The Washington Post National Weekly - September 18, 2016

Politics Trump’s big-money backer 4

Nation Car dealers face a tough sell 8

Museums MLK items are mostly unseen 16

5 Myths Smartphones 20

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

A seventh-grader’s sext was meant to impress a boy.

He shared it. It nearly destroyed her.

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THE FIX

Trump’s greatest trick yet BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

D

onald Trump is, at heart, a showman.

He rose to national fame thanks to star turns on reality TV in which he played the tough-talking boss to a group of aspirants hoping to become as successful as he has been in business. His great gift is the ability to draw attention — and then use that attention for his own, usually commercial, purposes.

Trump may have outdone himself Friday morning. He and his campaign touted a “major” announcement at his newly opened hotel in Washington, D.C., at 10 a.m. Friday. The word was that Trump would walk away from his past skepticism about President Obama’s citizenship while also laying the blame for the birther movement at the feet of Hillary Clinton. (That, of course, isn’t true — according to numerous fact-checkers — but no matter.

Trump planned to say it anyway.)

And say it he did. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said. “President Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

Trump’s assertions about Clinton’s role in the birther movement are wrong. His simple statement that Obama was born in the United States directly contradicts myriad statements he has made questioning the president’s birthplace over the past five years.

But neither of those things were the most amazing part of that Trump event. The most amazing thing was that it took the Republican nominee 29 minutes to deliver those three sentences. The event was slated to start at 10 a.m.

Eastern time. It wasn’t until 11 a.m. that it actually began — with Trump touting his new hotel and proclaiming that it is likely to be one of the best in the world. He then ceded the stage to a

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ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

parade of decorated military veterans who testified to his toughness, his judgment and his temperament.

Cable networks seemed to not know what to do. All three of them — MSNBC, Fox News and CNN — stayed with the generals’ testimonials for the better part of 20 minutes. That’s a remarkable amount of free cable time to dedicate to a series of surrogates testifying to how great one of the two party nominees is.

The networks eventually cut away from the generals, but then Trump was back at the mic — roughly 90 minutes after his event was originally slated to start. Meaning that he drew an hour and a half of live coverage for:

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 49

1. An empty podium.

2. A series of military endorsements.

3. Three sentences from Trump himself — one that is totally false and two others that represent a total reversal from a position he held as recently as, well, Thursday night.

It was a low moment for politics and political coverage. A nothing-burger filled with falsehoods covered as though it was the Super Bowl. But for Trump, it might have been his crowning achievement: All eyes on him with the chance to direct the play in whatever way he saw fit. The ringmaster — calling the shots in all three rings of the circus. It was peak Trump. n

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Sexting has gained a presence in every kind of school, but the story hardly ends when punishment is handed out.

Illustration by KATE MILLER for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

The rise of a GOP mega-donor BY

M ATEA G OLD

M

itt Romney had just lost the 2012 presidential election, and a group of wealthy donors that had assembled in New York’s University Club was trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Suddenly, a young woman stood up before the largely male crowd and delivered an unsparing critique of the Republican’s technology and canvassing operations.

Thomas Saunders III, chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees, was impressed.

“Who is that?” he asked the man next him.

Soon, there would be few in conservative policy and political circles who did not know the name Rebekah Mercer.

Galvanized in part by the Republicans’ 2012 White House loss, the middle daughter of billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer has rattled the status quo by directing her family’s resources into an array of investments on the right. In the past six years, the Mercers have poured tens of millions into Republican super PACs, Washington think tanks, state policy shops, a film-production company, a data analytics operation and one of the country’s most provocative online conservative news outlets.

This year, Rebekah Mercer has emerged as a heavyweight presidential player, leading a super PAC financed by her father that was the biggest outside benefactor of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) during the Republican primaries.

After Donald Trump clinched the nomination, the Mercers rallied to his side. Their imprint is evident on the real estate developer’s campaign, which is led by three close associates who ran Mercer-funded enterprises: former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon, pollster Kellyanne Conway and Citizens United President David Bossie.

Meanwhile, Rebekah Mercer has taken up the day-to-day management of her family’s super PAC, which is producing a string of

MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER

Rebekah Mercer has quietly become a heavyweight political player searing ads attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Mercer exemplifies a new breed of activist donors that has risen since the Supreme Court kicked off a flood of big money into elections in 2010. As one of the most influential figures in Trump’s orbit, she threatens to undercut the candidate’s insistence that he is free from the influence of elite contributors. And her access shows how donors can easily move between a campaign and a super PAC that is supposed to operate independently.

In response to a question about Mercer’s influence on the campaign, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, “The only special interest Mr. Trump is beholden to is the American people.”

The 42-year-old former Wall

Street trader is not your typical mega-donor, and not just because of the vast wealth of her father, who earned an estimated $150 million last year, according to Forbes.

Unlike other financiers Mercer home-schools her four children and runs an online gourmet cookie company with her sisters.

And unlike many veteran GOP financiers, Mercer feels more aligned with the anti-establishment movement that has buffeted the Republican Party. Although she and her family live in a sprawling triplex in a Trump-branded residential building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she maintains a keen sense of what will resonate with the conservative

Rebekah Mercer, shown at the Media Research Center’s 2015 gala in Washington, D.C., may be a low-profile conservative benefactor to federal GOP candidates and super PACs, but she is one of the most influential figures in Donald Trump’s circle and aims to put him in the White House.

base, friends and colleagues said.

“You would never think that this would make sense coming from the daughter of a billionaire, but she has an incredible understanding of the grass roots,” said L. Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, who is close to the family. “She is grounded in that, and she will ground you in that by constantly bringing you back and pulling you away if you are in any way drawn to the Beltway.”

Mercer is now applying those instincts and her family’s vast fortune to the biggest insurgent play yet: propelling Trump into the White House.

People close to her say that she admires how Trump challenges orthodoxies, even though she has flinched at some of his more un-

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POLITICS varnished comments. An even bigger driver is her deep-seated opposition to Clinton, who she believes would further expand the size and influence of the federal government.

“One is faced with a binary choice right now, and you know the country would be taken in one very clear direction with Hillary Clinton, and that’s a direction she would find extremely objectionable,” said Leonard Leo, a friend who serves as executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Intensely private, Mercer declined repeated requests for an interview.

‘Not a Marie Antoinette’ Mercer was shaped by her upper-middle-class upbringing in the New York suburb of Yorktown Heights, where her father then worked at IBM, pulling down a comfortable salary but not enough to cover college tuition for three daughters, friends said.

“Rebekah is not a Marie Antoinette,” said Amity Shlaes, an author who chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, which gets Mercer funding. “Her father was a research scientist at IBM. Her family did well late. She understands what it means to make economic decisions.”

Mercer, known as “Bekah” to close friends and family, is one of three sisters. The eldest, Jennifer, who goes by Jenji, has a law degree from Georgetown. The youngest, Heather Sue, made headlines in the early 1990s when she successfully sued Duke University for sex discrimination after she was cut from the football team.

Rebekah followed her older sister to Stanford University, where she studied biology and math and, in 1999, earned a master’s degree in management science and engineering. There, she met her future husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, a native of France, who now works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley.

Mercer did a short stint on Wall Street as a trader until her children were born. In 2006, when Heather Sue discovered that their favorite bakery, Ruby et Violette, was up for sale, the Mercer sisters bought it.

Still, her interests lay elsewhere. Mercer shares her father’s free-market philosophy and views a bloated federal government as a

“Politics is still a bit of a man’s world, and when I saw her walk into this meeting with a baby, I was like, ‘This is my kind of woman.’ ” Darcy Olsen, chief executive of the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank

threat to enterprise, associates said. In 2010, around the time Robert Mercer became co-chief executive of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, Rebekah Mercer began deepening her involvement in conservative circles.

Darcy Olsen, chief executive of the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank, recalled meeting her at a breakfast for prospective donors in New York.

“This woman walks in, and she is tall and she has this gorgeous mane of brunette hair and this baby sling and a tiny, beautiful baby,” Olsen recalled. “Politics is still a bit of a man’s world, and when I saw her walk into this meeting with a baby, I was like, ‘This is my kind of woman.’ We got to talking policy, and I realized that she was smart and as committed to the same set of principles as I am.”

‘She thinks out of the box’ Since 2010, Robert Mercer has climbed the ranks of the country’s biggest political donors, giving at least $36.5 million to federal GOP candidates and super PACs. Rebekah has contributed an additional $814,500, campaign finance records show.

At the same time, the Mercers have steadily upped their nonprofit investments. Run by Rebekah, the family foundation went from doling out $1.7 million in 2009 to $18.3 million in 2014, according to tax records.

In all, the foundation gave nearly $35 million to conservative think tanks and policy groups in those five years, according to records compiled by The Washington Post and GuideStar USA.

The Mercers’ largesse has catapulted Rebekah onto the boards of conservative organizations across the country, including the venerable Heritage Foundation, which she joined as a trustee in 2014.

“She thinks out of the box,” said Saunders, the Heritage board’s chairman, who first noticed Mercer’s “fiery” delivery at the Romney post-mortem in 2012. “She will immediately question what we are doing. It is constituents who are changing things in this election, and she’s on things like that, saying, ‘What is the best way to reach the American people?’ ” One of the efforts Mercer is most proud of, according to friends, is a watchdog group called Reclaim New York that she started in 2013 with Bannon, the longtime executive chairman of Breitbart News, which counts Robert Mercer among its investors. Reclaim New York is using the state’s freedom-of-information law to try to disclose every local public expenditure and is working to train citizens to function as watchdogs in their own communities.

From Cruz to Trump After the 2012 elections, Robert Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities, associates said. Rebekah Mercer has urged the organizations that her family funds to hire the company, according to people familiar with her advocacy.

Cambridge was a major vendor to Cruz’s presidential campaign, which paid it $5.8 million before he dropped out in May, campaign

The Mercer family’s political influence has been uneven.

Rebekah Mercer’s father, Robert, funded the opponent of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), above, in the GOP primary. McCain won handily.

$36.5M

Contributions Robert Mercer has made to federal GOP candidates and super PACs since 2010

$814,500

Additional contributions from Rebekah Mercer

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finance records show. Trump, who has expressed skepticism about the value of data analytics, brought Cambridge aboard in July, paying it $100,000.

Cambridge shares a Beverly Hills, Calif., address with other Mercer investments. The company’s Wilshire Avenue office suite is also the home of Breitbart News and a movie production company called Glittering Steel, which helped finance the films “Torchbearer,” starring “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, and “Clinton Cash,” a documentary based on the book by Peter Schweizer.

In the GOP primaries, Robert Mercer poured $13.5 million into the family super PAC — then called Keep the Promise 1 — in support of Cruz.

In May, shortly after the senator from Texas dropped out of the race, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, invited Mercer and Conway to lunch at Trump Tower.

By late June, the Mercer super PAC had been relaunched as an anti-Clinton vehicle called Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC. Last month, Mercer was among those who privately urged Trump to retool his campaign leadership. At a fundraiser in the Hamptons, she and Trump discussed the merits of hiring Bannon. Within days, the candidate had tapped Bannon as chief executive, pushing aside thencampaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump also named Conway campaign manager. A few weeks later, Bossie, who has been close to the billionaire for years, was hired as deputy campaign manager.

In a statement, Trump called Mercer “a spectacular woman and leader.”

“Her greatest desire is to make America great again,” the statement read. “Our country is lucky to have her support.”

Friends were not surprised by the turn of events. Rebekah Mercer is not known for giving up, they said.

“It would have done no good in June to sulk around and say, ‘I lost.’

These are people who are doers, they are not talkers,” Saunders said. He added that he believes Mercer and her associates have had an influence on Trump, who has been a relatively more disciplined candidate in the past month. “What better job can you do, if you can turn him into a winner?” n

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POLITICS

Nervous GOP pivots to N.C. S EAN S ULLIVAN Asheville, N.C. BY

A

fter years of successfully holding off Democratic gains in this rapidly changing state, Republicans are scrambling to pour new resources into North Carolina in the face of unexpectedly close contests in the presidential and Senate races.

Republicans here are increasingly nervous about the prospects in November for both presidential nominee Donald Trump, who held a rally in Asheville this past week, and Sen. Richard Burr, who is in a tight race with a relatively unknown Democratic opponent. The state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, also is in danger of losing his reelection bid.

It’s a dramatic change in fortune for a party that had reasserted control of North Carolina after President Obama narrowly won the state in 2008. Republicans enacted a wave of conservative policies, including imposing new voting restrictions and overruling protections for gay and transgender people. The rightward shift was particularly notable in a state that is gaining Hispanics and young white professionals at a rapid pace, following in the wake of its neighbor to the north, Virginia.

But North Carolina Republicans have been badly outgunned this year. Hillary Clinton and her allies have outspent Trump and groups supporting him 7 to 1 on television ads so far, and Democrats last week opened their 31st North Carolina campaign office.

The coordinated Republican campaign to help Trump, by comparison, had no offices in North Carolina at all at the start of last week, though they planned to open three.

“Donald Trump has a different way of approaching the national campaign,” said Art Pope, an influential North Carolina Republican donor who backs neither Trump nor Clinton. “I think he’s mistaken. I do think you need a ground game. You need more than social media and rallies.”

CHUCK BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republicans pour money, staff into state amid worries of losing races Republicans’ intensifying focus on North Carolina comes as their chances in several other battleground states have improved in recent weeks, particularly at the Senate level. Polls show GOP senators in Florida and Ohio running well ahead of Trump, boosting Republicans’ hopes of avoiding a scenario in which a Trump loss washes away down-ballot candidates.

More than a quarter of the 392 field staffers the Republican National Committee recently added nationwide have been assigned to North Carolina to help Trump and other Republicans there, according to Kara Carter, the RNC’s North Carolina communications director.

Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative nonprofit group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, recently decided to shift its resources in the state to help Burr and go after his Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross. The group had previously been focused on helping McCrory and on unseating GOP Rep. Renee

L. Ellmers, who lost her primary.

Adding to the Republicans’ challenge: Clinton and her allies have blanketed the airwaves, buying or reserving about $21 million worth of television ads in the state since late July, according to Republicans and Democrats tracking ad spending. Trump and his supporting groups have spent or reserved only about $3 million during the same period.

“I haven’t seen many Trump ads. I’ve seen a lot of Hillary ads,” Mary Simpson, 53, of Kinston, N.C., said after attending a Trump rally in Greenville this month.

In the Senate race, polls show Burr holding a small lead over Ross. But many Republicans here complain that Burr is not campaigning aggressively enough and should be much more comfortably ahead of Ross, a little-known civilliberties advocate who emerged only after Democrats were unable to recruit others to run.

In the governor’s race, surveys show McCrory trailing his Democratic challenger, Attorney Gener-

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), left, and Attorney General Roy Cooper (D), right, speak to the North Carolina Bar Association during a candidate forum in Charlotte on June 24.

The two men are vying to be governor in what could be the most expensive and most watched gubernatorial election this year.

al Roy Cooper. Many Democrats believe turnout could be boosted

by McCrory’s decision to sign a law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding with the gender on their birth certificate, which has prompted a court challenge and boycotts.

The RNC says it will have 172 staffers on the ground this month in North Carolina to help Trump and fellow Republican candidates — a big uptick from this point in 2012.

Clinton officials declined to say how many staffers the campaign has in North Carolina.

Republican officials sought to play down the disparity in the number of brick-and-mortar offices, maintaining that they are focusing on face-to-face contacts with voters at their homes.

“Office numbers are a false metric and completely miss the point that, as we saw in the primary, Mr. Trump is not a typical politician,” Jason Simmons, Trump’s campaign director in the state, said in a statement. “We will have all the

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NATION offices, staff and resources we need to win.”

Democrats see it differently.

“The offices aren’t just about phone banking,” said Thomas Mills, a Democratic blogger who is running for Congress in the 8th District. “If you watch what happens in there, they are the center point for your whole ground operation. What they are doing right now is registering voters on a massive scale in North Carolina.”

The decision by Americans for Prosperity to direct resources to the Senate race reflects the national importance of the contest and nervousness among GOP leaders about Burr’s campaign. The Kochbacked group is known for using TV ads, mailers and field staff to attempt to influence the outcome of targeted races.

“We do not to take anything for granted, so we are now making sure voters understand the differences between Senator Burr and his opponent,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity.

Republicans believe that a key to victory will be to define Ross as too extreme for the state because of her work with the American Civil Liberties Union. They have seized on her past concerns that putting a sex-offender registry online might also expose victims who are supposed to be protected, since many such crimes involve family members.

If Trump continues to let Clinton and her allies lap him in ad spending, his best chance for capturing voters’ attention might be in media coverage of events like his Monday arena speech in Asheville. The atmosphere was tense, with protesters seeking to disrupt the proceedings at regular intervals. In his remarks, Trump encouraged voters to cast their ballot early, beginning on Oct. 20, or on Election Day. “It’s our last chance to take it back,” Trump said. “In my opinion, it’s our last chance — I really believe that. It’s our last chance to take it back, to fix our rigged system.”

Republicans say he must convince voters that he will be a steady, trusted leader to counter the doubts Democrats are trying to sow about his judgment.

“He has to demonstrate that and not just say it,” said longtime North Carolina Republican strategist Carter Wrenn. n

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Poll: Nearly half in U.S. say voter fraud occurs often

BY E MILY G USKIN AND S COTT C LEMENT

N

early half of Americans say that voter fraud occurs at least somewhat often according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a viewpoint at odds with studies showing it rarely occurs in U.S. elections.

The poll also finds 63 percent of voters are confident that votes in this year’s presidential election will be counted accurately, down from about 7 in 10 in 2004.

Republicans and Donald Trump supporters express the greatest concern about voter fraud and election accuracy — worries that the GOP nominee has stoked on the campaign trail. The dynamic marks a reversal from 2004, when Democrats were more doubtful about the legitimacy of the vote.

The Post-ABC poll finds 46 percent of registered voters say voter fraud — described as multiple votes being cast by a single person, or an ineligible person casting a ballot — occurs very or somewhat often, while 50 percent say it occurs occasionally or rarely.

Over two-thirds of Trump voters say voter fraud occurs often, compared with less than one-third of Clinton supporters. Whatever the partisan differences, at least onefifth of every major demographic and political group says voter fraud occurs somewhat or very often.

The prevalence of voter fraud appears to be widely overestimated. A 2012 investigation by the News21 investigative reporting project published in The Washington Post found only 2,068 cases of alleged voter fraud had been reported since 2000, including only 10 cases of voter impersonation over the entire period. A separate study by Loyola Law School professor Justen Levitt found 241 potentially fraudulent ballots over a 14-year period out of 1 billion ballots cast.

The Post-ABC poll also finds a sizable gap in skepticism of vote

Skepticism from different parties in different elections Q: How confident are you that the votes for president across the country will be accurately counted this year?

SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST-ABC NEWS SEPT. 5-8 POLL OF 1,002 U.S. ADULTS. MARGIN OF SAMPLING ERROR +/-3.5 POINTS. THE WASHINGTON POST

counting accuracy between Clinton and Trump supporters. Just under half of Trump supporters (49 percent) say they are “not too” or “not at all” confident” votes will be counted accurately, while just 18 percent of Clinton supporters are similarly skeptical.

That's a reverse in skepticism from 2004 when supporters of Democrat John F. Kerry were far more likely to think votes would not be counted properly than backers of Republican George W. Bush — then, 44 percent of Kerry supporters and just 14 percent of Bush supporters were not confident that votes would be accurately counted.

Democrats’ skepticism of votes being counted accurately is probably due to the contested outcome of the 2000 presidential election, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a manual vote recount in Florida, resulting in George W. Bush winning the state and the presidency. Trump supporters’ heightened concerned about the vote count is probably fueled by the candidate’s own state-

ments. Last month, Trump warned that the election might be “rigged” against him, saying, “We may have people vote 10 times.”

What may matter most heading into the fall is how seriously people perceive the voting process as it occurs and whether candidates raise questions about its legitimacy that amplify concerns that exist today. Skepticism can linger even if all goes smoothly, as in 2004 when Bush won by a significant margin and Kerry conceded quickly. A Post-ABC poll one month after the election found 49 percent of Kerry’s supporters said they were not confident the vote was counted accurately, hardly changed from the final days before Election Day. The Post-ABC poll was conducted Sept. 5-8 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for overall results; the error margin is four points among the sample of 842 registered voters. n

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NATION

Car dealers fear the end of the road BY

J ACOB B OGAGE

T

he first Tesla store opened in Columbus, Ohio, 72 miles away. Then one popped up in Cincinnati.

Soon, another was in Cleveland.

Tesla’s Ohio invasion was swift and — to longtime auto dealers such as Blake Arbogast — a growing threat, creeping ever closer.

In Ohio, dealers sued and lobbied their legislators. One called Tesla’s spread into his territory “Armageddon.” All to no avail.

Tesla, the electric-car manufacturer, and its boutique “galleries” are here to stay. The question now: Are traditional dealers?

Tesla, the California company founded by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, plans to not only make electric cars as cool and fast as gas-guzzling sports cars but also to upend the way cars are sold. For generations, automobile manufacturers from Ford to Toyota to General Motors have been banned by state law from selling directly to consumers. Instead, their vehicles are sold by thirdparty dealers, many of which have deep ties to their community and political leverage.

But Tesla has been steadfastly eroding the traditional model, persuading an increasing number of states to allow it to sell vehicles directly to customers through its boutique stores and even over the Internet. In April, through little more than online viewing galleries, customers committed to buying 400,000 cars they had not seen in person.

Its stores are chic and small. A single model sits in the middle.

And unlike Arbogast’s dealership in Troy, Ohio, there’s no lot outside with cars ready for sale.

Now, legacy auto manufacturers, including Arbogast’s supplier, General Motors, are moving toward a future of sales directly from carmaker to driver, industry analysts say. That has triggered a standoff involving dealers, manufacturers and Tesla over the future of car sales, the role of the Internet and whether it is legal to sell a car — often the secondlargest purchase in the lifetime of

ANDREW SPEAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Dealerships are fighting back as more states allow Tesla to sell vehicles directly to consumers an average American — online.

If other carmakers followed Tesla, “essentially, it would put us out of business,” Arbogast said.

The battles have been breaking out in state capitals across the country over laws that prohibit manufacturers from selling directly to consumers. Arguments have occurred in statehouses in Texas, Ohio, Washington, New Jersey and more than 20 other states, with mixed results. Legislatures want to open up markets for electric vehicles but are wary of undercutting dealers, which are local economic and political engines.

A Missouri judge, for instance, ruled this month in favor of the state’s auto dealers, saying Tesla could continue operating showrooms but could no longer sell cars directly to consumers. The company said it plans to appeal.

Tesla has had notable success, gaining the right to sell in about 20 states.

“The reason they’re [Tesla] so successful is because everybody is fed up with the traditional dealership model,” said James Albertine, senior auto analyst at Consumer Edge Research. “If BMW or Audi or Lexus isn’t working on that, then they’re at a loss.”

But it is not yet clear that the disruption of the auto industry will lead to the shuttering of dealerships the way digital sales of music and books led to the closure of so many record stores and bookstores.

Tesla has struggled recently to meet earnings projections, and it posted a $293 million loss last quarter. It has also missed past production deadlines for vehicle orders, which has made investors wary of the company’s rollout of the Model 3, a $35,000 electric vehicle set to come out in 2017.

Auto dealers are widely considered one of the most politically connected groups in the United States. The National Automobile

Blake Arbogast is general manager at Dave Arbogast Buick GMC, the dealership his father started in the 1990s in Troy, Ohio. If other carmakers follow Tesla’s sales model, “essentially, it would put us out of business,” Arbogast said.

Dealers Association has spent more than $4 million on lobbying since 2015 and year after year is the largest spender in the entire auto industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group that tracks political donations. And in the fight for their survival, dealers are not giving up.

Dealers can also bank on their deep ties to their communities, where they have built up name recognition and goodwill, for decades in some cases.

“A franchised auto dealer, they’re involved with all the banks that are around,” said Zach Doran, president of the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association. “They’ve obviously got a significant customer base they’ve built over time. They have a tremendous amount of goodwill they’ve built up with charitable organizations.”

Arbogast sells GMCs and Buicks at a dealership his father started in the 1990s. His cousins own a dealership down the road.

Their children are in the business now, too.

He said he is relying on the Troy community and Ohio’s government to see the long-term effects of potentially losing the business.

Arbogast employs 220 people in a city of 25,000. He also contributes to local churches and sponsors youth sports teams and schools.

But he is worried about whether his business will be around for another generation of car buyers.

If other manufacturers started selling direct — dealers’ main fear — it could put his business in jeopardy. Arbogast said: “You can only put so much trust in General Motors right now.”

Car companies want to see how Tesla fares distributing the more affordably priced Model 3 before starting new distribution channels.

“The dealer groups in this country, they’re strong,” said Jessica Caldwell, director of industry analysis at Edmunds. “They have a lot of laws in place and have a lot of power. And though Elon Musk is ambitious, it might cause too much trouble for him than it’s worth.” n

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NATION

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Facing a future as climate refugees N

1 MILE

Barrow Pop. 4,296 (Estimate)

Elson Lagoon Barrow

Arctic Ocean

Arctic Circle

Anchorage Ikroavik Lake

Pacific Ocean

Permafrost extent ABSENT

CONTINUOUS

10

50

90%

Barrow

Detail above

100 MILES

Chukchi Sea

Beaufort Sea

Wainwright Pop. 482 Atqasuk 219 Point Lay 246

ille Rive r Colv

Point Hope 628 Kivalina 532

N O R T H

Prudhoe Bay 2,570

Nuiqsut 371

S L O P E

A L A S K A

Sagavanirktok R.

H

ere in the northernmost municipality of the United States, 320 miles above the Arctic Circle, people are facing the idea that they may soon be among the world’s first climate-change refugees.

Warming air, melting permafrost and rising sea levels are threatening their coastline, and researchers predict that by midcentury, the homes, schools and land around Barrow and its eight surrounding villages will be underwater. This despite decades of erecting barriers, dredging soil and building berms to hold back the water.

“The coastline is backing up at rates of [30 to 65 feet] per year,” says Robert Anderson, a University of Boulder geomorphologist who has studied Alaska’s landscape evolution since 1985 and who first noticed in the early 2000s how alarming the erosion was becoming. “It’s baffling.”

When the sea ice melts, the coast becomes exposed to waves, wind and storms that slam into the shore, causing erosion. As ice moves farther from shore, waves can be as high as 20 feet when they reach land, Anderson says.

“The only thing we can do, as far as I’m concerned, is move our towns inland,” says Mike Aamodt, the former acting mayor of Barrow and its surrounding villages of the North Slope Borough, which stretches over 89,000 square miles, an area larger than Utah.

Pointing out a window in his second-floor office, Aamodt isn’t joking when he declares that the sole refuge from erosion and rising seas is the Brooks mountain range — more than 250 miles south.

Barrow, with a population of just over 4,000, is as remote as it gets. There are no roads leading in, and it’s accessible only by air and, during the summer months, by sea. There’s a post office, a police station, a fire station and a high school with an indoor track and a swimming pool for its 200

Chukchi Sea

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As air warms and seas rise, Alaskans foresee an exodus before long

Ambler 329 Arctic Circle Sources: Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, ACS 2014 5-Year Estimates and DigitalGlobe DENISE LU/THE WASHINGTON POST

students, plus a rec center, a 14bed hospital, a few churches and a handful of mom-and-pop restaurants. There’s no movie theater for 1,000 miles, no bars (or legal alcohol sales), no nightlife to speak of.

There are oil fields 200 miles to the east in Prudhoe Bay, but aside from a few corporate logos on buildings, there’s no sign of Big Oil in town. Most visitors come here to experience the stark beauty and power of nature — seas so icedover in winter that you can walk on them for miles, tundra brown and green in summer, and the stunning variety of animals, including whales, seals, caribou, polar bears and walruses.

Scientists flock here to study climate change. Low temperatures average nearly 20 degrees below zero in winter; summer highs are mostly in the 40s,

though it reached 79 once in 1993.

Locals — and hard data — say there’s less snow and ice now than ever before.

The area has long been home to Inupiaq natives who have lived off the abundant marine life. Modern Barrow was built on commercial whaling in the late 1800s, but there’s evidence of indigenous settlements going back as far as A.D. 800. The giant bowhead whales native to this part of the Arctic are actually prospering with warming seas here. But it’s a different question for the humans.

A stroll along one of Barrow’s handful of roads shows just how tenuous civilization’s perch is.

Bulldozed mounds of sand and soil more than 20 feet high are all around town. But these sea walls are frequently penetrated as swells and storms overtop the

walls, sometimes sending houses, built on stilts because of the impenetrability of permafrost, floating inland for miles.

With ocean to the north and half a dozen major lagoons and lakes to the south and east, Barrow’s residents face danger on all sides. Yet the biggest worry may be from the ground itself.

“Sometimes I have that eerie feeling — I’m, like, ‘Oh gosh, we’re on the permafrost,’ ” says Diana Martin, a Barrow-born Inupiaq who works in the town’s museum, over a bowl of caribou soup at her sister’s home about a mile from the coast. “What if we start floating away?”

Science backs up her concern: This year is on pace to be the hottest on record.

As air and sea temperatures have notched up, there has been a warming of the permafrost, the thousands-of-years-old subsurface layer of frozen soil, rocks and water. That layer can be as much as 2,000 feet deep in parts of this area.

Gary Clow, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist who has spent 30 years measuring temperature here, says permafrost has warmed about five degrees since 1990. That makes soil soften, rise and shift, which Aamodt says affects everything that has been built on it: utility systems, roads, airports.

It’s a change Aamodt fears: If fuel dumps or sewage lines leak into freshwater sources, major pollution ensues. With hundreds of miles of coast not many feet above sea level, the potential impact on health and lives is great.

There’s no magic rescue, Aamodt says. There’s not even a Coast Guard outpost here should watery disaster strike: The closest is 1,000 miles away. Locals, known for extreme self-reliance, feel as if they are being left on their own to face a future as refugees from climate change.

Can these towns be saved? Aamodt fidgets in his seat, looking down. “It’s fruitless to even think about it,” he replies. “Our turn is coming. That could happen this year. It’s inevitable.” n

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Use of N. Korean workers is shamed A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

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s the international community looks for new ways to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test, one area is emerging as the next front to apply pressure: North Korea’s practice of sending workers overseas to earn money for the regime.

The United States and South Korea had already started quietly trying to persuade host countries to stop allowing in North Korean guest workers, according to people who work in both governments. That drive is likely to accelerate now that North Korea has shown that new sanctions imposed this year have failed to dissuade it from pursuing nuclear weapons.

“There’s going to be a global shaming campaign,” said Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, citing conversations with officials.

In the five years since Kim Jong Un took over, North Korea has dramatically stepped up the number of people it sends abroad to earn hard currency.

At least 50,000 North Koreans — and by some estimates, double that — are working in more than two dozen foreign countries. The vast majority, about 80 percent, are in China and Russia, toiling in garment factories and on construction sites, or felling trees in Siberian forests.

There have also been numerous reports of North Korean doctors working in Cambodia and Libya, sculptors building statues in Senegal and Namibia, and laborers on building sites in Mongolia and in the soccer stadiums of Qatar.

The North Koreans are sent abroad usually for three years and are still tightly controlled outside the totalitarian country.

At one garment factory in northern China, visited by a Washington Post reporter last year, North Korean women lived in small dormitories inside the factory and were allowed to go out to the market only once a week

GREG BAKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Effort aims to reduce how many citizens earn money abroad, most of which goes to regime and only in small groups — so they could keep an eye on one another.

While they’re abroad, the North Koreans are allowed to keep one-third of their earnings — or $100 out of their monthly $300 salary for the seamstresses in China — and the rest goes to the regime. The Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights estimates that the Kim regime now earns $300 million a year this way.

This is a considerable amount for North Korea. Its exports to China, by far its largest trading partner, totaled $227 million last year, according to South Korea’s International Trade Association.

Given that North Korea’s main exports — mineral resources like coal and iron ore — were explicitly banned under U.N. sanctions imposed in March after the previous nuclear test, analysts expect Pyongyang to become increasingly reliant on labor to generate money.

That’s where the “shaming

campaign” comes in.

The international community is now talking about more sanctions against North Korea. “We will be working very closely in the Security Council and beyond to come up with the strongest possible measure against North Korea’s latest actions,” Sung Kim, the American point man on North Korea, told reporters Sunday in Tokyo.

But after years of sanctions, many analysts say there is little left to target. And it will be difficult to designate host countries directly, so American and South Korean diplomats have been using behind-the-scenes pressure.

“We have raised with some governments our concerns about the use of [North Korean] workers in their countries, and consequently some governments have modified their policies,” the State Department said in a report sent to Congress late last month.

South Korea has been doing the same. “We’ve been trying to ex-

A woman looks out at the China-North Korea Friendship Bridge in northeast China.

Many of the North Koreans working abroad live in China.

plain to these countries that this [labor export] is not good for the North Korean people and that it’s aiding the North Korean regime,” said Kim Dong-jo, a spokesman for President Park Geun-hye.

The new campaign has already paid some dividends, but it also faces some inherent constraints.

For one, China and Russia, the hosts of the vast majority of the workers, have not traditionally seemed to worry about what other countries think of them.

Analysts are divided on the merits of clamping down on North Korea’s labor exports.

“I think that there is clearly a benefit to allowing North Koreans to experience something of the outside world,” said Go Myonghyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul and the author of a 2014 report on North Korean labor exports. “But the downside is great.”

Some of the income is going toward North Korea’s developments of weapons of mass destruction, Go said. “This money isn’t just being spent on toys for Kim Jong Un.” Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the benefit of exposing North Koreans to the outside world, even if only a sliver, was worth the cost of potentially funding the nuclear and missile programs.

“I believe that the more that North Koreans experience working overseas, the higher the chance of North Korea changing,” Yang said, noting that the workers might learn how rich South Korea is and how advanced South Korean products are. “There could easily be 200,000 North Koreans who now have a different, positive view of South Korea.”

But Choi Yoon-cheol, secretary general of the North Korea Strategy Center, a defector-led advocacy group based in Seoul, thinks the costs are too great.

“Yes, there’s a positive side to this,” he said. “But the money can also be a source for developing the missile and nuclear programs. We should make stopping this our priority.” n

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Premier matches politics with fashion A NTHONY F AIOLA London BY

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hen Prime Minister Theresa May touched down in China for a summit of major nations this month, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper zeroed in on her diplomatic ace in the hole. Her formidable policy acumen? Her tough stance on Chinese investment in sensitive British industries?

Nope. It was “the vivid, almostorange hue of May’s jacket and dress.”

The story — only days after the same paper ran a piece about shoes being the “greatest love” of May’s life — illustrated how the halls of power are turning into something of a catwalk for Britain’s first female prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. May’s embrace of high-end, even edgy clothes in a manner very unlike, for instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is transforming her into a relatively rare mix: politician meets fashion icon.

Singapore’s Straits Times has dubbed her just that, noting before she took office that “the woman who is set to fill [former prime minister] David Cameron’s shoes has quite a collection of footwear herself.” Photogenic Magazine — offering Sri Lanka’s latest in fashion news — tweeted that “Prime Minister Theresa May loves her leopard-print shoes.” The New York Times ran an entire article on Chinese “fashionistas” discussing “her shoes, her gender and her power, in that order.”

And then there’s the British media, which like no other has unleashed the dogs to chew on May’s trademark kitten heels. Or, if you’re the Times of London, a chest-accentuating scarlet dress of hers it dubbed “the boobinator” for showing off what it described as “power cleavage.”

“Is Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, the country’s most fashion-savvy politician?” the Times asked its readers.

With May constantly living under the threat that the odd reporter might blurt out “Who are you wearing?” perhaps it is no surprise

© POOL NEW / REUTERS/REUTERS

For Theresa May, leopard print and leadership don’t clash, but some ask if all the focus is sexist that the fixation on her wardrobe has also sparked a fierce debate. In short, is coverage of her clothes sexist?

May has made no secret of her penchant for high fashion. She has been photographed in the front row of runway shows and in 2014, she famously told a British radio program that the one luxury she’d want on a desert island is a lifetime subscription to Vogue.

But the blanket focus on her style choices is morphing, some say, into an unhealthy obsession that is wholly unlike the media’s treatment of her male predecessor.

The sexism, critics argue, particularly shines through when everyone becomes a critic. Like when the Daily Mail told her to trade in her “thigh-high patent boots, mini skirts and daring short dresses” for the more ladylike attire of Catherine Middleton. Or when the same paper had this to say about that scarlet dress: “It’s not just the economy plunging into the red,” with a shot of May’s

decolletage.

“What is telling about May’s penchant for fashion is why we care so much — and more so why we criticize it so readily,” columnist Imogen Fox wrote in the Guardian. “Would we condemn a similarly frivolous preoccupation in a male leader? It will be interesting to see whether May is allowed to continue to freely enjoy clothes or whether her advisers will judge her fashion to be too loud.”

Many others say that May is a trailblazer, a woman successfully walking the tightrope of a world leader with gravitas who also happens to love fashion. If people talk about her shoes during her first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin (and they did), then so be it. In fact, she has defended her right to style — declaring it one of the hurdles women of power must overcome.

“I’m a woman, I like clothes. I like shoes, I like clothes,” she said last year in an interview with writer and journalist Tina Brown. “It’s one of the challenges I think for women in

British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Hangzhou Exhibition Center to participate in the G-20 Summit in China on Sept. 4.

politics, in business, in all areas of working life, is actually to be ourselves, and to say, you know what, you can be clever and like clothes.

You can have a career and like clothes. These are not separate.”

Is it newsworthy that she launched her bid for prime minister in a tartan Vivienne Westwood suit? Or that she attends meetings in L.K. Bennett pumps? Some say yes — because it’s disingenuous to suggest that impressions are not part of a political package.

When Hillary Clinton — who once joked that a show about her fashion sense would be called “Project Pantsuit” — wears an Armani jacket to a speech, some say that it is indeed notable. Especially if that jacket retails for $12,000 and the theme of the night is inequality.

“Every politician, male or female, attracts attention as visible people. Every utterance or haircut will be parsed by journalists, and I think it’s fair,” said Sarah Mower, chief critic for the Vogue Runway website. “You can look at other female politicians and see that Hillary hasn’t played it safe. She’s played it all over, and she definitely had her moments in the way Theresa May has.”

In fact, fashion can be a formidable political accessory, as Thatcher proved with her famous leather handbags. Far from a stereotyping symbol of feminine softness, her stern satchels became metaphors for toughness, “a weapon” the BBC once wrote, “wielded against opponents or unfortunate ministers.”

And May’s cutting-edge clothes — say some on the other side of the political aisle — may equally have the ability to intimidate.

Keith Vaz, a senior politician from the opposition Labour Party, was the head of Britain’s Home Affairs Select Committee until he resigned this past week in the wake of a sex scandal.

“She is very unflashy, and she doesn’t make a fuss,” he said, “but I think her clothes do show her to be a very classy, intelligent political leader . . . But clothes are a side issue to the job, and she knows it.” n

COVER STORY

AND EVERYONE SAW IT

BY JESSICA CONTRERA

S

he crunched the cookies in her mouth, carefully mashing them into chunks.

She spit. They made a plunk sound as they hit the toilet water. The worst, the absolute worst thing had happened, and now, Maureen was sure, this was her only option.

“Moommm,” she called down the stairs. “I puked!”

She could not show her face in the seventh grade. She had to play sick. All day, she lay crumpled on the couch, replaying what he’d said to persuade her.

You’re so beautiful.

Don’t be ashamed of your body.

I won’t show anyone.

Then, last night, when he admitted he’d shown the photo to a few people: “Don’t even come to my funeral,” she texted him.

Maureen, 15, plays Minecraft in her bedroom in Auburn, Mass., last month.

She has built a community of friends through the video game and has thousands of followers.

PHOTOS BY BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

I’ll piss on your grave, b­­­­.

At least she had been wearing a bra and underwear. The camera flash reflected in the mirror had hidden her face, hadn’t it?

But he knew. And by the end of the day, everyone else would, too.

It would be months before she would learn she wasn’t the only girl who had fallen for his promises, who had trusted him.

She heard her dad come in from work. She heard the phone ring.

Then he was barreling out of the kitchen, the phone still in his hand. He stopped in the doorway to the living room. A sign above his

head read, “Yesterday’s Memories Are Tomorrow’s Treasures.”

“Your principal called,” he said. “What pictures is he talking about?”

When Maureen’s parents were in middle school, if a girl wanted to show a boy her body in the middle of the night, she would have to sneak out of her house, find a way to get to his, evade his parents and yank up her shirt.

For their daughter, all it took was a few clicks.

A few months before, Maureen had started messaging on Kik with a tall, athletic boy in her class. They weren’t officially dating, but they talked every day. For weeks, he asked for her picture. When she sent one, he asked for more. She liked him. She believed him when he said he would delete them. By March, the middle-school crush had fizzled, but he still had the three photos she sent. One day, another girl in their class saw one of them on his phone. The next day, while Maureen was

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hiding at home, she says he texted it around the lunchroom.

At her parents’ request, Maureen and her family members are being identified only by their middle names. The boy involved is not being named because he is a minor. His mother, on behalf of her family, declined to participate in this article. The principal of Maureen’s Auburn, Mass., middle school also declined to comment.

Maureen’s parents believe the boy was suspended from school for a few days; their daughter was expected to learn her lesson and move on. The ordeal began in March 2014, when Maureen was 13 years old.

Law enforcement agencies could have told her parents how truly ordinary their situation was. Sexting has gained a presence in every kind of school — rich and poor, urban and rural, big and small. As phones make their way into the hands of younger and younger kids, the incidents have grown more complex: Students collect their peers’ nude photos in passcode-protected Dropboxes, private Instagram accounts and apps disguised as calculators. In Massachusetts alone, the state police computer crimes unit gets multiple calls each month from schools needing its intervention.

The story hardly ends when punishment is handed out. For every “sexting scandal” reported, an unknown multitude of parents and teens — mostly girls — are just beginning to grasp what it means to live in a world where nothing digital ever truly disappears. What do you do when your 13-year-old takes photos of her body to impress a boy, and now she’s crying, stomping up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door screaming, “You don’t understand!”

Then help us understand, begged Maureen’s parents, Elizabeth and Michael.

“It wasn’t the picture itself,” she would later explain. It was that the boy told everyone that he didn’t ask for it. That she sent it because she was so desperate for his attention. Now, the comments streamed in on her social-media

At left, Maureen plays Minecraft and checks messages in the living room.

At right, Maureen’s father, Michael, cleans the back yard of their home.

accounts, the new outlet for time-honored middle-school cruelty.

Gross.

Slut.

Go kill yourself.

Her parents thought about sending her back to school in the next town over. But Maureen knew the kids there had heard about her, too.

“I felt like I couldn’t fix it,” she said. “Like I was alone and nothing was ever going to be better.”

Elizabeth and Michael started to wonder whether they could have done something to prevent all this. Were they supposed to have expected this stuff to start in the seventh grade?

They knew their tall, brown-eyed daughter had always seemed to grow up too fast.

“Even when she was 2, I would follow her around on the playground going, ‘She’s only 2,’ because she was so tall, the 5-year-olds would want to play hide-and-seek and tag with her,” Elizabeth said.

Maureen grew up to be a vibrant, quirky kid who loved to invent songs and tell jokes. She could spend hours drawing in charcoal pencil before jetting off to cheerleading practice, where her role was to catch the smaller girls as they came down from flips.

At school, she always seemed to be on the outskirts of fitting in. Note-passing and threeway-call eavesdropping have been replaced with disappearing-message apps and covert screen shots, but the Shakespearean drama of middle school has not changed much. Her friends were viciously mean one day, BFFs the next.

When one friend told her how cutting made him feel better, she started doing it, too.

Later, her parents would think that the tall, popular boy in the class must have known what

KLMNO WEEKLY

it would mean to Maureen to have his attention.

She had just gotten her first cellphone that year, as she entered seventh grade. Elizabeth and Michael had argued over the decision, which today plays out in almost every family household: When should they give her a phone? It would be the convenient way to communicate with her about cheer practice, but how much could she be trusted? How could they know what she was doing on it? And was it worth paying for? As an administrative assistant and a farmworker with three children, they couldn’t afford unnecessary expenses.

Michael didn’t want her to have a phone at all.

“So, what, she doesn’t get one until she’s 18, and then we watch her go off the deep end?”

Elizabeth argued. “That’s not going to work, either.”

Now, after the incident, they had taken away her phone, but she was still finding out what kids were saying about her. The longer she stayed out of school, the worse the rumors. The cutting grew more frequent and more serious.

Their youngest daughter learned to search her sister’s room for razors. It was like the light in Maureen had been powered off. Once, she took a whole handful of Prozac, coming dangerously close to becoming another headline about a sexting scandal leading to suicide.

Instead of going back to the seventh grade, she went to overnight counseling facilities in Worcester and Boston. Each time Elizabeth and Michael heard doctors say words such as “trauma” and “lack of coping skills,” they started to worry that their daughter’s fears — that this moment would last forever — weren’t just a 13-year-old’s distorted perspective of time. They didn’t want to believe it was possible that one foolish iPhone photo could derail their daughter’s entire life.

The boy still had her picture. The middle-school principal had called again, this continues on next page

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from previous page

time with worse — was that possible? — news.

Maureen had entered the eighth grade, and she seemed to be doing fine. Sometimes she would cry all the way to school, but when Elizabeth pulled up to the low brick building, Maureen would always get out of the car.

Now it was early November, and the principal was telling them that the boy had shown Maureen’s photo at a Halloween party. It was the same picture they thought had been deleted from his phone.

She had been part of a slide show. It wasn’t just her picture — there were photos of at least four other girls in the class. The girls later learned that the boy had made a game out of it: Because they had framed their photos so their faces weren’t visible, the boys guessed which body belonged to which girl. One they recognized by her dark skin. Another, by a large freckle on her chest.

Before this, the middle school thought Maureen’s ordeal was an isolated event. Now, they

Maureen, left, jokes with her mother, Elizabeth, and her uncle in the kitchen.

For a time, it seemed like the light in Maureen had been powered off.

realized they were dealing with a more pervasive problem.

“I thought, we’re a small, middle-class, suburban town. This isn’t going to hit us,” said one of the school’s counselors, who asked not to be identified. “But, boy, was I wrong.”

She was shocked to hear “some of the brightest girls in the building” had flirted with the boy for months, and then, late at night, alone in their bedrooms and bathrooms, sent him what he asked for.

“I don’t say it lightly when I say that if it can happen to them, it can happen to anybody,” the counselor said.

She brought all of the girls to a room together. Among them was one who had dated the boy for eight months. Her photos — ones she sent and ones he had taken of her — had

been on the screen at the party, too. Together, the girls spent hours comparing messages, realizing he had been texting them all the same smooth lines.

Meanwhile, the boy was in the principal’s office again. According to students and the counselor, the boy showed the principal the password-protected app where all the photos were hidden on his phone. He had them organized into folders, one for each girl he’d won over.

The school called the police.

The news rippled across the class of 205 eighth-graders and the 16,000-person town.

For Maureen, there was almost a sense of relief: Sure, more people had seen her photo, but at least she wasn’t the only one being called a slut.

“There was so much shame involved for the girls who had done it,” the counselor said. “Then those girls’ friends felt like, ‘If I hang out with you, I’m going to be seen as like you.’ And then the girls who were not involved were envious of all the attention the other girls were getting.”

Some teachers, she said, seemed to think the

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girls got what they asked for by being so careless.

Taylor, the boy’s former girlfriend, recalled trying to explain to everyone why it had seemed just so normal at the time.

“Sixth, seventh grade is when people started sending nudes. The popular girls would send them to the popular guys. . . . I would find out about it and be like, ‘You know that’s wrong, right?’ ” she said. “I was iffy, at first. But everyone was doing it, so I just felt like I had to.”

Taylor — who is also being identified by her middle name — and the boy had been friends since they were young. Their moms went to high school together. Her family once threw him a birthday party. And now, this.

She heard he did it because his group of friends had been pushing him away. This was his attempt to get back in.

On his social-media accounts, anonymous commenters wrote to him that he ruined their lives.

He wrote back: “And my own.”

Every morning, Maureen puts on her makeup in the purple bathroom where she sent him the photo. Winged eyeliner has become her signature look. Tight jeans, loose T-shirt, badass eye-flair — it all says: I don’t care what you think.

Now she’s in high school. So is the boy. Every day, they pass in the hall.

“It doesn’t even bother me,” Maureen says.

“People are always like, ‘Does it bother you when you see him?’ I’m always like, ‘No, why would it bother me?’ ” The Worcester Telegram reported that the boy is facing criminal charges: possession of child pornography, dissemination of obscene materials to minors and enticement of a child under 16. But so far, the families of Maureen and Taylor haven’t heard anything about a conviction or a plea deal. A spokesman for the Worcester district attorney said the office is legally prohibited from disclosing any infor-

At left, the living room of Maureen’s home. At right, Maureen, 15, shops with her sister Marion, 11. She still sees the boy who passed around her picture but says it doesn’t bother her.

mation about any juvenile case.

Although many states have passed laws that draw a distinction between child pornography and sexting among underage kids, Massachusetts has not. Conceivably, if convicted, the boy could face jail time and registration as a sex offender.

But chances are, he won’t.

Michael Ramos, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that in places where the law hasn’t caught up with technology, it’s rare for a minor to come away with a felony on his record. The consequences are usually lessened to misdemeanors, probation time, educational diversion programs or community service. In a 2013 survey of state prosecutors who had filed charges in sexting cases involving juveniles, 16 percent resulted in the defendant being registered as a sex offender. Just 4 percent led to a criminal trial.

“You’re dealing with young teens, people who don’t have criminal intent. Believe me, they’re making some huge mistakes, ethical mistakes, but you have to come up with other solutions,” Ramos said.

Depending on the nature of the charges, Ramos said, one key factor in a prosecution would be whether the boy had “intent to harm” the girls whose pictures he showed — something that can be difficult to prove without the participation of the girls themselves. Because coming forward means that they, too, could theoretically face charges. Although they took photos of their own bodies, in a technical sense, they have produced child pornography.

Until it’s sorted out, the boy will remain in school. Administrators purposefully kept him in separate classes from Maureen and Taylor.

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But his former girlfriend rarely comes to school anyway; after more than a year of counseling and therapy, her parents say, she still hasn’t recovered.

In summer, Maureen lives in another world, where there is no boy, no girls who stare at her, no one who can see the thin scar lines on her forearms. It exists on her iPad, in an online gaming community for Minecraft.

She started playing it regularly in the first few weeks of ninth grade, when she realized that even though she was in a new school, the people were the same. To them, she was the same.

“It’s not even brought up anymore,” she says.

“It’s just like, ‘Oh, that’s [Maureen], nobody talks to her.’ ” But in Minecraft, they call her Queen. And Mom. The game is made up of many tiny worlds where players can unite on teams to build places completely their own. In the summer, Maureen can be in her world anytime she wants. At cheerleading camp, on the bleachers of her sister’s softball games, in the car when her dad is listening to songs she rolls her eyes at. She founded her own team, and now there are more than 120 players from every corner of the world who know her. They look to her for guidance, in the game and in life.

The rules of their Minecraft world are that no one is allowed to swear or call anyone names.

“People come there because nobody can get hurt, or you’ll get banned,” Maureen says.

If one of her team members gets bullied, it’s Maureen who gets to report it.

“If there’s a problem, like drama or something, people come to me,” she says. “And I’ll solve it.”

Summer has ended. She started the 10th grade. She went back to the halls where every day she passes him. But after school, she can escape again, to the place where no one has seen her undressed and she is always in control. n

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MUSEUMS

An icon’s history, hidden away BY

G EOFF E DGERS

T

he Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s children called the museum with an intriguing invitation.

They had something they knew the National Museum of African American History and Culture wanted. So in January, curator Rex Ellis headed to Atlanta, slipped on a pair of white gloves, and carefully turned the pages of King’s traveling Bible. The public last saw it during President Obama’s second inauguration when it was borrowed from the family.

“It was heavier than I thought it would be,” remembers Ellis, the museum’s associate director of curatorial affairs. “Not only was it the weight of the object itself but the weight of what it was. You’re holding it like it’s a baby. I was uncomfortable holding it for long.”

Ellis and his colleagues didn’t hold it for long. The half-hour meeting with Martin III ended without a loan, a gift or any other promises. The Bible and a second key item, the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to King in 1964, were placed back into a bank vault.

When the museum opens Sept. 24, no major artifacts from the civil rights icon will be on display.

“It’s outrageous,” said Clarence Jones, the former King attorney who filed the copyright for his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

“This is the Smithsonian. This is not just another party. This is one of the most important institutions now in the 21st century. And this is probably the greatest civil rights leader in the 20th century. I find it shameful and I’m sad.”

Jones doesn’t blame the museum’s curators, instead focusing on the widely known obstacle historians, filmmakers and others have faced for years: King’s children, Bernice, Martin III and Dexter.

For years, the siblings have blocked media outlets from using King’s words or image without paying what some have described as exorbitant licensing fees. The nonprofit foundation that built

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

The African American History Museum will open without any of Martin Luther King Jr.’s belongings the monument to King on the Mall, finished in 2011, paid $800,000. The estate also has sued when they think they are not being sufficiently compensated. That included going after King’s close friend Harry Belafonte when the actor and singer wanted to sell letters and other papers given him

by King for charity. Belafonte eventually sued the King estate and won the right to bring the items to auction. In 2013, the King estate, as part of a lawsuit, demanded that Andrew Young, another King confidant and the former mayor of Atlanta, be removed from the board of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change after his foundation used material featuring King in a documentary. The case was dismissed.

The children have taken each other to court repeatedly. Bernice and Martin III once sued Dexter.

Dexter sued them back. Most re-

cently, Martin and Dexter sued Bernice over who has the authority to sell the Nobel Peace Prize and Bible. Former president Jimmy Carter was brought in to help mediate an agreement. Last month, a judge settled it instead, clearing the way for the brothers to sell the Nobel Prize and Bible.

Given these seemingly endless conflicts, historian David J. Garrow said he’s not surprised that the museum will open without a single item given or loaned by the King family.

“I could not be more cynical, more jaded on this subject,” said Garrow, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his book “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” “Given the family’s behavior this last 20 years, they’re unlikely to have any interest in sharing without a large upfront payment.”

Near a photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, James and Jewelle Gibbs prepare for the groundbreaking of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2012 in Washington, D.C. The museum opens Sept. 24.

It’s not clear what the King children plan to do with the precious items now that the latest round of lawsuits is resolved.

Attempts to talk with the siblings offer a glimpse into the delicacy of the relationship.

For a week, the family did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. Finally, Dexter King asked Phillip Jones, a friend and the general manager of the King estate, to respond. In an interview one night this month, Jones said the family would be open to the artifacts ending up in the museum but that there had been no discussions about how that might occur.

The King children, he said, have been focused on repairing the relationships damaged by the most recent lawsuit.

“It’s an extraordinary museum and the family believes that, certainly,” Jones said. “And we think it would be wonderful if these items were there. We just haven’t been able to focus on it.”

But the next morning, Jones spoke to Dexter King, who told him he was not authorized to speak for the family, only the estate. Jones demanded that references to “family” or “we” be removed from any of his previous quotes.

“It would not even be this way if there had not been legal disagreements between these family members who are trying to heal,” said Jones. “[Dexter] reminded me how sensitive things are.”

It’s important to note that the museum has not asked to borrow items from the family.

Museum Director Lonnie Bunch said that’s because the museum prefers to seek out permanent works that don’t need to be returned. Michèle Gates Moresi, supervisory museum curator of collections, who also went on the January visit to Atlanta to see the Kings, described the meeting as a first step in building a relationship. In addition, the curators knew the legal dispute still hovered over the items and that, even if they were available to buy, the museum doesn’t have that kind of money on hand.

“I knew this was just going to be

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

17

TRENDS an exploratory face-to-face, a chance to get to meet them,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting going in that a miracle would happen and things would change overnight just because they met with us.”

Ellis said that while there are no “major” artifacts from King in the new museum, he believes the exhibitions and works on display tell the story of the civil rights movement. There are 165 items listed under King at the museum, the majority of them photographs, vinyl records and buttons.

“There are artifacts that we wish we did have from his personal collection,” Ellis said, “but I would not say that what we have represents a missed opportunity.”

Young, despite his past issues with the King children, hopes that critics think about what the siblings have been through. They were children when their 39-yearold father was assassinated in Memphis, and he did not leave them much money.

“It was not only losing their father, but their grandmother was shot at the organ playing the Lord’s Prayer, in church,” said Young, who marched in Selma with King and was with him when he died. “Their uncle drowned mysteriously in his own swimming pool. . . . It’s been a really difficult road.”

But Young also is frustrated. He has reminded his own children, he said, that the family legacy is “theirs and nobody could take it away from them but it wasn’t to be monetized.”

In 2006, Young said, he helped encourage the fundraising to buy King’s papers when the four siblings — the oldest, Yolanda, died in 2007 — announced they planned to sell them at Sotheby’s. ThenAtlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin raised $32 million to buy the papers and place them at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College.

“I would have thought that would have been more than enough for four people to live on,” Young said. “But they spent their money suing each other about I don’t know what.”

This reputation for being difficult and litigious is one reason why museum leaders did not expect much from the King estate.

“I think I had low expectations,” said Spencer Crew, a guest curator and former director of the National Museum of American History.

“That came from having been at

the Museum of American History and having curators there who, even with good relationships, couldn’t exact things from them.”

Clayborne Carson, the Stanford University professor selected by Coretta Scott King to edit her husband’s papers, said that the challenges of working with the siblings are no secret.

“They’ve made clear that they’re not going to just give away his legacy, so I just think realistically you have to move on,” he said.

“Yes, it would be nice if they simply donated what they had inherited from their father but I’m not sure how many people put in the same situation would. If your father was Frank Lloyd Wright and you inherited one of his famous homes and somebody said you should donate it to the public because it’s an historic structure, you would say no. It just happens with King there is a sense that we all own him.”

Jones, of the King estate, said the family has not been reluctant to make loans. He points to an exhibit at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which includes the suit King wore when he met with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“It’s extraordinary that anyone would make a claim that the family has been difficult regarding borrowing items of memorabilia when, in fact, the majority of memorabilia has been on loan,” Jones said.

Deborah Richardson, executive vice president of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, said she does not believe the lack of major King material will diminish the new museum. The museum’s purpose, she said, is much wider in scope, meant to cover the entire range of the African American experience.

“To me, that’s so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “Dr. King, if you look at the whole arc of our experience, thousands of years before there were records of Western society, Dr. King and his work is just a blip.”

Clarence Jones, the former King confidant, took issue with that.

“Would you say Paul Robeson was a blip?” he said. “Frederick Douglass was a blip? It is impossible for you to talk about the African American experience in the 20th century without having Martin Luther King Jr. be the centerpiece of that discussion.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Millennials pick pets over people BY

A BHA B HATTARAI

Y

oung Americans are less likely to be homeowners, car owners or parents than their predecessors, but they do lead in one category: pets.

ADOGSLIFEPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

75%

Percentage of 30-somethings who own dogs

51%

who own cats

Three-fourths of Americans in their 30s have dogs, while 51 percent have cats, according to a survey released by research firm Mintel. That compares with 50 percent of the overall population with dogs, and 35 percent with cats.

The findings come at a time when millennials, roughly defined as the generation born between 1980 and 2000, are half as likely to be married or living with a partner as people were 50 years ago. They are also delaying parenthood and demanding flexible work arrangements — all of which, researchers say, has translated to higher rates of pet ownership.

“Pets are becoming a replacement for children,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of “Generation Me.” “They’re less expensive. You can get one even if you’re not ready to live with

someone or get married, and they can still provide companionship.”

Millennial men, it turns out, are more likely to look for companionship in pets. Among those surveyed, 71 percent of men between ages 18 and 34 had dogs (versus 62 percent of women), while 48 percent had cats (versus 35 percent of women).

“Men are more willing to put in the time and effort of taking care of a pet,” said Rebecca Cullen, an analyst at Mintel. “Women are more likely to feel they are away from home too much and that pets require too much work.”

All of this has big implications for the $63 billion pet industry, which has grown threefold since 1996.

Last year, Americans spent $11 billion on pet-pampering alone.

One-third of owners said they bought toys for their pets, while 17 percent bought pet costumes and 10 percent shelled out for pet strollers, according to Mintel, which surveyed 2,001 adults for its findings.

“When you’re preparing for your first child, you’re reading all the books, doing all the research,” said Nathan Richter, 36, a partner at Wakefield Research, a market research firm in Arlington, Va. “That’s how millennials are approaching pet ownership.”

A majority of millennials — 76 percent — said they are more likely to “splurge” on their pets than for themselves, including for expensive treats (44 percent) or a custom bed (38 percent), according to a 2014 study by Wakefield Research. By comparison, 50 percent of baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — said they would do so.

Millennials were also twice as likely as baby boomers to buy clothing for their pets, a phenomenon Richter chalks up to the prevalence of social media.

“The clothing is, for them, an opportunity for performance — they put it on their dog or cat, take them for a walk, post a picture on Facebook,” Richter said. “It’s increasingly about getting a digital stamp of approval.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Burnett was always ‘Good Company’ N ONFICTION

I

IN SUCH GOOD COMPANY Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox

By Carol Burnett Crown Archetype.

320 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

A MY H ENDERSON

n the 1960s and ’70s, while television blared bad news about war, protests and a presidential resignation, “The Carol Burnett Show” made us laugh. The great comedian filled America’s living rooms with pratfalls and Tarzan yells. It was a gift.

Carol Burnett’s new memoir, “In Such Good Company,” captures this zaniness with relish.

Written in Burnett’s laughing voice, the book chronicles how she prepared her weekly dose of mayhem. It was a magical recipe, and in an era ruled by “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “The Andy Williams Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show” was an audience favorite. From 1967 to 1978, Burnett’s 276 programs won 25 Emmys and averaged 30 million viewers a week. The show earned Burnett the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Kennedy Center Honor, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

Show business was part of Burnett’s DNA. Growing up with her grandmother near Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, she saw as many as eight movies a week and would “act out the movies with the neighborhood kids.” This is also how she learned to yodel like Tarzan. Her Broadway breakthrough came in the 1959 musical comedy “Once Upon a Mattress,” and she was soon hired as a regular on the popular comedy-variety program “The Garry Moore Show.”

She discovered that she loved the small screen more than Broadway’s bright lights. “Garry’s show allowed me to be different characters every week,” she writes, “as opposed to doing one role over and over again in the theater.”

When “The Garry Moore Show” made her a star, CBS offered her a 10-year contract to create her own program but vetoed the idea that she host a variety show. Burnett writes that variety was then “a man’s game” on network television, with shows headlined by the likes

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Carol Burnett tapes the final “Carol Burnett Show” before a live studio audience in Los Angeles in 1978.

of Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason and Dean Martin. Nevertheless, variety is what Burnett wanted, and she flexed her star power to force CBS to put “The Carol Burnett Show” on the air, beginning with a 30-show season in 1967-1968.

The first thing Burnett did was to create a remarkable repertory company that included “hunky” Lyle Waggoner, newcomer Vicki Lawrence and consummate comedy actors Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. She also welcomed prominent guest stars such as Lucille Ball, Bernadette Peters, Vincent Price and Jim Nabors.

Music and theater were her first loves, and Burnett’s program be-

came a showcase for both. She writes that “the sets, the costumes, the orchestrations, and the execution were worthy of a Broadway show.” Her “mini-musicals” often featured production numbers that celebrated Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and the Gershwins. Movie takeoffs were also signature segments, and the show’s parodies of “Gone With the Wind,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Sunset Boulevard” remain television comedy classics.

Costumes for all of these segments played an essential role, and Bob Mackie designed a remarkable 60 to 70 costumes every week. Burnett gleefully describes

the costume everyone remembers best, her Scarlett dress made from drapes for their “Went With the Wind!” sendup: When she met with Mackie for her fitting, he brought out “a green velvet gown still attached to the curtain rod.”

Burnett donated that stunning assemblage to the National Museum of American History, along with her charwoman costume, which is on view in the museum’s Laughing Matters display.

Production of the weekly show began with script readings and music rehearsals Monday mornings and continued through Friday run-throughs. The show was taped Friday night in Studio 33 at Television City in Hollywood, and Burnett is proud that, unlike many shows that did take after take, her tapings finished in less than two hours. She did few retakes because she wanted to “have a spontaneous feel.” Actors cracking up in sketches was all part of the fun.

As many of us can still remember, each show began with Burnett’s warm-up. She would come onstage and say, “Let’s bump up the lights,” so that the audience could ask her questions. Ongoing sketches were key elements of each program, notably Conway and Burnett in “Mrs. Wiggins and Mr. Tudball” and the whole ensemble in “The Family.” After segments spotlighting musical or movie features, the grand finale would showcase everyone onstage taking bows. Burnett would sing “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together” pull her left ear “as a signal for Nanny, my grandmother who raised me,” and everyone would wave good night.

Resonating with Burnett’s lively enthusiasm, “In Such Good Company” captures the excitement of being there once again, and it’s a joyous addition to her earlier memoirs, “One More Time” (1986) and “This Time Together” (2010). n Henderson is the author of “On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting” and has written on media and culture.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Decadence and a family mystery

The daily grind in a public school

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

P

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

erhaps the most heartfelt praise I can give the English novelist Alex Marwood’s unsettling new thriller, “The Darkest Secret,” is to report that it kept me up way, way past my bedtime. The book’s central mystery, about a missing child, is immensely painful, but ingenious and superbly executed.

It unfolds amid a delicious portrait of decadence among the rich.

They’re the English rich, but they don’t feel all that different from the 1-percenters we know and love on this side of the Atlantic.

Marwood’s alternating chapters move between the child’s disappearance, in August 2004, and the present, when clues to her fate finally emerge. The earlier scenes are built around the 50th birthday party of the child’s father, a rich, charismatic, aggressively immoral real estate tycoon named Sean Jackson. He is divorced from his first wife, who is the mother of his two teenage daughters, and is about to shed his second, the mother of 3-year-old twins Ruby and Coco. Two more wives are waiting in the wings.

“Do all women just go mad after a while?” Jackson asks. “All the ones in my life seem to. They adore me at first but after a while they just turn bitter. My wives, my girlfriends. It’s not fair.”

Three couples are Jackson’s guests at his birthday festivities.

One, a lawyer and a public relations executive, at first seem pleasant enough, the others less so. One husband is a boorish Tory politician with a clueless wife and the other is a drug-dealing doctor whose wife is secretly Jackson’s mistress. These aren’t likable people, but they’re believable.

It helps that Jackson’s teenage daughters, Milly and India, who rarely see their father, have come for the party. They’re funny and fine. Jackson attempts paternal discipline: “ ‘Listen . . . while you’re in my house, you live by my rules, okay?’ “ ‘Great,’ says Milly, and march-

es past him toward the house. ‘I’ll open the brandy, Indy. You fetch the dope.’ ” As the weekend progresses, Jackson treats his wife so rudely that on Saturday she departs in tears for London. The twins — and several other children — remain.

On Sunday morning, after a long night of booze and cocaine, the grown-ups awake to the terrible fact that Coco has vanished. There are no clues, no demands for ransom. The girl is simply gone.

The present-day scenes, a dozen years later, begin with Jackson’s death of a heart attack. Although he has taken a fourth wife, he has the extremely poor taste to expire while handcuffed to a bed in London’s fashionable Dorchester hotel. The chapters that follow revolve around his funeral and the reuniting of Milly, now in her 20s, with her half-sister Ruby, who is 15. Milly, who at first seems a spoiled rich kid, overly fond of vodka and sleeping around, emerges at the novel’s moral center. As she plans her father’s funeral, information about Coco’s fate begins to come forth.

No more should be said about the plot, except that one astonishment follows another. As the story progresses, Marwood, whose books include the Edgar Awardwinning “The Wicked Girls,” looks closely at the relationships among Jackson’s various wives and children. Milly, who barely knew her father and thought she hated him, comes to feel something like love for him; she also bonds with Ruby.

Her father’s very young, very difficult fourth wife is on hand to complicate matters.

Throughout “The Darkest Secret,” Alex Marwood, the pseudonym of British journalist Serena Mackesy, does a remarkable job of blending her sophisticated humor, her mordant view of the rich and the heartbreak of a missing child. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

‘S THE DARKEST SECRET

By Alex Marwood Penguin. Paperback, 390 pp. $16

SUBSTITUTE Going to School With a Thousand Kids

By Nicolson Baker Blue Rider.

719 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

D ANA G OLDSTEIN

ubstitute,” by the prolific novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, is an odd book. More than 700 pages long, it covers just 28 days in Baker’s life, during which he worked as a substitute teacher in Maine public schools.

Baker is an award-winning author who has taught college. To become a substitute, he was asked to produce merely a high school diploma and a clean criminal record. He earned $70 per day.

“I sought out the teaching job because I wanted to know what life in classrooms was really like,” he writes. “There are many books of educational advice, of theory, of hagiography, of gloomy prognosis — what’s missing is a livedthrough experience of how busy and complicated and weird and long every school day is.”

Baker has succeeded in filling this void. “Substitute” faithfully re-creates the grinding, sometimes stultifying routines of classroom life, from shushing the class to cleaning the whiteboard. Unfortunately, this comes at considerable expense for readers. Baker does not explain his reportorial methods, but the way the book is written, as a series of dialoguedriven vignettes, suggests he taperecorded each of his days as a substitute. The resulting book too often reads like a transcript, albeit one that highlights both the tedium and charm of teaching school.

If there is an upside to plowing through the quotes stacked upon quotes, it is that Baker has, like an investigative reporter, revealed much of the educational malpractice common in American schools.

Many of his substitute assignments entailed working as an “ed tech,” essentially an assistant in another teacher’s classroom, tasked with helping struggling students. He thus had the chance to witness full-time teachers doing their jobs. They relied heavily on work sheets, flashcards, and playing movies and TV shows. The students had iPads issued (and

paid for) by their schools but seemed to use them more for procrastination and distraction than for learning. In one elementaryschool music class, children were told to color in pictures of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, instead of singing or learning an instrument.

There were scattered examples of competent pedagogy. Baker saw that kids of all ages love literature read aloud. One high school history teacher, Mr. Boxer, assigned students to seek out primary source documents that shed light on antebellum social reform movements, such as temperance, abolition and women’s rights.

When Boxer realized that the teenagers didn’t know the difference between a primary and secondary source, he used resources from the Yale University library website to introduce them to the concept.

In the end, “Substitute” proffers a fairly cynical message: that children, who are complicated creatures, learn very little at school.

But by his last day as a substitute, Baker was able to admit, “I hadn’t been a good teacher.” He spent much of his time cajoling his students to stay quiet so he could pass out work sheets. His short tenure and low opinion of formal education reminded me of Henry David Thoreau, who, before writing “Walden,” taught for a short time in Massachusetts. Thoreau concluded that school subjected children to “the process not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind.”

The thing is, great teachers tend to overcome these self-defeating attitudes. They learn to control the classroom, plan engaging lessons and work around an educational bureaucracy more focused on compliance than creativity. Sadly, very few of these honorable souls write books. They are too busy. n Goldstein is a journalist and author of “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Refusal to design clothes for all women is absurd TIM GUNN is a design educator, author and Emmywinning co-host of “Project Runway.”

When I was chief creative officer for Liz Claiborne Inc., I spent a good amount of time on the road hosting fashion shows to highlight our brands. Our team made a point of retaining models of various sizes, shapes and ages, because one of the missions of the shows was to educate audiences about how they could look their best. At a Q&A after one event in Nashville in 2010, a woman stood up, took off her jacket and said, with touching candor: “Tim, look at me. I’m a box on top, a big, square box. How can I dress this shape and not look like a fullback?” It was a question I’d heard over and over during the tour: Women who were larger than a size 12 always wanted to know, How can I look good, and why do designers ignore me?

I love the American fashion industry, but it has a lot of problems, and one of them is the baffling way it has turned its back on plus-size women. It’s a puzzling conundrum. The average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18, according to new research from Washington State University. There are 100 million plus-size women in America, and, for the past three years, they have increased their spending on clothes faster than their straightsize counterparts. There is money to be made here ($20.4 billion, up 17 percent from 2013). But many designers — dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk — still refuse to make clothes for them.

In addition to the fact that most designers max out at size 12, the selection of plus-size items on offer at many retailers is paltry compared with what’s available for a size 2 woman. According to a Bloomberg analysis, only 8.5 percent of dresses on Nordstrom.com in May were plus-size. At J.C. Penney’s website, it was 16 percent; Nike.com had a mere five items — total.

I’ve spoken to many designers and merchandisers about this.

The overwhelming response is, “I’m not interested in her.” Why? “I don’t want her wearing my clothes.” Why? “She won’t look the way that I want her to look.”

They say the plus-size woman is complicated, different and difficult, that no two size 16s are alike. Some haven’t bothered to hide their contempt. “No one wants to see curvy women” on the runway, Karl Lagerfeld, head designer of Chanel, said in 2009.

Plenty of mass retailers are no more enlightened: Under chief executive Mike Jeffries, Abercrombie & Fitch sold nothing larger than a size 10, with Jeffries explaining that “we go after the attractive, all-American kid.”

This is a design failure and not a customer issue. There is no reason larger women can’t look just as fabulous as all other women. The key is the harmonious balance of silhouette, proportion and fit, regardless of size or shape. Designs need to be reconceived, not just sized up; it’s a matter of adjusting proportions.

The textile changes, every seam changes. Done right, our clothing can create an optical illusion that

DAN LECCA

helps us look taller and slimmer.

Done wrong, and we look worse than if we were naked.

This problem is difficult to change. The industry, from the runway to magazines to advertising, likes subscribing to the mythology it has created of glamour and thinness. But change is not impossible. There are aesthetically worthy retail successes in this market. When helping women who are size 14 and up, my go-to retailer is Lane Bryant. While the items aren’t fashion with a capital F, they are stylish (but please avoid the cropped pants — always a no-no for any woman). And designer Christian Siriano scored a design and public relations victory after producing a look for Leslie Jones to wear to the “Ghostbusters” redcarpet premiere. Jones, who is not a diminutive woman, had tweeted in despair that she couldn’t find anyone to dress her; Siriano stepped in with a lovely fulllength red gown.

Several retailers that have improved their plus-size offerings have been rewarded. In one year, ModCloth doubled its plus-size lineup. To mark the anniversary, the company paid for a survey of 1,500 American women ages 18 to 44 and released its findings: Seventy-four percent of plus-size women described shopping in stores as “frustrating”; 65 percent said they were “excluded.”

(Interestingly, 65 percent of women of all sizes agreed that plus-size women were ignored by

the fashion industry.) But the plus-size women surveyed also indicated that they wanted to shop more. More than 80 percent said they’d spend more on clothing if they had more choices in their size, and nearly 90 percent said they would buy more if they had trendier options.

According to the company, its plus-size shoppers place 20 percent more orders than its straight-size customers.

Online start-up Eloquii, initially conceived and then killed by the Limited, was reborn in 2014. The trendy plus-size retailer, whose top seller is an over-the-knee boot with four-inch heels and extended calf sizes, grew its sales volume by more than 165 percent in 2015.

Despite the huge financial potential of this market, many designers don’t want to address it.

It’s not in their vocabulary.

Today’s designers operate within paradigms that were established decades ago, including anachronistic sizing. But this is now the shape of women in this nation, and designers need to wrap their minds around it. I profoundly believe that women of every size can look good. But they must be given choices. Separates — tops, bottoms — rather than single items like dresses or jumpsuits always work best for the purpose of fit. Larger women look great in clothes skimming the body, rather than hugging or cascading. There’s an art to doing this. Designers, make it work. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Candidates can’t hide real illness DAVID BROWN is a physician and former science reporter for The Washington Post.

For centuries, prognosis was the principal thing doctors could offer to patients. They couldn’t heal much, but they could say what was likely to happen. Their art was knowing the natural history of disease and imparting that knowledge in an authoritative way.

Today, medicine is awash in treatments that work, but the expectation that doctors can foretell the future has changed little. Every presidential election season, the candidates are asked to bring forth their doctors and medical records to, in effect, attest to their good health for the next four years.

That’s happening in the current campaign, especially this past week as Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, took a break to recover from what is presumably a case of communityacquired pneumonia.

Such infections can be caused by a long list of viruses or bacteria; it’s often hard to identify the pathogen even if you look carefully. Diabetes, emphysema, cirrhosis and other chronic illnesses increase a person’s chance of developing pneumonia, but in one-fifth of cases there’s no underlying problem. Age, however, is an indisputable risk.

So does Clinton’s illness mask, or foretell, a more serious health problem? It could. But it probably doesn’t. More likely it’s the consequence of a transient dip in immunity — lowered resistance —

from the strain of nonstop campaigning by a 68-year-old.

Calls are growing for an independent panel of physicians to evaluate the health of candidates, as is the suggestion that unedited medical records be available for public review. Before either option gains more traction, however, it’s worth asking where they might lead us.

In the standard visit to the doctor, most of the useful information comes from the “history” — the conversation with the patient — and not the physical exam. Would the candidates tell the truth? It’s hard enough for patients to be candid in utter privacy. How would they do in front of a panel of strangers who will soon report to the whole country?

Further, physical exams — in

the absence of symptoms reported by the patient — actually reveal little. So little, in fact, that many doctors believe the “annual physical” should be abandoned.

Alternatively, perhaps the panel doctors won’t examine the candidates. Maybe they’ll just review the medical records and tell us whether there’s something to worry about. Will we believe them? What if there are dissenters? Can there be a minority report?

The less complicated route is to demand that candidates release their medical records in raw form, like tax returns. That will certainly reveal a lot. But what happens if a candidate refuses?

Will public shaming be the only sanction? Will redactions be permitted?

In the end, the question is: What’s enough information, but not too much? As with most things in medicine, the decision requires judgment as well as evidence.

It seems to me candidates should be expected to reveal their medical “problem list” — active and inactive diagnoses and conditions (“childhood asthma,” “Type 2 diabetes,” “non-cardiac chest pain”).

They should reveal what drugs they take on a regular basis — things such as Clinton’s

anticoagulant and Trump’s cholesterol-lowering statin. Asneeded meds (painkillers, Viagra) could be withheld. They should report weight, blood pressure, heart rate and a few key blood tests (measurements of kidney function, cholesterol, etc.). A case could be made for revealing recent diagnostic procedures and a summary of the results.

How far into the past this snooping should go is a matter for debate. More than one year, no more than five, would seem the right window.

None of this information, however, comes close to what we already have attesting to a candidate’s physical fitness.

It’s hard to hide serious illness.

If either Clinton or Trump has cancer, a brain tumor, congestive heart failure, epilepsy, an untreated mood disorder or a half-dozen other things that could get in the way of a president’s performance, we’d know it by now.

They’ve been crisscrossing time zones, sleeping irregularly, eating things handed to them, not exercising enough, and forswearing privacy for two years.

They’re still standing (except for Clinton last weekend) and making sense (more or less). A presidential campaign is a marathon only the fit can finish. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Stand up to Ethiopia’s oppression FEYISA LILESA is an Ethiopian Olympian and winner of a silver medal in the men’s marathon at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

On Aug. 21, when I reached the finish line of the men’s marathon at the Olympics in Rio, I crossed my fists above my head. This is sign of peaceful protest used by my people, the Oromo, for the past 10 months. I did it to raise awareness; hundreds of my fellow Ethiopians have been killed by security forces only because they peacefully protested against injustice. I knew there were millions of people watching the Olympics, and I wanted the world to see me. I want to tell the world what is happening in Ethiopia — in Oromia, Amhara, Ogaden, Gambella and elsewhere.

I know if I go back to Ethiopia I will be killed, arrested or put on a list of people never allowed to leave the country again.

Ethiopia’s government spokesperson made a comment in the media that I would be safe.

But government security forces have killed hundreds for just doing what I did. Crossing my wrists in Rio has already had a great impact on my life; I am now separated from my dear mother, my supportive wife and my precious children in Ethiopia, whom I miss dearly. I am here safely in the United States on a special skills visa for the time being.

As I was preparing for Olympic competition, my thoughts were always preoccupied with the suffering of my people. The Oromo are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. The Ethiopian

coffee that Americans drink comes mostly from my region. We are also well known for our longdistance runners. Peaceful protests against the government started in November when the government was forcing Oromo farmers off their land and selling it to foreign investors. Since then, human rights reports say more than 500 people have been gunned down by the security forces, but I believe at least twice as many have been killed. This includes at least 12 people that I know from my home district of Jaldu in Oromia. Tens of thousands have been arrested.

Families do not know what happened to their sons and daughters after they were taken by the army and police.

While training for the Olympics, I feared for my security, because of some philanthropic

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

work I was doing to help young Oromo students who I knew had no opportunities. I was afraid that someone could even jump out from the bushes and take my life while I was out running alone. I have not had a day when I could put my mind and body in sync to focus entirely on my training.

Recently while I was in Rio, a huge fire broke out at Qilinto prison outside of Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia’s famous political prisoners were there awaiting trial, some for months or years.

Others were held without being charged. Local media reported that gunfire could be heard before and during the fire. A week ago, I received the news that my close friend, Kebede Fayissa, was killed during that incident. His charred body was sent back to his family.

He was arrested on Aug. 6 for protesting. I suffer knowing that I was preparing to go to the Olympics in Rio while Kebede was being arrested for doing the same thing I did — standing up for our people. Now he is gone.

The Oromo just want their full rights like any other people. They want justice, they want free speech, they want government accountability, they want a free press, they want full participation in the political process and for their constitutional rights to be respected and protected by their

government. Yes, we protest, but ours is a peaceful protest.

But things are getting worse in Ethiopia. I fear for what could happen in the future. Our grievances have not been heard in the rest of the world because the government has blocked communication. Here is my question: Can nonviolence succeed if no one hears our voices or sees our protests? We all yearn for peace, but the government continues its attacks. I fear that if the killing does not stop, people could abandon nonviolence in self-defense.

My country is an important ally of the United States. Allies should not let allies commit the abuses that happen in Ethiopia every day.

I don’t think that the United States wants Ethiopia to disintegrate. I am asking the U.S. government to demand an explanation from Ethiopia and to condemn the brutal and unfair actions of the government. The United States needs to push hard for democracy in Ethiopia. I think that is the only thing that will keep my country together.

I’m a runner, not a scholar or politician. But I know that all people yearn for fairness and justice. I will continue to race and pursue my career, and I will speak out until the Oromo and others in Ethiopia find justice. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Smartphones BY

H AYLEY T SUKAYAMA

Americans are estimated to check their smartphones a collective 8 bil­ lion times per day, and Nielsen says we spend an average of one hour and 39 minutes on our smartphones each day — up 60 percent from last year. But while many of us consider our smartphones to be an essential part of our lives, there are many misconceptions about how we use them and how they affect us.

MYTH NO. 1 Smartphones give people cancer.

The World Health Organization (WHO) set off a small flurry of panic in 2011 when it classified the radiation from cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic.” But scientists have never established a direct link between cellphones and cancer, as even the WHO admitted. The group’s fact sheet, issued at the same time as its classification, says, “To date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use.”

Researchers have yet to definitively rule out suggestions that phones can increase cases of two types of brain cancer, a malignant form called glioma and a benign form called acoustic neuroma, but a definitive causal link has never been found. And the National Cancer Institute says there has been no significant increase in brain cancers in the past decade as cellphone use has increased.

MYTH NO. 2 Smartphones are a luxury that poor people don’t need.

The dropping price of smartphones has put these devices in reach of many more people. Companies such as Motorola and Chinese manufacturers Huawei and OnePlus have focused on selling affordable phones, particularly in the international market. The Pew Research Center reported that, as of last year, 54 percent of people across 21 emerging and

developing countries “reported using the internet at least occasionally or owning a smartphone.” In Malaysia, for instance, where the median monthly income is about $1,130, Pew found that 65 percent of people had a smartphone.

Smartphones have become a daily necessity, not just a perk for the middle class. For many lowincome families, as the Commerce Department found, the devices provide the only reliable access to the Internet — which they need to apply for jobs or do homework, among other things.

What’s more, in crisis situations, smartphones have become the most reliable way to get information, apply for aid and find a place to live.

MYTH NO. 3 Smartphones make you more productive.

Tapping away at your smartphone all day doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting things done. A study released in August, commissioned by the security firm Kaspersky Lab, found quite the opposite.

Researchers from the Universities of Würzburg and NottinghamTrent asked 95 participants to perform tasks with their phones placed in their pockets, on their desks, in a locked drawer or outside the room. As the phones got farther away, productivity levels went steadily up. Overall, those whose smartphones were outside the room performed 26 percent better on the tests than other participants did.

EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Does having a smartphone really make people antisocial? This group of Pokémon Go players in Virginia might disagree.

MYTH NO. 4 Smartphones make us dumb and antisocial.

There’s nothing inherent in smartphones that turns us into dunces. When it comes to actual intelligence, some studies suggest that they in fact make us smarter. Researchers studying the “Flynn effect” — a trend that suggests IQ overall has been improving over the years — in people older than 50 say mobile phones and computers seem to contribute “considerably” to people’s ability to stay in intellectually demanding jobs for longer periods of time. “On average, test scores of people aged 50+ today correspond to test scores from people 4-8 years younger and tested 6 years earlier,” researcher Valeria Bordone told Science Daily.

There are certainly cases in which digital media can prompt isolating behaviors; more and more researchers treat excessive smartphone and Internet use as an addiction. But that doesn’t necessarily make users antisocial.

In fact, smartphones enable us to speak more with close friends and relatives than ever before, as well as to meet new people and organize social events. A 2015 Pew study showed that coordinating plans and talking to

family and friends were the second and third most common uses for smartphones, behind finding information.

MYTH NO. 5 Smartphones are killing retail stores.

There is no denying that smartphones have altered the way we shop and that online shopping provides competition for the traditional storefront. But about 90 percent of purchases are still made in stores. Often, stores and smartphones have developed a symbiotic relationship, as retailers experiment with ways to incorporate mobile shopping into in-person shopping. One example is the rise of in-store pickup programs, which give customers the convenience of mobile shopping and the immediacy of real-world shopping — all without the shipping times.

Mobile shopping is on the rise — up 30 percent between the holiday seasons of 2014 and 2015, according to IBM — but brickand-mortar stores are also popular with young people. An August report from eMarketer found that teens prefer shopping in a real store for just about everything apart from games. n Tsukayama covers consumer technology for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE: U.S. Representative, Congressional District 8 THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

Is it imperative that some law on immigration reform pass and, if so, what do you see as the key component?

CANDIDATES:

DAVE REICHERT

TONY VENTRELLA

Incumbent, former King County sheriff

Former sportscaster and online host

prefers Republican Party

ANSWER: Immigration reform is a national security issue. It also plays a major role in our economy and the lives of countless families in our region. Our first priority must be to secure our border, but we cannot stop there. We need to streamline the process for H1B and H2A visas so we can fill the jobs that allow our agricultural community and high-tech industry to thrive.

We must also develop a system that allows families who are already here to work through a process that includes paying fines, back taxes and full compliance of our laws. A functioning immigration system is one that keeps our communities safe, benefits our economy, and treats families with dignity.

prefers Democratic Party

ANSWER: There is a need for comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Enforcement of immigration laws must be humane, while continuing to protect our borders and national security.

A reform bill should include the following components: • Keeping families together; • Ending the three and ten year bars that cause individuals to remain in the shadows, rather than pursuing a green card by leaving the country; and • Allowing for guest workers, so that farmers and growers have a reliable workforce, apart from seasonal workers.

I have talked with growers in Eastern Washington and they are looking for a more responsive answer from the current Congressman regarding this issue. Many have expressed their frustration with his lack of action.

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

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

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