A dinner-time telephone caller wanted to know, first, if I was a registered voter, and then if I supported President Obama, was worried about the fiscal cliff, opposed choice, or favored the Tea Party. The tagline identified the call from something nebulous with 2012 in the title. The respite from [...]

Over the coming months, the City Council will ask for public input on how best to fund projects to address flooding in the City and meet new, tougher federal and state requirements for water quality. We all recall the flooding that occurred in the City and throughout the region with [...]

It was unintentional, we think, but highly poetic. Absent from the 53rd annual Falls Church Citizens for a Better City (CBC) meeting and dinner Sunday night was Falls Church’s pillar among pillars, civic activist and three-term City Council member Ed Strait, who died in November. Also absent, as rare an [...]

How better to humanize the glass canyons of Crystal City than with offerings of fine local art?

The New Year is already a week old, as the busyness of the holidays is replaced by the business of returning to our normal routines, interspersed with the occasional sports event, watching the winter weather reports (so far, so good), and finishing off the last of the holiday goodies. If you are looking for some special, and free, community activities, here are a few suggestions.

Information forms the heart and sinews of a healthy democracy. I once visited a country in Southeast Asia and was very surprised to note the almost total absence of public libraries… or any discernable interest on the part of the population in reading. Like perhaps most in Falls Church, I [...]

Welcome to 2013, such as it is. Perhaps forestalling bad news until after the holidays, as readers can see on Page 1 of this edition, the Falls Church City Council wasted no time at its first meeting of the new year to begin figuring out how to best wrest another [...]

Arlington sits a mere 93 million miles from a most practical energy source. So notes Scott Sklar, the solar power luminary whose nonconformist home on Ivy Street may be the county’s most energy-savvy. The bearded and jovial Sklar, a longtime lobbyist, author and lecturer, is on friendly terms with his [...]

Happy New Year! A new calendar is much like a blank canvas – a surface just waiting for the strokes that highlight our lives – depth, color, and perhaps, perspective. Birthdays, anniversaries, pay days, school vacations, and medical appointments might get first listing on the family calendar; business meetings and [...]

On the eve of this New Year, it can be said that Ed Strait’s final, great gift to his beloved City of Falls Church was the memorial celebration in honor of his legacy held at the Community Center last Friday. There, the City’s finest assemblage of its greatest community servants [...]