GoFundMe

Thursday

Teresa Mull

In praise of American charity

Here’s a bittersweet headline to warm your heart this holiday season: “Woman set up GoFundMe that raised over $1 million for her children before she died.” And another: “GoFundMe benefiting pregnant wife of Matthew Gaudreau has raised over $500K.” And one more for good measure: “GoFundMe raises over $26K for Massachusetts State Police trooper’s family.” I see stories like these weekly — and what’s remarkable about them is not so much that people are willing to help neighbors enduring tragedy, but how so many people are willing to go above and beyond what is being asked. The first fundraiser, for instance, was set up by a single mother from Utah dying of cancer to raise $5,000 for her own funeral expenses and a little money for the kids she left behind.

charity

Monday

Bill McMorris

The coldness of K Street

You couldn’t miss him as you strolled down K Street. He wore a fedora and boxy suits, was not afraid to imbibe as he worked, and paced the capital’s most infamous stretch chain-smoking cigarettes. He arrived in Washington in the Nineties as a traveling salesman and would have kept right on traveling were it not for that checkout girl. For three decades, he put the road behind him and went to work erasing any trace of the street from the brogues, Oxfords and, in the final decade of his life, the slip-on monks and bit loafers ubiquitous among the graceless lobbyists of the twenty-first century. K Street may have become too busy to tie shoelaces, but its denizens were never too busy for a happy-hour stop with the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Shine.

k street