Farm Animals Roam Lanham Neighborhood No Longer

Zainab and Rakiatu Bangura were headed to the bus stop in their Lanham neighborhood in February when they were chased by the neighborhood llama.

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The Banality of Love

Around 1924, the professor seduced his student. He was 35 and married; she was 18 and single. He was an important philosopher, and she was a precocious kid, destined for great things herself. He was to become a Nazi and she was a Jew — Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. If you could understand them both, as a couple and individually, you would understand the world and all its mysteries. You might also never sleep again.

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We gather to mourn the loss of John McCain’s integrity

We are gathered here today to pay our final respects to John McCain’s integrity. It died recently — turned a triple somersault, stiffened like an exclamation point, fell to the floor with its tongue hanging out — when the senator told Newsweek, “I never considered myself a maverick.” This, after the hard-fought presidential campaign of 2008 in which McCain, his advertising team, his surrogates and his running mate all but tattooed the “M” word on their foreheads.

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The Estrogen Dilemma

Here we are, two fast-talking women on estrogen, staring at a wall of live mitochondria from the brain of a rat. Mitochondria are cellular energy generators of unfathomably tiny size, but these are vivid and big because they were hit with dye in a petri dish and enlarged for projection purposes. They’re winking and zooming, like shooting stars. “Oh, my God,” Roberta Diaz Brinton said. “Look at that one. I love these. I love shooting mitochondria.”

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