The Washington Post National Weekly - June 12, 2016

Politics Clinton’s historic climb 4

Nation Homeless fight for rights 8

Television Long shot with star power 16

5 Myths Gentrification 23

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THE FIX

Why he endorsed Clinton now BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

B

ernie Sanders had barely made it back to Capitol Hill after his meeting with President Obama at the White House when the news broke: Obama was endorsing Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And not only that! Obama was delivering the endorsement via a video, recorded on Tuesday — 48 hours before he even sat down with the senator from Vermont.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest insisted the meeting with Sanders was not simply a “formality.” And, apparently, Obama had told Sanders on Sunday that he was planning to endorse Clinton.

Still, the whiplash — as it played out on cable television — was hard to ignore.

So, why did Obama endorse Clinton when Sanders’s body, politically speaking, was still warm? A few reasons.

1. Obama is a pragmatist Obama, whose brand is built on idealism (that “hopey, changey” thing) is actually a brutal pragmatist. It annoyed him back in 2008 that Clinton kept running despite the fact that she had no path to victory. And, during his presidency, he’s shown time and again that he’s not a big believer in tilting at windmills. That’s exactly what Sanders — and many of his supporters — are doing right now.

“Well, if we flip 400 superdelegates, then . . .” is not a winning campaign strategy. Obama knows that — and doesn’t feel the need to suffer the long-shot arguments of people who came up short. Which leads me to this . . .

2. Obama is (still) the president and the head of the Democratic Party Here’s the thing: Obama doesn’t need to (really) worry too much about the blowback

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HILLARY CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN

President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in a video released Thursday.

he might get from some corners of Sanders supporters. He’s a two-term Democratic president. He’s the first black president. His support among Democrats is soaring.

Unlike Clinton, who has to carefully manage every moment of her — and her campaign’s — interaction with Sanders between now and whenever he decides to endorse, Obama is free to sort of do what he wants. He gave Sanders the full White House meeting treatment and, with that box checked, he did what he wanted to do.

3. Obama wants the party unified ASAP Obama is aware that Clinton and Donald Trump are running close in most national polls.

And he also knows that the longer a rump Sanders faction is left on its own, the longer it will take to focus on what he believes to be the

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real enemy: Trump in the White House.

“It was important to let the primary process play out, but the time to unify and get on with the business of beating Trump is getting short,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as Obama’s senior adviser in the White House.

Democratic pollster Paul Maslin added that Clinton “needs a solid stretch well before Philadelphia. And to see if she can open up a genuine 4- to 6-point lead again.”

Obama getting on board so soon after the primary process effectively concluded — D.C. holds the official final primary vote on Tuesday — is the best way to avoid any messiness and distraction before Democrats convene late next month in Pennsylvania.

That’s why he did it when he did it. Mostly because (a) he could and (b) he thought it was the right thing for the party. n

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

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ON THE COVER Paolo del Vecchio, director for the Center for Mental Health Services, said he has had depression and anxiety since he was a child but was reluctant to talk about it openly. Photograph by AMANDA VOISARD for The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

How Clinton did it — the second time

JULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

She had faith in her plan and a determination not to repeat her earlier mistakes K AREN T UMULTY New York BY

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ven before the polls closed in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton knew she was in for a very bad night.

The establishment worrywart caucus was freaking out, and the media was rife with speculation of an imminent staff shake-up. Was she once again being set up for a fall, a lumbering front- runner about to be toppled by a charismatic outsider?

Her answer: Get me a bigger

plane.

Robby Mook, her penny-pinching campaign manager, blanched.

But Clinton insisted that she did not want her aides trickling back to the Brooklyn campaign headquarters, one by one, nursing their dejection.

Everyone would fly together.

As 30 or so aides boarded, Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, stood at the top of the stairs, shaking each one’s hand and thanking them.

It was not just a gracious gesture. Clinton wanted to send a signal, one that would be under-

stood internally, even if it took the rest of the political world a while to catch on. She and her team had a plan. She believed in it. They were sticking to it.

Hillary 2.0 would be very different from her 2008 operation, which had run aground in part because her campaign had failed to master the fundamentals. All over the map, they had been outmaneuvered; even where Clinton won, Barack Obama’s more nimble and sophisticated team had somehow managed to squeeze out extra delegates.

Hillary Clinton assumes the mantle of the Democratic presumptive nominee Tuesday night at a rally in New York. Eight years earlier, she had been giving a concession speech to Barack Obama.

Like Mook, Marlon Marshall had been a part of that failed effort.

When he joined the 2016 campaign as its director of state campaigns and political engagement, Marshall recalled, “one of the first things that Robby and I talked about was, what is our delegate strategy?”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont proved to be a formidable opponent. His anti-establishment message was in tune with the disgruntled left, and he raised money by the boatload. The first sign came in September, when he raised more than $25 million — just

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POLITICS $3 million less than she did.

They also knew that the money and the enthusiasm of his supporters meant that Sanders could stay in the fight even as Clinton built up her delegate lead — and methodically snuffed out any realistic chance he had of securing the nomination.

The real surprise was how things played out on the other side. Clinton’s advisers had expected the Republicans, with their enormous field of candidates backed up by super PACs, to also have a drawn-out battle. Although her campaign chairman, John Podesta, had been predicting privately since last summer that Donald Trump would be the GOP standard-bearer, none of her advisers expected him to clinch it as suddenly and decisively as he did.

When Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) dropped out in early May, Clinton was effectively running two campaigns at once — the final stages of a primary race and the opening ones of a general election.

Clinton has never been a dazzling campaigner. Not one for mega-rallies, she prefers small, scripted settings where she can discuss the policy intricacies of heroin addiction, mental health treatment, college debt or gun control — all the while keeping her campaign press corps at arm’s length.

There were also times when her tone-deafness could be spectacular.

In March, during a CNN town hall in Ohio, she boasted that she is the “only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country,” and added: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Those words came back to haunt her in West Virginia. “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason, or the excuse, to be so upset with me, because that is not what I intended at all,” she told an out-of-work miner who confronted her about that comment.

Meanwhile, old questions about her character have been revived by an FBI probe into the security issues raised by her unauthorized use of a private email system while she was secretary of state.

And the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, are not generally receptive to do-overs by their failed

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

candidates. They prefer to turn the page.

So it was both poignant and ironic that the day Clinton would celebrate making history as the first woman to claim a major party’s nomination was also the eighth anniversary of her concession to Obama.

That speech is remembered mostly for the line in which she declared that she had put 18 million cracks — the number of votes she had gotten — in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

But there was also what, in retrospect, sounded like a declaration that she would be back.

“Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been,” Clinton said. “We have to work together for what still can be.”

A test of lessons learned “What have you done for Iowa today?” read the message that Mook had scribbled on a whiteboard in Brooklyn. Whenever someone would erase it, he would write it again.

The way they ran Iowa was to be the test of whether Clinton and her team had really learned from their mistakes.

And in the end, it was also a caution. They barely squeaked by Sanders, who had gotten a late start there and who did not have anything close to Clinton’s organization.

His huge rallies, and the fire he

lit with young people in particular, stoked worries that Clinton might be in for a replay of 2008.

“We said from the beginning it was going to be close, that we weren’t going to take anything for granted and that we were going to have to compete for every single supporter” in Iowa, recalled Matt Paul, her state director. “All of those things turned out to be true.”

Still, a win was a win, and it was also a little bit of insulation against Sanders’s 22-point blowout eight days later in New Hampshire.

Conceding in New Hampshire, Clinton was already looking forward to South Carolina and Nevada, both of which have more racially diverse populations than the first two states.

It was within the minority communities that she would gain traction. Averaging across all the primaries, Clinton won 78 percent of African American voters, to Sanders’s 21 percent, and Latinos by 60 percent to his 39 percent. Among whites, he narrowly edged her out, 49 percent to 48 percent.

The age disparity was also significant — and worrisome for Clinton, who needs younger voters to rally around her this fall, as they did for Obama.

Sanders won Democrats ages 18 to 29 by a 43-point margin in primary season. The two candidates ran close to even among voters in their 30s and 40s. Clinton carried older voters handily,

Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, share a moment as she waits to take the stage at the Central Iowa Democrats’ fall barbecue in Ames on Nov. 15.

“Even though no one would have fathomed it, we ended up being the leaner, meaner campaign and were more efficient.”

Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign spokesman

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winning the 45-to-64 age group, who made up 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, by an average of 28 points.

But Mook’s mantra remained the same: It’s all about the delegates.

After his loss in South Carolina, Sanders barely contested delegate-rich states in other parts of the Old South, concentrating instead on places where he could beat Clinton — such as Oklahoma.

That made sense in some way, in that it maintained the appearance of momentum, and kept his supporters’ enthusiasm going.

“They were going for wins, instead of spreading out their resources to narrow the margins everywhere,” a key calculation, given the Democrats’ system of proportionally allocating delegates, said one top Clinton campaign aide, giving a frank assessment in return for anonymity.

“It was a strategy for staying in the race. It wasn’t a strategy for winning,” the aide added.

Yet Sanders’s superior financial resources required Clinton’s campaign to make some calculations of its own. Clinton had to be careful, for instance, in deciding where to buy television advertising. Instead of running spots in the expensive Dallas market, for instance, the campaign bought time in Waco, which was cheaper and also had the potential to yield more delegates. Macon, Ga., made more sense than Atlanta because the campaign could reach into more congressional districts while spending less.

“Even though no one would have fathomed it, we ended up being the leaner, meaner campaign and were more efficient,” said spokesman Brian Fallon.

By the beginning of May, they faced a delicate dilemma. Clinton did not want to appear dismissive of Sanders or the fact that there were more primaries to go. But with the GOP contest over, they could not afford to wait any longer to get on a general-election war footing. The campaign started quietly staffing up in the battleground states, and now has state directors, as well as communications and organizing operations, in 10 of them.

Looking ahead to Trump One of the things that has worried some Democrats is the question of how a by-the-book candi-

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date like Clinton would deal with someone as wildly unconventional as Trump.

On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, Trump, with the GOP nomination in hand, had been vowing to recalibrate his style and become more presidential.

That was exactly what Clinton and her team expected as well — and it worried them. But so far, those fears haven’t been realized.

In the car on the way to the airport in Philadelphia, they heard of Trump’s latest fusillade.

“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card,” Trump said. “And the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.

Look how well I did with women tonight.”

On the short flight to Teterboro, N.J., they deliberated what to do.

Should she express outrage?

Should she dispute the fairness of what he had said?

As it happened, the campaign’s digital staff had already prepared a video of one of Clinton’s oftenused lines, which she had repeated that night: “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.”

“That,” communications director Jennifer Palmieri told the others on the plane, “is our only response.”

The next two days saw the biggest online fundraising of the entire campaign.

In San Diego the other week, Clinton eviscerated Trump in a speech billed as a foreign policy address. Her technique was to use Trump’s own words to make the case against him.

Her allies cheered.

“It put a lot of Democratic bedwetting on pause,” said one campaign official. “Now they can visualize how we will take the fight to him.”

Campaign officials said they are already planning a similar speech focused on the economy.

But they also insist that they cannot count on the Republican nominee to be his own undoing.

“We can’t go into it thinking our opponent will excite our base. We have to give people a reason to vote for us, too,” Marshall said. “We have an opportunity to go out there and earn it.”

This time, there will be no margin for error. n

GOP tries to quiet uproar over Trump’s attacks on judge

BY S EAN S ULLIVAN, J ENNA J OHNSON AND M ATEA G OLD

T

he racial controversy that threatens to derail Donald Trump’s campaign began on a sunny, late May afternoon in San Diego, where the White House hopeful went on an 11-minute tirade against the Latino judge handling fraud lawsuits against his Trump University business.

By this past week, the uproar — and Trump’s refusal to back down — prompted a full-scale effort by senior Republicans to get things back on track. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke with Trump over several days, arguing that the real estate mogul needed to do damage control. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus also counseled Trump, and even offered editing suggestions to a statement Trump finally issued seeking to clarify his remarks.

For Trump, the period between his boisterous May 27 San Diego rally and the restrained news conference he gave at his golf course in Westchester County, N.Y., on Tuesday night marked the most serious crisis faced by his year-long campaign, prompting condemnations from across the GOP and a growing number of defections among Republicans who declared they could not support him.

Trump was still dealing with the repercussion midweek. Rep. Bill Flores (Tex.), chairman of the influential Republican Study Committee, said he still planned to vote for Trump but that he was withholding his endorsement. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt said the GOP “ought to change the nominee,” while others said Trump still needs to apologize for smearing the judge.

“It was pretty evident that this was a distraction, and so Mr. Trump obviously realized that and took the positive steps he took,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y,), a Trump supporter. “And many of us are very glad he did.”

With the GOP primary season complete and Hillary Clinton the

presumptive Democratic nominee, many Republicans were left hoping the episode would serve as a lesson of the limits that Trump should observe as a new phase of the race unfolds. On Thursday, Trump and his campaign aides met with major fundraisers in New York, while his backers in the House met with campaign representatives on Capitol Hill.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Gonzalo Curiel is a U.S. district judge overseeing a case related to the defunct Trump University.

But there are plenty of prominent Republicans who are not ready to move on — at least not in lockstep with Trump.

“I’ve got to see that he’s going to start addressing the issues of the country instead of bashing judges,” Flores said. “I will vote for him, but in terms of getting my endorsement, I don’t endorse people that bash a judge based on his ethnic heritage.”

Many Republicans voiced public criticism of Trump’s comments, but it was the private talks, particularly between Christie and Trump, that seemed to have a particularly strong impact, according to those familiar with the efforts.

At the San Diego rally, Trump started in on the class-action fraud lawsuits against Trump University, which are being overseen by U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

Trump told the crowd that “there should be no trial” in the case, apparently referring to one of the lawsuits set to go to trial in November after the election.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump — a hater,” Trump said before calling Curiel out by

name, drawing boos.

The most controversial moment came when Trump said Curiel “happens to be Mexican, which is great — I think that is fine.”

In early June, Trump was back in California. In a series of interviews that started during that stretch, Trump escalated his racebased criticism of Curiel, who was born in Indiana to parents who emigrated from Mexico nearly a century ago.

Then, in an interview broadcast on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday, Trump said he thought a Muslim judge might treat him unfairly because he wants to temporarily ban most foreign Muslims from entering the United States.

On Monday, Trump held a conference call with his most prominent surrogates and told them to defend his attacks on Curiel and journalists, even as a parade of Republicans had come out against his broadsides.

Then on Tuesday, it all screeched to a halt. Trump, who frequently tweets attacks against his critics, went quiet on social media for more than 20 hours. In the late afternoon, he issued a statement saying that his comments about Curiel were “misconstrued” and that he no longer intended to talk about the matter.

He made no apology. Still, for Trump, it was as close as he had come to saying sorry as a presidential candidate. Later that evening, Trump delivered subdued remarks at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to mark the end of the GOP primaries. The mogul made no mention of the controversy that has embroiled his campaign in recent days, instead focusing his remarks on Clinton.

In an interview with columnist Cal Thomas published Wednesday, Trump explained why he brought up Curiel in the first place: “Instead of saying I have no comment and then winning the case two years from now, I’d rather bring up parts of the case,” he said, later adding: “It’s worth my while to explain this because people then say, ‘Wow, I never knew that.’ ” n

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With Senate at stake, will Rubio run?

M IKE D E B ONIS Boca Raton, Fla. BY

R

ep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) has been campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat for nearly a year. On the sidelines of a Republican candidate forum here, he adroitly fields questions on his House record, the challenges of running alongside Donald Trump, and his proposals to reform political fundraising.

Then Jolly concludes the interview with one of his own: “You tell me: Is Rubio running or what?”

That is the question currently consuming political players from Key West to Pensacola and on to Washington: Will Marco Rubio, the former presidential candidate who has only barely veiled his frustration at Capitol Hill, renege on his pledge not to seek re-election and help save the Senate for the GOP? The calls for a Rubio rescue have been loudest in Washington — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is openly urging Rubio to reconsider — driven by anxiety about the unsettled Republican field of five credible contenders that has emerged ahead of the Aug. 30 primary. If McConnell wants to retain his majority in 2017, keeping Rubio’s seat in GOP hands is crucial.

National Republicans see Rubio, with his high profile and proven fundraising ability, as their best chance to fend off Democrats in the year of Trump in a state where one in five votingage residents are Hispanic. Rubio must make a decision by June 24, the deadline for declaring candidacy in the state.

Trump himself weighed in last month: “Important to keep the MAJORITY,” he tweeted. “Run Marco!”

Rubio has long denied interest in re-entering the race, pointing to his friendship with a current candidate, Lt. Gov. Carlos LopezCantera. But the incumbent’s position softened recently when he told CNN he would “maybe” reconsider should Lopez-Cantera bow out.

Rubio declined to elaborate re-

PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amid a crowded field, some Republicans urge the senator to ditch his vow not to seek reelection cently at a Miami news conference, called to highlight his fight for Zika funding: “Nothing’s changed from what I’ve said in the past. I’m enjoying my work in the Senate, I’m honored to be able to do it, and I’ll continue to do it through the end of my term, but as far as beyond that, nothing’s changed.”

Yet speculation about Rubio’s intentions is rampant in Florida political circles.

“Everyone’s still waiting to see if Marco’s going to get in,” said Carl Domino, a former Republican state representative now running for Congress. “None of [the GOP candidates] has good name recognition; none of them are raising a ton of money. . . . Marco’s very popular. He’s Hispanic; he can raise the money. Marco’s the easiest answer.”

The current GOP field includes Lopez-Cantera, Jolly, Rep. Ron DeSantis and two wealthy, selffunding businessmen — real estate developer Carlos Beruff and defense contractor Todd Wilcox.

They are fighting to take on the

winner of a Democratic primary that’s been chock-full of drama itself, pitting Rep. Patrick Murphy, who is running with national party backing and has already raised $7.7 million, against liberal firebrand Rep. Alan Grayson.

Public polling has confirmed a muddled race. An early-May Quinnipiac University poll showed each of the five Republicans either statistically tied with or losing to Murphy, and none could open a statistically significant lead against Grayson.

Statewide name recognition does not come cheap in Florida.

Consultants there point to the roughly $75 million that businessman Rick Scott (R) spent in 2010 to get elected governor — a figure, they say, that neither Beruff nor Wilcox will be able to come close to matching. DeSantis has outraised Jolly and LopezCantera, but still has half of what Murphy has thus far collected.

Should Rubio agree to seek reelection, his near-universal name recognition would give him a clear advantage, but his path to a sec-

Sen. Marco Rubio (RFla.), seen in March during the presidential campaign, is facing pressure to run for re-election in the Senate. Republicans fear that if Rubio doesn’t run for a second term they could lose his seat — and the majority.

ond term would remain thorny.

Only Jolly has said he would exit the race were Rubio to enter: “He is one of the stars of our party, and I would be proud to support Marco if he decided to run,” he said. The other candidates have either committed to stay in the race or declined to address the question. Most observers assume Lopez-Cantera would bow out were Rubio to run.

In terms of fundraising, Rubio would start nearly from scratch.

His presidential campaign account had more than $3 million when he withdrew but also $2 million in unpaid loans. He would be faced with asking donors to contribute in a state whose voters roundly rejected him in March, when he garnered only 27 percent of the presidential primary vote and lost every county to Trump except his own.

That came after a bruising campaign where his absentee voting record in the Senate became a liability — a record, at one debate, he defended by pointing out he had pledged not to run again. The May Quinnipiac poll found Rubio’s Senate approval rating underwater, with 49 percent of registered voters disapproving of his job performance to 42 percent approving.

Rubio would have to mend fences with party regulars who say they’ve gone six years without having any meaningful interaction with him. And he can expect to do battle with the tea-party activists who propelled him into office in 2010 but were alienated by his pursuit of immigration reform and his shifts on other issues.

Others point to more personal reasons if Rubio demurs: His need to shore up his personal finances through private-sector work; his desire to spend more time with his young family in Miami; and, simply, his unwillingness to break his word.

Palm Beach County GOP Chair Michael Barnett said he doubts Rubio will end up running, and that is okay with him.

“Nobody is as well-known as Marco Rubio,” he said. “But once we have a nominee, I don’t sense that will be an issue anymore.” n

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‘It’s not illegal to be homeless’ J USTIN J OUVENAL Sarasota, Fla. BY

D

avid Cross had been such a fixture at Five Points Park, a patch of green in the prospering heart of this city, that residents dubbed the homeless man “the mayor.”

But that was before the city removed the park bench where he held court. Before a new panhandling ordinance made it illegal to ask for money in most places. Before he was given a written infraction for sleeping outside.

So the 66-year-old did what an increasing number of homeless people across the country are doing: He sued, claiming that the city had virtually regulated away his right to sleep and scratch together an existence. He and others in similar suits argue that homelessness has been effectively criminalized in some cities.

The lawsuits are, in part, a byproduct of the dazzling renewal of many downtowns, where new residents, tourists and businesses have come into conflict with the homeless as once-blighted corners have gained a fresh cachet.

Cities have enacted a wave of crackdowns and new laws against panhandling, camping and other activities associated with homelessness. They say such efforts help preserve the renewed vitality, curbing crime, health problems and behaviors that bother residents and disrupt business.

Between 2011 and 2014, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty found that bans on sleeping in cars shot up 119 percent, citywide camping prohibitions jumped 60 percent, anti-loitering laws increased 35 percent and anti-begging laws increased 25 percent in a survey of 187 cities.

The push includes controversial measures such as bans on distributing food to the homeless, making it illegal to sit or lie in public and, in one city, a ban on using blankets outdoors. The latter law was reversed after an

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Lawsuits are rising as displaced people claim that municipalities are regulating away their rights outcry.

Cross and some advocates argue that the approach is cruel, aimed at making the homeless disappear rather than addressing the issue. To them, it is another sign of the growing gap between America’s rich and poor.

“It’s not illegal to be homeless,” Cross said.

Sarasota, dubbed the “Meanest City in America” by advocates a decade ago for its ordinances, has been the scene of one of the fiercest and most anguished battles over homelessness in an era of urban renaissance.

The city’s balmy weather has drawn a large homeless population. On the streets, the contrast between panhandlers shaking cups and shoppers clutching bags from upscale boutiques is jarring.

City officials deny the allegations in Cross’s lawsuit and say that the city has moved to a progressive approach on homelessness in recent years. Officials

have created teams to engage the homeless, adopted a comprehensive plan to deal with homelessness and are looking to create new housing.

“We still have work to do but are making gradual progress,” City Manager Tom Barwin wrote in an email.

Similar legal fights are playing out across the nation as the homeless challenge anti-panhandling ordinances, anti-camping laws and the seizure of their belongings in sweeps.

In Virginia, more than a dozen homeless alcoholics represented by the Legal Aid Justice Center sued the state’s prosecutors in March, claiming Virginia’s “habitual drunkard” law criminalizes addiction among those on the street and violates their constitutional rights.

The law allows prosecutors to ask the courts to designate someone a “habitual drunkard” if they have been shown to have a drink-

Carlos Piras and colleague Maurice Connaughton pass a homeless man passed out on Main Street in Sarasota, Fla.

ing problem. After the designation, the person can be jailed if they are caught with alcohol.

Prosecutors say the law keeps drunks off the street. They have used the designation in more than 1,200 cases in recent years.

In Honolulu, a group of homeless people sued the city last fall, after what the mayor called a “war on homelessness” prompted by complaints from residents and tourists. The city passed a law banning sitting and lying on sidewalks, closed parks at night and dismantled one of the nation’s largest homeless encampments.

The lawsuit accused the city of illegally trashing medicine, identification papers and food storage during the sweep, leaving homeless children hungry. A settlement was recently reached that forbids the city from seizing certain items.

The homeless have also challenged broad anti-panhandling laws in Springfield, Ill., Oklahoma City and Sacramento County, Calif., on grounds it violates freedom of speech. Some locales have altered their laws in response.

The increase in laws targeting the homeless, and the legal battles surrounding those efforts, have drawn the attention of the Obama administration.

Last August, the Justice Department filed a brief in a Boise, Idaho, lawsuit challenging that city’s camping ordinance. The case was dismissed over an issue of standing, but the federal officials argued that it was unconstitutional for police to cite the homeless for sleeping outdoors when there is insufficient shelter space.

And last fall, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it would consider whether a municipality has implemented a strategy to prevent the criminalization of homelessness when awarding some grants.

Sarasota officials reject the claim that the city is criminalizing homelessness, saying that the lodging ordinance and others are necessary and are enforced legal-

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NATION ly and humanely.

The Sarasota Police Department’s “policy and practice is to offer a shelter bed to the homeless individual prior to any consideration of warnings, tickets or enforcement,” Barwin wrote of the lodging ordinance.

Barwin said many chronically homeless people refuse to go to the city’s only shelter or accept other services. He said the Salvation Army always finds room for the homeless, despite the crowding on some nights.

Barwin said the ordinances arose out of problems, not from an effort to make the homeless go away. He said encampments have created large volumes of unsanitary waste and trash. And crime has posed dangers for the homeless and city residents alike.

Barwin said the city has “evolved” on homelessness in recent years, moving away from simple crackdowns. He pointed to a multi-pronged plan adopted last year that includes a jobs program, an initiative that puts the homeless into apartments and more mental-health caseworkers.

Among the centerpieces of this new approach are Homeless Outreach Teams, joint patrols of police officers and social workers who engage the homeless on the street and try to get them into services. Police said they made 5,300 such contacts in two years and got about 150 people into a shelter, although they say it is too soon to say how many have stayed off the streets permanently.

Cross and the other plaintiffs won one concession. In response to the lawsuit and a Supreme Court ruling, the city recently revised its panhandling law to allow solicitation in more places.

Some in Sarasota think a tough approach is exactly what is needed — at least toward some homeless people.

Win or lose, Cross said he hopes his lawsuit spurs Sarasota officials to action.

He would like the city to build a downtown emergency shelter, which a consultant recommended the city do in 2013. The project got bogged down in politics over where to locate it, as well as other issues.

“It’s getting the city to do something,” Cross said of the lawsuit. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Side-street wars on a popular traffic app are a losing battle S TEVE H ENDRIX

exclude some small residential streets from their algorithms.

It was here that Connor learned hen the traffic on Timthat some Waze warriors had othy Connor’s quiet launched concerted campaigns to street suddenly jumpfool the app. Neighbors filed false ed by several hundred reports of blockages, sometimes cars an hour, he knew who was with multiple users reporting the partly to blame: the disembodied same issue to boost their credibility. female voice he could hear But Waze was way ahead of them. through the occasional open winIt’s not possible to fool the sysdow saying, “Continue on Elm Avtem for long, according to Waze enue. . . .” officials. For one thing, the system The marked detour around a knows if you’re not actually in months-long road repair was sevmotion. More importantly, it coneral blocks away. But plenty of stantly self-corrects, based on data drivers were finding a shortcut from other drivers. past Connor’s Takoma Park, Waze’s mission is to disMd., house, slaloming tribute traffic more efficientaround dog walkers and ly across the grid of public curbside basketball hoops, streets, Mossler said, not to thanks to Waze and other create traffic jams. Traffic ennavigation apps. gineers say the side street “We had traffic jams, peoflare-ups are a downside to ple were honking,” Connor the otherwise positive effect said. “It was pretty harrowthat navigation apps can ing.” have on vehicle flow.

And so Connor borrowed a The cut-through disputes tactic he read about from the “are an unintended consecar wars of Southern CaliforEVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST quence of this great technolnia and other traffic-weary ogy that is supposed to help regions: He became a Waze Tim Connor tried to prevent Waze from imposter. Every rush hour, he sending more cars down his street by posting people avoid sitting in traffic,” said Paul Silberman, a traffic went on the Google-owned false alerts, but the app booted him off. engineer with Sabra, Wang & social-media app and posted Associates in Columbia, Md. Those false reports of a wreck, speed trap pulled over to change a flat appear who live on side streets have been or other blockage on his street, almost instantly on the app’s intercomplaining for years about behoping to deflect some of the flow. face. When the first Waze-enabled coming through routes, but now He continued his guerilla councar finds a promising shortcut, it’s happening at Internet speed. terattack for two weeks before the thousands can follow.

“These great shortcuts used to app booted him off, apparently In Portland, Ore., for example, spread by word of mouth, but now detecting a saboteur in its ranks. when drivers trying to avoid local That made Connor a casualty in construction began flooding a they just spread like wildfire,” Silberman said. the social-media skirmishes street that had been redesigned as Connor and his neighbors put erupting across the country as a “greenway” bike route, city offiup “No Through Traffic” signs. And neighborhoods contend with sudcials had to put up barrels on some their city councilman tried to get denly savvy drivers taking routes stretches to filter out the vehicular Google Maps to take note of the that were all but secret. through-traffic. It worked. official detour, by calling the com“It used to be that only locals “The apps reacted pretty quickpany and flagging it through the knew all the cut-through routes, ly to that,” said Jonathan Maus, apps’ feedback feature. But still but Google Maps and Waze are publisher of Bikeportland.org. they came. One afternoon, Connor letting everyone know,” said Bates In California, where navigation counted a vehicle every two secMattison, a city councilman in the apps are as common to drivers as onds on a street with a single lane Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven, Ga. sunglasses, several communities available between parked cars.

“In some extreme cases, we have to are contending with overwhelmed The flow began to wane when address it to preserve the sanctity local streets that residents blame construction ended, Connor said, of a residential neighborhood.” at least in part on the programs. In but remains three or four times When population growth began the Los Angeles region, Waze’s bighigher than before. For some drivto overwhelm a set of major intergest U.S. market, the Sherman ers, their app-inspired shortcut sections in his district, there was a Oaks City Council is considering a became a permanent route. n jump of 45,000 cars a day on some motion asking the programs to BY

W

residential streets, as app-armed commuters fought their way to Interstate 85. In response, the city is posting signs to restrict left or right turns at key intersections.

The apps didn’t create the traffic, Mattison said, but they gave drivers options they wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Waze, with 50 million users worldwide, provides navigation guidance by combining its map database with data it collects in real time from every logged-on driver. Average speed, backups, and fleeting hazards such as a car

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WORLD

A stylish band of anti-ISIS brothers

BY H UGH N AYLOR AND M USTAFA S ALIM

Baghdad

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early everything about these barbers is at odds with the puritanical militants who overran their home towns.

Skilled in blow-drying and thickly applying gels, they transform patrons with chic looks that the Islamic State has brutally sought to eradicate.

The barbers also sport risque hairdos. They drink, chain-smoke and curse like sailors — all punishable sins, according to the group.

They have endured extraordinary suffering because of the hardline Sunni militants, who rampaged through their towns and murdered family and friends.

But here in central Baghdad they’re like a stylish band of antiIslamic State brothers.

“Daesh is our enemy, Iraq’s enemy. They tried to murder my entire tribe,” one of the stylists, Arkan Ismael, 21, recalled on a recent day as he ran a comb through his own meticulously coiffed hair, which seemed to rise a foot. Daesh is the Arabic name of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. Ismael fled his home town of Hit shortly after the Islamic State took it over two years ago. His tribe, the Albu Nimr, resisted the militants — and paid dearly for it.

The militants slaughtered hundreds, discarding dozens of the bodies in a mass grave near Hit, in Iraq’s western Anbar province.

Ismael spoke about how the group gunned down an uncle and his three children.

“I would have been killed if I had stayed,” he said. Hit has since been liberated by Iraqi forces, but it’s still too dangerous to return there, he said, adding that a cousin and friend were killed during a recent car-bombing.

The militant onslaughts and the government’s counterattacks have uprooted millions of Iraqis, including four of the five barbers at the shop. The owner takes pride in employing his displaced countrymen. In fact, he said, it’s a deliberate policy.

HUGH NAYLOR/THE WASHINGTON POST

In Baghdad, these barbers put aside sectarianism, focus on fashion The two-year-old business employs both Sunni and Shiite Muslims — Iraq’s largest religious groups, whose disputes have helped tear apart the country.

Inside the barbershop, however, there is far more horseplay than sectarian acrimony.

The owner is adamant that sectarianism — whether it involves militant Sunni or Shiite Islam — has no place in his business. That’s to foster an atmosphere reminiscent of what many Iraqis consider to be a bygone era when they didn’t mind working alongside and even marrying people from other religions.

“I’m from Iraq!” the owner responded when asked about his religion.

His employees certainly seem more interested in talking about the latest hair fashions than the sectarian squabbles that have bit-

terly divided Iraqis.

Mohammed Sultan, 29, explained the key to crafting hairdos and beards. He flipped through photographs on his phone, showing off the work of the barbershop’s employees, including snazzy beard designs they call “tattoo.”

“Whether you are good at styling hair depends on whether you have skilled hands,” said Sultan, who fled the northern city of Mosul after the Islamic State seized it in June 2014. Shortly after the assault, the group arrested his brother, Younnes, who is still missing and presumed dead, he said.

The shop itself isn’t particularly flashy. The chairs and clippers and product all seem a tad outdated.

But every day dozens of customers come, many of them young men in search of the latest, probably spiky, hair trend.

Arkan Ismael combs his hair at the Hajar barbershop where he works in Baghdad. The Islamic State has displaced him and other employees at the shop from their home towns.

The barbers described one of their colleagues, Osama Nouri, as being particularly talented.

The 27-year-old fled the city of Fallujah with his family in 2008.

Nouri declined to go into detail about the traumas he experienced as a young man. However, he eagerly showed off the large tattoo on his left forearm.

Asked what it symbolized, he responded with a toothpick wedged between his teeth: “I don’t know. I was drunk when I got it.”

He doubts he will ever be able to return to Fallujah. The city risks being destroyed in the ongoing fighting there.

He instead seems resigned to an uncertain future, like most Iraqis.

But at least he has his band of hair-stylist brothers.

“We have all suffered. We support each other,” he said. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Britain’s five-figure visa problem K ARLA A DAM London BY

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hen Shannon Harmon moved to the United Kingdom from Chicago, she did not plan to put down roots. But after nearly eight years, she has a master’s degree from a prestigious British university, works as a digital producer at a science-news organization and has built strong ties in her local community.

She also has a massive, five-figure problem: She earns less than 35,000 pounds, or about $50,000, which means that under new visa restrictions introduced this spring, she could be deported after her visa expires in January 2018.

The new rules require immigrants on skilled-worker visas from non-European countries, including Americans such as Harmon, to earn at least 35,000 pounds if they want to settle here.

Critics of Britain’s immigration policies say that the country is, effectively, rolling up the welcome mat for non-Europeans who do not make enough.

“For me, getting a raise from 25K to 35K is pretty unimaginable,” says Harmon, a 33-year-old with bright red hair who wants to stay in the United Kingdom but earns only 25,000 pounds. She is a driving force behind Stop35k, a grass-roots campaign against new visa restrictions that triggered a debate in Parliament.

The changes to Tier 2 visas — the equivalent of the H1B in the United States, given to skilled workers from outside the European Union — come amid an increasingly intense debate over Britain’s membership in the E.U. Britons will head to the polls this month for an in-or-out referendum that has pushed the issue of immigration onto center stage.

In recent days, the momentum has swung toward the campaign to leave the E.U., also known as “Brexit,” with its supporters arguing that Britain is overflowing and that something needs to be done to limit numbers.

“The system has spun out of control. We cannot control the

KARLA ADAM/THE WASHINGTON POST

With new rules requiring skilled work recipients to earn at least $50,000, many face deportation numbers,” lawmaker Boris Johnson has said.

As a member of the E.U., Britain has to abide by freedom-of-movement rules, meaning it cannot bar entry to citizens from the 28nation bloc. Curbing the number of non-European immigrants is one of the few alternatives the government has.

The government is “focusing on non-Europeans because this is the only group they can really control under the current conditions as a member of the E.U.,” said Franck Düvell, a professor at the University of Oxford’s Center on Migration, Policy and Society.

British Home Secretary Theresa May, whose department is responsible for implementing the changes to settlement rules, has said that they will encourage employers to train a home-grown workforce to “ensure that our migration system does not perpetu-

ate reliance on migrant labor.”

“In the past it has been too easy for some businesses to bring in workers from overseas rather than to take the long-term decision to train our workforce here at home,” the Home Office said in a statement.

May has said that the restrictions will reduce the number of non-E.U. migrants being granted residency by up to 40,000 a year.

Britain remains a hugely attractive draw for migrants who are not easily deterred by rocketing house prices or a national obsession with talking about the weather.

The country boasts a number of excellent universities and has the advantage of being an Englishspeaking country in Europe. Britain’s buoyant economy has prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to call it “the jobs factory of Europe.”

But the United Kingdom’s sta-

Oli Khan, a spokesman for the Bangladesh Caterers Association, says that Britain’s beloved curry industry is hurting as a result of new visa restrictions affecting those from nonEuropean countries.

tus as a country of mass migration has put pressure on hospitals, schools and transportation in some areas. It is also a source of deep embarrassment for Cameron, who pledged to reduce net migration — the number of people arriving minus the number of people leaving — to less than 100,000.

New figures recently published showed net migration in 2015 at more than three times that figure.

The new visa restrictions for non-E.U. workers include increasing the salary threshold for those living in the United Kingdom for less than 10 years who want to settle here. Previously, after five years, migrants on a Tier 2 visa could apply for permanent residency if they earned at least 20,800 pounds; as of April, that threshold has jumped to 35,000 pounds. These new rules do not apply to those with PhD-level jobs, workers on the “Shortage Occupation List” and nurses, who were made temporarily exempt after an outcry that not doing so could put patients at risk.

The changes have sparked a debate about whether income is the right measure for deciding who can stay and who must go.

Some proponents of Brexit argue that if Britain votes to leave the bloc on June 23, it would create a fairer system for skilled workers outside the E.U. “By voting to leave, we can take back control of our immigration policies, save our curry houses and join the rest of the world,” Priti Patel, Britain’s employment minister, told the Evening Standard.

Kymberly Blackstock, a 35year-old from Seattle, is one of those caught up by the restrictions. A mother of two young children, Blackstock earns 21,800 pounds a year working for a charity in Scotland. Her husband, a dependent on her visa, works as a careworker for the elderly.

She does not think it is fair that her salary may determine whether her family can settle in the United Kingdom after her visa expires.

“We make a much bigger social contribution to the society than somebody sitting at some management office at a bank,” she said. n

COVER STORY

Bringing mental illness out of the dark

F

PHOTOS BY AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

BY COLBY ITKOWITZ

or several years, she wrote about her bipolar disorder under a pseudonym. She described how she’d been hospitalized four times, twice since her first child was born. She explained how she went off her medication during both of her pregnancies and how each time — once as the mother of a newborn and then again weeks into her second pregnancy — she was escorted from her home in police handcuffs, defiant.

She blogged to connect and reach other mothers grappling with mental illness. Ultimately, however, she decided that hiding her identity was actually perpetuating the shame long associated with mental disorders.

So even as her parents urged her not to, Jennifer Marshall in 2013 typed her real name on a blog post, hit publish and waited for the reaction.

With those keystrokes, Marshall, who lives in Ashburn, Va., joined a growing community of people with mental illness who have chosen to out themselves.

Marshall describes a surge of strength as she shared her story. “It’s human connection,” she said. “When you find someone who has been able to overcome something that you’re struggling with, it’s really powerful.”

Likened by some to the gay rights movement, with its

beginnings in personal revelation, the groundswell to lift the stigma connected with mental illness has had a multiplying effect accelerated by social media. The more people who “come out” about their mental illness and are met with acceptance, the more others feel it’s safe to do the same.

Since the beginning of this year, millions have tweeted about their mental illness, many using established hashtags. For example, the campaigns #imnotashamed and #sicknotweak were tweeted 75,000 times and 139,000 times, respectively, since Jan. 1, according to an analysis from Twitter. The movement #BellLetsTalk, which began in Canada to “break down the barriers associated with mental illness,” received 6.8 million tweets in January from all over the world.

While U.S. mental-health experts said there is not yet scientific data tracking the increase in voluntary disclosures of mental illness, social media has been employed so much to that end that a former Johns Hopkins professor is studying behavioral trends by mining tweets in which people talk explicitly about their mental illnesses.

Glen Coppersmith said he was initially surprised by

how many people disclose that information online.

“Some of it is to end the stigma; some is an explanation of past behavior,” said Coppersmith, who recently started a company, Qntfy, to analyze mental-health data. He added that he “wholeheartedly” believes such disclosures have risen to the level of a movement.

The trend has been buoyed, experts say, by advancements in neuroscience that have enabled people to cast off stereotypes of mental illness as a personal failing and view it instead as the result of physiological changes in the brain that can be treated much like physical illnesses.

“We’ve become a much more sophisticated society about mental health,” said Bernice Pescosolido, a professor at Indiana University and an expert in mental-health stigma. “As people, we are opening up more about issues of race, issues of gender, issues of health generally. This is intertwined with the fabric of life.”

But prejudice persists, especially in the workplace, and Pescosolido and other experts say it is still to be seen whether the outpouring that is confined largely to social media will translate into advocacy and less discrimination in daily life.

The stigma “is still out there,” Pescosolido said. “I think

Among those openly acknowledging their mental illness and working to help themselves and others are Helen Dennis, top, and Jennifer Marshall, opposite page, who has bipolar disorder and displays a tattoo of the word “brave” on her wrist.

it’s an opportunity. We’ve had a resurgence in the science; we’ve had a resurgence of people coming forward.”

The stigma fighters Sarah Fader did not want her children to grow up thinking they had to be ashamed of their feelings, as she had been. So she decided to open up about the panic disorder with which she had lived since her teen years.

In early 2014, she penned “Fighting Against the Stigma of Mental Illness” for the Huffington Post to describe her struggles. She described how others had belittled her for her illness, telling her that she was being “dramatic” or disparaging her use of antidepressants. Hundreds of people from all over the world sent messages relating their own experiences.

Then Fader met Allie Burke, who lives with schizo-

phrenia, through a mental-health advocacy community on Facebook. The two women teamed up to launch Stigma Fighters, a blog and nonprofit group dedicated to giving other people a platform to share their stories.

Since its launch in March 2014, hundreds of people have written pieces for the blog. Fader originally let contributors write anonymously or under first names, but then Marshall reached out to Fader through social media to share her own epiphany about using her real name.

So now Fader requires almost everyone to write under their full names. Those who overcome their fears of being judged start to view themselves as survivors.

Amy Bleuel, who was depressed and plagued with suicidal thoughts most of her life, noticed the same phenomenon when she launched Project Semicolon in 2013. Her father died by suicide when she was 18, and she knew that he, like she, had felt alone in his illness.

In April 2013, after a conversation with a friend yielded the idea, Bleuel tweeted a request for people to draw a semicolon on their wrists.

People with mental illness often think their lives are over. But the semicolon signifies that there’s more to your continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

story, Bleuel said. Since then, thousands of people around the world have posted pictures of themselves on social media with real semicolon tattoos. The tattoos serve as permanent reminders that life does go on.

“People want to know they’re not suffering in silence,“ Bleuel said. “We want to have that discussion.

We’re done losing people to suicide; we’re done not knowing what to do.”

The movement to lift the stigma is also changing how mental illness is portrayed in popular culture and the arts. In the FX Network show “You’re the Worst,” the audience came to know one of the main characters as a gregarious party girl with questionable morals. Then, in the second season, it is revealed that Gretchen Cutler’s lifestyle is a diversion from recurrent depression. When it comes roaring back, she fears telling her boyfriend that “my brain is broken.”

The portrayal was widely acclaimed.

“I continually run into people who suffer from depression, and it was something very secretive, and we’re just seemingly starting to come into the light a little more,” said Stephen Falk, the show’s creator. “I thought if we could help that process along at all, then we’d be doing a service.”

That’s what Rachel Griffin, a singer-songwriter in New York, had in mind when she embarked on writing a musical about life in a psychiatric ward. The main character, Jane, is a young woman with severe panic disorder and depression. Throughout the show, another character portrays Depression — always hovering, sometimes controlling the conversation. Jane’s symptoms worsen until she checks herself into a mental hospital.

Griffin sees her show as doing for mental illness what “Rent” did for HIV/AIDS by presenting complex characters who are more than just their illnesses.

She started writing the show while riding the subway as an outlet for her depression and anxiety. “It’s about empowerment,” she said.

Coming out on the air “The stigma is most damaging not when others see it in a certain way, but when we see it that way ourselves,” said Michael Landsberg, a successful Canadian sportscaster who has a diagnosis of depression. “I tell people all the time . . . when you believe the stigma, that it’s a reflection of weakness, you tell it in a way that sounds weak: ‘I’m sorry; I don’t know why I do this; I’m so ungrateful.’ ” The alternative, Landsberg says, is this: “I suffer from a mental-health problem; I have depression; this has taken a lot from my life.”

Before suffering a breakdown at age 39, Landsberg said, he was among those who thought someone with depression should just buck up and get over it. Then his illness descended. By November 2008, the pain had become too great and he had his final relapse.

With severe depression, “you know with 100 percent certainty you won’t be able to feel joy that day,” said Landsberg, 58. “That’s the most profoundly damaging aspect of depression.”

In 2009, Landsberg was set to interview hockey player Stéphane Richer on his show when in his research he learned that Richer had also battled depression. Landsberg asked Richer whether it was okay for them to share their experiences on the air.

During the interview, Richer confided that he tried to kill himself in 1995, four days after winning the Stanley Cup with the New Jersey Devils. Emails poured in, some

2.4 million American adults live with schizophrenia, about 1.1 percent.

Top, Sarah Fader, who has panic disorder and depression, is co-founder of the Stigma Fighters blog, which gives people a platform to share their stories. Bottom, Rachel Griffin, who has anxiety and depression, started the Twitter campaign #imnotashamed, calling on people to disclose their mental illnesses.

6.1 million American adults live with bipolar disorder, about 2.6 percent.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

from viewers who said that hearing the two men talking about depression openly was life-changing.

Just a few months ago, Landsberg started a socialmedia campaign, #sicknotweak. The international response — a lot of it from the United States — was overwhelming, he said. The catharsis and sense of community that followed emboldened him, Landsberg said.

“The best way to show someone you’re not weak is to show it with strength,” he said.

Such boldness is contagious.

Paolo del Vecchio, the director of the federal government’s Center for Mental Health Services, said he has suffered with depression and anxiety since he was a child but had been reluctant to talk about it openly.

Then, through his work, he met people who were willing to open up.

“That made all the difference; that made it safe for me to be able to share,” he said. “When people disclose, it is the most effective way of reducing negative attitudes, what we’ve called stigma. And that’s the power.’’

14.8 million American adults live with major depression, about 6.7 percent.

Top, Paolo del Vecchio, director of the federal Center for Mental Health Services, has had anxiety and depression since childhood. Bottom, Helen Dennis, who suffers from Bipolar 2 disorder, is a cast member in “This is My Brave,” in which people tell their stories of mental illness.

42 million American adults live with anxiety disorders, about 18.1 percent.*

* These include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder and phobias.

‘This is My Brave’ Helen Dennis was preparing to stand alone on a stage in front of an audience on May 15 and describe how what was dismissed as moodiness as a child was actually the first sign of bipolar disorder. Dennis’s illness later manifested itself as deep depression. In 2007, when she was 27, she became so desperate to escape the pain that she called in sick to work, ready to take her own life.

“I would have these periods when I couldn’t think straight. The suicidal thoughts were rampant. . . . Nothing I could say or do could make me feel better,” she said.

“It’s that sense of loss of control over your very personhood that really made me feel like I was weak. I said I’m the worst person; I’m not strong enough to live this life.”

She called her now-husband, and he knew by her voice that something was very wrong. He came home and, for the first time, she shared everything with him.

He took her to a hospital, where she finally received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

But for the most part, Dennis was too ashamed to speak about her illness. Then she heard about Jennifer Marshall.

Marshall experienced her first manic episode at 26. She was forced to give up a high-pressure job at a recruitment agency after two back-to-back hospital stays. She was able to keep her symptoms at bay until she went off her medication several years later for her pregnancies.

Once she told her story, revealing her identity on her blog as a mother with bipolar disorder, no one judged her, Marshall said. Instead, she received a flood of supportive emails. Whatever residual shame she felt about her illness dissipated.

In 2013, Marshall started “This is My Brave,” a stage show appearing around the country this spring in which cast members tell their stories of mental illness, some for the first time. Dennis was to be among those to stand at center stage under a spotlight, sharing their stories of mental illness.

Dennis isn’t sure what compelled her to audition for Marshall. But on that day, she said, the words poured out.

“I’m a touch terrified because there is still such a strong stigma around it; there’s a lot of misinformation about it,” she said. “But I truly believe as people see co-workers and friends come out of the woodwork and be honest about this . . . it shows it can happen to anyone. . . . You feel so alone when you’re going through the worst of it; to hear you’re not alone for me is revolutionary.” n

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TELEVISION

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

a long shot in the suburbs BY

D AN Z AK

E

d Asner is not wearing any pants. He is standing in the back room of a former dollar store in suburban Maryland.

Taped by the door is a handwritten note on a blue piece of paper: “Ed’s dressing room.” Asner is staring into a mirror at his 86-year-old face, which is bisected by a fake mustache. On his script is an unlit cigarette. There’s a small bowl of Werther’s hard candy nearby.

“Who am I?” he mutters. “What am I doing here?”

The long answer involves Kansas City, the Army, Mary Tyler Moore, a shelf full of Emmys, rabble-rousing lefty activism, “Elf” and “Up” and then some free time in his twilight years. The short answer involves a dentist, a podiatrist and a former human-resources executive named Fred — all middle-aged Marylanders who decided to fulfill a pipe dream by creating a TV show about a frisky old fitness guru who runs an outdated gym in South Beach.

A costumer helps Asner into a mustard-colored velour tracksuit.

Asner hums a few bars from the

An Indie pilot gets Hollywood help Veteran actor Ed Asner, center, on the set of “Bennie’s Gym,” an indie sitcom pilot that was filmed in Maryland last month.

opera “Carmen.”

“This is how you get ready to go into the bullring,” he says, beginning to yawn and prowl like a lion awakened from slumber.

Starting points It started at a Starbucks in Bethesda, Md. The dentist, Neil Cohen, who had always wanted to make a sitcom, was a regular, and it was there that he met Fred Knowles, who had quit his HR job and was seeking a new purpose.

Along with Steve Kominsky, the podiatrist, they developed something of a standing coffee date.

Early-morning chatter eventually led to scriptwriting, and scriptwriting added a little thrill to their comfortable lives.

“You gotta understand how amazing this is,” Cohen, the dentist, says at their 6:30 a.m. Starbucks meeting the day before shooting starts. “One day they say, ‘Hey, let’s go write it.’ We meet at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and then we go to Steve’s office and have some stale food. Pickles, or something. For his patients. It went from there to . . . ” “The Emmys,” Kominsky says with a tinge of sarcasm.

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TELEVISION They formed Foot and Mouth Productions. They researched the art and science of TV writing.

They went through 22 revisions of the pilot script and hired a local playwright to help them refine it.

They titled the show “Bennie’s Gym” — and everything slowly fell into place, through a combination of luck and naivete.

Knowles, the HR guy, met a producer who knew a local director who knew a “House of Cards” casting director whose parents lived near someone who was friendly with Asner. Everyone along the way liked the script — which was irreverent and selfreferential, like “Taxi” meets “The Office” meets “Golden Girls” — and it kept moving toward Asner.

The team began holding conference calls in Knowles’s Toyota in the Starbucks parking lot. Once Asner signed on, financing the pilot seemed like a cleaner bet.

Five people, including Knowles’s wife and childhood best friend, put up the cash for the low-budget production.

They declined to divulge the cost other than to note it was a tiny fraction of the $2 million needed for the average studio comedy pilot. Asner received what could be described as modest fees, considering his fame, for both acting and executive producing (though a larger payday would come if the show is picked up).

It is money they are almost sure to lose, given the glut of TV-making these days: In 2007, fewer than 50 pilots were shot in the United States, according to filming permitter FilmL.A., while in 2013 there were 186. Everyone’s making television, so turning a pilot into a series remains a long shot, even as the number of content-hungry platforms expands to include the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and YouTube.

And while TV production is not foreign to these parts — “Veep” shot in suburban Maryland until last year, and “House of Cards” films in Baltimore — the trio faces long odds, coming from so far outside the industry. Only a handful of scripted pilots were filmed in Maryland over the past five years, and those had the backing of outfits such as HBO and CBS. “This is very unusual for the area,” says casting director Kimberly Skyrme, who works on “House of Cards” and helped get the script to Asner. Still, “in

“Why’d I take it? I wasn’t working.

They offered me a week’s work. The chance of steady work has a tremendous allure.”

— Ed Asner, talking about his role shooting the pilot of “Bennie’s Gym”

25 years, this was the most fun I’ve had casting anything, because the script was so funny.”

And the guys are okay with the likelihood of “Bennie’s Gym” going nowhere.

“You have to have people who want to have fun on the journey,” Knowles says of their endeavor.

Television is “not our business. We didn’t have the pressure of performing, succeeding, failing.”

Some of the crew was recruited from “House of Cards.” Cast auditions were held in Baltimore. The Maryland Film Office connected the team with Howard County, which leased them the old dollar store for a dollar. Then Asner boarded a plane to Maryland.

86, and still in the bullring “It went surprisingly well,” Asner says of the first day of shooting. “The dentist didn’t get in the way.”

As if on cue, Cohen pops his head into the dressing room, fresh from a Costco run. He is emptyhanded.

“You didn’t bring me a goddamn thing,” Asner growls with practiced Lou Grant-ness. “I thought you were gonna buy me some coffee, some goddamn

A print of a clapperboard — it’s a low-budget production — on the set. The comedy — a sort of “Taxi” meets “The Office” meets “Golden Girls” — came about when friendly chatter led to the formation of a casual scriptwriting team, all new to showbiz — a dentist, a podiatrist and a former vice president of HR.

breakfast!”

The walkie-talkies crackle with an order: “Quiet on the set.”

“QUIET!” Asner bellows, startling the high-school-age production assistants. Then: “Where’s the john?”

The set of “Bennie’s Gym” is the world’s tackiest and saddest fitness center. The walls are painted canary yellow and Pepto pink. The reception area looks like a tiki bar.

One wall is lined with trophies that belong to the children of the creators. There are forlorn treadmills. There is a vintage Radarange microwave. Just outside the building, between a real hair salon and a real medical equipment store for those “aging in place,” a bank of lights approximates the Miami sun.

Knowles, unable to contain his glee, watches Asner emerge from his dressing room and parade through the set, flinging a chair from his path with the vigor of a 20-year-old.

Just a few years ago, Knowles was burned out from 25 years in corporate life. Who am I? he began to ask himself. What am I doing here? He quit his job and in two short years found himself the cocreator and co-writer of a single-

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camera TV pilot starring a television legend from his youth. The whole experience has inspired Knowles to write a book titled “What’s Your Sitcom?” It’s about finding passion in one’s work.

“Sitcom,” Knowles says, is really a metaphor.

Asner himself has some thoughts about work, and about why he’s here in Columbia, Md., at age 86.

“Why’d I take it?” says the man who played Lou Grant for 12 years.

“I wasn’t working. They offered me a week’s work. The chance of steady work has a tremendous allure.”

Asner lives in Tarzana, Calif., with his daughter, her 11-year-old twins and boyfriend, four cats (China, Roast, Wheezy and Ringo), two lovebirds (Esther and Eve) and guinea pigs whose names he cannot remember. It is a menagerie he is happy to escape if the part is right. After 60 years of acting, there’s a reason he’s still heading into the bullring.

“I always felt I couldn’t be a great actor because I wasn’t a drunk, or whatever,” he says. “I didn’t have a Hamlet I needed to show you. Or a Lear.”

He has a Bennie, though. Oh, does he have a Bennie.

The second day of shooting involves a face-off between Bennie and his nemesis, Woody Cockburn, played with grizzled hostility by Joe Estevez (Martin Sheen’s brother).

Cockburn arrives at Bennie’s with a health-code inspector, intent on shutting down the gym.

The two aged macho men hiss and growl and circle each other.

Take 1: “Whaddaya doing here, Cockburn?” says Asner, a vision in velour, eyebrows twitching with contempt.

Take 2: “Whaddaya doing here, Cock. Burn?”

“One more, soft and dangerous,” says the director and co-writer Michael Skinner.

Take 3: “Whaddaya doing here, Cock — ” an uncomfortable and hilarious pause “ — burn?”

The crew stifles laughter. Asner is a pro, with or without a studio audience, with or without a guarantee that “Bennie’s Gym” will become a long-running and beloved network sitcom.

Sitcom is a metaphor, remember.

“Cut,” Skinner says.

“Where’s the john?” Asner says. n

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BOOKS

Drawn in by Manson family values F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

T THE GIRLS

By Emma Cline Random House. 368 pp. $27

he hubbub around “The Girls” threatens to trample what’s so deeply affecting about it.

The noise started in 2014 when an unknown 25-year-old writer named Emma Cline sold her debut novel about the Manson family murders for a reported $2 million as part of a three-book deal.

It’s not about the money, of course. Except that it is.

But beyond the glitter and gore, is the novel itself really that good?

Prepare to swallow your skepticism.

First, though, if you’re looking for another stab at “Helter Skelter,” you’ll be disappointed. “The Girls” is inspired by Charles Manson and the grisly murders his followers committed in 1969, but Cline’s story shoves that horror into the background. The novel focuses instead on its narrator, Evie Boyd, who has spent her life letting “the days crumble away like debris from a cliff face.” While housesitting one night, Evie meets a teenage girl and her obnoxious boyfriend. Helpless to intervene in what she senses is an exploitative relationship, she sees in that young woman the same mingled pride and desperation that briefly drew her into a murderous cult decades ago.

The novel unfolds as a reluctant act of retrospection, shifting back and forth between Evie’s static life in the present day and that infamous time when she was a 14-yearold girl with a face “blatant with need.” Evie’s parents recently have divorced, and she finds herself adrift between her distracted father and her floundering mother. “I was so attuned to attention,” she remembers. “I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anybody happen to glance over.”

This emotional desperation, kept tamped down beneath a pose

GEORGE BRICH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Charles Manson followers, from left, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, seen in 1969.

of ferocious nonchalance, makes Evie “an eager mark” for some otherworldly girls she sees in the park one day. Although they’re Dumpster-diving for food, Evie is awed: To her, the girls look as “sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.” She makes eye contact with one of them, a young woman she will soon know as Suzanne, “tragic and separate, like royalty in exile.” Eager to ingratiate herself, Evie pretends to shoplift toilet paper for Suzanne and is soon welcomed into the “family” of a drippy egomaniac named Russell, Cline’s refashioning of Charles Manson.

The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline’s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that’s gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager’s consciousness. The adult’s melancholy reflection and the girl’s swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together. As Evie’s tale of those fateful weeks moves along, we see how easily she learns to lie to her parents, how

readily she offers herself up to Russell and how acutely she wants Suzanne’s affection.

But for a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, “The Girls” is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that’s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror. Evie alludes to those infamous murders only with long-simmering shame and hushed amazement at how accidentally a life can split toward — or away — from disaster.

While our cultural consciousness has remained mesmerized by Manson, “The Girls” is far more fascinated by his female acolytes.

In an essay in the Paris Review, Cline recalled when they first captured her imagination: “I became obsessed with the Manson girls,” she wrote. “. . . In the photographs I saw of the girls — pictures striking for their strangely domestic quality — I recognized something of myself at 13, the same blip of

longing in their eyes.”

For Cline, then, the Manson cult — fictionalized here as Russell’s psychedelic commune — offers a difference in degree but not in kind from the poisonous climate so many young women endure. Loneliness tempts them to imagine they can trade access to their bodies for emotional support and empowerment, and by a barrage of blunt social cues, they’re trained to apologize, to negotiate impossible ideals of purity and lust.

The modern-day setting that frames these dramatic events seems comparatively staid, but it serves its own grim purpose by suggesting that little has changed for young women — or even older women. “None of this was rare,” Evie notes as she recalls some fresh creep she endured later in life. “Things like this happened hundreds of times. Maybe more.”

But debut novels like this are rare indeed. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

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An upbeat tour of combat gore

Favoring fairness over greed-is-good

N ON-FICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C AITLIN F LANAGAN

n 2003, journalist Chris Hedges published a pocket-size book with a simple title and fathomless moral implications: “What Every Person Should Know About War.” To begin reading the book — arranged as a series of simply stated questions and their spare, emotionally unweighted answers — was to be implicated by it.

Among the questions asked and forthrightly answered: “What does it feel like to get shot?” “Will I be able to withstand torture?” “What will happen to my body if I die?”

Mary Roach — a reporter, humorist and best-selling author of books that bring specialized scientific discovery to a popular audience — has, however unwittingly, produced a work that should sit beside Hedges’s on the shelf.

Called “Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War,” it is the latest in an oeuvre that includes titles such as “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal” and “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.” It brings the breezy, jokey, boosterish approach that fans have come to expect of her work to a dark new subject: how military scientists try to anticipate, prevent or mitigate the ravages of war — from debilitating injuries to violent death — on its combatants.

The tone is jarring, but the reporting is sound. At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, she interviews a young man — a 2011 graduate of West Point — whose penis was blown off when he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan.

Like other forms of amputation, this kind of wound is increasingly common, as advances in battlefield medicine have made many previously fatal injuries survivable.

In the moments after the explosion, the young officer — who also lost a leg — desperately tried to get off the ground to check on his men; when he learned that they were all safe, he told a medic, “If my dick is gone, just leave me here.” But they brought him home, and Roach meets him as he is

awaiting surgery to reconstruct his urethra. She asks a therapist at the hospital about the divorce rate after this kind of injury, and the woman replies: “Divorce rate?

How about suicide rate.”

Roach’s dominant attitude toward what she discovers is enthusiasm — particularly for the macho and often handsome military men she encounters. She’s aflutter at a “virile, omnipotent Special Ops man”; at a “droll and adorable” public affairs officer; even at the “glorious pectorals” of a serviceman’s corpse. She wants us to see her as a fun gal gamely poking around the big, exciting war machine and trying not to get in anybody’s way.

It’s hard to trust a reporter who “adores” military PR men and who writes a “grasping fan letter” to a source. Yet her descriptions of trauma injuries, and of the military’s evolving response to battlefield danger and wounds, are compelling and clear-eyed. Midway through this odd book, with its crushes and cork sandals, its gaping horrors and bloodless military euphemisms, you begin to wonder: Is this what 15 years of war have done to us?

The final chapter recounts Roach’s visit to the morgue of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. Every military person killed in action is autopsied. For this is the service member’s final duty to the state: offering his or her body for a process called “Feedback to the Field.” During an international video conference call, 80 people look at photographs of the warrior’s body to talk about what went wrong and what might be improved upon the next time such an injury is confronted.

Only then, when the military is fully and completely done with him, is his body wheeled out of the morgue to the mortuary and his waiting family. n Flanagan is the author of “To Hell With All That” and “Girl Land.” She is a contributing editor at the Atlantic.

I GRUNT The Curious Science of Humans at War

By Mary Roach Norton.

285 pp. $26.95

THE MORAL ECONOMY Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens

By Samuel Bowles Yale.

272 pp. $27.50

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REVIEWED BY

S TEVEN P EARLSTEIN

n 1714, Bernard Mandeville published the “Fable of the Bees,” a tale of a hive of industrious and avaricious bees that became so prosperous that it had the luxury of beginning to worry about its virtue — and by so doing brought on its own demise. It was Mandeville’s paradox of “private vice and public benefit” that Adam Smith would revive decades later in writing of the “invisible hand” of the market that miraculously transforms individual greed into collective prosperity. And ever since, economists and champions of free markets have relied upon this paradox to defend not only the wealth-creating efficacy of capitalism but its morality as well.

Liberal economist Samuel Bowles has made it his life’s work to challenge the ideas that greed is good and that free markets can be relied on to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number. In “A Cooperative Species,” Bowles and fellow University of Massachusetts professor Herbert Gintis showed that it is not only selfishness that has been hard-wired into our nature by the evolutionary struggle for survival — so have instincts such as cooperation, altruism and fairness. This biological evolution in favor of pro-social characteristics, they argued, has been reinforced by a simultaneous cultural evolution through which societies that have encouraged and enforced ethical and generous behavior have won out over those that have clung to the law of the jungle.

“The Moral Economy” is Bowles’s latest effort to purge homo economicus — the single-minded income-maximizing economic actor — as the conceptual foundation of our economic thinking. After all, even Adam Smith and free-market champions such as Friedrich Hayek acknowledged that freemarket economies rely not only on people pursuing their self-interest but on people also being honest, fair and concerned for the wellbeing of others most of the time.

In his latest book, Bowles ar-

gues that it is not sufficient to rely on rule of law, property rights and private contracts — the holy trinity of free-market fundamentalism — to ensure pro-social behavior.

Those incentives must be reinforced by widely accepted moral codes and norms of social behavior. He shows that over-relying on the market’s financial incentives will undermine moral values and social norms and cause them to atrophy, like unused muscles.

To illustrate the point, Bowles cites the story of a chain of daycare centers in Haifa, Israel, that imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their children at the end of the day. It turned out that the fine undermined the sense of moral obligation not to extend the workday of center staff and instead made the right to show up late something they could buy as an added service.

Bowles asserts that the pleasure we take in doing the right thing (or avoiding the shame of doing the wrong thing) is often a more effective incentive than money.

He cites numerous examples of when moral behavior and social norms have been enhanced, or “crowded in,” by market incentives, in contrast to those examples when pro-social behavior is “crowded out.” But what makes this somewhat belabored discussion so unsatisfying in the end is that Bowles fails to offer any useful criteria for knowing in advance whether an incentive will fall into one camp or the other.

One of the blind spots of modern economics has been its inability to incorporate moral sentiments and social norms into its models of how people, firms and even entire economies behave. But as Bowles reminds us, civic virtue is no less important to a prosperous economy as it is to a successful state. n Pearlstein is a Washington Post economics writer and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University.

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OPINIONS

Ali: ‘I don’t have to be what you want me to be’ SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

The old white sportswriters said the flicking, shying kid with the silly doggerel would get knocked into the ringside seats with one punch. It was 1964, and Cassius Clay hadn’t yet butterflied into the mythic champion Muhammad Ali. He was still incubating in a sweltering Miami Beach gym, where the aging opinion­makers in their narrow neckties watched him work out, disapprovingly, as he rapped out verses on the heavy bag with his light gloves, whap­whap­ whap­wump. The rumor was that he was hanging around with Malcolm and the Muslims. But even worse was the way he fought. The kid ran from a punch.

He was still emerging, just a nascent 22-year-old “whose face turned to cameras as flowers answer to the sun,” as his biographer Dave Kindred would write. For just 25 cents, anyone could go watch him work at the 5th Street Gym, an airless, lowceilinged hotbox up a wood staircase in a slummy part of Miami Beach. Somehow with just 19 pro victories he had quicklipped his way into a worldheavyweight bout with Sonny Liston, the gangsters’ pal with the truncheon fists, against whom he was an 8-1 underdog. “He was boxoffice sacrifice,” remembers Robert Lipsyte, then a 26-year-old sportswriter sent to cover him by the New York Times, because the main boxing writer considered him too insignificant to bother with.

Those months of ’64 were maybe the most interesting in his self-made epic of a life. A month before the fight, following a workout, Clay picked up a pen and autographed and dated a pair of his gloves: “From Cassius Clay, Next Heavyweight Champion of the World.” Then he underlined it, heavily. You can see the gloves at the Smithsonian. “He looked at himself as a historical figure, even at that age,” Suzanne Dundee Bonner, the niece of his

trainer Angelo Dundee, told me for Smithsonian Magazine a couple of years ago, when the gloves went to the museum for an exhibit on self-transformation.

Almost nobody believed in the challenger, or understood who he was. Nobody. The promoters had such trouble selling tickets to the fight that they cautioned Clay to keep his Muslim conversion quiet. Talk got around anyway that Malcolm X was coming to Miami and there was someone in his camp from the Nation of Islam, which only made the older white sportswriters more suspicious. Red Smith didn’t like those “unwashed punks” of the counterculture. Joe Louis was the right kind of dignified black champion; he kept his mouth shut and called columnist Jimmy Cannon “Mister.”

“Clay didn’t show any respect,” Lipsyte says. “He was very breezy and treated everybody almost casual, off-handed. They kind of lost control of the narrative.”

But strangely, what they distrusted even more than his spiritual defection was his boxing style. As A.J. Liebling put it, he had “a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water.” His boxing technique seemed to sum up every insurgent, subversive thing about him: Instead of

LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Cassius Clay, in the heady days before he would become Muhammad Ali and after he beat Sonny Liston for the first time to win the heavyweight title, holds court in Miami in 1964 with fans, friends and admirers.

slipping punches, Clay leaned back. He was a runner.

“He was completely unorthodox. Nobody had ever seen a fighter like that,” Kindred says. “If you backed away from somebody, you were seen to be avoiding the fight. No one ever did that. You went forward. They just didn’t like the way he fought.”

Of the 46 sportswriters credentialed to cover the fight, 43 predicted a Liston victory — most of them by knockout, many of them in the first round. After all, Liston had twice decked Floyd Patterson to the floor, so what would he do to this ducking juvenile? Smith called him “the boy braggart.” Cannon called him “all pretense and gas, no honesty.”

Arthur Daley of the New York Times predicted, “The loud mouth from Louisville is likely to have a lot of vainglorious boasts jammed down his throat by a ham-like fist. . .”

At his final news conference before the fight, Clay told the writers, “It’s your last chance to get on the bandwagon. I’m keeping a list of all you people.

After the fight is done, we’re going to have a roll call up there in the ring. . . . I’m going to have a ceremony and a lot of eating is going on — eating of words.”

But at the weigh-in on the morning of the fight, they said Clay looked scared. He had to be

held back by his camp as he yelled at the baleful Liston, “Chump!

Chump!” When the fight doctor checked his blood pressure and heart rate and reported it had elevated to 120, the writers took it as evidence that he was terrified.

But then they were in the ring and the bell rang — and the revolution was on and the militant-spiritualist-rhymingsage-charismatic was born, with his hands flying and tassled feet dancing. Cannon was converted by the end of the first round after watching Clay reduce Liston to “an aged chophouse waiter with bad feet carrying a heavy tray.” By round three, there were cuts on Liston’s face. By round seven, the former champion sat on his stool refusing to come out with a shoulder injury to try to find the elusive Clay, and the new champion was screaming at the writers, “Eat your words!” Red Smith began to write, with “a mouth still dry from excitement,” admitting in print that “the words don’t taste good.”

The next morning at his news conference, Clay said, “I’m through talking. All I have to be is a nice, clean gentleman.” And then he publicly acknowledged that he attended Black Muslim meetings.

“I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he announced.

“I’m free to be who I want.” n

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TOM TOLES

Will 8 justices be the new normal?

LAURENCE H. TRIBE AND JOSHUA MATZ Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Matz practices law in the District and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy from 2014 to 2015. They are the co-authors of the 2014 book “Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution.”

With 24 cases still to decide this term and only eight justices to decide them, the Supreme Court has mustered all its resources to find (or manufacture) consensus. Many rulings — even those with lopsided majorities — hint strongly of compromise. So far, the justices have mostly decided not to decide, drafting narrow opinions that leave big questions unanswered.

It is in vogue to treat this term as a one-off, yet another result of madhouse election-year politics.

On that view, the court just needs to tread water a while longer. In the meantime, each of us can hope that justices who share our particular vision will end up with a majority.

But when “exceptional” circumstances endure long enough, advance powerful political interests and are tolerated by the public, they can easily become the new normal.

One or more vacancies will probably arise soon enough, leaving the court’s ideological balance up for grabs. Especially in times of divided government, the historic norm of swift confirmations might be cast aside — replaced by lengthy delays that partisans on both sides will opportunistically decry or defend.

Long after the current vacancy

is filled, eight-justice courts may occur with depressing regularity.

To many exhausted or dismayed by the court’s recent pyrotechnics — which include landmark rulings on gun rights, campaign finance, same-sex marriage, health care and racial equality — the notion of a lowerprofile court is appealing. Of course, this spell of judicial restraint may be extinguished when a ninth justice is confirmed.

But that has not stopped those who prefer a chastened judiciary from declaring eight-justice courts a boon to democracy or, at very least, a trivial issue.

Their view misses crucial aspects of the court’s role.

To start, power abhors a vacuum. As important questions of federal law arise, an eightjustice court’s power could flow downward, to the regional courts of appeals. Establishing the (more liberal) U.S. Court of

Appeals for the 9th Circuit as a de facto “Supreme Court of the West” — or the (more conservative) 5th Circuit as a “Supreme Court of the South” — is a dispersal of judicial power, not a weakening. In some cases, moreover, an absentee court could embolden more aggressive lower-court judges to flex their muscles. When the justices are limited by obstructionism rather than by a consensus favoring restraint, thunderbolts may cease on the mountaintop only to intensify on the hills below.

Besides, when lower courts disagree, it is not “judicial modesty” to avoid refereeing. The Constitution should not mean one thing in Texas but another in California. Prolonged legal uncertainty can chill valuable economic and political activity and inflict grave harm on individuals. The Supreme Court must tame forces of fragmentation and vindicate the principle that we are a single union; a series of eight-justice courts would struggle to fulfill that duty.

Equally harmful are instances when a divided court punts on questions that ultimately require judicial disposition. That is certainly true of constitutional cases, where the court’s word is usually final. But even in matters of economic regulation,

environmental protection and anti-discrimination law, political gridlock typically means that the court alone can end disputes.

In such cases, artful evasion may eliminate the only forum able to authoritatively settle charged issues, thus inflaming the very tensions that have stalled confirmations in the first place.

Further, continued half-measures can keep the court mired for years in bitter political fights, as shown by the ongoing saga surrounding Obamacare’s contraception mandate. While there is a time for narrow compromise, sometimes prudence favors a broader resolution — which might be impossible for an eight-justice court to achieve.

As a worst-case scenario, it is terrifying to contemplate a divided court unable to offer the nation finality in the face of a major constitutional or electoral crisis.

It would be especially sad to see the court hobbled in an era of shattered faith in our political institutions. The court remains uniquely effective, but its legitimacy is hard won and easily lost.

Sustained bouts of indecision exact a heavy toll. We need branches of government capable of doing more than treading water: They must actually function. n

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BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

‘Ghostbusters’ becomes political ANN HORNADAY is The Washington Post’s chief film critic.

The idea of an all-female “Ghostbusters” should have been no big deal.

Ever eager to profitably repurpose their corporate properties, movie studios are constantly on the hunt for past projects to resurrect, capitalizing on nostalgic baby boomers and Gen Xers and, just maybe, enlisting a young generation of fans to support a new franchise.

When it comes to a potentially lucrative reboot, “Ghostbusters” — the beloved, albeit far from perfect, 1984 action-comedy starring Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson — checked every box.

The prospect was made all the more enticing when it was announced that this one would feature an all-female cast, including Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy and “Saturday Night Live” stars Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones.

Surely, Sony, the parent studio of “Ghostbusters,” and director Paul Feig had no reason to believe that their remake would run straight into a buzz saw of sexist backlash. Feig, after all, directed the hugely successful, female-centric comedies “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” — all of which featured hugely popular performances from McCarthy, whose appeal has transcended gender to make

her a global star and a rising commercial force in the industry.

But Sony and Feig were quickly disabused of their optimism in March, when the first trailer for “Ghostbusters” appeared and was met with an engulfing wave of hate, eventually becoming the most-disliked movie trailer in YouTube history. This was the work of a small but vocal and wellorganized cadre of male fans of the original film who were outraged at the prospect of a worshiped text being rewritten according to new norms, but with no actual, you know, Norms — or Egons or Rays.

(Apparently, no one hipped these guys to the fact that a remake doesn’t render the first one nonexistent. Strange but true.)

The backlash has simmered ever since. The message, by all these dizzying accounts, was clear: Outside narrowly proscribed channels of acceptability, women still have to fight for the right to claim the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

symbolic and social space that movies represent. A fairy tale about a young woman falling in love with a misunderstood prince? Girls rule! Longcherished narratives involving agency, competence and — heaven forfend! — humor? Not so fast, laydeeze.

For 20 years, I’ve been observing and writing about the power of films, which I’ve argued may not have direct cause-andeffect relationships to behavior but exert enormous influence on our values and imaginative identities. I’ve received a fair share of ridicule and anger for that idea — more public on some occasions than others, from, I suspect, the very same men and boys who react to a female-led “Ghostbusters” as if their manhood, indeed their very existence, were under prolonged proton-pack attack.

And, in an election year, the political is — inescapably — partisan. Which is no doubt why Ellen DeGeneres decided to book the women of “Ghostbusters” on her talk show the same day that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was scheduled to appear.

DeGeneres was clearly tickled at the you-go-girl optics of it all, even as Sony scrambled to position “Ghostbusters” as a notcontroversial, general-audience,

feel-good summer hit.

A few days later, author Andi Zeisler wrote in the Los Angeles Times that feminists now had an “obligation” to see “Ghostbusters” when it opens July 15. “When a big-budget movie starring men does poorly, it’s just another dud that’s shrugged off,” she wrote. “When one made by or starring women doesn’t live up to the hype, it becomes a referendum on women as artists and filmgoers.”

Zeisler’s context isn’t the presidential race, but rather the persistent lack of representation of women behind and in front of the camera, and the dismissal of them as an audience and market.

Still, it seems like just yesterday that anti-Clinton voters were being given the same marching orders to support “13 Hours,” Michael Bay’s amped-up action adventure about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

In a culture of politics-asspectacle, even our most escapist spectacles have become politicized. Whether fans choose to see “Ghostbusters” to take a stand or just for a laugh, the stakes are absurdly high for a film that will either become an unwitting beneficiary of this year’s silly season or its most undeserving casualty. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Gentrification BY

L ANCE F REEMAN

Everything about gentrification is controversial — even its defini­ tion. That’s not the only thing we can’t agree on. Gentrification is painted alternately as a destroyer of neighborhoods or a savior of cit­ ies. These competing views are driven in part by misconceptions about what the word means and what it entails. Here are some of the most common misconceptions.

1

Gentrification leads to lower crime.

In fact, studies of the relationship between crime and gentrification have found the opposite: Gentrification often leads to increases in crime. One study found that larceny and robbery went up in gentrifying neighborhoods across the country.

There are at least two explanations for this pattern. The new, wealthier residents might be more lucrative targets for wouldbe burglars and robbers, perhaps enticing them to engage in more illegal acts. And crime thrives on instability, anonymity and weaker social ties, all of which make it easier for criminals to blend in and less likely for neighbors to look out for one another. Gentrification, by definition, destabilizes a neighborhood.

2

Gentrification causes widespread displacement.

Of course, when neighborhoods change, some families do get pushed out. But my research shows that longtime residents aren’t more likely to move when their neighborhood gentrifies; sometimes they’re actually less likely to leave (in part because of the improvements gentrification can bring). In one study, I found that the probability that a household would be displaced in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York was 1.3 percent. A 2015 study in Philadelphia found something similar — that neighborhood income gains did not

significantly predict household exit rates.

What distinguishes gentrification is not who moves out; it’s who moves in. In a gentrifying neighborhood, new residents are more likely to be well-off. As a result, the neighborhood’s poverty makeup can shift, even if no one leaves. In 2004, I found that a neighborhood’s poverty rate could drop from 30 percent to 12 percent in a decade with minimal displacement. That’s because gentrification often leads to new construction or to investment in once-vacant properties.

neighborhoods don’t clamor for ‘gentrification,’ exactly, but they do want the things it often brings: grocery stores and other retail within walking distance; better transit connections; reduced crime; and attention from the city government.”

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4

Longtime residents hate gentrification.

Of course, some people don’t want to see their neighborhoods change. But often, residents appreciate certain aspects of gentrification.

Homeowners stand to gain a windfall as the value of their property appreciates. Increased retail activity brings more goods and services to once-forlorn areas. Whether residents appreciate the changes comes down to two things: the amenities in their neighborhood prior to gentrification, and whether the new services benefit the people who live there. In neighborhoods with severe disinvestment, lacking many retail services that most people take for granted, one may find long-term residents who appreciate gentrification. As the Washington City Paper wrote about the District, “Most longtime residents of low-income

EVY MAGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Gentrifiers are white.

In many neighborhoods, middleclass Asians, blacks and Latinos are part and parcel of the process.

Millennials and young professionals of all races appreciate the attractions and conveniences of city living. In a 2009 study, I found that gentrifying neighborhoods are more racially diverse than nongentrifying ones.

There’s another reason for this, too. Kesha Moore of Drew University has shown that professionals are drawn to some low-income minority neighborhoods because of a desire to give back to the communities where they or their parents grew up. In minority neighborhoods that are gentrifying, nonwhite gentrifiers aren’t as noticeable as white ones.

And even when we do notice them, we don’t call them gentrifiers.

5

Gentrification happens naturally.

When we talk about a gentrified neighborhood, we may imagine something specific — a bustling street with new coffee shops, boutique clothing stores and artisanal breweries.

It’s true that a lot of gentrifying neighborhoods get these amenities. But it’s not inevitable.

As sociologist Sylvie Tissot has shown, gentrifiers don’t rely on market forces alone to bring in the types of restaurants and shops compatible with a neighborhood’s new image. The same gentrifiers who are drawn to a low-income neighborhood for cheaper housing might also work to change the area more to their liking. This might mean leaning on police and code enforcers to drive out seedy bars, or pushing policymakers to provide subsidies to businesses that “fit in.” To be sure, market forces help change commerce in gentrifying neighborhoods. But there are often activists and policymakers who wish to nudge the market to certain outcomes. n Freeman is an urban-planning professor at Columbia University and author of “There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification From the Ground Up.”

SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2016

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 27

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Presented by

Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com Interested in having a booth at this event?

E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com

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