Readers of a certain age will remember the halcyon days of the early 2010s, when a startup digital media company called Buzzfeed popularized something known as the “listicle.” Bored students and work procrastinators suddenly had access to an endless stream of pointless articles about random subjects that were formatted as

Hey everyone! How’s your week been? Ours has been great—we’ve been at a silent retreat in a cave under a rock in the ground with our phones off. Haven’t seen a single bit of local news! And now to take a huge sip of coffee while

The denouement was rather unremarkable when it finally arrived. After a year of work, months of conversation, weeks of op-eds and yard signs, days of increasingly unhinged doomsaying—in a half empty City Council chamber in the small hours of a Wednesday morning in late November, a unanimous 7-0 vote

Happy Alexandria Thanksgiving everyone! We’re so excited to kick things off tomorrow with our city’s signature holiday tradition—a fun family road race that’s 2 miles longer than anyone wants or needs it to be. You should be statutorily barred from using “trot” to refer to anything

You guys remember the show Entourage? It was an HBO dramedy that ran for (somewhat inexplicably) eight seasons in the early to late aughts, and followed the lives of a fictional A-list movie star and his buddies from back home. You remember Entourage—it’s the show that Jeremy Piven

We Alexandrians have always been pathological overachievers. Not satisfied with the many hats we wear in our array of day jobs, we also enjoy moonlighting as armchair experts in additional fields of professional practice. Our qualifications arise not from training, knowledge, or hands-on experience but rather from quick skims of

It’s hard to be an adult. When you’re young, you dream of the unfettered freedom of self-determination and give little consideration to the downside of complete agency: the meals that have to be planned, the laundry that doesn’t do itself, the commutes that must be navigated. Being

Change is hard. It’s not our fault; the human brain is hard-wired to favor consistency and reject the unfamiliar. In fact, fear of change is such a universal emotion that literature and film are replete with characters whose stories revolve around it. If you’ve ever sobbed your way

Readers of a certain age—35 to 50, give or take—might remember the seminal 2001 crunk track “Raise Up,” in which rapper and Timbaland protégé Petey Pablo encourages people in locations across the world to take their shirts off, twist them around their hands, and spin them like a

Climate change… yikes, right? You’ve probably noticed that it’s been very warm this year. September, in fact, was the most anomalously hot month in recorded history, inspiring one climate scientist to describe the weather as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” Not a great sign!  Perhaps you’ve been worrying about

There’s an old saying that goes: if you can’t win the game, change the rules. This is a cute expression to print on a motivational poster hanging in the lobby of your scrappy upstart small business. It is not cute when you’re talking about toying with the

Great news, everyone! It’s a year that ends in a number, which means we here in the Commonwealth of Virginia get to exercise our god- and James Madison-given right to vote. Voting—an every four or two years at best exercise in most decent parts of this country—turns

What does an ideal Sunday sound like to you? Maybe there’s brunch. A bit of football. Some napping reading perhaps. Menu planning and meal prep, that’s popular. And let’s not forget drinking heavily to beat back the Sunday Scaries - that’s a classic! Also, yardwork. The

Near the end of the first act of Thornton Wilder’s most famous play, two characters discuss the address on an envelope and how it frames their place in the world. The instructions to the postman start from their house and go on to list ever more encompassing labels—their

Expectations are a funny thing. Take for example the recent Disney+ show Secret Invasion. It was the latest Marvel MCU story (awesome), it featured Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury character (awesomer), and it was adapting a legendary and era-defining Marvel comics storyline (awesomest). Anticipation could not have possibly been

Congratulations - you’re reading the inaugural issue of ALXtra! We picked quite a week to launch a newsletter about local issues in Alexandria, given the truly manic level of civic discourse we’re experiencing (I mean, have you seen Nextdoor??). In truth, the timing couldn’t be better -