SATURDAy, MARCH 14 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Free For All
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in Concord, N.H., on Feb. 11.I kept scanning the F eb. 20 Style
article “Dear Prudence greets the
brand-new day,” a n interesting a r-
ticle on the transitional life of
Daniel L avery, S late’s c urrent Dear
Prudence advice columnist, ex-
pecting to find at least a passing
reference to the transition in the
life of Dear Prudence’s inventor:
economist Herbert Stein.
As a former chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers,
Stein w as also well known, among
many other accomplishments, as
an occasional columnist in the
Wall Street Journal. Despite his
curmudgeonly affectations,
Stein’s sense of humor was a
source of delight to his trusted
friends, and when Michael Kins-
ley (former New Republic editor
and also a well-known wit) found-
ed Slate in the mid-1990s, he was
surprised and delighted when
Stein (who also arranged for Slate
to have a cramped office in a for-
mer storeroom at the American
Enterprise I nstitute on 16th Street
NW in the District) came up with
his plan to write a Dear Prudence
advice column on “Morals, Man-
ners and Macroeconomics.” Stein
was so afraid that no one would
notice it that he commissioned a
bunch of advice-seeking letters,
but it was an instant hit and I, as
Slate’s Washington editor at the
time, struggled over the next
month or so to be sure that all the
enlistees got a reply sooner or
later.
Jodie T. Allen, WashingtonAnd he was
Ben Stein’s
dad!
Gabriel Popkin’s Feb. 16 Washington Post Maga-
zine article “The Green Miles” gave the impression
that planting trees to reclaim strip-mined land was
a new idea when University of Kentucky forestry
professor Donald Graves experimented with it in
1996 and a few years later when U. S. Interior
Department reclamation specialist Patrick Angel
tried it on a broader scale.
U. S. Forest Service scientists had been doing it
since at least as far back as the 1970s when the
Forest Service had a research facility at Berea, Ky.,
that did extensive research on planting trees,
shrubs, grasses and legumes in mine spoils. The
article also ignored that thousands of acres of trees
were planted in reclaimed mine spoils in Ohio’s
Wayne National Forest at about the same time. I
was working there as a soil scientist and was
involved with that reclamation.
Ohio passed strip-mine-reclamation legislation
in 1972, five years before a similar federal act was
passed. At the time, Ohio’s law was the strictest in
the nation, and it became a model for the federal
law. The article undercut many years of innovative
work by U.S. Forest Service employees.
Dave Wester, Baraboo, Wis.Undermining
d ecades of regreening
Rick Maese’s coverage of the U.S. Olympic Mara-
thon Te am Trials in the March 1 Sports article “Rupp
returns from tough time with easy win at marathon
trials” w as overly focused on Galen Rupp’s w in in the
men’s r ace. Though Rupp’s v ictory was dramatic, the
article gave short shrift to other noteworthy stories
— especially from the women’s race. Why no quota-tions from women’s victor Aliphine Tuliamuk? Why
no mention that Molly Seidel’s second-place finish
was in her first marathon ever? Why no background
on the unexpected men’s second-place finisher,
Jacob Riley? Rupp deserves his due, but the race was
not all about him.
Todd Kushner, RockvilleShort shrift to a long-distance winner
KEVIN C. COX/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Aliphine Tuliamuk after winning the U .S. Olympic Marathon Team Trials in Atlanta on Feb. 29.The Post seems to find women in photographs
nonexistent. It reminds me of a milestone in the
movement to recognize women artists and women
in art when it was noted that the great art historian
H.W. Janson’s analysis of Masaccio’s “Madonna and
Child” c ompletely ignored the Madonna. So it was in
one of the photographs that accompanied theFeb. 26 front-page article “Sharp words at a surging
Sanders.” The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al
Sharpton were identified, but who was the woman
whose arms are on both men’s shoulders? Presum-
ably a woman of some significance in the South
Carolina Democratic Party?
G ail C. Weigl, AlexandriaHelp us identify this woman
ALICE KEENEY/BLOOMBERG NEWS
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, seated, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, right, in Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 25.When former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg ended
his c ampaign for t he Democratic nomination for p resident, the
next day’s Post put an article and photograph on Page 1. Fair
enough.
The day afterward, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) had
ended her campaign, the Page 1 photo showed not Klobuchar
but Buttigieg. The photo was taken from knee level, about the
same angle from which Holbein painted King Henry VIII.
Klobuchar appeared o nly on Page A 6, in a straightforward s hot
at eye level. Facing her, Page A7 gave us two more photos of
Buttigieg, both far more r omantic t han Klobuchar’s.
One B uttigieg photo showed h im from above, reaching out to
bless his subjects below. The shot looked remarkably as if theEnough of St. Peter
I could not help but notice that the Feb. 21 Metro
article “More racist graffiti is reported at Salisbury”
deleted an expletive to avoid repeating a word
written on the walls at S alisbury University recently.
Had the vandals written “Redskin,” I presume
The Post would have been fine printing it.
Jeff Owrutsky, Silver Spring
The R-word
Regarding the March 1 front-page article “Miran-
da’s rebellion”:
On the same day the front page reported on Joe
Biden turning it around in South Carolina, the coro-
navirus killing its first American and serious ques-
tions about the Ta liban peace deal, we also had
Miranda, Phillip and Liz i n Georgia — h iking, t alking,
thinking, loving, hating, struggling... evolving. No
answers, just a compelling s tory.
Marvin Solberg, E dgewater
A rebel alliance
At a time when the U.S. Women’s National Te am
continues its fight for equal pay for players and
coaches in women’s soccer, The Post continues to
give more prominent coverage to such things as
out-of-town exhibition baseball news. While the
Sports section of March 6 included coverage of the
2-0 win over England by the U.S. women’s team, the
story was tucked into a bottom corner, with a
headline that was half the size of that used for an
article about a Brazilian men’s soccer player’s pass-
port problems. Also, and perhaps symbolically, the
men’s soccer article appeared directly above the one
on women’s s occer. To t his reader, it sure seems like a
gender issue, but any way you look at it, the current
Women’s World Cup champions and Olympic gold
medal favorites deserve better.
John Graham, Rockville
Nobody puts Carli in a corner
Regarding the March 2 front-page article “Virus
spread for weeks in Wash. state, study says”:
I object to the “sobering implications” and other
dire conclusions without better context. In fact, the
higher the total number of cases, the lower the rates
of virulence and death. While 90,000 cases with
3,000 deaths means a death rate above 3 percent,
10 times the number of cases — which I understand
is possible — could lower the death rate closer to the
0.1 percent of seasonal flu. It would be great to read
better numbers based on age as well.
I would be very grateful if Post reporters would
publish good statistics when mentioning the poten-
tial for higher numbers of cases — especially in light
of the administration’s c lampdown on statements by
government scientists.
Mary Carpenter, Washington
Too high
In his Feb. 21 Friday Opinion column, “A glimpse
of victory against the coronavirus,” about deaths
from the coronavirus, Michael Gerson did not
appear to understand his o wn statistics. To a retired
Census Bureau statistician such as me, they are,
intuitively, nonsense. He used percentages and
decimals, but, to simplify, I’ll convert his statistics
to cases per thousand. He, therefore, stated that
“the mortality rate for the seasonal flu is generally”
1 in 1,000 and for pandemic flu 3 to 5 per
1,000. While I am not an expert on health statistics,
Gerson a ppeared to use U.S. population rather than
cases of infection (a figure difficult, if not impossi-
ble, to derive) as the denominator in his calcula-
tions. The result: The actual mortality rates, while
unknown, are far higher than he reported.
This obviously is the same error he made in
reporting that the apparent mortality rate from the
coronavirus is “upward of 2 percent,” about the
same as the flu pandemic of 1918, “which took the
lives of 50 million people around the world” —
including my grandfather — and “had a mortality
rate of about 2 percent.” Again, Gerson, or his
source, apparently used estimated world popula-
tion of about 2 billion at that time as the
denominator for the 1918 pandemic. Estimates of
the actual mortality rate for the 1918 flu range from
10 to 20 percent.
John Wikoff, North Potomac
Too low
The Feb. 25 Health & Science article “Is it finally
time to get rid o f leap days and years?” t ouched on the
invention of Leap Day and why it is Feb. 29. The
Romans invented it as part of the calendar reform
under Julius Caesar, but it was not Feb. 29. The Julian
calendar lasted f or well over 1,000 y ears before it was
reset and fine-tuned under Pope Gregory XIII. The
Romans quite logically put the extra day in February,
the shortest month, but rather than tacking it on to
the end of the February, it was actually inserted
several days earlier and was what we would now
count as Feb. 24. The Romans reckoned days of the
month not by counting up but by counting down to
special days such a s the I des, Nones and K alends. The
Kalends began at the first day of the month, so the
days near the end of February counted down to
March 1, the beginning of March Kalends. The leap
day was inserted as a second sixth day before the
Kalends of March. Since the first six-day would
correspond to our present Feb. 23, the second one
would fall on our Feb. 24. This “second-sixth” refer-
ence survives in several Romance languages in the
word for “leap year”; in French, a leap year is
designated as “bissextile,” a nd in Italian, “bissestile.”
Jack Aubert, Falls ChurchBeware the Ides and
b e wise to these others
The March 2 KidsPost article “How parties pick
their nominees” was very useful and informative
and could help our youths to stay abreast of what is
occurring this year. However, permit me to correct
one statement:
Americans do not vote for president on the first
Tuesday in November, as was stated. Rather, we vote
for president on the first Tuesday after the first
Monday in November, as provided i n law by the 2 8th
Congress in 1845. T he mistake is a common one, as is
the belief that the day is set forth in the Constitution
itself, which only authorized Congress to set a date.
George Margolies, RockvilleCloser to the Ides of November
photographer had taken
it from a helicopter hover-
ing above the Bucking-
ham Palace balcony. The
other Buttigieg photo on
that page showed his
head and shoulders,
again shot upward from
below. This time, mere
royalty wasn’t enough.
The lighting behind Butt-
igieg’s head formed a
halo.
Much coverage I’ve seen throughout the campaign has been
unbalanced, especially between the white men and everyone
else. These photos constitute an especially n auseating example.
Mary Goldwag, A lexandriaMATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Pete Buttigieg in Des Moines on
Feb. 3.As a math teacher, I was struck by the line “None
of more than 50 voters interviewed at three
Virginia Beach precincts on Tuesday said they
planned to vote for Sanders, even if they liked some
of his positions” in the March 4 front-page article
“With focus on beating Trump, Virginia voters
choose Biden.” It implied that there was essentially
no support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a
candidate for the Democratic nomination for
president, in the area.
Contrary to this erroneous implication, the
statement demonstrated that the reporter in Vir-
ginia Beach was good at excluding Sanders sup-
porters from his interviews. Sanders received
23.9 percent of the vote in Virginia Beach. The
probability of randomly selecting 5 0 voters who did
not vote for Sanders is vanishingly small: 0.
percent (76.1 percent to the 50th power).
Joyce Migdall, Falls Church
Even lower
STEPHEN M. DOWELL/THE ORLANDO SENTINEL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSCarli Lloyd after scoring a goal against England
in Orlando on March 5.
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST
Patrick Angel on his sheep farm in London, Ky.,
on April 7, 201 9.