Washington Post

One roof at a time, Preston Rhea is casting an invisible net across Mount Pleasant. The 26-year-old field researcher for the Washington-based think tank New America Foundation has spent the past nine months nudging his neighborhood into a community wireless network. Routers, installed on six rooftops so far, open up people’s wireless connections to the public and allow any neighbor within a nine-block radius free access to the Internet.

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside a posh bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my friends of almost two decades. I made an offhanded comment about the ratio of blonde-haired-blue-eyed chicks to brown girls like me. It seemed like a zillion to one.

My pals, who are white, didn’t get why I was bringing this up. “No one cares about race except you,” one said.

Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy argues that “the Big Flip” in gender roles “is just around the corner.” Soon, she says, “women, not men, will become the top earners in households,” transforming the dynamics of male-female relationships.

... are budget-conscious will need to reserve some of their high-bandwidth applications for times they are at home or connected to a WiFi network,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the future of wireless project at the New America Foundation think tank.

“As we enter the thick of the campaign season, no one can ignore the debt issue,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which works actively to support debt-reduction efforts in Washington.

It's not easy, given the part of Arlington I live in, but I manage to avoid Lee Highway almost entirely. I get some satisfaction out of my personal boycott. I'd rather be stuck at a few more stoplights, and go a little farther to a different grocery store, than incorporate into my daily routine a thoroughfare named after a man who so "nobly" led the fight to preserve slavery and destroy the United States. Don't even get me started on Jefferson Davis Highway and all its enticing commerce!

"The fiscal projections for the United States are so stunning that, one way or another, reform will occur," Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said this week at a forum organized by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

An earlier episode of these secret talks made real progress on Kashmir and other issues in 2007, as documented by journalist Steve Coll in the New Yorker. ...

Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, echoed that view, saying that any serious proposal to restrain deficits would require politically painful proposals, such as increasing the retirement age and limiting Social Security benefits for high earners. ...

The Smithsonian has decided this whole online contraption may not be a fad after all.

Over the weekend it invited 31 luminaries of the digital age to talk with what the institution hopes are its most energetic thought leaders. The subject: dragging the world's greatest museum complex into the current century.

No small task.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, the technorati monthly, tells of one Smithsonista who proudly observed that her operation's curators had already carefully picked 1,300 photos and uploaded them to the social-sharing Web site Flickr.