Channel 9 reporter Bruce Johnson has broken the story on the dust-up at the Washington Post this past week. Classical music critic Tim Page, winner of a Pulitzer prize, has long been one of the best writers in the Style section, making the paper’s shrinking coverage of classical music all the more shameful. In response to a mass email from the staff of Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry, which was sent to Page apparently…

For all his success outside of it, David Mamet has done all right by Hollywood. More than all right, in fact: His screenplays for The Verdict and Wag the Dog were nominated for Oscars, and, like Woody Allen, he gets to direct his own scripts just the way he wants to because 1) he’s got such unassailable artistic cred that everybody wants to work with him, and 2) he never spends very much money….

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant – it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market…

John G. Hanhardt has been working as a consulting curator on film and media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). He’s had an influential career as one of the pioneering curators of media art in North America, helping shape the way museums look at and receive new media within their galleries and collections — all stemming from his perspective of film’s influence on art and culture in the 20th Century. Hanhardt grew up in…

Woe is all of us this morning, as the National Zoo has officially announced that Mei Xiang is not really pregnant after all. Real panda pregnancies are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and this time, unlike two years ago, the hormonal spike recently tracked in the mama panda was a symptom of a false pregnancy. Sniff. This makes Mei Xiang’s fourth pseudopregnancy. She had three before giving birth to Butterstick (aka Tai Shan), her only cub…

Last week Prevention magazine put out its list of the Best Walking Cities of 2007. We were a little bit surprised by the results: 1. Madison, Wisconsin 2. Austin, Texas 3. San Francisco, California 4. Charlotte, North Carolina 5. Seattle, Washington 6. Henderson, Nevada 7. San Diego, California 8. San Jose, California 9. Chandler, Arizona 10. Virginia Beach, Virginia OK, so the top five cities are all plausible, even if we have a hard time…

Before we begin, we’d like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It’s the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we’re trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where to…

You know, back when I was growing up in Southern California, graffiti used to mean something. Of course, it meant territories and violence and “don’t you dare wear that red jacket over here,” and fun stuff like that. But now it’s gotten all existential and angsty — just look at this stuff (and also, what?). Flickr user AlbinoFlea gets a little laugh documenting our emo street art around town, and takes a particularly good…

This morning, the Post reminds us that in cities, as in everything, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The paper covers a new study from the Center for Housing Policy today, which finds that the advantages of cheaper suburban housing are quickly offset by the expense of longer commutes. The report goes on to note that even so, there is no question of living near the central city for lower income residents;…

The Washington Post ran a lovely Metro section article this morning chronicling progress on the mammoth effort to re-engineer the Mixing Bowl from a slapdash mess of on-ramps, merges, exits, and bottlenecks into 50 graceful bridges and 24 streamlined lanes of traffic. As we read the first few sentences of this little human interest-style puff piece, a curious trend jumped out at us.When Woodbridge resident Kit Oliva first drove across the new Springfield interchange ramp,…