The Washington Post National Weekly - May 22, 2016

Politics Not your usual surrogate 4

Nation Targeting corruption globally 9

Data Cities that are hard to forget 17

5 Myths On being transgender 23

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China’s crustacean connection

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Trump’s big moves BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

D

onald Trump effectively locked up the Republican presidential nomination on the night of May 3 when he won a sweeping victory in the Indiana primary. Ted Cruz ended his campaign that night.

John Kasich followed suit the next day.

It’s been more than two weeks since that night. And Trump, the least orthodox presidential nominee in modern political history, has made a number of very smart moves to coalesce the GOP behind him while also setting the terms of the general election fight to come against Hillary Clinton. Here are five examples: 1. Traveling to D.C. to meet with Paul Ryan His past condemnations of many of the party leaders in Washington — and their doubts about his ability to lead the party — made it very hard from an optics perspective for people like Ryan to simply throw their support behind Trump once it became clear he was the nominee. A gesture was needed, something that these members of Congress could point to as evidence that they had brought Trump to heel or, at the very least, that they had expressed their concerns to him, he had heard them and both parties were satisfied with the outcome.

2. Hiring a pollster Trump made much of the fact that during the primary process he had no pollster. The decision to bring on Tony Fabrizio, a wellknown pollster within GOP circles, is a mature decision by Trump. Here’s why: Winning a primary fight without a pollster is one thing. The calendar is laid out months (years?) in advance. Most of the time, a single state or, at most, two to four states vote on a single day. It’s a sequential process where momentum matters. A lot.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Winning a general election is something different. The electorate is much broader and, therefore, more complex when it comes to targeting messages and the like. All of the states vote on the same day, too, meaning that you need someone with actual hard data to help justify spending and travel decisions.

Then there’s this: There’s no downside for Trump. Do you think one person who was for him in the primary is going to care (or even know) that he hired Fabrizio? Answer: No.

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

2. Making nice with Megyn Kelly Trump has a theatrical/dramatic approach to most things. That includes his feuds, which play out as three-act plays: The introduction of the tension, the formal falling out, and then, of course, the high-profile making nice.

Trump finished that three-act arc with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly this past week with her prime-time interview, not on Fox News but the big Fox network. The interview was largely easy on Trump, and he came out looking none the worse for wear. Plus, he was able to show the world how magnanimous he is.

4. Rolling out a list of Supreme Court picks There’s nothing that united the disparate elements of the Republican party base like

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 32

talk of future Supreme Court nominees.

That’s long been true but is even more so now in the wake of twin decisions over the last few years that legalized same-sex marriage and upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. If you are looking to unite a fractious party, then, proposing a list of judges you would consider naming to fill the vacancy caused by the death of conservative hero Antonin Scalia this year is a very smart strategic play. Trump made no secret of his goal with the list: to put 11 names on it that would be totally unimpeachable in the eyes of conservative activists.

5. Making clear there are no boundaries in your planned attacks against Hillary Clinton Trump’s willingness to suggest that Bill Clinton had raped Juanita Broaddrick in his Wednesday night interview with Sean Hannity is only the latest signal he is sending to Republicans that he considers absolutely nothing off limits when it comes to drawing a contrast with Hillary Clinton in the fall campaign.

That’s a stone-cold winner for his efforts to unify the GOP. Why? Because large swaths of the Republican base have spent the last almost-20 years frustrated that their party leaders weren’t willing (or willing enough) to directly confront the Clintons about their moral character (or lack thereof ). That Trump won’t apologize for calling Hillary Clinton an “enabler” of her husband is exactly the sort of rhetoric that conservatives have been waiting the last two decades for.

It is literally impossible to be “too nasty” to Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton) in the eyes of the Republican base. The more Trump amps up his rhetoric toward the former first couple, the more loyalty (and unity) he engenders from a party base badly in need of a rallying force. n

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

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ON THE COVER On the waters off Little Cranberry Island, Maine, Kevin Wilson checks on a lobster trap on Bruce Fernald’s boat. Photograph by MATT MCCLAIN, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

The surrogate: First, do no harm?

LYNNE SLADKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ben Carson now sings Trump’s praises when he isn’t talking about those ‘major defects’ B EN T ERRIS Columbus, Ohio BY

B

en Carson, the neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate turned unfiltered pitchman for Donald Trump and now part of the presumptive nominee’s vice presidential search committee, sat in the back of a Town Car with his wife, Candy, on his way to a televised interview. He had just explained to the reporter riding along that he wanted no role in a

Trump administration when news arrived of a new poll naming him as the best liked of a list of potential running mates.

“Who else was on the list?” he asked quietly, maintaining his usual inscrutable calm. The most favorably regarded contenders after himself, he was told, were John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie.

“Those are all people on our list,” he said.

“Well, not you,” Candy reminded him sharply.

That the Trump campaign might want their potential VP picks held close to the vest didn’t seem to occur to Carson. He’s not the type to keep his candid thoughts to himself.

It’s an attribute typically unbecoming of a “surrogate,” campaign shorthand for the high-profile friend-of-the-candidate assigned to offer up flattering comments and spin away the controversies.

Since joining Team Trump, Carson has acknowledged that the mogul wasn’t his top choice and that sup-

Ben Carson, who is part of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump’s vicepresidential search committee, has been called “the worst surrogate ever.” But he has also earned Trump’s trust.

porting him was merely “pragmatic.” He’s called into question Trump’s Twitter habits, said he “has major defects” and recently went off-message by suggesting they might consider picking a Democrat for the ticket.

And despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he’s apparently earned the trust of Trump, speaking to the candidate a few times a week, making the rounds on television on his behalf, calling up House Speaker Paul Ryan ahead of Trump’s meeting on Capitol Hill

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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POLITICS and, yes, helping campaign manager Corey Lewandowski come up with a list of possible VP candidates.

Carson says there’s no plan to pull a Dick Cheney and suggest himself. Having already run for president, Carson understands he’s a lightning rod for controversy, and Trump doesn’t need help sparking fires.

“He’s not interested,” said Carson’s business manager and friend Armstrong Williams. “But miracles can happen, right?”

Williams added: “But I don’t see that miracle happening.”

And then: “But we’ve seen stranger things, right?”

Yes, yes we have. Not the least of which has been watching Carson say things that would get any other surrogate benched, only to be elevated within the campaign. He’s what some commentators have called “the worst surrogate ever.”

Which raises the question: Is Carson the best surrogate ever?

No, he’s not.

Or is he?

Not long ago, Donald Trump stood on a stage in front of thousands of Iowans accusing Carson of fabricating parts of his life story, calling him “pathological” and comparing him to a child molester. No big deal, Carson says today.

He didn’t take it personally.

“It just means he’s like a typical politician,” Carson said; at the time, he noted, he was creeping up on Trump in the polls. “Other politicians might not be as colorful, but they do the same things.”

Carson puts greater weight on another moment he shared with Trump. It was during the ABC debate in February, when Carson, waiting in the wings to be introduced, didn’t hear his name come through the loudspeaker. He remained standing offstage, hands clasped. Cruz, Rubio and Bush all breezed past him to take their spots at the lecterns, but when Trump was called, he, too, hesitated in the wings.

To viewers at home, they looked like a pair of middle school drama students who had both missed their cue. But Carson saw Trump’s pause as a deliberate gesture to ease his awkwardness.

“That showed the kind of person that he is, to stand by me even though it did nothing for him personally,” Carson said.

“They stood together that day like brothers,” said Williams, one of Carson’s closest confidants. “That

ROBERT F. BUKATY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“No one is going to believe him if he came out and said Trump is the perfect candidate, because he isn’t the perfect candidate.”

— Deana Bass, Ben Carson’s former spokeswoman

was a very important moment.”

Shortly after dropping out of the race, Carson headed to Mar-aLago to have breakfast with Trump. He hadn’t endorsed anyone yet but was leaning toward giving his support to the reality star who cared as little about political correctness — or, some would say, polite discourse — as he did.

They sat in an ornate room eating fruit and talking about, as Carson might put it, the fruit salad of each other’s lives.

“I wanted to make sure we were on the same page, and we were,” Carson said. In mid-March, he endorsed. He stumbled right out of the gate, telling the conservative website Newsmax that Trump wasn’t his first pick and that he had been promised some sort of advisory role in the administration.

Or was it a stumble?

“No one is going to believe him if he came out and said Trump is the perfect candidate, because he isn’t the perfect candidate,” explained Deana Bass, Carson’s former spokeswoman. “If he did that, Dr. Carson would lose the respect he’s earned for not telling the truth as he sees it.”

Good doctors don’t sugarcoat bad situations. If a patient requires an unpleasant but necessary procedure — say, a spinal tap or an enema — any physician worth his scrubs will warn that it’s going to be rough, not gonna lie, but it’s the best path forward. In other words, what critics see as Carson’s gaffes are really just part of his bedside manner: Look, this candidate comes with some unpleasant side effects — but if he couldn’t heal the country, I wouldn’t be prescribing him.

Ben Carson speaks with delegates at the Maine GOP convention in Bangor on April 22 — part of his campaign on behalf of former rival Donald Trump.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Would I and everyone always prefer someone who is completely consistent 100 percent of that time? Yes,” Carson said. “But who is that? Who is that person?”

Trump may have changed positions on a number of issues, but on the “spectrum of deceit” Carson sees Hillary Clinton as being much worse.

“That’s why I made it very clear that this is a pragmatic choice,” he said: Trump, he believes, is the Republican who has a chance of winning. “It’s sort of like: Would you rather have a cut on your finger or have both your legs cut off?”

Vote Trump: Doctors agree, he’s better than having your legs chopped off.

“The left-wing media loves to say I’m a terrible surrogate, but I pay so little attention to it,” Carson said. “If I said their mother was a good person, they’d find something terrible to say about it.”

But it’s not just people on the left who think the doctor should surgically remove his foot from his mouth.

“If I were to grade him, I’d give him a B-minus,” said Doug Watts, Carson’s former communications director. “He wings it a little bit too much.” Watts, who is now working for a new pro-Trump super PAC, the Committee for American Sovereignty, took particular issue with Carson saying they might pick a Democrat as a vice president.

“That wasn’t helpful,” said Watts, who thinks Trump has already had enough trouble proving he’s a conservative. “He would say it’s just him not being a politician, but I’d say it’s him not being mentally prepared.”

Not so fast, Doug, don’t put words in Ben’s mouth. Let’s let him speak for himself.

“I’m not a politician, and I will never be a politician,” Carson said when asked about his propensity to go off script.

It’s not a lack of preparation, he says, so much as a matter of being true to himself. Yes, he said that Trump has defects, because all people have defects. Sure, he said he’d consider a Democrat, if they could find one that stood strong on all parts of the Constitution, including the Second Amendment. And of course there will be times he disagrees with the candidate he is standing behind. “If two people agree all the time,” Carson said, “then one of those people isn’t necessary.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Clinton’s flaws worry her allies

BY A NNE G EARAN AND D AN B ALZ

H

illary Clinton’s declining personal image, ongoing battle to break free of the challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders and struggle to adapt to an anti-establishment mood among voters this year have become caution signs for her campaign and the focus of new efforts to fortify her position as she prepares for a bruising general election.

More than a dozen Clinton allies identified weaknesses in her candidacy that may erode her prospects of defeating Donald Trump, including poor showings with young women, untrustworthiness, unlikability and a lackluster style on the stump. Supporters also worry that she is a conventional candidate in an unconventional election in which voters clearly favor renegades.

“I bring it down to one thing and one thing only, and that is likability,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who has conducted a series of focus groups for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

To counter these challenges, Clinton is relying primarily on the prospect that her likely Republican opponent’s weaknesses are even greater. But advisers also are working to soften her stiff public image by highlighting her compassion and to combat perceptions about trustworthiness and authenticity by playing up her problem-solving abilities.

“Hillary Clinton is in a stronger position than Donald Trump, but it will be competitive,” said Joel Benenson, Clinton’s senior strategist and pollster. “All these races are.”

None of these Democrats said they expected Clinton to lose — but many said she could. For the most part, it is her qualities as a candidate that keep her allies up at night, not her fitness to be president, which they categorically do not question. They also lament how exposed these flaws have become during a long primary contest against Sanders, who has profited from suspicion and dislike of

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Likability looms large as an obstacle for the conventional candidate in unconventional race Clinton among ranks she now must win over.

Although Clinton has never trailed Sanders in the delegate count and is all but assured of securing the nomination in June, she is widely expected to lose more Democratic primaries this month, which could amplify her weaknesses.

When Democrats assess Clinton, they tend to zero in on her communication skills: She is scripted and thin-skinned, they say. And with a sigh, they acknowledge the persistent feeling among a lot of Americans that they just don’t like her. Polls long have shown that many voters do not trust Clinton and that a majority view her unfavorably.

Hart said being seen as likable is “about the lowest bar” for a candidate, and yet Clinton has lower likability numbers today than she did when the campaign began.

It is cold comfort that Trump’s are worse, several Democrats said.

Among other potential problems identified by supporters: Clinton’s unpopularity with white men, questions about whether her family philanthropic foundation helped donors and friends, and lingering clouds from her tenure at the State Department, including her private email system, the Benghazi attacks in which four Americans were killed and her support for military intervention in Libya.

Aides say Clinton will continue to speak of her State Department years as evidence of her national security credentials. They point to 11 hours of congressional testimony about Libya and Benghazi, and a willingness to acknowledge mistakes, as proof that she is dealing with those issues forthrightly.

There are also concerns particular to an election against Trump.

How, several Democrats asked, should Clinton deal with such an unpredictable antagonist? Supporters see potential problems for

Hillary Clinton meets voters at a political rally in Lexington, Ky., this month.

Advisers are working to soften her public image by highlighting her compassion and to fight her trustworthiness issues by playing up her problem-solving abilities.

her in Trump’s omnipresence in American media, while she neither likes nor excels at media interviews.

They said there are upsides and downsides to Trump’s insults and taunts, including those having to do with her husband’s past infidelities.

If Trump continues to call Clinton an “enabler” of her husband’s behavior, her supporters see an opportunity to outclass her opponent.

“I couldn’t believe it!” Clinton supporter Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said recently of Trump’s attacks. “You blame the woman for male infidelity? I mean, to me, it was kind of bizarre. You would visit the sins of one on the other? I don’t think there’s any woman in America who doesn’t understand that is wrong.”

Bill Clinton himself is a double-edged sword, longtime supporters said. Hillary Clinton has no better advocate, and one who is now working at a furious pace to rally Democrats in the last primary contests. But with his own prodigious political talents, the former president also shows up his wife’s shortcomings on the stump, even if inadvertently, and is perhaps even more prone than she to going off script when someone gets under his skin.

Another challenge, two people who know her well said, will be to show how Hillary Clinton can tackle issues people care about without letting her wallow in weedy policy details. Clinton is a self-identified wonk, a believer in the power of government and what she sometimes calls evidence-based approaches to solve problems. This does not often make for good political theater.

“She’s horrible at running, but she’s fantastic at governing,” a longtime friend and supporter said.

“She will roll up her sleeves. That’s not just a campaign talking point.”

A vice-presidential pick who is a rousing speaker and possesses strong populist Democratic credentials is one potential antidote to Clinton’s to-do-list style on the stump, Democrats said. Some of the names mentioned, including

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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POLITICS from previous page

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia and Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez, fit those bills. A campaign aide said Clinton is open to an unconventional candidate and does not rule out an all-woman ticket.

President Obama is another potential solution to Clinton’s message problem and lack of mass appeal. He is expected to begin campaigning for her in earnest as early as June, when she is expected to lock up the nomination.

Others said there is only so much Clinton can do to address her skills on the stump or to alter perceptions that have formed over nearly three decades in the public eye. Sexism and unfair expectations play a role, several of her partisans said, as the country adjusts to having a woman at the top of a national ticket — and so does the fact that nearly every American already has an opinion about the woman in question.

“They’re dealing with 20 years, almost 30 years now, of public narratives about her,” said Dan Pfeiffer, former White House senior adviser in the Obama administration. “I don’t think that’s fixable in the next six months. You have to turn it from a referendum on her trustworthiness to a contrast.”

Clinton has said that it pains her to hear that people don’t like her but that all she can do is make her case that she would be a good president. Some of her allies said she should focus on things she can control rather than on the subjective measure of likability.

“What I want to happen are things that will never happen,” said one longtime Clinton family supporter and donor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I mean, we can’t give her an injection to make her an energetic candidate.”

Several other veterans of past campaigns said that, although Clinton will suffer from an authenticity gap against Trump, in the end voters will choose a more guarded personality to occupy the Oval Office.

“When the true Hillary Clinton and the real Donald Trump are revealed to Americans, there is no way the American people are going to pick the petulant 12-yearold,” said Bill Burton, a former senior Obama strategist. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Where Trump voters part ways with the ‘working class’ BY

J ANELL R OSS

D

onald Trump has tapped into the economic anxiety and curdling rage that white working-class men harbor about their declining social and economic status. Trump is speaking to these people, no filter; other candidates did not. And these voters love it.

This is about as conventional as political wisdom gets in 2016.

But to believe that Trump’s fortunes are all about his ability to connect with the working class, you must first ignore that many of Trump’s voters appear motivated — at least to some degree — by Trump’s positions on issues beyond the economy. And to stick with the white working-class economic anxiety theme, one must absolutely block out the truth about who constitutes the modern American working class.

Most Americans hear “working class” and think Archie Bunker, when Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr) or Julia Baker (Diahann Carroll) is more accurate.

The share of white workers among the working class is rapidly declining, especially white men. In her book, “Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America,” Tamera Draut explores how the changing demographics and job duties of America’s new core workforce have contributed to a decline in political attention and cultural respect afforded the working class. American culture does not foster the same regard for home health-care workers and workers at Walmart as it did for men who once assembled boat-sized cars and erected record-setting skyscrapers.

A firm reminder of this emerged Wednesday when the Obama administration unveiled an overtime pay rule slated to go into effect Dec.1. The rule sets a far-higher wage threshold for overtime pay. It also requires a reset of that figure every three years.

In simple terms, the administration thinks too many employ-

Who will benefit from the overtime rule change?

An estimated 12.5 million workers will benefit from the rule change. This is based on the number of employees who earn more than the previous $415 per week threshold but less than the new $913 guideline. Before the rule change, employers could classify these workers as management, making them ineligible for overtime pay.

All Men Women Parents Black Latino Age 25-34 Age 16-34 H.S. education only

12.5 million 6.1 6.4 4.2 1.5 2 3.6 4.5 3.2

Source: Economic Policy Institute THE WASHINGTON POST

ers have taken advantage of a 12year-old standard which allowed workers to be classified as exempt from overtime pay based on their duties or a paycheck of as little as $415 per week. These workers were then often scheduled or given workloads that required 50 hours a week on the job. Now, the administration has created a simplified pay-based standard of $913 per week. Those earning less generally will be eligible for overtime pay. These people, in effect, are the American working class.

And when you look at who will benefit, it's not exactly a snapshot of a Trump voter.

A May Economic Policy Institute analysis (see above chart) shows that as many as 12.5 million workers stand to gain some income or added free time from the change.

There are more women than men who will benefit. And black and Latino workers together constitute about 28 percent of those who stand to gain. Similarly, about 33 percent of these workers are parents, and 36 percent are millennial workers between ages 16 and 34. There are men in this group — and plenty of white men — but they just don’t make up the lion’s share of the working class dealing with stagnant wages that it appears many people believe.

And it’s these figures that make some people believe that the rule change will do a lot to boost household-level financial fitness and slash the gender and race wage gaps. No one should take that to mean that these problems will evaporate Dec. 1. They will recede, a bit. How much will depend on precisely how employers decide to respond to the new rule.

Proponents of the measure — which include liberal economists such as those working for the Economic Policy Institute, labor unions and employee rights organizations — say forcing employers to pay these workers overtime will encourage some to take the cheaper option. These employers will raise some of their workers wages to the new $913 a week, no-overtime standard. Some will give additional hours to existing lower-paid workers already eligible for overtime pay or hire new workers to fill the gap.

Either way, workers will get more money or free time.

Opponents, which include House Speaker Paul Ryan (RWis.), argue it will force employers to hire fewer workers and shed some existing ones to cover the rising employee costs. Ryan called the rule change “an absolute disaster for our economy.”

This brings us back to the working class and the Trump political machine. The chart really does not depict the heart of the Trump voter coalition. It does, however, look a lot like modern-day America’s broader population, its total workforce and its electorate. n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

‘The start of a healing process’ BY

E MMA B ROWN

I

n the decade since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and swept away its public school system, the city has become a closely watched experiment in whether untethering schools from local politics could fix the problems that have long ailed urban education.

Louisiana seized control of most New Orleans schools and turned them into charter schools after the devastating storm in 2005. More than 90 percent of the city’s children now attend charters, which are publicly funded but privately run by unelected officials who have complete freedom to decide how to organize their programs, schedules, teachers and curriculum.

The schools, on the whole, are still far from excellent, and there are lingering questions about whether and how a bunch of independent schools — which are under pressure to meet academic targets to continue operating — can ensure access to education for all students, especially those with the greatest needs.

But test scores and graduation rates have risen. And now the state is poised to relinquish its oversight: The Louisiana legislature has passed a bill that would return the 52 schools it oversees to a measure of local control, testing whether charter schools and democracy can coexist.

Many charter advocates describe it as an inevitable next step in the city’s bold education experiment, and one that could serve as a road map for other cities grappling with how to manage and coordinate a large number of charter schools.

“If they can get that right, it will be really important for New Orleans and for the country,” said Neerav Kingsland, who worked for New Schools for New Orleans from 2006 to 2014, when it started dozens of new charter schools. “You can’t avoid democracy forever, nor should you.”

Proponents of the bill, including many charter-school advocates, are calling it a “reunifica-

EDMUND D. FOUNTAIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As scores improve, Louisiana looks to shift control of New Orleans’s schools back to elected officials tion” of New Orleans schools, putting the locally elected Orleans Parish School Board back in charge of the city’s schools but leaving actual control of individual operations in the hands of school leaders. They say it is an important step in closing the wounds left by the state takeover without sacrificing the autonomies that they say have been essential for driving academic progress.

“I do think this is the start of a healing process for a lot of individuals, to realize that the city is coming back together,” said Jamar McKneely, the chief executive of InspireNOLA Charter Schools, who helped negotiate the bill.

But some critics say it is a whitewash, written to appear as if local control over public education will be restored when the bill really leaves most of the power in the hands of the unelected boards of directors who run each of the city’s charter schools.

Karran Harper Royal, an advo-

cate for special-education students and their families, called it a “Trojan horse.”

“This is the kind of bill you get when the charter schools want to give the impression that schools are returning to local governance,” she said. “It feels like a very patriarchal view of communities of color, and white people deciding that black people, or people of color, don’t deserve democracy.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) is widely expected to sign the bill, which was introduced by Sen. Karen Carter Peterson (D) of New Orleans and was supported by the majority of the New Orleans state delegation. It outlines the transfer of schools from the staterun Recovery School District to the locally elected school board by 2019 at the latest.

But the parish school board — which already runs a half-dozen schools and oversees more than a dozen charter schools — would be prohibited from interfering

Hannah Bunis teachers students at Akili Academy in New Orleans in 2014.

Louisiana seized control of most of the city’s schools and turned them into charter schools after the devastating storm in 2005.

with school-level decisions about a litany of issues, including instruction, schedules, staffing, contracting and collective bargaining.

Instead, the district superintendent and board members would be responsible for reviewing schools’ performance and deciding whether they have met their targets and should be allowed to continue operating.

The district also would take on other functions that state officials now perform, such as running the city’s annual school enrollment lottery, which determines where children will go to school, and managing its centralized expulsion system.

Henderson Lewis, a former New Orleans charter school principal who now serves as the superintendent of the Orleans Parish School Board, said that the charter movement has served the city well, providing students with a stronger education and a better shot at graduating from high school than they had before Katrina.

Lewis, who helped write the language in the bill, said that the district is on firm financial footing and has shown during the past decade that it can hold charter schools accountable for meeting performance targets.

“It’s time that schools return under local control,” he said. He acknowledged the desire among parents to be able to send their children nearer their homes, and he said he’s working on proposals to that end. But he said that does not require returning to a traditional system of schools controlled by an elected board: “As far as going back to where we were pre-Katrina, we’re in a different place now in New Orleans, and that’s not the system of schools that we have.”

Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard — who played a key role in writing the plan — said the state never envisioned itself as the long-term steward of New Orleans schools.

“The spirit of the original law was for the schools to be returned in some way to local control.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Justice Department’s global outreach BY

M ATT Z APOTOSKY

T

he revelation that the Justice Department is looking into allegations of doping by Russian athletes seems to be the latest example of American law enforcement reaching beyond U.S. borders to target corruption — a noble effort, experts say, that nonetheless opens the country up to criticism about trying to serve as the world’s prosecutor.

In recent months, the Justice Department has assigned 10 new prosecutors to work exclusively on foreign bribery cases, while the FBI has created three squads dedicated to international corruption.

The department also has proposed legislation to give prosecutors more tools to ferret out such wrongdoing.

While federal prosecutors’ efforts have long been focused on corrupt foreign businesses and elected officials — they recently announced that the Amsterdambased telecommunications company VimpelCom had reached a deferred-prosecution agreement that required it to pay a criminal penalty of more than $230 million to the United States — they have also shown a willingness to examine wrongdoing in sports.

Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York — where one person said the investigation of Russian doping is based — are in the midst of a massive case against high-ranking officials at FIFA, the organization responsible for the regulation of soccer worldwide.

“It’s part of our culture of wanting to bring democracy and transparency to the world,” said Andrew B. Spalding, a law professor at the University of Richmond who teaches and writes about international anti-corruption law.

“We really stretch jurisdictional principles. Whether we should be doing that is an open question.”

The probe involving Russian doping, first reported by CBS News and the New York Times, appears to be in its infancy, and it is possible — perhaps even likely — that it will lead nowhere. One person familiar with the matter,

VASILY MAXIMOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

In latest case, U.S. prosecutors are looking into allegations of doping by Russian athletes speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing review, said among the people investigators seem to be targeting is Grigory Rodchenkov, the longtime head of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory. He told the Times that he helped Russian athletes use banned substances to get ahead in global competitions, including the Sochi Olympics, and that he did so at the direction of the Russian sports ministry.

New York lawyer Bradley D. Simon confirmed that he was representing Rodchenkov but declined to discuss his client’s allegations.

Separate from the Justice Department’s action, the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday that dozens of former Olympic athletes could be barred from the upcoming Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro after tests of old samples revealed sus-

picious results for 31 athletes from 12 countries. The analysis was triggered because of the allegations about Russian athletes.

Russian leaders said they supported barring athletes who had used banned, performanceenhancing drugs in competition, but expressed bewilderment at the U.S. action.

“We are puzzled that U.S. Justice decided to probe Russia,” Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko told the Russian news agency TASS. “There are enough violations of anti-doping rules around the world and they can all be probed. We would like to see the United States probing its own national team. The atmosphere there is far from being cloudless.”

To bring charges related to Russian doping, federal prosecutors would need some kind of U.S. nexus — although experts said that could be relatively insignifi-

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko says he was “puzzled” by the U.S.’s decision to investigate Russia.

“It’s part of our culture of wanting to bring democracy and transparency to the world.”

— Andrew B. Spalding, law professor

cant. Investigators are probably asking themselves whether U.S. citizens or businesses were defrauded, and whether any money passed through the U.S. financial system as a part of that, said white-collar criminal defense lawyer M. Scott Peeler of the Arent Fox law firm. Foreign companies, for example, can be investigated if their business is merely listed on a U.S. stock exchange, he said.

“They’re willing to stretch the concepts in order to go after what they truly believe to be illegal conduct that needs to be ferreted out and ended,” Peeler said.

The Russian constitution bars extradition of the country’s citizens. David B. Smith, a whitecollar criminal defense lawyer at the Smith & Zimmerman firm in Alexandria, Va., said U.S. prosecutors probably would face strong legal challenges even if someone charged were to end up here.

In a forfeiture case involving a former Ukrainian official, he said he has argued against the idea that money momentarily passing through the U.S. financial system gives prosecutors jurisdiction.

“The Justice Department has become very interested in foreign matters, much more so than I think is warranted, because there’s plenty of crime here for them to bust,” he said.

But that is not to say charges would be meaningless. An indictment could make life uncomfortable for those accused of wrongdoing — allowing prosecutors to freeze their U.S. assets or issue arrest warrants that would prevent them from traveling to certain countries for fear of being taken into custody. And U.S. officials may simply wish to embarrass Russia and send a message to the world that the United States will not tolerate corruption in any form.

“The U.S. is not just trying to prosecute criminals, but it’s also trying to change worldwide cultural norms around bribery and fraud and just governance generally,” Spalding said. “These sports cases, they’re a bullhorn for the anti-corruption message, because people listen.” n

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Gentrification goes global A NNA F IFIELD Pyongyang, North Korea BY

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hey like fast fashion from Zara and H&M. They work out to be seen as much as to exercise. They drink cappuccinos to show how cosmopolitan they are. Some have had their eyelids done to make them look more Western.

North Korea now has a 1 percent.

And you’ll find them in “Pyonghattan,” the parallel universe inhabited by the rich kids of the Democratic People’s Republic.

“We’re supposed to dress conservatively in North Korea, so people like going to the gym so they can show off their bodies, show some skin,” said Lee Seo-hyeon, a 24-year-old who was, until 18 months ago, part of Pyongyang’s brat pack.

Women like to wear leggings and tight tops — Elle is the most popular brand among women, while men prefer Adidas and Nike — she said. When young people go to China, they travel armed with shopping lists from their friends for workout gear.

At a leisure complex next to the bowling alley in the middle of Pyongyang, they run on the treadmills, which show Disney cartoons on the monitors, or do yoga.

The complex also has a fancy restaurant that advertises for wedding functions — glitzy venues cost as much as $500 an hour — and a coffee shop, where most drinks are priced between $4 and $8, although an iced mocha costs $9.

“It’s a cool spot. When you’re in there it feels like you could be anywhere in the world,” said Andray Abrahamian, who is British and helps run an exchange program that provides financial training to North Koreans. He recently played squash on one of the three courts at the center. “It’s not cheap. It’s a few dollars for a class.

It’s definitely for people who have disposable income.”

North Korea as a whole remains economically backward — industry has all but collapsed, and even in Pyongyang, the official salary remains less than $10 a month —

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

In North Korea’s ‘Pyonghattan,’ the wealthy share a love of pricey coffee and high fashion but the rise in recent years of a merchant class has created a whole layer of nouveaux riches in the capital city.

“Donju,” or “masters of money,” have emerged with the nation’s tentative move toward becoming a market economy that began about 15 years ago but picked up momentum under Kim Jong Un, the third-generation leader who took over the reins of North Korea at the end of 2011.

The donju usually hold official government positions — in ministries or the military, running state businesses abroad or trying to attract investment into North Korea. On the side, they trade in everything they can get their hands on, including flat-screen TVs and apartments.

The money that they are making now flows through society, through the markets that are present in every population center to the high-end restaurants of

Pyongyang.

“Kim Jong Un is very pro-market. His policy has essentially been benign neglect,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian historian specializing in Korea who once studied in Pyongyang. “A number of North Korean capitalists I’ve talked to say that they’ve never had it so good.”

Kim, 33, has made it a high priority to improve the lives of his fellow millennials in particular. He has ordered the construction of amusement parks and water parks and skate parks, even a dolphinarium and a ski resort. Around the capital, volleyball and tennis courts are full of young people.

On a trip to Pyongyang this month, three Washington Post reporters went to a German-themed restaurant near the Juche Tower that had exposed brick walls and seven kinds of North Korean beer on tap. A huge screen showed ice skating.

A young woman wearing a modern, brightly colored outfit and red clutch purse waits next to others in traditional Korean dresses.

Designer styles, in colors, and expensive jewelry are on the rise in the city.

On the menu, there was a prime steak with a baked potato for $48, although the Wiener schnitzel was more reasonable, at $7. Most of the North Koreans in the restaurant seemed to be opting for the local food, although at $7 for a bowl of bibimbap — the price you’d pay in Seoul — it was hardly cheap.

There are other signs that more people have more disposable income. Women, perhaps seeing a green light from Ri Sol Ju, Kim’s fashionable wife, have started wearing brighter and trendier clothes.

So much of this development is about image, Abrahamian said.

One woman who took part in his training program started a coffee shop.

“The coffee shops don’t make much money. It’s just a signifier that you’re fancy and cosmopolitan,” he said.

One of the most obvious changes has been the construction boom in the capital.

The high-rise apartment buildings that have popped up in the center of Pyongyang, from the Changjon complex near Kim Il Sung Square to the Mirae Scientists Street, look impressive from a distance.

But up close, tiles are falling off buildings that are only a year old and electricity supply remains so patchy that the most-sought-after apartments are the ones on the lower stories. Who wants a 20thfloor walk-up?

With the Mirae Scientists Street complete, Kim has ordered the development of Ryomyong Street, named for the place where “the dawn breaks in the Korean revolution.”

Kim said the area would contain “magnificent skyscrapers” — one is planned to rise 70 stories — with eco-friendly design incorporating solar panels and greenhouses.

These may all be part of a Potemkin village, but they nonetheless underscore the fact that in North Korea, poverty is no longer equally shared.

“There is only one game in town,” said Lankov, the historian.

“Capitalism.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

A small, ambitious step toward peace

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Eilat, Israel

T

his is what a little peace looks like in the Middle East. A room cleaner named Ahmad. A dishwasher named Mohammad. And a man with a vacuum in the lobby of an Israeli beach hotel.

Israel and Jordan signed their peace treaty in 1994 — that is a generation ago — but it has often been a cold peace, without real people moving back and forth, without workers, wages or bosses.

Now Jordan and Israel have launched a pilot project that is so small and simultaneously so ambitious that it tells the story.

For the past six months, very quietly, Israel has been allowing Jordanians to cross the border to its Red Sea resort to work minimum-wage jobs at hotels.

The first 700 of 1,500 have started.

So far, nothing bad has happened.

“The Jordanians need work, and we need workers,” said the head of the Eilat Hotel Association, Shabtai Shay.

Getting the Jordanians work permits to cross the border from Aqaba to Eilat took three years of negotiations with 10 Israeli ministries, he said.

On the Israeli side, there were concerns about security, vetting, the checkpoint, unions, the hours and how Israeli tourists would feel about being attended — even behind the scenes — by service workers who were Muslims from the Hashemite Kingdom.

Jordan and Israel fought two wars, in 1948 and 1967. Their relations have been further strained by the fact that Jordan is filled with Palestinian refugees.

“I never thought I’d live to see the first Jordanian worker in our hotels,” Shay said.

The Israeli resort of Eilat is not exactly the French Riviera. There is a short strip of beach with a touristy promenade of duty-free outlets, chain restaurants and swimming in the Red Sea. During the intense heat and

WILLIAM BOOTH/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pilot project at Red Sea resort fills jobs Israelis won’t do with people from Jordan who need work humidity of July and August, it is packed with vacationing Israeli families. To the East is Jordan and to the West is Egypt. In the distant haze is Saudi Arabia. Few Israelis venture to those destinations.

There are 55,000 Israelis living in Eilat and 40 hotels with 12,000 rooms that employ 9,000 workers, about a third of them in housekeeping — jobs Israelis won’t do anymore, or won’t do for the money offered.

A dozen Jordanian hotel workers interviewed by The Washington Post said they were either happy with their new jobs in Eilat — or as happy as someone who changes dirty sheets in a foreign country can be.

“It has made my life,” said Ahmed Riashi, 25, who washes dishes at Isrotel’s Royal Garden Hotel.

He previously worked as a waiter at a five-star hotel in Amman, the capital of Jordan.

He estimates his wages have doubled in Israel. He is saving; he feels he is going somewhere.

“I was surprised, in a good way, when I arrived here,” Riashi said.

He said Jewish Israelis are surprised, too, to see a Jordanian — then want to take a selfie together.

“We haven’t had a single complaint from customers,” said Etty Krichly, recruitment manager for Isrotel, which employs about 170 Jordanians.

If this is what peace looks like, it is still a wary and tenuous thing.

The Jordanian hotel workers cross the border into Israel at six in the morning but must return to Jordan by eight every evening.

They sleep in Jordan in a company dormitory. They are not allowed to travel outside the Eilat city limits, nor can they change employers without getting new permits. The Jordanians are only allowed to work as cleaners, not cooks, waiters or bartenders.

The Jordanian hotel employees are allowed to enter Israel with only the clothes on their backs — and one opened pack of cigarettes, because the Israelis do not want them to smuggle cigarettes, which

Jordanian Ahmad Salahat makes up a room at the Dan Eilat Hotel. He said that the hours and wages aren’t as high as he had hoped but that he’s not being cheated. “They have treated us very well,” he said.

are cheaper in Jordan than Israel.

Ahmad Salahat, 25, who cleans rooms at the Dan Eilat Hotel, a posh place on the beachfront, said the hours and the wages were not as high as he had hoped — but nobody was cheating him.

“They have treated us very well,” he said of his Israeli employees.

On social media, some Jordanians have criticized their fellow citizens for working for the Jews, while some Israelis have worried about opening the turnstiles to terrorists.

The employees said they cared less about politics and more about wages.

“In Jordan there’s work, but the pay isn’t so hot, so here I am,” said Eman Saleem, 33, who worked in Jordan as a nurse’s aide and a flight attendant.

“I do this for me,” she said. “For my life.”

Saleem washes dishes and on her day off came to pick up her paycheck in ripped jeans and designer sunglasses.

Asked if she was harassed in Jordan for working for Zionists in Israel, she said no. “My friends are open-minded,” Saleem said.

These room cleaners, pool scrubbers and floor sweepers — they are 99 percent men — are first vetted by a Jordanian employment agency, then Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, then interviewed by the Israeli hotels and scrutinized all over again by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.

The hotel workers make minimum wage — but it is the same minimum wage as Israelis — about $1,200 a month. After they pay commissions to their recruitment agency, room and board in Jordan, transportation, plus taxes, they take home about $700 to $800 a month.

The hotel managers, and the Jordan workers themselves, know that one violent incident, a stabbing, an assault, could shut down the program.

Magi Malul, a human resources manager for Isrotel, works closely with the Jordanian workers. “I love them, I really do,” she said.

“We have to try to make peace,” she said. “This is my little part.” n

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

COVER STORY

Tiny U.S. town stakes its future on China’s foodies

BY YLAN Q . MUI on Little Cranberry Island, Maine

T

he long journey from this remote island of free-spirited fishermen to the most populous country in the world began, as it does most mornings, at just about sunrise.

Bruce Fernald, a sixth-generation fisherman, loaded his 38-foot fiberglass boat with half a ton of bait and set out in search of Maine’s famed crustacean: the lobster.

One by one, Fernald checked the 800 traps he had placed along 30 square miles at the bottom of the Gulf of Maine. He quickly hauled each wire cage onto his boat, reached a gloved hand inside and plucked out the lobster lurking within. The young ones, the breeders and the crusty old ones were thrown back into the water. The rest were dropped into a saltwater tank to keep them alive and energetic on their 7,000-mile trip to China.

“Just do everything you can to not stress them out,” Fernald, 64, said of his cargo. “The less stressed they are, the more healthy they’ll be, just like people.”

Little Cranberry, an island of 70 inhabitants, and China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, increasingly find themselves connected by the shifting currents of the world economy. The rise of China’s middle class has coincided with a boom in Maine’s lobster population, resulting in a voracious new market for the crustaceans’ succulent, sweet meat. Exports of lobsters to China, nonexistent a decade ago, totaled $20 million last year. The bright red color of a lobster’s cooked shell is considered auspicious, making it a staple during Chinese festivals and at weddings.

The lobster’s tale is a testament to the complexities of the global marketplace — and a reminder that the line between economic winners and losers is not always clear. China has played the villain from Wall Street to the presidential campaign trail, blamed for plunging stock markets, the downfall of developing nations and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs — including in Maine, where the closings of lumber and pulp factories have left thousands of workers unemployed.

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SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Yet the reality is more nuanced. Even as foreign competition has devastated parts of the U.S. economy, China ranks among the biggest international customers for a vast array of other industries, from ginseng to airplanes to pork. Maine lobsters are just a tiny sliver of the $116 billion in annual exports to China, a figure that has nearly tripled in the past decade.

“China is undergoing an economic transition,” said Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group. “It’s this new buying class that’s changing trade patterns throughout the world.”

Maine is still testing the potential — and the limits — of that relationship. The state is hoping that deeper ties to the Chinese can help boost ailing industries, but they could also make the state vulnerable to a far-off, and unpredictable, source of customers.

Out here on the water, the forecast is sunny.

Amid the roar of the boat’s engine and the blustery wind, Fernald said his philosophy is simple.

“My father always said, ‘Keep hauling, and you’ll get a day’s pay,’ ” he recalled. “Most of the time, that’s true.”

China has also hurt An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that cheap exports of Chinese goods cost Maine 11,400 jobs, or nearly 2 percent of total state employment, between 2001 and 2013.

Finding a market There’s no escaping the lobsters at Fernald’s home on this island, where his family has lived since 1850. A brass lobster decorates the front door. A metal lobster graces the front yard. His collection of baseball caps hangs on lobster hooks. Even his butter dish is shaped like a lobster.

Fernald has been fishing since he got out of the Navy more than four decades ago, one of three siblings to follow in his father’s rubberbooted footsteps. In his workshop, Fernald keeps wooden buoys painted by generations of lobstermen before him.

Although the techniques for trapping lobsters haven’t changed much since, the industry itself is in the midst of transformation.

For the first time in decades, Maine is facing a glut of lobsters. When Fernald’s father was working these waters, Maine’s lobstermen pulled in roughly 20 million pounds a year.

But since 2012, landings have topped 120 million pounds. Explanations for the population boom range from climate change to the overfishing of cod, the crustacean’s natural predator, but the statistics are irrefutable: The state has more lobsters than it can handle.

The record catch in 2012 caught the industry by surprise, sending prices falling to the lowest level in almost 20 years. Lobstermen averaged just $2.69 per pound of lobster, barely covering the cost of going out on the water for many fishermen. The businesses that buy and sell the crustaceans say they did not fare much better. The sheer volume helped make up for the decline in price, but the margins grew scarily thin.

“We bought a ton of lobsters and made absolutely nothing off it,” said Aaron Bernstein, who manages the dock from which Fernald and the other fishermen on Little Cranberry ship their catch. “It was a very difficult season.”

Maine faced a potential crisis. The Pine Tree State already had suffered the decline of its traditional manufacturing industries, lumber continues on next page

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

from previous page

and paper, victims of advances in technology and foreign competition. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that cheap exports of Chinese goods cost Maine 11,400 jobs, or nearly 2 percent of total state employment, between 2001 and 2013.

The lobster industry could not be allowed to implode as well.

The solution state officials came up with seemed to come straight from an economics textbook: When supply is too high, increase demand — in other words, get more people to eat lobster. And nowhere are there more people than in China.

The first Maine trade delegation arrived in Hong Kong at the end of that year. Since then, the state has established a full-time development office in Shanghai and led a second trade mission to the city last year. Last fall, officials finagled lobsters onto the menu during the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. The lucky red crustaceans were featured as the second course, poached in butter and served alongside traditional

Aaron Bernstein is reflected in a mirror as he and Brian Bunker unload a boat with lobsters at Beal’s Lobster Pier in Maine last month. Demand in China has helped the state deal with a glut of the crustacean.

rice-noodle rolls.

It was a coup for a state that lacks name recognition in China. In fact, Maine lobsters are often called Boston lobsters overseas, because they are shipped from Logan International Airport.

“Most of the time when we go to Asia, we find that people don’t even know where Maine is,” said Janine Bisaillon-Cary, who heads the Maine International Trade Center.

Her pitch typically begins with geography but quickly moves on to the state’s pristine waters and crisp air, its strict seafood conservation efforts and outdoorsy culture — selling points intended to appeal to a country plagued by pollution. Experts say well-off Chinese consumers have moved beyond collecting luxury goods such as designer handbags to coveting luxurious experiences. Their palates now demand beef from Australia, honey from New Zealand, wines from Chile — and lobsters from Maine, preferably alive, so that chefs and diners can select the feistiest ones to feast on.

At the five-star Conrad Hotel in Beijing, chef Mirko Sun dishes up lobster porridge,

lobster bisque with garlic croutons and a lobster salad with fresh herbs. The crustacean sells for roughly $42 a pound, about a quarter of the average urban worker’s weekly income.

“For most Chinese people, eating lobster is about face,” Sun said. “Mostly people only order it to treat important guests.”

But Maine is not the only source of the crustacean. China gets much of its lobster from Australia, although it is the spiny-tailed variety that residents here deride as tougher and less flavorful. Still, China is spending millions of dollars to erect a shipping facility in Australia, and a fishermen’s co-op there is building holding tanks for live lobsters in Guangzhou, according to local news reports.

The projects exemplify China’s typical investment strategy: Go big. Instead of just shipping copper from Africa, it bought the mines. To feed its growing taste for American pork, it bought the largest producer in the world, Smithfield Foods. Bisaillon-Cary said she has had to explain to interested investors that Maine’s fiercely independent lobster industry is not for sale.

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

More Maine lobster sent More Maine lobsters being sentto to China China The value state’s livelive andand frozen lobster exports to China rapidly The valueofofthe the state’s frozen lobster exports torose China rose beginning in 2010 and was nearly $20 million in 2015. rapidly beginning in 2010 and was nearly $20 million in 2015. $19,882,877

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Each of Maine’s 5,785 lobstermen is an independent business: A license allows its holder to own one boat, and he must do the fishing himself. Each day, the lobstermen sell their catch to dealers for shipment across the country and around the world. State law prohibits dealers from owning boats and lobstermen from becoming dealers, ensuring that this $500 million industry remains decentralized.

“That’s a really tough concept for the Chinese. They’re like, ‘We want to own everything,’ ” Bisaillon-Cary said. “We’re like, ‘You can’t do that.’ ” Instead, the state has tried to steer Chinese investors toward plants that process lobsters — or other industries altogether. A Chinese firm purchased a struggling paper mill in 2010 and recently announced investments expected to add hundreds of jobs. Another Chinese company is building a health-care center in an abandoned shoe factory that caters to foreigners seeking medical care. State schools and colleges are wooing international students.

It may not be enough to replace all the manufacturing jobs that have disappeared, but it’s a start.

“To me, this is our last stand,” said Matt Jacobson, head of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative. “We better do this right.”

The long haul Forty years ago, Fernald persuaded the two dozen other lobstermen on the island to pool their catch so they would all receive the same price per pound and share in the bounty of a

good year and the belt-tightening of a bad one.

That cooperative is still operating, with the island’s haul ferried roughly once a day to a dock on Mount Desert Island, three miles away.

While Fernald worked his traps on a recent morning, another boat carried the previous day’s landings to the dock. Workers hoisted the crates of live lobsters from the boat and onto the pier, then loaded them onto a truck for the three-hour drive down to Portland.

“That’s a nice catch for Little Cranberry this morning,” said Bernstein, the manager at the dock, which is run by Beal’s Lobster Pier.

The truck was headed to Ready Seafood, a large supplier of Maine lobsters to China. At the company’s headquarters in downtown Portland, the lobsters would be immersed in cold water to purge their intestines and keep them docile. Then they would be transferred to a second, cleaner tank until they could be packed into boxes with frozen gel packs and wet newspaper to keep them alive during the drive down to Boston and the long flight to China, which takes at least 14 hours.

Lobster prices have rebounded since their 2012 plunge, but this year could test Maine’s strategy. Forecasters are predicting an early start to the fishing season, which could push prices down again. On this day alone, the value of a pound of lobster dropped 75 cents — on top of a $2 decline over the past few weeks.

“They say it’s not going to be like 2012. But no one can really predict that with any certainty,” said Justin Snyder, part of the

Bruce Fernald, also seen above right, walks from his home on Little Cranberry Island, where his family has lived since 1850. The lobsters haven’t changed much, but where they often finally end up has.

2015

THE WASHINGTON THE WASHINGTONPOST POST

family that owns Beal’s Lobster Pier. “It’s classic supply-and-demand economics.”

Maine’s iconic industry is more than just a revenue stream. The mix of fishermen, artists and wealthy New Englanders on this tiny, picturesque island is at the heart of the state’s nonconformist culture. Fernald has entertained blues singer Bonnie Raitt on his boat and once appeared in an Old Milwaukee commercial, sitting by a campfire and enjoying a cold one. His wife, Barbara, used to work on his boat, earning his respect when she baited his traps with maggot-infested fish without complaint. Now she designs jewelry, and his crew member is a 24-year-old college grad who walked away from a high-paying job offer at a hedge fund in California to spend his days on the water and also raise hogs.

In Fernald’s father’s day, trapping lobsters was the path to a modest but comfortable lifestyle. Since the population boom, it has become big business: Many fishermen pull in sales totaling six figures. Some lobstermen have indulged in new traps, new cars and new boats with monthly payments that can rival a mortgage.

For Fernald, the increase has helped pay for his twin sons to go to college and helped shore up his retirement account — even though he says he has no intention of turning in his boots anytime soon.

“When I first started, we made a living, and that was good,” Fernald said. “I know it won’t stay this way forever. Anybody that’s not taking advantage of it might be in trouble.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TRENDS

‘Forest bathing’ is latest fitness trend

ISTOCKPHOTO

BY

M EERI K IM

O

ver thousands of years of human history, we have effectively become an indoor species. Particularly for those of us trapped in the cubicle life, often the only times we regularly step foot outside is for our daily work commute or to run errands. In 2001, a survey sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that, on average, Americans spend 87 percent of their time indoors and 6 percent in an enclosed vehicle.

However, a number of scientific studies emphasize that reveling in the great outdoors promotes human health. Spending time in natural environments has been linked to lower stress levels, improved working memory and feeling more alive, among other positive attributes.

In an effort to combat our indoor epidemic and reap these health benefits, a growing number of Americans have become followers of a Japanese practice called Shinrin-yoku. Coined by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in 1982, the word literally translates to “taking in the forest atmosphere” or “forest bathing” and refers to the process of soaking up the sights, smells

and sounds of a natural setting to promote physiological and psychological health.

The increasing popularity of Shinrin-yoku, particularly in California, echoes the adoption of other East-to-West health trends, such as yoga and meditation. And like these activities, forest therapy can be a guided, paid-for experience or freely performed solo.

“I think about where yoga was 30 years ago and where it is today, and I realize that forest therapy is making the same journey toward cultural definition in a way that will mainstream the practice,” said Ben Page, a certified forest therapy guide who founded Shinrin Yoku Los Angeles. He recently returned to his home in Southern California after training a cohort of forest therapy guides toward certification in Sonoma County — a weeklong program popular enough to have a waiting list.

Those that practice Shinrinyoku explain that it differs from hiking or informative nature excursions because it centers on the therapeutic aspects of forest bathing.

“So whereas a nature walk’s objective is to provide informational content and a hike’s is to reach a destination, a Shinrin-yoku walk’s objective is to give participants an opportunity to slow down, appre-

ciate things that can only be seen or heard when one is moving slowly, and take a break from the stress of their daily lives,” Page said.

For instance, a 2010 study using data from field experiments conducted in 24 forests across Japan found that subjects who participated in forest bathing had lower blood pressure, heart rate and concentrations of salivary cortisol — a stress hormone — when compared with those who walked through a city setting. Studies performed in other countries, such as Finland and the United States showed similar reductions in tension and anxiety.

“There have been studies comparing walking in nature with walking in an urban environment and testing people on their mood, different aspects of depression, and in some cases, brain scans,” said David Yaden, a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center.

“In the natural setting, people are more relaxed and less stressed.”

People on nature walks also tend to engage in less rumination, or negative self-referential overthinking, which has been correlated with depression.

Other studies have found an association between Shinrin-yoku and a boost in immune function.

Subjects took a three-day/two-

Certified guides are helping people slow down and appreciate the benefits of nature

night trip to forest areas in Japan with researchers taking blood and urine samples before and after the excursion. The number of natural killer cells — a type of white blood cell that fights infected or tumor cells — and other immune system markers were significantly higher after forest bathing than before.

Participants’ natural killer cell activity rose about 50 percent throughout the trip, while their urinary adrenaline concentration showed a decrease.

“In Japan, Shinrin-yoku trails are certified by a blood-sampling study to determine whether the natural killer cell count is raised enough for the trail to qualify,” Page said. “I should also note that in Japan and Korea, forest therapy modalities are integrated into their medical system and are covered by insurance.”

Some researchers attribute Shinrin-yoku’s health benefits to substances called phytoncides, which are antimicrobial organic compounds given off by plants.

They argue that by breathing in the volatile substances released by the forest, people achieve relaxation. However, phytoncides — colloquially known in forest bathing circles as “the aroma of the forest” — only exist in small concentrations out in the field as compared with the amounts given to subjects in laboratory-based olfactory studies.

While the exact mechanisms of Shinrin-yoku remain largely unknown, the practice itself continues to spread — perhaps as a backlash against modern society’s obsession with indoor-use technology and office culture. Amos Clifford, a wilderness guide based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy in 2012. For a tuition fee, the organization offers forest therapy guide certification programs.

Besides U.S.-based training in Northern California and Massachusetts, others are scheduled for next year in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa.

“I think of it like a tree growing,” Page said. “It is still a young practice, but there are new branches forming all the time.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

17

DATA

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Unforgettable cities Fivethirtyeight.com, the ESPN-owned data-driven news site, compared Google searches and U.S. census figures with responses to a city-naming memory exercise on the brainteaser site Sporcle and declared San Jose the “most forgettable major American city.” n — Annys Shin

SAN JOSE Sporcle: 40 Google: 42 U.S. Census: 10

Sporcle asked people to name the 100 most populous cities:

WASHINGTON Sporcle: 15 Google: 8 U.S. Census: 22

NEW YORK Rank in % of Sporcle users who named city: 1 Google search rank: 1 U.S. Census rank (2010): 1 LOS ANGELES Sporcle: 2 Google: 3 U.S. Census: 2 CHICAGO Sporcle: 3 Google: 2 U.S. Census: 3

PHOENIX Sporcle: 14 Google: 20 U.S. Census: 6 DETROIT Sporcle: 13 Google: 34 U.S. Census: 18

DALLAS Sporcle: 4 Google: 11 U.S. Census: 9

ATLANTA Sporcle: 12 Google: 9 U.S. Census: 39

MIAMI Sporcle: 5 Google: 16 U.S. Census: 44

PHILADELPHIA Sporcle: 11 Google: 15 U.S. Census: 5

HOUSTON Sporcle: 6 Google: 4 U.S. Census: 4 BOSTON Sporcle: 7 Google: 7 U.S. Census: 24

SAN DIEGO Sporcle: 10 Google: 10 U.S. Census: 8

SAN FRANCISCO Sporcle: 8 Google: 6 U.S. Census: 13

SEATTLE Sporcle: 9 Google: 12 U.S. Census: 20 SOURCES: FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM; GOOGLE SEARCH DATA FROM JAN. 1, 2004, TO FEB. 18, 2016; SPORCLE DATA FROM SEPT. 26, 2009, TO FEB. 22, 2016; U.S. CENSUS; BRAIN: ISTOCKPHOTO

WEEKLY

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The greatest band to ever sell out N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

G EOFF E DGERS

T THE SUN & THE MOON & THE ROLLING STONES

By Rich Cohen Spiegel & Grau.

381 pp. $30

he Rolling Stones have been picked over more than the breakfast buffet at Shoney’s.

There are books by Keith, Ronnie, Bill, ex-roadies, managers, engineers, esteemed journalists, musicians, hacks, the sax player, even a former assistant affectionately named “Spanish Tony.” His entry is proudly named “I Was Keith Richards’ Drug Dealer.”

This sheer mass of material actually makes Rich Cohen’s “The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones” more valuable. The author isn’t shy about his reliance on previous books; he lists them all in the bibliography. But Cohen also has done his own reporting. He’s interviewed 71 people, including most of the band members.

And he understands where to make broad sweeps and where to pull back. We get the hits. What we don’t get is stuck in minutiae.

The title of the book comes from an exchange Cohen has with Keith Richards. The guitarist asks the author when he was born.

1968.

“What’s it like to live in a world where the Stones were always there?” Richards presses, almost incredulously. “For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”

This is an important, generational entry point. The Stones are not just famous. They’re the key commodity of a market built on the idea that you can virtually stop recording and still become the centerpiece for the biggest oldies festival of all time.

Cohen approaches the Stones from two directions. He is the kid discovering the group from muffled, glorious sounds emerging from his older brother’s room in the attic. Later, he gets on the inside as a young magazine writer, backstage as he works his way into the good graces of the aging rockers. Classy Charlie Watts loves him. Steve Winwood, angered by bad reviews in Rolling Stone, attacks him. Keith, Mick and Ronnie

J. MAUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

give him time. And his access doesn’t end with the story. Cohen is enlisted to work with Jagger on the show that would eventually become the HBO series “Vinyl.”

You might expect an author in that position to become a bit of an apologist, but he’s no company man. Cohen’s criticism of the band begins with the decision, 53 years ago, to boot keyboardist Ian Stewart out of the official lineup for perhaps not having the right look.

This established the almost mercenary approach to all future dealings. “They had torn open their chests and shown each other their craven hearts,” Cohen writes. “No sacrifice would be too great, no member too important.”

Elsewhere, Cohen concedes that the band hasn’t put out a great record in decades, most likely since 1978’s “Some Girls.” He’s tough on Jagger, whom he portrays as a sort of mystery man “still fronting the band because he

came up short as a solo act.”

Never mind that Cohen, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of such books as “Tough Jews,” has spent 20-plus years covering an industry that often converts artistic inspiration into soybean futures. He still charmingly finds it “heartbreaking” to see that the modern Stones have become largely a business arrangement.

“In the end, there is sentiment, then there is money. In other words, when you see Mick and Keith onstage, leaning together like Butch and Sundance, you’re seeing actors.”

There is a greater context here and a different way to view our musical icons: that as famous and seemingly untouchable as they may be, they’re really just a group of guys who got lucky. At one point, Cohen witnesses a man pressing Jagger about his fjord-deep wrinkles.

“Laugh lines,” Jagger says.

“Nothing’s ever been that fun-

ny,” the man fires back.

“But the guy was wrong,” writes Cohen. “There has been something that funny, mainly, the joke that this generation of rock stars played on fate, which had them marked for lives of quiet desperation in factories and insurance firms but instead set them up like medieval princes in frock coats and buckles — a life that for centuries had been the sole entitlement of the debauched nobility.”

In that context, the business arrangement, though lacking in romance, is almost palatable. You realize we should actually feel grateful that there’s still room to feel a nostalgic twinge when you hear the cowbell opening of “Honky Tonk Woman” or the shouts at the end of “Brown Sugar.” This oldies act, as Cohen writes, can still offer a “glimpse of what they had been.” n Edgers is the Washington Post’s national arts reporter.

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A haunting novel about survival

The kaleidoscope of America’s spirit

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

T

l

REVIEWED BY

L INDA K INSTLER

hings tend to weather dictatorships with far greater success than people do. For Romanian Nobel Laureate Herta Müller, the constancy implicit in this banal fact is an inspiration and a godsend. “How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?” Müller asks in “The Land of Green Plums,” her 1994 novel about life under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. “How do things manage — objects lying in the street? How do they manage not to draw attention as you walk by — even though someone has lost them?”

For Müller, the longevity of things is a fascination of great urgency. In “The Fox Was Ever the Hunter,” her latest work to be published in English, this concern takes on an encyclopedic, yet characteristically poetic, bent. Set during the final months of Ceausescu’s rule, the novel, deftly rendered by Müller’s longtime translator Philip Boehm, tells the story of two close friends, Adina and Clara, their alternate survival methods in the regime and the things that separate their fates.

As the title suggests, a fox is the thing at the center of this novel. It comes in the form of a beautiful striped pelt that Adina and her mother bought directly from a hunter years prior. Its luxurious, warm fur harks back to a less complicated time. “The hunter laid the fox on the table and smoothed out its fur. He said, you don’t shoot a fox. A fox will step into a trap,” Adina recalls of the purchase. “Even back then, fox and hunter were one and the same.” For the duration of the novel, Adina, Clara and their lovers and friends become the hunters and the hunted, trying not to step into traps.

Clara is the first to do so. After Pavel, a well-dressed lawyer, follows her into a clothing shop, they tumble into an affair. But Pavel is not a lawyer who works in the courthouse. His job takes him to the apartments of dissidents, in-

cluding Adina’s. For weeks, Adina returns to her apartment to find that a new part of the fox has been severed from its body. At first, she slides the offending parts back together, pretending nothing happened. But that soon becomes unbearable, and Müller delivers this arresting passage: “Adina lifts her hands off the table. Where they were resting the table is warm.

And down on the floor, where the fox is the hunter, her fingers slide the cut-off legs against the fur. And after her hands have once again warmed the table, they clasp her forehead. Her hands sense that her forehead is as warm as the table, but unlike the table it no longer knows anything about inhabiting a place, abiding.”

Adina and Clara take lessons in how to abide under duress from the things of their world. Adina learns the nature of endurance from the fox, from the hair clippings on the floor of the barbershop, from the dark forelock of the dictator and the “black inside the eye” that stares down from every one of his ubiquitous portraits.

For Clara, Pavel’s necktie and the coffee, sugar, cigarettes and flowers he brings her — along with perfume that “smells like secret police” — dictate her ability to persist in Ceausescu’s totalitarian world.

Literature is often at its best, and most urgent, when it is a survival tactic. In her writing, Müller inches closer to narrowing the gap between people and things, between life and language.

For that reason, her sparse prose often resembles poetry. Much like the life it depicts, Müller’s episodic tale doesn’t come with frills. Originally published in her native German in 1992, “The Fox Was Ever the Hunter” is a haunting portrayal of the secret lives of people and things during the last breaths of an obliterating regime. n Kinstler is a Marshall Scholar at the University of Cambridge and a contributing writer at Politico Europe.

C THE FOX WAS EVER THE HUNTER

By Herta Müller Translated from the German by Philip Boehm Metropolitan. 237 pp. $28

AMERICAN RHAPSODY Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building

By Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar Straux Giroux.

309 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

A MY H ENDERSON

laudia Roth Pierpont’s title is taken from George Gershwin’s original name for his 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue.” He wanted to call the work “American Rhapsody” to convey the “musical kaleidoscope of America — of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” Bursting with the energy and ecstasy of Jazz Age America, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” gave the American spirit a pulse.

A longtime arts writer for the New Yorker, Pierpont tracks the American spirit in 12 essays that portray individuals who have created the books, songs, films and architecture “that have become the common air we breathe and that we call a culture.” The result is a compelling group portrait of modern America.

The first profile is of Edith Wharton, who serves as a bridge to modernism. Wharton was a creature of the upper class who wrote fluidly about such “new women” as Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” (1905) — young women drawn to New York by the promise of jobs and freedom in the early 20th century. Wharton’s own economic independence allowed her to live an untraditional life, traveling in Europe, spending time with men she enjoyed and divorcing a husband she didn’t.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was the writer who defined America’s Jazz Age. In 1924, Fitzgerald announced to his editor Max Perkins that he was completing “the best American novel ever written.” Twenty-eight when “The Great Gatsby” came out the next year, Fitzgerald was already a celebrity because of his two popular Jazz Age novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned.” But “Gatsby” was a surprising commercial failure and achieved success only after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. His lasting importance, Pierpont suggests, grows from his relentless embrace of romance.

Another of Pierpont’s revealing

profiles describes an architectural “wonder” that sent the modernist spirit soaring. The Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, was the product of automobile titan Walter Chrysler’s ego. Designed

by William Van Alen, the art deco skyscraper featured a stunning crown made of always-lustrous steel and a spire that was “cloudpiercing.” Pierpont writes that the building’s “illusion” was essential to its identity: The spire rises to “an impossible slenderness that disappears gradually, like a bird flying out of sight.”

Illusion as a profession is central to Pierpont’s essays on Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and particularly Katharine Hepburn, who created an image that “embodied the most sought-after strengths of modern women . . . intelligence, independence, gall.”

Three of the essays focus on important African Americans whose careers spanned the century: performer Bert Williams, writer James Baldwin and musical legend Nina Simone. Each of their lives chronicles a search for inclusiveness in mainstream American culture. The idea of illusion was central to Williams’s minstrelsy: light-skinned, he “blacked up” to perform. Baldwin wrote about race and yearning amid the civil rights turmoil of the 1950s and ’60s. Simone has recently been rediscovered but not without controversy. A new biopic, “Nina,” stars Zoe Saldana, who is lighter-skinned than Simone. As Pierpont writes, “There is no escaping the fact that her casting represents exactly the sort of prejudice that Simone was always up against.”

In one guise or another, illusion plays a central role in each of Pierpont’s profiles. Her book is an ingenious and captivating way to spotlight the kaleidoscopic rhapsody of America’s spirit. n Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists DAVID PETRAEUS is a retired U.S. Army general who commanded coalition forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008 and Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 and served as CIA director from 2011 to 2012.

Almost 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, and five years since the killing of the chief architect of those attacks, the United States and the world face a resurgent threat from terrorism.

This stark reality should inform the national debate as we prepare to elect our next commander in chief.

As states across the Middle East have collapsed into civil war, Islamist extremist groups such as the Islamic State have exploited the upheaval to seize vast swaths of territory, which they have used to rally recruits, impose totalitarian rule over the people trapped in these areas and plot attacks against the rest of the world.

Few responsibilities that our next president inherits will be more urgent, important or complex than thwarting these terrorist plans, reversing the conditions that have enabled their rise and combating the broader Islamist extremist ideology that animates them.

It would be a mistake to minimize the continuing risk posed by these groups. Although al-Qaeda’s senior leadership ranks have been dramatically reduced, and while encouraging progress is being made against the Islamic State in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, Syria, these remain resilient and adaptive organizations. While Islamist extremist networks do not pose an “existential” threat to the United States in the way that Soviet nuclear weapons once did, their bloodlust and their ambition to inflict genocidal violence make them uniquely malevolent actors on the world stage.

Nor can they be “contained.”

On the contrary, from Afghanistan before 9/11 to Syria and Libya today, history shows that, once these groups are allowed to establish a haven, they will inevitably use it to project instability and violence.

Moreover, the fact is that free

and open societies such as ours depend on a sense of basic security to function. If terrorism succeeds in puncturing that, it can threaten the very fabric of our democracy — which is, indeed, a central element of the terrorist strategy.

For that reason, I have grown increasingly concerned about inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam, including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion.

Some justify these measures as necessary to keep us safe — dismissing any criticism as “political correctness.” Others play down such divisive rhetoric as the excesses of political campaigns here and in Europe, which will fade away after the elections are over.

I fear that neither is true; in fact, the ramifications of such rhetoric could be very harmful — and lasting.

As policy, these concepts are totally counterproductive: Rather than making our country safer, they will compound the already grave terrorist danger to our citizens.

As ideas, they are toxic and,

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Muslim members of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts take part in a color guard ceremony in Sterling, Va., last July.

indeed, non-biodegradable — a kind of poison that, once released into our body politic, is not easily expunged.

Setting aside moral considerations, those who flirt with hate speech against Muslims should realize they are playing directly into the hands of alQaeda and the Islamic State. The terrorists’ explicit hope has been to try to provoke a clash of civilizations — telling Muslims that the United States is at war with them and their religion.

When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists’ propaganda.

At the same time, such statements directly undermine our ability to defeat Islamist extremists by alienating and undermining the allies whose help we most need to win this fight: namely, Muslims.

During the surge in Iraq, we were able to roll back the tide of al-Qaeda and associated insurgents because we succeeded in mobilizing Iraqis — especially Sunni Arabs — to join us in fighting against the largely Sunni extremist networks in their midst.

Later, we took on the Iranianbacked Shiite militia, with the important support of the Shiitemajority Iraqi security forces.

The good news is that today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims are fighting to defeat the terrorists who wish to kill us all.

This includes brave Afghan soldiers fighting the Islamic State and the Taliban, as well as Persian Gulf forces in Yemen battling both Iranian-backed Houthis and alQaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

And it includes Arab and Kurdish forces who are battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In fact, we should do more to support these partners of ours.

I fear that those who demonize and denigrate Islam make it more likely that it will be our own men and women who ultimately have to shoulder more of this fight — at greater cost in dollars and lives.

We should also acknowledge that patriotic Muslim Americans in our intelligence agencies and armed forces — many of them immigrants or children of immigrants — have been vital assets in this fight with radical Islam.

Again, none of this is to deny or diminish the reality that we are at war with Islamist extremism.

But it is precisely because the danger of Islamist extremism is so great that politicians here and abroad who toy with anti-Muslim bigotry must consider the effects of their rhetoric.

Demonizing a religious faith and its adherents not only runs contrary to our most cherished and fundamental values as a country; it is also corrosive to our vital national security interests and, ultimately, to the United States’ success in this war. n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Time to stop counting my birthdays?

RUTH MARCUS is a columnist for The Post, specializing in American politics and domestic policy.

“Ruth, you have a birthday coming up!”

My friend’s voice contained an odd note of reproach, faint but unmistakable. The reason quickly became clear.

“You have to get your age off your Facebook profile,” my friend said.

She is an experienced Washington hand, a former administration official, a woman of, well, an uncertain age; her Facebook page doesn’t tell. “Have you lost your mind?”

Well, not yet. I mean, not that I’ve noticed. But I am about to turn 58. Not ancient, but still: less wunderkind, more éminence grise, although the eminence is debatable and the grise eminently concealable. And, actually, neither wunder nor kind. I once was one of the two, anyway.

Instead, I am old enough that age is a liability. It is a number to be shielded from public view, shaded if possible, mumbled if compelled. You, television booker; you, publisher of new media venture looking for a new editor — you’re probably not wondering: Where can I find a middle-aged woman to sign up?

I remember weighing the matter when creating a Facebook account and deciding, rashly, to include my birth year. What did I have to hide?

But that was 49. This is now.

Still in my first half-century, I was

probably being naively insouciant about the relevance of aging and the pitfalls of transparency.

This sensitive subject has both a demographic and a gender component.

Every generation confronts the uncomfortable reality that its time is passing and that it is about to be supplanted by the next.

Michael Kinsley captures this phenomenon in his new book, “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide,” writing about the moment when you are no longer rumored for a plum job opening.

“Even if it’s a job you don’t want or can’t take, it hurts the first time you’re not even mentioned as a candidate,” Kinsley writes. “It says that in a boomer culture that celebrates youth, you no longer qualify as young. Ouch.”

This phenomenon, for us baby boomers, may be even more stinging — and I’m not just

talking about the fact that my annual checkup just revealed that I have shrunk. An inch. Of which I did not have that many to spare.

Life expectancy is growing, meaning that we have the prospect of decades ahead once we reach ordinary retirement age.

When my husband and I visited our financial planner recently, we were advised to amass enough retirement savings to last through age 95. Okay, but I’m not planning to spend 30 years sitting around and knitting, as much as I like to knit. My mom, soon to be 82, is a crackerjack tax accountant.

At the same time, the explosion and primacy of technology have served to reduce the value, both real and perceived, of experience.

The traditional path in my line of work, for instance, was that a young journalist would spend years in the reporting trenches before being given a column.

Today, the Internet has lowered, if not eliminated, the barriers to entry for opinion writing, and the whippersnappers, it turns out, are awfully good.

Age is an even more fraught subject when tangled up with gender. The older gentleman is distinguished. The older woman is . . . haggard. Why do we talk about Hillary Clinton’s age but not Donald Trump’s, although he

is a year older?

I am experiencing what Barbara Bradley Hagerty, in “Life Reimagined,” describes as the “disconnect between my 30something self-image and my 50something reality.”

About that reality: A working paper last year from the National Bureau of Economic Research found “unambiguous evidence of age discrimination for female job applicants.” Economists sent out phony résumés, from older (64 to 66), middle-aged (49 to 51) and young (29 to 31) workers for retail sales, administrative assistant, janitorial and security guard jobs, ultimately “applying” for more than 40,000 positions.

They found “strong overall evidence of age discrimination, with callback rates statistically significantly lower by about 18 percent for middle-aged workers, and about 35 percent for older workers.” But the evidence was much more “consistent and compelling” for older women.

One reason, the researchers posit, is that “physical appearance matters more for women” and because “age detracts more from physical appearance for women than for men.” For this depressing but intuitively correct proposition, they cite additional research, which I might read.

After my nap. n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

Bernie Sanders vs. the Democrats DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Post as a political reporter in 2000.

Let’s examine what Bernie Sanders supporters did in his name over the previous weekend.

As the Nevada Democratic convention voted to award a majority of delegates to Hillary Clinton — an accurate reflection of her victory in the state’s February caucuses — Sanders backers charged the stage, threw chairs and shouted vulgar epithets at speakers. Security agents had to protect the dais and ultimately clear the room.

Sanders supporters publicized the cellphone number of the party chairwoman, Roberta Lange, resulting in thousands of abusive text messages and threats: “Praying to God someone shoots you in the FACE and blows your democracy-stealing head off!”

“Hey bitch. . . We know where you live. Where you work. Where you eat. Where your kids go to school/grandkids. . . Prepare for hell.”

Veteran Nevada reporter Jon Ralston transcribed some of the choice voice-mail messages for the chairwoman, some with vulgar labels for women and their anatomy: “I think people like you should be hung in a public execution. . . .

You are a sick, twisted piece of s--and I hope you burn for this!”

The day after the convention, Sanders supporters vandalized party headquarters.

And the candidate’s response to the violent and misogynistic

behavior of his backers? Mostly defiance. Asked by reporters Tuesday about the convention chaos — in which operatives from his national campaign participated — Sanders walked away in the middle of the question.

Finally, mid-afternoon Tuesday, Sanders released a statement saying, “I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.” But he blamed the Nevada party for preventing a “fair and transparent process,” and he threatened Democrats: “If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

It is no longer accurate to say Sanders is campaigning against Clinton, who has essentially locked up the nomination. The Vermont socialist is now running against the Democratic Party. And that’s excellent news for one Donald J. Trump.

The Nevada Democratic Party wrote, “Part of the approach by the Sanders campaign was to employ these easily-incensed delegates as shock troops.”

The state Democrats, warning of similar disruptions at the national convention in July, accused the Sanders campaign of “inciting disruption — and, yes, violence,” and said, “the goal of many of these individuals, sanctioned or encouraged by the Sanders campaign, is not partybuilding but something more sinister.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I wasn’t concerned about Sanders remaining in the race until the very end, because he doesn’t wish to see a President Trump and will ultimately throw his full support to Clinton. Sanders has, indeed, lightened up on Clinton and is instead trying to shape the Democrats’ platform and direction. But his attacks on the party have released something just as damaging to the causes he professes to represent. Coupled with his refusal to raise money for

the party, his increasingly harsh rhetoric could hurt Democrats up and down the ballot in November and beyond.

“We are taking on virtually the entire Democratic establishment,” Sanders says.

“The Democratic Party has to reach a fundamental conclusion: Are we on the side of working people or big-money interests?” he asks.

This was Ralph Nader’s argument in 2000: There isn’t much difference between the two parties. It produced President George W. Bush. Sanders said at the start of his campaign that he wouldn’t do what Nader did, because there is a difference between the parties.

Ralston wrote that “the Sanders folks disregarded rules, then when shown the truth, attacked organizers and party officials as tools of a conspiracy to defraud the senator of what was never rightfully his in the first place.”

And this, despite only two additional delegates being at stake, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out — not enough to make a difference in the race.

More to the point, no grievance justifies what happened in Nevada. Yet Sanders, recklessly, is fueling the fire. n

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Being transgender BY

J ACK D RESCHER

Over the past few years, transgender issues have moved into the spotlight in a big way. Caitlin Jenner came out on prime­time TV. Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of Time. The White House appointed its first openly trans employee. These cultural changes, though, have led to an ugly backlash. States including North Carolina and Kansas have passed or are considering legis­ lation that limits the rights of transgender people. And the polit­ ical debates around these issues have perpetuated many myths.

1

Transgender people pose a threat in public bathrooms.

This is flat-out wrong. Many transgender people already use the bathrooms that fit their gender identity. The state of Maryland, hundreds of cities and dozens of schools ban bathroom discrimination. And there have been no reported cases of such laws leading to harassment.

In truth, “bathroom bills” might endanger one group: transgender people. According to one study, 70 percent of trans respondents had been harassed, assaulted or denied access when attempting to use a public bathroom. More than half reported suffering physical ailments, such as dehydration or kidney problems, because they were afraid to use the restroom while out.

2

A 5-year-old doesn’t know enough about gender to be transgender.

Every so often, a media outlet will publish a profile of a child who believes he or she is transgender, and the story will prompt disbelief.

On the contrary, children as young as 2 can present with gender incongruence. According to the American Psychiatric Association, cross-gender behaviors often start between 2 and 4 years old. One study by the TransYouth Project found that

kids as young as 5 respond to psychological gender-association tests, which evaluate how people understand their gender roles.

Researchers have also found no relationship between gender incongruence and parenting styles. Transgender children appear in the homes of parents who are Republicans or Democrats, in the military or in civilian life, and regardless of racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds.

3

Being transgender is relatively new.

Certainly, transgender politics have shifted. But genderbending has been around a long time. Ancient Greek mythology references feminine souls in male bodies. In “Metamorphoses,” the Roman poet Ovid wrote about a man, Tiresias, who became a woman when he struck two copulating snakes. The Chevalier d’Eon, an 18th-century French politician, spent the second half of her life as a woman. (“Eonism,” a term for cross-gendered behavior, refers to the diplomat.)

In the United States and Europe, doctors have written about transgender patients since at least the 19th century. By the middle of the 20th, physicians had concluded that a transgender person’s gender identity was deeply felt, unresponsive to efforts to change the person’s mind and not necessarily

SARA D. DAVIS/GETTY IMAGES

Gender-neutral restroom signs in a hotel in Durham, N.C. Some state legislators say their “bathroom bill” aims to protect women.

accompanied by psychiatric problems.

even transition back. But the vast majority do not.

4

5

Transgender people often come to regret transitioning.

One writer, Walt Heyer (who regrets his own transition), claims that 20 percent of transgender people regret transitioning, 41 percent attempt suicide and at least 60 percent suffer from some kind of mental illness. “Suicide and regret,” he writes, “remain the dark side of transgender life.”

These statistics and misstatements are based on outdated research. More recent studies suggest that less than 4 percent of people who get genderreassignment surgery regret it.

Researchers have also found that the surgery dramatically reduces suicide rates among trans people.

That makes sense — the surgery can improve self-esteem, body image and general life satisfaction. This is why the international standard of care for adolescents and adults in many countries is to offer transition services.

Of course, some people regret transitioning. A handful may

Male-to-female transgender athletes have a competitive advantage.

Critics argue that transgender women have all the biological strengths — more muscle mass, greater lung capacity — of male athletes. But in reality, most of that dominance is pegged to hormones such as testosterone, not sex organs. Hormone therapy for trans women involves taking a testosteroneblocking drug along with an estrogen supplement. This usually leads to a decrease in muscle mass and bone density, as well as an increase in fat storage. “Together,” one trans runner and researcher wrote in The Washington Post, “these changes lead to a loss of speed, strength and endurance — all key components of athleticism.”

To date, trans athletes have not won a disproportionate number of races. n

Drescher is a New York-based psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who specializes in gender identity and sexuality.

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