The Washington Post National Weekly - July 2, 2017

SUNDAY, JULY 2, 2017

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY The revolution is off the ground Armed with better data, hitters are boosting their numbers by increasing their launch angles PAGE 12

The sweet spot

Politics GOP not afraid to defy Trump 4

Nation Study rekindles wage debate 8

5 Myths Air travel 23

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SUNDAY, JULY 2, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

ON LEADERSHIP

When dominant leaders prevail BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

S

ince the election, analysis after analysis has examined how an inexperienced politician whose divisive rhetoric and autocratic tendencies that flouted democratic norms could become president of the United States. Was it racism? The rise of populism? A preference for an authoritarian leadership style? Economic unease?

A new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests a link between the last two, finding that when voters are experiencing economic hardship, they tend to choose leaders who position themselves as particularly decisive and selfassured. And not only do they prefer leaders with a dominant style, but they prefer it to one who has gained status through “prestige” and experience but who may be seen as less forceful — in other words, a virtual mirror of the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

“As researchers, we were given a live election with two candidates that in many ways were almost caricatures of these two academic concepts of how you gain influence,” said Niro Sivanathan, an associate professor at London Business School who co-wrote the paper with a colleague.

Sivanathan said in an interview that although past researchers have looked at the preference people have for strong leadership when they feel they have lost control, his was one of the first to link his studies to this theoretical framework, which describes leaders as trying to gain power through displays of dominance or through “prestige” — gaining the admiration of followers through experience and success in the associated field.

Also unlike previous studies, Sivanathan

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said, his research linked economic data at the Zip code level to a sense of economic anxiety and a preference for strong leaders, rather than just experiments that manipulate feelings of uncertainty in a lab.

“The main takeaway is that whenever individuals feel a lack of control in their environment or their lives,” he said, they believe that “having a dominant leader is likely to help them regain that control.”

The race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was illustrative of a recent study.

The research paper includes several studies, the first of which looked at voters’ preference for Clinton or Trump and several questions about who they saw as a more dominant or prestigious leader just before the third debate. It compared that with the economic conditions in their individual Zip codes, controlling for issues such as political orientation, gender, age and income. “If people were living in a Zip code where the poverty rate, unemployment rate and housing vacancy rate were high, they showed a greater preference for voting for Trump,” Sivanathan said.

Again and again, Trump displayed a particularly dominant — even autocratic or authoritarian — concept of leadership while on the

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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 38

campaign trail. He said he would return the use of waterboarding and advocated for the use of torture. He commanded rally attendees to “get them out” when a protester was mobbed by a crowd. He said he thinks he has the best temperament, or one of the best of “anybody that’s ever run for the office of president” because “I know how to win.” At the Republican National Convention, he vowed that “I alone can fix it.”

Many Republican voters ate it up. For instance, some exit polls showed that “strong leadership” was the single most important attribute for picking a president.

To broaden the study beyond Trump and Clinton, Sivanathan and his colleagues also asked respondents about a hypothetical local election, asking voters in various Zip codes whether they preferred a candidate described as more dominant or one who was most admired and less forceful. Again, Zip codes with more economic uncertainty preferred the more dominant leader. A third study used global data maintained by the World Bank that finds a similar effect at the global level.

The research, Sivanathan said, is a reminder that yes, candidates matter — the style and approach of the individual people who run, not just the political party, are critical — but so does context.

“Regardless of the party, if people are feeling they don't have control or things are not certain, these are the types of leaders [voters] are going to prefer,” he said.

“The conditions were one where they felt very upset — and then along came the candidate who had all the rhetoric and all the behavior of someone who, psychologically, they believed would be the one to get them out of this state.” n © The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Groundballs are out and flyballs are in, as baseball players look for the perfect angle to hit that home run. Photograph of Washington Nationals player Ryan Zimmerman by JONATHAN NEWTON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Republicans unafraid to defy Trump

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Retreat on health care shows president’s limits in wrangling support for his agenda

BY P HILIP R UCKER, R OBERT C OSTA AND A SHLEY P ARKER

S

crambling to line up support for the Republican health-care bill, President Trump got on the phone Monday with Sen. Mike Lee (RUtah) and urged him to back the measure.

The president’s personal plea was not enough. On Tuesday, Lee said he would vote against the bill.

Senate GOP leaders later postponed the planned health-care vote because too many other Republican senators also opposed —

for now, at least — legislation that would deliver on Trump’s campaign promise to scale back the law known as Obamacare.

Trump had hoped for a swift and easy win on health care this past week. Instead he got a delay and a return to the negotiating table — the latest reminder of the limits of his power to shape outcomes at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

History suggests that presidents who have governed successfully have been both revered and feared. But Republican fixtures in Washington are beginning to con-

clude that Trump may be neither, despite his mix of bravado, threats and efforts to schmooze with GOP lawmakers.

The president is the leader of his party, yet Trump has struggled to get Republican lawmakers moving in lockstep on health care and other major issues, leaving no signature legislation in his first five months in office. The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is his most-cited achievement to date.

“This president is the first president in our history who has neither political nor military experi-

President Trump, center, meets with Republican senators about health care in the White House this past week. He had hoped for an easy win but got a delayed vote and more negotiating.

ence, and thus it has been a challenge to him to learn how to interact with Congress and learn how to push his agenda better,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who opposes the current healthcare bill.

The Senate could pass a revised version of the bill once lawmakers return from their July 4 recess and pick up deliberations. Still, some Republicans are willing to defy their president’s wishes — a dynamic that can be attributed in part to Trump’s singular status as a disrupter within his party.

“The president remains an enti-

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POLITICS ty in and of itself, not a part of the traditional Republican Party,” said Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), a moderate who represents a district Trump lost by 16 percentage points. “I handle the Trump administration the same way I handled the Obama administration.

When I agree, I work with them.

When I oppose, I don’t.”

In private conversations on Capitol Hill, Trump is often not taken seriously. Some Republican lawmakers consider some of his promises — such as making Mexico pay for a new border wall — fantastical. They are exhausted and at times exasperated by his hopscotching from one subject to the next, chronicled in his pithy and provocative tweets. They are quick to point out how little command he demonstrates of policy.

And they have come to regard some of his threats as empty, concluding that crossing the president poses little danger.

“The House health-care vote shows he does have juice, particularly with people on the right,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. “The Senate health-care vote shows that people feel that health care is a defining issue and that it’d be pretty hard for any politician to push a senator into taking a vote that’s going to have consequences for the rest of their life.”

Asked if he personally fears Trump, Graham chuckled before saying, “No.” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has distanced himself from Trump on various issues, said few members of Congress fear permanent retaliation from the president.

“He comes from the private sector, where your business partner today isn’t always your business partner tomorrow,” Issa said. “Just because you’re one way today doesn’t mean you’re written off.

That’s the ‘Art of the Deal’ side.”

One senior Republican close to both the White House and many senators called Trump and his political operation “a paper tiger,” noting how many GOP lawmakers feel free “to go their own way.”

“Members are political entrepreneurs, and they react to what they see in the political marketplace,” said the Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the White House.

John Weaver, a GOP consultant and frequent Trump critic, was

“The president remains an entity in and of itself, not a part of the traditional Republican Party. I handle the Trump administration the same way I handled the Obama administration. When I agree, I work with them. When I oppose, I don’t.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.)

blunter in explaining why Trump has been unable to rule with a hammer. “When you have a 35 percent approval rating and you’re under FBI investigation, you don’t have a hammer,” he said, referring to the probe of possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Trump’s approval rating in Gallup’s daily tracking poll stood Tuesday at 39 percent, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving of his performance. But a significant portion of those supporters, particularly in red states and districts, still strongly back Trump.

White House officials contest the suggestion that Trump does not instill fear among fellow Republicans in Congress, though they argue that their strategy is not one of fear.

“Our legislative strategy isn’t to scare people into passing bills,” principal deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an email. “That doesn’t work for any president.

We helped negotiate and facilitate the major breakthroughs on health care in the House and are doing the same in the Senate.”

The president’s political shop, meanwhile, is laboring to force more Republicans to bend to his wishes.

America First Policies, a Trump-allied super PAC staffed by former aides, launched a negative advertising effort against Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) after he spoke out against the bill Friday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) complained about the ads to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and the super PAC said Tuesday that it would pull the spots after Heller said he was open to further negotiations,

according to two people familiar with the decision.

America First Policies has been mulling similar ads against other Republicans who have broken ranks, hoping to make lawmakers believe they will pay a price for betraying Trump and imperiling his agenda. The super PAC also is considering grass-roots campaigns across the country to mobilize Trump supporters in key states during the July 4 recess, as a way to ratchet up pressure on wavering lawmakers.

Trump allies have encouraged major GOP donors to reach out to senators who oppose the bill. Las Vegas casino moguls Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn have both spoken by phone with Heller to prod him along, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has been hungry for a legislative policy victory on Capitol Hill, and he and his advisers see health care as the best chance for one this summer. The president is playing a less public role advocating for the legislation than he did leading up to this spring’s vote on a House bill, when he used his relationship with conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus to eventually bring them to the table.

In the Senate talks, Trump has been working largely behind the scenes to lobby senators, with personal phone calls and other entreaties. Unlike the House, where rank-and-file Republicans may be likely to follow Trump’s lead, the Senate naturally is a more independent institution.

Many senators fashion their own political brands and have outsize egos, and some Republicans ran away from Trump in their reelection races last year.

39% Trump’s approval rating in Gallup’s daily tracking poll stood Tuesday at 39 percent, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving of his performance. But a significant portion of those supporters, particularly in red states and districts, still strongly back Trump.

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Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” a new history of White House chiefs of staff, said the tumult inside Trump’s White House — and the president’s lack of a coherent message or vision for his policy agenda — inhibits his ability to enforce party discipline in Congress.

“Nothing instills fear on Capitol Hill like success, and all this White House has been able to do is one failure after another,” Whipple said. “There are just zero points on the board so far. Who’s going to be afraid of that?”

In the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats on Capitol Hill largely stayed in line — in part because they saw Obama as a powerful political force and believed there were risks in breaking with him.

Early in President George W. Bush’s tenure, fellow Republicans in Congress saw his White House as a finely tuned machine that could not be crossed.

“You never wanted to get on the wrong side of the Bush White House because the staff was disciplined, dedicated and extremely loyal to the president,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican operative.

“If you crossed or undermined the president or his administration, the Bush die-hards would remember it forever.”

Trump’s lieutenants, by contrast, have struggled to force Republicans into line. In March, when House Republicans were slow to rally behind the healthcare bill, White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told Freedom Caucus members that they must stop waffling and vote for the legislation.

Bannon was immediately rebuffed by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who has been in the House for more than three decades. Barton icily told Bannon that the only person who ordered him around was “my daddy” — and that his father was unsuccessful in doing so, according to several Republicans with knowledge of the meeting.

In an interview this past week, Barton smiled wryly when asked about the incident.

“I will admit on the record that I took exception to a comment that he made,” Barton said. “There is a separation of powers, and the president has a role and the Congress has a role. That’s all I’ll say.” ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Hanging in Trump’s clubs: Fake news BY

D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

T

he framed copy of Time magazine was hung up in at least five of President Trump’s clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . .

EVEN TV!” This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

But that wasn’t true.

The Time cover is a fake.

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

In fact, the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.

And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

“I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

On Tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for Time said that the magazine had asked the Trump Organization to remove the phony cover from the walls where it was on display.

So how did Trump — who spent an entire campaign and much of his presidency accusing the main-

PHOTOS BY ANGEL VALENTIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A 2009 Time magazine cover that touts his accomplishments is actually a phony stream media of producing “fake news” — wind up decorating his properties with a literal piece of phony journalism?

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions last week about who made the cover and why it was displayed at Trump clubs. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether Trump had known that the cover wasn’t real.

The cover seems to fit a broader pattern for Trump, who has often boasted of his appearances on Time’s cover and adorned his Trump Tower office with images of himself from magazines and newspapers. Trump has made claims about himself — about his charitable giving, his business success, even the size of the crowd at his inauguration — that are not supported by the facts.

In this case, Trump’s golf clubs might seem like places where he wouldn’t need to stretch the truth.

Reality is flattering enough. The clubs are monuments to Trump’s success — they bear his name and

are filled with his images. But, still, his staff added an extra trophy that was phony.

It is not clear who created this fake Time cover — or why.

While it’s not difficult to mock up a fake cover using graphicdesign software, whoever made this one sought out real Time headlines, to add to the fake.

There are secondary headlines on the Trump cover that tout stories on President Barack Obama, climate change and the financial crisis. Two of those are taken from a real March 2, 2009, issue of Time, which featured actress Kate Winslet on the cover. But the issue makes no mention of Trump.

Another possible clue to the fake cover’s origins: The fake bar code on the bottom right. An identical bar code shows up online in a graphic-design tutorial posted in 2010, in which a Peruvian designer laid out how to make a fake Time cover — complete with this bar code, for extra realism. The graphic designer did not respond to questions from The Post.

Framed magazine covers featuring Donald Trump and Trump family members hang last month at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Shop in Florida.

The Time magazine cover at top left is a fake.

The fake Time cover is dated March 1, 2009. The overline: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . .

EVEN TV!”

The Post found that the fake cover had been hung in at least five of Trump’s 17 golf clubs.

At Trump’s resort in Doral, Fla., outside Miami, the fake image hangs in two prominent spots. In the pro shop, it shares a wall with 11 framed magazine pages — all of them highlighting Trump, another member of the Trump family or a Trump golf course.

A copy of the fake cover also hangs in Champions, the Doral resort’s sports bar.

In Virginia, the phony Time cover hangs on the wall of the members’ dining room at the Trump golf course in suburban Loudoun County, near Washington.

At the same club, Trump’s staff put up a historical marker declaring that there had been a Civil War battle on the site, as first reported by the New York Times. Historians say this battle never happened.

The fake cover was also hung up near the entrance of Trump’s Mara-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., according to a photo taken in July 2016 by Scott Keeler, a photographer at the Tampa Bay Times.

The Time cover also appears to have been hung up at Trump’s golf resort in Doonbeg, in western Ireland. Photos posted on TripAdvisor show it on the wall of a dining room. But when a reporter visited the club last weekend, it was gone.

A bartender later found it in the manager’s office. Officials at the club could not explain why it had been moved.

And at Trump’s Turnberry club in Scotland, one employee said the fake cover had previously hung in the resort’s pub. But, she said, it was taken down a few weeks ago.

The Post also looked for the fake cover at two Trump courses in the United States that are open to the public, in the Bronx and in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. It was not on display at either. The rest of Trump’s courses are membersonly, making it difficult to get inside to look at the decor.

The image does not appear to be among the many framed magazine covers that adorn Trump’s old office in Trump Tower, based on photos of the office. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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An early force on the Supreme Court BY

R OBERT B ARNES

O

n Day 78 of his lifetime appointment, the Supreme Court’s newest justice, Neil M. Gorsuch, revealed himself Monday to be: Skeptical about the reach of the court’s two-year-old decision granting same-sex couples the right to marry.

Farther to the right than almost all of his colleagues on gun rights.

Unwilling to lend his full support to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s opinion in a major separation-of-church-and-state case, because of disagreement over a two-sentence footnote.

Willing to let President Trump’s travel ban be enacted as planned, without imposing the limits most of his colleagues required.

If the Supreme Court’s compromise decision Monday on the travel ban grabbed the headlines on the court’s final day, those who study the court were at least as focused on what they could learn about the 49-year-old Coloradan chosen by Trump to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia.

The bottom line, according to most accounts, is that Gorsuch is a Scalia 2.0, perhaps further to the right.

“The Gorsuch we were sold during the confirmation battle is the Gorsuch that we got,” said Elizabeth Slattery, a legal scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

And she meant that in a good way.

Gorsuch has spoken of the humility that comes with putting on the “plain black polyester robe that we buy with our own money at the uniform supply store.”

But in his short 2½ months on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch has proved himself to be a self-assured jurist unafraid of the big stage. He asked 22 questions at his first oral argument. He writes frequently — and well, as even his critics acknowledge — and has been willing to go it alone in providing his own reasoning in an opinion even when he agrees.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Justice Neil Gorsuch has shown himself to be a self-assured jurist who leans to the right “He’s asserted himself in a way that is really without precedent for a justice in the modern court,” said Ian Samuel, a former Scalia clerk who teaches at Harvard Law School.

Gregory G. Garre, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, cautioned against any “broad pronouncements” on Gorsuch. The justice did not take his place on the court until April 10 and thus participated in only one of the court’s monthly oral-argument sessions.

He wrote one majority opinion for the court, which was unanimous.

The views he expressed on the final day came in dissents or concurrences he wrote or joined with other justices. He has sided far more frequently with Justice Clarence Thomas on the court’s far right than with Roberts, closer to the center.

Garre said Gorsuch showed he “was perfectly willing to differ with his new colleagues, albeit ‘respectfully,’ as he was quick to point out.”

Said Slattery: “In his early opinions, he’s shown that he is

committed to careful statutory interpretation. In his first majority opinion, he pointed out that it’s the role of courts to ‘apply, not amend, the work of the people’s representatives,’ in narrowly reading a federal law dealing with debt collection.”

Jonathan H. Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor writing in The Washington Post, described Gorsuch as “a confident, committed textualist with a distinctive writing style — and a justice who is not afraid to challenge his new colleagues.”

It does not mean he convinces them.

In a complicated case involving which court should hear complaints from federal workers who say they were wrongly terminated, Gorsuch dissented from an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He accused Ginsburg of tweaking the law as written to reach an outcome he acknowledged might be easier for everyone.

“Respectfully,” he wrote, he “would instead just follow the words of the statute as written.”

There was no need to tweak the

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has “asserted himself in a way that is really without precedent for a justice in the modern court,” said Ian Samuel, a former Antonin Scalia clerk who teaches at Harvard Law School.

statute, Ginsburg replied, but only “to read it sensibly.” All justices except for Thomas agreed with Ginsburg.

Later, on the final day of the term, Gorsuch wrote a concurrence to one of the court’s orders “for no reason other than to disagree with” Roberts, who had written a dissent, noted Samuel, the former Scalia clerk.

Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who produces a podcast with Samuel about the Supreme Court called First Mondays, said he thought Gorsuch’s opinion was “perfectly fine and respectful” — but also gratuitous.

“It was a strange hill to fight on for a new justice, and it makes me wonder about the dynamics between them if he was willing to spar so publicly with the chief,” Epps said.

The court had only eight members in the 13 months between Scalia’s death and Gorsuch’s confirmation, and all agree it affected the court’s docket.

“These days, blockbuster terms seem more like the rule than the exception,” said Kannon Shanmugam, a Washington lawyer who frequently argues before the court. “By that standard, this year was the exception. The court had few headline cases and a lot of meat-and-potatoes ones.”

Roberts, the court’s master strategist, was seen as instrumental in helping the court find a narrow path through a thicket of cases that seemed destined for deadlocks. He seems positioned to become the court’s pivotal justice in the future.

“One of the most interesting things about Justice Gorsuch in the few decisions we have seen is the number of times he has joined forces with Justice Thomas,” who is often on the court’s far right, Garre said. “The chief justice, by contrast, has seemed more willing to find ways to broaden coalitions. . . . The chief seems content to occupy more of the middle ground on the court, increasing his influence in closer cases.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION ANALYSIS

Seattle study reignites wage debate BY

M AX E HRENFREUND

W

hen Seattle officials voted three years ago to incrementally boost the city’s minimum wage up to $15 an hour, they’d hoped to improve the lives of lowincome workers. Yet according to a major new study that could force economists to reassess past research on the issue, the hike has had the opposite effect.

The city is gradually increasing the hourly minimum to $15 over several years. Already, though, some employers have not been able to afford the increased minimums. They’ve cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go, the study found.

The costs to low-wage workers in Seattle outweighed the benefits by a ratio of three to one, according to the study, conducted by a group of economists at the University of Washington who were commissioned by the city. The study, published as a working paper this past week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has not yet been peer reviewed.

On the whole, the study estimates, the average low-wage worker in the city lost $125 a month because of the hike in the minimum.

The paper’s conclusions contradict years of research on the minimum wage. Many past studies, by contrast, have found that the benefits of increases for low-wage workers exceed the costs in terms of reduced employment — often by a factor of four or five to one.

“This strikes me as a study that is likely to influence people,” said David Autor, an economist at MIT who was not involved in the research. He called the work “very credible” and “sufficiently compelling in its design and statistical power that it can change minds.”

Yet the study will not put an end to the dispute. Experts cautioned that the effects of the minimum wage may vary according to the industries dominant in the cities where they are implemented along with overall economic conditions in the country as a whole.

TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Effort to raise the hourly minimum to $15 hurts workers, group says, in break from past research And critics of the research pointed out what they saw as serious shortcomings. In particular, to avoid confusing establishments that were subject to the minimum with those that were not, the authors did not include large employers with locations both inside and outside of Seattle in their calculations, such as fast-food chains.

Skeptics argued that omission could explain the unusual results.

However, the paper makes use of more detailed data than have been available in past research, drawing on state records of wages and hours for individual employees. As a result, the paper is likely to upend a debate that has continued among economists, politicians, businesses and labor organizers for decades.

Meanwhile, states and cities around the country are continuing to implement increases in the minimum wage. In November, voters in Washington approved an increase in the statewide minimum to $13.50 an hour by 2020.

The idea is popular in conservative states as well. In Arizona, for instance, the minimum wage will be $12 an hour in 2020 after voters there cast ballots in favor of a hike.

Economists have long argued that raising the minimum wage will force some employers to let workers go. In 1994, however, economists David Card and Alan Krueger published research on minimum wages in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that contradicted this theory. They found that restaurants in New Jersey had, in fact, added more workers to their payrolls than restaurants in neighboring Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained constant.

Since then, economists have brought better data and more sophisticated statistical methods to bear on the question of the minimum wage, but without resolving the debate.

Their studies examined the overall numbers of workers or their annual incomes but lacked precise information on how much

A sign is displayed near Seattle City Hall after the city council passed a measure in 2014 to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The costs to lowwage workers in Seattle outweighed the benefits by a ratio of three to one, according to a recent study.

workers were being paid by the hour. As a result, past research might be less reliable because the results might reflect many workers who are not paid low wages, said Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the new study.

Their research, using detailed records from the state of Washington, addresses that problem.

When the study’s authors took the same approach as Card and Krueger, measuring overall employment in the restaurant industry, they found similar results. The minimum wage did not substantially affect how many people were working in the industry or how many hours they were working.

Vigdor said that restaurateurs in Seattle — along with other employers — responded to the minimum wage by hiring more skilled and experienced workers, who might be able to produce more revenue for their firms in the same amount of time.

That hypothesis has worrisome implications for less-skilled workers. While those with more ability might be paid more, junior workers might be losing an opportunity to work their way up.

There could be another explanation for the results, however: the fact that large employers are not included. It could be that even if employers with only a single location cut payrolls, large firms expanded at the same time, giving low-wage workers other opportunities to earn money.

“The effect of the minimum wage depends on a lot of things. It depends on where you’re starting form. It depends on what kind of economy you’re raising it in,” Vigdor said. “There is no one ‘the effect of the minimum wage.’ ” That means that future research on the question could come to different conclusions. Vigdor said he looks forward to receiving criticisms of his group’s paper and suggestions for improving their approach.

“It’s really important to emphasize it’s a work in progress,” he said. n © The Washington Post

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

The race to save Florida’s coral reefs C HRIS M OONEY Pickles Reef, Fla. BY

T

wenty feet under water, Nature Conservancy biologist Jennifer Stein swims over to several large corals and pulls several laminated cards from her dive belt.

“Disease,” reads one, as she gestures to a coral that exhibits white splotches. “Recent mortality,” reads another card. Along the miles of coral reef off the Florida Keys, Stein and her fellow divers have found countless examples of this essential form of ocean life facing sickness and death.

The pattern of decay is shaping up as one of the sharpest impacts of climate change in the continental United States — and a direct threat to economic activity in the Keys, a haven for diving, fishing and coastal tourism.

The debate over climate change is often framed as one that pits jobs against the need to protect the planet for future generations. In deciding to exit the Paris climate agreement and roll back domestic environmental regulations, the Trump administration said it was working to protect jobs.

But what is happening here — as the warming of the sea devastates the coral reef — is a stark example of how rising temperatures can threaten existing economies.

The 113-mile-long Overseas Highway between the mainland and Key West — linking islands that themselves emerged from an ancient coral archipelago — is lined with marinas, bait and tackle shops and an abundance of seafood restaurants.

From the visitors who fill dive charters out of Key Largo to the local fishing industry’s catches of spiny lobsters, grouper, snapper and other species, nearly everything in the Florida Keys is tied in some way to the reefs.

Diving, snorkeling, fishing, and eating seafood are among the key tourist activities that could be harmed if the reef continues to suffer damage.

Cece Roycraft and a partner own the Dive Key West shop, which sells scuba gear and runs

MEAGHAN JOHNSON/THE NATURE CONSERVANCY

In the Keys, the fight against climate change is a fight to save jobs boat charters. Their operation depends on a healthy reef system, because divers naturally are not as interested in exploring dead or damaged reefs, which do not attract as many fish and can be covered in algae. It is an economic reality accepted by residents of the Keys but not yet widely recognized by other Americans, she said.

“It’s equal to the Yellowstone Park, okay?” said Roycraft, who worked to help create a federal program that certifies vessels that train their crews in proper coral protection practices, including following proper mooring rules and ensuring that divers do not poke and prod the reefs.

Tourism “is the economic engine of the Florida Keys. There is no other way for people to make money,” Roycraft said.

Three and a half million people visit the Keys each year — nearly 47 for each of the area’s 75,000 full-time residents. Tourism supplies 54 percent of all island jobs and fuels a $2.7 billion economy, according to Monroe County, which includes the Keys and a significant portion of Everglades National Park.

The importance attached to the reef system defies the usual political divides. Here in the Keys, people voted 51 percent to 44 percent in favor of Donald Trump in the presidential election — but they seem to differ from the president in their support for governmentfunded programs to protect the environment.

In March, amid fears that the

administration might try to defund enced back-to-back major bleaching The decline of a colony of Environmental Protection Agency events in 2014 and 2015. endangered elkhorn programs that protect the reef sysAn influential 2016 study in the coral in the Florida tem, Monroe County’s board of comjournal Scientific Reports found Keys is documented missioners called for sustaining the that coral declines were just as likely from nearly 100 EPA’s role and declared in a board to occur in remote, pristine reefs, percent healthy, left, resolution that “a healthy marine such as the northern sector of the to dead, right. The environment is essential and the Great Barrier Reef, as they were to photos were taken in most important contributor to the occur in non-remote reefs, such as October 2013, economy of the Florida Keys.” the Florida Reef Tract. That is deSeptember 2014 and The EPA’s South Florida prospite the fact that reefs closer to March 2015. gram, which received $1.7 million human communities probably exin federal funds in fiscal 2017, conperience a lot more pollution, overducts coral surveys, studies of the fishing and poor water quality. The health of sea grasses and carries researchers suggested that the main out more general water-quality asreason for a decline of coral was a sessments. Trump’s proposed 2018 uniform global cause — warming. federal budget seeks to eliminate “It’s not only me feeling compasthe allocation. sion for the actual coral, but for the In recent years, the islands have entire ecosystem and how that’s gospent millions of dollars, including ing to affect it in the years to come, some federal money, to convert to unforeseen things that we just don’t central sewer systems, ending the know are going to happen,” Stein damaging practice of allowing husaid after the dive. “It’s frustrating man waste to seep into the ocean and sad at the same time.” from septic tanks.

In the Keys, longtime residents But what is coming into focus is say there’s just no parallel between that the threats to the reef systhe reef of today — which still tem cannot be countered local- Average coral cover in the impresses inexperienced reefs of the Florida Keys ly. tourist divers — and what loEcologists describe the 360- 15% cals saw decades ago. mile-long Florida Reef Tract as “I don’t recall even thinka global treasure. It is the ing about bleaching or coral 10 world’s third-largest barrier death or coral diseases back reef. But less than 10 percent of then,” said Mimi Stafford, who the reef system is now covered has lived here for decades.

5 with living coral. Scientists an“My children saw it right Margin of error ticipate that as early as 2020, it before it really started to de0 could be in line for almost yearcline,” she said. “But you know, 1996 2016 I don’t think their children ly bleaching events, in which heat stresses upend the metab- Source: Florida Fish and Wildlife will unless we can do someolism of corals, in some cases Conservation Commission thing.” n killing them. The reefs experi- THE WASHINGTON POST © The Washington Post

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In Europe, fake news is old news

BY D ANA P RIEST AND M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Riga, Latvia

A

s the United States grapples with the implications of Kremlin interference in American politics, European countries are deploying a variety of bold tactics and tools to expose Russian attempts to sway voters and weaken European unity.

Across the continent, counterintelligence officials, legislators, researchers and journalists have devoted years — in some cases, decades — to the development of ways to counter Russian disinformation, hacking and trolling. And they are putting them to use as never before.

Four dozen officials and researchers interviewed recently sounded uniformly more confident about the results of their efforts to counter Russian influence than officials grappling with it in the United States, which one European cyber-official described as “like watching ‘House of Cards.’ ” “The response here has been very practical,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official stationed in Europe. “Everybody’s looking at it.”

In the recent French elections, the Kremlin-friendly presidential candidate lost to newcomer Emmanuel Macron, who was subjected to Russian hacking and false allegations in Russian-sponsored news outlets during the campaign.

In Germany, all political parties have agreed not to employ automated bots in their social media campaigns because such hard-todetect cyber tools are frequently used by Russia to circulate bogus news accounts.

The best antidote to Russian influence, European experts say, is to make it visible.

“We have to prepare the public,” said Patrick Sensburg, a member of the German Parliament and an intelligence expert.

President Trump’s embrace of the “fake news” label for traditional mainstream news outlets and his own record of unabashed distortions have, moreover, ener-

SERGEI KARPUKHIN/REUTERS

Countries across the continent have been working to counter meddling by Russia for years gized Western Europe against the threat of disinformation, said Claire Wardle, strategy and research director at Europe’s largest social media accountability network, First Draft News. “Now you’re seeing Western Europe wake up.”

Methods vary. Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society. In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.”

In Brussels, the European Union’s East Stratcom Task Force has 14 staffers and hundreds of volunteer academics, researchers and journalists who have researched and published 2,000 examples of false or twisted stories in 18 languages in a weekly digest

that began two years ago.

“What we try to do centrally in Brussels is put all of those pieces of the jigsaw together,” Giles Portman, head of the task force, said at a conference last year.

And beyond exposing Russian efforts, European countries are also moving to suppress them.

France and Britain have successfully pressured Facebook to disable tens of thousands of automated fake accounts used to sway voters close to election time, and it has doubled to 6,000 the number of monitors empowered to remove defamatory and hate-filled posts.

The German cabinet recently endorsed legislation — now before Parliament — to impose fines of up to $53 million on social-media companies that fail to remove posts deemed to be “hate speech.”

Some especially notorious recent examples concerning migrants have been traced to Russian origins.

And sometimes the effort goes face-to-face. Here in Riga, Vladimir Dorofeev, a 42-year-old re-

Russian President Vladimir Putin — shown addressing a conference on a big screen — has dismissed allegations of hacking and interference as “nonsense.”

porter for the Kremlin’s Sputnik news site, widely regarded as a conduit for propaganda as well as news, found out personally how Latvian authorities deal with the challenge.

In Dorofeev’s first week on the job, the Latvian Security Police questioned him about Sputnik’s local staff size, its editor and its payment procedures.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” he said they asked him. “Do you understand they can use you?”

His answers went into the files, to become part of a standing counterintelligence investigation, the kind Latvia has undertaken to ferret out clandestine Russia meddling since it broke free of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Maybe this is new to the Western world, but not for us,” said Normunds Mezviets, the security service chief here. “For 20 years, we’ve been calling attention to this. There is no reason to panic.”

Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that “informational conflict” is a key part of war.

Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said. This year, the Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new cyberwarrior unit.

No longer able to compete in conventional military terms — the U.S. defense budget is about eight times larger than Russia’s — Moscow has emphasized this less expensive but difficult-to-thwart tactic. “Weaponizing information” involves the dissemination of factual distortions and outright lies to achieve political ends. It builds on decades of experience wielding propaganda, going back to the Soviet era. In that sense, Europe has had more years of exposure than the United States.

“There has always been Russian propaganda, false information, attempts to smear people — that’s nothing new,” said Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden who was in Tallinn, Estonia, recently for a cybersecurity conference. n © The Washington Post

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Afghan bird refuge takes flight again P AMELA C ONSTABLE Kabul BY

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ust south of the Afghan capital, on a busy road lined with car repair shops, goat corrals and garbage pits, a narrow lane opens unexpectedly onto a small natural wonder — a picturesque, nearly hidden marsh that is known only to a few Afghans and inhabited only by migratory birds and several families of wild dogs.

The 470-acre site, known as Kol-e-Hashmat Khan, is one of the rare recognized wetland areas in central Afghanistan. Once it drew wealthy sightseers and royal hunting parties, but during four decades of war and turmoil it lay abandoned and neglected. The water filled with sludge, unauthorized settlements sprang up around the edges, and fewer birds stopped to rest or breed in the desiccated marsh.

Now, an ambitious effort to clean up and restore the site, launched several years ago by the Afghan government and local civic groups with support from the U.N. Environmental Program, is starting to bear fruit. Water from the nearby Logar River has been diverted with sandbags, and new reed growth has attracted an increasing number and variety of birds.

Last month, the United Nations took a further step, declaring Kole-Hashmat Khan a protected conservation site and bird sanctuary, which could bring more funds and attention to efforts to save it.

The site, also an important source of reservoir water for the capital region, dries up in certain months, and officials worry it could eventually disappear.

“Some of the birds stopping here travel from India to Siberia,” marveled Arif Azimi, an engineer and civic activist, looking out over the marsh one recent morning as a wildlife ranger with binoculars pointed to several pairs of waterfowl flitting among the reeds. Last year, officials said, 157 species were identified at the site — a healthy increase from a tally of 93 species in 2010.

PAMELA CONSTABLE/THE WASHINGTON POST

But cleanup efforts at the site face indifference — and even resistance — from local residents But although environmentalists have made headway with efforts to preserve the site, they are also encountering indifference — and some resistance — from local residents and businesses. Several poor communities surrounding Kol-e-Hashmat Khan have been provided with garbage collection stations, but people keep dumping their trash into the marsh.

All morning, as Azimi and a group of visitors watched, two government workers wearing rubber boots and gloves waded through the knee-deep water, raking up debris and collecting it to be hauled off. But just a short distance away, where a row of mud-walled houses lines the marsh, children emerged periodically with buckets of household slops and tossed them into the water.

“We have put up the collection sites, and the municipal government has signs telling people to use them, but it doesn’t always happen,” Azimi said with a frown.

He said mechanics also dump used oil and metal scraps at the wetlands site. “We do our best to make people aware, but we need more support,” he said. “It takes time to change people’s behavior.”

Several international agencies and nonprofit groups have worked for years to study and protect some of Afghanistan’s natural sites. The best known is the Wakhan Corridor, a 200-mile stretch of alpine valleys and rivers in the remote far northeast bordering China. Home to rare animal species including snow leopards, it has remained largely free of human development and interference.

But with the country mired in poverty, illiteracy and unresolved conflict, such projects can seem like luxuries — and in the more populous areas, human survival comes first. Most Afghan homes are heated by coal and wood stoves, and the mass cutting of trees for fuel has deforested provinces along the southeastern bor-

Mohammed Azim, 65, rakes muck and debris from Kol-eHashmat Khan, a marsh and bird sanctuary near Kabul that is being restored with help from the United Nations.

der with Pakistan. There has also been little effort to stop the illegal cross-border traffic in lumber.

While the idea of wetlands as places of beauty and social value is not widely understood, efforts to support bird migration and breeding appear even more esoteric. In the 1970s, the Afghan government declared Kol-e-Hashmat Khan a nationally protected area, but the designation lost all meaning in the ensuing decades of conflict. It is now managed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, which built an education center and observation deck there several years ago.

The site attracts experts and occasional groups of birdwatchers, and during the early-morning visit by Azimi, U.N. officials and several journalists, the wildlife ranger on duty eagerly named two dozen species of ducks, egrets and other waterfowl he had seen there this season. He said the number of visiting birds had been growing every spring, when the great south-north migrations take place and millions of birds must fly over the nearby Himalayan peaks.

Cleanup efforts have also begun to revive the fish population, he said, but he also pointed to mounds of discarded plastic bags clogging the water’s edge, noting that they contaminate the water and make it harder for aquatic life to survive. “That is all plastic fish food,” he said dryly.

Several residents at Kol-eHashmat Khan said that they appreciate efforts to beautify the area but that they have their own daily problems to worry about.

Sayed Rahman, 40, a mechanic whose workshop and home are a few yards from the marsh, acknowledged that he often dumps his work refuse there.

“We know this is a nice area of nature, and we’re happy the government is trying to keep it clean,” said Rahman, who built his family’s small house there a decade ago. “I have no place nearby to put the waste from my garage, so I put it in a bag, but unfortunately, its final destination is here.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

Batters try to

BY DAVE SHEININ

A high launch angle is more likely to result in a hit. Add enough velocity to that, and it becomes a home run.

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ne day several years ago, as Chase Headley was still trying to establish himself as the San Diego Padres’ everyday third baseman, Padres management passed around a sheet of paper full of facts and figures on how its spacious ballpark, Petco Park, played for hitters. Flyballs were mostly swallowed up in the vast expanses of outfield, while groundballs and line drives played better than in the average stadium. The conclusion, as Headley recalls it, was clear: Padres hitters should keep the ball out of the air.

“I had more loft in my swing when I came up,” Headley said recently, “so I was trying to undo some of that, and I was trying to hit the ball down. It was a conscious thing: They wanted us to hit the ball hard but down.”

A few thousand big league at-bats later, Headley, now 33 and the starting third baseman for the New York Yankees, chuckles at how antiquated that sounds now — as the gospel of flyballs and high launch angles spreads across the game — and can’t help but kick himself for not resisting the Padres’ efforts to turn him into a groundball machine.

“I look back, and I’m like, ‘What was I thinking?’ ” he said. “I’ve had to try to get it back the other way now.”

In that period between the Padres’ hit-itlow memo and the first part of the 2017 season has been a shift in philosophy so dramatic it can safely be called a revolution, with more hitters, armed with better and more extensive data than ever, reaching the conclusion that not only are flyballs, on average, better than grounders but that the latter are to be avoided at all costs.

“No grounders,” Toronto Blue Jays third

find an angle

baseman Josh Donaldson, the 2015 American League MVP and one of the movement’s most vocal proponents, said earlier this year.

“Groundballs are outs. If you see me hit a groundball, even if it’s a hit, I can tell you: It was an accident.”

Another proponent, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner, put it another way: “You can’t slug by hitting balls on the ground. You have to get the ball in the air if you want to slug, and guys who slug stick around, and guys who don’t, don’t.”

There is a simple and airtight logic behind the claim: Slugging, for the most part, happens in the air. In 2016, for example, big league hitters batted .239 with a .258 slugging percentage on groundballs vs. .241 and .715, respectively, on flyballs — with much of the difference, obviously, attributable to home runs: Grounders produced zero, while flyballs produced 5,422.

“If you look at a baseball field and look on the infield, there’s a lot of players there,” Donaldson said, providing an even more elemental logic. “There’s not as much grass.

But you look in the outfield, there’s fewer players and more grass. So if you hit it in the air, even if it’s not that hard, you have a chance. There are some outfielders who make it more difficult. But someone who has never seen baseball before would be like, ‘Oh, yeah.

You’d probably want to hit it out there.’”

‘A transition lane’ The introduction in 2015 of Statcast — MLB’s camera-based analytics system, which can measure player movements and ball flights in intricate detail — has confirmed and perhaps accelerated the flyball trend in baseball by introducing “launch angle,” a measurement of a ball’s vertical trajectory, into the mainstream. While a launch angle of zero is

essentially a line drive at the pitcher’s knees, a negative figure is a grounder and 90 degrees is a popup straight above home plate.

Analysts have been able to pinpoint the range of 25 to 35 degrees as the sweet spot for home runs, when paired with an exit velocity — a measure of the speed of the ball off the bat — of 95 mph or greater. The exit velocity is crucial: At lower velocities, those flyballs are simply outs.

“People see launch angle and think guys are just trying to hit it higher,” Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo said. “That is a part of it. But you also have to hit it hard.”

And while data is available for just the past three seasons, there is already evidence that players are catching on. In 2015, the average launch angle in MLB was 10.5 degrees, but in 2016, the league-wide average rose to 11.5, an increase of about 10 percent. This year, continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

through May 21, the league average was up to 12.8 degrees, another year-to-year increase of almost 12 percent. Clearly, the notion is gaining traction.

“It’s a transition lane in which the game is going,” Pirates Manager Clint Hurdle said this spring. “You’ve seen some very good hitters have very good success with it. More conversations are being had about it. We’re definitely having conversations.”

The increasing prevalence and success of flyball-focused hitters is a massively important development in the modern game because it can help explain — or at least illuminate — many of the major trends and issues confronting the sport.

How launch angle affects a hit Batters are increasingly trying to hit the ball at a higher angle, causing more flyballs and fewer grounders. Balls hit high enough are likely to either result in “bloops” over the infielders or, hit hard enough, in home runs.

Hit probability

20° 0°

More likely to result in a hit

-20°

Launch angle 70° Popups, usually caught for an out

l The

increase in frequency and efficiency of defensive shifts. According to FanGraphs,

teams are shifting at a rate nearly 10 times greater than six years ago (2,974 total at-bats against shifts in 2011 vs. 33,343 in 2016). Many hitters cite this as a primary reason they have chosen to take to the air. “Teams have more information about where to play their infielders,” Headley said. “But the one ball that can’t be caught is the one that lands in the seats.”

Some baseball executives say the next logical step to combat the flyball revolution will be occasional four-man outfields. l The overall increase in home runs. Hitters bashed 5,610 home runs in 2016, an increase of more than 14 percent from the year before and the most since 2000. That year turned out to be during the height of widespread performance-enhancing drug use in baseball. Maybe this new era of home-run hitting can be explained, at least partly, by more hitters simply concentrating on elevating the ball with power.

Almost all home runs were in this area.

“Bloops” over infielders

35° Daniel Murphy 16.6° 2016 Flyballs

0°

The “sweet spot,” between 25 and 35 degrees and more than 95 mph accounted for 57% of home runs in 2016.

Anthony Rendon 16.8° 2016

2016 MLB average 11.5°

Daniel Murphy 11.1° 2015

Anthony Rendon 10.6° 2015

Groundballs

l Even the pace of the game is tied into the flyball revolution. It’s no secret games are

longer and more bloated by inaction — one of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s pet causes — in part because hitters swinging for the fences are willing to trade strikeouts for home runs and thus are willing to go deeper into counts.

Meanwhile, pitchers are taking longer between pitches, which some in the game attribute to the fact mistake pitches are being turned into home runs at a higher clip than ever.

“You can see pitchers taking more time to gather themselves before every pitch,” Nationals catcher Matt Wieters said. “There used to be a couple of hitters in each lineup where you needed to do that. Now it’s everybody.”

It’s not as if anybody has suddenly cracked a secret code about the optimum swing plane.

Hall of Famer Ted Williams — in his seminal book, “The Science of Hitting,” published in 1971 when he was managing the Washington Senators — advocated swinging with a slight uppercut, a notion that went against the prevailing wisdom of the day.

“The ‘level swing’ has always been advocated,” Williams wrote. “I used to believe it, and I used to say the same thing. But the ideal swing is not level, and it’s not down.” Grounders,

−35°

−70°

40

80

120 mph

Hit speed The numbers in this graphic reflect only balls directly tracked by Statcast and do not include balls with projected hit speeds or launch angles. Hexagons containing one batted ball or less, balls slower than 20 mph or faster than 130 mph and angles lower than negative 85 degrees or higher than 85 degrees are not shown.

Source: Statcast from Baseball Savant, baseball-reference.com

ARMAND EMAMDJOMEH / THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY Williams acknowledged, put a “greater burden on the fielders.” But he added, “If you get the ball into the air with power, you have the gift to produce the most important hit in baseball — the home run.”

What is most important, Williams concluded, is that you hit consistently with authority.

But Williams’s measured theory is a long way from the more radical approach of today, with some hitters swearing off grounders altogether.

Where did the modern gospel of the flyball originate? The Oakland A’s of the early 2010s are credited with identifying and exploiting a market inefficiency of undervalued flyball hitters, hoarding relatively cheap players with extreme flyball rates — such as Jonny Gomes, Josh Reddick and Jed Lowrie — and leading the majors in both 2012 and 2013 in flyballgroundball ratio, while winning the American League West both years.

But in terms of hitters purposely revamping their swings to become extreme flyball hitters, this modern trend is often traced to Marlon Byrd, the outfielder serving a 162-game suspension after a second positive test for performance-enhancing drugs. In 2012, Byrd averaged two grounders for every flyball, a rate that was in line with his career numbers to that point. But in 2013, after working with an obscure, independent swing instructor named Doug Latta who runs a baseball training facility in Chatsworth, Calif., Byrd cut that rate in half and produced the best season of his career.

“Our first session was a tipping point for his career,” Latta said. “Basically, the whole idea of an uppercut was antithetical to what he’d been taught for his first 10 years in the majors. But right away, his first couple of swings, which he took using a little bit different movement, changed him, right there. And he was in. I could see the expression on his face. He told me, ‘Doug, I could never tell another hitting coach or player that I’m trying to hit under the ball.’ ” But in 2013, while with the New York Mets, Byrd convinced another struggling hitter, teammate Turner, to work with Latta. Before that, Turner was a fringe big leaguer with a lifetime slash line (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of .260/ .323/.361. Since joining the flyball revolution, he has hit .299/.367/.492 and was rewarded this offseason with a four-year, $64 million contract.

“He started drilling it into me,” Turner said of Byrd’s influence. “I started hitting with [Latta] in the [following] offseason, and then I just started running with it. . . . There’s no switch to turn on. There’s no trick. It’s just a lot of hard work, trying to get a better launch angle.”

Secret to success Look around the majors now, at players who make significant year-over-year leaps in performance, and there is a good chance at least part of the improvement is a result of hitting the ball in the air with more frequency and

Home runs on the rise again The number of home runs in 2016 almost matched the 2000 peak set during the steroid era. Experts say this is because batters are trying to hit the ball higher more often. (*)

Strike-shortened season 1977

6,000

Drug testing programs implemented

2000 PEAK

Ball change from Spalding to Rawlings

5,693

2016

5,610

*

4,000

* * 2,000

0

*

’70

’80

’90

2000

Source: baseball-reference.com

authority.

In fact, all you have to do is look at the Washington Nationals.

In 2015, Daniel Murphy, in his final season with the Mets, had a groundball rate of 42.8 percent (of balls in play) and a flyball rate of 36.0 percent, and he batted .281/.322/.449 with 14 homers and 56 RBI. The next year, his first in Washington, D.C., he essentially flipflopped his groundball-flyball ratio — to 36.3 and 41.9, respectively — and batted .347/.390/ .595 with 25 homers and 104 RBIs, while finishing runner-up in MVP voting. The change he made is illuminated by his average launch angle — 11.1 degrees in 2015, 16.6 degrees in 2016.

“It’s cool,” Murphy said this spring, “because with all the data we’ve been given now, [we have] some of the answers to the test.”

Teammate Anthony Rendon had a similar reinvention (from 45.3 percent grounders and 33.3 flyballs in 2015 to 35.7 and 43.8 in 2016) and had a similar boost in production, gaining 91 points of on-base-plus-slugging percentage.

Not surprisingly, his launch angle went from 10.6 degrees in 2015 to 16.8 in 2016.

This year, it is Ryan Zimmerman who — at Murphy’s prodding — has converted to the gospel of the flyball, going from an extreme groundball hitter (48.6 percent vs. 34.6 percent flyballs) in 2016, when he suffered through the worst year of his career at the plate, to a balanced 38.1/38.1 in 2017. He was off to a sizzling start this season, hitting .368/.409/ .709, with 15 homers in his first 50 games. His launch angle has gone from 7.8 degrees in 2016 to 11.2 this season, through May 25.

At least publicly, though, Zimmerman remains skeptical of advanced analytics such as launch angle, sounding more like Williams than Donaldson.

“For me, if I start to try to control those things, I start trying to do too much and think

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“There’s no switch to turn on. There’s no trick. It’s just a lot of hard work, trying to get a better launch angle.”

Justin Turner, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman

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too much,” Zimmerman said. “It’s always been tough enough to just hit the ball hard. If you can do that, good things happen.”

Zimmerman scoffed at the notion that improvement is as easy as hitting the bottom half of the ball. “Good luck trying to hit the bottom of the ball when everyone’s throwing 95 or 100” mph, he said. “I think it’s more of a mind-set.”

But there is a growing bank of evidence that the approach is catching on and that it works.

Eight of the 10 playoff teams in 2016 ranked in the top half of the majors in flyball percentage.

The gospel has spread so far, even the Padres have embraced it — though in fairness, they have turned over their front office and moved in the fences at Petco Park since the days of the keep-it-on-ground memo.

“I’m doing a lot to not hit groundballs this year,” Padres first baseman Wil Myers told the San Diego Union-Tribune this spring. “When I [hit] off the tee, I do not hit anything that does not hit the top of the [batting] cage. Stay away from the groundball.”

Even the most ardent flyball evangelists acknowledge the approach has its limitations and caveats. It isn’t for every hitter. There may also be another reaction coming, in the form of hard-throwing sinkerball pitchers, who can better counteract hitters trying to drive the ball in the air. For now, at least, teams are finding it easier to acquire flyball hitters than to convert them during the season; most players only make major swing changes in the offseason.

“It’s difficult to tell a guy to change something based on a launch angle. It’s more about getting them to understand the best swing path for them individually,” Orioles hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh said. “You never want to impose a higher launch angle on someone who’s not a power guy. A smaller guy, a speed guy, someone who’s not a power hitter — you could be asking a guy to be doing something that works against them.”

But it seems likely the gospel of the flyball will continue to grow as more struggling hitters resurrect their careers and more good hitters become great by embracing launch angles.

“It’s a career-changer,” Latta said. “The genie’s out of the bottle. Now, at the big league level, the key will be: ‘Do we really know how to instruct this?’ It’s not going away.”

If Williams was the oracle for older generations of hitters, perhaps Donaldson will be the same for this and future ones — a role he would relish. During an illuminating segment on his swing theory on MLB Network last year, Donaldson stopped at a crucial juncture and looked straight into the camera to address any kids who might have been watching.

“If you’re 10 years old and your coach says to get on top of the ball,” Donaldson said, “tell them no. Because in the big leagues these things that they call groundballs are outs. They don’t pay you for groundballs. They pay you for doubles. They pay you for homers.” © The Washington Post

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ENVIRONMENT

For activists, it was the last straw BY

D ARRYL F EARS

I

t started so innocently. A kid ordered a soda in a restaurant.

“It came with a plastic straw in it,” Milo Cress recalled.

He glared at the straw for a while.

“It seemed like such a waste.”

Not only did Cress yank the plastic from his drink, but he also launched a campaign, “Be Straw Free,” targeting all straws as needless pollution. He knocked on the doors of restaurants in Burlington, Vt., where he lived at the time, and asked managers not to offer straws unless patrons asked.

He was 9 years old.

Today Cress, 15, is one of the faces of a growing movement to eliminate plastic straws. They have been found wedged in the nose of a sea turtle, littering the stomachs of countless dead marine animals and scattered across beaches with tons of other plastics.

Why single out pollution as small and slim as a drinking straw?

Straws are among the most common plastic items volunteers clean from beaches, along with bottles, bags and cups, conservationists say. Americans use half a billion straws every day, at least according to an estimate by Be Straw Free, based on information from straw manufacturers. That many straws could wrap around the Earth 2½ times.

The slightest wind lifts plastic straws from dinner tables, picnic blankets and trash dumps, depositing them far and wide, including in rivers and oceans, where animals often mistake them for food.

And they are ubiquitous. Nearly every chain restaurant and coffee shop offers straws. They’re in just about every movie theater and sit-down restaurant. Theme parks and corner stores and ice cream shops and school cafeterias freely hand them out.

But they are starting to disappear because of the awareness campaign Cress and dozens of conservation groups are waging.

Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom bans them, as do the food

HELEN LOCKHART/TWO OCEANS AQUARIUM

Numerous groups want restaurants and homes to eliminate the ubiquitous, disposable plastics concession areas of Smithsonian Institution museums.

Keith Christman, a managing director for plastics markets at the American Chemistry Council, which promotes plastics manufacturers and fights attempts to ban plastic, said in a National Geographic article two months ago that the group would do the same for attempts to eliminate plastic straws.

But a spokeswoman for the council said “we won’t be able to offer comment” or say whether the group backs Christman’s claim.

The movement was growing at a slow, steady pace when Cress joined it six years ago, but it exploded after a YouTube video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose went viral in 2015. The cringe-inducing effort to pull the plastic out of a bloody nostril outraged viewers — 11.8 million so far.

Cress has launched a website on the issue, partnered with sev-

eral organizations that support the cause and testified against straws in the Vermont legislature.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) cited Cress’s activism in a 2013 proclamation that made July 11 a straw-free day in the state.

Manhattan Beach outside Los Angeles banned all disposable plastics, including straws. Berkeley, Calif., is considering a ban.

Restaurants in San Diego; Huntington Beach, Calif.; Asbury Park, N.J.; New York; Miami; Bradenton, Fla.; London; and British Columbia have pledged to ban straws or withhold them until patrons ask for them.

The Plastic Pollution Coalition estimates that 1,800 “restaurants, organizations, institutions and schools worldwide have gotten rid of plastic straws or implemented a serve-straws-upon-request policy,” said Jackie Nunez, founder of a group called the Last Plastic Straw.

More than 20 such restaurants near Wrightsville Beach, N.C.,

Plastic straws, collected here in Cape Town, South Africa, are among the litter commonly found on beaches, antipollution advocates say.

signed up last year to be certified by a coalition of groups as establishments that won’t serve straws unless they’re requested.

Ginger Taylor, a volunteer who cleans trash from the five-mile beach, said the campaign is working, at least anecdotally.

“I’ve been picking up straws on Monday morning on that same stretch of beach for five years,” she said. Four years ago, she picked up 248 straws in about two weeks.

The next two years, she collected about 500. But the number fell to 158 after the awareness campaign started last year.

Diana Lofflin, founder of a group called Straw Free, said the turtle video inspired her year-old organization. Her volunteers persuaded California’s Joshua Tree Music Festival to go straw-free in May. They also knock on the doors of Orange County, Calif., homeowners who grow bamboo to ask whether they can harvest a little and make reusable straws from the plant. Like several other groups, Straw Free sells reusable bamboo straws online, theirs in packs of 10 for $1.50.

Xanterra Parks & Resorts, a concessions company that partners with the National Park Service to provide food and lodging at Rocky Mountain National Park, the Grand Canyon and other national parks, offers straws at dispensers but posts fliers asking patrons not to use them.

“Humans didn’t really evolve around straws. It’s not like we have to consume fluids with this appendage,” said Catherine Greener, vice president of sustainability for the company.

“There are plenty of times when straws just aren’t necessary,” said Aaron Pastor, a restaurant consultant and one of dozens of vendors who sell stainless steel, bamboo and other reusable straws online.

Pastor said chastising plastic straw users isn’t his style. “If your goal isn’t to preach and come across as ‘I’m better than you,’ that’s best. I just say they’re wasteful, they end up in oceans and, hey, do you really need one?” n ©The Washington Post

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LIFESTYLE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Teens really do become less active

A RIANA E UNJUNG C HA

T

he adolescent years are when people’s bodies are supposed to start the ascent to their physical peak. Teenagers are growing like beanstalks. Their hormones are raging. They’re eager for new experiences. By all accounts, this should be among the most active periods in a person’s lifetime.

Except it turns out it’s not.

In an eye-opening study involving 12,529 Americans ages 6 to 85, researchers mapped how physical activity changes over a lifetime.

The participants, part of the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, wore accelerometers, devices that measure movement, for seven consecutive days. For the purposes of the analysis, researchers counted all types of movement, not just exercise.

The first thing to note about the results, published in the August issue of the journal of Preventive Medicine, is that physical

activity appears to be at its highest at age 6. If you’ve ever seen a squirmy kindergarten class that shouldn’t be a surprise.

Vijay Varma, a National Institute on Aging researcher and lead author of the study, said that there has been a belief that physical activity gradually declines across the entire life span. But according to the new data, there seems to be a sharper-thanexpected decline during childhood — starting in elementary school and continuing through middle school and high school. By age 19, the average American is as sedentary as a 60-year-old.

“At 60-plus, many people have health issues that might cause a restriction in movement, but why is this happening at age 19? It suggests that the social structures in place may not be supporting physical activity,” Varma said in an interview.

He theorized that the modern school day, which requires sitting for large amounts of time and where recess is often compressed into 20 to 30 minutes a day, may

be partly to blame. There’s also the issue of early school-bell times, which researchers have found lead to sleep deprivation.

“The timing of school isn’t consistent with biology of when kids wake up and go to sleep,” he explained.

Varma and co-author Vadim Zipunnikov, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, point out that the data shows that schoolage children were the most active between 2 and 6 p.m., or after school.

Another reason for the sedentary day is likely to be screen time.

Studies about how long we spend parked in front of our TVs, laptops, tablets and phones tend to become outdated quickly because of the constant rollout of new technology, but the numbers have been consistently high — as much as seven to nine hours per day.

While the American Academy of Pediatrics recently loosened its recommendations for screen time, almost everyone agrees that too much of it leaves less time for

The average 19-yearold is as sedentary as a 60year-old, study finds

ISTOCKPHOTO

BY

physical activity, which can lead to a higher risk of obesity and depression.

Calling the end of adolescence a “high-risk time period for physical inactivity,” the study confirms that most children are not getting the minimum amount of activity — at least 60 minutes of a moderate-to-vigorous workout — recommended by the World Health Organization. Among 6-to-11year-olds, 25 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls were not meeting the target. For adolescents ages 12 to 19, the situation was even more dire, with 50 percent of males and 75 percent of females falling short, the study found.

The next surprise in the study involves people in their 20s. The data show activity levels go up during this period — and this is important because this is the only period when people are moving more. Varma calls this a “catchup” period and believes this, too, may be related to social factors.

While the increase in activity was spread throughout the day, there was a noticeable spike in the early morning as compared to teenagers. According to the study, “emerging adulthood represent a period of multiple life transitions, including initiation of full-time work, increased household responsibilities, and changes in family structure including marriage and becoming a parent.”

As expected, physical activity starts to decline at around age 35, and that trend continues through midlife and beyond. That’s consistent with previous studies and attributed to the wear and tear on our bodies as we age.

The timing of physical activity showed that as children age, their physical activity moves later and later in the day until it flips after age 19 to more activity in the mornings.

“These findings broadly suggest to us we really need to start looking at when individuals are being more active so we can home in on what is occurring,” Varma said, “and start to design physical activity interventions that might target those behaviors.” n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The race to create e≠ective vaccines N ONFICTION

G THE VACCINE RACE Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

By Meredith Wadman Viking.

436 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

S USAN O KIE

rowing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I suffered through chickenpox and measles, like millions of other American kids, and I belonged to the first generation to receive the new polio vaccines in national campaigns. My parents had friends permanently paralyzed by polio; the mother of a schoolmate gave birth to a baby who was deaf, nearly blind and suffering a severe intellectual disability from rubella (“German measles”) contracted during pregnancy.

Within a half-century, vaccines have made these and other oncecommon viral diseases so rare in the United States that doctors being trained today may never see cases of them, and some parents worry more about the small or hypothetical risks of vaccinating children than about the risks of leaving them unprotected. It takes events such as the 2015 measles outbreak among visitors to Disneyland in California or the recent emergence of the Zika virus — so dangerous to the brain of a developing fetus — to remind us not to take our freedom from infectious diseases for granted.

In this meticulously researched history of the high-stakes race to develop effective vaccines against polio, rubella, rabies and other viruses, science writer and physician Meredith Wadman tells the story of these near-miraculous medical achievements of the postWorld War II era. “The Vaccine Race” also details the risks posed by some of the early products — risks that arose, in part, because to make the vaccines, researchers first had to invent techniques for growing viruses such as polio or rubella in living cells, without knowing what other viruses those host cells might harbor. Even when a courageous government scientist, Bernice Eddy, and colleagues showed that monkey cells used to produce the Salk polio vaccine and other vaccines contained a virus, SV40, that could

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Children line up to be immunized in New York in the 1940s.

cause malignant changes in human cells, government officials at first discounted the evidence and allowed such vaccines to remain on the market. By 1963, when the federal Division of Biologics Standards began to require that polio vaccines be free of SV40, 98 million Americans had received the Salk vaccine, indisputably preventing tens of thousands of cases of paralysis from polio. But between 10 million and 30 million of them may have received a dose contaminated by the SV40 virus.

Whether such exposure increased their likelihood of developing cancer remains uncertain.

Early vaccines against viral diseases were designed to stimulate the immune system by giving the recipient either a dead or a weakened version of the virus they were meant to protect against. In livevirus vaccines, choosing the right strength and strain of the virus was a challenge. If it was too strong, the vaccine might cause full-blown cases of the illness; if too weak, it might not produce lasting immunity. Live-virus vaccines are used today to protect

against infections such as measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.

Newer vaccines against some other diseases are genetically engineered to contain only proteins from the coat of the virus so they can’t cause the infection.

In the postwar decades, researchers and drug companies competed intensely to be the first to license vaccines against certain diseases. The need was urgent.

Polio paralyzed an average of 15,000 Americans each year. Rubella epidemics occurred every few years and were devastating for women infected during pregnancy: The nationwide epidemic of 1964-65 caused about 6,250 miscarriages or stillbirths, 2,100 deaths among newborns, and 20,000 cases of congenital birth defects. An additional 5,000 pregnant women obtained abortions after contracting rubella. Rabies, considered the most deadly of all infections in humans, was on the rise in wild animals in the early 1960s, and the existing vaccines for people bitten by infected animals were dangerous or insufficient.

At the time, government standards on the ethics of human research were rudimentary to nonexistent. As Wadman describes, vaccines were tested in circumstances shocking to a reader today.

Experimental vaccines were given to newborn or premature babies, to prisoners, and to mentally or physically disabled residents of institutions, often without the consent of patients or parents, and with minimal institutional oversight. The first humans to receive a live polio vaccine, in 1950, were 20 intellectually disabled children at Letchworth Village, an institution in rural New York.

Wadman relates this fascinating history as lived by a handful of scientists at the center of it all, especially Leonard Hayflick, an indefatigable cell biologist who refined techniques for growing, maintaining and infecting human cells with viruses to make safer, better vaccines, and Stanley Plotkin, a pediatrician and vaccinologist who studied the rubella virus and developed a safe, highly protective vaccine against it.

At almost 400 pages of text plus abundant endnotes, this book is so rich in scientific anecdotes, historical detail and quirky characters that I can’t do it justice in a short review. She conveys the era’s noholds-barred approach to science, as well as the altruism of individual scientists and doctors at a time when no one had yet thought of patenting a gene or a living cell.

Her dissection of the role played by abortion in vaccine development provides valuable context for understanding today’s abortion politics, and her chapter on the stirrings of entrepreneurship among biologists and universities is an enlightening primer on the birth of the biotech industry. n Okie is a physician, a former Washington Post science reporter and editor, and a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Finding humanity in a dying town

When the champ found his voice

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

W

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S IMS

ild Thyme is a township lost in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a place where the locals have awakened from the American Dream to find themselves in the new millennium’s nightmare of dead economies, fracking and heroin addiction. It’s a place so small it employs a single full-time police officer: Henry Farrell. A youngish, bearded, fiddle-playing widower and part-time barn builder, he first appeared as the narrator of Tom Bouman’s 2014 debut novel, “Dry Bones in the Valley,” which earned an Edgar Award for best first mystery and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Bouman’s new novel, “Fateful Mornings,” is as rich and satisfying as its predecessor — another relentless thriller that reads like a literary novel.

The people in both books make terrible mistakes and suffer terrible consequences. Bouman understands that most crimes result from toxic brews of passion and addiction, poverty and resentment. Henry Farrell does not go down these mean roads with his purity untarnished. In “Dry Bones in the Valley,” for example, Farrell foolishly got involved with a married woman; in “Fateful Mornings,” it’s his turn to pay for mistakes. Despite professional and personal errors, though, he remains a decent man concerned for his fellow travelers.

Bouman created Farrell out of the earth of this region, and in classical fashion sent him away to war (Mogadishu) and brought him back home, where he could see his origins with new eyes. “I’d been raised by a father like an ironwood tree,” Farrell says. “He never took off his camo except on Sunday, when we’d sit in an offbrand church and hear peculiar, harsh beliefs. My family’s home had been small, and in the hills, and I barely graduated high school.”

Unlike most crime writers, Bou-

man notices the natural stage as much as the human drama unfolding on it, and animals receive the same sympathy as other characters. At times the natural world provides apt analogies. “Greedy little things,” Farrell says of the carnivorous weasels called fishers.

“They just kill and kill, stash what they’ve got and move on, leave food on the table. They’d bury us in a second if they could.”

In “Fateful Mornings,” a human fisher haunts the never-innocent township. With convincingly suspenseful turns of the screw, Bouman provides an original, terrifying take on the hoary old serialkiller theme. The plot is so interwoven that providing details risks spoilers. What begins as a search for a missing young woman grows into a network of secrets whose uncovering will shock the whole region.

Bouman’s nuanced research — on courtroom law, drug addiction, barn building — underlies the story like the strata that shape the hills of Wild Thyme. Farrell’s approach to building barns evolves into a metaphor for building the future out of the past, searching for reusable strength, constantly repurposing and striving for beauty in the result — or perhaps even in the process. Detective novels are notoriously conservative in their restoration of order, but the order in Farrell’s world is precarious. For survivors, however, a painful search for meaning goes on amid the fiddle tunes.

Near the end of the book, Farrell and his friends play music on the site of a barn he is helping build from lost shelters of the past: “Wild Thymers drifted in and out of our work site, in and out of the life of a long-gone era we could only wonder at now. . . . I yawned, a great world-eating yawn, and I played.” n Sim’s recent books include “Arthur and Sherlock” and “The Adventures of Henry Thoreau.” This was written for The Washington Post.

I FATEFUL MORNINGS

By Tom Bouman W.W. Norton. 353 pages. $26.95

STING LIKE A BEE Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America, 1966-1971

By Leigh Montville Doubleday.

354 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

S UNNI K HALID

n “Sting Like a Bee,” Leigh Montville focuses on a transformative period in the life of Muhammad Ali when the heavyweight champion struggled as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; lost his boxing license, forcing his exile from the sport; rejected his “slave name,” Cassius Clay; and pledged himself to the Nation of Islam under the name Muhammad Ali. The book begins in 1966, two years after Ali snatched the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston, and takes readers through the 1971 Supreme Court decision reversing his draft-dodging conviction.

Montville does an excellent job of capturing the changing mood of the times, from the American public’s support of the Vietnam War, fear of the Nation of Islam and vilification of Ali to its gradual shift against the conflict and subsequent acceptance of Ali as a martyr and hero.

The author relies on a range of sources, including the vibrant black press of the time, with publications such as Ebony magazine and the Chicago Defender. The result is a balanced narrative that encompasses the civil rights movement, its Black Power offshoot and the growing antiwar movement. Montville delves into court documents and FBI files to recount Ali’s winding and often convoluted legal battle and appeal of his conviction.

Readers also get rare glimpses into Ali’s private life, much of which has previously been glossed over or ignored. The most valuable insights come from the champ’s second wife, Belinda Boyd, who changed her name to Khalilah Camacho-Ali, and who married Ali at age 17, shortly after he was stripped of his boxing license.

A compelling portrait emerges of Ali courting Camacho-Ali and behaving as a young husband.

Through Camacho-Ali, Montville depicts Ali at a crossroads, facing the prospect of prison and trying to remain loyal to the dictates of

Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, while still pining to return to the ring. We see the couple driving across the country to Ali’s university speaking engagements, which supported him and his family. In one scene, Ali and CamachoAli stop for gas in rural Alabama and are treated to Southern hospitality when strangers give them boxes of fried chicken for their journey. Camacho-Ali also provides an unflattering account of Ali’s marital infidelities after his return to boxing, including a tryst with a $40 prostitute the day before his highly anticipated first title fight against Joe Frazier.

Aside from revealing some of Ali’s personal foibles, Montville shows how he began to evolve intellectually: He embraced the straitjacketed, quasi-religious doctrine of the Nation of Islam, which rejected not only the war in Vietnam but racial integration — stances that put Ali at odds with other members of the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Within a short time, however, the charismatic Ali began to express more original thoughts on the war, and he grew confident enough to not only engage in giveand-take with college students opposing his views but also to hold his own in a famous television debate with conservative intellectual William F. Buckley.

As revelatory as Montville’s book is, it has some shortcomings.

While the author describes Ali’s devotion to the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, he unearths no new ground on the inner workings of the movement.

Nonetheless, “Sting Like a Bee” is a valuable, indeed essential, addition to the growing library on Ali, offering a broader understanding of the enigma known as “the Greatest.” n Khalid is a former foreign correspondent currently writing a book on modern Egypt. This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

What happens when all nations become ‘me first’ DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

Here in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, the mood is “Kurdistan first” with the announcement of a referendum on independence in September. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, it’s “Saudi first,” as a brash young crown prince steers the kingdom toward a more assertive role in the region. In Moscow, where I visited a few weeks ago, it’s “Russia first,” with a vengeance. And so it goes, around most of the world.

The politics of national self­interest is on steroids these days. For global leaders, it’s the “me” moment. The nearly universal slogan among countries that might once have acted with more restraint seems to be: “Go for it.”

The prime catalyst of this global movement of selfassertion is, obviously, President Trump. From early in his 2016 campaign, he proclaimed his vision of “America first” in which the interests of the United States and its companies and workers would prevail over international obligations.

Trump has waffled on many of his commitments since becoming president, but not “America first.”

He withdrew from the Paris agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to name two multinational accords that Trump decided harmed American interests, or at least those of his political supporters.

Trump’s critics, including me, have been arguing that this selfish stance is actually weakening the United States by shredding the network of global alliances and institutions on which U.S. power has rested. But let’s put aside this issue of selfinflicted wounds and focus instead on what happens when other leaders decide to emulate Trump’s disdain for traditional

limits on the exercise of power.

Nobody wants to seem like a chump in Trump world. When the leader of the global system proclaims that he won’t be bound by foreign restraints, the spirit becomes infectious. Call the global zeitgeist what you will: The new realism. Eyes on the prize. Winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing.

Middle East leaders have been notably more aggressive in asserting their own versions of national interest. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates defied pleas from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to stop escalating their blockade against Qatar for allegedly supporting extremism. Their argument was simple self-interest: If Qatar wants to ally with the Gulf Arabs, then it must accept our rules.

Otherwise, Qatar is out.

For the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, the issue has been whether to wait on their dream of independence. They decided to go ahead with their referendum, despite worries among top U.S. officials that it could upset

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Following President Trump’s example, many other world leaders have become more focused on their own national self-interests.

American efforts to hold Iraq together and thereby destabilize the region. The implicit Kurdish answer: That’s not our problem.

We need to do what’s right for our people.

Trump has at least been consistent. His aides cite a benchmark speech he made April 27, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in which he offered an early systematic “America first” pitch.

He argued that the country had been blundering around the world with half-baked, do-gooder schemes “since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union.”

Trump explained: “It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed.”

What’s interesting is that this same basic critique has been made, almost word for word, by Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s not a conspiracyminded argument that Trump is Putin’s man, but simply an observation that our president embraces the same raw cynicism

about values-based foreign policy as does the leader of Russia. (It’s an interesting footnote, by the way, that in the audience that day as Trump gave his framework speech was Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.)

Who are the outliers in this me-first world? Perhaps the Europeans. Despite body blows to the European Union over the past few years, France and Germany, the two dominant players, retain the conviction that their destinies involve something larger than national self-interest.

Fear and nationalism have shaken Europe but not overwhelmed it. An enlightened center is holding at Europe’s core.

China, too, manages to retain the image that it stands for something larger than itself, with its “one belt, one road” rhetoric of Chinese-led interdependence.

The question, as Harvard University’s Graham Allison argues in his provocative new book, “Destined for War,” is whether the expanding Chinese hegemon will collide with the retreating American one.

The politics of selfishness may seem inevitable in Trump world.

But by definition, it can’t produce a global system. That is its fatal flaw. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Justice Kennedy, please don’t retire RUTH MARCUS is a columnist for The Washington Post, specializing in U.S. politics and domestic policy.

As we mark the end of another Supreme Court term, we also mark the prospect — the terrifying prospect — of a retirement. Specifically, the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who turned 81 in June and is the longest-serving current justice, having been named to the high court almost 30 years ago.

So if Kennedy is inclined to retire, it is hard to begrudge him that choice. But his departure would be terrible for the court and terrible for the country. It could not come at a worse time.

Any court vacancy these days, under a president of either party, triggers a battle between liberal and conservative forces.

Kennedy’s retirement would unleash nomination Armageddon, given the feral political environment and the pivotal role he plays on the closely divided court.

To understand the impact of Kennedy’s departure, just look back to his selection to fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Powell.

Like Kennedy now, Powell was the ultimate swing justice; his was the key fifth vote for liberals on issues including abortion rights and affirmative action, topics as charged then as they are today.

President Ronald Reagan’s original choice to take Powell’s

place was conservative federal appeals court judge Robert Bork.

The ferocious confirmation fight that ensued — and resulted in Bork’s rejection — still echoes in today’s unceasing warfare over judicial nominations. Kennedy’s unanimous confirmation — he was Reagan’s third choice — calmed only the immediate furor.

Imagine, then, a Kennedy retirement in this partisan and unstable political landscape. It could make the Bork fight look like a kindergarten squabble.

With President Trump under investigation by the special counsel and his approval rating mired below 40 percent, his incentive may be to cater to his base with a pick as far to the right as possible, an instinct enabled by the Republicans’ move, during the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.

Justice Kennedy, perhaps it is

unfair to pile all this onto your shoulders, but is it really wise to subject an already divided country to even more turbulence?

And to another nomination by this president, with his evident ignorance of the role of the judiciary and disdain for judicial independence?

Your career has been characterized by insistence on civility, respect for the dignity of all individuals and commitment to the rule of law — qualities absent in our president. Just read Trump’s tweets and ask yourself: Do I really want my successor named by this man?

No need to look back to the campaign, and his repugnant comments about the “Mexican” judge presiding over the Trump University fraud lawsuit. Just consider the president’s tweets about judicial rulings in the case that has now reached your own court. He blasted the “so-called judge”; assailed “slow and political” courts; and, most alarming, suggested that blood would be on the judiciary’s hands if a terrorist incident took place while his travel ban was being delayed.

The hearing didn’t get much attention, but consider, too, the Trump appellate court nominees who came before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.

One, Kentucky lawyer John Bush, nominated to the 6th Circuit, posted pseudonymous writings on a political blog that touched on President Barack Obama’s Kenyan heritage and, in another post, he described slavery and abortion as “the two greatest tragedies in our country” and said they “relied on similar reasoning and activist justices at the U.S. Supreme Court, first in the Dred Scott decision, and later in Roe.” Another nominee, Damien Schiff, nominated to the Court of Federal Claims, used a different blog to denounce anti-bullying efforts for “teaching ‘gayness’ in public schools,” and to criticize the court’s ruling in Lawrence v.

Texas — that’s your ruling, Justice Kennedy — striking down state laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy.

Oh, and also, to observe that “it would seem that Justice Kennedy is (and please excuse the language) a judicial prostitute, ‘selling’ his vote as it were to four other justices in exchange for the high that comes from aggrandizement of power and influence, and the blandishments of the fawning media and legal academy.”

Justice Kennedy, does the president who chose this man really deserve to name your replacement? n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

It’s time to change House elections DON BEYER a Democrat, represents Virginia’s 8th District in the House. This was written for The Washington Post.

Democracy is in crisis. Even as the country is deeply divided along class and ideological lines, it seems to be unified in its frustration with our current brand of politics.

Polls show that less than 20 percent of the country approves of the way Congress is doing its job. The time has come to consider a transformative idea that reflects the American electorate’s desire for moderation and fairness and that encourages the reemergence of bridge builders and candidates with an eye for compromise. That idea involves changing the way we elect members of the House of Representatives.

This past week, I introduced the Fair Representation Act, which would make two fundamental changes in how voters elect their representative in the U.S. House. First, it would allow voters to rank the candidates in order of preference, rather than simply voting for their top choice. Some version of this system is already used in many municipalities, and six states have adopted some kind of ranked-choice voting for congressional elections. If your first-choice candidate does not win, your second or third choice may. This spurs candidates to work to appeal to a broader swath of voters, which would calm polarization in many parts of the country.

Second, the Fair

Representation Act would change congressional districts into “multi-member districts,” as used in many states for their legislative elections. Think of it as a hybrid between what we have today and Senate seats, in which two people jointly represent a larger area. States with five or fewer House members would elect all their representatives at large. Any state with six or more members would elect representatives in multi-member districts.

Let’s take Massachusetts. It is home to nine congressional seats, all held by Democrats.

Although 24 percent of Massachusetts voters with party registrations are registered Republicans, no Republican has held a seat in the House of

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Representatives — in 20 years.

This means that the Republican quartile of the electorate rightly feels left out and disillusioned, and Democratic candidates largely run and govern from the left, knowing it is the source of their only true opposition.

Now divide Massachusetts into equal thirds, apply rankedchoice voting and elect three candidates in each district. A few things happen. For one, no district is a gerrymandered, partisan swath of the state.

Rather, each district represents a larger and therefore more diverse array of voters. This is likely both to attract more candidates and to entice those candidates to speak to the middle of the spectrum. In turn, more citizens would feel that someone spoke to their issue or viewpoint, which would encourage voter participation.

Applied nationally, we would have more moderate Democrats from districts leaning Republican, and vice versa, creating a type of politician — now nearly extinct — known as a “bridge builder.” Many members would share constituents with members of the other major party, creating incentives to work together on legislation affecting the district.

Results from local elections

that use ranked-choice voting also show that more women would run and win and that minority voting rights would be strengthened by this change — all the more important today given that women make up less than 20 percent of Congress and that racial minorities are caught in legal fights over gerrymandering.

Some might ask whether it is Congress’s job to tell states how to hold their elections. Under the Constitution, Congress is in fact expected to act when the system is broken. In 1842, it mandated a system of singlemember districts when some states started to use at-large elections as a partisan tool. Now we see the breakdown of that district system, and it’s time for a new standard.

In 1993, 113 members of the House came from “crossover” districts, where voters favored the opposite party. After the 2014 midterm election there were just 26, according to analysis by FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that supports the Fair Representation Act. In the near future, we could again have dozens, leading to revitalization of our democracy.

But we almost certainly will not unless we change the system. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Air travel BY

S AM D ENBY

Airlines don’t just defy gravity; they also defy business norms. From the way they treat customers to the way ticket prices are determined to the blistering pace of change (the way we fly today is vastly differ­ ent than even 10 years ago), the industry is shrouded in misunder­ standings. Here are five of the most notable.

MYTH NO. 1 Bigger planes mean lower fares.

The difficulty is that economies of scale don’t always work for airlines, because planes generally don’t increase in perpassenger efficiency as they grow larger. In fact, many of the most efficient planes of today are the smallest ones. At a transatlantic distance, a 525-seat Airbus A380 has an efficiency of 74 miles per gallon per passenger, while the new 168-seat Boeing 737 MAX 8 reaches 110 mpg per passenger.

Smaller, more efficient planes allow airlines to operate less expensive nonstop routes.

Airport fees can account for hundreds of dollars of a longhaul fare, because these flights often operate between the busiest, highest-demand airports.

Most travelers living outside the largest cities are forced to connect through bigger, more expensive airports despite having originated at the least expensive airports. This routing drives up their fares. With newer, longrange small planes, however, airlines can operate nonstop long-haul flights from smaller markets.

MYTH NO. 2 Flying is expensive.

While flying might still be reserved for the middle and upper classes, it’s never been less expensive. In 1979, the average round-trip airfare in the United States was $617 (in 2016 dollars); today it’s down to $367. In 1974, the minimum legal price an airline could charge for a oneway ticket between New York

and Los Angeles was $1,442 (in 2017 dollars), while today tickets between the two cities go for as little as $149.

Meanwhile, according to AAA, the average cost to drive per mile in 2016 was 60 cents, while flying typically sets us back between 10 and 15 cents per mile. In a 25 mpg car, driving from Washington, D.C., to Chicago would cost $66 in gas alone, while airfares are available on the route for as little as $47.

MYTH NO. 3 Flying is worse for the environment than driving.

Airplanes are undoubtedly gas guzzlers. Jet fuel emits more carbon dioxide per gallon than car fuel, and contrails are believed to have a short-term negative impact on the environment.

What many statistics don’t account for, however, is just how many people airlines can pack into their planes. Lufthansa’s 747-8 seats 364 passengers. On a per-passenger basis, its flight from Frankfurt to Washington requires 65 gallons of fuel — not enough to get an SUV from D.C. to Denver. That plane averages 89 mpg per passenger, far higher than even the most efficient hybrid cars. And planes are becoming more energy efficient with each iteration, while carriers work to implement the use of biofuels to further reduce emissions.

MYTH NO. 4 Merger mania is bad news for travelers.

EGORYCH/GETTY IMAGES

Before the turn of the century, the big three U.S. airlines — United, Delta and American — were eight separate carriers. In the past few decades, we’ve seen an intense consolidation of the industry, most recently with the merger of US Airways and American Airlines.

Yet this unfortunate situation is also a result of something positive: aggressive competition.

After Southwest, the first lowcost carrier, found success, copycats took note. Virgin America, Allegiant Air, JetBlue and Frontier Airlines were all founded as low-cost carriers since 1990, and others, such as Spirit Airlines, have restructured into a low-cost model. The traditional U.S. airlines had trouble competing against these price-conscious companies.

The competitive advantage today of the big three U.S. airlines is their route networks, which allow them to serve smaller cities. Delta, for instance, flies to more than 200 airports in the United States — in places like Billings, Mont. The mergers let a traveler in Key West, Fla., fly to Anchorage, with just one connection. With prices as low as ever, this ability to traverse the country, from places big and small, surely is not bad for consumers.

MYTH NO. 5 The best flight path is the shortest distance.

That’s not quite right. What truly determines a flight path is cost: Every minute of additional flight time on a large jet costs an airline hundreds of dollars, so routes generally correspond with the shortest overall flight time, which is not always the shortest distance. Air India’s flight from Delhi to San Francisco used to fly a direct route, taking it north over Russia, above Norway, across Greenland, then down over Canada to its destination.

This route clocked in at roughly 8,600 miles. However, wind on Earth flows from west to east, so westbound flights take longer.

Last fall, Air India started using a new route for this flight. While adding 900 miles of distance by traveling eastbound across China and the Pacific Ocean rather than westbound, Air India now saves more than $10,000 in fuel and two hours of flight time. Most examples of wind affecting flight paths aren’t nearly as drastic, but every route deviates at least slightly from direct to minimize costs because of wind. n Denby is the founder of Wendover Productions, an aviation-focused video production company. This was written for The Washington Post.

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