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Brian Doucette with the hutch that he’s spent thousands of hours investigating.
Photograph by Louise Stoker.
Brian Doucette has purchased a lot of cool stuff over the years antique Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Meiji-period Japanese panels and an 18th-century Jacopo Brandini violin he picked up for $200 and later sold for $9,000. But the item that has most captured his imagination the one he has now spent 3,000 hours researching, trying to unlock its secrets is a wooden hutch he bought from a random couple in 2016. “Anybody in antiques always says, ‘One day I’m going to find a Monet,’ ” Doucette says. “This is my Monet. This has been the quest.”
Album / Aquatic Gardener, Godspeed (GÄD’SPĒD)
DC musician Jamal Gray’s latest project is this rich instrumental collection of moody hip-hop beats.
Photograph of Musgrove courtesy of UMBC
Website / Black Power in DC
George Derek Musgrove, a UMBC professor and coauthor of the essential DC book Chocolate City, is behind this en-grossing new resource (blackpowerindc.umbc.edu), which maps important sites of Black activism. It launches February 1.
Photograph of Guy Picciotto of the band Rites of Spring courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Podcast / End on End
Two appropriately unpolished hosts work through the entire Dischord Records catalog, album by album. You probably won’t hear in-depth interviews about most of these recordings anywhere else.
Photograph by Hannah Galliosborn
As a high-level aide to Harry Reid back when he was Senate majority leader, Adam Jentleson got an up-close look at how the Senate works or, more often, doesn’t work. Now he’s written a book,
Kill Switch, that explains what the problem is and offers concrete steps to fix it.
So this is a pretty depressing book. It’s about how the filibuster has basically broken the Senate.
People tend to think the filibuster is a foundational feature of the Senate, and they tend to associate it with long-winded speeches in the
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington model. Both of those things are totally incorrect. The filibuster did not even come into existence until more than half a century after the Senate was created. And the filibuster is simply a way for any single senator to raise the threshold for passing a bill from the simple majority where the framers set it and where Senate rules still put it all the way up to a supermajority of 60 votes. Instead of a