Two and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we have at long last reached a point where, even if the public health concerns have not yet dissipated, the public will for restrictions is all but completely absent. The CDC, WHO, and FDA may still issue occasional alerts and updates, but the thunk of
After seventy years of steady and often astronomical growth—from 1940 to 2010—suburban Fairfax County Virginia finally slowed in the 2010s to a more modest pace. It had no choice. This county opposite the Potomac River from Washington DC is developed across about 75% of its 390-square-mile land area. Even more impressive is that isn’t even
As I fine-tune and finish up a much longer blog post, I wanted to fill this dry spell with some amusing content that serves as a follow-up to an unexpectedly popular blog post from about a year ago. I noted last spring the strange, recent proliferation of bumper stickers (magnets in actuality) alerting passers-by of
Kirby Road drapes itself across the hills and valleys of McLean, Virginia, a Washington DC suburb in northern Fairfax County and among the most affluent communities in the country. In the summer, both the trees and the topography shroud the majority of the palatial homes that line either side of this former country lane. In
Amidst the broader cultural polarization and the ensuing moral panics (or perhaps the moral panics that have prompted the cultural polarization?), we’ve witnessed far more people announcing their political loyalties than in the past, often through overt displays in their front yards. While one can find these sort of signs just about anywhere in the
We have now reached, almost to the day, the point when the majority of US states, taking the lead from a national disaster declaration, began issuing safety precautions in an attempt to prevent the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), better known as COVID-19, the number attributing the year in which epidemiologists
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the World Wide Web exerted little to no influence. This second example of memetic behavior that is anti-digital is probably a bit more
The primary photo in this article features a landmark that is widely known to people in the greater Washington DC area, particularly those on the Virginia side of the river. But it isn’t significant or important enough to have any clout nationally or even outside the region. It’s a visual landmark in the sense that
It’s been over a decade since I wrote about the fish, chop, and steakhouse known as Kincaid’s, a chain with a location in Carmel, Indiana (an Indianapolis suburb) that, based on my fleeting observations, was doing everything it could to downplay its very chainy-ness. And that was the point. The interior of Kincaid’s included
It’s amazing the world of difference that a few stripes of paint can make. Thirty years ago, the notion that various municipal public works departments would overtly reserve portions of our roads as exclusive lanes for bicycles was essentially an extravagance—a weird provision relegated to a few choice roads in college towns, which were the
Two and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we have at long last reached a point where, even if the public health concerns have not yet dissipated, the public will for
After seventy years of steady and often astronomical growth—from 1940 to 2010—suburban Fairfax County Virginia finally slowed in the 2010s to a more modest pace. It had no choice. This county opposite the
As I fine-tune and finish up a much longer blog post, I wanted to fill this dry spell with some amusing content that serves as a follow-up to an unexpectedly popular blog post
Kirby Road drapes itself across the hills and valleys of McLean, Virginia, a Washington DC suburb in northern Fairfax County and among the most affluent communities in the country. In the summer, both
Amidst the broader cultural polarization and the ensuing moral panics (or perhaps the moral panics that have prompted the cultural polarization?), we’ve witnessed far more people announcing their political loyalties than in the
We have now reached, almost to the day, the point when the majority of US states, taking the lead from a national disaster declaration, began issuing safety precautions in an attempt to prevent
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the
The primary photo in this article features a landmark that is widely known to people in the greater Washington DC area, particularly those on the Virginia side of the river. But it isn’t
It’s been over a decade since I wrote about the fish, chop, and steakhouse known as Kincaid’s, a chain with a location in Carmel, Indiana (an Indianapolis suburb) that, based on my fleeting
It’s amazing the world of difference that a few stripes of paint can make. Thirty years ago, the notion that various municipal public works departments would overtly reserve portions of our roads as
