Deseret Magazine - May 2022

WHEN THE DESERT RUNS DRY THE FUTURE OF LAKE POWELL & GLEN CANYON

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THE WAR WITHIN: VETERANS AND MENTAL HEALTH

CAN ISRAEL SURVIVE?

HOW FLORIDA TOOK OVER THE GOP

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58 “Among certain characters in the Trump universe, a South Florida ZIP code has become a status symbol.”

3

THE FRONT LINES OF AMERICA FIRST A DISPATCH FROM THE HOME OF THE NEW GOP

BY TAR PL EY H IT T IL LUST R AT IO N

BY CF PAYNE

MAG AZ INE

WHEN THE DESERT RUNS DRY THE FUTURE OF LAKE POWELL & GLEN CANYON

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THE WAR WITHIN:

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HOW FLORIDA

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48 WHEN THE DESERT RUNS DRY IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT THE FUTURE OF GLEN CANYON.

THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN CAN A NEW, EXPERIMENTAL PEER-TO-PEER PROGRAM FOR RURAL VETS SAVE LIVES?

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CONTENTS

M AGAZ I NE

Anne-Marie Barton

“This was a struggle for dignity.

This was a fight for Israel to make good on its promises.”

CLASSICAL ROOTS MODERN EXPRESSION

LETTER FROM THE FIELD

42

THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL An Israeli citizen returns to assess the promise of the Jewish state. by mya jaradat

MODERN FAMILY

WHEN YOUR ADVENTURE PARTNER KEEPS DEMANDING GUMMY BEARS

20

IDEAS

Having kids has made exploring the outdoors, well, different.

THE DARK SIDE OF AI

by megan michelson

A WORD TO THE WISE

Artificial intelligence and the threat to religious freedom. by bonnie glick and kennedy lee

24

Embracing aging in a culture where ‘old’ is bad.

CULTURE

by connie zweig

SAVING GRACE

78

Can Adam Sklute bring Ballet West into the age of inclusion?

LEADERSHIP

THE TRAILBLAZER

76

by benoît morenne

26

Faith Briggs is opening up wild spaces to those long marginalized from them. by ethan bauer

THE WEST

INSIDE THE HOUSE OF LEE

38 WILL THE VOLUNTEERS COME BACK?

The West’s oldest political dynasty hangs in the balance. by matthew brown

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THE LAST WORD

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84

Meet the woman who confounds the left and the right by lois m . collins

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

5 EMBRACING CHANGE

T

o edit a magazine is to be inspired. By the writing, the courageous reporting, the beautiful art and the photography.

From our launch last year, we have strived to create a publication that informs, enlightens and entertains, to showcase the place we call Deseret and its intersection with the broader world.

As the editor, I get to see the sketches of art before they become the cover and hear behind-the-scenes anecdotes of reporting trips to far-off places like Cuba and Israel.

But like you, the reader, the biggest pleasure of editing this magazine are the places it takes me and the people I get to meet through its pages.

Speaking of being inspired, let’s start at the end, (“The Contrarian,” page 84). Liz Bruenig is someone I’ve admired for years, partly because she defies labels. She’s a democratic socialist who voted for Bernie Sanders. She’s a devout Catholic who tweets regularly about the joys of parenting. And because she doesn’t easily fit neatly in a box, she drives people nuts — on the left and the right.

Maybe that makes her an iconoclast. Someone who isn’t afraid to be different. To stand apart from the crowd. And for it, she gets heaps of abuse on Twitter.

When we started this magazine, we too hoped to stand apart from the crowd. To break from what seems to be the trend in media these days — to tack hard to the left or right and give a hyperpartisan audience what they want to hear, rarely breaking from the prescribed orthodoxy.

At times that can be uncomfortable. Journalism, when done right, can take us on journeys to unfamiliar terrain, to confront a world changing 8

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in ways we may not like. If you’re a certain type of Republican, you may not like the portrait of the party that emerges from Tarpley Hitt’s dispatch to Florida (“The Front Lines of America First,” page 58). And if you’re someone who marks spring and summer with trips to Lake Powell, you may not like Eric Balken’s richly reported piece on the future of one of the West’s most iconic landmarks (“When The Desert Runs Dry,” page 48).

But change is inevitable, whether we like it or not. And more often than not it ushers in new delights, as Balken points out in his cover story. The drought may be emptying out Lake Powell, but it’s revealing a breathtaking wonderworld that’s been submerged for nearly 60 years.

Embracing change. Finding solutions. Making the world a better place.

That’s part of the mission of this magazine. It’s why we profiled Faith Briggs, a woman pushing to make our wild spaces more welcoming to traditionally marginalized communities (“The Trailblazer,” page 26), and Randy McDonald, an Air Force veteran who, alarmed by the high rate of suicide among veterans, asked what more he could do to help (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” page 68). He created a local chapter of a group called Together With Veterans and started hosting meetings where veterans could gather to talk about things no one else would understand.

We live in a time of war and pandemic. We face challenges in our own homes, families and communities. It can feel overwhelming. We can slip into despair. But there is also reason for hope and optimism. I hope you can find that in this issue, and like me, find some inspiration in its pages.

—JESSE HYDE

THE BUZZ

OUR READERS RESPOND

FOR THE MARCH COVER STORY,

staff writer Benoît Morenne ex-

time isn’t so bad for kids (“Screen Time”). “Great article about a rel-

plored how climate change is spurring the world’s next great mi-

ative and important topic that affects the most important part of our

gration, focusing on families who have left the West Coast due to

society: children,” reader Joshua Young wrote. “Children are wired

catastrophic wildfires. It’s a global phenomenon, one that could “usher

to imitate the examples they see (we all are, but kids more so). If you

in an unprecedented exodus,” Morenne wrote (“The Great Climate

do not take an active interest in guiding your child’s development

Migration”). Robert McLeman, a geography and environmental

then strangers online will.”

studies professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, called the

Epidemic”), Lois M. Collins chronicled an alarming spike in teen

piece “one of the best written, best researched, in-depth popular me-

depression, asking what role the pandemic has played. “If adults are

dia articles I’ve read on the topic of environmental migration in the

confused, angry, stressed, we can imagine how children are feeling,”

U.S.,” while many readers expressed skepticism about the root causes

reader Wanda Stewart wrote in response. “Pandemics, economy,

of climate change.

stresses, health issues and now the prospect of war. We must take

In a companion piece, iconic broadcast journal-

In a related article (“The Next Teen

ist Ted Koppel wrote about the increasing importance for people

care of children.”

around the world to be prepared for disaster (“Prologue to Catastro-

Prize winner for feature writing and the former syndicated humor col-

phe”), and explored the unique spirit of self-reliance he found in the

umnist for The Washington Post, wrote about finding beauty in our

American West, in particular Salt Lake City. And Gérald Caussé,

age of chaos and distraction in the March issue (“The Art of Slow-

the presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

ing Down”). It was his first piece since leaving the Post in September.

Saints, wrote about the sustaining power of faith in times of crisis

The column received widespread attention and praise. Mark Woods,

(“After the Last Amen We Went to Work”). “Faith has done much

a columnist at the Florida Times Union, wrote: “Wonderful piece,

to help me weather life’s difficulties, increase what I do for other

as always,” and Spencer Ryan Hall, chief operating officer at New

people, and try to be a better person,” reader Stephen Preston

Hydrogen in Santa Clarita, California, wrote that he hopes it will be

wrote. “The power I have received in these ways gives me a kind of

the first of many columns in the magazine by Weingarten.

existential knowledge of the validity of that faith that seems no less

topher Solomon, one of the nation’s most renowned environmental

real to me than other ways of knowing, be they logical, scientific,

writers, praised staff writer Ethan Bauer’s first-person essay on les-

Jean M.

sons learned from a weeklong survival course (“Of Maps & Memo-

Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is

ries”): “I appreciate the way you approached this as not just a travel

perhaps best known for being one of the first psychologists to sound

or adventure story, but made it about much more than that — about

the alarm on excessive screen time. But in the March issue, she mod-

family and other things. Those are always the stories that mean the

ulated her previous stance, highlighting research that some screen

most to write, and resonate the most with readers.”

mathematical, sensory, based on authoritative sources.”

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Gene Weingarten, the only two-time Pulitzer

Chris-

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Deseret Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 14, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in December/ January and July/August.

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DESERET, proposed as a state in 1849, spanned from the Sierras in California to the Rockies in Colorado, and from the border of Mexico north to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming.

Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with the broader world.

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CONTRIBUTORS

d l O

JESSIE LIN

C.F. PAYNE

DANIEL ROLIDER

TARPLEY HITT

Lin is an award-winning illustrator from China. After studying business in college, she made the change to her current profession and received a Master of Fine Arts in illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her clients have included Knowable Magazine, 5280 magazine and American Educator, and her work is featured on page 25.

The legendary American caricaturist and illustrator has been highlighting the pages of major publications such as Rolling Stone, Mad and Der Spiegel since 1980. Payne has received gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and is also the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Illustration program at the University of Hartford. His work is featured on page 58.

An Israeli photojournalist and visual storyteller, Rolider started his professional life in the Israeli navy before covering stories for The New York Times, ESPN and Stern.

In 2021, his focus shifted toward Eritrean asylum-seekers and rising tensions within Israel. For this issue, his work is featured in “The Future of Israel,” on page 42, nearly 75 years after partition.

A 2018 Harvard University graduate, Hitt has been featured in The New York Times Magazine and the Miami New Times, and is currently a writer at Gawker, The Daily Beast and a managing editor at The Drift.

Her article on page 58 tells how Florida became the capital of the GOP.

BONNIE GLICK

LEAH LIBRESCO SARGEANT

ERIC BALKEN

MEGAN MICHELSON

The American diplomat and businesswoman served as deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development from January 2019 until November 2022. Glick is currently director of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue and a senior adviser for the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Her article, which she co-authored with Kennedy Lee, on the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence, can be found on page 76.

Writer, speaker and self-proclaimed instigator, Sargeant has been featured in First Things, The American Conservative and Commonweal.

She has written two books, including “Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer.”

She covers religion, statistics and theater, and runs two substacks: Tiny Book Club and Other Feminisms. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, Alexi Sargeant. Her commentary on aid to Ukrainian refugees can be found on page 16.

Executive director of Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit committed to the restoration of Glen Canyon, Balken was born and raised in Salt Lake City. Having developed a deep connection to Utah’s natural beauty, he has spent his career working to protect it. Balken is also involved with Colorado River policy and serves as an adviser to the Future of the Colorado group. On page 48, Balken writes about the West running out of time, when it comes to water, as Lake Powell water levels drop precipitously.

Starting her journalism career at a college newspaper in Vermont, Michelson’s work has since been published by some of the outdoor industry’s most iconic publications such as Outside and Ski magazine.

Now a freelancer, she continues to write for Outside, edits for Backcountry magazine, and has contributed to The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Backpacker. In “When Your Adventure Partner Keeps Demanding Gummy Bears,” she writes about exploring the outdoors after having kids, page 20.

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in a M

7

125 years of SUU NOW THAT'S A REASON TO CELEBRATE

COMMENTARY

C

A ROOM IN THE INN OFFERING SHELTER — AND HOPE — FOR THE DISPLACED

BY LEA H L I BR ESCO SA R G EA N T

lose to four million people have fled Ukraine, but so far there are few tent cities on the country’s borders. The refugee crisis has been met, at least initially, with a surge of support, such that one of the most pressing problems is connecting people who want to offer help with those who need it.

Two Harvard students, Avi Schiffmann and Marco Burstein, designed Ukraine Take Shelter as a way to pair refugees with rooms. They knew that there were people willing to offer help to Ukrainian refugees, but that they might have trouble connecting to people in need. Ukrainian refugees were simply trying to get out, as quickly as possible, and could easily end up in a town where they knew no one. Some people even turned to Tinder, because it let them connect to locals, to ask for help in a new place.

Flipping through the postings in different cities, I saw notes from people who had taken a look at their home and had asked how it could be different, whom else it could shelter. One person in Warsaw, Poland, wrote, “We have a 2-bedroom apartment and a 16-month-old son. We will move our son into our bedroom.” Another Polish person wrote that they had a dog, and would be willing to host up to three dogs along with their owners.

As far afield as New York City, people added their names, with one person offering to share their studio apartment, writing, “The couch isn’t a foldout, but I’ll just get an inflatable mattress, no big deal. I’m sure I can do longer than one week if necessary.”

When need comes knocking, it changes the way we see the world around us. A spare room, an extra set of towels, the clothes at the bottom of the drawer that rarely get worn, each of these superfluities make our everyday life feel a little more spacious. We have some wiggle room in our own home, with our own possessions, to not worry about running out. But each “extra” also poses a question: Can I hold onto this for my own comfort when someone else has a greater need?

A pair of friends I know in Washington, D.C., have always made sure to budget so that they can afford an apartment with a guest room. They wanted to always be able to say “yes” to someone who needed a long-term place to stay on short notice — the kind of prolonged stay that would be hard to sustain if your guest were on your living room couch. They wanted to be able to make it imaginable that someone they knew could leave an abusive relationship, quit an exploitative job, come to a new city to look for work.

Their room wasn’t always in use, but I met some of their long-term guests when I came over for dinner. They talked about their choice in part to inspire others, and in part so that friends knew that their door was open.

We were the ones who might bring someone to their door, someone who didn’t know them, except for their willingness to offer shelter.

Those friends offered an answer to what it means to have “extra” in a world where others are in need. Their extra space was the result of deliberate sacrifice and savings, and they never thought of it as “their” room, but as a room that they held in trust for others.

In the middle of a crisis, the people volunteering on Ukraine Take Shelter have stepped up. But, as my friends know, there are quieter emergencies all around us. We have to find our own ways of inviting need in.

Mutual aid societies, which have expanded during the Covid pandemic, are one way to know your community better. Knowing the specific needs of the people around you makes it easier to look at what you own and decide to give it away.

L E A H L I B R E S C O S A R G E A N T I S T H E A U T H O R O F “A R R I V I N G AT A M E N: S E V E N C AT H O L I C P RAY E R S T H AT E V E N I C A N O F F E R ,” A N D RU N S T WO S U B STAC KS : T I N Y B O O K C LU B A N D O T H E R F E M I N I S M S.

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OPENING SHOT

LOOKING UP? WINDOW CLEANERS SCALE THE 26 STORIES OF 95 STATE AT CITY CREEK IN SALT LAKE CITY ON MARCH 10, 2022

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAURA SEITZ

MAY 2022

19

MODERN FAMILY

WHEN YOUR ADVENTURE PARTNER KEEPS DEMANDING GUMMY BEARS HAVING KIDS HAS MADE EXPLORING THE OUTDOORS, WELL, DIFFERENT

BY M E G A N M I C H E L S O N

I

vividly recall my first run after giving birth to my daughter, Nora. She was around six weeks old, and I fed her, handed her to her dad, and left home wearing two sports bras and an oversized T-shirt, determined to reclaim a shred of my formerly active self. I was operating on a Swiss-cheese-like night of sleep and leaking milk through my shirt, but still, I was out in the world, moving my body. I jogged, slowly, to a spot on the bike path that’s just over a mile from my house. Then, I peed my pants a little, turned around and waddled home. It was liberating.

My daughter is seven now, and her brother, Otis, is five. In the years since they’ve arrived, I’ve gotten back into the outdoor sports I did fervently before they were born — backcountry skiing, trail running, mountain biking — but it’s, admittedly, not quite the same.

People with kids will tell you this: Seeing the outdoors through your children’s eyes is like discovering the world anew, a remarkable journey that you get to take together. And that is true. There’s nothing more fun than chasing your five-year-old on skis through the twists and jumps of a snow-covered forest, or plotting animal shapes in the constellations while sitting around a campfire with your kid. If you love nature, you know that stunning beauty and self-discovery are easy to find in the wilderness, and that can be even more profound when you add a child’s unique wonder to the mix.

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But also: Have you ever tried to hike with a toddler who refused to wear anything but sparkly silver ballet flats? Have you changed a diaper blowout on the side of a trail, when you forgot wipes and had to use your own shirt instead, or packed a breast pump in your backcountry ski pack? Or pushed a running stroller up a hill with a screaming baby and toddler in it?

Try hauling your ski equipment, your kid’s MY TOLERANCE FOR RISK IN THE OUTDOORS IS BASICALLY ZERO NOW. I NO LONGER LOOK AT AVALANCHEPRONE SLOPES IN THE BACKCOUNTRY AND THINK, “WOW, THAT LOOKS LIKE A PERFECT LINE TO SKI.”

gear, and eventually the kid, too, from what feels like the farthest parking spot in the lot on a crowded Saturday to squeeze in two whiny, Haribo-gummy-filled runs down the bunny slope before naptime and tell me parenting isn’t the hardest job in the world.

But I’m starting to see the light. As my kids get a little older, I see them getting stronger, tougher and more skilled. They can already climb a full route at the climbing gym, ski off

the top of the mountain and bike dirt trails (just don’t put a hill in the way). I see my freedom extending a little farther, too, making it possible to leave for longer or more frequent stretches to do things for myself.

When I was four months pregnant with Nora, my husband, Dan, and I took a ski trip with a few friends to Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. While we were there, I skied deep powder, reluctantly abstained from eating sushi and took only mini-dips into the country’s famous onsens, or hot springs. Over ramen one night, one of our friends (an adventure photographer who understood the full stop a new baby would put on these adventures) said, “So, this trip is your last hurrah, huh?”

I cringed. At the time, I despised the sentiment that having kids meant the end of your life as you knew it, that all big adventures and prodigious travels would come to a grinding halt the moment you learned how to swaddle.

I planned on continuing to do the activities I loved, and better yet, I wanted to bring my kid along for the ride. Having a baby wasn’t the end of adventuring; it was the beginning. Right?

Fast forward to the first day of kindergarten — when my formerly well-used expedition duffle has been replaced by an oversized mom bag littered with crushed goldfish crackers — and I’m starting to understand what my friend meant with his unsolicited comment. Don’t get me wrong: I still love big adventures in the I LLUSTR ATI ON BY HANNAH DECKER

MAY 2022

21

IF YOU LOVE NATURE, YOU KNOW THAT STUNNING BEAUTY AND SELF-DISCOVERY ARE EASY TO FIND IN THE WILDERNESS, AND THAT CAN BE EVEN MORE PROFOUND WHEN YOU ADD A CHILD’S UNIQUE WONDER TO THE MIX.

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mountains, and I take them on rare occasions when all the pieces line up perfectly (like, grandma is willing to babysit for two whole days!). But my approach to “getting rad” out there has changed significantly. For starters, I don’t care about getting rad anymore. Give me a morning on skate skis, followed by a coffee I can drink while it’s still hot, and I’m happy.

My tolerance for risk in the outdoors is basically zero now. I no longer look at avalanche-prone slopes in the backcountry and think, “Wow, that looks like a perfect line to ski.” Instead, I see the last will and testament I signed with my lawyer friend, where I relegated my kids to live with my sister if Dan and I were to both die (insert: in an avalanche). Bleak, I know, but no powder turn is worth taking a chance on not coming home to my kids.

A 2015 study in Germany found that men and women become more risk-averse after the birth of their first child. While women experienced a slightly higher increase in risk aversion than men, the difference is small. In other words: All of us change our behavior when saddled with the responsibility of an infant we have to keep alive. That risk attitude spikes in the first few years of the child’s life, then eventually comes back down again. The study found that (Shocker!) people without children have a higher risk tolerance than those with kids.

When rock climber and new dad Alex Honnold was asked recently in an interview for Climbing magazine if he’d keep free-soloing — climbing big walls without ropes — after his daughter was born, he said, “I’m totally prepared for (June’s birth) to (rein) in my risk-taking a little bit, though I could see it having no impact as well. … I’m open to the possibility that I’ll just want to stay at home and play with my kid.”

I appreciate that. He doesn’t plan on changing who he is, but he’s open to the notion that his preferences may change. Which is the mindset you need when you’re having a kid. Because when you’re raising a child, there’s only so much you can do to control the outcome. Parenting is unpredictable and challenging. It’s kind of like being on a lifelong mountaineering expedition, from what I can tell.

Some aspects of adventuring are way better in my current era: Life After Kids. I’m convinced that a woman’s endurance ability soars way up

after childbirth (sorry, guys, I have no idea if the same is true for you). I ran my first ultramarathon after having kids, and it felt like no big deal compared to 15 hours of labor. My body feels stronger now, like it’s survived so much.

I relish the moments I have in the outdoors. If I can sneak in a 30-minute trail run or a few laps at the ski resort with a pal, I’m pumped. Gone are the days of five-hour weekend mountain bike rides with friends that end in a lake swim. But in its place is something else magical: an appreciation for every outing, big or small.

When the kids were three and five, Dan and I decided to take them on their first overnight backpacking trip. I planned what I thought was a doable two-night route into Lake Tahoe’s Desolation Wilderness in California.

We’d start with a two-mile hike to a stunning alpine lake, where we’d spend the first night, and night two would be another mile or so up the trail at another lake.

Dan and I — plus a generous friend we recruited to help sherpa — loaded our packs with camping gear and enough food for a full preschool class. We gave the kids mini-packs with water, so they felt like they were contributing. But I was a little off on my distances, and as a result, it ended up requiring nearly a five-mile hike to get out on our final day.

(Sidenote: I often inadvertently sandbag my adventure buddies, and apparently my kids are no exception.) It took us over five hours to walk five painstakingly slow miles, with the kids demanding snacks every 20 steps. I had to start rationing food for the adults.

When we finally reached the car at the trailhead, both kids were asleep the moment they hit the car seats. On the drive home, Dan and I sat in blissful silence. The sense of accomplishment would come later, after a shower and a meal that wasn’t a half-chewed granola bar.

That’s often how it happens: In the moment, these missions with our kids in tow feel absurdly hard, like we might not even make it out the door with hats and gloves on. But when it’s over, no matter how much of a junk show it was, it still feels good to get out there, to share those raw moments that only happen in wild places. That sparkly hindsight — the memories we’ll hang onto even if they’re only half-truths — is the reason we keep getting out there.

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MODERN FAMILY

A WORD TO THE WISE IN A CULTURE WHERE ‘OLD’ IS BAD, HOW CAN WE LEARN TO EMBRACE AGING?

BY CO N N I E Z W E I G

A

bout a decade ago, at age 62, I had a rude awakening. While sitting in a restaurant, I caught myself staring at an old, frail-looking woman at a nearby table. Her clothes were raggedy and worn out. Her hands were dirty. As I watched her order free samples, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. “Why is she here at my favorite vegan restaurant,” I thought. “It’s so sad — those wrinkles, that frailty, the poverty and neediness. I’ll never be like that.”

It took me a little while to realize it, but at that moment I was meeting a hidden, unknown part of myself — a part that attributed to her what I was denying and rejecting in myself: my own loss of youthful vitality and a fear of looming potential dependency, loneliness and poverty. I was projecting onto her a dark image of my future and deeply disliking what I felt.

I was shocked by this new awareness, especially because I had worked and rallied against the other “isms” and stereotypes of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. Yet deep in the hidden recesses of my unconscious, ageism — invisible and insidious — persisted.

At that moment I became aware of my own “inner ageist.” I dubbed her “the bag lady.” She personifies my fear of losing everything — of being unable to take care of myself someday and being scorned by the rest of the world for being old or dependent or slow. My “bag lady” led me on an unanticipated journey.

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With ageism, we project our negative fantasies of “old” — ugly, frail, needy, senile — which leads to condescension and stereotyping: greedy geezer, old bat, over the hill, out to pasture. And when millions of young people project what they fear about aging onto elders, the latter try to appear and act younger.

Hence the epidemic of anti-aging marketing, advertising, surgery and hormone replacement therapy.

I didn’t know it at the time, but “the bag lady” is an epidemic image within women in PEOPLE WHO HAD POSITIVE BELIEFS ABOUT GROWING OLDER, AS MEASURED 23 YEARS EARLIER, GAINED 7.5 YEARS OF LIFE — MORE THAN THE LONGEVITY GAINED FROM LOW BLOOD PRESSURE, LOW CHOLESTEROL, HEALTHY WEIGHT, CESSATION OF SMOKING AND REGULAR EXERCISE.

our culture. A survey from Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America found that women across all income levels said they sometimes fear losing their money and becoming homeless.

My journey led me to Becca Levy, a

psychologist at Yale School of Public Health, who has spent her career pioneering research about the unconscious processes of age stereotypes and prejudice. She has revealed how positive and negative beliefs about older people — which she calls age stereotypes — can be embodied inside of us, having profound effects on our mental and physical health, as well as the journey we have ahead as we continue aging.

But how did aging even become “bad” to begin with? According to Levy, age stereotypes are internalized during childhood and young adulthood and are embodied when they lead to self-images. Those stereotypes are later reinforced throughout life by repeated exposure to ageist messaging. Eventually, over the years, they become “self-stereotypes” — the exact idea that I began to call “the inner ageist” after that day in the vegan cafe. Outside of my own personal experience, I have seen how this process of internalization leads to self-hate and a merciless inner critic (“I’ve become weak, useless, worthless”) while working with elders as a therapist. If we assign meaning and value only to our appearance, accomplishments, physical strength or productive roles — and at some point these become diminished — then the inner ageist can be relentless.

Levy’s findings are startling and confirm that ageism, operating beneath conscious awareness, has ripple effects throughout our bodies and minds. During studies, participants

exposed to negative stereotypes (“senile”) performed worse on memory tasks than those exposed to positive ones (“wise”). Older adults exposed to negative stereotypes showed higher heart reactivity, indicating physiological stress — although the participants were unaware of this impact. People who had positive beliefs about growing older, as measured up to 23 years earlier, gained 7.5 years of life — more than the longevity gained from low blood pressure, low cholesterol, healthy weight, cessation of smoking and regular exercise. People with early negative beliefs about aging showed a greater loss in their brain’s memory site and more growth of tangles and plaques, two indicators of Alzheimer’s disease. Those who held positive images about physical health during retirement lived 4.5 years longer than others.

I LLUSTR ATI ON BY JESSI E LI N

And those who held positive images of mental health during retirement lived 2.5 years longer.

Levy’s research made me realize that I had another book to write meeting our own inner ageists, taking a closer look at why we feel so negative about getting older and — most importantly — shifting our own perceptions and experiences with aging. If the unconscious beliefs and biases we have about aging are indeed shaping every aspect of our physical and mental health, then we need tools and practices to bring awareness to them and break free of them. After interviewing hundreds of people who are ages 55 and above, I discovered the inner obstacles that stop us from aging consciously and how to break free of them. When we do inner work, it leads to the elder stage.

As a long-term meditator, I knew that many

traditions teach that this stage of life is about spiritual practice. If ageist stereotypes and biases are blocking peoples’ emotional development, then they are probably blocking spiritual development as well. Many older adults are missing the real promise of late-life — the spiritual shift in identity from role to soul.

The phrase “role to soul” was coined by spiritual teacher Ram Dass to refer to an inner shift in identity from our doing, achievement and self-image to our essential spiritual nature, whether we call it soul, spirit or self. As the roles we previously held — CEO, mom, writer, provider — fall away with age or illness or loss or retirement, we’re thrown back on the essential spiritual question: Who am I? When we experience this late-life identity crisis, spiritual practices from all the traditions allow us to remember who we are and to become even more deeply established in a spiritual identity that is independent of what we do or how we look or what we achieve or what other people think of us. This shift is the gift of our extended longevity, the promise that is hiding in plain sight.

Becoming an elder is a stage, not an age. An elder has deep familiarity with spiritual depth or inner silence. An elder is aware of his or her own issues. An elder is open, rather than judgmental, and has compassion for the suffering of others. An elder wants to give their unique gifts to the world. An elder trusts that something larger is carrying them.

Now is the time, as thousands of us turn 65 every day, for a shift in how we think about aging, how we age and our opportunities to become elders for our communities. I believe that the world needs elder wisdom right now.

There are many fighting for age equality — trying to counter negative media portrayals and to create positive social policies. But Levy’s research shows that activism is not enough: We need to uncover the inner ageist in each of us and root it out so that we don’t continue to perpetuate the cultural ageism that has plagued us for so long.

If we can do that, then maybe we can slow down enough to self-reflect, meditate and find the treasures of late-life: a new rhythm, reclaimed creativity, opportunities to serve something larger than ourselves and advanced stages of spiritual development — a chance to find what life is really all about.

D R . C O N N I E Z W E I G, P H . D. , R E C E N T LY R ET I R E D A F T E R WO R K I N G AS A T H E RA P I ST I N LO S A NG E L E S FO R 3 0 Y E A R S. T H I S E S S AY I S A D A P T E D F R O M H E R L AT E ST B O O K , “ T H E I N N E R WO R K O F AG E : S H I F T I N G F R O M R O L E TO S O U L .” Z W E I G I S A LS O C O -AU T H O R O F “ M E ET I N G T H E S H A D OW ” A N D “ R O M A N C I N G T H E S H A D OW.

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THE TRAILBLAZER FILMMAKER AND PODCAST HOST FAITH BRIGGS IS FINDING HER WAY, AND LEAVING A NEW KIND OF PATH BEHIND HER

BY E TH A N B AU E R

F

aith Briggs was lost. She’d come to Utah as part of her 2020 short documentary “This Land,” which follows an ultra-run through three national monuments that were under threat by the Trump administration — including Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Floods had canceled her plans to camp in the monument overnight, so she decided to do a 16-mile afternoon run instead. But the rains marred the path she had charted, and she ended up off course. After haphazardly running toward anything that might serve as a guide, she found her way to the Wahweap Hoodoos, where wind and water and time have left bulging orange chunks of clay balancing atop narrow white pillars of sedimentary rock. They stood like Martian-esque lighthouses, signaling to her that she wasn’t lost anymore.

Of all her experiences in nature, this is the one she recalls first; the one that most reminds her of why she keeps coming back to wild places. “I love being in those spaces,” she says. Nevertheless, “it can be challenging.”

Briggs’ documentary work, as well as her newly released podcast “The Trail Ahead,” explore how outdoor spaces like parks and public lands can feel unwelcome to historically marginalized communities.

She once viewed the word “conservation” as one belonging to the privileged; as something that could be pursued by those lucky

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enough to not have to worry about protecting people first and foremost. But while working an entry-level job at the Discovery Channel’s environmental films department in 2015, she noticed a pattern.

“There were so many films coming in from people of color who were on the front lines,” she says. “People in the Amazon trying to protect their homelands from oil drilling; Indige-

BRIGGS’ WORK EXPLORES HOW OUTDOOR SPACES LIKE PARKS AND PUBLIC LANDS CAN FEEL UNWELCOME TO HISTORICALLY MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES.

nous people in the United States fighting for clean water; Black communities in the South being poisoned by pollutants and ending up with cancer for generations. I was seeing these things. And I was shocked. I just didn’t realize that people of color are on the front lines of environmental disaster everywhere you look.”

Witnessing those consequences over and over made her realize that conservation and environmental issues affect everyone, so everyone

should have a voice in the matter.

Briggs grew up in the Northeast, with her parents instilling the classic moral concept of, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

Briggs had excelled academically and athletically, running track for Yale while majoring in African American studies and film studies before eventually earning a graduate degree in documentary journalism. Following her parents’ guidance and her instincts about what she had learned at Discovery, she decided to use the skills and knowledge she had to make positive change.

Specifically, her current work targets the American history of outdoor segregation. In one of the most memorable moments of “This Land,” she observes, “I think people think that because public lands are for the public, that all people feel welcome there. And that’s just not the case.”

What isn’t present is just as important as what is. She points to examples of segregated areas within national and state parks, as well as other outdoor recreational spaces. Many of us probably didn’t learn about racially segregated parks, but a quick search on the internet will churn up thousands of returns, detailing public parks across the country that legally barred people of color from entering.

“Our context, the way that our laws were created, our history, most of our systems of how this country is run,” she explains, “they PHOTOGR APHY BY TYLER WI LKI NSON-R AY

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“AS A BLACK PERSON, YOU LEARN YOUR WHOLE LIFE THAT YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE THE IMPOSSIBLE, THE MOST INHUMANE, IS POSSIBLE.”

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were all founded in a time where racism was OK, legal and accepted.” And changing such a history doesn’t happen as soon as segregation signs are taken down. Their legacy, like the ominous blank space they leave behind, remains. For how long is what Briggs hopes to address. Her own family history offers a potential roadmap for how to do it.

The 33-year-old was born to a Black father and a white mother whose family shunned her for marrying a Black man. Briggs says her mother’s family’s rejection was “partially out of a place of fear and misunderstanding.” And this is why, Briggs says, it often isn’t helpful to call someone racist, even when their words and actions clearly meet the criteria. “There’s a difference between calling an individual racist or saying that an individual is capable of racist acts,” she explains. The latter invites conversation. And over time, those conversations can break down barriers and build connections. In her family’s case, those connections were of love for grandchildren. “The ideology is what stops you, but then there are human feelings that are able to help people push through,” she says. “What I’ve learned from my family is that you can get to the other side, and I think that’s what makes me feel hopeful and optimistic.

And that’s why I keep having these conversations — because I really think it’s possible to get through them.”

Such conversations, Briggs admits, are often uncomfortable. They need to be; the stakes are too high for anything less. Briggs notes that as a Black person who has studied Black history, what might seem impossible to a white American is possible indeed. “As a Black person, you learn your whole life that you have to be careful,” she says. “Because the impossible, the most inhumane, is possible.” That’s why she insists that white people not avoid or merely tolerate difficult conversations about race, but actively participate. “If white people leave the room during conversations about racism … you’re deciding that it doesn’t matter, and you’re going to duck out of it. And that doesn’t change anything.”

Some changes have already begun, led largely by people of color. Organizations such as Brown Folks Fishing and Brown People Camping are promoting community and visibility — showing marginalized communities that people like them belong in the outdoors.

The movement has also accrued allies in high places, most notably Deb Haaland, the first Native American secretary of the interior.

Data shows that while people of color make

up 42 percent of the U.S. population, they account for only 23 percent of visitors to national parks.

Briggs continues to leave the door open behind her, mostly through the stories she creates. Her documentary, “Camp Yoshi,” profiled a Black chef named Rashad Frazier.

After falling in love with the Oregon wilderness, Frazier combined his lifelong passion for cooking with outdoor exploration and created an outfit that leads clients into historically segregated spaces in search of adventure and rejuvenation.

“The Trail Ahead” podcast, co-hosted by Addie Thompson and sponsored by Merrell and Patagonia, also features interviews with people who work in or adjacent to the outdoors, but whose ideas and innovations haven’t always gotten much attention. In one episode with TV host and sports commentator Selema “Sal” Masekela, they discussed (among other things) racism in surfing.

But keeping the metaphorical door open doesn’t come without challenges. Briggs admits that high-profile sponsorships, featuring some of the biggest brand names in the outdoors, can sometimes be difficult to manage.

“I’ve definitely worked with brands that weren’t as open to what I wanted to say,” she concedes, “or really didn’t feel like they were ready to have the public conversations that I wanted to have.” But, overall, she’s been pleasantly surprised by how the corporate world has become more receptive to her niche of storytelling over the last three to five years.

Businesses too, she believes, can contribute to change. “It’s really cool to see.”

When we spoke in March, Briggs had a busy schedule ahead: interviews to record, subjects to film. But she also planned to take a vacation, a surfing trip with a friend. She’s trying to prioritize personal time. Over the past two years of living in Portland, while most of her friends and family remain on the East Coast, she’s realized how important it is to preserve those ties. “Those relationships feed me so much,” she says. “And I have to be more intentional about seeing those people.” That can sometimes be difficult when her work feels like a calling; when she can make a difference by talking to more people and sharing more stories. But she’s learning that rest is just as important as work. The two in tandem are what allow for the greatest impact.

That way, next time she finds herself losing the trail, she can get lost without having to worry about where she might end up.

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WILL THE VOLUNTEERS COME BACK? NONPROFITS HOPE THE PANDEMIC WILL SPARK A RESURGENCE OF HELPING HANDS

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

I

n my early 20s, I spent most Sunday mornings with my sister and her kids below an overpass in downtown Salt Lake City helping Eagle Ranch Ministries make breakfast for people who were homeless. We served eggs and bacon along with hugs, laughter and heartfelt prayers for better days to come. Long before President George H.W. Bush called on Americans to be a thousand points of light, each doing their share of good in the world, I was already engaged in the cause, and proud of it.

My volunteer heart wanders, and as word spread and many more showed up to serve breakfast, I moved on, looking for other groups that needed more help. Literacy Volunteers of America showed me how to teach a 54-year-old man how to read. Habitat for Humanity trusted me to tape and mud drywall.

North Star Elementary let me read books with a pair of grade schoolers every week for a year.

And after I had kids, our whole family helped our nondenominational church pack thousands of bags of dehydrated meals to send to what is now Eswatini, a tiny nation in southern Africa. Each experience gave me a different flavor of joy.

But as the years passed, my life got busier, my career more time-consuming and something shifted almost silently beneath my feet. I found

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myself donating more money but sharing less of my time. Those yearlong commitments dwindled into isolated events, when I’d pitch in for the United Way’s annual Day of Caring or do some shopping for the Sub for Santa program.

My schedule felt stuffed, and how much difference did one volunteer make anyway?

EXPERTS SAY FEWER VOLUNTEERS MEANS MORE ISOLATION AND WORSE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH.

Others would step up, I was sure.

What a sad way to become part of a trend.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans came out in droves to help their neighbors, but that surge peaked between 2003 and 2005, according to a report by the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland. And from that point, the number

of volunteers entered a long, steady slide. By 2015, just a quarter of Americans ages 16 and older volunteered for any kind of organization. Between 2004 and 2015, 31 states experienced significant declines in volunteering, and none saw a significant increase. By the time Covid-19 hit, the Corporation for National and Community Service found that only about one in five men and one in three women were volunteers.

The situation seemed dire, and there are certainly questions about where we’re headed as a country. But when I looked into it, I found plenty of reasons for optimism.

Nonprofits often live or die by having volunteers, who are so vital an Independent Sector report says a volunteer hour is worth $28.54.

They collect and distribute food, raise money, provide general labor or transportation, tutoring or teaching.

When the pandemic hit, nonprofits found themselves scrambling to serve a nation in crisis.

“The strain on nonprofits the last couple of years is unimaginable,” says Rick Cohen, chief operating officer at the National Council of Nonprofits. Some have told his organization, the largest such network in North America, that they’ve eliminated waiting lists — not because they caught up, but rather because lists create false I LLUSTR ATI ON BY ANDR É DA LOBA

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hope that help is coming. “We have seen many fewer volunteers over the past couple of years.”

Like many businesses, nonprofits face a workforce shortage. And because they rely on staffers to manage volunteers, some had to scale back on accepting help. Social distancing rules also meant they could accommodate fewer volunteers even if they were available.

And people over 65, who are normally an important source of volunteers, faced even higher risks from Covid-19.

The Do Good Institute report found that with fewer volunteers, those who did pitch in were doing more than ever, offering both time and money to compensate for folks like me who weren’t showing up.

Of course, the numbers don’t count all the acts of kindness in a community. Shoveling an elderly neighbor’s walk or picking up a sick friend’s groceries don’t register, even though they’re valuable to others, as a Bureau of Labor Statistics’ July 2020 monthly review points out.

Cohen says the pandemic brought out the best in people, including some who ramped up efforts despite risks to their own health. And many have volunteered to help others outside of the more formal nonprofit structure, “just pitching in around their community.” The pent-up desire to come together gives him hope that volunteering “will come roaring back.” The rise of mutual aid groups speaks to that, Cohen says. Their informal volunteers won’t make official counts, but they do make a huge difference in people’s lives.

Many volunteers do so through their religious communities, and they don’t always get counted either.

Early in the pandemic, when attendance was falling, K2, the church I attend in Salt Lake City, started offering more practical help, including monthly drive-up food and clothing distribution events. People were losing jobs and the need was clearly great, but so was the turnout of volunteers. Some even trained alongside staff as mentors for a marriage enrichment program, responding to the great pressure that the pandemic put on couples.

At Grace Community Church near Seattle, hundreds of members of the congregation volunteer for food drives, a drive-thru prayer ministry and a half-marathon to raise funds to provide clean water for kids overseas. “The pandemic is a wake-up call that we can’t be passive,” says Pastor Jesse Bradley. “We’re not designed to be isolated, and we’ve got to build more bridges.”

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“YOU COME ALIVE WHEN YOU SERVE AND YOU HAVE PURPOSE. EVERYONE HAS GIFTS, ABILITIES AND CAN SPREAD THEIR WINGS.”

Among traditional nonprofits, groups like

BUILD — which teaches youth in underres-

ourced communities about entrepreneurship, careers and opportunity — have seen more volunteers.

It helps that mentors and instructors for skills-based workshops can volunteer virtually.

And while many people started giving more money and less time during the pandemic, Heather White — who runs a nonprofit called One Green Thing and consults for others — now sees more people reaching out and wanting to connect in person, willing to do hands-on projects in their community. “The pandemic taught us we are all interconnected economically and biologically in a way I don’t think many of us understood until the last two years,” she says. Volunteering lets people see each other up close, which is a powerful antidote to polarization.

Pastor Bradley agrees. “You come alive when you serve and you have purpose. Everyone has gifts, abilities and can spread their wings,” he says. “The most joyful people in the world are people who serve. We need that in America.”

Fortunately, the future looks bright. A brief from the Points of Light foundation says that millennials, the largest generation alive today, use a personal lens to assess community need.

“Whereas social issues used to be something they volunteered for to help other people, they now see themselves as among those affected,” the brief reports. This generation was hit with some of the worst impacts of Covid-19, between school, work and child care disruptions. They cite mental health, social services, climate change, employment, health care premiums and wages as among their major concerns. Since the pandemic, they’re now more likely to volunteer and “think people should help their community and the world.”

Gen Z isn’t far behind. The foundation’s

civic engagement survey found that generation is the most likely to get involved in the future, including by volunteering.

But for now, the shortage is real. Salt Lake County Aging Services, for example, saw an influx of volunteers and both in-kind and monetary support with the onset of Covid-19, before it all fell back to more normal levels by winter 2020. Volunteering dropped slightly last year, which was especially problematic for Meals on Wheels, a program that delivers food to homebound elderly individuals. Winters are always tough, says spokeswoman Afton January, largely because of vacations and holidays. But the agency also had trouble hiring enough paid drivers and the combination made it hard to keep the program running. She hopes warmer weather brings new volunteers.

If you want to get back into volunteering — or jump in for the first time — there’s no lack of opportunity. The IRS listed 1.54 million nonprofit organizations in 2016, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics. And new groups arise as needs crop up.

Consider your passions, advises Natalie Buxton, communications director for Operation Kindness, an animal shelter in Carrollton, Texas. “Volunteering is an excellent way to not only strengthen your community by providing much-needed resources, but it’s a perfect opportunity to build relationships with the people in your neighborhood,” she says.

Experts say that fewer volunteers means more isolation and worse physical and mental health among both those serving and those who are served. But none of these benefits surprises me. I’ve experienced the boost in happiness, the sense that I was part of something bigger. I made friends, formed connections that I still have to this day, and I felt more optimistic about the world when I was surrounded by people who, like me, were trying to help others.

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A GROWING VICE A NEW KIND OF GAMBLING MONEY HAS FLOODED MAJOR AMERICAN SPORTS. AND THAT COULD SPELL TROUBLE

BY E TH A N B AU E R

A

s the ad starts, a woman leaps from a blimp flying over the big game, free-falling in black leather. She lands on the goal post like a character from “The Matrix,” just in time to deflect a field goal — as she warns against safe bets. “Life is a gamble,” says this cyberpunk Lady Luck. In shifting scenes, she joins Joe Namath promising to win Super Bowl III, Evel Knievel jumping his motorcycle over a line of buses, a couple in love getting tattoos. Take a risk, she urges, and be part of the action.

The clip is a slick TV spot for Draft Kings, one of several online sports betting companies that blanketed February’s Super Bowl broadcast with similar productions.

Some showcased celebrity athletes. Others offered free stakes or outsized payoffs to first-time users. All called on viewers to join a trend that has become inescapable. Watch this month’s NBA playoffs and you’ll likely face another barrage of gambling ads, sponsorships and even betting advice from on-air personalities.

For decades, major sports leagues and the media entities that cover them shunned any links to gambling, real or perceived. Now, sports betting is a massive revenue stream, an expanding industry ruled by tech companies and corporations like FanDuel, BetMGM and Caesars sportsbook. Competing for attention, they sponsor jersey patches, 34

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TV segments, podcasts, in-game scoreboard ads, individual players — like Utah Jazz guard Jordan Clarkson — and even ballparks. As recently as 2018, Las Vegas was barred from advertising during the NFL’s big game; but in 2024, the gambling mecca will host the Super Bowl. “At the end of the day, money is money,” NFL analyst Trey Wingo told The Washington Post last August, “and the NFL is really good at making money.”

Some critics are raising the alarm.“They’re

OBSESSION IS THE KIND OF ENGAGEMENT THAT SPORTS LEAGUES AND MEDIA OUTLETS HOPE TO ACHIEVE.

marketing to inexperienced betters,” says former gambling addict John Simmons.

“Now, you’re not really a sports fan unless you bet on the game, too.” The sudden embrace of an erstwhile societal ill is more than jarring to Simmons, who now runs an online Christian ministry. It’s a harbinger of what’s to come. “Three years from now, it’s going

to be the number one issue facing churches,” he says. “And within five years, this is going to be a nationwide problem.”

What has brought about this seismic change?

And where will it lead?

To understand the relationship between sports and gambling, consider the “Black Sox Scandal.” After the Cincinnati Reds won the 1919 World Series, rumors surfaced that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the games.

Some players admitted as much to a grand jury, citing $10,000 and $20,000 bribes from a gambling syndicate, though the latter amount was never paid in full. Player salaries ranged from about $4,000 to $15,000 a year. Eight were indicted, along with five gamblers, on charges including conspiracy to defraud. The players — among them the legendary “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — were found not guilty at trial but were banned from the major leagues for tainting the game’s reputation.

In the business of sports, trust is the lifeblood. If fans can’t rely on games to be decided by sincere competition, through the honest effort and errors of players and coaches, the thrill would lose much of its luster — and that would hurt both ticket sales and ad revenue.

No wonder today’s leagues investigate any hint of malfeasance, from underinflated footballs to sign-stealing schemes in baseball and academic cheating in college sports. That’s also why leagues have stood alongside the federal I LLUSTR ATI ON BY KYLE HI LTON

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government as it sought to curtail sports betting, a market dominated by organized crime throughout the 20th century. That effort led to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which limited sports betting to lotteries in three states and sports pools in Nevada.

For the same reason, leagues come down hard on violations related to gambling. Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, was banned for life after betting on games while he was managing the Reds in the late 1980s. Like Jackson before him, Rose is barred from the sport's hall of fame. In 2007, NBA referee Tim Donaghy pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy charges for fixing NBA games and point spreads. He served 15 months in federal prison, ending his career (though he wrote a memoir about the experience).

Any quarrels with these punishments were muted — until March, when Calvin Ridley, the Atlanta Falcons wide receiver who was set to score a massive contract on the free agency market, was banned for a season after betting on football games while he was on the non-football injury list to deal with mental health issues. Critics asked how the NFL could punish a player for engaging in an activity that’s not only legal in numerous states, but helps to fill the league’s considerable pockets.

The landscape had changed. It didn’t happen overnight.

Perhaps it dates to 1979, when the journalist Dan Okrent gathered with friends who loved baseball, at a Manhattan restaurant called Le Rotisserie Française. Inspired by a simple game he once played with a professor at the University of Michigan, Okrent developed a baseball league concept to test their knowledge of the sport. Each participant owned a team, picked real major leaguers in a draft and spent an imaginary budget, tracking stats in the newspaper and sharing results via fax.

Each anted up $250, and the pot was divvied up among the top finishers at the end of the season. Rotisserie baseball was born.

The game went viral, rebranded as fantasy baseball to skirt the originators’ trademark.

It gave ordinary fans a way to feel like part of the sport they loved to watch. Nerds pored over box scores in libraries across the country. New variations cropped up, offering that same experience to fans of basketball, hockey, NASCAR and football. By the late 1990s, the World Wide Web was offering up real-time stats, and websites like Yahoo and CBS Sportsline became ideal platforms for friends and 36

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strangers to compete. Some played for fun, others for money.

FanDuel launched a decade later, spicing things up with daily and weekly contests — and corresponding payouts. A player could sign up in the morning and get paid by the end of the day, a rush in more ways than one.

Because fantasy sports were deemed a game of skill, the company wasn’t subject to federal anti-gambling laws. So the company was able to grow through relentless advertising alongside its main competitor, DraftKings, which was founded in 2012.

Coincidentally, that was the year New Jersey, led by then-Gov. Chris Christie, launched a legal effort to make sports betting possible in that state. The climate seemed right for such a challenge. While fantasy sports played along the margins, traditional betting had also found a home online and, by extension, in living rooms across the country. The advent of pri-

“NOW, YOU’RE NOT REALLY A SPORTS FAN UNLESS YOU BET ON THE GAME, TOO.”

vacy technologies like virtual private networks — which shield a user’s identity — allowed users to place bets more easily than ever before, even if they lived in places where betting remained illegal.

In May 2018, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Murphy v. NCAA that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 was unconstitutional. New Jersey had prevailed, and betting was legalized in that state. The decision also opened the floodgates, with 26 states and Washington, D.C., following suit, and more likely to come.

That same month, FanDuel was acquired by an Irish sportsbook, which quickly added traditional betting to the company’s portfolio. DraftKings opened its own sportsbook a few months later. In 2021, the year Caesars sportsbook went online, the market for sports betting doubled to $52.7 billion, according to

Morning Consult. Perhaps not coincidentally, BetMGM launched this January.

“You used to hear concerns about the integrity of the sport, and you don’t hear that anymore,” says Jimmy Sanderson, a professor of sport management at Texas Tech. “There’s just so much money to be made.” In the attention economy, gambling also offers a tailor-made path for leagues to stay relevant.

With both dollars and engagement at stake, and legal barriers removed, the leagues are embracing the substantial rewards of gaming, and fans seem to love it.

Simmons had never been a fan when he started betting on sports in his early 20s, but he’d already gambled his way into bankruptcy.

Online poker offered a thrilling escape from the crushing grief of his father’s untimely death. Casinos were a step up. Realizing he needed help, he registered as an addict with his favorite casinos, so they’d kick him out if he showed up. But sports bookies had no such scruples, and he soon became obsessed. “I would bet everything,” he says. “If there was a game on TV, or if there was a game online — sometimes, I couldn’t even watch the games, but I’d be betting on them because I couldn’t stop.”

If that sentiment echoes a typical modern sports fan, perhaps we should not be surprised. Obsession is the kind of engagement that sports leagues and media outlets hope to achieve. Some observers believe gambling is just a new way to achieve that.

“I see it with my kids,” FanDuel CEO Amy Howe told Fox Business in the run-up to the Super Bowl this February. “They have their fantasy sports teams. This has become such an important part of how consumers engage with live sporting events.” Her company was preparing to offer 550 ways to bet on the game, from the final score to which player might get an interception, from the length of the national anthem to the color of Gatorade splashed on the winning coach. “Everyone can have a little bit of skin in the game.”

The media isn’t far behind. Sports Illustrated’s homepage features tabs for fantasy sports, betting and SI’s own sportsbook alongside traditional coverage areas. The New York Times lamented the “rising human cost of sports betting” ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, but only after publishing weekly NFL picks against the spread. FanDuel sponsors a segment on the “NBA on TNT” television show, during which its distinguished ambassador issues the “Charles Barkley guarantee,” suggesting games viewers should bet on. Barkley summed up his

feelings on “The Steam Room” podcast in March: “I think our whole society has changed on gambling.”

During an online Q&A in April 2021, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred spoke of a conversation he had with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. Baseball is trying to accelerate its game speed to accommodate the short attention spans of 21st century consumers, but Silver told him not to worry. The intervals between pitches are perfect, in fact — just enough time for fans to place bets on whether the next pitch will be a strike, a foul or a groundout. Microtransactions like these are where many analysts believe sports betting could be headed. And Manfred implied that he’s ready to embrace it. “We favored the idea of federal legislation. Having said that, the states have evolved,” he said. “Sports betting is a massive opportunity for fan engagement.”

That’s one way to frame what’s happening: As an enhancement of what already makes sports such a powerful cultural force. People become fans because the teams they support represent an extension of themselves — a phenomenon academics call “social identity theory.” When your team loses, you feel like you’ve lost; when they win, you feel like you’ve won.

Sports intrinsically offer fans the perception of skin in the game, and betting just adds to that. “I think it could absolutely drive viewership and drive ratings,” Sanderson observes.

However, he asks, “Is that where we want sports to go? Do we want every play to have something riding on it?”

In other words, can sports fans actually have too much skin in the game as betting becomes more ubiquitous? Playing in a seasonlong fantasy football tournament with friends for a $20-per-person pool can give every NFL game a little jolt of excitement at little personal cost.

But what happens when you ratchet that up?

When betting displaces love for the game or loyalty to a team in favor of the thrill of financial gain, the agony of money lost? Or an addiction that could change their lives forever.

“The risk for gambling problems has doubled” between 2018 and 2021, according to Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. His organization conducted surveys in those years.

The instrument didn’t measure sports gambling in particular, but Whyte says there’s reason to believe the new laws and regulations are driving the surge. “The risk is not distributed evenly across the population. It’s concentrated in young, male, online sports bettors.” Across

the Mountain West, calls to the national problem gambling helpline have boomed during that same period, according to data provided by the council, whether those states have legalized sports betting or not. Calls are up by 71 percent in Colorado, 14 percent in Utah and an alarming 221 percent in Idaho.

“It’s a tidal wave,” adds Timothy Fong, co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program. “It’s slow and steady, and it’s pervasive.”

Compulsive gambling is easier to hide than alcohol or nicotine addiction, but it has a similar impact on its victims, including the highest suicide rate of any addiction disorder.

The United Kingdom, which has allowed sports betting since 2005, offers an interesting case study on how sports betting might evolve in the U.S. Raffaello Rossi, a marketing researcher at the University of Bristol, warns that states should limit advertising, which over time can desensitize the viewer. “Seventeen years later, we’re seeing the big mess this has created,” he says. “It got out of control.” The National Health Service recently opened a clinic for “gambling-addicted children,” whose numbers have swelled to some 55,000.

Stateside, only Utah is a safe bet, as gambling is prohibited in the state constitution. But in the growing number of states where sports betting is legal, each fan has to decide how much skin they want in the game.

Simmons checked himself into a rehab clinic around the time he turned 30. He’d frittered away his dreams of becoming a professional wrestler or playing guitar in a rock band. He’d studied radio in college but that didn’t work out, either. His fiance had left him. His family wouldn’t talk to him. So he thought he was ready. But after 90 days, he checked himself out with the urge to make one last score. He pawned nearly everything in his apartment, called all the bookies he knew and placed as many bets as he could. “Just went on a bender,” he says. “I lost everything.” That’s when he turned to his faith and found his way back.

Nine years later, he’s married with four kids, and he’s working on a documentary about the pipeline that turns casual sports fans into problem gamblers, called “Betting Your Life.”

Despite these warnings, the sports world seems oblivious to rock bottom. This March, at the height of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, patrons entering a Buffalo Wild Wings in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, were greeted by a TV screen showing the point spreads, lines and over-unders for the day’s contests. The games themselves were harder to find.

WATCH THIS MONTH’S NBA PLAYOFFS AND YOU’LL LIKELY FACE ANOTHER BARRAGE OF GAMBLING ADS, SPONSORSHIPS AND EVEN BETTING ADVICE FROM ONAIR PERSONALITIES.

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THE WEST

INSIDE THE HOUSE OF LEE THIS ELECTION CYCLE, SEN. MIKE LEE LOOKS TO EXTEND THE WEST’S PREEMINENT POLITICAL DYNASTY

BY M ATTH E W B R OW N

A

knock on the door gets the young boy’s attention. It’s 1981, and his family has just moved into a new home, trading the shelter of Utah for a suburb on the edge of Washington, D.C. McLean, Virginia, sits across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, where his father now commutes for work. At 10, Mike Lee knows that his dad is an important man — he works for President Ronald Reagan, after all — but the boy wasn’t expecting a neighborhood welcoming committee. As the door opens, a man says, “We’re your ward teachers.”

Mike’s father, Rex E. Lee, chuckles at the inside joke. “Ward teacher” is an antiquated term, last used in 1963 to describe members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who visit fellow congregants each month, delivering spiritual messages and checking on the well-being of their families. “That shows how long it’s been since you’ve set foot in a Mormon church, doesn’t it?” But these men aren’t just co-parishioners, or neighbors in a community where diplomats, members of Congress and high-ranking government officials tend to live. They’re Rex’s cousins — and members of the same political dynasty.

As the new solicitor general, Rex is charged with running all government litigation before the United States Supreme Court. One cousin, Stewart Udall, is a former congressman and two-time secretary of the interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

And the other, Morris “Mo” Udall, is in his

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11th term representing Arizona in the House.

As young Mike watches, the men fall into the kind of easy conversation one might see among close relatives running into each other across the country from the tiny town where they all grew up.

St. Johns is a town of about 3,000, the seat of Apache County in eastern Arizona, about an hour from Interstate 40, between the Zuni Reservation and the New Mexico state line.

Some might call it the middle of nowhere,

REPRESENTING THE WEST, MEMBERS OF THE UDALLLEE DYNASTY HAVE SHAPED THE LIVES OF NEARLY EVERYONE IN THAT REGION, FROM TUCSON TO THE WASATCH FRONT.

but this clan has called it home since the first Udall arrived in 1880. Still, it’s their chat in a beltway living room that offers the boy his first real glimpse of his family’s place in the world, their history of political and legal legends, and the scope of their power.

In the ensuing decades, three more UdallLees would serve in the Senate, on both sides of the aisle. Eventually, Mike Lee would join their ranks, defeating the Republican incumbent in the Utah primary. He ran as an

outsider, buoyed by the rebellious tea party surge of 2010. With his reelection in 2016, the Utah senator cemented one of the most enduring political dynasties in American history, dating to the 1950s. “The Udall-Lee run of eight consecutive decades in Congress is nearly unprecedented,” says Jane L. Campbell, president of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, just behind the Dingells of Michigan, and on a par with the Kennedys.

That’s not how clan members like to think of themselves. “The Kennedys are wealthy, Catholic New Englanders,” said Sen. Mark Udall, of Colorado, citing an aunt. “The Udalls are poor, Mormon dirt farmers from the West.” For better or for worse, those “dirt farmers” have played an outsized role in economic and environmental policy in the West, and the impact of their public service over seven decades reverberates today in the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and throughout the nation.

Like many family sagas, the Udall-Lee story was born in tragedy. Its protagonists share an unlikely progenitor — the notorious frontiersman John Doyle Lee. Lee was a man of his time and place, hardened by a lifetime at the edge of civilization. His work as a pioneer alone could have made him noteworthy.

Instead, he is known for his role in one of the darkest chapters of American history. His descendants still grapple with its long shadow.

Born in 1812 in Kaskaskia, Illinois, Lee spent his early years in that primitive settlement on ART BY BR ENNA VATER LAUS

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THE WEST

the Mississippi River about 70 miles south of St. Louis. According to his own writings, his mother fell ill and his father plunged into alcoholism, leaving him largely on his own, though relatives took him in. Later, he worked on a steamboat crew and joined a militia to fight in the Black Hawk War. That conflict culminated in the Battle of Bad Axe in southern Wisconsin, where U.S. troops and their Sioux allies mowed down Sauk and Meskwaki tribe members, including women and children, as they tried to cross the river.

Settling into a more domestic life, Lee married his first wife in 1833 and converted to the Latter-day Saint faith in 1836. When the Saints migrated to the West, his polygamous family followed. He trekked to Santa Fe and back during the Mexican-American War, crossed the Plains in 1848, and helped to settle the harsh southern Utah desert. He even served a brief tenure in the Utah Territorial Legislature.

Broader events upset that relative peace.

In summer 1857, President James Buchanan dispatched troops to accompany new federal appointees to Utah, an intimidating show of force. Residents were incensed. When a wagon train from Arkansas reached the territory ahead of the soldiers, the emigrants encountered a climate of hysteria. Friction persisted as they passed remote settlements along the southern route to California. On Sept. 11, 1857, after a five-day siege of their camp in the mountains of southwestern Utah, they were slaughtered by a group of Latter-day Saint militiamen and Paiute Indians. More than 100 men, women and children were killed.

Lee was one of the ringleaders. Twenty years later — after his first trial ended with a hung jury — a federal court convicted him of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to die. He was executed at the site of what became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a memorial stands today. He was the only participant held accountable under the law.

That history has troubled many of his descendants, including a certain granddaughter.

“I remember hearing my grandmother, Lela Lee Udall, once express that it was a very heavy cross that her family had to bear,” recalls Gordon Smith, who served two terms as a Republican U.S. senator from Oregon.

Lee’s legal troubles may have set other descendants on a path to public service. His attorney, William Bishop, expected the second trial to end with another hung jury, and when that didn’t happen, he was caught unprepared, says Richard E. Turley Jr., a former assistant 40

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church historian and co-author of a forthcoming book on the aftermath of the massacre and the Lee trials. Sen. Mike Lee believes that sequence may have influenced his grandfather’s decision to go to law school, which has since become a family tradition.

Some relatives feel their ancestor was wronged. Loyal descendants have failed twice in their attempts to get a statue of John D. Lee placed in the memorial plaza of Washington, Utah, and it’s said at least one keeps his bust on the mantle.

Wounds like these can break a family tree.

But some trees heal. The scar becomes part of the tree, though it may send branches growing in new directions. After John D. Lee’s fall from grace, much of his family moved farther south.

Some landed in St. Johns, where happier times led to marriages that launched a dynasty.

Among Lee’s most loyal defenders was his son John David Lee, whose mother was Lee’s 14th polygamous wife. And it was from John David

that the Udall-Lee political progeny sprang.

Two of his daughters — Louisa and Lela — married Udalls, who along with several of their siblings held prominent public offices throughout Arizona. One was mayor of Phoenix; another was chief justice of the state Supreme Court. And their children continued the tradition in 1955, when Stewart Udall became the first family member elected to Congress.

Stewart, a Democrat, held that seat until 1961, when he was named interior secretary in the Kennedy and then Johnson administrations. His brother, Mo, succeeded him and represented Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District for 30 years. During that time, he even ran for president, losing the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Their Republican cousin Rex E. Lee, a grandson of John David Lee, served as U.S. solicitor general from 1981-85. His oldest son, Thomas Lee, is an associate justice of the Utah Supreme Court and was included on short lists

of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees during the Trump administration — along with his brother, Mike Lee. Mo Udall resigned in 1991, leaving Capitol Hill bereft of a Udall-Lee descendant for nearly six years, until Gordon Smith was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996. Two years later, cousins Tom Udall and Mark Udall, both Democrats, won congressional seats in New Mexico and Colorado, respectively. In 2008, Smith lost his bid for a third term, even as Tom and Mark won seats in the U.S. Senate. Mike Lee joined them in that body in 2010, leading to the rare occurrence of three relatives serving in the U.S. Senate at the same time.

While far apart politically, Lee says the Udalls supported their freshman cousin across the aisle. “Every new member is assigned a mentor upon arriving, and Tom was assigned to be mine,” he says. “It’s someone to look out for you and tell you how the place works. He was very helpful.” Tom Udall, Stewart’s son, is now U.S. ambassador to New Zealand.

A study of American political dynasties backed by the National Bureau of Economic Research found, simply, that “power begets power.” Examining dynasties in Congress since 1789, the 2007 project found that “legislators who enjoy longer tenures are significantly more likely to have relatives entering Congress later.” The report didn’t offer reasons, but one of the authors suggested to Reuters that it could come down to the children of political parents gaining name recognition, learning valuable skills or getting access to electoral machinery that smooths their pathway into a political career.

Mark Udall, Mo’s son, says there was never pressure in the family to pursue politics, but when people like Bobby Kennedy and other prominent people are dropping by the house it does leave an impression. “I just thought public service was a wonderfully exciting and rewarding and meaningful way to be in the world,” he recalls.

Gordon Smith had a similar experience. His father, Milan Smith, served in the Eisenhower administration, so Gordon spent his early years in Washington, D.C., and was well aware of the political prominence of his relatives.

When he considered entering politics, he and his mother paid a visit to her cousin Mo Udall, who was then hospitalized with Parkinson’s disease. “I told him I was thinking of running for the Oregon state Senate. And he didn’t make any comment of regret that I was a Republican, but he encouraged me to do it.”

Mike Lee would also drop by Mo’s congressional office when he was a Senate page. Lee says that he never felt any expectation to enter politics and that the Lee-Udall legacy in Congress isn’t a factor in his seeking a third term.

“I can tell you without hesitation that has never entered my mind,” he says. It was just part of what the family did.

Mark Udall believes future generations will likely get into politics when the timing is right for them. He didn’t decide to run for political office until his mid-40s and the process of campaigning didn’t come naturally. “I had climbed the third-highest mountain in the world,” he says, laughing, “but I was too scared to go knock on doors.”

Representing various states and districts of the West, members of the dynasty have shaped the lives of nearly everyone in that region, and many around the country. “If you live on the Wasatch Front and all the way to Tucson, you’re affected by them every day through water because they got both the Central Utah

RESEARCH INTO POLITICAL DYNASTIES LIKE THE DINGELLS, KENNEDYS AND UDALL-LEES FOUND, SIMPLY, THAT "POWER BEGETS POWER."

Project and the Central Arizona Project funded,” says retired history professor Ross Peterson, who has written about the lives of Stewart and Mo Udall.

Endangered species protections, national parks and recreation areas, wild and scenic river designations, and wilderness designations were created and expanded under the watch of the two brothers. Both were icons in the environmental movement, although the wisdom of the ambitious hydroelectric dam building campaign during the 1960s that fueled ongoing economic growth in the West is questioned by some today. Researchers have since learned more about the impact the projects have had on fisheries, and the megadrought afflicting the region the past two decades has policymakers rethinking how to quench continuing growth with a shrinking water supply.

The family has also worked through national policy and nonprofit initiatives to right wrongs done to Native American tribes by white settlers. These efforts began when their

grandfather, Levi Udall, wrote the majority opinion when the Arizona Supreme Court extended the right to vote to Native Americans living on reservations.

Their influence has affected a range of issues, including health care. Gordon Smith, who lost a son to suicide stemming from mental illness, sponsored legislation to put federal funding for mental health on par with other medical needs and changed the conversation about mental health in Congress. And Gordon Smith’s brother, Milan Smith Jr., was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006, where he wrote a unanimous opinion in 2020 finding that Nevada’s Covid-19 restrictions violated religious freedom.

Arguably the most influential member of the clan in the legal arena was Rex E. Lee, who is regarded by conservative and liberal scholars alike as the model solicitor general. While Lee is often noted for winning a high percentage of the cases he argued for the government before the Supreme Court, retired D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith says he was admired by his successors for skillfully balancing the interests of the administration and the nation at large.

“Sometimes the solicitor general is referred to as the ‘10th justice.’ That’s overstating it a little bit, but there is a history of the Supreme Court being able to trust the solicitor general,” Griffith says. “And as much as anybody, Rex is responsible for that.”

Griffith, too, was shaped by the clan. He grew up across the street from Mo Udall, who gave the 15-year-old neighbor boy his first job on Capitol Hill as a summer intern, even though Griffith was still too young to drive.

“Every morning that summer, Mo Udall would come up in his used Mustang convertible and honk the horn and little Tom Griffith would sit in the car with him and drive down to Capitol Hill. And then at 5:30 at night, he’d come by and say, ‘Let’s go home,’” Griffith says. “It was awesome.”

While their politics diverged, they stayed close until Mo Udall died in 1998. Udall’s widow asked Griffith, a Republican serving as chief legal counsel to the Senate, to sit with the family during a memorial service in the Capitol. When Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle came over to pay his respects, he gave Griffith a quizzical look, prompting the GOP appointee to explain himself. “I don’t want you to tell this to (Majority Leader Trent) Lott,” Griffith said. “I used to work for Mo Udall and he’s one of my heroes.’”

“OK,” Daschle told him. “Our secret.’”

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

BELOW: JEW IS H S ET T L ER S AND PO L ICE IN T H E S H EIKH JAR R AH NEIG H BO R H O O D DUR ING DEMO NST R AT IO NS AG AINST T H E EVICT IO N O F PAL EST INIAN FAMIL IES , F EBR UARY 2022.

IS THIS THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL? NEARLY 75 YEARS AFTER THE UNITED NATIONS VOTED TO PARTITION PALESTINE, AN ISRAELI CITIZEN RETURNS TO ASSESS THE PROMISE OF THE JEWISH STATE

BY M YA JA R A DAT

M

y first day back in Tel Aviv after seven years away, I buy and insert a new SIM card, open my phone and gasp when a name — resurrected, perhaps, by the international area code — appears in my contacts: Nava.

I first interviewed Nava in early 2011.

Then, on a cold winter night, she called to invite me to join her and other protesters as they demonstrated against public housing evictions. Nava was one of the Jewish Israelis who was slated to lose her home. So I followed her as she marched down a major road in the south of the city, weaving through traffic with a sign; her fellow demonstrators held signs decrying Israeli officials as “government for the rich.”

I walked behind her as she and others sat down in the street, stopping traffic. And I crouched and snapped a picture of Nava — a petite, dark woman with long curly hair — as she plopped down on the road in front of a line of magavnikim, Israeli Border patrol, and police officers. She was fighting for more than her home, I realized. This was a struggle for dignity; this was a fight to force Israel to make good on its promises — to be a refuge for Jews the world over, regardless of who they were, where they came from and what they were worth.

I know journalists aren’t supposed to fall in love with their subjects but, in that moment, I did.

N OW I HA D R E TUR N E D , nearly 75 years after the

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United Nations voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. I’d come back to gauge how much the state of Israel, three-quarters of a century later, has kept its oath to provide a safe, prosperous haven for Jewish people from all over the world. It was February 2022, and back in the U.S. partisan divisions had grown deeper than ever, everyone seemingly entrenched

I’D COME BACK TO GAUGE HOW MUCH THE STATE OF ISRAEL, THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER, HAS KEPT ITS OATH, TO PROVIDE A SAFE, PROSPEROUS HAVEN FOR JEWISH PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD.

in their own positions, more impervious to hearing each other out, more radicalized. I wondered how much Israel — already, from its inception, the epitome of bifurcation — had slid in the same direction.

Looking at Nava’s name on my phone

I recalled how she’d taken me by the hand and pulled me into her neighborhood, Kfar Shalem, to show me remnants of the Palestinian village, Salama, that had stood here prior to Israel’s war of independence, which erupted after the 1947 U.N. vote. Standing in the sun, Nava pointed to a stone arch and said, “They kept their horses there.”

By “they” she meant Kfar Shalem’s former inhabitants. Refusing to use the word Palestinian, she said, “They’re Arabs” — two words that said everything about her politics.

I, too, had offered two words that had said a lot about my politics: Al Jazeera. That’s who I was writing the piece for back then in 2011, a media outlet owned by the government of Qatar, a country that doesn’t formally recognize Israel. Though it was clear that we stood on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum, I didn’t mind. She’d moved through the neighborhood’s remains respectfully; she was thoughtful when she spoke of the people who’d lived here before us — and by us, I mean the Jewish people.

Gesturing to a crumbling wall that the state had partially destroyed, she asked me if I thought it was true what people say — that Israel wanted to erase the history of the place.

Thinking yes, I’d said instead, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, “But I’m not sure.”

A B OV E : PR O - I S R A E L D E M O N STR ATO R S AT E VYATA R , I N TH E I S R A E LI - O CC U PI E D W E ST B A N K , FE B R UA RY 2022.

R I G H T: B AT YA B E N - O R , 92, WAS A M E M B E R O F T H E J E W I S H M I LI TA RY FO R C E A FT E R TH E U N I TE D N ATI O N ’ S VOT E D TO PA R TI T I O N PA LE ST I N E I N TO T WO STATE S , N E A R LY 75 YE A R S AG O.

PHOTOGR APHY BY DANI EL R OLLI DER

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

In that doubt dwelled curiosity, openness — a willingness to interrogate things. Though she was a die-hard fan of then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she told me she was asking questions about him, too, and had voted left in municipal elections a few years before.

She knew the name of the Palestinian family who’d lived in her home before her parents had gotten possession of it in 1948 and, gazing at the stones, she wondered aloud what had happened to them. But at the same time, this was the house she had been born in and her parents and a brother had died in. This place, she told me, “is my air.”

I knew if that Palestinian family came back she wasn’t about to hand over her home, and I also knew that she was unapologetic about what had happened here in 1948. Still, in my mind, her curiosity about Kfar Shalem’s previous inhabitants betrayed an empathy, a softness. Her words revealed compassion. And it made me sympathetic to her despite our huge ideological differences.

The affection had seemed mutual: Despite our very different backgrounds and very

different politics, Nava had called me “gingit sheli,” my redhead.

NAVA H AD B E E N ON MY MIND even before I left South Florida, where I now live with my Palestinian husband (another story for another time) and our two young children. She’d come into my head as I’d packed, mulling over the ques-

I ADMIT THAT I’M AN IMMIGRANT TO ISRAEL, THAT I TOOK CITIZENSHIP — A DECISION THAT MANY PALESTINIANS FIND MORE EGREGIOUS A SIN THAN BEING BORN HERE.

tion of whether Israel was fulfilling its promise to the Jewish people. Nava, who seemed to embody many of the contradictions that plague Israel, was, I thought, the ideal person to ask.

Now, standing there on Allenby Street, in the middle of the sidewalk, holding my phone, staring at her number, I wonder: Do I just call?

What if she doesn’t remember me? I mentally rehearse, in Hebrew, what I want to say to her.

But the Hebrew in my mind is always grammatically perfect and unaccented, but what comes out of my mouth is the Hebrew of an immigrant to Israel — which I am — marred by unmistakably American consonants and vowels. The gap between my knowledge of the language and what I actually say leaves me blushing; too nervous to call, I slide the phone into my backpack. to the apartment a friend has loaned me, passing construction sites filled with Palestinian workers, and spend the day preoccupied with making plans for the week, Nava lingering in my mind as I do so.

On Friday, I’ll head to Tapuach Junction in the West Bank, where left-wing Israelis will protest a new Jewish settlement called Evyatar. If efforts to build the settlement are successful — Evyatar was established, some structures hastily built, and then was evacuated due to Israeli government intervention — it will stand

I RU N T H E RE ST OF T H E WAY

on the land of several Palestinian villages; among them Beita, an Arabic name that literally means “home.”

Jewish settlers have been open about the strategic location of the place: It will break up the territorial contiguity between Beita and nearby Palestinian villages, they said in a Facebook post. Territorial contiguity, of course, is crucial to a future Palestinian state; a disjointed, noncontiguous state wouldn’t be economically viable, experts at The Rand Corp. say. The Jewish settlements are also, according to international law, illegal, because they fall outside the Green Line, the boundary drawn in the armistice agreements that ended Israel’s war of independence, land that Israel nevertheless began occupying after the second big war in 1967. Since Evyatar was established, Beita residents have protested the new settlement, clashing with both settlers and the Israeli army. Soldiers have used gunfire during clashes and at least eight Palestinians have died in the past year.

To get a sense of the price of the Jewish state that continues to encroach on Palestinian land beyond the Green Line, I want to go to Beita and talk to the Palestinians about what is happening there. So I get in touch with a Palestinian woman, Lina, who lives in the West Bank and does some translation work. make arrangements via Facebook — the Israeli and Palestinian cellular networks no longer connect — to travel to Beita. As we talk, I mention that I should be transparent with her and tell her that I have an Israeli passport. Beyond the emotional baggage of being a citizen, my ID also affects what parts of the West Bank I can legally enter and exit.

“How did you get it?” she wants to know.

I admit that I’m an immigrant to Israel, that I took citizenship — a decision that many Palestinians find more egregious a sin than being born here. You can’t choose where you were born. But choosing to participate in a system that offers Jews from the diaspora an option to live here under the Law of Return — while denying Palestinian refugees and their descendants who were displaced by the 1948 war the same — is, in the eyes of some, unforgivable.

In fact, the Law of Return is one of the pieces of legislation advocates point to as proof positive that Israel makes national distinctions between Jews and Palestinians.

The Law of Return, which was passed in 1950, gives “Every Jew ... the right to come to this country as an oleh,” a new citizen. A 1970

LI N A A N D I

THIS IS FOR A PULL QUOTE THAT WAS TAKEN FROM THE COPY THAT IS GIVEN.

P R OTESTERS CALL FOR THE DI SSOLUTI ON OF E VYATAR, AN IS RAE L I OU T P OST IN T H E WE ST B ANK , F E B RUARY 2022.

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amendment extended this right to the spouses, children and grandchildren of Jews, as well — a move that echoes Jewishness as defined by the Nazis in the Nuremberg Race Laws that declared anyone with Jewish grandparents to be either Jewish or mischlinge, mixed race. The idea behind the Law of Return, of course, is to make Israel a safe haven for the Jewish people — it formalizes Israel as a place where all Jews can find refuge.

Taking Israeli citizenship, Lina says to me now on a Facebook call, affirms that the place exists. Sitting in an apartment in Tel Aviv, a bustling city of nearly half a million, I don’t even know what to say. I look out the window.

Clearly, the state of Israel exists. And, at this point, I think it’s unlikely that it’s going anywhere. This was the same debate I had with myself in early 2008, before I took citizenship — whether my doing so would actively hurt the Palestinians who can’t return or if it was a way of denying their national aspirations.

I try to explain now to Lina that my decision was pragmatic. I tell her how I arrived in 2007 on a volunteer visa and had gotten deeply involved in the migrant worker and asylum-seeker communities; my visa was going to run out and I wanted to stay to continue working with and for these groups.

“I think that was selfish and privileged of you,” Lina says. And then the call disconnects.

Five minutes later, she gets back in touch and explains that it was a coincidence — at the very moment she got upset her internet cut out. Nonetheless, she isn’t sure she wants to work with an Israeli and so she will need to think about whether we can go to Beita together. And if we do go, she says, she wants me to be transparent about my second passport with everyone we interview. There are so many Israelis with dual citizenship wandering around out here, disguised as foreigners, the people in Beita have a right to know my full identity, she says. And, she adds, I need to know ahead of time that it’s possible we’ll go out there and no one will be willing to talk to me. In that case, I will need to pay her even if no one speaks to me.

I’m apprehensive about all of this — I want to go to Beita to interview Palestinians, not to have tense conversations about my second passport. There’s also the fact that things can get very violent in Beita; I remember covering clashes in villages where Palestinians have opened their homes and businesses to Israeli protesters and journalists seeking to escape the violence. What if things get hot in Beita,

BELOW: PR O -IS R AEL DEMO NST R ATO R S S H OW S UPPO R T F O R T H E EVYATAR O UT POST. BOT TO M: A H AND F O R T H E DIAS PO R A' S CH IL DR EN, " S CUL PT ED

BY ZEEV BEN-SVI, BET W EEN 1 945 AND 1 947.

MAY 2022

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

but no one will give me shelter? What if I’m stuck out on the street amid live gunfire? The image of this flashes through my mind. We agree to take a day to think about this possible trip to Beita.

In the meantime, I manage to install Hebrew to my phone and work up the nerve to message Nava. After snapping an awkward selfie — no makeup, a close-lipped smile — I send it to her along with a text.

No response. has changed. The next day, I ask around — Tel Aviv is at once large and small. Everyone is connected somehow.

Less than an hour later, I have Nava’s new number. I call and say, “Nava, it’s Mya, the journalist you talked to about 10 years ago M AY B E N AVA’ S N UMB E R

— gingit shelach, your redhead.”

“Gingit sheli! My redhead! I was just thinking about you a few days ago. How are you?” she asks, using a phrase that is both formal and earnest, something that cuts past the superficial, slangy how are you’s that young Israelis offer each other when they don’t really care.

I interpret all of this as a good sign and tell Nava that I’m fine. That I’m living in America now but I’m back to report a story. That I’m hoping to visit her again in Kfar Shalem and find out what has happened with the eviction.

“Today, I’m in Jerusalem,” she says and I wonder, for a moment, if she has joined the struggle against the evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. I wonder if she has connected their plight with her own

T

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LE FT: A PR AYE R B E FO R E A PR OTE ST AG A I N ST TH E EVICTION OF PA LE ST I N I A N FA M I LI E S FR O M E AST J E R U SA LE M , FE B R UA RY 2022.

R I G H T A YO U N G PA LE ST I N I A N PR OT E ST E R I N TH E S H E I K H JA R R A H N E I G H B O R H O O D, FE B R UA RY 2022.

T H E NE X T DAY, I try Nava but there’s no answer. I have a fantasy that I will see her on Friday, at the protest at Tapuach Junction or at the protest in Sheikh Jarrah. I want to believe that she has made the connection between the state that seeks to evict Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and the state that is trying, at her expense, to hand her neighborhood over to land developers.

— the day, in theory, Nava and I are to meet — she finally answers. She doesn’t greet me warmly this time. Rather, her voice and words are tinged with suspicion.

“What’s the flavor?” she asks.

I don’t understand. Confused, I repeat her words back to her. “The flavor?”

“Nu,” she says, impatient. “The flavor of your article.”

I realize she means the angle. Uncomfortable, I babble about some of my underlying questions — What was the promise of the Jewish state? Has Israel fulfilled that promise?

What will she look like at 100? — in my heavily accented Hebrew.

“So you want to use my story to show that the state is discriminatory, right?”

“No,” I say, finding her comment odd. After all, this is something she, herself, has said about the state in the past. She has accused the state of racism. I explain that I’m curious what she thinks about the questions I’m grappling with.

“Let me ask you a question first,” she says.

“And you have to answer or I won’t sit with you. What do you think: Should Israel be Jewish or democratic?”

“Does she have to choose?” I ask. “Can’t she be both?”

“No. No. She can’t. She has to be Jewish.

And I can tell by your answer what you think,” Nava says, explaining how tiny Israel is and how we just want this small space for ourselves, while the Arabs have 22 other states to choose from.

Then she changes tracks: “Let me ask you something else, Mya. Are you Jewish?”

T H E T H IRD DAY

THIS IS FOR A PULL QUOTE THAT WAS TAKEN FROM THE COPY THAT IS GIVEN.

46

— a thought that gives me hope.

But before I have a chance to ask, Nava tells me, “Call me back tomorrow so we can talk a bit and maybe set up a meeting.”

I wonder about the maybe. Her reluctance seems odd. On the one hand, I’m her gingit, still, but on the other, she’s not sure she wants to meet me. Brushing the feeling off, I tell myself it’s about her busy schedule. I promise to call her back.

“Of course.”

“What ‘of course’?” she responds.

What I’m thinking is: Don’t you remember me, Nava? Don’t you remember my story and the things I shared with you? Don’t you remember my tortured love for this place? But what I say instead is something like, “How else would I have citizenship?”

“I don’t know,” she concedes. “OK. You’re Jewish. Then what are you ashamed of? Why are you ashamed of your Jewishness?”

I begin to protest, “I’m not ashamed — ” She cuts me off. “Because me, I’m not ashamed. I’m proud of my culture, I’m proud of my roots, I’m proud of my Torah.”

She tells me that Jewish people died on their way from Yemen to Israel, referring, perhaps to the antisemitic riots in Yemen that erupted after the U.N. vote that partitioned Palestine or those who died during Israel’s Magic Carpet Operation to evacuate Yemeni Jews. She tells me that if you dig deep enough, you’ll see that we were here before the Palestinians. She tells me that the people who became Yemeni Jews were the original inhabitants of the land.

Then she asks me where my people came from.

My family history is complicated, my lineage crooked, marred by affairs and divorces and remarriages and so many ands. I simplify things and tell her that my family is from

Europe — part from Italy and part from Poland. This makes me Ashkenazi — a European Jew. Forget about the Palestinians, now we’ve stepped into the territory of Israel’s inner racial tensions that pits Mizrachim like Nava — those who hail from Muslim and Arab countries, a group that, on the whole tends to lean and vote right — against the Ashkenazim.

“All you Ashkanazim are the same. You’re all

“LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION FIRST,” NAVA SAYS. “SHOULD ISRAEL BE JEWISH OR DEMOCRATIC?”

leftists. You’re a traitor.”

I wince.

She asks about my army service and I admit that I didn’t serve; she roars that everyone goes to the army. And because I didn’t, I’m not really a citizen, she says.

“You’re not really an Israeli. You live in the United States and you come back to write things about us and you do it at my expense.”

I listen in silence, hoping that she’ll calm down. She has a right to express herself and I have a duty to listen. She doesn’t calm down. I interrupt and say, evenly, “So I’m guessing you don’t want me to come?”

“Mamash lo. Mamash mamash lo,” No way.

Really no way.

I thank her nonetheless. We both say “bye” — at least there’s that tiny shred of civility — and hang up.

I look at the phone’s screen and see that the call was 17 minutes long.

Standing at the window in the lingering silence, I think about how, in interview after interview, the other Israelis I’d spoken with said that the biggest threat to the future of the Jewish state is internal — whether it comes from Israel’s policies of settling and occupying the Palestinian territories or from something else. Here, as in the U.S., something had changed. The partisan divisions had grown sharper. The ability to talk to each other seemingly vanished. The art of listening warbled out of reach like a mirage.

Alone, I look out at the city. At the country that exists.

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DROUGHT IS SHRINKING LAKE POWELL. IS IT TIME TO SAY GOODBYE?

BY ERIC BALKEN

ILLUSTRATION BY RUI RICARDO PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLIOT ROSS DATA VISUALIZATIONS

BY MADDY BUTLER

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MAY 2022

49

HE DESERT ISN’T A QUIET PLACE. MAYBE ITS VASTNESS IS PARTLY TO THANK FOR THAT — ECHOING AND AMPLIFYING WHATEVER NOISE FINDS ITS WAY OUT. THE POINT IS, IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK, YOU’LL FIND THAT THE DESERT IS FAR FROM EMPTY. SOMEWH E RE

B E T WE E N

B U L L F ROG ,

U TAH ,

and the Hole in the Rock trailhead, I’m following the distant rumbling of a waterfall, echoing between 500-foot walls of Navajo Sandstone. Not far from here is Cathedral in the Desert — a famed grotto in the heart of Glen Canyon. It gives me chills, knowing that this sound hasn’t been heard since 1968.

After rounding one last corner of the canyon, there it is: a 60-foot cascade bellowing into a clear pool. Water in the desert is a magical thing. It’s also a complicated thing.

As I crane my neck to take in the scale of the walls around me, something moves and catches my eye. A massive six-point stag is staring down at me. Seeing a fully grown deer here is stunning, not just because this part of the canyon only recently emerged, but because it’s almost completely isolated. No way in or out, except via the water or by rappelling down the falls. Dumbfounded, I take it as a good omen — another sign of life finding its way again in the vast labyrinth in the rocks.

But even in that moment, I know that from a different perspective the changes happening here are reason for unease, not revelry.

The reason a waterfall has been missing 50

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from the Colorado Plateau for 54 years isn’t a simple story, but more of an embroiled history of water use in the western United States. It ends with Lake Powell, actually a reservoir, which has been dropping precipitously in recent years. In fact, in March, it withered below 3,525 feet above sea level, the lowest it’s been since before it was filled in May 1968.

Under the pressures of overuse and climate change, the fate of the entire Colorado River system is being redetermined in real time, amid what scientists think is the worst drought in over 1,200 years.

Now that the reservoir is below 3,525 feet, it has officially crossed the “hydropower buffer” — which forces policymakers to start working on a solution. Every option seems to have immense challenges, with seven states invested in the matter and 40 million people who are directly affected by the Colorado River system’s water. But given the hydrologic outlook of what’s to come for the parched West, we can’t do nothing.

And at the physical and metaphorical heart of this issue is Glen Canyon, home to one of the most contentious dams in the world.

Thousands of years ago, ancestral Puebloan people inhabited what would someday be called Glen Canyon, farming in its side canyons and building granaries. According to the National Park Service, 19 American Indian tribes and bands have an association with Glen Canyon — including contemporary descendants of the people who left behind the thousands of archeological sites in the canyon.

Later, in 1776, came the crossings of the Spanish friars Domínguez and Escalante, and the migration of Latter-day Saint settlers on the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition in 1880.

Along the way, there were a few disappointing attempts at gold and mineral extraction.

In the early 1950s, a recreation industry began to blossom with river runners flocking to the canyon to enjoy its calm, riffled water. Katie Lee was one of those river runners, describing the canyon as “One-hundred and eighty-four miles of pure Eden. One hundred twenty-five side canyons, each of them different, each with its own personality.”

All 125 side canyons and those river miles became ghosts of the past when Glen Canyon Dam was commissioned in 1956 under the Colorado River Storage Project Act. The

sweeping legislation also paved the way for Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa dams farther north in the Colorado River Basin. But Glen Canyon was by far the largest of them all — its hydropower would bankroll much of the dam infrastructure for the Upper Basin states.

This collection of dams, especially Glen Canyon, was a crowning achievement for the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency charged with managing water in the West.

Along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the bureau erected more than 75,000 dams across the country before 1980, with the stated goal of not letting a drop of water be wasted by flowing to the ocean. Author Charles Wilkinson describes this time as “the big build up” — a frenzy of development that reshaped the country after World War II. But with development came pushback. In 1956, the bureau and lawmakers had to grapple with an increasingly organized conservation movement, led by the Sierra Club and its director David Brower. Original plans for a dam upstream on the Green River at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument were effectively shut down by nationwide pressure, led by campaigns from the Sierra Club.

REFLECTION OVERLOOK, GLEN CANYON, PICTURED IN OCTOBER 2021.

the reason a waterfall has been missing from the colorado plateau for 54 years isn’t a simple story, but more of an embroiled history of water use in the western united states.

MAY 2022

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DES E RET N EWS A RCHI VE

“without major changes in water management, lakes powell and mead — the two biggest reservoirs in the country — could dry up.”

GLEN CANYON DAM UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN THE EARLY 1960S.

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But in exchange for halting the Echo Park Dam, Brower ceded the battle for an alternative dam downstream. In Glen Canyon. He would go on to call it the greatest failure of his life.

After making several trips through the canyon, Brower echoed what Wallace Stegner once told him, “Echo Park doesn’t hold a candle to Glen.” Reeling from the sting of losing Glen Canyon, Brower and the growing membership of the Sierra Club ramped up a national campaign that successfully blocked two proposed Grand Canyon dams — the project shuttered after pilot holes were drilled into the Grand Canyon walls (which can still be seen today at mile 40 on the Colorado River).

It took 17 years to fill Lake Powell after Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963.

By the early 1980s, the reservoir had backed up 186 miles of the mighty Colorado River, creating an inland sea with a shoreline greater than the Pacific coast of the U.S. There was a lot of water. Almost too much. In 1983, the already-brimming reservoir was besieged by one of the largest runoffs in recorded history, maxing out the facility’s spillway tunnels.

The torrent of cavitation around the dam nearly brought the structure down.

The reservoir remained mostly full through the end of the century. But in the early 2000s, a series of dry winters started to whittle away at its water level. In five short years, Lake Powell had gone from almost 100 percent full to 34 percent of capacity. While the science of climate change was understood, its impact on the Western water supply was still murky. When a landmark study was released in 2008 by Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography — titled “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?” — the conversation began to turn. The study projected that under a warming climate, Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be mostly empty, most of the time in the decades to come. The analysis shocked the Western water community and ruffled feathers at the bureau.

The bureau didn’t fully acknowledge the impacts of climate change on the system until four years later in the 2012 release of its Colorado River Supply and Demand Study.

It too showed that without major changes in water management, lakes Powell and Mead

— the two biggest reservoirs in the country — could dry up.

Dozens of studies have been produced in the years since, and our understanding of the river’s hydrology has evolved. What was once called drought — a term implying a temporary event — is now called aridification, or a thirstier environment that sucks water into the atmosphere. 





W E N OW K N OW that the snowpack of the Rocky Mountains, which provides around 80 percent of the river’s water, isn’t the only factor in determining seasonal inflows. Soil moisture, which has been sapped by repeated hot and dry years, can have an outstanding effect on the river’s runoff.

As a result, Lake Powell is a shadow of its former self. Its surface area is almost onethird of what it used to be. The Hite and Dangling Rope marinas have been abandoned indefinitely, and other marinas are temporarily closed while new ramps are built to lower water levels. At the time of publication, there is only one single-lane ramp open to launch boats at the Stateline auxiliary ramp.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s most recent two-year projections show Powell could sink below “minimum power pool” — the level at which hydropower can no longer be generated — this year. Within the next five years, the bureau projects it could drop near “dead pool,” the lowest level physically allowed by the dam’s river outlets.

If we really are a few dry months away from losing hydropower at the dam, some experts believe that it’s time to consider phasing out the reservoir entirely and storing what water is left downstream in Lake Mead. With more than 50 published climate studies suggesting a future with less water in the basin, the likelihood of Powell becoming a dead pool reservoir becomes more realistic with each passing month.

This begs the question: Should Glen Canyon be managed as a semi-forgotten holding tank that seasonally oscillates around its minimum release outlets? Or should it be reimagined as a kind of national park or monument, with the river flowing around

the dam, kept in place as a backup facility?

Whether you consider yourself pro- or anti-Lake Powell or neither, this is the reality before us. 





Basin is comprised of seven states and Mexico. And somewhere in the middle of these seven states is an invisible line, drawn during the Colorado River Compact in 1922. When the seven states were tasked with dividing and allocating water rights of the Colorado River, they chose to split the basin in two: upper and lower. The agreement stated that each basin would be allotted the same amount of water and would be roughly divided along state boundaries. And while seemingly a fair deal, inequities soon became apparent. The Lower Basin is hot and dry, with large valleys of land irrigated by the river. The Upper Basin is mountainous, its melting snowpacks feeding most of the river’s water. One basin is where most of the water comes from, while the other is where most of the water is used.

A bare-bones summary of the law of the river is that whoever first put water to a “beneficial use” would assume a perpetual right to that water. “In the early 20th century, California began developing massive amounts of Colorado River water for irrigation projects,” says Dave Wegner, former staff director for the House of Representatives’ Water and Power Subcommittee. “As early as the 1930s, congressmen in the Upper Basin felt the only way to protect their water future was to impound it somewhere upstream.”

And so came the dam. But the impounded water of Lake Powell would never actually irrigate fields or supply the budding cities of the West. With the exception of a small diversion going to the town of Page, Arizona, the water behind the dam exists for Upper Basin states to meet a delivery obligation to Lake Mead, and so Lower Basin states don’t get one drop more than they’re legally entitled to. In the words of author Annette McGivney: “Lake Powell was designed to harness excess water, but the days of excess are over.”

If Upper Basin water in Lake Powell was moved to Lake Mead, it wouldn’t be a simple account transfer. The change in policy would

T H E CO LO R A D O R I V E R

THE COLORADO RIVER COMPACT Seven states in the U.S. are part of the Colorado River Compact, which divides and allocates water rights of the Colorado River. The states are split into two basins — upper and lower — and are allotted a certain percentage of that basin’s water.

WYOMING 1.05 maf*

14%

UTAH 1.725 maf

COLORADO 3.881 maf

51.75%

23% NEW MEXICO .84 maf

11.25% UPPER BASIN STATES

LOWER BASIN STATES NEVADA 2.8 maf

ARIZONA 2.8 maf

4

%

58.57% CALIFORNIA 4.4 maf

4% 37.33%

*maf = million acre feet

4% S OU RC E: U.S . B U REAU OF REC LAM ATI ON

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LAKE POWELL WATER LEVELS

DAILY PER CAPITA WATER USE BY STATE 200 180

GALLONS OF WATER

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20

Grand Bench

0

WY

UT

CO

NM

AZ

NV

CA

SO URCE: U.S. GEO LOGICAL S U RVE Y

Padre Canyon

CURRENT UTAH WATER USE FROM THE COLORADO RIVER

50

Dungeon Canyon

Padre Bay

%

West Canyon

%

UT AZ SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

AUGUST 27, 2021

S O U R C E : E A RTH O B S E RVATO RY/ N ASA.GOV

62%

18%

Agriculture Municipal

15%

25

5%

Tribal Industrial

SO URCE: UTAH GEO LOGICAL S U RVE Y

THE MAIN BOAT RAMP AT WAHWEAP MARINA IN LAKE POWELL BECAME INOPERABLE IN DECEMBER 2021, DUE TO LOW WATER LEVELS. PICTURED IN OCTOBER 2021.

Lake Powell is currently

176.93 feet below full pool.

By content, the reservoir is only

23.88% of full pool.

SOUR C E: SUM M I T TE C H N O LO G I E S , U.S. BUR EAU O F R E C L A MATI O N

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be monumental and pulls at century-old trepidations from Upper Basin interests.

Not only did the prior appropriations doctrine imbued in the 1922 Colorado River Compact give California and its burgeoning population the largest cut of the river, but Lower Basin states have collectively used more than their allotted amount. Since the Lower Basin states of Nevada, Arizona and California utilize 100 percent of their share for agriculture, municipal and industrial needs, any additional water lost through evaporation and seepage as it moves through canals, aqueducts or reservoirs is effectively lost to the system.

If properly credited, there’s no reason Upper Basin states couldn’t store their water in Lake Mead instead of Powell as an intentionally created surplus. The Upper Basin has already expressed a desire for a “protected pool” in Powell, whereby water conserved upstream can

be credited to them. The idea is the same here, except the protected pool would be in Mead.

A legal analysis by Larry MacDonnell, published in 2013 in The Water Report journal, found that the proposal to fill Lake Mead with the remnants of Lake Powell’s water supply is not precluded by any federal or state statutes. “The questions about its feasibility are not essentially legal but hydrologic and political,” he wrote.

In other words, the main obstacle would be getting states to agree to work together.

Interim guidelines for managing Powell and Mead were passed in 2007 to deal with drought in the early 2000s. Now, understanding this dry period isn’t transitory and will likely get worse, these guidelines are set to be renegotiated by 2026. And that means Colorado River management is about to be overhauled in a serious way.

The upcoming negotiations will center

around a number of factors, including hydropower production.

Any phasing out or end of hydropower production will create challenges for those who get electricity from the dam and for those who use the money it generates.

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority is one of the 174 utilities that receives power from the dam and would be one of the most impacted if or when it goes offline. According to an economic study commissioned by Glen Canyon Institute in 2015, the annual impact to the tribal utility would be around $1.3 million — the difference of buying electricity on the open market. For residential customers, this would equate to an annual $1.83 increase. For the average residential customer on the Western grid, the increase would be around eight cents per month.

Hydropower’s resource needs are becoming

increasingly insatiable, endangering local water supplies to keep dams above power pool levels. Under Reclamation’s Drought Response Operations Agreement, water from smaller upstream units like Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa is being released at greater volumes to prop up Lake Powell.

Phasing out one of the West’s largest renewable energy plants won’t be without consequence, but it’s important to remember it’s been operating well below capacity for over 15 years. If climate and runoff projections suggest it’s almost an inevitability, then it would make sense to start preparing now. As put by Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist, “loss of power, while not calamitous, is concerning.”

But out of all the complicated factors currently being brought to the desks of policymakers, one factor not being considered is the

any phasing out or end of hydropower production will create challenges for those who get electricity from the dam

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TO M SM ART/D ESERET NEWS ARCHIVE

the question of how to manage the new glen canyon grows more pressing every day. all the major boat ramps at lake powell are closed, and the park service is scurrying to extend new ones down to the level of 3,525 feet. below that, there is no plan.

AS LAKE POWELL RECEDES, RAPIDS THAT HAVE BEEN HIDDEN FOR YEARS ARE RETURNING TO CATARACT CANYON.

value of rivers, creeks, streams and ecosystems that have emerged in Glen Canyon — an area almost the size of Barbados. 





A V I S IT TO this island in the desert today would reveal La Gorce Arch perched a hundred feet above a sinuous side canyon in Davis Gulch. Streams meander past swaying coyote willows and Fremont cottonwoods and evening primroses with bees sheltering in their petals.

Gregory Natural Bridge — one of the largest natural bridges in the country with an opening of 127 feet — now stands 20 feet high after reemerging from the water last summer.

The Returning Rapids Project, a crew of river runners based out of Moab, Utah, is documenting the river’s restoration as Powell

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recedes. Mike DeHoff, the principal investigator of the team, describes how the project started: “As the reservoir dropped from its high level, we tried to figure out what was happening in some of the mystery areas on river maps that say, ‘area inundated by Lake Powell.’”

At full pool, Lake Powell drowned half of Cataract Canyon, the 46-mile stretch of whitewater above Glen Canyon. Cataract is known for having some of the biggest whitewater on the continent, and in the ’80s and ’90s, that whitewater abruptly ended after the infamous Big Drop Three rapid — the boundary between Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Using motors, rafters would have to push across 40 miles of reservoir flatwater amid houseboats and people who Jet Ski to arrive at the takeout.

Today, most rafters who venture down

Cataract probably won’t notice that part of the canyon was ever drowned. The river is reestablishing a version of its former self, which John Wesley Powell — who first mapped the river for the U.S. government in 1869 and after whom the reservoir was named — described as rolling “in solemn majesty ... in the depths of the earth.”

DeHoff made a spreadsheet of the returned rapids to help river runners navigate the new sections of whitewater. With the help of fellow guide and friend Pete Lefebvre and wife Meg Flynn, who holds a master’s in library science, they began combing through historical photos of the canyon to gauge how much the rapids had been restored, and how much more they had to go. To date, seven rapids have emerged from the reservoir, as well as 30 miles of returning river into upper Glen Canyon.

The riverine characteristics of the lower Cataract now resemble those of Canyonlands National Park more than the landscape of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. As the river continues to become more “parklike” in the years to come, there is a growing need for it to be managed as such, ostensibly by Canyonlands Park Service. They are the ones equipped to deal with river recreation and the safety and land practices that come with it.

But the question of how to manage the new Glen Canyon grows more pressing every day.

Right now, all the major boat ramps at Lake Powell are closed, and the park service is scurrying to extend new ones down to the level of 3,525 feet. Below that, there is no plan. But the park and its concessionaires appear to be acknowledging the winds of change. In a promotional email, Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas highlighted emerging wonders like Cathedral in the Desert. Billy Shott, the superintendent of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, told the Lake Powell Chronicle if the reservoir went away, “we’ll have more people coming here to raft than they have in the Grand Canyon. It’ll be a different place, but people will still enjoy it. It’s just change.”

A new approach to stewardship could also be a generational opportunity for the tribes who call Glen Canyon home. The Navajo,

Hopi, Ute, Southern Paiute, Zuni and Puebloan tribes all have deep connections to Glen Canyon. When the canyon was flooded, hundreds of tribal members were displaced — their homes, farms and sacred sites drowned.

The late Charley Bulletts, a member of the Southern Paiute Consortium, spoke about this loss in a 2018 National Geographic documentary. “To have this place backed up with water was sad because you couldn’t go back there, you couldn’t show your kids your history. All you can show them is the most powerful element in the world and that’s the water that was built up and covering our ancestors.”

As more ancestral lands emerge from the reservoir, there may be an opportunity for cooperative tribal management. There could be recreational economic opportunities for guiding, like the Hualapai tribe does in the Grand Canyon, or the Navajo Nation does in Antelope Canyon.

With a strategic approach, the transition from a reservoir economy based on motorized watercraft to a parklike economy based on hiking, biking and rafting could have lasting economic benefits. As seen in 2016, tourism revenue from Canyonlands and Arches has the ability to surpass that of Powell. According to the park service, much of Glen’s new growth in visitation is already land-based. The town of Page, which has historically relied on reservoir tourism, has already been impacted by dropping water. Its mayor, Bill Diak, told a Gizmodo reporter in November 2021 that “even if it is harmful to my community by losing an opportunity that we presently have, sometimes that opens a new opportunity, and we always need to be looking in that direction.” 



meaning this plan is already poised to fail. A white paper by the Future of the Colorado Project takes stock of the predicament, stating, “A gradual and incremental approach to adaptation, however, is unlikely to meet the challenges of the future. If the Millennium Drought, which has now persisted for more than two decades, has become the ‘new normal,’ or if the progressive decline of runoff resulting from climate change becomes even more apparent, major structural changes to water management in the basin will be urgently required.”

Long story long, we’re running out of time to make the choice ourselves and face a withered version of Lake Powell that could generate no hydropower, fluctuate erratically every season, offer few reservoir recreation opportunities, limit flows into Grand Canyon and exacerbate drought conditions.

The drought response plan outlined by the Bureau of Reclamation won’t be enough to elude this outcome, whether it happens in one year or five.

Even if it seems like a long shot now, a scenario where Lake Powell was phased out and a unified Upper and Lower Basin plan determined to store what water is left in Lake Mead would allow the structure of the dam to remain in place as a backup facility to add system flexibility and mitigate flood risk. The consolidated storage could lose less water to ground seepage in Powell, saving the equivalent of 10 percent of Nevada’s allotment. The recreation economy could resemble that of a national park. When all is said and done, it could be the largest river restoration site in the world.

Considering the alternative, and the reality that some version of this is coming whether we like it or not, why not start planning now? Following the lines of state Route 12 on my way back home to Salt Lake City after my fellowship at Cathedral in the Desert, I thought back to what Billy Shott said so simply: It’s just change.

E R I C B A L K E N I S T H E E X E C U T I V E D I R E C TO R O F G L E N C A N YO N I NST I T U T E .

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T H E B U R E AU ’ S E M E R G E N CY drought response plans are set to be finalized by the end of April.

But if you were to read through the plans yourself, you would find that the term “climate change” isn’t mentioned once in the entire document. What the plan does acknowledge, on line 453, is that “if dry conditions persist or worsen, available storage volumes for potential adjustments or releases may be insufficient to protect the Target Elevation at Lake Powell. As such, Drought Response Operations may be ineffective and therefore futile.”

Barring any biblical changes to the river’s hydrology, every climate study suggests dry conditions will likely persist and worsen,

“BATH TUB RINGS” AROUND LAKE POWELL — AS SEEN HERE FROM GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT — ARE STARK VISUAL REMINDERS OF THE RESERVOIR’S RAPID DECLINE IN RECENT YEARS.

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HOW FLORIDA BECAME THE CAPITAL OF THE GOP

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BY TARPLEY HITT ILLUSTRATION BY CF PAYNE

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STONE’S STRIKE WHEN ROGE R STONE ARRIV E D at Strikes, a South Florida lounge situated in one of Boca Raton’s many downtown parking lots, he stood out like a hanging chad. The political consultant and former Trump adviser had been scheduled to speak before a group of several dozen men. Most came in T-shirts, and most of those read: “ROGER STONE DID NOTHING WRONG.” But Stone strolled in wearing a gray three-piece suit with widely pleated pant legs and even wider lapels. For anyone playing I Spy, Stone offered an easy cheat; he was the guy with an actual pocket watch.

The guests had paid $75 to see Stone, who showed up several hours late to his own party. But there wasn’t much question that he’d come. For the past three years, Stone has been on a fundraising campaign to bankroll his legal expenses, after a grand jury indicted him for, among other things, making false statements to Congress. Following his arrest, Stone solicited contributions via crowdsourced legal funds, several live events and even Cameo, until former President Donald Trump pardoned him in late 2020. For a time, it seemed Stone’s financial woes were waning. But a combination of civil suits, medical expenses and a deposition before the Jan. 6 committee, in which he pleaded the Fifth to every question, put him back on the hunt. In December, Stone auctioned off an NFT of a Trump-autographed cover of Real Estate New York.

I was in Florida to write this dispatch from the state which, as Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan

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argued recently, has “reshaped the conservative vision of America in the age of Trump.”

During his presidency, Trump openly elevated South Florida to a second capital: entertaining diplomats at Mar-a-Lago and occupying Palm Beach with armies of Secret Service. Florida already housed much of his informal Cabinet — Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Chris Ruddy, Matt Gaetz, Mark Levin, Brad Parscale, Dan Bongino, Laura Loomer and two Koch brothers all have homes here — and some of his actual advisers, like Wilbur Ross and Rudy Giuliani. Since then, several more supporters have joined: Sean Hannity bought a $5.3 million Palm Beach mansion; Jared and Ivanka Trump spent five times that on a waterfront estate; Ben Shapiro relocated from Los Angeles; Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe fled New York mid-pandemic; her colleague Karol Markowitz followed, penning a “Goodbye to All That”-style explainer in the pages of the New York Post.

The rationales vary: Florida’s lockdown rules are lax and, more importantly, income tax is nonexistent. Right-wing figures aren’t the only ones to notice this; as a stern representative for Carlson and Hannity told me by phone: “Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski also moved their studio there.” And tech workers have flocked south in droves, thanks in part to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who publicly wooed a Peter Thiel-backed venture capital firm to town in late 2020. But it’s inarguable that, among certain characters in the Trump

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extended universe, a South Florida ZIP code has become a kind of status symbol.

The right’s Florida transplants are hardly pioneers. Conservative pundits Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter all blogged or broadcast from the Sunshine State when Trump was still a local punchline.

But the recent concentration of MAGA acolytes, paired with the state’s present national influence, represents a significant break with the country club conservatism of former Gov. Jeb Bush; his successor, Charlie Crist, who left the party in 2010; and many current members of the GOP’s establishment wing. The newer crop of Florida right-wingers are less hawkish neocon than populist “NatCon” — nationalist conservatives whose interventionist impulses lie mostly in the culture war. Just last November hundreds of them descended on Orlando for the second NatCon conference, an offshoot of a three-year-old think tank dedicated to “revitaliz(ing) conservatism for the age of nationalism already upon us.”

Stone has been here for much of the shakeup. His local maneuvering goes back to the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the presidential recount in 2000, so-called for its composition of mainly, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “50-year-old white lawyers with cellphones and Hermès ties.” Stone spent decades as the consummate party insider — advising campaigns for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — but he styled himself as a wily outsider for much of the last two decades, flirting with third parties throughout the 2000s and defecting for the Libertarians in 2012, before returning to the voter registry as, in his words, a “Rand Paul Republican.” In the midterms, the GOP will confront both Democrats and the schisms within their own ranks — and Stone, the so-called creator of Trump’s success, has been egging on a coup.

At Strikes that night, Stone offered his own vision of the country. The speech was aimed at liberals, but corporate conservatives were not exempt. “There is a dichotomy,” Stone later explained to a circle of men, “between the party leaders, who are just interested in lining their pockets” and “the grassroots.” If this had once been Jeb Bush’s state party, he argued, it became Trump’s when he beat both Bush and Marco Rubio in the 2016 primaries, and in 2020, when he converted more Hispanic voters in Florida than any Republican before him. “The Florida party is a middle-class, working-class party. It’s been transformed,” Stone claimed. “The weak-kneed, feckless,

R O G E R STO N E A R R I V E S FO R T H E CO NS ERVAT IVE PO L IT ICAL ACT IO N CO NF ER ENCE H E LD I N T H E H YAT T R E G E N CY O N F EBR UARY 27, 2021 , IN O R L ANDO, F LO R IDA.

lily-livered, white wine-swilling, country club-belonging Republicans — they’re a tiny minority.”

Hence his prediction: “A lot of their candidates are going to get beat.”

2 RINO

HUNTING

of the “weak-kneed, feckless, lily-livered, white wine-swilling, country club-belonging Republican” Stone described — and a term yelled several times during his speech — is the RINO, or “Republican In Name Only.” The acronym goes back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration, but it didn’t enter the political mainstream until the early 1990s, when a New Hampshire political reporter used it to describe Republicans cooperating with Bill Clinton. By the “Republican Revolution’’ of 1994, when the GOP regained control of Congress for the first time in decades, it had become a common dig for the party’s most traitorous members — as had “RINO hunting,” for the process of kicking them out.

The problem with RINO hunting is that its A C LOS E CO U S I N

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president’s style. “For months now,” Coulter wrote, “Trump’s been playing the aging silent film star Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ to DeSantis’ younger, prettier Betty Schaefer.”

DeSantis, an uneasy speaker with a stiff smile, is a hard person to place in the RINO taxonomy.

The 43-year-old has neocon credentials: after graduating Yale and Harvard Law School, he joined the Navy, worked at Guantanamo and deployed to Iraq with a SEAL team as the commander’s legal adviser. But he rode tea party momentum into the House of Representatives in 2012 and quickly joined the more radical wing of the party. DeSantis helped found the Freedom Caucus in 2015 and tea party groups backed him when he mulled a Senate run that year. On paper, DeSantis leans deep red, but if RINOs include anyone disloyal to Trump, his track record is rocky. In the 2016 primaries, DeSantis refused to endorse him over Rubio; he came around only to support “the Republican nominee.”

Stone disagrees with Coulter’s analysis.

“Ann is a very good friend of mine,” he told me.

“I don’t know that she’s a great political strategist.” A few weeks earlier, Stone had taken to Telegram to call DeSantis a “Yale Harvard fat boy (who) can’t get out of his own way.” That wasn’t new; Stone has publicly criticized DeSantis many times; he believes the governor owes his office to Trump. In 2018, only Trump endorsed DeSantis over establishment favorite Adam Putnam, despite his low poll numbers.

“Ron DeSantis was an unknown, undistinguished congressman with a bad haircut and an ill-fitting suit who’s not exactly a warm and fuzzy campaigner,” Stone explained. “That’s why Trump had to come back here in the last two weeks and drag him over the finish line.”

Over the past year in particular, DeSantis has become a polarizing figure among the Florida GOP, largely for his own success. The governor’s opposition to pandemic lockdown regulations won him COVID-skeptic fans across the state and country; he is now a clear contender for the 2024 presidential primary.

But while many possible candidates have said they would drop out if Trump ran, DeSantis has not. Trump has noticed. In January, Axios reported that the former president had been trashing DeSantis in private, claiming he has “no personal charisma and a dull personality.” Trump typically gave DeSantis a “pop in

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who, exactly, should be watching their back.

Longtime Floridian Ann Coulter has a theory, though when I emailed her, she declined to discuss it. Actually, she used different words: “HELLO! I salute you for a story idea that requires you to visit Florida! Everybody’s moving to Florida. Here are some more Florida based stories for you: ‘tech moving to Florida;’ ‘billionaires moving to Florida;’ ‘middle class moving to Florida;’ ‘Greenwich moving to Florida;’ ‘hedge funds moving to Florida;’ ‘Chicagoans moving to Florida;’ ‘young people moving to Florida;’ ‘Stallone moving to Florida;’ etc.

“The only people not moving to Florida are the ones who ‘BELIEVE IN SCIENCE!™’ Please warn readers: Gov. DEATH-Santis does not believe in science!’ No masks in schools — and he’s BRAINWASHING school children to love America, the sicko.”

But suffice to say, the right-wing author agrees with the spirit of The Hill headline.

Coulter soured on Trump when the border wall fell through, and in a January blog post titled “The Message in the Polls: Trump’s Done,” she argued that most Americans had, too. She prefers his would-be successor DeSantis — one of many mini-Trumps angling for a national profile by channeling the former

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targets can be tricky to spot; no one identifies as a RINO. The label is, as PBS put it back in 2004, “in the eye of the beholder,” and the beholders do not always agree on what they’re seeing. In the ’90s, RINOs were Republicans who defied Grover Norquist’s tax pledge.

But as the party evolved, so did the RINOs. In recent years, the label has been stamped on anyone who failed to adopt the carnival-barker effect of Trump-era conservatism. A running list would have to include Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, but also stalwarts like Lindsey Graham, Greg Abbott, Mitch McConnell, and Florida’s own Rick Scott and Marco Rubio. To some degree, the modern RINO is anyone who clashes with Trump. But even he is not immune. “I voted for Trump in 2020,” read The Hill headline in October. “He proved to be the ultimate RINO in 2021.”

Stone isn’t the only observer to suggest RINOs are at risk. On Telegram, the messaging app where Republicans banned from Twitter often find refuge, Trump himself recently warned that RINOs were approaching extinction “as we elect strong Patriots who love America.” Far-right influencer Laura Loomer echoed the sentiment. “2022,” she wrote, “is going to be a bloodbath for RINO incumbents.” But the Florida GOP seems split on

D O N A LD TR U M P H AS REPO R T EDLY CR IT ICIZED DESANT IS IN PR IVAT E.

the nose,” one source said, “in the context of the 2024 election.” In public, these tensions emerge only as subtext. Trump, who is vaccinated, recently grouched over “gutless” politicians who won’t say if they’ve gotten a booster — a subtle swipe at DeSantis, who avoided confirming whether he’d received a third shot.

The governor denied animosity but dealt it back; he told the “Ruthless” podcast he should have been “much louder” about Trump’s lockdowns in the early pandemic.

Few besides Coulter are ready to dispense with Trump, at least publicly. Her distaste for the former president has put her on the outs with her media peers; last year, she skipped town with fellow skeptic Matt Drudge. (“Drudge and I are both leaving Florida,” Coulter told Vanity Fair, “and we’re not telling anyone where we’re going this time.”) But even Stone does not entirely discount the governor.

Did DeSantis represent the country club RINOs, I asked, or the Florida grassroots? “I think he is very shrewd,” Stone said. “He sees where the party is headed, and so therefore, he’s headed that way himself.”

3 WHERE THE

BOYS ARE

ON A SUNDAY in January, I went to one place the party was headed. In this case, it was the Fort Lauderdale beach at the intersection of A1A, a scenic highway along Florida’s eastern coast, and Las Olas Boulevard, a commercial strip that once housed both Lucille Ball and Dan Quayle. This intersection is best known for the Elbo Room, a two-story art deco bar where anyone can hear ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC at lunchtime. It’s been a spring break hot spot since the 1960 comedy “Where the Boys Are” was filmed on-site but has occasionally made news for other reasons. And last April, it hosted the “Million Maskless March” — a “celebration of freedom” where lockdown skeptics burned masks in an aluminum baking pan.

The march had been organized by a bar

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mitzvah DJ named Chris Nelson, and now, he’d planned a sequel — a “Defeat the Mandates” rally, modeled on the larger protest in D.C. that day. The Million Maskless March was more like a hundred maskless march, and this one was even smaller. Unlike the capital, masks are somewhat irrelevant in Florida, outside of certain schools and public facilities. The only time I was told to wear one was on my flight, and even that seemed optional (“I’m not wearing a mask and I’ll tell you why,” the pilot said over the loudspeaker. “It’s because I’m Irish and you’ll never understand me”). Vaccinations, however, are required for many jobs. And for the crowd assembled along the sand, this amounted to “tyranny becom(ing) law,” as one sign put it, an authoritarian plot orchestrated by, per another sign, “genocidal satanic sociopaths.” The latter appeared beside twin portraits of Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.

The politics of the protest were spelled out on posters (“Masks make us sick”), flags (“Let’s Go, Brandon”), and graphic tees (“Florida First, like America First but with attitude”) — and several congressional candidates showed up for precisely that reason. Rubin Young, a diminutive ex-union leader running against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, scurried around in a black fedora and Spider-Man backpack.

Darlene Swaffar, a Stone-endorsed insurance agent vying for the seat that will be vacated

by Rep. Ted Deutch, advertised her “America First” platform with a hat that spelled it in rhinestones. Her primary opponent, Dr. Steven Chess, was also there, though not in the crowd.

Chess spent the afternoon driving down the strip in a trailer covered in text. The one legible line read: “Had Enough Crazy?”

But few politicians featured as prominently as Trump and DeSantis. And if the two were at odds, none of the activists seemed to know.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” said Saritza Varela, a field organizer with the Republican Party of Florida. Varela had campaigned for Trump in 2020; she was there organizing for the governor’s reelection bid. “I love them both,” she said, “because they love America.”

A real estate appraiser named John Rodemeyer, who’d biked from his condo for the protest, agreed. “I think that’s probably promoted by others,” he scoffed. “I don’t think they really are.”

It’s possible they’d missed the news; few

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attendees read or trusted any media. Rodemeyer only browsed outlets “that affirm (his) beliefs,” which included just three websites (the Drudge Report-knockoff, Citizens Free Press; the anarcho-capitalist site, Lew Rockwell; and Gary North — a blog by the “radical libertarian” and Christian reconstructionist.”)

An older couple named Tony and Gina, who’d come wearing flags as capes, said they “can’t watch anything” — not local news, not even Fox. “They all lie,” Gina said. Instead, they follow several social media accounts. “We’ll make up our own minds,” Tony added, “about what we want to believe and what we don’t.”

But perhaps the reports simply did not stick. Trump’s ability to brush off bad press is unrivaled, but DeSantis comes close. That may explain how both are so popular here, in spite of their stances on vaccines. Trump has spent the past year championing the jabs these protesters refused to take. In January, he released an ad that celebrated his role in producing a “vaccine in record time, saving millions of lives.” And DeSantis, while cagey about his own booster, is fully vaccinated. He even released a statement promising the “necessary” doses for Floridians. “While the manner of distribution may change,” he wrote, “the necessity of the booster shot will not.”

DeSantis didn’t upset the protesters. He had opposed mandates; he was “here to guide us,” said Ashton Beaudry, an activist with

Moms for America who’d quit her job at Longhorn Steakhouse over its mask requirement. DeSantis is “100 percent leader,” she yelled into a megaphone, a true “alpha male.”

Her husband, Joseph Cyr, a guy with a deep baritone, was “deeply bothered” by Trump’s booster. He wasn’t sure he would vote for him again. But Cyr was an outlier. When I asked Stone about Trump’s stance on vaccines, he smirked. “What’s interesting is, based on an enormous amount of polling, Republicans know that Trump is full-vaccination, but it doesn’t hurt his standing,” he said, “They’re still for him.”

4 DOG

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CY R’S T RU MP - S K E P T IC I S M was only partly about the booster. Mostly, he had lost faith in the electoral system. “Basically the Chinese stole my vote and turned it into a Biden vote,” he told me. How did China do that? “They

sent signals, which was caught by the United States military,” Cyr explained. “Everybody knows they cheated. You should look it up.”

He took down my email and promised to send proof; I haven’t heard from him.

There is no proof of Chinese vote tampering, because it didn’t happen. DeSantis himself has maintained that Florida had a secure election (“It was transparent. It was fair,” he said in February). And yet the specter of voter fraud has become doctrine to some in the GOP. When Rep. Gaetz voted to challenge the 2020 election results, he claimed “fraud was systemic” and “repeated”; Sen. Scott informed Congress that Democrats were attempting a “hostile federal takeover of American elections”; Stone told me that Florida alone had “1.6 million phantom voters on the rolls” (it does not). Even DeSantis, despite defending his state count, has spent six months touting a proposal to form an “election crimes and security” force. If passed, the $5.7 million bill would station 52 cops across Florida to watch for “ballot harvesting.”

But even those on the right who believe the system is rigged have not been acting like it. When I sat in on a strategy meeting for an “America First” candidate vying for a longheld Democrat seat, she told her team to encourage mail-in ballots. “While the Republican Party pushes negatively on vote by mail, the Democrats capitalize on it,” she told the group assembled in the lobby of her insurance clinic. “If we do not take a page from the Democrats’ book, we will not win.”

But they were sending anyone ballots, a man called from the back. They weren’t even checking ID! Other voices chimed in: Vote by mail was rigged! Could they even trust it?

“Stop it,” the candidate said. “Regardless of what you think, you’ve got to stop it.” The goal was to win this year, she said. Then they could go back, and “figure out how to fix 2020 and all the fraud.”

This double-thinking — voting is rigged, but we must vote — is their mantra ahead of the midterms. A few days later, I drove to the Palm Beach Kennel Club, an old-school venue that, until recently, was one of Florida’s last dog race tracks. After a voter referendum banned the sport by 2021, it stopped running greyhounds on New Year’s Eve. With its old business outlawed, the club is in transition.

Now, it hosts card games, simulcasts other parimutuels and holds live events in the track-side dining room — which is where, that morning, members of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County were nibbling lemon chicken and plotting a transition of their own.

The party was “operating at full speed, registering votes,” Chairman Michael Barnett told the members, looking out at the defunct track. Voter registration was “nonstop.” They were preparing a “Get Out the Vote” elections operating system. They would “pump out robocalls, text messages, emails, mailers every which way.” Republicans had to vote by whatever means necessary — even, if it came to it, “vote by mail.” So far the strategy seemed to be working. In November, DeSantis announced that Florida now had more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time in history. But they needed to go further. “We are looking for candidates to run in every race,” Barnett said, “even races that some might see as unwinnable.”

The Palm Beach party, Barnett explained, was taking a leaf from Newt Gingrich’s book.

In the late 1980s, when then-Rep. Gingrich took over the political action committee, GOPAC, he set about forming a “farm team” of local candidates who could graduate to higher offices and challenge Democratic incumbents. He transformed the PAC from a glorified campaign ATM to a kind of political bootcamp, recruiting thousands of new leaders and training them with mailed tapes.

One infamous tape, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” laid out a list of 133 useful terms — “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” for Republicans (“freedom,” “courage” and “strength”) and “Contrasting Words” for Democrats (“radical,” pathetic” and “traitors”). “It was like subscribing to a motivational course,” reporters recalled in a history of the Republican revival, “with Gingrich a cross between Norman Vincent Peale and a Marine drill sergeant.”

Barnett, whose tiny, oval glasses accentuated his nearly circular face, called this the “many candidate strategy.” And he wanted to bring it to Florida, by pushing dozens of down-ballot candidates — state representatives, county commissioners, mayors, city councilmen and school board officials. So far, every seat in the county had at least one Republican running.

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AMERICA FIRST with Stone, I asked which country clubbers were “going to get beat.” He had talked about a grand ideological transition between the old guard and new. But when pressed, Stone could only name two emissaries of the latter — Martin Hyde, a RINO hunter who’s challenging incumbent Vern Buchanan in Florida’s 16th Congressional District; and Luna Lopez, “a former model in the Jacksonville area,” opposing Rep. John Rutherford in the Fourth. The first is already floundering; Hyde took a hit when a viral video showed him shrieking at a cop (“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”), prompting an apology and a brief withdrawal, before Hyde doubled back to the race.

Maybe he’ll win. But it sounds less coup than conversion; a shift in the Overton window, pulling the RINO further right.

A more obvious division became clear

WHEN I SAT

U. S. R E P. LAUR EN BOEBERT, R-COLO., AND REP. MARJORIE TAY LOR GRE E NE , R- GA., SC R E A M “ BUI LD THE WALL” AS U.S. PRESI DEN T JOE B IDE N DE L IV E RS T H E STATE O F THE UNI ON ADDRESS DURI NG A J OI NT S E SS ION OF CONGRE SS IN T H E U. S. C A P ITOL HOUSE CHAMBER, MARCH 1, 202 2 , IN WAS H INGTON, D.C .

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a month later when I returned to Florida to cover the Conservative Political Action Conference — or CPAC. Once a gathering of the party’s more radical members, it has since entered the mainstream. The event’s organizer, the American Conservative Union, is headquartered in D.C., but for two years, it has held it in Orlando, so guests can roam vax- and mask-free (The entire group might follow: “We should probably just go to Florida,” Chairman Matt Schlapp told reporter Dave Weigel. “We’re considering it seriously”). It was four days of full Florida conservatism. Guests could binge speeches from Rep. Gaetz, Sens. Scott and Rubio, and Trump himself; swing by media booths with Kayleigh McEnany or Sebastian Gorka; or pop into the vendor hall to catch Mike Lindell promoting his book.

Internal tensions were noticeable; some speakers exchanged subtle digs. But the real divide lay outside the resort. White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who’s been banned from CPAC for storming a Dallas conference last year, organized a rival conference called the America First Political Action Conference, or AFPAC. It was a one-day ordeal, pitched as a space for the diehard patriots even conservatives canceled — former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, the livestreamer Baked Alaska and Loomer, who’s running against “RINO” Dan Webster in Florida’s 11th Congressional District.

AFPAC may have aimed to protest CPAC, but the lines weren’t that clear in practice.

After Arpaio headlined at AFPAC, for example, he coasted into the other conference to push his new book. Many of AFPAC’s speakers — Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, among them — were elected Republican officials. And Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at both events. She was scheduled for a CPAC panel called “They Can’t Shut Us Up!” on Saturday morning; the night before, she surprised AFPAC with a late appearance onstage. As Greene looked out from the livestream, she greeted the crowd as she would any other: “Hello, canceled Americans!”

The blurriness of the dueling PACs was most obvious when it came to Trump. The counterconference, as Fuentes admitted on its website, had been “inspired” by him; they were hardcore supporters. But Trump himself was speaking at CPAC, the event that

had supposedly censored them. This was the basic contradiction in the premise of AFPAC: Trump’s fingerprints were everywhere, at both events, in every rant about cancel culture or immigration, in gripes on critical race theory or inflation. The AFPAC crowd had promised a more renegade kind of conservatism, but they wound up merely toeing the new party line.

When Fuentes took the podium that day, he sounded a lot like Stone: “The deep state has taken complete unregulated control of the U.S. government,” Fuentes said. And like Barnett, he promised his group would be “deploying hundreds of political operatives across the country” in advance of the midterms. They would support candidates, he said, who are truly “America First.”

By the time Trump spoke at CPAC on Saturday night, the crowd had already heard him impersonated by several dozen speakers. This was perhaps the week’s greatest surprise: in a sea of his imitators, Trump hardly stood out.

The quiet joke of the Trumpian revolution is that it’s almost exclusively talk — by which I mean literally rhetorical. The Trump administration did accomplish some of its legislative priorities: slashing tax rates for corporations and the ultra-wealthy, appointing more conservatives to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and partnering with the private sector to fast-track vaccine development, among others. But they had little to do with the promises Trump yelled from his rally podiums, which had the pie-in-the-sky ambition of a student council candidate pledging to put Kool-Aid in the water fountains. That’s not to downplay Trump’s impact or ideological influence, but his accomplishments functioned outside conventional governance.

Trump’s protégés in Congress have mimicked both his bombastic phrasing and legislative laziness. Gaetz, who has spent the past year decrying the allegations of statutory rape and sex trafficking against him as a massive conspiracy to extort his father, parrots Trumpian talking points on a range of topics, but he has few policy wins to back them up. Since taking office in 2017, Gaetz has introduced 22 bills and 13 resolutions, of which just one passed the House (an obscure land conveyance bill about a Florida monument that never left committee in the Senate). Greene, arguably the Trumpiest of the proto-Trumps, was removed from all of her congressional committees after she was censured for — please guess — violent rhetoric against her colleagues. And Rep. Madison

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But they would train even more. More candidates, he reasoned, brought more voters — which would boost the bigger races. If Barnett worried about RINOs, he didn’t mention it. Rubio would likely win reelection and the party was “150 percent behind Ron DeSantis” (Barnett dismissed the “rumbling on social media”’ of tension with Trump). The House map had yet to be determined, but Republicans would hold more seats either way.

I was sitting by one such recruit — Chess, the hopeful House representative from the rally. This campaign was his first, and one he’d likely lose, not least because his district trends Democrat. Chess’ experience is minimal (he’s a chiropractor). His platform is filled with conspiracies; it reads like a word salad of Gingrich’s “governing words,” with a few Trump-flavored additions. But that’s fairly standard for Florida these days. As I was listening, Chess slipped me a piece of paper. It was a fake $100 bill, but his face was on the front, beside the motto “In Chess We Trust.”

The note was signed by “Biden Crime Family LLC;” its secretary of treasury was Hunter Biden. “I call these ‘Biden Bucks,’” Chess whispered, “because they’re worthless.”

S E N . M I TC H M CCO N N E LL, W H O H AS FAIL ED TO ADO PT T H E CAR NIVAL BAR KER AF F ECT O F TR U M P- E R A CO N S E RVATI S M , I S NOW PER S O NA NO N G R ATA W IT H T H E F O R MER PR ES IDENT.

Cawthorn, the Trump fanboy and driving enthusiast from North Carolina, appropriated his mentor’s language about voter fraud once his participation in the Jan. 6 riot threatened to disqualify him from reelection. But he, too, seems disinterested in drafting actual policy. In early 2021, Cawthorn said as much to his Republican colleagues. In an email later obtained by Time, he wrote: “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”

One reason it’s hard to locate the Republican divide is because it’s not happening between congressional candidates so much as in warring styles of articulation. Trump’s Floridian semantics have become the lingua franca, and in a sense, that’s an easier battle to fight. Anyone can pick it up, not that everyone has. If one needed more evidence that policy was no longer the Republican priority, Mitch McConnell makes a tidy Exhibit A. The Kentucky senator has whipped more Republican votes than anyone in recent memory, but he has resisted the Trumpish pidgin on election fraud, impeachment and endorsing candidates preferred by the former president. Now, he’s enemy No. 1. “Mitch McConnell does not speak for the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Telegram in February. “He bails out the Radical Left and the RINOs.” That could change, of course. McConnell has time to adjust his approach before his next election in 2026. Former Vice President Mike

Pence, on the other hand, has shifted his position since last year, when he criticized Trump for trying to overturn the election results. In a late-February speech, the possible presidential candidate defended a recent resolution from the Republican National Committee about the Jan. 6 riot. The resolution censured Republican Reps. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, for their role on the Jan. 6 select committee. But like so much within the party itself, it also operated in a largely rhetorical realm: it dubbed the insurrection “legitimate political discourse.” They had a point; by contemporary standards, it is.

Last year, when Vanity Fair asked Loomer about Florida’s draw for conservatives, she pointed to Trump. “All roads,’’ she said, “lead to Mar-a-Lago.” But in a certain sense, the roads don’t have to. Who needs Mar-a-Lago, when the party can talk its way there?

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RU RAL V E T E RANS ARE AT A H I GH ER R I S K O F DYI N G BY S U I C I DE T H AN T H E I R NONRU RAL COU N T E R PA RTS . C A N A N E W, E XP E RI ME NTAL P E E R-TO- P E E R P R O G R A M SAV E LI V E S?

STORY BY BENOÎT MORENNE

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ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID HABBEN

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RU RAL V E T E RANS ARE 2 0 P E RCE N T M O R E LI K E LY TO DI E BY S U I C I DE T H AN V E T E R A N S AS A WH O LE .

ANDY

MCDONALD

PRECISION-GUIDED

ONCE

OVERSAW

MUNITIONS

AND

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CLUSTER

BOMBS

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OF

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AIR FORCE BASE, SOMETIMES WORKING ALONGSIDE SOME OF THE

HIGHEST-RANKING AIRMEN. NOW IN HIS MID-40S, HE HAD TO MAKE SURE 10,000 ITEMS SAT WHERE THEY SHOULD ON SPRAWLING SHELVES AT HOME DEPOT: TOOLS, THERMOSTATS, HUMIDIFIERS, DUCT TAPE — YOU NAME IT. HE MISSED THE CAMARADERIE AND BROTHERHOOD THAT HAD DEFINED THE FIRST HALF OF HIS LIFE. NOW, IT FELT LIKE HIS SOLE GOAL WAS UNLOADING ENOUGH RETAIL FROM SEMITRUCKS TO EARN A BONUS CHECK.

VA SE C R E TA R IE S AND CONGRESS HAVE MA DE TACKLI NG VETERAN S UIC ID E A P R IO R ITY, BUT THE NUMBER O F D E ATHS HAS KEPT RI SI NG.

He felt like a burden. He thought about ending his life and leaving behind his two daughters and his wife. Leaving behind the three-bedroom stucco house where they lived in Minot, North Dakota, and its bricklined, arched front door. He came up with a plan. He knew the date, the time and the place, and how he was going to die by suicide. But then, a small deviation in his welloiled journey snapped him out of his funk.

“What the hell are you doing?” he thought.

He realized how close to the abyss he was teetering, and this realization set him out on a new journey. What if he could reach out to other veterans before it was too late, he wondered, even

those in the far reaches of North Dakota?

He knew he was hardly the first veteran to think about suicide. Across remote areas of the country, from Pennsylvania to Montana, from Wyoming to Nevada, thousands are going through the same trepidations. They face a fragmented social fabric, a byzantine path to receiving health care and a pervasive stigma surrounding mental health. This, combined with a dearth of community resources, at-times crippling isolation and a gun-friendly culture, makes rural veterans 20 percent more likely to die by suicide than veterans as a whole. These former servicemen kill themselves at such a high rate, in fact, that they’re driving overall self-inflicted deaths in rural counties.

Deep in the Intermountain West, mental health researchers have developed a program they say could help stem this tide of veteran suicides. It hinges on a radical shift of paradigm: What if people like McDonald — not just mental health experts — were the first line of defense against suicide? What if it took a veteran to save a veteran?

T WE NT Y-T WO. The numerals appear in white font on black rubber band bracelets worn by veterans — the estimated number of veterans who die by suicide every day. That figure has fluctuated over the years and now probably stands at around 17. But this issue has afflicted the U.S. military at least since the 19th century.

While suicide was deemed morally repugnant at the time, many Civil War veterans traumatized by the war still took their own

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lives. Some of the soldiers who’d survived World War I didn’t live much longer after the conflict ended: In 1921, a former colonel in the Army’s Medical Corps testified in front of a Senate committee that 400 veterans had taken their lives in New York state just the previous year. And about 9,000 Vietnam War veterans are estimated to have died by suicide from the time of discharge through the 1980s.

The trauma associated with combat exposure has long been blamed for veteran suicide.

It was once referred to as “nostalgia,” then as “shell shock” during World War I, and as PTSD after Vietnam. By the time James Peake, an Army doctor who’d served in Vietnam, was appointed as the U.S. Army Surgeon General in 2000, the crisis was well documented.

That’s why when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Peake made sure to send mental health experts to the front lines to “drive mental health (treatment) deeper into the units,” he says.

The experts found that not much had changed since the Civil War. A number of soldiers who went to Iraq and Afghanistan were diagnosed with Post-traumatic stress disorder and reported heavy drinking, among other stresses and disorders. What was different was the avalanche of deaths the post 9/11 era ushered in. One Boston University study found that 30,177 active-duty personnel and veterans have died by suicide since the Twin Towers fell, compared to 7,057 service members killed in war theaters. There’s no one explanation for that escalation. Experts point to the growing military-civilian divide, society’s scorn for interventions in the Middle East and the military’s failure to adequately prepare its members for civilian life. Some suggest that armed forces now attract a certain profile of people more likely to have experienced psychological trauma before. And then there’s the trauma many experience while serving, whether deployed or not, including sexual assaults and physical abuses.

Here’s something else that changed. For a long time veterans bore the responsibility for suicide, which was seen as a sign of moral weakness. But the onus is now on the government for failing to care for its veterans. When

Peake, then VA secretary, was called in to testify before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 2008, lawmakers made clear something needed to be done. “We should all be angry at what has gone on here,” one admonished him. Veteran suicide has since become one of the few nonpartisan issues on Capitol Hill.

The last three VA secretaries all made it their top clinical priority, and Congress in recent years considered at least five bills or initiatives aiming to tackle suicides.

And yet, a rising number of veterans took their lives during the past decade, with the exception of a small dip between 2018 and 2019.

Despite making up only 8.3 percent of adults, veterans today represent 14.3 percent of all suicides, according to the VA. North Dakota hasn’t been immune to this national trend.

Veterans now make up less than 6 percent of the state’s population but accounted for 17 percent of suicides in 2020. McDonald came perilously close to being one of them.

with kind eyes and a light brown beard, McDonald grew up in the college town of Morgantown, West Virginia, a Rust Belt community nestled in the Appalachian foothills, and the home of West Virginia University. It stands a few miles from the Pittsburgh coal seam and, at the height of the coal mining boom, men waiting to board buses for one of the 60 coal mines outside of town were a common sight. McDonald saw firsthand what mining will do to you. When his uncle died at 76, his lungs had soaked up about as much coal dust as tar from the three packs of cigarettes he smoked a day.

McDonald wasn’t interested in suffering the same fate. He wasn’t much interested in college, either, he says from a bakery in downtown Minot. He’s brought lunch — a couple of turkey sandwiches and a bag of onion chips — but he barely touches it.

He says he did what many young men in rural areas do when faced with limited options.

He walked into a military recruiting office and joined the Air Force. After training in San

A B U R LY M A N

Antonio, he was put on the maintenance career track and was sent to Minot Air Force Base for three years. Now married, he was deployed to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, where his first daughter was born. He went on to Virginia to work in a bomb shop at Langley Air Force Base, before spending a few more years in Minot, this time supervising one. With his wife, he bought a house a few blocks from the Souris River, which flows through Minot. After stints in Guam and Turkey, he retired from the Air Force in 2013. He’d seen the world and had had a rich career serving with men he admired. What else could he ask for?

He got a job at Nash Finch, a wholesale food distributor. It was an uneasy transition from manufacturing bombs, to say the least.

He’d been managing 70 people in Minot Air Force base, having in effect the power of “life and death” over people in far-flung countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, often the bombs’ final destinations. Now, he had to make sure grocery stores got their extra case of soda, or that the ice cream wasn’t too soft. He grew agitated, seemingly unable to hold on to a job for more than a year or two.

None gave him the same pride and satisfaction he’d felt as an airman. He hit a new low when he found himself working the night shift at a Home Depot, missing out on evenings with friends. The long winters only compounded a growing sense of isolation. He all but gave up painting, a long-held passion, instead spending his days watching TV or reading books. “Those are the times where you really start sinking down into your negative thoughts,” McDonald says.

One memory especially sticks out. He sees himself walking down the street outside of Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where he’s been stationed for a few months. It’s 1999 and Albanian refugees have been pouring from war-torn Kosovo. A group of children materializes, swarming McDonald and other airmen, looking to thumb-wrestle for a soda or peddle $1 pieces of gum. Suddenly, a Turkish teenager watching from a distance pounces on an Albanian child. Airmen aren’t allowed to intervene, and McDonald, about 24 at the MAY 2022

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I N RUR A L A R E AS, O N E IN THREE VETERANS ISN’T ENROLL E D IN VA HE A LTH C A R E , MAKING IT LESS LIKELY THEY WILL B E S C R E EN E D FO R DE P R E SSION AS PART OF A ROUTINE CHECKU P.

time, watches powerless as the teenager beats the child, dragging him behind a corner.

He enters the rabbit hole. What happened to the kid? Did he lose his vision? Did he have broken bones? Sometimes positive thoughts put up a fight against the bad ones. Perhaps a church person or a doctor found the child and treated him? But more often than not, the good thoughts lose.

Air Force base, there’s no shortage of veterans in Minot, where they make up nearly a tenth of the city’s about 48,000 residents. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans and AMVETS all have chapters in town. But this doesn’t necessarily translate into a tightknit, multigenerational veteran community.

At Charlie’s Main Street Cafe, you might see airmen in camouflage uniforms seated at one of the green upholstered booths, digging into a blueberry pie or wolfing down a hot beef sandwich. Veterans, on the other hand, don’t wear uniforms, and many won’t make their military history known.

This means that former servicemen like McDonald can feel utterly isolated, even in a military town. The VA, of course, provides robust mental health services, including at the local clinic, a one-story building next door to a Little Caesars. But in rural areas, more than a third of all veterans aren't enrolled in VA health care, making it less likely they will be screened for depression as part of a routine checkup. For many who, like McDonald, suffered no service-related physical disabilities or injuries upon being discharged, receiving care through the VA isn’t always the first option, especially if they have good private insurance.

“Once a service member leaves the service, there is nothing that overtly compels them to have contact with the VA,” says Jeffrey Smith, an associate professor of history at the D U E TO THE

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University of Hawaii Hilo who has studied military suicides. This makes it challenging for the VA to flag veterans who may be at risk.

People sometimes think that “there’s some kind of magic list with all the veterans, and that if we called all of them they wouldn’t kill themselves,” says Carl LoFaro, a suicide prevention social worker at the VA. “That’s not really, unfortunately, how it works.”

Historically, veterans clubs played a key role in suicide prevention, albeit not an explicitly defined one. Men sitting at the bar counter would suddenly spill out their guts in booze-fueled catharses, sharing harrowing war stories for the first time. But these days, mostly aging Vietnam veterans meet at vets clubs, a TV sometimes playing a black-and-white movie in the background. It can be hard for younger vets to feel welcome. “We’re having trouble recruiting new members,” says Tammy VanWinkle, the head of the American Veterans’ Minot chapter. This means that younger veterans, who research shows are more likely to commit suicide than older cohorts, aren’t receiving the same informal peer support as their elders.

In this context, intervening before it’s too late is akin to a crapshoot, especially in rural areas. Some groups like Forward Flag, a veteran nonprofit in New Mexico (it also has operations in Tennessee), have developed their own methods to ferret out former military members. There, volunteers drive a rusty Bluebird Wanderlodge bus deep into remote locales like the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation, and, once there, set up on well-trafficked parking lots. If they’re lucky, a veteran’s inquisitive grandmother or aunt will stop by and, later on, return with the veteran, opening up the possibility volunteers may identify signs of depression and direct them to mental health services.

In Minot, McDonald couldn’t find the kind of peer support that would pull him out of the rabbit hole. A call with the ND Cares Coalition in Bismarck, a state-sponsored initiative

that seeks to improve veteran-related services, finally brought him fresh answers. Someone, it turns out, was working on developing the sort of help he desperately needed.

NAT H ANIE L MOH AT T , a research psychologist, stood in a conference room in front of a dozen veterans in Kalispell, Montana. It was early 2018 and he’d just flown with a team of experts from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, an interstate agency based in Boulder, Colorado. They had one goal: persuade the men to become the first line of defense against veteran suicide in northwest Montana.

Mohatt, a soft-spoken man with well-kept hair and ​​ tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, knew a thing or two about rural veterans. In the 2010s, he’d worked on a mental health initiative targeting National Guardsmen in Kansas, and he’d studied ways rural primary care could better address suicide risks. In his years in the field, he’d noticed there weren’t any structured, comprehensive programs in rural America. Rather, existing initiatives tended to be one-off, often led by counties’ public health departments or by community behavioral health centers.

This observation led him and his colleagues at the VA-affiliated Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center for Suicide Prevention to develop a new approach. What if veterans were the ones doing suicide prevention, as opposed to experts in lab coats? After all, it’d long been documented that veterans were more likely to open up to one of their own. But to get the VA to fund the new initiative, called Together With Veterans, he would need to ground it in solid evidence. So, Mohatt set out to find successful programs for inspiration. After rummaging through the academic literature, he found three. The first one was in Arizona, where the White Mountain Apache Tribe

trained law enforcement, EMTs and community leaders to recognize warning signs of suicide, put together awareness campaigns and taught coping skills to at-risk youths. It managed to cut suicide rates by more than 38 percent. Then there was the Air Force, which worked to normalize help-seeking and reduce stigma around suicide.

But even more promising was the third initiative, which targeted a broad slice of the population, and not just subsets. In Germany, the Nuremberg Alliance Against Depression had taught 2,000 priests, teachers, pharmacists, policemen and other community facilitators how to identify people with depression.

It’d achieved a 24 percent reduction in suicide attempts and completed suicides, and inspired the European Alliance Against Depression, an international nonprofit that brought the model to Chile and Australia.

“It’s worked with native populations, it’s worked in Europe, it’s worked with the Air Force,” Mohatt thought. What if rural veterans could be trained to deliver the same kind of intervention in their communities? The suicide prevention center contracted with the Western Interstate Commission to design a program drawing on these efforts. Now, the researchers needed to test out their idea. After scouring suicide and population data, Mohatt’s team identified four communities to try it on. One of them was in the Kalispell region, whose high concentration of veterans and high suicide rates made it an ideal candidate.

But the veterans gathered in the conference room in northwest Montana weren’t biting.

They sat squarely in their chairs, their arms crossed as a lunch of sandwiches, chips and cookies arranged on a table laid untouched. “It was like talking to a silent room,” says Mohatt.

At the end of a 40-minute presentation, the team asked a simple question. “Do you want this in your community?” Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room changed. The veterans had been given a choice — this program wouldn’t

TH E VA H AS B E E N T RYING S O MET H ING NEW TO MAKE A DENT IN V E TE R A N S U I C I D E — M A K E VET ER ANS T H EMS ELVES T H E F IR ST L INE O F DEF ENS E.

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I ’V E ALWAYS NOT I C E D T H AT V E T E R A N S C A N TA LK TO V E T E RANS E AS I E R T H AN T H E Y C AN TA LK TO A N YO N E E LS E .”

—R A N DY M C D O N A LD, TO G E T H E R WI T H V E T E R A N S , M I N OT NO RT H DAKOTA CH APT ER

be imposed on them unless they wanted to participate. Slowly, the veterans started weighing in on Mohatt’s idea. “They started eating our food,” he says.

FOR A Y E AR ,

R E SE A R C HE R S THI NK VETERANS COUL D HO L D THE KEY TO PREVENTI NG SUIC IDE S A MO NG THEI R PEERS.

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Western Interstate Commission representatives flew in from Denver to craft a plan alongside the veterans. “While we were rolling the wheel down the road, we were inventing it,” says L.D. Gross, a veteran involved in the effort. They set the main goals for the grassroots organization: reduce the stigma attached to seeking help; promote gun safety; provide suicide prevention training — including to primary care providers; and link veterans to suicide hotlines and mental health centers. Now named the Veterans Coalition of Northwest Montana, the group would receive a $100,000 grant from the VA spread over three years. It would be on its own after that.

Once organized, the veterans moved fast.

They put up two big billboards on either end of Kalispell, showing a casket draped with an American flag, the words “NO MORE SUICIDE” superimposed on it, as well as the phone number to a crisis helpline. They got trained to teach “Question, Persuade, and Refer,” a program focused on discerning warning signs of suicide. Invariably wearing military baseball caps, they became fixtures at local gun shows, giving away gun locks — firearms are the method of choice for veterans committing suicide — and leaflets.

It’s too early to say whether these actions have made a dent in suicides, Mohatt says, in part because it takes two years for statistics on suicide deaths to trickle down to national databases. But there have been encouraging signs. Since 2019, the coalition has delivered QPR training to 432 people, including in vets homes and farming communities. It had 10,000 people attend its events and, crucially, helped 731 veterans access housing, receive

food assistance or get health care. This is an important metric because veterans enrolled in the VA are less likely to commit suicide.

Some benefits might not be easily measured but feel equally important. After Gross and two other veterans finished teaching a QPR course at an American Legion post on the Flathead Indian Reservation, two old farmers in overalls stood up to speak. They’d lost five family members to suicide, all veterans, they said, tears streaming down their faces. “You can run into some pretty emotional stuff,” Gross says. Soon after, the veterans got a call from the post.

Could they organize another class?

B AC K IN MINOT , McDonald hopped on a phone call in late 2020 with a consultant for Together With Veterans. The program was expanding to dozens of communities across the country. Maybe McDonald could start the first chapter in North Dakota?

The model made sense to McDonald.

“I’ve always noticed that veterans can talk to veterans easier than they can talk to anyone else,” he says. So, in January last year, he started reaching out to local veteran groups and nonprofits, hoping to recruit volunteers to help him set up the nonprofit. But things didn’t go as planned. His efforts got little traction, which he chalks up in part to a perceived lack of legitimacy. “I failed miserably,” McDonald says. In the summer, however, he gave it another try, reaching out again. He’d quit his job at Home Depot and started a new position as an outreach specialist for disabled veterans, in addition to studying for a master’s degree in mental health counseling. This time, he received positive feedback.

He joined forces with a female veteran who agreed to take on the paperwork, and in the fall, the chapter held its first meeting at the local post of Veterans of Foreign Wars. After reading about the event in the Minot Daily

News, about 15 people showed up, most having no idea what the meeting was really about, McDonald remembers. “That brought out a mixed crowd.” One participant had lost her brother, a veteran, to suicide in another state two days before and couldn’t immediately be with her family. The group was the only source of healing she could find at the time.

McDonald felt unsure about the initiative.

How, for instance, would he go about reaching veterans removed from society, those who elect to live on farms surrounded by dirt roads, dozens of miles away from the nearest city?

His plan was for the group to team up with a San Diego-based nonprofit to build bunk beds for kids. Perhaps a carpenter living in a rural area would hear about the workshops and get Bob, his veteran neighbor, to lend a hand and nail a few planks. Bob would show up and find a community ready to welcome him with open arms. Perhaps the dark thoughts would go away then. Perhaps his life would be saved.

Still, McDonald had mixed feelings about being the face of this effort. How could he talk about saving veterans when he’d come so close to losing himself ? “This is my first time admitting this publicly,” he wrote on the group’s Facebook page in September 2021.

“I’ve kinda felt like a fraud putting together a non-profit that focuses on rural veteran suicide, knowing how close I was just a year ago.” But, he continued, “This organization matters to me, veterans’ matter to me, YOUR LIFE MATTERS TO ME!!!!!”

A D OZE N PE O PLE emerge from the biting cold and file into a spacious conference room inside the Ward County Administration Building in Minot, a rotund edifice with sleek glass panels.

The emblems for the five military branches hang on a black wall, bathed in white light. The Minot chapter of Together With Veterans has been scrupulously following a 187-page toolkit

developed by the VA for local groups. This evening, they’re tackling phase two of a fivestep plan: a SWOT analysis — the acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats — of their community.

Ten fresh boxes of Papa John’s pizza are stacked on a filing cabinet. The smell of hot, melted cheese fills the room. “Through this process, you guys are helping shape what this organization looks like,” McDonald, wearing a cornflower blue polo shirt and a beige baseball cap, tells participants in a pep talk. They’re mostly men, veterans ranging in age from mid30s to late 70s. Some, sporting druid-like gray beards, resolutely prop up their elbows on one of four tables arranged in a rectangle. Others sit at a distance, coats still on. Some won’t open their mouth once during the two-hour meeting, as though worried they may break a vow of silence.

Soon, among those willing to talk, the comments pour in. There are the long, depressing winters, says one. Surely that’s a weakness. Old veterans have a hard time going grocery shopping, says another. A sexagenarian with a welltrimmed beard chimes in. “Does everybody in the community know that there is a veteran suicide issue?” An Iraq vet in a black hoodie emblazoned with an American flag holds up his smartphone and notes that there’s no dedicated website for Together With Veterans.

How is that for brand recognition? And by the way, how do we reach younger vets who don't read the local paper?

A man in a green sports jacket and brown boots notes another hurdle: How do we reach veterans with PTSD, who may steer away from big events? How about we do it in an open space, suggests someone. Green Jacket remarks drily that this leaves the group a 60-day window in the summer to organize meets, referring to the interminable North Dakota winters.

By the time the meeting is over, it’s apparent the chapter has a lot on its plate. The group isn’t even sure about the scale of the issue.

When I point out to McDonald that only one veteran committed suicide in the county last year, according to provisional data provided by the North Dakota Health Department, he smirks. This number, he says “seems very, very low.” But perhaps it doesn’t matter if only one veteran in the whole county is saved. At the very least, veterans who didn’t know each other six months ago have banded together, their eyes set on a larger goal than themselves, the despair they may experience at times receding in the depths.

McDonald knows what he’s talking about.

In the past months he has started meeting with a counselor, talking about his PTSD. Things are finally looking up. The sense of meaning that had eluded him all these years is slowly coming back, in no small part thanks to his involvement with the chapter. “It’s a little self-serving, building this nonprofit itself,” he says. “I get to accomplish what I need to accomplish for myself.” Perhaps he’s saved a life already.

WHERE TO GET HELP T H E DEPART MENT O F VET ER ANS AF FAIR S MAINTAINS A H OT L INE FO R VET ER ANS IN CR IS IS T H AT O PER AT ES 24 H O UR S A DAY. CAL L 1 -8 00-273-8 25 5 AND PR ESS 1. O NL INE, VIS IT VET ER ANS CR IS IS L INE.NET/G ET-H EL P/ CH AT, O R S END A T EX T MESSAG E TO 8 38 25 5 .

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THE DARK SIDE OF AI ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HOLDS PROMISE, BUT ALSO POTENTIAL RISKS FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

BY BO N N I E G L I C K A N D K E N N E DY L E E

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e frequently hear in the 21st century that data is the new oil.

Those who controlled oil flows in the 1970s had a near stranglehold on the global economy. Today, those who hold data might well control the new economy. Data, however, is diffuse, hard to track and nearly impossible to regulate, which could have unparalleled implications for human rights and religious freedom.

Big data companies have poured billions into research to bring technology and data into direct contact with us every day through artificial intelligence.

The idea of using AI for good has been the call to action for big data companies and democracies around the world. It wouldn’t just beat humans in chess or “Jeopardy!” it would eventually design smarter cities and driverless cars while improving businesses and agricultural yields with less water use. And, at its best, artificial intelligence holds the promise of allowing doctors to make better decisions about patient care or teachers to take a holistic view of students’ capabilities.

And during the pandemic, AI even helped faith to go online. Pastors and rabbis could connect communities and families for lifecycle events like bar mitzvahs, funerals or weddings.

Saudi Arabia deployed AI robot guides at the Grand Mosque in Mecca that answer questions from visitors in 11 languages, particularly useful during the hajj each year.

In early 2022, an AI-enabled livestream literally helped save lives when congregants,

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tuning in virtually from home, notified law enforcement officers of a hostage situation unfolding at Congregation Beth Israel, a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. What started as a joyful Sabbath service ended in a shootout with all of the hostages freed and one terrorist eliminated. Without the livestream, without the AI-enabled understanding of the congregation for law enforcement officers, the outcome might have been different.

Despite all the applications of AI for good, particularly when it comes to advancing faith,

ALL THE GATHERED INFORMATION THAT CAN HELP FACILITATE FAITH OUTREACH, CAN ALSO BE USED BY MALIGN ACTORS TO STAMP OUT MINORITY BELIEFS.

critics of this technology are now widespread, with even the Vatican vowing to fight back against AI’s threats to human rights and religious freedom.

Here is the paradox. All the gathered information that can help facilitate faith outreach, particularly information about vulnerable individuals or countries’ national security infrastructures, can also be used by malign actors to stamp out minority beliefs. What happens, suddenly, when an authoritarian regime

determines that a specific type of faith or religious adherent is a “threat to society”? Data and artificial intelligence can be deployed to target individuals and faith groups. Facial recognition technology, enabled by AI, can identify people entering or exiting houses of worship, which might later be used to bolster unjust charges of sedition.

Welcome to the roaring ’20s of the 21st century where this occurs every day in countries around the world. The ferocious behaviors of dictators are enabled by technology that was originally designed with an eye toward human progress and creating a better world.

Chinese authorities have already used a vast system of advanced facial recognition technology to profile religionists. This data then serves as a hub for authorities to track movements, search people’s homes and detain citizens. Labor camps have been set up that officials in Beijing cynically refer to as vocational training camps — these are “reeducation camps” designed specifically to target Chinese Uyghurs.

The Uyghurs are not alone in experiencing the abuse of AI technology. Catholics in Venezuela, comprising 70 percent of the country’s population, are becoming the archetype of what life looks like for religious adherents living under hostile governments when authoritarian regimes partner to export these technologies abroad. As the Catholic Church in Venezuela has worked to position itself as the bulwark defending human rights and dignity against Venezuela’s regime, government

actors have been known to crash Sunday Masses and to keep tabs on prominent priests.

A 2018 Reuters investigative report showed startling ties between the Venezuelan government and a Chinese state-owned technology giant. Those ties have grown stronger over time with the Chinese Communist Party’s export of some of its most powerful AI tools to fellow authoritarians.

Meanwhile, in Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has used artificial intelligence to surveil all citizens. As early as 2009, I LLUSTR ATI ON BY JAMES STEI NBER G

The Wall Street Journal profiled Iran’s spying web, which, at the time, was aided by European technology, but it’s no secret that many governments, including the United States, use big data and artificial intelligence under the banner of national security.

AI, in other words, is here to stay.

It is incumbent on the free world, including business, government and religious leaders, to harness its capabilities to advance human rights and religious freedom. The response from the U.S. and like-minded nations should

be twofold: calling out the malign actors who use the technology to tyrannize religious and other minority groups, while also keeping boundaries on how it’s deployed and only utilizing it as a force for good.

B O N N I E G L I C K I S T H E D I R E C TO R O F T H E K RAC H I NST I T U T E FO R T E C H D I P LO M AC Y AT P U R D U E . S H E I S T H E FO R M E R D E P U T Y A D M I N I S T RATO R A N D C H I E F O P E RAT I N G O F F I C E R O F T H E U. S. AG E N C Y FO R I N T E R NAT I O NA L D E V E LO P M E N T. K E N N E DY L E E I S S P E C I A L AS S I STA N T W I T H I N T H E K RAC H I NST I T U T E FO R T E C H D I P LO M AC Y AT P U R D U E .

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SAVING GRACE ADAM SKLUTE RESCUED BALLET WEST FROM THE BRINK. NOW, CAN HE BRING BALLET INTO THE 21ST CENTURY?

BY B E N O îT MO R E N N E

A

dam sklute strides around a studio in rolled-up sleeves, washed-out jeans and black sneakers, coaching about 50 dancers in a firm but gentle tone. Standing at 6-foot1, with a boyish face and broad shoulders, the 57-year-old artistic director of Ballet West has the physique of a retired football player, but when he stops pacing to demonstrate the next sequence, his inner ballet dancer shows up.

“Plié, plié, change,” he says, bending his knee, his feet taking on a life of their own. There’s nothing obvious in the room or his demeanor to suggest the revolution taking place at this modest ballet company in a midsized Western city.

He pauses to check in with Jenna Rae Herrera, the first Latina to be cast as the lead in Michael Smuin’s “Romeo + Juliet.” They talk briefly, he pats her on the shoulder and resumes his tour. It’s a trivial exchange but a symbolic one nonetheless, a nod to the fact that people of color have become an integral part of the company — not a given in an industry where white dancers are still the majority, where even costume accessories are designed to emulate pale skin tones.

Entering the 15th year of his tenure, Sklute exudes quiet confidence. In that time he has managed to turn a troubled troupe into one of the premier regional companies in the country, aiming for the kind of name recognition typically associated with heavy hitters like the New York City Ballet. The troupe’s dancers have performed in Havana’s ​​ International Ballet Festival and at New York’s storied Joyce Theater. It was featured in a BBC-produced 78

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reality show and, most recently, in a docuseries shot during the pandemic. And it has managed to establish itself as a hub for talent thanks to its expanding dance academy.

More consequentially, however, Sklute has worked to bring the company up to speed on racial diversity. Of Ballet West’s 52 dancers, seven are Black, and three of its eight principal dancers are people of color, including Herrera.

The troupe has finally ditched skin lightening makeup used to “whiten” dancers holding classical roles in “Swan Lake” or “Giselle,” and

WITH SKLUTE AT THE HELM, BALLET WEST HAS ALSO FOUND NEW AVENUES TO CREATE A NAME FOR ITSELF BEYOND THE INTERMOUNTAIN REGION.

when the company performs “Carmina Burana” in April, spectators may notice that Black performers wear shoes matching the hue of their skin. In many ways, Sklute was the right man to “bring Ballet West into the 21st century,” as he puts it. But how he got here was an unlikely journey.

SI TTI NG B E H IND H IS DE S K among yellow walls in his office, Sklute looks relaxed in an

anthracite-colored jacket and slip-on emerald sneakers as he recalls growing up as an only child in an unconventional family. He spent his early years in Berkeley, California. His mother, Barbro Klein, was a Swedish anthropologist and his father, John Sklute, was a professor of English at the University of California. The couple imbued him with a love for the arts, giving him broad exposure to ballet, opera, theater and taking him to concerts and museums.

He was still a small boy when his parents split. His mother took Sklute to Sweden with her new partner, a photographer. She found fertile ground in Europe for studying ancient rune stones as the family spent several years hopping from one capital to the next before settling in Paris. “I had a very hippie background,” Sklute says. They lived in the city’s posh sixth district, right around the corner from Le Bon Marché, a chic department store frequented by well-heeled Parisians, and a few blocks away from the Luxembourg Garden, ground once walked by American writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Sklute, who was nine years old, lived like a feral child. “I skipped school all the time,” he says. Instead, he explored, rifling through American comic books at antique stores and haunting stamp collectors to indulge in his newfound passion for philately.

When that idyll ended, the family moved back to the U.S. and Sklute went back to the Bay Area to live with his father. He was growing to be the kind of idiosyncratic teenager one might see in a Wes Anderson film: a literate PHOTOGR APHY BY LAUR A SEI TZ

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and well-traveled student and master dilettante. He took piano lessons, sang, painted and played lacrosse and basketball, but didn’t excel at any of these endeavors. “I loved doing all of it,” he says. “I was just lazy.” A turning point came when his high-school girlfriend, a dancer, suggested he take ballet classes. He took her advice and immediately fell in love with the art form. “All of a sudden, here was the theater, and the music, and the athleticism and the art, all rolled into one.”

After training for a mere six months, he told his parents he intended to turn professional.

But they’d always wanted their son to become an academic like them, and ballet wouldn’t get in the way of their expectations. “No, you’re not,” they told him. “That was all I needed to hear,” Sklute says.

Sklute was 18 years old when he auditioned for The School of American Ballet, the New York academy founded by George Balanchine, after saving his own money to pay for the flight to Los Angeles. About 300 kids were there to try out, most looking much younger. He felt so nervous that at one point, he ran out of the room, sick to his stomach. At the end of the lesson, the scouts had dancers stand in groups at one end of the room and went on to pick one or two dancers from each group as new recruits. When Sklute’s group stood in front

of the school reps, a woman pointed her finger at two performers. “You and you,” she said.

Slowly, she dragged her finger in the air until it settled on Sklute. “And you,” she finally said.

After attending the program, Sklute joined the Joffrey Ballet in New York, the first company ever to perform at the White House. Sklute’s mirthful tone falls to a deferential hush at the mention, and he nods at a black-and-white photograph of Robert Joffrey, the pioneering choreographer who gave him his shot, nestled high in a bookcase facing the desk. The frame is set against August Bournonville’s “Letters on Dance and Choreography.” In the image, a bearded Joffrey is shown directing a ballerina, his left arm extended at an oblique angle, his left forefinger propping up his chin. “He was a funny little man,” Sklute says. “When he hired me, he said, ‘Adam, I’m taking you into my company against my better judgment,’” Sklute says, adopting a nasal tone to mimic Joffrey's voice. “‘But you’re smart, so I know you’re going to succeed. Now you just have to learn how to dance.’”

At 20, Sklute had managed to become a professional performer. He was a skinny but muscular young man, capable of sending women flying over his head. His physical prowess and gangly looks earned him a nickname: Super Chicken. But he would have to grow a thick skin. Gerald Arpino, who co-founded the company, was “a bit of an ogre in the studios,” Sklute says. “The first time he saw me dancing, I was in the background and I was so excited SKLUTE WAS EXPECTED TO BUILD THE CALIBER OF THE COMPANY, PUT IT ON THE MAP INTERNATIONALLY AND DEVELOP THE ACADEMY ATTACHED TO THE TROUPE.

A DA M SK LUTE, A R T I STIC D IR E C TO R , B ALLET WEST

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just to be in that rehearsal. And he called out, ‘Hey, you with the spatulas at the end of your legs, get out of my sight!’” Far from feeling discouraged, Sklute took the criticism in stride.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, he noticed me!’”

It helped that Sklute wasn’t living the starving-artist life: He arrived in New York just as his mother and stepfather were moving back to Europe, so he moved into their rent-controlled, three-bedroom duplex apartment in Midtown Manhattan, a few blocks

announcing he’d resigned, the other that he’d been fired.

The ugly breakup came during a period of intense turmoil. In the years prior, soaring operating deficits had prompted the board to cut workweeks, staff, performances and dancers.

In two years, the number of dancers had been slashed. This led to a drawn-out battle over unionization efforts by the dancers, who ultimately prevailed.

This may explain why the dancers showing up for Sklute’s first lesson — as part of the interview process — eyed him with suspicion.

“They were terrified and nervous,” he says.

The company’s eight-month search for a new director ended when the board unanimously picked Sklute for the position, saluting his “contagious enthusiasm” and “tremendous experience.” It was a huge step up for Sklute, 42 at the time.

But the new job brought with it a set of daunting tasks. Sklute was expected to build the caliber of the company, put it on the map internationally and develop the

academy attached to the troupe. Within a year, he earned plaudits for his managerial savvy and charming nature, with The Salt Lake Tribune describing him as “Ballet West’s magic Sklute.” David Leta, chairman of the board, went so far as to say that Sklute “has done for the ballet what Barack Obama has done for

SKLUTE HAS A DREAM FOR THE COMPANY TO ONE DAY HOLD NO ONE RACIAL MAJORITY, BUT IT WON’T BE EASY.

the Democratic Party.” In other words, reinvent it, and breathe life into it.

Sklute’s ability to court donors and assemble epic lineups — his first season included Stanton Welch’s “Madame Butterfly” and

“The Tempest,” as well as “The Nutcracker” — made a splash. Over his tenure, that translated to improved financial health for the company. Its revenues reached $13.5 million in 2018, more than double what it earned in 2006, thanks in part to swelling contributions, as detailed in the organization’s tax returns.

During those years, Sklute, seemingly indefatigable, has become a fixture on the Salt Lake City circuit, appearing at Rotary Club dinners, hosting Ballet West’s annual gala with at-home personalized dinner menus concocted under his direction and directing dancers featured in a Zions Bank commercial. With Sklute at the helm, Ballet West has also found new avenues to create a name for itself beyond the Intermountain region.

In 2012, the company voted to participate in “Pointe Break,” a reality show produced by the BBC for the CW network. To say that the show earned mixed reviews is an understatement — it was excoriated by a New York Times critic as “breathtakingly bad” — but for all of its cringy drama, some of its 16 episodes

away from the United Nations’ headquarters.

He would spend the next 22 years with the Joffrey Ballet, following as the company moved to Chicago in 1995 and eventually serving as Arpino’s associate artistic director. Then, in 2007, he got a brief email from a recruiting consultant.

Would Sklute be interested in applying for a job as artistic director of Ballet West?

IT WAS S U P E R B OWL S U N DAY when Sklute flew to Utah from Chicago to interview for the position. He found stores with their curtains drawn and an opaque sky — caused by what he was told was the worst inversion in 30 years. “My first impression was, “What the heck is this place?’” he remembers. Ballet West wasn’t exactly a cozy landing pad, he was about to find out, but for entirely different reasons than its geographic setting.

Jonas Kage, a Swedish dancer who’d served as artistic director for nine years, had just been ousted by the board a year before the end of his contract, ostensibly because of a negative evaluation. Kage had helped breathe fresh air into the company, staging works by renowned choreographers like Hans van Manen, Glen Tetley, Amedeo Amodio and Richard Tanner for the first time in Utah. But the board, citing shrinking revenues, ramped up costs and disaffection among principal dancers, presented Kage with two prewritten press releases, one

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A DA M SK LUTE, ARTI STI C DI RECTOR OF BALLET WE ST, DIRE C TS A RE H E ARSAL IN SALT L AK E C IT Y ON T U E S DAY, MAR C H 1, 2022.

still managed to attract a million viewers.

In 2020, cameras poked their noses into the dance studios again as the company struggled to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, this time for a nine-episode web docuseries titled “In the Balance: Ballet for a Lost Year.”

were being held accountable for a lot of things as leaders in our field.”

Ballet West took some concrete steps as a result. After conducting an audit, the troupe moved to do away with skin-lightening-makeup.

B U T THE SE A R E N ’ T what Sklute cites as his proudest achievements. Rather, he notes that under his tutelage the dance academy has expanded from 100 to 1,000 students, now spread across four campuses in Park City, Lehi and Salt Lake City. The reason Sklute insists on this point is that he sees this recruiting pond as perhaps the best way to bring more faces of color to the company.

The dancers drawing aerial arabesques in pointe shoes tend to be overwhelmingly white and there have long been calls to bring more racial diversity to ballet generally. But the 2020 murder of George Floyd was a jolt for Sklute, he says. During a summer of reckoning that saw millions of people take to the streets, he and a dozen other directors — predominantly white men — took to Zoom to vent and discuss what they could do. “Sometimes they were just crying sessions because there were a lot of strong feelings,” Sklute says. “We

THE TROUPE MOVED TO DO AWAY WITH SKIN LIGHTENER. IT NOW PAINTS SLIPPERS TO MATCH THE SKIN TONE OF EACH DANCER AND SUPPLIES TIGHTS AND SHOE STRAPS MATCHING THEIR COMPLEXION.

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It now paints slippers to match the skin tone of each dancer and supplies tights and shoe straps matching their complexion. But some of Sklute’s goals are much more ambitious.

Along with 15 artistic directors, he pledged to design new programs that create more access for young artists of color. Last year, the company held a virtual “open house” for prospective dancers of color to ask questions to the troupe. Sklute didn’t attend the session to

make sure the dancers would feel comfortable sharing their opinion. He says he now reserves particular attention to applicants of color, auditioning some of them twice, for instance.

Sklute has a dream for the company to one day hold no one racial majority, but it won’t be easy, especially not in a state where 90 percent of the population is white — with a reputation to match. “He’s doing a great job, considering he’s in Utah,” says Lauren Anderson, who was the first Black principal ballerina of a major American ballet. Anderson has joined an ongoing conversation series on race organized

by Ballet West titled “Dismantling Racism in Classical Ballet,” and earlier this year walked onstage to present flowers of congratulations to Katlyn Addison, the first Black female principal dancer at Ballet West. But the challenge is formidable.

“If you have a Black kid coming in, and Ballet West offers you something but then Dance Theatre of Harlem offers you something,” she says, “where are they going to feel more comfortable going?” Still, Sklute wants Ballet West to open its doors even more broadly. “I feel like I spent my entire career proving that I can do something,” he says. Ballet “is and can be much more than people think.”

Mister Rogers

Won’t you be my neighbor?

FRIENDSHIP

THE LAST WORD

THE CONTRARIAN MEET THE WOMAN WHO CONFOUNDS THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT

lizabeth bruenig makes no apologies. Not for her progressive politics, not for her Catholic faith, and certainly not for having children at an age some of the left intelligentsia find unfashionable. Last year, for Mother’s Day, she penned an essay exploring the challenges and rewards of parenting as a millennial. The piece ran in The New York Times under the headline: “I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait.”

Lefty Twitter erupted in predictably righteous indignation, but the avowed democratic socialist didn’t let it bother her. “More than any single decision in my life,” she says, “having children has made me happy.”

Now a 31-year-old staff writer at The Atlantic, Bruenig is a rising star in journalism, with stints at The Washington Post and The New Republic, as well as the Times. In 2018, she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a feature story about the sexual assault of a student who attended her high school 84

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YOU TAKE A FAIR AMOUNT OF ABUSE ON TWITTER. WHY IS THAT?

Some of it is because I label myself, and I’m upfront about what I think. Some of it’s probably because I’m a woman, or for reasons that I don’t understand and don’t care to contemplate. It doesn’t bother me. If it’s concerning, The Atlantic security team will deal with it. If it’s just people being mean, hit the X. Focus on the stuff that makes you happy. My kids make me happy.

My husband makes me happy. My friends, my home life, those things make me happy.

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

E

In real life, Bruenig calls being a wife and mother to two young daughters her greatest accomplishment and joy. She’s earned a bachelor’s degree in English and sociology from Brandeis University and a master’s degree in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge — which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship. She’s unabashedly religious in a time when religious affiliation is fading and describes a personal faith journey to understand God and her relationship with him.

In a conversation with Deseret, Bruenig explains how she reconciles faith, politics and family even as nonconformists like her have become targets of public criticism from all sides.

YOU WERE RAISED A METHODIST. WHAT DREW YOU TO CATHOLICISM?

in Arlington, Texas. The judges praised her ability to write with “moral authority.” She has written prolifically about ethics, theology, politics and economics, from a complex position: just left of Bernie Sanders on economics,

“I FIND A NATURAL FIT WITH RELIGION AND A POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT ENSURES A DIGNIFIED LIFE FOR THE LEAST AMONG US.”

openly religious and quietly anti-abortion.

In 2020, Forbes included Bruenig in the magazine’s “30 Under 30” list, saying “Bruenig uses her unique perspective as a socialist, Catholic and Texan to weigh in on political

and moral issues in public life.”

Those adjectives are not frequently used to describe a single person, at least not in the United States, but Bruenig embraces them all. If there’s any tension between them, she embraces that, too. Maybe that’s why she enjoys taking on complicated stories about what goes on inside of the people she writes about — “moral universes and the sorts of battles we fight on the inside,” she says.

Social media skirmishes are a different animal, one she could largely do without. Still, as a millennial, she enjoys the bright side of that technology. “So much of it is fun, like posting pictures and talking to people about the things that I bake,” she says, “and it’s a great way to follow breaking news.” But she knows things can get out of hand, so she keeps it under control. “It’s very hard to stop something when you’re still having fun. But if you wait until you’re not having fun anymore, then you’re having a bad time.”

I started reading the work of St. Augustine of Hippo in college, then I won a scholarship to earn a master of philosophy in Christian theology at Cambridge. That’s where I was drawn even further into his work, those kinds of apologetics and the tradition. You fall in love.

That’s what happens when you convert.

WHAT DREW YOU TO STUDY THEOLOGY?

Maybe I just needed a little more help than others. Everyone else seemed content when they were at church, and that’s all they needed.

That wasn’t the case for me. I had things that I didn’t understand and wanted to understand better. And I felt most clarity and closest to God when I was studying or researching or answering some of these questions about history and philosophy of the faith. So I just kept doing it. That’s how I spend time with God. MANY AMERICANS SEE SOCIALISM

I LLUSTR ATI ON BY KYLE HI LTON

AND RELIGION AS MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. BUT YOU CLAIM BOTH. HOW DOES THAT WORK?

I see them as coherent. During the Cold War, when Americans were forming their opinions about socialism, the conflict wasn’t as simple as the media often framed it. The Soviet Union practiced Soviet communism, which was atheistic. But there are other forms of socialism, like the democratic socialism we see in Scandinavia. Not only do Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark allow religion, but some of those countries even have compulsory taxes that fund their state churches. It’s not the only system for any country at any stage of development, but the United States has a wealthy, advanced economy, we’re industrialized, we have the technology, there’s no reason we can’t do this. And it would make the lives of some of our neediest people much better.

I find a natural fit with a political system that ensures a dignified life for the very least among us. It seems extraordinarily obvious to me.

YOU MADE A SIMILAR ARGUMENT IN 2018, WRITING FOR THE WASHINGTON POST. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT PIECE GOT SO MUCH ATTENTION?

We were in a moment where politics felt subject to change. The 2016 election had produced an unexpected outcome. Not only the general election — Donald Trump winning and Hillary Clinton losing — but also the primaries, with Bernie Sanders coming so close. For a little-known senator from Vermont, a lifelong independent who caucuses with the Democrats, to do as well as he did, that surprised people. It seemed like there were possibilities that hadn’t existed in a long time. It felt like a moment of unique energy. A lot of people felt that.

WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR VISION OF GOVERNMENT COULD DO THE MOST GOOD?

There’s some logic to human life, and a predictable economic pattern. We can tell when people will need financial support. It’s when they’re children, because kids don’t work. It’s when they’re students, which is why they get loans or scholarships or rely on their parents to support them. Young adults sometimes need a little bit of help, because they’re making the least money of their career, but that’s also

when they’re having children and stuff. When they’re elderly and looking at retirement, those folks need support, too. They have earned rest.

We need to acknowledge that there is a cycle, a realistic number of years that a person is allotted. Pay some heed to it and recognize that there are periods where people need support.

We’re increasingly accepting a country where elderly people are expected to work until they die, with no rest and no retirement. The fact that is happening without grave protest is very, very disturbing to me.

WHAT’S THE MOST INTERESTING STORY PLAYING OUT NOW AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS?

When the Supreme Court starts acting this summer, there’s going to be an enormous amount of unhappiness in the public, one way or the other, with respect to the abortion issue. That’s an obvious one: there are religious angles to activism on almost every issue. There are religious climate activists and religious activists opposing gun violence and the death penalty. A lot of areas remain as active as ever, even if religion in general is trending towards disaffiliation.

AS A STORYTELLER AND A THEOLOGIAN, IS THERE A SCRIPTURAL ACCOUNT THAT FEELS IMPORTANT TO YOU?

The prodigal son. It’s so morally complicated.

Every character could be the protagonist of a compelling tale. I’m most interested in the elder brother, who’s always obedient and stays with his father, but is then frustrated when his brother returns to great celebration, despite his dissolute ways. That feeling when you have done everything right and you’ve obeyed but others who behaved badly are being accepted or forgiven or even praised for coming around.

That, I think, is so human. It’s morally wrong, but intuitively it’s a sympathetic response.

That is all the complexity I could ever hope to pack into something that I would write.

ANY LAST WORD?

I hope we’re all praying for peace. I’ve been including that in my prayers quite often and it seems like something that a Christian community could be clearly united on.

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PARTING SHOT

“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”

IBS

WATER WARS WAH WAH VALLEY, UTAH

mark wintch relies on a spring to run his ranching and farming operation in a remote section of Utah’s Beaver County in a place called Wah Wah Valley. This is dry country, with this particular swath of Utah locked in extreme or severe drought. “We’re at ground zero for the drought,” Wintch recently told Amy Joi O’Donoghue of the Deseret News. “Water is gold. That was the real gold rush of the West — water, in my opinion.” Wintch fears his family legacy will dry up if a proposed groundwater pumping project gets federal approval to proceed. “I’m immensely concerned,” he said. “The spring is my everything.”

PHOTOGR A PHY BY SPEN SER HEA PS

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CAN ISRAEL SURVIVE?

HOW FLORIDA TOOK OVER THE GOP

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