Washingtonian

A chilling and painstakingly reported account of the fall of a prominent D.C. rabbi. Barry Freundel secretly filmed 52 women while they undressed for a mikvah, or sacred ritual bath.

Retired Navy SEAL Don Shipley became a YouTube sensation for busting people who falsely claimed to be Navy Seals. But Shipley does more than just bust phonies; he also runs a bootcamp for civilians who want a taste of SEAL training.

A former Georgetown basketball star’s life took a troubled turn. Then he stopped at a gas station to buy a lottery ticket.

People afflicted with “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”—ailments related to being around devices like cell phones that emit electromagnetic frequencies—have flocked to the town of Green Bank, West Virginia, where modern technology has been banned due to their possible interference with a government telescope. The locals aren’t happy about the stream of newcomers.

Meet Vinnie Myers, known as the “Michelangelo of Nipple Tattoos.”

One owner’s $35,000 search for her lost dog.

Sean Bryant was a star student, charming, and fun to be around. Then one night he killed himself.

“‘Back when I was at the Agency,’ he said, ‘we once pulled a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.'” Matt Mendelsohn tracks down the story told to him by his neighbor Rod Carlson, a former CIA operative.

Meet Scott Boras, the superagent who scored the Nats their top talent—at top dollar.

Boras seems to get his way at least in part through willpower. Jerry Maguire he is not. During negotiations, Boras doesn’t scream. He isn’t manic. Baseball insiders consistently describe him with two words: prepared and relentless.

“At meetings, a GM might have the executive suite in the hotel—Boras has the presidential suite,” says Bowden, the Nats’ former GM. “He’s up jogging at 5 am. You walk into the arbitration hearing and his eight guys have Armani suits and matching ties. I worked in baseball front offices for 25 years. I never met anyone looking forward to a negotiation session with Scott Boras.”

Playing the DC Public Schools Lottery is a crazy, soul-crushing pursuit:

Consider the car-less Columbia Heights couple who applied to 16 schools and only got their kid into one, requiring a trek that adds two hours to their daily commute. Or the Mount Pleasant parents who went 0 for 6, four years running, for their eldest child, then lucked into one of the hottest schools in the city on their first lottery entry with their youngest. One mother I spoke to spent the first four years of her son’s life in her cramped premarriage one-bedroom apartment (and indefinitely delayed having another child) just so he’d have the right address when lottery time rolled around. Then there was the woman who seriously contemplated signing a lease on an English basement that was in-boundary for Maury, to increase her child’s chance of getting in there. (All right, I admit this last person was me.)