The Washington Post National Weekly - August 30, 2015

Worst Week Jeb Bush 3

Politics For these two, it’s personal 4

Healthcare Just what the doctors ordered 16

5 Myths About wildfires 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

10 YEARS AFTER KATRINA

A bittersweet influx A rush of capital and newcomers has unleashed seismic changes in New Orleans, which is used to moving at its own pace PAGE 12

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SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

Every Friday in The Wenatchee World, look for our new weekly outdoors page — Everybody Out — published in coordination with WenatcheeOutdoors.org.

Each week you’ll discover new pathways to get out and enjoy outdoor opportunities in North Central Washington.

Every Friday you’ll enjoy stories of adventures, stunning photographs, and a calendar of activities to plan your outings. Longtime outdoors writer Andy Dappen and others will guide you to some of the most popular recreational spots in our region — as well as some of the lesser-known and relatively undiscovered treasures in our area.

Everybody Out is also published on our website at wenatcheeworld.com, and you can share your outdoors experiences, photos and videos via our Facebook and Instagram accounts.

— Everybody Out — discover it in the Friday edition of The Wenatchee World.

wenatcheeworld.com

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Jeb Bush

by Chris Cillizza

W

hen you’ve got one foot in a bear trap, the natural reaction is to scramble to get your other foot to safe ground. But what if, in your panic, you step in another bear trap?

That’s what Jeb Bush did this past week. Trying to make amends with irate Latino voters after he used the term “anchor babies” to describe the U.S.­citizen children of undocumented immigrants who cross the border to give birth, he unleashed this gem by way of “explanation”: “What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed where there’s organized efforts — and frankly it’s more related to Asian people — coming into our country, having children in that organized effort, taking advantage of a noble concept with birthright citizenship,” Bush said during a visit to the border in McAllen, Tex., on Monday.

Aha! So it’s “Asians” who are the problem. Got it.

Donald Trump, never one to miss an opportunity to jab at someone else’s gaffe, took to Twitter to lambast Bush. “Asians are very offended that JEB said that anchor babies applies to them as a way to be more politically correct to hispanics,” Trump tweeted. “A mess!”

Trump was needling Bush in other ways, too. Even as the former Florida governor ramped up his rhetoric against the real estate reality star, polling on the race

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MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

suggested that the two were going in opposite directions.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday showed Trump well ahead of the rest of the GOP field at 28 percent — exactly four times as much support as Bush won in the same survey. (Bush’s 7 percent was good enough for a three­way tie for third.)

Jeb Bush, for becoming the latest GOP presidential hopeful to be Trumped, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 46

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

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ON THE COVER The “sliver by the river” in New Orleans has become a hive of activity. Farther from the Mississippi River, the recovery picture is mixed. Photograph by RICKY CARIOTI, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A long-simmering Trump-Bush feud

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OBERT C OSTA

D

onald Trump spent a day in January 2014 hobnobbing with politicians at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The billionaire mogul touted legalizing gambling with state House Speaker Steve Crisafulli and two other wired Florida Republicans, plugging his properties as potential sites for casinos.

But as they tapped putts on the greens, something else was on Trump’s mind: Jeb Bush.

“He was trashing Jeb and, quite honestly, I don’t think he’s ever held Jeb in high regard,” said Crisafulli, a Bush supporter who said he was “uncomfortable” with the conversation and defended the former Florida governor to Trump. “I’ve met with Mr. Trump on several occasions and he’s constantly had things to say about Jeb. . . . He’s always had a negative connotation about Jeb.” Trump’s jeering that day was a harbinger of the taunts and derision that the 2016 GOP frontrunner has directed at Bush on the campaign trail this summer.

The feud between the two leading Republicans, which has escalated in recent days, is shaping up as a defining dynamic at this early stage of the race. And considering Trump’s dominant status in polls and Bush’s fundraising dominance, the tensions between the two are likely to be a factor for weeks or months to come as each candidate attempts to topple the other.

The 2016 campaign is only the latest manifestation of decades of discord between Trump and the Bush family. Since the gilded 1980s, when Trump and George H.W. Bush rose as forces in their respective spheres, the relationship between Trump and the Bushes has been a melodrama — veering between displays of public affection and acerbic insults.

At the core, there are clashes of style, manner and class between the Bushes — a patrician clan of presidents, governors and financiers who have pulled the levers of

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Decades of discord are now on display in the 2016 GOP campaign power for generations — and Trump, a hustling New York City deal-maker who turned his father’s outer borough real-estate portfolio into a gold-plated empire.

“The Bushes were never Trump’s cup of tea,” said Roger Stone, a longtime confidant and former adviser to Trump. Asked why the Bushes often have kept Trump at arm’s length, he said: “He’s not from old, WASP money.

The Trumps didn’t come on the Mayflower.”

‘He’s not up to snuff ’ Trump shrugs off the suggestion that his rivalry with the Bushes is rooted in pedigree, although he is open about his animosity toward them; he char-

acterizes his relationship with former president Bill Clinton, for instance, as far closer.

Trump turned on former president George H.W. Bush when he raised taxes during his term despite pledging not to do so. He lashed out at former president George W. Bush over the war in Iraq during his tenure.

But Trump reserves particular, personal ire for Jeb Bush, whose first name he commonly mocks by drawing out in a slight drawl. One Trump associate, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said of Trump: “He’s very smart, he’s driven and he has two goals: One, to be elected president, and two, to have Jeb not be president.”

In a 35-minute interview this

Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and former Florida governor Jeb Bush at the first Republican presidential debate at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.

week with The Washington Post tracing his history with the Bushes, Trump unleashed a hailstorm of scorn. He found 33 ways to skewer the family — about one put-down per minute.

On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy.

I don’t think he has a clue.”

On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”

On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ” And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . . Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”

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POLITICS Trump was especially accusatory when he talked about Jeb Bush’s work in investment banking. After leaving the governor’s office in 2007, Bush was an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays, earning between $1.3 million and $2 million a year.

Trump called Bush’s role at Lehman a “no-show job” and suggested it was a reward for helping direct Florida funds to the firm, whose collapse in 2008 helped kick off the Great Recession.

“That’s a Hillary Clinton kind of situation,” Trump said. “This is huge. Let me ask you: Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers — which, when it failed, almost took the world with it?”

Asked if he thought Bush was ready to steer the nation’s economy, Trump said, “Steer it? He can’t steer himself.”

‘Liberal cocktail parties’ Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman, said Trump “is trafficking in false conspiracy theories” about Lehman. Responding to Trump’s broader criticisms, Miller highlighted the developer’s past ties to Democrats and liberal causes.

“While Trump was attending New York liberal cocktail parties and trashing conservatives and Republican presidents any chance he got, Jeb was the most conservative governor in the country, cutting taxes, reining in the size of government, and protecting life,” Miller said.

Bush has begun firing back on the stump, though not with Trump’s vigor. “There are some people running, they’re really talented about filling space — about saying big things,” he said Wednesday in Pensacola, Fla. “They think that volume in their language is a kind of a version of leadership. Talking is not leadership. Doing is leadership.”

Al Cardenas, another Bush friend, suggested Trump’s motivation was pure politics: “He wants to win this thing, he sees Jeb as the big gorilla with the big super PAC money and someone who would eventually be the one facing him in the home stretch.”

Cardenas also surmised that Trump had been a non-factor in Bush’s mind.

“In a thousand conversations I’ve ever had with Jeb, I’ve never heard Donald Trump mentioned once until last year,” Cardenas said.

TRUMP ON THE BUSHES

On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy. I don’t think he has a clue.”

On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”

On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart.

I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ” And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . .

Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”

Jeb Bush ‘a good man’ Trump fondly remembers one of his first encounters with the Bush family patriarch. It was 1988, and he hosted George H.W. Bush for a presidential campaign fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel, the palatial New York property Trump owned at the time.

“I remember Don King was there,” Trump said in the interview. “Big Don King. . . . He’s shaking Bush’s hand and saying, ‘Only in America!’ And, you know Don King’s voice. It’s like Pavarotti, right?”

Trump soured on Bush when he hiked taxes, but they eventually made amends. In 1998, Trump said, Bush asked him to host a fundraiser for his son, Jeb, who was running to be Florida governor. Trump agreed. The event was in his apartment at Trump Tower.

It was not merely a political favor. Trump had been trying to persuade Florida lawmakers to allow his company to manage casinos on tribal land.

“I had a fundraiser and raised about $1 million, which in those days was a lot of money,” Trump said. He said George H.W. Bush wrote “a beautiful note thanking me for helping with his son.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s swipes at the elder Bush continued and extended onto the pages of his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.” In it, he said the 41st president “failed to comprehend that he was in the bubble created by the American presidency and simply lost touch.” In that same book, Trump praised Jeb as a “good man” who is “exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future.”

Former ambassador Mel Sembler, a Bush family friend and fundraiser, said he attended the 1998 event at Trump Tower and suggested the current animus must be “newfound.”

“You don’t have animosity toward somebody and then put on a fundraiser in your home.”

‘I have never tried to click’ In 1999, as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was consolidating the Republican establishment behind his 2000 presidential candidacy, Trump explored a run of his own on the Reform Party, which grew out of the 1992 independent run of Ross Perot that many Republicans were convinced cost Bush’s father his reelection.

“Mr. Trump seems to always have an optimistic view of his abilities.

I respect him and his candidacy, but I am a Jeb Bush supporter like most current and former public officials in Florida.”

— former state House speaker Will Weatherford

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Trump went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and said Bush had not been forthcoming enough about his problems with alcohol. Later that fall, Trump made a splashy visit to Miami, Jeb Bush’s adopted hometown. Rallying Cuban Americans in Little Havana, Trump knocked George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore by saying that his wealth made him more qualified to be president than the two descendants of politicians because they were, as he put it, “anointed.”

In the end, Trump did not run.

But by Bush’s second term in the Oval Office, Trump had become a thorn in the president’s side. In the run-up to Bush’s 2004 reelection, Trump criticized his management of the Iraq war. By 2007, he declared that Bush was “a horrible president — possibly the worst in the history of this country.”

Trump said in the Post interview that he blames Bush for the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group, which has seized parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

“I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq,” he said. “The brother went in and destabilized the entire region. If [Jeb’s] brother didn’t do that with Iraq, I don’t think you’d have a destabilized Middle East right now.”

During Jeb Bush’s two terms as governor, even as his business interests expanded in South Florida, Trump shunned him.

“I’ve never tried to click,” he said. “If I devoted time to being friendly with them, don’t you think I’d be friendly with them?”

Instead, Trump cultivated ties to Bush allies in Tallahassee, inviting them to play golf or to dine with him in Manhattan or South Florida. Recounting one outing with former state House speaker Will Weatherford (R), Trump said, “I think they were more impressed with my golf game than anything else, if you want to know the truth. . . . I shot 72.”

Weatherford said this week that he did not remember Trump shooting 72.

“Mr. Trump seems to always have an optimistic view of his abilities,” Weatherford wrote in an e-mail. “I respect him and his candidacy, but I am a Jeb Bush supporter like most current and former public officials in Florida.”n

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POLITICS

A sunny outlook on energy C HRIS M OONEY Las Vegas BY

P

resident Obama came here this past week to throw his weight behind the booming solar energy industry and to announce a bevy of initiatives to push clean energy in America’s homes.

“It’s one thing if you’re consistent in being free market,” Obama said. “It’s another thing if you’re free market until it’s solar that’s working, and people want to buy it, and suddenly you’re not for it any more. That’s a problem.”

The president also announced that the administration will seek to expand access to a loan program that allows homeowners to get up-front financing for clean-energy or energy-efficient home upgrades, and then pay it off over many years as part of their property taxes.

“We’re going to make it even easier for individual homeowners to put solar panels on the roof with no upfront cost,” the president said at the eighth annual National Clean Energy Summit, co-sponsored by Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Center for American Progress, and representatives of Nevada’s universities and industry. “So we’re taking steps that will allow more Americans to join this revolution, with no money down.”

Additional moves by the Energy Department will make $1 billion in loan guarantees available for “distributed” energy projects, such as rooftop panels or batteries.

Appearing at the Clean Energy Summit has become a political must for members of the Democratic establishment, and those who have made common cause with Democratic elected officials.

Past speakers have included Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton (twice), Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg.

Nevada is an apt place for Obama to begin a renewed focus on clean energy and climate. The state has been dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of solar” and has recently shown the growth to prove it.

CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

At the Clean Energy Summit, Obama looks for more ways to help solar industry thrive Solar jobs in the state increased from 2,400 in 2013 to 5,900 in 2014, a 146 percent increase, according to the Solar Foundation.

On a per capita basis, Nevada now has more solar jobs than any other state (though California’s solar industry is far bigger overall). And no wonder: It has vast solar potential. In 1999, one Energy Department scientist even calculated that covering 10,000 square miles of the desert north of here with solar panels could power the entire United States.

Reid, who like Obama will be out of office after 2016 and is similarly trying to build a clean-energy legacy, praised his state’s progress at the conference, remarking that “Las Vegas is literally surrounded by large solar plants, and the roofs are dotted by solar panels.”

It’s not just solar — Tesla Motors is building its $4 billion to $5 billion battery Gigafactory in the desert to the east of Reno.

Nevada also leads the nation in

“untapped” geothermal resources, according to the Energy Information Administration.

After his Nevada visit, Obama traveled later in the week to New Orleans for the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and on Monday was scheduled to be the first U.S. president to visit the Alaskan Arctic, which is experiencing more rapid climate warming than anywhere else in the country.

“We’re incredibly focused on this issue,” White House senior adviser Brian Deese said about the president’s late-summer string of climate-focused stops.

The Nevada stop focused attention on the EPA’s recently finalized Clean Power Plan — and the change it depends upon, namely, the robust growth of clean energy.

The plan requires states to cut emissions through a mix of options that include greatly increasing the amount of electricity they get from wind, solar and other renewable sources.

Fifteen states, including West

President Obama and Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) wave Monday after addressing the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas. Playing to natural strengths, Nevada has embraced solar power.

Virginia and Wyoming, have filed suit seeking an “emergency stay” of the rule, which they call “clearly unlawful.”

The Clean Energy Summit is now in its eighth year. It has evolved not only into a showcase for trends in the sector, but a stomping ground for the highest echelon of industry and political elites, another sign of the growing influence of the industry.

Solar’s growth rate has been astronomical lately — net electricity generated from solar power in the United States more than doubled from 2013 to 2014, from 9,036 thousand megawatt hours to 18,321, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Wind has done well, too. Since 2007, one-third of new electricitygenerating capacity in the country has been in this sector.

“We still believe the estimates used by the EPA in establishing states’ goals based on solar deployment are conservative,” said Rick Umoff, counsel and state regulatory affairs manager at the Solar Energy Industries Association, which had criticized a draft Clean Power Plan in submitted comments to the agency over inadequately optimistic solar projections. “In fact, we are seeing lower costs in the market today than assumed by the EPA for its modeling.”

The newly announced Energy Department initiatives could only fuel that growth further — they will seek to stoke the booming growth of distributed energy in the form of rooftop solar, batteries and other technologies.

“We are seeing the beginning of this transformation. We really feel there is a major opportunity to expand this dramatically,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said.

According to Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner of San Francisco-based DBL Investors, the clean energy tipping point might very well be at this moment. “When you’re in a transition, you don’t know at the time that you’ve reached an inflection point, until you’ve looked back at it,” Pfund said. “And I think that’s the situation we’re in.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Big donors give Biden an opening BY

M ATEA G OLD

T

he possibility that Vice President Biden may jump into the 2016 presidential campaign is convulsing the network of wealthy Democrats that financed President Obama’s two White House bids, galvanizing fundraisers who are underwhelmed by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s performance.

A wide swath of party financiers is convinced that Biden will make a lateentryintotherace,andasizable number are contemplating backing him, including some who have signed on with Clinton, according tomorethanadozentopDemocratic fundraisers nationwide.

Their potential support — driven in part by a desire to recapture the passion they felt in Obama’s campaigns — could play a key role in helping the vice president decide whether to make a third White House bid. The chatter among a cadre of well-connected party fundraisers suggests that he could benefit from an early jolt of money should he run.

Clinton maintains a broad and loyal donor base, and her financial dominance would present a huge challenge for Biden if he entered the campaign this fall. The former secretary of state amassed a record $47 million during her first quarter as a candidate and is flanked by an array of super PACs and other independent allies socking away millions for her.

Biden would face a tight scramble to raise money this far along on the calendar. Because donors can give a campaign only up to $2,700, he probably would have to lean heavily on a super PAC, which could accept unlimited sums, a move that would be distasteful to many liberal voters.

Although Biden has not built his own fundraising network, he developed relationships with donors around the country as Obama’s running mate. And there is growing unease among some of Obama’s biggest financial backers about the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state.

Many of the president’s fund-

BIDEN IN AUGUST; JASON DAVIS/GETTY IMAGES

Of the 770 fundraisers who collected checks for President Obama in 2012 . . . nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

. . . just 52 are bundlers for Hillary Rodham Clinton or have held a fundraising event for her.

Source: Washington Post analysis

raisers are still up for grabs. Of the 770 people who collected checks for Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, just 52 have signed on as a “Hillblazer” bundler for Clinton or have held a fundraiser for her, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Top Democratic money players — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to de-

scribe private conversations — said discussions among senior Obama fundraisers about Biden’s possible bid have taken a serious turn in the past few days.

The news that former Obama administration officials Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer met privately with the vice president Monday night further accelerated a sense of movement toward Biden.

“I think you are going to see a groundswell,” said one prominent party funder, who said that top political aides and fundraisers who backed Obama in 2008 and 2012 are considering helping the vice president. “There is a lot of enthusiasm on the wires. This feels real.”

Kirk Dornbush, a San Francisco biotechnology executive who helped lead Obama’s fundraising in the South and has not signed on with the Clinton campaign, said Biden would find a receptive audience among Obama bundlers.

“Obama donors, the whole Obama world just loves Joe Biden — just loves Joe Biden,” said Dornbush, whose father served as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Netherlands. “And so they would be very open to sitting down with him and having the conversa-

Many who supported Obama have yet to get behind Clinton’s bid

tion, if not writing him a check.”

Jon Cooper, who was an Obama bundler and is now the national finance chairman for the Draft Biden super PAC, said he is fielding increasing interest from fundraisers he worked with during the past two presidential campaigns.

Nearly a dozen of the 35 bundlers Cooper contacted have committed to helping if the vice president runs, according to the Long Island technology manufacturer.

“It’s getting a lot easier to get people to return my phone calls, because there’s a greater feeling among big donors that this really could be happening,” Cooper said.

“There is going to be a deep reservoir of support, particularly among Obama fundraisers and bundlers, if Joe Biden enters the race.”

Even donors who are committed to Clinton say they expect that many fellow fundraisers would jump to Biden.

“I think you’ll see a whole lot of people way outside the sphere of influence will be looking to get inside a sphere of influence,” said John Morgan, an Orlando lawyer and top party contributor.

Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin declined to comment on donor interest in Biden, saying, “Hillary Clinton is grateful to the hundreds of thousands of people who have stepped up to support her campaign and made her first quarter in the race a historic one.”

But the issue is expected to be a major topic when Clinton bundlers gather in New York next week. Many bundlers are pining to relive the frisson they experienced as players in Obama’s bid.

“There was energy around the genuineness of that campaign that I feel that we’re going to have with a Biden campaign,” said Shiva Sarram who has signed on to help the Draft Biden effort.

“I think there is a thirst for that genuine, honest candidate,” added Sarram, who runs a Connecticut foundation that supports waraffected children around the world. “That’s what Vice President Biden is to me: He’s trustworthy, he’s genuine, you know exactly what you’re getting with him, gaffes and all.” n

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NATION

A big blessing for souvenir sellers Next month’s papal visit to the U.S. gives a flock of vendors a chance to cash in

BY

S TEVE H ENDRIX

W

arren Royal dreamed of a classier bobblehead pope.

The owner of Royal Bobbleheads is one of the many manufacturers, vendors and artists producing a heavenly host of commemorative baubles — and bobbles — that will surround Pope Francis on his visit to Washington, New York and Philadelphia next month. The multitudes will include papal mugs, magnets, buttons and T-shirts along with popes rendered in plush, plastic and (at one Philadelphia deli) mozzarella.

Whatever this pope’s view of global capitalism, there’s not much he can do about the Papal Industrial Complex busily slapping his name and face on souvenirs ranging from Pope Francis Cologne to “YOPO” (“You Only Pope Once”) beer. The mercantile blizzard has become a standard feature of the pontifical visit, and Francis, in particular, seems to have inspired secular as well as religious suppliers to get in the game.

“He’s one of the most popular men in the world,” said Royal, who had never made a papal likeness at his Georgia figurine company.

But Royal aimed beyond bobbleheads of questionable taste.

One version on Etsy features the pope’s visage bobbing between a pair of Rocky-esque boxing gloves, with a cheesesteak in one fist and soft pretzel in the other.

So Royal’s designers reduced the plastic pontiff’s head by 30 percent (“It’s not so cartoonish, but it still moves well”), vetted his vestments for style with Catholic scholars, and ordered him cast in the most substantial resin Guangzhou factories could provide.

“It’s not a just a tchotchke to stick on the dash,” Royal said.

“People seem to form a personal connection with this figure.”

By the middle of this past week, he had sold almost 10,000 of them, at $25 retail, and was rushing a new shipment from China. One of the stores on the back-order list is the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, where manager Kevin Jones expects the

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Pope Francis bobbleheads for sale in Washington. Souvenir sellers say the pope would approve of the folksy nature of papal tchotchkes.

visit to double or triple sales for the month.

Jones had no compunction about ordering bobblehead popes and plush popes to share shelf space with his more reverent lines of books, rosaries and prayer cards.

“We want people to know that our religion is one of joy,” he said.

“And the current Holy Father is one who is really filled with joy.”

It’s an article of faith among sellers that Francis, who has achieved pop star status with his populist touch, would approve of the folksy nature of T-shirts that portray him in a Philadelphia Eagles jersey. They say the pope, who has inveighed against global greed, is unlikely to apply that critique to the scrappy sidewalk vendors who will hawk knockoff “I [Bishop’s Hat] Pope Francis” shirts outside the U.S. Capitol while the pontiff addresses Congress on Sept. 24.

“It’s amazing.This pope may sell better than sex sells,” said Rocco

Palmo, a Philadelphia-based journalist who writes the “Whispers in the Loggia” blog. “You can’t walk within a mile of St. Peter’s Square without people accosting you with T-shirts, rosaries — everything but a vacuum cleaner — with the pope’s picture on it.”

Asapublicfigure—arguablyone of the most public on Earth — the pope has limited ability to keep his face off the soaps and ball caps and cardboard masks that will be for sale on card tables around Washington, New York and Philadelphia.

Trademark experts say popes, like presidents, have gotten used to it.

“In theory, the pope or the Holy See may be able to try to enforce publicity rights, but de facto it’s as if he’s given up the right to police his image,” said Jess Collen, a property rights lawyer in New York.

And it’s unlikely, Collen said, that the average consumer is going to think the Vatican has officially licensed such products as the toast-

er that burns an image of the pope into your morning multigrain.

There is an official segment (call it a holy-owned subsidiary) of the vast papal-visit memorabilia market. With permission from the Archdiocese of Washington, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where Francis will canonize a saint on Sept. 23, has commissioned several lines of papal-visit souvenirs in English and Spanish.

An island of shirts, medallions and holy water bottles, all emblazoned with a custom logo, already crowds the center of the shrine’s shop. By the time Pope Francis arrives, the inventory will fill a tented pop-up pope shop in the parking lot where more than 150 staff members and volunteers will use iPads to sell souvenir key chains and mugs.

There is a 10-inch porcelain Pope Francis for $59.95. But in this shop, the pope’s heads maintain a stately stillness.

“Catholics believe in sacramentality, the faith embraces things that are tangible, statues, incense,” Palmo said. “T-shirts and bobbleheads can be an extension of that.”

Even beer.

Down the street from the basilica, Brookland Pint plans to offer a specially brewed “No Pope ’til Brookland” draft. A Philadelphia priest recently blessed the bubbling vats of “Papal Pleasure” beer at Manayunk Brewery.

“People are going to have pope parties,” said Anthony Messina, co-owner of South Philly’s Pastificio Homemade Pasta. His shop is offering two versions of Pope Francis molded in mozzarella, one hatted and one without. The mitred pope is far more popular (“You can really tell that one is the pope”), but the shop is having a hard time keeping up with pre-orders for both. Messina expects to sell 700 to 1,000 of them, each weighing a bit over a pound and costing $20. He knows that carving the pontiff will be a challenge.

“On mine, I’ll cut off the shoulder, maybe the top of the hat,” Messina said. “But not the face. I think we’re going to have a lot of leftover faces.” n

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‘Ground zero’ for the heroin crisis L ENNY B ERNSTEIN Washington, Pa. BY

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he first call came at 7:33 p.m. two Sundays ago: Two people had overdosed on heroin in a home just a few hundred yards from the station where firefighters were awaiting their nightly round of drug emergencies.

Six minutes later, there was another. A 50-year-old man had been found in his bedroom, blue from lack of oxygen, empty bags of heroin by his body.

At 8:11, a third call. Then another, and another, and another and another.

By 8:42 — 69 minutes after the first report — a county of slightly more than 200,000 people had recorded eight overdoses, all believed to be caused by heroin.

There would be a total of 16 overdoses in 24 hours and 25 over two days. Three people died. Many of the others were saved by a recent decision to equip every first responder with the fast-acting antidote naloxone.

The toll wasn’t from a supply of heroin that had been poisoned on its journey from South America to southwestern Pennsylvania. Nor was there an isolated party where careless junkies miscalculated the amount of heroin they could handle. It was simply an extreme example of what communities in parts of the country are enduring as the heroin epidemic rages on.

“It’s absolutely insane. This is nuts,” said District Attorney Eugene A. Vittone, a former paramedic who is trying to hold back the tide of drugs washing across Washington County, a Rust Belt community 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. On any day, Vittone said, the county averages five to eight overdoses, almost all from heroin. More are recorded each day in towns just over the county line.

“There’s been a progressive increase in overdoses the last two years, and it just went out of control,” added Rick Gluth, supervising detective on Vittone’s drug task force. “I’ve been a police officer for 27 years and worked narcotics for the last 15, and this is the

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST

On a recent night in this Pennsylvania county, there were eight overdoses in 70 minutes worst. I’d be glad to have the crack epidemic back.”

The United States averages 110 overdose deaths from legal and illegal drugs every day. The heroin death toll has quadrupled in the decade that ended in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By all accounts, it has only grown worse since. In Washington County, there have been more than 50 fatal overdoses this year.

The national drug-death total, larger than that from auto accidents, is disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes region and the Northeast.

“There is a growing sense of community outrage that we can’t accept this like we are accepting it,” said David J. Hickton, U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania and co-chair of the National Heroin Task Force established by the Justice Department in April. “We just can’t go on like this.”

In this working-class community near the Monongahela River, where drilling for gas deposits has begun to stoke an economic revival, there is little sign that anything will change soon.

“I’m destroyed. I’m totally destroyed,” Valerie Mack said recently on the front porch of the home she shared with her brother and several other people.

Her brother, Sammy Mack, the second overdose victim in the Sunday night skein, was found dead in his bedroom, curled in a fetal position. Near his body were “stamp bags” of heroin — small paper packets that most closely resemble chewing gum wrappers. They bore the supplier’s brand, “MADE IN COLOMBIA.” The label is one of two flooding the area, Gluth said. The other is stamped “BLACK JACK.” Authorities are still investigating but believe both types of heroin are laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate that increases the drug’s po-

Valerie Mack, left, is comforted by family friend Carla Stormy Efaw. Mack lost her brother, Sammy Mack, to a heroin overdose.

tency and may have contributed to the rash of overdoses.

Sammy Mack had long had problems with alcohol and was not unknown to law enforcement authorities. But as so many others have, his sister said, he turned to heroin after treatment with narcotic painkillers prescribed for an ankle injury he suffered a few months ago. Mack’s divorce was recently finalized, she said. His four children are living with his ex-wife not far away.

Nationally, there are only a small fraction of the inpatient drug rehab beds needed for addicts, but Hickton, in an increasingly common stance for prosecutors, has agreed that users need help more than they deserve incarceration. Even as he has stepped up prosecution of dealers, he is taking a multifaceted approach to the current problem.

“If they’re using and trafficking, I prosecute them,” he said. “If they’re just using, they need help.”

With many more middle-class people addicted via prescription opioids this time around, heroin is bought and sold in bars, nightclubs, homes and more unlikely places, said Neil Capretto, an addiction psychiatrist and medical director of Gateway Rehabilitation Center.

Vittone said the county receives drugs from New York, Newark, Washington, Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere. “We’re kind of like ground zero,” he said.

On the streets here, prescription drugs are selling for about $1 per milligram, or $20 for a single dose. Heroin is much cheaper, at about $8 a stamp bag, Gluth said.

It is also much more potent than the heroin of previous eras, Capretto said. Users often start with a single bag, but as their resistance grows, they need increasing amounts.

All of which signals more overdoses and deaths, at least until authorities can find ways to stem the demand and the supply.

“If we had a serial killer killing one-tenth as many [people], we’d have the National Guard here,” Capretto said. “We’d have CNN here every night.” n

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China’s ghost town S IMON D ENYER Shenfu, China BY

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iant skyscrapers tower unfinished and abandoned around a lake that forms the centerpiece of this new town. The wind blows through the empty hulk of what was supposed to be a multi-story hotel and restaurant complex. A salesman insists that people have moved into one of the few housing complexes to be completed around the shore, but as dusk falls only a handful of lights blink on.

He offers to throw in a free car with every apartment purchased.

This is Shenfu New Town in the northeastern province of Liaoning, built to handle the overflow from the once-booming industrial cities of Shenyang and Fushun.

“Build it and they will come,” the saying goes. But here, in China’s industrial heartland, people are leaving instead of coming.

For much of the past decade, this was China’s fastest-growing region, the home of the heavy industry that powered the nation’s rise and rode on the coattails of a construction boom unparalleled in history.

Today, China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition that has left heavy industry reeling and set investors’ nerves jangling.

The stock market is crashing, and fears of an economic slowdown are spreading. In the real economy, nowhere is the brunt of that slowdown and the pain of that transition being felt as sharply as here in the northeast.

“Everyone knows what the problem is. It is structural,” said an official dealing with economic policy in the Liaoning government who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

“Everybody knows what to do.

You need to change the economic structure. But what concrete steps to take? Nobody knows,” he said.

“What can we do? Financial sector?

You can’t compete with cities like Shanghai. High-tech industries?

Those won’t flourish overnight.”

Nicknamed the Rust Belt, the three provinces of northeastern

ADAM DEAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Abandoned buildings in a once-booming area represent the nation’s shifting economic fortunes China have survived tough times before, just as their famously tough inhabitants survive the region’s brutally cold winters.

The challenges they face today reflect many of the challenges that China faces as a nation: Curtailing the power of stateowned enterprises and allowing market forces to play a greater role. Finding new drivers of growth now that the export-, infrastructure- and housing-led boom is playing out. And reforming the economy without causing more pain and upheaval.

But here the problems seem even more deep-rooted, and attitudes more entrenched. This is a region where factory workers still look back fondly on the good old days of the Soviet-style planned economy and the industrialization drive that Mao Zedong undertook in the 1950s. This is a region, as the government official acknowledged, without the culture of entrepreneurship you find on China’s southern and eastern coasts.

“Here it is not encouraged to start up your own business,” he said. “Everyone just wants a stable job with a big state-owned enterprise.”

Liaoning’s economy grew by a staggering average of 12.8 percent a year between 2003 and 2012, even faster than the 10.7 percent recorded by the nation as whole.

Now, official figures show the national economy growing at 7 percent, but growth in Liaoning tumbled to 2.6 percent in the first half of this year, the lowest of the country’s 31 provinces. Industrial production in the province contracted more than 5 percent in the first seven months of this year after growing over 8 percent the year before, says Shen Minggao, Citi’s chief economist for Greater China, a deterioration he calls “astonishing.”

The Tiexi district of Shenyang is nicknamed the “Ruhr of the East,” after the German district that forms the backbone of that nation’s industrial might. Yet

A construction site is quiet last week in Shenfu New Town in China’s northeastern Liaoning province.

Liaoning’s economy grew 12.8 percent a year from 2003 to 2012, but growth tumbled to 2.6 percent in the first half of this year.

here, the backbone of China’s economy appears to be wilting.

At state-owned companies, workers say fewer shifts mean their monthly pay has fallen from up to 5,000 yuan ($780) two years ago to more like 2,000 now.

At private factories such as the Shenyang Heavy Machinery Huayang Mechanical Co., the situation is bleaker. Here, just 30 workers man old-fashioned lathes making machinery for the coal industry in a factory that once employed 400.

Many people leave the region to look for work elsewhere. That relieves some of the social pressure but is draining some of the best talent from the northeast and leaving behind a rapidly aging population, experts say.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to write China’s economy off, or to conclude that the northeast has no hope of recovery.

At the gleaming new factory complex run by the Shenyang Machine Tool Group (SYMG), fully automated lathes and milling machines work with a precision and speed that was previously unimaginable, and company chairman Xiyou Guan talks enthusiastically about joining the next global revolution in smart machines.

SYMG rose from being the 36th-largest machine tool company in the world in 2002 to the largest in 2011. Times are much tougher now — revenue has since dropped sharply, and the company is projecting a net loss in the first half of this year. It has fallen back to third place globally. Nevertheless, Xiyou, who is also a senior Communist Party official, remains upbeat — about his company and for the region as a whole.

“In my opinion, the fact that we are in an economic downturn is not a bad thing: When something old dies, something new will be born,” he said, turning to his colleagues to cite a line from Russian writer Maxim Gorky. “‘Let the tempest come strike harder!’ — because this will give birth to new things much faster.” n

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Railway security is tough to ensure M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Brussels BY

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fter three vacationing Americans and other passengers tackled and trussed a Moroccan man who had started shooting aboard a high-speed train in Europe’s heart, this is what authorities did.

They provided a new hotline for rail passengers to phone in any suspicious activity. Slapped “Be Vigilant” stickers on the lapels of train personnel. And put a few more security officers at the biggest train stations.

Stunned by the foiled attack, European leaders are suddenly confronting an uncomfortable reality: It would be impossible to impose some steps that would boost security in public spaces, because they would be too onerous.

French President François Hollande vowed last week to convene his security advisers and speak with leaders of neighboring nations about the holes that allowed a 25-year-old man armed with a small arsenal to walk onto a packed train Aug. 21 and open fire before he was subdued.

“We will take all the necessary measures,” Hollande said, before he awarded the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor to the three Americans and a Briton who stopped the gunman. The decoration is France’s highest.

But many security experts said there are limits to what can be done on rail networks, which were also targeted by terrorists in highprofile attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London a year later.

X-ray machines and metal detectors would be impractical at train stations that handle thousands of passengers every hour, far more than at airports, experts and officials say. France alone has more than 3,000 train stations, and the biggest ones are bustling crossroads of humanity. At Paris’s Gare du Nord, the intended terminus of the train that was attacked, grandmothers amble toward suburban rail lines, freshly arrived immigrants push mountains of colorful luggage and businesspeople in crisp suits hurry to first-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stunned by the foiled train attack, European leaders confront an uncomfortable reality class cabins.

Even after the attack, passengers could buy tickets for the same route with little advance notice and without ever providing identification. And no additional security was visible on the trains.

“Making a security system work for trains is nearly as difficult as ensuring security on roads,” said François Heisbourg, a former defense official and a security analyst at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. He asked rhetorically whether it was practical to screen cars for bombs every time they pulled onto city streets.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration declined to provide details about the measures it takes to deter terrorists from attacking trains. The TSA, which has overarching responsibility for security on passenger trains in the country, created Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams after the 2004 train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people and injured 1,800. The teams are used in a

variety of circumstances, including monitoring and securing railway stations and trains.

The dilemma of how to secure trains has only heightened since the conflicts in Syria and Iraq began drawing aspiring jihadists from around the world, including many European citizens. Some of them have started to return home, presenting a new security threat.

Spanish authorities think the suspect, Ayoub el-Khazzani, may have traveled to Syria in the past year. At least one of the gunmen who in January targeted the Charlie Hebdo satirical newsweekly in Paris had done the same.

Since the attack, European leaders have been struggling to find the right response. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said the Schengen Agreement that did away with border controls between most European Union countries needs to be altered to give countries more flexibility.

Khazzani boarded the train in Brussels and is thought to have been living in Belgium for at least

A police officer in Arras, France, videotapes the crime scene in the train car where a Moroccan man started shooting Friday before being subdued by a handful of passengers.

part of the past year. Belgium has been confronted with terrorism issues of its own, breaking up a suspected militant ring in January shortly after the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

A borderless Europe “is undoubtedly a boon to economic development and freedom of movement for those who have good intentions,” Michel told a Belgian broadcaster, “but this freedom is also used in order to inflict harm.”

He suggested more identity checks and baggage monitoring on international trains.

But any attempt to change the rules is certain to meet with resistance from advocates of a Europe without borders.

The Schengen treaty establishing border-free travel “is non-negotiable,” a European Commission spokesman tartly replied to the Belgian leader’s proposal, the Belga News Agency reported.

Another proposal is to increase the number of armed personnel aboard trains. That could serve as a deterrent to attacks — although it would require significant resources, given how many trains crisscross the continent.

France was on high alert after the January attacks in Paris. Belgium, France and Spain had all marked the suspect for heightened scrutiny. Spain flagged him years ago as a man with ties to a mosque known for Islamist militancy.

But European leaders say it is difficult to separate the large number of people who could potentially be threats from the most dangerous ones, who are ready to pull triggers or detonate bombs.

“What this shows is the difficulty of policing in a 100 percent secure way in Europe,” said Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, an E.U.-wide law enforcement agency. Wainwright said Khazzani had not made it into Europol’s central database.

“In the end, there is only so much that we can do in a free and democratic society to protect the public from these kinds of random acts of terror, without going so far that it really impacts the way that we lead our lives,” he said. n

Fragile O City

PHOTOS BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

BY MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA in New Orleans

n the “sliver by the river,” that stretch of precious high ground snug against the Mississippi, tech companies sprout in gleaming towers, swelling with 20-somethings from New England or the Plains who saw the floods only in pictures.

A new $1 billion medical center rises downtown, tourism has rebounded, the music and restaurant scenes are sizzling, and the economy has been buoyed by billions of federal dollars.

The city is now swaddled in 133 miles of sturdier levees and floodwalls, and it boasts of the world’s biggest drainage pumping station.

But on the porch stoops of this place so fascinated by and so comfortable with the cycles of death and decay, they still talk about living in some kind of Atlantis-in-waiting. As if the cradle of jazz might still slip beneath the sea.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina slashed and snarled into New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, newcomers take their juice with chia seeds and buy fixer-uppers, and longtime locals fret that the city is no longer theirs, that it’s too expensive and still might lose its soul. A city some feared might be left for dead when

80 percent of its footprint was eventually submerged in floodwaters is undergoing a social, economic and cultural evolution.

Yet it is still a place deeply tied to its ancient traditions and rites, stubbornly and proudly unique, unparalleled in its embrace of the weird, the mysterious, the whimsical.

Most folks know someone who couldn’t get back to this city or has been pushed outside its bounds — these are the ghosts that don’t star in the moonlight tours, the ghosts of not-solong-ago neighbors. And it doesn’t take much to get people weeping or boiling with rage about that other New Orleans, beyond the resurrected city center, where gunshots form the nighttime soundtrack.

The mayor gathers before-and-after photos of murder victims, images of too-short lives and bloodied ends, in a tumbling and ever-spreading row of red binders on the floor of a corner in his office.

The other New Orleans reveals itself once

New Orleans, which some feared would be left for dead after Hurricane Katrina, is undergoing an evolution, but it is still very tied to its traditions

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Opposite page: Markey’s Bar is a watering hole in Bywater, a neighborhood along the river undergoing a dramatic population shift.

Top left: Trombone player Corey Henry, flanked by saxophonist Andrew Calhoun and guitarist Danny Abell, play a late-night set. Top right: Kansas transplants Isabel Boehms gets a haircut from Ione Fairchild in Bywater, while Danny Szlauderbach plays guitar and Tyler Carmody listens. Above: Dianne Honore, left, and Jen Medbery, right, in front of their homes in New Orleans. Gentrification and the rising cost of living have pushed Honore to leave the Treme neighborhood. Medbery is a self-proclaimed gentrifier who bought a home in Treme after Katrina.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

you descend from the dry heights by the river, down into the neighborhoods that were swamp when the French arrived 300 years ago and that seem fatally determined to return to that state-of-being whenever a storm blows up.

In the Lower Ninth Ward and out in eastern New Orleans, the shells of houses wrecked by Katrina still rot in the humidity, caved-in roofs and teetering walls sharing the same blocks with homes that got put back together, lifted onto concrete stilts and reinhabited.

Yet the city’s very survival as an inviting and vibrant space has made it into a symbol of resilience, an inspiration for other places savaged by nature’s whims and man’s mistakes. And the intractability of some of its problems — in some cases problems that existed before the storm but that have worsened or stagnated since — have made it a magnet for the world’s tinkerers, thinkers and doers.

“I say New Orleans is the nation’s most immediate lab for innovation and change,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu observes one afternoon in his City Hall office. “Some people call that an experiment, some a lab. We call it necessity.”

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which has funded a “chief resilience officer” position for New Orleans, calls the city a “resilience lab,” a model that the foundation has taken to dozens of other cities.

“Ten years isn’t long enough. They’re still on the journey,” Rodin says.

The suggestion that New Orleans is a petri dish sits uncomfortably with some people in this city so adept at defying convention. The debate over the long-term impact of the conversion of its schools to an all-charter system and the decision to demolish large public housing developments in favor of new mixed-use housing will play out for years.

The rising cost of living has flipped some of the city’s neighborhoods from majority black to majority white. Rents have soared and, by one estimate, home sale prices have climbed more than 40 percent in 10 years.

A year after Katrina, parts of New Orleans were still such forbidding hellscapes, so soggy and mildewed and broken and despondent, and its plans for recovery were so tangled in red tape, that the city’s population had dropped from 494,000 before the storm to just 230,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A decade on, the city has bounced back to 78 percent of its previous population, the Census Bureau says.

Though the people who now populate the city aren’t necessarily the ones who fled it.

“The Chocolate City” that the bungling and corrupt Katrina-era mayor, Ray Nagin, so famously described at the nadir of the post-Katrina crisis is still majority black, but its African American population has shrunk by nearly 100,000 — to 59 percent from 67 percent. (Nagin is one of those who no longer lives here, having relocated first to Texas and then to a federal prison after a post-Katrina bribery conviction.) continues on next page

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from previous page

And those African Americans who have returned have been less likely to share in the abundance — a National Urban League study said the gap between the median income of African Americans and whites grew by 18 percent after the storm, and the number of black children living in poverty jumped from 44 percent to more than 51 percent.

The public-policy laboratory has not yet solved that problem. “They’re peddling this notion of a complete recovery: opportunity for all, want for nobody,” says Jacques Morial, a community activist whose brother, Marc, and father, Ernest, have served as mayor. “That’s just not the case.”

In the cafes and side streets, New Orleans is sick of talking about Katrina, but can’t stop talking about Katrina.

“There’s Katrina and there’s Katrina-ism,” says Kenneth Ferdinand, a trumpeter who owns the Cafe Rose Nicaud in the Marigny neighborhood. “The -ism part ain’t ever going to be over. The -ism is the theory of disaster and struggle. It goes from generation to generation here. You understand?”

‘I am a gentrifier’ On Ursulines Avenue in the Treme neighborhood, there’s a pretty little side-hall shotgun house with olive trim and a porch painted red.

Buying that house in a neighborhood that embodies the African American culture of New Orleans, a place where they send off the dead from Charbonnet Funeral Home with trombones and trumpets, high-stepping and buck-jumping, came with a tangle of emotion for Jen Medbery, a child of Connecticut.

Medbery, one of the standouts in a post-Hurricane Katrina wave of successful tech entrepreneurs, and her husband are the only white residents of their block, and she’s acutely aware of what that means: “Technically speaking, I am a gentrifier,” Medbery, 31, says.

The presence of outsiders like her “is shifting the dynamic of what New Orleans is,” says Medbery, who fell hard for the city in her mid-20s while teaching at a charter school in the early years after Katrina and now runs an education software company. “It’s shifting the kinds of businesses that open, the kinds of restaurants. It’s important to be conscious of that and willing to discuss the implications.”

Five minutes down the road, on the opposite end of Treme, Dianne Honore rented half of a brick double across from Louis Armstrong Park a couple of years back. Honore, a licensed practical nurse, is one of the New Orleans Baby Dolls, a group of women who march during Carnival season as part of a tradition that dates back to the defiant side-street parades of segregation-era black prostitutes.

Honore’s landlord called a few weeks ago to tell her she had to go. The house would be sold. Honore, who lived in Texas after being flooded out, just “got gentrified” six years after coming home, she says one afternoon.

“Some days,” Honore, 50, says, “You feel like your culture is still drowning.”

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

‘Nieux’ money On the Friday before Mardi Gras, Patrick Comer and 150 of his friends, entrepreneurs all, spilled out of Arnaud’s, a venerable French Quarter restaurant, and onto Bourbon Street.

The Friday luncheon is a Carnival-season tradition. In another era, Comer — the founder of Federated Sample, a digital market-research company — might have been angling to join one of the city’s old-line krewes at tables in other restaurants along that bawdy strip. It might have been his entree into the social and business upper crust.

But Comer, a 41-year-old Alabamian who learned the tech start-up game in New York and Los Angeles, hasn’t bothered.

He and other investors — many from out of state, but some upstart locals, too — launched their own Carnival society. They call it the Krewe du Nieux, which is pronounced “new” — precisely the identity and message they hope to transmit to the world.

Investors have taken notice of the influx, pumping money into New Orleans start-ups such as Dinner Lab, a membership dining club founded here that allows up-and-coming chefs to test menu items in 30 cities, including the District. The company, born in a French Quarter apartment patrolled by a blind Rottweiler, recently announced $7 million in venture capital funding.

Comer, whose company recently re-branded under the name Lucid and announced plans for a London office, got some of his

St. Roch Market, a historic commercial space that was renovated into an upscale food emporium, was vandalized a few months ago. The vandals broke windows and spray-painted “Yuppy = bad.”

The crime sparked a conversation about the city’s identity after Katrina.

venture capital money from a New Orleansbased firm called, appropriately, Voodoo Ventures. Far from encountering insularity, Comer says the message he got was simple: “Come on in, the water’s warm.”

Forbes Magazine recently named New Orleans “America’s biggest brain magnet.” The city saw start-ups launched at a rate 64 percent higher than the national average from 2011 to 2013, according to the Data Center, an independent research group.

New Orleans as a magnet for “nieux” business would have sounded like fantasy a decade ago.

“It was a very insular community that was scared of new people,” said Tim Williamson, a New Orleans native who runs a business incubator called Idea Village. “The day after Katrina, everybody became an entrepreneur.

The closed, insular networks that didn’t want people to come here fractured.”

Volunteers poured into New Orleans “to save the world,” he said, and the city poured into them.

“New Orleans infected them,” says Williamson, whose organization hosts an annual entrepreneurs conference that drew more than 10,000 people this year.

Awhile back, Comer was walking through the French Quarter, talking tech business with a friend from New York. The restaurant where they were headed was closed, and Comer launched into an extended, chummy chat about where they should head with a man collecting garbage out front.

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conversation people who love a place so much it hurts are prone to having.

Comer’s friend pulled him aside: “Do you know that guy?” his friend asked, trying to wrap his brain around the intimacy of that chat with a complete stranger.

“This whole thing was bizarre to him,” Comer recalls.

Not long ago, he was talking with Ti Adelaide Martin, a scion of the Brennan restaurant empire.

“You people eat out so much!” Comer remembers Martin telling him. “Thank God!”

Members of the

‘We have hipsters now’ He smiled at first. It looked so charming, all those people driving slowly down Burgundy Street through the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods, pointing cameras.

Then it dawned on Keith Weldon Medley: These folks weren’t tourists or architecture buffs. They were shoppers. And on their shopping list was almost everything that could be had in these neighborhoods, a collection of Creole cottages, shotgun doubles, warehouses and small manufacturers at a humpback bend of the Mississippi River.

In the evolution of post-Katrina New Orleans, few phenomena have been more striking than the dramatic demographic shift of places such as Bywater from majority black to majority white. One census block group in Bywater dropped from 51 percent African American before Katrina to just 17 percent afterward; the largest went from 63 percent to

Treme

Million Dollar Baby Dolls dance and march during the “Satchmo Salute” Second Line Parade on Aug. 2 in the neighborhood, which embodies the city’s African American culture.

32, according to a Washington Post analysis of U.S. census data.

“You saw all these white people. Obviously they were displacing black people who were here before,” said Medley, a historian who lives in the house where he grew up in the Marigny.

Post-Katrina New Orleans feels like a “conundrum” to Medley, who is African American, a city that is safer and more prosperous but emptied of many of the people he’d known for decades.

“We have hipsters now,” Medley says.

A few months ago, vandals in ski masks broke windows and spray-painted “Yuppy = bad” on the nearby St. Roch Market, a shiny symbol of the New Orleans recovery that had been closed for years after it flooded. The market, which opened in 1875, sold shrimp by the pound and po’boys in an atmosphere of rotting charm before Katrina; it now houses pricey food stalls where the salad comes with Lacinato kale and Zante currants.

And though the vandals were roundly condemned, they also sparked a conversation about the identity of the city post-Katrina, and particularly about the character of neighborhoods that New Orleanians who couldn’t afford to live in St. Charles Avenue mansions called their own.

It’s on the mind of almost everyone here, a preoccupation not only with affordability but with authenticity and internal migration, ever farther from the center. It’s the kind of

Dancing to the right beat In Dallas, for those four years immediately after Katrina, Dianne Honore wearied of hearing a particular phrase: “You couldn’t do that here.”

It was nice in Dallas, even “wonderful” at times. She had a good job nursing. There were no burst levees.

But in Dallas, she danced indoors.

Chris Rose, the great poet journalist of New Orleans whose struggles with depression, addiction and even holding down a regular job are a living barometer of this city’s highs and lows post-Katrina, said it better than anyone, writing in a blog post: “The longer you live in New Orleans, the more unfit you become to live anywhere else.”

In 2009, Honore made it home from “anywhere else,” back to where she belongs.

“I felt that sense of wanting to put it back together,” she says.

She’s moved three times since coming back, most recently leaving behind Treme for a less expensive rental in a neighborhood along Esplanade Ridge, all she can afford on her stagnating nurse’s salary. She created an alter ego — “Gumbo Marie” — opened a little Creole arts and culture shop and got named queen of the Krewe of Red Beans.

She danced outdoors.

The same year, after teaching in flood-ravaged eastern New Orleans, Jen Medbery founded Kickboard, a software firm that aims to improve school performance through data analysis and teacher coaching.

The city “kind of seeps into your bones,” she says, and she noticed that the people who came to work with her wanted to “feel a connection to something bigger than themselves and their jobs.”

“You don’t feel that in San Francisco,” she said. “The scale of the city is right for people who want to leave their imprint and have a positive impact.”

Medbery raised more than $2.7 million in venture capital money, expanded her business into 30 states and 2,500 schools, and got named to Forbes’s “30 under 30” list of game-changing movers and shakers in education.

Frequently, she finds herself in “messy and necessary” conversations about race and class.

“There isn’t a day in this city that I am not fully conscious of my whiteness,” Medbery says. “You can use the privilege you’re afforded to acknowledge the inequality in the city.”

People sometimes ask her why she lives in Treme.

“Do you feel safe there?” they say.

She tells them about the time she raced off to some important appointment, her mind awhirl.

A neighbor called to tell her two things: Your door is wide open, and we’ve got your dog for you. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

HEALTHCARE

A plan to prevent burnout B RIGID S CHULTE Palo Alto, Calif.

BY

I

t was just before noon on a recent Friday when Greg Gilbert, an emergency room physician at Stanford Hospital, made it home from another of what would be six overnight shifts in a row. Bleary-eyed and hungry, the divorced single dad was thinking about how to squeeze in a nap before it was time to pick up his three kids from his ex later that afternoon.

He spied a cardboard box from Blue Apron, which delivers all the makings of a home-cooked meal, and a black bag from the Munchery, with gourmet ready-made meals, waiting for him on his front porch and cracked a weary smile.

They meant he’d have grilled flat iron steak salad for lunch, instead of his usual fast-food burger. And for dinner, he wouldn’t have to think of what to make or go to the grocery store but could just cook what was in the box and have time to play with the kids.

All of it is courtesy of the Stanford Department of Emergency Medicine. As was Gilbert’s freshly cleaned condo, the gift cards he’d given his assistant to thank her for her work, and the life coach he’s worked with to find better balance in his life.

“This gives me more bandwidth at work,” Gilbert said. “And because I can hang out with my kids and not be exhausted all the time, I’m able to be the kind of parent I’d always hoped to be.”

The meals, housecleaning and a host of other services — babysitting, elder care, movie tickets, grant writing help, handyman services, dry cleaning pickup, speech training, Web support and more — are part of a groundbreaking new “time banking” program aimed to ease work-life conflicts for the emergency medicine faculty.

Doctors can “bank” the time they spend doing the oftenunappreciated work of mentoring, serving on committees, covering colleagues’ shifts on short notice or deploying in emergencies, and earn credits to use for work or home-related services.

CHRIS HARDY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Stanford University program lets ER doctors trade work tasks for a little extra help at home The simple idea is aimed at addressing a complex challenge: Doctors, on average, work 10 hours more a week than other professionals, with nearly 40 percent working 60 hours or more, according to a 2012 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

It found that “an alarming” 1 in 2 physicians report at least one symptom of burnout and that they’re twice as dissatisfied with their work-life balance than those in other professions. Within 10 years of joining an academic medical faculty, 5 of every 10 doctors leave, and four leave academic medicine entirely.

And that is just as concerns about a coming physician shortage are reaching a fever pitch. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortfall of as many as 90,000 physicians by 2025 as doctors retire, aging baby boomers need more care and mandates of the Affordable Care Act kick in.

Stanford’s time bank, part of a two-year, $250,000 pilot funded

largely by the Sloan Foundation, showed big increases in job satisfaction, work-life balance and collegiality, in addition to a greater number of research grants applied for and a higher approval rate than Stanford faculty not in the pilot.

And for the first time, this year there are no openings for new fellows in the Department of Emergency Medicine. “All our spots have been retained,” Gilbert said. “There’s been no turnover.”

Stanford is not the only medical institution seeking to change an unforgiving culture that has traditionally rewarded long work hours. But most are aimed at medical students, where wellness programs are now required for accreditation. Johns Hopkins Medical School has instituted physical and emotional wellness programs for residents to prevent burnout, which has been linked to increased mistakes.

Beyond burnout, Stanford’s time bank is also designed to help stave off the steep attrition rate of

Greg Gilbert, an emergency room physician at Stanford Medical Center, says the “time banking” program gives him “more bandwidth at work” and lets him be a better parent.

women in academic medicine and science. For the past two decades, a recent study found that women have made up about half of all medical school graduates. But they account for only 19 percent of medical school full professors and 11 percent of medical school deans.

Time may be a big reason why.

Male and female faculty members in academia tend to work the same number of hours, one analysis found. But men spend more time applying for grants and doing research, which lead to promotions and tenure. Studies show female faculty members not only tend to do more housework and child care at home, but, at work, spend less time on research and more on teaching, mentoring and serving on committees, which contributes to the gender gap.

By rewarding time spent on service work with time-bank credits, more men stepped up to do it, said Jennifer Raymond, a professor of neurobiology and associate dean who proposed the time bank and helped implement it. And more women were able to focus on their research by using time-bank credits to get help writing grants.

And both men and women said using credits freed up time to spend with family.

“In my mind, this program is brilliant, and maintaining it was an easy decision,” said Paul Auerbach, former chief of emergency medicine, who said the credits cost “far less” than 1 percent of his budget.

“It’s extremely cost-effective.’’

The Department of Emergency Medicine’s time-banking program is currently all that’s left of the more ambitious pilot project. Other divisions are “waiting to see” how the program goes and whether the university will allocate funding for administrative costs, said Magali Fassiotto of the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, who has been monitoring the time-bank program. “There is quite a bit of interest, though.”

Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist who led the pilot at Stanford, said work-life struggles are still often seen as a side issue in medicine. “The whole idea of addressing work-life fit as an important

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

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TRENDS business case for excellence has not been bought into yet,” she said.

“And I would argue that it should be right up there.”

The view that work-life issues have little place in medical culture is a strong one. Auerbach and others say that when they were starting out the mantra was “Work more. Live less.” The decision in 2003 to cap residents’ workweeks to 80 hours and to limit first-year resident shifts to 16 hours continues to stir debate. Some doctors argue that less-exhausted residents give better patient care and make fewer mistakes. Others worry that young doctors won’t see as many patients with a variety of conditions, leaving them less skilled.

“In my mind, this program is brilliant, and maintaining it was an easy decision.”

Paul Auerbach, former chief of emergency medicine at Stanford

Mark Linzer, who has studied physician burnout for 20 years, said that when burnout rates hit 50 percent a few years ago, medical institutions began paying attention to work-home conflict.

“All these institutions think they have to do big, bold, expensive projects,” said Linzer, director of General Internal Medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. “But bold doesn’t mean expensive. It just means pay attention to what people are saying. Listen. Do something special.

Then measure how you did.”

Sittinginhisimmaculatekitchen and happily munching on his microwaved steak salad, Greg Gilbert said he once left academic medicine because of work-life conflict.

“I was definitely starting to feel burned out before the program,” said Gilbert, 43. He says the stress of long work hours had strained his former marriage.

Physicians like Gilbert can certainly afford to pay for time-banking services like these on their own, but they’re often too busy to find them, he said. And Stanford could give people raises to cover the cost. But, he and others said, the very fact that the institution is running the time-banking pro-

gram is why it works.

“A lot of times you feel that work doesn’t care about you. ‘I’m just doing the grind, and for what? I’m missing out on my family and my life.’ And this program really sets thatopinion on its ear,”Gilbert said.

The program got its start when a former medical school dean, Phillip Pizzo, grew concerned that so many talented female doctors, including his own daughter, were foregoing promising research and other career avenues in order to juggle family demands.

He set up a task force. An analysis found that the school had virtually every “family friendly” policy on the books imaginable — paid parental leave, sabbaticals, options for flexible scheduling, good benefits for part-time work and more. The problem: No one was using them.

“The physicians and scientists feared that if they used the policies, they’d be viewed as not being serious about their careers and would suffer as a consequence,” said Valantine, who is now chief officer for scientific workforce diversity at the National Institutes of Health.

Preliminary results of the pilot show that a vast majority of the physicians and scientists felt they’d improved their work-life fit, and the share who said they were satisfied at Stanford increased by nearly 60 percent, Valantine said.

Pilot participants submitted 22 grant proposals with the help of time-bank credits. Forty-one percentwereapproved,foratotalof$10 million, a higher success rate than for the general Stanford population.

“That shows the program pays for itself pretty quickly,” Raymond said.

Volunteering to cover shifts on short notice nearly doubled, to 83 percent, and people reported feeling more collegiality. Fewer postponed or avoided taking care of their health or put off vacation.

The proportion of faculty who had time to discuss science with their colleagues jumped from 9 to 55 percent. And the share of female faculty members who felt Stanford supported their career development rose from 29 to 57 percent.

“That’s superbly promising.

And we’re not talking about changing the metrics of success, lowering standards or diminishing excellence,” Valantine said.

“We’re talking about how we get greater excellence by paying attention to work-life issues.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Now you can rate the government BY

L ISA R EIN

T

he federal government is officially encouraging the public to rate their experiences with the biggest, most frustrating bureaucracy to deal with in the country — just like they would review the new Thai restaurant down the street.

Taxpayers will be able to weigh in, in real time, on whether they waited in line 20 minutes or two hours to renew their passports; whethertheairportsecurityscreeners they dealt with were surly or sweet; whether the U.S. Forest Service worked fast enough to put out wildfires spreading in their state.

That’s the goal of a new initiative the General Services Administration’s DigitalGov team launched this month. Yelp, the popular Web and mobile service that helps people find local businesses by ratings and is best known for restaurant reviews, is open for official government use.

The GSA is opening the door to agencies to launch new Yelp pages to listen and respond to comments from the public, then use the data to drive improvements to services.

“This allows agencies to go in and engage, and dedicate customer service staff to monitoring the feedback,” said Justin Herman, who leads social media for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

Right now, the new Yelp section for “Public Services & Govern-

ment” is a collection of reviews of hundreds of federal and state tourist destinations and buildings, including memorials, courthouses, motor vehicle agencies, embassies, fire departments, landmarks and post offices.

But the GSA is counting on the federal agencies that interact with the public the most to use the service to get much-needed feedback about customer service, an increasing focus of the Obama administration’s digital strategy.

“We’re moving into a world in which social media is the charge that fuels the circuit of collaborative public service,” Herman said.

Agencies can launch their own Yelp pages or claim existing ones that the Yelp community already has created.

As part of the terms of service with the government, Yelp will not display third-party commercial ads on an agency page.

The idea to get feedback from Yelp is an extension of an agreement the Web site made last January with the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which uses the site for a mobile drunken-driving-prevention app called SaferRide, designed to save lives over the holiday season.

The government isn’t paying Yelp to host government agencies, but Herman said that agencies that decide to use the site need to invest in monitoring what people are saying about them. n

WWW.YELP.COM

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BOOKS

It’s harder to cheer for college teams N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

O BILLION-DOLLAR BALL: A Journey Through the BigMoney Culture of College Football

By Gilbert M. Gaul.

Viking. 249 pp. $27.95

n the evening of Sept. 5, I will consume more beer than is recommended. I will dance a jig on a thin wooden bench. I will hug strangers, curse at teenagers and sing a 107year-old song at least a dozen times.

And I’ll remember it all for years.

That night is the football season opener for the University of Notre Dame, and I’ll be in South Bend, Ind., as my team lines up against the Texas Longhorns. I’m a Notre Dame graduate, season ticket holder and intransigent Fighting Irish fan.

All of which makes Gilbert M. Gaul’s “Billion-Dollar Ball” a hard and challenging book, but one that I hope college football diehards will join me in reading. Gaul, a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, forces us to confront what major college football has become.

When we cheer for our schools and our teams, we’re also supporting a powerful and autonomous entertainment business that monetizes every aspect of the game, an operation that is not only divorced from the mission of higher education but that often undermines it.

Gaul, who has previously investigated nonprofit finances and the agriculture industry, scours the financial statements that universities submit annually to the NCAA and visits top-tier college football programs. The result is not a book about touchdowns or concussions.

It’s about money.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Gaul sits down with DeLoss Dodds, under whose 33-year leadership the school’s athletic department budget ballooned from $4.5 million to $170 million. A big chunk of that increase came in the past decade, Gaul reports, when the school added thousands of stadium seats (including premium spots), television fees doubled, and royalties, licensing fees and advertising revenue grew nearly fivefold.

Texas sets the bar, but other schools are not far below it. In

BUTCH DILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban has an annual salary of almost $7 million.

1999, Gaul writes, the 10 largest collegiate football programs brought in $229 million in revenue. By 2012, the same schools reported revenue of $762 million.

For alumni, fandom is wrapped up in nostalgia for Saturday afternoons in the student section. But students have long ceased to be the focus of the college football machinery, with athletic departments pumping wealthy fans and alums for every dollar.

“Congress has effectively decreed that college football is exempt from paying taxes on billions in seat donations, television broadcast rights, bowl-game payments, and corporate sponsorships,” Gaul writes. “At the same time, no one on the Hill seems able or willing to acknowledge the role that these tax breaks have played in unleashing a tsunami of spending that has transformed oncemodest state universities into sports entertainment factories.”

The chief executives of these enterprises are not university presidents but head coaches, who

earn many times their bosses’ salaries and are often the highestearning public employees in their states. Today, 75 college football head coaches make $1 million or more per year, Gaul writes, and five earn beyond $5 million.

When universities recruit high school or junior-college athletes with weak transcripts and class records, they sell the kids on their “academic support centers.” The University of Oregon boasts the Jaqua Academic Center — the Taj Mahal of academic services, Gaul calls it — a lavish three-story, 40,000-square-foot, $42 million facility financed by Nike founder and Oregon alumnus Phil Knight. It is equipped with tutors, ADHD specialists, life-skills advisers, psychologists and other staffers, as well as plenty of laptops on loan. Meanwhile, Gaul notes, the university’s top students toil in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, a Depression-era structure with little air conditioning. Those students typically receive a $5,000 grant, onetenth of the value of a football

scholarship. Such a contrast makes “a mockery of the university’s purpose,” Gaul writes. “Schools are rewarding the wrong students.”

Gaul makes occasional factual missteps that fans will flag. But “Billion-Dollar Ball” commits a more serious penalty. Gaul interviews college presidents, athletic directors, coaches, tutors, professors — but virtually no players or recent players. Why not talk to people who can offer insights from the classroom and the field, and who can describe what life is like after eligibility runs out?

Gaul is not kicking off the debate over the impact and purpose of big-time sports in American universities. But his book skillfully chronicles and quantifies the more mercenary aspects of the game that many fans have long avoided or that we explain away with appeals to tradition. My school is different, we say. They all are.

Tradition is tough to give up, especially when there’s a home opener under the lights. But Gaul’s book makes it harder to cheer. n

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Greed is not good in this ’80s tale

Humans need not fear the machines

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

R

l

REVIEWED BY

S TEPHEN A MIDON

ooney, the narrator of Robert Goolrick’s elegiac third novel, is a true creature of the 1980s. His story, like that decade’s, is one of profound greed and sudden collapse, a cautionary tale of a Master of the Universe brought low by his own glittering excess.

“The Fall of Princes” consists of two interwoven narratives. The more beguiling, which opens in 1980, tells the story of Rooney’s rise. After abandoning his youthful ambition to become an artist, he earns a degree from the Wharton School, then lands a job as a trader at an unnamed firm that students of the Reagan era will recognize as Salomon Brothers.

Almost immediately, he becomes part of the young Wall Street elite who expect “salaries equivalent to our ages multiplied by 100,000” and believe “that black limousines were public transportation.”

Nicknaming himself Billy Champagne, Rooney thinks nothing of spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to rent a Long Island beach house for a summer of cocaine-fueled debauchery. Before long, his adventure turns into a sort of “Weekend at Bernie’s” where everybody is an emotional corpse. “We were the people people wrote about when they wrote about the evils of contemporary society,” he confesses.

The nonstop bacchanal results, inevitably, in casualties. At first, these tend to be women. There is Rooney’s longtime girlfriend, a ballerina turned model; a waif-like European countess who is a fixture at that rowdy summer house; and many others as well, women treated so badly that, as Rooney says, when he later passes them on the street, “they invariably look at me with such hatred that I am frightened to speak to them.” The only true survivor is Carmela, Rooney’s hard-hearted heiress wife, who turns out to be too rich and too jaded to be wounded by his drunken callousness.

But it is not just women who fall

by the wayside. Many of Rooney’s fellow Masters of the Universe also come undone. Among them are Harrison Wheaton Seacroft, a closeted gay man whose plummet comes immediately after he receives the bad medical news that is so characteristic of the era.

In the second of the book’s narrative strands, we meet a kinder, gentler Rooney a few decades after his collapse. He also wrestles with his complex sexuality, gradually understanding that his cruelty toward women sprang less from macho self-confidence than from his refusal to accept his true nature.

Goolrick, author of the memoir “The End of the World as We Know It” and the best-selling gothic novel “A Reliable Wife,” was a New York ad man in the 1980s who ended the decade broke and in Alcoholics Anonymous. This helps explain his novel’s air of credibility.

While “The Fall of Princes” patrols territory marked by Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney and Michael Lewis, Goolrick writes with an immediacy and precision that make this world feel as if it is all his own.

He is greatly aided in this by a finely tuned sense of bleak humor.

There is also a real poignancy running through the book. The aging Rooney, keenly aware that he has squandered his chance at family happiness, spends his free time visiting luxury Manhattan apartments as a bogus would-be buyer so that he can imagine living a fulfilled life. And the novel’s passages on AIDS, the dark underside of that brightly lit decade, can be painfully beautiful.

Goolrick’s only slip into sentimentality comes in his final chapters, when Rooney becomes entangled with a transvestite prostitute who appears to have escaped from a Lou Reed song. This is a small misstep, however, in a memorable book about a decade many survivors would like to forget. n Amidon’s new novel, “The Real Justine,” has just been published.

‘H THE FALL OF PRINCES

By Robert Goolrick Algonquin. 296 pp. $25.95

HUMANS ARE UNDERRATED: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will

By Geoff Colvin Portfolio/Penguin.

248 pp. $27.95

l

REVIEWED BY

T YLER C OWEN

umans Are Underrated” serves up two different books in one, each interesting in its own right. The first offers an overview of recent developments in smart software and artificial intelligence. The reader learns about the bright future of driverless cars; IBM’s Watson and its skills at “Jeopardy” and medical diagnosis; and the software of Narrative Science, which can write up stories and, in some cases, cover events as well as a human journalist. The overall message is a sobering one: The machines are now able to copy or even improve on a lot of human skills, and thus they are encroaching on jobs. We won’t all have to join the bread line, but not everyone will prosper in this new world.

That material is well argued, and those stories are becoming increasingly familiar ground.

The second and more original message is a take on which human abilities will remain important in light of growing computer efficacy. In a nutshell, those abilities are empathy, interpersonal skills and who we are rather than what we do. This is ultimately a book about how human beings can make a difference and how that capability will never go away. It’s both a description of the likely future and a prescription for how you or your children will be able to stand out in the world to come.

Geoff Colvin puts it pretty simply: “Rather than ask what computers can’t do, it’s much more useful to ask what people are compelled to do.” And what we are compelled to do is to contact other humans and seek value from them.

The theme of empathy recurs repeatedly. For all the virtues of software, it just can’t bring the same connection that human employees can. Good (human) managers understand how to motivate, how to set expectations, and when to offer rewards or perhaps enforce penalties. Face-recognition software may be able to judge

our moods, but it doesn’t come close to having the same flexibility of response, or the same two-way bond, as a human who can hear and interpret our personal stories.

My favorite parts of the book are about the military, an area where most other popular authors on automation and smart software have hesitated to tread. In this book you can read about how much of America’s military prowess comes from superior human performance and not just from technology. Future gains will result from how combat participants are trained, motivated, and taught to work together and trust each other, and from better afteraction performance reviews. Militaries are inevitably hierarchical, but when they process and admit their mistakes, they can become rapidly more efficient.

If machines and smart software carry any major lesson for our world, it is that human teams matter more than ever. That’s the best and most important insight in this book. Another lesson is that the future, including future jobs, will be more and more about telling stories. That includes telling stories to motivate and organize people, telling stories to express empathy, and telling stories to make people happy.

One interesting implication is that the future may be what Colvin calls a “woman’s world.” On average, women seem to be strong at empathizing and storytelling; there is also good evidence that female participation makes groups a lot smarter.

“Humans Are Underrated” is a worthy addition to the collection of books about the new economy.

It can serve as a good introduction to its core themes, but even if you’ve read all the other books in the field, it is still valuable for its insights into the enduring value of human performance and teamwork. n Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

An attack tailored for the age of social media JOEL ACHENBACH is a reporter for The Washington Post.

Rage, narcissism, a gun and social media combined for a particularly excruciating display of horror Wednesday morning. After murdering two former colleagues during a live TV news stand­up, the Roanoke killer uploaded a horrifying message to his Twitter account: “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.”

So now there were two awful videos — the live stand­up filmed by the videographer and the killer’s even more gruesome amateur version apparently taken with his phone.

This instantly took over the news feeds of the world. If you were anywhere near the Internet, you wound up experiencing this crime. You couldn’t escape it. This was an event both intimate and universal, and shared at the speed of light.

You may have realized the story had taken another terrible turn by the cries of co-workers saying, “Oh, my God.” The grief, too, went viral, as WDBJ7 co-workers and loved ones took to Twitter to mourn the murdered journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward.

Social media didn’t cause this crime. Nor is this the first case of a murderer seeking infamy. There is a stripe of killer who wants publicity. These people often leverage whatever technology is at their disposal.

That technology has become radically democratized in just the past few years. More than a billion people are on Facebook.

We essentially have our own broadcast outlets now. And the Roanoke murders were committed by a man who had worked in the news business and knew how to reach an audience.

There are fewer filters — or none at all. If you set your Twitter account on “autoplay,” then the murder video would play automatically without need for a click.

People possessed by hate, homicidal impulses or the desire to terrorize the public are getting

better at exploiting the power of social media.

Social media’s astonishing rise has rendered it possible for amateurs to produce instantly viral words and images.

Sometimes it’s something funny, or inappropriate — say, an Auschwitz selfie — but it can also be, as we saw Wednesday, a gruesome act.

“In the old days, you imagine Bonnie and Clyde getting excited when they made the papers. Now they’re taking it into their own hands. They’re putting out the stories themselves. It’s depressing,” said Keith Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and the coauthor of “The Narcissism Epidemic.”

The two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 fantasized that they’d be the subject of a Quentin Tarantino movie. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 paused to mail a media package to a TV network after he had killed his first two victims.

The 2014 Santa Barbara shooter uploaded a video to YouTube describing the mayhem he planned to unleash, and he distributed by mail a manifesto

WDBJ-TV VIA AP

WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were fatally shot during an on-air interview Wednesday in Moneta, Va.

detailing his hatred of women and minorities.

Moments before a 19-year-old man went on a shooting spree at the Columbia, Md., mall in January 2014, he posted an image of himself to the social media site Tumblr. He was posing with his shotgun and a bandolier.

Such social media posing may have seemed shocking a year and a half ago, but it may be turning into the standard operating procedure for psychopaths.

“Once people start doing it, other people get the idea, and it becomes the norm,” Campbell said.

Evil acts rarely have a single explanation, and this one’s no different. Again, a gun is involved.

Again, it’s an angry, unsuccessful man. Again, he sent a rambling manifesto to a news media organization.

He did everything he could to maximize exposure to the crime.

He timed it so that it would be on live television and back-stopped that video feed with a shooter’seye video. He uploaded his work to social media, and within a few hours turned his gun on himself.

Humans create technology, and it bites back in strange ways.

There are rising concerns among researchers about the effect of digital technology on human behavior and psychology. One major concern is that kids who can’t let go of a smartphone may not learn very quickly how to have a face-to-face conversation.

All of us immersed in a life of screens struggle to find the right relationship with our gadgets.

But there’s no evidence that we’re becoming violent, and in fact the opposite seems to be true: Violent crime is down over the past two tech-crazed decades, notwithstanding the recent spike in urban homicides.

The news media are obviously implicated in the rash of spectacular violence — granting prominent coverage to people who, without resorting to terrible crimes, would have had little chance of ever becoming famous.

Gone are the days when a news organization could function as a gatekeeper and its editors could hold a meeting to decide whether to publish something disturbing.

If there was one encouraging development Wednesday, it was the decision by news organizations to show restraint in showing the TV station’s video of the shooting and the action by Twitter and Facebook to remove the killer’s video from their sites.

Though by then it was too late for many of us. And it is the nature of the Internet that nothing ever disappears. It’s still there, circulating, like a pathogen that can’t ever be eradicated.

“It’s like showing those beheadings,” said Andy Parker, the father of the slain reporter. “I am not going to watch it. I can’t watch it. I can’t watch any news.

All it would do is rip out my heart further than it already it is.” n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

In U.S., citizenship trumps tribe FRED HIATT is the editorial page editor of The Post.

When we lived in Moscow, people used to ask my wife and me, “Who are you by nationality?”

“Americans,” we’d say.

Invariably the response would come: “Yes, but who are you really?”

Russia, you see, is a kind of melting pot, like the United States, but ethnicities don’t melt in quite the same way. People consider each other first as Armenians or Tatars or Jews (yes, “Jewish” is deemed a nationality), and only second as Russian citizens.

That is the kind of thinking that Donald Trump, and the Republican presidential candidates who are pathetically jumping on his nativist bandwagon, would bring to this country.

Trump would abolish birthright citizenship: the principle, embedded in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, that anyone born in the United States is an American, no matter the legal status of his or her parents. Sen. Ted Cruz promptly claimed he’d always opposed birthright citizenship, too, a claim the Houston Chronicle quickly disproved. Bobby Jindal and Ben Carson joined in, as did Scott Walker, though he didn’t seem entirely sure. Jeb Bush stayed admirably aloof from the mob.

Other conservatives pushed back, but often half-heartedly,

arguing that the law would be too hard to change, or that it shouldn’t be the focus of antiimmigration sentiment because it isn’t the biggest problem.

But that’s wrong, too.

Birthright citizenship isn’t a problem at all. It’s one of the things that makes America great.

For many countries, what is in your blood, or your DNA, defines whether you can belong.

Americans, by contrast, are bound together by a civic ideal.

“Birthright citizenship is much more about us, a nation formed and held together by civic values, than it is about immigrants themselves and an incentive or disincentive to come here legally or illegally,” says Doris Meissner, who ran the U.S. immigration agency under President Bill Clinton and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

“What’s the belief system, the social cohesion that binds us?” she continues. “A commitment to democracy, participation, equal rights, opportunity, due process, government by the people — people have to be full members of the society for that to be real and flourish.”

Of course most Americans take pride in their ethnic heritage, whether Irish, Ghanaian, Korean or, often, some distinct blend.

And often they have paid a price for that heritage.

But eventually each prejudice has been worn down, if not erased, by this shared notion of American-ness, the conviction that citizenship trumps tribe, that any infant born here is as entitled — and as likely — to grow up to be president as any other infant.

Abolishing birthright citizenship would vastly expand and extend what Trump claims is the underlying problem: the presence of so many residents without legal right to be here. His proposal to deport the 11 million is, as he himself said a couple of years ago, an unworkable fantasy.

That’s why most Americans support providing some path to citizenship.

But even without such a path, the problem would fix itself eventually. The children of the undocumented will be citizens,

and they will grow up — as children of immigrants, legal and illegal, generally have — to better their lot, sometimes to prosper, almost always to contribute.

If, on the other hand, American-born children were denied citizenship, the number of people illegally here would swell.

By 2050, according to a study a few years ago by the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 5 million people who had been born here would have no legal claim to remain — or, if having even one undocumented parent was deemed disqualifying, as many as 13 million.

“With all the problems illegal immigration presents, at least it’s a one-generation phenomenon. It self-corrects with the next generation born here,” Meissner told me. “A permanent underclass where disadvantage is transferred generationally is a terrible counter-force.”

After all, why do people around the world want to come to the United States? In large part it’s because this has always been a place that welcomed risk-takers, profited from their gumption and allowed them — and their children — to answer, when asked their nationality: “American. Really.”

I don’t think Americans will allow a demagogue to take that away. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

Will falling stocks lift a candidate?

EUGENE ROBINSON writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers.

The sudden turmoil in the financial markets is a reminder that when the preliminary hoopla is over and voters actually begin to select their presidential nominees, competence and cool will probably matter.

If the global swoon in stock prices were to turn into something more serious, which candidates would benefit? Could it give a boost to the billionaire developer who has a degree — as he constantly reminds us — from the prestigious Wharton School? Or would his four corporate bankruptcies and “ready, shoot, aim” approach to life make Donald Trump’s supporters think twice?

I’m reminded of a story I’ve heard House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tell. You may recall that when the financial crisis struck in the fall of 2008, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the GOP candidate, melodramatically suspended his campaign and demanded an all-hands summit meeting at the White House.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama was invited, as were the leaders of both houses of Congress and the frantic, sleepdeprived members of George W. Bush’s economic team. Bush was a reluctant but gracious host.

The president offered McCain the floor, as Pelosi recounts, but it turned out that the senator had nothing of substance to say.

Attendees were dumbfounded.

Then came Obama, the constitutional lawyer, who gave

an academic lecture on finance to a room littered with MBAs. Bush, who had no patience with meetings that wasted his time, leaned over to Pelosi and whispered, “Y’all gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

In the end, voters decided that sang-froid, perhaps with a touch of arrogance, was better than cluelessness. The financial crisis alone didn’t swing the election Obama’s way, but it helped.

This sharp decline in stock prices is in no way comparable to the meltdown of 2008, which threatened the global financial system with ruin. But the current market losses, which began in China, are not happening in a vacuum. China’s growth rate, which for years was about 10 percent a year, is down to a relatively anemic 7 percent,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DANA SUMMERS

according to official figures — and the true growth figure is probably much lower, according to independent economists. A slowdown of this magnitude in the world’s second-biggest economy inevitably ripples across the rest of the globe.

Oil prices, meanwhile, are lower than we’ve seen in years at about $45 a barrel. This should be good news for consumers. But remember that the United States is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas.

The domestic fossil fuels industry is bound to suffer.

How might all of this affect the presidential race? I’m guessing it could make voters pay more attention to the candidates’ records on economic and financial management — and might give a boost to those with experience.

On the Democratic side, I would expect Hillary Rodham Clinton to get a bump. Polls consistently say that voters see her as the most experienced candidate in either party. Steady economic management is part of the Clinton brand. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has plenty of bold economic ideas, but I wonder if voters might look at their shrinking 401(k) balances and become more risk-averse.

The Republican side is where

things get really interesting. Jeb Bush, as I’ve written before, was supposed to be the adult in the room, the consummate grown-up, the steady helmsman. But there’s the slight matter of his brother, who let the 2007-08 crisis get out of hand before finally reacting with a huge bank bailout that many conservatives saw as corporate socialism.

Governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey have already been pressed to defend their management of their states’ budgets and credit ratings.

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) has had to answer for his precarious personal finances.

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina did run a massive corporation, but there is disagreement over how well. Ben Carson was a tremendously gifted neurosurgeon but has never really run anything.

And then there’s Trump. Many of his policy prescriptions are, to put it mildly, far-fetched. Round up and deport 11 million people?

Somehow force the Mexican government to pay for a border wall? Take back jobs from China?

Logically, it seems to me that market craziness ought to be bad for Trump. But while his candidacy is about many things, logic isn’t one of them. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Wildfires BY

K YLE D ICKMAN

With weeks of fire season still to go, the federal government has al­ ready spent more than $800 million trying to extinguish blazes that promise to rival history’s worst in terms of size, destructiveness and cost. In other words: same sad stories, new year. This weekend, while the American West glows that weird and terrifying orange of the fire season, consider that it may only look like the apocalypse. Maybe we’re just thinking about wildfires in the wrong ways.

1

Technology has improved the way we fight fires.

Air tankers dropping 11,000-gallon loads of blood-red fire retardant on flames look great on the nightly news. So do drones mapping a fire’s active edges with infrared cameras.

But the boots-on-the-ground work of stopping fires has changed little since 1910, when America started its grand experiment to remove wildfires from forests.

Over the next century, the U.S. Forest Service modernized firefighting with surplus World War II equipment, including jeeps, helicopters and parachutes for smoke jumpers. But the most effective weapon in the increasingly sophisticated arsenal remains the many thousands of young men and women who, each year, spend their summers removing flammable materials around wildfires with chain saws and hand-held tools. So far, no technology has been able to replace human judgment and dexterity when it comes to culling potential kindling.

2

Fires are bigger now than at any point in history.

It’s true that between 4 million and 10 million acres of forest burn each year, 40 percent more acreage than just 40 years ago. But today’s fire seasons — and even individual fires — are actually smaller than the historic norm. Before the 20th century, almost 30 million acres burned every year.

What’s different about today’s

fires is the intensity with which they’re burning. One reason is that fire suppression has changed Western forests. Take the ponderosa stands of the Southwest: Historically, lowintensity blazes burned every five to 10 years, thinning the forest of young saplings and brush and leaving just 150 large trees per acre. Today, in the absence of flames, those stands are choked with as many as 1,200 trees per acre.

Another reason is the warming climate. The average annual temperature is 1.7 degrees higher than the 20th-century average, and by the end of this century, that number is forecast to climb an additional four to six degrees.

The extra heat wicks water away from plants, drying them out and priming the forests for fire.

Scientists call the resulting breed of blaze “megafires,” which burn so intensely that firefighters have little hope of containing them.

3

More firefighters and more air tankers can control wildfires.

The truth is that, at a certain point, firefighters have as much ability to control a wildfire as the National Guard does to stop a hurricane. Recognizing when a fire has reached that point seems to be the trouble. Just 2 percent of the 50,000 to 90,000 fires that burn every year account for 98 percent of the combined $4.7 billion that fire agencies — federal, state, county and municipal — are estimated to

ERIKA SCHULTZ/SEATTLE TIMES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Flames cover the hillsides outside Twisp, Wash., on Aug. 20. Three firefighters died battling the blaze, one of several in Western states.

spend fighting fires each summer.

These cost-gobbling blazes almost always flare up near towns, as Washington’s Carlton Complex did last year when it blackened 256,000 acres near Pateros and Malott. Despite the best efforts of 3,000 firefighters and more than $23 million spent, it was the largest fire in Washington history and scorched almost 300 homes in just two unpredictable days.

Sometimes, the safest thing firefighters and citizens can do is get out of the way, even if that means watching homes burn.

4

More wildfires mean more homes burned.

There are 70,000 communities, 1.1 million homes and almost $269 billion worth of property at very high risk of wildfire damage in the United States. By one estimate, less than 2 percent of those communities have done anything to prepare for the flames. Under current practices, more wildfires will menace these homes.

But certain strategies can mitigate the risk. From a planning perspective, communities can treat fires like floods by looking at fire-frequency maps to determine the places where homes are most likely to burn. Homeowners can create defensible space around

their houses by using chain saws and chippers to thin the forest near their property. The National Fire Protection Association found that homes with fire-resistant roofs and 30 feet of defensible space have an 80 percent chance of surviving a wildfire.

5

Fires must be put out.

For the past 50 years, wildland firefighters have extinguished 98 percent of blazes within 24 hours of ignition. It has been a tough transition for the woods. In one way or another, most Western forests and the wildlife that lives within them evolved beside wildfires. Some extraordinary species of beetles breed only in the heat of fires, and hoofed creatures graze on the grass that eventually grows in the wake of flames.

Americans must learn to live with fires. It will take preparing homes and communities for the worst blazes, letting flames do the good work of thinning trees and intentionally igniting more fires when it is appropriate. It took a century to remove fire from the landscape. It’ll take at least that long to teach people the flames are not just something to fear. n

Dickman is the author of “On the Burning Edge.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015

24

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