DC/VT. 2x Hoya. 2x Jeopardy! champ. Consultant and occasional writer; opinions all my own. Basketball, football, politics, beer, dumb jokes.
Washington, D.C.
Joined May 2012
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I just invoked Jon Snow, Aragorn and Winston Churchill in a talk about beer in case you're wondering how I feel re: fall seasonals in August
My most politically unpopular take is that we are nowhere near harsh enough on car crimes.
Making income-scalable fines for speeding treats it like a low-stakes, broken-windows issue, rather than what it is: Reckless operation of a one-ton piece of metal that can take lives.
There's been a flurry of talk this month in the D.C. Council about whether parking and traffic fines should be reduced. But the reality is that making tickets cheaper for drivers will be costly for the city, and that could complicate any real action: washingtonsun.com/metro/dc-r…
Patrick Curran retweeted
A plan to spruce up East Potomac while keeping it affordable had been in place for years; the contract was granted during Trump’s first term! He’s blown that up, and what he’s now doing is much more opaque. There’s no certainty that the end result will be affordable.
Imagine thinking that upgrading East Potomac, a course that is very much an average muni and nothing more, into a public potential major championship venue like Bethpage or Torrey - which both charge around $70 for local residents - is a bad thing.
Patrick Curran retweeted
The hero we need
Patrick Curran retweeted
The New York TImes: What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?
Zohran Mamdani: The role of the private market in housing construction.
Private developers are essentially bragging about still being able to do market-rate development in districts represented by democratic socialists therealdeal.com/new-york/202…
Falcons by 60
Bijan Robinson has the aux in the locker room today and he’s blasting Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine. #Falcons
Q: How messy is a pear?
Person who does not have a toddler: Not that bad. I'd maybe grab one paper towel so my hands don't get sticky, but it shouldn't made too much mess.
Person with a toddler: *thousand-yard stare*
Patrick Curran retweeted
He got it from his mama.
Bear 89, aka Backpack, is the 2026 Fat Bear Week champ. Turns out hefty runs in the family.
His mom, Holly the Duchess of Density, won in 2019. She carried him on her back as a cub and helped him survive a serious leg injury. Now her little Backpack has a crown of his own. 👑
ALT An offensively large brown bear with massive girth and several fat rolls.
Patrick Curran retweeted
This is baby Backpack, in case you needed another reason to root for the Lord of Lard, Earl of Girth and Commander in Beef. 👑
ALT Photo of baby Backpack riding on his mom’s (Holly) back. Photo by NPS
ALT Photo of yearling Backpack in 2007 with a hurt foot by Ranger Jeanne
He got it from his mama.
Bear 89, aka Backpack, is the 2026 Fat Bear Week champ. Turns out hefty runs in the family.
His mom, Holly the Duchess of Density, won in 2019. She carried him on her back as a cub and helped him survive a serious leg injury. Now her little Backpack has a crown of his own. 👑
ALT An offensively large brown bear with massive girth and several fat rolls.
I thought this was America
Another round: Cowboys TE Jake Ferguson was fined $13,611 for what the NFL said was his “imitation of shotgunning a beer” Sunday vs. Washington that “constituted an offensive demonstration and could reasonably could be construed as being in poor taste.”
OK that was not as bad as I thought it would be. Cleveland is bad but the rest vary from fine to quite good IMO
OK, this one makes me nervous the polls are just completely broken.
Vermont - Governor Polling:
🔵Janoo: 49%
🔴Scott: 43%
UNH / Sept 21, 2026
(Current VT-GOV Result: GOP 53% - DEM 42%)
usapolling.substack.com/p/th…
Patrick Curran retweeted
Hard to overstate how big a failure DOGE was. The government slashed its workforce without meaningfully shrinking the government’s overall footprint. So taxpayers got a less capable bureaucracy while spending billions paying people not to work. It was mostly performance art.
The cost of DOGE: The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, GAO finds nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/po…
Patrick Curran retweeted
Nearly every day toward the end of my tenure at The Washington Post, someone would complain to me about Jeff Bezos' changes. His decimation of the local news team. His abandonment of DC sports coverage. The shriveled Bezos opinion page, with the ideological diversity of a doorknob.
Today, The Washington Sun launches. It has made enormous new investments: +110 newsroom staff; DC's legendary food columnist; truly the best DMV reporters; a beloved weather blog; a growing roster of columnists; tons of worldclass reporters across many national beats; and also me.
The Washington Sun will not be perfect. We will write stories that you find annoying, dumb, or misinformed. I will make mistakes (& tell me if I do - [email protected]!). But at a time where investments in reporting are evaporating, I'm so excited The Sun is hiring real journalists doing real reporting.
If you want to help, I would love if you signed up for our (free!) newsletters, which routinely get genuinely rave reviews:
National coverage: washingtonsun.com/account/ne…
Local coverage: washingtonsun.com/metro-news…
Patrick Curran retweeted
It’s official: MacArthur High School in Ward 3 is no more. It’s now John Thompson High School, after the famed Georgetown basketball coach and D.C. native. (And the mascot has similarly changed for the better: from the mammoth to the jaguar.)
