The Washington Post National Weekly - October 30, 2016

Politics Sanders says Clinton will feel the Bern 4

World Which countries get money from U.S.? 10

Data crunch Halloween is a treat in these regions 17

5 Myths Get smart about what genius really is 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

THE TRUMP EFFECT

Has the Republican nominee transformed America, or simply revealed it?

PAGE 12

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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Foothills Magazine presents its 5th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

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

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2017

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

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Sputtering to the finish line BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

I

n a normal election, the past week for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign would be somewhere between “really, really bad” and “just plain disastrous.”

On Monday — 15 days before the election — came the news that the average premium for those on the federal market in Obamacare would rise 25 percent in 2017 and that 1 in 5 people in the federal marketplace would have only one option to “choose” from in terms of coverage plans. For a candidate like Clinton, who has linked much of her candidacy to the policies of the Obama administration, that’s a very bad thing.

On Thursday — just 12 days before the election — the WikiLeaks hack of top Clinton aides’ emails produced a 13-page memo from Doug Band, a close adviser to former president Bill Clinton, that outlines — in no uncertain terms — how Band used the former president’s stature (and the chance to spend time with him) to leverage donations to the Clinton Foundation.

Write my colleagues Roz Helderman and Tom Hamburger: Band detailed a circle of enrichment in which he raised money for the Clinton Foun­ dation from top­tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca­Cola that were cli­ ents of his firm, Teneo, while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal in­ come to the former president.

That. Is. Bad. It looks and feels like trading access to the former president for donations to the Clinton Foundation, which isn’t illegal but sure suggests that the hard line the Clinton campaign has tried to draw between the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons is much more like a semipermeable membrane.

The story is bad not only because it, well, looks bad but also because it reinforces so

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MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY IMAGES

Hillary and Bill Clinton address a Clinton Global Initiative audience in September 2014

many of the negative things that the average person already thinks about the Clintons.

They think the rules don’t apply to them.

They use their government service to feather their own nests. They surround themselves with people who obsequiously cater to their every need — no matter whether it's the right thing to do or not.

(For what it's worth: This is the same reason the Clinton email server issue has lingered for so long — and done so much damage. That story and this one reinforce so many of the preconceived notions — and negative ones at that — about the Clintons and how they do business.)

Donald Trump, to his credit, quickly moved to capitalize on both the Obamacare rate hikes and the Clinton Foundation story.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 3

He tweeted out the Post story Thursday to his nearly 13 million followers.

The issue for Trump on the Clinton Foundation story is, as always in this campaign, Trump. Not only has he — through a series of self-inflicted wounds — badly damaged himself as a messenger but he has issues with his own foundation as well. The race, as it has taken shape since the summer, has become a referendum on Trump, not Clinton. That’s amazing given her fame and notoriety. And it’s a very bad thing for Republicans hoping to win the White House.

Stories like this one on the Clinton Foundation coming this close to an election would be a massive blow to most campaigns in most elections. In this one, Clinton’s momentum is slowed but not stopped by it. Remarkable. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Rick Currie, 46; “Chief” Cherevas, 54; Jean Brewer, 75; and Jacob Hall, 16, pose for photos outside a Donald Trump rally in Fletcher, N.C. Photographs

by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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POLITICS

Sanders prepares to press his agenda

KELLY PRESNELL/ARIZONA DAILY STAR VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Clinton’s former rival says he won’t hesitate to be a liberal thorn in her side if she wins J OHN W AGNER Burlington, Vt. BY

S

en. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected — and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.

In an interview, Sanders said he and other senators have started plotting legislation that would achieve many of the proposals that fueled his insurgent run for president, including a $15 federal minimum wage, tuition-free public college, an end to “mass incarceration” and aggressive steps to

fight climate change.

The senators, Sanders said, also plan to push for the breakup of “too big to fail” banks and to pressure Clinton to appoint liberals to key Cabinet positions, including treasury secretary. Sanders said he would not stay silent if Clinton nominated the “same old, same old Wall Street guys” to regulatory positions that are important in approving and overseeing the financial policies he supports.

“I will be vigorously in opposition, and I will make that very clear,” Sanders said.

Sanders’s comments signal that, if she wins the presidency Nov. 8, Clinton may have to contend not only with Republicans who oppose her agenda but also with liberals in her party who were not excited by her campaign and

have long feared that she plans to govern as a centrist.

It remains to be seen how much sway Sanders will have in January.

He is in line to take over the chairmanship of one of the Senate’s major committees if Democrats regain control of the chamber, but aides to some of the senators he said are working with him suggested that less of a coordinated effort is underway.

The proposals Sanders plans to push are contained within the Democratic Party’s 51-page platform, a document that he and his allies were instrumental in drafting in the run-up to the party’s July convention in Philadelphia. Although in the past the party platform has often been quickly forgotten, Sanders’s role in shaping it was key to his decision to support

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at an early get-out-the-vote rally at the University of Arizona in Tucson on Oct. 18.

Clinton, and he has long planned to pressure her to follow through with action in the White House.

Progressive groups have questioned whether Clinton will fully embrace such initiatives as president and where they might fall on her priority list, particularly as she potentially faces a divided Congress and makes outreach to Republicans a focus of her campaign.

Clinton did not embrace some of the policies contained in the party platform as a candidate in the primary cycle, but she has since signaled her support.

Sanders said he considers it his job “to demand that the Democratic Party implement that platform.”

The iconoclastic senator from Vermont, whose long-shot presidential campaign turned him into a

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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POLITICS national celebrity, shared his plans during a candid and lengthy interview in his home town.

In recent weeks, Sanders has stumped for Clinton, traveling the country to rally skeptical progressives and others around her bid to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump. But during the conversation in his office, it became clear that Sanders is ready to reassert himself within the Democratic Party.

“The leverage that I think I take into the Senate is taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment, and, you know, taking on a very powerful political organization with the Clinton people,” Sanders said. “We won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates, 13.4 million votes . . . and a majority of the younger people, the future of the country. . . . That gives me a lot of leverage, leverage that I intend to use.”

Sanders said that his office and others have started converting the party platform into draft legislation. He said the lawmakers “informally” working with him include Sens. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) — who campaigned with Clinton on Monday in New Hampshire — Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Aides to those senators said they are certainly inclined to embrace liberal agenda items, many of which they have championed in the past. And Warren, in particular, has a history of speaking out against President Obama’s nominees when they are not up to her standards, and she has signaled a willingness to do so under another Democratic president.

Sanders said he has not sought assurances from Clinton or her staff that she would be on board with an effort to enact the platform “piece by piece,” as he intends.

But, he said, “right now, as I see it, that platform is where Clinton is at, where I am at, where the vast majority of Democrats are at, and that is what we’ve got to implement.”

The Clinton campaign has sought to play down any potential fissures with the left wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said that Clinton is “proud to have worked with Senator Sanders on drafting the most progressive platform in Democratic Party history.” If she is elected, Fallon said, Clinton “intends to partner with him to ad-

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

“We won 22 states. . . . That gives me a lot of leverage, leverage that I intend to use.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Democratic presidential candidate

vance their shared priorities.”

During a rally in Raleigh, N.C., Clinton touted her proposal to make college debt-free — and credited Sanders with working with her on the idea. The two rivals had worked together after the primaries to scale back Sanders’s proposal to make public colleges and universities tuition-free for everyone.

But in other ways, Clinton has signaled that her early agenda may be designed to appeal as much to Republicans as Democrats. Fallon told reporters in Raleigh that Republicans should be able to support two of her top priorities, immigration reform and investing in the country’s infrastructure.

“We think that we have put forward ideas for the first 100 days that are the ones that Republicans should have every reason to work with us on,” he said.

Sanders said in the interview that he favors a more combative approach.

“It’s not good enough for me, or anybody, to say, ‘Well, look, Republicans control the House: From

Day One, we’re going to have to compromise,’ ” Sanders said. “The Democratic Party, before they start compromising, has got to rally the American people around our ideas and make it clear that if Republicans do not go along with reasonable ideas to benefit the middle class and the working class, they are going to pay a very heavy political price.”

If the Democrats take over the Senate, Sanders is all but guaranteed to have a bigger voice in the chamber. He is in line to become chairman of the Budget Committee, although he said his preference would be to take the gavel of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which has jurisdiction over the minimum wage, health care and many of the issues he has championed during his quarter-century in Congress.

Sanders said Clinton’s appointees to top positions in her administration would provide a strong indication of the direction she intends to take — and he plans to hold her feet to fire to fill her Cabinet with progressives. A top

Hillary Clinton listens as Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at their joint appearance in late September at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

KLMNO WEEKLY

priority, he said, is a treasury secretary who does not come from Wall Street.

Like other progressives, he said he has been troubled by rumors that Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg could be under consideration for that post.

Sandberg, Silicon Valley’s bestknown female executive and author of a best-selling book on women’s empowerment, has a close relationship with former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who has ties to Wall Street.

“I personally believe that a billionaire corporate executive is frankly not the kind of person that working families want to see as secretary of treasury,” Sanders said. “We need somebody who has a history of standing up to Wall Street and is prepared to take on the financial interests whose greed and illegal behavior has done so much harm.”

Sanders said he also will make known to Clinton his views about who should serve in roles such as U.S. trade representative and attorney general.

“I expect her to appoint people who will head agencies in a way that is consistent with the Democratic Party platform, and if not, I will do my best to oppose those nominees,” he said.

Sanders characterized the platform as more progressive than Clinton’s campaign agenda but said she would have an obligation as the party’s president to try to enact it, regardless of which party controls the House and the Senate.

“On a number of positions, her views are progressive,” Sanders said, “but I believe that the Democratic platform is more progressive and that the Democratic platform is the most progressive platform in the history of this country.”

Sanders will get another opportunity to promote his agenda next month, when he launches a 17-city tour in support of his new book, “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.” The first half of the book, he said, is a recounting of his presidential campaign from a “very personal point of view.” The second half details many of the policy issues he pushed on the campaign trail, but in “much greater detail.”

The book tour, Sanders said, “will be a good place, I think, to begin talking about where we want to go as a country.” n

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POLITICS

McCain ponders GOP’s future P AUL K ANE Gilbert, Ariz.

BY

S

en. John McCain is already thinking about life after Donald Trump.

The Arizona Republican turned a recent question about millennial farmers into a soulsearching answer about the Republican Party’s future once, presumably, Trump loses the presidential election.

“Speaking as a proud Republican, we’re going to have to look at our party and look at how we can get back to the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” McCain told leaders of the Arizona Farm Bureau. “Ronald Reagan used to say if a fellow agrees with me 80 percent of the time, then I’m with him.”

He lamented the purist ideological approach that many conservatives now apply.

“You’ve got to be 110 percent, otherwise you’re out,” McCain said. “We’ve got to be a big-tent party.”

McCain, 80, can afford to think about his party’s future, largely because he is improbably well ahead in his bid for a sixth term.

Following a competitive August primary against a tea party conservative in which he barely cleared 50 percent, the senator is now leading Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) by about 10 percentage points in a state where some polling shows Hillary Clinton pulling ahead of Trump.

An Arizona Republic poll found McCain with a solid establishment coalition, garnering more than 75 percent of Republican voters, 50 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats. It’s a surprising turnaround for a man whose introduction on the national stage came as an anti-establishment truth-teller riding his “Straight Talk Express” in his unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump has targeted the senator in this year of deep anti-establishment fervor, first by slamming the former Vietnam prisoner of war as not being a “war hero” because he

ROSS D. FRANKLIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The senator’s lead grows in his own race, even as Clinton sees a window to beat Trump in Arizona was captured. Yet McCain made a clean break from Trump only after the release early this month of a 2005 videotape in which Trump openly bragged about lewd sexual advances.

Public polling is split on whether that decision has cost McCain among deeply conservative voters.

But Democratic strategists continue to privately say this race is not among their top targets. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its liberal super-PAC allies have not spent on the airwaves here in the general election, believing that Kirkpatrick can topple McCain only if Clinton routs Trump in the presidential race.

To that end, Clinton’s campaign has gone all-in trying to win Arizona, something only one Democrat, Bill Clinton, has done in a presidential race since Harry S. Truman in 1948.

Clinton’s campaign dispatched Michelle Obama to the state for a rally recently — Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) was in Flagstaff the other week — and invested $2 million to be spent largely on the ground.

The key demographic will be the state’s burgeoning Hispanic vote, which might top 20 percent for the first time and is largely against Trump’s nativist campaign.

Kirkpatrick is trying to lasso this late burst of activity to pull off what would be the biggest upset of the election season. She is focusing on highlighting McCain’s shifting positions on issues, with TV ads showing McCain sounding like Trump in his last reelection rodeo in 2010 as he called for a “danged fence” along the border.

McCain’s back-and-forth on Trump’s candidacy plays into the idea that he is not taking firm stands.

“They can’t believe John McCain didn’t stand up for himself when Trump insulted him, and they really believe if he can’t stand up for himself, he’s not going to stand up for voters in Arizona,” Kirkpatrick said after an event with several dozen retired federal workers in Tempe.

Polls over the summer showed Kirkpatrick within a few points of McCain in a head-to-head match-

Sen. John McCain of Arizona prepares for his debate with Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, his Democratic challenger, on Oct. 10 in Phoenix.

up, but Democrats in Washington think those numbers were false positives. They suggest that McCain’s vote was underestimated because some conservatives were unwilling to support the incumbent until his primary was over.

They cite a similar dynamic in the presidential primary, with Sanders supporters unwilling to back Clinton before that contest ended.

Following his primary victory, McCain quickly pivoted to the general election. During the primary, his campaign literature called only for making “the border stronger, safer and more secure” without mentioning a 2013 immigration bill he co-authored. But this past week, McCain, unprompted, brought up his support for a path to U.S. citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“Sooner or later we’re bound to take up immigration reform again, because there’s 11 million people that are in this country illegally,” he told the farm leaders.

“We’re going to have to address it.”

Many voters appear to be taking the view of Stefanie Smallhouse, vice president of the state’s farm bureau. She is happily voting for McCain and reluctantly backing Trump.

“When people ask me and talk to me about the election, I just tell them I’m voting for the Supreme Court,” she said.

Smallhouse told McCain that she suffers “extreme anxiety” and sleepless nights, disgusted by Trump’s behavior but fearful of more Democratic regulations on farm policy.

“I’ve heard more people express exactly what you just expressed in my campaign than I’ve ever heard before,” he said, trying to ease her concerns.

Of course, by his own actions, McCain is effectively rejecting a Trump presidency. He’s not certain Clinton will win, but he’s ready to begin the conversation about what Republicans do after the race is over.

As he searched for answers, he acknowledged that there were no easy solutions.

“Stay engaged,” McCain told the audience. n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Political danger of a good economy BY

J IM T ANKERSLEY

T

he U.S. economy is delivering some of the best employment and income gains of the past 40 years, boosting workers in a way that recalls the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s.

But while the gains may help Hillary Clinton rebuff Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on the state of the nation and Obama’s record, she would face a series of minefields if she wins the White House. As would Trump, if he is victorious.

Economists say there is a 1-in-5 chance of a recession next year.

The Federal Reserve is on a march toward raising interest rates. And threats continue to flow from abroad, including Britain’s exit from the European Union and other signs of turbulence in the global economy.

A recession — or even a decline in economic momentum — could rapidly expose the new president to criticism and change the ability of the new administration to accomplish its goals.

“When the economy goes south in the first term, it’s a treacherous situation for a president hoping for reelection,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia.

This is one way that the robust economy at the end of President Obama’s tenure could affect not just the outcome of the campaign but also what the next four years look like for whoever occupies the White House.

If wage and employment gains persist for the next four years, many of the concerns about worker stagnation that have dominated the national discussion could ease.

If not, it could complicate the next president’s agenda as he or she faces questions about why they are presiding over a weak economy.

The winning candidate appears certain to take office under far less economic strain than Obama did in 2009, in the thick of the Great Recession. In the past two years, the economy has gained an unusual level of momentum, with sharp improvements for many Ameri-

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

If it turns into a recession in 2017, it might affect the next president’s policy agenda and reelection cans. Unemployment is low, some out-of-work Americans are rejoining the labor force and wages rocketed higher in 2015, at their fastest pace since the Census Bureau started keeping track 50 years ago.

“The recovery has been accelerating in terms of incomes,” said Robert Shapiro, an economist who worked in the Clinton White House and who has donated to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “What we are seeing is a return to the faster pattern” of the 1980s and 1990s.

A new analysis by Shapiro suggests that the recovery during Obama’s second term has boosted typical workers’ incomes at a rate comparable to the 1990s under Bill Clinton and the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. That finding echoes an analysis of tax data released this summer by economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, who found incomes for the vast majority of Americans grew at a 1990sstyle clip in 2015.

The job-creation gains reflect continued strength in America’s service sector, including highskilled technology jobs and lower-skilled jobs in restaurants.

The income gains flow from several sources, most notably a tightening labor market, where employers are offering better pay and more hours to workers to fill job openings. Many economists also cite recent policy steps, including state and local initiatives to raise the minimum wage.

The current economy is far from roaring on all measures, of course. The most notable disappointment is economic growth, which averaged about 2.2 percent a year from 2013 to 2015 and is doing worse this year. That’s well below the 1980s and 1990s.

“Normally after a recession ends . . . you see growth on average about 5 percent” a year, said Beth Ann Bovino, the U.S. chief economist for S&P Global Ratings. “We never saw that.”

Millions of Americans in prime

Employees work at Pioneer Pipe in Marietta, Ohio. A new analysis suggests that the recovery during President Obama’s second term has boosted typical workers’ incomes at a rate comparable to the 1990s under Bill Clinton and the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

working age, meanwhile, have yet to start looking for work again after leaving the labor force during or after the recession. Many lower-income and middle-class families have not rebuilt the wealth they lost in the recession.

And the typical U.S. household still earns less than it did in 1999, a high point.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accentuated those economic negatives when campaigning. In the last presidential debate, he called the latest employment report, which showed the economy adding 156,000 jobs in September, “anemic” and said the economy was “dying” amid slow growth.

“Look, our country is stagnant,” Trump said. “We’ve lost our jobs.

We’ve lost our businesses.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has pressed a more upbeat view, praising Obama for nurturing the recovery but stressing that workers still need more help from policymakers.

“We are heartened by what we see,” said Jacob Leibenluft, a senior adviser to Clinton. “It provides a good foundation to build off. But we see the remaining challenge: Many families feel anxieties and squeezes that are not imagined.

They are real.”

One big factor outside the next president’s immediate control will be the Federal Reserve. After years of holding interest rates near zero to stimulate growth, America’s central bankers increased rates last December and now seem inclined to do so again this December, and again next year.

“The real unanswered question that the new administration is going to find out the answer to next year is: How does the economy respond when the Fed starts to raise rates?” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.

Some Fed officials, Shepherdson notes, are on record saying a rate increase could boost confidence and growth in the economy.

Markets, he notes, expect the opposite: that a rate increase will slow the economy, gradually or immediately. n

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NATION

One year later in Flint, Mich.

B RADY D ENNIS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY B RITTANY G REESON For The Washington Post STORIES BY

E

ven now, the people of Flint, Mich., cannot trust what flows from their taps. ¶ More than one year after government officials finally acknowl­ edged that an entire city’s water system was contaminated by lead, many residents still rely on bottled water for drinking, cooking and bathing. ¶ Parents still worry about their kids. Promised aid has yet to arrive. In ways large and small, the crisis continues to shape daily life.

The city’s continuing water crisis ‘was one more big thing on top of a bunch of big things.’

The Rev. Rigel Dawson From the pulpit of the North Central Church of Christ, the pastor can see it. The frustration over contaminated water, so visceral at first, has given way to something almost worse: resignation.

“It was one more big thing on top of a bunch of big things. ” You have to understand, Dawson says, that people in Flint have endured crime, blight, economic hardship. But as the water disaster stretches on, it has chipped away at their usual stoicism.

“You see the pain it’s caused. You see the discouragement and frustration. You see the full gamut.”

When President Obama came to town in May, the preacher was among the residents who met with him. Dawson tried to explain how marginalized people feel, how certain they are that, had this happened in an affluent community, change would have come sooner.

“I told Obama, ‘It makes you feel like you don’t count,’ ” he says.

Later that day, Obama referred publicly to the conversation.

“You can’t have a democracy where people feel like they don’t count,” the president said, “where people feel like they’re not heard.”

Each Sunday, he tries to deliver a message of encouragement and perseverance. Lately, he has relied on Ephesians: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Mona Hanna-Attisha The doctor got a cat.

The orange tabby showed up

Rigel Dawson

Mona Hanna-Attisha

Troy Kidd

Bob and Ronald Revord

not long after Hanna-Attisha’s daughter told her, “Mom, ever since you became famous, we never see you anymore, and we don’t have anybody to cuddle with.”

Since the 39-year-old pediatrician went public last fall with research detailing dangerously high lead levels in the blood of Flint children , her life has been a blur.

She has crisscrossed the country, reminding audiences that Flint’s crisis isn’t over. She has told college graduates that “there are Flints everywhere” and that they must have the courage to act. She has continued seeing her young patients — and their anxious parents.

The crusading doctor — named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world — tries to compensate for all the time she has missed with her own children, ages 8 and 10. She hopes the new cat can stay on cuddling duty until life regains some normalcy.

But she also suspects her girls understand what’s at stake.

“They very much recognize the importance of the work,” she says.

“They see that I’m a mom to a lot of kids now.”

Troy Kidd He missed her at Halloween, when she used to dress up as a witch and deck out the front porch with a fake coffin. He missed her at Thanksgiving, when she would cook for family and friends. He missed her at Christmas, when she made her famous casserole.

More than a year has passed since Troy Kidd’s mother, 58-yearold Debra Kidd, became one of the dozen people who have died from Legionnaires’ disease since officials switched to the Flint River for the city’s water supply. Scores more have fallen ill.

Officials suspected a link between the spike and the new water source long before they informed the public. All Troy knew was that one day his mother was bouncing on the trampoline with her grandchildren. Barely a week later, she lay sedated and dying in a hospital bed, her bacteria-filled lungs unable to get oxygen to her body.

Troy works 60-hour weeks at a local electrical-supply store, trying

not to think about all the unanswered questions. On the anniversary of her death, he worked on a deck at his home, trying to sweat out the anger and sadness.

“There is no accountability,” says Kidd, 38, who has filed suit with several other families over the Legionnaires’ deaths.

He pulls out a picture of his daughter, Jocelyn. Granddaughter and grandmother once spent every day together — until they didn’t.

Bob and Ronald Revord Trumbell Drive. Walter Street.

Brownell Boulevard. Jackson Avenue.

Block by block, house by house, the father and son have spent months ripping lead service lines from deep in the Flint ground.

“It needs to be done,” Bob Revord, 55, says one morning while the crew from Waldorf & Sons Excavating takes a break on Dartmouth Street.

The work is slow and hard, and the workers can replace only a handful of pipes most days. Across Flint, tens of thousands remain underground.

For Revord and his 24-year-old son, Ronald, this particular job has a personal element.

“I grew up in this city,” Ronald says. “I know the pain these people are going through not being able to drink the water.”

His father is one of them. He still lives here, still brushes his teeth with bottled water before heading out each morning to start digging.

Bob Revord says most residents are grateful when the crews show up. One woman made them doughnuts for breakfast. One family grilled them hot dogs for lunch.

Lots of people offer them bottled water. But at times, they encounter impatience and exasperation.

“Where have you been?” some homeowners ask when they arrive. “What took so long?”

The men down in the dirt understand.

“It should have been started years ago,” the son says.

“They don’t want to wait,” the father says. “They shouldn’t have to wait.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Many teachers chronically absent

ENRICOPISCOPO/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

1 in 4 fulltime U.S. educators missed more than two weeks of classes each year

BY

A LEJANDRA M ATOS

M

ore than 1 in 4 of the nation’s full-time teachers are considered chronically absent from school, according to federal data, missing the equivalent of more than two weeks of classes each academic year in what some districts say has become an educational crisis.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights estimated this summer that 27 percent of the nation’s teachers are out of school for more than 10 days of regular classes — some missing far more than 10 days — based on self-reported numbers from the nation’s school districts. But some school systems, especially those in poor, rural areas and in some major cities, saw chronic absenteeism among teachers rise above 75 percent in 2014, the last year for which data is available.

In the Alamance-Burlington School District, located between Greensboro and Chapel Hill, N.C., 80 percent of its 1,500 teachers missed more than 10 days of school in the 2013-2014 school year. Cleveland reported that about 84 percent of its 2,700 teachers had excessive absences. Nevada’s Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, reported that more than half of its 17,000 teachers were chronically absent — missing a total of at least

85,000 work days, or the equivalent number of hours that nearly 500 teachers would work during an entire 180-day school year.

While much attention focuses on the 6 million students who miss more than 15 days of school each year, making them much more likely to see low achievement and increasing the chances of not making it to graduation, teacher absences could be having a similarly negative effect on scholastic success.

Superintendents and education policymakers say students need consistency in the classroom and high-quality instruction, noting that a parade of substitutes can seriously set back academic progress.

“Most teachers are there all the time, as they should be, because they want to be in the classroom,” said Nithya Joseph, director for state policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality. But those who aren’t there all the time could be hurting their students. “When the teacher of record is not in the classroom, it has an impact on student achievement.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research has found that when teachers are absent for at least 10 days, there is a significant decrease in student outcomes. The decrease, according to one study, is equivalent to the difference between having a brand-new teacher and one with two or three years of

experience.

School district administrators do not know what exactly is causing excessive teacher absenteeism. Some point to teachers taking sick leave, maternity leave and personal days to which they are entitled, and others attribute part of the problem to school climate; when teachers don’t feel motivated to go to school and teach, some of them just don’t show up.

The estimates from the Department of Education indicated that 58 school districts with more than 1,000 full-time teachers had chronic absentee rates above 50 percent.

Though the federal absentee data was self-reported, several school districts told The Post that their numbers appeared to be incorrect, and sometimes wildly so.

School officials with the Alamance-Burlington school district in North Carolina said they are alarmed by their high teacher absenteeism, which was about 80 percent in 2014. The district began conducting regular surveys about teacher morale and increased teacher pay slightly.

The efforts have yielded results, bringing the number of teachers who missed more than 10 days down to about 50 percent last school year. But Superintendent Bill Harrison still considers that rate unfortunate.

“We still have too many days that our students don’t have that quality teacher in front of them,” Harrison said.

North Carolina ranks above the national average in teacher absences, and school district leaders there say state laws that grant personal leave and sick days are a contributor. Others say the state’s large military population has an impact. In Onslow County, a district that surrounds the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, school officials said their teachers are mostly young military wives, many of whom take maternity leave or take days off when spouses return from deployments.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the federal data doesn’t paint a fair, complete or accurate

picture because it only reports when teachers are out of their classrooms, not why they are out, such as for illnesses or family deaths. She also said teachers face unusual workplace stress, and that women, who make up a broad majority of teachers, are often primary caregivers for their families and are more likely to miss work because of it.

“The data also doesn’t address some other basic conditions faced by teachers — the stress, the need to work beyond the school day and the juggling of work and home that interferes more with their family life than most professions,” Weingarten said. “To better address absenteeism, we need to understand root causes.”

The Guilford County School District, North Carolina’s thirdlargest, began researching why its students were missing so many days of school. That’s when administrators discovered teachers, too, were also piling up absences. Federal data shows Guilford reported that half of its 4,700 teachers missed more than 10 days of school in 2014.

“It hits you in the face that maybe what you are dealing with is much more basic,” said Nora Carr, the school district’s chief of staff. “No matter what’s going on, if you don’t have a great teacher in the classroom, kids aren’t going to learn as much as they would otherwise.”

The Guilford school district has considered financial incentives for teachers who don’t take a lot of days off.

Nevada’s Clark County School District also is exploring financial incentives after it saw more than half of its nearly 18,000 teachers miss more than 10 days of school in 2014.

Mike Barton, the school system’s chief of staff, said replacing thousands of absent teachers is a significant burden, and the replacements are never as good for students.

“I don’t want for one minute for people to think that we are ignoring this,” Baron said. “This is something that we want to make sure improves.” n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Where America’s foreign aid goes U.S. assistance, by country $10M in assistance (rounded up) ECONOMIC AND DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE

Mexico $49M THE AMERICAS

Afghanistan $1B

EUROPE

Ukraine $224M Honduras $100.4M El Salvador $85.3M Guatemala $142.6M

ASIA

Ghana Liberia $145.4M $95.9M Ivory Coast $145.4M

Uganda $457M

Democratic Republic of the Congo $298.7M

Phil. $133.4M Iraq $332.5M

EUROPE

Mexico $85.6M

Ukraine $70.8M

Indonesia $150.4M

Colombia $203.9M

Syria $313.5M

Most of Mexico and Colombia’s assistance is for anti-narcotic law enforcement programs

Lebanon $123.5M

Kenya $618.5M

Israel

Pakistan $319.7M

Egypt

Jordan $367.6M

Sub-Saharan countries are the biggest recipients of U.S. development assistance

Mozambique $401.3M Madagascar $74.1M

South Africa $266.6M

LAZARO GAMIO /THE WASHINGTON POST

SOURCES: SECURITY ASSISTANCE MONITOR, STATE DEPARTMENT

U.S. assistance, by program

BY M AX B EARAK AND L AZARO G AMIO

less than the $4 billion to $5 It’s just a billion a year that Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu fraction of Minister had sought. if the U.S. assistance budg$16.8B et But the federal demonstrates where the U.S. government has strategic interbudget, est, then where are some of our allies on the maps? Saudi but some biggest Arabia, NATO members, Japan, South Korea and India are all nations absent. answer is that those counget quite a triesThesimply buy arms from the United States rather than receive large slice large-scale assistance. U.S. arms

ser Family Foundation study pubgest recipient, however, is Aflished in 2015, the average $10M re- in ghanistan, where thethatUnited ECONOMIC AND Programs provide assistance spondent thought that 26 percent DEVELOPMENT is hoping to win inover (roundedStates up) less that $10M assistance ASSISTANCE of the budget went to foreign aid. hearts and minds with all kinds of ast month, the Obama adUnsurprisingly, more than half of development assistance after 15 ministration announced the respondents thought the U.S. years of military quagmire there. a 10-year, $38 billion sespends too much on foreign aid.

As opposed to the broad discurity assistance deal The $42.4 billion in foreign aid persal of economic development with the Israelis, starting Migration International Foreign Afghanistan for 2017 comes through the State funds, security assistance reflects Security in 2019. That seemsand like a ton of Development Economic Global Health Disaster Refugee Military Support Fund Assistance Assistance and Defense departments and Programs a the targeted nature ofFinancing the Ameri- Forces Fund money. But as we looked into theAssistance slew of other agencies. can national military strategy. A deal, and others like it, we began to Seven African countries feaswath of countries from Egypt to realize how little we knew about ture among the top-10 recipients Pakistan receive the vast majority. the government budget. $2B assistance $3B $2.8B $3.4B of economic assistance. Most of Israel receives about $3.1 bilA fraction of the entire federal $6.1B $5.7B the money given to those coun- $8.6B lion in annual financing currentbudget is devoted to foreign assistries is funneled toward health ly, and that number will increase tance — just about 1 percent. Most $1.8B initiatives, particularly HIV/AIDS to $3.8 billion after 2017. That Americans vastly $1B overestimate $410M treatment and research. The bigamount, it’s worth mentioning, is this number in surveys. In a KaiFood for Peace

$25.6B

Millennium Peace Challenge Corps

Iraq $808M

$3.1B

$1.31B

Zimbabwe $175.9M

L

Afghanistan

$3.67B AFRICA

Tanzania $574.6M

Zambia $417.7M

Ban. $199.1M

Jordan $632.4M

Ethiopia $512.6M

Nigeria $604.8M

THE AMERICAS

ASIA

South Sudan $187.2M

Tunisia $74M

AFRICA

West Bank and Gaza $327.53M

Top 10 receiving countries

SECURITY ASSISTANCE

Pakistan $422.5M

Syria $175M Leb. $110M

Colombia $187.3M

Programs that provide less that $10M in assistance

SECURITY ASSISTANCE

Coalition Int’l Narcotics Support Control and Funds Law Enforcement $1.4B

$1.1B

$1B

Counter-Drug Assistance

$957.4M $668.5M

Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund

$630M

deliveries worldwide for 2015 Nonproliferation, Anti-Terrorism, amounted toand $21.9 billion. n Demining, Related Programs

Iraq Train and Equip Fund

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Zika leaves a confusing trail

BY D OM P HILLIPS AND N ICK M IROFF

Rio de Janeiro

N

early nine months after Zika was declared a global emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers.

But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil.

Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil.

The pattern is so confounding that health officials and scientists have turned their attention back to northeastern Brazil to understand why Zika’s toll has been so much heavier there. They suspect that other, underlying causes may be to blame, such as the presence of another mosquito-borne virus like chikungunya or dengue. Or that environmental, genetic or immunological factors combined with Zika to put mothers in the area at greater risk.

“We don’t believe that Zika is the only cause,” said Fatima Marinho, director of the noncommunicable disease department at Brazil’s Ministry of Health.

Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.”

Researchers and health officials remain cautious about the lowerthan-expected numbers. The latest studies have found more evidence than ever that the virus can inflict severe damage on the developing infant brain, some of which may not be evident until later in childhood.

But researchers so far have learned a lot more about Zika’s potential to do harm than its likeli-

FELIPE DANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Birth defects linked to the virus spiked only in northeast Brazil, and scientists don’t know why hood of doing so.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. But although the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil.

In Colombia, praised for some of the most rigorous standards for detecting and monitoring Zika, the government has tallied more than 104,000 Zika cases, including nearly 20,000 pregnant women. It has the second-highest number of Zika infections after Brazil.

But so far, Colombia has had just 46 babies born with congenital nervous system damage linked to Zika. And the number of new Zika cases in Colombia has fallen

so sharply that the government in July declared the epidemic over, saying the virus will remain a threat but no longer spread rampantly. Colombia is investigating 332 more cases of birth defects for a possible Zika link, but health officials there had been prepared for many more.

“Our focus on Zika has changed,” said Ernesto Marques, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who is working on a project to develop a vaccine for the virus.

Marques is from Recife, the city in Brazil hit hardest by the Zika outbreak, and he was part of the team that first identified the virus as a possible culprit when deformed infants began showing up “almost every day” in Recife’s maternity wards at this time last year.

At the time, Marques said scientists focused on identifying Zika as a “causal agent” for the sudden increase in birth defects, especially microcephaly, in which babies are born with undersize heads and

Lucas Matheus undergoes therapy at a hospital in Caruaru in northeastern Brazil, where Zika cases have clustered.

Scientists think other viruses or environmental factors could explain the uptick there.

often calcified brain tissue.

One of the leading theories, said Marques, is that northeastern Brazil’s last dengue outbreak was in 2003 — relatively long ago — so perhaps mothers in the area had relatively fewer antibodies to cope with Zika, which is spread by the same mosquito.

“Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk.

“We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said.

Researchers caution that it will take years to fully identify the dangers Zika poses to babies’ brains, and microcephaly is just one threat from the virus. A Zika infection poses the greatest danger toward the end of the mother’s first trimester of pregnancy, and its harmful effects on fetal development may not be apparent at birth or manifest themselves until later in childhood.

Marcos Espinal, director of communicable diseases and health analysis at the Pan American Health Organization, said U.N. officials were right to put the world on high alert earlier this year because so little was known about Zika. “If you don’t know about something, you better take preventative measures to minimize the risks,” Espinal said.

Puerto Rico is the next laboratory for understanding Zika. CDC researchers are watching for Zikarelated birth defects on the island, but the mainland United States appears to have averted a major outbreak so far.

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Congress’s failure to approve Zika funding this year means there was no effective way to accurately count how many people were infected.

“We’ll have to hold our breath to see what happens in labor and delivery suites in a few months.

That’s the only way we’ll know whether we’ve dodged a bullet.” n

COVER STORY

Win or lose, he won’t fade

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

BY MARC FISHER

Even if he loses, Donald Trump isn’t going away. But the man and the political phenomenon he has unleashed over the past 16 months are already posing a difficult chicken­or­egg question: Has Trump transformed America, or simply revealed it? ¶ Trump’s slash­and­burn march to the Republican nomination and on into this fall is perhaps the ultimate blending of entertainment and politics, a coarse yet mesmerizing new show that appears to have changed political language and deepened divisions in an already polarized nation. But is this a singular moment, tied exclusively to Trump’s larger­than­life personality and searing rhetoric, or has he loosed into the culture a new virus of confrontation and anger? ¶ “Win or lose, the Trump effect will be felt long after the election,” said David Nevins, president of Showtime, who has spent decades reflecting the nation’s mood on TV shows such as “24,” “Friday Night Lights” and “Homeland.” “Trump and his followers are in many ways a rebuke to the elites who are perceived as controlling popular culture. The people who feel left out, passed over, now have a champion, even though he’s actually one of the New York media power establishment.” ¶ Admire him or

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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COVER STORY

WEEKLY

guage about women and the allegations about his inappropriate advances became campaign issues.

Although much of the country had moved toward acceptance of same-sex marriage, the issue continued to divide many people by faith, family tradition and cultural expectations. The tea party, the Occupy movement and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign all demonstrated a popular hunger for thoroughgoing change and a realignment of the political parties.

“Trump didn’t appear out of nowhere,” said Chris Buskirk, a Trump supporter and talk radio host in Arizona who runs a conservative website called American Greatness. “He’s amplified things that were already happening, anyway. In two years, politicians are going to look at Trump and say, maybe I can be more revealing, more authentic.”

Buskirk, 47, said Trump’s blunt rhetoric and coarse language would have been startling decades ago but today only mirrors a society in which many people feel stifled by new limits on what can be said at work or school. “We’d all like a high level of public discourse,” he said, “but a 3 a.m. tweetstorm isn’t among my worries about the next generation.” Buskirk views Trump as a breakthrough candidate who has spread optimism that “change is still possible when the American people act on their own behalf.

Trump supporters see not his coarseness or vulgarity but a sense that an ordinary person can rise up and make a difference.”

Donald Trump, ordinary person? “Yeah, it doesn’t compute in a certain way,” Buskirk quickly conceded, “but even though he’s a billionaire, he’s a guy from Queens, not the Upper East Side, and he talks like average Americans talk.”

loathe him, many Americans are fascinated

by Trump, and that fascination is feeding a wave of new work that will aim to entertain and challenge the public in the coming years.

Trump’s ability to embrace — or manipulate — average Americans’ anxieties is inspiring more raw and rough rhetoric in politics, darker and more somber popular music, and in TV, movies and other arts, an edgier, more nervous set of characters and themes.

Social media expose rifts Has Trump granted Americans license to express overt racism or new levels of acrimony?

“It seems like a plausible narrative, but I seem to recall all kinds of sketchy things said about races and genders and groups aired publicly on a weekly basis before, say, the summer of 2015,” said John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor who studies public rhetoric. “He is distinct only in being someone of such prominence saying such things. I think the real change was Facebook and Twitter in 2009. Trump is just a symptom.”

Even as offensive language and ethnic insults became routine at Trump rallies, McWhorter saw the real culprit as social media. Twitter and Facebook became the foundations of daily communication for many Americans between 2007 and 2009, “revolutionizing conversation about, well, everything” and pushing political chatter in a far meaner direction, McWhorter said.

In this view, the Trump effect is not unique to the man but is a natural, almost inevitable, result of economic and social forces unleashed by swift, powerful technological change that had, even before Trump’s candidacy, made the country meaner, more confrontational and more divided.

The populism Trump represents and the social strains that made millions of Americans eager for someone like him appear regularly throughout American history. Previous bursts of populism have usually burned through in less than a generation, fading away as economic expansion, war or political reform eased people’s sense of insecurity.

The frustration and resentments evident among Trump’s supporters have roots, some historians say, as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot’s third-party insurgencies in the 1990s. Others say Trump’s success is the result of disorienting, displacing changes in the world beyond politics, in the technological revolution that has altered the way Americans relate to one another and in the arc of millions of work lives.

On college campuses, battles over clashing worldviews, identity politics and the definition of free speech have raged for years. Online, many Americans had already spent years swimming in a virtual ocean of pornography, foul language and sexual misbehavior — long before Trump’s coarse lan-

KLMNO

PORTRAITS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

“I think he has stirred some passion in people,” said Angel Hill, 53, a Trump supporter from Sarasota, Fla. “They either really love him or really hate him.

Same with Hillary. There is no middle.”

Effects on pop culture In TV, movies and the theater, programming decisions are starting to reflect Trump’s impact. Showtime’s “Billions,” a drama pitting a crusading prosecutor against a morally shady hedge-fund operator, “would never have caught on without Trump,” Nevins said. “Two years earlier, I wouldn’t have put it on. But with Trump the billionaire running against the billionaire class, we’re confronting all these questions of when our aspiration and our worship of wealth and business comes in conflict with our anger at what the big guys are getting away with.”

As the writers putting together the next season of the political thriller “Homeland” thought about “how to reflect the Trump era,” Nevins said, they searched, as ever, for “the edge of what you can get away with on television. That’s a line that’s constantly moving, not so much sexually as what qualifies as subversive or dangerous.” And Trump’s campaign has pushed that line in a coarser, angrier direction. continues on next page

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COVER STORY scooped up by an anxious audience.”

Ross said the current popularity of slow, low-energy songs is the most striking run of such music since the early 1980s — also a time of severe economic stress.

Since Trump became a mainstay of TV viewing, that soundtrack has accompanied notably harsher debate in politics and beyond. For generations, candidates could assume that voters wanted leaders who could achieve consensus. Trump capitalized on the ideological polarization of the past two decades and the more recent cultural shift toward the kind of hot takes that go viral on social media.

The result is a new pressure on politicians to be at once entertaining, provocative and even outrageous. The shift is evident in the media, advertising, even sports.

“There’s no place in 2016 for considering the other guy’s point of view, unless you want to be called a wishy-washy, namby-pamby flip-flopper,” Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin wrote last month. “There will never be a sports talk show called ‘You May Be Right,’ no TV roundtables called ‘Point Well Taken.’ ”

from previous page

R.J. Cutler, a documentary filmmaker who has focused on political culture in movies such as “The War Room” and “The World According to Dick Cheney,” is developing a TV series set in small-town America, in post-election 2017, “when any bad thing seems possible, when we no longer know the ground rules about the weather, about democracy, about very basic things.”

Trump didn’t emerge from the blue, Cutler said. A figure like him — charismatic, media-savvy, offering “believe me” solutions and bountiful blame — was inevitable.

“Trump arose out of the perfect storm — the power of television at its most pervasive, the maturation of social media, and the world’s greatest huckster,” Cutler said.

“Trumpism isn’t going away. Even if he only wins 37 percent of the vote, that’s tens of millions of people, and in a way, it’s even better for Trump if he loses, because then his policies never have to be tested.”

If Trump loses, he can say, as he has been for weeks now, that the system is rigged — the voting apparatus, the media, the parties’ domination. That opens the door to Trump or a would-be successor to lead a movement of disaffected Americans against both major parties and the elites that support them.

But couldn’t a post-Trump exhaustion set in, making it harder for a lasting movement to develop? No one interviewed for this article argued that Trump or his followers would simply vanish after a loss, but some wondered whether many Americans might crave escapism over another round of battle.

The widespread unhappiness with this year’s choices — Trump and Hillary Clinton are the least liked presidential candidates in modern times, polls consistently show — is part of a national spirit that’s been growing grumpier for years. Pop music, which often reflects the mood of the country, has been trending slower and darker, following a period of much more energetic hits around the start of the economic recovery in 2009, said Sean Ross, who analyzes pop music and radio play for Edison Research.

“This was the summer of unhappy popular music,” Ross said. “There’s an almost complete dearth of up-tempo, major-chord happiness. There’s no tempo right now in country, pop, R&B, anywhere.”

In the summer hit “Stressed Out,” the indie group Twenty One Pilots sang, “I was told when I get older, all my fears would shrink, but now I’m insecure and I care what people think. Wish we could turn back time, to the good ol’ days . . . but now we’re stressed out . . .”

The Chainsmokers’ hit “Don’t Let Me Down” tells a story of being “stranded, reaching out. . . . I think I’m losing my mind now.”

The exception to the trend proved the rule, Ross said: Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” was “the only up-tempo tune of the summer, and it was immediately

“America needs change, and he is change,” said David Thompson, 40, shown with 2-year-old Gabriella, speaking about Trump. “He has put a lot more topics out on the front line.”

The muzzles are off Trump supporters say he has liberated them to speak out against political correctness, whether in opposition to same-sex marriage or in defense of police officers accused of racial animus.

“Trump has given some people permission to say things they were afraid to say,” said John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and an opponent of gun control who joined dozens of researchers and academics on a pro-Trump petition. “People are just tired of having their motives questioned, of being demonized.

Trump’s letting people give voice to that feeling.”

Over the past year, Trump’s blunt, provocative rhetoric has morphed from outrageous to virtually ordinary for many Americans, said Frank Luntz, the longtime Republican consultant who uses focus groups of voters to analyze not only what they believe but also how they express it.

“Early on, people were horrified by his offensive statements,” Luntz said. “But as time went on, they came to enjoy it and absorb it. There’s no filter anymore. I hear Trump’s words over and over: ‘We have to keep them out.’ Trump has liberated their inner voice, and I’m shocked at what I hear now.”

Luntz sees no indication that the rougher rhetoric is a passing fad. “The more coarse language gets, the more coarse it stays,” he said. “We don’t go back. We don’t suddenly become civil and good to each other.”

In Luntz’s focus groups recently, the tone of disagreements has deteriorated into the kind of attacks that once would have silenced the room. “ ‘You’re an idiot’ has become relatively common,” he said. “It’s

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

15

COVER STORY gotten to the point where I cannot stop people from yelling at each other.”

Luntz has seen a sharp increase in parents telling him that their children are using Trump-inspired smears at school. “It’s ‘Lyin’ Thomas’ and ‘Little David’ in fifth or sixth grade,” he said. “That’s when you know you have a problem.”

Teachers around the country report not only a disturbing rise in the number of kids who mimic Trump’s insults but also a burst of fear among immigrant children about the threat of deportation, even when their families are legal U.S. residents.

In the Roxbury section of Boston, Karene Hines, an eight-grade English teacher, was startled recently to see a boy shaking with fear. She asked what was wrong, and the boy, whose family immigrated legally from Colombia, said that a Trump campaign sign that the owner of the neighborhood laundromat had posted had freaked him out: “He thought it meant that the INS was going to sweep through and he’d be rounded up even though he is legal,” Hines said.

“These kids are always asking, ‘Why does he hate us? We haven’t done anything,’ ” the teacher said. “These are kids who before Trump were interested in the latest sneakers, the Red Sox, the Patriots. Now they’re hyperfocused on Trump. One boy brought me his cellphone to show me Trump’s tweets.

They know his insults by heart. They’re scared.”

Both of the nation’s major teachers unions — which have endorsed Clinton — and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been collecting such reports as evidence of a Trump effect in which the candidate’s comments about minorities and women show up in classrooms and schoolyards.

Fear has not been limited to children.

Psychiatrists and counselors say people on both sides of the nation’s ideological divide are losing sleep and expressing concerns likely to extend beyond Election Day. When a patient recently complained that he’s being kept awake by his fear that a President Trump might start a nuclear war, Washington psychiatrist Bernard Vittone added the man to a growing list of people “whose main anxiety is Trump anxiety.” The doctor, who runs the National Center for the Treatment of Phobias, Anxiety and Depression, said that in three decades of practice, “I’ve never had people come in like this, about four a week, coming in scared, actually frightened, about a candidate winning an election. They may hate Clinton, but they’re not scared of her. They may have hated Bush, they may have hated Obama, but they were never scared.”

Vittone said he normally treats such patients with cognitive behavioral therapy, in which “you try to get people to look at things more realistically. But in this case, I can’t really dispel their anxiety because they have facts and quotes from Trump that they spout back at me that totally nullify my attempts to

KLMNO WEEKLY

ease their fear.” The psychiatrist tends to treat Trump-fearing patients with anti-anxiety medication.

“The New Uncle Sam,” 75, said he believes that since Trump has been running for president the average American is becoming involved the way they should be.

A darker future?

Such frayed nerves reflect a loss of trust and community that predates Trump’s political emergence. In a culture in which characters on reality-TV shows lash out at one another for sport, in a society in which bonds of trust have frayed as relationships become distanced from physical proximity, “along comes Donald Trump to give us permission to say out loud the things we’ve been saying anonymously online,” said playwright Joshua Harmon, whose short play, “Ivanka: A Medea for Right Now,” will be read at Washington’s Studio Theatre next month as part of a flash festival of Trump-related plays at five D.C. theaters. “He’s closer to how a lot of people are living than Hillary Clinton. A lot of men talk exactly like Trump online; he’s just the first person to do that while running for president.”

In most of popular culture, there’s a long lag between social change and the art that bubbles up from the streets. Playwrights, novelists and songwriters say that when Trump-inspired works begin to appear, they will probably focus on the sense that, as Harmon said, “People are immersed in their own worlds now. We were already being horrible to each other on social media, so we were kind of ripe for someone to come along and further dehumanize us.”

Many new works may be dark or tragic.

“This doesn’t feel like something that people will look back and chuckle about,” Harmon said.

Very little in the culture points toward any ‘what was that all about?’ reckoning if Trump loses. More likely, Trumpism will continue to be the agitator that propels the nation’s political machinery.

For many, Trump’s lasting impact is directly tied to his domination of the news media this year. “The depressing and dangerous change that Trump brought is this: The media have surrendered their airtime to him,” said Doug McGrath, a satirist and playwright whose show, “Beautiful,” is running on Broadway. “There seems to be no calculation other than ‘can we get him on and can we keep him on?’ ” Even before Trump came along, cable news had morphed from traditional reporting to “mainly people yelling at each other,” as McGrath put it.

Now, Trump has taken that coarsening of the culture and exacerbated it. “In Trump, we have the candidate himself making jokes about his own penis size, or calling women terrible names,” McGrath said. “He has obliterated the idea that tone matters . . . that there is such a thing as going too far. For the next person who tries it, it will seem less shocking because this has been accepted by the media who report it in detail (mostly without shock or complaint) and by the rest of us who grumble but keep watching.” n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

HEALTH

A new type of stress test

BY M ICHAEL C HANDLER

A LISON

S

oon after Nadine Burke Harris opened a pediatrics clinic in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco, she began grappling with the high rates of asthma and other illnesses in her patients. She wanted to understand why so many of the kids she saw were so sick.

“They would have chronic abdominal pain, headaches, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, opposition defiant disorder,” she said. “It could be that all these different kids have all these diagnoses, or it could be that there is one thing at the root of this.”

She found an explanation in a decade-old study that showed a strong link between chronic disease and traumatic experiences during childhood — things such as physical abuse or neglect, or living with a family member addicted to drugs or alcohol. She knew the children she saw lived with high “doses” of adversity, she said, and it made sense: Trauma was affecting their developing brains and also their developing bodies.

So she began to regard her practice in a whole new way. She started evaluating children not just for their medical histories but also for their social histories. And instead of treating only symptoms, she sought to help with the root causes of the stress that was making them sick.

She screened all the children at her clinic for traumatic experiences, and she built a new kind of medical center for those who screened positive. At the Center for Youth Wellness, which opened in 2011, children and their parents can see mental health workers, learn about mindfulness and other relaxation techniques, and meet with case managers who connect them with social services.

Harris’s novel approach to health care, and her personal story, are gaining national attention. Her work has been profiled in a bestselling book by Paul Tough and a documentary. Her health center has attracted major funders, including Google.

JASON HENRY

Doctors are screening and treating children for trauma in order to prevent disease In September, she spoke at the White House for a conference about trauma. And this month, she was honored in Pittsburgh with the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, one of six prizes given by the Heinz Foundation annually to “exceptional Americans, for their creativity and determination in finding solutions to critical issues.” The award comes with a $250,000 prize.

“I think we have reached a tipping point,” Harris said in an interview, meaning that awareness is growing about how traumatic experience affects health.

The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014 announced the launch of a Center on Healthy, Resilient Children to help pediatricians identify and treat children with toxic stress.

A screening tool for childhood trauma on the center’s website has been downloaded 1,100 times.

Harris’s goal is for every pediatrician to screen children for trauma.

It would be a big stretch for busy

doctors to try to identify and treat a litany of pervasive and entrenched social problems. But Harris compares the research about the negative effects of childhood adversity to the discovery of germ theory or the science that showed secondhand smoke is harmful. The medical community evolved and responded.

“Does it seem like a difficult problem to solve? Yes. Does it seem harder than cancer? I don’t know,” she said. “Medicine and public health are all about solving hard problems.”

Harris, 40, grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., the only girl in a family of five children. She was brought up with a strong cultural value of “we take care of each other,” she said, that her parents brought from their native Jamaica.

The research that transformed her career was a large-scale investigation undertaken by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention to see how chronic stress in childhood im-

Prompted by a study linking chronic disease with traumatic childhood experiences, Nadine Burke Harris evaluates patients not just for their medical histories but also for their social histories.

pacted health in later life. It included 17,000 Kaiser patients who answered a questionnaire about their personal histories with “adverse childhood experiences,” otherwise known as ACEs. Questions included whether their parents were divorced, whether they experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse or emotional neglect, and whether they grew up with family members who were mentally ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol.

The researchers, Vincent Felitti from Kaiser and Robert Anda of CDC, found that adverse childhood experiences were incredibly common. Two-thirds of respondents reported at least one. One in 6 reported at least four.

And they documented an overwhelming correlation with poor health outcomes. Higher numbers of adverse experiences consistently yielded more health problems.

Compared with people with no childhood trauma, people with four or more were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer or heart disease; seven times as likely to be alcoholics; six times as likely to have depression; and 12 times as likely to have attempted suicide. People exposed to six or more traumatic events died 20 years sooner than those who had none.

Traumatic experiences led people to engage in more-risky behaviors, such as intravenous drug use and early sexual activity. But even people without a history of highrisk behaviors had poor health outcomes.

Initial response to the findings was slow, partly because people did not know how to interpret the results, said Jane Stevens, publisher of ACEs Too High, a news site about the impacts of childhood adversity.

But in the years since the study was published, a generation of scientists have begun to understand and explain the way stress shapes our bodies. Biomedical scientists and brain researchers have shown how “fight or flight” stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which flood the body when someone encounters danger, can cause lasting damage in the brain

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DATA CRUNCH

WEEKLY

Who has the most Halloween spirit?

M

aybe it’s the specter of this unsettling election, but Halloween activity is up this year, according to figures released by the National Retail Federation. About 69 percent of those surveyed by Prosper Insights and Analytics in September said they plan to celebrate Halloween, which is the second-highest number since 2005.

Those people said they would spend an average of $83 on Halloween. That’s the highest amount the survey has recorded, and it is a 12 percent increase over last

year. Perhaps more startling, it’s a 71 percent increase over spending in 2005. So what part of the country has the most Halloween spirit? Folks in the West plan to spend $88, compared with $85 in the Northeast and South and only $74 in the Midwest. And it’s not just money. When you rank the regions by participation in activities such as dressing up or decorating, it’s even more clear that folks in the West are thrilled — dare we say to death? — by the holiday. n — Elizabeth Chang

How residents in each region of the country plan to celebrate Halloween: CARVE A PUMPKIN

DECORATE YOUR HOME

HAND OUT CANDY

DRESS IN COSTUME

DRESS PET(S) IN COSTUME

45% Northeast

50% Northeast

71% Northeast

45% Northeast

16% Northeast

47% Midwest

48% Midwest

73% Midwest

42% Midwest

15% Midwest

43% South

48% South

69% South

48% South

16% South

49% West

50% West

71% West

53% West

18% West

MARTIN SATI

and body when a child is under prolonged or repeated and unmitigated stress — what is now commonly known as toxic stress.

The confluence of research is beginning to have an impact in many fields, Stevens said. Police departments are offering stressreduction classes to officers. Educators are revising school discipline policies and offering more mental-health support for children dealing with severe stress.

As she pored through the research, Harris realized that exposure to childhood trauma increases the risk of contracting seven of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States.

“I went to medical school; I never heard about this,” Harris said. “When I did, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops.”

Jessica Weisz, a pediatrician at CCI Health and Wellness Services in Takoma Park, Md., said she heard Harris speak at a conference and was motivated by what she learned.

More than 30 percent of the children she sees suffer from asthma to some degree, she said, and research shows a link to childhood adversity. So this year, her office developed a screening tool for patients with asthma.

Because she mainly serves Latinos, the tool includes some questions about immigration-related stressors, including whether a family member has been deported. Children who screen positive are referred to a team of licensed social workers on staff.

So far, research shows six major strategies for mitigating stress: sleep, nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, mental-health care and healthy relationships. There is no breakthrough cure, Harris said.

Her practice focuses on low-income families, who experience particularly high rates of chronic stress. But childhood adversity is prevalent nationwide. Respondents in the original ACEs study were middle or upper class, and nearly three-quarters had college degrees; 69 percent were white.

She pays close attention now to the effects of stress — even in smaller doses — on herself and her own family. She and her husband are raising four boys.

“I have to work to manage my own stress. I love my job, but it’s stressful,” she said. “It’s really important for me to take care of myself.”n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

She’s notorious — but also decorous N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D AHLIA L ITHWICK

W

MY OWN WORDS

By Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams Simon & Schuster.

400 pp. $30

hen civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued her first case at the Supreme Court in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun, who kept track of such things in his notes, rated her performance a C-plus, adding, “very precise female.” As trite and sexist as his contemporaneous impressions were, they captured an aspect of Ginsburg that sometimes gets lost in the worship of the now-83-yearold cult figure known by her “rapper” moniker, Notorious RBG. That same Ginsburg who has fired up a generation of millennial feminists and spawned T-shirts, tote bags and tattoos, is and has always been, at heart, a very precise female, too.

It can be nearly impossible to reconcile the two Justice Ginsburgs: the one captured so exuberantly and lovingly in last year’s “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik — the spicy dissenter in landmark reproductive rights and voting rights cases, the bench-press queen of the octogenarian set — and the white-gloved wonk who always felt most comfortable when she was over-prepared.

In a new collection of the justice’s speeches, opinions and writings, “My Own Words,” curated by Ginsburg and her biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, the justice shows herself on balance to be far more comfortable in the latter posture. With deeply researched essays (often on pioneers such as the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, or the first women in the legal profession, including Belva Lockwood) and warm tributes to her colleagues, there is scant evidence here of the bomb-throwing feminist icon — with the exception of some strong dissents and opinions from recent court terms.

The Ginsburg who emerges from this collection is deliberative, gracious, quick to credit others

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

In her writing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg extols the law as “protector of the oppressed, the poor, the minority, the loner.”

with her own successes and above all temperate. That makes it even harder to reconcile this voice with the Ginsburg who told numerous press outlets in early July that she was terrified of a Donald Trump presidency, calling him, among other things, a “faker.” Ginsburg quickly said those political remarks had been “incautious” and added, “I did something I should not have done.” Recently, having said that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and others were “really dumb” to refuse to stand for the national anthem, Ginsburg apologized again.

In short: This year she is starting to sound just a bit like the rock diva she claims not to be.

If one accepts, as I think one ought, Ginsburg’s voice in this collection as her authentic voice, as opposed to the diva construct of the Internet, one thing is mani-

festly clear: The 2016 presidential election is nothing less than a referendum on everything Ginsburg has spent her life working toward.

What is under siege this fall goes beyond just her pathbreaking work in gender equality and the law, and her lifetime of labor for progressive legal advancement. At the heart of “My Own Words” is an abiding commitment to civility, to institutional norms, to the infinite possibilities of dialogue and cooperation, and to the now-dubious notion that protecting outsiders and others is a core American value. If the workhorse has become the celebutante in recent months, it may be because she is witnessing the end of a worldview she has long cherished and promoted.

The collection is organized in a fashion that makes it hard to locate a strong narrative arc. But to the extent that a clarion voice emerges, it is a devotion to the rule

of law as an ordering force. From the very first essay — a 1946 editorial for her school newspaper penned by a 13-year-old Ruth Bader, about the value of the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and the U.N. Charter — her concerns for peace, for caution in the nuclear era and for international cooperation are palpable.

Time and again in her essays, she reminds us that she stands on the shoulders of the female pioneers (“waypavers and pathmarkers,” in her parlance) who came before her, making it possible for a Jewish woman to sit on the highest court in the land. Her solicitude for outsiders and those locked out of legal processes is boundless.

Over and over, Ginsburg returns to the need for civility and cordiality and friendship across ideological divisions. She quotes Antonin Scalia — one of her dearest friends — saying: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.” She notes in tribute to Sandra Day O’Connor that “collegiality is the key to the effective operation of a multi-member bench.” She writes with urgency of the need for judicial independence, lauding the United States for having a culture “that frowns on attempts to make the courts over to fit the president’s or the Congress’ image.”

Above all, what shines through these essays is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, feminist.

“My Own Words” is the furthest thing from sexy. Unless you find a very precise woman sexy — which many of us do. But as a collection of thoughtful writing about perseverance and community and the law, it is a tonic to the current national discourse. When Notorious RBG steps out of these norms, it is only awkwardly. “My Own Words” reveals in fine relief how much she believes to be at stake. n Lithwick covers the Supreme Court for Slate and hosts the podcast “Amicus.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Grisham expertly targets corruption

Brief look at films, fears of Hitchcock

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

J

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

ohn Grisham is one of this country’s best-selling novelists — and he is also an important social critic. In more than 30 novels, he has often used his exceptional storytelling skills to take a hard look at injustice and corruption in the legal world and in our society as a whole.

His first novel, “A Time to Kill” (1989), written when he was a young lawyer and state legislator in Mississippi, was a searing look at Southern racism, as a black man went on trial for killing two men who raped his daughter. In “Sycamore Row” (2013), he brought back the lawyer-hero of “A Time to Kill,” to represent a black housekeeper who had been willed $20 million by a white man she nursed as he lay dying; this time Brigance was fighting respectable citizens who intend to relieve the housekeeper of the fortune. In “Gray Mountain” (2014), an idealistic young lawyer joins a legal clinic in Appalachian coal country and learns how cruelly the mining companies cheat their workers and despoil the land.

His new novel, “The Whistler,” is another ambitious look at corruption, this time involving a judge. The story begins with two investigators, Lacy Stoltz and Hugo Hatch, who work for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct, which polices judicial misbehavior. They are approached by a whistleblower, a disbarred lawyer, who asks if they want to investigate “the most corrupt judge in the history of American jurisprudence.”

He points them toward a Native American-operated casino in the Florida Panhandle that takes in a half-billion dollars a year in cash and a ruthless gangster whom the Native Americans fear. When some members of the tribe opposed the casino, the gangster had them killed. Now he shares the profits with the tribe’s leaders and they’re all protected against legal challenges by a corrupt state judge. Each month the gangster

takes the judge a briefcase containing $250,000 in cash; this has been going on for 11 years.

The FBI, busy with its pursuit of terrorists, shows no interest in the corrupt casino. The two investigators thus proceed on their own, knowing their inquiry may be dangerous. “We’re not cops with guns,” Lacy says. “We’re lawyers with subpoenas.”

Her concern is justified. One person is soon murdered, one is badly injured and another goes missing. We meet a Native American on death row who was convicted of murder on perjured testimony.

Although “The Whistler” reads as first-rate fiction, it takes on the feel of a documentary as Grisham’s complicated crime unfolds in great detail. The Native Americans, inundated with cash, face unforeseen dangers. The gangster, who has advanced from dealing cocaine to leading a criminal empire, thinks himself untouchable.

The judge relishes her ill-gotten wealth.

But inevitably the wheels of justice begin to turn. This is, after all, a Grisham novel, and the story winds down with the kind of legal drama readers have come to expect from him.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Grisham quipped that while he was writing this book, his wife had asked him to get off his soapbox. Readers can be grateful that he didn’t heed that advice. “The Whistler” is a fascinating look at judicial corruption — an entirely convincing story and one of Grisham’s best.

I can’t think of another major American novelist since Sinclair Lewis who has so effectively targeted social and political ills in our society. It is time at least to recognize that at his best he is not simply the author of entertaining legal thrillers but an important novelistic critic of our society. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

I’ THE WHISTLER

By John Grisham Doubleday.

374 pp. $28.95

ALFRED HITCHCOCK A Brief Life

By Peter Ackroyd Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. 276 pp. $26.95

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

m a sucker for brief lives.

Not people dying young, mind you, but short biographies of prominent artists, thinkers and politicians. The best entries in these series can sharpen our perception of a familiar figure by focusing on the essentials.

The prolific British writer Peter Ackroyd is becoming a one-man progenitor of his own brief lives.

Last year, he published a scintillating volume on the father of the mystery novel, Wilkie Collins.

Now he has taken on another English-born purveyor of suspense: Alfred Hitchcock.

Ackroyd reminds us what an outsider Hitchcock was. Raised Roman Catholic in Protestant England, he was perennially unhappy with his appearance, especially his spherical figure, and beset by multiple fears: of heights, policemen, imprisonment and, simply, other people. Even after he was well-established in a job with quasi-dictatorial powers — movie director — he “still did not like to cross the studio floor in case a stranger came up to him.” Such a cluster of neuroses would send many of us running to a shrink, but instead Hitchcock harnessed them to his talents. He was, Ackroyd sums up, “a superb fantasist of fear.”

After starting in the British film industry as a writer of title cards, Hitchcock quickly rose in the ranks: designer, art director, assistant director, director. More than most biographers, Ackroyd emphasizes his subject’s German phase, and makes a good case for doing so. While working on two Anglo-German productions in the 1920s, Hitchcock came under the sway of F.W. Murnau, who had directed “Nosferatu,” the great silent version of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula.” “From Murnau,” Hitchcock recalled, “I learned how to tell a story without words.”

Ackroyd also argues that the milieu depicted in the cinema of Weimar Germany “unlocked the door of Hitchcock’s imagination.

This world is hazardous and uncertain; it is tremulous and frightening; it is deadly and unpredictable. It elicits anxiety and disorientation. It is always precarious.”

It’s a world in which cops are apt to arrest the wrong man, in which an affable jokester on a train proposes an exchange of murders — except he’s not really joking, and a repentant woman is murdered while showering in her motel room.

Much has been made of the tension between Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick, who lured him to Hollywood in 1939.

Selznick could be a heavy-handed meddler, but in Ackroyd’s view, Selznick rightly overruled Hitchcock on how to approach their first collaboration, “Rebecca.”

Hitchcock submitted a treatment that lightened the novel, giving it more or less the tone of his breezy British films (“The 39 Steps,” say, or “The Lady Vanishes”), but Selznick insisted on a darker version faithful to the neo-Gothic melodrama Daphne du Maurier had written. Hitchcock gulped but started over, and the result was an Oscar for best picture of 1940. And in making his great movies of the 1950s — “Strangers on a Train,” “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “North

by Northwest” — Hitchcock enjoyed near-total control.

Ackroyd can write intelligently and evocatively about these films, but the prose is not always as crisp as it should be. And he makes a surprising mistake in discussing a MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s term for “the device that sends the plot and the characters on their way” — the secret invasion plans, for example. Ackroyd equates a MacGuffin with a red herring, which means almost the opposite: a false clue.

Ackroyd’s book is more astute on his subject’s psychological makeup than on what makes us want to read about him: his approach to the films he made. n Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, writes about film.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Adding guns on campus will only invite tragedies

BY DANIEL WEBSTER AND RONALD DANIELS Webster is a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Daniels is president of Johns Hopkins University.

Texas this year became the eighth state to require state colleges and universities to allow civilians with permits to carry concealed guns in public places. As a result, the University of Texas at Austin — a school that 50 years ago suffered the trauma of the nation’s first campus mass killing — must allow guns to be brought onto campus.

To those behind the campus­carry movement making such inroads in Austin and other state capitals, that’s a good thing. This effort is based on the belief that allowing more guns in public places will lead to less violence. But does the evidence support this premise? A new report released by Johns Hopkins University, with co­authors from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, surveys the best available research and says no.

Proponents of expanding civilians’ ability to carry guns argue that many mass shootings occur because perpetrators know victims will be unarmed and defenseless because of legal restrictions on carrying in public places. They also contend that citizens, if armed with firearms, can effectively end the carnage of active shootings.

But the latest research on mass shootings, much of it detailed in a new book by report co-author Louis Klarevas, tells a different story. First, the overwhelming majority of fatal mass shootings occur in places where guns are allowed. Second, when rampage shootings do occur, gun-wielding civilians rarely are able to stop them. Effective and responsible use of a firearm under the conditions of an active shooter requires significant training and the ability to make good decisions and shoot accurately under the most challenging circumstances.

Even some trained lawenforcement officers perform poorly under such circumstances.

These facts explain why the best research shows that right-to-carry gun laws do not decrease mass

shootings or the number of people shot in those incidents.

Campus-carry proponents have turned to another equally specious argument: If guns were permitted at colleges and universities, victims of sexual assault could use them to fend off their attackers. This argument, too, is starkly at odds with the best evidence. If carrying a gun were effective in warding off would-be rapists in a nation where civilian gun-carrying is not uncommon, you would expect many to report using a gun in this manner. Yet a study by Harvard’s David Hemenway using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2007 to 2011 showed that out of the 62 cases in which a respondent reported being a victim of a violent crime and using a gun in self-defense, not one involved a sexual assault. In fact, once a crime is in progress, the use of a gun by a victim in selfdefense did not affect his or her risk of being injured one way or the other.

The fact is that the evidence for guns as a deterrent to campus crime is weak or nonexistent. And profound evidence shows that the

RALPH BARRERA/AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Protesters on the University of Texas last year oppose a state law that allows permit-holders to carry concealed handguns on the campus.

college environment is particularly ill-suited to gun possession.

The risks and interconnectedness of violence, alcohol abuse and reckless behavior are elevated among college-age youths. The frequency of binge drinking among college students is a deep and enduring problem, and the evidence from studies of criminal assaults both outside and inside the home and comparisons of victims who are treated at hospitals for nonlethal assault-related injuries with homicides shows that the presence of firearms dramatically increases the risk of death and injury during altercations. Freely inserting firearms into this environment is a recipe for tragedy.

Similarly, a recent study of campus shootings conducted by Everytown for Gun Safety (founded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also is a major donor to Johns Hopkins University) shows that the vast majority are neither mass shootings nor active-shooter incidents but instead involve situations where the presence of guns is shown to be far more lethal — interpersonal disputes, targeted attacks, accidents and suicide.

Suicide attempts that lead to hospital treatment or death rise dramatically and peak during the college years, and they have been increasing in recent years. A large

body of research ranging from comparative studies of households where suicides have occurred and ones where they have not, studies examining the association between states’ suicide rates and gun ownership, and evaluations of laws designed to restrict firearms access of highrisk individuals clearly shows that access increases the risk of suicide. Should this not be a serious consideration for those advocating for guns on campus?

A university should be a place where ideas are celebrated and contentious views are faithfully explored. Here, we seek evidence that can shine light on our darkest challenges.

As the president of Johns Hopkins University and a gun violence researcher at the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, we work with city leaders and partners in the community to find solutions that can improve lives — and save them, in Baltimore and beyond.

We oppose guns on campus not in the hackneyed stereotype of liberals scolding from the ivory tower but as a result of a searching examination of relevant research, as well as a common-sense assessment of reality. What the evidence to date shows — and what we hope state legislators across the nation who are pondering such measures will consider — is that campus-carry laws will invite tragedies on college campuses, not end them. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Here’s how to fix Obamacare PAUL WALDMAN is a contributor to The Plum Line blog and a senior writer at the American Prospect.

Many people are laboring under misconceptions about what the Affordable Care Act is, how it works, what its genuine problems are and how they might be fixed. In fact, most people don’t understand the ACA, and given how complicated the topic of health insurance and health policy is, you can’t blame them. So I’m going to try to offer a little perspective, in an attempt to get us all on the same page.

The Obama administration announced this past week that premiums for certain plans on the ACA exchanges will rise in 2017 by an average of 25 percent. This is a serious problem, but it’s important to know that almost everything you’ll hear about this from Republicans is either false or misleading. Here are some key things to understand: This 25 percent average premium increase only applies to fewer than 2 million Americans. If you have employer-

sponsored coverage, this isn’t about you. If you have Medicare or Medicaid, this isn’t about you.

If you got your insurance on the exchanges but your income was low enough to qualify you for subsidies, this isn’t about you. It only concerns those people who get individual coverage on the exchanges but don’t qualify for subsidies — 15 percent of those on the exchanges. According to the

government’s figures, that’s fewer than 2 million people, or about one half of 1 percent of the American population.

The exchanges are only one part of the ACA. As Michael

Grunwald recently observed, “The perks of Obamacare — insurance protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions, a ban on insurer caps that limited payouts to expensive patients, delivery reforms that have helped produce the slowest cost growth in half a century — have been mostly uncontroversial and undiscussed.” But if Republicans were to succeed in their goal of repealing the law, all that stuff would disappear too, and we’d be back where we started — not to mention the fact that 20 million Americans would lose their coverage.

We can address this problem if we’re willing to. The exchanges

are not working as well as we had

hoped, but there are changes that would bring more insurers in and restrain premiums. Paul Starr of the American Prospect, one of the country’s foremost academic experts on health policy, offered this list: l Require all insurers who want to sell in the individual insurance market to offer their plans through the exchange, so they couldn’t cherry-pick individuals outside the exchange. l Reduce the waiting period for those on disability insurance to get Medicare coverage from two years to six months to move some of the very high-cost enrollees out of the individual-market pool. l Require any insurer that wants to offer a Medicare Advantage plan in an area to also offer a plan in the marketplace for under-65 enrollees. l Have the federal exchange adopt the procedures used by California in actively bargaining with plans instead of acting as a passive clearinghouses. l Create a public option for those ages 55-64 that is clearly identified as an early buy-in to Medicare. l Create a second federally run public option for enrollees from 18 to 54. l Restore the risk corridor and reinsurance provisions that have expired that were intended to

protect exchange plans against adverse selection.

These kinds of changes are meant to expand the risk pool to include both healthy and sick people, keep as many insurers in each marketplace as possible, and further increase competition via a public option — all of which might help to keep premiums down and make the exchanges work better. You might disagree with some of them, and some might have a greater effect than others. But the exchange’s problems aren’t so intractable that we have to toss the law out.

But congressional Republicans refuse to entertain any changes or reforms to the ACA. Republicans like to claim they have the same goals that the law had: get more people covered, bring costs down, make coverage secure, and so on. Yet the replacement plans Republicans have offered would at best do a fraction of what the ACA is doing.

So if they don’t want to participate in fixing the ACA, that simply means they don’t actually want to solve the problems they claim to want to solve.

That means that the only way that the shortcomings in the ACA can be addressed is to get a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress who are willing to do it. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

When Kelly silenced Gingrich MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist.

Previously, she was the New York Times public editor and the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

More magazine’s final issue in March showed a lovely — and quite serious — face with a memorable headline: “Lessons From America’s Most Beautiful Badass.”

The face belonged to Megyn Kelly, perhaps the hottest property in TV news and the host of Fox News’s “The Kelly File.”

Kelly hasn’t always lived up to her steel-spined reputation. Her much-touted special with Donald Trump in May was an exercise in mutual promotion that featured softball questions and cutesy laughs with the candidate and ended in a cringe-worthy preview of her soon-to-be-published book.

But on Tuesday night, Kelly once again showed what she can do in her best moments. Her interview with former House speaker and current Trump ally Newt Gingrich offered a rarely seen mic drop. They sparred, mesmerizingly, over the allegations of Trump’s sexual misconduct.

Gingrich tried to dismiss the topic — and dis the interviewer: “You are fascinated with sex, and you don’t care about public policy.”

Quite a claim — and Kelly wasn’t having it. Gingrich had conflated the violence of sexual assault with consensual sex. She

fired back, citing polls that show that most women actually do care about the issue of sexual harassment. And, as Gingrich proceeded to repeatedly label former president Bill Clinton a “predator,” she asserted the obvious: Fox has given plenty of coverage to Clinton’s checkered past with women. (And let’s not forget that while the House speaker was championing Clinton’s impeachment, he was carrying on an adulterous affair with one of his staffers.)

Then Kelly, a lawyer, ended the interview on a startling note: “We’re going to leave it at that, and you can take your anger issues and spend some time working on them, Mr. Speaker.” Startled, Gingrich managed this much: “You, too.”

The interview immediately blew up on social media, with the general reaction being something as simple as “Wow.” (Trump’s own reaction on Wednesday was

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

affirming: “We don’t play games, Newt, right?”)

Trump’s social media adviser, Dan Scavino, took the E-ZPass lane to the low road with a threatening tweet worthy of his boss: “Megyn Kelly made a total fool out of herself tonight — attacking Donald Trump. Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”

I’m not sure what that means — whether it was meant to evoke the need for a bodyguard or a defense lawyer — but I doubt that Kelly is losing sleep over it, any more than the New York Times is losing sleep over Trump’s recent threats to sue the paper.

There’s more than a whiff of desperation in that silliness.

The Kelly-Gingrich dust-up made for riveting TV — and it was good to see her taking no prisoners — but it wasn’t Kelly’s top moment. That remains her stunning question to Trump in the first Republican primary debate.

“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

Trump’s immediate answer carried a hint of yet another threat: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have

treated me.”

And in fact, he shunned her show for many weeks afterward until a much-touted summit meeting at Trump Tower, which resulted in the aforementioned special in May. Kelly is tough, talented and smart. She did the right thing when she told internal investigators that she, too, had been sexually harassed by her former boss Roger Ailes — perhaps the final blow for him at Fox, where he was fired in August.

She is also often occupied with burnishing her brand and enhancing her career, which includes the matter of the expiration of her Fox contract in 2017. Meanwhile, her autobiographical book, “Settle for More,” comes out next month and is expected to detail her feud with Trump and the toll it took.

Let’s not equate Kelly’s iron-fistvelvet-glove interviews — some interviews, that is — with journalistic idealism. Neither is it crusading feminism. There’s a hefty measure of calculated selfpromotion in all of this.

But it serves a good purpose: Kelly, with her profile, has provided a consistent voice for women’s issues in this campaign.

If that also helps her sell books and get a fatter contract, I’m all for it. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Genius BY

E RIC W EINER

It’s not always easy to know when we’re in the presence of “genius.”

We’re quick to anoint a “marketing genius” or a “political genius,” oblivious to the fact that true genius requires no such modification. In truth, real geniuses transcend the confines of their particular domains.

They inspire and awe, which is precisely why we should use the word sparingly. That’s not the only misconception. Here are some others.

MYTH NO. 1 Genius is mostly about genetics.

Genius is not transmitted genetically like blue eyes or baldness. Genius parents don’t beget genius babies, and there’s no “genius gene.” Genetics is part of the mix, but only part. “Much of the literature concludes that hereditary factors play a minor role at best in the determination of creativity,” University of Minnesota psychologist Niels Waller wrote in Psychological Inquiry.

There are other factors, too.

One is hard work — the “drudge theory” of genius. Others suggest that attitude matters as well. A study of young musicians found that it was not the number of practice hours students racked up that determined their success but rather their “long-term commitment.” In other words, genius requires a certain mindset, an unflappable persistence.

MYTH NO. 2 Geniuses are smarter than the rest of us.

Genius, particularly creative genius, is less about raw intelligence and more about elevated vision. A creative genius, says artificial-intelligence expert Margaret Boden, is someone with “the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable.” Yes, some intelligence is required to do that, but beyond a certain point — an IQ of, say, 120 — greater intelligence yields fewer measurable gains in creativity, many psychologists believe.

Nor is genius necessarily about encyclopedic knowledge or impressive education. The share of Americans who completed at least four years of college jumped from about 6 percent in 1950 to 32 percent in 2014, yet we have not seen a commensurate increase in creative output. In fact, many geniuses either dropped out of college or, like the renowned British scientist Michael Faraday, never attended. Albert Einstein was a famously mediocre student.

During his annus mirabilis, in 1905, when he published four papers that rocked the foundation of physics, his overall knowledge of physics was eclipsed by that of others working in the field. Einstein’s genius rested not with amassed knowledge but, rather, with his ability to make leaps of understanding that others couldn’t. Einstein wasn’t a knowit-all. He was a see-it-all.

MYTH NO. 3 Geniuses can pop up anywhere and at any time.

In fact, if you plot the appearance of genius over time and across the globe, you notice an interesting pattern. Geniuses do not appear randomly — one in Bolivia, another in Brooklyn — but, rather, in groupings. Genius clusters. Certain places, at certain times, produce a mother lode of brilliant minds and good ideas.

Think of ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence or Paris in the 1920s — or, arguably, Silicon Valley today. These places were, in some ways, quite different, but they also shared certain

HARRIS & EWING/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

characteristics. For starters, almost all were cities. The density and intimacy of an urban setting nurture creativity. All of these places, too, possessed an outsize degree of tolerance and “openness to experience,” the trait that psychologists have identified as the single most important for creativity.

MYTH NO. 4 Geniuses are grumpy loners.

It is true that geniuses (especially writers and artists) are more likely to suffer from mental illness, particularly depression, compared with the population at large. But they are rarely loners.

They seek out kindred spirits who can, at the very least, reassure them that they are not going crazy. Thus, the advent of the genius support group. Freud had his Wednesday Circle, Einstein the Olympia Academy. The French Impressionists held weekly meetings, outdoor painting sessions and other informal gatherings, all aimed at bolstering their spirits in the face of the regular rejection they received at the hands of the old guard. One study, by psychologist Dean Simonton of the University of California at Davis, examined the interpersonal relations of some 2,000 scientists. The more eminent the scientist, Simonton found, the more interactions he or she had with other eminent

scientists.

MYTH NO. 5 We’re smarter now than ever.

Admittedly, comparing creative output across the centuries is tricky. People of every era believe that theirs is golden.

We are no exception. Sure, we’ve seen tremendous advances in digital technology and the emergence of possible geniuses such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

But the jury is out on our goldenness. In the sciences, momentous leaps, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, have been replaced by impressive but incremental advances — important, yes, but nothing that alters our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Over the past 70 years, the scientific community has published exponentially more research papers, “yet the rate at which truly creative work emerges has remained relatively constant,” historian J. Rogers Hollingsworth writes in the journal Nature. We are producing a greater number of competent scientists, talented ones even, but not necessarily more geniuses. n Weiner is the author, most recently, of “The Geography of Genius: Lessons From from the World’s Most Creative Places.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016

24

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