The Washington Post National Weekly - July 26, 2015

Politics Sanders’s history with NRA 4

Nation Let’s talk about sex, maybe? 9

Housing The rent is too darn high 17

5 Myths About sharks 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

BALANCING SECURITY AGAINST FREE SPEECH Facebook, Twitter and YouTube look to mute Islamic State without stifling other voices globally PAGE 12

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

2

Subscribe to The Wenatchee World from $19.99 for 12 weeks

and get digital access to The Washington Post. Free.

Print subscriptions to The Wenatchee World are now eligible for 52 weeks of digital access to The Washington Post.

Get the best in national news, political coverage, Pulitzer-winning journalism and all The Washington Post has to offer — anytime, anywhere on your tablet, smartphone and computer — at no additional cost!

Already a subscriber? Look for an e-mail from The Wenatchee World with instructions on how to sign up for your complimentary access. Or call our customer service line at 800-572-4433.

Not a subscriber? Go to www.wenatcheeworld.com/wapost/subscribe/

In partnership with

Benefit available through an agreement with The Washington Post and is subject to change or cancellation at any time without prior notice. Benefit available to current print subscribers of The Wenatchee World and is non-transferable. Limit one free Washington Post Digital Premium subscription per person. Additional restrictions may apply.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

ON LEADERSHIP

McCain plays his Trump card BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

D

onald Trump’s comments over the weekend criticizing Sen. John McCain’s war record mark a new low point, even for an ego-driven candidate who appears to have been out for a laugh. Among his remarks, Trump said, “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Monday morning, both Trump and McCain sat for separate interviews, responding to the political broadside that blew up over the weekend and prompted nearly universal condemnation of Trump from the rest of the GOP field. In his interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Trump railed against the media’s coverage of his remarks and tried to say he was misinterpreted — though he didn’t apologize.

And yet while Trump blamed others, McCain refused to do the same. When asked on “Morning Joe” if Trump owed him an apology, McCain said, “No, I don’t think so,” referencing a famous Theodore Roosevelt quote.

“I’m in the arena, as T.R. used to say.”

When asked, essentially, how it felt to have his grueling experience as a prisoner of war mocked by the flamboyant businessman, McCain also didn’t take the bait. And he refused to take personal credit, saying the “great honor of my life was to serve in the company of heroes. I’m not a hero.”

But McCain did say that Trump owed an apology to all the other veterans and families of veterans who had been “sacrificed in conflict and those who have undergone the prison experience in serving their country.”

Speaking of the many men and women who had “served and sacrificed — somehow to denigrate that in any way, their service, I

KLMNO WEEKLY

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG

KEVIN HAGEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Donald Trump, left, criticized the war record of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), right, last weekend. McCain responded Monday.

think is offensive to most of our veterans.”

McCain went on to paint an image of how he remembers the missing and dead, after being pressed about how he felt about Trump’s remarks. “Who are the real heroes?

They’re the 55,000 names that are down on the wall, engraved in black granite, that I stop by sometimes early in the morning and when the sun’s going down.”

People are already speculating that Trump’s comments could spell the end of his campaign and inflict damage on the Republican brand. At the least, such incredible lapses in judgment will make it that much harder for the businessman to get his apparent quest for the White House taken seriously.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 41

But while episodes like this may show some of the worst sides of the political process, McCain’s response is a reminder that they can also show us the best. His high-road remark is the very definition of how we should hope our leaders will respond when they’ve been openly criticized, no matter who’s doing the taunting.

Real leadership is not about shouting the loudest, or getting the biggest laughs, or even protecting a bruised ego. It’s about keeping the focus on other people, especially those who have made the kind of sacrifices that service members have made.

And sometimes, it’s about knowing just what to say when a critic comes one’s way.

McCain, after all, managed to throw at least a bit of shade at Trump, while still maintaining his decorum. The “arena” quote by Teddy Roosevelt that he cited in his “Morning Joe” interview is worth reading again in its entirety.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no ef­ fort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devo­ tions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Social media companies face the challenge of limiting terrorists’ voices while preserving global platforms for expression. Washington Post illustration; original image by Istockphoto.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

NRA’s support helped elect Sanders D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD Burlington, Vt. BY

A

few days before Election Day in 1990, the National Rifle Association sent a letter to its 12,000 members in Vermont, with an urgent message about the race for the state’s single House seat.

Vote for the socialist, the gun rights group said. It’s important.

“Bernie Sanders is a more honorable choice for Vermont sportsmen than Peter Smith,” wrote Wayne LaPierre, who was — and still is — a top official at the national NRA, backing Sanders over the Republican incumbent.

That was odd. Sanders was the ex-hippie ex-mayor of Burlington, running as an independent because the Democrats weren’t far enough left. He had never even owned a gun.

But that year, he was the enemy of the NRA’s enemy.

Smith had changed his mind about a ban on assault weapons.

The NRA and its allies wanted him beaten. They didn’t much care who beat him.

“It is not about Peter Smith vs.

Bernie Sanders,” LaPierre wrote, according to news coverage from the time. “It is about integrity in politics.”

Today, Sanders is a senator and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, drawing huge crowds with his calls to break up big banks, increase taxes on the rich and make college free.

The election of 1990 launched him. When Sanders won, he became the first socialist in Congress since the 1950s.

That campaign also marked the beginning of Sanders’s complicated relationship with the issue of gun rights — the one area where Sanders’s Democratic presidential rivals have been able to attack him from the left.

As a candidate in 1990, Sanders won over gun rights groups by promising to oppose one bill they hated — a measure that would establish a waiting period for handgun sales. In Congress, he kept that promise. The dynamic served as an early demonstration

MIKE STONE/REUTERS

Mad at GOP incumbent, gun group backed leftist Vermonter in 1990 that, despite his pure-leftist persona, Sanders was at his core a pragmatic politician, calculating that he couldn’t win in rural Vermont without doing something for gun owners.

“The gun vote brought us down,” said Judy Shailor, Smith’s 1990 campaign manager. She said she had warned gun groups that, in the long run, Sanders would prove too liberal for them.

“The gun groups would say to me, ‘We are going to put him in office for one term and teach Peter Smith a lesson. Then we’re going to vote [Sanders] out,’ ” Shailor said. “I said, ‘You won’t get him out.’ . . . He’s one of the best master politicians I’ve ever come across.”

At the time of the 1990 election,

Sanders was 49, a guy who’d had a big break and was looking for a bigger one.

Trying to break through He didn’t look like a politician.

With his wild hair and rumpled clothes, Sanders carried himself like a man recently startled out of a nap. But he had a sharp, relentless political mind. It had taken him from a small leftist party — where the other leftists called him “the silver tongue” — to Burlington City Hall, where Sanders had been elected mayor by a 10-vote margin. He served four terms.

But he couldn’t take the next step. In six runs for statewide office, Sanders lost six times — including in 1988, when he lost to

Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator from Vermont, speaks at a rally in Dallas on July 19.

Smith in a close race for Vermont’s House seat.

Then, down in Washington, Smith made a disastrous, rookie mistake.

He went to a hearing. And he started to think.

The hearing was not supposed to be about guns at all. The witnesses were students who had graduated from low-performing D.C. high schools and gone on to college. Smith asked one woman what she wished she’d had more of in high school. “Courage,” the woman said. She meant courage to confront the armed bullies who taunted her on the way to school.

“It personalized something for me that had always been at arm’s length,” Smith recalled recently.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

5

POLITICS “Which is that this woman lived in a culture of fear, and she faced danger and threat because of guns every day of her life.”

Just a few months before, as a candidate, Smith had promised to oppose new forms of gun control.

That’s why the NRA had supported him. And the NRA support was a major reason why he had won in Vermont, where guns are associated with hunting moose and deer and not committing crimes.

But to the freshman congressman, all that didn’t seem to matter as much now.

“I’ll never forget, [the next day] brushing my teeth, looking in the mirror in my bathroom and realizing, as clear as day, ‘I’m going to have to look at this face for the rest of my life in the mirror, and I want to be proud of the person I see,’ ” Smith said. “I went back and looked up the gun bills.”

Smith found a bill to ban the sale of some assault weapons. He signed on as co-sponsor.

That was April 1989. Almost immediately, Smith’s office was flooded with angry cards, petitions, faxes and letters.

“I will do all I can to see that Mr Smith does not go to Washington much longer,” Pamela K. Walters of Middlesex, Vt., wrote in May, one of the many such letters that are now preserved in Smith’s papers at the University of Vermont. Someone in Smith’s House office — perhaps worn down by the vitriol and certain that the letter would never be seen again — scrawled an expletive in capital letters over Walters’s note before filing it.

Local gun groups passed out bumper stickers: “Smith and Wesson, Yes. Smith and Congress, No.” There were pictures of Smith as Pinocchio, with the caption “The Big Lie.” “Let’s get even,” Ed Cutler, the current president of Gun Owners of Vermont, remembered thinking then.

The NRA made Smith the only incumbent that it actively opposed in 1990. The group eventually spent between $18,000 and $20,000 on advertising and direct mail in Vermont, according to an estimate from the time.

The beneficiary was Sanders, who was Smith’s main opponent in the 1990 House race. The Democrat in the race turned out to be so far left — suggesting the legalization of heroin — she made the socialist look moderate.

“In some ways, I’m happy that [gun rights groups’ support for Sanders in 1990] happened. And in some ways I seriously regret it. I’m happy I did it, because it sent a message around the state that the gun vote really does count around here.”

“The gun groups would say to me, ‘We are going to put him in office for one term and teach Peter Smith a lesson.

Then we’re going to vote [Sanders] out.

I said, ‘You won’t get him out.’ . . .

He’s one of the best master politicians I’ve ever come across.”

Ed Cutler, president of Gun Owners of Vermont

Judy Shailor, who was campaign manager for Smith, the GOP incumbent, in 1990

The unlikely alliance The NRA-Sanders bond was an imperfect love affair.

Sanders was with the gun group on one major issue: he opposed a mandatory waiting period for handguns, saying that was best left to states. But, on assault weapons, his position was the same as the one for which Smith was getting hammered.

“It’s an issue I do not feel comfortable about,” Sanders said after one debate, according to a memoir about the race by a former aide, Steven Rosenfeld.

Sanders couldn’t very well rail against Smith for his views on assault weapons when they were the same as his own. Instead, the aide said, Sanders wanted to let others “do our dirty work for us.”

Instead of talking about guns, then, Sanders talked about honesty.

“Unlike some people, I won’t change my views on the subject,” he told one pro-gun group.

It worked.

“Bernie Sanders was upfront with us,” an NRA official wrote to one of Smith’s constituents after the race. The letter ended up in another official collection of Smith’s papers. “He was viewed as the lesser of two evils.”

As the election approached, the socialist’s good luck kept getting better.

Smith, the incumbent, invited his own party’s president, George H.W. Bush, to a breakfast fundraiser in Burlington. Then, Smith criticized the president to his face, calling for Bush to do more to tax the rich. “Like all Vermonters, Peter’s a man of independent mind,” the baffled president said when it was his turn to speak.

On Election Day, it wasn’t close.

Sanders beat Smith, 56 percent to 40 percent.

Today, Sanders’s allies insist that gun control wasn’t a major reason for his victory. “A couple of percentage points, in an election

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/ THE WASHINGTON POST

Old campaign literature supporting Bernie Sanders is kept by the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, Vt. He lost in six runs for statewide office before winning a House seat in 1990.

He won reelection repeatedly and then was elected to the Senate in 2006.

KLMNO WEEKLY

that we won by 16 points,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s longtime aide and his current campaign manager.

Republicans insist gun control was the most important factor in the race. “The reason Bernie Sanders got elected to Congress, beat Peter Smith, was he sided with the NRA,” said Stephan Morse, a former Republican speaker of the Vermont House and a close friend of Smith. Smith declined to talk about the race.

The correct analysis could be somewhere in between.

One poll after the election showed that about 35 percent of Sanders voters said the gun issue was a major factor in their decision.

“The NRA did not elect Bernie.

But they provided much of the margin,” said Garrison Nelson, a longtime political observer at the University of Vermont.

Either way, Nelson said, the 1990 race was another step in the evolution of Sanders, who had risen from the leftist fringe by embracing allies and tactics that the fringe would not. In Burlington, he had made allies out of the police and worked out an uneasy relationship with big business.

Later, in Congress, he would join the Democratic caucus, attaching himself to the party’s seniority system, after decades of railing against the Democratic Party’s politics as weak-kneed.

In the 1990 race, he made a tacit ally out of the NRA, a powerful Washington lobby that has become a chief nemesis of the left and a fierce obstacle to gun control efforts in Congress and state capitals across the country. The alliance allowed the group to bash an opponent whose positions were almost identical to Sanders’s own.

‘Bernie wants to win’ “Most socialists don’t want to win. Most socialists want to lose, because they can blame it on the system” and justify their decision to remain outside it, Nelson said.

“But Bernie wants to win.”

After he was elected, Sanders stuck to the assurances he had given gun rights groups. In 1991, he voted against a measure that would have required a seven-day waiting period to buy a gun. In 1993, Sanders voted against a broader version of the bill — named for James Brady, the White continues on next page

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

from previous page

House press secretary who was shot in the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life — that became law.

That bill set up the national background check system in place today. But Sanders objected because it also included a provision for a temporary waiting period, said Weaver, his longtime aide.

Since then, Sanders has had a mixed record on guns. He supported an NRA-backed bill to shield gun manufacturers from liability lawsuits. But in 2013, in the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, he backed a provision that would have tightened gun laws.

Amid his surprising rise in the presidential race, Sanders has been attacked for that record by a super PAC that backs a Democratic rival, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

“The NRA even paid for ads attacking a Sanders opponent?” the video ad says. “Bernie Sanders is no progressive when it comes to guns.”

Sanders declined to comment for this article, as did LaPierre, the NRA executive who wrote the 1990 endorsement letter.

The senator has defended himself by saying that he’s uniquely qualified to lead a national dialogue on guns, since he can see the issue from both an urban and a rural perspective. And besides, he said, the NRA has given him little support.

Except once.

“In every single race that I have run, with the exception of one, the NRA and the gun lobbies and the people who are most interested in guns supported my opponent,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this year.

Among Vermont gun groups, there is some ambivalence about that long-ago election.

“In some ways, I’m happy that it happened. And in some ways I seriously regret it,” said Cutler, of the Gun Owners of Vermont. “I’m happy I did it, because it sent a message around the state that the gun vote really does count around here.”

But now, Cutler said, when he calls Sanders’s office to ask for a meeting, he never gets one. “I regret that it happened,” he said, “because, realistically, we have no input with him.” n

Kasich hopes his approach is ‘just right’ for N.H. voters B EN T ERRIS Nashua, N.H. BY

O

hio Gov. John Kasich announced his intentions to run for president of the United States, grabbed a plane in Ohio, went to a town hall in Nashua, N.H., and talked about the perfect temperature to serve gruel.

“I think the porridge [needs to be] the right temperature, not too hot and not too cold,” he told the crowd of a couple hundred New Hampshire voters. He was talking about trying to strike the right balance between maintaining civil liberties and protecting the country. But he could have been talking about his path to the White House.

He’s a conservative, but a compassionate one. He’s got attitude, but maybe not as much as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He’s establishment, but not part of a dynasty like former Florida governor Jeb Bush. And he says he can agree with Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) about some concerns with the Patriot Act, but knows there are grave threats to the country.

Kasich is one of the many candidates who is betting it all on New Hampshire. His hope is that his tell-it-like-it-is style, his mix of fiscal conservatism and moderate social stances, and his executive experience will play well in the first primary state.

The only problem is that he’s not the only person here.

Paul, Bush, and Christie are making the state a centerpiece to their campaign strategy (Paul, Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker all had events scheduled here this past week). Carly Fiorina and former Texas governor Rick Perry seem to be here every other day. And with 16 Republicans running, it’s hard to make any noise that breaks through the din. Especially when that din includes Donald Trump.

Kasich starts so far down the ladder — polling nationally at about 2 percent — that there’s a chance that he might not even make it onto the stage of the first

JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks at a town hall on July 21 in Nashua, N.H., as part of his campaign to win the GOP nomination for president.

Republican debate in his home state of Ohio. His three-day swing through New Hampshire is his best chance to get a bump in the ratings and get on stage. How he starts is crucial to how he finishes.

“When people see John Kasich, theywillseeanormalhumanbeing, someone who isn’t captured by the political environment,” said Christopher Shays, a former congressman from Connecticut who served with Kasich. “He’s a true believer, notinthepoliticsoftheeffort,butin the policy behind the effort.”

Over the course of an hour-long meeting at Rivier University, a Catholic liberal arts school in Nashua, Kasich responded to questions about immigration, climate, the defense budget and campaign finance reform.

“I absolutely share some concern with Rand Paul,” Kasich said, applying his Goldilocks approach to the Patriot Act. “If we don’t trust the governmenttodoabunchofthings, then why when it comes to government would we trust them 100 percent. . . . On the other hand, as a governor I get briefings from time to time about the threats, we get threats in Ohio, so it’s a balance, civil liberties, protection.”

In response to a question about

illegal immigration, he said, “I do not think we should be demonizing people who are law-abiding hard-working folks.”

“And I don’t like the fact that they jumped the line,” he continued, comparing them to people who “jump in front of people” at a Taylor Swift concert.

He said that Americans need to be “good stewards” of the environment but not “worship” the earth.

“What I would not do is throw a bunch of people out of work,” he said, noting that the “science is not perfect, it’s questionable.”

And while the town hall didn’t offer many fireworks, it doesn’t mean he didn’t give Democrats something to jump on.

Shortly after the speech, the Democratic National Committee sent out a statement that highlighted this quote from Kasich: “I learned a lot about the way America works when I worked at Lehman Brothers.”

“The last thing we need in a president is the Lehman Brothers approach to America,” the statement added. “Kasich said he learned how America works from a Wall Street firm integral to the crash that led to almost 9 million people out of work? That’s rich.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Struggling to grasp a movement

BY W ESLEY L OWERY AND D AVID W EIGEL

A

mid the politicians, wealthy donors and top Democratic Party officials invited to New York last month to watch Hillary Rodham Clinton announce her candidacy sat another VIP guest — a newcomer whose presence was sought after by Clinton aides.

DeRay Mckesson, 30, one of the most visible organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement that has sprung up in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., protests, had received a personal invitation to attend, and the campaign encouraged him to tweet his observations to his 178,000 followers.

He wasn’t impressed.

“I heard a lot of things. And nothing directly about black folk,” Mckesson wrote. “Coded language won’t cut it.”

Then this past week, Clinton rivals Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley each began a frenetic push to appease Black Lives Matter activists angry at the way the two men handled a demonstration by the group at a liberal conference last weekend. O’Malley appeared on a black-oriented talk show to say he made a mistake, while Sanders called activists to request meetings.

The strained interactions demonstrate the extent to which a vibrant, new force has disrupted traditional presidential politics.

Led by several dozen core activists, many of whom voted for the first time in 2008, Black Lives Matter has organized protests at times drawing hundreds of participants.

“If you are running to be the leader of the free world, it is your responsibility to seize the opportunity that the protest movement has created,” said Brittany Packnett, 30, a St. Louis-based activist who also serves on a White House task force formed after Ferguson.

“Unless candidates are willing to discuss legislative, statutory and legal action that they will support or take themselves as president in order to right deeplyentrenched historical wrongs, then they’re not really ready to

SID HASTINGS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Black Lives Matter group is forcing Democratic presidential candidates to adjust their rhetoric play at the level that the protest movement will require of them,” Packnett said.

Democratic leaders are taking note. The campaigns recognize the importance of reaching out to the movement, and understand the perils of ignoring it.

“While it’s inconvenient, or it makes some people uncomfortable, we can’t go back,” said Donna Brazile, who has taken heat for defending Clinton against criticisms from Black Lives Matter.

“Politicians need to tune in.”

The activists made their biggest campaign splash yet last weekend in Phoenix, at the annual Netroots Nation conference in their surprise disruption of the joint appearance by Sanders, a Vermont senator, and O’Malley, the former Maryland governor.

Some activists had already begun to view Sanders and O’Malley with skepticism.

Some had expressed concern, for instance, that Sanders — whose elections in heavily white

Vermont had not involved much outreach to black voters — was not talking about race in his presidential campaign.

And O’Malley had earned mixed reviews from a meeting a few days earlier in New York with more than a half dozen Black Lives Matter organizers. Several in attendance said he stuck to “talking points” and said he was not ready to talk specifics, though O’Malley’s deputy campaign manager, Karine Jean-Pierre, said he made it clear his goal was to “listen and hear what they had to say” and that he was “thinking through the policy.”

At Netroots Nation, the two candidates might have expected to receive a warm welcome. Instead, they seemed to wilt under the questions of protesters, who stormed space around the stage and recited names of blacks killed during police confrontations.

Sanders threatened to leave the stage as protesters demanded that he repeat the name of Sandra

“I heard a lot of things. And nothing directly about black folk,” DeRay Mckesson, pictured in Ferguson, Mo., in March, tweeted after Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential announcement.

Mckesson is one of the most visible organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bland, a black woman who died in a Texas jail cell earlier this month.

Then he canceled a series of meetings he had scheduled with some of the activists.

Sanders used an appearance in Houston this past week to discuss the Bland case, saying to thunderous applause that it is “unacceptable that police officers beat up people or kill people.” Then, late Tuesday night, after the release of video from the police’s confrontation with Bland, Sanders quickly released a stern condemnation, saying the video shows the need for “real police reform” and calling police abuse an “all-too-common occurrence for people of color.”

Clinton’s campaign appears to be closely following Black Lives Matter, activists said.

But some activists say that she, too, appeared slow to catch on to the rhetoric of the movement.

Last month, she endured some Twitter backlash during a speech at a black church near Ferguson when she drew a connection between her mother’s difficult early life and the struggles of many people today.

“What kept you going?” Clinton said she asked her mother. “Her answer was very simple: Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered.” Then Clinton added: “All lives matter.”

Some attendees said the remark made sense in context, but others were offended. One attendee told NPR that the comment “blew a lot of support” that Clinton had been building.

Though Clinton did not attend Netroots Nation, where she, too, might have faced demonstrators, she has joined her rivals in recent days in seeking to show solidarity with black activists and their cause.

“Black lives matter,” Clinton said in response to a question posed to her on Facebook by a Post reporter. “We need to acknowledge some hard truths about race and justice in this country, and one of those hard truths is that racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality.

Black people across America still experience racism every day.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Silicon Valley’s diversity problem Tech firms blame low numbers on lack of talent, but colleges are turning out more minority graduates than hiring indicates

BY C ECILIA K ANG A ND T ODD C . F RANKEL

Y

ahoo disclosed this month that African Americans made up just 2 percent of its workers, while Hispanics stood at 4 percent. Those revelations came days after Facebook reported that in 2014 it had employed just 81 blacks among its 5,500 U.S. workers.

Silicon Valley has a diversity problem, a contentious issue that has come into sharper focus in recent months as tech firms have sheepishly released updates on their hiring of minorities. The companies have pledged to do better. Many point to the talent pipeline as one of the main culprits.

They’d hire if they could, but not enough black and Hispanic students are pursuing computer science degrees, they say.

But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.

Last year, black students took home 4.1 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in computer science, information technology and computer engineering, according to an annual survey by the Computing Research Association of 121 top U.S. and Canadian colleges. That’s double the average of blacks hired at the biggest firms. Hispanics accounted for 7.7 percent of degrees.

“It would be a more convincing argument if their numbers more closely tracked what we were producing,” said Stuart Zweben, an Ohio State computer science professor. And Silicon Valley’s diversity problem exists not just on the tech side. Tech’s largest firms also significantly lag in their hiring of minorities for sales, marketing and public relations jobs.

At Google, blacks and Hispanics each accounted for just 4 percent of Google’s non-technical workforce last year. At Facebook, blacks made up 3 percent of its non-tech workforce in May, while Hispanics were at 7 percent.

In the overall U.S. workforce, blacks made up 13 percent of em-

ployees and Hispanics 16 percent.

The lack of minorities in Silicon Valley has been met by a rising sense of urgency. Firms began disclosing their diversity data last year under pressure from groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. And those num-

bers have underscored the extent of the problem in this tech hotbed, where former start-ups have matured into some of the nation’s leading economic engines. Further doubts about workplace equality in Silicon Valley were stoked this year by the high-profile

trial involving former Reddit chief executive Ellen Pao, who lost her sex discrimination case against storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Jackson rebutted claims by companies that there simply isn’t a robust talent pool of blacks and Latinos. He for years attended shareholder meetings for Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google and demanded that the companies release data on their workforces.

“They aren’t looking in the right places,” Jackson said in an interview. “And this doesn’t answer the question of why the vast majority of their workforce — which is nontech — is also lacking diversity.”

For a tech sector accustomed to hacking its way out of problems, making its workforce more diverse has emerged as a major challenge. And the industry has only recently admitted its shortcomings. Until last year, Google, Apple and Facebook, among others, declined to disclose data on workforce diversity. Some firms — such as Oracle, which has 122,000 workers worldwide and declined to respond to a request for comment for this article — still haven’t.

Yahoo also declined to comment.

In tech’s data-driven world, the numbers were bruising. For example, Facebook’s data showed that it added only seven black employees from 2012 to 2013, before hiring 36 between 2013 and 2014.

“We know we have work to do,” said Ime Archibong, a Yale grad who is black and works at Facebook as its strategic partnerships director. “We know that.”

Others said it will take time for efforts to reflect in their employment data.

“The pipeline is just a piece of it.

Our main issue is that any meaningful change for a company our size takes time,” said Roya Soleimani, a spokeswoman at Google.

Facebook’s challenge is that it is looking for a very specific group of computer science graduates, for instance, people who understand data systems and algorithms, said Maxine Williams, the global head of diversity at Facebook.

“We are trying desperately to have a more diverse workforce

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

9

NATION and deal with the constraints on the pipeline,” Williams said.

But some in the tech world believe the focus on the pipeline overshadows the wealth of qualified candidates already out there.

“It’s not even remotely a pipeline issue,” said Andrea Hoffman, who runs Culture Shift Labs, which helps companies find minority and female talent. Her company recently hosted a brunch in Palo Alto, Calif., for minority jobseekers in tech and finance.

Asians are the exception. They have been hired at rates far above other minority groups and even above their representation in the overall U.S. workforce. At Facebook, for example, 41 percent of the tech workforce is Asian.

The strong recruitment of Asians is attributed to the hiring of skilled immigrants, particularly from China and India, and high U.S. graduate rates of Asians in computer science programs.

More comprehensive data on the number of black and Latino partners at venture firms isn’t yet available, said Kate Mitchell, a partner at Scale Venture Partners and the head of a diversity task force for the National Venture Capital Association trade group.

“I think it says something that we don’t even have the numbers.

How do we even know it’s a problem if we don’t have the numbers to show it exists?”

In the past year, the biggest tech firms have announced a slew of programs aimed at increasing diversity in their ranks.

Facebook expanded its summer internship program for minority computer science majors and started a new internship for minority business majors. Facebook also implemented a rule that requires recruiters to interview minority candidates.

Google, Facebook and Apple expanded the number of colleges for recruiting. Google said it found that 35 percent of black computer science graduates were coming from historically black colleges. So two years ago, it began to embed engineers at those schools. This summer, Google hired 30 interns from historically black colleges.

Intel has been particularly aggressive. Earlier this year, the chipmaker pledged that its workforce would reflect the broader U.S. labor pool by 2020, and it created a $300 million venture fund designated for minority-led start-ups. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Consensus for more sex ed; division over what to teach BY

E MMA B ROWN

A

s colleges grapple with the widespread problem of sexual assault, there is a growing consensus that the nation’s schools need to do more to educate young people about sex and relationships before they ever set foot on campus.

A little-noticed measure tucked into the Senate’s 600-page bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind, which passed this month, would require the nation’s high schools to begin reporting how they teach about safe relationships, including what it means to consent to sex. It is one of the ways that advocates, educators and lawmakers are pushing to reexamine what children learn about sex and sexual assault while in school.

Many activists see public school sex education as a missed opportunity. But sex education is — and always has been — a delicate subject for schools, and while there is a general agreement that teens should be taught how to avoid sexual assault and harassment, there is no consensus about how best to do that.

“There has to be a specific focus on K-12 if you’re ever going to address the problem in colleges,” said Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women’s Law Center, which has filed suits against universities and school districts accusing them of failing to protect students from sexual harassment and assault. “There is a tremendous amount of work to do.”

College freshmen arrive on campus with vastly different concepts of what constitutes consensual sex and gaps in their knowledge that can leave them vulnerable to assault. A recent poll by The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in five women experienced unwanted sexual contact while in college. The poll also showed that two people can interpret the same behavior differently: More than 40 percent of students said that nodding in agreement established

SOURCE: GUTTMACHER INSTITUTE

consent, for example, and more than 40 percent said it did not.

But schools face a challenge as they seek to help fix this problem.

Buried in efforts to teach healthy relationships are the same tensions that have made schools a battlefield for advocates of different approaches to sex education.

It is one thing, for example, to teach teens that consent means “No means no,” a phrase that implies that students don’t want to and are not going to have sex.

But it is another to delve into the nuances of how two people make sure they both consent. That is a skill that some young people say should be more explicitly taught, but some parents find objectionable: How do you teach about consenting, they ask, without implicitly condoning casual sex?

“I think there are many school districts in the country where a teacher would get fired for having a frank discussion like that,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University historian.

“If you start talking about different ways of . . . expressing consent, I think you’re in a much more complex territory that involves a very frank acknowledgment of teenagers as sexual beings,” Zimmerman said.

Sex education in the United States is uneven. Fewer than half of states require that it be taught.

In schools that teach about sex, many focus on anatomy and preventing pregnancy and disease.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Many assault survivors who participated in the Post poll and follow-up interviews said they believe that schools could prevent sexual violence by providing more robust sex education classes.

One survivor, a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said she was raped repeatedly in a long-term relationship but didn’t realize it because she had never learned the concept of consent.

She believed that if her partner wanted sex, she had to comply.

That is akin to the message Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D) heard from activists he met at the University of Virginia after the publication of a now-discredited story about an alleged violent rape on that campus. Many students told Kaine that their high school classes had delved into reproductive biology but had little to say about consent or relationships.

“It was kind of a light-bulb moment for me,” said Kaine, who introduced the safe-relationships provision that is in the Senate’s bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind. “This is a public safety reality. If we can educate kids and thereby there will be fewer victims but also fewer perpetrators, then it is the right thing to do.”

But Kaine’s provision may not stand in the end.

The House has passed its own version of the bill that prohibits schools from using programs that “normalize teen sexual activity as an expected behavior.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

An enduring presence in Afghanistan S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Kabul BY

T

wo days before his presidential tenure ended last September, Hamid Karzai delivered farewell remarks to foreign diplomats. With his trademark flair, he began by thanking them for helping Afghanistan, and by the end he was reciting lines from Robert Frost.

In between, he declared that he would remain in the “service” of his successor, Ashraf Ghani, as well as Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani’s partner in the coalition government, according to an official transcript. The country’s first peaceful transfer of power, Karzai continued, would be his “legacy.”

Ten months later, Karzai has emerged as one of Ghani’s and Abdullah’s most vocal critics, engaging formidably in the political, diplomatic and tribal realms. That has triggered tensions at the highest levels of power — and fueled concernsthatKarzaiisseekingtodestabilize the fragile U.S.-backed government.

“He clearly sees a role for himself, and it’s not just as an elder statesman. He sees a role as a player,” said a Western diplomat.

“The more the vacuum continues, the greater the opportunities will be for him to play that role.”

Karzai declined requests for interviews. His allies say he is not seeking to undermine Ghani or Abdullah nor return to power but is only exercising his rights as an Afghan. “He has not formed a shadow government nor does he have the intention to do so,” said Karim Khoram, who served as Karzai’s chief of staff. “He’s not even keen to form an opposition party to the government.”

Karzai headed the country for nearly 13 years, first as an interim leader after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, and later as the elected president for almost a decade. As Ghani and Abdullah fought over election results last year, Karzai’s term stretched on longer than scheduled — an extension some say suited a president viewed as uneager to relinquish power.

“But I have promises to keep.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Former president’s loud criticisms raise concerns that he wants to weaken the fragile government And miles to go before I sleep,” Karzai said that September day, quoting Frost.

Since Ghani’s inauguration, Karzai has been working to expand his power base, Western diplomats and analysts say. On any given day, tribal elders, former ministers and governors, members of parliament, provincial officials and his clansmen line up at his residence to seek his advice and help.

They include many who have not received government jobs or who otherwise feel alienated by Ghani, who opted not to appoint Karzai’s ministers to his cabinet.

Karzai’s critics contend that he wants to maintain power to protect his family and loyalists from possible corruption charges. Some describe him as angry that Ghani and Abdullah do not solicit his advice. Others say he wants to protect his legacy by ensuring that the current government struggles.

Khoram rejected all of the assertions as baseless.

Karzai continues to meet regu-

larly with ambassadors and diplomats. He has visited Russia, China and India. He’s often accompanied by former officials, including his former foreign minister.

In Moscow last month, Karzai was afforded many of the same courtesies as a sitting head of state, and he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the Taliban and the emergence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. Neither Ghani nor Abdullah have made an official state visit to Moscow since taking office.

Afghan officials say they are not concerned about Karzai’s foreign overtures. But the officials are concerned about what they described as Karzai’s interference in government appointments and policies.

Karzai still has followers in parliament, in the religious establishment, and in provincial posts Add to this the political inertia and collective frustrations over a lack of jobs and rising prices, and Karzai’s popularity has soared on the street. He exudes more charis-

The resurgence of former president Hamid Karzai, pictured last month in Moscow, is a sign of the ongoing tussle for Afghanistan’s future.“He clearly sees a role for himself, and it’s not just as an elder statesman. He sees a role as a player,” said a Western diplomat.

ma than Ghani, a former World Bank official. In interviews, some Afghans expressed hope he would run again for the presidency, even though Karzai held office for two terms, the constitutional limit.

“My business was much better under Karzai,” said Mustafa Haidari. “Since Abdullah and Ghani have gotten power, they are busy with their internal disputes.”

“One hundred percent Karzai was better than this national unity government,” said Abdul Qader, a tribal elder from Samangan province. “A temporary government should be formed under Karzai, and everyone will support him.”

Supporters of Ghani and Abdullah acknowledge Karzai’s growing popular clout. But they also complain that they inherited corrupt and poorly managed government institutions, in a country where most international troops have left and foreign aid is shrinking.

“In Karzai’s time, they had jobs, they had more troops in the villages, but now it’s changing,” said the Abdullah aide. “That’s what makes people believe Karzai.”

In public, Ghani, who served as finance minister under Karzai, has been deeply respectful of Karzai. Those close to him say he now considers that a mistake. Tensions have grown, but in recent days both camps have attempted to smooth their differences.

Ghani “finally has come to understand that by giving him respect as an ex-president, Mr. Karzai took that as a sign that he was able instruct the president in the current policies of the government,” said Hashmat Ghani, the president’s younger brother.

Ghani last month reportedly told leaders in Kandahar, Karzai’s tribal stronghold, that there would be “no parallel governments,” a reference to Karzai’s influence. Still, Ghani in recent weeks has tried to appease influential people he has alienated. He has offered positions to the sons of former mujahideen commanders as well as to some Karzai loyalists.

One former official said he had received an offer.

“I’m going to discuss this with Karzai,” he said with a smile. n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Hostility flares, long after war’s end A NNA F IFIELD Beijing BY

T

here is little room for subtlety at the Museum of Chinese People’s Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the “Chinese People’s AntiJapanese War and the World Anti-Fascist War Victory Commemoration Day,” as the end of World War II is known here, the museum has an array of wartime Japanese artifacts — including flags, medals and guns — in a display case under a glass floor.

“We want to keep Japan under our feet,” Li Yake, a 22-year-old college student doing a summer internship at the museum, said as she led visitors around the exhibition.

Adults and children posed for photos atop the glass display case, smiling and making a V sign with their fingers, while one man carefully lined up a shot of his foot over a Japanese flag.

Nearby was the table where “China accepted Japan’s surrender,” as the sign explained. A security guard kept a close watch.

Beijing and Tokyo have been edging toward improved relations: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been invited to the huge anniversary military parade that will be held in Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3, China’s Victory Day, although he hasn’t yet decided whether to go, and there is talk of a summit with China’s President Xi Jinping this fall.

But at the same time, China’s propaganda machine has been ratcheting up the anti-Japanese rhetoric, prompting suggestions that it is trying to stoke fears of new Japanese militarism to focus attention on a foreign threat rather than Xi’s own ruthless efforts to centralize power.

“Anti-Japanese nationalism is so high and so combustible,” said Xie Yanmei, a Beijing-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, noting that the Chinese authorities unleashed a similar wave of anti-Japanese nationalism in the 1990s. Then, it was part of an effort to legitimize the lead-

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

China ramps up its rhetoric against WWII-era Japan with museum exhibits and entertainment ership and stoke national unity after the Tiananmen Square incident. “It’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle.”

On Tuesday, China sharply criticized Japan over its annual defense report, which described China’s efforts to expand its footprint in the East and South China seas as “unilateral” developments. Beijing accused Tokyo of exaggerating the “China military threat” and of trying to stir up tensions in the region, but at the same time it seemed to be trying to avoid derailing a broader effort to improve relations between the two countries.

Today there’s the special exhibition at the museum with thousands of photos and relics, many of which are on display for the first time. In line with Xi’s ambitious project to revitalize communist rule and to secure the Communist

Party’s future, the exhibition stresses the party’s role in securing China’s victory, with signs noting the party’s “extraordinary courage and wisdom” and lauding Xi’s current leadership.

On a recent day, children stood at the section devoted to the Nanjing Massacre, gawking at a skull in a display case and photos of severed heads, dead babies and emaciated Chinese prisoners at a labor camp.

But the exhibition is just a small part of the state-directed efforts to remind the Chinese of Japan’s wartime brutality.

China’s national archives next month will publish a selection of confessions of Japanese war criminals, and state authorities are promoting war-related entertainment.

There’s the movie “Ballet in the Flames of War,” a love story of a

A visitor photographs artifacts stored under a glass floor at a Beijing exhibit that coincides with the 70th anniversary of World War II’s end.

Chinese girl who saved a Russian soldier injured by Japanese troops, and the TV series “The Waves,” about a group of intellectual youths who started a battlefield shooting team during the war and contributed to the revolutionary cause.

Relations between Japan and China have long been strained, but there is now more attention than usual focused on the historical issues that divide Japan and China because of the commemorations of the war’s end.

Abe, a conservative, will deliver a statement on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan’s defeat, in which he is expected to express “deep remorse” over Japan’s wartime actions but to stop short of apologizing.

The focus on history has been sharpened by Abe’s efforts to reinterpret Japan’s pacifist constitution and the progress of securityrelated legislation in Japan that would allow that country’s soldiers to fight abroad for the first time since World War II, sparking fear among Japan’s neighbors that the country is remilitarizing.

As China recently released official figures of its losses during the war — 35 million killed or injured and $100 billion worth of lost property — Chinese analysts said the data would help “clarify” wartime history and will act as a deterrent to some Japanese right-wingers.

They were “a response to denials by Japanese right-wing forces of the [war] aggression and a reflection of the sacrifices made by Chinese people,” Li Zhongjie, former deputy director of the party history research office under the Communist Party of China Central Committee, told reporters at a news conference.

Peng Changzheng, a painter from the central Chinese city of Chengdu, said that it was important to learn from the past.

“Although the war is over, we are not trying to hold on to the hatred. We are trying to remember history so that history won’t repeat itself,” he said at the exhibition. “We want to remember the history so that we can face the future, so that we can avoid such wars and create a better life.” n

The problem of reining in terrorist propaganda on social media

W

BY S COTT H IGHAM AND E LLEN N AKASHIMA

hen a lone terrorist slaughtered 38 tourists at a Tunisian resort on June 26, the Islamic State turned to one of America’s leading social-media companies to claim responsibility and warn of more attacks on the world’s nonbelievers.

“It was a painful strike and a message stained with blood,” the Islamic State announced on Twitter after the massacre in Sousse, a popular destination for Europeans on the Mediterranean. “Let them wait for the glad tidings of what will harm them in the coming days, Allah permitting.”

Three days before the assault, the Islamic State relied on another popular U.S. socialmedia platform, Google’s YouTube, to promote a grisly propaganda video of three separate mass killings. Men accused of cooperating with U.S.-coordinated airstrikes in Iraq and Syria are seen being incinerated in a car, drowned in a cage lowered into a swimming pool and decapitated by explosive necklaces looped around their necks.

Versions of it would remain on YouTube, even as company executives proclaimed during an international advertising festival that week in Cannes, France, that Google would not provide a “distribution channel for this horrible, but very newsworthy, terrorist propaganda.”

As the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and

ISIL, continues to hold large parts of Iraq and Syria and inspire terrorist attacks in more and more countries, it has come to rely upon U.S. social-media companies to summon fresh recruits to its cause, spread its propaganda and call for attacks, according to counterterrorism analysts.

“We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world, including here in the United States,” President Obama said July 6 at the Pentagon.

“So the United States will continue to do our part, by working with partners to counter ISIL’s hateful propaganda, especially online.”

The social-media savvy of the militant group is raising difficult questions for many U.S. firms: how to preserve global platforms that offer forums for expression while preventing groups such as the Islamic State from exploiting those free-speech principles to advance their terrorist campaign.

“ISIS has been confronting us with these really inhumane and atrocious images, and there are some people who believe if you type ‘jihad’ or ‘ISIS’ on YouTube, you should get no results,” Victoria Grand, Google’s director of policy strategy, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “We don’t believe that should be the case. Actually, a lot of the results you see on YouTube are educational about the origins of the group, educating people about the dangers and violence. But the goal here is how do you strike a balance between enabling people to discuss and access information about ISIS, but also not become the distribution channel for their propaganda?”

Some lawmakers and government officials say the companies are not going far enough.

“They are being exploited by terrorists,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin said in a recent interview. “I think there is recognition now that there is a problem, and so we’re starting to see people at the companies address additional resources.

But more needs to be done because we’re still seeing the threat, and the threat is increasing, not decreasing.

“It’s not a problem just here in the United

26,377 VIEWS

States. I think they’re hearing it from governments and customers from throughout the world.”

A field analysis in May by the Department of Homeland Security warns that the Islamic State’s use of social media is broadening the terrorist group’s reach.

“ISIL leverages social media to propagate its message and benefits from thousands of organized supporters globally online, primarily on Twitter, who seek to legitimize its actions while burnishing an image of strength and power,” according to the analysis. “The influence is underscored by the large number of reports stemming from social media postings.”

In Europe, some governments are requiring social-media companies to block or remove terror-related posts.

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill that would require social-media companies to alert federal authorities when they become aware of terroristrelated content on their sites. The bill is designed to provide law enforcement agencies with information about potential terror plots.

It would not require firms to monitor any users or their communications.

Putting more pressure on the social-media companies, a U.N. panel last month called on the firms to respond to accusations that their sites are being exploited by the Islamic State and other groups.

In the United States, government regulation of speech, regardless of how offensive or hateful, is generally held to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The socialmedia companies — each with its own culture, mission and philosophy — have been governing how and when to block or remove terrorrelated content.

The revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance have also made the tech companies wary of cooperating with Washington.

Facebook has been the most aggressive of the large social-media companies when it comes to taking down terror-related content.

The company has adopted a zero-tolerance

policy and, unlike other social-media companies, proactively removes posts related to terrorist organizations. Facebook also relies on its users to alert the company to posts that promote or celebrate terrorism and hires screeners to review content that might violate its standards.

“We don’t allow praise or support of terror groups or terror acts, anything that’s done by these groups and their members,” said Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor who heads global policy management for Facebook.

Of all the large social-media companies, Twitter has been the most outspoken about protecting freedom of speech on its platform.

Still, the company recently updated its abuse policy, stating that users may not threaten or promote terrorism.

“Twitter continues to strongly support freedom of expression and diverse perspectives,” according to a statement by a Twitter official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of recent death threats against employees by Islamic State supporters. “But it also has clear rules governing what is permissible. . . . The use of Twitter by violent extremist groups to threaten horrific acts of depravity and violence is of grave concern and against our policies, period.”

Another challenge for the companies: It is often difficult to distinguish between communiques from terrorist groups and posts by news organizations and legitimate users. Internet freedom advocates also note that much of what groups such as the Islamic State are posting can be seen as part of the historical record — even though many of the photographs and videos are horrific.

They point to the memorable 1968 Associated Press photograph of South Vietnam’s national police commander shooting a suspected Viet Cong fighter in the head on a Saigon street. They wonder how that Pulitzer Prizewinning image, which came to symbolize the chaos and brutality of the Vietnam War, would be handled in the age of social media and modern digital warfare.

“You want to live in a world where people continues on next page

4,427 VIEWS

4,475 VIEWS

54,735 VIEWS YOUTUBE

Google, which owns YouTube, has said it won’t provide a distribution channel for Islamic State videos, but some material remains on the site.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

have access to news — in other words, documentary evidence of what is actually happening,” said Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive and chief U.S. technology officer who now is a partner in the tech and media start-up firm Betaworks in New York. “And an ISIS video of hostages being beheaded is both an act of propaganda and is itself a fact. And so if you’re a platform, you don’t want to suppress the facts.

On the other hand, you don’t want to participate in advancing propaganda.

“And there is the conundrum.”

‘Pure evil’ Before the rise of social media, many of the three dozen video and audio messages Osama bin Laden issued before his death were recorded in remote locations, smuggled out by couriers, and aired on what was then a largely unknown television station based in Qatar called Al Jazeera. Weeks could pass between the time when bin Laden spoke and when he was heard.

Al-Qaeda operatives communicated through password-protected forums and message boards on the Internet. Access was tightly controlled.

“It was a different time,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, which tracks online communications of terrorist organizations. “The jihadi groups decided what could be posted and released. Twitter became the way around the forums. It became the Wild West of jihad.”

Before his death, bin Laden had come to recognize the revolution that followed the launch of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.

“The wide-scale spread of jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the Jihadist Web sites [are] a major achievement for jihad,” bin Laden wrote in a May 2010 letter that was later found by U.S. Special Operations forces inside his Pakistan compound.

Al-Shabab, a militant group in Somalia allied with al-Qaeda, became one of the first terrorist organizations to use Twitter for both propaganda and command and control during an attack, according to terrorism analysts.

The group set up Twitter accounts under al-Shabab’s media wing, called HMS Press.

In September 2013, al-Shabab attracted worldwide attention when it live-tweeted a terror attack it carried out at the upscale Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi .

“What Kenyans are witnessing at #Westgate is retributive justice for crimes committed by their military, albeit minuscule in nature,” HMS Press tweeted. A short time later, the group posted another tweet: “Since our last contact, the Mujahideen inside the mall confirmed to @HMS_Press that they killed over 100 Kenyan kuffar & battle is ongoing.”

In the end, more than 60 people were killed and an additional 175 wounded. Twitter took down those accounts that day, marking one of the first times the company removed material posted by a terrorist organization. But alShabab quickly created new Twitter accounts

JONATHAN KALAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

under different names — illustrating both the utility of the platform and the difficulty of policing it.

The attack and how it played out in real time inspired terrorists around the world.

The Islamic State has gone on to make Twitter one of its most important tools.

FBI Director James B. Comey testified to Congress this month about how the Islamic State is reaching out through Twitter to about 21,000 English-language followers. The group’s message, he said, is, “Come to the so-called caliphate and live the life of some sort of glory or something; and if you can’t come, kill somebody where you are; kill somebody in uniform; kill anybody; if you can cut their head off, great; videotape it; do it, do it, do it.” He described it as “a devil on their shoulder all day long, saying: Kill, kill, kill, kill.”

Comey also said that Twitter has become “particularly aggressive at shutting down and trying to stop ISIL-related sites. I think it led ISIL to threaten to kill their CEO, which helped them understand the problem in a better way.”

Others are not convinced.

“Twitter is providing a communication device, a loudspeaker for ISIS,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador who now runs the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit group that tracks terrorists and attempts to disrupt their online activities. “If you are promoting violence and a call to violence, you are providing material support. Twitter should be part of the solution. If not, they are part of the problem.”

At a Constitution Project dinner in April honoring Twitter for its leadership on First

A woman runs for cover in Nairobi’s Westgate mall, which came under attack on Sept. 21, 2013.

The Somali terror group al-Shabab attracted worldwide attention when it live-tweeted its attack.

Amendment issues, Colin Crowell, the firm’s head of global public policy, acknowledged that Twitter has hosted “painful content” and content reflecting “terrorism, government repression” on its site. But, he said, “it is also a place where people can find . . . information, conversation and where empathy can be shared.”

The “key thing,” he said, “for us at Twitter is to recognize our role as the provider of this open platform for free expression . . . to recognize that that speech is not our own.”

It is “precisely because it’s not our own content that we feel we have a duty to respect and to defend those voices on the platform,” Crowell said. “The platform of any debate is neutral. The platform doesn’t take sides.”

In August 2014, the Islamic State uploaded a video on YouTube and other sites showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley .

A succession of other videotaped beheadings of Americans and Britons followed — Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, David Haines, Alan Henning — as well as the immolation of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh and the mass killings of Syrians, Kurds and Coptic Christians, among others.

Each slaying became a carefully orchestrated and slickly produced event.

“Pure evil,” President Obama called Kassig’s beheading.

For Facebook, the killings marked a turning point. The company made it easier for its 1.4 billion users — the largest in the world — to report content from suspected terrorist groups, and it began to aggressively remove their posts. The company also deployed teams of people around the world to review content that had been flagged as terrorist-related to determine whether the posts were in fact from terrorist groups in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Facebook has banned terror-related content from its pages for more than five years. In March, the company updated its community standards, explicitly prohibiting posts that praise or celebrate terrorist organizations and their leaders.

Bickert, Facebook’s policy chief, said posts flagged by users are examined by “operations teams” of content reviewers stationed in four offices around the world.

“We want to make sure we’re keeping our community safe, and we’re not a tool for propaganda,” Bickert said. “On the other hand, we can see that people are . . . talking about ISIS and are concerned about ISIS, in part, because they’ve seen this imagery and it makes it very real to people. So none of these issues are easy.”

No quick fixes Confronting the Islamic State online and removing its material is a constant challenge, computer scientists say. Lawmakers, government officials and terrorism experts frequently cite social-media companies’ efforts to rid their sites of child pornography. If they can remove that content, why can’t they screen out tweets and posts from terror groups?

From a computer science standpoint, solv-

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

15

COVER STORY ing the child pornography problem was relatively straightforward. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children maintains a database of thousands of photographs of child pornography, images that are frequently downloaded by pedophiles and traded over the Internet. Using software called Microsoft PhotoDNA, images are scanned and identified using unique digital markers.

Every time a new image is uploaded onto a site, a company can run it against the database, which compares the digital markers.

Anything that matches is deleted and, by federal law, reported to the national center and then to law enforcement agencies.

Many social-media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, rely on the software, which can recognize images in still photos, but not videos.

Flagging terror-related content is more complex — but not impossible, computer scientists say.

Hany Farid, a Dartmouth computer science professor who co-developed Microsoft PhotoDNA, said the software is licensed to the national center solely to identify images of child pornography. But he said the software could be used to flag terror-related propaganda. For example, the software could identify a photograph of Foley, the American journalist, allowing companies to catch images of his beheading before they appear on their sites.

“The technology is extremely powerful, but it’s also limited,” Farid said. “You can only find images that you’ve already found before.”

Social-media companies also could download images of the Islamic State’s black flag, an image frequently displayed on the group’s propaganda posts and communiques, and create “hash values,” or digital fingerprints, of the images to search for them online, computer scientists say.

But while social-media companies could use such techniques to detect every post with an Islamic State flag, not all of those posts would necessarily have come from the terrorist group. A journalist could have tweeted out a link containing material from the Islamic State, or a government agency or think tank could have issued a report about the group that contains an image of the flag.

The sheer volume of the content on socialmedia sites also poses a challenge, computer scientists said. Twitter has 302 million active users who send out 500 million tweets a day.

YouTube has more than 1 billion users. Every minute of every day, they upload more than 300 hours of video.

“There is a long history of government asking technology companies to do things they can’t do. They say America has put a man on the moon. Why can’t the companies do this?” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “People treat computers like magic boxes. There is no silver bullet here. Companies are going to be reluctant to roll out technology that is going to have a high rate of false positives.”

BRITTANY GREESON/THE WASHINGTON POST

U.S. technology companies “are being exploited by terrorists,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin recently said.

Whac-a-Mole As the more established social-media companies become more aggressive in monitoring and removing terror-related content, groups such as the Islamic State are also migrating to lesser-known sites, where they can share their messages and videos. The sites include Instagram, Tumblr and Soundcloud, according to terror experts.

One of the sites, the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, has been around for nearly 20 years.

The archive was founded in 1996 to provide the public with free access to millions of documents and videos and clips and Web pages — almost anything that has been on the Web. It is probably best known for its Wayback Machine. So far, it has captured and stored nearly 150 billion Web pages.

In the past year, the Islamic State has created several accounts on the archive and has been using the site to host video and audio productions, online magazines and radio broadcasts, according to terrorism experts.

Internet Archive’s office manager, Chris Butler, told The Post that his organization is removing videos of beheadings and executions whenever it becomes aware of them, either during routine maintenance of the site or after outside complaints.

Twitter has recently stepped up efforts to remove terrorist accounts. In April, it took down 10,000 accounts over two days. That has led security researchers such as Daniel Cuthbert to lament the loss of what he saw as a valuable source of intelligence.

Cuthbert, chief operating officer of Sensepost, a cybersecurity firm, supports removal of

KLMNO WEEKLY

videos of beheadings and other content that “glorifies ISIS.” But he said he has lost a window into conversations between Islamic State members, supporters and potential recruits.

“I no longer have the ability to see who the key people are in ISIS when it comes to a social-media campaign, and how they’re tweeting, who they’re tweeting to, and how many are British nationals who may be getting groomed,” said Cuthbert, who is based in London.

After Twitter conducted the mass takedown, Cuthbert requested access to Twitter’s “firehose” — its entire stream of tweets. But a Twitter employee denied his request, citing concerns that he was sharing the material with law enforcement.

“We have certain sensitivities with use cases that look at individuals in an investigative manner, especially when insights from that investigation are directly delivered to law enforcement or government agencies to be acted upon,” the employee said in an e-mail to Cuthbert, which he shared with The Washington Post.

The FBI’s Comey told reporters “there’s actually a discussion within the counterterrorism community” as to whether it is better to shut the accounts down or keep them up so they can be tracked for intelligence purposes.

“I can see the pros and cons on both sides. But it’s an issue that’s live,” he said.

Counterterrorism officials say the constantly evolving social-media landscape is providing more places for groups such as the Islamic State to hide in cyberspace. Finding and shutting down sites and accounts is starting to resemble a carnival game of Whac-a-Mole, they say. As soon as one site or account is taken down, another pops up. As soon as one platform starts aggressively monitoring terrorist content, militants migrate to another.

Worse, investigators and terrorism analysts fear that the Islamic State and other terrorist groups are moving beyond public-facing social-media platforms for recruitment, increasingly relying on encrypted sites where their communications can continue largely undetected.

Comey recently said he is concerned that the Islamic State will use Twitter or another popular social-media platform to make contact with followers before “steering them off of Twitter to an encrypted form of communication.’’

John D. Cohen served as a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security. He said counterintelligence officials have traditionally searched for the proverbial needle in a haystack when trying to identify terrorists and their plots.

The explosion of social-media sites, he said, has complicated the search beyond compare.

“The haystack is the entire country now,” Cohen said. “Anywhere there’s a troubled soul on the Internet and a potential Twitter follower, that haystack extends. We’re looking for needles. But here’s the hard part: Increasingly, the needles are invisible to us.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY

MUSIC

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

T

hey are the songs of summer, the soundtracks to swim meets, weddings and the boardwalk that seem to never turn off, playing over and over again — and then again.

A few years ago, it was “Call Me Maybe,” played so relentlessly that an alternative title materialized on YouTube: “Call Me Never.” This summer it’s “Shut Up and Dance.”

“This woman is my destiny,” Walk the Moon croons, “She said ooh ooh ooh . . .” and you can hear the rest by opening the door to any mall: “Shut up and dance with me.”

Tunes have spun on repeat since the days of Greek choruses, but now social scientists are trying to explain how these songs become so viral and addictive. Some studies pin it on background singers. Others tie it to high pitches.

One attempted to find a link to our gross domestic product.

The newest explanation — and one attracting considerable scholarly interest — looks at lyrics and how the brain processes them.

After studying every Billboard hit since 1958, researchers at the University of Southern California have discovered that a song’s popularity is tied to the simplicity of the lyrics and how often they are repeated, exposing the brain’s weakness for plainness.

“Tempo does not appear to matter,” the USC researchers wrote in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “While every artist strives to create a catchy hook, they may also consider striving to write a coherent song in which the chorus is repeated frequently while utilizing a limited vocabulary.”

Walk the Moon seems to have hit upon the perfect lyrical lexicon in “Shut Up and Dance,” four simple words repeated 12 times, though for DJs, lifeguards and mall security guards, after hearing it for the 60th time, it can feel like an echoing albatross.

Evan Reitmeyer, a Washingtonarea DJ, is asked to play the song at almost every wedding he works.

“It’s so simple and so repetitive,” he said. “The first time I heard it, I said, ‘That’s a hit.’ You can just tell right away.”

But why?

The researchers behind the study think they know: processing fluency. That’s a theory in psychology that explains, as one study

Simple songs top charts, repeatedly

BENNETT RAGLIN/GETTY IMAGES

Oh, don’t you dare look back / Just keep your eyes on me / I said, “You’re holding back,” / She said, “Shut up and dance with me!” / This woman is my destiny / She said, “Ooh-ooh-ooh, Shut up and dance with me” “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon

recently put it, how “people are more likely to engage in a given behavior the less effort it requires.” Which basically means this: Human brains get really jazzed about things that are easy to grasp.

That might sound obvious, but it’s a powerful force in the marketplace.

Processing fluency explains the success of simple designs, like the smooth rounded corners of the iPhone. It explains why directions printed in a simple font are deemed easier to follow than the exact same directions printed in a complicated font. And it explains repetition in numerous famous ad jingles, such as this classic for Chili’s ribs: “I want my babyback babyback babyback.” (We apologize if that tune is now stuck in

your head again.)

“If it’s easier, it feels better,” said Joseph Nunes, a USC professor and co-author of the repetition study.

“If it feels better, it tells me I like it more. If I have a positive feeling about something because it’s familiar, then I think I like it more.”

But there’s a catch, Nunes added: “Whether or not you really like it is a philosophical question.”

Repetition has been a hallmark of music since there has been music. Greek choruses got their name from the masked actors who repeated, in unison, lines that were easy to grasp. Composers in the 18th century used repetition. Even the Beatles couldn’t resist: In George Harrison’s 1987 solo hit “Got My Mind Set on You,” he repeats the words “set on you” 20 times, though that seems like noth-

Repea t 12 timeed s!

Nicholas Petricca of Walk The Moon performs on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on July 10 in Central Park in New York. Walk the Moon is responsible for this year’s inescapable song of the summer, “Shut Up and Dance.”

ing compared with Meghan Trainor’s 2014 hit “All About That Bass.”

Number of times the word “bass” is repeated: 40.

“Repetition has always been the trans fats of song writing,” said Sean Ross, vice president of music and programming at Edison Research, which consults on song selection with radio stations. “It’s done because it works.”

Nunes and his colleagues discovered just how powerful repetition is in their study. Besides analyzing the lyrics in Billboard hits, they asked study participants to rate parts of songs based on the repetition in lyrics. The lessrepetitious parts were deemed novel, thus less familiar. The repetitive parts were deemed familiar, translating easily into fluency.

The researchers did not find a number in which repetition was deemed annoying.

“The more repetitive, the better,” Nunes said. “There is no wearout.”

The study also showed that there is a sort of chicken-and-egg effect of these repetitive songs in the ether: The more repetitive the song, the more it is liked (chicken); the more repetitive the song, the greater the odds that it will debut in the Top 40. When songs hit the Top 40 — sometimes helped along by programmers trying to hand-pick hits at big radio networks — that breeds even more repetition because Top 40 stations spin the same songs multiple times a day (egg).

There is no escape.

These songs are used for newlyweds to make grand entrances at their receptions and to get people out of their seats at bar mitzvahs, and they are lip-synced in video mashups on YouTube, which invariably make their way to social media, where they spread even further. A search on YouTube for “Shut Up and Dance” reveals 149,000 videos. “Call Me Maybe,” with 11 pleas for calls: 649,000.

The soundtrack changes every year. That’s the good news for the repetition-weary: These songs eventually die out, emerging again years down the line at weddings as nostalgic moments.

“Call Me Maybe,” so hot a couple of years ago, is now rarely heard.

But life repeats itself: Someone, somewhere is recording a repetitive song right now that will invade the airwaves next summer.

Might as well just shut up and dance. n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

17

HOUSING

KLMNO WEEKLY

Where rent devours paychecks BY

J ONNELLE M ARTE

M

ore people than ever are renting instead of buying homes, but being a renter isn’t getting any easier.

For many households, the monthly rent check is so big that it eats up the majority of their paycheck — and the burden is growing. Some 20.7 million rental households — or about half of all renters– spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2013, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. About 11 million of those households spent more than half of their paycheck on rent and utilities, up 37 percent from 2003, the study found. (Financial advisers typically recommend that people spend less than a third of their pay on housing costs.)

As the map above shows, rent-

ers in cities that people expect to be expensive, like New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., aren’t the only ones struggling to pay the bills. “The rental housing crisis is everywhere,” says Angela Boyd, vice president of advocacy at Enterprise Community Partners, an organization that advocates for affordable housing.

Take Miami, where close to 36 percent of renters spent more than half of their pay on rent and utilities in 2013, the highest of the 100 metro areas studied in the report.

Someone earning the median household income of $32,000 and paying the median monthly rent bill of $1,100 would spend 39 percent of their pay on housing.

In some cities where housing is less expensive, wages are still not high enough to make the rents there affordable.

In New Orleans, for instance, 35 percent of renters dedicate

more than half of their pay to housing, the second highest share for the cities studied. Many people working in tourism and hospitality, a major industry for the area, might have low-paying jobs that make it harder for them to afford the median rent bill of $900, Boyd says.

About a third of the renters in cities that have lower-than-average housing costs, like Rochester, N.Y., and Fresno, Calif., also spend at least half of their paycheck on rent.

Middle-class families are among those struggling the most.

The number of people making between $45,000 and $75,000 who spent more than 50 percent of their income on housing increased by 72 percent between 2013 and 2003. For people making between $30,000 and $45,000, the number of renters in that position increased by 69 percent.

The cheapest apartments are being snapped up quickly. The number of available units that cost less than $800 a month fell by 12 percent in 2014 from the year before, according to the report. In many metro areas, much of the rental housing being created consists of luxury apartments, which come with an unexpectedly higher price tag, Boyd says.

Those higher rent costs are making the process of saving for a down payment very, very difficult, Boyd points out. “You’re looking around and saying I cant afford to buy a home, and I also can’t afford to rent one of these luxury apartment buildings,” she says.

But for people with sufficient savings, it’s a great time to be a homeowner. About 19 million homeowners — about one in four — spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2013, the lowest share in a decade. n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The nitty-gritty of crime solving N ON-FICTION

V

FORENSICS What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime

By Val McDermid Grove. 310 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED

B Y D OUGLAS S TARR

al McDermid is one of the most popular crimefiction writers today. Her 27 novels have sold 11 million copies worldwide, according to her Web site, and have won several crime-fiction awards.

Now she has written a nonfiction book about criminal forensics as a kind of paean to all those experts whose work has informed hers over the years. “The stories these scientists have to tell us . . . are among the most fascinating you will ever hear,” she declares, and she tells plenty of them.

McDermid organizes the book into 12 chapters, each of which represents a different aspect of crime-scene investigation. Much as an investigator would, she starts by approaching the crime scene itself, discussing how it’s cordoned off, who takes charge, the CSI’s position in the chain of command and how the scientist works his or her way through the case. Frequently, she introduces us to an investigator who becomes our guide.

Throughout the book, she portrays forensic scientists not as emotionless Sherlock Holmes types (although she evokes him repeatedly) but as human beings who care about what they do and are troubled by what they see.

Along the way McDermid examines topics of forensic science such as pathology, toxicology and fingerprinting, fleshing out the historical and technical aspects, always telling vivid stories.

McDermid’s deep dives into history and science add substance. She does a commendable job of explaining some timely issues, such as the use of megadata in digital forensics and the latest controversies about forensic DNA. Yet certain weaknesses prevent this from being the go-to book for those who wish to learn about forensics. The author has a tolerance for cliche. Historical inaccu-

ALEXANDRA GARCIA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Val McDermid portrays forensic scientists as dedicated and smart, while ignoring scandals in the field.

racies also pepper the book.

At one point, McDermid says that in the late 19th century, Alfred Bertillon invented a system of biometric identification that was accurate to a factor of 1 in 286 million. Actually he claimed an accuracy of 1 in 4 million. She lists several “firsts” that really weren’t, such as her claim that Frenchman Edmond Locard opened the world’s first crime investigation laboratory in 1910.

His professor, Alexandre Lacassagne, did that decades earlier.

This careless writing and factchecking undermines the book’s credibility. Furthermore, after reading “Forensics” one could conclude that, despite the occasional problems and missteps, forensic science is basically healthy and that “the people who do it are, frankly, awesome.” Events of the

past several years show otherwise, however.

In a widely cited 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences portrayed forensic work as fundamentally flawed, saying that with the exception of DNA evidence, most forensic tools, such as hair comparison and bloodspatter analysis, are more like traditional beliefs that have never been statistically tested. One of the most troubling areas is arson investigation, which McDermid portrays uncritically in her book.

Over the past couple of decades, research has revealed that many of the traditional signs of arson also routinely occur in accidental fires, and there have been an unknown number of wrongful convictions. Similarly, scandals surrounding forensic laboratory personnel have been making

headlines for years; take, for instance, Annie Dookhan in Massachusetts, whose fraudulent practices tainted tens of thousands of drug cases. Omitting these scandals and the lessons they convey gives a less-than-realistic portrayal of the field.

That’s not to say “Forensics” is less than an enjoyable read. It skips along from story to story, and readers who aren’t squeamish will be entertained and intrigued. It will certainly please readers of McDermid’s novels, who will want to have her take on the subject. But readers seeking an authoritative book on a rapidly emerging and controversial field should look elsewhere. n Starr is co-director of the graduate program in science journalism at Boston University.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Drama long shadowed Ziegfeld

A tale of music and forbidden life

N ON-FICTION

F ICTION

F

l

REVIEWED BY

T IM P AGE

lorenz Ziegfeld Jr. was clearly the sort of person around whom legends will form. Put him up there with P.T. Barnum and David Belasco among America’s canniest impresarios, a man who prided himself on “glorifying the American girl” in revue after revue — or “Follies,” as many of them were called — on Broadway in the first decades of the last century and who went on to produce the first great work of American musical theater, “Show Boat.”

His advocacy was essential to the success of W.C. Fields, Will Rogers and Fanny Brice, among many others. Indeed, Ziegfeld is a leading character in “Funny Girl,” the fictionalized showbiz biography of Brice that won Barbra Streisand her first fame on Broadway and, later, an Oscar. He integrated the New York stage by casting the brilliant Bahamian comic Bert Williams in an otherwise all-white production. When some cast members complained, Ziegfeld responded that he could replace all of them “except the one you want me to fire.”

He was also a difficult, imperious man who regularly bedded his stars and chorines and refused to attend the funeral of his first wife, the Polish-born actress Anna Held. By then, he was married to Billie Burke, who survived him by nearly 40 years and memorialized their life together in two autobiographies.

“Ziegfeld and His Follies” was written by two sisters, Cynthia and Sara Brideson, who previously wrote “Also Starring . . . : Forty Biographical Essays on the Greatest Character Actors of Hollywood’s Golden Era, 1930-1965.”

For those with an interest in theatrical history, the new book will recommend itself as the first detailed biography of Ziegfeld in four decades. (Ethan Mordden’s 2008 study is best described as a witty and engrossing gloss on the producer’s artistry and influence.)

There is much to enjoy in the

Bridesons’ book, including 76 photographs — some of them rare, all of them evocative.

The Bridesons get most of the facts right, have assembled dates and partial cast lists for all of Ziegfeld’s productions and have had unprecedented access to the producer’s letters to Burke and their daughter, Patricia. Some of the anecdotes are hoary ones, of course, having been told and retold for more than a century, but who can resist characters with such names as A. Toxen Worm, as one hapless rival of Ziegfeld’s was christened?

A lively story of Ziegfeld’s early promotion of the professional strongman Eugen Sandow and his attempt to wrestle a “man-eating” lion deserves mention: “Sandow put up his fists as if preparing to box another man. The lion yawned at him. Sandow pulled at the big cat’s whiskers to rouse him. The lion half rose but then lay down again. Sandow then grabbed the lion’s mane, but the cat did nothing more than flick sawdust in the strongman’s face with his tail. . . .

In an attempt to salvage the evening, Sandow lifted the lion as if it were a house cat and carried it around the ring. The lion seemed to enjoy being carried, which only angered the crowd more.”

As it happened, an old, infirm lion from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park had been brought in (and likely drugged) for the occasion. It would be 20 years before Ziegfeld visited the Bay Area again, and even then, the local newspapers remembered and mocked him for his subterfuge.

For the most part, this is an agreeable book about an important figure, suffused with vignettes of the old New York, a place that later New Yorkers often vainly try to pretend still surrounds them. n Page, a former music critic at The Washington Post, is a professor of music and journalism at the University of Southern California.

T ZIEGFELD AND HIS FOLLIES A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer

By Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson Univ. Press of Kentucky. 516 pp. $40

THE GODS OF TANGO

By Carolina De Robertis Knopf. 367 pp. $26.95

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARIE A RANA

imes change. A century ago, Pope Pius X issued a pastoral letter against the tango, condemning it as degenerate, immoral, pagan. Today, Pope Francis insists that he likes it, that it lives deep inside him, that he often danced it in Argentina as a young man.

Tango has had a long and storied career since it burst into the wild drinking establishments of Buenos Aires’s port and meatpacking district just before the turn of the 20th century. It began as a dance between men as they waited their turns in brothels: a strange, circling ballet, depicting mortal combat and often ending in just that. By the time of Pius, the dance was emphatically between sexes — a venomous strut — the reenactment of a tension between pimp and prostitute. Now, of course, the dance is taught to children, performed in glittering ballrooms the world over, hawked to tourists.

All the same, it is in that earlier, meaner era — in the days of papal condemnation — that Carolina De Robertis sets her novel, “The Gods of Tango.” And it is into the overcrowded conventillos of turnof-the-century Buenos Aires, those squalid slums filled with luckless immigrants, that she thrusts her heroine, a 17-year-old Italian bride named Leda.

Leda is from the village of Alazzano, a day’s carriage ride from Naples. Married by proxy to her cousin Dante, she seems to inhabit a numbed state: observing rather than living. When this young woman arrives to find that her husband has been killed and that she is alone in a new land, decorum dictates that she write to her family, ask them to send money and wend her prudent way home.

But something stays her hand.

Slowly, tentatively, she gets a sense of Buenos Aires. She hears, to her astonishment, the tango, played right there, on a city street.

An old man is the irresistible siren.

“The sound ensnared her. It invaded her bones, urged her blood. She

didn’t know herself; it now occurred to her that she knew nothing, nothing, nothing about the world, could not have known a thing when she didn’t know the world contained this sensation, such sound, such wakefulness, a melody as rich as night.”

Alone in her tiny room, she takes out the violin her father gave her as a gift for her husband, Dante. Women are not allowed to play, but her father was a gifted violinist, and she learned by internalizing every lesson he had lavished on her brother.

It is here that Leda makes a bold decision, unimaginable for a woman of her time: She will dress in Dante’s clothes, pass herself off as a man and pursue this musical obsession. So it is that Leda becomes Dante, and Buenos Aires opens up to her in all its raw sexual splendor, forcing this newly transformed heroine into a life that is forbidden in a panoply of ways.

De Robertis is a natural storyteller, although not a particularly literary one: Her prose never soars, her characterizations are workmanlike, and her ambiences are not especially memorable.

Strangely, we never truly hear the tango. We are told about songs, rather than made to hear them.

Strung like a leitmotif throughout is the mysterious end of Leda’s young friend back in Alazzano, a girl who began as a free, vital spirit and was changed by cruel fate into a lewd, slavering madwoman. It is this heartbreaking thread and the book’s relentlessly propulsive story of gender-switching in a perilous time that keep us rapt.

A generous critic might say that De Robertis has chosen her subject well. Those who know the tango will feel that it is a living coil, moving deep within them. And so, for all the book’s imperfections, a winding narrative emerges. We can imagine the soundtrack of Dante’s life. n Arana is a former editor of the Washington Post’s Book World section.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Stripping Atticus Finch of his aura of perfection HOWELL RAINES is a former executive editor of the New York Times.

As a self­made multimillionaire with a solid literary reputation, Harper Lee does not need our sympathy, but she deserves a more reflective response to her decision to give us a searching look at Atticus Finch, the heroic Southern lawyer depicted in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

To put matters bluntly, commentators and readers who have lamented her “spoiling” their image of Atticus got things wrong on just about every level, including the importance of “Mockingbird” and its late­blooming prequel, “Go Set a Watchman” as artistic, sociological and historical texts.

A narrow reading of “Watchman,” wherein Lee portrays the aging Atticus as a conventional, small-town racist, is not just unfair, it ignores the key elements of the new book and distorts our understanding of the earlier one, which has become a part of the world’s intellectual heritage. Further, it unjustly lumps in Lee with Margaret Mitchell and “Gone With the Wind” as being overly tolerant of the evils of affluent Southern bigots. A threshold issue then becomes placing both Lee books in their proper place in the Southern literary canon.

“Mockingbird” (1960) is one of the monuments in the blossoming of Southern fictionwriting in the 20th century, achieving a success even greater than earlier masterworks by more ambitious writers. As an artist, Lee does not climb to the level of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren, but she has earned a spot on the same platform when it comes to definitive renderings of fictional archetypes. And faulting her for damaging a plaster saint of her own making is as myopic as faulting Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” (1936) for overemphasizing the tormented psyche of post-Confederate Mississippi or Warren’s “All the King’s Men” (1946) for highlighting Louisiana’s political

corruption in creating Willie Stark, the most complex demagogue in modern fiction.

Lee has earned admission to the Dixie Pantheon by giving us two views of upper-class whites in a vanishing world, setting “To Kill a Mockingbird” during the lynching epidemic of the 1930s and this new book at the dawn of the civil rights movement in the mid-’50s.

The “Mockingbird” Atticus was the kind of moderate, educated Southerner sympathetic to the New Deal’s progressive racial attitudes. The second Atticus is another Southern “type”: the erstwhile civic leader driven crazy by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. History changes us as we move through it, just as Huck Finn came to see Jim as a human being while they drifted down the river. Atticus changed, too, but in a less admirable direction. In “Watchman,” the cardboard hero becomes a real person, failing as a legion of otherwise sensible Southern politicians and preachers failed in the twin realms of law and religion as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement exposed Southern racist violence to a watching world.

The mature, worldly narrator of “Watchman,” Jean Louise Finch, is the grown-up version of

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

“Mockingbird’s” guileless Scout.

Using the same characters in both books, Lee offers two coming-ofage stories: the child’s recognition that evil exists in the world and the adult’s recognition that elements of that evil exist in the people she loves. From a stylistic standpoint, “Mockingbird” is a polished gem. “Watchman” is a lesser stone of rougher cut, but it deserved publication as it stood when Lee delivered the manuscript to Lippincott in 1957.

Lee’s decision — and the weight of the evidence suggests it was her decision, not just that of her willful attorney, Tonja Carter — means that we now have a good book to stand alongside the great “Mockingbird.” Moreover, the second book casts new light on the growth process by which the writer produced the more enduring work. From the standpoint of serious scholarship, there are ample precedents for the decision to publish. The posthumous appearance of Ernest Hemingway’s apprentice versions of the Nick Adams stories gave insight into how he developed the most arresting style of the Modernist era. Here are several insights scholars may glean from “Go Set a Watchman.”

First, it meets the Faulknerian standard that the only fit subject for a serious novelist is “the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself.” What better description could there be of an idealistic old lawyer aligning with

the forces of the White Citizens Council?

Second, Lee has given us a sociological portrait of a watershed moment in Southern, and American, history. Chapter 8 of “Watchman” is a tour-de-force of segregationist oratory as it really sounded in the Black Belt, and Birmingham, in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court decision. In impressionistic and stenographic passages, we can hear the original version of the hate speech that by 1962 would make George Wallace the very real dictator of Alabama.

Critics will fault the last chapters as melodramatic and overly didactic, and they are, but to a purpose. In releasing them from the vault, Lee fulfills the novelist’s deepest obligation, which is to expand through imaginary characters our understanding of the morals and manners of the real world. In “Go Set a Watchman,” we see the adult Jean Louise “Scout” Finch do something excruciating to herself and her father, who is honest, bewildered and irreversibly Southern as to his era and place.

She strips Atticus Finch, who on his best days was Maycomb’s most idealistic lawyer, of his “godlike” aura of perfection. Now, nearing the end of her fascinating life, Nelle Harper Lee has freed her readers to extend to Atticus the same blessing for the services of his better angels in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Don’t expect quick change in Iran FAREED ZAKARIA writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.

In selling the nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration has been careful to point out that it is just an agreement on nuclear issues. “[The deal] solves one particular problem,” President Obama explained in his news conference on Wednesday. And supporters and critics alike are quick to suggest that this move is quite different from Richard Nixon’s opening to China, which transformed China and its relations with the world. Iran, after all, is a rogue regime that chants “Death to America” and funds anti-American terror across the Middle East.

But let’s recall what China looked like at the time Henry Kissinger went on his secret trip to Beijing in July 1971. Mao Zedong was, without question, the most radical anti-American leader in the world, supporting violent guerrilla groups across Asia and beyond. And while it didn’t chant “Death to America,” Beijing was the principal supporter of the North Vietnamese, sending them troops, supplies and funds to fight and kill American soldiers every day. China was also in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most barbaric periods of its modern history.

Initially, the opening to China changed none of this. During the talks involving Nixon, Kissinger, Mao and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, the Chinese refused to end their support for the North

Vietnamese regime or even to encourage Hanoi to negotiate seriously with Washington. In fact, while Nixon and Kissinger were talking to the Chinese, Beijing’s shipments of arms to North Vietnam were increasing.

And just as today we are told that there was a mythical better deal to be had with Iran, conservatives excoriated Nixon for selling out Taiwan, claiming that rather than handing over Taiwan’s spot in the United Nations to Beijing, Washington could have done more to negotiate a dual-seat deal.

But over time, China did slow down its support for revolutionary movements in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. And its relations with Vietnam soured — for many reasons, but certainly the opening to the United States

was one of them. These shifts finally led to a wholesale rethinking of China’s foreign policy — but seven years after Kissinger’s meetings, under a new Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, who first consolidated power and then broke with Mao’s revolutionary worldview.

On Iran, let’s make several caveats. China’s move toward the West was fueled by its split with the Soviet Union and, perhaps, its total isolation. Iran faces no such dire security threat and, as an oil-producing country that, even under sanctions, gets tens of billions of dollars in revenues, it has never been truly isolated or destitute. And yet, Iran clearly resents being treated as a pariah.

A new generation of Iranians has demonstrated that frustration in many different ways. And a new set of leaders — who have some influence though not complete control — wants to restore Iran to a more normal status.

Will that mean that Tehran’s foreign policies will moderate?

History suggests that as countries get more integrated into the world and the global economy, they have fewer incentives to be spoilers and more to maintain stability. That is surely why so many hard-liners in Iran are opposed to the nuclear deal. They believe it will

take Iran in the wrong direction, one that might soften the revolutionary edge of the regime.

Of course, Iran will follow its national interests and sometimes these will conflict with U.S. policy sharply. But on the United States’ most pressing challenges in the Middle East right now — the threat from the Islamic State and the stability of the Iraqi and Afghan governments — Iran and the United States actually have overlapping interests. (Yes, Iran is funding militias in Iraq and Syria, but they are the single most effective force on the ground that is fighting the Islamic State. Should it stop?)

The sectarian war in the Middle East — being fueled by Sunnis as well as Shiites — will continue.

But finally Washington and others can talk to both sides of the divide to try to broker a reduction of tensions.

No significant change is going to happen in Iran in the next few months. It didn’t in China. It hasn’t in Cuba or Burma. But over the next 10 years, if there is greater contact, communication, commerce and capitalism between Iran and the rest of the world, surely this will gradually empower those Iranians who see their country’s destiny as being part of the modern world, not in opposition to it. n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

China’s irrepressible lawyers TENG BIAO is a human rights lawyer and a visiting fellow at New York University.

At around 3 a.m. July 9, human rights lawyer Wang Yu was abducted from her home in Beijing. Her husband, rights defender Bao Longjun, also disappeared. Wang is renowned in China: She represented Cao Shunli, who died after being denied medical treatment while in custody for her human rights activism; Ilham Tohti, a Uigher scholar unjustly sentenced to life in prison; and protest organizer Wu Gan. In the days since Wang’s arrest, dozens of human rights lawyers and others have been abducted, arrested and disappeared; all told, including those who have been temporarily detained or given warnings, the sweep has targeted more than 200 people in 24 provinces.

This is the biggest crackdown on lawyers in China since the legal system was reestablished in 1980 after the Cultural Revolution.

It is also just part of the purge that President Xi Jinping has carried out against civil society since he came to power in late 2012. Those hit by this comprehensive suppression have included political dissidents, nongovernmental organizations, government petitioners, underground churches, Internet users, news organizations and universities. More than 1,500 rights defenders have been arrested or thrown into jail, including well-known lawyers Xu Zhiyong, Pu Zhiqiang and Tang

Jingling.

But this repression has not succeeded at forcing the lawyers into retreat. In the courts, on the Internet and in the streets, China’s human rights lawyers remain active. Since the rights defense movement emerged in 2003, their numbers have grown from dozens to a thousand. They use the legal system to protect the rights and freedoms of citizens, and wield the Internet and media to expose abuses of power and the justice system. There is little doubt that they have become one of the most spirited and active civil forces in China.

As professionals with a thorough understanding of the law and a deep familiarity with political and social conditions, rights lawyers have, case by case, brought together a disparate range of social groups: the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY ENGLEHART FOR THE HARTFORD COURANT

victims of forced housing demolitions, legal injustice, forced abortion policies, pollution and poisoned foods and medication; persecuted Christians and Falun Gong practitioners; prisoners of conscience; and many others.

China’s rights lawyers are the link between them all.

The Chinese Communist Party sensed from the beginning that rights lawyers were a deep threat and thus has never eased its persecution of them. The brilliant Gao Zhisheng suffered extraordinarily cruel torture after he defended Falun Gong. Others have been thrown into forced labor camps or jail while still others have been abducted or disappeared. Many have simply had their legal licenses revoked. I, too, have been abducted, locked up and tortured.

If they chose, these professionals could reap a substantial salary doing other sorts of legal work — but their belief in the rule of law and liberty and their sense of responsibility leads them to this path. It is one beset by thorns, but it is also full of honor. They win the love and respect of ordinary people and they accumulate social influence. Working together in the battle for human rights, through the relentless

persecution, they have formed deep friendships. Using social media, they have brought together an informal organization that can be rapidly mobilized. Every time there’s a serious legal incident, hundreds of them take steps to publicize the matter, mobilize citizens to make their voices heard and, when necessary, dispatch lawyers to take up the case.

Over a decade ago, the Communist Party determined that rights lawyers were an enemy on par with underground religious groups, dissidents and online opinion leaders. So the current purge is no surprise. The security agencies struck just over a week after a new national security law went into effect on July 1 — as though they simply couldn’t wait.

Not long after coming to power in 1949, the Communist Party extinguished the legal profession almost entirely — for more than 20 years there were no lawyers, and the country was engulfed in chaos. Does Xi and the party wish to relive the nightmare of lawlessness of those years? When will they release China’s prisoners of conscience?

When Xi visits the United States this year, these are the questions that President Obama ought to put to him. n

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Sharks BY

X AV J UDD

A rash of shark attacks, including eight in North Carolina through mid July and one on a pro surfer last weekend, has put the giant fish in the spotlight — not that sharks needed the publicity.

1

Sharks pose a serious threat to humans.

Shark attacks often mean a media feeding frenzy: Coverage includes shots of bloody victims, pictures of great whites with gaping jaws and illogical descriptions such as “sharkinfested waters.” (Sharks live in the oceans. They are not an infestation.)

But shark attacks are actually quite rare. There are almost 400 shark species, and only about a dozen have ever committed documented attacks on humans.

According to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, only 70 attacks occurred on average each year in the past decade, with a handful per year proving fatal.

Recorded attacks have risen significantly since the 1960s — by 200 percent — though that’s mostly attributable to an increase in people swimming in the sea for leisure and to better gathering of data.

The risk of a shark attack while you’re in the water is infinitesimally small: about 11.5 million to 1. Humans are more likely to have deadly encounters with lions (which kill about 100 of us yearly), crocodiles (around 1,000) or snakes (close to 50,000). You’re 10 times more likely to be bitten by another human in New York City than you are by a shark anywhere on the planet.

The threat, in fact, is the other way around: The World Wildlife Fund estimates that people slaughter about 100 million sharks per year.

These animals take several years to mature and often produce few young; many species face extinction.

2

Sharks have to keep swimming.

It’s been repeated by sources both authoritative (textbooks) and slightly less so (Ripley’s Believe It or Not!): Sharks must move constantly in order to breathe, or they die.

But for most species, that’s not true. Sharks employ two methods to breathe. Ram ventilation entails swimming constantly, which forces water over the gills.

Buccal pumping uses muscles in the mouth to pull liquid over the gills. Fish in this latter group, including angel and nurse sharks, don’t need perpetual motion and can rest on the seafloor. Many shark species can use both techniques. About 20 species can’t, though even they won’t necessarily die if they stop swimming. Researchers have discovered that some of them can remain relatively stationary.

specimen. More recently, a comprehensive 2004 study found 42 carcinomas in Chondrichthyes species, the class of cartilaginous fish that encompasses sharks, skates and rays. To date, cancer has been documented in 23 species of sharks.

No scientific evidence shows that cartilage from these animals can prevent us from getting cancer or cure it, as Lane argued.

3

4

Sharks don’t get cancer.

William Lane’s 1992 bestseller, “Sharks Don’t Get Cancer: How Shark Cartilage Could Save Your Life,” helped popularize the mythical notion of sharks’ invincibility. The book seemed at least partially grounded in reality: Research from the previous decade suggested that inserting shark cartilage into certain animals inhibited the growth of blood vessels that nourish tumors, and that sharks had lower incidences of cancer than humans did. Lane’s book acknowledged that sharks occasionally get cancer, just not often. But it was the misleading title that resonated.

It’s been known since 1908 that sharks get cancer; that was when the first incidence of a malignant growth was discovered in a

JODY WATT/PACIFIC STOCK VIA AURORA PHOTOS

Aerial patrols keep people safe from sharks.

A string of shark sightings and attacks in the past few years has prompted a number of Australian states to increase aerial patrols , manned aircraft that monitor recreational waters for sharks. But after decades of operation along the coast there, there’s little evidence to suggest that this has any practical benefit in keeping swimmers safe.

Airplanes or helicopters have to survey a vast area in just a few hours. Some species, including the great white, are ambush hunters and come up to the surface only when they strike.

Others lie deeper in the ocean; if the water is murky or the skies not clear, they can be almost undetectable.

A smarter way to ensure

beachgoers’ safety is a “shark barrier,” currently used in parts of Australia and Hong Kong . These thin mesh nets — which aren’t harmful to wildlife and shouldn’t be confused with shark nets — form an underwater fence from seabed to surface around beaches and keep predators out.

5

A shark attack is a case of “mistaken identity.”

After an attack, media outlets often quote experts who say the shark mistook the human for something else; authorities including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reiterate that attacks on people are “usually a case of mistaken identity.”

But plenty of evidence suggests that shark attacks on humans, though rare, are intentional.

Sometimes simple curiosity prompts a bite. A shark might also attack humans if they’re in its territory or if it sees them as competition for food.

Some species have highly refined senses, and these remarkable hunters know exactly what kind of animal they are pursuing. n Judd is a freelance journalist based in London.

SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2015

24

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

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

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

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