The Washington Post National Weekly - September 10, 2017

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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The chosen Ayan Abdi is one of 5,000 refugees at a Kenya camp vying for a scholarship — and a new life in Canada.

Will she earn her way out? PAGE 12

Politics EPA sees new vetting 4

Technology Phones’ pricey future 17

Science A farewell to Cassini 23

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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THE FIX

‘Dreamers’ aren’t just Latinos BY

E UGENE S COTT

L

ike much of the debate around illegal immigration, the conversation about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is often centered on Latinos, and specifically Mexican immigrants.

But the population that immigrated to the United States illegally as minors is much more diverse than that.

It is true that the majority of applicants to the DACA program have been from Mexico and other predominantly Latino countries.

But seven of the top 24 countries with the highest acceptance rate for DACA applicants are in Asia, Europe or the Caribbean.

Tens of thousands of young people from South Korea, the Philippines, India, Jamaica, Tobago, Poland and Pakistan arrived in the United States as minors and have been protected from the threat of deportation since DACA was established in 2012.

And because Latino is not a race, even many of the predominantly Latino Central and South American countries that are in the top 20 for DACA recipients have sizable black populations, including Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Guyana.

The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reported that there are about 600,000 black undocumented immigrants among the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

And according to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an immigrant rights group, these immigrants are less likely to have their DACA applications approved than non-black immigrants. The countries with the largest number of black DACA recipients are Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Nigeria. “While approximately 87 percent of applications from

‘Dreamers’ from countries other than Mexico While most DACA recipients come from Mexico and other Latin American countries, thousands originated in Asia, the Caribbean and Europe.

28,371 19,792 18,262 9,066 7,250 7,361 6,696 6,591 4,655 4,774 3,182 3,435 3,099 3,115 2,361 1,960 2,062 2,047 2,096 1,782 1,736 1,685 1,576 1,266

El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Peru South Korea Brazil Ecuador Colombia Philippines Argentina India Jamaica Venezuela Dominican Republic Uruguay Unknown Bolivia Costa Rica Tobago Poland Chile Pakistan Nicaragua Guyana Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

these four countries were approved, about 91 percent of DACA applications from all of the top 25 countries tracked by USCIS were approved,” according to BAJI. While fear of deportation is common for undocumented immigrants, BAJI said the fear is justified among black immigrants because they are detained and deported at five times the rate of other populations of undocumented people .

Undocumented immigration from Asia is more common than many Americans realize; undocumented Asians make up about 14 percent of America’s total undocumented population. About one out of every seven Asian immigrants in the United States is undocumented, according to AAPI Data, a project by the University of California at Riverside providing data on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

And Asians made up 10 percent of the population potentially eligible for DACA, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The Congressional Black Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers addressing policy issues related to black Americans, called Trump’s decision to phase out DACA “racist.”

And Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) called Trump’s decision “an open attack” on immigrant communities inconsistent with U.S. core principles.

“This is not about the economy or crime; rather he only seeks to further his xenophobic, anti-immigrant agenda, which continues to tear families apart,” said Chu, who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

“Dreamers are deeply woven into the fabric of our nation, including the many undocumented Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who arrived in the United States as children through no fault of their own.” n ©The Washington Post

THE WASHINGTON POST

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This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 48

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY HISTORY BOOKS OPINION SCIENCE

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ON THE COVER Ayan Abdi, 20, is a Somali refugee who lives in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

Photograph by NICHOLE SOBECKI, for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Political aide now vets EPA’s grants

AARON M. SPRECHER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Nearly $2 million in funding, much of it related to climate change, has been nixed BY

J ULIET E ILPERIN

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he Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience.

In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. Ac-

cording to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.

Konkus, who officially works in the EPA’s public affairs office, has canceled close to $2 million competitively awarded to universities and nonprofit organizations. Although his review has primarily affected Obama administration priorities, it is the heavily Republi-

can state of Alaska that has undergone the most scrutiny so far.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that grant decisions “are to ensure funding is in line with the agency’s mission and policy priorities,” with the number of awards denied amounting to just 1 percent of those made since EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took office. “We review grants to see if they are providing tangible results to the American people,” she said in an email.

But the agency’s new system has raised concerns among career offi-

Scott Pruitt’s tenure as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has been marked by a skepticism of climate science, advocacy groups and academia.

cials and outside experts, as well as questions among some in Congress that the EPA grant program is being politicized at the expense of their states.

This summer, on the same day that Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined with two other Republicans in voting down a GOP healthcare bill, EPA staffers were instructed without any explanation to halt all grants to the regional office that covers Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho. That hold was quickly narrowed just to Alaska and remained in place for near-

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POLITICS ly two weeks.

The ideological shift is a clear break from the practices of previous Republican and Democratic administrations. It bears the hallmarks not just of Pruitt’s tenure but of President Trump’s, reflecting skepticism of climate science, advocacy groups and academia.

Although the EPA has taken the most systematic approach to scrutinizing the flow of money, it is not the only entity to do so. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has vowed to withhold Justice Department grants from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to hand over arrested immigrants who cannot prove they are in the country legally. The Interior Department, which is conducting a review of its grants, last month canceled a $100,000 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine study aimed at evaluating the impact of surface mining on nearby communities.

Yet several officials from the Obama and George W. Bush administrations said they had never heard of a public affairs officer scrutinizing EPA’s solicitations and its grants, which account for half of the agency’s roughly $8 billion budget.

“We didn’t do a political screening on every grant, because many of them were based on science, and political appointees don’t have that kind of background,” said former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who served under Bush. She said she couldn’t recall a time when that administration’s political appointees weighed in on a given award.

Konkus is a longtime Republican operative from Florida who served as Trump’s Leon County campaign chairman and previously worked for the state’s lieutenant governor and as a political consultant. From 2000 to 2006, he was an executive assistant, primarily on scheduling and organizational matters, for then-House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.). The panel has oversight of the EPA. Now, as deputy associate administrator in the EPA’s public affairs office, Konkus helps to publicize the funding of awards and serves more broadly as a grants adviser on policy and management issues.

While most of the internal focus has been on individual grants with a connection to climate change, the decision on July 28 to put a

temporary hold on all awards to Alaska attracted broader notice.

Two EPA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the action prompted a consultation with agency lawyers because of its unusual nature. The hold temporarily slowed awarding more than $10 million in federal funds through half a dozen tribal grants and one to the state’s Department of Conservation.

Bowman said Alaska was not singled out in the review, and aides to Murkowski and Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I) said they were not aware that any funding was delayed. The Obama administration had identified “combating climate change by limiting pollutants” as one of its priorities for awarding tribal funds, but several of the pending Alaska grants were unrelated to climate change.

Konkus has nixed funding for nearly a half-dozen projects to date, including a Bush-era program to address indoor air pollution, a project to protect watersheds in Central and Eastern Europe, and a one-day training session in Flint, Mich., to help residents eradicate bedbugs.

He allowed a $300,000 award for a computer system to help implement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan after the firm involved told the EPA that it could be used for policies other than climate change, officials said.

The newsletter E&E News first reported that Konkus was overseeing grant applications but did not describe the criteria he was applying or his specific work on the actual awards.

Bowman said that the agency’s

approach has allowed the Trump administration to determine whether decisions made by the previous administration were a wise use of taxpayer money.

“I want to underscore that only a select few have been rescinded,” she said in her email, noting that the EPA had given states nearly $74 million in competitive grants and $1.7 billion in noncompetitive awards between Feb. 1 and Aug. 22.

But Sen. Thomas R. Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, sent Pruitt a letter late last month asking that he provide documents outlining which grant programs are now subject to political review, how this deviates from past practice and which grants recommended by career staff have been subsequently declined.

From February through July, Carper noted, EPA grant awards to several Democratic-leaning states — including Delaware, Massachusetts and California — had declined compared with the previous year.

“There could be many reasons for these apparent declines,” Carper wrote. Although he added that it warranted attention “in light of the potential that EPA’s decision to involve political appointees represents a change in the grant-solicitation process and may be indicative of the politicization of the grant-awarding process.”

James L. Connaughton, who was chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Bush, said new administrations routinely do“a soup-tonuts review of the previous administration’s programs” and advance

“We review grants to see if they are providing tangible results to the American people.”

Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency

“We didn’t do a political screening on every grant, because many of them were based on science, and political appointees don’t have that kind of background.”

Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator for George W. Bush

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their own priorities through funding decisions.

“Some of the efforts might be more transparent than others, but let’s not fool ourselves,” he added.

Still, Connaughton said it was fair to question a review’s outcome. Two of the awards the EPA’s leadership rescinded — $1.1 million to the U.N. Foundation and a nearly $148,000 award to the nonprofit organization Winrock International — supported the deployment of clean cooking stoves in the developing world. The U.N. Foundation grant grew out of a 15-yearold EPA program with the private sector, which aims to curb the kind of pollution that fuels climate change and disproportionately affects women and children.

The program addressed pollution that enters the air and “affects all of us,” Whitman said. “It was also good for human health in those countries, which we wanted to have stable for national security.”

Bowman said the agency was pulling back grants to international entities that are not “providing results for American taxpayers.”

But several U.S. firms that sell stoves and equipment benefit from the program, countered Radha Muthiah, chief executive of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. “It’s a cutting-edge solution to one of the world’s oldest challenges, it’s working, and there is a lot still to be done,” she said in a statement.

The smallest grant revoked so far was a $20,000 award to the Midwest Pesticide Action Center to train Flint residents on how to combat bedbugs. Executive Director Ruth Kerzee said in an interview that regional EPA officials had urged the center to apply because it had a small amount of unused funds. The group was notified of the award and then told a month later that it was canceled.

Kerzee said bedbug infestations have spread in the Michigan city — which has grappled with lead-contaminated drinking water since 2014 — and the center’s past sessions attracted packed audiences.

“For low-income communities, it’s a really desperate situation,” she said.

Bowman said the cancellation made sense in light of the agency’s overall priorities: “Let’s be clear, we are talking about $20,000 for a one-day workshop on bedbugs.” ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s shift unsettles both parties

BY R OBERT C OSTA, S EAN S ULLIVAN AND M IKE D E B ONIS

P

olitical uncertainty seized both major parties on Thursday in the wake of President Trump’s sudden alignment with congressional Democrats, leaving Republicans alarmed about the unraveling of their relationship with the White House and uncertain about the prospects for their policy ambitions this fall.

In the span of 48 hours, Trump cut a deal with Democrats to keep the government funded and raise the nation’s borrowing authority, advanced talks with the senior Senate Democrat on a permanent debt ceiling solution and followed the advice of the top House Democrat, who urged him to use Twitter to ease the fears of young undocumented immigrants.

The developments confounded congressional Republicans and Democrats at the Capitol, where some long-standing political norms seemed to many to be shattered. The upheaval also raised new questions about how Trump plans to approach the looming debates over tax reform, immigration, government funding and the nation’s debt — and where congressional Republicans fit in.

“Haven’t seen anything like it before,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has served in the Senate for three decades. Of Trump, McCain said: “I have no way of divining his motives. I’m a pretty intelligent guy, but I don’t understand this.”

Democrats proceeded carefully amid the escalating GOP tensions, framing Trump’s overtures as an opening to assert themselves more forcefully while acknowledging that Trump’s favor could be fleeting — and that their many intractable differences are likely to remain.

“There aren’t permanent alliances. There aren’t governing philosophies. There’s day by day, seatof-the-pants management,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview.

By that measure, the Democrats

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans are frustrated by president’s deal over debt limit, while Democrats remain wary have enjoyed two good days working with Trump.

On Wednesday, the president agreed to support legislation providing hurricane relief money in a package that also averts an imminent shutdown of the federal government and raises its borrowing limit for three months. The deal gives Democrats leverage to play a role in negotiations over several big-ticket items at the end of the year, including efforts to pass a law allowing undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children to remain here legally.

And on Thursday, Trump talked up the possibility of permanently removing the requirement that Congress repeatedly raise the nation’s borrowing limit. It was an idea he had discussed with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) a day earlier, according to three people familiar with the discussion. The idea is opposed by many Republicans, including House Speaker Paul D.

Ryan (R-Wis.), who see the imposition of a debt limit as a check on government spending.

Also Thursday, Trump tweeted that young undocumented immigrants currently protected by an Obama-era executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals do not need to worry about his administration acting against them for the next six months. The tweet followed the White House’s announcement this week that the program will be rescinded in six months.

It followed a request from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — and was a striking move from Trump, who has largely ignored counsel of his own party’s leaders when it comes to his controversial social media habits, and who has rarely if ever communicated with Democrats about messaging.

“For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have

President Trump — seen Thursday at a news conference at the White House — cut a deal last week with Democrats to fund the government and raise the nation’s borrowing authority. He also advanced talks with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on a permanent debt ceiling solution.

nothing to worry about — No action!” the president tweeted from his personal account.

Said Pelosi at a subsequent news conference: “This is what I asked the president to do and, boom boom boom, the tweet appeared.”

The comity between the White House and Democrats sparked easy passage Thursday of a Hurricane Harvey relief package that allocates $15.25 billion in disaster aid and also raises the debt ceiling and keeps the government open until Dec. 8. The Senate approved the measure 80 to 17 as part of the pact between Trump, Schumer and Pelosi, sending it back to the House, where it was approved Friday 316 to 90.

Democrats see the dynamics in Washington as newly fluid and potentially in their favor on a host of issues. In addition to pressing for new protections for undocumented immigrants, Democrats hope to water down GOP plans for tax policy and thwart a bevy of federal budget cuts proposed by Republicans.

Even so, some suggested caution about Trump’s sudden cooperation with them. They warned that the president’s unpredictability makes him a dangerous ally.

“Take advantage of it — but do it with the full knowledge that Trump will be calling, you know, Chuck Schumer names on Twitter within the fortnight,” Murphy said.

Interviews with multiple GOP senators and aides on Thursday, meanwhile, revealed that a sense of helplessness has gripped Republicans in the upper chamber after Trump openly flouted their plans.

“It’s just been jarring,” said one GOP Senate aide. The aide said that at the start of the week, there was a sense of confidence that White House officials were on the same page as Capitol Hill Republicans on the debt ceiling and Harvey aid negotiations.

But Trump ignored the guidance of those planning conversations.

Congressional Republican leaders didn’t want to give Demo-

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POLITICS crats new leverage in December and have been under pressure from conservative rank and file to avoid more than one vote on the debt ceiling before next year’s midterm elections — only to be undercut by Trump.

“My fear is we set a bad precedent here, that you just load it up with other stuff,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), who represents the area where Harvey first made landfall. “This is what’s wrong in Washington: They pile stuff together so you have to weigh the good versus the bad rather than give every issue individual consideration. That’s the part of living in the swamp I don’t like.”

At the White House, Trump was asked by a reporter about abolishing the congressional process for raising the debt ceiling. He replied that “there are lots of good reasons” to do it.

Trump and Schumer discussed the idea Wednesday in the Oval Office. The two, along with Pelosi, agreed to work together to try to finalize a plan by December, which would need congressional approval. One individual who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private talk described it as a “gentlemen’s agreement.”

The U.S. government spends more money than it brings in, and it covers that gap by issuing debt to borrow money. The government can borrow money only up to a certain limit, known as the debt limit or the debt ceiling. The government routinely bumps up against this ceiling, requiring Congress to raise it again and again.

These votes are often politicized.

Some Republicans labored to put a positive spin on what has been a politically startling couple of days for the GOP on Capitol Hill.

“In my opinion, we’re not going to shut down the government.

That’s a plus,” said Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), a moderate who is up for reelection and whom Trump threatened to campaign against over the summer. “And we’re going to take care of people in Texas — I think that’s a good thing.”

Some took an optimistic stance.

“There’s going to be a little bit of sparring going on,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the Senate’s second-ranking Republican. “But hopefully the president will recognize it’s in his best political interest to have as many Republicans in the Senate” as possible. n © The Washington Post

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Democratic Party sees rift over technology companies BY

D AVID W EIGEL

A

messy, public brawl over a Google critic’s ouster from a Washington think tank has exposed a fissure in Democratic Party politics. On one side there’s a young and growing faction advocating new antimonopoly laws, on the other a rival faction struggling to defend itself.

At issue is a decades-long relationship between Democrats and tech companies, with Democratic presidents signing off on deregulation and candidates embracing money and innovations from companies like Google and Facebook.

Now, locked out of power and convinced that same coziness with large corporations cost them the presidency, Democrats are talking themselves into breaking with tech giants and becoming an antimonopoly party.

The argument had a breakthrough in late August when it was reported that Barry Lynn, a monopoly critic and longtime scholar at the Google-funded New America Foundation, was leaving and taking his 10-person initiative with him.

Lynn, who has been critical of Google, had praised European regulators for hitting the company with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine.

The foundation, which has received more than $21 million from Google, removed Lynn’s comments from its website.

“A lot of people see this as a tipping point,” Lynn said of his departure in an interview. “This is something that’s upset people on both sides of the aisle.”

Soon after, Lynn’s new project, Citizens Against Monopoly, launched with a website that asked people to protest “Google’s unethical behavior” and pledged that “Google’s attempt to shut us down will fail.” New America’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, pushed back, warning that Lynn was starting a family feud at a moment when Democrats could not afford it.

“Barry’s new organization and

campaign against Google is the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election,” Slaughter wrote on Medium. “I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country.”

ELISE AMENDOLA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said Democrats need to be stronger about antitrust policy.

The Democrats’ anti-monopolists have quietly been winning the argument inside the party. During the Obama years, they’d been routed, as Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, strongly supported the president, and the Federal Trade Commission abandoned an antitrust case against the company. Over the years, Schmidt gave $842,900 to Democrats, and less than half as much to Republicans.

“Google was Obama’s Halliburton,” said Luther Lowe, the vice president of public policy at Yelp.

A shift began when Democrats began to look for their next president. In October 2015, fending off a primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Hillary Clinton wrote an opinion piece for the business site Quartz in which she promised to “take a page from Teddy Roosevelt” and “stop corporate concentration in any industry where it’s unfairly limiting competition.”

In June 2016, Lynn organized a

conference where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) argued that the next president, which most assumed would be Clinton, could reverse the Obama administration’s lax antitrust policy. Democrats needed to consider the longterm implications for consumers, for jobs and for wages, she suggested.

“How do we get more competition? And how do we do it without new legislation that would require cooperation from a Congress awash in campaign contributions and influence peddling?” Warren asked. “We can start with a president and an executive branch willing to once again enforce our laws in the way Congress originally intended them to be enforced.”

Antitrust issues garnered almost no attention during the 2016 presidential campaign. In April, Hart Associates conducted polling, circulated among Democrats and think tanks, that found an enormous opening for antimonopoly politics. The polling, which surveyed 1,120 voters overall and 341 from the decisive Rust Belt states, found just a slim majority saying Democrats favored “average Americans” over “large corporations and banks.”

Those corporations and banks were toxic. The polling found “corporate monopolies” viewed negatively by 66 percent of all voters, and 70 percent of Rust Belt voters.

Just 21 percent of Rust Belt voters, however, favored “antitrust laws.”

Congressional Democrats who saw that polling factored into the “Better Deal,” their economic agenda and attempt to rebrand the party. The plan, which was released July 24, spent four pages arguing for new antitrust laws, new standards that would make mergers more difficult, and a new “competition advocate” with the power to police issues.

“It was a really good start,” Lynn said. “This is going to be a long process, and a long series of battles — not just inside the party, but intellectual battles.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Deadline looms for Houston evacuees M ONICA H ESSE Houston

clothing they had been given.

On the other side of the chair barrier, a stranger was crying over news about her house. Aragon and Vital bowed their heads. Aragon had been pregnant before, twice.

Two miscarriages. She knew miscarriages could be caused by stress.

“Bless us, oh Lord,” she said.

“For the gifts we are about to receive.”

BY

L

anny Dumbaulb and Elvira Wolf were the first Harvey evacuees to wake in the worship hall of Calvary Community Church, before the volunteers had even made coffee, before it was even dawn.

It had become their routine: the new friends, a classical composer and a German grandmother, sat at a table and whispered to each other amid a sea of inflatable mattresses and tote bags filled with what people had frantically grabbed before water seeped into their houses. Wolf told Dumbaulb she was yearning for a tomato. He told her the volunteers would bring her one; they were nice like that.

Juan “J.P.” Perez woke next, wandering to the table, saying that an acquaintance had promised to lend him a car so that he and his wife could drive to their subdivision and see whether their own car was still submerged up to the door handles.

At 6:32 a.m., one of the kenneled dogs started barking, which woke his owner. That woke the Hindi-speaking family next to her, which woke all the kids who spent their days kicking rubber balls to one another between the portable beds. The church’s pastor said a prayer.

Along the back wall, Andrea Aragon and Jordan Vital, under their donated blankets and wearing their donated clothes, tried to ignore the noise and sleep as long as they could, knowing that Aragon, two months pregnant, needed rest. And knowing that flooding and looting had taken everything they had. And knowing that when they eventually woke up that day — nine days after Harvey had first touched ground — they would still be in a shelter.

‘God doesn’t like ugly’ Every day, the Texas Department of Public Safety publishes a situation report listing the shelters still holding evacuees. There were 32,202 people on the list that Tuesday morning — 1,462 in rows

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Hope, worry and boredom mingle in shelters as Harvey victims struggle to find a place to live of military cots at Houston’s convention center downtown, 696 at a suburban high school.

At Calvary Community, the shelter had been operating for seven days, ever since Jeff McGee, the church’s senior pastor, had done the math, realized that the official Red Cross facilities might not have capacity in northwest Houston, and put out a call for supplies and volunteers. Now there were 72 evacuees in his worship hall, hundreds of travelsize shampoos in his prayer room, and a pile of pillows and quilts.

Aragon and Vital had walked 17 miles across town to get here, and Vital, 26, who had never stopped marveling that he met his girlfriend on Instagram when he messaged her that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, made sure they stayed hydrated and took breaks.

“God doesn’t like ugly,” Aragon’s mother often said, so Aragon, 20, had reminded herself to stay positive while they walked and while

the water filled the apartment they had just moved into three weeks before. And when, a few days later, looters had taken the television, PlayStation and vanity for which they had spent two years saving.

“My mother says, if you could get it once, you can get it again.

And that we need to be grateful for what we have,” she reminded Vital once they had woken up at Calvary Community.

Car: flooded. Jobs: gone. The shop where Aragon had done eyelash extensions told her they needed to reopen, but she couldn’t get to work. The couple tried to be grateful for the blue office chairs they had arranged in a square around their inflatable mattress, creating the semblance of walls in the shelter. They tried to be grateful for an outlet to charge their iPhones.

“I’m going to look for a vacuum,” Vital said. He returned with one a few minutes later and carefully cleaned under the chairs while Aragon folded the used

Hurricane Harvey evacuees Stephanie and Nash Ubale sleep for the night at Calvary Community Church in Houston.

The couple lost their home to flooding the same week they had a funeral for their newborn twins. “We lost everything and more,” they said.

‘A pretty prison’ The shelter was shelter, but the time in it was loose. It slipped by, divided not into hours but into distractions: Teenagers stayed in their beds, watching Hulu on their laptops. A few people went to the Spanish-language service in the upstairs chapel even though they didn’t speak Spanish. Juan Perez’s wife, Joan Potter, had taken to freshening up her air mattress with a new throw every day and posting the results on Facebook: “I redecorated my boudoir.” There was never anything new to look at.

“I’m so bored,” Wolf, 83, sighed to Dumbaulb.

“You could take a nap, Omi,” said Dumbaulb, 67, using the German word for “grandmother.” He looked at his iPad, hoping to hear from his daughter who was trying to help him find a place.

There was nothing to do here but try to get out.

A woman named Ginger Holcomb found housing in San Antonio, where she had never been but where she could bring her dogs. A couple named Stephanie and Nash Ubale were thinking of selling their house and moving out of the city, too. Their home had been flooded in the same week they had held a funeral for their newborn twins. “Did you lose everything?” people had been asking. “We lost everything and more,” they had been responding.

The Calvary shelter was scheduled to close in three days’ time, though the pastor was trying to make sure everyone had a place to go. The national news that they saw seemed to have already turned its attention to Hurricane Irma and to be talking less about the people still stuck in the Texas shelters. Vital recharged his

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‘That must be the secret’ Midafternoon, Potter decided she couldn’t stand being idle anymore. The ESL teacher wanted to get her nails done at the closest open Walmart. She wanted to drive up and down the highway nearest the shelter and stop at every available hotel looking for a room. McGee, the pastor, was doubtful she would have success; people had been calling hotels all day.

“I know, but I want them to see me in person,” she had insisted, so she and Perez got in their borrowed car and went to the Comfort Inn two miles down the road.

“Just checking — do you have any space?” she asked the clerk, who told her no but that she could check back in an hour in case something opened up.

“Are you all sold out?” she asked at the Best Western, whose clerk looked pained and apologetic.

“Do y’all —” she started at La Quinta, but the woman behind the desk was shaking her head before Potter could finish the sentence.

“They said they’re booked until September 20th,” Potter told Perez as she came out of the Hampton Inn. He stepped out of the car for a cigarette to calm his nerves. “Let’s just get back,” he said. “I’m getting hungry and irritated.”

The night before, Potter had woken to hear her husband talking in his sleep for the first time in their 23-year marriage. He was screaming “Help me! Help me!” into the darkness of the shelter.

When he woke up, he said he didn’t remember. “Let’s go to one more,” she said. “One more hotel.”

At the Country Inn, when Potter came out of the lobby, she

made a double-V victory sign. “Excellent news. We can 100 percent for sure get a room on Monday.

Maybe even Saturday.”

Monday was six days away, Perez pointed out, and they had to be out of the shelter by Friday.

“They have a breakfast area,” she told him. “The rooms are clean.”

They went back to the shelter.

They told the other evacuees sitting around a table about their room at the Country Inn. “You have to drive, to do it in person,” she said, explaining how they had lucked out.

Dumbaulb’s car was underwater somewhere. “I guess that must be the secret,” he said. “I’m amazed, and I’m jealous, and I’m happy.” The table was quiet.

‘I will fear no evil’ “I wish I could listen to German music,” Wolf said to Dumbaulb.

The worship hall, filled with air mattresses this morning, was now only half full. Teams of volunteers deflated the mattresses left behind by the people who had been lucky enough to leave.

Dumbaulb took out his iPad and showed Wolf how a person could search for almost anything on YouTube. Wolf leaned her chin on her fists and listened to Marlene Dietrich sing something slow and haunting in her native tongue.

“There’s nothing worse than not knowing where you’re going to be in three days’ time,” he said.

“This feels right. Doesn’t it? For this space right now — this sad Marlene Dietrich song?”

Over along the far wall, Aragon had changed for bed into a borrowed orange T-shirt with palm trees on the front. She climbed onto her air mattress and put in her ear buds to watch an old episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” on her iPhone. After a couple of minutes, McGee took his position in the middle of the raised platform to offer the evening prayer.

“We as Christians often take great comfort in the 23rd Psalm,” he said and began to recite it: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Aragon watched her phone as the lights dimmed around her, and someone coughed and another dog barked, and it was one more night in the shelter again. n ©The Washington Post

WEEKLY

In many counties, no maternity ward BY

C AROLYN Y . J OHNSON

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2.4 million Number of women of childbearing age living in counties without hospitals that deliver babies.

ISTOCK

phone again and again, depleting his batteries with call after call to apartments, hotels and friends.

Wolf had grown up in Nazi Berlin — Jewish but passing as Christian. When she was 6 or 7 years old, the German chancellor had come to visit her school and Wolf, as the prettiest student, had been chosen to greet him. That is how she found herself presenting flowers to Adolf Hitler.

“This is nothing,” she told people when they asked how she was managing shelter life. “This is a pretty prison,” she said. It was nobody’s fault they were there but the rain. Nobody could let them out but the weather.

KLMNO

t Meadows Regional Medical Center in rural Vidalia, Ga., the number of babies born each year has more than doubled over the last 15 years — increasing from about 400 births in 2000 to more than 800 in recent years, according to the hospital’s chief executive, Alan Kent.

It might sound like a significant baby boom for the community of nearly 11,000 people. Instead, Kent says the uptick is a symptom of a phenomenon that is playing out in rural areas nationwide: The hospitals around Meadows Regional have either winked out of existence or canceled their obstetrics services over the years. The medical center now keeps a strategy map of its primary service area, which extends in each direction about 30 to 40 miles, Kent said.

“Most of the rural hospitals around us, at one time or another delivered babies over the last eight to nine years. Two hospitals have closed. The three remaining hospitals that had maternity wards ceased their women’s services and stopped delivering babies,” Kent said. “We’re seeing an increase in women who deliver with no prenatal care.”

A new study in the journal Health Affairs quantifies the trend. In 2004, 45 percent of rural counties lacked a hospital with obstetrics services. About one in 10 rural counties lost those services over the next decade, and by 2014, 54 percent of communities lacked those services. That leaves 2.4 million women of childbearing age living in counties without hospitals that deliver babies.

There are already a slew of wellknown health disparities between rural women and those who live in urban settings. Women from rural areas are more likely to report having fair or poor health, be obese, smoke cigarettes, commit suicide and have cervical cancer than their urban counterparts.

But the recent trend could exacer-

bate disparities in reproductive health, too. One recent study found that rural areas had made far fewer gains in improving infant mortality compared with the rest of the country.

What was concerning to Peiyin Hung, a postdoctoral associate at Yale School of Public Health, who led the study, was that the most geographically isolated communities were more likely to not have had obstetrics services to begin with — and were more likely to lose them over the decade they studied. Rural counties that had lower median incomes and higher percentages of African American women of reproductive age were also more likely to not have hospitals with maternity wards.

The reduction in obstetrics services stems from many factors.

When hospitals are struggling financially, as many rural hospitals are, obstetrics services are often first on the chopping board because they generally don’t generate a lot of money, Kent said. In some communities, there may be such a low volume of births that there is simply not enough care to support an obstetrician. The lifestyle of an obstetrician in a remote area might also be a hard one, if the doctor is permanently on call as the only doctor who delivers babies.

Megan Evans, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, has been working with the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to push forward a solution to some of the workforce issues. Through a federal program called the National Health Service Corps, medical students can have their school paid for as long as they commit to practicing in an underserved community for a given period of time.

But she acknowledged that other barriers exist: Many young physicians may not want to relocate to remote rural areas where they may feel isolated, not have many mentors or could be the only obstetrician at the hospital. n ©The Washington Post

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Cold political truth emerges in Arctic D AN L AMOTHE Aboard the USCGC Healy in the Arctic Ocean BY

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oast Guard Ensign Ryan Carpenter peered north through a front window of this 420-foot long ship, directing its bright-red hull through jagged chunks of ice hundreds of miles north of Alaska.

It was only the second time that Carpenter, 23, had driven the 16,400-ton U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, one of the U.S. military’s two working polar icebreakers. He turned the ship slightly to the left in the sapphire-blue water, and a few seconds later, the ship’s bow rumbled through the crusty white ice floe at about 10 mph. Metallic shudders rippled throughout the vessel, a feeling that Arctic rookies often find unnerving.

Carpenter is part of an increasingly pointed U.S. strategy to prepare for competition — and possible conflict — in what was once a frosty no man’s land. The warming climate has created Arctic waterways that are growing freer of ice, and with China and Russia increasingly looking toward the region for resources, the United States is studying how many new icebreakers to build, whether to arm them with cruise missiles, and how to deal with more commercial traffic in an area that is still unpredictable and deadly.

Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, recently warned that Russia and China are already encroaching on Arctic waters over the extended U.S. continental shelf. The region is about the size of Texas and rich with oil, minerals and other resources that could be extracted as technology improves.

Zukunft said last month in Washington that the situation in the Arctic could someday resemble the contentious disputes in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands and military installations over the objections of its neighbors. Russia already has made contested claims that stretch to the North Pole and possesses more than 25 icebreakers, with more on the way.

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

Once a no man’s land, the melting polar region and its resources are the focus of powerful rivals The next generations of Russian icebreakers aren’t being built just to transit polar ice but to fight in it.

One kind of ship in the works, the 374-foot Project 23550-class, is designed to be nimble in this environment while carrying naval guns and cruise missiles. The Kremlin also has disclosed plans to build or expand numerous bases along the northeastern Russian coastline.

Meanwhile, China also has arrived in the Arctic, sailing research and exploration vessels here while arguing that no nation has sovereignty over these waters and the natural resources below. Chinese military officials have said that sovereignty disputes in the Arctic could require the use of force, according to an assessment written for the Naval War College Review.

The Obama administration proposed building new icebreakers in 2015, citing the warming seas and concerns about Russia’s intentions. But the effort to do so has gained new attention in recent months.

Despite President

Trump’s skepticism of climate change, he marveled at the power of polar icebreakers during a May 17 commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy, and promised his administration will build “many of them.”

Zukunft said that a fleet of three new medium icebreakers and three heavy icebreakers would allow the service to retire its older ships and keep one icebreaker perpetually patrolling in both the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Healy was commissioned in 1999, but the other working polar icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, is more than 40 years old. It deploys each year to Antarctica, but crew members have resorted to searching eBay for some parts because they are so hard to find, according to Healy crew members familiar with the sister ship.

The cost of the new icebreakers is uncertain at this point. Estimates are often reported to be about $1 billion each because of the reinforced hull and robust engines needed to operate in ice, but

Ice floes surround the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy in the Arctic Ocean this summer. The United States is preparing for competition and possible conflict as Arctic waterways become free of ice, and China and Russia look to the region for resources.

Zukunft said he thinks it will be less. A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine published in July recommended that a single class of four heavy icebreakers be bought in one block purchase to save money and suggested that time is running out to do so.

“The nation is ill-equipped to protect its interests and maintain leadership in these regions and has fallen behind other Arctic nations, which have mobilized to expand their access to ice-covered regions,” the report said.

Scot Tripp, the chief civilian scientist on a recent mission aboard the Healy, said that when he started coming to the Arctic in 2012, there was ice nearly all the way south to Alaska’s northern shores until June or July.

“There was no need for the Coast Guard to be up here,” Tripp said. “This was frozen, and now it’s not. So now there are waterways and cruise ships coming up, so you run into the possibility of disaster with one of those.”

Even with the warming climate, the Arctic environment is unforgiving. The summer water and air temperatures are about 30 degrees, and winds often howl at 30 to 40 mph. Coast Guard members work the decks in thick snowsuits, steel-toed boots and hard hats, and anyone leaving the Healy on a smaller seacraft used for exploration must wear a winter suit with a rubberized shell to extend how long they can survive if they fall in the water.

The Coast Guard has started its own ice-diving school and made diving a primary occupation. The divers can perform maintenance on the ship, assist other vessels that are in trouble or perform salvage operations involving ships that have sunk.

“When we deploy to the Arctic, there is no bench strength nearby,” said Capt. Greg Tlapa, the Healy’s commanding officer. “No one is coming to save us. So, the more self-sufficient you are in terms of underwater inspection and hull repair, the less risk there is to a deployment.” n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

A growing Kabul fears a water crisis P AMELA C ONSTABLE Kabul BY

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n affluent areas of the Afghan capital, sky-blue vans make daily deliveries of huge plastic water-cooler jars, dropping them at embassies, offices and ornate private homes surrounded by high walls.

“Water, clean and pure,” beckon the slogans on each van. “Water is life.”

But in much of greater Kabul, where the population has tripled to 5 million in the past decade, the quest for safe drinking water is more arduous. Returned war refugees camp in muddy vacant lots; trenches of fetid wastewater run beside dusty, unpaved streets.

Apartment construction has soared, adding to the strain on old, overloaded water and sewer services.

With no formal water-supply systems in many areas, people dig wells in their yards, boring deeper each time they dry up. With no public sewage systems, some also build septic tanks, but many simply dig latrines. As a result, well water sometimes mixes with sewage underground and becomes contaminated. Chemicals from construction or factories can also leach into the ground, giving the water a bitter taste.

Several recent media reports have warned that Kabul’s water is becoming dangerously contaminated, but government health officials say that is an exaggeration.

They estimate that 70 percent of the urban water supply is safe.

There have been scattered reports of more people being stricken with diarrhea in hot weather this summer, especially children, but no major outbreaks of water-related diseases have been reported.

Still, officials and experts expressed concern about future contamination, especially with the metropolitan area growing so fast.

A survey of household water connections in Kabul by the National Environmental Protection Agency in March found high levels of E. coli bacteria in five of 22 sites tested. The report said that 77 percent of the samples met World

WAKIL KOHSAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The Afghan capital now has 5 million people, but many don’t have water or sewage services Health Organization standards, but that because of a lack of chlorine and laboratory supplies, the scope of the survey was cut back by half.

“We used to get a lot of support for water-testing from UNICEF and the WHO, but that has ended,” said Mahmad Ali, a public health official who oversees water testing and preventive health outreach.

Teams of specialists from Ali’s office regularly visit city schools and other public facilities, checking on health conditions and sampling water from wells and pumps.

On a recent day, the team visited a large kindergarten program in west Kabul, where they quizzed the children on their hygiene habits.

“When do you wash your hands?” asked Anisa Popalzai, a health promoter. “Before eating!” a chorus of voices answered.

“Why?” There was a brief silence, then one boy ventured, “So germs won’t get to your mouth.” Popalzai nodded and smiled, then demand-

ed, “Who has clean hands today?”

Two dozen pairs of arms shot up, palms extended.

Popalzai asked the teachers if there had been any recent cases of diarrhea among the 600 children in the large facility. They said no, but she reminded them that in emergency cases, they could use a mixture of boiled water, flour and salt to rehydrate young patients as soon as possible. “For a child, diarrhea can be deadly,” she said.

Outside the classrooms, two other visiting team members with checklists took water samples from the school’s outdoor pump and put them in small bottles to be tested for bacterial and chemical contamination. They also asked school officials how far the pump was from any septic tanks, drains or animal waste.

Moving to the kitchen and bathrooms, they noted with approval that the lunch dishes were being covered after washing, but they frowned at a tangle of plastic garden hoses carrying water through

A man carries containers of water to his home in Kabul.

weedy yards to the kitchen and expressed concern that some toilets did not flush.

One inspector, Mahmad Daoud, said fears of drinking-water contamination had given rise to sophisticated scams in which discarded commercial water bottles were being refilled from wells, resealed and sold as pure.

The irony of Kabul’s growing water problem is that the capital is surrounded by sources of pristine water, including the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains in the distance and dams on powerful rivers in two nearby provinces. President Ashraf Ghani has made dams a top priority; last summer, with support from India, construction began on a long-delayed major dam in western Afghanistan.

But delivering mountain and river water safely to hundreds of thousands of households in Kabul is an expensive and risky undertaking. The city has been damaged by decades of conflict and now faces frequent bombings by insurgents, who have also attacked rural reservoirs and dams. An internationally funded project to build pipes, reservoirs and wells across the capital, launched two years ago, is still in the early stages.

Sardar Wali Malikzal, director of the Afghan Urban Water Supply and Sewer Corp., is at the nerve center of this effort. Progress has been steady, he said, but population growth and new construction — much of it unplanned and some illegal — have been faster. Malikzal said that officials are starting to force builders of large projects to provide modern water and sanitation systems, and that numerous private companies have sprung up to dig wells and supply filtered water to those who can afford it. But public piped water is still reaching fewer than a fifth of urban households.

“Most diseases come from polluted water, so water needs to be filtered,” Malikzal said. “Wells and septic systems have to be standardized.

“The challenge is not the water itself,” he added. “It’s management, and it’s money.” n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

‘It’s life or death’

BY KEVIN SIEFF in Dadaab, Kenya

It was time to go. Ayan Abdi slipped on a long black headscarf, grabbed her refugee ID and set out for the interview that could save her life.¶ Since she was 2, Ayan had lived in the world’s largest refugee camp, a constellation of tents and huts stretching across the red desert near the Somali border. Now, a few miles from her shack built of sticks and cardboard, three examiners with a Canadian university foundation were sitting at a wooden table, deciding which students were worthy of a way out. ¶ Ayan hurried along the sandy road. Past the piles of burning trash surrounded by giant scavenging birds. Past the girls no older than her, at 20, who balanced firewood on their heads, trailed by barefoot children. Past the group of men who stared at her — a small figure in a flowing black robe and bright red shoes — and hissed in Somali, “Where are you going, girl?”

When Ayan finally found a taxi, it was already full. She squeezed in, her whole body tense, dots of sweat on her forehead.

“I’m in a rush,” she told the driver, who didn’t ask why but careened a little faster from pothole to pothole.

A year ago, Ayan was one of about 5,000 students who jammed into classrooms across the Dadaab refugee camp for a two-hour exam, the first step in seeking perhaps the most generous scholarship anywhere. The World University Service of Canada, or WUSC, would award 16 of those students not just a college education but also a new life, with the Canadian government providing them citizenship and a chance to sponsor their families.

Now Ayan was one of 29 finalists, heading for the interview that would determine whether she won.

Her other options were being snuffed out.

Kenyan authorities were trying to close Dadaab, which for a quarter-century had sheltered the victims of Somalia’s war and hunger crises. In the United States, which had resettled more than 100,000 Somalis since 2000, President Trump had ordered a temporary ban on accepting refugees. Around the world, countries were shutting their doors to people like Ayan, even as the number of refugees surged past 22 million in 2017, the highest in recorded history.

What was left was the WUSC scholarship — a chance for the bright, young refugees of Dadaab to earn their way out.

“It’s life or death,” said Joseph Mutua, a program officer with the scholarship foundation in Dadaab. “That’s how it’s seen.”

In the taxi, Ayan was drumming her fingers against her knee. A printed verse from the Koran swung from the rearview mirror. On the bumper, a sticker read, “Succeed.”

Ayan Abdi is a Somali refugee living in a camp in Kenya. She applied for a scholarship to go to college in Canada.

Opposite page: Ayan, right, catches up with her friend Maryan Hassan. They teach in the camp.

The cab pulled up to a walled compound. “Is this the right place for the scholarship interview?” Ayan asked a security guard.

In her hand, which trembled, was a brown envelope with her documents. The white foodration card that said “Family size: 1” because Ayan’s parents and siblings had returned to Somalia years ago without her. The report cards she had earned since primary school. The recommendations from a Dadaab school where she was now teaching biology.

She carried the envelope to the cinder-block building where the interviews were taking place and sat under a tree, waiting her turn. “I’m getting a headache,” she told one of the other applicants.

She looked down at the cracked screen of her white cellphone, where she had written notes reminding her what to tell the interviewers.

“This scholarship is my only way out,” it said.

“I’m the best girl in the camp based on merit,” it said.

“Here I cannot awaken my dreams,” it said.

She took a deep breath.

A middle-aged woman stepped outside and called her name.

Ayan walked inside.

The afternoon before the interview, Ayan had pulled two lawn chairs into the sandy expanse in front of her hut. Her best friend, Maryan Hassan, sat across from her, with a list of mock interview questions ready.

“Describe yourself,” said Maryan, 20, a tiny girl with a high-pitched voice who was also a finalist for the scholarship.

“I was born in a refugee camp in 1997,” Ayan began, in the careful English she had studied in school. “My parents are in Somalia.” continues on next page

PHOTOS BY NICHOLE SOBECK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY NICHOLE SOBECK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

from previous page

“Don’t forget to tell them what you want to do for your country,” Maryan interrupted.

Ayan nodded.

They were trying to figure out how to distinguish themselves from the other refugees. But on the Internet, all they could find were generic interview questions, so that’s what they studied.

“What are your strengths?” Maryan asked.

“My ability to collaborate,” Ayan answered, a little unsure of herself, trying to remember what she had read online. “What are yours?

“I don’t give up,” piped Maryan.

A cloud of flies hovered around their faces.

The goats living nearby yapped. In both directions were rows of hundreds of huts made of whatever people could find — cans, tree branches, plastic sheets bleached by the sun. There were 250,000 refugees in all, surrounded by police checkpoints.

“If I get out of here,” Ayan said under her breath, “I’m never coming back.”

For years, Ayan and Maryan had watched their friends disappear, dropping out of school as they were forced to marry older men, in accordance with old Somali cultural traditions.

Fatima left when Ayan was 11. Mahado when she was 13. Farhiya when she was 14. They would reemerge, sometimes years later, balancing babies in their arms, and looking sullen and tired.

What was the point of school anyway, some of

Ayan’s friends scoffed. You could finish high school, but there was little work in the camp.

And refugees were not allowed to hold jobs in Kenyan cities.

Ayan was 12 when she learned of the WUSC scholarship, advertised in fliers taped to the sheet-metal walls of classrooms. It turned her from a good student who loved adventure novels into someone whose grades were part of a grand strategy of escape.

She and Maryan taught themselves to type at the camp in a market stall called Bukhara Computer School, with a row of old IBM desktops. In 2012, both girls received scholarships to attend top high schools hundreds of miles from the camp, with college-educated teachers and new textbooks. On their phones, they would enter in the search bar: “Best Universities in Canada.”

In 2015, when Ayan was away at high school, her mother and two siblings left Dadaab and returned to Somalia. They were sick of life in the camp and worried about Kenya’s threat to deport the refugees.

Come back to Somalia, her mom said by phone from a town outside Mogadishu, the capital.

Ayan knew what that meant. No schools. Few jobs. And a constant threat from al-Shabab, the Islamist extremists who controlled nearby villages.

Ayan, 20, walks past piles of burning trash, surrounded by storks and goats scavenging for food in the refugee camp.

In Dadaab, at least there was the WUSC. I am going to disobey you for the first time, Ayan replied.

She graduated near the top of her class and then moved back to Dadaab, into a stick hut next to the home of family friends. She covered the dirt floor with a red bedsheet and surrounded the hovel with a pile of thorny branches, to keep out the men who knew she was unmarried and alone.

“The harsh realities of life here are traumatizing,” she wrote in her personal essay for the WUSC scholarship. Women were raped when they went out to collect firewood for cooking.

Children died of chronic diarrhea during cholera outbreaks. When she was filling her water bucket one morning, Ayan was stung by a scorpion.

Ayan and Maryan talked about their lives in Canada, how they would walk across green college campuses, how they would get their families to safety.

“When I see her,” Ayan said, nodding toward her friend, “I see WUSC.” Maryan smiled.

Around the world, less than 1 percent of registered refugees are resettled each year, and most have little or no control over the process.

They are selected by U.N. agencies and approved by host governments, their fate determined by luck and charity, with the sickest and most vulnerable put at the front of the line.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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COVER STORY The WUSC scholarship represented something different. It was about merit.

“Make sure you’re smiling,” Maryan had told Ayan as they prepared for their interviews.

Ayan was determined not to become emotional.

“It’s not professional,” she had said. “You need to show them that you’re confident.”

Five minutes had passed since Ayan climbed the steps into the cinder-block building. Then 10.

Through the screened window, the other students waiting their turn outside could see her silhouette in front of the three interviewers.

It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun slicing through sparse trees.

“It’s taking a long time,” said Mohammed Abdi, one of the applicants, looking at the building.

Finally, Ayan emerged, glancing at the students waiting in a cluster of plastic chairs.

“I think I said the right things,” she said. “I think.”

But in the next hours and days, she would replay her performance in her head, over and over.

She had walked into the cinder-block room.

The three women welcomed her. Ayan remembered to shake the interviewers’ hands, even though she was so nervous she could hardly focus. One woman told her to relax, and that had helped. She sat at a wooden desk.

They asked her when she had arrived in the camp, what she remembered about the journey.

Ayan told them that she had been born in another camp in Kenya but that her family had to leave after it was damaged by fire, and that was how they had wound up at Dadaab.

“I told them the name of the road we took. I told them I was just a baby.”

They asked about the importance of education.

“I told them it had shaped me emotionally.”

Then one of the administrators asked about the challenges she had faced as a refugee. And suddenly, the weight of it all hit her.

“I told them: ‘I’m here alone. My family has left. Without this scholarship, I have no other options.’ ” And Ayan began to cry.

“I couldn’t stop the tears.”

The women waited.

“They handed me a tissue. I tried to get back under control.”

The questions continued. They asked what she wanted to study, and she said nursing.

They asked how she would adjust to Canada.

“I told them I would wear more clothes in the winter. I told them I would get used to the food.”

Ayan tried to hold back her tears. She didn’t want to look desperate. Finally she managed to focus on the words she had prepared.

“I said, ‘I am the best girl in the camp based on merit.’ ”

$80 monthly salary to her mother.

In the classroom, there were 21 boys and two girls in their midteens sitting on opposite sides of the room. A bell rang and class began.

Ayan tried her best to push her thoughts about the scholarship to the side. It was early June, and she would have to wait about a month for the results.

“I’m 50-50,” she said one day of her chances.

But a few days later she had reassessed, thinking about the caliber of the other candidates.

“I’m 20-80.”

She thought: “Maryan will get it, but I won’t.

I’m going to be stuck here forever.”

She wrote a text message to a friend: “I’m not sure I convinced the interviewers.”

The WUSC committee didn’t say exactly when the announcement would come. She checked her phone obsessively.

It buzzed and buzzed, often with messages from Maryan, who lived in another part of the camp.

“We still have to wait,” Maryan wrote in the middle of the month.

The school was a reminder of all the limitations of Dadaab. The boys often ignored commands from female teachers. Islamic clerics shut down the girls debate team, saying it gave women the wrong idea.

More female students dropped out every week, disappearing into marriage, often by force. Ayan had tried to intervene with one of the girls’ mothers, who responded with an old Somali proverb: “A woman should be at home or in the grave.”

In late June, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, with its long, hot days of fasting. Ayan was desperate to get away.

She walked to the police station and applied for a temporary pass to leave the camp. She explained that she wanted to visit the family that had hosted her while she attended the private high school in Nakuru, in western Kenya. Ayan was given a white piece of paper that allowed her two weeks outside the camp.

The day after the interview, Ayan walked to Hagadera Secondary School in the camp, where she teaches biology, sending most of her

“I feel free here,” she said in the living room of the Abdirahman family’s apartment, on the bottom floor of a concrete apartment building.

“I told them: ‘I’m here alone.

My family has left.

Without this scholarship, I have no other options.’ ” Ayan Abdi, above, talking about her interview for the WUSC scholarship

KLMNO WEEKLY

She wore a pale yellow headscarf, shorter than the ones that women wore outside in Dadaab. She blared songs from her phone: Nigerian pop, American hip-hop, traditional Somali music.

It was easier to forget about the scholarship here, visiting her high school friends. But occasionally they would bring it up.

“We just hope you get it,” Anisa Abdirahman, 21, said one morning.

“Dadaab is not a place for a person to live,” said Anisa’s 23-year-old brother, Mohammed.

Ayan was looking at her phone.

The scholarship finalists had created a group on the WhatsApp messaging service where they shared rumors, news — anything at all about the WUSC program. But it was silent.

“Still nothing,” Ayan said the following morning, sitting on a couch in the living room.

She threw her phone down on the cushion and went to the kitchen to make tea.

She crushed cinnamon and leaves.

“All of us, we are qualified. All of us, we are refugees,” she told Anisa as the water boiled.

“Maybe it’s just luck.”

In the other room, her phone started buzzing, The screen flashed.

From the kitchen, Ayan couldn’t see it.

“Ayan, I think your phone is ringing,” Mohammed said.

Ayan cleaned her hands, picked up the phone and saw the message: “Congrats.”

Her eyes widened.

“WUSC? Is it a prank?”

Then she saw a list on the WhatsApp group: “The Successful Candidates for 2018 WUSC scholarships.”

Her name was No. 4.

She burst into tears.

“Thank God! Thank God!” she yelled.

Her friend Farhiya ran into the room. She grabbed Ayan’s hands and they danced in circles, tears rolling off Ayan’s cheeks.

Ayan looked again at the list for Maryan’s name. It wasn’t there. “Oh,” she groaned.

But her phone was ringing nonstop now.

There were calls from other winners. Calls from her teachers.

“Alhamdulillah,” she told one friend. Praise be to God. Then Maryan’s number popped up on the screen.

“Congratulations,” said the voice on the other end of the line. It sounded as if she had been crying.

“Maryan, I’m very sorry,” Ayan said.

They would have another year together.

Ayan would be applying to universities in Canada, practicing her English and getting an introduction to Canadian culture. Maryan would have one more chance to apply for the scholarship — albeit with poor odds after having been rejected already.

“Goodbye, sister,” Maryan said.

Ayan lowered the phone from her ear and stared at it. More congratulatory texts were popping up. But Maryan had hung up and was gone. n ©The Washington Post

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HISTORY

Amateur once became polar explorer BY

S ARAH K APLAN

I

n 1845, two of the best ships England could build set off to find the fabled Northwest Passage — then vanished without a trace.

The mystery enthralled a generation of adventurers. No one could believe that the pride of the Royal Navy, commanded by the legendary Sir John Franklin, had fallen victim to nature’s wild menace. Convinced that there must be survivors and tempted by the promise of a large reward, the best explorers of the era headed for the Arctic.

But 15 years after Franklin disappeared, nearly 20 rescue attempts had turned up only bones and wreckage, and more people had died searching for the missing men than had been lost on Franklin’s original voyage.

Charles Francis Hall, a 38-yearold newspaper publisher from Cincinnati, was obsessed. Although he’d never so much as sailed on a ship, he became convinced that he knew how to solve the mystery. He filled four scrapbooks with clippings about the lost expedition and dashed off dozens of letters to Arctic adventurers, who occasionally wrote back.

In February 1860, Hall talked his way onto a whaling vessel and set sail for the far north — a middle-aged nobody equipped with little more than a reporter’s sense of curiosity, a hefty dose of Midwestern pluck and $27 borrowed from his wife.

He was shockingly successful: He uncovered a centuries-old archaeological site of European explorers, became a pioneering ethnographer of Arctic people and made it closer to the North Pole than any non-Inuit explorer before him. He also faced hardship.

Historians say they believe he was poisoned by a member of his crew on his final expedition.

Today, maps reflect discoveries Hall made, and artifacts he collected are still used for research at the Smithsonian.

“It’s fascinating to me the fact that just some amateur jumps on a

PHOTOS BY MONICA AKHTAR/THE WASHINGTON POST

A middle-aged Midwesterner found success with the help of the Inuit boat . . . and he survives and does it well,” said Joe Hursey, a reference archivist at the National Museum of American History, where half of Hall’s journals are stored.

“Not just does it well, but makes discoveries. How did he do it?”

Not the way Franklin did it, that’s for sure. The British explorer’s ships were powered by the latest steam engines and operated by a 130-person crew. He set sail for the Arctic with a library of 1,000 books, two organs, 8,000 tins of canned food and a porcelain dining set on which to serve it. When their vessels became trapped in the ice north of Canada, the voyagers cloistered themselves inside their ships instead of seeking survival advice from the native Inuit.

Many of Franklin’s failed rescuers also ignored the local people who might have guided their search.

“The pattern for interaction between white people and the Inuit in those early days was pretty disdainful,” said Bill Fitzhugh, director of the Center for Arctic Studies at the National Museum of Natural History, which houses the other half of Hall’s collection. “The Europeans

thought that they came from this grand civilization of big cities and fancy technology and big boats and so forth, and they thought the Inuit were really living on the edge of survival.”

Hall saw things differently. In the introduction to his memoir, he quoted the advice of a fellow Arctic explorer: “We experienced many severe trials; but . . . the major part of them emanated from our mode of living. When we lived as the Eskimeaux [an outdated, potentially derogatory term for the Inuit people] we immediately recovered and enjoyed our usual health.”

In other words, there was no reason to starve if you availed yourself of the generosity of the locals. (The memoir doesn’t mention how Hall’s Inuit companions felt about that.)

Hall, who had no navigational training, helped redraw maps of the Arctic by pointing out that a strait named for Elizabethan privateer Martin Frobisher was actually a bay and was not a path to the fabled Northwest Passage.

“Maps worldwide were changed,” Hursey said.

Except for a brief return to the

Bill Fitzhugh, director of the Center for Arctic Studies at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., displays equipment and artifacts from Charles Francis Hall’s voyages, including wooden goggles to protect against snow glare.

Unlike many explorers, Hall learned survival skills from the Inuit people he met.

United States to collect supplies and raise more funds, Hall spent all of the 1860s in the North. He filled thousands of pages with interviews with and detailed observations about his Inuit companions’ lives.

Standing in the vast warehouse that holds the National Museum of Natural History’s anthropology collections recently, Fitzhugh opened three drawers containing artifacts that Hall collected on his voyages: wooden goggles that protected the eyes from blinding light reflected off brilliant white snow; sinew-backed bows made from bone, which made archery possible in a land without trees; sophisticated harpoons tipped with spurs that spun and hooked into a seal's flesh to prevent the animal from pulling away. The tools are testament to Inuit people’s ability to adapt to the Arctic, honed over 4,000 years of living amid the ice.

“It really shows what life was like before Europeans started coming,” Fitzhugh said.

But Hall was far from flawless.

Hursey pointed out that in thousands of pages of notes, the explorer never mentioned the wife

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TECHNOLOGY and two young children he’d left behind in Cincinnati. And even as he lived alongside the Inuit, he harbored the prejudices of his era, dismissing his companions as “uncivilized” even as he depended on their expertise for survival.

He also had an ego, which inflated more when he was made commander of a U.S. Navy expedition to the North Pole in 1871.

“Here’s the problem with Hall, and why a lot of history has sort of forgotten him,” Hursey said. “All these people involved in all these searches and all this stuff were well known, were well educated. . . . And then you’ve got this guy here, a nobody, and he’s going to lead us and tell us what to do, and say, ‘I am the greatest’?”

Hall’s swagger made him enemies onboard the ship, particularly among the scientific staff.

Soon, he was suffering from strange aches and unexplained fatigue. In late October, after the ship became trapped in ice for the winter, Hall fell violently ill. Convinced that he was being poisoned, he refused all food. But it was too late. Hall died on Nov. 8, 1871.

The ship’s doctor, Emil Bessels, attributed the explorer’s death to apoplexy, and a Navy investigation concluded that Hall had died of natural causes. But later historians noted a suspicious passage in Hall’s journal in which he wrote that his coffee tasted oddly sweet — a signature of arsenic.

A century later, Hall biographer Chauncey Loomis ventured to northern Greenland to exhume Hall’s body, which had been well preserved by permafrost. Tissue samples revealed that Hall had indeed ingested alarming amounts of arsenic shortly before his death. The element was a common component of the quack medicines of the 19th century, so it’s possible that Hall was trying to medicate himself. Neither Fitzhugh nor Hursey quite buys that argument: “Maybe the doctor dipped into his little chemistry kit,” Fitzhugh said.

Hall’s last act was an attempt to reach the North Pole by sledge. It was a hard journey, Hall wrote in his journals, made more punishing by the poison already coursing through his veins.

Finally, he could go no further.

It was an isolated spot on the northwest tip of Greenland hemmed in by impassable moun-

tains and a channel packed with fast-moving ice. Judging by the stars, which had been visible since the long Arctic night began nearly a month before, Hall was within 600 miles of the North Pole. It was not the top of the world. But it was close enough.

There, Hall sat down to write his last message to the secretary of the Navy, which he sealed inside a

SMITHSONIAN LIBRARIES

copper tube that he then buried in a small rock cairn. Years from now, the thinking went, when future explorers happened upon this site they would see the cairn and know what Hall had done.

The tube was uncovered by Navy investigators a decade later and now sits in the National Museum of American History archives, alongside a report from the Navy’s board of inquiry.

Hursey opened the Navy’s yellowed manuscript to one of its last pages and began to read the description of Hall’s last venture: “The first step taken by Captain Hall fell upon land more northern than white man’s foot had ever before touched.”

“Look at that,” Hursey said. “He made it.” n © The Washington Post

WEEKLY

The rise of the $1,000 smartphone BY

H AYLEY T SUKAYAMA

A

Charles Francis Hall, center, with Inuit guides Tookoolito, left, and Ebierbing from Hall’s 1865 memoir, “Arctic Researches, and Life Among the Esquimaux.”

KLMNO

s we gear up for another smartphone battle between Samsung and Apple this fall, there is a new wrinkle for the average smartphone customer to consider: prices that edge toward $1,000 for a new phone.

The Note 8, Samsung’s latest premium smartphone, starts at $930. For months, analysts have speculated that the 10th anniversary edition of the iPhone, which will debut at Apple’s rumored event Tuesday, could be even higher. Even for smartphone customers used to paying $800 or $900 for a phone, the $1,000 mark may seem a bridge too far. For that, after all, you could easily get a pretty good laptop — a MacBook or Surface Laptop, for instance.

What’s behind the price increases? Some of it is pure function, as these phones do more than even the standard iPhone or Galaxy models. In general, smartphones carry more technology than ever before. While they aren’t yet laptop replacements, smartphones are required to do more than ever before as people rely on them for way more than Web browsing or phone calls. Making something versatile, portable and with enough battery life to endure being used every moment of the day isn’t cheap.

The smartphone-buying public is also craving innovation from this latest batch of phones. And innovation is expensive. The Note 8’s 6.3-inch edge-to-edge screen is its main feature, and a costly one. The same is true of Apple’s expected super-sharp OLED screen in the iPhone; the phone could also have new facial recognition technology and wireless charging, which all contributes to its bigger price jump.

Another part of it, of course, is profit. Apple and Samsung are companies, after all, and ones that are very good at making money.

Both companies declined to comment.

It’s hard to say whether anything will really justify a smartphone price that large in the average consumer’s minds. But the point for Samsung and Apple is that they may not have to.

For one, both are looking at markets where people have been waiting to upgrade for a while.

Given the Note 7 debacle and Apple’s decision not to substantially upgrade the iPhone 7, there are plenty of people with extra cash excited to get their hands on something new and spectacular.

Plus, in the case of the Note 8 and the rumored $1,000 iPhone, these are top-of-the-line phones for the companies, both a cut above the “everyone” phones: Think Lexus, not Toyota.

The good news is that very few people are going to pay so much for a phone all at once, analysts said. For the Note 8, there are already many discounts in place to soften the blow.

“Aggressive prices by leading carriers” make even $1,000 phones easier to swallow, said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at International Data Corp. The highestend iPhone 7 Plus is $969 but can be purchased for $46 a month.

For most people, it will be most palatable to buy a phone on one of these subsidized plans — the oldfashioned kind where you pay your wireless carrier a portion of the phone’s price up front and then a little bit every month.

The people who will really get hit are those who want to buy the phone outright, whether as a costsaving measure or to make it easier to jump carriers. In the United States, that’s about 12.5 percent of Americans, according to a June survey from analysis firm NPD. In the end, what consumers will see happen is that both Samsung and Apple are trying to carve out a new tier of the market above where we’ve traditionally thought of them, where they still stand a chance of making money and won’t tarnish their brands with cheaper phones. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Tech is only a part of better schools N ONFICTION

A

THE NEW EDUCATION How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux

By Cathy N. Davidson Basic.

318 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL R OTH

t the beginning of the 20th century, Harvard President Charles Eliot helped reshape America’s idea of a modern research university. To serve the needs of the industrializing economy, Eliot led higher education away from memorization and a fixed curriculum and toward specialization and electives. Now our economy is vastly different, and we need another rethink within our universities. So writes Cathy N. Davidson in “The New Education.”

Davidson seems to see Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, as the Charles Eliot of our time. Crow wants to define the quality of his school not by how many applicants are rejected but by how many students are educated. And he is very willing to offer online programs to expand his university’s reach, while still supporting high-level research. His “New University” is hungry for market share and demands scale.

Although Davidson would probably not put it this way, we could say Crow and his ilk, for better and for worse, are following a path laid down by Silicon Valley.

Davidson, who for most of her career was a professor in literary studies, is one of the most thoughtful voices from within academia calling for a more studentcentered university. “The New Education” is a welcome collection of stories detailing how professors, administrators and students are designing paths through higher education that are relevant to our changing culture and society. Many of her examples come from public higher education, which is where most college students are. She rightly emphasizes the damage done by policies that have defunded community colleges and public universities in the past decade. Forty-five states spent less per student in 2016 than they did before the Great Recession. The privatization of the state university and the rise of for-profit

BUBAONE/GETTY IMAGES

schools promising quick training for the newest jobs have had disastrous consequences for millions of students. As completion rates at these institutions have declined, student debt has soared. And as student debt has increased, the range of choices that students have after graduation has decreased. But how these unhappy trends are related to the new, digital economy and culture celebrated by Davidson remains unclear in her account.

But by no means is Davidson merely a cheerleader for technology as a force for change in the economy and on campus. In two strong chapters, she makes the case against both technophobia and technophilia. She is critical of professors who refuse to let students use devices in the classroom that are ubiquitous outside of it, and she provides strong examples of how she has used technology to help her students work more effectively in groups. However, she is also critical of digital tools that make learners more passive, such as many of the highly hyped, and then much derided, MOOCs (massive open online courses). She

does an excellent job of showing how her own MOOC created opportunities for active learning rather than just delivering video lectures to be passively watched by however many across the globe.

At its core, the new education Davidson envisions creates a platform for student-centered, active learning. Technology will be a part of that, but only if it enhances student agency. She cites approvingly the conclusion of Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist of technology: “If you believe technology is the answer to everything that plagues higher education, you probably don’t understand technology or higher education.”

“The New Education” provides strong examples of successful academic innovations. At the City University of New York, where Davidson leads the Graduate Center’s Futures Initiative, the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) has more than doubled graduation rates at community colleges in New York City. “Unlike most education reforms,” Davidson writes, “these treated students as full human beings with complex

lives, not just test takers and statistics.” Paying attention to the everyday experience of students living near the poverty line was key. “We have your back. And your books.

And your MetroCard,” is the slogan of ASAP, and it works. Lots of advising at ASAP works, too. Lessons from the program are now being applied in various parts of the country.

There is nothing “new economy” about the success of ASAP, nothing high tech. The reforms that get results at community colleges, at large public universities or at small private liberal arts colleges are changes that make learning the highest priority. This means schools have to treat teachers fairly, too, attending to their work conditions and opportunities for continued learning, which means providing opportunities to do research.

Nineteenth-century educational reformers also argued for active learning, and in this regard they were building on Socratic traditions. In the early 20th century, as college enrollments increased, many innovators of the time called for more vocational paths through higher education, paths more attuned to the economy of that era.

Others resisted the effort to turn a broad, liberal education into narrow training.

At her best, Davidson writes in a pragmatist tradition that puts inquiry first and sees learning through the potential of the full, complex human beings students can become. If the new education is to be successful, whatever its use of technology, it will build on this tradition — as teachers and students make it their own, adapting it to changing times. n Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Becoming artists before the Internet

A fatal fire sparked by economic shifts

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

J

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REVIEWED BY

J EFF T URRENTINE

arett Kobek’s previous novel, “I Hate the Internet” (2016), was a scabrously funny self-published diatribe against the Bay Area’s tech culture and especially the way that culture has changed both San Francisco and San Franciscans. Smart and acerbic, it skirted the line between a conventional novel and a book-length essay as it interposed the story of Adeline, a comic-book artist, with razor-sharp commentary regarding the effect of so much tech “disruption.”

Cultural-studies heavyweights such as Greil Marcus and Chris Kraus sang Kobek’s praises.

Now, with the publication of “The Future Won’t Be Long” — a kind of prequel to “I Hate the Internet” — we see Adeline, some two decades earlier, living in New York. But retrospection is more than just a means of continuing a character’s story by looking backward. “The Future Won’t Be Long” feels a lot like a document from the period it details — from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

Have you been pining for tales of drug-fueled big-city debauchery set in the pre-digital era, when MTV was king, people still used landlines and hookups were orchestrated on dance floors instead of dating apps? Look no further.

The first voice we hear in “The Future Won’t Be Long” belongs to Baby, who arrives in Manhattan in 1986 — just out of high school, fresh off the farm and still in the closet. When he chivalrously punches Adeline’s cheating boyfriend only moments after meeting her, she returns the favor by giving him a place to crash in her dormitory. Thus a friendship for the ages is born. In short order, Baby and Adeline are inseparable companions and platonic soul mates: not just living together but traveling together, enduring professional and romantic crises together, and (especially) experiencing the intoxicating ferment

of late-’80s Lower Manhattan nightlife together.

Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll: It’s never been a bad combination for storytelling purposes. It works here, too, but mainly because Kobek knows that milieu isn’t everything. When it inevitably occurs, Baby’s descent into the orgiastic “club kid” world is interesting, mainly as an obstacle to his creative ascent, first as a college student and later as a burgeoning science-fiction writer. With limited means and no family support, Baby needs someone in his life to spur him on and help him cultivate his talent. And Adeline is always there for him — until she isn’t.

Instead, she’s off discovering her own self and cultivating her own talent. Given that Kobek has already told us where Adeline ends up and what she does with her life, there’s not much suspense attached to her voyage.

Even so, you may find yourself cheering her on as she begins to jettison the trappings of a dilettantish rich kid and morphs into a thoughtful artist.

It seems unlikely that “The Future Won’t Be Long” will garner the same cultish following that its companion novel did. Its humor is biting but not lacerating; its critique of the amoral club-kid culture of the ’80s and ’90s can’t resonate in the same way that Kobek’s takedown of our current digital culture does. Oddly, for all of the squalor and degradation it depicts, this novel can’t help but elicit nostalgia for a time when our social lives weren’t entirely mediated by tiny screens, when New York felt like the center of the world, and when the prospect of someday becoming an artist or a writer seemed cooler than becoming a software developer. n Turrentine a frequent Book World contributor, writes about politics, culture and the environment for OnEarth and other publications. This was written for The Washington Post.

O THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG

By Jarett Kobek Viking. 399 pp. $27

THE HAMLET FIRE A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

By Bryant Simon New Press.

303 pp. $26.95

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REVIEWED BY

S AM Q UINONES

n Sept. 3, 1991, fire swept through the Imperial Food Products chickenprocessing plant in the town of Hamlet, N.C. Workers scrambled to save themselves. But an exit was blocked to keep flies out of the plant. Sprinklers failed.

The flames spread on the hydraulic fluid spraying from a loosened hose connected to the fryer and lapped up the chicken grease all over the plant floor. Twenty-five people died, most of them female minimum-wage line workers.

The Hamlet fire was one of the worst industrial accidents in recent U.S. history. Years later, Temple University historian Bryant Simon went to the town, suspecting that behind the fire was a larger story.

The story he finds connects the fire to changes in America. After the Depression and World War II, policymakers of both parties believed in the “broad benefits of decent wages and the need for taxes to pay for the safety net that hung beneath the economy,” Simon writes, and that “the more people made and the more they had in the bank and in their homes . . . the better, it was believed, for everyone.”

Years passed, though, and as a culture, we adopted a belief in the infallible benefit of the free market and grew unwilling to fund the government’s ability to help workers and build community, while shaking our heads at the poor choices of people who lost out.

The now-forgotten Imperial Food and the fire, in Simon’s view, were signs of that. They are powerful storytelling tools and Simon uses them well.

The New South, and particularly North Carolina, headquartered the new paradigm. Policymakers there “let business leaders — who were feeling the heat of competitive pressures and shrinking profits in their current locations . . . know that they would keep taxes low and the government out of their affairs.”

Simon’s list of the ways Imperial Food’s owner, Emmett Roe, practiced unfair competition by flouting safety regulations is long and graphic. At each moment, Roe was met by a government rendered flaccid by its new role as protector not of working people or of the middle class, but of capital. Thus the true cost of unclean and dangerous employment was quietly borne by vulnerable workers, while Roe produced artificially cheap chicken tenders.

Roe was a tiny part of a system that turned chicken into America’s most-consumed animal by relentlessly dropping the price.

Across America, as stable bluecollar jobs declined, chicken nuggets and other types of “cheap supermarket goods became . . . a necessity,” and obesity rose among people whose paychecks shrank along with community amenities that government could no longer provide: “parks or jogging trails, or jobs an easy walk down a wellmaintained sidewalk from their homes.”

Thus the opposite of industrial development took place in this, the now-largest segment of the U.S. working class. Strong rural people turned bloated and wounded by “job creators” such as Roe and the food they made, abetted by government. And for the first time in human history, “fatness” became “an emblem of poverty and failure.”

It is testament to Simon’s reportorial instincts and research that he has found this sprawling, occasionally nauseating story in the detritus of that now-forgotten fire. His trail from that day through poultry economics to a core of new American values is captivating and brilliantly conceived, and will provide readers with insights into our current national politics. n Quinones is the author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

‘Dreamers’ serve our country in many ways LEON E. PANETTA was secretary of defense from 2011 to 2013 and is chairman of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy. This was written for The Washington Post.

In October 1921, my Italian father arrived in the United States aboard the Providence, one of 1,800 third­ class passengers searching for a better life in this country.

At Ellis Island, he listed his total assets as $25 and his profession simply as “peasant.”

My parents became U.S. citizens, but my mother’s dad — my Nono — who had come from Italy to stay with us in Monterey, Calif., in the early 1940s, was not a citizen.

In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, some 10,000 Italians living in California coastal areas were targeted for removal because it was suspected that they would be a threat to the country during wartime. The order did not apply to U.S. citizens, but it did apply to my Nono, and he was forced to leave us and move inland. I was only 4, but I can still remember my tears as I struggled to understand why my Nono had to leave our family.

Fast-forward almost exactly 75 years, and again America is contemplating removing people who, though not citizens, have been living in the United States lawfully, serving as productive members of our society. This time, however, the government is contemplating not temporary orders to “move inland” but outright deportation of individuals from the country.

The targeted population are the “dreamers,” young men and women who were brought to the United States as children by their undocumented parents.

They have attended school here, spoken English and grown up as Americans.

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security created DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — to provide up to 2 million dreamers the chance for temporary protection from deportation and the opportunity to seek legal work permits. These dreamers must be vetted through a vigorous application process. To qualify

for DACA, they had to have entered the United States prior to age 16, have resided in this country since 2007, be in school or have graduated, and pose no threat to public safety.

On Tuesday, President Trump said he is planning to end DACA but defer any deportations for six months, giving Congress time to replace the program.

Congress should seize this opportunity to pass bipartisan legislation now under consideration to allow dreamers to remain. This legislation would also help ensure that DHS spends precious immigration-enforcement resources on true security threats, such as terrorism suspects or convicted gang members — not on individuals who are willing to live here, pay taxes and contribute to society.

One reason I believe we must keep dreamers in this country is because they provide an outstanding pool of young women and men who can engage in national service,

RICHARD VOGEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Protesters rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in Los Angeles on Monday.

including military service.

In a 2017 report on national service issued by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, we found that patriotic spirit and sense of purpose are declining among young Americans but that national service programs provide an antidote: an opportunity for young people to give back to their communities, strengthen bonds with one another, earn money for college and develop key skills.

Dreamers have shown high interest in military and national service. Many DACA recipients have participated in Junior ROTC, according to a 2013 letter to the Pentagon from Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

For example, one participant who was brought to the United States from Venezuela at age 9 was the fourth-highest-ranking officer and commander of the Air Honor Society in his JROTC unit; another brought here at 7 was the highest-ranking JROTC student and received the highest score on the military aptitude test at her Miami high school.

Several hundred JROTC cadets in Chicago Public Schools are undocumented. They would make outstanding soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen.

In 2014, the Defense

Department began to allow a small subset of DACA recipients with specialized skills to enter the military, following in the tradition of thousands of noncitizens who have stood up and said they are willing to fight and die for our country. Today, there are several hundred DACA recipients in the Army; if DACA is ended, these soldiers could face immediate deportation.

Even if Trump were to have a last-minute change of heart on DACA, the best protection for dreamers would be for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to agree to allow the Bipartisan Dream Act — co-sponsored by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Durbin — to be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act. Our nation’s first line of defense is our people. Dreamers are part of that line of defense.

My immigrant parents came to the United States because they believed they could give their children a better life in this country. This is the American Dream. I had the privilege of living that dream. It is our responsibility to let dreamers live the American Dream as well. That is the value that make our country free, secure and strong for all our people. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

History’s warnings about N. Korea DAVID IGNATIUS is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

When today’s historians look at the confrontation between the United States and North Korea, they’re likely to hear echoes of ultimatums, bluffs and botched messages that accompanied conflicts of the past, often with catastrophic consequences.

“The one thing that’s certain when you choose war as a policy is that you don’t know how it will end,” says Mark Stoler, a diplomatic and military historian at the University of Vermont. This fog of uncertainty should be a caution for policymakers now in dealing with North Korea.

History teaches that wars often result from bellicose rhetoric and bad information. Sometimes leaders fail to act strongly enough to deter aggression, as at Munich in 1938. But more often, as in August 1914, conflict results from a cascade of errors that produces an outcome that no one would have wanted.

World War I is probably the clearest example of how miscalculation can produce a global disaster. As Stoler recounted to me in an interview, each player was caught in “the cult of the offensive,” believing that his nation’s aims could be fulfilled in a short war, at relatively low cost.

It was a tragic sequence: After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria asked for Germany’s support against Serbia; Kaiser Wilhelm foolishly

offered a “blank check.” Russia, Serbia’s ally, began mobilizing forces; Germany countered with its own mobilization, as did France, and then Britain.

In the nuclear age, the costs of miscalculation are much greater, but good sense (and luck) have prevailed, so far. Evan Thomas explains in “Ike’s Bluff” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared close to the brink in the Korean War in 1953. “If the Chinese and North Koreans failed to come to terms, American diplomats were to broadly hint, the United States would expand the war with nuclear weapons,” he writes. Whether Eisenhower would have dropped the bomb is anyone’s guess; amazingly, it’s not clear his ominous messages were even passed on or understood.

Eisenhower played chicken again in 1958, when Soviet

Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave him an ultimatum that the United States must remove its troops from Berlin. Ike promised his aides that he was “all in” against this threat. But soon after, he invited the Soviet leader to visit the United States, and after a weekend with the president’s grandchildren at his farm, Khrushchev backed off.

The Cuban missile crisis is the ultimate moment of nuclear brinkmanship. But this story is murkier than it’s sometimes described, says Philip Zelikow, coauthor of “Essence of Decision,” the classic study of the event.

President John F. Kennedy made an ultimatum to Khrushchev on Oct. 27, 1962, that averted war.

But that was only after Khrushchev ignored a Sept. 13 warning against putting nuclear weapons in Cuba. Would Kennedy really have gone to war if Khrushchev hadn’t backed down?

He told a Navy commander later that he would have started combat operations on Oct. 30.

Modern history shows how wars are interwoven with promises and ultimatums, some honored and others ignored, Zelikow explains. Germany offered the 1916 “Sussex Pledge” that its submarines wouldn’t attack American ships and then did so anyway, drawing the

United States into war. America advised Iraq in 1991 that unless its troops left Kuwait, the United States would attack. The Iraqis didn’t, and America did.

How should we apply history to the current standoff with North Korea? First, messaging is critically important. With so much at stake, it’s crazy for President Trump to be sending sensitive signals about war and peace in 140-character public tweets. Second, evidence suggests that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a genuinely dangerous risk-taker. U.S. officials calculate that he has conducted more than 80 missile or bomb tests since becoming ruler in 2011, compared with just 20 under his father.

Would the impulsive Kim ever be ready for negotiations with Trump? So far, he has spurned peace overtures from the United States, answering American calls for restraint with three more tests. North Korea claims it’s acting defensively, provoked by joint U.S. military exercises with South Korea last month.

Is Kim’s position a charade?

Let’s find out. No new U.S.-South Korean exercises are scheduled until next March. That offers a sixmonth window to push Kim to explore options. As history shows, the consequences of making a mistake in war are calamitous. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

Steve Jobs gave us our president DAVID VON DREHLE is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post.

As Congress returns from summer recess to a plate heaped with work — President Trump has added a gooey serving of immigration reform on top of the debt ceiling, the budget, hurricane relief and tax reform — another of America’s key institutions is marking 10 years that shook the world.

These simultaneous events have caused the strangest picture to form in my mind. I see Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, as the tonsured abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the middle of the 15th century. The abbot’s job is to oversee production of handwritten Bibles by monks in the abbey scriptorium. He and his predecessors have tended this vitally important labor for hundreds of years.

But now a goldsmith named Gutenberg, in a German town called Mainz, has devised a machine that can produce identical Bibles — or any other document, for that matter — quickly and cheaply using movable metal letters and oilbased ink. And the abbot is awakening to the realization that nothing will ever be same.

When Apple unveiled its first smartphone in 2007, the company sparked a communications revolution likely to be as transformative as Gutenberg’s.

It’s the nature of such seismic change to shake the institutions of culture and society to the ground.

The explosive essence of the printing press was its ability to

transmit information widely across space and time. Laypeople could own and read their own Bibles, and the result was the Reformation. Scientists could record their observations to share with other scientists, and inventors their innovations with other inventors, and the results were the Scientific and Industrial revolutions. Philosophers could spread their ideas to activists, and activists to more activists, and one result was that durable document that begins: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . . ” If all of those changes could flow from oily ink on slugs of alloy, what earthquakes will follow from a technology that

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

gives to nearly every human being the tools of worldwide mass communication? I find the question frankly mind-boggling.

But one thing is clear after the election of 2016 — the first U.S. election truly dominated by mobile communication and the social networking it sparks: The future is cloudy for the likes of McConnell. The power of traditional party leaders flows from their ability to make, and control, connections that are otherwise extremely difficult.

We saw last year that the power of the smartphone is vaporizing these functions. Trump captured the Republican ballot line even though he had no appreciable connection to the Republican Party. Nothing like it had ever happened to a U.S. political party.

Trump had his own access to television after decades as a public performer and provocateur. More important, though, was the way he leveraged his celebrity via smartphone. His millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook became a rapidly growing Party of Trump. His supporters felt a personal and authentic connection that left no room for mediation by GOP elites.

Democratic bosses narrowly avoided a similar loss of control.

Only their insider system of superdelegates cushioned them

from the threat of a takeover by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In the cloisters of the Senate, Abbot McConnell’s scribes are his 51 fellow Republican senators, who, to one degree or another, must be asking themselves what this revolution means for them. If they fall into line behind their party leader on such difficult issues as debt, taxes and immigration, can he shield them from the critics who mobilize at the touch of a screen? Of course not — McConnell can’t even shield himself from the president’s tweets.

Perhaps Democrats could help him through his legislative minefield? That path is no easier.

McConnell’s knack has always been discipline, not compromise.

Moreover, it’s highly uncertain how much compromise is possible in this new age of direct connectivity. Any Democrat who votes for legislation that frees McConnell from a jam and gives the president an occasion to brag is likely to face a storm of Internet opposition.

In short, Pennsylvania Avenue is not the place to read the future of politics. Look instead toward Cupertino, Calif., where on Tuesday a new iPhone will remind us that change is the new normal. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2017

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SCIENCE BY

S ARAH K APLAN

I

n five days, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will nose-dive into Saturn and burn up in the planet’s atmosphere. It’s the final, suicidal step of a months-long dance through Saturn’s rings that has given scientists an unprecedented view of the sixth planet from the sun. It’s also the end of a mission that has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and opened our eyes to two worlds that could be home to alien life — the moons Titan and Enceladus.

It really is the end of an era. And Cassini fans are devastated.

To understand why, you have to understand Cassini — a plucky, school-bus-size spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004.

Cassini’s final act

First, a brief bio: Cassini launched on its billion-mile journey from Earth to Saturn on Oct. 15, 1997. It was named for the astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who discovered four of the planet’s moons and a gap in its rings. Cassini also carried a single passenger: the Huygens lander, built by the European Space Agency and named for the Dutch scientist who first spotted the moon Titan.

Cassini and Huygens arrived in Saturn’s orbit seven years after launch, in July 2004.

Several months later, Huygens split off and touched down on the shore one of Titan’s lakes of liquid methane. It was humankind’s first landing on a moon other than our own, and the first landing of any kind in the outer solar system. Cassini, meanwhile, was the first probe to orbit Saturn. (Pioneer and Voyager had simply flown by, in 1979 and 1980, respectively.)

Cassini has been extraordinarily successful — indisputably one of the most successful planetary missions ever. Its flight was smooth, its instruments worked, its software rarely acted up. In addition to Huygens’s perfectly stuck landing, Cassini probed the formation and behavior of Saturn’s ring system, discovered a 5,000-mile-wide hurricane at Saturn’s south pole and got the first close-up view of the planet’s hexagonal North Pole storm.

Cassini revealed that Saturn’s rings have a lot of three-dimensional texture and contain bumps as big as the Rocky Mountains, solved the mystery of the moon Iapetus’s two-tone blackand-white cookie coloration and photographed its odd equatorial bulge. Roughly 4,000 papers have been written using the 635 gigabytes of data collected by Cassini in nearly 300 orbits of Saturn.

Best of all were the revelations about Saturn’s ocean moons. In the haze around Titan, Cassini discovered molecules that could be precursors to — or even indicators of — biological activity on that methane-rich planet. Zooming past the icy moon Enceladus, it found evidence of an underground ocean of water and spotted geysers spewing out ingredients for life.

The craft couldn’t be left to float around in space, on the off chance that it might be knocked out of orbit and crash into one of the potentially habitable moons. If that happened, Cassini could potentially contaminate those worlds with Earthling microbes.

The mission team considered moving Cassini to a more distant orbit or sending it off to another planet. But then it came up with a proposal that would launch Cassini into one last flyby past Titan and use the moon’s pull to sling the craft into 22 close-in orbits of Saturn that would explore the gaps between the planet’s rings, then end by crashing into Saturn itself.

It was the obvious choice, Spilker said. She compared these ring-grazing orbits to a “brand new mission.” During the orbits, Cassini has mapped Saturn’s gravity and magnetic fields to reveal the internal structure of the planet. It got close-up views of the rings and even sampled some of the icy particles that constitute them.

It’s expected to finally figure out the length of a Saturn day — a measurement that has eluded scientists for decades.

NASA/REUTERS

Spacecraft’s successful mission will end with a crash into Saturn The spacecraft is not equipped with lifedetecting instruments — no one could have imagined it might make such discoveries when it launched 20 years ago. But these moons are now considered two of the best places in the solar system to look for alien organisms, and they are the focus of several proposals for new NASA missions.

“There’s this tremendous legacy,” said project scientist Linda Spilker, who has worked on the mission since 1988. “Cassini has certainly rewritten the textbooks.”

Cassini is a victim of its own success. It’s precisely because of Cassini’s revelations about Titan and Enceladus that the spacecraft has been sentenced to die. Back in 2009, when it became apparent the spacecraft was running out of fuel, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory got together to assess their options.

The Cassini spacecraft is seen in August. Its mission has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and found that the moons Titan and Enceladus could be home to alien life.

The “Grand Finale” began in April, and ends with a fiery plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in the early hours of Sept. 15.

On Friday, scientists who have worked on the mission during the past 30 years will converge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Just after midnight, the spacecraft will point its instruments in the direction of Saturn's atmosphere and start rapidly transmitting realtime data about what it sees. It will hit the atmosphere three hours later. A minute after that, it will start tumbling through the increasingly dense clouds of gas and will lose the ability to send a signal back to Earth. Because of the time delay in communication between Saturn and Earth, that final message won’t arrive at JPL until 83 minutes later, just before 5 a.m.

At that point, Cassini will already have burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere, a tiny, bright meteorite streaking across an alien sky.

The end of Cassini is also the end of humankind’s presence at Saturn — for now.

NASA has no additional missions planned for the ringed planet, though several proposals are in the works. But even if a mission were to get approval tomorrow, it would probably be more than a decade before we see Saturn, its rings or its moons again. Building a spacecraft simply takes a long time, as does traversing the 750 million miles from Earth to the outer solar system.

For the scientists who have devoted their lives to this mission, it’s a tough loss.

“Cassini is our eyes and ears allowing us to be there, allowing us to reach out and touch the world and the rings,” Spilker said. “As long as Cassini is there, we’re there at Saturn, and when Cassini is gone, that close personal connection to the Saturn system will be gone too.” n ©The Washington Post

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