The Washington Post National Weekly - August 5, 2018

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

White, and in the the minority Inside a rural chicken plant, they struggle to fit in.

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THE FIX

Ginsburg dashes GOP hopes BY

A ARON B LAKE

S

upreme Court justices aren’t supposed to be political actors, and they aren’t supposed to time their retirements to ensure they are replaced with a likeminded justice.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s latest comment about when she will retire is almost impossible to separate from politics. Indeed, it almost seems to send a concerted signal to liberals not to worry about her handing President Trump another Supreme Court vacancy.

“I’m now 85,” Ginsburg said, according to CNN. “My senior colleague Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90. So think I have about at least five more years.”

This is a message that understandably cheered liberals. While Neil Gorsuch was the appetizer for conservatives, and Brett Kavanaugh would be the first course, a Ginsburg vacancy would be the feast.

Unlike Trump’s first two nominations to replace GOP appointees, replacing her with a conservative justice would clearly and unmistakably solidify the right’s hold on the nation’s highest court for years — and possibly decades. And given that Ginsburg is the court’s oldest member at 85, it’s a possibility that can’t be ignored.

But with one quote, Ginsburg set the goal posts for her retirement in a suspiciously convenient place for liberals: when Trump probably won’t be able to pick her replacement.

Five years from now puts us in late July 2023. That could still be during Trump’s presidency, if he’s reelected in 2020. But Ginsburg doesn’t say only five years; she says “about at least five more years.”

That sounds as if she’s shooting for 2024.

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MIKE GROLL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she will not retire until she’s at least 90.

Which could also still be with Trump in the White House.

But it would also be a presidential election year — which Republicans clearly and unmistakably said during the Merrick Garland fiasco is not when you confirm Supreme Court justices. Democrats rather laughably tried to argue at the start of the current vacancy that Republicans set the standard at not confirming justices in any election year. That’s wrong.

They did, however, make pretty clear that no confirmation process should take place in presidential election years. And they made even clearer that an appointment shouldn’t be made by a lame-duck president — which Trump would be.

We’re following the Biden rule,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said at the time, talking to “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “And [Joe] Biden was chairman

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 43

of the Judiciary Committee in 1992, in a presidential election year, he said the Senate should not act on filling a Supreme Court vacancy if it had occurred that year. . . . So, all we’re doing, Chris, is following a long-standing tradition of not filling vacancies on the Supreme Court in the middle of a presidential election year.”

McConnell added at another point: “I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled — this vacancy should not be filled by this lame-duck president.”

Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 — midFebruary — meaning that it would be very difficult for Republicans to justify any replacement in 2024 being confirmed. Democrats have gone too far in accusing Republicans of hypocrisy on Kavanaugh’s nomination, but confirming a justice in 2024 would clearly go against just about everything Republicans said two years ago.

Which isn’t to say that they wouldn’t try. If the Republicans still have the presidency and the Senate, they wouldn’t need any Democratic votes to confirm Ginsburg’s replacement.

And the payoff for them might be worth doing something nakedly partisan and hypocritical.

But Ginsburg seems to be at least aiming to force that issue by waiting until 2024 — if not 2025, when history suggests it would be very difficult for Republicans to retain the White House with a two-term, lame-duck president.

Plenty has yet to play out here, but liberals have reason to cheer. Ginsburg, at the very least, seems intent upon giving them a chance to win back the White House before her replacement is picked. Whether that’s how these things should be handled is another question. n ©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER Heaven Engle, 20, and her boyfriend, Venson Heim, 25, sit in the break room at the Bell & Evans Plant 2 facility in Fredericksburg, Pa. Photo by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON of The Washington Post

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OPINIONS

Can the Catholic Church be trusted anymore?

ELIZABETH BRUENIG is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

We live in an era of diminished trust and heightened cyni­ cism. It is hard, now, to imagine someone expressing un­ qualified faith in government, the media, business — or even, for that matter, religious institutions. And the impli­ cation of this development is not simply the erosion of trust. It is the increasing difficulty of learning about the world around us, as we lose belief in those who might teach us.

ROBERT FRANKLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Learning requires risk-taking.

It forces us to face what we don’t know with the hope of advancing toward some grasp of it. The smaller the undertaking, the lower the emotional gamble — learning tomorrow’s weather forecast doesn’t entail an interior journey. But learning about the true and important things in life does require trust and dedication and vulnerability — usually under a teacher’s guidance. It is no surprise so many of us come to love the ones who teach us.

Neither is it a surprise, any longer, that some people charged with these roles of profound responsibility abuse them in the cruelest ways.

The latest revelation concerns the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, who resigned from the College of Cardinals. Over several decades, McCarrick is alleged to have sexually abused at least one child and several adult seminarians or young priests, all of whom looked to the charismatic prelate for guidance — moral, vocational, spiritual. Into his den, he drew them.

McCarrick, who has denied the allegation involving the child, has now become the first prince of the church to resign his role since 1927 and the highest-ranking member of the

Catholic hierarchy to step down amid sexual-abuse allegations.

But there are others in the church who presumably knew of the charges against him decades ago and failed to act when given the chance. Two New Jersey dioceses where McCarrick served as a bishop paid settlements to young men who alleged abuse as recently as the early 2000s; it isn’t likely that $180,000 went missing from church coffers with only McCarrick’s knowing. In 2011, a priest from Brazil filed a lawsuit against McCarrick for unwanted sexual advances. The suit was withdrawn — but again, it seems unlikely the episode came and went unknown to anyone other than McCarrick.

The question of who in the church hierarchy learned of the allegations against McCarrick — and when — has thus spawned its own predictable controversy.

Some Catholics have blamed the hierarchy’s lax attitude toward abuse claims on a modern, Pope Francis-inflected tolerance for gay priests and disregard for traditional church doctrine on sexual morality. Others counter that scapegoating gay priests who remain faithful and celibate is a dangerous and misplaced overreaction. The particular matter of who abetted McCarrick has taken on a dimension of doctrinal

Theodore McCarrick resigned from the College of the Cardinals after allegations of sexual abuse, including one involving an 11-year-old boy.

argument, subtly shifting into a debate about what the church ought to teach.

I am a faithful Catholic, and I worry that this discussion seems not only off-point but also ominously premature. What the church ought to teach makes sense to debate only if it is established that the church can teach at all. And it is precisely that capacity that McCarrick, along with his anonymous enablers and his legions of abusing predecessors, have all but destroyed.

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed, “the Catholic bishops are now somewhat protected from media scrutiny by virtue of their increasing unimportance.” The price of that protection is a conspicuous moral muteness: The light has gone under a bushel, and the salt has lost its flavor.

The church has described itself as “mater et magistra,” mother and teacher. Yet, having obliterated its ability to inspire trust, in large part through decades of abuse and abuseenabling, the church has now been rendered unqualified, in the eyes of many, to serve in that role. As McCarrick allegedly

transgressed and abused his position as a spiritual guide, so, too, can it be said that the church has forfeited, at least for now, its own teaching role.

Every effort ought to be made to restore this crucial function, which begins with rebuilding trust. And that requires accountability, which is painful.

Francis has already mandated that McCarrick remain in penitent seclusion until the accusations against him can be examined at a canonical trial.

This is a positive step, but the Vatican ought also to invite an independent inquiry into who aided McCarrick’s reported abuse, passively or otherwise, how and for how long.

The church should punish those found guilty and cooperate with law enforcement when needed.

The process will likely be ugly, but so much less so than what came before. It is not too much to ask not to be raped or otherwise sexually abused by shepherds of the faith in the course of following Christ.

Neither is it too severe to say that if clerics cannot meet that meager demand, they can scarcely teach His people anything at all. n

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In keeping this man locked up, China reveals its weakness FRED HIATT is the Washington Post editorial page editor.

Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen, was riding a train from Shanghai to Beijing in the company of two Swedish diplomats in January when 10 Chinese plainclothesmen stormed aboard, lifted him up and carried him off the train and out of sight.

Three weeks later, Gui was paraded before Chinese media to recite a bizarre and apparently coerced confession. He hasn’t been heard from since.

This is what passes for the rule of law in China today.

I think of Gui sometimes when I hear Chinese President Xi Jinping boasting about a country that “has stood up, grown rich and is becoming strong.”

Would a truly strong and selfconfident nation behave this way? Why would it feel the need to kidnap — for the second time, no less — a peaceable 54-year-old gentleman such as Gui and keep him, in poor health, locked up for, now, more than a thousand days?

Gui left China as a young man to study in Sweden and got marooned there when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rendered his home country inhospitable to anyone inclined toward democracy. He earned a Phd, married, had a daughter, Angela, who is now, at 24, beginning her own PhD studies at the University of Cambridge in England.

Eventually, as the political climate in China eased, Gui moved back. He established a book business in Hong Kong, where he published insider accounts from China’s Communist Party — books that were banned in China itself.

In October 2015, he disappeared from his small vacation home in Thailand. That was the first abduction, followed by the first bizarre confession: Gui showed up on television in January 2016 claiming he had voluntarily returned to China to take responsibility for a long-ago hit-and-run car accident.

Angela could never find out where he was being held, but last fall he was released into a kind of house arrest in Ningbo, a coastal city south of Shanghai, where he was allowed to resume a careful communication with his daughter.

He told her that, while in prison, he had been composing

poems. His captors had not permitted him pen and paper, but he had committed them to memory — and last fall he began writing them down and sending them to his daughter.

In one, he compares himself to a Père David’s deer — a species that, by the time a French missionary became in the 19th century the first Westerner to see it, existed only in captivity, in the Chinese emperor’s hunting preserve.

“When I was caught I started to evolve/When I started to evolve, I was tamed,” Gui wrote.

“But while I am shamed in the swamp/I still yearn to run through the Swedish woods.”

Also last fall, Gui began to notice alarming signs of neurological deterioration — perhaps a result of maltreatment in captivity; perhaps, as a Ningbo doctor believed, early signs of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“He was very shaken by this,” Angela recalled. “He told me, ‘I’m not afraid to die, I’m just not ready yet. There’s so much more to be done.’”

The Ningbo doctor said he should see a specialist; the Swedish government agreed to send one to Beijing; China’s ambassador to Sweden said Gui would be permitted to travel to the capital for the exam. It was on the way to that appointment that he was, again, abducted.

And at his next “confession,” he was being charged, even more absurdly, with stealing “state secrets.”

What kind of state secrets could Gui possess after nearly three years in captivity?

Angela wonders, sadly, if the secret is not the case itself — a story that has become such an embarrassment of injustice atop injustice that the Communist Party can’t bring itself to turn

her father loose.

All of this is happening while, given America’s forfeiture of global standing, China is, understandably, trying to present itself as an alternative model. Yet how can its leaders convince the world that they are “an unstoppable and invincible force” (that’s Xi, again) if they fear a man such as Gui Minhai?

Who wants to imitate a regime that behaves like gangsters?

Angela hopes the Chinese will let her father see a doctor. She hopes his health is not deteriorating. Sometimes she

even lets herself dream that her father — who was not there to see her graduate at the top of her class this spring — will be with her when she earns her next degree.

The Post is proud to publish two of Gui Minhai’s poems for the first time (one on this page, another at washingtonpost.com).

Like Angela, I hope he will be free and publishing a full volume of his verse before too long.

“There is so much more he wanted to do,” she says. “There was so much he wanted to tell people.” n

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TSA has been secretly watching us

BY A SHLEY AND M ISSY

H ALSEY III R YAN

N

ine years after hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center and crashed into the Pentagon, undercover police officers began scrutinizing the behavior of people in airports and aboard airplanes.

Using recently developed technology to track travel patterns and classic gumshoe observation, they took things one step further than the familiar uniformed Transportation Security Administration agents at airport checkpoints.

Called “Quiet Skies,” the program originated in 2010 under then-TSA Administrator John S. Pistole, a former FBI deputy director who changed the TSA from an agency that simply screened travelers at checkpoints into one that made greater use of information gathered by intelligence sources to identify possible terrorists.

“We looked at whether we could use our existing resources in a more effective, efficient way,” Pistole recalled this past week.

“Really, we were looking at how can we buy down risk, mitigate those risks, through commonsense application of our resources.”

He pointed to the hijackers who commandeered four commercial planes on Sept. 11, 2001, to illustrate the type of travel patterns that might draw the TSA’s attention.

“The 19 hijackers on 9/11 did some pre-operational flights to assess security,” Pistole said.

He said the agency utilized the FBI’s terrorist screening database to single out those people who still were permitted to fly. It also stationed plainclothes personnel in airport terminals and as in-flight air marshals to observe passengers.

“For the unknowns it was just based on their behavior, their activity,” he said. “Shame on us if we’re doing pre-operation surveillance on the flight, but they weren’t on anybody’s radar.”

Pistole said he consulted with

JULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Agency began covertly tracking air travelers’ behavior in 2010 to detect possible terrorists legal counsel at the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security before launching the program. Congress was unaware of “Quiet Skies” until reports surfaced over the weekend in a story broken by the Boston Globe and confirmed by The Washington Post.

“It’s one thing to provide additional security screening at the checkpoint, but shouldn’t we be able to do something more during the flight, just to make sure that we’re buying down risk the best way we can?” Pistole said. “We were trying to be forward-leaning and a little more predictive in what the threats might be.”

The TSA screens more than 2 million passengers daily at 440 airports, employing a security force of 43,000 people.

Several members of Congress said Monday they were seeking more information on “Quiet Skies.”

“We were not previously aware of the program,” said Drew Pusateri, Democratic communications

director on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We’ll try to seek some answers from the administration.”

Republicans on the committee released a statement that said “The Committee has been in contact with TSA leadership and requested additional briefings so our Members and staff can get answers to critical questions regarding [federal air marshals’] policies and procedures regarding this program.”

Frederick Hill, spokesman for the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which has jurisdiction over the TSA, said that committee also has requested additional information on the program.

“We had not heard of the program at the committee. We’re asking to be briefed on it,” said his Democratic counterpart, Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for ranking member Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida.

The program raises questions

Travelers wait in one of the terminals at Newark Liberty International Airport on July 18. A former head of the Transportation Security Administration said the agency stationed plainclothes personnel in airport terminals and as inflight air marshals to observe passengers.

about the willingness of Americans to sacrifice privacy to ensure safety as they go about routine air travel within the United States and abroad.

TSA undercover agents are trained to observe passengers waiting to board flights and those already on the plane, using a lengthy checklist of behaviors that, officials say collectively, suggest the person might be a terrorist.

“It’s a program where we identify people who have irregular travel patterns or exhibit behaviors that we know known terrorists have exhibited, so they come up as someone who is worth additional attention,” TSA spokesman Jim Gregory said. “It’s no different than how a police precinct might put additional police presence on a beat just to make sure that if anything happens there’s someone close by who can address it.”

Gregory declined to provide details because “we’re not excited about putting more information out about a program designed to catch bad people.”

The American Civil Liberties Union said Monday that it will seek TSA records of the “Quiet Skies” program by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

“The TSA is engaging in covert surveillance of travelers and raising a host of disturbing questions in the process,” said ACLU lawyer Hugh Handeyside. “Travelers deserve to know how this surveillance is being implemented, what its consequences are for Americans, and for how long the TSA is retaining the information it gathers.”

Handeyside said the TSA has “a track record of using unreliable and unscientific techniques, such as ‘behavior detection,’ to screen and monitor travelers who have done nothing wrong.”

Pistole said he did not know whether anyone had been taken into custody as a result of “Quiet Skies,” and Gregory declined to say whether there had been arrests made or plots disrupted.

“I don’t recall anybody offhand,” Pistole said. n ©The Washington Post

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FIVE MYTHS

Security clearances BY

G ARRETT M . G RAFF

Recently, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Trump was considering revoking the security clearances of former high­ranking officials who had criticized him, such as one­ time director of national intelligence James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan and national security adviser Susan Rice. It wasn’t the first time the shadowy process behind access to the government’s in­ nermost secrets was the center of questions this year. Here are some of the most common misunderstandings.

MYTH NO. 1 There’s a security clearance level above ‘top secret.’

While this is false, there are complex gradations of clearance that determine who has access to what, and it’s not just about “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” clearances.

There is no level “beyond” top secret, but within those three broad categories are what the government calls “need to know” information, multitudes of subclearances, each designated by its own code word. That “need to know” includes what’s known as SCI, or “sensitive compartmented information,” which deals with intelligence sources and methods.

There are also SAPs, or “special access programs,” which deal with specific “black” projects, operations, weapons systems or even secret acquisition efforts.

MYTH NO. 2 You can’t be political if you have a security clearance.

There’s no prohibition in the security clearance process against partisan opinions — with one narrow exception. The Clintonera Executive Order 12968, “Access to Classified Information,” guides the process, saying that clearances shall be granted only to individuals “whose personal and professional history affirmatively indicates loyalty to the United States, strength of character, trustworthiness, honesty,

reliability, discretion, and sound judgment, as well as freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion.”

That means agencies use what they call a “whole person” evaluation to adjudicate a clearance level and assess “derogatory events.” Although the government studies 13 areas, from demonstrated “allegiance to the U.S.” to sexual behavior, financial considerations and alcohol consumption, it doesn’t bar expressing partisan opinions, taking political views or even engaging in electoral politics (as long as federal employees don’t violate the Hatch Act).

MYTH NO. 3 There’s such a thing as a ‘permanent clearance.’

That term is a misnomer. Even those who fill out the lengthy SF86 background form — which requires listing personal information ranging from past relationships to financial information to drug use — and pass a “single scope background investigation” are not in the clear indefinitely. “Top secret” clearance holders are reinvestigated regularly — the standard is typically every five years, though it’s longer at times because of reinvestigation backlogs. They can have their clearances yanked if they have fallen into financial trouble, undertaken suspicious foreign travel or contacts, or if there’s

TASOS KATOPODIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

President Trump was considering revoking the security clearance of James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.

other new “adverse information,” such as recent treatment for mental health or charges of domestic abuse.

MYTH NO. 4 There’s no reason for former employees to have clearances.

Many agencies allow employees with active clearances to keep them after they leave the government. Indeed, highranking officials can often keep their clearances effectively for life, as long as they pass the routine reinvestigations, because agencies believe they serve as important keepers of institutional memory, providing advice and counsel to current employees. If you’re the new CIA director, it helps to call your predecessor and ask how he or she handled similar situations or navigated tricky political waters.

Already “cleared” federal employees are also in high demand with defense or other government contractors, since they can start work on classified projects immediately without

waiting for the lengthy background checks.

MYTH NO. 5 Only the president can declassify secrets.

While the president has unique powers to declassify information — he can instantly declassify anything without any process or review — the government has numerous “original classification authorities,” who are free at any time to classify or declassify information “owned” by their departments. Officials like the secretary of state and the CIA director, or those designated by them, can classify (and declassify) information at the “top secret” level. Even people like the commerce secretary and the agriculture secretary can classify at the “secret” level. n Graff is a journalist and historian. He is the author of, among other books, “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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Work begins on identifying remains B Y MIN JOO KIM AND SIMON DENYER in Osan Air Base, South Korea

M

ore than 60 years after the last shot was fired in the Korean War, the U.S. military is now in possession of what are believed to be the remains of more than 50 service members after the first such handover by North Korea in more than a decade.

North Korea transferred the remains July 27, the first tangible moves from agreements reached between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at their meeting in Singapore on June 12. On Wednesday, 55 boxes of remains draped in the United Nations flag were taken to a pair of U.S. military planes, which flew them to a military laboratory in Hawaii for analysis and identification. The caskets were carried off the planes at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, covered by American flags as a military band played taps and Vice President Pence joined commanders standing at attention.

Initial forensic analysis suggested that the remains were likely to be those of American service members, the U.S. military said. But experts say positive identification of all the remains could take years.

“Generally speaking, what I can tell you is that the remains are consistent with the remains we have recovered in North Korea,” John Byrd, director of analysis for the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, said in a news conference before the ceremony.

Byrd said the preliminary findings of the U.S. investigation were that the remains are what North Korean officials said they are.

“They are likely to be American remains,” he said.

Pence hailed the moment as a breakthrough after more than a decade in which no remains were handed over by Pyongyang amid a deepening standoff between the nations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

“What we see today is tangible progress in our efforts to keep peace on the Korean Peninsula. But today is just the beginning,” said

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Preliminary tests suggest bodies transferred from N. Korea are Americans, but effort will take time Pence, whose father was a Korean War veteran. “Our work will not be complete until all our fallen heroes are accounted for and home.”

Trump thanked Kim in an early morning tweet Thursday, writing “I am not at all surprised that you took this kind action. Also, thank you for your nice letter - I look forward to seeing you soon!”

North Korea provided enough information about where the bodies were found to allow U.S. officials to match them to battles fought in 1950 and 1951, Byrd said.

One dog tag was also returned, and the family of that soldier has been informed, but it has not been established whether his remains were among those returned, Byrd said.

Indeed, North Korean military officials did not claim that all items in each box went together, he said.

“They expressed concern that there was a lot of co-mingling when these remains were recovered from the very beginning,” he said.”

Byrd said a lot of military hardware — such as helmets, canteens and boots — were included in the shipment.

The Pentagon estimates that nearly 7,700 U.S. troops are unaccounted for from the war; among them are 5,300 believed to have been killed north of the 38th parallel, which largely follows the boundary between North and South Korea. Most died on the battlefield and were buried in shallow graves or in cemeteries that were intended to be temporary, but some also perished in POW camps run by North Korea or China, experts say.

The process of finding and repatriating their remains has long been hampered by North Korea’s reluctance to allow U.S. military investigators unrestricted access to battle sites and by the North’s desire to wring as much political capital and money out of the process of returning the remains as possible.

Rick Downes, executive director

Members of the military carry cases containing what are believed to be the remains of U.S. troops who died in the Korean War to a ceremony at Joint Base Pearl HarborHickam in Hawaii.

North Korea handed over the remains a little over a week ago, and they were flown to Hawaii on Wednesday. In the solemn ceremony, Vice President Pence spoke of “these great American heroes fallen so long ago.”

of a group of families whose loved ones never came home from the Korean War, said it now appears that Pyongyang is trying to help.

Troops from 16 other nations fought alongside the Americans under the U.N. flag during the Korean War, and diplomats and officials from all those countries placed wreaths at the ceremony. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said this past week it was possible that some of the remains could belong to soldiers from those nations, and if so, they would be repatriated once they have been identified.

On Wednesday, U.S. Consul General Angela Kerwin said that no money was paid to North Korea for the remains.

The remains were flown from the North Korean city of Wonsan on Friday, on the 65th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, and were greeted at Osan Air Base by hundreds of U.S. service personnel and their families.

Another ceremony was conducted Wednesday as the remains were sent to Hawaii, with bugles playing taps, as well as “The Last Post,” a call used at funerals by British and Commonwealth militaries, and a South Korean bugle call. National anthems of the United States and South Korea were played, and the caskets were given a three-volley salute by U.S. riflemen.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month that the two sides have agreed to recommence field operations in North Korea to search for missing Americans, and the Pentagon said it is considering sending personnel to North Korea for this purpose.

The United States and North Korean militaries conducted joint searches for missing service members from 1996 until 2005, and 400 caskets of remains were handed over during that period.

But Washington then halted the program, citing concerns about the safety of its personnel as Pyongyang stepped up its nuclear program. The United States says it does not pay directly for the remains but has given the North Koreans “compensation” for the costs of the recovery in the past. n ©The Washington Post

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When the majority is

is in the minority

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COVER STORY

White workers struggle in a factory where most employees only speak Spanish

I

BY T ERRENCE M C C OY in Fredericksburg, Pa.

t was minutes before the end of the first shift, and the beginning of the second, and the hallways at the chicken plant swarmed with workers coming and going. One pulled a hairnet over her curly hair, giggling at a joke. Two others exchanged kisses on the cheek. A woman with a black ponytail hugged everyone within reach. And a thin, ashen woman, whom no one greeted or even seemed to notice, suddenly smiled.

There he was. Standing near the lockers. Tall and crew-cut. Her boyfriend.

“Hi,” said Heaven Engle, 20.

“Hey,” replied Venson Heim, 25.

They met every day at this time, before he started his shift as a mechanic at Bell & Evans Plant 2, and she started hers as “I don’t know what they call it; I just check the chicken.” It was the hardest

moment of her day. She knew she was about to go at least eight hours without speaking English, or probably anything at all, in a plant where nearly all of the workers were Latino and spoke Spanish, and she was one of the few who wasn’t and didn’t.

She slowly took out her earrings, nose ring and lip ring, placing them into her knapsack, and he turned to leave. “I got to go in 10 seconds,” he said, and she grabbed onto him. “Why are you trying to act like you want to leave me or something?” she said, and the two held the embrace, swaying slightly, their world outside the plant’s walls — white, rural, conservative — feeling distant in this world within, where they were the outsiders, the ones who couldn’t communicate, the minority.

In a country where whites will lose majority status in about a quarter-century, and where research suggests that demographic anxiety is contributing to many of the so-

ABOVE: The house Heaven Engle lives in with her mother in Fredericksburg, Pa. LEFT: Vensom Heim, Heaven’s boyfriend, whom she met at work at Bell & Evans.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

cial fissures polarizing the United States, from immigration policy to welfare reform to the election of President Trump, the story of the coming decades will be, to some degree, the story of how white people adapt to a changing country. It will be the story of people like Heaven Engle and Venson Heim, both of whom were beginning careers on the bottom rung of an industry remade by Latinos, whose population growth is fueling that of America, and were now, in unusually intense circumstances, coming to understand what it means to be outnumbered.

They didn’t know the heavy burden of discrimination familiar to members of historically oppressed minority groups, including biased policing and unequal access to jobs and housing. But some of the everyday experiences that have long challenged millions of black, Latino and immi-

grant Americans — the struggle to understand and be understood, feeling unseen, fear of rapid judgments — were beginning to challenge them, too.

Venson let go of Heaven. He told her he had to clock in. She watched him disappear around a corner, then stood there for a moment, alone. She pulled on a winter hat, a wool scarf and a thick coat, knowing how cold the factory can get, then went to a different clock-in station. In the nearly vacant hallway, she watched the clock, waiting for her shift to begin at 3:20.

Seven minutes left: Employees gathered around Heaven, first three, then four, then six.

Studies have shown how whites, who are dying faster than they are being born in 26 states, react when they become aware of a tectonic demographic shift that will, with little historic precedent, reconfigure the racial and ethnic geography of an entire country.

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Some swing to the right, either becoming conservative for the first time, or increasingly conservative — politically activated, explained Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, who among others found that white Democrats voted for Trump in higher numbers in places where the Latino population had recently grown the most.

Four minutes left: Heaven, looking at the floor, heard laughter and jokes exchanged in the rapid Spanish of the Dominican Republic.

“They feel threatened, even if not directly affected by the change, and adopt positions targeting minorities out of fears of what America will look like,” said Rachel Wetts of the University of California at Berkeley, who argued in one study that recent calls by whites to cut welfare were born of racial resentment inflamed by demographic anxiety, even though whites benefit from the social safety net as well.

Two minutes left: Heaven pressed closer and closer to the wall in a hallway that was now filled with workers, all Latino.

They empathize more deeply with other whites — a sense of group identity ignited — because “they feel like ‘We’re part of a threatened group, and we need to band together,’ ” said René Flores, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Chicago who has analyzed how whites reacted to the growing Latino presence in rural Pennsylvania.

And they feel as Heaven did now, clocking in, then following the others out onto the production floor: Either she’d find a way to fit in, or she’d find a way to get out.

W

hen Heaven graduated from high school in the spring of 2016, she had no desire to leave Fredericksburg.

College didn’t interest her, because she hated school and wasn’t great at it, and she didn’t want to go out and see the world, either.

She believed that everything she would ever need was already here, so she felt content to apply for a job at Bell & Evans, whose water tower looms over the town, and where just about everyone she knew had already worked.

You’ll love it there, her sister said.

They’ve got great benefits, her

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

mother said.

It was now her 20th month of giving it a chance, and she was standing at the end of a long processing machine called the Multivac, wearing a white smock and blue latex gloves, making $13 an hour, waiting for the next four packages of chicken breasts to come down the line. They arrived every six seconds, and in that time she scanned for discoloration, leakage and mislabeling, setting aside defective packages for reprocessing. It was relentless: Here they came, there they went, every six seconds, about 40 in a minute, thousands in a shift — a shift during which so many things would upset her, but never the work.

She could handle the monotony. She could deal with standing under the vents, which cooled the production floor to 40 degrees.

She could even tolerate the mess.

The day chicken juice got all over her hair and face, the thing that had been intolerable had not been the smell or the taste, but that she didn’t have anyone to talk to

Heaven makes $13 an hour working on a quality-control line at Bell & Evans.

about it.

She felt more alone than she had ever thought possible. Alone when a worker slipped in front of her, and she wanted to ask if he was okay but didn’t know how.

Alone when she once went to the break room, saw the tables filled with people speaking Spanish, and swore that she would never be back. And now when another plant worker, Denisse Salvador, a demure 25-year-old from the Dominican Republic, came to collect 40 chicken breasts that Heaven had placed into a bucket, she felt alone again. Months before, Salvador had marshaled all of her English to ask Heaven her name, and for a moment Heaven had felt less isolated, as though maybe that could be the beginning of a friendship, but that had been the extent of the conversation, and now neither said anything as Salvador collected the chicken breasts and left.

H

eaven watched her go, then looked down. Four more chicken packages were ar-

riving. She vacantly scanned them, and the next batch, and the next, losing herself in a thought that had grown to consume her.

She couldn’t do this anymore. Two years of her life — gone, spent in near silence. She knew it was her fault, too. She could have tried harder, learned a few Spanish words, overcome her shyness. But instead, all she had ever wanted was another job, where friends would come easier and where she wouldn’t feel so outnumbered, because, as she had again tried to explain earlier that day to her father, Dave Engle, “It sucks when you can’t talk to no one.”

They were riding in Dave’s big red truck. The windows were down. Country music was playing. The road cut through an endless expanse of fields and hills, a view that included a sign that said, “TRUMP,” with the “T” replaced by a handgun.

So much of Lebanon County, population 140,000, was undergoing what local historian Adam Bentz called a “demographic transformation,” but not Freder-

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COVER STORY icksburg, and not its 1,500 residents. Over the past two decades, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans had surged into nearby Lebanon city, either from New York or the Caribbean, attracted by cheap housing, an established Latino community, and food-processing plants that had become increasingly, if not mostly, staffed by Latinos, because, as one former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity put it, “White people didn’t want to work in the stinky chicken shop.” Fredericksburg, meanwhile, home to some plants, was still 95 percent white and overwhelmingly conservative. Downtown amounted to a library, a bar named the Fredericksburg Eagle Hotel, banners emblazoned with the bald eagle and signs that said, among other things, “NOTICE: This place is politically incorrect.”

Heaven looked out the window.

This was her town. Her people.

Was it so wrong to want to be among them? Was it so wrong to want to work with them? Was it so wrong to refuse to learn a new language? She had taken some Spanish in high school but had dropped it, not because she had any animosity toward the language or the people who spoke it, but because that just wasn’t her — that was other parts of Lebanon County, not Fredericksburg.

Now on the edge of her Fredericksburg rose a giant new factory, and Heaven read a sign outside saying, “Hiring All Positions.”

“That big place right back there,” she said. “That’s the Ace Hardware I want to apply at. Isn’t it opening in June?”

“It’s already open,” her father replied, and she started thinking of all of the possibilities of working there — conversations, friends, belonging — rather than the reality of what awaited her hours later, which was another bin full of raw chicken legs, and Salvador again making her way toward the back of the line to pick it up. Heaven watched Salvador coming, annoyed. Why couldn’t she learn English? Why was it up to Heaven to change? Salvador was the newcomer, not her.

What Heaven didn’t know was that Salvador agreed with her. She thought it was her responsibility to learn English, too. She had grown up seeing Americans come through her town along the Dominican Republic’s northern

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

coast and had dreamed of following them back to the United States. But when she finally got here in April 2017, all she had found was a sick mother, who had sponsored her green card but whom she now had to care for, endless household chores and a 45-minute commute from their home in Reading, Pa., to a chicken plant where there was no need to learn English because everyone spoke Spanish. So now, nearly as monolingual as when she arrived, all she did when she reached the back of the line was smile at Heaven, who smiled back, then wheel the chicken away.

“I

’m quitting,” Heaven was saying.

“You’re always saying you’re quitting,” said this shift’s only other white production worker, Ronaele Wengert, 31, who came by one day to tell Heaven that they had a meeting in a few minutes. They knew what that could mean.

“I swear to God, if they don’t say anything in English, I’m going to freak out,” Heaven said.

“Then they’ll say, ‘Do you understand? Do you understand?’ Does it look like I understand?” Wengert said. “Then they translate.”

“They try.”

She shook her head. What was this job doing to her? She had never thought of herself as prejudiced — and still didn’t — but there were increasingly times

when she felt so far on the outside, so little understood, that her alienation was hardening into something closer to anger, and possibly worse. Like when she had to clock in and felt pushed out of the way. Or when supervisors separated Spanish speakers from English speakers for training videos, sometimes leaving Heaven in a room alone, except for a guy who she believed spoke only French.

Worried that it might happen again, she headed to the wash sinks and warmed her numb hands under the water. She took off her smock and hairnet and, straightening her hair, went into the meeting room. It was already filled with employees, but there was a seat in the back, where she sat down and waited.

A form was handed out, and she sighed in irritation when she saw it was in Spanish — “política de zapatos resistentes a resbalones” — only nodding in relief when she flipped it over and realized there was an English version: “slip-resistant shoe policy.” She quickly looked at it, then leaned over to Wengert, seated beside her, and said, “This is not going to be in English.”

“Yeah,” Wengert said.

“I’m okay sitting here and reading it,” Heaven said. “I did that last time.”

As the meeting went on — presenters at first switching between Spanish and English, but increasingly talking only in Spanish —

A part-American, part-Confederate flag flies outside a house south of Lebanon, Pa.

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she became more and more irritated. When one worker joked that his Timberland boots were probably slip-resistant, and everyone laughed, she didn’t understand what was happening. Later, when another employee called the boots pictured in the handout ugly, and people chuckled again, she crossed her arms. One of the presenters tried to keep up, translating all that he could, looking at Heaven when he did, but it was no use. He missed some things or got the words wrong.

“Is that supposed to be English?” Wengert whispered to Heaven, who shook her head slightly. When the meeting was over, she stood up and, without a word, walked out. It was break time, and everyone else was talking lunch, heading for the cafeteria. But Heaven didn’t follow.

She instead went to her locker, took out her phone and a pack of menthol cigarettes, and went outside into the day’s last light.

That’s where she saw him. Outside, along the iron fence, taking his break alone, too.

“Is that my boyfriend?” she called.

She went to him. They kissed and sat side by side, legs touching.

Flipping through Facebook, she told him about the meeting, how uncomfortable it had been.

“They don’t give a rat’s ass about people with white skin,” he said.

She nodded, feeling better. This was exactly what she had needed.

Someone who understood, and Venson always did. She first met him last July. For months, she had called over any mechanic — most of whom were white on her shift — repairing a nearby machine, just to have someone to talk to, and then one day it was Venson.

He told her he had gone to the same high school she had, and it felt so good to connect that they soon had a relationship going, one whose core was their shared experience at Bell & Evans.

“Half of them know English, and they just don’t show it,” Venson continued, pulling on a cigarette.

“They do,” she agreed, smoking her own.

“You get pretty much overlooked,” he said.

She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling tired, and then the two of them were quiet as the trucks carting away

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the chicken rumbled off and the final minutes of their break ticked down to nothing.

T

here were days when Venson imagined what might await America. This would be a nation where whites weren’t only a minority, but disadvantaged, punished for their collective crimes, because, as he put it, “we haven’t been the nicest race.”

Speaking Spanish wouldn’t just be beneficial, but essential, and people like him would never be able to recover from what they didn’t know.

These were relatively new thoughts for him. Until now, his entire life had been lived in one America, the America of Jonestown, Pa., where he shared a drab two-story rental with his mother in a neighborhood of neat yards, basketball hoops and trucks parked in the driveways. He graduated from Northern Lebanon High School, whose demographics the principal, Jennifer Hassler, struggled to describe as “Diversity isn’t necessarily — we don’t have a lot of diversity, we just don’t.” On weekends, his family took day trips to nearby Hershey’s Chocolate World.

But since he had started at Bell & Evans and been plunged into another America, this one less familiar, race had been on his mind all of the time.

He didn’t understand why people said the United States should allow in more immigrants. If a Syrian needed asylum from a murderous regime, then yes, the country should help. But anyone crossing the border seeking jobs, even government assistance — that didn’t seem fair. What about the people already here? What about the homeless? What about him?

He was the one, after all, whose career had been shaped by Washington policymakers, who he believed didn’t know what it was like to be an outsider in your own community — a feeling that had become as ordinary to him as the wrench in his back pocket, which he now took out to tinker with a malfunctioning batter machine.

Three white mechanics in blue smocks were huddled around the machine. Ten Latino workers in white smocks were huddled around them, watching as Venson unscrewed a clogged pipe to drain the excess batter, then screwed it back on. The white men stood up

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

and, with another job done, returned to the mechanics’ break room, finding a mess of junk food and drinks and a giant American flag hanging in the back from ceiling to floor. They took off their smocks and hairnets. Venson sat at the picnic table. He took in a slow breath and let it out.

The truth was that he loved this job. He didn’t have a vocational degree, like some of the mechanics, or any experience, like others.

But in just one year, he had gotten so good at it that his bosses had bumped his hourly pay from $13.50 to $17. When the Pacmac or the DSI Portioning System acted up, he was the one who knew what to do, not because he was a savant, but because he had worked at it, day after day, which was why he became so frustrated when workers in that department didn’t ask him for assistance. They wanted help only from Juan Leon, the shift’s lone Latino mechanic, a Puerto Rican transplant whom Venson genuinely liked and appreciated, but who didn’t know those machines. Venson did. So why didn’t they ask him for help?

Why did they want solely another Latino? How did it get to be this way?

“I was amazed,” mechanic Mike Stubblefield said one day, during another break room conversation about the plant’s racial dynamic, after seeing entire Latino families working at the plant. “ ‘Your father works here, your mother, your brother and your sister?’ ”

“That goes right back to what I was saying. It’s an easy place to get employed, these plants are,” Venson said. “They just come put in an application, ‘I need trabajo.’ ” “Yo necesito trabajo?” said Mike Zombro, another mechanic.

“Yeah, sure, whatever, yo quiero Taco Bell,” Venson said. “No speak-a the Spanish.”

“That’s why we have Juan.

‘Juan, what the f--- is he saying to me? Because I don’t f---ing know,’ ” Zombro said, laughing and backslapping Leon, who last year had requested a transfer to a shift with more Latino mechanics, in part to get away from this type of talk.

On his way toward the next assignment, Venson saw Heaven.

She was alone at the back of Line 4. He had never seen her speak with anyone, not in the year he had been here, and he didn’t know how she did it. At least he had the camaraderie of the mechanics, the reprieve of their break room, the fulfillment of doing work he liked. But why was she still here, he couldn’t help but think. Why hadn’t she quit?

I

t was nearly 2 in the afternoon when Heaven woke, two hours later than she had wanted, inside a trailer sealed from the light outside. Lying on a mattress without a frame, she checked her phone to see if Venson had texted her — not yet — then grabbed a pack of menthol cigarettes and went outside, squinting into the cloudless afternoon.

Heaven and her boyfriend, Venson Heim, visit Siegrist Dam near Lebanon, Pa. The core of their relationship is their shared work experience at Bell & Evans.

No matter how many times she had been out here, the view had never changed, one of the few things that hadn’t in a county and state and country where every year seemed to bring more news of transformation. In 2015, demographers announced that California had more Latinos than whites. In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau said white babies hadn’t been the majority the year before.

In 2017, all racial minorities were found to be growing faster than whites. And here in Lebanon County, plans were underway for yet more factories and plants, including one at Bell & Evans, that local experts predict will employ mostly Latinos, accelerating the demographic shift.

Heaven felt resigned to what she could not change. She had applied to the new Ace Hardware factory. Then when that didn’t lead to anything, she submitted an application to an industrial supply plant. But no one got back to her on that, either, and she now wondered: What had been the point? She believed she would be a minority no matter what plant she worked in.

The cigarette was done, and she went inside. She put on her makeup then drove the three miles into work. She looked for Venson, but he had already clocked in. It was seven minutes until her shift began, and with nothing better to do, and no one to talk to, she went to the clock-in station, where she watched the woman with a black ponytail coming down the hallway, hugging people as she went.

This time, however, when she reached Heaven, the woman stopped. Heaven stayed motionless, unsure. Without a trace of caution, the woman embraced her, saying something Heaven didn’t understand. Then an older woman kissed her cheek. Then the women crowding around Heaven began to laugh, and, as the final minutes went by, she started laughing, too.

Then it was over. The clock hit 3:20. A rush of key cards touched the clock-in machine. The women dispersed: the Spanish speakers to one station, where they stood and got to work, chatting as they went, and Heaven to the back of Line 4, where the only sound in her ears was the whir of the Multivac pushing out the next four packages of chicken. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Hemingway’s Venetian inspiration N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL M EWSHAW

E AUTUMN IN VENICE Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

By Andrea Di Robilant Knopf. 348 pp. $26.95

rnest Hemingway influenced generations of writers with his terse, understated prose, his stoic code of grace under fire and his commitment to producing a strict number of pages each day. In his private life, he showed no such discipline. Married four times and chronically unfaithful, a man alternately bellicose and sloppily sentimental, a blowhard and relentless self-promoter who claimed to crave privacy, he passed himself off as an icon of machismo, yet wrote a novel, “The Garden of Eden,” rife with crossdressing and gender fluidity. It would have taxed Sigmund Freud and all his psychoanalytic acolytes to tease out the implications of Hemingway’s rigorous literary standards and his slovenly personal style.

“Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse” focuses on the final turbulent decade of a life, but Andrea di Robilant captures the full panoply of quirks and conflicts that often made Papa and those closest to him miserable. Lovers, ex-wives, friends, publishers, even complete strangers were forced to dance to the tune he piped. Still, di Robilant, never fails to empathize with the aging author’s predicament. Staring down the gun barrel of his 50th birthday, Hemingway brooded about his health, his eroding powers and the opinion of critics that he was finished.

As usual when under attack, Hemingway didn’t retreat; he charged off to Europe, the source of his earlier successes. Setting sail in 1948, Papa and his wife, Mary, planned to tour Provence and cap off the trip with a stay in Paris. Instead, circumstances conspired to keep them in Italy, and Hemingway impulsively decided to revisit the Veneto region where, during World War I, he was wounded.

Unlike the raw adolescent who arrived in 1918 and departed from Italy without anyone noticing,

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ernest Hemingway in a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice in the fall of 1948, when he made his first extended visit to Italy in many years.

Hemingway was now world-famous, and journalists and photographers mobbed his every move.

He and Mary settled in Venice.

They were lionized by the local aristocracy, and Papa spent more time shooting ducks than working at his desk. It was on a hunt at a private reserve that he encountered Adriana Ivancich and fell in . . . “love” doesn’t begin to describe his state of besottedness.

He lost his heart, his head and his vaunted artistic detachment to a teenage girl. She was intelligent and pliable, and Hemingway made her his muse. There’s no evidence they were sexually inti-

mate, but they exchanged heartfelt letters and paired off in public, scandalizing Venetian society.

Through it all, Mary Hemingway hung onto her husband, swallowed his insults and her own humiliations, and forgave him his outbursts of rage.

To round off the cast of characters, Adriana’s brother Gianfranco also lived in Havana and appears to have struck up an affair with Mary. Papa responded by breaking his wife’s typewriter. His majordomo, René Villarreal, was romantically embroiled with Adriana and led her on late-night skinny-dipping escapades.

A diligent researcher of primary and secondary texts, di Robilant demonstrated in his first book, “A Venetian Affair,” a gift for weaving fascinating narratives from letters, diaries, archives and previously published work. In this instance he has a treasure trove of material. Mary, Adriana, Gianfranco and even René all published memoirs, offering a stereoscopic depiction of events.

But the crystallizing point of view, the one that raises this story far above idle gossip, belonged to Hemingway himself. He not only transmuted the romance into art in an interesting if flawed novel, “Across the River and Into the Trees,” but also produced “The Old Man and the Sea,” for which he won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize. (The next year he won the Nobel Prize.)

He also finished a major part of “A Moveable Feast” and drafts of “Islands in the Stream” and “The Garden of Eden,” published posthumously.

Sadly, the story doesn’t end in triumph. Hemingway continued to deteriorate. Drinking did much of the damage. A lifetime of reckless adventure broke down his body, and paranoia and depression addled his brain. After several bouts of convulsive shock treatment, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at the age of 61.

In the estimation of some critics, he had betrayed his code of honor and courage. But Norman Mailer speculated that Papa’s “inner landscape was a nightmare” and wrote, “The final judgment on [Hemingway’s] work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety with him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” n Mewshaw has lived on and off in Italy for 45 years. His memoir, “The Lost Prince: A Search for Pat Conroy,” comes out in 2019. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

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A generation’s debt and doubt

A modern twist on an Agatha Christie

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

K ATHERINE S . N EWMAN

he Great Recession — which lasted years longer than earlier downturns — wreaked havoc with the expectations of middle-class millennials. It accelerated the disruption of professions such as law and made more painful the longterm erosion of working conditions in academia and journalism.

As these ascendant generations came into their prime child-bearing years, the double whammy of the increasing costs of raising a family and the declining prospects for professional careers produced what Alissa Quart terms in her book, “Squeezed,” the “Middle Precariat.”

The boomer parents of the Middle Precariat raised their children to desire meaningful work and the benefits that were supposed to be attached: reliable salaries, home ownership, the financial wherewithal to provide a good education for the next generation.

From “Squeezed,” we learn that those expectations have been dashed by a new economic reality: the spread of contingent work into professions that were once stable, the erosion of salaries and the disappearance of benefits (including fixed work schedules), and stunning increases in the costs of child care and housing.

These bald facts are already well-known. What “Squeezed” adds to the familiar picture is a keen understanding of the bewilderment, shame and self-doubt that millennial parents now feel as they are forced to reckon with the fallout of their choices and the betrayal of the American promise that each generation will do at least as well as, if not exceed the fortunes of, the previous one.

That these experiences are not universally shared, even among millennials themselves, is testimony to the impact of economic inequality on the fortunes of young parents. Those who heeded the siren call of Wall Street have reaped outsize salaries and the wealth accumulation that goes

with them. It is their sisters and brothers who entered the world of arts and letters, racked up enormous debts to complete a law degree, or followed their calling into teaching who now confront the gap between what they were raised to expect and what they can provide.

They wonder whether they made mistakes in following their career dreams, whether they should have subordinated the desire for work they love to the security that follows from jobs that pay. And underlying their disappointment is a hint that they were sold a bill of goods, though it isn’t clear by whom: their parents, their generation, their society?

Quart captures well the toxic combination of American individualism and the disrupted evolution of particular professions that has left millions of millennials in a more fragile financial condition than they expected would be their lot in life. Hardened readers may find the stories it contains the self-absorbed accounts of people who should have known better. The storytellers themselves may feel the same way.

“Squeezed” could just as easily have been titled “Duped” because the underlying assumption that millennials should have seen this disaster coming is palpable throughout. It is hard to avoid the sense, so ubiquitous in American society, that each individual is to blame for the error of their ways because somehow they should have known. It is the special genius of American culture to create a powerful sense of agency in people who are, as the sociologist C. Wright Mills observed, living at the painful intersection of history and biography. n Newman is the interim chancellor of the University of Massachusetts and author of the forthcoming book, “Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality.” This was written for The Washington Post.

S SQUEEZED Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

By Alissa Quart Ecco. 312 pp. $27.99

THE PRISONER IN THE CASTLE A Maggie Hope Mystery

By Susan Elia MacNeal Random House.

320 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

A MY S TEWART

usan Elia MacNeal’s eighth Maggie Hope mystery opens with a scene tailormade for readers in the post-election, #MeToo era. During combat training, British secret operative Camilla Odell kills a man with her bare hands and enjoys it. At the moment she snaps his neck, “a sinister, intoxicating joy flowed through her.” She bends over him with the triumph of a hunter inspecting his prey.

It is the kind of gleeful celebration of women’s rage and power that is showing up in novels and on television right now — think Sarai Walker’s “Dietland” — but this novel is not set in the modern era. MacNeal’s series, which debuted in 2012 with “Mr. Churchill’s Secretary,” takes place in World War II and features the decidedly less bloodthirsty Maggie Hope, who manages, over the seven installments leading up to this one, to serve as secretary to England’s prime minister, unmask spies, thwart murderers and untangle her own complicated past.

Clearly, Maggie Hope can hold her own. But the introduction of seasoned killer Camilla Odell offers the tantalizing possibility of an invincible dynamic duo.

But MacNeal has other plans for “The Prisoner in the Castle.”

The book is a locked-room mystery in the spirit of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.”

There are several references to Christie’s 1939 classic, a book Christie wrote, according to her autobiography, “because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer becoming obvious.”

In MacNeal’s version, our protagonist, Maggie Hope — and now, Camilla Odell and several others — is imprisoned on an island, much like the guests invited to an island holiday in Christie’s novel.

It is helpful to surround them by a frigid body of water so no one can

escape, and it is also handy to have a reason they cannot send for help: In both novels, a storm makes it impossible for boats to approach.

There is one critical difference between Christie’s novel and MacNeal’s. “And Then There Were None” introduces readers to 10 characters who are alleged to be murderers themselves. Even the possibility of their guilt absolves readers of the obligation to mourn for them.

“The Prisoner in the Castle,” however, has to get by without that device. Maggie Hope and her fellow inmates have, for the most part, served their country faithfully. Some knew too much, some were susceptible to bribery, and some had committed a moral but not a criminal offense.

This is the difficulty with killing off a succession of characters who might not deserve to die: There is no time to mourn them as they go.

MacNeal does her best to give Maggie Hope her moments of grief, but those feel superimposed upon a story structure that is built for speed, not emotional depth.

Of the plot itself I do not dare give away more. Another note of genius in Christie’s locked-room mystery is the characters, being trapped on an island, have nothing to do with their time but to sit around and discuss the case. This is useful, because it sidesteps the awkwardness that can occur in murder mysteries when the plot becomes so convoluted that a couple of characters have to sit down and explain it to one another, just to make sure the reader is keeping up. Here it is the entire point of the book.

If you love a tricky puzzle that requires you to keep track of multiple alibis over time, this is your summer read. n Stewart is the author of 10 books, including “Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit,” the latest in the Kopp Sisters series.

This was written for The Washington Post.

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ENVIRONMENT

Warmer world, dangerous summer

BY J OEL A CHENBACH AND A NGELA F RITZ

I

n the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a recordbreaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low. It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth.

Montreal hit 98 degrees on July 2, its warmest temperature ever measured. Canadian health officials estimate as many as 70 people died in that heat wave.

In the United States, 35 weather stations in July set new marks for warm overnight temperatures. Southern California has had record heat and widespread power outages. In Yosemite Valley, which is imperiled by wildfires, park rangers had to tell everyone to flee.

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

And they predict that it will get hotter — and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.

“The old records belong to a world that no longer exists,” said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-

VALENTIN FLAURAUD/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Across the Northern Hemisphere, evidence of climate change has been extreme and deadly tion.

It’s not just heat. A warming world is prone to multiple types of extreme weather — heavier downpours, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts.

“You see roads melting, airplanes not being able to take off, there’s not enough water,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “Climate change hits us at our Achilles’ heel. In the Southwest, it’s water availability.

On the Gulf Coast, it’s hurricanes.

In the East, it’s flooding. It’s exacerbating the risks we already face today.”

Gone are the days when scientists drew a bright line dividing weather and climate. Now researchers can examine a weather event and estimate how much climate change had to do with causing or exacerbating it.

Last year, when Hurricane Harvey broke the record for how much rain could fall from a single storm, researchers knew climate

change had been a factor.

Months later, scientists presented findings that Harvey dumped at least 15 percent more rain in Houston than it would have without global warming.

Theory, meet reality: When the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more moisture. Climate change does not cause hurricanes to spin up or thunderstorms to develop, but it can be an intensifier.

In Los Angeles, Marty Adams, chief operating officer of the Department of Water and Power, said, “It seems like every year, we’ve had some type of temperature anomaly that we normally would not have.” Residents of beach cities such as Long Beach and Santa Monica, who normally rely on the ocean breeze to cool their homes, have added air-conditioning units, which strains the grid and has contributed to power outages, he said.

Said Hayhoe: “The biggest myth that the largest number of people have bought into is that

Swimmers play in Lake Geneva in Lutry, Switzerland, at the end of July, as wide swaths of Europe faced temperatures of up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

‘climate change doesn’t matter to me personally.’ ” The heat waves have hit hard where people don’t expect them — the Netherlands, Sweden, Britain, Ireland and Canada.

It’s Britain’s driest summer since modern records began in 1961. Reservoirs are declining rapidly, and water restrictions are in effect. The United Kingdom’s national weather service urged people to avoid the sun this past week, with temperatures expected to hit 98 Fahrenheit.

In Ireland, the sun-parched fields revealed a previously hidden footprint of a 5,000-year-old monument near Newgrange.

If nothing is done to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, scientists say, the global temperature increase could reach nine degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, with higher spikes on land and at high latitudes. The Paris agreement, signed by every country in the world, is designed to limit that temperature spike through commitments to cut greenhouse-gas emissions over time. President Trump, who in the past has called global warming a hoax, has vowed to pull the United States out of the accord as soon as that becomes possible, in 2020.

Average temperature is rising rapidly across the United States.

Heat waves are becoming more extreme and will continue to do so.

Overall precipitation has decreased in the South and West and increased in the North and East.

That trend will continue. The heaviest precipitation events will become more frequent and more extreme. Snowpack will continue to decline. Large wildfires will become even more frequent.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said even modest heat from global warming can build up over time.

“The accumulated energy over one month is equivalent to a small microwave oven at full power for six minutes over every square foot of the planet,” Trenberth said. “No wonder things catch on fire.” n ©The Washington Post

16

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