I suppose it’s a forgivable oversight. The stooped, frail-looking woman in a powder-blue dress was neither a celebrity nor a newsmaker when she appeared on “The Tonight Show” in August 1987. She was just a little old lady from a tiny town in Kansas—and by old, I mean historic. She was 105 at the time. But she had all her marbles, as well as a fierce, straight-shooting wit, and that was enough for Carson.

Its steady growth reflects the escalating popularity of its surrounding community, where dining, nightlife and home renovations are creating a new energy, and also the Atlas’s new formula for booking acts.

   The names were read aloud, each followed by the sound of a chime. Then a moment of silence. "The brave men and women whose names are etched on the Journalists Memorial remind us that little about a free press is actually free," James C. Duff, the Newseum's CEO, said in a statement. "Every day, journalists around the world scramble to bear witness, sometimes at great personal risk, to record the first draft of history."

He doesn’t need money or success; the founder of MarketWatch sold that thriving financial Web site in 2005 for more than half a billion dollars (his share: about $20 million). He has won journalism prizes, run two local newspapers and served as a senior editor at The Washington Post.

The month of May is turning into a catwalk of America’s greatest senior novelists. Ford’s new book is the best of the lot, though, a magnificent work of Montana gothic that confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America.

In addition to its successful Wednesday comedy block, the network will launch another block on Tuesdays and will resurrect its Friday family comedy block, last seen during ABC’s “TGIF” days.

Actor William Levy and Cheryl Burke

Padilla, 47, is a software developer who lives in Woodbridge. She’s also an oboe player. Although she is not a professional musician, she plays with four orchestras. Her life doesn’t look altogether different from that of some freelancing professionals: working out the logistics of a complicated rehearsal and performance schedule, picking up other gigs when she can.

And your coffee mug. Your tape dispenser. Your page-a-day calendar.

In January, while waiting to photograph head shots for an annual report by the CuDC, a local arts nonprofit, Robinson noticed a private workspace in a back room at Flashpoint Gallery.

Some of the movie business’s most cherished assumptions have been summarily smashed to bits since Memorial Day, which mostly bodes well for audiences. An industry that caters almost exclusively to teenage boys is finally poised to take other audiences seriously. (Please, God, let this mean fewer comic-book movies.)

The green-eyed monster is stalking literary novelists — or so you might conclude from a recent trend: an uptick in adult fiction that invents, and muses about, wildly popular children’s fantasy series.

That’s the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a powerful sentiment — and an instructive one, especially in this era of hyperpartisanship — but you won’t find it anywhere on the 450-foot inscription wall that makes up part of the MLK National Memorial. Actually, you won’t find it in most tributes to the late civil rights leader, because he wrote it in June 1958 to a concerned churchgoer as part of a magazine advice column.

If Brian Eno’s old maxim requires ambient music to be “as ignorable as it is interesting,” then the crowd gathered outside PS1 MoMa in Queens on a recent Saturday afternoon was definitely ignoring ambient music.

“2 Broke Girls,” CBS’ young raunchy comedy hit, has driven the network’s older raunchy comedy hit “Two and a Half Men” out of Monday night, opening up a half-hour for the network’s only new comedy this fall.

Despite nabbing the highest judges scores on Monday night’s performance show, TV host Maria Menounos was eliminated from “Dancing With the Stars.”

There was an audible gasp in the ballroom when Tom Bergeron and Brooke Burke Charvet revealed that Maria and her partner, Derek Hough, wouldn’t make it to next week’s season finale. They were against NFL player Donald Driver and Peta Murgatroyd in the bottom two; Donald will join classical singer Katherine Jenkins/Mark Ballas and actor William Levy/Cheryl Burke in the final competition round.

One way to announce you have Alzheimer’s is to issue a quiet statement and fade into history. That’s not Glen Campbell’s route.

Instead, the “Rhinestone Cowboy” legend publicly announced his diagnosis, sang at the Grammys in February and started a tour of farewell concerts around the world.

• Insane costumes, blood-soaked dancing, a general lack of pants — we in the U.S. are fairly used to Lady Gaga’s stagecraft by now, but it’s still fairly heady stuff in Indonesia, where officials just pulled the plug on her sold-out June 3 concert in Jakarta, reports the Associated Press. Islamic hard-liners and conservative politicians had criticized her sexually suggestive style — with some claiming she worships the devil — and local police, fearing violent protests, announced Tuesday they had withdrawn the permits for the concert at a 52,000-seat stadium.

Does George Stevens Jr. ever yearn for a bigger screen? The producer/director is Washington's biggest movie buff — the founder of the American Film Institute, the creator of the tributes to showbiz greats at the Kennedy Center Honors — but most of his own work has been in television. Now that he’s published a new paean to Hollywood — “The Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation,” interviews with post-studio system icons like Spielberg, Altman and Truffaut — we wondered if the son of the late film director George Stevens Sr. (“Giant,” “A Place in the Sun”) is wistful for a road not taken.

No, my siren is the daffodil.

On a rainy Wednesday evening at 21st and L streets NW, a small group of people has gathered — physically or via the Internet — at the offices of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).

“He socialized not at all with politicians and business people in Washington,” remembers his grandson Knight Kiplinger.

Few people who met Patsy Thorpe — third and most difficult spouse of Jim Thorpe, that primordial American athlete — accused her of being pleasant, in particular Thorpe’s children from previous marriages.

— Swahili proverb

The mountain was just as I remembered it: high and stark, dusky black against the blue sky. Its name was Meru and, like its sister to the east — Kilimanjaro — it was the remnant of an extinct volcano. It had a steep grade on one side, which gave way to foothills and then to the city of Arusha. On the other was a long slope that rolled out into lakes and plains.

It was the mid-1990s, and Nathan was working as a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun, engaged to be married and “really miserable.”

It is 1993, and she is the 39-year-old only daughter of her parents’ long and loving marriage. Her mother has suffered a stroke, so Braitman has flown from California to New York to be with her. She finds her mom awake, but groggy, and hopped up on meds. After an embrace, her mother asks, “So, how’s your boyfriend?”

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]]> http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=42edf2941bb8f582d800f69b6d008785 http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-makes-a-perfect-spy-tick/2012/01/09/gIQAXWvL1Q_story.html?wprss=rss_style http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-makes-a-perfect-spy-tick/2012/01/09/gIQAXWvL1Q_story.html?wprss=rss_style http://www.washingtonpost.com/Fragment/SysConfig/WebPortal/twpweb/rss/mobile/blog-entry.jpp?id=1000.3.2559172895 http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-makes-a-perfect-spy-tick/2012/01/09/gIQAXWvL1Q_story.html?wprss=rss_style http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-makes-a-perfect-spy-tick/2012/01/09/gIQAXWvL1Q_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/what-makes-a-perfect-spy-tick/2012/01/09/gIQAXWvL1Q_search.html 1000.3.2559172895 75674860-3ae9-11e1-af18-7ec0de5907e2 CIA Thu, 9 Feb 2012 09:45:26 EST Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:37:54 EST 20120221063754 The Washington Post /2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2012/01/09/Magazine/Stories/spies0212.xml article_story style.dwp:content_well/grid-style-magazine-fashion.dwc:col1/story-lifestyle-featuredmagazine.dwc:story EOM::CompoundStory The Washington Post His stepfather was laying into him that night something awful. Hurtful words. Head slaps. The usual. What made Frank King so mean? the boy had asked himself over the years. Now, Jamie King just wanted to watch the end of a great football game.

“We shall overcome Reagan”

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill.

Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman’s underpants. Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge. At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber.

Elijah Byrd adored motorcycles, a hobby he had dabbled in as a young man. But he could never afford to own one until his son Shane gave him a Honda Shadow Spirit 750 for Father’s Day in 2004.

For more than three decades, the University of Maryland health professor taught courses on death education that drew hundreds of students every semester. One young woman came because of a near-death experience she’d had at age 10, when a wave washed over her in Atlantic City. Another was grieving from the loss of her father in a plane crash. More than a few students over the years were contemplating suicide.

And she was.

When her hair started turning gray in her 30s, long before it should have, she kept it. Didn’t dye it black to maintain the appearance of an elusive youth, but wore the gray like a crown — piled in silky curls, done in waves or covered by hats. She had an extensive collection of hats, so large that she once had a room dedicated to them. In her generation, a hat was a thing of pride. Proper ladies wore hats and gloves and often a string of pearls, so that when they presented themselves socially, they would appear “finished.”

Twenty-five years ago, Washington Post Magazine was launched. That doesn’t seem like many years, but life sure has changed.

In 1986, terrorism was someone else’s problem, AIDS had only just become a household name, and we’d never seen a serious tech rally, much less a bust. Heck, Whitney Houston even had two hits on Billboard’s year-end singles chart.

Instead of getting to rest before her show at the Louisiana Superdome, the R&B star has been booked for two speaking engagements. She’s holed up in her hotel suite, fuming. Outside, her assistants are waiting for her to open the door.

On a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York three years ago, Dennis Hong was captivated not by the giant blue whale, or the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, but by the ankle bone of a timid prehistoric deer.

LaPides’s student assistant sets a timer for 10 minutes, and Pitch Dingman, a weekly speed-pitching session at the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, begins.

In fact, he carries everything he needs to survive in his 22-pound backpack. As a “ridgerunner” employed by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, he is in charge of hiking 112 miles of trail through Shenandoah National Park from May to September. While the park’s traditional rangers serve as law enforcement or nature “interpreters,” Augie actually lives in the backcountry woods for week-long stretches. He sleeps in a one-man tent, cooks dinner on the world’s tiniest camp stove and has a nodding acquaintance with the black bears he regularly passes as he hikes his rocky, winding path.

On this evening in late June, the 40-year-old is stepping out of a black SUV on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of “Larry Crowne,” her latest film. She has only a small part, but Tom Hanks asked her to do it, so now she’s shrink-wrapped into a knee-length tangerine Herve Leroux bandage dress — no bra, no back, plunging neckline.

The people were the Nacotchtank Indians. They or their ancestors lived alongside the waterway for 10,000 years.

He putt-putts in a pontoon south from Bladensburg Waterfront Park, where the Anacostia begins its eight-mile run to the Potomac River at Hains Point.

The other end is wound around a plastic water bottle, which whirs like any sportsman’s reel as it rapidly unspools on the dusty ground. The sinker and two hooks baited with chicken splash about 40 feet out.