The Washington Post National Weekly - July 10, 2016

Politics Clinton, Trump woo workers 4

Nation Schools are failing lead tests 8

Technology This robot is chilling — literally 17

Finance Learn how the rich invest 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

MEET THE NEW CHIEF OF STAFF As start-ups mature, a quintessential Washington institution is taking hold in Silicon Valley PAGE 12

SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2016

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RLD’S BUSINESS WO

We publish a World of business news every month.

If you’re not already receiving a copy of this region’s leading business publication, Wenatchee Valley Business World, stop by our office and purchase a copy of our July edition.

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THE FRANCHISE STORES AND RESTAURANTS ON YOUR WISH LIST

The results are in from our informal survey on the World’s Facebook page — Trader Joe’s, anyone?

A WOODWORKING FAMILY TRADITION

We profile Traditional Woodcraft of Leavenworth, where father and son keep the tradition of hand-crafted woodworking alive.

SPEND SOME TIME IN WATERVILLE

The iconic Waterville Historic Hotel, a landmark in the town for over 110 years, is a great place to spend the night, or just spend an afternoon sitting on the porch.

Plus Rick Steigmeyer’s wine column, with the results of the wine judging for this year’s Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival.

Also business briefs, real estate transactions and building permits, lively guest columnists, the Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce newsletter, local business achievements and much more.

And coming in our August edition it’s our 30 under 35 section, honoring 30 individuals in our area, all under the age of 35, who are making a difference in our community.

You can find Business World and daily business news updates on our website at wvbusinessworld.com.

Enjoy the digital edition of June’s Business World at wvbusinessworld.com/digital/

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THE FIX

What is Donald Trump doing?

BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

S

top me if you’ve heard this before: Donald Trump came to Capitol Hill on Thursday to make nice, again, with congressional Republicans. It didn’t go so

well.

This, from a terrific report by my Washington Post colleagues on Trump’s private meeting with Republican senators, is stunning: Arizona Sen. Jeff “Flake told Trump that he wants to be able to support him — ‘I’m not part of the Never Trump movement,’ the senator said — but that he remains uncomfortable backing him, the officials said.

“Trump said at the meeting that he has yet to attack Flake hard, but threatened to begin doing so. . . .

“Trump also called out Sen. Mark Kirk (RIll.), who withdrew his endorsement of Trump last month citing the business mogul’s racially-based attacks on a federal judge, and said he did not approve of the senator’s action, said the officials.

“Characterizing Kirk as a loser, Trump vowed that he would carry Illinois in the general election even though the state traditionally has been solidly Democratic in presidential contests. Kirk did not attend the meeting with Trump.

“Trump also singled out Sen. Ben Sasse (RNeb.), who has refused to support Trump and has emerged as perhaps the most vocal advocate for a third-party candidate. Sasse declined to speak with reporters as he left the meeting.”

Let me reiterate: Trump came to Washington on Thursday to rally the party behind him.

Instead, he wound up threatening one senator, calling another — who wasn’t even there — a loser and picking on a third. All of these people are, ostensibly, within the same political party!

While his meeting with House Republicans — earlier in the day — appeared to go margin-

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ally better (talk about a low bar), it was clear that Trump hadn’t changed many hearts and minds in the room.

Rep. Mark Sanford reportedly said: “I wasn’t particularly impressed. It was the normal stream of consciousness, long on hyperbole.”

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump met with House and Senate Republicans on Thursday.

It’s very, very difficult to see strategy in Trump’s combativeness and/or to imagine what that strategy (if one exists) might gain him.

The Republican National Convention opens in Cleveland in about a week. The single biggest task facing Trump between now and then will be uniting the GOP behind him. It has been a very rocky road thus far, but it’s been clear for some time that most on-the-fence Republicans are trying desperately to find some way — any way — to stand up for him.

This Flake quote, which came after Trump threatened to go after him, tells that story: “My position remains, I want to support the nominee. I really do. I just can’t support him given the things that he’s said.”

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 39

Translated: I need Trump to give me some­ thing. Show some turning over of a new leaf.

Some remorse. Some change in tone.

It’s not that hard, and yet, he doesn’t do it. In fact, what Trump seems to almost always do is double or triple down on past controversies — either refusing to let them go until everyone acknowledges he was right or savaging, taunting and threatening those who still don’t agree with him.

I get that Trump ran a very successful primary campaign against Washington and the Republicans who call it home. But the primary is over. The targets now can’t be Jeff Flake, Mark Kirk or any other Republican. Trump needs GOP elected officials not only on board but enthusiastically so as he tries to rapidly build a national fundraising operation and scale up his paltry voter identification and getout-the-vote operations. Trump may not like Flake — he clearly doesn’t — but Flake has something that Trump doesn’t have in Arizona: a tested and able political organization.

And, as of today, there’s no way in hell that political organization is going to work for Trump this fall.

Like I said: There’s no discernible strategy here. It looks from afar like pure political pique and ego; Trump doesn’t like the idea that some Republicans are blanching at the idea of supporting him, so he tries to bully them into support or, at the very least, submission.

It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. Most political people know this. I would suspect most people on Trump’s payroll know this. It appears, however, that the man at the top of the campaign still doesn’t get it. Need evidence?

Check out this tweet from Trump: “Just leaving D.C. Had great meetings with Republicans in the House and Senate. Very interesting day! These are people who love our country!” n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY MUSIC BOOKS OPINION FINANCE

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Silicon Valley companies have gotten bigger, often very quickly, and they’re seeking more organization and hierarchy as a result. Chiefs of staff can help with that. Illustration by OLIVER MUNDAY for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s curveball for Clinton, unions

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The Republican’s position on trade resonates with blue-collar rank-and-file workers

BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND D AVID W EIGEL

Philadelphia

T

hree dozen union workers gathered outside city hall here the other week to rally against the global free-trade deals they believe have harmed Americans like them.

Their candidate was Katie McGinty, the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania.

But their spiritual leader was

Republican Donald Trump.

“He recognized there’s some problems we need to solve,” said McGinty, who is challenging Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R), a free-trade advocate. “One, we have to stop bad trade agreements. . . . And two, we have to take the Chinese on when they manipulate their currency and dump goods in our markets.”

Just two days earlier, Trump had delivered a blistering speech at an aluminum recycling plant

near Pittsburgh in which he called U.S. trade policies a “politician-made disaster” that has betrayed the working class.

McGinty, surrounded by electricians, pipe fitters and steelworkers, declared that while Trump usually spouts “nonsense,” he had, in this case, “recognized a couple of truths.”

Of the many ways Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, has scrambled the 2016 campaign, it is his position on

Casino workers who are on strike line up to listen to likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speak July 6 in front of the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.

trade that has presented one of the most unexpected challenges for his rival, Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. In an election season animated by economic anxiety, Trump, a New York business mogul, bucked Republican orthodoxy and powerful business interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an appeal to blue-collar Republicans that helped propel him to victory in the GOP primary.

Clinton, who scrambled to

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POLITICS move left on trade during her tough primary fight against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, now finds herself again facing attacks on the issue — this time from Trump. He used his Pittsburgharea speech to disparage her association with a pair of major trade agreements — one negotiated by President Bill Clinton’s administration and the other by President Obama’s while she served as secretary of state.

For Hillary Clinton, the risk is not necessarily losing support directly to Trump but rather not inspiring enough enthusiasm among rank-and-file union workers, whose turnout and groundlevel organizing have traditionally been crucial for Democrats.

Clinton already has the endorsements of several of the nation’s largest labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, but faces the question of whether that organized support will be enoughto hold the labor voting bloc together at a time when Trump has co-opted the traditional labor message about the perils of free trade and globalization.

“Some of our members if not support [him] agree with some of Trump’s statements,” said Joe Jacoby, 54, of Pennsauken, N.J., who serves as a union representative with Boilermakers Local 13. “Because they feel like they’re being hit hardest. Because their jobs are going away. Because it’s hard to find a good-paying job.”

Jacoby, who was at the McGinty rally, said he and the other union leaders support Clinton. McGinty also made clear she supports Clinton and emphasized that Trump does not have the right solutions to trade and jobs.

But Jacoby acknowledged that Trump’s message is “going to have an impact.

“Trade agreements are a big part of what we’re arguing against, and he rings that bell,” he said. “You’ve got to give the man credit. When he talks about trade, it resonates with a lot of workers.”

Clinton’s potential weakness on trade is evident in her inability, so far, to consolidate some of the support that went to Sanders during the Democratic primary.

While Clinton dominated with endorsements from labor unions, plenty of locals went for Sanders.

He walked picket lines in Milwaukee and New York and fre-

JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES

“Trade agreements are a big part of what we’re arguing against, and he rings that bell.”

— Joe Jacoby, 54, a union representative with Boilermakers Local 13

quently was introduced by union leaders who warned that only one candidate for the presidency had opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, inked by President Clinton in 1994. Unions have blamed that pact with Mexico and Canada for the elimination of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Sanders supporters also appreciated that the senator strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation Pacific Rim accord led by the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton touted the TPP as the “gold standard” of trade deals in 2012 while leading the State Department, but she renounced her support after launching her campaign last year.

At least two unions that endorsed Sanders, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America,

said they are unlikely to make an endorsement for the general election.

“The problem is that Clinton has been a free-trader her whole life, so we’re not going to endorse her,” said Peter Knowlton, president of the electrical-workers union. “We will be running an anybody-but-Trump campaign.

We have many members in swing states, and our major goal is for Trump not to get elected — not to make a pitch for Hillary.”

The Teamsters, with 1.4 million members, also have not made a formal choice between Clinton and Trump. Teamsters President James Hoffa said that he hoped the contrast between the two candidates will become clearer after they release their platforms at their respective national party nominating conventions this summer.

“While trade is an important issue for our union, we believe

Presumptive GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigns on June 28 in Monessen, Pa. Trump attacked Hillary Clinton while delivering an economic policy speech targeting globalization and free trade.

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any presidential candidate needs to take a stand for our country’s working men and women by supporting critical issues like pension reform and the protection of labor rights,” Hoffa said in a written statement to The Washington Post.

Even for the big labor groups that have gotten behind Clinton, much of their initial efforts have focused less on touting her merits on trade and more on trying to undermine Trump’s appeals to the working class. The AFL-CIO has produced a pair of online ads denouncing Trump’s integrity and sincerity on trade, with video of the mogul acknowledging that his clothes were manufactured in Asia.

“I think he’s tapped into the legitimate anger and frustration that a lot of working-class people are feeling,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in an interview in his office overlooking the White House. But Trumka added: “Look at what he does, not what he says. He could have an effect on trade by bringing all the products he makes overseas back home and have Americans produce them. But he doesn’t do that.”

Asked what he is doing to ensure the organization’s 12.5 million members will actively support Clinton and reject Trump, Trumka said: “You go out and talk to them. It’s face-to-face contact.

It’s phone contact. It’s leafleting.

It’s work-site visits.”

Labor unions that support Clinton suggested their backing is based more broadly on the policies she would implement than just her record on trade.

Erikka Knuti, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said that Trump clearly “shuffled the deck” but that labor maintains a clear case against him — and for Clinton.

“Our endorsement is about what our voters want,” Knuti said, citing collective-bargaining rights and the National Labor Relations Board. “That is stuff that’s really solidly in Clinton’s wheelhouse and not at all in Trump’s wheelhouse. Hillary has 30 years of public-service baggage and Trump has 30 years of PR and celebrity behind him. But who’s going to be for collective bargaining? It’s pretty clear Hillary is.

Who’s better for paid family leave? Hillary is.” n

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POLITICS

FBI rebuke puts a cloud over Clinton

BY P HILIP R UCKER, A BBY P HILLIP AND A NNE G EARAN

H

illary Clinton avoided criminal charges, but the searing rebuke of her “extremely careless” email practices by FBI Director James B. Comey is likely to reverberate through the November election and, if she wins, well into her presidency.

Even as Comey lifted a legal cloud by announcing on Tuesday that the FBI would not recommend criminal charges, he systematically obliterated many of the key defenses Clinton and her advisers have offered to reassure the public in the 15 months since the discovery that she used a private email system. For instance, Clinton had insisted that she did not send or receive classified materials, but Comey said the FBI found that 110 of her emails contained classified information.

For weeks now, Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has been arguing that her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is unfit to be president and cannot be trusted in the Oval Office. Instead, the remarks by Comey — a Republican with a sterling reputation among leaders of both parties — delivered from a lectern at the FBI’s headquarters cast fresh doubt on Clinton’s own fitness and trustworthiness.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said.

The specter of a criminal indictment for Clinton had loomed over the final months of Obama’s term as the president has been enjoying some of the best approval ratings of his presidency. An unscheduled personal meeting at the Phoenix airport June 27 between former president Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch also garnered criticism from both sides of the aisle.

But Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies breathed a sigh of

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The criticism from the bureau’s director is likely to linger, despite no criminal charge for her email use relief after Comey all but erased the possibility that she might be indicted. On Wednesday, Lynch announced that there would be no charges, effectively closing the case.

Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart said, “It’s not a clean bill of health, but it’s a workable situation.”

He said that Clinton’s struggles with trustworthiness “are not going to just all melt away” but that “it seems to me that ‘Crooked Hillary’ doesn’t have the same sort of sting that it would have had with an indictment.”

Republicans sought to swiftly capitalize on the situation. Trump assailed Clinton for what he called “illegal activities” and “bad judgment,” suggesting that the Obama administration was protecting her from prosecution.

“Folks — the system is rigged,” Trump said in a statement. “The normal punishment, in this case,

would include losing authority to handle classified information, and that too disqualifies Hillary Clinton from being President. The final jury will be the American people, and they will issue the verdict on her corruption, incompetence, and bad judgment on November 8th.”

David Bossie, a conservative activist who chairs the super PAC Defeat Crooked Hillary, issued a statement calling Clinton “a serial liar who has a trust problem” and saying that the email episode “disqualifies” her from serving as president.

Public polls show that many voters do not trust Clinton and that the email controversy already has harmed her political standing.

Polls consistently show that roughly two-thirds of Americans do not consider Clinton “honest and trustworthy” — typically her lowest rating in a series of attri-

FBI Director James B. Comey called the handling of emails by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “extremely careless” last week.

The FBI did not recommend criminal charges, but his critique cast fresh doubt on Clinton’s trustworthiness, which many voters think is lacking, polls show.

bute questions.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll in June found that 56 percent of all adults disapprove of her handling of questions about her email use — 44 percent of them “strongly disapproving.”

It is unclear whether the FBI’s findings will further erode Clinton’s standing with the public. Republican pollster Neil Newhouse described the FBI’s findings as “damning results, just not indictable,” and expects fallout in the polls.

“Very little of her explanations hold up, most are at odds with the facts, and it was much worse than she admitted,” Newhouse said in an email Tuesday. “I’m not sure voters are going to be surprised, but when she’s already trailing on the key attributes of ‘honest and trustworthy’ to Donald Trump, today’s FBI findings are going to dig her hole even deeper.”

But Clinton’s allies, including former congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), believe the political fallout from the email controversy already has occurred.

“The criticism of her, the damage she suffered from having made a big mistake and having been irresponsible for using that server, has already happened,” Frank said in an interview. “She’s already paid a political price for it.”

Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) — a potential Clinton running mate — told reporters in Richmond: “I never believed this was going to be something in the criminal realm or even close to it. I have expected to get to this place where this is in the matter of lessons learned.”

Senior Democrats expect Trump and his allies to bang the drums about the email controversy for the rest of the campaign, but they think that the issue, short of an indictment, will have little currency with persuadable voters.

“Comey cut the legs out from under the only narrative that could have hurt her,” Democratic strategist Robert Shrum said. “I assume that Trump will continue to try to make hay out of this, and I think it will go about as well as the Republicans did on Whitewater or Benghazi or anything else. I just think it’s fundamentally over.” n

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POLITICS POLLING

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2016 rhetoric belies level of comfort Most people say they’re okay with at least one of the likely nominees

BY E MILY G USKIN AND S COTT C LEMENT

R

ound after round of Republicans’ awkward responses to Donald Trump’s rhetoric and Bernie Sanders’s not-quite endorsements of Hillary Clinton have underscored the country’s uneasiness with embracing both presumptive nominees. And polls have documented how this feeling permeates far beyond the Beltway: Americans rate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton more negatively than they have any other presidential candidates in decades.

This may be why fewer Americans say they support major-party candidates than in previous years, and why Republican Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) has gained a following for denouncing both Trump and Clinton.

But while it’s tempting to conclude the typical American is dissatisfied with both Clinton and Trump, a Washington Post-ABC News poll points to a different result: A clear majority are actually okay with at least one of the two major-party candidates, though few are comfortable with both of them.

Most Americans, 65 percent, are comfortable with at least one of the two candidates most likely to occupy the White House. Only 6 percent are comfortable with both candidates, while 20 percent are comfortable only with Trump and a larger 39 percent are comfortable only with Clinton.

The finding that most are satisfied with at least one candidate is driven by the simple fact that Americans have clear party leanings and tend to be comfortable with their party’s candidate. About two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are comfortable with Clinton and anxious about Trump (66 percent), while 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are comfortable with Trump and anxious about Clinton (more on that disparity in a moment).

A significant minority of Americans are anxious about both candidates — 30 percent — a number that peaks at a striking 48 percent

Anxiety over presidential candidates Q. Thinking about (Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump) as president — are you comfortable with this, or does it make you anxious?

Preferences, including third parties, among registered voters anxious about both candidates Q. If the presidential election were being held today and the candidates were Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, for whom would you vote?

THE WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON POST-ABC NEWS POLL JUNE 20-23

Clinton

Trump

among those under age 30, and is also higher among whites (34 percent) and women (33 percent).

Double anxiety is concentrated among political independents (37 percent are anxious about both), but it’s prevalent within partisan ranks as well, especially among those who favored a losing candidate in the primaries. Among Republicans and GOP-leaning inde-

Johnson

Stein

pendents who wanted a nonTrump candidate to win the nomination, 55 percent say they are anxious about both Clinton and Trump. A smaller but still substantial 39 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who wanted Sanders to win the party’s nod report being anxious about both major-party candidates.

Altogether, self-identified Re-

publicans (excluding independents who lean Republican) are more than twice as likely to be anxious about both Trump and Clinton than Democrats (40 percent vs. 16 percent). This is almost entirely because more Republicans say they are anxious about Trump becoming president (47 percent) than Democrats say about Clinton (19 percent).

In line with heightened Republican anxiety, registered voters who are anxious about both majorparty nominees favor Trump by 12 percentage points over Clinton if the election were held today: 44 percent to 32 percent. A significant 13 percent say they would support neither candidate, 6 percent mention that they would vote for someone else, 4 percent would not vote and 2 percent have no opinion.

The poll finds a mixed result for third-party candidates hoping to capitalize on voters turned off by both major parties. More than 3 in 10 voters (31 percent) who are anxious about both Trump and Clinton say they are seriously considering a third-party candidate for president — higher than the 18 percent of voters overall — though a 62-percent majority are not looking for a third-party option at this point.

Only 8 percent of voters who are anxious about Clinton and Trump volunteer Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein when asked specifically what thirdparty candidate they are considering, but the two fare better when mentioned explicitly as options.

Johnson pulls 15 percent of the doubly anxious vote (vs. 7 percent among all voters) while Stein garners 8 percent (vs. 3 percent overall).

Third-party candidates’ support in polls can be fleeting and tends to fall off by Election Day. In past elections, the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans have put their anxieties aside and voted in favor of their party’s candidate — as more than 90 percent did in 2012. n The Post-ABC poll was conducted June 20-23 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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NATION

Schools often lag on testing for lead BY

B RADY D ENNIS

I

n Portland, Ore., furious parents are demanding the superintendent’s resignation after the state’s largest public school district failed to notify them promptly about elevated lead levels detected at taps and fountains.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie (R) has ordered lead testing at every public school in the state after dozens of schools in Newark and elsewhere were found to have lead-contaminated water supplies.

In the District, which experienced a devastating lead crisis barely a decade ago, officials last month announced plans to spend millions of dollars to install water filters and more rigorously test the city’s public schools and recreation centers after a handful were found to have unacceptable lead levels.

The ongoing crisis in Flint, Mich., has shined a spotlight on the public-health hazards that lead continues to pose in U.S. drinking water. In particular, it has led to renewed pressure to test for the problem in the nation’s schools, where millions of young children, the age group most vulnerable to lead poisoning, spend their days.

“Unfortunately you find schools that are failing, and some are failing miserably,” said Robert Barrett, the chief operating officer for Aqua Pro-Tech Laboratories, a New Jersey-based environmental testing laboratory. He said the firm is booked through the summer, as schools race to test for lead before students return for a new academic year. “Before Flint, we’d get a call maybe once a month from a school. Now, it’s daily,” he said.

Public health officials agree that no amount of lead exposure is safe. Even at low levels, lead can cause serious and irreversible damage to the developing brains and nervous systems of young children. The result can be lasting behavioral, cognitive and physical problems. In short, it can alter the trajectory of a child’s life.

School systems throughout the country have long grappled with lead in water, due in part to aging buildings laden with lead-bearing

LLOYD FOX/BALTIMORE SUN

Most lack a mandate to analyze water, but after Flint, cash-strapped districts feel pressure to act pipes and fixtures. But even now, the vast majority of the nation’s schools are not legally required by states or the federal government to test their water on a regular basis.

Most public school districts, cash-starved and understaffed, don’t make it a priority. Years can pass before a calamity such as the one in Flint compels school officials to undertake a new round of testing.

“The pressure usually comes from the outside,” said Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech engineering professor who has long studied lead contamination in water. “When schools sample, it’s more often than not because they have been squeezed into a corner.”

After contaminated water in Flint became national news, parents and teachers in some parts of the country pushed for lead testing at their own schools. The results have often turned up reminders that lead problems persist decades after they first surface.

Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor who helped expose lead crises in Washington and Flint, and other experts partly blame the regulatory vacuum that leaves about 90 percent of the nation’s

schools with no mandatory requirements for testing and limited guidance on how to properly remediate the problem when they do find lead in the water. Only schools that have their own water source, rather than receiving water from a municipal system, must sample regularly for lead and meet certain standards.

In addition, the old age of many schools around the country makes it difficult to completely eliminate the risk of lead in the water without major, costly investments in replacing lead pipes, faucets and fountains.

Lambrinidou says it is not enough for schools to simply test a tap or fountain once for lead, then declare it safe. That is because lead can appear sporadically in a water system as particles break off or leach into the water at unpredictable times.

That situation can be exacerbated in schools, where water can sit stagnant in pipes over weekends and holidays. “This is exactly the condition that worsens leadin-water contamination,” Lambrinidou said.

She said the post-Flint push for lead testing in schools is prefera-

Signs over bathroom sinks instruct students not to drink the water at Cecil Elementary School in Baltimore, a city with a history of lead problems in public schools. After years of testing, retesting and unsuccessful attempts to rectify the lead problem, leaders in 2007 chose to shift the entire school system to bottled drinking water.

ble to no testing, but not as ideal as a more systematic approach.

“Nationally, this testing fever is good, because we want to know what’s happening in schools,” Lambrinidou said. “But it can also be misleading if the results are used to declare that any one tap is safe or not. I’m concerned the testing that schools are doing is more to allay parent fears than it is to truly understand the science of lead in water.”

The American Medical Association last month said it also would push for more state and federal laws to remove lead service lines around the country, better inform the public of water testing results and require all schools and registered day-care sites to routinely test for lead in drinking water.

In Baltimore, the city’s history of lead problems in public schools has resulted in an unorthodox long-term solution.

Elevated lead levels surfaced in many of its schools in the early 1990s, prompting the city to shut off contaminated fountains. But the issue resurfaced a decade later when it became clear that some of the troubled fountains had been put back into service.

After years of testing, retesting and unsuccessful attempts to rectify the problem, school leaders decided that they could not guarantee safety without replacing every pipe and fixture that contained lead. That would have been a massive — and massively expensive — undertaking. Instead, they moved the entire system to bottled water in 2007.

In the years since, the system has renovated half a dozen schools and installed new filtration systems in each one. But about 80,000 students in Baltimore remain on bottled water. It costs close to a half-million dollars a year, and the stream of paper cups and plastic Deer Park bottles creates much more waste than traditional fountains.

But Scroggins said it is a tradeoff he can live with.

“It was the best decision,” he said. “When it comes to lead in the water, you don’t want to take any chances.” n

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NATION

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Diving deep into the past The leader of the first scuba club for African Americans wants to document the wrecks of every slave ship

BY

S HAYLA L OVE

A

s soon as Albert Jose “Doc” Jones hit the water, he knew it was a different kind of dive.

The year was 1993, and Jones was placing a 2,700-pound memorial at the wreck site of a slave ship called the Henrietta Marie. “In memory and recognition of the courage, pain and suffering of enslaved African people,” read the plaque on the stone. “Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors.” Jones faced the words east, toward Africa.

“It felt eerie,” recalls Jones of the deep-sea dive off the southern tip of Florida. “You felt real sad for the people.”

The Henrietta Marie went down in 1701 with no slaves aboard, but it had ferried hundreds from Africa to the New World before it wrecked. “Whether there are any bodies there or not, we consider it a gravesite,” Jones says.

The founder of the first diving club for African Americans, Jones had been spurred to action two years earlier, when he had seen a collection of iron shackles recovered from the ship. Many were so small that they could have fit only a child’s wrist. That’s when he knew that he had to get involved in finding and cataloguing these slave ship sites.

“We can’t expect somebody else to go out and find these ships,” he says. “You can’t expect somebody to find your history for you. We need to do it.”

The Henrietta Marie dive eventually led to the formation of Diving With a Purpose, a group of African American divers who have made it a mission to find and document slave wrecks in collaboration with George Washington University’s Slave Wrecks Project and federal partners, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Last year, Jones and DWP member Kamau Sadiki dived to the São José Paquete Africa, a Portuguese slave ship that sank near Cape Town, South Africa, after leaving

ERIC HANAUER

CHRISTIAN K. LEE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Albert Jose “Doc” Jones started the first club for African American divers after seeing a collection of shackles recovered from a sunken slave ship.

Above, Jones cleans a plaque at the site of the Henrietta Marie slave ship, which sank in 1701.

Mozambique in 1794. An estimated 212 of the 500 slaves onboard died. Items salvaged from the wreck will be displayed at the African American history museum when it opens later this year.

Slave wrecks have been largely overlooked by marine archaeology until now — much like the little-known history of black scuba divers. It’s a story that can’t be told without Jones, a Washington native who created a welcome place for African Americans who wanted to dive.

In 1959, at Howard University, Jones and five others were certified, and the Underwater Adven-

ture Seekers was born. New members would find their way to the club through word of mouth — or a chance meeting. In 1965, Shirley Lee met Jones while admiring his gear at a pool where she was a lifeguard. Jones invited her to take lessons, and she became the first certified African American female scuba diver in the United States.

In 1991, Jones co-founded the National Association of Black Scuba Divers so that similar clubs could form all over the country.

This past June, the next generation of Underwater Adventure Seeker divers completed their training in a quarry in Virginia. The

older members were there, too, because Jones runs one of the only clubs that requires all members to undergo a yearly review of skills.

“We don’t make it easy,” Jones said. “Nobody is proud of being in something that’s easy.”

If it were about being easy, none of the organizations that have grown out of the Underwater Adventure Seekers would exist. DWP, which also does coral reef restoration, youth programs and trains people in mapping out wreck sites, has logged more than 8,000 volunteer archaeology hours.

Last year, DWP members dived Lake Huron, where a Tuskegee Airman, one of the famed World War II African American military pilots, crashed during a test flight.

This summer DWP will continue its search for the Guerrero, a slave ship that wrecked in 1827 near Key West with more than 40 slaves aboard.

Jay Haigler, a director at DWP, says that the club’s most important role is to add an African American voice in the water, especially at wreck sites.

“The stories that we tell matter, and it matters who tells the story,” he says. “I try to explain to someone who has not experienced racism what it is and how it feels.

Therein lies the critical importance of being able to tell this story from the perspective of people who have our experience.”

In Mozambique in 2015, before their journey to the São José, Jones and his colleagues met with chiefs from local tribes. The slaves who perished in the wreck came from those tribes, and the chiefs had a mission for Jones and Sadiki.

One took a handful of dirt, a symbol of home, and poured it into a cowry shell. He asked Jones to deposit the soil on the remains of the São José.

“This is not just divers going down and observing. They’ve got a stake in this,” says Jones. “What you’re doing is, you’re recovering history. And not just our history.

This is world history. It’s America’s history.

“You’re paying honor and homage to the people who made the ultimate sacrifice.” n

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WORLD

Germany’s challenge to take the lead A NTHONY F AIOLA Berlin BY

B

ritain may be in danger of becoming an inwardlooking nation of diminished influence following its vote to leave the European Union. But one country could find its voice in Europe dramatically amplified: Germany.

Under the stewardship of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s largest economy has already ridden to the zenith of its post-World War II power. But the pending departure of the E.U.’s secondlargest economy — Britain — could thrust an even bigger burden of leadership upon Germany.

Some Europeans remain leery of German power — the very energy the E.U. was designed to harness to prevent Berlin’s reemergence as the continent’s dominant force. But almost as many now worry that Germany will shrink from its leadership role, leaving a rudderless Europe drifting into political and economic limbo.

Germany’s stronger voice is emerging on the back of its massive economy, but also its stability at a time when a host of nations find themselves mired in myriad crises or focusing inward.

Yet no nation is more torn over its rise than Germany itself.

Jennifer Werthwein, a 22-yearold economics and philosophy major at the University of Mannheim, for instance, recently launched a social-media campaign with 500 others from the Green Party’s youth organization.

Their mission: to make fellow Germans stop displaying the national flag during a major European soccer tournament.

Their campaign against symbols of German power sparked a national debate. But Werthwein and her group were not alone.

Other student organizations have rallied to their cause. In Berlin and elsewhere, some bars and restaurants have posted signs or Facebook updates during the 2016 Euro soccer championships, warning their customers against displays of patriotism and barring the red, gold and black colors of

MARKUS SCHREIBER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In the wake of Britain’s vote to exit the E.U., a reluctant nation is seen as Europe’s ‘decider’ the German flag.

In the wake of Britain’s exit, Werthwein said, “there is a danger that Germany is going to push itself too much into the forefront, using its economic power to exert political domination in Europe.” She insisted Germany should not retake a pole position on the continent given the horror of World War II. “For me, our working through of the nationalism of the Nazi era can never be over,” she said.

Others here sense an opening in the British exit, regretting it while at the same time saying Germans should shoulder more weight.

Hans-Peter Friedrich, a leading politician of the Christian Social Union, Merkel’s sister party, is among those arguing for Germany to become “a normal nation.” In tweets, he chided the anti-flag campaign as shortsighted.

“Because of the British exit, Germany obviously gains more responsibility,” he said. Yet the anti-flag campaign, he added, “shows how

parts of German society still have a disturbed relationship with their own identity. . . . I think it’s a shame.”

Without Britain, a fellow defender of globalization and free trade, some observers are fretting over how and whether Germany will manage to turn the tide in Europe against more protectionist and inward-focused nations such as France and Italy. And yet, when it comes to leading, the Germans may also have little choice.

If Germany is Europe’s “decider,” it is not because it went after that role.

Dubbed the “sick man of Europe” in the early 2000s for its post-unification financial woes, its economy is now a global model.

But Germany, many argue, has not become diametrically stronger.

Although it leads globally on combating climate change, Germany remains gun-shy of forceful diplomacy backed by military strength.

Rather, Germany through Merkel is exerting a kind

Members of the youth organizations of Germany’s Social Democratic Party and the Green Party attend an event June 24 to support the European Union in Berlin. Many Germans are torn over a potential increased leadership role in the E.U.

of postmodern form of leadership — leading by example and through consensus.

Her pursuit of a patient and orderly British exit, even as some of her peers in Europe display grandstanding impatience, suggests the methodical style she has become known for at home. Merkel is being firm with Britain. But she is also avoiding the temptation to humiliate it because she believes that is not what is best for Europe.

That, some would argue, is leadership.

Perhaps Germany also seems stronger now because its neighbors have become weaker. Britain is exiting stage left. France is mired in economic woes and a war on terrorism. Spain and Italy face massive unemployment and political instability. Embracing nationalism, Poland and Hungary have turned inward. Pretty much everything that could go wrong has gone wrong in Greece.

Still, when Germany has shown leadership, it has often been messy, like a young monarch growing into the role. Merkel, her critics say, mishandled the region’s refugee crisis — encouraging a stampede of refugees with her welcoming stance before abruptly closing the door via a much-maligned deal with Turkey. The fighting in Ukraine continues. Management of the Greek debt crisis was a case study in how half-steps can trigger economic, political and social chaos.

But without Merkel’s consensus building, the Germans and others said, perhaps things in Europe would now be much worse.

“Germany did not seek its new role on the international stage,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, wrote this month in Foreign Affairs.

“Rather, it emerged as a central player by remaining stable as the world around it changed.”

But concerns have escalated that no one, really, may be in charge in Europe. Asked how decisions would be made in Europe going forward, former E.U. commissioner Guenter Verheugen, a German, said, “I have no convincing answer for that.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

A troubled bridge over global waters K EVIN W ILLIAMS Detroit BY

E

very year, $100 billion in trade passes back and forth between the United States and Canada here — roughly 16.5 percent of the total annual trade between the two countries. And it all trundles across the traffic-impaired and slowly declining 86-year-old Ambassador Bridge.

The Ambassador’s questionable condition — concrete chunks rained down upon the Canadian side last year — has trade experts concerned that a vital route could come to an unexpected halt. Truck companies, meanwhile, decry delays that can make crossing a bridge of less than two miles a four-hour hassle.

Canada promises to solve all of that with its $2.1 billion planned Gordie Howe International Bridge, which would begin construction within the year and open in 2020. Canada touts it as its single biggest infrastructural priority. And it has the added emotional pull of being named after the beloved Howe, a Canadian ice hockey legend who played for the Detroit Red Wings for 25 seasons, and who died last month at age 88.

But the new expanse would bring bitter defeat to the wealthy Michigan family that owns — and profits heavily from — the Ambassador. And it is not giving up without a fight.

The Moroun family — led by 89-year-old patriarch Manuel “Matty” Moroun — has owned the Ambassador since 1978. Moroun runs a diverse portfolio of holdings, including insurance, railroads and real estate companies, that keeps him ranked among the richest men in the United States.

He’s known for a bare-knuckled approach to business. He once spent a night in jail in 2012 after a judge found that he had failed to make promised access improvements to the Ambassador.

More recently, the Morouns have been pulling every lever to stall the Gordie Howe, including litigation challenging the approval process for the bridge and as-

CARLOS OSORIO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wealthy owners of a vital but aging link between U.S. and Canada seek to fend off new span serting their singular right to operate a bridge traversing the two countries. So far, the courts have dismissed these suits, including one last month in which a federal judge found that, contrary to the Morouns’ claims, “the crossing agreement was neither arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion nor unlawful.”

But the Morouns also countered by buying up parcels of property in Detroit that would be needed for the Canadian project to finish. Michigan should have no trouble taking back the land through eminent domain, but it’s a process that could take years.

It’s clear why the Morouns are battling so hard: One study released in 2008 by the Detroit River International Border Crossing Group estimated the Ambassador would lose 75 percent of its toll revenue with the opening of the Gordie Howe. It’s unclear how much revenue that is, though that same study estimated that the Gordie Howe would generate $70 million annually for Canada.

“The bottom line is that there has to be a better, collaborative

solution,” said Mickey Blashfield, spokesman for the Morouns’ Detroit International Bridge Co. The Ambassador Bridge, the only privately owned bordercrossing bridge connecting the United States and Canada, is a relic of the heady days of the pre-Depression 1920s, when money could move mountains and, in this case, build bridges. As trade picked up in the 1920s, a need for a bridge became clear. But when neither government could get a project off the ground, a wealthy banker named Joseph Bower secured all the proper permits, brought two international entities together and formed the Detroit International Bridge Co. The Bowers sold it to the Morouns, who dodged an attempt by Warren Buffett — who owned a 25 percent stake in the company — from buying it. But they are having a difficult time defending the Ambassador from charges that it is unequipped to handle the traffic that pours onto it, and that a significant alternative route is essential to protect the flow of trade.

“Ohio’s economy would be

The Ambassador Bridge frames the Detroit skyline. The 86-year-old bridge’s declining condition has trade experts concerned that an important route could come to an unexpected halt.

brought to its knees, and the impact would ripple out from there into the Deep South” should the trade route be halted for any reason, said William P. Anderson, director of the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor.

“The Ambassador needs to be replaced,” said Anderson.

While piecemeal improvements to bridge access have been made on the U.S. side in recent years, traffic going into Windsor gets funneled onto busy Huron Church Road, which frequently clogs with truck traffic. The road is hemmed in by motels, strip malls, the occasional Tim Horton’s and other gulps of Canadian culture for 2.5 crawling miles until, mercifully, all that traffic merges onto the King’s Highway 401, Ontario’s busiest freeway, and heads toward Toronto or other points east. Westbound truckers have to endure the same gantlet in reverse.

The Moroun family contends that the Blue Water Bridge, connecting Ontario with Port Huron, Mich., and more than an hour away, provides plenty of backup for the Ambassador. They also point to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, which connects the two cities under the Detroit River, though that doesn’t allow trucks.

The real effort should be to “upgrade what you do have” and make improvements to the Ambassador, Blashfield said.

To that effect, the Morouns have been seeking permits and approval to build their own alternative for the Ambassador: a new bridge that would run parallel to it and would allow the Ambassador to close for a time for repairs and improvements. If the Morouns get their way, they’d then be running two “Ambassador Bridges” while the Gordie Howe gets mothballed.

The second, as-yet unnamed Moroun bridge, did receive approval by the U.S. Coast Guard, but still faces scrutiny by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and U.S. National Park Service. It also would need the support of Canadian authorities, who have raised numerous concerns. n

COVER STORY

MANAGInG THE TITANS OF TECH

BY ELIZABETH DWOSKIN in San Francisco ne evening in March, a group of tech industry elite sat around a table in the private dining room of a Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, listening to a talk about how to do their jobs. ¶ The people assembled wielded about as much power as anyone in Silicon Valley, but they weren’t the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer or Elon Musk. Instead, the evening marked the quarterly gathering for Silicon Valley chiefs of staff — an under-the-radar group whose members are the right-hand men and women to tech’s biggest power players. ¶ Silicon Valley likes to thumb its nose at Washington. Tech executives have long derided the nation’s capital as a place where good ideas go to die by a thousand regulatory cuts. But increasingly, one quintessential Washington institution is taking hold: the chief of staff. Its growth in many companies is reflective of the evolution of the start-up boom: Companies have gotten bigger, often very quickly, and they’re seeking more organization and hierarchy as a result. ¶ “Silicon Valley used to be more scrappy,” said Brian Screnar, chief of staff to continues on next page

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COVER STORY

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from previous page

Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Myhrvold is chief executive of a company called Intellectual Ventures, which sells patents. “As tech matures, things need a much more rigid structure.”

Chiefs of staff are the people who control access to the people every entrepreneur wants to meet. The relationship is highly intimate: They’re the ones who brief the executives in the morning and are often the last people the leaders communicate with before going to sleep.

In a town where there’s a meetup group for “growth hackers” and “big data” aficionados, this club is by far the most obscure — and perhaps the most exclusive. Needless to say, it has no Web page, and the group’s members are largely unknown outside their own companies (most prefer it that way).

In Washington, such a group wouldn’t be necessary: Everyone knows who the chiefs of staff are, and the role is historically welldefined. But the job is still new in Silicon Valley, where everyone is frenemies, so it’s useful to compare notes on even run-of-themill topics, such as how to run efficient meetings, the best strategies for breaking into China and what makes the best administrative assistants.

The membership list includes chiefs of staff to entrepreneur and executive Musk, investor Peter Thiel, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sandberg and Apple design chief Jony Ive, as well as the chief executives of LinkedIn, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo. Chiefs of staff working for executives at archrival ridesharing services Uber and Lyft are also represented, as are high-growth start-ups such as Dropbox and DocuSign. Some Silicon Valley chiefs of staff prefer to eschew the Washington-sounding title, preferring terms like “technical lead” (at Intel and Amazon) or “director

of the office of the CEO” (for Musk).

Chiefs of staff in Silicon Valley must frequently juggle the commitments of a cast of characters with larger-than-life personalities, ambitions and whims. Consider Sam Teller, the chief of staff to Musk. Teller spends his time managing the affairs of a man who is chief executive both of electric carmaker Tesla and the space exploration firm SpaceX, is chairman of energy company Solar City, and is chairman of a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting artificial intelligence for the good of humanity. Or Screnar, chief of staff to Myhrvold, whose “side projects” in addition to his patent company include building a next-generation nuclear reactor, publishing scientific papers on asteroids and dinosaur fossils, and writing a 2,438-page cookbook on molecular gastronomy.

“Just keeping up with Nathan is a large part of my day,” Screnar says.

Ryan Metcalf, a former Obama White House aide who organizes the group, is chief of staff to the serial entrepreneur Max Levchin.

Levchin has founded or helped start seven companies, including PayPal, Yelp, online payments company Stripe, a financial-lending start-up called Affirm, and the fertility app Glow. He’s also an investor in some 100 startups and awards an annual cryptography prize.

“These guys have their hands in everything,” Metcalf says. “My job is to put out fires before they get to him.”

Between spoonfuls of caviar panna cotta and shots of liquid nitrogen gin and tonics, the evening began with everyone congratulating Musk’s chief of staff on SpaceX’s recent big achievement: landing a rocket on a drone ship floating in the ocean. Then they went around the table, each guest sharing a quick personal update and a current work challenge. After the ice-breakers, the group listened to Tyler Parris, a U.S. Marine-turned-consultant who recently

JONATHAN LEIBSON/GETTY IMAGES FOR AOL

Silicon Valley executives Max Levchin and Sheryl Sandberg each have a chief of staff, a timehonored Washington role popping up in corporate America.

wrote a book on how to be a chief of staff in a corporation.

Parris passed out an article about the water crisis in Flint, Mich. It depicted a beleaguered chief of staff to the state’s governor — rebuffed by state agencies when he tried to raise red flags and so overloaded with tasks that the lead-poisoned water became an overlooked line item on his agenda. How does this predicament compare with your jobs, Parris asked.

Was there something he could have done differently? Did he involve his boss too little or too much in big decisions?

The attendees listened. Someone piped up to say that the job is less about managing outside expectations than about reeling in a charismatic, temperamental boss. Tessa Lyons, business lead for Facebook’s Sandberg, noted that her boss was highly organized and adept at reeling in people herself. Everyone chuckled knowingly.

An old tradition The job is a Washington staple. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to have an official chief of staff, but the position extends back to the early republic. George Washington used chiefs of staff, known as aides-de-camp, when he commanded the Continental Army; as president, he had a private secretary whose salary he paid out of his own pocket, a practice that continued until the mid-nineteenth century.

The position appears to have migrated to corporate America over the past 15 years; in Silicon Valley, the number of people with the title is growing. Intel has had chiefs of staff since the 1990s; Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had them in the mid2000s.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg don’t have them.

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ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Increasingly, smaller start-ups are hiring chiefs of staff, said Nakul Mandan, partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, in part because the latest start-up wave is growing up.

Many people have been attracted to the recent tech boom, including Washington types, and once-small start-ups have raised a lot of capital and become hundred-person companies in short periods. They’re starting to recognize that the hierarchies, management structures and bureaucracies of corporate America can make you more efficient, he said.

Screnar, who was formerly the chief of staff to the deputy secretary of the interior, began working in tech in 2013. Today, a newer, bigger wave of Obama insiders is moving West in droves in search of positions.

The role is also growing because the tech industry is in the public spotlight in a way it’s never been before. Companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, and even smaller companies such as Dropbox, have hired lobbyists on issues such as net neutrality, cybersecurity legislation and patent reform. Prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen can make an insensitive comment on Twitter that has ripple effects across the globe. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has become perhaps the leading private-sector voice advocating for gay and transgender rights.

A useful back channel To some extent, the chief of staff group provides a back channel to see where fellow executives stand on these public issues. And as Silicon Valley executives become bigger public figures, it’s useful for chiefs of staff to know people who have handled that kind of public scrutiny.

In March, the group helped circulate and push out a letter, ultimately signed by about 100 U.S. companies, condemning the contro-

versial legislation over transgender bathrooms in North Carolina. When President Obama went to Stanford University for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit last month, the chiefs of staff group played a role in selecting the companies highlighted for their efforts to promote diversity.

Mostly though, the dinners are a chance to gossip, network and trade management tips. A couple of informal rules are observed: No one is allowed to poach anyone else’s executive assistant, and no trade secrets are shared, said Michael Arrieta, chief of staff at electronic signature company Docusign.

“We keep it high-level,” he said.

Parris, who interviewed dozens of chiefs of staff in many industries for his book, said the Silicon Valley group was the only such club he found. Arrieta and other members said they weren’t surprised: They think the tech industry is collaborative by nature. In part, that’s a function of it historically being clustered in a small area and driven by tight-knit relationships in which everyone is a potential investor, co-founder, purchaser of or contributor to your software.

When Metcalf began working for Levchin in 2013, he knew only one other person with the same role, and he wanted to have a group to compare notes with and exchange war stories.

So that October, he organized a low-key dinner in San Francisco’s Jackson Square with the chiefs of staff to Musk, Sandberg, Mayer and Thiel. They played bocce ball and came up with a list of invitees.

At the early dinners, most people were sizing up one another — figuring out who had the closest relationship to their executive and more responsibility to craft strategy, and who was more like a glorified administrative assistant, members said.

“You quickly figured out who had a job that

KLMNO WEEKLY

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Marissa Mayer and Jeff Weiner also have chiefs of staff. “You’re part campaign manager, part body guy, part adviser, and press person all in one,”one Silicon Valley chief of staff said.

was like yours,” Arrieta said.

In many ways, the job is performed similarly in Silicon Valley as in Washington. Silicon Valley chiefs of staff described themselves as b.s. detectors and filters for their bosses. They try to take their bosses’ far-fetched ideas and get them across the finish line — which means being an enforcer within an organization and saying no to a lot of projects. If there’s a task that no one has responsibility for — let’s say a start-up needs new office space — the chief of staff fills the gap. They try to make sure the executive is so prepared for every meeting that he or she seems like the smartest person in the room. Metcalf has even taken to producing classic Washington briefing books for Levchin.

The books, which are standard in politics, detail his travel schedule at 15-minute intervals.

“You’re part campaign manager, part body guy, part adviser and press person all in one,” Metcalf said.

Other aspects of the job are inherently different. At the dinners, people discuss strategies for raising cash, a perennial concern for start-ups. They talk about going global, particularly in China, and take lessons from other tech companies that made headway there.

If a chief executive wants to talk to another one, the chiefs of staff will discuss the issue in advance “so it’s greased on both ends,” Screnar says.

But unlike in Washington, most chiefs of staff said they aspire to be entrepreneurs themselves — and some have already done so.

Metcalf thinks that’s a good thing. In an era in which Silicon Valley is cutting back on perks, former government officials might bring some needed discipline to free-wheeling start-ups.

“As much as Washington gets a lot of flak for bureaucracy, there was one thing I learned from the White House,” he said. “Efficiency.” n

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MUSIC

For aging musicians, a difficult coda BY

M ARK G UARINO

T

he deaths of David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Natalie Cole may have caught music fans by surprise, but they can be assured their heroes died receiving the best medical treatment possible.

Most musicians, however, struggle to pay the bills, and those who may have enjoyed the spoils of fame in their heyday are finding that often doesn’t translate to covering the mounting medical costs they face in their twilight years. Accelerating the problem are changes in the music business itself. Artists who enjoyed hit records in the predigital era once were assured they could rely on continuing royalties that would allow them to enjoy retirement in comfort.

Not anymore. Digital streaming is emerging as the dominant way people listen to music, and the royalty rates involved with services such as Spotify are far lower than those connected to CDs and vinyl. Suddenly, the nest egg has shrunk. Organizations that help musicians deal with skyrocketing medical costs are discovering that the population of aging musicians needing medical care they can afford is accelerating in greater numbers than ever.

“This is a huge problem,” says Rob Max, executive director of Sweet Relief Musicians Fund in Fullerton, Calif. “Most artists haven’t sold an album since the ’70s, and with catalogue sales disappearing 10 years ago, they’re just now feeling the pain. All these artists who once thought they could live off royalties are in a lot of trouble.”

The most reliable option for musicians to earn money outside their recordings is touring, which usually allows them to get paid a guarantee and has the added value of merchandise sales, which often can be more lucrative than ticket sales.

However, the instability associated with a life on the road, induced by traveling hundreds of miles a day between cities, can trigger longlasting health ailments.

It doesn’t help that such an itinerant life often forces musicians to

LEONHARD FOEGER/REUTERS

JOHN SHEARER/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

MATT SAYLES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

David Bowie, Glenn Frey of the Eagles and Natalie Cole died in the past several months. But for musicians who live well into old age, retirement is often full of expensive medical problems.

stick with a short-term vision rather than take action to plan for retirement, says Janice Johnston, medical director of Arrowhead Health Centers in Arizona and a board director for the Blues Foundation in Memphis, where she oversees efforts to help with musicians’ medical and funeral expenses.

“They work these crazy, crazy hours, not eating well and not getting exercise, because it’s hard to get into a routine when you’re traveling,” Johnston says. She says diabetes, heart issues, hepatitis C, and liver and kidney failure are the most common maladies for musicians when they get older.

“Musicians tend to live gig to gig, which is more the mentality when you’re in your prime. But when you’re doing well, there’s not a lot of foresight to plan for the future,” she says.

Take Dick Dale. The guitar legend is revered for inventing surf music in the early 1960s, thereby creating an entirely new vocabulary for his instrument and influencing generations of musicians, from Jimi Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen. At 79, Dale should be retired. He would agree: For years, he has suffered from a long list of problems, including diabetes, kidney failure and an upper gastrointestinal tract infection.

Yet Dale continues to climb into his car a few times a year and drive

As royalty payments decline and health problems mount, more artists find it hard to pay bills

cross-country to perform. Lower hip pain has made climbing stairs difficult, so he usually needs assistance to the stage. Onstage, he plays guitar while planted on a stool, a colostomy bag tucked under his clothes. His doctors tell him he can no longer play his saxophone because the strain will cause bleeding, which could be fatal.

The herculean effort to keep going despite his problems is because of cost: Dale needs $3,000 each month to pay for attachments for his colostomy, plus the cost of daily insulin shots. He says that he has Medicaid but that it pays only a quarter of what he needs. “It’s unbelievable what we have to come up with,” he says.

His situation is common among musicians, Johnston says. Many are forced to shoulder the responsibility of health care as independent contractors, and often they don’t earn enough to afford medical treatment that fully covers their ailments.

“We see it every single day.

These guys basically need a gig to put gas in the car and food on the table. The last thing they think about is their health or paying for health care because they’ve been trying to keep it all going,” she says. From her work with MusiCares, a nonprofit organization that helps defray medical costs for musicians, she says it is common

for musicians to be either uninsured or underinsured with plans carrying high deductibles. “They have health insurance, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to use it,” she says.

Medical costs for musicians are often insurmountable because many have not earned very much from their recordings. Lester Chambers, a member of the California psychedelic soul group the Chambers Brothers, enjoyed multiple hit singles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but despite the group’s success, he did not receive royalty payments for decades. He blames inexperience, family squabbles and Columbia Records, the band’s record label, for why he receives only from $4,000 to $12,000 a year in royalties, despite the group’s biggest hit, “Time Has Come Today,” being used for TV commercials and movie soundtracks.

“We’ve never been paid for our recordings. That was a total ripoff. Basically because we never had lawyers,” he says.

Now 76, Chambers lives with his son outside San Francisco and, among other maladies, suffers from a fall onstage years ago that broke ribs and dislocated his shoulder and left hip. The injuries left him weakened and ended his performing career — and therefore his income. Medicare pays for only a portion of the nearly $70,000 in medical costs per year, he says. “We’re the people who entertained the world. And now everything in my life is a struggle because I haven’t earned any money. I’ve never had it so hard.”

For a long time, musicians have had to rely on unorthodox means to get health care, such as finding a pipeline of doctors and specialists willing to reduce their rates because they are music fans.

That might not provide much solace to performers such as Dale, who doesn’t relish getting behind the wheel every few months to drive to his next gig. Despite his pain, he says, being onstage remains for him the ultimate healer.

“You have to give back what life gives to you. The payback is I’m still here,” he says. n

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TECHNOLOGY

KLMNO WEEKLY

This robot is definitely the coolest BY

D ARRYL F EARS

R

einhard Radermacher has a vision: A person walks into a room hot and sweaty after exercising, and somewhere in the dark, tucked in a corner, a small robot notices and lights up. It moves forward and speaks.

“I see you’re coming home from the gym,” it says in a pleasant voice. “I will give you maximum cooling now.”

This isn’t a line ripped from the 2014 animated Disney movie “Big Hero 6,” in which a “personal health-care companion” called Baymax sprang to life whenever it sensed human pain. This is something happening now at the University of Maryland, as Radermacher and a team of engineers, researchers and designers race to develop RoCo — a robotic personal air conditioner capable of sensing when a person is too hot or too cold and taking action to make them more comfortable.

The big-picture aim is to one day cut the energy used to cool or heat a room, office or industrial space, regardless of whether anyone is there. RoCo, short for Roving Comforter, would follow its owners like a self-propelled vacuum cleaner and provide enough comfort to allow homes and businesses to adjust the thermostat up to four degrees.

Federal energy officials estimate that 14 percent of U.S. energy output goes for air conditioning, heating and ventilation in buildings — much of which is wasted.

That usage contributes to almost the same percentage of the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Saving only two degrees of energy would be “an enormous amount,” equal to converting a quarter of all vehicles on the road to electric hybrids, said Jennifer Gerbi, program director for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Maryland’s team is competing in a three-year challenge organized by an agency program called Delivering Efficient Local Thermal Amenities, or DELTA. It provides financial support to cutting-

CHRISTIAN K. LEE/THE WASHINGTON POST

For contest, University of Maryland team works on an air conditioner that follows you around edge technological innovations too new or risky for private-sector investment. The competition is helping to get the ball rolling on advances that could improve national security, defense and the environment.

Three other schools are also pursuing energy-saving projects, and all have the potential of going to market, although Gerbi doesn’t expect that to ultimately happen.

Syracuse University is designing a small box that would sit on a work desk or near a chair at home and perform a function similar to RoCo’s. Stony Brook University at New York is working on special vents that blow cooled air on individuals. And the University of California at Berkeley is testing a chair that heats or cools its occupant.

“The chair heats a small part of your back, but your entire body feels warm,” Gerbi said. “People are looking at very clever and novel ways of using tech.”

Office battles have long been fought over room temperature, with women typically complaining of feeling frozen. The dozen or

so people behind RoCo could help keep the peace.

But can they reach their goal in time? Can the Maryland team design a robot savvy enough to know when you’re sweating or shivering and sell it for the current goal of $60? Gerbi said she thinks warehouse operators would love how RoCo could lower energy costs in big rooms with a handful of employees. But she’s not so sure about an army of R2-D2-sized robots roaming a crowded office space.

It took time for the Maryland team to figure out its project. Engineering professors Vikrant Aute and Jiazhen Ling were part of a group that tossed ideas around for months. Some were almost laughably basic, such as a fan that would blow air over an ice bucket. Aute and Ling decided that wasn’t good enough, and the Energy Department provided the university with about $2.5 million for the team to think bigger.

As the ideas became more ambitious, Radermacher and others dreamed of a robot that would not sit idly while people suffered. It

The University of Maryland team of students and professors working on RoCo includes, from left, Jiazhen Ling, Darren Key, Vikrant Aute, Oliver Schmid and Daniel Dalgo. The school got $2.5 million from the Energy Department to develop the idea. The goal is to conserve energy used to control the climate of large spaces.

would be cute, thoughtful and intuitive, knowing when its owner was in distress. Unlike the fans available at home-ware stores, it would power on by itself, monitor motion, create cool air and somehow store the heat generated in the process. Signaled via wearable technology or perhaps a cellphone app, it also would adjust its height to custom-cool its user.

Daniel Dalgo is focusing on the wearable, serving as a guinea pig with sensors stuck on his bare chest to determine if his vitals can be downloaded into a secure digital cloud. “I think that’s what’s going to be the impact of this project,” said Dalgo, a graduate research assistant. “It will allow people to be comfortable in their environment without playing with the thermostat.”

Over the past seven months, the team mounted a tiny compressor and fan on its prototype. Someone found a large nozzle on the Chinese equivalent of Amazon.com and had it shipped to the school.

That piece is now the cyclops-like portal that directs the air, while three tubes are used to store and release the heat produced. A round, yellow base serves as the wheeled charging port.

The commands are delivered via the touch-screen of an Android tablet.

But while functional, RoCo still needs cosmetic work. Wires appear to come and go everywhere.

It doesn’t yet speak or have the ability to heat a surrounding space. It moves with the whir of a remote-control race car and only operates for a max of two hours before requiring a two-hour charge.

The team has a couple more years to give it an attractive appearance and soothing voice. Two students recruited for the outer design work came up with radically different ideas: One resembles a curving steamship pipe, while the other looks like a curvy body.

“There’s a whole lot to say about both of them,” Radermacher said.

“One is the more attractive one; one is more technical. They have their advantages and disadvantages.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Finding hope, and loss, worldwide N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

G ERARD D E G ROOT

‘T FAR & AWAY Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

By Andrew Solomon Scribner. 578 pp. $30

he world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” So said Augustine of Hippo, back when travel was much more difficult than it is today. The statement is indisputable. Ignorance of the world is dangerous, as the nightly news often demonstrates. Like it or not, people in other countries do not behave like us — that’s why they’re called foreigners. “Travel,” writes Andrew Solomon, “is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality.”

At an early age, Solomon decided to read that book of the world from cover to cover. To date, he’s visited 83 of the 196 recognized countries on this planet. “Far & Away” is a collection of his travel pieces published over the years in a wide variety of journals. That variety leads to an inconsistency of tone: Some are lighthearted, others somber. The short ones should be longer, the longer ones shorter. But does this matter? Probably not. This is an untidy book, but a great one.

In truth, this is not really travel writing in the recognized form of the genre. The reader who expects a collection of quirky anecdotes about fascinating places will be disappointed. “Far & Away” is not just a voyage around the world; it’s also a voyage around Andrew Solomon.

One chapter title encapsulates the man: “Gay, Jewish, Mentally Ill, and a Sponsor of Gypsies in Romania.” Let’s deconstruct that. First, the Jew. That’s the least prominent characteristic, which is surprising given where Solomon has traveled.

Yet his Jewishness explains in part why he travels. When he was 7, he found out about the Holocaust.

“Why didn’t those Jews just leave when things got bad?” he asked.

“They had nowhere to go,” his father explained. Young Andrew “decided that I would always have somewhere to go.” He chose to become a citizen of the world rather than a prisoner of one nation.

Now, the gay bit. Solomon is very upfront about his sexuality. He

TOMAS MUNITA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man prays in front of an Islamic shrine in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Andrew Solomon visited the country in 2002 to witness its awakening after the fall of the Taliban. Years later, that optimism has died, he writes.

openly celebrates the tolerance toward gays that has grown in his lifetime. Yet his wanderlust and his homosexuality often result in peculiar predicaments. Some are delightful. Others are tragic. Solomon regularly travels to countries where homosexuality is a crime, even a capital one. He has become, as a result of his encounters, a mouthpiece for stories of terrible persecution. These pepper the book.

Now the mental illness. “I’m not depressed now — but I was depressed for a long time,” Solomon writes. Chronic depression fueled a need to understand his illness, which in turn inspired further voyages. He traveled to Rwanda and Cambodia to discover how humans manage to cope after genocide. “I expected to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.” He went to Greenland to understand why suicide is the leading cause of mortality. Solomon assumed the oppressive darkness was at fault but then decided

cold was the culprit. People huddle together to keep warm; they sleep on top of one another. Forced intimacy makes them seek privacy within themselves. A society evolved with a taboo against talking about oneself.

Finally: “sponsor of gypsies in Romania.” The operative word is not “Romania” nor “gypsies,” but “sponsor” — Solomon’s big-hearted desire to help. Long ago, he set out to witness the change he wanted to see in the world. He sought to undermine insularity. “The central proposition of this book is that circling the wagons is not only impossible in a globalized world, but finally perilous.”

That intense purposefulness is what makes this book extraordinary. Travel is usually self-serving.

Solomon’s is seldom that. Hope fuels his voyages. He went to Afghanistan in 2002 to witness an awakening after the defeat of the Taliban. “I [was] . . . ready for hardship, and I did see horrible

things. But I also felt a warmth . . . that lay not only in the reform of government but also in the return to small satisfactions . . . generously shared.” That chapter, however, ends with a tragic postscript.

Solomon explains how the friends he met are mostly dead, the optimism he felt cruelly crushed. “You were there in those beautiful days — in the time of hope,” a friend reflected. “All of that is gone now.”

That is the pattern of this book: Hope blooms like crocuses in spring and is then trampled underfoot.

Yet still he searches for reasons to believe. “A crushed hope is suffused with nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.”

This is a very noble book. It’s also a very depressing one. n DeGroot is a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

His latest book is “Selling Ronald Reagan: The Emergence of a President.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Friends tumble into adulthood

A show of respect for sacred lands

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

S OPHIE M C M ANUS

lice Adams’s moving debut begins with an ending.

It’s 1995, in Bristol, England. Friends Eva, Sylvie, Lucien and Benedict lie entwined on a grassy hilltop, drinking from a bottle of wine, soon to leave the idyll of university. Life’s possibilities span before them like the city below. With affectionate languor, Eva asks, “If you could know the answer to any question, what would it be?”

On reading this bittersweet and compassionate novel, which sweeps this group in and out of each other’s lives from their 20th to their 40th year, I had a few: Are we agents of our destiny or flotsam bobbing on the tides of chance?

Does aging make us wiser, or just old? How do we reconcile our wrongdoings, if we never witness their harm? Is settling the path to happiness, or kind of a bummer?

What did Camus mean when he wrote, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there lay within me an invincible summer?”

Upon graduation, this quartet tumbles helter-skelter into adulthood. Adams casts a keen eye on that slow shock of the 20s, when even the most exceptional young people discover they are just . . . people, with jobs and partners decided as much by happenstance as by desire.

Eva notes the prosperous gleam of the Morton Brothers investment bankers at a recruitment fair and joins their program to become a derivatives trader.

Siblings Sylvie and Lucien set off hosteling through India. Sylvie’s talent as a painter blazes as bright as her flaming orange hair; all assume her travels are but a brief deferral of stardom. Lucien is a “sardonic, bullet-proof” club promoter with a shady sideline, a charmer whose number best be deleted by dawn — unless you’re Eva. She’s pined for him for years.

It’s only sweet, reserved Benedict, an affable update of Mr. Darcy, who knows what he wants:

to become a particle physicist and to be with Eva. After a summer at home, he’ll return to Bristol to study for his PhD. But what a home! Benedict gathers his meager courage to invite Eva to his family’s terraced Corfu manse above the “glittering Ionian Sea.” As hot as she is on the loot, she’s cool on Benedict, and in no mood, at 22, for a long-distance affair.

The friends’ fates rise and fall.

There are career highs and implosions, marriage and infidelity, addiction, prison — and funny, biting insights on how relationships can detonate when one friend has children and another does not.

The book’s structure — reminiscent of David Nichols’s “One Day” — skips from (mostly) summer to summer, returning to each character only when they return to each other. An intricate pattern of how deeply they influence each other emerges.

It’s in Sylvie’s hard fall that the beauty and depth of the book resides. It’s she who reads Camus, and discovers, “at last, that in the worst years of our madness, the memory of that sky had never left me.” The hopes she thought she’d lost were always with her, invincible. So what if Camus is referencing the ravages of war, and she the mess of her 20s? It holds.

That grassy Bristol hilltop is the first of many. At seminal moments, look up! Eva stands at the top of a rise, civilization below. Her perch mimics the novel’s bird’seye vantage, but also Eva’s drive, for better and worse, to vault above the fray. As she evolves, she moves downward, first with a business idea that puts Eva and Sylvie’s combined ingenuity at every Londoner’s front door, and later, with her friends, all so changed, to the ocean’s edge: an elemental, eye-level vastness belonging to no one, as graceful a symbol of their passage to maturity as any. n McManus is the author of “The Unfortunates.”

T INVINCIBLE SUMMER

By Alice Adams Little, Brown. 308 pp. $26

THE HOUR OF LAND A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks

By Terry Tempest Williams Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 395 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

erry Tempest Williams is a force of nature in at least two ways. First, she pleads forcefully on behalf of the natural world, especially national parks, wilderness areas and endangered species. And second, she writes as she pleases.

If Williams wants to use Canyonlands National Park as an excuse to recycle a number of letters she wrote — some to living souls (environmental activist Tim DeChristopher, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell), others to recipients long in their graves (John Wesley Powell, Edward Abbey) — she will do so. If she wants to bring up the restraining order she once obtained against one of her brothers without explaining what provoked it and how the feud ended, she’ll do that, too. And if she decides that the Chinese-artist-turned-activist Ai Weiwei deserves a lengthy treatment in a piece on Alcatraz Island (where his work was on display), she won’t be deterred.

Williams takes these and other chances in her new book, “The Hour of Land,” a collection of a dozen essays devoted to the state of the American environment as reflected in our national parks. (Sticklers take note: Williams uses the term “national park” broadly, as synecdoche for most of the categories in the national park system: park, monument, historic site, battlefield, seashore, recreation area.) The essays are interspersed with park-related photographs taken by contributors such as Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams, and Williams borrows epigraphs from the poet Jorie Graham.

But even with the book’s farflung collaborators and long reach, the author’s trademark poetic prose dominates every page.

The following image, about Gulf Islands National Seashore as seen from a plane, can stand for a myriad of others: “The Mississippi Delta comes into full view like a great nurturing hand smoothing the edge of the continent.” And here’s a striking passage from a piece on Big Bend National Park in Texas:

“Most deserts have a memory of the sea and here is no exception.

Fossils embedded in the limestone create an ancient brocade woven through the stratigraphy of stone.”

As that generalization about the desert suggests, Williams — who comes from an old Utah family — knows the West well. Maybe too well, to the point where the multitude of threats to Western ecosystems, especially threats posed by oil and gas companies, can prey on her mind. Where does she go for relief?

Why, to eastern national parks, notably Acadia. “It is here in ‘the settled wild’ of Maine that I find sanctuary from the painful politics surrounding western wilderness,” she writes. “I don’t know enough to have my heart broken in the east.”

In places, “The Hour of Land” reads as if it had been rushed into print for this year’s National Park Service centennial. To take just the essay on Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Williams tells us twice that the park’s beleaguered superintendent finds it easier to deal with the chief executives of energy companies than with North Dakota’s governor and legislature. (The crux seems to be that, trying to protect their firms’ images, the chief executives are open to compromise, whereas the state officials can’t see past their fixation on fostering an economic boom.)

Williams saves a surprise for the end: a dollop of optimism. She portrays the fossil-fuel industry as making “its last desperate cries,” although she wonders if the industry hasn’t already set in motion forces that will destroy “not only our most revered public landscapes but also the planet.” A few pages later, she adds, “After spending a lifetime immersed in our national parks, I believe we are slowly learning what it means to offer our reverence and respect to the closest thing we as American citizens have to sacred lands.” n Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, writes about the environment.

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OPINIONS

Elie Wiesel gave voice to suffering Soviet Jews NATAN SHARANSKY is a human rights activist, former political prisoner in the Soviet Union and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Perhaps better than anyone else of our age, Elie Wiesel grasped the terrible power of silence. He understood that the failure to speak out, about both the horrors of the past and the evils of the present, is one of the most effective ways there is to perpetuate suffering and empower those who inflict it.

Wiesel therefore made it his life’s mission to ensure that silence would not prevail. First, he took the courageous and painful step of recounting the Holocaust, bringing it to public attention in a way that no one else before him had done. His harrowing chronicle “Night,” originally titled “And the World Remained Silent,” forced readers to confront that most awful of human events — to remember it, to talk about it, to make it part of their daily lives. Then, as if that weren’t enough, he turned his attention to the present, giving voice to the millions of Jews living behind the Iron Curtain.

Although he is rightly hailed for the first of these two achievements, it was the second, he told me on several occasions, for which he most hoped to be remembered.

Wiesel first traveled to the Soviet Union in 1965 as a journalist from Haaretz, on a mission to meet with Jews there, and was shocked by what he saw.

Those with whom he spoke were too afraid to recount Soviet persecution, terrified of reprisals from the regime, but their eyes implored him to tell the world about their plight. The book that resulted, “The Jews of Silence,” was an impassioned plea to Jews around the world to shed their indifference and speak out for those who could not. “For the second time in a single generation, we are committing the error of silence,” Wiesel warned — a phenomenon even more troubling to him than the

voiceless suffering of Soviet Jews themselves.

This was a watershed moment in the struggle for Soviet Jewry.

While the major American Jewish organizations felt a responsibility to stick to quiet diplomacy, wary of ruffling Soviet feathers and alienating non-Jews in the United States, Wiesel’s book became the banner of activists, students and those who would not stay quiet.

He had realized that the Soviet regime wanted above all for its subjects to feel cut off from one another and abandoned by the world. I can attest that even 15 years later, Soviet authorities were doing their utmost to convince us that we were alone, that no one would save us and that the only way to survive was to accept their dictates.

Wiesel was thus uniquely perceptive in realizing that without this power to generate fear and isolation, the entire Soviet system could fall apart, and he was prophetic in calling on the rest of the world to remind Soviet Jews that they were not alone.

The history of the Soviet Union would probably be very different had the struggle for Soviet Jewry not come to encompass the kind of outspoken, grass-roots activism that Wiesel encouraged in his book. Without public campaigns and the awareness they generated, there could be no quiet diplomacy to secure results.

Every achievement in the struggle for Soviet Jewry over the succeeding 25 years — from making the first holes in the Iron Curtain, to securing the release of

BELA SZANDELSZKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, seen in Budapest in 2009, died July 2.

political prisoners and human rights activists, to ultimately making it possible for millions of Soviet Jews to emigrate — resulted from this mixture of activism and diplomacy.

Over the years, of course, Wiesel became an important part of establishment Jewish life.

From 1965 on, he once said, not a single day went by when he was not preoccupied with the fate of Soviet Jews, many of whom he regarded as his own family.

And he was true to this approach to the very end, to the last battle in our struggle: the March for Soviet Jewry in December 1987. Wiesel and I had first discussed the idea of a march more than a year earlier, in mid1986. Yet six months after our initial conversation, I found myself lamenting to him that the Jewish establishment was too resistant to the idea, afraid of the logistical difficulties involved and of being painted as enemies of a newly born detente. Wiesel replied that we should not expect establishment organizations to take the lead and should instead mobilize students, who would pressure them from below to get on board. So I traveled to about 50 U.S. universities in the months leading up to the march, galvanizing activists who were eager to participate. And sure enough, just as he predicted, all of the major Jewish organizations eventually united behind the

idea.

As we were all marching together, establishment leaders justifiably congratulated themselves for this great achievement. Wiesel looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Yes, they did it.” Rather than splitting hairs about who had been more influential, he credited the power of the Jewish world as a whole. We had been right to act as we did, to make noise and push for change through our own resolute campaign, but we needed the establishment to see our efforts through. Wiesel understood exceptionally well how to unite these two forces for the common good.

Elie Wiesel’s humanism, his active concern for the voiceless, hardly stopped with his fellow Jews. He spoke out against massacres in Bosnia, Cambodia and Sudan, against apartheid in South Africa, and against the burning of black churches in the United States. He became, as others have said, the conscience of the world. Yet he never gave up or sacrificed even a bit of his concern for the Jewish people. To the contrary: It was the tragedy of his people that generated his concern for the world — a world he felt God had abandoned — and it was his belief in universal ideas that helped him to ultimately reconcile with his Jewish God. May his memory be a blessing. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The office can survive without you JAMES R. BAILEY is professor and Hochberg Fellow of Leadership Development at the George Washington University School of Business.

Making plans for summer vacation? You’re probably wondering whether you’re too busy to take a week off from work. Maybe you’re thinking that you can, but only if you’re headed to a resort that has WiFi. The prospect of being away from the office probably makes you a bit jittery. After all, how will they get along without you?

Just fine.

You’re not the first person to consider what not to pack to make room for your laptop. We convince ourselves that our work contributions are so absolutely essential that our organization will fall apart at the seams if we go off the grid, no matter the interruption to our personal lives, much less the disagreeable impact on our colleagues.

It’s the indispensability syndrome: A fallacious emotional urge rooted deep in our desire to be wanted and needed. Our fragile psyches are at work here.

We feel threatened by the realization that our work-world can continue without us. It’s a perfectly natural feeling, but it comes at high cost.

Common justifications for such an inflated sense of selfimportance are multi-layered, ranging from “it’s my responsibility” to believing you’re the “only person qualified” to

handle a project or task.

Certainly, our contributions at work are valuable. But why don’t we apply the same thinking to our families? What makes us think our colleagues can’t function without us, but our families can?

Why are we so unwilling to power down once in a while?

One executive I worked with had been promoted to partner at a mid-sized government consultancy two years ago. Only 35, his ambition and work ethic propelled him quickly through the ranks. He was known as a perfectionist whose work reflected the very highest standards. His new role meant that he oversaw several major accounts. He was also responsible for the professional development of associates reporting to him.

The firm required all partners to take a two-week sabbatical every two years. The idea was to step back from the everyday grind and come back rested and

recharged with innovative ideas about how to advance the company’s practice. Associates were expected to be prepared to assume all responsibilities during a partner’s absence.

But during his sabbatical, this young partner emailed and texted his associates multiple times daily and directly contacted clients for updates — even though doing so was explicitly prohibited.

The result: Four of his 10 associates requested transfers.

They’d seen how well the sabbatical program worked for others, and resented being robbed of an opportunity to expand their skill sets and build relationships with clients and other partners. They made his behavior known to the managing director, and he was sternly warned by the management committee that his behavior was unacceptable and would negatively impact his annual performance review, which determined bonuses and promotions. He learned the hard way that he wasn’t indispensable.

There’s a psychological bulwark to indispensability syndrome. Not only do many of us inflate our view of our own significance, we also worry that our talent isn’t as critical as we have presented it to our colleagues, or ourselves. At some

level we’re also terrified that, if away, someone will figure that out. We fear that we will lose our jobs if we’re not 24/7.

According to a 2013 survey by the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence, more than half of all employed adults say they check work messages at least once a day over the weekend, before or after work during the week, and even when they are home sick. More than 40 percent reported doing the same while on vacation. The results would likely be amplified if focused on supervisors and executives.

The effects of this behavior are bad for us and our colleagues. If we distort our own importance, then we reduce the value of others. In doing so, we smother the people who work for and with us, rather than helping them stand on their own. That isn’t leadership.

If we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we’re not quite as important as we think we are, that all of us need to decouple from work in order to replenish, and that our constant involvement is not always beneficial to colleagues, we’re more likely to take a vacation, and will, in turn, make greater contributions at work upon our return. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES MIKE LESTER/WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

More Americans need to care CHRISTINE EMBA edits The Post’s In Theory blog.

Wednesday night, I dreamed about my brother’s death.

He’s alive, to be clear. Late 20s, in good health, has a great job, just moved states. He’s fine — for now.

The feeling of “for now” is new. I’m a black woman living in the United States of America, but I didn’t grow up with a pervasive sense of fear. I was taught that things were getting better — they’re always getting better. Look, we’ve moved past slavery, past Jim Crow. The civil rights movement worked!

Thinking back, perhaps my parents — like all black parents — were less convinced than I was, and rightly so. Immigrants from Nigeria, a pharmacist and a nurse, they were middle-class professionals obsessed with our educations and far more interested in pushing us to get ahead rather than in looking back.

Yet I still listened to them instruct my brother the day he received his driver’s license: Drive slow; don’t be outside at night; if you’re stopped by the police, always keep your hands in view; never raise your voice; don’t talk back; you’re not like everyone else; this country isn’t safe for you; you should always be on your guard.

And even as the younger, female child, I received my own warnings. Dress well; speak

correctly; don’t ever give anyone cause to suspect you; know that you need to be twice as good as anyone else. The threat of bodily harm was reduced, but the implication that certain structures couldn’t be counted on to serve me, and that I would need to work harder than my white peers to stay safe, was not.

Despite all that, I assumed the best — sure, it’s unfair; sure, it’s limiting; but hey, we’ll eventually be able to stop worrying. After all, things are improving.

The problem is, they’re not.

The past few months — the past few days — have taught us that. The years 2015 and 2016 have been a grim parade of black people killed by those who are supposed to protect and serve.

This year alone, at least 115 black men have been shot and killed by police. In two days this past week,

there were two. Alton Sterling, shot by the Baton Rouge police while selling CDs outside a store.

Philando Castile, shot by police in Falcon Heights, Minn., after being pulled over for a broken taillight — while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter watched.

Last night, I dreamed about my brother’s death because, in a situation that has become outrageously common, I stumbled across the latest video of someone who looked not unlike him bleeding out while a police officer pointed a gun.

Yet the past months have made it clear that not enough of America cares. The fight for justice, for basic safety, seems to be fought almost singlehandedly by people of color. Why is that the case? Shouldn’t a crisis like this appeal to the humanity of us all? Shouldn’t it extend across color lines?

Americans everywhere rally en masse for crises in Europe, and in Orlando, as they should.

Facebook statuses change, businesses drape themselves in flags. But the response to the claim that black lives matter is: “Stop being so divisive. All lives matter. You’re the ones bringing racism back.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee floats false

statistics that attempt to justify police brutality, but when the black community complains, the retort is something along the lines of, “Well, it was an accident.

And he’s not really racist, he’s just not politically correct.” Despite bold claims and press statements to the contrary, it’s not clear that the Democratic candidates care much more.

And when black writers or speakers dare to suggest that their community has long been ill-treated, that the effects persist into the present day, and that perhaps our white neighbors and friends are even slightly privileged by not having to worry constantly about their impending deaths, the reply is, “Well, we’ve tried. There’s a black president, after all. It’s your turn to do better — haven’t you seen the statistics for black-on-black crime?”

I don’t attend a lot of protests.

No one would describe me as a radical. I’m an opinion writer and editor, but I tend to avoid discussions about race.

But last night I dreamed about my brother’s death. Because I know that for all of his achievements — two Ivy League degrees and not even a hint of a criminal record — at night he’s just another black man driving, and he could be killed like one, too. n

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FINANCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Invest like a millionaire BY

J ONNELLE M ARTE

T

here are some people who are lucky enough to be both young and rich.

And a report released last month by Capgemini Consulting showed some interesting trends in the strategies young millionaires use to manage money.

In many ways, millionaires under 40 are even more conservative than their boomer counterparts. They are more likely to hold on to cash, less likely to invest in stocks and more prone to stashing money in alternative investments.

Here are some of their money strategies that stand out: THEY HAVE PLENTY OF CASH ON HAND. Millionaires under 40 held about a third of their total assets in cash, including physical cash and money kept in the bank, like a checking account, according to the report. When asked why it was important for them to have so much cash, 17 percent of young investors said they wanted to be ready to pounce on the right investment opportunities when they arise. Thirty-one percent said they wanted money on hand to be able to live the lifestyle they want. (Those vacations, shopping trips and nice meals need to be paid for somehow.)

Millennials who are more concerned with paying off their debt and covering the bills may have a hard time relating to that mentality. But some of the motivations pushing young millionaires to have cash in the bank aren’t that different from the reasons encouraging other millennials to build up a cash cushion. About 28 percent of young millionaires said it was important for them to have cash as a way to protect themselves from market volatility. It’s in line with other studies

How young millionaires invest their money Millionaires under 40 are more likely than boomers to hold cash and to invest in alternatives, such as real estate and other assets.

Other 7.5%

Real estate 17%

Cash 33.5%

With a wealth manager 28.7%

In a business 13.3% Source: Capgemini Global HNW Insights Survey 2016

THE WASHINGTON POST

Lessons learned from those fortunate enough to be both young and rich suggesting that millennials are nervous about taking on too much risk.

THEY SPREAD THEIR BETS. As for the part of their wealth that is being invested, the young and wealthy are not relying too much on any single approach.

Roughly 30 percent of their assets were held with wealth managers who could help them build a portfolio of stocks, bonds and other traditional investments.

But about 40 percent of their portfolios were split up among less traditional investments including real estate, a business and other alternative investments.

That broad category of alternative investments can include gold, hedge funds or other asset classes that are expected to behave differently than the stock market, financial advisers say.

For example, while stock markets were plunging on the day after

Britain announced it had voted to leave the European Union, the price of gold soared.

By branching out into real estate, which can lead to rental income, investors are creating additional income streams. Investing in a business by buying a sizable stake in a company or by starting a small business can boost wealth and lead to big payouts when a business does well. But because such investments always require more risk, business investments tend to make up a smaller portion of the overall portfolio — about 13 percent — compared with cash.

THEY CONSULT FRIENDS AND THE WEB. When seeking advice on how to best manage their money, younger millionaires are more likely to turn to family, friends and the Internet for guidance than they are to hire a professional when compared with older generations. Consider, among the

under-40 group, just 17 percent of assets were with a primary wealth manager, compared with 27 percent for millionaires of all ages in North America. And a separate study from TD Ameritrade found that 28 percent of millennials turn to their friends for financial advice, compared with 15 percent of boomers, who were more likely to turn to a professional.

THEY INVEST WITH A PURPOSE. In addition to looking for investments that will boost their portfolios, many young investors — and not just the rich — want to know that their dollars are going toward the social causes that matter to them. Through a strategy known as socially responsible investing, some investors work with an adviser to dedicate a portion of their money to companies they feel are working to advance a certain issue, such as climate change. In other cases, investors will ask their advisers or brokerage firms to exclude industries they don’t want to support, such as alcohol companies, tobacco companies or gun manufacturers. Investors can also use mutual funds or exchange traded funds that offer similar strategies.

The approach is particularly common among younger investors. Some 60 percent of millennials and 34 percent of Generation X investors said they wanted to use or were currently using social impact investments, according to a 2015 report from U.S. Trust, a unit of Bank of America.

“It’s a feel-good return,” said Richard Dale Horn, senior vice president of wealth management for UBS Financial Services. Still, investors should make sure that their efforts to exclude certain industries don’t leave them investing too heavily in any one sector, Horn said. “I think you have to have a balance.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2016

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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 27

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Presented by

Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com Interested in having a booth at this event?

E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON