The Washington Post National Weekly - June 19, 2016

Politics Investors lost big on Trump 4

World She holds powerful to account 11

Music Kenny Rogers’s farewell 16

5 Myths About rape 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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THE FIX

5 things I learned from Trump BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

J

ust over a year ago, Donald Trump announced that he was running for president. When he rode down that beautiful, classy elevator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, there was no one — up to and including Trump — who thought, a year later, he would be the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the lessons Trump has taught me. (NOTE: These apply only to the GOP primary. Trump’s struggles in the weeks since he’s been the party’s presumptive nominee suggest how he won the primary is not transferable to the general election.)

1. Assume nothing.

When Trump got into the race, he was greeted with eye rolls by, well, almost everyone.

Why? The assumption was that someone with Trump’s profile in the general public and within the GOP more specifically could never be a serious challenger for the highest office in the country.

Nope. Basically every assumption made about Trump by me and others — he wouldn’t run, he wouldn’t file his financial paperwork, he couldn’t win a primary, his controversial statements would catch up with him, he could never win a one-on-one race — were proven wrong over the last year.

So, stop assuming. What has always been true is true only until it stops being true. And that is now.

2. Money is overrated.

Remember how the 2016 election was going to be the super PAC election? If that were true, Jeb Bush would have cruised to the nomination. He didn’t. Trump did by spending the least money of almost any candidate running for either party’s nomination.

Yes, Trump bragged repeatedly about how

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he was self-funding his campaign — not accurate — but he was remarkably thrifty when it came to spending money in this race. Trump lived on free media, regularly having his rallies broadcast in full on cable television and calling in at will to virtually every show across the networks. That flood-the-zone media presence coupled with Trump’s celebrity (and social media presence) made traditional TV ads like the ones Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) were running almost totally useless.

LOGAN CYRUS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Not only that, but “big money” candidates became symbols, in Trump’s worldview, of the problem with politics — beholden to major donors and their whims.

3. Organization is overrated.

Trump made only the thinnest of attempts at building anything like the organization his rivals were spending millions of dollars on.

When Trump went to a state set to hold a primary, he drew wall-to-wall coverage that drowned out all of his rivals. People were excited to see him; they felt like they were up close to true fame. Had Trump done any significant organizing, he would have probably won the nomination even more easily than he did. But he won without any real organization — the one sine qua non of primary politics.

4. All press is good press.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 36

There was an assumption — see Point No. 1 — that sure, Trump got lots of press, but lots and lots of it was bad press over the many controversial things he said. So it didn’t do him any good and might actually hurt him.

Turns out that there were two things wrong with that idea. The first was that Trump didn’t get all the negative press we thought he got.

The second was that all press related to Trump wound up being good press. In some cases, more people than anyone thought agreed with Trump’s proposals (the wall, banning Muslims). In others in which people didn’t agree, they didn’t really hold Trump accountable for any one thing he said. That’s just Trump being Trump, they thought. And, more importantly, Trump was on their mind — which netted out to a win for him.

5. You can’t go too far in bashing your party.

Pre-Trump there was a belief that even if you were running as an outsider for president, generally speaking, you played nice with the party elders for fear that they would seek retribution against you.

What Trump proves is that the emperor had no clothes when it came to any alleged “retribution” that the party leaders could or would seek against him for attacking them. He laid waste to the Republican National Committee, along with Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and virtually every other major figure within the party over the past few decades.

And while some of those éminence grise — like Bob Dole — pushed back against Trump, the real estate mogul understood that Republican primary voters were much more on his side than Dole’s. They felt sold out by the GOP leaders too — and they liked someone who was willing to tell those elders exactly what they did wrong and why they were dumb.

There were no lines that GOP voters didn’t want crossed. Trump got that. And here he is. n

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

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ON THE COVER Michael Phelps cuts through the water on his way to victory in the 200-meter individual medley during the Arena Pro swim series meet on April 16 in Mesa, Ariz. Photograph by JONATHAN NEWTON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump profited as his investors lost BY

D REW H ARWELL

I

t was promoted as the chance of a lifetime: Mom-and-pop investors could buy shares in celebrity businessman Donald Trump’s first public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts.

Their investments were quickly depleted. The company known by Trump’s initials, DJT, crumbled into a penny stock and filed for bankruptcy after less than a decade, costing shareholders millions of dollars, even as other casino companies soared.

In its short life, Trump the company greatly enriched Trump the businessman, paying to have his personal jet piloted and buying heaps of Trump-brand merchandise. Despite losing money every year under Trump’s leadership, the company paid Trump handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company’s stock plummeted 70 percent.

Many of those who lost money were Main Street shareholders who believed in the Trump brand, such as Sebastian Pignatello, a retired private investor in Queens.

By the time of the 2004 bankruptcy, Pignatello’s 150,000 shares were worth pennies on the dollar.

“He had been pillaging the company all along,” said Pignatello, who joined shareholders in a lawsuit against Trump that has since been settled. “Even his business allies, they were all fair game. He has no qualms about screwing anybody. That’s what he does.”

Trump’s bid for the White House relies heavily on his ability to sell himself as a master businessman, a standout performer in real estate and reality TV. But interviews with former shareholders and analysts as well as years of financial filings reveal a striking characteristic of his business record: Even when his endeavors failed and other people lost money, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee found a way to make money for himself, to market his Trumpbranded products and to pay for his expensive lifestyle.

Trump was the chairman of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts

MEL EVANS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

His first public company gave him bonuses, paid for jet as stock sank in Atlantic City from 1995 to 2009, his only outing as the head of a major public company. During that time, the company lost more than $1 billion, financial records show. He also was chief executive from 2000 to 2005, during which time share prices plunged from a high of $35 to as low as 17 cents.

Trump received more than $44 million in salary, bonuses and other compensation during his time at the company, filings show.

He also benefited from tens of millions of dollars more in special deals, advisory fees and “service agreements” he negotiated with his company.

Trump’s campaign did not make him available to respond to specif-

ic questions about the company, but in a recent Washington Post interview, Trump said he “made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” adding, “I make great deals for myself.”

He expounded: “They say, ‘Why don’t you take the casinos public or something?’ You know, if you take them public, you make money on that. All I can say is I wasn’t representing the country. I wasn’t representing the banks. I wasn’t representing anybody but myself.”

Corporate governance experts say it’s rare for executives of public companies to suggest that they haven’t been looking out for the shareholders who financed them.

“When companies go public, when they first invite investors in

A sign announces the closing of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, N.J. While Trump was chairman of the Plaza’s parent company from 1995 to 2009, the firm lost more than $1 billion.

. . . they say: ‘I promise you, you will come first. We are here to create shareholder value, and that’s why you should trust us,’ ” said Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which advises shareholders on corporate governance issues. “For them to say, ‘I don’t really care about you,’ it’s basically your [sell] signal.”

Whatever price he wanted Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts started out as a holding company that owned the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, and then it steadily added other Trump properties.

Because it was publicly traded, Trump could sell shares and

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POLITICS quickly raise money while other corners of his empire were in distress. Virtually all of Trump’s other businesses are privately held, so key information about their performance is hidden.

The company began advertising its public offering of stock in 1995, saying shareholders would benefit from “the widespread recognition of the ‘Trump’ name and its association with high quality amenities and first class service.”

When it debuted that year on the New York Stock Exchange, Trump’s company raised $140 million from investors, at $14 a share, and said the money would go toward expanding the Plaza and developing a riverboat casino in Indiana. But much of that money went to pay off tens of millions of dollars in loans Trump had personally guaranteed, filings show.

Those loans were taken out before the company went public, but Trump’s private fortune could have been at risk if they went unpaid.

The company got off to an encouraging start. An improving national economy and an upturn in Atlantic City gambling helped shares soar to a peak of $35 in 1996. That boosted the value of Trump’s stake in the company and helped him return to the Forbes 400 list — the magazine’s ranking of America’s wealthiest people — for the first time since 1989.

The early success didn’t last long. In less than a year, the company paid premium prices for two of Trump’s deeply indebted, privately held casinos, the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Castle. In essence, he was both buyer and seller, able to set whatever price he wanted.

The company bought his Castle for $100 million more than analysts said it was worth. Trump pocketed $880,000 in cash after arranging the deal, financial filings show.

By the end of 1996, shareholders who had bet on a rosy Trump future were now investors in a company with $1.7 billion of Trump’s old debt. The company was forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on interest payments, more than the casinos brought in, securities filings show. The unprofitable company couldn’t afford the upgrades it needed to compete with newer gambling rivals.

Spooked investors fled the company in 1996, sending its share price down to $12. As millions of dollars in shareholder value evapo-

KATHY WILLENS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

rated, the company gave Trump a $7 million pay package, including a 71 percent raise to his salary, financial filings show. Trump defended his compensation by telling the Wall Street Journal, “Other than the stock price, we’re doing great.”

“He ran these companies into the ground,” Graef Crystal, an executive-pay consultant who watched the company at the time, said in an interview.

As the company spiraled downward, it continued to pay for Trump’s luxuries. Between 1998 and 2005, it spent more than $6 million to “entertain high-end customers” on Trump’s plane and golf courses and about $2 million to maintain his personal jet and have it piloted, a Post analysis of company filings shows.

Trump also steered the company toward deals with the rest of the Trump-brand empire. Between 2006 and 2009, the company bought $1.7 million of Trumpbrand merchandise, including $1.2 million of Trump Ice bottled water, the analysis shows.

“If you’re chairman of the company, there have to be safeguards to avoid that kind of blatant selfdealing,” said Pignatello, who said he lost tens of thousands of dollars in the investment. “He was milking the company.”

A ‘basket of goodies’ The grand promises and boasting Trump had become famous for as a private businessman became a

source of tension with public investors.

The company at times ran into trouble. In 1998, the U.S. Treasury fined one of the Trump casinos $477,000 for failing to file reports designed to help guard against money laundering. Trump did not comment then on the action. The company agreed last year to pay a $10 million civil penalty after regulators found that it had continued to violate the reporting and record-keeping requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act. In 2000, Trump and his partners paid $250,000 to settle a case brought by New York state alleging that they had secretly funded an ad blitz opposing the opening of competing casinos in the Catskill Mountains. “It’s been settled. We’re happy it all worked out nicely,” Trump said then.

In 2002, federal securities regulators issued a cease-and-desist order against the company, saying it had misled shareholders by publishing a news release with numbers “deceptively” skewed to appear more upbeat. The company said it quickly corrected the error and was not fined. Trump defended the release by saying it “was just a statement that was too verbose.”

The company lost money every year of Trump’s leadership, and its share price suffered. A shareholder who bought $100 of DJT shares in 1995 could sell them for about $4 in 2005. The same investment

Donald Trump speaks at the New York Stock Exchange after his company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, went public in 1995. In a recent interview, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said he “made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” adding, “I make great deals for myself.”

“He had been pillaging the company all along. . . . He has no qualms about screwing anybody.

That’s what he does.”

Sebastian Pignatello, a shareholder in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts

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in MGM Resorts would have increased in value to about $600.

In 2004, the year Trump took home a $1.5 million salary, stockexchange officials froze trading in the company — and, later, delisted it entirely — as word spread that it was filing for bankruptcy because of about $1.8 billion in debt.

Under the company’s Chapter 11 reorganization plan, shareholders’ stake in the company shrunk from roughly 40 percent to about 5 percent. Trump, meanwhile, would remain chairman — and receive a $2 million annual salary, a $7.5 million beachfront tract in Atlantic City and a personal stake in the company’s Miss Universe pageant.

“I don’t think it’s a failure. It’s a success,” Trump said in 2004 about the bankruptcy. “The future looks very good.”

Shareholders sued, saying in court filings that the “sweetheart deal” amounted to a “basket of goodies” for Trump. “Chairmen of public companies usually don’t celebrate when millions of dollars of shareholder equity are being wiped out,” attorneys wrote in a court filing that year. “Donald Trump apparently does.”

Trump settled, agreeing to give creditors $17.5 million in cash and the proceeds from an auction of the Atlantic City land.

Trump has said he had no regrets about the company’s performance.

“Entrepreneurially speaking, not necessarily from the standpoint of running a company but from an entrepreneur’s standpoint, [the stock offering] was one of the great deals,” he told Fortune in 2004.

Donald Trump resigned from the company in 2009, after Trump declared in a statement that he strongly disagreed with bondholders who had been pushing the company to file again for bankruptcy.

“The company has represented for quite some time substantially less than 1 percent of my net worth, and my investment in it is worthless to me now,” Trump said at the time.

The company, now called Trump Entertainment Resorts, never escaped its crippling debt and filed for bankruptcy twice more, in 2009 and 2014. Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor Trump has called a friend, took control of the public company this year. n

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POLITICS

Libertarian sees his moment to shine BY

D AVID W EIGEL

M

oments after he won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, was handed a peace offering — a replica of one of George Washington’s pistols — by runner-up Austin Petersen.

“You have my sword, and my gun,” said Petersen.

Cameras rolling, Johnson accepted the gift. Then he watched Petersen tell delegates to oppose Bill Weld, the former Massachusetts governor Johnson had enticed to run for vice president, whose past views against marijuana legalization are seen as a deal-breaker by many orthodox libertarians.

Johnson is not so much about orthodoxy. In a snit as he walked out, he tossed the gun in the garbage. For days afterward, a busy network of libertarian blogs investigated the story and got a confession. Fox News even ran with it.

“It wasn’t out of character,” said Johnson. “Maybe what was out of character was doing it in a public way, where I kind of, sort of, knew that it would be seen. In character would have been to do that in private. But to me, hypocrisy” — endorsing Johnson but not his running mate — “is the unforgivable sin.”

Johnson’s interpretation of libertarianism, and his sometimes surprising pragmatism on issues and alliances, raises a key question in an election year with two of the most unpopular major-party nominees in memory. Who would be hurt more by Johnson’s candidacy: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump?

Johnson’s support of legal marijuana and his opposition to deportations could endear him to the left.

His promise to sign any bill that lowers taxes could do the opposite.

Polling is not definitive on the subject, but for Johnson the bigger test is pulling support from anyone at all. One survey this month from Fox News gave him 12 percent of the vote in a three-way race with Clinton and Trump — a decent showing for a candidate who

RICK BOWMER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

With two highly disliked main candidates, the realist in a party of radicals thinks he has appeal most voters don’t know, or don’t know is a former governor, or don’t know is a presidential candidate. The key for Johnson is to continue to be included in national polls at all — and to move that number up to 15 percent, so that he qualifies for the fall debates.

Johnson is one of the least obviously power-hungry men to run for president. But he is not a pushover.

Born in 1953, he founded a construction company while in college.

After it grew into the aptly named Big J Enterprises, Johnson had enough money to self-fund a 1994 bid for governor as a Republican.

He won, in an oddball race where a third-party candidate got 10 percent of the vote. He promised to run the state “like a business.”

On the trail now, he mostly talks about his gubernatorial years to boast about his 739 vetoes.

“Every third Thursday of every month, I’d have an open-door pol-

icy — five minutes for anyone who wanted to call out waste, fraud and abuse,” said Johnson. “I’d do the same as president.”

Decades later, Johnson’s takeover of the Libertarian Party and success in getting it to nominate Weld was nearly as radical as Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP. The Libertarian Party is a bastion of radical libertarianism, a home to people who would rather be pure than win an election. Just 12 years ago, the party handed its nomination to Michael Badnarik, a freelance constitutional lecturer who refuses to obtain a driver’s license because that would mean using a Social Security number.

Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman and 1988 Libertarian Party candidate who might be the country’s most famous libertarian, can hardly finish a paragraph without citing the Constitution.

Johnson is an activist who

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson served for two terms as the Republican governor of New Mexico. He opposes some of the tenets of orthodox libertarians.

imagines a Libertarian president — he is serious about winning — using the executive branch to correct Congress’s mistakes.

Asked how his presidency might begin, he starts by describing executive actions, such reclassifying drugs (all of them) and ending the National Security Agency.

“The NSA was created by executive order,” Johnson said. “Did you know that? By executive order, for a starting point, you could turn the satellites away from the United States.” Johnson also sees no problem with “signing statements,” the extra language presidents sometimes use to explain which parts of legislation they would not enforce.

Johnson’s view of power, and the role of government, is not unique among libertarians. Since his first Libertarian bid, in 2012, he has described the party’s platform as “taking the best from both parties,” combining fiscal tightness with social liberalism. He has favored legal gay marriage since 2011; during the Libertarian contest this year, he criticized “religious liberty” laws that would allow merchants to refuse to serve gay customers.

Nearly every Republican, including Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), opposed President Obama’s executive action to allow the children of immigrants to stay in the United States. Johnson supports it.

On policy after policy, Johnson comes off as more of a realist than the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, or the runner-up for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Both of those men imagined a popular movement breaking through a gridlocked Congress to pass a president’s agenda.

Johnson assumes that libertarianism, as the oasis between the parties, is already popular. He knows, as pollsters know, that the major parties have chosen candidates who are decidedly unpopular among swaths of the electorate.

When offered a slogan or a swingfor-the-fences idea, Johnson suggests that a reality-based Libertarian president would find a solution.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Johnson responded to every idea by imagining what Con-

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POLITICS gress might pass or an executive might get past it. The Federal Reserve, for example, could not be abolished the way many libertarians want, but it could be tacked in, he said. He waved off the popular libertarian catchphrase “taxation is theft.”

“It is theft, yes, but the reality is that we’re not gonna abolish taxes,” said Johnson. “I mean, if I’m elected president, you can expect me to sign anything that reduces taxes.”

In 2016, as a candidate, Johnson talks about balancing the budget but lacks the zeal of libertarians who think the state could be cut in half without consequence. He’d keep Social Security for current retirees. Having learned in New Mexico how the government policed bad actors, he wouldn’t abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

“In the libertarian view, without the EPA, you as an individual could sue under the law,” said Johnson.

“But not really. You don’t have deep pockets to go up against Chevron.”

Later, he added that the government had its own mixed record.

But the Libertarian Party platform focuses on the government, and only that, suggesting that the planet would be cleaner if the market would be allowed to work.

That thinking comes from a philosophical lack of faith in government that Johnson simply doesn’t share. In his hunt for a libertarian center, he comes off as less angry about the state than many Republicans.

That cuts to the reason he might appeal to liberals. Asked if, as president, he would sign off on the killing of U.S. citizens who join terrorist groups, Johnson responded with a horrified “no.” The state might work better if Gary Johnson got to run it, but no president should be trusted to wage foreign adventures unchecked.

Not since America’s intervention in Bosnia, he said, had the country been right to get involved in war.

Johnson also said that the Islamic State is not an existential threat, noting that terrorism kills only 400 people per year.

“Microphones get put in politicians’ mouths,” said Johnson, “and the reporters frame questions like: ‘These atrocities are happening in Libya. Are you going to stand by idly and watch this happen?’ The knee-jerk response is, ‘Of course I’m not,’ without considering that by getting involved in Libya, the outcomes are going to be worse.” n

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Who would really be helped

by Bernie Sanders’s reforms BY

P HILIP B UMP

D

uring a brief statement in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders outlined four proposals to reform the Democratic Party.

Those proposals are as follows, given in the order Sanders presented them.

1. Get new leadership at the Democratic National Committee.

2. Approve “the most progressive platform ever passed” at the Democratic National Convention in July.

3. Enact “real electoral reform” within the Democratic Party.

4. Get rid of superdelegates.

On Thursday, he gave a concession-like speech but didn’t actually concede the race to Hillary Clinton or endorse her. He reiterated his pledge to push his agenda until the convention.

Let’s focus on Sanders’s “electoral reform” proposal, which included a number of sub-points: l Same-day voter registration. l Enough staffing and training to allow people to vote in a timely fashion (pointing to the mess in Arizona). l Make sure the votes get counted (pointing to a slow process in California). l And then there’s this one, which we’ll quote directly: “We need real electoral reform within the Democratic Party. And that means — among many, many other things — open primaries. The idea that in the state of New York, the great state of New York, 3 million people could not participate in helping to select who the Democratic or Republican candidate for president would be because they had registered as an independent not as a Democrat or a Republican is incomprehensible.”

This quote lies at the heart of the differences between Sanders and the Democratic Party, everything else aside.

It is the job of the Democratic Party to gain new members who will then vote for Democratic

candidates. To raise money from those members to help run campaigns on behalf of those candidates. In recent years, the number of people who identify with the party has declined; the number of people who identify with the Republican Party has declined slightly faster. By January of this year, 26 percent of Americans identified as Republicans and 29 percent as Democrats.

Forty-two percent called themselves independents. In other words: The party isn’t getting its job done.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

From the standpoint of the party, though, Sanders’s proposal would only make the problem worse. Allowing non-Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary might get voters invested in the candidate they support — but it wouldn’t get them invested in the party. The party wants to identify people whom it can reliably turn out to vote in important contests; allowing people to vote in Democratic primaries without being Democrats doesn’t help them with that identification.

What’s more, it doesn’t build loyalty to the ticket. Democrats tend to vote for Democrats. Independents vote for . . . whomever.

It’s not weird to suggest that more people should get to vote in elections. It’s somewhat weird to suggest that the party has a duty to let non-members help pick its nominee. It’s very weird to suggest that the Democratic Party would want to intentionally weaken itself.

Of course, the reason Sanders wishes that the party allowed non-Democrats to vote is that those non-Democrats helped keep him in the fight. In a few states, it was people who identified as independents that handed Sanders a win. If those New York voters had been able to pull the lever for Sanders, he may have . . . well, not lost quite so badly.

But notice what’s missing from Sanders’s list: caucuses.

As the primary season unfolded, a number of people pointed out that caucuses, which require a commitment of much more time within a particular period on Election Day, are rather undemocratic.

So why wouldn’t Sanders suggest that caucuses be reformed?

Well, a cynic might suggest it was because Sanders won caucuses overwhelmingly.

The core of Sanders’s argument is the second of his four points. His victories were shifting the conversation about what the party stands for to the left. Clinton may claim that she was there all along, but it doesn’t really fool anyone. Sanders managed to make the Democratic primary season about economics and about the role of money in politics in a way that it would not have been otherwise.

His articulation of what needs to change, though, moves into another sphere. Eliminating superdelegates is fair game, and something many have suggested. Suggesting open primaries is, from the standpoint of the party, iffy.

Ignoring the problems with caucuses sort of gives the game away.

The Democratic primaries are over. Party leaders and Clinton in particular will be looking to figure out how to make Sanders and his voters happy with the outcome. For Sanders, there’s no reason not to ask for the moon and the stars. For leaders in the Democratic Party, though, smoothing the runway for future insurgents probably isn’t at the top of the priority list. n

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NATION

Transformation via transportation M ICHAEL L ARIS Pittsburgh BY

U

ber is about to build a vast, high-tech playground in one of this city’s poorest areas.

The ride-hailing giant wants a protected place to test driverless Ubers, part of its effort to replace costly human drivers.

So on the site of an abandoned steel mill south of the Hot Metal Bridge, the company will carve out a 20-plus-square-block, Pac-Manlike maze lined with trapezoidal obstacles. It is the same place where thousands of workers once streamed in to take punishing jobs at beehive-shaped ovens for baking coal and the furnaces that were fueled by it.

The test course in the impoverished Hazelwood community is part of a broader plan by Pittsburgh to bring green housing, tech jobs and an autonomous shuttle to the site. That is all at the center of Pittsburgh’s push to transform itself.

The public-private effort reflects a surge of similar ambitions elsewhere. Cities across the country, with a nudge from Washington, D.C., are trying to remake themselves by taking an expansive view of the role of transportation in their civic lives.

They say that they can tackle the era’s big issues — traffic congestion, poverty and climate change — by melding technology with the work of private firms and innovative planners.

Columbus, Ohio, wants driverless vehicles to speed travel to jobs by people from neighborhoods with chronic health concerns.

Portland, Ore., is trying to cut pedestrian road deaths in its lesswell-off reaches, potentially with platoons of connected vehicles.

Denver hopes to link tractor-trailers wirelessly to prevent poorer areas from being jammed with idling trucks.

To speed that work, and learn from the places that are trying to do it, the Transportation Department launched a competition, and in March chose seven finalists out of 78 applications: Pittsburgh; Kansas City, Mo.; San Francisco;

JEFF SWENSEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A government competition aims to totally change American cities by improving how we travel Columbus; Denver; Austin; and Portland.

In an unusual partnership, the federal officials matched the cities with government researchers, regulatory wonks and private firms to offer practical advice as the teams developed plans to remake themselves. The federal government goaded the teams to talk to each other about the effort and to incorporate three big-picture themes: automation technology, slashing greenhouse gases and improving disadvantaged communities, which were paved over or shut out in earlier eras.

And they brought a pot of gold.

The final winner of the Smart City Challenge will get a $40 million federal grant to test its ideas, plus $10 million from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and technology support from companies brought in by Washington.

The “incentivized prize model,” as some call it, is just a fancy way of saying something simple: Competition helps make hard-to-do

things happen.

But the gamification of government has rarely had higher stakes than in the competition that came to a head this month. Seven mayors made a pilgrimage to Washington to pitch Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in person. One winner will be chosen later this month.

Given a “chronic lack of investment” in a stressed transportation system, Foxx said, adding an expected 70 million people and 45 percent more freight over U.S. roads in the next 30 years will be debilitating if more isn’t done. “All of these things are converging to make life hell for people who are trying to get from one place to another. That’s the bottom line,” Foxx said.

So working with cities, and helping to draw out — and feed off of — their ideas for the future, has been an exhilarating shift.

“That’s exciting to people.

Think about when President Lincoln put a marker down to create the transcontinental railroad or

An Uber automated vehicle goes for a test drive on the 31st Street Bridge in Pittsburgh. The city is one of seven finalists chosen for the Transportation Department’s contest, which focuses on automation technology, slashing greenhouse gases and improving disadvantaged communities.

when Eisenhower decided to support the interstate highway system. These were big, seismic moments in our country’s transportation system,” Foxx said.

And this is another one.

Blurring traditional roles, the feds are serving both as seedfunder and midwife, trying to help develop a list of great ideas that prove strong enough to spread elsewhere.

“When one city does something successful, it’s the single best way to get it adopted more broadly,” said Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York City and chief executive of Sidewalk Labs, a firm started by Google that markets technology to cities and is partnering on the federal effort.

That will happen when a city figures out how to use technology to squeeze the most out of its transportation networks, Doctoroff said. Sensors, cameras and computers are powerful and cheap, and can be distributed widely and connected easily. Artificial intelligence can help channel more cars through the same tight roads. But, “in order for this stuff to happen, government has to understand it,” Doctoroff said.

And that requires bridging the “very wide gulf” between tech people and the “urbanists” who run city governments, he said.

Federal officials also partnered with private firms that promised more than $20 million in software, services and equipment to the winner, including Sidewalk Labs, chipmaker NXP, 3-D design software firm Autodesk, crashavoidance company Mobileye and Amazon Web Services. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post. He also is an investor in Uber.)

On a recent afternoon along an industrial strip near Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River, a woman walked her dog between a Chinese grocery store and a cavernous, block-long building with no sign out front.

The only hint of the research going on inside the Uber Advanced Technologies Center was a maroon Chevy Suburban parked in a side lot, with telltale spinning navigation equipment and other clunky

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NATION electronics grafted to the roof.

Last year, Uber put its self-driving headquarters in the city and poached dozens of specialists from Carnegie Mellon University, considered the cradle of robotic car research. The firm, which some investors value at more than $60 billion, is locked in a technological arms race with Google, General Motors and others, and has added hundreds of employees.

Some companies say that their automated vehicles will be safe and ready to carry the public sometime during the next president’s term.

Some question Uber’s ambitions and what the gig-economy behemoth can really do for a place such as Pittsburgh.

“It’s supposed to be a driverless vehicle — I don’t know how it’s going to help the people in this neighborhood who need jobs,” said Gailen Hines, a retired receptionist who has lived in Hazelwood for 36 years.

An Uber spokesman says a wholesale move away from human drivers will not happen overnight. “That transition, for technical, regulatory and adoption reasons, at scale, will take some time,” the spokesman said. “In the meantime, we are focused on creating flexible earning opportunities for as many people as possible.”

The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco, says that “self-driving cars can help save millions of lives as well as cut congestion in our cities. That’s an exciting future.”

As the Obama administration winds down, Foxx has emphasized the need to redress decades of federal highway policies that marginalized many. “In place after place, highways cut the heart out of low-income and minority communities,” Foxx said this spring.

Foxx is 45, and “for most of my lifetime, our transportation system has been on a decline, in terms of our investment, in terms of travel times, in terms of congestion,” he said. Countless cities have conventional construction plans to try to address that. But scores of them have “spent time, energy and resources thinking about how innovation can help them move forward,” he said, and that’s “giving us a sense” things can turn around.

“This is going to be an era when transportation is going to literally change in front our eyes,” Foxx said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

The net neutrality court decision, in plain English BY

B RIAN F UNG

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ou may have heard something Tuesday about a court and net neutrality and something about the Internet. Maybe it didn’t make much sense.

A federal appeals court said that the Internet is basically like a giant telephone network and that the companies that provide it, such as Comcast and Verizon, must offer essentially the same protections to Internet users that the government has required of phone companies for decades.

That description glosses over some details that we’ll try to explain below, but the big thing here is that this court ruling represents one of the most important moments in the history of the Internet. It reflects a change in understanding that, if upheld, will now shape everything ranging from how Internet service providers (ISPs) upgrade their networks to what apps you can find on the Web. The weirdest thing is, you’ll probably never even notice.

What’s this court decision all about?

In a 2-1 decision, the Federal Communications Commission won a sweeping victory against a number of suing Internet providers. The FCC was accused of writing a set of strict rules for Internet providers that went far beyond what it was allowed to do under its congressional mandate. And by filing a lawsuit, cable and telecom companies hoped to get those rules thrown out.

But the companies lost?

Yes, pretty much across the board, surprising almost everyone on both sides of the issue.

The conventional wisdom in Washington was that the court would agree to let some of the rules slide, but not all. Analysts predicted that the three judges in the case would throw out an attempt by the FCC to apply its rules to cellphone data as well as regular, fixed home broadband. But in the end, the U.S. Court of Appeals

for the D.C. Circuit granted even those provisions.

Remind me again what these rules are for and what they look like?

In a nutshell, they’re aimed at making sure the Internet stays an open platform and that cable and telecom companies can’t use their position in the marketplace to unfairly benefit themselves and shut down competition.

More specifically, the rules come in several parts. The first part contains a series of total bans

JONATHAN ALCORN/REUTERS

Lori Erlendsson attends a rally in favor net neutrality in July 2014 in Los Angeles.

on certain kinds of tactics — things like blocking or slowing down the websites you’re trying to reach while favoring the sites that a cable or telecom may own or have a commercial relationship with.

These flatly aren’t allowed.

Then there’s a provision that allows the FCC to investigate suspicious ISP activity, under what it calls a “general conduct standard.”

Essentially, if the agency thinks a certain practice may run afoul of the rules, it can go after it on a case-by-case basis.

There’s a part of the regulation that extends these expectations to wireless carriers, which we’ve already briefly discussed.

And underpinning it all, making it the case’s biggest point of controversy, is the decision to regulate ISPs like legacy phone companies. Without this one move, all the rest of it comes falling down, because it’s this provision that legally enables the FCC to put the

other rules in writing.

How did the industry try to attack the rules? And what did the court say in response?

This is where it starts to get challenging, but we’ll tackle this together. In order to start regulating ISPs like phone companies, the FCC had to announce that it was doing so. It basically said, even though for a long time it had treated ISPs as an “information service,” it was now going to call them a “telecom service.”

ISPs and their supporters argued the FCC didn’t do enough to justify its regulations. And, they said, in writing such sweeping regulations, the FCC went beyond what Congress had allowed it to do when the agency was first created.

A few other FCC opponents said the rules represented a First Amendment violation, basically because Internet providers make “speech” when they decide how to carry Internet traffic over their networks. And they also claimed the regulations would put a chill on ISPs’ investment in network upgrades, resulting in a worse experience for consumers.

The court said the FCC had the power to change how it wanted to classify different industries. And it gave a pass to the FCC’s analysis that explained why the rules were necessary.

What does all this mean? And what happens next?

Now that the FCC has successfully reclassified all Internet providers under different rules, it can begin writing entirely new regulations to shape their behavior. It can also police behavior that it deems unfair.

Some ISPs, like AT&T, are hinting strongly that they will take this all the way to the Supreme Court.

Before that happens, ISPs might try for a rehearing at the D.C. Circuit, or file another lawsuit in a different appellate court. The whole process could take years.

But for now, having dealt with the immediate legal threat, the FCC will be moving ahead on implementing its net neutrality rules. n

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The ‘adoption’ of children as help S IMEON T EGEL Asuncion, Paraguay BY

T

ina Alvarenga never asked her mother why, at the age of 10, she was handed over to an upper-middle-class couple here in Paraguay’s capital to begin a harsh new life of domestic work and routine humiliation.

She had seven brothers and sisters, but as her indigenous Guarani parents struggled to make ends meet in the dusty town of Puerto Casado, on the border with Brazil, she was the only one who was given away.

Of the many psychological wounds she suffered in her new home, that bewilderment still hurts the most, says Alvarenga, now a 52-year-old indigenous rights activist and consultant to UNICEF. “The question never goes away,” she said. “I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life.”

Alvarenga’s experience remains tragically common in Paraguay, one of the last bastions in Latin America of a colonial-era system of child labor known here as “criadazgo.” The practice, in which impoverished rural families allow affluent urban households to informally adopt their children, is still found in Peru and Haiti, as well, but to a much lesser extent.

Paraguay’s most recent census, in 2011, showed 46,993 boys and girls — 2.5 percent of the country’s juvenile population — to be “criados,” some of them as young as 5.

The verbal understanding between the families involved is that the children, many of whom are indigenous, will be given education, food and other basic necessities in return for domestic work.

The reality, rights advocates say, is that many are routinely kept out of school to finish their chores or, worse, abused.

Few ex-criados grow up to achieve Alvarenga’s level of success, with many ending up on the streets.

“It’s easy to tell the criados,” said Marta Benítez, head of Global Infancia, a Paraguayan nonprofit group that focuses on children’s rights. “They wear hand-me-down clothes and have their hair very

JORGE SAENZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Since a teen’s death in January, the Paraguayan government has moved to ban the practice short. They usually eat apart from the family and go to a different school, a state school, while the biological children go to a private one.

“For those that do make it to school,” she added, “it is the only place where they can be children.

But even there, they are so tired from waking early to do domestic work that they often fall behind.”

Still widely accepted in Paraguayan society, criadazgo finally became a topic of national debate in January after a 14-year-old girl, Carolina Marín, was allegedly beaten to death by the couple for whom she worked.

The scandal prompted the National Congress to issue a declaration condemning the practice. But several lawmakers insisted that the wording specify “abusive criadazgo.”

“No one justifies child abuse, but you cannot prohibit criadazgo,” said Bernardo Villalba, of the ruling Colorado Party. “This is a national custom, and it is going to

take generations before we eradicate poverty. We can’t close the door on these children in the meantime, on their chance of a better life.”

Bernardo Puente, who spent 15 years advocating for children’s rights in Paraguay with the International Labor Organization, disagrees. “You need to tackle poverty and lack of opportunities where you find them, instead of removing kids from their families,” he said. “I have never heard a criado defend the practice.”

Even when there is no abuse and the informal agreement is fully honored, as in Alvarenga’s case, the impact can be devastating.

“You lose your roots, your sense of identity,” she said. “You are never part of the new family. They think you are, but they treat you differently.”

But many youngsters experience a worse fate than lack of affection. Some are turned out of their new homes in adolescence. According to Puente, 90 percent of Paraguay’s cases of teenage sexual ex-

Top, an indigenous Ache girl in Cerro Moroti. Many of the children from rural families adopted as “criados” are indigenous.

Above, Tina Alvarenga, an indigenous rights activist and UNICEF consultant, was given by her parents to an upper-middle-class couple when she was 10.

ploitation involve former criados.

A legal loophole has helped the practice survive, says Teresa Martínez, a human-trafficking prosecutor. She has to rely on general anti-slavery laws whose highly specific evidentiary requirements can be impossible to meet in criadazgo cases.

“It ties our hands,” she said. “We have to criminalize this behavior by its name, so that society understands it is unacceptable.”

Paraguay’s Ministry of Childhood and Adolescence is now doing exactly that, preparing a draft bill to outlaw criadazgo. Still, many issues remain to be resolved, including how to distinguish between abusers and families that are sincerely, if misguidedly, trying to help impoverished youngsters. A first step will be to require families who have informally adopted children to sign up in an official register.

The ministry is also evaluating how to avoid a wave of kids being dumped on the streets as a result of the new law, which will mandate jail terms of up to eight years for transgressors.

Alvarenga welcomes the measure. For eight years, she recalls, she awoke at 5 a.m. every day to make breakfast for the 50-something retired army major and his French-instructor wife who had taken her in after their own children were grown.

“I was never sexually abused, but I was always afraid,” she said.

Alvarenga was also, occasionally, beaten with a belt.

The one saving grace was that the major made her use his personal library, often demanding she recount to him what she had read.

Yet nothing makes up for the cold way she was treated, says Alvarenga, remembering the reaction of the major’s wife to her request to visit her home on hearing of a sister’s passing.

“What for? She’s already dead,” Alvarenga says the woman told her.

The new law, she hopes, will not only stop obvious cases of child slavery but also save future generations from exposure to that kind of casual cruelty. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

South Africa’s corruption-buster K RISTA M AHR Johannesburg BY

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t’s not every day that a constitutional lawyer gets treated like a rock star. But at South African President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Union address in February, reporters jostled to hear what Thulisile Madonsela had to say about it, and onlookers took to Twitter to gush about her and her canary-yellow dress.

“Please, can we have her as president!” one pleaded.

Madonsela is not just a lawyer.

She is also South Africa’s public protector, an ombudsman-like post that has come to symbolize for many a struggle for rule of law and better governance in this young democracy.

During her seven-year term, which ends in October, the softspoken Madonsela has endured personal attacks and intimidation as the public face of an office investigating allegations of misconduct, abuse of power and shoddy administration at every level of government, including the presidency. But her tenacity and success have also restored a sense of optimism in a country that many worry has veered off course 22 years after its first free elections.

“For the system to work, people have to believe it works,” said Pierre de Vos, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Cape Town.

“She has made people believe the public protector is someone you can trust. In a country where people are cynical about institutions, that’s a very big thing.”

Since the African National Congress sailed to power in the 1994 elections, the party that helped liberate South Africa from white minority rule and apartheid has retained deep voter loyalty. But it is also showing signs of disarray.

Infighting has burst into the open, with veterans of the freedom struggle openly calling for Zuma, the party leader, to step down. Politicians and business leaders have been accused in recent months of trying to wield inappropriate influence over the government. With the economy slowing and unemployment at 26.7 percent, the gap

SIPHIWE SIBEKO/REUTERS

Thulisile Madonsela has endured attacks and intimidation while restoring faith in the system between the political elite and poorer South Africans seems increasingly stark.

Amid these uncertainties, Madonsela’s willingness to stand up to stalwarts of the ruling class has raised the hopes of ordinary citizens. When Zuma appointed her to the post — one of the “Chapter 9” institutions written into the constitution to safeguard democracy — some wondered whether she would be tough enough to wake up the hitherto sleepy office.

The powerful soon found out.

“They didn’t bargain for what they were going to be getting,” said David Lewis, executive director of Corruption Watch, a nonprofit civil society group. “I think she’s the most highly regarded public servant in the country.”

Madonsela was born in 1962 in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, 14 years before the uprising in the township that inspired widespread resistance to the apartheid

regime. Her mother was a domestic worker and her father a laborer before they both began working in the informal economy. Her father was often harassed by police for lacking a license to run his business, she said in a 2014 interview with news channel eNCA, and would regularly represent himself in court.

“I think that may have spiked my interest in the law,” she said.

Madonsela became a successful lawyer, working in trade unions and eventually forgoing a Harvard scholarship to help draft South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. She worked in the Department of Justice and was a commissioner at the South African Law Reform Commission before being appointed public protector in 2009.

“I didn’t think I was good enough” for the job, she told eNCA. Today Madonsela, a single mother of two, is known widely as

Thulisile, or Thuli, Madonsela is South Africa’s public protector, an ombudsman-like post whose office investigates allegations of misconduct and abuse of power throughout the government, including the presidency.

“Thuli” — a testament to her laidback demeanor. She speaks quietly and listens carefully.

Most of the thousands of complaints her office deals with are filed by ordinary people who, for instance, have not received their pensions on time or whose government housing is falling apart. But the probe that has come to define her tenure is referred to as Nkandla, the name of Zuma’s homestead.

In 2014, the public protector issued a report finding that Zuma had “unduly benefited” from public funds spent on non-security upgrades to the estate and that he should pay back some of the money. He did not do so, and Parliament later absolved him from paying for the upgrades. Opposition parties took the matter to the nation’s highest court, which ruled in March that Zuma had failed to uphold the constitution by not heeding the report and that the public protector’s powers were legally binding.

Zuma has since apologized to the nation and said he will pay.

After the Nkandla report came out, “all hell broke loose,” Madonsela said during a brief interview recently. “It became, ‘Who are you to tell us what to do?’ ” As the powers of her office came under scrutiny, Madonsela also came under personal attack. A local newspaper reported that the deputy minister of defense and military veterans, Kebby Maphatsoe, suggested that the Chapter 9 institutions had fallen under CIA influence. Madonsela’s office demanded — and got — an apology, although Maphatsoe said he had been “misunderstood.”

For her part, Madonsela says that while the government sometimes “drops the ball,” she doesn’t see South Africa as engaged in an entrenched battle over the rule of law.

“It’s not really a culture of impunity,” she said. But she added, “What you’d like to see is a situation where everyone is equal, everyone is subject to the law, and everyone is accountable for their actions, whether they are on good terms with the powers that be or on bad terms.” n

Michael Phelps, seen after a race June 3 in Austin, will vie this month to be on the U.S. Olympic team for a record-setting fifth time.

TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

a final SHOT AT GLORY COVER STORY

BY MICHAEL RUANE

MARYLAND TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY

“I felt I’d gone from ... being on top of the world ... to being in the deepest black hole.”

Michael Phelps

For an instant, the Olympic champion glances up at the surveillance camera in the waterfront police station where he has been brought in handcuffs for processing.

He’s in a room where Cpl. Jerome Hamilton of the Maryland Transportation Authority’s Tunnel Command is giving him a breathalyzer test that will show how intoxicated he is.

It is 2:27 a.m., Sept. 30, 2014.

An hour earlier, the 29-year-old subject had been pulled over in his white Range Rover on northbound Interstate 95 for speeding on an approach ramp, swerving across lanes and racing through Baltimore’s Fort McHenry Tunnel. When police stopped him just north of the toll booths, his speech was slurred. His eyes were bloodshot. And he reeked of alcohol.

The arresting officer knew right away who he was, but spelled the name for the radio dispatcher: Michael Fred Phelps II. “One in custody,” he added. “DUI.” Now, as the most decorated swimmer in history leans against a wall in his tan pants, low-cut sneakers and dark shirt, he steals a look at the overhead camera, which catches, for a second, the pain in his eyes.

Peeling back the onion Then he turns away and lowers his head.

This month, Michael Phelps, 30, a year and a half removed from that night, will be trying out for his fifth Olympic Games.

A first-time father — his son, Boomer Robert Phelps, was born May 5 — the swimmer says he is over his past troubles, is transformed as a person and has trained as never before.

The legendary athlete, who holds 18 gold medals from three Olympics and still is the global face of swimming, says much of the change is because of that incident. He was on a dangerous trajectory, he says, and urgently needed to be diverted.

“It was . . . something that helped me,” he says. “I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today, in every aspect of my life, without that.”

Shaken by what was then his second drunken-driving arrest, Phelps underwent six weeks of treatment in a pricey desert rehab facility in the hill country northwest of Phoenix in the fall of 2014. His recovery was at times harsh. He says he stayed in his room for the first week of rehab.

And some thought he would never see it through.

But he did.

Now he’s “in tune,” he says, happier than he has ever been and delighted to be a father: “Really, truly . . . the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced.”

He says he hasn’t had a drink in more than a year and a half. His 18-month court-ordered probation ends this month. And while he admits to past binge drinking, he recently told NBC that he doesn’t think he has a drinking problem.

He has relocated to Scottsdale, Ariz., with his fiancee and Boomer’s mother, Nicole Johnson, 30, to train under his longtime coach and mentor, Bob Bowman, now at nearby Arizona State University. (The baby’s middle name is in honor of Bowman. As for Boomer: “Why not Boomer?” Phelps says.)

And he has come to grips with the 16 years of international celebrity that attended, for better and worse, his evolution from boy to man.

“If you looked at Michael like an onion,” says Johnson, “layers [have been] peeled back.”

And the core of Michael Phelps has been reached and examined.

“He’s made me a better person because of what he’s experienced.”

Phelps is in top physical condition — extra lean and muscled — and says he’s in the best continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

shape since he won a record-setting eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

He’s older and stronger, yet tires much more easily.

During a meet last weekend in Austin, Bowman withdrew Phelps from the finals of the 200-meter individual medley on the last day, saying his swimmer was tired.

The coach says he’s fine. Psychologically, Phelps needs to swim, Bowman says. The sport on which Phelps turned his back four years ago fills a psychic need he can’t fill elsewhere.

And now, “he’s in so much better place as a person, and therefore as an athlete,” his coach says. “I honestly never thought I’d see that again.”

A different state of mind On a sunny morning this spring at Arizona State’s Mona Plummer Aquatic Center in Tempe, Phelps took a white sheet of paper, dipped it in the water and plastered it to the concrete at the end of his swimming lane.

“Monday April 18,” the paper said.

“Turn your cant’s into cans and your dreams into plans.”

“69 days to Omaha.”

These were Bowman’s daily exhortations.

“Omaha” referred to the U.S. Olympic swimming trials that begin there June 26 and run through July 3. The trials determine who makes the U.S. team that competes in Rio de Janeiro in August.

Phelps wants to make the team and intends to swim the 100 and 200 butterfly and the 200 individual medley in Omaha.

If he makes the team, he would be the first U.S. male swimmer to compete in five Olympic Games — 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016. And if he gets to Rio, he could become the oldest swimmer to win an individual gold medal.

But he mainly wants to say that for the first time he has prepared to the max. “If I go to Rio and don’t final, I’m probably going to be a little pissed,” he says. “But . . . I’ll be able to accept it.

I’m in a different state of mind now.”

On this morning, he launched himself into the pool with about a half-dozen other swimmers. He had an arduous day ahead — practice, the unveiling of his new line of competition swimming gear and a round of interviews with the media. By day’s end, he would look exhausted.

Practice at the outdoor pool began quietly.

The bleachers were empty. The only sound was the gentle slap, slap of the swimmers’ strokes in the water. Up and back, from one end to the other. Over and over.

Bowman, who will coach the U.S. men’s team in Brazil, stood watching, arms folded, at one end of the pool. Everyone knew the drill.

Phelps was 21/2 years into his latest comeback.

Last summer, at a meet in San Antonio, he had stunned the swimming world, and himself, by swimming the 200 and 100 “fly” in stellar comeback times of 1 minute 52.94

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

seconds and 50.56 seconds, respectively.

Now he was about to head off for six weeks of work at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

But first there was business, and interviews.

The final round was with six reporters at a table in a small ASU conference room.

A French journalist asked what he had learned over the last four years. Phelps said he had learned a lot about himself and felt unburdened.

A German reporter asked about his relationship with his long estranged father. Phelps said he was glad he was able to repair it.

An American reporter asked him if he was still serious about playing professional poker.

“Mike, I haven’t played cards in a long time,” he said. “I have other things that are more important to me than playing cards.”

At the height of his glory I covered Phelps for eight months in 2004, as he prepared for and then starred in the Athens Olympics.

I watched him train and compete, observed him eat at his favorite breakfast spot in Baltimore. I got to know his mother, Debbie, and his coach.

Watching him was a thrill. He was competitive, relentless and dominating. He attacked the water like a predator chasing dinner.

Then, at the height of his glory in Athens, where he won six gold medals, he made a gesture of sublime sportsmanship.

He had edged out teammate and rival Ian Crocker to win the 100 butterfly and the right to swim in the medley relay, the crowning swimming event of the Olympics.

Phelps, then 19, knew Crocker had been fighting a sore throat and felt he deserved another shot. He announced that he was giving up his relay slot to Crocker.

“I will be in the stands, and I will be cheering as hard as I can,” Phelps said at the time. “We came into this meet as a team, and we’re going to be leaving it as a team.”

The next night, Crocker led the U.S. to victory in a world record.

Phelps was on top of the swimming world at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 when he won a record eight gold medals.

‘In the deepest black hole’ The last time I talked to Phelps that year was in November. The Games were long over, when one evening he called me at home. He had never done that before.

Five days earlier, he had been pulled over by Maryland State Police on the Eastern Shore and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and running a stop sign.

Now he was calling reporters to read a prepared statement.

“Last week, I made a mistake,” he said.

“Getting in a car with anything to drink is wrong, dangerous and unacceptable. I’m 19 but was taught no matter how old you are, you should always take responsibility for your actions, which I will do.

“I’m extremely sorry for this. . . . That’s all I can say right now.”

That was it.

“I was thoroughly ashamed,” he wrote four years later in a short autobiography. “I felt I’d gone from . . . being on top of the world . . . to being in the deepest black hole.”

The worst part was that he had made his mother cry. He had never seen her that upset.

“I vowed it would never happen again,” he wrote.

Done with swimming Phelps rebounded and went on to further renown at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

President George W. Bush telephoned him.

He was welcomed home to Baltimore with a parade and set up his own charitable foundation. Everybody seemed to know who he was.

Cab drivers. Airport baggage attendants. Photographers. Life was sweet. And he was worth millions.

Five months after the Beijing Games, his image was slammed again.

On Feb. 1, 2009, a now-defunct British tabloid reported that Phelps took several hits from a marijuana bong the previous November at a party in Columbia, S.C. A photo accompanying the story showed a man who appeared to be Phelps using the device.

In a statement the next day, Phelps said he had engaged in regrettable behavior and promised that this would not happen again.

USA Swimming barred him from competition for three months.

It gave him time to think: What was he doing? Would he leave swimming? Where was he headed?

A month later, Phelps woke up in his home near Baltimore’s harbor. He looked out the window at the water, and “like a light switch had been thrown,” he realized what was next.

He wanted to swim in the 2012 Olympics in London. This time, he wanted to be a leader, a role model. He would show that a person could learn from his mistakes.

He called Bowman to tell him. “The passion was back,” he wrote.

In hindsight, it really wasn’t.

Phelps has talked often in recent months about how poorly he prepared for London. His training was “a joke,” he says. Sometimes he’d

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COVER STORY show up for practice; sometimes he wouldn’t.

His relationship with Bowman frayed. “I will never allow another athlete to treat me the way Michael did during that stretch,” Bowman recalled in a book he published last month.

“We just kind of tolerated each other, ” the coach says. “There was a time there in 2010 where I got so frustrated that I just left and went to Australia for three weeks.”

“I was like, ‘If you’re not going to be here, I’m not going to be here.’ He shut me out.”

But Phelps made the U.S. team and won four more gold medals.

And after the Games were over, he was finished with swimming. He wanted nothing to do with it. He was moving on.

Among other things, he had always loved playing poker. He admired the professional top players, and for a time poker pro Jeff Gross lived with him in Baltimore.

“I’m more relaxed, I think, at a poker table than I was in the pool,” he told PokerStars.com in 2013. “When I was in the pool, that was my job.”

Outside the pool, he had no job, and no identity. “I looked at myself as a swimmer and nothing else,” he says.

His mother says the family tried to move on from swimming — “we were separating ourselves from the sport.”

But he was still trying again to figure out where he belonged, Debbie Phelps says. She thought her son looked tired, and lost.

In August 2013, Phelps asked Bowman if they could have dinner.

They had seen little of each other since London. During the meal at a luxury hotel in Baltimore, Phelps announced that he wanted to make another comeback and try for one more Olympics. Bowman was floored.

“I did not want to go through it again,” he says. “I couldn’t. No way.”

He told Phelps that if he was coming back for his sponsors, or because he didn’t have anything else to do, it would be a big mistake.

“You’re telling me that somebody that has all the money . . . all the freedom, all the choices, that somehow all of those things don’t meet a need inside of you that swimming does,” Bowman says he asked.

Phelps said yes.

“I said, ‘Under those circumstances, if you agree to do it the right way, then I would approve,’ ” Bowman says.

The swimmer resumed training a month later.

A come-to-Jesus meeting Phelps left Baltimore’s glittering Horseshoe Casino a little after 1 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 30, 2014.

A year into his return to the pool, the latest comeback wasn’t going well. His long layoff and lackluster London training showed. “It was very difficult for him to get back in shape,” Bowman says. “I think he got discouraged. I got discouraged.”

Phelps had missed a few practices, and Bowman was worried. “I just was afraid that

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

he was going to go down a bad path,” the coach says. Phelps told NBC he was, and going “fast.”

It’s not clear what he was doing, but the casino has a big poker room, and Johnson, his fiancee, says he was probably playing cards.

He was also drinking.

Johnson had called him from Los Angeles as he was leaving the casino. “I was already in bed,” she says. “I lived in California. I had to go to work the next morning. I just said, ‘Are you okay?’ ” He said he was.

He and Johnson, who had dated on and off for seven years, were back together but had a cross-country romance. “I would fly out as much as I could,” she says. “I was [in L.A.] He was in Baltimore.”

A former Miss California, Johnson had met Phelps in 2007 at the ESPY sports awards in Hollywood. “We hit it off,” she says. “He was a lot of fun.”

The couple lived together when Phelps was training at the University of Michigan, where Bowman then coached. But they later parted.

“We both had growing up to do,” she says. “He also had the world ahead of him, and was on top of the world in 2008. . . . I wasn’t in that same position.”

She didn’t attend the Olympics in 2008, or in 2012, when she and Phelps were still apart.

But by 2014, they had reconnected. (They were engaged in February 2015 and plan to marry after the Rio Olympics.)

Phelps left the casino and sped onto southbound Interstate 395, which curves sharply as it feeds into northbound I-95. The speed limit was 45. Phelps was going 84, according to the police.

He whizzed by Tunnel Command’s Officer Hirbod Mirzaie, who was operating a radar device that registered Phelps’s speed. Mirzaie pulled out and gave chase.

Phelps sped through the Fort McHenry Tunnel, passing cars and changing lanes.

Mirzaie pulled him over just past the toll plaza. Mirzaie reported that Phelps smelled strongly of alcohol and his speech was “mush mouth.”

Phelps struggled to find direction after his Olympic triumphs. He addressed reporters after the sentencing in his 2014 trial following a DUI arrest.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Phelps was swaying as the officer gave him standard field sobriety tests. He was at times disoriented and argumentative. After failing the field tests, he was handcuffed and taken to the Clinton Street station on the Patapsco River waterfront.

There, the breathalyzer test showed he had an alcohol concentration of 0.14 grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath, almost twice the legal limit, according to the police. They confiscated his license.

Phelps called a number of people after he was arrested. One was retired Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, who had long been a friend and confidante.

“Bro, I need to talk to you,” Phelps said, according to Lewis.

Phelps told him what had happened. Lewis was dismayed but sympathetic.

He says he later met with Phelps, his mother and others for several hours at Phelps’s house.

Phelps was despondent. He told Sports Illustrated that at one point he didn’t want to live anymore.

But Lewis says, “we had a come . . . to Jesus meeting.”

“I basically told him, ‘Okay, everything has a purpose, and now, guess what? It’s time to wake up,’ ” he says. He gave Phelps a copy of Christian author Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Five days after his arrest, Phelps announced via Twitter that he was taking time off “to attend a program that will provide the help I need to better understand myself.”

He flew with Johnson and his sister Hilary to enter a 45-day program at the Meadows, a facility in Wickenberg, Ariz.

“You’re fearful,” Johnson recalls. “You don’t know what that entails and what it means for Michael. And you also don’t know, from my standpoint, what’s going to happen on the other side of it, and what he’s going to take from it.”

Phelps was resistant to the process at first, but gradually he came around. “I felt myself walking taller and being happier every day,” he says.

He and Lewis talked and texted about Warren’s book, Lewis says.

Phelps called his longtime agent, Peter Carlisle, who could detect a change in his voice. “It was such a great feeling,” Carlisle says. “He just had this enthusiasm in his voice. He was excited.”

Phelps also called Bowman. At first, the coach was skeptical: “He never calls me. Ever.”

But in the middle of the program, Bowman flew out from Baltimore and spent a day with him. He was amazed when he arrived.

“I could not believe it,” Bowman says. “I didn’t think that he would embrace the process there. I thought he would just sit there like a bump on a log till the time was up. . . . When I saw him . . . he was dramatically changed.”

Phelps had been lifting weights, running and using the Meadows’s pool to train.

“My God,” Bowman says he thought as he left. “He might come back and really swim.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

MUSIC

Kenny Rogers: Ready to fold ’em After a music career spanning decades and genres, he says farewell

BY

R OGER C ATLIN

F

or a guy who has been singing that you’ve got to “know when to fold ’em” for nearly 40 years, Kenny Rogers had no single epiphany when deciding to go on one final tour.

“I can’t say there was anything that triggered it,” Rogers says in his crackled drawl over the phone from Nashville. “I just remember I called my management and I said, ‘You know, I’d like to do a farewell tour.’ ” Naturally, they hesitated.

After all, he has been a solid concert draw for decades, one of the biggest-selling recording artists of all time, with more than 120 million records sold worldwide.

But Rogers persisted, telling them: “If I don’t do it now, I may not be around for a farewell tour. I really want to do this. I want to go to all the places I’ve been before and say thank you and do a final show and have some fun with it.”

And that, he says, is exactly what he’s doing.

Others in show business have made farewells an iffy declaration: Kiss, Cher, the Who — they’ve all gone on lavish final tours, only to return to the road later.

“Look how young they are, though,” Rogers counters. “They don’t come close to me. I am my age and I know it. I’m 77. By the time I finish this, I’ll be going on 79. I just hope I’ll be able to finish the tour.”

But to reiterate: “It’s definitely the last time.”

Only a few weeks into “The Gambler’s Last Deal: Final World Tour,” Rogers was already enjoying himself.

“I’m at a point where I like it more now than I did the last two years, because we’re doing a totally different show,” he says. “We’ve done some things we’ve never done before, and showing some films with it that explain it. It’s kind of a chronological look at my career starting in 1954. The times were different then, to say the least.”

And Rogers has made some adjustments onstage to accommodate his age.

“I sit down for most of the show because I’ve got some back and leg

PIPER FERGUSON

problems. That creates some humor. I talk about that. So everything has a purpose.”

Fans at backstage meet-andgreets — “people that I’ve been seeing for 20 years, and I know by name from having been there” — understand his reasoning for the farewell tour.

“I explain to them I have identical twin 11-year-old boys and that’s what I’m going home to, that and my wife. I didn’t do that with my older boys, and I missed it. I missed that part of their lives.”

Recapping Rogers’s entire career means jumping genres, from jazz with the Bobby Doyle Three, to folk with the New Christy Minstrels, to psychedelic rock with the First Edition (whose enduring hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” was used in both the dream sequence of the 1998 cult classic “The Big Lebowski” and last season’s “Fargo”).

“Every career is touched on,” he says of his tour, “and it’s really fascinating. A lot of this stuff I’ve kind of forgotten about, so it’s good for me to go back and relive it, too.”

Rogers says that once he had a hit in 1977 with “Lucille,” which

sold 5 million copies and brought him to the top of the country charts and then pop’s Top 5 — still a rare thing — he knew he had a home for his sound. “ ‘Lucille’ was really the game changer for me,” he says.

But it was perfectly natural.

“My mom used to listen to country music all the time,” Rogers says. “I’d be getting up and going to school and she’d have a big pitcher of ice tea on the ironing board, doing the ironing and listening to Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell and those guys. So I think it was kind of embedded in me.”

Still, he says, “my influences at first were more jazz — music of the ’30s and ’40s. And then I got around to doing different kinds of music I was influenced by. I was with the New Christy Minstrels, and I learned the value of doing a story song that had social significance.”

That became a signature of Rogers’s repertoire.

“Like ‘Reuben James’ was about a black man who raised a white child. ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’ is about a Vietnam War vet. ‘Coward of the County’ was

about a rape,” Rogers says. “I tend to like to sing about things rather than just words.”

And then there were his love songs, for which he had a specific goal.

“I’d say, ‘I want to do ballads that say what every man would like to say and every woman would want to hear,’ ” he says. “And if you look at ‘She Believes in Me,’ ‘You Decorated My Life,’ ‘Through the Years,’ ‘Lady’ — they are the things that every man would like to say and every woman would like to hear.

And the reason I did that was then you had both audiences: You had the male and female audiences.”

“Lady,” in particular, brought Rogers together with Lionel Richie to build a rare bridge between smooth R&B and country balladry.

“I had always loved his work with the Commodores,” Rogers says. “And I called him and I said, ‘I’d like you to write me a song.’ He said, ‘I don’t think I have time.’

And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to put it on “The Greatest Hits” album and it will probably sell 5 or 6 million copies.’ And he said, ‘How’s Sunday night at 8:30?’ ” That collaboration was Rogers’s first No. 1 song on the pop charts, but also his 10th No. 1 country hit.

His only other No. 1 pop song was 1983’s “Islands in the Stream,” a Bee Gees-written tune intended for Marvin Gaye but retooled as a duet for Rogers and Dolly Parton.

“That was a totally different place for me to be,” Rogers says of that hit, part of an entire album produced by Barry Gibb.

Rogers can’t touch on every part of his career in his farewell tour, which he says they will eventually film.

“I’m going to ask them not to play it until after I die,” he says. “I look too old now. I don’t mind being old; I hate looking old.”

Rogers is still recognized in Asia, though for an entirely different reason — there’s still a flourishing line of Kenny Rogers Roasters restaurants.

“I go over there and walk in,” he says, “and somebody will recognize me from looking at the cups.” n

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SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Inside the mind of a mass murderer BY

A MY E LLIS N UTT

W

hether the words come from politicians, pundits or the general public, they’ve all been heard before — in Oklahoma City and Charleston, S.C., in Newtown, Conn., and San Bernardino, Calif.

And now in Orlando: “Hatred,” “bigotry,” a “twisted ideology,” a “poisoned psychology.”

But in the grim aftermath of last Sunday’s carnage at a gay nightclub in Florida, with at least 49 dead and 53 wounded, what can science tell us about the motivations of a mass murderer?

Reports suggesting that gunman Omar Mateen was perhaps struggling with his own sexuality are an important clue. The killer’s father said last Sunday that his son had recently become enraged when he saw two men kissing. By Monday, there were confirmed accounts that Mateen had frequently visited the Pulse nightclub and used gay dating apps.

“Hate of other people is really displaced hate of oneself,” said social psychologist Arie Kruglanski, a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s about the loss of a sense of significance, that one is important, and that can happen because of personal failure or being part of a discriminated minority or being bullied. There are many different ways people can feel insignificant.”

The neurological correlates of hate have not been determined — not surprisingly, the emotion is difficult to study in a laboratory — but scientists know where in the brain moral disgust arises and that the motor cortex is among the regions activated when a person feels aggression. They also know that the brain is constantly surveying our environment, always on guard as it assesses whether someone or something nearby is a friend or foe.

Ultimately, feelings of self-hate motivate people to restore their sense of significance through action. And the fastest, most efficient, most powerful action, Kruglanski said, is “the most primitive, primordial act a human being [can take] — showing one’s power over other human beings.”

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Feelings of insignificance can lead to violence, one psychologist says In other words: violence.

The ideologies of the Islamic State — to which Mateen declared allegiance in a 911 call from inside the nightclub — appear to have served his need. According to anthropologist Scott Atran, those ideologies essentially told him to “stand up, avenge your dishonor.”

Someone like Mateen could have been particularly susceptible to such a message. It doesn’t appear he had any formal contact with terrorist groups, but he clearly identified with them, as well as with others he viewed as victimized groups, including those from his parents’ native Afghanistan.

“We heard him talking to 911 saying the reason why he’s doing this is because he wants Americans to stop bombing his country,” said Patience Carter, a survivor of the shootings.

Carter, who was among several Pulse patrons Mateen held hostage, said at a news conference Tuesday that Mateen asked if there were any African Americans in the

bathroom. When one man answered yes, “the gunman responded back to him saying, ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country.

You guys have suffered enough.’ ” When viewed through an evolutionary lens, motivations based on group identification make sense because we are fundamentally communal beings, scientists say. It takes the human brain mere milliseconds to distinguish the faces of family members from those of strangers, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This is a manifestation of what psychologists call “in-group favoritism,” which is seen in both young and old.

Young children, however, add something else: “out-group hate,” or a desire to hurt those who are different. This characteristic usually disappears by adulthood. Why it doesn’t for some is not fully known.

In a series of experiments several years ago, psychologist Adam Waytz of Northwestern Univer-

At top, a prayer service is held Wednesday at Delaney Street Baptist Church in Orlando, Fla., for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, in which Omar Mateen, above, killed at least 49 people and wounded 53.

sity’s Kellogg School of Business showed that the more people are socially connected to a group, the more likely they are to believe that those outside the group are less intelligent, even less human.

A colleague, social psychologist Nour Kteily, says feeling dehumanized and alienated from mainstream society “can underlie actions like in Orlando,” where a person goes on a murderous rampage.

Taking action to ameliorate a perceived injustice actually has a neural benefit, scientists say, because revenge triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as happiness.

No one may ever know what was going on inside Mateen’s mind. But trying to place blame either on guns or a terrorist ideology, as many Americans are doing, is “a false choice,” Kruglanski said.

“They’re not mutually exclusive,” he said. “Ideology removes the moral obstacle. . . . What’s difficult to do is to prevent people from experiencing failure or being dishonored.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS FICTION

“Barkskins” by Annie Proulx (Scribner) By drilling deep into the forests that enabled this country to conquer the world, Proulx has laid out the whole history of American capitalism and its rapacious destruction of the land.

“The Book of Harlan” by Bernice L. McFadden (Akashic) A miraculous story about a pair of jazz musicians who travel from Harlem to Paris just before the Nazis invade.

“Bucky F*cking Dent” by David Duchovny (Farrar Straus Giroux) Set in 1970s New York amid one of baseball’s most famous pennant races, the “X-Files” star’s second novel traces a rite of passage: a son coming to grips with a distant father who has only a few months to live.

The dog-eared days of summer BY

R ON C HARLES

“Heat & Light” by Jennifer Haigh (Ecco) A Pennsylvania town is torn apart by the dirty business of fracking.

“My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) Lucy Barton wakes in the hospital to find her estranged mother at the foot of her bed. For

“The Summer Before the War” by Helen Simonson (Random House) Anglophiles mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” will find solace in this novel that begins in pre-World War I England and deftly observes the effects of war on the staid Edwardian sensibilities of a coastal village.

“What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours”

by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead) A series of loosely connected, magically tinged tales about personal and social justice. Built around keys, locks and magic doors, the stories cover a wide territory — from mythology and fairy tales to smartphones and YouTube stars.

“The Girls” by Emma Cline (Random House) A woman looks back on her involvement with a Charles Manson-like cult.

“Modern Lovers” by Emma Straub (Riverhead) Like her 2014 novel “The Vacationers,” Straub’s witty new book has a warm-weather vibe, even if it is set in the less idyllic, if beautifully gentrified, Brooklyn. Here, a group of friends from college, now nearing 50, are forced to take a hard look at their relationships.

“The Nest” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (Ecco) Just before the Plumb siblings are about to cash in the trust fund that will solve all their problems, they discover it’s been almost completely depleted.

A comic novel about filial greed and affection.

“The Year of the Runaways” by Sunjeev Sahota (Knopf) By following a handful of young Indian men in England, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean.

“Everybody’s Fool” by Richard Russo (Knopf) This big-hearted, often hilarious sequel to “Nobody’s Fool” finds Police Chief Douglas Raymer trying to track down his late wife’s lover.

“LaRose” by Louise Erdrich (Harper) When a man accidentally kills his neighbor’s 5-year-old son, he tries to make amends by turning over his own boy to the grieving parents.

the next five nights, she sits in a chair and tells Lucy stories about her past.

LISA CORSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

L

eave it to Americans — the folks who use only 77 percent of their vacation days — to ruin summer reading. For too many of us, what used to be an oasis of literary leisure has devolved into another chore.

Students are saddled with lists of Important Titles. Adults fret about which books are worthy of lugging to the beach. Even the littlest children are subjected to the anxiety of summer reading. As Erika Christakis reports, “We’ve made it a source of stress and recrimination.” ¶ We are, after all, people who no longer stroll; we count our steps. ¶ Enough. ¶ In this special feature on summer books, we’re all about helping you get away from the literary grindstone. For you, it might be one of the titles on our list of books we’ve loved so far this year. You’ll find fiction and nonfiction, from diverting to deadly serious, without a checklist or a ranking or a badge at the end. ¶ So just take a breath. Toss the Fitbit. Curl up with a few good books.

MYSTERIES & THRILLERS “End of Watch” by Stephen King (Scribner) The finale to the trilogy that began with “Mr. Mercedes,” this grimly entertaining tale follows the diabolical machinations of a villain thought to be in a vegetative state but who is in fact masterminding a fiendish plan to fool people into killing themselves.

“Fixers” by Michael M. Thomas (Melville) Thomas, a former partner at Lehman Brothers, spins an audacious financial thriller based on real-life events — the 2008 financial crisis — that features cameos by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

“A Hero of France” by Alan Furst

SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016

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BOOKS (Random House) In this masterly tale of espionage and historical fiction, Furst captures the dangers and intrigue of the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris.

“Evicted” by Matthew Desmond (Crown) An extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography, Desmond’s book makes it impossible to consider poverty in America without tackling the central role of housing and the demise of opportunity and of hope that occurs when people are forced to leave their homes.

“The Gunning of America” by Pamela Haag (Basic) An exploration of the major businesses and families that have manufactured firearms — and manufactured the seductiveness of firearms — in this country over the past 150 years.

MEMOIR “Knitlandia” by Clara Parkes (STC Craft) Parkes, who fled a job in high tech and launched the Knitter’s Review, shares her travels through the world of knitting, from Iceland to Paris and Portland.

“The Romanovs” by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf) Drawing on a wide array of Russian sources, Sebag Montefiore paints an unforgettable portrait of characters fascinating and charismatic, odd and odious.

“A Mother’s Reckoning” by Sue Klebold (Crown) Seventeen years after the Columbine shooting, the mother of Dylan Klebold tells her story.

“Shrill” by Lindy West (Hachette) Part memoir, part manifesto and social critique. West takes on fatshaming, rape jokes and men who harass women under the guise of Internet free speech.

CADE MARTIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

ganization for Women.

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi (Random House) Written by a young neurosurgeon as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, this memoir is inherently sad. Still, this moving and thoughtful tale of family, medicine and literature is well worth the emotional investment.

BIOGRAPHY “The Firebrand and the First Lady” by Patricia Bell-Scott (Knopf) A fascinating portrait of the unusual friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and a young black activist named Pauli Murray, who went on to become an influential lawyer, Episcopal minister, writer and co-founder of the National Or-

WEEKLY

the rise of “nerd culture.”

“Wilde Lake” by Laura Lippman (Morrow) A new case dredges up painful memories for Luisa (Lu) Brant, the state’s attorney of Howard County, Md. In what feels like Lippman’s most personal novel, the book is as much a legal drama as it is a tale of childhood and family life.

“Switched On” by John Elder Robison (Spiegel & Grau) Robison, who has Asperger’s syndrome, chronicles his rich emotional life after a scientific experiment on his brain. Exhilarated but chastened, he delivers an account that is both poignant and scientifically important.

KLMNO

“The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones” by Rich Cohen (Spiegel & Grau) Cohen approaches the Stones from two directions: as the kid discovering the group from glorious sounds emerging from his older brother’s room and as a young magazine writer working his way into the good graces of the aging rockers.

SCIENCE & MEDICINE “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner) A thorough and thought-provoking biography of the gene: its science, the scientists who study it and the controversies that have spun from our understanding of it.

“Lab Girl” by Hope Jahren (Knopf) The story of a girl who becomes a scientist, this book is also the story of a career and the endless struggles over funding, recognition and politics that get in the way.

“One in a Billion” by Mark John-

For links to full reviews of all of these books, go to wapo.st/ summerbooks2016.

son and Kathleen Gallagher (Simon & Schuster) A riveting account of a medical team’s frantic search for the genetic error threatening a little boy’s life. What they found proved that it was possible to use a person’s genes to diagnose and treat a previously unknown disease and helped usher in the use of genome sequencing for people with unusual disorders.

HISTORY, CURRENT EVENTS & POP CULTURE “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu” by Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster) Part travelogue, part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract and part thriller, Hammer’s book tells the story of a librarian who oversaw a plot to smuggle ancient manuscripts out of Timbuktu, Mali, in an effort to save them from war.

“The Caped Crusade” by Glen Weldon (Simon & Schuster) How does one comic-book character remain so consistently intriguing to so many people over eight decades?

A look at the history of Batman and

“Stamped from the Beginning”

by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books) In this history of prejudice in America, Kendi hunts for racist ideas, stretching back to the 15th century, sometimes finding them in unexpected places.

POLITICS “Engines of Liberty” by David Cole (Basic) When courts fail to protect our rights, citizen advocacy groups step in, as this book shows, and produce sometimes stunning constitutional changes.

“Exit Right” by Daniel Oppenheimer (Simon & Schuster) What causes a liberal to swing to the right? Here are the stories of six 20th-century intellectuals, politicians and journalists who underwent jarring transformations.

“The Highest Glass Ceiling” by Ellen Fitzpatrick (Harvard) The presidential campaigns of Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisholm hail from another era, but has much really changed?

“Republic of Spin” by David Greenberg (Norton) The merging of public relations and politics gave us presidential spin and, ever since, the electorate’s head has been spinning — trying to sort fact from hype. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

After Orlando massacre, divided we mourn MICHAEL GERSON is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post.

One of the manifold tragedies of the Orlando mass murder is how difficult it is for us to experience it and mourn it together.

This killing lies at the intersection of so many deep emotions and personal equities: the war against terrorism. Resentment against Islam. Gay rights and pride. Gun control. Many Americans immediately claimed that the shooting justifies their preexisting beliefs, not just about the threats to America, but about the nature of evil.

It is totalitarian ideology. Or someone else’s religion. Or religion itself. Or homophobia. Or gun lovers and their political defenders.

How can we possibly learn anything under these circumstances? But learning is needed. A friend refers to this type of attack as the price of living in a free society, comparing it to the situation in London during the years of Irish Republican Army terrorist bombings. And there is truth to this. The United States — free and vast — is a massive soft target. But conceding that future attacks are likely is very different from viewing them as normal. In Orlando, we saw the horrifying failure of a valid expectation of security.

We should fight this. But everyone, it seems, has chosen different battlefields. It is as if, following Pearl Harbor, some had urged a campaign against Japan, others against Canada, still others against Paraguay.

How can any society as polarized and politicized as our own diagnose and oppose a common threat?

This was once the role of political rhetoric — to find shared lessons and common purpose following the shattering of the peace. But it is difficult, at least in this case, to imagine the unity of Dec. 8, 1941, or even Sept. 12, 2001. President Obama’s speech after the Orlando attack asserted a unity “in grief, in outrage and in

resolve” but also touched on gun control themes that immediately angered many in the redder portion of his audience. The presumptive Republican nominee felt obliged to provide his own version of public grief. It was utterly typical for Donald Trump to seek shameless political advantage during a tragedy and to take shameful credit for past anti-Muslim sentiments. But this involves more than Trump’s classlessness.

A significant portion of Americans now expect the equivalent of a rebuttal at a funeral.

“In some ways,” Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission told me, “tragedies now have less the feel

MELISSA LYTTLE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Thousands attend a vigil in downtown Orlando on Monday evening after the June 12 shooting that killed at least 49 people and injured 53.

of the JFK assassination and more of the feel of the George Wallace attempted assassination in 1972. Nixon’s first response is to plant McGovern literature in Arthur Bremer’s apartment. We are all Nixon now, seeking to plant ideologies in the place of horror, for our political benefit.”

At a time when we need to listen to and learn from others, our strong tendency is to employ events to reaffirm our convictions. I suspect I am as susceptible to it as others are.

How do we remain open to listening, really listening, to people who have a different angle of vision? Isn’t it possible for a single event to prove various points about law enforcement, national security and the terrible harvest of hatred against our LGBT neighbors and family members?

Our political leadership has lost the ability to focus on shared tasks and express moral stakes. The president, it seems, is just one more voice in a chorus where everyone is singing a different piece of music. What Franklin Roosevelt called “the warm courage of

national unity” seems remote.

Maybe silence is the best tribute — or the only one we can manage to offer together. But I hope we do not give up on language so easily. The Orlando slaughter caught — in a horrible lightning flash of violence — the human reality of death and loss.

The answer, the alternative, is simple and difficult: empathy, even across the widest differences. “When you visualized a man or woman carefully,” concludes the Whiskey Priest in Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” “you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it.

When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

We are called to imagine both the last, terrible moments of unjustly shortened lives, and the pain — sudden, unearned, unending — of those they left behind. And to hope, not only in this life but also beyond it, against all the evidence of our grief, that love wins. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Will right to die lead to regret?

BY KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2010.

It was inevitable that we would one day seek ways to kill ourselves with society’s blessing.

California recently joined four other states — Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana — that allow terminally ill patients to commit suicide using doctor-prescribed drugs. Criteria under the California law include that the patient has a terminal disease, would likely die within six months, is of sound mind and can self-administer the “medicine.”

Thanks to medical advances that can extend life beyond what some find acceptable, resulting in unnecessary suffering, many think it’s their right to die with dignity using medications legally prescribed.

It’s an easy-enough argument to understand. There’s a certain logic and humanity to the option of leaving life gracefully by one’s own volition, as long as it really is.

Here, I should confess my own ambivalence. Basically, I’d like to have the means to end my own life on my own terms when my body has clearly called it quits. I’m just not sure I like the idea of the state and doctors lending a hand.

At least two problems seem obvious: Death dates can’t be predicted with precision and are, therefore, speculative. How often have you heard that someone has three months to live and he or she is still around two years later?

And “medicine” by definition means: (1) a substance to ease pain or other symptoms and (2) a science to prevent, treat or cure diseases.

One could argue that suicide medicine would relieve the pain of living through the final stages of cancer, as an example. But this clearly isn’t what MerriamWebster — or the Hippocratic oath — intended. The purpose of medicine is to prevent illness and to heal, not to end life when healing isn’t possible.

Still, what are we to do when medicine can do no more? Or when treatment means prolonging suffering toward inevitable death? We are kinder to our pets, many would argue.

Perhaps I read too many dystopian science-fiction novels during my formative years, but there’s something disturbing about asking doctors to help their

patients die. Then again, we’ve already asked them to destroy unborn human life, codifying the legal right to terminate a pregnancy.

When the continuum of life — from conception to natural death — is interrupted as a convenience to one’s individual concept of time (I’m not ready to be a parent; I’m ready to die), what else do we also terminate? Gradually inured to the metaphysical considerations of such actions, might we also be denying ourselves access to charity, compassion, empathy and love?

Unknowable in our calculations is what happens in the final moments of life. If Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, wasted away with terminal cancer, had decided to leave the party early, we might not have learned from his sister, Mona Simpson, that his final words were, after staring for a long time at each of his family members: Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

I don’t know what Jobs saw, but I think I’d like to see it, too.

Troubling, too, is the possibility that some patients might feel obligated to commit suicide once the option is available, even though prescribing doctors are encouraged to tell patients they don’t have to take the medicine.

Many reportedly don’t take the

pills.

But a sick person might want to protect family members and think, oh, well, what’s another six months? A lifetime, I should think. Can’t life be made tolerable enough during this time to avoid making doctors and family members complicit in suicide?

Other questions seize the mind: Will the right to die ultimately be considered as just another facet of “health care,” as abortion is? And when do six months become a year? A novelist would propose that it’s just a matter of time before a glut of elderly people in poor health, who are by definition “terminal,” so overwhelm the health-care system that “opting out” becomes an expectation rather than a choice. This would be satire, right? And satire does not a slippery slope make, but laws do condition values. Oregon, which passed its right-to-die law in 1997, has the highest suicide rate in the country — 35 percent higher than the national average, according to an Oregon Public Health report.

As more than a dozen other states consider similar legislation, it isn’t irrational to wonder whether, in tampering with our medical culture of healing, we aren’t inviting unintended consequences that we’ll live — or die — to regret. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY JOE HELLER FOR THE GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE

There are too many tiny colleges JEFFREY J. SELINGO is former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

In the past month or so, three colleges announced they were closing: Burlington College in Vermont; Dowling College on Long Island; and St. Catharine College in Kentucky. Two of them, Burlington and St. Catharine, had enrollments of less than 1,000 students. Just the other week, another college with an enrollment below 1,000, Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, announced that it was cutting salaries to avoid layoffs and close a $2 million deficit.

While we tend to picture higher education in the United States as dominated by public flagship campuses with tens of thousands of students, or small private colleges with thousands of students, in reality tiny colleges the size of many high schools are much more common.

About 40 percent of American colleges enroll 1,000 or fewer students. Another 40 percent enroll fewer than 5,000 students.

Since 2010, the smallest institutions, below 1,000 students, have been shedding the most enrollment, a decline of 5 percent compared to the institutions with more than 10,000 students, which have grown slightly, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The problem now is that there are too many colleges chasing too few students. The number of high

school graduates in the United States reached a peak in 2011.

After that, all regions of the country experienced a decline in the number of 18-year-olds, according to projections from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

While states in the South and West have already begun to experience an uptick in their share of high school graduates, populations in the Northeast and the Midwest continue to age. The Northeast’s graduating Class of 2028 is projected to be 10 percent smaller than in 2009, some 66,000 fewer graduates. The Midwest will face an even steeper decline. And guess what? The Northeast and Midwest have a larger concentration of colleges than the South and West given the historical migration patterns in the United States. Efforts by those colleges to expand their reach

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

have largely failed, given that students typically enroll in colleges within 250 miles of their home town.

In a report last year, Moody’s Investors Services said that college closures average about five a year, and predicted that figure would triple in coming years. A forthcoming analysis by Parthenon-EY, a consulting firm in Boston, has found that some 800 colleges face critical challenges because of their inefficiencies or small size.

At these colleges, there is zero margin for error. A first-year class that comes in even one or two students short of estimates wreaks havoc on the budget.

About two out of 10 colleges are running annual budget deficits.

Even as they raise their sticker price each year and look more unaffordable to families, they actually generate less revenue to invest in new academic programs, buildings and faculty because tuition dollars account for nearly 60 percent of the revenue at colleges with enrollments of less than 5,000 students.

Even with a discounted price, tuition remains out of reach for families forcing students to take on high levels of debt, and too many of these colleges suffer from low graduation rates or poor placement rates into jobs paying

wages that allow students to pay off their loans.

In most rational markets by now, these small players with high prices and poor outcomes would be driven out of business by more-efficient and lessexpensive options. But colleges rarely go under, because they are heavily subsidized and regulated by the government. They receive hundreds of billions of dollars in direct subsidies (and indirect tax breaks as nonprofits) and the only way to get access to those funds is to be an accredited institution, under a system controlled by the colleges themselves.

State and federal support for higher education is unlikely to dramatically increase in coming years. In this era, unless a college is sitting on billions of dollars in its endowment, its size matters to its ultimate financial success.

This is a departure from the past, when the philosophy was always that an increase in size comes at the expense of academic quality and prestige.

We’re likely to see more colleges close or merge, but in the process the financial footing of higher education across the country is likely to become stronger as students and dollars flow to institutions better able to get them to graduation and find success in the job market. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Rape BY

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was convicted of sexual assault af­ ter he attacked an unconscious woman. But to hear his father and close friends tell it, Turner was just another college kid who got car­ ried away. Surveys of college students often unearth similar confu­ sion. When Oklahoma State University professor John Foubert asks his students if they’ve ever raped someone, the answer is al­ ways no. Change the phrasing, however, and some admit to com­ mitting crimes. Ten percent of fraternity brothers in one campus study reported that they’d penetrated a woman without her permis­ sion. “They don’t see this behavior as rape,” said Foubert, who de­ signed OSU’s rape­prevention program. “It’s not just college stu­ dents. You hear these beliefs in broader society.” Even as the na­ tional conversation about sexual assault grows, myths persist.

1

Rape is primarily a college problem.

It is true that women between 18 and 24 suffer sexual assaults more often than any other group. But young women who don’t pursue higher learning are much more likely to be victims. A 2014 study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (using crime data from 1995 to 2013) found that the rate of rape was 1.2 times higher for non-students than for students. “It seems like these institutions get all the attention, and the other victims are never even talked about,” said Claudia Bayliff, a Virginia lawyer who has worked on rape cases for 25 years. “There are race issues here, class issues and mediaaccess issues.”

2

Rape is about the victimization of women.

Rape often gets lumped into a broader conversation about violence against women, and many of the most prominent victims are female. Before 2012, even the Justice Department defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.”

This obscures something that should be obvious: Rape isn’t

about gender, it’s about power and a particular set of behaviors.

These include, according to the federal government’s updated definition, “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

This crime can strike men as well as women. Overall, between 5 and 14 percent of rapes are reported by males. According to one study, 44 percent of women and 23.4 percent of men said they’d experienced some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, including unwanted contact.

Seven percent of men, meanwhile, report that they’ve been “made to penetrate” another person. Nearly half of men who reported an assault said their assailant was a woman.

3

You can’t rape your spouse.

It is illegal to rape anyone in the United States, even if you’re married to the victim.

And wives do report rape. Ten to 14 percent of married or cohabitating women surveyed by researchers reported at least one sexual assault by a husband.

TESSA ORMENYI VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Students promote rape awareness during new student orientation at Stanford University last September.

It’s true that rape of a spouse wasn’t always considered a crime.

About 40 years ago, feminists began a campaign to strike down the “marital rape exemption,” a remnant from a time when a wife was considered her husband’s property. By 1993, every state had banned sexual assault within marriage. Half, however, still don’t grant married women the same protections that cover single women. And at least 23 states make it more difficult for a wife to accuse her husband of sexual violence. Some require evidence of violent force; some give married victims less time to report an assault.

4

You can’t prosecute a years-old rape.

Statutes of limitation vary widely among states, ranging from three to 30 years. Sixteen states, including Maryland and Virginia, have no statute of limitations at all. Many states also extend the statute of limitations if new DNA evidence is found.

Others are pushing to relax these rules to prosecute sex crimes.

Other states have vowed to end their backlogs of unexamined rape kits, the forensic evidence collected after an attack. Ohio’s

Cuyahoga County Sexual Assault Kit Task Force has obtained more than 250 convictions from cases going back to 1993, said Rachel Lovell, a senior research associate at Case Western Reserve University.

5

The rising number of reported sexual assaults represents a crisis.

Advocates say the increase is not a bad thing. Rape is a massively underreported crime. Federal researchers estimate that just 34 percent of sexual assaults lead to police reports. So a reporting increase, in some cases, means the criminal justice system is working: Victims are coming forward, and authorities are listening.

“Once you talk about sexual assault and do prevention, that reporting increases,” said Jane Stapleton, who runs the University of New Hampshire’s Prevention Innovations Research Center. “There is absolutely no evidence to suggest the increase in reporting is directly associated with an increase in perpetration.” n Paquette covers people and policy for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016

24

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