Nearly two million people coursed through the District of Columbia yesterday. Many of them didn't know where to go or how to get from one place to another. So they asked the folks who were manning security checkpoints and other crowd-control stations.
Professional crowd controller Jim McClory got a lot of those questions. Too bad he [...]
T-shirts are as common a sight as cops. Hats, too.
But two women from Brooklyn are claiming a corner on the Obama commemorative water supply. "I haven’t seen anyone with water like this,” says 23-year-old Julie Harris, one of the Brooklynites. “It’s not really for public use. You supposed to keep it, not drink it. But [...]
Traffic deadlocks. Detoured buses. Jammed Metro. The city’s roads and railways are completely inundated and it’s gridlock-inducing. But if there’s one traffic channel that hasn’t experienced unendurable congestion (unless you're trying to go from the swearing-in to the parade route), it’s the bike lanes. D.C. Pedicab recognized the inauguration for its unique chance to drum [...]
A City Desk series chronicling the inaugural working class
Woe betide the D.C. street vendor who sets up shop on the sidewalk without a license. Competitors narc, and cops swarm. Pretty soon, the scofflaw vendor is packing his wares.
But this is the inauguration, and the authorities have real menaces to worry about.
So Ismail Jones and Jamar [...]
A City Desk series chronicling the inaugural working class
The intersection at 18th Street and Florida Avenue NW is a classic L'Enfantian gaffe, a place that was not designed for a world of fast-moving automobiles. This is a modern infrastructural clusterfuck, and "18th and Florida" doesn't adequately convey the confusion of the crossroads. U Street and [...]
The Every Child Matters Education Fund is hosting an inaugural ball exclusively for youngsters. The Ball seeks to "raise the visibility of children’s issues and to win new investments in their well-being."
Gawker published an e-mail conversation I had recently with a cordial Atlantic staffer. I forwarded the e-mail and my brusque commentary to vent about the the shittiness of unpaid internships. Sure, there are plenty of publications that staff armies of unpaid coffee-getters and google taskers, but this one struck a particular chord of indignation: [...]
Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day.
There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today, expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour.
But are we really more informed? Are we getting a wider range of news?
One of Obama's campaign pledges was to “wrest the federal government out of the hands of lobbyists.” And granted, most talk of lobbyists conjures images like this and this. But, c'mon, not all lobbyists are greed-driven parasitic rodents — some actually work to protect citizens.
For instance, organizations like The American Cancer Society, AARP, and The [...]
Princeton Review ranked American University as the "Most Politically Active School" in the nation in its 2009 survey. The feeling on campus this election day serves as a great measure into how these D.C. students earned such a distinction.
Audio from live CNN election coverage filled a student dining center as students clad in Obama [...]
With election day less than a day away, I thought City Desk should step into the news time machine (i.e. Lexis Nexis) and take a look at what McCain was up to a year ago this week:
No, this isn't a post about electoral college reform, or a diatribe about the inherent inequality of the winner-take-all system–although both complaints are sound.
During the Great Depression, the only two things people could seem to afford were bootleg liquor and Busby Berkley musicals, as both industries saw a rise in sales while the economy plummeted. But did the profits have anything to do with the depression?
The media have been making causal jumps between the economic downturn and the [...]
UDecide2008.com, a site dedicated to informing blog-illiterate swing voters, claims "ONE IN 14 AMERICANS IS STILL UNDECIDED." There's a kind of excitement to being "undecided." It makes voters feel valuable; casting a ballot will be the ultimate expression of democratic decision-making, since this cohort of voters ostensibly won't vote blindly down party lines. The media [...]
