>> Plans for the District’s biggest hotel, with 1,400 rooms, near the Washington Convention Center, are on the verge of being shelved. [WaPo] >> A healthy baby boy was born on I-270 this morning, proving once again that life is really just God’s cheesy network sitcom. [WJLA] >> Apparently those recent repairs at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library didn’t include water fountains, ceilings or bathrooms. [City Desk] >> A photography exhibit that…

If you’ve ever wondered about what lay behind closed doors, BUILDING, now on view at Project 4 Gallery, gives you a glimpse of just how big that universe can be beyond the boarded windows and padlocked gates. A small, unassuming brick building in Belfast, Northern Ireland ran the city’s electricity for nearly half a century. Once wild with rippling currents and responsible for channeling energy to all of residential, domestic, commercial, and industrial Belfast, the…

By DCist Contributor Steve Kiviat The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has a somewhat well-deserved reputation as a highly educational place to dump visiting relatives, but tourists and discerning locals alike can also have some fun at the event’s daytime performances and evening concerts and dance parties (not to mention chowing down on grub that’s better than street-corner hotdogs). This year’s 41st annual version features three themes: “Mekong River: Connecting Cultures,” “Northern Ireland at the Smithsonian,” and…

The sprawling anthology—wherein we follow a large number of characters as their lives overlap but rarely intersect directly—has been a constant presence at the movies for years. Although the genre was once an exclusive territory to which Robert Altman seemed to own the only set of keys, since the mid-90s, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have all followed this loose pattern to big success—the producers of 2004’s Crash even got a Best…