I finally got a chance to take shelter at Arlington’s infamous $1 million bus stop. It’s the one that drew international mockery last spring in what might someday make a Jeopardy category of boondoggles. It feels small for a scandalous object (I’d expected graffiti defacing it). But it is sleek […]

As a newly minted college graduate back in 1976, I applied for a reporting job at the Northern Virginia Sun. Thirty-seven years later, I landed an interview. Herman Obermayer, the longtime editor and publisher of the old Sun (predecessor of today’s Sun-Gazette), accepted my lunch invite so we could compare […]

Teddy Roosevelt continues to blow the 4th inning presidents’ race at Nationals Park. But, of course, in real life TR was anything but a slowpoke; in fact, the old rough rider was an ace horseman who rode many hours through woods here in Arlington. I ponder this when I bike […]

The closest thing to a museum of Arlington’s legal establishment is the law office of Earl Shaffer. During a visit to his longtime suite across from the courthouse, I was stunned to behold his frozen-in-amber wall filled with photographs – 60 years of rubbing elbows with the county’s notable jurists, […]

Arlington’s flirtation with backyard egg production, after two years of poultry puns and a culture clash worthy of the TV satire “Portlandia,” is coming to a boil. As promised, the 21-member Urban Agriculture Task Force last week delivered its report, and—surprise—the 74-pager with its 27 recommendations is a serious, consensus-seeking […]

When the school year ends next week, hundreds of lucky Arlington kids will shift to summer-camp mode. These scamps have no way of knowing – if my experience can be trusted – that their coming blacktop adventures are as fun for grownups as for themselves, and the memories may endure […]

In some office in Moscow lies a secret map of Arlington. It highlights not our famous cemetery or the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor but some sites of Cold War spy drama. Last Friday at the Arlington Historical Society’s banquet, David Robarge, chief historian at the CIA, delivered a rich talk titled “Spies […]

Washington-Lee High School is rightfully proud of the actors it has sent to the national spotlight—1950s graduates Shirley MacLaine, her brother Warren Beatty, and the 1980s generation’s Sandra Bullock. But there are other accomplished thespians, from W-L and greater Arlington, whose work you’ve seen on screen or stage or heard […]

The great neighborhood sign caper came into my view by happenstance. As I drove by the entrance to my boyhood Arlington neighborhood last month, I was stunned to behold a key ingredient gone missing: the white three-dimensional letters spelling “Rivercrest” had been removed from the two curved brick walls at […]

Eminent Arlingtonian John Paul Stevens brought down the house. The unassuming retired Supreme Court justice wowed Arlington’s Committee of 100 last Wednesday with wit and sportstalk on top of the expected legal insight. Freed to speak his mind at age 93, Stevens also hazarded predictions on the high court’s next […]