Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for commentary, 2007

RUTH MARCUS COLUMNAdvance for release Tuesday, Marcy 14, 2023, and thereafter(For MARCUS clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Ruth Marcus
 WASHINGTON -- If you hope that Donald Trump will face criminal charges for at least some of his misdeeds, there is a prospect worse than the possibility that the former president won't be indicted. It is that he will be charged and escape punishment anyway.
 When you strike at a king, you must kill him, the saying goes, and it applies with force in the case of Trump, who would inevitably use the mere fact of indictment as evidence of a supposed liberal plot against him, and then deploy an acquittal (or dismissal of any charges) as convincing proof of the conspiracy.
 Which is why, as much as I'd like to see Trump held to account, I am nervous about reports that New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) is poised to seek an indictment of Trump relating to the payoffs he orchestrated to silence a onetime lover, porn star Stormy Daniels. The New York Times reported last week that Bragg's office offered Trump the chance to testify before the grand jury considering the case, a sign that an indictment is imminent.
 Perhaps Bragg, a state prosecutor, has found a way around the legal difficulties that would be posed by charging Trump with criminal violations under New York law. But only time, and an indictment if it comes, will tell.
 Securing a criminal conviction requires not only convincing a jury of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It also requires proving the precise elements of the charged criminal offense. Bad or corrupt behavior isn't enough. Criminal law is reasonably easy to apply in straightforward cases of obvious crime -- say, armed robbery or murder. It can be a far more unwieldy tool in complex cases of financial fraud or political malfeasance.
 Trump's former lawyer and fix-it man Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal campaign finance violations for his role in orchestrating the hush money scheme, in which Cohen said he paid $130,000 to Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to secure her silence about an affair with Trump. Cohen said Trump arranged for him to be reimbursed in payments disguised as a retainer.
 Cohen admitted to causing an unlawful corporate contribution (the reimbursement came from the Trump Organization) and making contributions in excess of permitted limits. At the time of Cohen's plea, Trump was president and, under long-standing Justice Department policy, enjoyed immunity from prosecution while in office.
 It might be technically possible for federal prosecutors to go after Trump now that he is out of office, but that does not seem likely. Among other things, federal prosecutors told the judge overseeing the case in 2019 that they would not bring charges against Trump.
 This is frustrating and seemingly unjust: Why did Cohen have to serve time for doing something on behalf of Trump, who -- at least so far -- gets to skate?
 But it's not so easy to turn a federal case into a successful state prosecution, which is what Bragg is reportedly contemplating. "This is not a state case, it is a federal case, and they have all passed on it," Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, and he might have a point.
 Mark Pomerantz, a veteran of the Southern District who went to work investigating Trump for former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., walked through the complexities in his book, released last month, about the Trump probe. "Charges arising under federal law have to be brought by federal prosecutors," he wrote. "Local prosecutors like the Manhattan district attorney can prosecute only violations of state or local laws."
 The problems are manifold. New York state law makes it a crime to falsify business records -- for example, listing hush money payments as a retainer -- but that is only a misdemeanor. It could rise to the level of a felony charge if prosecutors could show that Trump ordered falsification of records to conceal another crime. But would "another crime" need to be a federal offense, or would a state offense be sufficient?
 Again, Pomerantz: "Cohen (with the agreement of Trump and others at the Trump Organization) had used phony documents and invoices to commit and conceal a federal election law violation, but there appeared to be no comparable state crime in play. So, to charge Trump with something other than a misdemeanor, [the district attorney] would have to argue that the intent to commit or conceal a federal crime had converted the falsification of the records into a felony."
 Pomerantz gave that strategy long odds. If Bragg's office chose to proceed, he wrote, "there was a big risk that felony charges would be dismissed before a jury could even consider them."
 The New York Times suggested that the payments might have constituted a violation of (BEG ITAL)state(END ITAL), not just federal, election law, but it's not at all clear just what that state election violation might entail.
 Plus, there are knotty questions about whether New York's ordinary five-year statute of limitation would apply in the case; New York law also provides that the statute can be extended for up to five years if the defendant is "continuously outside this state." The law doesn't define what that means, but one thing seems certain: Trump would contest any extension.
 "With respect to the 'Stormy' nonsense, it is VERY OLD &amp; happened a long time ago, long past the very publicly known &amp; accepted deadline of the Statute of Limitations," Trump wrote on Truth Social in January.
 Bragg is dealing with a wounded, but still dangerous, king. I hope he knows what he's doing.
 - - -
 Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.

New York's Stormy Daniels case against Trump is much thornier than it looks

Yale College

Harvard Law School

2018 Finalist team, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

2018 George Polk Award

2010 Urbino International Press Award

2013 Overseas Press Club Award for Foreign Affairs Commentary

Lifetime Achievement Award, International Committee for Foreign Journalists

Legion D'Honneur awarded by the French government

2004 Edward Weintal Prize

2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary

As The Post’s foreign editor, Ignatius supervised the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

The Paladin

The Quantum Spy

The Director

Bloodmoney

The Increment

Body of Lies

The Sun King

A Firing Offense

The Bank of Fear

SIRO

Agents of Innocence

DAVID IGNATIUS COLUMNAdvance for release WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15, 2023, and thereafter(For IGNATIUS clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By David Ignatius
 Monday's announcement of the AUKUS partnership is a "present at the creation" moment for U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific. But despite China's fears, the agreement isn't a NATO-style containment pact. It's the hub of something more flexible and adaptive.
 President Joe Biden didn't discuss China's growing military power, the obvious motivation for AUKUS, in announcing the pact Monday in San Diego. He was flanked by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, with an immense submarine, the USS Missouri, in the background. "This first project is only beginning. More partnerships. More potential. More peace and security in the region lies ahead," Biden said.
 "We're not looking to create a NATO in the Indo-Pacific," national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters in describing the submarine-building agreement announced Monday by the three leaders. AUKUS is about sharing defense technology, but it's also part of a series of overlapping security partnerships in the region.
 NATO is a formal treaty alliance with a large number of countries whose actual interdependence has often been less than advertised. Think of a headstrong Turkey or France. America's emerging strategy for the Indo-Pacific is something different, with a range of coalitions to address various needs. AUKUS is a hard defense alliance, for example, while the Quad partnership of India, Japan, Australia and the United States seeks the soft coalescence of technology and politics.
 A way to describe the new U.S. Asia policy is as a kind of "zone defense" - a web that links different groups of countries that all worry about China. At the center of many of these nodes is Japan, which is becoming America's most important ally in the region as it embraces rearmament.
 Several triangles of power are emerging: The United States is helping Japan mend fences with South Korea and form a strong tripartite security relationship. Japan is helping the United States improve relations with the Philippines, a country that had been leaning toward China but got tired of being muscled by Beijing. Similar relationships are evolving to connect the United States and Japan with such swing states as Vietnam and Indonesia.
 The strategy, to be sure, focuses on China. But it's not a wall of containment so much as an interdependent net. As a second senior administration official who asked not to be named to speak freely explains: "Previous Asian security policy was a series of bilateral interactions between Washington and its allies, the proverbial hub and spoke. Now we are encouraging more connections along the hub and more wheels."
 To use another metaphor, Cold War containment of the Soviet Union was like a chess game with a static board and a stress on offensive capabilities, this official argues. The Indo-Pacific paradigm is more like the classic Asian game of "Go," with waves of advancing and retreating action, rather than stress on an overpowering thrust.
 AUKUS matters partly because it brings Britain, a European power, into America's long-term defense plans for Asia. The United States will share sensitive nuclear technology to provide attack submarines for Australia and augment Britain's fleet. Britain will receive its first AUKUS subs in the late 2030s, and Australia will get them in the 2040s, Sullivan said. In the meantime, America will provide Australia with up to five U.S. nuclear-powered attack subs starting in 2032.
 A second "pillar" of AUKUS will involve sharing other advanced defense technologies among the three countries and perhaps other partners, such as Japan. Those technologies will include hypersonic flight, artificial intelligence, undersea warfare, cyberweapons, autonomous systems and electronic warfare, the senior administration official said.
 The missing link in this grand strategy, unfortunately, is economic policy. The Biden administration has scorned the trade alliance known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but it hasn't come up with anything powerful to replace it. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity launched by Biden last year bolstered supply chains. But it hasn't delivered on broader goals, such as a digital agreement that would shape technology investment and development.
 Biden needs to recognize that America's partners in Asia depend on trade. Until he demonstrates that he's willing to defy political resistance to trade in the Democratic Party - and show Asian partners that U.S. markets will remain open to their exports - some of the benefits of the new strategy for the region will be blunted.
 The Biden administration is understandably celebrating its strategic initiative for Asia. But before popping the champagne corks, it should recall Dean Acheson's description in his memoir of the launch of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. As the signatories were gathering, the Marine Band "added an unexpected note of realism" by playing two songs from "Porgy and Bess," the Broadway musical: "I Got Plenty of Nothin'" and "It Ain't Necessarily So."
 - - -
 Contact David Ignatius on Twitter @IgnatiusPost

How AUKUS fits into the complex U.S. strategy for the Pacific

Harvard College

Kings College, Cambridge

2009 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary

Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (Free Press, 1999)

Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution (Free Press, 2004)

EUGENE ROBINSON COLUMNAdvance for release Tuesday, March 14, 2023, and thereafter(For Robinson clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Eugene Robinson
 WASHINGTON - The luminous Michelle Yeoh said just the right thing Sunday evening as she became the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for best actress: "For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities."
 This year's Academy Awards will be remembered as the night Hollywood discovered the Asian diaspora. The truth is that Yeoh, who is 60, should have been celebrated for her enormous talent decades ago. Producers and directors should have long seen her as what she so clearly is - in outdated parlance, a "leading lady" - and given her roles that showcased her emotional range, not just her martial-arts moves.
 But better late than never, I suppose. For an industry that once routinely cast White actors in "yellowface" to play Asian roles, Sunday night has to be seen as a genuine breakthrough.
 Yeoh, who is Malaysian of Chinese descent, won for her performance as Evelyn Wang in "Everything Everywhere All at Once." Ke Huy Quan, a Vietnamese-born Chinese American whose family fled Saigon in 1978, won best supporting actor for playing Yeoh's husband, Waymond Wang, in that same film. Daniel Kwan, who is Chinese American, and his filmmaking partner Daniel Scheinert won the best original screenplay and best director awards. And they all returned to the stage at the end, when "Everything Everywhere All At Once" won the Oscar for best picture.
 Oh, and the award for best original song went to "Naatu Naatu" from the epic "RRR," a product of the huge Indian movie industry - not "Bollywood" but "Tollywood," referring to films in the Telugu language, which is spoken in southeastern India.
 That is a level of Asian representation we have never seen before at the Oscars. In the past, the message from Hollywood to Asian actors and creators has ranged from, effectively, "squeeze yourself into this stereotyped pigeonhole" to "just stay the hell away."
 When I was growing up, television stations still occasionally broadcast the old Charlie Chan movies from the 1930s, which starred a Swedish actor, Warner Oland, as a Chinese American detective. More acclaimed movie stars such as Anthony Quinn, Rex Harrison, John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Alec Guinness also donned "yellowface" makeup to play Asian characters. Even Katharine Hepburn, arguably the brightest star of all - the only winner of four acting Oscars, all for best actress - wore makeup to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 film "Dragon Seed."
 This practice is not ancient history. As recently as 2007, comedian Rob Schneider wore prosthetics and makeup to play an Asian character in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck &amp; Larry." (He was nominated in that year's Golden Raspberry Awards for worst supporting actor - but lost to Eddie Murphy, who was given the Razzie for his portrayal of an Asian character, Mr. Wong, in "Norbit.")
 In recent years, the more common Hollywood treatment of Asian characters has been to flatten them into two-dimensional caricatures - the science nerd, the overbearing mother, the kung-fu master.
 The 2018 rom-com "Crazy Rich Asians" broke new ground by letting talented Asian actors sparkle as protagonists of a traditional "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy marries girl" story, complete with corny, eye-dabbing ending. But even in that film, Yeoh - playing, yes, the overbearing mother - had to use all her mastery of subtlety and nuance to convey more than an inch of depth.
 What makes "Everything Everywhere All at Once" so revolutionary is that it takes what could have been a stereotype - the hard-working Chinese American immigrant family running a laundromat - and makes it universal. Actually, the screenplay by Kwan and Scheinert makes that setup multiversal, with Yeoh and her family zapping back and forth across so many parallel universes that I lost count. The film gave Yeoh the opportunity to be, well, everything - beleaguered, glamorous, fierce, defeated, indomitable. It was a chance for an actor to give us a tour de force, and Yeoh delivered.
 Yeoh labored in the Hong Kong film industry and on the fringes of Hollywood for many years before truly breaking through. Her co-star Quan was a child star - he played Short Round in 1984's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and Data in 1985's "The Goonies" - but struggled to find adult roles and was cast in no movies at all between 2002 and 2021. "My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp," he said during his acceptance speech. "Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine."
 Writer-director Kwan told the Academy Awards audience that "my impostor syndrome is at an all-time high." But it shouldn't be. Hollywood is slowly learning that you don't have to be White to be the real deal.
 - - -
 Eugene Robinson's email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Finally, representation is more than a hope in Hollywood

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

MEGAN MCARDLE COLUMNAdvance for release SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2023, and thereafter(For MCARDLE clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Megan McArdle
 In American politics, there is no greater applause line than promising to save Medicare from the filching, feckless mismanagement of the other party. Almost everyone is in favor of saving Medicare. So it's not surprising that President Joe Biden has chosen to sell his new budget this way.
 "Let's be clear about another key point of my budget," he told an audience in Philadelphia on Thursday. "I guarantee you I will protect Social Security and Medicare without any change. Guaranteed. I won't allow it to be gutted or eliminated, as MAGA Republicans have threatened to do."
 The problem is that Biden isn't actually doing anything substantive to save Medicare at all.
 He doesn't need to save it from "MAGA Republicans," because the party lost interest in substantial reforms years ago, after discovering that any major change to the program was politically toxic.
 Nor does he need to save it from the other imaginary problem of trust fund exhaustion. The trust funds are an accounting fiction that are practically irrelevant because, as already noted above, politicians don't dare cut Medicare in any significant way. If the exhaustion of the trust fund threatens services for seniors, no matter which party is in charge, Congress will step in with an emergency spending bill to transfer more money from the general fund, and the president will happily sign it.
 The Medicare problem that needs fixing is the program's cost. The Congressional Budget Office projects that its expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product will grow by almost a third in the next 10 years, while the percentage of GDP collected by the payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security will stay roughly flat. (Social Security, of course, has the same problem.) And this will take place in the context of massive deficits - projected to be nearly 7% of GDP in 2033 - that will make it impossible simply to paper over those gaps with transfers from the general fund indefinitely. Some combination of spending cuts and higher taxes will be needed to put the program on a sustainable footing.
 Unfortunately, there's no political will to fix the actual problem, as Biden's proposals themselves indicate.
 Consider that the only major delivery-side reform the administration could come up with was a proposal to force price cuts on the pharmaceutical companies that just delivered us from the worst ravages of an unexpected pandemic (not to mention real revolutions in other treatment areas, from cancer to hemophilia). Consider too that pharmaceutical spending actually accounts for a relatively small share of our medical spending, roughly 10%; it is not possible to balance Medicare's books entirely on the backs of drug companies. As Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out, drug cuts are "politically easy, but there is tons of money in hospitals and these Medicare/Medigap insurance plans. That's where most of the real money is."
 Why did the administration take this tack? The political calculus is clear. There are a lot fewer people researching and producing drugs than there are health-care workers and hospitals - and those folks are geographically concentrated in a few districts, while hospitals and doctor's offices are everywhere, and everyone has a few friends who work in one. Besides, we're more exposed to the cost of our drugs than our hospital stays, so we resent the former a lot more than the latter.
 Now, if you want to be really depressed, consider that even pharmaceutical cuts are pretty much DOA. "We just did drugs," says Goldwein; any new cuts will be the ones that couldn't get through a Democratic Congress the first time. And that is the proposal that has been (correctly) hand-selected as the most politically palatable remaining option.
 This is also true on the tax side: Once again, the administration is concentrating its proposed tax hikes on corporations and people who make more than $400,000 a year. Raising taxes on the top 1% is understandably popular, given that they take home about 22% of national income. But they also pay 42.3% of income taxes already. By 2033, under current law, federal spending is projected to be 25% of GDP, while revenue is on track to be roughly 18%. Mathematically, we can't close our budget gap, much less fund the larger government Democrats want, entirely by hitting the same small pool of taxpayers over and over.
 To solve our actual problem, politicians are going to have to get serious in the face of serious blowback. Taxes will have to be raised on people who make less than that $400,000-a-year threshold. Delivery reforms will have to be undertaken in more-controversial areas, such as those Medicare Advantage plans. And, unfortunately, those changes will need to be used to fund what we're already doing, rather than diverted to some popular new spending idea. Using Medicare reforms to fund new spending like Obamacare has already used up some of the easiest trims already. We can't afford to lose any more.
 - - -
 Follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, @asymmetricinfo.

Medicare needs saving, just not from Republicans

Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism, 2010

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2011

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2012

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2018

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2019

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2020

Gerald Loeb Award, Finalist, 2021

Online Journalism Award, 2021

CATHERINE RAMPELL COLUMNAdvance for release SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2023, and thereafter(For RAMPELL clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Catherine Rampell
 Job growth in February came in a lot higher than expected (311,000 jobs, compared with a forecast of about 223,000). If that phrasing sounds familiar, that's because it happened the previous month, too. And the month before that. And the month before that.
 In fact, for 11 consecutive months now, hiring has beat consensus Wall Street forecasts. Which is pretty unusual. Look, forecasting is always hard, and numbers rarely come in exactly as predicted, but it's surprising that month after month, the experts keep getting it wrong in the exact same direction. That is, they're always too pessimistic.
 To be clear, there was good reason to have expected, month after month, a slowdown in key economic indicators such as hiring. After all, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates eight times in the past year with the explicit goal of cooling the hot economy, to get inflation back down to more normal levels. For months, economists and politicians have warned these rate hikes might not just drag on the economic recovery - they might cause a recession.
 Yet (thankfully), recession still hasn't materialized. Like Godot, it's always just around the corner. Why, though, does almost everyone keep underestimating the strength of the economy? Or put another way, why has the economy remained so hot, despite all those rate hikes?
 The answer isn't that forecasters are a bunch of negative Nellies, or right-wing partisans downplaying the economy's strength (to make President Joe Biden look bad, or whatever the conspiracy theory might be). Wall Street forecasters are definitely trying to predict the numbers correctly, so they can make money.
 A few possible explanations:
 1) Maybe something weird has been happening with the numbers, and our measurements are off.
 I don't mean that anyone is cooking the books. Rather, response rates to the government surveys used to calculate key economic metrics have plummeted. That might skew the numbers in ways that are hard to account for upfront, and lead to bigger revisions to data later on.
 Or, maybe we're not paying attention to the right numbers. For example, there have been recent problems in the banking sector, which might not be reflected yet in federal data on jobs or consumer spending. Other, "softer" measures of the economy, such as consumer sentiment, also look quite negative.
 2) Maybe monetary policy operates with longer lags than expected, and we'll see the effects of those interest rate hikes a little further on. The housing market, among the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy, has already been declining; perhaps other sectors will follow. (Though, curiously, construction firms continue to add workers, another puzzle I'll get to in a moment.)
 3) We don't know what the economy would have looked like in the absence of all those Fed rate hikes. Maybe things would have been booming even more. So perhaps the Fed has already been slowing things down quite a bit - it's just not terribly obvious because we're comparing current conditions to the wrong alternative scenario ("counterfactual," in geekspeak).
 4) Maybe fiscal policy - i.e., spending and tax decisions - is continuing to stimulate the economy more than economists had expected or understood. That could be counteracting some of the things the Fed has been doing.
 The conventional wisdom is that fiscal policy is, if anything, dragging on the economy right now. Which makes sense: Federal stimulus checks, the expanded child tax credit and other emergency covid-19 programs that boosted consumer spending are for the most part in the rearview mirror. But remember, the feds aren't the only ones making significant tax-and-spending decisions.
 Virtually every state has cut taxes in the past two years. About half the states are now considering further tax cuts. These state tax cuts were enabled partly by the strong economy and partly by generous, deficit-financed funding from the federal government (such as Biden's American Rescue Plan). States are flush, and rather than holding on to their surpluses for a rainy day, many of them are doling out cash to residents.
 Who might just spend it.
 Because the available data on state-level fiscal decisions aren't great, economists might not be paying sufficient attention to how they affect the broader economy.
 Also: Even at the federal level, a lot of spending from industrial policy programs (infrastructure, climate, semiconductor subsidies) is coming down the pike. It's early, so those programs likely haven't been particularly stimulative yet. But some economists have suggested that one reason the construction sector is continuing to add workers, despite the softening housing market, might be that employers expect to be competing with government contractors for labor pretty soon.
 5) Covid's effects are weird and wild and hard to understand.
 We haven't been through anything like the recent pandemic in a long, long time, and never in a tightly interconnected global economy that looks like this one. Even the experts don't have great precedents or models to base their predictions on.
 Maybe everyone's erring on the side of being a bit more conservative - and stingy with their optimism.
 - - -
 Catherine Rampell's email address is crampell@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @crampell.

Why everyone keeps underestimating the strength of this economy

Princeton University

Named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Political Science Association’s Carey McWilliams Award, 1996

Empathy Award from the Volunteers of America, 2002

National Human Services Assembly’s Award for Excellence by a Member of the Media, 2004

Hillman Award for Career Achievement from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, 2011

One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (co-authored with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann)

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism – From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond

Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent

Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right

Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge

They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era

Why Americans Hate Politics

We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama (co-editor)

One Electorate Under God?: A Dialogue on Religion & American Politics (co-editor)

United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship (co-editor)

Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Should Government Help Faith-Based Charity? (co-editor)

Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (co-editor)

What’s God Got To Do With the American Experiment? (co-editor)

Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America (co-editor)

Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

E.J. DIONNE COLUMNAdvance for release MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2023 and thereafter(For DIONNE clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By E.J. Dionne Jr.
 WASHINGTON - The word "liberal" is noble and vexed, loved and hated. It is used by different kinds of people to refer to a wide constellation of worldviews, and it is denounced from many ideological directions.
 It also happens to be the word most worth fighting for at this moment - as an adjective.
 That is the thesis of what I believe will be the year's most important political book, Michael Walzer's "The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On 'Liberal' as an Adjective," published last month. Approachably compact, it's a volume that politicians and activists, students and academics, and citizens representing every creed should read, ponder and argue about.
 Lord knows how many books have been written about "liberalism" as an abstract noun referring to philosophies ranging from "classical liberal" laissez-faire libertarianism to New Deal and social democratic approaches to public life. And I'd make the educated guess that there have been thousands of political ads attacking "liberals" for all manner of sins and failures.
 After a lifetime of reflection, Walzer, an 87-year-old political philosopher, concludes that "liberal" is more important as a modifier of other substantive commitments than as a stand-alone noun. The word embodies moral sensibilities, values and disciplines that are compatible with a variety of creeds - and essential to making our politics "decent."
 The adjective "liberal," he writes, "determines not who we are but how we are who we are."
 Liberals "aspire to be open-minded, generous and tolerant" (even if, as Walzer notes, we don't always pull this off). They can "live with ambiguity," are "not dogmatic," are "not fanatics," can "recognize moral limits," and "oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty."
 To qualify as liberal, a regime and philosophy must be "not despotic, not repressive, not cruel - constrained by individual rights." The adjective encourages "pluralism, skepticism and irony."
 There are a lot of "nots" here, especially against cruelty, and each of them is important. Liberalism is indeed "sometimes constraining," as Walzer argues. It can also be "enlivening" and "transforming."
 To be liberal on the Walzer model does not mean, as the old joke goes, being so open-minded that you won't take your own side in an argument. Those of us who allow our creed to be modified by the l-word - "liberal democrats," "liberal socialists," "liberal communitarians," "liberal feminists," "liberal nationalists," liberal adherents to religious tradition, and even "liberal conservatives" - still fight fiercely for political victory and intellectual vindication. But all are committed to carrying on the fight in a particular way.
 It makes sense that what might be Walzer's valedictory book (even as I pray there are more to come) is case for "a decent politics." Decency has defined Walzer's approach to life, politics, teaching and scholarship in a career that has taken him from a small town in Pennsylvania to Brandeis University, Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study.
 The book is warmly informal and includes affecting, always relevant personal stories that run from his childhood to his political and academic undertakings. It puts to mind a wise neighbor conversing during a friendly dinner, not the thundering of a bombastic lecturer utterly certain he's right about everything.
 Walzer has been proudly involved in socialist and social democratic politics all his life. He is forceful in insisting that a more egalitarian society would be a more just and democratic place. Yet this very liberalism leads Walzer to sharp criticism of the sort of zealotry on his own side that dismisses competing arguments and ways of life.
 A secular Jew who embraces his tradition, has been friendly to Israel, and has done extensive work on the Bible and the Talmud, Walzer passionately endorses church-state separation and warns against religion-based government. "Absolutism in the form of faith, mystery, dogma, heresy and orthodoxy is not alien to religion," he observes, "whereas it should be alien to politics, at least to democratic politics."
 But he takes to task those who "disdain belief and treat religious men and women as fools." Liberal secularists, he insists, "respect the lives that believers live and the communities they create, and work to guarantee the safety of both."
 In an observation highly relevant to today's headlines, he says of the hospitality afforded by religious freedom: "In Israel today, and in many European countries, the treatment of Muslims is the critical test."
 Liberalism's tolerance and open-endedness make it the subject of easy derision as a flabby creed lacking in substantive commitments. This is the genius of insisting that the word "liberal" is strongest and most demanding in its adjectival form - as a commitment to freedom, mutual respect and to resisting temptations of dominance.
 "Two steps forward, one step back is better than three steps forward over the bodies of our opponents," Walzer writes. "There have been too many murdered bodies."
 Standing against brutality is the highest calling of all who embrace the word liberal. It's why we need more of them.
 - - -
 E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.

Why we should all be liberal: The power of an adjective

Oxford University, D.Phil.

Harvard University, BA

Lizzie feels like she and Drew are in a geeky threesome with Google Maps.

Reply All Lite

Joe tells Jane that Pearl is in the garage, practicing her anger.

Fort Knox

Lizzie didn't call Laura because she was busy being sick.

Reply All

Pearl is excited about the group she's joined: "anger management."

Drew disagrees with Lizzie that mid-lifers can have a meet-cute.

The therapist offers discounts to clients using her project timeline software.

chickenshop-4234feca-c277-11ed-a605-5b238ee8d395.jpg

chickenshop-5d57a6e4-c277-11ed-a605-5b238ee8d395.jpg

chickenshop-61956d36-c277-11ed-a605-5b238ee8d395.jpg

chickenshop-682bcde8-c277-11ed-a605-5b238ee8d395.jpg

chickenshop-6cd0e3d8-c277-11ed-a605-5b238ee8d395.jpg

<html><story><text>
 At the Chicken Inn on Cricklewood Broadway in London, a girl and a boy go on a first date. He's dressed in a suit and tie. "It looks like you're going to a funeral," the girl tells him. "Maybe I am," he says.
 "So, you were born in 1975," she says - the same year, she points out, as Liz Truss and DJ Khaled. But she knows she's wrong. The 1975 is just the name of his band. "I was born in the '80s," the boy says, sounding a little petulant. "I was born in 1989, and I'm still young. And relevant."
 "Sure," the girl says.
 Is this going well?
 That depends on what "this" is - is it a date? An interview? Both? Neither?
 The boy, in this particular episode, is singer-songwriter Matty Healy. The girl is Amelia Dimoldenberg, the star, creator, director and executive producer of "Chicken Shop Date," a web series in which she interviews celebrity guests in the oh-so-romantic setting of London's fried chicken spots. Now in its ninth year on YouTube, "Chicken Shop Date" has long enjoyed something of a cult following among extremely online viewers who get Dimoldenberg's arch, peculiar sense of humor. Aided by TikTok and a spate of viral red-carpet appearances - most recently she could be found sweet-talking stars for Vanity Fair's TikTok live stream after the Oscars on Sunday - Dimoldenberg's profile is newly ascendant, and "Chicken Shop Date" is reaching a wider audience than ever.
 On "Chicken Shop," the 40-minute encounters are trimmed to tight seven-or-so-minute episodes; only the funniest, flirtiest moments survive, spliced together with strategically deployed B-roll of food prep and the chicken shop's staff at work. Guests can approach the date as sincerely or ironically as they want; Dimoldenberg adapts accordingly. The question simmering beneath these conversations is less the rom-com "Will they or won't they?" but rather "Are they or aren't they?" As in: Are they really flirting, or just doing a bit?
 "Chicken Shop Date" is a gleeful subversion of the classic late-night talk show format, where male hosts often engaged with female celebrity guests by hitting on them, said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University's Newhouse School.
 "The talk show had that gendered dynamic going on," Thompson said, which went mostly unremarked upon at the time. But under modern inspection, those older interviews have a gross, leering undercurrent, he said, and talk-show flirting "has considerably backed off over the past few years, especially since MeToo." With "Chicken Shop Date," Dimoldenberg brings that dynamic back - and flips it. "It takes on a completely different dimension and attitude, because she is the boss." Thompson said. "She's the one that is controlling the situation."
 During their date/interview, Healy appears charmed - if a bit disoriented - by the Amelia Dimoldenberg experience.
 At first, Dimoldenberg insists her interest is genuine. "I'm quite picky, so, I wouldn't have asked you if I wasn't in love with you," she tells him. (Healy is on tour and was unavailable for comment.)
 "I do actually find you attractive, though, to break the fourth wall," Healy tells her. "This is a weird concept," he adds. "It's quite meta. This is like high art." Before the end of the date, he asks her for a kiss. It's unclear which side of the fourth wall they're on.
 Dimoldenberg demurs, but Healy encourages her to "commit to the bit." He leans across the table.
 A high-stakes moment - for either a date or an interview - and Dimoldenberg was sort of on both. Her mind was half in the moment and the half in the editing room. "I remember thinking, 'Yes!'" Dimoldenberg told The Washington Post. She knew the scene would make for a great episode. "But then the hard part was me, in the moment, thinking: 'What the hell am I going to do? What should I do? Should I kiss him? Should I not?'"
 She found her answer by asking a different question, one that guides her approach: "What can I do in the moment to make it the funniest it can be, and also the most authentic to the show?"
 She waits until he's inches from her face. She leans in, too. Then she kisses him on the forehead, sending him slouching back into his chair.
 - - -
 The girl going on dates in the chicken shop is "maybe an exaggeration of myself," Dimoldenberg says. "I like to amp up the awkwardness."
 She was "that awkward, sarcastic, deadpan person at school," an attitude she learned, to her delight, "throws people off, especially men and boys. Especially boys. And especially people with some kind of bravado to them." It was an "exciting" realization, she says, that "made me feel like I had some kind of power."
 Dimoldenberg is Zooming into our interview from the kitchen of her apartment in Hackney. On the wall behind her is a framed McDonald's paper takeaway bag; just off-screen is a painting by an ex-boyfriend. She's currently single. "It's like my dating life is 'Chicken Shop Date,' basically," she says, in her part-sarcastic, part-sincere tone. "I don't see why I couldn't maybe meet the love of my life on the show. It would just be meeting someone in the office, except mine is a chicken shop."
 She started "Chicken Shop Date" in 2011 as a column for the Cut, a youth magazine, when she was 17 and eager to interview the U.K. rap and grime musicians she loved. Dimoldenberg thought a date would be the perfect format for the interviews. "I honestly had never been on a date," she says. "Maybe that's why it's so awkward, the show. Because it kind of came from a place where I'd never been on a date before."
 "Chicken Shop Date" airs on Dimoldenberg's YouTube channel, which has over 1.7 million subscribers. Recent episodes with British rapper Central Cee, Spanish musician Rosalía and American indie artist Phoebe Bridgers have racked up millions of views each. A year ago, Dimoldenberg had on a hero of hers, documentarian Louis Theroux, and asked him whether he could recall any of the rap that he'd done on his "Weird Weekends" TV series, prompting him to gift the world with the instantly viral audio clip about how "my money don't jiggle jiggle, it folds." The sound clip sparked an inescapable TikTok dance trend among civilians and celebrities alike, cresting with a performance by Shakira and Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show" and a novelty rap song performed by Jason Derulo and featuring "Amelia Dimz."
 Dimoldenberg cites as influences "The Eric Andre Show," "Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis" and Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," interview shows from the 2010s that also toy with the customary celebrity interview construct. Also in this new class: "Ziwe" (where guests are asked bracingly direct questions about sensitive topics such as race) and "Hot Ones" (in which guests are served chicken wings with tongue-melting hot sauces, which they must eat during the interview); those shows share "Chicken Shop Date's" taste for the tense, confusing or uncomfortable moments more traditional late-night shows gloss over.
 While "Ziwe" enacts a fantastic sort of nightmare - what if you were asked, on the spot, to explain and apologize for racism? - Dimoldenberg plays out the ultimate fan fantasy: What if this famous person were genuinely, totally into me?
 In Dimoldenberg's interactions with celebrity guests, Theroux said: "Sometimes, she's needy. Sometimes, she's a little standoffish. There's this sort of playfulness suggested by the idea that it's a date. She seems, at times, to want it to be a date."
 One of the joys of "Chicken Shop Date" is watching Dimoldenberg skip tedious promotional drivel - the superhero flick training regimen, the supposedly relatable anecdote about a parenting misadventure, the pablum about how "on set, we're really like a family" - and go straight for the fun stuff: "Do you have a type?" "Would you ever date a fan?" "Do you have any turnoffs?" Liberated from the stories they're always stuck reciting, Dimoldenberg's dates often wind up saying something unexpected.
 "She's talking to very confident media performers, but she's kind of not really playing the game," Theroux said. "She doesn't really invite them to do the usual talk-show shtick of 'tell me the anecdote.' She doesn't attempt to especially put them at ease."
 On a "date" with Fumez the Engineer, Dimoldenberg admitted that she couldn't cook. "Is that a problem? I can do other things!" she quickly added, "I can make a, like, a dragon with my hands." She twisted her fingers around each other, aimed her thumbs and middle fingers (the dragon's mouth) across the table and made a weak "roar." Fumez was momentarily speechless.
 "Are you always like this?" he asked.
 - - -
 Dimoldenberg used to have a more "method" approach - no speaking to her dates until the cameras rolled - but, since becoming something of a celebrity in her own right, she's relaxed those terms. Even though "Chicken Shop's" rising popularity means more stars arrive thinking they know what they're in for, in Dimoldenberg's experience, "when they sit opposite me, they [still] don't know how this plays out" and get adorably flustered.
 Take actor Daniel Kaluuya, whose film performances would lead you to believe he is utterly unflappable but who spent the duration of his "Chicken Shop Date" nervously giggling through his answers to hard-hitting questions like, "Would you say you have time for a girlfriend right now?" ("Is this a proper date?" he asked, smiling wide as Dimoldenberg described her type as "talented actors from Camden." Then she sucker-punched him: "It's not you.")
 Making male stars giggle uncontrollably is something of a Dimoldenberg signature.
 "I think you're great." Andrew Garfield told her on the British GQ Men of the Year Awards red carpet in the first of two such encounters that swiftly went viral. But when Dimoldenberg countered that she'd been trying to get a date with him for ages, he said, through increasingly high-pitched laughter: "Well, you do date a lot of people."
 Their reunion, a month later at the Golden Globes, was held up across the internet as the definitive model for British flirting. Garfield managed to get out a very loaded "Hi" before bursting into giggles again, barely regaining his composure for an in-depth discussion of what their respective astrological signs (she's an Aquarius, he's a Leo) mean for their compatibility.
 Dimoldenberg says some of the dates she really wants would surprise even her most devoted followers. "I'm always trying to push the format." She wondered aloud if she'd ever have a politician on; she'd also love to get some actors in character, like Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk, the brilliantly daffy host of Charlie Booker's mockumentary series, "Cunk on Earth." She's long said that her last "Chicken Shop Date" will be an episode with Drake (who "says he wants to do it," according to Dimoldenberg, but they haven't been able to schedule it yet).
 Until then, she'll keep amping up the awkwardness and seeing what depths she can illuminate by the unflattering lights of the chicken shop. Most of the artists she meets reveal a true self that belies their public image, Dimoldenberg says. She's found some self-aware, sensitive souls beneath the don't-mess-with-me bluster of many of the rappers she's interviewed. She considers one of her skills as an interviewer to be inviting her guest's secret self to the surface.
 People always think she's the one playing a part for her guests, but she's found the opposite to be true.
 "If anything, I'm breaking down their character," she says. "I think maybe sometimes people come on the show with more of a character than I have. And then we whittle that away."
 
 </text>
 </story></html> chickenshop She goes on awkward 'dates' with celebs. Now she's flirting with fame. Style Jessica M. Goldstein ellipsis

california-park-b06e6f84-c100-11ed-89d4-13b3694f1fcd.jpg

california-park-b6e961e8-c100-11ed-89d4-13b3694f1fcd.jpg

california-park-bafe5202-c100-11ed-89d4-13b3694f1fcd.jpg

california-park-bcaf815c-c100-11ed-89d4-13b3694f1fcd.jpg

<html><story><text>
 BERKELEY, Calif. - So will it be history or housing in this famously liberal city, which today is long on the former and short on the latter?
 The question will determine the fate of People's Park, the seminal hippie hangout and staging ground for the-world-is-watching political demonstrations of decades ago.
 Hippies placed flowers into the rifle barrels of National Guard soldiers here. The free-speech movement was nurtured by its politically fertile grounds, and certainly much has been said here over the decades about the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.S. colonialism and wars, race and class and, most recently, the political power of the University of California system.
 The park is now primarily a homeless camp, but as it has been since its counterculture founding, it is also highly contested.
 For years, UC Berkeley has wanted to build a large apartment building in the roughly one-square block park that would accommodate about 1,100 students and 125 of the city's homeless residents.
 The wealthy neighborhood and its allies in other parts of this cramped city have said no, a refrain that first rang out in the park more than a half-century ago when it was shouted in opposition to the Vietnam War.
 Opponents filed a lawsuit last year to stop the project, and in late February, a state appeals court justice in San Francisco agreed that it should not go forward. The university has pledged to take the case to the state Supreme Court.
 Everyone is angry. Everyone has thoughts.
 All are spoken, some profanely.
 It's Berkeley.
 "A few wealthy Berkeley homeowners should not be able to block desperately needed student housing for years and even decades," the state's liberal governor, Gavin Newsom (D), said in a statement following the most recent court ruling.
 But it is not a simple case of Bay Area not-in-my-backyardism - which, to be sure, is rampant in the region. At least not to the groups fighting the project or even to some of those living in the park, which sits at the southern edge of the UC Berkeley campus in one of the city's most thickly developed neighborhoods.
 "This place goes beyond Berkeley, beyond California - it is our nation's history," said Harvey Smith, a founder of the People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group, a plaintiff in the suit opposing the project.
 The group formed a few years ago and includes members like Smith who live beyond the park's immediate orbit. Smith said the group's first task was to secure a spot for the park on the National Register of Historic Places, which the group did successfully last year.
 As landmarks from that hazy era go, Woodstock and Kent State University also appear in the register. But Smith, who graduated from UC Berkeley and worked in its School of Public Health as a graduate student, said People's Park is different.
 "Those places qualify because of events that happened there," said Smith, who is 77 and retired from the nonprofit world. "But People's Park is a living, ongoing monument to that history."
 Like most debates in Berkeley, whether about the place itself or the world at large, there are many voices and many reminders that this or that aspect of what's at stake is most important or misunderstood.
 But at the physical center of the fight is the park itself, just under three uneven acres carved up by the thick boughs of chopped-down trees, wood-chip hillocks and homeless tents, all imbued with the heavy sense that this is not the place for a sunny lunch break or a twilight pinot noir.
 The university, which owns the land, cut down dozens of trees last year when a brief window opened for the project to move ahead (a memorial was later held in the trees' honor). Over time, the park has been fenced and unfenced, cleared by force, and both policed heavily and ignored.
 To those fighting the university, the park has been intentionally neglected to ease the way for a change there.
 "This is a university that runs two national nuclear laboratories," Smith said, "and you just can't tell me they can't manage a 2.8-acre park."
 In the late 1960s, the university took the land through eminent domain, clearing houses already there to make way for its own construction projects. Those never materialized. The nascent counterculture movement stepped in and, essentially, turned the place into a stage for the rising, sometimes radical politics of the left that flourished in the East Bay and within its most prestigious university.
 Many of the demonstrations have been peaceful. But others have featured clouds of tear gas, flung rocks and bottles, and shotgun blasts. One death and several permanent injuries are attributed to police-protester clashes at the park.
 "It's the only place where people really have a chance to be themselves," said Nick Alexander, a 36-year-old UC Berkeley graduate who has lived in the park during some hard times in his life. "And it can be obnoxious, to be honest."
 Alexander was born in Oklahoma and raised in the foster care system, an experience that bounced him among several states. He moved west from Indiana when he was 18, enrolled in community college, and later transferred to UC Berkeley.
 His first visit to People's Park involved an LSD trip. He wasn't the first to experience the park in that hallucinatory way, nor the last.
 Since graduation, Alexander has devoted much of his time to preserving the park as a place where people can come for sanctuary and food, which he dishes out in big meaty helpings from a makeshift kitchen he has constructed there from scraps of plywood.
 He said he has served 20,000 meals from the kitchen, which sits in the shadow of a tree-fort crow's nest perched between boughs of a nearby redwood. Above his kitchen flies the flag of the Rebel Alliance, the underdog resistance to the Galactic Empire in the "Star Wars" movies.
 Of the university's $312 million housing proposal, Alexander says, "I like it and I don't like it at the same time." What he wants for the park is a community center, a place where the city's homeless can clean up and eat and rest.
 "We're a part of this history, this legacy, and we're fighting now against the sanitization of Berkeley," Alexander said. "A community center alone would change the character of this place. That alone would honor its history."
 There are about 1,000 homeless residents in Berkeley, a city that Alexander and others say has dined out for too long on a reputation as an accepting, liberal haven. It is a rich place now, as are many places that ring the San Francisco Bay.
 But it is very hard to build here - even when you are the flagship university of the $44 billion-a-year UC system, which is often seen as its own kingdom within the Republic of California.
 Several of its 10 campuses are facing severe housing shortages, from Davis near Sacramento to Santa Barbara on the southern coast. UC Berkeley is right there with them.
 Last year, the school said it would have to deny enrollment to 5,000 first-year and transfer students because it could not meet a set of court-ordered student housing requirements.
 What happened when the school told the state it could not meet the rules? The state changed the rules. The university - and, in a nod to equity, the rest of the state's public universities - was given 18 months to complete any court-ordered environmental review of new student housing locations before mandatory enrollment and admissions freezes would kick in.
 "This is all about power, the university's and the government's," said one of the park's homeless residents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing police reprisals. "That's all it is."
 The city of Berkeley adopted a highly ambitious housing plan two years ago that calls for the construction of 9,000 homes by 2031.
 Where those homes will rise when even building on a patch of neglected land in the middle of a residential neighborhood calls for a state Supreme Court opinion is anyone's guess.
 The legal debate pivots on CEQA, an acronym that sends a chill down the spine of every California builder. See-kwa, as the acronym is spoken in everyday vernacular here, is seen by many across the state's political spectrum as a multi-legged monster that chokes out many of California's best-laid housing, water conservation and transportation plans.
 Almost as old as People's Park itself, the California Environmental Quality Act was intended to require a rigorous review of nearly aspect of nearly every proposed construction project. That goal seemed just fine before the state's homeless population swelled to 170,000 people, a third of the nation's total.
 Now CEQA has become a target. In a state government that rarely finds a regulation it doesn't love, California political leaders agree that this one is in dire need of repair.
 And the People's Park case, among much of the other history it has raised, highlighted CEQA's broad mandate to obstruct yet again.
 In his opinion, Justice Gordon B. Burns said the university had failed to adequately consider other sites for the project, which CEQA requires. Opponents argue that there are many other sites - perhaps more than a dozen - more suitable in the city for large-scale student housing.
 But the justice added that the university also did not take into account noise from "loud student parties" in picking the site, a line that for CEQA haters said all there needed to be said about a metastasizing regulation.
 So what's the future of this scruffy patch of history, captured for today's generations mostly in black-and-white photos of hippies squaring off against helmeted National Guard troops?
 Neither side seems ready to back down.
 Smith, founder of the park advocacy group, wants the park to be, well, a park like the many well-tended others in Berkeley. Alexander, who runs the park's kitchen, wants a community center. The university wants housing, which it says is crucial to preserving enrollment numbers in the state's politically fortified citadel of higher education.
 There are about 15 tents in the park regularly, and in one of them lives Malik bin-Saud. He is 48 years old and has lived in the park off and on for all but 18 of them.
 He's planning to remain where he is, the kind of sentiment that has animated many happenings at the park.
 "I'm not going to leave this community hanging," Saud said. "I'm not going to leave here without doing something about it."
 Regardless of the outcome, an epitaph of sorts for People's Park.
 </text>
 </story></html> california-park History and housing clash in Berkeley in a fight over People's Park Postcards from America Scott Wilson ellipsis

ohio-residents-6e787f4e-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-74b661dc-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-7981af0a-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-7d97f86a-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-8498b398-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-88a36a00-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-8e348f1c-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

ohio-residents-9344024e-bea2-11ed-ae4f-88e8a9a481fa.jpg

russia-schools-c8300cd0-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-d1121d84-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-db60887a-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-e0b10674-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-e4890d8c-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-e80a5a56-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

russia-schools-ece19602-bb8e-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

<html><story><text>
 YEREVAN, Armenia - After last year's invasion of Ukraine, academic freedom was among the first casualties. In wartime Russia, schoolchildren are now required to attend compulsory 'patriotism' classes, teachers face jail time for expressing antiwar opinions in their classrooms and, in some kindergartens, there have even been weapons demonstrations.
 But outside the country, in Russia's emigre communities - swelled by the hundreds of thousands who fled in response to the invasion or to avoid military conscription - newly established Russian schools are grappling with a different challenge: how to talk to children about the war, which has displaced their families but also spurred a wave of anti-Russian sentiment.
 Vladislav Povyshev, a history teacher from Siberia, said he left Russia after it became clear he would not be able to teach in the way he wanted. "I understood that, especially with my subjects of history and social sciences, it would be difficult to get around these new, sharp corners in Russia," Povyshev, 32, said in an interview in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, where he now works at the Liberated School, which was set up to serve recently arrived young Russian immigrant families.
 Povyshev said that his students - overwhelmed by the move and missing home - ask a lot of difficult questions that he cannot always answer. "They want to know why we ended up here, at this point, from a historical and political perspective," he said.
 Povyshev has noticed that his students - all of whom grew up using the internet - often understand and see things more clearly than adults, "for better or worse."
 "They are well aware of the consequences that await Russia after the war, and they are aware of the reasons for Russia's failures at the present stage," he said, adding that there have been instances of children breaking down in tears in class, or struggling with anxiety. They want to know the causes of the war and its historical origins but are also deeply concerned for the future.
 "They want to know how it will end, what happens to both sides after a war," he said, "how future generations of Russians can improve the situation in Russia and relations with Ukraine and Ukrainians."
 Like other teachers, Povyshev is navigating different ways to respond without overstepping his duty as an educator.
 In his classes, he gives his pupils the space to express their opinions and encourages them to find counterarguments or parallels in history and international law. Debates in his classes have touched on many issues including the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations, the collapse of empires and the notion of collective responsibility.
 "The main thing is that we do not impose our own opinions and we do not suppress others' voices," Povyshev said. "It is always a conversation, always a dialogue. The students always have the opportunity to ask absolutely any question."
 The Liberated School's ethos is markedly different than that of traditional schools in Russia where, even before the war, the curriculum was rigid and slanted, and rote learning the norm.
 Pupils at the Liberated School. are encouraged to think critically, debate and freely express their opinions. Creativity is celebrated. And teachers tend to prepare their own lesson materials, diverging from standard Russian textbooks.
 "It is like night and day" said geography teacher Polina Primak, 27, while shepherding a class to the playground for recess. "We try to make learning as close as possible to how we would have liked to have been taught when we were at school."
 Elena Chegodaeva, the school's director, had just quit her job as a teacher a week before the war started, wanting a break from education. After she fled Russia last spring, she said she was given a renewed sense of purpose. She started out teaching 40 children in an apartment. She has since enrolled nearly 200 children and has relocated the school to a multistory building in downtown Yerevan, which is being renovated to create more, badly needed classrooms.
 "We definitely have a kinder atmosphere than in most schools in Russia" Chegodaeva said. "We certainly will not have a portrait of Putin hanging on the wall. And we will not bend to anyone. We will not be told who are the good guys, who are the bad ones, who we should support and so on."
 Despite the school's liberal values - and its predominantly antiwar-minded community - there appears to still be some nervousness around overtly political discussions and what several teachers referred to as "spreading propaganda."
 Chegodaeva said that while the school is physically outside of Russia's borders, many employees and families still have links to life inside the country, and therefore potential repercussions.
 According to OVD-Info, a watchdog group, there is rising backlash in Russia against minors for violating draconian wartime censorship laws. Schoolchildren who challenge their teachers or express antiwar opinions are publicly berated or ostracized. Sometimes the police are called. At least 19 teachers who expressed antiwar views have been fired, the group said.
 If students ask Chegodaeva about her opinions, she shares them, she said, but she does not "make speeches" in the classroom. Not all the parents at the school share the same political views. Some support Putin and, even, the war.
 "Children should make their own decisions. They should decide themselves how they relate to a political situation or a religious belief," Chegodaeva said. "This topic is also very complex and very personal for many people. We have children here whose relatives live or lived in Ukraine, and this is extremely difficult for them."
 Povyshev said the school's role was to liberate children's' minds. "Our task is to educate, to create a person who can think openly and rationally, who can consider different points of view," he said. "A freethinking person must come to conclusions on their own."
 Many of the teachers and parents interviewed were reluctant to directly address difficult questions about the war; especially, alleged war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, and Russians' collective responsibility for starting - or stopping - the war. The children seemed more preoccupied with their own homesickness than the war.
 Each family makes different choices about how much to share with their children about the war.
 Yulia Anfilatova, 35, said she vividly remembers the conversation she had with her 4-year-old daughter after the invasion began.
 "She was very frightened. I explained to her that the war is not taking place here in Russia, but that on the contrary - our country is attacking another state that is not so far from us" Anfilatova said. "I said that there is no direct threat to us, but that other people, who are not guilty of anything, are dying and their cities are being destroyed."
 Anfilatova said she thought it was important to explain what was happening honestly and to make it clear that Russia was responsible - for the war and for the family's need to flee.
 "I told her it was unacceptable, and that I didn't want our family to be a participant in this," she said.
 Anfilatova fled Moscow with her husband, Victor Tsatryan, 37, and their five children last spring. She said that her friends and fellow parents were having similar, difficult conversations.
 "Everyone that I know is speaking frankly and is not creating any illusions: They discuss this situation on an equal footing with their children, without attempts to hide anything," she said.
 </text>
 </story></html> russia-schools Talking to children who left Russia about the war in Ukraine Europe Francesca Ebel ellipsis

methadone-repeat-b2edd6ac-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

methadone-repeat-b6eb839e-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

methadone-repeat-bb2a2c1c-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

methadone-repeat-c2bb3598-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

methadone-repeat-befc2a0c-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

methadone-repeat-c7178eb6-bb6d-11ed-8871-55a949a93972.jpg

<html><story><text>
 Krystal Parker, a former heroin user, spent years making long daily bus trips with other patients to a methadone clinic in southwest Florida. For over a decade, the medication has kept at bay her crippling anxiety and the agonizing nausea of withdrawals.
 "When I wasn't on anything, I couldn't stand the way I felt in my own skin," she said. "Methadone satisfies me, but doesn't get me high."
 But Parker, a 41-year-old mother of three, always fears missing her daily dose. After Hurricane Ian closed her clinic in Port Charlotte last year, she had to pay $100 to a fellow patient for a ride over 40 miles to an open facility. "I was desperate," she said. Nearby pharmacies had reopened quickly - but by law, only methadone clinics can dispense the drug to treat addiction.
 Parker's experiences underscore what critics say are draconian methadone regulations that erect barriers to one of the few effective treatments for opioid use disorder - a life-or-death hurdle that may finally be overcome if Congress acts this year to expand access to the drug. Bipartisan bills were reintroduced in both chambers of Congress late last week that would allow patients seeking treatment to get methadone at local pharmacies with a prescription from a doctor specializing in addiction, in addition to from federally regulated clinics.
 Proponents of the measures say methadone is proven to help wean people off more dangerous street drugs, yet remains frustratingly difficult to get - even amid an opioid crisis claiming nearly 300 lives each day. A rigid clinic system imposed 50 years ago often requires daily visits to clinics that critics say stigmatize patients, disrupt lives and make it difficult to work.
 The clinics had already begun loosening up due to the pandemic. Apart from the proposed legislation, the federal government is moving to make permanent the relaxation of rules that made it easier for patients to take home doses of methadone.
 "You're saving a lot of lives by having people treated with methadone," said Yngvild K. Olsen, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), one of the agencies that oversees clinics.
 But at least one group is not on board with proposals to expand access to methadone beyond the clinic system - the clinics themselves, many of which are for-profit.
 Mark Parrino, president of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, the industry trade group, cites a worrisome recent uptick in methadone-related overdose deaths as a warning signal about why it may be dangerous to broadly deregulate methadone - itself an addictive drug that can be used to treat pain.
 He believes the legislation, if passed, would probably lead to the diversion of methadone to the streets - with grim consequences. "If that happens, I assure you there will be media accounts of methadone designed to treat opioid use disorder now killing people," Parrino said.
 That prediction is dismissed by many addiction specialists and the bills' backers, including Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Reps. Donald W. Norcross (D-N.J.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.). They note that methadone can already be prescribed by physicians and dispensed by pharmacies for chronic pain. Amid a raging fentanyl crisis, they argue, board-certified specialists should be able to write prescriptions to treat addiction.
 "Our communities are shouldering not just an opioid crisis but also an overdose crisis," Markey said in a statement. "Parents are losing their children. Children are losing their parents. Yet, we are still making recovery harder with outdated rules that burden the very people we need to be providing care for."
 - - -
 'We don't have enough methadone clinics'
 Methadone is one of three drugs, including naltrexone and buprenorphine, approved to treat addiction. Buprenorphine is widely used and be can prescribed outside opioid treatment clinics; Congress late last year also made it easier for physicians to treat patients with the drug, which is less potent than methadone.
 Methadone, developed as a painkiller for wartime casualties, remains much safer than the illegal street drugs killing tens of thousands of people each year. It blocks the roller-coaster effect of opioids, quashing the cravings coursing through the body. It also stabilizes opioid levels in users who might experience the nausea, chills and sweating of withdrawals from powerful but short-acting opioids such as fentanyl or heroin.
 The Food and Drug Administration approved it as a treatment for addiction to heroin and opioids in the early 1970s. But stringent regulations were imposed for fear the heroin epidemic affecting urban Black communities might spill into suburbia, said Paul Joudrey, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
 "Methadone comes with a lot of historical baggage," said Joudrey, who co-wrote a 2020 study that mapped excessively long drive times to clinics in five states hard hit by opioid deaths.
 As a result, Joudrey said, many methadone clinics are in urban areas, even as today's opioid crisis has wreaked widespread havoc across a wide swath of the country.
 About 2,000 clinics provide methadone care to at least 300,000 patients, according to federal data - a fraction of the estimated 2.1 million people in the United States with opioid use disorder. In many states, there are just a handful of clinics. Wyoming has zero.
 "We don't have enough methadone clinics," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
 Patients in rural areas have the longest commutes, if they can get to clinics at all.
 Around Madison County, Ky., hard hit by the drug crisis, that's prompted an unusual solution - the hiring of four drivers to ferry patients across long stretches of rural areas to a clinic in Richmond, a city about 20 miles south of Lexington. The program, run by the recovery support organization Voices of Hope and funded through NIDA, has logged nearly 200,000 miles over the past year.
 Daniel Deatherage, 42, of Harrodsburg, Ky., credits the program with helping him stay stable. A driver picks him up about 7 a.m. for the roughly two-and-a-half-hour round trip. The morning commitment means he must work the graveyard shift, from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., at an electronics manufacturing plant.
 The days are exhausting but worth it. "On methadone, I can live a productive life," said Deatherage, who struggled for decades with addiction to pain pills, heroin and other opioids.
 If pharmacies dispensed methadone, his life might be easier - he lives just a few minute walk from one.
 - - -
 A 'suspicion of criminality'
 For patients involved with methadone clinics, the daily routine can feel like being on probation. Many show up before the sun rises, standing in line, attending counseling and filling out worksheets. They're watched as they drink a small cup of the red liquid.
 "In no other treatment context does a patient enter into a medical intervention with the suspicion of criminality from the onset," said Erin Fanning Madden, a professor of public health and medicine at Wayne State University in Michigan.
 Counseling sessions are mandated. Urine tests are regular. Missing an appointment can lead to a reduction in a dosage of methadone, patients say.
 Louise Vincent, a 46-year-old methadone patient in Greensboro, N.C., describes every morning as a scramble. Because she recently had her leg amputated, Vincent's partner carries her to their car for the hurried drive to the clinic, which closes for dosing at 10:30 a.m.
 Patients jokingly call the mad dash the "Methadone 500."
 "If you're one minute late to many clinics, they lock you out," said Vincent, who is executive director of the North Carolina Urban Survivors Union, which is affiliated with a national group that in 2021 published a "Methadone Manifesto" calling for an end to the clinic system.
 For advocates of widening access to methadone, the relaxed rules during the pandemic offered a real-world experiment that they say proved the benefits of giving patients greater control over their lives. In March and April of 2020, as government agencies sought to curb the spread of the coronavirus, SAMHSA loosened regulations on taking home doses of methadone. Clinics had flexibility to give patients deemed "stable" up to 28 days' worth of doses. Patients with less time in treatment and fewer negative drug tests could get up to 14 take-home doses.
 One study that looked at five rural counties in Oregon found that stable methadone patients who got more take-home doses had fewer urine samples coming back positive for drugs and felt more trusted. In addition, their reduced travel time "permitted increased employment and recreation."
 In December, SAMHSA cited the study in proposing to make permanent the relaxed rules for take-home doses, saying patients "saw positive impacts on their recovery, including being more likely to remain in treatment and less likely to use illicit opioids."
 Last week, a group of academics released an analysis of 29 studies that also supported making the rules permanent. "It took a pandemic to break through" long-restrictive methadone rules, it said.
 Nonetheless, some experts have urged a cautious approach, noting that although methadone does not offer the same intense high of heroin or fentanyl, it can still be abused, with potentially deadly results.
 One group noted that when Denmark loosened restrictions on its use, methadone overdoses increased at the same rate as heroin overdose decreased, "offsetting any public health or safety benefit of the new regulations."
 Such concerns may be born out by U.S. data, although experts say it's too early to tell.
 A review of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention death records shows 3,359 methadone-related overdoses in 2020, when take-home dose rules were relaxed - a 30 percent increase from the previous year, although many of those deaths may have also involved illegal street drugs such as fentanyl. It's also unclear how many of the overdoses might have involved pain prescriptions. The uptick might not be a blip: Provisional data shows at least 3,528 overdose deaths involving methadone in 2021.
 "Accommodations during covid were necessary, but this data suggests we should really be cautious about making these changes permanent," said Brian Piper, lead author on a study documenting the increased overdoses and an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Center for Pharmacy Innovation and Outcomes at the Geisinger School of Graduate Education in Pennsylvania.
 Proponents of deregulation note the number of methadone-related overdoses represents only a small fraction of overall drug overdose deaths, which reached about 107,000 in 2021, the last year for which complete data is available. Given the magnitude of the drug crisis, they argue that if more people with opioid use disorder used methadone, rather than street drugs, there would be far fewer overdose deaths.
 "We're interested in the net outcome," said Madden from Wayne State. "If there's an overall decrease in overdoses, that's a win."
 - - -
 The view from the clinics
 The trade group that represents methadone clinics said it supports SAMHSA's relaxations on take-home medication. The group's president says the organization also endorses dispensing from pharmacies - but only if clinic doctors are writing the prescriptions.
 "Some patients really want or would prefer to go to a pharmacy like other people who are picking up prescriptions for other chronic illnesses," Parrino said. "And we understand that."
 But the trade group takes a hard line opposing measures that would allow addiction specialists outside the clinic system to prescribe methadone.
 Clinic proponents insist patients need the structure of that system, and contend that its doctors have the greatest expertise in treating opioid use disorder with methadone, particularly in the initial treatment stage when patients could overdose if given too much.
 Although the bills introduced into Congress would allow only board-certified addiction specialists to prescribe methadone, Parrino predicts that would lead to more overdoses as some patients sell or give away the drug. "Does anybody really think that the unstable fentanyl-using, heroin-using patient is going to take that 30-day supply home and use it as prescribed?" he asked.
 Brian Hurley, president-elect of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, counters that the issue of patients misusing methadone is a "clinical question, not a regulatory one."
 "I trust addiction physicians to be able to evaluate diversion risks and the potential of patients to go off and sell their methadone," Hurley said. "We have the training to be able to manage that."
 Norcross, a co-sponsor of the House bill, calls industry arguments self-interested, suggesting the "clinic cartel" simply wants to protect its profits. "Many of them are making money by keeping it restrictive," he said.
 For methadone patients such as Parker, of Florida, the push to make methadone available at pharmacies makes sense. Her story illustrates the frustrations and the successes of the methadone system.
 She started using pain pills with a boyfriend in her mid-20s, then graduated to heroin before doing her first stint in a methadone clinic. While under court supervision for dealing in stolen property, Parker says, she relapsed after her probation officer wouldn't let her leave the county to go to the clinic. She ended up going to prison for 17 months.
 After her release in 2011, Parker used drugs again, but later returned to a methadone clinic, taking a ride-sharing bus paid for by Medicaid. She didn't get the benefit of the eventual pandemic-relaxed rules - it took her almost four years to earn the right to take home just a week's worth of doses.
 Now, with her clinic commute down to once a week, Parker said she spends more time working with her boyfriend's lawn care service and caring for her three children, ages 9, 14 and 19. And she runs a Facebook support group, Life on Methadone. Her followers agree methadone rules shouldn't be so tough.
 "For those of us who have never been a problem patient, who go out of our way to do things the right way," she said, "we should be granted a little more leniency."
 - - -
 Dan Keating contributed to this report.
 </text>
 </story></html> methadone-repeat As drug deaths soar, experts urge expanded access to methadone Health David Ovalle ellipsis

calif-drought-repeat-c5a1830e-bacb-11ed-80fc-c8cf0e310a2a.jpg

calif-drought-repeat-ce52ebdc-bacb-11ed-80fc-c8cf0e310a2a.jpg

<html><story><text>
 SODA SPRINGS, Calif. - To keep out the snow, most of the windows of Andrew Schwartz's cabin are boarded up with plywood, creating a gloom so persistent that he keeps his house plant alive with a grow light and consumes daily vitamin D from a pillbox in his desk.
 Snow falls in such abundance around Schwartz's home - which doubles as the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory - that prior residents of his research station have been known to ski directly into a third-story window. The drifts bury cars, warp walls and pile up in monstrous mushroom caps on his roof, before sliding off with startling violence.
 But even Schwartz, who has chased hailstorms in Australia and tornadoes in Oklahoma, faced weather this week unlike any he has known. The blizzard that blanketed California's inland mountains hit Schwartz's cabin with 70 mph winds and blinding snow that covered up his snowshoe tracks minutes after he made them. On Tuesday afternoon, as he went to check his instruments, he slipped and plunged into a drift up to his neck.
 "That was the first time I've ever had a moment like: Am I going to get out of this?" he recalled. "That storm was genuinely the worst one I've seen in my life."
 The amount of snow that has fallen on California is rivaling some of the most bountiful years on record. Just in the past two weeks, more than a dozen feet of snow fell in this area, pushing the snowpack in the Central and Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains to roughly twice the amount of a normal year. The whiteout shut down national parks and interstates, buried neighborhoods, collapsed roofs, stranded motorists, trapped residents and knocked out power to thousands in mountain communities throughout the state.
 For a parched populace coming out of three consecutive years of extreme drought - the flakes have also felt miraculous.
 "We could not be more fortunate to have had this kind of precipitation after three very punishing years," Karla Nemeth, the director of California's Department of Water Resources, told a briefing Friday after the latest snow survey in the state.
 Just last fall, California's biggest reservoirs had dropped to dangerously low levels. A record number of wells in the Central Valley had run dry. Farmers were fallowing hundreds of thousands of acres. Residents in the Los Angeles area were being told to stop watering lawns. State officials were projecting dry La Nina conditions would persist; California was headed for a fourth year of drought.
 "And then, after Christmas, something interesting happened," Michael Anderson, the state climatologist, said during the briefing. "We began a rather amazing set of atmospheric rivers."
 A parade of nine drenching storms marched in off the Pacific, swamping the state. After a dry spell in February, another deluge of precipitation has fallen over the past week. This time, it came in the form of an unusually cold storm moving south from the Gulf of Alaska, dropping snow even at low altitudes and down toward the Mexican border. Flurries dusted the Hollywood sign.
 Anderson and other climate scientists attribute these wild oscillations in extreme wet and dry periods to the warming climate. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture - sucking up more during dry periods and deluging during wet ones - while also breaking down typical jet stream patterns, allowing cold air to move further south than normal.
 Even after all this rain and snow, state authorities have yet to declare the drought officially dead. But the water supply - and projections for once the snow starts melting in the spring - have dramatically improved. The Federal Drought Monitor on Thursday reported that the percentage of California experiencing at least moderate drought conditions had fallen from 84.6 percent to 49.1 percent in the past week. Major reservoirs across the state are at 96 percent of average levels.
 But the extraordinary snowpack has been predominantly in the central and southern parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains, less in the north, where some of the state's largest reservoirs remain far below capacity. The state's groundwater supplies, drawn down during the past dry decade, will also not recover quickly, water authorities said.
 "It takes more than a single wet year to really recover a lot of those groundwater basins that have been critically overdrafted for so many years," said Sean de Guzman, manager of the snow surveys and water supply forecast unit at the California Department of Water Resources.
 On Friday morning, de Guzman and his colleagues trudged across a snowy field south of Lake Tahoe and plunged a hollow metal pole into the depths, part of the monthly snow surveys that take place across the state. They found snows more than 9 feet deep, or 177 percent of average for that date.
 The state's record snowpack came in the winter of 1982-83. The snows this year have nearly matched those heights from four decades ago.
 "With the next few storms here, throughout this month, we could actually surpass that," de Guzman said.
 The blizzard conditions have made it difficult in some areas to even assess what's out there. A team hired to measure snow depths in Sequoia National Park had to be evacuated by a Navy helicopter on Thursday, as they were marooned in a cabin near Mount Whitney.
 "Some of these people that were extracted, they've been measuring snow for 30, 40 years," de Guzman said. "And they're seeing some of the most epic conditions they've ever seen up there."
 Yosemite National Park has been buried so deep it's been closed for the past week. Interstate 80 - running through the Donner Pass - also shut down for multiple days as snowplows worked to clear the route.
 The accumulation reached remarkable heights in mountain ski towns such as Truckee and Soda Springs, near Lake Tahoe, and residents are still digging themselves out. Up and down the roads, snowplows push through the drifts and blowers send roostertails of snow arcing high into the air. The giant berms they create turn streets into mazes.
 Whole neighborhoods remain nearly submerged. There are drifts that loom like undiscovered Mayan ruins, still draped in jungles of white. On one street, the red top of a stop sign is all that's visible above the sea of snow. On another, someone has spray painted "car" on the side of a white mound so the plows know what's underneath.
 In the Serene Lakes neighborhood in Soda Springs, one of those plows struck a buried propane tank, igniting a fireball that damaged three houses, breaking windows and scorching facades.
 "It broke our window. It just melted the blinds," said one of the homeowners, who gave her name only as Kristy, as she dealt with the telephone repairman and surveyed the damage. She lives in San Francisco but couldn't get up to her vacation home for days after the explosion because of the closed highways.
 "It seems like people are just, like, a little in a daze," she added. "It's just been so much snow."
 Some of her neighbors battled those cold, heavy blankets draped over their homes, scraping and shoveling clear their doors and windows, decks and driveways. Many of the ski chalets are second homes - and people have not yet bothered to return. Theresa Laster and her sweater-clad chihuahua, Angel, navigated the snowy streets on foot. She and her husband, both musicians and year-round residents, had ridden out the storms but hadn't been able to make it to the nearest store, more than three miles away.
 "We're running low on supplies," she said. "Yesterday we ran out of milk. I said, 'Go get some milk,' to my husband. He said, 'The roads aren't even plowed.' 'Well, walk.'"
 In other parts of the state, emergency crews have rescued residents and delivered food and medicine to others stranded at home amid the drifts. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency on Wednesday for 13 counties. In Lake Arrowhead, in Southern California's San Bernardino County, the California National Guard was called in to help extract stranded residents.
 This year's snowpack, in addition to its size, has other attributes encouraging for the state's water supply. It is a cold snowpack, water managers say, which could help it persist into the spring before turning to runoff. More storms are on the way for the Sierras, although some are expected to be warmer - which has raised concerns that rain-on-snow events could lead to flooding.
 "A lot of this warm storm will basically melt that low- to mid-elevation snow," de Guzman said. "We should see an increased amount in runoff but nothing that the reservoirs shouldn't be able to capture."
 California still faces looming cuts to its share of Colorado River water, which supplies cities as well as major farming regions in Southern California. Snows are above average in the Colorado River basin as well, but not to the extent of California, and the giant reservoirs on that system are still critically low.
 Understanding the complicated connections between the flakes that fall and how they could translate into water that sustains millions is key to the work of Schwartz, the lead scientist and manager of the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory. While big snow years in the recent past have been followed by brutal dry spells - and the trend is toward less snow in California's mountains as the atmosphere warms - this is still an optimistic moment.
 "People need a reason to celebrate," Schwartz said as he stood on an instrument tower that was 30 feet above the ground but only about 15 feet off the snow. "And with how much snow we've had, it's an amazing winter and even if it doesn't solve all of our issues, it's dramatically reduced our short-term drought, and if temperatures keep cool, it might help with our long-term drought as well."
 These blizzards mean boomtime for this work. As it snows, Schwartz fights the drifts at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day to measure snow and check other instruments to glean information about the snowpack's temperature and water content.
 The research station, situated on U.S. Forest Service land, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1946. At one point long ago there were seven full-time staff living on-site, Schwartz said, but now he lives alone, accompanied by his dogs and handwritten logs of temperature and snow data from decades past.
 When he gets stir crazy, he will trek to the general store down the hill for conversation. He has taken up painting this winter, and his water colors reveal his preoccupations: a lone snowboarder on a chairlift; a conifer draped in white. He has a poster on his refrigerator that reads: "These foods can keep you alive in the forest."
 Lately, Schwartz has been digging himself out like the rest of his neighbors high in the mountains, shoveling his steps and knocking snow off his equipment.
 Snow had mostly covered the window next to his desk - one of the few left unboarded.
 As he sat there on Thursday afternoon, the lights suddenly went out. He had ridden out the blizzard without losing electricity.
 "Come on. Are you serious?" he shouted. "A bright beautiful sunny day and the power goes out?"
 The gloom in his cabin intensified.
 But it wasn't so bad. He had a generator. And the forecast was more snow for the weekend.
 </text>
 </story></html> calif-drought-repeat California was hit with 12 feet of snow. Is it enough to ease the drought? climate Joshua Partlow ellipsis

Can't find what you're looking for?