Photo-illustration by Emma Spainhoward. Photographs by Ceren Bayrak and Vadim_Orlov/Getty.The holiday season is here again, which can only mean one thing: amid the jingling bells and frenzied shopping and way, way too many college football bowl games, you may find yourself wanting to check out—even if you can’t, you know, actually bail on your seasonal obligations by booking the next flight to the Bahamas alongside potential new US ambassador Herschel Walker. Anyway, what better way to take a mental vacation than by immersing yourself in a good story? With that in mind, here our are favorite longreads of the year: Babydog Unleashed: Inside the Weird World of the Most Powerful Pooch in Politics West Virginia governor Jim Justice is about to join the US Senate. His secret weapon? A 62-pound English bulldog who might be the best retail politician the state has ever known. From Sylvie McNamara’s delightful—and sneakily despairing—deep dive: In preparation to meet Babydog, I’d spoken to a motley crew of West Virginians—a handful of political operatives, the employees of Babydog’s favorite Wendy’s, a pollster, a statehouse reporter, and an assemblage of voters—trying to discern her meaning to the state. She’s like West Virginia’s mascot, they said, a “homegrown celebrity” but also a “prop.” She’s a “part of the governor’s persona,” his “secret sauce,” and “quite possibly the most popular political figure in West Virginia.” “If anybody’s star power is greater than Governor Justice’s,” someone said, “it’s his dog.” I also heard grumbling, particularly from Justice’s opponents. “The governor has a very cute dog. Everybody loves the dog,” said Mike Pushkin, the chair of the West Virginia Democratic Party. “But he uses that to distract from the fact that he’s not a very good governor.” Some think he’s deflecting from his personal problems, too. Justice’s business empire—with holdings in coal, agriculture, and hospitality—has been embroiled in disputes over hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. Since last summer, the governor’s state wages have been garnished, a helicopter owned by one of his companies was seized, and pieces of his property were auctioned in courthouses around the state. The Greenbrier, Justice’s historic mountain resort, owes his own state government millions in sales tax. “These are the kinds of stories that in the past would have sunk a governor, but he manages to remain relatively unscathed by them,” one Democratic operative complained. Another said, “We have major problems in the state of West Virginia. But the governor trots out a very cute dog and people just seem to forget about all that.” Meet the NIH Detectives Cracking Medicine’s Toughest Cases When people suffering from mysterious afflictions have nowhere left to turn, they come to NIH’s Undiagnosed Diseases Program in Bethesda, where a team specializing in ultra-rare genetic disorders takes on cases that have stumped the medical world—and offers patients new hope. Matt Ribel has more: In 2008, Gahl hired two nurse practitioners, began calling in favors from colleagues who had a spare hour, and launched the first iteration of the Undiagnosed Diseases Program. The goal: to use the world-class sequencing technology at NIH to crack those difficult cases, find new diseases to study, and create a living blueprint for genomic medicine. His team has since grown to 40. They’ve taken on 1,600 cases from 20 countries and solved a quarter of them. Their typical patient has spent eight years searching for answers and has a medical chart that runs hundreds—sometimes thousands—of pages. Each week, one or two new patients travel to Bethesda to undergo a five-day diagnostic marathon offered at no cost. Though each visit is custom-tailored, it could plausibly include visits with a dozen specialists, plus 50-odd tests and examinations. “The good news is that you’re going to get a year’s worth of evaluation in one week,” says Dr. Cynthia Tifft, who leads the UDP’s pediatric branch. “The bad news is that you’re going to get a year’s worth of evaluation in a week.” They Bought a New DC Luxury Condo. It Could Collapse. When a pair of first-time homeowners moved into a sleek condo in Northwest, they were thrilled. Now they’re afraid their building “could fall over”—and wondering why city inspectors failed to spot its many flaws. Ike Allen with a real-life horror story more terrifying than whatever number the “Saw” franchise is up to these days: On a stormy night in the summer of 2021, Darinka Komljenovic was sitting in the loft-like bedroom of her condo in DC’s Petworth neighborhood when she felt the room start to shake. She looked up and saw the tall potted cactus on her dresser wobbling back and forth. Picture frames clacked against the wall. Downstairs, hanging lights in the kitchen swung like pendulums. The weather stripping around the windows stretched and squeaked. She took out her phone and started recording videos. The leaks had been bad enough. During rainstorms, water would stream in from cracks in the ceiling, the edges of doors, and the recessed ceiling lights. But the swaying was even more alarming. When a big truck drove down the street, Darinka says, the six-story building near the corner of Georgia Avenue and Taylor Street, Northwest, would tremble—and when wind gusts were strong, Darinka and her brother, Nick, claim in court documents, it would shudder and shake as if enduring its own private earthquake. Sometimes, the siblings, who together had bought the condo more than a year earlier, would be so afraid the building might collapse that they’d run outside to take refuge in their cars. Or they’d frantically make arrangements to stay with friends, who joked that their own apartment was a storm shelter—except that no one else in the city was taking cover.   What’s the Deal With Republicans and Steakhouses? A history of the right’s favorite DC restaurants and the beef that’s fueling—figuratively and literally—the 2024 election. Jessica Sidman dishes plenty of red meat on the GOP’s love affair with ribeye joints: If Washington is the swamp, its steakhouses are the alligator pits. While a fresh generation of diverse and trendy restaurants have helped shake the local food scene’s longtime steak-and-­potatoes reputation, steakhouses have persisted—fueled in no small part by the ever-changing cast of politicos who frequent them. They’re places where alliances are forged, lawmakers are lobbied, and gobs of money are raised. They’re also country clubs of sorts, each with its own loyal membership. In particular, Republicans are associated with red meat, a stereotype buoyed by BLT Prime in the Trump hotel—the MAGA hub during the Trump years—and the former President’s own affinity for a well-done filet. Steakhouses have become not just meeting points but talking points in the culture wars. Trump has repeatedly suggested that beef is one more thing Kamala Harris is coming for: “She wants the government to stop people from eating red meat. She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows.” The data actually supports partisan perceptions. Campaign-finance reports reveal that Republicans overwhelmingly outspend Democrats at every major steakhouse in the city, including Charlie Palmer Steak; Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab; Rare Steakhouse; the Palm; and Bobby Van’s. At the Capital Grille, Republicans have outspent Democrats nearly 13 to 1 so far this election cycle, with bills totaling more than $762,000. Want to know where the right will congregate if there’s a second Trump administration but no more Trump hotel? Well, follow the money . . . and the meat. Because yes, there’s a lot at stake this election—but there’s also a lot of steak.     DC’s Last Bike Messengers While DC’s once-ubiquitous couriers have been pushed to the brink of extinction, their culture and camaraderie endure—as does their impact on the city’s streets. Ron Cassie, himself a former messenger, pens a love letter to a largely bygone era, and to the glorious group of misfits who grabbed messenger life by the handlebars: Being a courier was a mix of parkour, NASCAR, and hot potato. There were no protected bike lanes. You were up against car, truck, taxi, and Metrobus drivers who (a) did not believe you had a right to be on the road and (b) therefore would not yield a single freaking inch. You were vilified by the public and the press—former Washington Post columnist Bob Levey pilloried couriers in a dozen articles, once calling them “law-flouting, obscenity-spewing, bath-needing, wild-riding, pedestrian-smashing madmen,” who “should be kicked out of downtown forever.” You were targeted by the police as well, who sometimes demanded to search your bags under flimsy pretenses and regularly threatened you with citations and bicycle confiscation if your bike wasn’t registered with the department, as required by law. (Years of grievances led to a Police Complaints Board investigation in 2005, which found that mandatory registration had been “used as a retaliatory and pretextual search tool against [minorities and] other unpopular groups.” It was repealed in 2008.) The work was demanding—and dangerous. A Harvard School of Public Health study estimated that Boston bike messengers’ injury rate was 13 times that of the average worker—and three times higher than the next-most perilous occupation, meatpackers. It would be hard to find a longtime messenger who never got bounced across a hood, required stitches, or had a bone reset. Pat Riggin, a courier since 1989, estimates he’s been in more than 30 crashes. I remember one winter morning pedaling past him and noticing swelling and stitches above his eye. When I asked Riggin if he’d gone to the emergency room after a crash the previous night, he said that on principle he refused to pay high hospital fees—and had instead gone home and stitched himself up. In my worst crash, I hit a suddenly opening door of a Volvo so hard that the impact smashed the car’s corner panel and headlight as I catapulted down the street.     The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls” For decades, Jessica Jackson had a secret: Her high-school social life was an inspiration for the hit film “Mean Girls.” Sylvie McNamara gets the untold story, and then some: Back in December, at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from Mean Girls. It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but it’s really true?” Jackson told the room. “I’m the real Regina George.” As proof, she pulled up an article on her phone, a 2002 New York Times Magazine cover story entitled “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” At that time, Jackson was a 16-year-old junior at Northwest High School in Germantown. She loved Dawson’s Creek and Britney Spears, and when she spoke to the reporter for the story, she thought it was about some volunteer work she’d been doing with an organization that sought to build better relationships between girls. But in the course of their interviews, Jackson said some bonkers things about her social world, which wound up quite prominently in the Times. At the Christmas party, Jackson read some of these quotes aloud. The most eye-popping pertained to the rules of her high-school clique: “You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a week. Monday is fancy day—like black pants or maybe you bust out with a skirt.” For several paragraphs this goes on, teenage Jessica laying out her friend group’s dizzying standards for each other. “The rules apply to all of us,” she clarified. When one friend wore jeans on a Monday, “she wasn’t allowed to sit with us at lunch.” Among the moms at the party, nobody needed an explanation. Jackson’s friends were the Plastics, the catty clique of teen demigoddesses who run the school in Mean Girls, ensconced at their cafeteria table, reciting the ludicrous rules of their group. What Jackson said at 16 was rewritten—almost verbatim—into one of the megahit film’s most quoted moments. This was “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”     Tom Blanton Wants to Know Our Government’s Secrets For decades, Blanton and other “document fetishists” at the nonprofit National Security Archive have been uncovering protected information the government doesn’t want the rest of us to know—all to help the public see the unredacted truth about our history. Nancy Scola on the man who (usually) won’t take “classified”—or simply “no”—for an answer: Blanton has made a career of finding out things the government doesn’t want the rest of us to know. The Powell emails are just drops in the bucket of once-­classified documents and other secrets that have been collected at the headquarters of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit that has become, rather improbably, Washington’s ground zero for truly inside information. Located on the seventh floor of George Washington University’s Gelman Library, its offices are stacked with cardboard boxes sporting labels like “CIA Behavioral Experiments”. A magnet reading “Don’t Shred on Me!” is stuck on Blanton’s filing cabinet, near a desiccated snake plant. The archive’s 68-year-old director, Blanton has been doing this for nearly four decades. He arrived in Washington in the mid-1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War, and spent his first years, he says with a laugh, “rapidly failing in a variety of jobs.” He then discovered his passion. Since its 1985 inception, the archive has obtained billions of government documents and emails, covering everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s transcribed telephone conversations. Many are mundane. Others—like a Nixon White House memo suggesting the President ask Elvis Presley to “encourage fellow artists to develop a new rock musical theme, ‘Get High on Life’ ”—are delightfully daft. Then there are the documents the archive exists to uncover: protected information that, when dragged into the light, helps us see the unredacted truth about our own history, the better to avoid repeating mistakes. For example, the CIA’s “Family Jewels”—an internal compendium of assassination plots, domestic spying, and secret tests of mind-altering drugs such as LSD that prompted congressional investigations in the 1970s and that the agency finally released to the archive for public consumption in 2007. The archive also has helped India and Mexico write freedom-of-information laws, provided expert testimony in international human-­rights trials, and sued multiple presidential administrations—most notably Donald Trump’s—for alleged failures to keep and share records with the public.     Emergency Disservice: Inside DC’s Dysfunctional 911 System Dropped calls. Wrong addresses. Late-arriving help. The District’s embattled emergency-response agency is arguably broken—so much so that DC Fire and EMS has created a shadow dispatch operation to correct its sometimes tragic mistakes. Can things be fixed? Andrew Beaujon and Ike Allen lay out how and why things have gotten so bad, and why the answer to that question remains unclear: Emergency dispatch is difficult work, an exercise in coordinating chaos. Mistakes happen. In DC, however, the frequency and severity of those mistakes reflect what some inside and outside city government see as a dysfunctional system. In recent years, the District’s 911 response has been hampered by dropped calls, dispatch errors, and long response times that fall short of national standards—and have led to accusations that the system failed to prevent avoidable deaths. Mayor Muriel Bowser has consistently defended OUC’s performance and leadership. But the city’s auditor has criticized the agency for failing to acknowledge its mistakes. A former OUC head is suing the mayor and the city, accusing the agency of mismanagement and retaliation. More than 100 neighborhood leaders from across DC have called for an independent review of OUC’s shortcomings. Meanwhile, DC Fire and EMS has taken matters into its own hands, creating a shadow dispatch operation for fire and medical emergencies that spends much of its time mopping up OUC messes in real time. DC Council member Brianne Nadeau, a frequent critic of the agency, finds that telling—and alarming. “Is it not wild to you that our first-responder agency has set up a workaround for our 911 call center?” she says. “It’s bonkers.”     Meet The Smithsonian Bird Detectives Saving Lives When birds collide with airplanes, their remains are sent to a special lab in Washington, DC. There, an elite team of avian detectives works to identify the exact type of bird—the better to prevent future catastrophes. Andrew Zaleski visits the aptly-named Carla Dove to learn about her work, and the meaning of the word “snarge”: Back in the lab, Dove opens plastic bag containing three distinct feathers, each colored a shade of brown. The faintest aroma of jet fuel wafts over us as she picks up a white sheet of paper, the strike report mailed in with these remains. A Boeing 737 smashed anywhere from two to ten birds coming into Missouri. Dove and Jim Whatton, the lab’s deputy director, are sure that two of the feathers belong to a Canada goose, the cadaverous bird pulled from the library that’s lying before us. The first thing to understand about bird-on-plane collisions? They’re not the animals’ fault. Swaths of open green space and very few people around make airstrips and their surroundings ideal places for the feathered to, well, flock. As a result, most bird strikes occur during takeoffs and landings. Even off-airport strikes—such as the one involving Sully’s plane—usually happen within five miles of an airport, and at an altitude of 3,000 feet or less. With 45,000 flights crisscrossing the US every day, odds are good that a handful of airplanes will run into birds. In 1905, Wilbur Wright recorded the first-ever bird strike, over an Ohio cornfield. In 2023, planes hit more than 18,000 birds. The strikes cost the commercial aviation industry roughly $600 million annually in repairs—and if you add in military flights, the total is closer to $650 million.     Why Are Annoying Political Texts Out of Control? Often unwanted, increasingly unhinged, and almost always asking for money, political texts have become a campaign cash cow—turning America’s touchscreens into a perpetually pinging nightmare of inescapable irritation. Nancy Scola journeys into the heart of election season darkness: “You hear the ping,” says Michael Wagner, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, “and so you look down at your phone because it might be your kids. It might be work. It might be from a family member or a friend.” Or it might be Florida Republican Marco Rubio asking you to donate, right now, to defend his Senate seat from the Dems already pouring MILLIONS into the state. It might be California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, COUNTING ON YOUR HELP TO DEFEAT HOUSE REPUBLICANS. It might be word that Barbra Streisand is, in fact, 100% Team Kamala Harris! 700% MATCH now!! It might be a reminder from Donald Trump that EVERY CENT of Kamala’s $231 million war chest is DIRTY LIBERAL CASH! (followed by a donation link for the GOP presidential nominee). If you have a smartphone and a heartbeat, you probably recognize these sorts of texts: often unwanted, increasingly insistent if not borderline unhinged, and almost always angling for cash. Sent by campaigns and advocacy groups, they have in recent years descended upon our phones like a ravenous swarm of digital locusts, overrunning our notifications and devouring our touchscreens. Forget the hope of the early Obama campaign, the promise of democracy in the palm of your hand. Today we are living in the Great American Political Textpocalypse, a perpetually pinging nightmare of inescapable irritation. According to one estimate, Americans received 15 billion political texts in the midterm year of 2022, an average of 50 messages for every phone in the country. Alex Quilici, CEO of the spam-blocking company YouMail, says there were already more political texts by July of this year—well before the heart of election season—than in all of 2023, and that by early October as much as half of all automated texts being sent were political.     She Recovered From a Severe Covid Vaccine Complication. Is the Government Doing Enough for Others Who Were Less Fortunate? An uncommon reaction left Cristina Calvert fighting for her life. She survived and is healthy, but others with injuries are struggling to receive compensation from the “black hole” federal program meant to help them. Matt Ribel explains what’s happening, and what it could mean for public health:  Schoolmaster’s remedial scans offered the worst kind of vindication. Her instincts were correct. She wasn’t suffering from a passing migraine. Blood clots appeared throughout her head, neck, and leg—and if they weren’t dissolved soon, she risked a massive stroke or cardiac arrest. Two days earlier, on April 13, federal health authorities had issued a nationwide pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Nearly 7 million people had already received it, almost all without a problem. But at least six women came down with an exceptionally rare and confounding condition: Blood clots formed in unusual places, and at the same time, their platelet levels plummeted, increasing the risk of fatal bleeding. One patient had already died, and another was in critical condition. The CDC and FDA urged physicians to stay vigilant. If providers encountered a case, they weren’t to administer heparin, the first-line treatment for blood clots, for fear that it would worsen the condition. That evening, the hospital’s chief medical officer brought news to Schoolmaster: They didn’t know how to proceed, nor did they have specialists who could troubleshoot. In her exhausted state, she struggled to follow the conversation. Nurses begged her to stop crying, warning that it could spike her blood pressure. Her mother—a longtime nurse—pleaded with the administrator. “Do you have children?” she asked. “What would you do?” They’d already called every hospital in the DC area. Those couldn’t help either.     I Escaped My Problems at a DC Monastery As a break from her grinding domestic life, our Sylvie McNamara spent two days alone at a hermitage. The experience, she writes, was weirdly spiritual—and for many of our stressed-out, over-stimulated readers, highly relatable: I am not a religious person. I don’t pray. I’d come to this hilltop in Brookland not to grow closer to my faith, but to myself—to hear myself think, to be alone inside my own mind. I currently share a 1,000-square-foot apartment with an adult man, our chatty son, and a half-blind elderly dog. Everywhere is clanging pans and dinging phones. The dog whines, my son makes odd Darth Vader noises from the kitchen. There are only three rooms, and not one of them is properly mine; there’s nowhere I can go and shut the door. When I’m reasonably well, I can spend limitless time on my own. But these days, my mind is not the kind of room I want to dwell in; no interesting thought has crossed its threshold in months. Instead, in rare contemplative moments, I feel dread. My mortgage is burdensome, my marriage strained. I have a chaotic extended family, many of whom seem poised to fall off the face of the Earth. The bills don’t stop coming and neither do the emails from my son’s school. It’s shredding my consciousness. I’m scattered and fatigued. In response, my screen time has ballooned. There I am, night after night, Googling things I’m not curious about, scrolling various feeds, hoping something stimulating will appear. I’ve tried to fix it—with therapy, sobriety, exercise, Klonopin. Microdosing psychedelics. Burying myself in work. But intuitively, I figured I just needed some time alone. In solitude, I could offer myself up to the rapacious birds of my thoughts, and maybe, once picked clean, I’d have some peace.The post The Condo From Hell, NIH Disease Detectives, and the Most Popular Dog in Politics: Washingtonian’s Favorite Longreads of 2023 first appeared on Washingtonian.