On the Front Lines of a New Culture War

The Somali students watched the news with a sense of dread: Someone had hit six people with a car and then stabbed five more at Ohio State University.

Just don’t let him be Somali, some of the students thought to themselves as details of the attack started percolating on social media. Don’t let him be Muslim.

It had happened on a different campus in a different state, but the Somali refugees at St. Cloud State University had lived in the United States for long enough to know how this worked: Any act of violence by a foreign-born Muslim could reignite fears of immigration and terrorism, and there was no place more flammable than St. Cloud, Minn.

The bad news had arrived in short order: The Ohio State attacker, Abdul Artan, was Somali, Muslim, and a student. The next day, the Somali Muslim students at St. Cloud State gathered for their weekly meeting in the student union to talk about what, if anything, Mr. Artan had to do with them.

They had beaten long odds to get here. Their families fled a civil war that left hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved, brutalized, and stranded. Some of the students had been raised in refugee camps. They came to the United States at the invitation of the federal government and put down roots in Minnesota. They now stood to earn college degrees and the chance to climb the social ladder in their adoptive country.

But it was not clear that their country wanted them.

Earlier that month, U.S. voters had elected Donald J. Trump as their next president. During his campaign, he had spoken of Somali refugees as a “disaster” for Minnesota and called for a ban on Muslims entering the country. He had specifically mentioned St. Cloud, a city that sits at the axis of three counties in central Minnesota. On Election Day, more than 60 percent of voters in those counties cast ballots for Mr. Trump — the most support here for any presidential candidate in more than half a century.

The election dealt a moral blow to the Somali students. Now news of the Ohio State attack threatened to validate the suspicions stirred by Mr. Trump’s message.

The details of the attack were sadly familiar. They echoed a September incident here, in St. Cloud, where a Muslim man with Somali roots had hit a cyclist with his car and then stabbed 10 people at a local shopping mall. The attacker was a former student at St. Cloud State.

After the mall attack, Somali students at the university led a rally on campus to show solidarity with the city. Now, in the student union, they talked about whether they should make a statement addressing what happened in Ohio.

White people, they had noticed, always seemed to expect Muslims everywhere to condemn violence committed by Muslims anywhere. But why should they have to take responsibility for the actions of a stranger 800 miles away?

It felt unfair. The majority of the Somali students at St. Cloud State had spent most of their lives in America. They watch football on Sundays. They laugh at impersonations of Homer Simpson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They aspire to be social workers, police officers, and beauty queens.

They are part of a generation of refugees who are trying to do what immigrants in the United States have done for years: get educated, expand their horizons, and build better lives for themselves while also staying connected to the culture that sustained their elders through the traumas of war and dislocation. For the younger Somalis, a college degree represents a chance to avoid the powerlessness of life in the nonwhite working class.

What it might not offer them is a privilege afforded to many Americans regardless of education: the freedom to speak for themselves, and no one else.

St. Cloud sits along the chilliest stretch of the Mississippi River, about 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis. German was spoken in its downtown business district, and in many homes and schools, until a wave of nativism swept the state during World War I. Many German immigrants suppressed their heritage for fear of being seen as disloyal.

A few blocks south, the city opens up on a series of Brutalist buildings. Here, in the middle of a deep red gash in the Democratic Party’s crumbling upper-Midwest firewall, sits a public university that, over the past decade and a half, has tried to embody diversity, tolerance, and globalist optimism.

St. Cloud State, whose 15,000 students include 300 Somalis, now faces the task of making a case for those values in hostile territory.

For two decades, the city has been a destination for refugees fleeing the Horn of Africa. Some residents of the Minnesota city once known as “White Cloud” have been jarred by the influx of African Muslims.

In recent years, relationships have become tense. Somalis have reported being harassed on the street and in the hallways of a local high school. Somali-owned businesses have been tagged with graffiti. Last winter a Minneapolis-based newspaper declared St. Cloud to be “the worst place in Minnesota to be Somali.”

The university wants to be an exception to that rule. St. Cloud State prides itself on being safe and welcoming to students of color and to religious minorities, although this has not always been the case. At the time St. Cloud State hired its first nonwhite president, Roy H. Saigo, in 2000, it had been named in dozens of discrimination lawsuits.

Mr. Saigo, a Japanese-American who spent three years of his childhood in an Arizona internment camp during World War II, started working on making the campus more inclusive. The first step was to force the university to look in the mirror. Mr. Saigo asked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate how St. Cloud State was failing its minority students and staff members, and how it could do better.

Investigators found a “perception of ignorance and an acute lack of sensitivity among faculty, students, and administrators in regard to religious and cultural differences,” both on the campus and in the city.

“The university,” they wrote in a report, “suffers from a severe lack of credibility with regard to diversity issues.”

Mr. Saigo set about trying to fix that. He visited urban high schools in the Twin Cities, where St. Cloud State had never recruited. He faced some resistance. Three black faculty members, apparently worried that the new recruits might not know what they were getting themselves into, sent letters to guidance counselors in Twin Cities high schools warning that “residency in St. Cloud can be hazardous for black people.” At around the same time, a “cultural audit” by a consulting firm noted that the special attention given to minorities on campus had irked some white employees. “The white culture is feeling oppressed and left out,” wrote the auditors in 2002, “and wants to be recognized.” In 2007 and 2008, swastikas were scrawled on campus.

Since then the numbers of international students and students of color have ticked upward.

In the student union on an afternoon in late November, the progress is evident: The air is alive with the sound of a half-dozen languages and accents. Indian students in saris offer temporary henna tattoos. Muslim women in head scarves gossip around laptops. A grinning white guy with a patchy beard lumbers through in a Green Bay Packers jersey and a cheese head.

The student population at St. Cloud State is now more diverse than those of Minnesota and the country as a whole. But diversity alone does not erase boundaries. Seventy percent of students at the university are white Americans, many of them drawn from the mostly white counties around the city. And here, just as on many campuses, those white students can still sail through four years without spending significant time with people whose backgrounds differ greatly from their own.

Ashish Vaidya, St. Cloud State’s interim president, wants to do what he can to change that.

For Mr. Vaidya, diversity does not mean just better serving students of color. It also means preparing white kids from Minnesota to navigate a diverse world with grace and empathy. St. Cloud State requires students to take courses that focus on “multicultural, gender, and minority studies,” and Mr. Vaidya wants it to develop tools than can measure whether students have absorbed those lessons.

“If, at the end of their educational experience at St. Cloud State, they emerge without knowing very well how to engage in a diverse and multicultural environment,” says the president, “we have failed.”

Mr. Vaidya, an Indian-born economist, became president unexpectedly last year, when the man who had hired him as provost, Earl H. Potter III, died in a car crash. His father was a telecommunications engineer for the Indian government, a job that uprooted his family every few years. Mr. Vaidya was raised in an ever-changing backdrop of locales, including two years on the African island of Mauritius, where the children at his school spoke French and Creole. At the University of California at Davis, where he got his doctorate, he studied alongside students from Spain, China, and Iran. “My wife thinks I have no roots,” he says, “which is probably accurate.”

The interim president, who came to St. Cloud State from Los Angeles in 2015, is enthusiastic about the “internationalization” that he sees as part of the university’s identity. He is bullish on study-abroad programs, and the university is pushing more students to incorporate international travel into their education. If he could afford to send all 15,000 students at the university to study in foreign countries, he says, he would. His realistic goal is more modest: to increase study-abroad enrollment from 450 to 700 over the next three years.

As for central Minnesota, Mr. Vaidya believes his best pitch for diversity is an economic one. “Diversity is not just a nice social norm,” he says. “I’m convinced that it is a primary driving force for creativity and innovation that’s going to lead to economic success.”

Minnesota businesses have global ambitions, he says, and a state university that promotes multiculturalism will better serve both its students and the companies that might want to hire them. “It’s a globally interconnected world. There is no ‘other.’ There is no ‘the other side.’ "

That is, of course, exactly the kind of optimism that typified Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and failed to inspire so many voters here in central Minnesota. On the morning after Election Day, college leaders woke up to the realization that they were the “other.”

Mr. Trump’s victory was a reminder that big swaths of the population don’t cherish “safe spaces,” political correctness, or multiculturalism — to say nothing of fact-checking or the scientific method.

This might not have come as a shock to state universities, many of which have been gradually starved by state legislators as they have become more diverse. In the wake of the Trump victory, St. Cloud State has reason to feel especially disconnected from the regional political mood. If the voting results are any indication, most people around here seem to think that cultural and economic boundaries exist for good reasons, and would rather see them reinforced than blurred beyond recognition.

Two days before the election, Mr. Trump held a rally in an airplane hangar at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. He did not talk about the college graduates Minnesota was sending out into the world. He talked about people invading the state from the other side of civilization.

“Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in Minnesota,” Mr. Trump had told the crowd, referring to the Somali refugees. “Everybody’s reading about it. You don’t even have the right to talk about it. … You don’t even know who’s coming in — you have no idea. You’ll find out.”

He was not talking to Minnesota business leaders eager to leverage the “globally interconnected world,” or to college presidents who could help them do it. He was talking to white people who feel less connected than ever to the world right outside their doorsteps.

Two days before Election Day, Mohamed Warsame was at a friend’s apartment, watching a football game. His Minnesota Vikings were in the process of letting one slip away at home.

Mr. Warsame, a 24-year-old business major at St. Cloud State who is president of the Somali Student Association, checked Facebook and saw that Mr. Trump was trying to pull off a similar upset, decrying the presence of Somalis in places like St. Cloud.

“You’ve suffered enough,” Mr. Trump told the hangar full of white Minnesotans.

Mr. Warsame was not impressed. “We’ve dealt with civil war, we’ve dealt with some family members dying because of tribal issues that didn’t even make sense,” he says. “What else can you do to us? We’ve been survivalists all our lives. So, saying we’re bad people, that doesn’t really do anything to us.”

His family fled Somalia in 2001. Mr. Warsame doesn’t remember those days vividly, and doesn’t care to. There were guns, there were “travel issues,” there were people who died. He doesn’t see any point in dwelling on the past. “It’s very hard, and it’s a very divided issue,” he says. “If you bring it up, you’re just bringing problems.”

The family arrived in Minnesota the way a lot of Somalis did: by traveling from wherever else the U.S. government had placed them. They were in Tennessee but headed north after getting a call from a relative in Minnesota. The Somalis there had a community and a foothold in the working class. Mr. Warsame’s mother got a job at a turkey-processing plant in a small city called Faribault, and after a few years she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

Mr. Warsame has a soccer player’s build, but since moving to Minnesota as a teenager he has become a fan of American football. He and Mr. Trump share a favorite player, the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, whom the president-elect has called a “great champion.” Mr. Warsame likes Mr. Brady because nobody else wanted him on their team, and he proved them all wrong.

He believes in underdog stories, including his own. In junior high school, he remembers spending a long time working through the English sentences in his homework under the guidance of a Somali neighbor who had been in the country for a longer time. It was hard work, but Mr. Warsame didn’t give up, and made the honor roll.

When it came time to go to college, he almost slipped through the cracks. He applied to Minnesota State University at Mankato at the suggestion of a friend, but had to scramble to get his financial-aid forms in order. This time he had no one to guide him. “I didn’t have anyone to lead the way for me, to say, ‘This is how you do stuff.’ "

At Mankato he was stressed out. He made some friends but couldn’t afford a car, and as the days grew colder and shorter he felt more and more isolated. He left after a year and enrolled in community college. He took a job at a computer-chip manufacturer for $12 per hour.

It was hard manual work, and it wore him down. Mr. Warsame noticed that a lot of the other immigrants there were hired on a temporary basis and did not get benefits. “I figured out, I can’t do this for the rest of my life,” he says.

Finally he enrolled at St. Cloud State, where he found a home among the Somali students and student-government types. After the Somali student group elected him president, Mr. Warsame had the idea to pair up new Somali students with older mentors who could help them find their way.

As a campaign message, optimism might seem corny, but as a personal philosophy Mr. Warsame sees it a key for survival. Experience has shown him how some people start out with disadvantages — but, like bad memories, he doesn’t see any upside in focusing on them.

“There’s two ways of being an underdog,” he says. One way is to say the system is rigged and you’ll be shut out. But “there’s another way: I’ll find my way in, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Patrick Nelson was at the airport for Mr. Trump’s speech. The Republican candidate, wearing his trademark red hat, gripped the sides of the podium and recounted the knife attack in St. Cloud. Then, pinching thumb to forefinger and gesturing decisively, he promised he would not allow any refugees to be placed in any town that didn’t want them there.

The crowd cheered, and so did Mr. Nelson.

The stereotype of a Trump supporter is an alpha male of a certain age who longs for a time in American history when he felt less bitter about his place in the country and the country’s place in the world. Mr. Nelson does not fit that mold. He is 19 years old, fresh-faced and polite, too young to be nostalgic about anything. Like a lot of college kids, he professes to be antiwar, pro-gender equality, and pro-gay rights.

Mr. Nelson grew up in St. Cloud just as the Somali population was becoming more visible. The Somalis in his neighborhood lived up the road in an apartment complex overseen by Catholic Charities, which Mr. Nelson knew as “the projects.” He kept his distance from the Somali boys at his school, who always seemed to be involved in fights. They spoke their own language with one another and didn’t seem interested in him. That was fine with Mr. Nelson, who was a shy, anxious kid and wasn’t interested in them, either.

As he approached voting age, Mr. Nelson became curious about Islam, the dominant religion among the new immigrants. He says he read the Quran and did some research online — on his own, not for a class — on Shariah law and the differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He concluded that Islam was an intolerant religion, and that Muslims arriving from conservative cultures posed a threat to the gay-rights movement at a moment when homophobia in the United States was finally on the wane.

He says he used to worry about Christian extremists, like the Westboro Baptist Church. Now he worries about Muslims.

Mr. Nelson grew up around Somalis — in school and at the warehouse where he once worked as a janitor — but has not been close with any of them. “I think some of that was my choice,” he says, “just because I probably had some internal racism or something.”

He’s open to the possibility that he might feel differently about Islam if he had Muslim friends, but says his critique is ideological, not personal. “Most of the problems I have with Islam is the belief system,” he says, “not the individuals.”

Mr. Nelson, who transferred to St. Cloud State this year and lives at his childhood home, south of campus, describes his parents as center-left Democrats who like President Obama. He remembers learning concepts like racism from them and from his teachers in school. It was on YouTube and on 8chan, an anything-goes online hub popular among gamers and hackers, that he learned the term “race realism": the idea that race, rather than being a social construct, marks actual biological differences among people.

As the election approached, the first presidential contest in which he would be eligible to vote, Mr. Nelson started constructing his own political identity.

He believes in “race realism” but not white supremacy. He supports stemming the arrival of new refugees but not kicking out the ones who already live here. He doesn’t think Muslim immigrants are more violent than other groups, but he worries that Islam might attract people who are inherently violent.

He does not believe everything that Donald Trump says, but he doesn’t think Mr. Trump believes everything he says, either.

The guys on 8chan saw Mr. Trump as a cult hero: a trash-talking boss who broke the rules of politics and got away with it. “A lot of my peers online were into him,” says Mr. Nelson, “so I thought, ‘Jump on the bandwagon.’ "

After Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination, Mr. Nelson started taking his positions seriously. The candidate started looking like a guy capable of ushering his party to the left on gay-rights issues. (His running mate, Mike Pence, who has a record of supporting policies that would enable discrimination against gay people, is another matter. Mr. Nelson says, half-seriously, that he thinks Mr. Trump picked the Indiana governor to discourage would-be assassins on the left who would not want to be stuck with a President Pence.)

After Mr. Trump gave a foreign-policy speech railing against the country’s attempts at nation-building in the Middle East, he started looking like the antiwar candidate, too.

Mr. Nelson was sold, and he wasn’t alone. At an election-night watch party on campus, he was pleased to find that some of his fellow St. Cloud State students were also pulling for Mr. Trump.

He knows that some people think education should necessarily immunize voters to Mr. Trump’s charms, but he finds that view demeaning. Mr. Nelson sees his reasons for supporting the president-elect as legitimate, evidence-based, and moderate compared with some of the chatter he reads online.

“I’ve done my homework,” he says. “I’m not coming in completely stupid.”

On September 17, with the presidential race heating up, Mr. Nelson checked Facebook and saw a friend’s message with a link to a local news story. Something had happened at a shopping mall three miles west of campus.

A 20-year-old man with Somali roots had grabbed two long knives and driven to the mall, hitting a cyclist on the way. In the parking lot he slashed a pregnant woman and her boyfriend. Inside the mall, the man stabbed eight more people before being shot and killed by an off-duty police officer.

“The suspect made some references to Allah,” noted the story, “and asked at least one person in the mall if they were Muslim before attacking them.”

Details of the attacker’s life soon emerged. His name was Dahir Adan. He was born in Kenya to Somali parents and came to the United States when he was 2 years old. Other Somalis in St. Cloud knew him as a “normal American kid” who liked basketball, soccer, and video games. He was a good student, and after high school he had enrolled at St. Cloud State, where he studied information systems.

Earlier last year, something had changed. According to the FBI, Mr. Adan “flunked out” of college, lost weight, seemed unusually agitated, and took an intense interest in the Quran. The agency looked into whether Mr. Adan had ties to any terror groups. They did not immediately find any links, although the investigation remains open.

Faisa Salah, a student studying social work at the university, wonders if Mr. Adan might have been suffering from psychological problems — a possibility that, she notes with dismay, never seems to come up when an attacker is Muslim and foreign-born. (Mr. Adan’s family and his soccer coach have said they do not believe he was mentally ill.)

Ms. Salah, too, was born in Kenya to Somali parents. They came to the United States when she was 6, days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The refugee-resettlement office placed them in San Diego, but before long they, too, beat a path to Minnesota.

Growing up in St. Cloud, Ms. Salah did not learn much about mental health. Like many Americans, Somali immigrants see psychological disorders as shameful, she says, and usually they are swept under the rug. “With us, it’s more of a stigma,” she says. “If a family member is disabled, the whole family is frowned upon.”

When a cousin began acting out, Ms. Salah says, her aunt insisted that he needed the Quran, not psychiatric treatment. The cousin later jumped off a third-floor balcony. (He survived, she says, and eventually got medical help.) That experience made her want to study psychology at St. Cloud State. Now she plans to stay for a master’s degree and become a clinical social worker.

She knows how stressful it can be to try to build a life on a cultural fault line. In the early 2010s, she felt the plates start to slip. The ethnic tensions at her high school started to reflect those of St. Cloud generally. Ms. Salah has felt pulled between the culture she had inherited from her Somali relatives and the one she had adopted in Minnesota.

“I felt like it was ‘them’ and ‘us,’ and I didn’t know who to pick,” she says.

Ms. Salah considered herself an American. She had white friends, and all of her memories are of St. Cloud. But the arrival of newer Somalis, who don’t identify with the kids who grew up in central Minnesota, complicated the question of where she fit in socially.

“They thought we were too Americanized, or like we wanted to be like the white kids,” says Ms. Salah. But she and the other “Americanized” Somalis didn’t fully fit in with the white kids, either. “So, we were kind of stuck in the middle.”

Ms. Salah is Muslim — she wears a head scarf and does not shake hands with men who are not family — but she’s also a modern woman, who, despite her mother’s reservations, is planning on a career despite having two young children herself. She says her sense of identity has been shaped by her education and professional aspirations as much as by her faith and heritage.

“I can relate more to a white person who has the same ideas as me,” she says. “I can relate more to the social workers who are white than someone who is in my culture.”

The older generation of Somali refugees witnessed murder and the rape of family members during the conflict that turned their home country into what some have described as hell on earth. Ms. Salah believes there are cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among them that have never been diagnosed. She hopes a degree in social work will help her teach her elders about mental health.

But it’s complicated. Among Somalis, she says, credibility is conferred by age, not education. She sometimes tries to tell her mother what she’s learned about symptoms and treatments. “She goes, ‘No, you just need prayers,’ " says Ms. Salah. “Prayers do help, but it’s not the only factor. You need medicine, too.”

Ms. Salah hopes that fewer Somalis in her generation will see a family member showing signs of psychological distress and point to the Quran as the only solution.

She also hopes that fewer Americans in her generation will see a Somali Muslim commit an act of violence and point to the Quran as the problem.

St. Cloud state provides its Somali students with a relatively safe place in a world that they know, better than most, is anything but safe.

Whatever refuge the campus offers is temporary, of course. The students will continue their journeys in a country where many other people see them as a threat.

Abdi H. Daisane’s journey has been improbable. His father, a military man, took the family from one Somali city to the next during the civil war, trying desperately to avoid the purgatory of a refugee camp. They ended up in one anyway, in Kenya, where Mr. Daisane spent the next 18 years, until he was finally delivered, courtesy of the U.S. government and a Lutheran charity, to an apartment in Omaha.

His journey then took him to a couple of Nebraska towns and finally to Minnesota, where he earned a degree in international relations and planning and community development at St. Cloud State. Last winter, after he graduated, Mr. Daisane’s journey took him a few miles west of campus, to a small office with green walls, a space heater, and a window looking out on the parking lot of a Buffalo Wild Wings.

Mr. Daisane is a lanky 29-year-old with an easy smile. His desk is covered in printed forms and schedules, alongside a motivational book called Get Up Off Your Butt & Do It Now! His prayer mat is folded on a chair against the wall.

The office belongs to Resource Inc., a nonprofit group that works with counties to place people in jobs so they can receive government benefits under Minnesota’s welfare-to-work program. Mr. Daisane works primarily with new Somali refugees.

He calls himself a “career planner,” but he also teaches basic cultural competencies: the importance of showing up on time, respecting other people’s personal space, refraining from homophobic remarks, not answering their cellphones at inappropriate times. Most of his clients don’t speak English, he says, and many have never been to school.

Last year Mr. Daisane decided he wanted to give the local Somalis a voice where it counted: the city government. He filed to run for a seat on the St. Cloud City Council against three incumbents and one other challenger, all of them white.

He pitched himself as a “bridge builder.” At a public forum, Mr. Daisane challenged the council president on how attentive the council had been to racial divisions in St. Cloud. He showed up at the shopping mall after the stabbing attack and talked about how much Somalis in town feared being targeted for retaliation. He won an endorsement from the St. Cloud Times.

He hit the streets to canvas for votes. One day, he knocked on the door of a small white house with an American flag in the front yard. The man who answered the door seemed wary of the Somalis who had moved into the neighborhood, says Mr. Daisane, but the candidate made his case anyway and asked if he could count on the man’s vote. The man said he would do some research.

On November 8, Mr. Trump won, and Mr. Daisane lost.

The three incumbents won handily. The other challenger, who had skipped the public forum and had not responded to inquiries from the newspaper, came in fourth. Mr. Daisane came in last.

Two days after the election, a series of signs appeared next to the American flag on the lawn of the small white house near the mall. They spelled out a message: “Take your Muslim Somailian diaspora and put it where the sun doesn’t shine!!!”

The owner of the house, who didn’t want his name used, told The Chronicle he doesn’t remember a conversation with Mr. Daisane but wouldn’t trust any Muslim, no matter how well-educated, to serve at any level of government. “I believe,” he says, “that down the line they will go back to their strong Muslim, Shariah beliefs.”

Mr. Daisane didn’t sleep much the night after the election. The next morning, while his wife slept, he sat in his pajamas watching TV and wondering where the country might be headed. He thought about the kids in the refugee camp where he had woken up every morning for 18 years, unsure whether water would flow from the tap his family shared with 200 others. He remembers sitting down in his mostly bare Nebraska apartment the week he arrived in the country and writing down his goals: Get a driver’s license. Get a GED. Get a college degree.

The process had thrilled him. It was the first time he had lived anywhere with a functioning government, and America’s mythos as a land of freedom and opportunity felt very real to him. “This is the only country where you’re actually writing goals for yourself,” he says, “because there is stability, there is a system.”

After a while, he thought about his own campaign. He knows some people here are prejudiced. They might have seen his skin tone or his name and been reminded of the knife-wielding attacker on the evening news. Those same people might tense up at the sound of his footsteps behind them in a dark parking lot.

Just don’t let him be Somali, they might think to themselves. Don’t let him be Muslim.

Mr. Daisane has faith that if he came to their homes, and if they listened to his story and heard what he really believed, they would give him a chance.

“I probably should have knocked on more doors and had more conversations with people,” he says.

“If I had done that, probably I would have won.”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.