The one-drop rule of classifying race gets a drop-kick in the Washington Post, courtesy of Marie Arana, the editor of the Post's Book World section.
And the big news for the next couple of days will focus on the playoff chances of the Redskins, who lost to this blogger's favorite team on Sunday at [...]
Flash of Genius, the film version of inventor Robert Kearns' life, comes out this weekend, starring Greg Kinnear.
I don't know what's in the movie, but I got to know the real Kearns, who lived in Montgomery County and on the Eastern Shore, back in the late 1980s.
I wrote for a small chain of automotive trade [...]
• FIRST NO. 1: A SPEEDING TICKET
I have been driving for 23 years. I have never gotten a speeding ticket, a minor but not inconsiderable source of pride. I'm not a candyass on the road, but I'm not a maniac, either. What you get from me as a fellow driver is alertness, consideration, and sweet, [...]
This might be my final installment into the saga that is the life of Captain Melvin Gresham—a D.C. Police Department official who appears to always be in the center of intrigue and controversy. According to his civil-suit complaint filed in June, Gresham is a hero/whistle blower/all-around standup cop. To cop sources, he's a supervisor who [...]
LL is going to take the departure of D.C. Department of Transportation Director Emeka Moneme as an opportunity to mention a problem that he knows is being solved by Moneme's old agency in a thoughtful and thorough manner but has been such a longstanding menace to LL's quality of life that he feel compelled to [...]
I just got hit by a car. I was biking across Euclid at 16th Street NW, and everything seemed to be in order: I was in the crosswalk, Euclid had a red light, I had a walk signal. Prime crossing time, I thought, dutifully looking both ways. Nevertheless, a bouncy old Cadillac, [...]
Former ANC 5B-10 commissioner Kathy Henderson tends to draw strong reactions from the people she encounters. She's a scrapper, known for throwing all her energy into filing complaints, writing letters and putting politicians on the spot. When she relinquished her seat last year to run for city council, she had her teenage daughter, India, [...]
Via the increasingly indispensible Streetsblog, this story about how Philadelphia is planning to paint optical illusions on streets around town to slow down drivers. They're cheaper than speedbumps, apparently, and they have the added benefit of scaring the bejesus out of drivers who suddenly see three triangles floating in front of them. Why stop with [...]
LL was hanging out outside the office a few minutes ago when another City Paper employee passed and said, "Marion Barry blocked me in."
Indeed, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry is currently appearing on WPFW-FM, with whom we share our Adams Morgan building, speaking about his personal health issues and issues in the African-American community on [...]
Friday night I drove to Chincoteague, Va. It was an opportunity not just to try out the GPS unit my wife just bought but also to try Mike DeBonis' Best Crosstown Shortcut. These opportunities were soon at war.
"Recalculating...recalculating" said the GPS' voice over and over as we brazenly ignored its attempts to get [...]
That would be Delegate and Republican senatorial candidate Bob Marshall of Prince William County. Today, on WTOP's Politics Program With Mark Plotkin, Marshall was a guest, and Plotkin asked what he, as the junior senator from Virginia, could do to help Virginia's notorious transportation problems.
Volunteered Marshall, I'd build I-95 through D.C.
Let's set aside for a [...]
Richard McCann, author and creative-writing professor at American University, recently worked on a novel about a car. It's called In the Belly of the Beast, and you can read it at the Web site for Lexus Magazine. Lexus, like the car.
Earlier this week Galleycat and a handful of other literary blogs took notice of Belly, [...]
