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WONKBLOG

Effects of ‘national emergency’ C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance. “An emergency declaration can be used for resident Trump on good. It can help free up federal Thursday said he resources, help prioritize considers the opioid responses by the federal crisis to be “a national [government], help give the emergency,” starting a process administration leverage to aimed at giving the federal and request legislation from state governments more Congress.” resources and flexibility to deal On the other hand, Smith with the epidemic. said, “all of those things I just “The opioid crisis is an mentioned could be used to emergency, and I’m saying further the war on drugs. It officially right now it is an could give the administration emergency,” Trump told leverage to push for new reporters at his golf club in sentencing legislation. Or Bedminster, N.J. TOBY TALBOT/ASSOCIATED PRESS legislation that enhances The president did not offer [drug] penalties or law details of what his emergency President Trump has declared the opioid crisis “a national emergency.” enforcement response. It could declaration would entail, and give [Attorney General Jeff ] Sessions more example, currently Medicaid can’t reimburse he said his administration is working on the leverage to push the agenda that he has been drug treatment in large residential facilities paperwork needed for the emergency pushing.”

(16 or more beds). That could be waived in an declaration to take effect.

Humphreys points out that Congress could emergency.”

From a strictly practical standpoint the have addressed any of these issues legislatively Trump’s opioid commission recommended emergency declaration would have two main in recent years, and it could have allocated he make the emergency declaration, but his effects, according to Keith Humphreys, an billions of dollars in funding for the opioid statement Thursday was an abrupt reversal addiction specialist at Stanford University crisis as well. But, he said, “the reality is that from 48 hours ago, when Health and Human who worked in the Office of National Drug they have spent this entire year trying to cut Services Secretary Tom Price, after meeting Control Policy under President Barack Obama. spending on the opioid epidemic” via drastic with Trump, said at a news briefing that such a “First, it lets states and localities that are cuts to Medicaid contained within the various declaration was unnecessary. He added, designated disaster zones to access money in GOP-supported Obamacare-repeal bills that however, that all options including a the federal Disaster Relief Fund, just like they nearly became law. declaration of emergency were still on the table. could if they had a tornado or hurricane,” In 2016, Congress did approve $1 billion in Groups advocating for a public healthHumphreys said. States and cities would be funding over two years for state grants to fight centered approach to the epidemic are able to request disaster zone declarations from the opiate epidemic as part of the 21st Century worried about what powers an emergency the White House, which would enable them to Cures Act. But the epidemic shows no sign of declaration would grant an administration use federal funds for drug treatment, relenting. The latest federal estimates released with a fondness for “tough on crime” law overdose-reversal medication and more. this past week suggest the pace of drugenforcement tactics.

“Second, declaring an emergency allows overdose deaths accelerated last year. n “We need to be cautious about the temporary waivers of many rules regarding intentions of this administration,” said Grant federal programs,” Humphreys said. “For ©The Washington Post

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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. 44

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Rob Goldiez, cofounder of Hirebotics, configures a robot at Tenere Inc. in Dresser, Wis. Photograph by ACKERMAN + GRUBER for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Impulsiveness or savvy instincts?

BY M ARC F ISHER AND J ENNA J OHNSON

A

s with most things involving President Trump, the furor over the “fire and fury” has divided the nation in two — those who believe the president is a loose cannon, impulsively blurting whatever flits through his mind, and those who believe his inflammatory talk is a wily combination of politically savvy instincts and a gut-driven populism that simply aims to please.

When Trump went off script Tuesday to deliver a startling threat to North Korea — “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” — it was as if the nation relived the most lurid themes of the 2016 campaign in one chilling moment. The rhetoric between the two nations continued to heat up all week, and on Friday morning Trump tweeted, “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!”

Last fall, Hillary Clinton’s campaign used as one of its final weapons a TV ad featuring a nuclear missile launch officer who warned against voting for Trump: “I prayed that call would never come. Self-control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”

Then, quick-fire, a series of clips of Trump on the stump: “I would bomb the s--- out of them.”

“I want to be unpredictable.” “I love war.”

“The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death,” Bruce Blair, the retired launch officer, says in the ad. “It should scare everyone.”

It very nearly did: Voters made clear last fall that they trusted Clinton vastly more than Trump on the use of nuclear weapons — by 57 percent to 31 percent in a Fox News poll in October, for example.

But Trump voters often said

AHN YOUNG-JOON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Americans split on Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ response to N. Korea’s nuclear missile progress that their reasons for supporting him outweighed their sense that he could be dangerously impulsive — and they repeatedly expressed confidence that the national security apparatus would keep him in check.

Now, facing a reality test of that theory, Americans are coming to conclusions both predictable and surprising.

Trump’s critics tend to view his “fire and fury” threat as evidence of a president gone over the edge.

“Trump is fulfilling expectations of someone who lashes out dangerously at real and perceived challengers,” said Blair, who is now a research scholar at Princeton University. “He is raising the risk of a conflict that escalates to nuclear war. He has proven time and again to be . . . unable to apply a deft hand at diplomacy.”

But the president’s defenders see him working from the gut, with admirable instincts to protect the nation and take pride in

American power.

Fred Doucette, a longtime Trump supporter who is assistant majority leader in New Hampshire’s House of Representatives, watched Trump’s appearance Tuesday. He was pleased to hear the president deliver a strong message to North Korea.

“The president spoke in a language that Kim Jong Un understands — and, personally, I think they should follow up on that and show them that we mean business,” said Doucette, 52, a Navy veteran and retired firefighter and paramedic. “I assume the president spoke with his generals and his Cabinet first.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the president’s remarks were no harbinger of imminent nuclear war but rather tough talk designed to send Kim a clear message. “Americans should sleep well at night,” Tillerson said.

Doucette said he does exactly

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, seen on on a TV news program at the train station in Seoul on Thursday, have traded threats in the past week, including North Korea’s warning it could strike Guam, a U.S. territory.

that. “When the phone rings at 3 a.m., I want Donald Trump to be the president that answers that phone call,” he said. “I sleep well at night with President Trump, very well.”

Last fall, 10 former Air Force nuclear launch officers issued an open letter warning that Trump “should not be entrusted with the nuclear launch codes . . . He has shown himself time and again to be easily baited and quick to lash out, dismissive of expert consultation and ill- informed of even basic military and international affairs.”

But on Wednesday, those officers were no longer united in their view of Trump.

“The reaction to this is not wholly rational,” said one of the signatories, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his employer had not authorized him to speak publicly. “A lot of people are caught up on Trump the character — and he is erratic — without thinking about whether there’s historical precedent for this kind of language. I’m actually a little relieved that Trump is crawling inside the North Koreans’ helmets. I would not have chosen those words, but he did put the fear of God into them.”

But another of the former “missileers” said Trump’s fiery rhetoric was evidence of exactly what he had warned about last fall.

“He speaks impulsively, and he acts impulsively, and I don’t know what restraints there are on President Trump,” said Mark Lussky, a retired lawyer who served on a missile combat crew from 1972 to 1976. “He doesn’t know how to back down on anything.”

At the core of the anxiety over Trump’s remarks is the worry that the president made his threat without consideration of what might follow. The sheet of paper he held in his hand was about opioid abuse, not the conflict with North Korea. Yet the White House was quick to issue assurances that, as press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders

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TORU HANAI/REUTERS

said, although Trump’s “words were his own . . . the tone and strength of the message were discussed beforehand” by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and members of the National Security Council.

Presidents don’t usually improvise comments on global crises.

“What would be ‘normal’ in the Bush or Obama or Clinton administrations would be for the combination of strategic communications people and policy people — including the national security adviser — to develop, in consultation with the State Department and the Defense Department, a messaging strategy with top lines that they felt the president needed to emphasize,” said a senior diplomat who served in all three administrations.

To many Trump critics, the

president’s remarks were of a piece with what seems like a casual attitude toward wielding the unfathomable power of the United States’ arsenal. On the campaign trail, he said that any Iranian vessels that “make gestures at our people . . . will be shot out of the water.” Trump, who attended a military academy as a teenager and repeatedly avoided the draft for the Vietnam War, had hoped to add tanks and heavy military equipment to his inaugural parade in January but was overruled.

Trump was dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mara-Lago in early April when he authorized an airstrike on a Syrian airstrip. As he later described the moment, “We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen, and President Xi was enjoying it. And I was

given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do? And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way.”

The Clinton campaign ran ads focused on Trump as commander in chief throughout October, including one spot that showed Trump asking, “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”

“One of the great concerns voters had, particularly independent voters, was the threat of somebody that impulsive, that erratic, that unprepared, having control over the nuclear codes,” said Jim Margolis, the campaign’s media adviser.

Some of those voters acknowledged Trump’s erraticism yet voted for him anyway.

“There may have been a presumption that if elected, Trump would settle down, become more presidential, less crazy in his

People in Tokyo walk in front of a monitor showing news of North Korea’s latest threat on Thursday.

Later that day, Trump said his “fire and fury” rhetoric may not have been “tough enough.”

taunts, and that the cocoon of security advisers around him would keep him in check,” Margolis said. “Clearly, that presumption was wrong.”

Another anti-Trump spot, made by a super PAC run by former senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), targeted Ohio voters and evoked the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad for President Lyndon B. Johnson that capitalized on fears that his Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, was too reckless to be trusted with nuclear codes.

Bradley’s ad showed the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb detonating, and it showed TV host Chris Matthews telling Trump that “nobody wants to hear” a presidential candidate talk about using nuclear weapons.

“Then why are we making them?” Trump replies. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

ACA enrollment details still missing

BY A MY G OLDSTEIN AND P AIGE W INFIELD C UNNINGHAM

A

s the fate of the Affordable Care Act dangled dramatically in the Senate last month, the Trump administration abruptly canceled contracts with two companies that have helped thousands of Americans in 18 cities find health plans under the law.

The suspension of the $22 million contracts, which ends enrollment fairs and insurance sign-ups in public libraries, is one of the few public signs of how an administration eager to kill the law will run the ACA’s approaching fifth enrollment season.

With that sign-up period less than three months away, the government appears to be operating on contradictory tracks, according to insurers, state insurance commissioners, health-policy experts and leaders of grass-roots groups that have worked to enroll the roughly 10 million consumers around the country who now have ACA coverage.

President Trump continues to stage photo ops at the White House and on travels with people he terms “Obamacare victims.”

The Department of Health and Human Services is issuing weekly maps showing the few dozen counties that might lack an ACA health plan for next year. And despite the failure of Senate Republicans to abolish much of the law, Trump and his top aides have not entirely relinquished hopes of a victory in Congress this fall.

Yet many layers down in the government, the part of HHS that directly oversees the ACA’s insurance marketplaces and the federal HealthCare.gov enrollment website has been carrying out much, if not all, of its regular work — convening its annual meeting in June with “navigators” who help steer consumers toward ACA health plans and telling them their grants will continue, according to three participants.

Officials provided no assurances at that meeting, however, about whether the administration

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Insurers and states await pending or undisclosed decisions that could greatly affect marketplaces would continue the government’s other usual enrollment activities or promotion. (In January, it had halted most advertising aimed at encouraging consumers to sign up in the final crucial days before the deadline for 2017 coverage.)

“Every time the question was brought up . . . the only answer we received is they were working on it, and they hadn’t made a final decision about whether they were going to have a marketing campaign this year,” said Daniel Bouton, manager of a consortium that helps people enroll in North Texas.

The internal dissonance and information vacuum reflect the profound political shift that occurred in January when the administration of President Barack Obama, which relentlessly championed the sprawling 2010 law, was replaced by its ACA-naysaying successor. While the GOP’s recent legislative pyrotechnics have attracted the greatest attention regarding the law’s future, the most practical test of the Trump administration’s intent is whether it will

help or hinder the marketplaces, designed for people who cannot get affordable health benefits through a job.

Just recently, HHS Secretary Tom Price twice said during a television interview that “our responsibility is to follow the law” — before again bad-mouthing it.

For now, the largest mystery is whether the president will carry out his stated resolve to end payments made to insurers on behalf of about 7 million lower-income customers to help them afford their ACA plans’ deductibles and co-pays. Without those subsidies — the subject of a federal lawsuit — policy premiums are widely predicted to spike for 2018, and more insurers may defect. Insurers planning to participate in the marketplaces next year must submit final rates to states this week.

“It’s entirely opaque to us,” said Julie McPeak, Tennessee’s insurance commissioner and the incoming president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. She said that she and col-

President Trump greets children he terms “victims of Obamacare” July 24 at the White House.

While the Department of Health and Human Services carries out much of its regular work under the Affordable Care Act, the administration has canceled contracts with two firms that have helped thousands of Americans in 18 cities find health plans.

leagues have contacted officials at HHS, the Justice Department, the White House’s intergovernmental affairs office, and its Office of Management and Budget, trying to learn which part of the government would make the decision about these cost-sharing payments and when.

“And we can’t get a clear picture,” McPeak said. As a result, she noted, Tennessee cannot plan its own outreach efforts because it is impossible to provide consumers accurate information about insurance prices and choices for the coming year.

There are other unknowns that also will shape — or upend — the enrollment period when it begins Nov. 1: Will the government contact the roughly 10 million people with ACA coverage to alert them that sign-ups will last just 45 days, about half as long as in the past three years? Will HHS run call centers for consumers who need help as they look for plans? Will the HealthCare.gov computer system be adjusted to accommodate a possible crush of shoppers given the shorter time frame?

And how will automatic enrollment be handled? In previous years, notices have been sent out in mid-December, informing customers with coverage about price changes for their current health plan and urging them to shop around. This year, Dec. 15 is when enrollment will end.

Federal health officials declined to answer questions about a halfdozen specific facets of the impending enrollment season.

Heather Korbulic, executive director of the Silver State Insurance Exchange in Nevada, is feeling daunted by the lack of answers.

She has tried to find out whether HHS intends to contact Nevadans with ACA health plans to remind them to enroll. She also has tried to get federal officials to provide a list of enrolled residents so the state can notify them directly.

“I ask this question every week,” Korbulic said. “It’s verbal, written, and to different levels of management . . . We are desperately seeking answers.” n

©The Washington Post

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Mar-a-Lago ads leave some wanting

BY D AVID AND L ORI

A . F AHRENTHOLD R OZSA

P

resident Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club needs to hire 35 waiters for this winter’s social season in Palm Beach, Fla. Late last month, the club placed an ad on page C8 of the Palm Beach Post, crammed full of tiny print laying out the job experience requirements in classified ad shorthand. “3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club,” the ad said. “No tips.”

The ad gave no email address or phone number. “Apply by fax,” it said. The ad also provided a mailing address. It ran twice, then never again.

This was an underwhelming way to attract local job-seekers.

But that wasn’t the point. The ads were actually part of Mar-a-Lago’s efforts to hire foreign workers for those 35 jobs.

About a week before the ads ran, the president’s club asked the Labor Department for permission to hire 70 temporary workers from overseas, government records show. Beside the 35 waiters, it asked for 20 cooks and 15 housekeepers, slightly more than it hired last year.

To get visas for those workers, Mar-a-Lago, like other businesses that rely on temporary employees each year, must first take legally mandated steps to look for U.S. workers. That includes placing two ads in a newspaper.

Typically, this attempt to recruit U.S. workers is a ritualized failure.

Its outcome is usually a conclusion that there are no qualified Americans to hire, justifying the need for the government to issue the visas.

This summer, that ritual began again at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s members-only club that has become a frequent destination for the president.

The club’s request for visas stood out because it came in the middle of “Made in America Week” at the White House, as Trump and his administration sought to highlight his push to remake U.S. trade policy. Even as Trump urged other U.S. businesses to “hire American,” his business

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s club seeks U.S. workers, but it’s really part of process for permission to hire foreigners was gathering evidence to prove that it couldn’t.

Officials at Mar-a-Lago and at the Trump Organization did not respond to questions for this article. Neither did a White House spokeswoman.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump defended his practice of using foreign workers at his club — even as he blamed immigrants for taking American jobs and keeping wages low for native-born workers.

“It’s very, very hard to get people. But other hotels do the exact same thing. . . . This is a procedure.

It’s part of the law,” he said during a Republican candidates’ debate in March 2016, after Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) criticized him for using foreigners at Mar-a-Lago. “I take advantage of that. There’s nothing wrong with it. We have no choice.”

The category of visas requested

by Mar-a-Lago is called H-2B, and the visas are intended for workers doing temporary jobs in nonagricultural fields. The number is theoretically limited to 66,000 per year, although that cap is fre-

quently lifted: This year, for instance, the Trump administration added 15,000 visas after employers complained that they couldn’t get the workers they need.

The visas are common across the hospitality industry, including at other resorts in Palm Beach, where an influx of visitors for only a few months each year means businesses must find workers willing to take temporary — and, often, labor-intensive — jobs.

Youcheng Wang, a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, said that Florida’s tourism industry is utterly dependent on these workers.

“This is not an easy industry to work in,” Wang said. “The jobs are typically long hours, with relatively low pay. It’s seasonal and temporary, so there’s instability in that workforce. If you want to enjoy a balance between work and life, this is not that kind of industry.”

Mar-a-Lago has relied on foreign workers since at least 2008, according to government documents. To recruit them, it relies on Petrina Group International, a

The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., wants permission to hire 70 foreign temporary workers but must first attempt to recruit U.S. workers.

SCOTT MCINTYRE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Jeannie Coleman applied for one of the jobs in previous years, but was denied employment despite her many qualifications.

firm with offices in Ithaca, N.Y., and Romania. News reports have said that Mar-a-Lago’s workers have largely been from Romania and Haiti. Representatives for Petrina did not respond to requests for comment.

In the past, Trump’s club has followed the same pattern of searching for — and not hiring — American workers. Two years ago, for instance, Jeannie Coleman, who lives in nearby West Palm Beach, applied for a job as a housekeeper.

Mar-a-Lago called back. She had an interview. Then: nothing.

“I was very disappointed. At that time, I really needed a job,” said Coleman, now 50, who works at a clothing store. “I had the qualifications. The interview went great. But they never even did the common courtesy to call me and tell me why I wasn’t hired.”

The Labor Department says that employers seeking foreign workers must “hire any [American] applicants who are qualified and available.” That year, Mar-aLago told the government it needed to hire 20 foreign workers as housekeepers. The government gave permission.

Now, Trump has resigned from leadership positions at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump Organization businesses. But he still owns them.

And he has treated Mar-a-Lago as a second home. Last season, he spent seven weekends there.

To immigration critics who have welcomed Trump’s calls for tightened border restrictions, Mar-a-Lago presents a missed opportunity.

“Let wages go up. Offer better benefits. More vacation time. Better working conditions,” said Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration levels.

“We don’t have a shortage of this kind of workers. You just got to look harder. And I would encourage the president — or whoever makes the hiring decisions down there [at Mar-a-Lago] — to do that.”

So far, there is no sign that anything has changed. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Use of state troopers stirs tensions

BY T IM C RAIG AND E MMA O CKERMAN

St. Louis

S

gt. Brad Sevier usually patrols an area of Missouri where there is one farm for every 20 residents. Now the Missouri state trooper commutes an hour to patrol the big city.

On orders from Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, Sevier and about two dozen troopers have laid claim to St. Louis highways that slice through some of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, a move that has sparked concern among residents wary of heavy policing. It’s the first time in decades that state troopers have patrolled the city, Greitens said.

“We are looking for anything,” Sevier said shortly before pulling over a motorist for an expired license plate near downtown. “I don’t see how it can be detrimental having more law enforcement in an area that really needs more policing.”

Greitens dispatched the Missouri Highway Patrol last month amid a surge in shootings and assaults in St. Louis, part of a nationwide trend of rising violence in some large cities. The killings have rattled neighborhoods and embarrassed city officials, who tend to be Democrats.

But now governors — who tend to be Republicans — are sending in their troops to fight urban crime, reopening historical tensions.

The governors’ actions mirror President Trump’s vow to send in federal agents to curb crime in Chicago, which he said in June had reached “epic proportions.”

“Today, we declare that the days of ignoring this problem are done,” said Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and competitive boxer, announcing his plan to send in state patrolmen to look for criminals in St. Louis. “We are rolling up our sleeves and taking strong action to protect people.”

Lyda Krewson, the new Democratic mayor of St. Louis, has fierce political disagreements with Greitens on many issues, including gun control and the funding of social services. But Krewson

WHITNEY CURTIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Locals are wary as Republican governors begin to dispatch highway patrols to fight crime in cities also has an intimate perspective of the city’s crime problem: In 1995, she saw her husband get fatally shot during an attempted carjacking in front of their home in the city’s Central West End. Krewson supports Greitens’s plan.

“There are a lot of guns on these highways. There are a lot of drugs on these highways,” Krewson said.

“As long as it’s done in a responsible way — and I don’t have any reason to believe it won’t be — I think it’s a good help.”

But in an era of increasingly polarized views on policing, Missouri’s intervention is unsettling some local residents who question the governor’s strategies and tone.

How elected leaders define a “gang,” use the word “criminal” and deputize outside law-enforcement agencies are emerging as flash points. The debate threatens to drive another wedge between some officials in heavily Democratic cities and GOP leaders in statehouses and in Washington.

“He was heard saying . . . ‘Let’s

go get them,’ ” said State Rep. Michael Butler, a St. Louis Democrat who was referring to an offhand, salutatory remark Greitens made while rallying Missouri troopers. “A lot of folks wonder who ‘them’ is, and what exactly did he mean.”

St. Louis has recorded more than 110 homicides so far this year, which, as of late July, put 2017 on pace to be the city’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

The trends have been similar in big cities from Baltimore and Nashville to Tulsa and Little Rock, and in response, governors are reviving a role many had embraced from the 1960s through the early 1990s but pulled back from as homicide rates declined.

Last month, after 25 people were shot in a nightclub not far from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson organized state troopers and FBI agents to respond to “a looming cloud of violence” in that city.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott

State trooper Sgt. Brad Sevier conducts a traffic stop along Interstate 70 in St. Louis last month. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) ordered troopers to patrol interstates in the St. Louis city limits in an effort to help the city police reduce crime.

pledged in spring to use “all lawful means” to snuff out what he called a serious “gang problem” in Houston, the state’s largest city.

In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster even used warlike language when announcing his plan for more state resources in Myrtle Beach, where homicides in June threatened the city’s reputation as a family-friendly beach destination.

“There will be a lot more boots on the ground,” McMaster said in deploying state troopers.

The governors are all Republicans, and their actions come as Trump has used tough-on-crime rhetoric in response to law enforcement concerns, most recently telling officers in a speech not to “be too nice” to suspects.

But the implementation of the state response can clash with local policing strategies. Some on the left fear a shift away from Obamaera initiatives such as community policing, fewer mandatory minimum sentences and limits on the militarization of police units.

The tension is particularly pronounced in St. Louis, where the 311,000 residents are still navigating the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a close-in suburb.

For now, Greitens’s proposal is fairly limited. For the first time in decades, Missouri state troopers will patrol four major highways in St. Louis, freeing up city police to focus on violent crime that has driven up the homicide rate.

Beside politics, activists say there is real fear that Greitens’s plan could lead to more racial profiling. African Americans in Missouri are already 75 percent more likely to be stopped while driving than white motorists, according to the data compiled by the state attorney general’s office.

“Until and unless we start talking about that, there is a concern we are going to get more of the same,” said Jeffrey A. Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, which is seeking state records clarifying how the enhanced state patrols will be carried out.

While looking for expired li-

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NATION cense plates, unregistered vehicles or speed violators, Sevier stopped a white woman who was arrested for an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court on a previous traffic citation.

“Traffic enforcement is a good tool in finding criminals,” said Sevier. “That lady was wanted for expired registration but it just as easily could have been a murder warrant or a robbery warrant.”

During the first 11 days of the state patrols on about 16 miles of interstate highways that had been only lightly patrolled before, troopers issued more than 900 traffic tickets and made 220 arrests, according to Missouri Highway Patrol data.

St. Louis resident Danielle Shanklin panned Greitens’s plan.

Her 25-year-old sister, Sigaria, was fatally shot in the head last summer when gunmen opened fire on a car she was in. Shanklin’s 3-year-old son, who was riding in the back seat, was unharmed.

Greitens’s initiative, she said, is nothing more than a way to “give out more tickets for speeding.”

“What they need do is add more funding to do things in the community,” Shanklin said, reflecting a widely held view in St. Louis that Greitens can’t fight crime and cut spending on social programs at the same time.

That community reaction, both here and in other cities targeted by governors, is putting mayors in a bind as they decide whether to embrace the help and, if so, how publicly.

In Arkansas, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola (D) supported Hutchinson’s plan, but followed up on the governor’s announcement with his own one-hour news conference to call for more investment in inmate reentry programs, job training and neighborhood redevelopment.

“We know we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” Stodola said.

Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Police Chiefs Association, said the true test of the governors’ initiatives will come in a few months.

“The real problem with this is usually the states can’t stay very long,” said Stephens, noting states have limited budgets as well. “And to be effective at policing locally, you just can’t jump in and then take off two or three months later.” ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Towns in eclipse path brace for overwhelmed cell service BY

B RIAN F UNG

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estled in the southwest corner of Kentucky, about an hour west of Bowling Green, is the city of Hopkinsville.

Ordinarily known for its historical landmarks and hot, humid summers, Hopkinsville is home to about 32,000 people on a normal day.

But “normal” is about to go out the window.

More than 100,000 visitors are expected to descend on Hopkinsville and the surrounding region for this month’s historic solar eclipse. The city lies along what’s known as the “path of totality,” a swath of land stretching across the United States where, for a brief moment on Aug. 21, the moon will appear to completely block out the sun.

The crush of people who’ve journeyed to Hopkinsville for the celestial occasion will need food.

They’ll need shelter. And, in an era of Instagram, Snapchat and live-streaming, they’ll almost certainly need cellphone service. But the latter could be a problem: Cell service basically doesn’t exist, at least not at eclipse viewing sites such as Orchardale Farm, barely a 15-minute drive from town.

“You could typically get zero to one bar of service at these locations,” said Brooke Jung, the eclipse coordinator for Hopkinsville.

Hopkinsville isn’t the only place grappling with a need for sudden cell service in a rural area.

On the other side of the country, Madras, Ore., is a town of 6,500 that’s bracing for an influx of anywhere from 85,000 to 150,000 visitors, according to Brian Crow, fair coordinator at the Jefferson County Fair Complex.

Crow said he expected it to be crazy, “but the great thing about our community is that we’ve been planning for over two years.”

When Crow first joined the planning effort last year, he made a point of asking about cellular service and the effect of having

AT&T

An AT&T cell-on-wheels tower is seen near Hopkinsville, Ky. All four nationwide carriers will roll out surge capacity for the eclipse.

thousands of people vying for access to mobile data. All four nationwide carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint — are addressing the problem by rolling out surge capacity. Some are going to be cells on wheels, or COWs. Others are known as cells on light trucks, or COLTs. But whatever they’re called, they’re all designed to do one thing particularly well: boost wireless capacity, in some cases by more than 300 percent.

Carriers expect localized spikes in cellular usage along the path of totality as the sun and moon move across the sky. That should help spread out the overall amount of demand coming from those areas. And even as places like Madras and Hopkinsville experience more demand than they are typically prepared for, the networks as a whole should absorb the surge as easily as they do in the event of, say, a major sporting event.

If cellphone users are really having trouble sending photos to friends and family over Internetbased messaging apps like WhatsApp or Snapchat, they can

always fall back on text messaging, said Scott Mair, senior vice president of network planning and engineering at AT&T. “The stress point is going to be at the individual cell site at the moment of viewing,” he said.

“That’s why we’ve augmented the capacity there.”

In addition to Hopkinsville and Madras, you can expect temporary cells to crop up at four sites in Missouri, one site in Idaho, one in Illinois and one in Wyoming. For many of these communities, the best part is that it won’t cost them a thing. In Madras, it’ll run the other way around: The telecom companies will be paying rent.

“It’s in the best interest of the providers to be here,” Crow said.

“They want coverage for their customers.”

The thousands of people who hope to catch the eclipse on their smartphones probably agree. But because the vast majority of them will go home after the event, the viewing sites won’t be getting a permanent capacity boost. Instead, the COWs will be heading back to the barn. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Melting glaciers pose risk in Peru N ICK M IROFF Lake Palcacocha, Peru BY

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fter a day of bright sunshine, a chunk of ice the size of a dump truck broke off the glacier on Mount Pucaranra a few weeks ago. It plunged into the lake below and kicked up a wave nine feet high.

Victor Morales, who is the lake’s solitary watchman, scrambled up to a stone hut on the side of the mountain and got on the radio.

The wave had damaged an emergency drainage system meant to reduce the volume of the lake. But to his great relief, the earthen dam holding back the water was intact.

“It wasn’t a big avalanche,” Morales said.

Lake Palcacocha is a mile long and 250 feet deep, and the effect of a large avalanche would be similar to dropping a bowling ball in a bathtub. Modeling scenarios predict a 100-foot wave so powerful it would blow out the dam. Three billion gallons of ice water would go roaring down the mountain toward the city of Huaraz, burying its 200,000 residents under an Andean tsunami of mud, trees and boulders.

Lake Palcacocha is an example of the immediate threats Peru and other developing countries are facing from climate change. The country is especially vulnerable since it is home to 70 percent of the world’s “tropical glaciers” — small, high-altitude ice caps found at the Earth’s middle latitudes. Their disappearance has made Peru something of a laboratory for human adaptation to climate change.

So far, it’s not going very well.

“For countries like Peru that are trying to climb out of poverty, there are major social, cultural and economic obstacles to adaptation,” said Nelson Santillán, a researcher at Peru’s national water authority. “Identifying risks is one thing, but doing something about them is another.”

In the weeks since President Trump announced the United States would renege on its commitment to the Paris climate accord, scientists have pointed to new signs the planet is edging

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

A flood of political and social problems offers lessons about the threats of climate change closer to a precipice. Maximum temperature records continue to fall. New cracks are opening at the polar ice caps.

Peru’s glaciers are tiny by comparison, but millions of people depend on their runoff for water, food and hydroelectricity.

Some of Peru’s glaciers have lost more than 90 percent of their mass. While much of the water trickles harmlessly down the mountainside, in places like Lake Palcacocha, it is pooling in great big puddles of melted ice. Many of these new lakes are held back by glacial moraines, which are essentially mounds of compressed sediments. They may be structurally weak, and as the volume of water pushing on them increases, some will collapse.

“We have glaciers across 19 — no, 18 — mountain ranges,” said Marco Zapata, a top scientist at Peru’s institute for glacier research, correcting himself to reflect the latest monitoring data.

“They’re all shrinking.”

For Peruvian authorities, this is

becoming more of an engineering problem than an environmental lament. Without reliable glacial runoff, the country’s water and irrigation systems will need to be retooled. New dams and reservoirs will be needed to more effectively store water. Investments in agriculture and other waterintensive industries will need to be recalculated.

“The glacier used to come down to there,” said Tomás Rosario, 45, who farms in the shadow of 22,000-foot Huascaran, Peru’s highest peak. He pointed at a ridge above his village, where bare rock was exposed. “Now the snow is gone and we’re running out of water.”

Last November, in the middle of a crippling drought, a rumor began to spread in Rosario’s tiny town of Soledad and in other Quechua-speaking villages whose residents grow potatoes and corn on the flanks of mountains here.

The rainy season was late, the fields were parched and livestock were dying. The government said

An Andes mountain range and a cross headstone are seen from Cementerio Municipal De Huaraz in Huaraz, Peru. If Lake Palcacocha, a glacial lake, bursts its dam, Huaraz would be destroyed and thousands killed.

global warming was making matters worse.

The villagers, not unlike climate-change skeptics in the United States, did not believe it.

Their suspicions fell instead on the strange machines that foreign scientists and aid workers from the Swiss-Peruvian group Project +Glaciers had installed with great fanfare at Lago 513, another swollen glacial lake not far from Lake Palcacocha.

The $250,000 emergency warning system included a monitoring station to alert residents living downstream in the town of Carhuaz (population 13,000) in case of a dam rupture. A 2010 flood triggered by an icefall at Lago 513 destroyed dozens of homes.

But in the middle of a drought, no one was especially worried about flooding. Years of disappointing rainfall were sowing anxieties up and down the valley.

“Everyone was saying that the gringos’ machines were scaring away the rain,” said Feliciana Quito, who farms a small plot downstream from the lake.

Jesús Caballero, the Carhuaz mayor, said he wanted to set the villagers straight, so he offered to hike up to the lake one morning in November to show them the “gringo machines” were harmless.

But when Caballero arrived at the lake that day, he said, it was clear the villagers were not interested in a climate lecture. Some of the young men were carrying sticks. This was a lynch mob.

The villagers attacked the monitoring station, tearing out the antennas and solar panels. They bludgeoned some of the instruments and carried the rest back down the mountain, triumphant, as if they had slain a dragon.

The rains came three days later, ending the drought. The villagers were jubilant. Their climate beliefs were vindicated.

But now the lake has no emergency warning system in case the dam bursts. The farmers say they will not allow the foreigners to put the equipment back in.

“We’re not going to let anyone put anything up there that interferes with the rain,” said Rosario,

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WORLD who was one of the people who went to the lake that day.

Caballero said the episode has demonstrated the need for greater sensitivity to the fears of rural villagers whose lives and traditions are upended by water shortages and extreme weather.

Caballero said he thinks he can get the villagers’ approval to put the equipment back in if there is another drought this fall, because it would prove his point that the machines have nothing to do with the rain.

Then again, he said, the villagers may direct their anger at the emergency monitoring systems installed at other nearby lakes, such as Lake Palcacocha. “If the rains don’t come, I worry they’ll march up there and tear the other equipment out, too,” he said.

It would be especially unwise to attack the monitoring station at Lake Palcacocha.

A moraine dam at the lake collapsed in December 1941, and the flood it unleashed killed several thousand people in Huaraz. The city only had 17,000 residents at the time. Since then its population has exploded, as farmers in the surrounding hills have been lured to the city by jobs in mining and tourism. Land was cheap along the riverbanks, and today the flood zone is the most heavily populated part of Huaraz, with schools, hospitals and a stadium.

Draining the lake to a safer level can be done with relatively simple engineering techniques that would cost only about $7 million, environment ministry officials say. In contrast, a dam failure and catastrophic flooding in Huaraz would inflict more than $2.5 billion in damage, in addition to causing thousands of deaths.

But fixing Palcacocha has become a source of fierce debate. The lake is inside a national park, where big engineering projects are not welcome. While the central government in Lima is eager to drain the lake, local farmers say they need the water, and want new reservoirs that would store it elsewhere and redistribute the load.

“We’ve been focused on future flood risks, but that’s not the biggest worry for these farmers,” said Jahir Anicama, head of the Project +Glaciers office in Huaraz. “They want projects that give them access to water, and they want them now.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Two months into boycott, Qatar goes on the offensive S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Cairo BY

Q

atar is defiantly weathering a boycott by four of its neighbors in a deepening crisis that has roiled the region and threatened U.S. interests.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties and imposed an economic blockade on Qatar in June, accusing it of backing terrorism.

Qatar denied the allegations and has since gone on the offensive.

Two months into the isolation campaign, the tiny, energy-rich Persian Gulf nation has used its billions to strengthen its economy and security. It has announced reforms and bolstered ties with Turkey and Iran that could potentially reshape the region and its alliances for years.

Efforts by the United States to mediate between its close allies have not succeeded.

“It’s now personal, which in some ways makes it more difficult to find a way for both sides to step down,” said Perry Cammack, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is likely to fester for some time.”

The bloc, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has long been at odds with Qatar over its ties to Iran and support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that governments of the bloc view as a threat to their rule. The countries pulled out their ambassadors, ordered citizens to leave Qatar, closed their borders, and shut air and sea routes to Qatari flights and vessels.

President Trump jumped into the crisis with a tweet taking credit for the bloc’s decision to sanction Qatar. But senior State Department and Pentagon officials have tried to defuse tensions — not least because Qatar is home to 10,000 U.S. military personnel at the Al Udeid air base, the main staging area for U.S. air operations against the Islamic State.

In June, the bloc made 13 de-

IRAN Detail

KUWAIT BAHRAIN Riyadh

QATAR Doha

Abu Dhabi

Muscat

UAE SAUDI ARABIA

YEMEN

OMAN

250 MILES

THE WASHINGTON POST

mands of Qatar, including that it slash ties with Iran, sever links with the Muslim Brotherhood, expel several Islamists and make reparation payments.

In particular, the bloc has demanded that Qatar shutter Al Jazeera, a Doha-funded media network that has covered regional governments critically.

Saudi Arabia and its allies view the media network, which insists it operates independently, as a mouthpiece for Islamists backed

by Qatar.

The countries have blocked Al Jazeera’s website and shut down its offices; Israel last weekend announced its intention to close down the network’s offices and ban its journalists.

Qatari officials dismissed the demands as “neither actionable or reasonable.”

Instead, Qatar, one of the top producers of natural gas, has sought to diversify its economy and wean itself off its dependence on its gulf neighbors for food and other supplies. Food from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that once filled supermarkets in Qatar has been replaced by products from Turkey and Iran. One businessman has started importing 4,000 cows to produce milk.

The other week, Qatar inked a $262 million deal to bring one of soccer’s most well-known stars,

Neymar, to the Paris SaintGermain team, Qatar’s most prominent sports asset. The astronomical sum was widely seen as a good investment ahead of the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar is scheduled to host, as well as a public relations boost.

Qatar also unveiled a draft law recently that would allow some foreigners to acquire permanent residency. For the first time, they will have access to free health care and government-run education and will be able to own land and operate some businesses without a Qatari partner, according to the country’s state-run news agency.

If enacted, such rights would be unprecedented in the Persian Gulf: Countries rely heavily on a foreign workforce but rarely grant foreigners citizenship or privileges afforded to their nationals. Foreigners make up nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s 2.7 million population.

The draft law also gives permanent residency to children of Qatari mothers and non-Qatari fathers. Under current law in Qatar and other gulf countries, children take the citizenship of the father.

The measure is widely seen as a way for Qatar to thwart the economic blockade by providing incentives for its workforce to stay while attracting more investors and companies to choose Doha, its capital, as a business hub.

Qatar also is strengthening its ties with the West to counter the loss of its former gulf allies. It has announced the $6 billion purchase of seven Italian warships, and in June it purchased $12 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets from the United States.

And last weekend, Turkey and Qatar staged joint military exercises, the latest sign of their burgeoning alliance. In June, Turkey approved a plan to send several thousand troops to a Turkish base in Qatar, ostensibly to support anti-terrorism efforts. Shutting down that base is one of the demands of the anti-Qatar bloc to lift the blockade. n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

‘We’ve got the robots.’

After difficulty finding human workers, company turns to automation C HICO H ARLAN in Dresser, Wis. BY

T

ACKERMAN + GRUBER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Bobby Campbell, 51, is a worker at Tenere Inc. in Dresser, Wis. He does the same work as one of two robots used by Tenere, which manufactures custom-made metal and plastic parts.

he workers of the first shift had just finished their morning cigarettes and settled into place when one last car pulled into the factory parking lot, driving past an American flag and a “now hiring” sign. Out came two men, who opened up the trunk, and then out came four cardboard boxes labeled “fragile.”

“We’ve got the robots,” one of the men said.

They watched as a forklift hoisted the boxes into the air and followed the forklift into a building where a row of old mechanical presses shook the concrete floor. The forklift honked and carried the boxes past workers in steel-toed boots and earplugs. It rounded a bend and arrived at the other corner of the building, at the end of an assembly line.

The line was intended for 12 workers, but two were no-shows. One had just been jailed for drug possession and violating probation. Three other spots were empty because the company hadn’t found anybody to do the work. That left six people on the line jumping from spot to spot, snapping parts into place and building metal containers by hand, too busy to look up as the forklift now came to a stop beside them.

In factory after American factory, the surrender of the industrial age to the age of automation continues at a record pace. The transformation is decades along, its primary reasons well-established: a search for cost-cutting and efficiency.

But as one factory in Wisconsin is showing, the forces driving automation can evolve — for reasons having to do with the condition of the American workforce. The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger genera-

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tion that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more last long, with the warning signs beginning called this part the claw. and more, a workforce in declining health: when they filed in for orientation.

The purpose of the claw was to holster a disk because of alcohol, because of despair and “How’s everybody doing?” said Matt Bader, drive. Tenere had been making them for two depression, because of a spike in the use of as four just-hired workers walked in on a day years, at two separate mechanical presses, opioids and other drugs. when Robot 1 was being installed. “All good?” where workers fed 6-by-7-inch pieces of flat In earlier decades, companies would have “Maybe,” one person said. aluminum into the machine, pressed two butresponded to such a shortage by either giving Bader, who worked for a staffing agency that tons simultaneously, and then extracted the up on expansion hopes or boosting wages helped Tenere fill some of its positions, metal — now bent at the edges. Tenere’s workuntil they filled their positions. But now, they told them that once they started at Tenere ers were supposed to do this 1,760 times per had another option. Robots had become more they had to follow a few important rules, shift. affordable. No longer did machines require including one saying they couldn’t drink Robot 1, almost programmed now, started six-figure investments; they could be puralcohol or use illegal substances at work. trying it out. It snatched the flat metal from its chased for $30,000, or even leased at an “Apparently, we need to tell people that,” left side, then swiveled back toward the press. It hourly rate. As a result, a new generation of Bader said, not mentioning that just a few moved noiselessly. It released the part into the robots was winding up on the floors of small days before he had driven two employees to a mouth of the machine, and as soon as it and medium-size companies that had previmedical center for drug tests after managers withdrew, down came the press to shape the ously depended only on the workers who lived suspected they’d shown up high. metal into a claw: Wallop. The robot’s arm then just beyond their doors. Companies now After an hour the workers were heading back retrieved the part, swiveling back to its left, and could pick between two versions of the Amerito their cars, one saying that everything dropping the claw on a conveyor belt. can worker — humans and robots. And at “sounds okay,” another saying the “pay sucks.”

“How fast do you want it?” Hirebotics coTenere Inc., where 132 jobs were unfilled on Bader guessed that two of the four “wouldn’t founder Rob Goldiez asked a plant manager the week the robots arrived, the balance was last a week,” because often, he said, he knew supervising the installation. beginning to shift.

First the robot was cycling every “Right here, okay?” the forklift 20 seconds, and then every 14.9 secCompanies now could pick between two versions driver yelled over the noise of the onds, and then every 10 seconds. An factory, and when a manager gave engineer toggled with the settings, of the American worker — humans and robots. And him a nod, he placed on the ground and later the speed bumped up again. the boxes containing the two newA claw was being produced every at Tenere Inc., where 132 jobs were unfilled, the est employees at Tenere, Robot 1 9.5 seconds. Or 379 every hour; 3,032 and Robot 2. every shift; 9,096 every day. balance was beginning to shift.

“This motion,” Goldiez said, “will be repeatable for years.” enere is a company that manufactures customwithin minutes who would last. People who made metal and plastic parts, mostly ome distance away, in front of another said they couldn’t work Saturdays. People who for the tech industry. Five years earlier, a mechanical press, was a 51-year-old man couldn’t work early mornings. This was the private-equity firm acquired the company, named Bobby Campbell who had the same mystery for him: So many people showing up, expanded to Mexico, and ushered in what the job as Robot 1. He’d wound up with the position saying they were worried about rent or bills or company called “a new era of growth.” In because of an accident: In February, he’d had supporting children, and yet they couldn’t hold Wisconsin, where it has 550 employees, all too much to drink, tumbled off a deck at his down a job that could help them. non-union, wages started at $10.50 per hour daughter’s house, and broken his neck. When “I am so sick of hearing that,” Bader said. for first shift and $13 per hour for overnight. he returned after three months, Tenere pulled “And then they wonder why things are getting Counting health insurance and retirement him out of the laser department and put him on automated.” benefits, even the lowest-paid worker was light duty. Now, as the testing continued on a more expensive than the robots, which Tenere robot that he said “just looks like something was leasing from a Nashville-based start-up, you see in the . . . dentist’s office,” Campbell was he new robots had been made in DenHirebotics, for $15 per hour. Hirebotics costarting his 25th consecutive workday feeding mark, shipped to North Carolina, sold to founder Matt Bush said that, before coming to claws to the machine. He’d punched the same engineers in Nashville, and then driven to Tenere, he’d been all across America installtwo buttons that activated the press 36,665 Wisconsin. The robots had no faces, no bodies, ing robots at factories with similar hiring times. nothing to suggest anything but mechanical problems. “Everybody is struggling to find “Beat that robot today,” Campbell’s superviefficiency. If anything, they looked similar to people,” he said, and it was true even in a slice sor said. human arms, with silver limbs and powder blue of western Wisconsin so attuned to the elbows and charcoal-colored wrists.

“Hah,” Campbell said, turning his back and rhythms of shift work that one local bar held settling in at his station, where there were 1,760 Each had been shipped with a corresponding happy hour three times a day. claws to make and eight hours until he drove box of wires and controls. Each weighed Inside the factory, there have been no major home.

40.6 pounds. They had been designed to replicate issues with quality control, plant managers say, He set his canvas lunch container on a side movements with such precision than any deviaonly with filling its job openings. In the front table and oiled his mechanical press. He cut tion was no greater than the thickness of a human office, the general manager had nudged up open a box of parts and placed the first flat piece hair — a skill particularly helpful for Robot 1, wages for second- and third-shift workers and of metal under the press. A gauge on the side of which had been brought in to perform one of the was wondering if he’d have to do it again in the the press kept count. Wallop. “1,” the counter most repetitive jobs in the factory. next few months. Over in human resources, an said, and after Campbell had pressed the button As the engineers prepared it for operation, administrator was saying that finding people 117 more times, there were seven hours to go.

Robot 1 had been bolted in front of a 10-foot-tall was like trying to “climb Everest” — even after Unlike the employees on the assembly line, mechanical press. It was rigged with safety the company had loosened policies on hiring Campbell worked alone. His press was off in a sensors and programmed to make a three-foot people with criminal records. Even the new hires corner. There was no foot traffic, nobody to talk path of motion, one that it would use to make who were coaxed through the door often didn’t part No. 07123571. More commonly, Tenere continues on next page

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COVER STORY right. He nodded his head. coming. But he hadn’t said when they would The press’s clutch was hissing and exhaling, to, nothing to look at. Campbell stopped his arrive, or what exactly they would do. He hadn’t hissing and exhaling, and Campbell added a work and removed a container of pills. He took described how they would look. He’d just said last pump of oil to the machine with 15 minutes a low-dose aspirin for his neck, another pill for nobody was losing their jobs, and not to worry, to go. Out came a few more parts, and he fed high blood pressure. He snacked on some and that Tenere was “supplementing some of the them into the hopper, checked the gauge, and peppers and homemade pickles, fed 393 more people we can’t find.” shrugged. “Not so bad,” he said. parts in the machine, and then it was time for Now, though, the boxes were being opened Time to go home. He had punched the lunch. Four hours to go. up, wires everywhere, and Larson, 48, started buttons another 1,376 times, 384 shy of his “Monday,” he said with a little shrug. “I’ll pick to worry. The machines looked too complicattarget, and now he got in the car. it up after I get some fuel.” ed. Maybe they’d break down. Maybe they Campbell had been at Tenere for three years. couldn’t keep pace. Maybe they’d be just one He earned $13.50 per hour. He had a bad back, a more problem at the factory, and already, their obot 2 had a different job than Robot 1. It shaved and scarred head, a tear duct that boxes were getting in the way. was to be part of a team — the assembly perpetually leaked after orbital surgery, and But then came the next day: Back again, on line. The team worked along a 70-foot aging biceps that he showed off with sleeveless time. Always on time. Larson was one of the row of tables lined with workstations that were Harley-Davidson shirts. He liked working at steadiest parts of an assembly team in which so always at least a few workers shy, where emTenere, he said. Good people. Good benefits. many other workers had lasted for weeks or ployees snapped and riveted metal pieces, Some days he hit his targets, other days he months. “My line,” Larson called it. Her superbuilding silver, rectangular containers. Each didn’t, but his supervisors never got on him, and visor called her “old school.” A manager called container, by the time it reached the last assemthe company had always been patient with him, her “no nonsense.” Others moaned about the bly workstation, was outfitted with either 13 or even as he dealt with some personal problems. job during lunchtime breaks. Larson, wanting 15 miniature drawer slots. It was the job of the He lived 31 miles and 40 minutes away, prono part of that, pulled up a stool to the assembly third-to-last worker on the line to fill each with vided he didn’t stop. The problem was, line every day and ate by herself. sometimes he did. Along the drive “If the job is that bad, go!” she said.

Her line supervisor had told workers a few home there were a dozen gas stations But the numbers at work had been and minimarts selling beer, and Campleaving her feeling more drained than weeks earlier the robots were coming. But he bell said he couldn’t figure out why usual lately. The team felt as if it was some days he would turn in. He’d tried forever in catch-up mode. She and her hadn’t said when they would arrive, or what everything he could think of to stop co-workers were supposed to comhimself. Calling his daughters, calling plete 2,250 containers per week. But exactly they would do. his wife. Turning up the music and with so many jobs unfilled, they listening to Rod Stewart. He’d been to missed the mark by 170 the week Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he said. He’d before the robots arrived. They were off 130 the a claw. That would become the sole task of spent 28 days at a treatment center. He’d looked week prior. The line got a pep talk from the Robot 2, one that it started to test out after days for jobs that would cut down on the commute. supervisor, Johannsen, who said he noticed of programming and setup.

He’d faced a family intervention where the Larson “getting frustrated.”

The claws arrived at Robot 2’s station on a whole family read him letters, as he sat there Her co-workers were always changing. For conveyor belt. From there, the robot made a feeling like what he called a “kindergartner.” now, they were a Linda, another Linda, a Kevin, three-foot motion of its own. Grabbing the claw Sometimes, Campbell said, he almost a Sarah, a Miah, a Valerie and a Matt. Valerie with its gripper. Swiveling 90 degrees. Reaching thought he was through the worst — sober for was a good worker, Larson said, and so was one its arm toward the container. And then, insertweeks at a time — but then came Saturday, of the Lindas. But a few of the others struggled ing the claw into one of the drawer slots with an when he was supposed to work an eight-hour to keep pace. Larson told them sometimes how intricate push: forward 80 millimeters, down shift and instead clocked out after three hours, they could be more efficient in their jobs. How five millimeters, forward another 20 millimestopping on the way home and downing a they could line up rivets in parallel rows, for ters, up eight millimeters, forward another 12.

12-pack of beer before sundown. Then came instance. But who was paying attention?

“A delicate move,” Bush said.

Sunday, another 12 beers out on the lake. Now it “There’s no caring,” Larson said. “No pride.”

One that Robot 2 would be able to make was Monday, and Campbell said he was sure Friday now, and Larson was tired. There was every seven seconds once it joined the line. he’d be okay if he could just get home. There, his one more shift before the weekend, but this wife only allowed him to have nonalcoholic time, when she showed up for work, she saw ays earlier, Annie Larson, the woman beers. But that was 31 miles away. “Just the something different at the end of the line. The who would work alongside Robot 2, had uncertainty,” Campbell said, and he tried not to robots no longer looked like a mess. Their wires been at home, the end of another shift, think about it, with the lunch break over, and had been tucked into control boxes. Their laid out in a recliner sipping a Mountain Dew 3 hours and 40 minutes to go. stations had been swept clean. They were mixed with what she described as the cheapest He stepped onto the floor pad in front of the surrounded by new conveyor belts. vodka she could find. There’d been six years at press and got back to work. A box of flat metal “They’re pretty,” she said, and several hours Tenere of days like these. Trying to unwind. pieces was to his left, a hopper of finished claws later, mid-shift, she noticed an employee who’d Alone in her one-bedroom apartment. Bedtime sat on his right, and Campbell’s hands moved in missed the last few weeks with knee surgery at 9. Alarm at 5:40 a.m. Out the door at 6:20. a rhythm, grabbing and inserting. “As long as wander over, stopping at the robot.

Into her old Chevy. Six miles up the street. Then I’ve got parts in front of me, I’m all right,” he “Ohh,” the employee said, “they’re taking into the Tenere parking lot, clocking in just said. Twenty minutes without looking up. Then somebody’s job.” before 7, the next day of trying to keep pace.

40. Then nearly 60. The gauge said 912.

“No, they’re not,” she said.

Except this time, as a forklift came to a stop “All right,” Campbell said, when there was an She was surprised by her response. That she nearby, she saw four boxes being dropped off at hour left to go, still pressing the buttons. had come to the robot’s defense. But then she the end of the line.

He hummed a song. He whistled. He fed 11 looked at what the robot was going to do: Put a “What in the hell?” she thought. pieces of metal to the machine in a minute, and claw in the slot. Put another claw in the slot. Put Her line supervisor, Tom Johannsen, had told then 13, then nine. His eyes darted from left to another claw in the slot. workers a few weeks earlier the robots were

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ACKERMAN + GRUBER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Annie Larson, 48, works on an assembly line with one of Tenere’s robots. Before the robots’ arrival, Larson felt like her team was always behind.

“It’s not a good job for a person to have anyway,” she said.

The end-of-the-shift buzzer sounded, and Larson got back into her car. Then back into the recliner, where she poured her drink and tried to think about how the assembly line was going to change. Maybe the robots would actually help. Maybe the numbers would get better.

Maybe her next problem would be too many humans and not enough robots.

“Me and Val and 12 robots,” Larson said. “I would be happy with that.”

E

ight days after arriving in boxes, the robots’ first official day of work had arrived. In between the end of the overnight shift and the start of the first shift, the engineers did a last run-through and then picked up the touch screens that controlled the robots.

Robot 1 began grabbing the metal rectangles, feeding them into the mechanical press, then extracting them as claws. Robot 2 began swiveling and grabbing the claws, placing them into a few containers that had been assembled overnight. The robots were six feet apart from one another, at stations producing the only noise in an otherwise quiet factory. Every 9.5 seconds:

the wallop of the press. And then, the snapping of a claw sliding into a slot.

And then, the 7 a.m. buzzer to start the day.

In came the workers, some of whom took a moment to stand near the robots and watch.

“It’s pretty amazing,” one said.

“Gosh, it doesn’t take breaks,” another said.

“Can I smack it if I need to?” Larson asked, and then she said, “Okay, let’s go.”

The people took their stations. In one corner, Robot 1 was pounding out claws, laying them on a conveyor belt. Along a half-empty row of workstations, six people were constructing containers. At the end of that row, Robot 2 was filling those containers with claws. And at the other side of the factory, Campbell was stamping out claws the old way, feeding the metal and pressing the buttons, 320 in the first hour, even as he pulled a tissue out of his pocket every few minutes to dab his leaky eye.

“This machine is getting hot, I’m working it so hard,” Campbell said.

At the assembly line, Larson and the others were moving fast because they needed to.

Robot 2 was filling a container with claws every 11/2 minutes, and the humans could barely keep pace. They shoveled 10 containers down the

line, and Robot 2 filled them with claws. For a minute, as more containers were being riveted together, the robot sat idle.

“We have to keep leapfrogging,” Larson shouted. “The robot needs some work.”

Within an hour, the workers of the first shift had filled a shipping box with finished containers — the first batch made by both humans and robots. Then came a second box, and then a third, and then a buzzer sounded for a break.

The work paused, and a manager, Ed Moryn, grabbed the Hirebotics engineers and asked them to follow.

He took them through a passageway and into another building, stopping at two more workstations where he said the company needed help. A press brake job. An assembly job.

“Can we do these?” Moryn asked. The engineers studied the work areas for 15 minutes, took some measurements, and two days later offered Tenere one version of a solution for a company trying to fill 132 openings. Tenere looked at the offer and signed the paperwork.

In September, the engineers would be coming back, arriving this time with the boxes holding Robot 3 and Robot 4. n © The Washington Post

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LIFESTYLE

Home, sweet o∞ce park BY

K ATHERINE S HAVER

F

rom the rooftop terrace of their new townhouse, Keisuke and Idalia Yabe take in their suburban neighborhood: a staid, 1970s-era office park of glass buildings and concrete parking garages.

The Yabes say they have found the advantages of urban living in a shorter commute and the ability to walk to shopping centers and a park.

They also have what feels like the best of suburbia — mature trees, plentiful parking, soughtafter schools and a more affordable mortgage.

From the Washington and New York suburbs to North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, traditional corporate campuses that have struggled since the Great Recession are trying to transform from sterile worksites into vibrant mini-towns. In addition to housing, they’re adding restaurants, grocery stores, playgrounds and outdoor concert spaces — anything to draw people in and make them want to stay.

Although it might sound strange at first, the Yabes say, living in an office park feels convenient and even a bit hip.

“The location is ideal,” said Keisuke Yabe, 45, after returning from an evening walk with their 7-month-old daughter, Mela, just as the sun ducked behind a 14-story office building in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb.

“For me, if anything, it’s ‘Oh, this is pretty cool,’ ” said Idalia Yabe, 38. “I think the office setting makes it seem like we’re in a city a bit more and not as much in the suburbs.”

For many suburban business centers, attracting residents such as the Yabes is a matter of survival.

Once an elite address for companies fleeing downtowns, suburban office parks have grown increasingly obsolete as businesses have scaled back on office space or returned to transit-rich cities to attract young profession-

JASON ANDREW FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sterile suburban worksites are being repurposed into vibrant mini-towns with an urban feel als. Those reachable only by car or bus have been particularly hard hit.

Suburban office parks have plenty to offer residential developers, experts say. Many are close to major roads and near topranked public schools, and their sprawling campuses and vast parking lots provide land that has become increasingly scarce in lucrative areas.

“On the surface, suburban office parks don’t immediately suggest residential,” said Stockton Williams, a housing expert for the Urban Land Institute. “But they can be transformed. . . . It will take some creativity, but it’s certainly doable.”

Bob Geolas, a real estate economic development consultant in Raleigh, N.C., said suburban office parks can retool themselves for urban-loving companies and residents who are likely to want more space at more affordable prices as their staffs or

families grow.

“We’re not going to tear down all those buildings, so how do you reimagine them?” said Geolas, former chief executive of the Research Triangle Foundation, which manages 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. “I think it’s a real opportunity for the suburbs to make a hip comeback.”

In suburban New Jersey, developers are converting the former 2 million-square-foot Bell Labs headquarters in the affluent township of Holmdel into new office space, stores and restaurants. Toll Brothers is building 40 single-family homes, averaging $1.7 million apiece, and 185 “active adult” townhouses on former Bell Labs property near the massive office building.

Chris Gaffney, a group president for Toll Brothers, said people will want to live amid a 450-acre corporate campus for the same reasons they’ve always

Keisuke and Idalia Yabe sit on their rooftop with their 7month-old daughter, Mela, and their dog.

“I think the office setting makes it seem like we’re in a city a bit more and not as much in the suburbs,” Idalia Yabe said.

flocked to certain suburbs: convenience and nearby top-notch public schools.

“Like anything else in real estate, it’s all location,” Gaffney said. “The Garden State Parkway is right there, it’s a half-hour to the Jersey Shore, 50 minutes to Manhattan — it’s just an incredible location.”

Such large tracts of open land in high-demand suburbs, he said, “are few and far between.”

Suburban office park managers say they’re also trying to keep and attract office tenants who tell them they can’t recruit the best talent unless staffers can walk to restaurants, shopping and even to and from home.

For that reason, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park soon will get its first 600 apartments, along with restaurants, a grocer and other stores.

“Honestly, we are responding to how people want to live, work and play in the same area,” said Linda Hall, the Research Triangle Foundation’s chief financial officer. “There are literally no restaurants” in the park, Hall said.

In Northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., the 1,100-acre Westfields International Corporate Center has 155 townhouses — the first homes ever in the 1980s-era office park — and a high-end grocery store under construction. Plans include two apartment buildings, recreational trails, a movie theater and an amphitheater for community events.

Bill Keech Jr., whose Keech Co. manages the Chantilly, Va., office park, said he thinks plenty of the 26,000 people who work in Westfields will want to live there. New stores and restaurants, he said, will also help the auto-centric park — which is seven miles from the closest commuter train station — compete for tenants against office buildings popping up around other train stations.

“When you look at creating a special place, it’s a change for us, too,” Keech said. “It’s like we’re reinventing a town.” n ©The Washington Post

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TRAVEL

KLMNO WEEKLY

Bus company wants to be sleeper hit BY

P ETER H OLLEY

P

icture this: Your boss asks you to make a last-second trip to a city a few hundred miles away for a meeting tomorrow morning.

So how do you get there?

You could take an earlymorning regional flight, but frequent delays on small carriers might mean you risk missing your meeting and spending more time on the tarmac than in the air.

You could spend a few hundred bucks on a train ticket, but don’t expect to get much sleep ahead of your meeting. You could also drive your own car, but that means confronting traffic jams and an exhausting night on the road.

For many people, moving between major hubs that are just far enough away to create complications — think Los Angeles to San Francisco, for instance — is a regular travel headache.

Tom Currier calls it the “500mile problem” and now, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and his partner, Gaetano Crupi, say they have a solution. It’s called “Cabin” — a double-decker, luxury bus line with WiFi, a comfy lounge and sleeping pods that offer the same pressed sheets you’ll find at the Ritz Carlton.

Cabin began making overnight trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco last month. There’s nothing particularly innovative about packing people into a bus and moving them from one place to another after dark. But Currier argues that the company’s emphasis on providing passengers with a good night’s sleep separates Cabin from other forms of transportation. He says it allows the company to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s belief that a growing number of people will leap at any convenient opportunity to avoid driving as society begins to flirt with autonomous modes of transportation.

He compares the overnight bus ride to “teleportation.”

“We’re taking these 300-500 mile trips and turning them into an experience where you’re basically checking into a hotel in one city and then checking out of a

CABIN

Double-decker offers sleeping pods as overnight alternative to flying between L.A., San Francisco hotel in another city,” Currier said.

“And when you combine our service with Uber and Lyft in our destination cities, you’re replacing the need for having a car entirely.”

The difficulty of traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco has been a source of longstanding frustration for Californians, one that has led to development of smaller airports in both cities and an ongoing effort to build high-speed rail linking the two metropolises. In the absence of that rail — and with airports and roadways increasingly crowded — it’s not surprising that a creative entrepreneur would take a shot at creating an alternative, said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. The question facing Cabin, Manville said, is the same one that has hovered around high-speed rail for years: Is this an alternative form of transportation that people actually want to take?

“The distance between the two cities is far enough that, even if you’re comfortable in a pod, it’s

still a lot longer than flying,” he said. “How do you want your hassle served to you? In a series of crowds at the airport amid the unpredictable interruption of flight delays, or knowing you’ll be asleep, but it’s going to take nine hours to get to your destination?”

Currier points to early ticket sales from a large pool of people — from young to old, professionals to students — as evidence that people are desperate to avoid long car rides and frustrating flights.

Initially run as a pilot project called Sleep Bus last year, Cabin tickets sold out in three days and the company’s wait-list collected more than 20,000 names. Cabin now operates two, 24-passenger buses. So far, Currier said, his company has transported hundreds of passengers who pay $115 each way on the West Coast, and he plans to expand to the East Coast one day.

The buses depart around 11 p.m. and arrive at their destination the next day at 7 a.m., the company said. A road trip that could be completed in as little as six hours is

Cabin is an overnight bus line with sleeping quarters that transports passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The company considers itself a luxury hotel on wheels and an alternative to driving and flying.

actually extended to eight hours so that people are ensured enough time for a full night’s rest, Currier said. Slowing down the drive by using longer routes distinguishes Cabin from red-eye flights, which take less time but tend to disrupt a passenger’s sleep cycle, he said.

“The privacy curtain on each pod is a complete change in how people experience mass transportation,” Currier added, noting that luxury airlines offer seats with similar degrees of privacy for tens of thousands of dollars.

Cabin drivers are trained to use an accelerometer app that measures changes in the vehicle’s speed and vibration. The data from the app is used to test new routes in hopes of creating the smoothest ride possible and enhancing passengers’ sleep.

Once on board, Currier said, passengers can relax on leather chairs in the bus’s lounge or retreat to their pod to rest or watch a movie. Depending on whether passengers want to fall asleep or wake up, camomile tea and espresso are available. Currier said the company’s “obsessive focus” on cleanliness and comfort is more similar to a hotel than an airline or train. An NPR reporter who rode the bus detailed a pleasant communal travel experience, one she labeled “hipster, not hippie.”

The company employs a team of engineers who are developing a new suspension system that would make the buses so smooth passengers would be unable to tell that they’re on the road.

Asked whether a luxury bus line could alter travel across the country, Manville said he didn’t want to strike a discouraging tone, but thinks it’s useful to present speed bumps that offset Silicon Valley’s lofty optimism.

“Ultimately, these sorts of experiments are super important because they are ways to address a real source of travel dissatisfaction,” he said. “The difficulty of traveling between the two cities is a real thing, and if creative people want to explore solutions, that’s something we should encourage.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Sen. Jeff Flake takes aim at Trump N ONFICTION

J

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REVIEWED BY

J AMES H OHMANN

eff Flake took Donald Trump’s attacks on Mexican and Muslim immigrants personally during the 2016 campaign. They were among the many reasons that the Republican senator from Arizona could not bear to vote for his party’s presidential nominee and why he’s now written a stinging anti-Trump polemic, even though it will make winning reelection next year more difficult.

The most newsworthy parts of Flake’s new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” are his frontal attacks on the president. He writes that the GOP’s “Faustian bargain” to embrace Trump as a way to advance its agenda has backfired by putting sacred institutions and the rule of law at risk. He refers to Trump as a carnival barker, expresses alarm about the president’s affection for authoritarian rulers and calls out his GOP colleagues in Congress as enablers.

But the book is at its most compelling when Flake shows how he developed the conservative worldview that would make Trump so anathema to him. It was his experience as a worker on his family’s ranch, as a Mormon missionary in Africa and as the executive director of the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, where he worked closely with his political hero, Barry Goldwater, in the years before he died.

The 54-year-old Flake often asks himself, “What would Goldwater do?” And he feels certain that the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, to whom Trump has often been compared, “would not be pleased or amused” by the president or the state of the conservative movement.

Flake’s faith is an important part of his narrative. In 1838, the governor of Missouri signed an “extermination” order that made

it legal to kill anyone who belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His ancestors faced persecution as they moved west and settled in Arizona. The senator volunteers that his great-great-grandfather endured six months of hard labor in a Yuma prison for having a second wife. “When we say ‘No Muslims’ or ‘No Mexicans,’ we may as well say ‘No Mormons,’ ” Flake writes. “Because it is no different.”

To make the case against Trump’s travel ban, the senator recalls how two surgeons from predominantly Muslim countries saved his father-in-law’s life after a heart attack.

The weekend after Trump proposed his ban in December 2015 on Muslims entering the United States, Flake felt called to attend afternoon prayers at a mosque in Scottsdale so he could let the parishioners know that most Americans are not given to such intolerance. George W. Bush sent him a note the next day. “Thank you for your voice of reason in these unreasonable times,” the former president wrote.

But the unreasonable times continued. “During the campaign, I assumed that this shocking episode — among so many more — would be a political blunder from which Donald Trump would never recover,” Flake admits. “I readily concede that I got the politics wrong. I will even concede that I underestimated the populist appeal of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. But I will not concede the underlying principle of religious freedom.”

Growing up on a farm that employed migrant laborers, Flake got to know undocumented immigrants as hard workers, not criminals, who lived in constant fear of deportation.

He remains proud of his role in

the Gang of Eight, which negotiated a bipartisan compromise to overhaul the immigration system in 2013. It would have allowed millions of illegal immigrants to live legally in the United States and to eventually become citizens, in exchange for the construction of 700 miles of fencing on the southern border and a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents. The bill passed the Senate but went nowhere in the House.

Flake became inspired to write this book during a trip to Mexico City two weeks after the election, as he struggled to soothe the concerns of Mexican leaders about NAFTA, the proposed border wall and anti-immigrant sentiments.

“We have given in to the politics of anger — the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate,” he writes. “These are the spasms of a dying party. Anger and resentment and blaming groups of people for our problems might work politically in the short term, but it’s a dangerous impulse in a pluralistic society, and we know from history that it’s an impulse that, once acted upon, never ends well.”

Flake was already facing a tough primary race next year, and this ensures that it will be more challenging. The White House political team

CONSCIENCE OF A CONSERVATIVE

By Jeff Flake Random House.

140 pp. $27

has been actively talking with potential GOP challengers, with the goal of coalescing behind the most credible contender who could defeat him. Trump has reportedly told people that he’ll put up $10 million of his own money to help.

It seems almost inevitable that Flake will back off some of his strongest rhetorical broadsides, at least until he gets through the GOP primary. But Flake has laid down an important marker, and he deserves credit for taking a brave stand when the politically convenient thing is for him to bite his lip. He has created a permission structure for Republican senators with safer seats to express publicly what they often tell reporters privately.

Flake writes, “It is a testament to just how far we fell in 2016 that to resist the fever and to stand up for conservatism seemed a radical act.” n Hohmann is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post and the author of the Daily 202 newsletter.

ILLUSTRATION BY BETHANY BICKLEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST; PHOTOGRAPHED BY KRYSTLE MARCELLUS

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 2017

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A billionaire turns small-town don

The neglected role of women in WWII

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

J

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

onathan Dee’s thoughtful novels may not be ripped from the headlines, but his plots hug the contours of our era.

His prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving than in his new novel, “The Locals,” which describes a billionaire running for office and taking over a small town. Given that premise, it’s tempting at first to interpret this story as some kind of parable of our present political plight, but the timing makes that improbable. After all, a complex novel takes years to compose, and, more important, there’s no parallel between Dee’s hyper-competent billionaire and the one flailing around in the White House. Instead, “The Locals” feels attuned to the broader currents of our culture, particularly the renewed tension between competing ideals of community and self-reliance.

The story begins in New York during the immediate aftermath of 9/11 with a disquieting portrait of the way that cataclysm affected people who were not directly affected. One such person is Phil Hadi, a famously wealthy man who removes his family from the dangers of Manhattan and settles in the Berkshires. Hadi loves the quaint town of Howland, its local diner, its little library, its privacy.

When a seat opens on the Howland board of selectman, he wins the election by promising to forgo a salary, turn back a recent tax break and carry many of the town’s expenses himself.

We’re programmed to be suspicious of such largesse, and there’s something unnerving about Hadi’s eagerness to brush aside the messiness of democracy with the efficiency of his own vast fortune. But what are his real motives? Why has he installed so many surveillance cameras in town? Dee may lure us down the dark alley of dystopia, but this is Western Massachusetts, not Westworld. In fact, the novel is not really about Hadi at all. It’s about

the locals who feel the gravitational distortion of his wealth.

Dee focuses with needling precision on three generations of the Firth family. Mark Firth is a local contractor who recently lost money to a fraudulent investor. His wife, Karen, can’t shake her corrosive doubts about his financial competence, which only makes Mark more determined to succeed. Meanwhile, Mark’s parents are struggling with dementia and fury. His sister is climbing down the ladder of success. His daughter is slipping out of reach. And there are lots of other unhappy characters, too, all elegantly choreographed in a dance of discontent.

With this little town, this idylliclooking version of America, Dee has constructed a world — harrowing but instructive — where no one feels content. While doing some work on Hadi’s summer house, Mark confesses to his wealthy employer, “I feel like something is lacking in me, in terms of personality, in terms of vision.” When Hadi tells him not to be dismissive of the good work he does, Mark objects: “But this is America. . . . You’re supposed to better yourself. You’re supposed to think big. Right?”

That national ideology provides the hydraulic pressure that animates these characters. Dee teases out the way the business of getting and spending pitches them against one another, dissolving the bonds of community, even family, in the fight for financial survival. If anything, Hadi’s generous realm only makes these people more suspicious of each other.

Almost without exception, the men are congenitally resentful, clinging to a hollow doctrine of self-reliance that they use to club everyone else. Howland becomes a place poisoned with rage.

Amid the heat of today’s vicious political climate, “The Locals” is a smoke alarm. Listen up. n Charles is the editor of Washington Post Book World.

E THE LOCALS

By Jonathan Dee Random House. 383 pp. $28

THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR An Oral History of Women in World War II

By Svetlana Alexievich Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Random House. 331 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

L IZA M UNDY

arly in “The Unwomanly Face of War,” Svetlana Alexievich’s harrowing and moving account of female Soviet soldiers during World War II, there is a scene where a group of female fighters arrives at the front. Wearing army shirts and forage caps — shorn of the long braids they once felt proud of — they are crack graduates of a women’s sniper school, assigned to the 62nd Rifleman’s Division. Their commander is not happy to see them.

He orders them to prove they can shoot and perform other key tasks such as camouflaging themselves in the field. Skeptically watching their training exercise, he steps on a hummock and is taken aback when the ground below him speaks. “You’re too heavy,” the hummock tells him. It is a female sniper, embedded in the landscape. “I take back my words,” the commander admits.

The woman recounting that anecdote killed 75 men in the years that followed, receiving 11 combat decorations and becoming renowned for her skill at picking off Nazis. She and her companions were among some 1 million women who fought in the Soviet army, helping repel the Germans during four bloody years of siege, occupation and combat. For many Allied countries, World War II was the watershed conflict that brought women into the military (and intelligence) in significant numbers.

But the Soviets deployed theirs most fully. Soviet women served as fighter pilots, tank drivers, infantrymen, antiaircraft gunners. “The Unwomanly Face of War” tells the story of these forgotten women, and its great achievement is that it gives credit to their contribution but also to the hell they endured.

“At nineteen I had a medal ‘For Courage,’ ” says one. “At nineteen my hair was gray. At nineteen in my last battle I was shot through both lungs.”

Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and author, in 2015 received the Nobel Prize in literature.

The English translation of the book arrives at a time when women in combat remain a fraught topic.

During the book’s journey to publication, a censor urged Alexievich to tell heroic stories.

But, growing up, she had heard enough of those. Men start wars, she holds, and glorify them. She wanted to write a book “that would make war sickening.” She succeeded. There is the radio operator who drowns her baby so its crying won’t give away partisan fighters hiding neck-deep in water. There is the medic — 16 when she joined — crawling to rescue a man whose blasted arm is hanging by a few sinews; lacking scissors, she “bit his flesh off” so he could be bandaged.

The difficulty reconciling conventional femininity with killing and fighting is at the heart of this book. One gunner confided that those she killed — “my dead” — still came to her in her sleep.

The assault on their femininity got worse; after the war, frontline girls found that their service marked them, and not in a good way. So the front-line girls were well-advised not to talk about their service.

Alexievich did an enormous service, recovering these stories.

The outsize Soviet role in defeating the Nazi army and liberating Europe is often neglected. If men who fought on the eastern front have gotten short shrift, how much truer of the women.

As a female rifleman scrawled in charcoal on the Reichstag: “You were defeated by a Russian girl from Saratov.” That may be an overstatement, but it is not altogether untrue. n Mundy, a fellow at New America, wrote this for The Washington Post. She is the author of the upcoming “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Codebreakers of World War II.”

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OPINIONS

Silicon Valley’s bias also spills into the tech you use SARA WACHTERBOETTCHER is a web consultant and author of the forthcoming book “Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

Last weekend was a rough one at Google.

On Aug. 4, a 10­page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” started circulating on the company’s internal networks, arguing that the disparities between men and women in tech and leadership roles were rooted in biology, not bias. By the next afternoon, the tech news site Gizmodo had obtained and published the entire thing. The story blew up.

The author, a male software engineer (who was fired on Monday), argued that women were more neurotic and less stress-tolerant than men; that they were less likely to pursue status than men; that they were less interested in the “systematizing” work of programming. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he concluded before offering recommendations. Those included demanding that Google “de-emphasize empathy,” that it stop training people on microaggressions and sensitivity, and that it cancel any program aimed at advancing or recruiting women or people of color.

The memo was reductive, hurtful and laced with assumption.

It was also unsurprising.

We’ve heard lots about Silicon Valley’s toxic culture this summer — its harassing venture capitalists, its man-child CEOs, its abusive nondisparagement agreements. Those stories have focused on how that culture harms those in the industry — the women and people of color who’ve been patronized, passed over, pushed out and, in this latest case, told they’re biologically less capable of doing the work in the first place. But what happens in Silicon Valley doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It comes into our homes and onto our screens, affecting all of us who use technology, not just those who make it.

Take Apple Health, which promised to monitor “your whole health picture” when it launched in 2014. The app could track your exercise habits, your blood alcohol content and even your chromium intake. But for a full year after launch, it couldn’t track one of the most common human health concerns: menstruation.

Then there’s Snapchat. Last year, on April 20 (otherwise known as “4/20,” a holiday of sorts for marijuana fans), the app launched a new photo filter: “Bob Marley,” which applied dreadlocks and darkened skin tones to users’ selfies. The filter was roundly criticized as “digital blackface,” but Snapchat refused to apologize. In fact, just a few months later, it launched another racially offensive filter — this one morphing people’s faces into Asian caricatures replete with buckteeth, squinty eyes and red cheeks.

It’s bad enough for apps to showcase sexist or racially tonedeaf jokes or biases. But in many cases, those same biases are also embedded somewhere much more sinister — in the powerful (yet invisible) algorithms behind much of today’s software.

For a simple example, look at FaceApp, which came under fire this spring for its “hotness” photo filter. The filter smoothed wrinkles, slimmed cheeks — and dramatically whitened skin. The company behind the app acknowledged that the filter’s algorithm had been trained using

ISTOCK

a biased data set — meaning the algorithm had learned what beauty was from faces that were predominantly white.

Likewise, in 2015, Google launched a new imagerecognition feature for its Photos app. The feature would trawl through users’ photos, identify their contents, and automatically add labels to them — such as “dog,” “graduation” or “bicycle.”

But Brooklyn resident Jacky Alciné noticed a more upsetting tag: A whole series of photos of him and a friend, both black, was labeled with the word “Gorillas.”

The racial slur wasn’t intentional, of course. It was simply that the system wasn’t as good at identifying black people as it was white people. After the incident, Google engineers acknowledged this, calling for product improvements focused on “better recognition of dark-skinned faces.”

Then there’s Word2vec, a neural network Google researchers created in 2013 to assist with natural language processing — that is, computers’ ability to understand human speech. The researchers built Word2vec by training a program to comb through Google News articles and learn about the relationships between words.

Millions of words later, the program can complete analogies such as “Paris is to France as Tokyo is to _____.” But Word2vec also returns other kinds of

relationships, such as “Man is to woman as computer programmer is to homemaker,” or “Man is to architect as woman is to interior designer.”

These pairings aren’t surprising — they simply reflect the Google News data set the network was built on. But in an industry where white men are the norm and “disruption” trumps all else, technology such as Word2vec is often assumed to be objective and then embedded into all sorts of other software, whether it’s recommendation engines or job-search systems.

The effects are far-reaching.

Study after study has shown that biased machine-learning systems result in everything from jobsearch ads that show women lower-paying positions than men to predictive-policing software that perpetuates disparities in communities of color.

Some of these flaws might seem small. But together, they paint a picture of an industry that’s out of touch with the people who actually use its products.

And without a fundamental overhaul to the way Silicon Valley works — to who gets funded, who gets hired, who gets promoted and who is believed when abuses happen — it’s going to stay that way. The sooner we stop letting tech get away with being insular, inequitable and hostile to diversity, the sooner we’ll start building technology that works for all of us. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 2017

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Why Clinton is still Trump’s foil DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post columnist.

Winners, when they reach the end zone, are supposed to act like they’ve been there before. So why is President Trump still waging war on Hillary Clinton? Why tweet about missing emails and ties to Ukraine when he’s the one inside the White House? Why send press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders before the cameras — nearly nine months after the election — to read what amounted to a multi-count indictment of Trump’s defeated foe?

In this, as he does so often, Trump serves as a magic decoder ring for our seemingly incomprehensible 21st-century politics. With reptilian clarity — hopeless on strategy, but instinctively keen — he seizes on the binary basics of our endless combat: To survive, one must have a foe.

Down deep, Trump surely knows he owes his presidency to Clinton. His vulnerabilities as a candidate were precisely the spots where Clinton was too weak to land a blow. The murkiness of his finances was offset by the shadiness of the Clinton Foundation. Her outrage at Trump’s boorish behavior rang false given her infinite tolerance for her husband’s. If Trump’s first impulse was always to dodge the truth, well, where had we seen that before? Clinton’s story about her emails had more holes than

Trump National Golf Club. As for the empty slogans of his campaign (“Build that wall”), they were hardly less substantial than hers (“Stronger together”).

His ignorance of policy and history demanded a campaign about nothing. She gave it to him.

So it happened that one of the most unpopular candidates in our history won his narrow victory. Voters in the key states of the electoral college disliked his opponent a little bit more.

Democrats looking ahead to 2018 might want to keep this history in mind. Approval ratings are a mirage. They ask the public to compare the president to some theoretical standard or ideal. Do you approve or disapprove of the way the president is doing his job?

Compared to what? Lost in a desert of ballot-box ineptitude, the Democrats are crawling toward the false oasis of Trump’s low

ratings — as though blind to the fact that Trump was never popular to begin with, and still he won.

Or rather, he survived the election, a feat managed by making it a series of head-to-head combats, against Low-Energy Jeb, then L’il Marco, then Lyin’ Ted and finally Crooked Hillary.

Trump’s continuing focus on Clinton serves to remind all the people who held their noses while voting for him that elections aren’t about theoretical standards or ideals. They are about this one or that one. Too often, American voters feel like they’re dining at Hell’s Cafe, where the menu offers two dishes only: boiled work boots or roadkill tartare.

To win next year, Democrats will need to offer something more appetizing than the plate they served up in 2016. But their recently unveiled effort, called “A Better Deal,” ain’t it. While the nation is hurtling into the future, they’ve rolled out a recipe from the past, yet another “deal” to go with the Fair, New and Square deals of yesteryear. As for the vapid corporation-bashing at the core of the document, it feels like a ride in the DeLorean with Marty McFly, the timer on the Flux Capacitor set for 1901. What failed for William Jennings Bryan is unlikely to succeed today.

Behind the antique facade lay the same old policies. The $15-anhour minimum wage, which may already be killing jobs where progressives have started adopting it. The $1 trillion infrastructure pledge that merely echoes Trump’s own pie-in-thesky promise. The vague gesture of concern about rebuilding “rural America” — which Charles E. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi keep tabs on by jetting over it at 38,000 feet. And so on.

If America wanted this agenda, the Democrats would not be out of power from statehouse to White House. You can’t beat Trump by coining more vacuous slogans than his, or launching flimsier policy balloons. You can’t conquer his straw men with an army of your own. Trump’s opponents will only beat him with something new and better than the candidates, tactics and policies of the past.

These won’t be found in minority caucus rooms or the studios of MSNBC. To win a headto-head against Trump, a party of tomorrow must turn its focus from Washington to the country — where it is going and how best to get there. Forget about Republicans. Forget, even, about Trump. Have an honest, hopeful conversation with America.

He’ll never see it coming. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

The lonely segregation of America E.J. DIONNE JR. is a Washington Post columnist.

There are happier stories about those who travel the nation trying to find buyers for their wares than Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

Just ask Marc J. Dunkelman.

In an essay in the summer issue of the Hedgehog Review, Dunkelman recalls a conversation two decades ago with his grandfather, a retired salesman, about how people discover good restaurants. Dunkelman was enthusing about then-developing technologies that would widely share information on great eateries and even tell people about how to get to the ones located nearby.

His grandfather wasn’t impressed. On his sales trips, he said, he regularly sought out “a friendly looking stranger” to learn where he might find a decent bite to eat. In the process, he would often make a new friend and see him again on a return visit.

“That’s how I got to understand the world — by talking to strangers,” the older man said.

“With all these fancy technologies you’re telling me about, how are people going to get to know one another? You ask me, I think it’s going to make everyone lonely.”

Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, is no Luddite when it comes to technology. But the author of the 2014 book “The Vanishing Neighbor” has a healthy obsession with how people connect with each other (or fail

to), and his essay asks an important question: In the great revival of cities we are seeing all over our country, are we creating places “where neighbors remain strangers”? Are we thus robbing ourselves of “the crucial ingredient of a thriving American community”? Are we building great places to live (at least for those who can afford them) that are not actually neighborhoods?

He cites findings from the General Social Survey that “the percentage of Americans reporting a social evening with a neighbor has plummeted” and suggests that “cities may be coming back to life — but they’re being rebuilt with a very different social architecture.”

And our social architecture is playing a powerful role in deepening the political

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

polarization we regularly complain about. We know the basic facts about 2016. Thriving metropolitan areas leaned toward Hillary Clinton while less affluent and less diverse places in the interior of the country voted for Donald Trump. As my Brookings Institution colleagues Mark Muro and Sifan Liu pointed out after the election, the 472 counties Clinton carried represented 64 percent of our gross domestic product. Trump’s 2,584 counties accounted for only 36 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

These facts are important, but so are the more subtle issues Dunkelman underscores. The ways in which we arrange ourselves, even within the big metro areas, reduce the likelihood that we will encounter, as a matter of course, people we disagree with but nonetheless like or, at the least, have reason to work with on common problems.

I will confess to a certain romanticism about the kinds of interactions promoted by smaller cities because I grew up in one.

We shouldn’t be blind either to the benefits of the openness that today’s urban patterns encourage or to the sometimes vicious forms of exclusion, particularly along racial and ethnic lines, that could characterize relationships in older, tightly knit localities. We

shouldn’t pretend that the past was a time of perfect comity.

Nonetheless, Dunkelman is right to worry that we may be weakening the connections that strong neighborhoods can nurture among those of different views. These links can take the edge off political divisions.

“You might not like or agree with your neighbor, but you could understand why someone might hold an opposing viewpoint,” he writes. “. . . Often, such familiarity leads to compromise.”

No doubt the kinds of conversations Dunkelman describes still take place around the country, but we are, more than ever, segregating ourselves along the overlapping lines of class, values and ideology. Our technological interactions, about which Dunkelman’s granddad was so skeptical, create a connectedness among like minds that is also leading to even sharper forms of separation from those who think differently.

No federal program can solve this problem, and no app can force us to have dinner with people whose views we don’t share. But we would do well to ponder whether our social geography is aggravating our already pronounced tendency to treat so many of our fellow citizens as strangers. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Infrastructure BY

J OEL H . M OSER

President Trump’s “Infrastructure Week” in June came and went without a plan or any tangible changes. Meanwhile, congressional work on Trump’s proposed $1 trillion infrastructure package may have to wait until next year. But before the nation undertakes any big moves, here are five common misconceptions we should demolish.

MYTH NO. 1 New infrastructure projects would reduce unemployment.

While it is certainly true that more projects would mean more demand for hours of work, Americans are mostly already working, with the unemployment rate of roughly 4 percent at its lowest point in years. And while there is regional variation, the building trades are getting lots of work overall. It isn’t clear that there would even be enough skilled American labor to undertake any massive infrastructure program without cannibalizing existing projects and driving up the price of construction by private enterprise, thus reducing incentives to create new jobs.

MYTH NO. 2 Regulations kill infrastructure projects.

If job data is any indication, regulations do not result in an overall reduction of activity in the infrastructure sector, though they may change what kinds of projects are undertaken.

Since the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic book on environmentalism, “Silent Spring,” 55 years ago, the implementation of regulations — specifically environmental rules — has spurred infrastructure projects all over the country, from air pollution control to solarpower installations and more. In 2012, for example, a Marylandbased environmental group announced that cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay by upgrading sewage systems would create 240,000 jobs. And more regulations requiring, for

example, smart grids to distribute renewable power would result in extensive project starts.

MYTH NO. 3 Private investment leads to infrastructure projects.

What Trump — and before him, President Barack Obama — hopes is that investment in infrastructure equity by the private sector would fuel a building boom. What they have overlooked is that the private sector has always funded civil infrastructure by underwriting and buying municipal bonds, which allow local governments to borrow money from private investors in exchange for interest and tax benefits. What is now proposed is merely a different financing structure: private investment in equity — in other words, an ownership stake — in these public facilities, which supposedly will mean more new projects.

But this is a mistake. The mode of raising capital does not cause development. Projects happen either when there is an investable private opportunity or when the government levies a tax or authorizes a user charge, such as a toll, to fund the repayment of a capital investment. Private investment is a way to raise capital, but no evidence suggests that private investment itself causes projects to happen.

better option than “throwing money out of helicopters” — metaphorically speaking — to goose the economy. They may have had a point at the time, but these days, U.S. economic growth is not particularly slow, so speeding it up would probably take more than spending on infrastructure. And though the condition of our existing infrastructure is generally appalling, that’s a repair and maintenance issue, not a result of too little investment to begin with.

Finally, it’s not clear that an infrastructure boom would necessarily result in economic growth, especially not in the short term, when big projects can slow things down. And since congestion can slow economic growth, big projects shouldn’t be deployed with short-term growth gains in mind.

MYTH NO. 4 Infrastructure spending will spur growth.

During the global financial crisis, economists saw infrastructure spending as a

MYTH NO. 5 We know what infrastructure we need.

Infrastructure spending is, more than anything, a public policy tool, a way to encourage or

BRIAN GROGAN/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

Politicians like to talk about infrastructure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know what infrastructure the country needs.

enable certain ways of life and modes of commerce. How and where will we live in the future?

What kind of energy should we plan to consume? Do we accept a human role in climate change, and will we encourage patterns of commerce and life that reduce that? Should the global trend of urbanization be encouraged by investing in cities or discouraged by facilitating extreme commutes and rural lifestyles? Is potable public water a civil right or a costly service? What kind of jobs do we want for future generations of Americans?

These questions aren’t simple.

They require us to bring our judgment and values to bear, and until they’re answered, it’s not clear what infrastructure we need. n Moser is the founder and chief executive of Aquamarine Investment Partners, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 2017

24

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