The Washington Post National Weekly - June 26, 2016

Politics Inside Trump’s strategy 4

Nation It’s lonely in a gay gun club 8

Technology Developing future of defense 16

5 Myths Video games 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Five effects of Democrats’ sit-in BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

as way to get their voices heard.

H

ouse Democrats staged one of the most dramatic moments in recent congressional history Wednesday night and into Thursday, holding a sit-in for over 25 hours on the floor of the lower chamber to demand that votes be held on a series of gun-control measures.

It drew wall-to-wall coverage on cable television and lit up Twitter even as much of the East Coast went to bed. A number of those talking and writing about the sit-in insisted that the high-profile moment marked a major turning point in the political fight over gun control.

“This may turn out to be a Selma-like moment,” said Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) on the House floor just before midnight Eastern time.

It’s impossible to judge Levin’s claim with the events still so fresh. But here’s what I think I know about the immediate effects of the sit-in.

First, what it will change: l The

Democratic base will be energized beyond belief.

The organic nature of the sit-in — most Democratic members besides Reps. John Lewis (Ga.) and Katherine M. Clark (Mass.) were unaware of it before it launched Wednesday afternoon — is just the sort of thing that will thrill rank-and-file Democrats. The Democratic Party committees will fundraise like crazy off this event. So will Hillary Clinton, who will highlight it the next time she speaks publicly. Democrats had been privately concerned about the enthusiasm of their party base compared with Republicans during the primaries. A high-profile event like this one should help narrow that gap. l Democratic

elected officials will see it

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Being in the minority in the House is a miserable existence. Unlike in the Senate, there is no filibuster. The minority has to just grin and bear it while the majority rules. The sit-in is a tool that has been used only sparingly in the House (this is just the third time since the 1970s). Given the success of this one — and make no mistake, this move has succeeded beyond Democrats’ wildest dreams —

terms of how House members treat one another will now be gone. He’s right.

l John Lewis will be the new hot thing in Washington.

Lewis has long enjoyed legendary status with both sides of the aisle in the House due to his prominent role in the civil rights movement. As the sit-in wore on, Lewis rapidly became the face, voice and backbone of the sitin effort. Expect lots of reposted profiles of Lewis, a man whose place in history is already very much sealed, over the next few days.

l Periscope will be the other new hot thing in Washington.

REP. CHELLIE PINGREE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Reps. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.) protest in the House on Wednesday.

there will be many within the Democratic caucus who see this as their single most effective weapon in the fight against Republicans. It is far from clear whether a night like this can be replicated. It is almost certain that members will want to try.

l Partisanship in the House will get worse.

The spectacle of members shouting down the speaker of the House — as Democrats did Wednesday night — isn’t going to be forgotten anytime soon by either Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) or the Republican majority.

Ron Brownstein of the L.A. Times said early Thursday on CNN that “all the guardrails” in

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Until Wednesday, Periscope — the live video streaming platform owned by Twitter — was something of a curiosity in official Washington. The app had its coming-out party Wednesday as Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) used it to stream the sit-in. (The C-SPAN cameras were shut off because the House was not formally in session.) Expect Periscope downloads to go WAY up.

Now, what won’t change: l Republicans

will not budge on guns.

Democratic Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), a former head of the party’s campaign arm, said early Thursday that GOP members would go back to their home districts for the July 4 recess and have to explain to their constituents why they wouldn’t hold any gun votes.

Israel knows better. The reality is that in 90 percent of the districts House Republicans represent, there is zero desire from their base to act on guns — and certainly not to do so in response to a Democratic uprising on the floor.

The vast majority of House Republicans not only won’t pay a political price for their unwillingness to hold a vote — the move is likely to boost their image among many of their constituents. n

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

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ON THE COVER Farmer Rogelio Bautista, who sells produce to Blue Apron, lives in the Black Dirt region of Upstate New York. This summer, he is tending fairy tale eggplants, a vegetable he has never grown before. Photograph by YANA PASKOVA for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

How Trump chose to target Muslims

JUSTIN LANE/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Influenced by the attacks on 9/11, candidate and aides focused on ‘radical Islam’ BY

J ENNA J OHNSON

I

n the weeks between last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Donald Trump and his closest aides began discussing an idea far outside the bounds of normal political debate: banning all foreign Muslims from entering the United States based solely on their religion.

To Trump and his advisers — including then-campaign manag-

er Corey Lewandowski and thenpolitical director Michael Glassner — the idea was a commonplace response aimed at the heart of the problem: radical Islam.

The campaign’s views were also heavily influenced by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when al-Qaeda hijackers killed nearly 3,000 people, most of whom died in the collapsing World Trade Center, around 4½ miles from Trump Tower.

“My perspective on this is very much formed by 9/11,” said Glass-

ner, who is now Trump’s deputy campaign manager. “I worked at the World Trade Center. Those people were radical Islamists, and they were trying to kill me and they killed 87 of my colleagues. . . .

Why wouldn’t you start by trying to identify this demographic coming into the United States and see what they’re doing? It has nothing to do with religion; I think it had everything to do with the facts of who was perpetrating these crimes.”

A group of people representing multiple faiths protest presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump before his meeting with evangelical leaders in New York on June 21.

Trump has purposely and methodically made his proposed Muslim ban — and suspicion of American Muslims — a centerpiece of his nativist pitch to voters, along with promises to bring back jobs from overseas and crack down on illegal immigration.

Trump has seized on the issue again this month in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, reiterating his support for blocking Muslims from the country after seeming to soften on

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POLITICS the idea. He also alleged that many American Muslims and mosques are knowingly protecting terrorists, that the United States should consider profiling Muslims and that President Obama may be in league with Islamist extremists.

Trump’s rhetoric is a clear benefit for him among Republicans, a majority of whom support the idea of barring foreign Muslims from the country.

But the idea is largely opposed

by Americans overall. It is also one of the key issues that divides Trump from Republican leaders, who fear he is poisoning the party’s chances with his incendiary comments about Muslims, Latinos and other minority groups.

Muslim advocates also are outraged by Trump’s repeated assertions, saying he is unjustly smearing an entire religion and undermining the fight against extremism.

“It’s that deliberate, systematic targeting of the Muslim community that really sends chills down my spine,” said Corey Saylor, who directs the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Donald Trump has essentially given everyone permission to say the hateful things that they’ve been thinking. . . . Trump has basically mainstreamed Islamophobia.”

For Trump and his aides, 9/11 is a pivotal event when discussing what to do about terrorism.

Until shortly before the attacks, Glassner worked at the World Trade Center offices of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Lewandowski — who was abruptly fired this past week as part of a Trump campaign shakeup — had a close friend who died on United Airlines Flight 175, which took off in Boston and crashed into the South Tower; Lewandowski went on to marry his friend’s widow.

Trump was in New York on 9/11, although many of his claims about that day have been dubious or false. Among other things, he has said that he watched from his apartment window as people jumped to their deaths from the twin towers; that he helped clear rubble at Ground Zero, a claim many have challenged; and that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey publicly celebrating the destruc-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

tion, a story that has been widely debunked.

The discussions of a potential Muslim ban began after the Islamic State-linked mass shootings in Paris that killed 130 people on Nov. 13, aides said. By Dec. 2, when a couple inspired by the Islamic State shot 14 people to death in San Bernardino, Trump and his team were ready to announce it.

“The San Bernardino terrorist attack, I think, put an even brighter light on this question about who are these people, how are they getting in, who is checking them, what are their intentions?”

Glassner said.

Trump dictated a statement to his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, who copied it down on a note card that she has saved as a piece of history. For symbolic impact, the campaign decided to wait to announce the proposed policy on Dec. 7, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” he said in the statement. He added later, “It is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension.”

The backlash began immediately. Hicks was flooded with questions from reporters, and his primary rivals pounced. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush de-

clared that Trump was “unhinged,” while New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called it “a ridiculous position.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) warned that such rhetoric could endanger U.S. soldiers and diplomats working in the Muslim world.

As Trump and his top aides flew to South Carolina for a rally that evening, several said they worried that they had made a major mistake. But then Trump boarded the USS Yorktown in Mount Pleasant and read his statement to a crowd heavy with members of the military. The audience went crazy.

As Trump got into the car after the rally that night, he told his staff: “Well, there’s your poll.

That’s how people feel about this.”

Trump added a series of exceptions to his “total and complete shutdown” in the days that followed. The ban would be temporary, he said, and it would not apply to American Muslims, members of the military or prominent foreign Muslims such as athletes, dignitaries or world leaders.

Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has ranged widely. For instance, he has long stoked the idea that Obama might be a secret follower of Islam. Two months before proposing the ban, Trump announced he would kick all Syrian refugees out of the country and bar any others from coming in because they could be a “Trojan horse.”

Trump also suggested killing the

Trump speaks during a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., on June 13, the day after a gunman killed 49 at an Orlando nightclub.

“We need to tell the truth also about how radical Islam is coming to our shores. And it’s coming.”

Donald Trump

KLMNO WEEKLY

innocent relatives of terrorists.

“I’ve had good instincts in life, and a lot of this is instinct,” Trump said. He added that three of his Republican primary rivals “confidentially” told him that they agreed with the ban but could not publicly endorse it.

By February — after losing the Iowa caucuses and winning the New Hampshire primary — Trump focused on the next contest, in South Carolina. The night before the primary, he told an apocryphal tale that he would return to repeatedly about U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing fighting Muslim insurgents in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

“He took 50 men, and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood,” Trump said. “. . . And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’

And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem.”

Lewandowski said in an interview before his firing that the telling of the story was planned ahead of time. He said that it does not matter that it is not true.

“It’s not about that,” he said.

“Look, it’s an analogy.”

Soon after Trump became his party’s likely nominee in early May, he seemed to soften his position on the Muslim ban, saying that all of his proposals are just “suggestions” open to negotiation.

But his tone changed again on June 12, when Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and opened fire, killing 49 people in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Mateen, who was born in New York and whose parents are from Afghanistan, had declared his allegiance to the Islamic State.

Trump revived his call for the ban, blamed Muslim communities for not turning in terrorists and accused presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton of wanting “to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country” to enslave women and murder gays.

“Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions,” Trump said in a scripted policy speech June 13. “We need to tell the truth also about how radical Islam is coming to our shores. And it’s coming.” n

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POLITICS

Democrats eye deep-red Arizona P HILIP R UCKER Phoenix BY

I

f there is one place where the dramas and subplots of Campaign 2016 collide, it is across the sprawling and scorching desert state of Arizona.

Here lives Donald Trump’s restive base of white voters unsettled by the country’s social transformation and fired up to dismantle Washington’s power structure.

Here also lies the Democrats’ sleeping giant — an estimated 350,000 Latinos who are not registered to vote but who could mobilize against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee over his incendiary rhetoric.

Then there are the politicians.

One senator, Jeff Flake (R), is a vocal Trump critic sounding the alarm about an electoral wipeout.

The other, John McCain (R), alternates awkwardly between his maverick persona and a Trump apologist as he navigates an unexpectedly difficult reelection race.

Also on the ballot is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Trump backer whose long crusade against undocumented immigrants makes him a lightning rod.

This leaves the Democrats — who have withered away as the state took a hard-right turn in the Obama era — sensing their best chance in two decades to turn Arizona and its 11 electoral votes blue. They think that Trump, who campaigned in Phoenix last weekend, is energizing a new generation of Latino voters who haven’t participated in elections before.

“Everything that needs to happen on the ground is happening,” said Fred DuVal, a longtime Democratic power broker here.

There is no recent reliable public polling in Arizona, but Democratic and Republican strategists said private research shows the presidential race as a toss-up.

Asked whether presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has a path to victory here, GOP strategist Charles Coughlin conceded: “I believe it’s there if she wanted to do it. Everybody always says, ‘This is the election when Latinos turn out,’ and it’s

DAVID JOLKOVSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans have held the state for 20 years, but Trump’s rhetoric could get more Latinos to vote never happened. But I can actually see that happening this time.”

For now, the Clinton campaign is not targeting Arizona as a battleground state; its current advertising blitz includes eight other swing states.

Still, Clinton has hired Rodd McLeod, who ran former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s campaigns here, as state director for the general election. He is recruiting half a dozen staffers, according to local Democratic officials, while the state party’s coordinated campaign has deployed a field staff of about 70.

The Clinton team is assessing trends in Arizona to determine whether to make greater investments here, and officials were cagey when asked to detail their strategy. In a statement, Marlon Marshall, the director of state campaigns and political engagement, stuck to the Clinton campaign’s national talking points: “We’re hearing real doubts from voters in Arizona about Donald

Trump’s plans for a deportation force and his dangerous agenda on national security.”

Clinton’s footprint appears to be greater than Trump’s. His state director, Charles Munoz, is based in Nevada, and a visit last week to Trump headquarters in Mesa revealed little evidence of an active campaign. There was one worker eating lunch at his desk, a roomful of empty cubicles and, other than a small pile of plastic yard signs, no Trump paraphernalia, brochures or fliers. The GOP’s coordinated campaign has only one staffer, though party officials boast of an active volunteer corps and plans to soon open 14 offices.

The Trump campaign and GOP officials argue that carrying Arizona is pure Clinton fantasy.

“Arizona will stay red,” Arizona Republican Party Chairman Robert Graham declared. “The progressive left should avoid the state of Arizona because it’s a bad investment.”

Former Arizona governor Jan

Tim Sifert of the Arizona Republican Party explains past election numbers in Maricopa County at the party’s Phoenix headquarters.

Brewer — considered the state’s most popular Republican and a leading Trump surrogate — said Trump resonates here because he is speaking directly to voters’ fury and anxieties.

“People in Arizona like straight shooters, no pun intended, and Mr. Trump speaks the simple truth in very straightforward terms,” Brewer said. “I don’t agree with everything that he says and the way that he says it, but in my opinion, he’s a breath of fresh air.”

“Everywhere I go, whether it be at malls or at Costco, people come up to me and are very, very excited about Donald Trump,” she added.

But Trump is also a one-man motivator for Latinos, who make up about 30 percent of the state’s population but just 18 percent of the electorate in the last presidential election.

“The climate is ripe for something to happen here. . . . When we’re out there, the name Donald Trump elicits a response, and most of the time it’s a negative one,” said Francisco Heredia, national field director of Mi Familia Vota, a Phoenix-based organization that tries to increase Latino civic engagement.

Surveys show that Clinton enjoys a 3-to-1 advantage over Trump among Latino voters.

Flake, who is up for reelection in 2018, warned of the long-term consequences of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Hispanic immigrants.

“We can’t afford to alienate and demonize the largest-growing demographic out there,” Flake said, drawing a historical parallel.

“Back in the ’60s, we Republicans lost the African American vote that we still haven’t gained back.”

But party strategists think it is unlikely that Clinton would fully invest here because other battleground states, such as Ohio, will always be higher priorities.

Still, Arizona Democrats think they can galvanize anti-Trump voters without the resources of a presidential targeting operation.

Said state Rep. Jonathan Larkin, a Latino Democrat: “Trump has given us a lot to work with, that’s for sure.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Immigration moves to campaign trail BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

T

he bitter fight over President Obama’s immigration policies moved quickly from the courtroom to the campaign trail on Thursday, as the White House and its allies sought to turn a legal setback at the Supreme Court to their political advantage ahead of the November elections.

Obama decried the high court’s failure to lift an injunction blocking his use of executive authority to provide work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants and suggested that the unresolved questions about how to move forward on immigration presented voters with a referendum on the future of the country.

“Here’s the bottom line: We’ve got a very real choice that America faces right now,” Obama said, speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room. “We’ve got a choice about who we’re going to be as a country, what we want to teach our kids, and how we want to be represented in Congress and in the White House.”

Obama said he remained confident that most Americans share his vision of a welcoming and tolerant America even as Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has promised to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants and build a wall on the southern U.S. border to keep them out.

The court’s 4-to-4 deadlock in U.S. v. Texas meant that Obama’s signature immigration initiative, announced in November 2014, is unlikely to be implemented before he leaves office, denying him a important victory in an area he hoped to leave a significant legacy.

The president has tried in recent years to scale back deportations, which reached record highs during his first term, in response to fierce pressure from advocacy groups and congressional Democrats.

Yet even as Obama acknowledged that he had reached the end of his efforts to overhaul bordercontrol laws, he and other Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee,

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Obama says Americans face ‘a very real choice’ in 2016 after Supreme Court blocks his initiative Hillary Clinton, saw an opportunity to gain some advantage in the political fight over immigration reform that has roiled the 2016 campaign.

Immigration reform has animated Republican primary voters, who have expressed concerns that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from U.S. citizens, and Trump has made restricting immigration the centerpiece of his campaign. But the politics will be far trickier for GOP candidates, including Trump, in the general election.

In 2012, Obama won reelection with the support of more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the nation’s fastest-growing voting blocs whose electoral power is expected to play an even bigger role this fall.

Democrats are targeting those groups in their bid to not just to hold onto the White House but also to win back control of at least one chamber of Congress.

Clinton, who has said she would seek to expand Obama’s executive actions on immigration, called the

Supreme Court’s outcome “a stark reminder of the harm Donald Trump would do to our families, our communities and our country.”

In a statement, issued in both English and Spanish, Clinton referred to Trump’s characterization last year of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “murderers,” and she pledged to introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill within her first 100 days in office.

“I believe we are stronger together. When we embrace immigrants, not denigrate them. When we build bridges, not walls,” Clinton said.

Republicans hailed the high court’s rebuke of Obama, arguing that the immigration program was a flagrant violation of the will of Congress and the public.

Obama announced the program after the GOP-controlled House blocked a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants.

The courts have halted “one of the most unconstitutional actions

President Obama said he remains confident that Americans are welcoming and tolerant and suggested the Supreme Court’s deadlock would be an issue in the November election.

ever undertaken by a President,” Trump said in a statement. “The executive amnesty from President Obama wiped away the immigration rules written by Congress, giving work permits and entitlement benefits to people illegally in the country.”

Under Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, the parents of U.S. citizens who have lived in the United States at least five years would be eligible for work permits provided they have not committed felonies and do not have ties to terrorist groups.

The program was modeled after a smaller-scale initiative launched in 2012 for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Obama unveiled the expanded version just days after Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections.

Texas and 25 other states responded by suing the administration, arguing that the states incurred unnecessary costs for driver’s licenses for immigrants who qualified for work permits. A federal judge in Texas put the program on hold a day before it was to begin in February 2015, and a federal appeals court in New Orleans affirmed the lower court’s ruling last fall.

As he did after the mass shooting in Orlando, Obama cautioned that inflammatory rhetoric over immigrants threatened to undermine the nation’s democratic values.

“It is my firm belief that immigration is not something to fear,” Obama said. “We don’t have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now, or pray like we do, or have a different last name.”

Clarissa Martinez de Castro, deputy vice president for the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest immigrant rights group, noted that Obama’s campaign in 2012 got a boost after he announced the smaller-scale deferred action program a few months before the election.

The Supreme Court outcome, she added, “could have a similar energizing effect.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Getting gay people to the gun range BY

B EN T ERRIS

T

ry as he might, Tom Nelson just could not get any other gay people to the gun range.

For the past four years he sent out email invitations to a local mailing list for Pink Pistols, a shooting group that encourages members of the LGBT community to carry concealed firearms. Then, on the third Sunday of each month, he would head to a gun club in the Philadelphia area and wait. Nobody ever showed.

“It’s been very lonely out there,” said Nelson, a 71-year old retiree who continued to make the trek lest his own shooting skills deteriorate. Nelson also organizes a monthly support group for gay men who are married to women, and reliably draws a small crowd to that one, so he wondered: Could there really be more gay guys with wives than gay guys with guns?

But a week after a gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Nelson had reason to believe that might change. It pained him that it took such a terrible tragedy, but for the first time in recent memory he’d gotten some tentative RSVPs. The night before their meeting at the range, he was so nervous he lay in bed hardly able to sleep.

“We’ve been very good as a community with candlelight vigils, but not so good at doing what it takes to prevent them from happening,” he said the next morning after he pulled his white socks up high, tucked his salmon polo shirt into his cargo shorts and packed his .40-caliber Glock into a customized fanny pack. He sat at his living room table — scattered with issues of the Philadelphia Gay News and Gun Digest — and reread the speech he had always hoped to give to new Pink Pistols members.

“What’s going to happen is going to happen,” said Nelson as he folded his 6-foot-3 frame into a Honda hybrid. “I hope several people will show up, but I guess who knows.”

Nelson was a proud gun owner before he was a proud gay man. He got his first BB gun as a 12-year-old

BEN TERRIS/THE WASHINGTON POST

After Orlando, lonely Pink Pistols organizer wonders if more will heed call to take up arms living in Massachusetts and his first .22 rifle when he was 14, and at the University of Maine he joined the rifle team. As a college student, Nelson had “a lot of gay sex” but, he says, didn’t think of himself as gay.

He didn’t have anyone to talk about it with at the time, he says now, and didn’t really understand how to label his sexuality.

After college, he worked for the better part of a decade helping design guns for Remington. And at 38, he met a woman named Carol on an Appalachian hike. They ended up living together for 20 years.

His closest brush with gun violence came when a stray bullet from a neighborhood scuffle flew into their kitchen, not far from where Carol had been standing.

Nelson wasn’t around, though. He was on a camping trip with his

boyfriend at the time.

Nelson now lives with that boyfriend, Avram, and maintains a cordial relationship with Carol. It helped, he said, that when he started going to the support group for married gay men, he was open about it with her. Belatedly out of the closet, Nelson began joining various gay clubs and began to feel like part of a community. In 2001, he saw a blurb for the Pink Pistols in the Philadelphia Gay News and called right away.

“They told me I was one of the first people to sign up,” he said.

He quickly surmised that most people in the gay community were not gun lovers. “It’s a pretty liberal group,” he said. For the first couple of years he could expect somewhere between two and eight guys to show up at the range, but over

Tom Nelson, seen at the Gun Range in Philadelphia, is the founder of the Delaware County, Pa., chapter of the Pink Pistols, a shooting club for LGBT people. Nelson is also the only member of the Delaware County chapter of the Pink Pistols. In the wake of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, he hopes that will change.

the years the numbers dwindled down to just him.

Well — him and Jeff Bloovman, anyway.

“Hi, I’m Jeff Bloovman. Many of you know that because I’ve trained you. And as you know, I’m totally gay and stuff.”

This was how Bloovman, an uber-athletic self-defense and firearms instructor with a stylish swirl of gelled hair, introduced himself last Sunday in the backroom of the Gun Range in Philadelphia. Bloovman is not a member of the Pink Pistols, but for the past year he has volunteered his services for anyone from the group who shows up — which, up until now, had been Nelson. After the Orlando shooting, Bloovman turned to Facebook to encourage his friends, gay or straight, to come to the range this third Sunday of June and show some support for the Pink Pistols.

“I’m a firm believer in individual rights, and I think personal liberties are for everybody,” he said before introducing Nelson as the head of the Delaware County chapter of the Pink Pistols. “That’s in terms of sexuality and personal protection. And as we’ve seen, despite their best efforts, law enforcement cannot be everywhere at once.”

About a half-dozen people had shown up. They sat around a long table, loading bullets into magazines while Nelson read his speech. He rattled off the highlights of his biography and talked up the importance of lawful gun ownership. Most were friends of Bloovman’s, and not necessarily gay, but at least one came specifically for the Pink Pistols.

“I’d heard about the group a while back but didn’t think they were still around,” said Mike Klepper, a 52-year-old gay man with a mustache and close-cropped hair.

Klepper worried that after Orlando there would be more talk of government regulations on certain types of guns. He was willing to do “whatever it takes” to keep that from happening, but at the moment he was just happy to spend the day with some likeminded people.

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NATION The group put in their earplugs and headed out to the indoor range: a noxious hotbox of gunsmoke and sweat. Nelson stalked the range like a geriatric Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” quick-drawing his gun out of his fanny pack and shooting at a pink outline of a person.

An NRA-certified instructor introduced himself to Nelson and encouraged him to “continue breaking stereotypes.” He said that after Orlando he had reached out to a gay community organization in Philadelphia but never heard back.

“A lot of people discriminate against me because I have NRA in my job title,” he said.

“I’d heard about the group a while back but didn’t think they were still around.”

Mike Klepper, a 52-year-old gay man, referring to the Pink Pistols

A woman named Gloria, who had come to show support for the gay community, posed for photos with her AR-15, a firearm with similar design features to the one used in the Orlando shooting and other mass killings that have made global headlines in recent years.

“I had asked people not to come with rifles,” Bloovman said, mortified. “I knew it just wouldn’t look good.”

Bloovman offered quick lessons to everyone who showed up, working toward an ultimate goal of shooting 10 rounds, from 10 yards away in 10 seconds. Waiting his turn, Nelson looked around and couldn’t believe how many people had come. Yes, it would have been nice to get a few more gay people, or perhaps someone who wasn’t already a gun enthusiast, to show up. But it was a lot better than no company at all.

Nelson ambled up to the stall, fired 10 rounds at the target that left a fist-size cluster of bullet holes. Not bad, but there was still room for improvement.

“The next thing is to get faster,” Bloovman said. “But you gotta make the hits. If you can’t make the hits, it’s a liability and you start hurting your cause.” n

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Last nuclear power reactors in Calif. will be shut down BY

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he utility that owns a pair of nuclear power reactors at Diablo Canyon will close both plants when their licenses expire, leaving California without any nuclear power plants after April 2025.

The decision by Pacific Gas and Electric ends a long-running battle over the fate of the Diablo Canyon reactors, located near major geological fault lines close to the California coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The twin 1,100-megawatt reactors produce about 9 percent of the state’s electricity. The utility will replace the nuclear power generated there with renewable- energy projects and energy- efficiency initiatives.

Several leading climate scientists have supported extending the licenses because the power is generated without greenhouse gas emissions, but environmental groups have said the location of the reactors puts hundreds of thousands of Californians in danger in case of an accident or an earthquake.

“This is an historic agreement,” Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “It sets a date for the certain end of nuclear power in California and assures replacement with clean, safe, cost-competitive, renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy storage. It lays out an effective roadmap for a nuclear phaseout in the world’s sixth-largest economy, while assuring a green energy replacement plan to make California a global leader in fighting climate change.”

The Diablo Canyon reactors are the latest nuclear power plants to be closed as a combination of cheap natural gas and new renewable-energy projects makes competition difficult. Four reactors were shut down in 2013 — including the San Onofre nuclear power station near Los Angeles — and one was taken offline in 2014.

Meanwhile, a plant opened this year in Tennessee, and four more

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant’s location, near major geological fault lines, has been a source of concern for environmental groups.

are under construction elsewhere.

The current total of operating reactors in the United States is 100.

However, many reactors, most about four decades old, are coming to the end of their licenses, and companies are weighing returns on renewable-energy projects against the cost of making improvements to nuclear plants to persuade the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant long-term extensions.

That worries supporters of nuclear power. “While solar and wind have grown significantly, they have not grown enough to make up for lost nuclear,” said Michael Shellenberger, founder of the pro-nuclear group Environmental Progress.

California’s renewable portfolio standard requires that by 2030, utilities get 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources — without counting nuclear power. PG&E said it would hit a 55 percent renewable target by 2031.

“California’s energy landscape is changing dramatically with energy efficiency, renewables and storage being central to the state’s energy policy,” PG&E chief executive Tony Earley said in a statement. “As we make this transition, Diablo Canyon’s full output will no longer be required.”

PG&E also faced other regulatory hurdles to renew the nuclear

permits. The California State Lands Commission will meet Tuesday, and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and two other members could seek to deny a critical permit for Diablo Canyon.

PG&E said it will spend $350 million to help keep a skilled workforce in place while the plant is functioning. The company will also pay the local county, San Luis Obispo, $50 million.

Elsewhere in the utility industry, many companies are sticking with nuclear power. Duke Energy chief executive Lynn Good said, “We love the nuclear plants that we operate.” Good said the utility’s 11 reactors help keep its carbon emissions down and its electricity rates 20 to 30 percent below the national average. She said Duke Energy is seeking extensions of its licenses so it can “continue operating these plants as far as we can.”

But the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy coordinator, Ralph Cavanagh, said renewable resources and improved storage devices are more flexible than nuclear power, which is designed to deliver steady base-load power and not to be ramped up or down. He said phasing out Diablo Canyon will give PG&E time to develop more renewable-energy sources rather than forcing the utility to turn to more readily available natural gas as a substitute. n

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Guam considers push for statehood A NNA F IFIELD Hagatna, Guam BY

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his tiny Pacific island has several nicknames. There is “the tip of the spear” because it is the closest U.S. territory to potential hot spots in Asia, such as North Korea and the South China Sea. There is “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier,” because the island is home to a huge air base.

And then there is “Fortress Pacific” because of the huge military buildup that is planned to take place over the next decade.

But Guam’s population calls it by another name: ours. And a sizable portion wants a real say in how it is run.

“This American territory is not enjoying democracy, where citizens can determine who their leader will be and what laws will be put upon them,” said Gov. Eddie Baza Calvo, who has called a vote for November on Guam’s political status. “It’s up to our people to decide which way to go: whether to be fully in union with the United States or to chart a separate course.”

A “decolonization commission” is set to report to Calvo (R) next month on whether to proceed with the plebiscite, which would give Guamanians three alternatives to their current status as a U.S. territory. That status — shared by Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands — confers U.S. citizenship on people born here but does not give them the right to vote in presidential elections or a voting representative in Congress.

“Guamanian soldiers have gone to fight in countries so they can have democracy and vote, yet we have never voted for the person who sends us to war,” the governor said.

The three alternatives under consideration are: l Statehood, which would give Guam all the rights (and burdens) of being a state, albeit a very small one, with a population less than one-third that of Wyoming. l Free association with administrative power, like Palau and the

PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ACE RHEAUME/FLEET COMBAT CAMERA PACIFIC

Governor calls for vote on political status as Pentagon plans to move 5,000 Marines to island Marshall Islands. l Independence, which would make Guam a (minuscule) sovereign state.

The vote would not be binding — only Congress can change Guam’s political status — but would be symbolic of the territory’s sentiment.

The issue has been simmering for years but returned to the political front burner with the Pentagon’s preparations to relocate to here thousands of troops stationed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa.

The U.S. military presence on Okinawa has long been a source of contention in a prefecture that complains of being treated as a second-class citizen by Tokyo. But there are similar complaints on Guam, a 30-mile-long tropical island of 160,000 people, which is already home to large air force and naval bases.

Pockets of fierce opposition to the initial plan formulated a decade ago to move 10,000 Marines

from Okinawa to Guam led the Defense Department to halve the number coming here.

“The prospect of the military buildup caused a crack in the facade of American-ness on this island,” said Michael Lujan Bevacqua, who teaches the indigenous Chamorro language at the University of Guam.

Bevacqua is a strong advocate of breaking free from the United States. “Being independent and having the ability to determine our own policies is much better for us,” he said.

LisaLinda Natividad, another proponent of change, says the decision to move the Marines onto this island is the latest sign of Washington’s high-handed ways.

“The whole Guam buildup was set in motion because we’re a U.S. colony, and they think they can do whatever they want with our land,” said Natividad, who sits on the decolonization commission.

“Just drive around for 10 minutes and it’s obvious."

Guam, home to a large U.S. air base, could see a vote on its political status in November.

Statehood, independence and free association are under consideration.

The issue of Guam’s political status is complicated. Some resent the U.S. military presence but do not want to give up their American passports. Some want greater independence but want their taxes to stay here on the island, as they do now, rather than going into the federal coffers. Some fear the lack of opportunity if they could no longer travel freely to the mainland.

For the vote to go ahead, the governor, the decolonization commission and the Election Commission all have to agree. The decolonization commission is due to decide whether to press ahead at its meeting next month.

Local business representatives think that moving to lessen or get rid of the military presence on Guam would be economic suicide.

“As a businessperson, I wonder if they have thought through the economic aspects of the decisions they want to make,” said Joe Arnett, an accountant who has lived on Guam for 32 years and runs the Armed Forces Committee for the Guam Chamber of Commerce.

“The U.S. federal government puts $600 million a year into Guam through Social Security and taxes paid by military personnel stationed here. That’s not including food stamps and school lunches and things like that,” he said.

Almost $9 billion has been earmarked for the base expansion and support facilities, one-third of which will be moved from Japan.

But the buildup will be long and slow. The first wave of 2,500 Marines is expected here by 2022, with the remainder due by 2027.

A military socioeconomic impact assessment study found that the new base would create more than 3,000 full-time civilian jobs for Guam residents in 2021, and tax revenue to the Guam government would increase by about $40 million a year in 2028.

For his part, the governor said he would “gladly” pay federal taxes so that Guam could be a fullfledged state. “But anything is better than being an unincorporated territory,” Calvo said. “That’s just another word for colony.” n

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Saving Christianity’s holiest shrine W ILLIAM B OOTH Jerusalem BY

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ork has begun to save the holiest shrine in Christendom. It won’t be a simple patch-and-

paint job.

This is the alpha and omega of restoration projects.

They are going to repair Jesus’ tomb — with titanium bolts.

Over the next nine months, a team of Greek conservationists will restore the collapsing chapel built above and around the burial cave where the faithful believe that Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after the Crucifixion.

To fix the chapel, which is buckling under its own weight, the crew will have to enter a few square meters of the ruins of the first-century tomb.

It is called the Holy Rock.

To get there, they will clean centuries of candle soot left from votive lamps; they will reset and anchor the imported marbles; and they will inject 21st-century stabilizing mortar into 12thcentury masonry from the Crusader times.

And at the heart of the heart of the edifice, in the center of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, they will lift the slab where millions of pilgrims have knelt and prayed, where the salt of tears and the wet of sweat have smoothed and worried the hardest stone.

And for the first time in more than 200 years, they will look inside.

The ruins of what is believed to be a rock-cut tomb are being breached because the chapel built above is falling apart.

Its repair is decades overdue.

After years of squabbling among the Christian communities who occupy the site, work to restore the edifice began this month.

The conservationists — whose jobs have included repairing the Acropolis in Athens — are not sure what they will find.

“This is the most alive place we have ever worked,” said Antonia Moropoulou, a leader of the team

JIM HOLLANDER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Conservationists have begun to use modern tech to repair ancient site believed to be Jesus’ tomb from the National Technical University of Athens.

“We will see what we see,” she said.

The conservation team has already probed the chapel and tomb with ground-penetrating radar and laser scanners.

They are flying drones with cameras above the indoor site now, which — like flying drones around the Vatican or Mecca — is not easy.

They have detected a fracture in the rock of the tomb, unknown until today.

They believe that the crack is the result of stresses put upon it by the columns supporting a cupola above. Still. No modern scientist has ever looked inside.

What will they see?

Archaeology at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been limited, not only by protective clerics but also by centuries of tradition.

The site is considered the most sublime in Christendom, a place

of pilgrimage, faith, passion and mystery — not digging and probing.

Patriarch Theophilos III, of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, told The Washington Post: “There is no doubt that there is some kind of energy. I don’t want to describe it, but some kind of energy that emanates from this place.”

Theophilos said he has reread the historical accounts of his predecessors who saw the ruins of the tomb when it was last exposed in 1810.

Here in the ancient alleys of Jerusalem, two centuries is not a long time. But in 1809, the last time clerics and workers exposed the Holy Rock, Thomas Jefferson was the American president, people didn’t know that germs caused disease and the science of archaeology did not exist.

The previous Crusader-era chapel was destroyed by a catastrophic fire in 1808, the patriarch said.

Over the next nine months at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, a team of Greek conservationists will restore the collapsing chapel built above and around the burial cave where the faithful believe that Jesus was buried and rose from the dead. They will also look inside the tomb for the first time in over 200 years.

When the Greeks were rebuilding in 1809, Theophilos said, “Everybody was so excited to see part of what has remained of the original cave that served as the tomb of Christ.

“Now? To be honest, we have the same feelings,” the leader of the Greek church said. “You cannot remain indifferent.”

He smiled but warned his guest: “This is not an archaeological monument. Those stones are not mere stones.”

The British archaeologist Martin Biddle, who studied the site in the 1990s, speculated that there could be ancient graffiti left by pilgrims somewhere around the Holy Rock or beneath the floor under the rotunda, perhaps scribbles of “He is risen!”

Or maybe the small, scratched crosses left in the caves of Christians in the first centuries after his death.

Or maybe just cut stone.

Whatever evidence exists, the conservationists won’t know until they get there — and even then, will it prove definitively that this was the tomb of Jesus?

The Greek team has promised to keep the church open to visitors and pilgrims throughout the restoration, meaning its members will be working in the deep of the night.

“This is a very challenging environment. Very profound. Yet very exciting,” said Moropoulou, a leader of the Greek team.

It has taken years to get the Christian communities that worship at the Holy Sepulchre to agree to the restoration project.

It took a poke from the pope and a nod from the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church to get the project rolling — plus a commitment by King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Muslim who has rights as a protector of holy sites in Jerusalem, to foot most of the $3.4 million bill.

“The work will finally begin, and it is past time,” said the Rev. Peter Vasko, president of the Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land.

“The place is falling apart,” he said. n

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

From left, Matt Wadiak, Matt Salzberg and Ilia Papas, seen in their headquarters in Manhattan, co-founded meal-kit delivery service Blue Apron in 2012.

DINNER IN A BOX ALMOST STRAIGHT

FROM THE FARM

The fairy tale eggplant is nearly seedless, light purple and white­streaked, and tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Its shape is familiar but it tastes less bitter than the common variety. ¶ Fairy tale eggplants are hardly a staple of the American dinner table and are nearly nonexistent in supermarkets. And yet, Blue Apron, the meal­kit delivery service, has plenty of use for them: The company expects to buy half a million pounds of them this year. In fact, executives think they are buying literally the entire commercial supply of the obscure produce. ¶ They plan to do the same with Shokichi Shiro squash, Atlas carrots and at least 40 other specialty crops this year. ¶

BY SARAH HALZACK IN GOSHEN, N.Y. Blue Apron’s vegetable binge is helping the young company build a fast, almost­cult following among people who want to prepare original home­cooked meals without the fuss of dealing with a shopping list. ¶ And it is hardly alone.

Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a wave of ambitious start­ups with names like Plated and Sun Basket that are aiming to take a piece of a grocery industry that has proven difficult to disrupt. ¶ Each meal­delivery player has its own hook: HelloFresh has enlisted celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to whip up exclusive recipes, while Marley Spoon is doing the same with Martha Stewart. Purple Carrot, backed by former New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman, touts plans for vegans. PeachDish promises customers seasonal food with Southern flair. ¶ Earlier upstarts tried to win over shoppers by delivering food to their doorsteps and saving them a trip to the grocery store. The dinner­in­a­box companies, though, are betting that they can bypass the supermarket altogether by adding the convenience of curating recipes and portions so continues on next page that all families have to do is chop and stir and fire up the stove.

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COVER STORY

from previous page

It’s still too soon to know whether they will ultimately become a threat to traditional grocers. But Blue Apron thinks the secret might be changing the logistics of how fresh food moves to the pantry, fundamentally rethinking the food supply chain by starting all the way back at the farm.

R

ogelio Bautista’s farmstead is nestled in Upstate New York’s Black Dirt region, so named for the dark-colored, highly fertile soil that is unique to this stretch of onetime swampland.

On a sun-drenched spring day, only the tiniest shoots of green appear in his plot of 23 acres. But by the end of summer, if all goes well, much of the land will be bursting with tens of thousands of pounds of fairy tale eggplants destined for the dinner plates of Blue Apron subscribers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

Bautista, like many of the 16 farmers cultivating the tiny vegetable for Blue Apron this year, hasn’t grown the crop before. But the company helped him make a plan: Its agroecologist, Alison Grantham, earlier visited Bautista’s farm in Goshen to take soil samples. She consulted localized temperature and precipitation data. And she asked Bautista about what crops he has grown successfully in the past.

With that information, she gave guidance to Bautista about topics including planting dates, plant spacing and pest management for growing the fairy tale eggplant.

This kind of partnership is at the heart of Blue Apron’s strategy: If farmers grow only what they need, and then if Blue Apron delivers to customers only the precise portions a recipe calls for, that efficiency could both benefit the environment and keep a lid on the company’s costs, a key to competing in an industry notorious for thin profit margins.

Agriculture experts say this attempt to match supply with demand resembles a CSA, or community-supported agriculture, model, where farmers sell directly to a prepaid group of families — but on a massive scale.

Bautista said the arrangement marks a welcome change from his previous set-up, in which he was largely dependent on sales at farmers markets: One rainy day could keep away so many customers that he would end up throwing away armloads of perfectly good food that would spoil before his next selling opportunity.

“It’s been easier for us as a business,” Bautista said.

Blue Apron has built a team of regionally dispersed experts to replicate with small farmers across the country what Grantham has done with Bautista: to incentivize and help them to grow crops Blue Apron wants to use.

If this all sounds pretty straightforward, it isn’t. Weather can be fickle. And every step, from crop planning to seeding to harvesting, comes with a thorny array of challenges, each a domino that could set off other challenges in the supply chain.

For example, in the company’s early days, it

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

bought a citrus fruit called yuzu from an orchard in California. The team didn’t forecast correctly how much fruit each tree would yield, and so it had to include a substitute of kaffir limes for about half the orders.

Then there’s the challenge of trying to offer local produce across all of their geographic markets, despite varying climates. This year Blue Apron is working with a farmer in Texas to test a certain kind of eggplant that will be planted in July for harvest in September — a departure from the usual growing schedule there, given the border state’s heat. The hope is that in the future, Blue Apron can avoid shipping that crop from California to its Texas fulfillment center for part of the season.

A

lmost two hours north of Bautista’s New York land, the growers at Ironwood Farm in Ghent, N.Y., said that quest for stability has made it attractive for them to grow thousands of pounds of pea shoots for Blue Apron for dishes such as Falafel Pitas and Tzatziki With Pea Shoot Salad.

“A lot of wholesale is through restaurants,” said Aliyah Brandt, one of the farm’s co-owners. “They kind of know what they want, but it’s not precise. This is so precise.”

“And we know we can sell all of it,” adds Jenny Parker, also a co-owner.

In the late-morning heat, as the Ironwood team takes two of Blue Apron’s co-founders, Matt Salzberg and Matt Wadiak, on a tour of the farm, it is easy to see why this precision matters. They’ve got only nine acres of land, and that means little room for error.

Rogelio Bautista, who sells produce to Blue Apron, farms his land in Goshen, N.Y. Blue Apron works with small farmers to get them to grow crops it wants to use in its meals.

“We get one shot to make all of our money in a small space,” said Lauren Jones, a third Ironwood co-owner.

As the women invite Salzberg and Wadiak inside a greenhouse bursting with rows of salad greens, it’s not long before Wadiak — a former chef and tomato farmer who today heads Blue Apron’s operations — is crouching to pick off a piece of arugula and taste it, immediately praising how spicy it is. Salzberg, the chief executive, is soon crunching on the arugula as well. Stepping out of the heat of the greenhouse, Salzberg says the punchy flavor captures why working with small farmers is a core business strategy for Blue Apron.

“It tastes better,” Salzberg says. “It’s the quality control.”

Also, there’s this: At a moment when smallbatch goods and local produce are ultratrendy, Blue Apron can use these relationships with farmers to create a halo of uniqueness and a feel-good vibe around its brand.

But Wadiak and Salzberg think the business case is broader than that: The grocery business is extremely competitive, and they think what Blue Apron is doing with specialty crops would be hard for a supermarket to replicate.

“Traditional grocery stores can’t sell the variety of products we can, because they don’t merchandise as recipes,” Salzberg said.

Here’s what Salzberg means by that: Take a crop like pink lemon, another item that Blue Apron thinks it has bought the entire commercial supply of. If shoppers saw the uncommon green-and-yellow striped fruit at the supermarket, they might not know what to do with

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“One thing that we learned very early on is it’s an incredibly easy business to start.

It’s a very difficult business to scale.”

Ilia Papas, Blue Apron co-founder it — and so they probably wouldn’t buy it.

But Blue Apron isn’t selling a pink lemon.

It’s selling a recipe. It’s selling something like Za’atar Chicken and Pearl Couscous that is dressed with a pink lemon compote. By providing the pink lemon as part of a broader suite of ingredients, and providing instructions on what to do with it, Blue Apron thinks it’s better positioned to do a big business in unconventional produce and differentiate itself from other sellers.

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lue Apron is still a relatively tiny presence in the behemoth grocery business: Marketing research firm Mintel estimates that all the meal-kit delivery companies combined account for less than 1 percent of the home grocery market.

And yet it has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2012 by Salzberg, Wadiak and chief technology officer Ilia Papas. After a humble start testing recipes in Wadiak’s apartment and packing the boxes themselves, the company now delivers 8 million meals per month. Its expansion is breakneck: Blue Apron is hiring about 100 employees a week in its fulfillment centers and has nearly doubled the size of its warehouse in Jersey City to 190,000 square feet. Its corporate headquarters in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood has been expanded twice already, and they are once again running out of space.

Last year, Blue Apron announced it raised $135 million in venture capital funding in a round that valued the company at $2 billion.

There are even rumblings that an initial public offering might be down the road.

Analysts say Blue Apron and others of its ilk seem to have tapped into something very powerful and appealing to today’s consumer.

“Everyone’s busy; no one has any time. This is a trend we’re seeing across multiple industries, not just food. People are increasingly demanding that products and services come to them,” said Fiona O’Donnell, an analyst at Mintel.

And yet, the meal-kit category overall appears to have work to do on the customer retention front: According to e-commerce analytics firm Slice Intelligence, less than half of shoppers who used subscription meal services between January 2014 and February 2016 ended up ordering more than three times.

Plus,Blue Apron’s growth opportunities are somewhat constrained by the design of its menus and the relative inflexibility of its delivery schedule.

$2B Last year, Blue Apron announced it raised $135 million in venture capital funding in a round that valued the company at $2 billion.

Blue Apron offers two plans: A family plan that includes two or four dinners a week that feed four people, or a couple’s plan that includes three dinners a week that feed two people. That means there is a huge swath of consumers its model doesn’t work well for, including one-person households, which make up a greater share of the population than ever before. What if a couple wants to cook only once a week? What if some nights a busy mom is cooking for two, and other nights cooking for four?

And although Blue Apron does offer vegetarian plans and accommodations for certain dietary restrictions, it’s not doing much right now to cater to dining preferences. What if someone simply doesn’t like the taste of cilantro or often finds Indian dishes too spicy?

It’s clear that Blue Apron is considering more options to address these limitations.

Salzberg said Blue Apron is trying to reach more households, and pointed to the 2012 addition of vegetarian plans and the 2015 addition of the family plan as evidence of how it has already done that.

Papas said more personalization is in the works.

“The data team is working very hard on making more intelligent recipe recommendations,” Papas said. “We see a lot of how you’re rating the recipes, what you tell us about what you like to eat, what you don’t like to eat, so we have a lot of data there that we can use to make more informed decisions.”

So, for instance, if a user constantly gives low ratings to spicy dishes, perhaps Blue Apron could offer a substitute when those pop up on the menu.

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oing to one of Blue Apron’s fulfillment centers in Jersey City helps give a sense of how much complexity this level of customization could introduce into the system.

Much is done by hand to pack about 140,000 boxes a week in this facility: On a Tuesday in late April, workers were using a custom scoop to mete out the right amount of slivered almonds and were hand-counting spears of asparagus. There is automation, too: A machine is putting apple cider vinegar into tiny vials and then sealing and labeling them.

It gets through about 100 bottles a minute.

Blue Apron plans to invest in more machinery that can automate additional parts of the fulfillment process.

On this day alone, some 45,000 meal kits are

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scheduled to leave this facility. Some of the food will have been in the warehouse for only several hours, and most of it will be on customers’ doorsteps within a day.

Then layer in Blue Apron’s recipe planning, and it gets even more challenging: Wadiak’s team of chefs starts building a “shopping list” about one year out from distribution time. The shopping list contains all the ingredients that they know they’ll have to work with. Then begins what Wadiak describes as the “Iron Chef”-like process of figuring out what dishes they can put together with those ingredients.

Several months out, those then become recipe templates, but even then, they can’t be firmly locked in. They are making tweaks down to several weeks out based on whether various crops and other products are going to be ready at the time they initially expected.

It’s a puzzle, and adding more meal options will only make it more so.

“One thing that we learned very early on is it’s an incredibly easy business to start,” Papas said. “It’s a very difficult business to scale.”

The fact that they have been at it a while, the founders hope, should be an advantage as they try to fend off mushrooming competition from other meal-kit companies.

Papas and Salzberg founded what would become Blue Apron in 2012 after Papas, a software builder, became frustrated when he and some friends spent a weekend zigzagging to three different grocery stores to get the ingredients they needed to make Argentine-style grilled steak. He told Salzberg he wished there was a service that put all the ingredients together and delivered them to customers’ homes.

“And then I immediately followed up and said, ‘I would never do it, though, because it’s way too logistically complicated,’” he recalled with a laugh.

But Salzberg, a Harvard Business School graduate who had done a stint working at a venture capital firm, was intrigued and began doing research. He soon set out to recruit a third partner who had culinary chops and found Wadiak, a former chef and farmer who has shaped the company’s ethos about food.

(Early on, for instance, Papas said they mused about whether they should try to work with food-service colossus Sysco to source ingredients. Wadiak’s response: “Absolutely not.”)

The range of in-home dining competitors is growing rapidly: There’s Munchery, which delivers prepared meals that typically need just a quick spin in the microwave. There are Instacart and Postmates, services that bring the groceries that you’ve selected from a supermarket to your doorstep. And then there are grocery titans such as Whole Foods Market, which is experimenting with more prepared foods to lure a convenience-minded customer, and Walmart, which is partnering with Uber and Lyft on a pilot grocery-delivery program.

Blue Apron figures its best defense is to play offense by working with farmers to cultivate offbeat produce.

“If you have really great ingredients,” Wadiak said, “The food almost cooks itself.” n

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BY

TECHNOLOGY

C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

I

n his quest to transform the way the Pentagon wages war, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has turned to Silicon Valley, hoping its experimental culture, innovation and sense of urgency would rub off on the rigid bureaucracy he runs.

Carter has made several trips to the Valley and appointed Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company to an advisory board. And recently he sat down at the Pentagon with Elon Musk to see what suggestions the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX might have to make the nation’s military more efficient and daring.

Musk’s answer? “Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important,” he said in an interview after the meeting. “It’s economics 101. Whatever you reward will happen.”

The Pentagon finds itself in a new arms race, struggling to keep pace with forms of combat that are fought with bytes as well as bullets.

The technological advancements disrupting established business sectors are now shaking up the world of war — where robots, swarming drones and weapons enhanced by artificial intelligence might one day rule the skies and seas. And just like in industry, the advantages may be fleeting.

The Pentagon is seeking “an enduring competitive edge that lasts a generation,” said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant who serves at the Lexington Institute, a think tank based in Arlington, Va. “But generations in technology these days are measured in months.”

Harnessing the latest technology to upgrade the Defense Department’s arsenal is a top priority for Carter, who recently said, “The race now depends on who can out-innovate faster than anyone else.”

The effort has a renewed energy in the waning months of the Obama administration, which is trying to embed the effort into the bureaucracy — and budget. The Pentagon is turning to start-ups and steering billions of dollars to its own laboratories and project teams to develop prototypes for the kind of promising technologies it may need in the future.

It is testing autonomous ships that can remain at sea for months without a crew, an electromagnetic railgun that fires a projectile

ILLUSTRATION BY VIKTOR KOEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Welcome to the new arms race Pentagon studies the ways of Silicon Valley to regain technological superiority that can travel at seven times the speed of sound, and increasingly powerful laser weapons that sizzle their targets.

At a recent conference put on by Defense One, a website that provides news and analysis on defense and national security, highlighted an effort to produce “revolutionary textiles that combine fibers with electronics to create fabrics that can sense, communicate, store energy, monitor health, change color, and much more.”

The Pentagon speaks of its “Third Offset Strategy,” a way to offset shrinking budgets and transient technological superiority.

The first offset was the use of nuclear deterrence to keep the Soviets at bay starting in the 1950s.

The second was the advent of new precision munitions and stealth to overwhelm robust air and ground forces of adversaries.

The Pentagon hopes that this is the dawn of a third technological revolution, even if the conditions are markedly different. Instead of trying to offset the advantages of a single, traditional adversary, the Pentagon faces challenges on multiple fronts, including large, technologically advanced nations, such as Russia and China; smaller, aspiring powers, such as North Korea; and independent non-state actors, such as the Islamic State.

As part of the earlier offset campaigns, the Pentagon adopted military capabilities that emerged from its own labs. But big advances in robotics, biotechnology and computing are coming out of the commercial sector, much of which wants little to do with the Pentagon.

This round has gotten off to a fitful start, if for no other reason than the skepticism aroused by the late-term push of an outgoing

The idea is that “advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems [are] going to lead to a new era of human-machine collaboration and combat teaming.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work

administration. There are also doubts about nurturing a start-up mentality in a bureaucracy that must hew to drawn-out and unpredictable budget cycles.

Some companies are “watching to see how serious this is,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “Is this a fad? Is this going to last beyond this administration? And part of the problem is the acquisition system impedes this sort of development.”

Musk said he and Carter had a “high-level” discussion not about procurement programs but about innovation. One of Musk’s suggestions was that the Pentagon needs to embrace failure.

“Whenever you do try to do things that are new, and you’re in unchartered territory, there will be failures because you don’t know the path,” Musk said. “There should be no penalty for a failure where it was thoughtful and considered.”

But in a massive and often riskaverse bureaucracy, that might be easier said than done.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon plans over the next five years to invest $18 billion in the Third Offset, including about $6 billion in the classified “black” budget, according to Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on defense issues.

The Defense Department opened an outreach center in Silicon Valley to encourage some of the most innovative start-ups to turn their attention to national security.

And when that effort showed mixed results in its first year, Carter moved unusually fast to overhaul it, installing new leadership that reports directly to him. He also announced that the Pentagon would open a similar office in Boston.

The shake-up in Silicon Valley was done specifically “to signal to the bureaucracy that this is of the highest priority to the department,” Eaglen said. “The entire president’s budget was built around the Third Offset and the threats that Carter believes the U.S. military should be prepared to confront.”

After decades of unmatched superiority, the Pentagon fears that potential adversaries have benefited from the proliferation of commercial technology and have caught up with the United States.

The Pentagon is preparing for what Deputy Defense Secretary

SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016

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NATURE Robert Work called “network-onnetwork warfare” against more traditional rivals, such as China and Russia, after more than a decade of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The idea is that “advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems [are] going to lead to a new era of human-machine collaboration and combat teaming,” he said during a recent event at the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank.

The goal is not “killer robots that roam the battlefield,” said Work, a self-proclaimed sciencefiction fan. “I think more in terms of ‘Iron Man’ — the ability of a machine to assist a human, where the human is still in control in all matters, but the machine makes the human much more powerful and much more capable.”

Much of the work is being done in the Pentagon’s top-secret labs, at places such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research and the secretive Strategic Capabilities Office.

At any given time at the ONR, about 12,000 projects are underway, and the agency produces 350 to 400 technical patents a year, said Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, the chief of naval research. In 70 years in existence, the agency has funded 60 Nobel laureates.

“We want to do the impossible, can’t-be-done, there’s-no-waythat’ll-ever-happen problems,” Winter said in an interview.

“That’s what scientists do. We do magic. And the engineers have to do the miracle.”

At DARPA, the Third Offset is viewed differently from the previous offset strategies, which gave the United States a firm lead over its adversaries for decades. This time, the effort is seen as much more dynamic, using technologies that evolve quickly, said Arati Prabhakar, the agency’s director.

Sometimes that will come through software that’s easy to upgrade. Or through artificial intelligence, so that machines will be able to learn and adapt on their own.

“Where are the breakthroughs going to come from?” she said. “A theme is if you combine access to leading-edge commercial technology and deeply integrate it with DOD [Department of Defense] secret sauce, that’s where you get phenomenal advancements in capabilities.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Killing animals that attack is common, but not everywhere BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

A

runner in a marathon who was mauled by a bear in New Mexico played dead and escaped injured but alive. The bear, which officials said was with her cubs when she was surprised by the runner, was captured and put to death.

New Mexico officials noted with regret that state law requires them to euthanize and test for rabies any wild animal that attacks or bites a person, no matter the circumstances.

Rare attacks by wild animals on people in the United States are almost always followed by capital punishment for the animal, and sometimes even for uninvolved animals nearby.

After a mountain lion pounced on a child in his Colorado yard last weekend, officials captured and killed two lions, saying it is their policy to kill wild animals that may have been involved in an attack on humans. The other week, after an alligator dragged a toddler into a lagoon in Orlando, wildlife authorities trapped and killed at least six of the reptiles.

The justice system for wild animals varies across jurisdictions, and sometimes by species.

The prevailing idea is that if a wild animal attacks once, it might do it again. There’s not a lot of statistical support, but experts say the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong.

History books and newspaper archives contain plenty of stories about serial “man-eaters” that have gotten a “taste for blood.”

Craig Packer, a University of Minnesota big cat biologist, said there are credible cases of individual animals that have acquired a preference for humans, particularly in rural Africa and Asia.

Packer said that when farmers in Mozambique slept in their fields to protect crops from wild pigs, lions that followed the pigs happened upon another nutrientdense food source.

“There’s no impala. There’s no wildebeest. But there’s meat walk-

ing around in shoes,” he said.

Killing a suspected man-eater, even without being absolutely sure it’s the guilty party, is the right strategy, Packer said.

Problem bears and other animals in the United States are often “foodconditioned” — used to getting snacks directly from people or their trash, increasing the likelihood of a bloody human-animal encounter.

JAMES BORCHUCK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A black bear sits in a tree in a neighborhood near Adventure Island in Tampa.

In a survey of 48 North American wildlife agencies, 70 percent said the most common type of human-bear conflicts involve garbage or other food magnets. Of the agencies that relocate animals, 40 percent said they had a two- or three-strike approach — they move nuisance bears once or twice, but euthanize recidivists.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says 30 percent of calls it received about bears from 1990 to 2015 were about garbage-eating, and it says 50 percent of bears relocated after exhibiting “conflict behavior” become repeat offenders.

“We don’t euthanize bears just for getting in trash when that’s all they’re doing,” Carl Lackey, a wildlife biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, told the Associated Press last year after officials at Lake Tahoe euthanized a black bear. “But that conflict behavior escalates from tipping over trash cans to breaking into homes, and that’s when we have to euthanize them.”

This cycle has spawned a motto in the wildlife world: A fed bear is a dead bear. It’s why wildlife officials and advocates tell people not to feed wild animals.

To some observers, it’s never right to kill wild animals that attack people.

“The reason for letting these animals live, including presumed ‘man-eaters,’ is that they were doing what comes naturally to them, as horrific and sad as the results of their tragic attacks are,” Marc Bekoff, a professor at the University of Colorado, wrote in Psychology Today.

Some places do take a more nuanced position to wild animal justice. Australian authorities didn’t euthanize a crocodile that killed a 5-year-old boy in 2009.

India recently sentenced a maneating lion to life in a zoo.

If the New Mexico marathon encounter had taken place in Yellowstone National Park, the bear’s fate might have been different.

Officials there carry out complicated investigations involving crime-scene reconstruction and DNA, all to try to answer one question: Why did the bear do it?

Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said some bear attacks are deemed “natural” aggression. They occur when a bear is startled or defending its cubs or food.

Those bears aren’t euthanized, Servheen said, pointing to the case of a hiker who was fatally mauled after accidentally surprising a bear and her cubs in 2011.

If wildlife investigators determine that a bear’s actions were predatory, they deem it “unnatural aggression.”

But a bear is a predator, right — isn’t trying to eat a human the very definition of natural?

Servheen said no: “They’re very wary of us. But if a bear crosses that line and begins to think that humans are attractive as a food source, then they could become very dangerous. And we don’t tolerate those cases at all.” n

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BOOKS

Why Islam is, in fact, di≠erent N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

T ISLAMIC EXCEPTIONALISM How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World

by Shadi Hamid.

St. Martin’s Press.

306 pp. $26.99

here’s something going on with Muslims, Donald Trump repeats ominously, something about this faith and this group that threatens the West. So let’s bar their entry into the United States, the presumptive Republican nominee argues, until we figure out what it is.

Well, it turns out, there is something going on with Islam, and Shadi Hamid, quite helpfully, has figured it out. But his answer does not focus on conspiracy theories, lone wolves or terrorist plots; instead, it centers on the intricate relationship between faith and the state in the Middle East. In his illuminating new book, “Islamic Exceptionalism,” Hamid contends that Islam is unique among the world’s major religions, both in its obsession with wielding influence over government and in its resistance to the secularizing forces that religion in Western countries has experienced.

Throughout the Muslim world, the author writes, “Islam will need to play a significant role in the forging of political community, particularly where political community is weak.” Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, makes his case by surveying the history of Islamist movements and political parties in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia, particularly postArab Spring, as well as examining the brutality and bureaucracy delivered by the Islamic State.

For much of its existence, Hamid reminds, the Islamic faith has been inseparable from politics and governance. The prophet Muhammad was a theologian, preacher and warrior but also builder of a new state. In Christianity’s origins, by contrast, Jesus was a dissident against the political order.

For centuries, as Hamid sketches in rapid strokes, the Muslim world looked down on Christian Europe, satisfied in the success of Islamic empires — until it saw itself overwhelmed by the West’s increasingly secular colonial pow-

GOKHAN TAN/GETTY IMAGES

Supporters wave banners showing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, Shadi Hamid says, has veered right on religious issues.

ers. The demise of the Ottoman Empire punctuated a political decline that had started long before.

“The gap between what Muslims once were and where they now find themselves,” Hamid argues, “is at the center of the anger and humiliation driving political violence across the Middle East.”

Anyone assuming that Islam will necessarily follow the path of Christianity — that is, that it will undergo a reformation that channels the faith into the private realm — is likely to be disappointed. “Islam is, in fact, distinctive in how it relates to politics,” Hamid writes, simply and provocatively.

“Islam is different.”

For the record, Hamid does not believe that “Islamist” should be equated with “radical Islamist,” no matter the rhetoric in the U.S. presidential campaign. He defines an Islamist movement as one believing that Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in political life, and that organizes itself around that goal. “Though they now find themselves eclipsed by radicals,” the author writes, “the most politically influential Islamist groups have generally been of the mainstream and nonviolent variety.”

He dwells on the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and most influential Islamist movement, massbased and hierarchical. Though the brotherhood had a history of violence — including the 1948 assassination of Egypt’s prime minister — it had renounced it by the 1970s, becoming more interested in contesting elections than in unmaking the state. The group did not reach power until nearly a century after its founding, when the brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the Egyptian presidency in 2012 after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. “For the first time, the prospect of prolonged Islamist rule became more than just a theoretical consideration,” Hamid writes, and the backlash was predictable and fierce. The Egyptian military soon overthrew Morsi, and dispersed and killed brotherhood members through public massacres and mass death sentences.

“When observers imply that Arabs or Muslims are prone to violence, they’re usually thinking of groups like the Islamic State or alQaeda,” Hamid writes. “But the preponderance of Arab violence has come at the hands of ostensibly secular regimes that claim to be react-

ing against Islamist movements.”

In Turkey and Tunisia, recent experiences with Islamist parties in power have been mixed, Hamid writes. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has veered right on religious matters, a process Hamid calls “soft Islamization,” though with an increasingly illiberal, authoritarian leadership. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party, which shared power briefly after the fall of dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, has sought to move to the political center, producing an identity crisis that recurs among Islamist groups. Perhaps in part because of this tension, Tunisia has supplied a steady source of foreign fighters to Syria.

Which brings us to the Islamic State. Hamid explores the Islamic State’s elaborate legal structures and religious bureaucracy; unlike most terrorist groups, he writes, it has a “distinctive interest in longterm governance.” This is not at odds with the sadistic violence the group inflicts on Muslims and non-Muslims; for the Islamic State, Hamid says, terrorism and state-building go “hand in hand.”

I wish Hamid had spent more time exploring the future of Muslims in the West. “Talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’ is as unwise as it is imprecise,” Hamid writes, “but there does appear to be a clash of values.” For the faithful in a secular America, how might that clash play out? If the answer depends at all on how Islam is treated in political life, the current climate may prove counterproductive. “In the heart of Western democracy,” Hamid laments, “unapologetically anti-Muslim forces — who seem intent on echoing Europe’s tragic past — gain ground, with their calls for an exclusivist nativism based on the imagined glories of better days.”

There is something going on here, too. n Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

These mean streets are worth traveling

How Hemingway became famous

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

l

W

REVIEWED BY

N EELY T UCKER

alter Mosley’s latest Easy Rawlins novel, “Charcoal Joe,” comes on the heels of the author winning the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in April. No one familiar with the quality and quantity of Mosley’s creative output was surprised by this honor. His output encompasses more than four dozen books — including 14 Rawlins novels — science fiction, nonfiction and essays. He has been awarded PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Still, in some ways, the full measure of his achievement can be gauged only by seeing him at the Edgars, as the Mystery Writers’ honors are known. I watched the whole thing from a table near the back. Mosley was one of fewer than two dozen African Americans in a ballroom holding hundreds. Publishing, like the film industry, was a pale field when Mosley’s first Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, “Devil in a Blue Dress,” was published in 1990 and made into a Denzel Washington vehicle five years later. Two decades on, both still are.

So it’ s no surprise that Mosley, a native of Los Angeles whose father migrated west from Louisiana, is attuned to the uneasy America that black people inhabit. The fictional Easy, a child of New Iberia, La., who migrates to L.A., is, too. The central twist in “Devil,” set in 1948 L.A., turns on the different worlds that whites and blacks inhabit in the same place. “Charcoal Joe,” set in the same city two decades later, finds that things are different, if not all that much improved.

Mosley’s L.A. has many of the mean streets that Raymond Chandler made iconic, but these are different streets and they are mean for different reasons. Here’s Easy, narrating a crosstown drive in 1968 in “Charcoal”: “It’s a long way from West L.A. to Watts. It’s the same city but a darkness descends as you progress eastward. You pass from white dreams into black and brown real-

ities. There were many miles to cover but distance was the least of it. It was another world, where I was going.”

As “Charcoal Joe” opens, we find Easy in a good place. And he has been able to open a three-man firm in a building that seems a metaphor for the city: Once an elegant residence for a rich white guy, it has been cut up into three businesses. The first floor is an antique store of faded quality. The second floor, run by the landlord, is an insurance brokerage owned and operated by a Japanese family.

Easy’s new detective agency — one Jewish partner and one black — is on the third. Two of the couples in the building are interracial.

Likewise, the murder that forms the spine of the narrative is racially complicated. “A white man named Peter Boughman and some other guy named Ducky” were shot to death in a house in Malibu, Rawlins’s longtime friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, tells him. Seymour Brathwaite, a well-to-do black postgraduate student at UCLA, lived nearby, heard the shots and went to investigate, Mouse says. Brathwaite was found standing beside the bodies when the police came. He had no gun but was booked for murder.

The hitch is that Brathwaite is the son of a friend of the fearsome Rufus Tyler, a.k.a. Charcoal Joe, an elderly black man, who is good at cards, killing people and Getting Stuff Done. Charcoal, who has done Easy a favor in the past, now wants to call in his chit.

If you’ve read Mosley, you know that Easy is probably going to figure things out by the end, although at a cost. But like the crosstown drive from West L.A. to Watts, you don’t hop in the car with Easy Rawlins for the destination. You ride shotgun for the trip. n Tucker, a national reporter for The Washington Post, is the author of “Only the Hunted Run: A Sully Carter Novel,” which will be published in August.

E CHARCOAL JOE An Easy Rawlins Mystery

By Walter Mosley Doubleday.

305 pp. $26.95

EVERYBODY BEHAVES BADLY The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece “The Sun Also Rises”

By Lesley M.M. Blume Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

332 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

G ARY K RIST

ven the biggest alpha dog in the pack starts out as a callow young pup. Before Ernest Hemingway became a literary titan, he was a scheming, fame-hungry wannabe who cried over his rejection slips and struggled to pay the rent on a tiny flat above a Parisian sawmill.

And while he had somehow managed to get two slender collections of short stories published (in “artisanal” editions with a combined total printing of 470 copies), he realized that he’d have to think bigger to make the kind of splash he yearned for. His conclusion: “I knew I must write a novel.”

“Everybody Behaves Badly” is Lesley M.M. Blume’s fiendishly readable account of how that novel — “The Sun Also Rises” — came to be and how it turned Hemingway the obscurity into Hemingway the phenomenon. As literary success stories go, this is hardly unplowed territory. But Blume’s book is a slightly different animal. It’s a deeply, almost obsessively researched biography of a book, supported by a set of superb endnotes worth reading in their own right.

Blume stumbles early on with a breathless introduction that blithely overstates the novel’s historical importance. But she recovers quickly at the start of her main text, conjuring up a vivid picture of Hemingway’s early years in Paris, when the ambitious neophyte cultivated mentors such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound (only to ditch them once their usefulness to him ended). Almost from the beginning, Hemingway knew exactly the kind of innovative fiction he wanted to write — “saturated,” as Blume puts it, “with Poundinspired spareness and Steinian repetitive stream-of-consciousness elements.” But he also wanted his work to be accessible to a popular audience and thus widely read.

One legacy he took away from his friendship with Stein was a fascination with bullfighting, and it was this that ultimately provided him with the novel-worthy materi-

al he needed. In July 1925, he gathered a group of his Parisian cronies and headed down to Pamplona, Spain, for the festival of San Fermin, an annual event that begins with the now-famous running of the bulls and culminates in several days of high-level bullfighting. A visit the previous year had been a great success, but this year’s contingent of hard-drinking sybarites promised to generate more than a few interpersonal fireworks. And fortunately for Hemingway, his friends delivered the goods, turning the week-long fiesta into a carnival of drunken high jinks, explosive sexual jealousies, maudlin recriminations and enough bad behavior to fill any number of novels.

To translate this wine-soaked road trip into “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway did very little fictionalizing of his raw material. Virtually all of the major characters (despite appearing under invented names) were instantly recognizable to the cognoscenti of Paris, and their various misdeeds were so faithfully reported that one of the book’s real-life models — comic writer Donald Ogden Stewart — refused even to consider it a novel.

“It was so absolutely accurate,” he said, “that it seemed little more than a skillfully done travelogue.”

But most found the novel stylistically invigorating and sociologically profound. Within a few months of publication, there could be no doubt that “Sun” had accomplished its purpose, establishing Hemingway as “the most exciting of contemporary American writers of fiction.”

It’s a shame that Hemingway had to humiliate some of his best friends to achieve his long-awaited literary triumph, but the results were probably worth it. As Blume so deftly points out, “After all, he was revolutionizing literature, and in every revolution, some heads must roll.” n Krist’s most recent books are “The White Cascade,” “City of Scoundrels” and “Empire of Sin.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Is a guaranteed minimum income worth looking at?

CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.

By an overwhelming 3­to­1 margin, Swiss voters have rejected a proposal that would have guaranteed all residents a monthly income, whether they worked or not. Yet supporters of the concept elsewhere are not taking the Swiss “no” for an answer.

Frequently proposed in the past, guaranteed income for all is back in vogue because of fears that robots and artificial intelligence threaten whole categories of jobs, especially for less­skilled workers, and that any remaining jobs will be unstable “gigs.” Mass poverty and inequality loom.

Economists’ usual prescription is greater investment in education and training, to equip people for high-paying work. The guaranteed-income movement says it’s smarter and simpler to separate subsistence from labor.

Backers span the ideological spectrum: Andy Stern, uberliberal former president of the Service Employees International Union, cites straightforward social-justice arguments, as the title of his new book, “Raising the Floor,” suggests. Smallgovernment conservative Charles Murray says a guaranteed income would streamline the welfare state and clearly define society’s minimum — and maximum — obligations to the less fortunate.

Oakland, Calif., and Finland may soon see experimental guaranteed-income programs.

But even assuming political and financial support could be found for such a program, it would face immense practical issues.

Any minimum income — Murray suggests $10,000 plus $3,000 for health insurance, with a phaseout after $30,000 in earned income — would be insufficient in some areas, excessive in others. In Puerto Rico, $10,000 is more than half the median income; in Manhattan, it seems like a brie-and-prosciutto sandwich costs that much.

What about immigrants’ eligibility? The rule most consistent with guaranteed income’s goals — apply it to newcomers upon arrival, lest they form an underclass — would stimulate migration, irritating sender countries and U.S. taxpayers alike. We could impose a waiting period: Good luck choosing one that seems fair to everyone.

As for the obsolete-labor problem, no one really knows how large it is. In 2013, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University wrote that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are “at risk” over the next two decades. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says 9 percent. All estimates should be read in light of unfulfilled past predictions of mass technological unemployment.

Should we adopt a policy based on such guesswork? Probably not — when you factor in a guaranteed income’s imponderable, but likely dampening, effect on incentives to seek a job, especially entrylevel work, when earnings are lowest. (By the way, is a minimum wage still necessary and justified in a guaranteed-income world?)

Stern cites research showing no significant work reduction during guaranteed-income pilot

MAGALI GIRARDIN/KEYSTONE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

A huge poster in Geneva was displayed in May ahead of a referendum in which Swiss voters rejected an unconditional basic income.

projects in a rural Canadian town four decades ago and, more recently, in a Namibian village.

These tests (and the new ones being contemplated in Oakland and Finland) hardly indicate the repercussions of telling every American, from childhood, that he or she gets a check upon reaching adulthood.

Even after the robot-overlord takeover, someone will have to work, which means society must encourage people to try, even if the rewards aren’t certain.

Murray acknowledges his plan would discourage work — he just thinks it would not do so more than current policy. And he sees a bright side: Income-secure citizens would flock to volunteer work, reenergizing civic culture.

Stern sees guaranteed income enabling today’s incipient move toward work “driven largely by people’s own motivation, creativity, and the ability to make a job out of nothing.”

It all reminds you of Karl Marx’s daydream of communism, in which “society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Reality check: 25-to-54-year-

old American men who have left the labor force watch TV an average of 335 minutes per day, according to a report by White House economic advisers.

If government paid a $10,000a-year guaranteed income on top of the existing safety net — Medicaid, the earned-income tax credit, Social Security and the rest — it would have to raise taxes and cut other spending by $3 trillion per year, according to Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If, by contrast, guaranteed income replaced current safety net programs (Murray’s proposal), it would shift vast resources away from the poor, because means-tested benefits now devoted to low-income people would be distributed to others higher up. It’s not clear how you’d sell a Murray-style plan to people who paid into Social Security expecting, in most cases, much more than $10,000 per year upon retirement.

A guaranteed minimum income is thought-provoking. The main thought it provokes is this: We can, and should, rationalize the linkage that U.S. social policy has established between work and economic security — especially by decoupling health insurance and employment, as Obamacare did to some extent.

It’s probably unnecessary, and definitely risky, to eliminate that linkage entirely. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

My supporters want real change BERNIE SANDERS is a U.S. senator from Vermont and a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

As we head toward the Democratic National Convention, I often hear the question, “What does Bernie want?” Wrong question. The right question is what the 12 million Americans who voted for a political revolution want.

And the answer is: They want real change in this country, they want it now and they are prepared to take on the political cowardice and powerful special interests that have prevented that change from happening.

They understand that the United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and that new technology and innovation make us wealthier every day. What they don’t understand is why the middle class continues to decline, 47 million of us live in poverty and many Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to cobble together the income they need to survive.

What do we want? We want an economy that is not based on uncontrollable greed, monopolistic practices and illegal behavior. We want an economy that protects the human needs and dignity of all people — children, the elderly, the sick, working people and the poor. We want an economic and political system that works for all of us, not one in which almost all new wealth and power rests with a

handful of billionaire families.

The current campaign finance system is corrupt. Billionaires and powerful corporations are now, through super PACs, able to spend as much money as they want to buy elections and elect candidates who represent their interests, not the American people. Meanwhile, we have one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any major country on earth, and Republican governors are working overtime to suppress the vote and make it harder for poor people, people of color, seniors and young people to vote.

What do we want? We want to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections. We want universal voter registration, so that anyone 18 years or older who is eligible to vote is automatically registered.

We want a vibrant democracy and

a well-informed electorate that knows that its views can shape the future of the country.

Our criminal justice system is broken. We have 2.2 million people rotting behind bars at an annual expense of $80 billion.

Youth unemployment in a number of inner-cities and rural communities is 30 to 50 percent, and millions of young people have limited opportunities to participate in the productive economy. Failing schools all around the country produce more people who end up in jail than graduate college. Millions of Americans have police records as a result of marijuana possession, which should be decriminalized.

And too many people are serving unnecessarily long mandatory minimum sentences.

What do we want? We want a criminal justice system that addresses the causes of incarceration, not one that simply imprisons more people. We want to demilitarize local police departments, see local police departments reflect the diversity of the communities they serve and end private ownership of prisons and detention centers. We want to create the conditions that allow people who are released from prison to stay out. We want the best educated population on Earth, not the most incarcerated

population.

The debate is over. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity, and it already is causing devastating damage in our country and to the entire planet. If present trends continue, scientists tell us the planet will be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the end of the century — which means more droughts, floods, extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels and acidification of the oceans. This is a planetary crisis of extraordinary magnitude.

What do we want? We want the United States to lead the world in pushing our energy system away from fossil fuel and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We want a tax on carbon, the end of fracking and massive investment in wind, solar, geothermal and other sustainable technologies. We want to leave this planet in a way that is healthy and habitable for future generations.

What do we want? We want to end the rapid movement that we are currently experiencing toward oligarchic control of our economic and political life. As Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, we want a government of the people, by the people and for the people. That is what we want, and that is what we will continue fighting for. n

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

British vote is a warning to U.S. ANNE APPLEBAUM writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. She is also the director of the Global Transitions Program at the Legatum Institute in London.

Like everybody else in London, I woke up Friday morning, after not much sleep, to graphic depictions of the pound crashing, the stock exchange collapsing and markets all over the world in turmoil.

I have no doubt that in the following days the story will be different. Traders will take a step back and notice that nothing, actually, has happened yet. There will be cheap assets to pick up.

Markets will stabilize.

The true impact, on Britain and on Europe, will not be visible for many years. In a certain sense, it will not be visible at all, for the real damage will be done by the things that will now not happen. The slow agony of the divorce proceedings will take up precious political time and energy in London and other European capitals, so Europe’s leaders will not unite to cope with other crises. The U.K. will turn farther in on itself, so British energy and talent will not be dedicated to pushing back against the Islamic State, resettling migrants, resisting Russia. The situation of the U.K. will be unstable and uncertain for a long time to come, so investments will not take place.

Money will not be spent.

Opportunities will not be created.

It is not an exaggeration to say

that there are tens of thousands of decisions to be made in the U.K., on legal issues, on joint foreign policy, security and diplomacy and, if Britain leaves the European single market altogether, on tariffs and trade.

Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in Europe, and so the question of Scottish independence necessarily returns. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has called the referendum result “democratically unacceptable” for Scots, and one sees her point.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Northern Ireland voted to stay in Europe, and so the unification of northern and southern Ireland becomes a live issue again. Minutes after the referendum result was announced, Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, declared that “This British Government has forfeited any mandate to represent the economic or political interests of people in Northern Ireland,” and so it has.

It can only be a matter of time before a movement calling for a northern Irish referendum takes off.

Other European countries may now face political instability as well. The British vote has, in just a few hours, energized the supporters of anti-European — and in some cases antidemocratic — parties elsewhere in Europe. Not just in the smaller European nations but in big countries — France, the Netherlands, Italy and possibly even Germany — the political scene may shift dramatically,

The real damage of the vote to leave the E.U. will be done by the things that will now not happen.

particularly given the likelihood of slower economic growth. Once again, much of the damage will be invisible, taking the form of things that will not happen. The Dutch prime minister, the German chancellor or the French president, consumed with fighting off new political challenges at home, will not have time to think creatively about their own economies or Europe’s institutional structures, let alone the outside world.

Finally, I do realize that it’s facile to talk about the impact on a U.S. election that is still many months away, that it’s too simple to say “first Brexit, then Trump.”

But there is a way in which this vote has to be seen, at the very least, as a possible harbinger of the future. This referendum campaign was not fought on the issues that are normally central to British elections. Identity politics trumped economics; arguments about “independence” and “sovereignty” defeated arguments about British influence and importance. The advice of once-trusted institutions was ignored. Elected leaders were swept aside. If that kind of transformation can take place in the U.K., then it can happen in the United States, too.

We have been warned. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Video games BY

C HRIS S UELLENTROP

For decades, video games have mystified people who don’t play them. The New York Times Magazine grappled in 1974 with the emergence of the arcade game — calling it “the space age pinball ma­ chine” — in Manhattan bars. What was this new coin­operated amusement? More than 40 years later, some durable myths remain extremely difficult to dispel.

1

Pong was the first video game.

Pong was a commercial success, one that helped turn a nascent medium into mass entertainment. But it wasn’t the first arcade game, nor was it the first home video game that you could hook up to your TV. Most experts point to William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, a demonstration created for an open house at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958, as the first true video game.

And the first home game console was not Pong but Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey, which went on sale in 1972, three years before Atari’s home version of Pong. It had table tennis in it, too.

Pong was not even the first coin-operated arcade game from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.

That distinction goes to 1971’s Computer Space.

2

Video games are bigger than movies.

It’s true that Americans spent almost $24 billion on video games last year, compared with a measly $11 billion on movie tickets. But the theatrical box office is not even close to the entire revenue stream for “movies” or “Hollywood.”

Americans spent an additional $18 billion on home entertainment such as Blu-rays, DVDs, iTunes and Netflix.

Sure, some of that money is spent to binge-watch TV shows instead of movies. But we’re already $5 billion ahead of video-

game revenue without considering the cost of (or the rights fees paid by) premium cable channels such as HBO. The video-game numbers are inflated, too, by the inclusion of sales of hardware, such as consoles and controllers. The home entertainment figures don’t include the cost of things like Blu-ray players or universal remotes.

More important, dollars aren’t people. Here’s some rough math: When Grand Theft Auto V makes $1 billion, it’s because 20 million people, give or take, have bought the game. When “The Force Awakens” makes $1 billion, it’s because 100 million tickets were sold, more or less.

3

They’re for men.

The latest data from the Entertainment Software Association, the lobbying arm of the video-game industry, does indicate that the majority of players — 60 percent — are men.

But that still leaves a sizable percentage of female players.

There are also more women over 18 who play video games than boys under 18 who play; women 50 and older are more likely than their male counterparts to play.

A Pew Research Center survey published last August found that nearly 60 percent of teenage girls play video games on a computer, console or cellphone.

4

Violent video games are a cause of real-world violence.

A review of the scientific literature, conducted by an

NICK VEASEY/GETTY IMAGES

American Psychological Association task force, found a “well established” link between violent video games and shortterm increases in aggression.

Playing violent games also leads to higher levels of what psychologists call “aggressive cognition” — for example, completing a word with a missing letter by choosing a D for “explode” rather than an R for “explore.”

But many scholars dispute these findings, saying that at best they indicate an effect on thoughts rather than actions, and at worst merely prove that looking at an image of an explosion makes you think about explosions. Many video games, including Pac-Man, could be called “violent” under the vague definitions psychologists often use. Frustration or competition, rather than violent imagery, might be leading to the heightened feelings of aggression, these researchers say.

Hundreds of scholars signed an open letter in 2013, when the task force began its work, to protest that media-effects research has well-known methodological issues and that “responsible scholars” may conclude that violent media does not increase aggression.

Regardless, the task force did not find evidence that playing violent video games leads to criminal violence or delinquency.

5

They’re making us smarter.

“Action games” — mostly first-person shooters — have been found in a number of studies to improve hand-eye coordination and spatial thinking. More surprising, these games can improve vision, increase attention and make players more efficient at mental task-switching, even when they’re not playing the games.

But only some video games have these effects. Playing chess — whether on a physical board or a screen — doesn’t confer any of these benefits. Nor does playing some of the most popular video games, including the slower-paced Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, the Sims, Minecraft or even Tetris. The research has emphasized the benefits of shooters, which are more perceptually demanding.

And the games that improve cognitive performance tend to be the very ones that the American Psychological Association task force says increase aggression. n

Suellentrop is a host of the podcast “Shall We Play a Game?”

SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016

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Saturday, August 27

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

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