Live Q&As

   Thanks for the kind words. In reverse order, yes, the matter of that woman, Miss Lewinsky, was definitely a strong contender for the list, but ultimately, I thought that the whole episode, while historic nationally, really didn't change Washington that much. It was an expression of a huge and sad change in our national politics, part of the general loss of trust in society, but really ultimately only one more big step in a process that I thought was better illustrated a decade earlier, when Gary Hart dared reporters to "follow me around" and then paid the price when we did.

   As for the Mount Pleasant riot, to be honest, we eliminated that as a possibility pretty early in the process, mainly because the District's Hispanic population was then and remains today rather small and has not appreciably grown since that time. The real immigration story in our region is very much based in the suburbs, and that's why I chose the seminal moment of 2007, the battle in Prince William County over illegal immigration that led to a tough new law and an exodus of Hispanics from the county.

   I'm sure some of our other runners-up will come up throughout our hour together here....

   Really good point, and we struggled over how to choose an event or moment that would capture that epochal change. I ended up choosing that period around 1999 when it seemed like the entire city was a construction zone, as crews tore up streets to lay fiber optic cable that would cement our status as one of the most connected cities on the planet. That was when the promise of the Internet seemed to unfold before our eyes and the way we acquired goods and connected with others changed elementally. Of course, there have been some huge developments since then--notably social media and the advance of mobile, but those are just steps up from the foundation that was put down in '99.

   Tough indeed. I got the easy task--picking the 25 and putting them in the Magazine in chronological order. Then our website asked readers to put the 25 in order of importance, which is much more difficult.

    If I had had to do that, I think I would have chosen the 1999 item about the boom, which combines the explosion of the D.C. area's economy, solidifying our status as the nation's most affluent, best educated metro area and giving us some protection against the economic ravages we see in much of the rest of the U.S. Of course, that boom was also the tech revolution, which has changed daily life and the way Washington works in very important ways, speeding up everything. All in all, probably the most change in any one year in the 25-year period.

Poll: Rank the 25 moments

   Welcome back, regular reader, whomever you may be! For the uninitiated, during my many years of chatting here every week under the Potomac Confidential rubric, we had a running and now ultimately successful crusade against the soul-smashing evil that was Dippin Dots.

   Good does eventually triumph, even in the world of frozen desserts.

   Tell me more, because I don't see how the Iraq war has changed Washington even a little bit. The polarization that runs as a thread through a number of my selections long predates the war. What other lasting changes do you see from the war?

   I'll assume you mean the District itself, as opposed to the region as a whole--yes, the big theme for me was one of political maturation. Remember, the District as a self-governing entity is only a few years older than the Post Magazine, so this article covers almost all of the city's modern history.

   And in that short time, the city has gone from a sleepy, boring backwater to a major magnet for the nation's best and brightest. That transformation required several different phases, with different political styles that were right for each moment. Barry's in-your-face style created and reflected a black pride of place that was crucial to creating the affluence and stability of Prince George's, the nation's most affluent majority-black jurisdiction. And the Williams-Fenty era represents the development of Washington as a multi-ethnic city that has started to bridge the gap between the federal identity and the city as a living, breathing economic entity.

   Not sure what you mean--we had one item for each of the last 25 years, with one or two exceptions, so the list was chronologically balanced for the entire period.

   Re the Oklahoma City bombing: I thought so too and that's why the bombing and the closing of Pennsylvania Ave is indeed #10 on my list---see the 1995 entry in the article. That was the real beginning of the hardening of Washington that came full flower in the aftermath of 9/11-- a set of decisions that I'm confident history will judge to have been a cowardly and massive overreaction.

   This is another one of those runners-up that we debated for some time. I ended up arguing that the shutdown (and the subsequent near-shutdowns) were a bit of political theater that grew out of the polarization that started a few years earlier and is reflected in my choices of the Hill-Thomas hearings, the Gary Hart sex nonsense, and the Corcoran Gallery art culture wars. After all, the shutdown itself was barely noticed by much of the public and had a negligible effect on the city, except as one more sign of how dysfunctional our politics were becoming.

   Great question--non-events are so hard to judge, but  let's imagine a few: No terrorist attacks since 9/11--that tells us a lot, doesn't it? That could mean that we overreacted to the first couple of attacks and failed to treat them as the oddities they were, or it could mean that we reacted perfectly and nailed down the lid on further attacks. We just don't quite know.

   Similarly, the Nats Park development story--we know that the economic collapse of '08 froze the progress toward development around the ballpark that had already started, but we don't know if that will have any long-lasting effect. Indications are that it's just a delay, and there are already good signs that development in SW is picking up nicely.

   Good question--the Barry arrest was a dramatic enough event that it somehow still feels fresh in the minds of many Washingtonians, but more important, it marked the most lasting and defining shift in the city's direction since the advent of home rule and the establishment of Washington as the nation's premier black city. With Barry disgraced, the city turned to a string of mayors who represented a new generation and a style of politics and governing that turned its back on the confrontational manner of Barry and the civil rights era, and embraced instead a more technocratic approach with a deep belief in the power of planning and development. Tony Williams and Adrian Fenty remade Washington even more powerfully than Barry had, and in very different ways, with a wildly different tool kit.

   As for the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, they not only ended up shaping the Court and its rulings for decades to come, but also played an essential role in dividing the nation into two politically and socially antagonistic camps in a way that endures to this day. And for the first time, the selection of Supreme Court justices--and later presidents and other officeholders--seemed to turn not on differences of philosophy or opinion, but on separate versions of facts. Where you stood on Hill vs. Thomas depended on which story you believed about what had happened between them-- just as we've seen such debates over the facts in so many political contests until this current presidential race.

   That was the tricky bit of this assignment--how to find the right mix of local and federal while staying true to the original concept. We wanted to portray the ways in which life in Washington changed, and since the overwhelming majority of us do not work for or have anything to do with the federal government--yet "Washington" implies federal to some people, especially those outside the region -- we focused on deciding which of the historic moments of the past quarter century that just happened to take place in Washington really altered our lives. That made things much easier: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are monumental events for the nation, yet, perhaps unfortunately, did not change life in the Washington area much at all--a statement about the distance that has developed between our military and much of the rest of the population.

   The mix ended up, properly to my thinking, with an emphasis on the purely local--the things that changed our daily existence.

   Nice question...I bet there will be a transportation item or two on the next list, but I wonder if it will be high-speed rail or more likely, a devastating increase in traffic. Maybe it's because I am sitting in Cairo, where you have to budget--no joke--four to six hours a day just for moving around the city's impassable streets, but I think the direction our cities and suburbs are heading is that of eternal gridlock of L.A. and Cairo proportions, and the Washington area's failure to build more infrastructure--we'll argue another day about the right mix of transit and roads--will be a huge story in 25 years.

   Similarly, our overall failure as a nation to invest in infrastructure will mean that another story on our next list will be the decrepit state of American education and our resulting economic decline.

   Thanks very much... I wonder if the list we do in 25 years will include the demise of radio as a mass medium and its replacement by the highly personalized music and information services made possible by the various new technologies.

   Snowmageddon was definitely on our early lists, and it qualifies as one of those moments that we will tell our kids about for many years to come, but really, what did it change? Yes, it showed once again how ill-prepared we are as a region for major disasters, but that's not exactly news to anyone who lives here, right? So it fell off the list....

   Great idea! Can we add a 26th item?

   Really, though, I probably would have predicted a few years ago that the next list in 25 years might have included a new soccer stadium, but it now appears that nothing of the kind will develop and that Washington could well lose its soccer franchise. The sport continues to thrive as a youth game, but fail as a mass market pro sport in this country. Sure, it's doing better than 25 years ago, but the persistent lack of enthusiasm for the pro game is now undeniable.

   Those are good choices, though I would argue that the country is not really any more conservative today than it was 25 years ago--rather, the two great triumphs of conservatism have been to shift both parties toward the right of where they were in the 80s, and to lead the evolution of news media to a far greater emphasis on punditry and argument and away from reporting and narrative. (Economics played a big role in that shift too--mouthing off is hugely cheaper than paying for reporting.)

   But the country--and the D.C. area--remain much more moderate than either our politicians or the media would have you believe. This remains a highly pragmatic nation, one that tends toward centrism in most people's own lives and yet the political system rewards those who make louder, more binary kinds of arguments.

   I like your other trend choices.

   Agree on the metal detectors--and I tried to make that hardening of Washington a big theme in our list.

   I see the Capitol Visitors Center as a symbol of how fear and Big Security took over the city. I love the content inside that center, but despise what it says about our commitment to basic American values of openness and transparency.

   As for Occupy, I don't see it changing Washington in any way--it's one more in a long line of such encampments, from the early days after the Revolution straight through to the Poor People's gathering in the late 60s and on to the so-called Million Man March. Those are all politically important moments, some of which had a real impact on policy. But not on how the city operates or how people live.

  Totally agree--Oklahoma City, in a way, was the original trauma. 9/11, because of its scope and drama, was more devastating, of course, but Oklahoma City stripped us of our innocence in a way almost as powerful as did Pearl Harbor.

   I never had any doubt about including the Snipers in the list--as far as personal impact on people who live here, I put it in a virtual tie with 9/11. Just huge. Now, you could argue that the snipers didn't really produce lasting change, but I think those of us who lived through it have enduring psychological damage--our antennae are up in ways they never were before that.

   That's a huge and essential story and some editors thought I included too much of it in this list, but I think it can't really be overestimated. That's why I included several items among the 25 that get at the demographic and racial change: The rise of charter schools, the development of the MCI Center (Pollin Center, if you please), the Fenty-Rhee assault on the failed D.C. schools,  and the backlash against the city's support of bringing baseball back to Washington.

   They are an evil social force because they contribute to the dumbing down of a great American product--the plastic pellets of the Dots are to ice cream as MSNBC and Fox are to news--they define the category down, dragging the purveyors of the genuine item with them.

   In the decline of any polity or industry, there comes a point when the solution to declining quality is pronounced to be the highly specific measurement of production or content--it's a logical move, of course, because who can be against measuring what works and what doesn't, right? But the impact of such moves is to quantify and mechanize and homogenize work, and that leeches out creativity and thought, thereby ensuring the continued, and even accelerated decline that the measurement was set up to arrest.

   Happens every time, yet few systems have the courage to avoid it.

   Excellent point. I remember two close colleagues saying in the aftermath of the Hill-Thomas hearing that they had simply stopped having casual conversation at work with acquaintances of the opposite sex. I don't think that gotcha atmosphere has entirely gone away, but it has improved somewhat -- except perhaps in the bizarre world of elective politics.

New federal snow policy: 'Shelter in place'

   Despite all the shelter in place nonsense, we will have snow days and we will have paralysis of the entire metro area, and we will have all those wonderfully Washingtonian moments, including wondering why exactly we are so awful at handling major weather events. Remember, the people bringing you the silliness of Shelter in Place are the same folks who brought you the on-again, off-again government shutdowns on the eve of big storms....