Dear Family,
I am about to cancel my subscription to The Washington Post, thus bringing to a close three decades of parasocial relationships with a too-long-to-list series of writers at our local — and what was once arguably America’s finest — newspaper.
It’s hard to describe the palpable sense of loss I feel at its demise.
One of the first things I did upon moving here in 1996 was subscribe to the Post. Even though I was a poor graduate student and couldn’t really afford it, it was important to me. Crystal and I (and a short time later, Hannah) lived in a cockroach-infested apartment in Glenmont (before the Glenmont Metro station existed — I had to walk all the way down to Wheaton to catch the train — uphill both ways, kids!) and we did not have many nice things. But the Post reliably hit our second-floor doorstep every morning. It was a nice thing, and I actually treasured it.
A lot of people cancelled their subscriptions in 2024 when the editorial page, which had begun to take on a more libertarian bent, declined to endorse anyone in the presidential election (breaking a streak of endorsing every Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime — except for 1988 and 1972, when the paper also endorsed no one). If you happen to be one of the people who cancelled your Washington Post subscription because of this, then, with all due respect, you’re a moron. Failing to perfectly parrot back to you all the opinions you already hold is a truly stupid reason to unsubscribe to a newspaper.
I write now specifically to my children: Read people who disagree with you. They may not be as wrong as you think they are. Read and seek to understand where they are coming from. (And don’t just assume that “where they’re coming from” is bigotry. Assuming bigotry in others is just as intellectually lazy as bigotry itself.) Actual bigots exist, of course, and you don’t need to waste your time reading and trying to understand them. But read other people you think are wrong. It’s good for you. It’s good for everybody.
The Post lost even more customers earlier this year when it (in)famously fired half of its staff, eliminated its once-vaunted sports section, closed a bunch of international bureaus and dropped almost everything else that mattered. I can’t find fault with the subscribers who left when all that happened. But for reasons probably having more to do with nostalgia than anything else, I carried on.
And then, this month, the Post did the unthinkable: It dropped the Capital Weather Gang.
And that was it for me.
If you think I’m an idiot for holding onto a newspaper subscription because I like its weather coverage, well, I won’t argue with you about that. (I have never claimed not to be an idiot.) But it also means you have probably never read the Capital Weather Gang. They were the best. (I speak of them in the past tense — they still persist, just no longer as part of the Washington Post ecosystem.) I’ve never been one to take issue with conversing about the weather. I actually find weather to be a fascinating topic of conversation on its own terms. But the Capital Weather Gang elevated talking about the weather into an art form. They also (perhaps inadvertently) created a world divided into two types of people: ignoramuses (i.e., people who clearly have never read the Capital Weather Gang) who refer to the humidity in percentage terms (an utterly useless metric) and enlightened folks who cite the dew point.
I won’t go on here about the merits of the dew point (as I have already done so in multiple past letters) except to say that on any given day, I can tell you with 97.3-percent certainty whether that morning’s run will be a blissful experience or an awful slog simply by looking at the dew point. I don’t need the Capital Weather Gang to know the dew point, of course, but I could always rely on them to speak to me about it in the most charming possible way. Now that I no longer need the Washington Post to read the Capital Weather Gang, I no longer need the Washington Post.
I’ll continue subscribing to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as I have for many years. They are both fine newspapers, but they’re essentially foreign. They are not of here. It’s crazy to think that we don’t really have a local paper anymore. Never in my life can I remember not having a local newspaper to read (digitally or otherwise). It makes me sad.
In other melancholy news, my brother Andrew (and his family) are about to move to Switzerland for a yet-to-be-determined number of years, leaving his job at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (at least until Trump is gone and probably longer) to do similar work at the Bank for International Settlements (the world’s oldest international financial institution — sometimes referred to as the “Central Bank for Central Banks”) in Basel.
A decision was made to mark his impending departure with a “brothers weekend.” Matt drove up from Raleigh and joined Grant, Andrew, Peter, and me for a 28-hour whirlwind visit of Baltimore, Annapolis, and Kent Island.
We started with lunch on Friday at Nick’s Fish House, a popular waterfront restaurant in what is now known as “Baltimore Peninsula.” (Old timers would know that part of town as Port Covington — I don’t know when it got rebranded as the “Peninsula,” but that’s apparently what all the cool kids are calling it now.)
From Nick’s we went to Bmore licks for ice cream…
We drove a few hundred meters from Bmore Licks up to Federal Hill to take in the unique view it affords of the Inner Harbor.
If memory serves, we then made our way to Topgolf
And here’s a 10-second video that perfectly encapsulates our little brother:
Topgolf is walking distance from the stadiums and so we got ten-dollar tickets to that evening’s Orioles game against the visiting San Diego Padres.
For kicks, I just now typed “the platonic form of a baseball stadium” into the Google box. The AI came back, unsurprisingly, with an image of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
Try as I might, I just can’t think of a better place to watch a baseball game.
I’m pretty sure the O’s won the game. They had built a large lead by the sixth inning when we left.
We drove the 30 minutes or so from Baltimore down to Annapolis where we crammed into two rooms at the Residence Inn and caught the end of the U.S. – Paraguay World Cup match. Grant and Andrew shared one room, while Matt, Peter and I took the other. I was the only occupant of my room not attached to a cpap machine, but I’ve become accustomed to sleeping next to one, so it was no big deal.
Following a successful assault on the Residence Inn’s free breakfast buffet, we made our way across the Bay Bridge to Kent Island and a small, hidden Chesapeake Bay beach I had never heard of called Matapeake.
We went for a swim.
We drove back across the Bay Bridge to Annapolis for lunch at Chick & Ruth’s followed by some wandering around the charming old town’s narrow streets and alleys.
We walked around for as long as Peter’s stamina held out (which wasn’t very long), ultimately winding up at the Maryland State House. Most U.S. states have a capitol building. Maryland does not. Instead, we have a “State House.” But our State House is better than your rinky-dink, Johnny-come-lately state capitol for at least two reasons: 1) Our State House is older than the country. Older = better; and 2) … well, since I’m apparently Googling random stuff today, I’ll let Google AI tell you the second reason:
And here’s Peter admiring the father of our country in the aforementioned Old Senate Chamber:
I’m going to miss my brother and his family (and I hope they don’t decide to live in Switzerland forever — even though it gives us a nice excuse to visit a very pretty place). But it was nice to have an excuse to get together.
Oh, and, p.s., this past Thursday, I squeezed in one more baseball game with Andrew (and my nephew Sam and his new fiancée Eliza). This time it was a Nationals game. Nationals Park in D.C. is 35 miles south of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards and less awesome. But it’s a perfectly serviceable ballpark that is charming in its own way.
I also like that I can get to Nats Park without driving. (And that is, in fact, how I got there on Thursday. It necessitated a short bike ride home from the Metro in the dark, but I’ll take that over driving and parking any day.)
I pull for the Nats unless they’re playing the Phillies. Unfortunately (for the Nationals) they were playing the Phillies. After building a 5-0 lead in the first three innings, the Nats’ historically inept bullpen went on to surrender 2 runs in the sixth, 3 in the seventh, and 5 in the ninth, to the delight of what felt like at least 60 percent of the fans in attendance.
Father’s Day made me feel a little guilty, as it usually does. Apart from Crystal making me a very nice breakfast (which was only unusual because I seldom eat breakfast at all on Sundays), the day was pretty much marked by other people catering to my various wants while I watched golf on T.V. — so, not all that different from most Sundays nowadays. Church featured the Primary children on one side of the stand singing the first verse of “A Child’s Prayer” while the entire elders quorum (fathers and otherwise) squeezed onto the other side and sang the second verse. And then the children and men sang the two verses at the same time, as is customary when performing that particular song. (I played the piano.) It was simultaneously sweet and powerful, and it made Crystal cry.
Contributing to Crystal’s tears of joy may have been that the school year had (finally) ended two days before. The end of school, which seems to be later here than most places anyway, was further delayed by the mountain of snowcrete days we racked up earlier in the year. They were so exciting in February, even though we knew we’d ultimately be paying for them in June.
Crystal had to return to school on the Monday after classes ended for the latest round of “Woodcock-Johnson” training.
Crystal has been administering Woodcock-Johnson cognitive assessments to special education students for years, and I still can’t believe that that is what the assessments are actually called. “Woodcock-Johnson” sounds to me rather like the punchline to at least 60 percent of the jokes I heard in 8th grade, and, because I still basically possess the mentality and temperament of a 14-year-old boy, I remain incapable of referring to the tests without giggling. Presumably the middle school boys don’t know the name of the assessment Crystal is administering to them.
It doesn’t help that Ari discovered recently that Dr. Woodcock’s first name was, in fact, Richard — because, I mean, of course it would have to be, and you can’t make this stuff up.
For what its worth, I’ve also never heard a Uranus joke that doesn’t make me laugh.
The patriotic concerts that I mildly complained about in last month’s letter went better than I thought they might. They actually went well. A little one-dimensional and far too much narration between numbers (but we always do that — I’m not sure why we seem to think that people come to concerts to hear people talk about music) but the choir sang well, the soloist who portrayed King George in “You’ll Be Back” (from Hamilton) totally hit it out of the park, and I have to admit that I actually enjoyed myself.
But most of all, I was pleasantly surprised to see my cousin, Lt. Col. Michael Willis (U.S. Army) in the audience. He is currently posted in Georgia but was in town for a few weeks receiving legal training at The American University (which I guess explains the beard, which struck me as unusual for an Army officer).
Mike learned about the concert by reading last month’s Famlet, which of course delighted me to no end.
The following weekend, I also had the privilege of being the organist at a 50th anniversary “golden jubilee” celebration of the dedication of the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center. (The temple itself was completed in 1974 — the visitors’ center opened two years later.)
The invitation was extended to me after the person originally asked to play discovered he had a conflict, but I was happy to do it. The program featured memories from people who were involved with the events of 50 years ago, which means it included a lot of very “seasoned” people who tend to be capable of speaking for extended periods without always realizing that they have been speaking for extended periods. But it was nice.
And finally, this picture of me with my arm draped around Will Jawando is actually from last month. But I’m including it now because this past week he won the Democratic primary to be our next county executive (no mean feat, as our county has a higher population than six states). The Democratic primary is the de facto election in Montgomery County — the November vote will be a formality — and so I’m both happy for him and proud to have voted for him. I don’t agree with him on everything (I don’t agree with anybody on everything) but he is a genuinely good guy (as, I believe, were his opponents) and I’m eager to see what he does.
The photo was taken in the “gym-itorium” of Ridgeview Middle School where a child of his used to be one of Crystal’s students. We were there for the school’s production of a show who’s name I have already forgotten.
Looking forward to seeing a lot of you next month!
Love,
Tim et al
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly