The Washington Post National Weekly - June 5, 2016

SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2016

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ﬔe Screen Age What it’s like to be 13 in the age of likes, lols and longing PAGE 12

Politics Trump’s management style 4 Food Utility of labels has expired 17 5 Myths The Stanley Cup 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Ryan endorses Trump — tepidly BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

how important these reforms are to saving our country. And we’ve talked about how, by focusing on issues that unite Republicans, we can work together to heal the fissures developed through the primary.

“Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives.

That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall.”

H

ouse Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) confirmed Thursday that he will be voting for Donald Trump in the November presidential election, ending a month-long game of will-he-or-won’t-he that concluded with more of a whimper than a bang.

Ryan tweeted out the news just after 3 p.m.

Eastern, just as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had begun her much-publicized foreign policy speech aimed at discrediting Trump. That speech was being carried live by all three cable networks and had the attention of the entire political world. That coincidence was not a coincidence. (Fix rule: There are no coincidences in politics.)

The message is clear: Ryan is voting for Trump because Trump told him he would support the Ryan agenda in the House. What that means is that Ryan isn’t backing Trump’s outlined agenda for the GOP and the country.

Instead, Ryan believes, Trump is endorsing his.

All of this mishigas — from Ryan's initial hesitation about backing Trump to his meeting in Washington with the real estate mogul — is evidence of just how painful, politically and personally, this is for Ryan. Trump represents so much of what Ryan has spent his time in office trying to move the Republican brand beyond — both rhetorically and on policy. At the same time, Ryan understands that Trump is the de facto leader of the GOP — for at least the next five months — and doing anything other than voting for him really isn’t an option.

Tim Miller, former communications director for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, put it nicely in this tweet.

I’ll be voting for @realDonaldTrump this fall. I'm confident he will help turn the House GOP’s agenda into laws.

And, Ryan was careful — both in the tweet and the opinion piece he wrote announcing his decision — to carefully walk the line between voting for Trump and endorsing Trump. Asked about the seeming inconsistency, a Ryan aide told the Janesville Gazette that “he said he’ll vote for Trump in the piece.

That speaks for itself, in our view.” Brendan Buck, a Ryan adviser, quickly clarified on Twitter: ANDY MANIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

We’re not playing word games, feel free to call it an endorsement.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday he’ll vote for Donald Trump.

Then there is the way Ryan cast his support in that opinion piece. Here's the key bit:

Supreme Court nominees he released after our first meeting was very encouraging.

“But the House policy agenda has been the main focus of our dialogue. We’ve talked about the common ground this agenda can represent. We’ve discussed how the House can be a driver of policy ideas. We’ve talked about

“Donald Trump and I have talked at great length about things such as the proper role of the executive and fundamental principles such as the protection of life. The list of potential

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This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 34

Paul handled a tough situation about as well as he could. But let’s not try to sell this farce that Trump will support House agenda.

Absurd What Ryan did is a kind of, sort of endorsement. At every turn, Ryan seems to be saying, “I am going to vote for him, but . . .”

Welcome to 2016. The “Okay, but” election for Republicans. n

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

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ON THE COVER Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where the teenager is, too. Photograph by VICTORIA MILKO for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Inside Trump’s campaign, an unending series of tests

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

The GOP candidate often plays subordinates off each other, but he’s always in charge

BY S EAN S ULLIVAN AND R OBERT C OSTA

F

or the past two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers.

But the tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major deci-

sions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.

Whether the drama of recent weeks has been cathartic or calamitous is an open question — and one that is increasingly important as the general election phase of the campaign unfolds. The tumult has often dominated news coverage, stepping on Trump’s own campaign message and averting the spotlight from missteps by leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.

“It is definitely dysfunctional compared to, say, Ace Hardware Store,” said David Carney, a veteran Republican political strat-

egist. But, he added, “it is not fatal in and of itself.”

Honed over decades in business and now suddenly under the glare of a national contest, Trump’s style offers a glimpse of the polarizing management techniques he would carry into the White House.

In fashioning his campaign after his real estate and entertainment projects, the mogul has inspired supporters and alarmed critics with his brazen moves.

“He’s always the man in charge,” said Edward Rollins, the veteran Republican strategist who is working for a pro-Trump super PAC. “From his people, he gets

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, seen at a May 27 rally in San Diego, doesn’t like to delegate major decisions and insists on a culture of loyalty.

what he needs. He makes them compete. Sometimes it gets the juices flowing, sometimes it spurs conflict. If he needs to, he steps in to settle it.”

Rollins pointed to the relationship between Trump’s 42-year-old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his 67-year-old campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as a prime example of how Trump handles people. While they have worked just steps from each other in recent weeks at Trump Tower in New York, the pair — contrasts in age, experience and personality — have a simmering rivalry over stature and responsibilities within the

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POLITICS candidate’s orbit. And Trump doesn’t seem to mind.

“One day, Manafort goes up and Corey gets set back. The next day, Corey can move up to the forefront. Trump is at the center, watching it all and seeing it all,” Rollins said.

Trump’s firing recently of Rick Wiley as his national political director is a case study in how being close to Trump is usually the best way to influence him. A mantra for Trump’s campaign advisers has long been, “If you aren’t close to the principal, you aren’t anywhere,” according to one person on staff.

The abrupt dismissal was typical Trump — reminiscent of his NBC television show, “The Apprentice,” which spawned the catchphrase “You’re fired!”

Wiley, who joined the Trump campaign in April with a headstrong persona and establishment pedigree, did not endear himself to many of the grass-roots activists and Trump allies who had been working for the campaign for months, including Karen Giorno, who started as Trump’s Florida director and is now in charge of 10 Southeastern states.

According to multiple people familiar with the situation, Giorno grew unhappy with Wiley throughout May, telling friends that he was unresponsive to her and, in her view, too forceful in asserting his strategy.

Eventually, Giorno voiced her complaints directly to Trump. It worked. Wiley’s exit was announced May 25. In a statement, the campaign said Wiley was “hired on a short-term basis.” Wiley did not respond to a request for comment.

Giorno said Trump’s loyalty “goes beyond anything I’ve experienced in politics.” She also described Trump as a boss constantly testing his employees and turning the tables on them.

“He’ll ask questions — and if you don’t know the answer, you can tell that he’s disappointed that you don’t know it,” she said. “But then, he’ll brief you.”

On Florida matters, Trump has always been “extraordinarily curious — tell me more about what’s going on in Florida; give me the snapshot,” Giorno said. “As I am telling him information, he’s actually feeding me more information.”

From his 26th-floor office in New York, Trump — who through a spokeswoman declined to be in-

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Trump functions simultaneously as his own big-picture strategist and micro-managing chief executive. terviewed for this article — is attempting to bend the nature and norms of a presidential campaign to his unpredictable and outsize personality, eschewing the topdown, consultant-heavy mode used by most candidates.

Rather, Trump functions simultaneously as his own big-picture strategist and micro-managing chief executive. He has gotten involved in intramural skirmishing that has engulfed his campaign, both stoking and calming tensions depending on the circumstances.

“His style can be what I call ‘hands off, hands on.’ He gives people space to think and work and doesn’t get involved in everything each day, but he is the kind of person who can swoop in in a second and change everything,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide who was let go from the campaign last year after disagreements with Lewandowski and controversy over past racially charged posts on Facebook. “He monitors it all and he comes to check in on things when you don’t expect him.”

Trump’s fondness for stirring

internal competition was on display during his Atlantic City heyday, when he pitted his casinos against one another — much to the dismay of some of the executives who ran them. Trump liked the sparring, while others worried about cannibalizing customers; in the end, for a variety of reasons, the three casinos went through corporate bankruptcies.

Trump’s method contrasts sharply with that of Clinton, who operates her corporate-style campaign from a sprawling headquarters in Brooklyn with legions of professional aides. Unlike Trump, her aides say, Clinton does not offer daily input on personnel or brewing internal debates.

“He takes in information from people around him,” Lewandowski said. “We look at that as surround-sound advocacy that gives him the totality of an issue. Then he is decisive. People shouldn’t be surprised he’s involved. Of course he’s involved. It’s his campaign and his money.”

Carl Paladino, a businessman and political operative from Buf-

Donald Trump’s national political director Rick Wiley, seen in April, was fired last month.

Reportedly, he had clashed with other members of Trump’s staff.

KLMNO WEEKLY

falo, N.Y., who is the co-chairman of Trump’s New York campaign, recalled when Trump called him ahead of the New York primary and asked him to take the position.

“He said: ‘Carl, let’s do it. Let’s go.’ He didn’t have to say anything else. He trusted me to do what he needed me to do,” Paladino said.

“He knows that . . . if you get in my way, I’m going to knock you down.”

Such general directives demonstrate the level of trust Trump regularly places with many of his closest supporters. He continues to have faith in them when they collide, as has been the case with Manafort and Lewandowski.

Manafort, who declined to comment for this article, was brought into Trump’s circle in March when Trump started to fret that he might be headed for a contested Republican convention and would need someone who could navigate that thicket. Last month, he was given the title of campaign chairman and chief strategist.

Manafort calls Trump “Donald,” unlike Lewandowski, who calls the candidate “Mr. Trump.” He also does more freelancing than Lewandowski in terms of building relationships and arranging his own media appearances.

Trump at times seem to play the two off of each other. Manafort appears to relish being a strategist and chairman more than the manager Lewandowski. Lewandowski, who prides himself on having been at Trump’s side since the campaign’s start, regularly takes the lead on overseeing events, operations and Trump’s travels.

Even as Manafort and Lewandowski seek to exhibit and expand their influence on the campaign, there is no doubt within the campaign that Trump is the ultimate arbiter. Sometimes that means drawing conclusions on topics that more traditional campaigns would outsource to aides. Other times, it means his counsel comes from just one person: himself.

“Trump is micromanager on the most important things but not all things,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and a Trump ally who has known and observed Trump for decades. “On the most important things, he realizes you have to be a micromanager. He’ll delegate to a point. He has in his head what he wants to do and his issues, and he’ll hold onto them instead of sharing those big decisions.” n

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POLITICS

DNC chair’s fight echoes rift in party She faces a primary challenger running a grassroots campaign — backed

by Bernie Sanders

J AMES H OHMANN Hollywood, Fla. BY

T

im Canova was driving from a rally against money in politics to a protest against chemical giant Monsanto last month when his spokeswoman called to tell him that Sen. Bernie Sanders had just gone on CNN and endorsed his long-shot primary challenge against the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

It was a rather big moment for a little-known law professor with a shaved head who, in another year, might not have created so much as a ripple for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is seeking her seventh House term and has won all her previous elections in landslides.

A few hours later, Sanders called Canova for the first time — and the next day signed a fundraising email for him. Over the next 48 hours, Canova brought in about $300,000.

Canova, 56, finds himself in the right place at the right time. Wasserman Schultz, 49, has become increasingly unpopular within the liberal base of the party — and among Sanders’s supporters in particular. Though she claims to be neutral in the presidential nominating contest, many Berniecrats believe that she has tipped the scales in Hillary Clinton’s favor. They see her, as they see Clinton, as beholden to wealthy donors and focused on winning elections at the expense of advancing progressive principles.

Since that’s what Canova’s campaign is all about, his bid has become a proxy battle for everything dividing Democrats this year.

“She’s emblematic of an establishment not serving the grass roots,” Canova said of his opponent during a two-hour interview as he sipped a shot of espresso in a bohemian coffee shop here, not far from the beach. “In a presidential election, a lot of people vote for Hillary because they don’t want to lose to Trump and they think she’s more electable. This is such a safe Democratic district that there’s less of that calculation. So it’s really pitting a progressive grass-roots campaign against a corporate ma-

WILFREDO LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

PAUL MORIGI/GETTY IMAGES FOR ELLE

Tim Canova, a university law professor running his first political campaign, is challenging Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) in her House seat primary.

chine. What’s it going to be? This is a fight for the future of the Democratic Party.”

Just as Sanders’s challenge has brought unwelcome attention to Clinton’s vulnerabilities, so, too, has Canova shined a spotlight on Wasserman Schultz’s weaknesses as the head of the DNC. Even if she beats back this August primary challenge, which she is ultimately favored to do, the ferociousness of the criticism has exposed her unpopularity within the Democratic grass roots. It has also raised the volume on the question of whether she should continue in her party post.

Sanders has focused national attention on the matter by declaring his desire to replace her.

For Sanders’s supporters, the list of Wasserman Schultz’s offenses is long. There was a primary debate schedule, with several weekend events, that seemed designed for as few people to watch as possible. There is the view that she overreacted to a party data breach by the Sanders campaign, after which he was cut off from a crucial voter file just weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The file is the party’s in-house database of information about likely voters, the lifeblood for any serious campaign.

In February, the DNC rolled back restrictions first proposed by candidate Barack Obama in 2008, banning donations from federal

lobbyists and political action committees. The final straw came last month when Wasserman Schultz faulted Sanders for his response to the chaos at the Nevada state convention.

And no one has forgotten that she was Clinton’s national co-chairwoman during her 2008 campaign against Obama. “If Democrats are unified coming out of the convention, it will be in spite of her — not because of her,” Canova said.

Canova is trying to figure out how to scale up a campaign apparatus to compete with one of the most powerful figures in Democratic politics. Obama has endorsed Wasserman Schultz, and Vice President Biden is coming down this month to headline a fundraiser for her.

Only a small slice of South Florida will vote, but Canova is doing everything he can to nationalize the race.

The Communications Workers of America and National Nurses United, two unions that back Sanders, have endorsed him. So has Democracy for America, an outside group that has been supportive of Sanders.

Wasserman Schultz responded by announcing the support of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. All told, Canova has now raised nearly $1.5 million. Like Sanders, almost all of it has been small-dol-

lar donations that were collected online. Most of it is from outside the state, but Canova says he won’t travel outside Florida for fundraisers.

After joining a union-sponsored protest outside a Verizon store in Pembroke Pines on a recent night, Canova went home to speak via Skype with a group of progressive activists on Long Island. They then made calls on his behalf into the district, canvassing registered Democrats.

“The eyes of the country are on this district,” he told 40 activists at the Verizon picket line. “We’re getting support from all over the country, but that doesn’t mean anything if we don’t convert it to votes.”

Even Wasserman Schultz’s allies acknowledge that the influx of cash has given Canova credibility.

But this is not the most fertile territory to sow the political revolution Sanders and Canova seek.

Clinton won the March presidential primary in the 23rd District with 68 percent of the vote, compared with 31 percent for Sanders.

The district is largely made up of the very voters Sanders has failed to make inroads with during the long nominating contest. It stretches along the coast and then covers lower-income inland areas: 38 percent of the district’s voters are Latino, and 10 percent are African American.

Canova, who teaches at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, decided to launch his bid back in January primarily because of Wasserman Schultz’s support for giving Obama fast-track authority to negotiate trade deals.

He opposes “open borders,” though he supports some pathway to citizenship. But the insurgent said he believes that Hispanics will support him once they hear that Wasserman Schultz took money from people tied to the payday loan industry and that African Americans will back him because he opposes the war on drugs. (Wasserman Schultz opposed a ballot referendum to legalize medical marijuana.)

Much of Canova’s campaign literature emphasizes his opposition to the nuclear agreement with

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POLITICS Iran, a position shared by many in the district’s large and active Jewish population.

Wasserman Schultz backed the deal.

Canova has held off hiring an admaker. Instead, he’s using the Sanders windfall to open four new field offices. He also had resisted hiring a pollster but changed his mind with all the donations pouring in. “We just got someone,” he said. “We’re going to start polling now.”

Wasserman Schultz is determined not to get caught flat-footed. Even detractors say she comes home fairly often. “This is not going to be an easy race,” said Mitch Ceasar, a national committeeman who was the longtime chairman of the Broward County party, “but Debbie is a very hard worker, and I’m sure she takes the challenge seriously.”

Wasserman Schultz’s campaign declined to make her available for an interview, but a spokesman sent the names of four local Democrats willing to speak about her — and made the point that Canova is a newcomer to Florida who doesn’t understand how deep her roots are in the area.

The mayor of Hollywood, Peter Bober, praised the congresswoman for being accessible and helping the city get reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I really don’t know who this gentleman is,” Bober said of Canova. “I cannot recall seeing him at city hall or a neighborhood meeting or any type of civic event. . . .

People recognize Debbie is influential, and that benefits the district.”

Canova acknowledges not having deep roots in the community and speaks openly about his transient career path. After working as an aide to then-Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), he practiced law at a firm in New York City. Then he decided that he wanted to teach.

He bounced around for years in search of tenure, living in New Mexico and California before landing in Florida a few years ago.

He has already taken an unpaid leave of absence from law school for this fall.

“If I don’t win, I’ll need the break,” he said. “But I haven’t really entertained the thought of losing. That’s not being cocky. It’s that you don’t want to do this if you dwell on losing. You’ve got to have a positive attitude.” n

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A growing concern: Chaos off the GOP convention floor E D O ’ K EEFE Cleveland BY

A

mid recurring violence at political rallies held by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, many local officials and activists are increasingly worried that this lakeside city is ill-prepared to deal with tens of thousands of protesters and agitators expected to descend on the Republican National Convention here in July.

Some worry that police might be overrun or that the city has not stockpiled enough water to hydrate the masses in the summer heat. Others, particularly on the left, oppose new restrictions that will be placed on demonstrators and object to the kind of militarystyle equipment that law enforcement authorities may use to control the crowds.

There is also unhappiness among groups on both sides over the slow progress the city has made in approving parade and demonstration permits with less than two months to go.

Under the threat of a federal lawsuit by some groups upset over delays, city officials in late May finally unveiled an official parade route and speakers’ platform in a major downtown park. Parades and protests will be allowed, but plans by some groups to bring in trucks, horses and, in one case, a giant bomb-shaped balloon might need to be rethought.

Mayor Frank G. Jackson (D) defended the pace of preparations, saying his office has waited “because we want to do it right. So in doing it right, you have to take your time to do it right.”

Derided as “The Mistake by the Lake” during its nadir, this Rust Belt city has spent much of this century bidding to host a political convention to showcase its economic revival. Local business leaders say the city could reap between $200 million and $250 million in economic activity.

But many locals now fear that the four-day event, which starts July 18, could be marred or even

defined by strife — and some accuse Trump of stoking the idea.

In March, when the possibility of a contested convention loomed large, Trump warned that “I think you’d have riots” if he didn’t get the nomination. He has not made such comments since clearing the GOP field, but many of his rallies — including events recently in California and New Mexico — have been accompanied by violent clashes between protesters and police.

TY WRIGHT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena will host the Republican National Convention.

Trump “set the stage for things to be difficult. They don’t need to be,” said Christine Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which is closely monitoring convention preparations.

So far, there are at least 10 applications on file for major parades, protests and news conferences beginning the week before the convention, including anti-nuclear groups on the left and a “YUGE victory celebration” for Trump on the right.

Larry Bresler of Organize Ohio submitted applications in March for a demonstration with at least 5,000 participants on the first day of the convention. He has not heard back yet.

“I think that their ideal thing would be for all of us to go away,” Bresler, the executive director of Organize, said of city officials.

Global Zero, an anti-nuclearweapons group, has filed plans to erect a large, inflatable rocket.

The Citizens for Trump group’s

declared plans include an “America First Unity Rally” at which as many as 104 trucks and 100 horses could show up.

Other events will push for more AIDS research, the end of federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and aid for the poor. There also are reports that members of the band Rage Against the Machine, rapper Chuck D and others might hold a concert here that week.

“We’re going to march with or without permits. It’s our right to do so,” warned Tom Burke, an organizer of the Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC. His group arranged similar protests at the GOP conventions in 2004 and 2008.

Matt Zone, a Democratic member of the Cleveland City Council and chairman of the Public Safety Committee, joined Jackson in defending the city’s deliberate pace, saying that significant security threats required caution.

“We have an obligation and a right to make sure that those who live and work here and those who are visiting are safe,” he said.

“Every permit is getting extra scrutiny and review, and we will approve when accordingly.”

With pro- and anti-Trump groups expected, Police Chief Calvin Williams said that there are plans to keep opposing groups apart to avoid any violence.

“We are prepared for this,” he said, declining to share specifics.

Williams said he will take cues from the U.S. Secret Service, which will lead dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies during convention week.

Like Philadelphia — which will host the Democratic convention the week after the GOP event — Cleveland is receiving $50 million in federal grant money to spend on security. Roughly $30 million will be used to pay for overtime and accommodations for out-oftown officers sent by other departments to help patrol city streets; $20 million will be spent on police equipment for convention security, including new riot gear. n

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NATION

A town torn by sex assault allegation R OB K UZNIA Dietrich, Idaho BY

T

he first child they adopted was a 2-year-old from the Marshall Islands who had rotten teeth and a large abscess covering the side of his face.

At the time, the family of Tim and Shelly McDaniel was still passably conventional in this nostoplight town of 330, surrounded by high desert dotted with sagebrush and cattle.

But since that first adoption in 2000, the couple has brought into their fold 19 more castaway kids from all over the country — most from troubled families, and half of them black. The McDaniels now provide their conservative, Mormon Country town with the entirety of its black population, save one mixed-race child from another family.

It is a town in turmoil, thrust into national headlines by a tale of racially charged violence and negligence graphically detailed in a $10 million lawsuit the McDaniels filed last week against the 230student school district. The suit claims that three players on the high school football team sexually assaulted a mentally disabled teammate — a son of the McDaniels — with a coat hanger, which they kicked deep into his rectum.

The three alleged assailants are white; the McDaniels’ son is black.

The McDaniels sought legal help soon after the alleged Oct. 22 assault, which the suit says followed months of escalating racebased bullying that coaches and administrators allegedly ignored.

“I needed to know how to keep him safe,” Shelly McDaniel said of her son, who was a senior. “And we were just shunned.”

The alleged assault and the lawsuit’s contentions have torn apart the once tight-knit community, revealing the challenges of raising an unconventional family in a rural small town and sparking the resentment of people who feel unfairly branded as racists.

“It’s a community on edge,” said Lincoln County Sheriff Kevin Ellis. “I think the way to put it is

KRISTIN MURPHY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

White high school football players charged with attacking a mentally disabled black teammate everybody feels targeted.”

The tormenters, allegedly led by football star John R.K. Howard, a transplant from Texas with ties to a prominent Dietrich family, forced the victim to recite words to a racist song, called him racist names and, in full view of coaches, physically fought him as part of a “toughening up” program until he fell down unconscious, the lawsuit claims. The players were expelled in November and criminally charged in March.

Howard and an alleged accomplice, 17-year-old Tanner Ward, have been charged as adults with felony sexual assault for forcible penetration with a foreign object.

Ward was bound for trial at a preliminary hearing in April; Howard is due in court June 10. A third defendant, 16, will be tried in juvenile court. No one has entered a plea yet.

“They’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boys who are doing what boys do,”

said Hubert Shaw, who owns the town’s feed lot and whose daughter-in-law is Howard’s aunt.

The McDaniel family began as a “Brady Bunch” unit — Tim and Shelly and their five biological children from previous marriages.

They moved here from Boise, Idaho, two decades ago, as newlyweds. Tim, tired of selling cars, decided to make use of his education degree and accepted a job teaching science at Dietrich High School.

Fifteen years ago, the McDaniels started adopting children.

The house felt empty to Shelly when her own children were off with her ex-husband.

“I told her to start saving up,” laughed Tim. “Adopting kids is expensive.”

Tim, 60, and Shelly, 51, now have 25 children in total. To accommodate the outsize brood, they purchased a fitting building:

Shelly and Tim McDaniel of Dietrich, Idaho, are suing the local school district, alleging that their adopted son was bullied and sexually assaulted.

the town’s former elementary school, right across the street from Dietrich High, now a K-12 school. They remodeled it into a high-ceilinged homestead that has housed as many as 33 people.

Right now, nine of the children live at home. Outside, the family keeps eight goats, 100 chickens, 12 dogs and five turkeys. Baskets of fresh eggs sit in the former cafeteria.

The McDaniels get state assistance for some of the kids they adopt. The amount depends on the child and the circumstances but caps out at $400 a month.

Three of the children currently are subsidized (by the state of Texas) for that amount.

The family didn’t set out to become so teeming. After adopting several children with severe needs, the couple developed a good reputation with adoption agencies, they said, and people began seeking them out.

“They will take kids no other family will take,” said Marti Wiser, executive director of SNAPS, an adoption advocacy organization in Idaho. “A lot of people might assume they are doing it to make tons of money off each child, but not in that family. I think it just began with a few children, and they just have big hearts and take them in.”

Among the 16 kids they adopted was the son allegedly assaulted in the locker room last fall. The Washington Post does not name victims in sexual assault cases.

Exposed to drugs and alcohol in utero and diagnosed with disorganized schizophrenia, he struggles to carry out tasks that involve a sequence. When writing the first sentence of an essay, for instance, he may forget the point of the project.

As a lineman with the football team, the teen could seldom avoid jumping offsides; the quarterback’s play calls confounded him.

Shelly says she first learned of the bullying in August through another son, 17-year-old Rasaan, the team’s manager. He told her some of the players would “hump” the backsides of him and his brother and other boys.

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NATION Then her son came home in October with his underwear torn by a “wedgie” that he said his teammates had given him in the locker room. Incensed, McDaniel said, she marched across the street the next day to confront the principal, Stephanie Shaw. McDaniel said Shaw instructed her to call the coach, Michael Torgerson. Shaw could not be reached for comment; Ben Hardcastle, the superintendent, declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. The three are among the defendants named in the lawsuit.

When Shelly asked Rasaan if he had been targeted as well, he told her about the alleged hanger assault on his brother. The couple took their son to the emergency room for treatment, and hospital staff reported the alleged sexual assault to the police.

Acey Shaw and his wife, Jalyn, took Howard in last year. He had moved “due to his inability to keep out of trouble in Texas,” according to the lawsuit. He has since moved back to Texas, where his mother declined an interview request.

Hubert Shaw said he didn’t know Howard well.

“I would guarantee that those boys had no criminal intent to do anything or any harm to anyone,” Shaw said. “Boys are boys and sometimes they get carried away. . . . Have you ever been popped on the butt with a towel when you was in sports?

“But I know all the coaches,” he said, “and they are high-integrity people, and they are not going to let anything happen.”

The town’s mayor, Don Heiken, said sports are everything in Dietrich — to an unhealthy extent.

“I think they oughta fire them all,” he said, referring to the long list of defendants in the civil case.

“When this happened, everybody just swept it under the rug. . . .

These two boys were the top players on the football team. [The coaches] didn’t want to rock the boat. They were having such a good season.”

But Heiken also said the entire town has been besmirched for the alleged actions of outsiders.

(Ward is from the nearby town of Richfield.)

The McDaniels are looking to move. They had considered it a few years ago, but the family decided to stay put.

Now, the McDaniels say, the town feels hostile. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Calif. drought hasn’t lifted, but water restrictions have BY

D ARRYL F EARS

T

hey told Vince Calcagno to cut his water use by more than a third last year as the desert summer loomed with its 112-degree highs. He stood near the swimming pool in his pretty back yard off a Palm Springs golf course and wondered, “How am I going to make this work?”

It worked as badly as he envisioned. After months of almost no watering, “the back yard looks pretty awful now,” Calcagno, a retired restaurant owner, said recently. “It’s brown and full of crab grass.”

In the face of historic and extended drought, state officials warned that this was Californians’ new reality when they imposed the harsh water restrictions on municipalities last June.

But their tough talk did not last long. Last month, the State Water Resources Control Board voted to end those restrictions and let 408 water districts decide how much water their customers should conserve.

The move has baffled many people. Moderate to severe drought still grips three-quarters of California, and studies show the state is the driest it has been in 500 years — in advance of a megadrought predicted for the entire Southwest, one that scientists say could last several decades.

Lax enforcement of customer water use has been a standing concern for years, critics note.

Some say the loss of millions of dollars in revenue because of the restrictions is why many water authorities pressured the board to reverse course.

“I don’t agree with the decision.

I think it was premature,” said Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research and policy group based in Oakland. “It’s too soon to talk about going back to our old wasteful patterns of water use. I think we’re sending the wrong message to water users.”

The control board explains its decision as a gift from heaven — a deluge of snow and rain that fell

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

Before the restrictions put in place last year, the Coachella Valley in California had the highest water usage in the state — and the nation.

this winter in the Sierra Mountains north of Sacramento. The precipitation filled several huge Northern California reservoirs that had fallen to historic lows when snowpack in the mountains measured zero for the first time after the end of winter last year.

Northern reservoirs funnel water to the southern half of the state through a complex system of concrete aqueducts.

“We want the people to know we’re adaptable to changing conditions,” said Max Gomberg, the board’s climate and conservation manager. “We don’t want to continue to impose the kinds of restrictions we had in place when we had zero snowpack.”

The board will continue to monitor how much water is used and how much is available in each district. It will step in again if needed, Gomberg said, adding that it hopes suppliers and their customers will continue to conserve.

Across the state during the past year, residents cut their usage by 25 percent compared with two years earlier. They ripped out lawns and stopped washing cars. They took shorter showers and bought waterefficient appliances. They saved so much that millions of trees are

dead or dying, and wastewater has slowed to a trickle, causing problems in pipes.

The state board let up on water providers and customers even as lawmakers in Sacramento are pushing laws to put more pressure on them.

In early May, the Senate passed a bill that provides for “public disclosure of water-guzzling households.” According to the office of Democratic Sen. Jerry Hill, who drafted the measure, “Water agencies would be required to disclose, upon request, the excessive users in their service area.”

Calcagno, who moved to Palm Springs from San Francisco 14 years ago, is now free to revive his dying yard, but he does not plan to do so. “Because of the drought and all that stuff, it does make me worry,” he said.

He has watched his neighbors switch to desert gardens, and he might, too. The ficus bushes that separate his yard from the golf course next door will also have to suffer.

“They were lush. They’re dry now. It doesn’t have quite that look anymore. I’m okay with that,” he said, noting that there is something more important. “It’s water.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

As tigers rebound, threats remain A report shows their numbers are up, but 6 tiger deaths at a reserve in India are a reminder they still face many perils

A NNIE G OWEN Pench Tiger Reserve, India BY

T

he tigress lay partly obscured by a lantana bush, attracting a crowd of nature tourists with safari gear and long camera lenses who assumed she was napping in the sun.

But when the tiger nicknamed Baghinnala didn’t move, park rangers eventually realized the awful truth — she was dead, along with two of her four cubs.

She had been poisoned.

The big cat had been a familiar sight at the tiger reserve in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, an area abounding in teak trees, spotted deer, langur monkeys and more than 40 wild tigers that is believed to be the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” She had been such an important presence at the park that villagers protested after her death and the safari jeep drivers briefly went on strike.

Baghinnala’s death, along with those of five other tigers from the famous reserve this year, has again focused attention on the perils facing the big cats in the wild, even as a new study shows the global tiger population rebounding for the first time in decades.

Poaching, loss of forest, encroaching development and a booming market in smuggled tiger parts in China continue to threaten the endangered animals, experts say, despite the encouraging comeback. Thirty tigers have already been killed by poachers in the first part of this year compared with 25 all of last year, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

“The biggest enemy is man,” said S.K. Patel, a deputy ranger at the reserve. He was working on a recent Saturday with his hand still bandaged after a swipe from a tiger startled out of the tall grass. He was feeling lucky to be alive.

A World Wildlife Fund report released in April showed that the

Wild tiger population threatened The global wild tiger population is estimated at fewer than 4,500, with about half of them in India.

India

2,226 tigers

Malaysia

500

Bangladesh

400

Russia

360

Indonesia

325

Thailand

275

Nepal

121

Burma

85

Bhutan

75

China

45

Laos Cambodia

25 25

Vietnam

10

RUSSIA

CHINA NEPAL INDIA

BANGLADESH

THAILAND

MALAYSIA

Indian Ocean Sources: Environmental Investigation Agency, Census of India (India), Global Tiger Initiative (Cambodia and Vietnam).

population of tigers in the wild is now 3,890 in 13 countries across Asia, up from an estimated 3,200 in 2010. Meanwhile, India — home to the vast majority of these tigers — has 2,226 animals in the wild today, up from 1,706 in 2010, a 30 percent jump.

Some experts have questioned the country counts, saying it’s far too soon to declare victory.

Smaller-scale, more-intensive studies at some reserves in India do show significant local increases, according to K. Ullas Karanth, science director for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Asia. But a true rebound over wider regions will take time.

“The recovery is very slow. It will take a couple of decades,” Karanth said. Further, he said, the methodology of the global report is questionable, particularly in countries such as Russia

INDONESIA

KEVIN SCHAUL/THE WASHINGTON POST

that still rely heavily on track marks for their counts.

Rajesh Gopal, secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum, a preservation group, said that camera traps have recorded more than 70 percent of the tigers in India and that others are tracked

by DNA analysis of scat and additional methods.

India’s tiger conservation program has been in place since 1973, and the animal remains both an important symbol and a key part of forest ecosystems across the country.

The government hopes to add five more reserves in the coming years and has taken steps to boost tiger tourism — launching a new luxury “Tiger Express” train here this month, for example. A 2015 study of six Indian reserves showed that tigers bring in $124 million to $262 million to

local economies.

Experts say that tigers are outgrowing about 40 percent of the country’s 49 tiger reserves and that this is pushing them into inhabited areas where they could be poached, hit by cars or trains, or killed by villagers.

Most of the tigers that have died here recently have succumbed while wandering outside the preserve’s core zone, according to Subharanjan Sen, the reserve’s field director.

One fell into a well, while another was ensnared in live electrical wires meant to kill boar and deer. Baghinnala and her cubs drank poisoned water that was also the work of hunters.

In April, two men were arrested after they killed a tiger and cut off its paws for a black-magic ritual. They were captured with the paws on their way to find a local holy man who could perform the ritual, which they believed would make them rich, Sen said.

Sen says that he has been “stretched thin” for forest guards — he has only 105, versus an authorized staff of 170 — and that those associated with Baghinnala’s death have been disciplined.

Five men were arrested, including one forest guard.

Inside the reserve, 115-degree heat did not dissuade crowds of visitors, who packed safari jeeps that buzzed along the dusty roads past herds of grazing chital, or spotted deer. After a while, news passed from jeep to jeep that a tiger had been spotted at a nearby watering hole. Several vehicles descended on the site — 40 people, one big cat.

The tigress — called Langri, which means one-legged or limp in Hindi, because she has a slight deformity in one leg — made her way slowly to the watering hole, then submerged herself.

After a time, she climbed out of the water and made her way back to a copse of trees, where she arranged herself in repose.

Now that she was out of sight, the tourists drifted away, and she had the forest to herself again. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

ISIS seems to be selling sex slaves BY

J OBY W ARRICK

T

he woman is young, perhaps 18, with olive skin and dark bangs that droop onto her face. In the Facebook photo, she attempts to smile but doesn’t look at her photographer.

The caption mentions a single biographical fact: She is for sale.

“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” begins the May 20 Facebook posting, which was attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young face with weepy red eyes.

“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads.

“Yay, or nay?”

The photos were taken down within hours by Facebook, and it is unclear whether the account’s owner was doing the selling himself or commenting about women being sold by other fighters. But the unusual posting underscores what experts say is an increasingly perilous existence for the hundreds of women who are thought to be held as sex slaves by the Islamic State.

As the terrorist group comes under heightened pressure in Iraq and Syria, these female captives appear to be suffering, too — sold and traded by cash-strapped fighters, subjected to shortages of food and medicine, and put at risk daily by military strikes, according to terrorism experts and human rights groups.

Social-media sites used by Islamic State fighters in recent months have included numerous accounts of the buying and selling of sex slaves, as well the promulgation of formal rules for dealing with them. The guidelines cover such topics as whether it’s possible to have sex with prepubescent prisoners — yes, the Islamic State’s legal experts say — and how severely a slave can be beaten.

But until the May 20 incident, there were no known instances of Islamic State fighters posting photographs of female captives being offered for sale. The photos of the two unidentified women ap-

ALICE MARTINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Hundreds of women thought to be held captive by the Islamic State face increasing dangers peared only briefly before being deleted by Facebook, but the images were captured by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit group that monitors jihadists’ social-media accounts.

“We have seen a great deal of brutality, but the content that ISIS has been disseminating over the past two years has surpassed it all for sheer evil,” said Steven Stalinsky, the institute’s executive director, using the common acronym for the Islamic State. “Sales of slave girls on social media is just one more example of this.”

Almani, the apparent owner of the Facebook account, is thought to be a German national fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, according to Stalinsky. He has previously posted to social-media accounts under that name, in the slangy, poorly rendered English used by many European fighters who can’t speak Arabic. Early postings suggest that Almani is intimately familiar with the Islam-

ic State’s activities around Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria. He also regularly uses his accounts to solicit donations for the terrorist group.

In displaying the images of the women, Almani advised his Facebook friends to “get married” and “come to dawlah,” or the Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria.

Then he engaged with different commenters in an extensive discussion about whether the $8,000 asking price was a good value.

Some who replied to the postings mocked the women’s looks, while others scolded Almani for posting photos of women who weren’t wearing the veil.

“What makes her worth that price? Does she have an exceptional skill?” one of his correspondents asks about woman in the second photo.

“Nope,” he replies. “Supply and demand makes her that price.”

The Islamic State’s leaders have historically used U.S.-based social media such as Facebook and Twit-

A Yazidi who had been held by Islamic State militants as a slave for several months sits in a tent outside Duhok, Iraq.

Two different Islamic State captives recently appeared to be offered for sale on Facebook.

ter to attract recruits and spread propaganda, but in the past year American companies have sought to block jihadist accounts and postings whenever they are discovered. Facebook in particular has garnered high marks from watchdog groups for reacting quickly to terrorists’ efforts to use its pages. But at the same time, the militants also have become more agile, leaping quickly from one social-media platform to another and opening new accounts as soon as older ones are shut down.

The Facebook incident comes amid complaints from human rights groups about waning public interest in the plight of women held as prisoners by the Islamic State. The organization Human Rights Watch, citing estimates by Kurdish officials in Iraq and Syria, says the terrorist group holds about 1,800 women and girls, just from the capture of Yazidi towns in the region. After initial denials, the Islamic State last year issued statements acknowledging the use of sex slaves and defending the practice as consistent with ancient Islamic traditions, provided that the women are non-Muslims captured in battle or members of Muslim sects that the terrorist group regards as apostates.

A report in April by Human Rights Watch recounted the ordeals suffered by three dozen Iraqi and Syrian women who escaped from terrorist-held towns in recent months. Among the women were former Yazidi sex slaves who described abuses that included multiple rapes by different men as they were sold and traded.

The problems faced by such women appear to be growing worse as military and economic pressure against the Islamic State increases, the report said.

“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yazidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Meanwhile, ISIS’s restrictions on [non-enslaved] Sunni women cut them off from normal life and services almost entirely.” n

VICTORIA MILKO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

COVER STORY

Virtually validated

BY JESSICA CONTRERA

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade. ¶ She says hello.

Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?” ¶ She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram.

A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed.

There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed. continues on next page

SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2016

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too.

She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it. She’s on it while her 8-year-old sister, Lila, is building crafts out of beads. She sets it down to play basketball, to skateboard, to watch PG-13 comedies and sometimes to eat dinner, but when she picks it back up, she might have 64 unread messages.

Now she’s on it in the living room of her big house in McLean, Va., while she explains what it’s like to be a 13-year-old today.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts.

The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

“I decide the pictures that look good,” she says. “Ones with my friends, ones that are a really nice-looking picture.”

Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable. Counselors are prying them out of Internet addictions. Parents are trying to catch up by friending their kids on Facebook.

(P.S. Facebook is obsolete.) Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts — everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

Right now, Katherine is still looking down.

“See this girl,” she says, “she gets so many likes on her pictures because she’s posted over nine pictures saying, ‘Like all my pictures for a tbh, comment when done.’ So everyone will like her pictures, and she’ll just give them a simple tbh.”

A tbh is a compliment. It stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.”

Katherine tosses her long brown hair behind her shoulder and ignores her black Lab, Lucy, who is barking to be let out.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say, ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ” Tbh, Katherine is both nice and pretty. She has the cheeks of a middle-schooler and the vocabulary of a high-schooler. She has light brown eyes, which she paints with makeup only for dances, where there are boys from other schools. Her family is wealthier than most and has seen more sorrow. She is 5-foot-1 but will have a growth spurt soon, or so said her dad, Dave, in a very awkward talk he had with her about puberty even after she told him, “Please,

don’t.” She is not sure how Converse shoes became cool, but it’s what happened, so she is almost always wearing them. Black leggings, too, except at her private school, where she has to wear uncomfortable dress pants.

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

Now she’s on her own page, checking the comments beneath a photo of her friend Aisha, which she posted for Aisha’s birthday.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

Rachel, Katherine’s au pair, comes into the room and tells her it’s time to get ready for basketball practice. Katherine nods, scrolling a few more times, her thumb like a high-speed pendulum. She watches Vines — six-second video clips — of NCAA basketball games while climbing the stairs to her room, which is painted cobalt blue. Blue is her favorite color. She describes most of her favorite things using “we,” meaning they are approved by both she and her friends: Jennifer Lawrence, Gigi Hadid, Sprite, quesadillas from Chipotle filled only with cheese.

Her floor is a tangle of clothes, and her bed is a tangle of cords. One for her phone, one for an iPod, one for her school laptop and one for the laptop that used to belong to her mom, Alicia.

A pink blanket with Alicia’s name on it lies across her comforter. A black and white photo of her mom on her wedding day sits on her desk. In a frame on her nightstand, handprint art they made together one Mother’s Day. Now, Katherine’s handprints are almost as big as her mom’s were.

The breast cancer appeared right after Katherine was born. It went away, then came back when Katherine was in third grade. In fifth grade, Alicia and Dave bought Katherine a cellphone, in case things took a turn. She was one of the first in her class to own one.

She signed up for Snapchat and Instagram, Twitter and VSCO. She stopped inviting friends to the house, because her mom was there, sick.

Last year, on a cloudy Thursday in March, Alicia died. Katherine won’t talk about it, today or any day. Not talking about it means she doesn’t need to think about it, except when the house is quiet and the thinking just seeps in. She doesn’t tell her friends how it feels. When she’s asked about it, she crumples. Her shoulders hunch, her eyes well, but no tears fall on her cheeks. Please, she would say if she were reading this, go back to talking about her phone.

L

ila can’t find her tap shoes, Rachel is sick, the dogs are waiting for breakfast, and Katherine is heading straight to the garage.

“Don’t you think you should eat something?” her dad asks, rummaging through a cabinet. “A breakfast bar?”

Katherine’s arms are crossed with her pastel pink phone case in her hand.

PHOTOS BY VICTORIA MILKO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

At top, Katherine Pommerening, right, talks to her au pair, Rachel, center, and younger sister, Lila, while looking at Snapchat on her phone. Above, Katherine plays Xbox in the basement of her McLean, Va., home — her phone always within reach.

“I feel like you should eat something before —” “I’m fine,” she says.

Lila comes down the stairs, wearing shorts and complaining she’s cold.

“It’s 45 degrees out,” her dad tells her. “Do you think it’s a good idea to wear shorts today?”

He turns back to Katherine, but she’s already gone, somewhere in the house, doing something, he’s not sure what, on her phone.

Dave Pommerening wants to figure out how to get her to use it less. One month, she ate up 18 gigabytes of data. Most large plans max out at 10. He intervened and capped her at 4 GB. “I don’t want to crimp it too much,” he says.

“That’s something, from my perspective, I’m going to have to figure out, how to get my arms around that.”

He says that a lot. He’s a 56-year-old corporate lawyer who doesn’t know how to upload photos to his Facebook page. When he was 13, he lived only two miles away. He didn’t have a cellphone, of course, and home phones were reserved for adults. When he wanted to talk to his friends, he rode his bike to their houses. His parents expected him to play outside all day and be back by dinnertime.

Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To Dave, it seems as if they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems as if they’re together all the time. He tries to watch what she sends them — pictures of their family skiing, pictures of their cat Bo — but he’s not

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15

COVER STORY could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname, and that was totally embarrassing.

Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.

Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.

Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who know what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.

She gets back in the car with a navy blue sweater. One small parenting win for Dave. He needs to figure out what Snapchat is about. And how to be a Washington lawyer and a single parent. And how to get them to eat breakfast and brush their hair and get to school on time.

He clicks on the car’s satellite radio and changes the channel from “60s on 6” to “Hits 1,” the station he thinks Katherine and Lila like. It’s playing Justin Bieber. He pulls out of the driveway and glances over at the passenger seat. Katherine is looking out the window, headphones on.

sure what her friends, or whomever she follows, is sending back.

He checks the phone bill to see who she’s called and how much she’s been texting, but she barely calls anyone and chats mostly through Snapchat, where her messages disappear. Another dad recommended that Dave use parental controls to stop Katherine from using her phone at night. He put that in place, but it seemed like as soon as he did, there was some reason he needed to switch it off.

He finds Katherine waiting in the car with two backpacks, one for her books and one for her laptop.

“What jacket are you going to wear?” he asks.

“I’m going to grab a sweater,” she says, as if she already had this plan before he asked. She heads back into the house, phone in hand, protecting it from prying eyes.

Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments.

Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like.

Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.

Or how at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she

At top, Dave Pommerening walks with Katherine. He tries to keep up with the technology his daughter uses, but it’s very different from when he was that age. Katherine’s mother, Alicia, seen with Katherine in the photo above, died in March 2015 after a long battle with breast cancer.

Katherine got a cellphone in fifth grade, in case her mom’s condition took a bad turn.

O

ne afternoon, Katherine accidentally leaves her phone in her dad’s car. She shouldn’t need it while she does her homework, but she reaches for it, momentarily forgetting it’s not next to her on the U-shaped couch.

Her feet are kicked up onto a coffee table, and her mom’s old MacBook is on her stomach.

She’s working on her capstone project, a 12page essay and presentation on a topic of her choice. At the beginning of the year, she chose “Photoshop and the media,” an examination of how women are portrayed in magazines.

She types into Google, “How to change Chrome icon.” She finds what she needs in seconds. The icon becomes pink. She flips back to the essay and copies a line into the PowerPoint presentation she will give in front of her classmates.

Photoshop affects women of all ages ranging as young as six and even to women older than 40.

Her mom used to have People magazines around the house, but now there’s only junk mail with her name still on it.

Katherine doesn’t need magazines or billboards to see computer-perfect women.

They’re right on her phone, all the time, in between photos of her normal-looking friends. There’s Aisha, there’s Kendall Jenner’s butt. There’s Olivia, there’s YouTube star Jenna Marbles in lingerie.

The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel as if she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says.

“I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of

KLMNO WEEKLY

sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Her scooter sat in the garage, covered in dust. Her stuffed animals were passed down to Lila. The wooden playground in the back yard stood empty. She kept her skateboard with neon yellow wheels, because riding it is still cool to her friends.

Katherine switches from her essay to Instagram, which she opens in a new tab. There’s a photo of a girl who will go to Katherine’s high school climbing out of a pool. A photo of clouds above a parking lot. A poorly lit selfie.

She flips back to her essay. There’s a section about how unrealistic portrayals of women lead to teenage eating disorders.

If you aren’t thin, you aren’t attractive Being thin is more important than being healthy Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty She found the words on a blog encouraging anorexia. Its pages were filled with photos of rail-thin girls and tips for how to stop yourself from eating. If she were to go looking for them, Katherine could find sites like this for bulimia, cutting, suicide — all the dangerous behaviors that are more prominent for teens who have been through trauma. She could scroll through them on her phone, looking no different than when she’s reading a BuzzFeed article.

In the past you have heard all of your teachers and parents talk about you. You are “so mature”, “intelligent”, “14 going on 45”, and you possess “so much potential”. Where has that gotten you, may I ask? Absolutely no where!

She copies and pastes some lines from the blog into her presentation. She has never dieted. But for some reason, she says, when she first found this blog, she just couldn’t get it out of her head.

O

n the morning of her 14th birthday, Katherine wakes up to an alarm ringing on her phone. It’s 6:30 a.m. She rolls over and shuts it off in the dark.

Her grandparents, here to celebrate the end of her first year of teenagehood, are sleeping in the guest room down the hall. She can hear the dogs shuffling across the hardwood downstairs, waiting to be fed.

Propping herself up on her peace-signcovered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs.

They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.n

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COLLECTIONS

Another museum like no other K AREN H ELLER Gettysburg, Pa. BY

I

n September, in the shadow of the historic battlefield here, twins Rebecca and Ruth Brown opened Civil War Tails, possibly America’s most whimsical war museum.

Their collection of scale-model battle dioramas includes Fort Sumter, the Battle of the Ironclads and their masterpiece, four years in the making, Pickett’s Charge, 1,900 cat soldiers in all.

Yes, cats, an inch or smaller, each one lovingly sculpted in clay by the 32-year-old sisters, then baked in a 225-degree oven. The choice of figurine was born of necessity more than devotion, although the sisters like cats plenty.

“We just don’t make clay people as well as cats,” Rebecca says.

But they were determined to have a museum. It had been their dream since they were middleschoolers and fell in love with history. They imagined a time when they could open a museum in Gettysburg to share their passion with others.

Their museum is certainly unique, but in the desire to create it, they are far from alone.

America is often depicted as a buffet of fast food and disposable culture, the shiny and new. But this is also a nation besotted with history, collecting and museums.

We have far more museums than other countries, somewhere between 28,000 and 35,000, depending on which museum organization is counting. This is more than double the number since the 1990s, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

And the list doesn’t include the opening last year of the Broad museum in Los Angeles, the new Whitney in Manhattan, and Ralph Nader’s American Museum of Tort Law (because, apparently, we didn’t have one yet) in Winsted, Conn.

This year is like the Museum of the Month Club.

The Met Breuer opened in March in the former Whitney. In April, the National Blues Museum blew into

MATT ROTH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A museum of tiny cat sculptures re-enacting Civil War battles? It’s both unique and not alone.

St. Louis. Come fall, Washington, D.C., with its mall of museums, will add the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a dozen years in the planning.

But our museumphoria is not fueled solely by the prosperous and the powerful.

In the land of opportunity, anyone can become a curator, and any home a gallery.

For every Met Breuer, there’s an institution like the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum. An East Harlem garbage depot is home to the Treasures in the Trash collection, 50,000 found objects — Tamagochis, Furbies, 8-track tapes — curated by New York sanitation engineer Nelson Molina. Off the coast of Maine, patrons can visit the Umbrella Cover Museum. Not the umbrellas, just the covers.

What’s behind this exhibitionistic zeal? Not to get too esoteric, but we are a nation that excels at saving stuff.

“The growth in museums,” says Marjorie Schwarzer, who teaches museum studies at the University

of San Francisco, “comes from nostalgia, nerds and natural collectors. Most people can’t collect a Renoir, but they can collect old hammers.”

Indeed, there is a Hammer Museum — not to be confused with L.A.’s Armand Hammer Museum — in southeast Alaska.

“People amass all this stuff,” Schwarzer says, “and where are they going to put it?”

Most museums fall into one of two categories, says Elizabeth Merritt of the American Alliance of Museums. She is the originator of the theory of omphalic museum classification or, in the vernacular, “How Museums are Like Belly Buttons,” a post she wrote for the website of the Center for the Future of Museums, of which she is a vice president.

“Outies,” she notes, “feed a need in the community, like children’s museums.” There has been a bonanza of children’s museums since baby boomers started breeding and looking for ways to stimulate their wee ones intellectually, while avoiding being dragged to the

A diorama of a Confederate campground is part of the Civil War Tails museum in Gettysburg, Pa. It is run by twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth Brown, who love history (and cats) and have long dreamed of having their own museum.

232nd Pokemon movie.

“Innies,” Merritt writes, are “often created by enthusiasts who are sure that other people will appreciate their passion once it is shared in the form of a museum.”

Civil War Tails is a pronounced Innie, based on the twins’ indefatigable zeal for the Civil War and their total recall of intricate military strategy and the lengthy biographies of countless cats, er, officers and infantrymen.

“We want to reach the younger generation,” says Ruth, a lawyer by day. Rebecca works as a waitress at a nearby hotel restaurant so she can man the museum. “If they don’t get the history bug, they’ll get the art bug.”

Or, failing that, “We’ll get the crazy cat people.”

The growth in museums is unlikely to stop, although a few do close.

Some regional institutions in areas hard hit by the 2008 financial crisis, such as the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science, have been shuttered because of a lack of funding. And small museums close because of limited interest or the creators’ inability to continue.

In general, however, “we’re only going to have more” museums, Schwarzer says. As the baby boomers age, where is their stuff going to go?

“There’s the food truck phenomenon of museums,” she says, meaning not literally trucks — although, who knows, there may be some — but that anyone with enough pluck and enthusiasm can start a museum. “We have more stuff, the entrepreneurial drive and the freedom to play around.”

Despite the quiet winter, the Browns remain undaunted.

They hope that the summer, with the July anniversary of the battle, will bloom with visitors.

The sisters are working on the latest diorama, the Battle of Little Round Top, the second day of Gettysburg.

Rebecca creates Confederate soldiers, while Ruth constructs the Union forces.

One thousand cats made; 4,000 to go. n

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FOOD

BY

M AURA J UDKIS

Y

our cheese says “best by.” Your milk says “use by.” Those cookies? “Enjoy before.” It’s “sell by” for the salsa, and “best before” for the butter. “Born on” for beer and “guaranteed fresh” for bread.

These imprecise directives, which are designed to tell consumers by when they should finish their foodstuffs, may soon be nearing their expiration date.

Legislation announced last month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) aims to put an end to consumer uncertainty about whether their food is safe to eat. With the Food Date Labeling Act, they have proposed standardized language for retail packaging: “Best if used by” to indicate peak quality for shelf-stable foods, and “expires on” for riskier foods such as raw meat, fish and eggs. According to food policy advocates, the changes would save millions of tons of food from going needlessly into the garbage.

In December, Pingree introduced the Food Recovery Act, comprehensive legislation aimed at addressing waste from farms, corporations and homes. Last week, she testified at what she called the first congressional hearing on the topic. The same day, other advocates, including such chefs as “Top Chef” judge Tom Colicchio, met with lawmakers on the Hill to urge support for both measures.

“For a while, we’ve been really focused on food safety. There was a sense of ‘When in doubt, throw it out,’ ” said Emily Broad Lieb, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “I think now we’ve woken up to this landscape of 40 percent of the food we produce in the U.S. gets thrown away.”

So how did we get here, where a consumer needs a linguistics degree to parse the minuscule differences between “Best by” and “Best before”? Consumers didn’t need expiration dates at the beginning of the 20th century, when they were more likely to live near farms and buy everything fresh.

As the distance from our food

The food is still fine.

It’s the label that’s well out of date.

ISTOCKPHOTO

Making a product’s life span clear on the package could keep it out of the garbage sources has grown wider, there was a greater concern about food safety. In the ’70s, each grocery store had a complicated system of symbols and codes to tell employees when a product would go bad.

“Even the store clerks couldn’t read their codes,” said Gale Prince, a food safety consultant and former director of corporate regulatory affairs for Kroger. So the industry voluntarily moved toward “open” dating, which made that information visible on the package in plain language.

Except that language wasn’t specified on a national level, leaving states to develop their own regulations. And thanks to some

fanciful brand copy on product packaging, it ended up not being so plain after all. Some labels were meant to indicate the date after which food could no longer be safely eaten, while others displayed the date after which the product would no longer be as good-tasting — but would certainly still be edible. Sell-by dates were meant for store staff to circulate fresher products onto the shelves, but many consumers treat them as expiration dates.

“Their first thought was giving the date to the consumer as a piece of information, but we failed to educate the consumer on what those dates mean,” Prince

$1,560 Average amount a family of four wastes each year on food thrown away, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic’s 2013 report on date labeling

KLMNO WEEKLY

said.

All of this meant more food in the trash. Among the figures cited in the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic’s 2013 report on date labeling: 91 percent of consumers reported occasionally throwing food out after its “sell by” date; fewer than half of the consumers surveyed could correctly describe the meaning of “sell by” and “use by” dates; each year, a family of four wastes an average of $1,560 on food that is thrown away.

“One of the most common arguments people seem to have at home is about whether or not food should be thrown out just because the date on the label has passed. It’s time to settle that argument, end the confusion and stop throwing away perfectly good food,” Pingree said in a news release.

The Food Date Labeling Act would standardize labels to “Best if used by,” a phrase that Lieb says consumers clearly understood as indicating that a product may not be totally fresh but was still safe to eat. (“Expires on” was the clearest language for perishables.) The act would also prohibit states from preventing stores or manufacturers from donating products for which the quality period has passed, which could put more past-date (but perfectly safe) boxes of pasta and cans of vegetables in food pantries and homeless shelters around the country. General Mills is among the food manufacturers supporting the legislation.

If the bill passes, companies would have two years to comply with the new labeling requirements. In the meantime, a small crop of websites such as Stilltasty.com can help customers figure out exactly how long their food will stay safe to eat.

And if you’re leery about the dates on your food, Prince recommends treating your kitchen like a grocery store clerk would: “Periodically, take a look at your pantry,” he said, “and if you’ve got some products that are in the back of your pantry that have been there for a period of time, maybe you should pull those to the front and use them.” n

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BOOKS

The life and survival of James Taylor N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

A MY H ENDERSON

A

SWEET DREAMS AND FLYING MACHINES The Life and Music of James Taylor

By Mark Ribowsky Chicago Review.

332 pp. $28.99

fter his 2012 reelection, President Obama invited James Taylor to perform at his second inauguration. It was a perfect choice because popular culture had already anointed the singer-songwriter “America’s troubadour.” To the freezing crowd gathered across the Mall on Inauguration Day, Taylor sang “America the Beautiful” in a reassuring tenor that radiated the warmth of hope.

The wonder was that the 64year-old performer was still alive.

Mark Ribowsky’s new biography, “Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines,” describes the harrowing life that Taylor led from the 1960s through the ’80s. Ribowsky is a prolific journalist whose previous work includes books on the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and Otis Redding. His portrait of Taylor depicts a performer who was “a perfect trademark” for the age of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Born into wealth but deeply insecure, Taylor found solace in addiction.

Somehow, he survived a decadeslong bout with heroin, episodes of depression severe enough for institutionalization and countless bad relationships.

Along with graphic tales of Taylor’s personal life, Ribowsky chronicles his survival as a musician during a generational change in rock artistry and the music industry’s transformation from 45s and LP albums, through 8-track tapes, cassettes, MTV videos, to iTunes. Taylor’s first big hit, “Fire and Rain,” soared up Billboard’s chart in 1970 as the musical landscape imploded. With the Beatles disbanding and Elvis headlining in Vegas, Taylor emerged as a reluctant leader of a new generation of rock artists that included David Bowie, Elton John, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. The 1970s became his heyday, and Taylor enjoyed such major hits as “Sweet Baby James,” “You’ve Got a Friend ” and “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You).”

But the dark side continued to

TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST

James Taylor performs America the Beautiful on the stage at the seond inauguration of President Obama.

lurk, as well. Irresistible to women and incapable of resistance himself, Taylor engaged in serial relationships, including a long involvement with folk singer Joni Mitchell and a difficult celebrity marriage to Carly Simon. There

Despite personal turmoil and a radically morphing industry, Taylor survived and triumphed.

were no happy endings. Mainly, he was hooked on heroin. He spent months in rehab but somehow continued to write music.

Despite personal turmoil and a radically morphing industry, he survived and triumphed. Drugfree since 1983, he has continued to churn out albums. He also tours extensively, most recently with Carole King, whose song “You’ve Got a Friend” was one of his earliest hits. Today, James Taylor is revered as rock royalty and has a career that spans several generations.

Based on fresh interviews with musicians, producers, recording executives and music journalists, this book is intended to be Tay-

lor’s definitive biography. Ribowsky is especially effective weaving Taylor’s career into the complex story of the music industry’s evolution.

His portrayal adds to Timothy White’s 2001 biography, but only sketches the performer’s 21stcentury role.

This is unfortunate, because Taylor’s status today is arguably more resonant than ever. After all, Secretary of State John F. Kerry invited Taylor to sing “You’ve Got a Friend” to the French after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killings. n Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery and writes frequently about media and culture.

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BOOKS

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Irresistible puzzle wrapped in satire

Finding joy in everyday delights

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

N

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

oah Hawley’s terrific thriller “Before the Fall” begins one August evening as a private plane awaits passengers on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard. The plane has been chartered by David Bateman, a Republican political kingmaker who has founded a wildly profitable — and proudly right-wing — cable news network. Bateman is traveling with his wife, Maggie, the couple’s two young children, the family’s Israeli-born bodyguard, a friend who’s a financier facing indictment for money laundering, and a modestly successful painter to whom Maggie offered a flight back to the city.

Just before takeoff, the author tells us: “As she does at a thousand random moments out of every day, Maggie feels a swell of motherly love, ballooning and desperate.

They are her life, these children.”

After that lovely moment comes a punch: “None of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.”

Crash it does, and soon readers and federal officials alike are struggling to understand why. It’s an irresistible mystery and, for the icing on his fictional cake, Hawley adds a satirical portrait of a cable news star named Bill Cunningham that will delight some readers and outrage others.

Moments after the crash, Scott, the painter, struggling in the water amid burning debris, fearing sharks, sees no other survivors. A competitive swimmer in his youth, he heads in what he hopes is the direction of Martha’s Vineyard, only to find the Batemans’ 4-year-old son, JJ, clinging to a seat cushion. Miraculously, swimming for hours in the dark and cold, Scott carries the boy to safety.

As news of the disaster spreads, Scott is hailed as a hero. The National Transportation Safety Board questions him with respect, but then a hostile FBI agent sniffs terrorism and suggests that Scott might have somehow caused the crash. What was a penniless paint-

er doing on the plane, he demands.

Was he having an affair with Mrs. Bateman?

The agent’s insinuations are broadcast nationally by Cunningham, whom Bateman had transformed from a washed-up reporter into a $10 million-a-year cable superstar. Cunningham, an “angry white guy” who claims to speak for the Average Joe, warns his millions of followers that the crash is “an act of terrorism, if not by foreign nationals then by certain elements of the liberal media.”

He sees Scott as a loser, a nobody, yet somehow central to the conspiracy. The question becomes whether Scott, having survived the ocean’s sharks, can survive those of the cable-news universe.

Scott has bonded with JJ, who rarely speaks to anyone else. The boy has gone to live with his mother’s sister, Eleanor, a good woman who’s married to a jerk. The husband is indifferent to the boy but thrilled at the prospect of controlling the fortune the child has inherited. Scott is increasingly focused on both the boy and Eleanor, even as the FBI threatens to arrest him.

NTSB officials launch an intensive search for the bodies of missing passengers, as well as for the plane, the black box and cockpit voice recorder they hope will explain the crash. What caused this tragedy? Did the Bateman plane malfunction? Was it targeted by a missile? Was a bomb hidden aboard, perhaps by enemies of the network or by co-conspirators in the money laundering scheme? Or might someone on the plane have deliberately caused the disaster?

Readers can look for clues in chapters devoted to the background of each passenger and the plane’s three-member crew.

Hawley, the author of four other novels and the creator of the TV show “Fargo,” has spun a tale that’s an intriguing puzzle, a tasty satire and a painful story of loss. n Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

F BEFORE THE FALL

By Noah Hawley Grand Central. 400 pp. $26

UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES

By Adam Phillips Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

198 pp. $25

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S . R OTH

ew modern thinkers claim to know what’s best for everyone, but many weigh in on what’s strictly forbidden. Sigmund Freud most famously underscored how those things declared off-limits were always magnets for desire. People never bother to prohibit things they don’t want, he insisted, and the deepest taboos are expressions of our most intense longings. The idea of repression was the cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalytic edifice. Investigating that which is most firmly repressed leads to understandings of what really drives a person.

Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst, but in his latest book, “Unforbidden Pleasures,” he means to guide us away from Freud’s focus on dark places of prohibition and toward a receptiveness to the ways we take pleasure in the people and things around us. “To forbid something is to make it unforgettable . . . to coerce attention and to guarantee interest,” Phillips writes. Instead of requiring people to remember what they must never do, what if one instead helped them develop capacities to do the things that bring them satisfaction? Following Oscar Wilde, Phillips encourages his readers to explore new habits and possibilities without worrying too much about violating rules, or even being consistent with ourselves. “Once we start having it both ways we can see how many ways there may be.”

This sunny approach opposes Freud’s pessimism about our conflicted and violent desires that fight against one another and against the world. It is also far removed from American psychology’s recent notions that happiness is gained by learning to feel better about ourselves and the way things are. Phillips wants us not necessarily to be more satisfied with the status quo but to be more open to the changes already in the air around us. He quotes the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell, who writes that we “want

the world and want it to change.”

Psychoanalysis traditionally “involves talking about what we must not do, with a view to reconsidering whether or not we should do it.”

But from Phillips’s perspective, following the rules is overrated.

When we can give up our rules and our wounds, we are in the territory of the unforbidden. Here we no longer talk about those things we wouldn’t dream of doing while longing to do them. Phillips would have us attend more to what we are already doing to find joy and comfort, without imagining ourselves as other, better human beings. Maybe our ordinary pleasures — our conversations, our friendships, our work and play — can sustain us without imagining them against a range of prohibited delights.

Phillips has, one might say, confidence in the ordinary. That’s why he is so taken with Hans Monderman’s experiment in some Dutch neighborhoods to remove traffic lights and replace them with traffic circles. The “counter-intuitive traffic engineer” saw a sharp decline in accidents when drivers no longer had stop and go signals telling them what to do and instead had to use their own judgment in shared social spaces. Monderman compared this to an ice skating rink on which the skaters figure out how to keep moving without colliding with one another.

Phillips wants us to see that we get stuck in a sorrowful dynamic of obedience and transgression when we assume that our deepest desires are for the most forbidden fruit. “The tyranny of the forbidden is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we want — to do the forbidden thing. The unforbidden gives no orders,” he writes. n Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”

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OPINIONS

In Clinton White House, Bill should pick out china JILL FILIPOVIC is a journalist and lawyer.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, she won’t be the only Clinton making gender history: Her husband, Bill, will take his place as the first “first gentleman.”

Lest voters get nervous, Hillary has pledged that Bill wouldn’t be on traditional first lady duty — he’d be in charge of fixing the economy, not picking out the flowers and china for state dinners.

But why shouldn’t he pick the china? If one goal of a Hillary Clinton presidency is to challenge traditional gender roles, then her husband should flout them, too.

The best way he could do that is by taking on the domestic issues facing women and children that are too often derided as “softer” than economic or foreign policy topics — and, yes, doing the stereotypically feminine work of party planning and decorating, too. A first man managing the White House household would be just as groundbreaking as a female president.

The role of the first lady has always been high-profile. Her top duty has traditionally been to serve as a hostess, tending to the homebound aspects of White House life — planning state dinners, decorating, gardening and, more recently, tackling fairly uncontroversial issues such as literacy and children’s health. A few have been rebels. But by and large, first ladies have stayed out of male-dominated policy spaces, at least in the public eye.

Until first lady Hillary Clinton.

Presidents’ wives “have had significant roles in varying ways, but Hillary was really different,” taking on health-care reform as a major policy initiative, said Karen Blumenthal, a journalist and the author of “Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History.” “Once it failed, she didn’t just go back to picking the silver and the menus. She becomes something of a foreign emissary,

she goes to countries that Bill doesn’t go to but where it’s valuable for there to be an American presence.”

Clinton became a vocal advocate for women’s rights overseas, against the advice of her husband’s aides. She worked with Republican and Democratic senators to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and pushed her husband’s administration to fund and implement it.

And she faced enormous backlash. During Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, she was routinely compared to Lady Macbeth and denounced as a “rogue feminist.” Attacked for her thriving legal career, she defended herself by saying that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession” — and was swiftly pilloried.

Once Bill was in office, opposition to Hillary’s role in health-care reform, which was quickly branded “Hillarycare,” stemmed partly from the perception that she was straying from a first lady’s proper role. By the time her husband was embroiled in a sex scandal, Hillary had scaled back her domestic policy objectives, advocating for Bill as the House impeached him and the Senate voted to keep him in office. She also campaigned, often behind the scenes, for the rights of women and children. Her

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Bill and Hillary Clinton meet fans in Philadelphia in April. If Hillary Clinton is elected, they would both be able to upend stereotypes.

approval ratings soared.

It was clear in the 1990s that many Americans were uncomfortable with a break from tradition in what is our most public of traditional female roles.

People now also seem uncomfortable with the idea of Bill Clinton, once the most powerful man in the world, doing what’s always been seen as women’s work. Articles questioning the place of Hillary’s husband in a second Clinton White House abound, taking for granted that the usual duties are beneath him: It would be an insult to have a man of such experience and intellect using his expertise to promote a lightweight issue such as children’s health, or doing something as frivolous as deciding between gold-rimmed plates and silver-detailed ones.

This surely isn’t because we discourage frivolity or interest in aesthetics and entertaining in men — if that were true, the world would lack golf courses and sports cars. It isn’t because keeping the very young alive and thriving is inherently less valuable, or figuring out how to get there less complicated, than debating the merits of this tax policy or that infrastructure project.

It’s because we associate things like selecting flowers and caring for children with women — and so we’re okay with first ladies advocating on women’s and children’s issues, but not much

else. Culturally, we have a deeply ingrained, often subconscious contempt for women and for the things women do. That’s why when something is marked “feminine,” it becomes humiliating or emasculating for a man to do it.

Despite her clear preference for substantive policy work, Hillary Clinton also handled all the traditional first lady duties: hosting parties, overseeing White House renovations, hiring a chef, championing American historical treasures. If he really wants to challenge gender divides, Bill Clinton should take on these traditionally female obligations.

He would send a powerful message: There’s no such thing as “women’s work” and “men’s work,” “women’s issues” and “hard issues.” And the aesthetic, domestic and social labor women have long done in the White House — indeed, the labor they have long done in many houses, with smaller budgets and fewer flower arrangements — is valuable, too.

If they make it to the White House, both Clintons have an opportunity to break political molds as old as America itself.

Hillary’s attempts to challenge stereotypes have sometimes been imperfect. But largely, she’s dedicated herself to improving women’s lives, and she is a living icon of what smart, determined, feminist women can achieve.

She’s done her part. It’s time for Bill to do his. n

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OPINIONS

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TOM TOLES

Egypt’s long war on U.S. values JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post.

Last month, the United States delivered the first batch of 762 MineResistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to Egypt free of charge.

That’s on top of the $1.3 billion in military aid the Obama administration has allocated to the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sissi this year. The White House refuses to condition these gifts on an improvement in Egypt’s horrendous human rights record. So I’m here with a more modest proposal: Obama should ask Sissi to publicly explain how the MRAPs fit into the “fourth-generation war.”

Most people are unfamiliar with that esoteric term — unless they have been following the rhetoric of Egypt’s military leaders since the coup of 2013.

Fourth-generation warfare, Sissi once explained to cadets at Egypt’s military academy, occurs when “modern communication channels, psychology and the media are . . . deployed to create divisions and harm Egypt from within,” according to the website Mada Masr.

Who is the enemy in this war?

According to the Egyptian military, that would be the United States — the same country providing the army with those free armored vehicles and billions in aid. In March, the Defense Ministry’s Nasser Military Academy briefed the parliament about fourth-generation warfare.

According to the outline, reported

by Mada Masr, the subjects included “Egypt’s defense strategy and Western plans to divide the Middle East.”

Pro-regime propagandists are far more explicit. Amr Ammar, a frequent guest on state television, has written that Egypt’s 2011 popular revolution was actually a U.S. plot to destroy Egypt for Israel’s benefit. He calls it “the Hebrew Spring.”

Some might dismiss this antiAmerican ranting as harmless rhetoric for internal consumption. In fact, it is not. We know that because the military has been acting on its theories.

Among other steps, it has launched an offensive against those allegedly dollar-supported nongovernmental organizations.

In March, prosecutors reopened a 2011 court case against a number of human rights groups, banning

their leaders from leaving the country and asking a judge to freeze their personal assets.

During the first round of the case, the regime directly targeted U.S. organizations such as the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, forcing them to shut down their operations and pull their staff out of the country. Now it is prosecuting people such as Hossam Bahgat, the founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which recently reported on the regime’s persecution of gay people; Gamal Eid, the executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information; and Bahey eldin Hassan, the founder of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

Observers of Egypt might wonder why Sissi, who claims to be fighting the Islamic State and other Muslim extremists, would devote himself to prosecuting secular human rights activists as well as journalists and left-wing politicians who despise jihadism.

The answer is simple: It’s all part of fighting the fourth-generation war. The ultimate enemy in this war is not Sunni extremism but Western liberalism — headed by the United States.

As the Egyptian generals see it, they use the tanks and mineresistant vehicles and F-16s

supplied by Washington to fight the Islamic State on one front, in the Sinai Peninsula. Meanwhile, they direct their intelligence services and prosecutors to assault America’s subversive agents in Cairo. There is no contradiction, so long as the U.S. administration doesn’t object and the military aid isn’t endangered. And the Obama administration doesn’t object.

The problem with this is that U.S. support of the Egyptian military is serving to destroy U.S. relations with Egypt. Secular supporters of democracy and human rights, our natural allies, are being crushed. Meanwhile, Egyptians are being fed propaganda describing the United States as the sponsor of a massive plot to divide and destroy the country. From Washington’s point of view, it seems like a poor return on one of the largest aid packages in the world.

That’s why an Egyptian activist I know recently offered a friendly suggestion. Tell the generals that future U.S. aid will depend on a prime-time televised statement

by Sissi, in Arabic, assuring Egyptians that the United States is not plotting to destroy the country and has nothing to do with a “fourth-generation war.”

It doesn’t seem like much to ask in exchange for 762 free MRAPs. n

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OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

A better way to curb prostitution JIMMY CARTER is the 39th president of the United States and founder of the nonprofit Carter Center.

It is disturbing that some human rights and public health organizations are advocating the full legalization of the sex trade, including its most abusive aspects. I agree with Amnesty International, UNAIDS and other groups that say that those who sell sex acts should not be arrested or prosecuted, but I cannot support proposals to decriminalize buyers and pimps.

Some assert that this “profession” can be empowering and that legalizing and regulating all aspects of prostitution will mitigate the harm that accompanies it. But I cannot accept a policy prescription that codifies such a pernicious form of violence against women. Normalizing the act of buying sex also debases men by assuming that they are entitled to access women’s bodies for sexual gratification. If paying for sex is normalized, then every young boy will learn that women and girls are commodities to be bought and sold.

There is a much better policy option.

In my 2014 book “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power,” I described the approach known as the “Nordic model,” which is consistent with advancing human rights and healthy

societies. Pioneered in Sweden and adopted most recently in Canada and France, this strategy involves decriminalizing prostituted women and offering them housing, job training and other services. Instead of penalizing the victims, however, the approach treats purchasing and profiting from sex acts as serious crimes. Another key component is public education about the inherent harms of prostitution for those whose bodies are sold.

In Sweden, demand for prostitution has fallen dramatically under this model.

Conversely, Germany and New Zealand, which have legalized all aspects of prostitution, have seen an increase in sex trafficking and demand for sexual services.

Critics of the Nordic model assert that mature adults should be free to exchange money for sex. This argument ignores the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY BAGLEY FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

power imbalance that defines the vast majority of sex-for-cash transactions, and it demeans the beauty of sexual relations when both parties are respected.

Sex between people who experience mutual enjoyment is a wonderful part of life. But when one party has power over another to demand sexual access, mutuality is extinguished, and the act becomes an expression of domination. As author and prostitution survivor Rachel Moran explained in her book, “Paid For,” once money has exchanged hands, a woman must deliver whatever service the customer demands.

In May 2015, when the Carter Center held a global summit to end sexual exploitation, sextrade survivors, including Moran, described their painful journeys through exploitation.

They told of the abuse they suffered — abuse that should be understood as torture. They expressed their determination to speak not only for themselves but also for those who are either too traumatized to come forward or who perished as a result of homicide, suicide, drug abuse or disease. They compare their movement to the abolition of slavery, an institution that once also seemed like a permanent fixture in society.

Prostitution is not the “oldest profession,” as the saying goes; it’s the oldest oppression.

Those survivors told us that they once believed that selling sex was their choice but that this attitude was a requirement for survival — that only once they were fully free from the fetters of the trade were they able to fully understand their lack of choice.

If full legalization is adopted, it will not be the “empowered sex worker” who will be the norm — it will be the millions of women and girls needed to fill the supply of bodies that an unlimited market of consumers will demand. Where do we think these young girls in the sex trade will come from? (Most victims are girls, though some boys are exploited, too.) It is simply naive to oppose sex trafficking of children and women and at the same time support decriminalizing the buyers who create the demand and the pimps who profit from the supply of girls and women.

I believe it is better to help women and girls avoid a life of prostitution and to deter men from buying sex acts.

We must not abandon the equal dignity of each human being by simply regulating a form of abuse. There is a better way. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Stanley Cup BY

J OHN U . B ACON

Of the nation’s four major sports, hockey ranks last in popularity. But its championship trophy, the Stanley Cup, is arguably the most famous of the batch. The Stanley Cup is the only one of the four trophies that isn’t replaced every year, and it has generated more myths than the three others combined. With the San Jose Sharks and the Pittsburgh Penguins now vying for the trophy, here are some of the biggest myths.

1

There’s only one Stanley Cup.

There are actually three.

After Queen Victoria appointed Lord Stanley of Preston to become Canada’s governor general in 1888, he and his children were quick converts to the sensation sweeping the nation: ice hockey. In 1892, he purchased a fancy punch bowl from Sheffield, England, for about $1,200 in today’s dollars, to be awarded to Canada’s best hockey team. The Hall of Fame shows off this fragile gem in a climatecontrolled case.

After adding a series of rings to list all the winners, the trophy was nicknamed “The Stovepipe Cup.” In 1947, the National Hockey League replaced this somewhat silly-looking trophy with the redesigned Presentation Cup, which is the one players parade around the ice today. Since 1995, each player on the winning team has gotten custody of the cup for a day or two. During those stops, the cup has been used for everything from a baptismal font to a dog’s food dish to a prop for the dancers at an Edmonton strip club.

Because the Presentation Cup travels about 300 days a year, the Hall of Fame created a third trophy in 1993, the Replica Cup, to keep on permanent display.

2

The NHL owns the Stanley Cup.

Actually, the cup predates the NHL, and the league doesn’t own it.

Originally, Lord Stanley wanted the cup to go to Canada’s top amateur team. By 1915, the

cup’s trustees made the competition a playoff between the champions of two professional leagues: the National Hockey Association (NHA) and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA). But the NHA was replaced by the newly formed NHL in 1917, and the PCHA merged with the Western Hockey League, which folded in 1926. The NHL was the last league standing, and the cup became its de facto trophy.

Although the trustees ceded control of the trophy to the NHL in 1947, they did not cede ownership.

This distinction came to light in 2005, when the NHL canceled the 2004-05 season because of a lockout. A group of disgruntled fans filed suit against the cup’s trustees during the lockout to go back to the original arrangement and allow teams from other leagues to challenge for it. This resulted in an odd settlement: If the league canceled the playoffs again, an Ontario court ruled, the trustees could award the trophy to a team outside the NHL, although the trustees have asserted they wouldn’t be required to.

3

All the winners names are on the cup.

The Stanley Cup is the only major team trophy with winners’ names engraved on it — and not just the teams. The cup lists players, team owners, presidents, general managers, coaches, assistant coaches, even trainers — more than 2,200 names in all.

But many of the early champions didn’t even get their

EZRA SHAW/ALLSPORT VIA GETTY IMAGES

Phil Pritchard is known as the “Keeper of the Stanley Cup,” because he shepherds it around the world with players from the teams that win it.

Here, he relaxes with the cup in 1997 on the way to Russia.

team’s name on the cup. They didn’t start adding players’ names until 1925. And after Detroit piled 55 names on in 1998, the limit was set at 52. Today, players must have played 41 games (half the regular season) or one game in the Stanley Cup finals, and nonplayers must be officially linked to the club. As a result, a few folks get left off the list every year.

4

Touching the conference championship trophy curses your team to lose the Stanley Cup.

When a team wins the conference title to earn a spot in the Stanley Cup finals, an NHL official presents the captain with the Prince of Wales Trophy or the Clarence Campbell Bowl. Hockey legend has it that the lesser baubles are cursed, so the captains usually leave the trophies on the table, untouched.

But the curse is far from foolproof. In 1995, New Jersey’s Scott Stevens took the Eastern Conference trophy into his team’s locker room. The next year, Colorado’s Joe Sakic picked up the Western Conference trophy and showed it off for the home crowd.

In 1997 and 1998, Detroit’s Yzerman did the same. All four

teams not only won the cup, they swept their opponents in four games. And to prove it was no fluke, those three captains grabbed their conference trophies again from 2000 to 2003, and their teams won all four years.

5

The best regular-season team almost never wins the Stanley Cup.

Since the NHL started awarding the Presidents’ Trophy in 1986 to the team with the best regular-season record, 30 teams have won it, and only eight hoisted the Stanley Cup the same year. With a success rate of 27 percent, you might think it’s better to leave the prize to someone else, but you’d be wrong — mostly.

True, many Presidents’ Trophy winners have crashed and burned. But the odds of winning the cup only get worse when you go down the list. During that same span, of the 80 teams that were seeded fifth through eighth, for example, only two won the cup. The best odds? Even at 4 to 1, the Presidents’ Trophy winner is the favorite. n

Bacon has written seven books on sports and business.

SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2016

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