The Washington Post National Weekly - August 14, 2016

Politics A Clinton jobs plan faltered 4

Nation ‘Granny flats’ face legal test 8

Workplace Where jobs are loved — or hated 17

5 Myths Gymnastics 23

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THE SWITCH

SCREEN GRAB BY ANDREA PETERSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Obama’s not-so-fast friends BY

A NDREA P ETERSON

H

ave you ever wished getting in touch with the president was as easy as IMing your friends?

Well, you can now send President Obama private messages through the White House’s Facebook page. The Facebook messages will be among those considered for the 10 personal letters the president reads each day.

(Although, disappointingly, because the White House is on Facebook as a page, not a person you can friend, there doesn’t seem to be a way to “poke” POTUS to get his attention.)

White House chief digital officer Jason Goldman pitched the Facebook messaging feature last week as a way for the administration to “meet people where they are” online.

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The feature relies on a chatbot that simulates a conversation but doesn’t directly respond to questions. Instead, it guides users through sending feedback to the administration.

But the actual process of using the White House chatbot feels more labor intensive than another digital messaging option available to citizens since 1994: Email.

Sending an email to the White House is pretty straightforward: There is a basic contact form you fill out and then submit.

The chatbot is more complicated: To ask a simple question — “Are there any plans to allow people to ‘poke’ the White House on Facebook?” — you must open the messenger window, wait for the chatbot to say hello, then click the “Let’s Go!” button.

After a few minutes, the bot repeats the

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 44

question to confirm the contents. Then it requests contact information over the course of five questions — with lag time between each.

Finally, it requests one more confirmation.

The runaround took this reporter about 10 minutes — significantly longer than submitting the same question through the White House’s email form. But at least the White House Facebook bot did end the exchange with a smiley face emoji.

The chatbot fits into a larger digital legacy that Obama will be leaving behind when he departs the Oval Office in January. In 2008, his presidential campaign leveraged social media for organizing and fundraising. And the administration has made a clear effort to stay engaged with the public through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Medium and even Snapchat. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Baby boomers, many of whom need to hold on to jobs longer to replenish retirement savings lost in the Great Recession, are hitting a wall at work: Bosses want youthful “energy” and “innovation.” Illustrations by Paul Blow for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Clinton’s Upstate N.Y. job push fell flat BY

J ERRY M ARKON

I

n her presidential bid, Hillary Clinton has made job creation a centerpiece of her platform, casting herself as a pragmatist who would inspire “the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II.’’ Her argument that she would put more Americans to work has focused on her time in the Senate, when she took on the mission of creating jobs in chronically depressed Upstate New York. As her husband, former president Bill Clinton, put it recently, she became the region’s “de facto economic development officer.”

But nearly eight years after Clinton’s Senate exit, there is little evidence that her economic development programs had a substantial impact on employment upstate. Despite Clinton’s efforts, upstate job growth stagnated overall during her tenure, with manufacturing jobs plunging nearly 25 percent, according to jobs data.

The former first lady was unable to pass the big-ticket legislation she introduced to benefit the region’s economy. She turned to smaller-scale projects, but some of those fell flat after initial glowing headlines, a Washington Post review shows. Many promised jobs never materialized, and others migrated to other states as she turned to her first presidential run, said former officials who worked with her in New York.

Clinton’s self-styled role as economic promoter also showcases an operating style that has come to define the political and moneymaking machine known to some critics of the former first couple as Clinton Inc. Some of her pet economic projects involved loyal campaign contributors, who also supported the Clinton Foundation, The Post review shows.

Clinton’s Senate record — rarely examined in detail this campaign cycle — offers a template for her approach to jobs creation.

Her campaign has crafted a detailed jobs plan and cited her Upstate New York work as a blueprint for a Clinton presidency.

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

As senator, she had a plan to revitalize the region. It never happened.

Republican opponent Donald Trump claims he has created “thousands and thousands of jobs’’ as an international developer and knows better how to stimulate the economy. Most of the jobs Trump created were construction and management jobs for projects early in his career, when he was building heavily in New York City and other locations.

Clinton’s pledge to help Upstate New York amid an early 2000s recession was risky, experts say. “To her credit, she really did focus on economic development upstate as a focus and as a purpose,’’ said David Shaffer, former president of the Albany-based

Public Policy Institute, which compiles New York jobs data.

But Shaffer and other experts faulted Clinton for setting an unrealistic goal by promising to create 200,000 new jobs in a region struggling to retain existing positions. “As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘Okay, some D.C. consultant sat around with focus groups to figure out what would sound good. You wouldn’t make a promise like that if you had seriously looked into it,’’ Shaffer said.

Clinton also has touted success with cosmetic projects that created few jobs, The Post found. Nicholas A. Langworthy, the Republican Party chairman in Erie Coun-

Hillary Clinton’s campaign cites the work she did in Upstate New York while she was a U.S. senator as a blueprint for creating jobs during her presidency.

ty, N.Y., said he’s taken aback by Clinton’s repeated references to what he described as “small bore” efforts, such as securing federal money for a Buffalo project called Artspace that created residential living space for artists. Clinton cites Artspace in her list of Senate accomplishments.

“To have someone running for president of the United States bragging about an Artspace apartment building in Buffalo is laughable,’’ Langworthy said. “That’s a project a city council member or a small-city mayor would champion, not a U.S. senator.’’

Kris Balderston, a longtime senior Clinton aide now at Fleish-

SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 2016

5

POLITICS manHillard, a Washington communications firm, said the Buffalo project was a “symbol that she was going to be helping everybody no matter how big or small.”

Clinton’s backers say the unfulfilled jobs promise pales in comparison to her work on the Sept.

11, 2001, recovery and protecting New York military installations.

All told, Clinton aides have said, she helped to secure more than $1 billion in federal assistance for New York, not including $20 million in post-Sept. 11 funds.

Campaign spokesman Glen Caplin said Clinton “worked hard” to create jobs. “Facing the stiff head winds of the [George W.] Bush economy, she never gave up and never stopped fighting for New York jobs,’’ he said.

Caplin added, referring to the campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations by some of the entities Clinton worked with in Upstate New York: “Hillary Clinton worked tirelessly to help New Yorkers. It’s no surprise that people who saw that work wanted to support her election campaigns and efforts to make a difference in people’s lives around the world.”

Focus on Upstate In her first Senate campaign, Clinton zeroed in on Upstate, the region north of New York City and its suburbs.

A day after announcing her 2000 candidacy, Clinton, who was then the first lady, vowed to infuse more than a half-billion dollars into the upstate economy. A television ad ran just before the election, citing the 200,000 new-jobs goal. Clinton won by more than 12 points.

In March 2001, she introduced seven bills to stimulate the upstate economy — “part of a larger partnership to spur job creation across our country,’’ Clinton said.

None of the measures passed.

Clinton shifted to federal grants and other assistance. In her 2009 Senate farewell speech, she said she had worked “hard to help make investments in New York’s economy.’’

But counting jobs is trickier.

Clinton’s campaign said she stimulated employment by encouraging cooperative relationships and securing federal money for initiatives such as an Albany bioscience center and a Buffalo medical campus.

The campaign declined to estimate how many jobs Clinton cre-

MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS

ated. Campaign officials cited a line from a chart produced by the New York State Department of Labor, showing “upstate New York’’ gaining 117,000 jobs during Clinton’s first term.

The Post was unable to confirm that number, and the state agency does not use Upstate New York as a specific regional area to measure employment. Different agencies use different metrics to count jobs, and definitions of what constitutes Upstate vary.

The most authoritative jobs numbers are widely considered to be those from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Multiple analyses of its New York data show that Upstate actually lost jobs during Clinton’s first term. For example, the non-partisan Public Policy Institute in Albany — which uses BLS data for a monthly snapshot of Upstate New York — reported that the region lost more than 31,000 payroll jobs between October 2001 and December 2006.

Clinton was reelected in November 2006 and left the Senate to become secretary of state in January 2009.

During her Senate tenure, according to the institute, upstate jobs rose 0.2 percent, but manu-

facturing jobs fell 24.1 percent.

The quest for jobs In the Senate, Clinton cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship with Corning, an upstate manufacturer. Through legislation and federal grants, she helped steer money to Corning to support its diesel emissions reduction technology.

Corning officials said federal legislation passed in 2005 helped create about 300 upstate jobs. But that legislation was introduced by a Republican senator. Clinton was among the 21 co-sponsors.

The bill did not reverse the economic decline of Steuben County, where Corning is located. Employment there declined about 7 percent during Clinton’s Senate tenure, data show.

Corning employees have donated to Clinton’s campaigns at a massive clip, and Corning’s chief executive co-hosted a 2015 fundraiser for her. The company paid her $225,500 in 2014 to speak to Corning executives. Corning also has given more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, its records show.

Clinton also has touted her role in creating an “eBay university’’

Hillary Clinton, who at the time was first lady, holds Ray Goppert III as his father, Ray Jr., looks on, at the Griffiss Business and Technology Center in Rome, N.Y. Clinton was on a “listening tour” of Upstate New York cities and towns leading to her race in the state for a U.S. Senate seat.

KLMNO WEEKLY

that trained New York entrepreneurs to sell products on eBay.The idea was that expanding their sales would allow them to create jobs. Company executives have supported Clinton. Its then-chief executive, John Donahoe, hosted a 2015 campaign fundraiser with his wife, Eileen, who worked for Clinton at the State Department.

EBay paid Clinton $315,000 for a 20-minute speech last year, and eBay’s charitable foundation has given more than $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2003, Clinton launched an upstate jobs initiative with Clinton family ally Roger Altman, deputy treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration.

Hillary Clinton and Altman called their program New Jobs for New York, designed to match New York City financiers with upstate entrepreneurs. At the announcement, Clinton said New Jobs would “create the jobs that will make the entire state vibrant and economically sound.”

The nonprofit organization was headquartered initially at Altman’s Manhattan office. Its unpaid, voluntary board included former Bill Clinton administration appointees and a Hillary Clinton campaign donation bundler.

Overall, New Jobs board members and their spouses have contributed more than $115,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaigns since the nonprofit was formed.

The focus on job creation shifted over time. Instead, the nonprofit touted using Clinton’s “extraordinary power to convene” at business conferences. It issued a progress report in 2006 that reads like a Clinton campaign flier and features her in five photographs.

How many jobs did the program create? “From a jobs perspective, I genuinely don’t remember,’’ said one person familiar with the organization, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In the report, only one company specifically cited new jobs: Lumetrics of Rochester. Chief executive John Hart said last week that Lumetrics added 10 jobs after hooking up with investors at a New Jobs conference, then also securing help from New York state and other investors.

In eight years, New Jobs privately raised just more than $1 million from undisclosed continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

sources and spent the bulk of it on staff members’ salaries and conferences. Clinton appeared at networking events in 2005 and 2006 as she geared up for reelection.

New Jobs did virtually no work after 2007, according to documents and interviews. It liquidated in 2011.

Clinton personally went to bat to create jobs at Lockheed Martin.

Judy Marks, a Lockheed executive, was vice chair of New Jobs.

Lockheed and a British partner were competing in 2005 to build Marine One helicopters for the Navy, a contract that promised to generate 750 new jobs upstate.

Clinton called British Prime Minister Tony Blair to ask him to work the Bush White House, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who recounted it on the condition of anonymity.

Lockheed won the contract, but the Pentagon canceled it in 2009 because of cost overruns.

The jobs disappeared.

As Clinton cranked up New Jobs, she also helped recruit Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services to open a software development center in Buffalo.

Clinton, who co-chaired the Senate India Caucus, also persuaded Tata to partner on several projects with a local university.

Tata officials predicted up to 200 new Buffalo jobs. But Clinton came under fire for aligning with a global leader in outsourcing that relied heavily on foreign workers who were in the United States on temporary visas. Clinton defended outsourcing, telling CNN in 2004, “You know, outsourcing does work both ways.’’

Ron Hira, an outsourcing critic who at the time lived in New York, branded the Tata deal an obvious Clinton outreach to “the Indian American donor class.”

“From an economic development perspective, bringing in Tata was just a terrible idea,” said Hira. After opening in Buffalo, Tata announced it would also locate a new training center in the city. At one point, Tata employed about 45 people in Buffalo. As the U.S. economy tanked, however, Tata’s Buffalo business faded.

Anxious Tata employees said they turned to Clinton’s Senate office, which was unresponsive.

“We were calling to try to get a scope on what was happening, what we were going to do as the

economy continued to go south,’’ one former employee said. “The phone would go unanswered.”

Tata closed its Buffalo office in 2009 and laid off the eight to 10 employees still there, according to former employees.

Tata spokesman Ben Trounson said the office closed because “local market conditions did not perform as well as we hoped.’’

Although foreign nationals cannot contribute to U.S. campaigns, Clinton has won campaign support from the Indian American community, records show. And Tata has remained friendly to the Clintons. Tata Consultancy Services contributed between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and Ratan Tata, then chairman of the Tata Group, spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in 2010.

Clinton holds out the success of a Rochester project called Greenprint, a 2006 alternative energy conference and follow-up report that recommended ways for the city to create economic growth by harnessing green energy.

Clinton said the effort “holds tremendous economic potential,’’ although there has been no estimate of jobs created.

Clinton’s office worked with the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability, named for New York businessman Thomas Golisano, a billionaire philanthropist.

Golisano, a Bill Clinton friend, was an underwriter of the Clinton Foundation, to which he has donated between $10 million and $25 million, records show.

Back in Buffalo, the Artspace project illustrated Clinton’s theory that improved quality of life may draw prospective employers.

She secured a federal grant for Artspace, which also won backing from then-Gov. George Pataki.

In her 2009 Senate departure speech, Clinton said Artspace had created a “model” for not only urban revitalization but also “economic development centered on cultural projects.’’

Did the project create jobs?

“It’s a really creative use of space,’’ said former mayor Tony Masiello. He said it helped transform the neighborhood.

The remodeled building was the setting for a May 2015 Clinton fundraiser, billed as the premier western New York “Democrats for Hillary’’ event. n

THE FIX

GOP standing with Trump — for now BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

U Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is said to have told Donald Trump that, according to the party’s internal polling, the GOP presidential nominee is on track to lose, Time magazine reported.

ntil recently, it has mostly been a theoretical assumption among some disgruntled Republicans in Congress that the GOP would, at some point, simply cut its losses with Donald Trump and devote its cash and infrastructure to saving their congressional majorities.

On Thursday, Time magazine reported that for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, the idea is rapidly becoming less theoretical: The chairman had a frank message for the nominee, said two Republican officials briefed on the call. Priebus told Trump that internal GOP polling suggested he was on track to lose the election. And if Trump didn’t turn around his campaign over the coming weeks, the RNC would consider redirecting party resources and machinery to House and Senate races.

Trump denies the exchange ever took place. But whatever was said, there is no doubt the possibility now haunts Trump’s campaign.

Money plus votes equals winning. And Trump does not have enough of either without big help from GOP resources.

There are at least three reasons Priebus could follow through on his threat and drop Trump to save his party: money, polls and history.

1. The GOP has only so many resources to go around.

After Trump raised $80 million in July, Priebus declared in a statement: “We are off to a strong start for generating the support we need to reclaim the White House and preserve our majorities in the House and Senate.”

Indeed, the Republican National Committee has $21 million in the bank. The Democratic National Committee has $9 million. And the numbers Trump posted were on pace with the $90 million that Clinton and Democrats raised.

But Trump needs more to just keep pace. He’s way behind.

And he’s relying on the party for far more. Where Clinton has built

an army of staffers in swing states, Trump needs his party to do that heavy lifting for him.

Another factor is in the mix: Trump’s financial struggles don’t affect just his own campaign. Parties usually rely on their nominees to raise money for everyone else.

Trump will probably need much of the cash he raises just to bolster his bank account. That leaves less for other Republicans.

2. Senate Republicans do not seem positioned to outrun a Clinton tsunami.

Depending on the poll, Senate Republicans are either hanging on despite Trump or getting dragged down with him. Only candidates in Iowa and Ohio, 2 of the 10 or so seats the party is fighting to defend, appear to have enough of a head start to win if Trump were to lose their state by a significant margin.

It’s not inconceivable that if Trump’s poll numbers keep going down and Clinton’s keep going up, some Republican Senate candidates could run a perfect race and still lose their seats.

It’s not difficult to see a world in which Republican officials look at their flatlining balance sheet, look at Trump’s controversial statements and decide that their best investment is in . . . themselves.

Already, the Koch brothers, GOP mega-donors, and the grassroots Club for Growth have made that calculation. Neither of the powerhouses will be spending in the presidential campaign.

3. It has happened before.

“If we fail to protect our majority in Congress, we could be handing President Hillary Clinton a blank check.”

When Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) sent a fundraising email with that line last week, the political world freaked out over two words: “blank check.”

That’s the exact language used in 1996 when the party decided to cut loose from sinking nominee Bob Dole late in the election.

Then, as now, the GOP stood squarely behind its nominee. Until it didn’t. n

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POLITICS

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In polling, the tiny schools score big N ICK A NDERSON Hamden, Conn.

BY

A

mericans addicted to polls can get their fix from a growing number of colleges and universities that measure the ups and downs of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a tumultuous election year.

But the leaders in this expansion of academic polling are hardly household names: Marist College in New York, Monmouth University in New Jersey, Suffolk University in Massachusetts and Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

For these schools, polling in a polarized America yields a marketing bonanza akin to what others might reap through football bowl games or the NCAA basketball tournament. They are building brands through their work.

Monmouth, a private university with 6,400 students on the Jersey Shore, was little known beyond its state until recently. In 2007-2008, it conducted just eight election polls, all in New Jersey. During this cycle, it has conducted more than 60, moving into states as far away as Colorado and Nevada.

Quinnipiac has leveraged polling as aggressively as any school to raise its profile. It has morphed from a sleepy private college, with fewer than 3,000 students in the mid-1980s, to a university with medical, law and engineering schools that expects to enroll nearly 10,000 students this fall.

Quinnipiac has drawn attention for its hockey team. The Bobcats reached the NCAA championship game twice in recent years.

But it is polling that has turbocharged school marketing.

Quinnipiac released surveys in July showing tight Clinton-Trump matchups in of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That generated priceless and immediate publicity.

“You do a statewide poll in Florida, it’s in 200 newspapers,” said Quinnipiac President John L. Lahey. “It’s on every local station all over Florida.”

On a recent evening, the Quinnipiac call center crackled with voices reading the latest scripted

STAN GODLEWSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Taking political surveys in a divided nation is the answer for small colleges hoping to build a brand questions aimed at taking the temperature of the riled-up American electorate. There are 153 stations inside the center, and the university plans to add another 47 for the fall campaign. Callers are paid a starting rate of $10.50 an hour.

Politics polling, which emerged in the 20th century through the influence of such pioneers as Elmo Roper, Louis Harris and George Gallup, has proliferated in recent years as parties, consultants, candidates and the public have demanded ever more data, in real time, about voters.

Colleges have joined a vast field of specialists and media outlets that research public opinion. At the same time, debate has risen about the accuracy of polls in an era of rapid changes in demographics and communications.

Often, college polls are led by a professor with expertise in their state and public policy. Christopher Borick, who teaches political science at Muhlenberg, has been polling since 2001 for the private

college in Allentown, Pa., which has 2,400 students. His surveys often study energy and the environment. But he also knows how to call a political horse race.

“When I put out a poll, I do a lot of the contextual analysis,” Borick said. “I know Pennsylvania politics. Part of what a college can do is to add, with us academics, the analysis, the background, the context, the history.”

Many schools keep their polling budgets under wraps. One pollster said his school spends about $130,000 a year for a modest number of home-state polls. Other annual budgets are believed to range from several hundred thousand dollars to well over $1 million.

Quinnipiac won’t say what it spends on its operation. But for perspective, it spends $125 million a year on academic instruction.

Marist works with McClatchy News Service on national surveys as well as with NBC News and the Wall Street Journal on select battleground state polls. These part-

The call center at the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, Conn., has helped make the university into a leader among schools conducting political polls, a growing trend nationwide.

Quinnipiac’s polling operation began informally in 1988.

nerships deliver a bonus for the 6,400-student school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said Marist pollster Lee Miringoff: prominent, repeated coverage from the television network, the news service and the national newspaper.

But with publicity comes risk.

“You’re only as good as your last poll,” Miringoff said. “I worry about it for a lot of reasons: the reputation of the poll, the name of the college, our media partners. . . . We don’t want to be part of the ‘polls are wrong’ story.”

FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of 146 Marist polls found that 88 percent called races correctly. Of 169 Quinnipiac polls, the analysis found, 87 percent were correct.

Quinnipiac pollster Doug Schwartz still winces at his first big miss — in 1994, when surveys were still done with paper and pencil over a phone. His final poll in the New York gubernatorial race that fall showed Democrat Mario Cuomo cruising toward reelection 10 days before the vote.

But Republican George Pataki surged to a solid victory.

But in 1998, he was on the money when Democrat Charles Schumer beat Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) by a comfortable margin.

“Nailing an election exactly dead on is luck,” Schwartz said.

“But we should get as close as we possibly can to the margin.”

For Quinnipiac, the growth of polling since 1988 has coincided with the growth of the school as a whole. The college is now a university, added two campuses, built a sports arena, opened a host of online programs, and grew its endowment to $368 million.It draws 23,000 applicants a year and admits about 65 percent — a measure of demand and selectivity unknown a few decades ago.

“It’s crazy how it has grown even in the past five years,” said Jenna Mojkowski, 22, who earned a bachelor’s degree here in 2014 and is working toward a doctorate in physical therapy. She said she is struck by how often the university is mentioned on cable television because of its polling. “You see it on the news. People now know what Quinnipiac is.” n

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NATION

They have homes, but no legal shelter E MILY B ADGER Los Angeles BY

I

n the new home Julia Coffee designed for herself, handpicking the tiles and the flooring and the red front door, the microwave doesn’t work. Neither does the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, the washing machine, nor — including on 100-degree days — the central air.

Everything else runs on braided extension cords that snake into the bedrooms, through the living room, across the kitchen floor, out the window, through the yard and into her daughter’s house.

Charles, Coffee’s 82-year-old husband who relies on a walker, tends to accidentally unplug things.

“We have a nice little place here,” said Julia Coffee, 74. “But we really would like to get our power turned on.”

The Coffees built their two-bedroom home, the smallest they’ve lived in since they were married 44 years ago, in their daughter’s back yard. They were just finishing the place when a lawsuit earlier this year against the city of Los Angeles brought permits for homes like theirs — second units on single-family lots — to a halt. As a result, city officials who gave them permission to build now haven’t given them a certificate of occupancy, and the utility won’t connect them to the power grid.

Second homes, often called “granny flats,” have become a new front in the conflict that pits the need for more housing in the country’s most expensive cities against the wishes of neighbors who want to preserve their communities. The same battles flare over large developments that might loom over single-family neighborhoods. But even this modest idea for new housing — let homeowners build it in their own back yards — has run into not-inmy-back-yard resistance.

And the difficulty of implementing even such a small-scale solution shows why it will be hard to make room in crowded cities for the middle- and working-class households who increasingly struggle to afford to live there.

STUART PALLEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Even as cities and states pass laws for ‘granny flats,’ neighbors are suing to keep them out Homes like the Coffees’, proponents argue, could help ease housing shortages that have made $2,000-a-month one-bedrooms look like a bargain in cities such as Los Angeles. They could yield new affordable housing at no cost to the public. They could add rentals and economic diversity to more neighborhoods. And they could expand housing options for a population in which baby boomers are aging and millennials are stuck at home.

Many neighbors, though, protest that a glut of backyard building would spoil the character of neighborhoods designed around the American ideal of one family on one lot surrounded by verdant lawn. They fear that more residents will mean less parking. And they question whether small homes, particularly in wealthier neighborhoods with the most room to build them, would really constitute affordable housing.

And so across the country, homes like the Coffees’ remain extremely difficult — if not outright illegal — to build.

“We are determined to add need-

ed units to communities without changing the look and feel of our neighborhoods,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wants to remove more barriers to second units. He adds that such housing would make the city more affordable not just for renters but also for homeowners. “The extra rental income could make the difference for a potential homeowner between affording a mortgage or not,” he said.

Garcetti wants to add 100,000 new housing units by 2021, with 15,000 of them affordable. In a city with 600,000 single-family homes, even a small fraction of homeowners building second units would help achieve that second goal. Other places offer similar opportunity. In Seattle, more than half the city’s buildable land is reserved for single-family housing. It’s estimated that the East Bay around Oakland could get as much as half of its new infill housing from back yards.

The Coffee’s one-story home is hard to see from the street. It is 1,200 square feet, the largest al-

Len Judaken’s unfinished and legally disputed home is in his son’s back yard in Los Angeles. Second homes, often called “granny flats,”pit the need for more housing in expensive U.S. cities against the wishes of neighbors who want to preserve their communities.

lowed by California law for secondary units.

But now they are effectively squatting in their own home, in a residence they spent about $350,000 to build.

Now the couple are waiting for Los Angeles to resolve the legal fight over what kind of second housing the city can allow. They have already hung the new address intended for their home from the driveway gate. But even the postal service doesn’t recognize it.

A California law meant to encourage second units in the face of a housing crisis has run up against local ordinances that make them all but impossible to build. Pasadena requires 15,000-square-foot lots to build them. Other cities require additional covered parking spots for each unit and utility fees that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

California state Sen. Bob Wieckowski sponsored one of two bills in the this year to overrule some of those restrictions. The California Teachers Association, desperate for affordable housing, is among the powerful groups backing it. Of the state’s previous law, Wieckowski said, “it’s been a complete failure.”

Travel through parts of Los Angeles and it’s clear there are unpermitted second units everywhere.

They’re apparent from curtained windows in what otherwise would be garages, and from glimpses of front doors down driveways.

The city is hoping, first, to resolve the lawsuit — and the confusion for homeowners like the Coffees — by repealing the existing local ordinance. Afterward, Los Angeles would begin considering a new ordinance that could make building second units less onerous. Homeowners’ associations are already lobbying against weaker standards.

Other cities facing housing crises are weighing changes, too, including San Jose, Palo Alto and Seattle.

Still others — including Portland, Oakland, San Francisco and Austin — have already taken action. But for the most part, it’s been incremental. San Francisco approved second units in 2014 in some neighborhoods, a change that’s created barely more than 100 new units of housing. n

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A farmer’s enemy could be a lifeline D ARRYL F EARS Wright County, Iowa

Smith’s farm is much lower than the water in the creek, Schulte Moore said.

Such findings have not swayed some reluctant farmers. Nearly 200 miles south of Smith’s farm, Steve Berger is hesitant about prairie strips. “It’s not easy to do this, and if you set a farmer up for failure, they won’t come back.”

He said he needs more time.

“My days and hours are scheduled right now, and when you talk about prairie strips, I’ve got to make time for it,” he said.

BY

T

here’s a wild presence in Tim Smith’s corn and soybean field that most farmers kill on sight.

Smith moved toward it, stopping at the edge of a Midwestern prairie, a thicket of flowers and grasses more terrifying to farmers than any horror-movie madman lurking in a barn with a chain saw.

Most growers say prairie is a nuisance that can choke crops. But not Smith. He is proud of the three acres he planted on one of the county’s most productive farms.

This affection for prairie bucks a tradition that dates to when settlers arrived in the Midwest to farm, ripping out wild grasses to tame the earth. Over time, prairie was nearly erased. Farmers are still destroying the little that is left.

It is a colossal mistake, according to recent studies by researchers at Iowa State University. Not only does prairie, with its deeprooted plants, soak up farm wastewater that pollutes rivers, it also enriches soil.

“The reason why we have the best soil, making it possible to have the world’s best food production, is prairie,” said Lisa Schulte Moore, an Iowa State professor known around the state as the prairie guru. “And we’re killing it.”

Now Schulte Moore and a team of 50 researchers are pushing for a resurrection and spreading a message: Wild prairie could help the state’s agriculture industry. It could slow soil erosion that costs farmers more than a billion dollars per year in lost yield and lower water pollution from fertilizers and chemicals — pollution that triggered a lawsuit by Des Moines against three counties upstream.

Prairie, with other conservation practices already on farms, advocates say, could reduce the massive runoff of nutrient pollution mostly from Midwestern farms that flows down the Mississippi River and forms a gigantic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico every summer, suffocating marine life.

Some agriculture officials and city leaders think lawsuits will not

ANDREW DICKINSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

For years, growers in Iowa have ripped out prairie, thinking it a nuisance, but it may save their land stop with Des Moines if gulf cities and states continue to lose fish harvests and tourist dollars to damage from the dead zone.

Iowa joined several Midwestern states in an effort to cut the region’s contribution to gulf pollution nearly in half, but participation is voluntary in Iowa, and conservation efforts are lagging.

Hesitation lingers When Smith stepped off the edge of a soybean field into his prairie strip, he literally took a walk on the wild side.

Prairie serves as habitat for hundreds of species, and providing wildlife habitat for birds and animals on the decline is one of the driving forces behind a program called STRIPS — Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips. Smith said he planted his prairie two years ago because he strongly believed in that philosophy.

He received funding from the Natural Resources Conservation

Service to help pay for the seed, which is not always easy. Smith said other farmers told him agronomists at local NRCS offices fought them on the idea.

What STRIPS proposes is so new “and so innovative,” said Schulte Moore, one of the project’s leaders, that the entire conservation service is not onboard. In Washington, officials are watching with interest. In the counties, some farm advisers are skeptical.

Schulte Moore is hopeful that this is changing, but she said she understands why many farmers are hesitant. “Two hundred years ago, farmers plowed up the prairie because they didn’t consider it valuable . . . or couldn’t eat it. Now we’re asking them to plant it.”

Smith’s prairie was laid on a slope leading to Eagle Creek, which runs 90 miles to Des Moines. When rain soaks the field, the deep-rooted prairie “slows it down,” Smith said, and allows the earth to absorb it. Tests show that the nitrate level in water from

A prairie strip filled with black-eyed Susans sits next to soybeans on Tim Smith’s farm in Iowa.

Generally, farmers kill such areas, but a recent movement is calling for growing more prairie.

Advocates say it can reduce farm runoff and soil erosion, saving farmers a billion dollars a year.

The clock is ticking The state’s soil is eroding at an alarming rate. Topsoil was an average of 14 inches deep statewide in the mid-1800s; now it’s about six, Iowa State researcher Rick Cruse estimated in studies.

“Can we keep going this way for another 150 years? I don’t think so,” Smith said.

Iowa farmers lose about $40 per acre to soil erosion in a state where more than 85 percent of the land is covered by crops.

Public opinion could turn against farmers long before the soil is gone. Angered by pollution in two rivers that supply its drinking water, Des Moines Water Works sued three county boards of supervisors for failing to regulate farm pollution that the agency pays $1 million per year to remove.

The lawsuit pits Des Moines against a state that favors farmers and agriculture. Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett spoke out against it: “When you file a lawsuit, that draws lines in the sand.

The emotions make people harder and can develop resentment.”

For Cedar Rapids, the first step was to place several acres of prairie strip amid its corn and soy farm at the local airport, a project meant to show farmers that prairie can work.

Corbett said he sympathizes with Des Moines Water Works, but the state needs to work together to solve pollution.

Bill Stowe, the water agency’s general manager, said outreach efforts failed. “We’re not looking for sympathy,” he said. “We’re looking for results.” n

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WORLD

Venezuela is in a growing death spiral BY

M ATT O ’ B RIEN

thing it has in stock are lines, to the point that the country had to limit how many people are allowed to join. But the lines are still long enough that as many as 85,000 Venezuelans poured into Colombia to go grocery shopping when the Chavista regime opened the border for 12 hours last month.

4. Nationalizations. So what do you do when businesses refuse to sell things at a loss? Easy. You blame them, and then you sell their goods yourself. That, at least, is what Venezuela’s government did when it took over toiletpaper factories in 2013 and is what it has threatened to do with the country’s top food and beerbrewing company today. But, of course, this means losing even more money that Venezuela’s government does not have — which, in turn, means it has to print even more money. And round and round it goes.

V

enezuela is stuck in a doom loop that has become a death spiral.

Its stores are empty, its people are starving, and its government is to blame. It has tried to repeal the law of supply and demand, and, in the process, eliminated any incentive for businesses to sell things. The result is that the country with the largest oil reserves in the world now has to resort to forced labor just to try to feed itself.

It gives new meaning to the revolution devouring its own.

How has it come to this? Well, Venezuela was always going to have a tough time when oil prices fell from $110 to $40, as they did in the past two years. That’s because it doesn’t have an economy so much as an oil-exporting business that subsidizes everything by making up 95 percent of the country’s total trade revenue. Even then, though, the oil crash has hurt it much more than any other petro-state. To take one example, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Russia’s economy will “only” shrink 1.8 percent this year compared with 10 percent for Venezuela. That’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill recession and a complete collapse.

And it’s entirely man-made.

The easiest way to think about this is as a four-stage cycle of doom that begins with inflation, continues to price controls and shortages, and finally nationalizations. Here’s how it works, or rather doesn’t.

1. Inflation. Even when oil prices were in the triple digits, Venezuela’s government was in the red. The problem was that its state-owned oil company stopped producing as much after former president Hugo Chávez took money that should have gone into maintaining its fields and put it into social spending instead. This was the economic equivalent of eating your seed corn when it would have grown you more than ever before. Now, at first, the regime was just spending more

FERNANDO LLANO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Because of the government’s failed economic policies, the country is resorting to forced labor than it had, but eventually, after oil’s vertiginous drop, this became more than it could borrow as well. So it did what every bankrupt government does: It printed the money it needed. That is why inflation went from 19 percent in 2012 to, the IMF estimates, 720 percent this year. It is projected to hit 2,200 percent next year.

2. Price controls. Venezuela, for is part, has resorted to a triedand-untrue strategy for dealing with all of these price increases.

That’s pretending they have not happened. The government tells businesses what they are allowed to charge, giving a select few of them money at deeply discounted rates so that they can afford to buy what they need overseas and still sell at these deeply discounted prices. In effect, the Chavista regime is trying to spend the infla-

tion away. It hasn’t worked.

3. Shortages. Something Venezuela’s government has not quite managed to figure out, though, is that trying to force companies to sell at a loss means they won’t sell anything at all. It’s better to make nothing than to lose something.

And that has even been the case when the government has tried to cover some of its costs. The problem is that it is not profitable for unsubsidized businesses to stock their shelves, and it is not profitable enough for subsidized ones to do so, either. That is because companies can sell the cheap dollars they get from the government for more than they can resell the imports they are supposed to buy with those dollars.

That’s why Venezuela has had shortages of so much, including food, beer, medical supplies and even toilet paper. About the only

A man who was waiting in line at a grocery store argues with an officer with Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Police in Caracas in June. Waiting turned into a protest as shortages cause tensions to rise.

There are two things to remember about Venezuela. The first is that if it can get worse, it will. And the second is that it can always get worse. In this case, that means that it may not be long until we look back at all of this as the good old days. How in the name of five-hour-long grocery lines is that possible? Well, Venezuela’s government may be reaching the point at which it can’t coerce people economically but only physically. After all, it barely has enough money to even be able to print money anymore.

So it can’t buy people off any longer. It has to bully them instead. The army has started forcing butchers to sell food at a 90 percent loss, and the government has said it can force anyone to take a break from their job and work for at least two months growing food instead. Amnesty International has said this is tantamount to “forced labor,” which is just a polite way of describing what’s very close to modern-day slavery.

It brings to mind the old joke: Under capitalism, man exploits man, and under Bolivarian socialism, it’s just the opposite. n

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The vanished children R UTH E GLASH Raanana, Israel BY

A

t 84 years old, Yona Yosef is full of life. Her eyes sparkle as she talks about her nine children and many grandchildren. But ask her what happened 67 years ago, when as a teenager she arrived in Israel from Yemen with her family, and her eyes fill with tears.

“The people came, they told me to take Saadia to the clinic,” said Yosef, her voice stalling as she recalled the day she took her 4year-old half-sister for a routine checkup for new arrivals. “At the clinic, they told me to go home.

They said they would bring her back. What did I know? I was only a child myself.”

Yosef never saw her sister again.

Like many immigrants at the time, Yosef and her family lived in a transit camp after they came to Israel in 1949. Her father’s second wife and two children, including Saadia, lived with them.

Over the past 70 years, Israelis have become familiar with tales of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands who say their children simply vanished, possibly kidnapped, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, soon after arriving in Israel. In some cases, the children were taken away, never to be seen again. In others, parents were told their babies had died suddenly.

Some theories say the children were given to childless couples, possibly Holocaust survivors who could not conceive. Others say they may have been sent to Jewish families in the United States.

Those who have studied the mystery point to the aggressive state-building process adopted by the ruling elite at the time — white, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe — and perhaps paternalistic notions they held about uneducated Arabic-speaking immigrants who arrived poor with multiple children. Some might have thought they were helping the families by giving their children better lives.

Many suspect that state employees — doctors, nurses, social workers and government officials — were somehow involved. But

FAMILY PHOTO

RUTH EGLASH/THE WASHINGTON POST

Decades later, the disappearance of Yemeni youths in Israel remains an ‘open wound’ whether orders to remove children came from high levels of government remains unanswered.

Three separate government committees, the last in the 1990s, investigated the affair, but all ruled that most of the children had died of illnesses, with perhaps a minority being put up for adoption. Most of the families refuse to accept that finding.

But in recent months, the story has garnered renewed attention.

In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “lifting the immunity” on the case and appointed government minister Tzachi Hanegbi to reopen the files and “discover the truth.”

“The issue of the Yemenite children is an open wound that continues to bleed in many families who do not know what happened to the babies that disappeared,” Netanyahu said.

Last month, Hanegbi told a news station that after looking at material from government inqui-

ries into the matter, he is now sure that hundreds of Yemeni children were taken from their parents, although he could not say why or where they went. Hanegbi’s declaration has given hope to many families, whose claims have been continuously dismissed.

“We believe that the state needs to give us answers,” said Avi Yosef, Yona Yosef’s son. “We know that babies disappeared. Saadia was taken from my mother’s hands.”

Avi Yosef, a lawyer, grew up hearing about Saadia and two other children — born to his aunt, his mother’s older sister — who also disappeared in the transit camp.

“It’s clear there was a horrible crime here on an unprecedented scale and the state does not want to reveal it,” said Yael Tzadok, a former journalist who got involved in the issue more than 30 years ago when she began interviewing Yemeni mothers.

“It was difficult to hear their stories. I could not sleep at night. It

LEFT: Yona Yosef as a teenager with her father after moving from Yemen to Israel, about a year before losing Saadia, Yosef’s half-sister.

She has never seen her since. RIGHT: Yosef now at 84.

was clear to me they were telling the truth,” she said. “There were many witnesses saying these children were taken.”

Tzadok now works with Achim Vekayamim (Brothers Still Exist), a nonprofit organization set up to uncover the truth and track down relatives. Today, most of the children would be in their 60s and 70s.

Zvi Amiri is one such child.

When he was in his 30s, he discovered he had been adopted and started to search for his birthparents. “I always had a feeling that something was not right,” said Amiri, now 64.

With the help of a lawyer, Amiri got his adoption file and found that he had been born to immigrants from Tunisia. He found his birth mother, but she had been committed to a psychiatric facility.

Possibly the toll of losing a baby had been too much for her, he said.

And the documents he found in his adoption file — such as a declaration by his birth mother that she was putting him up for adoption, with no signature but only a thumbprint — convinced him that there had been a coverup.

“If she did not know how to write her name, then how could she have possibly known what she was signing,” Amiri said.

Only a few dozen adopted children have managed to track down their birth families. Those who lost children are not legally allowed access to the files.

Nurit Koren, a member of the Knesset who heads the parliamentary lobby for families of stolen babies, said she has more than 1,000 case files detailing how children vanished, and information on hundreds of families that have been making such claims for decades.

Koren is working to set up a DNA database that will help children find their birthparents — but only at the children’s request.

“We don’t know what really happened, but the more information we collect, the more chance we have of finding out and finding these people,” Koren said. “What is important is that if this did happen, and we believe it did in an organized fashion, then the state should finally recognize it and take responsibility.” n

AGE Baby boomers are taking on ageism.

AGAINST And so far, they’re losing.

THE

BY LYDIA DEPILLIS

MACHINE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL BLOW FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

B

Y AND LARGE, DALE KLEBER HAD A PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD TRIP UP THE ECONOMIC LADDER. He went to law school and worked his way up to general counsel of a major food distributor in Chicago and then chief executive of a dairy trade organization. He is putting his third and fourth kids through private college.

“Our generation was pretty spoiled,” says Kleber, 60. “We had it good. The economy was in a huge growth spurt. Some dips here and there, but nothing severe.”

But a couple of years ago, Kleber hit a roadblock. He’d left the dairy group and started looking for another job; he and his wife didn’t have quite enough saved to retire comfortably. He didn’t think he’d have trouble finding work.

Scores of applications later, with few callbacks and no offers, Kleber is close to admitting defeat — and admitting that age discrimination might be one of the biggest challenges his generation has faced.

One job posting, from a medical device company called CareFusion, seemed to suggest Kleber’s lack of success wasn’t just due to a tough job market: The ad called for a maximum of seven years of legal experience. He applied anyway and, after being passed over, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging age discrimination. The case is in the discovery phase in federal court in Illinois.

“They expressed concerns with an older person being less likely to take supervision from someone that’s younger than they are,” Kleber says, paraphrasing the company’s response to his suit. “If I felt like I was going to be dissatisfied in the position, I wouldn’t be pursuing it.”

That disagreement goes to the heart of the awkwardness that baby boomers are now feeling as they enter the last years of their working lives. Often needing to stay in jobs longer than they anticipated to shore up savings depleted during the Great Recession, or simply wanting to remain active further into their lengthening life spans, they’re coming up against a strong preference in America for youthful “energy” and “innovation.”

That bias is so common we frequently don’t recognize it. Todd Nelson, a psychology professor at California State University at Stanislaus, has singled out birthday cards for portraying advancing age as something to be ashamed of, with a tone that would never be used with race or religion. (“ ‘Ha-ha-ha, too bad you’re Jewish’ . . . wouldn’t go over so well,” he noted.)

Internet memes like the “Scumbag Baby Boomer” and “Old Economy Steve,” which lambaste boomers for transgressions from failing to adopt technology to causing the wars and recessions that millennials have weathered, channel resentment against an entire category of people in ways that might not be tolerated if they were members of another protected class.

The whiteness and maleness of Silicon Valley and the tech industry have been the subject of numerous magazine cover stories, but with rare exceptions such as Dan Lyons’s hilarious memoir this year about being a 50-something at a Cambridge, Mass., startup, its youth passes without comment.

This cultural backdrop has horrifyingly real consequences for many on the wrong side of 40. Formal age discrimination cases like Kleber’s spiked during the most recent recession and have not fully subsided. Longterm unemployment, defined as being jobless for 27 weeks or longer, is markedly worse for workers older than 55 than it is for the general population.

In contrast to the respect often accorded to the generation that fought World War II, their progeny are facing relative hostility in their senescence.

At a time when conditions have vastly improved for women, gay people, disabled people and minorities in the workplace, prejudice against older workers remains among the most acceptable and pervasive “isms.” And it’s not clear that the next generations — ascendant Gen Xers and millennials — will be treated any better.

AGEISM, OF COURSE, IS AS OLD AS AGE ITSELF. Even while venerating elders for their

wisdom, cultures across the world have disparaged the weakness and unattractiveness of those past the bloom of youth. “Senectus morbidus est,” wrote Roman philosopher Seneca in the 1st century A.D.: “Old age is a disease.”

In modern times, there are more formal protections: The advent of Social Security in the 1930s ensured older people would not be

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COVER STORY

IN A 2015 SURVEY, 65 PERCENT OF BOOMERS RATED THEMSELVES AS THE “BEST PROBLEMSOLVERS.” FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT OF MILLENNIALS THOUGHT BOOMERS WERE THE “BIGGEST ROADBLOCKS.”

entirely penniless when they could no longer work. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 ended some of the most egregious forms of prejudice, such as age limits for flight attendants and mandatory retirement ages for factory and mine workers.

At the same time, structural, economic and demographic changes have created new types of ageism that are more subtle and widespread.

One change is the presence of two large, culturally distinct generations — millennials and boomers, both about 75 million strong — that have found themselves in the workforce with less and less formal authority.

Older workers have the misfortune of wanting to work longer just as a new generation is trying to get an economic foothold. In a weak economy, companies are sometimes all too happy to dump veteran employees, with their

higher health-care costs and legacy pensions, for younger ones who expect neither.

(And this is not just an American thing: Faster-aging societies with low birthrates in Asia and Europe face an even larger demographic “bulge” of older citizens who will have to be supported by fewer wage earners, feeding into an image of the elderly as a drain on society.

A 2013 meta-analysis found that East Asian countries had even more negative attitudes toward their older populations than some Western ones — grimly punctuated by climbing suicide rates in China, South Korea and Taiwan.)

All of that underpins tensions in the workplace and has spawned a cottage industry of consultants who specialize in intergenerational relations.

In a 2015 survey by the Harris Poll, for example, 65 percent of boomers rated themselves as being the “best problem-solvers/troubleshooters,” and only 5 percent of millennials agreed. Fifty-four percent of millennials thought boomers were the “biggest roadblocks.”

Sometimes these perceptions come straight from the top: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once said “young people are just smarter.”

Those attitudes apply not just to perceptions of “old” people, but also to expectations: A 2013 experiment found that young people looked more favorably upon older adults who “act their age” by listening to Frank Sinatra over the Black Eyed Peas, or by being more generous with their money. One of the researchers, Michael North, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says younger people tend to resent it when older workers don’t “get out of the way” and retire.

Yet human resource consultants and the media have often placed the onus on older workers to overcome these biases, which surface in job postings for “recent college graduates,” applicants who “enjoy the pressures of the job” and those who can “fit in with a young team.” Older-than-50 job seekers are advised to update their wardrobes and hairstyles, purge their résumés of positions held during the Reagan administration and, above all, “show enthusiasm.” Projecting “energy” is another common tip, as if lethargy kicks in only after 40.

And what of the legal protections for older workers? Federal anti-age-discrimination laws have not proved to be an effective deterrent, says University of Houston professor emeritus Andrew Achenbaum. Proving you were passed over because of your age is devilishly difficult, and the EEOC has a large backlog of complaints that it hasn’t had the resources to deal with.

“I wouldn’t mess around with [gender bias] if I were a university,” Achenbaum says. “But I’m willing to take my chances on age discrimination, because there are so many [cases] that are unsolved.”

EFFORTS TO BATTLE AGEISM HAVE CROPPED UP NOW AND THEN, BUT THEY CAN BE STYMIED

BY THE SHEER FORCE AND FLUIDITY OF CULTURE.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Margery Leveen Sher, 68, a former corporate consultant and nonprofit executive in Washington, D.C., says she internalized the unspoken code of ageism long ago and was for many years a “closeted old person.” “I thought, ‘Nobody is going to want to work with me to start up a nonprofit because they will think I will want to retire shortly,’ ” she says. She never lied about her age; she just didn’t mention it.

And “thanks to good genes, good health and a wad of money thrown regularly at my hair salon,” she could easily pass for a decade younger. Sher says only since she retired and started her own business, the Did Ya Notice?

Project, writing and speaking about the importance of mindfulness, has she felt ready to “come out.” “I am not a trailblazing anti-ageism fighter. I have been a closeted coward,” she says. “But here goes: I am 68. I am full of energy and ideas, and I ain’t done yet.”

Multiply that sentiment by 74.9 million and maybe something will finally give. Ashton Applewhite, creator of the blog Yo, Is This Ageist?, says the size of the boomer generation should be an advantage when shifting the discourse around aging.

“Silicon Valley is finally getting some attention, and you know why? Educated, skilled, non-disabled white guys faced discrimination for the first time in their lives,” Applewhite says. “Baby boomers are starting to realize that we are actually going to have to get old. So there is this sudden awareness — we have an unusual sense of demographic weight.”

Nobody knows this better than AARP, which has appropriated the language of Silicon Valley in its “Disrupt Aging” campaign. It takes aim at common stereotypes and features stories about older people living unconventional lives, like a 55-year-old YouTube entrepreneur and a 64-year-old record-breaking long-distance swimmer.

But Applewhite thinks it’s more important to examine the source of ageist attitudes.

“They come from corporate interests that want to medicalize aging so they can sell you s--- to cure it, or they want to treat it as a problem so they can sell you s--- to fix it,” she says. “Capitalism is a problem.”

Capitalism has to be part of the solution, too, says North, of the Stern School of Business. He contends successful companies will find ways to accommodate the needs of people nearing the end of their working lives, such as part-time schedules to help them transition rather than drop out. “Companies really should be taking stock of these demographic trends,” North says. “There’s tremendous value to be had there, and most companies aren’t doing that.”

For his part, Dale Kleber thinks he’s a better hire than he was 20 years ago, when he was in the middle of raising kids and climbing the corporate ladder. He’s had time to keep up on professional reading and stay in better shape.

“I think the stereotypes [about older workers] are a little misleading, because the reverse might be true,” Kleber says. “I’ve got a good 15 years in me at least.” n

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Chinese selfie start-up is looking good E MILY R AUHALA Xiamen, China BY

T

he selfie, we all know, is an art form. That cast of light.

That tilt of the chin. Not that you’re trying.

But at the southern Chinese headquarters of Meitu, the maker of some of the world’s most popular beauty apps, the selfie is also science.

Here in the company’s sparse, oh-so-start-up offices, tables of 20somethings are using facial recognition and 3-D modeling to build a suite of apps that, quite literally, transform.

Their eye-widening, skin-lightening, chin-narrowing photo apps and “beautifying” video platform are ubiquitous in China, downloaded a billion times in total, according to the company. They are known by fans as “zipai shenqi,” or “godly tools for selfies.”

The company has hundreds of millions of monthly users, a valuation in the billions of dollars, according to estimates, and plans for global expansion. If you haven’t heard of Meitu, chances are you will. If you’re reading this on your phone, watch this space.

The extraordinary popularity of Meitu says much about today’s China.

When Americans think about China’s Internet, many gravitate to one thing: censorship. True, the country’s Great Firewall keeps the Web here tightly controlled and painfully slow, but Chinese tech firms are flourishing nonetheless, building products that capitalize on the spending power of a billionplus consumers.

In 2015, four of the world’s top 10 Internet companies ranked by market capitalization were Chinese, according to the data website Statista. China is now the world leader in e-commerce, with ordinary Chinese using their phones to invest, buy groceries or pay for street food.

To compete, U.S. businesses need to understand the forces shaping China’s digital culture and commerce. Understanding Meitu helps.

The company behind some of

EMILY RAUHALA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Like many tech firms, Meitu is flourishing, despite country’s censorship the world’s biggest beauty apps started out as something much humbler.

When Cai Wensheng and Wu Xinhong founded the company in 2008, “selfie” had yet to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Meitu was a desktop photo processor inspired by Google’s Picasa.

Bei Gou, a former portrait photographer who is now Meitu’s senior vice president for product, said the goal was to bring simple photo editing to China, allowing users to, say, quickly crop a shot of Shanghai's skyline.

The team soon realized that many users seemed focused on one type of editing: fixing their

faces. Meitu adjusted accordingly, creating the one- or two-touch “beautifying” options that became their signature.

“We recognized a good concept and optimized it,” Bei said.

Their timing was excellent. In the past five years, China’s Internet population has soared. There are now almost 700 million Chinese Web users, about 20 percent of the world’s Internet users.

That growth is partly explained by the rapid rise of affordable smartphones. Many of the people coming online here are doing so on mobile. And with each new mobile customer comes the potential for taking and sharing a photo

Meitu produces several beauty apps known by their Chinese fans as “zipai shenqi,” or “godly tools for selfies.” The firm began by making a processor for photos of all kinds but soon found users focused on themselves.

or video, whether it’s a pouty selfie or a live broadcast of a tasty lunch.

The focus on beauty and self-expression resonates in particular with Chinese women, who are a rising consumer force. A 2012 Boston Consulting Group report estimated that female earnings in China will grow from $350 billion in 2000 to $4 trillion in 2020.

“Meitu sits at the intersection of two exploding forces: Chinese mobile use and rising Chinese women,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University in Beijing.

“I don’t know if they saw that coming, but they went with it.”

Meitu’s users “went with it,” too,

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WORKPLACE sharing billions of selfies on their social and online dating accounts.

The most devoted users, like Apple fanboys, form groups to share news and arrange offline meetups.

Zhu Tingting, a 24-year-old college senior from Nanjing, is among the fans who regularly attend Meitu events. She said, without irony, that Meitu changed her life. She spends about two hours a day taking selfies.

“Nowadays, when girls go out, it just means finding a place to take pictures and post them on social media,” she said.

Although you’d think that an

ZHU TINGTING

Zhu Tingting, 24, shown in a selfie, says the “beautifying” Meitu “ranks number one in my life.”

app designed to “beautify” your face might inspire feelings of inadequacy, superfans insist it gives them confidence, providing an escape from real-world pressure.

Wang Bei, a 33-year-old civil servant from Hebei province, said she appreciates the compliments she gets when she posts “beautified” selfies. “I wish I could live in the world of my Meitu phone forever.”

Among the tools the company features: MeituPic, a one-touch beauty app that put Meitu on the map; Meipai, a video platform with flattering filters; and a line of souped-up cellphones with twin 21-megapixel cameras optimized for — you guessed it — selfies.

The challenge for Meitu is how to spin the selfie craze into hard cash.

The company’s revenue comes mostly from in-app advertising and its line of premium, selfie-centric cellphones, a real but modest revenue stream.

Investors are impressed by the size and spending potential of Meitu’s young, female user base.

What the company has to do now, analysts said, is to lock in those

users by creating a sense of community and new ways for them to spend.

“I’m still looking for a strong business model for Meitu,” said Terry Zhu, a partner at BlueRun, a Beijing-based venture capital firm.

The company’s plan so far seems to lean toward “digital tryon,” which lets users upload selfies and experiment with different looks. It wants to develop what it calls a “beauty ecosystem” where brands and shopping are part of the experience.

Meitu is expanding aggressively. Outside mainland China, it now has offices in Santa Monica and Palo Alto, Calif., and people on the ground in London; Mexico City; Tokyo; New Delhi; Singapore; Hong Kong; Taipei, Taiwan; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

But there is one important question facing the company as it tries to grow: whether the Meitu conception of beauty will resonate elsewhere.

The app spread quickly in Southeast Asia, but the challenge of “localization” may be harder in the United States, where the idea of one-touch beauty — particularly skin lightening, Meitu’s signature feature — may seem both offensive and out of date.

Last year, in a feature titled “Women photoshop themselves with an Asian beauty app,” BuzzFeed filmed a multiethnic group of American women experimenting with Meitu’s “BeautyPlus” app.

“Wait, there’s a filter called ‘whitening?’ ” asks one.

“Oh, gosh, I look really white,” says another. “It definitely just stripped my brownness away.”

Asked to comment on skin lightening, Meitu emphasizes its push to “localize” its offerings. “It’s fascinating to see how a woman’s definition of beauty changes from one market to the next,” the company said in a statement.

Tech analysts say Meitu can become a global brand even without success in the United States. The sheer size of China’s domestic market means the Web’s center of gravity is shifting east.

“Companies like this will go global, but it all circles back to their Chinese users in some form,” said Towson, the Peking University investment professor.

“If you are the biggest beauty ecosystem in China, you are the biggest in the world.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Your job: Love it or hate it?

Monster.com and Brandwatch pored over 2 million tweets to try to discern how Americans feel about their jobs. This year, Idaho pushed Hawaii out of the top spot for the state with the highest ratio of job-loving tweets to job-hating ones. n — Annys Shin

States with the highest ratio of jobloving tweets to job-hating ones, and most-loved job categories.

1

IDAHO Technical support representative, area/ regional manager, heavy-equipment operator 2

MONTANA Billing, barista, carpenter 3

NORTH DAKOTA Heavy-equipment operator, welder, carpenter

States with the highest ratio of jobhating tweets to job-loving ones, mosthated job categories.

1

MICHIGAN Welder, production worker, computer numerical control machinist 2

VIRGINIA Network engineer, government, IT specialist 3

WEST VIRGINIA Heavy-equipment operator, nurse, corrections officer SOURCE: 2016 MONSTER.COM AND BRANDWATCH JOB HAPPINESS REPORT. METHODOLOGY AT bit.ly/29LCqnl

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Why ‘hillbillies’ are supporting Trump N ONFICTION

I HILLBILLY ELEGY A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

By J.D. Vance Harper. 264 pp. $27.99

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REVIEWED BY

A MANDA E RICKSON

n recent months, J.D. Vance has become a spokesman for the white working class, explaining why many of his “hillbilly” friends will vote for Trump but why he won’t.

“These people — my people — are really struggling,” he said in a recent American Conservative interview. “And there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.”

In his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the politically conservative Vance focuses more on the personal than the polemic. Still, he wants people to understand something he learned “only recently — that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of a life we left behind continue to chase us.” For those who never achieved it at all, the demons — the anger, the depression and more — are hard to shake off.

Trump, Vance said in the interview, taps into that. “His apocalyptic tone,” he said, “matches their lived experiences on the ground.”

Vance grew up in what his memoir describes as “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” His mother struggled with addiction; he was raised by his grandparents, neither of whom graduated from high school.

“The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose,” he writes.

But he escaped that fate. He enlisted in the Marines, served in Iraq and went on to Yale Law School. At 31, he’s a successful, happily married Silicon Valley executive. Vance probes why he managed to lift himself, offering that he grew up surrounded by family and learned to believe in his own ability to make his life better.

Vance movingly recounts the travails of his family — his grandparents, for example, who got together as teenagers and moved

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mingo Junction, Ohio, is almost a ghost town, as a majority of its businesses, including its steel mill, have closed. In many places like it, social mobility is low, and poverty and drug addiction are high.

from Kentucky to Ohio for jobs at Armco, a steel company. Vance’s “Papaw” had a nasty drinking problem; his “Mamaw” could be just plain nasty. During one particularly vivid fight, Mamaw threatened to kill her husband if he ever came home drunk again. He did, so Mamaw poured lighter fluid on him and struck a match, leaving her children to put out the fire. (Papaw was, somewhat miraculously, fine.)

His mother bore the scars of her upbringing. Although she was at the top of her class, she got pregnant before she finished high school. She became a nurse but careened from man to man, marrying a half-dozen and uprooting Vance and his sister each time.

And she struggled with drugs, bouncing in and out of rehab and eventually losing her nursing license. She could be neglectful (Vance lived alone for much of the ninth grade) and abusive. After one brutal fight, Vance fled to a stranger’s house, scared that his mother might murder him.

It’s enough to make anyone bitter, but Vance’s feelings are more complicated. He’s sympathetic to

the psychic holes his mother tried to fill and to the ways the abuse she suffered as a child shaped her adult behavior. It’s a tension he returns to again and again in his nuanced, thoughtful book — what makes some children resilient while others succumb to the temptations that haunted their parents? Is his mother a victim, an abuser or both?

Vance left his mother’s home for good in the 10th grade, moving in with a much-mellowed Mamaw.

By the time Vance graduated, his grades were good enough for admission to Ohio State.

But actually getting to college wasn’t easy. Vance and his grandmother struggled with the financial-aid and loan forms. The potential for debt was so terrifying that Vance enlisted in the Marines.

It was the right call — he says the military taught him discipline, time management and confidence in his ability to power through.

Though he has overcome his demons, Vance is sympathetic to those left behind. As he describes their plight, “From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and

drug addiction, my home is a hub of misery.” And in contrast to other groups that also experience widespread poverty, “working class whites are the most pessimistic group in America.”

The wounds are partly self-inflicted. The working class, he argues, has lost its sense of agency and taste for hard work. In one illuminating anecdote, he writes about his summer job at the local tile factory. It paid $13 an hour with good benefits and opportunities for advancement. A full-time employee could earn a salary well above the poverty line.

That should have made the gig an easy sell. Yet the factory’s owner had trouble filling jobs. During Vance’s summer stint, three people left, including a man he calls Bob, a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. Bob was chronically late to work, when he showed up at all. He frequently took 45-minute bathroom breaks. Still, when he got fired, he raged against the managers who did it, refusing to acknowledge the impact of his own bad choices.

“He thought something had been done to him,” Vance writes.

“There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

Perhaps Vance’s key to success is a simple one: that he powered through his difficulties instead of giving up or blaming others.

“I believe we hillbillies are the toughest god----ed people on this earth,” he concludes. “But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. . . . I don’t know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” n Erickson is an assistant editor of Outlook.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

An electric new Mark Novak novel

How war on terror has altered the U.S.

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

n Michael Koryta’s exciting “Rise the Dark,” private investigator Mark Novak sets out to find his wife’s killer and instead confronts a lunatic plotting to take over the United States.

At the outset, Novak’s search takes him to a Florida town that’s home to spiritualists who say they can talk to the dead. He meets an attractive woman named Janell who isn’t who claims to be. She very nearly kills him, and she’ll kill others before the story is over, often by deftly wielding a knife.

But she is not his wife’s murderer.

So Novak’s search continues, taking him to Montana, where he is reluctantly reunited with family members who are given to drugs and petty crime and are allergic to honest work. His mother, in fact, will prove to be in cahoots with the novel’s No. 1 villain.

His name is Eli Pate, and he is obsessed with a grandiose scheme to topple the U.S. government by sabotaging the electrical grid system. To mess with the system’s huge transmission towers is exceedingly dangerous, but Pate plans to disable scores of them.

Then, with the country abruptly in the dark and without power, he’s counting on well-armed anti-government militias to enforce his takeover. “When darkness fell, chaos would reign, and the man who controlled the chaos? His ascent to leadership was natural order.” So goes his fantasy.

Pate, although possibly mad, is not stupid. He speaks nine languages. In furtherance of his scheme, Pate has kidnapped the wife of a skilled grid-systems engineer to force the man to help him.

This engineer had quit performing high-voltage repairs atop “massive transmission towers with their nearly a million volts” after an accident killed his brother-in-law. But now he must climb again to save his wife.

Along the way, Novak meets a fellow investigator he can’t ignore, even if he has avoided women in the two years since his wife’s

death. Her name is Lynn and she’s blessed with “eyes that seemed to be in on a joke that the rest of the world hadn’t gotten yet.” But Lynn has her secrets, and he has his problems, although he keeps telling himself that you can’t be unfaithful to a dead person. The romance is a troubled one.

In the novel’s conclusion, Mark does battle with the thug who killed his wife and other wellarmed men as he tries to free hostages being held in Pate’s mountain fortress. Pate, meanwhile, has his electrical engineer hostage 100 feet up a tower, trying to bring darkness to the West.

Does this madman succeed in dousing the lights all over the United States? The outcome is complex and fascinating.

“Rise the Dark” is Koryta’s 12th novel. A former private investigator and reporter, Koryta has won prizes and scored bestsellers, but he is not as well known as he should be. This book arrived with high praise from several stars of the genre — “A master,” says Stephen King; “Outstanding,” adds Lee Child — and they’re right.

“Rise the Dark” is both first-rate entertainment and an unusually interesting thriller in terms of its characters, its plot and the ideas it explores, which include the electrical grid, spiritualism and the nation’s possible vulnerability to a right-wing takeover.

This is Koryta’s second Novak novel after last year’s “Last Words,” and its ending suggests a third. For one, Novak has finally learned from his mother who his father is, and there probably will be surprises if father and son meet.

Moreover, although most of the troublemakers in “Rise the Dark” will do no more harm, one remains at large. That’s Janell, the comely psychopath who’s so handy with a knife. She lusts for revenge on Novak, and the feeling is mutual. A rematch should be fun. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

I RISE THE DARK

By Michael Koryta Little, Brown. 400 pp. $26

SPIRAL Trapped in the Forever War

By Mark Danner Simon & Schuster.

267 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

A LBERTO M ORA

n late 2002,the Naval Criminal Investigative Service uncovered evidence that detainees were being abused during interrogations at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Concerned about the lawlessness and the professional incompetence of the interrogators, they sought out a senior lawyer in the Defense Department’s office of general counsel.

Nothing could be done, the lawyer blandly informed them. “The decision has been taken,” he said, “and, anyway, if the public were to find out, no one would care.”

Mark Danner is one who does care. His essays in the New York Review of Books on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were among the first to reveal the bleak reality and moral vacuum of the George W. Bush administration’s torture policy.

In “Spiral,” Danner has three overarching objectives. The first is to equip us with the analytical tools to control the war on terrorism and not to be controlled by it. The second is not to allow the war to lead us on a path contrary to our laws, values and founding principles.

And the third is to help us avoid the self-defeating policies that strengthen the terrorist threat.

To assess where we are in the fight against terrorism and to help inform the decisions that lie ahead, Danner argues that it is necessary to look back at the critical decisions made in the early years of the Bush administration in response to 9/11. Those decisions coalesced into what Danner calls a “state of exception,” those years “during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside.”

This state of exception was created by several policy decisions after 9/11, among them: to frame the response to the al-Qaeda mass murders as a war against terrorism (war had been a legal and policy designation reserved for conflicts between sovereign entities); to decree that the terrorists were outside the coverage of law;

to legitimize these decisions and actions in the president’s authority and to shroud all of it in secrecy; and to have the war discussion increasingly define the political struggle between the two parties.

From these policies came tactics that became trademarks of this state of exception. He explores warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, enhanced interrogations.

Many of these practices have been modified, attenuated or, in the case of torture, ended. But, as Danner explains, in the main, they have not been. Instead of ending the state of exception, “the Obama administration normalized it.”

The best evidence for this is the administration’s failure to investigate or prosecute those responsible for torture, even though President Obama has said in reference to torture, “This is not who we are.”

Danner contends that by failing to hold ourselves accountable for torture and by repeatedly violating our founding principles, the real response is: Yes it is.

The title “Spiral” is drawn from historian Michael Ignatieff’s observation that the terrorists’ strategy is to pull us into an “escalatory spiral” that is controlled by the terrorists, not democratic governments. The terrorists’ outrages are not ends but means. The end is fear, and fear produces overreaction, which in turn produce policies that are self-defeating.

Although the book does not focus on the current presidential campaign, it speaks to one candidate in particular. By stoking fear of terrorism, calling for torture, stigmatizing Muslims and calling for an all-out war on the Islamic State, Donald Trump as president would violate America’s core values and feed the growth of terrorism. Somebody should buy him a copy of this indispensable book. n Mora is a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former general counsel for the Department of the Navy.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Epidemic of honesty on doping breaks out in Rio CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog

Irrefutable archival evidence proves that, during the 1970s, the communist East German government systematically administered anabolic steroids to its Olympic women’s swim team, which won 11 out of 13 possible gold medals in Montreal in 1976.

At the time, U.S. swimmer Shirley Babashoff called attention to the East Germans’ deep voices, bulging necks and other indicia of doping — only to be told to shush.

American Olympic officials apologetically sent the East Germans flowers.

Thereafter, an unwritten rule discouraged athletes from calling out even obviously doped competitors, lest they be ostracized like “Surly Shirley.”

Now, 40 years later, an athletes’ revolt against institutionalized Olympic hypocrisy about doping has broken out at the Rio Games, as a new generation of swimmers refuses to keep quiet. It’s like Prague Spring, in Speedos.

American Lilly King, just 19 years old, started the uprising by literally wagging a finger at Yulia Efimova, one of 271 Russians whom the International Olympic Committee allowed to compete despite the recent exposure of Russia’s East German-style doping program, and despite Efimova’s own past record of violations. Sweden’s Jennie Johansson noted angrily that “someone that doesn’t deserve it” — Efimova — had edged her out for the last spot in an eightperson race final.

Then male swimmers Camille Lacourt of France and Mack Horton of Australia criticized China’s Sun Yang, another Rio swimming gold medalist with a doping suspension in his past: “He pisses purple,” Lacourt said.

What’s more, Australia’s top official in Rio backed Horton up when he refused Chinese demands for an apology. And, setting a new Olympic record for forthrightness, King said she

wouldn’t mind a ban on the United States’ own top sprinters, Tyson Gay and Justin Gatlin, for their past doping. (They were suspended but reinstated in time for Rio.) Trying to stem the candor epidemic, IOC spokesman Mark Adams babbled: “Clearly we want to encourage freedom of speech, but on the other hand, of course, the Olympics is and should be about respecting others and respecting the right of others to compete, and you know there is a line somewhere there — and each case is different — where people should be free to compete in tranquility, if you like, and not be aggressed by others. So, yes, we would encourage people to respect their fellow competitors.”

Too late. There’s no “respecting fellow competitors” without also respecting the governmental and other athletic organizations that dope them, or tolerate their doping, for the sake

LEE JIN-MAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Lilly King of the United States, left, and Yulia Efimova of Russia compete in the final of the women's 100-meter breaststroke.

of national glory, financial gain — or both.

There’s no respecting them without surrendering what might be the best weapon against cheating, the one that Babashoff tried to employ, only to have it turned against her — shame.

What must really terrify the IOC is that uncontrolled honesty threatens the foundational myth of the Olympics: that they promote harmony among nations.

In retaliation for Horton’s remarks, China’s Global Times, a state-run newspaper, called Australia “a country on the fringes of civilization.”

Vladimir Putin’s press agency, Tass, produced an interview with Efimova in which she accused fellow swimmers of playing “politics.” “I always thought the Cold War was long in the past,” she reportedly said, echoing Kremlin talking points with remarkable fidelity. “Why start it again, by using sport?”

Like any revolt, the uprising in Rio might go too far, catching innocents as well as dopers in a web of suspicion and accusation, just as the Olympic authorities warn.

Still, the Olympic hierarchy could use a little destabilization — more than a little, actually.

And if things do get out of hand, the IOC will only have itself to

blame, because it has failed, all these long decades after the farce at Montreal, to ensure the integrity of its events.

The IOC’s acceptance of most of the team from Putin’s corrupt realm may have been the last straw for today’s athletes, but appeasing dictatorships is nothing new for the IOC. This year is also the 80th anniversary of the IOC’s eager staging of the Games in Hitler’s Berlin, prior to which the Third Reich’s authorities made German teams swear secrecy about their training.

East Germany’s secret police, too, imposed an oath of silence on doctors and coaches who drugged that glory-hungry state’s Olympians — they did not even tell the athletes what was in the pills they were given, though many were mere teenagers. For some, the health damage was severe and longer lasting than the ephemeral glory they won their ephemeral state.

There is one place where East Germany’s victories still enjoy legitimacy. To this day, the IOC’s website, olympic.org, features the names and winning times of East Germany’s medalists — as if nothing had been learned in the past 40 years, and as if these bogus champions continue to embody the Olympic spirit. Come to think of it, maybe they do. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Why I cannot support Donald Trump SUSAN COLLINS The writer, a Republican, represents Maine in the Senate

I will not be voting for Donald Trump for president. This is not a decision I make lightly, for I am a lifelong Republican. But Donald Trump does not reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.

When the primary season started, it soon became apparent that, much like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mr. Trump was connecting with many Americans who felt that their voices were not being heard in Washington and who were tired of political correctness. But rejecting the conventions of political correctness is different from showing complete disregard for common decency. Mr. Trump did not stop with shedding the stilted campaign dialogue that often frustrates voters. Instead, he opted for a constant stream of denigrating comments, including demeaning heroic military service of Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) and repeatedly insulting Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

I have become increasingly dismayed by his stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize. But it was his attacks directed at people who could not respond on an equal footing — either because

they do not share his power or stature or because professional responsibility precluded them from engaging at such a level — that revealed Mr. Trump as unworthy of being our president.

My conclusion about Mr. Trump’s unsuitability for office is based on his disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics. Instead, he opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities.

Three incidents in particular have led me to the conclusion that Mr. Trump lacks the temperament, self-discipline and judgment required to be president.

The first was his mocking of a reporter with disabilities, a shocking display that did not receive the scrutiny it deserved. I kept expecting Mr. Trump to apologize, at least privately, but he did not, instead denying that he had done what seemed undeniable to anyone who

watched the video. At the time, I hoped that this was a terrible lapse, not a pattern of abuse.

The second was Mr. Trump’s repeated insistence that Gonzalo Curiel, a federal judge born and raised in Indiana, could not rule fairly in a case involving Trump University because of his Mexican heritage. For Mr. Trump to insist that Judge Curiel would be biased because of his ethnicity demonstrated a profound lack of respect not only for the judge but also for our constitutional separation of powers, the very foundation of our form of government. Again, I waited in vain for Mr. Trump to retract his words.

Third was Mr. Trump’s criticism of the grieving parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq. It is inconceivable that anyone, much less a presidential candidate, would attack two Gold Star parents.

Rather than honoring their sacrifice and recognizing their pain, Mr. Trump disparaged the religion of the family of an American hero. And once again, he proved incapable of apologizing, of saying he was wrong.

I had hoped that we would see a “new” Donald Trump as a generalelection candidate — one who would focus on jobs and the economy, tone down his rhetoric, develop more thoughtful policies

and, yes, apologize for ill-tempered rants. But the unpleasant reality that I have had to accept is that there will be no “new” Donald Trump, just the same candidate who will slash and burn and trample anything and anyone he perceives as being in his way or an easy scapegoat. Regrettably, his essential character appears to be fixed, and he seems incapable of change or growth.

I also realize that Mr. Trump’s success reflects profound discontent in this country, particularly among those who feel left behind by an unbalanced economy and who wonder whether their children will have a better life than they have. As we have seen with the dissatisfaction with both major-party nominees — neither of whom I support — these passions are real.

Some will say that as a Republican I have an obligation to support my party’s nominee. I have thought hard about that, for being a Republican is part of what defines me. I revere the history of my party, especially the value it places on the worth and dignity of the individual, and I will continue to work across the country for Republican candidates. It is because of Mr. Trump’s inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy that I am unable to support his candidacy. n

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OPINIONS

BY MARGULIES

Millennials: Less sex, but content STEPHANIE COONTZ is the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”

Older generations always seem to fret about the sexual behavior and romantic lives of the younger crowd. In the 1920s, there was alarm when boys stopped visiting in the parlor and started driving girls around in what one newspaper called “a house of prostitution on wheels.” This worry paled in comparison to the panic evoked by the rowdy sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s.

In the 1980s, observers were rightly alarmed by the growing prevalence of early teen sex and sexually transmitted diseases. In the past two decades, anxiety shifted to college hookups and the emergence of dating apps to facilitate casual sex.

Recently, though, a new concern has surfaced, with the finding that young adults, those ages 20 to 24, are now having less sex than Gen Xers or baby boomers born in the 1960s did at the same age. Indeed, 15 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds today report having had no sexual partner since they turned 18. (This is more than double the percentage for those born the 1960s.)

Explanations abound. Some experts posit that porn and virtual sex are replacing the intimacy of actual sex. Others blame the distraction of social media, unrealistic expectations of beauty and sexual prowess perpetuated

by the mass media, the pressure of preparing for careers, or the inhibiting effect of so many young adults living with parents.

Many worry about the emergence of a generation that fears the physical and emotional risks of sexual entanglements.

My own sense is that the changes in the sexual behavior of millennials are less dramatic and more positive. This generation is hardly embracing celibacy in significant numbers. Most of the increase in sexually inactive 20-to24-year-olds occurred among women; much of this is probably due to their rising age of marriage.

At the same time, most millennials have never been the sexual players portrayed in the media, nor were the Gen Xers.

Still, they face an unprecedented romantic and sexual challenge.

Never before have young people reached sexual maturity so early, had so much freedom to explore

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

their sexual desires and identities, and yet had such strong incentives to postpone making long-term romantic commitments.

After interviewing more than 20,000 college students, sociologist Paula England and other researchers found that fewer than half of all campus hookups involve sexual intercourse. When intercourse does occur, it is typically between students who have hooked up before.

Furthermore, hookups are not replacing relationships. Most students hook up and date during their college years. Less than 10 percent reported having hooked up without ever going out on a date or being in a long-term relationship. More than onequarter had never hooked up at all, but instead had dated or formed long-term relationships.

As an AARP-card-carrying member of the older generation, I am more impressed by the positive changes in the sexual behavior of young adults today than by the negative behaviors that persist. Young people are initiating sex later than their peers did in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. They are taking more precautions, whether by having fewer partners or practicing safer sex.

True, in recent decades, sexual

frequency among couples has declined in several countries.

Distraction by computers, smartphones or work pressures may be part of the story. But another part may be that women today enjoy more equal status in their relations with men and feel more comfortable saying no.

One group of Gen Xers and millennials, moreover, seems to have discovered a new secret to sexual happiness. Among heterosexual couples married since the early 1990s, those reporting the highest marital satisfaction — and the most sex — are couples who share housework and child care. In fact, these egalitarian couples are the only couples having more sex than their counterparts in the past.

So perhaps we should spend less time worrying about millennials’ sex lives and more time following the models they seem to be pioneering. Don’t feel pressured to have sex unless you really want to. Don’t feel embarrassed about having consensual sex whenever you want to, with whomever you want to, without feeling you need to commit to either the partner or the “lifestyle.” But when you do commit, don’t settle for anything less than the equality that forms the basis of long-term, erotic and emotional satisfaction. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Gymnastics BY

D VORA M EYERS

Every four years, millions of people across the country tune in to watch gymnastics at the Olympics, and everyone thinks he or she is an expert. “That was NOT a handstand, more like a handSplit! UK gets JACKED by judges!” Samuel L. Jackson wrote on Twitter dur­ ing the 2012 Games. But this is a difficult, technical sport that is of­ ten poorly understood. Myths such as these abound.

MYTH NO. 1 You can’t get a perfect 10.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Nadia Comaneci’s historic first perfect 10 in Olympic competition. It also marks 10 years since the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) abolished the 10 in response to scoring scandals at the 2004 Games in Athens.

Nowadays, a gymnast gets two scores: one for the difficulty of the exercise and the other for how well she performed the elements.

The former starts at zero and increases depending on the content of the routine. The latter starts at 10 and decreases depending on the number of mistakes. The two scores are added together, and what the audience sees is an inelegant string of numbers, such as 13.667.

But if the judges find no fault with a gymnast’s execution, then he or she can still end up with a perfect 10 on that score. The closest any Olympian has come to the mark was McKayla Maroney on vault during the 2012 team finals, when she was awarded a 9.733 in execution.

MYTH NO. 2 Female gymnasts are young girls.

Comaneci was just 14 when she made her big splash in 1976, and for the next three decades, gymnastics was known as a sport with uniquely young athletes, a notion reinforced when countries were caught falsifying the ages of their gymnasts upward to sneak them into competitions. (See: Romania, China and North

Korea.) In 1992, half of the U.S. Olympic team was 15 or younger.

But in the past 10 years, the sport has undergone significant shifts. In Comaneci’s day, you had to be 14 to compete. The line has since moved to 16. The rules have also changed to allow gymnasts to specialize in certain events, instead of forcing every athlete to compete in the all-around. For an aging gymnast, this can mean abandoning her weak apparatuses.

The depth of the international field has weakened considerably, as many countries’ gymnastics programs shrink. If there are fewer young competitors waiting in the wings, odds are an older gymnast will be able to hold on to her team spot longer.

The average age of a female gymnast in Rio is 20.

MYTH NO. 3 The Olympics are the summit of the sport.

When Lloimincia Hall’s floor routine went viral in 2014, a “Good Morning America” host profiling the then-Louisiana State gymnast asked, “Will Hall ever go for the gold at the Olympics?” It was impossible for the host to grasp her significance without invoking the Olympics.

For most high-level gymnasts in the United States, college gymnastics is the dream — and certainly the more attainable one.

At the NCAA level, the rules (for the women at least) are more relaxed, as is the atmosphere. You can dab and nae nae in your floor routine, as UCLA’s Sophina de Jesus did to viral acclaim this

TONY DUFFY/ALLSPORT

JOE ROBBINS/GETTY IMAGES

American Shannon Miller, left, was 15 during the 1992 Games. Simone Biles, 19, right, is a favorite at this year’s Games in Rio de Janeiro.

year. Samantha Peszek and Bridget Sloan, 2008 silver medalists, had outstanding NCAA careers after their Olympic careers ended.

Some Olympic medalists will move mats and fill water bottles to take part. That’s what Jordyn Wieber, the 2012 Olympic team gold medalist, did. She accepted money in the run-up to the London Games and thus forfeited her NCAA eligibility and UCLA athletic scholarship, so she signed on to become the team manager.

MYTH NO. 4 Eastern Hemisphere countries are best.

Even though the Iron Curtain fell more than 25 years ago, people have been slow to come around to the fact that the United States is now the undisputed power in women’s gymnastics.

Romania is out of the picture — its women’s and men’s teams didn’t even qualify to compete in Rio. Russia’s team is a shell of its former self. And China, though still formidable, is a few points behind the Americans in the international rankings. The United States and other Western countries are on the rise.The reason is money. After the former

communist countries disbanded their sports programs, their coaches migrated, landing in the countries such as the United States and bringing their expertise with them. With foreign coaching expertise and Western financial investment, it’s not surprising that we’re on top.

MYTH NO. 5 Female gymnasts are waifs.

After Olga Korbut debuted an androgynous look at the 1972 Olympics, women’s gymnastics became known for unusually small, seemingly prepubescent athletes. This gave the sport a reputation as a hotbed of eating disorders, as Joan Ryan noted in her 1995 bestseller, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.”

But modern gymnastics relies more on strength and dynamism than it did just a couple of decades ago, so gymnasts with more athletic physiques are better able to perform today’s repertoire. Gymnasts are better conditioned than ever before and have more muscular bodies to show for it. n Meyers, a journalist based in New York, is author of “The End of the Perfect 10,” about women’s gymnastics.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE: District 12 House | Position 1

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

The state Supreme Court has ordered the Legislature to increase funding for K-12 education. Do you believe the court overstepped its authority and is K-12 education currently adequately funded?

CANDIDATES:

CARY CONDOTTA

DAN MAHER

Incumbent, media marketing and advertising consultant

Educator, IT consultant

prefers Republican Party

prefers Democratic Party

ANSWER: While the court may be in order to find that we are underfunding our constitutional commitment to education, they have no right to say say how much or how soon it should be remedied. That is purely a matter for the legislature to decide. In the past two cycles the legislature has added billions (a 36% increase) to K thru 12 funding. This is substantial and unprecedented. While we believe these increases may continue, the issue is now around “who pays?” The problem becomes not one of adequacy but that too much of that funding is from local levies. To that extent all of us on both sides of the aisle are working to find an equitable solution. Let’s hope one can be found.

ANSWER: No, I do not believe the court overstepped its authority. K-12 is not currently adequately funded. The legislature needs to find a fair funding model to satisfy the court. Some legislators point to the increases in state funding this last session as a success. It was not! This was done by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Other needed services’ long-term funds are being used for the less than adequate increase in funding for our K-12 schools. It is time to talk about why Washington considers state funding for education a constitutional mandate.

Our state’s constitution in past helped create a great public school system. We need legislators that have the guts to find real solutions that honor our constitution. It is not unacceptable to me to hear politicians talk about cutting taxes without addressing the services that will be cut too.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the candidates in any race in North Central Washington please your suggestion to newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

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