Politics Rudy Giuliani’s new role 4
Nation An eye in the sky for Pentagon 9
Awards Searching for Bill Murray 16
5 Myths Charter schools 23
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THE FIX
The meaningless pledge BY
A ARON B LAKE
D
onald Trump said Thursday that he will abide by the “traditions” of American elections and “accept a clear election result” if he loses on Nov. 8. And to the untrained ear, that sounds as if he is relenting and saying he would concede the race if he loses — contrary to his noncommittal answer at the previous night’s presidential debate. But that’s not what he said. Trump packed that pledge with so much wiggle room and so many caveats as to render it almost meaningless. Let’s break it down, piece by piece: First, Trump trolled us all — very hard — by making it sound as if he was saying he would definitely accept the election results. And then he added, “If I win.” “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a major announcement today. I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historical presidential election — if I win.” Trump was rather pleased with himself for this, and he certainly made some journalists do a double take. It had the desired effect. And this is a pretty good indicator of how Trump feels about the gravity of this latest controversy. He is having fun with it, even as his party pulls its hair out and the collective media makes this the story of the election right now — and writes about how it all could undermine democracy. Later in the speech, Trump appeared to detail his position more fully. “America is a constitutional republic with a system of laws. These laws are triggered in the case of fraud or in the event of a recount
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JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
Donald Trump holds a rally in Delaware, Ohio, on Thursday, the day after the third debate.
where it’s needed. Of course I would accept a clear election result, but I would also reserve my right to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result. Right? And always, I will follow and abide by all the rules and traditions of all of the many candidates who have come before me. Always.” First, Trump says he would abide by “all the rules and traditions” of American elections, but he also pretty clearly believes those rules and traditions include the ability to contest a “questionable” election result. He made a comparison: What if Al Gore had said three weeks before the 2000 election that he would accept the result? And he suggested that to make such a pledge would be tantamount to waiving his legal right to contest a questionable election result. But the question for Trump has never been about whether he would completely waive that right; it’s whether he would take his claims about massive voter fraud to their most extreme conclusion and suggest they caused him to lose even a lopsided race. He
This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 2
has said, after all, that there’s no way he could lose Pennsylvania unless there’s voter fraud. Second, Trump says he will “accept a clear election result,” but he quickly adds the caveat that he could challenge a “questionable” one. The line between a “clear” result and a “questionable” one is a line that is known only to Donald Trump — and possibly, not even clear to him. Again: This is a candidate who has alleged large-scale voter fraud that would make it impossible for him to lose a blue-leaning swing state. In other words, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Trump thinks even a lopsided popular and electoral college loss wouldn’t be a “clear” result. He has made it abundantly clear that he thinks the conspiracy against him is vast and that his loss could very well be due to a “rigged” election. Given that backdrop, Trump’s pledge Thursday means basically nothing. And the question of whether Donald Trump can ever achieve electoral clarity has just become one of 2016’s central questions. n
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DATA CRUNCH BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS
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ON THE COVER The U.S.-Mexico border wall in Brownsville, Tex., at dawn. Photograph by ZOEANN MURPHY, The Washington Post
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POLITICS
The reinvention of Rudy Giuliani BY P AUL S CHWARTZMAN AND B EN T ERRIS
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year ago, former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani read an editorial in his hometown newspaper mocking him as a “shill” for endorsing a little-known Republican it deemed “stunningly unqualified” to become a district attorney on Long Island. This was the same New York Daily News that years earlier had celebrated Giuliani’s tenure as a corruption-busting prosecutor, endorsed his no-nonsense reign as the city’s chief executive and helped deify him as “America’s Mayor” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Angry, Giuliani phoned the editorial page editor, Arthur Browne, to defend his endorsement. But the point that appeared to wound Giuliani the most, Browne recalled, was the editorial’s assertion that the former mayor “resides today beyond political relevance. He is reduced to offering endorsements in local races.” “ ‘I am relevant,’ ” Browne recalled Giuliani insisting, “ ‘because all these people want my endorsement.’ ” The former mayor has no such worries these days. Eight years after his own presidential bid failed, Giuliani has emerged as Donald Trump’s unflinching chief apologist, cheerleader and rhetorical Rottweiler, even as GOP leaders far and wide abandon their party’s candidate. It’s a role that confounds allies and admirers who remember Giuliani’s rise as a law-and-order Republican twice elected in the country’s largest bastion of liberalism. Giuliani has long been an attention seeker, but his bombast was tempered by moderate, socially liberal politics — a model for many Republicans hoping to expand their base. Yet here was Giuliani, ricocheting between talk shows last Sunday, disparaging a woman’s claim that Trump groped her on an airplane, saying, “It doesn’t make sense” because they were in first class and “you see everything that
SARAH RICE/GETTY IMAGES
Some are baffled how ‘America’s Mayor’ became Trump’s attack dog goes on in first class.” “I believe Donald Trump,” Giuliani told CNN. Here he was a week earlier, describing Trump’s vulgar boasts about “grabbing” women’s genitalia as little more than “locker room talk.” And here was Giuliani — eyes wide, voice rising, thin lips curling into a hard scowl — dredging up former president Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky to batter Hillary Clinton. (“There was semen on her dress!” he shouted on MSNBC.) At a Florida rally this month, Giuliani even suggested that Clinton, when she was a New York senator, was AWOL from Lower Manhattan after the 2001 attacks. “I heard her say she was there that
day,” Giuliani told the crowd. “I was there that day, I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton.” Within moments, social media was rife with photos of him touring Ground Zero the day after the attacks with Clinton, whom in fact he had praised at the time. Giuliani, who did not respond to multiple requests for interviews, apologized for his remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.” His bluster on Trump’s behalf has prompted the Des Moines Register to call him the mogul’s “chief toady and bootlicker,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to declare that he “seems nuts,” and late-night host Stephen Colbert to refer to him as “the former Rudy Giuliani.”
Former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani speaks at a rally for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump on Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine.
But his new role as Trump’s ubiquitous bullhorn has been especially painful for his former City Hall advisers, who remember him as a centrist who crossed party lines in 1994 to endorse Gov. Mario Cuomo (D). Many now are reticent to talk about him. “I don’t even want to think about it,” said Elliot Cuker, Giuliani’s former speech coach. “That part of my life has cracked off the face of the Earth and is floating into outer space.” Another former adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t want to offend the former mayor, said he is astonished by Giuliani’s willingness to play Trump’s understudy. “From his days as U.S. attorney,
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POLITICS he was at the top of the organizational chart,” the former adviser said. “Now he’s staff. He carries bags. He walks behind Trump. It’s just amazing to see.” Yet the raw combativeness now in service to Trump should surprise no one who followed Giuliani before the glow of his post-9/11 leadership. As a pol angling for the mayoralty and then at City Hall, Giuliani was known for his signature histrionics, shouting “Bulls---!” while addressing a racially charged police union rally and ejecting Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat from Lincoln Center. He may be the only elected leader in history whose wife learned of his plans to divorce her after he announced his decision at a news conference. His weekly radio show from City Hall was a stage from which he boasted of his accomplishments and berated a gallery of foes that included the Rev. Al Sharpton, drug dealers and jaywalkers. This was all as he presided over a city of 8 million residents. Now he is a private citizen who is a partner at a prominent law firm (albeit one that just announced he has gone on leave while campaigning for Trump). “He’s a general without an army,” said Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor of urban policy and planning. “He is an air gun. The only weapon he has are his words.” Browne, who as an editor directed the Daily News’s coverage of Giuliani when he was U.S. attorney and mayor, said that he has “struggled to find a way to recover lost glory.” “The Rudy Giuliani who was so public and so outspoken and combative and entertaining was engaged in actual public service that was meaningful,” Browne said. “But those years are long past. The same Rudy Giuliani who got great ego gratification doesn’t have the underlying basis for anyone thinking of him as an important national force.” A rare influence on Trump Giuliani, 72, first expressed support for Trump’s candidacy in April, on the day of the New York primary — a full 10 months after the real estate tycoon entered the race. Yet Giuliani said that his promise to vote for Trump did not mean he would campaign for him. Three months later, at the Re-
SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“He’s a general without an army. He is an air gun. The only weapon he has are his words.” Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor of urban policy and planning
publican National Convention, Giuliani left no doubt who his candidate was. His arms flailing as he shouted from the stage, Giuliani promised a national television audience that Trump “will do for America” what he himself had accomplished for New York as mayor. “I know it can be done because I did it,” Giuliani declared. As a candidate, Trump is said to display tepid interest in his advisers’ wisdom. Yet Giuliani has managed to find a clear path to Trump’s ear, appearing to enjoy a far closer relationship, for example, than his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. “Rudy is one of the few people who have influence with him,” said a friend of Trump’s and Giuliani’s. “Every campaign needs a nut cutter. Someone has to take the partisan attack. Pence isn’t doing it. As a surrogate, Rudy has been quite effective.” Yet Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, said Giuliani’s vitriol “has probably turned off” the moderate voters Trump needs to defeat Clinton. “That’s something the Rudy of 2008 might have been helpful with,” Heye said. But “what we have seen since then is a far cry
from the person who served as an important symbol of unity after 9/11.” Both Trump and Giuliani grew up in New York’s outer boroughs, the sons of hard-nosed fathers. While Trump’s youthful ambitions meandered between real estate and show business, Giuliani briefly considered the priesthood and fantasized about the White House. Each has been married three times and navigated at least one spectacularly public and calamitous divorce. And both have demonstrated that they are affiliationfluid when it comes to politics. Giuliani revered Bobby Kennedy in college and voted for George McGovern, then became a Republican and served in President Reagan’s Justice Department. Reagan later appointed Giuliani as U.S. attorney for New York. “He only became a Republican after he began to get all these jobs from them,” Giuliani’s mother, Helen, told author Wayne Barrett. “He’s definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn’t.” As much as anything, both men have demonstrated a fondness for the stage. When he was mayor, Giuliani dressed up as a woman
Donald Trump, left, talks with Giuliani at a fundraising event in New York on July 6, 2015. Giuliani earned the nickname “America’s Mayor” for his leadership in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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for a videotaped comedy sketch in which Trump — playing himself — groped him. “Oh, you dirty boy, you,” Giuliani shrieks, slapping Trump, who turns to the camera, shrugs and says, “Can’t say I didn’t try.” As his second term as mayor wound down, Giuliani planned to run against Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate, only to drop out after he was diagnosed in 2000 with prostate cancer. At the time, Trump pledged his support for Giuliani, although he said he considered Clinton “a wonderful woman.” Giuliani, too, had maintained cordial relations with both Clintons and was among the moderate Republicans who opposed the impeachment of President Clinton. In 2000, Trump toyed with the idea of a presidential bid. Giuliani was skeptical. “I like the idea of having held public office first before you can run for president, to prove yourself,” he told one interviewer. Eight years later, Giuliani entered the presidential race. A front-runner for months, Giuliani’s $50 million campaign won a single delegate. He mulled another White House bid in 2012 but dropped the idea, saying, “It’s too late for me.” Firmly in candidate’s camp Moments after the Oct. 9 debate in St. Louis, Giuliani ambled into a thicket of journalists, his broad shoulders hunched as he adjusted the flag pin attached to his lapel and ran his hands through his slicked-back hair. Everywhere he went, it seemed, the horde followed. For an hour, Giuliani was the spin room’s main event, breathlessly pounding Hillary Clinton while defending Trump. If it’s too late for Giuliani’s own presidential ambitions, at least he can live vicariously through Trump’s candidacy. By night’s end, Giuliani’s smile was wide enough to accommodate a dinner plate as he proclaimed Trump the debate’s winner. “If they called it a draw,” he said, “that means we won by a knockout.” Nearly 24 hours later, Giuliani was still talking, now to a throng of Trump supporters in Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton “hates you!” the former mayor shouted. “And we love you!” His voice was rising, his scowl was in place. n
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POLITICS
Young black activists seek inspiration B Y V ANESSA W ILLIAMS
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ahlida Lloyd can explain her reasons for voting for Hillary Clinton, even if she is not especially excited about them. But she has a hard time making the case to obstinate friends why they should support the Democratic presidential nominee. Lloyd, 31, a lawyer, sought advice from other black millennials during a recent lunchtime gathering in downtown Washington, D.C. What should she say to encourage young black voters, who rallied in 2008 and 2012 to help Barack Obama make history as the first African American president, to show a little of that enthusiasm for Clinton? “I just don’t want the first woman president to be elected because the other person sucks, but that’s where I think we are,” Lloyd said in an interview after the event this month hosted by #WeVote, a new effort aimed at mobilizing young black voters. “People either say, ‘Donald Trump is not where it’s at, so I’m going to vote for Hillary.’ Or you have people say, ‘Donald Trump is not where it’s at; I’m not going to vote at all.’ And that’s not cool.” Younger African Americans, like many millennials, are not excited about this year’s presidential election. The Clinton campaign, which has sought to reassemble the Obama coalition, has struggled to connect with a key piece of it: voters under 30. Turnout among African Americans younger than 30 spiked from 49 percent in 2004 to 57 percent in 2008, but it dipped to 53 percent in 2012, according to Census Bureau data. While 43 percent of Obama supporters younger than 40 were “very enthusiastic” about him in 2012, just 24 percent of Clinton supporters under age 40 feel the same way about her now, according to September averages of Washington Post-ABC News polls from four years ago and this year. Black activists and organizers, frustrated with the Clinton campaign’s inability to engage young
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Some find it hard to persuade their peers to vote when they are not enthusiastic about Clinton voters, have taken it upon themselves to challenge their peers to consider the consequences if Republicans take the White House and keep control of both houses of Congress. They also have encouraged young voters to focus on state and local elections, because those officials make decisions about how police departments and schools are run, issues that more directly affect their lives. Voting rights were an important victory of the civil rights era, and because Trump’s campaign has laid bare racist attitudes, the seeming indifference of black millennials to the election has sparked broad discussion within the African American community. But young people who say that the political system has failed them argue that they don’t owe it to anyone — not even the oft-cited warriors of the civil rights movement — to participate in the presidential election. Many are critical of some black political leaders for framing the election as a choice
between an archenemy and an old friend rather than talking about the issues, such as what they view as broken economic and criminaljustice systems. “We know what the issues are. What we can’t seem to get is candidates to talk about them in a nuanced way,” said Lauren Brown, 34, a public-relations professional who said she has not been moved by Clinton’s talking points on addressing police violence against black people or economic equity for women of color. “This election cycle is more about who you hate more than who you like.” Brown decided to vote for Clinton after taking part in a discussion during an event, hosted last month in Philadelphia by a civic project called Black and Engaged, about the stakes in the campaign. Trump’s debate performances also helped sway her. Clinton campaign aides say she has not only talked about issues affecting communities of color, but has offered detailed proposals
Kahlida Lloyd of Washington, D.C., plans to vote for Hillary Clinton despite little excitement surrounding her candidacy.
to address such concerns as criminal justice, income inequality and infrastructure in neglected neighborhoods. Addisu Demissie, director of national voter outreach, said the campaign has been doing extensive outreach to black voters — including millennials — in their communities, and in recent weeks African American celebrities and athletes have been more active on the trail. Recently, hip-hop artist Pusha T joined fellow Virginian and Clinton running mate Tim Kaine for a campaign event in Liberty City, a predominantly black, low-income community in Miami. Carmen Berkley, director of civil, human and women’s rights for the AFL-CIO, said many black millennials have to stop “waiting to have that same level of excitement” they felt for Obama’s campaign. “If I had my choice of who would be the president, it probably would be Michelle Obama, but she’s not running for president. Hillary Clinton is.” Berkley, 31, said some black millennials are being overly critical of Clinton, for instance, by continuing to criticize her for supporting her husband’s 1994 crime bill and using the term “super predator” to describe some young offenders. They don’t give her credit for having apologized, or for pledging to work to achieve criminal justice reform. “Here, you have a candidate who says, ‘I messed up, and I’m willing to change.’ ” Berkley said. “I think that is powerful. We have — as activists, organizers and everyday people — the power to bring pressure on political leaders to get what we want.” Lloyd, who said she gave money and volunteered for Obama’s campaigns, had not been active for Clinton. The #WeVote discussion inspired her to sign up for a text-athon. She sent messages to more than 500 mostly black voters in Pennsylvania. “I definitely think that event ignited something in me, made me want to take advantage of opportunities to share with others,” she said. n
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A GOP riven to its core, win or lose R OBERT C OSTA Las Vegas BY
T
he third and final debate Wednesday marked the beginning of the end of a presidential race that most Republican leaders cannot wait to forget. But the party’s Donald Trump-driven divisions will not cease on election night. The axis of furious conservative activists and hard-right media that spawned Trump’s nationalist and conspiratorial campaign is determined to complete its hostile takeover of the GOP, win or lose. Trump’s insistence that the election will be “rigged,” which he again suggested at the debate, has only stoked the specter of a grievance movement that will haunt Republicans for months and years to come — threatening to leave the longtime norms of American politics shattered and Washington paralyzed by his followers’ agitation and suspicion. “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time,” Trump said Wednesday, refusing to say whether he would accept the result of the election as legitimate. “I’ll keep you in suspense.” The first post-election target for the grievance movement is likely to be House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has drawn Trump’s wrath for not supporting him more fully. Trump’s backers, both inside the House Republican caucus and out, are already talking about a takedown. Fox News host and Trump ally Sean Hannity said in an interview after the debate that Ryan was a “saboteur” and “needed to be called out and replaced.” Hannity said he would actively urge hardline conservatives to launch bids against Ryan. That follows Trump’s blistering attack the other week on Ryan as “weak and ineffective” and a rush of anger on social media in which Ryan and other elected Republican officials have been cast as enemies. For top Republicans, the challenges could be staggering in the aftermath of a Trump defeat, as polls show is probable. Their num-
ROBYN BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Many of those who helped Trump rise to power are determined to completely take over the party bers are likely to shrink in both chambers of Congress, and they would have to navigate a Hillary Clinton presidency with constant questions about their loyalties and scorn for any attempts at bipartisan governing. “The revolt that has been going on in the Republican Party, that brought Trump to where he is, is not going away. If anything, it’s going to intensify,” said Patrick J. Caddell, a veteran Democratic strategist who advises Breitbart, the Trump-aligned website, on polling. “Republicans are living in a dream world if they think their voters are going to stop fighting the political class,” Caddell said. At the fore of this conglomeration is Stephen K. Bannon, the former head of Breitbart who has become Trump’s most influential confidant. Bannon encouraged the candidate’s claims of voter fraud and references to a deeply corrupt global conspiracy of international banks and corporatefriendly politicians.
Bannon has been a prominent backer of political assaults against Ryan and other Republican leaders over the past decade from the party’s fringes — boosting primary challengers against Ryan and others, and warning against compromise on hot-button issues such as immigration. But with the fringes of the GOP now managing the Republican nominee, a retreat is far from likely. Bannon’s friends say that he has become emboldened during his time with Trump, and that they expect him to work with his network of allies, super PACs and websites to battle Ryan and the Republican establishment throughout 2017 as that wing of the party tries to rebuild the GOP brand. “What the media misses is the amount of anger that’s out there. Trump didn’t create that,” Bannon told CNN on Tuesday. When Bannon was pressed about whether Trump would start a television network should he lose, Bannon grinned and said,
Republican nominee Donald Trump refused to say at the final presidential debate Wednesday in Las Vegas whether he would accept the result of the election as legitimate.
“Trump is an entrepreneur.” It is not just Breitbart that stands ready to claim the party’s future as its own. The conservative media, once dominated by highminded journals and Fox News, has been supplanted by a galaxy of websites such as Infowars, which is led by Alex Jones, who calls the 9/11 terrorists attacks an inside job. In a sign of his growing influence, the Clinton campaign featured Jones this month in an attack ad against Trump. Articles on those outlets have found their way into Trump’s speeches and been spread widely across platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, often building into a frenzy that leaves traditional GOP messengers unable to shape the consensus within their own party. “Forget the press — read the Internet,” Trump told his supporters Tuesday in Colorado. “Study over things,” he added. “Don’t go for the mainstream media.” Not every conservative, however, expects Trump to maintain the kind of power he has exerted over the past year, especially if Clinton wins in a dominant way. Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who is advising independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, said that “it’s hard to see a mass Trumpism movement without Trump.” “After 2008, there was a little Sarah Palin cult that has lasted, but it hasn’t changed the party,” Wilson said. “I see the same thing with Trump: a group of die-hards building a whole mythology about, ‘He was betrayed.’ Ryan is going to have to crack the whip and instill some discipline to remind these guys that they don’t run the party.” Within Trump’s inner circle, the view of the nominee and his place in political history is far different and could have sweeping consequences for Republicans. Everything is “rigged,” Trump said during the debate, from the economy to policymaking to the election itself. It was a reflection of who Trump is and what his Republican Party looks like now — and, quite possibly, for some time to come. n
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NATION
Education tool prompts privacy fears BY E MMA B ROWN AND T ODD C . F RANKEL
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aroline Pollock Bilicki felt uneasy about the new education program introduced this year at her children’s Chicago school. Summit Basecamp, built with the help of Facebook engineers, was billed as a powerful tool that could reshape how students learn. Dozens of schools nationwide have signed up to use the program, which tailors lessons to individual students using software that tracks their progress. But it also captures a stream of data, and Bilicki had to sign a consent form for her children to participate, allowing their personal data to be shared with companies such as Facebook and Google. That data, the form said, could include names, email addresses, schoolwork, grades and Internet activity. Summit Basecamp promised to limit its use of the information — barring it from being used, for example, to deliver targeted ads — but Bilicki agonized over whether to sign the form. “I’m not comfortable with having my kids’ personally identifiable information going to I don’t even know where, to be used for I’m not sure what,” she said. A joint project of Facebook and the high-performing charterschool network Summit Public Schools, Basecamp is an example of an increasingly popular education trend — data-driven “personalized learning.” Its most fervent backers have framed it as the next big thing in education, reimagining how classrooms work and allowing teachers to reach students across a wide spectrum. But as the Summit program and others like it have expanded, concerns such as Bilicki’s have emerged, highlighting the tension between the promise and the potential perils of new classroom technologies. Some parents, researchers and privacy advocates worry about what information is being collected and how it is being used. Education experts warn that while using computers to personalize teaching might prove trans-
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Facebook software to help students learn also captures a lot of data, which worries parents formative, its effectiveness remains largely unproven. None of that has dampened enthusiasm for Summit Basecamp. About 20,000 students in more than 100 charter and traditional public schools, are working with the program, a rapid expansion from a handful of West Coast schools two years ago. “We’re pushing really hard to make it so it can go to as many who want it next year and in the future,” said Diane Tavenner, chief executive of Summit, which runs schools in California and Washington state. The network provides Basecamp to other schools at no cost, aided by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others. Tavenner said Summit’s success — especially with low-income children, who account for half of its students — has drawn a steady stream of educators who want to duplicate it. In the classroom, personalization means students set goals for their own performance
each day. One student might be watching a video about calculating the area of a circle while another reads about ratios. Even as Basecamp and countless other tech-centered programs have taken off, there are few independent studies of the programs’ effectiveness, researchers say. “We really don’t know that much about personalized learning,” said Monica Bulger, senior researcher at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York. Yet the demand is surging as teachers and schools look for ways to close the nation’s stubborn achievement gaps. “There’s a lot of hype,” said Joel Reidenberg, a Fordham University law professor who researches student privacy. “In effect, they are experimenting on children.” Tavenner acknowledged the lack of published studies on Basecamp’s results. But she said the approach, based on research on how children learn, has worked well at Summit schools: Almost all graduates are accepted to four-
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and founder of Facebook, speaks during an event in San Jose on Oct. 6. The company has worked with a charter-school network to create Basecamp, an example of datadriven “personalized learning.”
year colleges, and they graduate from college at double the national rate. And there is ample evidence that the status quo is not good enough, Tavenner said. “What we are literally doing right now we know undeniably does not work for a huge number of kids in our country,” she said. “I’m just not compelled by the argument that we need to keep doing that.” Summit officials said personalization used to be a laborious, largely pen-and-paper affair. Then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — who has made personalized learning one of the focal points of his philanthropy — came into the picture, agreeing to donate the social-media company’s help after a tour of a Summit school in 2013. Now, Facebook supplies 20 engineers, product managers and designers to work full time on the Summit software, said Mike Sego, the Facebook team’s engineering director. The team accesses student data sometimes, Sego said, but only to improve the software. Sego emphasized limits on Facebook’s role: The project is not housed on Facebook servers. The software does not use Facebook log-ins. Cooperation between the two companies is limited to software development. “We’re not thinking of this as a business,” Sego said. “We’re focused on making the Summit Personalized Learning Platform better for teachers and students, and we have a lot of work to do.” But the involvement of a tech giant — and one with a history of privacy infractions — has been unsettling to some parents. Student data privacy has emerged as a concern in recent years, driven by worries that the 40-year-old federal education privacy law fails to protect students from risks inherent in new classroom technologies. A watershed moment came in 2014, when privacy concerns forced the nonprofit InBloom to fold. The $100 million project had aimed to harness the power of big continues on next page
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
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NATION data to improve education by collecting and sharing potentially sensitive information about students, including about discipline, disabilities, family relationships and socioeconomic status. Summit officials say they are collecting only limited student data necessary to run the software and sharing it only for educational purposes. But activist Leonie Haimson, who led the charge against InBloom, said she believes Basecamp’s privacy terms are written so broadly that they “basically require parents to give up all rights to their children’s privacy.” Basecamp’s terms of service allow Summit to share student data with any company it deems necessary. Use of the data would then be governed by that company’s privacy guidelines, which could be more permissive. “It does say that we can share with anybody if we think we should, and you the parent are consenting to it. You’re giving us complete discretion,” said Nate Cardozo, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who said he did not find the terms troubling so much as “sloppy.” Tavenner, the Summit CEO, said she understands the privacy concerns because she is a parent, too. Her 14-year-old son uses the Basecamp platform at a Summit school, and she feels confident that the terms are strong enough to protect his privacy. The parents of just four of Summit’s students have contacted the school with questions or concerns about Basecamp’s data privacy, she said. Experts praise Basecamp for requiring parental consent, pointing out that other ed-tech companies, including Google, publish their privacy terms in a fine print that most parents never see. But the Basecamp terms also require disputes to be resolved through arbitration, essentially barring a student’s family from suing if they think data has been misused. In other realms, including banking and health care, such binding arbitration clauses have been criticized as stripping consumers of their rights. Tavenner said she could not put Summit, a network of charter schools, at risk of legal action. “We’re offering this for free to people,” she said. “If we don’t protect the organization, anyone could sue us for anything — which seems crazy to me.” n
KLMNO WEEKLY
Telescope will keep an eye on a lot more space debris BY
C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT
T
here are a lot of rocks flying around through space. Lots of debris, too. Old satellites, spent rocket boosters, even, for a short while, a spatula that got loose during a space shuttle mission in 2006. All of it swirling around in orbit, creating a bit of a traffic jam. For years, the Pentagon has been worried about the collisions that might be caused by an estimated 500,000 pieces of debris, taking out enormously valuable satellites and, in turn, creating even more debris. This week, the Defense Department took another significant step toward monitoring all of the cosmic junk swirling around in space, by delivering a gigantic new telescope capable of seeing small objects from far away. Developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Space Surveillance Telescope was formally transferred Tuesday to the Air Force during a ceremony at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The telescope is designed to monitor objects as small as softballs in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) — some of the most important real estate in space. At about 22,000 miles away, its orbit mirrors that of Earth, so that satellites parked there remain in a fixed point over the globe. That allows satellite television or communications providers to serve particular areas — such as North America or Asia — uninterrupted. But not only is the orbit far away, it is also incredibly vast. “A volume of tens of thousands of oceans,” said Lindsay Millar, DARPA’s program manager, in a podcast posted on the agency’s website. But the telescope’s ability to see “something very far away over a very wide area is really what it’s best at.” DARPA says the advanced technology in the 90-ton telescope would allow officials to go
DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY
The 90-ton Space Surveillance Telescope is designed to monitor orbiting objects as small as softballs that could damage satellites.
from “seeing only a few large objects at a time through the equivalent of a drinking straw to a windshield view with 10,000 objects at a time.” It is also being used by NASA to monitor asteroids and other near-Earth objects that could collide with the planet, officials said. Over the next two years, the telescope is going to be moved and reconstructed in Australia, a vantage point that would allow it to survey an underserved area of space. The telescope is “a big improvement over the legacy ground-based optical telescopes that are used by the U.S. Air Force, because it can search large areas of sky and also track very faint (small) objects in and around GEO,” Brian Weeden, a technical adviser at the Secure World Foundation, wrote in an email. “That’s a critical capability for the U.S. military, as they have a lot of very important satellites in GEO, and are increasingly worried about threats to those satellites.” The telescope would join another new space-debris-tracking technology known as the Space
Fence, which is being built by Lockheed Martin. The radar system is going to be on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and would use radar to help the Air Force track 10 times the amount of debris it now monitors. With many valuable assets in space — satellites used for intelligence, communications and guiding weapons — the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned with what it calls “space situational awareness.” Instead of being a benign environment, the Pentagon likes to say that space has become “contested, congested and competitive.” In orbit, debris moves fast, as much as 17,500 mph, so that even a fleck of paint could cause damage. “Every military operation that takes place in the world today is critically dependent on space in one way or another,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten said in an interview earlier this year when he was the commander of the Air Force Space Command. “Whether our own people in the United States are fully cognizant of the dependence on space or not, the rest of the world has been watching us very closely.” n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
10
KLMNO WEEKLY
WORLD
As Egypt struggles, a call for change BY S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN AND H EBA M AHFOUZ
Cairo
E
gypt’s economic and social inequalities helped ignite the populist revolts that toppled President Hosni Mubarak five years ago. Now the economy is on the skids again, as discontentment rises in the Arab world’s most populous nation. Food shortages are widespread and prices are soaring. More people are living in poverty and unemployment remains high, especially among the nation’s disenchanted youth. There is a currency crisis, and investor confidence is flagging despite billions of dollars in aid and investments from Persian Gulf nations. “We cannot find sugar, rice and many other items,” said Ahmad Soliman, a 31-year-old shoemaker. “And when we find them, we cannot afford the prices. So we don’t buy as much as we used to do.” “The more the pressure is,” he added, “the stronger the outburst will be.” Whether Egypt’s deepening economic problems trigger another social upheaval remains to be seen. What’s palpable is the frustration directed at President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi’s government from all corners of society. The turmoil is affecting not only the poor, but also the middle class, and to some extent, even the wealthy. “We are going through a difficult phase that is being felt by every family in Egypt,” Mostafa Al Naggar, a former member of parliament, wrote recently in AlMasry Al-Youm, an independent daily newspaper. “The state is responsible for social solidarity. God be gentle with the Egyptians.” In the years before the 2011 uprisings, Mubarak’s liberal economic policies spawned a boom in business and the nation enjoyed annual average economic growth rates of 7 percent. But Mubarak failed to address widespread poverty and official corruption, high unemployment and lack of opportunities for young people — reasons that many gave for joining
NARIMAN EL-MOFTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The country’s economy has been in turmoil, raising the possibility of another social upheaval the revolts. After Mubarak was forced to resign, the elected Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi was also heavily criticized for mishandling the economy and failing to rectify social inequalities as he sought to tighten political control. Sissi, a former general who rose to power after ousting Morsi, pledged to enact economic changes and improve the lives of Egyptians. Today, inflation has risen to the highest levels in years. There are serious shortages of foreign currency, vital to transact global business. Nearly a quarter of the country’s 90 million people live in poverty. The official jobless rate is 13 percent, and triple that among young Egyptians. The grim economic indicators forced the government to seek a $12 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. The loan program comes with strict austerity measures that promise to make Egyptians’ lives even
more difficult in the months and years ahead. In recent interviews with three state-owned newspapers, Sissi said his actions were “inevitable to save the economic situation.” “We are in the bottleneck and we are on our way out, but if we want to get out we have to take tough decisions, tolerate these decisions, be patient and the results will be great for the upcoming days and the upcoming generations,” he said. The country’s economic problems can be partly blamed on the collapse of its tourism industry and concerns about terrorism. The number of tourists visiting the country, in decline since the Arab Spring revolts, plunged after the downing of a Russian passenger plane last year over the Sinai Peninsula by the Islamic State’s Egypt affiliate and a mysterious crash of an EgyptAir flight over the Mediterranean this year. Also affecting tourism, a key source of foreign currency, was
Egyptian museum workers clean the entrance of Abdeen Palace, one of the historical palaces that houses several museums, in Cairo this month. The collapse of tourism is one of the problems facing the nation’s economy.
the torture and murder of an Italian student in Cairo earlier this year, and the killing of Mexican tourists mistakenly by Egyptian security forces in September 2015. But critics have also blamed Sissi for grandiose projects that have sucked up billions in aid and taxpayers’ money. They include a large expansion of the Suez Canal, which failed to generate higher shipping revenue, as well as plans for a massive Dubai-like new capital city in the desert. He has also proposed a bridge to connect Egypt to Saudi Arabia, but that triggered protests and a legal challenge after Sissi decided to hand back two Red Sea islands to the kingdom in a show of gratitude. “I am the one responsible for [this] country, its protection, its future and the future of its sons,” Sissi said. “If I was just looking for my own interest, there are many things I would not have done.” In the poor and middle-class Cairo neighborhood of Gamaliyah, where Sissi grew up, the frustration is mounting. In the central market, shoppers complained about rising prices of electricity and cooking gas as their salaries have remained the same. The weak currency has driven up prices of imported goods, which Egypt heavily relies on. Many shops and businesses have shuttered. Some Sissi supporters praised his policies, saying he had inherited many problems, such as corruption and cronyism, from his predecessors that are still impacting the economy. “During Morsi’s rule, the country was broken, but now a lot of things have changed for the better,” said a 54-year-old woman. “The prices are our only concern. Sissi is trying his best.” Some activist groups have been calling for protests over the deteriorating economy on Nov. 11. Soliman said protests “would give people the chance to release all the pressures forcibly placed on them, and may even give them some hope in the future.” At the very least, they would send a message to Sissi, he said. n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
11
WORLD
KLMNO WEEKLY
The Japanese art of making lunch A NNA F IFIELD Tokyo BY
I
n Japan, the packed school lunch has been elevated to an art form. Every morning across this country, moms — always moms — wake up and make little boxes of delicious art for their children. Rice balls in the shape of pandas or bears, complete with eyes and smiles cut out from a sheet of dried seaweed, sausages carved to look like octopuses, and fruit speared with cute animal toothpicks. And all nutritionally balanced, of course. But some moms go the extra mile — or rather, the extra hour — to make a uniquely Japanese kind of lunchbox: the kyara-ben, or character bento. Think Hello Kitty or Doraemon the robot cat nestled in a bed of lettuce, pigs made out of ham resting on a rice ball, surrounded by a heart-shaped omelet and carrots cut into flowers. “I’m here because I thought it would make my kids happy if I could make them cute bento,” Saori Inokuchi, a 36-year-old mother of two children, ages 4 and 5, said while attending a special class to learn to make more elaborate lunchboxes. Inokuchi came along with her friend, Maya Minamisawa, who has three kids, ages 8, 4 and 1, to learn from Tomomi Maruo how to make Pokémon-themed bento. Maruo offers kyara-ben lessons at her home through her company, Obento4kids, and also has a YouTube channel. The women learned how to shape rice into Pikachu, the yellow Pokémon rodent, how to make eyes from seaweed and cheese slices, and cheeks from crab sticks. They made Poké Balls by sticking half a cherry tomato to half a quail’s egg then wrapping a strip of seaweed around it, topped off with another cheese circle. There were cheese hearts for the broccoli trees, and flowers made from ham. All in all, it took about an hour, although Maruo, the teacher, had already cooked the broccoli and
PHOTOS BY KO SASAKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Displaying artistic flair, devoted moms go to great lengths to craft fun bento boxes for their kids squash for the box. As a pro, she can do the whole thing in 40 minutes. Maruo started making kyaraben boxes when her sons, now 13 and 16, were younger. “I wanted my kids to enjoy eating lunch at kindergarten,” she said. Other mothers started asking her advice, kicking off a business that has had her offering kyaraben lessons for the past 13 years. “Moms like to see their kids’ happy faces, and most moms enjoy making kyara-ben because it’s fun,” she said. Kyara-ben are mainly made for children in preschool or kindergarten to help introduce them to a wide variety of foods and stop them from developing picky eating habits. This approach may have some merit: The vast majority of Japanese children happily eat grilled fish and steamed vegetables. But the kyara-ben craze is also a symptom of the enormous expectations placed on women in a
country notorious for creating hurdles to becoming a working mother. The Japanese government cabinet office was sharply criticized for tweeting a link to a blogpost in which a mom wrote about making cute lunchboxes even when she’s tired or busy. “Thanks to the smiles [I get from my son], making bento each day has become a time I enjoy,” Keiko Iwata wrote on the Cheering for Women blog, associated with the government’s “womenomics” efforts to getting more women into the workplace and let them “shine.” Critics noted the contradiction in promoting the idea that women ought to be making such timeconsuming lunchboxes at the same time the government is trying to make it easier for women to work. There is no shortage of inspiration here. The Japanese Internet is full of photos of adorable kyara-ben, and
Top, Japanese women participate in a class on making bento boxes at Tomomi Maruo’s home in Tokyo. Above, the finished lunch in all its splendor.
there are hundreds of books devoted to the subject, with titles like “Kyara-ben for First-timers: You Can Make Cute Kyara-ben Quickly on a Busy Morning!” Homeware stores have shelves of molds to easily press rice and even hard-boiled eggs into animal shapes, and supermarkets sell cute paper liners for boxes. A cable channel show offers instruction on how to make kyaraben inspired by the mascots that are ubiquitous in Japan, and there are even kyara-ben competitions where moms vie to make the most breathtaking box. This kind of pressure on moms can cause plenty of headaches. One news report titled “The cause is kyara-ben! A fight breaks out between mommy friends!” earlier this year described the envy that was fomenting between some mothers. Some kindergartens have even started banning kyaraben for fear of bullying: kids making fun of those with substandard lunchboxes. There are certainly detractors. “I saw kyara-ben images on Facebook and realized they were made by moms who woke up at 4 or 5 a.m. I am so glad I am not being a mom in Japan,” one woman wrote in Japanese on the popular recipe site Cookpad. But Minamisawa and Inokuchi, neither of whom works outside the home, said they were inspired by the class. “It was much easier than it looked,” Minamisawa said, although she noted Maruo had done most of the preparation. “It would be hard if I had to do everything from scratch.” Most days, Minamisawa spends 15 or 20 minutes making a lunchbox for each of her older kids, although more ambitious boxes take twice that. She is already thinking about making ghostshaped rice balls for Halloween. Inokuchi said she would use plastic wrap to form rice balls into shapes at home. “I want to work hard and make a cute bento,” she said. Minamisawa added: “When my kids come home with an empty bento box, it makes me really happy.” n
COVER STORY
r aising barrier s: a new age of wal l s
Asylum seekers at a camp in Idomeni, the Greek town that until May served as a way station for as many as 14,000 migrants trying to head deeper into Europe.
BY SAMUEL GRANADOS, ZOEANN MURPHY, KEVIN SCHAUL AND ANTHONY FAIOLA
A
generation ago, globalization shrank the world. Nations linked by trade and technology began to erase old boundaries. But now barriers are rising again, driven by waves of migration, spillover from wars and the growing threat of terrorism. The numbers are clear: In 2015, work started on more new barriers around the world than at any other point in modern history. There are now 63 borders where walls or fences separate neighboring countries — nearly quadrupling in 15 years. In many ways, the barrierbuilding is being driven by fear. ¶ “We are fencing out the south, and much richer countries are fencing themselves in,” said Elisabeth Vallet, a barriers expert at the University of Quebec at Montreal. ¶ Most of the new walls are being erected within the European Union, which until recently was nearly borderless. Britain is going further, rolling up its bridges to the continent by voting to exit the E.U. Intended to counter migrants and terrorist attacks, these moves are not limited to Europe. In the Middle East, Tunisia is erecting a desert barrier with lawless Libya to insulate itself from unrest and an Islamic Stateled insurgency.¶ This new age of barriers is not just about chain links and concrete. It also reflects the rise of populist politicians. The effectiveness of their nationalist rhetoric suggests that even as globalization was working its magic on trade, mobility and investment, a seditious resentment was brewing among those left behind. n A look at the divisions between countries and people, 13-15
In the U.S., b ui l d i n g a wall is no e asy task
D
onald Trump has made no secret of his plan to build a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border — and persuade Mexico to pay for it. The Republican presidential nominee has been remarkably vocal about the proposal, one that 6 in 10 voters disagree with. The wall, he argues, is needed to curb illegal immigration, reduce gang violence near the border and stop drugs from reaching the United States. For now, fences cover 700 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile-long border. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, opposes completing the wall — but as a senator, she voted for the 2006 bill that led to construction of most of the existing fence. The idea of “completing the wall” has been part of political rhetoric since the first 14-mile stretch was completed 23 years ago, jutting eastward from the Pacific Ocean. But opinions remain divided on whether a barrier spanning the entire border is necessary — or even feasible. And nowhere does the debate roil more loudly than in the dusty cantinas and lively migrant shelters in the arid reaches of the border region. Mile by mile, the landscape and culture
There are more border barriers than at any time in modern history.
along the border vary wildly. West of El Paso, through New Mexico, Arizona and California, where most of the existing fence has been built, the border is largely a series of straight lines drawn by men. But to the east, in Texas, it follows the winding path of the Rio Grande. Most of the border land here is still unfenced. Fencing is just one part of the effort by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to secure the country’s borders. The number of Border Patrol officers has doubled in recent years. Where no fencing exists, cameras and sensors do. Barrier construction in this area would be difficult because of the region’s isolation and rough terrain. The federal government owns very little land in Texas, so a bigger fence would require the use of private land, adding to the legal and logistical challenges. But most challenging of all, the Rio Grande is a natural feature — not a man-made boundary. Rivers erode the land they pass. They flood. They dry up. They sometimes change course. A completed border barrier would have to navigate these natural challenges. Data released by CBP officials suggest ille-
U.S.
CA AZ
San Diego
Nogales
Tijuana
M
X
I
ra n
C
Del Rio Laredo
de
Eagle Pass McAllen Brownsville Reynosa Matamoros
O
Source: Center for Investigative Reporting, Openstreetmap.org
Norway
Border with barriers Austria
Latvia Russia
Slovenia
Ukraine
Cro. U.K.
Hung. Rom. Mold.
Neighboring countries
South North Korea Korea
IN ASIA. Kazak. Kyrgyz.
Serbia Macedonia
40
E
oG
100 miles
continues on next page
IN THE AMERICAS AND EUROPE.
TX
Ri
Barriers on these 63 borders divide nations across four continents.
50
Segments of border with no fence
El Paso Ciudad Juarez
Nogales
60
BORDERS WITH BARRIERS, BY YEAR
Segments of border with some kind of fence
NM
Bulgaria
Turkm. Uzbekistan
Nepal China
U.S.
Cyprus
Greece
Turkey
Afghanistan
Hong Kong Macao
India Mexico
The number of barriers increased modestly after World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
After Sept. 11, 2001, barrier-building spiked.
30
20
0
1989 2001
Iran
Pakistan Burma
Spain
Tunisia
Moroc.
Libya
Lebanon
Syria
Bangladesh Iraq
10
1945
Guatemala
Turkey
2016
Note: Graphics include non-mobile barriers designed to seal a border that have fixed masonry or concrete foundations.
Source: Elisabeth Vallet, Zoe Barry and Josselyn Guillarmou (Raoul Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies - University of Quebec at Montreal).
West. Sahara
Alg.
Israel Egypt
Jordan Gaza West S.Arabia U.A.E. Bank
Angola
IN AFRICA.
Namibia
Kenya Somalia
Botswana
Zimbab. Mozam. S. Africa
Kuwait
Yemen Oman
Thailand Malaysia Brunei
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
14
KLMNO WEEKLY
COVER STORY
STe m ming t h e tide of refu gees
I EUROPE Many thousands of people, including the Syrian refugees, below, became stuck in the Idomeni refugee camp in Greece as walls went up and deals were made between European countries to stop the flow of migrants. The living conditions in the town are dismal.
from previous page
gal immigration has decreased since 2001, but it’s difficult to show which specific policies made a difference. The Great Recession, which began in 2008, almost certainly deterred some economic migrants, researchers say. Today, most deaths reported by the Border Patrol occur in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where most of the border remains unfenced, and in the Tucson area, which is mostly fenced. Border enforcement has pushed migrants off existing routes into more deserted areas. In southern Arizona, migrants walk dozens of miles through the desert, carrying water in plastic jugs. Immigration is a complicated issue; a barrier along the border addresses just one part of it. An estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already live in the United States, representing 5 percent of the labor force. Emma Sanchez embodies the intertwined nature of border protection and immigration policy. She is married to a U.S. veteran and has two American children but was deported 10 years ago after being found without documents. Every Sunday, dozens of deported mothers like her meet for a church service at Friendship Park, the only binational meeting place between the United States and Mexico. Situated at the west end of the border, the park provides divided families a chance to catch up — if only through an 18-foot-tall steel-and-mesh fence.
NORTH AMERICA Top, the Rev. John Fanestil, right, leads a service at the border fence at Friendship Park in San Diego. A simultaneous service takes place on the Mexican side in Tijuana. Above, Border Patrol agents monitor the border fence in Brownsville, Tex.
t is in Europe, not the American Southwest, where the cauldron of migration has truly begun to boil over. Until the upheaval of 2015, Europe was home to the world’s most open frontiers. But within months, a messy effort to halt a mass flow of migrants fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan cascaded into the construction of more border fences than anywhere else on the globe. The sheer numbers of migrant arrivals — nearly 5,000 a day to southern Europe alone — was shocking, though at first, the newcomers had arrived largely unhindered. Some Europeans welcomed the refugees, arguing that they had a moral duty to aid people displaced by war. Yet a backlash quickly grew. The European Union had no system in place to properly vet the newcomers — at a time when jihadists who fought in Syria with the Islamic State were seeking to re-enter Europe. The fact that the influx also included economic migrants passing themselves off as asylum seekers did not help. continues on next page
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
15
KLMNO
COVER STORY E.U. Schengen states from previous page
Hungary began building a fence in June 2015, with completion of the barrier rerouting migrants toward neighboring countries. By early 2016, Austria and other nations had banded together to halt migrant transit through the Balkans, and the E.U. signed a deal with Turkey to stop asylum seekers from crossing the Aegean Sea. The combined moves left nearly 60,000 migrants trapped in Greece, with the single largest bottleneck forming in Idomeni, a border town that formerly served as a way station for those heading deeper into Europe. This coordinated effort largely worked. With the completion of each new fence, the flood of migrants entering that country slowed to a trickle. A combination of barriers and diplomacy sent a deterrent message to desperate migrants across the Middle East and beyond. Even now, though some in Europe are asking whether the current walls are enough. To prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel, Britain is funding construction of a wall in Calais, France. There is reason for uneasiness. The E.U. deal with Turkey to halt the flow across the Aegean Sea is in danger of falling apart. European nations are charging Ankara with human rights abuses after a failed July coup attempt. Turkey has threatened to scrap the deal unless the E.U. honors its pledge to grant Turkish citizens visa-free access to the bloc. The heavy weight of terrorism also hangs
POLAND
NETHERLANDS
U.K.
UKRAINE
BELGIUM
Schengen areas where border controls were reintroduced
CZECH REP. SLOVAKIA GERMANY FRANCE
Barrier along the border
AUSTRIA
SWITZ.
SLOVENIA
Partial barrier Main routes
I TA LY
NOV.
2015 DEC.
FENCES CAUSED REFUGEES TO MOVE TO OTHER BORDERS Fence
Dec. 15 NORTH
Austria Oct. 16 Hungary
HUNGARY
MOLDOVA
ROMANIA
CROATIA SERBIA BULGARIA BOSNIA
Bl
a
ck
Se
a
MACEDONIA TURKEY
PORTUGAL
S PA I N
Mediterranea
300 miles
a n Se
ALGERIA
TUNISIA LIBYA
Source: Frontex and staff reports
over the discussions, after revelations that attackers in Paris and Brussels entered Europe disguised as migrants. A wave of sexual assaults in Germany on New Year’s Eve has further inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment. A continent that prided itself as the global standard-bearer for human rights is confronting a moral dilemma. A plan to resettle migrants stranded in Greece has broken down as European countries reneged on pledges to accept them, and Greek officials have been slow to
2016 JAN.
FEB.
MAR.
APR.
MAY
JUN.
(Feb. 8 - 12)
EU-TURKEY DEAL
EGYPT
process asylum claims. Although the E.U. offered to relocate 66,000 migrants, it has so far absorbed 4,134. Those left behind appear willing to take fresh risks despite the new obstacles rising in their paths. Many will employ dangerous smugglers — precisely a pattern the Europeans say they were trying to break. Europe’s new barriers have made it impossible for hundreds of thousands of Syrians to escape relentless war. The message is clear: Keep out. n
and its moral dilemma.
JULY
ARRIVALS TO EUROPE’S SHORES ARE DOWN 2015
DIPLOMACY STOPPED THE FLOW AUSTRIAN MINISTER VISITS THE BALKANS
SYRIA GREECE ISRAEL
MOROCCO
But are walls enough? A look at how Europe stopped migrant flows ... OCT.
WEEKLY
ESTIMATED DAILY ARRIVALS
(Signed March 7, returns started March 20)
10,000 5,000 0
1,015,078 2016 (As of Oct. 13)
316,542
Hungary built a fence on its border with Croatia, completely cutting off the flow.
Nov. 12 Migrants shifted to Slovenia, which built its own fence.
BUT WITH A HIGHER HUMAN COST...
Slovenia
Croatia In 2015, 3 out of 1,000 people trying to get to Europe died or disappeared. In 2016, the death rate tripled. Serbia Nov. 28 Macedonia
After a visit from Austria’s foreign minister on Feb. 12, Macedonia closed its border.
In Greece, thousands were stranded in camps. SOUTH
Greece
Source: UNHCR
... AND LOW SUCCESS FOR RELOCATION
As of Oct. 5, just 4 percent of the 160,000 refugees that the E.U. said it would relocate have been relocated. THE WASHINGTON POST
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
16
KLMNO WEEKLY
ENTERTAINMENT
Bill Murray’s greatest role? Being Bill Murray. The comedian is rather publicityshy, but there are still plenty of stories to tell
BY
G EOFF E DGERS
L
et’s start with one of those crazy Bill Murray stories. A couple of years ago, a guy named Ted Melfi had a movie idea and desperately wanted Bill Murray to star. Except Melfi had never made a movie before. In a normal universe, unknown firsttimers can’t get scripts to major stars. Except Murray doesn’t have a manager. Or a publicist. Or an assistant. He has an 800-number and a voice mail. Melfi wrangled that number from a producer friend. He left messages. Lots of messages. Then one day, Murray called. He asked Melfi to meet. They drove around and ate cheeseburgers, talked script, and then Murray told Melfi the news. He’d do the movie. “St. Vincent” came out in 2014, a critical and commercial success. “I owe everything I have in my life to Bill Murray, outside of my general health,” Melfi says. We are on the phone because I am pretending Melfi’s story is my primary interest when, in fact, it’s just a decoy. I want the 800number. I have a story to do. On Sunday, Murray will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor. In July, my editor assigned a profile, and I’ve been trying to reach him ever since. I told this to Melfi. I also explained that I’d been told — through a message from the comedian’s attorney — that Murray might be mad at me, though I wasn’t sure why. I had responded by sending Murray a note, through that attorney, to clear the air. Still, nothing. Would Melfi be kind enough to pass me Murray’s number? He laughed. “There’s an unwritten law with Bill, and everybody knows it,” he said. “You don’t give out his contact information ever. And no one will ever do it.” There’s a moment of silence on
TONY RODRIGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
the phone. “You don’t need Bill Murray to make it a great story,” Melfi says. “ ‘Bill Murray was unavailable for this story.’ That’s the story of Bill Murray.” Actually, there are many stories of Bill Murray. Here’s one from David Letterman. Friday, Jan. 29, 1982. Letterman is nervous. Back then, he’s a gaptoothed, former weatherman from Indiana fresh off a canceled morning show. “Late Night With David Letterman” is set to premiere Monday. The host leaves his office to film a remote. While he’s gone, Murray, the guest scheduled for the debut, stops by to meet with his writers. When Letterman returns, the “Late Night” offices are dark, the staff gone. The receptionist delivers a report. “First, he took all the lightbulbs
out of the writers’ room because it was hard to concentrate with artificial light,” Letterman recounts. “Then he said, ‘You know what we really need to do?’ Then Bill takes the writers out for rum. They say there was drinking and they all got really drunk and had to go home. And I thought, ‘Oh God, what’s happened here?’ ” That Monday, Murray blasted onto the set and began a hilarious, mock-harangue of Letterman followed by a lengthy mock-apology. Hopping out of his chair, he spoofed the aerobics craze by performing Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” It was a model for future Murray appearances. “Somebody would always come up to me and say: ‘We have a problem. Bill is not here yet,’ ” Letterman says. “And each time that happened I learned to not take it seriously. Bill was never
late. Never missed a performance and was always well prepared and the best thing of the year on the show.” The Twain Prize is the most prestigious comedy award in the field, with past winners including Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and Tina Fey. You would think the latest recipient would want to talk about it. Not Murray. His attorney won’t reply to my emails or calls. His friends — Melfi, director Ivan Reitman, writer Mitch Glazer, producer Fred Roos — offer sympathy but decline my plea for help. They don’t want to annoy him by nagging. During the months he’s avoiding me, he’s spotted plucking fries off the plate of a random diner at an airport, tending bar in Brooklyn, leading an “America” cheer at the Ryder Cup golf tournament, and cheering on the Cubs. Occasionally, Murray will do those interviews pegged to a movie that’s coming out. But even those arrangements rarely go as planned. At the Toronto Film Festival for the premiere of “St. Vincent,” Melfi remembers Murray disappearing at one point. Instead of doing more press, he had gone to a friend’s house to make waffles. This is the Everyman Murray, the crasher of kickball games and karaoke jams, who would rather borrow your 10-speed than preen on a red carpet. Friends have been describing his feelings about receiving the Twain as “ambivalent.” And don’t try to talk business with Murray. “You just don’t do it,” Dan Aykroyd says. “Talk about anything else and everything else and you start to bring up the business, like some kind of pitch, like you’re trying to angle him, you’ll turn around and there are those taillights.” Howard Stern remembers the first time he noticed him. It was 1977, and Murray had been brought in to replace Chevy Chase, a huge star, on SNL. “My first reaction was, who the f--- is this guy to come on?” Stern says. “And then, like out of nowhere, he started doing that thing. The lounge singer. He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t trying to win me over. But he won the audience over in minutes and didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat.” Murray’s leap from SNL to mov-
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DATA CRUNCH ies may seem natural now. John Belushi and Chase had come before, and many others would come later. But at a point when most young actors would just be grateful for a bit part, Murray haggled over his starring role in “Meatballs.” It wasn’t about the money. Reitman scheduled the shoot for the summer of 1978. Murray worried that making the summercamp comedy would cut into his time playing golf and baseball during the SNL break. The first day on the set, Reitman noticed the actor holding a rumpled script. “Up to that moment, I wasn’t really sure he had read it. The first thing that he said was, ‘This is crap,’ ” Reitman says. “The first scene is where he’s introduced to the CITs [counselors in training]. He did the script but he changed every single line. “The first mistake people make is to think because he is so spontaneous and puts on an air of not caring that he doesn’t care. But the fact is, he really does care about the work and is very precise and professional about how he conducts himself. He hated guys who went for the most obvious. He’d say, ‘I’ve seen that before. I’ve seen some version of that before. It’s the easy joke.’ ” So why won’t Murray talk to me? For weeks, I blamed Laraine Newman. I had spoken to the actress and comedian, an original SNL cast member, on Aug. 22. It had not gone particularly well. Newman has had some bad experiences with the media. With me, she was uneasy with questions I thought were straightforward. For example, what did she think of Murray’s willingness to take a risk like “The Razor’s Edge”? “One can never know what another person is thinking,” Newman said. “I don’t think he would like anybody describing what his thoughts and motives are. He of all people would detest that.” We talked about their friendship over the years. About how Newman, years ago, had gone through a difficult breakup, and Murray had come by, in a convertible, and they’d gone for a long ride that helped her feel better. But what she didn’t tell me, until weeks later, was that she had been uneasy enough about our interview to send Murray a warning. Newman pulled up the ex-
change and read part of it to me over the phone. Murray was already “horrified,” though we couldn’t determine if that was embarrassment about being singled out for the Twain. Then he responded to her concerns about me. “I’ll try to kill this,” he wrote. The interview? The story? My career? I mulled this over for weeks. Then I talked with Joel Murray. He’s the youngest of the nine Murray kids and also an actor. He heard me out and then told me to let it go. It wasn’t my fault. He suspected his older brother never planned to meet with me. “You can’t beat yourself up,” Joel Murray said. “. . . He doesn’t care about publicity at all.” But maybe there’s still a way to end this on a high note. With another story. This comes from Letterman. Last spring, Murray wrote to tell Letterman he was in New York and would love to get together. Letterman looked at his schedule. It was tight. The only day he had at least partially open was a day when he would be getting immunization shots for a trip to India. He gave Murray the address. “The following day I’m in Dr. Hartman’s office and I’m in the examining room and I’m in my underpants,” Letterman says, “and there’s Dr. Hartman, a lovely fellow, and he’s got his lab coat on and he’s beginning to explain all of the different things he’s going to vaccinate me against. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the examining room door and I think, ‘I bet this is an assistant or somebody wanting to take blood.’ ‘Hi Bill,’ I say, in my underpants. And the doctor, of course, is stunned. Oh, Bill Murray. So Bill comes on in. We’re squeezed in there the three of us. He starts yakking to the doctor about this and what you going to give him and that because Bill had been to India.” Letterman offers one of his patented cackles and stops telling the story. “It was so crazy I’m having trouble explaining it. I’m in my underpants. There’s Bill Murray and I’m getting injected. That’s not right, is it? That’s a violation of the Hippocratic oath, isn’t it? So now he starts giving me all of the injections, so Bill looks at me in my underpants and says, ‘Have you been lifting?’ ” n
KLMNO WEEKLY
Can you hear me now? You might assume the biggest cities have the fastest, most reliable mobile networks. But that’s not the case, according to RootMetrics, a mobileperformance information firm. — Annys Shin RootMetrics ranked 125 cities based on several factors, including network reliability and speed, and data, call and text performance: The top five performers 1. Lansing, Mich. 2. Indianapolis 3. Atlanta 4. Milwaukee 5. Chicago The five worst performers 1. Hudson Valley, N.Y. 2. Omaha 3. Scranton, Pa. 4. Santa Rosa, Calif. 5. Lancaster, Pa.
Where the most populous cities ranked (listed from largest to smallest) 59. New York and tri-state area 99. Los Angeles 5. Chicago 84. Miami 40. Philadelphia 18. Dallas 51. Houston 66. Washington, D.C. 3. Atlanta 17. Boston n
SOURCE: ROOTMETRICS: METHODOLOGY AVAILABLE AT ROOTMETRICS.COM/EN-US/METHODOLOGY; ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO
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BOOKS
A culture crushed by consumption N ONFICTION
M IF VENICE DIES By Salvatore Settis Translated from Italian by André Naffis-Sahely New Vessel. 180 pp. Paperback, $16.95
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J OHN D OMINI
y father was eager to leave Naples, the longtroubled Italian port in which he was born, but in his last years, he had a recurring complaint about life in the States. In this country, he would grumble, the simplest pleasures seemed to come with a price tag. “Even a pretty sunset,” he’d say, no doubt recalling the spectacular sunsets of his native city. “If you want it, you have to pay for it.” That complaint often came to mind as I sank into the erudite gloom of “If Venice Dies,” by Salvatore Settis, a distinguished professor of art and archaeology in Italy. Settis’s learning is so formidable that he can shuttle, in just three pages, from the anthropology of “cargo cults” to Walter Benjamin on capitalism and Nietzsche on the Italian spirit. But in this powerful work of cultural criticism, he seeks to reverse the same trend that upset my father: that of “a civilization completely subservient to market forces.” Those forces are easy to see at work on the streets around St. Mark’s and the Rialto. Lovely as such places are, they all but suffocate under the hordes of sightseers, many of them day-trippers down off gargantuan cruise ships, who reduce much of Venetian life to what Settis calls a “tourist monoculture.” His book’s first column of statistics — the first of many — details the collapse of the actual urban population, the people who raise their children and make their living in town. Almost 175,000 in 1951, the head count now comes to roughly a third of that. These dispiriting local figures are linked, throughout the opening chapters, to grim data from around the world. The global proliferation of the “megalopolis,” for instance, launches Settis into a sustained litany of its ills. In 1961, “megalopolis” served to describe “the Boston-Washington corridor.” These days, the term is more fitting for a largely unregulated boomtown like China’s Chongq-
VINCENZO PINTO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Life in Venice has been reduced to a “tourist monoculture,” author Salvatore Settis writes.
ing, its population exploding past 32 million, with “an urban jungle of hundreds of skyscrapers” looming over squalid shantytowns. Chongqing emerges as the book’s Inferno, a recurring shorthand for how civilization’s “highest cultural expression,” the city, has “given way to a machine which produces and consumes.” Production and consumption, to be sure, are the auricle and ventricle of capitalism, and certainly “If Venice Dies” misses few opportunities to lash out at “blind belief in the irrepressible power of the market as the sole source of all value.” But the effect can be wearying. What’s worse, Settis suffers such enthusiasm for his research that some passages call to mind an eager PhD candidate, working in every last item on the bibliography. (The pedantic effect, by the way, can’t be blamed on the translator, since André Naffis-Sahely proves adept even with colloquialisms like “chasing a quick buck.”)
The most lugubrious writing comes when the author whales away at the 21st-century craze for skyscrapers in a jeremiad that reaches at least one highly dubious conclusion: Are the tall buildings of a contemporary downtown actually “gigantic phallic symbols,” representing a “society in which rape can be considered a virtue”? But then again, the book’s excavations turn up fascinating nuggets. I particularly enjoyed learning that a 45-story Caracas, Venezuela, project is now known as “the world’s tallest slum” because after the investors pulled out, squatters moved in. Better yet, philosophers, such as Benjamin and Nietzsche, assert guiding principles throughout, lending humanity to the string of worrisome numbers and compendiums of bad urban planning. And Settis himself can wax philosophical: “Photographs do not preserve a memory; instead they have replaced our remembrance and our ability to see.”
Although brief overall, in other words, this polemic feels chockfull of insight. It shines a harsh light on the risks in the way we live, much as Jane Jacobs did in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” more than 50 years ago. As for a way out of those risks, a glint of light down the urban canyons, “If Venice Dies” makes savvy use of the great fabulist Italo Calvino. Settis credits his countryman for the notion of “invisible cities.” He uses this as a defining term for the city as “a living tapestry of stories, memories, principles, languages, desires, institutions, and plans.” If homo urbanus can go on weaving that tapestry, allowing for “human scale” rather than insisting we pay for it, then even the likes of Chongqing may yet serve as “reservoirs of moral energy we’ll need to build our future.” n Domini’s latest book is “Movieola!: Stories.”
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BOOKS
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Addictive satire of hipster culture
Economic sage or misguided wonk?
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
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L ISA Z EIDNER
ell Zink’s fiction comes with a trailer about her wild trajectory as a novelist. The California-born writer lives in Germany, after brief marriages in Philadelphia and Tel Aviv, and careers as varied as bricklayer and pharmaceutical rep. She didn’t publish at all until she became pen pals with Jonathan Franzen, bonding over their shared love of birds. With Franzen’s help, she was plucked from obscurity to be profiled in the New Yorker as her quirky novels sold at auction for big bucks. Now, we have zany, brainy “Nicotine,” her third novel since 2014. Zink specializes in weird hookups. “Mislaid” (2015) begins with the unlikely romance between a gay man and a lesbian. The heroine of “Nicotine,” Penny Baker, is the daughter of Norm Baker, a Jewish physician from New Jersey, and Amalia, a member of the ancient Kogi tribe of Colombia. Penny’s extended family is split between the hippie-spiritual (Norm runs a sweat lodge for terminal cancer patients in South America called the Last Resort) and the Wharton School (her halfbrother, Matt, is a ruthless businessman, and workaholic Amalia now manages an HR firm). And Penny? She’s not sure. Grief-stricken and unmoored after the death of her father, she is sent to investigate Norm’s childhood home in Jersey City. She finds the house occupied by squatters who are part of a collective of political activists. All of the communal dwellings in Jersey City have themes. Feminists bunk at Stayfree. DJD is “named perhaps for its address on Don Juan Drive or its political mission (Dealing Junk to Degenerates).” The Baker House is now known as Nicotine, because the occupants fiercely defend their right to chain-smoke. Penny promptly falls head over heels for collective founder Rob. When Rob declares himself asexual, the frustrated Penny beds down with another housemate,
the bisexual Jazz (short for Jasmine). So does her half brother, Matt, sent to check up on Penny. Matt’s mother, Amalia, is obsessed with Matt, while Matt becomes as obsessed with Jazz as Penny is with Rob. What ensues is a lot of longing, antic bed-hopping (Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction), and an epic road trip ending in Hawaii. Zink excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures. Here’s Matt surveying Waikiki: “There’s a café with one table and two chairs to raise money selling the bikers lattes and hash. The usual psychedelic barber poles, mandalas, and towers of junk. It reminds him of Pippi Longstocking’s place, if she and her friends had been flabby nudists.” Zink has confessed to being mesmerized by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a child, and the influence shows. There’s a sense of bizarre creatures skittering through a strange land, of fairy dust being liberally sprinkled — especially over the raunchy romances. We don’t get a doofusturned-donkey, but there’s Sunshine, a grown man who thinks he’s a heartthrob, even though he’s costumed in filthy footie pajamas. The satire in “Nicotine” is lighter and less trenchant than that of “Mislaid,” which skewered contemporary race relations and identity politics. The clueless hipster culture of Jersey City is simply an easier target, although Zink’s scathing takedowns of activist pretensions are dead-on. Zink’s novels have a loose, jumpy energy and depend on machine-gun-fire dialogue. She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around. n Zeidner’s most recent novel is “Love Bomb.” She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University at Camden.
I NICOTINE By Nell Zink Ecco. 304 pp. $26.99
THE MAN WHO KNEW The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan By Sebastian Mallaby Penguin Press. 781 pp. $40
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A LAN M URRAY
got to know Alan Greenspan in the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal covering economic statistics. I quickly learned he was the person to call when I really didn’t understand what was going on. He was the man who knew. As Sebastian Mallaby shows in his new book by that name, it was that quality that powered Greenspan’s career as the most important economic mind of his generation. He never achieved status in the academic community, in large part because he preferred raw data to fancy theories and models. But to his business clients and a generation of political leaders, he was the indispensable source of economic wisdom. At the peak of his power and influence, he occupied that role not only for the nation but for the world. Mallaby’s hefty book is a tour de force — the most deeply reported work on the dry art of central banking since William Greider’s “Secrets of the Temple” (1988). But Greider’s work was flawed because he pushed his reporting through a meat grinder of questionable economic theories. Mallaby avoids that pitfall. Much like the man he profiles, Mallaby shows a solid understanding of competing economic — and political — theories, without tying himself inextricably to any one. Over the past two decades, Greenspan’s reputation has gone from breathless heights to suffocating depths. At the end of the last century, he was applauded on the cover of Time as the vaunted leader of the “Committee to Save the World” and depicted glowingly in Bob Woodward’s hagiographic “Maestro” (2000). After 2008, he became vilified as a man who, blinded by Ayn Randian ideology, refused to acknowledge clear signs of the coming mortgage crisis and, instead of saving the world, pushed it into unprecedented chaos. Throughout this long book, Mallaby wrestles with Green-
span’s many contradictions. How a man who early in life was wedded to principles could at times abandon those principles in pursuit of political power. How he struggled to reconcile his economic philosophy and political ideology with his deep understanding of data. How he could both crave the acceptance of society and at the same time be so profoundly introverted that he would sequester himself with data for days and sit for hours at dinner parties without saying a word. Mallaby reserves his final judgment for the end of the book. He concludes that Greenspan deserves his vaunted reputation as an analyst but had a more mixed record as a policymaker. “As an observer, analyst, and forecaster, he was formidable,” Mallaby says. “He managed to be right about most things: right about the interaction between asset values and growth, which he laid out in 1959; right about the inflationary bias in an overregulated economy, starting in the 1960s; right about the interplay between monetary policy and housing finance in the late 1970s; right about the irresponsibility of Reaganite supply-siders in the 1980s; right about the productivity acceleration in the mid1990s; and right about the threat of low inflation in the 2000s.” But in his efforts to reconcile analysis and action, he was often “maneuvering in cramped political terrain,” and if “he often behaved passively, it was partly because he was hemmed in by these constraints.” Mallaby’s Greenspan, in short, is neither maestro nor villain. He is a determined man with a brilliant mind, a dedication to data, a commitment to public service, a love of the public spotlight and a profound recognition of the limits of power. He won some and he lost some, but in the end, like all of us, he was profoundly human. n Murray is chief content officer for Time Inc.
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OPINIONS
Mental-health research needs to focus on today ROBERTO LEWISFERNÁNDEZ is a professor at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Over the summer, the National Institute of Mental Health got its first new director in 13 years. As Joshua Gordon settles into the top job at NIMH, one of his primary tasks should be to respond to the widespread perception that the agency — the world’s largest funder of mental health research, with an annual budget of about $1.5 billion — has lost sight of its most fundamental mission: finding ways to ease the burden of mental illness for those affected by it today. For the past decade, an increasing emphasis on neuroscience research has eclipsed this publichealth mission, leaving a research void that results in unnecessary and protracted suffering in our communities. Gordon is well situated to respond to this tension. With dual degrees as a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, he is a clinician who treats patients suffering from serious mental illnesses as well as a basic science researcher who studies genetic mutations in the brains of mice for clues to the mechanisms of psychiatric disorders. These are two ways of approaching the same goal: One improves the lives of individuals and families today, the other seeks a foundation for the treatments of tomorrow. NIMH grant funding supports both approaches, but in recent years the balance has tipped heavily toward the science of tomorrow. This disproportionate focus on future discoveries neglects pressing public-health needs. It means we miss opportunities to conduct practical research that would teach us how to get effective, acceptable treatments to the people who need them right now. It means we fail to learn why people don’t accept or are never even offered medicines and therapies that we know work. It means we don’t identify the best
ways to deliver care outside the lab and in the real world. In the past, NIMH recognized the need for a diversified research portfolio. The urgency for research on overcoming barriers to care, testing new interventions and developing feasible ways to bring research findings into practice was balanced with research aimed at discovering the brain mechanisms behind psychiatric disorders and using this knowledge to develop treatments. But this once well-diversified research portfolio has been increasingly narrowed. Since 2012, a full 85 percent of nonAIDS-related grant funding has been channeled to basic scientific research. That’s left less than a fifth of this money for research on treatments and services to enhance the lives of those suffering today. Such a disproportionate emphasis is as unwise an investment approach as a retirement portfolio made up only of high-risk investments. The research portfolio also needs investments with shorter-term yields, if more modest benefits. As with any investment portfolio,
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diversification is prudent. Neuroscience research is crucial, but it is a long-term proposition. Its payoffs may be tremendous, but they are exploratory, and for every success there are many, many dead ends. The benefits of even the most successful breakthroughs may be generations away. Our current needs are urgent. Suicide is a good example. Effective interventions exist — previous research has proved that — but we need research to learn how best to get them to people at risk. In the meantime, people who might have been saved die. Knowledge of what works is a beginning only; demonstrating that depression can be lifted through a medication or therapy or proving that the hallucinations of a person with schizophrenia can be mitigated is important, but we also need research on how to get such effective treatments into practice. How do we make sure services can be implemented, organized and financed so that clinicians do the right thing at the right time? How do we identify and transcend barriers of culture, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? We know that poor people have grossly inferior access to mental-health care and
suffer worse outcomes. How do we eliminate such disparities? And, as in other areas of medicine, in mental health sometimes an ounce of prevention is the best cure. Preventive strategies can enhance resilience, particularly in young people, and help reduce the impact of the many mental illnesses that emerge during a person’s teens and 20s. NIMH support is needed for research in all of these areas. This is why a group of 20 current and former members of the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council (the body that approves NIMH funding decisions and advises on its overall direction), myself among them, have called on NIMH to make a course correction in its funding priorities. Although we presented our position in a scientific journal, the issue of how NIMH balances its research portfolio deserves the attention of Congress and the public. Public health has always been a cornerstone of the NIMH mandate. Basic science research must continue, of course, but Gordon should commit to restoring greater emphasis on research that will alleviate suffering and maximize recovery for people coping with mental illnesses right now. n
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TOM TOLES
Putin’s hope for a U.S. revolution JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs and writes a biweekly column that appears on Mondays.
In the fall of 2004, Vladimir Putin suffered a blow he has never forgotten. The fraudulent election of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president, which Putin had directly and brazenly engineered, was overturned by a massive popular uprising. What came to be known as the “Orange Revolution” created a model for resistance to rigged elections in autocracies across Eurasia — in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan and, in 2012, Russia. Most of the rebellions didn’t succeed. But Putin developed an obsession with “color revolutions,” which he is convinced are neither spontaneous nor locally organized, but orchestrated by the United States — and in the case of the Moscow protests four years ago, by Hillary Clinton. That’s the context in which Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election must be understood. Putin is trying to deliver to the American political elite what he believes is a dose of its own medicine. He is attempting to ignite — with the help, unwitting or otherwise, of Donald Trump — a U.S. color revolution. Let’s look at the way those revolts unfolded. In every case, they pitted an outsider political movement against an entrenched elite willing to employ fraud and
force to remain in power. The outsiders mobilized their followers to collect evidence of rigging on election day and, when they could, conducted exit polls and “quick counts” to obtain vote totals they could contrast with official results. They disseminated their findings through satellite channels and other foreign media. When the inevitable victory of the ruling party was announced, they called their followers to the streets for mass protests they hoped would cause the regime to crumble — or at least discredit its phony election triumph. Of course, Trump’s populist campaign is no more comparable to the pro-democracy insurgencies in formerly Soviet lands such as Ukraine and Belarus than Clinton’s administration-in-waiting is to the Putin regime. But Putin’s goal
is to create the illusion that they are. “He’s trying to establish that our system is just as bad, just as corrupt, as his,” says Brian Whitmore, a senior editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The first step of the campaign was to hack the computers of the Democratic National Committee and senior party figures and distribute — sometimes with alterations — material that was purported to show Clinton’s rigging of the system. The DNC was revealed, unsurprisingly, to lean against socialist-turnedDemocrat Bernie Sanders; Clinton’s campaign team was shown to be making political calculations about her public statements. As if on cue, Trump and his surrogates responded with mock shock and charges of “corruption.” Next came the suggestions that the balloting itself might be tampered with. Most likely, that was the point of the hacking probes into the voting systems of more than 20 states, including key battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Florida. A joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Intelligence said it was unlikely voting systems could be tampered with “to alter actual
ballot counts or election results.” But the reports of cyberintrusions are enough to damage public confidence. Trump meanwhile plays his part. Repeatedly warning that the election may be rigged, Trump has been enlisting his supporters to watch “certain areas” he is likely to lose, such as Philadelphia. His “Stop the Steal” movement is planning to conduct its own exit polls outside key precincts. Its inevitable reports of “irregularities” will provide the predicate for Trump to claim fraud. And the revolution? Putin understands that Washington is not Kiev; mobs are unlikely to mass in front of the White House or Congress. But rebellions can happen online: Imagine a blizzard of Internet posts, reinforced by the Kremlin’s paid trolls, its satellite television network and the Trumpian corners of Fox, alleging that what Trump calls the “political establishment” has stolen the election for Clinton. That wouldn’t stop Clinton from taking office. But she would start her term politically wounded, both domestically and abroad. Putin will have obtained payback. And Trump will have shown himself to be a most useful idiot. n
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BY SIGNE WILKINSON FOR THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS BY MATT DAVIES
Financial crisis 2.0? ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics.
While everyone fixates on the U.S. election, developments in the world economy threaten to create problems for the next president and, possibly, trigger a major financial crisis. A little-noticed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) delivers the bad news. It finds that global debt — including the debts of governments, households and nonfinancial businesses — reached a record $152 trillion in 2015, an amount much higher than before the 2008-2009 financial crisis. What’s worrisome about this is that the global economic recovery has assumed widespread “deleveraging” — the repayment of debt by businesses and households. Initially, the theory went, these repayments would slow the economy. To reduce their debts, households would cut consumption and companies would cut investment. But once debts had receded to manageable levels, consumer and business spending would bounce back. The economy would accelerate. It hasn’t happened. With a few exceptions, little deleveraging has taken place, the IMF shows. One exception is the United States, where there has been some deleveraging among households. But generally, just the opposite has occurred. Many countries have become more indebted. On a worldwide basis, the $152 trillion of debt (again:
both private and governmental) is up from $112 trillion in 2007, before the financial crisis, and $67 trillion in 2002. Recall that the pre-crisis economy relied on debt-driven growth. People and firms could spend more, because they’d borrowed more. This was not just true in the United States with its housing bubble. Borrowing financed housing booms in Europe, consumer goods, and investments in factories and machinery. Government debt has played a bigger role since the crisis, but private debts — borrowings by firms and people — represent two-thirds of all debt. Still, debt-driven growth has limits. The more that is borrowed, the more likely that borrowers, lenders — or both — will pull back, further undermining economic growth.
The IMF study fears “a vicious feedback loop”: High debts discourage more borrowing. A slowing economy then makes it harder to repay debts. Deleveraging is stymied. This is a pervasive dilemma. Private debt is “high not only among advanced economies” but also in many emerging-market countries (China, Brazil). These fears, of course, may be overblown. Economist William Cline of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank, notes that although debt is high, interest rates are low. What matters for borrowers is how easily they can service their loans by paying interest, and low rates clearly help. “Compared to the early 1980s, when interest rates were very high, there may be more space for higher debt levels,” Cline says. Also, there isn’t any magic threshold beyond which a country’s debts automatically become unsustainable. It depends on the country and on circumstances. Japan’s private and governmental debts equaled 416 percent of its economy (gross domestic product) in 2015, a level — in relation to GDP — almost two-thirds higher than the United States’. Yet, Japan’s debts have not caused a financial crisis. (Nor, it must be added, have they
fixed the economy’s underlying problems.) Perhaps societies can operate with debt levels that once were considered imprudent. Or perhaps such debt will prove, as with the United States’ housing bubble, a mirage that bursts destructively. What’s called the “debt overhang” is already acting as a drag on the world economy, says Hung Tran of the Institute of International Finance, an industry research group. Much evidence supports his view. Whether or how this might become a full-blown crisis is uncertain. Economist Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute, another think tank, says that the private debt of companies and households in China has inflated faster than the U.S. housing bubble. “China has been an engine for global growth,” he says. “Now it’s sputtering.” The next president cannot escape these issues. Compared with many countries, the United States survived the Great Recession in relatively good shape. But we are inevitably affected by the broader global economy. The delay of deleveraging suggests a slowing world economy and a continued political backlash against global trade and investment. n
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
23
KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Charter schools BY
E MMA B ROWN
The intense growth rate of charter schools has fueled an equally in tense debate about the role they’ll play in the future of U.S. education. A great deal of confusion surrounds them; here are some of the myths. MYTH NO. 1 Charter schools are everywhere. Yes, the charter movement is growing. And charters have a significant market share in an increasing number of cities, with New Orleans (where 93 percent of students attend charters) leading the way, followed by Detroit (53 percent); Flint, Mich. (47 percent); and Washington, D.C. (44 percent). Forty-three states and the District have laws allowing for charter schools. But in many parts of the country, charters are few and far between. About 3 million students are enrolled in about 6,800 charters, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That’s only about 6 percent of all public school students. Eight states have no charter schools, and five have fewer than 10. The debate is loud, but the market share is still small. MYTH NO. 2 Charter schools are the brainchild of union-busting billionaires. It is true that deep-pocketed foundations have played a key role in the expansion of charter schools, through contributions to charters themselves and to the ecosystem of organizations that work with such schools. But charters were originally the brainchild of teachers union stalwart Al Shanker, who served as president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997. Shanker proposed charter schools in 1988, arguing that they would give small groups of teachers a way to dream up new methods of reaching the students for whom traditional schools were not working. Their successes and failures would hold lessons
for other schools striving to improve. Some charters have acted as Shanker envisioned, but in many states they haven’t, rejecting requirements for teacher certification or barring collectivebargaining rights. Driven by a vision of market-based reform, charters have become not laboratories so much as competition meant to either spur traditional schools to improve or replace them. Just a few years after proposing charter schools, Shanker largely disavowed them, holding instead that schools would get better only by standardizing their goals. MYTH NO. 3 Charter schools are better than traditional schools. While it is true that some charter schools outperform traditional schools, it is also true that many charter schools fail. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has produced a series of studies comparing academic results at charter and traditional schools. In 2013, CREDO found no difference nationally between traditional and charter schools in math, while in reading, the average charter school student gained the equivalent of an additional eight days of learning per year. But there was wide variation. Among the charters CREDO studied, 31 percent were significantly weaker in math than their traditional school counterparts, 29 percent were significantly stronger and 40 percent showed no real difference. CREDO studies also show variation across state lines. In cities, charters tend to fare better: The average student in an urban charter school gains the
ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
An art class at Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. In the District, 44 percent of students attend charter schools.
equivalent of 40 more days of learning in math and 28 additional days in reading. But the average charter student in Texas and in Ohio — a state that has been notorious for allowing poor-performing charters to persist — learns less in math and reading each year than peers in traditional schools. MYTH NO. 4 Charter schools are public. Or private. Neither side is entirely right. Charters are a hybrid, and judges and regulators have struggled to figure out how they should be treated under the law. “Courts have had a difficult time determining their legal status because they exhibit both public and private characteristics,” researchers wrote in a University of Massachusetts Law Review article last year. Often, the public- or privateness of charter schools depends on state law. In many states, for example, charter schools are subject to sunshine laws, meaning their records and board meetings are open to the public. But not everywhere: In the District, for instance, charters are exempt from sunshine laws,
which means journalists and parents often cannot access even basic information about how the schools spend taxpayer money. MYTH NO. 5 All charters employ zerotolerance discipline. It has never been the case that all charter schools subscribe to the no-excuses, zero-tolerance philosophy. Lately — amid growing concern over feeding the school-to-prison pipeline with expelled students, and over producing graduates ill-equipped to deal with the freedom and responsibility of college life — there’s been a shift even among some stalwarts of the no-excuses approach. Some KIPP schools now use restorative justice, which prioritizes working through problems over doling out punishment. Even Education Secretary John B. King Jr. — whose charter school in Boston is known for both its high test scores and high suspension rates — delivered a speech this summer calling on charter leaders to rethink their approach to discipline. n Brown covers national education for The Washington Post.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2016
24
A & Q
THE RACE: U.S. Representative Congressional District 4
ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION: There are estimates of about 270,000 undocumented residents in Washington state. Should there be a path to citizenship for them?
CANDIDATES:
Dan Newhouse
Clint Didier
Incumbent, former director of state Department of Agriculture, farmer
Farmer
prefers Republican Party
prefers Republican Party ANSWER: As a lifelong resident of Central Washington who has worked alongside immigrants in the fields and orchards all my life, I know we must address the humanitarian crisis our broken immigration system has created. It is likely this next Congress will face the responsibility of addressing this immense problem, which is a top priority of mine in Congress. We must examine and reform every aspect of immigration, including creating a workable visa system to support our economy, ensuring we prioritize border security and the rule of law, as well as making sure we deal in a compassionate manner with the undocumented immigrants in our communities, including an eventual path to legal status for those who’ve committed no crimes in this country. For a long-term solution to be achieved, it must not be done by executive action, but rather must be debated and achieved by the people’s elected representatives in Congress.
ANSWER: Didier did not respond to requests to answer this question.
If you have a question you’d like to ask the candidates in any race in North Central Washington please your suggestion to newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.
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ELECTI N GUIDE
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