Big week in Congress: Pelosi releases a healthcare bill for all to read, resulting in the usual grumbles about how long it is. To which we reply, would you rather have a bill one could scrawl on the back of a Big Mac wrapper? Luckily our representatives, brilliant, biting humorists that they are, are able to see the funny side.

In other news, Pete Hoekstra is on Huckabee, Joe Wilson is making friends in Europe (don’t tell him they’re all socialists over there), Cynthia Lummis is hanging out with someone named “Hoppy” and Bob Latta is abusing the caps lock key. And happily, many representatives gathered outside the Capitol Building at the end of the week to protest the healthcare bill, resulting in yet more bad jokes for the weekend.

It might have been Halloween, but there were few costumes and not much candy up on the Hill. Apart from John Shimkus, who’s been inexplicably playing the part of a preacher all week.

Joy Zinoman After 35 years, the head of Studio Theatre is stepping down. How has Washington theater changed? What’s next?

John Lannan The only one of the Nationals’ 30 pitchers to last the entire season, he might have suggestions for a better season next year.

Stacie Turner According to insiders, the Georgetown real-estate agent is one of Bravo’s Real Housewives of DC cast members, so watch out for film crews.

David Ferriero The newly appointed US archivist, who headed the New York Public Library, comes here with a mission of transparency and openness.

Cate Blanchett The Australian actress will be here for a month of performances in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Center.

Brian Nutting The longtime Congressional Quarterly editor was fired for asking impertinent questions about mass layoffs at the newly merged Roll Call–CQ.

This article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of The Washingtonian. For more articles from that issue, click here.

In this disheartening Redskins season, a revolt against team owner Dan Snyder has spread through Redskin fandom. In response, Fedex Field security has been ordered to shred, stomp, or seize any protest signs directed at Snyder or the team’s top executive, Vinny Cerrato. (See accounts by the Post’s Dan Steinberg of fans at Monday night’s loss who were allegedly harassed by security and ejected for screaming “Danny sucks” near the ESPN booth.)

Fans in turn have taken their protest to a place beyond management’s control: the Web. From bitter blogs to fiery Facebook tirades, what some describe as Fascist Landover is under attack.

The story that comes to mind when reading Haleh Esfandiari’s memoir of wrongful arrest, surprise raids, puzzling interrogations, and solitary confinement in Ahmadinejad’s Iran is Franz Kafka’s dystopian novel The Trial. Yet unlike the fictional bank clerk Joseph K., Esfandiari—who runs the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program in DC—survived her ordeal, including four months in Iran’s Evin Prison on trumped-up charges, to deliver a taut, jolting narrative that describes how life in the Islamic republic is stranger—and darker—than fiction.

Esfandiari, who fled Iran in the winter of 1978, had been visiting her mother in 2006 when Iranian police forced her cab off the highway outside Tehran, swiped her passports and plane tickets, and disappeared into the night.

Interrogations follow. Esfandiari pleads her innocence. An investigator with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence twists her testimony. The story, a snapshot of Iranian paranoia in response to the Bush administration’s rhetoric, is also a luminous panorama of Iranian life. In prison, Esfandiari befriends the female guards, whose dark chadors disguise worldly concerns about body weight, love, and the future. In the juxtaposition of these women with Esfandiari and the generation that came of age before the revolution, the book channels another Kafka story, The Metamorphosis. As Esfandiari’s tale proves, Gregor Samsa’s transformation from man to insect is no more frightening than Iran’s from homeland to prison.

In an era when some baseball players try injections or supplements to gain an edge, it’s comforting to know that fans can still root for a loser.

Teddy Roosevelt has become Washington’s most endearing mascot, emerging during the fourth inning of every Nationals home game with three other Rushmore-style Presidents to race around Nationals Park. Teddy’s winless streak remains unrivaled in all of professional sports since the race’s 2006 inception. Of course, losing every race requires some creativity. Our favorites from the 2009 season:

While Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shepherds the nation through a financial storm, his wife, Anna Bernanke, is quietly navigating her own full-time project—to open a new private school.

The proposed school, Chance Academy, will offer an arts-oriented curriculum to prepare inner-city students for college. It was intended to open this fall at Joe’s Movement Emporium, a community arts center in Mount Rainier. Those familiar with Bernanke’s proposal say the building contract fell through at the last minute and she’s looking at other options for a site. According to these sources, the launch is being funded by the Bernanke family’s own money.

Apparently, a dinner more than a year ago with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend helped plant the seed: Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, told Anna Bernanke about Touchstones Discussion Project, a nonprofit that aims to help students think independently.

Photograph by Scott Suchman.

No one knows what to make of Howard Gutman. When President Obama nominated him to be ambassador to Belgium this spring, the Belgian press couldn’t choose which of Gutman’s three hats to lead with: Was he a high-powered DC attorney? A Hollywood bit actor and would-be TV producer? Or a close Obama confidant?

Sure, he’s a longtime partner at Williams & Connolly, one of the city’s top law firms. But he also has a Screen Actors Guild card and a role in the upcoming movie Fame, and he was a top Obama fundraiser as well as one of the “Washington insiders” the GOP has attacked.

Gutman graduated from Harvard Law, clerked on the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Potter Stewart, and did a stint with FBI director William Webster before settling at Williams & Connolly in 1982. He spent two decades building a practice in corporate litigation and labor law as well as representing people such as Steven Rales and Nigel Morris. He also represented former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada against charges of human-rights abuses.