Month: May 2019

The annual World Series of Poker opened Tuesday in Las Vegas with dozens of scheduled card tournaments and a special event to celebrate the 50th run of a series known for minting millionaires each year. 

The seven-week poker festival is expected to again draw tens of thousands of players seeking a piece of a projected combined prize pool of more than $200 million. Buy-ins for the series’ 89 championship events range from $400 to $100,000. 

To celebrate the milestone, owner Caesars Interactive Entertainment has scheduled an awards ceremony and a $500 buy-in, rake-free tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $5 million. The company is allowing fans and others to choose some of the players who will be recognized at the ceremony. 

“It’s absolutely a way to make them a part of it,” tournament spokesman Seth Palansky said. “The 50th year was a good time to reflect back on sort of where we’ve come both in poker and the World Series of Poker, but we wanted the fans and the players to decide what moments from our 50 years stood out to them.”

People can vote on seven categories, including fan favorite player, the series’ “favorite bad boy” and the four most important players in the tournament’s history. A panel will also put together a list of the 50 greatest poker players. 

Casino owner Benny Binion started the series in 1970 as an invitation-only event. Johnny Moss was declared the winner by the other men at the table and was given a trophy. 

Poker’s popularity in the U.S. erupted in 2003, when Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker entered a $39 online poker satellite contest, won an entry to the series’ famed no-limit Texas Hold `em main event and emerged victorious, winning $2.5 million and inspiring other amateur players. 

The series this year will run through July 16 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, west of the Las Vegas Strip. Champions go home richer and with gold bracelets.

The tournament saw a record 123,865 entrants in 2018. The prize pool of over $266 million was divided among 18,105 participants. Twenty-eight of them earned at least $1 million.

Palansky said the tournament keeps going strong because organizers have been open to changes and feedback from players.

“Poker is a unique game. We are just the operator — we deal the cards, we provide the chips and the setup — but they play amongst each other. It’s a peer-to-peer game,” he said. “So, ultimately, the WSOP, we look at it as sort of in the trust of the players, and it’s our job to just listen to their feedback and provide the schedule that meets their needs and demands.”

The tournament’s famed main event starts July 3 with players staking $10,000 to buy in. ESPN and PokerGO will again provide live coverage.

Indianapolis resident John Cynn won the main event last year after playing more than 440 hands at the final table. His cut of the prize pool was $8.8 million.

  
…

David Byrd contributed to this report

The founder of the Smithsonian Institution’s newest museum, which focuses on African-American history, has been selected to lead the institution’s entire system of museums and parks.

Tuesday, the Smithsonian Board of Regents appointed Lonnie Bunch as its 14th secretary, becoming the museum’s first African-American leader in its 173-year history.

The 66-year-old Bunch will guide the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, overseeing a $1.5 billion annual budget that helps fund 19 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo.

Bunch told the Associated Press that he is humbled and excited at taking over as Secretary.

“It is humbling, exciting.  It is something that had never crossed my mind to do,” he said. ” But it also makes me feel good because I get to give back to the institution I care the most about – the Smithsonian.”

Board of Regents chairman David Rubenstein said Bunch’s experience at three museums, reputation and fundraising skills separated him from other candidates.

However, Bunch says he was still surprised to get the Secretary’s job.

“I wasn’t even sure, when they ask you to go for this job, that they’d hire someone like me, that they’d hire an insider, they’d hire a curator.  They’d hire a historian,” he said. 

The appointment comes less than three years after the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

As its first director, Bunch oversaw an 11 year effort to collect more than 40,000 items before the museum opened on the National Mall in 2016. 

The museum immediately became one of Washington’s most popular attractions, drawing more than four million people in its first two and one-half-years.

The new Secretary says he does not want people to think of the Smithsonian as only looking at the past.  He wants the public to see it as suited to serving a 21st-century audience.

“And so in a way, this is also a wonderful day for the Smithsonian to sort of say it’s a place that embraces all of what America is and is comfortable with diversity of leadership and vision. So for me, this is less about a triumph for me and more about the Smithsonian recognizing what it takes to lead in the 21st Century,” he said. 

George Mason University history professor Spencer Crew will serve as the NMAAHC’s interim director.

Lonnie Bunch will assume his new duties on June 16.
…

The lawyer for a woman who filed a rape complaint in Paris against Chris Brown says the American singer-songwriter “has thumbed his nose at and shown disrespect for the French legal system” after he did not attend a formal meeting with the alleged victim on Tuesday.

Brown was arrested in January then released from custody without charge pending further investigation of the woman’s allegations that he and two other men raped her at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris. The Grammy winner called the accusation false.

“His failure to appear today is very unfair to my client, but I assure him that my client will not be deterred from seeking justice,” said American lawyer Gloria Allred, who traveled to Paris judicial police’s headquarters to assist her client at the meeting, which in France is called a confrontation.

The woman’s French lawyer, Jean-Marc Descoubes, said Brown was not legally obliged to attend the meeting. The two other suspects, both American, did not attend the meeting either, Descoubes said, adding he expects another date to be set.

“If he doesn’t show up a second time we will have to either ask for the preliminary investigation to be closed (to allow for an investigative judge take over the procedure) because we just can’t keep going like this. Or we will ask the prosecutor to put in place more coercive measures, a warrant to get him to come because the confrontation requested by our client is key to this case – a sexual abuse case,” he said.

Brown’s French lawyer, Raphael Chiche, did not immediately answer an email from The Associated Press seeking comment.

French police detained Brown and the two others in January on potential charges of aggravated rape and drug infractions. The Paris prosecutor’s office said at the time the investigation hasn’t been closed, but Brown was free to leave the country while it continued.

Allred said Brown “has betrayed the trust of the criminal justice authorities who allowed him to leave France expecting that he would honor his promise to attend the confrontation.”

The AP does not typically identify people alleging sexual assault unless they agree to be named or come forward publicly. Descoubes told the AP his client does not want to be identified.

Brown burst onto the music scene as a teenager and won a Grammy Award in 2011 for best R&B album for “F.A.M.E.”  He has had continued legal troubles since he pleaded guilty to the felony assault in 2009 of his then-girlfriend, Rihanna.
…

Kasey Turcol has just 75 minutes to explain to her high school students the importance of D-Day — and if this wasn’t the 75th anniversary of the turning point in World War II, she wouldn’t devote that much time to it.

D-Day is not part of the required curriculum in North Carolina — or in many other states.

Turcol reminds her students at Crossroads FLEX High School in Cary that D-Day was an Allied victory that saved Europe from Nazi tyranny and that the young men who fought and died were barely older than they are. She sprinkles her lesson with details about the number of men, ships and planes involved in the landing at Normandy while adding a few lesser-known facts about a Spanish spy and a deadly military practice conducted six months earlier in England.

Losing resonance

In the U.S. and other countries affected by the events on June 6, 1944, historians and educators worry that the World War II milestone is losing its resonance with today’s students.

In France, which was liberated from German occupation, D-Day isn’t a stand-alone topic in schools. German schools concentrate on the Holocaust and the Nazi dictatorship. And despite having been part of the Allied powers, in Russia, the schools avoid D-Day because they believe it was the victories on the Eastern Front that won the war.

“History has taken a back seat” in the U.S. because of the focus on science and math classes, said Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day in College Park, Md. 

In the U.S., teaching about World War II varies from state to state. It’s often up to the teachers to decide how much time they want to give to individual battles like D-Day.

California framework

California’s History-Social Science Framework, adopted in 2016, includes for sophomores an expansive unit on World War II that covers how the conflict was “a total war,” the goals of the Allied and Axis powers and how the fighting was fought on different fronts. The unit also includes a section on the Holocaust. 

In New York, school officials are using the D-Day anniversary to review the curriculum and “make recommendations on how the current average time of 90 minutes of World War II study in a school year can be strengthened, expanded and mandated.” 

There are special programs available to immerse select students in the history of D-Day. 

For eight years, National History Day sent 15 pairs of students and teachers to Normandy to immerse them in the history of D-Day. The high school sophomores and juniors would research individual soldiers close to them — relatives or people from their hometowns — who died. On the last day, the group visited a cemetery where each student read a eulogy for his or her individual soldier. 

Teachers also have outside resources. The National World War II Museum offers an electronic field trip through D-Day and provides suggested lessons plans.

In North Carolina, history is taught through “conceptual design” with connections to themes such as geography, economics and politics, said Meghan Grant, coordinating teacher for secondary social studies in Wake County schools.  

The lessons are based on a method of teaching social studies that was developed in 2013 and used by about half the states, said Larry Paska, executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies. Paska said it may focus on asking students a question like, “What makes an event a turning point in the war?” Students then will use difference sources of evidence to back up their answers.

‘This is the moment’

As part of her D-Day lesson, Turcol tells her class of juniors and seniors that the Germans thought an attack from the Allied forces wouldn’t be possible.  

“It’s too stormy. It’s too risky,” she said. “And what do we do? Yeah, we find a glimmer of hope. On June 5th, the skies kind of clear. The moon kind of shines. And we’re like, ‘This is the moment. This is what is happening.’ ”

She tells students that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower kept D-Day plans on the “down low.”  

Turcol plays a few minutes of a documentary about D-Day to “show you the true humanity of the war,” she says.  

“You saw the German praying … asking for his mother, father, asking for this to be over. Not everybody is on the same message in Germany,” she says. “Everybody here is a father, a mother, a brother, a cousin, a friend. So every life matters.”

Students in Europe also receive dramatically different lessons on D-Day depending on where they live.

Because of Germany’s history, any hint of militarism remains a taboo. While battles like D-Day, Stalingrad and the Operation Barbarossa invasion of Russia might be mentioned briefly in schools, they tend to be lumped together in broad overviews of the war. Individual teachers do have leeway, however, to pursue topics that capture the attention of students. 

The curriculum is similar from state to state. In Berlin high schools, for example, curriculum guidelines include the history of the war under the overall focus on “the collapse of the first German democracy; Nazi tyranny,” which includes classes on Nazi ideology, resistance movements, the Holocaust and World War II.

Similarly, Bavaria’s ninth-grade curriculum focuses primarily on explaining how the Nazis came to power and their anti-Semitic ideology and genocidal policies, with the war taught briefly as part of their “expansion and conquest policies.”  In the 11th grade, the focus is even more directly on the Holocaust, and the curriculum guidelines note specific dates to be learned, including the anti-Jewish “Kristallnacht” pogrom in 1938.

The Russian narrative on D-Day has remained almost unchanged since the days of the Soviet Union. Historians and schoolbooks describe the invasion as a long-awaited move, happening after the course of WWII had already been shaped by Soviet victories in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.

Even in the country where D-Day occurred, the assault doesn’t have a central place in the teaching of World War II. The history of 20th century conflict is taught in France as a theme and no longer as a chronological list of major battles.

A week of lessons ‘not possible’

“We no longer teach as we did before, what we called ‘the history of battles,’ ” says Christine Guimonnet, who teaches history at a high school west of Paris and is secretary-general of the APHG, a French association of history and geography teachers. “Everyone will, of course, speak about June 6 because it was a major moment in the war, but we’re not going to spend a whole week on it. That’s not possible.” 

As long as they are still teaching the broader themes, French teachers may home in on specific events, like D-Day, to organize study projects and, if they have the budget, trips to Normandy beaches, museums or screenings of The Longest Day, a 1962 film about the events of D-Day. 

As cultural director at Normandy’s Caen Memorial, Isabelle Bournier deals daily with school groups that tour the museum. French children often aren’t familiar with the details of D-Day, partially because fewer families have relatives who lived through the war and can pass on their stories, she said.

Students from Normandy are different from the broader French student population, she said.

“All families are more or less impregnated by this history. It is part of us,” Bournier said. 
…

On stage, amid the hubbub of a Bolivian street market, women recount their stories of abuse at the hands of men.

But the violence depicted in the play isn’t just make-believe for the 22 indigenous actresses: It’s based on their own real-life experiences.

“Kusisita,” a work that seeks to raise awareness about violence against women and mobilize people to fight it, has been drawing large audiences in Bolivia, which has one of South America’s highest rates of femicides.

In the theater, Maria Luque portrays a woman who asks her drunken husband to stop abusing her. In her own history, she said, she was so brutally beaten by the father of her four children that she was left partly paralyzed. Even after more than a decade, she still has trouble moving some of the muscles in her face. 

“I’ve suffered discrimination since birth,” she told The Associated Press. “My mom was very poor and she escaped violence. For some, (violence) might be normal, but we want to show that it shouldn’t be that way.”

“Kusisita” is one of two plays offered by the Kory Warmis – Women of Gold in the Aymara language – troupe, and both focus on the problems of gender violence and convincing women to reject it.

“I was quiet, submissive, but I left that behind on stage. Theater is now my life,” said Luque, 56, who immigrated to the city of El Alto from a rural community in search of work opportunities. 

The plays, presented in Aymara, are also aimed at indigenous communities where nearly half of all reports of gender-based violence takes place, according to 2017 figures from the National Statistics Institute. Those communities make up roughly a fifth of Bolivia’s population.

​About 40% of the country’s police cases involve family violence and alcohol is involved in 90% of cases, according to a government report last year on gender-based violence.

“It’s a very high and alarming rate,” said government minister Carlos Romero, who helped write the report.

Actress Gumercinda Mamani, an artisan and shepherd , recalled how the body of a friend was found on the outskirts of La Paz with marks from a rope that her partner had used to choke her.

“It’s hard to understand how the man that you give your life to is the one who takes it away,” said Mamani, a former representative for female farmers. “I’m fighting against this.”

Carmen Aranibar, another actress, joined the group in the hopes that her story would encourage other women to leave abusive relationships.

“We can’t wait until they kill us or we want to take our own lives out of the desperation caused by violence,” said Aranibar, a mother of two boys who sells diapers for a living.

She said she endured beatings by her partner for more than 10 years before finding out that he was cheating on her with a younger woman. 

“I nearly killed myself,” she said. “I put up with everything he did because I was afraid that he’d leave me. But then I realized that it wasn’t worth it and I left him. I’m happy here and that’s what I tell in the play.”

The theater group, which was founded in 2014, finds itself gaining an audience as waves of women mobilize to fight gender violence across the world. In neighboring Argentina, a grassroots movement known as “Ni Una Menos,” or Not One Less, emerged in 2015 and drew thousands to hold massive demonstrations in support of women’s rights. But while movements in Bolivia have lacked the impact of Ni Una Menos or the (hash)MeToo movement in the United States, some say the plays have had impact.

“It’s a success, 100% percent,” said Paola Ricalde of the La Paz mayorship’s directorate for equality policies. 

Theater group director Erika Andia said it’s challenging to oversee a group of women who have been forced to be silent and submissive. But she said that their strength of will helped them achieve their goal of “discovering what they’re capable of, helping them loosen up and boost their confidence.”

“We never thought we’d reach so far,” Andia said. “There are no limits to what we do. Every year we continue to grow and there’s happiness after all the pain that our actresses have suffered.”
…

Simon Pagenaud arrived at Indianapolis Motor Speedway this month with his job on the line and rumors swirling around Gasoline Alley that Alexander Rossi could soon replace him at Team Penske.

The Frenchman is leaving with a pair of wins, his face soon to be engraved on the Borg-Warner trophy as the Indianapolis 500 champion and an assurance from Roger Penske himself that he isn’t going anywhere.

“Do I even have to answer that?” Penske asked. “Absolutely.”

In a head-to-head duel for the ages, Pagenaud defeated none other than Rossi with a dramatic pass on the penultimate lap, then holding on the rest of the way to hand Penske his 18th win in “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” Even sweeter, it came the 50th anniversary of Penske’s arrival at the Brickyard.

Pagenaud and Rossi swapped the lead five times over the final 13 laps, and the margin of victory was a mere 0.2086 seconds — the seventh-closest finish in the 103 years of the race.

“It’s a dream come true. A lifetime trying to achieve this,” said Pagenaud, who dismissed the thought over job security as he celebrated his first Indy 500 win. “The milk motivated me. I was just focused on the job, man.”

Pagenaud was dominant all day, leading 116 of the 200 laps, and the win was cathartic. He stopped his car at the start-finish line and hopped out to share the moment with his fans. And once he finally made his way to victory lane, Pagenaud climbed from his car and let out a primal scream, then dumped the entire bottle of milk over his head. 

“I never expected to be in this position,” Pagenaud said, “and I certainly am grateful.”

President Donald Trump phoned Penske in victory lane from Japan, where he was meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over trade. Penske passed the phone to Pagenaud, and Trump later tweeted an invite to the White House for the winning team.

Penske, who was there earlier with Joey Logano last month to celebrate last year’s NASCAR Cup Series championship, said Trump told him: “I must have been your good-luck charm.”

Penske now has two consecutive Indy 500 victories — Will Power won last year — for the first time since 2002-03. It was his third win in the crown jewel race in the past five years and fifth in the past 14.

​It was a banner day, too, with Josef Newgarden finishing fourth and Power in fifth.

Rossi lost his cool several times in the race, but the Californian had better fuel mileage than Pagenaud and the Penske cars. The 2016 race winner twice charged to the front in the closing laps.

“Horsepower. That’s unfortunately the way it is,” said Rossi, who was in a Honda for Andretti Autosport. “I think we had the superior car. We just didn’t have enough there at the end.”

Pagenaud was in a Chevrolet, and the bowtie brand was the dominant engine all May. It swept the top four spots in qualifying, won the race and took four of the top six spots.

Pagenaud is the first Frenchman to win the Indy 500 since Rene Thomas in 1914. Indianapolis records count five French winners, but Gil de Ferran in 2003 and Gaston Chevrolet in 1920, while born in France, list other nationalities. Pagenaud was the 21st winner form the pole and first since Helio Castroneves a decade ago.

As he began the traditional victory lap in the back of a convertible, Rossi was one of many drivers to walk onto the track to congratulate him. The American leaned in for a genuine embrace.

“Nothing else matters but winning,” Rossi said. “This one will be hard to get over.”

Rossi, who drove from the back to finish fourth a year ago, had been patient through the first half of the race and set himself up to take control after the halfway point. But a troublesome fuel hose on a pit stop caused a lengthy delay, and Rossi was angrily pounding his steering wheel while imploring the Andretti crew to get him back on track.

He really lost his cool when he couldn’t get past the lapped car of Oriol Servia. As Rossi finally raced by, he angrily raised his fist at the Spaniard. A late wreck then caused an 18-minute stoppage with Rossi set to restart the final sprint as the leader, and he conveyed his mood over his team radio.

“A bunch of hungry, angry cars behind me,” Rossi said. “Little do they know I’m angrier.”

Pagenaud got him on the restart, though, and the two went back and forth four more times before Pagenaud locked down the win. Former champion Takuma Sato finished third as he and Rossi gave Honda two spots on the podium. Santino Ferrucci in seventh was the highest finishing rookie.

Attention had been heavy on rookie Colton Herta, but the 19-year-old driver for team owners Mike Harding and George Steinbrenner IV was the first driver out of the race when his gearbox broke.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials had prepared for rain, and perhaps even a postponement, in NBC’s debut as broadcaster. But it was a bright, sunny day — a picture-perfect showcase for Pagenaud to triumph on Memorial Day weekend. 
…

North America, as the world knows it today, would likely look different without their efforts. Woodsmen logged forests, producing essential lumber and firewood, while also clearing farmland. They grew to be called lumberjacks, and at a recent competition in Sweden, a champion emerged a cut above the rest. Arash Arabasadi reports.
…

Most kids love digging in the sand … and many never outgrow that. A new and unusual attraction nicknamed “sand box for grown-ups” is a big hit among teenagers and adults in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s a heavy equipment playground that gives customers a change to operate gigantic, earth-moving bulldozers and hydraulic excavators, get tested on their skills and just have fun. Roman Mamonov tried his hand at operating some of the biggest construction vehicles there. Anna Rice narrates his story.
…

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s social satire Parasite, about a poor family of hustlers who find jobs with a wealthy family, won the Cannes Film Festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or, on Saturday.  

  

Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme. In the festival’s closing ceremony, jury president Alejandro Inarritu said the choice was “unanimous” for the nine-person jury.  

  

The genre-mixing film had arguably been celebrated more than others at Cannes this year, hailed by critics as the best yet from the 49-year-old director of Snowpiercer and Okja.  

  

It was the second straight Palme victory for an Asian director. Last year, the award went to Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, a film also about an impoverished family. 

 

“We shared the mystery of the unexpected way this film took us through different genres, speaking in a funny, humorous and tender way of no judgment of something so relevant and urgent and so global,” Inarritu told reporters after the ceremony.  

  

Many of the awards at Cannes on Saturday were given to social and political tales that depicted geopolitical dramas in localized stories, from African shores to Paris suburbs.    

The festival’s second-place award, the Grand Prix, went to French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s feature-film debut, Atlantics. The film by Diop, the first black female director ever in competition in Cannes, views the migrant crisis from the perspective of Senegalese women left behind after many young men flee by sea to Spain. 

Sciamma’s period romance

  

Although few quibbled with the choice of Bong, some had expected Cannes to make history by giving the Palme to a female filmmaker for just the second time. Celine Sciamma’s period romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the Palme pick for many critics this year. Instead, Sciamma ended up with best screenplay.  

  

In the festival’s 72-year history, only Jane Champion has won the prize. In 1993, her The Piano tied with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine.  

  

Best actor went to Antonio Banderas for Pedro Almodovar’s reflective drama Pain and Glory. In the film, one of the most broadly acclaimed of the festival, Banderas plays a fictionalized version of Almodovar looking back on his life and career.  

  

“The best is still to come,” said Banderas, accepting the award.  

  

The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have already twice won the Palme d’Or, took the best director prize for Young Ahmed, their portrait of a Muslim teenager who becomes radicalized by a fundamentalist imam. 

 

The jury prize, or third place, was split between two socially conscious thrillers: French director Ladj Ly’s feature-film debut Les Miserables and Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Bacurau.  

  

Ly called his film an alarm bell about youths living in the housing projects of Paris’ suburbs. Filho viewed his feverish, violent Western about a rural Brazilian community defending itself from a hard-to-comprehend invasion as a reflection of President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.    

British actress Emily Beecham won best actress for her performance in Jessica Hausner’s science-fiction drama Little Joe. The jury also gave a special mention to Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven. 

  

The Camera d’Or, an award given for best first feature from across all of Cannes’ sections, went to Cesar Diaz’s Our Mothers, a drama about the Guatemalan civil war in the 1980s.  

  

The ceremony Saturday brought to a close a Cannes Film Festival that was riven with concerns for its own relevancy. It had to contend, most formidably, with the cultural television force of Game of Thrones. The continuing rise of streaming was also a constant subject around the festival.  

Netflix controversy

  

Two years ago, Bong was in Cannes’ competition with Okja, a movie distributed in North America by Netflix. After it and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories — another Netflix release — premiered at Cannes, the festival ruled that all future films in competition needed French theatrical distribution. Netflix has since withdrawn from the festival on the French Riviera. 

 

This year, bowing to pressure from 5050×2020, the French version of Time’s Up, the festival released gender breakdowns of its submissions and selections. Cannes said about 27% of its official selections were directed by women. The 21-film main slate included four films directed by women, which tied the festival’s previous high.  

  

The 72nd Cannes had its share of red-carpet dazzle, too. Elton John brought his biopic Rocketman to the festival, joining star Taron Egerton for a beachside duet after the premiere. And Quentin Tarantino unveiled his 1960s Los Angeles tale Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, 25 years after the director’s Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or.  

  

Tarantino, who attended the closing ceremony, didn’t go home empty-handed. On Friday, a prominent pooch in his film won the annual Palme Dog, an award given by critics to Cannes’ best canine.
…

In the United States, the last Monday in May is Memorial Day, a holiday that honors people who died in military service during wartime.

The end of May also marks the beginning of a less serious kind of war. It is one many living Americans fight each summer. It is a battle for – and about – the perfect lawn. That’s right, the lawn: the grass around most American houses.

Virginia Scott Jenkins is an expert on Americans’ extreme interest in lawns. In fact, in her book on the issue, she calls it an “obsession.”

She says that, in the minds of many Americans, the perfect lawn looks like a soft, green carpet. “One height, one color, one type of grass, one consistency.”

Many Americans believe such a lawn does more than make a house or neighborhood look good.

“An orderly front lawn is supposed to be representative of an orderly household,” Jenkins says. “Good neighbors have good front lawns, good citizens have good front lawn(s).”

Lawns are so linked to American identity that they are part of some U.S. government buildings overseas. Architectural historian Jane Loeffler notes that the design for the American embassy in Berlin, Germany, for example, includes an outdoor area made to look like “the beloved American lawn.”

Man against nature

Lawns are not only a big deal for Americans – they are also big business.

The Bloomberg news service found that Americans spend about $40 billion every year on lawn care. They pay for lawn mowers to cut the grass and chemical fertilizers to make it grow. Many also pay other people to help keep their lawns thick and green.

These things are all weapons in a war against natural forces that, in time, may make lawns look wild or brown. So why do so many Americans fight such a war each summer?

“People have grown up believing that that ’s what [a lawn] is supposed to look like,” Jenkins says. “Because of tremendous advertising campaigns and pressure from the lawn care industry, which is a multi-million dollar business.”

Jenkins says that lawns also show a person’s social position. “Do you know how much money it takes, and time and effort, to grow a perfect front lawn?”

A major reason why lawns are so much work is because they are completely man-made, she adds. “There is not anything natural about them.”

Even the grass seed historically comes from Europe and Africa.

Man against neighbor

Of course, not everyone accepts traditional American lawn culture.

In recent years, another front on the lawn war has formed. It is between people who want to control their lawns, and those who want to let native plants grow naturally.

In 2014, in an area of Virginia about 80 kilometers outside Washington, D.C, a couple entered into a legal fight with their neighborhood about their lawn. The couple’s house is on about 2.2 hectares of land. They cut and care for the grass on part of that land, but they permit the rest to grow naturally into a meadow, with tall grass and wildflowers.

The couple, Michael and Sian Pugh, told the Washington Post newspaper that they enjoy watching the butterflies, birds and deer that visit the meadow.

But the Pughs are part of a homeowners association – a group that cares for and governs a neighborhood. The homeowners association, or HOA, makes and enforces rules about that area. One rule that is common among HOAs across the country is that members must keep their grass short and green. The Pugh’s HOA says their meadow violates this rule and is not fair to their neighbors.

One concern is that the meadow might reduce the value of other people’s homes in the area. People who sell property say a well-kept lawn is an important part of making a house attractive to buyers.

Another concern is that the neighborhood will no longer feel pleasant – or even safe – to the people who already live there.

But the Pughs and their supporters say meadows such as theirs add value because they are better for the environment. The native grasses have deep roots and can protect against flooding. And the wildflowers invite bees and butterflies, which help crops and other plants grow.

Alternatives to the traditional American lawn

Activists in other places have made similar environmental arguments.

They say the chemicals that “feed and weed” traditional lawns can hurt people and animals. They criticize the water waste involved in keeping lawns green, especially in places that face drought.

They also note that some kinds of lawn mowers use gas and pollute the air. And they say that, in general, keeping lawns under control takes too much time, and is a job that few homeowners really want to do.

In answer to these arguments, some people have found other ways to use the area around their houses. They use plants that grow easily. Or they put in vegetable gardens and fruit trees. Or, like the Pughs, they permit nature to take over and hope their neighbors w ill come to accept a new definition of “lawn.”

By the way, the Pugh’s case was never fully resolved. The HOA decided not to go to court. But HOA officials are also re-writing the rules so that no one else tries to grow a tall, wild meadow in a place where neighbors prefer a short, orderly lawn.
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