The Washington Post National Weekly

Politics The biggest teasers 4

Nation Lost in the shadows in New York 8

Health Why we can’t hold the salt 17

5 Myths About riots 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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THE FIX

Tom Brady’s defender

VIDEO GRAB OF CHRIS CHRISTIE’S INTERVIEW WITH IJREVIEW

BY

H UNTER S CHWARZ

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hris Christie thinks we’re all talking about the New England Patriots cheating a little too much. But he also has some thoughts on it.

The New Jersey governor on Thursday scoffed at the NFL inquiry that found the Patriots likely deliberately violated league rules about football air pressure — and that star quarterback Tom Brady probably knew about it — calling the whole thing “overblown.”

“I think there’s a little bit too much attention on this,” he said in an interview with IJReview. “I mean, I don’t think anybody’s really

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trying to say that Tom Brady won four Super Bowls or became a future Hall of Famer because the balls were a little under-inflated.”

Christie also noted that Brady has a supermodel wife — suggesting people are only so glad to bring down the golden boy.

Christie’s love of the game notwithstanding, sports has long been an easy way for politicians to pander to voters. And this is clearly no exception. The comments came while the governor was in New Hampshire, which last time we checked just so happens to be in, yep, New England. (If only Iowa and South Carolina had beloved professional athletes in need of public defense, but alas.)

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. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 30

But this is also the guy who flaunts his Dallas Cowboys fandom in a state filled with fans of the rival Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. So clearly, he’s not a full-time panderer.

But he is a politician who has often found himself on the wrong side of the media. His explanation that attacks on Brady are just the media piling on makes more sense when you consider that Christie thinks the media is also being a little overzealous when it comes to another Northeastern scandal (Bridgegate, anyone?).

If you half listen to what Christie’s saying, you can almost hear him brush off questions about the closing of the George Washington Bridge. n

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

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ON THE COVER Emilio Cueto, in his Washington apartment, is surrounded by his collection of Cuban artifacts representing centuries of his native country.

Photograph by SARAH L. VOISIN, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

2016 flirters: Will they or won’t they?

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

Dancing around a commitment to run can be beneficial to those out of the spotlight D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD Manchester, N.H. BY

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he tall man in a blazer burst into the Chipotle in the middle of the afternoon. He had a smile, a TV camera following him, and the jovial air of a man who expects to be recognized.

“George Pataki, from New York,” he said, shaking hands with the first two diners he met. “We’re doing the non-Hillary tour. We’re actually saying ‘hi’ to people.”

Then the tall man moved on, to quiz the next table about their food. (“Chicken burrito? I gotta try

something new.”) When he was gone, the first two diners wondered: Who was that? Do they not have Chipotle where he lives?

“It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from New York,’ ” said Aaron Lee, 22. “What are you doing here, then?”

Officially, what George E. Pataki is doing is flirting — for the fourth time in 16 years — with the idea of running for president of the United States.

The Republican ex-governor of New York is raising money, visiting early-primary states and telling people that he’s close, close, close to making a decision. “I’m strongly leaning toward making

the run,” he told a radio station in New Hampshire. The first three times he considered running, he didn’t.

This is the flirting season in American politics: Right now, more than 20 politicians are officially “considering” or “exploring” a run for president. The key to understanding this strange every-four-years ritual is to understand that there are actually two kinds of flirting.

For the big-name candidates, the presidential flirt is a useful, temporary, legal dodge. They will run. They are basically running already. But they don’t want to

Former New York governor George E. Pataki has been visiting New Hampshire a lot lately as the Republican again considers running for president.

admit it yet, because that would bring on tighter fundraising rules.

For the others — particularly the eight or so who had fallen out of the political spotlight — the flirt can be an end in itself. It allows them to experience some of the most pleasant parts of a campaign: audiences, media attention, a chance to raise money. And then it lets them escape before they have to face the less-pleasant parts. Like getting crushed.

“I make a joke that every four years, there’s the Olympics, there’s the World Cup and I come to New Hampshire thinking about running for president,” Pataki told a

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POLITICS crowd of 15 people during a speech at a Sea-Doo and snowmobile dealership in Laconia, N.H. Nobody laughed. Then Pataki said this election was different: “This time, in all honesty, I see things differently.”

That might be true. But it is also the thing you have to say if you’re a good flirt.

Pataki, 69, has already lived a remarkable political life. He is the son of a postman, who unseated liberal icon Mario Cuomo (D) in a 1994 governor’s race — one of New York’s legendary upsets. Pataki then won second and third terms by large margins. He led New York through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the rebuilding of Ground Zero.

But he has not held office since 2007. Since then, his political star has faded somewhat.

“Who is Bloomberg?” a “Jeopardy!” contestant said in January while looking at a photo of Pataki.

The category: “New York governors,” and the clue was “He took New York into the 21st century.”

“No,” host Alex Trebek said. The other two contestants stared blankly, without buzzing in.

Another sign: There used to be a museum about Pataki in his home town, Peekskill. It opened after he left office, with an exhibit where schoolkids could see Pataki’s actual gubernatorial desk.

Then, in 2013, it closed. Its leaders thought maybe more kids would visit if it was a Web site.

“Basically, it would be like a monkey flying out of a unicorn’s [posterior],” if Pataki won the 2016 Republican nomination, said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson. If he got into the GOP primary, Pataki would face obstacles that go far beyond his meager name recognition. He is prochoice. He signed strict gun-control laws. He let state government spending grow rapidly.

In recent polls, his best showing has been 1 percent.

“Let’s just say a meteor strikes the first debate, and kills everyone except Pataki, who is stuck in traffic. Let’s hypothesize,” Wilson said. He thought. No. It still wouldn’t be Pataki. They’d find somebody else.

But despite those long odds, Pataki came to New Hampshire last month for his eighth flirtingrelated visit since September. And a ninth visit was scheduled for last week.

ROB STRONG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

This is one of the things that makes flirting worthwhile: For an ex-politician, it is an unlocked door back into the political arena.

“I know I can appeal — not just to Republicans and conservatives — but to independents and intelligent Democrats as well,” Pataki told an audience of eight at the University of New Hampshire.

This is the heart of Pataki’s pitch to voters. He’s a Republican who won big in a blue state. He’s a reformer who would tame Washington bureaucracy. “I go there today, and it’s like I’m on an alien planet,” Pataki said of Washington. “They are an insular world.

They talk a language you don’t understand.”

In New Hampshire, Pataki’s crowds were not big. At the official opening of his super PAC’s office in Manchester, for instance, 25 people turned up. And one of them turned out to be an incognito staffer for Nevertheless, wherever Pataki went, the crowds were pleasant.

“Under a Pataki administration,” one man asked, how would Middle East policy change?

“You’d change everything,” Pataki told him.

This is one of the things that makes flirting worthwhile: For an ex-politician, it is an unlocked

door back into the political arena.

That can mean new audiences for men used to audiences. The same College Republicans, for instance, had recently hosted a 2016 flirter whose odds are even longer than Pataki’s: former Virginia governor James Gilmore III (R).

Gilmore left office in 2002.

“I mean, thank God for Wikipedia,” said UNH senior Elliot Gault, 22.

And the same kind of magic works on the news media. Before former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee (D) announced he was exploring a presidential run on April 9, The Washington Post had not quoted him about anything in nine months.

Since then, The Post has quoted him eight times. Er, nine.

“Clinton is just too hawkish,” Chafee said in an interview, repeating his signature attack line on the Democratic front-runner, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The other great thing about flirting is the money. While you flirt, you can raise it. If you don’t run, you can spend it anyway.

In 1999, for instance, Pataki

George E. Pataki, center, and his wife, Libby, order lunch at a Chipotle in Manchester, N.H., in April as he flirts with a White House bid.

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flirted with a campaign, then gave up and endorsed George W. Bush.

In 2007, he did it again. “I was very serious about it” that time, Pataki says now. “But: Mayor Giuliani.”

The former New York mayor was in the race, and Pataki didn’t think there was room for two New Yorkers. So he got out.

Both times, Pataki raised more than $1 million. Both times, the New York Times reported, Pataki spent it — giving to allied candidates, paying for Pataki’s travels, and paying a circle of Pataki advisers, strategists and fundraisers.

Then came 2012.

“I was very serious about it,” Pataki says. “But everywhere I went, people had committed to Mitt Romney.” He pulled the plug but raised and spent more than $600,000 via political nonprofit.

This year, Pataki is raising money again — for a super PAC called “We the People, Not Washington.”

Among those leading the fundraising are several Pataki associates who got paid from money he raised in past flirtations. Aides wouldn’t say how much he’d raised or spent this time.

Pataki aides say they have a strategy ready if their man really gets into the race. He’ll stand out in the debates with his wit and executive experience. Then he’ll surge in New Hampshire, by appealing to libertarian-leaning . . .

Wait.

Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

“When I heard the name, I was like, ‘Pataki. Pataki. Pataki.’ But I didn’t know that he was the mayor of New York,” Tony Coutee, 42, a crane operator who was at the second table Pataki visited in that Chipotle, said incorrectly. After Pataki left his table, Coutee said, “I Googled him and found out.”

“So he is running?” asked Coutee’s lunch companion, Jason Soto, 35.

Yes, Coutee said.

While the two of them were talking, Pataki was into a fullblown, campaign-style restaurant schmooze. Then he came back and sat down with Coutee and Soto.

“I’m trying the chicken burrito,” Pataki told them.

The two men got up to leave.

“Kinda normal,” Soto said of this only-in-flirting-season interaction, a pseudo-conversation with a pseudo-candidate, who never said what he was running for. “But abnormal.” n

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POLITICS

Were Clintons a boon for Huckabee?

BY

K AREN T UMULTY

T

o hear former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee tell it, there is no Republican presidential candidate better equipped than he is to run against Hillary Rodham Clinton — and he has the battle scars to prove it.

Back in Arkansas, “every time I ever ran for public office, I ran against the Clinton political machine. I ran against their money. I ran against them,” Huckabee told a gathering of New Hampshire Republicans.

On Tuesday, Huckabee was back to his home town of Hope — yes, the same place where Bill Clinton was born — to announce a second bid for the Republican nomination for president.

So begins yet another chapter in the intertwined story line of Huckabee and the Clintons, which stretches back more than 20 years.

But many Arkansas political observers say that Huckabee’s version of his tenure as a personal contest between himself and the royal family of national Democratic politics is more than a little exaggerated — and that, indeed, if it weren’t for the ups and downs of Bill Clinton’s career, Huckabee might still be preaching in a Baptist church somewhere.

Right now, Huckabee looks like a long shot in a big field of GOP candidates. At the same time, there is little doubt who the Democratic nominee will be — which is why Huckabee’s stump speech often dwells on what he portrays as epic battles with “the Clinton machine” in Arkansas.

Huckabee did face an entrenched Democratic establishment in Arkansas from the time of his first statewide election in 1993.

Many opponents and adversaries had ties to the Clintons, who occasionally lent their endorsements to the network they left behind.

But the Clintons were in Washington when Huckabee arrived in Little Rock, and they had other things to keep them occupied.

“The Clintons had left the building, so to speak, by 1992,” said Janine Parry, a professor at the University of Arkansas.

LUKE SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The GOP presidential candidate has bragged of battling them, but it’s a complicated history Huckabee’s claims, she said, are “a great narrative for trying to stand out in a crowded Republican field, but it is not a narrative that, inside the state, looks particularly valid.” Hal Bass, a political scientist at Huckabee’s alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, agreed: “Clinton put his mark on the Democratic Party, but it was a pretty weak mark.”

And it could just as easily be argued that Bill Clinton was the best thing that happened to Huckabee’s early political career.

Huckabee did not get off to an auspicious start. In 1992, the Baptist minister and former broadcaster was trounced in a bid to unseat Sen. Dale Bumpers, a liberal Democrat. That same election sent Gov. Bill Clinton to the White House. Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker filled the vacancy, leaving an opening for the No. 2 job.

Huckabee jumped into that race and won a July 1993 special election. It was the first time in 13 years that a Republican had won a

statewide race in Arkansas.

Even then, Huckabee portrayed himself as up against a machine — a message that was shaped by his political consultant, Dick Morris, who had also guided Clinton.

“What would be fair to say is that when Huckabee stepped on the political stage, every facet of government was controlled by the Democrats, and the vast majority of them were Clinton loyalists,” said Rex Nelson, Huckabee’s communications director when he was governor. “The Democrats had a turnout machine. Maybe you get to playing with semantics” to label it a Clinton machine.

“There was no Clinton machine,” countered Huckabee’s opponent for lieutenant governor, Nate Coulter. “Those kinds of political machines typically don’t lose narrow elections, especially low-turnout special elections.”

At that time, Clinton’s presidency was also hitting its first rough patches, beset by controversies over policy toward gays in the

Signs are ready for the start of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s announcement that he will seek the GOP presidential nomination Tuesday in Hope, Ark.

military, tax increases and plans to transform the health-care system.

In Washington, Huckabee’s victory was seen as an early indicator of trouble ahead for the Democrats. “Today, there’s new hope for Republicans. Not Hope, Arkansas, but hope in Arkansas, where voters have chosen Republican Mike Huckabee as their lieutenant governor,” Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) declared in a speech on the Senate floor.

Three years later, Clintoncharged lightning struck again for Huckabee.

Tucker was forced to resign as governor after being indicted on charges stemming from the federal investigation known as Whitewater, which involved a complicated web of dealings surrounding a failed Arkansas real-estate investment by the Clintons.

The new governor: Mike Huckabee.

In a recent interview with the Hope Star newspaper, Huckabee cited a litany of slights from Arkansas Democrats.

“I remember going to places to ride in a parade and being put in the back behind the firetruck and the horses,” Huckabee said. “I remember being at a public event on the Fourth of July and the microphone being turned off when I spoke and it being turned back on when the Democrat spoke. I remember having a coin toss to see who would go first and I won, and they asked the Democrat opponent how he would like to go, whether first or last.”

Most famous is an episode cited in the announcement video by a super PAC supporting Huckabee.

After his first election as lieutenant governor, Huckabee found the doors to his office suite had been nailed shut from the inside, which is how they remained for nearly two months. Capitol officials said a newly formed Martin Luther King Jr. commission had prior claim to the space.

When he became governor, Huckabee fought bitter early battles with the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. But what ultimately distinguished his decade-long tenure was the rap-

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POLITICS prochement they reached, and how much he got accomplished.

In 2005, Governing magazine named Huckabee a “public official of the year,” noting he had succeeded in getting through 19 of the 21 bills he had pushed that year.

“He has overseen breakthroughs in health coverage for children, education management and school finance,” the magazine wrote. “He also sponsored the largest tax cuts Arkansas has ever seen, as well as the state’s biggest road construction package. And the state this year racked up the largest budget surplus in its history.” That, however, did not carry him as far as he had hoped in trying to follow Clinton’s footsteps to the White House.

When Huckabee ran for president in 2008, he scored an early success by winning the Iowa caucuses, largely on the strength of his appeal to the critical GOP bloc of evangelical Christians. But he ran out of money as the race moved forward and found himself unable to expand his reach.

Those challenges remain and even be even greater in 2016. He is likely to be facing upwards of a dozen credible, well-financed rivals. And his claim to evangelical voters is also being challenged, particularly by Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.), who has been a hit at evangelical gatherings. Cruz also is wooing Christian conservative donors, such as Dan and Farris Wilks, brothers from Cisco, Tex. Cruz’s inroads with this constituency are leading to some recalculations of Huckabee’s odds, said David Lane, who organizes conservative pastors nationwide.

“A year ago, a lot of people, including me, would have thought that if Huckabee decides to run it will scare off other serious challenges” for the support of conservative Christians, Lane said.

“But Cruz has decided to compete with Huckabee for this vote. His message is resonating.”

If nothing else, Huckabee’s experience in Arkansas may have taught him a lesson in tenacity that some might call Clintonian.

“I hear some people say we’re going to have to have someone who knows how to fight,” Huckabee said in New Hampshire. “I tell you what, if you battle the political machine that I battled, you know how to fight. But we need someone who knows how to win the fight, and not just start it.” n

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As masters of the attack line, Carson and Fiorina take aim

BY B EN T ERRIS, J ENNA J OHSNON AND D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

B

efore they got into politics, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina excelled in widely different fields: medicine for Carson, the computer business for Fiorina. But as presidential candidates, they have both been defined — and limited — by the same set of skills.

They are masters of the attack line.

Carson, a pioneering black neurosurgeon, began his political career by attacking President Obama’s health-care law — with Obama sitting nearby — at a prayer breakfast in 2013. Carson has since called the law “the worst thing to have happened in this nation since slavery.”

Fiorina, a pioneering female chief executive, already tried a political career. But then she lost a decisive, and expensive, election for a U.S. Senate seat from California. This year, however, Fiorina has resuscitated that career by attacking the most prominent woman in the presidential race: former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton must not be president of the United States — but not because she’s a woman,” she told a cheering crowd in Iowa recently. “Hillary Clinton cannot be president of the United States because she is not trustworthy.”

On Monday, both Carson and Fiorina announced that they are running for president.

They will be powerful new voices in the race because they can articulate many Republicans’ frustrations with Obama and Clinton and — because of who they are — can blunt a Democratic counterattack that galls conservatives deeply, which is that their frustrations with Obama and Clinton are just racism and sexism, endlessly repackaged.

The hard part, for both Carson and Fiorina, will be when they want to be more than just a voice in the race.

If they actually want to win, both will have to expand far beyond the role of punch-thrower.

And both will have to avoid the gaffes, rattling skeletons and policy blind spots that have doomed past outsider candidates, from Ross Perot to Herman Cain. The last non-politician to win a major party’s presidential nomination was Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) in 1952 — and that’s hardly comparable because Eisenhower’s service in World War II had made him

Ben Carson’s favorite target is Obamacare.

Carly Fiorina is taking on Hillary Clinton.

Their challenge will be going from spoilers in race to contenders a national icon even before he ran.

As of now, polls show that — among these two outsiders — Carson is in a stronger position than Fiorina.

In March, a Washington PostABC News poll showed him with the support of 6 percent of GOP primary voters. With the electorate divided among a number of candidates, that’s not bad, actually. It puts him in the middle of the pack: In South Carolina and Iowa, that kind of number puts Carson in the top six.

The bad news, for Carson, is that more recent surveys have shown his standing tick down as other, professional GOP politicians have formally announced that they are running.

On Monday, in his announcement, Carson sought to expand his political persona by returning to his personal story. He was raised by a single mother, graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan medical school, and became the youngest director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the first black person to hold the position.

In a video that played before Carson spoke, Carson’s message seemed to be that, if he became president, he could imbue the country with the qualities that underlie his personal success.

“Healing requires a leader with calm, unwavering resolve,” the video said. “We have the fortitude to heal, the imagination to inspire, and the determination to revive our American dream.”

For Fiorina, the bad news is her poll numbers: She gets only about 1 percent support among Republicans nationally. Even in this race, that’s low.

The good news is that a lot of people don’t know her yet: About three in five Republican-leaning voters had no opinion of Fiorina in a Monmouth University poll last month. And in a recent swing through Iowa, Fiorina attracted unexpectedly large crowds, more than 100 at some events.

“Where did she come from?”

Kim Hiscox of West Des Moines asked a Post reporter after seeing Fiorina speak. “I must be under a rock or something, because tonight is the first time I’ve heard her name. I’m so impressed that maybe the Republicans could put forward a woman to challenge Hillary.”

In her own announcement video, Fiorina stayed close to the attack line that had revived her career. The video begins with Fiorina watching Clinton’s own announcement video — then raising her TV remote and turning it off.

“If you believe that it’s time for citizens to stand up to the political class and say, ‘Enough,’ then join us,” Fiorina said. “We can do this, together.” n

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NATION

The dark side of living sky-high Tensions rise in cities over the right to sunlight

80,000

units of affordable housing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed building over the next 10 years.

E MILY B ADGER New York BY

“B

illionaires’ Row” is rising over Midtown, a collection of glassy new pinnacles that promise the kind of condo views you can only get in Manhattan by building taller than everything else around.

With its $95 million penthouse, 432 Park Avenue tops out just shy of 1,400 feet. It will remain the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere until the Nordstrom Tower — high-end shopping below, lavish apartments above — goes up four blocks away. Between them are a few more audacious developments, all part of a race for ever-taller towers to distinguish luxury living in an increasingly crowded city.

These new buildings — a product of developer ingenuity, architectural advance and international wealth — are changing more than the city’s famous skyline, though. They will also transform New York far below, further darkening city streets and casting long shadows that will sweep across Central Park.

Together, these towers, and new additions in neighborhoods undergoing a building boom from San Francisco to Toronto, have revived a long-simmering urban tension: between light and growth, between the benefits of city living and its cost in shadows.

For cities, shadows present both a technical challenge — one that can be modeled in 3-D and measured in “theoretical annual sunlight hours” lost — and an ethereal one. They change the feel of space and the value of property in ways that are hard to define. They’re a stark reminder that the new growth needed in healthy cities can come at the expense of people already living there. And in some ways, shadows even turn light into another medium of inequality — a resource that can be bought by the wealthy, eclipsed from the poor.

“There are certain things you just can never go back from,” said

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A Manhattan high-rise casts a long shadow over Central Park. Towering buildings have revived a longsimmering urban tension: between light and growth, the benefits of city living and its cost in shadows.

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NATION

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

High-rises cast shadows on Manhattan pedestrians last month. In New York City, a proposed bill would create a panel to scrutinize planned buildings’ shadow footprint.

Renee Cafaro, who lives just south of Central Park and is a member of the community board that’s been studying the shadows there. “Laws can be changed.

Even trees and traffic patterns can be changed. But once you have buildings of that caliber and that height and that massing, there’s nothing we can do to save the park any more. Those shadows are there in perpetuity.”

These tensions are rising with the scale of new development. As New York’s skyscrapers set height records, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed building 80,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years, much of which the city would find room for by rezoning to build higher. Boston wants 53,000 new units. All of which will inevitably mean more shadow — or even shadows cast upon shadow.

In New York, legislation was introduced this spring that would create a task force scrutinizing shadows on public parks.

Lawmakers in Boston in the last

few years have repeatedly proposed to ban new shadows on parkland, though they haven’t succeeded. In San Francisco, the city has tightened guidance on a long-standing law regulating shadows in an era of increasingly contentious development fights.

The stakes are highest in Manhattan, a crammed borough with few yards, balconies or even clear window views that city dwellers count on for light that doesn’t come from a fluorescent bulb.

“Parks have become the place where we go for this incredibly important experience of being in the sun,” says Mark Levine, the New York councilman who introduced the bill that now awaits public hearings. “And if even parks lose the sunlight, then I think it diminishes the experience of living here.”

New York City has been regulating shadows, if in an indirect way, for a century. When the 42-story Equitable Building was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1915 — rising from the side-

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walk like the sheer face of a cliff for more than 500 feet — it cast a seven-acre shadow over the neighborhood.

The outcry it caused helped prompt the city’s first comprehensive zoning law. Those rules didn’t require buildings to cast shadows of a certain size, but they influenced the shape of skyscrapers in ways that controlled how they loomed over the city. Tall buildings required “setbacks” at higher floors. This is why the Empire State Building grows narrower as it rises. It creates space and light between buildings.

In Central Park today, the new generation of luxury towers on Billionaires’ Row reach higher than many in the city ever envisioned. The developers behind them merged multiple building lots or purchased the “air rights” above adjacent properties to legally build taller than what would historically be allowed.

As a result, multimilliondollar apartments in the sky will darken parts of the park a mile away.

San Francisco, long torn between high housing demand and a reluctance to build more of it, faces a similar dilemma.

“We’re in the most extraordinarily gigantic building boom that we’ve seen,” says Rachel Schuett, an environmental planner in San Francisco.

Since 1984, San Francisco has had a “sunlight ordinance” that requires the parks commission to review any proposed building taller than 40 feet that might shadow public parks.

Washington architect Shalom Baranes argues that new buildings also add something to a city greater than what they take away. Central Park is an extraordinary place as much for its green space as its uniquely urban setting. The park is an outdoor room, surrounded on four sides by glass and steel, 19th-century apartments and Beaux-Arts buildings.

“To me, as an architect, that’s much more important than losing some sun — the contribution of the building to creating that outdoor room,” Baranes says. “I don’t think any of our squares and circles [in Washington] would be nearly as wonderful if they didn’t have any buildings around them.” n

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NATION

Wild animals dying for a drink BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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or the giant kangaroo rat, death by nature is normally swift and dramatic: a hopeless dash for safety followed by a blood-curdling squeak as their bellies are torn open by eagles, foxes, bobcats and owls.

They’re not supposed to die the way they are today — emaciated and starved, their once abundant population dwindling to near nothing on California’s sprawling Carrizo Plain about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, where the drought is turning hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland into desert.

Without grass, long-legged kangaroo rats can’t eat. And as they go, so go a variety of threatened animals that depend on the keystone species to live. “That whole ecosystem changes without the giant kangaroo rat,” said Justin Brasheres, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of California at Berkeley.

Endangered kangaroo rats are just one falling tile in the drought’s domino effect on wildlife in the lower Western states. Large fish kills are happening in several states as waters heated by higher temperatures drain and lose oxygen. In Northern California, salmon eggs have virtually disappeared as water levels fall. Thousands of migrating birds are crowding into wetland shrunk by drought, risking the spread of disease that can cause massive die-offs.

As the baking Western landscape becomes hotter and drier, land animals are being forced to seek water and food far outside their normal range. Herbivores such as deer and rabbits searching for a meal in urban gardens in Reno are sometimes pursued by hawks, bobcats and mountain lions. In Arizona, rattlesnakes have come to Flagstaff, joining bears and other animals seeking food that no longer exists in their habitat.

“You think about it. In our urban environments we have artificial water. We’re not relying on creeks,” said David Catalano, a

ABOVE, BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST; BELOW, RICHARD R. HANSEN/PHOTO RESEARCHERS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Drought-stricken states are dealing with more animals seeking food outside their normal range supervising biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. “We have sprinkling systems. We water bushes with fruit and water gardens. That’s just a magnet for everything.

“We’ve seen an increase in coyote calls, bear calls, mountain lion calls — all the way to mice and deer,” Catalano said of residents placing calls to his department.

About 4,000 mule deer have disappeared from a mountain range near Reno between late last year and now, likely because of drought. “Our level of concern is very high,” Catalano said. Nevada has placed low fiberglass pools called guzzlers that hold up to 3,600 gallons of water at more than a thousand wilderness areas across the state to provide water for wildlife.

In California, where mandatory water restrictions were passed by the state water board on Tuesday, humans are already coming into contact with desperate

wildlife from the 250,000-acre Carrizo Plain National Monument in California’s Central Valley, near Bakersfield.

“Just today, 20 minutes ago, four coyote cubs arrived” from the Bakersfield’s outskirts, said Don Richardson, curator for the California Living Museum, which has an animal shelter in the city.

“We actually get everything from reptiles to mammals,” Richardson said. “We have 13 San Joaquin kit fox, an endangered species. They were abandoned, orphaned. The kit foxes’ health was impacted by the struggle to make it with reduced resources.

Then, of course, we see a lot of birds of prey — owls and golden eagles.” The animals are already suffering from the fragmentation of their habitat because of ranching and urban development.

For a study, biologists caught a few kangaroo rats this year to probe their condition. “They were skinny,” Brasheres said. “We

TOP: A golf course adjacent to undeveloped land in Indio, a town in drought-stricken California. ABOVE: The giant kangaroo rat has seen its food supply dwindle.

looked at females to see whether they had young, whether they were lactating.” They weren’t.

In this reality where food is scarce and births are few, kangaroo rats are still a top prey item, further shrinking their numbers.

There’s no overstating how important the rodent is in the ecosystem. Few others are around to feed snakes, badgers weasels and animals already mentioned. Even soil that kangaroo rats dig for burrows creates moist habitat for insects.

A worse situation is hard to imagine, said Stafford Lehr, chief of fisheries for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. But there is one.

Chinook salmon are in great danger, he said. For two years, only 5 percent of their eggs have survived winter and spring migrations because the cold water their eggs need to survive drains from rivers and reservoirs.

“If you draw down a reservoir, cold water at the bottom drains first,” Lehr said.

To save them, wildlife officials tried to replenish cold water that drained from Shasta Lake north of Sacramento last year. “It didn’t work,” Lehr said.

“Ninety-five percent of eggs and juvenile brood in 2014 were killed,” Lehr said. “Those would be expected to return three years later. We also had heavy mortality in 2013, expected back in 2016.

The 2015 fish are spawning right now. We’re trying everything in our power to have enough cold water in Shasta so we don’t have what we had last year.”

Salmon are only part of the problem. Smelt are at the lowest number ever recorded in the state.

They are a major forage fish, feeding other fish and birds in the marine ecosystem.

“It’s part of the heritage resource in the state of California.

It’s our responsibility to ensure they are protected,” Lehr said. “Every time you lose something it puts pressure on the environment. You lose it, and something else will replace it but it will be lost. They’re part of the ecosystem.

Millions of dollars have been invested in their survival.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Anti-U.S. attitudes lessen in Pakistan T IM C RAIG Islamabad, Pakistan BY

D

uring a dozen visits here since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Montana resident Doug Chabot sometimes stuck a Canadian maple leaf on his bag. Even then, he dreadedtheinevitablelecturesfromPakistanis angered by U.S. foreign policy.

But when Chabot returned late last summer, he was surprised by how “welcoming” Pakistanis were.

“There was no anti-American sentiment walking into stores or the markets and, if anything, people were concerned that I thought they hated Americans,” said Chabot, who runs a charity focused on educating Pakistani girls.

His experience reflects a subtle but broad shift in Pakistani society as the war in neighboring Afghanistan draws to a close: Anti-American sentiment appears to be going out of style.

The shift has come as Pakistanis appear to be looking closer to home for the causes of — and answers to — the country’s woes, according to interviews with residents, analysts, and current and former diplomats.

Those observers say the change is being driven by a Pakistani middle class that is now more supportive of American drone strikes — which have declined precipitously in recent years — particularly since a school massacre by the Taliban that killed about 150 students and teachers in December. And as conflict spreads in the Middle East, there is a growing recognition in Pakistan that sectarian violence in Muslim countries isn’t all driven by the United States. The Obama administration’s efforts to quietly rebuild relationships here is starting to have an effect, analysts say.

“You now don’t even see the usual firebrands coming up with standard anti-American declarations,” said Ayaz Amir, a political commentator and former lawmaker. “There is a sense we have to deal with our own problems, and it is up to us how we handle

S.S. MIRZA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

In a nation looking inward for answers, ‘there is a sense we have to deal with our own problems’ those problems, and I think antiAmericanism, really, no longer seems that relevant.”

In recent years, as the war in Afghanistan spilled across the border and U.S. drone strikes pounded the Pakistani tribal hideouts of al-Qaeda and other militants, the United States was often the chief target of Pakistani frustrations over a stagnant economy, political turmoil and the terrorism-related deaths.

Newspaper commentaries regularly savaged the United States, and anti-American protests — sometimes violent — were frequent. Poll after poll indicated that Pakistanis viewed the United States, a major provider of aid to Pakistan, with more disdain than people in almost any other nation.

But a Pew Research Center poll released in August showed a significant decline in the percentage of Pakistanis who held negative views of the United States — still a majority at 59 percent, but down from 80 percent two years before.

The shifting attitudes do not necessarily mean Pakistan is safer for Westerners. This month, an American teacher was shot and critically wounded in Karachi, and three U.S. citizens have been kidnapped and released here over the past two years, according to a recent State Department report.

But those incidents, carried out

by Islamist extremists or criminal gangs, cloud what otherwise has been an improving relationship between the two countries.

Amir said it has been months since he has heard the snide antiAmerican comments that were once a mainstay of dinner parties and public forums. Although conspiracy theories about U.S. involvement in the region remain rife, he and other analysts say the tenor of those accusations is settling back into a more tolerant form of skepticism.

“It’s no more just hate heaped upon the United States,” said Allama Tahir Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, which

Pakistani protesters burn a U.S. flag in 2011 in Multan to condemn U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan.

Such anti-American protests now appear to be on the decline.

59%

of Pakistanis who held negative views of the United States, down from 80 percent two years before

represents 25,000 religious scholars and clerics, some of whom have been vocal critics of the United States. “Because of the serious internal issues that Pakistani society is facing, and also the Muslim world is facing, the focus is not that much on the United States.”

Many Pakistanis say antiAmericanism has faded even further after a Pakistani Taliban attack on the army-run school in Peshawar in December. The attack, widely referred to as Pakistan’s 9/11, magnified the threat Islamist extremists posed while making some American actions, such as drone strikes, appear less hostile, analysts say.

“Now, the progressive Pakistanis are choosing to stay quiet,” said Farzana Bari, an Islamabad-based human rights activist. “I personally have been very anti-drone strikes . . . but now I feel like, ‘Okay, if they are dealing with the extremist groups, that is good.’ ” Public anger toward the United States is now increasingly hard to spot. Last year, Imran Khan, a political figure and former cricket star, struggled to gain public support for a blockade of NATO supply routes to Afghanistan in response to U.S. drone strikes.

This year, after an al-Qaeda attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, the decision by several U.S. media outlets to publish some of the magazine’s controversial cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad drove relatively few protesters to the streets.

Even controversial American movies generate far less passion here than they would have a few years ago. Little attention, for example, was given to “American Sniper,” which has been criticized as insensitive to Muslims.

On the campus of Quaid-iAzam University, several students said the United States just isn’t a major topic of discussion anymore.

“Now, it’s more of a focus on Pakistan’s internal issues, such as terrorism, an ailing economy, jobs and unemployment,” said Syed M. Abdullah, 23. “It’s been a year and a half since there’s been a protest here about the drone strikes.” n

PHOTOS BY SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

PRESERVING CUBA

BY DAVID MONTGOMERY

Emilio Cueto at the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity in El Cobre, Cuba.

Cueto has written a book about the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s Catholic patroness and a national symbol.

Emilio Cueto hails a bicycle taxi, the principal means of transportation here in Camaguey, Cuba’s third­largest city, if you don’t have a horse. As for those colorful 1950s Chevys you see in pictures of the suddenly trendy forbidden island, they’re back in the tourist section of Havana, 335 miles away. This is the real Cuba. ¶ A handsome colonial square called Workers’ Plaza is filled with pedestrians watched over by large portraits of Che Guevara and several poets, who are almost as revered as the revolutionary hero in this city of poets. ¶ “Emilio!” cries a man in the crowd.

“You’reearly!”¶“It’salwaysnicetoberecognizedinyourowncountry,”Cuetosays,as the bicitaxista starts pedaling. ¶ Havana­born Cueto’s permanent domicile is two connected apartments in Washington that he has transformed into a private museum and archive of all things Cuban. Visiting scholars and diplomats come away stunned by one of the most significant personal collections of Cuban culture in the

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015

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COVER STORY world. They refer to it as the “Emilioteca,” a play on the Spanish word “biblioteca,” meaning library.

When Cueto was 17, in April 1961, a week after the Bay of Pigs landing, his mother sent him to the United States. He was one of thousands of uprooted Cuban “Peter Pans.” Then, in the mid1970s, he was one of the first exiles to return for a visit. And he kept visiting.

Now, at 71, Cueto carries two passports — American and Cuban — and considers both nations essential to his identity. In this season of wary rapprochement between old geopolitical foes, Cueto’s story is emblematic. The diplomats in Washington and Havana are feeling their way across a bridge that Cueto and a few others have been building in obscurity for many years.

“I change Cuba one Cuban at a time,” Cueto says.

Have pity on the panting bicitaxista, for load-

ed in back are 15 copies of Cueto’s new book, a 560-page illustrated coffee-table edition that weighs seven pounds. The subject is the long, strange trip of a little statue of the Virgin of Charity that was found floating offshore 400 years ago.

Nicknamed “Cachita,” this expression of the mother of Christ became the Catholic patroness of Cuba and was adapted by Santería followers.

Cachita grew into a national symbol, crossed into pop culture, went underground during the revolution and recently made a triumphant return to public life. She transcends politics as well as religion and is as cherished in Miami as in Havana. Which is why Cueto considers his quixotic mission so vital.

The bicitaxi ride is but one leg in this monthlong, 1,500-mile odyssey he is undertaking from one end of the island to the other and back. He is donating 2,000 copies of his book on the Virgin to Cuba. Of those, the Cuban Catholic Church is disseminating 1,500. Cueto himself is delivering the remaining 500 to the central libraries in the 15 provinces of Cuba and to historians and scholars.

The logistics are loco. In Cuba, “nada es fácil,” Cueto says. “Nothing is easy.” Traveling between cities in rented or borrowed Russian and Chinese roadsters — bookmobiles of dubious reliability — or on public buses, he plans to show up at each provincial library wobbling under the weight of enough copies to be distributed to the dozen or so municipal libraries in each province.

In practically pre-digital Cuba, the road trip is the simplest way Cueto knows to ensure that as many Cubans as possible will have access to the book. Few, if any, new works by exiled writers enjoy such wide diffusion. Cueto must give it away because local libraries couldn’t afford to buy this cultural encyclopedia that he sells for $80 outside Cuba — more than three times the average monthly salary here.

Just as the Virgin in Cueto’s book is an emblem of common ground between the exile communityandCubanswhoneverleft,hisquest

Spanning two apartments, Cueto’s collection of Cuban artifacts includes, from top, a pin of comics character Yellow Kid, “I Love Lucy” collectibles and vintage cigar boxes.

KLMNO WEEKLY

is an elaborate gesture of personal diplomacy.

Along the way, he will have to rely on the kindness of strangers as well as old friends. But it’s never simple when an exile returns.

Cross the threshold of Cueto’s Washington home and step into centuries of Cuba. It’s an

oasis of erudition and kitsch: powder horns dating to the taking of Havana by the British in 1762; 19th-century porcelain plates depicting Cuban scenes; rare colonial lithographs; ceramic Dutch jars to keep Cuban tobacco fresh; newspaper coverage of the 1898 war for independence against Spain; bound revolutionary decrees that established the new government in 1959; a bottle of José Martí American porter beer; original artwork by Antonio Prohías, the Cuban exile who transformed his popular Cuban cartoon, “The Sinister Man,” into “Spy vs.

Spy” for Mad magazine.

Every square foot of the dozen rooms — including one with his bed squeezed in like an afterthought — is dedicated to the Emilioteca.

Chambers and corridors are lined with bookshelves and displays, or subdivided into labyrinthine aisles of vertical files. A closet holds the secrets of Cuban maps. Another, Cuban sports. The cabinets in the extra kitchen are filled with Cuban cookbooks. Cueto has a database of 5,500 songs and hundreds of pieces of sheet music composed by foreigners and inspired by Cuba. He uses them to organize concerts in Cuba of music most Cubans probably have never heard.

A certain air of chaos is illusory, for everything is organized according to a mysterious system that allows Cueto to locate anything instantly.

“There’s no topic on which I have nothing,” says Cueto, a retired lawyer for the Inter-American Development Bank. He never married, lives frugally and does not own a car. For more than 40 years, he has dedicated all his extra time and money to his search for Cuba.

“The echo of Cuba is so enormous, in so many places, in so many forms, in so many countries and in so many epochs,” he says. “You can measure the power of Cuban culture through that. You don’t come from a quiet place; you come from a place that makes waves.”

Cueto inherited that audacious spirit. In the early 1970s, his mother, still in Havana, was grievously ill, and he wanted to see her. The Cuban government wouldn’t give him a visa.

After a four-year letter-writing campaign and the threat of chaining himself to a Cuban flag at a UNESCO meeting, he was allowed to visit her in 1977, for the first time in 16 years.

He realized that the United States had given him political freedom and economic opportunity, but Cuba had bestowed his language and culture, and he wanted a more meaningful relationship with that part of his being.

“I was willing to put aside my pain to work with people who had nothing to do with my pain,” he says. “I didn’t go and meet with Fidel and the generals. I met with ordinary people doing research in the library, going to mucontinues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

seums. . . . We realized we had a lot in common.”

The collector has opinions, but his collection is impartial. Satirical Fidel Castro masks and books on human rights coexist with the complete works of Castro and Guevara, not just in Spanish, but also English, Italian, German and Turkish.

“My house is a metaphor for what Cuba should be,” he says. “We should be able to live together with opposite views.”

And for that, the Emilioteca has become a place where people with sharp disagreements over Cuba feel welcome.

Rafael Peñalver, an outspoken Cuban-born lawyer and preservationist in Miami who has never returned because he thinks most trips only fill the coffers of the regime, applauds Cueto’s efforts.

“History will say that Emilio played a significant role in the preservation of Cuban culture during these years when the country was completely impoverished in every way,” Peñalver says. “He is motivated by the principle that we cannot allow the divisions of the present to obliterate our vision of the eternal Cuba that we all share.”

Cueto highlights facets of his collection in books and monographs. His book on the Virgin, in collaboration with Cuban photographer Julio Larramendi and Cuban designer Yamilet Moya Silva, is his fifth. Four more are in production, including one about Cuban culture in the United States.

His 2010 study of 19th-century French artist Frederic Mialhe, whose images introduced the island to the wider world, won the Cuban Catauro Prize for best cultural work. Presenting the award, the president of the Cuban writers and artists union saluted Cueto as “a rare bird, full of curiosity and love for his country. Although he may not live in his country, he lives within it, and for it.”

When the director of the provincial library in Camaguey, Carmen Diego Fonseca, heard that

Cueto planned to swing by with books, she insisted that he attend the annual two-day writers symposium and present a lecture.

“That is what I was not expecting,” Cueto says later. “It’s the provincial library of a communist country!”

But the Cubans are delighted to welcome the exile home and play a role in this celebration of shared culture.

The bicitaxi pulls up to a whitewashed former mansion. Diego and local scholars gather in the foyer to embrace him.

Cueto abhors the intolerance of dissent and the control over people’s lives on the island, yet his appreciation for Cuba’s virtues earns him the space to remark on its defects without causing offense. This becomes clear in the Camaguey library when he greets his old friend Soledad Cruz, a writer and former Cuban ambassador to UNESCO. They begin discussing the diplomatic talks. Cruz knocks the so-called land of the free for prohibiting most citizens from traveling to Cuba. Cueto agrees and calls the American travel policy “unacceptable.” But Cruz goes too far when she suggests that Cuba has been a paragon of free travel.

“No, no, no, mi amor,” Cueto says, his voice rising. “I lived this story. I lived it.” Flooding his mind are the memories of desperately trying to visit his mother.

Their voices rise again over which country is most to blame for starting the 50-year freeze in relations. Cueto appreciates Cuban resentment of the long history of American intervention.

But Cruz paints Castro as a victim of unprovoked American hostility.

“No, excuse me, mi amor. I’ve spent 50 years studying the subject,” Cueto says.

Cruz smiles at Cueto’s indignant self-certainty, equal to her own. She touches his arm and says, “I love you because you are a true Cuban.”

They watch scores of people streaming into the library for the symposium, which will focus on local history and literature.

To start the symposium, a jazz band plays classic Cuban ballads. Cueto, in the front row, sings along. He gasps when he hears the opening bars of “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” by Osvaldo Farrés — “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.”

Farrés left Cuba for New Jersey after the revolution, another exile whose motives were questioned in his native land and whose music was spurned for a time.

“She’s singing a song from someone who was banned,” Cueto says under his breath.

Another brick in the bridge?

Quizás.

Emilioteca has become a place where people with sharp disagreements over Cuba feel welcome.

The road from Camaguey to Las Tunas is straight and flat past dry cattle country and the occasional sugar mill puffing smoke. Today’s bookmobile, a tiny 1986 Moskvitch, crawls and whines on barely perceptible inclines. The Virgin of Charity medal stuck to the dashboard and the Virgin of Charity picture hanging from the rear-view mirror are for luck, protection and tips, says driver Carlos Alberto de los Rios Otaño.

Despite the talismans, the Moskvitch gives out. While de los Rios disappears under the hood to change a part.

During the pause, he takes stock of his mission. Unlike his other books, this latest

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

cultural event.”

In Matanzas, Cueto’s presentation is graced by a choir singing songs to the Virgin. In Santa Clara, he is interviewed on regional television, and a clip goes national.

Cueto always makes a point of introducing himself as an exile in Washington, then adopts the first-person plural to insist on a bond with his audiences — “our culture,” “our country.”

Finally, he arrives at the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, just outside the city of Santiago. He enters an alcove where pilgrims leave gifts of thanks to Cachita and solemnly sets down a copy of his book.

Almost immediately, a tour guide opens it and starts reading, absorbed. He just finished explaining to his group that the Virgin is something that all Cubans have in common. This book, he says, is “another step, by way of the story of the Virgin of Charity, to reunite Cubans — Cubans here and Cubans there.”

Out of 80 or so students in Cueto’s graduating class of 1960 at the prestigious Belén prep

one has the potential for much broader appeal. Translated into English, the title is: “The Virgin of Charity of El Cobre in the Soul of the Cuban People.” El Cobre is the former coppermining village in southeastern Cuba where a statue of the Virgin holding baby Jesus is on display in a basilica, four centuries after the statue was seen floating upright and pulled from the sea by three peasants, its clothes miraculously dry, according to sacred legend.

For decades after the revolution, activities of the Catholic Church were curtailed, but by the early 1990s, the church and the Virgin were recovering their place in society. At a special Mass in Havana’s Revolution Square in 2012, a giant image of the Virgin was displayed on the facade of the National Library, not far from the iconic portraits of revolutionary heroes.

It took an outsider-insider like Cueto to show, with 1,058 pictures, how extensively the Virgin has been transformed in art, music, literature, dance, television, radio, movies and marketing — both on the island and by Cubans in exile. In “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway, the fisherman Santiago promises to visit the Virgin’s shrine at El Cobre if he catches a fish. (Hemingway later had his Nobel Prize medal deposited at the shrine.) In the Oscar-nominated Cuban film “Strawberry and Chocolate” (1993) about the friendship between a gay man and a revolutionary, the characters address statues of the Virgin for

Cueto rides in a bicitaxi driven

by Aldo Varona to deliver some of his books in Camaguey. help with their love lives. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History owns a Barbie dressed as Cachita by an exiled artist.

“Emilio is an example of the type of person one hopes is emerging now,” says Joel Jover, a painter and sculptor in Cuba. His portrait of the Virgin, made of flattened beer cans and bottle caps — a commentary on Cachita’s closeness to the people — is included in Cueto’s book. “Cuba needs people who can extend a bridge to achieve normal relations not just with the United States, but with the exile community.”

At every stop on Cueto’s trek, affection for the Virgin and incredulity at his undertaking prompt people to make a big deal of the book tour.

“This is not a book,” says historian Víctor Marrero in the Las Tunas library. “This is a

school in Havana — where Castro graduated in 1945 — about 90 percent moved into exile,

by Cueto’s count. One recent afternoon at Catholic University in Washington — where Cueto graduated as valedictorian in 1965 — a dozen Belén classmates and relatives of classmates join an audience of 70 to hear Cueto talk about his book.

He’s trying to change the exile community, too, one exile at a time. “I keep a record of a slow resurrection” of Cuba, he says. “Something to inform my compatriots in the U.S. that it’s not what they think, and they should give it a chance.”

After dinner with old friends, Cueto returns to the Emilioteca and his constant search for a more intimate understanding of the repercussions of a past that is never past.

He turns to the section of 19th-century porcelain. He recently acquired a French plate printed with an image of a Cuban sugar planter beside a woman with a parasol.

“This is an image that has been haunting me for 25 years,” Cueto says.

He goes into another room and pulls down a decades-old binder labeled “Dudas” — Doubts.

He flips through the binder and stops on a photocopy: the same picture as the one on the French plate.

“I have now found another country whose porcelain industry included an image of Cuba,” he says with quiet triumph. “Prior to this discovery, France was not in the picture.

That is to me a source of joy, to know that my little country, in addition to all the echoes it has left behind, also left an imprint here.”

The hour is approaching midnight, but Cueto checks pending online auctions and discovers that tonight, for $3.50, he bought a vintage matchbox.

“Delightful Dining in Madison” is printed on the matchbox. “Poole’s Cuba Club.”

“So now I have a piece that documents that in Madison, Wisconsin, there was a Cuba Club,” the exile says happily. “See, it never ends.” n

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WORKPLACE

The flex schedule empathy gap BY

B RIGID S CHULTE

W

orkers around the globe have been finding it harder to juggle the demands of work and the rest of life in the past five years, a new report shows, with many working longer hours, deciding to delay or forgo having children, discontinuing education, or struggling to pay tuition for their children.

Why? A big reason is the economy: Professional workers in companies that shed employees in the Great Recession are still doing the work of two or more people and working longer hours. Salaries have stagnated, and costs continue to rise, according to a new survey of nearly 10,000 workers in eight countries by Ernst & Young’s Global Generations Research.

But another big reason? The boss just doesn’t get it.

Close to 80 percent of millennials surveyed are part of dualincome couples in which both work full time. Of Generation X workers, people in their 30s and 40s now, 73 percent are. But of baby boomers, the generation born just after World War II that now occupies most top management positions, just 47 percent have a full-time working spouse.

More than a quarter of babyboomer workers have a spouse at home, or one who works part time or with flexible hours and is responsible for taking care of all home-front duties.

“I really see that there’s an empathy gap in the workplace,” said Karyn Twaronite, EY globaldiversity and inclusiveness officer.

“When there’s frustration about work-life balance in the workplace, and you think your boss doesn’t get it, that very likely could be true. ” Younger workers see that technology frees them to work productively from anywhere, she said.

But older bosses who are more accustomed to work cultures with more face time may see only empty cubicles. “They’re afraid people who don’t come to the office won’t work as hard,” she said.

ISTOCK

Millennials are looking for a work-life balance.

But their supervisors don’t understand why.

Millennial workers, the group that companies say they are scrambling to attract and retain, are the most dissatisfied. Survey after survey, including the EY one, show that what millennials most want is flexibility in where, when and how they work. Millennials as well as men were most likely in the survey to say that they would take a pay cut, forgo a promotion or be willing to move to manage worklife demands better.

Yet the survey found that 1 in 6 reports suffering negative consequences for having a flexible schedule. Lack of flexibility was cited among the top reasons mil-

lennials quit jobs. And nearly 40 percent of young workers, male or female, in the United States are so unhappy with the lack of paid parental-leave policies that they say they would be willing to move to another country.

“A figure like that certainly shifts the conversation from paid parental-leave being a ‘nice to have’ to being a ‘need to have’ for companies,” Twaronite said.

In the United States, the only advanced economy in the world with no paid parental-leave policy, only 9 percent of companies offered fully paid maternity-leave benefits to workers in 2014, down

from 16 percent in 2008, according to the Families and Work Institute’s National Study of Employers. For spouses and partners, 14 percent of U.S. companies offer paid leave, either partially or fully paid, down from 16 percent in 2008.

The institute found that the share of employers offering reduced hours and career flexibility also has fallen and that flexible work options are not available to all employees, but only to certain groups, such as parents.

“Wanting flexibility or work-life balance is the number one thing we hear all the time from candidates. It’s the number one reason why people are looking for a new job, by far,” said Heidi Parsont, who runs TorchLight, a recruiting firm in Alexandria, Va. “We’re definitely seeing more candidates asking for it. But companies still see it as making an exception. It’s still not the norm.”

Ryan Shaw, 23, is a case in point.

He doesn’t have children, yet he rates work-life balance as not only important but also “necessary for success.”

Shaw does social media marketing for a start-up in Los Angeles called Forcefield. He liked his job.

But he didn’t like living in L.A., where his expensive rent kept him from being able to pay down his astronomical student loans. He had other job offers that would have given him more money but demanded more work hours.

He had a different idea. He told his boss that he would stay at the company but only if he could do his job from his laptop, wherever and whenever he wanted. His boss agreed.

So Shaw is moving back home to Florida.

“The narrative that’s always drawn is you have to choose financial success or personal success [and] having a life. And to me, that’s a false choice,” Shaw said. “I think you can have both. I’m sort of playing the long game. I want to take care of my health and have deep relationships with people I care most about. And not just people who happen to be in the same building with me everyday.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015

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HEALTH BY

M ARTA Z ARASKA

S

alt intake that is often deemed high may actually have benefits, scientists say.

“We humans eat more salt than is necessary. But we all do it.

So the question is: Why?” asks Paul Breslin, a professor of nutritional sciences who researches sodium appetite at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.

In the past, people thought that salt boosted health — so much so that the Latin word for “health” — “salus” — was derived from “sal” (salt). In medieval times, salt was prescribed to treat a multitude of conditions, including toothaches, stomachaches and “heaviness of mind.”

While governments have long pushed people to reduce their intakes of sodium chloride (table salt) to prevent high blood pressure, stroke and coronary heart disease, there are good reasons why cutting down on salt is not an easy thing to do.

Scientists suggest that sodium intake may have physiological benefits that make salt particularly tempting — and ditching the salt shaker difficult. It comes down to evolution.

“In biology, if something is attractive and we invest in gaining it, it must be beneficial, adaptive in evolutionary terms,” says Micah Leshem, a professor of psychology at Haifa University in Israel, who spent decades researching salt’s unique appeal.

People tend to consume about the same amount of sodium no matter where they live, and this amount hasn’t changed much in decades. Those facts hint at the biological basis of our sodium appetite.

A 2014 analysis of data that spanned 50 years and dozens of countries (including the United States, France, China and several African nations, including Zimbabwe and South Africa) found that the quantity of sodium that most people consume (and then excrete) falls into a historically narrow range of 2.6 to 4.8 grams per day. (And then there are extremes: In 16th-century Sweden, for example, people ate 100 grams a day, mostly from fish that had been salted to preserve it.)

“Over the last five decades, salt content of commercial food in

PASS THE SALT

CHARLES D. WINTERS/SCIENCE SOURCE

Health experts tell us to cut back, but there are evolutionary reasons we want — and need — it our food [in the United States] has gone up. But if you look at people’s 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, you see that the amounts of salt people consume have been constant,” he says.

Irrespective of age, sex or race, between 1957 and 2003 Americans have been eating on average 3.5 grams of salt a day. “This suggests that we are somehow regulating the amount of salt we are eating,” Breslin says.

And, in fact, salt is good for us.

Sodium is necessary for preventing dehydration, for proper

transmission of nerve impulses and for normal functioning of cells. If we ate no sodium at all, we would die. When they become sodium-deficient, many animals go out of their way to find the mineral. That’s why, for example, sweaty clothes of alpinists tend to attract mountain goats.

Eating salt may also help calm us or reduce our stress. In animal studies, the effects are pretty clear. An experiment published in 1995 showed, for example, that when rats are put in stressful situations, they choose to drink

S A LT C RAV ING S

3.5 mg Average daily U.S. consumption (1957-2003) REC OM M E ND E D DA I LY LIM IT S

1.5 mg American Heart Association

2.3 mg U.S. government

KLMNO WEEKLY

salty water rather than unsalted water. In another study, when wild rabbits were stressed, their sodium intake shot up.

The possibly stress-reducing, or mood-enhancing, effects of salt in humans are not as well documented, but there is some evidence. In a 2014 study involving about 10,000 Americans, Leshem and his colleagues found a relationship between salt intake and depression: Women whose diets were high in sodium were less depressed than other women. “Maybe people are selfmedicating with salt,” he reasons.

“But that’s a small effect; salt is not going to cure anyone of depression.”

It’s also possible that sodium aids growth. As scientists from New Jersey Medical School found out, if you put rats on low-salt diets, their bones and muscles fail to grow as fast as they normally would. In one of his experiments, Leshem found that children in general reach for more salt than adults do — independent of calorie intake — which may be explained by the needs of their growing bodies.

Yet most of us do not need huge amounts of salt to survive.

Just the opposite: About half of humans are what is called saltsensitive: If they consume lots of sodium, their blood pressure will go up. But if we do have internal regulatory mechanisms that tell us to load up on salt when our bodies need it (for growth, for mood improvement or to simply prevent dehydration), does it even make sense to encourage people to try to reduce their dietary sodium? It does, Breslin says, but only to a point.

“If people are regulating their sodium intakes, they are not going to be able to reduce it a lot — say, by 50 percent or more. It would be like putting someone in a room and cutting the amount of oxygen by half: Your body will try to maintain the level of oxygen in your blood and will make you breathe faster.” And so, as Johnson suggests, when it comes to salt intake, “moderation is probably ideal.”

Cut your sodium intake if your health condition requires it and your doctor recommends it, but don’t look at salt as an evil that should be banned from your plate completely: There may be valid reasons why your body craves it. n

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BOOKS

The guys behind Kennedy’s election N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

V INCENT B ZDEK

I THE IRISH BROTHERHOOD John F. Kennedy, His Inner Circle and the Improbable Rise to the Presidency

By Helen O’Donnell with Kenneth O’Donnell Sr. Counterpoint. 502 pp. $30

n the 52 years since John Kennedy’s life and promise were cut short by Lee Harvey Oswald, his story has inspired close to 2,000 books, a rate of nearly two for each of the 1,000 days of his presidency. It’s the Kennedy family’s distinct brew of triumph and tragedy — their beauty and charm and idealistic impulses, with a knack for human wreckage stirred in — that keeps us coming back to read more. But after so many books, it’s fair to ask if there is anything new to say.

Rather than trying to add information, Helen O’Donnell, the daughter of one of Kennedy’s most trusted aides, Kenny O’Donnell, recounts a well-trod story in a fresh way in “The Irish Brotherhood.”

O’Donnell is a writer and producer who worked as a researcher for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on his book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” but this is a personal project.

She’s dug up a wonderful trove of tape-recorded interviews her father did with NBC White House correspondent Sander Vanocur.

O’Donnell uses them not so much to shed light on what happened in Kennedy’s early career and the runup to his election as president as to render an intimate, novelistic sense of what it was like to be there. Through dialogue and anecdote, she re-creates the heady experience of a band of unknowns electing the first Catholic president. We watch as a squad of warhardened vets take down the backroom kingmakers of the day and usher in the modern political era, with its TV debates, its candidates hopscotching the country and its dawning power of celebrity.

“They were a new, post-World War II generation trying to shake up the drab, colorless political system and toss out the political hacks that they believed had moved the country off track,” O’Donnell writes. “They were upstarts, outsiders, tough guys. . . .

They were young, arrogant, reckless, and smart as hell.”

They were indeed young. When

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President John F. Kennedy confers with aide Kenny O’Donnell in 1961.

Kennedy took office at 43, he was the nation’s youngest elected president; Bobby, his attorney general, was 34. Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, was 35; Kenny O’Donnell, his closest aide, was 36; Larry O’Brien, his campaign manager, was the old man at 43.

The star here is O’Donnell, a rough-edged, blue-collar tough guy from Worcester, Mass., where his father was a football coach.

The great equalizer, the GI Bill, paid for him to go to college after World War II, and he took the money and went to Harvard, a school he would have never been able to afford in another life. He and Bobby met on the football field, where, by this account, Bobby had no talent whatsoever, surviving by sheer determination and force of will.

O’Donnell became the Kennedy family’s consigliere, described as the Gatekeeper, the Cobra, the designated bad guy, and the go-between for John and Bobby.

Some of the gripping anecdotes his daughter has unearthed include one from the long night that

preceded Jack’s first win, in a race for a Massachusetts House seat when he was 29. When campaign manager Bobby woke up the next morning and it was finally plain that victory was secure, he promptly threw up in a wastebasket.

We also get a first-person account of just how close to death John Kennedy was in January 1955, after two failed back surgeries and the start of treatments for Addison’s disease. In one harrowing weekend, Kennedy’s temperature spiked to 105 degrees, and he was given last rites by a family priest — a ritual that occurred multiple times.

“Suddenly,” O’Donnell told Vanocur, “I was not particularly interested in his political situation, but rather his survival.” O’Donnell’s vivid account fleshes out the human details of Kennedy’s never-ending medical peril, which Robert Dallek documented so well from medical records in “An Unfinished Life.”

What may be most revelatory, however, are the unvarnished accounts of the hardball, take-noprisoners politics that undergird-

ed much of Kennedy’s success.

When, for example, Pennsylvania Gov. David Lawrence dragged his feet about endorsing Kennedy as it became clear that the presidential nomination was Kennedy’s for the taking in early 1960, the candidate minced no words. Lawrence, hoping for political favors, wanted to keep control of his delegates before the convention, where he might promise them to Hubert Humphrey or Lyndon Johnson, who had not spent time fighting it out in the primaries. Staring directly at Lawrence, a Catholic, and his cronies during a speech in Pennsylvania, Kennedy told them that they had “better think what was going to happen to the Democratic Party if the candidate who has won all the primaries and amassed all the delegates can be denied the nomination simply because he is an Irish Catholic.”

The message Kennedy sent, according to O’Donnell: “You are not a kingmaker and the days of political backroom deals with only the insiders involved, well, John Kennedy would not stand for it.”

“It was the toughest, coldest, and most direct speech I had ever heard John Kennedy give publicly,” O’Donnell said. “He never took his eyes off Lawrence and it was cold as ice.” Afterward, “big tough steelworkers and hardworking fellows . . . were asking for him to sign his photograph and wanted to get his autograph.”

Once, when visiting the Kennedy compound long after its glory days, Helen O’Donnell saw Bobby’s widow, Ethel, standing alone under the portico of Jack’s former home. Ethel said to her: “Don’t forget all the good times. There may have been difficult days, there was tragedy, but never forget how much fun we all had along the way.

Not often does one get to live your dreams, and we did, they did.” n Bzdek is a senior editor at The Post and author of “The Kennedy Legacy: Jack, Bobby and Ted and a Family Dream Fulfilled.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A murder mystery you’ll remember

What Rivers didn’t take to the grave

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

t may be useful to think of David Baldacci’s “Memory Man” as a master class in the art of the bestseller. Starting with “Absolute Power” in 1996, Baldacci has, in less than 20 years, published an amazing 30 novels, almost all of them bestsellers.

That’s not to say his thrillers are all equally pleasing. I read “Hour Game” in 2004 and thought it so bizarre that I swore off his work until this one came along. Happily, “Memory Man,” although strange in some ways, is both interesting and highly entertaining.

It’s big, bold and almost impossible to put down.

There are several routes to the top of the list. Some bestselling authors — Michael Connelly, say, or Richard Price — write realistic novels and write them so well that they attract a large audience. Others lure readers with plots and characters that are implausible, sometimes wildly so, but also fun.

The Baldacci books I’ve read have tended that way — toward the fanciful, sometimes seriously over the top. I gave up on “Hour Game” when, during a climactic shootout, Baldacci gravely informed us, “Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided.” We all have our limits.

“Memory Man” has its improbable moments, but all in all the author’s fertile imagination makes it a winner. His new hero, the Memory Man of the title, is Amos Decker, a detective in a small town in the Midwest who comes home one night to find his wife and 9-year-old daughter slaughtered. Overcome by grief and rage, he almost kills himself but decides instead to live for revenge.

We rejoin Decker 16 months later. The murders remain unsolved. He has quit the police force, lost his home and car and been homeless for a time, but now he’s working as a private investigator and living in a motel. One day the police tell him that a man has confessed to the murders. The

confession proves illusory.

Then a masked intruder kills eight students and teachers at the local high school, the one that Decker, 42, attended. The police invite Decker to join the investigation. There’s evidence that the murder of his family and the rampage at the school are connected.

The killer starts leaving messages that taunt Decker and make clear his or her hatred of the detective.

What follows is both convoluted and captivating. We learn that Decker is one of the most unusual detectives any novelist has dreamed up. After playing football in college, he tried out for a professional team — only to be blindsided in his first game by a vicious hit to his head. He fell to the ground unconscious and for a time was legally dead. When he recovered, his brain had been rewired.

Decker now has total recall.

Anything he has ever seen or read, at any point in his life, he can remember. His analytic powers far exceed those of most mortals. It’s also true that he is no longer concerned with other people’s feelings or with love or kindness. He’s a brilliant machine who returns to his home town and joins the police force. He is a superhero detective, and much of the fascination of “Memory Man” comes from his being pitted against an enemy who is his intellectual equal and hellbent on Decker’s destruction.

Probable? No. Fun? You bet.

I called this novel a master class on the bestseller because of its fast-moving narrative, the originality of its hero and its irresistible plot. Yet the author lures us in other ways as well. Often I thought myself a few steps ahead of Decker in puzzling out who the villain might be. I wasn’t, of course, and that made me wonder if it might be the mark of a really smart novelist to let readers sometimes think we’re smarter than we are. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

J

MEMORY MAN

By David Baldacci Grand Central. 405 pp. $28

THE BOOK OF JOAN Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation

By Melissa Rivers Crown Archetype.

304 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

N ORA K RUG

oan Rivers has been dead less than a year, and already her daughter, Melissa, has written a biography about her. It was all her publisher’s idea, Rivers writes in “The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation,” which was released Tuesday.

Rivers says she was approached “right after my mother’s funeral — and I mean, right after. I was walking down the aisle of Temple Emanu-El when a strange woman . . . pressed her card into my hand and made the international sign for ‘Call Me!’ ” Rivers barely hesitated before saying yes. “What would my mother have done?” she writes. “Sell, baby, sell!” And so she has.

This book, Rivers writes, is “not only a fun homage to my mom, but also, now that she’s gone, she can’t return it to Amazon in exchange for Giuliana Rancic’s new memoir.”

You can almost hear Joan Rivers trying to sell that failing joke with a gruff, “C’mon, guys. It’s funny.”

Melissa Rivers’s book is not that funny, but it is an antic, sweet remembrance of the brazen comedian. It also shows that, even for the woman who pioneered the concept of oversharing, there were some things Joan took with her to the grave. (A few things she literally took: a book of crossword puzzles, a pair of glasses and her favorite pens — all of which her daughter says she placed in her mother’s casket.)

Among the other details Melissa Rivers divulges: When traveling, Joan hid money in empty Milk Dud boxes. “They’re the same size as paper money,” she points out, “so in case someone rifled through her purse, they’d overlook it.” (Also in her purse: full-size cans of Lysol to ward off germs).

She was a terrible speller, she loved to do needlepoint and, despite all of her jokes about them, she loved flight attendants. (One gets the sense that much of this material is a set-up for an off-color joke.)

Her favorite books: “Helter

Skelter” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Her fourth-grade teacher at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School noted in a report card that Joan (then Joan Molinsky) was “learning to be self-reliant and gain recognition through accomplishment rather than through complaining,” adding, “She is fast overcoming her tendency toward bribery in order to win friends.”

And in case you were wondering: Joan “changed her own physical appearance” more than 300 times — 365 to be specific, according to her daughter. “The running joke,” she writes, was that her own grandson used to call Rivers “Nana New Face.” Still, Melissa insists, “She didn’t have as much work as people think she had.”

(What does she think we’ve been thinking?)

Rivers’s breezy book is full of filler – Joan’s dating tips (“Never pick up the check;” “Never carry condoms”), Mother’s Day gift do’s and don’ts (“never, ever, ever . . . give your mother a vacuum”) and the like. The book is less a biography than a series of vignettes, some of which read like Joan Rivers sketches: “Right up until the end of her life my mother believed that, in a pinch, ketchup, Altoids, and Milk Duds were a threecourse meal. That doesn’t mean we didn’t sit down to dinner together every night. We did. And my parents would start a meal by thanking God not only for the abundance of food but for the abundance of restaurants offering delivery within thirty minutes.”

All joking aside, Melissa, who starred with her mother on “Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?” and is the executive producer for E! Entertainment’s “Fashion Police,” clearly has a genuine affection and respect for her mother, and losing her has been difficult. “I’m lost as a performer right now,” she writes, “but I will find my own voice. I was taught by the best.” n Krug is a Book World editor and a MisFits columnist.

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OPINIONS

Making church ‘cool’ isn’t going to draw millennials RACHEL HELD EVANS is a blogger and the author of “Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church.”

Bass reverberates through the auditorium floor as a heavily bearded worship leader pauses to invite the congregation, bathed in the light of two giant screens, to tweet using #JesusLives. The scent of freshly brewed coffee wafts in from the lobby, where you can order macchiatos and purchase mugs boasting a sleek church logo. The chairs are comfortable, and the music sounds like something from the top of the charts. At the end of the service, someone will win an iPad. This, in the view of many churches, is what millennials like me want. And no wonder pastors think so. Church attendance has plummeted among young adults.

In the United States, 59 percent of people ages 18 to 29 with a Christian background have, at some point, dropped out.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, among those of us who came of age around the year 2000, a solid quarter claim no religious affiliation at all, making my generation significantly more disconnected from faith than members of Generation X were at a comparable point in their lives and twice as detached as baby boomers were as young adults.

In response, many churches have sought to lure millennials back by focusing on style points: cooler bands, hipper worship, edgier programming, impressive technology. Yet while these aren’t inherently bad ideas and might in some cases be effective, they are not the key to drawing millennials back to God in a lasting and meaningful way.

Young people don’t simply want a better show. And trying to be cool might be making things worse.

You’re just as likely to hear the words “market share” and “branding” in church staff meetings these days as you are in any corporate office.

Megachurches such as

Saddleback in Lake Forest, Calif., and Lakewood in Houston have entire marketing departments devoted to enticing new members. Kent Shaffer of ChurchRelevance.com routinely ranks the best logos and Web sites and offers strategic counsel to organizations like Saddleback and LifeChurch.tv.

Increasingly, churches offer sermon series on iTunes and concert-style worship services with names like “Vine” or “Gather.” The young-adult group at Ed Young’s Dallas-based Fellowship Church is called Prime, and one of the singles groups at his father’s congregation in Houston is called Vertical. Churches have made news in recent years for giving away tablet computers , TVs and even cars at Easter. Still, attendance among young people remains flat.

When I left church at age 29, full of doubt and disillusionment, I wasn’t looking for a better-produced Christianity. I was looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity: I didn’t like how gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were being treated by my evangelical faith community. I had questions about science and faith, biblical interpretation and theology. I felt lonely in my doubts. And, contrary to popular

JOHN JAY CUBUAY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

belief, the fog machines and light shows at those slick evangelical conferences didn’t make things better for me. They made the whole endeavor feel shallow, forced and fake.

While no two faith stories are exactly the same, I’m not the only millennial whose faith couldn’t be saved by lacquering on a hipper veneer. According to Barna Group, among young people who don’t go to church, 87 percent say they see Christians as judgmental, and 85 percent see them as hypocritical.

A similar study found that “only 8% say they don’t attend because church is ‘out of date,’ undercutting the notion that all churches need to do for Millennials is to make worship ‘cooler.’ ” In other words, a church can have a sleek logo and Web site, but if it’s judgmental and exclusive, if it fails to show the love of Jesus to all, millennials will sniff it out. Our reasons for leaving have less to do with style and image and more to do with substantive questions about life, faith and community. We’re not as shallow as you might think.

You can get a cup of coffee with your friends anywhere, but church is the only place you can get ashes smudged on your forehead as a reminder of your

mortality. You can be dazzled by a light show at a concert on any given weekend, but church is the only place that fills a sanctuary with candlelight and hymns on Christmas Eve. You can snag all sorts of free swag for brand loyalty online, but church is the only place where you are named a beloved child of God with a cold plunge into the water. You can share food with the hungry at any homeless shelter, but only the church teaches that a shared meal brings us into the very presence of God. What finally brought me back, after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments. Baptism, confession, Communion, preaching the Word, anointing the sick — you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the past 2,000 years. The sacraments are what make the church relevant, no matter the culture or era. They don’t need to be repackaged or rebranded; they just need to be practiced, offered and explained in the context of a loving, authentic and inclusive community.

Church attendance may be dipping, but God can survive the Internet age. After all, He knows a thing or two about resurrection. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Fault men for divorce among poor DARLENA CUNHA is a former television producer turned stay-athome mom to twin girls.

She writes for The Washington Post and Time.

The first question people ask me when they learn that my husband lost his job, our house went underwater and we went from middle class to barely working poor during the 2008 economic crash is: How did you stay together?

It always struck me as a strange question. But it’s actually a reasonable one. Overall, America’s divorce rate has fallen. But like many things, the poor have not reaped the benefits of this trend. The number of married, collegeeducated couples splitting by their seventh anniversary has dropped from more than 20 percent in the early 1980s to just 11 percent today. But among the poor, those numbers are stagnant. According to the New York Times, 17 percent of lowerincome couples (pairs making no more than twice the federal poverty line of just over $30,000) get divorced, about the same rate as it was in the 1980s.

Why this discrepancy?

To start, money is a major source of tension for all couples (they fight more about it than about anything else, including sex and child care). And less money can equal more problems.

Raevan Zayas stays at home with her 1-year-old baby in California while her husband struggles at a low-paying job. “Our kid needs new shoes and clothes, and I

can’t remember the last time Isaac and I did something nice together,” she said. “Our relationship is so strained. How are you supposed to work through the problems in your relationship when you’re worried about how you’re going to buy milk for your kid?”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said he’s also found that workingclass families have more stringent views about men as providers. The economy has shifted so that those without college degrees have more trouble finding such work, which contributes not only to financial hardship but also to relationship stress.

But financial stress doesn’t explain why inequality, not poverty, is the key to understanding why the poor haven’t seen their divorce rates

fall. To understand that, we need to look at women.

Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women, according to Bill Doherty, professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota. In the 1960s and ’70s, he said, highly educated mothers got divorced at about the same rate of less educated mothers.

In the last decade or two, these two groups of women have been moving in opposite directions: fewer divorces for graduates, more divorces for non-graduates. In intricate lifetime marriage and divorce studies that span decades, done

by Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, 29 percent of married, collegeeducated couples have ever divorced. In contrast, those studies show that nearly 50 percent of married couples not holding college degrees have divorced.

Doherty theorizes that the reason for this has something to do with the changing expectations women have for their partners. “What we have is historically high expectations for what young people call a 50-50 marriage,” he said. “People are looking for a high-intimacy, high-income marriage where both partners contribute, regardless of income bracket.

Unless you have a good economic base and a certain level of personal maturity, it can be very hard to survive this ideal of modern marriage.”

Cece Azadi of Alabama said she simply wanted a partner who would work with her rather than against her. “With my first divorce, poverty was an issue, for sure,” she said. “He kept working and quitting, and eventually I realized that since I was the only reliable person in the family making money, there wasn’t much reason to hold onto the marriage.”

Doherty said that as more women show the willingness and ability to work hard in school to try to move their social class, the lower-income men, who previously have been shielded from financial instability with factory and industrial jobs, are being left behind.

“Women around 25 are starting to say: ‘Okay, it’s time to get serious. How do I get to the middle class? What are my prospects?’ And when they realize their partner is not interested in that, they get fed up,” Doherty said. “Plus, many have the added responsibility of a child at home. They can start to feel that they will never have a 50-50 marriage if they stay put.” n

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Bin Laden’s ambitious final plans DAVID IGNATIUS writes a foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

In the months before his death in May 2011, Osama bin Laden was discussing new gambits — from a truce with Pakistan to opportunistic alliances with jihadist groups spawned by the Arab Spring — so that he could focus on tipping what he called “the balance of fear” with his main enemy, the United States.

This picture of a cagey, quirky bin Laden, directing a terrorist “great game” from his secret lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan, emerges in eight documents released a few months ago. They were declassified to bolster the U.S. government’s case against a Pakistani named Abid Naseer but received scant media attention. Naseer was convicted in March for his role in an alleged al-Qaeda plot to bomb the New York subway. The documents deserve a closer look.

The new bin Laden files show that he recognized the opportunities that Arab upheaval offered for al-Qaeda and was moving to exploit them. AlQaeda’s main leadership had been rocked by America’s drone war, but the group still had big ambitions, even at a time when U.S. officials said it was buckling.

The bin Laden of these documents is ruminating about big strategic ideas but also micromanaging personnel decisions and counterespionage tactics. In one passage, he admonishes his deputy, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, to pay more

attention to climate change that might affect Somalia, a key recruiting area; in another, he proposes sending al-Qaeda recruits to universities to master advanced technologies that could benefit the terror group.

Bin Laden speaks in the aristocratic voice of a terroristintellectual, a Muslim version of the 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In one paragraph of a message to Rahman, he ominously presses for news about “a big operation inside America.” In the next paragraph, he asks blithely: “If you have any brother who is knowledgeable about poetry, please let us know about it.”

Bin Laden and his lieutenants believed in early 2011 that the world was moving their way, despite the harassment of drone

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

attacks. Rahman explained: “We are currently following the Arab revolutions and the changes taking place in Arab countries.”

He mentioned Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria and said, “In general, we think these changes are sweeping, and there is good in them, God willing.”

Rahman explained that he had sent al-Qaeda operatives to Libya, where there was “an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance underway.” That jihadist presence helped drive the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi the next year.

Even as bin Laden was seeking to capitalize on the Arab upheaval, he was considering local truces with Pakistan and among feuding factions in North Africa. Rahman said his operatives had conveyed this stand-down message to the Pakistani government, including contact with former intelligence chief Hamid Gul, and was exchanging messages with a senior Taliban official named Tayeb Agha (who would later meet secretly with the United States).

Rahman succinctly summarized the truce offer to Pakistan: “You became part of the battle when you sided with the Americans. If you were to leave us and our affairs alone, we would leave you alone.” Bin Laden concurred, noting: “We

would like to neutralize whomever we possibly can during our war with our bigger enemy, America.”

At that time, the United States was beginning secret peace feelers with the Taliban.

The most tantalizing nugget in these documents is Rahman’s claim that the British, too, were exploring a separate peace. He told bin Laden that according to Libyan operatives in Britain, “England is ready to leave Afghanistan if al-Qaeda would explicitly commit to not moving against England or her interests.”

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said “the claims are completely untrue.”

Hunkered down in Abbottabad, bin Laden was utterly focused on striking the United States “in its heartland.”

He noted that the slow bleed wasn’t working: Vietnam had been far more costly to America than Afghanistan; al-Qaeda’s allies would have to kill 100 times more people to equal the Vietnam death toll.

What was needed, he said a few weeks before his death, was another “large operation inside America [that] affects the security and nerves of 300 million Americans.” Al-Qaeda and its offshoots haven’t achieved that goal yet. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Riots BY

C ATHY L ISA S CHNEIDER

On April 27, after the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died of injuries allegedly suffered while in police custody, days of peaceful protests in Baltimore morphed into violent confrontations between police and stone­throwing youths. By evening, stores and cars were burn­ ing. The Baltimore riots, preceded by the violent demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last August and November, have reignited old mis­ understandings and untruths about who riots and why.

1

Riots are caused by outside agitators and activists.

The main participants in riots, my research shows, are usually young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods that have been virtually occupied by police; they usually feel powerless in the face of police brutality. When riots erupt, the balance of power momentarily inverts, and youths normally cowed by police experience a heady sense of efficacy and freedom.

Activists, in contrast, rarely participate in riots. More confident in their ability to effect social change, experienced activists tend to channel community anger into nonviolent forms of collective action. Their presence actually makes riots less likely.

2

The best way to stop a riot is strong police action and repression.

Police frequently respond to protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, as seen in Anaheim in 2012, Ferguson and Baltimore.

But police violence, in particular the killing of unarmed minority youths, is often the trigger for urban riots, so police repression prolongs the conflict.

In Anaheim, police attacks on nonviolent protesters marked the turn from peace to riots.

Researchers theorize that the very presence of weapons might make violence more likely.

A huge police deployment is not the only way to avert a riot. In 1968, as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked massive upheavals in Detroit, Chicago, Newark and Washington, New York remained quiet. Mayor John Lindsay knew that most riots break out in neighborhoods where the relationship between the police and the community has grown toxic and rendered the areas combustible. After he took office in the mid-1960s, he sought to give minorities a sense of ownership in government by creating task forces in “hot” neighborhoods and hiring young people as peacekeepers and communication liaisons. The youths kept city officials informed about potentially explosive issues.

3

Rioters are defending people who committed crimes.

Rioters are responding to longsimmering issues, not just one particular police act, which might be a symptom of a systemic problem. Since reporting on the use of lethal violence is not required, police tend to report those incidents that involved return fire or possession of a gun.

Yet many cities quietly settle lawsuits over unjustified killings and other misconduct at a cost of millions of dollars a year. In the 1990s, New York paid out around

POLICE IN BALTIMORE ON APRIL 27; PHOTO BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

$25 million a year to settle police brutality claims; that number has increased to about $100 million in recent years. Baltimore has paid $6 million in police abuse lawsuits since 2011. Moreover, in New York, more than 70 percent of accusations of resisting arrest are filed by 15 percent of police officers, which suggests that such charges have more to do with the conduct of the arresting officers than with that of the people being arrested.

4

The mass incarceration of black men has led to a decline in riots.

Since the mid-to-late 1970s, the number of riots in the United States has dropped sharply, a development often attributed to the fact that more minority men are in prison.

Mass incarceration has had a devastating impact on black and Latino men and on minority neighborhoods, but it cannot account for the decline in riot frequency since the 1970s, a decade before the explosive growth in incarceration rates. A mammoth uprising took place in Los Angeles in 1992, when California’s incarceration rate was well above

average. Missouri, home to the Ferguson riots, ranks 10th for its incarceration rate, and Baltimore has one of the highest incarceration rates of any U.S. city.

Instead of preventing riots, the punitive turn in criminal justice has multiplied the number of negative encounters between police and minority youths.

5

Riots accomplish nothing.

So say countless pundits, columnists and politicians. But as FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson said after the 1968 uprising in Washington: “A riot is somebody talking. A riot is a man crying out: ‘Listen to me, Mister.

There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you, and you are not listening.’ ” Unfortunately, riots are sometimes the only way those living in marginalized neighborhoods are heard. Rioters in Ferguson put the issue of police violence on the public agenda. It was only when Ferguson was in flames that the Justice Department investigated and condemned the city’s pattern of civil rights violations. n

SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015

24

BE INFORMED AND INSPIRED In the May-June edition of Foothills Magazine, we encourage you to get-out-and-about and enjoy the abundant recreational opportunities in our region.

To that end, we feature a group that’s been working tirelessly to help provide those outdoor opportunities. The Chelan-Douglas Land Trust and its 1,200-plus members have been a force for preserving and protecting open spaces for the past 30 years.

If your idea of outdoor recreation involves chasing a golf ball, you’ll enjoy our feature on the Alta Lake golf course. Areas of the course were charred by last year’s Carlton Complex fires, but the course is open again and in many ways, new and improved.

And after a long day spent on the many trails or fairways in the region, a glass of wine might be a welcome sight.

We have an article on the only commercial winery in the Methow Valley--Lost River Winery in Winthrop. Winemaker John Morgan purchases grapes from throughout the state to produce world-class wines in a setting of world-class scenery and recreation.

Pick up a copy of Foothills at locations throughout the valley--find the complete list of locations on our website at ncwfoothills.com.

Or if you’d prefer to receive Foothills in the mail, you can subscribe to all six editions published annually for just $14.99.

Subscribe online at wenatcheeworld.com/subscribe/foothills/ or call 509-663-5161 to begin your subscription.

oothills WENATCHEE

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