Tag: Washingtonian
Before the Internet, Your Lies Could Only Travel So Far
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“I’m sure there were phonies who claimed to be the sole survivor of Thermopylae,” [Don] Shipley says. “Guys that claimed service at Gettysburg, Valley Forge. But they could only project it down a couple of barstools at the village pub. Now with the internet, you can be anyone you want to be.” —Michael Gaynor writing for Washingtonian about […]
Where Do You Go When Being Around Cell Phones Makes You Sick?
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In the Washingtonian, a story about people afflicted with “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” who are moving to the small town of Green Bank, West Virginia, where much of modern technology has been banned due to their possible interference with a government telescope.
‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this story fundamentally changed me as a person’
Commentary
All reporters have pieces that stay with them, stories whose characters and components linger long after the last revisions have been rendered and the paper put to bed. For Jennifer Mendelsohn, Sean Bryant was that character. Mendelsohn first encountered Sean Bryant shortly after his death, nearly two decades ago. Transfixed by his short, vivid life and subsequent suicide, […]
Feature
Everything to Live For
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Jennifer Mendelsohn | Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words) Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June […]
The Decades-Long Quest for a Malaria Vaccine
Commentary
“Hoffman rolled up his sleeve and pressed the container—mesh side down—to the inside of his forearm. He felt a tickling sensation as the mosquitoes pricked his skin. Five minutes later, he removed the canister; an Army scientist examined the mosquitoes to confirm that each had sucked Hoffman’s blood. Five other volunteers did the same. “For […]
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Commentary
Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a DNA swab from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices were unusually divided—conservative Justice Antonin Scalia joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the dissenting opinion. For some deeper context, read Harry […]
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An oral history of the Beltway sniper attacks that occurred during three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed, three people were injured, and many people were too afraid to leave their homes: Iran Brown, victim, now 23: ‘I remember every detail, down to what I ate for breakfast: chocolate-chip waffles. My aunt drove […]
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Commentary
[Not single-page] A young football player kills himself after he sustained a concussion on the field: Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli. Scavongelli: “Do you know where you […]
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Commentary
Meet the man who’s been standing outside the Vatican embassy for 14 years—a vigil on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church: Time weighs on John Wojnowski. It wears him down. It winds him up. Time, for Wojnowski, is not just the half century since the priest in the mountains of […]
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Commentary
You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.” […]
