Washington D.C.

Washington, D.C., in 2018.

Catesby Leigh on the fight to build a World War I memorial near the White House.

The art and architecture (and tourist souvenirs) of the Sun King’s palace.

Most Americans can name only one local politician from Washington, D.C., and that happens to be the city’s “mayor for life” Marion Barry, famously busted in 1990 for smoking crack in an FBI sting operation (“bitch set me up!”). In March, the city unveiled a bronze statue to Barry on Pennsylvania…

Marijuana sellers have cute ways to get around D.C.’s legal loopholes, but trying to bank their cash becomes money laundering in the eyes of the feds.

If our scribblings here at The Weekly Standard have, for the last two years, had a jittery, anxious quality, it might be because we haven’t had a minute’s calm. And I don’t mean the mad whirlwind that is the Age of Trump. I refer to the daily slam-bang from the construction site next door.

Like most American cities, Washington has been grappling lately with the issue of historic monuments and statuary, public and private, and whether they ought to be displaced and discarded. The good news this past week is that, in a departure from recent custom, a new statue—eight feet high, encased…

Washington, D.C., should have listened to Marion Barry. The late four-time mayor of the nation’s capital may have made problematic lifestyle choices—even if the you-know-what did set him up—but give him this: He was 100 percent correct about the city’s streetcar boondoggle.

“I’m not sure a lot of people will come at midnight,” said the sales clerk who picked up the phone at Kramer Books when I called Thursday evening, wondering whether they were bracing for a crowd later that night.

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is currently engaged in a legal battle with the city’s Metro system. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has declined to run Christmas ads from the church. The ad design is fairly subtle in its suggestion of the Nativity—an outline of shepherds…

A neighbor has parked his classic Jaguar in front of my apartment building for the last two months. Around it are a new BMW, a Mercedes, and two Audis.

The moment its doors officially open, the new Museum of the Bible, with its prime real estate in the capital, will be the nation’s most prominent institution dedicated to educating the general public about Judeo-Christian ideas and history. But it is far from the first attraction built by…

What role does the Bible play in Americans’ lives? A century ago the answer to that question would have been straightforward: It was the most important book in the home, perhaps read daily, and the place where major events in a family’s history (births, deaths, marriages) were recorded. It was…

Greta Van Susteren, APP Baron? You of course remember Greta from her long tenures on CNN and Fox News and her brief one on MSNBC, right? Now, she's about to release an "APP" that she wants you to install on your phone. It's called Sorry:

By the time you read this, it is entirely possible that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have resigned his office in despair and frustration. He finds himself, after all, at “the breaking point” (New Yorker) in relations with his mercurial boss, President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, over at PBS…

The fanfare that greeted D.C.'s first public college preparatory school for African-American and Latino young men—Ron Brown High School in northeast has given way to an inevitable nag from the ACLU. If they're not going to admit young women, the ACLU says, then D.C. should at least give girls a…

Lionel Shriver is a novelist who is controversial in the literary world for her withering criticism of "cultural appropriation." It's the notion that if you belong to one ethnic, racial, or gender group, you're barred from writing fiction with characters from another group. If you're Asian, for…

Our neighborhood dodged a bullet. At least that's the spin the local weekly paper covering our tony D.C. community put on the news that a former museum would become a single-family residence rather than be converted into apartments. This despite the fact that the building boasts 27,000 square feet,…

Are these the droids I'm looking for?

An article in Sunday's Washington Post takes a look at mooted plans to expand the D.C. Streetcar's route network. For the fortunately uninitiated, the D.C. Streetcar is a 2.2 mile form of "transportation" that 1) is slower than walking 2) cost upwards of $200 million to construct and was years late…

It's hard to fall from "somewhat safe" and "questionably reliable," but the beleaguered Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has managed that feat. Having started an aggressive, long-overdue maintenance program in June, WMATA found that summer only added to its woes, as train delays left…

George Soros's philanthropy network sought to obscure its close coordination with a liberal Jewish advocacy group connected to the Obama administration and to campaigns designed to increase pressure on Israel and bolster the U.S.-Iranian relationship, newly leaked documents show.

The late mayor Marion Barry called the D.C. streetcar project "ill-planned, ill-thought-out, ill-engineered, ill-everything," a statement with which few would disagree. After a 54-year hiatus, the streetcar is back in action, offering commuters the nostalgia of a sluggish transit service with a…

On Tuesday, Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska spoke about their newly introduced ALLOW Act, which would stop the Washington, D.C. government from enacting excessive and arbitrary requirements for people to get jobs. They hope that states will follow their lead.

Washington mayor Muriel Bowser has presented plans to open new homeless shelters across the District of Columbia, including along the U Street corridor (a newly hip area of restaurants and bars) and in swanky neighborhoods such as Wisconsin Avenue, blocks from the National Cathedral, where a…

The Scrapbook’s commute is probably no worse than that of many of our readers who live in urban areas, which is to say that it's almost never pleasant and is also highly unpredictable. President Obama's appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 4, for example, added a good 30 minutes…

My local weekly newspaper, The DC Current, (like most such things amply funded by real estate ads) reports that the latest housing development in my upmarket D.C. neighborhood has run into an obstacle.

It would appear that few people know as much about business as liberal spokespeople. One of them, Generation Opportunity’s Patrice Reed, recently wrote in the Washington Post that the rules governing food truck owners in Washington, D.C.—one of the few approved occupations in the eyes of app…

A half dozen residential buildings have been put up in my Washington, D.C. neighborhood in the last five years, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are shorter than their surrounding buildings—markedly so. Two recently completed developments are a full two stories shorter than…

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Juliàn Castro defended his department’s new "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" program on Capitol Hill last week. Designed to integrate low-income families into higher-income neighborhoods, the proposed rules would funnel federal grant money to…

‘Skip the Bag, Save the River.” No, it’s not a line from The Godfather (that would be “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”). Rather, it was the District of Columbia’s motto for a 2009 initiative to clean up the Anacostia River by charging five cents for every plastic bag used by consumers in D.C.…

Police and city officials in the District of Columbia must be downright giddy these days. Over the past year, D.C. drivers exceeded the speed limit on fewer occasions than the year before, meaning they were less likely to get into serious accidents. At least this is what we can extrapolate from the…

About a year ago, the government of Washington, D.C., introduced a lottery system to allocate lunch hour parking spots for the city’s booming food truck industry. The one-year retrospectives have been almost uniformly positive, with the government, the media, and the food truck vendors themselves…

The news broke hard in my house this morning that Marion Barry, Washington D.C.’s former Mayor for Life, was dead at the age of 78. Of the profile subjects featured in my 2010 collection, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader, he’s the third I’ve had to eulogize in the last few years. (The other two being…

Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana lists her parents' New Orleans address as her primary residence for voting purposes. But it's clear she and her husband consider their primary residence to be their multimillion-dollar home on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. These revelations have…

Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is already in the electoral battle of her life this November. Her national party is far out of step with Louisiana voters on health care, abortion, and energy issues, and the national mood is continuing to shift against the Democrats. And the leader of…

The Washington Post reports that Democratic senator Mary Landrieu doesn't own a home in her state of Louisiana, instead listing her residence on federal election forms as either a mansion she owns in Washington, D.C. or her parents' home in New Orleans. Landrieu, who is facing a tough reelection…

Fifty members of the United States Senate haved signed a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell urging the league to "endorse a name change for the Washington, D.C. football team," known to the rest of us as the Washington Redskins. The name, the undersigned argue, is a "slur against Native…

Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon about the recent announcement that Democratic lobbyist power couple Tony and Heather Podesta are divorcing:

It is no secret that Washington generally prospers even as the rest of the country struggles. In a rough fashion, prosperity in the capital and economic hardship in the rest of the country are inversely related. An economic crisis means lots of new government pump priming--remember the…

Say you are a company that builds and operates large retail stores, selling consumer goods at desirable prices and that you have been successful across the land.  Let's call you ... oh, Walmart.

Visitors to the nation's capital for the upcoming inauguration have the chance to see a unique exhibit outside the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue. Until Saturday night, the Newseum's large First Amendment tablet will feature a projection of the work of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was…

Republican congressman Allen West of Florida took to his Facebook page to criticize Washington, D.C. culture, after attending this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend:

NATO agrees to oversee no-fly zone.