Good morning, Washington, and welcome back to work after a nice long holiday away. We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving vacation as much as we did ours. That is if you can take a long enough break from all the online shopping you'll supposedly be doing from your desk today to tell us about it. Stay tuned until the week before Christmas for your next update on the holiday shopping habits of Americans -- we... more ›

Civil rights leaders like Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and others are gathering with supporters on Freedom Plaza at 10 a.m. this morning to march to the Justice Department in a "March Against Hate Crimes." NBC4 says that organizers hope the march will bring attention to racism and recent hate crimes against African Americans that have been popping up around the country. The march was also designed to bring attention to the Jena... more ›

Good Morning, D.C. Remember the news we told you about back in August, about an investigation into a potential prostitution ring at D.C. firehouses? Well D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin acknowledged yesterday under fire from the D.C. Council that "sex for overtime" allegations in his department are "potentially true." The Council also expressed concern about the abnormally high rate of disciplinary action against African American firefighters in the department. African Americans were the subjects of... more ›

Tuesday and today Howard University is hosting the Children's Defense Fund National Summit, which includes panel discussions on the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Initiative, a project that seeks to end the cycle of poor minority children ending up destined to be shuffled in and out of the country's prison system. Yesterday Bill Cosby appeared on a panel titled "The Need for Personal and Community Responsibility" in conjunction with the summit, along with NPR's Juan... more ›

Good morning, Washington. Have you recovered from yesterday's local sports emotional rollercoaster yet? The Nationals bid farewell to RFK, and managed to close out their time there with a 5-3 victory over the Phillies. The Redskins, on the other hand, well ... we might still not be ready to talk about that last drive. Yet despite the despondent football fans across the region this morning, we get the sense that no one is sadder than... more ›

Happy Friday, Washington! Oh, wait. It's Tuesday. But we're not going in to work tomorrow! Oh, wait again. We have to come in on Thursday. And Friday. This is confusing. We'll have some more info for you later today on how to avoid the crowds and have a stellar 4th of July celebration -- just as soon as we can wrap our heads around the idea of stumbling to our desks on the 5th, totally... more ›

When Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier introduced their new strategy for tackling the District's stubborn crime problem late last week, we expressed some skepticism. After all, "new" strategies come along about as often as school superintendents, neither of which have proven to be particularly good at fixing what they have to fix. But we might have reasons to be hopeful. Beyond today's news that the weekend's all-out deployment netted nearly 500 arrests,... more ›

There have been many great performers in Music Land, for example Bono, Freddie Mercury, and Madonna, just to name a few. There are also many folks who go out of their way to exude cool via ironic t-shirts purchased at Urban Outfitters and meticulously unkempt hair. It’s one thing to dance with a pretty girl in the audience, but how many rock stars put a guitar in her hands and then proceed to wrap their... more ›

From the front page of this morning's Washington Post, it seems the last person anyone expected to be right about anything, perennial whack-a-doo mayoral candidate Faith, wasn't actually that far off the mark during last year's campaign: Chocolate City is rapidly becoming Vanilla Villa. The District of Columbia will likely no longer be majority-African American within the next 13 years. The 14 percent increase in non-Hispanic white District residents and 6 percent decrease in blacks... more ›

No, these adorable critters don't have anything to do with the last post of the day. We just finished watching many hours of Planet Earth and are now looking for ways to make blogging "green". See, Al Gore, DCist loves Mother Nature and all her creatures. Well, most of them. >> We also love all sorts of maps. Now we've been informed that National Geographic's awesome array of maps are online. Let the cartographic... more ›

Most Washingtonians are accustomed to participating in guided tours only when entertaining out of town guests. We all know we'll have to trek out to the monuments with family and friends at least a few times a year, so being a tourist in our own city voluntarily at other times might not sound terribly appealing. But try not to think of the tours being offered in this coming weekend's WalkingTown DC, a series of 60... more ›

Good morning, Washington. Need something to warm your funny bone (or at least your sense of outrage) on this appropriately cold winter morning? Well, look no further that the hijinks of Virginia's legislators. We thought that Virgil Goode's silly attacks on Rep. Keith Ellison were all the entertainment that the commonwealth was likely to offer in the short term. But, as NBC4 reports, state representative Frank Hargrove has come to the rescue, committing two enormous... more ›

Washington D.C. lost one of its favorite adopted sons over the weekend as Arnold "Red" Auerbach passed away at the age of 89. Best known as the patriarch of the Boston Celtics, Auerbach had close ties to D.C., the city he called home for much of his life. Auerbach attended George Washington University from 1937-1940, starring on the basketball team as the team's top scorer. In 1946, after stints in the Navy and as... more ›

Good morning, D.C. How're those new Metro express lanes treating you? We know it's only five stations for now, but we're pretty excited by the prospect of a nearly-50% speed-up through the turnstiles during rush hour. There's nothing more infuriating than finding yourself stuck behind a perplexed tourist who's fiddling with his farecard like a newly-tool-using ape at the beginning of 2001 — unless you count the encounter you just had with him on the... more ›

In a play that oscillates easily between explicit sexual fantasies and pointed critiques of African American culture, Nina Angela Mercer’s Gutta Beautiful, part of the Fringe Festival, gives a complex picture of contemporary African American life. Written as a “conversation with [her] block,” Mercer’s story is also rooted particularly in D.C. and her life here. The loose narrative of the story focuses on Lola, a young woman hungry for both sex and love, but... more ›

Signaling an additional layer of complication to the already complicated and fractured immigration debate, the Washington Times is reporting today that some African Americans are joining together with the Minuteman vigilante groups that have been hounding illegal immigrants along the border and in day laborer centers, most locally in Herndon, Virginia. Though seeming like an alliance of strange bedfellows, African Americans in the region and across the nation tend to see immigrants as a threat... more ›

Good morning, D.C. In addition to scattered showers and thunderstorms, today brings news that the Circulator bus line is nearing its millionth passenger. Not too shabby — although the city's busiest buslines put up those kinds of numbers every month and a half (probably less, given the age of the linked numbers). But officials say that Circulator ridership has been increasing steadily; assuming the service survives the looming Tourmobile legal apocalypse, its planned route around... more ›

Lawyer Abducted in Alexandria, Escapes Shallow Grave: This is just too weird. A lawyer, a stun gun, a shallow grave, a dispute over a will, a 75 year-old man standing near the shallow grave when the cops arrive. It sounds like it could make for a good side plot in "The Sopranos." No, this is not Jersey. It's Alexandria. Just read the Post's account of this odd drama to keep all the details straight.... more ›

The Post notes yesterday that native Washingtonian and author Edward Jones has been named a MacArthur Fellow. Jones, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World", will receive $500,000 from the MacArthur Foundation, spread out quarterly over five years. Jones has lived in the D.C. area for most of his life. His first book, the short story collection "Lost in the City"", tells fourteen stories... more ›

An anonymous community member has posted a lengthy and personal discussion of this week's eviction of Sisterspace and Books on a website calling itself "Think Tank Magazine." Gentrification in the U Street district and other D.C. neighborhoods shows no signs of abetting, and DCist fears this sort of community displacement and its affiliated anger will become more common:" ... The gentrification engine grinds on full steam ahead. My first introduction to Sisterspace and Books was... more ›