The Washington Post National Weekly - December 18, 2016

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLDVIEWS

‘Friendship?’ Maybe not.

D AVID F ILIPOV Moscow

president at the time, Boris Yeltsin, the order has gone out to a number of less-prominent Americans, historians and business figures, as well as one arguably unsuccessful National ou don’t have to be a close friend of Basketball Association coach.

President Vladimir Putin to be awarded This past January, David Blatt was fired midRussia’s Order of Friendship, much way through his second season, even though less the globe-trotting head of one of the his Cleveland Cavaliers were in first world’s most powerful corporations. place. What wasn’t good enough for You can be a basketball coach who Cleveland, which went on to win the couldn’t cut it in Cleveland. Or a muNBA title, was perfectly fine for the seum director in Minnesota who’s just Kremlin. Blatt was awarded an Order happy to know that Putin isn’t angry of Friendship in 2014 for his successes at him for holding on to a large collecas the head coach of the Russian nation of Russian paintings. tional team between 2006 and 2012, a So although there might be plenty run that included a gold medal in the of valid concerns about the Russian 2007 European Championship and an entanglements of Rex Tillerson, the Olympic bronze medal in 2012.

ExxonMobil chief executive who has Not only do you not have to be a been tapped by President-elect Donfriend of Putin to get the award, but ald Trump to be the next secretary of you can also be someone worried state, his 2013 Order of Friendship about getting on the Kremlin leader’s award, based on its own merits, isn’t bad side. necessarily one of them.

In 2006, Raymond E. Johnson, Tillerson was given the award after founder of the Museum of Russian signing deals with the state-owned Art in Minneapolis, was awarded an Russian oil company Rosneft, whose Order of Friendship in recognition of chief, Igor Sechin, is seen as a loyal Pu20 years of efforts to enhance cultural tin lieutenant. The partnership began understanding between Russia and a drilling program in the Arctic’s Kara the United States.

Sea, where Exxon made a find, and had POOL PHOTO BY MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/RIA-NOVOSTI, PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE VIA AP Johnson and his wife, Susan, acagreed to explore shale oil areas of In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the Order of cording to the museum’s website, West Siberia and the deep waters of the Friendship to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, seen in 2012. “have acquired what is believed to be Black Sea. But U.S. sanctions against the largest privately owned collection Russia over the annexation of Crimea of Russian Realist paintings outside the borkicked in and the partnership was put on hold. place showing in the International Tchaikovders of the former Soviet Union.”

ExxonMobil spent $650 million to drill an sky Competition. The people most unnerved In a 2012 interview, Johnson recalled exploratory well in the Kara Sea and had gotby that were the organizers of the event, who that his Order of Friendship brought relief ten just a measly sample of oil, said Mikhail never dreamed that a 23-year-old raised in Kilthat Russia didn’t consider him an enemy.

Krutikhin, co-owner of RusEnergy, an indegore, Tex., could swoop into Moscow and walk “What this meant to me was that they were pendent oil and gas consultancy. (The head of away with the prize in an event that was supproud of what we were doing and not angry the Italian oil company Eni also won a 2013 posed to showcase Soviet piano mastery. Cliabout our having a large part of their art hisOrder of Friendship.) burn died at 78 in 2013. tory,” he said. n Note to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Since it was established in 1994 by Russia’s

BY

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who called Putin’s honoring of Tillerson “unnerving”: The Wichita Falls native is not even the first “Texan who conquered Russia” to earn one.

That would be the pianist Van Cliburn, to whom Putin awarded an Order of Friendship in 2004 for, among other things, his 1958 first-

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

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ON THE COVER The Fix says Democrats had the Worst Year in Washington and Donald Trump had the best. Plus, other worst-year picks. Illustrations by ANDI MEIER, for The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Real Obamacare fight is within GOP

BY M IKE D E B ONIS AND K ELSEY S NELL

R

epublicans on Capitol Hill are already laying the groundwork for a rapid repeal of President Obama’s signature health-care law beginning on the first day of the new Congress, before President-elect Donald Trump is even sworn in.

But the urgent efforts to make good on a Republican campaign promise six years in the making obscure major GOP divisions over what exactly to replace Obamacare with and how to go about it, and how long a transition period to allow before the law’s insurance would go away.

Hard-liners are pushing to move as fast as possible, bolstered by a GOP base eager to see lawmakers follow through on years of promises. But key congressional leaders are keenly concerned about potentially throwing millions off their insurance plans and repeating what they have long decried as Democratic missteps eight years ago, sparking a fierce political backlash by moving too far, too fast.

While Trump could sign legislation gutting the Affordable Care Act before the spring bloom, a full replacement could take months, if not years.

“I’d like to do it tomorrow, but reality is another matter sometimes,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will help lead the “repeal and replace” efforts. “We have to live with the real world. And the real world right now is that the Democrats won’t help with anything.”

Hatch and other high-ranking Republican senators are pushing for an extended transition period that could keep large portions of Obamacare in effect until 2019 or beyond, allowing time to carefully craft a replacement and push the final debate past the midterm elections.

Many of them, such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), have been chastened by conversations with insurers and state regulators who

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After years of vowing to repeal it, there is division on how to replace it are warning of chaos in the market for individual insurance if Congress moves rashly.

“I don’t want to leave the 84,000 people in Maine who are buying insurance on the exchange uninsured because, all of a sudden, two-thirds of them who have subsidies have lost that subsidy,” Collins said.

But those Republicans are clashing with GOP colleagues — many of them sent to Congress in the midterm, anti-Obama waves of 2010 and 2014 — who see little reason to dawdle.

“The history of this place is, the longer it takes, the more exponentially the probability grows that it’ll never get done,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), elected recently as the new chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. “Republicans have been

saying they have a replacement plan for over two years, so why do we need three years?”

Part of the problem is that Republicans have never been able to agree on a replacement plan, despite railing against Obamacare for nearly eight years now. Their foot-dragging is a function of internal divisions and the political peril of floating a detailed alternative that would be closely evaluated for costs and benefits. Trump has also been vague, promising a “terrific” replacement that will provide “great health care at a fraction of the cost.”

The current battle centers on when exactly to schedule Obamacare’s sunset. But other fights loom — over what precisely a replacement plan should look like, whether Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will continue, whether

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has announced plans to put an Obamacare repeal on the Senate floor Jan. 3. But decisions loom on an end date and efforts to stabilize insurance markets.

lawmakers should also now tackle the future of Medicare and how Congress should assist insurers during the transition.

The battle lines, however, are familiar, with “establishment” Republicans on one side and conservative insurgents, mainly in the House, on the other. Those dynamics pushed GOP leaders into increasingly dramatic confrontations with Obama and last year helped force House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to retire.

Come Jan. 20, Obama will no longer serve as a foil for Republicans, and while Senate Democrats could block parts of a health-care overhaul, the real fight will occur inside the GOP. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has announced plans to put an Obamacare repeal on the Senate floor come Jan. 3.

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POLITICS But that will only set the stage for a future repeal bill that will have to tackle major decisions such as a sunset date and interim measures to stabilize insurance markets.

So far, Trump and key GOP leaders on Capitol Hill have shied away from taking firm positions on repeal and replace, but they have done little to tamp down the expectations of conservatives expecting a swift and wholesale substitute.

“We’re going to repeal Obamacare lock, stock and barrel,” Vice President-elect Mike Pence told donors to the conservative Heritage Foundation recently. “The number one priority of this administration is to keep that promise to the American people.”

Hard-liners on Capitol Hill see Pence and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, as allies in their push for quick and decisive action. Pence called on Congress to pass a repeal bill “with all deliberate speed” but pledged only to then “set into motion a process to replace it.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said this month that Republicans would move “as well and as fast as we can but make sure that the transition does not pull the rug out from under people.”

Transition spokesman Sean Spicer said that an Obamacare replacement strategy has been part of discussions Trump and Pence are having with top congressional leaders and that the talks are ongoing.

“The idea is to really figure out the sequencing on both the repeal and the replace,” he said.

Conservative activists who pushed a take-no-prisoners approach toward the Obama administration say their patience is limited.

“When Republicans have the House, the Senate and the White House, you don’t wait,” said Adam Brandon, president and chief executive of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group. “I’m a Cleveland Indians fan. I only get a shot at a World Series every couple decades. When you have a shot to do it, you do it. That’s it.”

Democrats and many healthcare experts are warning that a swift repeal could lead insurers to stop selling policies to individuals on federally mandated exchanges.

More than 12 million Americans are covered under those policies.

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I’d like to do it tomorrow, but reality is another matter sometimes. We have to live with the real world.”

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), on repealing the Affordable Care Act

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell briefed Senate Democrats the other week on the expected unraveling of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, according to people familiar with her remarks inside the closed-door meeting.

“Delayed replacement is a situation where it is basically repeal and chaos in terms of what will ensue, because of the uncertainty that will get presented to insurers, providers, consumers and states,” Burwell told reporters after the meeting.

Republicans want to end Obamacare’s system of penalties and subsidies. But many — including Trump — want to continue to ban insurers from denying coverage or sharply increasing rates for the sick.

Experts warn that “repeal and delay” under those conditions would prompt insurers to flee the individual market. Linda J. Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said insurers could face as much as $3 billion in losses if healthy individuals leave the market once the subsidies and penalties are eliminated.

“That $3 billion is the tip of the

iceberg,” Blumberg said. “With all of these changes and the uncertainty, it is hard to predict how bad the risk is going to get.”

Keeping insurers in the market during the transition could require Congress to step in with bailout payments, something that would be deeply unpopular among conservative lawmakers.

“The insurance industry should understand that there’s a new sheriff in town,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a Freedom Caucus member. “They signed up for Obamacare, and if they want to make a profit, they’re going to have to figure out how to make a profit in a free-market insurance industry.”

The strategy of repealing Obamacare without first replacing it reflects not only the wishes of the GOP base but also Senate arithmetic.

There will be a slim 52-to-48 Republican majority come January, and while Republicans can gut Obamacare with a simple majority using arcane budget rules, passing a complete replacement will require 60 votes.

Only by dismantling Obamacare first, Republicans say, will

Sen. Orrin Hatch (RUtah), left, meets with secretary of health and human services nominee Rep. Tom Price (RGa.) on Dec. 8. Hatch and other Republican senators are pushing for an extended transition period that could keep large portions of Obamacare in effect until 2019 or beyond.

KLMNO WEEKLY

they have a chance to persuade enough Democrats to support a replacement plan — and Democrats have already signaled that they will not do so.

“We all know we have to repeal it to get them to even settle down and work with us at all,” Hatch said.

Incoming Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), however, has rejected that strategy. “We’re not going to do a replacement. If they repeal without a replacement, they will own it,” he told The Washington Post recently.

But the Republican base, prodded by conservative media outlets and well-organized activist groups, has been loath to accept Democratic obstruction as an excuse for inaction.

One prominent activist, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, suggested that Trump could goose the repealand-replace efforts by reversing an administrative ruling that gave financial assistance to 11,000 congressional members and staff who were forced onto the Obamacare exchanges under a compromise included in the original law.

“I don’t think anyone thinks that you’re going to flip a switch . . . but the replacement for it needs to happen quickly,” she said.

“We want it done as quickly as it possibly can be done.”

Brandon was even blunter: “This is going to be a hard thing for Republicans, but tough [cookies],” he said. “They’re going to have to push this through using parliamentary maneuvers, and guess what? It’s hard.

“The political risk in doing nothing is why you got Donald Trump in the first place,” he added.

“The old excuses of having divided government, they’re gone.”

A few strident Obamacare critics are urging activists to soften a bit. “They have to look at the complexity of the problem here, and hopefully they’ll recognize that it’s not quite so simple,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was first elected in the 2010 tea party wave.

But many others are not.

“Literally every Republican member has made this part of their platform in running for Congress,” said Rep. Mark Walker (N.C.), a first-termer who will chair the conservative Republican Study Committee next year.

“We’ve got to act on it.” n

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POLITICS

Oil, gas allies amass power in D.C.

BY J ULIET E ILPERIN, S TEVEN M UFSON AND P HILIP R UCKER

A

fter eight years of being banished and sometimes vilified by the Obama administration, the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a remarkable resurgence as its executives and lobbyists shape Presidentelect Donald Trump’s policy agenda and staff his administration.

The oil, gas and coal industries are amassing power throughout Washington — from Foggy Bottom, where ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson is Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, to domestic regulatory agencies including the departments of Energy and Interior as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It feels like the grizzly bear in ‘The Revenant’ has been suddenly pulled off our chest,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.

The energy sector is no stranger to political influence. The oil industry once claimed a president as its own: George H.W. Bush, who co-founded and ran Zapata Oil before becoming the nation’s 41st commander in chief.

But the industry’s breathtaking ascension to power during the first month of Trump’s transition is palpably different — and has alarmed environmentalists, who fear the new administration will undo what they see as a decade of progress in combating climate change.

“I think there’s a level to which the puppeteers have become the actors, a change unprecedented in its breadth,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on automobile fuel efficiency. “The ship of state is about to be turned into the Exxon Valdez.”

A slew of Obama administration policies on fossil fuels are expected to be reversed after Trump is sworn into office on Jan. 20. Eliminating these regulations — which limit carbon emissions on power plants and restrict

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Fossil fuels industry is shaping Trump’s Cabinet and his policies, which alarms environmentalists oil, gas and coal extraction — would represent major gains for the industry.

At a rally Tuesday night in West Allis, Wis., Trump vowed to “eliminate all wasteful job-killing regulations. On energy, we will cancel the restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean beautiful coal.”

Oil and gas favorites have been nominated to lead the Cabinet agencies that regulate the industry: former Texas governor Rick Perry as energy secretary, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator and Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) as interior secretary.

Energy executives are advising Trump in more informal ways, including Harold Hamm, a billionaire who heads the major oil producer Continental Resources, and Carl Icahn, a billionaire investor who owns a pair of oil refineries. Both men are friends of Trump’s and helped him devise energy and economic policies during the campaign.

Other industry officials and allies, who have been sidelined and

stigmatized during the Obama years, are working on Trump’s transition team to shape the next administration’s agenda and look to enjoy ready access to the Republican White House.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats plan to use whatever power they have in the minority of both chambers to serve as an aggressive check on the executive branch’s power, especially on energy and environmental policies.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Trump “is rigging the Cabinet top to bottom with allies of the oil industry.”

“It’s pretty clear that the bottom line of oil companies is going to take precedence over clean air and water protections for American families,” Schumer said in an email. “We’re going to fight hard to make sure that the Senate is a bulwark against those who want to undo environmental protections next year.”

Trump transition officials did not respond to several requests for comment.

While Trump’s energy and environment picks have already come

An oil well near Midland, Tex. The energy industry will seek “a big change” in federal policies in 2017.

under sharp criticism from the left, Ben Bulis, president of the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, said he was hopeful Zinke would compromise when it comes to wildlife protection.

“He’s going to come with a balanced approach to it,” Bulis said.

“As an industry, we’re not opposed to responsible oil and gas development.”

Registered lobbyists are banned from serving on Trump’s transition team, but some energy lobbyists are serving as informal liaisons between transition staffers and the industry.

For instance, Michael McKenna — a lobbyist who represents the utility giant Southern Co. — recently accompanied the head of Trump’s Energy Department transition team, Thomas Pyle, to an official meeting on the nation’s security grid with representatives from President Obama’s Energy Department and utility executives.

McKenna, who had to quit Trump’s transition team because he did not want to relinquish his lobbying work, said he made a brief appearance at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, where the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council was meeting Nov. 29, to introduce Pyle to Southern’s chief executive, Thomas A. Fanning. After doing so, he left, he said.

Pyle is not a paid lobbyist, but he once was one for Koch Industries, the oil and gas company owned by Charles and David Koch, who have funded a wide array of libertarian groups and think tanks. Pyle also has worked for American Energy Alliance and its sister group, the Institute for Energy Research, both with strong ties to the oil industry.

Paul Bledsoe, an energy consultant who served as a climate change adviser in the Clinton White House, said the permeation of “Big Oil” in the emerging Trump administration reflects the president-elect’s vision of geopolitics.

“Trump seems to view fossil fuels as at the center of U.S. economic power at home and abroad, providing cheap energy for the dream of increased domestic

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POLITICS manufacturing and also lucrative export markets for U.S. oil, natural gas and coal,” Bledsoe said. “Overseas, he appears stuck in a ’70s-era worldview of oil and gas power plays, where flows of energy are the key to global geopolitics — perhaps because Russia and other traditional foes are so dependent on oil and gas revenues.”

Trump’s posture represents a turnabout from the Obama years, when fossil fuel industries and the White House navigated tense relations.

While it is not clear whether these policies can revive the sagging U.S. industry, which faces significant global market pressures, it could boost domestic energy production broadly and translate into higher carbon emissions.

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it was not just a matter of policy. It was, he said in his own energy-centric state of the union talk in January, because the Obama administration “continues to adhere to last century’s thinking that pits increased energy production against climate goals.” Obama, he said, had a “tendency to place ideology over experience.”

The energy industry has ambitious plans to overhaul energy and environmental policies almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration.

Pyle mapped out an agenda that he described as “a big change” in a Nov. 15 email to supporters, which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. In it, Pyle predicted that the Trump administration would withdraw from or stop participating in the Paris climate accord, lease more federal lands for drilling, lift the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands, push a “reset” button on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and give states greater say in managing federal lands.

Pyle’s note also said the new administration would stop using the “social cost of carbon,” a method the EPA uses in calculating the cost and benefits of climate change. It added that Trump’s government would relitigate the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide was a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA was obligated to regulate it as a result. n

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THE DAILY 202

Common inspiration in Trump’s Cabinet: Ayn Rand BY

J AMES H OHMANN

D

onald Trump decided to risk a confirmation fight, officially nominating ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state this past week. Tillerson and Trump had no previous relationship, but the Texas oilman and the New York developer hit it off when they met face to face.

One of the things that they have in common is their shared affection for the works of Ayn Rand, the libertarian heroine who celebrated laissez-faire capitalism.

The president-elect said this spring that he’s a fan of Rand and identifies with Howard Roark, the main character in “The Fountainhead.” Roark, played by Gary Cooper in the film adaptation, is an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything,” Trump told Kirsten Powers for a piece in USA Today.

Tillerson prefers “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s novel about John Galt secretly organizing a strike of the creative class to hasten the collapse of the bureaucratic society. The CEO listed it as his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine, according to biographer Steve Coll.

This has officially become a trend. Trump is turning not just to billionaires but also to Randians to fill the Cabinet.

Andrew Puzder, tapped by Trump to be secretary of labor, is an avid and outspoken fan of Rand’s books. One profiler asked what Puzder does in his free time, and a friend replied that he reads Ayn Rand. He is the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which is owned by Roark Capital Group, a private equity fund named after Howard Roark. Puzder, who opposes increases in the minimum

wage and wants to automate fastfood jobs, was quoted just last month saying that he encouraged his six children to read “Fountainhead” first and “Atlas Shrugged” later.

Mike Pompeo, who will have the job of directing the CIA for Trump, has said that Rand’s works inspired him. “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ and it really had an impact on me,” the Kansas congress-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Novelist Ayn Rand advocated the ideology of “objectivism.”

man told Human Events in 2011.

Trump has been consulting several other Rand followers as he fills out his Cabinet. John A. Allison IV, for example, met with Trump for about 90 minutes recently. “As chief executive of BB&T Corp., he distributed copies of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to senior officers and influenced BB&T’s charitable arm to fund classes about the moral foundations of capitalism at a number of colleges,” the Wall Street Journal noted in a piece about him. “Mr. Allison’s worldview was shaped . . . at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill [where he] stumbled across a collection of essays by Ms. Rand.”

Ayn Rand was perhaps the leading literary voice in 20thcentury America for the notion that, in society, there are makers and takers, and the takers are parasitic moochers who get in the way of the morally superior innovators. Her books portray the federal government as evil, trying to

stop hard-working men from accumulating the wealth they deserve. The author was an outspoken atheist. Rand’s explanation of “objectivism,” as she called her ideology, is that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”

For many Republican elites, Rand is someone whose books they got excited about one summer in high school or college but then grew out of once exposed to more sophisticated intellectual influences and/or tried to reconcile the books with precepts of the Christian faith.

The fact that all of these men are such fans of works celebrating individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was an outspoken Rand booster but has distanced himself. “It’s an atheist philosophy,” Ryan told National Review in 2012. “It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”

An interesting wrinkle: Stephen K. Bannon, who will be Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, has been sharply critical of Rand. He outlined his worldview in a 2014 speech delivered by Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican. In it, he said there are two strands of capitalism that he finds disturbing.

“One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia,” he said, according to a BuzzFeed transcript. “The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. . . . It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost.” n

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NATION

A dry run for Mars exploration BY

S ARAH K APLAN

The Martian landscape is otherworldly. The ground is twisted into ropelike coils, rippling waves and jagged spikes; sulfurous gases billow from vents in the ground, bits of volcanic glass glitter in faint sunlight that filters through the undulating fog.

Two astronauts clamber across the tortured terrain, encumbered by the heavy scientific instruments they carry on their backs and in their hands. They are looking for rocks that could tell us whether life ever existed on Mars.

At makeshift mission control inside a converted conference room several miles away, Darlene Lim surveys video from the scene.

The NASA geobiologist has been planning this mission for months.

She listens attentively to the chatter between the roving astronauts and their counterparts at “base camp” and watches as one of the scientists in the field points a handheld spectrometer at a rock and scans it, Star Trek-style. Data on the rock’s composition starts streaming onto Lim’s computer screen.

“This is super awesome,” Lim murmurs under her breath. Remembering a reporter is listening over the phone, she laughs at herself. “It is!”

This landscape, of course, is not actually Mars, and the people exploring it aren’t really astronauts.

But the expedition to the Mauna Ulu volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii is a dry run for the distant day when NASA intends to send a real crewed mission to the Red Planet.

Though NASA has spent billions of dollars and countless hours trying to get people into space, what they actually do up there can be an afterthought. Lim wants to change that.

“You’re trying to keep people alive and trying to get them beyond low Earth orbit . . . there are experiments that are done, but the science isn’t really baked in,” Lim said. “But when we head out to somewhere like Mars, and we’re going to be there for a while . . . we’re going to have to look at

ZENA CARDMAN

A Hawaiian volcano makes a good setting to rehearse for a crewed mission to the Red Planet designing these missions with an inherent component to science.”

With the exception of space suits — and the thin, oxygen-less atmosphere that necessitates them — it is as high-fidelity a mission to Mars as Lim can muster. The Hawaiian mountainside is similar to the landscape scientists think existed on Mars billions of years ago, when the atmosphere was thicker and the planet seethed with volcanic activity. The “astronauts” tasked with collecting rock samples use instruments that are being developed for real space missions; one heavy backpack contains a spectrometer that is destined to fly to the moon. Their time in the field is limited to the length of an average astronaut excursion outside the spacecraft: about four hours per day. Their communications to “mission control” (the conference room where Lim and her colleagues are set up)

are subject to a five- to 15-minute delay that mimics the actual signal latency between Earth and Mars.

And the science is real. Unlike many other NASA analog missions, which test gear and operations design on safe, familiar terrain, Lim and her team are exploring a site they have never seen.

They are collecting rocks not for practice, but for research — the samples will be studied to understand the relationship between rock types and the microbes that live in them. Some day, the scientists hope their findings will help guide the search for past or present Martian life.

NASA has been trudging toward its goal of launching a human Mars mission in the 2030s — though at the program’s current pace, it’s unlikely to meet that deadline. About six weeks before the mission’s trip to Hawaii, SpaceX founder Elon Musk an-

“Astronauts” hike up the side of the Mauna Ulu volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii during a simulated mission to Mars. The mission involves collecting rocks for research and prioritizing them for samples.

nounced his conceptual plans for a rocket and spacecraft that would help humans colonize the Red Planet. Discussing the news at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., engineer Amanda Cook shook her head.

“The rocket’s the easy part,” she said. “It’s people who really throw a monkey wrench into things.”

This is the guiding principle for the Hawaiian mission, called BASALT, which stands for Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains and is also the name of a kind of volcanic rock. Robots, satellites and space telescopes have produced pioneering, Nobel Prize-winning science — and they don’t require food, oxygen or a return trip home. If NASA is going to put humans on Mars, it needs to be certain the discoveries made are worth the expense and risk of sending them there.

During the Apollo program, science goals were secondary to the sheer technical challenge of getting people to the moon, and most astronauts had backgrounds in the military rather than research.

Though the astronauts got some training in geology, and landing sites were selected according to pre-mission surveys of the moon’s surface, the collection of rock samples was relatively haphazard.

Subsequent research on board the International Space Station has yielded mostly minor discoveries, and it is conducted in the relative security of low Earth orbit, where every detail can be monitored by principal investigators on Earth.

On Mars, the risks are more immense, and help from home is dependent on a weak and sometimes erratic connection with mission control. That’s why BASALT takes place in an environment known to the researchers mostly through satellite images. Lim wants to make sure that the mission leaves room for the unknown.

“NASA has a lot of legacy of automation,” she said. The space agency understandably prefers to minimize the potential for the unpredictable, given that lives are on the line. “But we’re trying to figure out how to not stamp the humanity from human exploration.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

The case for taxing sugar, not soda Different taxation plan would better reduce intake, report says

BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

S

oda taxes have become a weapon of choice among public-health advocates: In the past year alone, six U.S. cities and counties have begun targeting sugar intake by taxing sugary beverages.

But while there’s evidence that these measures reduce soda consumption, economists say there is a very simple way to more effectively reduce sugar and sweetener intake. In a nutshell, don’t tax the soda — tax the sugar it contains.

According to a new research report by the Urban Institute, such an approach would reduce both sugar consumption and consumer burden more than the volume taxes — which tax beverages by the fluid ounce — that are favored by cities and counties across the United States. What’s more, they might also encourage manufacturers to reformulate some high-sugar beverages.

“The whole point is this: If you’re going to have taxes on soda, and if those taxes are motivated by sugar, then the tax should be on the amount of sugar,” said Donald Marron, who directs economic policy initiatives at the Urban Institute.

Marron and his colleagues at the Urban Institute modeled several soda tax schemes to reach those conclusions. For starters, they looked at volume taxes. Then they modeled several schemes that emphasize sugar content, such as a volume tax that applies only to very sugary beverages and a tax that varies proportionately with sugar content.

Britain uses a version of that former model, levying one rate on drinks with more than 5 grams of sugar per 100 milliliters, and a second, higher rate on drinks with 8 grams of sugar or more.

South Africa recently adopted the proportionate approach, taxing drinks at roughly 2.29 cents per gram of added sugar.

In the United States, seven cities and one county have passed soda taxes: Philadelphia; San Francisco; Cook County, Ill. (which includes Chicago); Boul-

How much sugar is in that drink?

Average sugar content per 8-ounce serving across seven drink categories.

ISTOCKPHOTO

Regular soda 29 grams Fruit drinks 22 grams Energy drinks 19 grams Bottled coffee 16 grams

Bottled tea 15 grams Sports drinks 12 grams Flavored water 10 grams

Building a better soda tax The predicted fall in sugar consumption under five different tax schemes, normalized by tax revenue. U.S. soda taxes currently tax by volume.

Sales 20% Volume 22% Sugar content 24%

Two-tier 24% One-tier 25%

Source: The Urban Institute

der, Colo.; and Berkeley, Oakland and Albany, Calif. All tax 1 cent per ounce, or 12 cents on a traditional soda can, with the exception of Philadelphia and Boulder.

Philadelphia’s rate is 1.5 cents per ounce, or 18 cents per can; Boulder’s is 2 cents per ounce, or roughly a quarter per can.

Assuming that manufacturers and distributors pass those costs on to consumers — which is a big assumption — Marron found that all versions of the soda tax result in less soda consumption. When it comes to drinking less sugar, on the other hand, tax schemes that penalize high-sugar drinks have

the biggest effect.

When normalized by the amount of taxes paid, a “one-tier tax,” which taxes only beverages that cross a certain sugar threshold, reduces sugar consumption by 25 percent. A straight volume tax, on the other hand, reduces sugar intake by only 22 percent.

Of course, sugar reduction is not the only goal of soda taxes — which may explain why the volume tax persists. Soda taxes are also major moneymakers for the localities that pass them. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, estimates that

Berkeley sees $1.5 million in extra soda tax revenue each year, and that Philadelphia will see more than $90 million. Marron’s model found that restricting soda taxes to only the most sugary beverages, as under the “one-tier” plan, would cut sharply into tax revenue.

That’s less money for the programs that soda taxes benefit; it’s also less money to cover the administrative costs of the tax itself.

In other words, volume taxes might not be the most efficient or effective way to reduce sugar consumption — but on the local level, they’re the most realistic.

“Taxing the caloric sweetener, the ingredient of concern, is a policy approach that makes sense,” said Jim O’Hara, the director of health promotion policy at CSPI. “That’s just easier, from an administrative point of view, as a federal-level initiative.”

Such an initiative is, however, a long way away — at least if recent experience is any indication. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) has twice proposed a soda tax that would collect 1 cent per teaspoon of sugar in sodas and sugary beverages, a model similar to South Africa’s. Despite the endorsements of organizations such as CSPI, DeLauro’s bill never advanced out of committee. It was widely criticized by the American Beverage Association and the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

In the absence of a measure such as DeLauro’s, public health advocates will settle for what they can get. No sooner had Marron’s report come out than the American Heart Association issued a statement urging local governments to study its conclusions.

“As cities and states focus on improving health, they can encourage healthier choices by placing greater taxes on high-sugar beverages and lower taxes on lower-sugar beverages,” American Heart Association chief executive Nancy Brown wrote. But also, “We will continue to support local governments that take a more uniform volume approach.” n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Israel wants mosques to turn it down

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Jerusalem

W

hen the call to prayer begins in the Palestinian neighborhoods here, the Muslim faithful hear a song beautiful and sublime. Hour by hour, five times a day, it is the soundtrack of their lives. And it stirs deep emotions.

Across the walls, across the lines that separate Arabs from Jews, the Muslims’ call to prayer means something very different.

The Jews hear noise, they say.

And worse.

During periods of heightened violence, when the Jews who live near Palestinians hear the Arabs proclaim that “God is great!” in a broadcast that travels far from the mosque’s loudspeakers, they say they do not think of God. They hear a threat.

Israeli lawmakers are pushing legislation to ban mosques in Israel and East Jerusalem from using loudspeakers to issue the call to prayer, especially in the early morning, when the summons begins as early as 4. The bill is being debated, and its sponsors hope to pass it in coming weeks.

One might think that after centuries of Jews and Muslims living side by side, in war and peace, these issues would be settled — but that would be naive.

The bill’s proponents describe the “muezzin law” as necessary, not to clip religious freedom but to muzzle excessive noise. The sponsors say their goal is to safeguard quality of life.

As might be expected, a proposed ban on amplified calls to prayer has touched a raw nerve.

The Muslims say their sacred tradition cannot be compared to a rowdy party to be shut down by police.

In Pisgat Zeev, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, Yael Antebi lives in a sunny apartment with a terrace overlooking a dry desert riverbed. In the distance is a refugee camp for Palestinians in Shuafat, which today does not resemble the “camp” it was generations ago but rather a city with

THOMAS COEX/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Muslims hear the sublime in the call to prayer.

Jews say they hear noise, especially at 4 a.m. high-rise apartments, a mall and narrow, twisting streets.

“In tense times, the call feels threatening,” said Antebi, who sits on the Jerusalem city council and is a deputy mayor.

To her visiting grandchildren, who do not live near Arab villages, “the sound is frightening.”

Antebi said the mosques crank up the volume during conflicts.

The prayer calls were especially loud in the summer of 2014, during the Gaza war.

“It’s like they’re trying to get inside your head,” she said.

Motti Yogev, a member of parliament from the pro-settler Jewish Home party, introduced the bill after hearing from frustrated Jewish residents who live in mixed cities of Arabs and Jews in Lod, Acre, Haifa, Ramle and Jerusalem.

“People came to me to complain about the sound from the muezzin all day, but especially in

the early morning,” he said. “The mosques would put their speakers right up near the homes of Jewish people and wake them up.”

He said some of those grumbling were Muslims, too. Arabs make up about 20 percent of the Israeli population, and most are Muslim.

Yogev said that years ago when there were no public-address systems or electricity, Muslims would knock on doors to let people know it was time for prayer. Or they would sing from the minaret without amplification. That was old-school.

“Now they can put it on the phone or an alarm clock,” he said.

“They don’t need to broadcast it on speakers.”

In the Palestinian neighborhoods, residents see the threats, too. In Shuafat, locals said the muezzin bill is nothing more than power politics, the strong against the weak.

An Israeli flag hangs in Jerusalem’s Old City near a mosque with a loudspeaker on a minaret. Israeli lawmakers are pushing to ban mosques from using loudspeakers to issue the call to prayer, especially in the early morning.

“This call doesn’t hurt anybody,” said Kamal Abdul Khader, a former boxer who works as a bus dispatcher in Shuafat.

“You know what the call is? The call is to come and pray to God,” he said. “The Jews don’t want to hear this? Tell me why.”

Told it wakes people up, Khader laughed and pointed at the chaotic street scene with its cacophony of honking horns, cellphone rings and pop music blasting from shops.

“Listen, this is Jerusalem. We Muslims don’t complain when the Christians ring their church bells.

We don’t complain about the Jews with their ram horns. This is religion,” he said. “No one should interfere.”

Men attending Shuafat’s main mosque agreed. One recalled that he had heard the muezzin bill was changed to protect Jewish customs. In the deeply Orthodox communities of Israel, sirens often wail on Friday afternoons to mark the beginning of the Sabbath. Sometimes a trumpet or ram’s horn is sounded.

After the bill was first introduced, it was criticized by ultraOrthodox Jewish lawmakers worried that it could apply to the customs of their constituents.

Proponents agreed to amend the bill to protect the Sabbath sirens.

The bill has broad support in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. “I cannot tell you how many times people of all faiths are bothered by this,” Netanyahu said recently.

The prime minister pointed to ordinances in Europe and the Middle East that control the volume or hours of the muezzin’s call.

“Israel is committed to freedom of religion, but it must also protect citizens from the noise,” he said.

Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, hosted a meeting of Muslim and Jewish clerics last month to seek a middle way, without a new law.

“I am the son of someone who translated the Koran and observed the Jewish commandments, and I recognize the need to tread a fine line,” he said. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Rio hoped for a boom. It got a crisis.

D OM P HILLIPS Rio de Janeiro BY

T

hree months after its successful staging of the Summer Olympics, Brazil’s cultural hub should be riding high. Instead it is a financial, political, crime-ridden mess.

The Rio de Janeiro state government is broke, struggling to pay salaries. This month, riot police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and percussion grenades at public- sector workers protesting a proposed austerity package.

Among the protesters: police, firefighters and teachers. Some of the protesters hurled rocks and fireworks back at the riot police.

Two former governors have been arrested, one accused of vote-buying, the other of running a vast corruption ring. Prosecutors are investigating billions of dollars in state tax exemptions that benefited luxury jewelers, construction companies and even brothels. And violent crime continues to surge, along with allegations of execution-style mass killings by overtaxed police.

Rather than the bright, postOlympic future they were promised, many Cariocas — as Rio’s citizens are known — fear the city is doubling down on the chaos and corruption of its past.

“It’s in the worst condition in 20 years,” said Ignacio Cano, a professor of sociology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “You have an economic crisis, a political crisis, a moral crisis. There is a general perception of a very dark time.”

Financial problems are at the core of the state’s difficulties. In June, just weeks before the Olympics, officials declared a state of fiscal “public calamity.” Brazil’s federal government stepped in with an $870 million bailout, but that money has gone — and with it the Olympic cheer that briefly uplifted the city.

Rio’s governor, Luiz de Souza, has blamed the state’s money woes on a drop in oil-tax revenue because of the fall in petroleum prices and a slowdown at the state-run oil company, Petrobras. The com-

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Three months after the Olympics, big problems are unresolved and public workers are protesting pany, which is based in Rio, has been roiled by an enormous graft scandal.

Faced with a $5 billion deficit and a government that has more retired than active employees, de Souza, known as “Pezão,” or “Big Foot,” is pushing austerity measures that include cutting official spending and increasing employees’ pension contributions.

The employees say corruption and mismanagement caused the crisis, and they have been protesting vociferously outside Rio’s state parliament as it debates “the package of evils.”

Jerson Carneiro, a professor of administrative law and management at Rio’s Ibmec business school, blames the problems on the way Rio has always been run — a system he says is based on cozy ties among business leaders, politicians and government officials, rewarding corruption and breeding inefficiency.

“It’s crony capitalism,” Carneiro said. “If the state was a company, it would be in bankruptcy proceedings.”

To many, the embodiment of that system is former governor Sérgio Cabral. In 2012, photos were published showing him and other government officials, some wearing napkins on their heads, partying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris three years earlier with an influential Brazilian businessman. When street protests swept Brazil in 2013, a protest camp was set up near Cabral’s apartment in Rio’s affluent Leblon neighborhood.

On Nov. 16, former governor Anthony Garotinho — who had published those photos of Cabral on his blog — was arrested on vote-buying allegations. Next morning, Cabral was arrested with 10 others, accused of heading a group that pocketed $66 million in bribes on state government contracts — including for the renovation of Rio’s Maracana Stadium, where the 2014 World Cup final and Olympic opening and closing ceremonies were held.

Demonstrators wearing napkins on their heads and waving champagne bottles cheered as Cabral was driven through the

A protester faces down riot police during a demonstration by public-sector workers in Rio against austerity proposals. The police fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets.

gates of Rio’s Bangu prison.

Prosecutors say that during Cabral’s tenure, from 2007 through 2014, he and his wife, Adriana Ancelmo, a lawyer who also is now in jail, spent millions on items including a luxury boat, art works and fine jewelry. That some of the money allegedly came from bribes related to the Maracana Stadium renovation has merely confirmed the skepticism of many Cariocas.

To further sour the postOlympic mood, it has emerged this year that under Cabral and “Big Foot” (formerly Cabral’s vice governor), the Rio government gave billions of dollars in tax exemptions to scores of companies — including jewelry companies that made personal deliveries to the Cabrals and construction companies accused of paying bribes.

According to the state’s Court of Accounts, jewelry firms alone saved $68 million by way of tax breaks from 2008 through 2013.

Not all the tax breaks were illicit. Brazilian states use them to compete with each other to encourage industries to move to their areas; Nissan, for example, built a car factory in Rio in 2014 after it got an exemption. A spokesman for the Rio government, commenting anonymously in accordance with internal regulations, said that the exemptions helped many sectors and that tax revenue from the jewelry industry rose as smaller companies operating informally went legal.

Other exemptions are harder to justify, such as those given to some “termas,” or spas; in Rio, these establishments are thinly disguised brothels.

Vinicius Cavalleiro, a state prosecutor in Rio investigating as much as $55 billion worth of exemptions granted from 2007 to 2015, described the practice as “a big cause of the state’s fiscal imbalance.” In October, a judge prohibited the state from granting further tax breaks.

“The perception was that things were getting better,” said Cano, the sociologist. “Now the perception is everything is deteriorating.” n

T H E W O RS T Y E AR I N W A S H I N G T ON

By many accounts, 2016 has been one of the worst years in history. “One calamity after another,” John Oliver labeled it, citing Syria, Zika and celebrity deaths. Over at Slate, historians urged us to look at 2016 in context — at least it wasn’t 72,000 B.C., when humans came close to extinction. But for some people, 2016 was truly a disaster. And our tradition at The Washington Post is to recognize how bad they had it.

STORIES BY CHRIS CILLIZZA

K

nowing what happened, it’s a little hard to recall how confident Democrats were that 2016 would have a happy ending.

Party leaders thought they couldn’t have hand-picked a more desirable opponent than Donald Trump. They thought he would be such a drag on the GOP that, along with winning the presidency, Democrats might be able to win back the Senate and the House, a feat thought impossible in the pre-Trump era. “I think we could, today, win everything. Bless his heart. Donald Trump is the gift that keeps giving to us,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in June. And with the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in February, Democrats began to imagine the potential of a liberal Supreme Court. “It would enable a revival of a dramatically different role for the court: as an institution that drives social change instead of halting it,” Linda Hirshman wrote in an opinion essay for The Washington Post.

But, of course, 2016 didn’t work out that way. Now the Democrats may be effectively locked out of power in all three branches of government for years. At the state level, after last month’s elections, they’ll control only 16 governorships and 13 legislatures.

This year, punctuated by Hillary Clinton’s loss, exposed the remarkably shallow depth of the Democratic bench. The size of the Republican primary field — for which the GOP was relentlessly mocked — was also a sign of the party’s health up and down the ballot. Democrats simply didn’t have the political talent to put forward 17 candidates (or even seven). That’s partly because there’s been limited opportunity to move up in the leadership ranks. Pelosi (Calif.) and Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and James E. Clyburn (S.C.) have had a death grip on the party’s top congressional slots for a very long time. It’s also partly because the Democratic farm system is hurting.

Clinton’s formidable political machine scared off most of what little competition she had, and the party lined up behind her. Democratic insiders touted her status as the lone serious contender as a virtue. It demonstrated unity, they said, and she was by far their best candidate anyway, they argued.

Yes, she had one of the most impressive résumés of her generation. She was one of the party’s top fundraisers. And she knew practically every Democratic activist and donor in the country by their first names. But she was also a deeply flawed candidate who was the definition of “the establishment,” making her a remarkably poor fit in a year when

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

13

COVER STORY anti-establishment sentiment was running so high. That should have been clear when Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), a self-avowed democratic socialist, came from nowhere to make the primary a real race and to force the start of a conversation about what sort of party the Democrats should be. It should have been doubly clear when Trump, with no government service, emerged as the GOP nominee.

And yet Clinton ran on her experience, and as close to President Obama and his record as possible. “America is stronger because of President Obama’s leadership, and I am better because of his friendship,” she said when accepting the party’s nomination. “. . . I don’t think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes.”

Obama, for his part, stumped enthusiastically for Clinton during the general-election campaign.

But for all their attempts to peacefully pass the baton, the Democrats were hit with one unexpected event after another. Email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and top party operatives — hacks that U.S. intelligence attributed to Russia — forced Democrats on their back foot over and over again. Careful planning for the party’s convention was thrown into disarray when, the day before it began, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned amid outrage over hacked emails showing she had several fingers on the scale for Clinton in the primaries.

It didn’t help that in the final days of the race, FBI Director James B. Comey resurrected the debate over the private email server Clinton had used while secretary of state. Whatever his motives, Comey reinforced points Trump had been hammering all year: The Clintons thought they were above the rules and a cloud of scandal always trailed them.

In the end, Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.7 million votes, or 2 percent of all ballots cast. But she couldn’t revive the Obama coalition in key states. And she couldn’t sway the people who wanted the radical change embodied by Trump. What Democrats expected to be the historic election of the first female president was instead a devastating loss — for Clinton, Obama and their political vision. That reversal of fortune was palpable in the days after the election as Democrats reeled from a knockout blow that they never even saw coming.

As Obama’s term winds down, his popularity remains relatively high, but his legacy is very much in question. Trump has talked about repealing large parts of the Affordable Care Act and rolling back executive orders in areas such as immigration and environmental regulation. The Cabinet the president-elect has chosen is among the most conservative in recent memory.

Meanwhile, Merrick Garland, Obama’s Supreme Court pick — who, thanks to GOP obstruction, has been in limbo since March — is unlikely to ever take a seat on the nation’s highest court. Instead, Democrats are girding for Trump’s nominees and an onslaught of conservative judicial challenges. Ohio legislators this month offered a taste of what’s to come with their “heartbeat” bill, which aimed to prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected. (Typically around six weeks, before most women even know they’re pregnant.) Gov. John Kasich vetoed the bill but approved a 20-week ban.

The state of the Democratic Party was perhaps best illustrated by the desperate hope generated recently by Biden’s offhand comment about running for president in 2020. Biden would be 78, a little on the old side even when you consider that the soon-to-be sitting president will then be 74. Elizabeth Warren, the other oft-mentioned savior of the Democrats, will be 71 years old when that race comes around — not exactly the next generation of party leadership. Among younger Democrats, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, now 47, is seen as the next big thing, but the campaign he ran to get to the Senate wasn’t confidence-inspiring.

Obama, to his credit, seems to grasp the party’s problems and how to fix them. He has pledged to raise money (and attention) for the next round of redistricting, when Democrats can truly begin to rebuild their ranks. But that’s not until after the 2020 election.

Perhaps most important, there’s a deep divide within the party over the way forward from a policy perspective. Do Democrats embrace the cultural liberalism and creative-class appeal of the Obama years? Or do they return to the workingman message of the Biden wing? Who decides?

How? When?

This is what being on the wrong side of a massive bet looks like. It’s a lousy way to start 2017.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BEST YE AR IN WASHINGTON

Donald Trump

‘O

ur main story tonight, and I cannot believe I’m saying this, is Donald Trump,” John Oliver said to boos and knowing laughter in his studio on Feb. 28.

Until then, not even comedians had considered Trump seriously. Sure, he had lasted longer and polled better in the preliminary stages of the presidential race than conventional wisdom expected. But it had often seemed that his fade was imminent — that we had seen peak Trump. His loss to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses strengthened that sentiment.

Then he won New Hampshire, and state after state after that. Although the Republican primary fight lasted until May 3, it was clear much sooner that Trump was going to be the nominee. For all of the #NeverTrump movement’s best efforts, the real estate mogul secured the nomination more easily and more convincingly than Mitt Romney had four years earlier.

But the primary race and the general election are two different animals, right? Many of us assumed Trump’s appeal could never find purchase in a broad enough swath of the country for him to possibly win.

His endless stream of controversial remarks — about women, about Hispanics, about, well, everyone — would doom him. It had to.

It didn’t. Trump was right all along, and we, the political class, were flat-out wrong. Trump effectively channeled anger and anxiety into a movement. It didn’t matter that most people didn’t like him, didn’t think he had the temperament for the job, didn’t believe he was qualified to do it. People hated politics, hated Washington, hated where the country was headed and desperately wanted change — even a radical one. Four in 10 people in exit polls said a candidate’s ability to “bring needed change” was the most important quality in deciding their votes; Trump won that group 83 percent to 14 percent over Hillary Clinton.

Trump pulled off the largest upset in the history of modern presidential politics. (Sorry, Harry Truman!) He began 2016 as a punchline. He ends it as the president-elect. Not bad.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY WORST YE AR IN MEDIA

WORST YE AR IN ENTERTAINMENT

Roger Ailes

The Oscars

L

ike him or hate him, Roger Ailes had been on a two-decade hot streak.

Ailes made Fox News into a ratings powerhouse and helped make the post-Reagan Republican Party, by combining news, politics and entertainment. As biographer Gabriel Sherman has written: “Ailes was able to personally shape the national conversation and political fortunes as no one ever had before. It is not a stretch to argue that Ailes is largely responsible for, among other things, the selling of the Iraq War, the Swift-boating of John F. Kerry, the rise of the tea party, the sticking power of a host of Clinton scandals, and the purported illegitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency.”

On July 6, Ailes became the scandal. Former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit claiming that he had behaved inappropriately toward her for years and fired her for rebuffing his advances. Ailes denied the charges and sought to rally Fox’s talent behind him. Yet more than two dozen other women made similar allegations, including the brightest star in the Fox firmament: Megyn Kelly. Those revelations — combined with owner Rupert Murdoch’s discomfort with the pro-Trump direction in which Ailes had steered the network and the anti-Ailes bent of Murdoch’s sons — doomed the most successful man in cable news. Two weeks after Carlson came forward, Ailes was out as head of Fox News.

Ailes once said that “I have been through about 12 train wrecks in my career. Somehow, I always walk away.” Even as additional harassment claims kept his story in the news, it seemed possible he could make it out alive. In August, the New York Times reported that he was helping Donald Trump prep for the presidential debates. The Trump campaign denied it. But that didn’t stop speculation that, if Trump lost, Ailes might find enough wiggle room in his noncompete clause to advise Trump and Breitbart’s Stephen K. Bannon on the launch of Trump TV. And if Trump managed to win, well, Ailes had been a valuable media consultant to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

But by October, the relationship between Trump and Ailes had reportedly soured. There’s been no mention of a possible White House role for him.

Meanwhile, the release of Kelly’s memoir dealt a further blow, with its allegations that Ailes offered to promote her “in exchange for sexual favors.”

There may be no walking away from 2016.

I

t’s pretty hard to mess up the Oscars. Beautiful people, good movies and zany acceptance speeches. Win, win, win.

This year, however, the Academy Awards were shrouded in controversy and threatened by the cultural cluelessness of one of America’s leading cultural institutions. For the second year in a row, every nominee for the four acting awards — best actor and actress, best supporting actor and actress — was white.

The backlash was immediate and major. Director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith said they would not attend the awards show.

David Oyewelo, who was snubbed as the star of 2014’s “Selma,” seethed: “For 20 opportunities to celebrate actors of color, actresses of color, to be missed last year is one thing; for that to happen again this year is unforgivable.” The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite and calls for a boycott proliferated.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — a group of more than 7,000 people with a variety of affiliations with the movie industry — responded with a promise to double the number of female and minority members by 2020 and to rescind the lifetime membership clause.

Women make up fewer than 1 in 4 academy members; people of color fewer than 1 in 10. Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs is the only African American on the 51-member board.

Those changes took some of the heat out of the controversy. As did Chris Rock’s hosting of the ceremony, which he unflinchingly called the “White People’s Choice Awards.”

It’s hard to imagine that we’ll see a third consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite. As African American Film Critics Association President Gil Robertson noted, 2016 has been “a bonanza year for black cinema” — with “Fences,” “Hidden Figures,” “Loving” and “Moonlight” all generating Oscar buzz. Also, the academy can’t possibly be that out of touch. But it shouldn’t have taken until the 89th Oscars for it to register that there’s a problem.

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COVER STORY

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KLMNO

WORST YE AR IN SPORTS

WORST YE AR IN BUSINESS

Ryan Lochte

Elizabeth Holmes

he Summer Olympics are supposed to be a quadrennial celebration of sports and international friendship. They’re also, usually, a three-week distraction from whatever is bad in the world.

This summer, we really needed that distraction. Terrorist attacks around the globe. A still-sluggish economic recovery. A presidential race defined by how much everyone hated the two major-party nominees.

The nation turned its lonely eyes to Brazil in hopes of finding something, anything, to rally behind. Instead, we got Ryan Lochte.

In the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Games, Lochte was the Robin to Michael Phelps’s Batman. Lochte won — he has 12 medals, including six golds — but his star never shone as bright as Phelps’s did. He was known as a great swimmer with not a ton going on between his ears. (The 2013 docu-series “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?” played up his frequent blank stares.)

Boy oh boy, did Lochte live up to that reputation in Rio. As you’ll recall, Lochte reported that he and three teammates were pulled over and robbed at gunpoint by men bearing police badges. The story was huge news, thanks to Lochte’s celebrity and how it fed concerns that Rio wasn’t up for playing host. But it quickly grew into an international scandal, after Brazilian police thoroughly discredited the account. Turns out the swimmers had vandalized a gas station — with Lochte punching down a sign — and a security guard had pulled a gun while demanding that they pay for the damage. Rio police charged Lochte with filing a false crime report, though by then he had left the country.

To avoid a lifetime swimming ban, Lochte mustered a lame apology “for not being more careful and candid in how I described the events.” He is now serving a 10-month suspension from USA Swimming and won’t be able to compete in the 2017 world championships. He also lost an estimated $1 million in sponsorship deals with the likes of Speedo and Ralph Lauren.

For Lochte, the incident may have been career-ending. For America, it unnecessarily tarnished the otherwise impressive cache of medals the nation’s athletes took home. #ThanksLochte.

I

WEEKLY

n 2015, Forbes estimated Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth at $4.5 billion. By June of this year, the magazine had revised its estimate. The new net worth for Holmes? $0.

What happened is the stuff of fiction.

Holmes was the whiz-kid founder of Theranos, a Silicon Valley company that sought to revolutionize disease diagnosis. Its proprietary technology was supposed to be able to test for hundreds of diseases by analyzing a few drops of blood drawn from a finger. Its promise — and the 32-year-old Holmes’s hustle — made her into a legend, the youngest female self-made billionaire. The New Yorker, Fortune, Inc. and others wrote glowing profiles. Marc Andreessen, tech investor and co-founder of Netscape, hailed her as the next Steve Jobs.

The only problem: Her technology didn’t work.

Government regulators found major inaccuracies in Theranos’s lab results. And an October 2015 Wall Street Journal story reported that the company was having to do “the vast majority of its tests with traditional machines,” rather than its own devices, and either diluting those few drops of blood or using more traditional blood samples to get the volume necessary for testing.

In 2016, Holmes continued to promote the Theranos revolution. But it became clear that her pitch was far better than her product.

Throughout the year, Theranos has been under investigation — by the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In May, the company voided or revised tens of thousands of test results from 2014 and 2015. In June, Walgreens shut down all the blood-draw sites it had allowed Theranos to run in its stores. (It’s now suing Theranos for breach of contract.) In July, federal regulators imposed sanctions and sought to ban Holmes from owning or operating any sort of lab for two years. In October, she announced that Theranos was suspending its blood-testing business and cutting 40 percent of its staff. It faces multiple class-action lawsuits filed by patients who say faulty tests put their lives at risk and by investors alleging fraud.

Holmes remains defiant. She’s appealing her two-year ban and insists that the lawsuits are without merit. She’s trying to revive her company with a different blood-testing instrument. But she has to realize: She flew way too close to the sun — and got burned. n

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SCIENCE

What really makes dogs tick?

KPGS/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

Scientists seek thousands of pet owners to collect data for genetics study

BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

D

oberman pinschers are more prone than other dog breeds to compulsive behaviors like blanketchewing. And in 2014, researchers unveiled some clues to a cause: Obsessive-compulsive disorder is in some dogs’ genes.

Studies like this that examine how DNA affects dogs’ behavior and thinking could, in theory, shed light on why some breeds have better memories than others, what genes make Labs so good at retrieving, or even what drives some dogs to bark at the UPS guy.

Linking behaviors to genes is simpler in dogs than in humans: Thanks to generations of selective breeding, dog DNA is far less variable than ours.

Even so, there are obstacles to doing this research well. Scientists need a lot of information on how dogs behave or how well they perform in intelligence tests, and they also need to collect their

DNA. For statistical power, they need to do it in thousands of dogs.

Doing that in a laboratory would take loads of time — and sequencing DNA takes loads of money.

Now some prominent scientists are going about it from a new direction — by asking ordinary dog owners for help.

Adam Boyko, a dog geneticist at Cornell University, and Brian Hare, a canine cognition researcher at Duke University, have each in recent years founded their own companies. Boyko’s, Embark, is sort of like 23andMe for dogs, and it says it’s the highest-resolution DNA test for dogs on the market.

Send in a swab of your dog’s drool and $199 and you get a report that breaks down the pup’s breed and ancestry, as well as its risk for dozens of genetic diseases. Hare’s company, Dognition, charges fees starting at $19 for Web-based cognition tests — “interactive games” that can involve hiding treats under cups — that dog owners perform with their pets. Owners get a

report outlining how their dog rates on traits like empathy and memory, as well as a personality profile such as “Einstein” or “Socialite.”

Recently, the two teamed up in hopes of getting 5,000 of America’s dogs to sign up for both products and participate in what they are billing “the largest canine behavioral genetics study to date.” In doing so, dog owners act not only as research assistants and research funders but also help build a database that could yield “genetic insight into what makes dogs tick,” Boyko said.

“We know a lot more about the bodies of our dogs and how they can break down, more than what we know about their brains and behavior,” Hare said. “The reason we do not know about genes involved with brain and behavioral problems is there has never been a large scale study combining behavioral and genetic data on thousands of dogs.”

Hare and Boyko said they plan

to make their data available to other scientists with the goal of answering some of those questions. Embark, for example, looks at whether dogs’ genomes have a common genetic variant found in wolves, dogs’ wild ancestors, and assigns dogs a “wolfiness score.”

By comparing that with Dognition data, which probe behaviors fundamental to dog domestication, “we can get some early insights into what made a dog a dog,” Boyko said.

That, in Hare’s words, “is from a scientific perspective the Holy Grail.” But it could also help dog owners better understand their dogs. Dogs are frequently taken to vets or surrendered for behavior issues, and knowing whether they’re rooted in genetics could help owners tailor training or decide whether a dog is best suited to being a guard dog rather than a family pet, Boyko said.

That’s the idea, anyway. Not all dog scientists are sold on the idea that this sort of canine crowd-

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HOLIDAYS sourcing approach is useful. Some fault Dognition’s matter-of-fact labeling of a dog’s traits based on cognition tests, because they say the science behind what those tests reveal is hardly clear. Clive Wynne, a psychologist who directs Arizona State University’s Canine Science Collaboratory, said he believes charging participants could lead to skewed samples heavy on privileged dogs, and that data collected by pet owners in uncontrolled living-room settings are bound to be dubious.

“If you want to do behavioral genetics, you need to be analyzing the behavior with a certain level of precision,” Wynne said. “I’ve never heard it suggested that you could achieve that level of precision by letting everybody do tests on their own dog.”

Hare disputes that, noting that he and colleagues compared Dognition’s dog-owner data with labcollected data and found they were similar. In 2015, they published their findings in a paper that argued “citizen scientists will generate useful datasets.”

Even in dogs, determining links between behavior, personality and genes remains profoundly complicated, said Jessica Perry Hekman, a veterinarian and PhD candidate in behavioral genetics at the University of Illinois. But she said the Dognition-Embark effort and others like it are “the next thing to try,” in part because dogs tested in homes probably display more typical behaviors than dogs raised in laboratories.

Hekman, for her part, named a different “Holy Grail” for the field: the creation of a genetic test for dog aggression, a goal she said is very far off. Identifying the genetic underpinnings of aggression, fear or compulsiveness and using that to see how those affect brain processes is more realistic, she said.

“Maybe we’d be better able to understand which medications work and why and how,” she said.

“That really is a much more graspable goal.”

Another effort, based at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is also using a citizenscience approach to dog behavioral genetics. Participants in Darwin’s Dogs, as it is known, swab their dog’s mouth for DNA and answer more than 120 survey questions about their dog’s behavior and personality. There’s no fee — this project is funded by the

university and the National Institutes of Health — but participants also get no immediate results.

That hasn’t deterred dog owners, nearly 11,000 of whom have signed up, said Elinor Karlsson, a professor of bioinformatics and integrative biology who heads the project.

Karlsson has long worked on dog behavioral genetics — she was one of the researchers on the study of Dobermans and OCD — and usually relied on dogs that were patients at veterinary clinics. But she said she had trouble building statistically significant samples.

“I’m sitting there thinking, how can we possibly be having this problem? There’s millions of dogs out there in this country,” Karlsson said. At the suggestion of a veterinarian, she said, she realized, “we could ask owners how their dogs behave at home.”

With the help of canine behaviorists from the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants, Karlsson and colleagues designed questionnaires that focus on well-established mental disorders as well as dog behaviors that have been selected by humans, such as retrieving. A third focus is on quirks that behaviorists told Karlsson some breeds display more than others but that wouldn’t have resulted from training. Examples: Sleeping belly up, eating grass, and “that adorable head tilt,” Karlsson said.

But there’s a more serious side to the project. Dogs and people have similar genes and diseases, so findings in dogs could lead to treatments for people.

“We know that psychiatric diseases in humans and dogs have a big genetic component. They’re very heritable,” Karlsson said.

“We’re trying to understand in much more detail what exactly are the pathways of the brain that are involved in these diseases.”

Eventually, Darwin’s Dogs’ data will be shared broadly among researchers, said Karlsson, who called the Embark and Dognition partnership “fantastic.”

“Even if behavior in dogs is way easier than behavior in humans, you’re still going to need thousands and thousands and thousands of dogs to get statistical power,” Karlsson said. “And the only way we’re going to be able to do it is to get dog owners to help us.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Change your focus to give better gifts BY

A NA S WANSON

W

hen you’re buying gifts for people this holiday season, you might be thinking about how your loved ones will react the moment they open them. Will they be truly happy and thankful — or will you see disappointment flicker across their faces?

If you’ve given terrible gifts in the past, this focus on the moment of exchange might be why. A new paper that reviews decades of research on gift-giving suggests one common mistake people make is thinking too much about how recipients will react to their gift initially, rather than how it might benefit them in the long run.

Figuring out whether a receiver will use a gift might be hard. But one takeaway from the researchers at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business is that givers are often drawn toward surprising or entertaining gifts that are fun in the moment of exchange.

But in the process, they underestimate how much people typically appreciate practical gifts.

Researchers say they aren’t sure whether gift-givers are doing this intentionally. That focus on the moment of exchange might be natural: In many cases, it’s the only moment the giver is around. They won’t be there on the morning of Jan. 10 to see your expression when you put on your comfy new pair of socks.

Research in social psychology has consistently shown that people are bad at predicting what others want, even those close to them. And failures in gift-giving are often linked to selfish behavior in the giver and the recipient. The giver is focused only on the recipient’s reaction on Christmas morning, while people who receive gifts often have little appreciation for the effort that goes into them.

Neither thoughtfulness nor

price are actually a good prediction of how much someone will enjoy a gift. One 2012 study, for example, showed that recipients weren’t good at picking up on how much thought a giver had put into the gift. A study published in 2008 showed that while givers believe that expensive gifts are appreciated more, that isn’t the case, either.

Another paper published in 2015 showed that people don’t have much regard for socially responsible gifts, including donations to charity. Givers often think that a charitable donation on behalf of the receiver provides the recipient with a “warm glow.” But research says there’s little effect since the recipient doesn’t feel much ownership over the gift.

Finally, trying to express something about your knowledge of or relationship with the recipient in your gift usually doesn’t work well, either. Maybe the giver knows the recipient likes elephants or the Green Bay Packers, and buys them gifts along that theme. In all likelihood, however, what the giver thinks they know about someone is probably only a small part of that person’s identity. A paper published in 2015 showed givers would be better off going with more general gifts than more specific ones.

So what can you do as a giftgiver? If you want to give stuff most people will love, focus on presents that are versatile and useful. Rather than trying for something fun or thoughtful, it might be better to give them something you’re sure they can use.

You should also stick to people’s lists, the researcher say. Givers sometimes think surprises will be more appreciated, but past research doesn’t bear that out.

Finally, don’t be afraid to give experiential gifts. Givers often favor things that are tangible, so the recipient has something to open, but research says that people often get more happiness from dinner, a movie or a basketball game. n

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BOOKS

HANDOUT

JENNIFER CHASE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Commonwealth

By Ann Patchett (Harper) An illicit kiss at a christening wrecks two marriages in Los Angeles but blends the six children from different families. As we follow them over the next half century, their stories come into focus the way our own family legends cohere — from scraps of information and fractured memories. Patchett is daringly elliptical here, and her storytelling has never seemed more effortlessly graceful. We’re not so much told this history as allowed to eavesdrop from another room as a door swings open and closes. Even the most traumatic events — such as the death of one of the children — can be only partially known, thwarted as these characters are by invention, by gossip, by the deep emotional need to avoid the truth. This is minimalism that magically speaks volumes, further demonstration of the range Patchett demonstrated in “Bel Canto” and “State of Wonder.”

THE BEST OF 2016 In our annual survey of the best books, you’ll find 10 that we think are exceptionally rewarding.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

By Matthew Desmond (Crown) “Evicted” immerses readers in the lives of families and individuals trapped in — or thriving off — the private-rental market for the poor, a brutal world in which landlords have all the power and tenants feel all the pain. In spare and beautiful prose, Desmond chronicles the economic and psychological devastation of substandard housing in America and the cascading misfortunes that come with losing one’s home. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” he writes. “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.” In this extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography, Desmond has made it impossible ever again to consider poverty in the United States without tackling the central role of housing.

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BEST BOOKS OF 2016 The Gene: An Intimate History

By Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner) Genetics has two histories: the history of what we have found out, and the history of the uses and abuses of those discoveries. In “The Gene,” Mukherjee explores the nature of this double narrative. He never loses sight of the tension between those who wish to understand genetics and those who wish to apply such emerging knowledge, but neither does he fall into the obvious trap of seeing the first category as good and the second as bad. Mukherjee contends that while genetic theories have provided crucial medical insights, they also have fueled the depraved thinking that reached its nadir in eugenics.

News of the World

By Paulette Jiles (William Morrow) Jiles has always been a terrific storyteller, and her latest tale moves at a characteristically brisk pace across post-Civil War Texas. The hero, septuagenarian Captain Kidd, earns a modest livelihood by reading aloud from newspapers and journals in public halls. But his latest job is to return 10-year-old Johanna to her aunt and uncle in San Antonio. Johanna has not seen them since a band of Kiowas killed her parents and took her captive four years earlier, and this fiercely magnificent child now has no memory of her white life; she doesn’t speak English, and she keeps trying to run away. Every encounter Kidd and Johanna have on the trail between Wichita Falls and San Antonio seethes with the possibility of violence. In this tender novel, Jiles renders the pain of loss and the power of words for an old man and a young girl who really don’t belong anywhere anymore.

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

By Hisham Matar (Random House) Hisham Matar was 19 in 1990 when his father, a prominent Libyan dissident, was seized in Cairo by Egyptian secret police and delivered to Libyan authorities. Jaballa Matar was held for about six years in a notorious Tripoli prison, and then no more was heard of him. Much of the younger Matar’s adult life has been ruled by unknowns, and they form the foundation for his breathtaking memoir, “The Return.” The book is constructed as two interwoven narratives. One is the story of a closing: the kidnapping, incarceration and disappearance of Matar’s father. The parallel story is of an opening, as the son spends two decades peeling away layers of obscure, unreliable details from ex-prisoners and craven Libyan officials to try to uncover what happened to his father. Matar, a Barnard College professor of English and New Yorker

contributor, has produced two acclaimed novels about fathers who go missing under Middle Eastern dictatorships. “The Return” is an elegy by a son who defies the men who wanted to erase his father and gifts him with a kind of immortality.

Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War

By Ben Macintyre (Crown) In earlier days, generals understood war as two armies facing each other across a defined battlefield. A startling change occurred when an unlikely war hero, David Stirling, came up with an experiment that called for sneaking soldiers into the adversary’s camp, sabotaging equipment, then sneaking off again into the night. At first the tactic seemed unsporting, if not scandalous, but the commando operation became the prototype for special forces around the world. In “Rogue Heroes,” Macintyre provides a riveting history of a revolutionary fighting force. Using unprecedented access to British Special Air Service regimental archives, Macintyre has gleaned fascinating material. Among the characters is an SAS officer invested with “an enormous moustache, an upper-class accent so fruity that the men barely understood his commands, and a habit of saying ‘what, what’ after every sentence, earning himself the nickname ‘Captain What What.’ ” Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

By Svetlana Alexievich (Random House) In “Secondhand Time,” Alexievich turns on a tape recorder and listens to average Russians describing their lives amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Alexievich, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, has produced one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts yet attempted of this society caught in the throes of change. It is the story of what one character aptly describes as “our lost generation — a communist upbringing and capitalist life.” No one should pick up this book expecting to find a wellexplained chronological history of what happened in the Kremlin. Rather, the material is a trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful. Alexievich makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony, enveloped in their nostalgia and riven with their anxiety. As one party member observed, “The times have led me into confusion.”

Swing Time

By Zadie Smith (Penguin Press) Smith opens her fifth novel to the toe-tapping tunes of Fred Astaire’s 1936 musical comedy “Swing Time.” But a darker bass line thrums beneath that happy melody. This is a complex story at once intimate and global that moves along two alternating timelines. One takes us back to the narrator’s child-

KLMNO WEEKLY

hood in Northwest London in 1982 when she meets Tracey, a biracial girl desperate to be a star. As the years pass, success eludes them both, and their old feelings of affection grow knotted up with jealousy and even disdain.

Spliced between these memories appears a more recent story about the narrator’s work as a personal assistant an international celebrity intent on founding a school in West Africa. The novel uses its syncopated structure to turn the issues of race and class in every direction. As in the work of any great choreographer, movements that seem initially extraneous eventually prove essential.

The Trespasser

By Tana French (Viking) French’s novel brings back the two young detectives from the Dublin Murder Squad, Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran, who solved the prepschool slaying in her 2014 offering, “The Secret Place.” Conway narrates “The Trespasser,” and with her anger, intelligence and toughness emerges as French’s finest character yet. This time around, Conway and Moran are assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman found dead in her Dublin home. Her boyfriend is the initial suspect, and it looks like a routine domestic killing. But because the case against the boyfriend is circumstantial, Conway and Moran shift their attention to another suspect, only to have more senior detectives pressure them to arrest the boyfriend. The partners begin to fear that their colleagues have some agenda other than the truth.

French digs deeply into police culture, the tricks of the trade, the ugly side and the heroics, too.

The Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) Since his first novel, “The Intuitionist” (1999), Whitehead has nimbly explored America’s racial consciousness — and more — with an exhilarating blend of comedy, history, horror and speculative fiction. In this new book, though, those elements are blended as never before. “The Underground Railroad” imagines that the system of safe houses and clandestine routes used to smuggle enslaved people fleeing north, was, in fact, an actual railroad built underground. The story follows young Cora, who escapes from a Georgia plantation and runs from “the miserable thumping heart” of one town after another, moving through a culture determined to domesticate African Americans or infantilize them or sterilize them or demonize them or ultimately exterminate them. This thrilling novel, winner of the National Book Award for fiction, reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era. n

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OPINIONS

Don’t walk back our environmental progress CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN was EPA administrator from 2001 to 2003 and is president of the Whitman Strategy Group environmental consulting firm and co-chair of the Clean & Safe Energy Coalition, which advocates for nuclear energy.

President­elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) to head the Environmental Protection Agency has drawn criticism because of Pruitt’s public stances against the agency’s authority and his numerous lawsuits to block agency regulations in his state. Given Pruitt’s obvious dislike for what the agency does, I am disappointed in his selection, but his appointment does not come as a surprise given the professed views of the president­elect and many of his closest aides.

As a former EPA administrator under a Republican president, I recognize that it is easy to hate regulations in general. After all, regulatory action causes people to spend money or change behavior, often to solve problems they do not believe exist. Regulations have certainly gone too far in a number of areas, but it’s important to remember that regulations are meant to be protective, and when it comes to the EPA, that means protecting human health and our world. Pruitt would be wise not to try to walk back the real progress that has been made.

Let’s not forget the atmosphere in which the EPA was created. The nation was experiencing great turmoil in 1969 and 1970, with riots on college campuses and in many cities. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, and our air and water sources were being polluted by actors not required by any governing body to protect our citizens. People demanded that Washington protect them, and they got a Republican president to work with a Democratic Congress to establish the EPA and enact the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. To forget that the EPA was borne out of public demand is to invite a real backlash.

So I hope that Pruitt will take time to rethink some of his criticisms of the agency and also recognize the role of science in a

regulatory agency such as the EPA. Pruitt has questioned “the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.” I have long said that activists have done themselves a disservice by stressing that humans have “caused” climate change. That claim to sole causation results in people like Pruitt dismissing the need to address climate change because they doubt that humans have done all of the damage.

The climate has always changed — after all, we’ve had numerous ice ages without human influence — but human activity has undoubtedly exacerbated Earth’s natural trends beyond its capacity to adjust.

The New York-based Regional Plan Association reported last week that by 2050 the sea level along the Atlantic Coast could

JIM URQUHART/REUTERS

Steam rises from the stacks of the coal-fired Jim Bridger Power Plant outside Point of the Rocks, Wyo., in 2014.

rise by an entire foot. This means every time there is a bad storm, more land will be susceptible to erosion and more of our coastline at risk for destruction. The cost in human lives and capital rebuilding will reach beyond the capability of any government or institution.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military leaders view climate change as a national security issue; hopefully that fact demonstrates, even to those who are most skeptical, the gravity of the situation we are facing. To the extent that we can slow the process, we would be wise to do it.

There are very practical ways that the EPA and federal government can protect our environment, as well as human health and our infrastructure.

To slow the rate of climate change, we need to reduce our carbon output; thankfully, there are ways to achieve that goal that have significant economic benefits as well. Promoting energy conservation and reminding people only to use what they actually need benefits

household budgets. Building nuclear plants and other cleanenergy sources creates good jobs for Americans. The EPA should also work with the Transportation Department to advance mass transit, which will get people out of traffic jams, saving time for them and massively reducing carbon emissions from idling cars.

Between 1990 and 2012, the population grew by 38 percent, and electricity demand increased by 27 percent, but we more than doubled our gross domestic product in real numbers while at the same time reducing pollutants by 67 percent. This is not a zero-sum game. President-elect Trump and EPA Administratordesignate Pruitt should recognize that it is a fallacy to believe we cannot have a healthy, thriving economy and a clean and green environment.

The new administration can vigorously pursue its economic goals while allowing the EPA to do what it was created to do: protect the health of the American people and our land. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Syrian conflict is not a ‘civil war’ HANIN GHADDAR is the inaugural Friedmann Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute.

In the past five years, Syria has become many things: a refugee crisis, a regional quagmire, a western nightmare, a terrorist haven, a Russian power play and the core of Iran’s ambitions. To the international community, however, it’s a civil war. The United Nations, Western governments, media and European Union all refer to the Syrian conflict this way. In December 2015, Secretary of State John F. Kerry emphasized the need to “end the nation’s civil war.” In September this year, the New York Times published a long explainer on the conflict, answering, among other questions, “What is the Syrian civil war?”

These simplifications are inaccurate and dangerous. They absolve the international community of responsibility, and give Bashar al-Assad a veneer of legitimacy. They liberate Russia and Iran — actively involved with troops in the conflict — from culpability. And they allow internal terrorist groups to justify their involvement and violence.

There is no doubt that civil war is one of the many layers of the Syrian conflict. Local factions are fighting each other. In truth, though, this is a war on the people of Syria, carried out by the Assad regime and his allies.

We see that in the violence.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Assad’s forces have killed 95 percent of

Syrian victims. Additionally, Assad controls the army, including tanks, planes and barrel bombs. He has shelled areas that witnessed peaceful protests. Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people. He controls the intelligence, security and military apparatus that have diligently and systematically worked since 2011 to arrest, torture and kill all nonviolent activists.

Assad also released dangerous Islamists from prison and allowed them to organize and build armed groups. He did this not by accident but as a part of a strategy to create a civil war and radicalize what remained of the revolution. His strategy has been to shift the narrative from reform

to sectarianism by emphasizing Islamic terrorism, thereby presenting himself as a partner in the global war on terrorism.

It’s also hard to square the civil war claim with the vast amount of external interference. Faced with a strong resistance from the armed opposition groups, Assad allowed both Iran and Russia in to help him and his regime survive. In fact, Assad’s army is barely fighting today. The fighting force on the ground is mostly Shiite militias, with some Syrian Arab Army battalions — all reporting to Hezbollah and the IRGC and aided by Russian air bombing. Without Iran and Russia, Assad would have been long gone.

How can we call this conflict a civil war when the Syrian opposition is rarely fighting Syrian loyalists and instead battling with foreign fighters in its own country? Is it a civil war when all of Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States, and other assorted NATO nations are involved in one way or another?

Calling it a civil war has serious implications on policy. It protects Assad. Assad may be an obnoxious dictator, the logic goes, but a stabilizing one. It also gives the impression that this is an internal conflict, allowing

Western powers and international organizations not to take sides. As a result of this inaction, the world witnessed the exodus of Syrian refugees, the castration of U.S. efforts by Russia and Iran and terrorist attacks in European cities.

Equating the killer with the victim has a moral challenge that eventually legitimizes the regime’s crimes against humanity. It also subdues the modern history of Syria that brought Hafez al-Assad to power where the Baath Party and eventually the ruling family refused to allow anyone else in Syria to participate in politics.

This regime has always resorted to military solutions and has never chosen negotiations over violence. Today, with Iran commanding the battles in Syria and Russia negotiating with the international community on the future of Syria, what is left of the regime is an image that is only needed to preserve other states’ interest.

This is not a civil war. Only when we stop calling it a civil war, might we be able to understand the history and strategy of the regime, the various layers of the Syrian people, the interests of those who are already intervening, and the significance of accountability. n

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OPINIONS

BY STANTIS FOR USA TODAY

Creativity doesn’t lessen with age ALBERTLÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI is professor of network science at Northeastern University and the author of “The Formula: The New Scientific Laws of Success” (2018).

Many of this year’s cohort of Nobel laureates achieved their awardwinning efforts when they were quite young — a phenomenon detected by decades of research on creativity. J. Michael Kosterlitz, co-recipient of the Nobel in physics, was 31 at the time of his prizewinning discovery, and his collaborator, David J. Thouless, was 39. Bob Dylan, the literature winner, wrote his defining work even earlier, in his 20s.

Based on this pattern, one might assume that once you pass this early career stage, your chances of making a breakthrough drops precipitously. Einstein, who developed his theory of special relativity at the tender age of 26, put it bluntly: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”

Yet as we show in a paper recently published in Science, our ability to have a creative breakthrough does not diminish with age. It is our productivity and will to keep trying that decline, not our creative potential. For those who stick with it, success can come at any point in their career, and if they keep trying, it can return over and over again.

Our understanding of creativity comes mainly from studies of recognized geniuses.

Studies conducted in the 1980s by psychologist Dean Keith

Simonton, who inspected the careers of 2,026 notable scientists and inventors from antiquity to the 20th century, found that most of them made their mark on history around the age of 39, bolstering the contention that youth equals creativity. Benjamin Jones, an economist who analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes between 1900 and 2008, saw a slight increase in the age of winners across the years, rooted mainly in the increased schooling as time passed.

We took a different tack. The long-standing focus on genius prompted Professor Roberta Sinatra and me to ask: When do bursts of creativity happen in not just extraordinary but also ordinary scientific careers? We thought this would give us better insight into the effect age has on creativity at large, as opposed to just creativity in extreme and

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BY SIGNE WILKINSON FOR THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

unusual careers.

We inspected the careers of tens of thousands of scientists in disciplines ranging from physics to math, biology to computer science. Our results confirmed the decades of research on creativity: Most scientists published their defining work within two decades of the start of their scientific career. In other words, geniuses and everyday scientists alike cease to be creative by the third decade of their career.

When we asked why, however, we stumbled across something unexpected. First, we found that productivity — the number of papers published by an individual — has the same early peak as creativity. We scientists are not only the most creative in the first two decades of our careers; we are more productive as well. This made Roberta and me suspicious about the roots of our creative success: Is it because we are young, or is it because we simply buy more raffle tickets during those early decades?

We next arranged every paper the scientists had published in chronological order, asking if the highest impact paper was among the earliest of each person’s career, somewhere in the middle, or perhaps among the last. In other words, we took age and

productivity out of the equation, viewing each paper as another attempt at a breakthrough.

And there lay something unexpected. The highest impact papers were rarely the scientists’ earliest ones. Instead, the biggest hits were completely random: They were just as likely to be a first work as a last one, or anywhere in between.

Our surprising conclusion: Fresh-faced thinkers disproportionately break through not because youth and creativity are intertwined but because they produce more work early in their career. Indeed, 30 years into a scientific career there is a sixfold drop in productivity compared with productivity at any time within the first 20 years. Hence scientists’ early success has little to do with the vibrant ideas they bring to the stodgy establishment.

Rather, undeterred by disinterest or failure, young people try again and again.

Equally important, our data show that if you had that coveted early-career breakthrough, there may be more to come. Einstein, despite his age-of-30 admonition, was 59 when he published his finding on quantum entanglement, his most cited work today.

As long as you stay with it, success can still be yours. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

U.S.-China relations BY

J OHN P OMFRET

U.S.­China relations have never been easy. No problem in the world can be solved without the pair working together, but working togeth­ er is hard. The relationship is set for more uncertainty with the elec­ tion of Donald Trump. A whole mythology has emerged about the most consequential relationship in the world. Here are a few myths that could use busting.

MYTH NO. 1 Trade and engagement will set China free.

This idea has been a foundational myth of America’s engagement with China almost since President Richard Nixon went there in 1972; it’s been used to justify decades of interaction.

So far, this epochal bet has been a bust. China’s economy has become more open over the past few decades, and personal freedom for average citizens has expanded. But China’s one-party state represses dissent even more severely than it did 30 years ago in the run-up to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square. A slew of internal Communist Party documents indicates that the level of paranoia about American values encroaching on China is at a crescendo.

MYTH NO. 2 Trump’s Taiwan phone call threatened the status quo.

When Trump took a call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan this month, the U.S. foreign policy establishment had a minor nervous breakdown.

Let’s take a deep breath and realize that the “status quo” between Taiwan and the United States has been evolving for decades. In exchange for Chinese promises to help ease the United States out of Vietnam and counter the Soviet Union, officials from the Nixon and Carter administrations promised China that America would walk

away from Taiwan, allowing China to absorb the island of 23 million people, which Beijing views as a renegade province.

Since then, however, especially as U.S. presidents have come to understand that China’s political system has not moved in a positive direction, successive administrations have worked to better ties with Taiwan. Weapons sales to the island remain robust despite a promise to China in 1982 to slow them. Diplomatic contact has been upgraded.

Washington now supports granting Taiwan observer status at a variety of international organizations. Most Taiwanese can come to the United States without a visa. In that sense, Trump’s call was a logical continuation of a slowly evolving process of improved relations.

The big concern, however, is that China will use the call as an excuse to further bully Taiwan and that Trump will stand by.

MYTH NO. 3 The United States has tried to contain China’s rise.

This is China’s version of Myth 1, and it undergirds Beijing’s official view of the United States.

Any clearheaded look at the history between the two countries reveals that throughout their interaction, save for a short interregnum during the Cold War, the United States has been, if anything, the prime foreign enabler of China’s rise. America’s open wallets, open society and open universities have been key factors in China’s ascent from a Third World backwater to a

FRED DUFOUR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Guards stand in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Will Donald Trump’s call with Taiwan upset U.S. relations with China? Probably not.

global economic power. In 2001, the United States ushered China into the World Trade Organization, contributing to a massive boom in Chinese exports. American-trained scientists man Chinese research institutions, and Americantrained technocrats populate its central bank.

MYTH NO. 4 China is killing the U.S. economy.

On trade, years of studies have shown that automation is more of a factor than outsourcing to China in the hollowing-out of U.S. manufacturing jobs. That said, certain sectors of the economy, such as furniture-making and textiles, have been hammered by China. As for total competition with the United States, Americans tend to overestimate our problems and underestimate those of our competitors. China is facing a series of looming predicaments: Its corporate-debtto-GDP ratio is one of the highest in the world; if it’s not dealt with soon, it could cause a financial crisis. Its environmental issues are so extreme that some cities, such as Beijing, which is routinely cloaked in a cocktail of dust and

smog, have stopped publishing life expectancy statistics. And finally, China’s demographics, born of its former one-child policy, are resulting in a rapidly aging population and higher labor costs.

MYTH NO. 5 China’s anti-American propaganda doesn’t matter.

Attacking America did matter to the communists; it was a centerpiece of their ideology.

Four decades later, this remains the case. The occasional official has worried about the U.S. tendency to ignore the avalanche of anti-American claptrap in China’s media or our willingness to allow Chinese officials to operate in the United States in ways that run counter to our values.

America’s unwillingness to demand reciprocity from China on such fronts has harmed the relationship by effectively rewarding Chinese bad behavior, which encourages more. n Pomfret a former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, is the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 5th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

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

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