The Washington Post National Weekly - August 6, 2017

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Politics Is Joe Biden ready to run? 4 Nation Facebook’s daunting task 11 5 Myths Stephen K. Bannon 23

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POLITICS

Trump’s policy vs. his ancestors BY

P HILIP B UMP

I

t wasn’t until the media started asking questions that the White House’s introduction of a law curtailing legal immigration got contentious. During the daily news briefing, CNN’s Jim Acosta, himself a son of Cuban immigrants, challenged senior adviser Stephen Miller on a component of the proposed bill that would grant English speakers more favor in gaining admission to the United States.

“Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English?” Acosta asked. “Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?”

The answer is, of course, that they can. As President Trump’s grandfather did. As Stephen Miller’s great-grandparents did. And as a member of Trump’s own Cabinet did.

The policy, the Raise Act, would introduce a point-based system for new applicants to enter the United States. In addition to speaking English, points would be awarded based on answers to these other questions that Miller mentioned: Can they support themselves and their families financially? Do they have a skill that will add to the U.S. economy? Are they being paid a high wage?

Were that policy in place in 1885, Friedrich Trumpf would probably not have gained entry to the United States. The immigration record for his arrival that year indicates that he arrived without an identifiable “calling”: The word “none” sits next to his name in that column.

A biographer of Trumpf — father of Fred Trump, who was the father of the president — told Deutsche Welle that Donald Trump’s grandfather didn’t speak English when he got here.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“He came to New York,” Gwenda Blair said, “and, after he learnt English, he went to the West Coast, ran restaurants, amassed a nest egg, then went back to Kallstadt, married the girl next door and brought her to New York.” It was on the West Coast that Trumpf (now just Trump) became a citizen and registered to vote in the 1892 election.

1902 PHOTO BY ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

The Raise Act would create a point-based system for admitting immigrants to the U.S.

But: no skills, no English. Would he have gotten in?

Were Friedrich Trumpf barred entry, there might not be a President Trump. But if this law had been in effect a century ago, there also may not have been a senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Reporter Jennifer Mendelsohn tracked down Miller’s genealogy. She discovered that Miller’s father’s father’s mother — his greatgrandmother, Sarah Miller — was identified in the 1910 Census as speaking only Yiddish.

The Los Angeles Times obituary for Miller’s grandmother Freya makes special mention of how her parents, Nathan and Frannie Baker,

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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 43

“epitomized the American Dream.”

“Teaching each other English, working together to build a nest egg, the two immigrants eventually bought a small grocery store,” it reads. “The Baker Family lived upstairs and all the family worked in the store. Freya, and her two brothers, were educated in the superb public school system.”

Other senior Trump officials have family trees that suggest ancestors who may have been barred entry at Ellis Island.

Kellyanne Conway’s great-grandfather was named Pasquale Lombardo and was born in Naples, Italy. A man of that name and the proper age is identified in the 1910 Census as living in Pennsylvania and working as a blast furnace laborer who spoke only Italian.

Elaine Chao, Trump’s secretary of transportation (and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), was born in Taiwan and came to the United States in 1961, when she was 8. She described that transition in a CNN interview last month.

“I remember how tough it was to try to learn a new culture, a new language and just to adapt to, like, ordinary daily stuff like the food.

Like, most Chinese don’t eat meat between breads,” she said. As she tried to learn the language, “the kids were mean to me,” she said.

Her father, who spoke English, was already in the United States when Chao and her mother and sisters arrived, working in the maritime industry. Would that have been enough to warrant admission? To bring over his family?

This, it seems, was Acosta’s point: Doesn’t two centuries of experience show that people who arrive in America without the ability to speak English or a highly skilled trade can have a significant impact on the future of the country? n

© The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DATA CRUNCH BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Storm clouds roll in over downtown St. Petersburg, Fla., on July 2. The area has been reluctant to prepare for a major hurricane or sea-level rise.

Photograph by EVE EDELHEIT for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Is Joe Biden ready to run?

R OXANNE R OBERTS Rehoboth Beach, Del. BY

T

he new house is on the edge of Cape Henlopen State Park, just north of the boardwalk: three stories, six bedrooms, three fireplaces and an expansive view of the Atlantic Ocean.

The new owners are Joe and Jill Biden, rich for the first time in their lives, thanks to a three-book publishing deal — two by him, one by her — that allowed them to purchase the $2 million vacation home in this beachiest of beach towns.

Red-white-and-blue bunting hangs from the second-floor balcony. There’s a small wooden sign, “A Promise Kept,” over the entrance, and two others on either side: “Forever Jill” on one, “Beau’s Gift” on the other. One is a tribute to Joe’s wife of four decades, the other to the elder Biden son, who died of brain cancer two years ago at age 46.

“Throughout our careers, Jill and I have dreamed of being able to buy a place at the beach at home where we can bring the whole family,” Joe said when the sale made headlines this summer. “We feel very lucky that we’re now able to make that happen and are looking forward to spending time with our family.”

But if you think that sounds like a man ready for that golden political afterlife where time is finally your own and nothing is on the line, you’re wrong. Since Joe left public life in January, the Bidens have never been more public.

The past six months have seen the formation of the Biden Foundation, a way for Joe and Jill to support their pet causes, and the Biden Cancer Initiative to honor Beau. The University of Pennsylvania inaugurated the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement to study international issues, and the University of Delaware the Biden Institute for domestic initiatives.

Last — but not least — there’s a new political action committee, American Possibilities, a vehicle for raising money for Democratic

JIM LO SCALZO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

A 2020 campaign would put his family back under intense scrutiny candidates.

And maybe for one last try at the White House in 2020.

Delaware’s favorite son and America’s favorite uncle decided not to run in 2016, a choice he made while he was still in mourning, and Donald Trump was just a political sideshow.

“Do I regret not being president?” Joe said this spring. “Yes.” The story behind that decision — Beau’s illness, his death in May 2015, and the announcement that October that Joe would not seek the Democratic nomination — is the subject of “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose.” The memoir comes out Nov. 14, and every stop on the book tour will undoubtedly include a variation of “What if?”

With Washington in chaos and

the Democrats without a standard-bearer, Joe Biden is arguably the most popular former vice president in history. But there was also the recent bitter and very public divorce of their younger son, Hunter, and the news of his affair with Beau’s widow, Hallie, a stain on the perfect family portrait.

Conventional political wisdom says that Joe, now 74, is too old to run for president again. But American voters, it seems, don’t really care about conventional wisdom anymore.

So the real question is: What next?

The Biden saga reads like one of those big beach novels that pepper the sand every summer. Middleclass Joe makes good. There’s ambition, success, hope, tragedy — but always family first. Although

Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, walk with President Barack Obama on Oct. 21, 2015. That day, Biden announced he would not seek the presidency.

the loquacious politician loves to talk about his parents and his wife and kids in speeches and memoirs, he declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Bidens have chosen this 144-year-old quintessential beach town for their family retreat. Joe, with at least one family member at his side, has been coming here for years and is a regular at the local bookstore and ice cream shop.

“He’s still a hometown boy,” says council member Paul Kuhns, who is running for mayor of the town of 1,500 full-time residents (30,000 in the summer). “That’s what a lot of people like about him. When he walks around the neighborhood, it’s not, ‘There’s the vice president.’

It’s, ‘There’s Joe.’ ” When the Bidens celebrated his birthday in Rehoboth last Novem-

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POLITICS ber, they dropped by the Pond, an unpretentious sports bar with $2 Bud Lights at happy hour.

“Word spread like wildfire,” says Pond owner Pete Borsari. “Everyone gave him a standing ovation. He is a beloved figure here. I would say the vast majority of people love Joe.” He grew up in Scranton, Pa., but made his name in Delaware, which he served as a U.S. senator for 36 years, riding the train into Washington every day. In 2009, he became President Barack Obama’s vice president and trusted confidant. The two are so close that in January, Obama surprised him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

Citing his “charm, candor, unabashed optimism and deep and abiding patriotism,” Obama called his friend “one of the most consequential vice presidents in American history, an accolade that nonetheless rests firmly behind his legacy as husband, father, and grandfather.”

But that storied career almost didn’t happen. Weeks after the 29-year-old was first elected to the Senate in 1972, his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident. Sons Beau and Hunter, then 3 and 2, were severely injured.

Biden intended to resign his Senate seat, but congressional Democrats persuaded him to stay, and he was sworn into office at the boys’ hospital. The tragedy created an unusually close bond between Joe and his sons, a bond unaffected by his 1977 marriage to Jill and the birth of their daughter, Ashley.

Beau was his father’s political heir: He was attorney general of Delaware and served a year in Iraq as a member of the U.S. Army National Guard. He was widely expected to run for governor or the U.S. Senate, but it was not to be. In 2015, he died of brain cancer, a disease he had been secretly battling for more than two years.

The death devastated the family and kept Joe out of the presidential race. Grief, he said in announcing that he wouldn’t challenge Hillary Clinton, “doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.”

His fans in Rehoboth are convinced that was the wrong call.

“Had he run, he would be president right now,” Borsari says.

And the entire Biden clan

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

would be in the spotlight — which can be both a blessing and a curse.

The triumphs and the tragedies are real, but as in a novel, everything is more dramatic and a bit romanticized in the telling.

Joe loves to tell audiences that Jill had no interest in politics when they met, but he never says that she worked in his Senate office for five months before they married. He ended his 1987 presidential campaign amid charges of having plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock, something he now claims he never did. There’s nothing about his controversial role overseeing the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.”

And so it is with the Biden sons.

If Beau could do no wrong (“the finest man I’ve ever known in my life,” says Joe), his younger brother has struggled — but with his father always in his corner.

“We have an expression in our family: ‘If you have to ask for help, it’s too late,’ ” Joe told Popular Mechanics last year. “We’re there for each other.”

“We don’t have a complicated relationship,” Hunter said in the interview. “I know that no matter what, he loves me, and no matter what, I love him more than anything in the world.”

Hunter, 47, is the second son, with all the baggage that comes with having a perfect older brother. He has bounced from law to banking to lobbying. In 2014, he was kicked out of the U.S. Naval Reserves for cocaine use and spent some time in rehab. This spring,

he became tabloid fodder when he divorced his wife of 23 years and went public with a love affair with his sister-in-law. Friends said that the two fell in love as they tended to the dying Beau.

“Hallie and I are incredibly lucky to have found the love and support we have for each other in such a difficult time, and that’s been obvious to the people who love us most,” Hunter said in a statement. “We’ve been so lucky to have family and friends who have supported us every step of the way.”

The relationship has the blessing of Joe and Jill, who also released a statement: “We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together after such sadness. They have mine and Jill’s full and complete support and we are happy for them.”

There was no mention of Hunter’s estranged wife, Kathleen, a fact that didn’t play well with her friends, who privately complained that she had been neatly erased from the happy family portrait.

The news of the romance leaked out in the midst of a nasty divorce between Hunter and Kathleen, who have three daughters. The two officially separated in October 2015. In public court filings, Kathleen alleged that her husband had blown a fortune on drugs, women, strip clubs and “other personal indulgences.” She requested that his access to their joint assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in back taxes. She also requested sole custody of their teenage daughter. (The other

On Jan. 20, 2013, Vice President Joe Biden was surrounded by family, including his wife, Jill, as he took the official oath of office from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Washington.

“Joe Biden has always been a man with boundless energy. . . .

He’s not the retiring kind.”

Bruce Reed, Joe Biden’s former chief of staff

KLMNO WEEKLY

two girls are adults.) Hunter struck back, suggesting that it was his wife who had been unfaithful.

It was dirty laundry flying on a flagpole, a tactic they quickly came to regret. The divorce was finalized in April.

People fall in love every day, but falling in love with a sister-in-law is rare enough to raise eyebrows.

Hunter’s childhood friend Lea Carpenter told People magazine that anyone critical of the relationship “doesn’t understand the Biden family. Anyone moved to judgment now has no knowledge of the grace and strength with which Hunter and Hallie have navigated the last four years.”

Hunter and Hallie have not been spotted in Rehoboth this summer. That doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about them — although not to the media.

“That’s a sensitive subject,” says Rehoboth councilwoman Kathy McGuiness. “Personal life is personal life. In my book, it’s off limits.”

In the protective embrace of Delaware, that may be true. In the wider world of politics, maybe not so much.

Once you dream of becoming president, it’s hard to let go. Joe has chased that elusive prize for more than three decades, and missed his best chance in 2016 for the worst possible reasons.

Is he too old for 2020?

“Joe Biden has always been a man with boundless energy, and he’ll never quit,” says Bruce Reed, his former chief of staff. “He would be doing all he’s doing no matter what his plans are. He’s not the retiring kind.”

For now, it’s all talk, the endless stream of speculation and desperation that drives cable news 24-7.

“I have no intention of running for president, but I’m a great respecter of fate,” Joe told NPR. “I don’t have any plans to do it, but I’m not promising I wouldn’t do it.”

If Joe chooses the role of elder statesman, his family’s private life will probably be — for the most part — old news. If, on the other hand, Team Biden takes one last swing at the presidency, his entire family will be scrutinized, judged and otherwise pushed into the spotlight — including Hunter and Hallie.

The new conventional wisdom, one the public does seem to accept: You don’t elect just a president. You elect his family, too. © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

GOP frustrations with Trump grow BY

S EAN S ULLIVAN

T

he relationship between President Trump and Senate Republicans has deteriorated so sharply recently that some are openly defying his directives, bringing longsimmering tensions to a boil as the GOP labors to reorient its stalled legislative agenda.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (RTenn.), head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced this past week that he would work with his Democratic colleagues to “stabilize and strengthen” the individual insurance market under the Affordable Care Act, which the president has badgered the Senate to keep trying to repeal. Alexander also urged the White House to keep up payments to insurers that help low-income consumers afford plans, which Trump has threatened to cut off.

Several Republican senators have sought to distance themselves from the president, who has belittled them as looking like “fools” and tried to strong-arm their agenda and browbeat them into changing a venerated rule to make it easier to ram through legislation along party lines.

Some are describing the dynamic in cold, transactional terms, speaking of Trump as more of a supporting actor than the marquee leader of the Republican Party. If he can help advance their plans, then great, they say. If not, so be it.

“We work for the American people. We don’t work for the president,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said. He added, “We should do what’s good for the administration as long as that does not in any way, shape or form make it harder on the American people.”

The friction underscores the challenge Republicans face headed into the fall. As they seek to move beyond a failed health-care effort in pursuit of an elusive, first big legislative win, the same infighting that has plagued them all year threatens to stall their push to rewrite the nation’s tax laws, which Senate Majority Leader

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Many senators are openly flouting the president, who has used strong-arm tactics to steer them Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he wants to do beginning in September and finish by year’s end.

While some Republicans try to tune out what they see as distracting and sometimes destructive rhetoric and action from Trump, they recognize that they cannot fully disavow him without also dashing their hopes of implementing the conservative policies they championed in the campaign.

For many Republican senators, the challenge is trying to walk an increasingly fine line.

As public opinion polls show a decline in Trump’s approval rating, some Republican senators have sought to address difficult questions about what the president’s diminishing popularity means for his mandate by insisting that congressional Republicans, not Trump, are the ones driving the GOP agenda.

“Ever since we’ve been here, we’ve really been following our lead,” said Sen. Bob Corker (RTenn.). After ticking through major Republican initiatives so far, he added, “Almost every bit of this

has been 100 percent internal to Congress.”

Senate GOP leaders have openly flouted Trump’s attempts to steer them back to repealing and replacing the ACA, an endeavor that collapsed in failure recently.

Instead, Alexander signaled he would go around the president.

He and Sen. Patty Murray (DWash.) announced they would hold fall hearings to shore up the individual health insurance markets. It was the most concrete sign yet of bipartisan work in the Senate on strengthening the existing health-care law, and it followed a proposal offered by a bipartisan group of 43 House members.

Trump, who installed John F. Kelly as his new chief of staff a day earlier, on Tuesday was noticeably tame toward fellow Republicans on Twitter. But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders blamed the GOP-controlled Congress for the lack of major accomplishments this year.

“I think what’s hurting the legislative agenda is Congress’s inability to get things passed,” she said Tuesday.

Sen. Tim Scott (RS.C.) and Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) talk before a July 19 luncheon about health care with GOP leadership and the president. “We work for the American people. We don’t work for the president,” Scott has said.

Trump had used his favorite social media platform to push Senate Republicans to end the 60-vote threshold for most legislation, writing: “Republicans in the Senate will NEVER win if they don’t go to a 51 vote majority NOW. They look like fools and are just wasting time.”

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said that if the rules were changed as Trump wants, “it would be the end of the Republican Party. And it would be the end of the Senate.”

Trump’s repeated insistence “doesn’t help,” Hatch said. “But he just doesn’t understand that.”

McConnell was able to muster only 49 votes for his health-care bill. Ending the 60-vote threshold as Trump has demanded would not have changed the outcome — a point McConnell was quick to bring up.

The concerns about the 45th president extend beyond arguments over how the Senate conducts its business, to his discipline, strategy and core values.

Such concerns often are expressed in private, but one Republican senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, has laid them out in lacerating fashion in his recently published book, “Conscience of a Conservative.”

“In the tweeting life of our president, strategy is difficult to detect,” Flake writes. “Influencing the news cycles seems to be the principal goal; achieving shortterm tactical advantage, you bet.

But ultimately, it’s all noise and no signal. . . . We have quite enough volatile actors to deal with internationally as it is without becoming one of them.”

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has been one of the most outspoken Republican critics of Trump, laid out his thinking on the president.

“President Trump won. I respect his victory. I want to help him with health care and do other things that I think we can do together like cut taxes,” Graham said. “I’ll push back against ideas I think are bad for the country, like changing the rules of the Senate.

And that’s the way I’m going to engage the president.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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Not how GOP wanted to enter recess BY

P AUL K ANE

I

t’s as if the summer turned into the perfect storm against the best-laid plans of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Soon after Memorial Day, McConnell (R-Ky.) drew up a game plan around approving a rewrite of the Affordable Care Act by the end of June. The benefits were twofold, providing House Republicans a few weeks to approve the Senate version and send it to President Trump.

Also, McConnell wanted to create separation between the conclusion of the healthcare debate and the start of the annual August recess, providing the month of July to wrack up victories on other legislative matters. Such wins would give some Senate Republicans, wary of tackling the health-care issue back home, something else to tout with their voters.

Instead, everything got consumed by the health-care storm, which culminated in the bill failing by a single vote. The Senate left town Thursday for a five-week break with no major legislative accomplishments to show for the first seven months of unified Republican control of Congress and the White House.

When they return after Labor Day, Republicans have to tackle several must-pass bills to fund federal agencies and to increase the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Those are perfunctory tasks, but without the proper tending, failure would result in government shutdowns or worse.

That leaves October, maybe, to pass major legislation, particularly the bid to overhaul the tax code.

“We’re, you know, a little behind. We’ve got some things to tidy up and take care of in September,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday, acknowledging the disappointment. “My guess is we’ll be well on the way to tax reform in October.”

This is the scenario McConnell was trying to avoid back in early June. Everyone wanted to avoid a replay of August 2009 when Democrats were in control and could not finish approving the ACA before the summer break.

They faced a tsunami of opposition in their town halls, and while they did finally approve the legislation, in March 2010, it devoured much of President Barack Obama’s political capital.

Now, Republicans face a different problem, their own unique brand: liberals still angry at their effort to repeal Obamacare and conservatives fuming at their inability to deliver on a core seven-year promise to repeal the health law.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

In mid-July, McConnell told reporters that he would tell Kentucky voters that the GOP majority delivered Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and eliminated 14 regulations imposed during the Obama era. Then he said Republicans should be judged for the totality of 2017 and 2018 by voters heading into the November 2018 elections.

“Last time I looked, Congress goes on for two years,” he said.

For certain, Congress is more efficient than the public ever realizes. Many pieces of legislation get cleared by unanimous votes, such as this past week’s bill designed to improve health care for veterans. Hard work and detailed negotiations go into those bills, which never receive the attention they deserve from the conflict-driven media in Washington.

But by every possible measure, the Senate has been a shell of its former legislative self this year. Weeks have passed without any legislative proposals on the floor for consideration.

Most of the Senate’s output consisted of approving Trump’s nominations and the regulatory repeals, both of which required a simple majority on roll calls and little to no input from Democrats.

In terms of the normal wheeling and dealing, with debates and votes and finally legislation, the Senate has approved less than 10 bills this year that required a roll call.

The recent 98-to-2 vote imposing sanctions against Russia is the legislative highlight of the year, a bill the president did not

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had hoped to overhaul health care and rack up other legislative victories by the time the August recess began.

even support but was forced into signing.

Another bill gave the Government Accountability Office a bit more investigative authority. Another granted a waiver allowing Jim Mattis to become secretary of Defense despite retiring from active military service in 2013.

Another piece of legislation passed by the Senate, on a roll-call vote of 82 to 15, allowed for a historic steamboat, the Delta Queen, to be relocated to St. Louis.

The other legislative votes came on noncontroversial matters such as keeping federal agencies funded and honoring the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem.

Some Republicans suggest that Trump’s lack of experience has left it hard to coordinate and move legislation. This is, said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), “a unique administration that really a lot of people didn’t think would win. So this is a time frame that you can’t really fairly measure against previous senators or governors who have been in the Oval Office.”

Republicans have complained that Democratic stalling on Trump’s nominees have stolen time from their ability to do other things.

Yet when they have had time for legislation, Republicans produced bills such as reapproving fees on pharmaceutical companies overseen by the Food and Drug Administration.

This has left Democrats — who began the year fearful because 10 members of their caucus face reelection next year in states Trump won in 2016 — largely relegated to the sidelines. Their incumbents have felt no pressure to support McConnell’s initiatives, which were drawn up to be Republican-only affairs from the outset.

Gardner, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he remains “very confident” about the GOP’s chances because Democrats are defending so many seats in conservative-leaning states.

Some senior Republicans believe that the failed vote on repealing portions of the ACA will allow senators to let conservatives know in their states where they stood.

“This is not just what I tell you I would’ve done, but this is what I did do,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of McConnell’s leadership team. “Going home with those votes, even though unsuccessful, their vote counted and they were able to take it.”

Others have grown philosophical about the repeated failure, hopeful that the direction can change sometime soon.

“We are where are,” Corker said, promising to be “very frank and direct” with Tennessee voters this month. “I’ll be sure and explain as to why we are where we are.” n

© The Washington Post

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NATION

Cleaning up Facebook is daunting

BY T RACY J AN AND E LIZABETH

D WOSKIN

F

rancie Latour was picking out produce in a suburban Boston grocery store when a white man leaned toward her two young sons and, just loudly enough for the boys to hear, unleashed a profanity-laced racist epithet.

Reeling, Latour, who is black, turned to Facebook to vent, in a post that was explicit about the hateful words hurled at her 8- and 12-year-olds on a Sunday evening in July.

“I couldn’t tolerate just sitting with it and being silent,” Latour said in an interview. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin, like my kids’ innocence was stolen in the blink of an eye.”

But within 20 minutes, Facebook deleted her post, sending Latour a cursory message that her content had violated company standards. Only two friends had gotten the chance to voice their disbelief and outrage.

Experiences like Latour’s exemplify the challenges Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg confronts as he tries to rebrand his company as a safe space for community, expanding on its earlier goal of connecting friends and family.

But in making decisions about the limits of free speech, Facebook often fails the racial, religious and sexual minorities Zuckerberg says he wants to protect.

The 13-year-old social network is wrestling with the hardest questions it has ever faced as the de facto arbiter of speech for the third of the world’s population that now logs on each month.

In February, amid mounting concerns over Facebook’s role in the spread of violent live videos and fake news, Zuckerberg said the platform had a responsibility to “mitigate the bad” effects of the service in a more dangerous and divisive political era. In June, he officially changed Facebook’s mission from connecting the world to community-building.

The company says it now deletes about 288,000 hate-

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Critics say hate-speech rules are confusing, often improperly applied speech posts a month.

But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

The result: Minority groups say they are disproportionately censored when they use the social-media platform to call out racism or start dialogues. In the case of Latour and her family, she was simply repeating what the man who verbally assaulted her children said: “What the f--- is up with those f---ing n----- heads?”

Compounding their pain, Facebook will often go from censoring posts to locking users out of their accounts for 24 hours or more, without explanation — a punishment known among activists as “Facebook jail.”

“In the era of mass incarceration, you come into this digital

space — this one space that seems safe — and then you get attacked by the trolls and put in Facebook jail,” said Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore. “It totally contradicts Mr. Zuckerberg’s mission to create a public square.”

In June, the company said that nearly 2 billion people now log onto Facebook each month. With the company’s dramatic growth comes the challenge of maintaining internally consistent standards as its content moderators are faced with a growing number of judgment calls.

“Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online

Zahra Billoo of the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations says she posted a threatening letter received by a San Jose mosque on four Facebook accounts.

She was baffled when the company removed it from two and left it up on the others.

content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

The company recently admitted, in a blog post, that “too often we get it wrong,” particularly in cases when people are using certain terms to describe hateful experiences that happened to them.

The company has promised to hire 3,000 more content moderators before the year’s end, bringing the total to 7,500, and is looking to improve the software it uses to flag hate speech, a spokeswoman said.

“We know this is a problem,” said Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja, adding that the company has been meeting with community activists for several years. “We’re working on evolving not just our policies but our tools. We are listening.”

Two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidency, Zahra Billoo,

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

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NATION executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ office for the San Francisco Bay area, posted to Facebook an image of a handwritten letter mailed to a San Jose mosque and quoted from it: “He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”

The post — made to four Facebook accounts — contained a notation clarifying that the statement came from hate mail sent to the mosque, as Facebook guidelines advise.

Facebook removed the post from two of the accounts — Billoo’s personal page and the council’s local chapter page — but allowed identical posts to remain on two others — the organization’s national page and Billoo’s public one.

The civil rights attorney was baffled. After she reposted the message on her personal page, it was again removed, and Billoo received a notice saying she would be locked out of Facebook for 24 hours.

“How am I supposed to do my work of challenging hate if I can’t even share information showing that hate?” she said.

Billoo eventually received an automated apology from Facebook, and the post was restored to the local chapter page — but not her personal one.

Being put in “Facebook jail” has become a regular occurrence for Shannon Hall-Bulzone, a San Diego photographer. In June 2016, Hall-Bulzone was shut out for three days after posting an angry screed when she and her toddler were called lazy “brown people” as they walked to day care and her sister was called a “lazy n-----” as she walked to work. Within hours, Facebook removed the post.

Many activists who write about race say they break Facebook rules and keep multiple accounts in order to play a cat-and-mouse game with the company’s invisible censors, some of whom are thirdparty contractors working on teams based in the United States or in Germany or the Philippines.

Others have started using alternative spellings for “white people,” such as “wypipo,” “Y.P. Pull,” or “yt folkx” to evade being flagged by the platform activists have nicknamed “Racebook.”

In January, a coalition of more than 70 civil rights groups wrote a letter urging Facebook to fix its “racially-biased” content moderation system. The groups asked

SHANNON HALL-BULZONE

Last year, Shannon Hall-Bulzone posted an angry screed that was taken down after she and her toddler were called lazy “brown people.”

Facebook to enable an appeals process, offer explanations for why posts are taken down, and publish data on the types of posts that get taken down and restored.

Facebook has not done these things.

The coalition has gathered 570,000 signatures urging Facebook to acknowledge discriminatory censorship exists on its platform, that it harbors white supremacist pages even though it says it forbids hate speech in all forms, and that black and Muslim communities are especially in danger because the hate directed against them translates into violence in the streets, said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, Calif., who was part of a group that first met with Facebook about their concerns in 2014.

Cyril, executive director for the Center for Media Justice, said the company has a double standard when it comes to deleting posts.

She has flagged numerous white supremacist pages to Facebook for removal and said she was told that none was initially found to have violated the company’s community standards even though they displayed offensive content. One featured a picture of a skeleton with the caption, “Ever since Trayvon became white, he’s been a good boy,” in reference to Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager killed by a volunteer neighborhood watchman in Florida in 2012.

Like most social media companies in Silicon Valley, Facebook has long resisted being a gatekeep-

er for speech. For years, Zuckerberg insisted that the social network had only minimal responsibilities for policing content.

In its early years, Facebook’s internal guidelines for moderating and censoring content amounted to only a single page.

The instructions included prohibitions on nudity and images of Hitler, according to a trove of documents published by the investigative news outlet ProPublica. (Holocaust denial was allowed.)

By 2015, the internal censorship manual had grown to 15,000 words, according to ProPublica.

In Facebook’s guidelines for moderators, obtained by ProPublica in June and affirmed by the social network, the rules protect broad classes of people but not subgroups. Posts criticizing white or black people would be prohibited, while posts attacking white or black children, or radicalized Muslim suspects, may be allowed to stay up because the company sees “children” and “radicalized Muslims” as subgroups.

Facebook says it prohibits direct attacks on protected characteristics, defined in U.S. law as race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, serious disability or disease.

But the guidelines have never been publicly released, and as recently as last summer Zuckerberg continued to insist Facebook was “a tech company, not a media company.”

Unlike media companies, tech-

nology platforms that host speech are not legally responsible for the content that appears.

The chief executive has shifted his stance this year. At the company’s “Communities Summit,” a first-ever live gathering for members of Facebook groups held in Chicago in June, Zuckerberg changed the mission statement.

Earlier, he said the company would become, over the next decade, a “social infrastructure” for “keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

The company acknowledged that minorities feel disproportionately targeted but said it could not verify those claims because it does not categorize the types of hate speech that appear or tally which groups are targeted.

In June, for example, Facebook removed a video posted by Ybia Anderson, a black woman in Toronto who was outraged by the prominent display of a car decorated with the Confederate flag at a community festival. The social network did not remove dozens of other posts in which Anderson was attacked with racial slurs.

Benesch, who herself has tried to build a software tool to flag hate speech, said she sympathizes with Facebook’s predicament. “It is authentically difficult to make consistent decisions because of the huge variety of content out there,” she said. “That doesn’t, however, excuse the fact they sometimes make some very stupid decisions.”

As for Latour, the Boston mother was surprised when Facebook restored her post about the hateful words spewed at her sons, less than 24 hours after it disappeared.

The company sent her an automated notice that a member of its team had removed her post in error. There was no further explanation.

The initial censoring of Latour’s experience “felt almost exactly like what happened to my sons writ large,” she said. The man had unleashed the racial slur so quietly that for everyone else in the store, the verbal attack never happened.

But it had terrified her boys, who froze, unable to immediately respond or tell their mother.

“They were left with all that ugliness and hate,” she said, “and when I tried to share it so that people could see it for what it is, I was shut down.” © The Washington Post

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“It is authentically difficult to make consistent decisions because of the huge variety of content out there. That doesn’t, however, excuse the fact they sometimes make some very stupid decisions.”

Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project

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WORLD

Macron: Leader of the free world?

J AMES M C A ULEY Paris BY

E

mmanuel Macron is a master of persuasion.

In his youth, he seduced his married high school drama teacher, the woman who is now his wife. In middle age — with no government experience — he cajoled a sitting president into giving him a coveted cabinet position. Then — with no support from any established political party — he dazzled a nation, becoming, at 39, the youngest-ever president of France, a country where tradition is a way of life.

Nearly 100 days into Macron’s presidency, there are already indications that the French are increasingly skeptical of their new president. While a majority still approve of him, Macron’s initially sky-high approval rating dropped by 10 percent this month, mostly because of his refusal to back down on commitments to slash government spending. He has also come under fire for failing to aid migrants, sparred with France’s chief military officer, who later resigned, and pushed to expand the state’s powers to fight terrorism in ways that critics fear will permanently curtail civil liberties.

Judging from the new president’s calendar, however, the dip in domestic popularity is of little concern, for his roving political eye seems to have identified a new conquest. Macron may be the president of France, but now he seems to be running for a different office altogether: the leader of the free world.

Following the election of Donald Trump — who ran on promises of “America First” isolationism — commentators worldwide immediately began referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the de facto defender of the liberal world order. With her famously stoic demeanor, Merkel appeared the natural replacement.

Throughout her long career, she has advocated diplomacy and international law and has defended an embattled European Union.

But in his first three months in office, Macron has dared to tread

ETIENNE LAURENT/POOL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Nearing 100 days in office, the French president has been showing ambition to take a greater role where Merkel hesitates to go. In keeping with his youthful image, he makes bold statements in defense of global causes such as climate change action, as evidenced in his Twitter campaign to “Make Our Planet Great Again.” And in the style of the “French Obama,” he hosts international celebrities in the Elysee for “conversations” on hot-button issues — including Bono and Rihanna recently.

In any case, the major plot points of his young presidency have all featured him in the international spotlight, either attempting to charm or stand up to powerful world leaders, often those unpopular in France.

This is not to say that nothing has happened on the domestic level since his election in May. Macron, a relative political outsider even a year ago, ultimately succeed in carrying out an almost unthinkable overhaul of French political life. The new centrist party he founded, République En Marche (Republic on the Move), now has an absolute majority in

Parliament.

But in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, his principal ambition to date seems to be casting himself as a master negotiator in a new world where all roads lead to Paris.

“To some extent, France is back again,” said Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to the United States and the E.U. “You have France pushing forward its interest, but doing so in a way that makes it take a central position on the world stage, because France likes to lead and likes to be seen as leading.”

This defense of French interests has taken forms large and small, including a last-minute move to temporarily nationalize France’s largest shipyard last month — to save French jobs from a potential Italian takeover. But so far, it has mostly been the world stage on which Macron has set his sights.

The other week, for instance, he hosted Libya’s two rival leaders for talks in a chateau outside Paris.

The mission was tentatively suc-

French President Emmanuel Macron heads to a special session of Parliament on July 3.

cessful: The meeting led to a conditional cease-fire agreement between Fayez al-Sarraj, Libya’s U.N.-backed prime minister, and Khalifa Haftar, the military leader who controls much of eastern Libya.

Likewise, Vimont said, Macron has positioned himself as a similar mediator between Israel and Palestine and even between the United States and Russia.

Macron has hosted — separately — Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In each of these meetings, Macron has used his charm to play both sides, even while blasting Putin for Russia’s state-owned media being “organs of propaganda.”

With Abbas, he opposed settlements, calling them “illegal under international law.” With Netanyahu, he decried anti-Zionism, which, for Macron, is “the reinvented form of anti-Semitism.”

But nowhere was Macron’s ability to seduce more on display than in the case of Trump, whom he invited to Paris after the two had a tense first meeting in Brussels in May. The entire affair was dominated by a six-second handshake widely interpreted as a display of Gallic machismo.

In their second encounter, however, Macron was all smiles, outwardly embracing Trump, who enjoys an approval rating of just 14 percent in France, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. The young president referred to his American counterpart as “dear Donald” and flattered him while the cameras were rolling.

For Dominique Moïsi, a French foreign policy expert at the Parisbased Institut Montaigne, a think tank with ties to the Macron campaign, there is potential danger in Macron’s having “put himself in the limelight.”

“At the same time, the devil is in the details,” Moïsi said. “By receiving these leading opposite forces in Paris, he’s taking a risk. What if he fails?” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

In Libya, fear that worst is to come S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Tripoli, Libya BY

T

he line at the bank was two blocks long and Abdul bin Naji was once again praying for the doors to open. He desperately needed his $60.

With Libya in the throes of a currency crisis, that was the weekly limit for withdrawals. For the past month, though, the bank hadn’t had any cash. That didn’t stop bin Naji and hundreds of others from arriving every night to get a good spot in line.

On this morning, the unshaven airline employee was third from the door. At 10 a.m., the bank still hadn’t opened. “Thirty-two days and no money,” he sighed.

Excruciatingly long bank lines are the latest misfortune for Libyans trapped in a cycle of war and economic upheaval.

Six years after the revolution that toppled dictator Moammar Gaddafi, the mood in this volatile capital is a meld of hopelessness and gloom. Diplomatic and military efforts by the United States and its allies have failed to stabilize the nation; the denouement of the crisis remains far from clear. Most Libyans sense that the worst is yet to come.

Increasingly, decisions that were once mundane are potentially life-altering.

Is it safe to visit parents in a neighborhood across the city?

Which car will kidnappers be less likely to notice? Will a $60 bank withdrawal stretch until the next one is available?

“Every day, our future is getting darker and darker,” said bin Naji, 57, leaning against an ATM that hasn’t worked in years.

Under Gaddafi, the oil-producing country was once one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Even as the economy struggled in his last years, Libyans enjoyed free health care, education and other benefits under the eccentric strongman’s brand of socialism.

The insecurity that followed Gaddafi’s death has ripped apart the North African country. Rival governments and an array of

LORENZO TUGNOLI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Residents of Tripoli must contend with collapsing economy, kidnappings and hopelessness armed groups compete for influence and territory. The economy is on the verge of collapse. Criminal gangs prey on the vulnerable.

In Tripoli, parliament and other buildings are concrete carcasses, shattered by heavy artillery fire, rocket-propelled grenades and tank shells. Clashes often erupt suddenly, trapping residents in their homes and creating new no-go zones.

A journey through the city revealed how Libyans are adapting to the vicissitudes of the civil war.

In the southern Tripoli district of Salaheddin, a main thoroughfare bustles during the day but is deserted at night.

Surrounded by what was once a typical middle-class enclave, the street has become a focal point of the contest to control the capital.

On one side, militiamen aligned with a self-declared, Islamistleaning government operate checkpoints. The other side is

overseen by fighters loyal to a U.N.-installed unity government.

By 9 p.m., many residents have locked themselves inside their homes. Gunfire usually starts around that time, residents said.

Those who dare to venture out are careful not to bring any valuables.

“I leave my iPhone and carry a cheap Nokia,” said Ibrahim elWorfali, 31, a shop owner. “All these guys have guns and they can do anything they want to you.”

At the western entrance to the city, fighters with the Knights of Janzour, a militia aligned with the unity government, stop and search cars for weapons being funneled to their rivals.

“It’s obvious they want to control the capital,” said Mohammed Bazzaa, 29, the militia’s thickset commander, who wore tan camouflage fatigues and stood next to a pickup truck mounted with a heavy machine gun.

One of the militia’s biggest rivals is a group led by Gen.

Children play soccer in Tripoli’s old city.

Under dictator Moammar Gaddafi, the oil-producing country was once one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Khalifa Hifter, whose army controls much of eastern Libya. Hifter, who lived in exile in Northern Virginia for two decades, is aligned with a third government based in the east.

“He’s another Gaddafi,” said Bazzaa, who fought in the revolution.

But the militia’s primary threat, Bazzaa said, are the fighters from a rival tribe controlling an enclave less than two miles down the main highway between Tripoli and the city of Zawiyah.

Last year, they fought fiercely.

Now, they are both aligned with the unity government.

The tensions and mistrust, however, still run deep.

“They are motivated only by money,” Bazzaa said of his rivals.

Not far from the checkpoint, Sulaiman Abu Hallala was kidnapped.

He was pulled from his car by three masked gunmen and taken to a farm outside the capital. Held there for 19 days, he was deprived of his diabetes medication until his family agreed to pay an $11,000 ransom.

“I was so scared,” recalled Hallala, a businessman who is in his 80s. “My nephew was kidnapped three months earlier. He was killed after we paid the ransom.”

Kidnappings have become so common in the capital that residents constantly trade detailed information about the enclaves and roads where they have occurred. Once predominantly motivated by political or tribal rivalries, abductions have become a criminal enterprise fueled by the worsening economy.

As he stood in the snaking bank line, bin Naji expressed a sentiment shared by many in the capital.

“The revolution was not the right thing,” he said. “Before, people were happy. Before, I was a king. I had a job. I felt like a man.

Now, I can’t even take out my own money.”

At 11 a.m., the bank was still closed.

He planned to return again at night. n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

A rising threat

BY DARRYL FEARS in Tampa

M

ark Luther’s dream home has a window that looks out to a world of water. He can slip out the back door and watch dolphins swim by his private dock. Shore birds squawk from nearby nests in giant mangroves.

He said it’s hard to imagine ever leaving this slice of paradise on St. Petersburg’s Bayou Grande, even though the water he adores is starting to get a little creepy.

Over the 24 years since he moved into the

house, the bayou has inched up a protective sea wall and crept toward his front door. As sea level rises, a result of global warming, it contributes to flooding in his Venetian Isles neighborhood and Shore Acres, a neighboring community of homes worth as much as $2.5 million, about 70 times per year.

“Why stay?” asked Luther, an oceanographer who knows perfectly well a hurricane could one day shove 15 feet of water into his living room. “It’s just so nice.”

KOLIN POPE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Tampa Bay is mesmerizing, with 700 miles of shoreline and some of the finest white sand beaches in the nation. But analysts say the metropolitan area is the most vulnerable in the United States to flooding and damage if a major hurricane ever scores a direct hit.

A Boston firm that analyzes potential catastrophic damage reported that the region would lose $175 billion in a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. A World Bank study called Tampa Bay one of the 10 most at-risk areas on

the globe.

Yet the bay area — greater Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater — has barely begun to assess the rate of sea-level rise and address its effects. Its slow response to a major threat is a case study in how U.S. cities reluctantly prepare for the worst, even though signs of impacts from climate change abound all around.

State leaders could be part of the reason.

Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration

Tampa Bay is a prime example of just how reluctantly U.S. cities prepare for the worst

has reportedly discouraged employees from using the words “climate change” in official communications. In June, the Republicancontrolled state legislature approved bills allowing any resident to challenge textbooks and instructional materials, including those that teach the science of evolution and global warming.

The sea in Tampa Bay has risen naturally throughout time, about an inch per decade.

But in the early 1990s, scientists say, it accelerated to several inches above normal, so much that recent projections have the bay rising between six inches and more than two feet by the middle of the century and up to nearly seven feet when it ends. On top of that, natural settling is causing land to slowly sink.

Sea-level rise worsens the severity of even small storms, adding to the water that can be pushed ashore. Hard rains now regularly flood neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater.

By a stroke of gambler’s luck, Tampa Bay hasn’t suffered a direct hit from a hurricane as powerful as a category 3 or higher in nearly a century. Tampa has doubled down on a bet that another won’t strike anytime soon, investing billions of dollars in high-rise condominiums along the waterfront and shipping port upgrades and expanding a hospital on an island in the middle of the bay to make it one of the largest in the state.

Once-sleepy St. Petersburg has gradually followed suit, adorning its downtown coast with high-rise condominiums, new shops and hotels. The city is in the final stages of a plan to build a $45 million pier as a major attraction that would extend out into the bay.

Worried that area leaders weren’t adequately focused on the downside of living in a tropic, the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council reminded them of the risks by simulating a worst-case scenario hurricane, a category 5 with winds exceeding 156 mph, to demonstrate what would happen if it entered the Gulf of Mexico and turned their way.

The fictitious Phoenix hurricane scenario projects that wind damage would destroy nearly half a million homes and businesses.

About 2 million residents would require medical treatment, and the estimated death toll, more than 2,000, would top the number of people who perished from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Florida’s most densely populated county, Pinellas, could be sliced in half by a wave of water. The low-lying county of about a million is growing so fast that there’s no land left to develop, and main roads and an interstate connecting it to Tampa get clogged with traffic even on a clear day.

“If a hurricane 4 or 5 hit us,” St. Petersburg City Council Chairman Darden Rice said, referring to the two highest category storms, “there’s no doubt about it. The plan is you’d better get out of Dodge.”

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s warning was even starker. Standing outside City Hall last year, he described what would happen if a hurricane as small as a category 3 with 110 mph to 130 mph winds hit downtown.

“Where you’re standing now would be 15 feet under water,” he said. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

‘You live in a paradise, and that’s wonderful, but it has storms’ Video simulations of hurricanes that strafed Florida but missed Tampa Bay look like an epic game of dodgeball.

“It’s like we’re in this sweet spot. It’s like we’re blessed somehow, protected,” said Allison Yeh, a planner for Hillsborough County in Tampa.

The last direct hit from a category 3 in 1921 left the area in ruins, but few people lived there then. A single death was recorded.

Now, with 4 million residents and gleaming new infrastructure, the stakes are higher, and Yeh and her fellow planners are wary. They know a major hurricane like one of several that barely missed the bay in recent years would have a devastating effect.

There are few hurricane-proof buildings in the bay area. One is a gallery, the Salvador Dali Museum in downtown St. Petersburg with 18-inch-thick concrete walls and pressured glass supported by steel frames that could withstand anything the aforementioned storms could dish out. The building supervisor could stand at the windows and watch a hurricane pass as though it were on the Weather Channel.

The museum is better protected than one of the largest hospitals in the state, Tampa General, which sits on Davis Island, a spit of earth that was dredged from muck at the bottom of the bay a few years after the last hurricane hit.

Buckhorn said a category 3 hurricane would level the island’s houses, including his own.

Tampa General has a thorough evacuation plan, indoor generators that can supply energy for several days, and safe floors with reinforced walls and windows.

But parts of two bridges that lead to and from the island would be cut off by floodwaters, a concern of officials in spite of assurances by the hospital’s managers that there’s a contingency for that, too.

Floridians view hurricanes with the same bravado of Oklahomans who face tornadoes and Californians who brave earthquakes and wildfire: They come with the territory, a fact of life in a tropic, they say.

But other problems are less abstract than big hurricanes. Sea-level rise doesn’t need a megastorm to make its presence felt.

“Even when we don’t take a direct hit, even when it’s a tropical storm or a category 1, the rain it delivers to our city puts enormous stress on our rainwater and sewer collection system,” Rice said.

Water is bubbling up all over Florida. Within the next 12 years, according to an assessment by a group of researchers, Risky Business, the value of state property that will vanish under encroaching water could reach $15 billion. By 2050, it could reach $23 billion.

Along the barrier islands that lured more than 6 million tourists who spent nearly $10 billion last year, governments spend a mix of local and federal funds to renourish beaches lost to erosion that even a tropical storm can

PHOTOS BY ZOEANN MURPHY/THE WASHINGTON POST

cause.

“The bay’s getting higher, and the bay needs to go somewhere else. But there’s nowhere for the water to go,” said Mark Hafen, a University of South Florida instructor who specializes in urban and regional planning.

A team of planners in Hillsborough County said they fight against the potential impact of rising water every day, creating alternative bus routes and detours for flooded roads and trying to get the message out to residents in low-lying areas that their homes could be ruined.

Mark Luther, top, and Jessica Lopez, middle, could see major damage to their homes if a hurricane hits.

Bottom, the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg was designed to withstand a major hurricane.

“You live in a paradise, and that’s wonderful, but it has storms,” said Eugene Henry, mitigation manager for Hillsborough County.

He preaches about improved coastal inspection, color-coded warnings for residents depending on how low their homes are in a flood zone, making them more aware of the threat so they can take steps to protect themselves.

“If the inevitable monster storm comes, it’s not going to keep you safe from 30 feet of storm surge,” he said, but they’ll know when the tide rises to put shutters up. New structures built on the Florida coast, along with homes seeking major renovations, are mandated to have three feet of clearance from floodwaters.

Planners in Tampa Bay are noticing that floodwater is sticking around longer. As the water rises, it’s filling huge outfall pipes, pushing water that would flow down a storm drain back onto streets.

Tampa and Hillsborough County officials have considered levying a tax to help fix a growing problem, but in a state where Republicans opposed to taxes control the governor’s office and the legislature, that’s a tough sell.

“We do have a real challenge with our storm water drainage system,” said Beth Alden, the executive director of Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization, which recently spent millions to clear huge pipes blocked by barnacles left by increasingly swollen tides.

“This isn’t a glamorous expenditure, something you’re going to go have a ribbon cutting for.

“It’s something that if we don’t have the funding to keep up, it’s not going to be there.

What we’ve been seeing is a very conservative state legislature that has been coming out and trying to reduce the ability of local governments to levy taxes.”

In Hafen’s eyes, there’s an additional problem, one that officials who work at the pleasure of politicians are reluctant to discuss.

“We’ve had a really hard time getting buy-in on sea-level rise on this side of the bay,” Hafen said. “Hillsborough County and Tampa are super conservative. They’re burying their heads in the sand.”

Pinellas County, on the other side of the bay, is more progressive about addressing climatechange impacts, Hafen said. But that didn’t happen until fairly recently. It took a nerdy University of Florida county extension agent to help open everyone’s eyes.

‘They weren’t doing a lot to address climate change and sea-level rise’ Elizabeth Carnahan was plucked from academia by the county’s director of sustainable living. Her new role was to focus on climate change and engage with others to make the county more resilient to its impacts, and Carnahan took it seriously.

But Carnahan didn’t see a lot of area collaboration in planning.

“They weren’t doing a lot to address climate change and sea-level rise,” she said. “They were willing, but no one was going to the head

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Tampa Int’l Airport

Clearwater Mariners Cove Mobile Home Park

Tampa

4

Tampa General Hospital

Old Tampa Bay

MacDill AFB Venetian Isles Shore Acres St. Petersburg Dali Museum 75

Gulf of Mexico

Tampa Bay 41

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‘You hear when it starts to storm, and you can’t sleep’ Living in near-poverty in Clearwater, Jessica Lopez said she has little time to worry about a threat that might arrive years down the road.

For her, the future is now.

Last year around June, she fell asleep as rain pounded her mobile home and awoke to a terrifying sight. The rain hadn’t stopped, and water from an overflowing creek had climbed the stairs to her front door.

Lopez; her husband, Matt; and their daughter, Aurora, were trapped. Water was four feet deep in places, up to her neck. She was six months pregnant with a second daughter.

At least two venomous water moccasins swam past a trailer. A community septic tank that sits directly behind Lopez’s back window flooded. “The feces,” she said, “was everywhere.” She put her head in her hands. “It was so gross.”

The problem got worse. Wet dirt shifted under her trailer, causing it to tilt. Lopez worried they would not survive.

But Pinellas County rescuers quickly rushed to the scene. The county is so flood prone that the Mariners Cove Mobile Home Park is one of numerous “hot spots” that emergency management department officials watch closely

Amount of high tide inundation under category 5 storm surge 1 foot 21 feet or more

LO

of the pack to take it on.”

But they were doing that elsewhere, in Gulf Coast states that were hit by Hurricane Katrina and the Southeast Florida area of Fort Lauderdale and Miami that was raked by hurricanes constantly in the first years of the new century.

Carnahan dropped in on their meetings, talked to planners and listened to their sealevel rise projections and vulnerability assessments. After three years of networking outside the bay, she gathered what she considered the best ideas she heard and imported them to Pinellas County.

The county sponsored a three-hour workshop at the Weedon Island Preserve that Mark Luther can see from his flood-risk home. After that gathering, Carnahan noticed a change in officials in the 30 cities in Pinellas County.

“I could see them calling each other a lot more to share what each other were doing,” she said. Watching this, Carnahan’s boss, Mary Campbell, floated an idea to get scientists together to make climate-related recommendations to local governments.

That group became the Climate Science Advisory Panel. Within months, they helped establish the One Bay Resilient Community, looping Hillsborough and Pasco counties into a network that works on climate-related problems.

Tampa Bay now produces a climate report that compares to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Assessment, offering projections for sealevel rise specifically for their region. It is used to plan bridges and roads, to site government buildings that are supposed to last at least 75 years.

5 MILES

Note: Data illustrate height of possible storm surge flooding and are estimates.

This map should not be used to replace those used for hurricane evacuation zones. Sources: NOAA SLOSH storm surge data (2014), Florida Geographic Data Library. Population grid data from A. Dmowska, T. F. Stepinski, P. Netzel (2017).

DENISE LU/THE WASHINGTON POST

when it storms.

“We know at those locations, if we get too much rain and get high tide, we know they’re vulnerable,” said Kelli Hammer Levy, director of the county’s environmental management division.

Three months later, Mariners Cove Mobile Home Park flooded again when Tropical Storm Hermine took a swipe at Tampa Bay. Now Lopez is frightened whenever it rains.

“You hear when it starts to storm, and you can’t sleep,” she said. “I’m constantly worried now when it floods and the dirt shifts, it’ll tilt us more and more sideways.”

She and her husband had no idea that the mobile park home was a county hot spot when they moved there about a year ago. Like several residents there, she said managers didn’t include that information when they signed leases for the land where their trailers sat.

The county’s floodplain coordinator told Levy that notifying potential tenants of a flood risk is recommended but not required. Renters and leaseholders are often left in the dark.

Leaving is not much of an option, Lopez said. “If we were to move without paying off the trailer, they would undo everything we’ve done. We’ve paid about $2,000. They would just void that.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

Repetitive flooding is so dire that county officials considered buying out the mobile home leasers and relocating them but lacked the funds, Levy said. The county had already spent $300,000 to purchase nearly three dozen homes near McKay and Allen creeks in Largo and relocate the owners.

‘People who want to live on the waterfront will always live on the waterfront’ In Shore Acres, the wealthy community next to Mark Luther’s neighborhood, residents are much better informed about the area’s flooding and have far more options.

Like Lopez, they’re staying. Many Venetian Isles and Shore Acres residents have poured thousands of dollars into homes to accent their bayou views.

But it might be a trap.

Nearly all of Shore Acres is considered a repetitive loss area where homes have flooded more than once and required compensation from insurers. Street flooding happens after rains and high tides.

Eighty percent of homes in the area are what planners call “slab-on-grade.” It means their living rooms are one step from the ground or less. More than 1,500 are subject to flooding, according to an analysis of repetitive loss flooding by the city of St. Petersburg.

Since 1978, 29 homes have made 129 flood insurance claims totaling $2.9 million. A significant flood or a catastrophic storm could ruin a thousand more, triggering major insurance claims.

St. Petersburg, like Tampa, is spending millions in an attempt to clear storm drains that are supposed to collect water from streets and dump it back into Tampa Bay. The city is also imploring owners of slab-on-grade homes to consider building mounds to raise them three feet from the ground.

It’s a tough sell for someone like Luther, whose home was built long before anyone started talking about accelerated sea-level rise.

“I’m not sure you can elevate this type of house,” he said. “It’s U-shaped and fairly large, 3,700 square feet.” Luther’s house is brick with terrazzo floors “that would crack to pieces.”

But there’s one option that Venetian Isles residents have that Lopez in her Clearwater trailer park does not, and Luther is considering it. The real estate market in paradise is hot, and he can sell.

“People who want to live on the waterfront will always live on the waterfront,” Luther said, a reference to the rich. “Every house on my street that sold within the past 10 years, they’ve knocked it down and built a 10,000- or 12,000-square-foot mini-mansion on top of it.”

Carnahan seconded that. On the edge of Tampa Bay, where the danger from a colossal storm is worse, homes in Venetian Isles and flood-prone Shore Acres are still being snatched up.

“I can’t believe what houses here are selling for,” she said. n © The Washington Post

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TECHNOLOGY

A hand in the chip-reader business D ANIELLE P AQUETTE River Falls, Wis. BY

T

he bearded body piercer with tattooed forearms tells Sam Bengtson to take a deep breath, and then he plunges in the needle, implanting a microchip into the software engineer’s hand.

“That was nothing,” Bengston says, as the piercer smooths a bandage onto his skin.

The radio-frequency identification tag now lodged between his index finger and thumb will allow Bengtson to open doors and log onto his computer at work with a wave.

His employer paid for the device, which costs about $300, and threw a “chip party” for employees at its headquarters Tuesday, handing out blue T-shirts that say: “I got chipped.”

About 50 employees agreed to be implanted with the devices.

Three Square Market, which designs software for vending machines, hopes to soon launch a global microchip-reader business, marketing the technology to other firms.

But first they have to conquer U.S. reservations about the devices.

Patrick McMullan, the chief operating officer, said he and another executive learned about Biohax, the Swedish start-up that produces the implants, about six months ago during a business trip to Europe.

The microchips are about as big as a grain of rice and enable the wearer to perform various tasks, such as entering a building or making a payment.

The company already uses similar proximity readers in its vending machines. Shoppers can tap a credit card and walk away with a soda.

With microchips, McMullan said, the company could take their products to the next level of convenience — and beyond the vending industry.

If we’re going to work on this, we need to know how it works,” he said. “I can’t go research technology that we’re not willing to use

TIM GRUBER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A Wisconsin company hopes use of implants can overcome religious and privacy concerns in U.S. ourselves.”

As of today, implants are practically useless in the United States.

But Three Square Market is betting that will soon change. People in Sweden can already use the chips as train tickets, the company said.

Bengston, the engineer, said he doesn’t feel like a guinea pig. His information is encrypted, he said, which means it’s more secure in his hand than on, say, a cellphone.

He plans to build an application that will enable him to start his Toyota Tundra with a touch. If the program works, he said, the company could sell it.

Microchips aren’t new. Pets and livestock are tagged. Deliveries, too. Chips that pierce human skin, however, have a history of fizzling out on American soil.

Technology analysts fear the chips could ease the way for hackers. Others say the devices violate their religious beliefs.

Sixteen years ago, Applied Digital Solutions, a company in Delray

Beach, Fla., introduced a microchip that could be implanted in human arms to store medical records.

Doctors said at the time that they hoped to trace a patient’s history with a hand scanner — a useful ability, the company asserted, if someone is unconscious or confused.

But while VeriChip won approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2004, the device never caught on with consumers. Some people expressed privacy concerns: Could they be tracked?

By 2008, the company stopped making the device, citing low sales.

However, VeriChip motivated states to consider the legal quandaries a future with microchips could present.

After the device hit the market, Wisconsin outlawed mandatory implants.

Marlin Schneider, the former state representative who intro-

Sam Bengtson, right, has a microchip implanted in his hand at Three Market Square in River Falls, Wis. The company hopes to launch a global microchip-reader business.

duced the measure, said in 2005 that he wanted to get ahead of employers requiring workers to get chipped, or prisons forcing inmates to do the same.

“Eventually, people will find reasons why everyone should have these chips implanted,” Schneider told reporters at the time.

California, Missouri, North Dakota and Oklahoma also banned tagging without consent, with lawmakers asserting the chips could lead to serious privacy breaches, such as covert monitoring.

Michael Zimmer, a professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee said it’s hard to predict how hackers could evolve to exploit seemingly impenetrable devices.

“Often what appears to be simple technologies,” he said, “shift into becoming infrastructures of surveillance used for purposes far beyond what was originally intended.”

Workers have resisted similar technology because of their religious beliefs.

Two years ago, a coal miner in West Virginia, backed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, won a discrimination case in federal court after his employer mandated a hand scanner to clock in.

The coal miner said he was forced to retire after declining to use the scanner, which he believed was the “mark of the beast” — a sign of evil and end times, discussed in the Bible. He was awarded $150,000 in damages.

Cordarrel Lyrek, 28, feels the same way about Three Market Square’s microchips.

The Minneapolis resident, who makes T-shirts for a living, said he made the 45-minute drive Monday to River Falls to hang protest posters on trees and business windows. A Christian, he put his phone number on the flier, hoping people would call to talk about God. “It says in the Bible that’s a sign of the beast,” Lyrek said. “But it’s not only about that. It’s about invading people’s privacy.” n ©The Washington Post

Crunched SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

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DATA CRUNCH

WEEKLY

Where do military recruits come from? Not the District.

Where military recruits come from In fiscal 2015, the District of Columbia sent the fewest people into the military, compared with the 50 states: 84, or 0.06 percent, of 145,270 total recruits. The nation’s capital lands at the bottom even when accounting for its smaller population. California sent the largest share, 11.7 percent, almost as much as the entire Northeast of the country (12.8 percent).

As the map below shows, the greatest number of recruits overall come from the South, a whopping 44.3 percent, which is more than 7 percentage points higher than the region’s share of civilian 18-to-24-year-olds. (The District, Maryland and Virginia are all counted in the South.) sentsent 2,754 for of 1.9itspercent of the total (the state has 1.8ofpercent of the nation’s In fiscal Maryland 2015, California the recruits largest share populatiuon to the military: 11.7 percent the nation’s 145,270 total 18-to-24recruits.sent That’s almost much as theof entire Northeast of the percent). The District of Columbia sent the year-olds). Virginia 4,582, foras3.2 percent the total (it has 2.4country percent(12.8 of 18-to-24-year-olds). fewest this people: 84,In orfiscal 0.06 percen.

Thatfirst put D.C. bottom even whenmilitary, accounting its smaller population.

It wasn’t always way.

1973, the yearatofthe the all-volunteer thefor South supplied 35.3 percent of the recruits As the map below shows, the greatest number of recruits overall come from the South, a whopping 44.3 percent, which and the Northeast sent 18.1 percent. points The difference cannot entirely beofexplained by population shifts. is more than 7 percentage higher than the region’s share civilian 18-to-24-year-olds.

It wasn’t always this way. Inrecruits fiscal 1873, firstA year of other the all-volunteer the South 35.3 percentwere of thewomen. The Below is a map of non-prior-service bythe state. few statistics:military, 82 percent weresupplied male; 18 percent recruits and the Northeast sent 18.1 percent. The difference cannot entirely be explained by population shifts. racial breakdown: 71.7 percent white, 19.2 percent black, 0.96 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 4.7 percent Asian, 0.54 Below is a map of non-prior-service recruits by state. A few other statistics: 82 percent were male; 18 percent were percent nativewomen.

Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, percent two more black, races,4.7 0.97 percent unknown.

Nearly 17 percent identified as The racial breakdown; 71.7 2.1 percent white, 19.2orpercent percent Asian, 0.96 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.54 percent native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 2.1 percent two or more races and 0.97 percent unknown.

Hispanic by ethnicity. — Elizabeth Chang Nearly 17 percent identified as Hispanic by ethnicity. n

— Elizabeth Chang, The Washington Post

NH 0.43%

WA 2.3% MT 0.31% OR 1.2%

ID 0.61%

NV 1.0% CA 11.7%

VT 0.12%

ND 0.13%

WY 0.19%

MN 1.2%

SD 0.24%

IA 0.79%

NE 0.57% UT 0.68%

AZ 2.6%

CO 1.8%

NM 0.70%

WI 1.4%

IL 3.5%

KS 0.86%

OK 1.3%

MO 2.0%

AK 0.29%

MI 2.7% OH 3.7%

IN 1.9%

KY 1.2%

PA 3.2% WV 0.50%

AR 0.99%

AL 1.9%

VA 3.2% NC 3.8%

TN 2.2% MS 0.95%

TX 10.2%

NY 4.3%

SC 2.0% GA 4.6%

LA 1.3% FL 7.9%

HI 0.54%

ME 0.42% MA 1.3% RI 0.21%

CT 0.87%

NJ DE 1.9% 0.28% MD 1.9% DC 0.06%

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

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BOOKS

Capturing the essence of baseball N ONFICTION l

T THE STREAK Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken Jr., and Baseball’s Most Historic Record

By John Eisenberg Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

299 pp. $26

REVIEWED BY

A DAM K ILGORE

he world is an unreliable place. Friends let you down, people you love change, and your boss makes you work the weekend. You cannot count on many things, but one of them is baseball. Seven months of the year, every year, baseball begs to join you. It can be background noise on May afternoons or a template for forensic study on September nights. It can be a companion in a lonely apartment or cause for frenzied communion inside an emerald cathedral. It can be distraction or obsession. The game’s central appeal lies in its ubiquity.

Baseball is always there for you.

It figures, then, that the sport’s most revered figures are the men who are always there for baseball.

In his new book, “The Streak: Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken and Baseball’s Most Historic Record,” longtime Baltimore sportswriter John Eisenberg explores the motivations, travails and triumphs of Ripken and Gehrig, the only two men to appear in 2,000 consecutive major league baseball games.

The book uses historical study and new reporting to explain how Gehrig and Ripken did it and why it mattered. It tackles the allure of human endurance and the pitfalls of fame, but it is mostly a baseball book for baseball fans. It succeeds as both a thorough accounting and a love note to the game.

“The Streak” opens with Ripken circling Camden Yards on the night he played in his 2,131st consecutive game, which nudged him past Gehrig as the sport’s all-time Iron Man. Eisenberg unspools the stories of Ripken and Gehrig in alternating chapters, interrupted by inter-chapters on themes, titled “Ironmen.” We learn how Ripken developed an intense feeling of responsibility to play from his father, the baseball lifer Cal Ripken Sr. We see how Gehrig, born in poverty to a domineering German mother, started with a deep work ethic and came to embrace the

MURRAY BECKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

GARY HERSHORN/REUTERS

The New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig, left, and the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken Jr. are the only two players to have appeared in 2,000 consecutive major league baseball games.

fame associated with his streak.

Eisenberg dives into the evolution of the public’s view of consecutive-game streaks, from ignorance in the earliest days through fixation during Ripken’s run. The prose is straightforward, and the details are rich.

The depth of his research about Gehrig and his precursors delights. We learn the story of Everett Scott, who to play in his 971st straight game endured a journey from Fort Wayne, Ind., to Chicago that feels incomprehensible today.

A blown cylinder head caused his train to break down; he banged on a farmhouse door so he could use the phone; a garage manager drove him to South Bend, Ind., where he caught a trolley to Gary and then a cab to Chicago. He arrived at the ballpark in the seventh inning, just in time to continue the streak.

As Eisenberg shows, the streaks were in many ways contrivances.

When Gehrig had played 1,060 straight games, a court date involving his mother forced him away from the park. The Yankees’ owner, Jacob Ruppert, canceled the game on account of threatening weather and rescheduled it as part of a doubleheader; no rain ever fell. At the end of his streak,

Gehrig routinely took one at-bat and then exited because of an injury, just to keep his streak alive.

But the toll on the men, physical and psychic, was real. Gehrig’s streak caused a fissure with Babe Ruth, who chided Gehrig for caring too much about a streak that took years off his career. Gehrig responded by telling an interviewer that Honus Wagner — not Ruth — was the best player he’d ever seen, in part for “doing a grand job without any thought of himself.”

The squabble, as Eisenberg writes, made continuing his streak “personal” for Gehrig.

When Ripken played poorly, the streak made him a target. Fans and reporters labeled him selfish, too concerned about the streak to rest and, presumably, improve his performance. Ripken states he remembers games 1,300 through 1,800 as uniformly “negative.”

Some larger questions are left uncultivated. Eisenberg never grapples with the idea that the consecutive-game streaks boiled down to management promoting relentless work for no extra benefits, a theme especially worthy of exploration given Ripken’s role as a savior after the 1994 strike and canceled World Series.

But that quibble may be asking

the book to be something it never strives for. Eisenberg details Ripken’s achievement without overreliance on celebrating Ripken for personifying an everyman ethos, the go-to cliche to describe the streak’s attraction. Instead, he focuses on a more subtle and powerful notion, connected to the heart of baseball’s central appeal.

“Indelible moments are not baseball’s currency,” Eisenberg writes near the book’s conclusion.

“This is a sport that rewards consistency and perseverance. Its truths crystallize gradually rather than immediately, over weeks, over months, sometimes even over years. Ripken’s record was a reflection of that subtle sensibility, its value becoming evident almost imperceptibly, inning by inning, game by game, year by year. He delivered indelible moments, none more enduring than the night he passed Gehrig, but what mattered, what constituted the very essence of baseball, was his consistent presence, his dependability, the simple fact that he was there, always there.” n Kilgore is a national sports reporter at The Washington Post, where he covered the Washington Nationals from 2010 through 2014.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Intriguing inmates inhabit the Blinds

How curiosity can blunt our fears

F ICTION

N ONFICTION l

A

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

dam Sternbergh’s eerie new novel is set in a strange community where 50 criminals live in cinder-block bungalows surrounded by a 14-foot fence on the arid plains of West Texas. They call their grim little world the Blinds, perhaps to suggest the blind leading the blind. The inmates are given books, booze and meals but denied telephones, mail or visitors, and a sheriff with a dime-store badge keeps the peace.

The residents of the Blinds are unique in that, as part of an experiment in rehabilitation, all their criminal memories have been erased. They know they’ve been bad, but they don’t know how. Although free to leave, they stay because they fear that the law, or perhaps old enemies, might await them outside the fence. Life may be dull as dishwater in the Blinds, but it’s safe.

As this story begins, a resident named Errol Colfax kills himself with a gun he wasn’t supposed to have. Next, Hubert Humphrey Gable is shot to death in the Blinds’ grubby little bar. The easygoing sheriff, Calvin Cooper, investigates this outburst of violence without success. Cal is a likable sort, but he has his secrets.

We meet others. Fran Adams is one of the few women in the Blinds and the mother of its only child, a boy of 8. She and Cal once were lovers, and he hopes to persuade her to leave so the boy can have a normal life. Cal has a deputy who was a battered wife before she took refuge in the Blinds. Dr. Judy Holliday, the elegant scientist who dreamed up the experiment, adds more mystery to the tale.

(If some of these names seem odd, it’s because, to promote anonymity, arrivals to the Blinds must choose a new name from two lists, one of movie stars and another of former vice presidents.

Thus we meet the likes of Lyndon Lancaster, Spiro Mitchum and

Marilyn Roosevelt. The author, like certain of his characters, has a few quirks.)

The violence grows.

One resident, cruelly beaten as a child, responds at age 15 by murdering his abusive father and then, when she protests, his mother. He thus began a long career as a professional killer: “The truth is, once you’ve killed your parents, there’s no one in the world you can’t kill,” the author notes. This formidable fellow fights a duel to the death with another psychopath, a newcomer whose body is covered with the tattooed faces of the 23 men, women and children he has slain.

Sternbergh’s characters are intriguing, his plot is suspenseful and his outlook is endearingly dark. Nice moments flash by, such as this snapshot of Cal: “A halfdrunk bottle is on the table before him, and the half-drunk Cooper contemplates it.” Abruptly, he seizes the bottle and toasts himself: “Here’s to the person you might have been, and to the per­ son you have become. May they never meet in a dark alley.”

What is the author telling us, as he parades these deplorables before our eyes? One hint arrives near the novel’s end, when the enigmatic Dr. Holliday says to Cal, “The minds of the innocent are simple and so easily explained.

The minds of the guilty, however — they are endlessly fascinating.”

For Sternbergh, culture editor of New York magazine and author of “Shovel Ready,” just about all our minds are guilty and thus potentially fascinating, if not homicidal. Readers who share his dim view of humankind can embrace “The Blinds” as naughty fun, but it can also be viewed as a meditation on the ubiquity of evil.

Read it and weep. Or laugh. Or both. Sternbergh is an original, grandly irreverent writer. n Anderson writes regularly about thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.

W

THE BLINDS

By Adam Sternbergh HarperCollins.

400 pp. $26.99

WHY What Makes Us Curious

By Mario Livio Simon & Schuster. 252 pp. $26

REVIEWED BY

K ATHERINE H ARMON C OURAGE

hat is it that compels us not only to gaze at the stars but also to build the technology to reach out to them, study them, understand them? It is, of course, that mysterious, powerful force of curiosity that is with us from infancy, blossoms in childhood and persists throughout our lives.

Plenty of animals show a keen interest in objects and situations.

But in “Why,” astrophysicist Mario Livio argues that humans are the only species to ask not just what, where or who, but also why.

This wide-ranging investigation is no humanist’s dalliance into wonder and whimsy. Commanded by Livio, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the topic is treated with a physicist’s sensibility. Examples are put under the microscope, the science is assessed, and hypotheses are tested. Livio has the credentials for taking on this unwieldy subject, having written numerous popular-science books, and is apparently plenty familiar with the topic.

(The first line of the book is: “I have always been a very curious person.”)

His research roves broadly, from historical documents and technical studies to personal interviews. But the result is rather stilted, yoked to the cult of individual scientific genius, embellished with unmoored quotations from Western thinkers and delivered in a tone that often reads as didactic.

The reader feels less like a fellow discoverer than an undergraduate in lecture.

Like any notable instructor, Livio includes some fascinating tidbits along the way. Perhaps the most interesting and useful segment delves into the role of curiosity in learning and memory. Participants in one study were asked to rate how interested they were in learning the answers to various questions on a list. They were then shown the questions, one by one, followed by the corresponding answer. But the answer was not de-

livered instantaneously. The subjects sat through a waiting period, during which they saw a brief image of a random face. Later, an unexpected memory test showed that people best recalled the faces shown when they were waiting for an answer they had been particularly eager to know. The lesson: Stay curious, remember more.

The curiosity memory boost involves a partnership between the brain’s learning and reward systems. The hippocampus, which is associated with learning, and the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is linked to pleasure, were activated together in a range of studies on the physiological underpinnings of curiosity. “In other words,” Livio writes, “the desire to learn produces its own internal rewards.”

This reward, at times, proves too enticing to Livio himself. He often starts into a promising line of narrative but then quickly veers off to insert a tangential fact, quote or reference before moving on to something else entirely. As a result, the reader must move through a scree field of asides, which have apparently tumbled down from some great unseen monolith of the author’s mind.

But he rescues his book with an unexpected moral call that is worth listening to: “Curiosity,” he writes, “is the best remedy for fear.”

We now have an unprecedented ability to quench our curiosity about the specific. Nevertheless, fear of the broad unknown — often in the guise of protectionism or hatred — remains. Curiosity is an overlooked catalyst that can turn such detrimental potential energy into true human progress — which can take us to the stars and beyond. n Courage is a science writer and the author of “Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea” and “Cultured,” a forthcoming book about cuisine and the microbiome. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

If you could ‘design’ your own child, would you?

VIVEK WADHWA

Scientists in Portland, Ore., just succeeded in creating the first genetically modified human embryo in the United States, according to Technology Review. A team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University is reported to “have broken new ground both in the number of embryos experimented upon and by demonstrating that it is possible to safely and efficiently correct defective genes that cause inherited diseases.”

ISTOCK

is a distinguished fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley and a director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke. This was written for The Washington Post.

The U.S. team’s results follow two trials — one last year and one in April — by researchers in China who injected genetically modified cells into cancer patients. The research teams used CRISPR, a new gene-editing system derived from bacteria that enables scientists to edit the DNA of living organisms.

The era of human gene editing has begun.

In the short term, scientists are planning clinical trials to use CRISPR to edit human genes linked to cystic fibrosis and other fatal hereditary conditions.

But supporters of synthetic biology talk up huge potential long-term benefits. We could, they claim, potentially edit genes and build new ones to eradicate all hereditary diseases. With genetic alterations, we might be able to withstand anthrax attacks or epidemics of pneumonic plague. We might revive extinct species such as the woolly mammoth. We might design plants that are far more nutritious, hardy and delicious than what we have now.

But developments in gene editing are also highlighting a desperate need for ethical and legal guidelines to regulate invitro genetic editing — and raising concerns about a future in which the well-off could pay for CRISPR to perfect their offspring. We will soon be faced with very difficult decisions about when and how to use this

breakthrough medical technology. For example, if your unborn child were going to have a debilitating disease that you could fix by taking a pill to edit their genome, would you take the pill? How about adding some bonus intelligence? Greater height or strength? Where would you draw the line?

CRISPR’s potential for misuse by changing inherited human traits has prompted some genetic researchers to call for a global moratorium on using the technique to modify human embryos. Such use is a criminal offense in 29 countries, and the United States bans the use of federal funds to modify embryos.

Still, CRISPR’s seductiveness is beginning to overtake the calls for caution.

In February, an advisory body from the National Academy of Sciences announced the academy’s support for using CRISPR to edit the genes of embryos to remove DNA sequences that doctors say cause serious heritable diseases. The recommendation came with significant caveats and suggested limiting the use of CRISPR to specific embryonic problems. That said, the recommendation is clearly an endorsement of CRISPR as a research tool that is likely to become a clinical treatment — a step from which there will be no turning back.

CRISPR’s combination of

usability, low cost and power is both tantalizing and frightening, with the potential to someday enable anyone to edit a living creature on the cheap in their basements. So, although scientists might use CRISPR to eradicate malaria by making the mosquitoes that carry it infertile, bioterrorists could use it to create horrific pathogens that could kill tens of millions of people.

With the source code of life now so easy to hack, and biologists and the medical world

ready to embrace its possibilities, how do we ensure the responsible use of CRISPR? Will we enter a time when those who can afford a better genome will live far longer, healthier lives than those who cannot? Should the U.S. government subsidize genetic improvements to ensure a level playing field when the rich have access to the best genetics that money can buy and the rest of society does not? And what if CRISPR introduces traits into the human germ line with unforeseen consequences?

Barriers to mass use of CRISPR are already falling. Dog breeders looking to improve breeds suffering from debilitating maladies are actively pursuing gene hacking. A former NASA fellow in synthetic biology now sells functional bacterial engineering CRISPR kits for $150 from his online store. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the big drugstore chains carry CRISPR kits for home testing and genetic engineering.

While the prospect of altering the genes of people — modernday eugenics — has caused a schism in the science community, research with precisely that aim is happening all over the world.

We have arrived at a Rubicon.

Humans are on the verge of finally being able to modify their own evolution. The question is whether they can use this newfound superpower in a responsible way that will benefit the planet and its people.

Failing to figure out how to ensure that everyone will benefit from this breakthrough risks the creation of a genetic underclass who must struggle to compete with the genetically modified offspring of the rich. And failing to monitor and contain how we use it may spell global catastrophe. It’s up to us collectively to get this right. n

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21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Sessions will lose a war on pot ASHLEY C. BRADFORD AND W. DAVID BRADFORD W. David Bradford is the George D. Busbee Chair in Public Policy at the University of Georgia.

Ashley C. Bradford is his co-researcher and daughter. This was written for The Washington Post.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will soon receive a report he has been waiting for. The document, from the President’s Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, is expected to clarify the federal government’s position on marijuana — and the conflicts that exist between state and federal laws. It’s clear what Sessions wants to do: Over the past month, he has asked Congress for permission to prosecute medical cannabis suppliers who are acting in accordance with their state’s laws, reauthorized civil asset forfeiture (a highly controversial practice used in drug cases), and announced his desire to start a new “war on drugs.”

On at least one front, however, Sessions’s new war on drugs is likely to fail. In taking on cannabis — particularly the medical uses of cannabis — he is staking out a position that is at odds with powerful interests and an overwhelming majority of Americans from nearly all walks of life. This tide is too strong to swim against.

The first obstacle is that the medical community has largely resolved the question of whether cannabis is clinically useful. In January, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) reported that there is “conclusive evidence” that cannabis (both whole plant and extracts) is clinically effective at treating some diseases, including chronic pain. Cannabis may prove to be a pain management strategy

that could substitute for opioids for many desperate patients, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) acknowledges that cannabis may be an effective tool to combat the opioid crisis.

Researchers studying the relationship between medical cannabis laws and opioid use have found that states with such laws have nearly a 25 percent reduction in opioid-related deaths.

State governments are a second major hurdle for Sessions.

States are sharply opposed to his moves to crack down on their cannabis policies. Eight states (with nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population) have legalized recreational cannabis use by adults. Even more striking, 29 states and the District of Columbia have approved the

medical use of botanical cannabis, with 17 more having cannabis extract laws in place.

This doesn’t just save lives; it also saves money.

In two studies, we find substantial reductions in a broad array of prescription spending for both Medicare and Medicaid in states that have medical cannabis laws in effect. Medicare and Medicaid don’t cover cannabis, but it nevertheless appears to substitute for many prescription drugs that the programs do cover.

Nationally, the savings could be in the billions of dollars across the two programs if all states would adopt medical cannabis laws.

States benefit directly. Our work on Medicaid spending shows that they saved money — as much as $98 million in the case of California in 2014 — when they implemented medical cannabis laws in an environment in which the federal government took a hands-off attitude.

And it’s not just about savings: Cannabis generates substantial economic benefits as well. In 2016, Colorado saw the cannabis industry grow to about $1.3 billion in sales. Colorado levies substantial taxes on cannabis; as a consequence, it generated almost $200 million in tax revenue. Recent estimates suggest that states will collect

nearly $655 million in tax revenue from cannabis sales nationwide.

Not only are those direct contributions to stressed state budgets, but those taxes represent tens of thousands of jobs and the associated economic activity. At least four state governors recently wrote Sessions to ask him to let states pursue their own policies without federal interference.

Because state budgets would suffer if Sessions reversed the current federal position, state attorneys general would have standing to sue the Justice Department to force Sessions to actually implement the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which insists that a drug can be listed as Schedule I only if there is “no currently accepted medical use.”

If Sessions does target cannabis as part of his new war on drugs, there is one final reason to believe the states would win and he would lose. The American people want access to medical cannabis. The most recent Quinnipiac Poll found that 94 percent of Americans support medical access when directed by a physician (including 96 percent of Democrats and 90 percent of Republicans). That poll found 73 percent of respondents oppose enforcing federal cannabis laws against state laws.

The tide has already turned. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

Trump is right on China, N. Korea DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post.

Here’s a contrarian thought: President Trump had the right instinct to insist that China help resolve the nightmare problem of North Korea.

A peaceful solution is impossible without help from the other great power in East Asia.

As Trump nears the threshold of a military crisis with North Korea, he needs to sustain this early intuition — and not be driven into actions that may look tough but would leave every player worse off. The template hasn’t really changed from the Korean War in 1950: North Korea’s aggressive actions bring an American response and then a general war that devastates the Korean Peninsula. The conflict ends in stalemate and at huge cost.

Trump in his first months saw the need for a negotiated halt in North Korea’s program. But he has been pushed toward military options by Kim Jong Un’s reckless continuation of his missile testing — despite China’s efforts to restrain the impulsive young leader. War fever is growing, as in Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) comment Tuesday that conflict is “inevitable” unless Pyongyang stops testing weapons.

What is wise policy? Even as Trump ratchets up the pressure,

he should quietly urge China to take the lead in a diplomatic solution. He should continue to make clear to Beijing that its economic and security interests would be severely harmed if the United States is forced to address the North Korea problem on its own, militarily.

Here’s a suggestion for Beijing: China should invite the other key players — the United States, Japan, South Korea, perhaps Russia — to gather in New York during the U.N. General Assembly meeting for talks about how to handle the North Korea problem.

The model would be the “P5+1” group that sponsored the Iran nuclear talks. China was an observer back then; this time it would be the convener. Xi Jinping’s global status would be enhanced as he heads toward this fall’s big party congress that will shape his future as president.

Three months ago, Trump was ready for face-to-face diplomacy with Kim, under Chinese

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

sponsorship. He seemed to be packing his bags back on May 1, when he said: “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it.”

Ingratiating language aside, that was the right instinct. But now, Trump feels burned that the Chinese couldn’t stop Pyongyang’s missile tests, and the White House wants Xi to take the lead.

There was a tone of personal betrayal in Trump’s tweets last weekend: “I am very disappointed in China . . . they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk.”

Because of Trump’s pique toward Beijing, trade is back on the table. The United States is readying harsh trade sanctions against Chinese steel producers and perhaps against several big Internet companies, too. Sources tell me that a milder trade deal worked out by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross last month was scuttled by the White House, humiliating the Chinese, and Ross, too, but sending the message that Trump is serious in demanding China’s help on North Korea as the price of trade flexibility.

The U.S. Pacific Command is readying military options. But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis knows better than anyone that a

military conflict would be a catastrophe. A preemptive strike by the United States would risk the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Japanese (and U.S. residents of Seoul), albeit with little risk to the American homeland. That may appeal to some members of Congress, but it would outrage the rest of the world. It would also spin the problem of nuclear proliferation into a lawless zone of unilateral action, harming U.S. interests.

China knows that the road ahead is potentially ruinous.

Russia, too, seems willing to be helpful on North Korea, as it was on Iran — because its interests are harmed by an erratic nuclearweapons state.

Trump has the opportunity for a foreign policy reset in the shadow of the North Korea crisis.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has overreached and been rebuffed by congressional sanctions. Kim has overreached with his relentless missile testing.

Xi has overreached by offering more than he has delivered on curbing Pyongyang.

The world is beginning to worry that Trump could go to war.

Maybe that’s the moment when China helps to organize one of those “win-win” solutions that Xi is always talking about. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Stephen K. Bannon BY

J OSHUA G REEN

Stephen K. Bannon seemed to come out of nowhere in August 2016, taking over Donald Trump’s struggling campaign and leading it to the most shocking upset in U.S. presidential history. Because he liked to cultivate an image of himself as a dark, nationalist political Svengali, a number of myths have arisen about Bannon. Here are five of them.

MYTH NO. 1 Bannon is Trump’s Rasputin.

Trump chafes at the puppet master portrayal and periodically takes steps to demonstrate that Bannon doesn’t have nearly the sway ascribed to him. For instance, in April, Trump removed his chief strategist from the National Security Council and roasted him in a series of interviews. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve.” This wasn’t true — Trump had known Bannon for years — but the president made his point.

Bannon managed to stick it out and return to a position of power.

But the recent, albeit brief, appointment of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director shows the limit of his influence: Bannon opposed the move and was overruled.

MYTH NO. 2 Bannon hates Muslims.

Although he has a long history of making inflammatory statements about what he calls “Islamic fascism,” and he was an architect of the ban on travelers from six majority-Muslim countries, Bannon is not reflexively anti-Muslim. His nationalist philosophy is built upon ideas drawn from a personal guru of sorts, René Guénon, an early-20th-century French metaphysician who was raised Roman Catholic, practiced occultism and Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim and

observed sharia. Guénon is the intellectual godfather of a movement known as Traditionalism.

Guénon’s philosophy is built upon the belief that the world has been in decline since the Enlightenment and is now in the midst of a “dark age” — a theme Bannon has echoed and channeled into Trump’s politics and speeches. As Guénon wrote in 1924, he wished to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.” Trump’s tweets saying that transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the military was a gesture in this direction — and a gesture Bannon supported.

MYTH NO. 3 Bannon is a nationalist.

Bannon’s political brand, like his boss’s, is something he calls “America first” nationalism — a kind of hard-right, muscular populism that thinks of itself as being in opposition to what Bannon calls “globalism.”

But Bannon is a globalist in the sense that he considers Trump’s rise to be the American culmination of a right-wingpopulist global uprising that includes Brexit and the ascent of nationalist politicians and parties in France, Italy, Poland and elsewhere. Of course, Bannon’s Traditionalist philosophy also inclines in a globalist direction.

MYTH NO. 4 ‘Seinfeld’ made Bannon fabulously rich.

When I first profiled Bannon for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2015, I included a colorful detail he told me about his time in Hollywood: that he owned a piece of the hit

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

television show “Seinfeld.” As Bannon told the story, he was running a boutique investment firm and helped negotiate the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment (which owned “Seinfeld”) to Ted Turner. In lieu of his full adviser’s fee, he accepted a stake in five TV shows. One of them was “Seinfeld.”

“We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” Bannon told me. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”

A source familiar with the deal told me that the “Seinfeld” rights went to the French Bank Société Générale when Bannon sold his firm, but that he and his partner still receive payments. Sure enough, Bannon’s White House disclosure form showed income from Société Générale of between $50,000 and $100,000 last year.

Another source said the number was closer to $100,000. It’s been 20 years since Bannon struck the fateful deal, meaning that he’s probably collected as much as $2 million. That’s hardly pocket change, but it also means “Seinfeld” has had a relatively small impact on Bannon’s net worth, which may be as big as $48 million, according to financial disclosure forms.

MYTH NO. 5 Bannon knows what he’s doing.

For all his success as an investment banker, film producer, conservative publisher and campaign strategist, Bannon — who had no prior experience in government — has had a much tougher time succeeding in the White House. Although he was credited with being a tactical genius at critical junctures in the campaign, helping Trump battle back from crises such as the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, Bannon hasn’t shown nearly the same facility in manipulating the levers of government.

The travel ban he supported was blocked by the courts (although a revised version has been allowed to take partial effect). He appears unlikely to get the “border adjustment tax” that he hoped would be a key component of tax reform.

Bannon’s strategy of making an enemy of the media may be keeping some Trump supporters in the fold, but it hasn’t done anything to advance Trump’s legislative agenda — a black mark for the chief strategist’s image as Machiavelli. n Green is a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2017

24

GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN.

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 26, 2017

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com or at the door Presented by

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

Sponsored by

Banner Bank • Spokane Industries • Port of Douglas County • Moss-Adams, LLP • Great Northwest Wine Visconti’s Italian Restaurant • Blue Horizon Insurance & Financial Services • Haglund’s Trophies • Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce • Real Homes - RE/MAX - Viva Wenatchee • Microsoft Data Center Operations • Washington Trust Bank