The Washington Post - 06.09.2019

It was an exercise in perspec-

tive, in relativity, in epochal con-

cerns scrunched into a sliver of

prime time that seemed to go on

forever. It was an “unprecedented”

televised discussion about an “ex-

istential” threat, but it often col-

lapsed into quips about lightbulbs

and cheeseburgers.

When she pulls up the video, it

will start like this:

“This is an important evening

for all of us,” Wolf Blitzer said at

5:02 p.m., after connecting climate

change to Hurricane Dorian,

which provided CNN with a con-

venient real-world catastrophe to

liven up a string of 40-minute

Q&As with 10 candidates.

Behind Blitzer was a panorama

of Earth, that hot blue dot with a

thin haze of atmosphere — our

protector, our smotherer — arcing

across the stage. The audience was

made of Democrats and indepen-

dents. Many of the questions came

from college students pursuing cli-

mate-related degrees and young

SEE CLIMATE ON C3

BY DAN ZAK

What will a historian in the

22nd century learn about our

country, our age, by unearthing

video of CNN’s town hall on the

climate crisis? She will learn that

candidates for our highest office,

centuries after the Enlighten-

ment, still had to declare publicly

that they believe in science. She

will learn that these candidates

also believe that climate change is

a paramount threat that must be

confronted immediately, but in an

incremental way. She will learn

that the “global war on terror”

unleashed 1.2 billion metric tons of

greenhouse gases, that a senator

named Cory Booker was a Trekkie

and that a businessman named

Andrew Yang wanted to dole out

“democracy dollars,” and that a

cable news network — for all its

turbulence and theatrics — devot-

ed a workday’s worth of its pro-

gramming, on a Wednesday in

September, to the issue that

shaped her reality.

BY NNEKA MCGUIRE

Home. Those four letters teem
with such meaning it’s a miracle
they don’t collapse under the
weight. Home can manifest in the
intangible — a sound, a scent — or
the concrete (four walls, the feel of
your mother’s hand, the spot on
the sofa where you always find
yourself sitting).
Home can induce nostalgia or
anxiety. Like the curves of spines
and the shapes of noses, home is,
for each of us, a shade different.
For Sarah M. Broom, home is
memory and history, recounted
with rigor, candor and grace in
her new memoir, “The Yellow
House.” The actual wooden struc-
ture after which the book is
named is gone, a casualty of Hur-
ricane Katrina.
“The Yellow House was witness
to our lives,” Broom writes of the
home where she and most of her
11 older siblings grew up. “When it
fell, something in me burst.”
Broom probes the history of
her family and New Orleans East
— a part of the city often missing
from maps and history books,
even though it’s significantly larg-
er than the French Quarter —
before and after Katrina. Archival
research and oral histories factor
heavily in the work.
Recently, Broom and I spoke
about how and why she under-
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C2

KLMNO

Style

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ SU C

BY ROBIN GIVHAN

Ethan Miller’s fashion story began when he was

one of seven children in a working-class black family

in a predominantly white town in rural Idaho, not far

from where members of the Aryan Nations were

known to squat. Miller had no fashion industry

mentors, no inside track, no nothing.

Yet through tenacity, skill and a bit of luck, he

became a talent manager at IMG, one of the most

influential creative management agencies in the

fashion industry — one that represents well-known

models Karlie Kloss and Joan Smalls and also owns

NYFW: The Shows, which will host more than 50

presentations and talks as part of the broader New

York Fashion Week this month.

Most notably, however, Miller is the founder of the

Fabric, which is his way of paying his professional

good fortune forward. The Fabric is an initiative born

out of frustration with an industry that can be

daunting to enter, confusing to navigate and existen-

tially overwhelming for people of color. All too often,

black people are the first this, the only that, the rare

whatever. They are there; but their presence is

diffuse. Miller’s project helps to create a sense of

community — and he hopes that will help avert the

offensive cultural blunders that have stained the

industry.

As Miller’s professional life blossomed, he would

often walk into a large meeting and see only one

other person of color in the room. He’d nod or make

SEE ETHAN MILLER ON C2

He gathered Fabric

to fold in inclusiveness

A fashion insider gets black people together so they aren’t a ‘first’ or ‘only’

ELIAS WILLIAMS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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Kennedy Center’s expansion makes its debut with arts festival^14

Weekend

THE WASHINGTON POST.GOINGOUTGUIDE.COM .FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

CNN’s climate town hall: A time capsule (if we have a future)

BOOK WORLD

Finding

a sense of

place after

losing home

THE YELLOW

HOUSE

By Sarah M.

Broom

Grove Press.

376 pp. $26

Ivanka’s

misdirected

mission of

diplomacy

Ivanka Trump
descended upon
Bogota, Colombia,
this week to talk
about women’s
empowerment
and left us talking
about her sleeves.
They were
voluminous, bell-
shaped swaths of green fabric. As
the first daughter stood in
solemn formation with the
Colombian vice president, the
sleeves caught a draft and
attempted to launch themselves
away from her body. Midair, they
formed into perfect circles, and
this became the hallmark
photograph of the trip. Ivanka
Trump from the neck up was on a
mission of benign diplomacy.
From the neck down, flying
saucers.
It’s shallow to call attention to
a minor clothing malfunction,
but this viral sleeve image is what
alerted many people to the fact
that Ivanka Trump — who, after
all, is not an elected official with a
dedicated press corps — was in
Latin America at all.
To understand exactly what
she was doing there, your best
hope was to follow the itinerary
she unspooled on Instagram: She
launched the Academy of Women
Entrepreneurs, which, she said,
was “designed to equip women
with the practical skills they need
to create sustainable businesses
and to participate more fully in
the global economy.” She
participated in a wreath-laying
ceremony. She met with
Colombia’s president and vice
SEE HESSE ON C3

Monica
Hesse

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; ISTOCK; GETTY IMAGES

Ethan Miller created the Fabric so black fashion professionals would have an easy, informal way to

connect: “I’d thought about it a long time. I thought, ‘I’d like to do something. Something.’ ”