Worst Week Kevin McCarthy 3
Politics Red states warm up to Sanders 4
Income The high cost of city living 17
5 Myths Online dating 23
ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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IN COLLABORATION WITH
A billionaire’s quest to build an artificial brain PAGE 12
Thought process
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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON
Kevin McCarthy by Chris Cillizza
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ortunes can change so quickly in Washington. Two weeks ago, Rep. John A. Boehner (ROhio) shocked the political world by announcing that he would resign as House speaker. Into the GOP leadership void stepped Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a genial Californian who, despite having been elected only in 2006, looked like he would go unchallenged for the top spot. Then came his interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, in which McCarthy said a special committee formed to investigate the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya — and thensecretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the response — was primarily responsible for Clinton’s declining poll numbers in the Democratic presidential race. Clinton immediately seized on McCarthy’s comments, insisting that they proved, finally, that Republicans were seeking to politicize the deaths of four Americans. Things only got worse from there. A letter circulated by Rep. Walter B. Jones (RN.C.) this past week asking House leadership candidates to confess any “misdeeds” in their personal lives led to rampant rumormongering about potential skeletons in McCarthy’s closet. And on Wednesday, the day before the GOP conference was to vote for speaker, the House Freedom Caucus, the hardest of hardcore conservatives, endorsed longshot Rep. Daniel Webster (RFla.) over McCarthy.
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JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By the time his colleagues gathered Thursday morning, McCarthy was reeling, finding himself well short of a convincing majority of support. Still, no one expected that he would remove himself from the race entirely — dashing the ambitions that had seemed so close to being realized just a fortnight ago. Kevin McCarthy, for watching your career flash before your eyes in the space of a single week, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n
This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 52
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS
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ON THE COVER Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen is using his wealth to back two philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Illustration by SÉBASTIEN THIBAULT for The Washington Post
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Bernie Sanders’s red-state appeal
JARED WICKERHAM FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
His economic message resonates with the working-class voters Obama lost D AVID W EIGEL Morgantown, W.Va. BY
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helley Brannon, 62, can sum up the Obama presidency with three words. Well, three words and an exclamation. “He screwed us,” said Brannon, a coal miner from Wise County, Va., as he sat outside a rally for the United Mine Workers of America. “Man, he screwed us.” He shook his head under a camouflage hat that matched his camouflage UMWA T-shirt, and
he described his fantasy of dumping nuclear waste in the yards of environmentalists, “if they think coal’s so bad.” He mulled over the mistake he says the UMWA made in 2008, when it endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton. Then he explained why he would probably be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the next Democratic primary. “For one thing, he knows what union is, and he respects it,” Brannon said. “That’s all we need is respect. He’s just a likable fellow, trustworthy. I don’t think
she has the same respect for the union, and she really shot herself in the foot over, you know, all that secretive stuff.” West Virginia has rejected the Obama-era Democratic Party more dramatically than any other state outside the South, with Appalachian counties that voted for Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale turning blood red over the past eight years. But if you think it’s in places like this where the insurgent Sanders campaign faces its most formidable test, here’s what he thinks: It is also
From left, Rick Wells, Gary McGwire and James Richardson at a United Mine Workers of America rally in Morgantown, W.Va., on Oct. 2. The union says it hasn’t decided on an endorsement in the 2016 presidential contest. It has never endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton.
one of his greatest opportunities. The Vermont socialist believes that white, working-class voters — the sort of people Obama once self-defeatingly said “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — are just one honest argument away from coming back. “We have millions of workingclass people who are voting for Republican candidates whose views are diametrically opposite to what voters want,” Sanders said in an interview. “How many think it’s a great idea that we have trade
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POLITICS policies that lead to plants in West Virginia being shut down? How many think there should be massive cuts in Pell grants or in Social Security? In my opinion, not too many people.” This state, one of the last to vote in the 2016 primary race, is supposed to be Clinton country. Seven years ago, in the 2008 primary, West Virginia Democrats gave Clinton a landslide victory over Obama. She won 69 percent of the white vote and did even better with voters who lacked a college education. A Democrat who improved a few points on Obama’s 39 percent of the national white vote in the 2012 general election would stroll into the White House. Sanders, who has won elections only in a white, rural state, thinks his brand of bold democratic socialism can sell. He has never campaigned here, yet at Friday’s rally in Morgantown, miner after miner said they basically agreed with the former mayor of Burlington more than they agreed with Clinton. Several were aware that Sanders had walked picket lines, something that resonated as they packed a hotel ballroom to demand that Washington fully fund UMWA pensions. Sanders’s campaign theory may be that there’s a larger electorate hiding in plain sight. Over the summer, as he gained in polls, Sanders was criticized for bringing seemingly every issue back to the sediment of economics and class. Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson dubbed it “class reductionism.” Clinton allies had trouble seeing how his support could grow beyond white liberals. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who has endorsed Clinton, said Sanders has a weakness in West Virginia greater even than the socialist label: coal. Although the economics-first focus makes sense, Manchin said, Sanders’s support for every major Obama initiative on the environment makes his candidacy a “nonstarter” here. “His environmental stance?” Manchin asked. “Oh, my, it would be awful.” But Sanders believes that such naysayers are missing the weight of his cardinal argument — for greater economic fairness — and voters’ willingness to look past the other issues where they disagree.
JARED WICKERHAM FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
He has won elections in Vermont, a white, rural, gun-owning state, as a socialist. The socialissue “distractions” bemoaned by red-state Democrats have seemed to bounce right off his armor. (He has taken mixed positions on gun control, supporting a ban on assault rifles, for instance, but opposing the Brady Bill.) In the end, is the white guy who voted for him in Vermont any different than the white guy in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who was told to blame liberals for his problems? “What I’ve found in Vermont and around the country is that we go to people and say, ‘Look, we do have differences,’ ” Sanders said. “ ‘I believe in gay marriage. I’m not going to change your view if you don’t. I believe climate change is absolutely real, and some of you do not. But how many of you think we should give hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the richest 1 percent?’ ” Conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.) has made a similar argument — that his party can win, with no changes to its message, if more evangelical voters are inspired to come out. Bolstering Sanders’s case are his strong numbers in independent polls. A national Quinnipiac survey last month found him polling marginally better against leading Republican candidates than Clinton did. A
recent Marquette University poll indicated that Sanders is running just as strong as Clinton in Wisconsin, home to some of the white voters who have abandoned the Democrats in off years. Something similar may be happening in West Virginia. In Morgantown, home to West Virginia University, a 62-year-old activist named Andy Cockburn went to an early organizing meeting for Clinton and found only 10 other people. In July, more than 100 people packed a bar basement and started organizing for Sanders. Railing against oligarchies and “the 1 percent” means one thing in New York or San Francisco. It means more in West Virginia, where coal magnate Don Blankenship is standing trial and Patriot Coal is trying to spend most of a $22 million settlement for miners on its own attorneys. Sanders is the candidate with consistency on corporate greed — a fact that has helped him slow down some labor endorsements for Clinton. According to the New York Times, the International Association of Fire Fighters hit the pause button on its expected endorsement after too many local leaders blanched. The other week, Sanders lost the endorsement of the National Education Association but only after a similar protest made Clinton work for it.
Don Maynard attends a United Mine Workers of America rally Oct. 2 in Morgantown, W.Va. Many in the crowd expressed support for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
What we’re going to do is base our decision on our future here.” UMWA President Cecil Roberts
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The UMWA has never endorsed Clinton. In 2008, it went for the doomed campaign of John Edwards, switching to Obama only after he had basically sewn up the nomination. In 2012 it made no endorsement, in an avowed protest of the administration’s environmental regulations. This year, the union, with 32,354 of its 71,160 members based in West Virginia, is not yet close to a decision. “What we’re going to do is base our decision on our future here,” UMWA President Cecil Roberts said in an interview — “whether we’re going to have health care, have pensions, have jobs for people in Appalachia.” That question could vex Sanders just as much as Clinton. In his energy talking points, Sanders notes that he “introduced the gold standard for climate-change legislation with Sen. Barbara Boxer to tax carbon and methane emissions,” a résumé item that would be about as welcome in West Virginia as a University of Maryland Terps jersey. Asked what he would say to a coal miner who blames Environmental Protection Agency regulations for the loss of his job, Sanders said he could only be straight with him. “What we have to say is, ‘Look, through no fault of your own, you’re working in an industry which is helping to cause climate change and in fact having a negative impact on the country and world,’ ” Sanders said. “What the government does have is an obligation to say: ‘We’ll protect you financially as we transition away from fossil fuel. We are going to create jobs in your community, extended unemployment benefits. If you lose your job to a trade deal, you get benefits for two years. You get job training.’ I would take that same approach to energy jobs that are lost because of the threat of climate change.” Nothing about Sanders’s pitch is easy, but this piece is especially rough. Still, at his farm in Grafton, Democratic former state legislator Mike Manypenny was firm that enthusiasm for Sanders is big and getting bigger. “This is something new,” he said. “Barring anything happening in the Democratic debate, like Bernie stumbling badly, I don’t see anything changing the momentum. I think he wins.” n
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Planning an even better second act BY R OBERT C OSTA, P HILIP R UCKER AND D AN B ALZ
New York
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fter a summer of dominating the Republican presidential campaign, Donald Trump is moving into a new and uncertain phase that the billionaire businessman acknowledges will be more challenging than any project he has ever undertaken — even as he views the nomination as now within his reach. In an hour-long interview with The Washington Post at his 26thfloor office in Trump Tower, the Republican front-runner ruminated on the many obstacles ahead. Sitting at a desk piled high with magazine covers bearing his image and strewn with polls and other testaments to his early success, Trump said he is far from satisfied with what he has accomplished to date. “If you don’t win, what have I done? I’ve wasted time,” he said. “I want to make America great again, and you can’t do that if you come in a close second.” Trump laid out for the first time in detail the elements of what will be the second chapter of his 2016 bid, signaling an evolution toward a somewhat more traditional campaign. Trump is preparing his first television ads with a media firm that is new to politics. Melania, his wife, and Ivanka, his daughter, are planning public appearances highlighting women’s health issues to help close Trump’s empathy gap with female voters. Trump is also publishing a book and planning to roll out policies on reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs and on trade and China’s currency manipulations. And he is deepening his political organization far beyond the early states, with top advisers vowing that his fight for the nomination will go all the way to the floor of the Republican National Convention. Trump, who is mostly selffunding his campaign, said he had originally budgeted up to $20 million through mid-September for television advertising. But so far he has not spent anything to go on
MARK ZALESKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trump is going to employ nontraditional TV ads and a book on his way to the GOP nomination the airwaves, since he is so often on them: “It’s been all Trump, all the time. . . . If you had an ad, people would OD.” But he and his aides said that would soon change. His campaign says it has hired a Florida-based advertising firm, and Trump said he has proposed several concepts for ads in the works. “I have such a great concept — in fact, so good,” Trump said, declining to specify. Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump’s team would probably spend considerably more than $20 million on paid media later this year — “whatever it takes.” He said the spots would be “nontraditional,” saying the firm, which he and Trump declined to name, has never created political ads. Central to the fall strategy is the release later this month of a book that will serve as a campaign manifesto. During the interview, Trump showed off the cover and title,
“Crippled America,” and held up pages of the galleys, which he was editing by hand. “It’s actually the hardest I’ve worked on a book since ‘The Art of the Deal,’ ” he said, referring to his 1987 bestseller. “I don’t want to have a stupid statement in the book that people are going to say, ‘Hey, why did he say that?’ ” Trump said he does not believe the next stage of the campaign will require him to change his flamboyant, confrontational style, which has captivated the attention of voters whether they support him or not. But he noted that running for president has brought pressures and demands that he did not experience in the business world and had not anticipated in the political arena. “It’s very unforgiving,” he said. “If you make a mistake that can be very easily explained, it can still be turned around and then you have three bad days of press over something that actually wasn’t even a big deal.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, seen Oct. 3 in Franklin, Tenn., says he’s in it to win. “If you don’t win, what have I done? I’ve wasted time,” he said. “I want to make America great again, and you can’t do that if you come in a close second.”
Trump said he doesn’t want to significantly tinker with how he presents himself to the public. As Lewandowski put it, Trump “remains Trump.” “It’s going to be the same thing,” Trump said. “You’ve got to have a personality. You’ve got to be able to speak your mind. You’ve got to have some thoughts that are correct.” Asked if he had discussed an exit plan with Trump should the candidate slip in the polls, Lewandowski said he had not: “We’re going to the convention — that’s it. One delegate or 2,000 and change, we’re going to the convention, and there’s nobody who can get him out of the race.” From behind his desk, with Central Park over his shoulder, and with no television cameras rolling, Trump presented a less strident and combative persona than the one that has become a familiar presence on television. He was conversational and at ease, even introspective at times, while still displaying high sensitivity to perceived slights and unfair media coverage. Trump held up last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, which included a cover he did not like of a cartoonish Trump as a rising balloon. Then he flipped to an inside page with a black-andwhite portrait of him intensely pointing his finger at the camera. “Look at this,” he said, arguing that the photo should have been on the cover. “It’s the greatest picture I’ve ever had.” Trump’s candidacy has been fueled by his loud swagger and his hard-line views on immigration. But in the coming weeks, he hopes to bolster and reorient his message with an eye toward bluecollar voters. Glancing at an office wall covered in mementos and awards, Trump picked up a campaign bumper sticker featuring his name in thick red letters. “A hot ticket,” Trump declared, smiling proudly. “I believe in the power of positive thinking,” he said, “but I never like to talk it. It’s never in sight until you win it. You know, there are a lot of minefields out there.” n
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Ann Romney can feel Clinton’s pain BY
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ast winter, Ann Romney curled up in the family mansion to write her memoir, in pen on yellow legal pads. She wanted the story to hinge on her struggle with multiple sclerosis. The fatigue. The agony. The depression. After she miraculously went into remission, the brutality of presidential politics became a new source of pain — which she relived when she saw Hillary Rodham Clinton on the “Today” show Tuesday. Voters “just don’t connect with you,” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie said to Clinton. And “they might not like you.” Horrible, Romney thought. “Oh that really hurts my feelings, I have to tell ya,” Clinton said, and Romney believed her, because she has felt those feelings. The judgments of likability. The accusations of inauthenticity, of out-of-touchness. “It’s like: ‘We don’t like you; how come?’ ” Romney says, mimicking the querulous media. “It’s like, really? I know her. And she’s obviously an extraordinary mother, she’s extremely brilliant, with unbelievable experience. The whole thing, with the attacks from everything, you develop — a bubble. From that. A protective bubble. Which you have to do. You have to. Whatever that bubble then projects to somebody is really not what’s inside the bubble.” The almost-FLOTUS arrives for breakfast alone, without a bubble. No security or entourage or husband or horse or any of her 28 children and grandchildren. Just herself and her Givenchy purse. Can you believe that only one presidential cycle after the Romneys were doomed by their demure wealth — the dressage, the car elevator, the off-handed $10,000 bets — Trump has momentum precisely because he flaunts his success? “So much of politics is theater,”
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
The almost-first lady knows about the brutality of political campaigns — and about life after them Romney, 66, says. “And it’s ‘how do you play it?’ And he’s playing it well. Let’s give him credit for that.” The Romneys are not theater people. They are too nice for that. Too herringboned and Town & Country. They don’t burn bridges. They build them above creeks on their property. Four years ago, Mitt Romney was leading in the polls for the Republican primary while fending off a clown car of challengers. After he clinched the nomination in 2012, Trump threw Ann a birthday-party fundraiser in Manhattan at his penthouse triplex, complete with a cake topped by a figurine of her horse Rafalca. It was “totally Donald,” she remembers. Everything was gold. Then the coal miner’s daughter — who had once been crippled by M.S., who had been through a miscarriage and a breast-cancer scare and raised five boys — was
giving a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, which built to a promise on behalf of her husband: “This. Man. Will. Not. Fail.” He did, of course, by 126 electoral votes. And now the Romneys are full-time grandparents in suburban Salt Lake City, with at least 18 of 23 grandchildren no more than one time zone away. “Truly, our life is better,” Romney says, exuding relief, stirring blackberries into her oatmeal. “We have flexibility, freedom, ability to do what we want, go where want, be with our grandchildren. Our personal life is better.” The memoir is called “In This Together: My Story,” and as far as this kind of book goes, it’s not bad. It’s breezy and frank, with just enough eyebrow-raisers to redeem the platitudes. The book has a definite purpose, and so does Ann Romney: to
Ann Romney, the wife of 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, has written a memoir, “In This Together: My Story.” About campaigning, she says, “The whole thing, with the attacks from everything, you develop — a bubble.”
offer hope to people living with “the monster” of M.S., and to promote the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The center, for which the Romneys gave seed money, has 250 scientists and researchers working to unlock the mysteries of M.S., Alzheimer’s and other neurological ailments that don’t get as much attention as heart disease or various cancers. Of course Mitt read a draft, tweaked her passage on Romneycare, and is portrayed as the sweetest of sweethearts. How is he? He’s exulting in his grandfatherness, she says, and advising his sons. He helps Tagg with investments. He’s a political sounding board for Josh, whom Ann Romney said she thinks will run for statewide office in Utah. Mitt’s more involved in the Mormon Church now. And people keep telling him to run again for president. The family had a 20-second conversation about it in January. The answer was no, even though everyone in the Romney clan believes in Mitt’s presidentiality. “I felt worse for what America had lost than what we had lost,” Ann Romney writes in the memoir. “More than anyone else in the world, I knew the kind of president Mitt would have been.” There’s a curious phrase, a skeleton key to something, that appears on page 127 of the memoir. “Eternal perspectives.” What does it mean? “Our faith believes that the family is the structure that will last beyond this Earth life,” Romney says, before scooting off to lunch with a friend. “And that’s why we put such importance on the family. We invest in it, we are committed to it, we are committed to marriage, we’re committed to raising children. And that is going to be that eternal structure that will always be there.” The White House, by comparison, seems as fleeting as a sand castle. n
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Team sports take a beating BY
M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD
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he number of children playing team sports is falling, with experts blaming a parent-driven focus on elite travel clubs, specialization in one sport and pursuit of scholarships for hurting the country’s youth sports leagues. Baseball, basketball, softball, soccer and touch football — long staples of American childhood — have all taken hits, worrying public health advocates, league organizers and pro sports teams. More than 26 million children ages 6 to 17 played team sports in 2014, down nearly 4 percent from 2009, according to a survey by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. Total sports played are down nearly 10 percent. Some of the drop-off is attributable to the recession, particularly in low-income urban areas. But experts fear larger socioeconomic forces are in play, especially in the suburbs, where the shift to elite competition over the past two decades has taken a growing toll: Children are playing fewer sports, and the less talented are left behind in recreational leagues with poor coaching, uneven play and the message that they aren’t good enough. Seventy percent of kids quit sports by age 13. “The system is now designed to meet the needs of the most talented kids,” said Mark Hyman, a professor at George Washington University and the author of several books on youth sports. “We no longer value participation. We value excellence.” And those studying the issue know were to put the blame: parents. “The adults have won,” Hyman said. “If we wiped the slate clean and reinvented youth sports from scratch by putting the physical and emotional needs of kids first, how different would it look? Nothing would be recognizable.” The Aspen Institute, the Clinton Foundation, and several amateur and professional sports organizations are working on solutions. Officials came together last month for a roundtable at the U.S.
RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST
With an eye on scholarships, more parents are pushing their kids toward elite travel clubs Open tennis tournament in New York and earlier this year at a Washington summit attended by the U.S. surgeon general. Dick’s Sporting Goods is appealing directly to customers, asking for donations at the checkout counter for Sports Matter, its new program to pump money into underfunded youth sports teams. The toughest problem, Hyman said, is that no parent wants to acknowledge the system is broken. Many of the adults trying to fix the problem remember a simpler, less competitive, less expensive time in youth sports. There were no travel teams, no faraway tournaments — now a $7 billion industry. There were pickup games with friends and leagues at neighborhood parks, with the focus mostly on fun. All of the kids in the neighborhood played together: the stars, the stalwarts, the daisy pickers. One of the most popular movies in the 1970s: “The Bad News Bears.” Amazingly, kids still made it to the major leagues.
“Sports was everything in my life,” said Dick’s chief executive Edward W. Stack, who played baseball and football. “I don’t remember every teacher I had, but I remember every coach I had.” Although Wall Street analysts haveexpressedsomeconcernabout how participation drops could affect the sporting goods business, Stack says: “The whole problem is very personal to me. This is not about business. I saw how my life was impacted through sports.” There is little debate over the value of playing sports for children, although the risk of concussions in contact sports, particularly football, has become a concern for parents, pediatricians and coaches. Still, active kids are less likely to be obese and are more likely to have higher test scores, attend college and have higher incomes. This is how youth sports looks now: The most talented kids play on travel teams beginning at age 7 (or sometimes younger), even though many athletes bloom
Coach Rachel Freehand instructs her players on strategy at a Koa Field Hockey U-12 practice at the Wheaton Sports Pavilion on Thursday in Wheaton, Md. With traditional team sports in decline, niche sports might be benefiting from some of the quitters. Lacrosse is up nearly 12 percent. Field hockey is up nearly 8 percent.
much later; the best coaches (often dads who are former college athletes) manage travel teams, leaving rec leagues with helpful but less knowledgeable parents in charge; and coaches of elite teams pressure kids to play only one sport (the one they are coaching), even though studies show this leads to injuries, burnout and athletes who aren’t well rounded. Particularly with specialization, parents believe they are making the right choice in pursuit of a scholarship. “I’m done trying to tell parents that the odds are against them,” said Hyman, the GW professor. “That’s a loser’s game. They don’t want to believe that. The better approach is to tell them that what they’re doing is not helping you reach your goal.” Those who study the issue are more worried about the kids who just want to play sports for fun but get the least attention. “The rec leagues become much less sustainable,” said Tom Farrey, a sportswriter running the Aspen Institute’s initiative on youth sports. “These kids kind of know they are second-class, and they check out quickly. The quality of coaching isn’t as good. The kids fall behind. It becomes a compounding effect.” With traditional team sports in decline — the number of kids playing touch football is down more than 7 percent, softball down 5 percent, and baseball, basketball and soccer all down nearly 2 percent — niche sports might be benefiting from some of the quitters. Lacrosse is up nearly 12 percent. Field hockey nearly 8 percent. Meanwhile, the race is on to put solutions in place. The Aspen Institute has made eight recommendations, including revitalizing intown leagues, reintroducing free play, encouraging sports sampling, training coaches and, perhaps most important, asking kids what they want. “Hopefully, these ideas can help change things,” Farrey said. “You’re not going to change the culture by telling parents to stop acting like fools.” n
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A call for clarity in police shootings BY A ARON C . D AVIS AND W ESLEY L OWERY
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he lack of accurate information about policeinvolved shootings is roiling the nation’s law enforcement community, leaving officials unable to say whether highprofile killings are isolated events or part of an alarming trend, FBI Director James B. Comey said Wednesday. Speaking to a private gathering of more than 100 politicians and top law enforcement officials, Comey expressed frustration that the federal government has no better data on police shootings than databases assembled this year by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper. “It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody,” he said. “You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to ‘The Martian.’ . . . The CDC can do the same with the flu,” he continued. “It’s ridiculous — it’s embarrassing and ridiculous — that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.” Mayors, police chiefs and state attorneys general said the lack of data is contributing to a dangerous trend in which police officers spurn aggressive tactics for fear of becoming the next officer to be caught on camera in a compromising situation. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) implored U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch to stand up publicly for police officers and show them that the nation’s top cop has their back. “There’s no doubt Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, in my view, have put the genie out of the bottle,” Emanuel said, reciting a list of cities where policeinvolved fatalities have provoked civic unrest. Although most officers do the right thing, authorities lack the
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
FBI director decries ‘ridiculous’ lack of official data as cities move to increase transparency data to prove it, said Emanuel, who served as President Obama’s first chief of staff. “Unless we deal with backing them up, the gang members know” police “are not putting their hands on them because they don’t want to be prosecuted, whether it be by public opinion or by the court.” The Summit on Violent Crime Reduction was convened by the Justice Department and comes as law enforcement agencies across the nation are taking unprecedented steps to improve transparency and data collection, efforts that could bring clarity to how often and under what circumstances officers use deadly force. In New York, state officials now require a special prosecutor to investigate any death at the hands of police. In Texas, lawmakers recently approved legislation requiring local police to report shootings by their officers. And in California, Attorney General Kamala Harris has released a searchable database containing a dec-
ade’s worth of information about deaths in police custody, as well as officers killed or injured in the line of duty. “We have a system currently that is almost entirely reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,” said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is that they don’t lie.” In perhaps the most significant development, the Justice Department announced Monday that it, too, is keeping a database of deaths in police custody — the first effort by federal officials to assemble accurate information about such killings as they happen. Until now, federal officials have relied on local police to report officerinvolved shootings, but reporting is voluntary and typically occurs months after the fact. “The administration’s position has consistently been that we need to have national, consistent data,” Lynch said Monday. “We are work-
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie RawlingsBlake was among officials attending the Justice Department’s Summit on Violent Crime Reduction.
ing closely with law enforcement to develop national consistent standards for collecting this kind of information.” Advocates for better information about police use of force say the usefulness of the federal database remains to be seen. “There are all sorts of important bits of info that should be collected in a national data base of deaths involving the cops,” said David Klinger, a former police officer and professor at the University of Missouri, who has long advocated for better data. “If they get it right, good on them. If not, well . . .” The FBI has for years collected information about people killed by police officers, but reporting is voluntary and only 3 percent of the nation’s 18,000 police departments comply. As a result, the data is virtually useless, Klinger and others say. The Post’s database shows that over 750 people have been shot and killed by police so far this year — nearly double the number recorded in any year by the FBI. The vast majority of those killed were armed with a deadly weapon. However, blacks represent a disproportionate percentage of those who were unarmed when they were killed, the database shows. Justice Department officials are exploring new methods of gathering the data on deaths in custody, including mining rosters maintained independently by newspapers and community activists and then requesting additional information from police departments, medical examiners and agencies. “It’s important to have transparency around police killings, but also around police interactions,” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) said. Rawlings-Blake saw her city erupt into riots and looting in April after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a black man who suffered fatal injuries while being transported in a police van. “Change is coming. If you can’t see that, you’re blind,” she said. “There is a wave in our country that is unrelenting, that will hold officers accountable.” n
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WORLD
Dread, defiance in VW’s home town A NTHONY F AIOLA Wolfsburg, Germany BY
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he cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s dream to bring affordable cars to the masses, this city emerged from the ashes of World War II by hitching its star to Volkswagen. VW’s vast global headquarters, along with an auto plant so big it could fit Monaco under its roof, are the engines that drive this city of 125,000. Injected with VW cash, the local soccer team went from third rate to first tier. Thousands of residents live in apartments built by the auto giant. A $500 million Volkswagen theme park — think Disney meets Detroit — lures 2.2 million visitors a year. But in the wake of an emissions scandal that could cost Volkswagen billions of euros in fines and recalls, this company town is suddenly bracing for something that had become virtually unknown here in recent years: lean times. After the scandal broke last month, Wolfsburg City Hall — a 1950s behemoth on Porsche Street — declared a spending freeze, citing fears of a sharp decline in tax revenue, of which VW directly or indirectly accounts for more than half. Timing for a $70 million modern education center that would house a middle school and adult learning project under the same roof is now up in the air. Renovations and expansions of wellness, cultural and sports centers are on hold. Road projects are being reconsidered or delayed. Off years at VW have rippled through the Wolfsburg economy before, but analysts expect the hit from the emissions scandal to be unprecedented. Overall, the jolt could end up shaving a few tenths of a percentage point off growth in Europe’s largest economy. But no place will feel the downshift more than Wolfsburg. “There is a general consensus to take things a bit slower for a while,” Mayor Klaus Mohrs said. Suggesting a tough road ahead, a hiring freeze is already in effect at Volkswagen’s financial lending arm based in nearby Braunsch-
REITHAUSEN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Amid emissions scandal, Wolfsburg is preparing for lean times even as it rallies behind automaker weig. The Volkswagen Group — which owns a constellation of car brands including VW, Audi, Porsche, Seat, Bentley, Bugatti and Lamborghini — is cutting production at its massive engine plant a 37-minute drive southwest. On Tuesday, VW chief executive Matthias Müller warned employees of “pain” ahead for the company, saying that future investments would be “under scrutiny,” according to the Associated Press. On Thursday, VW’s U.S. chief testified before Congress that the carmaker is pulling diesel models from its 2016 lineup. It has all come as a shock in a town built on Das Auto. Privately, some residents now talk of a new sober mood that has led to the cancellation of dinner parties and hangs like a cloud over city businesses that depend on VW and its 64,000 local employees.
“Everybody in Wolfsburg is worried,” said Antonio Viapiano, an Italian hairdresser who runs a salon near the VW plant. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.” Founded by the Nazis, this industrial hub of sprawling factories — punctuated by a massive power plant bearing the VW logo — was never a looker. During World War II, its assembly lines, manned in part by forced laborers and initially meant to churn out the forerunner of the VW Beetle, produced military vehicles and armaments for the German war machine. After the Allied occupation of Germany, the city named after the Nazis’ Strength Through Joy social program was re-founded as Wolfsburg, taking its name from an ancient castle in the city. Today, it has the feel of an oversize office park, with drab postwar housing blocks radiating out from VW’s
Volkswagen Beetles are assembled at a plant in Wolfsburg, West Germany, in 1954.
sprawling corporate complexes. But the city is proud. And with an economy that even in lean times is the envy of Europe, it is also fiercely loyal to the hand that feeds. Despite a scandal that could cost the city millions in lost tax revenue, most here are rallying to VW’s side. “It’s a fortress mentality now,” said Svante Evenburg, a Wolfsburg city councilor from the Pirate Party. “The first instinct is to protect VW, no matter what they did.” Take Britta Enders, who works on the VW paint-spray line here and said she went as far as printing T-shirts to sell to locals after the scandal broke. They are emblazoned with the slogan “VW — Trust in a Global Brand”; she said she has already sold 150. “I stand by VW,” she said, declining to be drawn into a discussion on the possible criminal activity at the company. “We are proud to work for VW.” The city is abuzz with rumors. Some swear that Volkswagen will suspend annual bonuses — not true, the company says. Even more insist that the scandal is nothing more than an American plot. Indeed, since the U.S. government publicly charged VW with cheating on emissions tests, prompting a broader admission of guilt from the company that it installed software to cheat on such tests in 11 million cars worldwide, one impulse here has been to kill the messenger. A 38-year-old who test-drives cars for VW, and who declined to give his name, conceded that the scandal was “bad for the image of the city of Wolfsburg.” But he said he was also deeply suspicious of American motives at a time of rising competition from German automakers. “It is not a coincidence [that the Americans] are causing such a commotion now about the emissions levels,” he said. Evenburg, the city councilor, is one of the few in Wolfsburg speaking out about VW’s lapse in ethics. He said that Wolfsburg would now pay the price. “This is one of the biggest crises this city has faced,” he said. “We’re going to lose a lot of tax money from this.” n
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Refugee journeys take a toll on kids A NNA F IFIELD Belgrade, Serbia BY
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oor had never seen the sea, much less been in it. Of course, she couldn’t swim. But at 4:30 one recent morning, Noor, her parents and her three younger siblings put on life jackets barely thicker than sweaters and got into the dinghy. They’d made it from Baghdad to the Turkish coast, and now it was time to venture onward to Greece. The waves were high and rough, crashing into the cramped boat. “I was crying a lot. I thought we were going to die,” said Noor, a 13-year-old Iraqi girl. The man in charge didn’t want to land the boat on the island of Lesbos, so he told everyone to get out 30 yards or so from shore. The water was above their heads. “I was so scared when my father told me to jump out of the boat,” Noor said, smiling meekly, at a “child-friendly space” in Belgrade, Serbia, run by UNICEF and the Danish Refugee Council. More than 500,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe this year, according to the European Union. Most are from Syria and Iraq. Between a third and a half are children who, like Noor, point to the boat journey across the Aegean Sea as a terrifying experience. And it was the image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up drowned on a Turkish beach, that refocused the public’s mind on the crisis. But there are plenty of other sources of fear for children along their perilous journeys to Western Europe — from unscrupulous smugglers, Macedonian thieves and Hungarian police to the nights sleeping in cold and rain. The experiences are clearly taking a toll on the young. A small minority of children will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but experts say many others will experience anxiety and fear — which can be remedied if handled the right way. In a bright room in Belgrade, where refugees and migrants have camped out, the child-friendly space is a place where children can
JODI HILTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
‘I’m not okay.’ Many children, after escaping conflict in their homelands, struggle in Europe. draw, make things with modeling clay or play board games. A place where kids can be kids, where they don’t have to think about lugging their belongings onto boats or through rainy cornfields. Noor’s mother, Shaima, had brought her four children there on a recent day to get them out of the rain, which had turned parks into swamps. While her children played, she recalled the most traumatic part of their journey. “The little ones were crying loudly the whole time,” she said. “We saw death on that journey.” Shaima and her husband, Riad, who was a traffic policeman in Baghdad, fled Iraq because of the dangers posed by militias. They asked to withhold their surname to protect family members. When Noor’s 12-year-old brother, Salaheddine, came ashore, he said to his mother: “All the blood has come back into my veins now.” “After that, I was okay,” Salaheddine recalled. Their parents car-
ried ashore 2-year-old Amir and 8-year-old Dali. Everything they owned — papers, cellphones, meager belongings — was soaked. Their faces had been lashed by wind and salt water. Then they walked for hours in wet clothes. The length of time refugees and migrants are on the move compounds the psychological impact of their experience, experts say. “This emergency is probably one of the most serious in terms of affecting children’s well-being that we have seen in years, because of the long-term impact,” said Amy Richmond, a child protection adviser at Save the Children. “The most important thing for children’s mental health is to have a sense of place and of belonging. But these kids have been through a really dangerous war and have moved to community to community for more than four years.” The disruption often results in anxiety and fear, nightmares and difficulties sleeping, and bed-
The Gulun family from Deir al-Zour, Syria, waits at Croatia’s border with Slovenia for permission to cross. “This emergency is probably one of the most serious in terms of affecting children’s well-being that we have seen in years,” says Save the Children’s Amy Richmond.
wetting. Sometimes stress is manifested through sadness, other times through nervousness or aggression. Acting out and temper tantrums are common. Many children also experience what psychiatrists call “ambiguous loss” — when a person isn’t sure what happened to someone who is missing. Sitting on the border between Serbia and Croatia waiting to cross on a recent night, Judy Kalash talked about home with the kind of smile kids put on when they don’t want to cry. “I miss my home, I miss my parents, I miss food, I miss everything so much. But now my memories of home are all of death and killing,” said the bespectacled 12year-old from Yarmouk, a Palestinian area of Damascus. Judy’s parents stayed in Syria — her father is old and her mother too sick to make the journey — so she was traveling with a cousin. They were heading to Geneva. “I’m not okay. I’m very scared. I’m so far from my parents,” Judy said. “She often has nightmares about what happened. She was in school when the bombs were dropped,” her cousin said, referring to the barrel bombs that the Syrian military has used on civilian targets. Judy hasn’t attended school in more than a year. Neither has Stera, a 13-year-old from the Syrian city of Aleppo who was also waiting in the cold at the border. “I just want to go back to normal life and normal things,” Stera said, looking out from under her bangs. Stera’s mother cradled her youngest daughter, 6-year-old Julia, on the border between Serbia and Croatia on a recent night. Julia “hasn’t stopped crying for a month,” since the family left Aleppo, her mother said. She did not want to reveal her name, because her husband had stayed in Syria. But asked about the choice between conflict at home and trauma on the road, she was unequivocal. “We escaped from war, from terrorists on one side and terrorists on the other side,” she said. “All of this, we are doing it for our children and their future.” n
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s $500 million quest to dissect the mind and code a new one from scratch BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA In Seattle
Made up of 100 billion neurons,each one connected to as many as 10,000 others, the human brain is the most complex biological system in existence.
Paul Allen has been waiting for the emergence of intelligent machines for a very long time. As a young boy, Allen spent much of his time in the library reading sciencefiction novels in which robots manage our homes, perform surgery and fly around saving lives like superheroes. In his imagination, these beings would live among us, serving as our advisers, companions and friends.¶ Now 62 and worth an estimated $17.7 billion, the Microsoft cofounder is using his wealth to back two separate philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence that he hopes will hasten that future. ¶ The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest softwareengineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code. ¶ The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverseengineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations. ¶ “Imagine being able to take a clean sheet of paper and replicate all the amazing things the human brain does,” Allen said in an interview.
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KEVIN CRUFF
“Imagine being able to
take a clean sheet of paper and replicate all the amazing things the human brain does.”
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, who is using his wealth to back philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence
He persuaded University of Washington AI researcher Oren Etzioni to lead the brain-building team and Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch to lead the brain-deconstruction team. For them and the small army of other PhD scientists working for Allen, the quest to understand the brain and human intelligence has parallels in the early 1900s when men first began to ponder how to build a machine that could fly. There were those who believed the best way would be to simulate birds, while there were others, like the Wright brothers, who were building machines that looked very different from species that could fly in nature. And it wasn’t clear back then which approach would get humanity into the skies first. Whether they create something reflected in nature or invent something entirely novel, the mission is the same: conquering the final frontier ofthehumanbody—thebrain—toenablepeople to live longer, better lives and answer fundamental questions about humans’ place in the universe. “We are starting with biology. But first you have to figure out how you represent that knowledge in a software database,” Allen said. “I wish I could say our understanding of the
brain could inform that, but we’re probably a decade away from that. Our understanding of the brain is so elemental at this point that we don’t know how language works in the brain.” In the Hollywood version of the approaching era of artificial intelligence, the machines will be so sleek and sophisticated and alluring that humans will fall in love with them. The 21stcentury reality is a little more boring. At its most basic level, artificial intelligence is an area of computer science in which coders design programs to enable machines to act intelligently, in the ways that humans do. Today’s AI programs can adjust the temperature in your home or your driving route to work based on your patterns and traffic conditions. They can tell you someone stole your credit card to make a charge in a strange city or who has the best odds of winning tonight’s soccer match. In medicine, artificial intelligence algorithms are already being used to do things such as predicting manic episodes in those suffering mental disease; pinpointing dangerous hot spots of asthma on maps; guessing which cancer treatments might give you a better chance at living longer based on your genetic makeup and medical history; and finding connections be-
tween things such as weather, traffic and your health. But when it comes to general knowledge, scientists have struggled to create a tech that can do as well as a 4-year-old human on a standard IQ test. Although today’s computers are great at storing knowledge, retrieving it and finding patterns, they are often still stumped by a simple question: “Why?” So while Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana — despite their maddening quirks — do a pretty good job of reminding you what’s on your calendar, you’d probably fire them in short of a week if you put them up against a real person. That will almost certainly change in the coming years as billions of dollars in Silicon Valley investments lead to the development of more sophisticated algorithms and upgrades in memory storage and processing power. The most exciting — and disconcerting — developments in the field may be in predictive analytics, which aims to make an informed guess about the future. Although it’s currently mostly being used in retail to figure out who is more likely to buy, say, a certain sweater, there are also test programs that attempt to figure out who might be more likely to get a certain disease or even commit a crime. Google, which acquired AI company DeepMind in 2014 for an estimated $400 million, has been secretive about its plans in the field, but the companyhassaiditsgoalisto“solveintelligence.” One of its first real-world applications could be to help self-driving cars become better aware of their environments. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says his social network, which has opened three different AI labs, plans to build machines “that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc.” All of this may one day be possible. But is it a good idea? Advances in science often have made people uneasy, even angry, going back to Copernicus, who placed the sun — not the Earth — at the center of the universe. Artificial intelligence is particularly sensitive, because the brain and its ability to reason is what makes us human. In May 2014, cosmologist Stephen Hawking caused a stir when he warned that intelligent computers could be the downfall of humanity and “potentially our worst mistake in history.” Elon Musk — the billionaire philanthropist who helped found SpaceX, Tesla Motors and PayPal — in October 2014 lamented that a program whose function is to get rid of e-mail spam may determine “the best way of getting rid of spam is getting rid of humans.” He wasn’t joking. Allen and Etzioni say that they also have thought a lot about how AI might change the world and that they respectfully disagree with the doomsayers. The technology will not exterminate but empower, they say, making humans more inventive and helping solve huge global problems such as climate change. “There are people who say, ‘I don’t care about the ethics of it all. I’m a technologist.’ We are the opposite of that. We think about the impact of continues on next page
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When you see, hear, touch, taste or think, neurons fire with an electrochemical signal that travels across the synapses between neurons, where information is exchanged.
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this kind of technology on society all the time,” said Etzioni, who is chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “and what we see is a very positive impact.” Koch is more hesitant. “Runaway machine intelligence is something we need to think about more,” Koch, president and chief science officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said. “Clearly, we can’t say let’s not develop any more AI. That’s never going to happen. But we need to figure out what are the imagined dangers and what are the real ones and how to minimize them.” Allen’s vision is creating an AI machine that would be like a smart assistant, rather than an independent being, “answering questions and clarifying things for you and so forth.” But he admits he has wondered whether it will one day be possible for that assistant or its descendants to evolve into something more. “It’s a very deep question,” Allen said. “Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible. But that is a long, long ways away.” First, the brain institute started with data, not a hypothesis. Not just ordinary big data but exabytes of it — billions of gigabytes, the scale of global Internet traffic in a month — detailing the growth, white matter and connections of every gene expressed in the brain.
Human brains Made up of 100 billion neurons, each one connected to as many as 10,000 others, the human brain is the most complex biological system in existence. When you see, hear, touch, taste or think, neurons fire with an electrochemical signal that travels across the synapses between neurons, where information is exchanged. Somewhere within this snarl are patterns and connections that make people who they are — their memories, preferences, habits, skills and emotions. Building on the work that Allen accelerated through his philanthropy, governments around the world have launched their own brain initiatives in recent years. The European Commission’s Human Brain Project, which began in 2013 with about $61 million in initial funding, aims to create an artificial model of the human brain within a decade. President Obama announced the United States’ own BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) effort in 2014 to great fanfare, comparing it to the Human Genome Project that led to the current genetic revolution. BRAIN was launched with initial funding of $110 million. Some futurists even believe that the brain, not the body, may be the key to immortality — that at some point we’ll be able to download our brains to a computer or another body and live on long after the bodies we were born in have decayed. Allen’s own interest in the brain began with his love of tinkering. He always has been interested in how things were put together, from steam engines to phones, and as he grew older he became fasci-
PHOTOS BY STUART ISETT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
DiJon Hill, an electro physiologist, helps prepare mouse brain cells for research at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
nated with the brain. “Computers are really basically computing elements and a lot of memory,” he said. “They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.” But it wasn’t until his mother, Faye, a former elementary school teacher, became ill with Alzheimer’s that Allen’s brain philanthropy took shape. Allen was very close to her and was devastated when she began to regularly exhibit symptoms in 2003. “It deepened all my motivations to want to bring forward research about the functions of the brain so that we can create treatments for the different pathologies that can develop. . . . They are horrific to watch progress,” he said. Within months, he had founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science and seeded it with $100 million. But he didn’t want to just replicate what was being done at university and government labs. “He wanted to do a different brand of science, tackle bigger questions,” said Allan Jones, who was involved in the founding of the institute and is now its chief executive. Allen’s marching orders were simple: Figure out “how information is coded in the brain.” Allen, who has committed a total of nearly $500 million to the institute, thought that gathering great minds under one roof, all focused on the same goal, could accelerate the process of discovery. “Our whole approach is to do science on an industrial scale and trying to do things exhaustively and not just focus on one path,” Allen said. Allen’s “big science” strategy has attracted and significantly increased the salaries of some of the world’s top talent — including a number of tenured professors at the peak of their careers,
such as R. Clay Reid, a neurobiologist who left Harvard Medical School in 2012 to continue his work on how vision works in the brain. “The brain is the hardest puzzle I can think of, and never before has such a large group been directed to reverse-engineer how it works,” he said. The Allen Institute also has pioneered a number of other approaches uncommon in biology research. First, the brain institute started with data, not a hypothesis. Not just ordinary big data but exabytes of it — billions of gigabytes, the scale of global Internet traffic in a month — detailing the growth, white matter and connections of every gene expressed in the brain. Researchers spent their first few years painstakingly slicing donor brains into thousands of microthin anatomical cross sections that were then analyzed and mapped. Then, it took a page from the open-source movement, which advocates making software code transparent and free, and it made all of its data publicly available, inviting anyone to scrutinize and build upon it. By 2006, the institute’s scientists had created the most comprehensive three-dimensional map of how the mouse brain is wired and released that atlas to the public, as promised. By 2010, they had mapped the human brain. Since then, researchers around the world have built on their work; the mouse brain paper alone has been cited by more than 1,800 peerreviewed scientific articles. Now many of the institute’s 265 employees are turning to more tangible problems, studying autism, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury and glioblastoma, a rare but particularly aggressive type of brain tumor, as well as projects to understand the nature of vision.
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At a morning meeting held every day at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, engineers, researchers and other staff meet to update each other on their work.
Artificial brains All along, Allen has been backing parallel projects in artificial brains. He wondered whether it might be possible to encode books — especially textbooks — into a computer brain to create a foundation upon which a machine could be a digital Aristotle, using a higher level of knowledge to interact with humans. “I wasn’t aiming to solve the mystery of human consciousness,” he explained in his 2011 memoir. “I simply wanted to advance the field of artificial intelligence so that computers could do what they do best (organize and analyze information) to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.” That idea grew into the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (or AI2 as it is called by its employees), which opened its doors on Jan. 1, 2014, and currently has 43 employees — a number of them recruited from places like Google and Amazon. Allen hasn’t publicly announced the exact amount of his investment, but Etzioni said it is in the tens of millions of dollars and is growing. Over the past year, Etzioni and his team have created Aristo. The institute’s first digital entity now is being trained to pass the New York State Regents high school biology exam. Not only do the engineers have to figure out how to represent memory, but they have to give this entity the ability to parse natural language and make complex inferences. It’s not as easy as it sounds. “It’s paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer any child can understand,” Etzioni said. For example, he said, computers have a
difficult time understanding simple sentences such as “People breathe air.” A computer might wonder: Does this apply to dead people? What about people holding their breath? All the time? Is air one thing? Is it made up of a single molecule? And so on. The data that Aristo possesses doesn’t add up to the wisdom an elementary school child has accumulated about breathing. So far, Aristo has passed the first-, second-, and third-grade biology tests and is working his way through the fourth. The last time Aristo took this test, a few months ago, the grade was about a C. Or, more precisely, 73.5 percent. Etzioni says that’s pretty good — for a computer. Sounding like a glowing parent, he said, “We’re very proud he has started to make measurable progress.” But he estimates that Aristo needs at least one more year to get an A on fourth-grade biology, mostly because the team needs to figure out image recognition and visual processing so that the computer can interpret the diagrams. Five more to pass the eighth-grade test. After that, who knows? Convergence The artificial intelligence researchers and their counterparts in brain science are in a kind of race, Allen says, and their work one day will converge — although to what end he’s not sure. Koch, who leads the team that is reverseengineering the brain, explained that for Allen, understanding the brain is about cracking a code. “He’s fascinated by how codes work. What codes are used to process information in the cerebral cortex? Is the code different in a mouse versus a human? It’s the same for programming
code. He wants to know, ‘Can you program intelligence in an artificial way?’ ” Koch said. The implications of this work are incredibly complex, and Hawking and Musk — who in January announced he would donate $10 million to fund researchers who are “working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity” — are hardly the only ones calling for researchers to slow down and think about the consequences of superintelligent machines. “There’s a huge debate right now about whether simulating the human brain is necessary to get the kind of AI we want or whether simulating the human brain would be the equivalent of reproducing the brain. Nobody knows exactlywhatthismeans,”saidJonathanMoreno, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research’s main lab in Redmond, Wash., and a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, stepped into the debate in December by announcing he would fund a major research project on the potential effects of AI on society. Led by Stanford University historians, the study would run for 100 years. The first report is scheduled to be completed in 2015 and subsequent ones will be published every five years, containing updates on technological progress and recommendations and guidelines about the law, economics, privacy and other issues. Horvitz, who sits on the board of AI2, said he hopes the study will help trigger thoughtful discussion, draft guidelines and help redirect the focus in the field back to the short-term where he believes the programs can do a lot of good. He cites being able to minimize hospital errors, help make sense of scientific publications and improve car safety as worthy and achievable goals. He also said it’s critically important to think about the implications of AI for democracy, freedom and other important values in the most basic blueprints for the machines. “If we could design them from the ground up to be supporters of their creators, they could become very strong advocates of human beings and work on their behalf,” Horvitz said. But could those beings ever become selfaware? Two iconic works of science fiction of the 1950s address that question in an ominous way. In Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” humans ask a supercomputer how to save the world until they are gone. Only the machine is left when it comes up with the answer and in the end it commands, “Let there be light ...” In Fredric Brown’s “Answer,” a “supercalculator” made up of all the machines on 96 billion planets is asked: “Is there a God?” Its answer: “Yes, now there is a God.” “I don’t think we’re building a god by any means,” Etzioni said. “We’re building something on science. The computer is an assistant — not someone you ask, ‘Solve cancer and get back to me.’ “I think it’s going to be something very sophisticated with vast amounts of information, but I still think of it very much as a tool.”n
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“I don’t think we’re building a god by any means,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “We’re building something on science. The computer is an assistant — not someone you ask, ‘Solve cancer and get back to me.’ ”
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ENTERTAINMENT
Hollywood’s heavenly partnership BY
B RIAN F UNG
W
hen Navy flyboy Tom Cruise got too close for missiles and switched to guns in the spring of 1986, what seemed like an entire nation got up to follow him. Military recruitment booths popped up in theaters, eager to attract young Americans who’d just seen Maverick tell Charlie about the inverted dive he’d done at four Gs against a MiG-28. To say “Top Gun” was a boon for recruitment would be an understatement. That year, the Navy signed up 16,000 more people than it did the entire year before, according to the author Richard Parker, writing for Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine. “Top Gun” didn’t just leave a lasting impression on thousands of would-be sailors and airmen; for Hollywood, the swashbuckling film marked a watershed moment for military-entertainment collaboration. The two have worked together since at least the 1920s, but the release of “Top Gun” led the mutually beneficial relationship to new heights. Now the film industry is rediscovering another patron of the arts — one whose mandate is less about fighting for country than it is about fighting for knowledge. Enter NASA, whose fictional adventures in outer space are the subject of Ridley Scott’s gripping new survival drama, “The Martian.” Raking in over $100 million its opening weekend around the world, the film starring Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on the red planet taps into a deepening well of public interest for all things space-related. Part of this has to do with some of the exciting things happening in private spaceflight. But when it comes to studying the stars, NASA is still tops. It knows this. And it’s using every tool in its media arsenal to take advantage of its time in the spotlight. With “The Martian,” NASA has the same opportunity defense officials had in the 1980s, only now
AIDAN MONAGHAN/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that NASA benefits from helping films such as ‘The Martian’ with additional social media superpowers. By highlighting everything from the real-world technologies depicted in “The Martian” to explaining the science behind Martian dust storms to calling on young women to take after the fictional Ares III mission commander, Melissa Lewis, NASA’s hoping to turn moviegoers into the nation’s next generation of scientists, technologists and the other all-around awesome eggheads celebrated in the film. In the runup to the movie’s release, NASA even made a major announcement about the discovery of liquid water on Mars that some believed was simply too conveniently timed to be a coincidence. Never mind that “The Martian” begins with what is essentially a colossal embarrassment for NASA: A series of events that causes Ares III crewmember Mark Watney to be left for dead on Mars. Watney’s subsequent struggle to survive, and NASA’s feverish attempts to rescue him, turn what
would otherwise be an agency disgrace into a massive coup for science and humanity. The story of “The Martian,” adapted from the novel by Andy Weir, is unquestionably friendly to NASA. Even if it weren’t, a spokesperson told the Guardian, the agency doesn’t make a habit of altering scripts. That’s a break from the long and controversial history of what some critics have called the militaryentertainment complex, a close association between the armed forces and Hollywood that more or less made the Defense Department a gatekeeper for action movies. After “Top Gun,” the columnist David Sirota explains, the Pentagon shrewdly began using its cooperation as a kind of leverage against filmmakers. If your script didn’t portray the troops in a favorable light, you could forget about getting access to the ships, tanks and bases that served as your props and sets. The tension in that relationship
Matt Damon portrays an astronaut who faces seemingly insurmountable odds as he tries to find a way to survive on a hostile planet in “The Martian.”
grew increasingly evident over the last decade as regular Americans — faced with the painful costs of two unpopular U.S.-led conflicts — struggled to reconcile the gap between war as it often appeared in theaters, and what was happening in actual theaters of war. NASA’s involvement in Hollywood carries little of this political baggage. It primarily consults on scientific accuracy. Its primary mission is education. And, notably, it doesn’t have any military hardware to dangle in front of filmmakers. Indeed, what “The Martian” has to say about international politics might baffle military types: A key plot point involves an implausible but inspiring bit of international cooperation with a U.S. frenemy. In producing “The Martian,” filmmakers were treated not to displays of weapons systems but a behind-the-scenes tour of Johnson Space Center. They got interviews with real NASA scientists and astronauts who answered hundreds of questions about the way ion engines and artificial gravity really work. Against the backdrop of the military-entertainment complex, all this makes the prospect of a deeper relationship between NASA and the film industry seem relatively nonthreatening. The agency isn’t a stranger to the film industry, of course: It’s played a part in such unlikely movies as “Armageddon,” “Men In Black III” and the “Transformers” franchise. But none of those films did much to inspire young people to go into science, technology, math or engineering — the socalled STEM fields that tech experts say must be cultivated if the United States expects to remain a global leader. “The Martian” is different. For the first time since “Apollo 13,” moviegoers are getting to see a scientific government agency as a leading character — a hero, even. It lays the groundwork for a science-entertainment complex at a scale we’ve never seen. Three decades after Maverick buzzed the tower against orders, NASA is catching up to the Pentagon. n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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INCOME
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The cost of city living The Family Budget Calculator developed by the Washingtonbased liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute tallies the annual income needed to support a family of four to cover seven needs: transportation, food, housing, child care, health care, taxes and “other necessities.” Here is a look at how much a family has to earn in the 10 largest U.S. metro areas, by population. n HIGHEST COST
LOWEST COST HOUSING
FOOD
CHILD CARE
TRANS.
HEALTH CARE
OTHER NECESSITIES
TAXES
New York City $98,722
$17,280
$9,384
$24,130
$6,991
$12,731
$12,879
$15,327
Los Angeles $73,887
$16,776
$9,384
$10,815
$6,991
$9,335
$12,635
$7,950
Chicago $71,995
$11,748
$9,384
$15,533
$6,991
$8,421
$10,207
$9,712
Dallas $61,150
$10,956
$9,384
$10,015
$6,991
$8,989
$9,824
$4,991
Houston $60,608
$11,112
$9,384
$10,015
$6,991
$8,324
$9,900
$4,882
Philadelphia $76,393
$13,620
$9,384
$14,630
$6,991
$10,766
$11,111
$9,891
Washington, D.C. $106,493
$17,628
$9,384
$31,158
$7,439
$8,969
$13,047
$18,868
Miami $68,503
$13,992
$9,384
$10,658
$7,301
$9,427
$11,291
$6,449
Atlanta $63,888
$10,752
$9,384
$9,733
$6,991
$9,917
$9,726
$7,386
Boston $85,793
$17,448
$9,384
$16,066
$6,991
$10,602
$12,960
$12,343
ANNUAL COST OF LIVING
SOURCES: THE ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE, U.S. CENSUS 2014 POPULATION ESTIMATES
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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BOOKS
The thug who gave us Islamic State N ON-FICTION
l
REVIEWED BY
J ESSICA S TERN
M BLACK FLAGS The Rise of ISIS By Joby Warrick Doubleday. 344 pp. $28.95
uch of the world awakened to the threat of the Islamic State in August 2014, after the organization began beheading foreign hostages on video. But ISIS, as it is also known, was not a new group, nor was it the first to use horror as a weapon. It was founded as alQaeda in Iraq in 2004 by an infamous Jordanian thug known by his nom de guerre, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since its creation, the group has changed names several times, but it has retained and expanded many of the innovations put in place by its founder, who used his experience as a gangster to create an unusually wealthy, vicious and crude organization. Zarqawi was a high school dropout, known around town as a boozer and a brawler, certainly not as a pious man, let alone a fundamentalist. He was familiar to the local police for his involvement in violence and drug-dealing. His mother encouraged him to study Islam, hoping to rescue her son from a life of crime. But studying religion did not help Zarqawi find peace. The Islam that he discovered was an unusually violent one. His jihad had nothing to do with elevating himself spiritually and everything to do with justifying his preferred lifestyle — burglary and brutality. In “Black Flags,” Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick explains the importance of Zarqawi and analyzes his continuing influence on the Islamic State long after his death in 2006. There have been a number of previous biographies of Zarqawi, but Warrick takes the story much further and deeper. Most important, he shows, in painful but compulsively readable detail, how a series of mishaps and mistakes by the U.S. and Jordanian governments gave this unschooled hoodlum his start as a terrorist superstar and set the Middle East on a path of sectarian violence that has proved hard to contain. Until 2003, Zarqawi was largely
SITE INTELLIGENCE GROUP
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a video in 2006, the year of his death. In his youth, he was known to Jordanian police for violence and drug-dealing.
unknown outside Jordan. As Warrick recounts, in his famous speech to the U.N. Security Council in 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell pointed to the obscure Jordanian as the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, as part of the Bush administration’s justification for the invasion of Iraq. That speech, Warrick explains, which Powell later described as a blot on his record, catapulted this small-time jihadist into the terrorist firmament. Ironically, it was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that gave purpose to Zarqawi’s chosen vocation. The invasion pushed him into an alliance with bin Laden and led to al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq, and ultimately to the emergence of the Islamic State. To tell Zarqawi’s story, Warrick turns to intelligence and military officers who spent years tracking the terrorist. One of his sources is Nada Bakos, a brilliant young CIA operative who describes her struggles to justify the invasion of Iraq as well as to hunt down Zarqawi. Perhaps the most sur-
prising observations come from the doctor who treated Zarqawi in the 1990s while he was in a Jordanian prison, where, together with his mentor, he ran a sort of jihadi university for fellow Jordanian militants. The doctor describes a moody person, capable of horrific acts of violence but also surprising acts of kindness, especially toward those who were weak. Jordan’s role, until now, has been largely unsung. (Jordanian officials admitted to Warrick that Zarqawi was accidentally left on a list of political prisoners to be released in 1999, as part of a general amnesty when King Abdullah ascended to the throne. Because Zarqawi was known to be trying to overthrow the Jordanian regime, he should not have been on the list.) The king comes across in Warrick’s narrative as courageous, wise and prescient. As Warrick shows, Abdullah repeatedly warned President George W. Bush that removing Hussein from power could do far more harm than good. He tried to talk to Paul Bremer, the top civilian adminis-
trator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, out of disbanding the Iraqi army, correctly anticipating the trouble those unemployed military personnel could cause, but his warnings went unheeded. Jordanian intelligence officers were able to pinpoint Zarqawi’s location in 2006, leading to the U.S. airstrike that killed him. But his descendants joined forces with former military officers to establish a proto-state. By now, much has been written about the rise of the Islamic State. What makes Warrick’s book unique is its focus on the group’s roots, especially the evolution of its founder. Warrick provides a great deal of reason for Americans to feel remorse: shame that we lashed out at the wrong enemy after 9/11; regret that we chose to remove Iraq’s military leaders from their jobs, leaving them vulnerable to recruitment by Zarqawi and his successors; sorrow that so many American and Iraqi lives were lost in fighting the jihadists, who nonetheless rose again in a more lethal form. But Warrick’s is not a partisan accounting. His narrative puts equal blame on the Obama administration for doing so little to stop the resurgence of a group we spent many billions to stamp out during the troop surge in the Iraq war. What is missing from all these accounts thus far, including not only Warrick’s, but also my own, is a clear strategy for going forward. It is far easier to point out the flaws in our current strategy than to suggest a better one. In this case, there is good reason to feel responsible, but it’s not clear what actions we can take that won’t make the problem even worse. It is going to take a great deal of ingenuity even to contain the Islamic State that Zarqawi unleashed, let alone defeat it. n Stern is a co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror.”
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BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
The new ‘it’ book is also a long one
Is Gehry an artist, architect or both?
F ICTION
N ON-FICTION
T
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REVIEWED BY
R ON C HARLES
he phenomenal success of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt tempts us to believe that readers of literary fiction crave long novels, but that bit of magical thinking works only for long novels that succeed. After all, Bob Shacochis’s spectacular “Woman Who Lost Her Soul” clocked in at 715 pages and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but how many people actually read it? The truth is that readers stampede toward good novels that are very long, except when they don’t, and anyone who can tell you why could make more money selling diet aids and New York bridges. This debate about the currency of Big Novels is about to get a big boost. The “it” book this fall is “City on Fire,” a 911-page debut by an unknown writer named Garth Risk Hallberg. Yes, Risk is literally his middle name, but it’s his publisher that’s taking a chance here, having reportedly paid nearly $2 million for the manuscript. Such irrational exuberance can’t buy a spot on the bestseller list, but it can guarantee coverage. So prepare yourself for a book publicity juggernaut. And at some point, you’ll wonder, “Should I read this novel — or three others?” That decision may hinge on your stamina, but “City on Fire” is an extraordinary performance. Radiating youthful bravado that will make older authors sniff with contempt (or sweat with envy), Hallberg has conjured what he calls the “muchness” of New York City in the late 1970s. At the center of all this clamoring life is Samantha Cicciaro, a college freshman too cool for her own good. She’s a fan of the briefly super-hip group Ex Post Facto, one of whose songs gives the novel its title. Samantha fell in with those culty musicians and produced a few issues of her own cacophonous zine before being gunned down in Central Park, another victim in a city already terrorized by the Son of Sam. While she lies in a coma in the hospital, Hallberg
ventures out into the vast matrix of her friends, cohorts and avengers. Indeed, “City on Fire” is a novel that never met a character it didn’t like. When we’re introduced to Samantha’s grieving father, we learn all about his failing business as a fireworks operator, which intrigues an affable magazine writer who once slept with a flight attendant who got pregnant and moved to Florida and had a baby. But forget that baby — we’ve got to get back to wounded Samantha, who was dating an asthmatic teenager who is grieving the death of his father and wishing he were even half as cool as Samantha. The night of their big date, her body is found in Central Park by a gay black man named Mercer, who teaches at a ritzy school for girls. He’s just learned that his artistic boyfriend is probably a heroin addict and is definitely the long-lost son of the Hamilton-Sweeneys, a wealthy New York family. Hallberg’s opus depends on its accelerating velocity, its hairpin turns down every side street. There’s something frightening — if not a little ludicrous — about a plot of such intricacy. The central miracle of “City on Fire” may be that it re-creates this impossibly complex metropolis while also suggesting that everyone in it is closely connected. “City on Fire” burns brightest when it gets fresh fuel. The original manuscript was reportedly much longer, but there are still at least 200 pages of unnecessary flashback and explanatory detail here. Plus, Hallberg’s storytelling is usually so smart that its dim patches grate on the reader. The police work runs dangerously close to TV cliches. And the financial dynamics underpinning a major branch of the plot are fuzzy and melodramatic. But such objections will be drowned out by the vibrancy of a novel whose Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers. n
L CITY ON FIRE By Garth Risk Hallberg Knopf. 911 pp. $30
BUILDING ART The Life and Work of Frank Gehry By Paul Goldberger Knopf. 511 pp. $35
l
REVIEWED BY
E RIC W ILLS
ast October, when a journalist at a news conference in Spain asked Frank Gehry whether his buildings were more about spectacle than function, the jet-lagged architect flipped him the bird. Righteous snub or insolent posturing? That depends on whether you consider Gehry, now 86, to be one of our greatest living artists or a purveyor of self-indulgent sculptural excess. It was in Spain, of course, that Gehry unveiled his Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997 to white-hot acclaim (“I’ve been geniused to death,” the architect once lamented). But as cities around the world have sought their own Bilbao effect — 15 years later, the museum was still attracting a million visitors a year — the resulting wave of bespoke architecture has inspired a backlash. Critics have assailed Gehry and his fellow “starchitects” for producing preening buildings that exhibit little regard for their context and the unfortunate souls who have to use them. Such criticism may be inevitable when your ambitions are as significant as Gehry’s. Paul Goldberger, in his new biography of the architect, defines the fundamental questions that have driven Gehry’s career as: “How much should architecture be considered a humane pursuit, an artistic enterprise, a cultural event, as opposed to a practical work of construction? And even when architecture is pursued with the highest aims, how much impact can it have?” “Building Art” is a measured attempt to see Gehry’s work in this larger context — to understand the forces that shaped him, from the coterie of artists that he cozied up to in Los Angeles to the shifting movements within the profession of architecture itself, and to witness how, with each of his commissions, he responded to its unique set of requirements. Goldberger, a contributing edi-
tor at Vanity Fair, is an architecture critic by training, and his portrayal of Gehry’s childhood and life outside of his career is, for the most part, workmanlike. The son of Jewish immigrants in Toronto, the architect had a humble childhood, his family frequently on the verge of financial ruin. Even now, Gehry can’t say for sure how his parents paid for him to attend architecture school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Modernist architecture was ascendant in California in the 1950s, but Gehry — who was, according to Goldberger, a potsmoking, socially conscious liberal — soon rebelled against the prevailing aesthetic of cool, straight lines. In the early 1960s in Paris, when he worked for an architect named André Remondet, Gehry got his first intimate look at the architecture of the Old World, and he had an epiphany: Great buildings could incorporate ornamentation. “When I walked into Chartres I was furious,” Gehry recalls. “I said, ‘Why, why didn’t they tell us?’ ” Gehry’s projects make for a kind of architectural Rorschach test. Goldberger defends him against the claim that his work is inflexible or arbitrary, the accusation that the architect himself most despises. But Goldberger is surprisingly reserved in offering his own critical take on Gehry’s portfolio, leaving largely unanswered the question of why certain buildings succeed in such brilliant fashion, while others fail to live up to the architect’s lofty standards. Gehry shouldn’t be blamed for the excesses that Bilbao inspired, the ego-fueled projects of our current Gilded Age. That doesn’t mean, however, that he didn’t step up to the plate now and again and fail to deliver. Wills is a senior editor at Architect magazine.
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OPINIONS
The House’s new conservative politburo DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Post as a political reporter in 2000.
You think John Boehner had a rocky time as speaker of the House? Just wait until you see how his successor fares this fall — if House Republicans can even find a successor. The same conservatives who badgered Boehner into retirement wasted no time in ousting his hand-picked successor, Kevin McCarthy. Conservatives had been grumbling about McCarthy as the speaker-apparent almost from the moment Boehner announced his retirement, and by the eve of Thursday’s House GOP vote to name a Boehner replacement, the criticism of McCarthy was murderous. Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) declared at a luncheon with reporters Wednesday that “there is absolutely no way that I think you can vote for McCarthy and go back home and tell your constituents you did the best thing for them.” Rep. Raúl Labrador (Idaho) had questions about whether McCarthy “is prepared for such a high office.” And Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.) let it be known that “outside conservative groups are not comfortable at all with picking Boehner’s right-hand man to take the speaker’s spot.” On the eve of Thursday’s vote, the conservative Freedom Caucus announced that its few dozen members would vote en bloc against McCarthy. He had enough votes to prevail in the caucus election on Thursday, but unless he could win over the conservative holdouts, he wouldn’t prevail in speaker elections that had been set for Oct. 29. And so, at noon on Thursday, the time the leadership election was to occur, McCarthy withdrew from the race. McCarthy’s surrender is surprising, but nothing changes. It doesn’t really matter who the next speaker is, because that person will be leader in title only. Conservatives, far from
being placated by Boehner’s ouster, are emboldened: They have plans to bend the entire House to their will. Defaulting on the federal debt? Not a problem. Shutting the government to defund Planned Parenthood? So be it. These were a couple of the take-aways from Wednesday’s installment of “Conversations with Conservatives,” a monthly luncheon sponsored by the Heritage Foundation (parent company of the House GOP caucus) and catered by ChickFil-A, the fast-food chain owned by religious conservatives. The 10 men on the dais, members of the Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, the Tea Party Caucus and other conservative factions, might be considered the politburo of the new conservative order in the House. “The marginalizing of conservatives that’s taken place over the last nine months is just not going to be tolerated anymore,” declared Rep. Andy Harris (Md.).
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“We have an opportunity to completely change what’s happening,” announced Labrador. To seize this “opportunity,” they presented the three contenders for the speakership — McCarthy, Jason Chaffetz and Daniel Webster — with a list of demands that would increase the (already deafening) voice of conservatives in the House. There may be only a few dozen die-hard conservatives in the caucus, but, as Boehner and McCarthy have learned, if they withhold their votes, they deny Republican leaders a majority. Any would-be speaker, therefore, had better do what conservatives want — and that includes likely showdowns over a debt-ceiling increase, an omnibus spending bill, a transportation bill and ExportImport Bank legislation. Beyond that, the conservatives demand that the speaker never punish them for voting against the caucus; let them amend legislation on the floor at will; never let bills come to the floor without the support of a majority of Republicans; and refuse to take up Senatebrokered compromises. That would lead to shutdown and default in short order. But this did not seem to be a major
concern over lunch. Labrador, mocking GOP leaders’ claims that “we can’t shut down the government,” said he would prefer a leader who would be willing to fight — “even if we fail.” Paul Singer of USA Today observed that the conservatives’ description of leadership is more like followership. “You’re asking for a speaker,” he said, who “follows your lead.” They did not dispute this notion. Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) said that “we want a process-focused speaker,” while Rep. John Fleming (La.) said the goal is to give “power to the individual members” so that the speaker no longer is “dictating the agenda.” Then why doesn’t one of the conservative hard-liners run for the speakership himself ? Labrador’s answer was revealing. “When you’re leading the revolution, you also upset a lot of people,” he said. “It’s very difficult to make change as we have been trying to make and also build a coalition.” That’s true. It’s harder to build a coalition than to tear things apart. And this is why the next speaker — whoever it is — will be no match for emboldened conservatives hellbent on destruction. n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
Stop dumbing-down state tests HAROLD O. LEVY is executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and was New York City schools chancellor from 2000 to 2002.
Some states, recognizing that teaching reading to all students is a tough business, have simply chosen to legitimize illiteracy by making their tests so easy that almost anyone can pass them. That’s the sorry conclusion I’ve reached after going through this year’s selection process for the elite scholarship program I head. An amazing disparity in standards is emerging. This race to the bottom has got to stop. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, each state is required to conduct annual assessments in third through eighth grade in math and reading. Historically, there has always been a range of standards and scores in the various states, with a cluster of Eastern states having both the highest standards and scores, and with Mississippi at the bottom. Today, the Eastern states are still at the top (although they’ve shuffled around a bit) and Mississippi has raised its standards dramatically, but other states are giving Mississippi a run for the title of national dunce. When the authors of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test — the “nation’s report card” — sought to “map” their national standards against the standards established by individual states using the most recent available data, they identified 10 states where reading proficiency standards were below the NAEP standards. Jill Barshay of the Hechinger Report recently called
out Georgia for having standards that are particularly weak; they are a full four grades behind New York’s, which are generally regarded as the toughest. The greatest scorn, however, has to be reserved for the five states that have set their eighth-grade standards below the NAEP levels in both reading and math: Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho and Ohio. The legislators in those states who permit this fraud on the public are dooming their populations to failure. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which I head, uses state scores to award large scholarships to exceptionally high-performing, low-income students nationally. We use the state tests to equalize grades among schools, because different schools employ very different
standards in their grading. However, it has become clear to me that we can no longer use state tests without a separate equalizer among the tests themselves when several scholarship applicants with top state test scores also had terrible standardized test scores. The College Board’s widely administered PSAT revealed that many of the students who would be regarded as exemplary, for example, in Georgia would be regarded as merely proficient (or worse) in many other states. The state-by-state disparities at the “advanced” level are particularly revealing. Using the NAEP eighth-grade reading standards, for example, Mississippi had 1 percent of its students score “advanced” and Nevada 3 percent, while Maryland had 7 percent and Massachusetts 8 percent. Without using the NAEP test results to equilibrate the scores, we might have been misled into believing that all “advanced” performers on the state tests were equal. That turns out to be false, the product of the kind of subterfuge that would not be tolerated if test scores were subject to consumer protection laws. The update of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act making its way through Congress
does nothing to remedy this situation. It does for the first time facilitate comparisons among students of different income brackets, which is a major step in the right direction. However, it continues the practice of allowing each state to set its own standards. As a result, a state can set the bar low and claim victory when its students clear the unjustifiably low hurdle. States that choose to reach higher are then criticized for having fewer of their students reach the ostensibly “advanced” level. This is what happened two years ago when the New York Board of Regents was criticized for a precipitous “drop” in the percentage of students deemed proficient in reading; what really happened was that the state adopted an appropriately rigorous set of standards. Ironically, neighboring Connecticut, with its embarrassingly low standards, was simultaneously being praised for having so many of its students ace what in reality were dumbeddown tests. Students can no longer afford this political shell game. All states should be compelled to use rigorous standards. That’s the only way we will know which children are being educated and which are being cheated. n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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OPINIONS
BY DARKOW FOR THE COLUMBIA DAILY TRIBUNE
Get NRA to license bullet sales JEFFREY ZALLES is president of the Marin County, Calif., chapter of the Brady Campaign.
In August, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof noted that gun violence claims one life every 16 minutes in the United States. Think about it. Every day, more than 90 American families are broken by gun violence. If you’re like most people, you have come to feel that achieving any significant reduction in this disturbing statistic is hopeless. Because there are more than 300 million guns in private hands in the United States. Because the gun lobby is just too strong. Because gun-control proponents have fought for years with little to show for it at the federal level. But this can’t go on forever. We will eventually reach a tipping point whereby a majority of Americans, fed up and fearing for their safety, will finally work their will in the form of strict gun-control measures or even a rewrite or repeal of the Second Amendment. There is a way to end the standoff before we reach that tipping point, to wipe the slate clean by quickly and drastically reducing gun violence without infringing on gun rights. But first, those who support gun rights must recognize that the biggest threat to those rights lies in the pervasiveness of gun violence, while those on the other side must accept that 300 million guns aren’t going away anytime soon.
The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that in the United States there was a 200-year supply of guns but a four-year supply of ammunition. So what if we stopped worrying
KLMNO WEEKLY
BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
about the guns and instead focused on the bullets? Two steps would work wonders: First, license buyers of ammunition. This license would take the form of a photo ID, and obtaining it could be as easy as watching a video, answering some gun-safety questions, paying a small fee and passing a background check. No doubt, gun owners would scream that such a requirement represented a big-government intrusion into their privacy and constitutional rights. But what if the National Rifle Association, and not the government, was responsible for issuing licenses? Such a role would simply represent a return to the organization’s roots. The
All bullets could be stamped with a serial number, and stores could scan a buyer’s license and a bar code on the box.
NRA was founded in 1871 to advance marksmanship, promote gun safety and provide training to gun owners. It’s only recently that it became political. Second, mark the shells. All bullets could be stamped with a serial number, and stores could scan a buyer’s license and a bar code on the box. Since shell casings recovered at a crime scene could easily be traced back to stores and buyers, there would be a powerful incentive to see that bullets were handled responsibly. How might the country benefit from this system? Almost immediately, it would become increasingly difficult for those who shouldn’t have ammunition to acquire it. After a while, the guns in the possession of criminals would become virtually useless. Of course, this wouldn’t put an end to all gun violence, but my guess is that thousands of lives would be saved every year. A reduction that large could be enough to end once and for all the battle between pro- and anti-gun forces. A focus on ammunition wouldn’t infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Instead it would guarantee the protection of those rights — while saving many lives. n
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FIVE MYTHS
Online dating BY
C HRISTIAN R UDDER
Once upon a time, online daters were mocked as lonely losers, or worse. Not anymore. Today, at least 40 million Americans are looking for love on the Web. But that doesn’t mean we know what we’re doing. Like sex, love and attraction, online dating is an object of fascination and confusion. As the head of OkCupid, I worked diligently to untan gle many of the misconceptions about finding love on the Internet. But some persist; here are the most common.
1
Men aren’t interested in women in their 30s (or, God forbid, their 40s).
The raw data is undeniable. While women generally prefer men around their own age, men are most attracted to 20-yearolds, period. But as I learned at OkCupid, men don’t necessarily end up dating young women, even if they think they’re gorgeous. Men on the site tend to message women closer to their own age; very few men over 30 actually reach out to 20-year-old women. And while it’s true that being older and single means you face a “thin” romantic market, both on the Web and off, the sheer scale of online dating mitigates this. After all, the best way to beat long odds is to take lots of chances, and even for older users, dating sites provide millions of romantic options.
2
Online dating is to blame for our hook-up culture.
This is silly. People have always sought out casual sex — flings are key plot points in “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) and “The Fires of Autumn” (1942). One sociologist found that college-age students are having no more sex today than they were in 1988. In fact, online dating has made it easier for those seeking long-term commitments to find each other. Experts say that one-third of recent marriages in the United States started online. Those couples tend to be happier, too, research suggests.
3
Everyone lies online.
While it’s tempting to shave off a couple of pounds or add a couple of inches, studies show that online dating profiles are, fundamentally, quite honest. Gwendolyn Seidman, in Psychology Today, explains it well: “Online daters realize that while, on the one hand, they want to make the best possible impression in their profile, on the other hand, if they do want to pursue an offline relationship, they can’t begin it with outright falsehoods that will quickly be revealed for what they are.” That’s not to say every profile is the gospel truth, of course. People do exaggerate, just as they do in person. OkCupid has found, for example, that men and women more or less uniformly add two inches to their height. In any human interaction, there will always be some amount of posturing. But online dating isn’t especially vulnerable to our collective weakness for selfflattering fibs.
4
Online dating is dangerous.
Grim stories abound. In 2010, Boston’s “Craigslist killer” was charged with murdering a woman he had met online. In 2013, Mary Kay Beckman sued Match.com for $10 million after a man she met on the site came to her Las Vegas home with a knife and an intent to kill. But despite the occasional bad press, the numbers suggest that online dating is very safe. OkCupid creates something like
ALEX BELOMLINSKY/GETTY IMAGES
30,000 first dates every day, and complaints about dangerous meetings are extremely rare. I remember only a handful in my 12 years at the company. Although there are no comprehensive numbers, executives with other sites report similarly low levels of abuse. Additionally, dating sites have taken steps to respond to concerns. Match.com, for example, now checks its users against the National Sex Offender Registry and deletes the profiles of anyone found on the list. Online dating allows people to browse partners from their own homes. Compare that with meetings at bars or parties, where people might be a few drinks in when the flirting starts (studies show that alcohol use increases the risk of sexual assault). Also, people almost universally pick public places for their initial online dates: coffee shops, restaurants and the like. It’s very deliberate and that creates a safer environment.
5
Photos are the best way to tell whether you’ll be attracted to someone.
This premise is so well-worn that sites like Tinder, Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel offer little information about users beyond a
collection of pictures and a twoline profile. In reality, how someone looks in a couple of pictures is no indicator of whether you’ll be attracted to them. That point was driven home for me during a small publicity stunt OkCupid ran to promote a blind dating app; we called it Love Is Blind Day. The premise was simple: For a day, we removed all the profile pictures on the site. Users howled — site traffic dropped more than 80 percent that day. But those who stuck around had much deeper and more productive conversations than normal. Replies to messages came fast, and dates were set up more quickly. We saw the same thing among people who used our blind dating app. A person’s attractiveness had no correlation with how well a date went. All in all, OkCupid worked better with no pictures. The catch, of course, was that, without pictures to keep users happy, OkCupid would go out of business. So we turned the photos back on, giving people the dating experience they wanted: superficial and probably worse. n Rudder is the author of “Dataclysm” and a co-founder of OkCupid.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015
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