It’s great to be ‘in the zone’ — while working, exercising and creating art. Here’s how to get there.

By mile 10 of my first half-marathon, the persistent, frigid drizzle had forced my fingers into a clenched C shape. The thrill of running alongside thousands of people after weeks of solo training had mellowed into a quiet, somewhat dull drive toward the finish line. Then, without warning or conscious effort, my body started moving faster. The hard pavement felt like a supportive mattress. A sense of elegance freed me from my clumsy body. I was — there is no other way to put it — at one with the cityscape around me. I was in the zone. In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow became the first academic to write about what he called “peak experiences,” moments of elation that come from pushing ourselves in challenging tasks. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it “flow,” and his extensive studies, beginning in the late 1960s, eventually drew interest from researchers around the world. Psychologists have since amassed a wealth of data and insights on flow, also known as “being in the zone”: what it is, how it works and why it matters. The research has created a road map for all the runners — and artists, chess players, rock climbers, etc. — who seek the exhilaration you feel when completely absorbed in the pursuit of something difficult. And that road map points to one direction: The best way to reach flow is to forget you’re trying to get there. What it means to be 'in the zone' In the 1960s, Csikszentmihalyi noticed many artists kept working despite hunger or fatigue when the painting was going well. The promise of fame or fortune wasn’t the motivation; it was the work itself — it felt good. Dancers, composers and others practicing a singular skill followed the same pattern. The descriptions people gave about the state of flow were so strikingly similar that Csikszentmihalyi could identify eight essential ingredients. Some are prescriptive: A person must be challenging themselves, he wrote in 1990. They must have clear goals. They must be totally absorbed in what they’re doing. Their thoughts and actions must be in sync. Other points are more descriptive: Distractions disappear as their attention remains solely with the task at hand, though effortlessly so. They feel totally in control of themselves, without self-consciousness or worries. Time may seem to move faster or slower. And there is a sense of reward — what Csikszentmihalyi calls an “autotelic


Brexit hasn’t even happened, yet Ireland is already seeing signs of the economic toll

Brexit would cause job losses in the tens of thousands over the next decade, in a country with a population of less than 5 million. Ireland sends most of its agricultural exports to Britain, and much of the rest of its trade uses Britain as a land-bridge to the rest of Europe. A hard Brexit would be very hard on Ireland. And as Irish Pressings’ experience suggests, you don’t actually have to wait for Brexit to see economic ripple effects across both sides of the Irish Sea. With Brexit, says Ward, “The damage is already done. There’s been a dramatic decline in car buying.” The uncertainty over the shambolic Brexit political process is making matters worse. Mark Sharkey, the chief executive of the Cope, a retail cooperative near Irish Pressings, recalls starting to plan for a hard Brexit and asking his suppliers what they were doing. He says he was startled when they replied, “Very little,” but it was understandable. With everything in doubt, how can you plan? Companies waiting to discover whether Britain is going to leave, and how, are withholding investment — or steering investments elsewhere. And as Hardie told me, “Once a hundred-million pound investment has gone somewhere else, it’s not coming back.” And of course, some of the follow-on investments that otherwise would have been made will instead flow toward the money’s new home. But the changes taking place in the British economy aren’t necessarily visible in the headline gross domestic product figures, and that may actually be making things worse. If the uncertainty had crashed Britain into a recession, politicians might have been forced to come to some orderly, timely arrangement. But GDP grew at a rate of 1.4 percent in 2018 — not stellar, but not catastrophic either. Even more perversely, the uncertainty has spurred some of the growth: British firms are building up their inventories in case a no-deal Brexit suddenly cuts off supplies. That has given the British economy lately a healthier glow than it merits. Even in an orderly Brexit, or a canceled Brexit, the glut of goods will depress output in future quarters. Eventually, something will have to happen with Brexit, and eventually, Irish Pressings and British industry will muddle through; the Cope will cope. But every day that politicians dither is another day of damage to businesses — and another day for firms to look beyond the British market,


Theresa May was warned about Brexit. She didn’t listen.

she refused to choose something else, she has not wanted to discuss anything else in public. And so the discussion has continued without her. Anyone who tunes in to parliamentary debates or watches “Prime Minister’s Questions” knows that debates in the House of Commons can often seem ritualized, with both sides trading carefully scripted insults and sound bites. But on Monday night, the British Parliament suddenly became a place of substance again, as several members made serious, considered, alternative proposals, and then answered tough questions about them. For once, a critical political debate was not taking place on television, or behind the scenes, but on a public stage, inside the institution created for that purpose. Several people made passionate cases; one them was Nick Boles, a Conservative MP who has held government jobs in the past but is not in the cabinet. He was proposing an alternative deal: Britain should stay in the single market free trade area, which it helped create, and inside a customs union with Europe. There are advantages to this proposal — it would eliminate the need for a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and preserve all existing trade arrangements — as well as disadvantages: Among other things, it would allow “free movement” of British and E.U. citizens in one another’s countries to continue, a policy that the current government has decided its priority is to end. But the truth is that every Brexit proposal requires some kind of trade-off, some kind of compromise. There are advantages and disadvantages to each one, even if the prime minister has so far refused to discuss them. “Our constituents do not send us here for an easy ride in which we duck difficult choices,” Boles argued. But he was speaking to a half-empty chamber. The government, and most of the Tory party, boycotted the debate, refusing even to listen. They returned to the chamber to vote. And, thanks to the Tories who refused to back not only the Boles proposal but also every single other alternative — as well as other parties who selected one option but not others — all of them lost. The House of Commons, which has already declared that it doesn’t want May’s deal and that it doesn’t want to crash out with no deal, has also voted against the single market, against the customs union, against another referendum and against revoking Article 50,


Leave vs. Remain caricatures have only added to Brexit’s messiness

tedious bureaucracy, while Britain accomplished it with the sword. From an American perspective, the European way is preferable, if less romantic. But if your nation was the one with the sword, and your Parliament the seat of all that power, you can see how the E.U. version might feel intolerably second-rate. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Patel was so fiercely attached to the old, singular Britain, though I confess I was. I was even more surprised to find that the Leave demonstrator next to him was an Irishman, though a resident in England for some 30 years, who said he would surrender his passport and apply for British citizenship if Brexit went through. That was my error, not theirs. An error that many have made, over and over. Since the twin upheavals of 2016, when Britain voted to leave the E.U. and the United States elected Donald Trump, both countries have seemed neatly divided into just two camps, each perceived to have a unified set of ideas and goals. But the process of actually leaving the E.U. has been so fraught precisely because there were so many different people who wanted to divorce Europe for so many different reasons: leftists who felt that E.U. governance would interfere with their project of renationalizing everything; free-marketers who wanted to open borders with the rest of the world rather than participating in a limited trading bloc; “Little Englanders” who hate the loss of sovereignty … they all agreed on getting shut of Europe, but precious little else. Which is why on Friday, for the third time, Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise Brexit deal, this one a stripped-down version. Patel’s presence in front of Parliament earlier in the week provided a striking reminder of the storied past to which so many Leavers are so attached. But he also reminds us that ancestry is not culture, and that the world cannot be neatly divided into Leave and Remain. Like his Parliament, Patel is singular, and his reasons for leaving are his own. Read more: Megan McArdle: What the political storms over the Mueller report and Brexit have in common Megan McArdle: Brexit shambles ever onward, destination unknown Anne Applebaum: The more we learn about Brexit, the more crooked it looks Andy Burnham: Brexit has achieved the opposite of its goal Ian Dunt: The collective madness behind Britain’s latest Brexit plan


Brexit shambles ever onward, destination unknown

of Commons settled down to the exciting business of charting a path for the nation. Eight indicative votes later, members had voted down every alternative on offer. May’s Brexit process has been an unbelievable shambles; the parliamentary Brexit process turned out to be the same shambles, but noisier. How has one of the world’s oldest democracies come to this pass? Mostly by accident. In 2014, the Labour Party changed the way it selects leaders, having previously given most of that power to Labour members of Parliament and the party’s affiliated trade unions. The result was an influx of young leftists who elected an unreconstructed 1970s radical named Jeremy Corbyn to head the party. In addition to the predictable foreign-policy dovishness and socialist leanings, Corbyn seems to have a wee problem with anti-Semitism. He terrifies many of the moderate members of Parliament in his own party, making for a less than fully effective opposition. Conservatives, meanwhile, are hamstrung by their own accidents. First came the Brexit referendum itself, which was supposed to quiet the party’s Brexit faction by handing it a public loss but instead handed it the keys to the kingdom. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron went into exile, and May, his replacement, soon called an early election, seeking a bigger majority heading into Brexit negotiations. Instead, Conservatives lost so much ground that May was left dependent on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which is adamantly opposed to either rehardening the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, or treating Northern Ireland as in any way separate from the rest of Britain. Since one of those two things must happen if Britain leaves — the Republic of Ireland won’t tolerate the customs barriers to the rest of Europe that would be necessary to keep its border with the north open — this is a bit of a pickle. In ordinary times, a vote of no confidence would have been called and won by the opposition. Britain would be headed for a general election and, very probably, a Labour government. But with Corbyn atop the party, victory is uncertain, and Labour moderates are loath to empower him anyway. Which is what has kept the shambles endlessly dragging on: Everyone is afraid that their negotiating position could worsen if anything changes, and no one is confident it would improve. The hard Brexiteers don’t want to shake things up too much because


The only way out of Brexit lies with the people

leave us poorer and with less control than our current European Union deal, those with the least to lose from this national humiliation were sitting down to save their party, rather than their country. It speaks to the fundamental truth of the Brexit saga from the very beginning: Brexit was always an ideological fantasy fostered by Britain’s elite. May now needs to get her Brexit deal passed by April 12, or Britain will be forced to leave the E.U. with no deal in place, which would cause travel, trade and diplomatic chaos. If she is successful, Britain will leave the European Union on May 22. But it is highly unlikely that she will be successful. Members of Parliament from both the Conservative and Labour parties will rightly continue to reject her deal — a deal that the vast majority of the country opposes. Those MPs pushing for a new referendum are right to champion the only democratic route out of an intractable parliamentary gridlock, and they are likely to continue to do so in growing numbers. The million-strong march was a clear signal of what the country thinks of May’s Brexit deal. The government has failed on every level to craft a deal even vaguely resembling the promises made by Brexit’s chief architects. We were told that Brexit would save us money that could then go toward our National Health Service — but that takes into account neither the inevitable economic losses nor the spending that the government will have to take on after Brexit. By the government’s own estimations, Brexit will cost the country £100 billion ($132 billion) a year by 2030. We were promised more trade with the rest of the world, but only a fraction of our existing trade deals are ready to roll over. And we were promised more control over our laws, but instead, we’ll be following E.U. rules and regulations in a transition period without any say over them. Young people are outraged by the abject failure of their representatives, and they will not forget a government bereft of leadership and an opposition that failed to hold those leaders to account. Our will is very clear. We know that any form of Brexit would damage our future. We know this government cares little for us, and we are not prepared to sit by while the Conservative Party struggles to keep itself alive. We also


The quest for Brexit has killed Britain

Nick Cohen, a British author, journalist and political commentator, is a columnist for the Observer. Brexit Britain has reached populism’s inevitable terminus. The government is collapsing as Conservative ministers vote against their own administration with impunity. The equally chaotic opposition cannot oppose. No one can say whether my country will crash out of the European Union provoking an economic and social crisis. Honest commentators don’t make predictions anymore, but stare at the wreckage with slack-jawed disbelief. “We have no idea where we are going,” Sam Gyimah, from Theresa May’s ruling Conservative government, said last week (although I use the word “ruling” advisedly). “There is no strategy; there is no plan.” The British crisis is deeper than the United States’ because at its heart lies a failure of truth-telling. We have no equivalent of the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives; no power center or coherent voice that can expose the populist politicians whose combination of cynicism and magical thinking led us to this pass. The Brexit that the electorate narrowly voted for on June 23, 2016, could be achieved in two ways. Britain might choose a complete break with the European Union. It would necessitate rebuilding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that would threaten the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, one of the greatest political achievements of my lifetime. It would rip Britain out of the E.U.’s single market, the destination of 44 percent of our exports, and out of 46 years of agreements that allow the frictionless movement of goods, services and people. It would destroy Britain’s Customs Union with the E.U., along with free-trade agreements with 56 other countries. It could still be done, but by God, it would hurt. Alternatively, we could stay in the Single Market and Customs Union, accept E.U. laws we had no say in making, and leave in name only. A course that would raise the pertinent question: Why bother? Like populist movements across the West, the Leave campaign refused to make a tough call. Instead, it promised that wrenching change could be achieved without pain. Unlike the nationalists of the 20th century, who fetishized sacrifice, their successors are the authentic representatives of a baby-boomer generation that wants to have it all. Boris Johnson, an upper-class politician who could make President Trump seem a model of integrity, and his fellow supporters of Brexit promised that the task of securing


What’s up with Brexit? A guide to emergency summits, flextensions and more.

Britain voted to leave the European Union almost three years ago. But, so far, it is still an E.U. member. Despite the Brexit vote in June 2016, the country has not Brexited. With British Prime Minister Theresa May in Brussels on Wednesday for an emergency summit to plead for a second extension to her Brexit deadline, we thought it was worth taking another look at how we got here and what the big questions surrounding Britain’s path out of the E.U. have been. So, let’s start with the most basic: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: But May has traveled to Brussels this week for an emergency summit with leaders, in the hope of getting an extension. Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: But European leaders aren’t keen on a “no deal” Brexit either, so it’s expected that there would be some sort of extension. It just depends how long that extension would be. Q: A: The alternative would be a long delay designed to calm things down and ramp down some of the pressure. Some E.U. policymakers have argued for a “flextension” that would set a date for Britain’s E.U. exit far in the future but allow Britain to leave as soon as it comes up with a viable plan. Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: However, they also said there was little room for more negotiations, writing: “We are not in a position to agree to anything that changes or is inconsistent with the Withdrawal Agreement.” After the deal was voted down a second time, E.U. chief negotiator Michel Barnier basically said the E.U. had done what it could do. Q: A: So, we probably won’t find out how these ideas work in practice unless May loses her job. Q: A: Q: A: Karla Adam and William Booth in London and Marisa Bellack, Emily Tamkin and Siobhán O’Grady


See a black hole for the first time in a historic image from the Event Horizon Telescope

what we now call a black hole. Einstein never liked the idea, but it hung around, and gradually scientists started seeing evidence that black holes really exist. Searches of the sky showed the paths of stars being bent by a black hole’s tremendous gravity, and telescopes revealed the brilliant jets of light produced as the superheated material swirling around a black hole is splashed back into space. In 2016, scientists revealed ripples in space-time caused by black holes colliding — the first-ever detection of the phenomenon known as gravitational waves. To capture a direct image of a supermassive black hole was a daunting technological challenge. M87 and Sagittarius A* are both so distant they would appear to Earthlings as a doughnut on the moon. To see them in any kind of detail, scientists would need a telescope as big as the planet — and, of course, no such thing existed. So in the mid-2000s, scientists began to MacGyver a telescope out of previously existing infrastructure, linking up instruments around the world to collect scores of observations, each from a slightly different perspective. This kind of cosmic triangulation, called “very long baseline interferometry,” took years to refine. Some telescopes had to be upgraded to capture the right kinds of light. Researchers needed to install atomic clocks precise enough to match up their observations down to the microsecond. Supercomputers had to become orders of magnitude more powerful to process the mountains of data collected. Most significant was an improvement in VLBI technology that allowed for observations in extremely high-frequency radio waves. This is the one form of light that can penetrate the hot gas around a black hole, the dusty expanses of the galaxy, and the Earth’s atmosphere, carrying an uninterrupted signal from the event horizon all the way to telescopes on Earth. “We were inventing the methods by which we make images as we went along,” said team member Dan Marrone, an astrophysicist a the University of Arizona. Finally, in 2017, the EHT was ready. Ozel, who helped coordinate the week of observations from the project’s makeshift command center at MIT, recalled the surge of excitement as hundreds of astronomers around the world prepared for their first night of work. “There was an element of the unknown,” she said. Technical difficulties or bad weather at any of the eight sites could jettison a whole night of observations. Even if everything went


Don’t let rising seas drown the Marshall Islands

transforming themselves into a real-life laboratory for preparing for the effects of climate change. They are building sea walls, designing large coastal protection systems, integrating adaptation and resilience into national plans, and expanding capacity to store rainwater in both urban and rural communities. Planners are also exploring the possibility of raising new islands to physically increase the landmass above water. The Marshall Islands and the Netherlands are far apart, but they are both low-lying territories that have learned to live with water. The Dutch have mastered land reclamation over centuries. But a sustainable plan of flood-risk protection and fresh water supply takes commitment and substantial financial resources that go far beyond what is possible for a country ranked as one of the smallest economies in the world by the International Monetary Fund. The Netherlands, which saw 250,000 people evacuated in the 1990s because of flooding, is spending around 17 billion euros ($19.2 billion) by 2031 to make the country safe for generations to come. Measures include the construction of dikes, permanent sand dunes, water-resistant buildings on stilts and floating structures that rise with water levels. The rest of the world can also help by accelerating adaptation strategies. Globally, each and every investment must be screened for its climate impact. New infrastructure that is not climate-proofed in its design is a liability. Existing technologies, such as climate-proofing buildings, safeguarding drinkable water through conservation, recycling and building new reservoirs should be scaled up. We must move rapidly to make use of innovations such as new saline-tolerant crop plants and satellites that can spot planet-warming methane leaks. Once again, the countries that did the least to cause climate change are suffering the most. Even so, and without the resources of the richer world, the Marshall Islands is taking the lead on global adaptation efforts against rising sea levels. In recognition of its endeavors, the small island nation chairs the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of 48 countries on the front line of climate change. The Marshall Islands offer a warning of things to come, but also a beacon of hope for coastal communities all over the world. The actions we take now will determine which of those futures awaits us. Read more Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s climate change rhetoric won’t work James Downie: The fierce urgency of climate change The Post’s View: More studies show terrible news for the climate. We should be alarmed.


Algorithms gave us the black hole picture. She’s the 29-year-old scientist who helped create them.

Katherine Bouman had a secret: An algorithm she’d developed had stitched together a picture of a black hole. She told nobody except her colleagues. Until today. That’s when Event Horizon Telescope team, of which Bouman is a member, unveiled the first image of a black hole. Bouman, 29, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had been working on such an algorithm for almost six years, since she was a graduate student at MIT. She was one of about three dozen computer scientists who used algorithms to process data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope project, a worldwide collaboration of astronomers, engineers and mathematicians. Telescopes around the world collected high-frequency radio waves from the vicinity of Messier 87, a supermassive black hole 54 million light-years away. But atmospheric disturbance and the spareness of the measurements meant “an infinite number of possible images” could explain the data, Bouman said. Well-designed algorithms had to crunch through the chaos. The image shared Wednesday, which has been likened to a molten doughnut or the Eye of Sauron or even a Rembrandt, is a composite of several such reconstructions. “We blurred two of the images and then averaged them to the other one to get the image that we showed today,” Bouman said. The ring of material that surrounds Messier 87, which has the mass of 6.5 billion suns, “is something that we were incredibly confident about.” The Washington Post spoke with Bouman after the picture was unveiled. The following is lightly edited for clarity. Q: A: I have an interest in how can we see things or measure things that are thought to be invisible to us. And how can we come up with unique ways to merge the instrumentation and algorithms to get at measuring things that you can’t measure with standard instruments. Q: A: We get this partial information. It’s almost like seeing one pixel in an image (but it’s in a different kind of domain). We have to come up with methods that take this really sparse, really noisy data, and try to find the image that might have caused those measurements. What we have to end up doing is imposing things called “regularizors” or “priors” that allow us to say, “Okay, of all of the images that possibly could fit this data, this set of images is most likely.” But the danger is we don’t want to inject


She went to the hospital for an infection. Doctors found four bees living in her eye, eating her tears.

The 29-year-old woman had no idea why her eye was swollen shut. She was in unbearable pain and could not stop tearing up. The Taiwanese woman said she was confused about why an issue she thought was an infection kept getting worse, CTS News reported. But when the woman, identified by her surname He, received treatment at Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan, doctors didn’t find a bacterial infection. While looking at He’s eyes through a microscope, Hung Chi-ting, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology, witnessed something he hadn’t seen before. Insect legs were wiggling from one of her eye sockets. He yanked out a small bee, known as Halictidae, or a “sweat bee.” And it was alive. The doctor wasn’t done. Soon he extracted a second sweat bee. And a third. And, finally, a fourth bee was pulled from the woman’s eyelid. Craving salt, the bees had been feeding off He’s tears, the doctor said at a news conference last week, later describing the odd medical diagnosis as a “world first.” The insects had made a new home under He’s eyelid — that is, until they were all removed alive. “I saw something that looked like insect legs, so I pulled them out under a microscope slowly, and one at a time without damaging their bodies,” Hung said, according to Business Insider Singapore. So how did sweat bees end up camping out in a woman’s eye? He suspects it all started the previous day. As He recounted in the news conference, she was taking part in the Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day. “I was visiting and tidying a relative’s grave with my family," He recently told reporters. “I was squatting down and pulling out weeds.” As CTS News reported, He said she felt something get in her eye. Thinking it was only dirt, she cleaned her eye out with water and did not rub her eyes much for the rest of the day. She didn’t think much of it until her eyes began to swell up that night and she experienced a stinging pain that made her tear up. It would have been very likely for sweat bees to be around He at the time, Hung told reporters, as they tend to nest near graves and in the mountains. At the hospital the following day, when Hung discovered that the sweat bees were feasting on He’s tears, the


Son of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi appears to defend Saudi crown prince, his family’s compensation

be premature to do so before the cases are resolved. Saudi prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against five men accused of playing a direct role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October. Among them is Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a longtime Saudi official with close ties to the crown prince who previously worked with Khashoggi at the Saudi Embassy in London. Saudi officials have maintained that the killing was carried out by rogue Saudi operatives and that Mohammed had no foreknowledge of or involvement in the plot. But the CIA, citing intercepted communications and other evidence, has concluded with medium to high confidence that the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s capture or death. Salah, the only Khashoggi child who continues to live in Saudi Arabia, has been the family’s point person in dealings with the government and royal court. He was photographed shaking hands with the crown prince in October before leaving the kingdom to meet with others in his family, including a brother and two sisters. When reached by phone earlier this month, Khashoggi declined to answer questions about the payments. His statement Wednesday appeared to acknowledge the compensation indirectly, saying that members of the family “were brought up by our parents to thank acts of good not disavow.” Khashoggi and his siblings were given houses in Jiddah worth several million dollars apiece, according to people familiar with the arrangement. Salah Khashoggi owns the largest of the structures, while the other properties are part of a shared compound. The children also received initial payments of about 1 million Saudi riyal — or roughly $266,000 — after Saudi authorities acknowledged that their father had been killed by state operatives, according to a person with knowledge of the issue who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the matter. These payments have not been previously disclosed because they were not known at the time of The Post story this month. The Khashoggi children have shown significant restraint in their few public statements since their father’s death. But Salah Khashoggi’s tweet went further than those previous communications in praising the crown prince. The son described his father as “a respectable journalist and patriotic Saudi citizen,” although he was frequently critical of the kingdom’s policies in opinion columns published by The Post. The paper also reported in December


How this brand ambassador got her job

Name: Position: Salary: What she does If you’re a regular on the D.C. party circuit, chances are you’ve seen Kapri Robinson shaking, stirring and pouring drinks at some of the hottest bars and events in the city — with bottles of rum at the ready. Robinson serves as the D.C. brand ambassador for Santa Teresa 1796, a solera rum from Venezuela. Her duties involve educating drinkers, bartenders and bar managers about the rum, encouraging them to buy the product or serve it at their bars. “When I see my brand on the menu, I’m ecstatic because that means you really like my product, that means you really enjoy what I’m doing and you enjoy our friendship enough to do this,” Robinson says. Robinson is essentially her own PR machine, and her marketing takes various forms. At the charity event Chefs for Equality, for example, mixologist and Tiki TNT owner Todd Thrasher used the rum to create his frozen “Rum in Coke” cocktails for hundreds of guests. Meanwhile, Robinson handed out promotional items and answered questions about the rum. During an intimate tasting of rum-infused caramel she hosted and bartended at The Gibson in February, Robinson explained the brand’s origins and its project to rehabilitate former gang members through rugby. Robinson’s brand ambassadorship is a part-time job. She sets her own hours and also tends bar part time at Reliable Tavern. There’s definitely a glamorous side to the job. The brand gives Robinson a budget to throw parties and happy hours at some of the most coveted spots in D.C. — her 30 accounts include Columbia Room, the W Hotel, Dirty Habit (where she briefly worked as a bartender) and the Michelin-starred Kinship. She reps the brand at well-attended food and drink events around the city, including Rum Day DC and the Repeal Day Ball. Sometimes businesses outside her account list invite her to guest bartend, which helps Robinson amplify the rum to people beyond her circle of influence. Robinson organizes one or two events a month centered on the rum that can get pretty involved. Before Robinson plans an event, she needs permission from her regional marketing manager to ensure it aligns with the brand’s image. If it’s a go, Robinson buys the equipment and tools, secures the venue, devises the theme, produces flyers for it, creates drink recipes, bartends if necessary, posts photos on social media (with the proper


Woman dead, several injured after crash involving school bus, tractor-trailer in Prince George’s County

A collision involving a tractor-trailer, a school bus and other vehicles killed a woman and injured eight people, including two students, Wednesday in Clinton, Md. Two teenage students on the bus, the bus driver and three other people were taken to a hospital with injuries not considered life-threatening, according to Mark Brady, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Fire Department. Information about the extent of their injuries was not available. Two people declined to be taken to a hospital, Brady said. Prince George’s police responded at 6:13 a.m. to the crash, which involved several vehicles on Surratts Road near Branch Avenue in southern Prince George’s County. The tractor-trailer, school bus and other vehicles collided for “reasons that remain under investigation,” police said. The woman who died was driving one of the vehicles and was pronounced dead at the scene. Her name was not being released Wednesday. Officials with the county school system said the bus was heading to Charles H. Flowers High School. Hazmat crews cleaned up fluids that leaked from the vehicles. Traffic backups extended about seven miles during the morning rush as authorities closed roads during the investigation. All lanes were reopened about 2 p.m. The crash occurred about three miles south of Joint Base Andrews.


The black hole image is beautiful and profound. It’s also very blurry.

are created when a large star has burned up all of its hydrogen. What remains, as Rovelli explained, “is no longer supported by the heat of the combustion and collapses under its own weight, to a point where it bends space to such a degree that it plummets into an actual hole.” How would you show such a thing? That has long been the challenge. It’s worth noting that this image isn’t really a photograph. It is information recovered and transposed into visual data with the help of various “calibration and imaging schemes.” The image shows a black hole in the center of a giant elliptical galaxy known as M87. The scientists who produced it were working from the premise that, “when surrounded by a transparent emission region, black holes are expected to reveal a dark shadow caused by gravitational light bending and photo capture at the event horizon.” It’s heady stuff. And like so much in astrophysics, it gets us wondering as much about metaphysics as physics. Explaining why he believed agnosticism was a more rational position than atheism, the author Martin Amis said: “Since we know so very little about the universe, it’s a bit previous to say that there’s no higher intelligence. Since the universe is much cleverer than we are and cosmology is almost going backward, we’re just finding out more about our ignorance.” Is that true? Is cosmology really going backward? Today, it may look like it’s going forward. But even just a cursory look into the field of astrophysics can make it seem that below each new forward step is an abyss of unknowns. We yearn, as humans, to increase our knowledge, and a day like today — an image like this one — briefly satisfies that yearning. It deepens our understanding of reality. But it may be better understood as what Rovelli called “a glimpse of reality, a little less blurred than our blurred and banal everyday view of it.” But still — just look back at the image — it’s very blurred. Even our greatest scientists — who are figuring out extraordinary things about time, the cosmos and the almost implausible strangeness of space — exist, as Rovelli wrote, “at the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown.” But it is precisely here, he concluded, that the mystery and beauty of the world shines forth. sebastian.smee@washpost.com


Here’s why the black hole photo looks like the Eye of Sauron

How to decipher the event horizon and glowing doughnut


Scientists reveal the first image of a supermassive black hole

in Hawaii, said it reminded her of the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Scientists not connected with the project suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Taken over four days when astronomers had “to have the perfect weather all across the world and literally all the stars had to align,” the image helps confirm Einstein’s general relativity theory, Dempsey said. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, she said. “It’s circular, but on one side the light is brighter,” Dempsey said. That’s because that light is approaching Earth. The measurements are taken at a wavelength the human eye cannot see, so the astronomers added color to the image. They chose “exquisite gold because this light is so hot,” Dempsey said. “Making it these warm gold and oranges makes sense.” “It’s just seriously cool,” said John Kormendy, a University of Texas astronomer who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “To see the stuff going down the tubes, so to speak, to see it firsthand. The mystique of black holes in the community is very substantial. That mystique is going to be made more real.” The first image is of a black hole in a galaxy called M87 that is about 54 million light-years from Earth. One light-year is 5.9 trillion miles. This black hole is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun. The telescope data was gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope two years ago, but it took so long to complete the image because it was a massive undertaking, involving about 200 scientists, supercomputers and hundreds of terabytes of data delivered worldwide by plane. The team looked at two supermassive black holes, the M87 and the one at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The one in our galaxy is closer but much smaller, so they both look the same size in the sky. But the more distant one was easier to take pictures of because it rotates more slowly. “We’ve been hunting this for a long time,” Dempsey said. “We’ve been getting closer and closer with better technology.” —Associated Press


Brexiteers are just like Trumpists — except on this

The similarities between Trumpism and Brexit support have been frequently noted. And indeed, it’s hard for an American to spend a week in Britain, as I recently did, without feeling a certain amount of deja vu. Yet it’s also hard to spend any time talking to Brexiteers without noticing one key difference: Unlike President Trump’s fans, Brexit supporters show no noticeable hostility to free trade. A number of Brexiteers are actually ardent free traders who want to leave the European Union precisely because they see the E.U. as an obstacle to trading elsewhere. To be sure, the bulk of Leave voters are more concerned with other things — sovereignty, regulation, migration. But even among those voters, I struggled to find anyone who talked about trade the way Trump voters do. And the Britons I asked about it reassured me that I wasn’t finding them because they weren’t there. In fact, the only anti-trade jeremiads I heard all week seemed to span the political spectrum. As Britain started thinking about the sort of trade deals that might be done in a post-Brexit world, one issue united left and right, Leave and Remain: a collective terror of chlorinated U.S. chicken. Americans unaware that some of their chicken is washed in chlorine might be baffled, but the Britons were passionate on the subject and deafeningly unanimous. But to the extent that restricting trade with the United States had any political valence at all, it was being deployed by Remain, not Leave. That’s because of the current tussle about Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic of Ireland. If anyone suggested that the E.U.’s demand for a hard border was a strategic move to make it harder for Britain to leave, rather than an actual necessity, Remainers had a ready answer: Of course, the E.U. could not allow the United Kingdom to serve as a gateway for a U.S. invasion of the continent with brigades of chemical-soaked poultry. Opposition to trade liberalization was a major strand of Trumpism; it is somewhere between absent and reversed in polarity in Britain. Can two political movements with such different manifestations really be called part of the same phenomenon? Political scientist Eric Kaufmann argues that it can. His book “Whiteshift,” published in February, makes a convincing case that a single phenomenon is rolling across the West, one that has little to do with free trade, pro or anti. Instead,


Six months after Khashoggi killing, foreign investors flock to Saudi bond sale

Foreign investors flocked back to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to snap up $12 billion in bonds offered by state oil company Aramco, suggesting that Westerners’ snubbing of the kingdom last year after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi was short-lived. Aramco plans to use the money to buy most of a petrochemical company from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. That will give the fund additional billions to pursue plans to diversify the economy away from oil — a key aim of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. State-owned Aramco, which last week disclosed it is the world’s most profitable company, with $111 billion in net income in 2018, drew high demand for its first international bond sale, attracting orders nearly 10 times beyond what it ultimately sold. But luring the foreign expertise and investment needed to meet the kingdom’s economic diversification goals won’t prove as easy as drawing foreign investors to a bond sale, Saudi experts said. “There’s a ton of interest in buying Aramco bonds and owning a piece of Saudi Aramco, or at least its debt,” said Jim Krane, an energy studies fellow at Rice University in Houston. “When it comes to actually moving your personnel to the kingdom and opening a franchise there and being subject to Saudi laws and courts, the enthusiasm is quite a bit lower. There’s a lot of questions about rule of law in Saudi Arabia, especially over the last couple of years." Mohammed, who came to power in June 2017, has promoted the Vision 2030 strategy, which aims to boost domestic manufacturing, increase the number of women in the workforce and build a private sector in industries other than energy, such as tourism, tech and entertainment. One big goal is to ensure employment for Saudi Arabia’s young population in the private sector and to move workers off the public-sector payroll. More than 60 percent of Saudis are under age 30. Attracting foreign investors to build factories and establish businesses is crucial to the plan, but such investment has been slow to materialize, said Karen Young, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the Persian Gulf states. “It’s been one of the more disappointing aspects so far,” she said. Foreign direct investment in the kingdom fell steadily in the decade up through 2017, from a high of $39.5 billion in 2008 to only $1.4 billion in 2017, according to World Bank


A brief history of black holes as we await the big reveal from the Event Horizon Telescope

to apply. “At that point, nobody knows what the hell to say about it,” Weiss said. To understand the singularity, Weiss said, “you need to know how to do the quantum theory of gravity.” Which is? “We don’t have a theory that is the quantum theory of gravity,” he said. Science writers often describe black holes as monstrous, but they don’t really have much personality at all. Indeed, anything that plunges into a black hole is eventually stripped of all identity other than mass, charge and spin. Protons, neutrons, electrons, big metallic atoms, whatever goes in becomes undifferentiated as it reaches the “singularity” at the center of the black hole. The physicist John Wheeler famously declared that black holes “have no hair,” meaning no hairstyle, nothing personal and flashy. The physicist Brian Greene, in his book “The Elegant Universe,” notes that this featurelessness of black holes makes them oddly similar to subatomic particles, leading to “the strange speculation that black holes might actually be gigantic elementary particles.” As for what a singularity is, no one really knows. You probably can’t describe it with spatial coordinates, and there is no such thing as time in a singularity. In a sense, there’s no there there. And nothing really happens. “It is one of the great mysteries in science right now — what is a black hole?” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York. “What is the singularity? Mathematically we define it as the infinite curvature of spacetime. But that can’t possibly be true." She means the mathematics may not correspond to the actual reality at the heart of the black hole. “Mathematically that’s the best we can do. And that’s fine and that’s fair. But if we could actually observe what’s at the center of a black hole, a singularity, it’s likely a thing,” she said. The famed LIGO experiment — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — has successfully picked up the signature, in the form of gravitational waves, of solar-mass black holes merging. In the first detection, the two black holes were estimated at roughly 30 solar masses each. When they merged, about three solar masses of energy dissipated across the universe in the form of the gravitational waves, which LIGO detected. The Event Horizon Telescope has looked at two supermassive black holes: Sag A* and the one in M87 (for Messier


no there there. And nothing really happens. “It is one of the great mysteries in science right now — what is a black hole?” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York. “What is the singularity? Mathematically we define it as the infinite curvature of spacetime. But that can’t possibly be true." She means the mathematics may not correspond to the actual reality at the heart of the black hole. “Mathematically that’s the best we can do. And that’s fine and that’s fair. But if we could actually observe what’s at the center of a black hole, a singularity, it’s likely a thing,” she said. The famed LIGO experiment — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — has successfully picked up the signature, in the form of gravitational waves, of solar-mass black holes merging. In the first detection, the two black holes were estimated at roughly 30 solar masses each. When they merged, about three solar masses of energy dissipated across the universe in the form of the gravitational waves, which LIGO detected. The Event Horizon Telescope has looked at two supermassive black holes: Sag A* and the one in M87 (for Messier 87, named for the astronomer who catalogued galaxies in the night sky before anyone knew exactly what a galaxy was). M87 is a truly enormous elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. Whereas the Milky Way’s central black hole has a mass equal to 4.3 million suns (or solar masses), the black hole in M87 is more like 6 billion solar masses — billion with a b. M87 is remarkable for producing a dramatic jet of particles streaming some 5,000 light-years into intergalactic space. So the announcement Wednesday could reveal an image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, or M87’s, or both. The black hole may reveal itself in silhouette, or as a shadow of sorts. Astrophysicists are hoping the results provide insight into Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The image may show how the black hole distorts space around it, including bending light from behind the black hole so that we can see it from Earth — a gravitational lensing effect. “It’s like being able to see the back of your head,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University. “We’ve often used models and simulations and kind of theorized about black holes and especially about the event horizon.


Pediatric medical center supported by United Arab Emirates to open at former Walter Reed site

A pediatric medical research facility funded by a financial gift from the United Arab Emirates will open next year at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center site in the District, officials announced Tuesday. The facility, which will be affiliated with Children’s National Health System, will open in 2020 on about 12 acres in Northwest Washington. The new Children’s National Research and Innovation Campus will research rare childhood illnesses and host an outpatient clinic. The $190 million campus will be supported by $30 million from the UAE — a gift that comes 10 years after the Arab nation gave $150 million to build the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, named for the nation’s founding father, a few miles away at Children’s National. Kurt Newman “This moves us down the line in a big way,” he said. “It’s an investment with a trusted partner.” The UAE funding comes almost a decade after the Walter Reed Army Medical Center closed its D.C. location and moved to Bethesda, making way for massive redevelopment of the 66-acre site. The closure came after a 2007 Washington Post investigation found substandard living conditions for wounded troops in outpatient care. Newman said Children’s National secured 12 acres from the Army and will host researchers and companies focused on pediatric health. “It really does feel like hallowed ground,” he said. “I can’t wait to get started.” The UAE gift was announced the same day Children’s National said it would partner with Johnson & Johnson to build a 32,000-square-foot facility on the new campus called JLabs @ Washington, DC. In a collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services, JLabs will focus on medical responses to chemical, biological and nuclear threats, as well as infectious diseases. The $30 million UAE donation comes at a time when representatives of foreign governments bearing gifts are sometimes greeted with suspicion. Six months ago, as the nation grappled with Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the slaying of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate brought scrutiny to the Saudi $27 million influence machine — the amount it spent on U.S. lobbying in 2017, according to Justice Department filings. The UAE spent more than $21 million on lobbying that year. UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba said in an interview that the donation shouldn’t be viewed as a lobbying effort. “If you just look at it as, ‘Oh,


Britain’s destructive deadlock may finally be ending

MAYBE IT’S a mirage, but there are signs that Britain’s destructive deadlock over leaving the European Union may be easing. Last week, Prime Minister Theresa May finally broke with the extremists in her Conservative Party who had blocked the exit deal she negotiated, and she opened negotiations with the opposition Labour Party. The hope is to find a compromise formula for Brexit that would preserve close economic relations with the continent and thus minimize the inevitable damage of a split. Meanwhile, E.U. leaders appear prepared to grant a new extension on Britain’s departure at a summit Wednesday, avoiding a crash-out this Friday. Such a disastrous no-deal Brexit has already been ruled out by Parliament — the one thing that badly divided body has been able to agree on. Months more of fractious debate could lie ahead in London — especially as the E.U. might offer a long extension, until the end of 2019 or beyond. In the interim, Ms. May might be forced to step down as Conservative leader, agree to a general election or hold a new referendum on Brexit — or perhaps all three. That could reverse the fragile trend toward finding a centrist consensus and further polarize the country — which is why responsible members of all parties should work for a negotiated compromise. For now, the chance that talks between Ms. May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will produce results don’t look particularly good. Mr. Corbyn, a rigid Marxist, has until recently been unwilling to pursue a solution to the Brexit crisis; his priority has been to force an election that he thinks could make him prime minister. The Labour Party, too, is badly divided over whether and how Britain should depart the E.U. And Ms. May can be inflexible. After the first rounds of talks, Mr. Corbyn complained that the prime minister had been unwilling to depart from her previous “red lines.” The broad parameters of a compromise are nevertheless fairly clear. Britain would agree to remain in the E.U. customs union, which would allow mostly frictionless trade to continue and avoid the creation of a “hard border” between British Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland — the factor that bedeviled Ms. May’s deal. Britain would remain outside the E.U. single market but would harmonize provisions for workers’ rights and the environment. And Parliament would enact legislation or negotiate provisions with the E.U. to


Here’s what will decide whether technology becomes a force for good, or evil

of global and societal context. Consider flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers created the first powered flying machine — one of the most amazing technological miracles ever performed by humans. In its early years, flight was utterly whimsical. Almost as soon as the wheels left the ground, competitions were announced, with prizes awarded to pilots who broke speed and distance records. But then World War I intervened, and the playfulness evaporated. In many countries, civilian aircraft production was converted into weapons manufacture, including the production of the first bombers. Only after the Treaty of Versailles did civil aviation bounce back — so successfully, in fact, that passenger travel soon became possible for the glitterati across much of the globe. But the Nazi invasion of Poland and the bloodbath that followed struck this revival down with ax-like brutality, putting aircraft production back under the control of war ministries. Massive bombing campaigns against civilians in cities culminated in the dropping of atomic weapons in 1945. These uses of aerial power were not morally equivalent, but they highlight a fundamental point — and it’s not about ethics. It is this: When the global order is improving — when there is peace and prosperity, liberal democracies are expanding, repression is withering away and human rights are being honored — chances are technology will generally be put to good use. If the situation is the opposite — when liberal democracies are failing, repression spreads, human rights are violated and nations are engulfed by war — technology will become a partner of bad intentions. So Google or Apple can roll out their principles or establish their ethics boards, and Verizon can try to block scamming robocalls; but such piecemeal measures, devoid of an overall coordinated strategy, will have limited impact. Indeed, so long as societies, and the global order, are being broadly reshaped by more sinister forces, the measures could be meaningless. I am reminded of Niels Bohr, who visited Los Alamos in December 1943 and urged fellow physicists working on the Manhattan Project to think beyond physics and consider the project’s implications to humanity — and of his fears, as he wrote in 1944 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that despite its temporary advantage, the atomic bomb would be “a perpetual menace to human security.” But, by then, it was too late for either Bohr or for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who agreed with Bohr’s concern,


A solar eclipse will shroud part of the U.S. in darkness for four minutes. Here’s the path it will take.

until just southeast of Indianapolis, those huddled along the track’s center will get a whopping four minutes of totality just after 2 p.m. The three-minute-and-20-second contour extends all the way up to Maine. The increased duration is a symptom of two factors: shadow width and speed. The closer the moon is to Earth during the eclipse, the bigger its shadow is. The umbra was about 72 miles wide in 2017, but it will be 120 miles across in 2024. Because it covers more real estate, more people will live in its path — plus, finding a spot might be a little bit easier. But that’s just part of what determines eclipse duration. The speed of the shadow is also a factor — it depends on the shadow’s path, the Earth’s rotation, the orbital velocities of the moon and Earth and the elevation of the sun and moon in our sky. Simply stated, it’s far from simple. Ordinarily, a slower shadow speed would mean a longer eclipse. But the 2024 eclipse’s shadow will move 111 mph faster at the location of greatest eclipse than it did in 2017. (Speed varies significantly elsewhere on the eclipse path). So why the longer duration? The moon’s shadow in 2024 will be about twice as long and more than 2.7 times larger in area. Its size compensates for its swifter speed, leading to a longer show this time around. It’s not just quantity of eclipse time that will be better in 2024 — the eclipse will be of a greater quality. That’s because of its greater magnitude. Because the moon’s shadow will be larger, it will shunt twilight closer to the horizon — leading to a darker sky during totality. More stars and planets will be visible, and the temperature will cool more dramatically. Solar eclipses aren’t terribly rare, but seeing one is. Though a total solar eclipse occurs on Earth on average once every 18 months, seeing them isn’t always easy. They often occur over the ocean, remote areas or locations that require days of travel. If you were to stay still, you’d see one about every 375 years — so 2024 is a big opportunity for those looking to cross something off their bucket lists. The next total solar eclipse will be July 2 this year in Argentina and Chile. Read more: Best images of the 2017 total solar eclipse From sun to


Trump administration scrambles to defend budget cut for Special Olympics

many times before, what a huge impact the organization has on athletes, their families and their communities.” This year’s World Games included more than 7,000 athletes from 170 countries. Special Olympics’ motto — “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt” — has resonated with many people, as has the spirit of competition and mutual support that the games engender. On Tuesday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who oversaw the 2002 Winter Olympics, voiced support for federal funding, saying the games play “a great role in the lives of many, many Americans and many people around the world.” Former Ohio governor John Kasich, another Republican, called the proposal to end federal funding “outrageous” and “ridiculous.” And in the House, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee on education, agreed that the final bill would retain Special Olympics funding. “There is no doubt that will be the case,” he said. The maelstrom was ignited Tuesday on Capitol Hill when House Democrats who sit on an Appropriations subcommittee pressed DeVos to defend her budget plan. “Do you know how many kids are going to be affected by that cut?” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) asked. The education secretary said she didn’t know. “I’ll answer for you,” he replied. “It’s 272,000 kids.” A representative from Special Olympics did not return a request for comment Wednesday. Special Olympics is one of many programs the Trump budget eliminates or slashes. Overall, the budget slices $8.5 billion from the Education Department, a 12 percent reduction. At the hearing, DeVos made little headway in her defense, partly because she was cut off by Democratic lawmakers. “We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget,” she said. She added: “I think Special Olympics is an awesome organization, one that is well-supported by the philanthropic sector as well.” Pocan’s office posted a video of their exchange to Twitter on Tuesday evening, but even his aides said they were not sure why it took off so dramatically. By Wednesday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than 1.1 million times. One aide attributed it to a combination of DeVos’s unpopularity and the popularity of Special Olympics. On Wednesday, DeVos’s statement called the criticism “unacceptable, shameful and counterproductive” and defended her budget plan, even as she expressed support for the group’s mission. In 2017, DeVos, a billionaire, donated her salary


There’s far more gray area on ‘campaign spying’ than Trump and his supporters present

they were spying on “what the Russians were doing.” (He noted that he didn’t like the word “spying,” probably for the same reasons that Trump embraced it.) The FBI was running counterintelligence operations focused on several individuals who were, at various points, working for the campaign. They were investigating Page, Papadopoulos and Manafort as individuals and seeking to determine if any of them were working with Russia. This idea is bolstered if we expand the window through which we’re looking at this. Both Manafort and Page had interactions with the FBI before joining the campaign. Page was interviewed back in March 2013, when an alleged Russian agent mentioned Page as a possible target for recruitment. They interviewed him again in March 2016, though it’s not clear if it was before or after he joined the campaign. Manafort was interviewed by the FBI in July 2014, along with his longtime business partner (and, later, deputy as Trump’s campaign chairman) Rick Gates. Manafort claimed that interview was about “offshore consulting activities.” Manafort’s history of work in Ukrainian politics on behalf of Russia-connected politicians and his work for the Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska — a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin — were well known before he joined Trump’s campaign. There was good reason to think there was a connection between Manafort and Russia while he was on the campaign. Once Page traveled to Moscow in early July 2016, there was good reason to be curious about his interactions, too. Papadopoulos himself had described receiving information about Russian activity, even while he was carrying on an extensive series of communications with a Russian tied to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The investigation into Papadopoulos began on July 31. The FISA warrant on Page was initiated in late October, after he left the campaign. An investigation into Manafort’s business relationships began in the spring. It’s not clear when the Flynn investigation began, but it appears to have been predicated on his lobbying work for Turkey, not his work with Trump. What we have, then, is not an investigation into the campaign, but investigations into people who were considered suspect. This idea is bolstered by a simple question: If the campaign itself was being investigated, why are there no reports of surveillance of Trump himself? Of his communications aide, Hope Hicks? Of Donald Trump Jr.? Of Corey Lewandowski or Stephen K. Bannon, who led


New York City vaccination order shines spotlight on insular Jewish community

NEW YORK — Even among New York’s Hasidic Jews, members of the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect are known for their strict religious and cultural traditions. They speak mainly Yiddish. They shun the secular world. They are skeptical, if not suspicious, of anyone from outside their insular community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Now the refusal of some parents to vaccinate their children — a decision not based on any religious proscription — and a resulting measles outbreak have brought public health authorities to their doorsteps in a collision of cultures that could turn messy. On Wednesday, the city sent 15 to 20 “disease detectives” into the community, some with Yiddish interpreters, a day after Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) vowed to quash the outbreak with $1,000 fines and misdemeanor charges for anyone in certain areas who refuses to be immunized. The workers, wearing blue Health Department jackets, conducted interviews in the homes of people who may have been exposed to the dangerous, highly contagious measles virus and checked the immunization records of all those they may have had contact with. Others pored over records for the same information at a federally funded health clinic in the heart of the community. There are 1,800 unvaccinated yeshiva, or Orthodox Jewish, students with religious exemptions in the four Zip codes targeted by the city, spokeswoman Marcy Miranda said. “It is highly unusual for the city to deploy health workers in this manner,” Miranda said. The last time health-care workers undertook the time-consuming work of contact tracing was during the Zika outbreak in 2016. New York City has had 285 cases, virtually all of them in Brooklyn, since the outbreak began in October. Of those, 229 were reported this year, accounting for nearly half of the 465 cases that have been reported nationwide in 2019. Now, measles has been found in more than a third of U.S. states — up and down both coasts, and across the plains, the Midwest and the South — with most of the illnesses in children. In Williamsburg, the attention is becoming a sore spot for some in a community that would rather be left alone. David Oberlander, principal of a yeshiva where measles was found earlier in the outbreak, criticized De Blasio’s office and what he called “very, very inaccurate stories” about his community. “Three percent are anti-vaccination,” he said. “Ninety-seven percent of our students and family are vaccinated.” Israel


What if British Americans staged a Brexit? We’d totally lose Utah.

What would Brexit look like if it happened in the United States? For this goofy thought experiment, we’re ignoring politics and focusing solely on ancestry. Specifically, we’re considering what might happen if the parts of the country that are home to Americans claiming United Kingdom ancestry split from the parts containing those who trace their roots to the 27 other countries that make up the European Union. An American Brexit wouldn’t split the nation as deeply as you might think. Sure, most Americans speak English as their first (or only) language and are taught from an early age about English colonies such as Plymouth and Jamestown. But the share who actively claim English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish ancestry on government surveys is small and geographically contained. It shows that any focus on early white settlers doesn’t represent the reality according to the self-reported identity of most Americans. The ultimate results depend on how you slice the numbers, but one thing remains constant: If the split were based on ancestry alone, Utah and eastern Idaho would be the first to pull a British exit. As a rule, areas of Mormon influence report the strongest ancestral ties to the U.K., and both Utah and eastern Idaho have large Mormon populations. By some metrics, northern New England and much of the Deep South and southern Appalachia would also be part of a Brexit bloc. For this experiment, we focused on comparing the ratio of people claiming U.K. ancestry in each county with the ratio of people claiming ancestry from the other 27 countries in the European Union. That has obvious limitations. The United States, United Kingdom and European Union are multicultural societies, but our metric can only capture the overwhelmingly white subset of Americans claiming British or E.U. ancestry. In addition, support for Brexit within the U.K. varies. In the 2016 referendum, voters in England opted to leave the E.U. Voters in Scotland and Wales wanted to stay. But for these purposes we will consider Americans claiming roots in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be a single bloc that would exit together, based on the U.K.'s narrow vote in favor of leaving. The initial result is a bit too messy for a theoretical national boundary, and probably would contain only Mormon country. But once we broaden the definition to anywhere that’s atypically tilted toward U.K. roots and consider each county’s


Brexit will cause untold harm to Britain’s minority communities

especially difficult for those on low incomes or employed in industries that rely on the E.U. for exports and are sensitive to tariff increases — groups that are disproportionately made up of ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities are more likely to be in economically vulnerable positions. They are more likely to spend a greater share of their income on rent and have less in savings. This makes it harder to inoculate themselves from any negative consequences of a no-deal exit, such as projected increases to the price of food. These harmful impacts could carry over even if the government evades a no-deal scenario, but still pursues a “hard” Brexit. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has projected that a hard Brexit would leave workers in jobs on production lines or operating machinery at high risk of job cuts. Pakistani and Bangladeshi men are twice as likely to work in these industries, and much more likely to be living in poverty. The reality is that Britain has an inequality and poverty problem. It is world’s fifth largest economy, but a fifth of its population live in poverty. This is heavily drawn across ethnic lines. Minority groups have seen consistent gains in formal qualifications. But they still face lower pay, insecure working conditions and higher rates of unemployment, and are concentrated in particular industries compared to the rest of the population. This led the government to launch the Race Disparity Audit in 2017, to shine a light on chronic racial inequalities. A no-deal Brexit, or even a hard Brexit, risks exacerbating inequalities that already exist. And government preparations for any number of Brexit scenarios has funneled money away from domestic policies that could directly address these inequalities. The Treasury has earmarked more than $5 billion since 2016 to support core Brexit preparations — money that could have been used for anti-poverty measures to ensure that the most vulnerable members of the population are insulated from the harmful repercussions from Brexit. Finally, Brexit has also unearthed that ethnic divisions go beyond inequality. What was once unsaid in polite society is now public discourse, with mainstream politicians engaging with Islamophobic rhetoric and shameless association with far-right figures. The worst ever rise in recorded hate crime followed the Brexit vote in 2016. The charity Hope Not Hate recently helped foil a far-right plot to kill an anti-Brexit member of Parliament, and tensions only stand to grow with


NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to Earth

he faced was adjusting to an unscheduled existence, in sharp contrast to life on the space station. “When you get back, you feel a little bit directionless,” he said. The new study points out: “In addition to re-exposure to Earth’s gravity, the post-flight period can be demanding for astronauts owing to participation in research studies and media events.” Andrew P. Feinberg, one of the study co-authors and an epigenetics expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, cautioned that this research study is limited, focusing on a single pair of twins, and should not be seen as providing universal truths about the human health effects of spaceflight. “The study sample is two people,” Feinberg said. “If you see a difference between these two people, how do you know if what you’re looking at is because of the twin on the ground or the twin in space?” Moreover, Scott Kelly remained in low Earth orbit under the protective shield of the Earth’s magnetic field. Interplanetary spaceflight, or journeys to the moon, will expose astronauts to much higher levels of radiation. “We need to get outside of low Earth orbit, and we need for the astronauts to spend longer periods of time to really evaluate some of these health effects. Radiation exposure will certainly be a very big concern,” Bailey said. At the start of the teleconference Thursday, Mark Kelly took a moment to praise his brother: "As a citizen of our country, not just as his twin brother, I appreciate the sacrifice he took to spend a year in space.” Mark Kelly is six minutes older than his brother. But Scott Kelly says he’s actually a few milliseconds younger still, due to having spent 500 more days in space than his astronaut brother. Einstein’s special theory of relativity leads to a “twins paradox” in which someone moving at a high velocity, such as 17,500 mph in low Earth orbit, ages more slowly than a twin on Earth. “I look younger than he does,” Scott said. “He’s busy running for office. His telomeres are going to be way worse than mine. I’m not worried. I’ll be on a beach in the Bahamas, and he’s going to be hopefully in the U.S. Senate. He’s going to age much faster than me.” Read More: The truth about Scott Kelly’s viral “space genes” How Andy Weir and “The Martian” may have saved NASA’s Mars dream


The Health 202: Lawmakers are trying to prove they’re serious about lowering drug costs

older adults should be addressed. “I don’t see this data as pointing to a problem in the facilities.” OUCH: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there have been at least 587 confirmed cases of an emerging fungus infection officials are calling a “serious global health threat.” The nearly 600 cases of Candida auris infections have emerged over the last few years and have been largely reported in the New York City area, Chicago area, and in New Jersey, the North Jersey Record’s Kaitlyn Kanzier and Lindy Washburn report. The CDC said by the end of February, the infections had spread across 12 states. “Found in hospitals and long-term care facilities, it can quickly lead to death in patients who have weakened immune systems or other underlying serious medical problems,” Kaitlyn and Lindy write. “More than one in three patients with an invasive infection of the fungus has died, the CDC said.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unveiled a revised version of his Medicare-for-all plan, calling for a replacement of the current “dysfunctional” health-care system that he said it based on “greed and profiteering.” “Together we are going to end the international embarrassment, of the United States of America, our great country, being the only major nation on earth not to guarantee health care to all as a right,” Sanders said at an event on Capitol Hill. “This is a struggle for the heart and soul of who we are as American people.” The Health 202 yesterday previewed Sanders’s ambitious, expanded plan that goes far beyond what he initially introduced back in 2017. Sanders’s event unveiling the plan alongside activists and medical industry professions “underscored how much headway Sanders has made among Democrats in pushing what was viewed as a fringe idea during his last presidential bid,” our Post colleagues John Wagner and Sean Sullivan report. Fellow 2020 contender Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) joined the kick-off event. In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders panned the proposal, instead touting a plan the president has vowed to produce. “Self-proclaimed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing a total government takeover of healthcare that would actually hurt seniors, eliminate private health insurance for 180 million Americans, and cripple our economy and future generations with unprecedented debt,” Sarah Sanders said. “The Trump Administration is working on realistic solutions to provide Americans with the options and control


What does Brexit have to do with Churchill movies, punk and ‘50 Shades of Grey’?

years and said, “We want you to vote for the status quo.” It's almost surprising, again, that 48 percent of people did vote for the status quo. Given that dynamic? The outlet for people was to rage. The rage is real and somewhat justified. But the outlet is an enormous act of self-harm. Q: A: Q: A: This is the stuff you got for 25 years in the British newspapers. It's not just food; it's other stuff. Brussels is banning donkey rides on beaches! One particularly good one: Brussels is trying to humiliate manly English fisherman, by making them wear hairnets. Where does that come from? The regulation says: If you're processing food, you have to wear a hairnet. Right? It’s pretty basic health and safety stuff. Everybody knows these are lies. It’s Monty Python humor, you know. One thing most of us who are not English really appreciate about the English is their great absurdist sense of humor. So Brussels becomes a kind of Monty Python joke. You can say anything you like, because it has no consequences. Because Brussels is really bad at doing rebuttals. Q: A: I’m not a mad Irish nationalist; I’m really not. But it’s really hard to just go about your life. I don’t want my head full of Irish history. I just want to get about my daily business, and that irritant, every single day, particularly for people who live on either side of the border, who might be crossing the border three or four times a day, it’s a ridiculous border. [Now,] nobody stops me, nobody asks me. The relief of that — it's just hard to express how it lifts a psychological cloud for people. This is crucial for the peace process, because the peace process was all about saying, look, if you keep asking the big questions of Ireland, the only answers are deadly ones, because we don't have agreed answers to the big questions. The big questions: Are you Irish? Are you British? Do you want to be part of the United Kingdom? Do you want to be part of united Ireland? There are opposite answers to those questions, and they fuel conflict. The brilliance of the peace process was to say, let's park those things, let's try to get some boredom, let's try and get a generation of people who don’t have to think about that stuff. william.booth@washpost.com


How things could turn ugly with Brexit

The big day was March 29. Then it was April 12. And now Europe’s powers have decreed that Britain has until Oct. 31 to decide how — or indeed whether — it would like to leave the European Union. At this rate, you may be thinking, Britain is never really going to quit. Unfortunately, the odds of a hard-line Brexit are probably increasing. The immediate consequence of the E.U.’s announcement is that Britain’s Parliament gets more time to decide what sort of Brexit it favors. But the logic that has blocked a deal so far has not been magically altered. On one side, the supposedly governing Conservative Party cannot unite behind an exit formula that would satisfy Europe’s determination to safeguard peace in Ireland. On the other side, the opposition Labour Party refuses to join Conservative moderates in backing a workable deal because it wants to destabilize the government and force an early election. Theresa May, the dogged prime minister whose defenestration has been prematurely rumored for two years, now has one foot out the window. She will keep trying to strike a deal with the top brass in the Labour Party. But even if she appears to succeed, the chances of keeping Labour’s support through the marathon of implementing legislation seem minimal. At the first opportunity, Labour is likely to make common cause with hard-line Brexiteers on the Conservative right and vote no confidence in the prime minister. If the talks with Labour’s leaders fail, May’s next move will be to consult the members of Parliament directly. This involves a cumbersome process known as “indicative votes”: MPs vote on various Brexit permutations until one commands a majority. Last time this was tried, no majority emerged for anything. But even if a second experiment produced a majority for some kind of deal, it would be tough to hold that majority together. The prime minister might yet succeed in conjuring a breakthrough: The situation is so fluid that almost anything is possible. But if she fails, she will have both feet out the window. Her mission has been to deliver a moderate Brexit; if she cannot, her unloved leadership will serve no further purpose. Local elections on May 2 are likely to deliver a rebuke to her party, and on May 23 she faces a still-greater humiliation. Britain will have to hold elections for the European Parliament, almost three years after


Lawmakers question Trump’s Space Force proposal

Lawmakers said Thursday that the United States must act to confront unprecedented military competition in space but questioned the Trump administration’s $2 billion proposal to create a new military branch to address that threat. Acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan But Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Republican committee chairman, asked a question heard throughout the more-than-two-hour hearing: “What will [this] organization fix?” The Pentagon has already reestablished a Space Command that will be headed by a four-star general. But the Space Force, if approved, would stand up an organization to train and equip specialized forces whose mission would be to accelerate America’s response to militarization of space. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the committee’s top Democrat, said he agreed that changes needed to be made to maintain America’s dominance in space. “However, creating a new branch of the armed forces for the first time in 70 years is not a decision Congress should make lightly,” he said. “Such a major reorganization would have long-lasting consequences, both intended and unintended.” Establishing a Space Force, which would be housed inside the Air Force, is expected to cost an estimated $2 billion spread out over five years. The fate of the proposal may become clear later this spring when lawmakers draft an annual defense bill that could include language on a Space Force. The debate over the Pentagon’s role in space comes to a head after years of growing anxiety about efforts, mainly by Russia and China, to develop abilities to target satellites critical to a host of military functions, including guided munitions, missile defense systems and GPS. Both countries have improved their capability to attack U.S. space assets using lasers, missiles or jamming technology. Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said supporters of an organization overhaul now faced the best odds in many years of on-and-off congressional discussions on such ideas. “My sense is that this is the year of the decision,” he said. “Either it’ll happen this year or we’ll have to wait another generation.” In the House, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, has said he does not support the proposal as written, complaining that it is too expensive and too bureaucratic. Smith has never opposed the idea of focusing more attention on developing space capabilities in concept, though he has balked at the idea of


Forget politics for a moment. Behold infinity.

is to gaze into the ultimate abyss. Dumbstruck awe is the only reasonable response. The black hole in question, known as M87, lies at the heart of a galaxy far, far away — 55 million light-years distant, to be a bit more precise. That an international team of astrophysicists was able to snap its photograph is a reminder that while so many of our institutions have lost their way and squandered the public trust, science is still capable of doing miraculous things. To see M87, they needed a telescope as big as Earth itself. To simulate such a thing, they trained existing radio telescopes at eight widely separated sites around the globe on the target simultaneously, gathering mountains of data — so much that the files were too large to be sent through the Internet and had to be shipped around on high-capacity hard drives. Winter observations from a telescope in Antarctica were delayed until the weather abated and the drives containing the data could be flown out. All of that information was combined and analyzed, a process that took many months. The image that emerged was revealed at coordinated news conferences, including one at the National Press Club led by Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Doeleman served as director of the Event Horizon Telescope project, named after the spherical boundary that surrounds a black hole and marks the point of no return for anything unfortunate enough to venture closer. Another key member of the team was computer scientist Katherine Bouman, 29, soon to be an assistant professor at Caltech, who developed an algorithm that made it possible to combine the massive amounts of data produced by the participating telescopes. Those of us who believe in the power of diversity predicted that science would greatly benefit by opening its doors to women. We were right. The greatest contribution, of course, came from Einstein. A century ago, he described gravity not as a force of attraction between masses (Isaac Newton’s view) but as a warping of space-time. His equations made predictions that were counterintuitive and even preposterous — that the path of light from a distant source would be curved by passing near a strong gravitational field, for example, or that time would pass more slowly near a strong gravitational field. On all counts, however, he turned out to be right. Your mobile phone’s GPS would send you


Pentagon cloud contract investigation uncovers ‘potential ethical violations,’ narrows competition to Amazon and Microsoft

investigation into allegations that Amazon created a conflict of interest when it hired Deap Ubhi, a former Defense Department procurement professional who worked on the JEDI project in its early planning phases. Ubhi, a Silicon Valley start-up founder, had worked for Amazon’s commercial cloud computing division before going to work for the Defense Digital Service in 2016. While he worked at the Pentagon, Ubhi worked on early planning for the JEDI procurement. The procurement kicked off soon after he left the Pentagon to rejoin Amazon in November 2017. Oracle’s lawsuit has centered around the idea that Ubhi could have improperly influenced the procurement during his tenure at the Defense Department or carried confidential procurement information when he rejoined Amazon. While he worked at the Pentagon, Ubhi claimed to be “leading the effort” to outfit the Defense Department with commercial cloud computing technology. He openly praised Amazon on Twitter while he was a government official, repeatedly referring to himself as an “Amazonian” while he helped lay the groundwork for a government contract Amazon is now bidding on. Before he left the Defense Department, Ubhi recused himself from the JEDI procurement. Aside from his job at the Pentagon, Ubhi had been running a tech start-up called TableHero, a business that drew interest from Amazon. In his October 2017 recusal letter, Ubhi cited “potential conflicts arising from “partnership” discussions between Amazon and TableHero, according to court documents. It is unclear if those discussions went anywhere. Amazon and the Defense Department have sought to portray Ubhi as a minor player who could not have influenced the JEDI contract in his relatively short stint in government. Amazon accused Oracle of dragging Ubhi into a “broad fishing expedition” meant to undo a national security initiative. “Oracle attempts to use Mr. Ubhi’s voluntary recusal as evidence of supposed bias, when in reality it demonstrates precisely the opposite: Mr. Ubhi acted specifically to avoid any potential conflict by voluntarily recusing himself from any JEDI activities before he eventually returned to AWS,” Amazon’s attorneys wrote in a recent court filing. An Amazon spokesman has repeatedly declined to make Ubhi available for an interview, citing pending litigation. Amazon has also declined to comment on whether the company engaged in acquisition or partnership discussions with TableHero while Ubhi worked for the Pentagon, when employment discussions began for his second stint at Amazon, or what prompted his recusal in the first place.


E.U. leaders offer to extend Brexit until October, avoiding chaotic exit on Friday

on a guarantee to keep the Irish border open and mostly invisible. And no future trade deal between the U.K. and E.U. will be negotiated until the withdrawal deal is inked, the Europeans say. Those restrictions — which give stomach cramps to many British lawmakers — are nearly unavoidable, E.U. diplomats said. Even if Britain declares it wants to leave without a deal, the next demand from the Europeans will focus on the core of what British already agreed upon: cash, the Irish border and the rights of E.U. citizens in the U.K. “It is now up to the British to be honest with themselves and with their people,” Macron said. May said talks with the Labour Party would continue Thursday. The hope is to come up with a vision of Britain’s future relationship with the E.U. that might win over the divided House of Commons. But those talks have yet to produce any breakthroughs. Both Labour and Conservative leaders described the negotiations as “productive,” but opposition negotiators have complained that May was not moving far from her red lines. E.U. diplomats said those talks barely figured into their planning — because they don’t expect much to come of them. Meanwhile, May’s own party is divided and her cabinet is mutinous — filled with ministers who want her job. Britain was originally supposed to leave the E.U. on March 29. Hardcore Brexiteers are furious at the idea of yet another delay — and at the idea that the country is preparing for European Parliament elections nearly three years after voting to leave Europe. They say they are willing to see Britain break away with no deal, no transition period, no safety net. But the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday that a no-deal Brexit could lead to a two-year recession for Britain. And European leaders were in no mood to invite that sort of economic or political instability. October is just long enough to relieve pressure on British lawmakers for a quick compromise. But it may not be enough time to allow May — or her successor — to pursue a truly new approach, such as a new referendum. Some diplomats who favored a longer extension expressed concern that the compromise could raise the risk of sending the British talks aground. Despite the seriousness of the meeting, there appeared to be less tension than at a summit last month, when May


The black hole photo was no big surprise to scientists. Here’s why it’s still a big deal.

of our faith in the existence of supermassive black holes. In 2012, early data from the Event Horizon Telescope about a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, or M87, was released. The Event Horizon, a network of telescopes from the South Pole to North America, had combined radio waves to peer into the very heart of the black hole, with its mass of 6.5 billion suns. It looked like . . . a blob. So I was not quite prepared for the beautiful ring unveiled this week. I was awed by the tremendous work that went into producing that image. My friend and colleague Dan Marrone spent many months at the South Pole, far from his family, with little time to eat or sleep, to make this happen, and he was only one of 200 scientists working hard over the past decade. However, what has really stuck with me is a comment from Avery Broderick, a theorist in astrophysics who makes the model predictions of what light rays should do right at the edge of the event horizon. The models were exactly right — a triumph for the theory of general relativity that Albert Einstein formulated more than a century ago. “I have to admit that I was a little stunned that it matched so closely the predictions that we had made,” Broderick said during Wednesday’s news conference announcing the result. “It’s gratifying, sometimes frustrating.” I get this frustration — did the modeling have to work so well? After all that work, couldn’t we just get a hint of new physics? A challenge to general relativity that might open fresh theoretical horizons? Indeed, I was asked by a journalist whether there was really anything interesting about the M87 image, when we were just seeing exactly what we expected to see. So after the decade of investment, the sleepless nights, the petabytes of data, the heroic imaging efforts, was the Event Horizon Telescope worth the investment? Yes, absolutely. We can never know what surprises nature holds until we push right up against the edge of what is possible. Confirming the predictions of general relativity, and seeing the event horizon, is magical. Yes, finding new physical laws would be splashy, but strong and clear confirmation of the theoretical is both fundamentally important and surprising in its own right. I am confident that as the Event Horizon Telescope incorporates more telescopes and


The new crop of Washington hotel bars offer luxe seating, board games and secret rooms

earned 2.5 stars from Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema this spring. There are three other eating and drinking options. The daytime attraction is Kintsugi, a coffeehouse with inviting seating at the large windows along K Street NW and a menu focused on vegan and gluten-free pastries, fresh juice and holistic teas. After dark, the focus shifts to the Allegory, tucked behind an unmarked door off the lobby’s library lounge. In Shaw or on H Street NE, this would come with all the baggage of a speakeasy. Here, the dimly lit lounge, outfitted with long leather couches, cozy nooks and an “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired mural, is just a place to linger and explore the menu created by Passenger and Columbia Room veteran Alexandra Bookless and her team. Grab a seat at the glowing bar and watch the bartenders whip up the frothy, floral Open Veins, made with genever, acai berry and egg white, or the mezcal-and-mole 2666, which offers a great depth of flavor. There are pages of classics, too, organized by base spirit, making it easy for your friend who only likes gin or rum drinks. (The brandy section might be the most rewarding.) Take the elevator to the top floor and you’ll find Wild Days, the rooftop bar with indoor and outdoor spaces. On chilly nights, there are fire pits and blankets at the tables fronting K Street, though you might as well stay in the greenhouse-like main bar, wrapped in glass walls. Plants grow throughout the space, and attractive murals and long tables attract happy-hour groups. The cocktail menu is shorter than Allegory’s but still interesting — the No Man’s Woman is an Irish whiskey Manhattan with notes of baking spice, and there are a pair of nonalcoholic cocktails, plus tacos from American Son’s kitchen. The downside to Wild Days can be its popularity for events and DJ nights: Show up on a Saturday, and you might find a line of folks waiting to take the elevator up. But time it right, and Wild Days could be your new summer hang. 1201 K St. NW. Doyle Bar at the Dupont Circle Hotel Over the past decade, the Dupont Circle Hotel’s bar has had multiple personalities, including the genteel Irish pub Biddy Mulligan’s and Bar Dupont, a lobby lounge as generic as its name. It has offered live music on the patio and special Oktoberfest food-and-drink takeovers. The