The Washington Post National Weekly - Oct. 25, 2015

Worst Week Rep. Paul Ryan 3

Politics How Biden decided not to run 4

Science Helping coral reefs evolve 17

5 Myths Weight loss 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

The pink pill is here. Who wants it?

The epic quest for a ‘female Viagra’ and why it is far from over. PAGE 12

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

2

Thank you for your service.

The Wenatchee World is seeking stories and photos of area veterans for our online Veterans Guide this November. We’ll compile your stories and photos on our website, and feature selected stories and photographs in print in The Wenatchee World.

There’s no cost, we want to include as many stories of veterans, living and deceased, to serve as a permanent repository of these stories of service from local veterans and their families.

To submit your stories, or those of a family member who served, go to our website at wenatcheeworld.com/veterans/submit/ and complete the online form.

wenatcheeworld.com

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Paul Ryan

by Chris Cillizza

C

ongrats, Paul Ryan! You’re going to be the speaker of the House!

Of course, you got the job (which just two weeks ago you said you didn’t want) only after the uber­ conservative House Freedom Caucus tanked California Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s chances. Even then, you couldn’t rally 80 percent of its members behind you.

And while you’ll get the 218 Republican votes you need to be the top ranking Republican in the House — something no other GOPer could do! — it’s not entirely clear whether you will be able to get 218 of your party pals to support you on, say, raising the debt ceiling or funding the federal government. You know, the big stuff.

The good thing is that the other members of your conference have pledged to help carry the fundraising burden of being speaker, so that you can spend time at home in Wisconsin with your wife and kids.

One thing on that, though: Donors are going to want to see you and not those other guys — particularly with McCarthy diminished and John Boehner soon gone.

Look, being the speaker is still a great gig. You are going to love it. Just ask Boehner. Actually, on second thought, don’t.

Paul Ryan, for getting the most powerful job you didn’t want with no guarantees that you’ll be able to actually succeed in doing it, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

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This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 2

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER In August, the FDA approved a drug to help women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The drug, marketed as Addyi, hit the market Oct. 17.

Photograph by CRAIG CUTLER, for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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POLITICS

How time ran out on Biden’s dream

JIM LO SCALZO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

After months of uncertainty, vice president decided the campaign window ‘has closed’

BY D AN B ALZ AND P AUL K ANE

O

n Monday morning, Vice President Biden returned from a weekend in Delaware to meet with some of his most senior advisers, under great pressure to make a decision about whether he would run for president. As he deliberated, the Washington rumor mill, which had been running wild for weeks, was in overdrive about a likely Biden campaign.

Allies outside Biden’s inner cir-

cle were increasingly confident he would run, based on their own reading of events. Throughout the day, cable news and others provided a continuous series of reports about an imminent decision, with Biden now ready to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the Democratic nomination.

In reality, Biden, 72, had not arrived in Washington with his mind made up. And as he and his advisers weighed options, things did not look favorable.

His advisers were confident that he could raise the money and recruit the talent for a successful campaign, and they told Biden so.

But they all agreed that there were not enough days left to execute those tasks, while also participating in debates and campaigning actively in the early states, before the voting began in February.

As he and his family were going through the emotionally wrought grieving process after the death of his son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer on May 30, the vice

Vice President Biden and his wife, Jill, accompanied by President Obama, walk to the Rose Garden on Wednesday to make the announcement he would not be running for president.

president had finally run out of time to mount and run a serious campaign.

The final decision did not come until Tuesday night, after late meetings with his family and senior advisers following a dinner for former president Jimmy Carter and former vice president Walter F. Mondale.

Hoping to avoid leaks, Biden made the announcement public on Wednesday in the White House Rose Garden, flanked by his wife, Jill Biden, and President Obama.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

5

POLITICS The decision snuffed out the last flickers of Biden’s dream of occupying the Oval Office — a dream he had carried with him for more than four decades and one he was clearly reluctant to let go. But as much as he never wanted to say no to one final campaign, in the end, he couldn’t find a way to say yes.

There were many mixed signals along the way, and as it turned out, many missed ones as well. Biden never said publicly he was emotionally ready, but many who wanted him to run interpreted what they heard or saw privately as evidence that he would do so.

There is no better example than that of Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, who on Tuesday told The Washington Post and others he expected Biden to run and promised the union’s endorsement when it happened.

There was an alternative reality that eventually proved decisive.

Over the past week, with filing deadlines approaching, Clinton winning praise for her debate performance in Las Vegas and polls showing Biden slipping, the vice president’s window of viability closed quickly and with finality.

Scenarios existed for a possible winning campaign, but they clashed with available evidence of the moment.

As the 2016 campaign took shape, Biden played coy about his intentions, never signaling clearly an interest in running but never saying he would not. As Clinton built a political machine and gathered institutional support around her likely candidacy, Biden stood still.

He occasionally traveled to Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina, but it was at most a game of keeping everyone guessing rather than taking serious steps to assemble the elements of a modern campaign.

Something changed in the weeks after Beau Biden’s death.

As he began more serious deliberations, the political and journalistic worlds soon joined in full pursuit of the answer to the question: Will he run?

Biden Watch begins The media frenzy began on Aug. 1, an otherwise quiet summer Saturday. The New York

BRYAN WOOLSTON/REUTERS

For Biden to really consider the race, he and the family would have to start having more better days than bad days.

Times reported that afternoon that Biden and his advisers had “begun to actively explore” a presidential campaign. The article quoted a column by Maureen Dowd, published the same day, that recounted a conversation between Biden and his dying son in which Beau urged the father to run.

The Wall Street Journal had written about Beau’s urgings two weeks earlier, but it wasn’t until the Times stories appeared that the idea of a Biden presidential

Biden backers break for Clinton Hillary Clinton was the secondchoice candidate for a majority of Biden supporters, according to polling done before his decision.

Support among Democratic-leaning voters

Clinton Sanders Biden

nnnnnnnn 54% nnn 23% nn 16%

When Biden supporters are assigned to their second choice

Clinton Sanders

nnnnnnnnn 64% nnn 25%

Source: Washington Post-ABC News poll

campaign fully took root.

Biden had long wanted to be president and talked about it not long after he was elected to the Senate in 1972. “I know I can be a good president,” he said in an interview with author Kitty Kelley in Washingtonian magazine. The date was June 1974. At 31, he was not yet old enough to run for president.

He first ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988 but was forced out of the race amid charges of plagiarism and exaggerations in September 1987. He waited 20 years before trying again, entering the 2008 race in a field that included two political rock stars in Obama and Clinton.

When he barely registered in the Iowa caucuses in early January 2008, he quickly announced he would end his candidacy.

No one around Biden was saying in August that he was a likely candidate, but the preparations were underway. The vice president went away on vacation with no decision made or announced.

This was a family issue, advisers said, even as they were fielding calls of encouragement from people who wanted Biden to run and

In June, as Beau Biden’s casket is taken from a hearse, the Biden family looks on. They include his father, Vice President Biden, right; Beau’s widow, Hallie, second from right; and brother Hunter.

KLMNO WEEKLY

were prepared to raise money or work in the campaign.

Biden’s campaign-in-the-making was under the domain of a few trusted advisers: his vice presidential chief of staff Steven Ricchetti; Ted Kaufman, the former senator from Delaware and Biden’s former Senate chief of staff; and veteran strategist Michael Donilon.

Biden and his team talked about trying to run a campaign that would break the mold of modern politics, one that would prove that it wasn’t necessary to spend two years on the trail, one that would show that the power of a big message could break through some of the clutter, partisanship and small-bore thinking that afflicts some candidates.

On Sept. 7, Biden joined union workers in Pittsburgh for an annual Labor Day parade. Biden sprinted along the parade route, shaking hands with well-wishers and, as the cliche of the moment put it, looking every bit like a candidate.

Nothing he was saying publicly suggested that was the case.

On Aug. 26, Biden spoke to members of the Democratic National Committee, meeting in Minneapolis, by conference call.

He told them he was trying to assess whether he had “the emotional fuel” to run. He said he would need to run with his whole heart and soul to do so, adding that “right now, both are pretty well banged up.”

On Sept. 3, he spoke at a synagogue in Atlanta, where he talked about whether he had the “emotional energy” required to run for president. “I can’t look you straight in the eye and say, ‘Now I can do it,’ ” he said.

A week later, he appeared on CBS’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” He spoke even more openly and emotionally about himself, his son’s death and the process he was going through trying to decide whether to run.

“I’d be lying if I said that I knew I was there,” he told the host.

Supporters of a Biden bid were delivered a blunt warning: For the vice president to really consider the race, he and the family would have to start having more better days than bad days.

Mixed readings

By Oct. 3, the day of a memorial continues on next page

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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POLITICS

from previous page

service for a civil rights leader in Delaware, Biden was still having bad days.

The vice president was one of the eulogists, and those in attendance saw a “fragile” man who every five seconds had to pause to take a deep breath, according to one of those in attendance. “He was in absolutely no shape to run a presidential campaign.”

None of those public comments slowed down the speculation that a Biden campaign was coming soon.

In private meetings or telephone calls with friends, potential donors and supporters, Biden left some with the impression that he was leaning strongly toward running. Advisers continued to insist that no decision had been made and chalked up some of the talk that he was on the brink of running to people who wanted to offer public encouragement.

Through the early fall, Biden’s presumed timetable for a decision continued to slide, from early September to late September, then to early October in time to participate in the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13, and even to the possibility that he might wait until the end of October, just before the first filing deadlines.

As he agonized, some longtime friends expressed concerns about embarking on another campaign.

In their view, he already had put together an illustrious career in public service, capped by two terms as vice president. He was enjoying an outpouring of sympathy and respect following his son’s death. All that, they said privately, would be put at risk by a campaign against the formidable Clinton, as well as Sanders, who had captured the imagination of the progressive wing of the party.

By Tuesday, some who had encouraged Biden to run still held out hope. Schaitberger began making plans for the endorsement.

But Biden had concluded it simply wasn’t possible to run a successful campaign with so few days left: The Iowa caucuses were barely three months away, the holidays would eat up time, and three debates would steal precious days away from the trail.

As one adviser put it, “By the time the family was ready to go, we were down to 70 days.” n

THE FIX

Paul Ryan might be saving his party. But at what cost?

BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

P

aul Ryan nailed down critical endorsements and agreed to serve as speaker of the House last week, a move that avoids a protracted and messy fight to be the next face of the Republican Party — even as Congress teeters on the edge of a series of self- imposed deadlines.

But peel away the plaudits directed at Ryan for his “selfless” and “courageous” decision, and you see that the 2012 vice presidential nominee might pay a severe price for agreeing to take one for the team.

The most obvious problem for Ryan is that the past 160 years of political history suggests that there is a congressional path and a presidential path, never shall the twain meet. The last person to be elected president directly from the speakership was James K. Polk way back in 1844. And with the anti-Washington sentiment coursing through the GOP electorate since 2010, voluntarily making yourself the face of Washington Republicans could well foreclose — or at least hamstring — the possibility of being president.

“I’d hate to lose him as a potential contender down the road for the White House, but I — he is such a man of such talent and such integrity and character that he’s a real resource for the country,” Mitt Romney said of Ryan last weekend.

But, there are lots of other problems lurking for Ryan.

He insisted that he be endorsed by all of the various factions of the House Republican conference before he agreed to put himself forward as a candidate for speaker.

[On Thursday, Ryan won the backing of those factions, paving the way for him to be elected.] So he’s speaker. Now what?

Does Ryan truly believe that, say, the House Freedom Caucus will line up behind him on con-

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), center, said he would consider running to be the next House Speaker if his conditions were met.

tentious fights over the next year simply because they voted for him as speaker? This sentence, from a Washington Post story, suggests he does: “Ryan’s allies said his conditions for assuming the speakership were likely to include an understanding that he would have a free hand to lead without a constant fear of intra-party reprisals.”

I’m not convinced that’s true or, even if it’s true today, that it will be honored going forward. The Freedom Caucus has made its name — and increased its influence — by refusing to simply line up behind what leadership wants.

Why, suddenly, would they abandon that very effective tactic? Because Ryan asked them to? Or even because they voted for Ryan as speaker? Count me as dubious.

Then there is this condition from Ryan: “Another aim would be to delegate some of the job’s travel and fundraising demands so that Ryan could spend enough time with his wife and schoolaged children.”

While I commend Ryan for wanting to keep his family time protected, it’s a totally unrealistic idea. Without John Boehner, the

party’s best congressional fundraiser by a mile, who exactly is going to fill the void for Ryan? Donors — especially the big ones — don’t want to be asked for a giant check from the guy next to the guy. They want to be in a room with the speaker. Period.

Given that — and the fact that Republicans don’t control the White House, the best of all fundraising perches — it’s hard for me to imagine Ryan as speaker taking weekends (and nights) (and mornings) off and someone else just “filling in.” Being speaker isn’t the sort of job you can do on your own terms — no matter the promises that people make you in order for you to take the job.

Ryan, quite clearly, believes that he can do something that saves his party and preserves the parts of his life that he treasures.

But the hard realities of politics suggest that the deal Ryan is trying to cut for himself might wind up being a bad one, in the long run, for the Wisconsin Republican. n Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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POLITICS

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Clinton back in the Benghazi hot seat BY

K AREN D E Y OUNG

10:29 A.M.

1:21 P.M.

6:28 P.M.

8:58 P.M.

R

epublicans on the Benghazi committee made headway Thursday in depicting former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton as disengaged from the security needs of a key outpost in Libya and curiously receptive to the lengthy policy musings sent to her private e-mail by a friend and sometimes political adviser.

But during hours of fastballs flung at Clinton by GOP lawmakers, and softballs lobbed by Democrats, very little was added to the already extensive factual and investigative record of what happened, and why, in Benghazi before, during and after the terrorist attacks there in September 2012.

Much of the questioning rehashed issues that were settled in other hearings and official inquiries about Benghazi over the past several years. Clinton repeated her categorical denials of the longdebunked charge that she told the Defense Department to “stand down” attempts to launch a military rescue.

Questions that Clinton addressed in testimony nearly three years ago were repeated: What did Clinton do the night of the attacks?

With whom did she speak? What did she say?

Select committee Republicans spent much of their time focused on the precarious nature of the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi and the multiple requests for additional security from the ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. Clinton said she considered Stevens not only a Libya expert but also a friend.

As those requests increased during the summer of 2012, Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) asked Clinton, “Why did you not pick up the phone and call your friend” and ask him what he needed?

Stevens was among four Americans killed in Benghazi, when militants first rushed into the diplomatic compound and later launched a mortar attack on a secret CIA facility nearby.

Local guards hired to protect the diplomatic perimeter melted

PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

away, and five armed U.S. Diplomatic Security guards inside the compound were overwhelmed.

Disputing that she was inattentive to security needs, Clinton repeated her response to similar questions during testimony in early 2013. Security discussions for individual overseas posts “will not ordinarily come before the secretary of state, and they did not in this case. . . . The Diplomatic Security professionals reviewing requests . . . in war zones and hot spots . . . have great expertise in keeping people safe.

“I was not going to secondguess them,” Clinton said.

“I was not responsible for specific security requests and decisions,” she said. Stevens himself, Clinton said, never contacted her directly about security issues, and he strongly supported the continued operation of the Benghazi mission.

Neither Clinton nor committee Democrats disputed the conclusions of the Accountability Review Board, which said after a late 2012 investigation that the “security posture . . . was inadequate for Ben-

ghazi and grossly inadequate to dealwiththeattackthattookplace.”

The ARB faulted the State Department for maintaining the facility as a “temporary” outpost that made it ineligible for funds dedicated to security improvements of recognized diplomatic facilities and for a climate within the department in which separate decisions on policy and security were “stove-piped” among different officials without any sense of “shared responsibility.”

Clinton also repeated the ARB findings that numerous Benghazi requests had been fulfilled, including heightening the surrounding walls and the presence of five Diplomatic Security guards accompanying Stevens on his visit there from the embassy in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

But although more guards might have helped, Clinton said, security experts she has since consulted were “not sure if anything could have stopped the attackers.”

Republican lawmakers tried to tie Clinton’s influence over and support for the Obama administra-

The former secretary of state emerged unscathed from a hearing in which the 2016 race quietly loomed large

tion’s policy in Libya directly to the failure to protect the facility.

They charged that she overruled State Department experts who warned of the historical failure of regime change and opposed U.S. participation in the 2011 air campaign in support of the rebel force that overthrew the government of dictator Moammar Gaddafi, eventually leaving Libya in its current chaos.

“How is it possible that these urgent requests” for additional security assistance “did not break through to the upper level?” Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.) asked, concluding that “I think your attention waned. . . . I think that this was what was going on. To admit a need for more security . . . didn’t fit your narrative.”

Clinton categorically denied the charge, calling it a “disservice” to the people making “these hard security decisions.”

Again and again, Clinton sought to place Benghazi in the long line of attacks against U.S. overseas missions and the dangers faced by those who man them.

In particular, she noted the 1983 attacks that killed 258 Americans in Beirut and the 12 Americans, among nearly 200 others, who died in 1998 when terrorists blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

“I was the boss of ambassadors” and other officials in 270 diplomatic missions, Clinton said. “I am very well aware of the dangers that are faced by our diplomats and development professionals. There was never a recommendation from Chris Stevens or anyone else to close Benghazi. . . . Sitting here in this large, beautiful meeting room, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, there should have been.’ But that was not the case.”

Those and many similar comments underlay an issue no one wanted to raise directly — Stevens’s unilateral decision to travel to Benghazi despite his descriptions of the tenuous security situation there. Clinton noted only that ambassadors do not normally ask permission or even notify the State Department of their plans to travel within countries where they are posted. n

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NATION

Where students are still paddled Most states have banned spanking, but across the Deep South the practice continues

BY

C HICO H ARLAN

I

n Greenwood, Miss., this year’s student/parent handbook shows a globe being hoisted by several young students. “Maximizing student potential,” the Greenwood Public School District declares on its cover. On page 3, the handbook tells students to be honest, respect authority and “avoid violence,” because “there are other ways to resolve conflicts.”

Then, on page 19, it lays out the circumstances under which school administrators can hit students.

“Corporal punishment for use in this district,” it says, “is defined as punishing or correcting a student by striking the student on the buttocks with a paddle.”

Greenwood’s policy is not uncommon — at least not in the Deep South. Though a majority of U.S. states banned the spanking or paddling of students over the last few decades, public schools in some Southern states still depend on the practice — creating one more stress point for students already more likely to confront ill-qualified teachers, crumbling infrastructure and chaotic classrooms.

“Some people would cry,” said Laquerius Leflore, 18, who graduated last year from Ruleville Central High School in Ruleville Miss., and says he was paddled at school five times as a teen. “It would be like somebody really got tortured, sometimes. They tried to make it hurt. That was the whole point of it.”

Administrators at the Sunflower County and Greenwood school districts did not respond to e-mails and phone calls seeking comment.

There are 19 states that still permit corporal punishment, but according to U.S. Department of Education data, nearly 60 percent of the students paddled nationwide come from just four neighboring states — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Texas.

The first three of those states also happen to have among the largest African American populations. Blacks constitute about 16 percent of public school students in the U.S. but 35 percent of those

Corporal punishment in U.S. public schools Number of children being hit in public schools.

Up to 200

200-999

1,000 to 3,999

4,000 or more NH VT

WA MT OR

ND

ID WY NV

CA

MN

SD

IA

NE UT

AZ

CO

NM

WI IL

KS OK TX

MO AR LA

NY

MI IN OH KY TN

MS AL

PA WV VA NC

ME MA RI CT NJ DE MD DC

SC GA FL

AK HI

SOURCE: U.S. CENSUS BUREAU

DATA FROM 2011-2012 SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CHARTS BY THE WASHINGTON POST

who receive corporal punishment.

That leaves a situation at majority-black districts in the Deep South where physical punishment is a relative routine part of the public school experience.

Most districts require that principals, rather than teachers, carry out the discipline. Some schools go so far as to specify the dimensions of the paddle, according to a 2008 report on corporal punishment published by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Lib-

erties Union. (Roughly 1½ to 4 feet is typical.) Typically, students are ordered into a passive position: butt sticking out, hands on the desk or wall. Sometimes students get bruised, the same report said.

According to a 2014 article by the Hechinger Report, punishment at one Mississippi district starts at day care and Head Start, where teachers use only rulers and pencils but caution, “Just wait until you get to big school.”

The article continues: “At ‘big

school,’ the wooden paddle is larger — the employee handbook calls for it to be up to thirty inches long, half an inch thick, and from two to three inches wide — and the teachers sometimes admonish errant students to ‘talk to the wood or go to the ’hood’ (slang for choosing between the paddle and an out-ofschool suspension).”

Particularly in some rural districts, the hitting of students is a point of only minor contention.

One district superintendent in the Mississippi Delta, for instance, said parents have to sign consent forms before their kids can be paddled; about 80 percent give the green light.

Still, some education experts say the practice compounds the hazards of growing up in a region where test scores and job opportunities lag behind.

The National Education Association says such discipline is “more than ineffective — it is harmful.”

Children who are physically punished “are more inclined to engage in aggressive conduct toward their siblings, parents, teachers, and schoolmates,” according to the Human Rights Watch and ACLU report.

Even in Mississippi, the number of cases has fallen over the last decade, and some schools say they are reconsidering the practice.

“Everybody now wants to say, ‘I’ll go get an attorney,’ ” said Darron Edwards, the superintendent at West Tallahatchie School District in Webb, Miss. “How many times can the school district afford to pay for legal fees?”

Edwards, principal at Ruleville Central until 2013, used to use the paddle himself, though he says he tried to bring it out sparingly.

“I just feel like the threat of doing it was just as effective as doing it,” Edwards said.

Edwards added that the policy was in place long before he got there, and those who questioned it tended to be newcomers, like Teach for America staffers.

“They were definitely surprised,” Edwards said. “But of course, they’resurprisedwithalotofthings that exist in the state of Mississippi when it comes to education.” n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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NATION

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Parents, kids compete for housing BY

Y LAN Q . M UI

M

illennials have tough new competition for the condominiums and apartments heating up the nation’s housing market: mom and dad.

Roughly 10,000 baby boomers are retiring each day, and data show that half of those who plan to move will downsize. Many are seeking the type of urban living that typically has been associated with young college graduates — so much so that boomers are renting apartments and buying condos at more than twice the rate of their millennial children.

“There’s not one thing I miss about my house,” said Abby Imus, 57, who recently moved with her husband into an urban condo three miles and a lifetime away from the house they lived in for more than two decades.

This new generation of empty nesters is reshaping the recovery in real estate after the industry suffered its worst setback in half a century during the Great Recession. Boomer demand has helped fuel a surge in high-end housing that features two-bedroom units and large kitchens. That could have big implications for cashstrapped millennials, who had hoped to snag affordable studios in buildings developed to house 20-somethings.

The data suggest that boomers who are downsizing are relatively well-off. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that those 55 and older accounted for 42 percent of the growth in renters over the past decade. In addition, the wealthiest tier of American households made up about one-third of new renters between 2011 and 2014.

“Boomers will pay a premium if you can give them exactly what they want,” said Matt Robinson, principal at MRP Realty in Washington. “Something closer to what was in their house, and that pushes up the price; they’re happy to pay for it.”

Young Americans are not wellsuited to compete: Many entered the job market in the middle of the

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Young professionals can’t escape mom and dad, who are driving up prices for urban living recession and during the lackluster recovery. Few have had time to build wealth, and many are saddled with student-loan debt.

Analysts worry that the trend is making affordable housing more scarce at all ages — including for some boomers. Nationally, the cost of rent has made a doubledigit jump since the recession and hit a record $803 a month, according to government data. At the same time, the Harvard study estimated that the number of families who pay more than half their income in rent is expected to rise 11 percent to 13.1 million over the next decade.

The rebound in apartment and condo buildings has played a critical role in driving the recovery of the broader real estate market.

Spending on what the industry calls “multifamily” buildings rebounded in 2011 and is growing faster than expenditures on offices and hotels. Government data

shows that permits to build multifamily homes jumped 21.5 percent in August from the previous year, while approvals for single-family homes rose 8.7 percent.

The numbers reflect two trends that have become intertwined since the recession. The first wave of boomers hit the traditional retirement age of 65 in 2011, a point at which many begin thinking about downsizing from the family home. Meanwhile, developers began capitalizing on a shift toward urban living that is revitalizing cities and transforming suburbs into hubs friendly to pedestrians and commuters — often creating the ideal empty nest for those who can pay the price.

That’s what happened at Vita, the 31-story luxury apartment building in Northern Virginia. Developer Bob Kettler expected that the building would attract a crowd of young professionals, so he designed it with plenty of one-

Neil and Abby Imus enjoy the sunlight in the living room of their condominium after living for decades in a fourbedroom Colonial.

“Forever,” Neil Imus said when asked how long he planned to live in their new home. “We don’t have any plans to move.”

bedroom units. Instead, Kettler said that the strongest demand has come from baby boomers.

But downsizing — especially to an apartment that might be onethird the size of the family home — is often easier said than done. Kettler said that the most frequent complaint he hears is that his apartments aren’t big enough.

Of course, many boomers have no plans to move — because they can’t afford to and don’t want to.

Their net worth remains below the pre-recession average, and more than half would need to take out a loan to buy their next home, according to research by the Demand Institute. The study found that downsizers were typically wealthier and living in homes that might be expensive to maintain.

Boomers are typically defined as those born between 1945 and 1964, encompassing roughly 70 million people. They were the largest demographic group in the country until this year, when millennials took the top spot.

For Neil and Abby Imus, the moment of truth came after the last of their three children finished graduate school and got engaged.

The couple had raised their family in a Colonial on a tree-lined, one-acre lot in Bethesda, Md. But their kids were starting families of their own and it was not likely that they would return to the homestead. Keeping up the yard was becoming a hassle. No one used the two bathrooms upstairs. They didn’t need a living room and a study. And a finished basement.

And a separate dining room.

So now they live in a condo in downtown Bethesda.

On a recent afternoon, the last rays of sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows while their grandson raced around their living room. Their son, Steve, and his wife had brought over wine and spaghetti for dinner. Steve had briefly mourned the loss of the house in which he grew up.

But Neil Imus was clear: There is no going back.

“Forever,” he said when asked how long he planned to live in his new home. “We don’t have any plans to move.” n

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Still playing in Cuba: Pirated movies N ICK M IROFF Havana BY

T

here’s little question that 50-plus years of U.S. economic sanctions have taken a heavy toll on Cuba’s factories, banking system and hospitals.

But for Cuban fans of American movies and television, it’s been a pretty darn great run.

Flip to the TV guide in Granma, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, and you’ll see a prime-time lineup featuring reruns of “Cold Case,” “MythBusters” and “Seinfeld.” Now playing at governmentowned cinemas: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Toy Story 2” in 3-D and, quite fittingly, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”

None of it is properly licensed or paid for by Cuba, whose government has had little compunction about pirating good programming from a longtime foe with a vast legislative apparatus designed to choke its economy.

Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in July, but rebuilding mutual respect for copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property is one of many still-pending issues.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said it was not one of the topics she brought up with Cuban authorities during her visit to the island this month, but she said it is on the agenda for future talks. At a news conference after her departure, Cuban officials said the U.S. sanctions remain so restrictive that discussions of copyright protections are premature.

“There are so many [trade] issues to resolve, and until we establish some basic things, it’s going to be very difficult to talk about copyrights and trademarks,” said Ana Teresa Igarza, director of Cuba’s Mariel free-trade zone, which is courting foreign investment.

Cuba is a signatory to the major international treaties protecting intellectual property rights, and trade experts say the Castro government has generally done a good job enforcing protections for U.S. products and brands such as Coca-Cola or Nike.

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Despite restored ties with U.S., rebuilding mutual respect for intellectual property will take time Media content has been treated somewhat differently, though, perhaps because of a socialist ethos that views cultural output — and pharmaceutical breakthroughs — as a kind of public good. TV programming on the island has no ads, and like concerts and sporting events, tickets for movies are practically free, so it isn’t as if the Cuban government is turning a big profit on Disney movies and Discovery Channel documentaries.

Although the Cuban government has registered thousands of trademarks with the U.S., some of the most bitter and litigious disputes involve the island’s famous cigar and rum brands, such as Cohiba and Havana Club.

Despite being shut out of the biggest market in the world by U.S. sanctions, Cuba’s premium cigars and rum bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from other countries each year. Recent changes by the Obama administration allow U.S. travelers who visit the island legally to bring

back those items in limited quantities for personal use.

Meanwhile, the Castro government has been battling in U.S. courts for nearly 20 years against Dominican-based producers of Cohibas, as well as rum rival Bacardi, which sells the Havana Club brand. Those products are recognized as Cuban trademarks virtually everywhere else in the world, and experts say U.S. courts are likely to also do so as trade relations normalize.

“As the United States moves past aggressive, punitive measures, I think Cuba will be more willing to accept agreements that protect property across the board,” said Robert L. Muse, a lawyer in Washington who specializes in U.S. trade laws relating to Cuba.

Muse said that U.S. sanctions against Cuba do not prohibit payments for the use of media content, because the U.S. Free Trade in Ideas Act of 1993 allows for the sale or export of informational materials, even to countries under

A family watches TV in their rooftop apartment in an Old Havana building.

Hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Cuban households subscribe to a privately distributed weekly bundle of movies, shows, games and apps known as “El Paquete” (The Package). Cuban authorities generally turn a blind eye.

embargo.

Enforcement of intellectual property rights is an issue all over the world, of course, and the Cuban government’s appropriation of U.S. media content is dwarfed by that of street-level Cuban bootleggers, who offer DVDs, CDs and media files out in the open.

Hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Cuban households subscribe to a privately distributed weekly bundle of movies, shows, games and apps known as “El Paquete” (the Package) that circulates on memory sticks and hard drives. Cuban authorities generally turn a blind eye.

The result is a culture of media piracy that is likely to persist long after trade relations are fixed.

But what is rarely acknowledged is the effect of that culture on Cuban directors, authors and creators. Alejandro Brugués, whose award-winning zombie spoof “Juan of the Dead” became a sensation on the island in 2011, said a badly produced bootleg of his film began circulating on the streets of Havana within days of its premier in Spain.

The official release in Cuba was three months away. “We had the crappiest possible copy of the film out there, and everyone was renting it. There was nothing we could do,” he said.

“I remember at some point one of my producers went to check on the pirates in the street, and one of them was bragging he had the best copy of the film there was in Cuba,” said Brugués, who lives in Los Angeles. “My producer told him he was wrong, he had the best copy, as he produced the movie. Then the pirate offered him $5,000 for a Blu-ray of the film. I think now we should’ve taken it.

“I know some filmmakers don’t care about piracy, as long their film makes it to an audience,” Brugués said. “But I do care, because for me and the kind of film I make, international sales are very important. And the problem with having a copy leaked in Cuba is that it immediately makes its way to Miami, and over there someone just uploads it and pretty much screws up your international sales.” n

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What drives Palestinian attacks?

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Jerusalem

I

sraelis and Palestinians are struggling to understand the minds and motivations of the attackers who awake one morning to wield a kitchen knife against Jews.

After three weeks and dozens of assaults with screwdrivers, guns, meat cleavers and cars, it is becoming clear there is no single, neat profile, nor is there any single reason for the growing number of Palestinian attacks.

Instead, there is a list of possible motivations — political, religious, personal — by assailants who range from Hamas militants to a middle-aged Palestinian telephone technician who used his car as a battering ram against an elderly Jew to a 13-year-old Palestinian who attacked another Israeli kid with a knife at a candy store.

One relative of a slain attacker believed the root of his anger was the “humiliation of occupation.”

The father of an attacker who stabbed to death an ultra-orthodox Jew wheeling his two children in a stroller in Jerusalem’s Old City said his son was upset by a viral video showing a Palestinian girl shot by Israeli troops at a Hebron checkpoint and left to die. The attacker was a law school student.

A relative of another Palestinian assailant said his cousin attacked Israelis because of threats against the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Asked if the youth who slashed at an Israeli soldier was a devout Muslim, the relative said, “Not really.” Instead, he explained, the mosque is a symbol of Palestinian pride, and Palestinians are outraged by provocative visits by Israeli ministers and right-wing members of parliament, who arrive surrounded by armed police and say the site should be shared with Jews who want to pray.

Some Palestinian parents denied their sons had done anything wrong at all. They charge that their children were hounded by Jewish lynch mobs shouting “Die!” or gunned down by triggerhappy police or armed settlers.

MAJDI MOHAMMED/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Both sides struggle to understand mind-set after three weeks and dozens of assaults on Israelis The Palestinian leadership has accused Israeli forces of planting knives at the scenes of shootings and demanded investigations and protection from the United Nations. But it is undeniable that most of the attacks are real: the wounded and dead are proof.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alternately blames the violence on incitement by Hamas militants or Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas or the sheiks at the Islamic Movement in northern Israel.

[Netanyahu ramped up the rhetoric this week, asserting in a speech that a Palestinian religious leader gave Adolf Hitler the idea to annihilate the Jews.]

One thing Netanyahu never mentions is the 48-year military occupation of the West Bank and growth of Jewish settlements — the realities most often cited as a

root cause of Palestinian despair.

Some see the wave of knife assaults as an uprising of disillusioned youths from the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, communities living under complete Israeli control that in the past have taken a back seat in rebellion.

These are Palestinian teens who speak some Hebrew alongside their native Arabic , whose parents often work for or beside Israelis, and are too young to recall the second intifada in the early 2000s.

Yet just as analysts were focusing on East Jerusalem youths, the attacks pivoted to Hebron in the West Bank last weekend.

One recent assailant was a Bedouin Arab Israeli from southern Israel who went into the Beersheba bus station and was competent enough to wrestle a military rifle from an Israeli soldier and use it to wound a dozen.

A Palestinian demonstrator keeps weapons handy during clashes with Israeli troops near Ramallah. A recent surge of violent attacks against Israelis is being ascribed to a range of political, religious and personal motives.

Israeli police, struggling to establish a profile so they can counter the attacks, report that most of the Palestinian assailants have no history of previous arrests. They were unknown to Israel’s sprawling domestic intelligence agencies as militants or even members of Palestinian political factions.

Among the attackers are: A 33-year-old father of three, who had worked for an Israeli phone carrier for a decade; the other week he drove his company car into a group of ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and emerged swinging a meat cleaver.

A 13-year-old Palestinian boy who with his cousin stabbed a Jewish 13-year-old at a candy store. His father said he had no idea his son was carrying a knife — and said he had gone out to buy video games. The boy told Israeli investigators, essentially, “My cousin made me do it.”

A 30-year-old mother, Asaraa Abed of Nazareth in northern Israel, who was shot in the legs after brandishing a knife in Afula’s bus station, in what police initially described as a stabbing attempt.

Now officials suspect she may have suffered from mental issues.

Unlike past popular uprisings, this spasm of Palestinian violence and resistance — both the knife attacks and violent demonstrations that end with Israeli troops firing live rounds at alleged rockthrowers — appears to be waged with little direction from above.

“He was part of a new generation who sees there is no political solution with the Jews and all the negotiations have been in vain,” said Shafeek Halabi, the father of Muhannad Halabi, a 19-year-old law student who stabbed a wellknown rabbi and an off-duty Israeli soldier to death in the Old City of Jerusalem before being shot to death himself.

On Facebook, Muhannad Halabi wrote that Palestine was like an orphan girl adopted by an evil man, Israel, and that Palestinians, especially women, were subjected to humiliation and abuse.

“Rage, rage, rage,” Halabi wrote.

“Wake up from your long sleep. Let the revolution burn.” n

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX

BY BRIGID SHULTE

Erica Palim trembled as she stood before a microphone at a packed hearing in June at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For the first time, she was about to tell the world what it felt like to lose all desire to have sex.

For years, she’d kept quiet, because the securities lawyer, mother of four and fixture in her Maryland neighborhood, is a private woman. And because, let’s be frank, talking honestly about one’s sex life just isn’t something most Americans do. Lie about it?

Yes. Uncomfortably change the subject? Yes. See it everywhere, steamy and hot in movies, TV shows and glossy magazine ads?

Yes. But talk candidly about how much, how good, how often you’re in the mood, or why you’re not? No.

All morning, Palim had listened to a parade of mostly women, arguing about sex and whether this advisory panel should recommend FDA approval for the first-ever “female Viagra.”

The real Viagra boosts blood flow to the genitals, making the hydraulics work better for men and thus treating erectile dysfunction, the most common male sexual problem, affecting about half over age 40. The drug under discussion, flibanserin, works on the brain. It jolts neurotransmitters to rekindle the flagging flames of a woman’s desire to remedy a condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder. It is the most common sexual dysfunction for women and afflicts about one in every 10.

No one asked Palim to come to the hearing.

No drug company paid her travel expenses. But she had heard low desire dismissed one too many times as just all in a woman’s head.

“I have never had another sexual partner besides my husband, and we have always had a very active sexual life,” Palim began in a quiet voice, speaking of her husband of 25 years.

Petite, dressed conservatively in a classic black pantsuit, her black hair pulled into a sleek ponytail, she told the panel how she and her husband met at college on her freshman orientation weekend and married on her graduation weekend. How he’d nursed her through six months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments after she found out she had aggressive breast cancer at age 24. Even through the cancer treatments that ravaged her body, even when she’d lost all her hair, the sex was good.

And it stayed good through the pregnancies and births of their four children.

So when what she’d always considered a healthy sex drive simply vanished, and what had felt like a gift that she shared with her husband lost all meaning because she felt nothing, she became despondent. She felt old and thought she might be going crazy. Her doctors told her there was nothing to be done.

Women deserve better, she told the committee, her voice rising. “How is it possible that the medical community could so actively treat sexual dysfunction in a man — Who in this country has not heard or seen an ad for Viagra?

— but completely ignore the same symptoms in women? Let alone treat those symptoms?” she asked. “What kind of message does that send — that a man’s sex life is important but a woman’s sex life isn’t?”

In August, after an 18-to-6 panel recommendation, the FDA approved flibanserin for premenopausal women with warnings about side effects. Days after the decision, a Canadian company bought the drug’s maker, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, for $1 billion. The drug, marketed as Addyi, hit the market Oct. 17.

A month’s supply costs about the same as a month’s supply of Viagra, about $400, or for those with health insurance, the cost of a co-pay, Sprout officials said. They could not offer estimates of how many women are likely to try Addyi.

In the clinical trials, flibanserin worked for about half of the women who took it. On average, women on the drug reported having one more

sexually satisfying event per month than women taking asugar pill. Criticssaidthat meantthe pill was only a “mediocre aphrodisiac.” Supporters argued it’s not how much sex but how much a woman wants it that matters. “We’re not aiming to move someone to want sex all of the time,” Sprout chief executive Cindy Whitehead said.

“We don’t want hypersexuality. We’re aiming to bring her back into normal range.”

Criticscallhypoactive sexualdesire disorder a creation of the drug industry and contend that low libido is really mismatched sex drives, that monogamyisboring,orthatsexisjustbad—one survey of U.S. heterosexual couples found 75 percent of the men always climaxed during sex, compared with 29 percent of the women, one of the largest “orgasm gender gaps” in the world.

The solution isn’t a drug, they argue. It’s another

“How is it possible that the

medical community could so actively treat sexual dysfunction in a man . . . but completely ignore the same symptoms in women? . . .

WHAT KIND OF MESSAGE DOES THAT SEND — that a man’s sex life is important but a woman’s sex life isn’t?” — Erica Palim

glass of wine. Or more chocolate. But questions like these raised at the hearing and throughout the nearly 20-year quest for a little pink pill still hang uncomfortably in the air. What is normal?

Is it “natural” for men to desire sex, but not women, or not as much? What sparks desire? If the spark dies, is it something that popping a pill can — or even should — reignite?

The lawn in front of Erica and Mark Palim’s Bethesda, Md., home is littered with soccer balls, a pink jump rope and a rope swing, and near the minivan a ping-pong table stands at the ready in the driveway for their four children, ages 10 to 18.

Sitting on their sunny screened-in back porch, drinking a morning cup of coffee together, the couple said that through the years, sex was something they both looked forward to, even in the joyful mayhem and exhaustion of working and raising a young family.

“That’s part of what carries over the next day with a loving spouse and keeps you connected,” Erica said. “Sex is an important part of a wonderful relationship. A part of a full life.”

After Erica’s breast cancer diagnosis, and with her genetics — she tested positive for the BRCA1 gene associated with higher rates of breast and ovarian cancer — her doctors wanted her to have her children quickly, and once her family was complete, they wanted her to

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have her ovaries removed.

So, a few months after giving birth to their fourth child, Palim underwent an oophorectomy. Her doctors warned her that without ovaries to produce estrogen, she’d undergo “surgical menopause” and could experience vaginal dryness and painful sex.

What they didn’t tell her is that the ovaries also produce testosterone, without which she may never want to have sex again.

From the first moments after surgery, Palim didn’t feel like herself. She became stooped, depressed and fearful, and routine tasks easily overwhelmed her. “She was like an old woman,” said Mark Palim, a PhD economist who was raised in Belgium. Once, Erica became completely undone trying to figure out what to pack for their daughter’s Girl Scouts camping trip.

And she lost all desire to have sex.

She worried it was all in her head and sought out a psychiatrist, who suggested anti-anxiety drugs. Her doctors said that other than lubricants, they had nothing for her. She kept trying to want Mark. “But it was impossible. When we kissed, or he touched me, it was like trying to start an engine: You turn the key and nothing happens. The battery is dead,” she explained.

“I still loved him. But I was crying inside every time we had sex. I kept thinking, ‘Maybe this is what it feels like to have sex with a prostitute.’ ” She turned to her husband and asked, “Could you tell?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You could?”

“Yes,” he paused. “I was sad for you. And sad for me.”

As Erica sank into deeper depression, Mark began to read medical journals about testosterone treatments in Europe and Canada for women with low desire. Then, Erica found that one of the leading doctors using that treatment, James Simon, was in Washington.

Her other doctors tried to warn her away from testosterone. “My oncologist said, ‘If you use testosterone, you’re going to grow a penis in your vagina,’ ” Palim said. And, in truth, once women start taking testosterone, facial hair can start to grow, their voices can become lower and they can break out in acne. Simon has seen a clitoris swell to the size of a thumb.

Those more extreme side effects may be because there is no FDA-approved testosterone treatment for women. The FDA has twice rejected such treatments. Now, 2 million women with low libido, like Erica, are receiving offlabel prescriptions. So getting the dosage right is still a matter of trial and error.

Many doctors say falling hormone levels and a flagging libido are simply natural parts of aging. “So is tooth decay. So is osteoporosis, nearsightedness and hemorrhoids,” Simon responded. “We don’t accept them as okay. We have treatments for all those natural conditions. Why not this extraordinarily common condition, a woman’s loss of sexual desire?”

Simon put Palim on a regimen of hormone replacement that she continues to this day that includes an estrogen patch, progesterone pills

and a tiny drop of testosterone cream that she applies near her vagina every other day.

Within two weeks, Erica’s anxiety diminished. That delicious warm flood of longing coursed again through her body when Mark touched her. She felt returned to life. But what if she’d never found Simon? Or if the hormones hadn’t worked? What if, like many of the women who testified before the FDA over the years, she had no idea why her sex drive disappeared?

Women needed treatment options, she said.

That’s why she decided to break her silence.

“Just because we don’t fully understand this, just because we don’t have a cure for it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she said.

The pink pill is as much a symbol of ignorance as it is of progress. Science is only just beginning to understand the complex alchemy that triggers a woman’s desire.

The hormone testosterone, scientists say,

The first-ever “female Viagra,”or flibanserin, works on the brain. IT JOLTS NEUROTRANSMITTERS TO REKINDLE THE FLAGGING FLAMES of a woman’s desire to remedy a condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder. It is the most common sexual dysfunction for women and afflicts about one in every 10. makes desire for men a fairly straightforward affair. The more testosterone, the more sexual thoughts and fantasies, the more erections.

Erectile dysfunction is all about blood flow.

As with men, Viagra increases blood flow to a woman’s genitals. But it does little to fan passion, which prompted manufacturer Pfizer to abandon studying the drug for use in women in 2004, after eight years of work.

For FDA approval, sexual dysfunction drugs for men and women must show a statistically significant increase in “sexually satisfying events” over placebo. For male dysfunction, that’s easy. Men with erections have more sex than men who don’t. But what has long confounded clinical trials for desire drugs like flibanserin is this: Women with low desire still have sex. Sometimes lots of it. They just don’t want it. So how can you tell if a desire drug is working?

Adding to the confusion, ideas about “normal” female sex drive throughout history have had more to do with prevailing social norms than with science.

The ancient Greeks thought women were

naturally the randier sex. The prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law declared that, of the 10 parts of desire, nine accrued to women. And early Christian leaders blamed women’s lustfulness on the original temptress, Eve. A woman’s unbridled sexual desire was something to contain in chastity belts, behind veils and within the bonds of marriage.

That view changed entirely in the buttonedup Victorian era. Doctors began writing that women were “naturally” passive and passionless and “merely endure” the sexual advances of men. Scientists began theorizing that men evolved to be sexually adventurous to spread their seed into the next generation, and that women mated reluctantly and sought a stable partner to ensure they and their children survived — a view that has only recently been challenged.

To cut through the centuries of mythology and taboo, Meredith Chivers, a sex researcher at Queen’s University in Ontario, studies human sex drive. She invites men and women to her lab, connects them to equipment that measures blood flow to the genitals and monitors vital signs, then shows them erotic films. She also asks them to rate how turned on they feel.

Men’s heads and bodies tend to be in tune.

What gay and straight men reported aroused them — videos of men with women, and women with women for straight men, and men with men for gay men — lined up squarely with the blood flow the instruments picked up.

Gay women reported being aroused by the videos of women with women. Straight women reported being aroused by videos of men with women. But the instruments told an entirely different story: All the women were turned on by just about everything: men with women, women with women, men with men, even copulating apes.

So if Chivers’s research indicates women do indeed have strong and indiscriminate sex drives, why do some women lose the urge?

Could it be biological: that the wiring gets tangled? Could it psychological: the message that good girls don’t and bad girls do? Could it be social: the notion that women may be more inclined for sex if they weren’t so resentful or tired doing two to three times as much housework and child care as men? Would a pill help?

Research suggests Yes. Yes. Yes. And Maybe.

Desire requires a very particular firing of neurotransmitters in the brain: a rush of dopamine for pleasure-seeking and reward, norepinephrine for arousal and oxytocin for bonding. Not too much serotonin, the elusive signal of well-being that antidepressants seek to boost but winds up putting the brakes on sexual desire. Flibanserin, which has to be taken daily, boosts dopamine and inhibits serotonin. Other libido-boosting drugs being developed involve different brain chemicals. One, which has to be injected just before sex, tinkers with receptors for hormones associated with skin pigmentation. It was first developed as a sunless tanning drug until researchers noticed it also caused spontaneous erections. Robert Peter Millar, a South African neuroendocrinologist, is trying

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ANDRE CHUNG/THE WASHINGTON POST

Erica Palim, seen with her husband, Mark, lost her sex drive after having her ovaries removed. She is on a hormone replacement regimen including an estrogen patch and testosterone cream.

to develop a drug that mimics a neuropeptide, called gonadotropin-releasing hormone, that helps regulate reproductive behavior — i.e., the desire for sex. “By stimulating this one molecule in the brain,” he said, researchers have been able to gin up the libido in some primates, musk shrews and iguanas, male and female, and at the same time suppress their appetite.

Although developing a drug is still far off, the British press have already dubbed it the “skinny sex pill.”

While the drugs may boost libido, they can’t answer the question that has plagued Palim: Is hypoactive sexual desire disorder real? For that, researchers at Stanford University have found brain differences on functional magnetic resonance imaging exams between women diagnosed with the disorder and women with healthy sex drives. Dutch researcher Gert Holstege is one the few to attempt to peer into women’s brains to see what low libido looks like

and whether the disorder exists. Holstege recruited about a dozen married or partnered women ages 20 to 45 who’d been diagnosed with low desire disorder and a dozen women who had not. He put them in a PET scanner to track blood flow. For 21/2 hours, he showed them snippets of two-minute films: One about whales and the ocean, to capture a sexually neutral brain state; then he showed clips from romantic and pornographic films.

The results startled him. As the women with healthy desire viewed romantic or erotic clips, nearly the entire left side of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part that governs thinking, planning and organizing, became less active. Parts of the more intuitive and emotional right side of the brain lit up, showing the women had become caught up in the moment. For women with a desire disorder, the left side busily continued to whir.

For healthy women, as they watched roman-

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tic and sensual clips, the orbito-frontal cortex, which is thought to tell the brain what’s important to pay attention to for survival, was also engaged, Holstege said. For women with low desire disorder, it was disengaged. He sees the scans as proof that “low desire is a real biological phenomenon.”

“It was unbelievable,” Holstege said. “For the healthy women, they were so interested emotionally in what they saw that they weren’t thinking about anything else. That didn’t happen with the women with low desire. Their brains seemed not to be involved in what they saw at all.”

Suzy Olds, a biomedical engineering professor in the Chicago area and mother of two, knows what it feels like to, during an overture from her husband, suddenly start thinking about a carpool she forgot. “That kills desire, all that clutter in the brain,” she said.

When she worried about her disappearing sex drive nearly a decade ago, her doctor told her she needed not a pill, but porn. Watching helped but made her feel ashamed. So she and her husband started their own video production company, After Nine Tonight, to make “tasteful, super-soft porn” films, such as “Staycation,” about Simone and Will’s surprise sexy date. The films last no more than 15 minutes and are designed to help busy women get in the mood.

On her Web site, Olds also includes Quickies, educational videos about women’s low libido, with such titles as “Is Resentment Toward Your Husband Killing Your Sex Drive?” “We Hardly Have Sex Anymore. Is Our Marriage in Trouble?” and “How to Get Your Wife in the Mood.”

They provide helpful hints such as longer hugs before work, text messages during the day, “or even unloading the dishwasher without being asked.” Said Olds, “Sex isn’t a priority for women when they have so much else going on.” Then she quickly excused herself to rush from work to pick up her son at hockey practice.

While Olds has never tried flibanserin and isn’t sure it would work for her, Cara, 45, an executive who lives in Southern Maryland, said she wants to be first to get a prescription. Cara, who didn’t want her full name used because of the “stigma of being thought of as a sexual woman,” was one of 11,000 women who took part in the flibanserin clinical trials. She once had a powerful and hungry sex drive that inexplicably turned off in her 30s.

To kick it in gear again, she tried herbs, supplements, expensive drinks, date nights, bed picnics and afternoons in hotel rooms with her husband. She sought out sex therapists and experimented with sex toys, lubricants and pornography. Nothing worked. “I was just servicing him,” she said. Flibanserin changed that.

When the FDA approved the drug in August, she and her husband shared a bottle of champagne. “We’re really excited,” she said, “like we just planned our honeymoon.”n Schulte, a former Washington Post staff writer, is director of the Good Life Initiative and the Breadwinning & Caregiving Program at New America.

WEEKLY

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TRENDS

Men spice up Korean cooking shows A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

C

hef Jin Kyung-soo stood in the kitchen, fedora and trendy glasses accessorizing his white smock, putting the finishing touches on his steakwithfig sauce. Then he served it up to the seven attractive men sitting at the tables in front of him.

“I never get tired of eating this,” said Cho Se-ho, a well-known comedian and one of those waiting to taste Jin’s creation. “It makes me so excited. This food turns me on.” All the other guys fell about laughing.

It’s the latest food craze in South Korea: “sexy cooking men.”

Koreans love eating. Indeed, when they greet each other, they don’t say, “How are you?” but, “Have you eaten?”

Even more, Koreans love eating together, sitting around a table full of communal dishes, dipping their chopsticks into everything and slurping from the same bowl of soup. Food is such a social event that one craze in recent years involved vloggers eating on camera, a phenomenon called “mokbang,” or “eating broadcast,” in part so people at home alone could eat along with them.

Now, it’s “cookbang” that’s all the rage.Butnotjustanycookingshow: ones that involve men in the kitchen. That’s a novelty in this Confucian society, where gender roles remain deeply ingrained. Indeed, grandmas shoo men out of the kitchen — that is, those who dare to venture into it in the first place — with an old phrase that roughly meanstheywilllosetheirmasculinity at the stove.

But now, there is a whole host of cooking shows that revolve entirely around good-looking men whipping up delicious yet replicable meals. There’s “Mr. Paik’s Home Cooking,” featuring celebrity restaurateur Paik Jong-won; “What Shall We Eat Today?” where two amateurs improvise; and “Please Look After My Fridge,” in which chefs create a meal out of the contents of a celebrity’s kitchen.

There’s the more conventionally manly “Three Meals a Day,” a

SHIN WOONG-JAE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The latest TV craze in a country that loves its food is educational for some, fantasy for others show that involves men camping and cooking over a fire. Then there’s “The Olive Show,” in which a group of chefs use everyday ingredients to come up with five simple meals to last the week. A group of judges, most of them well known, crowns one the winner.

One of the judges during a recent day’s taping was Sung Sikyung, a K-pop star who also hosts “What Shall We Eat Today?”

“I’m really into cooking and learning how to cook, and I’m really into eating,” Sung said after the taping. Girls were gathered outside the studio, waiting for him to come out. “I think things are changing in Korea. My dad’s generation didn’t cook, but we do.”

Certainly, women love to watch these stylish men chopping and sautéing, advising that meat should sit out of the fridge for a while before frying and warning against using too much extra virgin olive oil (too strong a taste).

For many viewers, it’s escapism.

“I don’t find men who are good

at cooking around me in real life, so seeing male chefs on TV is nice,” said Chung Sun-hee, a 37-year-old woman who was grocery shopping with her 8-month-old baby on a recent day. “I think men who can cook are attractive.”

Like many men, Chung’s husband made an effort while they were dating, cooking her kimchi stew and rice. But that stopped once they got married.

But Shin Sang-ho, the producer of “The Olive Show,” was optimistic that Korean society was slowly changing.

“Female viewers watch these trendy young chefs cooking and having a great time, and their men see how interested they are in this and try to cook at home to please them,” he said in the dressing room after the taping. “So it started as a fantasy but has become more popular and more real.”

Nam Sung-youl, the chef who won during that day’s taping, admits that such shows are popular because women are hopeful of see-

Cho Se-ho, foreground, and Sung Si-kyung, right, watch chef Jin Kyung-soo cook steak with fig sauce on “The Olive Show.”

ing men in the kitchen more often.

But he also says that he’s noticed some changes. “There are more men cooking these days and more men doing the grocery shopping,” he said.

Nam runs cooking classes and says that where he used to have only five men in a class of 50, now they’re more evenly split, often 30 women to 20 men. And sales of kitchen gadgets have gone through the roof.

Byon Min-young, a 33-year-old marketing manager, said he was trying to be part of the change. “I enjoy going to the supermarket with my wife, buying groceries and cooking together,” he said.

Plus, he added, the ladies love it.

“Women think men who cook well are kind and in touch with their emotions, and I see a lot of good-looking male chefs making a lot of money and appearing a lot on TV and doing TV commercials, so I want to cook well for my wife.”

Koo Se-woong, a Korean social commentator who runs a Web site called Korea Expose, said there was another reason these shows had become so popular. “It’s voyeuristic, and Korea is nothing if not voyeuristic,” he said. “There is a great desire to see how other people live and behave.”

Indeed, this craze doesn’t just tap into Korean women’s hopes that men will take on more of the cooking, but the more widespread aspiration to move up in the world.

Chang Mi-ran, a 53-year-old saleswoman who was also out grocery shopping, watches the shows but does not want her husband anywhere near her kitchen. For her, the allure is not the cooking but the earning. “I find Paik Jongwon attractive because he makes good money,” she said.

For now, these celebrity chefs are sticking to the old mantra that sex sells. Nam, judged the winner during this taping for his pasta with pork and anchovies, got to film the show’s sign-off. Addressing the camera after his victory, Nam ripped open his chef’s jacket and declared: “Everyone, eat before sleeping!”

And that was a wrap. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Building a better coral reef BY

D ENNIS H OLLIER

K

eyhole Reef is one of dozens of small reefs rising abruptly from the depths of Kaneohe Bay, one of Hawaii’s most scenic places. The water around it is sapphire blue, and bright schools of tang and triggerfish flit over its surface. But the reef is showing troubling signs of stress these days because of climate change.

Here and there along the steep face of the reef, clumps of coral have turned stark white. This bleaching means the coral has begun to eject the micro-algae that normally live within its tissues and provide up to 90 percent of the nutrients that coral needs to live.

And that has scientists worried, because similar things are happening in tropical waters around the world. Coral reefs are one of the planet’s keystone habitats, as rich in species as the rain forest. But they’re even more vulnerable to climate change and the warm, acidic ocean conditions it is creating.

Yet scientists may be coming up with a way to protect the fragile reefs for the warmer world of the future Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, calls the process human-assisted evolution. Last spring, she and Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute for Marine Sciences received a $4 million grant from the family foundation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen for a plan to develop strains of coral that will be able to withstand changing ocean conditions.

Like their close relatives, sea anemones and jellyfish, corals begin their life as free-swimming larvae. Eventually, though, they settle permanently on a rock or a patch of dead coral and transform into polyps, the basic units of coral. Almost immediately, the polyps begin to secrete the hard exoskeleton that we think of as coral reef.

Collectively, corals are nature’s most prodigious architects. The Great Barrier Reef, where van Oppen does her research, is large enough to be seen from space.

Despite the provocative label,

RUTH GATES

Scientists are trying to give evolution a boost to help the ocean habitats survive warming waters human-assisted evolution relies largely upon old-fashioned selective breeding. Gates points out that, even during a dramatic warming event, like last summer’s in Hawaii, when mean sea temperatures in Kaneohe Bay were several degrees above normal, not all the coral on a reef bleaches. Some individuals are clearly more tolerant of these kinds of stresses.

Gates is collecting small samples of those individuals and bringing them into her lab to crossbreed them. By selecting the most robust offspring, she hopes to produce more-resilient strains of coral.

That’s just the first step. Ultimately, the plan is to return these corals back onto the damaged reefs they came from so they can interbreed with the wild coral. But before that happens, Gates and van Oppen believe they can exploit the complex biology of these organisms to create “super corals.”

There are two main thrusts to their plan. The first involves epige-

netics, the science of how genes are turned on and off.

“We’re trying to turn on, if you will, genetic pathways that allow corals to sustain exposure to stress better,” Gates says.

The idea is that, by exposing the coral to stress, they will turn on formerly idle genes that are beneficial in the new conditions.

There are some early signs of success. Some of the acclimatized corals that were returned to their reefs appeared to exhibit higher resiliency. Even during last year’s dramatic bleaching event, when between 40 and 70 percent of the coral in Kaneohe Bay were affected, none of these corals showed signs of bleaching.

But it’s not enough to induce these changes in an individual. For assisted evolution to work, Gates says, the changes have to be heritable. This is, whatever characteristics the corals develop that make them more resilient have to be inherited by their offspring. That’s

Coconut Island, site of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, rises from Kaneohe Bay. Light spots in the water are patch reefs, some of which are showing troubling signs of stress.

the essence of epigenetics.

So, can acclimatizing individual corals to the conditions of the future create traits that can be passed on to the next generation?

“Our preliminary work suggests that the answer to that is ‘Yes,’ ” Gates says.

The second focus of research in the Gates lab looks at the relationship between corals and the microorganisms that live on and in them.

Modern genetic tools have revealed that there are hundreds of species of these micro-algae, as well as thousands of species of symbiotic bacteria and other microorganisms. Importantly, some of these microorganisms are more tolerant of the warm, acidic conditions of the future than others are.

Gates plans to exploit these differences. In other words, scientists may be able to improve the resilience of coral by improving the resilience of its assemblage of microorganisms.

The key to all this — and maybe the reason there has been so little criticism in the scientific community — is that none of what Gates and van Oppen are doing is genetic engineering in the technical sense. They’re not gene-splicing or creating Franken-corals. They’re simply turning on genes that are already present in the coral’s DNA. Similarly, the micro-algae that they’re working with already exist in the corals on the reef. No new genetic material is being introduced. And in the future, when the coral is returned to the wild, it will go back to its home reef.

But Gates isn’t cavalier about the risks. For example, she says that, however unlikely, it’s possible that these new “super corals” could become invasive or have other unintended consequences.

“We can often pick holes in potential solutions and have a very nuanced argument about why we shouldn’t do anything,” Gates says.

“Or, we can turn the argument on its head and ask, ‘What is the risk of doing nothing?’ The risk of doing nothing is the obliteration of coral reefs worldwide.” n Hollier is a Hawaii-based science writer.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

An impossible marathon quest?

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

P TWO HOURS The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon

By Ed Caesar.

Simon & Schuster.

242 pp. $26

itching a perfect game.

Bowling 300. Winning the Triple Crown. There are markers in sports that embody excellence, the greatest possible achievement in a particular discipline. You can’t be more perfect on the mound than 27 up and 27 down; you can’t roll 301; there was no fourth leg for American Pharoah to capture.

But when it comes to running, it’s hard to define the ultimate standard, because someone, somewhere, someday will manage to break the tape faster, right? The four-minute mile and the 10-second 100-meter dash were once deemed unbreachable barriers.

But once an athlete surpassed them, many more did. The hurdles may have been less physical than mental.

British journalist Ed Caesar has written a book about one race time that seems unfathomable, impossible, yet with each new record comes tantalizingly closer: the two-hour marathon. Fifty years ago, the record for the 26.2-mile race stood at 2 hours, 12 minutes and 2 seconds. Today, it is more than nine minutes faster, at 2:02:57. The distance to two hours is just 177 seconds, the length of a short pop song. But it’s also a gap that would require an unprecedented combination of physical gifts, mental fortitude, pain tolerance, training techniques, weather conditions, and perhaps new shoe technology and nutritional advances to surmount — if it ever happens at all.

Caesar thinks it could. “The feat appears to be within the range of human possibility, in terms of physiology,” he writes. “But understanding physiology is only one aspect of understanding running.

Human beings are more than hearts and lungs and legs, and the quest for virgin territory more than a battle of swift feet.”

The author describes that quest through the story of Geoffrey Kiprono Mutai, winner of the 2011 Boston Marathon (in a course rec-

JEWEL SAMAD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Geoffrey Kiprono Mutai competes in the New York City Marathon in November 2014.

ord 2:03:02) and two-time winner of the New York City Marathon (including a course record 2:05:06 in 2011). Mutai is a member of the Kalenjin tribe in the Rift Valley region of Kenya, which has produced an extraordinary crop of distance runners that dominate the sport. Caesar chronicles Mutai’s childhood, his training, his races, his burdens and his obsession with owning the marathon world record.

Mutai is driven by the desire to right what he regards an injustice.

His extraordinary 2011 time in Boston was then the quickest marathon ever run — almost one minute faster than the world record at the time — but because the race was not on a looped course, it did not meet official world-record standards. (Ironically, Boston is a hilly race; unlike the Berlin Marathon, for instance, it is not one that anyone enters hoping to break records.) Also, some observers discounted Mutai’s Boston time because of a strong tailwind. “It was painful,” he told the author. “It

hurt me. But then I sit down and I tell myself, ‘This is not the end.’ ” So he made a pledge. “Before he retired, Mutai would beat 2:03:02 on a recognized course in unimpeachable circumstances. . . . He would silence the talkers. Two-ohtwo or die trying.”

Spoiler: Mutai, now 34, has not reached two-oh-two, nor has he died trying. But the attempt allows Caesar to describe shifting strategies in training and racing, explore the genetics of running talent, investigate doping controversies, and detour into the lives of other East African runners. Particularly poignant is the tragic story of Sammy Wanjiru, who won Olympic gold in Beijing and twice won the Chicago Marathon before alcohol abuse and money troubles overtook him. In 2011, he would die in odd circumstances — falling off a balcony during an argument with his wife — at age 24.

Wanjiru’s story, and Mutai’s to some extent, reveal the enormous familial and social pressures East African runners bear. The top run-

ners not only support families and training partners, but often entire villages.

The book transcends the search for a two-hour marathon. At times one yearns for Caesar to keep his eyes on the clock, focus more on what it would take to accomplish the goal. His survey of the science of running is instructive, citing multiple studies and theories on the limits of marathon racers.

As the race has become more democratic, the community of the world’s top marathoners has become more rarified, more separate. “Two Hours” shows us their world. And if the two-hour mark is ever reached, it won’t be in one sudden, big leap for all runningkind, Caesar writes, but in “baby steps — each one taken by a member of the tiny, elite fraternity of athletes with the talent and industry to inch the sport closer to the impossible marathon.” n Carlos Lozada is associate editor and nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Grisham’s legal thriller raises bar

A sweet, bumbling and pitiful Nixon

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

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l

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

hirty novels into his nearly three-decade career, John Grisham still makes it look easy. Last fall, he brought out “Gray Mountain,” a superb thriller about the wreckage, environmental and human, wrought by big coal companies in Appalachia. This fall, Grisham has switched gears once again and is debuting what looks to be a new series featuring a “street lawyer” named Sebastian Rudd.

Or maybe a better term for Rudd would be “mobile lawyer.” Ever since his last brick-and-mortar office was firebombed, he’s been operating his practice out of a bulletproof van. It’s tough to say who was responsible for the firebombing because Rudd is an equalopportunity offender. He’s rubbed so many different people the wrong way — gang members, the police, insurance companies, other lawyers, his ex-wife — that he’s resigned himself to packing a pistol, sticking close to his bodyguard and changing motel rooms every few nights when he’s arguing his (always controversial) cases.

For relaxation, Rudd swigs bourbon and patronizes cage fights, those brutal, no-holdsbarred martial arts “entertainments” that critics have likened to human cockfights. “Mr. Smooth” Sebastian is not. But in hallowed Grisham tradition — where the guys in the custom-tailored suits are always trumped by the scrappy underdogs — he is the defense lawyer you want sitting beside you in the courtroom when something unpleasant hits the fan.

“Rogue Lawyer” is so cleverly plotted it could be used as a howto manual in fiction-writing courses. Its opening chapters are self- contained, giving the impression that this will be a collection of short legal suspense stories, rather than a novel.

The first chapter, for instance, gives readers the heads-up that no case is too repugnant or hopeless for Rudd to take on. His client is a “brain damaged eighteen-year-

old dropout” named Gardy, who’s accused of the sadistic murder of two little girls in a small town called Milo. Rudd is the only lawyer for miles around willing to defend him, but not out of some misplaced chivalrous legal impulse. Instead, Rudd relishes the challenge of a fixed fight, of having to “claw and raise hell in a courtroom where no one is listening.”

The down-and-dirty moves that Rudd performs in that Milo courtroom are not unlike the moves of those cage fighters he cheers on. It’s a mark of just how fleet-footed and inventive “Rogue Lawyer” is to say that the Gardy trial — which is pretty suspenseful — is the weakest story line in the novel. Riveting cases follow involving a fatally erroneous home invasion carried out by Homeland Security; a wild, 11th-hour disruption in the fate of a death-row inmate; and a serial killer who draws Rudd into his orbit with promises to divulge the whereabouts of a police chief’s missing daughter.

In that last labyrinthine adventure, the desperate police force becomes more of a threat to Rudd than the serial killer. Rudd survives by holding fast to his somewhat soiled code of ethics: “A lawyer like me is forced to work in the shadows. My opponents are protected by badges, uniforms, and all the myriad trappings of government power. They are sworn and duty-bound to uphold the law, but since they cheat like hell it forces me to cheat even more.”

The biggest mystery that “Rogue Lawyer” poses is how Grisham, at this stage in his long writing career, can still devise all these distinctive characters, tricky legal predicaments and rogueishly cheating ways to worm out of them. It’s one mystery we Grisham fans just want to appreciate, rather than solve. n Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

I ROGUE LAWYER

By John Grisham Doubleday. 344 pp. $28.95

THE LAST OF THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster.

291 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

E VAN T HOMAS

n 1974, Bob Woodward, together with his fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, published “All the President’s Men,” about the Watergate scandal. Woodward has gone on to write 11 other No. 1 bestsellers and establish himself as the best reporter in town at getting top government officials to spill their secrets. The Woodward method is legendary: flattery, patience and relentless persistence.

In 2011, Woodward invited Alexander Butterfield, the deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon who revealed the existence of the White House taping system during the 1972 Watergate hearings, to his weekend home. Three years later, Butterfield sat down for 40 hours of interviews with Woodward and turned over more than 20 boxes of documents, some highly secret, that he had carried from the White House in 1973.

“The Last of the President’s Men” is the title of Woodward’s latest book, but Butterfield was not one of the president’s men, in the sense that he was never a member of the palace guard of Nixon loyalists. Woodward’s book contains no real bombshells, but it does offer a cringe-worthy portrayal of the 37th president, seen through the eyes of an aide who sometimes witnessed the better side of Nixon but more often, in Woodward’s telling, the worse.

It has been speculated that Butterfield was a plant for the CIA or the Pentagon intent on spying on Nixon. The conspiracy theories have never been proved, and Butterfield told Woodward the more plausible story that he was just an ambitious young man who wanted a job. A UCLA classmate of Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, he was hired to be Haldeman’s “staff clone,” Butterfield told Woodward — a carbon copy of the chief of staff, ready to step in and do whatever Nixon wanted.

Woodward puts Nixon’s pettiness on vivid display. On Christmas Eve of his first year in office,

Nixon walks around the White House to wish his employees a Merry Christmas. Woodward writes: “He found something very disturbing. A number of the offices prominently displayed pictures of the late John F. Kennedy. I want all those pictures down today, Nixon ordered Butterfield. ‘Down from the walls and off the desks. Jesus Christ! If we’ve got this kind of infestation imagine what [Secretary of State] Bill Rogers has at the State Department.’ ” Butterfield does find some attributes to admire in Nixon: “the work ethic, snatches of empathy, the determined, focused effort so evident in nearly everything he did.” But Butterfield is grudging and misses some crucial dimensions of his infinitely complex and contradictory boss. Butterfield offers a scene of Nixon ignoring his wife, Pat, and describes the first lady as “borderline abused.” Nixon, it’s true, could be embarrassingly dismissive of Pat in public.

But over a long and complicated marriage, he also showed tenderness and depended on her, almost desperately, to stand by him. Anyone who questions the depth of Nixon’s devotion needs only to Google the video of Pat Nixon’s funeral. Nixon is not just crying; he is bawling, devastated, utterly undone. He was dead a year later.

Nixon could be considerate with his aides. Butterfield describes a sweet scene of Nixon meeting with Butterfield’s teenage daughter, who had lost her teeth in a car crash. Nixon empathetically tapped his own front teeth, capped after they had been broken in an accident. He also could be callous.

In their own memoirs, Haldeman recalled that Nixon never made an effort to learn about his children, while his other top aide, John Ehrlichman, wrote that Nixon sometimes distractedly called him “Bob.” Nixon was at heart a lonely man. He paid for it. n Thomas is the author of “Being Nixon: A Man Divided.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

I destroyed my gun so NRA can’t speak for me STEVE ELLIOTT is a writer and former journalist who lives in Calaveras County, Calif.

I am a responsible gun owner.

I bought my first gun when I was 12. It was a Browning 12­gauge shotgun, and I saved money from my paper route and cleaning a drive­in restaurant to buy it in time for dove season. In the years before I could legally drive, I’d tie the Browning across the handlebars of my bike and ride to the fields outside town to hunt.

I’ve owned several guns since — deer rifles and target rifles, shotguns and a handgun. I bought that gun, a semi­ automatic Ruger, to keep my family safe, and locked it up to keep them safe from it. Like I said, responsible.

Although I’d like to believe I’m not party to the gun violence that stains the United States, I can’t.

My grandmother shot and killed herself with a gun, and a few years ago my father shot and didn’t quite kill himself with one. A family friend lost a teenage son in an accidental shooting while he and his friends were playing with a gun. My stepbrother died in a murder-suicide with a gun, and the husband of one of my sister’s co-workers was killed in a mass shooting by a guy carrying three of them.

None of that happened with my gun, of course, but after every new mass shooting, I’m reminded that I, as a responsible gun owner, bear a portion of the responsibility for our nation’s gun violence.

After the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon — after every mass shooting on a college campus, movie theater, elementary school or wherever — someone from the National Rifle Association or some other gunrights group, or someone in Congress or running for president, goes on television and says we can’t fund federal studies on gun violence or have universal background checks of gun buyers or do anything that even hints of gun control because it infringes

on the rights of responsible gun owners.

My gun is being used to argue against doing anything to even try to reduce gun violence in our nation. That’s what being a responsible gun owner means now — I’m responsible.

I’m a bit ashamed how slowly I came to that realization. For most of my life, I never thought about guns, and certainly didn’t weigh in on the gun control debate.

Until recently, I didn’t even connect the personal tragedies in and around my family to guns.

I was at a restaurant when I first learned about the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., watching news reports on the television over the bar. Like most of America, my reaction was horror and disgust. But I could also overhear a guy talking at the bar, and his first reaction was, “They’re gonna use this as an excuse to come after our guns.”

The authorities were still trying to figure out how many 6and 7-year-olds had been killed, and he was worried about his guns.

I thought Sandy Hook might prompt a sober discussion about gun control or even legislative action, but that didn’t happen.

The NRA’s proposed solution was

STEVE ELLIOTT

After the recent mass shooting in Oregon, the author disassembled his gun and sent the proper paperwork to the state to report it destroyed.

more guns — arming teachers and guards at every school. The church shooting in Charleston, S.C., happened about a week after I’d visited that city for the first time, and again, the gun lobby opposed any hint of gun control, ostensibly on behalf of responsible gun owners.

I thought about giving up my gun then, but I didn’t. In the face of so much gun violence in our society, disarming is a bit frightening (even though I know statistically I’m safer without a gun in the house than with one). I still told myself I wasn’t part of the problem.

That ended this month.

After the Umpqua shooting, and the gun lobby’s predictable response, and a visibly angry President Obama admitting there’s no political will to try to solve our country’s gun violence problem, I realized it’s not their problem. It’s mine.

The Monday after the shootings, I disassembled my Ruger, clamped the pieces in a vise and cut them in half with an angle grinder. I sent the proper paperwork in to the state to report it destroyed. And then I wrote about it on Facebook, and included a hashtag: #ONELESSGUN. I’m not an activist, I’m an angry American. I’m angry about the senseless killings, and the more senseless “stuff happens”

response to them. I’m angry that the gun industry’s special-interest spokesmen claim to speak for me, and that politicians believe them.

Mostly, I’m angry about what it says about the United States. The idea that kids getting slaughtered at school is too big a problem for us to solve infuriates me. If there is truly nothing we can do, nothing we can try — if we just have to accept it — then we have failed as a nation and as a culture.

I don’t want to believe that.

Instead, I believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans — including American gun owners — want to reduce gun violence and are open to solutions: policing, education, training, technology, mental health, media and yes, gun laws.

I believe claiming the NRA speaks for all gun owners is like saying the Westboro Baptist Church speaks for all Christians.

It doesn’t. The gun lobby in this country is considered an allpowerful political force, but it is a narrow special-interest group, same as any other. It has exactly the amount of power we give it.

I will no longer allow myself to be used as a justification for doing nothing.

Maybe cutting up a perfectly good gun is just a symbolic — some say stupid — gesture that will accomplish nothing. Maybe.

But at the very least, there is #ONELESSGUN. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Our nation’s untapped strength FRED HIATT is the editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

In many ways, and contrary to whatever Donald Trump may say, the next president will inherit an America in better shape — better positioned for world leadership — than the nation that George Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama.

So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why does it feel as if we’re losing?

In 2008, when the U.S. economy was on the verge of implosion, so was our country’s standing as a model for the world.

Pundits proclaimed the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The latter especially was ascendant. Democracy seemed to have led the West down the drain, while the authoritarian communists in Beijing were building fast trains and creating good jobs. The United States was in no position to tell them or anyone else what to do.

Today that conventional wisdom doesn’t seem so wise.

India has a reform government, but the magnitude of its task is clearer than ever. Brazil is stagnating, Russia is going backward, China is slowing.

Europe is focused inward, threatened by weak links such as Greece and terrified of an immigrant tide.

“Right now,” Obama said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently, “our economy is much stronger relative to the rest of the world.

China, Europe, emerging markets, they’re all having problems.”

Longer-term trends, especially demographic, favor the United States, too. Five of the 10 most populous nations in 1950 were from the “first world.” Of those, only the United States will remain on the list a century later, thanks in large part to immigration, which in turn reflects still other American strengths — in education, entrepreneurship, rule of law — that keep this nation a magnet unlike any other.

And yet, if the United States is the leader of the free world, its domain after two Obama terms is shrinking. According to Freedom House, global freedom has declined every year that Obama has been in office. The number of countries ranked “not free” has risen from 42 in 2008 to 51.

China, tightening the screws at

home, is pushing U.S. allies around in East Asia and the South China Sea. Russia, also more repressive internally, has dismembered the Western-leaning Ukraine, dismissing U.S. protests.

The Islamic State has accomplished something that alQaeda never managed: a state of its own. Impervious to a year of U.S. aerial bombardment, it continues to draw converts.

When CBS’s Steve Kroft asked Obama in that same interview whether the world is safer than when he took office, “America is a safer place” was the most he would venture, and it’s not clear his security team would agree.

What explains this apparent contradiction? If what MarxistLeninists might have called the correlation of forces is increasingly in U.S. favor, why does U.S. influence seem to be waning in so much of the world?

One possible answer, I suppose, is lag time: Having drawn certain conclusions as the Great Recession set in, the world needs time to recalibrate to changed conditions.

More likely, the advantages are real but not self-actualizing.

The United States’ economic, demographic and other strengths provide an opportunity to exercise leadership. But it is an opportunity that has to be seized,

something Obama has shied away from.

The president helped right the U.S. economy, and he has tried to boost its other strengths with immigration and education reform. But he is better at analyzing U.S. advantages than at capitalizing on them. Russia is a second-rate, “regional” power, so why bother to give Ukraine the arms it needs to defend itself?

Vladimir Putin’s intervention into Syria is doomed, so why come to the aid of U.S.-allied rebels whom Putin’s planes are pummeling?

Let him play out his losing hand.

There’s a more alarming possibility, too: that something in the body politic will keep the nation from capitalizing on its strengths. A global leader needs to invest in its infrastructure, schools and laboratories; it needs to maintain a robust and technologically advanced military; it needs to show leadership in promoting trade, helping poorer countries, welcoming refugees.

Hyperpartisanship, a waning of empathy, a turning inward — I don’t think those are our country’s most probable direction, but in this odd election year, it’s hard to rule them out. If they took hold, the nation’s strategic advantages wouldn’t matter — and they wouldn’t last. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Adelson’s money buys an audience DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital.

Sheldon Adelson is rambling.

The casino mogul and big-time Republican donor is onstage at the Washington Hilton, talking about, in no particular order: his son’s college deliberations; his casinos; his new diet; the Holocaust; his business in Macau; the Spanish Inquisition; Bibi Netanyahu; diamond merchants; the importance of travel to Israel; the Nobel Prize; his youth in Boston; his interviewer’s wife. He relates an anecdote about Israeli soldiers. Seven minutes later, he tells the same anecdote again.

Many in the audience are scrolling on their smartphones. A few leave the ballroom. But most remain, listening dutifully. As well they should: Adelson paid for this microphone.

Actually, he paid for the whole organization. The 82-year-old gambling tycoon pledged $12 million this year to the group, the Israeli American Council, up from $10 million last year, according to the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. He contributes most of the funds for the group, an eight-year-old organization for Israeli expatriates, and its staff has grown to 65 from seven two years ago. Adelson told the gathering in Washington last week that “I came up with the idea for, the vision for, IAC.” Those who favor unlimited campaign contributions like to

say that “money is speech.” The problem with this arrangement is the more money you have, the more speech you get — and Adelson is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

He knows a lot about the gambling business, but he has no particular insight into politics.

Yet, with the possible exception of the Koch brothers, he exerts more influence over elections than anyone in America. He almost single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign alive by spending $15 million in 2012. (Gingrich later said Adelson was part of “an election process that radically favors billionaires and is discriminating against the middle class.”) This year, most of the GOP candidates for president have been wooing the billionaire to win the “Adelson primary.”

On Israel and Jewish issues,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DANZIGER

likewise, Adelson’s insights are unoriginal. But he has become one of the most influential American Jewish figures — and a leading voice for Israel hardliners — just by throwing around a lot of cash.

His Israeli American Council bills itself as nonpartisan, but its members stand, conveniently, where the top donor stands.

“There are many in this room who are already looking to January 2017 and to the inauguration of a new president,” Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the gathering. There was a wave of applause.

Next on the stage were Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Eliot Engel (N.Y.), who boasted that he was one of only 25 Democrats to oppose Obama on the Iran deal. Royce accused the Obama administration of an “abdication of moral responsibility” in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict and of “aiding and abetting” violence in the region. Engel said he is “sick and tired of this moral equivalency” preached by the administration.

Finally, it was time to hear from the big donor, introduced to the crowd as “important,” “inspiring,” “legendary,” “unparalleled,”

“visionary” and “remarkable.”

“It’s a huge honor to be onstage with you,” Adelson’s interviewer, Barry Shrage, gushed. “You know that you’ve been my hero from the beginning.”

What followed was a 30minute infomercial for one of Adelson’s pet projects, the Birthright trips to Israel for American Jews. “Why is Birthright so successful?” Adelson asked. “One of the significant factors is the eight soldiers that go on every bus with 40 Birthright participants,” he answered.

Then, before departing, he piped up again: “One last thing.

One of the greatest reasons for the success of Birthright. . . . The soldiers, guys and girls, go on the bus. There are eight military.”

In between, the billionaire held forth on all manner of topics.

“Jews . . . got into things like the diamond business,” he explained, “so if they were expelled from one country, from one district, they could take their wealth in their pockets.”

Alternatively, “they could take it in their brains,” he said. “The Jews represent two-tenths of 1 percent of the population of the world, but the Jews have won 28 percent of all Nobel Prizes.”

Fun facts! And here’s another: Nobody would listen to Adelson if he weren’t worth $26 billion. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Weight loss BY

K EVIN D . H ALL

Obesity has been on the rise for decades, putting people at risk for developing diabetes, heart disease and several forms of cancer. To­ day, two­thirds of adults and one­third of children in the United States are overweight. What doesn’t seem to be increasing is people’s understanding of obesity and how to lose weight. Here are a few of the myths clouding the facts.

1

Body mass index is useless.

The body mass index, or BMI, is a simple and widely used method for classifying whether a person is overweight or obese.

It’s calculated by dividing a person’s body weight by height squared, which helps account for the fact that taller people weigh disproportionately more than shorter people if they have the same percentage of body fat.

BMI is often criticized because it doesn’t differentiate muscle from fat. Muscular people can therefore erroneously be classified as overweight.

But despite its limitations and notorious counter-examples, BMI is highly related to body fat and correctly categorizes people as having excess body fat more than 80 percent of the time.

2

All people with obesity are unhealthy.

Fat’s location in the body may be more important for health than the total amount of fat.

People who are “pear-shaped” tend to store fat in their buttocks and flanks and are at less risk of disease than those who are “apple-shaped” and tend to accumulate fat around the belly.

Especially bad is the “visceral fat” around the organs as well as the fat in the liver. So being obese but pear-shaped may be less risky than being overweight or normal weight but apple-shaped.

Additionally, exercise may help counterbalance obesity’s negative effect on health.

Physically fit and active people who are obese have a similar or

decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and death as people who are less fat but also less fit.

Therefore, physical inactivity may be as great a risk to health as obesity, and people should be active even if it doesn’t result in weight loss.

3

Having a healthy body weight is all about personal responsibility and willpower.

Even when people participate in a supervised exercise program, weight loss is much less than would be expected from the calories burned during exercise.

On average, exercising women experience no weight loss, and many people actually gain weight. This may be the result of compensatory decreases in other physical activities — such as collapsing on the couch for a few hours after a 30-minute run.

Alternatively, hunger may increase, and it doesn’t take much food to offset the calories expended during exercise.

Why not just count calories and eat less? Unfortunately, even with the best diet-tracking apps, people tend to greatly underestimate how much food they consume. Furthermore, calorie intake tends to fluctuate widely, with swings often exceeding 1,000 calories from one day to the next. How would someone know if they made a dent in their calorie intake using such imperfect tools? Of course, making large calorie cuts would be easier to detect, and this is what most people do when they “go on a diet” to lose weight.

MIN WANG/ISTOCK

When this happens, biology resists weight loss by increasing appetite and hunger.

4

Dieting causes the body to go into “starvation mode,” slowing its metabolism and halting weight loss after several months.

Although it’s true that metabolism does slow down when people cut calories, that offsets less than half of the decrease in diet calories over the first six months. It takes several years for metabolic slowing to fully offset the average dieter’s reduction in calories and result in a weight plateau. The fact that most people experience a weight plateau much earlier, typically after six to eight months of dieting, means that something else must be happening to thwart their continued weight loss.

In truth, the dreaded weight plateau is much more likely the result of a gradual loss of adherence to the original plan — people are actually eating many more calories when their weight loss stalls than when they started to diet. Why this happens is not fully understood, but biology probably plays a major role.

5

All diets are doomed to fail.

This myth exists

because, statistically, most people tend to regain at least some portion of their lost weight after a few years. This is especially true if they consider dieting a temporary strategy for losing weight. However, when diet changes are part of a persistent lifestyle modification, many people lose weight and keep it off over the long haul.

A recent study showed that eight years after adults began a diet and exercise program, more than half maintained weight loss of greater than 5 percent — an amount believed to be clinically beneficial. Furthermore, almost 40 percent of people lost more than 10 percent of their initial body weight after one year, and about 65 percent of those maintained more than 5 percent weight loss after eight years.

In addition to frequent weight monitoring, the secret to their success may be physical activity.

Although exercise may not be very effective for inducing weight loss, it’s often a major contributor to maintaining lost weight. This may be because, compared to losing weight, only a relatively modest change in calories is required to keep weight off. n Hall is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2015

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at ncwfoothills.com/photocontest Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2016

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com