The Washington Post National Weekly - June 24, 2018

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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The unsung astronauts What does it mean to be a NASA astronaut in the celebrity space age? PAGE 12

Politics Trump ‘strong’ on immigration 4

Nation Civil War remains found 8

5 Myths Alzheimer’s 23

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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THE FIX

The immigration policy mess BY

A ARON B LAKE

I

n the days after President Trump signed an executive order reversing his policy of separating families who immigrated illegally at the border, the shards were still being reassembled.

On Friday we still did not know what was happening with at least 2,500 children already separated from their parents. Congress on Thursday failed to pass the first of two immigration bills — and a vote on the second one was postponed for this coming week. And U.S. Customs and Border Patrol now says it will stop referring parents for prosecution, while the Justice Department says prosecutions will continue under its zero-tolerance policy. Put simply: It’s a mess.

There is no plan With Trump, there is a tendency to view everything he does as if he’s secretly manipulating things behind the scenes. Maybe he separated families just so he could reverse the decision and look magnanimous! Maybe he did it knowing his new executive order would just be struck down anyway! Maybe he’s just going to hold families in detention indefinitely! But basically everything about the past week has betrayed this central reality: There is no plan.

If Trump wanted the House’s immigration bills to pass, he has a strange way of showing it, given he undermined them three times in six days.

Trump overplayed his hand The Trump administration repeatedly said this wasn’t a new policy and that it had no choice. Both of those arguments were directly contradicted by its executive order to reverse the policy. The White House initially said it

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BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Security personnel stand at a port of entry in Tornillo, Tex., near toys and shoes. Children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally are being housed nearby.

needed Congress to pass a larger immigration package rather than just fix the problem, but then it backed down and fixed the problem itself. Trump seldom backs down in the face of pressure, but he did so in this case. That, in and of itself, is a pretty unmistakable admission that the White House badly miscalculated the politics of this issue.

There is no end in sight Trump has such credibility with a conservative base that has repeatedly balked at any

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 email 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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 37

immigration compromises that he could effectively force passage of something if he were to put his full weight behind it. But Congress and the administration are now in the position of dealing with recently created disasters rather than the long-standing issues that have been the focus of previous immigration debates.

And with the well sufficiently poisoned and so little time until the 2018 election, we may be past the window for getting anything done with a fully Republican-controlled Congress. n ©The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Astronaut Sunita Williams has flown in the shuttle and the Soyuz. She is one of four chosen for NASA’s next human missions. Photo by JONATHAN NEWTON of The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

For Trump, looking strong is key SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

B Y M ICHAEL S CHERER

P

resident Trump abandoned his policy of removing migrant children from their parents’ care without any mention of his supporters who defended his false claims that Democrats were responsible for a family separation crisis on the border that only Congress could solve.

Instead, he invited the news media to the Cabinet Room on Wednesday to talk at length about his own strength, an issue he has always placed at the center of the immigration debate. “We are very strong,” he said twice to start, going on to say the word “strong” seven more times, as if worried that allowing undocu-

The president changed his policy for family separation but emphasized his tough-guy stance on immigration

mented immigrant families to remain together might call his resolve into question.

“If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart,” he said.

“That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps, I’d rather be strong.”

That bluster — the shock and awe of a president who claims he might not care — has been a calling card throughout Trump’s political rise, a clear rebuke of George W. Bush’s self-styled “compassionate conservatism” and Bill Clinton’s desire to feel the nation’s pain. The “heart” might have won this battle, Trump told the nation, but no one should mistake the skirmish for

President Trump prepares to sign an executive order to end family separations at the border with Mexico while in the Oval Office with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Vice President Pence.

Nielsen told members of Congress that the separations could resume if lawmakers don’t offer a legislative remedy.

the whole war.

The projection of strength, after all, has always been the central pillar of Trump’s politics, the reason behind his constant attraction to conflict and a main draw for voters desperate for change and a powerful ally. And immigration has always been his favorite arena for flexing his rhetorical muscles.

“It seems ‘strong on immigration’ wins now,” Trump said in a recent interview on Fox News, after a conversation with Italy’s new prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, who won election on a platform of restricting immigration.

The tough-guy posture of a citizen politician who had encouraged fisticuffs at cam-

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POLITICS paign rallies, praised murderous foreign regimes and described immigrants as snakes who might “infest” the nation was, ultimately, more important than any single policy, even one that his aides hoped would give him leverage in congressional negotiations and deter future border crossings.

It did not even matter that his team had spent days arguing that the president did not have the power to stop separating parents from their kids, a trauma the American Academy of Pediatrics says can permanently disrupt the “brain architecture” of children.

“The Democrats have to change their law,” Trump said just a few days before proving his own words untrue. “It’s their law.”

For days, he had doubled down in the face of resistance, sharpening his own rhetoric with each turn.

White House staffers and conservative defenders followed him into the breach, aiming to discredit any who raised the ethical dilemma presented by young children given over to strangers by the state. “Don’t for a second let them take the moral high ground,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said in a monologue last week on his prime-time show.

“Their goal is to change your country forever.”

Then Trump dropped his defenses just as effortlessly, all but admitting the moral dilemma. In his White House, positions on immigration, gun control and foreign policy can spin like a weather vane. The typical shame felt by his peers for taking a misstep, uttering a falsehood or failing to follow through has never been a top concern for Trump.

What matters is that each scene in the unfolding drama shows him as the leader, taking control, calling the shots, appearing defiant and always, most important, strong. He understands politics on a more theatrical level, what one of his close friends has called “the emotional truth” of a situation. That instinct helped him win the presidency.

Family separations had been attractive as a symbol of an immigration policy he has always wanted to appear harsh, a central illustration of his own toughness as a leader. He has described immigration for years as a zerosum game, with noble Americans

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JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

in competition against often dangerous foreigners.

Asked in 2015 whether he worried that his immigration rhetoric would lead to innocent people getting hurt, he responded with provocation. “Are you ready?” he said, annoyed by the question.

“People are getting hurt. People are being decimated by illegal immigrants. The crime is unbelievable.”

The policy of separating families had been put in place after careful consideration, after being rejected by the Obama administration. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly had acknowledged on CNN that he was considering it in spring 2017, about a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced and defended the policy as the result of a new approach to prosecution.

But the backlash over the weeks that followed extracted a heavy cost on Trump’s own circle, sparking debates with his family and growing discord within his party. Evangelical allies condemned the policy, Pope Francis

gave public comments of concern, and Republican incumbents in tough reelection fights found voters they hoped to court rising up in fury.

Even Trump’s former personal attorney and longtime adviser, Michael Cohen, denounced using children as “bargaining chips” in the letter he wrote resigning from a fundraising committee of the Republican National Committee.

“Your random high school friend that never talks about politics posted on Facebook about this,” said one Republican strategist, who did not want to be named criticizing White House policy. “It broke through in a way that I haven’t seen.”

Some in Trump’s circle hope the controversy will serve as a wake-up call, redirecting the debate over immigration in the Republican Party.

“Here is the lesson learned: You can’t negate compassion,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership

Migrant families from Mexico and Central America who have been granted asylum in the United States are processed in McAllen, Tex., for transport to various destinations across the country.

Conference, who offered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration. “I don’t think ever again we are going to see children ever again involved in such an egregious manner.”

But there is no guarantee that Trump will take the same lesson.

His need to appear strong remains unchanged.

Several hours after the Cabinet Room meeting Wednesday, the president reconvened the media in the Oval Office for his signing of the order negating the policy he once claimed was a Democratic law.

He allowed Vice President Pence to make some remarks about “the compassion and the heart of the American people, and respect for families.” After Pence was finished, Trump offered a clarification of his own, not wanting anyone to mistake the new approach for flagging strength.

“I think the word ‘compassion’ comes into it,” Trump said of his new policy. “But it’s still equally as tough, if not tougher.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Will tariffs knock economy off stride?

BY

D AVID J . L YNCH

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resident Trump’s tariffs are eroding the gains from last year’s tax cut, disrupting factories and farms across the nation, and could even tip today’s humming economy into recession if the president carries out his most extreme threats.

Work on a petrochemical complex that Shell is erecting 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh has slowed while workers wait for a shipment of Brazilian steel that’s trapped at the Port of Long Beach in California. Sorghum farmers in Colorado have had to rethink their plantings in the face of retaliatory Chinese trade action.

And Hovnanian, a New Jerseybased home builder, has been rattled by a sharp uptick in lumber prices.

Most economists still expect the economy to grow by around 3 percent this year, aided by corporate and individual tax cuts as well as higher government spending, and to see the already low jobless rate fall toward half-century lows.

But there are mounting worries — as the president lashes out at the country’s major trading partners — that Trump’s aggressive diplomatic strategy could ignite a costly global trade conflict.

“The potential for the trade war to have a much bigger impact is significant,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. “It’s not only a direct impact on imports and exports. But it can spill over to confidence and also spill over to the stock market.”

In Sintra, Portugal, on Wednesday, the heads of the central banks of the United States, Europe and Japan voiced alarm at the potential impact of protectionism. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell said the consequences of all-out commercial conflict could force the Fed to revise its economic forecasts.

“We have a very wide range of contacts in the business world in the United States and around the world, and as we talk to them they

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Economists fear a global trade war could wipe out growth resulting from tax cuts, deregulation continually and increasingly express concern about trade developments,” Powell said according to Reuters. “For the first time, we are hearing about decisions to postpone investment, postpone hiring, postpone making decisions.”

Trump says that tariffs on such products as solar panels and washing machines are needed to protect American companies from unfair foreign trading partners. Other import levies, he says, are needed on national security grounds to revitalize steel and aluminum mills.

The president threatened this week to escalate his “America First” trade war with additional taxes on $450 billion in Chinese products and more than $330 billion in imported autos and related parts.

With the economy arguably in its best condition since the 2008 financial crisis, administration officials say the United States can

withstand a trade war. Kevin Hassett, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, projects annual economic growth of 3 percent for the next decade.

If the president uses the threat of tariffs to extract more favorable terms from U.S. trading partners, the U.S. will benefit, Hassett says.

Outside the administration, that sunny view is received skeptically. Economists at JPMorgan Chase Bank this week warned clients that “recent announcements from the Trump administration have raised risks that changes in trade policy could be more disruptive than we thought.”

Before moving to overhaul U.S. trade links, the centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda was last year’s reduction in corporate and individual tax rates. Coupled with a big boost in government spending, and relaxed federal budget limits, that policy acted as a fiscal stimulus for the economy.

A shipping container is offloaded at the Port of Oakland in California.

Administration officials say the United States can withstand a trade war because of the condition of the economy.

Tariffs slow the economy by raising the price of imported consumer goods like televisions and computers and industrial equipment used in factories.

“Could it wipe out the benefits from fiscal stimulus? Yes, absolutely,” said economist Jim O’Sullivan of High-Frequency Economics.

The president has not followed through on all of his various trade threats. He campaigned on a pledge to impose a 45 percent tariff on all Chinese imports and declare Beijing to be a currency manipulator, then backed off once in office.

His threats to hit imported cars and auto parts could likewise prove hollow. But if Trump implements them and puts tariffs on nearly all Chinese imports, as he has threatened, the economy would slow sharply.

Growth would dip to an annual rate of 1.7 percent, little more than one-half of the president’s goal, and 1.5 million to 2 million Americans would be thrown out of work, sending the unemployment rate back up, according to economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s.

The average U.S. household gained an estimated $900 annually from last year’s Republicanauthored tax legislation. Widespread tariffs, which make imported goods more expensive, would consume $720 of that amount, he added.

“That does real damage to the economy,” said Zandi, who advised the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (RAriz.). “The probability that the trade war goes off the rails is rising.”

In a worst-case scenario involving 25 percent tariffs on the entire range of Chinese imports that Trump has targeted, the nine-year economic expansion would veer into recession, Zandi said.

Tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, which already are rippling through major industries, offer a glimpse of the risks. On Capitol Hill Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was grilled by members of the Senate Finance Committee about imple-

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POLITICS mentation of the import levies.

Commerce is struggling with a backlog of more than 21,000 applications. Ross told lawmakers that the first 98 decisions, including 42 approvals, were posted on a government website on Wednesday.

“American manufacturers are already suffering,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the panel’s chairman. “The effects have spread throughout the economy.”

At Bish’s Steel Fabrication and Manufacturing in Salt Lake City, which opened its doors in 1945 and specializes in large metal structures for the waste water industry, “contracts have all but dried up,” Hatch said.

Ross said that by raising the selling price of steel and aluminum, the tariffs have made it profitable for domestic companies to reopen shuttered mills and approve new investments.

Measured against the nearly $20 trillion U.S. economy, the trade barriers enacted so far have been limited. Though the president has made threats about trade for months, his first China tariffs — affecting a modest $34 billion in Chinese goods — don’t take effect until July 6.

Wall Street and most Washington analysts remain confident that the president will avoid an economic catastrophe. His escalating tariff threats, they say, are just the bold tactics of a veteran dealmaker.

Even if the United States avoids economic pain in the short term, the president’s habitual brinksmanship may be sowing the seeds of bigger problems in the long run, according to Shang-Jin Wei, a business professor at Columbia University in New York. Trump’s tariffs are alienating major trading partners, including traditional U.S. allies, and undermining the global trading rules that were written under American leadership.

“Every country now has to live with the U.S. because it is the largest economy in the world,” said Wei, former chief economist of the Asian Development Bank.

“But the U.S. as the largest economy is not a permanent feature of the world economy. There will be a time in the future when it will be more important to the U.S. that other countries follow the rulesbased system.” n ©The Washington Post

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Citing anti-Israel bias, U.S. leaves human rights panel BY

C AROL M ORELLO

T

he Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday in protest of what the administration perceives as an entrenched bias

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley told the United Nations Human Rights Council that it had become a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.”

against Israel and a willingness to allow notorious human rights abusers as members.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has sought major changes on the council throughout her tenure, issued a blistering critique of the panel, saying it had grown more callous over the past year and become a “protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.” She cited the admission of Congo as a member even as mass graves were being discovered there, and the failure to address human rights abuses in Venezuela and Iran.

“I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments,” she said during a joint appearance with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the department. “On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”

Haley accused governments with woeful human rights rec-

ords of seeking seats on the council to avoid scrutiny and then resisting proposals for reform.

“When we made it clear we would strongly pursue council reform, these countries came out of the woodwork to oppose it,” she said. “Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt all attempted to undermine our reform efforts this past year.”

The decision to leave the 47-nation body was more definitive than the lesser option of staying on as a nonvoting observer. It leaves the council without the United States playing a key role in promoting human rights around the world.

The United States is midway through a three-year term on the council, which is intended to denounce and investigate human rights abuses. A U.S. departure deprives Israel of its chief defender at a forum where Israel’s human rights record comes up for discussion at every meeting, a standing “Item 7” on the agenda.

“By withdrawing from the council, we lose our leverage and allow the council’s bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked — including running roughshod over Israel,” said Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House committee that oversees the State Department.

“However, this administration’s approach when it sees a problem is to take the United States off the field,” he added.

“That undermines our standing in the world and allows our adversaries to fill the void.”

But Pompeo was scathing in his assessment of the council, calling it an “exercise in shameless hypocrisy, with many of the world’s worst human rights abuses going ignored, and some of the world’s most serious offenders sitting on the council itself.”

“The only thing worse than a council that does almost nothing to protect human rights is a council that covers for human rights abuses, and is therefore an obstacle to progress and an impediment to change,” he said.

The decision came a day after the U.N. human rights chief had slammed the administration’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children after they enter the United States at the Mexican border, calling it “unconscionable” and akin to child abuse. The president then signed an executive order Wednesday to end family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This is the first time since the Human Rights Council was formed in 2006, replacing the disbanded Human Rights Commission, that a sitting member volunteered to step aside, though Libya was suspended in 2011 after a government crackdown on unarmed protesters.

The United States initially shunned the panel over President George W. Bush’s concerns that so many human rights offenders could be seated through noncompetitive elections for members nominated by their regional colleagues. The Obama administration sought a seat in 2009 in an effort to showcase that human rights were an important aspect of U.S. foreign policy.

Before the United States joined, half the country-specific votes condemned Israel. During the first six years the United States was a member, resolutions critical of Israel dropped to onefifth. U.S. membership also led to a sharp decrease in the number of special sessions that focused exclusively on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“It’s true, the Human Rights Council continues to disproportionately focus on Israel,” said Peter Yeo, an official with the United Nations Foundation that connects the organization with private and nongovernmental groups and foundations. “But with U.S. leadership, the attention Israel brought has dropped significantly. U.S. leadership matters. We’re still the only ones with credibility on human rights on the world stage.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

A ‘one in a million’ Civil War find BY

M ICHAEL E . R UANE

T

he bullet probably hit the Union soldier as he was fleeing. It may have struck his cartridge box first, which sent it tumbling through the muscle of his right buttock, broke his right leg and buried itself sideways in his thigh bone just below the hip.

His buddies probably carried him as they retreated before the storm of Rebel gun and cannon fire. At the field hospital, the harried surgeons probably took a look at him and moved on to those less seriously wounded.

After he died, he was laid in a shallow pit with a dead comrade and the sawed-off arms and legs of as many as 11 more soldiers cut down at the Civil War’s Second Battle of Bull Run, in August 1862.

This past week, the National Park Service announced that archaeologists have found the “limb pit” where the two soldiers and the amputated arms and legs were buried. The discovery, on the battlefield just north of Manassas, Va., is extraordinary, experts said.

Nothing like it has been found before, and a century and a half after the battle, when a Park Service archaeologist examined the fallen Yankee’s thigh bone, the bullet was still stuck in it.

“As an archaeologist . . . it’s exciting,” said Brandon S. Bies, who brought the bone out of the pit. “As a human being, lifting the leg of an American soldier and holding the bone with the bullet that killed him, it’s an emotional experience.”

Scientifically, it’s “one in a million,” he said. “But for that soldier, it wasn’t a good one in a million. It was the end of his life.”

The two soldiers — referred to as Burial 1, with the embedded bullet, and Burial 2 — were placed side by side in the pit. The severed limbs were carefully arranged next to them, like broken tree branches, according to a photograph from the dig.

Burial 1 probably went in first, because Burial 2 was partially on top of him.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pit holding 2 skeletons and 11 amputated limbs discovered at Bull Run battlefield site in Virginia The hole was about a foot deep, and over the years farm plows had carried off the skull of one man and part of the skull of the other.

Anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution have studied the injuries suffered by the two soldiers and examined the cut marks on the severed limbs made by the surgeons’ saws. There were nine severed legs and two arms in all.

The identities of the soldiers are not known, and their fates were probably a mystery for their families. But scientific tests and circumstantial evidence show they were probably Northerners.

The bullet in the leg of Burial 1 was fired from an imported British Enfield rifle musket then commonly used by Confederates, said Bies, now the superintendent of the Manassas National Battlefield Park.

The Burial 1 soldier, who was

probably in his 20s, stood about 5 feet 7 inches tall. No clothing was found with him.

The man in Burial 2 was laid to rest in his Union coat — its four eagle-imprinted buttons were found in the pit with him. He was probably in his 30s, and only about 5-foot-5.

He had been wounded by one large ball that smashed his upper right arm, a smaller one that hit him in the groin and a smaller one that struck near his right shin.

Several of the rounds were found in the ground near him.

“It’s so rare that you have a discovery like this,” said Smithsonian anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide. “You have a burial feature that speaks in so many ways to the events of a battle, but also to the . . . people participating in treating the wounded.”

The Second Battle of Bull Run was at that point the largest battle

A femur with a bullet was among the limbs found at the Civil War burial pit just north of Manassas, Va.

ever in the Western Hemisphere, Bies said, and involved almost 125,000 combatants. It was fought Aug. 28 through 30, 1862, over much of the same ground as the First Battle of Bull Run a year before.

Roughly 1,700 Union soldiers and 1,200 Confederates were killed, and a combined total of more than 14,000 were wounded.

Amputation of a broken arm or leg was a common remedy, and surgeons worked feverishly with saws and knives.

The result, after almost any combat, was the refuse of amputated arms, legs and feet. In one field hospital after Second Bull Run, doctors dropped limbs out a window into a grisly pile.

Evidence of the pit was discovered in 2014 during excavation for a utility line but was not fully examined until 2015, the Park Service said. Initially, tiny bone fragments from the utility digging were taken to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where they were found to be human. Further excavation was recommended, and the pit was subsequently located.

(The agency will not disclose the exact location of the site.)

“It was humbling,” Bies said.

“You could see, standing above that as it was being uncovered, the horrific wounds, the one gentleman’s leg completely obliterated.”

Bies used a metal detector to check for artifacts. As he did, he got a hit near the broken leg that he suspected might be a bullet.

“It wasn’t until it broke loose from the dirt and was lifted into the air that you could tell that the bullet was embedded in the bone,” he said. “We never expected that. Never.”

The two soldiers will be the first burials in the new section of Arlington National Cemetery when it opens this summer. Their coffins will be built with wood from a downed tree taken from the battlefield.

The Park Service said it is still deciding what to do with the limbs. n ©The Washington Post

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FBI: Active shooters don’t just snap BY

M ARK B ERMAN

T

he terror of an armed gunman opening fire in public places has become an all-too-common occurrence, affecting American schools, churches, offices, holiday parties, government facilities and movie theaters.

While the attacks differ in location, level of carnage and the community affected, an FBI study released this past week found that a common element of the attacks lies with the shooters, who are frequently motivated by grievances in their lives, wielding guns they obtained legally and targeting specific victims when they open fire.

The study, which examined dozens of active shooters between 2000 and 2013, found that contrary to the public perception of the episodes as being fueled by mental health issues — an assertion frequently given voice by politicians, including President Trump — law enforcement officials were able to verify that only about 25 percent of the attackers had diagnosed mental health issues.

The attackers, who almost always were men or boys, typically attacked places that were familiar to them. They had acted in ways that concerned the people around them ahead of the attacks, with many expressing a desire to carry out violent acts. And most used guns they acquired legally, oftentimes buying the weapons specifically for their attacks, the study concluded.

“Offenders don’t snap,” Andre Simons, supervisory special agent of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and a co-author of the study, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide to attack.”

Rather, the decision is part of “a long process,” Simons said. The study found that 77 percent of attackers spent a week or longer planning their violence.

The new study examined 63 cases, focusing on the shooters and the actions that led up to

MANDEL NGAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The attackers are often motivated by grievances, obtain guns legally and target victims, study says their attacks. It is a sequel of sorts to a 2014 report the FBI released examining active shootings during the same time frame. That report identified 160 incidents fitting the definition of “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area” — and it found that such attacks had become more frequent during that 13-year period.

Since then, the bureau has continued studying shooting rampages, and its findings have been grim. In 2017, the massacres at a concert in Las Vegas and inside a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., were among 30 active shootings the FBI found nationwide, the most it has tracked in a single year.

After attacks like those or the rampages at high schools this year in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., attention often turns to what could have prevented the bloodshed and what red flags

might have been missed. Other research has found that most attacks came after people close to the shooters noticed worrisome behavior.

“Some of these concerning behaviors do presage violence,” said James Silver, a criminal justice professor at Worcester State University, one of the FBI study’s three authors.

The FBI study found that on average, each active shooter it examined “displayed four to five concerning behaviors over time.”

About 1 in 3 shooters had made threats or confronted people they later targeted. More than half of them revealed their intentions to do something violent, a phenomenon called “leakage.” Some of these attackers did not share their intentions with their eventual victims but instead expressed a broader desire to hurt others.

The study’s authors write that there was “no single warning

Police respond to an active shooter at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. A new FBI study examining active shooters from 2000 to 2013 says that 77 percent of attackers spent a week or longer planning their violence. It also found that only about 25 percent of the attackers had diagnosed mental health issues.

sign, checklist, or algorithm for assessing behaviors that” suggest a potential rampage shooter. But they say the study is meant in part to help members of the public keep an eye out for warning signs.

The warning signs included threats and physical aggression, and the study found that most of the shooters “had a history of acting in an abusive, harassing, or oppressive way.”

The files counter claims that rampage shooters must be mentally ill. The study found confirmed diagnoses of mental illnesses in 25 percent of the attackers, with some others exhibiting depression, anxiety and paranoia.

But the authors noted that many Americans experience such symptoms, and say more thought should be given before concluding that a shooting has its roots in mental illness.

“Mental health does not automatically equate to violence, so we need to be very careful when we approach the motivations or the causes behind any active shootings,” Simons said. “Simply saying that all [shooters] must be mentally ill because it’s such a horrific and incomprehensible act is probably not accurate or helpful.”

Most of the shooters examined were fueled by a grievance that “may not have been reasonable or even grounded in reality, but it appeared to serve as the rationale for the eventual attack, giving a sense of purpose to the shooter.”

In some cases, this grievance could stem from something like losing a job or being romantically rejected. Silver, the criminal justice professor, said most people would be upset in those situations, but their strongest feelings eventually dissipate.

“It’s the people for whom it doesn’t dissipate, and the people for whom that action, which may seem reasonable to everyone else in the world, becomes for the active shooter a cause, in that they have been unfairly, unjustly wronged,” Silver said. “It’s not the action itself, it’s their reaction to it that turns it into a grievance.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Gazans’ new weapon: Flaming kites R UTH E GLASH in Kibbutz Nir Am, Israel BY

O

fer Liberman zips out the kibbutz gate in his wellused jeep, frantically calling out to people as he drives. There’s a fire beyond the residential area, in the fields, he tells them. A few minutes later, Liberman pulls his jeep to a halt and watches as a line of angry flames licks the parched shrubs.

The first incendiary kite of the day has landed.

Outfitted with rags dipped in gasoline, smoldering embers, coals and, more recently, lightweight explosive devices, the kites are the latest weapon used

by Palestinians against Israelis in their decades-old conflict. Handmade, mostly from household objects, the kites sail over the border from the Gaza Strip, which lies just to the west.

Israelis have dubbed these lowtech weapons “terror kites.” Although the damage has not been huge — a little more than $1 million to date — it has put Israelis on edge. Multiple fires started each day by kites and helium balloons are the focus of nightly news broadcasts. One cabinet minister said soldiers could legitimately shoot kite fliers if they were endangering Israeli lives.

According to the Israeli army, thousands of incendiary kites and balloons have been flown over the border in the past eight weeks. As the number of kites has grown, Israel’s response has intensified.

On Monday, warplanes struck two military compounds and a munitions site belonging to Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules Gaza. Israeli officials said the action was “in response to arson and explosive kites and balloons that have been launched against Israel.”

“It doesn’t matter what this is; it matters what it does,” said Liberman, who oversees the agricultural operation at Kibbutz Nir Am. He said fires started by balloons and kites have caused more than $300,000 worth of damage to the collective farm.

“They are sending us a mes-

MENAHEM KAHANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Palestinian protesters, often facing Israeli gunfire, launch low-tech devices that can set fields on fire sage: We will burn your fields and maybe you will leave,” Liberman said.

The kites started coming in April, not long after Gazans held their first in a series of weekly demonstrations demanding the return of land Palestinians lost when Israel was created and highlighting the humanitarian crisis facing the strip. Israel and Egypt have imposed a land and sea blockade of the Palestinian enclave since Hamas took it over in 2007.

Those protests have turned lethal, with Israeli soldiers killing more than 120 Palestinians and injuring thousands. Israel’s actions have drawn wide international condemnation and increased anger inside Gaza.

“We want to burn the crops of the settlers,” said Ahmed, 17, who brought a homemade kite to the border on a recent Friday. By settlers he is referring to Israeli communities along the border.

“Every day they burn our hearts in killing the young and injuring them. They torture us.”

Ahmed, who did not want his full name published for fear of Israeli retribution, said the materials used for his kite — wood, ropes and paper — were free. The wind, blowing eastward off the Mediterranean Sea, also worked in his favor.

“It is a simple act. We enjoy our time flying kites, and we make the Israelis suffer like us. They can put pressure on their government to make us live better,” he said.

Murad, a 27-year-old Gazan, said the idea of using kites came “after seeing children playing with them.”

“We ask each other, ‘What are you going to do today?’ and then answer, ‘I’m going to burn a few acres on the other side,’ ” said Murad, who also feared using his full name. “Young people cannot find work here, and now their work is making kites to burn land

Israeli firefighters and soldiers attempt to extinguish a fire in a field near Kibbutz Kissufim, near the Gaza border, after it was caused by incendiary kites flown by Palestinian protesters from across the border.

inside Israel.”

The Israeli army, with its topnotch air-defense systems, has only recently achieved some success in stopping the crudely made kites, adapting drones so they can latch onto the flying objects and guide them to a specific point.

“It is not 100 percent protection, but we get about 90 percent,” said Col. Nadav Livne, head of the Israeli military’s research and development unit, which developed the drone defense.

But some are getting through.

At the Beeri nature reserve, damage to woodland and wildlife is extensive, said Daniel Ben David, regional director of the Israeli Jewish National Fund, which takes care of the reserve. About 1,000 acres have been destroyed, and more than 450 fires have been started in the past two months. Remnants of the kites, their long tails made from shreds of paper with Arabic writing, lie strewn on the burned ground.

“Kites are the same as rockets; they might not have killed anyone yet, but they could,” Ben David said. He has found dead porcupines, turtles and other woodland creatures among the charred trees.

“I used to love kites, but when you see how much damage a [$3] kite can cause — how much damage to nature, the environment, tourism — then you start hating them,” he said.

At Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath begins, life appears tranquil, even as just a mile or so away, Palestinians in Gaza gear up for their weekly faceoff against Israeli troops. A large mushroomshaped cloud of black smoke from burning tires rises to the west.

Amir Adler works in the kibbutz fields. He sees kites and balloons every day.

“It is very imaginative, using something so low-tech, but it’s devastating to see the fields we’ve worked so hard to prepare totally destroyed,” he said. “Honestly, I just cannot understand how this makes a difference to their protest.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Populist or pragmatist to lead Mexico?

BY K EVIN S IEFF AND J OSHUA P ARTLOW

He will hold a referendum on his presidency after three years, stepping down if he loses, rather than fulfill the six-year term enshrined in Mexico’s constitution.

Those promises don’t flout Mexico’s democratic values, but a leader willing to depart from institutional norms could try to consolidate power, some say.

From 1929 to 2000, Mexico was ruled by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). More than a leftist, some say, López Obrador could represent a return to that era. But Mexico has changed dramatically since that era.

in Mexico City

W

eeks before Mexico’s presidential election, some of the country’s biggest companies issued dire written warnings to their employees, cautioning them not to be misled by dangerous populists.

They were thinly veiled admonitions about one candidate — the man who appears increasingly likely to become this country’s next president: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

His rise is seen by his opponents as the greatest threat to Mexico since it embraced democracy and a free-market economy at the end of the 20th century.

One chief executive warned of “catastrophic effects” in his letter to employees. Another said that the candidate’s proposals would “turn the clock back decades.”

López Obrador, a longtime fixture of the left and former mayor of Mexico City, holds a commanding lead in polls leading up to the July 1 vote, in large part because of an anti-corruption platform that has resonated with many lower- and middle-class Mexicans. But members of Mexico’s powerful private sector have suggested that López Obrador’s most dramatic policies could have devastating effects on the economy. Analysts and intellectuals say his lack of respect for Mexican government institutions could usher in a period of quasi-autocracy.

The stakes are high outside Mexico, too. The country is the United States’ third-biggest trading partner in goods, and its cooperation is crucial in the fight against drug trafficking. Mexico’s next president may inherit stalled negotiations on NAFTA, which the Trump administration is trying to alter to be more favorable to American workers.

Many Mexicans say the fear of a López Obrador presidency is overblown, and fanned by his political opponents. The candidate appears to be embracing a

YAEL MARTINEZ/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador stirs fears of an economic crisis and quasi-autocracy kind of centrism, courting some of the business leaders who had expressed concern about his ascent.

In recent weeks, López Obrador and his advisers met with global investment managers to offer their assurance that he is, at heart, an advocate of free trade and a strong private sector.

Among his top advisers are millionaires who have contradicted some of the candidate’s policy positions, suggesting that private oil drilling contracts will not be dramatically affected, for example. But López Obrador has said that he won’t allow oil “to return to foreign hands.”

Many observers of the election see two versions of López Obrador: one a pragmatist, like the popular, fiscally prudent politician he proved to be while governing Mexico City from 2000 to 2005; and the other an erratic populist, with proposals that could lead to economic turbulence.

“The future really depends on which López Obrador we get,” said John Padilla of IPD Latin America, a regional energy consultancy.

The candidate declined several interview requests from The Washington Post.

López Obrador has run for president twice before, and some see additional reasons to worry in the way he handled his narrow loss in the 2006 election. He held weeks-long protests in the center of Mexico City, declaring himself the country’s true president.

Now, Mexicans wonder what such comments say about López Obrador’s governing style.

“The main concern about him is his democratic credentials.

Will he govern as a democrat?” said Luis de la Calle, a former undersecretary in the Economy Ministry.

López Obrador has already promoted several institutional changes on the campaign trail.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, seen at a rally in the southern city of Chilpancingo, has Mexico’s business elite and others worried that his proposals would “turn the clock back decades.”

A platform that some fear Most analysts and diplomats say there’s little chance López Obrador will attempt to dramatically alter Mexico’s economic model. He has promised “no expropriations, no nationalizations.” But some of his constituents will certainly push for change.

In its “declaration of principles,” López Obrador’s Morena party wrote that the country’s “neoliberal model” has served “a true Mafioso state built by a minority that dominates political and economic power in Mexico.”

While López Obrador has proposed a range of new social programs — for the poor, the disabled, the elderly — he has spoken against increasing the country’s public debt. And he has promised not to increase taxes, even on Mexico’s wealthiest. His welfare programs, he said, would be funded by the money he saves by cracking down on corruption, an amount he estimates at $20 billion a year.

Many analysts are skeptical of that plan.

“Where’s this money going to come from? He says he’s not going to raise taxes, but where else do you get this amount of money?” said Esteban Illades, the editor of Nexos, a cultural and political magazine It’s a real question mark. ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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COVER STORY

Astronauts: From idolized to anonymous The nature of space flight and who does it is changing again B Y C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT in Houston

T

he journey to outer space for American astronauts for the past seven years has begun at a Soviet-era launch site in Kazakhstan, deep in Central Asia. There, they pay homage to Russian cosmonauts and graciously participate in the rituals of their hosts, even the tradition of urinating on the right rear tire of the bus that ferries them to the rocket.

The landscape is barren and desiccated, resembling the moon or some distant celestial body, a reminder that the astronauts are a long way from Cape Canaveral.

Now, human space flight is returning to the place where the American Space Age was born.

As soon as this year, NASA expects to end its reliance on Russia and launch American pilots from U.S. soil for the first time since the final shuttle mission in 2011. But this time, the astronauts will fly on rockets unlike any NASA has ever seen — built and operated by companies trying to turn spaceflight into a sustainable business.

These first flights will be the fruits of $6.8 billion worth of contracts that NASA awarded to Boeing and SpaceX and mark a fundamental shift in America’s human space program — outsourcing access to Earth’s orbit to private sector companies, some of which hope to eventually bring tourists to space.

Those chosen by NASA for its upcoming missions are a quartet of former military pilots and NASA veterans who combined have spent more than a year in space over eight flights.

They were all carefully selected not just to fly to the International Space Station but to help reinvigorate NASA’s often-overlooked human spaceflight program.

Yet unlike their predecessors from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs — heroes and household names whose “one giant leap” was imprinted in the national lexicon and whose

Astronaut Doug Hurley flew two shuttle missions, including the last one before the shuttle program was shut down.

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

Astronaut Robert Behnken remembers watching the C-SPAN hearings after the Challenger explosion in 1986.

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

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lunar footprints endure undisturbed decades later — today’s astronauts are largely anonymous.

The stars of the new Space Age are instead a group of billionaire entrepreneurs, led by SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, who value technology over bravery, algorithms over instinct, and whose rockets and spacecraft may one day turn ordinary people into astronauts. In the digital age, the mantle of “the right stuff” is being bequeathed to the engineers and the programmers, who are collapsing the line between pilot and passenger one line of code at a time.

They are the ones calling for the Kennedyesque vision of space travel, which has attracted the public’s attention, and also investors. Musk talks of colonizing Mars. Branson boasts that Virgin Galactic already has 700 people signed up for tourist jaunts to the edge of space. And Jeffrey P. Bezos’s Blue Origin says its goal is nothing short of “millions of people living and working in space.” (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

NASA does its best to promote its astronauts.

They are available for interviews and to speak at community events, at businesses and to schoolchildren, especially from the space station, where they perform weightless somersaults and gobble floating M&Ms. They rhapsodize about seeing Earth from space and dutifully answer the question that everyone always asks: How do you go to the bathroom in space?

Aboard the space station, the orbiting laboratory, they work more as researchers and scientists than explorers, circling the Earth every 90 minutes on an endless loop just 250 miles high, or about the distance between New York and Washington.

Back on Earth, they are no longer feted by Broadway ticker-tape parades. Inside Houston’s Johnson Space Center, they are still treated like heroes. But outside those walls, they are recognizable, like soldiers, police officers and firefighters, only when they don their signature blue suits. Otherwise, they are government employees, performing a job that has an entrylevel salary for civilians of $69,904 a year, free to roam the grocery store aisles in peace.

This is a good thing, says Scott Kelly, the most famous of the modern astronauts, who spent nearly a year in space. It’s hard-won progress that’s the result of making space travel routine.

“It’s an indication we do it right,” he says.

“Safely.”

More than 500 people have been to space.

Not all of them can be famous. John Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts were pioneers in the truest sense — the first Americans to go to space, and then to orbit. Then came Gemini and Apollo. Men on the moon, and another ticker-tape parade.

“Everyone knows who Orville and Wilbur Wright were,” Kelly says. “But no one knows the second or third person to fly an airplane.”

The forgotten astronauts Their names are Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley and Sunita Williams. They are the ones chosen for NASA’s next big missions. But

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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instead of flying on rockets designed and operated by the space agency, their rides will come courtesy of a pair of contractors — SpaceX and Boeing — hired to provide a taxi-like service to the International Space Station.

Even the spacesuits are new and sleek, far different from the traffic-cone orange “pumpkin suits” worn by the shuttle astronauts. Boeing’s are ocean blue and comfortable; SpaceX’s are white and black, right out of a sci-fi flick.

With the first flights scheduled for later this year — a timeline that will probably slip — NASA is expected to soon announce which astronauts are flying when. That would mark a definitive step for its “Commercial Crew” program, which has been delayed again and again, as the companies have struggled to get their new spacecraft ready and as the ever-cautious NASA overcomes the scarring memories of the shuttle Columbia explosion in 2003.

NASA has already offered a glimpse of four members of the first crews to fly, some of the best and most experienced in the astronaut corps.

They have served as high-ranking officers in the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy who grew up wanting adventure. Combined, they have spent 74 years at NASA. Three have children. All are married. Two, Hurley and Behnken, are married to other astronauts.

At 53, Boe is the oldest, with a vague memory of being nearly 5 years old “when my parents came in and said, ‘Come watch this.’ ” There were men walking on the moon on the blackand-white television. At 47, Behnken is the youngest, with no memory of Apollo but a vivid one of when the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, and how for days afterward he stayed glued to the hearings on C-SPAN, as investigators tried to sort out how the mission had gone so horribly wrong.

Williams, 52, is the veteran of the group, having joined the astronaut corps in 1998, two years before the other three and the only one to fly on both the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. She grew up wanting to be a veterinarian but ended up going to the Naval Academy and then became a naval helicopter pilot and then an astronaut, who on her first trip to space was “hooting and hollering” and “having so much fun” with her crewmates as the shuttle lifted off.

“The guys on the flight deck were like, ‘Would you guys shut up? We can’t hear,’ ” she recalls.

Hurley, 51, is a retired Marine Corps colonel who flew two shuttle missions. He knows the triumph and the majesty of seeing Earth from space. His first mission lasted 16 days, traveling 6,547,853 miles, orbiting the Earth 248 times.

His second mission was shorter, 12 days, and bittersweet. It was the very last shuttle mission, which brought not just sadness but unemployment for hundreds.

Inside the Johnson Space Center, the four astronauts’ photos line the walls. But their anonymity among the public doesn’t bother them, they say. They fly not for fame but “for the greater good,” Hurley says. “We do it for the

Astronaut Eric Boe remembers being nearly 5 years old and watching TV as the first humans landed on the moon.

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

country. We do it for the agency.

And we do it because we are passionate about it.”

But today, they do it on Russian rockets from a launch site in Kazakhstan, nearly 7,000 miles from Cape Canaveral, a distance that muffles their launches to the point of obscurity for much of the American public.

Few seem to remember that astronauts have lived on the space station continuously since 2000 and that NASA still operates three spacecraft orbiting Mars and two rovers on its surface. Its New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in 2015; Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is more than 13 billion miles from Earth, the only human-made object in interstellar space.

And still, so many ask: Is NASA closed?

“We get that question constantly,” Hurley says. “What do you do now that the [shuttle] program is over?”

That question shows “just how closely tied human spaceflight is to the public perception of NASA,” says Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut.

Paying homage to Russia When they launch on Russian rockets, a world away, NASA’s astronauts are like foreign-exchange students, strangers soaking up the local culture and customs in a distant and curious land. They stop first in Star City, Russia, outside of Moscow, where American astronauts pay homage to the Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human ever to reach space, leaving red carnations at his memorial wall.

Then, two weeks before launch, they head deep into the Central Asian desert, to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet-era launch site in Kazakhstan, where the food is heavy and salty, and, like the astronauts who have flown before them, NASA’s best participate in rituals both sacrosanct and superstitious.

Before the launch, the astronauts watch the 1970 Russian movie “White Sun of the Desert.”

They are blessed by an Orthodox priest in a golden robe, who presses a cross to their nose and blesses them with a splash of water to the face that comes, to some, with unexpected force. The astronauts drink a glass of champagne and then, before being transported to the launch site, urinate on the

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NEIL A. ARMSTRONG/NASA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

bus’s rear right tire because, legend has it, Gagarin did so before his first flight.

Perhaps most disorienting is that at Baikonur the astronauts aren’t clued in to the countdown.

They get a five-minute warning.

Then one minute. But then the seconds tick by in silence, until the engines begin to rumble beneath them. “There’s a lot of superstition,” Williams says. “There’s a lot of tradition. . . . And when you think about it, it’s pretty cool.”

Even christening the tire, which can be tricky for female astronauts: “I got some of my urine on the tire — put it that way,” she says.

“I was sticking with tradition.”

The Florida Space Coast has its traditions as well, like the prelaunch parties on the beach that may not be as raucous as they once were, but still endure.

“When you’re launching from the Kennedy Space Center, you feel the support of the country behind you because there’s a ton of people,” Williams says. In Baikonur, the number of visitors is limited. But in Florida, “all your friends and family get in their cars and their campers and make their way down.”

She now hopes they’ll gather again just as they used to. On the sunny coast of Florida, where the waves lap not far from the launch-

pad, the hotels and bars along the four-lane Cocoa Beach strip have, for years, served as a sort of fraternity row for the tourists lining the beach, just down the road from Disney World.

It is here on the beaches and causeways that tens of thousands would gather, all chanting the anthem of the Florida Space Coast in unison: “3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .”

Opening space to the masses Soon, they may gather somewhere else as well: In the deserts of New Mexico and West Texas; in Mojave, Calif.; and along the Gulf of Mexico, in the secluded retreats where the billionaires are building their private spaceports.

The most stunning of these is New Mexico’s Spaceport America, which Branson’s Virgin Galactic has been promising for years would become a destination for the tourists who for as much as $250,000 a ticket would go on a thrill ride to the edge of space.

So far, more than 700 have signed up, the company says, more than the 560 or so people who have been to space. In 2014, the company suffered a major setback when its spacecraft came apart in midair during a test flight, killing the co-pilot in a blow that set the company back years.

A photo of astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on the moon remains iconic. Today’s astronauts are largely anonymous, unlike their predecessors from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs — heroes and household names whose “one giant leap” was imprinted in the national lexicon and whose lunar footprints endure undisturbed decades later.

Now it is flying again, and on May 29 its new spacecraft flew supersonic for the second time from its test site in Mojave, roaring closer to the edge of space, making it 22 miles high.

Just over 200 miles away, in the West Texas desert, Bezos’s Blue Origin has built its own launch site, where it, too, plans to fly tourists just past the edge of space.

Across the state in Brownsville, SpaceX is building a private launch site of its own.

Axiom, a Houston-based company that is building a commercial space station, recently advertised 10-day trips to the International Space Station for $55 million a stay, starting in 2020.

The companies have different approaches and ambitions, but all want to open up space for the masses, to create a new generation of astronauts far different from the ones NASA has been producing since the dawn of the Space Age. It would be an era in which voyages may be not just about collective achievement, but the opportunity for private individuals to go.

“I’m completely supportive of all kinds of people going into space. I mean that’s the whole point of what we’re trying to go do,” says Bob Smith, the CEO of Blue Origin. “We want poets, we want artists, we want journalists, we want all kinds of people to go out there because we believe strongly that there is this thing called the ‘overview effect,’ where people get a better perspective of where they live.”

As she prepares for her third trip to space, NASA’s Williams says that she, for one, is all for that.

“I wish everyone on this planet would have an opportunity to take a lap around the Earth, just one time at least,” she says. “And just see what it looks like from there.”

Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin hope to have their first test flights with humans to space later this year.

That breakthrough could come before Williams and her colleagues launch into space. That would mean the people restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil won’t be NASA astronauts at all, but the private executives and their customers who have become the new celebrities of America’s foray into the cosmos. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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TECHNOLOGY

KIM RAFF FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Curing addiction to apps — with apps BY

W ILLIAM W AN

I

n the modern economy of tablets and apps, our attention has become the most valuable commodity. Tech companies have armies of behavioral researchers whose sole job is to grab and hold our focus as often and long as possible.

But some people are starting to fight back. A small but growing number of behavioral scientists and former Silicon Valley developers have begun trying to counterprogram those news alerts, friend requests and updates crowding

As phones take up more of our time, developers are working to break the hold of craveable technology

our waking hours.

Increasingly, the rebel developers are using fire to fight fire — creating apps that try to put users back in control. They call their movement “digital wellness,” and in recent weeks, they scored two huge victories when Google and Apple announced plans to incorporate some aspects of digitalwellness apps — like allowing users to track their screen time — into upcoming Android and iPhone operating systems.

“The system is built against us, because the more you use these products like Facebook and

Kevin and Mandy Holesh sit with their dogs on the porch of their RV at Utah Lake in Saratoga Springs, Utah. Kevin Holesh’s Moment app works like a Fitbit, tracking the number of hours users spend on their phones and specific programs.

Google, the more money they make,” said Nick Fitz, a behavioral researcher at Duke University. “It’s like playing chess against a billiondollar company. For every one of us trying to fix the attention economy, they have 20 researchers trying to suck you further into it.”

Fitz has wrestled for the past two years with one small corner of this emerging battlefield: annoying notifications.

In an experiment, he tracked the smartphone use of more than 200 people. Most received between 65 to 80 notifications a day.

When he eliminated their alerts,

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TECHNOLOGY their stress levels dropped. A haze of inattention lifted. Their concentration improved. But cutting off the updates also caused a spike of anxiety in most of his subjects, who reported feeling fears of missing out.

So Fitz and a team of developers created an app to bundle those notifications and deliver them in three batches — morning, afternoon and evening. The people with the app on their phone reported lower stress, higher productivity and no spike in anxiety.

The 29-year-old researcher said his work was sparked by an epiphany in his life a few years ago. His father was visiting him at graduate school, and “I realized I was sitting there in the bathroom scrolling through Instagram, while my 78-year-old dad — who I only have so many years left with — was waiting for me outside,” he recalled.

Since then, Fitz has slowly unplugged from Facebook and Instagram and rarely uses them these days. On his web browser, he has installed an extension app called “Mortality” so that whenever he goes online, he is greeted by a black-and-white countdown of the days he has left to live (based on average life expectancy).

“I’m not saying that technology is inherently bad,” Fitz said. “But people should be conscious of how they’re using it and how it’s using them.”

The average American, for instance, checks their phone every 12 minutes. Market research shows the average user touches their cellphone 2,617 times a day.

In a 2014 survey, 46 percent of users said their smartphone is something “they couldn’t live without.”

Such habits fuel today’s Web economy. Among the legions of developers who specialize in behavioral design, one of the most famous is Nir Eyal, whose 2014 best-selling book “Hooked” is required reading in Silicon Valley.

Eyal details the four key elements of craveable tech: the trigger (the ping from an unread message), the action (clicking open an app), user investment (liking or commenting on other posts) and the variable reward (the crucial hook).

What’s important is that web users do not know when they will come across their reward. As they hunt through their news feeds,

ABOVE: KIM RAFFFOR THE WASHINGTON POST; BELOW: FORESTAPP.CC

their brains experience surges of dopamine. The neurochemical is associated with the feeling of anticipation and plays a large role in linking specific cues with reward.

The mental-health effect of today’s constant digital grab for our attention is unclear. Some studies have linked social media and smartphones to stress, depression in teens and poor sleep. Other researchers have cast doubt on such findings.

But lately, amid the tech backlash over data-mining scandals and election interference, warnings have come from the very people who helped develop the Web’s earliest and biggest platforms.

Facebook’s founding president, for one, admitted at an event last year that the company had been “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Its creators, Sean Parker said, “understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.”

In response to the criticism, Facebook and other tech companies say they are trying to improve products to address such concerns. Facebook pledged $1 million last year to research the effect of social media on youth.

Kevin Holesh has read the work of Eyal and other behavioral designers closely. As a web developer, he employed many of the same principles at previous start-ups.

Then five years ago, he found himself increasingly frustrated with the way he and his fiancee were spending their evenings. “We would spend all day working. At

TOP: Kevin Holesh works in the RV where he and his wife live as they travel the country.

An app he created helps people pull away from constant social media use.

BELOW: The Forest app plants a virtual tree on your phone whenever you put it down.

night, we’d spend dinner half-talking, half-catching up on things on our phone. Then, we’d turn on the TV and basically zone out in our separate worlds for the rest of the night,” he said.

He decided to create an app to fix what he felt was broken in his relationship with his iPhone and fiancee.

His Moment app works like a Fitbit, tracking the number of hours users spend on their phone and specific programs. It sends notifications after they’ve been on for an especially long stretch, suggesting a break. It also allows them to turn their usage into a game of sorts, challenging them to pick up their device less and less — until they feel like they’re back in control. Moment is now one of the most successful digital wellness programs, downloaded 5.9 million times.

Shortly after it launched, Holesh and his fiancee-turnedwife uprooted their lives and moved into an RV. The 20-somethings have worked together from the road ever since.

“Our routine these days is basically a lot of conversation,” Holesh said from a state park in Utah. “We cook together. We talk about life goals over dinner. We’re thinking of having kids soon, so that’s been a huge topic of conversation lately.

We read and we get a lot more sleep than most people.”

Several other apps have also emerged in the past couple of years. A particularly popular one

KLMNO WEEKLY

— called Forest — plants a virtual tree on your phone whenever you put it down to focus on work. But the second you pick it back up, the tree withers and dies.

Andrew Dunn, a San Francisco product manager, recently launched a program that essentially gives Android phone users a new home screen — batching their notifications, removing the colorfully attractive logos on apps and making it harder to access apps they feel are wasting their time.

One fundamental problem he and other developers struggle with is how to create successful apps without employing the usual hooks and business models.

“You don’t want to monetize based on ads. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of decluttering people’s lives,” Dunn said. He also doesn’t want to generate revenue by collecting user data or demanding a high purchase fee. Getting buy-in from investors has understandably been difficult.

Ultimately, his team decided to create a way to let Siempo users pay what they can. “These are the kinds of questions we’re still wrestling with in the humane, ethical tech movement,” he noted.

In the three years since publishing “Hooked,” Eyal has increasingly focused on the importance of ethics instead of just the techniques of design.

The behavioral design guru does not regret writing the book.

“There will always be downsides to new technology,” he said in an interview from New York. “The solution isn’t to throw it out. The solution is to make it better.”

At the same time, he thinks users have to take personal responsibility as well. “It’s so much easier to blame the technology,” he said.

Eyal has spent much of the past year visiting the country’s biggest tech companies and trying to persuade top executives to install safeguards to help chronically addicted users. “We should be demanding that these companies use the data they’re collecting to help those who are overusing them,” he said.

Every company he’s talked so far has agreed it’s a good idea, but none has actually implemented such use-and-abuse policies.

“I don’t know what it will take to get there,” Eyal admitted, “but I’m starting to lose my patience.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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BOOKS

Rodeo family at the crossroads of old and new N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C ARSON V AUGHAN

N THE LAST COWBOYS A Pioneer Family in the New West

By John Branch Norton.

277 pp. $26.95

o doubt there is something romantic, even literary, about rodeo: the grit, the sacrifice, the tinge of nostalgia, the dust lingering beneath the floodlights after the final ride. And yet, unlike baseball or boxing, rodeo is rarely given serious literary treatment.

If you Google “books about rodeo” you’ll find no passion project of a great American novelist but instead a smorgasbord of trashy romance novels, each one adorned with a square-jawed cowboy unencumbered by his pearl snaps, the sunset bouncing off his waxy chest.

This makes “The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West” seem entirely overdue. The book, an intimate if sometimes insular portrait of one family’s rodeo dynasty, profiles the Wrights of southern Utah, who have ranched on Smith Mesa near Zion National Park for 150 years, “long before there were any roads to get there,” writes author John Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter. But in the 21st century, as climate change triggers periods of drought, land values continue to skyrocket, and the attraction of Zion expands along with its hotels, restaurants and bike shops, the family operation finds itself “squatted at the intersection of the old and new Wests.”

While Bill Wright, the patriarch of this large Mormon family, struggles to manage the ranch, his sons and grandsons continue to dominate the pro rodeo circuit, their names familiar to anyone with a knowledge of the sport.

Cody, the oldest of Bill’s seven sons and one of the oldest riders in the field in his late 30s, is a two-time world champion saddle bronc rider. He has qualified 13 times for the National Finals Rodeo and earned millions of dollars in prizes and sponsorships. In 2016, his stiffest competition at the National Finals came from two of his own sons, Rusty and

ISAAC BREKKEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cody Wright in the saddle bronc competition at the 2013 National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

Ryder. In earlier years, the ranch financed the family’s rodeo hobby. Now rodeo earnings might just save the ranch. The narrative of “The Last Cowboys” turns on a question of succession. Can Smith Mesa survive another generation in the Wrights’ name? And if so, how? The land is perfect for a postcard, but as Bill explains, “Beauty don’t pay the bills.”

Branch spent three years shadowing the Wrights at rodeos, brandings and family gatherings, and he chronicles the dizzying ups and downs of the family business during this period of transition. He maintains a reporter’s objectivity that allows him to avoid caricaturing and sentimentalizing a lifestyle so often portrayed as if stuck in the cattledrive era or worse, a bad spaghetti western. Branch’s legwork is astonishing, and he delivers a visceral sense of both the danger of the sport and the grueling schedule of full-time saddle bronc riders, who regularly travel hun-

dreds of miles or more to spend eight seconds in the saddle.

“The next ride might be a winner. Or it might be the last,” he writes. “Either way, it was always a long way back home.”

The author seems at times reluctant to fully elaborate the issues underlying the area’s transformation, perhaps because he wishes to shield the family from criticism, or to escape reprisal from a West often defensive of tradition and suspicious of the outsider, or perhaps simply to avoid distracting from his narrative. Though drought plays a role in the evolution of ranching, the author delves into climate change only peripherally.

Similarly, Branch shies from directly discussing the safety of the sport. And though wives and girlfriends float in and out of this necessarily male-driven narrative, it might be good to hear from the women who hold their families together while the men spend most of the year away from

home, saddling up despite the obvious risks.

The narrative is so packed with rodeos, rides and injuries that one misses moments of wider reflection on the quest driving the men.

But the pros far outweigh the cons in this timely, clear-eyed examination of rodeo and the shifting culture that has long sustained it. If “The Last Cowbodys” doesn’t provide all the answers, it does give us one hell of a ride. As Branch writes of Cody: “None of these injuries mattered to him, really, because they were just excuses, and rodeo was where excuses went to die. The only way to make a dime was to get on the horse. Anything less than eight seconds didn’t really matter, and might as well never have happened at all.” n Vaughan is a writer from Nebraska. His first book, about a small-town zoo in Northeast Nebraska, will be published in 2019. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

89-year-old poet reflects on aging

A troubled teen’s desert journey

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

“I

l

REVIEWED BY

H ELLER M C A LPIN

n my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity,” Donald Hall writes in his freewheeling essay collection “Carnival of Losses.”

Hall, who will turn 90 in September, is not only stripping down to his unadorned essence, but also emptying his life savings of odds and ends.

His previous book, “Essays After Eighty,” created a stir with its frank, dryly humorous perspective on debility and death. This collection of more than 70 short ruminations on the indignities of old age, poets he has known and stray memories is looser and more anecdotal, and makes it clear that Hall, a former U.S. poet laureate, has aged more gracefully mentally than physically. Hall comments, “In a paragraph or two, my prose embodies a momentary victory over fatigue.”

He sets up “Notes Nearing Ninety” with a page of trenchant one-liners: “You are old when someone mentions an event two years in the future and looks embarrassed,” he writes. “In your eighties you are invisible.

Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you.”

Among his reminiscences, Hall exposes a few shameful memories. He regrets having called his 3-year-old son a bad boy for interrupting his work, and he is appalled that he confirmed a former Harvard roommate’s Communist Party affiliation during an FBI job background check in the height of McCarthyism. More risible gaffes: Repeatedly forgetting to open the garage door before backing out his car; constantly losing his dentures.

Hall wrote poetry until 2010, and mingled with many of the best. He recalls arguments with an immodest William Faulkner over freeing Ezra Pound, whose poetry he loved despite his

“madness and his fascism.” He remembers James Dickey as “the best liar I ever knew,” and Allen Tate looking perpetually grumpy.

Repeatedly, he wonders whose work will survive. About Richard Wilbur, who died at 96 in 2017, he writes, “In his work he ought to survive, but probably, like most of us, he won’t.”

Hall’s whole-animal approach to writing — leaving no parts unused or wasted — recalls the poem he turned into his most popular children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” in which nothing is wasted in a farmer’s repetitive cycle of manufacture and market.

Much in this collection is familiar, including stories about his grandparents’ 1803 New Hampshire house at Eagle Pond Farm, owned by his family since 1865. This is where he retired from teaching in 1975 with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, and where they lived in blissful “double solitude,” devoted to each other and their poetry until her death from leukemia at age 47, in 1995. He is ecstatic to learn that his granddaughter Allison intends to move into the family homestead after he is gone.

Hall, who has spent decades exploring the poetry of death, is sanguine about mortality. In “A Carnival of Losses,” he considers life’s roller coaster between desolation and joy. He writes: “As a grandfather approaches his ninetieth birthday, he remembers his mother’s in 1993.

Although he lacks greatgrandchildren, he chugs on, he chugs on, he chugs on, understanding that eventually each locomotive reaches its roundhouse.”

May this engine that could keep on chugging — and writing. n McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. This was written for The Washington Post.

T CARNIVAL OF LOSSES Notes Nearing Ninety

By Donald Hall Houghton Mifflin.

224 pp. $25

THE SHEPHERD’S HUT

By Tim Winton Farrar Straus Giroux.

267 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

im Winton’s new novel hovers between a profane confession and a plea for help. “The Shepherd’s Hut” is almost too painful to read, but also too plaintive to put down.

The narrator is Jaxie Clackton, a troubled teenage boy who lost his mother to cancer and suffered years of beatings from his drunken father. Jaxie has fantasized about killing his old man for so long that when he finds him dead in the garage, he panics: “They’ll say I kicked the jack out from under the roo bar and crushed his head like a pig melon,” Jaxie thinks. “It all points to me.”

Convinced he’ll be pursued by the police, Jaxie grabs a few supplies — including a gun — and runs north toward the salt lakes of Western Australia: “Pushing.

Hauling. Going.” It’s not a bad plan except for the high likelihood of dying somewhere over thousands of square miles of desert. But somehow Jaxie survives, and so what follows is a strange picaresque tale: Huck Finn on a moonscape.

What’s even more hypnotic than this deadly territory is Jaxie’s alternately proud and woeful voice, which Winton captures in a thick Australian accent spiked with slang and curses. Starving, dehydrated and often ill, the boy keeps stumbling across the arid ground as his thoughts spin back over the violence he’s suffered and — sometimes — committed.

“Some nights there was so much feeling in me head I was glad it couldn’t get out,” Jaxie says. “You could burn a skyscraper down with the what’s in me.” From the moment he grabs your attention, he’s frightening and sympathetic, a wholly human creation by a writer who pushes hard on our ambivalence about aggressive adolescent males — these beings who are no longer children but not quite adults either.

Whatever Jaxie is, he’s a bracing figure of resilience, hardened by a home, a school and town all

set against him. “I wasn’t what everyone thought,” he insists.

“The thing with the teacher’s car come out all wrong. And the business with the crossbow, that never ever happened.”

If too many contemporary novels strike you as effete and suburban, here’s survivalist fiction at its rawest. “I was sitting round starving to death,” Jaxie says, before finally shooting a kangaroo and skinning it with a dull knife.

But this tale of tooth and claw is deepened by Jaxie’s abiding dignity. Fear of capture isn’t really pushing him across these hundreds of miles so much as his determination to reach a young woman he loves. Even that chivalric quest, though, is complicated.

Possibly hopeless.

In fact, the tension between hope and hopelessness grows more taut in the second half of “The Shepherd’s Hut.” On his way north, Jaxie happens upon a corrugated iron cabin in which lives an old Irish priest named Fintan MacGillis. Jaxie would prefer to remain invisible, but he desperately needs water, and Father MacGillis desperately needs company. The relationship that develops between these two cagey outcasts is fraught with mystery and suspicion — and a degree of grudging affection that never slips into sentimentality. “He talked so . . . much it was like a junkpile he chucked at you,” Jaxie says. “You had to sort through all these bent up words.”

In the end, their words won’t matter, true or not. This oasis of security in the desert is a mirage, as Jaxie always knew. The sun and the salt bleach everything away until these characters are stripped down to their essence.

“What does that make me?”

Jaxie asks. “Someone you won’t see coming, that’s what. Something you can’t hardly imagine.” n Charles writes about books for The Washington Post, where he hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

We should stand with North Korea’s dissidents NATAN SHARANSKY is a human-rights activist, former political prisoner in the Soviet Union and is head of the Jewish Agency for Israel. This was written for The Washington Post.

Ten years ago, I participated in a conference on North Korean human rights in Washington. Speaking with brave North Korean men and women who had chosen to oppose and escape from that terrifying regime, I was struck by the similarities between their experiences and those of dissidents in the U.S.S.R. In light of President Trump’s recent summit with Kim Jong Un, it bears remembering that the character of totalitarian rule, and the struggle for freedom against it, follows the same basic pattern the world over.

Citizens of fear societies such as North Korea — that is, societies in which individuals cannot enter into a public space and freely speak their minds without fear of physical harm — can be divided into three groups. On one side are true believers, those who genuinely support the regime and believe in its official ideology. On the other are dissidents, who are disaffected with their regime and willing to pay the oftenterrible price of publicly opposing it.

In between stands a silent majority of double-thinkers, who question the justice of their government but are too terrified by the repercussions of dissent to speak out. The stronger the regime’s repressive reach, the fewer dissidents and the more doublethinkers there will be. On the other hand, the more the government appears vulnerable to pressure, the more emboldened individuals will feel to speak out and mobilize against it. In general, the number of double-thinkers tends to grow with time, as citizens continue to experience the daily indignities and deep frustrations of life under repressive rule.

In the case of the Soviet Union, it was a combination of external

pressure from world powers and internal pressure from dissidents that ultimately brought down the Iron Curtain. By linking their negotiations with Moscow to the latter’s respect for human rights, Western leaders put the regime on notice that they took the wellbeing of ordinary Soviet citizens seriously, and they gave us dissidents the confidence to challenge the regime knowing that they were on our side.

Sadly, the long-suffering people of North Korea are not yet in such a position. Although Trump’s meeting with Kim was a historic event with potentially dramatic consequences for nuclear disarmament, it is less clear — though no less important — what effect the meeting will have on the dismal human-rights situation inside the hermit kingdom.

Dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington is commendable. Yet current and would-be dissidents also need reassurance that America and other world powers understand their struggle and will defend their basic rights.

It is unfortunate that some of Trump’s subsequent remarks have conveyed the opposite message. In the meeting’s aftermath, Trump said that Kim had proved himself “very talented” in taking

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Trump shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their summit on Sentosa Island in Singapore.

over totalitarian rule from his father and averred that the young dictator “loves his country very much.” Even more troubling, he declared that North Koreans love Kim in return, supporting him with “great fervor.”

The president may have been attempting to solidify his newfound goodwill with Kim. Yet his comments are likely to have a deeply dispiriting effect on North Koreans.

Given the death grip of Kim’s regime on his people, relatively few North Koreans choose to cross the line between doublethink and open dissent. As the president himself pointed out in a moving speech last November, North Korea is a country where tens of thousands of citizens languish in gulags, subject to forced labor, torture, starvation and murder. It is a country where children can be beaten in school for forgetting a small detail about their ruler’s life. It is thus only natural that North Koreans overwhelmingly keep their doubts to themselves and publicly demonstrate their allegiance to Kim. Trump may well understand this reality and know better than to believe in signs of loyalty and affection displayed under conditions of mortal fear. Yet he should also understand how demoralizing it is for dissidents, how discouraging it is for the silent ma-

jority of double-thinkers and how harmful it is to the strategic interests of the United States for him to commend a supposed love affair between Kim and his people. Such statements undermine America’s moral standing and dampen North Korean dissent, which is in fact the most powerful unconventional weapon in the fight against dictatorship.

There are many situations in which world powers must cooperate with dictators on security issues despite their human rights abuses. Even in the context of such tactical alliances, however, it is a mistake to praise relations between an unjust regime and those who suffer under it. Soviet dissidents were acutely sensitive to every statement coming from foreign leaders, relying heavily on the knowledge that they kept tabs on our fate and had not abandoned us to our tormentors.

Just as standing firmly with dissidents back then furthered the long-term goals of the United States, so too standing with the North Korean people now will advance rather than hinder America’s objectives.

It is both a moral and a strategic imperative, then, for world leaders to bolster the men and women suffering under tyranny, not to betray them with false flattery or diplomatic courtesy toward their oppressors. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

California’s open primary works ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND RO KHANNA Schwarzenegger is a former governor of California.

Khanna represents the 17th District of California in the U.S. House of Representatives. This was written for The Washington Post.

Last month, leading up to California’s primary elections, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said “I hate the top-two” open primary system. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said California’s top-two system “is not a reform. It is terrible.” Their bipartisan response should tell you everything you need to know: Political parties hate top-two, so voters should love it.

We’re from different parties, we don’t agree on every issue, and we don’t bench-press the same amount — yet. But when it comes to California’s open primary system, where the two candidates who get the most votes advance to the general election, regardless of their political party, we see eye to eye: That current system, in place since 2012, works best because it puts the voters first.

When California voters came together in 2010 to pass the twin reforms of an independent redistricting commission and top-two open primaries, our state was reeling from the effects of destructive partisanship — stuck with structural deficits, passing budgets months after their deadlines, with few legislators looking for innovative solutions to the real problems our state was facing. A 2005 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Government Performance Project gave California government a C-minus, the lowest grade issued to any state in the nation that year. In 2009, Los Angeles’s then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said

California was “ungovernable.”

When assembly members Joe Canciamilla, a Democrat, and Keith Richman, a Republican, established a bipartisan working group 15 years ago to discuss solutions for pressing problems facing the state, they were initially forced to meet in secret.

Beginning to change that meant taking power away from the political parties, which became, increasingly, artificial gatekeepers, giving an advantage to candidates who campaigned only to their respective party bases and ignoring independents, who are now 25.5 percent of all registered voters in California and the second-largest group of voters in our state.

With open primaries, a better political culture has emerged, with more and more legislators governing for the people they represent, not just special interests and party bosses in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.

From immigration reform to pro-growth economic policies, our state legislature is addressing issues that Congress and most states won’t touch.

We’ve had bipartisan agreements on bills to improve health care and against bills that could hurt California’s economy.

For those of us who embrace top-two, it’s not about moving legislators in any one political direction. It’s about moving them closer to the voters.

Closed primaries don’t work: In red strongholds such as California’s Central Valley or blue strongholds such as the Bay Area, elections became a purity test — candidates willing to question their party’s orthodoxy are at a significant disadvantage. Party loyalists easily win traditional primaries and advance to general elections, where they coast to landslide victories.

In those same strongholds, open primaries work: When candidates and voters know that more than one candidate from a given party can advance to the general election, an

independent-minded Democrat or Republican can campaign to the voters in the middle of the political spectrum, not just to his or her party’s base, and still have a chance to advance along with a more conventional party-line candidate to the November election. Incumbents who know they have to worry about more than just their own party base wind up being more innovative and willing to strike legislative compromise.

In our recent primary, top-two meant candidates had to compete for votes, rather than leaning on party ID. In that way, uncertainty and increased competition is a feature, not a bug. We doubt there’s a voter in California, or anywhere in the country, who wants politicians to have guaranteed job security — except maybe their lobbyist friends and campaign consultants. If incumbents win in top-two, voters can have more confidence that it’s because they took on all the contenders, and faced all the voters, rather than pandering to their base.

California landed on a way to solve this problem, and now’s the time to take it nationwide. Let voters vote for the candidates they want, not just the ones the parties tell us we have to choose from. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

Bringing war into space would be a disaster for the entire planet PETER WISMER is an international legal consultant based in Denmark and Austria.

This was written for The Washington Post.

President Trump is fond of suggesting that the five branches of the U.S. armed forces are not enough. This past week, he directed the Defense Department to create a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military, saying, “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.” This follows a statement the president made in March during an address at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, in which he said, “Space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air and sea.”

This is a horrible proposition.

In making these statements on Monday, Trump is parroting lines from people who know a lot about war and nothing about space. First of all, space is considered a “province of mankind,” according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 — which the United States and more than 100 other countries are parties to. This treaty lays out the principle that space is a domain that belongs to us all, not just to some states.

Second, war in space is particularly dangerous because it is a uniquely pollutable domain. The more space pollution there is, the more difficult it is for any of us to use space.

Imagine that Montenegro went to war against Fiji and that the war extended into Trump’s new “war-fighting domain.” Even those two countries, if they would obtain relevant space capabilities, would be extremely dangerous, as a war in space would almost inevitably lead to the destruction of satellites and the creation of debris that would remain in orbit for decades.

Scale up and imagine a war in space between the United States and China. Such a conflict would be devastating, affecting not only the 1.7 billion citizens of China and the United States but all 7.6 billion inhabitants of Earth.

We often forget how dependent we are on the use of space. Space is not just for

BILL INGALLS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/ GETTY IMAGES

A satellite launch in May.

astronauts; it is not even primarily for astronauts. Space is for telecommunication, navigation, Earth observation satellites and so many other purposes that we take for granted. A day without the use of satellites would send modern society into disarray. Power grids would go down, transportation would become much more difficult, global banking would discontinue and the Internet

would fail.

The laws of war try to make sure that the consequences of a war are generally restricted to the countries fighting the war. A war in space could never achieve that. It would affect the global community and create significant damage to all. The United States would be the country to suffer the most because its dependence on space is by far the greatest, as it possesses the most satellites.

It is in the interest of the United States and the rest of the world to make sure that space never becomes a war-fighting domain. We can achieve that by continuing to make sure it is neither permissible nor opportune. The next logical step would be to agree that war in space is an international crime.

China and Russia could be welldisposed toward establishing such an international norm; after all, they have proposed a treaty to ban the placement of weapons in space entirely — a proposal the United States has blocked for a decade.

Outer space is under threat, and it is high time for the international community to make sure that the threat does not become reality. If Trump wants to make his country more secure, he must join the cause. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Alzheimer’s BY

D ENISE C . P ARK

Older adults report that a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is the thing they most fear about their future. Alzheimer’s is a progressive brain disease characterized by increasing forgetfulness and confusion, eventually resulting in loss of independence and, ultimately, loss of self. Patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease are often unable to recognize even their spouse or children. There is an urgent scientific effort underway to solve the mystery of Alzheimer’s, but many are still unclear on its fundamentals. Here are some common myths.

MYTH NO. 1 The first detectable marker of Alzheimer’s is memory loss.

There is growing evidence that Alzheimer’s disease begins its attack on the brain many years before such symptoms appear, leading researchers to suggest that there is a syndrome called preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists have learned that the amyloid protein is one of the earliest markers of the disorder. In fact, 20 to 30 percent of healthy adults over age 65 with no memory symptoms show evidence of amyloid deposits, indicating that the disease can be identified well before its most notorious symptoms set in.

MYTH NO. 2 Early diagnosis makes Alzheimer’s easier to treat.

There are no effective treatments to prevent or slow Alzheimer’s disease and hence, no clinical advantage to an early diagnosis. Clinical trials have found that by the time Alzheimer’s is diagnosed, it is too late to intervene with antiamyloid agents. A recent large clinical trial that focused on adults in an early phase of the disease showed no benefit from anti-amyloid drugs. This has led to a debate as to whether amyloid is even a cause of Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it is merely a marker of the disease — just like gray hair is a marker of old age, not a cause.

MYTH NO. 3 Alzheimer’s is an undiscriminating tormentor.

It turns out that a life of privilege (financial security, higher social class and high levels of education) appears to confer some limited protection from Alzheimer’s. For example, Yaakov Stern of Columbia University studied 593 older adults who lived in Manhattan and found that over time, those who were less educated and held lower-status jobs were diagnosed with the disease at younger ages compared with those who were more privileged.

The initial advantage faded, however, as highly educated individuals declined at a faster rate once they were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Stern has proposed that high levels of education and a lifetime of intellectual work associated with higher-status jobs create a type of “reserve” that can be drawn upon to protect performance as an individual becomes cognitively frail or develops early Alzheimer’s.

performance of a younger person on that game, but this will not reverse brain aging.

There is, nevertheless, a fierce debate among cognitive neuroscientists as to whether various forms of brain training result in limited benefits to general memory function or improved performance in everyday life. On balance, an exhaustive review of the evidence by a group of scientists led by Dan Simon at the University of Illinois concluded that for the overall public, the benefits of mass-marketed brain training are nonexistent or small.

MYTH NO. 4 You can prevent Alzheimer’s disease with brain training.

There is no credible scientific evidence indicating that commercially available brain training programs will slow the mind’s march toward Alzheimer’s. Practice on a specific game might help an older person achieve the

MYTH NO. 5 Smelling peanut butter can help diagnose Alzheimer’s.

The definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease requires that there be an overabundance of two proteins in the brain: beta amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles. This diagnosis occurs when a

JOHN STILLWELL/PA WIRE/PA IMAGES

Although memory loss is the most commonly cited sign of Alzheimer’s, research shows that the disease could start affecting the brain years before such symptoms appear.

pathologist examines slices of brain tissue obtained after an autopsy and sees the sticky amyloid deposits and remnant tau tangles associated with Alzheimer’s.

Recently, however, researchers have developed tools to identify these amyloid deposits in living people via PET scans. Spinal fluid also provides a measure of amyloid burden.

These “biomarkers” of Alzheimer’s disease are the frontier of much new research. If a PET scan is negative for amyloid, Alzheimer’s can definitively be ruled out. If it is positive, and neuropsychological tests show abnormal memory and cognitive function, an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost certain. n Park is professor of behavioral and brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and director of research at the Center for Vital Longevity where she leads the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018

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