It’s the time of year for moving trucks loaded with client files to roll down DC streets under cover of night. “[Law partners] want to leave stealthily,” says James Durfee, a vice president at the Kane Company Office Movers.

The start of a new year is a busy time for Durfee’s company, which works with a number of local law firms. Partners often wait till January or February—after they’ve received their final payouts from the annual profit pool—to jump to a new firm.

Forget the cheery office goodbye parties common in other professions. Law-firm departures routinely occur within 24 to 48 hours of a lawyer’s giving notice to partners that he or she is leaving. That’s because once a partner resigns, the competition for clients begins.

Princess Noire By Nadine Cohodas

True callings often stir in the dust of jilted dreams. William Faulkner wanted to be a poet, George Bernard Shaw a painter, Martin Scorsese a priest. Eunice Waymon was dead set on becoming a classical pianist when Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music rejected her application in 1951. That washout, as Washington writer Nadine Cohodas writes in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, turned into a watershed for Waymon.

In response, she started tickling the ivories at an Atlantic City nightclub. It turned out the pianist had both pipes and panache. She added ballads and show tunes to her repertoire of Bach and Debussy, learned to dress down boisterous onlookers, and, to avoid her Methodist mother’s rebuff at playing the devil’s melody, took the stage name Nina Simone.

The career in jazz and soul music that followed was turbulent and seminal. Simone camped on the fringe of the pop-music charts yet gained iconic status by sticking to her songbook and crafting evocative, sometimes confrontational, live performances. Like Frank Sinatra’s, Simone’s voice—which in songs like “Sinnerman” and “Feeling Good” could both seduce and scald—became richer with age yet remained “the third layer,” as she called it, “complementing the other two layers, my right and left hands.”

Ronald C. Machen Jr. What are the top priorities for President Obama’s nominee to be US Attorney for the District of Columbia?

Anne Kornblut. Women aren’t as close to getting the reins of power as they think, argues the Washington Post political writer in her new book, Notes From the Cracked Ceiling.

Abdulwahab Abdulla Al-Hajjri. Yemen’s longtime ambassador—and Washington host extraordinaire—is at the top of everyone’s get-to-know list.

Janet Napolitano. After a year as a low-profile Cabinet Secretary, the Homeland Security head is front and center in the renewed debate over intelligence.

Happy Friday, tweetbeaters! Hopefully, like many of our representatives, you’ve managed to escape in time and won’t get caught in the EPIC SNOWPOCALYPSE COMING TO KILL US ALL. With all this hashtagging going on, we have to wonder- how did people manage to hype things before Twitter? Text messaging? Telegrams? Cable news?

There was great excitement (and typical partisan posturing) this week when President Obama went to Baltimore for a powwow with House Republicans, conveniently taking most of the White House press pool with him. Virginia Foxx was unimpressed by the lecture, even if she did line up like a hardcore Obamabot afterwards to get the President’s autograph. Jason Chaffetz used the opportunity to actually ask useful questions, David Vitter is absolutely, completely obsessed with some Super Bowl copyright issue, Bob Goodlatte is reading, Glenn Thompson is groundhogging and Gabrielle Giffords got out just in time... And John McCain is very proud of his family. Which is nice.

Change was in the air for The Real World: DC last night! That and the whiff of dry vomit, as the roommates ventured to Adams Morgan instead of Georgetown, in support of Andrew’s tireless quest for a soul sex mate. It was in Adams Morgan that, among a sea of four people on the dance floor, Andrew spotted the neighborhood’s weekend native species: the Tom Tom Tramp. Much like its cousin, the poisonous dart frog of South America, the Tom Tom Tramp has a freakishly long tongue and sports neon colors as a warning—but it’s, well, obviously much, much bigger. Luckily for both Andrew and the Tom Tom Tramp, a full-on encounter was averted thanks to the divine intervention of a jumbo slice of pizza, which lured the TTT far, far away. Thus, disaster was avoided—at least for now.

Read on to find out how the roommates fared this week:

Blogger Claudia Holwill is brunch’s Carrie Bradshaw: “My college roommates and I watched Sex and the City together, and it always seemed to trigger my desire to write,” she says. “I’m not the type to write about my personal life or dating life, so I went with food instead.” The name Brunch and the City seemed the perfect fit.

She started the blog two years ago to fill what she saw as a hole in the food-blogging scene: “No one else was really covering brunch, and I knew there was so much more that could be shared,” she says. Holwill blogs about her favorite brunch spots, of course, but also posts recipes, foodie gossip, and the occasional ode to bacon, her favorite food. Her most useful feature: a list of bottomless-drink deals at brunch spots throughout Washington.

We caught up with the 29-year-old to find out where she’s brunched lately. Read on for her favorite brunch spots, recipes for at-home brunches, and her pick for the most unusual brunch menu in town.

Happy February, readers! This month’s photo contest celebrates stripes in every size and color. Any photo showing stripes—from zebra stripes to candy stripers—is fair game. Of course, technical skill and composition are important, but so is creativity. So go find some stripes and get snapping!

For newcomers, here’s how the contest works: Send submissions by noon on Tuesday, February 17, and our judges will pick the best shots to advance to the reader-voting round. Then we’ll open it up to you to select a favorite. The winner will be published in the April issue of The Washingtonian.

Photos—one per e-mail—should be sent to photocontest@washingtonian.com. Be sure to include the photographer’s name, phone number, e-mail address, and place of residence, along with a sentence or two describing the photo and explaining why it fits the theme. Photos should be 300 dpi and at least four by six inches. And remember, both the photographer and the photo’s subject need to be from the Washington area, which includes the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Good luck!