The finalists of Axios DC’s best building bracket are the Washington National Cathedral and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. An easy choice!

I am having more fun than I should following the Axios D.C. building madness brackets. The semifinals feature two traditional versus modernist face-offs: EEO building v. MLK library and the National Cathedral v. NMAAHC. Just delightful.

If you haven’t yen seen CGP Grey’s new video in which he ranks the US state flags, please do so now. It is vintage Grey.

The DMV region is 2 for 3 in the good flag department: Maryland’s is in the so-bad-it’s-good category, DC’s is just a really good flag I’m proud to see fly every day. Virginia’s is… quite bad. The seal is good — I love to see Latin in the wild — but as Grey notes, plastering your seal over a blue background does not magically make a flag.

What would make for a good flag of Virginia is the black snake on yellow background design it’s put on its specialty license plates, but of course “Don’t tread on me” has been forever poisoned, and other than the plates it has no particular ties to Virginia. If anything, since Ben Franklin drew the original design Pennsylvania could have use it to replace its own vexicological abomination, but for the toxicity.

No, if Virginia is to lean into its herritage it should put a ball of cotton on the left, a leaf of tobacco on the right, and a congestion-priced highway right down the middle.

“The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.”

He gets my vote.

I have cut my commute down to 40 minutes door-door (from ~2 hours), 25 of which are walking, and we only have to pay 1.69 times the rent. Yay?

Some observations about our new neighborhood from a Serbian/European/Baltimorean transplant.

Dogs are everywhere.

Runners and cyclists too.

And a couple of homeless people. One seems to have staked out a bench I pass by every day.

Very few children. Assuming all the little Audreys and Maddisons are attending their ballet lessons, or whatnot.

Restaurants with street seating. It’s like I’m back in Belgrade. Alas, most of them serve nothing but greasy American classics, only they call it Southern-style and put even more grease.

Are people who eat at these places the same ones doing all the running?

Why do two different streets in the same neighborhood have the exact same name? If you put a super-block that cuts a road in half, does it not make sense to rename one of them?

Safeway is a dump.

The title may remind you of Marginal revolution. That’s on purpose. Go read it.