A doctor told Lynn Morris she might never play music again. She proved him wrong. Photograph by Benjamin C. Tankersley

Music had always come easily for Lynn Morris. At age 54, the Winchester, Virginia, resident was a two-time winner of the National Bluegrass Banjo Championship and the only woman to earn the title. She’d been named female vocalist of the year three times by the International Bluegrass Music Association and ten times by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America.

She and her Lynn Morris Band had just released their fifth album when she suffered a stroke in March of 2003.

“It was the darkest, most frightening time of my life,” says Morris’s husband and former bandmate, Marshall Wilborn. “Having no experience and no knowledge of stroke recovery, I thought that in six months she would be in great shape and we’d just pick up where we left off. But it didn’t work that way.”

Morris’s right arm was incapacitated and she suffered from aphasia, which impaired her ability to understand and use language. Without her, the band broke up.

Wilborn recalls a doctor’s appointment he went to with Morris, who was weeks into her recovery and barely able to speak: “He said, ‘If and when you return to your music . . .’ and when he got that much of his sentence out, Lynn, without a struggle for one single word, said to him, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t, because I’m gonna do it.’ The doctor and I both had our jaws on the floor.”

Chuang followed a boyfriend and moved across the country. “What would my friends say?” the author wondered. Photograph by Benjamin C. Tankersley

Nobody teaches you Chalkboard 101. When I stepped to the front of a classroom for the first time, I struggled to grasp the stumpy piece of chalk on the ledge of the blackboard and write “Prof. Chuang.” My first try was barely readable over the remnants of calculus equations on the board. I pressed harder. The chalk made a squeal. My students groaned.

At 34, I had left a reporting career on the West Coast to teach journalism in Washington. I was used to traipsing around Afghanistan and post-Katrina Louisiana, scribbling in a reporter’s notebook. With a piece of chalk in my hand, I was completely out of my element.

Why had I moved here and changed jobs when I’d had a perfectly good one already?

In college, my friends and I were the girls who lived in flannel shirts and never called ourselves girls. It was the early ’90s, and we wanted to look like Kurt Cobain, not Courtney Love. We swore we’d never wear heels, change our last names, or sacrifice our careers “for a man.”

In 2004, I traveled to Afghanistan, disguised in traditional clothing and a headscarf to get past checkpoints in non-NATO-controlled territory—and fell in love with Asad, my handsome, flak-jacketed bodyguard. Our love story bloomed in the shadow of the war on terror. When Asad got a visa to study in the US, near Washington, our happy ending was closer by 7,000 miles—and a lot of red tape.

It may be a stretch to call them Washington’s version of “Brangelina.” But Jay Carney and Claire Shipman already have a celebrity-style nickname—JayClai—to note their elevated status in the world of local power couples.

Carney, a former Time correspondent and communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, moved to the big podium in January, when he became White House press secretary. Shipman has been an ABC News correspondent for a decade. They’re among the Obama-era power pairs—couples with double doses of prestige and clout plus matching invitations to A-list parties. Here’s a sampling.

Photograph by Yassine El Mansouri

Growing up in Arkansas, Patterson Clark spent many hours trekking through the woods—either bird-watching with a buddy or learning to identify plants with his farmer-turned-botanist father.

That appreciation for the natural world stuck, and Clark earned a degree in biology from Hendrix College. An MFA from the California Institute of the Arts helped shape an artistic approach to nature.

When Clark moved to Washington 15 years ago to write and illustrate the weekly natural-history column Urban Jungle for the Washington Post, he noticed aggressive, nonnative plants such as English ivy climbing trees at Whitehaven Park, an arm of Rock Creek Park just 50 feet from his home. Invasive, nonnative plants can crowd out native species that wildlife depend on for food.

Sonnez, Blake, and Weiner represent the Post's new approach to reporting. Photo by Benjamin C. Tankersley.

Rachel Weiner has the résumé of a journalism veteran—and she’s 25.

In the summer of 2006, Weiner covered politics for Talking Points Memo while getting her degree at George Washington University. That fall as an intern, she worked on one of the Washington Post’s political Web sites. With her degree in hand, she was hired as Talking Points Memo’s associate Web editor. She was 21.

The Huffington Post hired her away to manage its politics page. Post editor Sandra Sugawara lured her back last year to be a political Web editor. Then Weiner became a national Web editor. At 24. “But,” she says, “I had always wanted to be a reporter.”

Chris Cillizza, author of The Fix on the Post’s site, asked her to be one of his assistants. In March, Weiner became what’s affectionately known in the Post newsroom as a Fixette. She joined two other young writers who have leapt over hundreds of ink-stained wretches at the daily newspaper to seek success on its Web site.

The apartment where journalist Bob Woodward lived when reporting the Watergate scandal hit the market in April. A 500-square-foot studio near 17th and P streets in DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, the apartment is listed for $215,000. In The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, Woodward wrote that he would place a flowerpot on his balcony to signify that he wanted a meeting with Mark Felt, the FBI official who became his secret source. When Felt wanted to meet with Woodward, he’d circle page 20 in Woodward’s New York Times and draw the hands of a clock on the bottom of the page to indicate what time they should meet in a Rosslyn parking garage.

Many Washingtonians have been addicted to the BlackBerry, the PDA of choice for lots of busy people, but a number of shiny new local applications—such as Bluebrain’s new National Mall app (available May 30), which provides a musical soundtrack to accompany walks around the Mall—are helping the iPhone in its quest for total domination. For those who still need persuading, here are some dream-app ideas that might do the trick.