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IN COLLABORATION WITH
The race to save coffee Climate change and other woes threaten America’s favorite beverage. Science may offer a solution. PAGE 12
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THE SWITCH
What we searched for in 2017
GARY LLOYD MCCULLOUGH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS
SIDE SHOW STOCK/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
Hurricane Irma, former “Today” show host Matt Lauer and “how to make slime” were among the top searches on Google during the past year. BY
E LI R OSENBERG
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he top search term was for a disaster. The No. 1 searched person was a man accused of sexual harassment. And the most-searched how-to was how to make slime. It was a slimy year, perhaps. The year 2017 was captured in global search data released by Google this month in all of its tumultuous, emotional and eventful splendor. Hurricane Irma, which roared through Florida in early September after days of speculation, led the company’s global searches. Former NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer, who was fired in November as part of a wave of men who found themselves the subject of sexual misconduct allegations, was the mostsearched-for person and one of the three in the top five who were in the news because of that type of allegations. The others were Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein. Global news searches revolved around similarly bleak events such as the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, and North Korea, as tensions between President Trump and North Korean
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leader Kim Jong Un renewed fears of a global nuclear confrontation. The bitcoin frenzy and August’s solar eclipse also cracked the global news search. In the company’s data for the United States, protests and rallies, such as those in the National Football League; Charlottesville, Va.; and Berkeley, Calif., were in the limelight. Starbucks’s Unicorn Frappuccinos were Googled by those searching about calories more than any other food. People wanted to know about antifa, the group of black-clad anti-fascist activists who have become a boogeyman for the far-right, and net neutrality, the Obama-era regulation that prevents telecommunications companies from offering different Internet speeds for different websites and digital services. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an Obama-era program that provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought here as children, was the subject of a large number of searches, too, Google said. It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Meghan Markle, whose engagement to Prince Harry charmed the world, was the most-searched-for actor in the world. Kendrick Lamar’s “Hum-
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ble,” was the sixth-most-searched-for song. The first? Luis Fonsi’s global anthem “Despacito,” featuring Daddy Yankee. Slime, a squishy concoction beloved by children that you can make at home, is perhaps not so bad. Joining it on the how-to list were how to make solar eclipse glasses, buy bitcoin and make a fidget spinner. There were some upsets in the rankings, too. Wimbledon, pleasant, civil Wimbledon, topped the Super Bowl and the fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor as the most-searched-for sporting event in the world. Pogaca tarifi, a Turkish bread, was the thirdmost-searched-for recipe, behind “ground beef” and “chicken breast” (Side note: Those aren’t recipes). Do you have a guess for the top meme search? It’s the “Cash me outside howbowdah” girl, Danielle Peskowitz Bregoli, who was back on Dr. Phil after her first appearance in 2016 started the meme. Others included memes about Elf on the Shelf, Joe Biden, SpongeBob SquarePants and rompers. Any questions? Ask your niece. Or just Google it. n
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CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SPORTS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS
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ON THE COVER Scientists are working to create varieties of coffee beans that can withstand climate change and other threats. Illustration by KOLIN POPE, The Washington Post
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POLITICS
How the GOP passed its tax bill BY M IKE D E B ONIS AND E RICA W ERNER
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n the days leading up to a critical Senate vote this month on the GOP tax plan, Republican Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio) met secretly with Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) in the moderate Democrat’s hideaway office in the basement of the Capitol. Manchin told Portman that he would consider joining the tax effort, if only a few changes were made. Chief among them: Instead of cutting the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, a top Republican goal, reduce it to 25 percent — and use the proceeds for bigger middleclass tax cuts. Other Democrats, Manchin suggested, might follow. Portman took the request to Republican leaders, who rejected it. For Republican leaders, the prospect of a bipartisan deal that could have solidified public support for the tax plan was far outweighed by the imperative to keep the GOP unified and the belief that deep cuts in corporate taxes, more than anything else, were the recipe for economic and political success. “I would have preferred for it to have been bipartisan,” Portman said. “There were certain things that he was looking for that didn’t fit with the consensus that we had reached with the Republican conference.” The result is a bill passed along strict partisan lines that now awaits President Trump’s signature — the GOP’s crowning legislative achievement in the first year of the party’s control of Washington. The decision to spurn Democrats underscores the political risks undertaken by the GOP, which pushed forward on the tax bill despite polls showing that it is one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation in recent history and independent, nonpartisan analyses projecting that it will disproportionately reward the wealthy and corporations, offer only moderate benefits to the middle class, and substantially drive up the deficit. Republicans argue, however, that the cuts will spur economic growth and that everyday Americans will reward the GOP for creat-
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Biggest tax overhaul in 30 years had to overcome many obstacles ing jobs, boosting their paychecks and simplifying the tax-filing process for millions of households. “My view of this: If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after the final bill passed his chamber. Republicans plowed forward and stuck to their schedule, a nearly unheard-of achievement for a major bill. The strategy was effective for several basic reasons, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican lawmakers, aides and lobbyists. After earlier efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed, Republican leaders decided to abandon the GOP principle of making sure the tax bill would not add to the deficit and instead invested their faith in the view that tax cuts can pay for themselves. They learned from the calamitous health-care efforts, deciding
to keep the tax negotiations fluid until the very end, and used a variety of techniques to coax reluctant Republican lawmakers to support the legislation. They managed to contain a volatile president, using his support where helpful but trying to avoid rhetorical broadsides that could upend the sensitive negotiations. And they held closely to their views that deep corporate tax cuts were the most important thing to ensure the success of the bill, and that, despite the legislation’s billing, tax cuts for working families had to be a second-tier goal. Without a dramatic reduction in the corporate tax rate, Republicans said, they would have lost their chance to make U.S. companies more competitive in a globalized economy. “The president cared a lot about the business rate — it was the single biggest topic the president talked about,” National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), left, and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have their weekly meeting in the speaker’s office on Dec. 12. After much work on their parts, Congress passed major tax legislation this past week along strict partisan lines.
Wednesday. The push begins It was the day after the presidential election, and Rep. Kevin Brady’s cellphone was blowing up. Trump had secured a shocking win, ending six years of divided power in Washington. Business executives, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers were all ringing Brady (RTex.), the House Ways and Means chairman, asking one question: What’s border adjustment? It was a wonky-sounding term, for years an idea discussed only in academic circles, but it also stood out as a powerful tool that could allow Republicans to significantly remake the tax code — crucially, dropping the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to the low 20s or below — without significantly driving up the deficit. The provision was effectively a new tax on imports, and it would generate about $1 trillion in new tax revenue and serve as an incen-
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POLITICS tive for businesses to keep operations in the United States. For some industries — particularly retailers and manufacturers that purchase their raw materials abroad — the implications were glaring: The corporate rate would be lowered on their backs. As the Republicans faced a lobbyist revolt at the start of the new administration, private negotiations among what was called the “Big Six” — the top Republican leaders in the House and Senate, the chairmen of the two taxwriting committees, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Cohn — weren’t going any better. McConnell and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, didn’t see the border tax as politically feasible. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Brady, who had spent years warning of the risks of mushrooming federal deficits, were loath to abandon it. There appeared to be no way forward, and some in the party had already begun to lower their expectations of a once-in-ageneration tax overhaul. Divisions on the deficit It took a massive failure on another policy to clarify things. Early on the morning of July 28, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) turned his thumb downward, casting the deciding vote against his own party’s health-care bill. From the beginning, the GOP’s effort to remake the nation’s health-care system was racked with infighting. It seemed quite possible the tax effort would fare similarly. But hours before McCain’s vote, the Big Six released a statement: “While we have debated the progrowth benefits of border adjustability, we appreciate that there are many unknowns associated with it and have decided to set this policy aside to advance tax reform.” The group had effectively removed the requirement that the tax plan not add to the deficit. Brady said he and other Republicans were convinced that the tax effort would boost economic growth enough that the requirement was no longer necessary. “In my view, over time this tax reform plan will recoup these revenues,” he said. “Without tax reform, we are doomed to a slower economy and higher deficits.” Even if Republican leaders were
Tax bill’s total effect on individuals and businesses Individual tax cuts expire after 2025, but corporate cuts stay in place. Individuals
Corporations and pass-through businesses
+$50B $0B
Tax i nc reas e 2018
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
2027
–$50B –$100B –$150B
Tax c ut s
*Pass-through businesses pay their taxes through the individual tax code Source: Joint Committee on Taxation
prepared to borrow money to pay for the tax bill, they still had to win over the support of Republican lawmakers who saw the nation’s rising debt as the biggest threat to American prosperity. Chief among them was Sen. Bob Corker (RTenn.), a member of the Senate Budget Committee with an independent streak who had been openly clashing with Trump. McConnell asked Corker to craft a deal with Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), who believed big tax cuts spur economic growth. White House officials initially thought they could not achieve a very big tax cut — maybe $1 trillion. Toomey persuaded White House officials to request a larger package from his colleagues on the Senate Budget Committee, while he would advocate for the even bigger number he wanted, making the administration’s request seem modest. During a meeting in McConnell’s office with the Republicans on the Budget Committee, the plan played out perfectly. The White House and a number of Republicans were bombarding Corker with huge numbers all at once, numbers that were much bigger than many had thought possible. Corker settled on the $1.5 trillion range, with the expectation that later steps would be taken to limit the impact of the legislation on the debt. A corporate-rate standoff From the beginning, the centerpiece of the plan was the reduction in the corporate rate, and for more than a year, Trump had promised 15 percent. On Capitol Hill, that number was considered unworkable — it
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would open a gaping revenue hole. Publicly, the president kept the pressure on. But privately, Trump signaled to tax negotiators some flexibility. While Trump and the House felt comfortable with 20 percent, McConnell and Hatch wanted more flexibility. But by late September, the negotiators knew they needed to be on the same page, providing very broad principles to the House and Senate’s tax-writing committees. The result was a “unified framework” sparse on details. It looked a lot like the House blueprint, including a 20 percent corporate rate. But it would omit the difficult provisions — any offsets that would help pay for the plan. Securing the votes Even with broad agreement on the shape of the legislation, the House and Senate faced two sharply different calculations. For the House, it came down to a bloc of blue-state Republicans threatened by a proposal to significantly scale back or do away with the state and local tax deduction. The tax break had been part of the federal tax code since the income tax was first instituted in 1913, and it had largely survived every effort to scale it back thanks to the clout of lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states that disproportionately benefited. But in 2017, the politics were different: There were no Republican senators representing New York, New Jersey, California and other high-tax states. There were a handful of GOP House members from those states, but not so many that Republican leaders felt they absolutely had to be accommodated.
This time around, House Republicans proposed limiting the deduction to allow people to reduce only up to $10,000 in property taxes. That was enough to split the bloc. In the Senate, McConnell faced a different complication. There wasn’t one bloc of potentially aggrieved lawmakers but at least nine Republicans who could present problems. Republicans could afford to lose only two votes given the chamber’s 52-to-48 split. Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and McCain had doomed the Affordable Care Act repeal that summer, on a combination of concerns about drastic changes to health care and the Senate bypassing its usual process. Corker and Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), both of whom had announced they wouldn’t be running for reelection, were worried about the impact on the federal debt. Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mike Lee (Utah) were upset that their proposed expansion of a child tax credit benefiting families wasn’t included in the bill. And Johnson and Sen. Steve Daines (Mont.) complained that businesses that pay taxes through the individual tax code — pass-through entities — weren’t getting as significant a rate cut as corporations. With the health-care debate this year, similar types of concerns had led the Republicans to rapidly present different versions of the legislation, failing each time to advance it. This time around, McConnell worked to avoid a similar situation. He and top lieutenants summoned lawmakers in small groups to his ornate suite of offices to fill them in on details of the bill and hear out their concerns. Before each group departed, McConnell delivered a message: Don’t draw red lines, least of all in public, about what should be in or out of the bill. For the most part, lawmakers heeded McConnell’s request, even as tax writers added controversial measures to the Senate bill. Most notably, they made the individual tax cuts sunset in 2025 and added a repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. But one by one, all but one of the senators were won over. Collins got agreement from McConnell to pass legislation — still to be delivered — stabilizing the health-care law. Murkowski got a provision that would enable drilling for oil off Alaska’s shores. Mccontinues on next page
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“My view of this: If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.), after the Senate passed the tax bill
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POLITICS ANALYSIS from previous page
Cain was convinced that the Senate had followed the type of process he had insisted upon. Flake got a promise that Congress would move forward to address the status of young undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children. Johnson and Daines were given a more generous “passthrough” provision. Rubio suggested he would pull back his support if Republicans later made the plan more advantageous for the wealthy without doing more for working families. The bill finally passed the Senate in the early hours of Dec. 2. Corker was the lone “no” vote after leaders couldn’t overcome his concern about estimates the bill would add at least $1 trillion to the deficit. Final steps Then came the process of reconciling the House and Senate bills. At the 11th hour, Republicans pushed up the corporate tax rate to 21 percent while moving the effective date of the corporate tax cut earlier and reducing the top income tax rate. But then Rubio threatened to oppose the bill unless the child tax credit was sweetened; leaders met his demand. And in a surprise move, Corker announced that he would vote for the bill after all, angrily denying that language that could benefit real estate developers had anything to do with it. Stunningly for legislation of such magnitude, Republicans had stuck to their timetable. Everything was lined up for final passage through the House and Senate on Tuesday. But after the House had acted and left for the night came one final hiccup — Senate Democrats succeeded in last-minute parliamentary maneuvers that knocked out a few minor elements of the bill. So the House had to come back into session Wednesday to pass a revised bill, an anticlimactic finale for the first tax overhaul in three decades. One thing is certain: The nation has a new tax code. Much of the rest is a guessing game. Only in coming years will the parties learn who wins and loses as a result of the legislation and whether workers will see the benefits that have been promised them. n © The Washington Post
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Even with legislative victory, Trump’s future still in flux BY D AMIAN P ALETTA AND P HILIP R UCKER
cut deals with wavering lawmakers. They also believe that bulldozing Democrats, none of whom were expected to support the tax resident Trump has now plan, gives Trump additional levachieved what had eluded erage because the tax bill shows he him throughout his tumulcan enact his agenda without help tuous first year in office — from across the aisle. a major legislative victory. “I’ve said for the last two With Congress’s passage of a taxmonths, if he gets a big legislative code overhaul that also dismantles victory like this, he’s off to the part of the Affordable Care Act, races,” said Dallas businessTrump hopes to shed the label man Roy Bailey, who was coof legislative loser. But whether chairman of Trump’s finance the win will help him pass othcommittee during the 2016 er agenda items in 2018 and campaign. “I think he’ll have catapult him onto firmer politifull wind in his sails.” cal ground ahead of the midThe successful, sustained term elections is an open quesstrategy that muscled the tax tion. bill through Congress stands Trump’s achievement on tax in contrast to incomplete inicuts could be compromised by tiatives, such as health care, the unpopularity not only of and unfulfilled campaign the legislation but also of his CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST promises, such as building a own performance in office. Rewall at the U.S. border with cent polls show Trump’s ap- President Trump has also focused on Mexico. Trump has promised proval ratings reaching new deregulation during his first year in office. to renew his push for a border lows, with a clear majority of wall but has not identified any way Americans holding negative views “I hope the lesson is good policy to fund the project. of his presidency. works, better process works,” said He is not the first president to And the hyperpartisan divide Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “I get off to a rocky start with Conon Capitol Hill — where Republithink the process was far better on gress, though none in recent hiscan will hold just 51 out of 100 this than on health care, and I tory has been so unpopular with Senate seats after the arrival of hope we all learn from that, inthe general public. Presidential Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama cluding the White House. But it’s a historian Douglas Brinkley lik— makes it exceedingly difficult victory for him.” ened Trump’s year to 1961, when for Trump to push other legislative Conservative economist DougPresident John F. Kennedy’s first priorities in an election year, such las Holtz-Eakin, a former director year in office was beset by failures. as new infrastructure spending. of the Congressional Budget Of“Kennedy couldn’t get anything Still, the tax package will be the fice, said that the White House big done in Congress,” Brinkley centerpiece of Trump’s uneven could follow the same approach if said. “He had the Bay of Pigs. first year as president, along with it wanted to pursue changes to Kennedy did his reset by going to a positive economic indicators. The entitlement programs such as joint session of Congress and sayStandard & Poor’s 500-stock index Medicaid in 2018, as Republicans ing we’re going to put a man on the has risen roughly 20 percent since have spent years working on these moon.” his first day in office, and the unissues and the Trump administraFor Trump, Brinkley said, passemployment rate has fallen from tion has not. ing tax cuts is “a big moment” 4.8 percent to 4.1 percent. Infla“There is some work on the Hill similar to Kennedy’s man-on-thetion remains low. they could pick up and go with if moon promise. Trump’s pick for the Supreme the administration decided to fol“At the end of the year, he’ll have Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, was conlow the same model, which is, ‘We a major accomplishment,” Brinfirmed by the Senate, as were 12 will follow your lead, Congress. kley said. “The problem with the U.S. Circuit Court judges, the most Go!’ ” he said. tax bill is that it doesn’t quite during a president’s first year in White House officials and other capture your imagination. It’s not office in more than 100 years. allies close to Trump believe that grand history-making. People The administration, meanwhile, the push for tax cuts helped unlock aren’t going to line up at his presihas launched an aggressive stratsecrets for navigating Congress, indential museum to learn about a egy of dismantling dozens of regucluding the power of coalescing tax cuts bill.” n lations, and this month Trump took around a unified message and givsteps to fulfill a campaign promise ing Republican leaders flexibility to © The Washington Post
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by vowing to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It is the tax overhaul, though, that stands as the most sweeping change, one that could affect nearly every American household and business for much of the next decade. Republicans rallied to support the package, even though a number of them have shown a personal animus toward Trump.
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COVER STORY
Scientists try to develop hardy
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strains of a beloved beverage
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KOLIN POPE/THE WASHINGTON POST
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COVER STORY
Many people depend on coffee to get through the day, but the crop is more fragile than many realize. It requires specific temperatures and is vulnerable to numerous pests, so scientists are working to create varieties that can withstand climate change and other threats. BY CAITLIN DEWEY
C entroamericano, a new variety of coffee plant, hasn’t sparked the buzz of, say, Starbucks’s latest novelty latte. But it may be the coolest thing in brewing: a tree that can withstand the effects of climate change. Climate change could spell disaster for coffee, a crop that requires specific temperatures to flourish and that is highly sensitive to a range of pests. So scientists are racing to develop more tenacious strains of one of the world’s most beloved beverages. In addition to Centroamericano, seven other new hybrid varieties are gradually trickling onto the market. And this summer, World Coffee Research — an industry-funded nonprofit group — kicked off field tests of 46 new varieties that it says will change coffee-growing as the world knows it. “Coffee is not ready to adapt to climate change without help,” said Doug Welsh, the vice president and roastmaster of Peet’s Coffee, which has invested in WCR’s research. Climate scientists say few coffee-growing regions will be spared the effects of climate change. Most of the world’s crop is cultivated around the equator, with the bulk coming from Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia. Rising temperatures are expected to shrink the available growing land in many of these countries, said Christian Bunn, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture who has analyzed the shift in coffee
regions. Warmer air essentially “chases” coffee up to cooler, higher altitudes — which are scarce in Brazil and Zimbabwe, among other coffee-growing countries. Temperature is not climate change’s only projected impact in coffee-growing regions. Portions of Central America are expected to see greater rainfall and shorter dry seasons, which are needed to harvest and dry beans. In Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, rainfall is projected to decrease, potentially sparking dry periods. These sorts of changes will pose problems for many crops. But coffee is particularly vulnerable, scientists say, because it has an unusually shallow gene pool. Only two species of coffee, arabica and robusta, are currently grown for human consumption. And farmers traditionally haven’t selected for diversity when breeding either plant — instead, essentially, they’ve been marrying generations of coffee with its close cousins. As a result, there are precious few varieties of arabica that can grow in warmer or wetter conditions. In addition, diseases and pests that might be exacerbated under climate change could knock out entire fields of plants. A disease of particular concern — coffee leaf rust, or “la roya” in Spanish — devastated coffee plantations across Central America in 2011. It effectively halved El Salvador’s coffee output and cost the region an estimated 1.7 million jobs. Coffee farmers could see their livelihoods threatened, noted Aaron Davis, a British coffee researcher, because coffee trees are perennials with a 20- to 30-year life span: If a field is damaged by a bad season, farmers aren’t necessarily in a position to immediately replant it. And because coffee takes three years to mature, farmers face several years without income after new trees are planted. “Under all these scenarios, farmers pay the biggest price,” Davis added. While few experts expect these factors to drive coffee to extinction, they could severely reduce the global supply — and increase the hardship for coffee farmers. “The major concern of the industry is that the quantity, and even the future, of good coffee is threatened by climate change,” said Benoit Bertrand, an agronomist with the French agricultural research group CIRAD and one of the world’s most respected coffee breeders. “So the question becomes: How can we address this with new technology and new innovations?” Despite coffee’s global popularity, few growers have risen to the challenge. There has
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historically been no real market for improved coffee plants, Bertrand and Davis said: Unlike such major commodity crops as corn or soybeans, coffee is grown primarily by small farmers with low margins who can’t shell out for the latest seed or growing system. As a result, coffee is coming late to the intensive breeding programs that have revolutionized other crops. But in the past 10 years, interest around plant improvement has exploded, driven in part by the growth of the specialty coffee market. Plant breeders have begun cataloguing the hundreds of strains of arabica in existence and cultivating them in different growing areas. They’ve also begun to experiment with robusta, which grows in higher temperatures and fares better against diseases but often tastes bitter. There is some hope that new varieties of robusta, or robusta/arabica crosses, could capture that resilience without the bad flavor. Lately, there has been a particular surge of interest in a type of plant called an F1 hybrid, which crossbreeds two different strains of arabica to produce a unique “child” plant. They can be made from any of the hundreds of varieties of arabica and bred for qualities such as taste, disease resistance and drought tolerance. Because they are the first generation, F1 hybrids also demonstrate something scientists call “hybrid vigor” — they produce unusually high yields, like a sort of super plant. Since 2010, eight such F1 hybrids have been released to the commercial market. Bertrand is testing a class of an additional 60 crosses with the support of World Coffee Research. The researchers say that the top two or three — which are expected to become available to farmers as soon as 2022 — will offer good taste, high yields and resilience to a range of coffee’s current and future woes, from higher temperatures to nematodes. “These hybrids deliver a combination of traits that were never before possible in coffee,” said Hanna Neuschwander, the communications director at World Coffee Research. “It’s the traits that farmers need with the traits that markets demand. People used to think the two were mutually exclusive.” But the hybrids’ success remains largely untested at scale. Of the eight F1 hybrids on the market at present, only one — Centroamericano — has been planted in any significant volume, Neuschwander said. The variety is growing on an estimated 2,500 acres in Central
America; for context, the U.S. Agriculture Department reports that Honduras alone grows coffee on more than 800,000 acres. Farmers who have planted the new trees are seeing success. Starbucks has sold coffee made from F1 hybrids as part of its small-lot premium brand. Last spring, a batch of Centroamericano grown on a Nicaraguan family farm scored 90 out of 100 points in that country’s prestigious tasting competition, which some in the industry heralded as a major victory. But the path to adoption will be steep. Breeders have developed these plants, Neuschwander said, but many areas of the world don’t have the seed industries and infrastructure in place to actually distribute them. That’s particularly true in the case of F1 hybrids, which — thanks to their particular genetics — can only be grown from tissue samples. F1 hybrids are also expensive — as much as 21/2 times the cost of conventional plants. That puts them well outside the range of most small farmers, said Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist and technical adviser with Catholic Relief Services’ Latin America division. Kraft, who has worked with World Coffee Research to test F1 hybrids in Nicaragua, said that in his region, at least, only midsize and large plantations have switched to them. “I think our position is that we need to really understand the requirements for all farmers to be able to use these new technologies,” Kraft said. “My concern is that small farmers don’t have access to the capital to pay for these investments.” Even if they did, however, some experts caution that the new coffee varieties are only a piece of a much larger adaptation process. To cope with the effects of climate change, farmers may need to adopt other agricultural practices, such as shade-farming, cover-cropping and terracing, said Bunn, the researcher. In some regions, those practices won’t be economical. And in that case, policymakers should focus on helping farmers transition to other crops or other livelihoods altogether, researchers stress. “People sell [F1 hybrids] as a silver bullet,” Bunn said. “To be clear, those plants are indispensable, and I don’t question the value of the work . . . but we need more to adapt to climate change. And we need to accept the hard reality that some places will need to move out of coffee production.” n © The Washington Post
Only two species of coffee, arabica and robusta, are currently grown for human consumption. And farmers traditionally haven’t selected for diversity when breeding either plant — instead, essentially, they’ve been marrying generations of coffee with its close cousins.
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FOOD
KLMNO WEEKLY
Are recipes getting stale? BY
M AURA J UDKIS
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here will be no more cookbooks from chef Tyler Florence. Sure, you’ve welcomed him into your home through his books “Tyler Florence Fresh” and “Dinner at My Place,” and his Food Network shows like “Tyler’s Ultimate.” But he will not print any more recipes. Why bother? “I’ll publish a cookbook and I’ll have 125 recipes. People only use five,” he said. And they won’t even follow them: “They’ll use those as like a guide that they’ll kind of interchange different ingredients with.” All of this has led Florence to a conclusion that seems unusual for a person who has spent his career producing recipes. “Recipes are dead,” said Florence. “They’re dead the same way paper maps are dead.” Maps help you find your destination, but it’s still pretty easy to get lost. But now we have GPS, which can precisely guide us to our location, automatically reroute us to avoid obstacles and tell us where to find gas or a sandwich along the way. At the Smart Kitchen Summit in October, Florence announced that he had signed on with what he says will be the kitchen equivalent of GPS. He joined Innit, a start-up building a “connected food platform” — connecting the smart kitchen with software that aims to personalize and automate cooking. The company’s newly released app, the thing Florence thinks will be a recipekiller, promises highly customizable “micro-cooking content.” It will offer thousands of permutations of meals, and it could preheat your oven, too. Eventually, it could go further — perhaps suggesting foods based on your genetic profile or how many steps your fitness tracker registered that day. It might be able to order your groceries or help you build your own meal kit. Someday, it might even know the entire contents of your fridge. Consumers have grown to expect customization. Consider the
ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some see technology as the key ingredient for cooking in the future, with apps as sous-chefs vast array of options at fastcasual restaurants. It’s a premise thoroughly embraced by millennials: Choose your protein, some vegetables, some sides, and some sauces or garnishes. That’s how Innit’s namesake app will work, too, but it’s more elaborate. First, you input some basic information — whether you’re allergic to shellfish or on the Paleo Diet. Then you pick a style of dish, like pasta or a grain bowl, select from an array of ingredients, and Innit will configure a recipe — er, some microcooking content — for you. It’s launching with a couple of broad templates — a few swipes will transform a chicken taco to a beet-pineapple salsa lettuce wrap, for example — with more to come. It’s about giving users “great combinations that are somewhat guardrailed,” said Joshua Sigel, Innit’s chief operating officer. “If they want to, we jokingly say, add Thai peanut sauce on top of a
cupcake, that’s [their] prerogative.” Innit will not only design a meal for you, it will also walk you through how to make it with a video stitched together from hundreds of techniques that Florence filmed in the Innit offices. The steps are resequenced and times and nutritional information update dynamically as you swap ingredients in and out. The app will also operate certain smart appliances, and there’s more automation to come. Florence contends the app can even help novices learn how to cook. “This is your sous-chef in the kitchen, and if you go along with the guidance, it’s going to help you get it right,” Florence said. The recipes of the future won’t just be instructions for people. They’ll be instructions for appliances. Our devices will know more about how we cook. It’s the concept of “the Internet of actions,” said Sarah Smith, research director of the Food
Chef Tyler Florence, who has written multiple cookbooks and has a Food Network show, says, “Recipes are dead.” He has joined with a start-up to connect the smart kitchen with software to personalize and automate cooking.
Futures Lab at the Institute for the Future. First, the Internet connected us with information, and now, our objects can supply that information. The next step is for objects to perform tasks. After all, “a recipe is a series of instructions to take action,” Smith said. “The role of the recipe . . . becomes even more important when it’s fed into kitchen systems that are acting on your behalf.” Bridge Kitchen, a forthcoming app, will eventually walk users through recipes by listening to what’s happening in their kitchen. Yes, you can call out to the app to ask how much paprika you need, but the company promises it will also hear audio cues to know where you are in the recipe — the sounds of chopping, or the sizzle of a frying pan. Those will encourage the app to automatically move to the next step, such as setting a timer or preheating your oven. “For high-temperature stuff like searing, where you need to very carefully control the amount of time, we can synchronize a timer to the moment that searing sound starts,” said Arun Bahl, the company’s founder and chief executive. It raises privacy concerns, but Bahl says the audio is analyzed by software within the app, not on the cloud, and is deleted afterward. Bahl also says the app will help you time out multiple recipes so they can be completed at the same time. He is also working toward a feature that would allow users to take a photo of any cookbook recipe, whose text would be automatically incorporated into the app. What food-tech companies are working toward is a vision of the future in which our digital assistants, appliances and health data are unified into a system that makes decisions seamlessly, guiding us to healthy choices and less food waste. Cooking will be automated, but not too automated. “It’s the Ikea furniture effect: People have an irrational attachment to furniture they’ve helped to build,” Bahl said. “We need to still give them a role.” n © The Washington Post
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18 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
KLMNO WEEKLY
BOOKS
A beloved cartoon dog has his day C OMICS
G CELEBRATING SNOOPY By Charles M. Schulz Andrews McMeel. 560 pp. $75
l
REVIEWED BY
M ICHAEL T ISSERAND
rowing up in the early 1970s, I drew Snoopy constantly. I started young, depicting Snoopy on his doghouse as three small white hills on a red triangle. Before long, I graduated to Snoopy as a flying ace with a helmet and scarf. Like too many kids, I eventually gave up the pleasures of drawing, but Snoopy served as a vital introduction to an unleashed imagination. While Charlie Brown dodges kite-eating trees and gets suckered into football pranks, his dog soars, swoops, battles, dances, skates and, best of all, writes. While Charlie Brown leans against a wall and discusses theology, Snoopy relishes the joys of make-believe. This is made abundantly clear in the massive new anthology “Celebrating Snoopy,” with an introduction by The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs columnist Michael Cavna. Editors Alexis Fajardo and Dorothy O’Brien offer a unique retelling of Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” by omitting strips that don’t feature Snoopy in a significant role. So instead of starting with the famous Oct. 2, 1950, image of Shermy commenting, “Good ol’ Charlie Brown. . . . How I hate him!,” “Celebrating Snoopy” launches with the strip published two days later: Snoopy proudly walks down the sidewalk with a tall flower in his collar and is accidentally watered by Patty. In the final panel, both flower and Snoopy’s mood are wilted. The next comic presented here — a strip originally published Oct. 20, 1950 — shows Snoopy popping out of a jack-in-the-box. It’s his first impersonation, and he never looks back. This is not the first “Peanuts” anthology to spotlight Snoopy. His flying-ace adventures were recounted in “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” (Fantagraphics, 2015), and his career as an author was honored in the lovely “Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life” (Writer’s Digest, 2002). But the oversize and colorful “Celebrating Snoopy” is the most ambitious move to put Snoopy at the center of all activity
ANDREWS MCMEEL PUBLISHING
A “Peanuts” comic strip from “Celebrating Snoopy.” The chronological compilation of strips featuring Snoopy shows how Charles M. Schulz’s neighborhood puppy transformed into something more.
in the “Peanuts” universe — which is surely how Snoopy would have preferred it. Of course, we know otherwise. “The Complete Peanuts” (Fantagraphics, 25 vols.), which set the gold standard in publishing archival collections of long-running strips, makes clear that “Peanuts” always was an ensemble show. This fact is underscored by the new “Complete Peanuts Family Album” (Weldon Owen), a one-volume encyclopedia of more than 70 “Peanuts” characters, ranging from the iconic to the obscure.
“Celebrating Snoopy” should be read chronologically to fully appreciate the evolutionary leaps of the dog at the center of it all. Aided by Fajardo’s brief but instructive essays, we see Snoopy first as an amusing neighborhood puppy — sort of a comic-strip version of Petey from “The Little Rascals” — only to quickly transform into an entirely different being. “For Snoopy, change begins in the form of a thought, and that thought is how miserable it is to be a dog,” Fajardo writes. By the mid-1950s, Snoopy had
begun trying on new personas: There sits the dog on the croquet pole, thinking himself a vulture. In 1958, Snoopy ascends his doghouse for the first time. From that point on, neither his life nor ours will be quite the same. “The best thing I ever thought of was Snoopy using his own imagination,” Schulz once said. The transformation was evident from the start. In 1957, Hugh Morrow wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, “Snoopy of late has taken to dancing on his hind legs, thereby achieving a certain superiority over the children because he is able, while dancing, to ignore them.” For anyone who has ever looked at a dog’s twitching paws and wondered just what was going on in that mind, Snoopy provides all the best answers. And as David Michaelis revealed in “Schulz and Peanuts” (Harper, 2007), Snoopy’s fantasy life also offered glimpses into Schulz’s own life and passions. Such was the case in 1966, when a fire in Schulz’s studio inspired a series in which Snoopy’s doghouse burns down. While Charlie Brown worries about the insurance policy and Lucy insists the tragedy is punishment for various sins, Snoopy quietly walks over to the charred remains, pauses and climbs back on top of what’s left of his rooftop. More than a half-century later, “Peanuts” fans would recall this story upon hearing that wildfires were threatening the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif. His widow, Jean Schulz, lost her home to the blaze, but the museum and its treasures were spared. With all the spirit of Snoopy climbing back on top of his doghouse, the museum has since reopened. It’s yet another reminder of the enduring qualities bestowed by one of our greatest cartoonists on a most uncommon dog. n Tisserand is the author, most recently, of “Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.” This was written for The Washington Post.
12 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
19 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
Novel may be the next ‘Gone Girl’
How Detroit was forged by slavery
F ICTION l REVIEWED
N ONFICTION
M
BY
P ATRICK A NDERSON
ost of the hundreds of first novels published each year sink like stones into a vast, cold ocean of indifference. A lucky handful receive a more favorable welcome. A.J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window” is among these fortunate few. Even before its publication, movie rights were sold as well as foreign rights in multiple countries. Novels such as this, for which publishers have high hopes, are often dreadful potboilers. But if “The Woman in the Window” achieves success, it will be entirely deserved. It’s a beautifully written, brilliantly plotted, richly enjoyable tale of love, loss and madness. The title character, Anna Fox, is 38 and lives alone in a costly house in uptown Manhattan. We soon learn why she is so often peering out her window. She is agoraphobic and has not left home in nearly a year, but she delights in spying on her neighbors. Otherwise, Anna drinks a great deal of wine, mostly merlot, and watches countless black-and-white movie classics — “Gaslight,” “Rebecca,” “Strangers on a Train” and “Spellbound” are among her favorites. Anna’s husband has left her and taken their 8-year-old daughter with him. She talks to them by phone and vainly begs him to return. She’s a child psychologist and still advises a few patients by email, but mostly she is alone with her wine, her movies and her cat. She also has a tenant, a handsome carpenter who lives in her basement. His presence injects a bit of “will they or won’t they?” excitement into the story, but mostly she is content to spy on her neighbors. Then, Ethan Russell, a boy of 16 who lives across the street, arrives bearing a gift from his mother. He is a good-looking, friendly lad: “He looks like a boy I once knew, once kissed — summer camp in Maine, a quarter century ago. I like him.” Anna meets Ethan’s parents, Paul and Jane, and Finn’s plot kicks in. The Russells are a troubled family. Ethan hints that his father is
violent toward his wife and son. Anna uses her binoculars to learn more, and one day sees what she believes is an act of violence. She calls the police, who investigate and find no problem. They think Anna’s wine consumption — two or three bottles a day — along with the many prescription drugs she consumes, have impaired her judgment. (Anna cherishes George Bernard Shaw’s quip that alcohol is the “anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”) She continues to spy on the Russells, and dark deeds soon unfold. As the plot seizes us, the prose caresses us. A woman “walks west, toward the avenue, the crown of her head a halo in the sunset.” Thinking of a man she fears, “I shudder, wade deeper into my wineglass.” She tells us, “Now the night has my heart in its claws. It’s squeezing. I’ll burst. I’m going to burst.” Anna is a mess, but in her way she’s wonderful. Although Finn’s plot must not be revealed, it’s fair to say that his characters are rarely who or what they first appear to be — and that his story ends with a series of mind-boggling surprises. “The Woman in the Window” is firstrate entertainment that is finally a moving portrait of a woman fighting to preserve her sanity. After finishing the novel, I wanted to know more about the author, A.J. Finn. It turns out Finn is pseudonym of Daniel Mallory, an executive editor with none other than the novel’s publisher, William Morrow. In an autobiographical statement, Mallory writes that he has for years struggled with depression. It is an experience, he writes, that “informs, in part, my debut novel and its traumatized heroine.” With “The Woman in the Window,” he has not only captured, sympathetically, the interior life of a depressed person but also written a riveting thriller that will keep you guessing to the very last sentence. n Anderson writes regularly about thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.
‘P THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW By A.J. Finn Morrow. 448 pp. $26.99
THE DAWN OF DETROIT A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits By Tiya Miles New Press. 288 pp. $27.95
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REVIEWED BY
H ERB B OYD
lease rip your mental map in half and turn it upside down.” These are the orders from Tiya Miles in her new, groundbreaking history, “The Dawn of Detroit.” Miles asks us to rethink our idea of the Midwest — and of Detroit in particular — and the role of enslaved and indigenous people in its creation. “We tend to associate slavery with cotton in the commercial crop heyday of the southern ‘cotton kingdom,’ ” she writes. But the institution also was central to the fur trade, the industry on which the northern territories were built. “Detroit was born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people and the taking of land occupied by Native people,” Miles writes. “Captivity and capture built and maintained the town, forged Detroit’s chin-up character.” Miles calls her book “an alternative origin story” — and with good reason. Hers is a history that “privileges people in bondage, many of whom launched gripping pursuits of dignity, autonomy, and liberty.” Piecing together voices from wills, letters, account ledgers, church registries, court cases, papers of attorneys and other documents, Miles chronicles “the rise, fall and dawn of Detroit while centering on the experiences of those who were held in bondage from the mid1700s to the early 1800s.” Years of perusing dusty volumes, leafing through court records, deciphering handwritten letters, and making sense of complex treaties and settlements have resulted in a comprehensive study of Detroit’s formative years. Miles, a historian at the University of Michigan and a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South. Miles demonstrates a unique insight on native and African American culture. Very few schol-
ars move so seamlessly from the intricacies of the Africans to those of the Ottawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwe cultures. Miles’s voice is consistently authoritative. This is evident in the account of the warrior chief Pontiac and is no less commanding in the depiction of enslaved people, such as Peter and Hannah Denison, whose lives are framed by the historical narrative. Miles patches together records and oral histories to create a fascinating family saga. According to probate records, the Denisons were owned by William Tucker, a farmer on Indian land. Hannah and her husband, Peter, had multiple children; one of them, Elisabeth Denison, became the first African American landowner in Detroit. Many historians have briefly written about the Denisons, but Miles provides a full tableau of their struggle for freedom. Central to this endeavor were the court battles in which the Denisons fought to rescue their children from Catherine Tucker, who was bequeathed the children after her husband’s death. Miles conjures up a city of stark disparity and lives quashed. “Here, where silver spires pierce the powder blue of sky, shiny highrise office buildings reflecting the cool shades of water, it is difficult to imagine a prior world of French shingled homes and fruit orchards, of canoes and bateaux plying the waters,” she writes in her concluding chapter. “. . . But these are the same streets, now paved and densely populated, where an enslaved indigenous woman was forced to give birth in a prison cell . . . where Peter and Hannah Denison were purchased and later fought in the courts for their children’s freedom. These striking individuals have long been erased by the collective consciousness of the city.” At long last, we hear them. n Boyd is the author of “Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination.” This was written for The Washington Post.
13 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
20 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
KLMNO WEEKLY
OPINIONS
Silicon Valley’s biases are ruining tech for all of us SARA WACHTERBOETTCHER is a web consultant and author of “Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.” This piece was adapted from “Technically Wrong” for The Washington Post.
It was Christmas Eve 2014 when Eric Meyer logged onto Facebook, expecting the usual holiday photos and well wishes from friends and families. Instead, Facebook showed him an ad for its new Year in Review feature. Year in Review allowed Facebook users to create albums of their highlights from the year — top posts, photos from vacations, that sort of thing — and share them with their friends. But Meyer wasn’t keen on reliving 2014, the year his daughter Rebecca died of aggressive brain cancer. She was 6. Facebook didn’t give him a choice. Instead, it created a sample Year In Review album for him, and posted it to his page to encourage him to share it. “Here’s what your year looked like!” the copy read. Below it was a picture of Rebecca. And surrounding her smiling face and curly hair were illustrations, made by Facebook, of partyers dancing amid balloons and streamers. Meyer, a friend of mine who is also one of the Web’s early programmers and bloggers, was gutted. “Yes, my year looked like that,” he wrote in Slate. “True enough. My year looked like the nowabsent face of my Little Spark. It was still unkind to remind me so tactlessly, and without any consent on my part.” When I started working in tech in 2007, I could never have imagined a blunder like this. Facebook had just begun transforming from a collegecentric site to the behemoth it’s since become. Google had just bought YouTube. The iPhone hadn’t even launched yet. People were still writing “click here” on their links. But seven years later, something had started to feel off. Despite all the improvements in technology, my peers and I weren’t getting better at serving people. And Meyer’s story really drove that home. Facebook had designed an experience that
worked well for people who’d had a good year, people who had vacations or weddings or parties to remember. But because the design team focused only on positive experiences, it hadn’t thought enough about what would happen for everyone else — for people whose years were marred by grief, illness, heartbreak or disaster. It’s not just Facebook, and it’s not just grief or trauma. The more I started paying attention to how tech products are designed, the more I started noticing how often they’re full of blind spots, biases and outright ethical blunders — and how often those oversights can exacerbate unfairness and leave vulnerable people out. Like in the spring of 2015, when Louise Selby, a pediatrician in Cambridge, England, joined PureGym, a British chain. But every time she tried to swipe her membership card to access the women’s locker room, she was denied; the system simply wouldn’t authorize her. Finally, PureGym got to the bottom of things: The third-party software it used to manage its membership data — software used at all 90 locations across England — was relying on members’ titles to determine which locker room they could access. And the title “doctor” was coded as male. In 2016, JAMA released a study showing that the artificial
SORBETTO/GETTY IMAGES
intelligence built into smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft isn’t programmed to help during a crisis. The phones’ personal assistants didn’t understand words like “rape” or “I was beaten up by my husband.” In fact, instead of doing even a simple Web search, Apple’s Siri cracked jokes and mocked users. It wasn’t the first time. In 2011, if you told Siri you were thinking of shooting yourself, it gave you directions to a gun store. After getting bad press, Apple partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to offer users help when they said something that Siri identified as suicidal. But five years later, no one had looked beyond that one fix. Apple had no problem investing in building jokes and clever comebacks into the interface from the start. But investing in crisis or the safety of its users? Just not a priority. The examples go on and on. In August 2016, Snapchat launched a new filter that morphed users’ selfies into bucktoothed, squintyeyed caricatures — the hallmarks of “yellowface,” the term for white people donning makeup and masquerading as Asian stereotypes. Snapchat said that this particular filter wouldn’t be coming back but insisted it hadn’t done anything wrong, even as Asian users mounted a campaign to delete the app. Individually, it’s easy to write each of these off as a simple slipup, an oversight, a shame. We all make mistakes, right? But when we start looking at them together,
a clear pattern emerges of an industry that is willing to invest plenty of resources in chasing “delight” and “disruption” but one that hasn’t stopped to think about who’s being served by its products and who’s being left behind, alienated or insulted. Tech is an insular industry: a world of mostly white guys who’ve been told they’re special, the best and brightest. It’s a story that tech loves to tell about itself, because the more everyone on the outside sees technology as magic and programmers as geniuses, the more the industry can keep doing whatever it wants. And with gobs of money and little public scrutiny, far too many people in tech have started to believe that they’re truly saving the world. Even when they’re just making another ride-hailing app or restaurant algorithm. Even when their products actually harm more people than they help. We can’t afford that anymore. Ten years ago, tech was still, in many ways, a discrete industry — easy to count and quantify. Today, it’s more accurate to call it a core underpinning of every industry. The more technology becomes embedded in all aspects of life, the more it matters whether that technology is biased, alienating or harmful. The more it matters whether it works for real people facing real-life stress. And the more it matters that we stop allowing tech to make us feel like we’re not important enough to design for. Because there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with tech. n
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21 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
Train crash victims deserve better JOSHUA GOTBAUM is a guest scholar in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. This was written for The Washington Post.
My friends started calling as soon as the news broke about the Amtrak derailment in Washington state. They worried I would suffer flashbacks to the horrible night in May 2015 when Amtrak 188 derailed near Philadelphia. I was one of the “lucky ones”; unlike the woman right behind me, the cadet two rows ahead and six others, I lived. I “only” had scratched corneas, broken ribs and a damaged knee. In some ways, flashbacks are appropriate because the similarities between the two derailments are eerie: In both, the trains were going much too fast. In both, positive train control (PTC) safety systems could have prevented the accidents by automatically slowing down the trains. In both cases, PTC systems had already been installed on the tracks. And, in both cases, they hadn’t been turned on yet — because the deadline for installing them hadn’t been reached and Amtrak balked at spending money on safety until it absolutely had to do so. I did have flashbacks, but they weren’t to the accident. I flashed back to Amtrak’s responses afterward, which were appalling — a combination of callous indifference and phony promises to reform. And to the response of Congress, equally appalling,
which was both to delay PTC requirements that would prevent these disasters and to limit Amtrak’s liability to compensate its victims when disasters occur. The National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending PTC for 45 years, but it took a head-on train collision in 2008in California that killed 25 people and injured more than 100 to get Congress to move. Responding to that disaster, Congress gave major railroads more than seven years, until the end of 2015, to install PTC systems. Had the requirement been in place eight months earlier, Amtrak would have turned on its PTC system, Amtrak 188 wouldn’t have derailed, I would still have my knee, and eight people would be alive. Sadly, the response of the railroad industry to the
Philadelphia disaster was not to install PTC but to delay it. Railroads complained about the costs and threatened not to run their trains unless Congress pushed the deadline to 2018. Congress caved, allowing railroads to defer PTC without penalty. Congress even allowed an additional loophole: If railroads “showed progress,” they didn’t have to start using PTC until 2020. The first thing that Amtrak Cascades 501 victims and their families will likely learn, as we did, is that this accident didn’t have to happen. But the bad news doesn’t stop there, because in 1997, Congress also decided to cap at $200 million the total compensation that Amtrak and other passenger railroads must pay when their negligence leads to an accident. This means that the costs of major accidents are sometimes borne not by the negligent railroad, but by its victims. One judge applying this cruel law in another case said, “There just wasn’t enough money. . . . What was given to one victim had to be taken from another.” That’s what happened after the Amtrak accident in Philadelphia. Congress raised the cap to $295 million, but that was far from sufficient to compensate the eight families who lost loved ones
and the 200 passengers who suffered life-changing injuries. Amtrak ended up paying only a fraction of the damage it had inflicted. The victims ended up bearing a large part of their own medical costs and lost wages. Meanwhile, Amtrak’s chief executive — who ran what the NTSB described as a railroad lacking a “safety culture” for eight years — retired without so much as a slap on the wrist. My heart goes out to the victims of Amtrak Cascades 501. They deserve better than what we experienced after Amtrak 188. Sadly, the responses from Washington thus far aren’t encouraging. President Trump used the tragedy to talk about an infrastructure program he has yet to propose. Congress, for its part, makes statements about the need for PTC, but they do not mention that they delayed requiring it and that more people have died as a result. For the victims of the crash Monday near Seattle, it’s far too late to promise better safety controls. But it’s not too late to eliminate the liability cap and to say that government-funded railroads should be responsible for their actions and that the victims of Amtrak’s negligence should get the full protection of the law. n
23 15
SUNDAY, DECEMBER DECEMBER SUNDAY, 24, 24, 20172017
KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Bitcoin BY
J OSEPH B ONNEAU
AND
S TEVEN G OLDFEDER
This month, bitcoin, the digital currency launched by Satoshi Nakamo to in 2009, hit record prices on its march toward $20,000 per coin and got its own futures market at a traditional brokerage firm. Perhaps be cause of its complicated technical design, zealous community of advo cates and famously mysterious founding story (its creator was un known for years), a variety of myths about bitcoin have persisted. MYTH NO. 1 There is a finite supply of bitcoin. The currency’s original design calls for the 21 million units to be slowly created over the next 100 years or so. But the protocol can be amended by community consensus — a majority of participants in the bitcoin network — as has already occurred several times, such as an update that helped users specify payment conditions. So far, the bitcoin community has fiercely defended the planned finite supply and is notoriously change-averse. But only politics among users, not math, keeps things that way for now. Those politics may shift if bitcoin’s adherents come to agree with mainstream economists, who say the currency will hit a deflationary spiral as bitcoin are accidentally lost over time and the supply dwindles. MYTH NO. 2 Bitcoin’s users are anonymous. Bitcoin’s blockchain, the permanent public record of transactions, uses cryptographic pseudonyms. Users can create as many free pseudonyms as they want, and most bitcoin software generates a unique pseudonym for every transaction. But the vast majority of bitcoin users don’t get significantly more privacy than they would with traditional bank transfers, and they probably get much less than they would by paying with cash. That’s because it’s possible to link a user’s pseudonyms together by
studying patterns in the blockchain. Several blockchain analysis firms already offer their services to law enforcement. What’s more, most users leave a paper trail when they buy or sell bitcoin in exchange for dollars or other fiat currencies, as reputable exchange services record identities to comply with “know your customer” laws. MYTH NO. 3 Bitcoin is beyond the reach of the law. In bitcoin’s early days, it was the currency of choice for a multimillion-dollar underground drug market called the Silk Road, prompting critics to claim that bitcoin is a haven for those seeking to evade the law. However, new technology always requires updated interpretations of existing statutes and case law, and that gradual process is well underway for bitcoin. Its exchanges are already regulated through specific laws in some states, such as New York, and by rules on money transmission services elsewhere. All mainstream bitcoin exchanges at least attempt to comply with “know your customer” laws to prevent money laundering. The IRS regards bitcoin as taxable property. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently began cracking down on initial coin offerings, a new type of blockchain-based fundraising mechanism, under its existing authority to regulate securities. The original Silk Road market has been closed, and authorities
KIN CHEUNG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A man uses a bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong. Bitcoin is the world's most popular virtual currency.
have managed to shutter numerous follow-up efforts. And many other countries, most notably China, have moved aggressively to regulate or ban certain types of cryptocurrency business. MYTH NO. 4 Bitcoin wastes energy. Bitcoin mining is an energyintensive process. It requires special hardware chips working constantly to solve the cryptographic puzzles that create new blocks in the bitcoin ledger (in exchange for the rights to newly created bitcoin). Because of its decentralized nature, nobody knows the exact amount of electricity this process consumes, but it’s likely to be several gigawatts at any given moment, roughly equal to the output of a massive power plant such as the Hoover Dam. But compare the overhead for various currencies. Banks pay for security guards (among many other security expenses), who often merely stand around watching the customers. We don’t think of this as wasteful, because without guards, theft could undermine the entire system. The same is true for the raw power used by bitcoin miners.
MYTH NO. 5 Bitcoin will replace credit cards and/or cash. Bitcoin does not yet have several key properties needed for a universal payment mechanism. First, the design currently limits the system to handling only a few transactions per second, nowhere near the tens of thousands that credit card networks can handle, nor the tens of thousands more done in cash every second. Second, bitcoin transactions, once free, are increasingly expensive, with fees now averaging $20 and reaching as high as $400, based on demand. Finally, bitcoin transactions do not take effect immediately because of the limitations of the blockchain. New transactions are added only every 10 minutes, on average, and when users desire extra security, they can take more than an hour. n Bonneau is an assistant professor of computer science at New York University. Goldfeder is a computer science PhD candidate at Princeton University. They — along with Arvind Narayanan, Edward Felten and Andrew Miller — are co-authors of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.” This was written for The Washington Post.
16
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2017
Foothills Magazine presents its 6th Annual
PHOTO CONTEST
Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2017 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes. Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2018
North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine ncwfoothills.com