From the archive: the author presenting some preclinical work on the cell cycle at the AACR annual meeting in Washington DC, circa 2017. Little did I know that six years later I’d be living just a few blocks down the street.

You don’t need to live in DC to appreciate Martin Weil’s delightful prose about its weather this weekend:

Both days, Friday and Saturday, innocent of haze and atmospheric moisture as they were, seemed to celebrate change and assure us that in coming days, humidity would cease to be a concern.

These two days seemed to embody the exhilaration that comes of seeing blue skies, and nothing but blue skies, everywhere we looked.

Of course, when it comes to weather reporting nothing can beat Kevin Killeen’s story on why February is the worst month.

“On the morning of 8/6/1945, the Yamaki family and their bonsai survived the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 30 years later, bonsai master Masuru Yamaki offered this tree, one of his oldest and most precious, as part of a gift from the people of Japan to the people of the United States”

When traveling through Washington National airport, looking up is so much more rewarding than looking down. Not as safe, of course, but beauty comes with risks.

Boarded then left a broken JetBlue plane, and noticed how… ugly abstract the carpet was while waiting at the gate.

Lenore Skenazy, a co-founder of the free-range kid movement Let Grow, writes about the playgrounds of North Virgina:

“Welcome! Play Safe,” reads the sign at a Fairfax County Public School playground in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. The sign also lists a few simple rules—21 of them, by my count.

⊕ Although, to be fair, the background of my favorite sign ever was green.

The accompanying photo shows the playground sign, versions of which I’ve been seeing so much they’ve become part of DC’s atmospheric noise, like ambulance sirens, or screams of people who may or may not be experiencing homelessness but are definitely experiencing a psychotic episode: crowded white text on a screen-of-death blue background trying to codify common courtesy.

Skenazy’s Let Grow partner Peter Gray had the best comment:

“The only restriction that needs to be added to make them complete is ‘No Playing,'”

And of course, at least one person in the article mentions that these signs are there to “mitigate the liability of the entity responsible for the playground (school, municipality, etc.) in the event they are sued.” This just in case regulatory creep is apparent everywhere, medicine being the prime example, and the expanding size of clinical protocols yet another. Yes, we have Choosing Wisely, but how about Regulating Wisely?

(↬Tyler Cowen)

It’s the first day of school in DC, and we now officially have a middle-schooler in the family. I need to watch Eight Grade (2018), if it’s not already out of date by now. Tempus fugit…

The mantra at the end of this back-to-school themed Washington Post column — please drive safely, please drive safely, please drive safely — should have an addition: and don’t look at your G-d damn phone. We’ve had a couple of near-missed walking through DC; each time it was because the driver was too busy texting to pay attention to the intersection.

Kevin Kelley’s 10-year-old list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever has three from The Washington Post that are in the top 25:

• The Peekabo Paradox (2006), about Washington’s preeminent child entertainer, the Great Zucchini, and also about virtue and vice.
• Pearls Before Breakfast (2007), about a master violinist playing a 1713 Stradivari violin incognito in front of L’Enfant Plaza commuters.
• Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009), about, well, that.

The first two in particular are better than anything that will come out this week in any magazine, least of all in the Post. (↬The Technium)

National Harbor, MD is a cute mixed-use development just south of DC anchored by a casino, a convention center, and a ferris wheel; but it is most certainly not Washington, DC, the 5,000 residents of NH having representation in Congress, 700,000 of those in DC being without. These District turf wars are a tiny bit less parochial than they seem.