Featuring stories by: Amy Argetsinger, Leon Dash, Eddie Dean, David Finkel, Marc Fisher, Linda Greenhouse, Walt Harrington, Wil Haygood, Philip Kennicott, Howard Means, Luke Mullins, Maureen Orth, John Pekkanen, David Remnick, James "Scotty" Barrett Reston, Roxanne Roberts, and Josh Swiller. Like many residents of our nation’s capital, Susan Sheehan is an accidental Washingtonian. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1937, she survived the Blitz in London as a very young girl and then settled with her parents into an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It wasn’t until 1966, when her husband, Neil Sheehan, took a job at the DC Bureau of The New York Times, that she became a Washington resident, but there she would raise their two daughters and remain for the next sixty years. By then, Susan was a correspondent for The New Yorker, on her way to writing eight books. One of them, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? , was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1983. Neil was himself a well-known foreign and war correspondent. After becoming world-famous for his role in surfacing the Pentagon Papers (for which The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service), he would win his own Pulitzer (also for General Nonfiction), in 1989, for his monumental history of the War in Vietnam : A Bright Shining Lie. From the earliest age, Susan says, she was a “print junkie.” Having grown up reading The Times instead of children’s books, she says she has always interacted with the world through the filter of great reporting and writing. From this point of view comes her idea of painting a portrait of her adopted hometown with a collection the stories that left strong enough impressions to stick with her through the years. Of course, when you reside in Washington, DC, it’s not all about politics. As a local resident, the backdrop of your daily life just happens to be the most powerful city on earth. In describing their hometown, these fine writers bring their residency and feelings to bear. While it was statedly not Susan’s idea to turn out a political book, experience tells us that a random sample can often yield universal truths. Published in chronological order, the seventeen stories in Our Washington, DC begin in 1963 with James R. Reston’s eyewitness account of Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic and hopeful “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall . . . and features, antepenultimately, a Linda Greenhouse column from 2022 decrying the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Row v. Wade. America’s hometown is today in a period of rapid transition. The future is yet to be seen. A free and lively press, dedicated to fact-based reporting, will always be the best window. "A critic for Newsweek once described Susan Sheehan's prose as "tenacious, observant, and unsentimental." Sheehan, who has contributed nearly seventy pieces to The New Yorker since she became a staff writer in 1961, is known for her intricate portraits of lives interrupted . . . Her articles delve into the hidden corners of American society-chronicling the lives of the people we often don't see, and revealing the complexity of their unique journeys." - The New Yorker "For several decades, James Reston's reporting was the standard that most serious newspapermen and -women used to measure the quality of their work. The bulwark of the Washington bureau of the New York Times from the 1950s to the 1970s, Reston was a master stylist and a master scoop artist." -Charles Kaiser, Los Angeles Times "David Remnick is so completely in charge of his craft that it becomes an art." -Toni Morrison, author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye and Beloved , and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award "In Howard Means' fine hands, we discern how the terrible events at Kent State unfolded-relentlessly, ineluctably-like a Greek tragedy. Through dogged and imaginative reporting, 67 Shots shows us how the tragedy fed into, and was fed by, the larger maelstrom of the times. In this definitive account, Means has deftly extracted Kent State from the amber and exposed it to fresh air once again." - Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice and Hellhound on His Trail "For years, I've been marveling at Walt Harrington's work and wondering how he did it. After reading Artful Journalism , I have my answer. Not only is Walt a brilliant writer, he's a true master of the craft."-David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Award winner, author of The Good Soldiers Susan Sheehan graduated from Wellesley College in 1958, worked as a fact checker for Esquire for a year and a half, started writing book reviews for the New Republic in 1959, and light pieces for the New Yorker in 1960. After contributing "casuals" and Talk of the Town stories to the New Yorker, she became a staff writer for the magazine in 1961 and wrote her first nonfiction series in 1963.In 1965, Sheeh