The Washington Post National Weekly - May 15, 2016

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

TEN THINGS TO TOSS

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

The daily shower l Out-ofoffice messages l Friendly waiters l Polling l Tenure l School suspensions l Beach bodies l ‘Strong women’ l Olympic hosts l Voting booths PAGE 12

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Warming up to Trump BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

U

nless you spent your week on Mercury (not advisable!), you know that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan huddled in Washington Thursday in an attempt to squash their beef.

It appeared to go well. “It was all positive, it was cooperative, it was great,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who attended the gathering. In a news conference following the meeting, Ryan said he “heard a lot of good things” from Trump.

The key to the whole day, however, was the joint statement that Ryan and Trump released in the wake of the gathering: “The United States cannot afford another four years of the Obama White House, which is what Hillary Clinton represents.

That is why it’s critical that Republicans unite around our shared principles, advance a conservative agenda, and do all we can to win this fall. With that focus, we had a great conversation this morning. While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground. We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal. We are extremely proud of the fact that many millions of new voters have entered the primary system, far more than ever before in the Republican Party’s history. This was our first meeting, but it was a very positive step toward unification.”

Pay particular attention to two ideas: 1) America can’t afford to elect Hillary Clinton

KLMNO WEEKLY

and 2) Trump and Ryan agree on the big stuff so disagreements on the smaller stuff matters less.

Those are the makings of how Ryan — and the large majority of the rest of the resistant Republican establishment — will justify coming around on Trump. Witness Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who runs the party’s campaign arm and who endorsed the real estate billionaire even as Trump and Ryan were meeting on Thursday morning.

HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL D. RYAN. (CLIFF OWEN/AP)

“The American people know the damage done by this administration here at home and around the world. The last thing I want is to give the same Obama/Clinton/Sanders philosophy another four years in charge.

While I may disagree with the rhetoric Mr. Trump uses and some policy positions, he is the better option than Hillary Clinton in the White House. That’s why all along I’ve said I intend to support the GOP nominee.”

Notice the similarity in language between Ryan and Walden. We don’t agree with Trump on everything. But we agree with him on the big things. And we all want to beat Hillary Clinton who will be bad for the country if she wins.

Ryan echoed much of that same sentiment

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 31

in his weekly news conference, which was dominated by questions about the Trump summit. “There are core principles that tie us all together,” Ryan insisted — listing support for limited executive authority, a healthy respect for the Constitution, being pro-life and the need to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court as a few examples of commonality between him and Trump on the big issues.

What Ryan — and Walden — are doing is showing Republican candidates (incumbents and challengers) the best way to deal with Donald Trump as the party’s nominee. To summarize, those steps include: 1. Talk about how bad Hillary Clinton would be as president 2. Emphasize that you don’t agree with Trump on every issue or his tone in every moment 3. Note that on key issues to the Republican base — abortion, Supreme Court, the Constitution — Trump sees things the way you do.

The obvious fourth step of that process is to endorse Trump. Ryan didn’t do that on Thursday, but my gosh it certainly sounded like he plans to in the not-too-distant future — assuming that Trump doesn’t blow up the gains made from this meeting. (This is Trump we are talking about, so that sort of self-sabotage is absolutely possible.)

What Ryan’s reaction to his meeting with Trump suggests is that the speaker has concluded that withholding support for the party’s nominee or aggressively urging downballot candidates to run away from Trump carries more political risk than does cautiously and guardedly embracing his candidacy.

It’s a risk. But when it comes to Trump and what it means for individual candidates or the broader future of the GOP, everything is a risk. Ryan appears to have made up his mind on what leap of faith he is prepared to make over the next six months. n

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Summer is nearly here, but before you bust out the sandals and sunscreen, 10 writers this week nominate something we should toss. A little spring cleaning never hurt, right? Illustrations by THOMAS BURDEN for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Clinton’s agenda is big on small steps

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

Her intricate approach could increase the burden on the federal bureaucracy BY

D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

H

illary Clinton’s official campaign platform is now twice as long as “Hamlet.”

Seventy-three thousand six hundred forty-five words of policy ideas. One hundred seventyfour pages. And growing.

But, at its heart, this wordy list amounts to a statement of Clinton’s confidence in two things.

The status quo.

And the federal bureaucracy.

The other two candidates left in

this presidential race want to overhaul American government. Clinton mainly wants to tinker with its parts. In many cases, her plans involve adding small — but intricate — new tasks for the bureaucracy, designed to make government smarter, more generous and more just.

To crack down on Wall Street, for instance, Clinton would expand a particular regulatory form.

The form already is 42 pages long and can require up to 300 hours to fill out.

If Congress doesn’t overhaul immigration, Clinton’s plan is to allow undocumented residents to walk into local federal offices and ask for help. Already-busy bureaucrats — armed with guidelines that nobody has written yet — would make millions of new decisions about who can stay.

This approach says a lot about Clinton’s worldview, after 23 years in and around Washington.

To her, complexity is realism.

Clinton says she simply can’t make the simple, grand promises

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals are mostly about bureaucracy changes, not glitzy pronouncements.

of her rivals — free college tuition, a big, beautiful, free wall. Instead, she skips ahead to what policy looks like the way it’s actually been done: complicated, ugly and in small steps.

“It’s all incremental. It’s a lot of small ball,” said Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute. “But it’s incrementally increasing the size and cost of government. It’s all in one direction.”

If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, this may turn out to be the perfect election to be a

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POLITICS wonk — because of who she’d be running against.

If Clinton treats policymaking like watchmaking — a lot of whirring, tiny, hidden gears — the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, is a man making parade floats. His ideas are attention-grabbing. Expensive. And often discarded.

Trump recently came out against his own plan to give huge tax cuts to the rich. He discarded his past opposition to raising the minimum wage. And he offhandedly suggested that the United States might pay back only a percentage of its debts, an idea that would rock the world economy and America’s place in it.

“I don’t like either of them. But at least one of them is in the real world. And one has no bearing on reality,” Tanner said. “I simply believe Donald Trump is unqualified to be president. Hillary’s qualified.

[And] I mean, I disagree with her on almost everything.”

To draw a full portrait of Clinton’s ideas, The Washington Post reviewed her campaign platform, speeches, TV interviews and performances in the Democratic debates. In that platform, there are sweeping goals inherited from President Obama: immigration reform. Gun control. And there are a few abrupt shifts to the left, made during the race against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Previously, for instance, Clinton argued that the United States should continue deporting children who cross the U.S. border illegally, in order to “send a message” that would discourage future migrations. But in March, after pressure by Sanders, Clinton gave. “I will not deport children,” she said in a debate.

Clinton has never adopted Sanders’s basic vision of liberalism — that the simplest way to help the needy is to help everyone at once.

“I also believe in affordable college, but I don’t believe in free college,” Clinton said at a debate in February, attacking Sanders’s simple, huge plan to make tuition free at public colleges. “What I want to do is make sure middle-class kids — not Donald Trump’s kids — get to be able to afford college.”

Clinton’s solution for college is cheaper: $350 billion over 10 years, versus $750 billion for Sanders.

But it’s not simple.

Clinton’s plan is to determine what families can afford to pay,

PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“It’s all incremental. It’s a lot of small ball. But it’s incrementally increasing the size and cost of government.”

— Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute without borrowing and to provide the rest of the money as a grant.

But that requires fine-grained bureaucratic determinations to find the right number for every family.

She also wants to help students by extending a tax credit that has a history going back to the tenure of her famously wonky husband. It can be worth up to $2,500. But only if students find their Form 1098-T, then fill out the relevant portions of Form 8863, then enter the amount from Lines 8 and 19 of Form 8863 in Lines 68 and 50 of their Form 1040. Just like that.

“There’s some inevitable tradeoff here between cost and simplicity,” said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Put me down for, ‘Let’s spend our scarce resources more carefully, even if it means more complexity.’ ” But that complexity sometimes backfires.

In this case, watchdogs say more than a quarter of those who deserve education credits don’t

bother applying. And the IRS paid more than $5.6 billion to people who applied for educational credits but — upon later review — may not have deserved them.

The pattern repeats.

In health care, Sanders wants to rip up the system, start over and make the government everyone’s insurer. Clinton wants to help in part by adding a tax credit to give families up to $5,000 to cover outof-pocket payments.

In Appalachia, Sanders promises to undo the trade deals that he blames for killing factory jobs.

Clinton’s plans include extending a tax credit.

The credit, which already exists, would be tapered to spur new investment in areas that declined with coal. But it comes with just a little red tape.

The rules, for example, require a certified Community Development Entity to make a Qualified Low Income Community Investment in a Qualified Active Low Income Community Business. To

John Freels wears socks in support of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Louisville. Where her rivals Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Donald Trump make grand, simple vows, Clinton offers solutions that would add complexity to complexity.

KLMNO WEEKLY

get the money, a business must perform at least 50 percent of its business and have at least 40 percent of its tangible property within a designed Low Income Community. Also, by rule, the business can’t be a racetrack, massage parlor, tanning salon or what the government calls a “hot tub facility.”

Before the credit expired the last time, a Senate study found it was so loopholed that — in one instance — it had been used to pay for a dolphin exhibit at the Atlanta aquarium.

“I do not believe, in totality, that’s enough,” said West Virginia State Rep. Clif Moore, a Democrat who represents the heart of coal country. “I don’t think she’s offering anything that’s in and of itself brand new. She doesn’t have the lightning rod.”

Clinton’s approach is an extension of the one that both her husband and President Obama used to make change in the face of a balky Congress and hostile states.

Instead of handing out money, they handed out tax benefits.

Democrats could celebrate the benefit, Republicans the cut.

Instead of simple, universal benefit programs, they engineered complex solutions — like the Affordable Care Act — that were supposed to be customized to fit consumers’ needs.

The result, now, is a government that groans under the weight of its complexity.

The tax code has changed more than 4,000 times since 2004. The overwhelmed IRS expects to answer just 47 percent of the calls made to its help-line staff this year, and it has 923,000 unanswered letters. The broader growth of federal regulation has also caused a boom in the number of professional “compliance officers,” whose entire job is to follow rules: There are 136,000 in the private sector, at last count.

Clinton’s solutions would add complexity to complexity.

That, in a way, requires its own kind of faith: that bureaucrats can make the kind of fine-grained decisions necessary to keep such a detailed enterprise running. Her campaign’s argument is that, in today’s Washington, that’s the only way to do it.

Said Jake Sullivan, a Clinton policy adviser: Clinton “won’t make promises that she can’t keep or hide the details from the people whose vote she’s trying to earn.” n

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POLITICS

‘Let us write a different story this time’ BY

S ARI H ORWITZ

O

n Monday, there was a remarkable moment at the Justice Department: Two women of color who had personally experienced the pain of prejudice walked to the podium to announce the Justice Department’s discrimination lawsuit against the state of North Carolina.

The two top Justice Department officials — one the daughter of Indian immigrants and the other the granddaughter of a “dirt poor” sharecropper and minister in the Deep South — linked the growing controversy over transgender access to restrooms in North Carolina to the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

“It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations,” said Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, a native of North Carolina, in perhaps the most impassioned speech she has given since taking the reins of the Justice Department last year. “We have moved beyond those dark days, but not without pain and suffering and an ongoing fight to keep moving forward. Let us write a different story this time.”

Lynch’s father, 84-year-old Lorenzo Lynch, is a retired fourth-generation Baptist minister who grew up in the segregated South, where every aspect of his life was touched by Jim Crow laws. Black ministers driving to other states to preach could not stop and use the bathroom. Her grandfather, who had a thirdgrade education, would help hide people who got in trouble with the law but had no recourse under Jim Crow in the rural South, where Lynch once said that “there was no justice in the dark of night on a rural road.”

Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said that calling the new North Carolina law a bathroom bill “trivializes what this is really about.”

“The complaint we filed today

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Top Justice women link civil rights fight to transgender rift in N.C. speaks to public employees who feel afraid and stigmatized on the job,” Gupta said. “It speaks to students who feel like their campus treats them differently because of who they are. It speaks to sports fans who feel forced to choose between their gender identity and their identity as a Tar Heel. And it speaks to all of us who have ever been made to feel inferior — like somehow we just don’t belong in our community, like somehow we just don’t fit in.”

Gupta’s parents came to the United States from India in the late 1960s, but she spent some of her childhood in England and France because her father worked for an international com-

pany. She has recalled to reporters an incident when she was 4 and was in a McDonald’s in London with her parents and a grandmother visiting from India.

A group of skinheads came in and yelled “Go home, Pakis!”

They then threw french fries and other food at Gupta and her family until Gupta, her parents and her grandmother left.

Gupta, a graduate of Yale University and New York University’s law school, has devoted her career to civil rights issues and criminal justice reform as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union. Lynch, a graduate of Harvard College

Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, right, came out against the North Carolina “bathroom” bill, citing the pain of prejudice they have experienced.

and Harvard Law School, was a career prosecutor and U.S. attorney before becoming attorney general in April 2015.

Lynch and Gupta are also clashing with North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) over his state’s 2013 voting law, one of the strictest in the country. A federal judge last month upheld the law, and Lynch said Monday that the Justice Department is joining civil rights groups to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Before Lynch and Gupta announced their lawsuit, McCrory sued the Justice Department on Monday morning, accusing the federal government of “baseless

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

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POLITICS and blatant overreach.” The governor has repeatedly defended the state law, which he signed in March in response to a city ordinance in Charlotte that expanded civil rights protections for people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The new law requires transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates.

Citing federal laws, Gupta said that the law sexually discriminates against transgender people and that its proponents are misinterpreting or making up facts about gender identity.

“Here are the facts,” Gupta said sternly. “Transgender men are men — they live, work and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work and study as women.”

Groups supporting the law and similar proposals across the country refer to them as “bathroom bills.” The groups have raised the concern that men would enter women’s restrooms for perverse or harmful reasons. McCrory said the issue will affect not only North Carolina but also other states across the country, and he accused the government of “being a bully.”

After Lynch’s news conference, McCrory’s spokesman said the attorney general was “using divisive rhetoric.”

“Governor McCrory is appropriately seeking legal certainty to a complex issue impacting employers and students throughout the country,” said McCrory spokesman Josh Ellis.

Lynch made it clear Monday that North Carolina is at risk of losing millions in federal funding. North Carolina, for example, receives more than $4 billion in federal education funding each year, much of it in the form of student loans, and the Education Department is now reviewing whether to withhold that money.

“Let me speak now to the people of the great state, the beautiful state, my state of North Carolina,” Lynch said. “You’ve been told that this law protects vulnerable populations from harm, but that just is not the case. Instead, what this law does is inflict further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Donations to super PACs zoom past $700 million

BY M ATEA G OLD AND A NU N ARAYANSWAMY

A

burst of giving by liberal donors and a last-ditch effort to fend off GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump helped super PACs pick up nearly $100 million in new donations by the end of March, pushing the total raised by such groups this cycle to more than $700 million, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission reports.

At this pace, super PACs will raise $1 billion by the end of June.

In the entire 2012 cycle, such groups brought in $853 million, according to FEC filings.

The Post is keeping a running tally of the largest contributors of the 2016 cycle, whose six- and seven-figure checks have allowed super PACs to spend $278 million so far on ads and voter outreach.

Already, nine mega-donors have each given at least $10 million to such groups, which can take unlimited sums from individuals and corporations. Together, that tiny cadre has provided 17 percent of the money raised through March 31, The Post found.

Now topping the list of megadonors: conservative hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer. His total giving reached $17.2 million after he put $2 million more into a super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in March. The Renaissance Technologies co-chiefexecutive moves up from fourth place, bumping liberal San Francisco environmentalist Tom Steyer out of the No. 1 slot.

Another Renaissance Technologies figure joins the top-10 list this month: James Simons, an elite mathematician who founded the hedge-fund giant. Together, he and his wife, Marilyn, have given $10.13 million to super PACs this cycle, the vast majority to Democratic groups. The bulk of James Simons’s donations — $7 million — have gone to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC

ANDREW TOTH/GETTY IMAGES

Hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer is the biggest GOP donor.

What they gave Wealthy donors are giving record sums this cycle to super PACs, which can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations. These groups are not allowed to coordinate their advertising with candidates or political parties, but they often work in close proximity with the official campaigns. Here’s a look at the top 10 givers so far. (Donations in millions) 1. Robert Mercer 2. Tom Steyer 3. The Wilks family 4. Maurice Greenberg 5. George Soros 6. Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein 7. Paul Singer 8. Marilyn & James Simons 9. Toby Neugebauer 10. Ronald Cameron

$17.2 17 15.3 15.1 12 11.1 10.4 10.13 10.10 8.8

Source: Federal Election Commission

backing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Other wealthy Democrats allied with Clinton stepped up their contributions significantly in March, making Priorities the top-raising super PAC for the month. The group, which plans

to unleash a $91 million TV ad blitz in support of Clinton in June, brought in nearly $12 million in March.

Meanwhile, a surge of investment in the Stop Trump movement drove a slew of donations by rich conservatives. Among the big givers: hedge-fund co-founder Cliff Asness, who made it onto The Post’s top-50 list after shelling out $1 million in March to Our Principles, an anti-Trump PAC. Investor Michael Vlock, who is married to billionaire Karen Pritzker, gave the group $1.7 million in the same period.

For the first time, a publicly traded corporation cracked the top-50 list: oil giant Chevron, which has given $3 million to GOP congressional super PACs. The Chevron money reflects an uptick in funds flowing to super PACs on both sides of the aisle that are focused on House and Senate races. The GOP Senate Leadership Fund brought in $2.95 million in March, while the Democratic Senate Majority PAC took in $2.49 million — the best fundraising month both groups have had so far this cycle. Their coffers are expected to expand significantly as donors in both parties turn their attention to congressional races that now may be in play because of Trump’s volatile candidacy.

Big money is seeping into individual congressional races in new forms, with a proliferation of super PACs created to support a single candidate each. One such group, Maryland USA, which has backed the House bid of Republican national security expert Amie Hoeber, is financed almost entirely by her husband, Mark Epstein, a senior vice president at Qualcomm. Epstein poured $2.1 million into the group, making him one of the 50 biggest givers of 2016.

In April, Hoeber won the GOP primary with 29 percent of the vote. She will face off against Democratic Rep. John Delaney in November. n

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NATION

In Madison, ‘safe level of lead is zero’

BY D ARRYL F EARS AND B RADY D ENNIS

Madison, Wis.

L

ong before Flint, Mich., faced a water-contamination crisis, this city dealt with one of its own. The local utility had sampled residents’ tap water in accordance with the federal government’s new Lead and Copper Rule and discovered unacceptable levels of lead.

But Madison’s response was like hitting a gnat with a sledgehammer. It was so aggressive that only one other major municipality in the United States has followed its approach so far. It’s also why some people now call Madison the antiFlint, a place where water problems linked to the toxic substance simply couldn’t happen today.

Madison residents and businesses dug out and replaced their lead pipes — 8,000 of them. All because lead in their water had been measured at 16 parts per billion — one part per billion over the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard.

That’s a microliter, onemillionth of a liter of water. The utility’s water quality manager, Joe Grande, explains the reasoning in seven words: “The safe level of lead is zero.”

Radical though it was, what occurred from 2001 to 2011 in this state capital could help guide cities across the country as they consider taking action to protect public health. The extreme, monthslong leaching of lead into Flint’s water supply has shown the danger of the estimated 6 million or more lead pipes in use nationwide — by more than 11,000 community water systems that serve as many as 22 million Americans.

Increasingly, voices are calling for complete replacement of these lines. As Madison showed, it’s possible, but not easy.

“As long as there are lead pipes in the ground or lead plumbing in homes, some risk remains,” David LaFrance, chief executive of the American Water Works Association, noted when its board voted unanimously in March to back such efforts.

COURTESY OF MADISON WATER UTILITY

Wisconsin’s capital took drastic action to improve its water: It ripped out every offending pipe A TALE OF TWO CITIES The Environmental Protection Agency’s safe threshold for lead in drinking water: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn 15 ppb

Madison, Wis., level in 2001: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn 16 ppb

Highest level recorded in Madison since pipes were replaced in 2011: nnnn 3.5 parts per billion

90th percentile* level in Flint., Mich., in the summer of 2015: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnn 27 parts per billion (ppb) *This means 90 percent of homes will have a lead level below this threshold, while 10 percent will register above it.

Sources: EPA, Virginia Tech

“We should seize this moment of increased awareness about lead risks to develop solutions for getting the lead out,” LaFrance said.

Madison’s solution was to go for broke. The Madison Water Utility

dismissed the easy fix recommended by the EPA regulations, which entailed treating pipes with phosphates to lower corrosion that releases trace metals. The company instead ripped out every lead line it owned. Then it made some 5,500 of its customers do the same.

Dozens of streets were torn up for a decade of digging and copperpipe replacement at a cost of nearly $20 million.

Five years after the project’s completion, Madison’s lead levels are well under the Lead and Copper Rule’s “action” threshold. Its highest measure since 2011 is 3.5 parts per billion, which is so low that the EPA requires the utility to collect water samples every three years instead of annually.

Only Lansing, Mich., is known to have taken a similar all-out approach. As Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration remains under fire for its mishandling of Flint’s water debacle, the city where he lives is about to finish removing 14,500

Crews replace service lines, most of which were made of lead, in Madison, Wis., in 2001. The conversion there cost nearly $20 million and lasted until 2011.

lead pipes. That 10-year, $40 million program will end in June, said Stephen Serkaian, a spokesman for the Lansing Board of Water and Light.

One advantage for the effort there: The local utility, unlike many, owns every pipe in its system, even those leading up to houses.

And Lansing’s mayor has asked the utility to provide technical assistance to Flint, 60 miles to the west. Hit hard by its water contamination, which could have serious and permanent health consequences for many of its children, Flint is now pushing to replace 15,000 lead service lines. Yet city officials want to accomplish that in a single year, not 10. The projected expense is $55 million.

While the greatest concentration of lead service lines is in the Midwest, the pipes can be found nationwide. The cost of replacing them could exceed $30 billion, and the American Water Works Association understands that homeowners won’t be eager to help pick up the tab.

“It doesn’t increase value like granite countertops or a new deck,” said Tracy Mehan, its government affairs director. “Homeowners are going to have to be convinced that this is an important thing to do.”

Madison, a city of 245,000, sits on an isthmus between two large and scenic lakes that give the area its easygoing character. Planners put the city’s long shoreline to good use, with paths, running trails and boat ramps.

Back in 1992, when the elevated lead levels were detected, the EPA’s fix called for Madison Water to inject phosphate into the water supply. At the local wastewater treatment plant, which was under state orders to remove phosphorous, officials were stunned.

For one, phosphate pollutes lakes by causing algae blooms that suck away oxygen and suffocate marine life. “We did tell them that would not be a good idea,” said David Taylor, director of ecosystem services for the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District.

There was also a good chance that the chemical would fail. A

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NATION chemist hired by the city tested the lead pipes to determine whether adding phosphates would lower lead contamination. In some cases, levels instead increased.

After four years of testing, Abigail Cantor told the utility in 1996 that there was only one sure solution. “You have to get rid of the lead,” she said.

The utility opted to remove all suspect pipes. The next step was more daunting. Backed by the city and state, Madison Water required its customers to remove the lead pipes connecting their houses and businesses to the system.

Grande says there was no alternative. Removing lead pipes only up to a property — a partial replacement — could make contamination worse because metals inside the pipe dislodge during excavation. It takes years to flush it out of the system.

“There certainly was a lot of opposition from people who thought it was ridiculous . . . who thought it didn’t need to happen,” Grande said of the project.

Thanks to utility rebates of up to $1,000 for homeowners who switched, their average cost was $1,300. Bauman said apartment owners paid more, but they likely passed on the cost to renters.

Yet for many reasons, Madison is a tough act to follow. The city is home to the University of Wisconsin and is full of professors and highly educated residents who earn a comfortable living.

“A relatively high willingness to pay for quality drinking water” among Madison residents made the lead-removal project easier for officials to sell, said Greg Harrington, a University of Wisconsin engineering professor who served on the Madison water utility’s board during the project.

Lansing, also a state capital and university town, is similar in many ways to Madison. The two are now linked by their extraordinary effort to go beyond the federal rule and protect their water supply from lead contamination.

Olson argues that the complete removal of faulty underground pipes, some of which date to the time of slavery, should also be the EPA’s main focus.

“We’re basically living off investments that were made by our great-grandparents,” he said. “So many pipes are being used past their design date. You can only live on the edge for so long.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Yellowstone National Park, brought to you by . . . Nike?

BY

L ISA R EIN

A

Coca-Cola Visitor Center will still be off-limits, but an auditorium at Yosemite National Park named after the soda company will now be permitted. Naming rights to roads are not available, but visitors could tour Bryce Canyon in a bus wrapped in the Michelin Man. And parkgoers could sit on a bench named for Humana health insurance — and store their food in a bear-proof locker emblazoned with the Nike swoosh.

The national-park system, created a century ago to preserve the country’s natural treasures for the public, has long been a bulwark against commercialization.

But as it jockeys for donors in a more competitive environment than ever, the National Park Service is starting to tread a delicate path, making aggressive corporate appeals without giving the impression that it’s selling public spaces to the highest bidder.

Parks have long relied on philanthropy to pay for improvements, interpretive programs, trail renovations and other projects left uncovered by their operating or capital budgets. Donors got unobtrusive recognition in return — maybe a plaque near a trail to thank them.

But now Director Jonathan Jarvis wants to swing open the gates of the 411 national parks, monuments and conservation areas to an unprecedented level of corporate donations, broadening who can raise money, what that money will be raised for and what the government will give corporate America in return.

“The great thing about the policy is it protects those features of the park that are important to all of us,” said Jeff Reinbold, the Park Service’s associate director for partnerships and civic engagement, “but it gives us new opportunities and new tools” to respond to donors who perceive the government as too slow to get deals done.

2005 PHOTO BY DINO VOURNAS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Visitors tour Yosemite National Park. New rules will allow corporate donors a more visible brand presence at national-park venues.

Jarvis proposed the expanded rules for philanthropy in March in a 33-page order that’s set to take effect by the end of the year.

The Park Service still won’t recognize donors with advertising or marketing slogans. But for the first time, their logos will get prominent display. Companies will be able to earmark gifts for recurring park expenses, which was prohibited before.

Bricks or paving stones on the steps to a visitor center; video screens inside; and educational, interpretive, research, recreational and youth programs, positions or endowments also will get naming rights, according to the proposed policy.

And donors will now be allowed to design and build a park building and even operate it long term.

Park officials say the shift, tested during this year’s centennial celebration, was prompted by an $11 billion backlog in maintenance projects, virtually flat funding from Congress and a need to attract young and diverse visitors that the right corporate partnerships might be able to encourage.

But the new brand of philanthropy is drawing fierce criticism from watchdogs and park advocates who accuse Jarvis of embracing a creeping commercialization they say has no place in the park system.

“You could use Old Faithful to pitch Viagra,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group.

“Every developed area in a park could become a venue for product placement,” Ruch said.

At Yellowstone National Park, one of the crown jewels of the system, companies such as Toyota and energy corporation ConocoPhillips have paid for crucial needs in recent years that the park could not have afforded, Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk said.

He said he feels comfortable with an expanded role for park superintendents in fundraising, which he contends does not cross the line into direct solicitation.

But park advocates worry that the new role for park managers alters their fundamental duties as caretakers of the park system.

“The policy says park superintendents must perform a number of fundraising duties,” said John Garder, budget and appropriations director for the National Parks Conservation Association, the nonprofit advocacy group that lobbies for the parks.

“Does that become a major part of the job?” Garder asked. “Can the Park Service say, ‘This person’s doing an awesome job protecting bison, but they’re not raising enough money?’ ” n

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Blocking the pass out of Italy A NTHONY F AIOLA Brennero, Italy BY

S

ince the days of ancient Rome, conquering armies have traversed the Brenner Pass, a scenic gorge in the Alps connecting the boot of Italy to the heart of Europe. Now, nations to the north fear that this vital passage will become the funnel for a new “invasion” of migrants.

A thousand miles away in Greece, the main migrant route into Europe is shutting down amid stricter border controls in the Balkans and a deal with Turkey to stop new arrivals from the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Yet as one door closes, concern is mounting in a host of countries that the poor and desperate may find another way in.

Claiming that as many as 1 million more migrants are massing in Libya with the aim of crossing into Europe through Italy, the Austrians, for instance, are laying the groundwork for an emergency fence between the jagged Alpine peaks at its Italian border. To stop the feared hordes, the Swiss are threatening to call out the army (yes, Switzerland has an army).

The Germans and the French, meanwhile, are joining an effort to extend “crisis” checks already in place at various European Union borders despite early signs that the region’s migrant flows may be coming under control.

Some Austrian politicians are backing a possible fence at the Brenner Pass despite their historic ties to Alto Adige, a largely German-speaking enclave in Italy ceded by Vienna in the early 20th century. At local restaurants, schnitzel competes with pizza on menus, and families of Grubers and Hubers outnumber Rossis and Bianchis.

But if a fence can hold back migrants, some politicians say, then a fence there should be.

“We can’t be the social security for Africa,” said Rudi Federspiel, a regional leader in the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria from the bordering province of Tirol. “Most of these people are Muslims, not Roman Catholics.”

Those migrants already in Austria, he insisted, are causing serious

JAN HETFLEISCH/GETTY IMAGES

As other routes to the heart of Europe are closed, Austrians want to build a fence to halt migrants social problems: “We have rapes.

Rapes in the city. Rapes all over the place. Because [Muslim] men don’t accept women. . . . They are not on the same level” as Europeans.

In 2014 — before migrants started choosing the easier route via Greece — Italy was ground zero for Europe’s migrant crisis. Already, hundreds of migrants per week — most of them sub-Saharan Africans who first arrived in Italy’s south — are again seeking to go north through this majestic valley.

So far, overall arrivals to Italy — about 28,600 since Jan. 1 — are roughly on par with 2015 and are not yet near the huge numbers seen in Greece at the peak of the crisis last year. Nevertheless, they are provoking what Italy calls a disproportionate, even hysterical, response from its neighbors. This month, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi suggested that the ugly tone of the fence debate with Austria in particular risked digging up dark chapters of divisions

and bigotry in European history.

“If you play on fear, you risk giving strength to those who know best how to wake the ghosts and specters of the past,” he said.

Amid a growing migrant backlash, the rush to bar the doors in some nations is indeed being framed in populist — some say xenophobic — terms. This month, the Swiss village of Oberwil-Lieli voted in a local referendum against accepting 10 refugees, despite having to pay a 300,000 euro ($345,000) fine for the privilege.

Last month, Austria passed a law allowing mass rejections of asylum requests if a huge new wave of migrants comes. A gang of rightwing youths recently stormed Vienna’s prestigious Burgtheater, spilling fake blood onstage and disrupting a play about xenophobia.

The Austrian police have started random checks and have broken ground on a patrol station, where blanket inspections could rapidly be introduced along one of Europe’s busiest corridors for commerce.

Riot police face protesters during an April rally against the Austrian government’s planned reintroduction of border controls to stem the flow of migrants at the Brenner Pass.

The Italians have refused Austrian requests to board trains heading north to stage migrant hunts. Austrian police have deployed tear gas against Italian protesters resisting the border action in recent weeks. Just last weekend, hundreds of demonstrators again mobilized against the Austrian plans, some hurling smoke bombs and stones at Italian riot police. If a massive wave of migrants comes, local politicians say they will be distributed to communities across the region rather than housed in one big camp if they cannot cross the border. But some in this quaint community of gingerbread-houselike villages and Alpine ski resorts are fretting that their streets may turn into a “new Idomeni” — a reference to the squalid refugee camps on Greece’s sealed border with Macedonia.

Any fence, Austrian officials say, is a contingency — a barrier that will go up only if there is a major migrant surge. But on a continent where freedom of movement and open borders are the linchpin of the E.U., critics say such moves are part of an effort to effectively fence off Europe’s south.

The Austrian response, observers say, is partly an outcrop of roiling domestic politics there. Vienna’s ruling coalition is under intense pressure by the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria.

Norbert Hofer — a Freedom Party politician who said he understood why more Austrians are buying guns amid the refugee crisis — staged a spectacular first-place finish in last month’s presidential elections, strongly positioning himself ahead of a May 22 runoff vote. Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, resigned this past Monday, citing insufficient support within his party on issues including the migrant crisis.

Austria has now adopted a hard line on new migrants. But Hofer has called for even tougher measures. He mocked the barrier — a chain-link fence with no barbed wire — that Austria has erected at its border with Slovenia as a “garden fence” with holes in it.

“This is no border protection,” he said. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Pentagon girds for a fight way, way up BY

C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

T

he first salvo was a missile launch by the Chinese in 2007 that blew up a dead satellite and littered space with thousands of pieces of debris.

But it was another Chinese launch three years ago that made the Pentagon really snap to attention, opening up the possibility that outer space would become a new front in modern warfare.

This time, the rocket reached close to a far more distant orbit — one that’s more than 22,000 miles away — and just happens to be where the United States parks its most sensitive national security satellites, used for tasks such as guiding precision bombs and spying on adversaries.

The flyby served as a wake-up call and prompted the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to begin spending billions of dollars to protect what Air Force Gen. John Hyten in an interview called the “most valuable real estate in space.”

Fearing hostilities there, defense officials are developing ways to protect exposed satellites floating in orbit and to keep apprised of what an enemy is doing hundreds, if not thousands, of miles above Earth’s surface. They are making satellites more resilient, enabling them to withstand jamming efforts.

At the same time, the Pentagon has designated the Air Force secretary a “principal space adviser,” with authority to coordinate actions in space across the Defense Department. Agencies have begun participating in war-game scenarios involving space combat at the recently activated Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center.

The flurry of activity raises the specter of a new technological arms race, this one in space, as nations jockey for advantage. The Pentagon is even developing what is known as the “Space Fence,” which would allow it to better track debris in space.

National security officials are not only concerned that missiles could take out their satellites but also that a craft’s equipment could

U.S. AIR FORCE

Defense Department, fearing hostilities in space, fortifies exposed and valuable satellites in orbit be easily jammed. That could lead to soldiers stranded on the battlefield or missiles that would not be able to find their targets.

“We have considered space a sanctuary for quite some time.

And therefore a lot of our systems are big, expensive, enormously capable, but enormously vulnerable,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work.

Perhaps most striking is how openly Pentagon officials are talking about their efforts to fight in space — especially because much of the work remains highly classified.

While the United States has been bogged down in counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon officials say that Russia and China have been developing the capability to attack the United States in space.

“Every military operation that takes place in the world today is critically dependent on space in one way or another,” said Hyten, commander of the Air Force Space Command. “Whether our own peo-

ple in the United States are fully cognizant of the dependence on space or not, the rest of the world has been watching us very closely.”

Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States has become increasingly reliant on space for how it fights. Its satellites are used to snap images of the enemy, provide communication in remote areas, and guide ships, drones and bombs via GPS. That navigation technology also has become part of everyday life for Americans, who rely on satellites for driving directions, television signals and more. Even the banking system uses GPS to time transactions.

Those high-tech capabilities have given the U.S. military an extraordinary advantage over its adversaries.

Now, as Russia, China and others develop technology that could take out the national security infrastructure the United States has built in space, Pentagon officials fear its satellites could be sitting ducks. Navy Adm. Cecil Haney,

The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, detects, tracks and identifies all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit. A flurry of activity in space raises the specter of a new technological arms race, this one thousands of miles above Earth.

commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said recently that North Korea has successfully jammed GPS satellites and that “violent extremist organizations” were able to access space-based technologies to help them encrypt communications.

“We must recognize that despite our efforts, a future conflict may start, or extend, into space,” he said.

As adversaries began targeting space, “there was a level of frustration” in the space community, Hyten said. “We just needed someone to say go.”

The “go” came in 2014, when top Pentagon officials, including Work, the deputy defense secretary, made space a priority, saying at a meeting that “if, God forbid, someday a conflict does extend from the Earth to space, what are you going to do about it?” Hyten recalled.

The Pentagon spends $22 billion on space programs and is investing an additional $5 billion in space efforts this year, including $2 billion for what is known as “space control,” which includes its highly classified offensive programs. Hyten declined to discuss the ways in which the United States is preparing to attack other countries in space.

But there has been a culture change, he said. Where Pentagon officials who focused on space once operated in what was a peaceful environment, they have had to think of themselves — and space — differently.

“They are warriors,” Hyten said.

“And they need to recognize that they are war fighters.”

Not that the Pentagon is inviting war. Its preparations are to deter conflicts, not incite them, officials said.

Without space, the United States would be forced to revert to “industrial age warfare,” Hyten said.

“It’s Vietnam, Korea and World War II,” he said. No more precision missiles and smart bombs. “Which means casualties are higher, collateral damage is higher. . . . We don’t want to fight that way because that’s not the American way of war today.” n

10 THINGS

TO TOSS

With spring weather finally here to stay, we asked 10 writers to nominate something we’re better off without. Here are their picks.

The daily shower BY

K ATHERINE A SHENBURG

Someone told me about the proprietor of a Toronto perfume shop, an elegant Frenchwoman who regularly railed against the North American ritual of the daily shower. “All you need to do,” she insisted, “is wash the hairy bits.”

She has a point. North Americans are among the world’s most fervent believers in the daily shower. The average American showers most days of the week.

They’re making a mistake.

It’s crucial to wash your hands frequently, but unless you’re a farmer or a manual laborer — jobs with lots of contact with the ground and potential for cuts — you wouldn’t harm your health if you rarely washed above your wrists. (Yeast or fungal infections would be the rare exception.) More damage is done by washing than by not washing, as dermatologists who treat the dry skin caused by enthusiastic showering attest.

Cracked, dry skin makes a good entry point for infection-carrying germs. Even more important, our skin hosts a rich blanket of hardworking microbes, helping us battle disease and stress. Experts say that relentlessly washing them away is not a great idea.

Our great-great-grandparents made do with a basin and ewer in the bedroom and spot cleaning. That’s the perfume shop owner’s prescription, although done at a modern sink — and it works. I spot-clean with soap and water when I don’t feel like showering, and people still invite me to their dinner tables and to the movies. As for sex, sometimes the most erotic odors and flavors are the real ones: Napoleon and Josephine bathed every day but felt there were times when a natural body trumped a clean one. He wrote to Josephine from a campaign: “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” n Ashenburg is the author of “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.” A version for 9- to 12-year-olds, “All the Dirt: A History of Getting Clean,” will be published this fall.

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Friendly waiters BY

Out-of-office messages BY

J OHN F REEMAN

Not long ago, I received an out-of-office message from a colleague informing me that she’d be away from her desk the rest of the afternoon. It was 3 p.m. Oh, I thought, good for her. I hope she enjoys that spin class. Meanwhile, her email had jumped a queue of messages that snaked around the block of my inbox and into the next town. Why did I need to know that she had knocked off a little early?

The truth, of course, is I didn’t. Just as I could live without the awareness that a friend would not check emails in Italy, another replied only on Mondays and my dentist had no more appointments today. Out-of-office messages used to be reserved for prolonged absences, departures. They were like traffic cops at accident scenes, directing flow. Now an afternoon’s errand produces the cones, the lights, the whole show.

We all get too much email. According to the Radicati Group, people using their work email accounts will send and receive an average of 131 messages a day in 2016. Automated out-of-office replies needlessly add to the clutter. The cellphone is the office these days, and everyone from construction workers to shepherds to captains of finance carries a smartphone. So what people are really saying is, “I’m reserving the right not to respond,” rather than “I cannot respond.”

There are even services that enable people to set up out-of-life emails to be sent when they die. It’s absurd, but the great email deluge is built on the equally absurd notion that we need to know where everyone is at all times. We don’t. Tell the people who need to know where you’re going, shut down your computer, log off and let the rest of us get on with our lives. n Freeman is the author of “The Tyranny of E-Mail” and the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual.

T IM C ARMAN

The question has come to feel as much like a trap as a courtesy. Like when your dentist asks if you floss after every meal, or your mechanic wonders if you’ve checked your car plugs lately: “Have you dined with us before?”

We’ve all been there: Excited to snag a reservation at this season’s trend-setting restaurant, you sit down and are immediately confronted with the Question. Your answer is irrelevant. A lecture will be forthcoming. You may have dined at the finest restaurants in Barcelona — you might be brilliant enough to decode the Kryptos monument without assistance — but it won’t stop your server from explaining that the chef suggests you order two to four small plates per person.

I’ve sat helplessly as a server crowded my table and read from the menu I was holding in my hands, moving from one section to another with robotic efficiency, oblivious to my distress. I still have servers who inform me that small plates arrive “as they’re ready” and are “designed to be shared,” a default speech that treats customers like hayseeds who haven’t set foot in a restaurant in a decade. I’ve even had a server announce, as I’m seated in a Belgianbeer-focused restaurant, that its specialty is — you’ll never guess — Belgian beer.

Enough of this oversharing.

I understand that some restaurateurs are trying to topple the tyranny of the appetizerentree-dessert triumvirate. They’re searching for new ways to stimulate their staff, their customers and themselves. Bravo.

So how else could chefs communicate their new ideas? Allow me to suggest this radical tool called a menu, and a quiet moment to review it. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote, “Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.” If diners don’t understand, they can ask questions, inviting the speech that, at present, starts every meal with a bitter pill to swallow. n Carman is a food writer at The Washington Post.

Polling BY

P ATRICK R UFFINI

On the day of the South Carolina Republican primary, the rate at which the candidates’ names were typed into Google in the state predicted their vote shares, sometimes to within one percentage point. We can build models that forecast Donald Trump’s vote share in a state using nothing but previous election returns and publicly available census data. Online chatter last year was a leading indicator for the GOP race, with Ted Cruz dominating early and Trump running circles around everyone. In fact, the rate at which the candidates were mentioned in the media predicted their polling averages to within one or two points, according to an analysis by Nate Silver.

This campaign is giving us a peek at what a post-polling world might look like. Combining social data, media analytics and statistical profiles of 260 million American adults, we can precisely quantify the drivers of public opinion and predict who’s winning or losing right now, down to the neighborhood level.

As we zero in on whether Trump will have enough delegates to avoid a floor fight for the nomination, traditional polling is less useful. In smaller states and congressional districts, it is difficult and expensive to interview enough voters to yield valid samples. Americans have become harder to reach on the phone, making reliable polls more expensive. Campaigns are increasingly turning to statistical models, in which information such as past election results and search data can indicate whether the most likely path to stopping Trump lies in the Republican northern suburbs of Indianapolis or in the Democratic San Francisco Bay area.

Polling isn’t dead. But media polls aren’t very useful; they don’t use campaigns’ voter lists, and at this point in the race, national polls are surveying people whose states already voted. The future is a hybrid: We’ll survey less and observe more, based on billions of digital behaviors recorded every day. n Ruffini is a co-founder and partner at Echelon Insights.

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COVER STORY

WEEKLY

School suspensions BY

Tenure BY

D AVID J . H ELFAND

We don’t give it to U.S. presidents or to corporate chief executives: Although we install them with great ceremony, in a few years, most are gone. We don’t give it to plumbers or police officers: They have to perform to keep their jobs. Queen Elizabeth II has it, but what she does is highly constrained. But college professors can do with it what they wish, without review, for life. We call it tenure.

One hundred years ago, the American Association of University Professors endorsed a “Declaration of Principles” regarding academic freedom and tenure. Academic freedom in the United States has produced 357 Nobel Prizes and 9 of the 10 most innovative universities on the planet, as ranked by Reuters. But academic tenure produces stultifying intellectual uniformity, protects incompetence, generates tons of useless “research.”

Tenure is not, as was its original intent, protecting the freedom to teach controversial subjects; it is protecting the right to offload teaching onto underlings. This isn’t freedom to pursue research; it’s the right to publish irreproducible studies and uncited scholarship.

Many of my tenured colleagues are excellent undergraduate teachers — when they are not on sabbatical or some exemption from teaching.

Most are outstanding researchers: as good as the untenured staff and students with whom they work, but not worlds better.

Is tenure what motivates and protects their teaching and scholarship? No. Would our universities be more equitable, more agile and more focused on the students who pay the bills without tenure? Undoubtedly. Tenure protects behaviors that diminish our universities. It is an anachronism we can no longer afford. That’s why, when offered, I turned it down.

Academic freedom and tenure are not synonymous. You can have one without the other. n Helfand is a professor of astronomy at Columbia University.

A NDRE P ERRY

As a former charter-school administrator in the majority-black city of New Orleans, I often saw the same scene play out: A principal barks at a black child over a misbehavior, calling him aggressive and telling him he’ll end up in jail if he’s not disciplined. The principal issues him a three-day suspension. The child is 4 years old.

According to the Education Department, black children made up 18 percent of preschool enrollment in 2014 but 48 percent of preschool children who got more than one out-of-school suspension. It also found that black kids across primary and secondary grades were suspended and expelled at triple the rate of white students.

Black children are more likely than white students to be suspended for nebulous, nonviolent infractions such as dress-code violations.

Because of educators’ irresponsible use of suspensions, the Education Department, with the Justice Department, issued a school discipline guidance package in 2014 to help states and schools reduce suspensions and expulsions.

The Council of State Governments found that suspended or expelled students are significantly more likely to repeat a grade, drop out or become involved with the juvenile justice system. No wonder academic achievement lags among black youths — we expect kids to learn how to behave by kicking them out of school.

Schools need to make room for “restorative justice” approaches, which address the root causes of behavior issues by helping students resolve conflicts. As more districts have adopted alternate approaches, the numbers of suspensions and expulsions have fallen. Educators need to throw outdated discipline policies, not black children, out of school. n Perry is a Hechinger Report columnist and the founding dean of urban education at Davenport University.

Beach bodies BY

M IKKI K ENDALL

We’ve all seen the ads. “Are you beach body ready?” one typical billboard screams. Conveniently, the way to become beach-bodyready is to purchase a series of weight-loss products hawked to you by the Photoshopped image of a woman who was 30 pounds heavier when she posed in that bikini. Before we dare show our bodies in public, we apparently also need to lengthen our hair, narrow our noses, and paint or plump our lips. We might need to tan or bleach our way to an acceptable range of beige. Even the model for the ad isn’t able to meet the standard, as bikinis lack the corset required to give her the unnatural waistline that’s supposed to be every woman’s goal.

The easy retort is that your body is beachready whenever you decide to take it to the beach. But it’s hard to believe that when even celebrities who make “most beautiful” lists are doctoring their “candid” pics on Instagram — trimming their arms, adding thigh gaps — to stem the never-ending wave of criticism from fans and the media. (A Web search for “bad celebrity beach bodies” yields pages of results, mostly images of fit beauties who happen to have a bit of cellulite or, in one case, an outie belly button.)

Enough. This summer, let’s give humans a pass for having human bodies in public. We could spend a little more time minding our own business and not the appearance of others, reading good books and completely ignoring US Weekly’s latest celebrity bodyshame fest. I know I’ll be focused on having fun in the sun after a long Chicago winter, instead of evaluating whether the people around me look like an artist’s rendering of humans. And the first body I’ll be going easier on is my own. n Kendall is a writer living in Chicago.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Olympic hosts BY

Strong women BY

A NN F RIEDMAN

“Here’s to strong women,” the inspirational Pinterest quote goes. “May we know them.

May we be them. May we raise them.” It has no attribution, and it doesn’t need one, because we’ve all heard the sentiment so many times.

Our lives are full of women we wouldn’t hesitate to label “strong.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently held a “celebration of strong women” event. And Fast Company offers an ongoing series of articles on women in business called “Strong Female Lead.”

I struggle to name a single weak woman. Yet when “strong women” are singled out, weakness is implied. A Huffington Post listicle on “dating a strong woman” cautions that she won’t tolerate disrespect or mindless talk.

Apparently the typical single woman loves disrespect and inane text messages.

When a woman is singled out as strong, it’s usually not a mere compliment: It’s an attempt to distract from more widespread sexist behavior. In Hollywood, where for decades female characters have been more motivated by male approval than by their own ambitions, the “strong female lead” is not just a category Netflix suggests I would enjoy. It’s shorthand for a film that passes the Bechdel test.

In politics and the workplace, “strong women” are used as a convenient cover. Lawmakers invoke the strength of their mothers, daughters and wives when their records on reproductive rights or equal pay are at issue. I’m not a sexist, they imply, because I respect certain women I know. A male boss once defended his choice to interview only male candidates for a job by telling me that his wife was a strong woman who was active in the women’s movement.

Let’s limit the “strong” label to female weightlifters. Otherwise, we don’t need to call it out. “Strong” is synonymous with “woman.” We know them. We are them. We raise them. n Friedman is a freelance writer and columnist for NYMag.com.

A NDREW Z IMBALIST

The modern Olympic Games began in 1896.

Which means the economic model for the Games was born in the 19th century. That’s where it belongs.

Until the end of the 20th century, if someone wanted to watch the Olympics live, the only way was to travel to the host city. In such a world, perhaps it made sense to move the Games every four years. Before international TV rights arrived, the economic stakes were different, and the International Olympic Committee was far less grandiose than it is today.

Now, it costs $10 billion to $20 billion to host the Games, or more in cities with underdeveloped infrastructure. Studies have shown that the touted benefits (increased tourism, trade and investment) are almost always illusory. Certainly, Olympic hosts get some improvements — a modernized airport, for example — but these are investments that could be made without hosting the Games.

Putting on the Olympics comes with steep costs. This summer’s host, Rio de Janeiro, is suffering from the eviction of thousands of residents who live in favelas, the city’s shantytowns; the despoliation of a nature reserve in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood; fiscal bankruptcy; intensified corruption and instability; and horrific publicity surrounding water quality and shortages, as well as the Zika virus.

It is time to ditch this outdated model. The competition among the world’s cities to prove their worthiness to the IOC is wasteful. One option: The IOC could be made to pay for all Olympic construction. Then we’d see a downsizing of its gaudy venues and a reluctance to go to a new city every four years. Global athletic competition can be healthy, but there is no need to ravage a new city every cycle. n Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College and the author of “Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.”

Voting booths BY

A LEXANDER C HEE

I’m writing as I sit waiting for jury duty. I’ve sworn an oath to tell the truth. I’ve handed over my jury card, sent to me in the mail. I’ve been through security twice. No one has asked to see an ID. The court trusts that I’m here to exercise my civic duty, not to meddle with the judiciary.

Voting, too, can be like this — if we get rid of the voting both.

As many as 300,000 Wisconsinites — up to 9 percent of the state’s voters — may be unable to cast ballots this year because of a voter-ID law, according to the Nation. These would-be voters are not alone: They are among 5 million Americans whose enfranchisement has been limited by restrictions enacted in several states since 2012. Currently, voter-ID laws affect citizens in 33 states. Relying on specious claims of voter fraud, many exclude common forms of identification such as student IDs and Social Security cards, effectively denying those without driver’s licenses — usually minorities — their right to vote.

Instead of long lines (up to seven hours in some precincts), unpaid days off work (only some states offer paid time off to vote, and often only limited hours), distant and scattered polling locations, and ever-increasing restrictions, let’s do away with the voting booth and expand our options for voting.

The United States lags most developed countries in voter participation. Online voting presents one promising solution; so do mail-in voting and early-voting hours available days before elections. While a recent uptick in fraudulent online tax activity may leave some skeptical about the security of online voting, Web security systems are ever improving. And there’s always the regular, reliable U.S. Postal Service: All I need to do to renew my New York state driver’s license is to send a form off by mail. Why can’t the same be true of my vote? n Chee is the author of the novels “Edinburgh” and “The Queen of the Night.”

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INNOVATIONS

A secure login may be a selfie away BY

J ONNELLE M ARTE

T

he selfie is about to get serious.

Already ubiquitous at parties, raising a phone to your face and finding the perfect angle could take on a whole new role in people’s finances. Some banks, tax agencies and tech companies are making the selfie an integral step for people checking their bank accounts, shopping online and filing tax returns.

Forced to find creative ways to guard against the rising threat of identity theft, a growing number of companies are moving from a system that tests people on what they know, such as a password.

Now they want to ask consumers to provide evidence of something that can’t easily be changed or copied: their face.

“In our opinion, the password is dying,” said Tom Shaw, vice president of enterprise security at financial services firm USAA. The company lets customers use a selfie to log in to their mobile banking apps. Customers need only to choose the facial-recognition option when they open the app, hold the phone up to their face and blink.

A photo also can serve as a way for consumers to offer proof that it was indeed them — and not an imposter — who made a purchase or submitted a form.

For instance, MasterCard plans to roll out a service nicknamed “Selfie Pay” this summer through its member banks.

Through the program, consumers would shop online as usual, and after checking out, they would confirm the purchase by taking a selfie with a MasterCard mobile app.

And Georgia will roll out a pilot program for the next tax season that gives taxpayers the option of creating a secure account where they verify their identities by taking a photo. If there is a match, taxpayers will be asked to take a photo on their smartphones before their tax returns can be processed, ensuring the return was not submitted by a fraudster.

The growing use of facial rec-

MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS

As threats of identity theft grow, companies look to something beyond passwords: Consumers’ faces ognition, however, raises a series of security and privacy concerns.

One obvious vulnerability is that it is not that difficult to find out what someone looks like.

“Everyone has your face,” says Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “So it is a mode of authentication that is inherently public.”

To overcome that risk, the companies are requiring selfies that are a little different from the ones you may see on Facebook.

In the MasterCard and USAA programs, users are told when to blink. Georgia’s tax program will prompt people to position their faces a certain way and will scan for motion.

The photos are typically not the only safety measure, serving instead as the second or third method of authentication. USAA, for example, says that it checks not only the photo but also for the device being used to access the account. That means a criminal

should not be able to log in from another phone that isn’t already registered with the company’s systems, Shaw said. For the tax program, Georgia will compare the selfies consumers submit to the photos it has in its database of state driver’s licenses.

Privacy advocates fear that if companies misuse the photos, it could lead to situations in which people are instantly identified when they walk into stores or while they are walking down the street. Some of that is already happening.

Several states allow law-enforcement agencies to use facial recognition to search, or request searches, of driver’s-license databases when they need help identifying people for investigations.

Some retailers have used the technology to recognize regular or problematic shoppers.

“It is a basic human freedom to be able to walk outside and be anonymous and be private,” Bedoya said. “If you can no longer

Privacy advocates fear that if companies misuse the photos, it could lead to situations in which people are instantly identified when they enter stores or while they are walking down the street.

be a face in the crowd, that’s a problem.”

But some of the companies and agencies introducing facial-recognition programs say they are using the images only to verify customers’ identities.

They also say they are protecting consumers by not storing the images. MasterCard, for instance, said it converts the initial photo users take when they set up their accounts into a series of 1s and 0s that cannot be used to recreate a person’s face. USAA says the biometric information is encrypted and wiped if a customer hasn’t logged in for a while.

Still, some of the hiccups consumers may face are much more basic. For example, it is not clear how well the apps will hold up in cases in which people’s faces have changed — say, because they gained weight or grew a beard.

USAA says its app has worked after such minor changes but reminds users that it could always switch to another method of authentication. And MorphoTrust USA, the company providing the technology for the facialrecognition pilot in Georgia, says that its technology will scan for features that are unlikely to change much over time, such as the shape of a person’s eyes.

Whether most consumers will go along with the new selfie programs has yet to be seen. The parties introducing facial recognition and other biometric options cite convenience and security when pitching the technology.

Some consumers may welcome the added measure. Greater access to consumers’ personal details has made it easier for criminals to take out loans in others’ names, go on shopping sprees or file fraudulent tax returns. About 17.6 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2014, meaning they had their bank account, credit card or other personal information stolen, according to the most recent data from the Justice Department.

The selfie, the companies say, offers a simple way to help combat that kind of fraud. n

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

17

SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Want female turtles? Just add heat.

Scientists learn how warmth may affect sex, which could help save the animals as the climate changes

BY

S ARAH K APLAN

I

n the 1980s, scientists trying to save sea turtles noticed something truly bizarre.

They thought they were doing something good: rescuing eggs from vulnerable beaches and keeping them warm in incubators until they could swim out to sea.

But when the sea turtles were born, almost all were male. At that point, scientists had known for about 80 years that chromosomes determined sex. It seemed crazy that taking an egg out of the sand could skew a hatchling’s gender.

Yet here were dozens of all-male sea turtle siblings, suggesting that sex wasn’t so straightforward.

What those scientists encountered was temperature-dependent sex determination, a phenomenon found in a range of cold-blooded animals. Unlike mammals, birds and other creatures, whose sex is set by the chromosomes they get from their parents, the trigger that decides a turtle’s sex comes from outside the egg. Warmer ambient temperatures during incubation will skew the hatchlings female.

But if the eggs are kept just a few degrees cooler — as the scientists in the ’80s inadvertently did — they’ll become mostly male.

Decades later, scientists are still trying to understand how and why that happens. From an evolutionary standpoint, it seems like a pretty risky adaptation; it would take only a few hot years full of female hatchlings to spell the end of the entire species. And from a developmental standpoint, it’s just as confusing. If an embryonic turtle’s chromosomes aren’t telling it how to grow, what is?

Turk Rhen, an integrative biologist at the University of North Dakota, has devoted much of his career to studying that. In a study recently published in the journal Genetics, Rhen and his colleagues identify a gene that seems responsible for sex determination. If they’re right, the find could help keep turtles safe in a warming world.

But, “like every scientific project ever,” joked co-author Kelsey Metzger, a former master’s stu-

TURK RHEN

JACKIE LORENTZ/UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA

TOP: Scientists know a slight shift in ambient temperature influences a turtle embryo’s sex, but they understand little about how or why that is so. ABOVE: Because higher temperatures can produce almost entirely female populations, climate change could wipe out the animals.

dent in Rhen’s lab and now a life-sciences professor at the University of Minnesota at Rochester, “there’s a lot of work that came before it, and there’s going to be a lot of work that comes after it.”

What came before were decades of research into the sex differentiation of common snapping turtles.

Even though the trigger for differentiation isn’t genetic, scientists know that the developmental process that determines a turtle’s sex is similar to that of other species: It’s carried out by genes. Past research shows that early in development, some of the same genes that control sex in humans are also at work in turtles.

But Rhen wanted to know the origin of the process. Those genes may control sex, but they don’t respond to temperature.

He and colleague Anthony Schroeder, the lead author on the latest paper, identified their candidate gene years ago: the cold-inducible RNA-binding pro-

tein gene, or CIRBP (pronounced “surp”). It’s known to be involved in body-heat regulation in humans and other mammals. But it’s also something like the project manager on the construction site that is a developing embryo; it directs the transcription of DNA (the body’s molecular master plan) into RNA (its working blueprint), which creates the proteins that do the body’s work.

In his newest study, Rhen tested to confirm that CIRBP was responsible for taking the temperature and directing the body’s response. Turtle eggs in incubators had their ambient temperatures changed by less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit over five days of development, when differentiation was known to take place.

The reaction was almost instantaneous.

“The gene expression changed within 24 hours of the shift,” Rhen said. Two days after that, the genes that scientists know are involved in sex differentiation started to

spring into action.

Not only that, but a minute variation in the gene — swapping out just one of the molecules that make up DNA for another — changes how turtles respond to temperature. One version lowers the temperature threshold for females — which are typically born at the warmest incubation temperatures.

The other raises it.

“We don’t know for sure yet,” Rhen said. “But our hypothesis is that CIRBP might be upstream and is involved in regulating expression of all those other genes” that determine sex.

Rhen has a theory to explain why turtles evolved this way, and it is looking increasingly convincing. In 1995, he and a colleague used hormones to get female turtles to hatch at “male” temperatures and found that the females grew far larger than normal.

Knowing that larger male turtles are usually more successful, because they can fight off competition, a picture began to take shape: Natural selection favored male turtles born at lower temperatures, where development speeds up and results in larger bodies. Those “successful” males passed on the genes favoring low temperatures, and, over time, the current temperature regime took shape.

Which was fine, until the planet began dramatically warming.

Researchers studying painted turtles in Mississippi estimate that an average temperature rise of just 1.1 degrees Celsius could skew a population all female.

“It’s ultimately extinction,” ecologist Rory Telemeco, lead author of the painted-turtle study, told the New Scientist in 2013.

Understanding the genetic mechanism will become more and more important as Earth warms, the researchers say. Knowing that some turtles have, say, the gene variant that raises the temperature threshold to skew female may help scientists to save them.

“There’s a lot of discussion going around with climate change,” Metzger said. “But in the end, the question is, is there enough genetic variation that these species will be able to adapt?” n

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18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Can pure grit prevail over talent?

N ONFICTION

F GRIT The Power of Passion and Perseverance

By Angela Duckworth Scribner.

333 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

S ARAH C ARR

rom classrooms to boardrooms, playing fields to parenting blogs, “grit” is the buzzword of the moment. Success, the theory goes, has as much to do with character — in particular, passion and perseverance, or grit — as it does with intellect. One of the prime movers of this idea is Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was teaching seventh-grade math in the 1990s when she noticed that her most successful students were not necessarily the smartest ones but the ones who had endurance and drive. Since then, through her research, and in numerous speeches and articles, Duckworth has helped popularize the idea. She has even developed a Grit Scale, which asks people to rate themselves on such statements as “I finish whatever I begin” and “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.”

In her book “Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance,” Duckworth expounds on the concept. “I have the scientific evidence to prove my point,” she writes. “What’s more, I know that grit is mutable, not fixed, and I have insights from research about how to grow it.”

She details the habits of the grittiest among us: interest in a pursuit, a willingness to practice, a sense of purpose and a hopeful spirit. To raise gritty children, she encourages parents to follow the “Hard Thing Rule”: Everyone in the family must self-select one difficult thing to practice — piano, ballet, French — and persist at least until a natural stopping point arrives, such as the end of a sports season.

The book is heavy on anecdote.

There is some science: For example, in 2011, an analysis of more than 200 education programs found that teaching social and emotional skills significantly improved students’ academic achievement.

Duckworth also describes a few of her own studies. An analysis of West Point cadets, for instance,

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

West Point cadets were analyzed for their grit to determine how well they would fare in boot camp.

concluded that their scores on her Grit Scale were better predictors of whether they would make it through boot camp than “Whole Candidate Scores,” ratings that encompass their physical, academic and intellectual prowess.

But “Grit” focuses much more on seemingly endless accounts of world-class swimmers, coaches, journalists, novelists, artists, and chief executives — all of whom testify to the preeminent role that grit has had for them.

The book is readable if repetitive — written in a conversational tone that amply incorporates anecdotes from Duckworth’s own life. We learn, for example, that when she was a child, a running joke in her family was that she and her siblings were not geniuses — yet in 2013, Duckworth won a MacArthur “genius” grant. She pauses to ponder the irony of winning that award for discovering “that what we eventually accomplish may depend more on our passion and perseverance than our talent.”And we learn that as a parent, she adheres to the Hard Thing Rule: Her daughters plod

away at piano and viola while Mom strives at psychological research and yoga, and Dad at real estate development and running.

“Grit” is a useful guide for parents or teachers looking for confirmation that passion and persistence matter. But there are some troubling unintended consequences to Duckworth’s theories.

Already, there’s a nationwide push to test students on character attributes such as self-management, conscientiousness — and grit.

Duckworth has spoken out against such testing, but the movement has taken root. This year, schools in nine California districts will begin giving character-assessment tests. And Duckworth’s book will probably add momentum.

She dances around the question of poverty in the book. She notes that young children who feel helpless in the face of major trauma and adversity develop altered brain circuitry that makes it difficult to feel the degree of control and hope required for grit. And she reports that scores on her Grit Scale were a full point lower on average for high

school seniors who qualified for federally subsidized meals. Yet she doesn’t offer any solutions for this quandary, apart from quoting one education luminary who says that “what [poor kids] need is a decent childhood.”

But Duckworth’s work, and the move to assess character strengths more broadly, has had some of its deepest impact in schools working primarily with low-income children. Although her work is clearly well-intended, I worry it may lead schools to ask and demand the most of those children who are least prepared for acquiring grit.

The intense individualism embedded in Duckworth’s argument may lead some to judge poor children for their lack of grittiness in the face of immense struggles. Instead of tackling the essential task of providing poor kids with a decent childhood, we’ll simply expect them to become paragons of grit. n Carr, the author of “Hope Against Hope,” directs the Teacher Project, an education reporting fellowship at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Redemption, love and loss in war

Paul McCartney’s revealing solo

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

C

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID L . U LIN

hris Cleave begins his fourth novel, “Everyone Brave is Forgiven,” with a moment of pluckiness: It’s 1939, and 18-year-old Mary North, a daughter of privilege, has left school to return to London, where she means to take part in the war.

“She did it at lunch,” Cleave writes, “in case her mother said no. . . .

Nineteen hours later she reached St. Pancras, in clouds of steam, still wearing her alpine sweater.

The train’s whistle screamed. London, then. It was a city in love with beginnings.”

Think of those sentences, like many openings, as a litmus test for the narrative that follows: a little breathless, built of broad strokes, in which the inevitable losses and depredations of World War II are presented, more or less, through a social filter, as a mechanism for the vagaries of love.

This makes sense, to some extent, because Cleave was inspired by the saga of his grandparents, who got engaged in 1941 and then didn’t see each other again for three years. Still, despite their roots in family history, his fictional counterparts — Mary and also Alistair Heath, an art restorer who spends the latter part of the novel besieged on Malta with British forces — are just a bit too undaunted, or unbroken, by the trauma that the war throws in their path.

Both appear to shrug off hardship — to face it, yes, but also to know they will get past it. Each is hurt physically and spiritually by what he or she has experienced, yet it is less their wounds than their resilience that resonates.

That, of course, is part of Cleave’s intention; “Everyone Brave is Forgiven” is about redemption, but it leaves the novel with major problems because it flattens the conflicts, rendering them more as device or backdrop than transformative experience.

It’s not that the characters are unaware. Early in the book, thinking of Alistair’s roommate Tom, who is her lover first, Mary con-

siders the circumstances: “Without the war, how would one ever meet an ordinary man like Tom?” Yet the thought, with all its social implications, fades beneath a more conventional story, defined by romance and pluck.

“Soon,” she reflects, “Tom would realize that there was nothing more important than Mary North — that it was only her sorcery causing the planets to stay aligned and preventing the milk from curdling.”

To be fair, Mary hasn’t suffered much at this point, which makes her callowness understandable.

War alters us — or it ought to — turning our hearts and psyches unexpectedly. In “Everyone Brave is Forgiven,” though, such a turning never happens, because the characters are fully formed.

Mary’s sense of destiny, Tom’s steadiness, Alistair’s diffident gentility — all of these harden, rather than develop. None of the characters is truly changed.

What makes this unfortunate is that Cleave can write. His descriptions of the Blitz and, even more, of Alistair’s shock are affecting. “It happened from time to time,” he observes of the latter, describing the dread that seizes him in moments. “It was just a maddening tic, like getting a popular jingle stuck in one’s head.

How one wished that all the gore had never got in there. Still, in this as in all other things, he felt certain he would recover.” It’s the last line that is the problem, for it reveals the novel’s intentions, which are sentimental at the core.

This is the difficulty with looking back at such an event as World War II: 50 million dead, a continent destroyed, and the anxiety of all those years spent in the shadow of devastation. “Everyone Brave is Forgiven” pays lip service to such issues, but it can’t, or doesn’t want to, deal with the complexities. n Ulin is a former book editor and book critic for the Los Angeles Times.

A

EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN

By Chris Cleave Simon & Schuster.

424 pp. $26.99

PAUL MCCARTNEY The Life

By Philip Norman Little, Brown.

853 pp. $32

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REVIEWED BY

C OLIN F LEMING

s a four-brained collective, the Beatles possessed a staggering oneness. Remove any individual skill set from that collective, and they would have been something else — something less — entirely.

It’s possible to be a passionate fan of the band yet still have little interest in the solo careers of the four members. That poses a challenge for biographers who set their eyes on just one of them.

In 1981, Philip Norman wrote “Shout!,” one of the finest Beatles biographies. Norman also revealed himself as a writer willing to advance theories where facts feared to tread. He’d tell you what he thought was going on, even if his opinions could be polarizing.

Now he’s back with a massive biography that focuses just on Paul McCartney. It wraps up Beatles matters about halfway through and isn’t very polarizing, but then again, McCartney rarely has been.

Norman is thorough, giving us a fuller McCartney than you’ll find anywhere else, in part because of McCartney’s studious management of his brand over the years.

Norman is not shy about the group’s flaws. The Beatles, trotted out so often nowadays for their surplus of love, were, in fact, deeply sexist. Read a biography like this, and you’ll find them shockingly so.

Beatles management was regularly trying to keep up with women with paternity suits. At the band’s triumphant post-“Hard Day’s Night” return to their home town in 1964, leaflets were printed on behalf of a Liverpool woman “denouncing Paul as ‘a cad.’ ” The band’s breakup in 1970 plunged McCartney into a depression, and that accounts for some of the most compelling new material in this book. People forget how young the Beatles were when the group ended: late 20s, basically.

Norman captures how daunting the future was for McCartney. Having achieved so much, with the bulk of his life left, he felt overwhelmed by high expectations.

Linda McCartney, who emerges as the love of Paul’s life — if we’re not counting John Lennon — was downright heroic during a time in which McCartney himself could barely function. “I don’t know how anyone could have lived with me,” McCartney says. “I was on the scrap heap in my own eyes. . . . It was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul.”

The Wings years are seen as chaotic and exciting, but the specter of those past relationships with the old band members hovers at the edge of almost every page.

There are some poignant glimpses of what might have been, before Lennon’s assassination in 1980. At the end of the 1970s, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr clambered up on a stage at a party to bash out a jokey version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The past is something better revisited with a joke than with an attempt to measure up to earlier glories, even for a genius like McCartney.

Music has been a key component throughout his life, of course, but what the book makes plain is a far bigger component, one that continues to this day: McCartney’s desire to live well. We see a man who must have a woman in his life.

Family is his focus now, along with talking about John and the days of yore, and being Sir Beatle, the ultimate surviving rock star.

You just want to shake the McCartney of the final third of this book and say, Boyo, don’t you want to be a great artist again? Write something awesome — or try, any­ way. But that’s one of the take-away themes of Norman’s biography: the idea that most of day-to-day life is spent by adapting, by humming along, rather than by standing up and pulling at stars. But how you wish this guy would have kept pulling nonetheless. n Fleming is writing a book titled “Same Band You’ve Never Known: An Alternative Musical History of the Beatles.”

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

A spy chief’s hardened but candid perspective DAVID IGNATIUS writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post and contributes to the PostPartisan blog

Early in his tenure as director of national intelligence, James Clapper could sometimes be heard complaining, “I’m too old for this [expletive]!” He has now served almost six years as America’s top intelligence official, and when I asked him last week how much longer he would be in harness, he consulted his calendar and answered with relief, “Two hundred sixty­five days!”

Clapper, 75, has worked in intelligence for 53 years, starting when he joined the Air Force in 1963. He’s a crusty, sometimes cranky veteran of the ingrown spy world, and he has a perspective that’s probably unmatched in Washington. He offered some surprisingly candid comments — starting with a frank endorsement of President Obama’s view that the United States can’t unilaterally fix the Middle East.

Given Clapper’s view that intelligence services must cooperate against terrorism, a small breakthrough seems to have taken place in mid-April when Clapper met with some European intelligence chiefs near Ramstein Air Base in Germany to discuss better sharing of intelligence. The meeting was requested by the White House, but it hasn’t been publicized.

“We are on the same page, and we should do everything we can to improve intelligence coordination and information sharing, within the limits of our legal framework,” said Peter Wittig, German ambassador to Washington, confirming the meeting.

The terrorist threat has shadowed Clapper’s tenure. He admitted in a September 2014 interview that the United States had “underestimated” the Islamic State. He isn’t making that mistake now. He says the United States is slowly “degrading” the extremists but probably won’t capture the

Islamic State’s key Iraqi stronghold this year and faces a long-term struggle that will last “decades.”

“They’ve lost a lot of territory,” he told me Monday. “We’re killing a lot of their fighters. We will retake Mosul, but it will take a long time and be very messy. I don’t see that happening in this administration.”

Even after the extremists are defeated in Iraq and Syria, the problem will persist. “We’ll be in a perpetual state of suppression for a long time,” he warned.

“I don’t have an answer,” Clapper said frankly. “The U.S. can’t fix it. The fundamental issues they have — the large population bulge of disaffected young males, ungoverned spaces, economic challenges and the availability of weapons — won’t go away for a long time.” He said at another point: “Somehow the expectation is that we can find the silver needle, and we’ll create ‘the city on a hill.’ ” That’s not realistic, he cautioned, because the problem is so complex.

I asked Clapper whether he

MOLLY RILEY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. has taken a long view on U.S. affairs in the Middle East, including on the Islamic State.

shared Obama’s view, as expressed in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic magazine, that America doesn’t need the Middle East economically as it once did, that it can’t solve the region’s problems and that, in trying, the United States would harm its interests elsewhere.

“I’m there,” said Clapper, endorsing Obama’s basic pessimism. But he explained: “I don’t think the U.S. can just leave town. Things happen around the world when U.S. leadership is absent. We have to be present — to facilitate, broker and sometimes provide the force.”

Clapper said the United States still can’t be certain how much harm was done to intelligence collection by the revelations of disaffected National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.“We’ve been very conservative in the damage

Clapper agrees with Obama: The U.S. cannot unilaterally fix the Middle East.

assessment. Overall, there’s a lot,” Clapper said, noting that the Snowden disclosures made terrorist groups “very securityconscious” and speeded the move to unbreakable encryption of data. And he said the Snowden revelations may not have ended: “The assumption is that there are a lot more documents out there in escrow [to be revealed] at a time of his choosing.”

Clapper had just returned from a trip to Asia, where he said he’s had “tense exchanges” with Chinese officials about their militarization of the South China Sea. He predicted that China would declare an “air defense identification zone” soon in that area, and said “they’re already moving in that direction.”

Asked what he had achieved in his nearly six years as director of national intelligence, Clapper cited his basic mission of coordinating the 17 agencies that work under him. “The reason this position was created was to provide integration in the intelligence community. We’re better than we were.”

After a career in the spy world, Clapper argues that intelligence issues are basically simple; it’s the politics surrounding them that are complicated. “I can’t wait to get back to simplicity,” he said, his eye on that calendar. n

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The economy’s real drag: Us ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics.

American consumers aren’t what they used to be — and that helps explain the plodding economic recovery. It gets no respect despite creating 14 million jobs and lasting almost seven years. The great gripe is that economic growth has been held to about 2 percent a year, well below historical standards. This sluggishness reflects a profound psychological transformation of American shoppers, who have dampened their consumption spending, affecting about two-thirds of the economy. To be blunt: We have sobered up.

This, as much as any campaign proposal, may shape our economic future. There’s an Old Consumer and a New Consumer, divided by the Great Recession.

The Old Consumer borrowed eagerly and spent freely. The New Consumer saves soberly and spends prudently. Of course, there are millions of exceptions to these generalizations. Before the recession, not everyone was a credit addict; now, not everyone is a disciplined saver. Still, vast changes in beliefs and habits have occurred.

A Gallup poll shows just how vast. In 2001, Gallup began asking: “Are you the type of person who more enjoys spending money or who more enjoys saving money?” Early responses were almost evenly split; in 2006, 50 percent preferred saving, and 45 percent

favored spending. After the 20082009 financial crisis, the gap widened spectacularly. In 2016, 65 percent said saving and only 33 percent spending.

What’s happening is the opposite of the credit boom that caused the financial crisis. Then, Americans skimped on saving and binged on borrowing. This stimulated the economy. Now, the reverse is happening. Americans are repaying old debt, avoiding new debt and saving more.

Although consumer spending has hardly collapsed, it provides less stimulus than before.

Consider the personal savings rate: the difference between Americans’ after-tax income and their spending. If a household has income of $50,000 and spends $45,000, its savings rate is 10 percent. Here are actual figures. From 1990 to 2005, the

savings rate dropped from 7.8 percent to 2.6 percent. Since then, the savings rate has risen; it was 5.1 percent in 2015.

Federal Reserve data tell a similar story. From 1999 to 2007, household borrowing (mainly home mortgages and credit-card debt) increased nearly 10 percent annually, far faster than income gains. People mistakenly thought they could safely borrow against the inflated values of their homes and stocks. Now, borrowing is subdued. In 2015, household debt of $14 trillion was unchanged from 2007.

The surge in saving is the real drag on the economy. It has many causes. “People got a cruel lesson about [the dangers] of debt,” says economist Matthew Shapiro of the University of Michigan. But much saving is precautionary: Having once assumed that a financial crisis of the 2008-2009 variety could never happen, people now save to protect themselves against the unknown.

Research by economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics finds higher saving at all income levels.

In theory, it’s easy to replace lost consumer demand. In practice, it’s not so easy.

Businesses could build more factories and shopping malls. But with weaker consumer spending, do we need them? More exports

would help, but economies abroad are weak.

Government policies are also frustrated. The Fed’s low interest rates don’t work if people don’t want to borrow. Ditto for tax cuts.

During the Great Recession, Congress enacted several temporary tax cuts to boost consumer spending. The effect was modest, as studies by Shapiro and his collaborators found.

Direct government spending (a.k.a. infrastructure) might work better as stimulus. But it, too, faces problems. A mere onepercentage-point increase in the savings rate would offset almost $140 billion in infrastructure spending.

Significantly, the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting company’s research arm, predicts that future returns on stocks and bonds will be lower than in recent years. But it’s also possible, as Shapiro says, that accumulating levels of saving and repaid debt will reassure households and keep their spending growing at a steady, if boring, pace. That wouldn’t be such a bad result.

Whatever happens, the public and politicians should take note: This legacy of the Great Recession will endure. It has left a deep psychological scar that won’t soon heal. n

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

The right to vote, at last TERRY GARRETT is a public speaker living in Virginia

I have never voted. By the time I was 18, I had a felony shoplifting conviction, which meant that I forever lost my right to vote in Virginia. I never had a chance.

Not that I cared about voting at 18. I started getting into trouble very young — running away from serious issues at home at age 12, drinking, smoking weed. I had a child at 16 (her father later broke my nose, which ended that relationship), and by the time I was 20, I had three more kids and a new addiction to crack cocaine.

I didn’t think of anyone but me.

Besides, I thought voting was just for rich people. They made the decisions. I didn’t think I counted.

When I was in my early 20s, Bill Clinton was running for president, and I wanted to vote for him. I tried to register. That was when I learned that I couldn’t vote because of my record.

But I had other problems. I was often homeless. My grandparents were raising my two older children; the younger two had been adopted by other families. I saw them as much as possible, but most of the time I was using. Eventually I stopped visiting, except for a few periods when I managed to be sober and hold a job.

After many years of trouble, including a number of felony convictions (more shoplifting, prostitution), I served seven months in 2005 for stealing a cash

register at a Kinko’s in Alexandria. When I was released at age 38, I knew I wanted my life back. I don’t know how else to explain it — I guess God intervened. I wanted to accomplish my goals, and one of them was to get my rights back.

My life is so different now than it was before. I’m sober, and I have much closer relationships with my children. I worked for a time at the dining hall at George Mason University. A lot of the students got to know me, and they were very accepting. My co-workers knew I was in recovery and had been to prison, but I never felt judged.

That had an effect on me. My asthma forced me to leave that job and go on disability, but I started doing public speaking. I’ve been working on my GED. I recruit people for treatment through SAARA, an alliance dedicated to

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

treating addiction. This is a big deal, especially when you grow up thinking you’re nothing. When I look at what I’ve done and am able to say, “I did that” — that’s exciting.

But I still couldn’t vote. With the encouragement of my family and Friends of Guest House, an organization that helps women in Northern Virginia transition from incarceration to life in the community, I applied in 2010 through the governor’s office to have my voting rights restored. It was a long process (I had to wait five years just to qualify to apply) with a lot of paperwork, but the hardest part was waiting to hear back. A month later, my application was rejected. I cried. I felt as if I still wasn’t good enough, that my past was still being held against me.

It has not been easy to be shut out of voting, especially during President Obama’s first campaign. I wanted to be a part of the election of the first black president. But I couldn’t. All of my daughters went to vote and got their stickers. And I was jealous.

When you’re walking around without an “I Voted” sticker, people ask why you didn’t vote.

And you don’t want to say, “Because I’m a convicted felon.”

It’s embarrassing.

But I’m not ashamed anymore.

I’m proud that my kids can vote —

they can make a difference.

Last month, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) issued an executive order to restore the vote to more than 200,000 ex-convicts. All felons who have finished their sentences and are no longer on supervised probation or parole qualify. When I learned that I could get my voting rights back, I felt relief. Finally, I thought, someone sees past what we did.

(And just in time — I want to use my right to vote against Donald Trump.) And I’m glad to hear that other people are getting their rights back, too. There are a lot of us, and even though we made mistakes, we’re worthy. As for the Virginia GOP lawmakers who plan to sue to have the order reversed, they’re just ignorant.

Many ex-offenders have put the past behind them, and you still think we shouldn’t vote? People who turned their lives around 20 years ago — you still want to hold it against them? It’s not right.

In my old life, I didn’t feel as if I was part of the country, a citizen.

Whoever people voted in, I didn’t get to have a say. Today I know that I am an important part of society, and every vote counts. But even if I hadn’t changed my life, I should still be able to vote because I am a citizen and part of this country. Everyone should keep that right. No matter what. n

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Suicide BY

M ATTHEW N OCK

It populates our most ancient stories — spelling the ends of figures both infamous and innocent, including Brutus, Judas and Juliet — but we still don’t fully understand suicide. Despite decades of re­ search, scientists, clinicians and counselors are just beginning to un­ lock the mysteries of self­inflicted death. The federal government currently allocates more money to problems like headaches, Lyme disease and lupus than to suicide, according to the National Insti­ tutes of Health; no other leading cause of death (in the United States, it is No. 10) has so little money dedicated to it. The absence of consistent, well­funded, quality research has led to a proliferation of myths about suicide and the people whose lives it claims.

1

BERNARD JAUBERT/GETTY IMAGES

We’re experiencing a suicide epidemic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data last month showing that the suicide rate in the United States rose between 1999 and 2014. Many media outlets reported this as “an epidemic.”

But that is misleading: Suicide is not a disease or contagious, so it doesn’t fit the literal definition of an epidemic. But the metaphorical use of “epidemic” doesn’t match, either. Suicide is not gaining sudden prevalence.

Today, 13 people in 100,000 in the United States kill themselves; in 1914, 16 in 100,000 did.

Worldwide, more people die from suicide than from wars, genocide and interpersonal violence combined — more than 800,000 every year, according to the World Health Organization.

2

Suicides are most common during the winter holidays.

The notion that suicides peak during the holiday season is a misconception. In 2014, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that 70 percent of news

articles between November 2013 and January 2014 mentioning the holidays and suicide suggested that they surge during the season.

Instead, the rate is consistently highest in the spring. Experts do not fully understand why, but one recent study by University of Vienna researchers, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, showed that as hours of sunlight increase, so does the risk of suicide. The authors speculate that sunlight could boost energy and motivation, giving people who are depressed the ability to make a suicide attempt.

3

Most suicides are impulsive acts.

Suicide is often described as an act born of a sudden, fatal decision. “Many people who commit suicide are more momentarily desperate than classically depressed,” Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote in a 2013 New York Times article, for example.

In reality, most people who attempt to kill themselves make a plan to do so, including those classified as “impulsive,” a 2007 Australian study found. Likewise, a recent review of research

concluded that the link between impulsivity and suicide is weak.

According to a 2002 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, nearly half of those who die by suicide visit their doctors in the month before their deaths, and nearly two-thirds tell someone about their thoughts, providing clues they are at risk and opportunities to help them.

Several studies published in the past few years have identified aspects of DNA that seem to differ between some people who have died by suicide and those who haven’t.

When such studies are reported in the media, they are often described as having found “a gene for suicide.”

But there is no such gene.

Suicide is the result of a complex interaction among many factors, and the genetic factors that have been linked to suicide are not unique to suicidal behavior and often exist in non-suicidal people.

suicide is preventable. The National Institute of Mental Health, for instance, dubs suicide a “major, preventable mental health problem.”

But we are not yet successful at spotting and stopping it, though. We have little evidence or research on which of the many well-intentioned prevention programs work, such as ones proposing restricting gun access or doing more screening.

We know what factors put people at elevated risk for suicide — depression, substance use, a family history of suicide. A study this year in the journal PLoS Medicine found that some treatments appear to reduce the chance of reattempts of suicide.

But we have no programs backed up by evidence from randomized controlled trials showing they stop people from attempting suicide. Our best bet for preventing suicide is to ramp up research and shed more light on this troubling phenomenon. n

5

Nock is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for his research on suicide.

4

There is a “suicide gene.”

We know how to prevent suicide.

Many organizations and public health campaigns say

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

24

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