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Last weekend I made my first trip to the Newseum, a shiny new museum dedicated to—well, I'm still trying to figure that out. On its second floor there's an interactive exhibit in which you can play reporter by responding to battery of ethical questions. This'll be easy, I figured, knowing that the game was designed [...]

When he's not busy being the favorite target of desperate, confused GOP apparatchiks grasping for any non-issue that might help their candidate win a presidential election, Bill Ayers is a Chicago-based professor of education theory. If you'd like to talk to him about that—and presumably other stuff he's been involved with—you can see him in [...]

Blog Action Day, an annual event where bloggers collectively weigh in on some matter of import, happened yesterday. Last year the event failed to do something about the environment—if some game-changing idea about climate change or alternative energy or whatever got blogged about that day, I must have missed it. (Did one of the presidential [...]

Tonight Vertigo Books in College Park has what should be a fun evening planned: Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, the self-proclaimed first and only black and white comedy team, will discuss their new book, Tim & Tom: American Comedy in Black and White. Our sister paper the Chicago Reader has an excerpt from the book; [...]

An apology to anybody who was reading this week's print edition of the paper, saw my blurb on the Submersion Journalism event, and wanted to attend; I dutifully included the start time (6:30 p.m.) and info about the venue (Busboys & Poets), but neglected to state the day the thing is actually happening.
The good [...]

Ben Westhoff, a New York freelance writer and occasional contributor to City Paper's arts pages, recently signed on with the Examiner's new blogger-generated-content model, where writers proclaim themselves experts in some discipline and get paid based on pageviews. It didn't work out so well for Westhoff, who had a brief stint as a "music examiner," [...]

For a brief moment on Friday, John McCain's campaign had an ad up on YouTube making a big noise about the non-issue of Barack Obama and ACORN. Fox News apparently had a problem with it, so it's down now, but the McCain-Palin camp is apparently still proud enough of the ad to have a transcript [...]

If you're any kind of fan of crime and mystery novels, you'll want to take a look at the Baltimore Sun's book blog, Read Street, which is doing a knockout job covering this weekend's Bouchercon. The blog invited a batch of writers attending the fest to weigh in on a topic of their choosing, and [...]

On top of eradicating a much-loved local chain, the closure of Olsson's bookstores also played havoc with the schedules of a few authors who had readings scheduled at the stores. At least one writer has found a new date and place to do a little self-promotion: Michael Kimball, Baltimore author of the novel Dear Everybody [...]

Northern Virginia cartoonist Richard Thompson, whose strip Cul de Sac now runs daily in the Post (we're patting ourselves on the back), has a must-read blog where he comments on some of his illustrations that get published. Today he has an interesting post on an illustration that didn't get published. A little while back, [...]

If you can't make the trip up to Baltimore this week for the country's biggest convention dedicated to crime fiction, you can at least meet two of Bouchercon's guests of honor in D.C. tonight. Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald, owners of the Poisoned Pen bookstore/publisher in Scottsdale, Ariz. (and winners of Bouchercon's 2008 lifetime achievement [...]

As you may have heard, some smart guy who helps give out the Nobel Prize in literature recently said that Americans are simply too "insular" and possessed of a restricting "ignorance" to produce great writing. So we have much to learn from the arrival of Suhayl Saadi, who's here for a month of readings and [...]

From now through Oct. 7, we'll be running updates from the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival at our music blog, Black Plastic Bag. Check out our report from opening night and, if you're disinclined to watch tonight's debate, our picks for tonight's shows.

Valleywag points to a Time magazine widget listing the results of a poll asking folks who will win tonight's watch-it-through-your-fingers-like-it's-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vice Presidential debate. The rest of the world gives it to Joe Biden, 83 percent to Sarah Palin's 17 percent. Even Alaska is on the same train as everybody else (78 to [...]