The Washington Post National Weekly - October 29, 2017

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Changing the face of families The booming fertility business has fostered a quest for ‘good’ genes PAGE 12

Politics Trumps plan Mississippi hotels 4

Nation Costs of second run at parenting 9

5 Myths Nazis 23

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An Evening with Renee Montagne Northwest Public Radio will host NPR’s Renee Montagne in Wenatchee for an interview-style presentation on

Thursday, November 2, at 5:30pm at the

Numerica Performing Arts Center

2015 NPR by Doby Photography

Montagne co-hosted NPR’s Morning Edition—the most widely heard radio news program in the United States—from 2004 to 2016, broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California, with co-hosts Steve Inskeep and David Greene at NPR’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Montagne and a team of NPR reporters won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 1994 for their coverage of South Africa’s historic presidential and parliamentary elections. Montagne has also been honored by the Overseas Press Club for her coverage of Afghanistan and by the National Association of Black Journalists for a series on Black musicians going to war in the 20th century.

Tickets are on sale for $15 (general seating) at 509-663-ARTS, www.numericapac.org, or the Numerica PAC Box Office, 123 N Wenatchee Avenue.

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THE FIX

A Charlottesville-fueled backlash BY

E UGENE S COTT

C

harlottesville was apparently the game changer.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) had his problems with President Trump before the violence in the Virginia city in August, in which a counterprotester was killed during a white supremacist rally organized in defense of Confederate statues. But it is when Trump blamed both sides for the unrest — white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the activists condemning them — that Corker’s critiques of the president gained momentum.

Trump waited two days to specifically condemn the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other hate groups that had organized the Unite the Right rally. Then, a day later, he reiterated what he had said in his initial, widely criticized remarks about the violence. “I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said at a news conference Aug. 15 in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.

“What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at, as you say, the ‘alt-right,’ do they have any semblance of guilt?” he asked. “What about the fact they came charging with clubs in hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do.”

“You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now,” added Trump, who supports leaving Confederate memorials in place.

The majority of Americans — 56 percent — viewed Trump’s response poorly, but the majority of GOP lawmakers were silent.

Corker, however, warned that if Trump does not change his behavior — behavior that

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many white supremacists viewed favorably — that “our nation is going to go through great peril,” reported The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan.

“The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in

MATT MCCLAIN

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), left, and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) have taken President Trump to task over his comments on race.

order to be successful,” the senator told reporters in Tennessee. “And we need for him to be successful.”

Corker also said that Trump “recently has not demonstrated that he understands the character of this nation. He has not demonstrated that he understands what has made this nation great and what it is today.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection and took

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 email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 3

Trump to task in a Washington Post opinion piece, even alluding to his controversial comments after the Charlottesville unrest.

“How many more times will we see moral ambiguity in the face of shocking bigotry and shrug it off,” Flake asked.

“Nine months of this administration is enough for us to stop pretending that this is somehow normal, and that we are on the verge of some sort of pivot to governing, to stability,” he added. “Nine months is more than enough for us to say, loudly and clearly: Enough.”

If Flake, Corker and other GOP lawmakers are looking to Trump to change his views — or at least his public comments — on race in America, they may not want to hold their breath. Even after Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — the only black Republican in the Senate — met with Trump at the White House after criticizing his comments on Charlottesville, the president doubled down.

“I think especially in light of the advent of antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also, and essentially that’s what I said,” Trump said, referring to the anti-fascist protest movement.

As both Corker and Flake have articulated, Trump’s words on race aren’t the sum of why the senators have spoken out against him.

But if the two are truly concerned about the president’s views on race, they may want to look beyond the White House.

Most white Americans, Republicans and Americans over age 65 — all groups Trump won in the 2016 race — agree with his views on Confederate monuments and reject liberals’ arguments that these memorials glorify white supremacy. n

© The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER Julie Schlomer smiles as son Logan, 3, hugs her at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. At 43, Schlomer became pregnant with twins. Photograph by CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s sons see green in the blues J ONATHAN O ’ C ONNELL Cleveland, Miss.

BY

J

ake Brown crooned the Mississippi blues to a nearly all-black audience on the outskirts of town, his guitar filling the darkened club with pangs of heartbreak and regret.

Between numbers, the local singer paused and in a gravelly drawl, beseeched the crowd to be thankful. For God. For the Mississippi blues. And for Donald Trump’s hotel, being built on the other side of Cleveland.

“Have you all been out west of Cleveland?” he queried his audience. “To those that don’t know, get ready. Get ready, ’cause the blues is on the way.”

President Trump’s hotel company, the New York-based managers of luxury properties and golf courses around the globe, seems an unlikely presence in this struggling stretch of the Delta, where new businesses are hard to recruit and black residents are eight times more likely than whites to face unemployment.

But in June, the Trump Organization, now run by the president’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, bestowed a singular distinction upon Cleveland, population 12,000, and two nearby towns.

It announced it would debut two new hotel brands here, beginning with a four-star, 100-room Scion hotel originally designed to replicate an antebellum plantation.

In a partnership with local owners, the company said it would reopen two Comfort Inns and a Rodeway Inn after bringing them up to Trump standards and use the properties to launch its newest brand, known as “American Idea.”

It is nearly unheard of for a national hotel company to debut hotel lines in one of America’s poorest corners, surrounded by cotton and soybean fields and lacking a commercial airport or even an easily accessed interstate.

But the plan offers the first glimpse into how Trump’s sons will steer the company while he is in the White House. The Trump Organization is planning dozens of locations “designed to work in

PHOTOS BY LEE POWELL/THE WASHINGTON POST

In impoverished Mississippi Delta, hotel plans draw praise, questions every city U.S.A.,” said company spokeswoman Christine Da Silva.

It’s the company’s first appeal to middle America, the core of Trump’s political base.

Expansion of the Trump brand ratchets up the ethical implications for the president, who maintains his financial stake in the company he founded. The expansion could involve partnerships, new investors and local government approvals posing potential conflicts of interest. The Scion project, for example, is already slated to receive city and county tax breaks over seven years.

The deals could test the country’s acceptance of a complex business divestiture that Trump announced earlier this year, in which

he defers profits but maintains his financial stake in the Trump Organization. Ethics experts quickly criticized the divestiture, and a federal lawsuit alleges that it violates an obscure constitutional provision known as the emoluments clause.

The president’s explosive Twitter forays into racial issues — like the violent white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, and the NFL kneeling controversy — also have begun to shade how Mississippi residents view the expansion. The Scion hotel is designed to take advantage of the Delta as a growing destination for blues enthusiasts, a plan that some black residents view as Trump’s effort to monetize the threadbare

The Delta Blues Alley cafe in Clarksdale, Miss.

music invented by slaves in the Mississippi cotton fields.

“It shows he really doesn’t have a conscience. It’s about money,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is black and represents the area, said in a phone interview.

The president has said he does not defend white supremacy and his comments about the NFL were not about race.

Ellis Turnage, a black attorney and Democrat who has represented black residents of Cleveland in voting rights lawsuits, said he thinks acceptance of the Trump hotels will hinge on whether economic arguments prevail over political ones.

“People are looking for something that’s going to raise Missis-

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POLITICS sippi up off the bottom,” he said.

Turnage said he does not have a single friend who admits to voting for Trump. But when it comes to the new hotels, he said, “I don’t see that as an issue. I mean, Cleveland needs hotels.”

A ‘big thing’ for Mississippi Economic revival has long been challenging in Bolivar County, home to Cleveland, where 53.3 percent of children live in poverty, according to 2015 census data. Fifty nine percent of households make less than $35,000 a year, and the region has barely recovered from the recession and the closures of factories that once produced ceramic tiles and auto parts.

But the area has a selling point that the state of Mississippi has seized upon as a marketing slogan, now emblazoned on license plates and highway signs: “Birthplace of America’s Music.”

Assorted museums and clubs along Highway 61, “the Blues Highway,” tout the names of state natives and blues originators B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and others.

Last year, the local economy got a $20 million jolt with the opening of a Grammy museum in Cleveland, the first outside of Los Angeles and just down the street from the Trumps’ Scion.

In its first 17 months, the Grammy museum attracted 55,000 visitors, beating expectations, and welcomed 8,000 students for educational programming. The museum attracts big names for its events, like a recent show on the front lawn featuring Grammy Award winners Bobby Rush, Charlie Musselwhite and Frayser Boy. Cleveland also boasts a hospital and a 3,300-student university, Delta State, home of the Delta Music Institute, which teaches the creative and business areas of music.

“I think the blues is beginning to play a lot bigger role in the economic development of this area,” Tricia Walker, who heads the institute, said.

A 2014 economic analysis stressed the need for more hotels to accommodate Delta State’s homecoming weekend, blues festivals and Grammy events.

Trump’s company was not the only one interested in tapping into the market — another firm plans to break ground later this year on a high-end hotel along the downtown strip.

Judson Thigpen, executive di-

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Supervisor Donny Whitten said the hotels “a lot of times are running at 90 to 100 percent occupancy” because of crowded university and music events.

Two are Comfort Inns, in Cleveland and Clarksdale, on the side of the highway and surrounded by strip malls and gas stations. The third is a Rodeway Inn in Greenville, across the street from the Trop Casino and separated by a levee where local residents take power walks. The area nearby is pockmarked with empty and boarded-up buildings.

“I don’t support [Trump]. I wouldn’t go to his hotel unless I had to. But I don’t blame other people if they do,” said Shanna Ray, 31, a medical lab technician on a stop during her walk.

rector of the Cleveland-Bolivar County Chamber of Commerce, said the city has only about 280 rooms, less than what was needed for a recent baseball tournament that forced visitors to search for rooms a half-mile away. “That’s money that we’re not getting in the town because we don’t have the capacity,” he said.

Local entrepreneurs Dinesh and Suresh Chawla now run a successful chain of midrange hotels, which they took over from their father, an Indian immigrant.

Thirty years ago, V.K. Chawla called New York magnate Donald Trump out of the blue in search of investors. He received no money but lots of advice.

“Mr. Trump proceeded to explain to my father how to get the small-fry project off the ground,” Suresh Chawla said in June. “It’s an incredible testimony to how he can listen to something and in just a few seconds dissect it and come to what needs to be done.”

When his father was running for president, Donald Trump Jr. met the Chawla sons at a Republican fundraiser in Jackson, introduced by Gov. Phil Bryant.

Afterward, Suresh Chawla donated $50,000 to Republican candidates, including $27,700 to the Trump campaign. Eric Danziger, chief executive of Trump Hotels and an industry veteran, began considering the Cleveland project among a couple dozen nationwide for the company’s first Scion.

In June, the Chawlas joined

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump at Trump Tower to announce the Mississippi venture. The deal was pitched as a breakthrough for a state often ranked dead last as a place to work or go to school.

“This is a big thing for Mississippi. We’re usually 50th in every list there is,” Suresh Chawla said at the announcement.

Since then, the press has not been kind, particularly a Bloomberg story associating the Mississippi projects with a failed development, Trump Farallon Estates at Cap Cana, in the Dominican Republic.

“We are very hesitant to work with reporters at this point — everything we say, explain, do — is taken out of context,” Dinesh Chawla wrote in an email. “It’s frustrating that we seem to be used as pawns in a game.” He and his brother declined further comment.

Construction on the Scion hotel paused late this summer as the Chawlas reconsidered the original plantation design, a decision they haven’t addressed publicly. They came up with a new plan that will incorporate more restaurants, a clubhouse and convention space, according to the Trump Organization. In mid-September windows and siding on the main building had been added, and furniture was being delivered, but construction hadn’t restarted.

According to the Trump Organization, the American Idea brands will launch at the three older Chawla-owned mid-scale hotels in the area. Bolivar County

Jake Brown, a blues musician, at his day job in his shop in Cleveland, Miss.

Brown says he is not a Trump supporter personally but likes the idea of the hotel: “It will bring a lot of attention to the blues.”

Prospects for success Some of the plans may yet get tripped up in the heated litigation and ethical controversies surrounding the Trump Organization. For instance, the Chawlas have repeatedly expressed interest in having music students from Delta State produce or perform shows at the hotel.

But attorneys general from Maryland and the District of Columbia have challenged Trump in one pending emoluments lawsuit, and some legal scholars say benefiting from a publicly funded university qualifies as a violation.

Don Allan Mitchell, chair of languages and literature at Delta State, calls the hotels “one of those opportunities that I’m not sure we could pass up but at the same time it does bring with it the political baggage.”

He said he hoped the politics wouldn’t destroy something Cleveland needs.

“We’re enough of a community where we can have this civil conversation,” he said. “We can agree to disagree without screaming at one another. Or getting on Twitter.”

Brown, the local bluesman, spends his days fixing car upholstery in a workshop that is a hodgepodge of instruments and dismantled car seats.

He says he does not support Trump personally. His allegiance is to the music he and his band, Jake and the Pearl Street Jumpers, have played since the 1970s.

“I feel good about [the hotel],” he said. “It will bring a lot of attention to the blues.”n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

The Democrats’ dossier problem BY

A ARON B LAKE

T

he Washington Post reported this week that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped pay for that now-famous dossier of research on President Trump.

The Post reported that powerful Democratic attorney Marc E. Elias retained the firm Fusion GPS for information, and Fusion GPS later hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who was versed in Russia-related issues.

The dossier, which was published by BuzzFeed News in January, has been partially confirmed, though its most salacious allegations have not been.

There is a lot to sort through, but here are four key points: 1. Clinton supporters — though not the campaign itself — were previously reported to fund the dossier That Democrats were behind the funding for the dossier is not totally new. When Mother Jones first reported on the research that led to the dossier back in October 2016, it said the research effort was originally funded by President Trump’s GOP opponents and then, when he won the nomination, by those supporting Clinton.

As David Corn reported: “This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.)”

Until now, though, the dossier had not been tied specifically to the Clinton campaign or the DNC. 2. Yes, the dossier was funded by Democrats Some of the pushback on the left has focused on the fact that a still-unidentified Republican client retained Fusion GPS to do research on Trump before the Clinton campaign and the DNC did.

Thus, they argue, it’s wrong to say the dossier was just funded by Democrats.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

But The Post reported that the dossier’s author, Steele, wasn’t brought into the mix until after Democrats retained Fusion GPS. So while both sides paid Fusion GPS, Steele was only funded by Democrats.

3. Trump’s allegation of FBI payments is still dubious Some on the right seized upon The Post report, noting the FBI had agreed to pay Steele for information after the campaign. The argument seemed to be that the FBI was engaged in a witch hunt against Trump using Democrats’ sources. But The Post originally reported on the FBI’s agreement back in February: “The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement. . . . Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele.”

Despite there being no proof the FBI actually paid Steele, Trump suggested it might have in a recent tweet, along with “Russia . . . or the Dems (or all).”

4. The appearance problems for Democrats There is, presumably, a reason Democrats haven’t copped to

funding the dossier — something they still haven’t publicly confirmed. Fusion GPS threatening to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination raised eyebrows last week, for instance.

First among those reasons is paying a foreigner for opposition research for an American political campaign. Given Democrats’ argument that Russia’s interference on Trump’s behalf was beyond the pale, the Clinton camp and the DNC paying a Brit for information would seem somewhat problematic.

Some on the right even alleged that Democrats paying Steele amounts to “collusion” with foreigners. But Russia-Steele comparisons aren’t apples-to-apples.

The British after all are, unlike the Russians, America’s allies. Also, Steele was not acting as an agent of a foreign government, which is what would probably be required to prove collusion in the case of the Trump campaign and Russia.

Steele’s dossier does include information it says was obtained from “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.” In other words, the Clinton camp and the DNC were essentially paying for information allegedly obtained from inside the Russian government, even as there is no proof they deliberately sought Russia’s help.

Separately, the firm that the

Key points on Clinton camp and DNC funding the Trump research Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

He retained Fusion GPS, which hired dossier author Christopher Steele.

Clinton camp and the DNC paid also has alleged ties to the Kremlin. In Senate testimony in July, Hermitage Capital Management chief executive William Browder accused Fusion GPS and its head, Glenn Simpson, of running a smear campaign against Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who in 2009 was tortured and killed in a Russian prison after uncovering a $230 million tax theft. Magnitsky worked for Browder, and his name was used for a U.S. law containing sanctions that was passed by Congress and is a sore spot between the U.S. government and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Browder said the smear campaign was run by Fusion GPS with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. You might remember them from the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. that took place in June 2016. Veselnitskaya was the Russian lawyer with alleged Kremlin ties who arranged the meeting.

As The Post reported in July of Browder’s accusations: “They were all allegedly working with the law firm Baker Hostetler to defend the Russian company Prevezon from charges it laundered funds stolen in the fraud Magnitsky uncovered.” “ ‘Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act,’ ” Browder will testify. “ ‘He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistleblower and was instead a criminal.’ ” Fusion GPS has confirmed it worked on a lawsuit involving Veselnitskaya for two years, The Post’s Josh Rogin reported. It denied any involvement in the Trump Jr. meeting.

The firm has worked with both Democrats and Republicans over the years. n

©The Washington Post

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Republicans plan to target Bannon

BY D AVID W EIGEL, M ICHAEL S CHERER AND R OBERT C OSTA

A

llies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have declared open warfare against Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and leader of an insurrection aimed at defeating mainstream Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

More than a year ahead of the 2018 congressional contests, a super PAC aligned with McConnell (R-Ky.) revealed plans on Wednesday to attack Bannon personally as it works to protect GOP incumbents facing uphill primary fights. The effort reflects the growing concern of Republican lawmakers over the rise of anti-establishment forces and comes amid escalating frustration over President Trump’s conduct, which has prompted a handful of lawmakers to publicly criticize the president.

Yet the retaliatory crusade does not aim to target Trump, whose popularity remains high among Republican voters. Instead, the McConnell-allied Senate Leadership Fund will highlight Bannon’s hard-line populism and attempt to link him to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support.

It will also boost candidates with traditional GOP profiles and excoriate those tied to Bannon, with plans to spend millions and launch a heavy social media presence in some states.

The turbulence presents a danger to Republicans’ narrow 52seat majority in the Senate, with seasoned GOP lawmakers deciding against seeking reelection amid the political storm — and with many GOP voters cheering the rancor that Bannon has stoked from his perch at his website, Breitbart.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), in an emotional plea Tuesday, said that he would not run in 2018, after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) had done the same in late September.

Both men, no longer accountable to Republican primary voters,

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Allies of Sen. Mitch McConnell are joining effort to counter an anti-establishment push in 2018 have taken on higher-profile roles as critics of the president, with Corker calling for a “day care” to step in and control him, and Flake calling Trump’s behavior “unacceptable.”

Some Republican lawmakers have privately fretted that simply speaking out against Trump’s incendiary statements or the Bannon-aligned candidates that are rousing anger in their states will not be enough — and could backfire — as they try to survive the surge of grievance-driven politics that has gripped the GOP’s base.

“It’s tough,” Flake told CNN on Wednesday. “I’m competitive. I like to fight these battles. But I also knew that I couldn’t run the kind of race that I would be proud of and win in a Republican primary at this time. The politics in that way have changed.”

In the wake of Flake’s announcement, the SLF called Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward, Bannon’s pick to replace Flake, a “conspiracy theorist” and promised to ensure her defeat.

In recent weeks, Bannon has held court as dozens of candidates

have streamed through his Capitol Hill townhouse, urging them to pledge to vote against McConnell for majority leader.

Hedge fund executive Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah — Bannon’s wealthy allies — have pledged millions to the cause, said people briefed on their plans.

Bannon’s critics argue that he is causing unnecessary internal divisions that could make it harder to pass tax legislation — and to win general elections next fall. They also point to Sen. Luther Strange’s defeat in last month’s Republican primary in a special Senate election in Alabama as an example of a dynamic they worry could repeat itself across the next year if left unchecked. The SLF spent more than $10 million to help Strange.

Strange was endorsed by Trump and McConnell but lost to a former state judge, Roy Moore, who had won the backing of Bannon and his orbit of allies. Moore is now in a tight race with Democratic nominee Doug Jones.

“Do we need any further evidence than Mitch McConnell and his cronies reducing themselves to using left-wing talking points to

Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of Breitbart and former White House chief strategist, is supporting a number of candidates who are challenging mainstream Republican incumbents in 2018.

attack Steve? It’s pathetic to watch,” said Andy Surabian, a senior adviser to the Great America Alliance super PAC and Bannon’s former deputy at the White House.

The pro-Trump PAC is engaged in a slew of races, sending around a bus to rally activists, and counts longtime operative Edward Rollins as its strategist. “Every poll shows Mitch McConnell is an albatross on the Republican candidates,” Surabian said. “If McConnell truly cared about our Republican majority in the Senate more than he cares about his own power, then he would step down as Senate majority leader today.”

Bannon’s circle says the contents of his divorce proceedings, along with claims of racism, are unlikely to do new damage to his reputation, since he has been targeted in the past along those same lines by Democrats, and even in a “Saturday Night Live” caricature as an angel of death. Advisers also note that the attacks elevate Bannon’s profile, which could help carry his anti-establishment message.

According to public polling, neither McConnell nor Bannon is in good standing with voters. In an April poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, one of few to ask voters about Bannon, just 11 percent said they viewed him positively and 45 percent said they viewed him negatively. The numbers were better among Republicans, with a nine-point favorability margin.

As the two sides spar, Senate Republicans are trying to demonstrate that the party’s agenda is moving forward despite the infighting — and that relations with the White House are smooth.

Still, GOP donors who are friendly with McConnell welcomed the effort to thwart Bannon’s attempts to shape the 2018 contests and rattle McConnell as Senate Republicans are trying to work with Trump.

“Absolutely. Why not?” said Al Hoffman, a major Republican donor and McConnell ally. “You’ve got to get rid of the Bannon banner.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Wildfires harsh the buzz about pot

BY K ATIE

Z EZIMA

T

he deadly wildfires that ravaged communities and wineries in Northern California also severely damaged numerous marijuana farms, just before the state is expected to fully legalize the drug, in a disaster that could have far-reaching implications for a nascent industry.

At least 34 marijuana farms suffered extensive damage as the wildfires tore across wine country and some of California’s prime marijuana-growing areas. The fires could present challenges to the scheduled Jan. 1 rollout of legal marijuana sales at the start of an industry that is expected to generate billions of dollars in revenue.

In many cases, owners have spent tens of thousands of dollars to become compliant with state law to sell the product. But because the federal government considers marijuana cultivation and sales a criminal enterprise, it remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most of the marijuana businesses affected by the fire to access insurance, mortgages and loans to rebuild. Even a charitable fund set up to help marijuana farmers was frozen because a payment processor will not handle cannabis transactions.

Cannabis businesses also are not eligible for any type of federal disaster relief, according to a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“It’s the darkness right before the dawn of legal, regulated cannabis in California,” said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, who cautioned that the full extent of the damage remains unknown. “These businesses are in a really vulnerable position, and this really came at about the worst time it could have. It means we’re on our own.”

The fires burned swaths of Mendocino County, which is part of what is known as California’s “Emerald Triangle,” the nation’s epicenter of marijuana growing. It also devastated Sonoma County, which is best known for wine but has seen an increase in cannabis farming. The fires killed at least 42

MASON TRINCA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

With a scheduled rollout of legal marijuana sales approaching, California faces challenges people and damaged thousands of buildings, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Some marijuana farms were completely destroyed, and many others are believed to have been heavily damaged by fire, smoke and ash. Structures used to store dried marijuana burned, as did greenhouses and irrigation lines.

Many marijuana cultivators live on their farms, and some homes burned to the ground.

Erich Pearson, co-owner of SPARC, a large medical cannabis dispensary with two locations in San Francisco and others north of the city, saw his crops in Glen Ellen, Calif., about 50 miles north of San Francisco, engulfed by flames after awakening to the smell of smoke. The first thing he saw after getting close to the farm was a metal-roofed barn on fire. It was filled with marijuana harvested to sell on the legal market.

“We lost everything we harvested to date, and had significant

damage to what’s left,” he said.

There is concern that what has been destroyed, as well as the damage from smoke, ash and lack of water for crops that did survive, could seriously impact the supply for customers when marijuana is legal for sale. The fire has compounded existing problems with the initial start of sales because of a regulatory mess: Many municipalities and the state have not released draft regulations for how businesses must comply with the new law. Businesses in some places, including San Francisco, are not likely to be able to open Jan. 1.

“Now, we might be facing a much smaller harvest than we were anticipating, which could potentially drive the price up,” said Josh Drayton, deputy director of the California Cannabis Industry Association. “It’s going to touch every different piece of the industry, and we can’t get ahead of this yet. We still don’t know how much has survived, how much has been lost.”

Amy Goodwin removes yellow leaves and checks for damage to the marijuana crop of SPARC, a large medical pot dispensary, in Glen Ellen, Calif. The plants require a high level of maintenance, and the wildfire stopped SPARC employees from working.

Ashley Oldham, owner of Frost Flower Farms in Redwood Valley, Calif., did something very out of character: She left her cellphone at a friend’s house the day the fire reached her. A neighbor pounded on her door in the middle of the night as flames surrounded her home, saving the lives of Oldham and her 4-year-old daughter.

Oldham’s house was destroyed, but her greenhouse stayed intact, in part because she hiked through what looked like a “post-apocalyptic disaster zone” to check on her property after the fire passed. She said that emergency officials initially did not allow marijuana farmers to check on their crops, as is allowed for farmers of other agricultural products.

When she arrived at the farm, she used a neighbor’s hose to wet down a large oak tree that was ablaze, saving her greenhouse.

Oldham has been okayed for a legal permit in Mendocino County, spending “a lot of money” to come fully into compliance. She estimates that she lost about 25 percent of her crop to wind damage, and much of it looks burned.

She and other cannabis farmers must have their crops extensively tested under California’s new regulations, and most people don’t know what impact smoke or burn damage will have.

“We’ve never experienced this and I don’t know what to expect,” she said. She said that she will not be able to recoup the full value of her house through insurance because she grows marijuana.

“We’re totally legal,” she said of her farm. “But we’re still being treated unfairly.”

Susan Schindler, a grower in Potter Valley, Calif., said she has spent at least $20,000 on consultants, attorneys and fees trying to come into compliance for legal sales in January. She evacuated her home and has been at a San Francisco hotel since the fires. Her master grower told her the plants are “very crisp.”

“I’m not going to give up,” she said, “but it’s going to take a lot of money out of my bank account this year.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Double bind in 2nd run at parenting

BY D ANIELLE G ABRIEL

D OUGLAS-

E

ach month, 72-year-old Sandra Bursch withdraws $4,200 from her retirement savings to cover her bills. A chunk of it goes toward paying college bills — for her grandson Gage.

She expects to do the same for Gage’s younger brother, Mason, when he graduates from high school in another year.

Every stitch of their clothing, all of their meals and day-to-day expenses have been her responsibility since 2003, when drug use by her daughter and son-in-law prompted the police to remove the children from their home.

“My biggest concern is I won’t be here long enough to see them finish their education,” said Bursch, who lives in the Tujunga area of Los Angeles. “I’m using all of the money I have to raise the boys. That’s all I care about now, that the kids grow up, finish school and that they’re okay.”

Among the thousands of families filling out financial aid applications and struggling to save for tuition, there are grandparents such as Bursch facing the same financial responsibilities but with limited resources. Their second run at parenting arrives as their earning potential winds down and retirement kicks in with a fixed income never meant to cover the cost of college.

“These are folks who had moved on with their life and then now emotionally, socially and financially, they have to change their mindset and get back into the parenting mode,” said LD Ross Jr., vice president of programs for the District of Columbia College Access Program, a college advising group widely known as DC-CAP. “Some of them had more resources when they were working, but now that they’re retired it’s difficult. It’s a labor of love.”

For some grandparents, helping a grandchild earn a degree means spending a few more years working. For others, it is a matter of tapping into savings they had squirreled away for the next stage of their lives. Resources exist for grandparents, but some of that aid is not

BOB RIHA JR. FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Grandparents in care role struggle with fixed incomes not meant to cover college costs widely available and information can be hard to come by.

Nonprofit and government organizations are stepping in to help grandparents navigate programs designed to help them with child rearing, especially as the need grows. There is no definitive data on the number of grandparents paying their grandchildren’s college tuition. But with more grandparents serving in custodial roles, higher-education costs are a looming concern.

Census Bureau data shows about 2.7 million grandparents are raising their grandchildren, up 7 percent from 2009. A quarter of these families are living in poverty.

Having a firm grasp on the support services available from the outset can affect how grandparents cover the costs of college in the long run. The federal government established grants several years ago to pay for programs that help caregivers in the child welfare system access legal, financial or social services. These programs, however, ex-

ist in only about 20 states.

Nonprofits such as Generation United are filling in some of the gaps. The organization, in collaboration with the American Bar Association and Casey Family Programs, runs a website, Grandfamilies.org, with information and resources organized by state.

There are even colleges offering grandparents guidance. The University of Central Oklahoma, for instance, hosts workshops on applying for scholarships and on financial planning for people raising their grandchildren. The sessions were a natural fit in a state with one of the highest percentages of grandparents providing custodial care, in large part because of female incarceration rates, said Glee Bertram, a professor of family life education at Central Oklahoma.

Those who adopt their grandchildren out of the foster care system or become licensed foster parents often receive money from the state until the child turns 18. That financial assistance can allow

Sandra Bursch watches her grandson Gage get a high-five from Shyla as his brother Mason looks on at Bursch’s home in Los Angeles.

“I’m using all of the money I have to raise the boys,” says Bursch, 72.

grandparents to save for college, said Sylvie De Toledo, founder of Grandparents as Parents, an organization in California that supports grandparents. She said retired grandparents receiving Social Security benefits can also have a portion of that money set aside for their adopted grandchild.

Bursch has saved the money she received from the state after adopting her grandsons out of foster care, creating a trust for the boys in the event of her death.

Navigating the higher education system can be overwhelming for grandparents who have gone years, if not decades, without having to help with applications and financial aid forms. Reaching out to high school counselors is vital, especially when filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, said Ross, from DC-CAP. The federal government and colleges use the application to grant students access to more than $150 billion in grants, loans and workstudy money.

Bursch’s grandson Gage did not qualify for financial aid to attend Los Angeles Valley College because of the income she draws from her annuities, she said.

To keep costs down, Gage chose to live at home while pursuing an associate degree in kinesiology. After graduation in May, he plans to transfer to California State University at Northridge to complete a bachelor’s degree in the same field.

While Bursch has covered the costs of community college, she said her grandson will use the $14,000 in the 529 college savings plan. The savings plan allows families to invest without the earnings being taxed, so long as the funds are used to pay for college expenses.

The money, she said, was not enough for four years of college, but it will give the boys a chance of graduating without a lot of student debt.

“I’d tell everyone now to go talk to them at the college and find out what they can do for you. I didn’t know to do that,” Bursch said. “I wasn’t aware of what was out there, and I suspect many grandparents are in the same position.” n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Learning to love the coffee they grow A NTHONY F AIOLA Bogota, Colombia BY

N

ot so long ago, Cesar Parra’s world changed with a cup of coffee — a freshly brewed, richly aromatic ambrosia served at one of this nation’s fast-multiplying quality cafes.

“It came as a shock, having a good cup,” said Parra, 47, a late-tothe-game coffee lover who spoke on the sidelines of a master class for baristas. “I was born and raised in Colombia. And all my life, I’d been drinking bad coffee.”

For decades, this South American nation harbored a dirty little secret. In the land of Juan Valdez and his mule, Conchita — the fictional characters from advertisements who have hooked the world on rich mugs of Colombian coffee since the 1950s — it was nearly impossible to get a good cup of Joe. The reasons are well established. The finest arabica beans from Colombia’s emerald hills were mostly exported, leaving domestic coffee consumers to drink the proverbial dregs. Some of the coffee consumed locally actually came from cheap imports from as far away as Vietnam. Then there’s the way filtered coffee is prepared here. The most popular style is tinto — a weak and watery concoction with a shelf life rivaling Spam.

“Even at five-star hotels in Bogota, you’d have a hard time,” said Roberto Velez, chief executive of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation. “We grew the best. But Colombians just weren’t used to drinking quality coffee.”

Globalization is changing that — specifically a wave of well-traveled Colombian entrepreneurs who, along with a number of foreign investors, are upping the quality of domestic coffee roasting and brewing. Together, they are fomenting a revolution in Colombia’s coffee-drinking culture.

In Latin America, the bettercoffee trend is percolating well beyond Colombia’s borders.

Supermarkets in Brazil were long known for peddling a few cheap, lower-quality brands. But as consumers there clamor for a better

ANTHONY FAIOLA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Colombia has long produced the beans. Now it is waking up to the beauty of a quality cup. brews, grocery stores are stocking locally produced gourmet beans.

Panama, meanwhile, is worldfamous for cultivating Geisha — a prized coffee variety known for its subtle, almost tea-like favor. Yet for years, Panama was as infamous as Colombia for serving up bad brews at home. That has changed, however, with a new crop of “third wave” coffee houses — reflecting a movement to produce and serve artisanal coffee.

In Colombia, domestic consumption of coffee — which lagged global trends for years — is skyrocketing, with experts citing the wider availability of better-quality coffee as a major factor. Hundreds of new cafes have opened in recent years, with much of that growth coming from just one chain, Tostao. Since opening in December 2015, the company has democratized good coffee, offering prices so low that even maids and construction workers can afford a

quality cup.

Yet the most elaborate new brew houses are elevating coffee to an art form, replicating the almost laboratory-like cafes pioneered by hardcore java hipsters in such places as New York, Berlin, Seattle and Tokyo.

An aspiring cafe owner, Parra said he became inspired after sampling the brews at one of the capital’s new high-style cafes. His obsession drove him one recent afternoon to downtown Bogota, where he joined 14 students for classes at Varietale. One of the capital’s hippest coffee shops, it serves, among other things, blends produced via vacuum and heat in glass siphons.

“As drinkers, I think Colombians only now are really understanding what good coffee tastes like,” Parra said.

Colombians began to get a taste of premium coffee at least as far back as the early 2000s, when

A server makes coffee at Varietale, a hip coffee house in Bogota, Colombia.

Better beans and new brewing methods have brought better coffee to Colombians.

Juan Valdez — the now-global chain established by the national coffee federation — began opening cafes. The quality of Colombian coffee beans was already on the rise. In the early 1990s, when coffee prices collapsed on the commodities markets, Colombia responded by encouraging its farmers to better compete globally by producing finer varieties of beans.

The government has additionally deployed experts to help teach farmers to better judge well-balanced taste and acidity levels.

But experts say the spurt in quality coffee shops began more recently. The idea came in large part from Colombian entrepreneurs who had traveled to Europe and the United States and experienced coffee-drinking epiphanies.

Abel Calderon, co-owner of Varietale, for instance, opened his first branch in 2015 after sampling what Colombian coffee could taste like at cafes such as Storyville in Seattle.

“We had to taste our coffee outside of Colombia to appreciate what it could be like here,” he said.

Another boost for coffee culture, local entrepreneurs say, came from peace. The official end last year of Colombia’s half-century-long war with the left-wing FARC guerrillas, as well as an easing of paramilitary violence in some coffee-growing regions, has opened up swaths of the country.

Alejandro Gutierrez, chef at Salvo Patria — a Bogota restaurant that started as a coffee shop six years ago — recently tasted coffee grown and roasted in the battledscarred Meta region. Meta is not one of the country’s better-known coffee regions, and Gutierrez was surprised by the beans’ quality. He ended up ordering batches for his restaurant, which lists coffeegrowing regions for blends on its menu in the same way it does for wines.

“That whole state was FARC territory, and you wouldn’t have thought about it before as an option for good coffee,” he said. “But here you have this great coffee coming from there, and who knew? Well, now we know.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Austria’s Muslims see ominous sign

BY G RIFF W ITTE AND L UISA B ECK

Berlin

A

little over a century ago, the ancestors of modern Austrians were at the vanguard of religious liberty in Europe, giving their small Muslim community the same rights as Christians or Jews.

Today, the much larger and rapidly growing Muslim population of Austria sees their country again setting the tone in Europe — but this time in a far more ominous way.

In the election earlier this month, well over half the country’s voters chose parties that defined themselves by their hardline stances on immigration, integration and multiculturalism.

The third-place finisher, the Freedom Party, campaigned on the proposition that Islam is incompatible with Austrian values and an existential threat to Europe.

The leader of the vote-topping People’s Party and Austria’s likely next chancellor, 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, doesn’t go that far.

But he has mimicked much of the Freedom Party’s rhetoric, lashing out at Muslim kindergartens, calling for rescued migrants to be sent back to Africa and promising sharply reduced benefits for newcomers. Together, the two parties are expected to form a coalition government that leaders of the Austrian Muslim community see as a nightmare come true.

“This election result is something we feared,” said Ramazan Demir, a Vienna-based imam and a leader of the Islamic Religious Community in Austria, an umbrella group. “During the campaign we saw how populists created panic. Austrians voted for them for that reason.”

The Austrian results reflected anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment that has been rising across Europe in recent years. But it has been especially pronounced in Austria, a country that hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers transited at the height of the European refugee crisis. Tens

ALEX HALADA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Election boosted parties that have emphasized resistance to immigration and multiculturalism of thousands — many of them Muslims fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — settled in the central European nation.

The newcomers added to a fastgrowing Muslim community that represented just 4 percent of Austria’s population as of 2001, but has now expanded to 8 percent — or 700,000 people.

Austria was long known for its relative openness to Muslims — an outgrowth, analysts say, of a 1912 law that gave Islam official status in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that remains on the books today, long after the empire’s collapse. But attitudes have hardened in recent years, with widespread perceptions that newcomers haven’t adequately integrated. Terrorist attacks in Europe — and the departure of about 300 Austrian Muslims to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State — have heightened concerns. Politicians have picked up on the fears, and exacerbated them.

Peter Hajek, an expert on Austrian public opinion, said that after initially welcoming refugees in 2015, voters grew jaded and came to see the newcomers less as legitimate asylum seekers than as economic migrants. They also began to regard Muslims in general as suspect.

“They do not really differentiate between Muslims and Islamic extremists,” he said. “Nearly every Muslim seems to be dangerous.”

Kurz, more than any other mainstream politician, capitalized on those sentiments. On the campaign trail, he boasted that as foreign minister he had stopped the flow of asylum seekers along the Balkans route by closing Austrian borders. He has promised to force Europe to do the same with the central Mediterranean route, the main path by which migrants reach the continent today.

Domestically, Kurz has championed changes to the country’s laws for Muslims, including a prohibition on foreign donations for

People’s Party leader Sebastian Kurz, 31, prepares to deliver a statement after meeting with the Austrian president last week in Vienna. Kurz’s party was the top vote-getter in the recent election.

Islamic institutions and a ban on women wearing full-face veils.

He also caused a storm of controversy by commissioning a study on Islamic kindergartens, which have equal weight under Austrian law with other religious schools. The study found that the schools contribute to “a parallel society,” and Kurz frequently cited the findings on the campaign trail.

But the study’s methodology was widely questioned by academics, and Austrian media reported that Kurz’s ministry had changed the findings to make them more politically advantageous. Kurz has consistently denied that charge, and his aides bristle at the notion that he has simply copied the language and policies of the far right. But they don’t deny that he is responding to a genuine discomfort in Austrian society with multiculturalism.

“Most European populations don’t want to become half-Afghan or half-Syrian or half-African,” said a Kurz adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record.

Muslim leaders in Austria, too, have been restrained in their public responses. There have been no major protests, and few sustained appeals for Kurz to choose a more centrist governing partner than the Freedom Party, which is led by Heinz-Christian Strache, a onetime neo-Nazi youth activist.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t profound concerns.

Omar al-Rawi, a Vienna city council member and one of the country’s most prominent Muslim politicians, said his chief worry is that Austria is looking more like its former partner in empire, Hungary. There, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made xenophobia and bashing the European Union central to his agenda.

“We don’t want an Orbanization” of Austria, said al-Rawi, who was born in Baghdad and has lived in Austria for nearly four decades. “Our city, our nation in general, it’s a beautiful place to live. Unfortunately, the climate is becoming rougher.” n ©The Washington Post

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

n

LEXINGTON PARK, MD - OCTOBER 1: Julie Schlomer looks back at her daughter Alyssa Schlomer, left, and son Logan Schlomer, right, after reading them a bedtime story at the Schlomer family's home on October 1, 2017 in Lexington Park, MD. Julie Schlomer used a shared egg donor and in vitro fertilization to have the three-year-old twins. (Photo by Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

In the bedroom Alyssa shares with her twin brother, Logan, Julie Schlomer takes a bedtime glance at her children.

COVER STORY

Discounts, guarantees and ‘good’ genes

BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA

W

hen Julie Schlomer got the news that she was finally pregnant at the age of 43, her thoughts turned to the other mothers. There were three of them in all, complete strangers, but they shared an extraordinary bond made possible by 21st-century medicine and marketing.

They were all carrying half-siblings.

Under a cost-saving program offered by Maryland-based Shady Grove Fertility, the women split 21 eggs harvested from a single donor — blue-eyed, dark-haired, with a master’s degree in teaching. Each had the eggs fertilized with her partner’s sperm and transferred to her womb.

Schlomer gave birth to twins, a son and daughter, now 3. She hopes her children will one day connect with their genetic half-siblings.

“I would love to see pictures of the other kids, to talk to them,” Schlomer said.

The multibillion-dollar fertility industry is booming, and experimenting with business models that are changing the American family in new and unpredictable ways. Would-be parents seeking donor eggs and sperm can pick and choose from long checklists of physical and intellectual characteristics. Clinics now offer volume discounts, package deals and 100 percent guarantees for babymaking that are raising complicated ethical and legal questions.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12 percent of American women 15 to 55 — 7.3 million — have used some sort of fertility service; the use of assisted reproductive technologies has doubled in the past decade. In 2015, these procedures resulted in nearly 73,000 babies — 1.6 percent of all U.S. births.

The rate is even higher in some countries, including Japan (5 percent) and Denmark (10 percent).

Most couples use their own eggs and sperm, turning to doctors to facilitate pregnancy continues on next page CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

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from previous page

through techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). But the use of donor gametes is on the rise. The donor-egg industry, in particular, has taken off in the past decade with the development of a safe and reliable egg-freezing process. The number of attempted pregnancies with donor eggs has soared from 1,800 in 1992 to almost 21,200 in 2015.

Yet in the United States, the industry remains largely self-regulated. Questions abound about the recruitment of donors; the ethics of screening and selecting embryos for physical characteristics; the ownership of the estimated millions of unused eggs, sperm samples and embryos in long-term storage; and the emerging ability to tinker with embryos via the gene-editing tool CRISPR. Earlier this year, a group of donor-conceived adults documented numerous ethical lapses in the industry, including donors who lied to prospective parents about their health histories and other qualifications, and clinics that claimed to have limited donations from some individuals — while permitting those individuals to submit hundreds of samples. They called on the Food and Drug Administration to provide more oversight of the “cryobanks” that gather, store and sell the most precious commodities in the industry — sperm and eggs.

The agency said it is reviewing the matter, but cannot predict when it will have a response “due to the existence of other FDA priorities.”

In the meantime, the business of assisted reproduction remains a mostly unregulated frontier. Shady Grove Fertility, the nation’s largest clinic, offers refunds if couples don’t go home with a baby. New Hope Fertility in New York City held a lottery earlier this year that awarded 30 couples a $30,000 round of IVF. And the California IVF Fertility Center is pioneering what some refer to as the “Costco model” of babymaking, creating batches of embryos using donor eggs and sperm that can be shared among several different families.

That model has served to highlight a preference among many would-be parents for tall, thin, highly-educated donors.

“It’s a little unsettling to be marketing characteristics as potentially positive in a future child,” said Rebecca Dresser, a bioethicist at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics under George W. Bush. “But it’s hard to think on what basis to prohibit that.”

And so, Dresser said, “what we have now is prospective parents making judgments about what they think ‘good’ genes are” — decisions that are literally changing the face of the next generation.

Choosing baby’s traits When little Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, came screaming into the world at 5 pounds 12 ounces in 1978, her birth was greeted with as much fear as hope. IVF success rates were low, and some doctors expressed concern about possible harm to the baby and mother. The Roman Catholic Church

‘High-tech’ babies The use of in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has almost doubled in the past decade. The number of attempts at ART procedures, or cycles, is now at an all-time high.

ART cycles

Infants born using ART 231,936

200,000

134,260 100,000

64,681

52,041 72,913

20,840 0

1996

2015

2005

Note: ART procedures often result in multiple children per birth.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, and Division of Reproductive Health TED MELLNIK AND SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

worried that IVF would lead to the creation of “baby factories.”

Nearly 40 years and 6.5 million assisted births later, the procedures are considered mainstream medicine. And the basic building blocks of human life — sperm and egg — can be found for sale online with a simple Google search.

Prospective parents can filter and sort potential donors by race and ethnic background, hair and eye color, and education level. They also can get much more personal information: audio of the donor’s voice, photos of the donor as a child and as an adult, and written responses to questions that read like college-application essays.

Want your sperm donor to have a B.A. in political science? Want your egg donor to love animals? Want the genes of a Division I athlete?

All of these are possible. Prospective parents overwhelmed by all the choices can leave it to the heavens and pick a donor by astrological sign.

A prescreened vial of sperm sells for as little as $400 and can be shipped via FedEx. A set of donor eggs — as many as 30, depending on the donor — can cost $10,000 or more to compensate for the risky and invasive medical procedure required to harvest eggs from the donor’s ovaries.

Fertility companies freely admit that specimens from attractive donors go fast, but it’s intelligence that drives the pricing: Many companies charge more for donors with a graduate degree.

Talent sells, too. One cryobank, Family Creations, which has offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin and other large cities, notes that a 23-year-old egg donor “excels in calligraphy, singing, modeling, metal art sculpting, painting, drawing, shading and clay sculpting.” A 29-year-old donor “excels in softball, tennis, writing and dancing.”

The Seattle Sperm Bank categorizes its do-

“What we have now is prospective parents making judgments about what they think ‘good’ genes are.”

Rebecca Dresser, a bioethicist at Washington University in St. Louis

nors into three popular categories: “top athletes,” “physicians, dentists and medical residents” and “musicians.”

And the Fairfax Cryobank in Northern Virginia, one of the nation’s largest, typically stocks sperm from about 500 carefully vetted donors whose profiles read like overeager suitors on a dating site: Donor No. 4499 “enjoys swimming, fencing and reading and writing poetry.” Donor No. 4963 “is an easygoing man with a quick wit.” Donor No. 4345 has “well-developed pectorals and arm muscles.”

Some companies offer a face-matching service that finds donors who look most like the prospective mom or dad. Or, if they prefer, like Jennifer Lawrence. Or Taye Diggs. Or any other famous person they want their offspring to resemble.

A money-back guarantee Before they decided to use donor eggs, Schlomer and her husband, Ryan, had been trying to have a baby for two agonizing years.

Their insurance paid for those early infertility treatments, but nothing worked. Not intrauterine insemination (which involves having a doctor place sperm inside the uterus during ovulation), not hormone injections, not acupuncture, not herbs.

The couple, from Lexington Park, Md., about 60 miles east of the District on the Chesapeake Bay, was psychologically ready to take the next step. But a set of eggs and up to six attempts at embryo transfers cost $55,000 — none of it covered by insurance.

“I thought it was crazy high. There is no way I could pay for that,” Schlomer recalled. While they both had steady incomes — she as a government contractor in information technology and he as an aerospace engineer for the Navy — they were far from wealthy.

But as they studied the material from Shady Grove Fertility, they discovered that the clinic offered a huge range of payment options, neatly outlined in a nine-by-six grid, 54 possibilities in all. If Schlomer split the eggs with one other mother, the cost would go down to $39,000. If she split the eggs with two other mothers, the cost would be $30,500.

Schlomer’s husband noticed that they could cut the cost even more, to $24,500, if they agreed to use only one set of eggs and forgo the right to ask for more.

Schlomer initially was put off by the idea of sharing; she feared that her offspring could unknowingly meet a half-sibling and fall in love.

But more research reassured her that such a meeting was mathematically unlikely, even for half-siblings living in the same geographic area.

What sealed the deal was the money-back guarantee. If Schlomer didn’t get pregnant or they opted to stop, they would get a refund.

This guarantee is the hallmark of Shady Grove. Clinic co-founder Michael Levy, who now serves as the company’s president, drew criticism when he pioneered the model decades ago. “People were calling it ‘contingency medicine’ and saying it is unethical,” he recalled.

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Today, he said, about three-fourths of programs nationally offer some kind of guarantee, adding, “I think it’s probably been our most important contribution to the field.”

The Schlomers drained their savings account, borrowed $10,000 from their 401(k) retirement fund and sold a Toyota Prius. Then they set aside a quiet weekend to look for a donor.

Schlomer had two main criteria: One, the donor had to have blue eyes. While her eyes are green, she was charmed by the idea of a child with blue eyes.

Second, the donor had to have a graduate degree. While neither she nor her husband studied beyond the undergraduate level, she explained, “Who doesn’t want smart children?”

She found 12 matches and looked at their profiles. A few of them, she noticed, used horrible grammar in their written responses to some standard profile questions. Those were the first to go. She also crossed off donors with hereditary health issues.

That left two. In the end, they went with the one whose personality spoke most to Julie.

The donor said she was a “homebody” who loves taking pictures and being with family on the beach. Her personal goals, she wrote, include being “the best possible mom I can be for my children. I want to be ‘present’ when I am with them and invest into their lives. . . . I want my life to matter.”

Schlomer put in the order, and it wasn’t long before the clinic found two more women to join her group. Within a few weeks, the eggs were harvested from the donor, fertilized and implanted.

Alyssa and Logan were born in 2013. Both have very blue eyes — “beautiful, big, giant blue eyes,” Schlomer said — and have been very healthy. “They don’t even get colds,” she said.

She is grateful that there’s no chance they inherited lupus, a serious autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks its own organs and tissue, that she inherited from her mom.

Ryan Schlomer looks as his wife, Julie, points out otters to Alyssa and Logan at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore during a families event hosted by the Rockville clinic that helped the couple have their children via a shared egg donor and in vitro fertilization.

In the years since, Schlomer has thought about how to tell them the story of their birth.

“I believe babies choose their mothers,” she said. “So I have the same children that I would have had if they had come from my own eggs.

They just have a few different physical characteristics.”

“I’m thrilled with the results, as it turns out,” she added.

The Schlomers purchased two books for the twins: “Before You Were Born: Our Wish for a Baby” and “A Tiny Itsy Bitsy Gift of Life, An Egg Donor Story,” which their father occasionally reads at bedtime.

When the time is right, Schlomer thinks she will explain that they are “high-tech babies” and impress on them the importance of memorizing their donor number, in case they happen to “run into another donor-egg kid.”

“I know it’s a really slim chance,” she said.

“But I want them to be aware, just in case.” n ©The Washington Post

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ENTERTAINMENT

G EOFF E DGERS in Hartford, Conn.

BY

S

ometimes, okay, all the time, David Letterman, who used to host his very own television program, is asked whether he still wishes he were on TV. Back then, he could do almost anything he wanted in front of millions of viewers: chat with a president, toss a wheel of runny brie off a building, even mock his once mortal frenemy Jay Leno.

He must miss it terribly.

“Not for a second,” Letterman says before delivering a lengthy analogy about a prison sentence that references beatings, food poisoning and a knife fight. You sit there waiting for the punchline, the twist, the resolution and then, at a certain point, realize it’s not coming. Wait. Mr. Letterman, are you saying hosting a late-night talk show is hard time?

“They are exactly the same,” he says.

The David Letterman who received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor this month looks different from the guy you remember from television. He’s got a bushy white beard everybody makes a big to-do about — stop asking, folks, they will BURY me in it, he says. But that voice and octave-jumping cackle is hard to mistake for anyone but the man who hosted NBC’s “Late Night” and CBS’s “Late Show,” a stretch that ran from 1982 until 2015.

At 70, he remains a masterful storyteller, infinitely curious and as quick with a quip as Kyrie Irving’s first step to the hoop. What’s gone is the nightly entertainment race that ruled his life for 33 years. There was a time, even he’ll admit, when he cared about nothing more than that TV show. Today, as he tries to keep up with his boy Harry, 13, that former life baffles him. That brooding guy on television, he’ll shrug, was “a different man.”

“It was ‘The Late Night Wars,’ oh ‘Jay’s winning, nobody likes me, and everybody likes Jay,’ ” he says. “Now I think, what was that? Who’s at war here? There’s no war anymore. And I think, why was I in the war?”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Letterman has driven from his home in New York to visit the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn.

This is textbook Dave. When he realized he would be receiving the Twain Prize, Letterman didn’t feel proud, he felt guilty, and on multi-

JESSE DITTMAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Being Harry’s dad ple levels. First, he’s sadly deficient in the study of Samuel Clemens.

“All I really knew about Mark Twain was Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, trying to get through his autobiography and then I read a book of his letters, and I’m currently reading ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ ” he says, referring to the 685-page travel book.

If failing to measure up to Twain isn’t enough, Letterman notes the other 19 recipients of the prize, including Neil Simon, Tina Fey and Bill Murray.

“There’s one gaping sinkhole on that list at number 20,” says Letterman. “And it’s me.”

That’s a good one. The prize is meant to recognize those who have had an “impact on American society in ways similar to” Clemens.

During his tenure, Letterman invented an entirely new language for

Even with Netflix and the Mark Twain Prize, late-night legend David Letterman focuses on his main gig

television, one steeped in irreverence, edge and sarcasm but fortified, particularly as he grew older, by his presence as a trusted, calming voice. He may have made his name by throwing himself against a Velcro wall or with the show’s “Monkey-Cam” — yes, a camera strapped to a live chimp — but after the World Trade Center attack, it was Letterman who returned to the air with a somber eight-minute monologue that displayed both a steady hand and a comforting vulnerability.

Jimmy Kimmel, a lifelong fan, admits he thought of Letterman recently when he spoke out, passionately, on his show about healthcare protections and gun control.

“You reach a point in your career where you feel like you’ve done enough silly stuff and you realize, thanks to Dave, that it’s okay to be serious sometimes,” says Kimmel.

‘I can’t do that, I can’t do that’ His comedy career, unofficially, began in Indianapolis, where Letterman grew up.

Steve Brown, a lifelong friend, remembers sitting around one day after school when Letterman, then just 13, saw a listing in the want ads of the local newspaper. A guy was selling propane tanks. Letterman picked up the phone.

“This guy had a large quantity, I don’t know, maybe 50 of them,” says Brown. “So Dave gets the guy on the line and he put him on for 15 minutes and had the guy convinced that he was from the naval department and they were interested in buying all of these and they were going on a miniature submarine project, that they were going to equip them as weapons. He got to the point where he was actually trying to negotiate a price with the guy.”

Harry Joseph Letterman, his father, introduced him to Jack Benny’s radio show. He also introduced him to the concept of the tortured performer. Harry owned a flower shop. To this day, Letterman isn’t sure why because his father seemed happiest when he was playing organ, which he could do for hours, or putting on an impromptu show, even at church functions.

“He would throw in jokes, he would have props,” says Letterman.

“He would turn something dull into something silly. While he liked flowers and liked growing them and arranging them, it is not where he wanted to be.”

In 1975, two years after his father’s fatal heart attack, Letterman decided to take his leap. He quit his gig as a weatherman on a local TV station and drove out to Los Angeles. That’s where he met Merrill Markoe, a brilliant writer, and a group of comics that included Leno, Elayne Boosler and Robin Williams. As a stand-up, Letterman had good nights, he had bad nights.

But early on, his peers recognized his calling.

Tom Dreesen, the veteran comic, remembers going with Letterman for his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1978.

“When I saw him walk through that curtain into that television studio, I went, ‘Oh my God, he’s home,’ ” he says.

Much has been written about how “Late Night With David Letterman,” which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1993, revolutionized comedy. There were the characters like Chris Elliott, who played

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“The Guy Under the Seats” or “Marlon Brando” with obnoxious, nasty glee. There was Letterman’s slate of quirky guests, curmudgeonly George Miller or Gonzo master Hunter S. Thompson.

There were also the many bits — Viewer Mail, Stupid Pet Tricks, the Top Ten List — developed under Markoe, who began the show as head writer.

But what set Letterman apart, as much as his material, was his persona. He was a fidgety, self-deprecating figure, either so pleased or so disturbed when a joke failed that he would remind viewers of the biggest bombs by calling them back throughout the show.

“If we were analysts, we could analyze him, he wouldn’t even have to lie down on the couch,” says Paul Shaffer, Letterman’s longtime music director and sidekick. “And he loved having a show like that. And he liked real conversation. . . . He never wanted to plan what we were going to say and it made for a real ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of experience.”

He could be a complicated boss, always unsatisfied with himself and sparing with his compliments.

Do you like me? Barbara Gaines, the former receptionist who rose to executive producer, asked him in an insecure moment. “ ‘You’ve been here, I’ve promoted you, don’t look for approval,’ ” she remembers him saying.

But Letterman was hardest on himself.

“He would think, I can’t do that, I can’t do that,” says O’Donnell. “But I think he also had an idea he wasn’t going to be a zany, clownish comic. . . . It wasn’t because he thought he wasn’t as good as those broadcasters who went before, but in a way he’s so discriminating and so skeptical about things that it extended to his own abilities as well.”

G. PAUL BURNETT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Eventually, Letterman would define himself as a performer, but on his own terms. There would be nothing approximating Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent on his program. Instead, Letterman would haul a crew to a Sears in Hicksville, N.Y., to confront a viewer, Colleen Boyle, who had criticized him in a Viewer Mail segment for wearing sneakers.

Writer Jim Downey, who left Letterman to return to “Saturday Night Live” in the early ’80s, remembers watching as Letterman grew more comfortable.

“It was like someone who was afraid to ask a girl to dance and suddenly came back and it was like watching ‘Footloose.’ ”

LEFT: Letterman chats with Johnny Carson during a taping of “The Tonight Show” in 1991. At the time, Letterman was in contention with Jay Leno to succeed Carson.

Retirement, not retirement The past is something Letterman views differently than others.

He is not above a nostalgic anecdote, but he doesn’t get dewy-eyed when talking about himself.

Gaines remembers urging her boss to include a clip of his 9/11 monologue in various highlight reels. He wouldn’t. In fact, Letterman won’t even watch old clips.

When the Kennedy Center asked for help putting together video highlights for the Twain ceremony, he and Mary Barclay, his longtime assistant, sat at a monitor. “Could you turn down the sound?” he asked first. When she pressed play, she looked over and he had his hand over his eyes.

Letterman also wishes he had been properly medicated earlier.

His wall-punching tantrums were regular, ugly and “triggered over nothing.” Around 2003, he began taking an antidepressant.

“And so now I feel like probably most people feel,” he says.

Since leaving late night, he’s avoided his old playing field. He hasn’t visited as a guest. (The ex-

RIGHT: Letterman rides a go-kart powered by a mixture of Mentos candies and CocaCola on a 2010 episode of CBS’s “Late Show With David Letterman.”

MIDDLE: Farmer Bob Corbett of North Lewisburg, Ohio, shows off his prizewinning boar Hog Chief on a 1987 episode of NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman.”

ception being “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” which he did most recently this month.) Which is not to say he’s a shut-in. Letterman has just signed a deal to develop a six-episode Netflix show. He’s gone on Howard Stern, Norm Macdonald’s video podcast, showed up at former “Late Show” writer Steve Young’s class at NYU, and even popped into Indianapolis to speak at the dedication of a statue for retired Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.

This summer, Letterman was taking in the Bommarito 500 car race when “Mister Gary,” a former hotel manager who wears a red crown and waves a golden scepter, approached him for an interview.

At one point, Letterman began talking about Long’s doughnuts, an Indianapolis favorite, and how let down he had been when he stopped by the shop before the Indy 500.

“I was so disappointed because they said on their website they would be open,” he said, pausing dramatically. “Gary, they were not open.”

“What do we do about that?”

“Well,” Letterman said, “I have a call in to the governor.”

His biggest regret He left at the right time, though sometimes he wonders whether he overstayed his welcome.

Which is when Letterman brings up his biggest regret. It wasn’t losing “The Tonight Show” to Leno in 1992. It wasn’t the embarrassing affair with a staffer he revealed on the show in 2009 after a former CBS news producer threatened to blackmail him. It’s something that has nothing — or everything — to do with TV. He wishes Harry had a sibling. (Letterman says he is too old to adopt a child.)

For years, he fought with his girlfriend, Regina Lasko, 56, about starting a family. She even dumped

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CHARLES SYKES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

him at one point. His resistance, he admits, was that he felt he couldn’t do the show and be a father. Then, in 2003, they had Harry, named after Letterman’s father.

“And then the minute the kid is born I realize: Holy s---, I have made an enormous mistake and tried to defend it for 15 years now,” he says.

“I was wrong. I could not have been more wrong.”

As the years pass, Letterman remains grateful that he’s been around to watch his boy growing up. He likes to tell Harry stories, even if they don’t always wrap up in a bow. Take a recent Saturday morning when he and Harry went to see “Battle of the Sexes.”

“It’s a very good movie, but what hadn’t occurred to me is that it’s a lesbian love story,” Letterman says.

“So you see a lot of good-looking girls in their underpants making out.”

He stares straight ahead.

“We’re both eating our popcorn.

‘Uh huh. I see. Okay.’ Then it would go away and we could breathe again.”

He thinks back 60 years to a fishing trip he took with his own father. Somewhere along the way, they stopped to use a bathroom.

Young Dave spotted a prophylactic machine on the wall.

“And I came out and said, ‘Jeez, there’s a machine in there. It’s not candy. It’s not cigarettes.’ And my dad said, ‘Ah, one day you and I are going to have that talk.’ And we never did.”

This brings a big cackle and he relates the story to his own son.

“I always think of that and I pester Harry. ‘Have we had the talk? We should. Especially now. Let’s have the talk.’ ” His voice trails off and he laughs again. David Letterman knows there’s still time.n © The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Crisis that gave rise to the Constitution N ONFICTION

B WE HAVE NOT A GOVERNMENT The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution

By George William Van Cleve Chicago.

390 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

J ACK R AKOVE

ack in 1889, as the centennial of the Constitution was closing, the historian John Fiske published “The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789.” His title phrase has beguiled and haunted historians ever since. Were the years between the close of the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution really so bad?

Perhaps this image of crisis was simply a ploy the framers of the Constitution concocted to justify their efforts to reverse the swirl of democratic forces through the states. Or perhaps, as Gordon Wood argued in his epochal book, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,” this mood of crisis reflected a diffuse disappointment over the factional turmoil of the mid-1780s.

George William Van Cleve decidedly favors the crisis model. His new book, “We Have Not a Government,” provides a focused explanation of the reasons the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first federal constitution, went lurching toward collapse. Like most historians, Van Cleve wants to study the past for its own sake, rather than drawing lessons for the present. Yet while writing this book, he was surprised to discover how often acquaintances linked his academic concerns with our own political travails.

Still, a working historian would tell lay readers that the real task of history is less to draw straight lines from past to present than to appreciate the differences between then and now. So let us go back to the great story of the founding era, tracing the road to Philadelphia that led to the bold political strokes of 1787-1788.

“We Have Not a Government” is very much a work of synthesis, but in the best sense of the term. Van Cleve patiently examines the specific matters of public policy that vexed national politics in the mid1780s. He draws sharp conclusions and generally takes decided stands on matters that historians

ISTOCK

still actively dispute.

After eight years of war, American society did not enjoy an easy path to recovery. Massive public and private debts saddled the economy. Congress repeatedly tottered on the verge of bankruptcy.

Its system of levying “requisitions” on the states failed to produce the revenue it needed. Lacking resources, Congress could not project national authority into the trans-Appalachian interior, where British and Spanish influence and the justified fears of Native Americans threatened the orderly settlement of the Ohio Valley. British goods flooded American markets, while American ships were denied access to British ports. The Spanish closure of the Mississippi River to American navigation in 1784 weakened the political loyalty of the thousands of settlers heading west. It also sharpened sectional tensions between Northern and Southern states. These were badly exacerbated in 1786, when Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay tried to conclude a commercial treaty with Spain that would subordinate the South’s concerns with the Mississippi to the commercial interests of Northern merchants.

These collective failures demonstrated the “imbecility” of the Con-

tinental Congress and the Articles of Confederation. Congress began submitting amendments to the states as soon as the Confederation took formal effect in March 1781.

But none of these amendments ever attained the unanimous approval of all 13 state legislatures.

These are familiar events, and Van Cleve does not break new ground in surveying them. To be blunt about it, his rather wooden prose does not quite convey the excitement of American politics that has engaged other commentators. Yet he is absolutely clear on one key point: Both within the individual states and at the level of national government, the obstacles to constitutional reform were high.

Regional suspicions ran deep, and the idea that the union could devolve into two or three confederations was a real possibility.

If there is one critical character in Van Cleve’s story, however, it is George Washington. Artfully quoted throughout the book, he emerges as the most nationalist leader of all, the one most committed to creating an imperial republic. Among scholars, Washington is often taken for granted — a major force, perhaps, but a lesscreative political entrepreneur than Madison and Hamilton, the

two actors he relied on most.

What Van Cleve does demonstrate, persuasively, is that the genuine crisis of the Confederation required creating a “staggeringly powerful” national government through a “grand bargain” that went well beyond what any state might have asked for itself.

Some commentators still see the Constitution as the self-interested work of an elite propertied class, recycling the tired arguments Charles Beard made a century ago.

Not Van Cleve. He argues that the framers “took very large political risks not out of selfish class interest, and not just from perceived necessity, but from objective necessity.” It was this perception of manifest crisis that broke the multiple stalemates that had vexed the Confederation since 1783.

That perception of dogged impasse is what has jogged Van Cleve’s acquaintances to muse that the 1780s and the 2010s may not be as different as one might assume. There may be no obvious political lessons from the 1780s, but if Van Cleve is right, there are some obvious political morals. n Rakove teaches history and political science at Stanford University. This was written for The Washington Post.

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A prequel worth the 17-year wait

A history of our fear of witches

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH H AND

as it really been 17 years since the publication of “The Amber Spyglass,” the final volume of Philip Pullman’s magnificent “His Dark Materials” trilogy?

What might seem an insuperable gap between then and now disappears in a blink as one reads the enthralling, enchanting first installment in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage,” a prequel to that earlier series.

As millions of readers of all ages know, “His Dark Materials” skipped between alternate versions of our own world as it recounted the adventures of Lyra Belacqua, a.k.a. Lyra Silvertongue, a girl of mysterious parentage who finds herself caught up in a cosmic war with metaphysical elements drawn from Milton, Blake, quantum physics and Nordic mythology. “The Book of Dust” maintains a tighter focus, with both characters and chronology. The protagonist, a boy named Malcolm Polstead, lives in Oxford, where his parents own a Thames-side pub called the Trout. Malcolm spends much of his free time messing about in his beloved canoe, La Belle Sauvage.

As with “His Dark Materials,” Malcolm’s world is one in which every person is attached to a daemon, an animal counterpart who accompanies its human partner everywhere. Until its human reaches puberty, a daemon can manifest as any creature, mythological or otherwise. These shifting personae reflect a person’s psychological and emotional states, and the daemon’s ultimate, adult appearance signifies one’s deepest, underlying self — one’s soul, perhaps.

Intrigued by a conversation with three strange gentlemen who visit the Trout one winter night, Malcolm is drawn into a plot that involves an infant foundling being cared for by nuns at a nearby priory. The mystery deepens when he comes across a message hidden inside a brass

acorn and subsequently befriends Hannah Relf, an Oxford scholar. Hannah reveals that she belongs to a clandestine government agency trying to infiltrate and defeat the Magisterium, a fascist religious organization. Indeed, the first half of “The Book of Dust” reads like a thriller.

The story becomes darker, deeper and even more engrossing when a cataclysmic flood overtakes southern England. Warned of its coming, Malcolm rescues the baby given refuge by the nuns. With Alice, a surly teenager who also works at the Trout, he embarks upon a hair-raising journey across an inundated landscape as the three young people and their respective daemons are pursued by one of the most frightening villains in contemporary literature: a charismatic sexual predator whose vicious daemon may give you nightmares.

“The Book of Dust” feels more earthbound — in the best way — than the earlier trilogy. Familiar characters and themes recur, with the former attempting to understand the secret of a divinatory device called the alethiometer and its relationship to quantum physics and Dust, the cosmic particles that play a crucial role in “His Dark Materials.” This is an alternate world where a clever boy reads both Stephen Hawking and Agatha Christie, and the first stirrings of sexual desire are as puzzling to him as the uncertainty principle.

But there is plenty of magic here, too, not just daemons and startling prophecies but also witches and specters, forays into Faerie, and Malcolm’s eerie, migraine-like visions of the aurora borealis. Too few things in our own world are worth a 17-year wait: “The Book of Dust” is one of them. n Hand’s most recent book is “Fire: Essays and Short Fiction.” This was written for The Washington Post.

T THE BOOK OF DUST La Belle Sauvage, Vol. 1

By Philip Pullman Knopf. 464 pp. $22.99

THE WITCH A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present

By Ronald Hutton Yale University Press.

376 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

B RUNONIA B ARRY

hese days, when the accusation of “witch hunt” seems far too casually invoked, we owe historian Ronald Hutton gratitude for showing us what a witch hunt really looks like. He details not only the diverse cultural traits of those hunted in Europe, but the roots, history and prevalence of witches throughout the world.

To avoid any misunderstanding, Hutton defines his terms early, choosing the classic historian’s definition of a witch as “one who causes harm to others by mystical means.” This dark magic is not to be confused with our modern association of the term with pagan nature-based religions, which Hutton considers “thoroughly worthwhile.”

In some ways, it’s easier to mention three significant groups that didn’t take issue with practicing witches: The Egyptians harbored neither fear nor disapproval of magic. When Egypt fell under Roman rule, some aspects of their ceremonial magic influenced Greek philosophy as well as Jewish and Christian culture. Forms of it were adopted by Judaic, Byzantine and Muslim religious ceremony, and later by Latin Christianity.

The Celts had a similar non-reaction to witches. Indeed, the infamous and brutal Scottish witch hunts took place in areas beyond the reach of Celtic influence.

Nomadic tribes also seemed impervious to accusations of witchcraft. When unfortunate events occurred, they didn’t demonize dark magic, they simply relocated.

So when and why did things turn deadly?

Though the elements were already in existence in the ancient world, the satanic witchcraft connection emerged strongly in the late Middle Ages, after Roman influence spread throughout Europe and Christianity became the dominant religion. The church outlawed divination and ceremo-

nial magic as heresy, prompting witch hunts in the 1420s in Spain and Italy. Friars of the Observant reform movement, who preached in remote areas and dedicated themselves to “purging Christendom of all laxity and ungodliness,” blamed misfortunes on satanic conspiracy, thereby creating widespread panic among their followers.

The second great European witch hunt arrived with Protestantism and the waning power of the Catholic Church. In late 16thcentury England, Protestant evangelists targeted all magic, claiming witches were deluded by the devil. The Catholic Church responded in kind. Each side blamed the other for colluding with Satan. This quickly escalated, leading to a number of the most brutal witch hunts in history, some that eventually reached the shores of British colonies, including America, before European belief in witches seemed to spontaneously disappear.

What never died out completely, however, was the demonization of those considered “other.” It resurfaced, along with witch hunting, in postcolonial Africa, most likely, Hutton suggests, as a response to the process of modernization after independence.

“The Witch” is an important work, representing more than 20 years of scholarly research.

Though not a casual read, for anyone researching the subject, this is the book you’ve been waiting for, one that lays to rest many conflicting theories that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. But it’s also a cautionary tale. In Hutton’s words, witch hunts remain “a very live issue in the present world, and one that may well be worsening.” In these tumultuous times, we would do well to learn from the history Hutton depicts. n Barry is the author, most recently, of “The Fifth Petal.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Court-ordered opioid treatment might not work MICHAEL STEIN AND PAUL CHRISTOPHER Stein is chair of health law, policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health and author of “The Addict: One Patient, One Doctor, One Year.” Christopher is an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. This was written for The Washington Post.

Your daughter uses heroin and can’t stop. She doesn’t want — or doesn’t think — she needs treatment. You know, as does she, that we are in the midst of a fentanyl crisis where most heroin on the street is invisibly laced with this synthetic opioid that is driving the overdose and death rates higher and into the daily headlines. Should you turn to the courts — as are an increasing number of parents, probation officers and doctors — to save her from herself?

Court­ordered opioid treatment, known as civil commitment, gives judges the authority to hospitalize people against their will. Commitment is not a criminal charge, only a decree that has the force of law, obliging a person to receive medical treatment. In Massachusetts, which has one of the highest rates of opioid deaths nationally, addiction­related civil commitments have doubled in the past decade, to more than 6,000 last year, largely in response to the opioid crisis.

More than 30 states now have commitment laws for substance users on the books.

But while policymakers and families might be desperate for tools to address the opioid crisis, we need to recognize that we don’t yet know know the impact of commitment laws. We need to carefully and empirically review these laws as we consider sequestering and treating more opioid users against their will.

Doctors already have the power to commit people based on mental-health concerns. In Massachusetts, suicidal or psychotic patients can be hospitalized against their will for up to 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation. Other states allow for similar or longer detainment before a hearing. Emergencyroom physicians have the authority to hold people for this short period without court approval. If a longer period of treatment is required, a doctor can petition a court for civil commitment. The rationale is that the state bears responsibility

and therefore has the authority to intervene when people are unable (or unwilling) to protect themselves.

If your daughter’s addiction poses an imminent risk for overdose (which some consider a form of unintentional suicide) is this pressing danger reason enough for a judge to hospitalize her against her will for up to 90 days? Has a world with fentanyl produced a new understanding of “imminent risk”?

Those who believe that civil commitment is being overused say opioid use is not reason enough to take away a person’s liberty. Others contend that people should only be held for shorter periods of time. Still others reject any application of involuntary treatment on the view that if a person chooses to misuse opioids, and is not a danger to anyone else or to civil order, he or she should bear the consequences of that decision.

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

An example of the amount of the opioid fentanyl that can be deadly.

Heroin is often invisibly laced with the opioid.

The moral questions are vexing. But the growing use of civil commitment brings up three practical concerns: First, we don’t have any idea if it works. There is no careful research on civil commitment — even as to what kinds of treatment are currently being offered during these forced inpatient stays — and therefore no evidence that civil commitment saves lives. Yes, commitment enforces a relatively short-term period when patients cannot get their hands on opiates and can receive some addiction treatment. But after release, the risk of relapse and overdose returns unless commitment leads to initiation of long-term medication treatment. The risk is perhaps even higher after commitment because the user’s body is now more sensitive to the drugs. It may be that there is a parallel to the dangerous trend we see among drug users who are criminally incarcerated and then released only to overdose shortly thereafter.

Second, it may be that shorter periods of involuntary hospitalization are just as effective as civil commitments in addressing the imminent risk

that opioid use poses. But as it stands, we simply don’t know. In both instances, what is likely to produce lasting benefit is whether clinicians can arrange, and whether patients are willing to begin, medication treatment.

Third, as expensive civil commitments grow, funding is required to increase the number of beds to house committed patients. The policy implication in a world of limited resources is that lawmakers will choose to pay for commitment rather than pay for building a more robust, outpatient, medication-based treatment system — our best hope for stemming the opioid crisis.

We need studies to guide the crafting of new commitment laws and the revision of existing ones.

How long should commitment last? What services should be required during commitment that increase the chances of a safe release back to the community?

Without data, judges will face desperate parents and their children and continue to direct commitments one by one, restricting civil liberties without knowing whether they are reducing overdose deaths or if the clinical and public health resources are justified. n

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TOM TOLES

Is a NAFTA showdown coming?

ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics for The Washington Post.

The NAFTA war is heating up. It’s a confusing conflict because perceptions are driven by political rhetoric, not economic reality.

NAFTA, of course, stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has eliminated most tariffs among the United States, Mexico and Canada. During the campaign, candidate Donald Trump denounced NAFTA as a bad deal for the United States. He vowed to improve or scrap it. The trouble is that NAFTA actually isn’t a bad deal for the United States.

Consider. Canada and Mexico are the first- and second-largest markets for U.S. exports. In 2015, these exports — counting both goods (such as computers) and services (such as tourism) — amounted to $600 billion. That’s more than a quarter of total U.S. exports and almost four times U.S. exports to China.

Why would we want to attack our best foreign markets? But what about the massive trade deficit with Mexico? On inspection, it turns out not to be so large.

It’s true that Mexico had a $63 billion surplus in goods traded with us in 2016. But it also runs a deficit with the United States in services. Likewise, Canada runs a slight overall deficit with us in goods and services. Counting these trade flows, the United States runs

about a $50 billion deficit with the two countries on total trade of $1.2 trillion. The U.S. deficit roughly equals 4 percent of NAFTA trade.

It’s a good deal for us and our partners. We all get more consumer choice. We all get more competition, which holds down prices. Jobs are created in all the countries. To be sure, some American jobs are lost, as factories move to Mexico. This is hard on the displaced workers, but so is competition that eliminates American jobs for other American jobs. Overall, benefits exceed costs.

No matter. The Trump administration is obsessed with economic nationalism and reducing the U.S. trade deficit, which — after China — it blames on NAFTA. Negotiations are underway to defuse U.S.

complaints, but the lack of progress leaves open the possibility that Trump will withdraw from NAFTA. The administration’s increasingly acerbic rhetoric suggests that a showdown may be approaching. “I am surprised and disappointed by the resistance to change from our negotiating partners,” said Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative and chief American negotiator, after the last bargaining session. “We have seen no indication that our partners are willing to make any changes that will . . . [reduce] these huge trade deficits.”

Opposition to a U.S. withdrawal from the pact would come not only from Mexico and Canada but also from U.S. business and farm interests, which fear a loss of sales if NAFTA is crippled. “We’re going to fight like hell to protect the agreement,” said Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a recent speech

Under NAFTA, any country can withdraw with six months’ notice.

outlining his group’s position.

Indeed, some critics of the administration speculate that its proposed remedies are so extreme that they’re intended to cause a breakdown of negotiations. For example, one U.S. proposal would require that NAFTA be renewed every five years and be terminated if all three countries didn’t agree that it should continue.

“The business community is worried about the disruption of supply chains,” says Chad Bown, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Supply chains are networks of contractors, spread over long distances including between countries, making components for the same product. Supply chains need dependable trade, which would be threatened if NAFTA could be ended every five years.

Under NAFTA, any country can withdraw with six months’ notice. Whether Trump could unilaterally withdraw — without the concurrence of Congress — under U.S. law is unclear. A move to abandon NAFTA would almost certainly be challenged in court.

That is all that can be said with confidence.

Still, Trump seems determined to vilify Mexico and Canada. The facts say otherwise. n

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OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Death for Westerners who join ISIS? NASSER WEDDADY is a Boston-based independent consultant working on terrorism, youth movements and countering radicalization.

This was written for The Washington Post.

Rory Stewart, minister of state at the British Department for International Development, made a remarkable statement last week. He was speaking about British citizens who have joined the Islamic State — a topical subject given the group’s shattering defeat in Syria, where the anti-ISIS coalition recently captured the terrorists’ “capital” of Raqqa.

Here’s the full quote: “So I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

Take note: This is a British official publicly declaring that citizens of his country should be killed without trial or due process. Is he expressing an official policy? The first hints that it might be came out last November, when media reports suggested that Britain’s elite SAS troops were handed a kill list with the names of 200 Britons in Islamic State ranks in the Middle East.

It was also suggested that the policy stipulates that in case of failure to “eliminate” the targets, all efforts should be made to make sure those terrorists are handed over to the Iraqi government – which, of course, generally executes any suspected Islamic State members that fall into its hands. Preventing the return of any Islamic State members to British soil seems to

be the driving principle behind this policy.

Britain is not the only Western democracy to follow this course of action. “If the jihadis perish in this fight, I would say that’s for the best,” said French Defense Minister Florence Parly recently.

Her words were soon seconded by America’s envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk: “So if they’re in Raqqa, they’re going to die in Raqqa.”

It is obvious that no Western countries want any of their citizens associated with the Islamic State to return home. This shows a rather peculiar situation: nations that have abolished the death penalty are outsourcing the execution of their own citizens to countries that have no such scruples.

Granted, how to deal with Islamic State fighters poses a

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

serious dilemma. Deradicalization schemes have hardly worked convincingly anywhere in the Western world.

Putting Islamic State alumni in normal prisons is also problematic. In a word, our attempts to contain and reform violent extremists have not set encouraging precedents. Yet this is also a poor excuse for disregarding the rule of law.

Most disturbingly, there has been no real public debate about this de facto policy. Our public intellectuals and other thought leaders around the world have had little to say on this point. We are all so dazed by the Islamic State’s horrific crimes that we have begun to think of the world in Manichean terms, the light vs. the darkness. Yes, there is no question that we are locked in battle with a profoundly evil and unrepentant enemy. But surely we would serve ourselves best by not forgetting why we represent the light and our enemy, the darkness.

The greatness of nations is not only measured by how they treat their own citizens, but also by how they treat their own treacherous combatant enemies. Even Germany’s Nazis and the Japanese militarists had their day in court.

(Well, perhaps not all of them, but the precedent stands.) The

victorious Allies confronted an unprecedented challenge: how to try leaders whose crimes included genocide and wars of aggression — and how to do so without simply administering victors’ justice.

Great legal minds wrestled with the task. They understood that democracies cannot simply put to death those whose actions qualify them as enemies of mankind. The Allies had fought for the sake of democracy and rule of law, and they could not simply abandon these principles once the war was over. The architects of the war crimes trials ultimately managed to set new legal standards. In fact, it is to their work that we owe one of the 20th century’s great contributions to progress: International Humanitarian Law. Today, these same Western democracies’ policy of “kill them all” shows that they seem to have lost faith in their own justice systems, the rule of law, and their own sense of moral superiority over the militants. I can already hear the litany of excuses that will be advanced to justify that course of action. And I understand them only too well, since I wrestle with them every day in my own work on counter-radicalization. Yet we should not allow the savagery of our enemies to tempt us into surrendering our own ideals. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Nazis BY

T HOMAS C HILDERS

White nationalists in the United States have been seeking (and find­ ing) attention frequently this year, in the form of widely publicized protests and rallies. But for all the focus on this new wave of Nazi im­ itators, the original Nazi Party, which unleashed chaos on the world in the early decades of the 20th century, is still shrouded in myths.

Here are five of the most persistent.

MYTH NO. 1 Adolf Hitler was bankrolled by big corporate donors.

During its rise to power, the Nazi Party did receive some money from corporate sources — including German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, but business leaders mostly remained at arm’s length.

The party largely depended on grass-roots sources of funding (membership dues, subscriptions to the party press, admission to events and so forth). The Nazi propaganda machine — the dances, the “German evenings,” the concerts, the speeches — was also a moneymaking operation, as is made clear in entries in Joseph Goebbels’s diary.

Once in power, however, the Nazis did receive funding from corporate sources, as business leaders were given fat contracts for armaments production and construction projects. The regime also seized Jews’ assets, from valuable art to private savings and investments. And it took control of Jewish-owned companies in what the Nazis called the “Aryanization” of the economy.

MYTH NO. 2 Jesse Owens’s 1936 Olympic wins embarrassed Hitler.

“Although Adolf Hitler intended the 1936 Berlin Games to be a showcase for the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy,” the History Channel wrote in 2013, “it was a black man who left the biggest imprint on that year’s Games.” Such retellings of Owens’s stunning

four-gold-medal win are common. Yet while the public (especially in the United States) focused on Owens, the Germans actually won the Olympic medal count, surpassing the favored Americans. Germany walked away with 33 gold medals to America’s 24, 26 silver to America’s 20, and 30 bronze to America’s 12.

Hitler took great pride in hosting the Olympics, and for him the event was a roaring success — even according to Owens, who told the press: “When I passed the Chancellor, he arose, waved his hand to me, and I waved back to him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.”

MYTH NO. 3 Racist ideology was the key to Hitler’s rise.

It’s true that Nazi racism, especially rabid anti-Semitism, was always on the surface. Hitler was an ideological fanatic, and his ideology attracted a small but intensely loyal core of supporters during the party’s early years.

The truth is that Hitler rose on the strength of his skill as a political strategist, more than anything else. The Nazi Party’s propaganda staff became masters of negative campaigning, launching vicious assaults on the establishment parties and the “system” they supported. Indeed, Nazi claims were often outright lies. The Nazis also promised everything to everybody, pledging higher sale prices for farmers and lower food prices for workers in the cities. The contradictions

KIRN VINTAGE STOCK/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

One group of German soldiers holds another group “hostage” during war games around 1940.

abounded, and opposing parties never tired of pointing them out.

Such criticism did not faze the Nazis in the least. They either ignored it or railed that this sort of whining was what was wrong with German politics. Hitler understood that there are times when desperate, angry people want two and two to be five, and he swore that the Nazis would make it so.

MYTH NO. 4 Hitler was a forceful, decisive leader.

Hitler was, in reality, a vacillating, indecisive leader who drove his lieutenants, and later his military, to exasperation with his long delays and shifting, often contradictory decisions. His closest advisers complained frequently about his inability to make a clear call.

Making matters worse, Hitler’s decisions were rarely committed to paper; instead, he preferred issuing vague verbal orders that contributed mightily to the confusion around his stances.

Once he had finally decided on a course of action, nothing could change his mind — but reaching that decision was often a long, circuitous, frustrating process.

MYTH NO. 5 The Third Reich was well-organized.

Perhaps bolstered by an overall impression of Germans as methodical, orderly people, we tend to imagine that the Third Reich embodied these characteristics to the nth degree.

In fact, the regime was, according even to the memoir of Hitler’s minister of armaments and munitions, Albert Speer, more like organized chaos.

Offices and agencies of party and state often overlapped or were given identical responsibilities, creating confusion. There were, for example, five different military, state and party agencies charged with leadership of the war economy. Hitler was also fond of creating ad hoc bodies to operate alongside (but often in conflict with) established party or state agencies.

Hitler explained this approach to governing by claiming that in this situation, “the strongest gets the job done.” n Childers, the author of “The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,” recently retired as the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. This was written for The Washington Post.

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