The Washington Post National Weekly - May 20, 2018

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Politics Russia probe enters 2nd year 4 Nation Boy Scouts retain lobbyists 8

5 Myths U.S.-Mexico border 23

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THE FIX

7 Trump Jr. testimony findings BY

A ARON B LAKE

The Senate Judiciary Committee released 2,500 pages of congressional testimony last week. The trove of information provides a new window into that ill-fated June 2016 Trump Tower meeting before which Donald Trump Jr. was promised damaging Russian government information about Hillary Clinton — from Natalia Veselnitskaya, who turned out to be a Kremlin-connected lawyer. The episode has been a centerpiece of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of whether there was any interference between the Trump campaign and Russia. Here are some key findings: 1. Trump Jr. was clearly anxious for dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Publicist Rob Goldstone had said his source could provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” Trump Jr.’s response: “Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

In his testimony, Trump Jr. confirmed that he was talking about the opposition research when he said “I love it.” This is key because Trump Jr. wasn’t completely clear about what he was talking about in the email. It suggests that he was eager to have the meeting specifically because of the opposition research that was supposedly being supplied by official sources in the Russian government.

2. Trump Jr. says President Trump may have personally influenced misleading explanations about the meeting.

Trump Jr. said he didn’t know about his father’s direct involvement and actively discouraged it, but he said he thinks Trump may have influenced the messaging about the meeting through then-White House commu-

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CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Donald Trump Jr. shown in 2016 in Trump Tower in New York.

nications aide Hope Hicks.

3. Trump Jr. says he doesn’t recall whether a key call with a blocked phone number was his father.

One particular phone call has raised lots of eyebrows. It came June 6 shortly after a call with Russian pop star Emin Agalarov about the meeting, but we don’t know whom it was from because the number was blocked. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has testified that the president’s primary residence uses a blocked number, but Trump Jr. said in testimony that he doesn’t recall whether the call was with his father.

4. Goldstone suggests Veselnitskaya was pitched as having Russian government connections.

Veselnitskaya has denied she was working for the Kremlin, despite her ties to it. But Goldstone said Emin Agalarov pitched Vesel-

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 email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 32

nitakaya as being “well-connected.” Goldstone’s initial email to Trump Jr. said the information came from the Russian government. This suggests he wasn’t guessing or speaking loosely.

5. Meeting attendees say no valuable information was provided.

Goldstone said: “I said to [Trump Jr.], ‘Don, I really want to apologize. This was hugely embarrassing. I have no idea what this meeting was actually about.’ ” 6. Goldstone vented about the meeting being “an awful idea” after investigators grilled him.

In an email to Agalarov in June 2017, Goldstone expressed concern that the investigation was becoming very serious and said he regretted the whole thing. This was also 11 days before the New York Times first reported on the existence of the meeting. It shows again how far ahead Mueller’s team is of what we see being reported.

7. Paul Manafort took notes.

We’ve known that then-campaign manager Paul Manafort jotted things down during the meeting, and now we know what they said: “Bill browder “Offshore - Cyprus “133m shares “Companies “Not invest - loan “Value in Cyprus as inter “Illici “Active sponsors of RNC “Browder hired Joanna Glover “Tied into Cheney “Russian adoption by American families” Exactly what any of it means is unclear, but there will be plenty of sleuthing to figure it out. n ©The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Chance Pearirs, 6, plays basketball in Cairo, which once aspired to be a river-trade city but now is struggling to survive.

Basketball is a bright spot in town.

(MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/The Washington Post)

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POLITICS

White House braces for probe’s 2nd year

BY A SHLEY P ARKER, P HILIP R UCKER, T OM H AMBURGER, R OBERT C OSTA AND M ATT Z APOTOSKY

T

he grand jury witnesses arrive one by one at the windowless room in the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue in downtown Washington. They are struck first by how commonplace the setting feels — more classroom than courtroom, two witnesses said.

One of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecutors stands at a lectern. The jurors, diverse by age and ethnicity, are attentive and take notes. The questioning is polite yet aggressive, surprising witnesses with its precision and often accompanied by evidence — including text messages and emails — displayed on a large, old-fashioned overhead projector.

The investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which hit its one-year mark last week, has formed the cloudy backdrop of Donald Trump’s presidency — a rolling fog of controversy, much of it self-inflicted, that is a near-constant distraction for the commander in chief.

The Mueller operation, like the former Marine Corps platoon commander who leads it, is secretive and methodical. Ten blocks west in the White House, President Trump combats the probe with bluster, disarray and defiance as he scrambles for survival.

The president vents to associates about the FBI raids on his personal attorney Michael Cohen — as often as “20 times a day,” in the estimation of one confidant — and they frequently listen in silence, knowing little they say will soothe him. Trump gripes that he needs better “TV lawyers” to defend him on cable news and is impatient to halt the “witch hunt” that he says undermines his legitimacy as president. And he plots his battle plans with former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, his new legal adviser.

“We’re on the same wavelength,” Giuliani said. “We’ve gone from defense to offense.”

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Witnesses keep churning through the grand jury, and the gloves are off for Trump and his allies The probe is a steaming locomotive, already delivering indictments or guilty pleas involving 19 people and three companies, while soliciting interviews with most of the president’s closest aides and outside associates. Players have departed, including most of Trump’s original legal team, while others have joined — including, most recently, Cohen, adultfilm actress Stormy Daniels and her attorney, Michael Avenatti.

“This has moved at a lightning speed,” said Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend and chief executive of Newsmax. “They’re not messing around. They’re going very quickly. The number of indictments, pleas and other moves is just amazing. I think it will come to a head quicker than other investigations.”

This portrait of the president and the special counsel investigation nearing its first anniversary is based on interviews with 22 White House and Justice Department of-

ficials, witnesses, Trump confidants and attorneys connected to the probe, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments.

“Everyone seems resigned to just buckle up and get through whatever we’ve got to get through for it to reach its conclusion,” one White House official said.

Many Trump aides and associates say they are confident the president will be exonerated. But they privately express worries that the probe may yet ensnare more figures in Trump’s orbit, including family members. There is particular worry about Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior adviser.

Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the election and connections to Trump’s campaign and associates has resulted in a guilty plea from former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is cooperating, and an

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is scheduled to go on trial in Virginia in July and in Washington in September on conspiracy, bank fraud and tax fraud charges.

The special counsel also is examining whether Trump obstructed justice in a variety of areas, from his request of then-FBI Director James B. Comey to drop the Flynn investigation to his firing of Comey to his role dictating a misleading statement on behalf of Trump Jr. about his 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer.

Mueller and his prosecutors are probing other areas as well, including the relationship between former Trump political adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization released hacked Democratic Party emails, according to people familiar with the probe.

The sprawling investigations amount to a political anchor as Trump leads the Republican Party into the fall midterm elections.

Though few candidates see it as a decisive issue, the probe still sows doubt among some voters about the credibility of Trump’s election and about his conduct in office.

Public opinion surveys have found wide support for the Mueller investigation. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans backing the probe and 25 percent opposing it, though other surveys this spring have shown a modest decline from earlier polls in support of continuing the investigation.

Among the political class, there is a guessing game about whether the special counsel completes its work this summer — sufficiently in advance of the November elections — or presses well past it. The longer Mueller’s work continues, legal analysts said, the more difficult it may be for the special counsel to maintain public confidence, especially with Trump, Vice President Pence and other administration officials calling for the probe to wrap up.

“You don’t have much longer than 18 months to 24 months to get to the heart of the matter and

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resolve the things that need to be resolved,” said Robert W. Ray, who served as independent counsel toward the end of the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton presidency. “That’s about the length of time that public sentiment is with the investigation.”

The Mueller probe has also brought about a national reckoning on the boundaries of presidential power. Trump is at war with the leadership of his own Justice Department and FBI, has threatened to defy a subpoena to testify and even toyed with ordering the firing of Mueller.

“We want to get the investigation over, done with,” Trump said last month. “Put it behind us.”

‘Like a classroom’ Mueller — the 73-year-old former FBI director with a hangdog visage and rigid bearing — looms over the investigation but is an intermittent presence in the windowless room in the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse.

Three witnesses who described their experience of being subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury said Mueller was not present for their initial interviews, which instead were conducted by one of his prosecutors standing at a lectern — peppering them with questions and presenting the case to members of the jury, who scribbled notes.

The cramped room, complete with inelegant furniture, one witness said, “looked like a classroom from an underfunded junior college in the 1970s.”

The variety of witnesses Mueller has called in has been breathtaking, from White House Counsel Donald McGahn — at least twice — to Avi Berkowitz, the 29-year-old personal assistant to Kushner.

One prominent witness who was called to appear in front of the grand jury recounted coming in through a rear entrance, to avoid the news media gathered at the front of the building. But another, former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg, said he was not given that option and, regardless, preferred to enter and exit in full view of reporters.

“If they had asked me to go through a back door, I would have said, ‘No, I prefer to see the paparazzi,’ ” he said, recalling the phalanx of cameras that swarmed him during his appearance in early March.

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Yet aside from a few witnesses who have shared glimpses of their experiences with Mueller’s team, the exact contours of the investigation remain opaque — even for Trump’s lawyers, who have been in regular contact with Mueller’s investigators.

Only recently, for instance, did the public learn that Mueller had been probing payments made by Fortune 500 companies to Cohen since at least last fall.

Mueller and his team seldom issue public statements and speak mainly through indictments and court filings. In pressing for an interview with Trump, investigators would not provide a written list of questions, which could increase the chances of a leak and constrain prosecutors in their inquiries. Instead, investigators verbally provided the president’s lawyers with only the subject areas that prosecutors wished to discuss. A Trump attorney then formulated a list of 49 potential questions the legal team believed Trump might be asked — a list that soon leaked to the New York Times.

“The biggest challenge for the White House is that the special counsel is conducting an investigation properly, which is not commenting publicly, only making known its activities by virtue of bringing cases or executing legal process in a manner that is publicly observable,” said Jacob S. Frenkel, who worked in the independ-

ent counsel’s office in the late 1990s.

Even Giuliani, who said he was brought in to end the probe and initially predicted it would wrap up within two weeks, now seems uncertain of where Mueller’s investigation will conclude.

Giuliani met with Mueller five days after his hiring, on April 24, to try to understand issues including the scope of a possible Trump interview and whether Mueller believes that Comey, whose firing by Trump triggered the probe, is a credible witness.

“From our point of view, it’s a two-track possibility for what’s next,” Giuliani said, referring to the possibility that Trump may sit for an interview with Mueller or, if he refuses, that Mueller may subpoena him. “But we don’t know which track it’ll end up being.”

‘This Russia thing’ Few achievements make Trump more proud than the 306 electoral college votes he won on Nov. 8, 2016. The president relishes showing off a county-by-county map of the election results and giving visitors a tour of the Oval Office.

But every time he hears about “this Russia thing,” as he memorably phrased it in an NBC interview last year, he feels the legitimacy of his victory is under attack. He characterizes the Russia probe as a “hoax” orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats — a reminder of the majority of voters

The courthouse on Constitution Avenue is where the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has questioned a wide variety of witnesses, but the probe’s direction remains opaque.

“The biggest challenge for the White House is that the special counsel is conducting an investigation properly, which is not commenting publicly, only making known its activities by virtue of bringing cases or executing legal process in a manner that is publicly observable,” former prosecutor Jacob S. Frenkel said.

who didn’t choose him and those who are eager to evict him.

The only option, the president has said, is to hit back.

“Let me tell you, folks, we’re all fighting battles,” Trump bellowed at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention this month.

“But I love fighting these battles.”

It would be easy to interpret the president’s tweets — and even his behavior — as an admission of guilt. But Trump’s advisers and friends say he believes he has done nothing wrong. What some legal analysts call obstruction of justice, Trump’s associates call punching back.

“His view is, ‘If I’m defending myself, you mean that’s obstructing justice?’ ” Giuliani said. “He’s right. He’s being president, but he’s not going to just sit there.”

Giuliani’s hiring marked the latest stage of the Russia fight.

Already, Trump’s legal team was in flux. Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the probe, had repeatedly counseled Trump that if he cooperated fully, it would be over soon. But Cobb is now exiting, to be replaced by Emmet Flood, one of Clinton’s impeachment attorneys. Also gone is John Dowd, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer.

But within the White House, Giuliani has created tensions with some senior staff members, in part over his frequent media appearances, which he does not coordinate with them. In an interview earlier this month with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani disclosed that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for a $130,000 payment to Daniels near the end of the 2016 campaign in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. The revelation drove headlines for days, frustrating the president, who told reporters that Giuliani was “a great guy” but needed to “get his facts straight.”

For now, Trump and Guiliani are inextricably bound. The two men huddled for five hours May 6 at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, Giuliani said. That afternoon, the lawyer said, he counseled his client to focus on his job as president and leave the legal matters to him.

But the next day, Trump fired off a missive on Twitter: “The Russia Witch Hunt is rapidly losing credibility . . .” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A shot to redefine the left in 2020 BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

T

he future of the Democratic Party has been booking late-night TV gigs, waking up for morning drive-time radio and showing up at watering holes in rural counties to try out new material.

Before the start of a 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, at least 25 candidates — mayors, governors, entrepreneurs, members of the House and Senate — have hit the road to workshop their vision, experiment with catchphrases and test policy ideas that could keep President Trump from winning a second term.

Many deny that their actions have anything to do with a coming presidential run, but they unmistakably play off the chords of campaigns past, seeking a way to break through a political maw that has been focused more on the latest actions of the president and the coming midterm elections.

“I don’t want to speak to Democrats only,” says Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who recently appeared on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to riff on the Founding Fathers’ vision of patriotism and love. “I’m talking to us as Americans, about how this is a moral moment.”

In front of policy conferences and campaign rallies for congressional candidates, former vice president Joe Biden has been updating his own paeans to the middle class, repeating his thematic refrain that “America is all about possibilities.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has broadened her calls for people to “fight back,” and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has demanded that “we must speak truth.”

“This is like taking the play to Topeka and New Haven to see what works before you even get to Broadway,” said David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama. “The season hasn’t opened.”

At stake in the rehearsals is nothing less than the future of the Democratic Party, which has yet to congeal around a positive vision. Party leaders privately talk about the next two years as a potential pivot point for what it

ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS

Even though the presidential election is years away, Democrats are workshopping their vision means to be a Democrat. The questions are big ones — of style and policy — that can only be answered in the story told by the candidate who eventually captures the party’s imagination.

Some promote a vision of a youthful future, while others speak of their own wizened experience. Some use the language of the private sector, while others have begun to promote guaranteeing public-sector jobs for all unemployed Americans. Some speak of class as the defining American divide, while others focus first on racial and gender inequality. Some are brawlers ready to take on Trump, while others pose as healers.

They have begun to grapple with the sense that Trump’s presence has erased all of the old rules, even for Democrats, and that the party should consider looking outside the standard roster of governors and senators.

“My theory of this election is you are going to basically have a swing back,” said Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who has been traveling the country talking about “expanding opportunity.” “People are going to look for someone who can unite the country instead of divide it, someone they can trust.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has focused on another theme: the wisdom that can be brought to Washington from those working outside the dysfunctional city.

“At this moment you have leadership in D.C. that defines itself by dividing us and subtracting us,” he said. “In local communities, we still are decent people who are about the politics of addition and multiplication.”

Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz has recently started a personal office as he

FROM LEFT: Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.), Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz are among possible contenders in 2020 who are testing new policy ideas.

pulls back from day-to-day control of the company. His public speeches drift far afield from the coffee business.

“This is not a time for isolationism, for nationalism,” he said recently at the Atlantic Council.

“This is not a time to build walls.

This is a time to build bridges.”

Potential candidates preach both national and party unity, decrying the “false choices” between appealing to white Midwestern voters and the more diverse and urban Democratic base.

But in the next breath, they sometimes demonstrate how many different routes there are to reach that goal of restitching the Democratic coalition ripped apart

by Trump.

Since the 2016 election, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has tried to focus more on healing the rifts that emerged between him and minority communities. Warren has also been reaching out to the black community in an effort to stamp out the impression that the financial regulatory issues at the core of her life’s work are not a central cause of minority communities.

Several potential candidates, including Booker, Gillibrand, Harris and Sen. Jeff Merkley (DOre.) have signed on to a bill that would create a pilot program, offering guaranteed jobs paying at least $15 an hour in 15 high-unemployment communities. Others have charted more moderate paths. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble,” Biden said in a recent speech, in which he proposed free community college tuition, limits on worker noncompete clauses and efforts to broaden the geographic reach of venture capital.

Most of the potential candidates, including entrepreneur Mark Cuban, have said they will wait until after the midterm elections to make any announcements about 2020 plans. “It’s not about Donald Trump,” Cuban said in an email explaining his view of the coming campaign. “He is who he is and everyone knows who he is.” n ©The Washington Post

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He teleworks, but runs a federal agency

BY R OBERT O ’ H ARROW AND A NDREW B A T RAN

J R.

T

he man named by President Trump last year to oversee regulation of the nation’s $1.4 trillion credit union industry has taken a novel approach to the agency he leads.

Instead of going to his office near Washington every day, J. Mark McWatters works from his home.

In Dallas.

McWatters, whose salary as chairman of the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) board is $165,300, may be the federal government’s most unlikely telecommuter.

The arrangement adds a wrinkle to the tendency among some Trump administration officials to spurn government norms. An NCUA spokesman confirmed a Washington Post finding that McWatters works from Dallas and declined to say how often he travels to the headquarters in Alexandria, Va., where more than 400 of the agency’s 1,200 employees are based.

“It’s unprecedented and incredibly troubling,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonpartisan group composed of scores of former lawmakers and Cabinet secretaries from both parties. “How can he lead a federal agency from his house?”

McWatters declined multiple requests for interviews and did not respond to questions emailed to him. The White House did not respond to questions about the vetting of McWatters or whether Trump knew about McWatters’s practice of telecommuting.

Agency spokesman John Fairbanks played down the significance of McWatters’s remote work, saying it has had no impact on NCUA operations because the agency is “predominantly a virtual workforce.” He said McWatters travels to Alexandria at his own expense for monthly board meetings and other occasions when his duties, such as testifying before Congress, require that he be there.

“Regardless of location, Mr. McWatters is engaged with staff at the

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

J. Mark McWatters oversees the National Credit Union Administration — from his home in Dallas NCUA every day using the full suite of video, voice and electronic tools available to our staff,” Fairbanks said.

The government has for years encouraged wider use of telework among federal workers, citing improved recruitment, retention and other factors. Almost a half-million federal workers participated in telework programs in fiscal 2016, according to data maintained by Telework.gov.

But watchdog groups and longtime observers say it is rare for senior managers, and almost unheard of for an agency leader, to routinely work from home.

Trump named McWatters acting chairman of the agency on Jan. 23, 2017 — after his more than two years as a minority-party member of the agency’s board, appointed by President Barack Obama — and then chairman in June. McWatters has since followed through on promises to ease the regulatory burden on credit

unions and to cut costs and staffing at the agency, documents and interviews show.

A lawyer, an accountant and an advocate of free-market principles, McWatters has sometimes spent agency money in the style of a corporate executive. McWatters has used limousine services dozens of times while traveling to meetings across the country, spending about $114 per trip on average, according to records provided by the agency. He once paid $582 for a “luxury sedan” and driver for himself and a colleague to travel from Madison, Wis., to Green Bay. Last year, he spent $12,000 to fly from Dallas to Barcelona to attend a conference.

Fairbanks said that all of McWatters’s work-related expenses conform to agency guidelines and that all board members travel frequently on agency business.

Fairbanks said McWatters chose to work remotely in part because, after he and his wife di-

J. Mark McWatters, current chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, at a Senate Banking Committee hearing last June.

vorced, their son lived in his house in Dallas. “It was important for Chairman McWatters to telework from Dallas when his duties did not require his presence in Alexandria,” Fairbanks said.

Fairbanks said McWatters has been an effective leader. McWatters has reorganized the agency, trimmed more than 5 percent of the workforce through attrition and cut more than $10 million in costs while ensuring credit unions operate safely and account holders are protected, Fairbanks said.

Concerns about McWatters’s teleworking surfaced during a board meeting in February 2016, almost a year before he became the agency’s leader. McWatters was complaining that his colleagues had not adopted a wording change he had proposed, at 6 p.m. the night before, to a rule they were considering. He suggested they should be more flexible, particularly because “from the perspective of a practicing lawyer, 6 o’clock is practically the middle of the day,” a transcript and video of the meeting show.

Deborah Matz, then the chair, and Rick Metsger, then the vice chairman, bridled at the criticism.

“Perhaps if you came to the office more than three days a month and got your briefing more than two days in advance of our meeting, we’d be able to have discussions about issues in a timely fashion,” Matz, a Democrat, told McWatters.

Before he was named to the board, McWatters, 63, was assistant dean of graduate programs and a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, and an adjunct professor at SMU’s business school. He had been a law partner at a prominent firm, worked as counsel to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) and served on the oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

McWatters took an unusual approach to the regulatory job from the start. After his Senate confirmation in June 2014, he waited nearly three months to take his oath of office — and then did so at Hensarling’s office in Texas. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Boy Scouts seeks to stem abuse suits BY

E LISE V IEBECK

T

he Boy Scouts of America, which acknowledged last year that it has taken a financial hit from settlements in child abuse cases, has lobbied against proposals in multiple states that would expose the organization to more lawsuits, according to victim advocates and proponents of the legislation.

The group retained lobbyists in Georgia and New York, where lawmakers say such action helped stall proposals that included “lookback” windows allowing adults to take legal action over decades-old claims. It has hired lobbyists in Michigan, where similar proposals are being debated.

The bills would give adults who were abused as children a second chance to file suit if they missed their first opportunity under state law.

The Boy Scouts’ lobbying push comes as the 108-year-old group, an institution long associated with leadership training and outdoorsmanship for American boys, is pressured on multiple fronts. In addition to declining membership, the group has faced financial uncertainty and public relations problems related to accusations of child sex abuse against former adult volunteers.

Those accusations have led to dozens of lawsuits against the Boy Scouts in recent years, some of which have resulted in expensive settlements.

Opponents of the state proposals, including the Boy Scouts and Catholic archdioceses, argue that open-ended lookback periods violate due process and would put groups in the tough position of defending themselves in cases from the distant past.

“It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to defend cases decades old in which evidence has been lost, or witnesses are unavailable,” Effie Delimarkos, director of national communications for the Boy Scouts, wrote in an email.

Proponents called the bills crucial for holding groups such as the Boy Scouts accountable for past

GEORGE FREY/GETTY IMAGES

Proposed ‘lookback’ provisions would allow accusers to bring older cases against the group abuse.

“It’s reprehensible that the Boy Scouts of America has hired lobbyists to kill legislation that would help the adult survivors of child sexual abuse,” New York bill sponsor Brad Hoylman, a Democratic state senator, said in an interview.

The Boy Scouts has faced a steady stream of lawsuits alleging that it knew about child abuse perpetrated by its adult leaders.

With 2.3 million youth members and more than 900,000 adult volunteers, the Boy Scouts’ organization has been a defendant in at least 200 federal lawsuits since 2008, many alleging abuse of young members. Some suits are still playing out in court.

Some experts said the number of lawsuits rose after 2010, when an Oregon jury ordered the Boy Scouts to pay $18.5 million in damages to a former scout who claimed he was abused in the 1980s. Two years later, the Oregon Supreme Court approved the re-

lease of more than 14,500 pages of Boy Scouts records that exposed alleged abuse dating to 1965.

The Boy Scouts’ lobbying efforts in the states have taken place against the backdrop of the group’s simmering financial woes. The Boy Scouts raised annual membership fees from $24 to $33 late last year in what some regional councils said was an effort to bolster the insurance fund used to pay victim settlements. In his financial report for 2016, Joseph P. Landy, the organization’s treasurer and vice president for finance, stated that the group’s financial condition in the coming years will depend “in large part” on the outcome of victims’ legal claims.

Delimarkos stressed that the group has taken critical steps to protect children, including screening adult leaders, requiring them to undergo training and mandating that they report signs or suspicions of abuse. Addition-

A Boy Scout works on a canoe at camp Maple Dell in 2005 outside Payson, Utah.

ally, she said, the group provides counseling and other resources to former scouts who say they were molested.

“If someone was abused and we had prior knowledge of the perpetrator, we try to find a way to help the victim heal by whatever means is appropriate,” Delimarkos wrote in an email.

The Boy Scouts has kept its lobbying efforts low-profile and declined to answer specific questions about lobbying tactics. But Delimarkos said the group opposes some bills proposing lookback periods and has engaged lobbyists to “help educate policy makers.”

Public records shed some light on the group’s efforts in a few states. In Georgia, the group has retained lobbyists from Dentons, a major firm, since last year. Its four current representatives include two former state lawmakers, one of whom is former House majority whip Edward Lindsey.

The total spent is not detailed in lobbying reports.

In New York, the BSA spent $137,500 last year on two Dentons lobbyists, including a former state senator. In March, the group hired a prominent Michigan lobbying firm, Public Affairs Associates, for an undisclosed sum.

Delimarkos declined to make the group’s lobbyists available for interviews. Those contacted by The Washington Post referred inquiries to the group’s leaders or did not respond.

Victim advocates said openended lookback provisions are necessary because many people who were abused as children do not come forward until their 30s, which in some states comes after their opportunity to sue has expired. Additionally, lawsuits alert today’s parents about alleged abusers and the institutions that shelter them, advocates say.

“The lookback windows protect children now,” said Barbara Dorris, former executive director of SNAP, an advocacy group for people abused by Catholic priests.

She has followed the legislative fights. “Let’s name the predators and let the parents be warned.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Gig economy hits retail, restaurants BY

A BHA B HATTARAI

A

aron Stallings, who used to work as a bill collector for Capital One, says he’s no longer interested in having a full-time job.

Instead, for the past year, he has cobbled together work — 50, sometimes 60 hours a week — by parachuting into restaurants in Richmond that have last-minute openings to prep food, bus tables and bottle beer. There are obvious downsides, like the lack of health insurance and the trouble of not having an employer withhold money for taxes. But he says the arrangement reflects a new reality in which flexibility trumps stability. Plus, he says, he is often treated better than full-time employees.

“It’s definitely stressful to show up and have your first day almost every time,” Stallings, 25, said, “but at least I don’t feel miserable and stuck on the job.”

The gig economy is clocking in to retailers and restaurants.

The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low, but stagnant wages, chronic underemployment and growing inequality are leading more Americans to take on “side hustles.” Some want to supplement their incomes. Others are just trying to eke out a living.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans now earn money from the digital “platform economy,” according to the Pew Research Center. Most of that work is for domestic tasks, such as housecleaning and repairs, or driving for companies such as Uber.

By moving into shops and cafes, on-demand work stands to reshape a broader slice of the U.S. economy. There are implications for low-wage workers, too, as a new class of employers fills its labor pool with on-call temp workers. Retail and hospitality — which accounts for 20 percent of U.S. positions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is the on-ramp for many employees to better jobs. But the sector is also pinched by rising minimum wages and health-care costs, and employers are seeking more flexible

JULIA RENDLEMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As more workers clock in to on-call temp jobs, low-wage employees could feel a squeeze work arrangements that respond to the ebbs and flows of their businesses.

“We’re seeing only one trend here, which is that the gig economy is big and getting bigger,” said Diane Mulcahy, a lecturer at Babson College and author of “The Gig Economy.” “Companies will do just about anything to avoid hiring full-time employees. Add to that the fact that there is no job security anymore, and workers are increasingly aware that they need to work differently if they want to create any sort of stability for themselves.”

Snag Work and other new platforms are the go-betweens, allowing users to pick up open shifts from retailers, restaurants and hotels that have gaps in their schedules. Wonolo, which bills itself as 40 percent cheaper than traditional temporary staffing companies, counts Coca-Cola,

McDonald’s and Papa John’s Pizza among its clients. Other start-ups include AllWork and Coople.

Snag Work, which recently expanded to Washington, says the arrangements are mutually beneficial for cash-strapped workers and understaffed businesses. This is how it works: Interested workers sign up online and are vetted

by Snag Work via Skype interviews and background checks.

They can search for open shifts — which typically pay $10 to $15 an hour — on the company’s app and sign up for the ones they’re interested in. (The median hourly pay for retail work in the United States is $13.20, according to the BLS.) They clock in and clock out and are paid through Snag Work’s online platform. A spokeswoman for Snag Work said the company provides workers’ compensation coverage to all workers.

Labor economists and law pro-

Aaron Stallings, 25, and Carmen Price, 22, work at Ardent Craft Ales in Richmond. The two learned about the temp job via Snag Work, a company that connects businesses with willing temporary workers.

fessors say the system raises concerns for some of the country’s most vulnerable workers.

“If a restaurant has dishwashers, cooks, busboys, servers — those people are employees, they have a fair number of protections under employment law, including a minimum wage, overtime pay and family medical leave,” said Catherine Fisk, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “What is at risk for all of these Snag workers is that they are potentially entitled to none of that if they are treated as independent contractors.”

Temporary workers also have fewer rights — they can’t unionize, for example, and don’t have the same legal protections against workplace harassment that regular employees do, according to Erin Johansson, research director at Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit group that advocates for workers’ rights.

“Who’s going to stand up and speak up about sexual harassment if they feel like they’re just going to be replaced by a gig worker who has no rights on that?” she asked.

Although the gig economy has been touted as an effective way for Americans to make money on their own terms, most gig workers — 85 percent — make less than $500 a month, on average, through those services, according to San Francisco-based loan provider Earnest, which analyzed tens of thousands of loan applications to study the effect of gigeconomy jobs.

At Boulevard Burger & Brew in Richmond, managers use Snag Work to fill about three shifts a week, often during peak weekend hours. But, they say, they use the service as a last resort.

“We’re a very high-volume restaurant, a turn-and-burn kind of place, so sometimes we need help filling shifts,” said Jake Lee, a manager at the restaurant, which has 30 employees, half of whom are full-time. “But on the whole, it’s way better if you can hire someone who’s always there when you need them.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

U.S. tourism boom in Cuba goes bust A NTHONY F AIOLA in Havana BY

A

s U.S.-Cuba relations warmed in recent years, Matilde Portela, an Airbnb host, reveled in the flood of American tourists. An aspiring business executive at age 73, she quickly learned the art of niche marketing — adorning her home with two American flags and laying out back copies of the New Yorker magazine.

But Cuba’s Great American Tourism Boom has turned to bust.

During the first three months of this year, 95,520 Americans came to Cuba — a 40 percent drop from the same period last year, according to Cuban government statistics. The decrease in Americans seeking to discover one of tourism’s last forbidden fruits is hurting this island’s access to hard cash and setting back the effort to reestablish ties between U.S. citizens and Cubans.

The drop in American visitors has occurred as a thaw in relations under President Barack Obama has chilled under President Trump — particularly after revelations last August that more than two dozen U.S. diplomats, family members and intelligence agents stationed in Havana had suffered mysterious brain injuries. The Cuban government has denied any involvement, but Washington has accused it of, at the very least, failing in its obligation to protect diplomats.

The result: stark U.S. warnings to Americans to avoid visiting the island. Along with a Trump administration overhaul of the travel rules to Cuba, those warnings have served as a tourism deterrent.

Those feeling the pinch the most, observers say, are the very Cubans the Trump administration has vowed to defend here — small-business owners looking to inject a dose of the free market into the economy.

Cuban officials have worried that the number of new entrepreneurs — including Airbnb hosts, the owners of small restaurants and art galleries, and tour opera-

ALEJANDRO ERNESTO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOC

Slowdown in tourism comes amid a worsening of relations between the United States and Cuba tors — was growing too fast. Last year, the government here froze the issuance of new licenses.

Now, those like Portela who had come to depend on American tourists find themselves caught between the communist hardliners and the American hawks.

In the mid-20th century, Old Havana seduced Americans, famously including Ernest Hemingway and Frank Sinatra. But in 1962, the U.S. government slapped an economic embargo on the communist nation that prohibited Americans from vacationing there. There were loopholes and tricks to get in — such as flying through third countries — but for the majority of Americans, Cuba was off-limits.

That changed under Obama.

The ban on plain-old pleasure travel was never lifted. But he began loosening the restrictions in 2014. With Americans permitted to visit the island for educa-

tional and cultural reasons — a bar easily met with a few visits to art galleries and communitybased projects — direct flights to Cuba resumed in 2016.

Unlike many European visitors to Cuba, the American newcomers largely eschewed the package tours that corralled tourists at big, beachfront hotels and assembly-line restaurants. Instead, the Americans spent more time exploring the colonial streets of Old Havana on their own, scattering their dollars far and wide.

Those dollars landed in the pockets of small-business owners such as Nidialys Acosta. In 2016 and early 2017, she said, her company, NostalgiCar — which rents chauffeur-driven 1950s Chevys in a rainbow of colors — saw record growth as the Americans poured in.

“We’ve had to grow in Cuba creatively because of restrictions,” said Acosta, 41, referring to the

Tourists ride in a vintage American car in Havana.

Despite new U.S. travel rules, Trump administration officials said Americans are still allowed to visit in part to support small businesses.

economic embargo.

Cuba’s tourism industry has suffered other setbacks — including damage last year caused by Hurricane Irma. But it still managed to stage a record 2017, aided in part by a massive influx of Americans in the first half of the year.

In November, the Trump administration published new guidelines on travel to Cuba, part of an effort to ensure that U.S. dollars were not directly aiding the communist government’s power structure. The rules listed hotels, restaurants and stores linked to the Cuban military that Americans must avoid. Americans could still visit Cuba on structured tours, or via cruise ships. Yet buried inside the Trump administration’s new measures was a loophole that, much like Obama’s rules, still allows Americans to go to Cuba as independent visitors as long as they engage with civil-society groups, such as artists or local business executives.

Asked about the U.S. measures hurting Cuban businesses, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who supports a tough line on the communist government, said that the regulations apply only to military-owned businesses, not private enterprises. “If the Cuban people continue to suffer it is because the Castro regime doesn’t allow them to hire employees, and operate and expand their own businesses, not because of the new U.S. policy toward Cuba,” he said in a statement.

The problem, critics say, is that the new rules are so confusing that some Americans have simply opted not to travel to the island for fear of running afoul of the law.

“The new guidelines were intentionally vague,” said Collin Laverty, who operates educational visits for Americans in Cuba.

“Americans can still travel to Cuba in almost the same way as they could before, but a lot of people just don’t know that. I think that’s exactly what [the Trump administration] wanted.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

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Live from Kabul: Afghanistan’s SNL S HARIF H ASSAN in Kabul BY

O

n a recent Friday night in Ghulam Faryad’s grocery store, half a dozen customers gathered for a weekly dose of comic relief from the tribulations of daily life in the Afghan capital.

Watching a flat-screen TV above the counter, they smirked as two inept policemen made fun of a man who was trying to report that his uncle had been robbed and killed. A few minutes later, they roared as a member of Parliament, obviously drunk, beat someone who complained about his son smoking hashish.

“They are showing the truth,” Faryad pronounced, as everyone in the store nodded appreciatively. “They raise awareness.”

“Shabake Khanda,” or “Laughter Network,” the wildly successful Afghan version of “Saturday Night Live,” is watched by millions once a week, with reruns airing twice more during the week. No one — not powerful politicians, corrupt bureaucrats, even President Ashraf Ghani — is spared its skewering.

In fact, the regular impersonation of Ghani by comic actor Mohammad Ibrahim Abed — who casually mocks the president’s peevishness and political tin ear — is so popular that even palace aides call the show to complain if a Friday passes with no Alec Baldwin-like roast of their boss.

In a bow to nonpartisanship, “Laughter Network” also makes fun of Abdullah Abdullah, the government’s chief executive officer, whose relationship with Ghani has been strained since they agreed to share power after flawed elections in 2014. Actors Seyar Matin and Nabi Roshan alternate playing Abdullah.

One episode in January, after a string of deadly terrorist attacks in Kabul left more than 100 people dead, portrayed both leaders as clueless to the public’s distress and far more worried about their dependents living

SHARIF HASSAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The political satire show includes a presidential impersonator, a touch of prudence on warlords safely abroad.

In the sketch, Abdullah asked Ghani, wearing a turban and fake beard, if he was sad because of the bombings. “No, my son is sick and I am really worried,” Ghani replied. Then the president asked a teary Abdullah if he was weeping for the Kabul victims.

The chief executive said no, it was because his son in New Delhi had caught his heel in a train door.

With few sacred cows, “Laughter Network’s” producers at the private TOLO television channel say its political satire gives struggling Afghans an outlet for

frustration and brings the powerful down a peg. It is among the most widely watched shows in the country, tackling topics from air pollution to crime and corruption.

“I am proud of what I am doing,” said Roshan, 34. “When I play someone’s role to convey a message, I feel like I am in the front line of a war, like a soldier.”

Last month, when the “Laughter Network” crew’s van stopped on a street, a man rushed up and kissed Abed’s forehead. The man, Rohullah Mansouri, said he loved the show so much that he had missed only one episode —

From left, Mohammad Ibrahim Abed, Nabi Roshan and Seyar Matin criticize Kabul’s private hospitals in a scene for the wildly popular Afghan TV show “Laughter Network.”

the night his wife gave birth.

Still, in Afghanistan’s conservative Muslim culture, there are red lines that cannot be crossed. Religious satire is strictly off-limits, and the editors bleep out potentially offensive language after the show is recorded live.

There is also pressure from politicians to censor critical segments, and the cast uses madeup names for prominent figures they imitate. Last spring, after a devastating bomb in the capital triggered mass protests, the show’s producers agreed to mute their criticism of the government, at least temporarily.

“It is not like Western countries, where we can speak freely,” said Roshan.

After one episode mocking a powerful figure, exiled vice president Abdur Rashid Dostom, supporters of the ex-warlord mobbed the street outside the TOLO studio. Not until Dostom sent orders from Turkey did the demonstrators disperse. Matin also said he had been threatened by gunmen twice for impersonating strongmen.

Dealing with issues of sex, domestic violence and malefemale relations is also extremely sensitive. There are no female comedians in the cast, and it is not acceptable in Afghan culture for a female actress to portray a lover or prostitute. So the show’s producers improvise.

In one segment recorded last month, about a member of Parliament who spent the legislative winter recess with a prostitute in Dubai, Matin had to play the woman’s part. Rather than risk offending people, he said, “it is important to make them laugh.”

During the taping session, producer Rafi Tabee stood behind a camera, issuing instructions to cast members.

“Put on a sexy outfit,” he ordered Matin. The actor dutifully walked toward an open suitcase packed with costumes, and donned a skirt and wig. ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Basketball gives a dying town a pulse

BY J ESSE D OUGHERTY AND B OSWELL H UTSON

in Cairo, Ill.

T

here are not as many pickup basketball games these days. Not as many kids dribbling in the street after school. Not anymore, at least.

Not since the town’s two biggest public housing complexes closed a year ago.

Except some afternoons still have a slow pulse, like on this Thursday in April, with a handful of kids skipping around a skinny

A public housing crisis is threatening the existence of Cairo, Ill., a place where ‘basketball is life’

block on Cairo’s northern end. In an hour or so, they would all be called in for dinner and leave skateboards and scooters and bicycles scattered on the sidewalk.

The street would then fall quiet again, like the ones next to it and the ones across town and the ones weaving through the Elmwood and McBride housing complexes, where about 400 people used to live and now only a few dozen families remain.

But first there was an important game of one-on-one basketball to play. Two little boys bound-

Cairo High girls’ basketball coach Alvin Wiggins, right, helps boys’ coach Larry Wood rearrange the school’s trophy case.

Cairo, Ill., is in a fight for its existence because of a public housing crisis, but its boys’ high school team finished an improbable 23-6 and won a regional title this past season.

ed toward baskets on each side of the block, focusing hard to keep the ball from striking the uneven pavement and bouncing out of reach.

Jermar Collier, a 9-year-old in a baggy blue shirt, said he wants to be like Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry when he grows up.

Rashad Harrison, 10, has a different hero.

“I’m going to be the next Paypay Taylor,” Harrison declared, referring to Demarius Taylor, the 18year-old high school guard, the possible last basketball star of

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COVER STORY

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MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Cairo, Ill. A ‘dying community’ Demarius Taylor floated up and down the court in Cairo High’s gymnasium later that evening, his 6-foot frame squeezing through defenders on his way to the rim, his shots pouring in one after another. This is where he grew into the scorer who averaged 28 points this past season, was named first-team all-state and later earned six votes for Illinois’ Mr. Basketball award as a senior. This is where he became another piece of Cairo’s long basketball history.

His drive to the gym cuts through the center of Illinois’ southernmost town, which is located where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet and is closer to Huntsville, Ala., than Chicago. On the right is the Dollar General, one

of the few remaining stores, a gas station no longer offering gas and a Subway sandwich shop that closed two years ago but is still advertising “SOUP AND CHILI ARE BACK” and “BOWL OF BISCUITS AND GRAVY 99 .” On the left is a minimart that just started selling fresh fruit, a gutted motel and Cairo’s Historic Park District, filled with abandoned mansions that hint at the city it never became.

There is no grocery store. No hospital. No community center, so the high school gym hosts weddings and post-funeral meals and pickup basketball runs such as this one. It is also where Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson stood in August, an American flag hanging beyond his right shoulder at center court, lamenting the

unfairness of Cairo’s situation but offering no concrete solutions to fix it. Two months earlier, during a hearing in Washington, Carson had called Cairo a “dying community.”

Cairo (pronounced CARE-oh), has been depopulating for decades, but an ongoing public housing crisis threatens its very existence. HUD closed the Elmwood and McBride complexes in April 2017 because of years of mismanagement, displacing about a sixth of Cairo’s 2,400 residents. Cairo High had just 97 students, the fewest in its history, when classes started soon after Carson’s visit.

The town keeps shrinking — along with the solutions to stabilize it — as Illinois confronts an issue facing states across the country: whether to lift disadvantaged communities by reviving

Demarius “Paypay” Taylor shoots during a pickup game. The 6-foot senior was named all-state and landed a basketball scholarship to Lincoln College in Illinois, but his family will soon be moving from Cairo.

public housing or tell people to move on.

“Nobody seems to know what’s going to happen. There was no planning,” Cairo Mayor Tyrone Coleman said in early April. “It’s taken this event to make elected officials even realize we’re here.”

Last month, Carson proposed significant changes to federal housing subsidies, including raising rent for low-income Americans. The initiative, which was criticized by housing advocates and would require approval by Congress, would initially affect half of the 4.7 million families receiving housing benefits, HUD officials said.

About 40 families remain in Elmwood’s and McBride’s livable units, the only ones not boarded up by light-brown plywood. Those continues on next page

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COVER STORY

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

from previous page

families have until June 30 to vacate their homes before facing eviction, according to a HUD official. They, along with those who have already left, were given public housing vouchers to move elsewhere. Taylor is the seventh of 11 children and still lives in McBride with his mother and some of his siblings. The high-scoring guard — whom everyone calls “Paypay” because he used to hustle adults in video games — learned to play basketball on McBride’s court, back when the playground buzzed with evening activity and brought dozens of kids outside.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

Many of the kids are gone, and the best pickup runs are at the high

school, where the Cairo Pilots again lifted this basketball-crazed community with an improbable season. Cairo pressed its way through Illinois’ Class 1A regional in February, upending much bigger schools while playing all but three games on the road because most opponents were unwilling to travel to Cairo. The Pilots finished 23-6 and four games short of their first state championship.

But now they, too, stare down their town’s possible collapse and what also could be the end of an important basketball tradition.

“I guess I don’t know what will happen,” Taylor said in April. “The team will be straight, they’ll be good, unless everyone moves away.”

‘Basketball is life here’ Cairo overflows with basketball hoops, from the town’s barren south-end streets to its northern point, from the stone levy on its eastern edge to the grassy one to the west.

There are cracked courts behind closed schools, a clean plexiglass backboard at the end of one street and a worn, crooked basket the next block over. On the town’s south side, a square piece of plywood is fastened to a telephone pole and a netless orange rim is bent toward the ground. The wood was taken from one of the windows of the boarded-up hospital across the street. The hospital closed in 1987. The rim is still holding on.

Chance Pearirs, 6, plays with a hoop in Cairo, Ill., which once aspired to be a bustling river city but now is struggling to survive. Basketball is a bright spot, and hoops are on many blocks.

“Basketball is life here,” said Andrea Evers, the superintendent of the Cairo School District. “It’s a lifeline. It always has been.”

The sport is woven through the town’s troubled history, with the 1987 team or 2003 team or 2004 team floating into casual conversations. Cairo, which is 70 percent black, once aspired to be a bustling river-trade city. Victorian mansions were built in the 1860s with the town’s promising future in mind, as were schools and churches and restaurants that have since shut down. As river and rail trade diminished in the early 20th century, jobs started to leave town. That, coupled with violent racial tension that erupted in the late 1960s, led to a mass departure

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COVER STORY of investment in Cairo. Its potential was further stunted when the Interstate 57 bridge was built to travel a mile north of town in 1978.

That gave trucks and travelers little reason to pass through and its service industry little chance to develop.

That all left Cairo in steady decline. In 2016, Cairo’s poverty rate reached 46.5 percent and its population fell to 40 percent of what it was in 1980. Today, the Cairo School District is the town’s largest employer, followed by the Bunge oilseeds plant. There are otherwise two restaurants, two liquor stores and two housing complexes slowly emptying out.

“If Cairo goes down, I’ll go down with it,” said Mary Teague, an older woman who moved to Cairo in 1986. “My kids keep trying to get me to move, but I’ll go down with it.”

It is all they have been hearing since April 2017. Cairo is in another downswing. The town is dying, one boarded-up housing unit at a time. This time, there is no hope.

The high school players heard it, too, as their roster was thinned by the public housing crisis before the season started. A 6-foot-5 forward moved 50 minutes north to Marion, Ill., because that provided his mother with better job opportunities. Another player left for Blytheville, Ark. The same could happen again next year, with more families gone and current players living with grandparents or cousins or friends so they can stay in Cairo for at least one more basketball season. HUD plans to demolish the Elmwood and McBride complexes this summer.

“We’re going to coach whoever is here. That’s all we can do,” said Larry Wood, who just finished his first season as Cairo’s coach. “But either way, this past year’s team meant so much to the town and leaves a great legacy behind.”

‘I couldn’t face it’ A week after Cairo’s seasonending loss to Sesser-Valier High in the sectional semifinals, Taylor and senior teammate Malachi Brown sat in the school district office and leafed through cards made by elementary school students. The cards congratulated the Pilots on a great season, and some showed Taylor, in his No. 11 jersey, drawn in crayon on pieces

KLMNO WEEKLY

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

of construction paper. Taylor could not stop thinking about how fast his senior season ended.

“I got T’d up for no reason,” Taylor said, referring to a technical foul called on him in the sectional semifinals. “I was talking to my teammate!”

“It felt like your best friend got killed, like someone just robbed you,” added Brown, who hopes to walk on the football team at Southern Illinois University despite never playing in an organized game. “It was a lot of mixed emotions. Anger, sadness.”

They stayed there with Evers, Cairo’s superintendent, and kept rehashing the final game of the season. Evers, along with Wood, the team’s coach, is active in the players’ lives. She checks in on players’ schoolwork and stays late to help them study, even though she has a 45-minute drive home to Paducah, Ky. She rode the team bus to most games and was one of the team’s only fans on the road.

She watched the Pilots defeat much bigger schools — some with 1,099 or 1,369 or 735 students — while traveling far east to Kentucky, west to Missouri and sometimes hours north into Illinois, often to predominantly white communities.

Evers has also shepherded Taylor through his college recruiting process. Taylor finished his senior season still looking for a chance, drawing interest from junior colleges throughout southern Illinois. He had more games with 40 points (three) than under 20 (two), but Cairo did not have any kind of weight-training program before this season, and Taylor’s skinny frame made a junior col-

lege scholarship more attainable than a shot with a Division I school. Cairo players also have a difficult time getting noticed.

“It’s hard to see how these kids just don’t get a fair chance,” said Evers, wiping tears from her eyes.

“If Demarius were at a bigger school or Malachi at a bigger school, people would be looking at them. They’d have scholarships by now. But it’s Cairo, and you’re counted out if you’re from Cairo.”

Behind Taylor and Brown, the Pilots won the regional championship this past season. That led into the state quarterfinals and the matchup with Sesser-Valier, which led to Taylor’s fourth-quarter technical, which led him to foul out and watch the end of a crippling loss from the sideline, which led them to Evers’s office with the construction-paper cards and a conversation that will course far into the future, whenever the 2018 team is brought up.

“I didn’t even come to school the next day,” Taylor said.

“Me either,” Brown added.

“I couldn’t face it,” Taylor muttered, but by the next day he had no other choice.

‘That’s the hope’ Taylor smacked his right hand against the ball and dashed toward the right elbow with his eyes fixed on the shifting defense.

The court was filled with players from Cairo’s present and past for that evening pickup run in early April, the bleachers empty aside from a few toddlers playing tag. Taylor made 10 straight shots during one stretch of play, switching hands in the air to spin in a lefty layup, pulling up for a five-

Rich in history, Cairo is on a rapid decline brought on by a housing crisis and economic misfortune.

foot floater and finally stepping behind the three-point line to bury a jump shot.

“Yo, Pay, you get that offer at Lincoln yesterday?” asked Carlton Jackson, who graduated from Cairo in 2015, after the games wrapped up. Taylor smiled and nodded. Evers had brought Taylor to Lincoln (Ill.) College for a visit, traveling four hours in the minivan used for the school’s driver’s education classes, and he left Lincoln with a scholarship offer to play National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics basketball.

NAIA is a step below the NCAA but gives Taylor the potential opportunity to transfer to a Division I program.

“Yo! You can go anywhere after that, man!” Carlton yelled.

“That’s the hope,” Taylor said, his teeth stained red by two big gulps of a fruit-punch drink and his grin fading into his round face.

He stepped into a cool evening, a light breeze pushing off the Ohio River, and into a car in the high school’s gravel parking lot. Taylor’s family will soon move to Marion when they, too, have to leave the only place he has ever lived. He will miss Cairo, the courts he grew up playing on, the school hallways that hummed with his name, all the friends who might not be there if he ever comes back to visit.

But first there was another drive cutting through the center of town, past the gutted motel, the gasless gas pumps, the abandoned mansions and finally to the quieted McBride housing complex, still home, down but not yet finished. n ©The Washington Post

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EDUCATION

At Yale, a class on living a joyful life S USAN S VRLUGA in New Haven, Conn.

BY

L

aurie Santos greeted her Yale University students with slips of paper that explained: No class today.

It was mid-semester, with exams and papers looming, everyone exhausted and stressed.

There was one rule: They couldn’t use the hour and a quarter of unexpected free time to study.

They had to just enjoy it.

Nine students hugged her. Two burst into tears.

Santos, a professor of psychology, had planned to give a lecture about what researchers have learned about how important time is to happiness. But she had created a singular class, on the psychology of living a joyful, meaningful life. And she wanted the lessons to stick. All semester, she explained why we think the way we do. Then, she challenged students to use that knowledge to change their own lives.

So canceling class was not just a break, it was an immersion. And it was a provocation: She was asking them to stop worrying about grades, even if only for an hour. Leonardo Sanchez-Noya, a senior who had skipped lunch that day because he had been studying, was delighted to have the time to eat a hamburger, and to play Frisbee. All over campus, he said, you could see people relaxing. More people were outside, more people were smiling.

That’s because some 1,200 students were simultaneously taking Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life” class. It’s the largest class, by far, in Yale’s 317-year history.

On that spring afternoon, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body was enjoying an unexpected break at the same time. No, not just enjoying it — really loving the gift they had been given. *** Santos designed this class after she realized, as the head of a residential college at Yale, that many students were stressed out and unhappy, grinding through

STAN GODLEWSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A wildly popular psychology course teaches students a simple lesson: Play more, worry less long days that seemed to her far more crushing and joyless than her own college years. Her perception was backed up by statistics, including a national survey that found nearly half of college students reported overwhelming anxiety and feeling hopeless.

“I worry so much how they’re going to look back on it,” she said.

“They feel they’re in this crazy rat race, they’re working so hard they can’t take a single hour off — that’s awful.”

The idea behind the class is deceptively simple, and many of the lessons — such as gratitude, helping others, getting enough sleep — are familiar. It’s the application that’s difficult, a point Santos made repeatedly: Our brains often lead us to bad choices, and even when we realize the choices are bad, it’s hard to break habits.

All semester, hundreds of students tried to rewire themselves — to exercise more, to thank their mothers, to care less about the final grade and more about the ideas.

Did that lead to skepticism, snark and derision? Yes, lots. But in ways small and large, silly and heartbreakingly earnest, simple and profound, this class changed the conversation at Yale.

In a way, the class is the very essence of a liberal-arts education: learning, exploration, insight into oneself and the world.

But many students described it as entirely unlike any class they had ever taken — nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with life.

The impact is not limited to Yale. Stories about PSYC157 spread around the world. And so at the end of the semester, Santos

When Yale professor Laurie Santos canceled class and told students they had to enjoy the free time, many did so on campus, as shown from the Sterling Memorial Library.

asked the students of this most famous, most infamous class at Yale (as she described it): Did it work? *** Half an hour before Santos’s last class, the quiet memorial plaza by the rare-book library and the stately president’s house began to buzz as students streamed into Woolsey Hall. This concert hall was the only space school officials could find for such a large class. At the beginning of the semester, Santos worried there wasn’t a big enough classroom, but an administrator said, “We are not going to cap the happiness class!”

A crew of two dozen teaching fellows was dashing around, handing out quizzes. Santos asked those who already had a copy to meditate on their best possible selves, instead of worrying about grades.

She wondered how to end such a class and joked she would just turn on Kanye West’s “Good Life,” mic drop and give them all Ds. She made fun of herself not practicing what she was teaching them, as she struggled with the demands of this enormous, ambitious new course. She read them a gratitude letter she had written — to the class, for inspiring her with their willingness to make changes, and giving her life so much meaning this semester.

As for the good life, she told them they already know how to live it — they just have to practice, put in the hard work.

“Good Life” began blasting into Woolsey Hall, and more than a thousand Yalies stood up, some laughing, some crying, all applauding. Finals were happening, papers were due, internships and jobs were imminent. Later, they would pour out into the sunshine, hurrying to other classes or exams or the library, and Santos would hug her husband and promise him a date night. But for now students stood and clapped and clapped and clapped, beaming, drowning out even Kanye with their standing ovation. As if they had nothing but time. n ©The Washington Post

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Team Liquid gains some structure N OAH S MITH In Santa Monica, Calif.

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n a Tuesday morning in March, five half-awake young men who constitute the Team Liquid roster shuffled into the esports franchise’s new training space. They walked through the neonaccented foyer and into the dining area, where they grabbed catered omelets with fresh sliced tomatoes and avocados, fruit cups, toast and coffee, and sat down in wood booths.

As the caffeine kicked in, some of the players began to talk business, mostly in Korean, with English exclamations, reviewing their performance the previous night during the League of Legends’ Championship Series (LCS) regular season. After the meal, the team’s assistant coach called the men into their colorfully lit film room featuring a 120-inch screen.

The coaches used an interactive tablet to mark up gameplay footage, like the telestrations on NFL broadcasts.

After dissecting the film, the players shifted to another part of their team-exclusive facility featuring a row of top-of-the-line gaming computers akin to the players’ competitive environment. They slipped into monogrammed gaming chairs, each bearing a gamer’s name, and began their training regimen.

It was, in many ways, similar to the start of a practice day for any professional sports team.

The opening of Team Liquid’s new training facility is a recent example of how esports organizations in North America are increasingly putting themselves on par with professional and collegiate teams in traditional sports, providing organized environments and structure to support their players and staff. It is a literal architecture that teams believe will help sustain the stunning growth of esports properties such as the LCS. The goal is not only to improve the caliber of current players and develop prospects into future pros but also to instill a culture of

NOAH SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Esports team’s training facility brings gaming a step closer to traditional professional sports professionalism to a group of players used to operating on their own from remote locations or in team houses in which players both work and reside.

With its new home, Team Liquid joins esports franchises Immortals/Los Angeles Valiant and Echo Fox in Los Angeles in moving away from the gaming house model and toward a more professional setup.

“When we formed the idea of a training center, it got [the players] out of training and living in the same environment,” said Bruce Stein, co-founder and CEO of aXiomatic Gaming, which holds the controlling stake in Team Liquid. “We felt that was a little stifling. It didn’t give them a separation between relaxation and work.”

‘Next evolution of esports’ Located just down the road from Lionsgate’s headquarters

and Amazon Studios in this upscale Los Angeles-area coastal city, Team Liquid’s Alienware Training Facilities sit in a nondescript, 8,000-square-foot space in an office park. The lack of external allure belies the building’s glistening, amenity-rich interior but also its importance as a key component in what the team believes to be “the next evolution of esports.”

The facility includes a conference room with a mammoth screen and three game-themed lounges, all of which have murals of the team’s past glories. There’s a kitchen and dining area — on-site chef included — and dedicated areas for scrimmages for Team Liquid’s LCS (the League of Legends’ top league), Academy (its minor league) and CounterStrike: Global Offensive teams — the three teams on-site.

Each squad also has a couchrimmed film room for postgame

Team Liquid’s sparkling new training facility in Santa Monica, Calif., has a film room for postgame analysis and film sessions, where Assistant Coach Jun “Dodo” Kang reviews games.

analysis and film sessions. There’s also an on-site production studio tasked with creating original video for YouTube, helping to promote Team Liquid and its players, as well as commercials. The team also has access to a nutritionist, a sports psychologist and gym memberships.

The setup blends developmental tools with creature comforts so it doesn’t “feel like you’re sitting in an office meeting,” according to Stein.

“That part was what was unique to the industry [about the facility]. Nobody had ever done that before, and we did it with some trepidation because you don’t know how the players in the community will respond,” Stein said, noting that esports has a unique culture teams must treat with some reverence. “Fortunately the team response has been phenomenal.”

A blending of sports worlds The idea to move away from the gaming house setup and into a practice facility stemmed in part from the involvement of Ted Leonsis and Peter Guber, co-owners of aXiomatic who serve as co-executive chairmen along with Jeff Vinik and Bruce Karsh. Given the success of their traditional sports franchises, the idea was to blend some of the best practices from those teams to coax more from Team Liquid’s players.

As much as the facility seems to help with performance — Team Liquid won this year’s North American LCS Spring Split — it also points to the continued rise in the prestige of esports.

For Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, the facility reflects a growing sense of respect toward his fellow players and their craft, even as mainstream society over a certain age is still largely coming to terms with esports’ emergence as a legitimate part of the global sports scene.

“It’s going to be this niche thing, until it isn’t, like UFC,” Peng said. “I don’t care too much about the label. I’m a pro league player, and I’m really proud of it.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

The hilarious, tortured life of a comic N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M ERRILL M ARKOE

R ROBIN

By Dave Itzkoff Henry Holt. 544 pp. $30

obin Williams and I both moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco at the tail end of the 1970s and were hired for our first jobs in TV to work on the doomed reboot of “Laugh-In.” I sat in one of many cubicles in an isolated office with a large, inexperienced writing staff. He was in front of the cameras, the breakout star of the cast.

Otherwise, we didn’t maintain a friendship. He was a busy showbusiness star on the rise, and, to be honest, I found him hard to talk to. There was an impenetrable wall inside him somewhere.

Or, as our mutual friend Dave Letterman once put it, “He’s like a guy within a guy.” So apart from what I gleaned from public gossip or the personal anecdotes of mutual friends, some of whom he dated, I never knew much about his real life.

Which brings us to “Robin,” an immersive, intimate and incredibly detailed new biography by Dave Itzkoff. It’s a revealing, warts-and-all portrait of a man of great talent trying to design a career and a life while being buffeted around by a cacophony of contradictory voices and impulses.

Williams was the son of a Ford executive father and a socialite mother who traveled together a lot, both for business and pleasure. As parents, they provided the comforts of wealth and a genetic strain of alcoholism with which Williams would struggle for most of his life.

Williams’s world-class improvising talent may have begun as a brilliant child’s solution to loneliness, but his move to L.A. instantly brought him the attention and companionship he was seeking.

His ability to make a comedy monologue look like a free-form, spontaneous joke cyclone stunned everyone. Characters!

Voices! Accents! Improv! Williams was so good at spewing out an endless stream of new material

HENRY HOLT

Actor and comedian Robin Williams started in stand-up comedy and had world-class improvising talent.

that it took multiple viewings to discern where he was hiding the structure in this magic trick.

Show business began to fall all over itself looking for ways to incorporate his unique abilities.

I was also there when comics started to complain that he had lifted lines from their acts. When confronted, Williams explained that this was just a guileless behavioral tic over which he had no control once the comedy spigot had been turned on.

Most of us were unwilling to buy his excuse. But now, viewing that moment through the widerangle lens of Itzkoff ’s biography, I can see how the endless stimulus, showbiz pressures, relationship tumult, desperate neediness, burgeoning family responsibilities, and drugs and alcohol engulfed a guy in his 20s. Williams was launched into a life remarkable for its highs and lows: A Grammy for best comedy album! A terrible divorce! A happy remarriage! A People magazine exposé! A sold-

out tour! A fall off the wagon! The birth of a child! A lawsuit about herpes! A Broadway hit! Openheart surgery! Big movie successes followed by films that were widely despised.

“I’m trying to play characters that allow us to look at who and what we are as a species,” Williams once said, explaining his artistic decisions.

“Dad’s happiness was correlated very much to how he was doing career-wise,” says his son Zak, who seems to have pursued a life the opposite of his father’s. “When there were films that would be less successful, he took it very personally. He took it as a personal attack. That was really hard for us to see.”

In time, he found himself at the mercy of those all-too-common, uncontrollable insecurities. Itzkoff says that Williams worried “that his position in the comedy world could be usurped at any moment by a younger, up-andcoming star.”

Itzkoff also includes those Robin Williams moments that wouldn’t be tolerated now. Pam Dawber, his co-star on “Mork and Mindy,” recalls: “I had the grossest things done to me — by him. . . . I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people.” But she adds, “I never took offense.” Despite his sexual overtures, she still refers to “that magic” he had.

In the end, Itzkoff describes Williams’s last act through reporting that’s detailed enough to allow us to make some sense of his despair. I guess it’s better to understand that, when he took his own life, he’d been transformed by the throes of dementia. Sadly, that doesn’t make the tragedy any easier to bear. n Markoe is a humorist, television writer and the author of several books. Her audiobook “The Indignities of Being a Woman” will be released this summer.

This was written for The Washington Post.

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A mother’s crash course in race

Yes, you do get happier after 50

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REVIEWED BY

L ISA P AGE

hen you become a mother, you start to disappear. Your body becomes someone else’s. Your priorities change.

Your existence is suddenly tied to breast-feeding, dirty laundry, the changing table. Even you can’t see yourself.

So it is with Rebecca Stone in Rumaan Alam’s riveting new novel, “That Kind of Mother.”

Rebecca, a poet married to a British diplomat in Washington, finds her life upended when her son is born. Because this is the 1980s, Princess Diana is everywhere in the news. Rebecca, by comparison, hardly exists.

Her one lifeline is Priscilla, a hospital nurse, who becomes her nanny. Priscilla is full of advice about lactation and baby care.

Her formal education was limited, but she has years of experience — she gave birth at 17 — and she possesses what Rebecca does not: a deep understanding of motherhood.

Alam, whose debut novel, “Rich and Pretty” (2016), is about the friendship between two women, is an attentive observer of female experience. In some ways, the characters at the center of “That Kind of Mother” are polar opposites — Priscilla is black, Rebecca is white — but they forge a working relationship, and Rebecca eventually finds herself considering the black experience: “She’d search out metaphors for Priscilla’s skin color, chocolate/coffee/coconut, all unimaginative at best and offensive at worst. . . . Black skin called chocolate because the stuff is sweet.

Priscilla was sweet, but that was beside the point.”

As a poet, Rebecca’s business is language, but Alam shows how words sometimes confuse her.

“Rebecca reached for her tea, careful not to spook the sleeping baby. Was spook racist when a verb as it was when a noun?”

Parenthood, too, is full of contradictions.

“It went unsaid, in the parenting books . . . that the baby needed you but also you needed the baby. They were reassuring. You could hold on to them and it was like you were holding on to life itself. . . . A baby was so weak — why should it make you feel so invincible?”

When Rebecca decides to adopt a black baby, she learns that erasure goes beyond female experience. Her white son is treated one way, and her black son quite another. She notices that black people are invisible or hypervisible, depending on the circumstances. Another mother in the playground assumes Rebecca has adopted a crack baby.

Her sister fears a family history of AIDS. Even her husband is unnerved about the adoption.

As her boys mature, Rebecca realizes that she is “an author with no real authority.” When a middle school teacher complains that her black son is disruptive, Rebecca suggests that he is merely spirited. The teacher hopes he can learn to “restrain his enthusiasm” and suggests that he’s also sexually inappropriate. The boy is forced to drag his desk outside the classroom and sit alone.

Alam, who is the adoptive father of two black boys, has created an outstanding depiction of motherhood and cross-racial adoption. He deftly sets up these characters to fail repeatedly even as they persevere. The tensions of privilege and identity are brilliantly set against the backdrop of wealthy American cities, and Alam’s pacing is phenomenal.

“That Kind of Mother” is an astonishing book, one unafraid to look at the minefield of parenting and race. It reveals how we blind ourselves to the truth — and how we might finally open our eyes. n Page is co-editor of “We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America.”

She teaches writing at George Washington University. This was written for The Washington Post.

T THAT KIND OF MOTHER

By Rumaan Alam Ecco. 291 pp. $26.99

THE HAPPINESS CURVE Why Life Gets Better After 50

By Jonathan Rauch Thomas Dunne. 244 pp. $26.99

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P AMELA N EWKIRK

hanks to modern medicine, the lifespan of the average adult has increased by more than a decade and will probably expand even more in years to come. If that isn’t enough of a silver lining, journalist Jonathan Rauch offers even more good news about aging in his book “The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50.”

The optimistic, breezy title could easily be dismissed as wishful thinking. However, Rauch’s rosy projection is based less on new-age optimism than a review of a series of multi-country, big-data studies on happiness conducted over the past few decades. The findings by scholars from a variety of disciplines consistently show that life satisfaction is U-shaped, with contentment high in the 20s, plunging at mid-age and taking a turn for the better after 50.

The ample scholarship on the “happiness curve” debunks many long-standing beliefs about aging and happiness and shows that contrary to being over the hill, people over 50 are generally happier than they were during their 30s and 40s.

For example, the Office of National Statistics in England surveyed more than 300,000 people of different ages in 2014 and 2015 and asked, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”

Like other studies cited by Rauch, the results showed that life satisfaction was high between 20 and 34 and hit its lowest point around 49 or 50, then began to rise, peaking in the mid-60s.

Similarly, research on data sets from 37 countries by David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth College economics professor, found the same U in response to the question “If you were to consider your life in general, how happy or unhappy would you say you are, on the whole.” In a paper Blanchflower co-wrote with British colleague Andrew Oswald, they said: “We show that wellbeing reaches

its minimum around the middle of life. The regularity is intriguing.

The U shape is similar for males and females, and for each side of the Atlantic Ocean.” Analysis of the Gallup World Poll of 99 percent of the world’s adult population between 2010 and 2012 also showed that people got happier over time.

But given the variables among people’s experiences, it is impossible to meaningfully apply the curve found in large data sets to an individual. An unhappy 60year-old who was more content at 30 or 40 could find the conclusions irrelevant. The U-curve, Rauch cautions, “is not an inevitability; it’s a tendency.” But it’s a tendency that drives the 218 pages of text, which become somewhat redundant once the curve is substantially established. Similarly, interviews Rauch conducted sometimes detract from the far more compelling scholarship. At times Rauch chronicles the trajectory of his own life, presumably to show that it tracks with the book’s central premise.

The strength of the book, then, is less the personal anecdotes than what appears to be overwhelming evidence of a happiness curve after 50 that could inspire a societal reassessment of later-life planning. “By telling them that their best years are behind them at age fifty, we make them gloomy about the future,” Rauch says. “In all of those ways, by telling the wrong story about adult development, we bait and set the midlife trap.”

It may be difficult to convince some that life gets better after 50.

But by supplanting dated cliches with compelling scholarship, Rauch offers a fresh and reassuring vision of aging that supersedes superficial fixations. n Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2018

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OPINIONS

America is facing a new ‘Sputnik moment’ C. L. MAX NIKIAS is the president of the University of Southern California and member of the National Academy of Engineering. This was written for The Washington Post.

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fter the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we saw how federal investment in U.S. private industry and academic research allowed the United States to catch up, win the space race and hold decades of military and technology dominance. There is no doubt: America emerged victorious from the Cold War because of its investments in science and technology. ¶ Now the land­ scape of conflict is increasingly being driven by a new set of AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which triggered a Cold War factors, which Director of National Intelligence Daniel space race with the United States.

Coats summed up as a global “competition for technological research. And the U.S. Intelligence China has already launched superiority.” Yet our most advanced technologies are still Advanced Research Projects into orbit the “Quantum largely based on Cold War­era inventions.

Activity, which operates under the Experiments at Space Scale” The development of quantum technology presents the United States with its new “Sputnik moment.” Quantum systems promise to upend everything that came before. But once again, America has some catching up to do.

A national strategy, like the one this nation embarked on following the Sputnik launch, will help get us there. And, yes, the stakes are just that high. If not higher.

The science is famously hard to grasp, but this is what’s important: Quantum tech takes advantage of quantum physics to manipulate atoms and subatomic particles in new, potentially powerful ways. For example, the speed and power of today’s computers are physically limited to the transistors that carry out their functions. That’s because transistors are basically on-off switches for the flow of electrons in computers (typically represented in values of zeros and ones, or “bits”).

But quantum computing promises a way around this limitation through the quirks of quantum physics. Specifically, the bits in quantum computers can exist in more than one state at a

time, can influence each other instantaneously from great distances, and can act as particles and waves simultaneously. These new bits — known as quantum bits or “qubits” — create the potential to process data much faster than traditional computers.

This technology holds immense promise. It could allow us to communicate faster, more accurately and more securely than ever before — meeting not only the security challenges of tomorrow but also revolutionizing everything from code-breaking to cybersecurity to climate modeling, and opening new frontiers in medicine and materials science.

Whoever gets this technology first will also be able to cripple traditional defenses and power grids and manipulate the global economy. The surest way to deter such behavior is to win this race.

Yet, many suspect that China is already pulling ahead. Although the country’s total investment is unknown, the Chinese government is building a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, due to open in two years.

satellite. Using quantum communications technology, the satellite successfully sent “unbreakable” code from space last year.

In comparison to China’s investments, U.S. governmentfunded research in quantum technology, stood at just $300 million a year as of 2016.

In 1958, the year after America was jolted into action by the launch of Sputnik, NASA was given an initial annual budget of less than $800 million in today’s dollars. By 1962, after the United States once again came in second — this time in the race to human spaceflight — NASA’s budget jumped to more than $10 billion.

America never looked back.

A similar misfire in the race for quantum technology would not be as easy to overcome. If the United States is to lead, immediate investment is needed to fund advances in quantum encryption, quantum computing and quantum communication.

Some of this is already underway, but we are only scratching the surface. The National Science Foundation has listed quantum technology as one of its 10 big ideas and has made multimillion-dollar investments in secure communications

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, recently selected my university, the University of Southern California, to lead a consortium of institutions to build and test 100-qubit quantum machines. The largest quantum computer currently operating is a 72-qubit system built by Google.

Other institutions are breaking important ground in this area as well, including Harvard University and the University of Maryland. But these efforts will only mark a watershed if our nation prioritizes quantum research as it did aerospace and defense in the mid-20th century.

Like then, critical partnerships between academia, government and the private sector can build the human capital we need to lead in the quantum era.

But if we do not take the appropriate action, America’s dominance in a technologydriven world will be short-lived.

Congress should use the 2019 budget debate to form a national quantum strategy and to ensure it is funded appropriately not only next year but also in the years to come.

Our leaders did not fail us in 1957. Our leaders cannot fail us now. n

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TOM TOLES

Democrats, it’s time to pay up MEGAN MCARDLE is a Washington Post columnist and the author of “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.”

B

efore the ink was dry on our new tax bill, outraged blue states were screaming about the cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes. Their governments were also frantically seeking ways around it, and small wonder. For decades, high-tax states with a lot of wealthy residents enjoyed a hefty subsidy from the rest of America. Legislators were understandably panicked over what voters might do when handed the rest of the bill.

That panic generated some desperate ideas. The most popular, currently, is allowing people to convert tax payments above the $10,000 cap into a “charitable donation.” New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have already passed laws to allow this.

While charmingly innovative, this approach is likely to fall afoul of tax courts, as will the other proposed tactics. Bluestate taxpayers may finally have to confront the full cost of the government they want. And Democrats will finally have to confront the tension between what those voters want government to do and what they’re willing to pay for.

Remember the Bush tax cuts?

A heartless giveaway to the rich that did nothing for the middle class, Democrats said. But when their expiration date approached, President Barack Obama called for raising taxes only on families making more than $250,000 annually — that

being, apparently, what it now takes to call yourself “rich.”

This absurdity is no accident.

It’s a function of the ideological beliefs of the Democratic activist base clashing with the geographic and demographic distribution of their voters.

Over the past few decades, the United States has undergone “the Big Sort,” the clumping of the electorate into demographically, professionally and politically homogenous neighborhoods. This fact has been often remarked, but the implications for tax politics are rarely noted.

Democratic voters have crammed themselves into a handful of the most

economically successful counties, heavily concentrated in narrow strips along the coasts.

There they’ve formed a coalition of affluent, educated professionals and lower-income minorities. That coalition used its prosperity to fund expensive, intensive state and local governments. Most of the party’s energy comes from those coastal clusters, where left-wing activists are most numerous and powerful. They want to supersize the federal government just as they’ve done in their home states. But so far, they’ve been unwilling to ask their neighbors to foot the bill. Eventually, they’ll have to, because in deference to the moderate-income portion of their coalition, they want to finance all their plans by taxing the rich.

Many on the left now call for a Danish-style welfare state, but few are calling for Denmark’s 25 percent value-added tax on all purchases, or their heavy income tax on all wages above about $55,000 a year.

“I’ve been frustrated with liberals,” says Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center. “They really do just want to raise all the revenue from rich people, and they don’t understand that that really constrains what they can do in terms of financing the safety

net.”

Especially if you also try to defer to the affluent, educated portion of your base by continually redefining “rich” to just north of what moderately successful blue-state professional couples earn. Yet politics require this ratchet.

Thanks to the Big Sort, those folks are now concentrated in coastal cities where competition from others like themselves, and blue-state taxes, raise the cost of living sky-high. Compared with their neighbors, they don’t feel especially rich; they feel as though they’re struggling just to pay for the basics.

Eventually, Democrats are going to have to either give up their big dreams or hand those voters the bill, because they’re the ones with most of the money.

This creates a certain cognitive dissonance for progressives.

Blue-state professionals have enjoyed a disproportionate share of the prosperity gains over the past few decades; if they want a bigger government, they’ll have to give up those gains to fund it.

But thus far, Democrats haven’t managed to convince these voters that providing lavish government to every state means that they need to be taxed like a Rockefeller — or even like a Dane. n

SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2018

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Proof that online school can work DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Post. He was previously an editorat-large for Time Magazine and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”

For months I have been reading and writing about the poisoning of social media, the perils of unregulated drones and assorted other dangers posed by rampant technology. So I was delighted to see the pro side of progress during a visit to Southeast Kansas.

Near the town square of Humboldt, Kan., inside Humboldt Community Fieldhouse, 60 students in black gowns and mortarboards waited for the chance to collect their high school diplomas. But this wasn’t a group that grew up together through ballgames and choir concerts. Alienated from traditional high schools, seeking an alternative, they found the Humboldt Virtual Education Program, one of the largest and best-regarded online high schools in the Sunflower State. After solitary study in Internet classrooms, they gathered as a physical community for the first, and probably the last, time.

Across the United States, online education is booming.

Sixth-through-12th-graders enrolled in Florida’s largest fulltime virtual high school completed more than 44,000 semesters of classwork last year.

In Kansas, virtual school enrollment grew 100-fold between 1999 and 2014, from about 60 students to more than 6,000.

Perhaps inevitably, controversy has followed the growth. Some educators worry that online schools are inherently inferior to traditional classrooms with their flesh-and-blood teachers and peer-group teamwork. I agree that the trend requires close

monitoring; at this point, quality research is still sparse. But one widely cited study for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that a well-run virtual school can match outcomes of brick-and-mortar institutions.

To Jody Siebenmorgen, director of the Humboldt virtual high school, comparing her program with traditional schools misses the crucial fact. Her students have tried the old model, and it didn’t work for them. “A lot of my students were expelled from their local schools, and neighboring schools won’t take them,” she said. “I work with 14 different probation officers. I also work with some gifted students

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

who are bored stiff in their schools and just want to finish quickly and move on to greater challenges. I work with students in foster care. I work with a lot of teen moms juggling school and child care. I work with students who are battling illnesses that prevent them from going to school. I once had a student who received a double lung transplant, and she attended high school on a laptop in bed at Children’s Mercy Hospital.”

When the Kansas legislature weighed whether to eliminate funding for adult virtual education, Siebenmorgen traveled to Topeka to share the story of a Walmart worker in Iola whose GED certificate was preventing him from moving up in management.

As I scanned the gymnasium floor, I couldn’t help thinking of my own high school graduation some 40 years earlier. In those days, few alternatives existed for students turned off by bell schedules, crowded lunchrooms and teen drama. The 20thcentury school was designed in a time when the majority of Americans did not finish 12th grade. Yet we took for granted that it could work for everyone, in an age of the indispensable diploma.

Thankfully, we’ve begun to appreciate that students aren’t stamped from a single mold.

Some do their best learning at their own pace and rhythm. This awakening is surely one reason more Americans are finishing high school: The dropout rate fell from 11 percent to 6 percent between 2000 and 2015, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Well-run virtual education programs are part of that success.

Educators with up-close experience of at-risk students understand this — which is why Humboldt’s virtual school includes the daughter of a traditional school principal. And the daughter of a newspaper columnist. When the nontraditional learner in my family gripped her diploma proudly and gave Siebenmorgen a tearful hug, she became one of more than 400 alumni of a little Kansas town’s very big idea.

These aren’t students normally celebrated with trophies and scholarships. But I would not bet against them. In an age of constant change, they’ve seized tools offered by technology and put them to good use. Instead of dropping out, they stepped up, toward a future that will favor those who see and grab new possibilities. An hour after they marched in, they sailed forth on the stream of lifelong learning, which promises to take them far. n

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FIVE MYTHS

U.S.-Mexico border BY

C HRISTOPHER E . W ILSON

A much­discussed caravan of Central American migrants arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, recently to seek asylum in the United States. The event, and President Trump’s reaction to it, set off more debate on the management and security of the U.S.­Mexico border. That de­ bate is laced with political rhetoric that is not always firmly ground­ ed in the truth. Here are five myths about border crossings.

MYTH NO. 1 The border is out of control.

FBI statistics I have analyzed for a forthcoming report for the Mexico Institute show that from 2011 to 2015, all but one of the 23 U.S. counties along the border had violent-crime rates lower than the national average for similar counties, a finding that echoes previous analyses.

In some ways, the border is porous — more than 300,000 people were apprehended last year for crossing into the country illegally. But what does it mean to have a secure border? The number of Border Patrol agents has increased more than fourfold since the early 1990s, and that 300,000 figure is the lowest recorded since 1971, meaning that the border is as secure as it has been in nearly five decades.

Without a nationally agreedupon way of measuring border security, we are stuck in a political debate as much about semantics as substance.

MYTH NO. 2 A border wall would stem the opioid epidemic.

The top causes of opioidrelated deaths in 2016 were, in order, synthetic opioids like fentanyl, prescription opioids and heroin. A large proportion of fentanyl is shipped by mail or express carrier directly from China. Some is also trafficked through Mexico, but usually in vehicles through official crossings rather than in remote areas where a wall might complicate smugglers’ plans. Prescription

opioids are produced and shipped through legal means.

Finally, although heroin trafficking has evolved over the past decade to enter the United States mainly through Mexico, that drug, too, is primarily moved in vehicles through official crossings. Security improvements at ports of entry and cooperation with Mexican officials may contribute to a comprehensive anti-opioid strategy, but a border wall would not.

MYTH NO. 3 Border enforcement does not curtail illegal crossings.

Enforcement does push migrants to cross in more remote and dangerous areas. But U.S. border officials have become increasingly effective in detaining those seeking to cross the border illicitly, as demonstrated by economists Bryan Roberts and John Whitley.

And surveys show that Mexican migrants apprehended and returned to Mexico have become much less likely to attempt to reenter the United States, with the share saying they’d try again falling from 95 percent in 2005 to 49 percent in 2015, according to a Migration Policy Institute report.

Economic and demographic shifts during that period account for some of the change, but so does enforcement, in particular the fact that migrants apprehended at the border are now much less likely to be simply dropped off on the other side and more likely to face formal deportation proceedings.

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

A Central American man peers through a border fence in Tijuana, Mexico, last month. He was part of a group seeking asylum in the U.S.

MYTH NO. 4 Terrorist groups are exploiting a porous border.

There has never been a successful terrorist attack on the United States involving the crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, as the State Department has reported, Mexico has cooperated closely with the United States on counterterrorism issues, and there is “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”

An analysis of travel in the planning and execution of terrorist attacks by Kathleen Smarick and Gary LaFree of the University of Maryland shows that most travel is through airports and seaports rather than across U.S. land borders. All of this means that large flows of migrants over the southern border do not necessarily generate significant terrorism risks.

MYTH NO. 5 Mexico’s border laws are strong, and ours are weak.

Mexico passed a major

overhaul of its immigration code in 2011, seeking to limit the discretionary nature of enforcement, which had served as a tool of corruption, and to strengthen the protection of migrants’ human rights. It was a pro-migrant reform, and Mexico’s immigration laws are far from hawkish.

As for U.S. immigration laws being weak, that is hard to square with an immigration and border security system that detains and removes hundreds of thousands of people from the country each year.

The Trump administration cites flaws that allow lone minors and some asylum seekers to be placed with family members or paroled, sometimes for years, while their cases are processed.

But rather than a weak legal framework, the United States has an under-resourced asylum and immigration court system.

Asylum applications have more than quadrupled over the past decade, causing a backlog of more than 300,000 cases. n Wilson is deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2018

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