The Washington Post National Weekly - August 16, 2015

Worst Week Hillary Clinton 3

Politics Big crowds ‘Feel the Bern’ 4

Health The great breakfast myth? 16

5 Myths About coal 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Hillary Clinton

by Chris Cillizza

“I

believe I have met all of my responsibilities, and the server will remain private.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton in March, insisting that her private e­mail server, which she used exclusively to send and receive e­mails during her time as secretary of state, was nobody else’s business.

This past week, she turned that server over to the FBI, along with a thumb drive that has on it thousands of e­mails she sent as secretary. The agency has been looking into the security of the unusual e­mail setup.

On the same day that news broke, it was reported that the intelligence community’s inspector general had found four e­mails that traveled across the server (among the 40 the State Department allowed him to look at) that contained classified information — including two that had “top secret” material.

In addition to previously insisting that the server need not be turned over, Clinton had said that she never sent or received any classified information on it. Whether the information the inspector general found was labeled as “classified” at the time she sent or received it remains murky.

Clinton and her campaign team did everything they could to cast the handing over of the server as part of her attempt to be totally cooperative — despite what they say are spuriousness allegations of wrongdoing. “This kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for

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BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

president,” communications director Jennifer Palmieri said.

But, really, not. This is the sort of thing that seems to follow the Clintons around. Clinton desperately needs her campaign to be about the future, but will the ongoing — and seemingly never­ending — look into her e­mail practices remind voters too much of the past?

Hillary Clinton, for doing exactly what you said you wouldn’t have to do, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 44

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER An aerial view shows the jungle valley land where Minería Texas Colombia owns an emerald mine in Muzo, Colombia.

Photograph by DANIA MAXWELL, for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

How is Bernie Sanders doing it?

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

His rallies are the biggest draw of the 2016 contest in either party. And it’s not even close.

BY E D O ’ K EEFE AND J OHN W AGNER

Los Angeles

D

ante Harris, the leader of a local flight attendants union, had a question for the 17,500 people inside the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

“Did all of you make the trip out here on a Monday night because everything is going well for you and your family?”

“No!” they roared.

Harris nodded in agreement and shouted back: “Workers’ lives matter! . . . Black lives matter! . . .

The truth matters!”

Deafening cheers nearly drowned him out as he said: “We canbuildamovementwithBernie!”

Bernie, of course, is Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont whose Democratic presidential campaign has brought more than 100,000 people to his rallies in recent weeks — making him the biggest draw on the campaign trail this year. The huge crowds are building via social media, word of mouth and promotion by likeminded local groups in each city that Sanders visits, without any paid advertising by the campaign.

Such turnout is no guarantee that Sanders will perform well in

the crucial early nominating states — fellow Vermonter Howard Dean preached to similarly large and frenzied audiences in mostly liberal enclaves in 2003, only to collapse as the Iowa caucuses approached.

But it is drawing energy and attention away from Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose largest crowd to date was 5,500, according to her campaign. And it is creating a network of small-scale donors and volunteers that could provide Sanders with the resources he will need to compete with Clinton in the weeks and months ahead.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks before a packed Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on Monday.

Roughly 28,000 showed up to see Sanders on Sunday in Portland, Ore., the largest crowd of the 2016 presidential campaign cycle.

He drew 15,000 in Seattle on Saturday. Approximately 11,000 were in Phoenix recently; 10,000 in Madison, Wis.; 8,000 in Dallas; and 4,500 in New Orleans.

On Monday night, Sanders’s campaign said that 27,500 people were inside and outside the sports arena — a figure impossible to independently verify. But nearly every seat in the building appeared to be taken, and the arena floor was packed. Outside, thousands more watched on large screens.

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POLITICS The crowd was noticeably more diversethanthoseatrecentSanders rallies in Portland, Seattle and other majority white cities — Los Angeles is majority-minority, with about 44 percent of its population Latino.

Those who came to “Feel the Bern” — a popular chant among Sanders supporters — were white, Latino, black and Asian. There were young hipsters and graying hippies. Some wore black T-shirts with red hammers and sickles, others wore black T-shirts that read, “Black Lives Matter.” They sang along as the loudspeakers blasted songs by Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman and Neil Young.

One guy carried a handmade sign that said, “Bernie: Our Only Hope for Change.”

About a week before each Sanders rally, the campaign sets up a Web page advertising the location and blasts out an e-mail to supporters in that geographic area, asking them to RSVP. The events are also promoted on Facebook.

And from there, things tend to take on a life of their own.

“What we’re seeing all across the country are organic formations of people independent of the campaign,” said Phil Fiermonte, Sanders’s national field director.

Harris got a speaking slot Monday night because his union helped promote the rally. Same with Joe Galliani, a climatechange activist and member of a local union who earned some of the loudest cheers as he denounced construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and touted the benefits of solar roofs.

There was Maria Barrera, the 31-year-old leader of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, who burst into tears as she noted that Congress hasn’t enacted comprehensive immigration reforms since the 1980s.

“For the last 25 years, families have been separated,” Barrera said. “That means for the last 25 years, it’s been too long.”

Next came comedian Sarah Silverman, who earlier Monday had alerted her 6.67 million Twitter followers of her plans to attend the rally.

“Bernie always seems to be on the right side of history,” Silverman said, noting that he was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, supported gay rights in the 1980s and strongly opposed the Iraq war before most other Americans.

The turnout and enthusiasm

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sanders is striving to harness the energy of his rallies to help him in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. has been similar at Sanders events across the country.

For the Portland rally, a local group lobbying for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in the city — a cause Sanders supports nationally — drove a sizable contingent of people to the event. And the Oregon Democratic Party sent an e-mail to people in its database letting them know about the rally (with the disclaimer that the party is not taking sides in the presidential primary).

Sanders supporters also posted fliers on telephone poles and promoted the event by “chalking the sidewalks,” a tradition in a city whose residents are known to turn out in big numbers for political rallies. In May 2008, an estimated 75,000 people came to see thenSen. Barack Obama on the banks of the Willamette River as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders is striving to harness the energy of his rallies to help him in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where his crowds

have been much smaller but still relatively robust. Volunteers hand out donation envelopes to rally attendees and carefully take down their contact information so they can be solicited for money later.

On Monday night, anyone who gave on the spot received a Sanders campaign T-shirt. Speakers on stage asked the crowd to text “Bernie” to a five-digit number. In reply, they would receive text messages asking for money and volunteer time.

When Sanders came onstage, the cheers were deafening. His voice hoarse, the senator told the crowd, “This campaign is not a billionaire-funded campaign — it is a people-funded campaign.

“There is no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism,” he told them. “Or for a higher minimum wage. Or for paid parental leave. Or for at least two weeks of paid vacation. Or to end military conflicts overseas. Or to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. “Whenever we stand together, when we do not allow them to

The crowd at Bernie Sanders’s Los Angeles rally was packed, with thousands more watching on large screens outside.

27,500 Sanders crowd, in Los Angeles

28,000 in Portland, Ore.

15,000 in Seattle

11,000 in Phoenix

5,500

Largest Clinton crowd

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divide us up by the color of our skin or our sexual orientation — by whether a man or a woman is born in America or born somewhere else — whenever we stand together, there is nothing, nothing, nothing we cannot accomplish,” he said.

“Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” the crowd shouted repeatedly.

Mike Jelf, 69, said he spent Sunday distributing leaflets for the campaign in nearby Torrance. On Monday, he brought along his Saint Bernard, Munro, who wore a shirt that said, “Saints for Sanders.”

“I want to see a country that’s returned to the people rather than a plutocratic oligarchy,” Jelf said.

“I would like to have a planet that’s habitable for future generations.”

Gloria Rios, from Eagle Rock, Calif., said she joined Sander’s email list a month ago. “I feel very strongly about him,” she said, adding that she has concerns about Clinton.

What are those concerns? She paused. For a really long time.

“I just don’t feel — there’s — too much conflict around her,” she said. “I’m the kind of person who feels that what you say and do has to match up.” Sanders, she added, “resonates more closely to me.”

Jean-Luc St. Pierre, 19, said he flew from Baltimore to attend the rally. He’s started a “Baltimore for Bernie” Facebook group in the hometown of former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential candidate. St. Pierre said he doesn’t think O’Malley has any chance of gaining traction in a race in which Clinton has been the presumed front-runner for years and Sanders is drawing massive crowds.

“There’s not enough people in Maryland who like O’Malley,” St. Pierre said. “I’m not sure there’s enough in the country to like him, either.”

Rigoberto Chavez, a 19-year-old from Downey, Calif., said he liked Sanders’s plans for affordable college education. He recounted that as a high school senior he was assigned to do a project on a U.S. senator. He spotted the name “Bernie” on the list and chose the Vermont man with the funny name.

“I made a PowerPoint presentation about him, and now it’s relevant,” he said with a big smile.

“Somebody I made a PowerPoint presentationaboutinhighschoolis actually running for president.” n

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POLITICS

The builder and the brand Fred Trump made millions with cheap brick; his son’s goals were always flashier

BY

E MILY B ADGER

T

rump Village, unlike every other property that famously bears that brand, was not named by — or for — the presidential candidate currently upending the Republican Party.

The Coney Island complex, completed in 1964, was no luxury residence either. It was a modest brown-brick development, seven sturdy 23-story towers in a park, each containing carpeted hallways but no air conditioning. The middle-class homes were supposed to be nice but not that nice, given that the government helped finance their construction.

The apartments were developed by Fred C. Trump, the father of Donald J. Trump. The elder Trump was a prolific builder, too, although in nearly every way different from his son: Where Donald sought the spectacular in Manhattan, Fred built thousands of units of good but banal governmentbacked housing for New Yorkers who would never dream of penthouse living.

Where the son spares no expense, the father counted pennies.

Where Donald builds in glass and steel, his father built in brick. Donald has made the family name a synonym for luxury, but the origins of the Trump empire lie in Fred’s decidedly less elite market: the lower-middle class, the outer boroughs, renters.

The contrast between the two is also revealing for what it says about the son now that he’s running for president.

“My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,” Trump, 69, said in written comments to The Washington Post. He credits his father, who died in 1999 at age 93, with teaching him about construction, contractors, negotiating and how to succeed in real estate. But from an early age, the younger Trump, who took over his father’s company, knew he wanted to build skyscrapers, and his success doing so is part of the basis for his campaign, he said.

“Dreaming about building a skyscraper and actually getting it

DENNIS CARUSO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOS BY YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Fred C. Trump, at top with his son Donald, made a fortune constructing banal but affordable housing around New York. The Trump Village apartment complex, middle, was built in Coney Island in 1964. In contrast to his father, Donald Trump has made his name synonymous with luxury properties, such as Manhattan’s Trump Tower, above.

built are two very different scenarios,” Trump said. “I know the difference. I understand the value of a blueprint and that can carry over into many endeavors.”

But for some longtime observers of the Trump family’s real estate history, there is a disconnect between Trump’s anti-government rhetoric as a candidate and his father’s legacy.

“It’s so funny the Donald does all his government attacks, because his entire heritage is from the government,” says Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow with New York’s Regional Plan Association. She interviewed Fred Trump in the 1970s on behalf of the city when officials were trying to figure out how the construction industry, which had ground to a halt, could repeat Trump’s successes.

Today, Donald Trump’s New York real estate portfolio includes a dozen ritzy buildings in Manhattan and its suburbs. Trump Place condominiums on the Upper West Side of Manhattan sell for more than $3 million. Then there’s Trump Palace (55 stories with a marble and mahogany lobby) and Trump SoHo (a condominium-hotel with panoramic views of Manhattan’s skyline) and Trump Park Avenue (a redeveloped 1920s-era building where a penthouse will cost you $35 million). His name is on skyscrapers throughout the world.

“Fred Trump built for people like me,” says Sol Cooperman, 70, now a retired accountant who’s been in Trump Village since renting a $220-a-month, two-bedroom apartment there in 1977. Today, he pays just $630 a month for it. “I can afford a little decent housing.

But Trump Place — who can afford that type of square footage paying $300,000, $400,000?”

Besides Trump Village, Fred Trump did not leave his name on anything else. But his imprint is all over Brooklyn and Queens, in 1930s-era row homes and six-story garden apartments, and vast complexes like the one on Coney Island that made him one of the biggest builders of his day.

With the government’s help, he created badly needed Depression-

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POLITICS era and post-war housing, often rent-stabilized. And much of what he built — though all of it has since been sold off by the Trump Organization — remains today part of the scarce stock of middle-class housing in a city that has an abundance of Donald Trump-like luxury.

The elder Trump’s fortunes came, in large part, by leveraging public programs to spur housing.

He began constructing hundreds of single-family homes in Queens and Brooklyn in the 1930s using mortgage commitments from the newly created Federal Housing Administration to obtain construction loans. Without the FHA, biographer Gwenda Blair wrote, Fred Trump would have been running a supermarket (one of his earlier investments). With it, he became the biggest builder in Brooklyn.

During the war, he moved to constructing thousands of nofrills homes for the Navy around Norfolk. Then after, when the government was trying to jump-start the construction industry to house veterans, he built even larger FHA-backed apartments and projects, like Trump Village, that were financed through public bonds issued by the state.

Over the years, Fred Trump became very good at turning a profit on modest housing. Then he made more money taking over distressed apartments.

In the early 1970s, the family company was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against black would-be tenants in 39 buildings it managed.

Donald, then leading the business, called the charges “absolutely ridiculous” and complained to the media that the federal government was trying to force landlords to rent to welfare recipients.

The company eventually agreed to a consent decree with the Department of Justice that required it to list vacancies in minority publications and with open housing advocates.

By the 1970s, Fred Trump had become a millionaire.

“He built what everybody’s talking about today as the impossible market,” Vitullo-Martin says. Developers now frequently insist that affordable housing isn’t profitable, that tax breaks and incentives to build it are too cumbersome. Only luxury pays.

“Who’s building like Fred Trump?” Vitullo-Martin asks. “No one.” n

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Rubio gets bump in support after debate performance BY

S EAN S ULLIVAN

M

arco Rubio is reaping the benefits of a breakout performance in the first Republican presidential debate by winning over new donors, earning praise from evangelical leaders and eagerly engaging in political combat with Hillary Rodham Clinton over abortion.

The burst of activity has come at a welcome moment for the freshman senator from Florida.

He surged after kicking off his campaign in April but more recently has lagged in early state polls. Like his opponents, Rubio has been overshadowed by the rise of billionaire Donald Trump.

Rubio donors say they have been flooded with calls, texts and e-mails in recent days from uncommitted patrons now eager to make and bundle contributions to help him. In addition, his comments against abortion during the debate have also allowed Rubio to emerge as one of the GOP’s leading voices on the issue — drawing sharp criticism from Clinton, which is always a plus in the Republican primary.

Rubio, 44, emphasized during the debate in Cleveland that he has never advocated allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest and said the current generation would be eventually be viewed as “barbarians” for legalizing the procedure. The remarks elevated his standing among social conservatives, but Democrats say it undermines his pitch as a newgeneration Republican.

The issue also underscores a broader predicament facing the son of Cuban American immigrants if he wins the Republican nomination: how to portray himself as a representative of the “new America” while defending views on gay marriage, drugs, abortion, Cuba and other issues that are out of step with much of the public, particularly younger voters.

Despite signs of momentum, including a poll in Iowa released

Tuesday showing the debate helped him, Rubio’s campaign is tempering expectations. In a conference call with supporters and donors the day after the debate, Rubio reemphasized his long view of the campaign and his refusal to get caught up in the highs and lows.

“There will be another debate here in about a month and another opportunity to do the same thing, and in the meantime we’re

JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) speaks during the debate Aug. 6 in Cleveland.

going to be traveling the country, obviously trying to continue to raise money, but also making trips to those early states,” he said.

Rubio won rave reviews for his debate performance, which included a promise that he would represent “the party of the future” against Clinton. But one of the lines that has lingered longest was his disavowal of abortion exceptions in cases of rape and incest.

“He has certainly fired up the interest and imagination of prolife leaders across the country with those remarks,” said Al Phillips, an influential South Carolina pastor who has met with Rubio and other candidates.

Conservative Iowa activist Bob Vander Plaats agreed. “I do believe he is getting a closer look,” he said, “and I believe the debate did him a lot of good.”

Clinton, the Democratic front-

runner, took notice on Monday for different reasons.

“When one of their major candidates, a much younger man, the senator from Florida, says there should be no exceptions for rape and incest, that is as offensive and as troubling a comment as you can hear from a major candidate running for the presidency,” she said, comparing it to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. “The language may be more colorful and more offensive, but the thinking, the attitude, toward women is very much the same. It just is delivered in a different package.”

Rubio shot back quickly with a statement charging that Clinton “holds radical views on abortion that we look forward to exposing in the months to come.”

Abortion is not a central issue in a typical Rubio stump speech, but he and his campaign have embraced the chance to showcase his views on the national stage.

Rubio has backed bills that have rape and incest exceptions and bills that do not, giving him some flexibility in his remarks. He says his larger aim is to reduce the number of abortions.

Also potentially worrisome for Rubio in a general election are his views on drugs, gay marriage and Cuba.

Rubio opposes the recreational use of marijuana and has said he would enforce federal laws barring it, including in Colorado, a swing state where it is now legal.

Majorities of Republican and Democratic millennials favor legalization, polling shows.

He also opposes gay marriage, putting him at odds with a growing majority of Americans. And Rubio staunchly opposes Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba, another stance at odds with public opinion.

Still, Rubio’s youth, charisma and compelling biography clearly make him a potential threat to Democrats — which is one reason Clinton attacked him this past week. n

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NATION

The buzz about a bee comeback L EAH S OTTILE Corvallis, Ore. BY

O

n a recent morning in a bright green meadow, Devon and Landon Prescott were prying open beehives. They moved quickly among the 1,400 wooden boxes, eyeing each brood and locating its queen.

Landon, 19, spoke up after finding four hives without queens.

“That’s pretty bad,” said Devon, 21, peering over his brother’s shoulder to search the beecovered screen. A hive without a queen is probably doomed.

There was a crate of replacement queens in the truck, each housed in its own tiny wooden box. Each queen, specially ordered and shipped from warmweather climates, costs at least $20. Too many queenless hives could put young beekeepers like the Prescotts out of business.

Over the past decade, billions of bees have been lost to colony collapse disorder, an umbrella term for factors thought to be killing honeybees in droves and threatening the nation’s food supply. Beekeepers have been going to extraordinary lengths to save their bees and their livelihoods.

That effort may finally be paying off. New data from the Agriculture Department show the number of managed honeybee colonies is on the rise, climbing to 2.7 million nationally in 2014, the highest in 20 years.

Bees are still dying at unacceptable rates, especially in Florida, Oklahoma and several states bordering the Great Lakes, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a research collaborative supported by the USDA. Last month, Ohio State University’s Honey Bee Update noted that losses among the state’s beekeepers over the past winter were as high as 80 percent.

Oregon has taken less of a hit.

Researchers say innovative beekeepers will be critical to helping bees bounce back.

“People ask me, ‘The bees are going to be extinct soon?’ ” said Ramesh Sagili, of the Oregon State University Honey Bee Lab. “I’m not worried about bees being

LEAH NASH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

U.S. colonies are at a 20-year high thanks to some extraordinary measures taken by keepers extinct here. I’m worried about beekeepers being extinct.”

Beekeeping in America was already a graying industry when the rigors of colony collapse began to take their toll. A generation of backyard keepers and urban hobbyists — worried about the fate of bees — has sprung up in the face of the disorder, said Tim Tucker, a Kansas beekeeper who serves as president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

But “what’s not increasing are the commercial levels of beekeepers,” said Tucker, who estimates that the number of professionals on his membership list has plummeted by half since the mid-1990s.

That makes Devon Prescott something of an anomaly among the nation’s estimated 2,200 commercial pollinators: a young man.

He networks with other beekeepers on Facebook and Instagram and sees his work as an essential part of a global cause.

“I feel a social responsibility to provide good bees,” Prescott said.

“It makes me happy to look at the

part that I’m playing.”

Researchers think a variety of factors are responsible for colony collapse: monocultural farming practices, diseases and pesticides are suspected. Also, the tiny varroa mite, which sucks bee blood and leaves open wounds. The mite arrived in the United States in the late 1980s and “has changed the face of beekeeping,” Sagili said.

Bee death was not new to beekeepers. In their 2012 working paper, “Colony Collapse Disorder: The Market Response to Disaster,” agricultural economists Randal Rucker and Walter Thurman write that seasonal die-offs have always occurred, with beekeepers losing 14 percent of their colonies, on average, each winter.

But since colony collapse was first documented in 2006, the annual die-offs have been far more dramatic, forcing beekeepers to use increasingly creative techniques to keep their bees alive. One common tactic: restocking queenless hives with fresh queens. Another: splitting a

Henry Storch holds up a honeycomb full of feral bees in Corvallis, Ore. Storch conducts his own experiments to help save hives.

hive in two and starting a second hive with a new queen. Beekeepers also turn to packaged bees, which cost about $55 for 12,000 workers and a fertilized queen.

“Beekeepers know what to do,” Rucker said.

Research suggests that beekeepers are being at least partially compensated for that effort with higher honey prices and higher pollination fees. For California almonds, which require the pollination help of 1.6 million hives per year, beekeepers earn roughly $175 per hive.

Other crops pay significantly less, however. For example, blueberries, cherries and pears pay around $40 per hive in Oregon.

Henry Storch, 32, does it because he felt a calling to beekeeping. A farrier by trade, Storch said he could make more money shoeing horses. But five years ago, he became obsessed with the notion that he could build a better bee.

“I put some out in the middle of nowhere, and the bees were doing really good,” Storch said, popping open a hive with his bare hands.

He barely flinched as a bee stung him on the upper lip.

Storch’s mountain-bred “survivor” bees are like open-range cows: tough, hardened and less in need of close management. He compares the effort to growing organic, non-GMO food.

“I’m trying to create something with a certain set of traits that’s more resilient, that provides a solution to world problems.”

While Storch depends on almonds to stay in business, he always keeps some survivor bees in the mountains to make their “really rad honey.”

“Bee breeding has gotten really skewed toward almonds,” he said.

“That’s part of why I’m doing my own thing.”

Earlier this year, Storch separated five breeder queens from his survivor colonies and gave them to keepers in California.

Storch hopes the bees, bred deep in Oregon’s bear country, might just be a first step toward saving bees around the world. n Sottile is a freelance writer.

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On Martha’s Vineyard, money woes T OM R OWLEY Martha’s Vineyard BY

S

ummertime, and the living is pricey. Small hotels are charging 500 bucks a night — without breakfast — and tourists renting a car for a week will not get much change from $1,500.

Not that this troubles many visitors here, plenty of whom spend their days searching not for parking spaces but for yacht moorings.

That search has gotten tougher still now that POTUS is in town.

August is always busy, even without the retinue of aides and security staff that President Obama brought with him when he choppered in for his sixth presidential vacation on the island last weekend.

Add to that a hefty gaggle of White House correspondents, lining up for a spot in the presidential motorcade every day like sightseers on a particularly nerdy coach trip, and the place is heaving.

So these two August weeks mark the zenith of the island’s seasonal boom, when the population swells sixfold, according to figures kept by the Vineyard Gazette. It is also the point of greatest contrast between the tens of thousands of “summer people” and the far smaller, and often far poorer, population who live here year-round.

That gulf has been brought into even sharper focus this year by a Native American tribe’s proposal to build a casino here. The plan, which calls for bingo machines to be installed in the community center owned by the Wampanoag tribe of Gay Head, could generate $4.5 million a year for the tribe and, supporters say, help bridge the gap between rich and poor.

Many of those who spend their summers here oppose the development, arguing it would disturb the island’s tranquility. The state, and the town of Aquinnah, where about 300 Wampanoag members live, argued in a federal court hearing Wednesday that the tribe has no right to build the casino.

David Schulte is among the summer residents who oppose the plan. For the investment

PHILIP MARCELO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Backers say tribe’s casino plan would address disparities, but not all August regulars are happy banker, the whole appeal of the island lies in the total absence of the sort of neon lights that adorn a gambling parlor.

A gaudy temple to the pursuit of money would stand in marked contrast to the discretion that he believes defines the Vineyard, where visitors have long been reluctant to flaunt either their wealth or their celebrity status.

“The ethic here is: If you’ve got it, hide it,” Schulte said, recalling how Jackie Onassis used to walk around on her own and how Bill Clinton would join the line for ice cream.

Obama has maintained that low-key tradition. So far this year, he has largely remained within the secluded confines of his rental home, slipping out occasionally to dine with the first lady or play golf with Larry David.

It was much the same two summers ago when the Schultes rented their 7,000-square-foot residence to the first family.

Schulte was determined that his summer home, now on the market for $22.5 million, would be in top condition for the presi-

dent. “The king is coming so you want the house to be perfect,” he said.

But he stressed that only he was concerned about such impressions: The president made no demands.

Just a 10-minute drive from Schulte’s house, though, some members of the Wampanoag tribe believe the days when all summer visitors were relatively unobtrusive are long gone.

Kristina Hook, an elder, agrees that the island’s super-rich vacationers used to blend into the background. But no more, she said. She singled out “nouveau riche” visitors who ignore stop signs or complain when the tribe goes foraging for berries.

“Summer people — some are not,” Hook said, a rueful quip that captures her mixed impressions.

Hook’s home is much darker than Schulte’s, without the benefit of his floor-to-ceiling windows. It is 10 times smaller, too, but she still cherishes the place, because the island house where she grew up had no electricity until the 1950s.

The Wampanoag community center sat unfinished on Martha’s Vineyard last year. The tribe wants to turn the building into a casino. The proposal says that a casino with bingo machines could generate $4.5 million a year for the tribe.

She left the Vineyard in her teens when her father could no longer find work. She always dreamed of moving back but could never afford it.

Then, 15 years ago, she was offered one of 30 or so units of wooden tribal housing in Aquinnah. Little of the development on the island during the three decades she was gone seems to have benefited the tribe, she said.

She blames pollution from overpopulation for the dwindling haul of mussels and scallops when she wades into the island’s ocean-fed “ponds,” while the cost of living is so high that she imports toilet paper from the mainland. At 70, she still works a 40-hour week to support her husband, whose kidneys have failed.

When she does venture into the local store, she finds it troubling to hand over a “fistful of coupons” while others can “toss anything into the basket.” “I take it a little on the personal side,” she said.

This is why many members of the tribe believe a casino is the only way for their community to benefit from the summer influx.

In court documents, the tribe’s chairman, Tobias Vanderhoop, argues that the extra revenue is “sorely needed” and will boost local employment.

“We as a tribe do not benefit from the tourism industry at all,” said Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, chairwoman of the tribe’s gambling corporation. “We hope to be another entertainment venue for folks to visit so we, too, can capitalize on the industry that keeps the island economy going.”

But some tribe members, see things differently, siding — for once — with the very summer people they usually complain about.

Hook is among them. For her, the development would be a “travesty,” just as detrimental to the tribe’s commitment to nature as the damage inflicted by outsiders.

She argues the tribe should instead set up landscaping or cleaning businesses to cream a little income from the summer guests.

“I like to go to the casino,” Hook said. “Just not here.” n

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WORLD

Where China meets the Alps A NNA F IFIELD Changbaishan, China BY

T

hey call it the Switzerland of China. Switzerland would not be flattered by the comparison.

But in this area of northeastern China, at the base of a mountain called Changbaishan on this side and Paekdusan on the North Korean side, developers have built a European-style resort for China’s exploding middle class — complete with a town square with a clock tower, villas built to look like log cabins and gondolas that glide up the forest-covered hillsides.

Unlike Beijing, which just won its bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, the area has plenty of natural snow, and the powdery slopes are crammed with skiers in the winter, although the apres-ski fare involves spicy hotpot and karaoke rather than fondue and schnapps. In the summer, people come for the two 18-hole golf courses, one designed by Jack Nicklaus, and a break from the oppressive heat of the cities.

There’s even been talk here of holding another Chinese version of Davos, the annual Swiss Alps get-together of the movers and shakers among the world’s business and political leaders. (Dalian, China, already has one of its own.)

“We wanted to build a lifestyle destination for the new elite,” said Cao Yanan, a representative of Wanda, the Chinese real estate behemoth that developed and manages this resort town.

“New elite” here means whitecollar workers and businesspeople and their families. “These two groups overlap,” Cao said.

“The new elite wants to take their family on vacation.”

President Xi Jinping has talked about creating a “Chinese dream” — making China prosperous and powerful again. For a sizable chunk of the country’s 1.3 billion people, it is playing out a little like the American Dream — they’re working hard and seeing their standard of living rise sharply.

That manifests itself in more conspicuous consumerism, including leisure travel. An increas-

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

For a growing middle class, a mountain of adventure looks to keep nation’s tourists at home ing number of Chinese are heading abroad — generating lots of embarrassing stories about boiling instant noodles in hotel room kettles and trying to open airplane emergency doors — but domestic tourism is also skyrocketing.

It has grown by 10 percent a year for the past decade and now makes up about 4 percent of the economy, according to statistics from the China National Tourism Administration.

That might change if the Chinese economy comes off the boil too fast and the stock market continues its wild gyrations, but for now, Changbaishan serves as a totem for China’s transformation.

On one side is North Korea, where there is no infrastructure save a military camp and a few monuments.

The area is also popular with South Koreans. According to Korean myth, Paekdusan is the birth-

place of Dangun, the half-bear, half-god ancestor of all Koreans.

Because they can’t go up the North Korean side, they come here.

On the Chinese side are a bunch of stone-and-wood American hotels — think Westin, Sheraton, Holiday Inn — and the main street is home to a Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and KFC. There’s also the decidedly capitalist system that charges tourists for every step of the journey up Changbaishan.

The whole place feels about as real as Disneyland. It’s easier and cheaper to get to than Europe or Japan’s Hokkaido, and no visas are required.

Many of China’s cooler, mountainous areas — such as Tibet and Xinjiang, home to the Uighur population — are politically sensitive.

But this area, although it has a large minority population of ethnic Koreans and is on a border, is relatively calm. At an altitude of

Tourists line up for the journey to Heaven Lake at the top of Changbaishan, a mountain on the border with North Korea, where it is known as Paekdusan.

4,600 feet, its summer temperatures are in the mid-70s during the day, edging into light-sweater weather in the evening.

“This kind of vacation is an upgrade from the kinds of group tours that Chinese used to take all the time. The idea of coming here is to have a slow vacation,” said Cao, of Wanda. Visitors enjoy puttering around the resort on the free tandem bikes, walking by the lake (man-made, of course), or visiting the hot spring.

One visitor from Beijing, stepping off a gondola to look out over a green landscape under a bright blue sky, exclaimed: “Is this really China?”

Many visitors also make the journey up the mountain, about 12 miles from the resort, in a series of buses and death-defying van rides — a day trip that affords the meteorologically fortunate with a view of Heaven Lake in its crater.

“As people become more affluent and more sophisticated, and they’ve been to Paris, been to Hong Kong, they start to appreciate their own country more,” said Chris Koehler, vice president of China operations for Hyatt. For hotel companies, places like this offer the allure of a new market.

“It’s off the beaten track, but as Chinese have become more adventurous travelers, that’s something we feel they will seek out,” he said.

The idea of a “slow vacation” appealed to Song Jingju, a 33year-old manager from Beijing who was hanging out in the central plaza with her two sons and nanny on a recent balmy evening.

“Working life in Beijing is really fast, and we’re mentally exhausted, so we wanted to come here and relax and walk around in the fresh air a bit,” Song said as the nanny chased around her youngest boy.

“It’s so hot in Beijing right now, and the children have summer vacation, so we decided to come here for four days.”

That morning, they had gone up Changbaishan and, thanks to a break in the clouds, seen the famously reclusive lake. Just like the Alps, almost — Switzerland with Chinese characteristics. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Mexico’s surprising economic flop

BY J OSHUA P ARTLOW AND G ABRIELA M ARTINEZ

L

argely lost amid the frantic scramble after drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s dramatic prison escape, one of the biggest leaps of faith for the Mexican economy landed with a flop.

At the first auction last month to sell the rights to drill for oil in Mexico — as the country opens its oil industry to foreign investment for the first time in eight decades — the government sold just two of its 14 blocks. The disappointing showing for President Enrique Peña Nieto’s signature economic reform prompted the government to modify the terms of the contracts for next month’s auction and added to what has been a noticeable string of bad news for Latin America’s second-largest economy.

Mexico has been held up as one of the economic bright spots among emerging market economies, as Peña Nieto’s government has pushed through constitutional overhauls aimed at making major industries such as oil and telecommunications more competitive. But in recent months, Mexican newspapers have kept running banner headlines of economic gloom: The value of the peso has plummeted to record lows against the dollar, growth rates have shrunk to dwarfish size, and the only things that seem to be getting bigger are the poverty rate and the gap between rich and poor.

“With all this financial volatility we have seen with the peso, the failure of the round-one [oil] contracts and low growth, the economy continues to suffer from the chronic anemia of the past,” said Alfredo Coutiño, director for Latin America at Moody’s Analytics.

He added: “I do not see Mexico growing as the government expected at the beginning of this administration.”

Peña Nieto’s strategists had predicted that the structural changes in the oil and telecom industries would produce growth rates of 5 to 6 percent, but expectations keep dropping. While preparing this year’s budget, the government pre-

JONATHAN LEVINSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Bad press, a falling peso and an oil rights auction disaster combine to make one gloomy summer dicted growth rates of 3.7 percent, although so far this year growth has hobbled along at 1.6 percent.

That has taken a political toll. A poll in the Reforma newspaper found Peña Nieto’s approval rating had fallen to 34 percent, down from 39 percent in March, reaching the lowest point since he took office in December 2012. (It didn’t help morale that Guzmán, the world’s most notorious drug lord, was able to tunnel out of a maximum security facility.)

“We have an economy that practically has not grown in two-anda-half years,” said Jonathan Heath, an economics professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “And that has bothered a lot of people, because the government promised that we were going to grow.”

Economists say that part of the drag on the economy has been the low world price for oil, which has sapped revenue for the oil-producing country and dampened the initial enthusiasm from investors that they could reap big rewards by drilling in the newly accessible waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That has made for a sluggish start to the

How many Mexican pesos equal one U.S. dollar

historic opening of the industry, which the government touted as a saving grace. Although reforms may have contributed to lower electricity and telecom prices, and kept inflation low, their other growth-producing benefits have yet to materialize.

“To think that oil reform was the great solution to this country, that was wrong,” said Gerardo Esquivel, an economics professor at the College of Mexico in Mexico City.

“It’s a sector that employs less than 1 percent of Mexican workers.”

The peso has also been troubling. Mexico is not alone with its

While the falling peso is a boon for foreign tourists such as these in a hotel pool in Acapulco, it is problematic for Mexican citizens struggling to keep up as the country’s poverty rate grows.

The currency has fallen to record lows against the dollar, sparking memories of the 1994 crisis.

currency problems. World economic uncertainty, notably exemplified by the crisis in Greece, has boosted the U.S. dollar against many emerging market currencies.

But Mexico has painful memories of a peso crisis in 1994, which led to hyper-inflation and capital flight, and today’s devaluing currency has caused concern and skittishness in the financial markets.

Compared with the middle of last year, when the peso was trading at about 13 to the dollar, it has now surpassed 16. For Mexican exporters, or for American tourists who want discount Mexican beach vacations, this can be a good thing.

Mexico’s tourism secretary said that in the first five months of the year, foreign visitors to Mexico have risen 7 percent over the same period in 2014.

Economists said they don’t expect a similar crisis to what was seen in the past. They note that the Mexican government has little debt right now and is in a more stable position.

“We all remember the catastrophic devaluation of ’95,” said Armando Sanchez Vargas, an economic researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “But the conditions aren’t the same now.”

Slow growth has been a problem around Latin America. The region averaged just 1.3 percent growth in gross domestic product last year, and that is projected to be even lower this year.

Also troubling is the increase in poverty and inequality in Mexico.

A recent biannual report from government agency Coneval found that the country’s poverty rate — set at $158 per month — reached 46.2 percent of the population last year, an increase from 45.5 percent in 2012. Esquivel noted that poverty rates, including extreme poverty, are similar to those of the early 1990s, before the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Over two decades, we have not been capable of reducing poverty,” he said. “We continue to be a country where the economy grows little, and that little amount of growth is not distributed in an equal way.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

Digging in, despite obstacles

BY JOSHUA PARTLOW AND JULIA SYMMES COBB in Muzo, Colombia

T A miner walks inside an emerald mine owned by Minería Texas Colombia, a U.S. company, in July in Colombia.

Photograph by DANIA MAXWELL For The Washington Post

he chopper touched down on the hillside helipad and Charles Burgess, a cigar­chomping former U.S. government employee, stepped out to survey the full sweep of his Andean domain. ¶ Since before the conquistadors, men have dug for emeralds in the soil of this steep­ walled jungle valley. The gemstone bounty found here fueled the empire of Victor Carranza, the feared billionaire “emerald czar” who vanquished his rivals in bloody battles that left some 6,000 dead. Now all that Burgess could see — from the green peaks where the vultures circled to the valley floor where grimy campesinos shoveled dirt in the black river — belongs to his American mining company, which has taken control of the world’s largest and most valuable emerald mine. ¶ “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Burgess said. ¶ By purchasing Carranza’s share of the mine two years ago, the Houston­based company, Minería Texas Colombia, known as MTC, is now the only foreign mining company in the treacherous world of Colombia’s emerald trade — once responsible for about two­thirds of the world supply. As the Americans try to reverse declining gemstone production, they also intend to revamp a feudal system of peasants and patrons by paying salaries and benefits and using modern machinery. In that way, the company’s goals mirror those of the country, whose half­century conflict with leftist rebels is nearing a negotiated peace.¶ But as MTC has bucked local customs, and without Carranza to protect them, some residents and rivals have begun to revolt. On two occasions, armed villagers have seized the company’s mine shafts. Riot police and soldiers fought to control the crowds, but four people have died in the disturbances. Burgess has received threats that his enemies will seize his barbed­wire encampment, blow it up and make off with the emerald vault. ¶ “It’s tough being the only foreigner out here,” he said. continues on next page

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

The region is world famous for its emeralds, considered the highest quality on Earth. from previous page

A VIOLENT HISTORY As the helicopter flies, Muzo is a short 60-mile hop north of Bogota, but by road it seems to lead back in time, a seven-hour bumping journey along cliffside switchbacks into a lost green world. The region is rich in coal and iron but it is world famous for its emeralds, considered the highest quality on Earth. From open pits and dank shafts, miners have pulled out stones so precious they have names, such as Fura, at 15,000 carats one of the world’s biggest, named for a mythical unfaithful king whose wife’s tears turned to emeralds. A smaller but brighter gem named after the wife, Tena, is one of the most valuable, and was once owned by the Russian empress Catherine the Great.

Independent emerald mine laborer Efrain Sanchez displays an uncut emerald he found sorting through the dirt and rubble tossed out

by MTC. Around Muzo, people speak of the stones in superstitious ways.

“An emerald is an enigma. She’s a very jealous rock,” said Efrain Sanchez, a 63-yearold miner who has been searching for them for four decades. “To find her, you have to have enormous faith.”

In Colombia’s recent history, Carranza was the leader of the faithful. A child miner from an impoverished family, he rose to control nearly half of Colombia’s emerald business and become one of its largest landowners and wealthiest men. Carranza fought off Medellin drug traffickers who wanted to use the emerald mines to launder drug profits and used his private army of some 2,000 people to attack leftist guerrillas. He survived at least two assassination attempts as he consolidated power.

During the bloodiest years of the 1980s, known as the “Green War,” feuds between families grew into wars between villages.

Accusations of killings and kidnappings mounted, as well as suspicions that Carranza was running his own drug operation. State Department cables and reports referred to him as a “big-time narco” who was “involved in illegal financial activity.” Arrested in 1998 for forming right-wing death squads, Carranza spent three years in jail but the charges were eventually dropped and he was freed.

“You couldn’t stand in this spot during the war,” said Sanchez, as he shoveled in the riverbed under the MTC mine. “I carried two pistols in my belt. Everywhere there were drug-traffickers, spies for the army. They’d kill anyone just on suspicion. It was everyone against everyone.”

In that environment, Carranza was both

PHOTOS BY DANIA MAXWELL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

protector and frightening overlord. His hilltop estate, across the valley from MTC’s headquarters, has tennis courts, a Turkish bath and a giant emerald safe. He had many enemies — his cook would test his favorite breakfast rib soup for poison — but even more supplicants.

Next to his helipad was a low stone bench known as the “Wall of Laments,” where he would sit to hear the entreaties of his subjects.

“He was the irreplaceable man,” said Wilson Murcia, a mining engineer who worked for Carranza. “When he was alive, you wouldn’t have the type of problems like you have today in the region. Who could say no to Victor Carranza?”

MODERNIZING THE OPERATION “I knew Carranza quite well,” Burgess said from the back seat of his McDonnell Douglas helicopter, flying toward the mine.

Burgess had spent his career in U.S. embassies in Latin America in the 1980s and ’90s, with stints in Mexico and Colombia as well as at the U.S. interests section in Cuba, before retiring in 2009. The archbishop who officiated at his wedding to a Colombian woman happened to be the same one who negotiated

José Vicente Ico drops a rock while digging through mined rubble. Many villagers look for missed emeralds in the dirt dumped by the company.

the 1990 peace agreement that ended Carranza’s Green War and introduced him to people in the emerald business.

By the time Burgess met him, Carranza was worried about flagging emerald production.

With little investment and surface emeralds getting harder to find, Colombia’s production had dropped from a world-leading 9 million carats in 2004 down to 2.6 million a decade later, losing ground to Zambia and Brazil.

Carranza was looking for foreign investment to modernize the industry.

“He realized the old way of doing things had to change,” Burgess said.

Burgess had no mining experience. But he passed Carranza’s message on to private equity people he knew “and then found myself, much to my surprise, helping to set up and run an emerald mining company.” Burgess declined to name the owners or investors behind MTC, besides saying some of them were Americans.

In 2009, the company started operating Carranza’s Muzo mine.

Since then, the company has sought to graft a modern corporate approach onto an outlaw industry. Miners used to work for food and

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2015

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

MTC has sought to graft a modern corporate approach onto an outlaw industry.

whatever emeralds they could steal, but the company, which has become the state’s second-largest employer, pays its roughly 600 mine workers at least $420 a month, about twice the national minimum wage, plus health insurance and other benefits. Industrial machinery is replacing picks and shovels. The company is digging a ramp that, when finished, will spiral into the mountain for nearly two miles, down to a depth of 1,300 feet, big enough that emeralds can be driven out by four-wheelers rather than loaded into cumbersome handcarts, as in the older shafts. And in an industry where pocketing a few stones was customary, the Americans have brought stricter vigilance: Behind miners operating hydraulic jackhammers, another employee films the work to prevent theft.

“We are the pioneers in changing this and we’re pretty proud of it,” Burgess said. “We’re opening up the whole region to the outside world.”

MTC has won praise from some inside and outside the industry for its reforms.

The Americans “bring order to the mineral extraction,” said Archbishop Hector Luis Pabon, one of the Catholic Church leaders who

worked to bring peace to the region. “They will pay the miners fairly, they will take care of things, and they will educate people so their salaries are not spent only on beer.”

Top: MTC pays its 600 mine workers at least $420 a month, about twice the national minimum wage, plus health and other benefits.

Above: Charles Burgess, MTC director.

TROUBLE WITH LOCALS Under the protective shield of Carranza and his security guards, the company faced little resistance. But since 2013, when Carranza died of lung cancer and MTC purchased the mining rights, trouble for the Americans has mounted.

From one side, villagers who mine the area informally feel the company is cutting off access to what has been theirs for generations.

In Carranza’s day, the mountains of dirt excavated from the mines would be dumped in the riverbed so people could pick it over for emeralds missed by the company. The practice helped keep the peace among communities who lived in the bleakest poverty, and thousands would line the river banks on dirt dumping days. But residents say MTC filters out more emeralds, leaving them fewer scraps.

“Every day they’re strangling us more,” said Inocencio Nuñez, one of a few dozen men shoveling through MTC’s castoff soil on a recent day. “They’re throwing out dirt that has

no value. They wash it one, two, three times.

There’s a lot for this company and nothing for the people.”

Videos of MTC trucks dumping remnants show a seething crowd of residents jostling to grab a few handfuls to sift through.

Carranza’s old enemies, including henchmen of a former Medellin drug ally of Pablo Escobar, have also taken aim at the Americans.

In September 2013, allegedly incited by these gangsters, more than 2,000 people poured over a hillside, ignoring police, and began digging dozens of tunnels on MTC land.

When some of them collapsed, three people were killed and about 10 more injured.

“The other illegal miners just stepped over the dead bodies and went on digging,” Burgess said.

Burgess was sleeping at the mine after midnight on May 13 when gunmen blasted off the steel access doors of a tunnel across the valley and began firing inside at company miners on the night shift. Forced to flee by police gunfire, the men came back in force the next night. A mob of some 2,500 people, in thrall to rumors of fresh emeralds, crowded the dirt road and forced their way into the tunnel.

Burgess said one local gangster, the nephew of an extradited drug trafficker, brought 500 lunches to try to entice villagers to stay and keep digging.

MTC workers were beaten and its ambulance battered by rocks. Riot police sprayed tear gas down the tunnel to disperse the crowd. MTC exploded dynamite to collapse its own tunnel. After the blast, 15 people sneaked in through a side tunnel trying to get at the emeralds.

“The first one in was overcome by the toxic fumes from the explosives and died,” Burgess said. “We had to haul the other 14 out and give them oxygen. After this, the government issued orders to the police and army to immediately end the invasion and this was done, fortunately without more violence.”

Villagers see no end to the conflict.

“The poorer we are here,” said Jose Evelio, who lives near the invaded mine shaft, “the more people will force themselves into the mine.”

Other foreign companies, such as the British mining firm Gemfields, are considering following MTC’s lead and entering the Colombian emerald industry. But the American company’s experience has shown that poverty and organized crime are still daunting obstacles in this jungle treasure hunt.

“How could people be happy?” one Muzo resident asked. “They’re putting tons of emeralds on a helicopter and flying it all away.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BY

HEALTH

P ETER W HORISKEY

R

esearchers at a New York City hospital several years ago conducted a test of the widely accepted notion that skipping breakfast can make you fat.

For some nutritionists, this idea is an article of faith. Indeed, it is enshrinedintheU.S.DietaryGuidelines, the federal government’s advice book, which recommends having breakfast every day because “not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight.”

As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated.

At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was . . . the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change.

“In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from Columbia University concluded in a paper published last year.

A closer look at the way that government nutritionists adopted the breakfast warning for the Dietary Guidelines shows how loose scientific guesses — possibly right, possibly wrong — can be elevated into hard-and-fast federal nutrition rules.

This year, as the Dietary Guidelines are being updated, the credibility of its nutritional commandments has been called into question by a series of scientific disputes. Its advisory committee called for dropping the long-standing warning about dietary cholesterol, which had plagued the egg industry; prominent studies contradicted the government warnings about the dangers of salt; and the government’s longtime condemnation of foods rich in saturated fats seems simplistic, according to critics, given the ever more intricate understanding of the nutrition in fatty foods.

The Dietary Guidelines are important because they shape the contents of school lunches and oth-

Eat breakfast to lose weight?

Well ...

ISTOCKPHOTO

er federally subsidized programs, and because amid widespread obesity, so many people look to them for sound eating advice.

The notion that skipping breakfast might cause weight gain entered the Dietary Guidelines in 2010, during one of the reviews conducted every five years by experts to update its findings.

In preparation, a governmentconvened panel known as the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee collected research on skipping breakfast. Some of it did, indeed, suggest that breakfast skippers may be more likely to gain weight.

One of the key pieces of evidence, for example, examined the records for 20,000 male health professionals. Researchers followed the group for 10 years and published results in 2007 in the journal Obesity. They showed that after adjusting for age and other factors, the men who ate breakfast were 13 percent less likely to have had a significant weight gain.

“Our study suggests that the consumption of breakfast may modestly lower the risk of weight gain in middle-aged and older men,” the researchers said.

The advisory committee cited this and similar research, known as “observational studies,” in support of the notion that skipping breakfast might cause weight

gain. In “observational studies,” subjects are merely observed, not assigned randomly to “treatment” and “control” groups as in a traditional experiment.

Observational studies in nutrition are generally cheaper and easier to conduct. But they can suffer from weaknesses that can lead scientists astray.

One of the primary troubles in observational studies is what scientists refer to as “confounders” — basically, unaccounted factors that can lead researchers to make mistaken assumptions about causes. For example, suppose breakfast skippers have a personality trait that makes them more likely to gain weight than breakfast eaters. If that’s the case, it may look as if skipping breakfast causes weight gain even though the cause is the personality trait.

In analyzing the results of observational studies, scientists make statistical adjustments to adjust for the potential confounding factors that they can measure. Breakfast skippers in the health professionals study, for example, tended to drink more, smoke more and exercise less. The scientists adjusted their statistics accordingly. But the adjustments are imprecise, and there is no guarantee that the groups are not different in some other unmeasured way.

Relying on observational stud-

A longheld belief featured in federal dietary guidelines has been put under scrutiny by scientists

ies has drawn fierce criticism from many in the field, particularly statisticians.

Because of the weaknesses in observational studies, many scientists prefer true experiments, or randomized controlled trials.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines committee did cite one randomized controlled trial on the question of breakfast. That experiment “found no relationship with breakfast alone” and weight gain, a committee summary said.

But the committee looked beyond that trial and gave weight to several observational studies.

“Modest evidence suggests that children who do not eat breakfast are at increased risk of overweight and obesity,” the advisory committee said. “The evidence is stronger for adolescents.” As for adults, the evidence was described as “inconsistent.”

It was hardly a ringing endorsement of what might be called the breakfast hypothesis, but it was enough to get the federal agencies who write the guidelines — the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services — to buy in. The breakfast recommendation and the link to obesity became part of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, under its advice for losing weight.

“Eat a nutrient-dense breakfast,” it said. “Not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight, especially among children and adolescents. Consuming breakfast also has been associated with weight loss and weight loss maintenance.”

Linda Van Horn, a professor of nutrition and preventive medicine at Northwestern University, was chair of the 2010 advisory committee. She explained in an e-mail that the amount of evidence available at the time was “limited” and that more research has been conducted in the intervening five years.

When in the coming months the government unveils the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, it is unclear whether the advice on breakfast and weight gain will be included.

“I just don’t think it surfaced as a priority question,” said Barbara Millen, chair of the 2015 advisory committee. “The sentiment was we don’t have to say anything further about it. We didn’t want to focus on a laundry list of foods and meals. We were focusing on overall dietary patterns.” n

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17

BUSINESS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Men lean in to push gender equality BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

L

ast year, students at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate business school, started a new campus club focused on gender equality. They called it The 22s, after the percentage gap that still persists between men’s and women’s pay on the job. Since its founding last year, the club has hosted discussions about discrimination, screened a film about gender issues and conducted surveys that examine attitudes about equality.

And its founders and membership base are made up entirely of men.

“One of the key ideas behind the group was we wanted to dispel the notion that gender equality is a women’s issue,” said Simran Singh, who graduated from Wharton this year and now works as a senior product manager for VMWare. “We wanted to show that it’s a universal issue.”

The new club at Wharton is just one of a number of ways that men who attend top-flight business schools are getting more involved in supporting gender equality. The efforts reflect both the growing importance of the topic among the next generation of business leaders and the current reality that most of those climbing the top rungs of the corporate ladder are still men. Only about 38 percent of MBA students in North America are women.

Business schools have been increasingly trying to address such gender discrepancies by boosting their numbers and rethinking the tone of their programs. Just last week, the heads of 40 business schools sat down at the White House to discuss gender-equality issues in the workplace. Other efforts include things like recruiting more female faculty members, offering assertiveness coaching for female students and adding more case studies featuring women to the curriculum.

Yet what’s interesting is that it seems to be the schools’ maledominated student cohorts, as much as their academic administrators, who are pushing for the change.

FROM EMMA WATSON’S WEB SITE HEFORSHE.ORG

In 2013, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business launched a “Male Ambassador Program” as part of its women’s association. That same year, Harvard Business School’s Women Students Association began a similarly named “Manbassadors” program, spurred by male students’ interest in getting involved.

At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a group called WIMmen was formed a year ago as an arm of the school’s Women in Management club. Its founder, student Jeff Barnes, says, “There was a lot of interest in this topic but not necessarily a structured avenue for men and women to have conversations about gender issues. We’ll make a lot more progress on this if we have both genders sharing their perspectives in the room.”

The clubs and programs have begun, of course, amid a national conversation about gender in the workplace that has been spotlighting the role men can play to aid women’s careers. “Lean In” author and Facebook chief operating offi-

cer Sheryl Sandberg has written frequently about the importance men have — both at work and at home — in helping women get ahead. Actress Emma Watson also gave a powerful speech that went viral last year about why men should get involved in women’s rights, launching the HeforShe campaign.

Meanwhile, more and more companies are involving men in their corporate women’s initiatives or granting them longer paternity leave to share the work at home. That’s essential for promoting real change, says Susan Adams, a professor at Bentley University who studies gender equality. “Most organizations were built by men, and are still by and large run by men,” she said. “They’re going to change quicker when men are part of this movement.”

Figuring out the best way for men to help tackle, or even talk about, gender equality issues has proved somewhat delicate, however. Harvard Business School’s efforts, for example, were scruti-

At several business schools, all-male clubs are trying to figure out how they can better support women

nized in a front page story in the New York Times that caused some controversy, even while showing how much the school was trying to effect change.

At Wharton, The 22s began after male students encouraged the school’s women’s group to host a roundtable discussion about ways that men could get more involved.

About 20 men showed up, and after a couple hours of discussion, they decided to form their own club — one that would co-sponsor events with the women’s club but also host some of their own, in order to let men speak openly.

“It was really important to create these spaces where guys could feel like they weren’t being judged or criticized,” said Rena FriedChung, who was co-president of the Wharton Women in Business club last year. “It can be really hard to talk about these issues without feeling like they’re saying something wrong.”

Several of the men leading these campus clubs noted that part of their interest in getting involved was because they had working moms. “In part it’s an abstract sense of what I think is right, but also personal experience of seeing the impact our current system has,” said Laszlo Syrop, the current president of The 22s, who attributes his involvement in gender-equality efforts to seeing what his mother and other women in his life have faced.

Meanwhile, Barnes, who started the men’s group at Stanford, has had an particularly up-close view of the challenges female leaders face. His mother is Brenda Barnes, the former president and chief executive of PepsiCo North America, who famously stepped down from her job to spend more time with her family when Jeff was 11, becoming a poster woman for the debate over whether women could really have it all.

And yet to Barnes as he was growing up, “she was just an executive, it was all very natural,” he said of his high-powered mother.

“I don’t think I really appreciated the struggles women face in the workplace until I got into it myself.” n

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BOOKS

Carried through life on a wave WILLIAM FINNEGAN IN THE WATER AT CLOUDBREAK, FIJI, IN 2005; PHOTO BY SCOTT WINER

N ON-FICTION

I BARBARIAN DAYS A Surfing Life

By William Finnegan Penguin Press. 447 pp. $27.95

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REVIEWED BY

J OHN L ANCASTER

n March of last year, the New Yorker writer William Finnegan nearly drowned while surfing off the west coast of Oahu. A giant wave buried him under an avalanche of whitewater, holding him down for so long that he ran out of oxygen.

Finnegan finally surfaced, gulping air and thinking of his young daughter back home in New York.

He berated himself for his recklessness and vowed then and there that he would never again take such a foolish risk.

Finnegan recounts this harrowing near-death experience — “my little fiasco” — near the end of “Barbarian Days,” his terrific new memoir, which chronicles his halfcentury obsession with the sport that has shaped his life and, on occasion, nearly ended it. But just as surfing has always been more than a form of recreation (some call it a religion), so “Barbarian Days” transcends its putative subject. Elegantly written and structured, it’s a riveting adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, and a restless, searching meditation on love, friendship and family.

Finnegan’s waterlogged epiphany off Oahu is typical of the spirit of

the book, its interweaving of life and waves.

Which is appropriate, because in Finnegan’s case the two are hard to separate. One of four children from a liberal Catholic household, he fell for the sport, hard, while growing up in California and Hawaii in the 1960s and has never managed to shake the addiction.

As a young man, he embraced the life of an itinerant surfer, wandering the far Pacific with little more than his surfboard and a clutch of old nautical charts to guide his quest. Eventually he fetched up in apartheid-era South Africa, where he got a job teaching in a “colored” high school. That experience led to a book, but even as his writing career took off, he continued to feed his habit with extended surfing trips — to Fiji and the Portuguese island of Madeira, among other places — that make one marvel at the forbearance of his New Yorker editors, to say nothing of his long-suffering wife.

A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport — its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes — in a way that should

resonate with surfers and nonsurfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world’s most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful. “Approaching waves were like optical illusions,” he writes of a spectacular, unmapped break off Tavarua, a tiny, uninhabited island in Fiji. “You could look straight through them, at the sky and sea and sea bottom behind them. And when I caught one and stood up, it disappeared. I was flying down the line but all I could see was brilliant reef streaming under my feet. It was like surfing on air.”

Finnegan displays an honesty that is evident throughout the book, parts of which have a searing, unvarnished intensity that reminded me of “Stop Time,” the classic coming-of-age memoir by Frank Conroy — or in one case, “Lord of the Flies.” That would be the scene in which Finnegan, struggling to find his way in a tough, ethnically mixed middle school in Honolulu, joins in the beating of a hapless, unusually tall classmate, cruelly nicknamed Lurch. It took him far too long, he writes, before he recognized the nature of this “disgusting crime.”

If “Barbarian Days” is partly about growing up, it’s also about growing old. Now in his early 60s, Finnegan sometimes struggles with takeoffs — “I missed waves I should have caught, lumbered to my feet when I should have sprung” — and his arms, which once seemed impervious to fatigue, now go limp after a few hours of hard paddling.

But he soldiers on, sometimes in icy winter swells off Long Island and New Jersey, sometimes in the same tropical waves he discovered in his youth. Of course, they’ve changed, too. When Finnegan first surfed the reef break at Tavarua, the number of surfers who even knew about it could be counted on two hands. But the island eventually was taken over by a private resort, which restricted access to its breaks to paying guests.

Though dismayed by this privatization of surf, Finnegan went back to Tavarua multiple times. He couldn’t help himself — the waves were too good. He “didn’t want this to end.” And neither, by the end of this fine book, do we. n Lancaster is a former Washington Post reporter and a longtime surfer.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A barrage of fun — and profanity

Celebrating pluck, spirit in baseball

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

“T

P ATRICK A NDERSON

he Redeemers” is the fifth novel in Ace Atkins’s series about Quinn Colson, a U.S. Army Ranger turned Mississippi crime-fighter. It’s a fast-moving portrait of a formidable hero doing battle with an all-too-believable onslaught of corruption, violence and rampant ignorance.

Earlier in the series, after 10 years serving in Afghanistan, Colson returned home to Jericho and was elected sheriff. As this book opens, he has been defeated for reelection by the machinations of his archenemy, Johnny Stagg, a local politician who owns the town’s gambling house and brothel. Colson also faces personal problems. Not only is his sister a heroin addict but he’s also trying to sort things out with his high school sweetheart, who has left her husband so they can be together.

More problems ensue when two numbskulls decide to rob the home of a businessman who reputedly keeps a million dollars in cash in his safe. Not knowing how to open a safe, they recruit an Alabama safe-cracker, a sex-crazed sleazebag who is assisted by his 19-year-old nephew, who’s just dumb enough to be dangerous.

The misadventures of these four foul-mouthed fools provide high comedy, even after they start killing one another over the money. Then Colson learns that the stolen safe contained proof of illegal deals carried out by the businessman, Stagg and corrupt members of the stage legislature. People will kill for these documents.

That fact leads to a brilliant climax in which Colson, badly wounded, must summon his military skills to save himself and his sister from hired killers who pursue them through a frozen forest. It’s adventure writing of a high order.

So what’s my beef with a novel so richly packed with colorful characters and expert writing? Let me digress. Just after World War II, when Norman Mailer was at work on “The Naked and the

Dead,” he had to invent a threeletter word — “fug” — to use in place of the four-letter word that real soldiers used but that his publisher wouldn’t print. Today, of course, anything goes. That’s the problem: This novel goes bonkers with regard to profanity.

I tried to ignore the barrage, but on Page 227, when Atkins used what I will delicately call the s-word seven times and the f-word three times, I started circling those and related words. By Page 281, I had noted 82 uses of the s-word and 48 of the f-word. I stopped counting there, but at that rate, the entire book would approach a thousand uses of those two words, and that’s not including many other terms, including various terms for female anatomy.

Atkins would probably justify this on the grounds of realism — that his characters are ignorant lowlifes who simply reflect the way countless others across the country speak. And that’s true.

Still, although realism is generally a virtue in fiction, it can be overdone. Profanity can be amusing or dramatic or, on rare occasions, poetic, but used this obsessively, it simply becomes a distraction.

I wish Atkins had given us less trash talk and more welcome glimpses of the South he knows so well. For example, he has Colson’s mother serving black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck, a custom I had almost forgotten. He has one of the nitwits who stole the safe say plaintively of an ex-girlfriend, “I think she’s dating the [curse word] meat manager at the Piggly Wiggly. Said I never took her nowhere.” And when Colson plays his radio, he hears not only the predictable voices of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash but lessremembered songs by Ferlin Husky and Mel Tillis. Ferlin and Mel. I knew those boys in Nashville, a long time ago, and it’s good to think back on them. n Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for Book World.

B THE REDEEMERS

By Ace Atkins Putnam. 370 pp. $26.95

INTANGIBALL The Subtle Things That Win Baseball Games

By Lonnie Wheeler Simon & Schuster.

271 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

aseball writer Lonnie Wheeler isn’t opposed to sabermetrics, the application of sophisticated (and often recondite) statistics to professional baseball. But he does object to a habit that stathounds sometimes fall into: disregarding the sport’s old-fashioned virtues.

Thus, he opens his entertainingly garrulous book “Intangiball” by celebrating the Philadelphia Phillies’ 2008 World Series win over the Tampa Bay Rays as a demonstration that “pluck, soundness, and winning spirit had, at last, in this advanced and exhaustively quantified stage of the sport’s evolution, been acknowledged, even embraced, as strategically vital. The day . . . had been won by the respectful, enthusiastic observance of the socalled little things.” One of the little things the Phillies had going for them was the mentorship of pitcher Jamie Moyer, whose long career made him a baseball Yoda.

As explained by sportswriter Jayson Stark: “If you watch a Phillies game — any Phillies game — we can almost guarantee that sooner or later, the TV cameras will zero in on the Phillies’ dugout. And somebody will be locked in deep conversation with Jamie Moyer. . . . Moyer draws teammates to him like a giant magnetic force — to watch and listen.”

Baseball’s 162-game march toward the playoffs doesn’t take just a physical toll; it also tries men’s souls. A team needs a jester or two, and Wheeler singles out “wacky-dancing, injured closer” Brian Wilson for keeping the San Francisco Giants loose during the 2012 playoffs.

Harking back to one of baseball’s pivotal moments, Wheeler notes that “sabermetrics would have been of little use to [Brooklyn Dodgers general manager] Branch Rickey when he set out to integrate professional baseball.

The numbers would not have led him to Jackie Robinson.” Other

Negro League players outranked Robinson on paper, but they lacked his “conquering spirit.”

Robinson’s success as baseball’s desegregator became, Wheeler concludes, “a case study in subjective scouting.”

Wheeler also lauds players who can best be described as “putting the team before” themselves, the Phillies’ Chase Utley being a case in point.

Wheeler hails from Ohio, so it’s understandable that he would turn to the Cincinnati Reds for many of his examples and anecdotes. At times, however, the emphasis on Cincinnati seems misplaced. Well-constructed as their teams may be (this year excepted) by their canny general manager, Walt Jocketty, the Reds fail at the big thing. As Wheeler himself admits, “Cincinnati still hasn’t won a postseason series since 1990.” Wheeler probably should have hung out more with franchises that tend to flourish year after year, such as the Giants, the Red Sox or the Cardinals.

My other misgiving about what, on the whole, is a most enjoyable book is that it doesn’t go far enough. Those “little things” come up so often that their downside ought to be examined more closely. Wheeler quotes a Reds official as saying: “We’re seeing the game go through a renaissance right now.

[A] premium is going to be placed on speed, on range and on doing all the little skills that were so important in baseball until all of a sudden, you started seeing 70 home runs and guys getting on base and waiting for bombs.” Yet we’re also seeing something else: Baseball slowly slipping into the same category as grand opera — spectacles that appeal, by and large, to an older audience. Could the new love affair with “the little skills” be making it harder to replenish baseball’s fan base? n Drabelle is a contributing editor of Book World.

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OPINIONS

Don’t make it harder to punish campus rapists JILL FILIPOVIC is a journalist and lawyer in New York.

It might be time for sorority women to call it quits on the “sisterhood.”

A bill was introduced in Congress last month that would bar colleges and universities from punishing alleged sexual assailants unless victims of sexual violence report the assault to police. Anti­violence advocates, trauma experts, women’s groups and higher­education organizations are in almost near­universal agreement: It’s an awful idea, putting up cruel and unnecessary barriers for assault survivors. But pan­Hellenic organizations, which represent both fraternities and sororities, support it — even though men accused of assault are the only real beneficiaries.

“This bill is absurd,” says Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women’s Law Center. “It would make campuses less safe. It would mean that fewer students make reports to their schools at all, because why would you, if you knew that there was this range of additional hurdles?”

The Safe Campus Act, sponsored by three House Republicans, dictates to an unprecedented degree how colleges and universities must handle disciplinary proceedings.

All allegations of sexual assault must be reported to police, unless the victim provides a written statement that he or she does not want to report; if she doesn’t report, the school cannot carry out any sort of investigatory or disciplinary proceedings against her alleged assailant. That’s a big step back from the status quo, where students can choose to report their assaults to their school, to law enforcement or to both, giving them a variety of options — something experts say is crucial for survivors of violence.

“The traumatizing nature of sexual assault is that sense of powerlessness that the victim experiences,” says Liz Roberts, deputy chief executive of Safe Horizon, the largest victims’

services organization in the United States. “Our work is focused on restoring that sense of power and putting the survivor in the driver’s seat as much as possible. Any policy that takes away choice and options from victims has the potential to do real harm.”

This bill would take away choice and options from both victims and educational institutions. Unless a student reports an assault to police, schools couldn’t even make basic accommodations so that, for example, the alleged victim wouldn’t have to share a classroom or dorm hall with an alleged perpetrator. It also would take away schools’ power to suspend student organizations — such as fraternities — that the administration knows to be causing problems, unless the organizations present a “significant risk to the health and physical safety of campus community members.” Frats couldn’t be suspended as punishment for bad behavior.

And the bill specifically says that adhering to it couldn’t be construed to violate Title IX, the law that ensures women access to education. Under current law, Title IX may be violated if schools

ISTOCKPHOTO

do not create safe learning environments by punishing or expelling rapists.

Professional advocates for Greek organizations, though, are all for the new legislation.

“The police involvement sends a strong message that sexual assault must be treated as the heinous crime that it is,” says Jean Mrasek, chairman of the National Panhellenic Conference. “I think everyone will acknowledge that sexual assault is a crime, is a felony, and really, if you step back and think about it, what other felony do we allow a victim to evade police investigation by using the college conduct process?”

In fact, campuses adjudicate all kinds of crimes where victims may not go to the police: physical assaults at fraternities, for example, or a student swiping another’s laptop. They also deal with more pedestrian but serious violations, such as academic cheating or plagiarism. Under this bill, a student could still be expelled for copying a Wikipedia article, but not for committing rape, unless his victim goes to the police.

Women’s advocates have pushed for campus adjudication processes precisely because so many college women were hesitant to report a classmate to the police but still didn’t want to sit next to the assailant in class or see him around campus. With few good options, many assault

victims simply dropped out of school. The goal of women’s rights advocates is to create a campus adjudication process that protects victims and is fair to the accused. Forcing victims to take their claims to the criminal justice system, which has an understandably high bar of “innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” — the bar should be high when the punishment is jail time — often makes it impossible for campus victims, who typically know their assailant and usually lack overwhelming evidence that they did not consent, to get any justice.

There’s no question that adjudication processes should be more transparent, consistent and fair, and that schools should do a better job of interfacing with local law enforcement and letting students know that they can report to police and to their academic institutions. But preventing schools from investigating assaults unless the police are involved doesn’t solve those problems.

It’s hard to figure out why an organization representing sorority women would support this bill, especially when there’s some evidence that sorority women are more likely to be victims of assault, mostly because fraternity men are more likely to be assailants. But as anyone who was in a sorority probably knows, sometimes your “sisters” just pick the boys over the girls. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

There’s no escaping work now VIVEK WADHWA is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at Singularity University.

Netflix recently announced an unlimited paid-leave policy that allows employees to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. It is trying to one-up tech companies that offer unlimited vacation as a benefit. These are all public-relations ploys and recruiting gimmicks. No employee will spend a year as a full-time parent; hardly any will go on month-long treks to the Himalayas. Employees will surely take a couple of weeks off, but they will still be working — wherever they are. That is the new nature of work.

In the technology industry, it is standard practice for employers to provide cellphones to their employees and to pay for data plans. This is because employees are expected to always be on call and to receive text messages and e-mails. Urgent or not, the e-mails continue for 24 hours a day — even on weekends. Companies don’t mandate that employees check them, but few dare not to check e-mails when they are commuting, at home or on vacation — to make sure that they haven’t messed up.

The reality is that there is no 9 to 5 anymore. We are always connected, always on, always working — no matter where we are or what industry we are in.

Everything is now urgent, and problems that previously could have waited until the next day now need to be addressed

immediately.

We can debate whether it is good or bad, but these are the new rules of work. Everything changed over the last decade as we became chained to the Internet. These changes are happening globally.

Information of all kinds is being digitized and stored online — so we can access it wherever we are. There is no longer an excuse for not working.

With digitization, work is also becoming micro-work. A big project becomes a series of small projects that can be done by people in different locations.

Accounting firms routinely outsource tax preparation and data analysis; lawyers farm out discovery and contract creation; doctors rely on skilled technicians in other countries to do their radiological analysis. Data

handling, Web site development, design and transcription are commonly outsourced.

With humanity becoming connected, many good things are becoming possible.

Crowdsourcing is making it possible for people to come together as never before to solve social problems. I saw the possibilities firsthand when using the power of the collective to create a book, “Innovating Women,” on how we can get more women to participate in the innovation economy. I was able to tap into the knowledge of more than 500 women all over the world. Within six weeks we came to a consensus on the key issues and solutions and gathered enough information to publish not just one but several books.

The participants learned from each other, and the quality of the discussion kept increasing.

Businesses are beginning to use the power of the collective as well. Rather than locking workers into departmental silos, companies on the cutting edge are using internal social-media sites to have employees communicate with and help each other. What used to be the quarterly memo from the chief executive has become a torrent of sharing, with information being exchanged at all levels of the

corporation.

Employees can gain access to people they would never have had contact with and crowdsource solutions to their problems.

You also don’t need to be physically present any more to be at work. Telepresence robots are taking video conferencing to a new level.

Not only has the nature of work changed; so have the rules for getting ahead. Success no longer comes from hoarding knowledge, which was the key to job security in the past; it comes from sharing knowledge and helping the company solve its problems. The hard part is that employees have to take the onus to keep their skills current; they must keep reinventing themselves. They have to keep adapting to the changes that technology is bringing, because the ability to use technology is now a fundamental skill. It also no longer matters what degree you have or from what school you graduated; what matters now is how effective you are at getting the job done. And that means staying connected to work constantly.

So employees can take as much leave as they want, but the employer’s expectations remain the same: that the job will be done. n

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Courting the un-PC vote KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010.

It is perhaps time to stop wondering what The Donald’s got that the others ain’t got.

What he’s got is conservative America’s number, which has less to do with policy or political purity than with an evolutionary tic that’s been developing for decades.

It also has little to do with social issues, other candidates might note, though some values voters may also like Trump. Nor is it exclusively the economy, stupid — that cannonball of wisdom forever shackled to James Carville’s name.

Indeed, Trump’s fans may have revealed themselves to be ABDs (All But Democrats), since Trump himself is an ABD. But for his recent conversions — pro-life with exceptions, walls make good immigration policy and repealand-replace Obamacare “with something terrific!” — he would be giving Hillary Clinton a primary run for her money (and possibly some of his).

As recently as Tuesday, he wasn’t jumping on the antiPlanned Parenthood bandwagon, though he did say that no funding should go to abortion, which is pretty safe because such federal abortion funding is already disallowed under current law.

What Trump primarily has is a manner of speaking. (And how.)

His many outbursts, insults and invectives are by now familiar

enough to be boring — and not at all the point. The point is what he said to Fox News’s Megyn Kelly during the first debate when she asked about disparaging remarks he has made about women and whether he has the temperament to be president.

Trump, who frequently reminds us that he’s a very busy man, said he didn’t have time for such political correctness. Huh? It was a fair question in my book — and probably to most women. It was not a “politically correct” question, as Trump insisted, nor do his intemperate words measure up to the kind of serious scrutiny that true political correctness does. An insult is not the same as stifling ideas or political thought, as has been the rage — if I may use that word in the absence of a “safe zone” — on

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

college campuses and, often, wherever bureaucrats gather.

But mention PC to a constituency that despises an increasingly alien (PC correction: unfamiliar) country whose core principles are routinely ridiculed by popular culture — and who perceive illegal immigrants (PC correction: undocumented people) as receiving greater deference than hardworking Americans barely scraping by — and you, my friend, are a hero.

The fact that Trump has emerged not only unscathed but also triumphant after his subsequent and disgusting remarks about Kelly, whom he described post-debate as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” speaks trumpets and trombones to critics’ shakers, scrapers and cowbells.

Attempting to cover his posterior, Trump says he was thinking of Kelly’s nose when he said “wherever.” Really. We all have wherever/whatever moments, but “nose” isn’t one of those words that sends us foraging for misplaced vocabulary.

Rather than apologize, which would be as foreign to Trump as a woman his age, he’s insisting that Kelly apologize to him. Classic narcissism. Trump is like the

murderer who blames the victim for being home when he was burglarizing the victim’s house.

Meanwhile, Trump tweeted (no wonder he’s so busy) that Fox News President Roger Ailes had called him and smoothed things over. How perfectly . . . practical.

For her part, Kelly announced on “The Kelly File” Monday night that she wouldn’t be responding to Trump’s taunts and she certainly wouldn’t apologize for doing her job.

In a political arena lacking same, that’s what classy looks like.

Perhaps now, as Kelly suggested, we can move on, but do people really want to? Trump is the quintessential partisan divider whom people feel obligated to denounce but love to watch. Ailes knows that 24 million viewers tuned into the debate because Trump would be there. Trump knows this, too.

After so much history that would destroy anyone else’s candidacy, it’s hard to imagine what would cause Trump’s fans to abandon him. My own unscientific surveys turn up a consistent refrain: “I would never vote for him, but I like the way he stirs things up.”

Polling reflects that the second part of that sentence is probably true. And I’m no longer sure I believe the first part. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Coal BY

M ICHAEL E . W EBBER

Between President Obama’s new Clean Power Plan, the pope’s moral pronouncements on climate change and the abundance of cheap nat­ ural gas, there’s not been a lot of love for coal this year. As Americans ponder coal’s fate, let’s debunk some myths about this multifaceted hydrocarbon.

1

Coal is dirty.

Popular depictions of coal focus on its polluting qualities. Films depict miners coated in black dust or trapped deep underground. There’s truth to these images, but they don’t tell coal’s whole story.

About 150 years ago, forests in the upper Midwest and the Northeast were being cut down rapidly as demand for firewood to heat homes and fuel factories outstripped the rate at which the trees grew back.

Coal mines brought that rampant deforestation to a halt.

The black rock was cheaper, hotter and more plentiful. It was also cleaner: Burning coal produces less carbon dioxide than burning wood, per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.

Today, biomass is promoted as an eco-friendly, renewable energy source, but it’s the old fossil fuel that emits fewer greenhouse gases when burned. And used the right way — with scrubbers and other environmental controls, along with technology that captures carbon emissions and sequesters them underground — coal can be combusted in a very clean way.

2

Obama’s “war on coal” is killing the mining industry.

The domestic coal-mining industry is suffering: The number of mine workers dropped by more than 10 percent in 2013, and the combined market capitalization of the four largest coal extraction companies has collapsed to $1 billion, down from $22 billion just five years ago.

While the Environmental

Protection Agency’s smokestack emissions standards certainly aren’t helpful for coal, the rules have been around in some form for decade.

Cheap natural gas has been much more damaging for coal’s market share than environmental rules. The shale revolution has unleashed a huge supply of gas that competes with coal on price and ease of use, so utilities are switching to natural gas at a much greater rate than was anticipated just a few years ago.

percent — labor not in mining, but in the food, lodging and entertainment industries, according to a 2010 report by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

3

4

Appalachia depends on coal, and coal depends on Appalachia.

Appalachia was the historic heart of coal production. During the 1930s, the industry employed as much as 75 percent of the male workforce in some Appalachian counties. Fifty years ago, 95 percent of America’s coal was produced east of the Mississippi River.

But as environmental regulations tightened, cleaner coal out West (it contains less sulfur, which forms sulfur dioxide, one of the precursors to acid rain) became more popular.

Today, just 1 percent of jobs in Appalachia are related to mining.

Wyoming is by far the nation’s leading coal producer.

Coal mining is not particularly lucrative for Appalachia. In response, communities have begun to make changes.

Economic development programs are trying to help the region identify new sectors, including natural gas and technology, that aren’t subject to the whims of coal markets. And the largest portion of Appalachia’s workers — 14.5

LUKE SHARETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Coal is unsubsidized.

Fossil fuel defenders complain about the subsidies allocated to renewable energy. Often forgotten is the fact that coal receives about $1 billion in subsidies and largesse from the federal government each year.

Certainly, that’s less than the $6 billion the government allots for the wind production tax credit. But while renewableenergy tax credits are direct subsidies, and therefore easy targets, the subsidies for coal are less obvious. They pay to support research and development and to lower tax liabilities for coal companies. Plus, the decade-long prohibition on new natural-gas power plants beginning in 1978 effectively subsidized the construction of coal plants by removing natural gas as a competitor.

Environmentalists also like to point out that allowing coalburners to pollute without paying a tax on carbon is a hidden subsidy worth tens of billions of dollars, as the health-care costs and ecosystem damage are borne by individuals, insurance

companies and others.

5

China is addicted to coal.

China’s demand for electricity has been booming this century. To keep up, the country has been building out its electrical grid at a furious pace.

And since coal is an abundant natural resource in China, it has been a preferred fuel. For several years, China was constructing the equivalent of a small to mid-size coal-fired power plant every week to 10 days.

But the situation has changed rapidly. Beijing is shutting down all of its major coal-fired power plants, and nearly 2,000 small coal mines are slated to be closed nationwide by the end of this year.

Crippling air pollution kills at least 1 million people in China prematurely each year, a dire situation that required action from government officials.

Consequently, solar and wind farms have been built at a staggering rate to combat pollution, cutting into the market share for coal and leading to declining coal consumption over the past year. n Webber works at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the deputy director of the Energy Institute, codirector of the Austin Technology Incubator’s Clean Energy Incubator.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2015

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Great Wine. Great Food. Great Fun. They all add up to a great evening.

Saturday, August 22 6pm to 9pm

5th Annual Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee Tickets $45 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com

oothills

WENATCHEE u LEAVENWORTH u CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

Port of Chelan County • Moss-Adams, LLC • Banner Bank Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce Haglund’s Trophies • Spokane Industries Washington Trust • Port of Douglas County • Visconti’s Town Toyota Center • Cascade Farmlands Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center Country Financial -- Callie Klein & Frank Verebi