The Washington Post National Weekly - July 15, 2018

SUNDAY, JULY 15, 2018

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SOBERING TRUTHS Inside country music’s complex — and increasingly lucrative — love affair with alcohol. PAGE 12

Politics The Kavanaugh decision 4

Nation Cultural shopping habits 8

5 Myths The Beatles 23

SUNDAY, JULY 15, 2018

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POLITICS

A friendly tone ahead of summit B Y S EUNG M IN K IM AND J OSH D AWSEY In Brussels

P

resident Trump pledged last week that he will “of course” raise the issue of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election at his summit on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but he also said he has little recourse if — as expected — Putin denies that Russia interfered.

“Look, he may. What am I going to do? He may deny it,” Trump said at a news conference in Belgium on the second day of a NATO summit. “All I can do is say, ‘Did you?’ And, ‘Don’t do it again.’ But he may deny it.”

Trump continued to strike a friendly tone toward the Russian leader, calling him a “competitor” rather than a U.S. enemy — while declining to label him as a security threat to the United States or European nations.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has avoided admonishing Putin, even though U.S. intelligence officials concluded that Moscow sought to sow discord and help Trump win in 2016.

“Somebody was saying, is he an enemy?

He’s not my enemy. Is he your friend? No, I don’t know him very much,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Hopefully, someday, he’ll be a friend. It could happen.”

Trump continues to tell senior aides that he can have a good relationship with Putin and that Russia’s involvement is needed to sort out how to deal with Syria, China and many of the world’s other problems.

Trump resents that many advisers have told him not to meet with Putin, two White House officials said. National security adviser

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ALEXEI DRUZHININ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“He’s not my enemy,” President Trump said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, above, at the NATO Summit in Brussels on Thursday.

John Bolton, who has taken a leading role on Russia policy, has a more jaundiced view of Putin, according to these officials.

“I don’t mind him having a friendly personal relationship with Putin as long as it’s understood that Russia will pay a price,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. “Without any hesitation, we have to reject Putin’s denial.”

During a 35-minute news conference shortly before he left for London, Trump also insisted that other world leaders at the NATO summit expressed “just the opposite of concern” about his pending meeting with Putin.

“They actually thanked me for meeting with President Putin,” Trump said. “They thought it was a great thing that I was doing it, and they gave us . . . their best wishes.”

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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 40

The specter of Russia loomed large in Trump’s dealings during the two-day NATO summit.

In his first NATO meeting — a breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg — Trump went on the attack against Germany, asserting that it is “totally controlled by Russia” because it imports Russian natural gas and setting a highly combative tone for the rest of the summit.

In Moscow, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov dismissed Trump’s criticism of a new Russian gas pipeline to Germany as an unfounded effort to get Europeans to buy American liquefied natural gas instead.

But he added that Trump’s tough talk was unlikely to make Monday’s summit with Putin any more complicated.

“They’ll be difficult anyway,” Peskov said of the upcoming talks, according to the Interfax news agency. “You already know the volume of disagreements that are on the agenda, so it’s unlikely that anything will make this even more difficult.”

Trump said he will raise several other issues at that meeting, including the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. Also on the agenda, he said, will be a Reagan-era arms control agreement and the prospect of extending a 2011 nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.

When asked whether he would recognize Crimea as part of Russia during the summit, Trump did not respond directly. Instead, he blamed Barack Obama, who was president in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimea region from Ukraine.

“That was on Barack Obama’s watch. That was not on Trump’s watch,” he said. “Would I have allowed it to happen? No.” n ©The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Alcohol has become an inseparable (and profitable) part of country music culture. Photo illustration by BILL O’LEARY of The Washington Post

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POLITICS

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

How Trump decided on Kavanaugh Until last day, president was asking friends whom he should nominate to Supreme Court

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND R OBERT C OSTA

A

fter the two couples — President Trump and his wife and federal judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and his wife — gathered in the residence of the White House for over an hour Sunday night, Trump made Kavanaugh a historic offer: to be his choice to succeed Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

Yet just hours later on Monday morning, Trump seemed to waver — making a flurry of calls to friends and allies and asking them what they thought of Kavanaugh and whom he should nominate.

Some White House advisers fretted Trump might reverse himself even after informing Vice President Pence and White House Counsel Donald McGahn that he had reached a final decision. Others shrugged off his apparent waffling as the showman president attempting to inject a last bit of suspense into his second Supreme Court nomination.

The 24-hour whirlwind leading up to Monday night’s prime-time announcement, and the 12-day stretch that preceded it, was classic Trump — a freewheeling process involving an eclectic cast of advisers and punctuated by bouts of indecision and drama.

“All a little misdirection,” said a White House official, speaking anonymously to share a candid look at the search. “How much did he enjoy the media tripping all over themselves? I’m sure he loved it.”

Ultimately, in Kavanaugh, Trump chose not just an unabashed conservative candidate likely to please his base but one who appealed to him for other reasons, as well: personal chemistry, Ivy League credentials and a compelling personal story.

Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, likened the nomination strategy to a marketing campaign, saying it had the benefit of pitching a premium product. “We have a well-

President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, second from right, walks up the Senate steps with Vice President Pence on Tuesday.

qualified, articulate nominee whose record will sell itself,” Shah said.

This portrait of Trump’s Supreme Court nomination decision is the result of interviews with more than two dozen White House aides, members of Congress, Republican operatives, outside advisers, presidential friends and confidants, many of whom requested anonymity to share details of private conversations.

Trump “landed where he started” said a senior White House official, explaining that the president settled on the federal judge who had been his favored candidate since learning of Kennedy’s retirement.

Kavanaugh was also the top choice

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POLITICS of McGahn, who sat in on nearly every interview and meeting.

Kavanaugh’s years in the White House of George W. Bush, who then nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, were a knock against the judge in the eyes of Trump, who frequently rails against the Bush dynasty. But those concerns began to dissipate during their initial in-person interview on July 2, when the 72-year-old president and the 53-year-old judge established a rapport.

Kavanaugh advocates also worked to convince Trump that merely by offering him a lifetime appointment to the nation’s top court, the justice would inherently become a “Trump guy” rather than a “Bush guy.”

“Bush put him on the D.C. Circuit; Trump put him on the Supreme Court,” a senior White House adviser said.

Both McGahn and Kavanaugh also sought to portray the judge’s lengthy record — including more than 300 opinions, roughly a dozen of which were affirmed by the Supreme Court — as a benefit rather than a potential stumbling block.

While it might complicate his confirmation process, they told Trump, Kavanaugh would be the safest and most appealing candidate for the president’s conservative base.

After that first sit-down, Kavanaugh emerged as the clear front-runner. One person familiar with the interview said Kavanaugh, who worked closely with Bush as his staff secretary, “knew exactly how to talk to Trump” because he understands how presidents operate. “Brett has been planning for this his whole life,” the person said.

Trump, a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was also impressed with Kavanaugh’s dual undergraduate and law degrees from Yale. The president has long viewed an Ivy League pedigree as a mark of intelligence and is, in the words of a senior White House official, an unabashed “credentialist.”

In the end, one of Kavanaugh’s biggest hurdles was that he was the “conventional wisdom” pick, while Trump relishes defying the experts.

For his part, Trump mostly hewed to the process laid out by activists, basing his search off a list of roughly two dozen judges and legal figures who were preapproved by conservative groups, said Leonard Leo, an executive at the Federalist Society.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

During the announcement of his nomination Monday, Kavanaugh said, “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.”

“What people need to remember is the president came up with the idea of doing the list and wanted to make the Supreme Court a very big issue in the presidential campaign,” Leo said. “He took ownership of the list, and it helped propel him to victory and hold the Senate, so it’s no surprise he wants to be in the driver’s seat on judicial selection and keep up what’s worked.”

On the same day as the Kavanaugh interview, Trump also met in person with three of the four other finalists — Amy Coney Barrett, Raymond M. Kethledge and Amul Thapar. (The only finalist he did not meet with in person was Thomas M. Hardiman, who was the runner-up for the vacancy filled last year by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, though the two men spoke twice by phone.)

Trump told advisers that he liked all of them but that none immediately stood out. Thapar was a favorite of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), but that didn’t excite Trump. Kethledge was more engaging than expected, but his lighter judicial record made him a long shot, especially after some hard-right conservatives began to complain to the White House about what they viewed as his soft rulings on immigration.

Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, spoke favorably to the president about Hardiman, with whom she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. But the judge was hurt by the fact that

Trump felt he already knew him from their previous meeting.

Barrett, meanwhile, was a favorite of the Christian right, especially after she took on Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) during her confirmation fight last year, when Feinstein raised questions about Barrett’s Catholic faith.

When Barrett sat down with Trump, she was friendly but reserved and did not particularly connect with the president. Nonetheless, he later told associates he was impressed by her and her large family, including one child with special needs and two adopted from Haiti, and that he hoped to save her as a future pick for the high court once she has more experience on the federal bench.

In the week before the nomination, some on the right began grumbling about Kavanaugh. Republican-aligned groups who worried that his opinions on health care and abortion were insufficiently conservative fumed to friends in the West Wing.

Sensing an opening, Hardiman proponents redoubled their efforts. Former Republican senator Rick Santorum, a Hardiman ally, pitched his blue-collar biography to friends at the White House.

Officials there promised to give him a serious look and began talking about Hardiman as a top option should the president suddenly sour on Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh’s allies mobilized, too.

Former clerks fended off criticism

KLMNO WEEKLY

that his record on abortion was squishy and that his rulings were too deferential to government agencies.

“We were surprised by the criticism from the right and thought it was important to set the record straight,” said former clerk Roman Martinez, a Washington lawyer who helped organize dozens of Kavanaugh’s former clerks from a family vacation in Ireland.

Trump’s weekend was spent at one of his favorite retreats: Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. On July 6, the president spoke by phone with McConnell, who told him Hardiman or Kethledge would perhaps be the easiest to confirm, based on McConnell’s private conversations with Republican senators about the shortlist.

Trump asked aides afterward whether McConnell’s worries about Kavanaugh were correct.

McGahn and others told Trump that Kavanaugh did have a paper trail from his time investigating President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and from the Bush White House that would be parsed by Democrats.

But they sought to stress the upside of his long record of conservatism.

Think about the pick as a longterm decision, McGahn counseled Trump, rather than something that will be defined by the nomination hearings.

As late as lunchtime this past Sunday at Bedminster, Trump was asking friends — including Fox News host Sean Hannity and Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy — for their input.

Ruddy, a Kavanaugh booster, told the president that the judge was admired by Ed Meese, who served as Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, as a genuine conservative.

It was a seal of approval the president appreciated, according to people briefed on the discussion.

On Monday evening, shortly before entering the East Room, Trump made his decision official, signing the commission to nominate Kavanaugh at the Lincoln Desk in the residence.

Kavanaugh effusively praised the president in summing up the process when he took the lectern: “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.”

Trump, looking on from behind his shoulder, half-nodded and did not smile. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

White House aides derided in D.C.

BY P AUL S CHWARTZMAN AND J OSH D AWSEY

J

ust after arriving in Washington to work for President Trump, Kellyanne Conway found herself in a supermarket, where a man rushing by with his shopping cart sneered, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!

Go look in the mirror!”

“Mirrors are in aisle 9 — I’ll go get one now,” Conway recalled replying. She brushed off the dart with the swagger of someone raised in the ever-attitudinal trenches of South Jersey. “What am I gonna do? Fall apart in the canned vegetable aisle?” she said.

For any new presidential team, the challenges of adapting to Washington include navigating a capital with its own unceasing rhythms and high-pitched atmospherics, not to mention a maze of madness-inducing traffic circles.

Yet for employees of Trump — the most singularly combative president of the modern era — the challenges are magnified exponentially, particularly in a predominantly Democratic city.

For as long as the White House has existed, its star occupants have inspired demonstrations, insults and satire. On occasion, protesters have besieged the homes of presidential underlings, such as Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s strategist, who once looked out his living room window to find several hundred protesters on his lawn.

Yet what distinguishes the Trump era turbulence is the sheer number of his deputies — many of them largely anonymous before his inauguration — who have become the focus of planned and sometimes spontaneous fury.

“Better be better!” a stranger shouted at Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser and the architect of his “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, as he walked downtown a few months ago. Miller’s visage subsequently appeared on “Wanted” posters someone placed on lampposts ringing his apartment building.

One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bar-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

In predominantly Democratic Washington, Jeers and protests greet Trump team around town tender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!”

When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.

On a recent Saturday, as Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, browsed at a bookstore in Richmond, a woman in the shop called him a “piece of trash.” The woman left after Nick Cooke, owner of Black Swan Books, told her he would call the police.

“We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening,” Cooke told the Richmond TimesDispatch.

“Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business,” he said.

While he was a part of the president’s team, Bannon dealt with life in Washington, a city he freely

described as enemy territory, by hiring security and rarely venturing out in public. When Bannon traveled, it was usually aboard a private plane.

For a time, a sign on the front steps of his Capitol Hill address read, “STOP.” Most interactions that Trump’s well-known aides have with strangers amount to nothing more than posing for selfies. But his advisers have also found themselves subjected to a string of embarrassing public spankings, a litany that began even before he took office.

Before Vice President Pence’s swearing-in, his neighbors in Chevy Chase, where he was renting a house, hung rainbow banners to protest his opposition to equal rights for gay men and lesbians. When Pence went to the musical “Hamilton” in New York, the actor playing Aaron Burr concluded the evening by announcing from the stage that he was afraid

White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway brushed off her confrontation by a supermarket customer while she was shopping. “What am I gonna do? Fall apart in the canned vegetable aisle?” she asked.

that Trump wouldn’t “uphold our inalienable rights.”

A White House reporter, once on the phone with Sean Spicer while the then-press-secretary was standing in his yard in Alexandria, Va., said he could hear a passing motorist shouting curses at him. By then, Spicer had become a regular inspiration for mockery on “Saturday Night Live,” along with Trump, Conway and Bannon.

Spicer said he spent his free time at home in those days because he did not want to deal with strangers’ interruptions — friendly or not.

“We were very deliberate about what we did and where we went because of the increasing notoriety,” Spicer said. “When we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle.”

More recently, Trump appointees have starred in a flurry of in-your-face encounters that ricochet around social media for days.

A private school teacher interrupted her lunch to tell Scott Pruitt — eating with an aide a few feet away — that he should resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

By the morning of July 5, nearly half a million viewers had clicked on a video of the confrontation that the teacher, Kristin Mink, had posted on Facebook. Later that afternoon, Pruitt quit.

“I would say it’s burning people out,” said Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director. “I just think there’s so much meanness, it’s causing some level of, ‘What do I need this for?’

And I think it’s a recruiting speed bump for the administration. To be part of it, you’ve got to deal with the incoming of some of this viciousness.”

On at least two occasions, demonstrators have assembled outside the home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Both like to attend early-morning spin classes at a nearby studio, where the room goes dark when class starts — the better to pedal unobserved.

The president himself leads a cloistered existence, never visiting a restaurant or golf club other

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POLITICS than the ones he owns or controls.

In recent weeks, senior administration officials say, Trump has voiced dissatisfaction with aides who have backed down during public confrontations, including his spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia last month by the establishment’s owner.

On June 19, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen walked out of a Mexican restaurant after demonstrators followed her inside to rail against the administration for separating children from migrant parents.

“Shame!” the protesters shouted while Nielsen remained in her seat, her head down as she typed messages on her smartphone.

Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally and former House speaker, said the way to end the public confrontations is “to call the police.”

“You file charges and you press them,” Gingrich said. “We have no reason to tolerate barbarians trying to impose totalitarian behavior by sheer force, and we have every right to defend ourselves.”

When she arrived in Washington, Conway said she expected people “would help transition into the next administration. I wasn’t expecting people to try to undo the election.”

She described her random encounters with Washingtonians as largely pleasant. Recently, she said she ate dinner at an outdoor table with her husband.

“It’s just endless selfies,” said George Conway, an attorney who has set himself apart from his wife a bit by criticizing Trump on Twitter. “It makes it hard sometimes to leave when you have to go some place.”

Referring to Kellyanne, he said, “She has been getting a harder time from me about working for this administration than walking down the street.”

Still, there are plenty of moments not free from heckling.

When a stranger at a Baltimore Orioles game took her photo and mumbled that she was famous “for all the wrong reasons,” Conway said she walked over to him.

“I’m fluent in ignoramus,” she said. “What did you say?”

Then she took her own photo of him and announced that she was adding it to her “collection of underachieving men.” n ©The Washington Post

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‘Whiplash’: Inside Trump’s NATO summit disruption

BY P HILIP R UCKER, J OSH D AWSEY AND M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM

In Brussels

T

he NATO summit was concluding on course, with European leaders pleased that their unruly American counterpart had been surprisingly well-behaved, if not truly conciliatory. Their planes were getting gassed up at the airport, and they were ready to call the whole shebang a success and jet home.

Then President Trump showed up, a half-hour late and with another agenda. He effectively took a meeting over Georgia and Ukraine hostage by seizing the floor and, one by one, scolding and shaming countries for their defense spending.

Trump was on such a tear that some diplomats said they feared he could well try to withdraw the United States from NATO, rupturing the existing world order. For more than an hour, the transatlantic alliance was caught in the chaos of Trump’s making — until the president called an impromptu news conference to announce that everything, in fact, was just fine.

“I believe in NATO,” Trump said, claiming credit for forcing Western allies to raise their defense spending to “levels never thought of before.” He called the alliance “a fine-tuned machine,” remarking that there had been “great unity, great spirit, great esprit de corps.”

Thursday’s events were a signature Trump spectacle, with other presidents and prime ministers cast as bit players in his drama. He was direct and at moments crass with America’s historical partners, vague on substance and misleading with facts and figures. He grabbed the spotlight for himself, sending the entire Western alliance scrambling to satisfy his whims and desires — “whiplash,” in the words of one diplomat.

And he declared unprecedented victory, though his partners said little new had actually been agreed.

As Trump commandeered the

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After scolding countries on their defense spending at a NATO summit meeting on Thursday, President Trump said, “I believe in NATO.”

conversation, he berated and harassed individual leaders over defense spending. In comments open to interpretation, Trump told his counterparts that if they did not meet their 2 percent targets by January he would “do his own thing,” according to two officials briefed on the meeting.

At one point, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg tried to calm his tirade and promote unity within the alliance, but Trump snapped.

“No, we are not playing this game,” Trump said, according to one official who was present.

Trump sees his disruption abroad as a political benefit at home, administration officials said. As he departed Brussels and scrolled through Twitter, read headlines and watched U.S. cable news coverage, Trump saw an upside: The president was depicted as fighting for America and knocking heads in Old Europe. For Trump, his advisers said, there is no benefit to traveling overseas and playing nice.

Ahead of the trip, Trump complained to advisers about how some countries chose to channel their budgets away from defense.

Germany, in particular, came in

for ire because of the money it spends to assimilate migrants, who poured into the nation during a 2015 crisis. He complained about allies paying for the $1.4 billion price tag of the NATO building but not for their militaries. He was derisive of the whole organization, one official said.

But only a portion of that carried through on day one of the summit, officials said. Although he blasted Germany in a breakfast meeting with Stoltenberg, he was polite — even conventional — in later meetings throughout the day, leading European leaders to believe they had dodged what all were expecting would be a contentious encounter.

Stoltenberg and other officials said the disruption may also have been salutary by knocking leaders away from the tightly-scripted talking points that are ritual for this type of meeting.

Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, after helping to host an array of Western leaders at a sideline forum, said Trump “decided to declare victory, but it wasn’t until after some torturous twists and turns along the way.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Buying into the cultural divide BY

A NDREW V AN D AM

T

he cultural divide is real, and it’s huge. Americans live such different lives that what we buy, do or watch can be used to predict our politics, race, income, education and gender — sometimes with more than 90 percent accuracy.

It turns out that people are separated not just by gun ownership, religion and their beliefs on affirmative action — but also by English muffins, flashlights and mustard.

To prove it, University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica taught machines to guess a person’s income, political ideology, race, education and gender based on either their media habits, their consumer behavior, their social and political beliefs, or even how they spent their time. Their results were released in a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The duo trained their algorithms to detect patterns in decades of responses to three longrunning surveys, each with between 669 and 22,093 responses per year. The surveys were tuned and filtered to be consistent over time, which allowed Bertrand and Kamenica to measure how America’s cultural divides have evolved.

To determine how accurately cultural factors predicted a person’s race, education or income tier, the duo tested their algorithms on subsets of the data that the programs had never seen. To keep it fair, they omitted variables that would have been a dead giveaway — if they were predicting whether someone was liberal or conservative, for example, they wouldn’t allow the algorithms to consider the answer to “Which political party do you support?”

Nevertheless, some results are obvious, which indirectly proves that their approach can detect tangible divides. Spending predicts gender with almost perfect accuracy, for example, because men don’t buy nearly as much mascara as women do, and women buy much less aftershave/cologne than men do. But others are revelatory: White people and black

What Americans purchase can be used to predict politics, race, income or education — sometimes with more than 90 percent accuracy Social attitudes that best predict that a person is white 1976

1996

2016

Spending on blacks isn't too little

75.3%

Spending on blacks isn't too little

73.0%

Approve of police striking citizens

65.6%

Not a Baptist

71.5

Spending on welfare is too much

64.4

Own gun in home

62.3

Not a fundamentalist

70.3

Spending on space expl. is adequate 64.4

Favor death penalty for murder

61.0

Trusts people

67.9

Approve of police striking citizen

64.0

Own rifle in home

60.5

Believes people are helpful

63.9

Favor death penalty for murder

61.7

Voted for GOP pres. candidate

60.3

Voted for GOP pres. candidate

63.9

Voted for GOP pres. candidate

61.4

Spending on blacks isn't too little

60.3

Approve of police striking citizens

63.3

Own gun in home

60.8

Homosexual sex isn't wrong at all

60.1

Favor death penalty for murder

61.5

Trusts people

60.5

Own shotgun in home

60.0

Premarital sex isn't wrong at all

59.3

Spending on space expl. is adequate 60.9 Spending on welfare is too much

60.9

Divorce should not be made easier 60.5 60.1

Not a Democrat

Not confident in the executive branch 58.9

Consumer products and behaviors that best predict that a person is white 1992

2004

2016

Owns a dishwasher

62.5%

Own cruise control (automobile)

64.5%

Owns a pet

63.4%

Owns a shovel

62.4

Owns a pet

64.4

Owns a flashlight

63.3

Owns a smoke/fire detector

62.1

Owns a dishwasher

63.8

Owns a dishwasher

62.5

Owns a pet

62.0

Owns a coffee maker

63.7

Owns a sport/recreation equipment 62.4

Owns a microwave

61.7

Owns a smoke/fire detector

63.6

Owns glass ovenware/bakeware

61.9

Owns a flashlight

61.5

Owns a flashlight

63.4

Owns a gas grill

61.6

Used suntan/sunscreen products

61.4

Own power locks (automobile)

63.3

Owns a smoke/fire detector

61.5

Owns a hand−held electric mixer

61.3

Owns a hot water heater

63.2

Owns an air conditioner

61.4

Owns a hose

61.2

Owns a hand−held electric mixer

63.0

Owns a hot water heater

61.4

Owns a coffee maker

61.2

Own air bags on driver side (auto)

62.9

Owns a built−in dishwasher

60.8

Source: Analysis of General Social Survey and Mediamark Research Intelligence by Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, University of Chicago THE WASHINGTON POST

Factors which best predict if a person is liberal CONSUMER BEHAVIORS, 2009 Not own a fishing rod Not own fishing lures/hooks Not own a fishing reel Own any vehicle Didn’t use frozen bread/dough Drank any alcoholic beverage Bought a novel Didn’t use ranch salad dressing Didn’t use disposable plates Not own other fishing equipments

BRANDS, 2009 56.9 56.8 56.7 56.5 56.3 56.2 56.2 56.2 56 55.8

Didn’t buy at Arby’s (fast food) Didn’t use JIF (peanut butter) Didn’t buy at Applebee’s (family rest.)

Not own a Chevrolet (automobile) Didn’t use Tyson (chicken/turkey) Didn’t buy at Sonic (fast food) Didn’t buy Wrangler (men’s clothing) Didn’t use Little Debbie (snack cake) Didn’t buy Dockers (men’s clothing) Didn’t use Cool Whip (whip. topping)

55.6 54.4 54.4 54.2 54.2 54.1 54 54 54 54

people are almost as different in their spending habits as rich and poor people are, for example.

Differences in social attitudes between liberals and conservatives have been widened over time, Bertrand and Kamenica found. The gap in social attitudes between whites and nonwhites has fallen slightly, but the difference in consumer behavior between races has grown.

Race In the world of television in 2016, some of the top-10 predictors of whiteness were watching “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “American Pickers,” “The Big Bang Theory” and the Kentucky Derby.

If we’re looking at specific brand names, the top 10 included Thomas’ English muffins, Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce and Stove Top stuffing.

More generally, in consumer products, the best predictor of whiteness was whether someone owned a pet — followed closely by whether they owned a flashlight.

Many of the differences appear to be correlated with wealth and homeownership, areas in which America suffers from vast racial disparities.

The Federal Reserve has found that the median net worth of a white household in 2016 was 9.7 times greater than that of a black one.

Each analysis is binary, meaning that although the authors frame everything in terms of predicting whether someone is white, or high income, or male, the direct opposite is equally true. In other words, “doesn’t own a pet” predicts that someone isn’t white just as strongly as “owns a pet” predicts that someone is white.

To maintain statistical integrity, the authors were able to break the population into only two categories, “white” and “nonwhite,” which may hide differences across a large and diverse population.

Within the surveys they analyzed, social attitudes and media habits were almost as closely linked to race as consumer behavior was. The racial differences in social attitudes were particularly notable.

By a relatively large margin, the view that best predicted being white in 2016 was “approve of police striking citizens.” In previous decades,

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NATION the best indicator of whiteness was saying that the government was spending the right amount (or too much) on improving the condition of black residents.

On other issues, the gap has closed. “In 1976,” the authors write, “one could correctly predict race based on views towards government spending 74 percent of the time but by 2016 this number was down to 56 percent.”

Income Attitudes toward police violence are only a few percentage points less effective in predicting high (in the top 25 percent) income than they are in predicting whiteness. The overlap shows how closely related race and income are, probably because of historical disparities and continuing problems with racial bias.

Race aside, consumer behavior is strongly linked to income level.

In 1992, Grey Poupon mustard predicted income better than any other brand. By 2016, its place as the key signifier of the country’s economic and cultural divide had been taken by Apple’s iPhone — which the researchers found to be a much clearer signifier of income than the condiment had been.

Politics Because of limitations in the survey they used, researchers could not get reliable data on the liberal-conservative split that was more recent than 2009. But differences up to that time include some of the most interesting findings in the survey.

They start with superficial differences: If someone went to Arby’s or Applebee’s or used Jif peanut butter, you might guess they were conservative. If they did not own fishing gear or use ranch dressing, but drank alcohol and bought novels? Probably a liberal.

The researchers find that, across almost every dimension, America’s cultural divide has remained constant. Yes, high-income households buy different things from low-income ones, and white Americans and black Americans watch different television programs and movies.

We’re divided. But we always have been and, despite popular narratives to the contrary, it’s not getting worse.

“What’s really striking to me,” Kamenica said, “is how constant cultural divisions have been as the world has changed.”

But there’s one exception. And it’s a big one. The ideological difference between conservatives

BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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aves driven by sea-level rise will hack away the base of cliffs on the Southern California coast at an accelerated pace, a recent study says, increasing land

©The Washington Post

PATRICK BARNARD/PACIFIC COASTAL AND MARINE SCIENCE CENTER/U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

The researchers' machine-learning approach combined elastic net, regression tree and random forest analysis. As input, they used specific responses to three major surveys: l The American Heritage Time Use Study, now conducted by the Labor Department, asked between 669 and 10,210 U.S. residents per year about the time they spend on activities such as sleeping, working, yardwork and video games. l The General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, polls between 1,093 and 3,735 people per year on their attitudes toward myriad social issues, such as trusting others, marijuana legalization and approving of police striking a man. l Mediamark Research Intelligence queries between 15,352 and 22,033 adults a year about thousands of consumer behaviors, such as owning a dishwasher, reading “Architectural Digest” and watching the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie.

WEEKLY

Calif. faces a dire seaside decision

and liberals is wide and growing.

“This is not a new phenomenon,” Kamenica said. “For the past 40 years, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more each year. On every topic, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more than they used to.”

Their analysis of televisionwatching habits indicates the nature of America’s media divide may be changing, even if its size isn’t. In 2001, you could predict that someone was conservative if he or she hadn’t watched the Academy Awards or “Will and Grace.”

By 2009, those cultural signifiers had been replaced by three major Fox News programs: “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Fox and Friends” and “Hannity & Colmes.”

According to Bertrand, cultural factors such as television and movies matter because of how they enable (or disable) conversation and exchange between neighbors of different backgrounds and viewpoints.

“We feel this sharing of culture is important,” Bertrand said. “There is a lot of focus in economics on human capital and social capital. We must also think about cultural capital and the importance it has in our ability to get along.” n

Methodology

KLMNO

Homes along the edge of the coast in Santa Barbara County, Calif., in 2005. A study says rapid land erosion will eventually topple the houses.

erosion that could topple some bluffs and thousands of homes sitting atop them.

California officials from Santa Barbara to San Diego will face an awful choice as the sea rises, the U.S. Geological Survey study says: Save public beaches enjoyed by millions, or close them off with boulders and concrete walls to armor the shore and stop the waves in a bid to save homes.

The study predicts coastal land loss on an unimaginable scale over the remaining century, up to 135 feet beyond the existing shoreline. “For the highest sea-level rise scenario, taking an average cliff height of more than 25 meters, the total cliff volume loss would be more than 300 million meters by 2100,” it says.

One of the study’s authors, Patrick Barnard, a USGS research geologist, tried to explain the issue in a way that laypeople can understand. “It’s a huge volume of material,” he said. “We place this in a context of dump truck loads,” he said. “It would be 30 million dump trucks full of material that will be eroded from the cliffs.” The

trucks would stretch around the globe multiple times, he said.

The USGS undertook the study to inform the state’s public planners and policymakers of possible effects of climate change, which is causing the seas to rise. The analysis focuses on Southern California, but future studies will examine possible effects on the state’s central and northern coasts as well.

In the San Francisco area, officials have already retreated from some parts of the coast, removing homes from cliffs that have eroded and areas that have flooded.

The study was published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It predicts that by the end of the century, erosion in Southern California will double from the rates observed between 1930 and 2010, depending on how high the seas rise, as waves pound cliffs more frequently.

Barnard, who co-authored the study with fellow USGS researchers Patrick W. Limber and Sean Vitousek, along with Li Erikson of the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowledged that the research was limited in the way it made predictions.

For the study, they combined five computer models into one, the Coastal Storm Modeling System. CosMoS, as it is called, “simulates changes in local coastal topography through the 21st century,” predicting shoreline change, ocean energy and flooding scenarios, according to a statement announcing the study.

According to the statement’s synopsis of the study, “Without the supply of sand from eroding cliffs, beaches in southern California may not survive rising sea levels — and bluff-top development may not withstand the forecast 62 to 135 feet cliff recession.”

As a result, the authors wrote, “managers could be faced with the difficult decision between prioritizing private cliff-top property or public beaches” when they allow or ban hard shore protections. n ©The Washington Post

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‘We achieved a mission impossible’

BY S HIBANI M AHTANI AND P ANAPORN W UTWANICH

In Mae Sai, Thailand

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ivers compared it to mountain climbing, but in tight, pitch-black spaces and buffeted by swirling floodwaters, towing a child.

They had to guide their charges through passages as narrow as a couple of feet, weighed down by bulky equipment. A diver in front led the way, with a boy tethered to him and another diver following behind.

Each arduous round-trip extraction took between nine and 11 hours.

Finally, on Tuesday, the “allstar” team of expert cave divers from at least six countries completed the mission once feared impossible, pulling to safety the last of the 12 young soccer players and their 25-year-old coach from the remote cave where they were marooned for more than two weeks.

“We’ve rescued everyone,” said Narongsak Osatanakorn, the former governor of Chiang Rai province and the lead rescue official, as volunteers and journalists erupted in jubilant cheers and claps.

“We achieved a mission impossible.”

The disappearance of the boys and their monk-turned-soccercoach from this small town on the Thailand-Myanmar border — remarkably found alive nine days after they went missing on June 23 — launched an extraordinary saga of international cooperation and ingenuity, as experts from many fields planned how to maneuver all 13 out alive.

When no clear opening could be found atop the mountain range housing the cave, having the boys swim out with the 18-strong team of British, Australian, Chinese, Thai, American and Danish divers was considered the least risky of a range of daunting options.

The dramatic three-day mission kicked off this past Sunday after days spent preparing the cave — and the boys. One diver said in a Facebook post that he had spent 63 hours in the cave system

THAILAND GOVERNMENT SPOKESMAN BUREAU/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

To save 12 boys and a coach from a remote cave, it took a 3-day race against Thailand’s weather over the past nine days.

The effort that swelled and gained momentum after the group was found on July 2 involved more than 100 other rescuers inside the cave, 1,000 members of the Thai army and almost 10,000 others who facilitated everything from rides up to the cave site to meals for divers, volunteers and journalists.

The mission was also a race against the weather.

Rescuers had spent days balancing the risk of impending monsoons, which could have flooded the cave again, against the boys’ readiness, weakened as they were by their ordeal. Rain fell periodically throughout the three days of extractions, but pumping efforts were so successful that the amount of time the boys spent underwater was minimized, officials said.

Tension that had gripped this small town near the site finally broke Tuesday evening, as the last

of the ambulances turned on their lights and sirens and raced downhill from the cave. Thai police lining the road from the entrance laughed and flashed thumbs up at the vast numbers of media from all over the world waiting for this very scene.

Onlookers cheered, “Hooyah moo pa!” — a reference to the name of the boys’ soccer team, Moo Pa, or Wild Boars.

Thai navy SEALs and an Australian medic who had been stationed with the boys for days, preparing them for their dive, were brought out of the cave soon after.

Last Sunday, officials decided they could no longer wait, saying conditions were “as perfect as they will be” for a rescue attempt. Over the next three days, the boys were brought out in groups: four on the first day, four on the second and four, plus their coach, on Tuesday.

Among those rooting for them were world leaders, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and bil-

In this image made from video, three of the 12 Thai boys are seen recovering in their hospital beds after being rescued along with their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Mae Sai, Chiang Rai province in Northern Thailand.

lionaire inventor Elon Musk.

Shortly after the full rescue was announced, President Trump sent a congratulatory message.

“On behalf of the United States, congratulations to the Thai Navy SEALs and all on the successful rescue of the 12 boys and their coach from the treacherous cave in Thailand. Such a beautiful moment — all freed, great job,” he wrote.

Doctors attending to the eight boys who were rescued last Sunday and Monday said they are generally in good health. It was an incredible result considering that the boys spent nine days incommunicado, without food, until they were found, and then waited days more before embarking on an hours-long dive that even the most skilled cave divers have described as among the most dangerous they have attempted.

A retired Thai navy SEAL died on July 6 after he ran out of oxygen while placing compressed-air tanks along the exit route.

One of the boys initially had a heartbeat that was too slow, and some had low white blood cell counts, but they have since been stabilized. Two have been treated for minor lung infections, doctors added. They were all treated for rabies, in case of bats in the cave, and tetanus, and they were given IV drips.

Doctors expect the boys to be in hospital for about seven days, although they could be out sooner if their bloodwork comes back negative for abnormalities.

By Monday evening, the boys were able to joke, laugh and have normal conversations, doctors said. So far, their families have seen them through a glass barrier.

Officials said that families of the rescued group were preparing to head to Chiang Rai, finally able to see their loved ones after weeks of agony. Among them was Umporn Sriwichai, an aunt of coach Ekapol Chanthawong. She has cared for the young man since his parents died when he was 10.

“I just want to give him a hug and say I missed you,” she said.

“That is the first thing I will do.” n ©The Washington Post

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Deal could cut U.S. border crossings

BY J OSHUA P ARTLOW AND N ICK M IROFF

In Mexico City

W

hile President Trump regularly berates Mexico for “doing nothing” to stop illegal migration, behind the scenes the two governments are considering a deal that could drastically curtail the cross-border migration flow.

The proposal, known as a “safe third country agreement,” would potentially require asylum seekers transiting through Mexico to apply for protection in that nation rather than in the United States. It would allow U.S. border guards to turn back such asylum seekers at border crossings and quickly return to Mexico anyone who has already entered illegally seeking refuge, regardless of their nationality.

U.S. officials believe this type of deal would discourage many Central American families from trying to reach the United States.

Their soaring numbers have strained U.S. immigration courts and overwhelmed the U.S. government’s ability to detain them. The Trump administration says the majority are looking for jobs — rather than fleeing persecution — and are taking advantage of American generosity to gain entry and avoid deportation.

“We believe the flows would drop dramatically and fairly immediately” if the agreement took effect, said a senior Department of Homeland Security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss negotiations with the Mexican government, which the official said had gathered momentum in recent weeks.

The proposed agreement has divided the Mexican government and alarmed human rights activists who maintain that many of the migrants are fleeing widespread gang violence and could be exposed to danger in Mexico.

On the surface, such an agreement would appear difficult for Mexico. The number of Central Americans claiming asylum in Mexico has risen sharply in recent years, and many analysts warn

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Officials believe agreement with Mexico would discourage Central American asylum seekers that the country does not have the capacity to settle fresh waves of people. Last year, Mexico’s refugee agency failed to attend to more than half of the 14,000 asylum applications it received, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission.

Critics of the plan say that President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government should not reach a deal at a time when the Trump administration has used tactics such as separating migrant parents from their children at the border.

Even so, some Mexican officials have warmed to the idea.

They argue that requiring Central Americans to apply for asylum in Mexico would undercut the smuggling networks that charge fees of $10,000 or more for a journey from Central America to the United States.

The senior DHS official said the U.S. government has signaled to Mexico that it would be prepared to offer significant financial aid to

help the country cope with a surge of asylum seekers, at least in the short term.

Such an agreement could also allow Mexico’s government to develop its capacity to settle asylum seekers and improve its battered international reputation by taking a public stance in favor of human rights, according to supporters.

The U.S. government has had a “safe third country agreement” with Canada since 2004, preventing migrants from transiting through that country to apply for asylum in the United States.

But violence has reached record levels in Mexico, and the border states are particularly dangerous, which could put migrants at risk if U.S. authorities began busing Central Americans back into Mexico.

The State Department’s travel advisories warn U.S. citizens against visiting parts of Mexico, including the border state of Tamaulipas.

A Honduran family waiting to seek asylum at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint camps on the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Tex., last month.

“It’s one thing to say we’re going to have a ‘safe third country agreement’ with Canada,” said Roberta Jacobson, who left her post as U.S. ambassador to Mexico this spring.

“It’s another thing to say you’re safe and well as soon as you cross the Guatemalan border into Mexico.”

It might seem surprising that Mexico and the United States are in negotiations at all on migration. Relations between the countries have slumped to their lowest point in years, with the United States threatening to dump the North American Free Trade Agreement and Mexico leading a push recently at the Organization of American States to condemn the Trump administration’s family separation practices as “cruel and inhumane.”

But DHS officials believe they have a window to secure a deal in the lame-duck phase of Peña Nieto’s administration, which ends on Dec. 1. Some on the Mexican side see such an accord as a possible valuable chit in broader negotiations over tariffs and the future of North American free trade.

Arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border — a barometer of overall illegal crossings — had plunged in the months after Trump’s inauguration but began climbing again last summer. A sudden surge this spring infuriated the president, who leveled his anger at Nielsen.

She broached the “safe third country agreement” when she visited Mexico in mid-April. But she received contradictory signals from Mexican counterparts, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

Mexican officials say the plan has divided Peña Nieto’s government. Some in the Foreign Ministry who want to improve ties with the United States remain in favor of at least a pilot project, while others in the Interior Ministry, who would have to handle resettling thousands of Central Americans, stand opposed, officials said.

The winner of the July 1 presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has yet to weigh in publicly on the issue. n ©The Washington Post

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST; STYLING BY LISA CHERKASKY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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s the temperature inched toward 92 degrees in the parking lots outside Kenny Chesney’s concert in May, the beer cans were icy, the Jell-O shots were melting, and the T-shirts were direct: “Country Music and Beer, That’s Why I’m Here.” “Pour Me Something Tall and Strong.” “Make America Drunk Again.”

Brightly hued bottles of Blue Chair Bay Rum, the country superstar’s popular beverage brand, lined the tables at tailgates around AT&T Stadium, where fans gathered hours before the first opening act went on at 5 p.m. When the crowd of about 46,000 started streaming into the venue, some friendly patrons near an entrance offered a beer bong funnel to passersby, and cheers erupted

Country’s Drunken Romance Drinking has been ingrained in the music genre’s culture

BY E MILY Y AHR In Arlington, Tex.

whenever anyone took on the challenge.

“Tequila, baby!” one man yelled nearby. Across the street, participants in a mother-daughter tailgate ticked off why summer Chesney concerts are so appealing: “Beer, songs, sunshine.”

That night, Chesney, who has found immense success in the past two decades selling the idea of island-style relaxation, would reference alcohol in 18 out of his 23 songs.

Although fans imbibe copiously at concerts of every genre, all of which boast songs about drinking, it’s possible that no slice of American life has embraced alcohol with the enthusiasm of country music. The two have gone handin-hand for decades, thanks in part to the “tear in your beer” songs that helped make the format famous.

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COVER STORY But today, country music and alcohol are inextricably linked as never before. Not only has the genre become known (and sometimes mocked) for its sheer amount of drinking-themed songs, but an increasing number of country acts have created their own brands of booze, including Chesney’s rum, Blake Shelton’s Smithworks vodka, Miranda Lambert’s Red 55 wine and Toby Keith’s Wild Shot mezcal.

In June, Shelton and Jason Aldean opened bars in downtown Nashville. They join recent establishments from Florida Georgia Line, Alan Jackson and Dierks Bentley, each of whom has a musical catalogue that pairs naturally with a few drinks.

“I know what’s going on at my shows. People are coming out to blow off steam and have a great time,” said Bentley, whose current tour is sponsored by Twisted Tea. “I’m kind of like the lead bartender: Jumping up on the bar table, drinking shots with you and singing ballads with you like at an old Irish pub somewhere.”

Every artist — even those who don’t drink — knows the power of relating to audiences through drinking, even if it’s in appearance only. Brad Paisley closed his 2012 concert tour set list with one of his biggest hits, “Alcohol,” during which he would invite his opening acts back onstage. A makeshift bar was brought out, and drinks were poured — except, according to one opener’s band member, the liquid was actually lemonade Vitamin Water.

However, when hearing “country music” and “alcohol” together, some people are reflexively defensive. Traditionally, the conjured image is not flattering, from the early-1900s “drunk hillbilly” stereotype to summer 2014, when country concerts saw a spate of intoxication-related hospital trips, arrests and one death.

But that connection is changing, as the genre is skewing younger and wealthier than ever. According to the Country Music Association, fans of country music ages 18 to 24 have increased by 54 percent over the past decade, and the format has grown in popularity on the coasts — not just middle America, as many assume. The CMA also reported country music consumers have an average annual household income of $82,000, above the national aver-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Country legend Hank Williams died of a heart attack in 1953 at age 29 after years of alcohol and prescription-drug abuse.

age, and that amount is climbing.

Decades ago, when the country format was scorned as niche music of the working class, the prominence of alcohol fed into the cliche of drowning your sorrows at a honky-tonk. Now, it’s the reverse. Modern country singers promote alcohol largely as an escape: partying with friends, having wild nights on the town or — for singers like Chesney who lean into the tropical, Jimmy Buffett vibe — sitting on the beach with a drink in hand.

“Alcohol no longer serves as a sign of the distance between country music listeners and the middleclass culture,” country music historian Diane Pecknold said, “but as a sign of the similarity.”

‘HANK WILLIAMS SYNDROME’ he holy grail in country music can be summed up in one word: authenticity. And if there’s one star who sums up authentic country music, it’s Hank Williams, the legendary singer who inspired generations of artists by writing hits such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “I Saw the Light” and the classic drinking

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song “There’s a Tear in My Beer.”

In 1953, Williams died of a heart attack at age 29 after years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and his influence lived on in more ways than just as an artist.

Bobby Bare, who launched his country career in the 1960s with “Detroit City” and released a song this year called “I Drink,” about the effects of alcoholism, remembers that trying to trace Williams’s path was a popular tactic in Nashville.

“Everybody I know wanted to be like Hank Williams. And everyone I know bought into the drinking,” Bare said. “You figure if Hank did it, it must be okay.”

The late Waylon Jennings, who long struggled with drug addiction, called it the “Hank Williams syndrome.”

“I studied him. . . . He was out of control, and that was the part I picked up, the bad part,” Jennings told the Chicago Tribune in 1992.

“I think a lot of people did that, because it looked really romantic to be crazy and wild and die young.”

This thinking led to tragedy, such as Nashville crooner Keith Whitley dying at age 33 of alcohol poisoning.

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“I thought everybody had to drink to be in this business,” Whitley said in an interview not long before his death in 1989. “Lefty [Frizzell] drank, Hank drank, George Jones was still drinking, and I had to. That’s just the way it was. You couldn’t put that soul in your singing if you weren’t about three sheets in the wind.”

Before Williams’s time, country music had been associated with alcohol as far back as the early 1900s, when many acts hailed from Appalachia, known as moonshine territory. The connection grew and faded over the years, from the 1950s honky-tonk bar craze to the alcohol-heavy outlaw era, followed by the 1980s, when people became increasingly aware of the dangers of alcohol.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving reportedly protested Gene Watson’s “Drinkin’ My Way Back Home” in 1983, and it stalled on the charts. Keith said his record label didn’t want to release “You Ain’t Much Fun” in 1995, about a guy who sobers up and suddenly can’t stand his wife.

As country went mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s, the topic

LAURA BUCKMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

From left, Amy Shields, David Shields, Dina Medina and Monica Orozco before a Kenny Chesney concert in Arlington, Tex., on May 19.

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became more popular, and varied: Although hits including Gretchen Wilson’s “All Jacked Up,” Tracy Byrd’s “Ten Rounds With Jose Cuervo” and Keith’s ubiquitous “Red Solo Cup” celebrated getting drunk, some warned about the downside, such as Billy Currington’s “Walk a Little Straighter” and Chesney’s hit “The Good Stuff.”

Then, the past six years or so brought the rise of “bro country,” and suddenly, it seemed every hit on the radio was a dude singing about drinking beer in his truck with a pretty girl by his side. From Luke Bryan’s “Drunk on You” and Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” to Cole Swindell’s “Chillin’ It” and Shelton’s “Boys Round Here,” the songs appealed to the new surge of younger listeners.

“I think that today, the consumer likes to be in the car, turn on the radio and hear something that’s upbeat that they can sing along with and feel good,” said Troy Tomlinson, president of Sony/ ATV Music Publishing in Nashville. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be a serious ballad with pain. But for the younger country music consumer, alcohol in a celebratory manner is very relatable.”

No matter the decade, country singers search for that elusive “authenticity,” which experts say remains somewhat linked to Williams — and alcohol.

“Today, country singers will still throw out references to Hank,” said Travis Stimeling, an associate professor of musicology at West Virginia University. “If you want to establish you’re a real country musician . . . you go back to same imagery and same symbolism.”

‘PART OF A FAMILY’ t Chesney’s Texas concert, Nichole Anderson of Arlington stood near a pickup truck, where a group of friends had beers in hand and explained why tailgating at a Chesney concert is almost as important as the show itself.

“He just makes you want to be part of a family, and this is what this family is,” Anderson said.

“The parking lot pre-party, hanging out.”

The most boisterous tailgate was in Lot 12, and known as Lot 12 Nation; Chesney’s fandom is called No Shoes Nation, a play on one of his biggest hits, “No Shoes,

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‘START OUR OWN BRAND’ o country star sells escapism quite like Chesney, who has two hit songs on country radio this summer: “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” a duet with David Lee Murphy that encourages people to stop stressing out, and “Get Along,” which encourages everyone in this crazy world to just, well, get along.

So it made sense when Chesney (who declined to comment for this article) decided to start selling rum, a drink that goes well with relaxation. The singer owns a home in St. John and told Forbes that he wanted his flavored versions “to try to capture my life in the islands.” Now, his rum company sponsors his concert tours.

In 2016, Forbes reported Chesney’s annual sales had almost tripled over three years, in a time when overall rum sales had dropped; according to Nielsen data, country fans outspend average music listeners by 12 percent when it comes to rum.

Someone at Chesney’s level can earn millions through alcohol brands and sponsorships, which is why other country stars have had the same idea. Lambert, Little Big Town, Sara Evans, Zac Brown Band and Craig Morgan all have sold wine; Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn has his own vineyard outside of Nashville. There’s also whiskey from Jake Owen and Darius Rucker, along with tequila from George Strait.

Florida Georgia Line, the duo of Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard, burst onto the scene in 2012 with their smash “Cruise” and proved to Nashville there was an appetite for party songs. They were vocal about their love for Fireball whiskey and even mentioned it in their hit “Round Here.”

“We reached out [to Fireball] and asked how it benefited them, and they said it was pretty drastic,” Hubbard said. “That made us feel good. But also, it made us think, why don’t we start our own brand?”

So they collaborated on Old Camp peach pecan whiskey, which combines the flavors of their home states mentioned in their band name. As the brand has taken off, they have name-dropped it in songs. In “Smooth,” they sing about “young love buzzing off an Old Camp bottle by the moon.”

Morgan Wallen collaborated with the duo on “Up Down,” which has

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RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES

Many country stars have connections to alcohol, including Miranda Lambert, top, who created her own wine, and Kenny Chesney, right, who has his own rum and has long promoted a lifestyle of islandstyle relaxation.

RICK SCUTERI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

No Shirt, No Problems.” (“The sun and the sand, and a drink in my hand with no bottom / And no shoes, no shirt and no problems.”)

Chesney songs and pop hits blasted on speakers as people played flip cup and cornhole, snacked on barbecue and kicked back in lawn chairs. A human-size flip-flop and an enormous inflatable bottle of Blue Chair Bay Rum were popular spots for selfies.

Natalie Bechard of Starkville, Miss., is a founder of Lot 12 Nation. About 2006, a small group met on a Chesney cruise to the Bahamas and decided to start tailgating together at his Dallas shows. Now, hundreds show up.

At one point, the tailgate’s DJ announced that Bechard’s car got towed while she was helping set

up — so he started a collection for her next to the funds they already raised for Chesney’s charity.

It was a far cry from what some might imagine happens at country tailgates; Chesney concerts have made headlines in other cities, such as Pittsburgh and Foxborough, Mass., for getting rowdy.

In Texas, though people had stories from previous years of some fans getting a bit out of control, the tailgating scene was fairly low key.

“You’re always going to have a few that stick out,” Bechard said.

“But so far, everybody’s been really great. It’s just having fun, enjoying the great weather. We’ve become one big family celebrating Kenny and his music and the spirit of his music.”

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WILLIAM DESHAZER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

the line, “Somebody pass that fifth of Camp this way.”

Last year, they furthered their image as young guys who love to have a good time with the opening of FGL House in downtown Nashville, a restaurant and bar that has lines down the block on Saturday nights.

In Nashville, Budweiser has signs that say it is “the official beer of beer drinking songs.” While women have had difficulty getting alcohol sponsorships (“I love alcohol! You would think a beer company would sponsor me,” Lambert told W Magazine in 2012), Maren Morris recently partnered with Corona Light.

Companies will even endorse groups who sing tunes that aren’t so happy. Smithfield, the duo of Trey Smith and Jennifer Fiedler, broke out with the ballad “Hey Whiskey,” about a woman who dreads when her ex drinks, because then he calls her. The duo has an endorsement deal with Rebecca Creek Distillery.

“It’s kind of weird, because if you listen to the song, we always wonder, ‘Why do we have a whiskey endorsement?’ ” Fiedler

joked. “Because it’s like, the whole song is about how whiskey ruins the girl’s relationship — but hey, we’re handing out whiskey.”

‘IT’S A DRINKING ENVIRONMENT’ ashville, which some winkingly call “a drinking town with a music problem,” has a well-established culture of alcohol: Writers say that grabbing a few beers is common after — or during — a songwriting session. This can make it difficult for the people in the industry who don’t drink.

Some high-profile singer-songwriters are sober, though they don’t advertise it. Others, such as Tim McGraw and Keith Urban, have spoken out about not drinking. Brantley Gilbert, who went to rehab in 2011, said that he relied on the guidance of Urban, who had gone through rehab five years earlier.

“I told him, I don’t think I can do my job. I don’t know if I can ever play a song at my shows without being [messed] up,” Gilbert told the Tennessean last year.

“Or writing, I was worried my songs wouldn’t be the same, that I

N

wouldn’t be on everyone else’s level. It’s a drinking environment.”

Gilbert still knows the appeal of drinking songs and sings about partying on tracks such as “The Weekend” and “Bottoms Up.” He’s not the only one: Chris Janson, not a frequent drinker, had a big hit with “Fix a Drink” and released a single called “Power of Positive Drinkin’.” AJ McLean of the Backstreet Boys, who is sober, recently decided to embark on a country music career and assumed the best way in was a debut single called “Back Porch Bottle Service.”

Ray Scott, known for “Sometimes the Bottle Hits You Back” and “Drinkin’ Beer,” has been sober for more than a year. Initially, he was concerned fans would be disappointed to learn he didn’t drink.

“Some fans can kind of build you up to be this thing that they think you are, and a couple of these songs sort of painted a picture of who I was,” Scott said. “I’ve been pleased that people take it for what it is. It’s just fun music; I don’t have to live the part.”

Behind the scenes, despite the casual drinking, country music

Honky Tonk Central is a popular venue in Nashville, which is often called “a drinking town with a music problem.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

isn’t necessarily the crazy party some might think.

Jason Fitz, a former fiddle player for the Band Perry, is now an ESPN radio host. The Band Perry opened for Paisley on tour in 2012, which is how he came to know that the cups from the onstage bar actually contained Vitamin Water.

(Although Paisley is also known for not drinking, his publicist said the onstage bar now serves beer and has in the past, yet added that it’s possible previous tours had water because he featured opening acts younger than 21.)

“I get asked so often, ‘Tell me your craziest backstage story!’

People think I’m joking when I say, ‘There really aren’t that many,’ ” Fitz said. “You get into the grind on the road — we were on the road for about 300 days. I don’t care who you are, you can’t party and survive that many days.”

Even artists with a party-heavy playlist echo this attitude. “We like to have a good time but maybe drink a little bit less than we used to,” said Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line. “As our manager says, if you’re gonna party like a man at night, you’ve gotta work like a man in the morning.”

Chesney is also a prime example. As his lyrics celebrate having a drink, from the “little umbrellashaped margaritas” in “How Forever Feels” to a “cold drink chilling in my right hand” in “When the Sun Goes Down,” he’s also in killer shape. He didn’t lose a second of intense energy in his nearly twohour set.

“I probably don’t drink as much as perceived. I’m too healthy,” Chesney told Parade magazine in 2010. “But a lot of my songs were written with the idea of having a good time.”

There’s no doubt the audience appreciates this. And as Nashville continues to see dollar signs (a CMA study this spring found “country music consumers are spending more on alcohol” these days), artists will keep singing about it.

The mutual benefit is a marked difference from decades ago, when there was a negative connotation of even listening to drinking songs in country bars. Now, those establishments embrace the image. Even a Sirius XM satellite radio station proudly plays “music of country-themed bars and honky-tonks across America.”

It’s called Red, White & Booze. n ©The Washington Post

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ADVENTURES

A self-discovery of over 14,000 miles BY

R ICK M AESE

I

n May 2015, Holly Harrison — known as “Cargo” to most of his buddies — was hiking along the Appalachian Trail and taking stock of his situation.

“You know, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life,” he said.

He was 55 years old at the time and had always dreamed big. He wanted to do something no one before had ever done, maybe something no one would ever be able to match. But he felt time was running out.

“I just had this thought: I wonder if anybody’s ever hiked the entire Western Hemisphere,” he said, “from the bottom of South America to the top in North America.”

He would discover that one man had, in fact — the British explorer George Meegan did it four decades earlier, taking 6 years 236 days to walk from Patagonia to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — but Harrison thought maybe he could do it faster.

Seven months later, he set out on his journey, making it only about 1,700 miles, not even past Chile, before tearing a tendon in his left foot. He flew home, and for the next nine months, he stewed, thinking about his mistakes and plotting his corrections. He sold his house in North Carolina to finance another attempt, and in December 2016, he again found himself at the southern tip of South America.

What followed was a 14,481mile journey along the Pan-American Highway with twists and turns that Harrison never could have anticipated: dog attacks in South America, a life-threatening heart attack in Nevada and a bear attack in Alaska. He passed through 14 countries and used crutches for added support over the last 2,000 miles, pushing through physical pain and emotional turmoil. He hadn’t known this at the outset, but it would turn into a journey of self-discovery, too.

“As much as I thought about this, there are just so many things

COURTESY OF HOLLY HARRISON

At 55, Holly Harrison was trying to figure out what to do with his life. So he went on a 530-day hike. you simply can’t plan for,” Harrison said.

He had spent a lifetime preparing for the adventure. Harrison had been an Army Ranger in the early 1980s, later worked as a program manager for the Girl Scouts and spent years as a camp director. When he was 15, he hitchhiked across Nebraska. He hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2011 and had also trekked through Yellowstone and Yosemite.

Trudging through Patagonia and hiking across Argentina and Chile was no easy task. He could go several days without seeing a building or even a tree. At times, Harrison carried four or five days’ worth of food and water. Litter was prevalent, and he would collect and drink from discarded water bottles he found along the road. When he happened across a town, he might sleep in a hostel, but most nights Harrison slept outdoors.

“My primary directive was al-

ways to keep myself safe,” he said, “and in the country that meant that I had to hide. Every night I would have to find a hiding place, whether it was under the road or in a grove of trees or behind a sand dune.”

Large drainage pipes beneath roads became a preferred overnight dwelling. “I would call them my hotel under the highway,” he said, “and I would rate them, like a one-star to a five-star.”

His goal was to cover 30 miles or so each day. He would do as few as five and as many 51. But with few exceptions, every day, Harrison woke up and kept moving forward.

“I didn’t have a day where I ever questioned what I was doing out there,” he said, “because I knew what the consequence was of quitting and I knew that I would just be miserable. So I told myself, ‘You know, no one said it’s going to be easy, dude. It’s your choice coming out here. Suck it up, buttercup.

After multiple leg injuries, Holly Harrison uses crutches on the final stretch of his hike from the bottom of South America to North America’s top.

Let’s go.’ ” As the weeks and months passed, so did the terrain: deserts, mountains, rain forests, jungles, swamps, rivers. There’s a system of roads that goes almost the entire route, with the exception of the Darién Gap, the famously dangerous jungle on the border of Colombia and Panama.

It’s less than 100 miles long and required Harrison to enlist the help of a hired guide. For much of that stretch, he splashed his way through shallow river waters, the safest passageway. The jungle should have been the most perilous part of his journey but turned out to be among the most beautiful stretches, he said.

The scariest point of his hike up the hemisphere was still ahead, waiting 4,000 miles to the north, just south of Reno, Nev. For weeks, he had been traversing a desolate and lonely stretch of desert through Arizona and Nevada.

Harrison covered 31 miles one December day but awoke with a sharp pain in his arm and could not fall back asleep. He walked in a daze to the next town about 10 miles away where he found a motel room. The next day, the pain was much more pronounced, and Harrison knew he was in the midst of a heart attack. He was taken by a medevac helicopter to Reno and immediately went into surgery. Doctors put a stent in his heart.

“They were real sympathetic and apologetic, really, like, ‘We know what you’ve been trying to do and it’s too bad you’ve got to stop,’” Harrison recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I didn’t say I was stopping.’ ” He wanted to test out his heart and after four days in the hospital, he went for a walk — for five miles.

The next day he made it 11, and then 17 the day after that. The doctors wouldn’t give him a green light to continue his journey, but he wasn’t waiting for one. While he covered the first 11,000 miles solo, Harrison’s brother-in-law joined him in Nevada with a van to provide road support, and he hit the road again.

He started sleeping in the van but still woke up each morning

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17

ACTS OF KINDNESS and started his hike where he left off the previous night. The walk provided endless opportunity for reflection — “trying to reconcile certain events in my life,” he said.

Somewhere along the way, he decided “it was time to confront an issue that had plagued me for so many years.” So while in Nevada, he met up with a daughter he had not seen in 20 years, not since she was a 9-month-old baby.

“We have a beginning,” he would later post on Facebook.

“That’s what I had hoped for.”

In March, with 12,400 miles behind him and Canada’s snowy Yukon and all of Alaska still ahead, Harrison pulled a hamstring. Then, compensating for the injury, he re-tore the tendon in his foot that had wiped out his previous attempt to hike across the Americas. But he had gone too far to quit this time, and he bought a pair of crutches to help him cover the remaining 2,000 miles.

After a few days, he said, he found his rhythm and was back to covering 25 to 30 miles each day.

He even used his crutches to pick up aluminum cans along the road — using the recycling money to help fill the van with gas.

With the end in sight, his brother-in-law had to depart, and Harrison was again sleeping outdoors and battling the elements alone, tucked into a sleeping bag in freezing temperatures each night.

Finally, on May 31, Harrison set out for his last day of hiking. A crew from NBC’s “Today” show joined him as he walked toward a frozen Prudhoe Bay. “It doesn’t even seem like a finish line, you know?” he said at the end. “Look at it. I could keep walking. It’s ice.”

Harrison walked 14,481 miles in 530 days — an average of more than 27 miles a day. He bettered Meegan’s mark by more than five years.

“It was just exhilarating,” he said. “You know, physically I was just totally beat up. Emotionally and in a lot of other ways, it’s kind of sad that it was finally over.”

He still doesn’t have a home of his own, and after a year and a half of walking as fast as he could, he is not in much of a hurry to settle down. For now, he is starting to write down his memories from the road. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. But in some fashion, he will keep putting one foot in front of the other. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

He travels across the nation mowing lawns — for free BY

T ARA B AHRAMPOUR

W

ith more rain than normal this year, it seemed to Tania Castro as if the weeds were growing three inches a day.

She had bought a house last year on half an acre in Lusby, Md., but now the lot felt impossibly large. A single mom of three kids, the youngest of whom has autism, Castro works 60 hours a week and had not stayed on top of the mowing.

By late spring, the lawn had sprouted vegetation so tall and thick that she could not get a mower through, and professional services were quoting her astronomical fees. Castro, 44, was stressed — and unsure what to do.

Then a man with a mower came along and took care of the whole thing. Free.

Rodney Smith Jr., 28, is driving across the United States in search of people like Castro — single moms, veterans, disabled people and older people who need help with their lawns.

“A lot of them are on fixed incomes, and they really can’t afford to pay someone,” said Smith, who lives in Huntsville, Ala. Traveling around the country, he said, “I realized that it’s a bigger need than I thought.”

He has mowed pocket-size yards and vast expanses, with a goal of doing a lawn in all 50 states.

He is hoping to inspire a new generation to follow his example.

Three years ago, Smith, who is from Bermuda, came across an older man mowing his lawn and stopped to help him. Smith had been looking for a cause or a calling, he said, and the experience clicked: He set a goal of mowing 40 lawns for people in need of help. Then he upped it to 100.

The following year he started an organization, Raising Men Lawn Care Service, that gets children between 7 and 17 to do the same. So far 130 kids — mostly in the United States but also in Canada, Bermuda, Australia and the

COURTESY OF RODNEY SMITH

Rodney Smith Jr., 28, shown in Milwaukee, mows the lawns of people who need help. Last summer, he mowed 50 lawns across 50 states.

United Kingdom — have signed on to his 50-yard challenge of mowing 50 lawns for those in need.

Smith himself is far past that goal; he has mowed around 2,000.

Last summer, he mowed 50 lawns across 50 states. This summer, he is taking it more slowly, stopping in each state to spread the word about community service and lawn-mower safety, and signing up more young people for the challenge. So far he has checked off more than 30 states.

He gets funding from private donations and from Briggs & Stratton, a Milwaukee lawn-mower company that also donated his equipment.

Smith loads his car with a gaspowered push mower and an electric weed-eater and blower, and uses social media to find lawns. He announces where he is heading next and asks if anyone knows someone in that state who needs a mow.

That’s how he got connected with retired Staff Sgt. Joseph Gruzinski, 85, a Korean War veteran in Linthicum Heights, Md. Smith mowed his lawn last year and returned this year for a repeat visit.

“It made me feel great,” Gruzinski said. “He really looks out for the veterans and seniors where

others don’t give a hoot.”

Smith did a good job, he added.

“He trimmed some of the flowers and everything else up in front.”

When Castro, the single mom, heard about Smith, she messaged him, figuring she wouldn’t hear back. “Well, he responded to me in 10 minutes, saying, ‘I can be there tomorrow or Tuesday.’ ” Her lawn, which is on a hill, was so overgrown that she felt guilty when he showed up. But he took it in stride.

“I felt humbled and grateful, thankful and just blessed,” Castro said. “I couldn’t believe that just a stranger would do that. My ex wouldn’t do that.”

With the lawn cut back, Castro said she is now able to get a mower through it and stay on top of it.

Ironically, Smith, who recently completed a master’s degree in social work, never liked mowing lawns when he was younger.

“God took something I disliked and turned it into something I now love to do,” he said. “It’s relaxing. And then to see the smile on the faces of people whose lawn I do. A lot of people take pride in their yard, and it feels good to see that I made a difference in their life.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

An industry past its Don Draper days N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

S TEPHANIE M EHTA

I FRENEMIES The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else)

By Ken Auletta Penguin Press. 358 pp. $30

t is telling that one of the most prominent and memorable figures in Ken Auletta’s new book, “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else),” is Don Draper, the fictional executive at the center of the celebrated television series “Mad Men.” Draper, a 1960s adman whose brilliant creative campaigns made clients swoon, is a convenient stand-in for the advertising industry of yore, a simpler time when corporations paid agencies big money to reach consumers through newspapers, magazines, billboards and the emerging 30second spot on television.

The real-life advertising and marketing executives Auletta quotes in “Frenemies” talk about Draper like he’s an actual person.

“Back in Don Draper’s day you had three major networks. You had people’s attention. People had fewer choices,” Beth Comstock, a former General Electric executive whose portfolio included marketing and advertising, tells Auletta.

“The biggest difference from Don Draper days is data,” says Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer.

You can hardly blame marketing executives for feeling a little nostalgic for a less-tumultuous time. The average tenure for a corporate chief marketing officer is less than four years, about half the shelf life of most CEOs. Publishers, facing declining revenue from traditional advertising, have started their own studios to create “native advertising” for clients, cutting out agencies. The lifeblood of the business is no longer creativity — though commercials still have the ability to pull at heartstrings or go viral — but rather computers, which use algorithms to place advertising on websites and, as Unilever’s Weed notes, produce data that can be used to precisely target consumers.

The challenge for Madison Avenue and its clients, of course, is

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Ken Auletta uses MediaLink chief executive Michael Kassan, shown above, to navigate the reader through the shifting industry landscape.

that its partners in this new world — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — collect, control and manipulate far more information about consumers than agencies and marketers do. Sorrell applies the word “frenemies” to describe the uneasy relationship between marketers and technology platforms, but there’s little doubt which parties have the upper hand — for now. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Auletta’s book, completed before Facebook admitted that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to data on 87 million users, doesn’t go nearly deep enough into privacy concerns, despite an entire chapter titled “The Privacy Time Bomb.” He unquestioningly quotes Ricky Van Veen of Facebook as saying “privacy is overrated” and bolsters that view with anecdotes about how teens and college kids love to share intimate details on social media.

To help illustrate the shift from Draper to data, Auletta relies on

mini-profiles of industry players such as Sorrell; Carolyn Everson, head of global marketing solutions for Facebook and the ad industry’s main liaison with the social platform; and corporate executives such as Comstock, Weed and Bank of America Vice Chairman Anne Finucane. With the exception of Sorrell, who resigned as CEO of WPP in April amid an investigation into alleged personal misconduct, it’s a pretty buttoned-up bunch. Even Everson, who is meant to represent the industry’s big disruptor, comes with a pristine corporate pedigree — Anderson Consulting, Disney, MTV, Microsoft. “Carolyn Everson doesn’t look like an existential threat,” Auletta writes as he introduces her. It is as if he’s going out of his way to make her bland.

Auletta zeroes in on Michael Kassan, founder of MediaLink, a consultancy that works with publishers, big brands, ad agencies and digital platforms. (In 2016 and 2017, MediaLink was a paid sponsor of the Vanity Fair New Establishment conference, which

I helped produce.) Kassan is an expedient choice to help guide the reader through the changing industry landscape, as his firm touches every part of the ecosystem. Like Facebook’s Everson, Kassan, now 67, doesn’t fit the typical “change agent” mold. The author describes him as “a pearshaped teddy bear of a man with a soft, round, tanned face, the sunny smile of a practiced politician, and the jokey shtick of a stand-up comedian.”

The lack of a modern-day Draper makes “Frenemies” a bit of a slog for the general-interest reader. Auletta is a quiet writer. His books and pieces for the New Yorker are propelled by his deep reporting and access to colorful titans of business. “The Highwaymen,” published in 1997, features profiles of Barry Diller, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch — entrepreneurial risk-takers whose gambits have had a huge and dramatic impact on everyday American life. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the protagonists of Auletta’s 2009 book, “Googled,” are not exactly swashbuckling, but the pervasiveness and audacity of their ambition keep the reader engaged.

“Frenemies” never successfully makes the case that the advertising industry, despite its massive size, is as important or innovative or influential as cable news or Google. “Frenemies” culminates in the 2017 sale of MediaLink to Ascential, a British company that owns the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Kassan, described by Auletta as the “supreme power broker in the advertising and marketing industry,” fetched $207 million for MediaLink. By contrast, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is valued by the market at about $800 billion. And there’s nothing imprecise about the difference between those numbers. n Mehta is editor in chief of Fast Company. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Facing down the Mafia, misogyny

From White House to crime-fighting

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

D

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REVIEWED BY

J OHN D OMINI

own in the toe of the Italian boot, in rustic Calabria, a criminal subculture thrives: The ’Ndrangheta. If the word seems unpronounceable, that’s in keeping with this gang’s shadowy ways. In “The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took On the World’s Most Powerful Mafia,” Alex Perry takes care to sound out the name: “un-drungget-a.” The Greek term means “society of men of honor and valor.”

Perry’s book, however puts the women, not the men, at the center of a story that is both harrowing and heartening.

Calabria, when Perry begins his tale at the turn of the 21st century, remains “bandit country,” in the grip of the same mob families who ruled at the end of the 19th century. The machismo is deeply ingrained. “The severity of the misogyny,” Perry writes, “prompted some prosecutors to compare the ’Ndrangheta with Islamic militants.”

Mountains of illicit cash sustained the code. The economics of the syndicate are spelled out in the opening chapters. But Perry, while never lax about the bookkeeping, keeps the emphasis on matters of heart and conscience: the risks taken by a brave few Calabrian women. At great personal cost, these women took down vicious clans and shattered the myth of Mafia invulnerability.

One of the women, Lea Garofalo, has achieved the status of martyr in Italy; there’s even a movie about her. Garofalo first denounced her mobster husband, as well as others, in 1996, then spent a dozen difficult years in witness protection with her daughter, Denise. In the end, the state let her down, and Garofalo attempted a rapprochement with her old crowd. This ended in her disappearance. Lea’s vanishing provides “The Good Mothers” with a suspenseful kickoff, her last days alive as observed by a teenage Denise. The mystery’s solution

waits till the closing chapters.

Thus human drama shapes the narrative; it ends with the daughter’s tearful farewell at a massive 2013 rally in the mother’s memory.

Still, “The Good Mothers” is casting a wider net, indicting an entire pestilent culture. Another protagonist is the magistrate and investigator Alessandra Cerreti, southern Italian herself, with a lifelong dedication to fighting the Mafia. Like the others, she benefits from Perry’s deep research, so that a couple of the episodes featuring her have the intensity of Garofalo’s final night alive.

The same is true of events involving a pair of other ’Ndrangheta women. These are Maria Concetta Cacciola, an abused wife who can’t take any more, and Giuseppina Pesce, who has gotten her own hands dirty (though not bloody), yet she’s a jelly doughnut when it comes to her kids.

The children, for all three “good mothers,” afford leverage for the bad guys. The women don’t do well under state protection; in a motel up north, with no one but cops for company, the old crowd down south starts to look appealing. The kids especially suffer, and one by one, the women cave, recanting their testimony and falling back into ’Ndrangheta clutches. The results are not always fatal, thanks in particular to Cerreti, but the sorry pattern creates a problem for the book, a touch of the predictable.

Yet it’s good to go step by step, as Perry does, through the destruction of these clans. It’s good to linger over the women’s triumph, since theirs is but one battle in the war against what Perry calls a “global mafia.” So his book celebrates how a few heroes made a significant change for the better — in a “display of adamant and unyielding femininity.” n Domini is the author of “Movieola!” and the upcoming novel, “The Color Inside a Melon.” This was written for The Washington Post.

I THE GOOD MOTHERS The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia

By Alex Perry William Morrow Books.

333 pp. $27.99

HOPE NEVER DIES

By Andrew Shaffer Quirk. 304pp.

Paperback, $14.99

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

s it mere coincidence or the beginning of a trend? First, former president Bill Clinton co-writes a potboiler (with some guy named James Patterson) about an embattled Democratic president who saves the United States from annihilation. Now, former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden have been reimagined as a dynamic detective duo in a thriller about the opioid epidemic called “Hope Never Dies,” by Andrew Shaffer.

For all its much-mocked faults (canned dialogue, eyelash-thin character development), “The President Is Missing,” the ClintonPatterson confection, is a pure page-turner. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the drowsy plot of “Hope Never Dies.”

The opening premise here is that a veteran Amtrak conductor, whom Biden befriended during his long years in the Senate commuting between Delaware and Washington, is found dead on a deserted stretch of train track outside Wilmington. Given that a bag of heroin is found in the dead man’s pocket, police theorize that he passed out on the tracks, just another victim of drugs. But Biden can’t believe it. Bored with his post-vice-presidential life of taking naps, grouting bathroom tile and waiting for Obama to call, Biden leaps at the opportunity to be useful. Soon, he’s carrying out a cockeyed investigation into who drugged and dumped his old conductor buddy on those tracks.

The hook here is that Biden doesn’t go it alone for very long.

The murder simply serves as an excuse to reunite Joe and Barry in what turns out to be a wacky buddy story. The whole allure of “Hope Never Dies” is encapsulated in this paperback novel’s brilliant cover illustration: Joe grimacing in determination behind the wheel, with Barack rising up beside him on the passenger side, tie flying, right arm pointing forward. That image all but shouts: “Yes We Can”

. . . solve this crime! And, by extension, “Yes We Can” . . . set a rotten world right again! For some readers, that cover illustration alone — and the fantasy it conjures up — will be worth the price of this book.

As is fitting, Biden is the narrator: He’s a rattling Dr. Watson to Obama’s Holmes. Shaffer does his best to generate Biden-isms to lend a smidgen of authenticity to Uncle Joe’s voice. Thus, at times of stress, Biden mutters, “Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick” and “Son of a buttermilk biscuit . . . we got bamboozled.”

Some aspects of this novel strain too hard for zaniness. As is often the case with screwball comedy, the slighter episodes are the funniest. Here’s a chase scene in which Biden and Obama, along with a Secret Service agent crouching in the back seat, speed down a country road, trying to overtake a motorcycle gang member who may be involved with the conductor’s murder. Biden, who’s driving, says: “The motorcycle whipped around a midsized sedan with Vermont plates, and I did the same, keeping pace. As we passed the sedan, I caught a glimpse of a small tuft of white hair poking out above the bottom of the window.

The driver’s head was so low, it was a miracle he could see. A pair of bony hands hung from the steering wheel like Halloween decorations.

‘Everybody wave to Bernie,’ I said.

Nobody laughed at my joke.”

I did laugh, but if you didn’t, perhaps this romp, sweetly goofy as it is, isn’t for you. Word is that “Hope Never Dies” is just the first of a projected series of ObamaBiden mysteries. That may be a bit too much of this bromance even for those who think that the last administration was the stuff that dreams are made of. n Corrigan is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Future of college: Wider presence, students for life JEFFREY J. SELINGO is a regular contributor to The Washington Post. He is the author of “There Is Life After College” and the best-selling “College (Un)Bound.”

Predictions about higher education’s future often result in two very different visions about what is next for colleges and universities. In one camp: those who paint a rosy pic­ ture of an economy that will continue to demand higher levels of education for an increasing share of the work­ force. In the other: those who believe fewer people will en­ roll in college as tuition costs spiral out of control and al­ ternatives to the traditional degree emerge.

“We are living in an incredible age for learning, when there’s so much knowledge available, that one would think that this is good news for higher education,” Bryan Alexander told me recently.

Alexander often writes about the future of higher education and is finishing a book on the subject for Johns Hopkins University Press.

“Yet we’ve seen enrollment in higher education drop for six consecutive years.”

Alexander believes that for some colleges and universities to survive, they need to shift from their historical mission of serving one type of student (usually a teenager fresh out of high school) for a specific period of time.

“We’re going to see many different pathways through higher ed in the future,” Alexander said, “from closer ties between secondary and postsecondary schools to new options for adults. The question is which institutions adopt new models and which try desperately to hang on to what they have.”

One university thinking about those new models is the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2015, Georgia Tech formed a commission on the future of higher education, and its 48 members were asked to imagine what a public research institution might look like in 2040. (I joined the group as an adviser.)

The commission’s task was

audacious, and I must admit that at first, I was skeptical. I had seen many colleges develop extensive plans that ended up collecting dust on a bookshelf. What interested me about Georgia Tech’s attempt was its lengthy time horizon. Not only did the university imagine it would be around in 20 years, but the timeline allowed the group to think of far-reaching ideas that could be enacted over decades.

“The fact is that to maintain affordability, accessibility and excellence, something needs to change,” Rafael Bras, Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, told me when he unveiled the report at the Milken Institute Global Conference this past spring.

The commission’s report includes many compelling ideas, but three point to the possibility of a very different future for colleges and universities.

1. College for life, rather than just four years. The primary recommendation of the Georgia Tech report is that the university turn itself into a venue for lifelong learning that allows students to “associate rather than enroll.” Such a system would provide easy entry and exit points into the university and imagines a future in which students take courses either online or face-to-

ROB FELT/GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

The Georgia Institute of Technology formed a commission to look at what a public research university might look like in 2040.

face, often in shorter spurts over the course of a lifetime.

“Students who we educate now are expected to have a dozen occupations,” Bras said. “So a system that receives students once in their lives and turns them out with the Good Housekeeping seal of approval to become alums and come back on occasion and give money is not the right model for the future.”

2. A network of advisers and coaches for a career. If education never ends, Georgia Tech predicts, neither should the critical advising function that colleges provide to students.

The commission outlines a scenario in which artificial intelligence and virtual tutors help advise students about selecting courses, navigating difficult classes and finding the best career options. The university has already successfully experimented with a new kind of teaching assistant in one course. In 2016, a computerized assistant named Jill Watson was used to guide students, who weren’t told until the end of the semester that some of them had been seeking advice from a computer.

But even for a university focused on science and technology, Georgia Tech doesn’t suggest in its report that computers will replace humans

for all advising. One recommendation is that the university help students establish a “personal board of directors,” which includes an evolving network of peers and mentors, both in-person and virtual.

3. A distributed presence around the world. Colleges and universities operate campuses and require students to come to them. In the past couple of decades, online education has grown substantially, but for the most part, higher education is still about face-to-face interactions.

Georgia Tech imagines a future in which the two worlds are blended in what it calls the “atrium” — essentially storefronts that share space with entrepreneurs and become gathering places for students and graduates. In these spaces, visiting faculty might conduct master classes, online students could gather to complete project work or alumni might work on an invention.

Whether Georgia Tech’s ideas will materialize is, of course, unclear. But this is clear: After remaining relatively stagnant for decades as enrollment grew, colleges and universities are about to undergo a period of profound change — whether they want to or not — as the needs of students and the economy shift. n

SUNDAY, JULY 15, 2018

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

‘Bad’ jobs don’t have to be so bad E.J. DIONNE JR. is a Washington Post columnist.

So many policy proposals aimed at reducing economic inequality emphasize moving disadvantaged people into higher-paying, higherskilled jobs, typically with more access to education and training.

We do need to invest far more in expanding opportunity for fellow citizens who have lost all hope for advancement. But there is a flaw in this thinking, as Steven Dawson argues in “Make Bad Jobs Better,” a compendium of his recent work published this year by the Pinkerton Foundation. If we define success “solely as securing a middle-class job,” he writes, “then we will limit ourselves to helping only a narrow segment of low-income workers improve their lives.”

Dawson focuses on the tens of millions of Americans who do very necessary work in our society and receive little reward for their efforts. He challenges the idea that “bad jobs” are destined to be bad forever and that little can be done to enhance them.

Consider that we mourn the decline of auto, steel and other manufacturing jobs that were seen in the past as at least as “bad” as the retail and service occupations of the new American working class. It took unions working to raise pay and benefits and social legislation limiting hours and protecting worker safety to make old-economy blue-collar jobs “good.”

The lesson is that what

constitutes good work is a matter of social and political decisionmaking — and choices by employers to see their workers as assets and not merely as costs.

Dawson is a pioneer in doing what he recommends. At the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, he helped create employee-owned cooperatives of home health-care workers, thereby converting what were once poorly paid jobs into pathways to independence, entrepreneurship and respect.

Dawson is scathing about the way our employment markets treat large numbers of very hardworking people. “A bad job is not simply the absence of a good job,” he writes. “A bad job destabilizes the individual, her family and

the community. A bad job not only fails to pay enough for decent food and shelter for a worker’s family, it can risk her health, disrupt any chance for a predictable family life, undermine her dignity, and deny her voice within the workplace.”

He notes that “the occupations that employ the largest numbers of low-income youth and adult workers . . . experienced higher than average real wage declines” in the years after the Great Recession. The pay drops were especially large for workers in retail, personal care and food preparation.

For many who find themselves at the bottom of the economy, the bane of their lives is instability: wage theft, part-time work, seasonal work, variable hours and unpredictable schedules — the problem of “not knowing when you will be called to show up to your next part-time shift.”

Low-wage jobs are also among the least safe.

Public policy has a role to play in making jobs better, starting with higher minimum wages, income supplements such as the earned-income tax credit, universal family leave and health-care coverage for everyone. We should be building on the Affordable Care Act, not gutting it.

Many low-income jobs are supported indirectly by government money (Medicaid especially), so public programs should be consciously geared not just to providing essential services but also to offering platforms for the improvement of work life itself, for enriched training and for more worker voice. These can, in turn, raise the standard of the services.

Dawson looks as well to private-sector employers as part of the solution. Especially when labor markets are tight, employers have an interest in satisfied, engaged and welltrained workers who welcome responsibility. This is one reason the Federal Reserve should be wary of steps that would increase unemployment.

We should not allow the melodramas of the Trump presidency to overshadow the problems we need to solve or distract us from the reforms and innovations that could change the lives of a great many struggling people.

Dawson writes that “fear and insecurity will remain, and deepen, unless having a job once again means securing stability, dignity and self-worth for ourselves and our families.”

When it comes to job quality, we need to get to work. n

SUNDAY, JULY 15, 2018

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

Schumer’s dissent may be his end DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post columnist.

Poor Chuck Schumer.

Those are not words I ever expected to write. The leader of the Senate Democrats is a smart cookie (perfect SAT score: just ask him!) from Brooklyn back when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, before the arrival of man buns and artisanal cheese. He’s the son of an exterminator, pronounced ’stermunatuh, for chrissake. Clearly, Schumer has plenty of brains and street savvy to take care of himself; the last thing he needs is pity from the sort of person who uses a semicolon.

But what a fix he’s in with President Trump’s nomination of federal judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The donors and activists of his party’s base are pushing him to maintain a united front against the conservative nominee. But if Schumer delivers, he might forfeit his chances of leading a Democratic majority in the foreseeable future.

That’s quite a prediction, given that the guy needs only two additional seats to take possession of the majority leader’s magnificent office with its sweeping views of the Mall — and control of the Senate’s business.

But Schumer’s tide may be going out. The coming midterm elections could hardly be less favorable for Senate Democrats,

whose incumbents are defending 10 seats in states that went for Donald Trump in 2016. Only one Republican incumbent is running in a state carried by Hillary Clinton.

Now the likely timing of the Kavanaugh confirmation vote — Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is promising to get it done in September — adds to the peril for Democrats in tossup races on red turf. They could really use a pass from Schumer to escape the no-win dilemma of choosing between the demands of their party and the leanings of their constituents.

Make no mistake: A vote against Kavanaugh will be highly controversial in those states.

Kavanaugh, 53, has impeccable credentials after 12 years of service on the second-most-

BY SHENEMAN

powerful court in the land, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The worst thing Democrats can honestly say about him is that he is a strong conservative.

What’s more, the White House rolled out the selection with a degree of polish and skill hitherto unseen in this administration.

The president himself was the impresario, using suspense to build a prime-time audience for an unveiling worthy of “The Bachelorette.” Kavanaugh targeted his simple and effective speech directly at Republican and independent women — the keys to any faint hope Schumer might harbor of swaying Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to help block confirmation. The judge portrayed himself as the son of a strong mother, husband of an accomplished wife, father of spirited daughters and fan of women’s basketball to boot.

Schumer knows deft messaging when he sees it. If the sight of a smooth-running Trump operation wasn’t enough to convince him that Kavanaugh will not be stopped, a headline in his hometown newspaper ought to have. “A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh,” by the influential Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar, was a doubly strong

endorsement by virtue of its appearance in the New York Times.

Despite these signals to move cautiously, Schumer leaped to Twitter to declare war: “I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have. . . . The stakes are simply too high for anything less.”

This was a mistake. A wise leader preserves options — including the option to fall back and fight another day on more favorable ground. Schumer’s base-pandering makes strategic retreat nearly impossible. If, in a few weeks, Kavanaugh’s nomination is humming along, a leader with room to maneuver could give cover to those endangered Senate Democrats by joining them in supporting the fait accompli. Instead, Schumer has left them high and dry in hostile territory.

The irony here is that Schumer’s base is only hurting itself. If a doomed stand against Kavanaugh strengthens the GOP’s hold on the Senate, conservative judges will be easier to confirm, and liberal ones more difficult, should a Democrat capture the White House.

Perhaps there’s still time for Schumer to think long-term. As they used to say in Brooklyn: Wait till next year. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Beatles BY

A LLAN K OZINN

The Beatles produced some of the most enduring music of all time and rose to a level of near­universal adoration that few other musi­ cians have achieved. But as the story of their brisk evolution from a scruffy, hard­working Liverpool dance hall combo to pop gods who reconfigured music and culture has been told, retold, debated and parsed, many myths have sprouted around them — some created by the Beatles themselves. Here are five.

MYTH NO. 1 The Beatles objected to trading leather outfits for suits and ties.

“In the beginning,” John Lennon told Melody Maker, the British music magazine, that in 1970, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, “. . . put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him.”

Lennon later complained to Rolling Stone that by giving up leather for suits, “we sold out.”

The other Beatles remembered things differently. “It was later put around that I betrayed our leather image,” Paul McCartney said in “The Beatles Anthology,” “but, as I recall, I didn’t actually have to drag anyone to the tailors.”

George Harrison said that “with black T-shirts, black leather gear and sweaty, we did look like hooligans. . . . We gladly switched into suits to get some more money and some more gigs.”

MYTH NO. 2 Ringo Starr was not a good drummer.

Starr has often been portrayed as a so-so drummer who became “a living symbol of good luck,” as Craig Brown called him in a 2005 column in the Telegraph. Discussions of Starr’s drumming often include a quotation attributed to Lennon, who supposedly said: “Ringo was not the best drummer in the world.

He wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles.”

Mark Lewisohn, the author of “Tune In,” discovered that this quote originated not with Lennon but in a 1983 television appearance by the British comedian Jasper

Carrott. What Lennon did say, in one of his final interviews, was that “Ringo is a damn good drummer,” and he noted that Starr had already been a professional, playing in one of Liverpool’s best bands, when the Beatles were taking their musical baby steps.

MYTH NO. 3 George Martin recognized the band’s talent right away.

Martin’s perspicacity in signing the band, after the rest of London’s record producers turned them down, is a pillar of the Beatles legend.

But Kim Bennett, a songplugger for EMI’s in-house publisher, said Martin had turned Epstein down, according to Lewisohn’s research. Epstein had also played his recordings for Sid Colman, Bennett’s boss. Colman wanted to publish some of the Lennon-McCartney songs, but without a record on the market, it would be difficult to sell the sheet music. So Colman tried to interest EMI’s producers in recording the group, with no more success than Epstein. Eventually he persuaded Len Wood, EMI’s managing director, to take them on. Wood was upset with Martin — thanks to a difficult contract negotiation and the discovery that Martin was having a romance with his own secretary. Wood assigned the Beatles to Martin’s Parlophone label as comeuppance.

MYTH NO. 4 Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles.

Lennon’s inseparability from

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The belief that the Beatles did not want to give up their leather outfits and wear suits and ties has been disputed by members of the band.

Ono during the Beatles’ final 16 months unquestionably contributed to the tensions in the already fractious group. But given everything else that had been going on — Harrison’s growing resentment about his songs being ignored, fights about how to stage a live concert for the “Let It Be” film, and business squabbles — the breakup cannot be pinned on her. “She certainly didn’t break the group up,” McCartney declared in an interview with David Frost on Al Jazeera in 2012, later adding, in a 2016 interview on the BBC “Mastertapes” radio program, that “the business thing split us apart.”

MYTH NO. 5 ‘Abbey Road’ was named for the Beatles’ recording studio.

“We take it as a great compliment that The Beatles should choose to name what turned out to be their last album after our studio,” Ken Townsend, the former general manager of

EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, said in “Abbey Road: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studios,” by Brain Southall, Peter Vince and Allan Rouse.

Originally, the LP was to have been called “Everest,” the engineer Geoff Emerick has said.

The band agreed to fly to Mount Everest to take the cover photo, but as the album neared completion, they decided that the trip was not worth the trouble.

As Emerick remembered it, Starr suggested that the group just go out to the street outside the EMI Recording Studios for the cover shoot. EMI changed the studios’ name to Abbey Road in 1970, to capitalize on the interest created by the album. n Kozinn, a music critic for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of “The Beatles: From the Cavern to the Rooftop” and “Got That Something!: How the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ Changed Everything.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 15, 2018

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