The Washington Post National Weekly - May 6, 2018

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Clean sweep Our yearly survey of the things that need to be tossed PAGE 12

Politics Inside Giuliani’s surprise 4

Nation Economic trifecta ends 8

5 Myths Artificial intelligence 23

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Elect Travis

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

BRANDT Chelan County Superior Court

For J

UDGE

ENDORSED BY THESE MEMBERS OF THE CHELAN/DOUGLAS COUNTY LEGAL COMMUNITY: Chelan County Superior Court Judge TW ‘Chip’ Small (ret.)

Former Chelan County Court Commissioner Neil Fuller

Chelan County Superior Court Deputy Clerk Joyce Reisen (ret.)

Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges (ret.)

Retired Chelan County Prosecuting Attorney Gary Reisen

City of Wenatchee City Council Member Ruth Esparza

Douglas County Superior Court Judge John Hotchkiss

Douglas County Prosecuting Attorney Steve Clem

East Wenatchee City Attorney Devin Poulson

Retired Douglas County District Court Judge Judith McCauley

East Wenatchee Mayor Steve Lacy

East Wenatchee Municipal Court Judge Chancey Crowell

Douglas County Court Commissioner Jill Wise Danielle Marchant Tony Ditommaso Jeff Marchant Tracy Brandt Frank Brandt Ernest Radillo Robin Gaukroger Don Bell Bob Siderius Mike Zanol Quinten Batjer Michael Bradford Clayton Graef Jeremy Ford David Law Thomas O’Connell Sunshine Poliquin Steve Woods Ryan Feeney Krystal Frost Stephanie Sellers Steve Funderburk Kevin Forrest Justin Collier Justin Titus Arianna Cozart Jordan Miller Steve Zimmerman Robert Gower

Endorsed by retired Chelan County Superior Court Judges John Bridges and T.W. “Chip” Small

“Travis Brandt will serve Chelan County with humility and fairness. His nearly two decades of experience practicing law in Superior Court has prepared him very well for this position. He has my vote.”

— John E. Bridges, Chelan County Superior Court Judge (retired)

“Travis Brandt is my choice for Superior Court Judge. He reflects our community’s values. His integrity and intellect will benefit our court for years to come.”

— T.W. “Chip” Small, Chelan County Superior Court Judge (retired)

Andrew Melton Scott Volyn Jonathan Volyn Brandon Redal Shannon Moreau Clarke Tibbets Holly Pederson John Beuhler David Kazemba Paul Cassel Sean Esworthy Wes Hensley Scott Kane Cory M. Kane Kambra Mellergaard Earl Murdoch Richard Montoya Lee O’Brien Nicholas Yedinak Julie Anderson Thomas Overcast Joe Woolett Lorna Lewis Sarah Clifton David Visser Keith Howard Kurt Parrish Robert Sealby Jeremy Wallace

“RAISED HERE TO SERVE HERE”

www.BrandtForJudge.com Paid for by the Committee to Elect Travis Brandt for Chelan County Superior Court Judge, 330 King St. Suite 1, Wenatchee WA 98801 (509) 663-0500

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Support for probe is slipping BY

E MILY G USKIN AND S COTT C LEMENT

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shrinking majority of Americans say Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian election interference and possible links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign should continue, according to a poll released this past week.

The Monmouth University poll finds 54 percent of Americans saying the special counsel’s investigation should continue, with support down from 60 percent in March and 62 percent in July. A 43 percent minority says the investigation should end, up six points since March and 10 points since last summer.

The results, released Tuesday, mirror two other recent polls finding a dip in confidence that Mueller’s investigation is fair toward Trump, although Mueller continues to receive significantly more positive ratings than negative.

Trump has long criticized the investigation as a “witch hunt,” and Tuesday he lambasted the New York Times’ publication of questions that Mueller was said to be interested in asking him as part of the probe into Russian interference and possible attempts to obstruct the inquiry.

Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided about whether the investigation should continue, and while a majority of independents say it should go on, the Monmouth poll suggests that support has declined. Support for continuing the investigation has slipped by eight points since March among Republicans (from 26 percent to 18 percent), while 82 percent of Democrats favor continuing the investigation, little changed from March.

Perhaps most important, independents’ support for continuing the Russia investigation declined from 63 percent in March to 54

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J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry of the election is losing support among independents.

percent in the new poll, an indication that criticisms of the probe have begun to catch on beyond Trump’s Republican base.

Separately, a Marist poll from April found 45 percent saying they thought the Mueller investigation was “fair,” down from a high point of 53 percent in February but similar to the 48 percent at the end of March. A still-smaller 30 percent said Mueller’s investigation was “not fair.”

And a Quinnipiac poll released the other week found 54 percent of registered voters saying that Mueller was conducting a fair investigation, down slightly from 58 percent in March and a high of 60 percent in November, while 31 percent said it was unfair.

The latest surveys differ from polls earlier this spring that suggested support for Mueller’s investigation was steady or even rising.

The Pew Research Center’s polling found 61

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 30

percent saying they were confident that Mueller would conduct a fair investigation, up from 55 percent in January. CNN-SSRS polling found almost no change in opinion, with between 47 percent and 48 percent approving of Mueller’s handling of the investigation in four polls from December to March, while between 33 percent and 35 percent disapproved.

Besides fairness or whether the investigation should continue, a mid-April Washington Post-ABC News poll found clear majority support for Mueller investigating three substantive questions, including 69 percent who supported his investigation of possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government in its attempts to influence the 2016 election.

A somewhat smaller 64 percent supported Mueller investigating Trump’s business activities, while 58 percent favored Mueller investigating allegations that Trump’s associates paid hush money to women who said they had affairs with him. It’s worth noting there has been no indication that Mueller’s team is exploring accusations by women about Trump’s personal conduct and no confirmation that his investigation has expanded to cover Trump business activities that do not relate to Russia.

Together, the polls suggest that while more Americans continue to support than oppose Mueller’s investigation, confidence in his probe has slipped in recent weeks. Polls in the coming weeks will tell whether the results are short-lived or mark a lasting trend.

The Monmouth University poll was conducted April 26-30 among a national sample of 803 adults reached by cellular and landline phones. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. n ©The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Here are 10 things -- including sit-ups, Social Security numbers, TV and film reboots, homework and women’s fiction — that it’s time to get rid of.

Illustration by BOMBOLAND for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Inside Giuliani’s shocking revelation J OSH D AWSEY, R OBERT AND A SHLEY P ARKER

C OSTA

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e may have had a strategy, but Rudolph W. Giuliani hatched it almost entirely in secret.

The White House counsel had no idea. Neither did the White House chief of staff, nor the White House press secretary, nor the new White House lawyer overseeing its handling of the Russia investigation.

They watched, agog, as Giuliani, the president’s recently installed personal attorney, freestyled on live television Wednesday night about the president’s legal troubles and unveiled an explosive new fact: that Trump reimbursed his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen for the $130,000 paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump.

Giuliani’s attempt to defuse a ticking time bomb exposed Trump’s failure to divulge the full story about the Daniels hush money and highlighted contradictory public statements from him and White House spokesmen. One month ago, Trump told reporters that he did not know about the payment to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, or where Cohen got the money to make it.

Aides and advisers to the president — who were scrambling Thursday morning to manage the fallout of Giuliani’s interview with Sean Hannity, a Trump-friendly Fox News Channel host who also has been a Cohen client — expressed a mixture of exasperation and horror. One White House official texted a reporter a string of emoji characters in response, including a tiny container of popcorn.

A second White House official, who like most others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said of the president, “His story is obviously not consistent anymore.”

The episode was just the latest convulsion for a White House that perpetually navigates turbulence,

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump and his recently appointed lawyer secretly made a plan to reveal info on payments to Stormy Daniels, catching aides off guard lurching from one crisis to another, most of them of the president’s own making. It has become standard operating procedure for Trump and his aides to deceive the public with false statements and shifting accounts.

“It’s about time that our public officials started telling us the truth,” said one former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House. “There is nobody in America who didn’t think the president had the affair with the porn star. I doubt there’s anybody in America who didn’t think the president had Michael Cohen pay off the porn star.”

In this case, Giuliani said he was trying to solve one problem for Trump — by establishing that the payment to Daniels came from personal funds and was “funneled” through a law firm, arguing it therefore did not violate campaign finance laws.

Giuliani said in an interview with The Washington Post that he discussed the issue with Trump a few days ago and that they agreed that he would reveal details about the reimbursement.

“He was well aware that at some point when I saw the opportunity, I was going to get this over with,” Giuliani said.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, seen in 2016, said he and President Trump talked about revealing the details of the payments to Stormy Daniels and Trump’s reimbursements to attorney Michael Cohen.

Asked whether he might be fired for what he told Hannity, Giuliani replied, “No, no, no! I’m not going to get fired.” Laughing, he added: “But if I do, I do. It wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened. But I don’t think so, no.”

Tony Carbonetti, a longtime friend and adviser to Giuliani, said he was dining with the former New York mayor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Wednesday night before he went on Fox. He warned that those lampooning Giuliani are mistaken.

“If you’ve been around Rudy, there’s always a reason for it,” he

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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POLITICS said. “If you knew a narrative was coming out, wouldn’t you want to tell the story on your terms? . . . He wanted to get ahead of it.”

Outside the government, Trump’s band of informal advisers and alumni cheered Giuliani’s move.

“I loved it,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign official who also has worked for Giuliani.

“They got this news out there on their terms, and they didn’t wait around for enterprising journalists to break it. This is P.R. 101. . . .

The president deserves his own team defending him, and now finally he has it.”

‘Cleaning this mess up’ In a trio of tweets Thursday morning, Trump attempted to do some damage control, writing in a notably restrained style — complete with honorifics, although marred by one misspelling — that Cohen had received a monthly retainer that did not come from the campaign and insisted that no campaign finance laws had been violated.

Aides speculated that the tweets may have been drafted by members of the president’s legal team, noting that they did not seem to be written in Trump’s singular Twitter voice.

Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, said that the president’s “typical knee-jerk reaction to everything is deny, deny, deny” but that his lawyers have impressed upon him the importance of being truthful.

“The president has to understand that what he did in the private sector, as a mogul, celebrity and entrepreneur, where you can simply deny things in the press — when you’re under federal investigation, the FBI and Justice Department takes everything that is said publicly literally,” Nunberg said. “So I think they’re cleaning this mess up.”

The Cohen payment disclosure was not the only problematic comment from Giuliani in his wideranging interview with Hannity.

He offered a reason for Trump firing former FBI director James B. Comey — because he would not publicly state that Trump was not under FBI investigation — that differed from the one provided by the administration at the time of Comey’s firing last May. In addition, Giuliani said scrutiny from special counsel Robert

KLMNO WEEKLY

winds him up or calms him down.”

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

S. Mueller III toward Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, was inappropriate because she is “a fine lady.”

But Giuliani said it would be acceptable for Mueller to scrutinize her husband, Jared Kushner, because Kushner was “disposable,” as he jokingly put it. Both Ivanka Trump and Kushner are senior White House advisers.

Privately, some in Trump’s orbit were skeptical about the hiring of Giuliani, wondering if the combative and colorful former prosecutor who is at home sparring with reporters was the right choice to lead a white-collar defense team.

Andrew Kirtzman, a Giuliani biographer, said he did not see any “strategic sense” to Giuliani’s comments. “While he has always been bombastic, there has always been a logic to that bombast,” Kirtzman said. “I don’t see the logic here.”

But if Trump was upset with his lawyer’s performance, he did not show it. Indeed, the president was party to hatching the strategy, according to three people involved in the discussions. In recent weeks — over phone calls, dinners and private Oval Office huddles — Giuliani and Trump have talked through the thicket of legal issues facing the president beyond the Russia investigation, these people said.

Giuliani at first was reluctant to join Trump’s legal team because he preferred to offer informal ad-

vice, but the president pushed him to sign on formally because of the complexity of personal matters he was confronting, the people said.

Once on board, Giuliani spent days reading and being briefed about the many issues facing Trump, including the Cohen case and the payments made by Cohen to Daniels. Giuliani and Trump decided that it would be best to try to explain why Trump and Cohen acted as they did and clarify their business relationship, the people said.

Giuliani, in particular, viewed potential federal scrutiny of election law as an issue that Trump had to address head-on rather than dodge because he believed that it could fester in the coming months, according to one person who spoke with him last month.

This person added that Trump was prone to trust Giuliani’s position because they had bonded privately over their shared frustrations with the Justice Department, and both men wanted to run a more combative, freewheeling media campaign.

“Giuliani’s value to Trump is not just that he’s got gravitas in the room with Mueller,” said Kirtzman, author of “Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City.” “It’s not just that he is a television celebrity.

He’s a confidant. Trump needs a confidant more than ever. He hasn’t been able to find a confidant among the lawyers he hired.

The question is whether Giuliani

In a trio of tweets Thursday, President Trump wrote that Michael Cohen had received a monthly retainer that did not come from the campaign and insisted that no campaign finance laws had been violated.

Out of the loop Cohen’s attorney, Stephen M. Ryan, has been aware of Trump’s repayment for several weeks, possibly months, according to a person familiar with Cohen’s account. Cohen was averse to sharing this information publicly because he didn’t want to appear to be contradicting Trump’s denial in early April that he knew about the payment.

But Trump’s sensitivity over the Daniels matter led Giuliani to be one of the only people fully in on the plan for the former mayor to attempt to swat away the matter on Fox News, a White House official said, leaving many other aides bewildered about what could come next.

Neither White House counsel Donald McGahn nor Emmet Flood, the White House attorney recently hired to handle the Russia investigation, knew that Trump had reimbursed Cohen before Giuliani revealed it, according to a person familiar with their knowledge.

McGahn and Flood also were not informed in advance of Giuliani’s plan to disclose the repayment information in his Fox interview, nor were other senior aides in the White House. The communications and media staff run by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not book Giuliani’s appearance on Hannity’s show and were not involved in helping him strategize his talking points.

David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama, said, “It is beyond bizarre to think that one set of lawyers who are poised to defend him should hear from another of his lawyers on TV plainly material facts about his case and his own conduct. This is the reason so many lawyers apparently refused the assignment.”

Surrounded by reporters Thursday morning outside the West Wing, Sanders declined to comment beyond what Giuliani and Trump had said earlier, citing “ongoing litigation.” Later, at the daily press briefing, Sanders referred questions to Giuliani.

“I haven’t had that conversation with the president,” Sanders said, again and again. “I’d refer you back to the president’s outside counsel.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

They want the gavel, not the speaker

BY A VID W EIGEL AND P AUL K ANE

Charlotte

D

emocrats sense a growing opportunity to unseat Republicans as part of a national wave that could put the House speaker’s gavel back in their party’s hands.

There’s just one catch: Many Democratic contenders aren’t willing to say they support returning their party’s leader to power.

“I’ve said since Day One that I wouldn’t vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” said Dan McCready, 34, who is running in a North Carolina district that stretches from Charlotte’s suburbs into more rural counties. “I think we need a whole new generation of people in D.C. That’s part of why I’m running; we need some new blood.”

Democrats across the country are locked in an awkward dance in which candidates sensing a chance to win GOP-held seats are increasingly distancing themselves from the party’s longtime liberal leader from San Francisco — at the same time that the 78-year-old congresswoman is boldly holding on to power.

So far, 10 Democratic candidates have said they would oppose Pelosi’s return to the speakership, while at least another 10 have conspicuously declined to express support for her, according to interviews with several candidates and a Washington Post review of statements collected by Republicans.

They are following in the footsteps of newly elected Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb, who scored a stunning upset in March in a Republican Pennsylvania district and had said he would oppose Pelosi.

This clamor for change at the top underscores the generational tensions within the House Democratic caucus as younger lawmakers look to replace not only Pelosi but also two other septuagenarians — Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), 78, and Assistant Democratic Leader James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), 77.

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pelosi wants to lead the House if her party takes the majority. Some Democrats have other plans.

Pelosi stands as the Democratic conundrum, a prolific fundraiser and skilled politician, as well as a deeply polarizing figure used by Republicans as a club against Democrats.

The dynamic sets the stage for a potential showdown — should Democrats win the majority — between Pelosi allies, who would relish the historic moment of returning a woman to one of the most influential positions in the country, and her critics, many of whom would have won office by promising a change in leadership.

“We will win. I will run for speaker. I feel confident about it.

And my members do, too,” Pelosi told a meeting of Boston Globe reporters and editors Tuesday.

There is the question of whether Pelosi would have the votes to win the job. Unlike other leadership posts, which are selected by secret ballot in the respective caucuses, the entire House must vote for the speaker in early January.

The minority party never votes for the majority’s speakerdesignate, so it would require Pelosi to get at least 218 votes from her side of the aisle.

So, if Democrats ended up with a caucus of 235, Pelosi could afford to lose 17 votes when the speaker vote is held on the floor.

Pelosi’s strength comes from several sources, the first being her fundraising on behalf of candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Her advisers attributed 45 percent of the committee’s $34 million raised in the first quarter of 2018 to Pelosi.

But there are other, beneaththe-radar reasons Pelosi feels confident in her post.

Despite GOP claims, Pelosi is not as unpopular as she was eight years ago when she was speaker.

Back then, 58 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of Pelosi, including 41 percent who held a strongly unfavorable view.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is an experienced politician and a strong fundraiser, but she’s also a deeply polarizing figure used by Republicans as a club against Democrats.

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, just 44 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view, with those strongly disliking her down to 29 percent.

That played out in Lamb’s victory. Outside Republican groups spent more than $6 million on TV ads in southwestern Pennsylvania, most of it on commercials trying to tie Lamb to Pelosi. But the 33-year-old Democrat ran an ad making clear he would not support Pelosi.

It helped to inoculate him against the Pelosi attack line. GOP operatives now worry that other Democrats will follow Lamb’s lead and that there will be even less potency in the anti-Pelosi campaign that they have been hoping will save their majority.

Democrats are not demanding a loyalty pledge from candidates who might flip the majority their way. McCready and Manning have been added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list, denoting them as candidates who can expect party support in their primaries and the general election.

In an interview, Elissa Slotkin, a “red-to-blue” candidate in a GOP-held southwest Michigan district, said she would prefer an alternative to Pelosi.

“I think it’s clear that on both sides of the aisle, people are seeking new leadership, and I’m going to be looking for someone who best represents my district and what we care about here. And I believe that’s a new generation of leaders,” said Slotkin, a former Defense Department official running her first congressional race.

Some House Democrats are openly advising these candidates to oppose Pelosi.

“If Republicans want to do the same thing to Elissa Slotkin that they did to Conor Lamb, all Conor Lamb had to do was point to the front page of the newspaper that said ‘Conor Lamb will not vote for Nancy Pelosi.’ It’s phony. It’s played out,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), who traveled to Michigan this past week to campaign for Slotkin. n ©The Washington Post

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Hawks swoop in as Korea talks near

BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND J OHN H UDSON

A

s the top commander of the U.S. military forces in the Pacific, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. has been such an outspoken China hawk that he was reportedly subject to a gag order by the Obama administration and targeted with a smear campaign by Chinese state media.

Now, Harris is set to become a key player in the Trump administration’s attempts to craft a diplomatic deal with an even more hostile and threatening East Asia power: North Korea.

Harris is expected to be nominated to fill the long-vacant ambassadorship to South Korea, one of new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s first decisions.

The move, just weeks before President Trump is planning to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, could thrust the 61-year-old Japanese American into the weighty role of translating Trump’s unpredictable strategy to a Korean Peninsula that has been whipsawed between war threats and, more recently, talk of historic peace.

It also reflects an important dynamic in the growing diplomatic thaw between Washington and Pyongyang. Even as Trump softens his rhetoric in hopes of easing tensions with Kim, the president has assembled a team of foreign policy hawks that will be with him at the negotiating table and assume responsibility for hammering out the crucial details if the leaders announce a broad agreement to pursue a nuclear disarmament deal.

Pompeo, who last year expressed a desire for regime change in Pyongyang against long-standing U.S. policy, has taken the lead on coordinating the North Korea summit, meeting with Kim in Pyongyang over Easter weekend. National security adviser John Bolton suggested in March, a month before joining Trump’s staff, that the United States should consider a preemptive strike on the North, noting

D. MYLES CULLEN/DONALDSON COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

When he meets with North Korea’s Kim, Trump will bring a team of foreign policy hard-liners that the Kim family’s regime has acted in bad faith in diplomatic talks for 25 years.

And Harris took a hard line during an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 15, six days after Trump’s stunning announcement that he was willing to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. Harris, who at the time was not being considered for the post in Seoul, told senators that Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign had successfully brought the North to the negotiating table but added that his view of any nuclear disarmament deal would be to “distrust but verify.” He emphasized that, in his view, Kim wanted the nuclear arsenal as leverage to fulfill the dreams of his father and grandfather to unify the peninsula under his family’s control.

Asked about military options, Harris responded that, despite media reports, the military was not developing plans for a limited

“bloody nose” strike aimed at sending a warning to Pyongyang.

“I believe if we do anything along the kinetic region of the spectrum of conflict, we have to be ready to do the whole thing,” he said, meaning full-fledged military assault against Kim’s million-man army. “And we’re ready to do the whole thing if ordered by the president.”

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Foreign-policy analysts who know Harris predicted that he, Bolton and Pompeo would aim to set guardrails to protect the unpredictable Trump from being hoodwinked by empty promises from Kim. The North Korean leader has suggested he will freeze his nuclear program, but analysts have warned that Kim could easily reverse himself or conduct secret tests once the United States agrees to lift economic sanctions or remove

Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., center, seen last month with Vice President Pence at a military base in Hawaii, would join John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as hawkish members of the president’s foreign-policy team.

troops from the peninsula.

“You don’t want the president to sign away the alliance,” said Patrick Cronin, an Asia-Pacific security expert at the Center for a New American Security. “With Harry and Bolton and Pompeo, it’s unlikely to be a weak deal. Kim may reject it, but then at least Trump has done everything possible to try to reach a deal.”

It is a high-pressure spot for Harris, who has spent four decades in the Navy since graduating in 1978 from the U.S. Naval Academy and has no background in formal diplomacy. But colleagues and friends said he could be an inspired choice, given his knowledge of the region and ability to navigate incoming political fire.

“Harry is never afraid to be in the center of everything — never afraid,” said Victor Cha, a former high-ranking Asia policy official in the George W. Bush administration. Cha had been Trump’s initial choice for the Seoul posting until the White House abruptly cut him loose in January.

Foreign-policy analysts speculated that Pompeo, eager to fill the embarrassing opening in Seoul, turned to a well-respected officer with bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Harris had been in line to become ambassador to Australia until Pompeo yanked his nomination a day before his confirmation hearing to redirect him to Seoul.

In Seoul, Harris’s appointment was met with relief after the top job at the U.S. embassy sat vacant for more than 15 months. Yet his background as a commander could raise eyebrows given that there is already another four-star U.S. commander, Vincent K. Brooks, stationed in the country overseeing nearly 30,000 troops in the United States Forces Korea.

South Korea’s liberal president, Moon Jae-in, has pursued greater diplomatic engagement with the Kim regime, welcoming a delegation from the North to the Olympics in PyeongChang in February and temporarily freezing joint military exercises with the United States. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

New calls for statehood in Puerto Rico A RELIS R . H ERNÁNDEZ Jayuya, Puerto Rico BY

E

rnesto Davila Marin was in school when rebellion interrupted class. As he left the schoolhouse that October day, black smoke rose from the town center where nationalists had set Jayuya ablaze, shooting police officers and declaring the independent republic of Puerto Rico from a rooftop.

In the struggle for sovereignty from American colonial rule, Puerto Rican independence fighters staged uprisings in nearly a dozen cities that day in 1950 and later attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. They held the central mountain city for three days until U.S. bombers buzzed over the emerald peaks.

Today, talk of independence feels distant to Puerto Ricans still recovering more than seven months after Hurricane Maria.

But what Puerto Rico is to the United States has everything to do with why power restoration has been slow, why millions in federal dollars for reconstruction have yet to be disbursed and why so many felt disrespected when President Trump shot paper towels into a crowd of survivors.

The humanitarian crisis created by Hurricane Maria has added fuel to an ongoing power struggle for the island’s future: Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and his New Progressive Party advocate statehood as the solution to Puerto Rico’s second-class status. His opponents call for greater autonomy from the United States and, for some, eventual independence.

The U.S. government has shown no interest in affecting the status quo, and many Puerto Ricans view the current relationship as a relatively stable option that provides an adequate balance of sovereignty and support.

But the sluggish disaster response and dissatisfaction with the coordinated recovery efforts have aggravated the sense of abandonment and the sting of Puerto Rico’s subordinate standing with the United States, according to residents, experts and

ERIKA P. RODRÍGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sluggish recovery from Hurricane Maria adds fuel to ongoing power struggle over the island’s future island leaders.

Raising the stakes, Rosselló has refused to implement pension cuts and other austerity measures that a federal oversight board imposed on the bankrupt territory, challenging the panel’s authority over Puerto Rico.

“The relationship needs to adapt to modern times,” said Carlos “Charlie” Delgado, secretary general of the Popular Democratic Party, which supports commonwealth status but seeks greater autonomy from the United States.

“It’s unacceptable, democratically speaking, to have a foreign country control another country’s government via a board of unelected leaders. That is not a democracy.”

Puerto Rico’s political party system, which is oriented around the resolution of its colonial status, has played a role in the island’s paralysis, academics say.

In recent years, they note, those parties have done little to advance

the central cause of their existence.

“The political parties are politically and ideologically bankrupt,” said Pedro Cabán, a professor at the State University of New York in Albany. “None of them are offering a vision for the future.”

Puerto Rico’s Resident Commissioner, Jenniffer GonzálezColón, who holds a nonvoting role representing the territory in the House said she will file a bill this spring petitioning for statehood.

Yet there is no indication such a bill would pass. Legislators have said the votes to make the island a state do not exist. With 3.3 million residents before the hurricane — ranking it just below Connecticut — Puerto Rico could be a sizable force in Congress.

“Granting statehood means granting seven seats to the Democrats,” University of Connecticut professor Charles Venator Santiago said. “Statehood has been dead for decades.”

Edwin Morales, center, vice president of the Teachers Federation of Puerto Rico, speaks March 31 during a community event at the Valle Garita, a formerly abandoned building in Caguas, Puerto Rico, that has been revitalized by community organization Urbe Apie.

Christine Nieves, who studied social entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University, returned to Puerto Rico a year ago to help others open businesses and build sustainable economic development projects with minimal government involvement.

She leads an organization in the Mariana community on the island’s east side that helped feed, clothe and entertain residents after the hurricane amid the absence of water and electricity.

“The only way we end colonialism is when people feel what it means not to be colonized,” said Nieves, 29.

“Everything that we’ve experienced so far is top-down from the government or federal government. Top-down is not going to make a difference,” she said. “The question is, how do you change things from the bottom-up?”

It is a model that Alexis Massol González has been waiting to see replicated across Puerto Rico for 38 years: people taking back control from an ineffective government.

He was one of the founders of Casa Pueblo, which began as an environmentalist fight against mining in the municipality of Adjuntas and became an experiment in energy independence and economic autonomy. The organization bought a building that runs on solar panels and sustains itself through a coffee cultivation and roasting business, music school and gift shop. Its radio station continued transmitting throughout the hurricane as communications broke down islandwide.

Massol González blames colonialism for what he sees as Puerto Rico’s dependence on the federal government.

“To change our status, we need to start to change how we live,” Massol González said. “The status won’t change on its own. It will come from a people that learns to value themselves, respect themselves and look for their own alternatives apart from government dependence.”  ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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NATION

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A rare economic era comes to an end BY

D AVID J . L YNCH

F

or most of the past decade, as the U.S. economy marched through the second-longest expansion in its history, Americans enjoyed a rare trifecta: soaring stock values, cheap loans and consumer prices that rarely rose.

That favorable climate benefited everyone from those near retirement to those buying homes or just filling their gas tanks.

But suddenly, the good fortune is melting away, imperiling the props that have supported American economic confidence and incomes and intensifying pressure on President Trump to deliver the faster growth and higher wages he has promised.

Consumer prices by a key measure are rising at their fastest point in seven years, with mass consumer companies such as McDonald’s and Amazon.com increasing prices on some of their popular offerings. Mortgages and business loans are becoming more expensive. And after peaking in January, the Dow Jones industrial average is now roughly flat on the year.

The result is that Americans have to spend more on staples, pay more to borrow money to buy big-ticket items, and are seeing less growth in their investments.

These factors will probably pinch Americans particularly during spring and summer, when homebuying and driving peak.

Overall, the economy is still doing well today, and many economists don’t expect any major disruption this year. But the rise in consumer prices and interest rates — and the stagnating stock market — are seen by many as warning signs that this period of easy growth could be ending.

“You’re moving from being benign to biting. It is a fundamental shift from the world we’ve known,” said economist Diane Swonk of Grant Thornton. “I fear we’re seeding a boom-bust cycle.”

That fear, experts say, explains why the stock market has had such a difficult year.

“The markets always lead the economy,” said David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at

JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Americans have enjoyed a trifecta of a soaring stock market, cheap loans and low inflation Gluskin Sheff.

The combination of falling stock prices and rising bond yields troubled some financial market veterans. “It raises the risk of a deep and disruptive drop by share prices. A good analogy? 1987,” said John Lonski, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, referring to the stock market crash of 1987.

“This is not a favorable portent.

It’s an ominous development.”

Borrowing costs for ordinary Americans are on the way up, too.

To battle the financial crisis in 2008, the Fed pushed short-term interest rates to near zero and left them there for years. Easy money helped consumers and businesses afford new purchases and aided in the healing of the economy.

Rising interest rates will inflate borrowing costs for consumers and companies alike, adding $100 billion to annual debtservicing costs, Rosenberg said.

That is money that consumers otherwise could spend on houses,

clothes, and cars or that businesses could devote to new machinery.

But today’s rising borrowing costs will hit an economy loaded with debt, meaning people and businesses will have to spend even more on interest payments. Corporations outside the finance industry at the end of last year owed creditors more than $49 trillion.

That debt burden has grown since 2004 at a rate four times faster than the economy, according to the Federal Reserve.

Despite progress in paying off mortgage balances since the housing collapse, American households still owe more in debt than they make in disposable income. Credit card delinquency rates have begun inching up.

Interest payments (not including mortgages) now take as big a bite out of the typical American’s income as in mid-2008, when the crisis was gathering force, according to the Federal Reserve.

With interest rates headed

Investors in four of the past five weeks pulled money from mutual funds investing in domestic stocks and added to their bond funds.

higher, some experts worry that consumer borrowing no longer will be able to power the economy.

“You still needed that growth . . . to drive the meager expansion that we’ve seen,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner of Westwood Capital. “How much on the household side was that debt being increased in order to make ends meet, i.e. sustain existing levels of spending?”

Americans already must pay more for mortgages, though that is not yet influencing home-buying. Average rates on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage hit 4.5 percent last month, up from about 4 percent in January. That change would add about $88 to the monthly cost of a $300,000 mortgage, yet applications for new loans are holding steady, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Rising consumer prices have not been a significant problem for years. That may be about to change. The Commerce Department reported that prices, excluding food and energy products, rose at a 2.5 percent annual clip in the first three months of 2018.

Oil prices are nearing $70 a barrel, up roughly 50 percent since August, and Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and Chinese goods will raise costs. The boost in spending coming from the big tax cut passed in December could further push up prices.

That, in turn, may lead the Fed to more quickly move rates higher.

“The economy will run hotter than it would have because of the tax cuts and spending increases,” said economist Michael Strain of American Enterprise Institute.

“That will push the Fed to increase interest rates a little faster than they otherwise would have.”

After topping $4 per gallon in 2008, gas prices have been below $3 for more than three years. But they have been creeping higher for several months. With the nationwide average now at $2.80, filling up will cost the average household an additional $190 this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

Confronting a rise in anti-Semitism

BY G RIFF W ITTE AND L UISA B ECK

Berlin

B

ullied students. Crude rap lyrics. An ugly confrontation on an upmarket city street.

In another country — one less attuned to the horrors wrought by anti-Semitism — evidence that the scourge is once again growing might have been ignored.

But this is Germany, a nation that nearly annihilated an entire continent’s Jewish population.

And after a series of high-profile incidents, the country isn’t waiting to sound the alarm on a pattern of rising hatred toward Jews.

Recently, demonstrators have filled the streets, a first-ever national coordinator to combat anti-Semitism has taken up his post, and officials from Chancellor Angela Merkel on down have spoken out.

Germany is also doing something difficult for a country that sees itself as the open and tolerant antidote to the prejudice-driven murder machine it once was: acknowledging that the problem’s resurgence has been fueled not only by the far right, whose views have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream, but also in significant part by Muslims, including refugees.

“The nature of anti-Semitism in Germany is definitely changing,” said Sergey Lagodinsky, a member of the assembly of the Jewish community in Berlin. “We’re having a lot more violent, everyday confrontations that come through incidents with immigrants.”

That’s not an easy admission in Germany, where Merkel led the push three years ago to open the country to more than a million asylum seekers — many of them Muslims fleeing conflict. At the time, the move was widely seen, at least in part, as a grand gesture of atonement for the worst crimes of German history.

Since then, Merkel has rallied the nation around the slogan “We can do it,” brushing away suggestions that Germany will suffer for its generosity.

But she’s also been forced to concede the link between the new

CARSTEN KOALL/GETTY IMAGES

Germany is taking steps and also admitting that an influx of refugees is partly to blame for problem arrivals and creeping antiSemitism. Last month, she told an Israeli broadcaster that Germany was confronting “a new phenomenon” as refugees “bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country.”

That’s something critics have warned of for years, given that many of those who arrived in Germany came from nations where anti-Semitism is widespread, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But officials, analysts and Jewish and Muslim leaders all say Germany has been slow to recognize the risks.

“The cultural dimension that is linked with the influx was always underestimated,” said Felix Klein, who started work last month as the federal government’s point person for combating antiSemitism. “Now we have to deal with it.”

The first step, Klein said, is to understand the scale. But the data

is surprisingly limited, and what is available has been called into question.

Police statistics, for instance, show that about 90 percent of the anti-Semitic cases nationwide are believed to have been carried out by followers of the far right — traditionally the bastion of prejudice toward Jews in Germany.

But government officials and Jewish leaders doubt that figure, citing a default designation of “far right” when the perpetrator isn’t known. The government also has no reliable means of tracking anti-Semitism that falls below the level of the criminal — something Klein said he wants to change.

A survey of victims of antiSemitism commissioned last year by the German Parliament concluded that Muslims were most often identified as the perpetrators. A separate study found comparatively high levels of antiSemitic thinking among refugees

People, some wearing Jewish prayer caps, protest in Berlin against anti-Semitism.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany is confronting “a new phenomenon” as refugees “bring another form of antiSemitism into the country.”

with a Middle Eastern or North African background.

The number of reported antiSemitic incidents in Germany has remained fairly steady over the past decade, at around 1,500 every year, although researchers think the actual numbers are much higher, said Uffa Jensen, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. One recent survey found that 70 percent of Jews said they would not report an anti-Semitic incident because they feared the consequences.

Even if the overall numbers are relatively stable, the behavior behind the data has changed, said Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

“The incidents are more aggressive, more pronounced, and directly affect Jewish people with insults or attacks,” Schuster said.

Beyond the bullying, two highprofile instances of anti-Semitism have spawned outrage in recent weeks.

A German rap duo won the top honor at the country’s most prestigious music awards in April for an album that included lyrics threatening to “make another Holocaust.” Amid a backlash, the awards program was terminated.

Meanwhile, cellphone video footage emerged of an assailant shouting anti-Semitic slurs and whipping a belt against a man wearing a kippa, or Jewish prayer cap. Police arrested a 19-year-old Syrian refugee in connection with the assault, which took place in the trendy Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg.

Aiman Mazyek, the president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, emphasized that it’s only a small minority of Muslims who are taking part in anti-Semitic acts. But he said there is no doubt that some newcomers — and some who have been here far longer — have failed to integrate into a society that has put “Never Again” at its core.

“If people come here and want to integrate, they need to understand the DNA of the country,” he said. “And part of that DNA is the legacy of the Holocaust.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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WORLD

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Another Ford seeks Canadian office A LAN F REEMAN Ottawa BY

D

oug Ford is campaigning to become leader of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province — and perhaps to bring glory to the Ford name.

The family name was marred by his brother Rob Ford, the late mayor of Toronto whose political career was dogged by drunken escapades and a video of him smoking crack cocaine.

But Doug Ford’s rhetoric on the campaign trail has compelled observers to link him to another political name: President Trump.

Ford has positioned himself as the antithesis of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and as a right-of-center businessman who derides elites, whom he has described as “people who look down on the average, common folk, thinking they’re smarter and that they know better to tell us how to live our lives.”

“They have their glasses of champagne with their pinkies up in the air, looking down like they’re better than you are,” Ford, the surprise winner in a March leadership race for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, recently told a Toronto radio talk show.

With less than two months remaining until the June 7 provincial election, his party is well ahead in opinion polls and widely expected to win.

“Doug is smart in the way Trump is smart,” said John Filion, who served on Toronto’s city council with both brothers and is the author of a biography of Rob. “Doug is very calculating and, like Trump, doesn’t have any political ideology. . . . It’s this intellectual agility to come up with positions that appeal to a broad group of people even if they make no sense.”

Ford, who shares his brother’s populist appeal and combative style but keeps away from alcohol, has promised reduced taxes, lower electric power rates and an end to the 14-year rule of the Liberal Party, led by an unpopular premier, Kathleen Wynne.

LUCAS OLENIUK/TORONTO STAR

The brother of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford wants to lead Ontario — and sounds like Trump Wynne lashed out at Ford earlier last month, calling him a “bully” and likening him to Trump. “Doug Ford sounds like Donald Trump, and that’s because he is like Donald Trump,” she said. “He believes in an ugly, vicious brand of politics that traffics in smears and lies.

He’ll say anything about anyone at any time because he’s just like Trump. It’s all about him.”

Ford struck back at his opponent, calling her “desperate” during a campaign stop in Cobourg, Ontario, after hearing a tape of Wynne’s comment.

Some analysts dismiss the comparisons between Ford and Trump. Pollster Darrel Bricker of Ipsos Public Affairs says both politicians may reject elites but Ford doesn’t embrace Trump’s strident anti-immigration stance.

In fact, Ford and his brother have always attracted substantial support from Ontario’s big immigrant communities, particularly

in the Toronto suburbs.

These ethnic Canadians are “middle-class strivers buying houses with two-car garages,” Bricker said, who feel the same frustration and anger with what they see as high taxes, too much congestion and an out-of-touch government as other Ford backers. Bricker sees the election as “a referendum on Wynne and she’s losing.”

Ipsos’s latest poll, published on April 10, shows Ford’s Conservatives with 40 percent of decided voters over the left-of-center New Democratic Party with 28 percent and the ruling Liberals in third place with 27 percent.

Voters “are taking the biggest hand grenade they can throw and they’re pulling the pin,” Bricker said. “The day after, they don’t care what happens.”

Over the past few weeks, Ford’s campaign has crisscrossed Ontario, hitting on several hot-button

Doug Ford, seen in March, will be on the ballot for June’s provincial election in Ontario. He has positioned himself as the antithesis of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and as a right-of-center businessman who derides elites.

issues. At a rally last month, he took the microphone before 400 people in a suburban sports complex and told supporters, “The days of gouging taxpayers are done.”

Ford got some of the biggest rounds of applause when he attacked plans for a carbon tax, which Ontario has agreed to implement in conjunction with Trudeau’s government. Just the mention of Trudeau led to jeering.

While promising to cut taxes, reduce the provincial debt and cut waiting times in the provincial health-care system, Ford didn’t say how he would pay for it all other than by eliminating wasteful spending.

The Fords grew up in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, where their father built a thriving printing and label manufacturing business and was a onetime provincial legislator. But despite their privileged background, family members struggled with substance abuse and had several run-ins with the law.

Rob, considered shyer and less self-assured than the supremely confident Doug, was the first of the Ford brothers to enter municipal politics. He developed a loyal following, dubbed Ford Nation, among lower- and middle-class voters in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

Filion said the Fords appeal to the same segment of the electorate as Trump and other populists: “It’s about all the angry, alienated, disenfranchised people out there, which makes up one-third of the population wherever you are.”

But Ford needs to attract enough swing voters to get about 40 percent of the vote if the Conservatives are to win a majority in the provincial legislature, said pollster Lorne Bozinoff of Forum Research.

Despite Ford’s commanding lead, he still attracts high disapproval ratings. “He’s a polarizing figure,” Bozinoff said. “I think this election is going to have a lot of twists and turns before it’s over.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BOMBOLAND FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

We asked these 10 people what should be sent to the dustbin of history. Here are this year’s spring cleaning targets.

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Sit-ups

E

ach time I commanded a unit during my years in the Army (except in war zones), I ran competitions to promote excellence in physical fitness, and buddy-held sit-ups — with your fingers behind your head and your feet under a friend or a heavy object — were part of the program. The competitions also typically included a two-to-four-mile run, pull-ups, dips, push-ups and various other exercises. I participated in dozens of these competitions myself and practiced for them thousands of times: Leaders need to lead by example, after all. With decades of practice, I frequently held the sit-up record, even in units with thousands of soldiers. My personal best was 143 sit-ups in two minutes.

For some reason, I never associated — or refused to associate — the lower-back and neck pain that I often experienced during weeks of multiple competitions with the performance of sit-ups. But as research made the toll sit-ups take increasingly clear, I finally ended my denial when I was a three-star commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. There, we replaced sit-ups with the “eagle ab” (named for the “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne),

by David Petraeus

a very tough test of stomach, core and arm muscles that involves hanging fully extended from a pull-up bar with hands facing away,

curling your body up to touch your shoelaces to the bar and then returning to a dead-hang position. Another challenging option was the “devil ab” (named for the Devils in Baggy Pants, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne): Lie on your back with your legs extended, your feet several inches off the ground and fingertips touching gently behind your ears. Then bring your knees up while your upper body curls (not as in a crunch, but with the body balanced with knees bent and feet still a few inches off the ground) before returning to the starting position.

These two exercises, and others, can strengthen your core and abs without the strain on the neck and lower back of buddyheld sit-ups. It is time to sweep buddy-held sit-ups into the ash heap of physical fitness. n Petraeus finished his U.S. Army career with six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of which were in combat. After he retired, he served as director of the CIA. He is now a partner at KKR, a global investment firm; a Judge Widney professor at the University of Southern California; and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Replay review

I

t’s deep into the second half of a critical, win-or-go-home game, which is the only kind there is in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Texas A&M is hoping to knock off the favored North Carolina Tar Heels. At question is the relative flagrancy of a foul committed. Should the punishment be one foul shot or two? Scrutinizing this heavy matter are the game’s referees, huddled by the sideline, peering into a TV monitor. The process goes on for nearly four minutes. Every breath in the arena is bated, or would be bated, but for one fact: The Aggies are ahead, 73-53. Who cares what the call is? The game is over.

Of the 1,312 calls that were reviewed via video replay in Major League Baseball games last year, the site MLB Replay Stats reports that 47.4 percent were overturned.

The National Football League, according to the website Football Zebras, posted a similar video replay reversal rate, 45.3 percent.

Some of the reversals were defensible, others inexplicable.

But what is the cost of “getting the call

by Mike Pesca

right”? Instant-replay review and the way it’s conducted have turned basketball and football into slogs. The promise of sports to deliver a just result is so great that we make too many excuses for the fact that, as a practical matter, replay reviews hardly ever add to the entertainment product. They are the new static in a sports broadcast, the enemy of compelling TV and great athletic feats.

The NCAA women’s final ended on a shot

by Arike Ogunbowale to win the championship for Notre Dame. But for minutes, Notre Dame’s celebration was suppressed so the video could be rewound and picked over, all to determine that 0.1 second was left on the game clock: no time to make a shot that could have tied the contest, but plenty of time to dampen the emotion and persuade TV viewers to change the channel. n Pesca is the host of the Slate podcast “The Gist” and the editor of the forthcoming book “Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History.”

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

Reboots

‘Colorblind society’

by Angela Nissel

by Theodore R. Johnson

Social Security numbers

by Daniel Castro Experts routinely warn people not to share their Social Security numbers. Yet whether applying for a loan, visiting a doctor or renting an apartment, consumers must frequently turn over this sensitive information to help organizations authenticate their identity. These everyday requests lead to stockpiles of Social Security numbers in insecure databases — rich targets for hackers like the ones who stole 148 million profiles in last year’s Equifax breach. Identity thieves buy the data and use it to fraudulently obtain tax refunds, take out loans and open credit card accounts.

The best way to end this would be for Congress to ban the use of Social Security numbers to identify people. If these numbers couldn’t be used to commit financial crimes, that would lower the stakes of many data breaches.

Instead, Congress should expand the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, an initiative to create a secure electronic ID system that individuals could use for government and commercial applications. It could take the form of physical cards or digital certificates installed in mobile apps, which people could use to prove their identity to online services — such as to sign legal documents or open bank accounts.

Unlike past proposals for a national ID, these electronic IDs would be voluntary. And unlike Social Security numbers, this system would be designed to withstand today’s cyberthreats and unlock new opportunities for digital commerce. For example, using these IDs would require a security token, such as a physical smart card, and a password or biometric, such as a fingerprint — making fraud significantly more difficult.

Let’s put Social Security numbers in a lockbox and throw away the key. n Castro is vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and director of its Center for Data Innovation.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a world where his children wouldn’t be “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he was asking Americans to not let differences affect how they treat one another — not to pretend differences don’t exist. Somehow, his wish became a mantra that we should have a “colorblind” society.

Hardly a conversation on race occurs today without someone claiming they don’t see color. Politicians seek raceneutral fixes to race-specific challenges like racial economic inequality — during his presidential run, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was upbraided by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates over his opposition to reparations.

The irony: We’re a nation that exalts hard work, but when it comes to addressing racial inequality, we’re lazy. One study found that minorities in the United States are segregated to a greater degree than in similar European countries. Black Americans fall below the national median in nearly every socioeconomic indicator: employment, wealth, education level, health outcomes. Latinos, too, fall below the median and remain a scapegoat for the cultural anxieties shaping intolerant immigration policies. Asian Americans confront a double-edged “model minority” stereotype.

Since the causes of racial inequality are color-conscious, the remedies must be, as well. To fulfill the nation’s promise, we have to see color and see each other as equally American. Only then can we dismantle the structural barriers preventing the United States from living its creed. n Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

‘Millennials killed . . .’

by Maura Judkis I did it, Officer. I killed them all. Golf was the first to go. It just seemed so stodgy and slow. No one born after 1982 was going to miss it. Next came bars of soap, which had outlived their usefulness — liquid soap is just so much easier, don’t you think? I killed department stores, too, because I didn’t like the format and presentation of the merchandise, and besides, I’d rather get my jeans from a stand-alone store of a brand I love. And I killed “breastaurants,” like Hooters, but we can all agree they had it coming.

I didn’t act alone. All the other millennials were my accomplices. Usually we didn’t even plan to kill something — it just happened, and then we read about it later in a hyperbolic news story. Nylon magazine explained “How Millennials Killed J. Crew,” while Fortune described how “Millennials Are Killing Lunch.” We killed traditional gyms by neglect, because we went to studio classes like Barre more often. We killed cereal because a granola bar is more portable. We killed fabric softener and dinner dates and, somehow, doorbells.

It’s not like we’re the only ones with blood on our hands: Previous generations killed the railroad industry, diners and, ahem, the environment.

But one murder for which we millennials would have no remorse is killing the phrase “Millennials killed ___.” We will dispatch it with blunt sarcasm and memes. Put that phrase in a headline now, and see how mercilessly you’re mocked on Twitter for your lazy generalizations about this generation.

Yes, a lack of interest from young people helps explain why these products and industries are struggling. But maybe it’s because they haven’t changed with the times. Maybe we’re just a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it’s justifiable homicide. n Judkis is a reporter for The Washington Post covering culture, food and the arts.

The Hollywood reboot has been remixed. Rehashing old hits with fresh faces is no longer enough: Audiences demand diversity, so studios now repackage women, people of color and other marginalized actors into roles previously portrayed only by straight, white men. “Yes! Finally! Representation!” we of the neglected classes cheer.

Eh. Let’s not be so grateful for handme-downs.

As a black female television writer, I think it’s fantastic for little girls to see that they, too, can grow up to be proton-packcarrying Ghostbusters or thieves and con women, as in the upcoming all-female “Ocean’s 11” reboot. But these secondhand reboot roles often seem like awkward attempts to put a bandage on Hollywood’s very real problem of inclusion.

And sometimes, these reboots are more than just ham-handed efforts to toss some diversity into a new moneymaking franchise. Take the “Roseanne” reboot. Why is it “important,” as Roseanne Barr says, that D.J. now have a black daughter because as a child he didn’t want to kiss a black girl? Are black TV children a reward for past prejudiced behavior? My wish for the black actress playing Roseanne’s granddaughter is that, when she’s old enough to choose her own roles, she’ll have more pickings than an obvious diversity add-on in a show that originally would have considered her only as “girl D.J. doesn’t want to kiss.”

Throwing the underserved a few rehashed roles when the vast majority of television shows and films are still helmed by the overserved? That’s not empowerment. That’s cheap window dressing over ugly systemic exclusion.

Let’s get rid of “Drop a Random Character of Color In” and “The Minority Version Of” reboots. Instead, Hollywood should aim for true empowerment: letting women, people of color, the disabled and other overlooked creatives craft their own narratives. n Nissel is an author and a writer on TBS’s “The Last O.G.”

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

15

COVER STORY

Homework

Open offices

by Lindsey Kaufman My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Granberry, sat her students around a big communal table where we could all see one another and be supervised. There was yelling, commotion and general childlike chaos. The same things happen in an open office — only we’re grown-up professionals with deadlines, personal lives and a basic human need for some privacy.

Adults are not immune to distractions; many of us welcome them. So the open space may reduce overhead — 70 percent of U.S. businesses use these kinds of workspaces — but it crushes performance. Research has shown that distractions in the communal corral cut productivity by 15 to 28 percent. Plus, sharing a space makes us sick, just like the kindergarten Petri dish: Studies show we’re twice as likely to get ill, leading to more absences and less work.

When my ad agency moved from a cubicle/shared-private design to an open concept, I immediately felt an effect on my work. I could hardly get anything done during business hours as people stopped by with questions (they used to email) and lured each other into boisterous debates about which character might get offed on “The Walking Dead.”

Along with the cost savings, the Csuite loves to proclaim that open spaces promote camaraderie. But my rapport with co-workers was fantastic before we relocated to the great wall-less wonder.

A main complaint many workers cite about such spaces is too much noise, which also elevates stress levels. Instead of joining group discussions, some employees opt for headphone-huddles to thwart the clamor and get work done.

I’m here to report that headphones don’t work. I bought an obnoxious blue pair to signal to colleagues: “Do not disturb.” Guess what? They disturbed.

After all, they could still see me. n Kaufman is a creative director and freelance writer.

Bayard is a novelist and book reviewer.

WEEKLY

Investment clothing

by Louis Bayard Early in the seventh grade, my son, for reasons never voiced, waged a strike against homework. Neither stick nor carrot could shake his resolve, and much of what came to pass fell in the realm of the expected: emails from teachers, meetings with administrators, a procession of frustrated tutors. The unexpected part was that, after a few months, I began to see his point. “Why does he need to do all this stuff?” I found myself asking anyone who would listen. “Why does anyone?”

Research has repeatedly shown that students who do homework perform no better than students who don’t. Even at the high school level, a significant 2012 study found, the amount of time spent on homework has zero impact on grades (which means that even the teachers who assign it don’t give it weight) and, at best, a teensy effect on standardized math and science test scores. As Alfie Kohn, author of “The Homework Myth,” wrote: “The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.”

Perhaps some homework is “good” — reading a novel, say, before a class discussion — but so much more is a waste of time: the literary dioramas, the macaroni Colosseums, the chemistry crosswords, the spring break packets. Perhaps homework prepares a child for life — if that preparation is mainly learning to grit your teeth and perform pointless tasks, which is a skill we have all our days to master. Freed from homework, what might kids do? I don’t know, stare into their phones? Play “Far Cry 5”? Braid each other’s hair? Nothing at all? The point is that kids deserve the same license to unwind that adults do. And parents deserve to be liberated from their uncompensated jobs as project managers. And teachers deserve to be liberated from their endless rounds of grading. When it comes down to it, the only reason we’re still assigning homework is because we always have. n

KLMNO

by Kaarin Vembar

Women’s fiction

by Jennifer Weiner A few years back, a Wikipedia reader discovered that the site’s editors were systematically removing female writers from the “American novelists” page and placing them on a new list called “American women novelists.” There was no corresponding list for “American male novelists.” A male writer is just a writer, not a “man writer”; his work is not “men’s fiction.” Male is the default setting. Women remain the exception, the other, sequestered in a room of our own.

“Women’s fiction” has been a catchall term for years, an ever-expanding tent big enough to cover anything written for women or by a woman, or consumed primarily by women. It’s Jodi Picoult and Tayari Jones. It’s light-as-souffle Sophie Kinsella. It’s Roxane Gay, deep-diving into issues of weight and sex and selfesteem. It’s romance (of course). It’s every book a woman ever wrote about a marriage or a family; every book ever to bear an Oprah’s Book Club sticker; every book with headless female bodies on pastelcolored covers. It’s also every book read by a female audience, which means that Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, Will Self and Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Cunningham and Stephen King all write women’s fiction.

The label “women’s lit” is far from neutral. Some critics use the term to dismiss any book that smacks of sentimentality or to cut down any author who has become too popular with the wrong kind of readers. Male writers have traditionally had it both ways, taking on the topics of “women’s fiction” — marriage and family, domesticity and disappointment — while evading the label.

If the appellation stands for everything that’s read by women or written by women, then it means nothing at all.

Let’s toss it and call women’s works what they should have been called all along: books. n Weiner is the best-selling author of 12 novels and, most recently, the essay collection “Hungry Heart.”

Once upon a time, you could go to a department store — say, Macy’s, Lord & Taylor or Bloomingdale’s — and buy a piece of quality clothing. These stores, and other brands, offered investment pieces: a little black dress, a statement bag, a luxury watch. Having these timeless pieces in our closets would make our lives effortless and chic. It was a given that the premium price tag meant the clothing was exceptional.

I worked as a personal stylist for almost a decade, teaching clients how to shop, identify their personal style and build a wardrobe. Over the years, I started to notice a decline in the quality of clothing. The tipping point came, though, when I handed a client a Diane von Furstenberg dress to try on. The style was gorgeous, the color perfect, but when I turned the dress inside out, I saw uneven, sloppy stitching. Stitching is a clue to quality and can give a buyer a sense of how a garment will hold up over time. Seeing poor stitching in a brand known for quality cut deep.

The problem isn’t that well-made garments don’t exist anymore. The problem is that quality is so inconsistent, even within a brand. A sped-up fashion calendar, globe-hopping manufacturing to meet production schedules and fashion houses playing musical chairs with their leadership have wreaked havoc on quality and led to a shopping environment that leaves consumers bewildered.

Add that to sartorially relaxed work environments, and chasing after those investment pieces seems more and more like a charade. There’s no quick fix when it comes to building a perfect wardrobe — not even throwing a ton of cash at it. My advice? Do the best with the budget you have, buy for your actual life vs. one that’s imaginary, and always turn your clothes inside out to look at the stitching. n Vembar is a fashion and retail reporter and cohost of the podcast “Pop Fashion.”

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ENTERTAINMENT

Theaters grapple with filling seats BY

S TEVEN Z EITCHIK

L

AS VEGAS — The owners of America’s movie theaters are having a few good months, with February’s “Black Panther” an all-time box-office winner and the recent “Avengers: Infinity War” enjoying the biggest weekend opening ever — $250 million.

But that encouraging news conceals a more disruptive set of forces that threatens to undermine theaters’ conservative — and decades old — business model.

The main reason for chaos: a Netflix-style disruption from a fast-growing movie-theater subscription service, MoviePass, that its executives say is a solution but many theater owners see as undermining the industry’s future.

The debate over the service offers a window into how a longstanding industry weighs how radically to change its business strategy in the hope of long-term success in the digital economy.

Digital entertainment options are causing more people to stay at home, and the Motion Picture Association of America reported that Americans for the first time last year spent more on streaming entertainment than movie tickets. At the same time, the industry group reported that ticket sales fell to a 22-year low last year.

At CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners held here in April, much of the convention-floor talk centered on incremental changes such as better screens, improved food and seats that recline, the last of which has become a popular go-to.

The idea with all of these tweaks, which have drawn people to theaters even as they have sometimes increased sticker shock, is to give consumers added incentive to tear themselves away from that “Stranger Things” binge-watch.

But a more radical solution has come in the form of MoviePass.

With the service, people pay $10 a month to MoviePass to see either four or an unlimited number of movies, depending on when they signed up. The company then pays

PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Movie theaters add new features to get viewers and debate effects of MoviePass subscriptions the full cost of each ticket to the theater.

MoviePass has attracted nearly 2 million new subscribers over the last year. But as its executives claim to be sending scores of new customers to theaters, MoviePass has prompted worries in the industry about a devaluation of the movie ticket and a monopoly on customer data.

“We’re a big part of theaters’ revenue and very good for their business,” Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson, said in an interview. “It’s too bad they don’t see it that way.”

As they stood outside a theater after a Warner Bros. presentation, two independent-theater owners hashed out the question that’s been at the top of everyone’s mind.

“I like that someone else is advertising to customers and then paying for their tickets,” said Randall Hester, the owner of Hometown Cinemas in Austin.

“But they’re making it seem like the movie ticket isn’t worth anything,” said Amy Tocchini, who owns Santa Rosa Cinemas in Northern California.

“And what happens if they go out of business?” she added.

“What customer will be willing to pay full price then?”

The conversation is a microcosm of the debate among theater owners. Last summer, MoviePass slashed its price to $10 a month, betting that it would attract many new casual consumers — people who’ll pay for the service monthly but then barely use it, like a gym membership.

The move certainly attracted consumers: Farnsworth estimates that MoviePass will reach 5 million subscribers by the end of the year. Whether they’re casual is another matter. MoviePass says only 12 percent are frequent users and that many of the remaining 88 percent don’t go to the theater often enough to cost MoviePass

Movie theaters are adding new features, such as 4DX experiences, to encourage viewers to watch movies there instead of at home. Millions of people have also signed up for the MoviePass subscription service, though theaters are divided over whether it will ultimately be good or bad for the industry.

much money.

But four monthly tickets still cost MoviePass far more than they receive from a given subscriber.

The average price for a movie ticket is about $9 nationwide and can easily reach $15 in major cities.

Many theater owners shake their heads at the model, wondering about the long-term health of a company that needs to attract people passionate enough about movies to buy a monthly subscription but too lazy to take much advantage of it.

A review of a prospectus by the website Business Insider and a University of Michigan professor found that the company is losing $20 million a month. Helios and Matheson’s stock has dropped from a high of nearly $33 in October to $2.50 near the end of April.

In the meantime, few theater executives seem certain about what to do in the face of MoviePass’s disruption. They veer between embracing it, fighting it and co-opting it.

Theater owners also worry about a scenario in which MoviePass controls so many customers it can make huge demands for revenue-sharing and essentially hold the theater owners hostage.

Thanks to franchises like Star Wars and the upstart phenomenon “It,” domestic box office in 2017 topped $11 billion for the third straight year; before 2015 it had never reached that plateau.

Box office may have remained stable over the past several years, but that’s mainly due to higher prices. The number of tickets sold, known as admissions, actually dropped 6 percent in 2017, to 1.24 billion, according to the MPAA, the lowest in more than two decades. Admissions have dipped 9 percent over the past five years.

At stake is both an industry and the bedrock American tradition of leaving one’s home to spend two hours crying and laughing in the company of strangers.

“You have a 100-year-old business, a very mature business, and it’s going to change,” said Paul Yanover, president of movie website Fandango. “It’s just that no one knows how.” n ©The Washington Post

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TRENDS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Farmers reap less of food spending BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

F

or every dollar consumers spend on food, only 7.8 cents goes to farmers — a record low that reflects shifts in how Americans eat, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Where once consumers cooked most of their meals at home, they’re now buying just as many at cafes and restaurants. And while shoppers were once content to husk their own corn and slice their own apples, they now buy those foods — and thousands of others — pre-husked, pre-sliced and otherwise processed.

Economists say those trends, coupled with low commodity prices, caused farmers’ share of consumer food spending to fall 1.2 cents in 2016 (the latest year for which data is available), reaching the lowest point, adjusted for inflation, since the USDA began the measure in 1993.

While falling share doesn’t hurt farmers, necessarily, it does expose the long-term, macro trends that shape the supply and cost of food.

“This measure basically asks, ‘What value was added at each stage of the process?’” said Patrick Canning, a senior economist at the USDA. “Long-term, we definitely see the farm share trending down over several decades.”

Even a simple food, like an ear of corn, takes a long journey to get to consumers’ plates.

Before that corn is planted, farmers buy seeds, fertilizers and farm equipment to get it in the ground. Once the corn is grown, it must be picked, packed, sorted, stored and shipped to grocery stores and restaurants — and each of those steps incurs labor and logistical costs.

The USDA’s food dollar series, which tracks average annual consumer expenditures in retail food stores and restaurants, attempts to break down which steps cost the most, relative to the final value of food.

In each of the past four years, farmers’ share has dropped sharply. The relative importance of

ANTHONY WAHL/JANESVILLE GAZETTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Growers’ share is at a new low, as consumers spend more on restaurants or ready-to-eat items farms, agribusinesses (such as seed and fertilizer suppliers), packagers and processors have also fallen slightly since 1993. In 2016, agribusiness saw two cents of every food dollar, according to the USDA. Canning cautions that it’s difficult to tease out individual causes.

Higher transportation costs, which impact many crops, might have a lesser impact on produce from California, frequently consumed closer to the farm.

In general, however, economists agree that a recent dip in commodity prices, driven by a surplus of corn, soybeans and milk, has pushed the farmers’ share down in the short-term. There has also been a separate, long-term erosion of that share over the second half of the last century, thanks to growing consumer demand for convenient, ready-to-eat foods.

According to the USDA, just over half of all consumer food dollars are spent at restaurants,

cafes and other food service places, compared with 44.3 percent in 1994. Farmers receive a smaller share of away-from-home “food dollars” — roughly 2.4 cents, on average — because the price of restaurant meals includes additional preparation, service and marketing.

“That was the other shoe to drop,” said John Newton, the director of market intelligence at the American Farm Bureau Federation. “The on-the-go consumer leads to farmers getting a smaller share of the food total.”

On top of that, over the past decades, Americans have also embraced an incredible range of processed and prepared foods, from frozen pizzas and rotisserie chickens to meal-replacement bars, meal kits and riced vegetables.

That trend is likely to accelerate, the USDA predicts, because millennials buy proportionally more prepared foods than past generations.

Contract farmer Bob Dorr and nephew Chad Bergsbaken plant corn in Avalon, Wis., last month. As consumers pay more for food, many farmers are failing to capture that “added value.”

While Canning has not studied the long-term effects of processed foods on farmers’ share of food spending, he said he suspects it represents a significant “structural change.” He points to the popularity of pre-husked, shrinkwrapped corn, which costs three to four times the price of corn consumers shuck themselves.

Farmers get only 16 to 17 cents of each dollar spent on that corn.

They might get 60 cents of the old-fashioned version.

The farmers’ share falls even more dramatically for more processed products: Farmers average five cents on a five-dollar box of cornflakes, according to estimates by the National Farmers Union.

“At some point, even for food at home, you started to get more and more processing of food postharvest,” Canning said. That processing adds to the final retail cost of food, he said, but that money goes to food manufacturers — it doesn’t trickle down to the farm level.

None of this hurts farmers, per se. But it does mean that, as consumers pay more for food, many farmers are failing to capture that “added value” themselves. It’s an issue that has long troubled Stewart Smith, a Maine farmer who previously served as a senior economist at the USDA and on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

Smith argues that, in a food system where farmers and consumers are separated by so many middlemen, farmers will never gain a bigger piece of the pie — even if the pie itself is growing.

There are too many steps in the industrial food supply chain, he said, where large processors, retailers and restaurant chains can pad their margins.

Instead, he has advocated for alternative systems — such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture and regional sourcing — that move the supply chain back toward the farm.

“Alternative food systems tend to keep a larger share of consumer expenditure in the farming sector,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

A history of what drives military decisions N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

G ORDON M . G OLDSTEIN

S ON GRAND STRATEGY

By John Lewis Gaddis Penguin Press.

368 pp. $26

oon after the collapse of Saigon during the grinding conclusion of the Vietnam War, “each officer assigned to the United States Naval War College for the 1975-76 academic year received a puzzling package in the mail,” recalls Yale University professor John Lewis Gaddis. “Inside was a thick paperback with instructions to read it — all of it — before arrival in Newport.” The book was Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” about the 5th-century B.C. geopolitical and military contest between Athens and Sparta, which through the centuries has remained an essential work of international relations theory. Adm. Stansfield Turner, a future director of the CIA, “was determined that we would cover Vietnam . . . even if we had to get there by a 2,500-year detour,” explains Gaddis, who was recruited

by Turner to teach a seminar in the academic discipline known as grand strategy. “History of the Peloponnesian War” served as a prism for weeks of intense discussion about America’s disastrous entrapment in Vietnam.

Decades later, Gaddis continues to lecture on the theme of grand strategy, which he defines as the “alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities” of states and their leaders. One of the world’s preeminent diplomatic historians, Gaddis has collected his reflections and musings in a remarkably erudite volume titled “On Grand Strategy,” which by the author’s own admission is an “informal, impressionistic, and wholly idiosyncratic” treatment of strategy and world history.

Gaddis renders nuanced verdicts on an eclectic cohort of thinkers, writers, monarchs and conquerors, including Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Cicero, the Roman Empire of Mark Antony and Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, the Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Throughout, Gaddis is cheerfully

HORST FAAS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. helicopters aid a South Vietnamese attack in 1965. In both ancient Athens and Vietnam, concerns about credibility helped fuel conflict, John Lewis Gaddis writes in his latest book.

candid in clarifying his purpose.

He declares that Augustine’s “City of God” is “a loose, baggy literary leviathan — a Moby Dick of theology — in which cycles and epicycles, angels and demons, myths and histories jostle one another in no particular order. Making it a manual for strategy, much less for salvation, is devilishly difficult.” Abraham Lincoln, in contrast, captures the ideal of deep strategic insight fused with moral resolve and determination. “He read voraciously, remembered pragmatically, and applied lessons ingeniously.” Lincoln realized that civil war, as bloody and awful as it would be, “might also permit the American state, tainted by slavery, to save its soul.”

Queen Elizabeth’s challenge and ultimate success in the 16th century to consolidate her reign provides further instruction. Gaddis portrays her as a resourceful, agile strategist: “Relishing opposites, the queen was a constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination — a requirement for pivoting — never

to be pinned down.” Elizabeth was utilitarian and ruthless. “In 1573 she made Sir Francis Walsingham her secretary of state, with orders to do whatever necessary . . . to guard queen and country.” Elizabeth empowered Walsingham to employ espionage to protect the throne. “Using bribery, theft, entrapment, blackmail, and torture, he built a network of informants stretching across Europe.”

While Elizabeth was cunning and disciplined, Napoleon was brilliant but compromised by grandiosity. Hoping to shock Czar Alexander into a peace settlement, the French emperor invaded Moscow in June 1812, finding it abandoned and accomplishing nothing of strategic value. The 600,000 French soldiers who stormed Russia’s capital were doomed. By December, Napoleon’s army was reduced to 90,000. “This rate of attrition,” Gaddis observes, “couldn’t help but revive a question asked of the Persians in Greece, the Athenians in Sicily, the Romans in the Teutoburg forest, the Spanish in the English Channel, and the British in America:

what were they thinking?”

Gaddis defines a historical lesson to be extracted from such disasters. “Overstretch — the enfeeblement that comes with confusing ends and means — allows enemies to apply leverage: small maneuvers that have big consequences.”

These examples of misapplied strategic ambition and miscalculated military intervention are the most illuminating in the author’s elegantly composed study. They bind ancient and modern history to provide practical guidance to the contemporary strategist.

Thucydides, regarded as the original progenitor of the school of political realism, famously observed that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” But as his history teaches us, the strong are not necessarily wise. n Goldstein is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Thriller is best when it’s bonkers

A child who could never mention Dad

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

J

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

ake Tapper, the tenacious anchor of CNN, has written a novel about corruption in Washington. Today’s news doesn’t leave much room for fiction about our government’s debauchery, but Tapper still heaps plenty of scorn on the king of chaos: “He’s impossible to ignore.

He’s become this . . . planet . . . blocking the sun. And whatever points he makes that have validity are blotted out by his indecency and his lies and his predilection to smear.”

I’m not sure whom you’re thinking of, but that’s Tapper’s description of Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. senator from Wisconsin who fueled the flames of communist paranoia in the 1950s. McCarthy is the dark lord of “The Hellfire Club,” Tapper’s debut political thriller.

The novel opens in 1954 with an echo of the Chappaquiddick incident reset in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park. A handsome new congressman named Charlie Marder wakes up from a drunken stupor after a car accident. The body of a young woman lies nearby in a ditch. Before he can figure out what happened, a quick-thinking lobbyist pulls up, burns the evidence and whisks Charlie away.

His family, his career, his life have been saved — but at what cost?

As openings go, this is terrific.

But no sooner does Charlie climb out of that ditch than this novel careens into another one and stays there, spinning its wheels for 150 pages of leaden backstory before we finally arrive again at that fateful morning crash.

Perhaps all this exposition stems from the good journalist’s determination to provide context, but the whole enterprise labors under a heavy burden of explanation, accentuated by the novel’s flat, irony-free prose.

But there is actually a thriller gestating in this husk of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Tapper’s 33-year-old protagonist, Charlie, is a World War II hero as

attractive and flavor-free as a genetically engineered tomato.

“You’re good,” his father tells him. “And even more than that, you believe in goodness.”

Nothing like a few months in Washington to test that mettle.

Charlie barely finds his seat on the House floor before he crosses a powerful committee chairman and gets humiliated. He quickly learns that McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn aren’t the only power-hungry creeps slithering around Washington. There’s a shadowy network of secret societies where toxic information is swapped and important deals are cut. One of those nefarious groups may be a descendant of the Hellfire Club that Ben Franklin visited in London before the American Revolution. Its members will stop at nothing — not even murder — to secure their aims.

Once all this cloak-and-dagger is laid out, “The Hellfire Club” finally lurches into the crazy Dan Brownish adventure it was meant to be. Naturally, there are deathbed statements to ponder, enigmatic codes to decipher and shocking secrets to unearth in the bowels of the Library of Congress, where all the most shocking secrets are kept. Soon, Charlie realizes that he’s not just trying to save his own skin, he’s fighting to save possibly millions of Americans.

“The Hellfire Club” is most enjoyable when it’s most groanworthy. The gun-toting thugs chuckle like Batman villains. In Charlie’s most valiant scene, he picks up his wife and the horse she rode in on!

And did I mention that Charlie has an unusually acute sense of smell? Possibly the least sexy superpower ever. Throughout the novel, he identifies people’s perfumes and colognes as if it’s some kind of nasal parlor trick. By the end of “The Hellfire Club,” you can be sure he’ll sniff out a rat. n Charles is editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

I THE HELLFIRE CLUB

By Jake Tapper Little, Brown.

352 pp. $27

NO WAY HOME A Memoir of Life on the Run

By Tyler Wetherall St. Martin’s.

305 pp. $26.99

l

REVIEWED BY

A NNE B OYD R IOUX

f family secrets are the stuff memoirs are made of, it’s no wonder the genre is flourishing. Nearly every family has them, and rare is the family that encourages its members to explore the dark corners of its past or present. Tyler Wetherall’s was no exception, but in her case, words had a particular power that necessitated silence.

It is a small miracle that Wetherall has finally broken that silence in her debut memoir, “No Way Home,” having grown up under the constant admonition to never mention her father to anyone. Even after the danger has long passed, she is terrified at the imagined consequences of committing words to the page. She curls up in fear one day and frantically calls her father to make sure once again that her parents won’t go to prison if she tells their story.

Yes, her father tells her, it’s okay to talk now. And more than that, he wants her to, hoping that something good can come out of all they have been through. And indeed it has, for Wetherall has written a luminous memoir that no one who reads it will soon forget.

The book’s two parts, “Before” and “After,” not only balance the book but almost split it into two.

“Before” has the feeling of a thriller told from the point of view of innocence. It’s an arresting, absorbing read as we come to know Tyler the child, the youngest in her family and, it would seem, the most attuned to the unspoken and unspeakable. She is swept along from home to home, mostly within England, inured to the routine abandonment of things and clandestine trips to remote phone booths to talk to her father, who is on the run across the continent.

Men in black suits, driving black cars, show up at her home and turn it upside down in search of clues to her father’s whereabouts.

In this part of the book, Tyler is aware only that her father has had to flee England for legal reasons.

Her mother will tell her and her

sister only that he did something when they were little and they were all living in California.

Through it all, as Tyler struggles to carry on with the business of growing up, she conveys her exceptional yet familiar experiences in language that makes the reader stop and savor, or simply chuckle.

She is witty and eloquent on the passing of childhood.

The title of the book’s second half, “After,” signifies not only the fallout of her father’s arrest but also the aftermath of her fall from innocence. As the scales fall from her eyes, the tone and perspective shift. She is a teenager now, struggling to figure out what all teenagers want to know: Who are my parents? Where have I come from?

And who am I? Tyler finds out that her father is wanted for being a multimillion-dollar drug smuggler and a kingpin. His defense to his daughters is that he smuggled only marijuana and that he was helping to support other families.

Tyler, however, can’t accept that he continued to take risks despite his already vast wealth and his responsibilities to his young family.

Soon it becomes clear that the questions driving Tyler’s story are no longer what will happen to her father and what has he done, but what will happen to Tyler? Who will she ultimately become?

It is perhaps fitting, then, that Wetherall begins to understand herself as not simply a product of one family’s experiences, and not only as part of a far-flung network of fugitive families, but also as a member of “a generation of nomads.” As in any good coming-ofage story, our heroine has left family behind and begun to make her home in the wider world. Now that she has done so, we eagerly await the new stories she will tell. n Rioux is a professor at the University of New Orleans and the author of the forthcoming book “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

We can help young adults overcome their loneliness RACHEL SIMMONS is the leadership development specialist at Smith College and the author of “Enough as She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards to Live Healthy, Happy, Fulfilling Lives.” This was written for The Washington Post.

This past week, a study by the health company Cigna found that young adults 18 to 22 are the loneliest genera­ tion of Americans, more disconnected and isolated than even our nation’s elderly.

As an educator working on a college campus, I am not surprised. More than 40 percent of 18­to­24­year­olds are college students, and the young people who knock on my office door are markedly different from the ones I went to school with in the 1990s.

When I first arrived on campus, I made small talk with students by telling them about the daytripping and goofy late-night pranks of my college life. After frenetic high school days in Rockville, Md., where I raced from school to sports practice to homework, college offered a welcome downshift: more than enough time to sleep, go to class, babysit and get my work done, while still hanging out with friends. I assumed the same would be true of my students.

Not so. My students charge into their undergraduate lives with the same intense schedule they had in high school, filling their every waking minute with work.

The phenomenon can be seen all over the country. UCLA’s 2015 Freshman Survey, which includes responses from 150,000 full-time students at more than 200 colleges and universities, found that the number of first-year students who spent 16 or more hours a week hanging out with friends fell by nearly half over 10 years, to just 18 percent. The same survey found that 41 percent of students said they felt “overwhelmed by all I had to do,” and logged the highest levels of unhappiness ever recorded among women, who are the majority of college students.

How is it possible that at a time when access to friendship is at its

peak — when adolescents are less encumbered than ever by the demands of family and work — more than half of young adults say they feel left out, isolated and without anyone to talk to? After all, the study found that people who have frequent, meaningful in-person interactions report better health and less loneliness than those who have scant face time with others.

The answer is not the smartphone — at least, not as much as we think. Cigna’s study found no correlation between social media use and loneliness.

Indeed, the problem is hardly that college students spend all their time alone and on screens. It is that they spend too much of their time with peers working: running meetings, producing plays, organizing conferences or studying. They prioritize activities that achieve goals, not meaningful connection. The study found that 69 percent in this age group felt that the people around them were “not really with them,” and 68 percent felt as if no one knew them well. I suspect this is because young adults are far less content to be than to do.

Students I have interviewed across the country fear that if they are not constantly busy studying or attending meetings, something must be wrong with them, their

PEOPLEIMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

Many students feel that not being constantly stressed and busy is a sign of laziness, according to surveys and the author’s experience.

schedule or their work ethic.

Constant busyness takes a toll not only on the quality of relationships but also on the skills young adults use to forge them. To walk into a dorm living room where you know only one other person, make small talk with people at a party, connect spontaneously with a stranger in an orientation group — this comes naturally to only very few.

Skills are like muscles: They need to be flexed repeatedly. Friendmaking skills atrophy from underuse.

So what can parents of college students do?

Encourage your child to take self-care seriously. Stress culture has demoted self-care from a right to a privilege for too many students, making it something they think they deserve only once they’ve done enough work. But the Cigna study found that people who get enough sleep (but not too much) and have a healthy balance of daily activities are less likely to say they are lonely. Periods of rest and recharge will also help your child work smarter and longer.

Remind your young adult that everyone gets lonely sometimes. Some of the most popular people on college campuses, including student government and dorm presidents, confide to me that

they feel lonely. It happens to everyone. The point is not to never feel lonely, but to know what you need when it happens.

Anyway, sometimes we need to feel lonely. It can be a signal that tells us something is not right.

Tell children that loneliness isn’t their fault. Remind them of the systems in play that contribute to a nationwide epidemic of quiet isolation: the pressure to work constantly, the sense among students that no amount of work completed is ever truly enough, and, yes, the rise of smartphone use that shunts us away from face-to-face interaction.

There is a difference, too, between being lonely and alone.

People who are always busy may not know the difference. They may not know what to do, or who they are, when they are idle.

Overscheduling their lives may, for these students, be a defense against solitude and stillness, or the fear of it.

Above all, urge them to tell someone about how they are feeling. When we surface and share the thing we feel afraid of, we take away much of its power.

We also find that others are feeling the same way. College is hardly the best four years of every student’s life, but to pretend that it should be will keep students quiet and feeling ashamed. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Do opioid rules violate our rights?

CHARLES LANE is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

Fatal overdoses of prescription opioids were rare before 1999. Then doctors, influenced by pharmaceutical industry marketing, began prescribing them for chronic non-cancer pain. By the end of 2016, prescription opioids — not illicit heroin or fentanyl — had claimed 200,000 lives.

Now, at last, the opioid wave has crested. Per capita usage declined for the sixth straight year in 2017, according to IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, a health-care consulting group. Changes in public policy, including long-awaited prescribing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2016, promise to sustain this lifesaving progress.

Or maybe they’ll lead to human rights violations. That’s the premise of a new investigation by the New York-based nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW), known for its exposés of war crimes around the world.

HRW is seeking evidence that the CDC guidelines and other efforts to modulate opioid prescribing result in patients being cut off from vital medication, in violation of their right to appropriate health care.

The group “is looking for testimonials from chronic pain patients who have been forced or encouraged to stop their opioid medication by physicians or pharmacists,” the Pain News Network reported in March.

“The CDC clearly knows what’s going on and they haven’t taken any real action to say, ‘That is not appropriate, involuntarily forcing people off their medications.

That’s not what we recommended,’ ” Diederik Lohmann, HRW’s director of health and human rights, told the network, which says two-thirds of its readers take opioids, mostly for chronic, non-cancer pain.

“When a government puts in place regulations that make it almost impossible for a physician to prescribe an essential medication, or for a pharmacist to stock the medication, or for a patient to fill their prescriptions, that becomes a human rights issue.”

Human Rights Watch is not alone; a recent cover story of the libertarian magazine Reason denounced “America’s war on pain pills.” And, of course, patients who have become dependent on opioids must be treated compassionately.

But even after the recent decline in prescriptions, the U.S. opioid rate of consumption in 2017 — 676 morphine milligram equivalents per adult — was five times the 1992 rate. It’s double or triple that of other advanced countries. People who really need them can get licit opioids in the United States. And the drugs still killed 46 people a day in 2016, according to the CDC. In any case, alleged unintended consequences of justifiable and, indeed, moderate public-health policies just do not belong in the same moral conversation as deliberate human rights violations such as police brutality or torture.

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights does indeed exhort governments to guarantee the “highest attainable standard” of health; in that sense, there is a human right to health. Whether it can be defined with sufficient objectivity for this situation is another story. Ensuring health is exactly what the CDC is trying to

do — not through “regulations,” but through evidence-based recommendations.

To be sure, HRW acknowledges that opioids have been overprescribed in the past, in part due to deceptive industry marketing; a key focus of its current research is ensuring nonopioid alternatives for patients weaned off the drugs, Lohmann said.

Here’s another legitimate concern: Poor and middle-income countries may be vulnerable to the same kind of pro-opioid campaign that wreaked such havoc in the United States.

Mundipharma, a network of companies controlled by the same closely held family business that introduced Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin to the United States, is engaged in aggressive opioid marketing in China, Colombia, Egypt, Mexico and the Philippines, according to a recent Los Angeles Times report.

As Keith Humphreys, Jonathan P. Caulkins and Vanda FelbabBrown write in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. experience shows that “legal drugs pushed by corporations can bring death on a scale vastly surpassing the effects of illegal ones.” And no human right is more important than the right to live. n

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

Trump can leverage Iran’s secrets DAVID IGNATIUS is a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a treasure trove of secrets on Monday about Iran’s hidden nuclear activities. But it would be a waste of this extraordinary intelligence to use it as a pretext for American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Much better to use it as a pressure tool to squeeze Tehran.

The Israeli intelligence coup should open the way for a much smarter U.S. campaign to isolate Iran and tighten the deal — and bring Europe, Russia and China along in a common push for a better agreement. This approach would keep the international community together and avoid handing Iran the propaganda victory that unilateral U.S. withdrawal would provide.

The bold Mossad operation to grab the files in Tehran in January has caught the Iranians redhanded. Now let them squirm awhile, as the international community sifts the evidence of Iranian deception.

Acting through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world should demand answers about the issues framed by the harvest of secrets: Why did Iran repeatedly lie about its past nuclear activities? How did it shape its program of deception? What stronger provisions are needed to make the 2015 agreement real and binding?

Skeptics have argued that the captured Iranian documents only confirm what the U.S. concluded

in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate — that Iran had an aggressive bombmaking program that it halted in 2003.

The skeptics are right that, despite Netanyahu’s theatrical presentation, the documents aren’t a smoking gun that shows Iranian violation of the nuclear agreement. But they do provide a ton of new information about Iranian lying, cheating and deception. Above all, they shatter Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s claim that Iran has never pursued nuclear weapons.

The Israelis made off with a veritable encyclopedia of secrets that the Iranians had stashed in big, refrigerator-like safes in a warehouse in the Shorabad

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

district of Tehran in 2017.

Netanyahu said the haul includes 50,000 pages in notebooks and folders, and 50,000 more files contained on 183 CDs. The sample he showed Monday night included blueprints, charts, spreadsheets and simulation results.

U.S. and Israeli officials familiar with the documents say there’s far more Netanyahu didn’t disclose — revealing Iranian research sites, key scientific and technical personnel, and other information that should allow much better insight into the Iranian nuclear effort — and make it easier to strengthen and enforce the 2015 agreement.

The hottest items Netanyahu revealed were the 2003 quotes from top Iranian officials about how they intended to continue secret work after the official program, called “Project Amad,” was stopped. “Work would be split into two parts: covert and overt [dual use],” said a document citing orders from Ali Shamkhani, who was then minister of defense.

“The general aim is to announce the closure of Project Amad. . . .

Special activities will be carried out under the title of scientific know-how developments,” said Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a physicist who ran the Amad effort and now heads the Defense Ministry’s

Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research.

Fakrizadeh is a key figure in any Iranian bombmaking effort, past or future, because he appears to have led Iran’s research into building a so-called neutron initiator to trigger the nuclear explosion.

President Trump’s challenge is to use Iran’s new vulnerability, now that its secrets have been exposed, to get the tougher deal he wants. The problem with Trump’s strategy has been that it’s not clear what he intends to do, after withdrawing from the 2015 deal, to get a better one — assuming, that is, that he doesn’t plan to go to war against Iran.

Now, Trump has a plausible rationale for working through the IAEA to hold Iran accountable, while gaining global support for curbing Iran’s missile programs and regional meddling.

Trump’s choice on Saturday is clearer now: If he scuttles the deal, he risks isolating the United States, rather than Iran. If he instead uses Israel’s intelligence windfall to fuel a global pressure campaign, he may actually have a pathway for getting a better, longer-lasting and more enforceable agreement.

Thanks to Israeli intelligence, Trump just got lucky on Iran. But will he be smart? n

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Artificial intelligence BY

B ILL L A P LANTE

AND

K ATHARYN W HITE

From health care to transportation to national security, artificial intel­ ligence has the potential to improve lives. But it comes with fears about economic disruption and a brewing “AI arms race.” Like any transfor­ mational change, it’s complicated. Perhaps the biggest AI myth is that we can be confident about its effects. Here are five others.

MYTH NO. 1 You can differentiate between a machine and a human.

AI is already writing financial news, sports stories and weather reports, and readers aren’t noticing. From the Associated Press to The Washington Post, it’s becoming increasingly common.

AI is also producing “deep fake” videos — from invented speeches by politicians to pornography featuring celebrities’ computergenerated faces — that many people think are real. These rapid advances present significant concerns, shaking the public’s confidence in what they see and hear. As a 2017 Harvard study warned, “The existence of widespread AI forgery capabilities will erode social trust, as previously reliable evidence becomes highly uncertain.”

MYTH NO. 2 The U.S. is falling behind in the race for AI breakthroughs.

China’s national strategy to lead the world in artificial intelligence has elicited fear and loathing in the United States.

While there is clearly reason for concern about the United States’ standing, China’s strategic document admits that “there is still a gap between China’s overall level of development of AI relative to that of developed countries.” According to Jeffrey Ding, a University of Oxford researcher, “China trails the U.S. in every driver except for access to data.” The United States also has more AI experts, who publish more Association for the

Advancement of Artificial Intelligence papers on the topic, and far more commercial investments in the field.

That said, given China’s dedication to pursuing AI, the United States will need to take a concerted societal approach if it wants to maintain its dominant position. Such efforts are already underway: In March, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon is attempting to work with Silicon Valley companies to push projects ahead.

MYTH NO. 3 AI will automate the economy and put people out of work.

In transforming work, AI may also create new jobs. As Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, observed, “We can’t predict what jobs will be created in the future, but it’s always been like that.”

Historically, technological change has initially diminished, but then later boosted, employment and living standards by enabling new industries and sectors to emerge.

We don’t yet know how AI will affect employment in the long term. Between now and then, there may still be disruptions, and we’ll have to grapple with the growing gap between those who have the skills to thrive in a changing world and those who don’t.

MYTH NO. 4 AI can remove human bias from decision-making.

If only it were that simple. In one example that shows AI’s vulnerability to bias, ProPublica found that a program intended to

PAUL GILHAM/GETTY IMAGES

Artificial intelligence probably won’t take the form of Terminator-style robots soon. But some experts worry about other risks it poses.

play a key role in criminal justice decisions from bail to sentencing was almost twice as likely to rate black defendants as probable repeat offenders than white defendants. The program also incorrectly rated white defendants as low-risk more often than blacks. “It’s often wrong — and biased against blacks,” ProPublica wrote.

In another example, a 2015 Carnegie Mellon University experiment found that far fewer women were being shown online ads for jobs paying more than $200,000 than were men. “Many important decisions about the ads we see are being made by online systems,” said Anupam Datta, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Oversight of these ‘black boxes’ is necessary to make sure they don’t compromise our values.”

Researchers are already addressing the bias issue, seeking to head off mistakes and build more transparent algorithms.

MYTH NO. 5 Artificial intelligence is a threat to mankind.

The truth is we simply don’t know where AI will lead us, but that doesn’t mean murderous

terminators are going to start stalking the streets. In a 2015 open letter, experts associated with the nonprofit Future of Life Institute warned against the rise of autonomous weapons systems, which could be abused by illintentioned humans. The more pressing concern might not be that AI is a risk to us, but that we’re a risk to ourselves if we don’t exercise caution in how we push ahead with our AI experiments.

In some contexts, AI can save lives. In March, a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, an incident that presaged trouble for the emerging technology.

Nevertheless, many researchers have long held that self-driving vehicles will help reduce traffic fatalities overall. A 2017 Rand Corp. report, for example, concludes that introducing autonomous automobiles to the streets sooner could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. n LaPlante is senior vice president for the national security sector at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit research and engineering organization. White is senior vice president for the public sector at MITRE. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2018

24

River Ramble ROCKY REACH DAM SATURDAY MAY 12, 2018 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.

5000 HWY 97A, Wenatchee, WA Questions? Call us at (509) 663-7522 For more information: www.facebook.com/visitrockyreach or www.chelanpud.org/visitrockyreach

Native American Dance exhibition The Wenatchi, Entiat and Moses/ Columbia Peoples in the arena Reptile petting zoo & Reptile Man Tipi significance and set up

The Plateau tribal long tent Tribal sports, customs and games Cayuse architecture and cultural plant, fish and animal harvest Tribal lithic technology demonstrations

Drumming and Dancing Tuck’ush Man and Two Bears Traditional arts and culture