I see Nehemiah's name every now and then, since he's still around here, working for the McLean-based sports marketing giant, Octagon. And whenever I see it, it's not Nehemiah's track dominance that comes to mind. It's his hard luck.

Monday will mark 30 years since the opening ceremonies of the "Games of the XXII Olympiad" in Moscow. The U.S.A. didn't send a team. Nehemiah held the world record in the 110-meter hurdles at the time and had no real competition, but the boycott took away Nehemiah's chance to showcase his genius on the world's biggest stage. He fell victim to politics: President Jimmy Carter wouldn't let Nehemiah or any other American athletes travel to Russia in 1980 because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.

So, Nehemiah lost his chance for gold and glory all because another country invaded Afghanistan. On paper, these days, that seems sorta funny. The U.S. military has been in Afghanistan for nine of the 30 years since the boycott took place.

I emailed Nehemiah and asked for his thoughts on the Olympic boycott's anniversary. He didn't respond.

The grind, in Schulte's words:

There was the Tuesday I flew in late to a meeting with school officials about why my son was floundering in fifth grade; I dragged along my second-grader, still in her pajamas and slippers because she had stayed home sick, and I kept glancing at my BlackBerry because I was in the middle of reporting a fast-breaking deadline story about a Chinese student who'd had her head chopped off. Then there was the Thursday that the amount of work I needed to do pressed like a heavy weight on my chest, but my heart just about ripped apart when my daughter's big blue-gray eyes started to water because I had said no when she asked, "Mommy, will you please come with me on my field trip today?" I spent three hours in the woods with her — and my BlackBerry and my guilt over not being at work. I worked an extra four hours after she went to bed that night.

And so it went throughout the piece, with Schulte doing more and more stuff, like baking Valentine's cupcakes till 2 a.m., or clearing the rocks from the kids' closets, tidying, doing laundry, not to mention a bunch of other tasks, plus Harry Potter for story time. The stated purpose for airing Schulte's life in the pages of the Washington Post Magazine was to challenge the obviously flawed conclusion of University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson that a woman like Schulte has 30 hours of leisure time per week.

Yet as I flitted from task to multitask with Schulte, I cared less and less about Robinson and more and more about Schulte's husband. As in, Where the hell is this guy? I wasn't alone. One of Schulte's own colleagues, upon reading the piece, wondered, "When did Brigid get divorced"?

In the story, Schulte invokes the hubby just long enough to outfit him with a sharp elbow to the eye. Here's how it reads:

One recent report showed that married working mothers were "more likely to do household activities and provide child care on an average day than were married fathers." (If I didn't already know that intuitively, the phenomenon certainly showed up in my diary: Saturday, 9 to 10:30 p.m., Clean up after 11-year-old's birthday party while husband smokes cigar on back patio.)

"Husband," here, isn't some imaginary being. It's Tom Bowman, the well-traveled Pentagon correspondent for National Public Radio. Now, if Tom Bowman is going to get slimed in the pages of the Washington Post, shouldn't he get a chance to comment, a little space to provide his point of view?

Turns out he did. Schulte previewed a draft of the piece, and Bowman wasn't elated at how he profiled. "'Do you have to be so rough on me?'" he asked, according to Schulte.

They worked it out. "I wasn’t upset in any way," says Bowman. "We're still joking with our lawyer about it. Our lawyer said, 'I see you are attacked in the article.'"

Writer and husband came to terms after Bowman suggested putting in a paragraph about how fathers do more around the house than ever. "She agreed," says Bowman, referring a a passage in the story that references the emerging "androgyny" in mother-father workloads.

In that very spirit, Schulte says that Bowman "does a lot." Though he certainly could have been a bit more helpful on the post-birthday-party front. According to Schulte, Bowman indulged in the cigar after having just returned from a monthlong reportorial tour in Afghanistan. So she cut him some slack.

But hold on here. Why shouldn't Schulte have been the slack recipient? That's the conclusion she appears to be reaching in retrospect. "Well, wait a minute—you were a single mom for a month. Give yourself a break!" says Schulte.

That assessment came from a 66-page report obtained by Woodward. Over the weekend, Woodward and Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, along with other Post officials, held some tense discussions with Pentagon higher-ups about which parts of the report are suitable for public consumption and which parts could endanger operations on the ground in Afghanistan.

The two sides ultimately reached agreement on the particulars and the Post ran the story on Monday.

So here you have a newspaper discussing redactions of a critical document with government officials. Now there's a process that calls for a little explanation from the executive editor, right?

No, wrong. When Kurtz asked Brauchli for comment on the negotiations, Brauchli declined. "I asked him for an interview and he declined to talk to me, perhaps because he knew Woodward had spoken to me," says Kurtz. When asked whether he thought Brauchli's input was pivotal to his story, Kurtz said, "It's always good to have another participant when you're writing about high-level meetings."

Woodward shed some light on Brauchli's silence: "He generally takes the position now that he’s not going to spend a lot of time talking about how stories are done or not done."

Aha! That sounds a lot like the Brauchli Doctrine, which holds that newspapers spend too much time explaining themselves.

In this case, says Woodward, Brauchli essentially delegated the press-talking to him, with no resulting harm to public accountability: Since Woodward sat through the entire process, he was conversant with all the details of the negotiations—and reports that Brauchli did a bang-up job in handling the defense establishment.

Brauchli didn't immediately respond to an e-mail requesting comment on why he didn't comment.