell products from “wellness retreats” to Korean skin-care routines, self-care has become something you deserve when you’re feeling blue, no matter the reason.

In this new understanding of self-care, keeping yourself strong isn’t about your role in a movement: It’s just about you. As feminist author Laurie Pennywrote in the Baffler last year, the “obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life.”

The modern concept of self-care is no longer useful; it has become shallow and selfish. Let’s get rid of it.

Tom Cotton is a Republican senator from Arkansas.

Tom Sietsema is the food critic for The Washington Post.

Amanda Erickson writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

15

Tweetstorms

Wedding registries

College football

BY JEFF MACGREGOR

BY CAITLIN FLANAGAN

BY PATRICK HRUBY

Made famous (or maybe notorious) by the likes of thinker and essayist Jeet Heer, perfected by bumptious billionaire Mark Cuban and Eric “Guys, it’s time for some game theory” Garland, the tweetstorm is now normcore.

Get rid of it.

I refer, of course, to the long, linked, numbered threads of Twitter posts strung together to form an essay, one scrolling sentence fragment at a time.

You’ll find these threads on dog Twitter and cat Twitter, the kids are alt-right Twitter, Oxford comma Twitter and on and on, through the 140-character infinities of the Twitterverse.

Back in the day — two years ago — Twitter was all non sequitur and pictures of sandwiches, and if we wrote 27 tweets on a single topic we expected you to read them up the page in reverse until some stranger ran them through Storify.

But brevity is the soul of twit, so if you want to write an essay, maybe just write an essay and send us the link, k? cuz as alwys pnctuation and cap’zation are the rl vctms as we dscvr & dply nw cntrctns 4 mkng sns in lmtd spcs Or maybe these threaded tweets are simply serial telegrams stop an old idea on a new platform stop in the same way the top 10 list really began with the stele of Hammurabi stop.

Or old-time tabloid gossip columns in which every sentence was a new paragraph, and starcrost woosome twosomes were seen dining justthisclose at Ciro’s or Sardi’s or the Stork Club.

Michel de Montaigne, 16th-century inventor of the personal essay, would be proud of its persistence and adaptability. Unless he was trying to read one on the bus, on his phone, in 38 parts.

In which case — like trying to read the Lord’s Prayer inscribed on the head of a pin — his question for the engraver wouldn’t be how, but why?

According to lore, the wedding registry was born in the 1920s, at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. It was simplicity itself: A young woman could list her china and silver patterns, and guests could select a gift they knew she’d like. Was it a bit gauche to direct people to buy you a particular present?

Probably. But it was the ’20s. If a girl wanted something, sometimes she had to take matters into her own hands.

The registry as we have come to know it, however, was born in 1993, when some marketing whiz at Target realized a new use for the bar code scanner. Engaged couples could walk through the store scanning things they might need or want: towels, sheets, smart TVs. The technology immediately reshaped private behavior and social mores.

Zapping things with the scanner is fun! It’s like a shopping spree with no bill and an element of surprise — which of these things will actually arrive as gifts? Today, the creation of a vast and highly specialized registry (at high-end housewares stores, Walmart, department stores) is as much a part of wedding custom as pretending you’re Lutheran to get the church you want.

You can’t be invited to many weddings without realizing there’s a lot of junk on registries. Couples zap far more than they possibly need, without ranking items by level of desire — so we log on, find a good price point and plug in our credit card numbers.

The function of a wedding gift is to let the couple know: We support you in this new life together. The function of the online wedding registry is to wedge corporate America into that exchange of goodwill. Better to Venmo some cash and let them get what they actually want — perhaps a chance to pay down their credit cards or student loans — than to add more weight to the marital landfill.

Imagine you’re running a national university.

Your athletic department has a modest proposal. It would like to add a varsity sport that has a tortured relationship with academics, carries a significant risk of physical injury and of triggering litigation against your institution — and will invariably result in about 100 of your male students being hit in the head, repeatedly.

Thanks, but no thanks, you’d certainly say. What kind of school needs a boxing team in 2017?

Why do we treat football any differently? Universities are supposed to advance knowledge, nurture young minds and protect students. Football runs contrary to all three. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the sport can be very bad for the brain; it doesn’t take peering through a neuropathologist’s microscope to know it also can be bad for bones and ligaments, leaving participants with lifetime ailments and expenses. Campus football exploits the labor of uncompensated athletes, turning hard-working makers into government subsidy takers by annually transferring billions to the coaches and administrators who call the shots. (Is it really surprising that the on-field workforce is predominantly African American, while management is overwhelmingly white?) Meanwhile, the system too often fails to deliver decent educations to the same players it pickpockets: Half of the black male players in the top programs don’t graduate within six years.

Then there are the sport’s ancillary benefits: sex assault scandals, academic malfeasance, classaction concussion suits, strength coaches who make $600,000 and Xanadu-like football facilities. And because athletic department donations and seasonticket purchases are largely tax-exempt, everyone else in society is helping to pick up the tab.

When the University of Chicago dropped its powerhouse football program in 1939, school President Robert Maynard Hutchins argued that the sport had become a distraction. That has never been more true than it is today. n

Jeff MacGregor is a writer-at-large for Smithsonian Magazine.

Caitlin Flanagan is the author of “Girl Land” and a contributing editor to the Atlantic.

Patrick Hruby is a D.C.-based journalist and contributing editor at Vice Sports.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BY

SCIENCE

C AITLIN G IBSON

T

he moment he emerged onstage in a black jacket and red bow tie, the crowd noise hit near-deafening decibels. A sea of iPhones appeared, everyone stretching and jostling for the best possible photo angle. They cupped their hands to their mouths, screaming his name.

“Greetings, fellow citizens,” Bill Nye said to the thousands huddled beneath umbrellas and handlettered signs. “We are marching today to remind people everywhere, our lawmakers especially, of the significance of science for our health and prosperity.”

It was a significant moment — for science, for William Sanford Nye and for the masses who have followed him for decades, from fuzzy TV screens in their middle school classrooms to the grounds of the Washington Monument at April 22’s March for Science. He is beloved by millennials who came of age watching the ’90s-era PBS series “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” a role that made him an icon: half mad professor, half Mr. Rogers, perpetually clad in a pale-blue lab coat and bow tie as he unveiled the science of eroding mountains or orbiting comets with theatrical flourish.

‘Science’ is his name

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST

How a children’s TV personality became an icon — and an activist — for a movement More than 20 years later, the 61-year-old still wears the bow ties, and he still punctuates his speech with impassioned catchphrases. (“It’s not magic, it’s science!” is his new favorite.) But now his disheveled locks and vaguely Vulcan eyebrows are streaked with gray, and his persona has assumed a new edge. He has become more than the zany educator-entertainer who charmed kids with cartoonish sound effects. He is an activist for science, leading those nowgrownups into political battle.

Of all the roles he has played, this is the one he was preparing for all along.

“I did imagine it could come to this,” Nye said the day before the march.

By “this,” he meant the legions of scientists, doctors, engineers and concerned members of the

public that took to the streets of Washington and more than 600 cities worldwide. Their demonstration was a response to the rise of anti-scientific notions — the anti-vaccination movement and climate-change denial in particular — and a retort to the Trump administration, which has proposed deep budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

In the weeks before the march, many called this kind of mass protest from the scientific community unprecedented. But Nye was not surprised.

The current “anti-science thing,” he said, had been on the rise for decades. “People were denying pollution in 1970, saying it’s a-okay.”

He took note of the early warning signs as a young man in Seat-

tle, where he got his start in broadcasting with a local sketchcomedy show. He also was volunteering on weekends at the Pacific Science Center and with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.

“I realized that kids are the future,” he said. “The reason I made the ‘Science Guy’ show was quite deliberate. If we can get young people excited about science, then we have a shot. I knew I was fighting the fight.”

The fight is political, but not partisan, he emphasizes. Still, he has drawn his share of partisan critics. Some, like Sarah Palin, have questioned whether Nye is actually qualified to speak on behalf of science: “Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am,” she once declared.

Nye chuckles in response: “Well, Ms. Palin, you’re wrong.”

To be fair: He did make his

“The reason I made the ‘Science Guy’ show was quite deliberate,” says former PBS host Bill Nye, who came to Washington, D.C., to lead last weekend’s March for Science.

“If we can get young people excited about science, then we have a shot. I knew I was fighting the fight.”

name as an entertainer. “I’m not a research scientist,” he acknowledged, like his good friend and fellow science celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson, who climbed the academic ranks as an astrophysicist. Nye earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at Cornell then went to work for Boeing.

His fancier science credentials — designing an interplanetary sundial used by NASA and becoming chief executive of the Planetary Society, a space-advocacy group co-founded by Carl Sagan — came after his TV fame.

Still, his education was grounded in the scientific method. And, he argues, it doesn’t take a paleontologist to defend evolution or a meteorologist to comprehend the perils of climate change.

“When you become scientifically literate, I claim, you become an environmentalist,” he said.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

17

TRENDS “Somewhere along the way, there has developed this idea that if you believe something hard enough, it’s as true as things discovered through the process of science.

And I will say that’s objectively wrong.”

And so, at a moment when science is at the forefront of public discussion, Nye has found himself in the spotlight once again — though in truth, he has never quite left it. Since “Science Guy” ended its five-year run in 1998, Nye has hosted other science-education programs, sold out lecture halls and written best-selling books. He recently debuted a new 13-episode Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” with a more urgent tone, and aimed at a broader audience, than his public TV days.

Nye isn’t married, and he never had children of his own — a neurological illness runs in his family, which “really affected my life choices,” he said. So he focused on other people’s children instead, determined to pass his own passion for science on to them. The little ones who watched his show became the young adults who would march beside him.

“The scope of it is really astonishing,” he said, with more awe than swagger. “There are millions of kids who watched the show. I’m very proud of that.” He smiled slightly. “But I don’t think I quite get it.”

But then it’s the day of the march, and he’s in a white van that’s driving him and the other event leaders to the starting point, and the streets are lined with signs that say “Science, not Silence” and “Facts Matter,” and maybe he’s starting to get it a little bit more.

“Look! This is so, so freaking cool,” he says, pointing out the window.

The event ends just before 3 p.m. in front of the Capitol, where the massive crowd gathers around Nye and his fellow cochairs for one last group photo.

The chant starts up again: “Bill!

Bill! Bill!”

Nye bows his head slightly, then raises his hand into the air, three fingers outstretched. It’s the motion of a teacher trying to quiet a classroom, reminding his students to focus — not on him, but on what he taught them. He counts down: “Three, two, one!”

And they answer in heartfelt unison: “SCIENCE!” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Indie films’ new home? Yours.

B Y A NN H ORNADAY

S

how of hands: Who’s planning to see this weekend’s big movie?

That was a trick question. Because with screens getting smaller, choices getting wider and audiences getting narrower, the entire notion of “big movie” has become exponentially more difficult to define.

No doubt, such worldwide behemoths as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Fate of the Furious” count as big movies, if only in deference to their budgets, spectacle and wide-ranging appeal.

But a glance at some of the recent new releases reveals how, with Hollywood depending ever more heavily on remakes and sequels, and streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon becoming players in the art-house space, the proportions of modern films — the ambition with which they’re made and their ultimate size and scale on the screen — have become increasingly fluid.

There was a time when “Unforgettable,” starring Katherine Heigl, would easily count as the weekend’s big movie. But, from concept to execution, the tale of a jealous ex-wife and the new bride she terrorizes is puny indeed — a grim, hopelessly retrograde portrait of toxic femininity and neurotic jealousy. Filmgoers largely rejected “Unforgettable,” which debuted at seventh at the box office last weekend, despite the name recognition of its star.

Meanwhile, a “smaller” movie with far greater artistic aspirations opened, not in theaters, but on Netflix, which has aggressively been scooping up independent films to produce and distribute.

Along with “Rodney King,” Spike Lee’s film of Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man show, and the Iraq War drama “Sand Castle,” the service started streaming “Tramps,” a playful love-on-thelam romance by Adam Leon.

With its nods to the likes of the French New Wave, its bravura camerawork and fleet editing, “Tramps” is a lively, high-spirited crowd-pleaser. It played well at the Toronto International Film Festi-

NETFLIX

Grace Van Patten and Callum Turner in “Tramps,” a playful romance movie that opens on Netflix instead of in theaters.

val, where it made its debut and where Netflix purchased it for a reported $2 million.

But despite Leon’s cinematic sensibility and high-minded aspirations, he’s fine with his film not being seen in theaters. What was once the holy grail for young filmmakers — showing their work on the big screen — has given way to platform-neutral realism.

Leon, who grew up in New York, admits that he harbored the theatrical dreams for his first film, the 2012 caper comedy “Gimme the Loot.” And those dreams came true: The film wound up playing in more than 50 theaters throughout the country. But for “Tramps,” he said, “it was going to be a major challenge to get crowds into the theater. And the reality is that most people would end up seeing it on a streaming service anyway.”

When Netflix bought “Tramps,” Leon cried with relief that he could make his investors whole, and the pressure of filling theaters was lifted. Despite his confidence in the film, Leon observed, “It’s far from a slam dunk. There are no known quantities, it’s not a horror movie, it doesn’t feature the Rock.

There are no TV actresses taking off their clothes. But on VOD, someone will buy it.”

Leon’s sentiments were echoed

by Macon Blair, whose movie “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” opened the Sundance Film Festival in January before

going directly to Netflix.

Thanks to recommendation algorithms and subscriber data, Netflix is able to make sure that films such as “Tramps” and “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” get in front of viewers who are likely to enjoy them — and, more crucially, to tell their friends that they enjoyed them.

(The company doesn’t make its viewing statistics public.) It’s the same model used by Amazon’s Video Direct service.

There are still films that demand to be seen in theaters — films like “The Lost City of Z.” Thankfully, “Lost City of Z’s” parent studio, Amazon, is giving it a strong theatrical run before streaming it later this year. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) As Gray observed at the New York Film Festival premiere, this is precisely the kind of film that studios used to make and should still be making. Now addicted to sequels and dubious star vehicles like “Unforgettable,” they’ve handed the baton to smaller outlets and streaming services adept at knowing which movies are meant to be seen on the big screen, and which are just as well-served by bypassing theaters entirely, and meeting audiences where they are. It’s an ethic that a new generation of filmmakers is embracing without complaining. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

That pork on your fork had a personality N ONFICTION

F PERSONALITIES ON THE PLATE The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat

By Barbara J. King Chicago.

229 pp. $25.

l

REVIEWED BY

V IRGINIA M ORELL

or our dinner recently, my husband cooked a Moroccan-style chicken dish, the meat tender and gleaming with spices, and topped with thin slices of lemon and green olives. He served me a leg and wing. I love this dish, and normally I would dig right in. But I’d been reading Barbara J. King’s new book, “Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat,” and I hesitated.

Whose leg was this? Whose wing?

In previous centuries, even as recently as the early 20th, I probably could have told you because I would have raised the chicken myself. But like most Americans, I don’t have a farm, and I don’t grow my own food. Meat comes bundled in packages, and the fleshy lumps don’t conjure up a creature that once possessed a mind, emotions and a personality. Did that make it easier for me to eat the chicken? Or would I have more enjoyed biting into a leg of a chicken I knew?

Perhaps I couldn’t have done it at all.

King makes you think about such matters because the lives of animals matter to her. She is not a vegan, she asserts right at the beginning. She’s eaten plenty of animals. But years ago, after dining on slabs of grilled game meat, including zebra and antelope, at the Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi, she had an epiphany. At the time, she was a graduate student in anthropology studying monkeys. When she could, she stole away to simply watch the other animals graze and move across the plains. She loved them. And then at the restaurant, she found herself devouring some of the very same species she so admired.

She’d gone from being “Barbara the avid observer of animals” to “Barbara the voracious eater of animals.” And while she didn’t change her meat-eating habits overnight, that epiphany — and her work of watching animals — began to undermine her taste for barbecue. These days, she limits her meat meals to fish, and she

CARSTEN KOALL/GETTY IMAGES

suggests that all of us try to reduce the amount of meat we eat because the industrial farming of animals harms the environment — and because those lumps of packaged flesh were once sentient beings. Individuals with personalities.

King takes us chapter by chapter on a cook’s tour of animals we eat, from insects to octopuses to chickens, fish, goats, pigs, cows, chimpanzees and dogs, exploring the latest scientific discoveries about their intelligence and sentience — building a case for them as beings that deserve more out of life than a trip down our gullets.

She starts with insects, explaining that people actually do prepare such things as katydid-andgrilled-cheese sandwiches and grasshopper-stuffed tacos. They eat them, too.

King doesn’t try to persuade us to switch from chicken legs to those of grasshoppers. Instead, she tacks in a different direction, asking if insects are intelligent.

They are, judging by studies of social wasps and fruit flies. The former recognize the faces of their hive-mates, and the latter can gather information before making a decision. They also have

personalities.

What is personality? It’s the way, King informs us, that “an individual feels, thinks, and acts in the world.” Usually it’s thought of in terms of introversion vs. extroversion, and agreeableness vs. aggression. Crickets, like those baked in cookies, have varying levels of boldness and aggression, depending on whether they grew up in quiet or noisy environments.

We learn that octopuses, too, are not simple cookie-cutter animals. Some can be shy, prone to hiding in corners, like one named Emily Dickinson who lived at the Seattle Aquarium. Another, called Leisure Suit Larry, was brashly forward, much too ready to reach out and touch the humans. Octopuses also do clever, intelligent things, laying and guarding their eggs as chickens do; camouflaging the color, shape and texture of their bodies in an instant to match their surroundings; and engaging in eye contact with humans. King is excellent at summarizing all that’s been discovered about animals like octopuses, soft-bodied invertebrates that seem so different from us. But she shows otherwise, declaring them at last to be

“conscious, thinking, strategizing” creatures that “evaluate what’s going on around them.”

King is not a scold, but she is good at stirring up guilt — and making us question if we truly want to eat that fennel-and-garlic-scented chicken leg that once belonged to a good-natured, lovable and smart bird. She serves up jaw-dropping statistics (every year, about 50 billion chickens are killed globally, and some 8 billion of these are slaughtered in the United States for us to eat) and painful-to-read descriptions of killing methods — but leavens this darkness with humor and tales of animals acting as individuals, expressing the full gamut of emotions we humans often wrongly claim solely for ourselves. Her method and passion are effective, and I ended the book agreeing that we can — and should — help these creatures and our environment by choosing to eat fewer of them or none at all.

Nevertheless, dear reader, I confess: I ate the chicken. n Morell is the author of “Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel.”

She wrote this for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Silence is used to say so much

A real-life detective takes on the mob

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

W

REVIEWED BY

S USAN S CARF M ERRELL

hile writing her 2016 novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Elizabeth Strout found herself “drawn to the constellation of characters surrounding Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois.”

And so she began writing what became this new collection of gently linked stories. “Anything Is Possible”can easily be read without knowing the earlier book, and, in a way, it’s a greater achievement than that “source material.” These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response.

Such a simple goal, so difficult to achieve.

Each of these stories stands alone, but they are richer in juxtaposition to the others. And that’s because over the years, from angle after angle, Strout has been packing and unpacking how silence works — between people, within a single person, on the page, in the spaces between stories. Omission is where you find what makes a writer a writer; it is in the silences where forgiveness and wisdom grow, and it is where Strout’s art flourishes. This new book pushes that endeavor even further.

In one story, a married Vietnam vet named Charlie Macauley is betrayed by the hooker he believes he’s in love with — not even her name is real. That night, Charlie ends up at a bed-and-breakfast, waiting for the accumulated pain of his life to release itself. Dottie, owner of the bed-and-breakfast, forever after recalls that night. She finds the memory of the sobbing man a palliative against the kind of guest who shows up, confesses secrets and, inexplicably, gets annoyed with Dottie for having listened.

My favorite of these stories is “Cracked,” about Linda’s complicity in her husband Jay’s hidden-

camera spying and subsequent attempted sexual assault on their houseguest. “Linda did not comment as she got into bed next to her husband, and Jay did not comment either,” Strout writes, “although it was unusual these days for Linda to watch with him.” I love this particular one not for its creepiness, but because of the sneaky completeness of its origin story: “In college in Wisconsin she met Jay, who with his intelligence and vast money seemed to offer a life that might catapult her away from the terrifying and abiding image of her mother alone and ostracized.” Linda is who she is because of events from her childhood, events we understand because we have read her sister Patty’s story and have information Linda will probably never know.

Beyond the nine stories in this volume, numerous others are touched upon and resolved without the heat of Strout’s direct gaze.

For example, behind Linda’s story (and behind Charlie Macauley’s as well), is the tale of her sister Patty’s finally requited desire for Charlie.

The fact that this pairing happens offstage, as it were, allows us to believe in all the possible good things that happen in the world that we aren’t privy to. Or responsible for.

Strout’s story is about the ways we carry the burden of our pasts through life, suffering wordlessly, when admitting out loud what has hurt could ease that pain.

I still treasure my coffee-stained copy of Strout’s first book, “Amy and Isabelle.” When a book startles you — teaches you that there are other ways to tell a story — you want to come back to it again and again. With “Anything Is Possible” — using the sum of its parts to paint the humanity of an entire community — Strout hits the target yet again. n Scarf Merrell is the author, most recently, of “Shirley,” a novel about Shirley Jackson. She wrote this for The Washington Post.

I ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

By Elizabeth Strout Random House.

272 pp. $27.

THE BLACK HAND The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History

By Stephan Talty Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

288 pp. $28.

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

t sounds like a gang of baddies from a comic book or a Hardy Boys adventure. But the Black Hand was dead-serious, a loose network of Italian immigrants who in the early 20th century terrorized dozens of American cities and towns by demanding protection money from merchants, kidnapping children (the ransom note typically came embellished with the logo of a black hand), and committing murders — all with near-impunity because the cowed victims refused to testify.

In “The Black Hand,” his gripping account of this scourge, Stephan Talty focuses on Joseph Petrosino, who did more than anyone else to cripple the Hand. His task was made even more difficult by the failure of his employer, the New York Police Department, to give him the manpower he needed. Italian Americans were looked down upon, and as long as the Hand kept to Little Italy, the political establishment hardly bestirred itself. At the time, the NYPD employed mostly Irish Americans, none of whom spoke Italian or had much interest in cooperating with Petrosino.

The Petrosinos had immigrated in 1873, when Joseph was 13. To help support his family, he left school after sixth grade to work full time as a shoeshine boy, earning about a quarter a day. At 17 or 18, he was hired as a city street cleaner. Thanks to his work ethic, his obvious talent and the intercession of a mentor, he advanced to commander of a scow that dumped municipal garbage in the Atlantic Ocean. In 1883, despite being only 5 feet 3 inches tall, he was recruited by the police force.

One of Petrosino’s motives in going after the Black Hand was a fear that authorities might eventually crack down on immigration from Italy. Yet he also sought to distance himself from his countrymen. His superb memory for faces and his dogged pursuit of leads won him a promotion to detective,

leadership of a small unit of Italian cops, and the nickname “the Italian Sherlock Holmes.” One of his star turns came when the Hand tried to extort $5,000 from the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

Impersonating Caruso, Petrosino kept the rendezvous and overpowered and arrested the extortionists.

Despite his success, however, Petrosino faced discrimination within the NYPD just as his countrymen did outside it, and his operation remained woefully understaffed as the Black Hand expanded to other cities and states. All that changed, however, when a man without ties to the political machine known as Tammany Hall was appointed commissioner of police. This was Theodore Bingham, an ex-military engineer. At the heart of “The Black Hand” is Talty’s account of how Bingham was both the best and worst of bosses, making a favorite of Petrosino, giving him the support he needed, but foolishly sending him on an intelligence-gathering trip to Italy, where, thanks to Petrosino, so many Black Hand members were now living in sullen exile.

Talty, himself the son of Irish immigrants, tells his story with flair. Talty also gives us a peek at the leave-nothing-to-chance ethos of Tammany Hall. “It was said that [boss Big Tim Sullivan] perfumed the ballots on election day so that he could make sure his constituents had actually voted by sniffing out the scent on their hands.”

I only wish the author had provided more detail on how the Black Hand was finally stopped.

Once Petrosino is out of the picture, Talty seems to lose interest, covering the gang’s decline and fall in a mere three-and-a-half pages. On the whole, though, this is a valuable recounting of a lurid and little-known episode in American history. n Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Trump finally got it right in his Holocaust speech DANA MILBANK is an author, political analyst and columnist for The Washington Post.

I’ve written a million columns critical of Donald Trump, give or take. This one is in praise.

His campaign was a toxic stew of dog whistles to white nationalists and at times overt anti-Semitism. He continued during his first weeks in office to flirt with the racist fringe; his administration excised any mention of Jews from a statement on the Holocaust; he suggested that the rise in anti-Semitic threats and violence since his election might be a false-flag campaign orchestrated by Jews; he repeatedly hesitated to disavow anti-Semitism; and his spokesman perversely claimed that the Jews Adolf Hitler gassed weren’t “his own people.”

But give him credit for this: Trump’s speech in the Capitol Rotunda this past week for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Yom Hashoah remembrance ceremony was spot-on. Some highlights: “The survivors in this hall, through their testimony, fulfill the righteous duty to never forget and engrave into the world’s memory the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people.”

“For the dead and the living we must bear witness. That is why we are here today, to remember and to bear witness, to make sure that humanity never, ever forgets.”

“The Nazis massacred 6 million Jews. Two out of every three Jews in Europe were murdered in the genocide. . . . Yet even today, there are those who want to forget the past. Worse still, there are even those filled with such hate, total hate, that they want to erase the Holocaust from history. Those who deny the Holocaust are an accomplice to this horrible evil.”

“We’ve seen anti-Semitism on university campuses, in the public square and in threats against Jewish citizens. Even worse, it’s been on display in the most sinister manner when

terrorists attack Jewish communities, or when aggressors threaten Israel with total and complete destruction.

This is my pledge to you: We will confront anti-Semitism.”

Yes, he was reading from a teleprompter a speech somebody wrote for him. His delivery was prosaic and he occasionally repeated a phrase he liked as if reading the speech for the first time, which perhaps he was. So what? At least he gave the speech.

I don’t pretend to know whether Trump has changed in his heart. His campaign was so laced with bigotry toward African Americans, Latinos and immigrants that the antiSemitism was just one outrage.

But his Holocaust speech and similar words in a video and a White House statement in recent days suggest that Trump has the capacity to adjust. And that’s welcome news.

His first 100 days have been a disaster: No health-care reform, no travel ban, a passel of unmet promises, international confusion, historically low support. He has resorted to creating a fake sense of momentum with executive orders — the kind of governing he and his allies decried when

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

President Trump attends the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. “This is my pledge to you: We will confront anti-Semitism,” he said in his speech.

President Barack Obama did it.

But Trump has never been a man of consistent principles, and he has shown that he’s willing to jettison his campaign program, changing his positions on China, trade, the debt, the influence of lobbyists and others. He has apparently backed down from his promise to build a wall, to avoid a government shutdown. I don’t expect some broad transformation, but if he’s moving even tentatively or temporarily in the right direction — in this case, shifting from his courtship of Steve Bannon’s altright nationalists — he should be encouraged.

The Hill, a publication that covers Capitol Hill and politics, absurdly criticized Trump’s Holocaust remembrance proclamation for using “similar wording to the Holocaust Museum website” when it said, “The Holocaust was the statesponsored systematic persecution and attempted annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.” The White House should be praised for echoing the museum’s description of the Shoah.

My friend Peter Beinart quibbled in the Atlantic with

Trump’s speech for failing to acknowledge that “the Holocaust creates obligations to protect the dignity of all people, not just Jews.” That’s true, but given Trump’s history, he needed to make a full-throated acknowledgment of Jews’ suffering.

After a campaign that trafficked in the filth of antiSemitism — tweeting an image showing a Star of David atop a pile of cash; retweeting messages from white supremacists; refusing to condemn antiSemitic threats against Jewish journalists; granting access and interviews to white-nationalist outlets; and closing with an ad showing prominent Jews juxtaposed with warnings of an international banking conspiracy — Trump needed to speak clearly.

Last week, he spoke. “Today, we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children whose lives and dreams were stolen from this Earth,” he said. “. . . We remember the hatred and evil that sought to extinguish human life, dignity and freedom.”

And, crucially, he added: “Today we mourn, we remember, we pray and we pledge: Never again.”

Well said, Mr. President. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

These folks see solid first 100 days DANIEL LEE is a writer who lives in Washington, Ind. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

Washington, Ind., a city of 11,000 nestled among a handful of low hills rising from table-flat Hoosier farm fields, is 680 miles from the other Washington, but the cultural and political divide may be even greater than the geographical distance.

Solidly red Indiana backed Donald Trump by 57 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent. Voters here in Daviess County went for Trump over Clinton by 79 percent to 16 percent, more than the 74 percent who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and the 67 percent who supported John McCain in 2008. Indeed, Daviess, tucked into the state’s southwestern toe between Illinois and Kentucky, was the Trumpiest county in the state.

So listening to the crowd at Rep. Larry Bucshon’s town hall here recently, it was both unsurprising that Trump’s support appeared solid despite what some in the other Washington might consider a rocky start, and notable that some of those assembled were less than full-throated in their backing.

There was no fist-shaking at the North Elementary School auditorium — these folks tend to save their shouting for basketball sectional time, and that ended last month. Bucshon, a fourth-term former heart surgeon whose original favored candidate was Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), encountered none of the anger that has greeted other Republicans at town halls this year, although the temperature

might have been controlled by his decision to accept only written questions.

Several questioners reflected impatience with the slow or nonexistent progress of health insurance reform. One asked Bucshon if he thought the president should release his tax returns.

“Yes, he should,” Bucshon said, to applause.

And about a third of the room clapped for a question calling for more investigation of the Trump administration’s ties to Russia — even if the loudest applause came when Bucshon defended his willingness to defund Planned Parenthood, citing the organization’s abortion services.

Still, no one took the

opportunity to lambaste Trump for failure to launch.

“I think he’s doing all right, with all the opposition he’s getting,” Gene Perkins, 77, wearing an NRA T-shirt and red Trump baseball cap bearing an American flag on the sides and “USA” proudly lettered on the front, told me. “He’s trying to do what regular people want done out here in flyover country.” Perkins laughed. “That’s what they call us.”

Perkins, who runs a trucking firm he built from the pavement up after having to leave Purdue University when his father died, thought that, until Trump came along, “this country was on the way down the tubes, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve said for many years that the government ought to be run like a business, and now we’ve finally got a businessman in there.”

More guarded, and perhaps even more reflective of the general attitude, was David Stowers, a local businessman who brought along his three schoolage children and was reluctant even to say if he supported Trump. “There’s a need definitely for some changes, and he’s making them,” he said. “You have to give somebody the time to do the things that you elected them for.”

This exactly reflects the mood one encounters often here. At

family Easter get-togethers, chatting in grocery store checkout lines, or overheard at nearby restaurant tables, Trump gets credit for pushing for change, even if his efforts seem unfocused and even inept. It’s a steep learning curve.

Politics watchers point to signs of progress — easing of strict environmental oversight, greenlighting coal exploration and fuel pipeline work stalled under the Obama administration, withdrawal from the TransPacific Partnership, punishing Syria’s chemical attack, dropping a massive non-nuclear explosive on the Islamic State and drawing a hard line with North Korea.

Less detail-oriented Trump supporters like his combative tone, finding in it a reflection of their own sense of being under attack by opposing culture warriors.

Three days after the town hall, Perkins said Washington political professionals of both parties often seem more committed to the D.C. establishment than to the people who sent them there.

“They may be Republicans or Democrats,” he said, “but they’re all politicians, and they don’t want their apple cart turned over.”

Which is exactly what Trump has done — or at least started to do — in his first 100 days. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MARGULIES

Stop the net neutrality roll back RON WYDEN, AL FRANKEN AND TOM WHEELER Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, are members of the U.S. Senate.

Wheeler was FCC chairman from 2013 to January. They wrote this for The Washington Post.

For as long as the Internet has existed, it has been grounded on the principle of net neutrality — that what you read, see or watch online shouldn’t be favored, blocked or slowed down based on where that content is coming from. Net neutrality means that cable companies can’t reserve the fastest Internet speeds for the biggest companies and leave everyone else in the slow lane. That’s what ensures a website for a local pizza place in rural Oregon or Minnesota loads as quickly as the website for Pizza Hut or Domino’s. Or why a social network built in a garage is available to the same people as Instagram or Twitter.

That’s why it’s so alarming to see that the Federal Communications Commission, a federal agency that’s expected to help protect the Internet, is planning to roll back net neutrality rules.

In the past few months, President Trump’s new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has already abandoned other important consumer protections: He backed out of a proposal to free people from having to rent expensive cable boxes, and he is trying to make it harder for low-income families to access affordable high-speed Internet. It’s amazing that Trump, having promised to stand up to the powerful on behalf of ordinary Americans, now has an FCC that gives the powerful what they ask for — even if it hurts consumers.

So with powerful forces pushing to get rid of net

neutrality — Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other multibilliondollar companies — it’s going to take Americans speaking up to protect the Internet that we depend on. In 2014, nearly 4 million Americans contacted the FCC, with an overwhelming majority sending a very simple message: protect net neutrality.

And as a result of those efforts, we got policies put in place to do just that. But now those very policies are on the chopping block. Unless people fight back, these deeppocketed corporations will upend how we get our news, watch our favorite shows, use social media or run our businesses.

Net neutrality is good for consumers, small businesses and rural America. It creates jobs, especially at small businesses. The software that runs agricultural

DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

tools, the point-of-sale operating systems in our restaurants, the newest idea from a dorm room or a garage — all function in an Internet ecosystem that is equal and won’t allow Big Cable and others to prioritize one piece of Internet traffic over another.

Net neutrality also allows small businesses to compete against the largest, most profitable corporations. Here’s just one example. In 2005, three guys set up shop above a pizzeria in a strip mall in San Mateo, Calif., where they launched the nowubiquitous YouTube. Videosharing websites were in their infancy, but these guys already faced competition from something called Google Video.

Because of net neutrality, YouTube was able to contend with Google on a level playing field.

Internet service providers treated YouTube’s videos the same as they did Google’s, and Google couldn’t pay the ISPs to gain an unfair advantage, like a fast lane into consumers’ homes. Well, it turned out that people liked YouTube a lot more than Google Video, so YouTube thrived. In fact, in 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Small businesses shouldn’t have to outbid massive conglomerates just to get their product in front of consumers’ eyes. If net neutrality is

gutted, only the biggest conglomerates will be able to pay for the fastest Internet speeds. In many ways, it’s our small, innovative, nextgeneration businesses that have the most to lose.

This isn’t just about high-tech innovation, though. The Internet is absolutely critical for rural communities. Access to highspeed Internet in rural areas supports jobs and businesses, of course, but it also affects things such as education and health care.

Now, because of the Internet, our rural areas are better-connected than ever. Yes, there are still huge access gaps, but those gaps will become impossible to fill if we don’t protect the principles that have already made the Internet a driver of innovation and economic prosperity.

Big Cable and other opponents of net neutrality will try to argue that getting rid of these protections will somehow actually help consumers. Or they’ll argue that you can have an open Internet without net neutrality. That defies evidence and common sense.

The best way to protect consumers and small businesses on the Internet is to preserve net neutrality. And the only way to preserve net neutrality is to join together to speak out and fight back against this latest attack on the open Internet. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The oceans BY

S TEVE P ALUMBI

AND

A NTHONY P ALUMBI

The high seas are as vital to life on Earth as terra firma, and with their hugeness and depth, they provide that much more room for myths and mysteries. Here are five of the most persistent.

MYTH NO. 1 Coastlines are clear boundaries between land and sea.

The distinction isn’t really that clear. Every few seconds, waves move the edge of the sea in and out. In six-hour cycles, the pull of the moon shifts the level of the water. The combination of waves and tides means the edge of the sea is dynamic, depending on the moon, the wind and the steepness of the shore, which itself changes over time due to erosion.

This movement creates an area of mingled land and sea where certain species thrive in a halfshore, half-ocean zone.

Mangroves are some of the only trees that can grow in seawater, some by secreting salt crystals through their leaves to rid themselves of saline. They expand from soil into the shallows as they grow, trapping sediment and creating new land. Marsh grasses do the same, helped by animals that live among their roots and fertilize them. Corals are probably the most stubborn of this group of in-betweeners: They live around mountainous islands, and as the mountains sink under the sea, the corals keep growing toward the surface. Eventually, the mountains disappear, leaving only a ring of coral called an atoll: neither land nor sea, but a space in between.

MYTH NO. 2 The deep sea is totally dark.

It’s true that daylight penetrates the oceans only weakly: Below about 3,200 feet deep, there is virtually no sunlight. But there is other light: a starry flickering of blue and green luminescence thanks to an enzyme called luciferase that generates light by breaking down

high-energy molecules and producing photons instead of metabolic energy in the bodies of bacteria and some deep-sea fish.

MYTH NO. 3 Oceans are big enough to dilute pollutants safely.

That was probably true long ago, when the vastness of the ocean could not be harmed by any of the trickling products of scattered human villages. But today, the scale of human industry is so great that even the oceans cannot contain its waste safely.

Over the past two centuries, the concentration of mercury in the top 300 feet of the oceans has tripled because of human activity, including the burning of coal.

Likewise, carbon dioxide levels in the air have gone up about 25 percent since 1958. A great deal of this extra CO2 has dissolved in the oceans, where carbon levels have also increased. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create carbonic acid, and an excess of CO2 is leading to higher acidity across the world’s oceans. Despite the vastness of the sea, these pollutants are affecting marine life and ocean ecosystems, dissolving the shells of some creatures and leading to higher mercury content in some species of fish.

MYTH NO. 4 The hottest parts of the oceans are in the tropics.

If you go looking for the warmest waters around, many sources will probably point you toward the tropics. But those sites are talking about surface temperatures. The warmest waters in the sea are much deeper, and not necessarily in tropical areas. Far below the

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The line between land and sea is not really as clear as it often seems.

waves in places where the planet’s crust runs thin, fiery magma courses just beneath the ocean floor, and burning-hot water screams through underground channels like steam through an old radiator. In the water, superheated minerals mingle and bind into exotic sulfurous compounds. This brew bubbles through small gaps in the ocean floor and can emerge at over 600 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s impossible at the surface; water in your kitchen boils into steam at a little over 200 degrees. But water behaves differently at the base of the world. Its boiling point increases with pressure, so that even 600 degrees can’t induce a boil. The result is, instead, a plume of poisonous fluid so hot it practically glows.

MYTH NO. 5 Oceans are experiencing unprecedented changes.

Massive sea changes are not new. Over the past 6,000 to 18,000 years, sea levels have risen more than 300 feet, drowning shorelines that once were high and dry. Ancient seas have disappeared and been reborn: The Mediterranean, for example, dried up about 5 million years ago, but one of the planet’s major

spectacles, the Zanclean flood, refilled the entire sea in as little as two years.

Marine life, too, has vastly changed. Once, the chief predators in the sea were giant cephalopods related to squids and octopi: Some had coiled shells as wide as a human is tall. Then, 400 million years ago, sharks evolved their trademark teeth and have used them effectively ever since to avoid mass extinctions. Some of the newest major animal groups are the most spectacular: Modern baleen whales, the largest creatures ever to live on Earth, evolved just 25 million to 35 million years ago.

What sets today’s transformations apart is not their size or the ocean’s stability until now, but the culprit (human beings), the number and the rate at which these changes are taking place. Human activity is now altering the oceans at a pace that far outstrips what they have adapted to before. n Steve Palumbi is a professor of biology, director of Stanford University’s marine lab, and author with his son Anthony of “The Extreme Life of the Sea.” Anthony Palumbi is a California-based writer and author. They wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2017

24

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