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Worst Week Dennis Hastert 3

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Lifestyle Beating wedding stress 17

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Dennis Hastert

by Chris Cillizza

U

ntil Thursday night, J. Dennis Hastert was best known as “the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House.”

No longer.

Hastert, who held the speakership from 1999 to 2007, was indicted by a federal grand jury this past week on charges that he had broken banking laws by withdrawing large sums of money from a variety of bank accounts, concealing the withdrawals and then lying to the FBI about them.

The indictment alleges that Hastert agreed to give $3.5 million to an unspecified someone from his hometown in the Chicago suburbs because of “past misconduct.” Since 2010, Hastert allegedly withdrew $1.7 million in order “to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against” the unnamed person.

While the seven­page indictment was light on specifics, it did make clear that Hastert had purposely sought to skirt bank withdrawal laws, which dictate that any time more than $10,000 in cash is taken out of an account, a Currency Transaction Report must be filed.

When confronted with that illegal activity, Hastert lied to the FBI about what he was doing, the indictment alleges. “Yeah . . . I kept the cash,” Hastert allegedly told the feds. “That’s what I’m doing.” Except that’s not what he was doing, according to the indictment. Not at all.

The post­congressional career Hastert had built for

KLMNO WEEKLY

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

himself as a high­powered (and high­paid) lobbyist quickly began to crumble. He resigned from the lobby shop of Dickstein Shapiro LLC on Thursday night, hours after the firm’s Web site had been scrubbed of any mention of his work there. Friends were left stunned and speechless by the allegations about a man whose low profile was legendary.

Denny Hastert, for rewriting your place in history — and not in a good way — you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 33

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY HEALTH BOOKS OPINION Q&A

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Paul Gayle and his infant daughter head home after a fatherhood development class at the nonprofit Next Door Foundation in Milwaukee. Photograph by JAHI CHIKWENDIU, The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

NSA vote tests Kentucky alliance BY

M IKE D E B ONIS

M

itch McConnell stood at his desk on the Senate floor after 1 a.m. on that Saturday night, the eyes of his colleagues trained on him.

He seemed bewildered.

“Enter your motion to reconsider,” Laura Dove, his chief floor aide, told the majority leader, the exchange audible throughout the chamber. “You need to enter your motion to reconsider.”

McConnell studied procedure firsthand over five decades, and there is not much that can leave him flummoxed, even momentarily. But here he stood on May 23 — thanks to, of all people, his fellow Republican, fellow Kentuckian, close political ally and the man he has endorsed for president — Sen. Rand Paul.

With a dramatic series of procedural maneuvers, Paul had just dashed McConnell’s public pledge to extend a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program beyond a June 1 deadline before the Senate left for its weeklong holiday break. The program allows the government agency to collect vast troves of call data from telephone companies as part of the fight against international terrorism. Paul sees it as a violation of individual privacy.

“Our forefathers would be aghast” at the spying, Paul declared in front of McConnell, who once favorably compared Paul to Kentucky statesman Henry Clay.

Moments later, McConnell said the Senate would reconvene for a rare Sunday session on May 31.

The early return from break gives McConnell just a few hours of business to prevent a scenario that he had repeatedly warned would pose a grave threat to national security.

The early-morning antics not only complicated senators’ vacations but created a new chapter in the evolving relationship of McConnell and Paul, who have come to symbolize the once-tenuous but now increasingly comfortable ties between tea party conservatism and the Republican mainstream.

McConnell, the consummate

2013 PHOTO BY J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Maneuvers by close ally Paul leave GOP’s McConnell in a tight spot insider, and Paul, the populist firebrand, have become increasingly close since Paul crushed McConnell’s hand-picked Senate candidate in the 2010 Republican primary — culminating with Paul campaigning strenuously last year for McConnell’s sixth Senate term, and McConnell returning the favor this year with an endorsement of Paul’s presidential bid.

“We’ve developed a very tight relationship, and I’m for him,” McConnell told the Lexington Herald-Leader last year.

Their paths have now diverged.

Paul is seeking to motivate his activist base with a mantra of “defeat the Washington machine” as he tries to distinguish himself in a crowded GOP presidential field, while McConnell is trying to corral Republican senators to govern effectively to boost the party’s standing ahead of the 2016 elections.

Paul played down any tensions with his senior colleague. “I think we have good relations,” he said the other week. “Really, period.

We’re friends and we disagree on this issue. . . . We have disagreements in our caucus all the time.

As the 2016 elections near, Kentucky GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell, left, and Rand Paul seem to be traveling different political paths.

But I try to keep it on a friendly basis, and, you know, I don’t think this will hurt our friendship.”

Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell, said: “They’re friends and work together well for Kentucky. They have different opinions on the Patriot Act.” The first signs that Paul’s presidential ambitions and McConnell’s desire for smooth governing might be at cross purposes came May 20, when Paul held the Senate floor for nearly 11 hours to decry any extension of the current surveillance law at a time when sena-

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POLITICS tors were working through complex trade legislation that McConnell promised to pass by week’s end.

Paul said he did not warn McConnell before starting what he deemed a filibuster, but McConnell aides played down the speech, saying it did not delay consideration of the trade bill, which passed a final vote May 22.

But Paul’s maneuvering afterward most certainly went against McConnell’s wishes. With Paul leading the objections to a shortterm extension of the existing legal authority for the NSA program, it highlighted McConnell’s tactical missteps in delaying consideration of the surveillance program and undermined any attempt he might have made to blame its potential expiration on Democrats.

Instead, the Democrats were gleefully blaming McConnell for the impasse.

“This mess is an entirely predictable consequence of Senator McConnell’s bad habit of governing by manufactured crisis,” said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). “Senator McConnell badly misjudged the members of his own conference and failed to listen to advice from Senator Reid and others who saw this mess coming weeks ago and tried to warn him.”

There are other signs that relations between McConnell and Paul have become strained. According to Democratic aides, Reid approached McConnell to ask about the possibility of moving up consideration of surveillance legislation by an hour — something that would require Paul’s consent.

But McConnell refused to ask Paul to accelerate the vote, the aides said, so Reid asked a Democratic ally of Paul’s on surveillance reform, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, to approach him and ask for the accommodation. (Stewart said that McConnell did not refuse and that it was Republican floor staff, not Wyden, who secured Paul’s consent to move up the votes.)

Attitudes toward Paul sharpened as the long night wore on. A camera captured Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rolling his eyes at Paul’s floor remarks, while Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tweeted her exasperation, accusing Paul of “using Senate rules to grandstand.”

“Frustrating for those of us who

actually want to reform NSA,” she said.

Many had hoped that Paul’s marathon floor speech the previous Wednesday — or “performance,” as Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) called it — would suffice to make his point.

It did not. Paul objected to a seven-day extension to the current law, taking advantage of Senate rules protecting the right of an individual senator to oppose quick action on any question. McConnell then proposed, in turn, fourday and two-day extensions, which were opposed by Wyden and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), respectively.

When McConnell finally offered a one-day extension, Paul objected again, prompting today’s unusual Sunday session.

“There’s a new breed in the Senate, and we have seen the manifestation of it,” McCain said. “One or two or three are willing to stand up against the will of the majority.

Some time ago, the Senate people would sit down and try to work things out. And obviously these individuals don’t believe in that.

But I’m sure it’s a great revenueraiser.”

Throughout recent days, Paul’s presidential campaign issued a steady stream of e-mail solicitations to supporters and a flurry of tweets to the world highlighting his efforts to end the NSA surveillance program.

“My filibuster will continue, but I need some extra muscle from the grass roots to keep it going,” one missive read. “I hope you’ll please stand with me by chipping in a generous contribution. I could use your help right now like never before.”

Asked about those dismissing his surveillance stand as a fundraising ploy as he left the Capitol early May 23, Paul said, “I think people don’t question my sincerity.”

It is unclear what difference a week will have made in the surveillance debate. The positions of national security hawks such as McConnell and civil libertarians like Paul have barely softened, while a House-passed, White Housesupported compromise measure — the only legislation offering a seamless transition — was unable to gain the 60 votes necessary to proceed. A procedural vote on the bill failed 57 to 42.

“Sometimes things change as deadlines approach,” Paul said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Carter’s gaffe puts Obama on defense BY

G REG J AFFE

P Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said last weekend that Iraqi forces lacked the “will to fight” Islamic State militants.

resident Obama has not had an easy time with his secretaries of defense.

Two of his defense secretaries wrote books critical of his administration after they left office and his third was essentially fired. This past week, the White House scrambled to clarify remarks by Obama’s fourth defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, who said last weekend that Iraqi forces who collapsed in their defense of Ramadi lacked the “will to fight” Islamic State militants.

Carter’s pronouncement, unusual for its bluntness, angered senior Iraqi officials in Baghdad and seemed to suggest that the president’s strategy, built around supporting Iraqi forces with training and airstrikes, was failing.

“Airstrikes are effective, but neither they nor really anything we do can substitute for the Iraqi forces’ will to fight,” Carter said in an interview with CNN. He added that the Iraqi government force, which “vastly outnumbered” the Islamic State attackers, simply refused to fight in Ramadi.

Asked about Carter’s remarks, White House press secretary Josh Earnest pointed to some of the successes Iraqi forces had earlier this year in retaking the cities of Tikrit and Baghdadi from the Islamic State. In both battles, a multi-sectarian force of Iraqi fighters backed by U.S. air power and under the central command of the Iraqi government won relatively quick victories. And he praised the leadership of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

“It’s very clear what our strategy is, and it’s clear that strategy is one that has succeeded in the past,” Earnest said.

Carter still has the strong support of the president, and there is little sign that he is pressing internally for a change in the overall strategy in Iraq. His remarks and the controversy they produced, however, highlight the perils of running the Pentagon at a time

when the United States is counting heavily on frequently unreliable local partners to battle Islamic State fighters on the ground.

“The State Department never loses a battle or loses a war. Their defeats are much more nebulous,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and is a scholar in residence at American University. “It’s crystal clear when you lose Ramadi.”

The past few weeks have been particularly tough ones for Iraqi forces. Iraqi officials had been planning to launch a major attack soon to retake territory in western Iraq’s Anbar province, where Ramadi is the provincial capital. The unexpected collapse of the Iraqi forces in Ramadi, including some of the Iraqi army’s elite counterterrorism troops, cast doubt over that coming offensive.

“It’s easier to have a clear, consistent, unified story when a policy is working,” said Stephen Biddle, director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. “Ramadi clearly indicates the policy isn’t working.”

The controversy over Carter’s remarks is different in many ways than the conflicts Obama had with his predecessors. Former defense secretaries Robert M. Gates and Leon Panetta both complained in memoirs of micromanagement from the White House. Obama concluded that Chuck Hagel, who preceded Carter at the Pentagon, was not well equipped to lead the fight against the Islamic State.

Carter’s comments seem to fall under political journalist Michael Kinsley’s definition of a “gaffe”: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” Kinsley once said.

“This is a diplomatic gaffe,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security. “Everyone knows that . . . the issue is one of will — will of Sunnis in the Iraqi security forces to fight for a Shia-led military, and the will of Shia to fight for Sunni land.” n

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POLITICS

WEEKLY

Student debt jells as issue for voters

K

OC

IST

Subject weighs heaviest among millennials, who are a big slice of the 2016 electorate

BY D ANIELLE G ABRIEL

T

D OUGLAS-

he $1.3 trillion burden of student debt is becoming an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign as candidates court the millions of Americans grappling with the high cost of college.

Congressional Democrats are advocating for debt-free public higher education and pushing party front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton to take up the issue in her campaign.

White House hopefuls Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley have already backed the plan, with Sanders proposing his own federal program to make four-year public college free.

Republican contenders have not laid out any specific positions, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and former Florida governor Jeb Bush have framed the issue as a barrier to economic mobility in recent speeches.

“We’re talking about over 40 million Americans who have student debt,” said Sarah Audelo of the Center for American Progress.

“We have this multi-generational impact . . . and there has to be a conversation.”

The latest data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that 65 percent of student loans are held by Americans younger than 39, while people age 40 to 59 hold another 30 percent.

The issue weighs heaviest on the minds of millennials, who have endured soaring college costs that forced many to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt. A Harvard University Institute of Politics poll found that 57 percent of people under 30 believe that student debt is a major problem for young people.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, said he thinks the issue of student debt is as important to millennials as “war and peace issues” were to baby boomers.

“A part of the reason student debt is so important for Democrats is that it’s a crucial motivator to get younger people to vote,” Garin said.

“Student debt is often the defining economic fact of their lives.”

People 18 to 34 account for about one-fourth of the voting-age population. While that group

largely sat out the midterm elections, their votes proved critical in the last two presidential elections.

Although it is early in the campaign season, Democrats are making a clear play for the millennial vote. They have introduced a slate of resolutions calling for the elimination of student debt at public colleges, the increase of federal grant aid and reduction of interest rates on student loans. It is part of a larger push to promote debt-free college as a campaign issue.

“Student debt will be a central issue in the 2016 elections, both at the presidential election and the congressional level,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters at a Howard University event in April. “There are two problems that have to be solved: the high cost of college education and huge outstanding student loan burden. And we need to go after both of them.”

The debt-free college initiative is based on a plan sketched out by liberal think tank Demos. It calls for the federal government to award grants to states that increase spending on higher education and increase need-based grant aid.

That way, fewer students would

have to take on high debt loads to attend public colleges.

Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, called the plan “a return to the promise of higher education as a public good.” He said it is the sort of big idea, much like universal health care, that’s built for a presidential campaign, the grounds to test out a platform that could shape future policy.

Building on the Demos plan, Sanders introduced a bill the other week for free tuition at four-year public colleges and universities.

He would have states pony up $1 for every $2 the federal government invests in higher education.

The federal share of the money would come from taxing transactions by hedge funds, investment houses and other Wall Street firms. All told, the plan would cost $70 billion a year.

Since many popular solutions for reducing student debt involve more government spending, it is an issue that the Republican Party has largely shied away from, said Lanhee Chen, a Hoover fellow and Mitt Romney’s policy director during the 2012 campaign.

But Chen said that shouldn’t preclude candidates from touting ideas to provide graduates with quality jobs to repay their debt or supporting online learning to reduce costs and completion time.

“The answer to how to get people prepared for the jobs of this economy is not, let’s just throw free school at them,” he said. “The right response is, are we providing the proper avenues to ensure that students are getting access to the education they need to be productive members of the economy?”

There are no Republican Party initiatives comparable to the debtfree college plan, but conservative leaders say there are a number of proposals that GOP candidates can support to gain a toehold with young voters.

High on the list is a set of ideas floated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Kelly. One proposal would make colleges pay a percentage of their graduates’ defaulted student loans to give schools more of a stake in student outcomes. Another would establish a legal framework for incomeshare arrangements that let private investors pay students’ tuitions in exchange for a guaranteed percentage of their future incomes.

“The crisis of college affordability has marched up the income

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POLITICS spectrum in a way that it hadn’t in past cycles, and it’s going to be a defining issue for the middle class,” Kelly said. “Republicans have ceded a lot of the ground to the Democrats on this. They’ve made the issue about how much we spend rather than how we spend it. And that’s been a mistake.”

Of all of the Republican presidential contenders, Rubio has been the most vocal on student debt. The Florida lawmaker has backed income-share lending as an alternative to student loans, and he supported the expansion of online learning.

Rubio also introduced a bill with Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) last year to simplify federal student loan repayment by placing borrowers into a plan that automatically deducts 10 percent of their earnings every month. Unlike the current Pay as You Earn plan, the bill placed a $57,500 cap on loan forgiveness after 20 years — a move that could hurt grad students.

While the bill gained little traction in Congress, it did establish Rubio, who finished paying off his loans in 2012, as someone concerned about students.

This month, congressional Republicans passed a budget that would eliminate guaranteed funding for Pell grants, which provide money for the country’s poorest students to attend college. The budget plan also reverses the expansion of income-based repayment and gets rid of a federal program that forgives any remaining student loan debt for borrowers who work in the public sector for 10 years.

Although the budget resolution is unlikely to become law, it sends strong signals that Republicans are taking aim at higher education. In fact, two presumptive presidential candidates, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have each proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to their state higher education budgets.

“There is an argument for fiscal responsibility,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.

“And then there is an argument for saying: ‘Look, just because the Democrats decided they want to spend record levels and you put the brakes on that doesn’t mean you are an enemy of students.’ ”n

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE TAKE

The road map for a GOP win BY

D AN B ALZ

I

t isn’t often that a presidential campaign blueprint comes packaged between covers and available in bookstores for all to see. But that’s the inescapable conclusion from looking through “2016 and Beyond,” by Whit Ayres.

Ayres is pollster for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). His new book is subtitled, “How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America.” If not exactly the strategy memo for a Rubio campaign, it’s a good proxy.

Ayres’s analysis looks at a changing United States from the perspective of a growing minority population (and GOP weaknesses there) and the majority white population (and GOP strengths and limitations there).

His argument is straightforward: To win the White House, Republicans must improve performance among minorities while maintaining or even improving support among white voters.

In an electorate in which the white share of the vote was 72 percent, President Obama won reelection in 2012 despite losing the white vote by a bigger margin than any winning Democrat in the past.

Based on estimates of the 2016 electorate, if the next GOP nominee wins the same share of the white vote as Mitt Romney in 2012 (59 percent), he or she would need to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote. That’s a daunting obstacle. Romney won only 17 percent of nonwhite votes in 2012. John McCain won 19 percent in 2008. George W. Bush won 26 percent in 2004.

Ayres points out that the GOP’s support among whites is not even across the country. He notes that Romney won “overwhelming margins” among whites in conservative Southern states, but won fewer than half the white vote in Northern states such as Maine, Vermont, Iowa, New Hampshire and Oregon.

More importantly, Romney won fewer white votes than he needed

in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

To Ayres, this isn’t an either-or choice for the GOP. As he puts it, “For Republicans to become competitive again in presidential elections, Republican candidates must perform better among whites, especially in the overwhelmingly white states of the upper Midwest, and much better among minorities.”

The coming nomination contest will test the appeal of the candidates with both groups of

A book by Sen. Marco Rubio’s pollster shows how Republicans could win the presidency in 2016.

voters. Is there any candidate who can raise the share of the nonwhite vote and attract more white votes in the Midwest?

When I put that question to Ayres, he said yes but only “if that candidate can relate to people who are struggling economically and relate to people who have been disadvantaged by a remarkably changing economy.”

Ayres addresses immigration, seeking to debunk those in his party who say Hispanics will always vote for Democrats or those who say there are more than enough white voters who stayed home in 2012 to make up the deficit by which Romney lost.

He lists any number of GOP candidates who have won significant portions of Hispanic voters and includes a table that shows that, even if all the “missing white voters” had turned out in 2012 and if Romney won them all, “he still would have lost.”

Much of the book is an examination of public opinion on a range of issues. His conclusion is that, on the role and the size of government, the country is center-right, not center-left. On debt and deficit, he argues that a Republican candidate is on solid ground talking about both, as long as he or she doesn’t make it all about the numbers and instead links it to policies to stimulate more economic growth.

He says cultural hot buttons of abortion and same-sex marriage are separable. On abortion, he argues that Americans are and will remain “torn about the morality” of the issue and sees no particular downside for the GOP to remain the antiabortion party, as long as candidates talk about it with sensitivity.

On gay marriage, he says the political debate is over and that public opinion has made a decisive shift. But he acknowledges that changing the party’s position will be wrenchingly difficult and sketches out some do’s and don’ts for those opposed, including not advocating federal intervention to overturn same-sex marriages adopted through referendums or legislative action.

Ayres said he wrote and published the book before Rubio made a final decision to run and said he hoped it would be a blueprint not just for Rubio but for any 2016 candidate. What the party needs, he said, is a candidate who will prompt people who have not voted for Republicans in the past to consider doing so rather than one who offers modifications in message.

Rubio will choose to run as he sees fit, but the similarities between what he already is saying and doing and what Ayres lays out in his book are striking. The interest in a Rubio candidacy clearly exists within the party for the reasons that Ayres outlines.

But there is a large leap from the pages of a pollster’s book to the rigors of a campaign.

Ayres has offered a road map.

Now comes a road test of whether the candidate can deliver. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Finding green in a drought DAVID WALTER BANKS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

R OB K UZNIA Hermosa Beach, Calif.

BY

C

hristopher Knight makes no apologies: He likes a green lawn. But the actor best known as Peter on “The Brady Bunch” also wants to do his part to conserve water.

The solution? Fake grass.

“It feels totally different,” Knight, 57, marveled as he stepped barefoot onto an expanse of newly installed plastic turf. “Frankly, I’m not really sure why more people haven’t started doing it.”

After four years of California drought, more people are doing it.

Fake grass is a booming business, much to the chagrin of some environmentalists and grass purists.

Comprehensive numbers are hard to come by, but makers and installers of synthetic turf say they are experiencing an unprecedented spike in residential business.

From middle-class families who don’t want to forfeit the patch-ofgreen part of the American dream to celebrities mortified by TV coverage of their sprawling water-hog lawns, homeowners across the Golden State are ripping up sod and replacing it with plastic.

“Everything is in California right now,” said David Barbera, president of Georgia-based Artificial Turf Supply, which opened

both a warehouse and a sales office in Southern California last year.

“We have doubled the size of our business in the past 12 months.”

The benefits are hard to deny.

Live grass guzzles some 55 gallons of water per square foot annually, making the all-American lawn increasingly untenable in an era of skyrocketing water rates and excessive-use penalties. Over the two months since Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency and decreed that water use be cut by 25 percent, turf companies have reported an avalanche of interest.

In many parts of the state, the trend is being fueled by cash rebates of up to $3.75 a square foot for installing low-water (or nowater) landscaping. The majority of rebate-takers go the more natural — and cheaper — route of shrubs and succulents. But a growing number are paying up to $10 per square foot to luxuriate in plastic’s convincing lushness.

“For people who want to play with their children — soccer, baseball, Frisbee — they can’t do that in a front yard with cactus. You’re going to get a needle in the rump,” said Ara Najarian, mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale.

To be sure, fake grass — known as “frass,” in some quarters — has its critics. Santa Monica, for instance, will not approve rebates for

homeowners who install plastic.

Sacramento and Glendale have banned the installation of artificial turf in front lawns, as have some homeowners associations.

Najarian has been waging a spirited campaign to get his city’s ban overturned.“I’ve always been a firm believer that we need to give families the option,” he said. But Peter Fuad, president of the Northwest Glendale Homeowners Association, adamantly defends the ban.

“You can’t be assured people won’t buy the cheapest Home Depot special,” Fuad said at a City Council meeting. “Are you going to allow red, white and blue turf?”

Synthetic turf advocates dismiss such fears. Today’s fake grass, they say, is nothing like the preternaturally green stuff that used to carpet miniature golf courses.

The venerable Hollywood Bowl amphitheater recently made the switch. Mark Ladd, assistant director of operations, notes that the fake greenery looks authentic: The height and color of the blades are varied, with a few brown ones thrown in to emulate dead thatch.

Danna Freedman, owner of SYNLawn — a local wholesaler and affiliate of AstroTurf — says some of her most loyal clients are famous. They include former California first lady Maria Shriver, comedian Steve Martin and actress-

Fake grass makers cash in as California residents look for ways to save water and have a nice lawn Domingo Espinosa helps install turf at Christopher Knight’s home. “Everybody is concerned about the water. It’s a problem.

So it makes me really feel like I’m helping the planet,” says DuraTurf’s Olivier Roumy.

es Julia Roberts and Laura Dern.

Freedman noted that SYNLawn artificial grass is made from soybean oil and recycled plastic bottles collected from national parks — an environmental bonus.

Today’s artificial turf is the descendant of AstroTurf, which was developed in the mid-1960s by Monsanto. Originally called ChemGrass, it was rechristened after gaining fame in the Houston Astrodome, where the trials of maintaining indoor natural grass had compelled crews to paint the dead outfield green.

The product has traveled a bumpy road to sporting-field prominence. The $1 billion-a-year industry began expanding into the residential market in the 1990s.

Nevada, the Sagebrush State, was an early adopter. The percentage of Nevada residents taking a water-savings rebate for replacing natural grass with artificial turf has skyrocketed over the past decade. A quarter of lawn conversions now include an artificial turf component, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

For many artificial-turf enthusiasts, it isn’t just about saving water. It’s also about reconnecting with idyllic childhood memories.

Danna Ziv, who lives in Montecito near Santa Barbara, said her 2,000 square feet of fake lawn reminds her of playing on the grass as a child in the San Fernando Valley. Her father, the late Dan Blocker, played Hoss Cartwright on the 1960s TV show “Bonanza.”

For others, it’s all about the environment. Olivier Roumy ditched his 25-year career as a high-end hairstylist for Washington politicians and moved to Los Angeles to work sales for DuraTurf, whose expanding list of clients include Knight and the Hollywood Bowl.

Knight admits he had other motives for spending around $4,000 for his new lawn and a matching patch of green on his rooftop balcony. While the rebate and the water conservation were important, he said, his primary consideration were the dog owners who pretended not to see his posted signs. (“No dog pee on wet lawn!”)

An endless stream of canine leg-lifters had left his grass blemished with yellow spots. “Now I don’t even have to worry about the damage,” he said, admiring the handiwork of the DuraTurf crew.

Still, Knight said, he plans to leave the dog-pee signs up. n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Ban on fertility treatments draws fire E MILY W AX- T HIBODEAUX Tampa BY

A

fter Army Staff Sgt. Alex Dillmann was paralyzed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, the Department of Veterans Affairs paid to retrofit his truck so he could drive it and bought him a handcycle so he could exercise.

But the agency that cares for former troops won’t pay for what the onetime squad leader and his wife, Holly, ache for most: a chance to have children.

VA will not pick up the bill for in vitro fertilization, which fertility experts say offers those with spinal cord and genital injuries the best hope for a biological child.

Under a 23-year-old law, VA is prohibited from covering IVF. Congress adopted the ban as the result of conservative opposition to assisted reproduction and concern that some fertilized embryos might be discarded.

Now, however, veterans and lawmakers from both parties are pushing to overturn the ban. They argue that it is outdated and that IVF is widely accepted and performed worldwide.

The law also predates the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where widespread use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in attacks on U.S. forces has caused far more reproductive injuries than in past conflicts.

The Dillmanns are among thousands of young post-combat couples who are struggling to start a family after blast injuries left them unable to conceive naturally.

But IVF costs tens of thousands of dollars and often takes multiple tries to produce a viable pregnancy. Combat-wounded veterans say the financial burden and emotional toll are often overwhelming, especially on top of learning to live as an amputee or in a wheelchair. Some say that they have to take on debt or skip getting an education afforded them under the GI Bill so they can rush back into the job market, or that they have to rethink plans to start a family altogether.

“At the end of the day, I’m so

EDWARD LINSMIER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Lawmakers push to change the 23-year-old law to help injured veterans who want children lucky to be alive. Part of that is this dream to be a parent,” said Alex Dillmann, 30, whose dirtyblond hair is still cut high and tight and whose tan arms are buff from years of exercise. “But this is a big pill to swallow for all veterans facing combat injuries, which have hurt their chances to have children.”

Their upcoming round of IVF will cost nearly $25,000, which will wipe out years of savings.

Alex said that if the treatment doesn’t work, he would be willing to curtail his education in information technology and delay his hopes for a job in “the virtual battlefield” for the Pentagon or another national security agency.

Last year, congressional efforts to overturn the law barring IVF and provide funding for veterans ran into resistance because of concerns over how to pay for it.

But a new push is underway.

The Defense Department changed its policy in 2012 and said

it would cover IVF for active military members in recognition of the increasing number of pelvic fractures and injuries to reproductive organs suffered during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 1,830 troops have suffered such wounds since 2003, according to the Pentagon. That is in addition to the thousands of veterans who have spinal-cord injuries, which can also impact fertility.

But under the law, wounded military members can be covered only during a window of time between their injury and their discharge from the military — a period of hospital stays, surgeries and adjusting to their new postwar bodies. Many wounded veterans describe it as the most stressful and disorienting time of their lives.

“The timing was just all wrong.

It’s the time when you are trying to learn to shower and get your mind around the fact that you will never walk again. I wasn’t in the position to think about starting a

Retired Army Staff Sgt. Alex Dillmann and his wife, Holly, have set up a nursery in their Tampa home, hoping to one day become parents.

1,830 Troops who have suffered pelvic fractures and injuries to reproductive organs since 2003 during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon.

family at that moment,” Alex said.

“Yet the pressure was on.”

Alex had been on patrol on a snowy night four years ago in Ghazni, nearly 100 miles southwest of the Afghan capital of Kabul, when his vehicle hit an IED. He said he doesn’t remember much immediately after, except waking up in a series of hospital beds.

He endured more than 25 surgeries — including painful procedures on his spinal cord as well as skin grafting for burns. He had a punctured lung and several broken vertebrae. He was on a feeding tube for so long that his weight dropped from 180 to 150 pounds. He spent a year in the hospital and another in and out.

Last summer, with Alex finally free of the hospital and with six months left before he was to be discharged from the Army, he and Holly started the IVF process.

Alex hoped for a “mini Holly, who would be earthy and like to play with worms and listen to Nirvana and Björk.” Holly dreamed of a “mini Alex, who would be adventurous and curious about how everything works and likes to go fishing and hunting.” They agreed that if they had a son, his middle name would be Kristopher, for one of Alex’s closest friends, Sgt. Kristopher Gould, who was killed in the same bomb blast that paralyzed Alex.

Two rounds of IVF failed.

“It was really stressful because we knew the stakes if it didn’t work,” said Holly, a petite 29-yearold with deep-set dark eyes and long black hair tossed into a ponytail.

So now they are trying again, this time paying for it themselves.

“The VA ban is literally adding insult to injury,” Holly said. “It’s like the approach to this is: ‘We aren’t going to do anything to help you. You get to go this one alone.’ ” On Capitol Hill, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has called the ban on funding for this process “a shocking gap, outdated and just wrong” and introduced a bill to let VA pay for IVF. The measure also would cover the costs of surrogate pregnancies and adoption.n

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WORLD

Jerusalem brings back cave burials

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Jerusalem

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or Jews seeking eternal rest, the most coveted real estate on Earth lies in the soil of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the city is rapidly running out of room to bury the dead.

And so it has come to pass that an Israeli burial organization has teamed with a cutting-edge construction firm to bore deep under a mountain here to create a vast underground necropolis — with elevators.

The first phase of the new subterranean city of the dead will include 22,000 crypts, arranged floor to ceiling in three tiers, in a network of intersecting tunnels now being dug through the rocky clay soil beneath Jerusalem’s largest cemetery.

The $50 million project, begun a few months ago and paid for with private funds generated by the sale of burial plots — mostly to Jews overseas — is the first of its kind here in modern times. And it is likely to be the start of a trend.

The last time cave burials were in vogue in Jerusalem was about 2,000 years ago. As readers of the Bible may recall, a Jew named Jesus was interred in a cave, according to belief, though he did not stay long.

Modern catacombs may soon be the preferred option — or the only realistic one, in a delicate balance of economy, space and piety.

The need is dire. Perhaps surprisingly, there are only a handful of Jewish cemeteries in Jerusalem still accepting new arrivals.

Two cemeteries — the Sheikh Badr beside the Supreme Court, another beside the Shaare Zedek hospital — are small and closed to new burials. The private Sanhedria Cemetery in the center of town is almost full (and expensive at $20,000 a plot, according to some Israeli reports).

Mount Herzl is the national cemetery of Israel — but it is reserved for Jewish notables, Israeli leaders, armed forces and those who sacrificed their lives for the

DAVID VAAKNIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As the city runs out of coveted space, a cemetery is digging into a mountain to find more room nation. So it may be tough to get your nana from Boca Raton in.

There is the Mount of Olives, of course, just east of the Old City. At 3,000 years old, it is the most famous and most profound, has the best views and is especially desired for its prime location: Jewish tradition says that when the Messiah comes, the resurrection of the dead will begin there.

There are complications, however. The Mount of Olives is in contested East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as the capital of a future state. Security can be heavy-handed or spotty, especially during times of heightened tensions. Also, vandals have been desecrating Jewish tombs in recent years. Burial directors say the location is not quite as coveted as it had been.

Which leaves Har Hamenuchot, the “Mount of Those Who Are Resting.” It is the city’s largest cemetery, opened in 1951, a sprawling city of stone covering a

hilltop on the western edge of Jerusalem and one of the first landmarks a traveler sees while driving into Jerusalem on Highway 1 from Tel Aviv.

The cemetery was the scene of an emotional outpouring this year at the burial of four Jews killed in a January terrorist attack at a kosher market in Paris.

“We need our land for the living and not for the dead,” said Hananya Shachar, director of the Jerusalem Jewish Community Burial Society, who said he first dreamed of digging burial caves 25 years ago, when he saw how quickly demand was outstripping supply. In Israel, nonprofit burial societies manage assigning and selling plots and helping the bereaved plan funerals.

There are about 522,000 Jews living in Jerusalem and 6 million Jewish Israelis in all. Another 8 million Jews, more or less, live around the world. That is a lot of potential demand. Most observant Jews do not cremate their

Aboveground vaults have been one solution to meet the high demand among Jews for burial in Jerusalem. Now, a vast subterranean necropolis is under construction.

dead. Burial directors say they will need hundreds of thousands of new plots, niches and vaults to keep up.

If they go subterranean, the possibilities for new spaces are nearly limitless. There are more than 6 million remains in the catacombs of Paris, for example. The Roman catacombs were dug during the 2nd century for the same reason Jerusalemites are burrowing today: They were running out of room.

“Now we’ve got the drilling equipment, the know-how and the means, so we said, ‘Let’s go for it,’ ” Shachar said.

Shachar pointed out that not only do Jews around the world want to be buried in Jerusalem, but also the soil is good for digging, making his dream of caverns doable. In Tel Aviv and in much of the settled coastal lands, it is not possible; you hit water within a couple dozen yards.

At the cemetery on a recent day, Shachar showed how overcrowding is driving new solutions. The burial society is clearly running out of space for “field graves,” the traditional plots side by side on the mountaintop. “Those are finished,” he said.

When the tunnels and crypts are complete, there will be soft lighting, beautiful stonework and an airy, dry, cool and peaceful climate — no dank cave here.

Most of the money that supports cemeteries in Jerusalem comes from Jews abroad who want to be buried here. A Jerusalem burial — air transport, rites, plot and tombstone — costs between $5,000 and $10,000.

“This is amazing, nothing like it, at least in the world of Jewish cemeteries,” said David Jacobson, an American who came from New York to take a look at the project.

“The future is underground,” agreed Yair Maayan, project manager for the new burial tunnel project. “This is all about how to make better use, smarter use of the land.”

Maayan predicted: “We can fill the 22,000 vaults in seven years.”

After that? “We will dig deeper and deeper, all over the mountain.” n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

An ugly turn for the beautiful game S TEVEN G OFF New York BY

K

nown as the beautiful game for the on-field spectacle, soccer has operated for decades under an ugly cloud of allegations related to match-fixing in professional leagues and bribery in connection with the hosting of the sport’s premier competition, the World Cup. At the center of soccer’s immense global influence sits Federation Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA, a Swiss-based organization that serves as the umbrella governing body for the sport.

Wednesday’s revelations — 47count indictments brought by the Justice Department, arrests of executives gathered in Zurich for annual meetings and a raid of affiliated offices in Miami — shook FIFA like no internal or independent investigation before.

The charges were by far the most powerful strike against FIFA — and perhaps a watershed moment for the governing body of the world’s most popular sport — and intensified calls for reform to an organization that has long drawn fans’ ire over corrupt leaders and a structure that helps perpetuate their influence.

Whether FIFA is capable of meaningful reform remains to be seen, in large part because of what has been the unwavering support for FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter by many of the organization’s smaller member-countries who benefit most from his largesse.

FIFA counts 209 members, more than the United Nations, and rakes in billions of dollars at every World Cup. Soccer fans and players worldwide for years have expressed dismay over the organization’s practices, yet it has operated in much the same fashion.

“Enough is enough,” Kelly T. Curry, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in announcing indictments against nine FIFA officials and five corporate executives on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

FIFA’s world is shaken by indictments and arrests but is the group capable of meaningful reform?

“Organized international soccer needs a new start — a new chance for its governing institutions to provide honest oversight and support of a sport that is beloved across the world, increasingly so here in the United States. Let me be clear: This indictment is not the final chapter in our investigation.”

FIFA, which technically is a nonprofit institution, took in an estimated $4 billion from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, mostly from TV deals and corporate partnerships. It says it spends $550,000 a day on worldwide soccer development — on such things as stadiums, fields and training centers — but the suspicion has long been that most of those funds have ended up in private hands.

The setup is a breeding ground for the “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” corruption cited by U.S. authorities Wednesday, as well as what fuels the elaborate networks of patronage that link

the sport’s top administrators with officials in national soccer associations.

The criminal investigation is expected to have long-term effects on the way FIFA conducts itself.

“This is a long time coming and certainly a positive development,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor and sports economist who wrote “Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.” “This is an opportunity for soccer to right itself and to have a better future. Even though there are dark clouds, I think it’s a bright day for soccer’s future.”

American soccer fans hope that future includes moving the 2022 World Cup to U.S. soil.

Swiss authorities are conducting a criminal probe into the 2010 selection of Qatar, a small but wealthy Middle East nation, to host the 2022 World Cup. The

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and U.S. law enforcement officials indict 14 influential soccer figures on racketeering and bribery charges Wednesday. “Enough is enough,” said Kelly T. Curry, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

United States was considered the early favorite but finished second in the voting.

Almost immediately, Qatar and other figures were accused of bribing members of the FIFA executive committee, a 24-member board that votes on the World Cup hosts. Blatter ignored claims made by whistle-blowers and, instead of calling a new vote, let the actions stand.

Two years ago, under increasing criticism, FIFA did hire Michael Garcia, a former U.S. prosecutor, to conduct an internal probe of the World Cup bidding process. But upon its completion last fall, the organization released only a small portion of the 430page findings. Garcia said the information made public was “incomplete and erroneous.”

Despite numerous issues related to the Qatar bid, including oppressive heat during the summer months and mistreatment of migrant workers building the stadiums, FIFA has stood by the decision.

Although Swiss authorities are investigating the selection process, FIFA reiterated Wednesday that the locations of the next two tournaments will not change.

However, one U.S. soccer official, who requested anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak on the matter, said the 2022 tournament moving to the United States is not out of the question.

FIFA’s problems have steadily eroded worldwide fan support for the organization. In a poll of more than 35,000 fans from 30 countries released this past week

by Transparency International, 83 percent said they want Blatter to step down and 69 percent said they had no confidence in FIFA. Whether the investigations prompt a 2022 re-vote and, in a broader context, force change in FIFA remains to be seen.

“We are pleased to see that the investigation is being energetically pursued for the good of football,” FIFA said in a statement addressing Wednesday’s indictments, “and believe that it will help to reinforce measures that FIFA has already taken.” n

Raising better fathers

PHOTOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

BY ELI SASLOW IN MILWAUKEE Paul Gayle, 19, and his infant daughter, Sapphire, nap at the home of the young father’s best friend.

Despite taking fatherhood development classes for guidance, so much about his life remained unstable.

The last student to arrive for fatherhood class was the only one holding a baby, and a dozen men looked up from their desks to stare. Paul Gayle, 19, had a pink diaper bag hanging off a shoulder decorated with tattoos of marijuana leaves, and a crying 7-month-old in his arms. “Come on, girl, chill out,” Paul said, carrying the baby to a seat in the corner. He offered her a rattle, and she swatted it away. He gave her a bottle, and she only cried louder. Finally, he reached into the diaper bag and took out a pacifier for her and a shot of Goody’s Headache Relief for himself.

“Sorry for the noise, y’all,” he said. “We’re both a little mad at the world today.”

“No problem,” the teacher said. “I’m up here talking about being a dad, and you’re

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COVER STORY doing it.”

“I’m trying,” Paul said. “But damn.”

He had pushed a creaky stroller through one of Milwaukee’s worst neighborhoods and ridden a bus across the city not because he wanted to attend a class called Fragile Families and Responsible Fatherhood, but because, like everyone else in the room, he saw no other choice. Some of the men had been told to take the class as a condition of visiting their estranged children. Others had been lured by the promise of job referrals or reduced child-support payments. Paul had come mostly because of the promise of free baby supplies, and lately he had been purchasing his Pampers one at a time, repeating the same transaction so often at a corner store that a clerk had dubbed it the Daddy Paul Special, 75 cents for a single cigarette and a size-3 diaper.

Here in one of America’s most segregated cities, the biweekly fatherhood class has become President Obama’s preferred antidote to so many of the problems facing black men. His administration approved the 16-course curriculum and devoted more than $500 million to funding hundreds of fatherhood classes around the country. One of the biggest grants went to North Milwaukee, where, according to studies of census data, black children face disadvantages that accumulate from birth: three times as likely as white children to die in their first year; five times as likely to live with a single parent; nine times as likely to attend failing schools; 15 times as likely to live in poverty; 18 times as likely to go to prison.

“Strong fathers can be the first and best step toward fixing these communities and helping our children reach their goals,” Obama said last year while promoting the classes.

Paul had written down his goals as part an exercise on the first day of class: “Brush Sapphire’s teeth every night.” “Stay calm.”

“Find a stable apartment.” “Get a job — any.”

Now it was his 15th class, nearing the end, and despite the hopeful language in a course guide — “End the cycle of intergenerational poverty!” “Help turn your child turn into a success story in 16 lessons.” — so much about his life remained unstable. He had moved nine times in seven months. He had been offered two jobs but failed the drug tests. It had been several days since he had seen the baby’s mother, a former longtime girlfriend who was no longer living with them. “Sapphire misses you. Are you coming over to see her??” he had texted once, and the silence that followed made him think Sapphire might become another black child whose long odds depended on a single parent, and that parent was him.

In the first fatherhood class he had recited 20 strategies for managing anger. In the fifth

he had role-played effective methods of child discipline; “Say ‘no’ firmly and repeat as necessary,” the course book read.

Now the teacher asked the students to stand for a group exercise, so Paul grabbed the baby and joined his classmates in the center of the room. The teacher said he would read a series of “value statements,” and students would go to the right side of the room if they agreed with the statement, the left side if they disagreed or stay in the center if they were unsure.

“Men and women are equally capable of caring for children,” the teacher said, and all at once the men began to move, half to the right and half to the left, jarring at each other as they went. Paul stood alone in the center of the room, unsure.

“A man who cries easily is weak,” the teacher said, and the men hurried around the room again.

“It’s okay to use violence if you’re disrespected,” the teacher said.

Paul Gayle, center, and his daughter, Sapphire, participate in a parenting exercise during a fatherhood development class in April in Milwaukee.

The program, launched by President Obama, lasts 16 weeks.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“A man should be willing to take any job to support his children.”

Paul still stood alone in the center of the room, watching everyone move, cradling the baby against his shoulder. “Paul, come on, man, what are you sure about?” the teacher asked.

“Me being honest?” he said. “You’re asking us for simple yes/no answers, and I can see it both ways. It’s a whole lot more complicated than you’re making it seem.”

S

he was his first child, and when he found out he was going to be a father, he felt both excited and scared. He was unemployed, broke, single and still pursuing his high school diploma — an accidental teenage father, the exact thing his mother had warned him not to become. He hid the pregnancy from his mother for several months, hid it from nearly everybody, until his daughter arrived in August at 6 pounds and 13 ounces, with tousled hair, soft skin and normal results on her first hospital check-up. “Health: Good.”

“Ethnicity: Black.” “Risk factors: None.”

The first crisis of her life had come a few hours later. “I need a car seat ASAP,” Paul had written on his Facebook page, when the nurse explained they couldn’t take the baby home without one. He didn’t have a phone or a computer, so he logged onto Facebook using a cheap tablet he shared with a friend. “I need one now!” he wrote. “I am at Sinai hospital.

Please someone help or let me borrow $50.

They sell one here. Please help.”

He managed to borrow a car seat from a relative, borrow a car from a friend, buy a few baby supplies from Goodwill and take the baby and her mother home to a friend’s one-bedroom apartment. “I’m gonna be the best daddy for this girl,” he wrote on his Facebook page, and only in the next months did he begin to understand what that would require.

“Fittin to walk everywhere and do whatever to find me a job,” he wrote, in September.

“Job interview. Keep praying,” he wrote, in November.

“Kills me to be missing so much of my baby’s life,” he said, in December, when Sapphire and her mother left to stay with relatives in Minnesota.

“Headache outta this world,” he wrote, in January, when the baby and her mother returned from Minnesota, and the baby moved in with him.

“Tired, irritated, stressed and plus,” he wrote, in February, when the mother started to visit less, and when he began to wonder if he should fight for custody in court.

“Anyone trying to buy a PlayStation?” he asked in March, when he had run out of money and used up his $198 in food stamps. “Asking $130 but would be willing to work something out. Need baby stuff.”

Now it was the end of April, and he left fatherhood class and took Sapphire back to his mother’s rental house in North Milwaukee, continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

where they had been staying for the last several weeks. His mother, Bindu, was sitting in the living room and watching a report on the local news about a shooting a mile away.

“I just want to take Sapphire and myself and go dig a hole like Bugs Bunny,” Paul said, once the report finished.

“Get yourself out of this neighborhood,” Bindu said. “It’s a mess, and it’s only getting worse.”

“Believe me, I’m trying.”

“Get an education,” she said. “Get a phone.

Get a car. Get a job. Get an apartment. Get a bank account. Get a plan for your life.”

“I said I’m trying.”

“A baby needs stability, Paul. It can’t be day-to-day for 18 years. Give her something to depend on.”

“Okay. I get it,” he said, turning back to the TV. Paul was Bindu’s youngest child, and he reminded her of his father: soft-hearted and hard-headed, all the right intentions without the necessary follow through. Paul had tat-

Paul Gayle and his mother, Bindu Derksen, meet with social worker Alphonso Pettis to talk about tensions in the house.

tooed the names and birth dates of his siblings on his arms as a tribute to family, but he had gotten one of the birth dates wrong. He had skirted the edges of trouble — suspended from school but never expelled, using marijuana but not dealing it. And at 19 he possessed what few other black men in his neighborhood did: He was among the 42 percent with no criminal record; the 35 percent with a high school diploma; and the 14 percent of fathers who lived with their child. “A master at barely avoiding disaster,” Bindu said of him, but she had said the same thing about Paul’s father until he was shot and killed during an argument at 39, when Paul was in eighth grade.

Even if some considered Obama’s initiative a thin solution to so much systematic racism and decay, Bindu thought that a fatherhood class could at least be a safe and constructive place to go. She had encouraged Paul to enroll and said he could stop sleeping on friends’ couches and live with her, so long as he followed her rules: no wandering the neigh-

borhood at night; no visits from the baby’s mother, whom she didn’t trust. “I can’t be your safety net forever,” she had told him, and she had decided against giving him his own key.

Now he carried Sapphire upstairs to their bedroom, where his mattress was on the floor under a string of Christmas lights. He brushed her teeth and rocked her down into her crib.

Then he sat on the window ledge, lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the alleyway.

“Bedtime,” he said, as Sapphire played in the crib. “Come on now. Daddy needs a break, girl.”

“We’re getting up early tomorrow, making something happen. We’re starting out fresh, you and me.”

“Close your eyes,” he said, but as Sapphire kept looking up at him, he closed his.

H

e awoke the next morning to a hopeful message on his Facebook page: “Might have a job lead. Call if you can,” his former high school counselor had written, and since

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

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COVER STORY Paul didn’t have a cellphone and didn’t want to wait, he packed his diaper bag, wrapped Sapphire in a blanket and traveled across the city to find the counselor at Pulaski High.

Paul had graduated from Pulaski the year before, and he had been celebrated that day as one of the principal’s handpicked “turnaround stories.” He had started high school just months after his father’s murder, a stormy freshman who dented lockers in the school hallways, but he had become one of the school’s most popular eccentrics, with fluorescent socks and wild hair. He cooked his father’s native Jamaican food and sold it in the cafeteria. He made honor roll his last semester, and a teacher suggested he apply to culinary school or even to college.

Paul changed Sapphire’s diaper, went upstairs and found the counselor in his office.

“You mentioned something about a job?” Paul said, and the counselor explained that his friend was hiring for a caretaking position in an elderly home, no experience necessary, paying $10 an hour. “They need somebody who can start right away,” the counselor said.

“Do they drug-test?” Paul asked, thinking about the urine tests he had failed at Target and Milwaukee Sanitation.

“No,” the counselor said. He pointed to Paul’s tattoos. “You might need to cover up all those marijuana leaves on your arm, turn them into hearts or something. But the main thing is you need to call her tonight.”

“I’ll borrow a phone,” Paul said.

“Or you can just drive out there and see her,” the counselor said.

“I don’t have a car, but I’ll bus.”

“It’s way out in Waukesha.”

“What? The job is in Waukesha?” Paul said.

Waukesha was three bus transfers to the west, a mostly white suburb where 83 percent of children lived with both parents, 90 percent of families were middle class or better, 93 percent of adults were high school graduates and 95 percent were employed. “What are they going to let me do in Waukesha?” Paul said, but he listened as the counselor outlined a plan: Cover the tattoos. Get the job. Save enough money to rent an apartment near work and move with Sapphire to Waukesha, where she could enjoy all the advantages of an America that Paul had never experienced, an America nine miles away.

“Waukesha,” the counselor said, stretching the word out, nodding his head. “That could be the answer right there. She’ll grow up right.

She’ll have some rich friends.”

“She could go to one of those day cares with a garden and a big old playground,” Paul said, nodding now, too.

“She’ll go to college,” the counselor said.

“She’ll become a doctor or something,” Paul said.

He promised the counselor he would call about the job, and he started traveling back across the city. “Waukesha,” he said, still getting used to the idea, because maybe it could work. He would get a bank account. He would save money to put himself through

KLMNO WEEKLY

He didn’t even own a key to his own home.

“Waukesha,” he said. “I know. Pretty stupid, right?”

W

“Waukesha,” Paul said, still getting used to the idea, because maybe it could work. school and win full custody of Sapphire.

By the time they arrived back at his mother’s house it looked to him like a place he was already preparing to leave. “A week tops and I’ll be out,” he said, carrying Sapphire up to the front door. He reached for the knob, but it didn’t turn. He knocked, and nobody answered. He pushed his shoulder against the door just to be sure. “Damn,” he said. “Locked out.”

They sat on the curb, waiting for his sister to come home with a key.

A neighbor came out to talk to Paul while they continued to wait. “What’s happening?” he asked, and Paul told him about the trip back to his high school, the counselor and the $10-an-hour caretaking position. “Waukesha?

Yeah, you’d fit in real good in Waukesha,” the neighbor said, laughing at the idea, and something about his reaction made Paul realize how ridiculous it seemed. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have a car to get him to work, or money to rent an apartment in the suburbs.

At top, Paul Gayle takes a break from the fatherhood class to change his daughter’s diaper.

Above, he and Sapphire wait for a bus to head home after the class.

hat he had was a baby and one more fatherhood class the next afternoon, the last of Obama’s 16 sessions. The teacher talked about the five developmental stages of childhood. He talked about treating mothers with respect. “Congratulations, Graduate!” read a certificate with Paul’s name printed on it, but before he left the teacher pulled him aside. “This isn’t really the kind of thing you finish,” the teacher said. “This is about achieving self-discipline. That’s the essence of manhood. We want to keep giving you help,” and so Paul agreed to continue coming, thinking about the free baby supplies, and thinking that help might be something he would need.

“Are you coming over today?” he texted Sapphire’s mother, on his way home, and she told him that she was.

He brought Sapphire back into the house, turned on cartoons and waited. This was where they spent much of their time together, rotating from a chair to a couch to another chair as empty soda cans and baby formula piled up around them. He bounced Sapphire on his knee as a cartoon about a talking car gave way to another about a talking horse. He cooked potatoes and fed them to Sapphire by hand.

“Soooo bored,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “Who wants to hang with me and Sapphire?” and finally he heard the front door open. It was Bindu, home from work, and she squeezed his shoulder and kissed the baby.

“Did you call about the job in Waukesha?” she asked. “Not yet,” he said.

He switched from cartoons to MTV, and then to “American Idol” as the sun went down. He started to fall asleep on the couch, but Sapphire grabbed at his beard. “Let me sleep,” he said, but now she was chewing on the remote control, pulling his arm, asking for attention.

“What do you want?” he said, and what she wanted was to be held, then to crawl, then to eat, then to play peek-a-boo, then to crawl again. “Ugh, are you serious?” Paul said, strapping her into a bouncy chair, closing his eyes.

Bindu came back into the room and put a hand on his shoulder. “Did you call yet?” she asked.

Paul stood up and walked out of the living room, out the back door and into the alley.

“How long are we going to be stuck like this?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “Weeks? Years?”

He looked down the alley to the street, and on that street was a bus stop, and for a few seconds he wondered what it would feel like to leave: just quiet, no questions, no stroller, no baby.

But even now he could hear Sapphire crying. He stomped out his cigarette and walked back into the house. She saw him and held up her arms. He lifted her from the bouncer, pulled her into his lap and offered what he could.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m right here.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

HEALTH

You eat what you see on TV ISTOCK

BY

R OBERTO A . F ERDMAN

I

n 2006, a landmark study established that advertising for unhealthy foods on television was a significant contributor to childhood obesity in the United States. At the time, nearly 20 percent of U.S. children ages 6 to 11 were considered obese (not merely overweight) — a rate that was not only among the highest in the world but was also rising. And America’s youths were being bombarded with commercials for sugary cereals, cookies, chicken nuggets and other high-calorie fare on every major television network.

Finding itself in a corner, the food and beverage industry resolved that it couldn’t stand idle any longer. Dozens of food companies, including 17 of the country’s largest, mobilized to address the problem. Together, they re-created the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which laid out a set of rules for television advertising that promised, among other things, that child-directed food advertisements on television would tout only healthier foods and scale back the use of cartoons and other characters to gain kids’ favor. The program was self-regulatory— meaning that only the

industry itself was tasked with making sure that participants complied — but it was seen as a respectable step toward responsibility.

More than half a decade later, it’s become clear to some that the program has not succeeded. Despite a public promise to change its marketing behavior, the food industry is still almost exclusively pitching unhealthy food to kids watching TV, according to a new study. While the industry has taken to highlighting when it meets its own standards, those rules aren’t in line with the guidelines put forth by the government, or, really, most independent organizations.

“The good news is that the industry has done exactly what it promised,” said Dale Kunkel, a professor at the University of Arizona who has spent the better part of his career studying the effects of advertising on children. “The bad news is that the industry’s definition of what constitutes healthy food is a joke.”

Roughly 80 percent of food television ads in 2007 were for the kinds of things the Department of Health and Human Services believes should be eaten “only once in a while or on special occasions.”

In 2013 the percentage was exactly

the same.

The healthiest tier of foods (fruits, vegetables, etc), meanwhile, now makes up only 1 percent of all food advertisements, compared with what was an already paltry 4 percent in 2007.

Kunkel, who was a key contributor to the 2006 report, has spent the past few years studying how well the food industry’s new advertising guidelines are working.

His findings, published this month, are hardly encouraging.

To measure how well the food industry has performed since it pledged to curb the nature of children-targeted TV ads, Kunkel, along with Christine Filer, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and Jessica Castonguay, a physician at Akron Children’s Hospital, analyzed hundreds of food advertisements from 2007, the year the program took effect, and 2013. The channels Kunkel’s team considered include some of cable network’s most popular broadcasts — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — as well as some of TV’s most prominent places for children’s programming — Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

By gauging a number of characteristics about each commercial — including length, product type, use

Children are still being inundated with ads for unhealthy food, a study shows, and that takes a heavy toll

of cartoons and characters, and nutritional quality — the researchers found that progress has been unimpressive. The industry has met its standards by running fewer commercials and ensuring that those that are running are shorter in length. But, in terms of actual content, the industry has continued pitching unhealthy food to kids, almost without exception.

“How much has been accomplished? Virtually nothing,” Kunkel said. “Parents are trying to help kids understand what healthy food is from a young age, but kids almost never see an advertisement for any of those healthy foods. There are almost no ads for genuinely healthy foods, and that’s profoundly confusing for kids.”

Dan Jaffe, executive vice president for government regulations at the Association of National Advertisers, disagrees.

“It’s important to realize that the health standards Kunkel’s analysis uses are an overreach,” said Jaffe. “Most of the foods consumed in the U.S. would not meet these standards. The industry would effectively have to stop advertising food to anyone under 18 years old.”

There are good reasons to be concerned about advertising sugary cereals, McDonald’s Happy Meals and other deficient meals beyond just their lack of nutritional value. The ads, research shows, skew children’s understanding of what is actually healthy to eat.

Some of the clearest evidence might be a string of studies that show that children who watch TV are both more likely to be obese and less likely to know what healthy food is.

What’s more, food advertising on TV can lead to nutritional confusion that can last a lifetime. A 2009 study showed that children who watch television carry unhealthy food preferences and lessthan-ideal diets into adulthood.

“It’s so bad that children who are the heaviest TV viewers tend to have a negative correlation with nutritional knowledge for the rest of their life,” Kunkel said.

He argues that policymakers might want to revisit the whole idea that the food industry can successfully police itself. “At this point, it seems fairly obvious that we need to reconsider how effective self-regulation is,” Kunkel said. “Because it’s not effective.” n

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LIFESTYLE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Always a bridesmaid (for hire) L ISA B ONOS New York BY

I

t’s three weeks before her wedding day, and Bryn Haffey has some important decisions to make: Should she go with fake eyelashes or extensions?

What should she do about the hideous burlap birds her mother purchased as decorations for the hipster-chic wedding in Queens?

What documents does she need to secure a marriage license, what’s going in the wedding welcome bags, and when will the family rehearse walking down the aisle?

Jen Glantz, a 27-year-old who markets herself as a “professional bridesmaid,” is marching Haffey briskly through her to-do list at a Starbucks in the West Village on a rainy Saturday afternoon. For now, Haffey seems most concerned about makeup and Mom, and Glantz quickly mollifies her.

“You have perfect eyelashes as is,” Glantz tells Haffey, 32. “Don’t experiment with anything between now and April 4th.”

“Thank you for boosting my ego,” Haffey responds with a smile.

And those burlap birds? “Tell her to bring them,” Glantz says, “and then, day-of, say no.” She also suggests that Haffey and her mother pick a time once or twice a week to discuss wedding-related details, rather than flood Haffey’s inbox on a daily basis. Glantz even offers to help shoulder the load: “I love moms — send her to me,” she says matter-of-factly.

Glantz is far more than a bridesmaid, but she’s not exactly a wedding planner, either: She does the logistical duties of the latter while providing the emotional support of the former. She’s an unlicensed therapist who’s also your very organized bestie for a few months.

The brides who hire don’t lack for friends, she says; they just don’t have anyone nearby with the time or energy to do the stuff a sister, mother or confidante might.

The work rarely involves accompanying a bride down the aisle or planning a bachelorette party (though she can do those things for an additional fee, of course). It’s about finding the most

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Planning your wedding doesn’t have to be stressful if you hire a best friend to help with the occasion acute sources of anxiety — weddings can be monumentally complex endeavors, with dozens of vendors, hundreds of guests and tens of thousands of dollars in expenses — and neutralizing them. It’s an insurance policy against the emergence of Bridezilla. Phone sessions plus showing up on the big day can run about $1,000 to $2,000.

“A wedding planner focuses on the things,” Glantz tells me. “I focus on the people.”

“The professional bridesmaid” says she got her nickname after being asked to be a bridesmaid twice in two days in 2014, when she was still technically an amateur. A few days later, Glantz put up a Craigslist ad offering her services for free. The ad went viral, attracting interest not just from brides but also from women who wanted to work for her. For now, it’s just Glantz, though she gets business advice from her older brother, Jay, in Miami and an 82year-old she found through an organization that offers free busi-

ness tutoring.

With her parents in Detroit and her sister, who had her second child seven weeks before the wedding, in Chicago, Haffey didn’t have a huge support system nearby. Her mother, she says, was “very adamant” that she hire a day-of coordinator, but “they were extremely expensive” — about twice what she paid Glantz. And they didn’t seem as personable, either.

But Glantz was something else entirely. “The way she pitched herself was: ‘You can reach out to me whenever you have anxiety.’ ” Glantz — who balances her early morning, nighttime and weekend consults with a full-time job at a Manhattan start-up — says she’s used to parachuting into close groups, quickly diffusing tension and bonding with just about anyone.

Haffey and Glantz hit it off over the things that fast friendships are made of: work, food, TV and music. They both work at male-dominated tech companies. They’re vegetarians. They share a love for

From left, the bride’s sister, Shannon Haffey; professional bridesmaid Jen Glantz; and bride Bryn Haffey prepare for her wedding to Markus Meuller.

“The Bachelor” and Taylor Swift.

“I feel like we’re friends,” Haffey tells me a few weeks before the wedding, “not someone I hired.”

Seven weeks after the wedding, they’re still in touch. The two of them even have plans to get dinner in honor of Haffey’s recent birthday.

“Jen, are you rocking a fanny pack?” Haffey asks. It’s April 4, the big day is here, and Haffey is getting her hair and makeup done — along with her sister, mother and soon-to-be mother-in-law — in a hotel room with a view of the Queens skyline.

“Does that embarrass you?”

Glantz banters back.

“I love it,” Haffey says.

In that trusty fanny pack, Glantz has stuffed everything she or the bride might need to survive the 13-hour day: peanut M&Ms; a baby toothbrush; hair spray; mints; Shout Wipe & Go, for stains; perfume; nail glue; BandAids; and, of course, a small pack of tissues.

The lipstick choices have been narrowed to four, and Haffey’s sister, Shannon, picks the shade of red that Glantz suggested. “Make sure you give me the color, and I’ll hold it,” Glantz says. Off it goes into her fanny pack.

When Haffey’s mother helps her into her dress, Glantz is there to clean up, snipping the temporary straps out of the way.

“You look like a supermodel,” Glantz gushes.

“Now I know why I hired you,” Haffey says.

There’s still the ceremony area to set up, place cards to untangle, a rehearsal to run through and a few vendors to direct.

As the band warms up, Shannon’s 21/2-year-old daughter, Maren, dances and twirls. When Maren throws a tantrum, refusing to wear a flower crown atop her head, Glantz convinces her that she’s friends with Princess Elsa from “Frozen” and gets the toddler to wear it for the photos.

Glantz preempted adult tantrums, too. When she spotted the box with those infamous burlap birds, she quietly shoved it under a table. n

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Napoleon’s last stand revisited N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

G ERARD D E G ROOT

T WATERLOO The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

By Bernard Cornwell Harper. 352 pp. $35

THE LONGEST AFTERNOON The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo

By Brendan Simms Basic. 186 pp. $24.99

WATERLOO The Aftermath

By Paul O’Keeffe Overlook. 392 pp. $37.50

his June marks the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon suffered his final defeat. It’s no surprise, then, that books have blossomed this spring. But two centuries after the battle, is it actually possible to say anything original about Waterloo?

The sources are rich but finite.

Books therefore recycle material that has been used dozens of times before. That’s certainly true of Bernard Cornwell’s “Waterloo,” but it’s not necessarily a problem. The story he tells is familiar, but he still manages to produce something dramatic and engaging.

Cornwell recognizes that a battle is mainly composed of human beings, each with distinct flaws, each with a different story. In the midst of his Waterloo commentary, he inserts the tale of Martha Deacon, found wandering around British bivouacs on June 17. She was noticeable because she had three children in tow and because she was nine months pregnant.

Apparently, it was not unusual for a soldier’s family to accompany him on campaign, though Martha’s condition made her unique.

Martha’s husband, Thomas, an ensign in the 73rd Highland Battalion, had been wounded in the arm during the battle of Quatre Bras on the 16th. He was on an ambulance wagon to Brussels at the very moment that she was looking for him around Waterloo.

Teetering on the edge of panic, she found someone who knew where her husband had gone. She then walked to Brussels with her little family, a distance of 22 miles. The journey took two days. Martha eventually found her husband in a makeshift hospital. Thomas survived and, unusually for the time, kept his arm. The day after their reunion, Martha gave birth to a baby girl, christened Waterloo Deacon. Little stories like this, told with stark simplicity, are what make this book.

By June 1815, the armies of Europe had been fighting one an-

YVES HERMAN/REUTERS

The Lion’s Mound memorial on the Waterloo battlefield in Brussels. The battle was fought on June 18, 1815.

other for 16 years. Soldiers possessed great potential for secondguessing. The battle of Waterloo was shaped by their preconceptions. Each commander tried to predict how an adversary or ally would react. Each usually predicted wrongly. It is this clash of personalities that Cornwell conveys so well, especially when it comes to the relations between the British and Prussian allies.

Waterloo is so often presented as a British battle, yet only around 13 percent of the soldiers that day were from the United Kingdom.

This was in truth a European conflict fought by troops from France, Holland, Britain, Prussia, Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau.

Wedged within the British army was the King’s German Legion, 6,000 Hanoverians. They fought under British command because King George III was also elector of Hanover. The Second Light Battalion of the KGL was given the task of defending the farmhouse at La Haie Sainte, in the middle of the British line and where Napoleon focused his assault. On June 18 the fate of Britain rested on 400 Germans.

Brendan Simms tells the story

of the Second Light Battalion in a superb little book that is micro-history at its best. Over the course of “The Longest Afternoon,” we get to know those Hanoverian soldiers intimately and feel the enormous pressure that weighed upon them. Because his focus is so fine, Simms is able to provide detail that broader books omit. For instance, early on the 18th, those Hanoverians killed a lamb found wandering around the farm. The delicious smell from the meat, cooked in butter, attracted a small crowd. “The captain and lieutenant . . . came to take part in our meal, which I hasten to add, tasted awful because instead of the salt we lacked, our cook had put a handful of [gun]powder into the pot.” That’s curious since gunpowder was scarce at La Haie Sainte.

Battles usually seem to have a distinct end marked by the moment of victory or defeat. We seldom think of the mess — physical and metaphorical — that remains.

This is what Paul O’Keeffe examines in “Waterloo: The Aftermath,” the most original and fascinating book in the current crop. If you buy one book to mark this anniversary, buy this one.

On the 19th, Capt. Alexander Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery woke to “a slaughter ground rendered perversely beautiful by the night. He saw ‘pale wan faces [of the dead] upturned to the moon’s cold beams, which caps and breastplates, and a thousand other things reflected back in brilliant pencils of light.’ ” Waterloo was, among other things, a very literate battle.

Before long, however, scavengers arrived to disturb that sublime landscape of carnage. Things of value — watches, money, rifles — went first, often stolen from men not yet dead. Then went the caps, epaulettes and breastplates, destined for the souvenir market.

Boots and uniforms went next, filched by the poor. When the first tourists arrived four days after the battle (yes, that’s right), they found a putrid landscape littered with bloated bodies.

It’s still possible to tell an original story of Waterloo. One common feature of these three books is that they are all wonderfully short. Big isn’t necessarily better. n DeGroot teaches at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

If ‘Misery’ loves company, this is it

Another author delivers the blues

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH H AND

S

tephen King’s superb new stay-up-all-night thriller, “Finders Keepers,” is a sly, often poignant tale of literary obsession that recalls the themes of his classic 1987 novel “Misery.”

At the center of this story is John Rothstein, a novelist whom Time magazine once crowned “America’s Reclusive Genius.”

His best-selling trilogy — “The Runner,” “The Runner Sees Action” and “The Runner Slows Down,” is considered “the Iliad of postwar America.”

When the teenage Morris Bellamy reads the first two books, he falls in love with their antihero, Jimmy Gold, “an American icon of despair in a land of plenty.” But Morris finds the third novel, in which the protagonist settles down and takes a job in advertis-

The book is the second part of a planned trilogy. ing, a sellout and an unforgivable betrayal. A smart, deeply troubled kid who’s already done time in juvie, Morris hatches a plan to break into Rothstein’s New Hampshire farmhouse to steal the author’s notes and write a more satisfying ending. His hope is to find the new Jimmy Gold novel that Rothstein is rumored to have written since retiring from public view. But when Morris’s plan goes disastrously wrong, he ends up, at age 23, sentenced to life in prison.

That’s where the fun begins — for the reader, if not for Morris.

More than three decades later, another teenage boy, Pete Saubers, is living with his family in the same house that had once been Morris’s childhood home. Like Morris, Pete is in thrall of the Jimmy Gold novels, though he has other things on his mind. His

family is struggling to get by after his father was injured when a madman plowed a Mercedes-Benz though a crowd waiting in line for a job fair. King fans will recognize that tragedy as the seminal event in his novel “Mr. Mercedes” (a much less enjoyable book than this one). They’ll also recognize several characters from that novel, including retired police detective Bill Hodges, now a private investigator. After Pete discovers the trunk with Rothstein’s stolen notes, King begins to weave this web of characters, coincidence and connections with dizzying speed and dazzling facility.

“Finders Keepers” — the second in a planned trilogy — may be a twisted love story, but it’s also a love letter to the joys of reading and to American literature. Rothstein’s books evoke Updike’s Rabbit novels, as well as works by J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Richard Yates. Pete reads D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and realizes too late its lesson that “money from nowhere almost always spells trouble.” And Pete’s favorite English teacher mentions Theodore Roethke’s sublime “The Waking.” That poem’s most famous line — “I learn by going where I have to go” — could serve as a mantra for Pete, who at every step must make life-altering decisions about Rothstein’s literary legacy, his family’s financial well-being and his own survival. In one sense, sweet-natured Pete is not so different from vicious Morris: Both, “although at opposite ends of the age-spectrum, are very much alike when it comes to the Rothstein notebooks. They lust for what is inside them.”

Near the end, one of Rothstein’s many fans muses, “I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. . . . I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”

Readers of the wonderful, scary, moving “Finders Keepers” will feel the same way. n

N FINDERS KEEPERS Stephen King Scribner 448 pp. $30

BILLIE HOLIDAY The Musician and the Myth

By John Szwed Viking. 230 pp. $28.95

l

REVIEWED BY

M ATT S CHUDEL

o figure in American music led a more interesting, troubled and tragic life than Billie Holiday. She was the tortured soul of jazz, whose breaking heart could be heard in every note she sang. She had a childhood of pain and privation and struggled throughout her life with drug addiction, racial discrimination and violent relationships — yet she managed to create an unforgettable, timeless body of work.

Holiday, who was often called “Lady Day,” would seem to be a natural subject for a first-rate biography, but for some reason that has not been the case. The best of a mediocre lot is perhaps Donald Clarke’s “Wishing on the Moon,” published in 1994. In this, Holiday’s centennial year — she was born April 7, 1915 — music scholar John Szwed has come forward with a new study, which he describes as not “a biography in the strictest sense, but rather a meditation on her art and its relation to her life.”

An anthropologist and onetime jazz musician who has taught at Columbia and Yale, Szwed is best known for his biographies of Miles Davis and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who traveled the country recording folk music. Szwed’s book on Holiday is a series of essays that does not purport to be a biographical chronicle or even a coherent narrative.

In his first section, Szwed seeks to correct public perceptions of Holiday, created largely through her often inaccurate 1956 autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues.” In the first paragraph of the autobiography, Holiday and her coauthor, William Dufty, memorably wrote: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was seventeen, and I was three.” Every “fact” in that sentence, Szwed demonstrates, is untrue. Holiday was born when her mother was 19 and her father 17, and her parents were never married.

Szwed revives several passages omitted from “Lady Sings the

Blues” for legal reasons, including evidence of Holiday’s apparent affairs with Orson Welles and with various women.

The most interesting sections of this diffuse and poorly conceived book are two chapters in which Szwed analyzes Holiday’s singing style. “Billie Holiday’s voice is odd,” he writes, “indelibly odd, and so easy to recognize, but so difficult to describe.” He shows how Holiday emphasized certain notes and words, how she deliberately lagged behind the beat as she sang, and how she took improvisational liberties with melody and meter.

Her singing may not have been acrobatic, but it was original, subtle and deeply communicative.

“Holiday’s songs get much of their affective and emotional power,” Szwed writes, “from her ability to create the feel of simultaneously speaking and singing.”

But illuminating passages like these are all too rare. Instead, Szwed wanders around the periphery of Holiday’s art without taking us inside. She is all but absent from one chapter about the history of blues and minstrel singing, but we learn more than we could ever want to know about vaudeville stars Eva Tanguay and Sophie Tucker. Elsewhere, Szwed writes that Holiday and Frank Sinatra were among “the first to use a microphone creatively,” without mentioning that Bing Crosby had discovered the intimacy of a microphone a decade earlier.

Szwed’s goal, he writes, was to use new archival sources to cast light on Holiday’s art, and to a certain extent he succeeds. But he also admits to a strange paternal instinct toward his subject: “I also found myself wanting to defend her, hoping to give her a new hearing in the court of biographical opinion.” In the end, like so many others, he fails to solve the mystery of Lady Day. For all the drama in her life and the magic in her music, Billie Holiday remains elusive and alluring, just beyond the reach of words. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Rise of the woman crush is about more than love LAVANYA RAMANATHAN is a features reporter for Style.

It’s not even Woman Crush Wednesday, social media’s designated day for women to fawn over the success and inner beauty of our gender. But we’ll say it: Amy Schumer, you are our spirit animal, the latest crush in a spectacular boom year for woman crushes.

When the star of Comedy Central sketchfest “Inside Amy Schumer” recently reenvisioned “12 Angry Men” as a jury of men deciding whether she was hot enough to be on TV, we shook our heads in empathy. When the 33­year­old comedian boldly twerked in that video lampooning America’s obsession with bountiful backsides, we totally died.

Kids, you can keep Taylor Swift.

A woman crush is the antithesis of bad blood. It’s unashamed gushing over the accomplishments of our fellow woman, with far more emoji than we could have imagined in high school. It’s wanting to elbow our way into Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s friend circle to bond over closing the gender wage gap and consuming carbs.

It’s seeing Schumer for all her wingwoman potential. “I love everything about you,” one of Schumer’s female followers coos on Instagram, where the comic has more than 400,000 followers.

“You literally are the most beautiful hilariously gifted woman on the planet,” writes another.

To crush is to want to borrow Mindy Kaling’s pencil skirts and tell off street harassers with Jessica Williams of “The Daily Show.” And yes, that is us all over the Internet posing like actress Anna Kendrick on the “Pitch Perfect 2” poster.

“They’re just like us!” we women whisper to each other.

Which is to say that they’re brilliant. They seem like they may, in fact, eat. When they vent, it’s quotable, often employing an emphatic F-word when one is called for. And when they refer to

the female anatomy — which is often — they would never, ever call it a “va-jay-jay.”

Our women crushes probably go to barre class or SoulCycle, or whatever it is that celebrities are doing now. But they never lord it over us; they don’t want to be at the gym any more than we do.

(Notable exception: Michelle Obama with those 35-pound dumbells, to which we can only say, “Yaaaaaaas.”)

A decade ago, all pop culture seemed to give us in the way of female role models were celebutantes and a drab political figure or two. Paris Hilton was lithe and blonde and a woman whose primary contribution to society was encouraging vapidness. Gwyneth Paltrow was kicking around, too, but it’s not easy to have the feels for a celebrity whose colon always seems somehow more perfect than your own.

Now, we have Amal.

Ah­maaaal. When we first discovered the ravishing creature that had ensnared George Clooney, it was hard to pick out precisely what it was that made her better than say, the statuesque lady wrestler Stacy Keibler.

Then we learned that Amal Alamuddin is a human rights lawyer. She advised Kofi Annan on Syria, speaks French and Arabic and somehow manages to

PHOTOS, FROM LEFT, BY FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES, CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS, LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES

From left, Mindy Kaling, Amy Schumer and Jessica Williams are some of the women crushed on by an adoring female fandom.

look like a gazelle in a Giambattista Valli minidress.

She’s in her 30s. At the Golden Globes in January, she flashed not her bare thigh but a “Je suis Charlie” button pinned prominently, unfashionably, to her clutch.

Hate her? Never. We want to be her.

Crushing might be explained by a millennial mind-set, which includes being more comfortable with our bodies and more inclusive, says Jeff Fromm, an author and millennial marketing consultant. Millennials don’t shy away from being complimentary, Fromm says, in part because affirming others can feel like affirming themselves.

Modern women and men are also looking for authenticity in influential people, Fromm adds.

“But they’re looking for more than that. They’re looking for uniqueness, meaningfulness and innovation.”

Perhaps that’s why the more these women speak out about the issues of the day, from racism to sexism to rape, the more they make us laugh as they’re skewering the old ways of

thinking, the more feverish the fandom becomes.

When Fox axed Kaling’s halfhour comedy “The Mindy Project” this month, her fans raced to social media to protest.

“So many people in the press call her a curvy girl or a different girl, but I think it is refreshing to see someone who is so confident about who they are. That’s something a lot of females really identify with,” says Mehek Seyid, 24, a human-resources professional from Toronto who took to her blog and Twitter to protest the show’s cancellation. (“The Mindy Project” was quickly picked up by Hulu.)

For Seyid, Kaling isn’t just an actress. She is the showrunner.

She’s a writer with a best-selling book; she’s a Dartmouth grad; she has been on two major network comedies, including “The Office.”

An ideal woman to crush on.

As for Schumer, she’s only getting started. This summer, she’ll star in the Judd Apatowdirected flick “Trainwreck,” which she also wrote.

Yes, we’ll drag our friends to go see it. Because Amy Schumer, we love you. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A better way to deliver innovation L. RAFAEL REIF is president of MIT.

In 2012, MIT researchers introduced a liquid-impregnated surface that made the inside of a bottle so slippery that ketchup would flow out freely to the last drop.

Today, LiquiGlide, the company spun out from this advance, has 30 industrial customers and has received thousands of inquiries from businesses that see new ways to use the technology, from IV blood bags to oil pipelines. The company, in which MIT has an equity stake, secured significant first-round venture funding this spring.

This is one way the United States’ innovation system works: Together, the public and private sectors make investments in higher education and scientific research.

(LiquiGlide emerged from research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department.) These investments spawn graduates and ideas that, through venturecapital-funded start-ups, pay off in innovations that serve society: the ultimate return on investment.

That system works beautifully for digital technologies and those tangible innovations, such as LiquiGlide, with market-ready applications. Generally, these are new ideas based on existing technologies. With a good shot of producing returns within five years, they are magnets for talent and venture capital — and eventually for big companies that

often buy the start-ups whole.

But this system leaves a category of innovation stranded: new ideas based on new science. Selffertilizing plants. Bacteria that can synthesize biofuels. Safe nuclear energy technology. Affordable desalination at scale. It takes time for new-science technologies to make the journey from lab to market, often including time to invent new manufacturing processes. It may take 10 years, which is longer than most venture capitalists can wait. The result? As a nation, we leave a lot of innovation ketchup in the bottle.

In the past two decades, and especially the past five years, the United States has undergone a profound shift in how it develops, adopts and capitalizes on innovation. Today, our highly optimized, venture-capital-driven

innovation system is simply not structured to support complex, slower-growing concepts that could end up being hugely significant — the kind that might lead to disruptive solutions to existential challenges in sustainable energy, water and food security, and health.

This is no criticism of U.S. venture capital, which does its job extremely well. Nor is it a plea for government-funded innovation.

Federal support is crucial for fundamental and applied science, which leads to new technologies and innovation. But government cannot effectively supply largescale, long-term funding for new companies and products. And it may be unrealistic to expect big corporations to patiently invest in technologies designed to impatiently disrupt them.

But the United States needs a more systematic way to help its new-science innovators deliver their ideas to the world. That calls for accelerating a two-stage process: from idea to investment, and from investment to impact.

To create a new way of supporting the first stage — from idea to investment — a coalition of funders from the public, forprofit and nonprofit sectors could work together to establish “innovation orchards.” These would provide what universities

alone cannot: the physical space, mentorship and bridge-funding for entrepreneurs to turn new science into workable products, up to the point that they meet venture capital’s five-year threshold for the journey from investment to an impact on the market. This would make investing in tangible or tangibledigital hybrid innovations no riskier than investing in the purely digital.

A second approach: Find ways to shorten the full span from idea to impact, reducing it from, say, 10 years to five. We could also speed the process by helping researchers more efficiently master the best practices of science-based entrepreneurship.

LiquiGlide’s founders did not wait to finish their scientific thinking before focusing on manufacturing: They refined the research and worked out how to scale up production in parallel.

There are, no doubt, other ways to address this lost potential; perhaps there are ways of applying crowd-funding, where the small scale of contributions would translate into nearly infinite investor patience. But to find solutions, we first need to recognize the problem. To tackle our biggest societal challenges, we need an innovation pipeline that delivers every drop. n

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY NICK ANDERSON FOR THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

A drug cartel’s power in Venezuela JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

Venezuela is afflicted with the world’s highest inflation, its second highest murder rate and crippling shortages of food, medicine and basic consumer goods. Its authoritarian government is holding some 70 political prisoners, including the mayor of Caracas and senior opposition leader Leopoldo López, and stands accused by human rights groups of illegal detentions, torture and repression of independent media.

All of that is now pretty well known, and it is finally beginning to gain some attention from Latin American leaders who for years did their best to appease or ignore Hugo Chávez and his “Bolivarian Revolution.” What’s less understood is the complicating factor that makes political change or economic reconstruction in this failing state far more difficult: The Chávez regime, headed since his demise by Nicolás Maduro, harbors one of the world’s biggest drug cartels.

Ever since Colombian commandos captured the laptop of a leader of the FARC organization eight years ago, it’s been known that Chávez gave the Colombian narcoguerrillas sanctuary and allowed them to traffic cocaine from Venezuela to the United States with the help of the Venezuelan army. But not until a former Chávez bodyguard

defected to the United States in January did the scale of what is called the “Cartel of the Suns ” start to become publicly known.

According to multiple news accounts, Leamsy Salazar has been cooperating with U.S. federal prosecutors who are developing criminal cases against a host of senior Venezuelan generals and government officials. Chief among them is the man Salazar began guarding after Chávez’s death: Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly and the second most powerful member of the regime after Maduro.

The day after Salazar’s arrival in Washington, Spain’s ABC newspaper published a detailed account of the emerging case against Cabello, and last month, ABC reporter Emili Blasco followed up with a book laying out the allegations of Salazar and

BY KAL FOR THE ECONOMIST

other defectors, who say Cuba’s communist regime and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been cut in on the trafficking.

That was followed by a lengthy report recently in the Wall Street Journal that said Cabello’s cartel had turned Venezuela into “a global hub for cocaine trafficking and money laundering.”

Cabello has responded with the regime’s most familiar tactic: an assault on the press. Last month he brought defamation suits against 22 journalists from three Venezuelan news organizations that published accounts of Blasco’s reporting, including El Nacional, the one remaining independent national newspaper. In early May, a judge imposed the penalty Cabello sought without bothering to hold a trial; the regime long ago captured the judiciary. The journalists were banned from leaving the country and ordered to appear for weekly court check-ins.

The order came down as El Nacional’s publisher, Miguel Henrique Otero, was traveling abroad. Last week he flew to Washington to seek support from the Organization of American States. The regime, he told me, is desperate to deflect the drug trafficking allegations, which could destroy what remains of its international credibility.

“This is a very serious blow to

the regime,” Otero said. “Their only way of combatting it is to claim it is a right-wing conspiracy directed in Miami and Madrid, and to say that the press that report the charges are part of it.”

It’s not clear whether or when U.S. prosectors will bring charges against Cabello and his associates, but arrests look unlikely. But the leaking of the cartel case and any charges, if made public, could divide as well as isolate the regime.

Cabello leads one of three “families” that Otero says are battling for Chávez’s legacy; the others are headed by Maduro and

by Chávez’s daughter. Only Cabello is linked to the cocaine shipments, and there are drug-free elements in the military leadership.

Like many opposition leaders, Otero is hopeful that Venezuela can resolve its crisis through democracy. If an election for the National Assembly due this year is held and is fair, the opposition should win handily. But Maduro’s term extends to 2019 — and those in the regime tied to drug trafficking, and vulnerable to U.S. prosecution, will not willingly surrender power. Could rival elements of the regime or military move against them? Says Otero: “The situation is so dramatic and so catastrophic that the probability of some kind of event occurring is high.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

Q&A

A beautiful ‘third act’: Recovery BY

Z ACHARY A . G OLDFARB

happen to Johnny now?” There was a very close family friend who really has been very helpful. Alicia has cousins who have been very helpful.

But they were really his main human connection.

S

ylvia Nasar lay awake many nights in the mid-1990s worrying whether any anxiety caused by the biography she was writing about the Princeton mathematician John Nash would make him lapse back into the schizophrenic episodes that ravaged so many years of his life. But the 1998 publication “A Beautiful Mind,” and the Oscar-winning movie of the same name instead became part of the long-running story of Nash’s miraculous turnaround.

Inthis“thirdact,”asNasarcallsit, Nash overcame mental illness, rebuilt his life and ultimately became an international celebrity known not just for Russell Crowe’s portrayal of him in the 2001 movie but also for his outsize contributions to mathematicsandeconomics,which had won him the 1994 Nobel Prize.

Not featured in the film, and lesser known to the outside world, was how he experienced day-to-day life, relishing the little things while caring for his son John Charles Martin Nash, known as Johnny, who also suffers from schizophrenia.

Nash and his wife, Alicia, died May 23 in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. On Monday, I talked with Nasar about their unexpected deaths and about Nash’s life.

Question: In the most recent edition of your book, you discuss how Nash’s story has the qualities of a Greek myth and a Shakespearean tragedy. His death with his wife seems, if anything, to underscore that. How do you see this in the arc of their lives?

Sylvia Nasar: The ending was

senseless because it was completely random. But very few lives have a third act, and it was the third act to me that made this story so unique. Most biographies of geniuses are of a meteoric rise and then the gradual or sudden fall, but Nash’s third act, starting with aging out of schizophrenia and the Nobel, was 20 years long.

Q: How did he spend the last 21

Q: Let’s talk about John Nash the mathematician. Why were his findings quite so revelatory?

SN: Game theory was invented

MONEY SHARMA/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

John Nash’s biographer discusses the genius’s family life and battle with mental illness years since he won the Nobel?

SN: The first time I saw him was

a few months after he won the Nobel, and he was going to a game theory conference in Israel. He was surrounded by other mathematicians, and he looked like someone who had been mentally ill. His clothes were mismatched.

His front teeth were rotted down to the gums. He didn’t make eye contact. But, over time, he got his teeth fixed. He started wearing nice clothes that Alicia could afford to buy him. He got used to being around people.

He and Alicia spent a lot of their time taking care of their son, Johnny, and doing the things that are so ordinary that the rest of us don’t think about them. Once I asked him what difference the Nobel Prize money made, and he literally said, “Well, now I can go into Starbucks and buy a $2 cup of coffee. I couldn’t do that when I was poor.” He got a

driver’s license. He had lunch most dayswithothermathematicians,reintegrating into the one community that mattered to him most.

Q: Most people may be aware of John Nash’s mental illness but may not know his and Alicia’s son also suffered from schizophrenia.

SN: Johnnywasvery,verybright,

but at 15, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He never graduated from high school, never graduated from college, but he was talented mathematically,notageniuslikehis father but very, very good. He managed to get a PhD, and this was 10 years into his illness, but he was never able to work, and he really never has responded to any of the available drugs, which of course are better than what was available when his father got sick.

The first thought that I had when I got the news [of the car accident] was, “Oh my God, what’s going to

Noble Laureate John Nash speaks about “Global Games and Globalization” during a function in 2007 in New Delhi.

by John von Neumann in the 1930s as a way of thinking about strategic behavior, but von Neumann’s theory concerned zerosum games, where either the participants had absolutely no common interests or their interests were totally congruent. In real life, especially in economics, neither of those situations are really found often in nature, not even between countries who are at war. What Nash did with was to show that in a situation where there are multiple players — even if they were not collaborating explicitly — there was an equilibrium: Players were able to do the best they could do, given what the others were doing.

Q: Moving back to the movie, what was your reaction to the way the film discussed schizophrenia and mental illness?

SN: What was the genius of the

movie, and this was a completely different narrative arc of the biography, was to let you see the world through Nash’s eyes in the first half of the movie and then pull the rug out from under the audience in the second half. Putting the audience in the shoes of someone who couldn’t distinguish reality — and in a way that sparked empathy and sympathy and understanding, rather than revulsion — was extraordinary.

I think that is why the movie translated so well to so many disparate countries and cultures. It was as big a hit in India and China as in Argentina and Mexico because severe mental illnesses are a problem everywhere, and finding a way to talk about them is very difficult. These families often suffer in silence because there’s no easy way to do talk about it. n

SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015

24

GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN.

It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $65 each Available online at wenwineandfood.com Presented by Foothills Magazine

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

Interested in having a booth at this event?

E-mail us at info@ncwwineawards.com