D.C. residents avoided downtown the day of the riot, leading to a muted public health impact on the District, a new working paper shows.

“There are many state-of-the-art options that wouldn’t needlessly wall off the Capitol complex like a fortress.”

This bill, approved Wednesday, also seeks to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision in 1857.

Reader Lane Thompson sends this photo taken in front of the Capitol building last night.

Architect of the Capitol, the federal agency that provides information about the historic Washington building, has released a “visual timeline” showing 200 years of growth around the National Mall.

The National Mall is, as we’re sure the Park Service will tell you, a national treasure, a constantly evolving piece of L’Enfant’s vision of Washington. (It is not, however, a place for careful editing, unless “relfecting” is a colonial word meaning “to walk about in knee-high tube socks and bermuda shorts upon gravel pathways”.) The key word, though, is evolving. The moment ground is broken on one monument, the lobbying begins for the next one….

FRIDAY: >> While Argentinian actress and singer-songwriter Juana Molina put out her first album in 1996, most of us in the U.S. probably didn’t get hooked on her until 2004, when her sophomore effort, Segundo, was finally released. Despite such a long lag time between her debut and follow-up, since then she’s been recording like a woman on fire — this tour is support of a fourth outing, Son. She’ll be bringing her unique Latin/French/Electronica/Folk…

If you frequent Dupont or Logan circles, please note those traffic circles are tied to the apex of all evil: The White House. That’s what people who push Masonic conspiracy theories would like to make you to believe at least. Now that “DaVinci Code” author Dan Brown is preparing his next megaseller on D.C.’s Masonic machinations, we thought we’d lay out the general thought patterns as to why some people think the L’Enfant street plan…