The Washington Post National Weekly - August 21, 2016

Politics The many facets of Donald Trump 4

World Afghanistan’s future is fleeing the country 10

Money How much is a dollar worth in your state? 17

5 Myths Brazil, host of the Summer Olympics 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

CAMPAIGN.....2016

MILLENNIAL VOTERS FEEL PUSHED INTO APATHY PAGE 12

m u e s u M SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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It’s all happening at the

Change with a Purpose: Learning to Live with and Adapt to Wildfire

Legendary

Landscapes

60-minute multimedia presentation featuring Dr. Paul Hessburg 7 p.m. Aug. 30 Wenatchee Valley Museum Info: 509-888-6240

The Era of Megafires Tuesday, August 30 • 7pm

Produced by The Wildfire Project, an affiliate of the Wenatchee Valley Museum Welcome to our 16th annual environmental film series, exploring topics important to our community. All films are presented at the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center. They are free (with a suggested donation of $5) and open to all. Thanks to our co-sponsors for helping make these monthly screenings possible. Series sponsors are The Trust for Public Land, Wenatchee River Institute and Chelan-Douglas Land Trust.

27 S. Mission Street, Wenatchee 509-888-6240 wenatcheevalleymuseum.org Open Tues - Sat from 10am to 4pm

Native Heritage Bus Tour

9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 24 $55, $50 members Explore culturally significant locations with Native American guide Randy Lewis

Native Heritage Bus Tour Saturday, Sept. 24 • 9am to 3pm

Explore culturally significant locations from the Peshastin Pinnacles to the Wenatchee Heights with Native American guide Randy Lewis during a day-long bus tour Saturday, Sept. 24. The bus will depart from the Wenatchee Valley Museum at 9 a.m. and return about 3 p.m. with a stop for lunch on your own at Pybus Market.

Tickets are $55/person or $50/member.

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THE FIX

Time to face the press, Clinton BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

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onald Trump said lots (and lots) of things during his hour-long town hall with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday night. This one — Trump talking about Hillary Clinton — stood out to me: She is so protected. They are so protecting her. She hasn’t had a news conference in, like, 250 days.

It couldn’t be that long since Clinton has talked to the press, I thought. So, I went to the handy-dandy tool that The Washington Post’s Philip Bump built to track how long it’s been since Clinton faced the press. And this is what I found: Almost 258 days as of Wednesday night!

Trump undersold something!

Jokes aside, it’s beyond ridiculous that one of the two people who will be elected president in less than 80 days continues to refuse to engage with the news media in this way.

But she does sit-down interviews! And she did a “news conference” with a moderator, um, moderating the questions!

Not good enough. Not when you are running to be president of the United States. One of the most important things when someone is offering themselves up to represent all of us is that we get the best sense we can about how that person thinks on his or her feet, how they deal with unwanted or adversarial questions. Those two traits are big parts of doing the job of president in the modern world.

There’s nothing like a news conference to put a candidate for president through their paces. If you don’t believe me, consider how Clinton handled the presser — not well! — when she tried to put the email server contro-

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MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton speaks to voters on Aug. 16. She has avoided news conferences since last year.

versy to rest.

Clinton’s struggles with the news conference format are a major part of why she hasn’t done one in so long. Why do something you aren’t good at unless you absolutely have to? If campaigns are about downplaying your weaknesses while putting your strengths front and center, Clinton’s avoidance of news conferences is “Campaigning 101.”

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 45

There is also the fact that Clinton’s general election opponent continues to suck all of the oxygen — and then some — out of each day’s news cycle. Trump so dominates the coverage — and not in a good way — that there’s not enough room for Clinton’s unwillingness to face unscripted, unmoderated questions from reporters covering her to get much attention.

Put all of that aside, and think of this: The last time Clinton held a news conference was Dec. 5, 2015. That was before: 1. A single state had cast a vote in either a presidential primary or caucus.

2. Major terrorist attacks in Nice, Brussels and Orlando.

3. FBI Director James B. Comey issued his scathing report on Clinton’s email practices while at the State Department.

4. The Bernie Sanders phenomenon.

5. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was run out of the Democratic National Committee in the wake of a massive email hack/leak.

6. This whole Ryan Lochte international gas station incident.

A woman who conceived on Dec. 5, 2015, would be 8½ months pregnant today. On Dec. 5, 2015, the Golden State Warriors were NBA champs. On Dec. 5, 2015, I was still in my 30s.

You get the idea. It's been a long time. Lots of important things — Lochte and my 40th birthday being at the top of the list — have happened.

Clinton is now the unquestioned favorite to be the 45th president of the United States — if you believe polling. The fact that she continues to avoid questions from the news media is simply unacceptable given the office she is seeking and the stakes in this election. n

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

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ON THE COVER Disenchanted millennials are, clockwise from top left: Matthew Ritt, Jesika Rose, April McGuffie, Aaron Johnson, Wes Sumrell, Andrea Bazoin, John Bynum and Britni Smith. Photos by MATTHEW STAVER and JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post

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The Trump we saw was forever on the make

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

In fascinating, but often frustrating, interviews, the many facets of Trump are revealed

BY M ARC F ISHER AND M ICHAEL K RANISH

T

he man who would be president rose from his tall, thickly cushioned leather desk chair, buttoned his suit jacket and waved his visitors to follow along: “Come on, boys, I have something to show you.” He ushered us from his lushly carpeted office in Trump Tower, with its breathtaking view of Central Park and the majestic Plaza Hotel, immediately across the hall to a windowless room, not five steps away.

“I just discovered this,” he said, pointing at the conference table that took up most of the room. He swept his arm over the table, beckoning us to inspect. Every inch of the table’s surface was filled with stacks of magazines. “All from the last four months,” he said, and on

every cover of every magazine, there he was, Donald J. Trump, smiling or waving or scowling or pouting, but always him.

“Cover of Time, three times in four months,” he said. “No one ever before. It’s amazing.” There he was on the New York Times Magazine, and on Esquire and on Rolling Stone and on and on, the man who was about to be nominated as the Republican candidate for president, his success (or his notoriety) emblazoned on magazine after magazine. He was very much impressed.

He was all sunshine on that June day, an exemplar of the power of positive thinking, the core of the theology that he’d grown up with in Fred Trump’s office and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s church. In that moment, Donald Trump was the can-do dealmaker,

the tough decider, the ebullient kid who, as his sister put it, was “just a nice boy from Queens.”

A few moments later, he would switch gears and show us his other side, also a classically American streak, this one darker, with a trace of paranoia and a dash of despair.

This was the author of “Crippled America,” the truth teller who told huge crowds, “We don’t have a country anymore,” the prideful tycoon who now threatened to sue us even as he told us how much he was enjoying our interviews.

All told, over the past four months, Trump spent more than 20 hours talking to Washington Post reporters who were working on a biography, titled “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” which will be published by Scribner on Tuesday. Trump was gra-

Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Richmond on June 10. The Republican presidential candidate can come off as a can-do dealmaker or a darker truth-teller.

cious and generous with his time, took nearly all of our questions, and often extended the length of our interviews, sometimes doubling or tripling the allotted time. That level of cooperation was a surprising switch from the campaign’s initial reaction to the book.

On a Friday in April, Marc Fisher called Trump’s campaign press secretary, Hope Hicks, to tell her about the book deal that would be announced the following Monday.

Fisher asked if Trump would grant a series of interviews about his life and work.

Hicks cut him off, calling the decision to write a book “incredibly disingenuous. . . . You are profiteering off Mr. Trump. This isn’t something we’re participating in; you all are making money on this.”

Fisher pointed out that in every election year, The Post publishes a

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POLITICS comprehensive series of articles tracing the candidates’ lives. This would be no different, except that the same reporting that was going toward newspaper articles was also being used to tell the story in one narrative, in book form. The Post planned a similar examination of the life and record of the Democratic nominee. Hicks was unimpressed. She reiterated icily that no cooperation would be forthcoming, and she ended the call.

After the weekend, Hicks called back, her tone now bright and friendly. “I told Mr. Trump about your project, and he loves it,” she said. “He’s happy to meet with you.”

From then on, Trump made himself available, in person and on the phone, to reporters delving into his childhood, real estate career, Atlantic City gambling operations, foreign business ventures and political evolution, as well as his romances, family history, friendships and other influences. He provided this access despite his public ban against The Post’s reporters who were covering his campaign.

The interviews were fascinating but frequently frustrating: He rarely refused to answer our questions, but when the subject was uncomfortable or raised doubts about some of his past decisions, he often gave us disjointed answers that steered into completely unrelated matters.

Throughout the interviews, he was alternately enthusiastic (“Let’s keep going — this is a lot of fun,” he said during one of our sessions, rebuffing his secretary’s effort to bring the meeting to a close) and sternly skeptical, repeatedly telling us about the “lowlife reporters” who had written books about him through the decades and about the legal actions he had contemplated or taken against those authors.

Both aspects of Trump seemed to be the stuff of fiction, of characters who were written to capture the hopes and ambitions of a great, young nation, but also its fears, doubts and jealousies. Even after all those hours of interviews, Trump seemed not quite real, a character he had built to enhance his business empire, a construct designed to be at once an everyman and an impossibly highflying king of Manhattan, an avatar of American riches.

Trump was charming, yet forever on the make, like Lonesome Rhodes from “A Face in the Crowd,”

CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/ASSOCIATED PRESS

a 1957 movie starring Andy Griffith as a folksy, but ultimately cynical Arkansas traveler who soars from a filthy jail cell to the pinnacle of American celebrity and political power. Trump was a natural-born populist, like Howard Beale, the TV anchorman from “Network,” a 1976 film in which the newsman rallies the nation to open their windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Trump was at times naive yet wise, like Chauncey Gardiner, a dim gardener whose unwitting folk wisdom turned him into a possible presidential contender in “Being There” (1979).

Throughout the past century, Americans were periodically drawn to voices arguing that foreigners or The Other were responsible for the nation’s troubles: Father Charles Coughlin, a priest who used his nationwide radio show in the 1930s to deliver an America First message laced with assaults on Jews; and George Wallace, a segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for president in the 1960s and ’70s as a populist preaching that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republicans and the Democrats; and Patrick Buchanan, a Washington insider and presidential candidate who encouraged voters in the 1990s to rise up as “peasants with pitchforks” to take their country back from politicians who had failed to

stop illegal immigration and the ravages of free trade.

These men had appealed to the darker aspect of the American personality, the flip side to Billy Graham’s confident theology of good deeds and righteous capitalism, Martin Luther King Jr.’s march to the mountaintop of justice and fairness, and Barack Obama’s promise of hope and change.

Trump believed — like so many great Americans real and imagined, such as Steve Jobs and Jay Gatsby — in the unlimited, unequaled power of the individual to achieve nearly anything. And like many other products of the uniquely American machinery of celebrity, Trump believed that his fame and success would catapult him to a level of power that he deserved because he had made so much money. He believed that just by walking into a room, just by reflecting the passions of a crowd, he could shift the course of events.

He could, for example, make America great again.

In his incongruously serene office high above the cacophony of Fifth Avenue, the walls lined with awards and photos of himself at dinners and parties and even on the cover of Playboy, one portrait stood out, positioned prominently on Trump’s desk. It was a framed photograph of his father, Fred Trump, who made his fortune by providing housing for workingclass families, mostly in Brooklyn

Donald Trump waves to staff of the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City in 1990. From left are his mother, Mary; his father, Fred; and his sister, U.S. District Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. In 1991, the casino filed for bankruptcy.

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and Queens.

At the start of the Depression, Fred, then in his mid-20s, worried about his financial condition and shouldered as little risk as possible. He said he was successful because he squeezed nine days out of a seven-day week and made sure every penny was spent wisely.

A key to success, Fred once explained when accepting the Horatio Alger Award for overcoming adversity, is “you must like what you do. You must pick out the right business or profession. You must learn all about it. . . . Nine out of 10 people don’t like what they do. And in not liking what they do, they lose enthusiasm, they go from job to job, and ultimately become a nothing.”

As his father’s son, Donald was given everything from the start — he could never qualify for the Horatio Alger Award — but he was driven to avoid failing in his father’s eyes, to avoid becoming a nothing.

The last three presidents had struggled fairly publicly with their fathers. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama wrote and talked about their feelings of abandonment. Their resolve to prove themselves helped propel their meteoric ascents, tempered by a charisma perhaps born of their lifelong need to win attention and love that were missing from their upbringing. At a later stage in life, George W. Bush similarly struggled with the shadow cast by the failure of his father’s presidency; he, too, chose a road on which he might make right the disappointments of his father’s journey.

All three of those presidents, to one degree or another, openly carried burdens from their parents’ lives. Trump admitted to no such troubles. He had never been very forthcoming about the texture of his home life. His father, he would admit, was sometimes distant — “His life was business . . . a very content person” — but ultimately a loving, strong figure. Trump had reduced his story of his mother, even more of a mystery to outsiders, to less than a sentence: “very warm . . . great sense of pageantry . . . very beautiful.” Donald Trump had walled off the pain in his past, hid it behind a never-ending show about himself.

The rest of the desk was devoted to Donald, the stacks of magazines featuring his image, the morning’s news clippings about himself. Yet in an office dedicated almost encontinues on next page

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from previous page

tirely to celebrating Trump’s success and performance, nothing spoke to the man’s private passions or predilections, nothing to indicate a hobby, an artistic interest, a literary bent, a statement about his credo, his crises, or his dreams.

In one of his books, “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” he had asserted that visionary business leaders succeed “because they are narcissists who devote their talent with unrelenting focus to achieving their dreams, even if it’s sometimes at the expense of those around them.” He approvingly quoted a writer who said, “Successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world.”

Trump had reached the pinnacle of American politics virtually without allies, rising in opposition to the party structure. More than any other major figure in modern presidential politics, he seemed allergic to ideology. He had won the nomination with an impossibly tiny campaign staff, a core of half a dozen loyalists, most of them newcomers to presidential politics. His most valued consultants were his children and their spouses.

He had never really had close friends. As far back as 1980, he had told TV interviewer Rona Barrett, “My business is so all-encompassing that I don’t really get the pleasure of being with friends that much, frankly.” She pressed him: Whom would you call if you were in trouble and your family wasn’t around? “Maybe I’d call you, Rona,” he said.

Thirty-six years later, when we asked Trump about his friendships, he took a considerable, unusual pause, and then said: “Well, it’s an interesting question. Most of my friendships are businessrelated because those are the only people I meet. The people I meet, really, I guess I could say socially, when you go out to a charity event or something. . . . I have people that I haven’t spoken to in years, but I think they’re friends.” And he named — off the record — three men he had had business dealings with two or more decades before, men he had seen only rarely in recent years.

“I mean, I think I have a lot of friends,” Trump continued, “but they’re not friends like perhaps other people have friends, where they’re together all the time and they go out to dinner all the time.”

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

But was there anyone he would turn to if he had a personal problem, or some doubt about himself or something he’d done? “More of my family,” Trump said. “I have a lot of good relationships. I have good enemies, too, which is okay. But I think more of my family than others.”

Trump often struggled to respond to questions that pushed beyond his business deals and political tactics. In one of our visits to Trump Tower, we asked what he might say to people who wondered whether he had core convictions, given that he had changed his party registration seven times, including stints as a Democrat.

Trump didn’t talk about his ideological evolution or about how the parties had changed.

Rather, he explained his political hopscotching as pure pragmatism. “It had to do more with practicality,” he said, “because if you’re going to run for office, you would have had to make friends.”

Despite his lifelong belief in holding his ground and refusing to apologize, Trump at times candidly acknowledged his mistakes.

Asked by our Post colleagues about failures such as corporate bankruptcies, most of them related to his Atlantic City casinos, he said, “I did take my eye off the ball, and part of that was because of the difficulty I had with the marriage, of course.” His affair with Marla Maples during his marriage to his first wife, Ivana Trump, coincided with one of the most difficult pas-

sages in his career.

But he was unapologetic about making big money even as his financial maneuvers hurt those who had backed him. The bottom line, he said, was that “I wasn’t representing the country. I wasn’t representing the banks. . . . I was representing Donald Trump. So for myself, they were all good deals.”

In the weeks before this summer’s Republican National Convention, Trump was under pressure from his party’s leaders to tone down his coarse rhetoric and show that he could be more than the sneering voice of a frustrated nation. Trump told us that to win in November, he needed to be disciplined. “I think that consistency in the message is very important,” he said.

But despite his efforts to build a disciplined message about national security, trade deals and bringing back American jobs, he continued to startle the nation with personal attacks, suggesting that a U.S.-born judge ruled against him because of his Mexican heritage, or criticizing the grieving parents of a Muslim U.S. Army captain who was killed in action in Iraq.

Trump and his aides kept saying that as the general election approached, he would alter his tone and become more presidential, but on many days, his first mission seemed to be to rationalize his prior comments, or to attack how they’d been reported.

At the GOP convention in Cleve-

The family of presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 21.

Book excerpt: This is an adapted excerpt from “Trump Revealed,” a broad, comprehensive examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee to be published by Scribner on Tuesday.

land and in the weeks that followed, Trump’s vision featured no shining city on a hill and offered no details about how he’d make the instant, absolute fixes he promised. He would just do it.

He seemed smoother now — when a lone protester interrupted his acceptance speech in Cleveland, Trump said nothing, just stood quietly and waited for her to be removed. But he was still Trump, still the cocky, blunt kid from Queens, still the guy who would say what others only thought. “I am your voice,” he said.

After the convention, there was no rest. The blitz of a fall campaign would begin almost immediately — debates, rally upon rally, a blizzard of charges and countercharges in countless cable TV appearances — and it was already clear that this would be a bitter battle between the two least-popular major-party candidates in modern political history. At the end of that slog, Trump was certain, the White House would be his.

Yet he said he had not spent much time planning for how he would operate if he won. He would run the country much as he had his businesses, he said, keeping a close eye on everything, insisting on high standards. The difference would be that he’d be doing everything for the country, not just for himself.

What exactly that might look like was not entirely clear. He expected his day-to-day work style to be similar to what he’d done for decades. At Trump Tower, he kept no computer on his desk, and he avoided reading extensive reports or briefings. He went with his gut.

He tweeted what he felt, confident that his heart was right where the people were.

There would be so much to do now. His daughter Ivanka had promised the nation on that last night of the convention that, come January, “all things will be possible again.” And Donald Trump had told the crowd that because “nobody knows the system better than me . . . I alone can fix it.”

He alone. His father, who had warned him against being “a nothing,” was gone. His family joined him onstage for the final celebration as red, white and blue balloons fell. But in that last moment before he left the stage, Donald Trump was on his own. He stuck out his jaw, pursed his lips and stepped into the dark tunnel behind the stage. n

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Pa. senator dances awkward two-step P HILIP R UCKER Washington, Pa. BY

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s Sen. Patrick J. Toomey convened a roundtable discussion with local law enforcement leaders here in Western Pennsylvania, he made no boasts about a big, beautiful wall, or rounding up illegal immigrants, or banning Muslims.

Instead, Toomey asked questions and listened. He spoke softly and judiciously. The message he hoped voters in this battleground state would take away was clear: I may be a Republican, but I’m no Donald Trump.

“Stylistically, we’re extremely different,” Toomey said in an interview. “The way we talk about issues, I think, is very, very different. . . . I think people understand that I’m a very different person, and they’ll make that separation.”

The two men’s fates are intertwined: Trump sees Pennsylvania as a must-win state, and the outcome of Toomey’s race could determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

But they are charting divergent courses here. Trump has been stumping in hardcore Republican rural areas and in declining manufacturing towns to galvanize aggrieved, blue-collar white voters.

He has also suggested that the only way he can lose the state is if Democrats cheat.

Toomey, meanwhile, is courting more moderate voters who regularly swing state elections in the Lehigh Valley and in the cities and suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Polls show they are inclined to back Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, but Toomey needs some of them to cross over and vote for him, too.

For Toomey, this is a new strategy born of necessity. Once celebrated by his party’s grass-roots activists as a conservative purist, Toomey has labored throughout his first term to soften his image, most prominently by co-authoring gun-control legislation backed by Democrats.

“Pat Toomey had positioned himself extremely well to win reelection,” said Rep. Charlie

JOHN RUCOSKY/TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Toomey is undecided on Trump but needs those who support the nominee — and those who don’t Dent (R-Pa.). “He has done everything right that is within his control. The challenge for Pat Toomey is things outside his control — that would be the top of the ticket.”

Toomey’s careful posturing may amount to nothing in the season of Trump. The presidential nominee’s tanking poll numbers in Pennsylvania could torpedo Toomey’s reelection chances.

Clinton leads Trump 49 percent to 38 percent in the state, while Toomey trails Democrat Katie McGinty by one percentage point, within the margin of error, according to an Aug. 4 Franklin & Marshall College poll. In the Philadelphia suburbs, Clinton’s lead is a whopping 40 percentage points.

Despite Pennsylvania’s history of ticket-splitting, analysts here say it will be exceedingly difficult for Toomey to win if Clinton beats Trump by double digits.

Like other endangered Republican senators, Toomey is dancing an exceedingly awkward two-step as he tries to keep from alienating

Trump’s fervent supporters while simultaneously distancing himself from Trump and his rhetoric.

Consider Toomey’s personal paralysis: Fifteen months into a Trump campaign that has captivated the world, the senator insisted in the interview that he is still “learning things about this nominee” and has not decided whether to endorse him.

Toomey initially endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for president, and then voted for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas since Rubio had dropped out by the time Pennsylvania had its primary. Toomey said he has ruled out voting for Clinton.

“Look, Donald Trump is a completely unique nominee,” Toomey said. Toomey said he finds some of Trump’s comments “disturbing” but praised his selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as a running mate, as well as his list of potential Supreme Court nominees. “It’s mixed and it’s without precedent, and that’s why it’s difficult to make a decision.”

Sen. Pat Toomey meets supporters at the Cambria County Republican headquarters in Johnstown, Pa., on July 19 while campaigning for reelection.

Toomey’s stance puts him at odds with one of Pennsylvania’s more successful moderate Republicans, Tom Ridge, a former governor and homeland security secretary. Ridge was among 50 senior GOP national security officials who recently signed a letter stating that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history.”

Democrats say Toomey’s indecision exposes a lack of courage and conviction.

Toomey’s indecision has also infuriated many Trump supporters across the state, which Trump carried decisively in the April primary.

“Our ‘Rock the Knock’ folks, ‘Doors for Donald,’ they don’t want to show up for Pat Toomey,” said Tricia Cunningham, volunteer coordinator for Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign. “How do we support a candidate that is not endorsing ‘We the people of Pennsylvania’? ” If Toomey had his way, he would never have to talk about his party’s “unique nominee.” But the reality of life as a Republican senator is different.

Toomey skipped last month’s Republican National Convention to spend time campaigning in Pennsylvania, but when he stopped by a restaurant in Chambersburg hoping to talk about local issues, all voters wanted to ask him about was Trump.

In June, when Toomey tried to promote a bill to toughen school screenings against pedophiles — an act that could help him make inroads with suburban voters — reporters peppered him with questions about Trump’s latest controversy: his race-based attacks on a federal judge.

Toomey is leaving himself flexibility to break decisively with Trump this fall, should the celebrity businessman’s campaign implode. Pressed in the interview how he could be so indecisive when so much already is known about Trump, Toomey said: “We still have several months to go.

I’m going to make a decision when I have to make my decision.” n

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Misconduct roils merchant marines L ISA R EIN Kings Point, N.Y. BY

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hey call it the “safe word.”

It’s the secret code that cadets at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy are advised to use if things get really rough during their yearlong shipboard training on merchant vessels thousands of miles from shore or at ports far from home. Women — and men, in some cases — can use it as a failsafe if the lewd comments and unwanted advances from fellow sailors escalate to something worse. The government will bring them ashore.

But like many efforts by this federal service academy to confront inappropriate behavior, the safe word has not worked.

It was “goldfish” in 2012, the year Erika Lawson, an engine cadet on a commercial ship for what is known as “sea year,” was pushed against the back seat of a taxi and groped by the chief mate to force her to kiss him. She tried to push him away.

Lawson was 19 and didn’t use the safe word — provided by administrators — to email or phone the school. She was 7,810 miles from shore, in port in Saipan in the North Pacific.

Few cases like Lawson’s are ever reported. But the Merchant Marine Academy has the highest rate of sexual assault and harassment of any U.S. military school. While the school received just one report of sexual assault in the 2014-2015 academic year, student surveys taken by the government reveal that 63 percent of women and 11 percent of men experienced unwanted advances or other sexual harassment.

And 17 percent of women and 2 percent of men endured sexual assault, defined as unwanted contact, from groping to rape.

Those numbers exceed the combined rates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the Naval, Air Force and Coast Guard academies, where 48 percent of women and 10 percent of men described sexual harassment in similar surveys. For both genders, sexual assault rates were half that of

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Action is being taken after surveys reveal assault and harassment, though few cases are reported the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, a forgotten outpost on Long Island Sound east of New York City, the first of the service academies to admit women 42 years ago but which today trains the fewest. Today, about 15 percent of Kings Point students are women.

For years, these statistics were ignored by the federal government. But with its accreditation threatened and facing growing scrutiny from Congress, its advisory board and its federal watchdog, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in June suspended Kings Point’s most prominent feature, a grueling year at sea during which midshipmen apprentice on large deep-sea ships.

It’s the first time a federal service academy has been in danger of losing its accreditation.

“In our judgment, we could no longer continue to send them to sea with the status quo,” Rear Adm. James A. Helis, the school superintendent, said in an interview in his office on Long Island

Sound. Citing rising sexual misconduct at sea and on campus, school leaders say they will not reinstate sea year until midshipmen are safe.

The academy decided to bring home 116 cadets who were already at sea. “This wasn’t a problem we could fix as we go,” said Helis, a retired Army colonel hired in 2012 as the fourth superintendent in eight years.

In this atmosphere, victims have been afraid to report unwanted advances.

Back on campus in New York, it took Lawson more than a year to file a “restricted report,” which informed the school that she had a bad experience. There were no names and no investigation.

“I feel like you’re taught there to keep your head down and just get through it,” said Lawson, 24, who works on a cruise ship out of New York Harbor. “The sexual assault policies are a total joke. Everybody would just snicker and laugh during the training.”

Erika Lawson, now 24, says she was sexually assaulted by a shipmate during her sea year for the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, when she was 19.

Right after the assault, she wrote the chief mate a note telling him she felt violated. He slipped $200 under her door — and kept working, she said.

“I’m tired of people saying this doesn’t happen or that I have to suck it up and act like a man,” Lawson said.

The Washington Post does not normally identify victims of sexual assault, but several agreed to speak on the record to bring public attention to what they believe is a serious problem at the academy.

Kings Point is a military and civilian hybrid whose glory days came during World War II. Its heavily unionized fleet is dwindling amid growing automation and competition from foreign ships, which transport goods for less than American vessels.

The school trains about 1,000 students tuition-free for four years, including up to 330 days at sea. Students are nominated by their members of Congress. Graduates are licensed by the Coast Guard and must work five years in the maritime industry or eight in the Navy Reserve, unless they go on active duty.

Under pressure from Congress, Kings Point hired its first sexual assault coordinator four years ago and beefed up online and face-toface prevention training. But officials were shocked to find so few victims reporting when surveys told them otherwise.

Helis said the prevention training and reporting systems are not effective enough and faulted the leadership curriculum. Concerned lawmakers on the Board of Visitors pushed legislation through the Senate requiring more rigorous reporting and training policies.

Kings Point has been troubled by years of mismanagement, high staff turnover and leadership turmoil and is effectively in receivership, with Washington controlling its budget, hiring and other operations. Some graduates accuse the Obama administration of coddling students and inflating the extent of sexual misconduct.

But the Middle States Commission on Higher Education — which

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NATION does 10-year accreditation reviews for the U.S. Education Department — placed the school on warning in June, citing failures of leadership and governance, administration, and student services. The commission described a “campus climate and incidence of sexual harassment and sexual assault that have been a serious and recognized problem for over 10 years.”

“The pervasiveness of the incidents is perceived as undeniable and disturbing,” the report said.

Helis and Maritime Administrator Paul “Chip” Jaenichen, whose small agency at the Transportation Department oversees the academy, said a “steady accumulation of evidence” led to the decision to cancel sea year, setting off a war with parents and a vocal group of older graduates who say the school is overreacting. Some parents are demanding that their sons and daughters return to sea.

Cadets describe abuse as part of the culture at sea.

In interviews, 11 recent Kings Point graduates and current midshipmen, including two men, said they or someone they knew had experienced bullying and inappropriate sexual behavior at sea and on campus. Some shrugged it off and told the offenders to get lost. Others were devastated.

Maritime has always been a man’s industry of oil tankers and container ships, where recent graduates and Kings Point leaders describe how crews at sea for months at a time frequent brothels when they’re in port, “porn night” below deck is a common fixture, and female cadets have to sit on the chief engineer’s lap before he will sign off on their apprenticeships.

Some of the behavior at sea carries over to campus, Jaenichen said. Midshipmen return from sea year with “a new bias that shifted their thought process to sexist behavior.”

The shipping industry — which hosts hundreds of cadets for sea year on its vessels — and merchant marine unions are working with the school to strengthen its training to prevent sexual offenses.

“The notion that it is hard to change the maritime culture — we don’t accept that,” said Michael Roberts, general counsel for Jacksonville, Fla.-based Crowley Maritime, which is leading the effort. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

They survived Katrina — only to lose everything again

BY E MMA B ROWN, A SHLEY C USICK AND M ARK B ERMAN Baton Rouge

W

hen Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, thousands of people left behind their ruined homes and took refuge here. They found new jobs and rebuilt their homes. Slowly, things started to feel normal again.

But then a nameless storm brought unprecedented flooding to Baton Rouge and a wide swath of southern Louisiana over the past week and a half. Countless Katrina survivors have been left, for a second time, with nothing.

“Everything was going good,” said Trinice Rose, a nurse who escaped her home near Baton Rouge on foot as the floodwater rose — 11 years to the month after her home in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward was drowned under more than nine feet of water. “Now, again, we’re back where we started.”

Two displacements, two traumas. A loss that has left many feeling tired, battered and hopeless. And even as many face unclear futures and questions about where they will live, experts say they are also concerned about the mental health consequences for Katrina survivors now weathering this new loss.

The historic flooding that is battering Louisiana has left at least 13 dead, state officials said.

Another 30,000 people have been rescued and 40,000 homes have been damaged.

An unknown number of people remain missing. Scores of firefighters, police officers and other first responders fanned out across the region this past week to begin a massive search-and-rescue mission that authorities said could last for up to two weeks.

“Nobody has been forgotten,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said at a briefing this week.

“We understand there are a lot of people who are suffering.”

Many in the flooded area and across the country have ques-

tioned why this devastation — which the American Red Cross called the country’s worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — has not received more attention from national media outlets, politicians and government officials.

Obama declared the flooding a major disaster last Sunday, opening up federal funding for 20 parishes, and the White House said he has been receiving regular updates. The White House said that

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

A vehicle is partially submerged on Tuesday in Port Vincent, La., after historic flooding.

70,000 people had registered for FEMA assistance.

The flooding in Louisiana has closed government offices, schools, businesses and roadways, with uncertainty in some areas about when things will reopen. Authorities are going house to house checking to make sure that every resident is accounted for and that no one died inside their homes since more than two feet of water began falling the night of Aug. 11.

The painstaking effort is being coordinated by the office of H. “Butch” Browning, the state fire marshal. He estimates that teams will search some 30,000 homes and businesses in at least five parishes.

“We are really challenged in situations like this, where you have such widespread damage,” Browning said.

But he said he anticipated finding far fewer bodies than during a similar effort after Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that caused an

estimated 1,500 deaths. During Katrina, people were facing not only rising water but also high winds and a tidal surge. “We won’t see that type of death toll at all,” he said.

Still, the specter of Katrina was inescapable as the water rose in Baton Rouge.

“I was just thinking, ‘Not again,’ ” said Phonecia Howard, who lives in East Baton Rouge.

“This cannot happen again.” Howard’s family fled their New Orleans home at 4 a.m. the day before Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. They headed to Baton Rouge, to safety.

All of the memories of that storm and its aftermath — ripping out sheet rock, stepping over warped hardwood floors, having to replace all their possessions right down to the last measuring cup — raced through her mind as she waded into her yard last weekend and stepped into a boat waiting to take her to safety.

“I was praying, just ask God to spare us one more time,” Howard said. Of the 260 houses in Howard’s subdivision, she says, hers is one of only 20 that did not flood.

“I want to get away from water, get away from low-lying areas,” said Jerry Savage, who lost both his home and his lawn-care business in Katrina, then rebuilt both in Baton Rouge only to lose them again. “I want to get out of here.”

People facing this repeated trauma after enduring Katrina could be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, experts said.

Bill McDermott, a psychologist for the New Orleans Police Department, said that repeated traumas can shatter victims’ presumptions about how the world works, which can be deeply unsettling.

They are left with a worldview, he said, “that involves no longer believing the same as I had in justice, in fairness, in that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

That’s a presumption that is shattered.” n

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WORLD

An exodus of exceptional youths BY

M ELISSA E TEHAD

T

he well-educated, 20-yearold woman did not want to leave Afghanistan, but she said she had no choice.

After receiving death threats because of her work on women’s rights, she feared for her life and left in 2013 — feeling guilty, but intending to return after a few months when the security situation at home improved.

Three years later, the young woman, now 24, lives in the United States and does not know when she will go back to Afghanistan.

She told her story on the condition that her name not be used because of concern that her family in Afghanistan could be in danger.

“I left because I didn’t feel safe anywhere,” she said. “Afghanistan doesn’t need another dead body or another dead woman.”

She is one of a growing number of educated young people who, frustrated by their country’s growing insecurity and lack of job opportunities, have been leaving Afghanistan in record numbers.

The woman, who earned her master’s degree in the United States, said that growing violence against women contributed to her decision to leave Afghanistan. Her parents agreed and told her not to return. In recent years, many of her friends have also left Afghanistan — partly because of the violence and the country’s depressed economy. “I know a lot of people who are leaving because they don’t have jobs and they are scared they can’t feed their children,” she said.

As a result of unemployment and the insecurity that has followed a resurgence of the Taliban after the withdrawal of U.S. and international forces at the end of 2014, Afghanistan’s economy showed minimal growth in 2015 — about 1.5 percent, according to the World Bank. Combined with increased fighting between government troops and insurgents, that instability is causing some of Afghanistan’s brightest young minds to flee the country.

“Everybody anticipated that this was going to be a problem because of the drop-off in the eco-

OMAID SHARIFI

Violence and a depressed economy prompt Afghanistan’s brightest young minds to flee nomic opportunity after the bulk of international forces were transiting out,” said James Cunningham, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014. “Unfortunately, the government effort to reorganize itself to deal with the economy didn’t materialize as they had hoped.”

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that a large part of Afghanistan’s economy in recent years was built around the war, so brain drain was inevitable because a lot of jobs disappeared after the foreign troops left.

Although there are no reliable figures for the number of Afghans who leave each year, there was a mass exodus in 2015. Afghans accounted for 20 percent of the more than 1 million refugees who reached Europe’s shores in 2015, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and nearly half of them were young adults.

As more educated young people pack up and leave Afghanistan,

government officials, who are depending on the younger generation to rebuild the country, are becoming increasingly concerned.

Cunningham said it is important to find ways to encourage Afghans to remain in their country. “There are many people who are staying and continue to tough it out, and what they can do is quite noteworthy, actually,” he said. “My last year and a half in Afghanistan, I kept telling Afghan leaders that this was a really unique opportunity . . . and that they should take advantage of it,” he said of the country’s talented youths.

Shaharzad Akbar returned to Afghanistan after finishing her studies at the University of Oxford in 2010 and works in the projectmanagement sector in Kabul. The 28-year-old says that even though she studied abroad and has relatives who left the country, she always planned to return.

“We feel a sense of responsibility as people who are privileged

This mural, painted on a blast wall in Kabul, depicts Afghan refugees making the perilous journey to Europe. It was created by ArtLords, a group of activists who paint such murals on blast walls around prominent buildings in Afghanistan to restore hope through the arts.

with an education,” she said. “If we give up, who can we expect to stay behind?”

But she also understands the fears and frustrations of many of her peers. “Every morning when I leave the house, I don’t know if I’ll come back,” she said. “Every time I’m stuck in a traffic jam, I’m nervous about what could happen.”

Feroz Masjidi, an assistant professor of economics at Kabul University, also decided to return to Afghanistan after studying abroad. The 31-year-old said the government needs to come up with long-term solutions and help build confidence in the country so that Afghans will invest in it.

President Ashraf Ghani has made stemming the brain drain a priority. Last year, Afghanistan’s National Unity Government started a program called Jobs for Peace to stimulate more employment and restore faith in the economy.

However, a lack of funding may limit the impact of this initiative, according to the World Bank.

Bolstering the private sector and encouraging entrepreneurship are important steps toward lessening the brain drain, says Laurence Hart, the International Organization for Migration’s head of mission and special envoy for Afghanistan.

Young Afghans also have been involved in creating initiatives to motivate people to invest in the country. Omaid Sharifi, co-founder of ArtLords — a group that paints murals on blast walls around prominent buildings in Afghanistan — said that he wants to restore hope through the arts.

“Thousands of young Afghans are leaving the country,” he said.

“So I want to do an art activation day, where we paint nine to 10 murals in one day, have street art and also show a movie about immigration.”

Even for those like the young woman who left in 2013, Afghanistan is still home.

“I want to help out, and I want to participate in rebuilding” the country, she said. “But I want to make sure if I die, it won’t be in vain. And right now, I’m not sure it won’t be in vain.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

New president makes Peru fun again S IMEON T EGEL Lima, Peru BY

T

he red-and-white sash draped over an incoming president’s shoulder during the inauguration ceremonies in Peru’s Congress is a clear symbol of the solemnity of the office.

On July 28, observers were much less sure what to make of the white handkerchief that a grinning Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the Andean nation’s new, centrist leader, placed on his balding head during the military parade that followed his swearing-in.

Kuczynski’s impromptu response to the sunshine unexpectedly bursting through Lima’s winter skies provoked mirth in some corners — and criticism from supporters of his defeated opponent, Keiko Fujimori.

Yet the incident appears to have captured the original presidential style of PPK (Kuczynski is widely known here by his initials): spontaneous, informal and good- humored.

Since winning a runoff election on June 5, the 77-year-old former Wall Street banker has repeatedly cracked jokes, including the quip that he has been unable to speak to Fujimori because he gets a wrongnumber message when he calls her.

He has broken into a Latino two-step at the request of passersby and delights in publicly ribbing his cabinet ministers, including on the occasion when he informed them of his “seven commandments,” which ranged from resisting corruption to touring every corner of the geographically challenging country.

To encourage Peruvians to exercise more, the new president led 10 of his ministers in a public workout before one of their first cabinet meetings. After two personal trainers had put the politicians through their paces for 30 minutes in front of amused journalists and citizens, PPK said he wanted the entire nation “ready” for the Pan American Games, which Lima will host in 2019.

PPK’s grandfatherly bonhomie

PERU’S PRESIDENCY VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The public is loving the 77-year-old leader’s humor and spontaneity contrasts with the dour public manner of his predecessor, Ollanta Humala, a 54-year-old centerleft former army officer who, critics say, appeared overwhelmed by the presidency.

So far, Peruvians appear to be loving PPK’s style.

Kuczynski beat Fujimori, daughter of Peru’s jailed 1990s strongman president, Alberto Fujimori, by just under a quarter of 1 percent. Now he has an approval rating of 70.4 percent, while Fujimori, who had a double-digit lead before the election, is languishing at 38.3 percent.

While he has been conciliatory, the 40-year-old former congresswoman, whose Popular Force party dominates Congress, waited weeks to congratulate him on his

victory — via Twitter — and then vowed that Popular Force would govern from the legislature.

That has left some here worried about the long-term prospects for Kuczynski’s plans to crack down on endemic corruption, reform Peru’s police service and judiciary and lift millions of Peruvians out of poverty, starting with providing them running potable water.

Yet one person who isn’t concerned is PPK. “He was a poor candidate, but it seems like he is finally allowing his real personality to come through,” said Pao Ugaz, a progressive journalist. “It’s something Peruvians are not used to in their president. When he put the handkerchief on his head, he obviously didn’t care about the pic-

Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, top right, and part of his cabinet follow personal trainers through a public workout on Aug. 4.

tures. Good humor always goes down well, and the Fujimoristas don’t know how to respond.”

The relaxed approach may also be rooted in Kuczynski’s age and long career in the private and public sectors. As a former prime minister, economy minister, highlevel World Bank official and investment banker, he doesn’t need to fake gravitas.

It remains to be seen whether an electorate known for its contempt for the political class — often with good reason — will still be entertained by the president’s idiosyncrasies when his term ends in 2021.

But for now, Peruvian voters, inspired by PPK’s good spirits, are getting used to that rarest of feelings: cautious optimism. n

MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

‘iT ALL FEELS LIKE A JOKE’

BY PHILIP RUCKER IN FORT COLLINS, COLO.

Jo Tongue doesn’t have much time for politics, but the Hillary and Trump show is hard to tune out. And even harder to take. To this 31­year­old mother of two, with a third on the way, the presidency should be an honorable office, but instead she feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.” ¶ “Watching Jimmy Fallon, I feel like, ugh, is this how we should start out? We’re already mocking our president?” ¶ Tongue says she is both “sad” and “defeated” and — in a world filled with shootings, bombings and financial strain — maintains scant hope that a new president will change any of it.

At a sports bar 1,800 miles away in Goldsboro, N.C., Aaron Stewart is shooting pool with a buddy and thinking the same thing. The pair doesn’t just feel cut off from the current campaign, but from a political system they see as controlled by mysterious networks, greased by money and off-limits to people like them.

“I’m not really a conspiracy theorist, but the system is corrupt,” says Stewart, 21, who works at a convenience store. He draws a $1 bill from his wallet, holds it up to the bar’s faint light and declares, “This little piece of paper tells me what I can and cannot do.”

At the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in California, the summer interns are up on the issues. But Dominic Cicerone has a similar sense of foreboding. For him, the big issue is his own safety — he was afraid to go to the July 4 fireworks at Fisherman’s Wharf because the Islamic State had released a video claiming San Francisco as a target — and neither candidate is easing his concerns.

“These things are no longer happening in other places in the world; they’re now happening here in our own communities — and that scares me,” says Cicerone, 20, a student at Humboldt State University. “To be completely honest, I don’t trust either one with foreign policy.”

Polling suggests that the millennial genera-

Opposite page: Jo and Wes Tongue with their daughters, Evie, 4, and Lu, 3, in Fort Collins, Colo.

The Tongues are disillusioned with the presidential campaign and undecided about which candidate to support.

tion will act much the same this November as it did four and eight years ago — by voting heavily for the Democratic nominee, though with a considerable share supporting a thirdparty candidate.

But in interviews recently with more than 70 young voters in nine states from diverse backgrounds, lifestyles and careers, it is clear their mood is decidedly different from previous elections. Despite their varied lives, most of those interviewed shared a disgust with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump so intense that it is pushing many beyond disillusionment and toward apathy.

The message coming from America’s rising generation is ominous, and it carries ramifications after the November election. No matter who wins, they don’t think the next president will address their concerns or even have an impact on their lives. They have grim expectations for their government and have stopped looking to Washington for solutions. Why? Because they see it as too gridlocked — and its leaders too corrupted.

These voters were embarrassed and ashamed that Clinton and Trump are the best the country has to offer. Of the more than 70 millennials interviewed by The Washington Post, only a small fraction sounded genuinely

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COVER STORY

from previous page

enthusiastic about a candidate.

Though a few people voiced admiration for Clinton, most talked about both her and Trump in searing, caustic words: Supervillain. Evil.

Chameleon. Racist. Criminal. Egomaniac. Narcissist. Sociopath. Liar. Lying cutthroat. Panderer. Word salad. Willy-nilly. Douche. Joker. Troll.

Oompa Loompa. Sad. Absurd. Horrifying. Dishonest. Disgusting. Dangerous. Disaster.

The election “seems like it’s a prank, but it’s not a prank,” said Kyle Forster, 21, a student at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.

Wes Sumrell, 32, who enlisted in the military after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and now works as a longshoreman in Norfolk, Va., said he plans to vote for Trump. But his enthusiasm is tempered by what he sees as the mogul’s unrealistic promises.

“He’s doing the same thing Obama did — building people up to think he can do all these things,” Sumrell said. “But the nature of the position is that you can’t satisfy everyone. I don’t think he’ll be the savior he claims to be.”

The presidential campaign is drawing global interest, but young people from Virginia to Silicon Valley — students and teachers, shopkeepers and baristas, engineers and lawn mowers — feel isolated from it. Their Facebook feeds are cluttered with political headlines and outrage. They see snippets of Clinton and Trump on Snapchat. Some of them follow daily developments on news websites. But they don’t hear anything from Clinton or Trump that sounds like solutions for their own challenges.

“It’s kind of a scary time to have such a wishy-washy presidential election,” said David Searle, 25, a software engineer in Portland, Maine.

Some young people said they are so uninspired that they’re just going to sit this one out.

“I’m not going to vote. I’m just not,” said Dustin McKindsey, 26, a handyman in Madison, Wis. “This is the first time I’ve felt that way. . . . A choice between two stones that’ll sink.”

Many young people said they are mistrustful and wary of both parties and inclined to disaffiliate. “I don’t see the point of the parties — just another way to divide us,” said Casey Bunn, 21, an automotive repair worker in Goldsboro.

These sentiments represent a dramatic shift from eight years ago. With his cool charisma and change message, Barack Obama inspired legions of young voters to volunteer for him. Many poured into the streets of America’s cities to celebrate his victory with tears and toasts.

Aaron Johnson, 32, a barista and musician in Seattle, predicted that would not happen this year.

“You have a choice between a douche and a turd sandwich,” he said. “That’s from ‘South Park.’ This is a lesser-of-two-evils vote. We’ll be a laughingstock if Trump becomes president.

With Hillary, we’ll stomach it for four or eight years and live through it.”

For any politician, millennials are a prized block. Roughly 1 in 6 voters have been younger than 30 in the past two presidential elections, according to Census Bureau data. This spring,

MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

millennials up to age 34 surpassed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation, numbering 75.4 million, according to the Pew Research Center.

For Clinton, millennial outreach is a cornerstone of her strategy. She trumpets her plan to make college debt-free and recently visited Raygun, a millennial-owned T-shirt manufacturer in Iowa, to promote entrepreneurship.

And her campaign is prolific on social media — making behind-the-scenes videos for Snapchat and designing Clinton-inspired pantsuit outfits for Bitmoji users.

Trump is not ceding this demographic. He talks openly about gay rights — a greater priority for millennials — and his 34-year-old daughter, Ivanka, has championed his cause with her peers.

The millennial generation is loosely defined as people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, so adults up to age 35. Political pollsters measure the demographic as voters between the ages of 18 and 29.

These voters favor Clinton over Trump by nearly 2 to 1, 57 percent to 32 percent, according to an average of the last two national surveys by The Washington Post and ABC News. That is similar to Obama’s 23-percentage point margin over Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

These polls show Obama’s job approval rating at 68 percent among young adults, far higher than overall, and 58 percent of them said they think Clinton better understands their problems than does Trump.

But both are deeply polarizing with younger Americans, just as they are with the broader population. Seventy-two percent said they have

an unfavorable view of Trump, while 49 percent said the same of Clinton. An overwhelming majority — 68 percent — said they are dissatisfied with the choice of Clinton or Trump.

One-quarter of younger voters said in the two Post-ABC polls that they would support a thirdparty candidate. In a four-way race, Clinton leads among younger voters with 43 percent, followed by Trump at 25 percent, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson at 16 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 9 percent.

Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster who researches millennial attitudes and wrote “The Selfie Vote,” said: “We’re at a depressing moment where it’s unlikely that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will ever get these voters to love them. Instead, they’re trying to scare them, saying, ‘You can’t vote for him because he’ll nuke countries,’ or, ‘You can’t vote for her or like her because she’s a liar.’ ” So it is that the impressions many millennials have formed of the candidates are based almost entirely on issues of character, as opposed to their policy prescriptions or ideologies.

April McGuffie, 24, who serves in the Navy and is stationed in Norfolk, said she doesn’t have “the millennial mind-set.” She is more aligned with Trump yet has a hard time imagining him as president.

“Trump is acting like we’re in high school again,” McGuffie said. “He has good ideas, but it seems like he’s constantly on the attack.”

Polls show a majority of the country’s voters want change in Washington, but many young people interviewed said things are not so bad as they may seem. Gay men and lesbians can legally marry. Health care is more accessible. Jobs are

Jarrad Doolittle, right, Claire Secrist and Alan Fessler live in Fort Collins.

Secrist, 23, said of Hillary Clinton: “It doesn’t matter that she’ll be the first woman president. She should be in jail.”

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MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Derrick Wessels, 24, a barista in Fort Collins who describes himself as only “marginally unhappy,” says neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump can bring positive change to the country.

more available. Society has become more diverse and tolerant. To them, that is progress.

Parker Grimes, 20, a microbiology student from Fond du Lac, Wis., recalled talking about Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan with his roommates the other day.

“We said, ‘You know what? This place is pretty great,’ ” Grimes said. “We go to UW, a pretty decent school, and my family is okay, and a lot of things did get done in the last eight years.”

Behind the counter at Bean Cycle Roasters in Fort Collins, Derrick Wessels described himself as only “marginally unhappy.” Asked whether he thought Clinton would be a change agent, the 24-year-old barista said, “I don’t think she’ll cause a whole lot of change — and that’s why I’m voting for her. I think Trump will change things for the worse.”

Over and over again, young voters said they had hoped one of the candidates would inspire them. Some of them cast their first ballots for Obama and said they long to feel those same emotions of pride and hope for someone else.

Instead, this summer they have grown disenchanted with the whole process.

“This election is a complete joke,” lamented Donovan DeWeese, 25, a pantry chef at a steakhouse in Fort Collins.

“This is my future,” he said. “When I have kids, this will be something they remember me for. When my parents were this age, they had candidates like JFK and Ronald Reagan. These candidates we have now are not inspiring.”

Few of the young women interviewed said they felt moved by the historic nature of Clinton’s presidency. Britni Smith, 29, said, “I wanted the first woman president in office, but

then everything came to the surface — the email scandal, how much her positions fluctuate on really important issues.”

“I don’t think she’s super trustworthy,” added Smith, who works in retail and backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) in the Democratic primary campaign. “She’s kind of a social chameleon. She’ll tell any group she’s standing in front of what they want to hear.”

To Claire Secrist, 23, who was raised in a Republican household in Fort Collins, Clinton’s “life is a lie.” Secrist, who manages a clothing store, said: “It doesn’t matter that she’ll be the first woman president. She should be in jail.”

It does not help that Clinton and Trump, at 68 and 70 respectively, are two of the oldest presidential candidates ever.

Asked whom he might vote for, Noah Mack, 20, a junior political science major at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, exhaled in frustration.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking out at a glistening Lake Mendota. “Probably Hillary, but I don’t particularly like her. Hate Trump. I really don’t like Trump because he’s obviously incredibly racist, and his agendas, I just don’t agree with. He’s out of the Stone Age. So is she, too, in her own way — not age-wise, but in terms of values.”

Sanders, 74, is even closer to the Stone Age than the two nominees, yet he connected with millennials. They saw him as authentic and principled. In the Democratic primaries where exit polls were conducted, millennials supported Sanders over Clinton 71 percent to 28 percent, even though Clinton won many more votes overall.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Bernie did spark a fire with a lot of us,” said Christopher Lee, 22, a nursing student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “We thought, ‘Wow, our generation is actually going to get someone who has our values and understand that we want to see change.’ Then it all went away. Hillary and Trump. . . . It’s like we’re reverting to the country before Obama.”

This generation’s support for Sanders grew so intense that Allison McCartney recalled having to hide her Clinton favoritism.

“People who liked Clinton or thought she had anything worthy to say kind of had to hide in a digital hole for a while to let it blow over.

Any time you posted anything vaguely proClinton, it was like immediate swamping — ‘You’re a horrible person,’ ‘She’s a criminal,’ ” said McCartney, 26, a recent Stanford University graduate who works at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

But not every millennial has been so engaged. John Bynum, a Democrat, recalled eight years ago feeling excited about the possibility of the first black president.

“I remember following closely, watching the debates and everything,” said Bynum, 30, a Navy logistics specialist in Norfolk. But not this time. He said he will vote for Clinton, but that’s about the extent of his participation.

“I’ve slacked off a lot this election.”

Some right-leaning millennials thought they had a standard-bearer in Marco Rubio — until Trump effectively ate the youthful senator from Florida for lunch. One of them is Branden Windle, 27, who lives in Austin and co-founded a company that sells cowboy boots.

Windle sounded chagrined and at times sheepish as he explained his political evolution. In 2008, as a college student in California, he was “super engaged” with John McCain’s campaign. This time around, he supported Rubio in the primary. In November, however, he doesn’t even plan to vote.

“The more I engage in this election, the more apathetic I become,” he said. “I’m reluctant to talk politics and more reluctant to identify as a Republican. . . . I’m 100 percent sure I’m not a sexist or racist or bigot or intolerant, but I feel like identifying with the Republican Party makes you more associated with those things.”

The 2016 campaign risks making millennials — mistrustful, alienated and disappointed — a lost generation in politics.

Jessie Nelson, 21, was a star wrestler in high school in Stoughton, Wis. Then he worked as a process operator at a chemical company. Now he’s unemployed in Madison. Nelson follows politics on Snapchat. A whir of images. The one that stuck with him was of Sanders marching for civil rights in the 1960s.

“I’m afraid when I watch Trump,” said Nelson. “He’s openly racist against so many people. With the little knowledge I have about politics, I know someone like that shouldn’t be funded or supported. To think millions of people think he’s a good idea, it’s scary.”

“Hillary,” he added, “I don’t know. You hear the news, and you wonder why either of these people should be president. I see disguised evil.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

CYBERSECURITY

WhyYourPasswordIsAllWrong

ISTOCKPHOTO

BY T ODD C . F RANKEL AND A NDREA P ETERSON

P

eople tend to hate computer passwords, that often nonsensical jumble of letters, numbers and special keystrokes said to be essential for digital security. The secret codes seem impossible to remember. It’s why every log-in page has a “Forgot password?” life preserver. The struggle even has a name: Password rage.

Now, a new standard is emerging for passwords, backed by a growing number of businesses and government agencies — to the relief of computer users everywhere. No longer must passwords be changed so often, or include an incomprehensible string of special characters. The new direction is one that champions less complexity in favor of length.

Passwords that once looked like this: W@5hPo5t!, can now be this: mycatlikesreadinggarfieldinthewashingtonpost.

Requiring longer passwords, known as passphrases, usually 16 to 64 characters long, is increasingly seen as a potential escape

route from our painful push toward log-ins that only a cryptographer could love.

A series of studies from Carnegie Mellon University confirmed that passphrases are just as good at online security because hacking programs are thrown off by length nearly as easily as randomness. To a computer, poetry or simple sentences can be just as hard to crack.

Even better: People are less likely to forget them.

“You’re definitely seeing more of it,” said Michelle Mazurek, one of the Carnegie Mellon researchers, now at the University of Maryland College Park. “For equivalent amounts of security, longer tends to be more useful for people.”

One sign of change came this year from the federal agency overseeing government computer policy. The National Institute for Standards and Technology issued draft recommendations that called for a password overhaul — encouraging longer passwords and ending the practice of forcing new ones every 60 or 90 days.

“Passphrases are much harder to crack and break, and much easier to remember,” said Paul

Grassi, a NIST senior adviser.

It was an acknowledgment that current password practices are a pain.

Passwords today are “completely unusable,” Grassi said. “Users forget, which creates all sorts of cybersecurity problems, like writing it down or reusing them.”

The demand for simpler passwords has grown along with the share of time spent online, where hard-to-recall codes restrict access not only to work and school email, but shopping, playing games, managing health claims and finding recipes. The average person has 19 to 25 different online passwords, polls have shown.

But the change to simpler password protocols remains slow.

When Lorrie Cranor joined the Federal Trade Commission as chief technologist in January, she was stunned to learn that six of her government passwords came with automatic expirations. A couple months later, she had whittled that list down to four.

Cranor said NIST’s draft rules send a signal to agencies and companies that the revamped password guidelines have the blessing

“Passphrases are much harder to crack and break, and much easier to remember.”

Paul Grassi, a senior adviser at the National Institute for Standards and Technology

of the federal government.

“One of the things we’ve seen when we talk to companies is they say, ‘Well, this is all good,’ but I can’t change things until I have something I can point to,” Cranor said.

Now, they can point to NIST special publication 800-63, which still needs final approval.

The government’s move was applauded by privacy advocates such as Christopher Soghoian at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The fact that NIST is clearly coming around to embracing modern, science-based policies is great,” Soghoian said.

It’s possible the government could be the nimbler mover on this topic.

Guillaume Ross, senior consultant at computer security firm Rapid7, said businesses are often forced to slow adoption of new password policies because of legacy computers.

“On those systems it’s really hard for a security group to support long passwords,” Ross said.

Still, Ross tells clients to focus on password length for beefing up security rather than any other

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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MONEY variable.

Joe Hall, chief technologist at think tank Center for Democracy and Technology, has noticed easier password rules among the 800 different log-ins he uses. (He admits he’s an outlier having so many accounts. But, he says, that’s part of his job.) In recent years, he has seen more sites allowing 16 characteror-longer passwords. Fewer are requiring regular resets.

“This is part of a big push to make things more usable for humans,” Hall said.

Like many computer experts, Hall has been a fan of passphrases for years.

“I tell people to think of a sentence that is shocking and unpredictable, even nonsensical,” he said.

One example: “The spherical brown fox jumped into the Russian Bundestag.”

A friend of his likes to use pet peeves as his passwords, such as the malapropism “all intensive purposes.”

Of course, most experts say passwords of any kind are outdated.

Many have been pushing twofactor verification, where users have to prove their identity by entering a code sent to their email address or cellphone number. This standard is being more quickly adopted than passphrases.

In the meantime, experts caution against using popular song lyrics or poetry lines in passphrases. So no Beyoncé or Wallace Stevens. Hackers can download libraries of information to try common phrases. Mazurek suggested typing in your passphrase into a Google search bar and seeing if the search engine can autocomplete it — signifying that it’s a common phrase.

Rich Shay, another Carnegie Mellon researcher, said the studies grew out of experiences on campus: School email passwords had to be eight characters long and include one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, a special character and a number.

The researchers figured there had to be a better way.

Still, the studies showed that even with passphrases throwing in a little complexity — a number, a special character — could only help.

“There is no magic bullet,” said Shay, now at MIT. “There is no perfect password.”

And that’s something everyone already knows. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

The power of your dollar depends on where you live States that offer the most bang for your buck The relative value of $100 in each state

$84.67

$90

$100

$110

$115.34

SOURCE: TAX FOUNDATION THE WASHINGTON POST

Source: Tax Foundation

BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

Y

ou might think you know the value of a buck. But a recent Tax Foundation analysis provides a stark illustration of just how much further a dollar goes in some parts of the country than in others.

It’s no secret that some regions are more expensive. This is most obvious when it comes to rent, which is nearly twice as high in New York state as it is in Mississippi. These disparities extend to all sorts of other prices, too, for items such as food, gas and utilities.

The flip side of this, of course, is that income can differ drastically from place to place as well. The average household income is a lot higher in New York ($54,310) than it is in Mississippi ($35,521), which takes some of the sting out of those higher prices. So to get a true comparison of the value of a buck across state lines, you’d need to crunch the numbers showing how

THE WASHINGTON POST

much money people make and how much things cost where they live.

That’s exactly what the Tax Foundation did, using numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. They found that, compared with the national average, $1 in New York state will buy you about 14 cents less. If the average American can buy a chocolate candy bar for a buck, in other words, a New Yorker would only get 86 percent of that candy bar for the same money.

Conversely, a buck goes a long way in places such as Arkansas and Mississippi. Folks there get about 1.15 candy bars for the average national buck. In other words, if you take your New York dollar and fly to Mississippi, you can buy a candy bar that is a whopping 33 percent bigger than what you’re used to.

Or look at it this way: If you lived and worked in New York, and then one day decided to up-

root and move to Mississippi, and you kept your same job at your same wage via telecommuting, that would be akin to giving yourself a 33 percent raise. Not bad!

Given the rise in the availability of telecommuting, it may seem surprising that more workers aren’t negotiating telework arrangements that allow them to live in less-expensive areas of the country. But, of course, there are other factors at play, too. Many people, as it turns out, enjoy living in densely populated areas with lots of food and entertainment options within walking distance. Good luck getting tickets to “Hamilton” if you live 30 miles outside of Biloxi, Miss.

These differences matter a lot in some of the big public policy debates we’re having on things such as the federal minimum wage and tax policy. As the Tax Foundation analysis shows, a $15 minimum wage would mean a very different thing in Mississippi than it does in New York. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Pondering where trails have led us N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

Y

ON TRAILS An Exploration

By Robert Moor Simon & Schuster.

340 pp. $25

ou might think of Robert Moor as the Roger Angell of trail-walking. Just as Angell’s reports on specific baseball games segue effortlessly into reflections on the venerable sport itself, so Moor looks up from whatever trail he may be on to see the big picture. Which is often very big, indeed. Not only has he hiked some of the most out-of-the-way trails on the planet (in Newfoundland, Morocco and Malaysian Borneo, to name just a few). He has also taken part in a grand, ongoing effort to extend the Appalachian Trail to Greenland and even parts of Africa, on the dazzling theory that those locales hold pieces of what was once a single mountain chain — the ultra-proto Appalachians — on the supercontinent of Pangea.

In addition to hiking his tail off (among other footsore coups, he has chalked up the traditional, Georgia-to-Maine version of the Appalachian Trail), Moor prepared for writing this book, his first, in unusual ways. He herded sheep on the Navajo Reservation.

He learned to fashion a working stove from Coke cans. He boned up on the writings of the 9thcentury Chinese poet Han-shan, the 18th-century French naturalist Charles Bonnet and the 20thcentury American engineer Vannevar Bush. While you’re catching your breath, let me assure you that Moor mixes these and other ingredients into a highly satisfying whole, neatly avoiding the pitfall of pretentiousness. “On Trails” is an engaging blend of travelogue, sociology, history and philosophy that might be summed up as a meditation on the centrality of trails to animal and human life.

Moor starts off in Newfoundland, where he goes to have a look at what are thought to be the world’s oldest trails, left some 565 million years ago by primitive creatures called Ediacarans but discovered only eight years ago along the island’s coastline.

ROBERT F. BUKATY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Katahdin Lake in Maine is seen from Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

Moor’s scientific informant speculates that the fossilized Ediacaran trails memorialize the creatures’ efforts to regain perches from which they’d been dislodged by waves. “The first animals to summon the strength to venture forth,” Moor writes, “may simply have wanted to go back home.”

But since a trail implies that someone other than its maker might want to follow it, Moor ultimately decides that the Ediacaran spoors don’t make the cut.

Each recorded journey was selfcontained — a kind of filmstrip of an animal on the go but not really a trail.

Still, refining one’s subject is a useful exercise, and Moor’s prose makes him such good company that the reader is happy to keep pace. On the way, Moor is menaced by a storm cloud that emits “a soft digestive growl,” and soon “the air [is] crazed with rain.” He writes at a high level throughout the book, almost never settling for

a shopworn expression.

He’s also adept at pulling in research to support his arguments. In an early chapter on (undisputed) animal trails, for example, he summarizes an improbable and astonishing experiment: “When researchers tasked a slime mold with connecting a series of oat clusters mirroring the location of the major population centers surrounding Tokyo, the slime mold effectively re-created the layout of the city’s railway system. Linger a moment over that fact: A single-celled organism can design a railway system just as adroitly as Japan’s top engineers.”

Yet he doesn’t gobble up every flashy new scientific theory. After citing such thinkers as Carl Sagan for the proposition that the development of tracking and hunting skills led to a quantum leap in human brain power, Moor expresses his own skepticism: “If tracking is a prehistoric form of physics, then gathering plants is

also an early form of botany, and cooking is a precursor to chemistry.” The furthest Moor will go is to acknowledge that “hunting is an indisputably fundamental human tradition, which has shaped us in various ways.”

The book offers multiple human portraits, including the hikers with whom Moor chums around. Thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail make periodic appearances, sometimes providing comic relief, sometimes demonstrating an affecting solidarity with one another.

As for Moor, I’ll remember him not as the erudite quoter of Hanshan and Nietzsche on the same page, but as the thoughtful stylist who turns out sentences as simple and eloquent as this: “As they do for ants and elephants, [sheep] trails function as a form of external memory.” n Drabelle is a backpacker and former contributing editor of Book World.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A poetic mix of wonder and grief

Divergent paths from a riverbed

F ICTION

N ONFICTION l REVIEWED

J

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

acqueline Woodson, one of the most celebrated youngadult authors in the country, has always challenged her adolescent readers — and older readers, too. In books such as “Brown Girl Dreaming,” her memoir in verse, which won a National Book Award, or “Miracle’s Boys,” which won a Coretta Scott King Award, Woodson explores class, race and death with unflinching honesty and emotional depth.

So, in a way, it feels a little artificial to note that her new book, “Another Brooklyn,” is her first novel for adults since “Autobiography of a Family Photo” more than 20 years ago. But if that’s what it takes to broaden Woodson’s audience, I’m all for it. Her younger fans won’t pay any attention to these labels anyway, and nothing here is beyond the purview of interested teenagers.

“Another Brooklyn” is a short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper.

“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet,” the narrator begins, which perfectly conveys the novel’s suspended sorrow. Now an anthropologist who studies the way different cultures honor their dead, August is an adult looking back at her adolescence in the 1970s. She came to Brooklyn with her younger brother two decades earlier when their father hoped they could all start a new life away from the tragedies that shattered their family back in Tennessee.

But August and her brother aren’t so much renewed as arrested in this alien, dangerous place.

Unable to acknowledge her mother’s death, young August pines for her return while staring out the window, month after month.

By the time she turned 15, she remembers, “I was barely speaking. Where words had once flowed easily, I was suddenly silent, breath snatched from me, replaced by a melancholy my family couldn’t understand.”

Woodson reminds us that this

was, indeed, another Brooklyn, far from the tony borough of multimillion-dollar brownstones and speciality grocery stores. Heroin addicts wobble along these streets. A prostitute who lives beneath August’s family loses her children to Social Services.

In a voice that mingles the child’s longing with the adult’s awareness, August studies a trio of girls who pass below her window.

When her father finally lets her leave the apartment, she quickly bonds with these girls, and the four of them form a tight support group in a world determined to humiliate them, eager to molest them. “We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them — our voices loud, our laughter even louder. But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades.”

Some of the book’s most moving passages involve their efforts to encourage each other. One girl wants to become an actress; another a dancer; another a lawyer.

But everywhere the culture conspires against them. One by one, the girls are lured or dragged away from their dreams, sometimes with shocking results. “When you’re fifteen,” August says, “pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow.” Which is right where this exquisite novel strikes, too.

It’s as much as a compliment as a complaint to say that I wish the story were fuller. There’s enough material here for a much longer novel, and, though Woodson’s prose is always carefully constructed, she’s sometimes so elliptical that complicated issues are illuminated only obliquely.

But that’s the real attraction of this novel, which mixes wonder and grief so poignantly. Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. “Another Brooklyn” is another name for poetry. n Charles is the editor of the Washington Post’s Book World section.

I ANOTHER BROOKLYN

By Jacqueline Woodson Amistad. 175 pp. $22.99

RIVERINE A Memoir from Anywhere but Here

By Angela Palm Graywolf. 253 pp.

Paperback, $16

BY

M ICHELE F ILGATE

magine sitting across from your first love, whom you haven’t seen for 16 years. He’s more handsome than you thought he would be. He’s strong, healthy and charming. There’s just one problem. He’s in prison, serving a life sentence without parole for murdering two people.

This is where Angela Palm found herself some years ago, face to face with the man she once dreamed she’d spend the rest of her life with. In her affecting memoir “Riverine,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Palm searches through her past to understand “how it was possible for the lives of two people sprung from the same place to diverge in such different directions.”

Growing up in rural Indiana on an old riverbed, Palm fell for Corey, a troubled but charismatic neighbor whose bedroom window faced hers. They became fast friends, playing truth-or-dare and tag, having serious conversations while sitting on top of Palm’s swing set.

“We’re not much different,” she says to Corey, who landed in prison at 19. “None of us. People are mostly water and thoughts.”

Corey struggled through adolescence. Gradually, his troubles grew from minor infractions such as marijuana possession to the stabbing of two neighbors. After killing them, he lit their car on fire.

Palm’s reaction is disbelief. It isn’t until she visits him in prison years later that she gets some answers: Corey was on drugs, including heroin, and was homeless, sometimes even sleeping at his dead sister’s grave. He was trying to recover, and he needed money.

Palm is no stranger to criminals. Her Uncle Pat served time for shooting his former boss in the stomach. After he is released from prison, it’s apparent he’s mentally ill. In a particularly disturbing scene, he drives his niece to pick up a pizza, and he casually tells her that he was planning on killing her entire family but didn’t.

Writers tend to search for

meaning in their origin stories, and Palm is fixated not just on her physical geography but also her internal map.

“The need to look at other landscapes for clues about what already lies within us is real,” Palm writes. “It is a variation on distance, that thing you need to put between yourself and a problem in order to see it clearly.”

The juxtaposition of Palm’s fascination with landscapes and her coming of age as an author works nicely. Both strands of the story cross-pollinate. Now married with two kids, she lives in Vermont with her husband, a pilot.

“My best self has grown here in Vermont,” Palm writes. “Only it is a wild self, one that knows it was never meant to root down into any ground. One that values freedom above all else.”

She remains free, but part of her will always belong to Corey. The two maintain a close relationship, exchanging emails and holding on to a relationship that was planted years ago. Palm’s husband understands but has asked her whether she’d leave him if Corey were released. Her response is that there’s no point in talking about something that can’t happen, yet “it was a relief to know that he was open to any answer I might give.”

Palm emerges from these pages as someone who holds on firmly to the first boy she ever fell in love with, someone who forges a new life for herself while never forgetting where she comes from.

There’s a flickering beauty to her stubbornness, like the reflection of late afternoon sunlight in a river. Corey committed an awful crime — but underneath his surface, there’s still the boy she peered at through her window all those years ago. Reading this tale, we can all remember lost loves and ponder the might-have-beens. n Filgate is a freelance writer and contributing editor at Literary Hub and VP/Awards for the National Book Critics Circle.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

After ISIS falls in Mosul, next steps will be crucial DAVID PETRAEUS is a retired U.S. Army general who commanded coalition forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008 and Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 and served as CIA director from 2011 to 2012. He is a partner in a major global investment firm.

In the next few months, a mixed force of Iraqi Arab and Kurdish security forces — including various Sunni and perhaps some Shiite militia elements — will enter Mosul, clear the city of Islamic State extremists and then work to bring governance, stability and reconstruction to one of Iraq’s most complex cities and its province.

There is no question that the Islamic State will be defeated in Mosul; the real question is what comes afterward. Can the postIslamic State effort resolve the squabbling likely to arise over numerous issues and bring lasting stability to one of Iraq’s most diverse and challenging provinces? Failure to do so could lead to ISIS 3.0.

The prospect of the operation to clear Mosul brings to mind experiences from the spring of 2003, when the 101st Airborne Division, which I was privileged to command, entered a Mosul in considerable turmoil. Our first task, once a degree of order had been restored, was to determine how to establish governance. That entailed getting Iraqi partners to help run the city of nearly 2 million people and the rest of Nineveh Province.

Establishing a representative interim council to work with us in Nineveh proved to be no easy task — and its formation and later developments hold insights for the coming endeavor in Mosul.

The challenge of Mosul and Nineveh is the considerable number of ethnic groups, religious sects, tribes and other elements that make up the province. Ultimately, we ensured that the provincial council included representatives of every district in Nineveh, of every major religion (Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Shabak), of each ethnic group (Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Turkmen), of every additional major societal element (Mosul University academics, businessmen, retired

generals) and of each major tribe not already sufficiently represented.

We were able to structure a caucus that elected an interim provincial council. That council, in turn, elected an experienced, able interim governor (a Sunni Arab, given that Sunni Arabs made up the majority of Nineveh’s population), who was a wellrespected, highly decorated former major general whose brother had been killed by Saddam Hussein and who had been under house arrest for a considerable period.

Importantly, I had the legal authority needed and the forces necessary to back up that authority, if required. I was not reluctant to exercise either.

U.S. forces today obviously lack the authority, remit and sheer numbers of the U.S. elements in Iraq in 2003. They also do not have the mandate that we had in the early days. But I have no doubt that coalition assets will, in the weeks ahead, do so much damage to the surviving Islamic State elements in Mosul that the battle there may well be less intense than many have feared.

Thus, the most significant challenge in Mosul will not be to defeat the Islamic State; rather, it will be the task we faced there in 2003: to ensure post-conflict security, reconstruction and, above all, governance that is representative of and responsive to the people.

Leaders of the various Iraqi elements will probably have their own militias, and there will be

ALICE MARTINS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sunni Arab tribal fighters gather in Hajj Ali, Iraq, on Aug. 9. They are among the forces preparing to retake Mosul from the Islamic State.

endless rounds of brinkmanship on the road to post-Islamic State boundaries, governing structures and distribution of power and resources. If those challenges are not enough, others will emanate from Iran and the Shiite militias it supports, from Turkey and Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors, from the Kurdish Regional Government that understandably wants to retain the disputed internal boundary areas that its peshmerga now largely control, and so on.

The effort in Mosul and Nineveh in the spring, summer and early fall of 2003 was very successful. Ultimately, however, it was undone by an inability to get Iraqi authorities in Baghdad to approve initiatives we pursued in reconciliation with former Baath Party members cast out of work by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s de-Baathification decree and in providing work for the tens of thousands of Iraq soldiers also rendered unemployed by the authority. The other ultimate challenge was the lack of clear direction and resources from Baghdad for their ministries’ activities in Nineveh.

These failures meant that the Sunni insurgency ultimately intensified in Mosul, as it already had in the other Sunni Arab areas of Iraq. The Sunni Arabs in Nineveh came to see few reasons to support the new Iraq.

There clearly are lessons to be learned from our earlier experience — and from after the departure of U.S. forces in late 2011. Most particularly, they have to do with the need for inclusive, representative and responsive governance.

In the case of Mosul, Nineveh’s Sunni Arabs, in particular, will need considerable reassurances that their interests will be adequately represented in the new Mosul and Nineveh. But so will the Kurdish citizens of Nineveh (of multiple political parties), as well as Shiite Arabs, Shiite and Sunni Turkmen, Yazidis, Christians, Shabak and numerous tribes.

The best vehicle for carrying this out would be a provincial council like the one set up in 2003, and through a similarly inclusive process. Importantly, Shiite militias should play no role in post-Islamic State security and governance. Baghdad and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will need to be prepared to perhaps grant the region greater autonomy in determining spending priorities. The task facing Abadi is exceedingly complex, but the only way forward is to squarely face the challenges, work to build relationships and press the many disparate parties to find common ground on the issues — aided by the U.S.-led coalition. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Don’t fear the robot revolution STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a business and economics writer at The Washington Post and a public affairs professor at George Mason University.

Millions of jobs are threatened by things such as self-driving cars, voice recognition systems and intelligent software, in the same way that millions of jobs were eliminated by the mechanical reaper and precision lasers and computers. The result will certainly be a lot of economic churn and dislocation. And as with similar job losses from globalization, if we don’t find a mechanism for the winners of this process to provide a better economic safety net for the losers, there will be a populist backlash.

However, there are many who worry that this next wave of technological progress may be different — that, in the end, there won’t be enough work for everyone to earn a living and have productive lives. These skeptics have a difficult time imagining what all those displaced cabdrivers and bookkeepers will do. But historical experience strongly suggests that there will be jobs for those who want them at wages in line with those in the rest of the economy.

So how would that work?

Remember, first, that these technological advances will be adopted because companies will be able to make and do things cheaper. Because of this, people will buy more of what they are selling, generating an increase in demand for those newly productive workers that will at least partly offset the initial job loss from automation.

A generation ago, for example, air travel was so expensive that only wealthy people could afford to fly. Improvements in airplane technology and computer reservation systems have changed that, and now millions more Americans fly for business or pleasure or simply to go home for the holidays. There are fewer employees per flight but more planes, pilots and flight attendants than ever.

Not all the benefit from increased productivity is captured by consumers in the form of lower prices, however.

Some is captured by the workers who remain, who can now command higher wages because of the extra skills they have acquired. The rest of the benefit goes to company shareholders in the form of increased profit. And let’s not forget all those new highpaying jobs associated with

designing, manufacturing and marketing all that job-destroying technology. With their higher incomes, all of these people — the remaining workers, shareholders and technology producers — will buy more goods and services of all sorts, increasing the demand for the workers who produce them.

I realize such trickle-down economics has gotten a bad name in some circles, but there is some truth in it. The winners from jobdestroying technology hire more gardeners, housekeepers and daycare workers. They take more vacations and eat at more restaurants. They buy more cars and boats and bigger houses.

They engage the services of more auto mechanics and personal trainers, psychologists and orthopedic surgeons.

To be sure, some of those are low-wage jobs. But in a country whose native-born labor force is likely to shrink because of lower birthrates, an aging population and a trend toward earlier retirements, even these workers’ standard of living will rise. In the same way that barbers in the United States make many times more than equally productive barbers in India, the only way companies will be able to meet the increased demand for auto mechanics and personal trainers is to pay them enough to keep

them from choosing some other line of work.

These adjustments can take years, even decades, because there is so much “friction” in labor markets. People who lose their jobs must have the willingness and wherewithal to find new opportunities, learn new skills, move to new cities — and to the degree they do not, the economy’s ability to keep everyone employed will be frustrated.

Technology skeptics will argue that a bookkeeper displaced by intelligent software isn’t likely to become a software engineer. Fair enough — but that’s not the way you would expect labor markets to adjust. The way it might work is the bookkeeper upgrades her skills to become an accountant, an accountant becomes an actuary, an actuary becomes a math professor, and a math professor becomes a software engineer who creates even better bookkeeping software.

In a market economy, nobody plans or manages this bumpingup process — it is the natural dynamic by which market economies become richer as productivity improves. We are on the cusp of a wave of “creative destruction.” That nobody can say where exactly the new jobs will come from is not unusual, nor is it reason to despair. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY HALL

Do taxes tarnish Olympic medal?

MICHELLE SINGLETARY writes the nationally syndicated personal finance column “The Color of Money.”

My family and I have been mesmerized by the Summer Olympics.

And to be honest, a few times, as we watched Michael Phelps win another gold medal or Simone Biles defy gravity, we thought, “This athlete is going to get paid!”

While it’s true that some of the superb competitors see big paydays from their triumphs at the Olympics, many don’t end up cashing in.

But here’s something else. When those who win get bonuses for their medals, the income is subject to U.S. income tax. The U.S. Olympic Committee gives winners $25,000 for a gold medal, $15,000 for a silver and $10,000 for a bronze.

A bipartisan bill that passed the Senate this summer would exempt the income for Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Americans for Tax Reform has drafted a petition to urge the House of Representatives to follow.

“Most countries subsidize their athletes; the very least we can do is make sure our athletes don’t get hit with a tax bill for winning,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the bill. “After a successful and hard-fought victory, it’s just not right for the U.S. to welcome these athletes home with a tax on that victory.”

As part of my email newsletter, I ask the Color of Money Question of the Week. My most recent query: Should U.S. Olympic winners have to pay taxes on the bonuses they get for

winning a medal? Here’s what some of you had to say: On Twitter, @Eddieca11486276 wrote: “No!!!! They [Olympic athletes] were given to the world to represent the achievements of their country. Let them enjoy the fruit of their labor.”

Many people echoed the following comment from another reader: “The prize money should not be taxed, although for some of the high-profile athletes, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the endorsement money and other financial windfalls that come with their success. Many, perhaps most, of the less visible winners in sports that don’t make prime-time TV don’t enjoy that benefit even though they also put in years of sacrifice to reach their success at the Olympics. The

KLMNO WEEKLY

MIKE LESTER/THE WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

federal or state governments that have income taxes are never going to miss the few thousand dollars they might get from taxing the medal winners. We collectively claim success for our great country and society based on their hard work and we ought to reward them; not taxing their prize money seems like a small token of appreciation for their dedication and hard work.”

Another wrote: “I can’t understand why there isn’t more of an uproar about this antiquated policy. Other countries subsidize and even pay their athletes. Our athletes and/or their families go into debt so we can beat our chest in front of the TV.” But there were many who don’t agree that Olympians deserve a special tax privilege.

“At my corporate job, I’m taxed on any bonus and reward given to me by my employer, even if the reward is an item instead of money,” Ruth B. wrote. “If Congress considers changing the taxable status for medal-winning Olympic athletes, they should change the rule for everyone. Why is one person’s bonus different than another’s?”

Kimberly Rotter of San Diego chimed in: “It doesn’t make sense to me that an Olympian wouldn’t have to pay taxes on winnings.

Why not? The taxes will still be

subject to normal limits, so if you win one gold medal, you will pay very little. If a person wins 12 gold [medals], he’s starting with a total income of $300,000, so any complaint is just whining. We all have to step up and meet our financial obligations, including the one to Uncle Sam. That’s real life.”

Philip Lilienthal, president of Global Camps Africa in Virginia, made a good point: “Of course they should pay a tax. I do wonderful work in Africa, working with children to educate them in avoiding HIV. Any salary I make is and should be taxed.

Your relief from tax should not be the value of the work you do: Or, maybe it should be, but that never has been the prism through which the IRS looks to see whether you should be taxed. This is no different.”

I understand the compassion people have for folks who devote a great amount of money and time to compete in the Olympics. The competitors make sacrifices for which they deserve much kudos.

But if we are going to carve out a special tax break for Olympic athletes, then we should add to that list all those people who serve for the good of society, including educators, social workers and people who work with the poor. Just saying. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Brazil BY

J ULIANA B ARBASSA

As Rio de Janeiro’s Summer Olympics reach their end, much of the world is puzzling over the country in the background, Brazil. Though it’s one of the largest, most populous countries in the world, with one of the biggest economies, it’s often poorly understood. Here’s a guide to sorting out what’s true and what’s not.

MYTH NO. 1 Brazil celebrates diversity and is a racial democracy.

Brazil is an ethnically mixed country: Whites make up less than half of the population. It has more black people than any nation outside Africa and more Japanese residents than anywhere but Japan. There are also thriving communities of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, and millions who claim ancestors from Europe and Russia.

Don’t let this broad range fool you, however. There is a hierarchy of races in Brazil, and white is at the top. Blacks are far more likely to be poor, face long-term unemployment and earn lower wages. They also attend college at lower rates than whites. Though public colleges are free, entrance exams are tough; wealthy students who can afford expensive private education secure most slots. This makes it harder for Brazilians of color to reach powerful positions in business or politics.

MYTH NO. 2 Brazilians are sexually liberated.

Yes, my countrymen are comfortable flaunting their skin and given to exuberant public displays of affection. But the apparent openness regarding sex, sexuality and gender relations is rife with tension. It co-exists with a deep religiosity, a rightward shift in the government, and pockets of machismo and homophobia. Though church attendance has dropped, Brazil still has more Roman Catholics than any other country. And 1 in 4 Brazilians are now evangelical

Christians. They have become cultural and political heavyweights, running for office and dominating the media. Many fear this could lead to restrictions on the rights of religious, sexual or ethnic minorities. Sexual violence is also a problem. A recent report found that someone is raped every 11 minutes in Brazil. And hate-motivated attacks have killed 1,600 LGBT people in the past 41/2 years.

MYTH NO. 3 Brazil is the heart and soul of world soccer.

Brazil has won five World Cup trophies, the only country to have done so. We also export more players than any other.

But our once-proud team is struggling. In 2010, it failed to reach the World Cup semifinals.

In 2014, Brazil lost 7-1 to Germany on home turf, a crushing defeat.

At this Olympics, Brazil tied with the 64th-ranked South Africa and the 113th-ranked Iraq. These disappointing results have exposed deep-seated flaws a long time in the making: The lack of a competitive league at home, with teams selling talented young players as fast as possible, has sapped the quality of domestic soccer and emptied stadiums.

Corruption — entrenched, long-lasting and widespread — has also eaten into the quality of Brazilian play. The past three presidents of the Brazilian Football Confederation are all facing serious charges.

MYTH NO. 4 Brazilians are carefree about appearance.

Casual dress is so prevalent

FELIPE DANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sunbathers enjoy Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilians are fastidious about those famous beach bodies.

that an Ipanema church posted a sign asking worshipers to refrain from entering in bikinis and sungas, or male swimming briefs.

But informality is not synonymous with a lack of grooming. To the contrary, Brazilians are the world’s most finicky when it comes to sprucing, pruning, scenting and generally keeping clean. For starters, no one takes as many showers; the national average is nearly 12 a week. Americans bathe about half as much. The same is true for brushing teeth: The country has the largest population of dentists in the world, and households spend as much on their teeth as those in the United States do, though Brazil’s economic productivity is a fifth the size.

Brazilians, both men and women, are beauty product junkies. Brazil’s gym industry is the world’s second largest, and what can’t be tightened on the treadmill is nipped and tucked away. With less than 3 percent of the world’s population, Brazil accounts for nearly 13 percent of cosmetic procedures.

MYTH NO. 5 Brazil is an up-and-coming, modernizing economy.

For a handful of years, Brazil did rather well, with an average annual growth of 4.5 percent

between 2006 and 2010. The economy continued to expand between 2011 and 2014, though the rate slowed significantly to an average of 2.1 percent.

During those good years, Brazil’s economy was buoyed by rising prices for the commodities it sold abroad, such as iron ore, oil and beef. This bonanza made it one of the most attractive nations for foreign direct investment.

Things went downhill when commodity prices, which are notoriously volatile, plummeted.

By 2015, Brazil’s economy was in a downward spiral. It shrank by nearly 4 percent and is expected to do the same this year. What’s worse, Brazil didn’t use those prosperous years to do much of the hard work it needed to grow in the long term.

Brazil failed to take on painful but important reforms to its labyrinthine tax code or its cushy pensions system. Despite some progressive measures, by and large Brazil continues to subsidize the education of its wealthy. Loans for poor students, in the meantime, have been slashed. This does not bode well for long-term economic — or social — progress. n Barbassa is a Rio-based journalist and the author of “Dancing With the Devil in the City of God.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. Saturday, August 27

6pm to 9pm Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

The 6th Annual Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival has grown into a once-a-year spectacular evening.

AND THIS YEAR IT’S EVEN BIGGER. With 35 wineries from throughout the region, you’ll have the opportunity to taste over 100 wines.

Plus enjoy locally crafted beers, amazing ciders, crisp distilled spirits and tasty bites from local restaurants.

And there’s live music, the Sticks Cigar outdoor lounge, and for a few fortunate patrons, enjoy the VIP experience with early entry to the festival, the Moss-Adams, LLC private lounge to relax away from the crowds, and our famous VIP bag with plenty of goodies including a bottle of award-winning NCW wine.

The Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival is a one-ticket event, there are no additional tasting fees or tokens needed.

All wine and food samples are included in your ticket.

Tickets are $45 for general admission, and a limited number of VIP tickets are available for $75. Purchase your tickets at wenatcheewineandfood.com Presented by