The Washington Post National Weekly - July 5, 2015

Politics Navigating social sea change 4

World Embracing U.S. pop culture 10

Education Hey, grads, take a year off 16

5 Myths Women’s sports 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JULY 5, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

DR. WAT S ON, I PRESUM E?

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, is training alongside cancer specialists to do what they individually can’t PAGE 12

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

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

The GOP’s ‘Deadheads’

by Hunter Schwarz

T

he Grateful Dead are playing the final show of their “Fare Thee Well” Tour on Sunday in Chicago, and if that means anything to you, you’re more likely a Republican than a Democrat.

What? America’s pioneering jam band is more a Republican thing than a Democratic one? Well, kinda.

A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and the Mellman Group found the band has a 46 percent hard name ID (i.e. whether people can judge it favorably or unfavorably) among Republicans, compared with 37 percent among Democrats, and 35 percent among independents.

It seems a little counterintuitive that a band so often tied to drug use and tie dye is better known among members of the party largely opposed to legalizing marijuana. (Only 39 percent of Republicans or those who lean Republican support it, compared with 64 percent of Democrats or those who lean Democratic, according to Gallup.)

The reason though, is pretty simple: age. Fans who were teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the band released songs like “Dark Star,” “Box of Rain” and “Truckin’” are now in their 50s and 60s. Those are some of the most Republican age groups.

And Republicans are actually just as likely to be Grateful Dead fans than Democrats — 32 percent and 31 percent have favorable opinions of the band, respectively.

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STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

Favorability of the Grateful Dead, by political affiliation

THE WASHINGTON POST

Of course, members of the GOP are more likely to have an unfavorable view of the band — 15 percent, compared to Democrats’ 6 percent.

What a strange poll it’s been. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 38

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

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ON THE COVER IBM’s Watson computer is best known for winning “Jeopardy!” against human opponents, but it’s since been trying out other endeavors.

Photograph by ANDREW SPEAR for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Amid a cultural shift, can GOP stand firm?

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Republican Party’s candidates struggle for footing as national consensus evolves

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OBERT C OSTA

Corydon, Iowa

M

ike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor, Fox News personality and Baptist preacher — gathered with a modest crowd at the Breadeaux Pizza on his “Main Street American Family” tour and opened the floor to questions.

The very first one set the tone.

Jeff Hontz, 49, a Baptist pastor, said he has been anxious because he sees “America going down the wrong roads morally.” God decreed unchanging standards in Scripture, Hontz argued, but society keeps changing — and fast.

“I saw a commercial this morn-

ing about a transgender show, and everybody was praising it,” he said, prodding the candidate.

Huckabee responded by declaring that the standard of all truth is the Bible. Distorting the laws of nature, he said, is akin to playing the piano without a tuning fork — or baking a cake without the proper measurements of salt, flour and sugar. “You’re going to have a disaster on your hands,” he said.

The exchange illustrates the vexing challenge now facing Republican presidential candidates and the GOP itself: how to get in step with modern America.

Across the cultural landscape, the national consensus is evolving rapidly, epitomized by this year’s convulsions of celebrity, social is-

sues and politics — including the acceptance of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender identity, Pope Francis’s climate-change decree and widespread shunning of the Confederate flag. Then came last month’s landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

As rainbow colors bathed the White House and other landmarks in celebration, the entire field of Republican presidential candidates condemned the ruling.

This uneven terrain is now a key battlefield in the 2016 campaign, unnerving red America and fueling intense debate within the Republican Party about how to navigate such changes — or whether to adapt to the mainstream at all.

“Most Republicans look at

Mike Huckabee has said the standard for all truth is the Bible and that distorting the laws of nature is akin to playing piano without a tuning fork — or baking a cake without proper amounts of salt, flour and sugar.

what’s happening and think we’re watching a new stage of left-wing nuttiness,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

“It’s just surreal.”

The GOP’s activist base wants its leaders to fight loudly for traditional, Christian values and sew together a moral fabric they see as frayed, even shredded. This is especially true here in Iowa, which hosts the first caucuses and where candidates will not easily avoid pressure from the far right. Yet political survival demands evolution with popular opinion.

So far, many contenders are giving the base what it wants.

“We’re called upon not to be the thermometers that reflect the temperature in the culture,” Huck-

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POLITICS abee said. “We’re called upon to be thermostats, which can read the temperature and seek to adjust it to where it should be.”

Democrats are hoping for just this approach. They argue — as many Republican Party elites in Washington fear — that if Republicans don’t moderate on issues such as gay rights and immigration and become more tolerant, they will be locked out of the White House. Asked how Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton could motivate voters, several top Democratic officials said: The Republicans may do it for her.

“Republicans are going to have to make inner peace about living in a same-sex marriage world,” said Pete Wehner, a former adviser to George W. Bush. “Our nominee can’t have serrated edges. Like it or not, any effort to create moral or social order will be seen as rigid and judgmental. . . . Grace and winsomeness are the ingredients for success in a world where cultural issues are at the fore.”

‘Get with modern life’ This is a profound shift for a party that a decade earlier won national elections under a banner of social conservatism. In 2004, Bush successfully used his opposition to gay marriage as a wedge issue in his reelection campaign.

“If these topics are the big ones in the general election — rather than the failure of President Obama and Hillary Clinton as his third term, foreign policy, and, of course, the economy — we can’t win,” said Austin Barbour, a Mississippi-based operative who runs the super PAC supporting Rick Perry. “We need to be sensible, logical and reasonable on the social issues but also make sure the debate isn’t entirely about them.”

The shifts to the left on social issues may reinforce pessimistic beliefs among Republicans about the direction of the country. In a CBS/New York Times poll in May, 88 percent of Republicans said the nation was on the wrong track, compared with 63 percent of all Americans. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Democrats said the country was headed in the right direction.

“When a young voter sees a Republican coming, many of them roll their eyes and wonder why they can’t get with modern life,” said Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary.

The party’s business wing has

BRIAN POWERS/DES MOINES REGISTER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

One likely candidate trying to soften the party’s language is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who espouses what he calls “the kindness of conservatism.” A devout Christian, Kasich looks to the activist pope as a model. been evolving quickly on many social issues, particularly on gay rights. Religious liberty measures in Indiana and Arkansas that many saw as discriminatory against gays drew immediate backlash earlier this year from local chambers of commerce — not to mention corporations such as Wal-Mart, the red-state retail giant — prompting reversals from Republican governors.

“The country is changing, the culture is changing, the demographics are changing and politics is changing,” said former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, now president of the Financial Services Roundtable. “The rhetoric at the congressional level and with some of the candidates tends to be a lagging indicator.”

In far-flung state capitols, legislatures that became more solidly Republican during the past two midterm election sweeps are moving aggressively with social policy designed to combat what conservative lawmakers see as liberal encroachment from Washington.

For instance, bills to ban abortions after 20 weeks are moving in sev-

eral state legislatures.

Politicians are responding to the deep angst conservative activists voice in their communities. At a Huckabee event in Osceola, Mary Klein, a 79-year-old school nurse, invoked an urban legend.

“Have you heard about the frogs?” Klein asked. “When you put a bunch of frogs in water and you heat it, they don’t realize the temperature is getting warmer and warmer and warmer. Then it kills them. Our country is getting neutralized, at small degrees at a time, and we won’t realize it until we’re already sucked in and it’s too late.”

‘Kindness of conservatism’ Among the 16 declared or likely Republican presidential candidates, there is general agreement on traditional social policies, such as opposing gay marriage and abortion rights. The differences come in tone and countenance.

“We can share our views without sounding like avenging angels,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.). “It’s the self-righteous tone that scares more than the views themselves.”

Poll In a CBS/New York Times poll in May, 88 percent of Republicans said the nation was on the wrong track, compared with 63 percent of Americans as a whole. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Democrats said the country was headed in the right direction.

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Major GOP donors, especially those in high finance in New York, have been privately quizzing leading presidential candidates on same-sex marriage. Some have been turned off by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, thinking the son of a Baptist preacher to be too strident in his opposition, and preferring Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) because they suggest a more laissez-faire attitude.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), an even-tempered ally of House Speaker John A. Boehner (ROhio), recalled: “Ronald Reagan was awfully good at not backing off his position while also never yelling or shouting or pounding the table. Persuasion, persistence and resolve — that was his magic.”

Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, said that speaking only to the base about issues of God, guns, gays and abortion isn’t enough to win.

One likely candidate trying to soften the party’s language is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who espouses what he calls “the kindness of conservatism.” A devout Christian, Kasich looks to the activist pope as a model.

In Iowa last month, Kasich advocated a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants — a lightningrodissueintheRepublicanprimary season. When he encountered an undocumented woman and her young son, Kasich said, “They are made in the image of the Lord.”

By contrast, Donald Trump railed against illegal immigrants in his campaign announcement speech. He said the United States had become a “dumping ground” for drug abusers, “rapists” and other criminals from Mexico.

Democrats are eager to portray Republicans as the party of Trump, Santorum and Huckabee, as well as retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — all candidates who proudly resist the shifting social mores.

Housing Secretary Julián Castro, a potential Democratic vice presidential candidate whose ancestors emigrated from Mexico, criticized Trump in a recent interview for “plainly insulting Mexicans and by extension folks who are the descendants of Mexicans.

“He will be in this campaign in many ways the face of the Republican Party, because he has higher name identification than almost all of them,” Castro said. n

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POLITICS

Clinton’s unlikely — but real — threat

BY J OHN W AGNER AND A NNE G EARAN

Rochester, N.H.

A

t the first glimpse of the rumpled 73-year-old senator from Vermont, the standing-room-only crowd at a historic inn here last Sunday morning erupted — leaping up, waving signs and breaking into chants of “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!”

The scene has become a familiar one as Bernie Sanders makes a most unexpected surge in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders — a self-described democratic socialist — has seen his crowds swell and is gaining ground in the polls on the formidable Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton. In New Hampshire, where Sanders was on yet another weekend swing, one survey last month showed him within 8 percentage points of Clinton.

Sanders’s emerging strength has exposed continued misgivings among the party’s progressive base about Clinton, whose team is treading carefully in its public statements. Supporters have acknowledged privately the potential for Sanders to damage her — perhaps winning an early state or two — even if he can’t win the nomination.

“He’s connecting in a way that Hillary Clinton is not,” said Burt Cohen, a former New Hampshire state senator and Sanders supporter who attended Sunday morning’s event, where a nasty rain didn’t seem to deter many people from coming. “He’s talking about things people want to hear.

People are used to candidates who are calculated, produced and measured, and they see through that.

Bernie’s different.”

During his hour-long stump speech here, Sanders railed against the “billionaire class” and pledged to make large corporations pay their fair share of taxes if he becomes president. But much of his message focused on improving the lot of the lower and middle classes — by providing free college; guaranteeing workers vaca-

MICHAEL DWYER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders emerges as a serious obstacle for the Democratic front-runner tion time, sick leave and family leave; and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

“I don’t believe it is a terribly radical idea to say that someone who works 40 hours a week should not be living in poverty,” Sanders told a crowd of about 300 people.

For all the excitement surrounding his grass-roots effort, Sanders still faces significant skepticism from party elites — and even from some of his supporters — about whether he can advance beyond being a summer sensation. Some suggest he could fade as voters think more seriously about who they want as their nominee, and even Sanders acknowledges that money could become an issue once the contest moves to bigger states, where television advertising is more essential.

Sanders also has said that his campaign has a lot of work to do to connect with minority voters. Although he has a long history on civil rights, Sanders represents a state that is 95 percent white, and

he remains largely unknown among African Americans — a crucial constituency in South Carolina and other states on the primary calendar after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Ultimately, Sanders’s fate may rest with voters like Beth Powers, who sat June 27 in a Nashua community college gymnasium, where Sanders kicked off his seven-stop Granite State swing before a crowd of more than 500 people.

“I love Hillary, but I like that fact that Bernie is a populist, and he’s saying a lot of important things,” saidPowers,48,ahighschoolteacher in nearby Milford who started learning about Sanders on Facebook through postings by friends and liberal media sites she follows.

Powers said she’s leaning toward Sanders but admitted being a little torn: “I’m a realist. In terms of money and networking, he’s got some real ground to make up. If people like me don’t come out for him, he doesn’t have a chance.”

Clinton’s advisers had long

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) speaks during a town hall meeting on June 27 at Nashua Community College in Nashua, N.H. It was part of a sevenstop swing through the early-primary state.

planned for a populist challenge from her left, perhaps from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Sanders appears to be the heir to populist support for Warren, who took herself out of the race before Clinton entered it in April. Sanders routinely praises Warren in his stump speech.

The Clinton campaign declined to discuss Sanders’s candidacy on the record, but the strategy is plain: She will not attack him — she has yet to mention him on the campaign trail — and will stick to her plan to roll out her policy agenda in phases this summer.

Clinton loyalists note that she has taken liberal positions on issues including immigration reform, voting rights and same-sex marriage, and is expected to follow suit with proposals affecting college affordability and student debt, raising the minimum wage and expanding paid leave.

Clinton’s focus on race relations and gun control since the Charleston, S.C., massacre also provides an implicit comparison with Sanders, who has no broad base of support among African Americans in urban areas and the South.

The Clinton campaign is betting that as she builds a progressive platform, Sanders’s appeal will wane — at least among those attracted to him primarily because of his ideological credentials.

Sanders supporters drawn more by distaste for a Clinton coronation may be a different story.

In an interview over the weekend, Sanders said some in Washington have misjudged the potential breadth of his support and are wrongly suggesting that his appeal is limited to liberal activists.

“The truth is, the vast majority of the voters in this country are middle-class and working-class people,” Sanders said. “I think the vast majority of those people are totally frustrated with a political system in which big money buys elections, and they’re totally disgusted with our country’s economics. . . . If we can get through to those people, not only will we win the Democratic nomination, we’re going to win the general election as well.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Living up to the family name

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN

W

hen the University of Missouri at Kansas City was looking for a celebrity speaker to headline its gala luncheon marking the opening of a women’s hall of fame, one of the names that came to mind was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But when the former secretary of state’s representatives quoted a fee of $275,000, officials at the public university balked. “Yikes!” one e-mailed another.

So the school booked the next best option: her daughter, Chelsea.

The university paid $65,000 for Chelsea Clinton’s brief appearance Feb. 24, 2014, a demonstration of the celebrity appeal and marketability that the former and possibly second-time first daughter employs on behalf of her mother’s presidential campaign and family’s global charitable empire.

More than 500 pages of e-mails, contracts and other internal documents obtained by The Washington Post from the university under Missouri public record laws detail the school’s long courtship of the Clintons.

They also show the meticulous efforts by Chelsea Clinton’s imagemakers to exert tight control over the visit, ranging from close editing of marketing materials and the introductory remarks of a high school student to limits on the amount of time she spent on campus.

The schedule she negotiated called for her to speak for 10 minutes, participate in a 20-minute, moderated question-and-answer session and spend a half-hour posing for pictures with VIPs offstage.

As with Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches at universities, Chelsea Clinton made no personal income from the appearance, her spokesman said, and directed her fee to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

“Chelsea is grateful to have the opportunity to speak at events like this while also supporting the work of the Clinton Foundation,” said the spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz. He said she was happy to “celebrate the legacy of women in

DAVID EULITT/THE KANSAS CITY STAR

After a college balks at Hillary Clinton’s fee, it books Chelsea Clinton for $65,000 instead their community.”

The e-mails show that the university initially inquired about Chelsea Clinton but her speaking agency indicated she was unlikely to do the speech. At that point, a university vice chancellor urged organizers to “shoot for the moon” and pursue the former secretary of state, who proved too expensive.

So the university turned back to others, eventually choosing Chelsea Clinton when the agency indicated she was willing. Just shy of her 34th birthday, Clinton commanded a higher fee than other prominent women speakers who were considered, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem ($30,000) and journalists Cokie Roberts ($40,000), Tina Brown ($50,000) and Lesley Stahl ($50,000), the records show.

Officials with the school appeared to believe Clinton was worth her fee, which university spokesman John Martellaro said was paid using private donations.

They exulted to Clinton’s representatives that the luncheon sold

out quickly, with 1,100 tickets selling for $35 each — which would equal $38,500. University officials say the event was intended to boost attention for the new hall of fame, not raise money.

“Chelsea was the perfect fit,” Amy Loughman, an alumni relations official who managed the event, wrote in an e-mail a few days later. “It created fantastic buzz in the community.”

Chelsea Clinton has become an increasingly public figure in her own right.

With her parents stepping back from the foundation, started by former president Bill Clinton in 2002, Chelsea Clinton has assumed a prominent management role there and as an advocate for its work on global health, childhood obesity and other issues. Until last summer, she worked as a special correspondent for NBC News, where Politico first reported she earned an annual salary of $600,000.

Clinton is stepping out as an early key surrogate for her moth-

Chelsea Clinton, left, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, answers questions posed by former Kansas City, Mo., mayor Kay Barnes during a paid appearance by Clinton at the University of Missouri at Kansas City for an unveiling of the Starr Women’s Hall of Fame.

er’s campaign, appearing this spring on the cover of Elle magazine and walking at the head of the campaign’s marchers at last weekend’s gay pride parade in New York City.

Clinton has delivered nine paid speeches on behalf of the Clinton Foundation in recent years, raising between $370,000 and $800,000 for the nonprofit organization.

Overall, the foundation has taken in between $12 million and $26 million in speaking fees, most of that from 73 speeches delivered

by Bill Clinton.

In dozens of e-mails exchanged between University of Missouri officials and Clinton’s representatives at the Harry Walker Agency, which arranges appearances by all three Clintons, there was no reference to her $65,000 fee going to charity. Nor was there any reference in the five-page contract.

The university paid the fee — which also covered Clinton’s travel expenses — in two disbursements to the Walker Agency. But Martellaro said, “We have no knowledge of how funds were disbursed from that point.”

Bazbaz said all of Clinton’s paid speeches through the Walker Agency are delivered on behalf of the foundation “to support implementing its life saving work” and that this was “always the intention” with the University of Missouri. He added that neither she nor her hosts receive charitable tax deductions.

The contract stipulated that Clinton would have final approval of everything, such as the selection of her introducer , the onstage setup and the type of microphone provided for her use.

In e-mails with university officials, Clinton’s aides closely edited the texts of press releases, marketing materials and introductory remarks.

Clinton’s representatives also closely managed her time on campus. They asked whether she would be free to depart from the event once she finished her remarks, rather than waiting until the luncheon concluded.

Martellaro said she stayed until the end. n

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NATION

Big setback for SpaceX and industry Sunday’s rocket explosion follows two other failures in past year

BY J OEL A CHENBACH AND C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

I

t was a beautiful day on the cape, sunny and hot with patchy clouds — good weather for rocketry. SpaceX’s unmanned Falcon 9 rocket looked great as it tore a hole in the sky, propelling 4,000 pounds of cargo in a Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station.

Two minutes later, Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 blew up like a bottle rocket. Food, supplies, hardware and dozens of student science experiments rained to the sea off the Florida coast.

Rocket explosions are nothing new in the Space Age, but this one instantly reverberated across the U.S. space community. No one was aboard this time, but the privately owned and operated Dragon capsule is being designed so it can carry astronauts in the future. Moreover, this was the third cargo mission to the space station to have a catastrophic failure since October — and the second in a row.

“Having three this close together is not what we had hoped for,” Michael Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager, said in a news conference.

The timing of the latest explosion was terrible for SpaceX, NASA and the Obama administration more broadly. The administration has been counting on SpaceX, founded by the tech titan Musk, to play a key role in a new strategy that relies on commercial contracts to put cargo, and eventually astronauts, into orbit.

Musk is the most prominent figure in the “New Space” movement, which seeks to make space travel cheaper and more accessible to ordinary people. New Space companies style themselves as entrepreneurial and innovative, in contrast to the plodding nature of the NASA bureaucracy and its traditional cost-plus contracts with huge aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

“This doesn’t change our plans. Our customers have always been loyal,” Gwynne Shot-

well, SpaceX president and chief operating officer, said in the joint news conference with NASA. “It’s a hiccup. It’s certainly a time to pause and make sure we’re doing everything we need to do.”

Until now, Musk and SpaceX seemed to have a magic touch.

With a fortune from his efforts as a founder of PayPal, Musk started SpaceX with a dream of colonizing Mars in his lifetime.

Bold as his rhetoric has been, he has been able to back it up with an astonishing string of successful ventures on Earth and in space. SpaceX had a track record of seven successful flights to the station.

NASA put up a brave face after the blast, vowing to forge ahead.

Astronaut Scott Kelly and the two Russian astronauts on the space station are not in danger, and NASA officials said the astronauts have sufficient food and water and other basic supplies to last until October. Another cargo mission, using a Russian Progress vehicle, was scheduled for Friday. Three more astronauts are supposed to join the current crew via a Russian Soyuz spacecraft later in July.

In August, a Japanese HTV-5 cargo vehicle is scheduled to send more supplies. That would have been followed by another SpaceX launch in September, though last Sunday’s explosion is sure to postpone that.

With Sunday’s launch failure, both U.S. space-cargo contractors, SpaceX and Orbital, have had rockets blow up. Orbital’s Antares rocket exploded in October, just seconds after lifting off.

In April, a Russian Progress spacecraft, carrying another load of cargo for the space station, went into an uncontrolled spin and fell back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.

Eric Stallmer, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said this is not the first time there’s been a launch failure, and “it won’t be the last time.

I think we need to be patient, conduct the investigation and get back flying. I don’t think we have a choice.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Dawn of a new Thurmond legacy K AREN T UMULTY Charleston, S.C. BY

W

hat finally opened Paul Thurmond’s eyes and changed his heart was in the Gospel of Mark — the very New Testament passage that his state Senate colleague Clementa Pinckney and eight other members of Emanuel AME Church were studying the night they were gunned down.

It was the parable of the sower, in which Jesus explains that if a seed falls on fertile ground, it can yield thirty- or sixty- or a hundredfold.

“I thought it spoke to my public service. I kept thinking about the circumstances,” he said in an interview. “I kept praying about what had happened, and there was this really true belief that good could come out of this horrible tragedy.”

The next morning, the 39-yearold Republican wrote the speech he would deliver the following day, calling for the Confederate battle flag to be taken down from the capitol grounds.

The youngest son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. senator Strom Thurmond noted his great-grandfather was with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

“I am aware of my heritage, but my appreciation for the things my forebears accomplished to make my life better does not mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions,” Thurmond said. “And for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based in part on the desire to continue the practice of slavery.”

Though Paul Thurmond did not mention his father in that speech, it was lost on no one that he was signaling a generational shift.

“Strom Thurmond’s legacy lingers even in this century,” said Matt Moore, chairman of the state GOP. “But ironically enough, the page has been turned by his son.”

Over the past three-quarters of a century, no name in South Carolina — and, it could be argued, the nation — has been more closely associated with the politics of race and segregation than that of Strom Thurmond.

ALEX HOLT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The words of Jesus and Martin Luther King inspired call to bring down Confederate flag In 1948, after the Democrats added a civil rights plank to their platform, then-Gov. Thurmond broke away and ran for president as a “Dixiecrat,” vowing, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

As a U.S. senator, he stood and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes, setting a record that still stands.

And when he finally left his party to become a Republican in 1964 Thurmond said it was in part because Democrats had “become the party of minority groups.”

“I love my father. He was a wonderful role model for me,” Paul Thurmond said. But he added: “I’ve always wanted to kind of make my own way.”

The younger Thurmond does not recall ever being asked, either as a candidate or a public official, what he thought of the flag — and

as a result, he said, he had not given it much consideration.

Thurmond acknowledged he initially was angered by new calls to remove the flag. “My first reaction was just the same as I think a lot of people are still reacting, which was: How can you take this tragedy and create a political issue from it — creating a political opportunity, so to speak?”

But when he went to a vigil for the victims, Thurmond said, he was struck by a passage cited from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

Then the parable of the sower convinced him that, indeed, a moment had arrived when something good could happen.

Later in his life, as his state shifted on racial issues, Strom Thurmond did as well. He appointed African Americans to his

South Carolina state Sen. Paul Thurmond (R) is the youngest son of Strom Thurmond, famous for his segregationist stands. Paul is helping lead the push to remove the Confederate flag at the state capitol.

Senate staff, for instance, and supported a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the extension of the Voting Rights Act. But he always insisted he had no regrets for his earlier stands.

Strom Thurmond was 73 years old when Paul, the youngest of his four children by his second wife, Nancy, was born in 1976.

On Thurmond’s wedding day in 2003, not long after his father’s death, a family secret — something he had heard rumored but never believed — became public.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired Los Angeles schoolteacher, announced that she was Strom Thurmond’s daughter. Her African American mother had worked in the Thurmond household when she was a teenager; Strom had privately acknowledged her and provided financial support since 1941.

“I met her a couple of times — a very, very gracious woman, very kind,” Paul Thurmond said of his half-sister, who died in 2013. On the other end of the capitol grounds from the Confederate flag, her name is now engraved with those of Strom Thurmond’s four other children at the base of a statue of their father.

“I don’t know how I can judge that,” Paul Thurmond said.

“There’s no problem for me judging how horrible slavery was and how horrible segregation was, but that’s a relationship. That was with my father and Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Relationships are complicated.”

His family has been supportive of his stand on the flag, and the reaction has been almost universally positive, Thurmond said.

Hundreds of e-mails have come in from around the country, and he has tried to answer every one.

The legislature is expected to vote shortly after July 4, and it appears there will be the necessary two-thirds vote to take down the flag.

“My forefathers gave me life.”

Thurmond said. “They really built this country and this state. I’m appreciative of their sacrifices. I don’t necessarily have to agree with them.” n

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WORLD

Afghanistan, American-style S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Kabul BY

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n a private room inside the Wiana Cafe, Mahmood Rezai snapped his hands to an imaginary beat, mimicking the actions of his favorite rap stars: Eminem, 50 Cent and Tupac. Under the Taliban, Rezai’s own lyrics — blistering critiques of social woes — would have earned him a beating, or worse. Today, he is a testament to the subtler influences of the nearly 14-year-long American presence in Afghanistan.

“I love gangsta rap,” said Rezai, wavy-haired, clean-shaven and wearing a big silver watch. “It’s like being in a desert, so very free.”

How history will remember America’s longest war will be shaped by debates over the United States’ failures and successes and visible consequences such as the collapse of the Taliban regime and the death of Osama bin Laden. But the U.S. engagement has also affected urban Afghan society in indirect ways, seeping into its culture, language and attitudes.

It can be seen in the graffiti that covers blast walls in some neighborhoods and the haircuts sported by hip Afghan youth. It can be heard in the vernacular of Afghan security guards after they frisk visitors — “You’re good to go, buddy” — and the alternative American rock music that fills Kabul’s illegal underground bars.

The U.S. influence can also be seen in the handmade carpets emblazoned with drones and F-16 jets. Or in the indifference of Afghan elites, grown wealthy on American military contracts, calmly losing thousands of dollars in Texas hold ’em poker games.

“I have personal freedom. I can wear what I want,” said Samira Ahmadi, an employee at a consulting firm. “Now we can have mixed parties with boys and girls, and we are going to picnics. This was all unimaginable under the Taliban.”

Yet what was once forbidden is unfolding under a cloud of history.

Afghans remember the liberal 1970s, when women in Kabul wore miniskirts and jazz clubs were the rage. But those freedoms had

ANDREW QUILTY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

U.S. influences, from rap to skateboarders, have seeped into nation’s culture — but for how long? evaporated by the 1990s. The society is still mostly conservative and tribal, many women remain subjugated, and centuries-old traditions rule. Even as they enjoy the new liberties, a question lingers among many Afghans: How long will they last?

Steps away from a stadium where the Taliban once stoned people to death, teenage skateboarders twist and fly off curved ramps in a gym. Seventeen-yearold Farid Wahidi rattled off the names of his heroes: “Rodney Mullen, Chris Cole and Tony Hawk” — all American skateboarders.

And he wants to be just like them, from his knee pads and Vans to his outsize ambitions. “My dream is to go to the United States and win a skateboarding tournament, just like the ones sponsored

by Red Bull,” Wahidi said.

In video stores around Kabul, bootleg DVDs of Hollywood films such as “ Furious 7” and “Taken 3” are hot sellers. So are Walt Disney cartoons, which parents use to

teach their children English.

At Bush Bazaar, named after President George W., shops sell Chinese-made knockoffs of U.S. military uniforms, khaki trousers with thigh pockets, gray U.S. Army T-shirts and Bushnell binoculars.

“When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, people liked to look like the Russians,” said shopkeeper Mohammad Idris, 25, who regularly sells out of Oakley sunglasses.

“Now, they want to look like American Special Forces.”

Conservative Afghans chafe at the new freedoms. Racy Turkish soap operas and the country’s version of “American Idol” are seen as Western imports that dilute Afghanistan’s centuries-old ethos.

Fashionably dressed women, their uncovered faces glowing with makeup, are often derided as unAfghan or prostitutes.

“The Americans are leaving behind a mess,” said Idris, the shopkeeper at Bush Bazaar. “They brought Afghans living in the West here, and together they are

Ibrahim Sayeedzai, 16, wears a cap emblazoned with American flags in Kabul. America’s contribution may prove to be mostly psychological, the reshaping of the psyche of a society.

spreading foreign culture among Afghans. The television shows are spreading immoral values. Our culture has been changed.”

Nowhere is this more apparent to Afghans than with the rise of the ultra-rich, created largely by U.S. military and aid contracts, and the rampant corruption it has fueled.

Around Kabul, the signposts of the wealthy are everywhere: milliondollar mansions, opulent weddings and luxury cars. Hummers are popular. The rich spend at will in a country where the average annual income is about $425.

On a recent night, several Afghans and Westerners huddled inside a house transformed into a dim underground bar called the Venue. The song “Getaway Car” by the Los Angeles band Audioslave filled the room, followed later by a dose of Frank Sinatra. Conversation, over $5 beers, turned to Kabul’s high-stakes, secret — and illegal — poker scene. In one cash game there was said to have been at least $30,000 on the table.

At the Wiana Cafe, six young women and seven men huddled on cushions, smoking from hookahs and chatting. Couples held hands while others clapped to loud American pop tunes, acts that were both banned under the Taliban.

Underneath their Western patina, though, they had existential questions about what the United States will be remembered for.

With most U.S. forces departed, the country remains politically dysfunctional and mired in conflict, with the Taliban revitalized and the Islamic State emerging.

And in the minds of most Afghans, there’s little evidence of the billions the United States has spent on development projects.

“If Americans continue to support Afghans after their withdrawal, democracy and civil freedoms will be their legacy,” said Ahmadi, the consulting firm employee.

And if they don’t, the “legacy that Americans are going to leave behind is war and mayhem,” said Hadi, an amateur actor who uses one name. “They are not leaving anything like what the Soviets left.” n

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In Japan, a very different gun culture A NNA F IFIELD Isehara, Japan BY

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hiaki Sakurai heard a story from his shooting buddies about an American school in Japan.

“I heard that there’s an American school here that has a sign out front saying ‘No guns,’ ” he said incredulously one day last month during a break from target practice at a shooting range. “The school has a sign, even though it’s in Japan!”

It’s not the prohibition that shocked Sakurai, a 56-year-old who has been shooting competitively for three decades, but the idea that such a sign would ever be needed.

Why would anyone be carrying a gun at all, let alone into a school?

The story about the sign might be an urban legend, but Sakurai’s astonishment was unfeigned.

As news of another U.S. mass shooting reverberates around the world, the Japanese, who live with some of the tightest gun-control laws in the world, are bewildered by the lack of restrictions in the United States.

“In Japan, shooting is strictly regulated, but in the United States it seems like everybody can have a gun,” said Hiroshi Yanagida, 70, who has been shooting for sport for nearly five decades.

Sakurai and Yanagida were among a handful of people practicing at a rifle range in Isehara, southwest of Tokyo, a week after nine people were killed in a shooting at a Charleston, S.C., church.

The people at the range limbered up, doing a variety of stretching exercises, before donning leather shooting jackets that looked like something that might be worn on a motorcycle. Then they lay on their mats to carefully line up their shots, glancing at the computer screens next to them to see how they did.

In Japan, shooting is not something you do to let off steam. People don’t go to their local ranges in T-shirts and jeans to unload a few rounds into an Osama bin Laden target.

Shooting here is a serious sporting activity, like archery or judo,

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Even the enthusiasts, who shoot only for sport, are baffled by the lack of regulations in the U.S. and ranges such as the one in Isehara are run by the Kanagawa prefectural government, much like public swimming pools or basketball courts.

Plus, gun use is regulated in a way that would give Second Amendment defenders heartburn.

Here’s how it works in Japan: If you want to apply for a permit to shoot and own a gun (there are no rentals), you must first attend a class on gun laws and gun safety, then pass a written test.

Next, submit all of the paperwork — details about your family, work and educational background, and a medical certificate declaring that you’re not depressed or an alcoholic, among other things — to the police, who will check to see if you have a criminal record and look into whether you’ve had any domestic or neighborhood disputes. A police officer will visit your home to

see where and how you intend to store your equipment.

Then you must attend a full-day training course where instructors teach basics such as etiquette at shooting ranges, how to handle guns and how to hit a target.

If you pass the shooting test, you can apply for a permit. Once it is issued, you can buy a gun, then take it to a police station for inspection and registration. Only the registered individual can fire that gun.

The permit is valid for three years. To renew it, a gun owner must enroll in a refresher course and pass a practical test.

Where would you keep your gun? In your gun locker, of course, which regulations stipulate must be affixed to the wall and have three locks on the outside and a metal chain on the inside to run through the trigger guard.

Your ammunition, of course, will

Tsunehiro Nakamura coaches his 10-yearold daughter, Sora, on shooting a rifle that fires a strobelight beam rather than bullets.

Shooting is a serious sporting activity in Japan, like archery or judo.

be kept in a separate, locked safe, per regulations, and you will probably keep the bolt in yet another safe. This last step is just a recommended one, to make sure the gun is fully disabled, but almost all Japanese gun owners comply.

“This is probably our national character, but people seriously follow the laws and keep their guns and bullets according to the regulations,” said Toshiaki Okazaki, an inspector in the community safety department of the prefectural police in Kanagawa, which includes Isehara.

Think such rules sound excessive? People here don’t. In Japan, even the gun enthusiasts are in favor of such restrictions.

“I’m against the idea that everybody can have a gun, and I completely agree with strict gun controls,” Yanagida said.

That the United States has experienced so many mass shootings but no regulations have been changed is particularly puzzling to these Japanese gun owners.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” Yanagida said of Congress’s inaction after 26 people, most of them children, were shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. “The politicians are to blame, and the general public as well.”

Experts here see a strong link between Japan’s strict gun controls and the lack of gun crime.

In 2013, the latest year for which National Police Agency statistics are available, 12 people were killed by guns, although 10 of the shootings were tied to crime syndicates.

That was a big jump over the previous year, when there were only three gun deaths and all had ties to the yakuza, the Japanese mafia.

Sakurai said people have guns for entirely different reasons in Japan and the United States.

“You should have a reason for having a gun, and if you don’t have a reason, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun,” he said.

Indeed, farther along the range, Yanagida seemed puzzled when asked about using his guns in selfdefense: “I never thought about using my guns to protect myself.” n

WATSON’S NEXT FEAT? TAKING ON CANcER.

BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA IN HOUSTON

SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ken Jennings, who won 74 “Jeopardy!” games in a row, and another of the show’s past champions, Brad Rutter, took on Watson in 2011 and lost.

Candida Vitale and the other fellows at MD Ander­ son’s leukemia treatment center had known one another for only a few months, but they already were very tight. The nine of them shared a small office and were always hanging out on weekends. ¶ But she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the new guy. ¶ Rumor had it that he had finished med school in two years and had a photographic memory of thousands of journal articles and relevant clinical trials. When the fellows were asked to summarize patients’ rec­ ords for the senior faculty in the mornings, he always seemed to have the best answers. ¶ “I was surprised,” said Vitale, a 31­year­old who received her MD in Italy. “Even if you work all night, it would be impossi­ ble to be able to put this much information together like that.” ¶ The new guy’s name was a mouthful, so many of his colleagues simply called him by his nickname: Watson.

ANDREW SPEAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Four years after destroying human competitors on “Jeopardy!” to win a suspense-filled tournament watched by millions, the IBM computer brain is everywhere. It’s done stints as a call center operator and hotel concierge, and been spotted helping people pick songs. It’s even published its own cookbook, with 231 pages of what the company calls “recipes for innovation.” (The reviews haven’t been flattering — one foodie declared one of Chef Watson’s creations “the worst burrito I’ve ever had.”)

But these feats were essentially gimmicks.

IBM is now training Watson to be a cancer specialist. The idea is to use Watson’s increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence to find personalized treatments for every cancer patient by comparing disease and treatment histories, genetic data, scans and symptoms against the vast universe of medical knowledge.

Such precision targeting is possible to a limited extent, but it can take weeks of dedicated sleuthing by a team of researchers. Watson would be able to make this type of treatment recommendation in mere minutes.

The IBM program is one of several new aggressive health-care projects that aim to sift through the huge pools of data created by people’s records and daily routines and then identify patterns and connections to predict needs. It is a revolutionary approach to medicine and health care that is likely to have significant social, economic and political consequences.

Lynda Chin, a physician-scientist and associate vice chancellor for the University of Texas

Fredrik Tunvall, a senior client engagement leader at IBM Watson, goes through a demonstration in May in the Immersion Room in New York. The screens show medical diagnoses and potential diseases.

system who is overseeing the Watson project at MD Anderson Cancer Center, said these types of programs are key to “democratizing” medical treatment and eliminating the disparity that exists between those with access to the best doctors and those without.

“I see technology like this as a way to really break free from our current health-care system, which is very much limited by the community providers. If you want expert care you have to go to an expert center,” she said, “but there are never enough of those to go around.”

Instead of having to find specialists in a different city, photocopy and send all the patient’s files to them, and spend countless hours researching the medical literature, a doctor could simply consult Watson, she said.

Jho Low, the 33-year-old billionaire who is bankrolling the $50 million MD Anderson project with Watson, said the effort grew out of his grandfather’s treatment for leukemia in Malaysia. Low said that he felt fortunate to be able to connect his grandfather’s doctors remotely with MD Anderson specialists to devise the best treatment plan. He believes everyone, rich or poor, should have the same access to that kind of expertise.

“This is very personal to my family. It is really

something we have gone through and seen what kind of difference it can make,” said Low, who is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and runs one of Asia’s most successful investment firms.

Low is part of an influential new movement in scientific research driven by young philanthropists and tech titans who have faith that the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data that powered the information revolution can also be used to understand, upgrade and heal the human body.

But the Watson project and similar initiatives also have raised speculation — and alarm — that companies are seeking to replace the nation’s approximately 900,000 physicians with software that will have access to everyone’s sensitive personal health information.

While there’s much debate about the extent to which technology is destroying jobs, recent research has driven concern. A 2013 paper by economists at the University of Oxford calculated the probability of 702 occupations being automated or “roboticized” out of existence and found that a startling 47 percent of American jobs — from paralegals to taxi drivers — could disappear in coming years. Similar research by MIT business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has shown that this trend may be accelerating and that we are at the dawn of a “second machine age.”

Scientists are already testing bots that can whip up pastries, machines that can teach math in class and robot anesthesiologists. continues on next page

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from previous page

Many physicians and academics in medicine have come to view Watson’s work with reservation, despite reassurances from IBM officials that they are trying not to replace humans but to help them do their jobs better.

“I think a lot of folks in medicine, quite frankly, tend to be afraid of technology like this,” said Iltifat Husain, an assistant professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Husain, who directs the mobile app curriculum at Wake Forest, agrees that computer systems like Watson will probably vastly improve patients’ quality of care. But he is emphatic that computers will never truly replace human doctors for the simple reason that the machines lack instinct and empathy.

“There are a lot of things you can deduce by what a patient is not telling you, how they interact with their families, their mood, their mannerisms. They don’t look at the patient as a whole,” Husain said. “This is where algorithms fail you.”

Watson’s evolution Named after Thomas J. Watson Sr., IBM’s first chief executive, Watson was designed to be a substantial leap forward from Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a marathon three-day man vs. computer match in 1997.

Deep Blue’s edge was brute force. It had the ability to calculate and analyze up to 200 million scenarios per second — a skill that could be applied to complex calculations as diverse as modeling the stock market and ranking the potential of small molecules for new drugs.

But the program was handicapped by its inability to perform basic skills that humans master in their first few years of life. It couldn’t make sense of regular human speech or any other type of unstructured data or information that isn’t organized according to a predefined formula like a chart or table.

Given that the world is a messy place when it comes to data — from the text of Shakespearean plays to traffic patterns in Los Angeles — Deep Blue’s abilities were limited.

Watson was imagined from the start to be more human.

One of the top priorities for programmers was to give Watson the power to read and understand natural language. They also gave it the ability to generate hypotheses and locate and parse evidence to support or refute them.

Much like the human brain, Watson has become smarter over time by learning from its successes and failures and from user feedback.

Watson is literally evolving.

In the beginning, Watson’s knowledge base was limited to trivia for “Jeopardy!” But since its debut on national television in February 2011, Watson has devoured many thousands of literary works, newspaper articles and scientific journal reports as well as information input by hundreds of researchers and doctors nationwide. These experts have helped the machine brain make more reasonable inferences and conclusions by reviewing Watson’s ideas and

IBM VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. congratulates Thomas J. Watson Jr. on succeeding him as the company’s chief executive in 1956.

Watson has become smarter by learning from its successes and failures and from user feedback. telling it whether it is right or wrong and by highlighting which sources of information are considered more reliable than others.

Unlike a human brain that can be distracted, confused or inspired by huge volumes of information, Watson is not a creative thinker but a rational one. It looks at known associations among various bits of data and calculates the probability that one provides a better answer to a question than another and presents the top ideas to the user.

Rob Merkel, who leads IBM Watson’s health group, said the company estimates that a single person will generate 1 million gigabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime.

That’s as much data as in 300 million books.

“You are deep into a realm where no human being could ever make sense of this information,” Merkel said. That’s where Watson comes in to create a “collective intelligence model between machine and man.”

“We’re not advocating that Watson replace physicians,” he explained. “We are advocating that Watson does a lot of reading on behalf of physicians and provides them with timely insights.”

Originally made up of a cluster of supercomputers that took up as much space at IBM as a master bedroom, Watson is now trimmer — the

size of three stacked pizza boxes — and versions of it live in the server rooms of IBM’s various partners.

IBM has so much faith in Watson’s innovativeness that in January 2014 the company announced that it would invest an additional $1 billion in the technology, and it created a new division to grow the business. Since then, IBM has highlighted health care as Watson’s priority and said it will dedicate at least 2,000 medical practitioners, clinicians, developers and researchers to the effort and will partner with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic to collect patient information that consumers had consented to share.

French bank Credit Agricole predicted that as much as 12 percent of IBM’s total revenue in 2018 could be from Watson-related products — with a large chunk coming from “consulting” fees that would be billed per use or through a subscription for access to its expertise.

It is Watson’s work in cancer that is the most advanced.

Among the most ambitious projects is a partnership with 14 cancer centers to use Watson to help choose therapies based on a tumor’s genetic fingerprints. Doctors have known for years that some treatments work miraculously on some patients but not at all on others because of genetics. But the expense and complexity in identifying genetic mutations and matching them up with potential therapies has made it difficult for more than a handful of patients to benefit from this new approach. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

Meanwhile, Watson is continuing its on-theground training with cancer specialists.

In 2011, IBM announced that Watson had learned as much as a second-year medical student. Since then it’s graduated and has been doing residencies at some of the nation’s top cancer centers, including Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and the Cleveland Clinic. In late September, Watson achieved another training milestone: It began its first fellowship in a specialty — leukemia — at MD Anderson.

The revolution The process of creating the world’s first artificial-intelligence expert in cancer starts with something decidedly low-tech: paper.

Lots of it.

A team from MD Anderson and IBM spent months feeding the computer program the names, ages and genders, and medications, lab tests, imaging results and notes from each visit for thousands of leukemia patients treated there over the past few years.

Leukemia is a cancer that can be attacked in dozens of ways — including high-dose chemotherapy and immune-based therapies such as targeted antibodies — and it’s often tricky for physicians to decide between one or another.

Watson — or the Oncology Expert Advisor, its official name at MD Anderson — was tripped up by little things at first. It sometimes had trouble telling whether the word “cold” in a doctor’s notes referred to the virus or the temperature. Or whether T2 was referring to a

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IBM VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

type of MRI scan or a stage of cancer. So each patient record had to be validated by a human.

Moreover, Watson’s recommendations were often a little wacky.

“When we first started, he was like a little baby,” said Tapan M. Kadia, an assistant professor in the leukemia department. “You would put in a diagnosis, and he would return a random treatment.”

To teach Watson, the doctors would have to type in what they believed the “right” course of treatments should be and why. They also handpicked a number of key journal articles from the past for Watson to reference and started giving it access to newly published material.

In October, the team decided Watson was ready to start its fellowship.

Koichi Takahashi, who was at the top of last year’s class of fellows and recently appointed an assistant professor in leukemia, said he’s been impressed so far.

Watson’s ability to synthesize a patient’s history is “amazing,” Takahashi said. “He beats me.”

The program still surprises Kadia.

“Every once in a while you’ll see something and think, ‘This shouldn’t be.’ The other way you’re surprised is, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t I think of that?’ We don’t like to admit it,” Kadia said, “but it does happen.”

Vitale, who did her residency in hematology in Italy, said she thought it was “a little bit strange” to learn a computer program would be in her class of fellows. But now, she said, there’s a good back and forth between her and Watson.

She regularly tells Watson about journal articles she’s read that might be helpful, by inputting

This 1954 photo shows IBM’s “Electronic Brain,” the 704 Electronic Data Processing Machine. Today, IBM’s supercomputer Watson is the size of three stacked pizza boxes and constantly evolving.

a citation and highlighting key passages, and Watson helps her delve into patient records much faster than she could on her own.

“We are still learning trust,” she said.

One afternoon at MD Anderson, Vitale was sitting next to Kadia studying a patient’s file on the Watson program on the professor’s desktop.

When the numbers from the patient’s bloodwork came up, Kadia frowned.

Shamira Davis, 23, was a patient of Kadia’s.

They had met two years ago when she was brought into the intensive care unit, bleeding and near death. The stay-at-home mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and Kadia treated her with chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. She had been well since then.

Now it looked as if her cancer had returned.

Vitale, who is shadowing Kadia, studied Davis’s background and asked Watson what it thought.

A long list of options appeared on the screen.

Like medical doctors, Watson doesn’t operate in black and white. Instead, it offers a set of possibilities and rates whether it has low, medium or high confidence. In Davis’s case, Watson suggested a handful of standard treatments as well as experimental clinical trials as being of high and medium confidence. Kadia scanned the list, but his instincts told him that there was something more promising.

He had recently been talking to a colleague about a new clinical trial for an aggressive chemotherapy treatment, and he thought it was Davis’s best chance.

A few minutes later, when Davis was told that her doctors were consulting with the “Jeopardy!” champ about her case, she was intrigued. But would she trust a treatment recommendation made by a computer or by a human?

Davis didn’t hesitate. “I trust Dr. Kadia,” she said.

Guillermo Garcia-Manero, a senior MD Anderson leukemia specialist who sometimes disagrees with Watson’s recommendations, said it isn’t so much that Watson is wrong but that it’s still learning.

“I’m not saying we’re Kasparovs, but the doctors here are the experts, and it’s going to take him a little time to catch up,” Garcia-Manero said. In the future, Watson “will be a fantastic adjunct even for a master chess player.”

But even Kasparov, of course, was beaten by a computer in the end.

Computers have an edge, said Garcia-Manero, because they have a predictable view that isn’t impacted by any biases about certain types of treatments or how tired they are: “Computers can’t cut corners. Humans cut corners all the time.”

Garcia-Manero’s bosses at MD Anderson and the University of Texas have been so pleased with Watson’s abilities in leukemia that they are preparing to train it in two other specialties: lung cancer and diabetes.

“They keep telling me it will not replace me,” Garcia-Manero said. “But I am pretty sure it will replace me.” n

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BY

EDUCATION

Yes, College can wait

A DRIENNE W ICHARD- E DDS

W

ant independent, welladjusted kids who succeed in college, career and beyond? Parke Muth, aconsultantwho spentnearly three decades working in the University of Virginia admissions department, says the best investment you can make in your kid’s college education might be to delay that education.

Muth, who has worked with thousands of highly competitive students from around the globe, often encourages kids to take a gap year — a year off between high school and college — to travel, work, learn a new language or pursue independent study.

This concept has its roots in Europe (particularly England) but has been steadily growing in popularity in the United States; and while there’s not a lot of hard data on how many students choose to take a gap year annually, organizations such as the American Gap Association cite private studies and student feedback to report on the rising trend — as well as on the myriad benefits — of taking a structured year off before entering the high-stakes world of higher education.

But isn’t taking a gap year just a form of procrastination? A slacker’s path out of studying? Muth says that it’s often quite the opposite. Muth highlights instead how a gap year can address the problem plaguing so many colleges today where kids are unable to manage themselves, and parents are unable to let them.

“Parents have been chauffeurs and secretaries for their kids all their lives, so kids tend to have a rough adjustment period when they head off to college,” he says.

“But taking a gap year is the antidote to helicopter parenting.”

“It’s an investment in the whole person,” Muth says, one that allows kids to develop the maturity, independence and self-reliance necessary to make the most of a college education. He speaks to the significant growth opportunities that a gap year can provide as well as the common freshman pit-

Want an independent, successful kid? A gap year may be the answer.

90% Percentage of students who enter college after taking a gap year, according to a study conducted by Karl Haigler, author of “The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit From Time Off Before or During College”

falls it can help students sidestep.

It can also give students the opportunity to take a step back to focus on their goals, leading to a stronger sense of direction once they’re back in the classroom.

“A gap year experience can also expose kids to the realities of the world that awaits them on the other side of college,” Muth continues, turning them into young adults who are more inclined to take their education seriously rather than as a “prepaid, four-year playland.” Plus, it gives kids a break from the intensive work—and parenting—that goes into completing high school and getting into college, making it less likely that kids will bottom out during their first year away from home.

College costs an average of $23,410 for public schools or $46,272 for private schools each year, according to the College Board. The cost of supporting a student who’s taking a gap year is often significantly less, and when those students enter college the following year (and 90 percent do, according to a study conducted by Karl Haigler, author of “The GapYear Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit From Time Off Before or During College”) they often

do so “much hungrier to succeed and get off the treadmill,” as Muth puts it.

Izzy Siemon-Carome, a rising senior at Virginia Tech, is happy with her decision to take a gap year. “When I got to college, I was calmer and didn’t go through that adjustment period that my classmates did. I was excited to be there,” Siemon-Carome says. The year gave her “a chance to breathe, to reflect on what I really wanted to do.” Namely, to start an outdoor education school, a decision inspired by the 78 days she spent back-country hiking and camping with the National Outdoor Leadership School in Mexico during her gap year. She spent the balance of her year in South America with a program called Where There Be Dragons. “It took me out of my comfort zone, which is what I was looking for.”

Siemon-Carome describes feeling burned out after 12 years in a classroom, but her parents agreed that if she applied and got accepted during her senior year, she could defer her enrollment.

To ensure that school is still a priority, making sure you are accepted before beginning the gap year may be the best path.

Muth points out that it’s more difficult to get the collegeapplication momentum going again once you’ve been out of school for a year. This is what he counseled his own daughter, Grace, to do when she was graduating from high school in 2011: After being accepted to Virginia, Grace deferred her enrollment and spent a year volunteering and traveling in Europe, Africa and India.

As for the experience itself, Muth says that not only has it helped Grace get the most out of college, it’s also the “single most impactful growth experience” she’s had. “The ability to navigate foreign countries on her own, without parents or teachers to tell her what to do, was a skill she’d been building toward for years,” says Muth, but the true test of her grit and self-reliance came as she attempted to embark on the final leg of her gap year in India. “Grace was 18 years old, traveling in Africa by herself,” Muth recounts. “She went to board a plane that would take her to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s in India, and they wouldn’t let her on the plane because they said her inoculations weren’t up to date. So there she was, stranded in the middle of Africa with no one to take care of her or tell her what to do. She had to figure it out all on her own.

That’s a tremendous skill to have.”

For parents of younger children worried that a year abroad at age 18 will be too much too soon, Muth suggests taking smaller steps throughout their pre-teen and middle school years to prepare them for the challenge.

“Try sending them to sleepaway camp,” Muth advises. “Send them off to live in a cabin with other people, hike out in the woods and learn how to make things work on their own. Sleepaway camp is where they form bonds, figure things out and find other likeminded souls. Parents think that if they send their kids to camp at Harvard, it’s going to look good on their transcript, but it’s not. Sometimes it’s better just to have a truly transformative experience.” n Wichard-Edds is a freelance writer.

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Redefining big cats to protect them BY

R OBERT G EBELHOFF

F

ewer than 4,000 tigers roam across the Asian continent today, compared with about 100,000 a century ago. But researchers are proposing a new way to protect the big cats: redefine them.

The proposal, published in the latest issue of Science Advances, argues current taxonomy of the species is flawed, making global conservation efforts unnecessarily difficult.

There are up to nine commonly accepted subspecies of tigers in the world, three of which are extinct. But the scientists’ analysis, conducted over a course of several years, claims there are really only two tiger subspecies: one found on continental Asia and another from the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali.

“It’s really hard to distinguish between tigers,” said Andreas Wilting, the study’s lead author from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. “There has been no comprehensive approach.

The taxonomies are based on data from almost a hundred years ago.”

The study, described by its authors as “the most comprehensive analysis to date,” looked at the mitochondrial DNA, skulls, skin markings, habitat and prey of all nine tiger subspecies. It found a high degree of overlap in these traits between the continental tigers — spanning from Russia to Southeast Asia — and between the island-dwelling “Sunda” tigers.

Nearly $50 million is spent worldwide to preserve the big cat each year, according to the Science Advances study, and there has been some progress made.

The Amur tiger, found in Russia, has been on the rise over the past decade, with as many as 540 of the tigers in the wild, up from between 423 and 502 a decade ago, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Likewise the Bengal tiger population was reported to have increased by 30 percent since 2010, according to India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The hope is that by simplifying the taxonomy, conservationists

ALY SONG/REUTERS

South China tigers are critically endangered.

KEVIN SCHAFER/WORLD WILDLIFE FUND

The number of Amur tigers also is growing.

would have more flexibility in preserving tigers, such as by moving tigers from one area to the next.

This is especially important for the South China tiger, which is considered critically endangered with less than 100 in the wild.

“They’ve gotten down to such low numbers that there’s really little hope for them,” Wilting said.

The study reinforces evidence that tigers are perhaps the least diverse big cat in the world. It also supports a theory that there was a massive population decline after a super-eruption took place in Sumatra about 73,000 years ago, leaving only a single ancestor for all modern tigers from the South China area.

But in a field where one of the biggest goals is to preserve the diversity in tigers, convincing people

BIKAS DAS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bengal tiger numbers increased since 2010.

MATTHEW BECK/CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Florida panther numbers have bounced back.

that tigers aren’t really that diverse can be a challenge. This is not the first time tiger taxonomy has been challenged, but earlier proposals have had trouble gaining ground because of a lack of evidence.

At the heart of the debate is a concept called “taxonomic inflation,” or the massive influx of newly recognized species and subspecies.

Some critics blame the trend in part on emerging methods of identifying species through ancestry and not physical traits. Others point to technology that has allowed scientists to distinguish between organisms at the molecular level.

“There are so many species concepts that you could distinguish each population separately,” Wilting said. “Not everything you can distinguish should be its own species.”

Scientists say the current taxonomy of the tiger species is flawed.

This concept of inflation becomes more pressing when animal habitats are destroyed. Populations affected by habitat loss often become increasingly isolated and more susceptible to genetic drift. Because there are fewer genes in the population pool, the animals change more rapidly and becomes more distinct — sometimes for the worst.

This was especially true in the case of the Florida panther in the early 1990s, when the species was reduced to fewer than 30 individuals in the wild. Rampant inbreeding left the big cat inundated with genetic defects, such as heart problems and reproductive issues.

Efforts to preserve the animal through captive breeding proved unsuccessful. Florida researchers, frantic to save the long-held state symbol, decided to take controversial action by introducing eight female Texas cougars in 1995.

The result has been considered a success, as the cougars, a close genetic relative to the panther, were able to refresh the gene pool and stave off extinction. There are now between 100 and 180 in the wild.

Still, the case has sparked debate on whether the panther remains a pure subspecies. That’s important because it may affect the priority placed on protecting the cat and its habitat by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“It really depends on what you define a subspecies to be,” said Dave Onorato, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who worked on the panther restoration project. “Perhaps they’re now more close to what they were before they became inbred.”

Onorato said the Florida panther case could be held up as an example for people trying to protect big cats around the world, including the most stressed tiger populations.

Worldwide conservation efforts have been put into place to double tiger counts by 2022, but many tiger populations remain under threat by poachers, habitat loss and climate change, according to the World Wildlife Fund. n

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BOOKS

Through the Net’s shadowy realms N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

M ATTHEW W ISNIOSKI

A

THE DARK NET Inside the Digital Underworld

By Jamie Bartlett Melville House. 308 pp. $27.95

league of trolls, anarchists, perverts and drug dealers is at work building a digital world beyond the Silicon Valley offices where our era’s best and brightest have designed a Facebook-friendly Internet. Most of us spend our days on the commercial surface of the World Wide Web, unaware that the “darknet” on which these outliers seek unfettered freedom is as much as 500 times larger than what is captured by Google’s search engines.

The shadow realms of the Internet are increasingly familiar territory. From teen sexting to terrorist recruitment videos, the nefarious elements of our electronic world dominate headlines. Studies such as Andy Greenberg’s “This Machine Kills Secrets” shed light on the cryptography-based activism of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden that blends world-class programming with libertarian politics. The digital underworld similarly looms large in fiction, including the recent Canadian horror series “Darknet.” Imagination and reality often intertwine in these accounts. In May, the two worlds collided when the documentary “Deep Web” (narrated by “Matrix” hero Keanu Reeves), about the online drug bazaar Silk Road, was released and the site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison on a variety of counts including drug trafficking.

In “The Dark Net,” Jamie Bartlett, director of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media at the British think tank Demos, provides a bracing tour of this digital underworld. He describes the humiliation of a user on the anonymous bulletin board service 4chan; trolls tricked her into placing identifying details in the nude photos she uploaded, then sent the images to her friends and family in a malicious practice known as doxing. He explores how white supremacists forge connections via social media. He

JAMES JOYCE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

uses the crypto-currency Bitcoin to purchase pot on Silk Road 2.0, which emerged online almost immediately after Ulbricht’s arrest, with a new Dread Pirate Roberts in charge. He visits communities dedicated to anorexia, cutting and suicide. He even appears in a webcast with “camgirls” who perform on-demand sex acts for an international audience.

“The Dark Net” lets inhabitants of the digital underworld speak for themselves. Each chapter explores a different Internet activity or community in historical context. The opening chapter on trolling, the practice of provoking online disruption, traces the activity from the early days of the federally funded network Arpanet to the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s (on which I spent my childhood) and the Usenet flame wars of the 1990s. To simulate being online, the author intersperses chat logs throughout the text, including

harrowing conversations among teens with eating disorders. The book’s anchor and its unique strength, however, are the interviews Bartlett conducts with people he finds in the virtual world and then meets in the physical one.

These intimate portraits pay dividends. We learn that, prior to the Internet, the supply of child pornography was “vanishingly small.” In 1982, federal enforcement agencies did not consider it “a high priority,” and in 1990 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children estimated that only 7,000 images of child pornography were in circulation. Bartlett tracks how the Internet has aided a massive proliferation of such images. “Between 2006 and 2009,” he writes, “the U.S. Justice Department recorded 20 million unique computer IP addresses who were sharing child pornography files.” In a powerful chapter, a middle-class busi-

nessman with a daughter explains to Bartlett the gradual descent that led to his arrest for possession of more than 3,000 images. “I remember thinking at the time that it was terrible,” the man says about one unconscionable video.

“But I kept it, just in case.” We then venture to a suburban office park where Bartlett joins Internet Watch Foundation workers who describe their coping mechanisms as they combat the spread of such videos.

The darknet isn’t all dark, however. At a cypherpunk commune in Spain, the activist-programmer Amir Taaki, creator of Dark Wallet, tells Bartlett how Bitcoin will help topple corrupt governments.

At a cafe in northern England, the appropriately named Vex describes how she makes a comfortable living stripping and chatting from the safety of her home. A cheery entrepreneur, she maintains a dedicated fan club, talks books and politics with regulars, and cultivates a “real girlfriend experience.” Across these uneasy profiles, Bartlett’s aim is to “rehumanize” the people behind the screen.

“The Dark Net” entertains as it takes its toll. You happily follow Bartlett vicariously. But you worry for the author. He assures that he acquired no new taste for illegal pornography or drugs, though he admits to becoming “accustomed and habituated to horrible and troubling things.” In a clever trick of witnessing and distancing, Bartlett alleviates your queasiness and shock as you acclimate yourself to whichever destination he shows you next. But unlike him, you can simply close the book.

Seasoned dwellers might scoff and trolls will troll, but nearly anyone else with a Web browser will learn from “The Dark Net.” Discover at your own risk how darkness drives innovation as much as does light. n Wisnioski is an associate professor at Virginia Tech.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A saint, a sinner and a ticket taker

The suffocated life of Stalin’s daughter

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

M

l

REVIEWED BY

C AROLINE P RESTON

azie Phillips-Gordon, the so-called Queen of the Bowery, was a cartoonishly large real-life heroine that no fiction writer would dare make up. A busty bottle-blonde with a green celluloid eyeshade and a booming voice, Mazie occupied the ticket booth of New York’s famous Venice movie theater at the south end of the Bowery from the beginning of Prohibition to the end of the Depression. When she wasn’t selling tickets, she cruised the sidewalks to distribute dimes and bars of soap to the ever-growing number of homeless bums, and, when necessary, stake a night in a flophouse or call an ambulance.

Joseph Mitchell canonized “Saint Mazie” in a 1940 New Yorker profile, but she was evasive about her family background and the circumstances that compelled her to work 13-hour shifts in a ticket booth for 30 years. Tantalized by Mitchell’s tale, Jami Attenberg has stepped in to fabricate Mazie’s backstory. As she demonstrated in her brilliant third novel, “The Middlesteins,” about a family helplessly watching its matriarch gorge herself to death, Attenberg is a nimble and inventive storyteller with a particular knack for getting at the heart of outsized characters.

The narrative conceit of “Saint Mazie” is the chance discovery of Mazie’s long-lost diary by an aspiring documentarian, who then fills in the rest of the story with interviews of geriatric acquaintances and talking-head experts. Mazie’s diary, a 10th birthday present, starts in 1907, just after she’s rescued from her abusive home by an older sister, Rosie, and her gambler husband, Louis Gordon. “My father is a rat and my mother is a simp. I live in New York now. Rosie says I am a New Yorker.”

Right from the get-go, Mazie is nobody’ssimp.Assoonasshedevelops “bosoms,” she becomes a “goodtime girl,” carousing with sailors in Bowery bars and getting into rows with Rosie when she sneaks back

home at dawn. “Why won’t you be a good girl?” Rosie pleads, but Mazie is too mesmerized by “the streets and the bars and the men and the women and the whiskey and the beer and the smokes.”

Finally, Rosie devises a scheme to corral Mazie by literally sticking her in a cage: the ticket booth of Lou’s movie theater. She objects, with prophetic words: “All day, hours and hours, the whole world going on around me. . . . The world will pass me by. I will grow old and then die in that cage.”

But Mazie slowly adjusts. Her voice grows gravelly and deep to be heard over the Second Avenue elevated rattling overhead. She also learns to accept the diminished horizon of her life. Her occasional lover and her dancer sister send postcards from faraway places that she is never tempted to visit herself. She can enjoy nature’s beauty from her cage. “No one else can see this sky like I can. No one else sits here and watches it change all day except for me. I see the snow and I see the clouds and it is all a show for me.”

As in “The Middlesteins,” the cumulative narrative power of “Saint Mazie” comes from an antic array of outside voices, here in the form of documentary interviews.

We hear from her childhood neighbor who lusted after the teen, the son of Mazie’s sea captain lover and the great-granddaughter of the longtime manager of the Venice. A blowhard high-school history teacher opines about Louis Gordon’s crime career, Coney Island’s middle class and the construction of Knickerbocker Village. Even the hapless thrift store owner who found Mazie’s diary in a junk heap adds his two cents.

The magic of “Saint Mazie” lies in its multi-generational voices and diary snippets seeking an answer to boozy, brassy Mazie’s simple question: “Is it so hard to believe I could be a good person?” n Preston’s latest novel is “The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt.”

S SAINT MAZIE Jami Attenberg Grand Central. 325 pp. $25

STALIN’S DAUGHTER The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

By Rosemary Sullivan Harper. 741 pp. $35

l

REVIEWED BY

G ERARD D E G ROOT

vetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, was seldom alone but always lonely. Her life was crowded with people intending to manipulate, swindle or exploit her. She had friends, but intimacy carried great risk because her father’s evil was a noxious cloud that swirled around her. “Never in my life have I been so directly shaken and captured by the tragedy of another person,” David Samoilov, a lover, wrote. “And never had I had such an intense need to run from a person, from the circle of her unresolved and suffocating tragedy.”

That process of being shaken, then captured, then suffocated by Svetlana is duplicated perfectly through this extraordinary book.

It would be easy to blame her for the manifold follies of her life, the oppressive regularity of idiotic mistakes. Yet Rosemary Sullivan possesses the sensitivity necessary to unlock a beguiling and complex character worthy of admiration, not ridicule. Svetlana emerges as a woman of deep compassion and superb creative intellect. There was, however, “something of the tyrant in [her] emotional exuberance.” By the end of the book, like Samoilov, I understood the need to run.

Svetlana was the daughter of history’s most prolific murderer — a patrimony impossible to jettison. For most people, her attraction lay in her connection to Stalin. Some despised her for her proximity to his evil; others found her irresistible. “Wherever I go,” she lamented, “I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”

She was also a prisoner of her mother, Nadya, who committed suicide when Svetlana was 6. She loved her mother deeply but did not know her well. In truth, she loved a chimera; it was a love pestered by feelings of abandonment. Memories were inevitably minute. She could recall the smell of Chanel perfume, which Nadya wore as a small act of defiance

because Stalin disapproved.

Her father could be kind, even loving, yet her affection for a man so wicked tormented her. When he died in 1953, Svetlana, then 27, expected a “deliverance of some kind.” Yet that hope was naive.

She could not escape those who wished to use her for political purpose.

At the age of 31, already thrice divorced, Svetlana met and fell deeply in love with Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist working in Moscow. He was already suffering from the emphysema that eventually killed him. She wanted to marry, but the Politburo demurred. “What do you want with this old sick Hindu?” Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, chided her. All she wanted was love.

Though prevented from marrying Singh, she was allowed to take his ashes to India. While there, she decided on impulse to defect to the United States.

The wonderful comic opera of her escape is reason enough to buy this superb book. India, keen to remain on the good side of the Soviets, wanted nothing to do with her after she announced her decision to defect. The United States, in the interests of detente, was at first similarly dismissive.

“Tell them to throw that woman out of the embassy. Don’t give her any help at all,” Deputy Undersecretary of State Foy Kohler advised. Eventually, however, the Americans discovered value in possessing Stalin’s princess.

“I was born into my parents’ fate,” she eventually realized. “I was born under that name, that cross, and I never managed to jump out of it.” Yet she somehow survived, and her survival is testimony to her enormous resilience.

“I think it was living that was the hard part,” her daughter Olga reflected. “My mother never mastered that.” n DeGroot is a professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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OPINIONS

U.S. should let refugees of climate change move here MICHAEL B. GERRARD is associate faculty chair at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and is the Andrew Sabin professor of professional practice and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

Toward the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed, large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water. Some small island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, will be close to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, on which entire regions depend for drinking water, will be melting away. Many habitable parts of the world will no longer be able to support agriculture or produce clean water.

The people who live there will not sit passively by while they and their children starve to death.

Tens or hundreds of millions of people will try very hard to go somewhere they can survive. They will be hungry, thirsty, hot — and desperate. If the search for safety involves piling into perilous boats and enduring miserable and dangerous journeys, they will do it. They will cross borders, regardless of whether they are welcome. And in their desperation, they could become violent: Forced migration can exacerbate ethnic and political tensions. Studies show that more heat tends to increase violence.

The United Nations says the maximum tolerable increase in global average temperatures is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial conditions. (Small island nations argued for a much lower figure; at 3.6 degrees, they’ll be gone.) But the promises that nations are making ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Paris in December would still, according to the International Energy Agency, lead the average temperature to rise by about 4.7 degrees before the end of the century. Those promises are voluntary, and if they aren’t kept, the thermometer could go much higher. That means our children

and grandchildren will be confronting a humanitarian crisis unlike anything the world has ever faced.

Absent the political will to prevent it, the least we can do is to start planning for it.

Rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world stranded, without any place allowing them in, industrialized countries ought to pledge to take on a share of the displaced population equal to how much each nation has historically contributed to emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing this crisis.

According to the World Resources Institute, between 1850 and 2011, the United States was the source of 27 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; the European Union, 25 percent; China, 11 percent; Russia, 8 percent; and Japan, 4 percent.

To make calculating easy, let’s assume that 100 million people will need new homes outside their own countries by 2050.

(That number could be way off in either direction — we won’t know until it happens.) Under a formula based on historic greenhouse gas emissions, the United States would take in 27 million people; Europe, 25 million; and so on. Even as a

JITENDRA PRAKASH/REUTERS

A boy catches fish in a dried-up pond near the Ganges river in Allahabad, India, on June 4. A heat wave there killed thousands.

rough estimate, this gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem: The United States has been granting lawful-permanentresident status to only about 1 million people a year for several decades.

None of this would be popular, but it would be fair. Climate change results from the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases all over the world, because the gases stay in the atmosphere for a century or more. International law recognizes that if pollution crosses national borders, the country where it originated is responsible for the damages.

Finding suitable land for resettlement will be immensely difficult, because it is not only a matter of responsibility or acreage. A population that needs to move may want to go to a place that is geographically similar to where it came from and where it can make the same sort of living as before, such as from fishing, farming or herding. Its members may also wish to go together and re-create their old communities.

Yet most of the habitable places on Earth are already inhabited, and moving a sizable population into an area that is already populated is not so easy. The most prominent example of such a movement in modern history is Israel — a project that has not gone smoothly. Technologies such as desalination can make more areas

habitable, but they typically take a great deal of money and energy, the very resource we have failed to conserve in the first place.

This problem will also require a new legal solution: Under current law, those displaced by climate change have no recognized legal status. The 1951 Refugee Convention applies only to people who are fleeing because of a well-founded fear of persecution.

Assuming that most nations aren’t actually interested in taking a great deal more migrants than they do now, the vast majority of those who will be displaced by climate change will simply have no place outside their own countries where they can go.

Just southwest of India is the low-lying island nation of Maldives. Before its president, Mohamed Nasheed, was deposed by a military coup in 2012, he rose to global prominence as a voice of endangered island nations by staging an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight his country’s likely fate. Last year, just before the military imprisoned him again, he told me about his message to developed nations.

“You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much,” he said. “Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.” n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The Ukraine cease-fire is fiction JOHN MCCAIN is a Republican senator from Arizona and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Last month, I traveled with Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to eastern Ukraine to meet with the courageous men and women fighting there for their country’s freedom and future. I arrived on a solemn day as Ukrainian volunteers grieved the loss of two young comrades killed by Russian artillery the day before. They had lost another comrade a few days before that, and four more the previous week. Their message to me was clear: The cease-fire with Russia is fiction, and U.S. assistance is vital to deterring further aggression.

Along the front lines, separatist forces backed by Russia violate the cease-fire every day with heavy artillery barrages and tank attacks. Gunbattles are a daily routine, and communities at the front bear the brunt of constant sniper fire and night skirmishes.

Yet while these low-level ceasefire violations have occurred regularly since the Minsk agreement was signed in February, Ukrainian battalion commanders said the number of Grad rocket strikes and incidents of intense artillery shelling are increasing. Their reports suggest that the separatists have moved their heavy weapons and equipment back to the front lines hoping to escalate the situation.

So far, Ukrainian armed forces supported by volunteer battalions have been able to hold their ground, and they have done so largely without the support of

Ukrainian artillery and tanks that have been pulled back from the front as stipulated by the Minsk agreement. How long can we expect these brave Ukrainians to abide by an agreement that Russia has clearly ignored?

It is time that the United States and our European allies recognize the failure of the Minsk agreement and respond with more than empty rhetoric.

Ukraine’s leaders describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy as a game of “PacMan” — taking bite after bite out of Ukraine in small enough portions that it does not trigger a large-scale international response. But at this point it should be clear to all that Putin does not want a diplomatic solution to the conflict. He wants to dominate Ukraine, along with

Russia’s other neighbors.

No one in the West wants a return to the Cold War. But we must recognize that we are confronting a Russian ruler who seeks exactly that. It is time for U.S. strategy to adjust to the reality of a revanchist Russia with a military that is willing to use force not as a last resort, but as a primary tool to achieve its neoimperial objectives.

President Obama has wrongly argued that providing Ukraine with the assistance it needs to defend itself would only provoke Russia. Putin needed no provocation to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea. Rather, it is the weakness of the collective U.S. and European response that provokes the aggression we seek to avoid. Of course, there is no military solution in Ukraine, but there is a clear military dimension to achieving a political solution. If Ukrainians are given the assistance they need and the cost is raised for Russian forces that have invaded their country, Putin will be forced to determine how long he can sustain a war he says is not happening.

I urge anyone who sees Ukraine’s fight against a more advanced Russian military as hopeless to meet those fighting and dying to protect their homeland. These men and women have

not backed down, and they will continue to fight for their country with or without the U.S. support they need and deserve.

During my trip, the Ukrainians never asked for the United States to send troops to do their fighting.

Ukrainians only hope that the United States will once again open the arsenal of democracy that has allowed free people to defend themselves before.

How we respond to Putin’s brazen aggression will have repercussions beyond Ukraine.

We face the reality of a challenge that many assumed was resigned to history books: a militarily capable state that is hostile to our interests and our values and seeks to overturn the rules-based international order that American leaders of both parties have sought to maintain since World War II. Among the core principles of that order is the conviction that might does not make right, that the strong should not be allowed to dominate the weak and that wars of aggression should be relegated to the bloody past.

Around the world, friend and foe alike are watching to see whether the United States will once again summon its power and influence to defend the international system that has kept the peace for decades. We must not fail this test. n

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OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Shunning labels, but not principles FRED HIATT is the editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

President Obama recently expressed his frustration at dysfunction in Washington.

“Congress doesn’t work the way it should. Issues are left untended.

Folks are more interested in scoring political points than getting things done,” the president said. “And as mightily as I have struggled against that . . . it still is broken.”

Washington being Washington, people here will disagree whether Obama has struggled against dysfunction or contributed to it.

But we’re not going there today.

Instead, this is about a new attempt to overcome dysfunction, so that the next president might not only get elected as a “uniter” but govern as one, too.

An organization called No Labels is leading the attempt. Its leaders are quick to say that its name does not mean they are without ideology or principle.

“We are not a centrist or a moderate group, and we are not pushing for bipartisanship for its own sake,” the group says.

The group’s co-chairs, that disclaimer notwithstanding, may strike party purists as suspiciously unreliable: Jon Huntsman, a Republican former governor of Utah who committed the heresy of serving in the Obama administration; and Joseph I. Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator who won as

an independent after losing a Democratic primary.

But the group also claims 70 adherents in Congress, half from each party, which Huntsman says makes No Labels the third-largest caucus on Capitol Hill. The group’s adherents, according to its manifesto, are “liberals, conservatives and everyone in between who believes having principled and deeply held political beliefs does not require an all-or-nothing approach to governance.”

Rep. Tom Reed, a New York Republican, said members of Congress hear from many organizations that are narrowly focused on single issues. “No Labels taps into the silent majority and organizes them. That makes us a little more comfortable sticking our necks out.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

In five years, No Labels claims to have signed up a half-million supporters and spawned student chapters on 100 campuses.

Now it is staking out a role in the presidential election process, deploying field organizers to states and inviting candidates to an October convention of more than 1,000 undecided New Hampshire voters — the “most valuable resource” in the state, Huntsman said.

Its version of a platform is a “national strategic agenda” of four goals important to majorities across the political spectrum: creating 25 million net new jobs in the next decade, securing Medicare and Social Security for 75 years, balancing the federal budget by 2030 and achieving energy security by 2024.

The goals may be easy to agree on in principle, but they are divisive as soon as you start talking about the how.

No Labels leaders don’t entirely disagree. “You can’t talk about energy very long without talking about climate,” Huntsman said. “You can’t talk about jobs very long without talking about immigration.”

But in many ways, the process is the point. No Labels isn’t going to change many of the factors that are driving partisanship: a fractured media landscape,

divisive redistricting, polarizing campaign finance rules and so on.

It also dismisses as unlikely the emergence of a viable third-party candidate.

So the idea is to set in motion a mechanism that could generate results even in a partisan environment. Agreeing that the country should have strategic goals is a first step; for a newly elected president and Congress, coalescing around one or two of those goals could be the next. And the commitment to find a solution would force members to start talking across party lines.

“In this case, good policy is good politics,” said Mack McLarty, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House who serves as a No Labels vice chair. “People want to see some measure of getting something done.”

And, Huntsman added, they won’t be satisfied with candidates promising airily to fix Washington. “No more of the rhetoric — we’ve heard that,” he said. “You’re going to have to tell us how you’re going to do it.”

Reed, the Republican representative from Corning, N.Y., said many legislators are “tired of not having results” and would gladly join in a process built around strategic goals.

“A lot of us came here to do stuff,” he said. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Women’s sports BY

L IZ C LARKE

With the success of the U.S. women’s soccer team, which plays in the World Cup finals Sunday, let’s dispel myths about women’s athletics.

1

Women’s sports don’t get enough media coverage.

Despite serious strides in the past 25 years, female athletes continue to lag behind men when it comes to media coverage. One five-year study concluded that the time devoted to women’s sports on local TV news and on networks like ESPN “remains dismally low” compared with football, baseball and men’s basketball. But it’s far from clear that coverage of women’s sports doesn’t meet demand. If ratings are a meaningful gauge, then coverage is in proportion to popularity.

In tennis and figure skating, women’s championships are often more popular among U.S. sports fans than men’s, and coverage of those events correlates. The U.S. Open, for example, moved its women’s final to prime time in 2001 and was rewarded with the top-rated show that night, as 22.7 million watched Venus Williams defeat her sister, Serena.

But ratings for women’s team sports, whether the WNBA, college basketball or soccer, don’t come close to those of the NBA, men’s college hoops or the NFL. The NBA’s top-rated broadcast of 2014 drew 18 million viewers. The WNBA’s most-watched game had less than 5 percent of that audience — 828,000 viewers.

Yes, it is hard for women’s sports to find an audience if the public isn’t given the chance to see them. But decisions about what to cover are market-driven.

And the clamor for more coverage of women’s team sports doesn’t appear to be a clamor at all.

2

Men won’t watch women’s sports.

In 2013, ESPN says, men accounted for the majority of its WNBA audience — 66 percent. At any college women’s basketball

game, the crowd has male fans as crazed as those at the men’s games. Men also dominated the TV audience for the most recent women’s World Cup: 61 percent of the 13.5 million viewers for the U.S.-Japan final in 2011.

3

Women’s pro sports leagues are viable.

Every few years, a stellar performance at the Olympics or the World Cup prompts calls for professionalization of women’s sports. Australian cyclist Rochelle Gilmore started a pro cycling team in Britain after the 2012 London Olympics, saying: “It was the amount of people on the side of the roads who were engaged in the race. It showed me there was clear potential to go to sponsors and ask them to invest.”

Upon the launch of the Women’s United Soccer Association in 2001, on the heels of the American women’s triumph in the 1999 World Cup, one investor declared: “WUSA is an idea whose time has come. ” But women’s team sports have yet to prove commercially viable as a stand-alone enterprise. The WUSA fizzled after three seasons.

It was followed in 2009 by the similarly short-lived Women’s Professional Soccer. A third crack at women’s pro soccer was launched in 2013. The National Women’s Soccer League may have legs, given the financial support it draws from U.S. Soccer and the Canadian and Mexican soccer federations, which bankroll the salaries of their top stars competing in the NWSL. But will a women’s pro sports league ever stand on its own?

The WNBA, now in its 19th season, would never have launched in 1997 and would have folded many times since had it not been financed by the NBA,

CARMEN JASPERSEN/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

U.S. midfielder Carli Lloyd celebrates her penalty goal in the women's World Cup semifinal against Germany on Tuesday. The U.S. won 2-0.

whose former commissioner David Stern was its mastermind and godfather. The league started with eight NBA-owned teams playing in NBA arenas. It has expanded and retrenched over the years, and attendance and TV ratings have similarly waxed and waned. For the past two years, only half its 12 teams have turned a profit. Average attendance isn’t quite 7,500 per game.

4

Title IX is hurting men’s sports.

Men’s college sports that don’t generate a profit — wrestling, tennis, gymnastics — are endangered species. To close budget shortfalls, some athletic directors target men’s teams. In response, the American Sports Council was created to rally support and spread the word that Title IX, the U.S. law that guarantees equal opportunity for men and women, is the culprit.

It’s a fallacy. The real battle lines are between college sports’ “haves” ( football and men’s basketball) and its “have-nots” (men’s Olympic sports and women’s sports). If their departments run deficits,

Division I athletic directors can either rein in spending or eliminate a sport. Many have done both. In the past decade, Division I schools have cut 121 men’s non-revenue sports programs. But in Divisions II and III, which don’t compete in bigtime football, men’s non-revenue sports are thriving, with more than 400 teams added in the past decade. So if wrestling vanishes, blame football, not Title IX.

5

Women’s sports would be more popular if players dressed provocatively.

If sex appeal was what it took to build a fan base, the Lingerie Football League would be thriving.

Unveiled in 2009 on the premise that less is more when it comes to women’s sports attire, the league clad its athletes in lacy bras, bikini bottoms and garters. Fans want athleticism, skill or competition — no matter who the players are. And women’s soccer shows that sexless uniforms and good ratings aren’t mutually exclusive. n

Clarke covers the Washington Redskins for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 5, 2015

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $65 each Presented by

Available online at wenwineandfood.com Interested in having a booth at this event? E-mail us at info@wenwineandfood.com Callie Klein & Frank Vedrebi Financial Representatives