The Washington Post National Weekly - June 28, 2015

Politics Hillary Clinton is no quitter 4

World Haitians’ struggle worsens 11

Lifestyles Where to get out and play 17

5 Myths About Jeb Bush 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

‘I woke up.

He was in the room.

I didn’t know who he was.’

A poll finds 1 in 5 college women have been violated — experiences that are both common and traumatizing PAGE 12

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See the full lineup of Summerfest events in the official program, published in the Tuesday, July 7th edition of

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THE FIX

Obama has the best week BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

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won.

That was the message President Obama had for Republicans and other opponents of the Affordable Care Act after the Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 ruling Thursday that upheld the use of subsidies in the federal marketplace created by Obamacare.

“Today after more than 50 votes in Congress to repeal or weaken this law, after a presidential election based in part on preserving or repealing this law, after multiple challenges to this law before the Supreme Court, the Affordable Care act is here to stay,” Obama declared in a Rose Garden appearance less than two hours after the court handed down its opinion.

It’s hard to argue with Obama’s triumphant tone. The court’s ruling Thursday amounted to the final, major attempt by opponents of the law to invalidate all or part of it. Those attempts — ranging from more than four dozen votes to repeal the law by the Republicancontrolled House, a 2012 election fought on the law and a previous court challenge on the constitutionality of the individual mandate — amounted to one of the longest and trickiest political and legal gantlets run in modern American politics.

Yes, there are more challenges to the law to come — most notably one brought by House Speaker John Boehner, who pledged Thursday to continue his efforts to get rid of Obamacare.

But the simple truth is that this was widely regarded as the last, best chance to knock the law down in a meaningful way.

Politically speaking, most Republican strategists and even most GOP politicians have privately acknowledged for quite some time that the chances of ripping the law from its roots legislatively was a nonstarter for two reasons.

First, with Obama in the White House, he would veto any measure that would substan-

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JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

President Obama speaks after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday against a major challenge to his health-care law.

tially change the law that bears his name. Second, the longer the law is, well, the law, the harder it becomes to drastically change it.

Whether or not people initially liked Obamacare, they have begun to get used to it. Trashing the law in place of something else — that would, inevitably, have its own set of issues and problems — becomes a harder sell every day it remains law.

Given that, the only route to invalidation or major overhaul of Obamacare in the minds of savvy Republicans was through the courts. That first took the form of the case dealing with the individual mandate. When that was lost, most anti-ACA forces rallied to the Burwell case, which was decided Thursday. Now, whether they want to admit it or not, a significant amount of the air has come out of their balloon.

“The huge life and death cases [related to the law] have pretty much run out,” concluded NBC’s justice correspondent Pete Williams.

The law can and will be an issue in the 2016 presidential election, particularly given Hillary Rodham Clinton’s immediate embrace of

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 37

the decision Thursday.

Already many Republicans are seeking to drive the remaining energy aimed at getting rid of the law toward next November — insisting that now, controlling the presidency is the only way to make fundamental changes to it.

Here’s Jeb Bush, for example, in the wake of the court decision: “I will work with Congress to repeal and replace this flawed law with conservative reforms that empower consumers.”

And that might well work, as the base of the Republican Party remains deeply unhappy about the ACA. And we’ve already seen how being identified as the most ardent opponent of the law has helped boost Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.), not only into the 2016 presidential race but close to its top tier.

But in a general election context, that will be a far harder sell. Why? Because Clinton will now be able to make the very strong case that the law has been fought judicially, legislatively and through campaigns and, in each instance, has survived those challenges. “This is old news,” you can hear Clinton saying. “The Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. I know some Republicans might not like that, but the fight is over.”

That’s a compelling argument, especially to voters not closely affiliated with either party who are likely to be swayed by the sheer amount of validation Clinton can point to regarding the law.

All of that, of course, is a bit down the road.

For now, Obama — after five years of efforts that cost his party control of Congress and inflicted deep down-ballot losses — has seen the law that bears his name and that will be his signature policy legacy, no matter what he does in the remainder of his second term, validated in a massively high-profile way.

“This is health care in America,” Obama declared Thursday.

He’s right. n

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

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ON THE COVER Rachel Sienkowski, 21, is a junior at Michigan State University.

Sometime after a tailgate party, she woke up in her dorm with a man she didn’t know. Photograph

by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Hillary Clinton won’t back down

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Will that unyielding mind-set help her make history, or sabotage her again?

K ENT B ABB New York BY

H

illary Rodham Clinton looked into their eyes, her voice dropping. “I have to confess,” she said, and the group surrounding her in this little makeshift room leaned in.

Usually the atrium at PS/IS 41 is a community area, kids’ voices echoing off the walls. On this day, it was a political proving ground: Clinton alongside Chirlane McCray, first lady of New York City, was helping to persuade parents to talk or sing to their children.

Clinton was days away from launching a second run for president, determined to win what she lost in spectacular fashion in 2008. But her won’t-back-down resolve — the quality that could

make her America’s first female president if it doesn’t sabotage her first — was nowhere in sight as she sat with about a half-dozen parents and educators, nodding at their stories.

This was a chance, in a carefully controlled setting, to project the warmer, more intimate persona she would be unveiling in Iowa and New Hampshire. She may have gotten her first campaign for the nomination wrong, but now she was planning to get it right.

So here she was, in a neighborhood dominated by public housing projects, trying to connect not as President Obama’s first secretary of state, or an ex-U.S. senator, or the former first lady of the United States. Nor did she want to be seen as a $200,000-per-speech megastar driven in a private van to a

school where nearly all 525 students get free or subsidized lunch.

Clinton was presenting herself as a mother, just like those gathered around the table with her.

And maybe if she said it often enough — believed it hard enough — voters would see her as she likes to see herself.

And, anyway, about that confession: She can’t sing a lick. Years ago, Clinton told the group, amid laughter, that she would rock young Chelsea to sleep by singing her favorite song, “Moon River.”

Her daughter was less than appreciative, her tiny finger pressing into her mother’s lips.

“No sing, Mommy,” Clinton recalled Chelsea saying, some of the child’s first words. Clinton was a young mother then and is a 67year-old grandmother now, and

Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has tried to come off as warmer and more intimate than in her first campaign.

my, how fast the time goes. The parents nodded.

Clinton was grooving now, comfortable and in command, offering a tender version of herself in a place where no one would challenge her about e-mails, or the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, or the ugly political fights of the past four decades. Where no one would bring up the psychological Kevlar she wears into every room, the unyielding mind-set that has defined her since she was a child and still fuels her now.

“She will not give up when she knows she’s right,” says Sara Ehrman, a friend of Clinton since the 1970s. “She will not give up. And it is admirable — and annoying.”

Or as Clinton put it in a 2012 e-mail to a State Department col-

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POLITICS league bracing to testify on Benghazi before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Well, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger (as I have rationalized for years), so just survive and you’ll have triumphed.”

‘Go back out there’ Fifteen miles from Chicago, jets descended over the northern suburbs into O’Hare International Airport. It was the early 1950s, and a 4-year-old girl danced alone in her family’s back yard, reaching for the rumbling sky.

This is one of young Hillary’s earliest memories, recounted decades later in her first memoir, “Living History.” She declined to be interviewed for this article, but in her book she remembers her mother, Dorothy, asking why she wasn’t playing with other kids.

Hillary started to cry. The problem was a girl named Suzy. Suzy was bigger, meaner, used to roughhousing with her older brothers, Hillary told her mother.

She was afraid of her.

“Go back out there,” Dorothy Rodham ordered her oldest child and only daughter, nudging her out the door. Dorothy reminded her that if Suzy bullied her, she had her mother’s permission to punch back. “You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”

Though Dorothy deferred always to her opinionated, domineering husband, Hugh, she was perhaps the household’s strongest soul. She had spent her own childhood mostly alone, taking care of her sister when their parents left them alone for days.

Dorothy was 8 when her parents put her on a train in Illinois bound for California, shuffled off to live with relatives.

Years later, Dorothy watched from behind a curtain as Hillary marched out to confront Suzy.

The bully backed down.

Hillary began defying the limits imposed on girls in that era. She dreamed of becoming an astronaut or a baseball player and ran unsuccessfully for student government president at Maine South High. When she later applied to law school at Harvard and Yale, a well-known professor told her at a cocktail party that Harvard didn’t need more women, Hillary’s final nudge toward Yale.

Still, Hillary sometimes harbored self-doubt. She was a fresh-

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Then Bill, seeking a second term as governor, lost to a Republican challenger named Frank White, and advisers put some of the blame on Hillary’s refusal to be a genteel Southern wife. When Bill announced he would seek the office again in 1982, his wife began calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton — a notable compromise.

Winning, she realized, was more important. A few months later, Bill retook the Governor’s Mansion in a landslide.

FRANK JOHNSTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

“You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards,” her mother once told a young Hillary Clinton. man at Wellesley College, an allgirls school near Boston, when her first math and French grades came back. They weren’t A’s. She called home, holding back tears.

Hugh Rodham told her to come on back to Illinois. Dorothy, who had never felt in control of her own life, said no such thing. She had been offered no opportunities; she wasn’t going to let her only daughter give up on hers.

“I realized,” Clinton would later write, “that I really couldn’t go home again.”

Starting a new life Hillary moved to Washington after graduating from Yale Law School, where she had met a bright and charismatic student named Bill Clinton. She worked as a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, then for the House committee investigating Watergate. Home during those years had been Ehrman’s Capitol Hill townhouse, where the roommates often talked about the future. Hillary’s ambition was among the most popular topics.

“She wanted a job. She wanted a life. She wanted to be recognized for what she was qualified to do,”

Ehrman recalls.

Now, as they drove south, Ehrman was trying to talk her friend out of a decision that contradicted all that: Hillary wanted to join Bill in Arkansas, where he was a law professor with lofty ambitions of his own. Ehrman agreed to drive her because it gave Ehrman time to talk Hillary out of it.

They arrived in Fayetteville, Hillary taking her first steps toward a new life that would eventually make her one of the most powerful — and most controversial — women in the world. Ehrman, still certain her friend was making a terrible mistake, sat in her car and cried.

Hillary married Bill in 1975 but refused to take on Clinton’s last name, raising eyebrows in Arkansas. When Bill ran for governor in 1978, advisers urged her to rethink such a trivial matter, but the fact was, this wasn’t trivial to her. Hillary, who would go on to be the first female partner at Rose Law Firm, wouldn’t be talked out of flying to New York a month before Chelsea was born to speak alongside board members of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital — and she wouldn’t be talked out of this.

The Clintons — Hillary, Bill and daughter Chelsea — depart the White House for a Thanksgiving holiday getaway at Camp David in 1997.

No pretending She stood alone sometimes looking out a White House window, watching as tourists strolled by. Years of fighting had helped Bill become America’s 42nd president, but it had left Hillary with more enemies than allies.

Hillary had demanded her own 20-person staff and West Wing offices, unprecedented for a first lady, and was charged with running point on a task force to reform the country’s health-care system.

During the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, no topic was off limits.

The Clintons’ marriage was dissected as a union not of love but of shared ambitions; she was depicted as a ruthless woman who craved power. Her approval rating dipped to 44 percent, and at a 1994 tobacco rally in Kentucky, a Hillary effigy was burned.

Blair suggested she could spare herself headaches by being friendlier to the press and dabbling in fewer political decisions.

“I know how to compromise, I have compromised,” Blair wrote that Hillary told her during a phone call. “I gave up my name, got contact lenses, but I’m not going to try to pretend to be somebody that I’m not.”

During the months before the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, she insisted on traveling to the Beijing event — a move that had the potential to offend the Chinese. When Democrats balked and the White House hesitated, she threatened to board a commercial flight and attend anyway, not as first lady but as a private American.

The administration relented, and she delivered the conference’s signature speech. “Human rights are women’s rights,” she told the gathering, “and women’s rights are human rights.”

Then, in 1998, two years into continues on next page

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from previous page

his second term, Bill Clinton admitted to having an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The scandal led to impeachment and to the spectacle of Hillary, who had once dismissed questions about her marriage by declaring that she wasn’t “some little woman standing by my man,” doing exactly that.

No shrinking from a fight A black van traveled out of New York last month and into the heart of America, through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, stopping at one point in Joliet, Ill., about 40 miles from the Chicago suburb where a mother once nudged her daughter outside to confront her tormentor.

The last of Dorothy’s fight had left her in 2011 as Hillary Clinton held her dying mother’s hand. For the first time, she would have to take on all those Suzys alone, no one but herself to push her.

Clinton, who visited 112 countries in four years as secretary of state, announced her second run in mid-April, and Hillary haters cracked their knuckles. Her motives will again be scrutinized, and so, of course, will her marriage. Can she go the distance, avoiding the traps and attacks, including the self-inflicted ones?

And what if she wins — making her, at 69, not just the first woman but the second-oldest president to assume office?

“I’m aware I may not be the youngest candidate in this race,” Clinton told Democrats in South Carolina in May. “But I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years. You’re not going to see me turn white in the White House. And you’re also not going to see me shrink from a fight.”

On a Tuesday in Iowa, seven vehicles passed grain silos, taking Exit 63 toward a community college in the rural town of Monticello. A small crowd waited outside to see which Hillary Clinton would emerge from the back seat: the defiant but locked-in former first lady, the controlled and locked-down secretary of state — or some new version of a candidate everyone thinks they know.

The van pulled up inside a loading area, and Clinton stepped out and waved. Then a door opened, the same as it did more than six decades earlier in Park Ridge, and she walked through it. n

Republicans outraged, but relieved, by subsidy ruling BY

K AREN T UMULTY

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ven as Republicans rose in a chorus of outrage Thursday over the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to gut the unpopular Affordable Care Act, party leaders were privately breathing a sigh of relief.

Had the court gone the other way, Republicans would have faced their most serious governing challenge since taking control of both houses of Congress earlier this year.

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie called it “a bad legal outcome, but a good political outcome” for Republicans. But he said it will put pressure on his party to come up with a specific alternative to the law ahead of the 2016 election.

David Winston, who advises the GOP congressional leadership, said, “Ultimately, the challenge for Republicans is not just how to deal with this law, but where’s the direction? Where are the alternatives?”

More than 6 million Americans — most of them in conservative states — would have suddenly been without the government subsidies that make health insurance affordable under the act.

And it would have primarily been the responsibility of Republicans — a party that is on record as favoring repeal of the law — to come up with a solution that could pass both houses of Congress and be signed into law by President Obama. A decision to severely undermine the law also would have presented a tricky political challenge for conservative governors and legislatures, and for more than a dozen GOP candidates running for president.

Not that the issue will go away.

“ObamaCare is fundamentally broken, increasing health-care costs for millions of Americans,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement issued by his office. “Today’s ruling doesn’t change that fact.”

Indeed, the initial round of

rhetoric after the court decision suggested that the ruling might have inflamed the right, and given the growing field of Republican presidential contenders a new battle cry. While all are on record as opposing the law, none has come up with a detailed plan of what they believe should replace it.

“Our Founding Fathers didn’t create a ‘do-over’ provision in our Constitution that allows unelect-

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A supporter of the Affordable Care Act cheers the Supreme Court ruling that the law’s insurance subsidies are legal.

ed, Supreme Court justices the power to circumvent Congress and rewrite bad laws,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said in a statement while campaigning in southern Iowa.

“The decision turns both the rule of law and common sense on its head,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a statement. “As president, I would make it my mission to repeal it, and propose real solutions to our health care system.”

The justices, in a surprisingly strong 6-to-3 vote, ruled that subsidies should remain available not only in 16 states that have set up their own health insurance marketplaces but also in the 34 states — most of them dominated by Republicans — that have refused to do so, relying on the federal government exchange instead.

That might sound like a technical issue — resolving ambiguous language in the bill that Obama signed into law in 2010. But the practical effect of taking govern-

ment assistance from people who bought their coverage on the federal exchanges could have made the entire law unworkable, because so many consumers would have found their new insurance policies unaffordable, many health-care experts said.

“Today, Democrats, and my guess is Republicans, are breathing one gigantic sigh of relief,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Making the politics more treacherous is the fact that Americans hold paradoxical views of the law and the choice that was before the court.

In a May Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 39 percent of respondents said they approve of the law, while 54 percent said they opposed it. But when asked whether the court should take away subsidies in states that rely on the federal exchanges, 55 percent said the justices should not, and only 38 percent said they should.

Rick Wilson, a Florida-based strategist for Republican statewide candidates nationwide, said he was “relieved by the decision,” which has given his party of reprieve from having to navigate those straits.

“What I don’t want is a political environment where for the next year we’re in a ditch with people asking, ‘What’s your exact healthcare plan?,’ and then when we present one it gets torn apart,” Wilson said. “Anyone who thinks that’s a great political frame to put yourself in for 2016 hasn’t ever done an election.”

Former Michigan governor John Engler, a Republican who now heads the Business Roundtable, said that pressure will remain to fix individual elements of the law that are opposed by many in both parties, including the tax it would impose on high-cost “Cadillac” health policies and its tax on medical devices.

But he said of the court decision: “What this means is that probably major changes in the Affordable Care Act will be debated in the 2016 election.” n

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An incomplete legacy on guns, race

BY G REG J AFFE AND J ULIET E ILPERIN

T

he killing of nine black worshipers in South Carolina has compelled President Obama to look back with anger, then melancholy and finally some distance at the two most intractable issues he has faced as president: guns and race.

In the White House briefing room, at a fundraiser at the home of a movie star, before a roomful of the country’s mayors and in a garage in Pasadena, Calif., Obama has reflected not only on the Charleston shootings but also on the missed opportunities and unfinished business of his presidency.

“Increasingly, I’ve spent my time thinkingabouthowdoItrytobreak out of these old patterns that our politics have fallen into,” Obama said in Pasadena in a podcast interview Monday. He wondered how to have a normal conversation that’s “not this battle in a steel cage between one side and another.”

The pain laid bare by Charleston has led Obama to a frank assessment of his presidency and an acknowledgment that he hasn’t been the unifying, transformational figure many hoped he would be.

On Friday, he was at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where he delivered another eulogy, this time for a pastor who was one of the earliest supporters of the movement that sent Obama to the White House in 2008. That campaign’s most enthusiastic backers believed that a newly mobilized and enthusiastic citizenry could radically improve the nature of the political debate in Washington.

Just hours after the June 17 shootings in Charleston, Obama stood before the cameras and spoke mournfully of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the eight others who were killed.

Obama was thinking about the dead. But his frustration and disgust in that moment sprang just as much from the killing of 20 elementary students in Connecticut three years earlier, his aides said.

Obama has described the Newtown massacre as the “worst day”

LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS

After Charleston, Obama takes a frank look at the two most intractable issues under his watch of his presidency and Congress’s inability to pass gun control legislation as his most stinging defeat.

“Let’s be clear,” he said in the briefing room, his voice edged with anger. “At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now.”

The next day, the president bristled at the suggestion that his remarks had amounted to surrender to the gun lobby. “I am not resigned,” he told a gathering of the nation’s mayors in San Francisco.

Indeed, he suggested that lawmakers’ and lobbyists’ resistance on gun control had cost American lives.

By week’s end, Obama was in Pasadena for a podcast interview with Marc Maron.“What happens

now?” Maron asked.

In the near term, Obama said, gun sales increase and gun manufacturers “make out like bandits, partly because this fear that’s churned up that the federal government and the black helicopters are all coming to get your guns.”

For Obama, the failure on gun control was now a symptom of a larger political disease, one he had hoped to cure but has paradoxically grown worse on his watch. “The problem is that there’s a big gap between who we are as people and how our politics expresses itself.

You get a negative feedback loop . . . then the public withdraws, and you get even worse political gridlock and polarization.”

If Obama sought to curb gun violence through direct legislative action in Washington, he has chosen a more indirect route on race.

Few anticipated that his election would become a flashpoint for racial anxiety. “If you are a white man in America, this coun-

President Obama speaks about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., at the White House on Dec. 14, 2012.

try is changing dramatically. You have always been in charge,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “So there is something to white men feeling like something has been taken away from them.”

That awareness has bred a sense of caution, one heightened during the first months of Obama’s presidency when he criticized a white police officer who confronted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who is black.

Since then, Obama has spoken about race in fits and starts, gradually becoming more explicit. He compared himself to teenager Trayvon Martin, who was killed in Florida, and after the riots in Baltimore urged Americans to search their souls on the question of race.

After the Charleston killings, he talked about the long shadow of slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination that exists “in almost every institution of our lives.”

The conversation showed he has become more at ease talking about race. “I know what I’m doing, and I’m fearless,” Obama said.

But he still recognizes the risk that his intervention can backfire.

Obama’s prescriptions for racial reconciliation have focused on modest and largely noncontroversial policy initiatives. “Early childhood education works,” he said in the podcast. “That’s one way to break the legacy of racism and poverty.” In San Francisco he touted his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which provides grants to programs aimed at men of color.

The small advances, however, haven’t erased his larger frustrations with Washington.

“Congress doesn’t work the way it should,” Obama said at a recent fundraiser. “. . . Folks are more interested in scoring political points than getting things done.”

Even during the early, optimistic days of his presidency, Obama reminded the group, he never promised to fix Washington alone.

“I didn’t say, ‘Yes, I can,’ ” he said.

“I said — what?” In 2008, stadiums full of people screamed it. Now it fell to a small party of Democrats to sing the chorus.

“Yes, we can,” they said. n

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NATION

Is renting the new homeownership?

Since the housing bust, more of us are living in someone else’s house — and the trend is building

BY

E MILY B ADGER

T

he majority of American households still own their homes, a fact that will remain true as far into the future as demographers and economists can see. But the balance of homeowners and renters has been shifting in the U.S. in ways that have already altered the demographics of renting, the affordability of rental housing and the kind of new housing we build.

This shift, underway since the housing bust, is flipping conventional images of what it means to rent: Renters are now living, by the millions, in single-family homes that were once owned. Wealthy households far from the stereotype of struggling twenty-somethings are renting, too. So are the parents of those twenty-somethings.

It’s too soon to say, though, whether this new picture — an American housing market tilting steadily toward more renters — represents a sane correction from the housing bubble, or an overcorrection that will only bring new problems. We don’t know exactly how many of these renters would prefer to own if only they could. In a country where household wealth (and financial stability in retirement) is often bound up in housing, what will happen to the growing number of people who never become homeowners?

“What is the natural, normal rate of homeownership? No one knows the answer to that question,” says Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which released its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report this past week. “At some level, what it comes down to is how many people would like to own — who actually objectively have the ability to own in the sense of being able sustain it — and can’t? We don’t know.”

The U.S. homeownership rate, over 69 percent at the height of the housing bubble, had fallen by the beginning of 2015 all the way to 63.7 percent. That means over the last 10 years that the U.S. has lost all of the homeownership gains of the previous 20 years. It means, according to

Homeownership rate (percent)

Change in homeownership rate (percentage points)

JCHS TABULATIONS OF U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, HOUSING VACANCY SURVEYS

“We think, ‘Oh, it’s millennials driving it.’ And it’s not. It’s across a broader spectrum of ages and income.”

Chris Herbert of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies

the report, that the 2010s are on pace to be the strongest decade for renter growth in history.

That steep drop has put the national homeownership rate back where it last was in 1993.

Effectively, 1.7 million fewer households owned their homes by 2015 than did at the bubble’s peak.

“If you look at the long sweep of the last several decades, a five percentage-point move in the homeownership rate is substantial,”

Herbert says.

The large baby boom generation — now in the over-50 years when homeownership rates are typically high — has helped prop up the national homeownership rate, masking what has been a precipitous decline for younger groups. The homeownership rate for 35-to-44-year-olds hasn’t been this low since the 1960s.

The growth in renters has come from singles and families,

twenty-somethings and retirees, moderate-income households and wealthier ones, too. In fact, households headed by someone over 55 are responsible for 42 percent of the growth in renters over the last decade. One in three new renters since 2011 comes from the wealthiest fourth of all U.S. households.

“We think, ‘Oh, it’s millennials driving it,’ ” Herbert says. “And it’s not. It’s across a broader spectrum of ages and income.”

All of this rental demand — which may alter how we think about who rents — is straining the country’s rental housing supply. If rental costs feel like they’re rising fast, blame (in part) the declining homeownership rate. Rental vacancies are as scarce as they’ve been in nearly 20 years, according to the Harvard report. Last year, rental prices rose twice as fast as inflation.

The rental supply simply hasn’t kept pace with these broad changes in how many Americans want (or need) to rent. A lot of this demand, Herbert says, was initially met by single-family homes that were converted to rentals. More than half of the growth in renters from 2004 to 2013 came from households living in the kind of detached single-family homes Americans have long associated with homeownership.

The building industry has increasingly responded with new multi-family buildings, the vast majority of which are now intended for renters.

But that new construction hasn’t been enough to keep pace with the rapid changes in rental demand. And most of these apartments have been built for the high end of the market.

“As we keep going, there’s got to be a limit to that,” Herbert says.

“How many luxury rentals can you build?”

For reasons of demographics and debt, the homeownership rate is likely to continue falling for years to come, further pushing these trends, and giving us — and the home-building industry — a lot of time to think about what a more heavily rental America really means. n

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Teen takes the plunge into new life BY

V ALERIE S TRAUSS

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he was the quintessential recruit for the women’s swim team at Harvard: a nimble breaststroker with a fierce work ethic and sharp intellect. But when Schuyler Bailar jumps into the school’s Olympicsize pool this fall, he instead will be a member of the men’s team, the first openly transgender collegiate swimmer in U.S. history.

Emerging from a tortuous year of self-reckoning and a lifelong quest to feel comfortable in his own skin, Bailar, 19, will be navigating far more than the usual freshman challenges; he also will be a pioneer and role model as society openly grapples with shifting mores about traditional male/ female gender lines.

Bailar, a 5-foot-8, 170-pound athlete, struggled for years through depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and a broken back. As a girl, Bailar competed at a high level — setting a national relay record on a girls’ team with future Olympic champion Katie Ledecky — but Bailar was confused and pained.

“I was a very lost kid who didn’t understand why I spent my entire childhood being a boy but not really, one who focused intently on studies and swimming to distract from anything that came up in my mind,” said Bailar, who grew up in Virginia and attended the private Georgetown Day School in the District. “I was caught between two worlds.”

He isn’t anymore. Though he bears scars across his chest from surgery to remove his breasts and mammary glands — and he faces some fears about living as a man — he feels better now than he ever has.

And the world, so far, has been far more accepting than he imagined.

His parents, Terry Hong and Gregor Bailar, told him that they loved him no matter what. When he told his Korean grandmother that he was transgender, she said: “Well, I knew that. Now I have two grandsons from your mother.”

Switching squads meant that Bailar would go from being one of the school’s strongest female

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST

After originally being recruited by Harvard for the women’s swim team, he’ll compete as a man swimmers to possibly the back of the pack on the men’s team. “It meant giving up the goals I had set for myself as a swimmer,” Bailar said. “But I had to let go of those goals. This isn’t a choice.”

That Bailar is being welcomed into Harvard’s swim community — male and female alike — speaks not only to the team’s culture but also to how quickly a national discussion about the complex nature of biological sex and gender has moved into the mainstream, pushed in part by the public transformation of Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned from famous male Olympian Bruce Jenner to female this year.

Bailar says it is difficult to explain how one can be physically born female but feel male; he just knows who he is. He is now taking testosterone, which he says makes him feel moody. As for genital reassignment surgery, he said he is not considering it right now.

“It is important to understand that ‘fully transitioning’ does not

include genital reassignment surgery for everyone,” he said. “Fully transitioning is a process defined by each individual.”

Bailar has long thought about his gender. As far back as he can remember, he says, he felt he was in the wrong body and couldn’t imagine growing up to be a woman.

In high school, Bailar decided to try to be the girl she believed society wanted her to be.

Swimming was his life and his escape. But in August 2012, Bailar broke his back while bicycling, derailing him and keeping him out of the water for months. He developed an eating disorder, and his body-image problems deepened.

Even getting back to the pool — and ultimately joining a girls’ relay team that set a U.S. record at the time — could not provide relief.

By April 2014, his thoughts had turned suicidal and it was clear he needed to take a gap year, which Stephanie Morawski, the Harvard women’s head coach who recruited him, accepted without hesita-

Schuyler Bailar, 19, works out in McLean, Va. A coach had a piece of advice for the first openly transgender U.S. collegiate swimmer: “Be on a team that makes you happy.” Growing up as a girl, Bailar, above in 2002, felt as if he was in the wrong body.

tion. Bailar spent 131 days in a Miami eating disorders treatment center, facing his gender confusion, too.

In September 2014, when Bailar would have been starting college in Massachusetts, his father came to pick him up from a gender workshop in Miami. “I walked out, crying, and hugged him,” Bailar remembers. “He said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Dad, I think I’m transgender.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ ” Though emotionally overwhelming — Bailar spent three days in a hospital for a breakdown — he started telling people what he was going through. He had breast-removal surgery in March 2015, and he moved to Cambridge to assemble a medical support team and to get to know Harvard’s swim community.

“The common thought amongst all of us was that Schuyler is Schuyler,” said Regan Kology, who was recruited to the women’s team at the same time as Bailar. “He’s the same, genuine, funny, kind-hearted person, no matter who he chooses to identify as.”

The NCAA, the governing body of collegiate sports, has guidelines for transgender athletes, with different rules for transgendered males and females to avoid creating an “unfair competitive advantage” on gender-separated teams.

Bailar fit the criteria for participating on the men’s swim team.

The finality of the decision scared Bailar. In April, Morawski pushed him to choose. His journal entry for April 27, 2015, said: “Her point was SO WHAT about the swimming fast piece. Be on a team that makes you happy. Make the decision sooner than later because it’s driving you crazy. . . . Just jump.”

He jumped. He understands it will be difficult, but the swimming is the easy part. Knowing he is a man is one thing; learning to live like one and being accepted are his next big challenges.

“I can’t live inauthentically anymore,” Bailar said. “So do I give up my goal of being a great women’s swimmer to be a decent male swimmer at best? Yes. There is pride and glory in this path, too.” n

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Climate-change doubters lose big one

BY A NTHONY F AIOLA AND C HRIS M OONEY

Vatican City

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ope Francis was about to back the science behind human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind.

A French doubter who wrote a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions.

After securing a high-level meeting at the Vatican, he was told that, space permitting, he could join. But five days before the April summit, de Larminat received an e-mail saying there was no space left. It came after other scientists insisted he had no business being there.

“They did not want to hear an off note,” de Larminat said.

The incident highlights how climate-change doubters tried and failed to alter the landmark document unveiled this month — one that saw the pope fuse faith and reason and come to the conclusion that “denial” is wrong.

It marked the latest blow for those seeking to stop the reformminded train that has become Francis’s papacy. It is one that has reinvigorated liberal Catholics even as it has sowed the seeds of resentment and dissent inside and outside the Vatican’s ancient walls.

Yet the battle lost over climate change also suggests how hard it may be for critics to blunt the power of a man who has become something of a juggernaut in an institution where change tends to unfold over decades, even centuries. More than anything, to those who doubt the human impact of global warming, the position staked out by Francis means a major defeat.

“This was their Waterloo,” said

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Efforts to alter landmark papal document were no match for a long-determined Pope Francis Kert Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, who has been tracking deniers for years. “They wanted the encyclical not to happen. And it happened.”

The pope’s interest in the topic dates to his days as a bishop in Buenos Aires, where Francis, officials say, was struck by the effects of floods and unsanitary conditions on Argentine shantytowns known as “misery villages.”

In January, Francis officially announced his goal of drafting the encyclical — saying he wanted to make a “contribution” to the debate ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in December.

But efforts of skeptics to influence the document appear to have come considerably later — in April — and, maybe, too late.

In late April, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a group that serves as a hub of skepticism on the science of global warming, sent a delegation to the Vatican, said Heartland communications director Jim Lakely.

“It was a side event,” he said.

“We were outside the walls of the Vatican. We were at a hotel — literally, I could throw a football into St. Peter’s Square.”

Seven scientists and other experts gave speeches at the Heartland event, raising doubts about various aspects of the scientific consensus on climate change, even as several also urged the pope not to take sides in the debate. Lakely said his group did not see much of its argument reflected in the final document.

One member of the Heartland delegation was E. Calvin Beisner, a theologian and founder of an evangelical group called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. In April, the group launched an “open letter” to the pope, signed by more than 100 scholars and theologians, arguing that climate-change models “provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming, and therefore no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming by restricting the use of fossil fuels or any other means.”

Rio de Janeiro and other cities along the ocean will be affected by a rise in sea levels if climate change continues unabated. Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change calls for protection of the world’s oceans and climate via “enforceable international agreements.”

Based on the people he recently appointed to his council for science, Francis was also seen to have made up his mind on the question of global warming. Some prominent conservatives — particularly economic and environmental conservatives — were consulted by the Vatican during the process, but “many were sort of shocked that none of their contributions made it in there,” said Raymond Arroyo, news director at the Catholic mega- channel EWTN. Instead, the pope sought to build on the progressive environmental platforms established by his immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II. For advice, he turned to a number of scientific advisers who support the consensus that human activity is warming the Earth. They included Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

A professed atheist, Schellnhuber nevertheless saw a chance for a massive coup in the climate debate if a sitting pope issued an ode to Earth and the ills of carbon emissions. But not everyone, he said, seemed to want the encyclical to take sides.

He said he was stunned to hear that de Larminat, the French doubter, almost made it to the key Vatican climate summit in April.

To him, it showed that “even within the Vatican, there were some people who would like to see something that presented both sides.”

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has denied that there was significant internal opposition to the pope’s encyclical. He insisted that, rather than from inside Vatican City, the primary pressure against its message had come from climate-change deniers — particularly in the United States.

“But it is clear that this pope is very courageous,” said Sánchez Sorondo, who, like Francis, is an Argentine. “He is not a politician.

He is not a diplomat. He is someone who is willing to say what others are afraid to say.” n

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Haitians flee as tensions grow J OSHUA P ARTLOW Ouanaminthe, Haiti BY

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everal mornings a week for the past five years, Smith Laflur has left his one-room cinder-block shack, walked past the stray goats and the cherry tree, down the quiet dirt lanes and out into the shouts and motorcycle roar of this clamoring town.

He has stepped around the smouldering trash piles and the clothes drying on the bank of the Massacre River, which separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic, and hopped up onto the border bridge on his way to another day’s work. At the metal gate, he hasn’t shown a passport — or papers of any kind — but mentioned his boss, a customs official who owns several houses, and with that he has crossed into Dajabon.

Over the years, Laflur has built a swimming pool, erected concrete walls, fixed toilets and swept the patio at the Drink Bar — labor that feeds his five children and is far harder to find in his native Haiti.

But his daily routine, and the livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, has been put at risk by new immigration rules that intend to oust Haitians who don’t have documentation to stay in the Dominican Republic.

“Everything we can get is here,” Laflur said at one of the Drink Bar’s wooden tables. “I don’t know how to find work in Haiti.”

In the days before the June 17 deadline for undocumented migrants to register for residency permits — if they could prove they lived in the Dominican Republic before 2011 — many predicted police roundups and waves of deportations. So far, what has happened is a voluntary departure by more than 12,000 Haitians who fear a crackdown could turn violent.

Ouanaminthe is now the scene of returning Haitian families packed into trucks lashed high with suitcases and burlap sacks. In their rush to leave, they abandoned furniture and appliances; some said immigration agents stole money or threatened harm if they didn’t flee. Smith Blanco, a 23-year-old who worked as a cook

JOSHUA PARTLOW/THE WASHINGTON POST

Workers returning to avoid Dominican Republic deportation worry about how they will survive in Santo Domingo, stood in a dirt lot with his belongings, not sure where to go next.

The Dominican government has encouraged these departures, with free bus rides to the border.

The roots of the current immigration policies date to a 2004 law that was challenged in court and not implemented until last year, during the presidency of Danilo Medina. The law calls for registering the estimated 600,000 people — Haitians or people of Haitian descent — without documents.

A quarter of the country’s health budget is consumed by Haitians living in the country illegally and not paying taxes, presidential spokesman Roberto Rodriguez Marchena said, and more than 40 percent of the births along the border are to Haitian women.

The government has described its new program as measured — and with an eye to avoiding disruptions to industries relying on manual labor and to the human rights of Haitians. There are ex-

ceptions for retirees and students.

So far, 288,000 people have begun the registration process. The remainder, roughly the same number, are subject to deportations.

The country’s far northern border has seen some of the worst moments in the troubled relationship between these island-locked neighbors. When sugar prices fell in the 1930s, the Dominican government sought to drive out Haitian cane cutters. Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered a bloody military campaign that became known as “The Harvest,” with soldiers slaughtering more than 10,000 Haitians along the Massacre River using machetes.

Leonilda Jus moved with her aunt to the Dominican Republic decades after that, in 1974, but the jobs available were the same. She grew up cutting sugar cane, picking tomatoes, digging onions. She gave birth to 12 children there, nine of whom survived, and eventually moved from the outskirts of the capital to the northern city of

Haitians return this month from the Dominican Republic, where many found it easier to find work.

Hundreds of thousands are fleeing a government crackdown on undocumented migrants — a crackdown they fear could become violent.

Santiago. The sugar cane industry has shriveled, but her sons found jobs in construction and on farms.

On Saturday, two of them, Thony Dume, 29, and Felix Mondesir, 24, worked on an addition to the rented shack in Ouanaminthe where they had moved four days before, to make room for more relatives returning from the Dominican Republic.

“It wasn’t a problem living there before. The police and many others knew me,” Dume said. “But now things are too hot.”

In March, before deciding to move, Dume stood in line at one of the government’s immigration offices to register himself — Ministry of Interior and Police number DO-29-000345. That gave him 45 days to prove he had the right to live in the Dominican Republic, even though he was born there.

During that time, he needed to get written documentation from seven neighbors to vouch for his existence, plus testimony from a store where he shopped, and proof of residency from his landlord, in addition to a birth certificate. To hire a lawyer to complete the process would cost up to $900, he said, equal to what he could earn in five months at his job milking cows.

Instead, he got on a bus and headed for Dajabon.

On Saturday morning, Smith Laflur headed for the bridge. It was his son’s third birthday, and if he was going to afford a present, he needed to get to the Drink Bar. He pushed through the crowd to the border gate. He told him who he was, and his boss’s name, but this time the guard shook his head.

“Not today,” he said. “Things aren’t good right now.”

Laflur argued for a while, then turned away and sat on the railing over the river. In the past, he’d considered trying to get to the United States, but he was afraid of the open ocean. He didn’t have the money to apply for a Haitian passport, and his boss in the Dominican Republic had never helped him with a work permit. He was tired of sneaking around.

“I want to arrive in a country with my own papers. I want to be able to walk as a free man.” n

COLLEGE SEXUAL ASSAULT

Survivors’ rage, regret “I told him to stop. He thought I was joking. I froze.”

“I never expected that from my friend.”

Kristina Erickson, Beloit College (Wis.)

Katie MacPherson, Kent State University

PHOTOS BY EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“I wasn’t even thinking about not getting away from him. I was determined to fight my way out.”

“If I could’ve made a decision, I wouldn’t have chosen to do that.”

Mikala Burt, Howard University

Rachel Sienkowski, Michigan State University

BY EMMA BROWN, NICK ANDERSON, SUSAN SVRLUGA AND STEVE HENDRIX | EAST LANSING, MICH.

She remembers doing shots of liquor in her dorm room before heading out to a football tailgate party, where she got blackout drunk. When she came to, she was groggy, standing in the bathroom of her dorm room, looking in the mirror. Her hair was a mess. Behind her was a man she didn’t recognize, staring back at her and then slipping out the door. ¶ It was just a few weeks into her freshman year at Michigan State University, and Rachel Sienkowski had become a survivor — but of what, she wasn’t sure. A sexual assault? A rape? ¶ All she knew was that her head was bleeding.

Blood had spattered the ceiling of her bedroom and stained her bed sheets, her pillows, her zebra­striped comforter. She was crying. “I was very confused,” Sienkowski says now, nearly three years later. “I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was or how I got there or how long I had been there.” ¶ Sienkowski’s story, and her confusion about what happened to her on that boozy football Saturday, echo the descriptions many women and men gave of their sexual assaults during their time in college. ¶ After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation

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Sarah Jane Boyer, 25, says that while attending Southwestern College in Kansas, a friend had sex with her even though she was too drunk to consent. conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.

Their personal accounts portray college as a world where unwelcome sexual experiences, ranging from fondling to rape, are so commonplace that they are almost mundane. Like Sienkowski, many victims said they were assaulted soon after they arrived on campus, as they embraced newfound freedoms, and many of them had been so drunk that they couldn’t remember much, if anything, of what happened.

Yet however gauzy their memories, they knew they had been violated. Many survivors described their experiences as scars that stayed with them for months or years, often seeding anxiety that interfered with academics and relationships.

Other survivors’ stories — including about groping, coerced sex and rape within long-term

relationships — illuminate the dizzying breadth of experiences that make it impossible to generalize about sexual misconduct in college.

A student at California’s University of La Verne, a devout Muslim who was a virgin and had never had alcohol, said she didn’t recognize a sexual advance until it was too late.

A University of Connecticut student said she told her boyfriend she wasn’t ready for sex, only to wake up from a deep sleep to discover he was raping her.

A woman at a public university in the Midwest said she pretended to be asleep as her roommate’s friend, a man staying overnight, touched her lips, her arm, her face. He didn’t stop until morning.

“It was seven hours of hell,” she said.

Many female victims blamed a pervasive lack of respect for women and a culture of expected sex. The majority never reported their assaults to their colleges or to police, meaning that their stories don’t show up in crime statistics and have never been investigated.

Some said they didn’t report the attacks because they wrestled with hidden guilt, feeling partly to blame for the crimes committed against them as they grappled with the aftermath.

A student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan said she was raped in the shower after a day of drinking at a house on the lake. A stranger forced his way into the locked bathroom and then joined her in the running water. She said no but feared she should have done more. She never reported the attack.

“I could have screamed, I could have yelled for help, or hit him or scratched him or something,” the student said. “I don’t feel like I did enough to prevent it.”

Sienkowski probably wouldn’t have chosen to go to police if not for the gash in the back of her head, she said. Her friends were alarmed when she walked into their room, bleeding and clad only in a bra and gym shorts. They alerted the dorm’s resident assistant, who called Michigan State University police. continues on next page

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from previous page

Sienkowski went to the hospital, where doctors stapled her wound shut and completed a rape kit, according to police records. The examination showed signs of sexual intercourse but couldn’t determine whether it had been consensual. Because Sienkowski remembered so little, police conducted multiple interviews with her friends and other witnesses to piece it together.

She and her roommate had started drinking that afternoon with shots of Bacardi rum in their dorm room.

Then she headed outside to the campus tailgate frenzy, an all-day party before Michigan State faced off against the University of Notre Dame at 8 p.m. It was a sunny Saturday in mid-September, and lawns near the stadium were crowded with thousands of people anticipating the matchup of two national powerhouses.

Sienkowski and her cousin each had a beer and a shot at a tailgate tent near the tennis courts. Then Sienkowski headed off to Spartan Stadium for the game.

She never made it.

Sometime that evening, she met a man at a tailgate party, police records say.

In interviews with campus police officers, the man described an evening of drunken consensual sex — one he said he regretted, because he had a girlfriend. And, like Sienkowski, he said he was too drunk to remember much.

The man told police that they had flirted while tailgating, holding hands and embracing as they walked through the crowd. They then headed to her dorm, he said. Police found that Sienkowski signed the man in via the receptionist’s visitor log book, the clue that led them to him.

The man told police that the two of them hadn’t discussed why they were going to the dorm, but “he thought to himself that he was going to get laid,” officers wrote.

‘A really big deal’ Even sober people can have difficulty agreeing on how and when and whether consent is established during a sexual encounter, and even sober people sometimes struggle to communicate their desires during sex. But survivors said there’s far more potential for trouble when drinking is involved.

A person incapacitated by drugs or alcohol cannot legally consent to sex; sex with someone in such condition is rape, according to the Justice Department. But where is the line between intoxication and incapacitation? And what if both people are incapacitated?

Alexandra Le Blanc and her date both got “pretty intoxicated” at a party last fall, during the first weeks of her sophomore year at American University in the District, she said. When the party ended, she found herself in a jam: A friend who was carrying her room key had left.

Her date, whom she’d met a week earlier, invited her to his house.

“When he started kissing me, it was definitely consensual,” Le Blanc said, but she didn’t

want it to go too far. “I had zero intentions of having sex that night. It’s not what I wanted to happen.”

To Le Blanc’s distress, it did: “I didn’t say no, but I didn’t really know what to do. I just kind of froze. I was visibly crying during the experience.”

She fled his house. When the man called the next day, Le Blanc told him she was upset, and he apologized. “I was a wreck. I very much felt it had to be sexual assault,” she said. She didn’t go to authorities because at the time she felt overwhelmed and confused.

The Post generally does not identify victims of alleged sex crimes. The survivors named in this

story all agreed to tell their stories publicly.

Another woman, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said she got so drunk at a party that she lost awareness of her surroundings. In a moment of clarity, she realized that she was on a couch, making out with a man who had his hands up her skirt, in her underwear.

She leaped up and ran home. He apologized afterward, and though she knew she had been violatedshecouldn’trememberenoughaboutitto be confident that he should be charged with a crime. She never reported it. “Accusing someone of sexually assaulting you is a really big deal, and I wasn’t putting him in that position,” she said.

She thinks about the other partygoers who filtered through the room that night. They laughed, she said, but they should have intervened. “They could have had my back.”

While some survivors who did not report their assaults said they didn’t want to make accusations based on alcohol-blurred memories, others were certain they would not be taken seriously or said they didn’t want scrutiny or blame.

Messages about preventing sexual assault, many survivors noted, tend to be directed at women: Don’t go out alone, don’t drink too much, don’t leave your drink unattended. Survivors said they so internalized those messages that they wondered — and others questioned — whether they should have done something different to head off attacks.

Katherine Bowman often crashed with one of her closest friends at his place, sleeping in his bed without worry. She was sure it was clear that they were just friends, but that changed one night during her sophomore year at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

She went home with her friend after drinking, got sick and passed out. She awoke at 4 a.m. in a haze, her pants off and her friend touching her. “He was orally assaulting me,” Bowman said. “I don’t know how else to put it.”

She jumped up, pulled her clothes on and went home, she said. She was angry. She hadn’t been given a chance to consent, and her intoxication had not been an invitation for sex. She ended the friendship and felt her trust in other male friends evaporate.

But she never reported the incident to authorities. She said she sees it as an unequivocal assault, but she was sure she would be dismissed because she had been drunk, because she had been in her friend’s bed, because — no matter how wronged she had been or had felt — she wouldn’t be seen as innocent.

“It’s not something my friends took seriously.

It’s not something the law would take seriously,” she said. “It’s just not something that’s seen as sexual assault.”

Bowman blamed a culture in which sexual assaultandrapearenotseenasrealcrimes.

“We live in a society that normalizes it, even celebrates it to some degree,” Bowman said.

Wrestling with rage and regret Sexual assault isn’t just something that men do to women. Survivors interviewed by The Post included men who said they were raped by wom-

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COVER STORY en, men raped by men, and women assaulted by women. And these victims said they often found themselves battling gender stereotypes afterward.

“Guys aren’t supposed to be victims,” said one male survivor, a student at a public university on the West Coast who said he was assaulted by another man who was his fraternity brother and roommate.

He left the fraternity and found another place to stay. But he was rattled and ashamed, and he didn’t want to tell the fraternity, the school or the police.

“I didn’t think anybody would believe me,” he said.

A student at Northern Illinois University said she was assaulted when she stayed with a female friend who promised a ride to Chicago the next day.

“As I was getting ready to sleep, she started to kiss me. I froze and didn’t reciprocate,” the woman said. “I turned my head away but she didn’t stop. She started touching me other places. I still didn’t say anything. After a bit, she stopped and called me a prude.”

The student, who is a lesbian, told her girlfriend what had happened. She said her girlfriend replied that if she hadn’t wanted it to happen, she would have found a way to stop it.

The student said she began to have trouble concentrating, and her grades plunged. “I was crying all the time. Everything felt like a blur and I felt dirty, small and numb,” she said. “I felt like it was my fault and like I was broken.”

Some survivors were victimized during longterm relationships.

A student at the University of Nebraska Omaha said she dated the same man for six years, starting in high school and into college. Only after she left him, moving out of their shared home at the behest of her family, did she realize that he had raped her multiple times.

“He was never super violent against me, but it was very much a lack of consent,” she said. “He would continue to berate me until I gave in.”

Once when they were driving, for example, he refused to let her out of the car until she performed oral sex. “Eventually I gave in so I could get myself out of that situation,” she said.

She began having panic attacks, and she didn’t want to leave the house. “I felt so unsafe in the relationshipallthetime,” shesaid.

Many survivors said they wrestled simultaneously with rage and regret.

“That night it was just poor decisions,” said Sarah Honos, a student at Eastern Michigan University, who got separated from friends after a night of drinking in New York City. They were headed back to their hotel in New Jersey when she got off the subway and realized that it was the wrong stop.

Her cellphone was in a friend’s purse. Honos said she remembers asking dozens of people to direct her to the Port Authority, until a man said he was going there and could show her the way.

When the bus they were on crossed the Hudson River, she started to worry. When they got off the bus, he led her into a liquor store and into the bathroom, pressed her up against a

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“I was determined to fight my way out. I was more angry than scared,” she said. He was lying down on top of her, but she somehow pulled a knee up quickly and kicked him as hard as she could in the chest. She got away.

Read more than 50 survivor stories at wapo.st/stories.

wall and raped her, she said.

She spent the rest of the night terrified, walking through the dark, asking for help and finding none.

“I take it as a lesson of humanity,” she said. “No one wouldhelpme.”

She never told anyone what happened until she was contacted by The Post.

Other women were assaulted in situations that seemed safe. Mikala Burt, a student at Howard University in the District, was on her way to study German with the guy she was seeing when they stopped off at a friend’s house one night last fall.

When she realized that he had drunk too much to drive, she didn’t think twice about curling up on a couch in the living room there; the father of one of the men, who owned the house, was home at the time. But then a man woke her up about 2 a.m., saying he wanted to have a good time. He told her he would pay $100. Disgusted, she told him to let her go, but he pinned her arms down.

She started screaming for help, but no one woke up.

Grappling with the unknown Three years after Rachel Sienkowski woke up with a strange man in her Michigan State dorm room, she thought she was done grappling with the experience. She had come to terms with not knowing exactly what had happened.

But then she read the police files.

“We were both interested in each other and hit things off right away,” the man wrote in his statement to police. “Both of us were intoxicated, but neither was more intoxicated than the other.”

The man provided officers with photographs of hickeys on his neck as evidence that Sienkowski “was very into everything that was happening,” according to his written statement.

“At no time during sexual intercourse with this girl did she ever tell me to ‘STOP’ or try to push me away,” wrote the man, who was not a student at Michigan State, according to police records. Sienkowski doesn’t know the man’s name, and it was redacted from the documents.

Authorities declined to share his identity with The Post, citing privacy restrictions.

He told police that he fell asleep and awoke when Sienkowski fell out of her loft bed onto the floor. When he got up to check on her, he found her in the bathroom, looking in the mirror. He described a scene that matched Sienkowski’s hazy memory of the same moment: He asked her why she had given him hickeys when he had a girlfriend. And he left.

Sienkowski said the man’s account made her doubt herself. “He said all of this stuff, that it was me who caused all this trouble. It was just me being drunk,” she said. “It made me feel guilty.”

Her case went to the office of the county prosecutor, Stuart Dunnings III, who said he decided not to file charges but declined further comment on the case.

There’s still plenty about that night that Sienkowski still doesn’t understand, and she is troubled by the unknowns. She doesn’t know why she blacked out, as the amount of alcohol she had that afternoon wasn’t unusual for her, she said. She still isn’t sure what caused her head injury. And she doesn’t know for sure whether she had wanted sex in the moment, when she was unaware of what was happening.

She still has trouble assigning a label to what happened to her. Even though she was too drunk to know what she was doing, rape doesn’t seem like the right term. But it wasn’t consensual sex, either.

Still, she knows she was violated, the term she says makes the most sense to her. It was not what she wanted; she can’t imagine seeking to have sex with a stranger in a crowd.

“It’s not something I would do,” she said. “If I could’ve made a decision, I wouldn’t have chosen to do that.” n

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TECHNOLOGY

Farmers feed the self-driving push BY

A NDREA P ETERSON

G

oogle has received tons of gushy press for its bubbleshaped self-driving car, although it’s still years from the showroom floor. But for years, John Deere has been selling tractors that practically drive themselves for use on farms in America’s heartland, where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way.

For a glimpse at the future, meet Jason Poole, a 34-year-old crop consultant from Kansas. After a long day of meetings earlier this month and driving five hours to watch his little girl’s softball game, he was still able to run his John Deere tractor until 2 a.m., thanks to technology that left most of the driving to a computer.

The land is hilly on Poole’s family farm, so he drives the first curved row manually and handles the turns himself to teach the layout to his tractor’s guidance system. But after that, he takes his hands off the steering wheel and allows the tractor to finish.

“We kind of laugh when we see news stories about self-driving cars, because we’ve had that for years,” Poole said.

The advancements being rolled out on the farm could soon show up next door: Your neighbor can already replace his lawn mower with the John Deere equivalent of a robotic vacuum.

The technology being sold by John Deere and some of its competitors is less technically complex than the fully driverless cars that big tech companies and car manufacturers are working on. For now, the tractors are still supposed to have a driver behind the wheel — even if they never touch it.

They’ve already started to transform farming in America and abroad: John Deere is selling autosteering and other selfguidance tech in more than 100 countries, said Cory Reed, vice president of the company’s Intelligent Solutions Group.

“John Deere is the largest operator of autonomous vehicles,” said Catherine J.K. Sandoval, a California public utilities commissioner,

JOHN DEERE VIA VISUAL SERVICES-EAST MOLINE

Tractors have a long head start in the race for autonomous vehicles at a recent event hosted by the Federal Trade Commission.

Some farmers aren’t shy about their enthusiasm for the technology — even uploading videos showing it off online.

The systems come with their own risks, including concerns that they could be hacked. But because farm-equipment makers operate almost exclusively on private land, they’ve been able to bring products to market much more quickly than consumer automakers — and without the same level of scrutiny.

There are no federal rules specifically addressing self-driving tech for tractors, largely because farm equipment is designed for use in fields where it doesn’t pose the same level of risk to other vehicles or people as a self-driving vehicle on a public road. The closest thing to national regulations are safety standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but the agency does not have any rules directly aimed at self-driving technology.

That lack of regulations is one reason that the future reached the

farm first. But another is pure necessity: There’s a labor crunch in rural America — young people move to the cities, leaving the average age of U.S. farmers at 58, according to the Agriculture Department. Similar forces are pushing self-driving tech into other industrial sectors at a pace that outstrips the consumer market. Earlier this year, the first selfdriving semi-truck licensed to drive on public roads in the United States made its debut in Nevada with a splashy press show. Selfdriving trucks are being rolled out for mining and oil operations in remote parts of the world.

The successes seen in agriculture could serve as a guidepost for carmakers who are trying to figure out how to move similar technologies onto U.S. streets.

John Deere isn’t the only company selling this kind of tech; its main competitor, Case IH, markets similar systems, as do lesserknown companies. Outfitting a tractor with top-of-the-line autosteering, navigation and guidance tech could cost upward of

This tractor and planter has an operator at the wheel, but it’s being driven by satellite guidance to a level of precision unmatched by humans.

$20,000, Reed said. There are also activation and subscription fees if farmers want to use the company’s satellite or radio signals.

There are risks to reliance on software. Poole said one neighbor using self-driving technology downloaded an update that disabled his tractor for a week in the middle of planting season. If a system is working, farmers will often hold off on updates rather than risk complications, he said.

Those gaps could raise added cybersecurity risks. John Deere takes this issue seriously, Reed said, and encrypts its systems to protect them from hackers.

Still, issues such as digital security fears, along with more traditional physical safety concerns, make it hard for consumer automakers to get their self-driving vehicles past various regulators and onto roads. But tractor makers have shown that much of the technology is here.

“All of the things we’re doing on the farm will find their way into the consumer market in the coming years,” Reed said. n

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LIFESTYLES

KLMNO WEEKLY

Get out!

The best places to park it.

The Trust for Public Land scored urban park systems, based on access, size, and facilities and investment*, awarding 1 to 5 park benches, with 5 being the best. n

KEY % OF CITY: Park land as % of city area PEOPLE/ACRE: People served per park acre HOOPS: Basketball hoops per 10,000 residents PG: Playgrounds per 10,000 residents DP: Dog parks per 10,000 residents

3. Washington

*Park access measures the percentage of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park (about a half-mile). Park size is based on a city’s median park size and the percentage of total city area dedicated to parks. Facilities and investment combines park spending per resident with the availability of four popular park amenities: basketball hoops, off-leash dog parks, playgrounds, and recreation and senior centers.

SOURCE: THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND; PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

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BOOKS

Unknown scam artist extraordinaire N ON-FICTION

T EMPIRE OF DECEPTION The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation

By Dean Jobb Algonquin.

336 pp. $27.95

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REVIEWED BY

A RT T AYLOR

he first chapter of Dean Jobb’s comprehensively researched and enthralling account of the life, times and crimes of Leo Koretz begins in June 1922 at Chicago’s posh Drake Hotel. An elegant banquet celebrates “Oil King” Koretz, the “New Rockefeller” whose Bayano River Syndicate, a timber business turned oil empire, has made many of his friends and associates filthy rich.

A “fine vellum” booklet at each place setting offers a satirical bio of the man of the hour, including a jesting reference to “Our Ponzi,” such a ludicrous comparison to the inventor of the infamous Ponzi method of defrauding investors that “the diners roared with laughter.” By the end of a chapter that also sketches Chicago as a capital of both business and crime, and evokes the roaring, booming 1920s, Jobb unpacks the first irony of “Our Ponzi,” unmasking the master swindler and revealing the author as an equally masterful storyteller.

Koretz’s story proves to be highstakes drama of the first order.

After his family immigrated to the United States from Bohemia when Koretz was 8, he quickly set out on a path to a good education and American success. After graduating, he clerked at a law firm and took evening courses to earn his degree. It was as a young lawyer that Koretz took what he called his first “dip into dishonesty,” offering a fake mortgage to a client with money to invest. From there he went on to invent increasingly elaborate confidence schemes, including a slew of fictitious claims on Arkansas rice farms.

After Koretz made his own “fool mistake” in 1908, investing in a bogus land deal in Panama, he came up with a “big idea” about that faraway country’s Bayano region, and then bigger ideas after that, until his syndicate had 5,000 employees, plans for a pipeline spanning Panama, orders for a

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ALGONQUIN BOOKS

In addition to his fake business, Leo Koretz had many affairs, multiple identities, disguises and a stint of hiding in plain sight. Above, a stock certificate for Bayano River Syndicate, his phony company.

dozen tankers to transport oil to the States and increasingly generous buyout offers from Standard Oil — each declined in turn, or so Koretz said. Along the way, he honed his strategy of “negative salesmanship,” building on what one duped client called “the principle that a person will literally fight for something that is most difficult to get.” The more Koretz discouraged investors, the more

he insisted that no stock was available, the more those wealthy friends wanted in: “They camped at the curb outside my home, and at my doorstep,” he recalled.

The ultimate irony of Koretz’s career is that he was performing the Ponzi maneuver — misusing contributions from new investors to pay dividends to earlier ones — before Charles Ponzi himself. (As Jobb notes, it could have been

called the Koretz scheme, except that Ponzi got caught first.) And while Ponzi’s scheme fell apart within a single year (1920), Koretz’s persisted for nearly two decades. Even when the fictional syndicate began to dismantle in 1923, Koretz still enjoyed everyone’s confidence. Sending off a batch of freshly hired executives to Panama to inspect operations, and using the trip’s length to buy time for his escape, he was handed a literal blank check for yet another deal, to be filled out “once he knew exactly how much money was needed.”

And that’s not even the halfway point of an audacious story that also features secret love nests and affairs with many women; multiple identities, rough disguises and a stint of hiding in plain sight; an international manhunt, a fateful knock at the door and a gripping court drama. Even when he lands in prison, his plotting’s not done; an “escape plan” is still ahead.

High-stakes hijinks give the story a rollicking feel, but Jobb manages great poignancy, too, from his portrait of Koretz’s wife, Mae, stung by her husband’s betrayal and committed to making amends to his victims, to brief anecdotes about those victims, such as the dining-car steward who invested his life savings and then quit his job “to live off the profits he was certain were headed his way.”

After peaking in true-crime magazines and criminology textbooks of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, Koretz’s fame waned. While Ponzi’s name lives on, Koretz didn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry until just after this book was published. This lively and sweeping account seems to have already given a master con artist his due, putting him in the “pantheon of pyramid-building swindlers.” n Taylor is an assistant professor of English at George Mason University and a prize-winning short-story writer.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Celebrating the triviality of reality

A nonconformist music legend’s life

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

H

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL D IRDA

ow French this little book seems! Milan Kundera is still known as a Czech writer, mainly because of his early works, in particular such novels as “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and, above all, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” But he has lived in France for the past 40 years, and his more recent books, like this one, have been written in the language of his adopted country.

The important characters are all men, too — our “heroes,” Kundera calls them. They are lightly sketched, four of them good friends, despite a wide difference in age. The most important, Alain, is retired, moody and reflective. In the opening section of the book, “Alain Meditates on the Navel,” he muses about the various erogenous zones of the female body.

While Alain is mulling over these sexual mysteries, his friend Ramon is strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Wandering among the greenery, he encounters a buoyant D’Ardelo, happy because recent medical tests have come back negative: He is not, as he thought, dying of cancer. Till recently, the two men, now apparently retired, worked together, so they pause to chat. A former colleague has recently died. Surprisingly, his widow attended a dinner party on the very day of his death, and there, although her eyes were still red with tears, she laughed and made merry. Life must go on, eh? Taken with a perverse impulse, D’Ardelo suddenly lets on, quite untruthfully, that he is suffering from cancer and probably has only months to live. Ramon is shocked.

Giving a stoic shrug and a wan smile of resignation, D’Ardelo declares that he is still planning to celebrate his birthday with a cocktail party.

As readers of Kundera’s essays know, he greatly admires Sterne, Diderot and other practitioners of those tricksy meta-fictions that make little pretense of being “real.”

Thus, only a dozen pages into “The Festival of Insignificance,” the book has already begun to grow multilayered, stereoptic.

Mildly philosophical conversations recur throughout the novel: Why is it that a rather mousey, unprepossessing man can seduce women more successfully than a witty and handsome one? Are the experiences of differing generations so great that real communication among them is almost impossible? How is it that people can be divided into the jostlers and the jostled?

Kundera is now in his late 80s, and death, not surprisingly, is much on his mind.

Nonetheless, the title of the novel is “The Festival of Insignificance,” a phrase that could be a definition of life itself. “Insignificance,” says Ramon, “is the essence of existence.” Yet this shouldn’t be a cause of despair.

Life is still a festival. Joy must be found in the quotidian and seemingly inconsequential, the overlooked details of the everyday, the small things. “The best portion of a good man’s life,” wrote Wordsworth, are “his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”

Sympathetic readers will find “The Festival of Insignificance” an entertaining diversion, a lightly comic fiction blending Gallic theorizing and Russian-style absurdity. This is, in short, just the book for an idle afternoon spent sipping espresso and watching the passing show on the Boulevard Saint-Michel or Connecticut Avenue.

To the unsympathetic, though, “The Festival of Insignificance” will come across as inconsequential and pretentious. Yet however you judge it, in Linda Asher’s translation, the short novel flows smoothly and the intertwined stories are involving enough to keep anyone turning the pages. Plus, who knows? You may begin by scoffing and then find yourself reading all the way to the end with real, if muted, pleasure. n

I THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE

By Milan Kundera Translated from the French by Linda Asher Harper. 115 pp. $23.99

IT’S A LONG STORY My Life

By Willie Nelson with David Ritz Little, Brown. 392 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

D OUGLAS B RINKLEY

n 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks — everybody, it seems — now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country. The 82-year-old troubadour, who still performs more than 150 shows a year, considers the open road his authentic home, but Austin is a close second. If you live in central Texas and don’t like Willie — godfather of the Keep Austin Weird movement — then you’re persona non grata.

Austin figures prominently in “It’s a Long Story,” Nelson’s wellwritten telling of his down-home, Algeresque, up-from-Abbott, Tex. (population 300), saga. Although Nelson is a God-loving Methodist turned Zen philosopher, his renegade antics provide this simple memoir with a happy-go-lucky zest. A beatific farmer of Great Depression vintage, he has long drawn inspiration from the singing cowboy Gene Autry. “You live life based on loyalty,” Nelson learned from his hero; “you stay on the right side. You protect your own. And when the going gets rough and the day grows dark, you pick up your guitar and soothe your soul by singing the pain away.”

When Nelson was 10 or 11, he cobbled together his own cowboy songbook of 12 original lyrics. His goal was to be the next Hank Williams or Roy Acuff. After a brief stint in the Air Force, followed by two years at Baylor University, Nelson applied himself full time to the art of songwriting.

In the late 1950s, he moved to Houston, performing weekly at the Esquire Ballroom. Before long he wrote such standards as “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls,” “Pretty Paper” and “Crazy.”

Nelson feels blessed to have such an enduring backlist. “When songs fall from the sky — even the polluted midnight sky of Houston

— all I can do is catch them before they land,” he writes.

Nashville beckoned next. Because of his Western roots, offbeat ways and discomfort with traditional studio producers, Nelson never took to the Music City. Once in Austin, he grew his red hair long and braided it like a Cherokee, becoming the ultimate cosmic cowboy. He brought the hippies and rednecks of Austin together in a drug-and-booze-hazed orgy of good-time music. Recognizing that whiskey made him mean-tongued, Nelson turned to marijuana as his drug of choice, becoming “a flag-waving advocate of legalizing pot and utilizing cannabis in dozens of positive ways.”

The liveliest pages in the memoir are when Nelson discusses his fruitful collaborations with Johnny Cash (“traditionally conservative”), Kris Kristofferson (“a firebrand liberal”) and Waylon Jennings (“a wild man, not known for taming his tongue”). Together this quartet made up the Highwaymen, recording two marvelous albums together in the 1980s.

The very fact that the intrepid Nelson has written a serious memoir is cause for celebration.

For Nelson is, hands down, the unabashed king of Americana.

“My eyes are closed, my prayers are aimed towards the heaven, but in my gut, I don’t feel worthy of so much good fortune,” he writes. “I sing okay, I play okay, and I know I can write a good song, but I still feel like I’ve been given a whole lot more than I deserve.”

I feel that same way about Nelson writing this heartfelt memoir from the highway of life.

He didn’t have to give “It’s a Long Story” to his fans, but I am sure glad he did. n Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and the author of “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

How A-Rod went from villainous to venerable LISA SWAN co-writes Subway Squawkers, a YankeesMets fan blog.

Alex Rodriguez was the kind of figure who brings Americans together: Just months ago, the superstar Yankees third baseman was, by unanimous consent, a national villain. He had received the longest suspension in MLB history for his use of performance­enhancing drugs, missing the entire 2014 season. He was a known cheater, liar and all­ around weirdo. He had paid off his creepy cousin Yuri to keep quiet about what substances he used, sued everybody from Yankees team doctor Chris Ahmad to Columbia University Medical Center to the commissioner of Major League Baseball, and eventually made a deal with the feds.

He was caught cheating on his wife with a stripper and broke up his marriage for good when he reportedly decided that Madonna was his soulmate.

When A-Rod’s suspension ended this spring, he could have stayed exactly the same and still earned $64 million over the next three seasons, as his famously inflated contract requires. After all, change is hard, and changing people’s opinion of you is even harder. Instead, Rodriguez has achieved both, returning not only as a fabulous almost-40-year-old baseball player willing to do whatever his manager and coaches say, but also as a player who goes out of his way to make amends, to act like a mensch and to reach out to the fans. It is truly an inspirational redemption story — a lesson for any public figure dispatched to the wilderness.

A-Rod’s history of villainy and eccentricity is almost hard to believe. He upstaged the 2007 World Series by opting out of his contract with the Yankees, then managed to get an even bigger one from the team, filled with performance-based milestone bonuses that the Yankees now refuse to pay. He kissed his reflection in a mirror during an interview with Details magazine.

He allegedly commissioned

paintings of himself as a centaur.

He let Cameron Diaz feed him popcorn at the Super Bowl like she was putting food into a baby bird’s mouth.

On the field, A-Rod was a Hall of Fame-quality player, but he did odd things during games as well, especially in the playoffs. One play that defines him occurred during the 2004 American League Championship Series, when he slapped the ball from the glove of Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo while running to first base, a bush-league move that exemplified the ineptness of the Yankees against Boston that year.

While some of the complaints against Rodriguez over the years were silly, the overwhelming sense that came with his unprecedented suspension was that Rodriguez had reaped what he sowed, had hit rock bottom and would live in infamy for the rest of his baseball life.

But a funny thing happened after A-Rod became MLB’s biggest pariah. He began trying something he’d never done before: turning his life around.

“No father, no college — these are his two gaping wounds, his two great sorrows,” J.R. Moehringer wrote in a long, road-to-perdition profile for ESPN the Magazine. So Rodriguez spent 2014 going to

AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES

intensive therapy sessions, attending a college class to see if he had what it takes to be a student and apologizing to everyone he had wronged: He came to the Yankees brass in person with his mea culpa, and he offered a handwritten apology to the fans.

This wasn’t strictly necessary.

Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Lance Armstrong stayed their prickly selves after their own performance-enhancing-drug scandals. Nevertheless, the world began to get a sense for the new Alex Rodriguez in 2015.

Always known as a hard worker, he showed up to spring training early and kept his cool, even when his arrival strangely ticked off the Yankees. His team’s front office made it clear that it wished A-Rod would just stay home and retire, but Rodriguez took the high road and refused to complain, at least not publicly, as he might have once done. When he lost his position at third base to Chase Headley, when he was told he would play only as the designated hitter, when he was put at the bottom of the lineup, when he was ordered to pick up a first baseman’s glove, when the Yankees told him they wouldn’t pay the $6 million in milestone money he earned by tying Willie Mays’s 660-homer record — he absorbed all these humiliations and more. He swallowed his titanic pride. He even showed a humble and self-deprecating side,

as well as a sense of humor — new developments for a man once obsessed with success.

Most important, A-Rod showed that he could play again at a high level. The year off allowed his bad hips to heal, and as he approaches his 40th birthday next month, he is back batting third. On June 19, he hit a home run to reach that magic number: 3,000 career hits.

Now A-Rod is getting what he has always craved — love and affection from Yankees fans.

New York Times columnist Tyler Kepner, a longtime critic of A-Rod who has called him “one of baseball’s greatest con men,” grudgingly acknowledged how much Rodriguez has changed his image, writing that “it is stunning to see Rodriguez’s discipline this season,” and that “for Rodriguez to go this long without causing any controversy, without saying the wrong thing or so much as smirking at the wrong moment, is as remarkable as his hitting revival.”

We want our role models to be perfect, especially for our children’s sake. But what can flawless, contour-free statues — the marble creatures on pedestals — really teach us about overcoming adversity? The reality is that most of us have more ARod in us than we do Jeter. No. 2 is cool but boring; No. 13 is the one who, after decades of trying, finally bested his demons — the flawed human who dug his own grave, then climbed out of it. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Singapore’s lessons on integration FAREED ZAKARIA writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for the Atlantic.

In thinking about the United States’ enduring racial divide, I found myself intrigued by lessons from an unlikely source: Singapore. To help prepare for a trip there next week (as a guest of the National University of Singapore), I asked the country’s deputy prime minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, what he regarded as the country’s biggest success. I imagined that he would talk about economics, since the city-state’s per capita GDP now outstrips that of the United States, Japan and Hong Kong. He spoke instead about social harmony.

“We were a nation that was not meant to be,” Shanmugaratnam said. The swamp-ridden island, expelled from Malaysia in 1965, had a polyglot population of migrants with myriad religions, cultures and belief systems. “What’s interesting and unique about Singapore, more than economics, are our social strategies. We respected peoples’ differences yet melded a nation and made an advantage out of diversity,” he said, echoing remarks he made last month in Switzerland.

How did Singapore do it? By mandating ethnic diversity in all of its neighborhoods. More than 80 percent of Singaporeans live in public housing (all of it is well regarded, some of it very upmarket). Every block, precinct and enclave has ethnic quotas.

This is what people mean when they talk about Singapore’s “nanny state,” and the minister readily admits it. “The most intrusive social policy in Singapore has turned out to be the most important,” he says. “It turns out that when you ensure every neighborhood is mixed, people do everyday things together, become comfortable with each other, and most importantly, their kids go to the same schools. When the kids grow up together, they begin to share a future together.”

This belief was at the heart of many of the efforts of the U.S. federal government in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate schools and integrate neighborhoods — through court orders, housing laws and executive action. Those efforts were largely abandoned by the 1980s and, since then, the

data show a United States that remains strikingly segregated. In Boston, 43.5 percent of the white population lives in areas that are at least 90 percent white and have a median income that is four times the poverty level, University of Minnesota researchers found. In St. Louis, that share of the white population is 54.4 percent. (Both figures come from an April article in the Atlantic.) This residential segregation has translated into unequal access to security, basic health care and, crucially, education.

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation 61 years ago, schools have become more homogenous in the past two decades. An investigation by ProPublica found that the number of schools that were less than 1 percent white grew from 2,762 in 1988 to 6,727 in 2011.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that today “only 14 percent of white students attend schools that you could consider multicultural.”

These findings would not surprise Singaporeans. “The natural workings of society rarely lead to diverse and integrated communities, not in Singapore nor anywhere else,” Shanmugaratnam said. “They

more likely lead to mistrust, selfsegregation and even bigotry — which we see in abundance in so many countries today.”

Singapore is an unusual case.

It is a small city-state. It has its critics, who point to a quasiauthoritarian system, one that impedes free expression and makes opposition parties face severe handicaps. Singapore can do things Western democracies cannot. It also has had its own racial problems.

All that said, I believe that Singapore is an example of a diverse society that has been able to live in harmony and that we could learn something from. (To be sure, Singapore could learn some lessons from Western democracies as well.)

“You cannot simply assume that the natural workings of the market or of society will produce social harmony or equal opportunity. They won’t,” Shanmugaratnam said.

“Government — an elected government — has a role to play.

And it’s not about speeches and symbols. It’s about specific mechanisms and programs to achieve the outcomes we all seek.”

Something to consider as the United States, in the wake of the tragedy in South Carolina, debates flags and symbols. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY JOEL PETT FOR THE LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

Taylor Swift proves her leadership JENA MCGREGOR

writes a daily column analyzing leadership in the news for the Washington Post’s On Leadership section.

This year, when Fortune magazine ranked Taylor Swift No. 6 on its list of the “world’s greatest leaders” — ahead of GM chief executive Mary Barra, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Bill and Melinda Gates — the haters, well, hated.

One commenter on Fortune’s story said, “Fortune just lost my respect . . . Taylor Swift??? C’mon.” On Twitter, some responded with confusion.

“Fortune Magazine’s definition of LEADER needs some explaining,” one former CEO wrote. And to another story covering the list, a reader responded, “What exactly has Swift done for the world anyway?”

Swift answered that question with force last Sunday night when she penned an open letter to Apple, criticizing the tech behemoth for its new music service, which was going to offer a free trial period to consumers during which musicians wouldn’t get paid. “I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company,” Swift wrote.

Apple quickly changed course, and the Internet exploded in applause. Musicians thanked her.

People on Twitter asked her to use her apparently magic powers to fix the crisis in Greece and pass gun control legislation. And business columnists heralded her leadership prowess, with headlines calling her an example of “open leadership.”

Swift’s ability to get the tech giant to switch gears wasn’t the first time she has been recognized for her influence, of course. Fortune has cited her brand savvy, her application to trademark some of her phrases, and her move to pull all her music from Spotify over how the streaming service pays musicians.

Time magazine, which named her as a finalist as its Person of the Year, has also highlighted her power in the industry. In a cover story, it examined Swift’s thoughts about the lack of female role models in music and her ability to make the industry believe big albums can matter again.

Last summer, Swift wrote an insightful and optimistic opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (under the label “Journal

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Reports: Leadership”) where she shared her hopes for other artists not undervaluing their work, her approach to her relationships with fans and her predictions on the future of music.

“Another theme I see fading into the gray is genre distinction,” wrote the former Nashville star turned pop artist.

“I think that in the coming decades the idea of genres will become less of a career-defining path and more of an organizational tool.”

Not only does she have more than 59 million Twitter followers and a reported net worth of $200 million, she was also the nation’s best-selling artist in 2008, 2010 and the second-best in 2012. Her latest album, “1989,” sold 3.66 million copies last year to become the best-selling album (even beating out the “Frozen” soundtrack). The first week of its release, it sold more than 1.2 million copies, better than any since 2002.

But for all that power, insight and influence, what truly makes Swift a leader in the industry is her interest in using her position to speak on behalf of other artists.

She did so with full-throated force in her letter Sunday to Apple, when she wrote that “this is not about me. Thankfully I am

on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success.

This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field . . . but will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs.”

She went on: “These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much.”

So yes, Taylor Swift is a leader.

She may not be perfect: After the Apple story broke, a photographer criticized the demands her management company has made about photo rights. And whether her leadership should rank above that of country presidents or global CEOs is a worthy question. But more and more she’s been proving why she merits many of the leadership accolades she’s received. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Jeb Bush BY

B RIAN E . C ROWLEY

Though his last name is one of the most famous in the country, much of the conventional wisdom about Jeb Bush is wrong, starting with his first name. (It’s actually John, not Jeb.) Here are five other myths.

1

Jeb Bush is a moderate.

Almost nothing in Bush’s record as governor suggests he’s a moderate. The notion puzzles Floridians who watched him govern for eight years, during which he pushed to disrupt public schools by establishing vouchers, grading schools and student performance, and creating charter schools. He reduced the size of state government, promoted tax cuts for the wealthy, passed tough-on crime bills and helped Florida have more concealed-weapon permits than other states.

When Bush left office, “he was widely, unanimously, unambiguously regarded as the most conservative governor in the United States,” according to Steve Schmidt, who was Sen. John McCain’s senior campaign adviser in the 2008 presidential race.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell stated it more bluntly: “a union-busting, school-voucherpromoting, tax-cutting, gunloving, Terri Schiavo-interfering, hard-core conservative.”

2

George is the dumb one, Jeb is the smart one.

George the bumbler, Jeb the thinker. Got it. But some who worked in the Bush White House say the perception that Jeb is smarter may have more to do with style than with substance.

George’s persona is often one of swagger and verbal stumbles.

However, Keith Hennessey, former director of Bush’s

National Economic Council, argues that “President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer.” Meanwhile, Jeb the policy wonk has had his share of gaffes. During the 1994 gubernatorial race, an African American woman asked candidate Bush what he would do for blacks in Florida. Bush answered, “Probably nothing.”

The remark followed him through the rest of the campaign.

And last month, Jeb flubbed questions about whether he would have authorized the Iraq war, demonstrating that, like his big brother, he, too, can slip up.

said Rubio respected Bush but was “not necessarily a protege,” and strategist Ana Navarro suggested that a Bush-Rubio matchup “would be less awkward for Jeb and Marco than for a lot of us around them.”

Why the false narrative? A battle between mentor and mentee certainly increases the personal drama of the campaign.

3

4

Bush is Marco Rubio’s mentor.

Last year, National Review asked: “Would a presidential run by his mentor lock Rubio out of the race?” The Times called Rubio the protege of Bush and described the senator’s decision to run as a “Shakespearean turn in a 15-year relationship so close, personal and enduring that friends describe the two men as almost family.”

Both Rubio and Bush live in Miami-Dade County and are heavily immersed in the Hispanic community. As fellow Republicans, they worked together and were politically close. But was Rubio really Bush’s protege?

“I wouldn’t diminish the relationship or exaggerate it,” Rubio told The Post in February.

One Florida GOP operative

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Bush will campaign “joyfully.”

Last year, while discussing whether he would run for president, Bush said, “The decision will be based on ‘Can I do it joyfully?,’ because I think we need to have candidates lift our spirits.” He’s apparently decided that yes, he can.

His opponents in his three races for governor would have been delighted to see Bush campaign joyfully. At home, he ran tough races with heavy use of attack ads.

Nothing about Bush’s attack ads was out of the ordinary. And he got hit back just as hard. But it would be a very unusual presidential campaign that did not use negative ads, and the idea that Bush’s team will somehow refrain and embrace “joy” instead

is unlikely.

5

He has broad support in Florida.

“Return of the GOP King” was the headline of a January Miami Herald story about the growing Bush campaign machine. Just before Bush formally became a candidate, Florida’s three elected Cabinet officers and 11 of 17 Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation endorsed him. So Bush has Florida sewn up, right?

Not exactly. Despite this establishment support, polls suggest that Bush, who has not been on the ballot in the Sunshine State in 13 years, cannot take Florida for granted. A MasonDixon poll from April showed Bush (30 percent) and Rubio (31 percent) essentially tied among Florida Republican voters.

And much has changed since Bush left the governor’s mansion.

One study, as Bloomberg News reported, “found that nearly three-quarters of Florida’s 12.9 million currently registered voters have never even seen Bush’s name on a ballot.” n Crowley is a Florida political analyst and author of Crowley Political Report.

SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015

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See you there !

Hosted in Chelan County PUD’s Walla Walla Point Park

wenatcheevalleyfourth.com Wenatchee Valley Independence Day Celebration

4:00pm 6:30pm 9 :45pm

Festival opens Music begins Wenatchee Valley Symphony Orchestra

10:15pm

FIREWORKS!