News Collection April 13, 2008

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Freedom and Faith on Campus
By Patricia McGuire
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B07

Mindless dogmatism is not part of the Catholic intellectual tradition. As stewards of that tradition, Catholic colleges and universities engage in the robust "dialogue of faith and reason" that the church expects of us, exploring the complex mysteries of God, the profound meaning of human life, the social-justice imperatives of the Gospel.

Critics of Catholic higher education, however, seem to expect us to be submissive disciples of some lesser religion, obedient to a doctrinaire laundry list of "Thou Shalt Nots" -- e.g., "Thou Shalt Not" stage a play about women's body parts ("The Vagina Monologues"), allow gay students to form clubs or allow speakers whose political views diverge from church teachings.

When Pope Benedict XVI visits Washington this week, he will have a special meeting to address the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities. Critics have swung into full smackdown mode, predicting that the pope will lambaste the presidents for failing to prohibit activities the critics deem offensive.

The image of us presidents as wayward boys and girls assembled before the pope for chastisement feeds into the most pernicious anti-Catholic stereotype of mindless adherence to theocratic rulers. For Catholics to encourage the kind of actions that bolster such banal stereotypes is the real scandal.

The pope and the presidents have more serious and urgent business to consider together in the name of our faith. Civilization itself is beset by profoundly consequential choices among radical forms of religious and political beliefs, creating deep chasms within the global community and threatening long-term war and violence that undermine the peace essential for true human dignity.

Ours is a world with extreme economic disparities in which a small percentage of the planet's inhabitants consume almost all of the resources while billions lack even the most fundamental sanitation, shelter, food or education. The mission of Catholic higher education is to educate citizen leaders to enable them to address these grave moral and social challenges with conscience, conviction and intellectual strength.

The seminal Vatican document on Catholic higher education, known as Ex Corde Ecclesiae, posits a remarkably contemporary view of the purpose of Catholic higher education. The document reflects the lively intellectual life of its author, Pope John Paul II, who had long experience as a university professor before moving into the hierarchy. Ex Corde Ecclesiae embraces the fundamental nature of a university as a place of free research and true higher learning leading to the discernment of truth, which is the heart of our faith. To suggest that Catholic universities are not places where intellectual freedom can flourish betrays the very teaching of the church itself, which is respect for our academic freedom.

Nothing in Ex Corde Ecclesiae expects Catholic universities to diminish our identity as normative institutions of higher learning. On the contrary, Ex Corde calls us to an active life as real universities with the additional distinctive dimension of taking the dialogue of faith and reason into the culture, with all of the complex problems that may pose.

Of course, church leaders, including institutional presidents, also expect Catholic colleges and universities to manifest clear respect for the church and its moral teachings across the spectrum of issues in human life and moral conduct. How we manage that expectation within our respective communities of diverse scholars and students exercising their free-speech rights is at the white-hot center of many controversies. Controversy itself is sometimes the most fruitful way to teach about our faith.

The critics would have us ban plays, speakers, student clubs, faculty members and alumni guests whose words or deeds run contrary to the most orthodox interpretation of Catholic teaching. A great silence would descend on most Catholic campuses if we did that. Rather than being afraid of the expression of contrary ideas, we should leverage the teaching opportunities inherent in the free and open exchange of ideas that is essential to university life. If our faith is as strong as we claim it to be, we should not fear the cacophony that emerges during the struggle of learning.

Pope Benedict will be doing his job when he addresses Catholic university presidents Thursday on our obligation to be faithful stewards of the Catholic intellectual tradition and the moral teachings of our faith. We academics are doing our job when we engage in critical analysis of those teachings in light of our Gospel tradition, contemporary research and cultural context.

A church with a brain is not afraid to ask itself the hard questions about the role of faith, moral teachings and theological exploration in contemporary life. This is what Ex Corde Ecclesiae calls us to do; this is what the pope will remind us is essential and what we will continue to do in our mission in Catholic higher education.

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The Future Is Now
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B01

The most important things happening in the world today won't make tomorrow's front page. They won't get mentioned by presidential candidates or Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly or any of the other folks yammering and snorting on cable television.

They'll be happening in laboratories -- out of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change life as we know it.

Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent. Problem is, most of us are mystified and intimidated by such things as biotechnology, or nanotechnology, or the various other -ologies that seem to be threatening to merge into a single unspeakable and incomprehensible thing called biotechnonanogenomicology. We vaguely understand that this stuff is changing our lives, but we feel as though it's all out of our control. We're just hanging on tight, like Kirk and Spock when the Enterprise starts vibrating at Warp 8.

What's unnerving is the velocity at which the future sometimes arrives. Consider the Internet. This powerful but highly disruptive technology crept out of the lab (a Pentagon think tank, actually) and all but devoured modern civilization -- with almost no advance warning. The first use of the word "internet" to refer to a computer network seems to have appeared in this newspaper on Sept. 26, 1988, in the Financial section, on page F30 -- about as deep into the paper as you can go without hitting the bedrock of the classified ads.

The entire reference: "SMS Data Products Group Inc. in McLean won a $1,005,048 contract from the Air Force to supply a defense data network internet protocol router." Perhaps the unmellifluous compound noun "data network internet protocol router" is one reason more of us didn't pay attention. A couple of months later, "Internet" -- still lacking the "the" before its name -- finally elbowed its way to the front page when a virus shut down thousands of computers. The story referred to "a research network called Internet," which "links as many as 50,000 computers, allowing users to send a variety of information to each other." The scientists knew that computer networks could be powerful. But how many knew that this Internet thing would change the way we communicate, publish, sell, shop, conduct research, find old friends, do homework, plan trips and on and on?

Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermilab research center in Illinois, tells a story about something that happened in 1990. A Fermilab visitor, an English fellow by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, had a new trick he wanted to demonstrate to the physicists. He typed some code into a little blank box on the computer screen. Up popped a page of data.

Lykken's reaction: Eh.

He could already see someone else's data on a computer. He could have the colleague e-mail it to him and open it as a document. Why view it on a separate page on some computer network?

But of course, this unimpressive piece of software was the precursor to what is known today as the World Wide Web. "We had no idea that we were seeing not only a revolution, but a trillion-dollar idea," Lykken says.

Now let us pause to reflect upon the fact that Joe Lykken is a very smart guy -- you don't get to be a theoretical physicist unless you have the kind of brain that can practically bend silverware at a distance -- and even he, with that giant cerebral cortex and the billions of neurons flashing and winking, saw the proto-Web and harrumphed. It's not just us mortals, even scientists don't always grasp the significance of innovations. Tomorrow's revolutionary technology may be in plain sight, but everyone's eyes, clouded by conventional thinking, just can't detect it. "Even smart people are really pretty incapable of envisioning a situation that's substantially different from what they're in," says Christine Peterson, vice president of Foresight Nanotech Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

So where does that leave the rest of us?

In technological Palookaville.

Science is becoming ever more specialized; technology is increasingly a series of black boxes, impenetrable to but a few. Americans' poor science literacy means that science and technology exist in a walled garden, a geek ghetto. We are a technocracy in which most of us don't really understand what's happening around us. We stagger through a world of technological and medical miracles. We're zombified by progress.

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially "hard science fiction" that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong," she says. "But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."

That's exciting -- and a little scary. We want the blessings of science (say, cheaper energy sources) but not the terrors (monsters spawned by atomic radiation that destroy entire cities with their fiery breath).

Eric Horvitz, one of the sharpest minds at Microsoft, spends a lot of time thinking about the Next Big Thing. Among his other duties, he's president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He thinks that, sometime in the decades ahead, artificial systems will be modeled on living things. In the Horvitz view, life is marked by robustness, flexibility, adaptability. That's where computers need to go. Life, he says, shows scientists "what we can do as engineers -- better, potentially."

Our ability to monkey around with life itself is a reminder that ethics, religion and old-fashioned common sense will be needed in abundance in decades to come (see the essay on page B1 by Ronald M. Green). How smart and flexible and rambunctious do we want our computers to be? Let's not mess around with that Matrix business.

Every forward-thinking person almost ritually brings up the mortality issue. What'll happen to society if one day people can stop the aging process? Or if only rich people can stop getting old?

It's interesting that politicians rarely address such matters. The future in general is something of a suspect topic . . . a little goofy. Right now we're all focused on the next primary, the summer conventions, the Olympics and their political implications, the fall election. The political cycle enforces an emphasis on the immediate rather than the important.

And in fact, any prediction of what the world will be like more than, say, a year from now is a matter of hubris. The professional visionaries don't even talk about predictions or forecasts but prefer the word "scenarios." When Sen. John McCain, for example, declares that radical Islam is the transcendent challenge of the 21st century, he's being sincere, but he's also being a bit of a soothsayer. Environmental problems and resource scarcity could easily be the dominant global dilemma. Or a virus with which we've yet to make our acquaintance. Or some other "wild card."

Says Lykken, "Our ability to predict is incredibly poor. What we all thought when I was a kid was that by now we'd all be flying around in anti-gravity cars on Mars."

Futurists didn't completely miss on space travel -- it's just that the things flying around Mars are robotic and take neat pictures and sometimes land and sniff the soil.

Some predictions are bang-on, such as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke's declaration in 1945 that there would someday be communications satellites orbiting the Earth. But Clarke's satellites had to be occupied by repairmen who would maintain the huge computers required for space communications. Even in the late 1960s, when Clarke collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay to "2001: A Space Odyssey," he assumed that computers would, over time, get bigger. "The HAL 9000 computer fills half the spaceship," Lykken notes.

Says science-fiction writer Ben Bova, "We have built into us an idea that tomorrow is going to be pretty much like today, which is very wrong."

The future is often viewed as an endless resource of innovation that will make problems go away -- even though, if the past is any judge, innovations create their own set of new problems. Climate change is at least in part a consequence of the invention of the steam engine in the early 1700s and all the industrial advances that followed.

Look again at the Internet. It's a fantastic tool, but it also threatens to disperse information we'd rather keep under wraps, such as our personal medical data, or even the instructions for making a fission bomb.

We need to keep our eyes open. The future is going to be here sooner than we think. It'll surprise us. We'll try to figure out why we missed so many clues. And we'll go back and search the archives, and see that thing we should have noticed on page F30.

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A Test for Md. Education
Sunday, March 30, 2008; B08

Should students learn something before they are given a high school diploma?

Is it reasonable to think that high school graduates know a little about the world and can manipulate language and numbers at least a bit?

Should they know about the role of the Supreme Court? About photosynthesis? Commas? Algebraic equations?

This seems like a no-brainer. If students are handed high school diplomas without meeting minimal standards of knowledge and skill, they are being lied to. They are being told they are ready to function as adults without being given the ability to negotiate an increasingly unforgiving world.

For that reason I have eagerly looked forward to the day when Maryland students would have to pass exams in government, English, biology and math to graduate. Students have taken the four tests -- High School Assessments, or HSAs -- for years, but the Class of 2009 is the first to be required to pass them.

Around the state, high schools are looking closely at whether their students are learning. For some, paying attention to each of their students is a new experience; they balk at the idea that they are responsible for ensuring that their graduates actually know something.

Yet many educators are stepping up to the plate and working hard to help students pass. And the students themselves are buckling down. Of the juniors who have already taken all four HSAs, 87 percent have passed them.

But that doesn't mean all is well.

Several thousand students in both Montgomery and Prince George's counties in the Class of 2009 have not passed the tests. Those students need a concerted community effort to help them learn enough math, English, biology and government to succeed.

Unfortunately, bills being debated in the Maryland General Assembly would pull the plug on all the work that has been done and should be done. The bills would either remove the HSAs as a graduation requirement or reduce their importance. The argument being made is that the tests are too hard; the subtext, because many of the students who have not passed are poor and minority, is that such students are unable to learn what they need to pass them.

Some years ago, Massachusetts faced the same question that Maryland faces. Like Maryland now, Massachusetts experienced substantial resistance when it came time for the tests to count for graduation, but the state's leadership held firm. The Boston school superintendent at the time, Thomas Payzant, told me recently that the implication that their students wouldn't be able to pass because they were poor or African American or Latino "strengthened the resolve of the urban superintendents," meaning not just him but the superintendents in Worcester and Springfield as well, all of whom supported the assessments. Now, after a rough couple of years, just about all of Massachusetts's students -- including Boston's -- pass the assessments.

Educators and political leaders in Massachusetts had the courage to say that, when given clear goals, students have the ability to learn and teachers and principals have the responsibility to teach. We need the same kind of courage from Maryland's leadership.

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Let's Stop Running Scared
By Shannon Brownlee
Sunday, March 30, 2008; B01

Felt a little short of breath the other day, walking up a hill. Uh-oh. A nugget of worry lodged for a moment in my mind. At 50-something, I'm in decent enough shape. I don't smoke. I walk several miles most days, and I can still beat my 40-something friend at tennis. Not exactly a candidate for a heart attack. But still. I've read all those stories about women like me, the ones with no risk factors for cardiac disease who were suddenly hit with an attack.

Maybe you've had the same worries -- wondered whether some sharp little twinge was heartburn or a heart attack, whether that nasty headache was caused by tension or a stroke. Almost everyone I know who has hit middle age spends a certain amount of time fretting about this or that ailment. My husband and friends and I used to talk about politics, science, religion, kids. Now no dinner party is complete without at least a few minutes' discussion of cholesterol levels, the merits of walking vs. running, or whether or not snoring is a sign of sleep apnea.

It's not as though we're actually sick. Oh sure, a couple of us have high blood pressure, and a dear friend has a serious chronic disease. We all know at least one person our age who has died of cancer or a heart attack. As a medical reporter, I've met many people who suffer terribly from life-threatening or debilitating conditions, and I know that eventually nearly all of us will be hit with a serious illness.

But most of my friends and I, like most middle-aged Americans, are a remarkably healthy lot. If I asked my friends how long they plan to live, I'd bet they'd answer like the respondents to a recent UPI poll, which found that a majority of Americans believe they'll live well into their 80s and beyond -- even though the average U.S. life expectancy is 77. It's not that we fear we're in imminent danger of death, but that we think we have to be hyper-vigilant about disease to put it off as long as possible.

That's what worries me. By constantly reminding us to be on the lookout for illness, doctors and the media have made many Americans feel more anxious. I'm not so sure their warnings have made us any healthier, but they have decidedly eroded our sense of well-being. We worry about every ache and pain; we fret that the least little sign of sadness in a teenager is a symptom of clinical depression. But in viewing so many aspects of ordinary human experience as treatable diseases, we may have granted medicine more power than it deserves -- or is good for us.

I realize that's a contrarian view of medical progress. But think about all the messages we constantly get from the medical world and the media: Watch your weight. Know your cholesterol. Learn the warning signs of stroke. Get more sleep, or you'll have car accidents. That mole on your back? Could be melanoma. Feeling constipated? Might be ovarian cancer. Take the test. Know your numbers. See your doctor.

In case you've missed the point, there are headlines like this one that appeared in Forbes magazine: "Medical Symptoms You Shouldn't Ignore." And a new book: "Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms . . . How to Be Your Own Diagnostic Detective" -- a compendium of symptoms ranging from dry skin to excessive hiccupping that could signal serious conditions. The book's mission is to "alert you, warn you, maybe even scare you into going to the doctor."

Scaring people, of course, being the operative idea here. Patient advocacy groups such as the American Cancer Society have long believed that the way to improve the nation's health is to increase "awareness" of this or that disease, and the best way to increase awareness is to frighten people into their doctors' offices. As early as 1936, the American Cancer Society was using slogans like "No one is safe from cancer" in an effort to get women to go in for a breast exam.

Today, patient-advocacy groups routinely sound the alarm about whatever condition they're trying to eradicate, either by inflating the number of people affected or by exaggerating the danger. The National Sleep Foundation, for example, a group dedicated to encouraging Americans to get more rest, recently released a poll claiming that a whopping 75 percent of us are so sleep-deprived that it's interfering with our sex lives. That's one heck of a lot of sleepy, undersexed people, and it's pretty hard to believe, given that the National Institutes of Health find that at most 21 percent of the population has recurrent insomnia. A few years back, at least one breast cancer patient advocacy group was claiming their disease as the No. 1 killer of women. In reality, far more women die of heart disease, followed by lung cancer.

Striking fear also serves pharmaceutical companies, which want you to worry about diseases, because people who worry are more likely to go to their doctors and ask for drugs than people who don't. It turns out that much of what we -- and our doctors -- think we know about many health problems has been shaped by drugmakers and their marketers. Take "condition branding," one of the most brilliant and widely used marketing techniques for selling drugs. Condition branders use "information" about medical conditions to forge links between disease and treatment in the minds of both patients and doctors. If they have a drug but no condition, they will simply invent a disease. I've been reporting this for years.

One of the best examples is "osteopenia," a diagnosis that millions of women my age are given every year. Osteopenia is supposedly the precursor to osteoporosis, the gradual loss of bone that happens to most of us as we age. Advanced osteoporosis can make women vulnerable to hip fracture, a serious event when you're old and frail because it often heralds a series of complications, such as pneumonia, that can ultimately lead to death. Millions of women are treated for osteoporosis with drugs that can slow bone loss, thus reducing the risk of hip fracture. Or so the logic goes.

The problem is, osteoporosis and osteopenia aren't really diseases. Before the 1990s, doctors decided that you had osteoporosis if you were elderly and you broke a bone. When the pharmaceutical company Merck came up with its anti-bone-loss durg Fosamax, it wanted a broader market than just elderly fracture patients. The solution? The company helped fund a panel of medical experts to create diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis so that a diagnosis could be made before the patient actually broke a bone.

The panel's first step was to define "normal" bone density as that of the average 30-year-old woman. Next, the experts chose as their cutoff for osteoporosis a statistical point that was slightly below the bone density of their normal 30-year-old -- a definition they admitted was "somewhat arbitrary." Finally, they came up with a completely new disease -- osteopenia -- for bone density that fell somewhere between that normal 30-year-old and their arbitrary definition of osteoporosis.

Voila -- 30 percent of post-menopausal women suddenly had a disease that needed to be treated early in order to prevent a problem -- hip fracture -- that wouldn't occur for many years, if ever. According to the new guidelines, millions more women now had osteopenia, which their doctors needed to watch like hawks so that their patients could be treated once they progressed to osteoporosis. Merck then took the added step of helping doctors buy DEXA scanners, X-ray machines needed to scan your bones to get that all-important diagnosis.

Along with osteoporosis and osteopenia, we now have a whole raft of pre-diseases that doctors want to screen us for -- and that drug companies are only too happy to remedy. There's pre-high blood pressure and pre-diabetes, which your doctor can supposedly diagnose even when your blood sugar is perfectly normal. If you've been to the dermatologist lately, maybe you had some "pre-cancerous" spots removed. These may well have been actinic keratoses, which, despite the scary name, almost never develop into an aggressive form of skin cancer. Get them removed if they're unsightly, but there's no cause for alarm if you don't. Then there's the mother of all pre-diseases, high cholesterol -- which is a risk factor, for heaven's sake, not a death sentence. Yet one creepy Pfizer ad for the anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor that appeared a few years ago used a female corpse to exhort women in their 50s to get their cholesterol checked. Know your numbers. Ask your doctor. Be afraid -- be very afraid.

What's lost in all of this is the belief that we can cope with life, or really, that we can live in the face of its abiding uncertainties.

In the 1983 movie "The Year of Living Dangerously," a character named Billy Kwan explains the significance of the Indonesian sacred-shadow puppet plays. Called the wayang, the plays are set on a screen that represents heaven. The puppets' shadows are their souls. "The unseen is all around us," says Kwan, "the right in constant struggle with the left, the forces of light and darkness in endless balance. . . . In the West, we want answers for everything, but in the wayang, no such final conclusions exist."

In our desperate desire for protection against the ambiguous and unseen nature of disease, we have allowed our physicians and the drug industry to medicalize everything from heartburn to heartache. We want answers, even when there are none. We look to medicine to bring relief from the terrible unknowns of aging and its inevitable losses, even when the answers have been manufactured to sell a drug. And we are now so thoroughly convinced of medicine's power that anyone who doubts the wisdom of medicalization risks being labeled a "therapeutic nihilist," one who rejects medicine in its entirety. But you can't spend most of your career reporting on medicine, as I have, and fail to marvel at its many wonders -- or to feel compassion for those who are truly ill.

At the same time, I can't escape the sense that we are paying a heavy price when we broaden the definition of disease to encompass so much of life. For one thing, there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to medical treatment. Every drug you can name, from aspirin to Zocor, has side effects -- some potentially more serious than the diseases they are supposed to prevent. Fosamax, for instance, can cause necrosis (death) of the jawbone. What's more, there aren't any valid scientific studies to show that treating osteoporosis early will prevent fractures down the road. The drug can also trigger serious heartburn, for which you can take an antacid such as Nexium, but that makes you more susceptible to pneumonia.

The other price we pay, of course, is that medicalization has created its own side effect -- anxiety. (There's a drug for that, too.)

Thanks anyway, but I think I'd rather not spend the rest of my life obsessing over what might kill me. When I fall ill, I'll seek treatment. I will get my blood pressure checked, because there is clear evidence that keeping it under control will reduce my chances of a stroke or heart attack (though even that is no guarantee). I'll probably get the occasional mammogram, although their value has been much overstated.

I have no plans to monitor my cholesterol, undoubtedly to my doctor's consternation. Why bother? I'm already watching my weight, exercising regularly and eating a healthful diet, and I don't want to take medications that offer little if any protection against heart attacks for people whose only risk factor is elevated cholesterol. If I fail to get eight hours of shut-eye, oh well. There's always tonight to catch up. My bones will just have to crumble quietly on their own, because I have no intention of taking a drug whose benefits are uncertain and whose risks are all too real.

As for anxiety? I think I'll take care of that by tuning out the medical scare talk.

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After a Baby, Full Time or Part?
When Family and Career Collide, Working Mothers Struggle With Their Answers
By Amy Joyce - Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 30, 2008; F01

I love my new job. It was absolutely the right choice for me.

But -- isn't there always a but? -- when I come in to work, I have to leave a little guy at home who has just learned to wave bye-bye with his chubby backwards wave. So even though I feel excited about being back at work, I also feel guilty about not having more time with my 9-month-old, Sam. I wonder, what would be different if I worked 80 percent of the hours I do now?

The idea of working part time entered my mind off and on throughout my six-month maternity leave. Many of my friends in similar situations worried about the same things I did: What would a part-time job do to my career? Would work continue to be gratifying, or would it just be a job where I punched a clock? Would working fewer hours save money in child-care costs, or would I actually earn too little to make ends meet? And really . . . does Sam even care?

For those of you who don't remember, I wrote the Life at Work column for The Post's Business section. I've come back to the paper in a completely new job -- as an editor for the Weekend section. The job allows me to work more predictable hours than I did as a daily reporter with a weekly column. That helped me easily make the decision (for now, at least) to work full time.

But the decision isn't so easy for many women. For those who have a choice, family, finances and career success are all major considerations when settling on a work schedule.

Julie Ingoglia considered working part time after Matthew (2 1/2 ) and Giovanna (14 months) were born. But the family's insurance was covered through her job, and if she cut back on her work schedule, her insurance would also be cut back, as would her salary and her leave.

"I returned full time after both kids and pondered it a lot and still do," said Ingoglia, a senior analyst at the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Ingoglia, 33, said she might eventually decide to work part time. Before her children were born, she went to graduate school to prepare herself for a job that could let her consult and therefore have a more flexible schedule. She hopes that when the kids are school-age, she can reduce her work schedule so she can be around when they get home. "The decision was, I'd stay working full time now and reduce hours then," she said. She and her husband hope that at that point, he will have a higher salary to offset her pay reduction.

Stepping off the linear career path has become so common that it now has a trendy vernacular. It's not called "going part time" or even "quitting." It's "off-ramping." When it's time to go back to work and pursue a direct career path, you're said to be "on-ramping." Words aside, the way we work is being redefined, even if the changes are not universal.

Women are "redesigning careers to be a lattice instead of a ladder," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. If you view your career as a ladder and you jump off, Galinsky said, it's hard to get back on. The idea of a lattice implies more flexibility.

Patricia Fuentes works a 60 percent schedule in public relations at Freddie Mac. She decided to take that route after her first daughter (now 3 1/2 ) was born. Nearly half of the employees at Freddie Mac work a nontraditional schedule.

"It's happening so much more, I think because there are more women in the workplace," said Debi Gay, human resources senior director at Freddie Mac. "Companies want to keep good people and have to be creative." More than half of the company's employees are women.

But not all careers or employers are set up for alternative schedules.

Colleen Kotyk Vossler, 36, worked at an international law firm when she had Andrew, now 4. After maternity leave, she came back on a reduced schedule. She was soon working far more than she had expected. "I don't hold the firm responsible," she said. "Clients want the availability."

Because she was billing more hours than an average attorney at her firm, she returned to a full-time schedule. Ultimately, Vossler left the firm when her second child, Abigail, was 8 months old to take an in-house counsel position at BearingPoint. She wanted a job that would continue to be a challenge but give her more flexibility. The trade-off? Less pay.

"What I get in return is an opportunity to go on a field trip with my son," she said.

Elaine Lippmann, 34, is a lawyer who decided to take on an 80 percent schedule after her son was born. She is grappling with the impact on her career. She never thought she would be one to work part time. Like many Type-A Washington career lawyers, she put in long hours to get where she was. But she said that after Judah, now 1, was born, "the thought of being away from him so much just felt terrible."

Now she's reckoning with the consequences. "I do feel that I've had to make compromises when it comes to my career, and I'm often not sure how I feel about that. I wonder whether I'll have regrets down the road that I limited myself career-wise," she said.

Lippmann works at a small firm. She's the first lawyer there to go part time. "I feel a lot of pressure to show that this can work," she said. But she isn't sure yet it can.

She has moved into a practice group she likes, though it's limited her training, she said. In her review this year, she asked to "dabble in other practice groups to keep up my knowledge base," she said. "But I was told if I am part time, that limits what I can dabble in."

Before going part time, women need to take a hard look at their financial situations.

Fuentes, who works part time for Freddie Mac, and her husband created three spreadsheets to help them decide. They analyzed first what life would be like with her working full time and them paying for full-time child care. Then they looked at their budget with her working 60 percent of the time and hiring part-time care. Finally they assessed a situation in which Fuentes wouldn't work for pay at all and would be a full-time mom. The spreadsheets showed that a part-time work schedule was affordable.

"It worked out that it was a financial hit, but we could do it," Fuentes said.

Before Lippmann decided to go part time, she and her husband looked at their previous year's savings, then calculated how much less they would be able to put away. They determined that on her reduced schedule they could still contribute something to their 401(k)s.

Vossler took what she called a significant pay cut for her job as an in-house counsel. But she also had additional day-care expenses for her second child, hoisting the bill from $16,000 to about $30,000 a year. She and her husband have been talking about cutting back on their 401(k) contributions to have a little more cash on hand.

The family is also sacrificing short-term goals, such as taking big vacations, to stay on pace with retirement savings. Instead of buying trendy luxuries, they apply their money to house renovations and do much of the work themselves.

"We're focusing ourselves to stay within a budget," she said. That means shopping at BJ's, buying on sale and going to consignment shows for children's clothes and toys.

Stretching a dollar wasn't new for Julia Gordon or her husband, which made it easier for her to start working part time as a public interest lawyer in the District. "I work in a really low-paid field as an attorney, and my husband doesn't make a very high salary, either," said Gordon, 44.

They are pros at budgeting and have been able to survive because they bought their house in 2001 (an easier market). They take inexpensive vacations, entertain at home, and drive 10-year-old cars that are fully paid for.

One thing they do spend on is a house-cleaner every two weeks. "I think of that as something we might have to spend on marriage counseling otherwise," Gordon said.

If you decide to cut back your hours, it doesn't mean your schedule is fixed for the remainder of your career.

My Sam is at that age when he's thrilled to see his babysitter walk in the door, and he squeals with delight when his 8-month-old friend, Charlotte, with whom he shares the nanny, shows up in the mornings. But this morning, for the first time, he cried and held his arms up as my husband and I said goodbye. My heart is in my throat just thinking about it. But for now, this schedule works for us. In a few years, the situation may be different.

"There's no perfect solution," Lippmann said. "When you have a baby, you kind of have to throw all of your preconceived notions of what you want out of your life out the window. . . . In terms of career, you don't know what your priorities will be until you're in it." She added that she was surprised at how much she wanted to be with her baby. "I take it one step at time. I feel like what I'm doing is trying not to worry about the long term and be happy right now."

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Do Your Homework, Then Visit the Principal
By Mary Ellen Slayter - Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; F05

For families with children, the quality of local schools is often a key factor in deciding which house to buy.

Buyers trying to determine if the schools in a neighborhood will meet their needs can find plenty of data on the Internet about standardized tests, but they shouldn't neglect the value of visits to the schools and old-fashioned word of mouth, real estate agents and education experts say.

If you're working with an agent, don't expect him to judge the schools for you.

"When my clients begin to ask questions about the quality of the school system, I try to be careful with labeling schools as 'good' or 'bad' that could be construed as code words to discourage certain groups of people from buying a home in a particular neighborhood, which is a violation of the Fair Housing Act," said Thomas Minetree, a real estate agent in Weichert's Gainesville office

Instead, Minetree, who works primarily in Fairfax and Prince William counties, refers clients to Weichert's Web site, which includes links to basic information about schools. Other brokerages' Web sites provide similar reports.

Andi Fleming, an agent with Long & Foster's Brookland office in the District, also directs home shoppers to the Web for more information, including the Web site for D.C. public schools ( http://www.k12.dc.us), the District's charter school system ( http://www.dcpubliccharter.com/home/index.html), and the Archdiocese of Washington, for Catholic schools ( http://www.adw.org/education/edu_schools.asp). Public school districts throughout the Washington area have similar Web sites.

Individual schools also often have Web sites, but their claims should be taken with a grain of salt, education experts say. "You never see any that says they have a rotten math department," said Georgia K. Irvin, an educational consultant in Chevy Chase and former director of admissions at Sidwell Friends, a private school in the District.

Besides, whether a school is "good" depends on more than test results, she said. One important factor is "appropriateness for their own child," said Irvin, author of "Georgia Irvin's Guide to Schools: Metropolitan Washington, Independent and Public/Pre-K-12." That includes the availability of nonacademic programs. "Some children need adequate outdoor space for a range of athletic options. Some need a relatively well-developed arts program. Some need very small classes."

You can find some of this information online, but none of this Web surfing is a substitute for visiting the schools, education experts say.

Call to make an appointment to tour the school and meet with the principal, said Karin Chenoweth, author of "It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools." "If the principal says 'no,' right there, that's a problem."

Such visits usually last a half hour to an hour. "You're not going to find out everything you want to know on a tour. You find out enough to know if you want to apply" if it's a private school, Irvin said.

What are you looking for? "Facilities should be safe and hospitable," Irvin said. Ask about security and disciplinary policies, as well as classroom arrangements and teaching styles, she said. Find out if the school has accommodation for children with special needs. Ask about homework expectations.

Other ways to meet staff and parents are to attend a PTA meeting, a back-to-school event or a spring fair, said Chenoweth, a former education columnist for The Washington Post. Attending such events can help you see if it's an "engaged school versus a dispirited school."

Talk to the neighbors, including by approaching people you see gardening, Chenoweth said. "But what you don't want to do is drive up, ask what school someone's kids go to, then sneer when they tell you."

If you know that you want a specific public school, real estate agents can help you find a home within that school's boundaries, by using that as a criterion as they search the multiple-listing service. But don't rely only on information from the sellers or their agent, Minetree said. Double-check the school boundaries with the school board.

Buyers should keep in mind that school districts aren't permanent. As populations shift, schools are built or closed, and boundaries may be redrawn.

Buyers in an area where the population of school-age children is booming or declining can ask school officials how they plan to deal with the long-term effects of those changes.

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The Future of Entitlements
A novel idea for an old problem: Force politicians to stop ducking.
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B06

THE FEDERAL budget is on an autopilot course to ruin. Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly. Meantime, there is almost no public discussion about the trade-offs involved: Would the money be better spent on education, homeland security, defense or infrastructure? Even before the baby boomers retire, more than four dollars out of every ten go to these programs; if health-care spending increases at the current rate, within 40 years Medicare and Medicaid alone will amount to as large a share of the economy as the entire federal budget comprises today.

Absent intervention, the country faces three unpalatable scenarios: running dangerously high deficits, squeezing spending on other vital needs or raising taxes to levels that could threaten economic growth.

Meanwhile, the easy-sounding fixes peddled by right and left are not going to solve the problem. Eliminating government waste, growing the economy, getting health-care costs under control, rolling back some or even all of the Bush tax cuts -- all of these are important elements of a solution, but the unpleasant fact is that the country has promised more than it is going to be able to deliver. No wonder you're not hearing much about this from the presidential candidates.

Last week an impressive and ideologically diverse collection of economists and budget experts proposed an intriguing mechanism for forcing lawmakers -- and the next president -- to focus on the problem. The group, whose members come from think tanks ranging from the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, would take Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid off autopilot growth and require lawmakers to set 30-year budgets. These would be reviewed every five years to determine whether the costs are set to remain within the allotted limits. If not, there would be automatic adjustments -- the experts' paper doesn't specify what those would be -- unless lawmakers acted to override this trigger.

This is not, and was not intended to be, a solution to the problem of runaway entitlement spending. The group, not surprisingly given its ideological scope, does not offer answers to the toughest questions: What should the spending levels be? What benefits should be cut, taxes raised or provider payments reduced? Rather, the paper offers a mechanism to force Congress and the president to face up to these difficult policy choices. There are legitimate worries about whether this mechanism would function as intended. Tax breaks, too, are on an automatic course; why not require that they be revisited as well? Would the trigger mechanism really work -- or would lawmakers just vote to waive the limits ?

These and other questions are worth debating with the serious people (they include three former Congressional Budget Office directors, two Democrats and one Republican) who worked for nearly two years on the proposal. As one of them, Alice M. Rivlin, said when the proposal was unveiled, "We're hoping to start a conversation. If you don't like our proposal, tell us what you think should be done -- because continuing the status quo is simply not an option."

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Three Kids? You Showoffs.
By Pamela Paul
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B02

My husband and I are getting ready to do what many couples in these brink-of-recessionary times would consider unthinkable. No, we're not buying a Martha's Vineyard retreat or planning a month in St. Bart's or eco-decorating our house.

We're planning to have a third child.

What shocks people, when we tell them, isn't the thought of hauling three kids onto a place for a vacation, or even the idea of coming home every night to a houseful of runny noses and homework assignments. What gets them is the sheer financial audacity. Raising kids today costs a fortune. Last month, the Department of Agriculture estimated that each American child costs an average of $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18.

But to me, a family with just two kids seems minimalist, and even a bit sad. Back in the 1970s, when my husband and I were born, sprawling families were more common. My husband had two sisters and, following a Brady-Bunchy set of remarriages in my family, I wound up with seven brothers, real and step. I've always fantasized about creating a "Meet Me in St. Louis"-style household of my own, with children constantly underfoot and enough relatives around to skip to my lou en masse.

And yet nowadays, people seem aghast if a couple wants more than two children. When Elana Sigall, a 43-year-old attorney in Brooklyn, was pregnant with her third, people came up to her constantly, she said, to admonish her: "You've got a boy and a girl already. Why don't you just leave it alone?"

What's worse, the desire to have another child opens one up to charges of elitism and status consciousness. In many major U.S. cities and their suburbs -- especially New York, where I live -- having three or more children has now come to seem like an ostentatious display of good fortune, akin to owning a pied-Ã -terre in Paris. The family of five has become "deluxe." Last year, novelist Molly Jong-Fast mused in the New York Observer, "Are people having four or five children just because they can? Because they feel that it shows their wealth and status? In a world where the young rich use their $13,000 Birkin bags as diaper bags, one has to wonder."

We not only wonder, we marvel, we get jealous, we gawk. "Having three kids in the city is a way of showing off, absolutely," says Elisabeth Egan, who, like many families she knows, moved out of New York to the suburbs of Montclair, N.J., to manage the feat. "A third child in the city is definitely a luxury good."

It's true that, following in the designer maternity clothes of such fecund celebrities as Posh Spice (three kids) and Angelina Jolie (speculatively six), most of the people going for a third baby are well-heeled moms and their high-salaried husbands. A February analysis of Current Population Survey data by the Council on Contemporary Families found that in the past 10 years, the top-earning 1.3 percent of the population has seen an uptick in families with three or more children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 12 percent of upper-income women had three children or more in 2002, compared with only 3 percent in 1995.

There's no question that it takes a lot more money to bring up baby nowadays. Many parents would scoff at the Agriculture Department's humble figures. When you get into the nitty-gritty, the price of kids feels more like a million dollars a pop.

Consider raising a single "luxury" child. By luxury, mind you, we're not necessarily talking hedge-fund rich, merely able to afford and "raise right." And the pressure to do that, even if you're not uber-wealthy, has become overwhelming. From the moment the heartbeat blinks across the sonogram screen, Big Baby starts in with its pleading and conniving: I'm your child! How can you spare any expense? Don't you care?

For a couple's every conceivable wish or worry, the parenting industry knows the precise formula of guilt, fear, hope, love and desire that will empty the parental wallet. Rather than fret about spending too much money, most parents these days are consumed by the anxiety of underspending -- the fear that somewhere, some other parent is offering her baby an educational toy or child-development class that will propel the toddler ahead, and that if you skimp, your child risks losing out and falling behind.

So parents quickly adjust to the demanding realities of the child-rearing industry. Baby showers have replaced bridal showers as the blowout du jour; American women today have an average of three. The accompanying baby registries have mushroomed into a $240 million business, according to research firm Mintel International Group. Between diapers and bouncy seats, parents can count on spending at least $6,500 on the first year of baby gear alone. "You walk into Babies R Us, and you're just overwhelmed," recalls Brooke Houghton, a 35-year-old mom from Chicago who said she ran out of the store in panic after 15 minutes. "There was just so much equipment I hadn't even considered."

Once a new mom's maternity leave (if she's lucky enough to get it) is up, a nanny or quality day care is in order. In upscale urban areas and tony suburban enclaves, where luxury families are flourishing, that can translate to $800 a week for child care alone. So-called high-end nannies -- those who hail from licensed agencies and come equipped with working papers and even driver's licenses -- can cost more than $50,000 a year on the books. And to think, some deluxe families hire two. After all, how can one nanny juggle a set of twin infants and a 3-year-old, or ferry three kids under 6 to their various play dates, preschool programs and lessons?

For parents who both work full-time -- or those otherwise occupied with family, charitable and social obligations -- child care doesn't end when the children enter school. If you calculate nanny pay on top of $26,000 annual private school tuition (eventually multiplied by three), you're talking $140,000 just to keep your children safe and reasonably occupied while the sun's up. Once children are a bit older, there's the battery of ballet, piano, squash (offbeat sports viewed as an inroad to Harvard), and the vehicles needed to get there. Hyper-vigilant child safety laws mean that up to the age of 7, children are boxed into full-size or booster car seats. Try jamming three of those into the back seat of a compact car.

Most families simply can't afford all this. And surely it can't all be necessary. Didn't Benjamin Franklin grow up to be a statesman, inventor, printer, author and political theorist without having his vision enhanced by a Stim-Mobile or his sense of spatial relations improved by Baby Einstein Numbers? Somehow young Ben managed to thrive and prosper even though the Teddy bear had yet to be invented.

Today's American children, by contrast, get an average of 70 new toys a year, yet child development experts agree that the best toys are simple playthings such as blocks, balls and figurines that a child can play with over and over, in new ways. When I was growing up, a sticker was something precious that a stationery store owner would carefully cut off a roll and sell for 25 cents. Today, a made-in-China jumbo book of 600 stickers can be bought at CVS for $6.99. Something has been lost in this ostensibly positive development.

Far from inducing feelings of inadequacy, saying no to the parenting consumer culture should make parents feel all the wiser. And conversely, no one should have to feel that they should refrain from having a child for fear of being accused of snobbery.

Since her own pokes at deluxe families last year, Molly Jong-Fast has become a mother of three herself, having recently given birth to twins. "I don't blame people for having more, if they can," she told me. "If we had unlimited resources, I think we'd have more children, too."

As for my husband and me, we hardly have unlimited resources, but we're still planning to go forth and multiply in the big city. The way we figure it, one day our children will be grateful for what we didn't give them -- and what we did for them instead.

Some may call this rationalization or flat-out denial. Perhaps we mere mortals of the upper middle class, preparing to haul out the bassinet and the Exersaucer for a third go-round, should question our sanity. But we're banking on proving the naysayers wrong.

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The Loneliest Call - In the end, only the candidate can know when it's time to fold 'em.
By John Dickerson
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B01

At some point in the next weeks or months,either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama is going to face a lonely moment. Standing at the bathroom sink with a toothbrush, or huddling with aides at campaign headquarters or collapsed on a couch at home with his or her spouse, one of them will decide that it's over.

This will happen -- honest. The campaign may seem interminable, but at some point, it's going to end. The voters will cast ballots and the superdelegates will scheme, but for Clinton (or, less likely for the moment, Obama), the contest will come down to this simple, stark moment of recognition.

But how does it happen? How does a presidential candidate decide to switch off his or her frantic determination to win every news cycle, shake every hand and rebut every charge, and instead end a quest that for many candidates has been the driving force of their adult lives? "Nobody can make the decision except you," says Tony Coelho, who managed the early portion of Vice President Al Gore's campaign in 2000 and was a confidant to Rep. Richard Gephardt during his 1988 run."And you have to make the decision in a way that you don't second guess yourself the rest of your life."

Heaven help the staffer who tries to get in front of a candidate who isn't ready to get out of the race. "They know that the second they start thinking they're not going to win, they crack," says Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, who also worked on Gephardt's 1988 race. After Gephardt's disastrous Super Tuesday showing, Trippi says he broached the idea of throwing in the towel wit h the former House majority leader and got a stir ring rebuke. "I'm not getting out until they cut my head off and hand it to me," Trippi remembers Gephardt roaring. Trippi adds: "His neck was red, and you could see the veins."

Usually, candidates get ushered to the threshold of departure: The voters spurn them, the media stop covering them, and they run out of money. "It's like the seven stages of denial at hyper-speed," says Mary Matalin, a veteran GOP operative who advised former senator Fred Thompson (remember him?) this time around. In 1996, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) spent record sums only to place fifth in the Iowa caucuses; he still had cash aplenty in the bank, but the voters clearly just didn't want him, so he folded up shop. In 1976, when former senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma ran for the Democratic nomination, his campaign plane was full of reporters -- until he lost Iowa and New Hampshire. "Hell, I had 'em with me one day, and the next day I didn't," he says of the press. "That's how you know."

The biggest blow for any candidate, though, is the day the money disappears. "What gets them out is not that lightning strikes," says Bob Beckel, who managed Vice President Walter F. Mondale's 1984 campaign, "but when their treasurer arrives and says, 'We're a million bucks in debt.' " In conversations with campaign veterans and candidates, the scene they paint is always the same: stern men in shirtsleeves in a drab hotel room, talking about the hard numbers and the folly of plunging into deep personal debt.

Clinton won't experience that quick death. She has the money, votes and media attention to continue until the convention. (So does Obama, for that matter, if he were suddenly to become the underdog.) Undecided superdelegates could rally to her, but this doesn't look likely to happen anytime soon. The voters could show an overwhelming preference in the remaining 10 contests or deliver a big upset in a single, crucial one, but they've been no help so far in bringing the race to a close. "I don't think it's going to be a 3 a.m. phone call," says the Democratic stalwart Robert Shrum of the final moment that will persuade one of the candidates to get out of the race. "I think it will gradually dawn."

The Obama forces tried to bring on the early dawn for Clinton, and it backfired. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) suggested recently that superdelegates should embrace Obama as the nominee before the primary voting ended. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) went further last weekend, saying that Clinton should drop out of the race immediately because she can never overcome Obama's lead among elected delegates.

But if Clinton had even been flirting with leaving the race, her male colleagues gave her fine reasons not to. A ruling from a few white-haired white men from the most exclusive club in America was just what Clinton needed to energize her supporters, many of whom see deep sexism in the calls for her to drop out. Supporters now show up at Clinton rallies with signs that read, "Don't Quit." Clinton sent out two different fundraising appeals using the calls for her exit to help raise money. "They couldn't have done anything more helpful to her," says James Carville, the Clintons' resident janissary.

All presidential candidates are ambitious, of course, but the decision to throw in the towel goes beyond one person's personal desires. Candidates keenly feel the weight of disappointing all those people at the rope lines and in the living rooms who have told them they're pulling for them. "A lot of people invested time and money and effort into my campaign when I ran," says Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 1996 and 2000. "One of my feelings was that I let them down. I haven't done as well as I should have."

Candidates who think that they're fighting for a cause, such as Teddy Kennedy in 1980 and Ronald Reagan in 1976, won't get out of the race early because they are convinced that they're fighting for bedrock principles -- the very principles that attracted them to politics! -- and not their private ambitions. Clinton has been promising voters that she'll fight for them; with her own struggle to survive, she has won (as it were) the chance to show people just what kind of fighter she is. So it was probably inevitable that, in Philadelphia last Tuesday, she would compare herself to the town's fictional boxing hero: "Could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten half-way up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough?' Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up."

So call it the Rocky syndrome -- the just-before-the-end affliction that strikes losing candidates. They all go through a punchy period in which, no matter what the odds, they come to believe that they can pull out a victory with a roundhouse before the final bell. "You can convince yourself of anything," says Beckel. "I was convinced with a couple more weeks that Mondale could have beat Reagan. How nuts is that?"

To make matters harder, there are plenty of real-life political comebacks that candidates can act out in their hotel rooms at night to comfort themselves. Remember that "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline, they can tell themselves. John F. Kerry pulled out his doomed 2004 campaign with a surprise win over Howard Dean in Iowa. Ronald Reagan looked as though he was in deep trouble when he fired his campaign manager late in his 1980 campaign. Sen. John McCain, left for dead last year, may be one of the best Lazarus stories of all. And there may yet be one more. "If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination," says Trippi, "no candidate will ever want to get out."

Perhaps the greatest impediment to clear thinking for a doomed candidate is simply that endurance in the face of doom is a key political trait -- probably one crucial to the candidate's success in life so far. Toughness and endurance were, in fact, the only ideas the McCain team had left during its bleakest period. "I have a very complicated strategy for you," adviser Charles Black says he told McCain as they tried to decide whether the senator could keep going after his staff, money and lead in the polls had all disappeared. "Stay in the race until you're the last man standing."

For Clinton, who has endured smears, sneers, calls for her head and a thousand editorial cartoons, this armor has sustained her throughout her career. "If you have scar tissue, then you know what it's like to be beat up, and you can go through it rather easily," says Coelho. "There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton has scar tissue, which makes her immune to many of the attacks coming her way. When people call for her to get out, they are not appealing to her intellect; they are appealing to her scar tissue, and for her that means, fight on."

Candidates without a thick hide often grow one simply by going through the brutal campaign process. To have any success at all, they must become immune to the very forces that ultimately might signal that they need to drop out. Once they've bought into the process, the end-stage indignities -- audiences of only a few dozen, the disappearance of your once-chummy campaign surrogates -- are hard to recognize.

In the end, Clinton (or perhaps Obama) will likely call it quits when she (or he) decides, in a dark night of the soul, that continuing will permanently harm her (or his) political future. Then they will begin the long process of comforting disappointed supporters, watching the cameras disappear and hearing the endless analyses of their political demise. They will feel, in some ways, as though they're attending their own wake. Then perhaps they'll have another solitary realization: The way they handle their exit from one presidential campaign might be the first step in building the case for the next one.